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canepazzo posted:What I don't get is the giant hangups people have with "mana". What's the issue with it exactly? Why is it different from ducats, prestige, piety, unity, political power etc.? I think one of the big arguments is people think that it's not "real". Like many think that teleporting magical substance that summons armies and never inflates is somehow more realistic than a numerical representation of your government's power in a specific area just because one is called "gold" which is real and the other isn't. The other thing is disappointment with EU4 DLCs which added a lot of "buttons". Like spend military points to get legitimacy, spend diplomacy points to get mercantilism and every special government has similar stuff. Many think that ability to turn gold into MP in I:R removes all the strategic thinking. Many of the complaints are about how the system would be used if taken to absurdity. It's true that it'd be nice to see more intricate mechanics that EU4's "spend X resource to instantly gain Y resource or buff" but it's sorta stripped down and straightforward decision. And EU4 is all about removing bullshit like waiting for stuff to progress, a bar to fill.
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May 5, 2019 19:24
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My second campaign, the first 'real' one, I decided to go for the Gaul achievement. I ran into some problems when I got my capital to 50 civilization, which might be apparent from the screenshot: The barbarians killed all the civilized folk in western Europe. In order to form Gaul you have to be a monarchy or republic, and in order to become one of those you need to neighbor one. I ended up selling a city to Carthage so that I could neighbor someone sufficiently smarter than me and teach me their ways. Reminiscent of the old westernization in EU4 before institutions. There's some kind of bug with clan retinues, when a clan leader died I was inheriting their retinue as a regular army, but the units still all had the loyal icon and I couldn't delete them. That was saddling me with some big economic issues as I ended up with a stack of 80 something chariots rusting in the capital because I couldn't get rid of them. Seems like either they should delete when the clan leader dies (as the tooltip implies), or at least not be loyal anymore so I can delete them. (And the clan leaders really should notice that I'm teching for infantry and light cav and recruit appropriately.) I started as Treveria, in case anyone was wondering.
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May 5, 2019 20:04
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What the gently caress, can I please have your AIs in my games, I have never seen even half that much blobbing from anything other than Rome
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May 5, 2019 20:47
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quote:There has been a lot of feedback of the game about how most countries just feel the same to play, and there are no variations. While most people appreciate that there is enough difference between settled tribes, migratory tribes, monarchies and republics, there is not much difference between the different tribes other than their starting location. I can't quite get over this part of Johan's dev diary. Is lack of variety really not something Paradox is looking to prioritize?
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May 5, 2019 23:25
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Beamed posted:I can't quite get over this part of Johan's dev diary. Is lack of variety really not something Paradox is looking to prioritize? I think he's more saying that the differences between Tribes, Monarchies, and Republics are supposed to be the fundamental differences, not location.
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May 5, 2019 23:44
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Sampatrick posted:I think he's more saying that the differences between Tribes, Monarchies, and Republics are supposed to be the fundamental differences, not location. It reads to me like he's saying there should be differences between them, but not within them, if that makes sense.
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May 5, 2019 23:52
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That Heritages thing along with actual variation between religions will go a long way towards giving real mechanical flavor for all the regions. It sounds like the Heritages mechanic will sort of act like the unique national ideas from EUIV. From playing so far, my main complaints is that diplomatic range is too short in a lot of cases (Epirus should be able to actually interact with Egypt and the Antigonids/Phrygia), the populist faction should have a less-punishing effect for being in power, the game needs to make it a whole lot easier to set up royal marriages across borders, and changing laws should be reliant more on senate politics / a ruler’s legitimacy / tribal cohesion. The various mana types also don’t feel ‘balanced’ and are often feast/famine, and I think that condensing the number of “mana types” to like one or two like in HOI4, but making various actions have varying costs based on a ruler’s mil/Econ/dip/religion skill as relevant to the action would help to reduce the feeling a little. I’m not sure how much of it’s just psychological on the part of the player or an actual imbalance in the power point economy, but both of those are valid parts of game design that need to be examined.
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May 6, 2019 00:17
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pissuria is stored in the Caucasus e: oh. that's not the caucasus. drat.
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May 6, 2019 00:33
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Playing Egypt and my heir was castrated. She has no children. Definitely a bug. I had her get treatment and it caused her to go blind but she got castrated instead. Not looking forward to this.
