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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I watch few lengthy youtube videos but pdox games do present an inherently sort-of-bad message about how the world works, and despite protests by people who don't want to think about it, they do influence how people (especially kids and teenagers who do in fact play the poo poo out of these games) see history and by consequence modern society. It's an interesting topic and enjoyable to talk about imo, and I'd like to see Paradox take stronger steps against the outright fash section of their fanbase. Any sort of historical strategy game attracts various brands of crazy nationalist but you don't have to, as a company, be polite to them or sidestep telling them to gently caress off.
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Dec 2, 2019 01:31
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I watch few lengthy youtube videos but pdox games do present an inherently sort-of-bad message about how the world works, and despite protests by people who don't want to think about it, they do influence how people (especially kids and teenagers who do in fact play the poo poo out of these games) see history and by consequence modern society. It's an interesting topic and enjoyable to talk about imo, and I'd like to see Paradox take stronger steps against the outright fash section of their fanbase. Any sort of historical strategy game attracts various brands of crazy nationalist but you don't have to, as a company, be polite to them or sidestep telling them to gently caress off. The thing about Paradox games is that it's basically the same problem that the Civilization games have, where because it's historically themed it gives people the mistaken perception that it's historically accurate. Like not that it's a literal historical depiction - nobody needs to be told that Ghandi didn't lead the Indian civilization into a nuclear war against the Romans - but more the broad strokes of "this is how society is organized" and the framing of map painting being how a culture should be judged. I don't believe it's the intention of the designers to be perceived this way - they just want to make a fun game with nods to stuff they recognize - but that framing gives off the air of being "educational" and a lot of people who don't know any better (and some that do) will use that depiction as evidence of some real world political point they're trying to make. It's the reason why Paradox has had to take a few hard stances on memes about the games. Because oops, it turns out that some of the people making the joke were not just seeing it in the context of a silly little map game.
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Dec 2, 2019 01:41
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Zane posted:seems difficult. the first gamified mechanical principle that all paradox games share is that the expansion of the state through territorial conquest is 'winning.' the one exception is of course victoria 2 where there is a sort of trade-off between your prestige score (which encourages social-political traditionalism) and your economic score (which encourages social-political innovation). so i'm not really inclined to criticize victoria 2. new vision for the complete game lineup paradox please hire me: Victoria: Hearts of Bronze Victoria: Rome Victoria: Three Kingdoms Victoria: Jihadi Sultans Victoria: The Prequel Victoria III Victoria: Stalin And Hitler Were Absolutely Correct Victoria: War for the Straits Victoria: Stellaris
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Dec 2, 2019 01:46
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Victoria: Water Wars
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Dec 2, 2019 02:52
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Senior Dog posted:Victoria: Water Wars Patch notes here.
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Dec 2, 2019 03:02
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Victoria: East vs. West Victoria The Masquerade 2 Victoria Goon Opinions Victoria Enemy Unknown
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Dec 2, 2019 03:59
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Funky Valentine posted:Victoria Goon Opinions
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Dec 2, 2019 04:45
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The Magical Realms of Tir na nOg: Escape from Necron 7 - Revenge of Cuchulainn: The Official Game of the Movie - Chapter 3 of the Victoria Saga
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Dec 2, 2019 08:02
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A thing I do appreciate about how Paradox games reflect the world is that there is a sort of cynicism with regards to motives. It leans heavy on realpolitik and tends to portray ideological decisions as ultimately driven by material conditions first and rhetoric second. I guess CK2 would be the exception to that but even so the wider framing results in characters acting without regard to their material self-interest as irrational.
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Dec 2, 2019 10:26
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YF-23 posted:It leans heavy on realpolitik and tends to portray ideological decisions as ultimately driven by material conditions first and rhetoric second. It is by necessity, I'd say, cause then you'd be the only sane person who methodically paints the map in a world of people who want normal human happiness, irrationally hate those specific people, fight for the title for their brothers and so on. Even CK2 portrays its characters as too rational cause characters don't have desires not connected to the power play. You don't even have people who just want to be rich for the sake of good life. Historical realpolitik is also paradoxically serves some very ideological worldviews. I see plenty of adepts of totalitarian ideologies who say that murders of millions were justified because reasons (e.g. Stalin knowing that WW2 is coming and thus he just have to kill millions). If you think hard enough you can see geopolitical mind game in a decision that the glorious leader ordered while being drunk in a company of yes men. One of the things I don't like more detailed Paradox games like HoI4 is making historical events rational. Munich agreements are portrayed as a rational political play, not a risky gamble that by itself could cause WW2. And as USSR you're dumb not to murder those generals on made-up charges because Trotskism.
