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Imperator is okay and its got some good ideas but there's just not a ton thereCrazycryodude posted:Yeah it tracked actual material balance of goods as discrete units rather than just floating price pools that summon/dismiss goods out of the void like V3 does. Which was maybe more realistic for your Marxism Simulator, but I imagine must have been hell on performance and gameplay. Led to frustrating things like being completely unable to buy a single unit of Good X ever because your prestige was too low and all the countries above you bought the entire world market's supply before you could, whereas in V3 you can get your hands on at least small quantities of everything by just paying obscene rip-off prices that summon some of Good X from the shadow realm. My favorite bug in vicky 2 was that there was line one OPM in India that if they got and maintained independence would sell luxury wood for high prices but didn't have the technology or population to actually invest any of it, so they'd just gradually drain the world's entire money supply into a single province
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Mar 15, 2024 15:54
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soviet elsa posted:Also, Imperator is more fun than any of the "good" Paradox games right now. Do any of the haters actually play it? It's their best game mechanically (outside of some issues that feel underbaked) but it underdelivers in terms of feels. Countries are quite different because of their deities, available trade goods, population and geography, but it doesn't have EU4's stuff like events, missions, disaster, national ideas that screem into your face that you are playing as Dithmarschen right now. There are also few countries that don't need explanation, and fewer still that give you an idea of how they play. A lot of interesting countries are involved in Diadochi stuff and it feels overwhelming, like you start playing in the endgame. Your average Joe probably wants to play as Sparta or Athens or Judea or Epirus and these countries are screwed in the beginning unless you really know what you're doing. These playthroughs require you to engage with the mechanics a lot, it's like every famous country in the period is Byzantium. And simple campaigns like Rome still have a lot going on - your early expansion as Rome or Carthage requires you to manage a lot of wars and web of alliances, which is not necessarily difficulty but relatively complex compared to playing major power in other Paradox games. A hater won't change their mind about this game after playing it now. The mod Invictus does a great job of creating personal stories for many countries allowing you to have a relatively relaxed roleplaying experience. I generally dislike mods but this one is very reserved and basically only adds these guided missions and decisions allowing for low-stakes campaigns that are as hard as you want them to be. I think with this mod a hater can actually be persuaded there's a great game there, and see that even countries without specific content have a lot of interesting directions. E.g. any of hundreds of tribes can have multi-tiered formable tribe federation, each providing a different bonus making you feel like you building a nation. And the mission tree for switching from a tribe to a monarchy or a republic (which is not added by a mod, it's in vanilla) is a rare moment in I:R where family business doesn't feel tacked on: different families take stances on the future and by working with them you build your new state. It really is amazing how much stuff is there under the hood if you look past the "EU4 but without content" first impression. But, again, I totally understand haters who play this game and feel nothing, see only numbers jumping around without a grand story behind it, and the story behind it all is what we love Paradox games for. And at its best it's still "EU4 but with different content provided by a mod which is usually good but oh well you know it's a mod and also some cool mechanics but unlike EU4 it's not a contender for a best strategy game of all time title so when you play it you often think that you could play a very similar game but better". ilitarist fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Mar 15, 2024 |
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Mar 15, 2024 16:15
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ilitarist posted:It's their best game mechanically (outside of some issues that feel underbaked) but it underdelivers in terms of feels. Countries are quite different because of their deities, available trade goods, population and geography, but it doesn't have EU4's stuff like events, missions, disaster, national ideas that screem into your face that you are playing as Dithmarschen right now. That honestly why I like it, come to think of it. And why I would have liked to see it expanded more. There's not a lot of written records outside of Rome, the assorted Greeks, and India. So much more would come from focusing on making the gameplay be different as you switch from Rome to Gaul to German to Numidian to Sabaean. The reason I've skipped most of the latest EU and HOI DLCs is because actual gameplay features seem second to yet another "if you choose to install the wacky monarchists who historically had 4 members, you may choose from three candidates, and if you pick Napoleon's uncle's second cousin's great-grand nephew, he decides you get to become pirates, which means you get missions to conquer and core the whole continent! So crazy!"
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Mar 15, 2024 16:27
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Thank you for all the responses
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Mar 15, 2024 17:06
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soviet elsa posted:The reason I've skipped most of the latest EU and HOI DLCs is because actual gameplay features seem second to yet another "if you choose to install the wacky monarchists who historically had 4 members, you may choose from three candidates, and if you pick Napoleon's uncle's second cousin's great-grand nephew, he decides you get to become pirates, which means you get missions to conquer and core the whole continent! So crazy!" I hear you. I haven't played HoI4 but EU4 mostly does this stuff gracefully in my opinion. Crazy stuff is supposed to be rare and come in special circumstances. I don't like most of this additions aee tied to magical tags, as in a country with identical culture, religion, government type and even territory usually can't do missions or government interactions. But the alternative would be further cluttering the game with concepts and values, so sure, fine, let Russians get a unique genetic ability to use modernization mechanic in a DLC. The abundance of missions is exhausting too. I liked EU3 with it's dynamic objectives through decisions and triggered modifiers. As an Orthodox nation conquer Rome to mend the schism, as a Christian nation hold Jerusalem to gain additional missionary, that kind of thing, and missions were context sensitive. I still like some missions in EU4, like early missions for Livonians allow them to build a counter-intuitive set of forts close buy and get them for cheap. As an American nation it feels cool to do missions about reversing the tide of colonization. In some cases the missions work as an alternative tech tree providing long-term bonuses not unlike ideas (but UI buries these in modifiers) But a lot of these missions don't feel justified with a flavor, and lack impact, and feel like handholding instead of acknowledgement of your achievements. I'd be a happy man if EU5 uses updated I:R system with more types of mission trees and specific missions.
