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Charlz Guybon posted:Lol, how? A gazillion provinces and holdings, leading them to have a larger economy and army than the Eastern Roman Empire.
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May 28, 2018 06:30
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Rynoto posted:You have no idea how badly I want a Paradox-style game based on the Spring & Autumn through to the beginning of the Han Dynasty. There is Oriental Empires, which basically tracks Chinese civilization from early civilization straight through to the Imperial era. It's got more roots in Civilization than Paradox, but it still does a pretty neat general strategy overview of China. I particularly appreciate the brilliant little twist where one of the most important reasons to start relying on trained soldiers instead of noble or peasant levies isn't how well they fight, but rather the fact that they can suppress both noble and peasant dissent - there's a natural and organic evolution from the use of free-to-raise but limited levies to a standing army both for military and anti-rebellion purposes as the state becomes steadily more coercive and onerous to the people it rules. Unfortunately, despite all that it does well, the actual combat is rear end on burnt toast. Think Total War, only you can only offer vague suggestions to your units when planning your turn and your units have the pathfinding and combat logic of a concussed, drunken cow. If you really really like the Chinese setting, though, it might be worth powering through that. Tomn fucked around with this message at 06:45 on May 28, 2018 |
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May 28, 2018 06:35
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Tomn posted:There is Oriental Empires, which basically tracks Chinese civilization from early civilization straight through to the Imperial era. It's got more roots in Civilization than Paradox, but it still does a pretty neat general strategy overview of China. I particularly appreciate the brilliant little twist where one of the most important reasons to start relying on trained soldiers instead of noble or peasant levies isn't how well they fight, but rather the fact that they can suppress both noble and peasant dissent - there's a natural and organic evolution from the use of free-to-raise but limited levies to a standing army both for military and anti-rebellion purposes as the state becomes steadily more coercive and onerous to the people it rules. Doesn't that provide just an even more dangerous avenue of dissent however? If the professional stadning army rises up, you'd be screwed.
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May 28, 2018 06:48
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Oriental empires has a bunch of really interesting ideas but it’s kind of an oddly put together game. I love the sense of progress in it especially though, passing the reforms and stuff, you really feel like you’re moving through time and making sweeping changes even when your borders barely move.Rynoto posted:You have no idea how badly I want a Paradox-style game based on the Spring & Autumn through to the beginning of the Han Dynasty. Also because I doubt they’ll ever do a specifically China-focused game, which is the biggest reason I want it in Imperator even though China is mostly disconnected in this era. How would you go from Spring and Autumn all the way through to the Han though? I was thinking about this for my mod and I don’t really see how you as a player won’t have unified all of China (or at least become the de facto hegemon) after a few centuries at most unless you’re actively holding yourself back. Long timelines would be problematic enough in the classical world, but at least there, there’s room for another major power to be growing off in Persia and India or something. In China in this period (in a paradox game), once you’ve gotten the upper hand against your neighbors, that’s basically it, aside from a unified nomadic empire but that’s more of an endgame than anything more. I guess we’ll see how the internal systems are modeled though, hopefully with the pops it’ll be more challenging than EU4 is for expanding. E: incidentally if any of you know good maps/lists of cities etc for ancient China that’d be great. I have 3-400 from Western Zhou from my old mod and I’ve found another hundred or so from Qin and Han so far, but scraping 500 in the central plains isn’t gonna go very far if the base game is balanced around having 7,000. I read that the Paradox devs back-“translated” some modern city names into ancient gallic/Germanic-Esque for some regions they needed more cities in so I guess I can do something similarly anachronistic to fill in space but I’d rather not. Koramei fucked around with this message at 07:00 on May 28, 2018 |
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May 28, 2018 06:52
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I'll have to disagree, I honestly hope they keep the game streamlined and tightly focused on the Mediterranean and the surrounding areas. One of the biggest problems with EUIV is how it eventually turned into a bloated mess. That's not to say a separate game about China wouldn't be interesting, even if it does seem unlikely.
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May 28, 2018 07:15
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Phlegmish posted:I'll have to disagree, I honestly hope they keep the game streamlined and tightly focused on the Mediterranean and the surrounding areas. One of the biggest problems with EUIV is how it eventually turned into a bloated mess. I don't think fleshing out other areas naturally means becoming a bloated mess. CK2's expansions through Old Gods, for example, were all very good.
