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RabidWeasel posted:From a gameplay perspective being able to cause a massive civil war and then just hopping over to the winning side would make the mechanic completely flaccid in terms of how it restricts the player from doing whatever the gently caress they like. Yeah if there isn’t a fail condition then it’s just wasting your time. Civil wars not being a fail condition works in CK because state control isn’t the end all be all but that isn’t how Rome works.
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Oct 1, 2018 18:33
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To clarify I certainly wasn't saying no consequences, it's not a binary decision between Game Over or No Consequences. For example things like: - Every god drat general now wants to be the next Marius - Chronic lack of experienced / skilled leaders due to purges - Regions/Provinces (non-core?) split off into low loyalty vassals - Penalties to non-soldier pop generation and heavy increases to Military upkeep - Manpower shortages / Food Shortages / Civil Unrest scaled to whatever is challenging I assume the team has had discussions about Civil Wars and either tabled Civil War fallout for expansions or has reasons why not to do them (this is the kind of stuff I want to read about in dev diaries).
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Oct 1, 2018 19:35
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I mean if it's possible to go from republic to a dictatorship, it'd only make sense for the player to provoke a civil war for their desired dictator-for-life. Or even vice-versa for overthrowing a king and establishing a republic or democracy. Also now it seems like it'd make a lot of sense to implement the whole dual-consul system for leading armies switching off on different days, since that seems perfectly tailored to work with the loyalty to characters system.
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Oct 1, 2018 19:35
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Fellblade posted:To clarify I certainly wasn't saying no consequences, it's not a binary decision between Game Over or No Consequences. Those are consequences for having a civil war period. Making the actual war itself rather pointless.
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Oct 1, 2018 19:37
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If you're not on ironman, I assume you'll be able to reload from the last autosave before losing a civil war and play as the winning tag anyway, if you want. Or swap as soon as the rebellion starts.
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Oct 1, 2018 20:11
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expanded civil war is probably DLC planned for some point
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Oct 1, 2018 21:00
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RabidWeasel posted:From a gameplay perspective being able to cause a massive civil war and then just hopping over to the winning side would make the mechanic completely flaccid in terms of how it restricts the player from doing whatever the gently caress they like. Yeah no, civil wars in EU4 allows you to create monarchies, republics, have a new dynasty and even trigger the revolutionary governments in the last century. It's bizarre how you're meant to survive every single civil war in the classical age when how civil wars in those times were usually guaranteed rotating door scenarios.
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Oct 1, 2018 22:02
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Civil wars aren’t really a thing in EU4. Rebellions are a thing but outside like five different rebellions spawning at once they aren’t a threat. I guess there are pretenders but ironically they are the least threatening ones.
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Oct 1, 2018 22:03
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Mans posted:Yeah no, civil wars in EU4 allows you to create monarchies, republics, have a new dynasty and even trigger the revolutionary governments in the last century. EU4 is not a game with a major mechanic (IIRC Johan said in a recent interview that Loyalty was going to be the single most important design feature of Imperator) designed specifically around creating large civil wars.
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Oct 1, 2018 22:05
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General question for paradox devs, purely out of curiosity: how much of what your QA department does is balance playtesting vs. "does the thing actually work" testing? Asking because I work in software QA (not in games) and I feel like the state space of testing a paradox game would give me an aneurysm. Especially because it doesn't seem very automatable
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Oct 1, 2018 22:15
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"you are always loyalists" is the issue i have here what, exactly, is a loyalist in the context of marius vs sulla, caesar vs the optimates, octavian vs antony...y'know, the marquee civil wars of the period? are sullans loyalists because they tended more aristocratic? are marians loyalists because they were the ones actually in control of rome when the civil war started? caesar is definitionally unplayable here because he's certainly the less "loyalist" of the two factions in his war...at first, but then later he's the more "loyalist" faction leader.