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May 6, 2019 01:52
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I'm quite happy with Johan's post. Are people really complaining about his tone when he's conceding there are issues and that they're working on them? At this point I feel like there's literally nothing he can say that would please some people. The only thing I wish Paradox would acknowledge that they haven't yet already is the power system imbalance. I actually wasn't aware that there were people complaining about the premise of monarch power itself, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I just hope Paradox isn't conflating criticisms of the way the system is balanced with criticisms of the system itself.
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May 6, 2019 03:50
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The biggest flaw with the game is the lack of unit sprites. Why the hell does my elephant stack look like a guy with a spear paradox 
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May 6, 2019 05:03
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Game’s good, I’ve already put 48 hours into it and am having fun, and it will get better with patches and DLC. I don’t know why we go through this with every new Paradox title. Honestly I’d rather they focus on making the game run smoother and not worry about the short term bitching and adding bandaid features in reaction thereto.
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May 6, 2019 05:04
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:I actually wasn't aware that there were people complaining about the premise of monarch power itself, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Oh boy, this has been a regular thing since EU4 first came out.
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May 6, 2019 05:40
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The UI is missing critical information from easily accessible places. I just conquered a neighboring province, and immediately fell into a civil war. I'm still learning the mechanics, but two things happened that I feel like I shouldn't be surprised by. 1. My capital province was steadily losing loyalty from a previous war, before the conquest took place. This isn't highlighted anywhere until the civil war alert flag is raised, and by then it's too late. 2. Halfway through the revolt, another country joined the war against me. I didn't know this happened until 20k soldiers showed up out of the fog. Why isn't this a game pausing alert by default?
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May 6, 2019 06:39
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:The only thing I wish Paradox would acknowledge that they haven't yet already is the power system imbalance. I actually wasn't aware that there were people complaining about the premise of monarch power itself, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I just hope Paradox isn't conflating criticisms of the way the system is balanced with criticisms of the system itself. There have been people constantly complaining about this from day 1 EU4, the only thing I can think of from any Paradox game which caused as many tears was hyperspacegate
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May 6, 2019 07:06
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RabidWeasel posted:There have been people constantly complaining about this from day 1 EU4, the only thing I can think of from any Paradox game which caused as many tears was hyperspacegate What do these people want? A ton of competing sliders to juggle in the hopes that things get actually done over time? I vaguely remember eu3 having something like that, and it being horrible Or maybe just hardcoded "actions" with no costs and different possible outcomes a la ck2? That is fine for a character based game, but randomness in a proper strategy game is bad, your actions must have predictable results or you're just in the hands of the rng. Again, fine for ck2, bad for eu4/Stellaris/imperator Seriously what's wrong with abstracted currencies? I seriously struggle to think of a way to "eliminate" them, and as far as I can tell almost every single drat strategy game has them in some way or another
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May 6, 2019 07:34
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RabidWeasel posted:There have been people constantly complaining about this from day 1 EU4, the only thing I can think of from any Paradox game which caused as many tears was hyperspacegate I just figured that after the first month of EU4, everyone realized they were wrong and shut up about it. At least, that's mostly what happened here. I shouldn't have underestimated the paradox forums, though.
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May 6, 2019 07:43
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TorakFade posted:What do these people want? A ton of competing sliders to juggle in the hopes that things get actually done over time? I vaguely remember eu3 having something like that, and it being horrible Yeah I think most of the people who hate mana are big on the "wait a random time or have a random chance for your actions to either succeed or fail" approach i.e. basically what EU3 and CK2 do for a lot of things. I think that this approach is OK for CK2 which is basically as much of a RPG as it is a strategy game but not so much for any other Paradox games. It really doesn't help that the balance between different currencies is so hosed up though, it makes it hard to defend the system when you have massive excesses of mil and religious points all the time while you're simultaneously scraping the barrel for oratory and civic points.
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May 6, 2019 09:16
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EU3 didn't have much more randomness than EU4, truthfully. Instead, it was big on making the player wait for a lot of stuff. Its tech research was based on your monetary income. You'd fiddle with sliders to set how much of your monthly income you wanted to dedicate to research, then you'd wait until you've contributed enough money to get a new tech level. The cost of tech advancements rose depending on how many provinces you had, making you run cost-benefit analyses on every province you conquer. It was a truly awful system. You waited on tech advancements that would unlock more national idea slots (and also the late-game ideas). You waited on slider movement cooldowns to customize your government. But there were also multiple different currencies, even still. You spent military and naval tradition on leaders, for instance (instead of spending MP). And Merchants, Missionaries, Diplomats, Spies, and Magistrates? Those were all currencies. You'd gain x number of each per year depending on your sliders, ideas, etc, and you spent them to perform various actions. This too was an inferior system. The cap on them was low (5 each), and it never felt like you were actually using people to accomplish things. Just spending random resources to gain more trade in a CoT, or whatever. With EU4's Monarch Power system, it took them some time to work out all the kinks and balance things (the original building system charged the player MP to build stuff), but it still represented a huge step forward from their old games. I've got no problem with it in Imperator, other than the aforementioned imbalance in power usefulness.