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May 28, 2018 07:21
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Eu4 didn’t get bloated because they made playing in other parts of thre world interesting. It got bloated through poo poo like sailors, professionalism, innovativeness, absolutism, etc. those could have all been introduced in your tightly focused Europe game
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May 28, 2018 07:31
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I can’t believe I bought a DLC whose top 3 feature was sailors
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May 28, 2018 07:32
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Tomn posted:There is Oriental Empires, Will definitely have to take a look at this, cheers! Got a pretty high tolerance for weird indie games Koramei posted:How would you go from Spring and Autumn all the way through to the Han though? I was thinking about this for my mod and I don’t really see how you as a player won’t have unified all of China (or at least become the de facto hegemon) after a few centuries at most unless you’re actively holding yourself back. Long timelines would be problematic enough in the classical world, but at least there, there’s room for another major power to be growing off in Persia and India or something. In China in this period (in a paradox game), once you’ve gotten the upper hand against your neighbors, that’s basically it, aside from a unified nomadic empire but that’s more of an endgame than anything more. I guess we’ll see how the internal systems are modeled though, hopefully with the pops it’ll be more challenging than EU4 is for expanding. And yeah, there would definitely be a lot of problems that would have to be specifically addressed for an ancient china game - namely how to balance out the various autonomous warlords against the varying degrees of centralization of the dynastic courts. Can always dream though of a game that can somehow find the perfect balance between external and internal manipulations that led to many of the real rises and falls of hegemons.
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May 28, 2018 07:44
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Sailors were free tbf. Though mare nostrum was still bad and expensive.
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May 28, 2018 07:46
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What’s the Crete LP people keep mentioning?
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May 28, 2018 08:01
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Charlz Guybon posted:Doesn't that provide just an even more dangerous avenue of dissent however? If the professional stadning army rises up, you'd be screwed. In the context of the game, dissent exists in two forms - peasant dissent and noble dissent. Peasant levies can suppress noble dissent, but can't do anything about peasant dissent (and in fact raising the levy increases peasant dissent), and vice versa with nobles. Trained soldiers, however, can suppress both and don't cause dissent in and of themselves, which means you don't have to pander as much to either peasant or noble demands when you can just raise taxes and garrison soldiers in towns - though this DOES come with the interesting side effect that you can end up with an enormous army but only be able to use a fraction of it because you can't afford to move them out of their garrisons to actually fight. In the context of history, yeah, but what's the alternative? If you rely on any branch of society for military defense and they rise up, you get screwed. This isn't exclusive to a standing army. At least with a standing army the soldiers are usually beholden to the king himself and lack a broad tax base to rely on if they try to go their own way, unlike nobles who have their own taxable fiefs to build a support base off, or peasants who ARE the tax base (and who usually aren't fans of getting levied anyways).
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May 28, 2018 08:03
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Pirate Radar posted:What’s the Crete LP people keep mentioning? Perhaps the most ambitious Paradox LP on these forums https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3257534&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1 Run by now-Paradox dev Wiz, it had audience participation in the form of extremely convoluted politics
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May 28, 2018 08:07
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Pirate Radar posted:What’s the Crete LP people keep mentioning? mate... https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3257534&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1
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May 28, 2018 08:08
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Charlz Guybon posted:I think the map encompasing Tibet and the Tarim basin is a pretty good indicator that they're planning a Warring States map expansion down the line. Given the situation in China at the time, the mechanics for the base map of the game shouldn't need much adjusting to work in the East. I am a bit suspicious of how the balance re: India is going to turn out and I wouldn't be upset at all if the map stopped at the Indus, similarly I hope that however the mechanics with colonisation work out that we don't end up with Russia being populated by Romans. OTOH the trade between India and Rome was a real and significant thing so depending on how the trade system works exactly it might be that India's presence is necessary for a satisfying simulation of the Mediterranean world. I just don't want the Mauryans to be conquering their way to the Mediterranean.
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May 28, 2018 08:33
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:The Sahara has been by and large inhospitable for millions of years. There were however more rivers and such as recent as 5400 years ago, but the vast majority of it was still inhospitable. Around 5400 years ago it seems that nearly all of the rivers aside from the nile dried up rapidly ("rapidly" in this case meaning in the course of 2000 years or so). Which means that during the Roman era, the Sahara basically was as it is now. The Nile was likely more fertile and maybe there were more oases, but that's about the only difference. I think your post is unfounded or based upon outdated research, and requires a bit more context than you provide. I most recommend that last article, particularly their section titled: Second Criterion: Crossing the Threshold Due to External Forcing?.