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Dec 2, 2019 10:42
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OTOH, the generic fascist tree in HoI4 presents its focuses in bland matter-of-fact language while the generic communist tree borders on being the tree of a cartoon villain, and liberal centrism is presented as the only reasonable, considered option while also containing a shitload of reactionary monarchist and openly fascist historical factions across the world that wouldn't even agree with actual contemporary liberal centrists. And then there's the fascist-labeled fascists (not unaligned centrists like the Vaterländische Front, known completely centrist unaligned not at all fascists) being explicitly correct mechanically. No subtext there Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 11:35 on Dec 2, 2019 |
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Dec 2, 2019 11:25
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On the other other hand, I will point to this out of context clip where Chris King says "Marxism is Great" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYzxcf_ZL_g&t=1406s
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Dec 2, 2019 13:36
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Yeah, I don't believe anyone should make any conclusions from stuff like that. Reminds me of Company of Heroes 2: devs wisely decided that they wouldn't touch Axis war crimes cause you don't want to see death camp and then go into multiplayer and cheer for your King Tiger defending fatherland policies. But with Soviets you can make player command Soviet armies and see them doing some bad stuff, here you can go all philosophical and ask whether fighting evil and defending evil justifies those specific atrocities. And so it somehow happens that in the world of CoH Soviets are the only ones who do bad stuff, cause their bad stuff is big enough to scare you but not in the Nazi league of being beyond evil.
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Dec 2, 2019 14:14
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Yeah, CoH2 was quite the thematic mess due to that.
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Dec 2, 2019 14:30
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Any sort of historical strategy game attracts various brands of crazy nationalist but you don't have to, as a company, be polite to them or sidestep telling them to gently caress off. He said, in between typical tankie complaints how communism is misrepresented in games, oblivious to the irony
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Dec 2, 2019 14:46
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Pyromancer posted:He said, in between typical tankie complaints how communism is misrepresented in games, oblivious to the irony Oh god I'm a tankie now? Xi Jinping doesn't look like winne the pooh and also there is no genocide in Xinjiang, long live the the CCP police in Hong Kong, remove the ahistorical chinese civil war in HoI5
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Dec 2, 2019 18:17
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CoH2 was trash because of how it treated the Soviets, leaning heavily on myths about the Red Army than actual facts. Also I think the thread has discussed this before, but video games like Pdox's have never mastered balancing building tall. Theoretically if you wanted the counter to going on a conquering spree you should be able to sit and improve your starting provinces, thereby improving your polity and the lives of the people in it. Of course while this might be great ideologically, it doesn't make for thrilling gameplay, as it tends to just involve waiting for money/points to go up and then you invest it. You aren't in competition with anyone and you're not over coming a challenge and those two things tend to make up gameplay. CK2's council and I guess EU4's estates try and offer something there, but they just don't do enough and are far too easy to game to be interesting and make playing tall any more fun. As well there's the balance issue of if building tall is on par with wide, what incentive is there for war?
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Dec 2, 2019 19:40
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Eimi posted:CoH2 was trash because of how it treated the Soviets, leaning heavily on myths about the Red Army than actual facts. I can see an argument for making "tall" play more interesting to make it viable to the player to enjoy, but I mean, really, it's not a balance issue to say conquering is better than staying home and developing your state. All the polities in history who had the best "score" IRL were conquering, genociding peoples, who during periods of "peace" were consolidating other states in their sphere or quelling internal rebellions of conquered states. I can think of very few in the course of time who projected real power to be influential globally without also trying to "build wide" as we'd describe it in game terms.
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Dec 2, 2019 20:16
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Eimi posted:EU4's estates try and offer something there, but they just don't do enough and are far too easy to game to be interesting and make playing tall any more fun. Estates aren't really anything to do with tall vs wide now, if they ever were. They're, "Do I want to give away x percent of my country's output in exchange for bonuses right now and periodically after that?" really. Nowadays you can completely ignore the estate system, just start the game and strip the estates out of your country, then never give any land to estates ever again.
