Broguts posted:

Does anyone have that writeup on that crazy EU II or HOI 2 mod that added faaaar too many provinces and the creator was some crazy portuguese guy who referred to his house as his "Carnival of Pleasure" or something?

Broguts posted:

Does anyone have that writeup on that crazy EU II or HOI 2 mod that added faaaar too many provinces and the creator was some crazy portuguese guy who referred to his house as his "Carnival of Pleasure" or something?

quote:

Here's a quick history I'm going to steal from Patter Song off the Something Awful forums:

1. Ubik (a Portuguese man named Carlos Gustavo) and his team release a popular mod to EU3:HTTT called "Magna Mundi" (hereafter Magna Mundi the Mod or MMtM). It's absolutely filled with features, some good, many bad, but the overwhelming scope of it impresses people for a time.

2. After DW comes out, Paradox, as it's done before with Darkest Hour and Arsenal of Democracy for HOI2 and For the Glory for EU2, agree to allow Ubik's new company Universo Virtual to license out the Clausewitz engine to create Magna Mundi: A Europa Universalis Game. (Hereafter Magna Mundi the Game or MMtG)

3. Ubik's team is composed of modders, some Portuguese and others from all over, who have little concept of how to make an actual video game as opposed to a mod of an existing game. Despite a gigantic budget, they miss multiple deadlines.

4. Two years later, MMtG is nowhere near release-ready status, yet Ubik keeps trying to submit the game, filled to the brim with game-breaking bugs, to Paradox as a ready-for-release Gold Master. Paradox shoots down his release candidates again and again, while Ubik and co. (the & co. including the amazing team featured here) attempt to continue to feature bloat and break the stuff that was already there. MMtG looks like a massive boondoogle and Paradox begins to sweat.

5. Ubik raises the tensions by launching his own PR campaign that the game is ready for release and is being held back by Paradox, including giving interviews and having one of the UV people do a hilarious "Let's Play" video of MMtG. He announces a hard release date that cannot possibly be met.

6. Paradox goes public with its concerns in a thread titled "Magna Mundi: the Sad State of Affairs." In the thread, UV employees bite the hand that feeds them, saying that MMtG is ready for shipping except that the multiplayer is broken. Paradox calls them out on it and tells the public that the game is barely even functional.

7. MMtG is cancelled. Ubik, not understanding the difference between licencing and selling, claims that he now owns the Clausewitz Engine and that Paradox has stolen his intellectual property. He doesn't end up filing a lawsuit. He then claims that Paradox had stolen his hard work and was going to release it as the newly-announced Europa Universalis 4. Ubik says that anyone that wants to play Magna Mundi can come to his basement in Portugal and play it themselves.

8. The sprites and music for MMtG, which, of course, Paradox owned, were the only things salvageable from the wreck and are now DLC for EU3.

Drone posted:

ooo now tell us what happened with that East vs. West boondoggle. I love me some Paradox gossip, especially when it involves upjumped modders with personality disorders.

quote:

I've been betatesting (and translating) Magna Mundi since June 2011 and it breaks my heart to see that the game is in a very bad shape.
I don't want to be disrespectful, but we have already started to send GM versions to Paradox and the game is in no state of GM.

Game Breaking Issues:

Relations:

The concept to stabilize around a value is good, but it has been set in a bad way and with no balance. Right now the relations sets at -30 with your own religion countries
and -90 with other religion countries. This is specially bad since most of the diplomatic agreements won't be accepted if you have bad relations. But you have bad relations
cause you have no diplomatic agreements. Do you see the problem there? Also, since the relation will go to a value no matter what, there is no use for the "Give Gift".

A way to improve it is if the value where between two values set: if you have "this agreement and that agreement and have the same religion etc, the value of the relations
won't change between -xxx and +xxx, if you are outside those values, it will change slowly towards those values. Now that would make sense. You will be at the lower value
but with gifts, etc, you can reach the maximun value and it won't go back unless some agreements are broken, there is a war, etc.