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Mar 15, 2024 17:32
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I:R had good bones but needed more regional content to flesh it out, it's a drat shame it got ditched when it did. Good thing Invictus is actively updated
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Mar 18, 2024 15:19
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imperator's release state was really really bad, but paradox really did invest the time into it post-release to make it very promising and systems-ful. it's kind of a shame it got dumped when it did, but it's not like I can argue that they didn't give it a fair shake, it's just one of those things.
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Mar 18, 2024 15:22
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I really want to get into imperator but the post above about making every interesting nation feel like EU4 Byzantium is absolutely right. I'm instantly overwhelmed by poo poo and barely guided so it's really hard to get into. The recent push by streamers/this thread has me ready to try again. Any recs for good nations to play to learn the mechanics? It's insane viewing EU4 as more accessible by comparison, but I know that's at least part because I got into EU early and the feature creep was gradual rather than all at once. Also, any good imperator streamer recommendations would be welcome.
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Mar 18, 2024 16:23
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JosefStalinator posted:Any recs for good nations to play to learn the mechanics? Unsurprisingly Rome is good to learn the mechanics, especially if you have EU4 background. It's in an easy environment but it's not simple. Egypt is another good choice. They will fight Seleucids soon but they're big and strong enough to survive anything. But really what I'd recommend is some backward settled tribe in a middle of nowhere. You'll learn a lot of mechanics this way and you'll have a much more traditional gameplay with stuff getting real and mechanics being introduced gradually. It's fine if they won't have special content, cause dynamic content is already cool enough and you'll be overwhelmed already.
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Mar 18, 2024 16:42
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JosefStalinator posted:Any recs for good nations to play to learn the mechanics? Crete is Tutorial Island. You'll start as a isolated OPM and fight to conquer the island, learning about war, development, trade and missions. Once you are done, you can start with the navy from a very safe and powerful position.
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Mar 18, 2024 16:57
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Armenia, my beloved
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Mar 18, 2024 19:22
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:Armenia, my beloved This is a pretty good shout, I also like Scythia and the Bosporan Kingdom. The caucasus / black sea region is the most fun to play in IMO.
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Mar 18, 2024 20:23
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I am very fond of a Eravisci -> Galatia run but uhh that's probably about the furthest thing from a beginner game imaginable lmao.ThatBasqueGuy posted:Armenia, my beloved Is a good shout, it's very large, defensible without being isolated, and there are a lot (too many, probably) Armenian culture pops around to build a powerbase on. Probably worth emphasising that those Diadochi blobs in the East are a lot more fragile than they probably appear. Imperator has a lot of scope for a country to be bad at leveraging the resources it controls, especially when it comes to developing military power out of them. Especially at the start, the Hellenistic kingdoms are going to be incapable of levying large sections of their populations. And that Antigonid blob? Almost certainly going to have a scripted collapse very shortly after the beginning of the game, which will open up Anatolia in a big way. Oh and definitely grab the Invictus mod. Lots of balance adjustments and content expansions, no complicated new mechanics hacked together out of event script. The platonic ideal of the vanilla+ mod.
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Mar 19, 2024 02:30
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soviet elsa posted:The arguably most popular massive historical mod for EU4, Mayo and Texas, starts in 1356, and the main reason it is limited to absolute grogs is how the population stuff is awkwardly forced into EU4 interfaces. I think the start date tracks with EU5, and not a brand new overlapping game. i definitely got strong MEIOU vibes from the dev diaries. i don't think paradox is likely to lift most of their systems because they're janky and weird and extremely RSI-inducing but putting the broad strokes of MEIOU systems into EU5 would do a lot to curtail the snowball effect while also adding a lot of internal knobs to twiddle. which seems directly opposed to johan's traditional vision of EU but the diaries do seem to indicate that this game is going in a very different direction
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Mar 19, 2024 03:08
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FrancisFukyomama posted:What gaps are left in the current paradox line up? Is it just Late Antiquity? there is no cold war game yet. we're also waiting on march of the eagles 2 naturally
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Mar 19, 2024 03:18
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Jazerus posted:i definitely got strong MEIOU vibes from the dev diaries. i don't think paradox is likely to lift most of their systems because they're janky and weird and extremely RSI-inducing but putting the broad strokes of MEIOU systems into EU5 would do a lot to curtail the snowball effect while also adding a lot of internal knobs to twiddle. which seems directly opposed to johan's traditional vision of EU but the diaries do seem to indicate that this game is going in a very different direction The market stuff in M&T 3 is a bunch of superfluous nonsense but comms efficiency the privilege/reform mechanics are A++ gold standard GSG gameplay imo
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Mar 19, 2024 03:25
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I could live with MEIOU if the increment speed was faster
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Mar 19, 2024 03:48
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:The market stuff in M&T 3 is a bunch of superfluous nonsense but comms efficiency the privilege/reform mechanics are A++ gold standard GSG gameplay imo MEIOU starting you with a bunch of terrible estate privileges that you have to slowly and painfully revoke does so much to create a feeling of progression and internal development from a feudal into a modern centralised state. I hope that the new game, even if it doesn't match the intensity of MEIOU's simulationism, being in the modern Clausewitz engine will allow the MEIOU guys to make a version of their mod that is not dependent on tying the interface together with shoestring. The amount of UI compromise you have to accept to interface with the mod's systems is honestly probably the single worst thing about it.