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May 28, 2018 08:51
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Koramei posted:E: incidentally if any of you know good maps/lists of cities etc for ancient China that’d be great. I have 3-400 from Western Zhou from my old mod and I’ve found another hundred or so from Qin and Han so far, but scraping 500 in the central plains isn’t gonna go very far if the base game is balanced around having 7,000. I read that the Paradox devs back-“translated” some modern city names into ancient gallic/Germanic-Esque for some regions they needed more cities in so I guess I can do something similarly anachronistic to fill in space but I’d rather not. Uh, how's your Chinese? Because this is probably going to be the gold standard for something like that.
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May 28, 2018 09:42
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I really hope Paradox NEVER adds something as terrible as a globe shaped map. Not only would it be frustrating to use and impossible to get any kind of overview of the world without flattening it out and at that point why bother to waste all the time and resources on implanting it? Please never, Paradox.
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May 28, 2018 09:48
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RabidWeasel posted:I am a bit suspicious of how the balance re: India is going to turn out and I wouldn't be upset at all if the map stopped at the Indus, similarly I hope that however the mechanics with colonisation work out that we don't end up with Russia being populated by Romans. This is always going to be the challenge with paradox 's 'you can play any nation on the map' approach. The roman trading network logically would include India, but a playable India would necessitate interactions with Tibet, and a playable Tibet necessitates interactions with east Asia, and so on. Drawing a line at the indus would make playing as any Iranian state a weird experience. I think ultimately it's a result of the European perspective on classical history where we see things as being centred around the med, when in reality it makes far more sense to see eurasia and north Africa as a big and fairly interconnected world during the iron age. I hope at least there will be some sort of trade flow coming from the eastern edge of the map.
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May 28, 2018 09:53
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Poil posted:I really hope Paradox NEVER adds something as terrible as a globe shaped map. Not only would it be frustrating to use and impossible to get any kind of overview of the world without flattening it out and at that point why bother to waste all the time and resources on implanting it? Please never, Paradox. Clearly they should solve this problem by using the tiling and infinitely scrollable Peirce quincuncial projection:  This standard projection surely won't confuse anyone.
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May 28, 2018 09:58
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Yeah but will Antarctica be playable
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May 28, 2018 10:36
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Xerophyte posted:Clearly they should solve this problem by using the tiling and infinitely scrollable Peirce quincuncial projection:  It's better than a globe but I'm getting just a tiny bit confused trying to wrap my dumb head around playing on a map like that. Pirate Radar posted:Yeah but will Antarctica be playable
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May 28, 2018 10:56
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Who knew that the equator could have right angles?
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May 28, 2018 10:59
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I dig the Imperator: Rome map, but for some reason I really dislike the marble aesthetic of the actual UI. On top of being kinda difficult to read because of the color choices and thin typeface, it's also anachronistic in a "this isn't what Rome was actually like, but what people in the 19th century who idealized Rome thought it was like" kinda way.
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May 28, 2018 11:03
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Dev diary #1 https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/imperator-development-diary-1-28th-of-may-2018.1101600/
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May 28, 2018 11:22
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NoNotTheMindProbe posted:Who knew that the equator could have right angles? Yeah, that would be (one of) the tradeoffs. The mathy short of it is that any 2D map that tries to accurately preserve angles -- i.e. keep latitude and longitude lines at 90 degrees everywhere and preserve the general shape of things -- must also have some number of specific points where those properties totally break down. "Normal" cylindrical projections break down at the north and south poles. Peirce's and other quincuncial projections break down at 4 arbitrarily chosen points on the equator or other great circle. There's fun other ways but all 2D maps have problems somewhere, which is why you can find forums full of enraged nerds shouting about map projections. I actually use quincuncial projections at work, if usually in the opposite direction: I pretty often need to map points on a unit square to the globe. I'm being about 80% serious when I'm suggesting it as good for a strategy game where the arctic needs to make sense. It's perfectly usable for maps zoomed in, but sure looks real weird zoomed out.
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May 28, 2018 11:27
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Charlz Guybon posted:What do you guys think? I'm sitting here watching a guy mod East Africa into CK2    The maximilists will kill us all Pirate Radar posted:Yeah but will Antarctica be playable I am ready to lead an army of dire penguins and shoggoths for the glory of the Elder Things. :crying_glacier: ... Why isn't that a Dominions nation already?