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Oct 1, 2018 22:34
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VostokProgram posted:General question for paradox devs, purely out of curiosity: how much of what your QA department does is balance playtesting vs. "does the thing actually work" testing? Asking because I work in software QA (not in games) and I feel like the state space of testing a paradox game would give me an aneurysm. Especially because it doesn't seem very automatable It is part of their job but it might be overshadowed by smoketesting and other things like "Please don't crash game". I don't know how much time they dedicate to it but I discuss with QA a lot about our current and future features. But we do have also the very dedicated betas who I communicate a lot about balance with. Who usually are always on the case of "History replaces any kind of game design decisions. If it happened in history it is automatically the best feature ever." or "if you conquer a single province you should implode on yourself" since the recruitment does become biased towards historical researchers or the hardcore players. We do have some automation when it comes to testing, every single computer at the office becomes a slave at nights running all of paradox games and collecting that data, summarizing it and presenting it to us and putting it in an email. That will give us information like if performance have degraded or the fact that Ming does in fact implode in more than 50% of those games run contrary to what people say. Right now I am also seeing a lot of Prussia forming which might be from the Poland patch changes, I can't say for sure though. Besides that me and Jake play the game a lot and balance accordingly. We read what other peoples experiences are with the game and respond on that. Sometime we trash it because we don't agree, it doesn't fit or whatever. Sometime we polish it to fit better with what is our goals, and sometimes it is just pure correct and we add it in. A healthy tip to keep someones attention for an issue you want to highlight: Do not write from a position of you know better. Just putting this as a qualifier, I go through a lot of feedback on a weekly basis, mostly poo poo because people only voice their opinion if they think a thing is poo poo. For instance this forum asks quite why we are not doing more with ROTW, "why did Dharma have feature X, it's the India Expansion it should only have India", was something I saw. Well because ROTW basically no matter what we do, get a very small percentage of the player base. So I made some things for Europeans in Dharma as well. Groogy fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Oct 1, 2018 |
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Oct 1, 2018 22:37
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Rebels have no winning answer, locking Rev behind one in EU or radicals in Vicky aren't exactly brilliant implementations either.VostokProgram posted:General question for paradox devs, purely out of curiosity: how much of what your QA department does is balance playtesting vs. "does the thing actually work" testing? Asking because I work in software QA (not in games) and I feel like the state space of testing a paradox game would give me an aneurysm. Especially because it doesn't seem very automatable
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Oct 1, 2018 22:37
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Having beta testers who you know would prefer that you're actually making a different game doesn't seem like a great idea. I mean I think that the game makes it rediculously too easy to outperform the AI but the solution isn't making the game play in a more realistic way, it's changing parts of the game which the AI is bad at but the player is extremely good at, or alternatively, making the AI better (which is hard and presumably often not technically feasible due to performance concerns)
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Oct 1, 2018 23:29
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Eh that wasn't my point of the Betas, my point is the Betas just like every player have their own view of what they want out of the game, and I filter everything. This applies to just any feedback though really, the betas just have a more direct line. The filtering can be based on it being too extreme, it can be we don't want that at all. It could even be just simply time restraints. "You know what would be cool? *goes on to list a whole rework of the trade system* You'll have that done by next week right when your RC deadline is?" (RC stands for Release Candidate) Yeah no
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Oct 1, 2018 23:34
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Groogy posted:"You know what would be cool? *goes on to list a whole rework of the trade system* You'll have that done by next week right when your RC deadline is?" (RC stands for Release Candidate) Been reading the Stellaris thread I see.