Merchants:

Day one of a game, the value of sending a merchant is between 4 and 15. The next day and for the rest of the game, the value is twice or three times that value.
The countries can send as many merchants to a cot as they want. The problem? at 1470 I needed 57 merchants to reach a 35% of the share of the cot to see how the monopolize works
(with cheats obviously). It seems that is not the way it should work. There are not enough battles between merchants. But if you increase the amount of battles, it will be
crazy with the notifications.

The only way I see it can be solved is to reinstaurate a maximun of merchants in a cot, until there is a way to address this.
The monopolize seems to work properly, I went from 35% to 70% but then what? you can monopolize again, and over and over. It seems to me, that once a cot is monopolized,
you shouldn't be able to do it again, and the number of merchants should be set during some years, otherwise, since every country is sending merchants, the share of the marked
plumbs again. This mean that I with ie 12 merchants, monopolized the cot. There are 40 merchants. At the end of the monopolozation, I ended with 9 merchants, and there are
18 merchants in total at the cot. During, (IE) 10 years, my merchants won't be kicked out, and the amount of 18 merchants is the max merchants that can be in the cot.
For new merchants to arrive, they have to battle the other remaining 9.

War score and war aims:

War score is just not working. It goes negative even if you do nothing, there is no battles, there is no blockades, etc. You can win battles and invade provinces but it
goes negative as well. Once the negative reaches -100%, you lose the war aim.

Once that is solved, the problem of losing your war aims: if I lose them, I should be able to offer a white peace, but I can't see that option in the offer Peace Interface
Also, IF both countries loses their war aims (ie:because they didn't fight during some years), there is no reason to carry on the fighting and a white peace should be enforced.

Right now you can't make wars since you won't be able to offer a peace and the other accept them (since warscore in both side is negative!)

Colonization:

If you colonize a province, you get : Authority: without respect or somethin like that in that province, which hurts the admin efficiency, and also makes every province have a high revolt
risk. Obviously, this tribal modifier shoudln't be applied to a non-tribal country when it is colonizing, but this inhabilites the colonization for the player and for
the beta-testing

Modernization:

When you make click in Modernize, you get a "Tensions for early reformation" and from 1 to 3 "Desires for X policy". Then, a decision appears for each desire.
The "Tensions..." modifier last too long for its name, and should disappear when you start making the reforms of the decision. Also, the modifiers of "Desires fox X policy"
should disappear when you enact the reform, but it doesn't. When you enact a reform, a stability hit should happen, and you shouldn't be able to enact a new reform unless x years
happens, OR you get the stability back. Right now, you can just enact the 3 reforms at once. Also, when you hit the first reform, you get "Society Change" or something like that.
The next reform you choose, it is a bigger penalization modifier and the last one is the biggest, the problem is with each reform, the previous modifier should disappear
but it doesn't.

The event's of the factions losing and winning influence fires too often and makes no sense with thing that a faction losing influence event firing twice in a month, and the next day
you get the event they have won influence. That just can't happen. In twenty years of reformation, I can understand they happen twice and they may change, but not 30 times. A little more
balance and relating some events with the other is needed.

And finally, it's been 30 years of modernization but it hasn't ended. That is not working.

Other issues:

Chinese Tributary System: how does that work? I've got no idea. I only see two options, and both are to make things "automatic".

quote:

There mere act of singly clicking on a foreign country causes you to go from this...

... to this:

(alt-tabbing out seems to have caused all of the country names to disappear).


There are 5 additional country sub-menus, and 4 out of a possible 9 province submenus which I can click on.

There is no way of getting out of these menus or submenus, other than clicking on another country (which changes the contents of the menus and submenus) or clicking on the sea.

Also, zooming in to this level means that you are overpowered by incredibly loud wind and seagull ambient noises. Attempting to change the volume of which causes crashes.

corn in the bible posted:

I'm pretty sure EvW was canceled because they couldn't make it not suck

E: still, they released sots2, so I'm surprised they didn't just sell magna mundi full price and lie about that too

Broguts posted:

Does anyone have that writeup on that crazy EU II or HOI 2 mod that added faaaar too many provinces and the creator was some crazy portuguese guy who referred to his house as his "Carnival of Pleasure" or something?