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May 28, 2018 11:31
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RabidWeasel posted:OTOH the trade between India and Rome was a real and significant thing so depending on how the trade system works exactly it might be that India's presence is necessary for a satisfying simulation of the Mediterranean world. I just don't want the Mauryans to be conquering their way to the Mediterranean. Drone posted:I dig the Imperator: Rome map, but for some reason I really dislike the marble aesthetic of the actual UI. On top of being kinda difficult to read because of the color choices and thin typeface, it's also anachronistic in a "this isn't what Rome was actually like, but what people in the 19th century who idealized Rome thought it was like" kinda way.
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May 28, 2018 11:42
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Ooh they have Greek colonies in Iberia
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May 28, 2018 11:54
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Yeah, I brought this up on the announcement day, and I haven't come around to it yet. Would definitely prefer if they dropped the ahistorical "Classy Classicism" style and went a bit more gaudy and colorful - which has the obvious UI advantage of allowing greater contrast. but who doesn't love monotone
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May 28, 2018 11:59
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Charlz Guybon posted:Dev diary #1 Not a lot of concrete info but omens and trade were indeed terrible in EU:R so removing those is a good start.
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May 28, 2018 12:00
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i hope they're not biting off more than they can chew here. between having a gazillion tiny provinces that i assume the player with have to interact with, to stretching the map all the way to bangladesh, to talking about "adding more depth and complexity [...] make this into the ultimate GSG" i have to wonder.
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May 28, 2018 12:03
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A Buttery Pastry posted:The fact that this might be an issue could be just the thing Paradox needs to realize that it has to come up with some limiter on countries' ability to project power - rather than just trying to solve fundamental issues with custom handicaps. I mean, they should have for EU4 too, but hopefully they've learned a bit from that. The interface, at least when playing the Successors, should start off more OTT, this is the Hellenistic, the era of properly mad and elaborate sculpture. Also calling Antigonus' empire "Phrygia" hurts me every time I see it on the map, please change it Paradox.
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May 28, 2018 12:12
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A Buttery Pastry posted:The fact that this might be an issue could be just the thing Paradox needs to realize that it has to come up with some limiter on countries' ability to project power - rather than just trying to solve fundamental issues with custom handicaps. I mean, they should have for EU4 too, but hopefully they've learned a bit from that.
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May 28, 2018 12:13
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Autonomous Monster posted:I'm sitting here watching a guy mod East Africa into CK2 Didn't Oman interact a lot with East Africa?
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May 28, 2018 12:25
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Prav posted:i hope they're not biting off more than they can chew here. between having a gazillion tiny provinces that i assume the player with have to interact with, to stretching the map all the way to bangladesh, to talking about "adding more depth and complexity [...] make this into the ultimate GSG" i have to wonder. Astroclassicist posted:The interface should start of more OTT, this is the Hellenistic, the era of properly mad and elaborate sculpture. Potzblitz! posted:Romans didn’t actually paint every single marble surface.
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May 28, 2018 12:32
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Potzblitz! posted:Romans didn’t actually paint every single marble surface. Just give me a UI inspired by bathroom graffiti from Pompei.
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May 28, 2018 12:33
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A Buttery Pastry posted:What the UI needs is a bunch of nude statues with tiny/humongous dicks, all extremely garishly colored. Drone posted:Just give me a UI inspired by bathroom graffiti from Pompei. See, now we're getting places.
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May 28, 2018 12:55
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The Narrator posted:See, now we're getting places.
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May 28, 2018 13:05
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A Buttery Pastry posted:The way Johan talked about them, the cities (which I think are the ones that are 7,000 of) seem to be analogous to provinces in Victoria, with provinces being analogous to states. I suspect that a lot of interaction happens at the "state" level, with the "provinces" being mostly there for warfare and to allow various tribes and city states to be properly represented - the Peloponnese thunderdome would be real underwhelming if the 16 or so city states were consolidated into 4. If you skip to 11:06 in this video they start poking around in the province interface here and you can sort of see the system in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83FxSUjDvjc&t=666s You've got 9 (what I assume are) cities, plus whatever's hidden by the scrollbar, grouped together into "the province of Roma". Each of them has what would appear to be its own pop count and a trade good. Trade goods apply their bonus to every city in the province, and it's additional copies of a good in a province that a "surplus" and can be traded, so I guess trade is done province to province? If it's ten or so cities to the province then we're already down to 700 provinces, which sounds a lot more manageable. Whatever is reserved to the province layer, I hope you can still conquer individual cities. States-only conquest causes some real dumb poo poo in V2.
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May 28, 2018 13:07
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