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Oct 1, 2018 23:43
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If only there were some chads involved with EU4 testing. Then we’d have something truly special
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Oct 2, 2018 00:24
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Groogy posted:It is part of their job but it might be overshadowed by smoketesting and other things like "Please don't crash game". I don't know how much time they dedicate to it but I discuss with QA a lot about our current and future features. But we do have also the very dedicated betas who I communicate a lot about balance with. Who usually are always on the case of "History replaces any kind of game design decisions. If it happened in history it is automatically the best feature ever." or "if you conquer a single province you should implode on yourself" since the recruitment does become biased towards historical researchers or the hardcore players. We do have some automation when it comes to testing, every single computer at the office becomes a slave at nights running all of paradox games and collecting that data, summarizing it and presenting it to us and putting it in an email. That will give us information like if performance have degraded or the fact that Ming does in fact implode in more than 50% of those games run contrary to what people say. Right now I am also seeing a lot of Prussia forming which might be from the Poland patch changes, I can't say for sure though. Thanks for writing such a detailed response! If you don't mind humoring me some more, I have a few more questions. Do you folks write regression tests for bugs that you find? Are there big test plans that QA goes through (either programmatically or by hand) to make sure the game is in a good state for release? Also send the next QA engineer you meet my respect b/c like I said before your games are so loving complex that keeping them in a good state seems very hard
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Oct 2, 2018 00:38
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i wonder if the idea is to just make imperator more of a traditional pass/fail game than most of the PDS games. it's arguably a weakness of EU4 and HOI4 that you are irreparably hosed long before you actually see a game over. i doubt many people ever see an actual game over screen on EU4, rather than just savescumming or just ditching the save first.
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Oct 2, 2018 00:45
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Cease to Hope posted:i wonder if the idea is to just make imperator more of a traditional pass/fail game than most of the PDS games. it's arguably a weakness of EU4 and HOI4 that you are irreparably hosed long before you actually see a game over. i doubt many people ever see an actual game over screen on EU4, rather than just savescumming or just ditching the save first. I hope that it's actually impossible to completely avoid civil wars (if you're being expansionistic) and the difference between playing well and poorly is just how frequent and large they are. Having the occasional massive civil war which you have to win or you lose the game actually sounds great.
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Oct 2, 2018 00:55
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RabidWeasel posted:I hope that it's actually impossible to completely avoid civil wars (if you're being expansionistic) and the difference between playing well and poorly is just how frequent and large they are. Having the occasional massive civil war which you have to win or you lose the game actually sounds great. the risk there is how CK2 attempts this boom and bust cycle, with mixed success at best. it's obvious that map painting in CK2 is meant to involve opportunistically gobbling up a chunk of the map, then spending some period of time sorting out all the rear end in a top hat foreigners who hate you living there. in practice, the latter gets less interesting and more predictable the better you get at it. it's telling that the most recommended DLCs either add busywork (WOL, M&M) or ramp up the difficulty in the bust (conclave, old gods, the extreme minority gimmick religions). this wouldn't be a problem for most games, but paradox presumably wants to be selling imperator DLC in 2022, and i can't imagine stellaris-style deep revamps are cheap or easy. on the other hand, part of the problem in CK2 is one too many casus belli that evict all the inconvenient locals, which is a mistake imperator can easily avoid.
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Oct 2, 2018 01:27
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I feel like the game definitely sides on the Sullan side of things from how they dismiss general assemblies. I guess mechanically maybe Caesar's conquest of Rome would be the player moving onto a new consul (maybe there's term limits, and maybe there's consequences for the player breaking term limits, like after sticking with martially brilliant Marius for too long, a later consul loses a bunch of loyalty after they're not allowed to stay in office?) and putting the now less-loyal but high martial score Julius into a governor office on a frontier territory. Then I guess either Julius takes it upon himself to conquer Gaul with a frontier army that was loyal to him, rather than the player (but that would require sub-state actors to be modeled within the game, so probably not) or the player uses Governor Julius with the army loyal to him to conquer Gaul, but the newly acquired territories aren't loyal to the player, they're loyal to Julius. Seeing the risk this poses, the player decides to remove Julius, but instead of stepping down like a good little NPC, he rebels, taking all of Gaul along with some allies like Egypt? A whole lot about this game depends on the people-management aspects being fun, which I'm not sure they will be. Maybe if families are tracked, along with their feuds?
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Oct 2, 2018 01:40
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I'm starting to think Johan is just a lovely game designer.