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May 6, 2019 09:51
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OK I get it, of course, but what baffles me about the "protests" is that you still have to wait for the accumulation of resources with this. It's not "I can do whatever I want whenever I want instantly", it's "I have to save up the points to make what I want", so not that different from "I have to click button and wait"... it's actually "I have to wait and then click button", that's the difference. is that difference enough to vote Imperator worst game of all years, as many people do? 
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May 6, 2019 10:01
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TorakFade posted:OK I get it, of course, but what baffles me about the "protests" is that you still have to wait for the accumulation of resources with this. It's not "I can do whatever I want whenever I want instantly", it's "I have to save up the points to make what I want", so not that different from "I have to click button and wait"... it's actually "I have to wait and then click button", that's the difference. Complaints about mana != All complaints about Imperator. Imperator has a bunch of UI and game design issues that are detrimental to the enjoyment of a lot of players. These complaints have nothing to do with the idiot brigade skreeing about mana or the youtube brigade monetizing them. I enjoy Imperator, but the UI needs a ton of work. That a lot of the UI issues have been solved in Paradox' other games just makes the optics of the situation so much worse.
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May 6, 2019 10:09
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Cynic Jester posted:Complaints about mana != All complaints about Imperator. I know, I was specifically speaking about people who protest about mana (which is a SHITTON of complaints btw) I do recognize there are UI problems, heck it's so evident it's barely worth discussing, and they already said they're working on it 
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May 6, 2019 10:27
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Family Values posted:My second campaign, the first 'real' one, I decided to go for the Gaul achievement. I ran into some problems when I got my capital to 50 civilization, which might be apparent from the screenshot: Like not to poo poo on your work but I've said it before in here - you DON'T need to neighbour one. It's an either or thing. As long as you've passed the right laws, all your guys like you and you have 50 civilization in your capital you can do it. The laws you have to pass require 8 oratory though, and that level (or around there) is also needed to get to civilization 50. You're lucky you got to form Gaul, I've had to abandon mine because I can't beat rome and they took some of the provinces. I'm also going to say that while CK2 and EU4 weren't amazing at release they were so much better than what Paradox released previously that it was amazing for most people. That's what made them better at launch, that they're better than what came before. Taear fucked around with this message at 10:40 on May 6, 2019 |
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May 6, 2019 10:34
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:EU3 didn't have much more randomness than EU4, truthfully. Instead, it was big on making the player wait for a lot of stuff. Its tech research was based on your monetary income. You'd fiddle with sliders to set how much of your monthly income you wanted to dedicate to research, then you'd wait until you've contributed enough money to get a new tech level. The cost of tech advancements rose depending on how many provinces you had, making you run cost-benefit analyses on every province you conquer. It was a truly awful system. You waited on tech advancements that would unlock more national idea slots (and also the late-game ideas). You waited on slider movement cooldowns to customize your government. I was refering more to poo poo like "I want to annex this vassal time to click request annexation over and over for a billion years until they randomly say yes"
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May 6, 2019 10:56
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I think the core reason for the "mana" hate is Oratory, and how it gates so many actions. In the other games there are plenty of things I can do without waiting for a resource as the default pacing mechanism. EU4 uses mana to force me to prioritize how I develop my nation - but never starves me to the point of having to wait for prolonged periods. CK2 uses mana as passive buff fuel and a way to access exceptional actions - but all the awesome character mechanics are "free". Stellaris uses mana to pace and balance expansion and aggression, but internal development is about managing and spending several readily available resources. In Imperator the use of Oratory controls internal development (pops, governor policy), character interactions (bribes, citizenship) and expansion (diplomacy, claims). Players can ignore claims, pop culture, ill-fitting governor policies and expand while handling the penalties inflicted, but that feels counter-intuitive and punishing to many players. So they feel Oratory blocks them from having fun. Other Paradox games give a plethora of things to do while waiting for something else. Perhaps it's somewhat caused by Imperator seeming to be far more aimed at territorial expansion as the player goal. If you don't expand you'll probably be gobbled up by some blob. Playing tall is currently just a way to exploit tech mechanics - and once that's fixed I don't see it being fun or anything but subpar. Becoming a diplomatic and/or economic powerhouse is not really a valid alternative to just blobbing as much as possible. And since Oratory is the tool used to negate the penalties from blobbing, it becomes so extremely important. This is an awesome game if you want to paint maps. If you are more into flavor, larping, playing tall, economy-building, diplomacy, etc. then I am sure the game will evolve to make those playstyles more fun too. But for now it seems to have sadly alienated a lot of players looking for an experience offered by most other Paradox games, but not really supported by Imperator. The reaction of many upset player has been extremely petulant, rude and unreasonable - I hope this does not prevent Johan and the rest of the team from seeing the few nuggets of reasonable criticism, and using them to widen the appeal of the game.