OperaMouse posted:

There was also HoI3. It added hundreds or thousands of provinces, all with 0 strategic value.

OperaMouse posted:

There was also an HOI2 mod/standalone called Iron Cross. It added hundreds or thousands of provinces, all with 0 strategic values. Also riddled with spelling errors, it wasn't a fraction as exciting as Darkest Hour and Arsenal of Democracy.

OperaMouse posted:

There was also an HOI2 mod/standalone called Iron Cross. It added hundreds or thousands of provinces, all with 0 strategic values. Also riddled with spelling errors, it wasn't a fraction as exciting as Darkest Hour and Arsenal of Democracy.

Broguts posted:

Does anyone have that writeup on that crazy EU II or HOI 2 mod that added faaaar too many provinces and the creator was some crazy portuguese guy who referred to his house as his "Carnival of Pleasure" or something?

RentACop posted:

That was from a Dev Diary, featuring a story was written about an espionage event that backfired and killed two targets, the Carnival of Lust, (images all sadly broken)

HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:

Everything. That's why it ended up not doing anything.

Baloogan posted:

thorsilver posted:

Is CMANO fun even if I'm totally new to modern strategic warfare? I'm kinda into simulating plausible poo poo going down like North Korea going nuts or whatever, but I won't know what the gently caress I'm doing or what anything means.

Squiggle posted:

CMANO is the first groggy game that actually stuck for me, after watching the fantastic LP series on a really well made community scenario, Under African Skies. It taught me a lot about the game and paired with Baloogan's youtube videos made it easier to put to gether. It can be tough at first but you get the hang of it pretty quick. The depth is awesome.

Broguts posted:

I was about to ask why Ubik thought that was a good idea but then I remembered he's literally insane.

thorsilver posted:

OK gently caress it I'm in, this drat game's been on my wishlist for like a year anyway. Gonna watch this dude play and see if I can figure out what the gently caress's going on.

How bout Barbarossa or Pike and Shot, anybody got opinions on those? I can splash out for one of those. Leaning towards Barbarossa for the cool political shenanigans but the tabletop miniatures vibe of Pike and Shot looks cool too.

thorsilver posted:

OK gently caress it I'm in, this drat game's been on my wishlist for like a year anyway. Gonna watch this dude play and see if I can figure out what the gently caress's going on.

How bout Barbarossa or Pike and Shot, anybody got opinions on those? I can splash out for one of those. Leaning towards Barbarossa for the cool political shenanigans but the tabletop miniatures vibe of Pike and Shot looks cool too.

Drone posted:

Pretty much any of the Decisive Campaigns series (plus ATG, which is real good but also real intimidating in ways the others aren't) are great. I was interested in Pike & Shot too until I saw a Let's Play from DasTactic where the framerate in-game was like enough to make even Combat Mission games look smooth in comparison.

thorsilver posted:

Holy poo poo there's a GrogSale on Steam?! Now I'm freaking out about what to buy with my £35-ish budget.

Pike and Shot: Campaigns looks cool, and with tons of armies/poo poo to do -- is it any good? Are the leaders/generals in Sengoku Jidai enough to make that the better game?

Is CMANO fun even if I'm totally new to modern strategic warfare? I'm kinda into simulating plausible poo poo going down like North Korea going nuts or whatever, but I won't know what the gently caress I'm doing or what anything means.

Would Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa be too confusing for a newbie to that series? The political layer to that sounds amazing to me, I've heard it's better to start with the first DC game but it doesn't look nearly as interesting.

I'm kinda tempted to try an AGEOD game (Revolutions Under Siege or Thirty Years War) but all the horror stories of interface poo poo scare me a bit. Worth a try if I'm interested in those periods of history?

Broguts posted:

I was about to ask why Ubik thought that was a good idea but then I remembered he's literally insane.

Drone posted:

Distant Worlds is so good