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Oct 2, 2018 05:10
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Cease to Hope posted:i wonder if the idea is to just make imperator more of a traditional pass/fail game than most of the PDS games. it's arguably a weakness of EU4 and HOI4 that you are irreparably hosed long before you actually see a game over. i doubt many people ever see an actual game over screen on EU4, rather than just savescumming or just ditching the save first. My favorite part about HOI4 is that I can actually finish games. /edit Vicky2 also!
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Oct 2, 2018 05:24
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unwantedplatypus posted:I'm starting to think Johan is just a lovely game designer. The internet makes you stupid
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Oct 2, 2018 05:37
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VostokProgram posted:If you don't mind humoring me some more, I have a few more questions. Do you folks write regression tests for bugs that you find? Are there big test plans that QA goes through (either programmatically or by hand) to make sure the game is in a good state for release?  VostokProgram posted:Also send the next QA engineer you meet my respect b/c like I said before your games are so loving complex that keeping them in a good state seems very hard Will do! I'll do even better and tell all of them. Paradox is still small enough to do that. Groogy fucked around with this message at 07:47 on Oct 2, 2018 |
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Oct 2, 2018 07:43
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unwantedplatypus posted:I'm starting to think Johan is just a lovely game designer. Still upset they picked a different platypus to be the company mascot?
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Oct 2, 2018 13:55
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Johan was the director of EU4 originally, right? A game that was basically the greatest grand strategy game ever created upon release. What a dumbass.
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Oct 2, 2018 16:28
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Was it though
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Oct 2, 2018 17:29
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Yes. The only games that give it a run for its money are other Paradox games like Crusader Kings. What's better than Europa? (not Civilization, lmao)
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Oct 2, 2018 17:36
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Vicky, Ricky, and Vicky 2
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Oct 2, 2018 18:03
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Groogy posted:Eh that wasn't my point of the Betas, my point is the Betas just like every player have their own view of what they want out of the game, and I filter everything. This applies to just any feedback though really, the betas just have a more direct line. The filtering can be based on it being too extreme, it can be we don't want that at all. It could even be just simply time restraints. We also have a fuckton of telemetry on player behavior that is collected when people play (anonymously. I don't care where you shop or what you buy, but please don't take my aggregated stats on what focus paths people go down away from me), so you can always go "Hm, yes, interesting, it would seem that 0.2% of our playerbase share your opinion" when the Betas get too...enthusiastic.
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Oct 2, 2018 20:00
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Paradox please stop spying on the embarrassing number of times I have tried and failed to get a Byzantium game off the ground in EU4, ty. Actually if you do have data on the average life span of a Byzantium player I think that would be an interesting statistic.
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Oct 2, 2018 20:04
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I'm very glad that Paradox knows exactly what % of its playerbase is fash. This information can only be used for good
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Oct 2, 2018 20:26
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That means they know how many times I've done horribly stupid things as Communist France 
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Oct 2, 2018 20:31
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They know that for reasons unknown even to myself I always end up playing a blobbing colonialist south east asian nation
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Oct 2, 2018 20:47
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They know my horrible addiction to invading and massively destabilizing the middle east.
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Oct 2, 2018 20:51
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Senor Dog posted:Vicky, Ricky, and Vicky 2 All mostly unplayable at release with the exception of Ricky but that's an expansion.
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Oct 2, 2018 20:59
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uPen posted:All mostly unplayable at release with the exception of Ricky but that's an expansion. while true, i don't think that's relevant to the discussion of "what's a better grand strategy game than eu4"
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Oct 2, 2018 21:04
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The context was the game's quality on release. EU4 was a pretty incredible step up even from EU3 + expansions. And the current state of EU4 comes a few years after Johan stepped down from the lead designer role, so if you're one of those people who think EU4 is worse than ever currently, then slagging on the guy who was in charge of the game's design before its supposed downslide is extra weird.
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Oct 2, 2018 21:14
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