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May 6, 2019 11:02
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Spiderfist Island posted:That Heritages thing along with actual variation between religions will go a long way towards giving real mechanical flavor for all the regions. It sounds like the Heritages mechanic will sort of act like the unique national ideas from EUIV. The problem is most of those ideas are fluff. Kinda like historical events. Of course if you're minmaxer and optimize stuff then for you +10% to trade power of Novgorod or something is important, but in reality Novgorod is defined by it's geography and relations and religion and government system (and special mechanics if you own DLC). Those national ideas are very rarely focused and greately affect play outside of several examples where they make Exploration ideas unnecessary for Russia and Berbers get raiding and France gets a lot of focused military bonuses. Even so when we talk about some special countries we have to watch out for they're mostly defined by special government like Prussian monarchy. So those heritages look to me like a bone thrown to a community. The Roman one makes Heavy Infantry cheaper the way a single invention (and you'll have hundred of inventions by the end game) could do. And Roman characters may have more rivals. Not sure how will it affect anything at all. I:R made starting location and government and populace much more important than it was in previous games (even Victoria, I would argue) and defining how you play the game. But those countries don't have flavor and guidance. If you start as Savoy in EU4 you'll see that they have fort defense bonuses and diplomatic reputation and you get the idea of Savoy. Those bonuses are nothing, if you try to stack those bonuses as, say, Ethiopia, you'll probably have 60% bonus fort defense while Savoy has 70% or something, and some random event bonus can uplift Ethiopia even higher than Savoy. And when you play against Savoy or Ethiopia you don't care about all their bonuses beyond direct military ones, you'll barely notice this fort defense. So really strategic part doesn't get any meaningful update even from EU4 expansive national bonuses, those Imperator Rome bonuses look as important as dynamic historical events giving you 3 prestige in EU4. Some variety to religion is nice though, especially if it means that conversion becomes possible and meaningful. Though I'm afraid they'll have to go into fantasy land: even current descriptions of many religions blatantly say that we know nothing about them.
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May 6, 2019 11:17
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People loving love fluff though, they want every different government type, every culture and every religion to have a huge pile of buttons saying "wow this state is so unique and different look at the ~flavour~ gain 10% more commerce income" I mean I assume that this is true because that's the main gameplay differences between different states in EU4 (with the exceptions of being in the HRE and some explorer-related stuff. And I guess Merchant Republics get a unique "punch yourself in the balls lol" penalty because?) other than gross differences in starting conditions and people apparently love the flavour in EU4. This doesn't hurt but it's a really weird thing to specifically request when there's so much more useful changes you could make to the game that make the core gameplay better.
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May 6, 2019 11:29
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Yes, they do love flavor and fluff. So from the tone that Johan uses, I can see him imagining himself being Leonardo Da Vinchi making a beautiful portrait of a girl with a mysterious smile... And the whole art community says that he should've painted bigger tits. Still that flavor doesn't harm at least. And he ignores the peasant rabble where it's important, underlining that they can easily change the game from being MP-focused but he knows it makes for a better game. And as long as they work on imporving UI and AI and base mechanics I won't be regretful about additional events and unique Iceni bonus to female ruler martial skill or Spartan button to throw babies from a cliff (-manpower, +discipline).