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Dec 2, 2019 20:19
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hot cocoa on the couch posted:I can see an argument for making "tall" play more interesting to make it viable to the player to enjoy, but I mean, really, it's not a balance issue to say conquering is better than staying home and developing your state. All the polities in history who had the best "score" IRL were conquering, genociding peoples, who during periods of "peace" were consolidating other states in their sphere or quelling internal rebellions of conquered states. I can think of very few in the course of time who projected real power to be influential globally without also trying to "build wide" as we'd describe it in game terms. In EU, more internal management would also just make the game more fun and flavourful imo even if it's not optimal. It's kinda lame that at present, once you learn the mechanics of EU, picking any of the actual major powers of the period just means slowly blobbing outward forever starting in 1444. Even if you don't pick a major, there's a small difficult period and then proceed to blob. I think EU would really benefit from having more internal mechanics to deal with. Transitioning from a traditional society to a modern state is represented in halfassed systems, some DLC-locked, that mainly amount to "wait to have enough numbers to click button to up number" but imo that's the main appeal of the EU era. I'd like to see it leaned harder into. In particular I think it'd make playing the majors a lot more interesting. Instead of France, England, Vijayanagar, Ming, Castile, etc being EZ mode that have enough resources to just brute force anything they want, have them have to deal with poo poo. Like France should need to spend actual time, in an engaging way, wrangling its theoretical power into an actual semi-functional unified state, with the possibility of failure. England should have enough poo poo to deal with that it can't pick Quest for the New World as soon as Portugal does without risking serious asskicking, and conquering Scotland and Ireland shouldn't be something easily completed in the 15th century, mostly by Henry VI. Castile should be lovely and hard enough that Portugal is a serious threat and conquering Granada is a big concern that you might take fifty years to accomplish, instead of an instant stomp as soon as the starting truce runs out. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Dec 2, 2019 |
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Dec 2, 2019 20:37
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Paradox's games are designed so that building wide gives you visual confirmation of your success, whereas building tall often involves disengaging with a lot of the more interesting mechanics and fiddling around with a couple of numbers. If you're lucky, there'll be some graphs to keep track of, but mostly it's wiggling around your place on the top 10 lists in the ledger. It's even a little questionable how building tall exactly works when you're playing as a national government and many of the traditonal narratives about economic progress involve the actions of individuals outside of the government who are only indirectly empowered by governmental policies. The ones that do involve heavy governmental influences are the "westernization" stories. And then there's the whole way that building tall means taking an introspective perspective so there's less of a point to paying attention to the rest of the world and less reason to not just be playing Anno.
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Dec 2, 2019 21:08
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Just gotta add like dope big city graphics growing real big so everyone knows your like 5 provinces own bones.
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Dec 2, 2019 22:31
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SlothfulCobra posted:Paradox's games are designed so that building wide gives you visual confirmation of your success, whereas building tall often involves disengaging with a lot of the more interesting mechanics and fiddling around with a couple of numbers. If you're lucky, there'll be some graphs to keep track of, but mostly it's wiggling around your place on the top 10 lists in the ledger. Yeah honestly even in Victoria, the series that seems most designed around playing tall, it still tends to feel like you aren't really accomplishing anything because your population will basically grow on a fixed percentage no matter how well or poorly you're doing since immigration is more heavily influenced by "are you in North America" than every other factor combined, and other metrics like how well your citizens are able to meet their needs are very hard to actually learn (and harder still to figure out how to fix it if they aren't). It's why the more popular campaigns are always Germany or Italy or the US - their whole arc is about starting relatively small and then gaining a shitload of territory relatively quickly, mostly through wars.
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Dec 3, 2019 00:47
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The games may not be a great history teacher, but I've learned a lot of history thanks to playing them. Having a country I'm playing as a focus has given me a starting point for looking around and learning up on the history of the region I'm playing in. Having events pop up has been a great excuse to go and find out what really happened. One of the things that EUIV has helped me appreciate in a way that Civ never did is the sheer parallelness of world history. Everything is happening all at once in a way that traditional histories struggle to convey. They tend to siloize their stories to keep the narratives comprehensible. The global simulation (partial though it may be) being in a continual state of "meanwhile, in ____" has helped me feel the interconnections of the world.
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Dec 3, 2019 01:12
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Eimi posted:Also I think the thread has discussed this before, but video games like Pdox's have never mastered balancing building tall. In reality it's balanced by the fact that when you play tall you don't send your children to die in a foreign land opening up your borders for third party invasion, and you also don't have to make peace with the fact that you're destroying a whole culture. Tall VS Wide game should be psychological horror. As you've said, if there's a real balance then to start a war you'd need someone as bad as real warmongers instead of someone who just wants some fun game with friends.
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Dec 3, 2019 08:56
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The Cheshire Cat posted:nobody needs to be told that Ghandi didn't lead the Indian civilization into a nuclear war against the Romans Edgar Allen Ho posted:In particular I think it'd make playing the majors a lot more interesting. Instead of France, England, Vijayanagar, Ming, Castile, etc being EZ mode that have enough resources to just brute force anything they want, have them have to deal with poo poo. Like France should need to spend actual time, in an engaging way, wrangling its theoretical power into an actual semi-functional unified state, with the possibility of failure. England should have enough poo poo to deal with that it can't pick Quest for the New World as soon as Portugal does without risking serious asskicking, and conquering Scotland and Ireland shouldn't be something easily completed in the 15th century, mostly by Henry VI. Castile should be lovely and hard enough that Portugal is a serious threat and conquering Granada is a big concern that you might take fifty years to accomplish, instead of an instant stomp as soon as the starting truce runs out.