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May 6, 2019 11:43
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ilitarist posted:So from the tone that Johan uses, I can see him imagining himself being Leonardo Da Vinchi making a beautiful portrait of a girl with a mysterious smile... And the whole art community says that he should've painted bigger tits. Well, he should have. Everybody loves bigger tits. As you correctly say, flavor is, at the worst, harmless; an event giving you 3 prestige can be safely ignored if you don't care for flavor, but if you DO care even reading those 3 lines of text and seeing your prestige go up 3 points is nice. I won't lie, I love that "skinnerbox"-esque feeling even if there is absolutely no serious impact on gameplay whatsoever. Also flavor is one of the easiest things to add - have a bunch of interns researching potential funny historical events generic enough that they can be applied to many different countries, come up with a few non-threatening bonuses or maluses, create a few hundred events and slap them in FLAVOR PACK DLC#1 for 5€ (or integrate them togheter with other stuff in MORE SERIOUS DLC#1 for 15€, whatever). I believe most people don't much care about exact historicalness or perfect execution or gamebraking advantages - even though they could be added of course - but more for just something that makes you feel "oh, this playthrough is not 99,9% the same as my previous one, only 90%" So for now I'd rather they concentrate on more broken things like religions (that are de facto useless and same for everyone right now), UI, AI and the other glaring issues, there's always time for a "way of life"-style DLC a few months from now.
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May 6, 2019 12:08
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TorakFade posted:So for now I'd rather they concentrate on more broken things like religions (that are de facto useless and same for everyone right now), UI, AI and the other glaring issues, there's always time for a "way of life"-style DLC a few months from now. I actually wish they'd gone with not have pop-based religion in the game at all. It's just a facet of culture in this period. It feels awkward and weird to have culture and religion changes happen completely separate from one another. We could still have omens, even differentiated ones, so what is the point of tracking pop religion apart from conversion acting as an expansion roadblock? I don't think it adds anything. It's just another thing for people to get angry about not having enough flavor. Instead it could have been flavor if made solely a trait of cultures and nations.
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May 6, 2019 12:31
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I do think the process of waiting a long time for MP to accrue then cashing them in for instant actions can be amazingly unsatisfying, so I’m sympathetic to people who want to see those processes changed if possible. And they already have a great method for doing so with all these characters and families who don’t feel nearly prominent enough. Like I don’t know why I’m waiting for 200 oratory and then clicking a button to get a claim instead of appointing some person from one of my families as a diplomat or whatever and sending them off to make the claim based on their oratory skill. That opens up so many more interesting things that can happen down the line.
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May 6, 2019 12:58
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Everyone's talking about mana, but no one's talking about the more important bit: I:R is obviously better than other Paradox titles in its current state because it doesn't yet have pop-up-box-itis.
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May 6, 2019 13:14
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Half-wit posted:Everyone's talking about mana, but no one's talking about the more important bit: Those trade requests, though...
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May 6, 2019 13:17
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PederP posted:Those trade requests, though... The fact that there's a whole trade UI and even a button to prevent you getting requests which trade away bonuses and somehow they still didn't manage to put in the "just accept everything" button is kind of 
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May 6, 2019 13:59
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It's all about flavour, that sweet, that sour. Without flavour the game is just a map and numbers. I want the feeling that I'm building something, that my nation's culture is changing, expanding etc. If I wanted to play a game with just numbers I got Excel, budgeting and that paperclip game.
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May 6, 2019 14:06
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Dev Diary on religion and the new naval mechanics: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/imperator-development-diary-6th-of-may-2019.1174793/
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May 6, 2019 14:30
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Bitter Johan is the best Johan for Dev. Diary! Some needed sarcasm to spice it up. anyway, the new changes looks good! And Navigable Rivers has always been something i wanted, so that's sweet. now, lets add Norway and Sweden, so i can play early Vikings. but no rush, I'm properly one of the few that's having a blast playing Imperator as is anyway
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May 6, 2019 15:03
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Descar posted:Bitter Johan is the best Johan for Dev. Diary! Some needed sarcasm to spice it up. That's not Johan - it's Trin-Tragula / Henrik Lohmander, a (pretty senior, I think) designer. Much bigger changes than expected. Looks good I agree.
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May 6, 2019 15:34
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The real reason Rome acquired an Empire was to feed the nascent republic’s inexhaustible hunger for civic points. Nervos Civicpointii, Pecuniam Infinitum
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May 6, 2019 16:03
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What the gently caress I actually think the naval rework sounds fun? I didn't think that was possible but I guess it's just moving the land combat system over and I really, really like how Imperator does land combat so it makes sense. Major rivers as borders, gently caress yes. Religion rework is not exciting but adds some cool stuff, the addition of state conversions is funny since IIRC Johan said like yesterday or late last week that it wasn't going to be added. Anyone else notice the new UI element on the centre right? Looks like a sad guy with a sword over the top of his portrait. I wonder if it's just war exhaustion since people complained about it being harder to find? The icon is different to the one on the religion screen, though.  Look at that sweet, sweet natural border
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May 6, 2019 16:24
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