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Dec 3, 2019 18:35
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:This being a part of EU 5 would get me really excited. I am disappointed that Grenada held out till 1492 in history but in a game that starts in the 1450s, the hapless Castillian AI can still end Grenada before the end of the 1460s, no sweat at all. In history, the English for a long time had to chose between an army or a navy because they were so budget constrained, but instead in EU4 even the hapless UK AI can swallow 95% of the British Isles before the mid 1500s. I would like to see these kinda of things brought to life in an interesting way. The Paradox devs are a creative lot that have come up with and implemented tons of great ideas in their games and I believe that if they wanted to, and invested the effort, they could do it. The Paradox devs have always said that 'gaming fun' is more important than historicity. Imagine the riot over a a historical EU IV where Byzantium wouldn't stand a chance of survival?
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Dec 3, 2019 21:22
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Lotti Fuehrscheim posted:The Paradox devs have always said that 'gaming fun' is more important than historicity. if in real history a disembodied spirit had taken complete control of the roman state in the 1400's and had unlimited retrys it would have eventually managed to turn things around at least once
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Dec 3, 2019 21:40
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Lotti Fuehrscheim posted:The Paradox devs have always said that 'gaming fun' is more important than historicity. AAAAA! Real Muenster fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Dec 3, 2019 |
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Dec 3, 2019 22:36
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420 Gank Mid posted:if in real history a disembodied spirit had taken complete control of the roman state in the 1400's and had unlimited retrys it would have eventually managed to turn things around at least once  (the only way this could happen in RL is if the Council of Florence actually succeeded in ending the church schism - which would never have happened - and Venice had sent a naval force capable of blocking the straits - which they had the opportunity to and passed on - and the battle of Lepanto happened a century early. so, totally possible!) Lum_ fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Dec 3, 2019 |
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Dec 3, 2019 22:54
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Brian of Mumu married his lover to william the conqueror and I guess would sail to england and visit his court every yeah to repeatedly impregnate her. Brilliant.
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Dec 3, 2019 23:32
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I don't think the real Mehmed II would have trapped his entire army in the Adriatic
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Dec 3, 2019 23:52
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It’s been both funny and sad watching Paradox’s decline over the last two years since they went public. Today we talked in discord about the new Punic Wars for Imperator and for Carthage being such a major faction they didn’t include unique army models for them, they still use the default Greek units but get a ship and a mercenary model. Someone also pointed out to me that Imperator launched with a music DLC that’s supposed to get new tracks with every major update but you have to PAY for it and it didn’t come with the deluxe version of the game. So if you don’t buy that DLC you’re stuck with the release songs forever. Plus the new Stellaris DLC looks to be adding another building type along with a new job type and it’s just more bloat for a game that’s already coming apart at the seams, combined with the cheap feel of PDXcon this year and the poor communication about the issues there I feel like PDX is really in the decline phase we’ve seen in other studios after they got bought out. Federations is probably the first stellaris DLC I’ll skip and it’s increasingly looking like they’re just making poor decisions everywhere trying to chase dividends. The mobile game blew up because of stolen assets but I really felt like the big scandal of that game was the cynical way it was aimed at extracting money from whales.
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Dec 4, 2019 00:05
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Yeah it was enjoyable seeing the forum post / blog from Fred that was like "Don't worry I'm not CEO anymore but nothing will change" and it was the exact moment that things were clearly off the rails  I mean, why would having new ownership and management possibly change things?  Absurd
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Dec 4, 2019 00:08
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RIP Paradox
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Dec 4, 2019 00:20
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Lol everyone pissing and moaning about PDX in this thread will buy CK3 day 1.
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Dec 4, 2019 00:40
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I'll do the same thing I do with just about every game. Give it a few days after release to see how it's received and then maybe consider giving it a try.
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Dec 4, 2019 00:54
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There's a 0% chance I'm buying CK3 on day one after HOI4, Stellaris and Imperator (which I still haven't bought). Maybe after a year or so when it goes on sale if it's getting good word of mouth.
OctaviusBeaver fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Dec 4, 2019 |
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Dec 4, 2019 01:00
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V for Vegas posted:Lol everyone pissing and moaning about PDX in this thread will buy CK3 day 1. boycottcodmw2.jpg
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Dec 4, 2019 01:01
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OctaviusBeaver posted:There's a 0% chance I'm buying CK3 on day one after HOI4, Stellaris and Imperator (which I still haven't bought). Maybe after a year or so when it goes on sale if it's getting good word of mouth. I am capable of learning slowly. I thought Pokemon Sword looked bad so I held off for a few days of goon opinion. Imperator burned me really badly so I'm not preordering any Paradox titles anymore, I'm waiting to see if it's good first.
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