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Mar 20, 2024 01:11
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ItohRespectArmy posted:there is no cold war game yet. I thought it was Paradox policy to hard-stop at WW2 because they feel that everything Cold War till now was too recent and politically sensitive to touch?
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Mar 20, 2024 01:26
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the can't find the right expert on strategic straits that you need to make a good cold war game
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Mar 20, 2024 01:31
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DrSunshine posted:I thought it was Paradox policy to hard-stop at WW2 because they feel that everything Cold War till now was too recent and politically sensitive to touch? Wait long enough (22 or 24 more years depending on whether you date its end in 1989 or 1991), and the Cold War will be as distant as the original HOI was from WW2. I guess it might still be more contentious though, since Cold War revisionism is a lot more acceptable than World War II revisionism.
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Mar 20, 2024 01:33
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Dr Kool-AIDS posted:Wait long enough (22 or 24 more years depending on whether you date its end in 1989 or 1991), and the Cold War will be as distant as the original HOI was from WW2. I guess it might still be more contentious though, since Cold War revisionism is a lot more acceptable than World War II revisionism. If the timespan is counting from 1945-1991 then that gives a game that spans 46 years. Too long for HOI hourly ticks, too short for Vic weekly ticks. I wonder what would be ideal?
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Mar 20, 2024 01:41
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They did commission East Vs West (lol) so it's not like they won't touch the Cold War on principle
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Mar 20, 2024 02:11
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DrSunshine posted:If the timespan is counting from 1945-1991 then that gives a game that spans 46 years. Too long for HOI hourly ticks, too short for Vic weekly ticks. I wonder what would be ideal? Daily is probably good. Vicky 2 did that for a 100 year time period and the pacing was fine. And it's not like having the game be short is a bad thing. Everyone complains about how tedious it is to take a EU or CK game to the finish line but with Vicky 2 its actually fun to play to the deadline and try to maximize your GDP or whatever. A 50 year cold war game could be like that
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Mar 20, 2024 02:36
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YF-23 posted:MEIOU starting you with a bunch of terrible estate privileges that you have to slowly and painfully revoke does so much to create a feeling of progression and internal development from a feudal into a modern centralised state. I've never gotten into EU4 but this sounds interesting. Would you recommend this for a beginner?
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Mar 20, 2024 03:03
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gradenko_2000 posted:I've never gotten into EU4 but this sounds interesting. Would you recommend this for a beginner? No. It's very beginner unfriendly.
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Mar 20, 2024 03:04
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Okay. I managed to figure out Victoria 3 over the weekend (thanks in no small part to this thread) so I think I'll have another crack at EU4 Vanilla.
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Mar 20, 2024 03:08
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Yaoi Gagarin posted:Daily is probably good. Vicky 2 did that for a 100 year time period and the pacing was fine. And it's not like having the game be short is a bad thing. Everyone complains about how tedious it is to take a EU or CK game to the finish line but with Vicky 2 its actually fun to play to the deadline and try to maximize your GDP or whatever. A 50 year cold war game could be like that I was thinking six-hour segments like the Vic3 clock does, but insofar as it actually mattering. For Vic3 it's a bit odd in that you see the clock flicking through morning, afternoon, evening and night, but the things that actually matter, like the construction time of buildings, is counted in weeks. I think a cold war game would want to make the segments matter -- I think about all the diplomatic and military crises where decisions made over the course of several hours or a few days were the deciding factor between continued stalemate and nuclear war. If they played it right, it would make for a really tense game!
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Mar 20, 2024 03:41
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gradenko_2000 posted:I've never gotten into EU4 but this sounds interesting. Would you recommend this for a beginner? As Gaius Marius said, not really; at least not unless you are prepared to deal with janky UI design, like using a repeatable decision to pop an event chain whose only purpose is to give you the current state of some ticking values of the mod's systems and to interact with them. Now truth be told it's been years since I last played with the mod, so maybe they've figured out a better way by now - but I don't think there's anything in EU4 that would really let them do that.
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Mar 20, 2024 10:02
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gradenko_2000 posted:Okay. I managed to figure out Victoria 3 over the weekend (thanks in no small part to this thread) so I think I'll have another crack at EU4 Vanilla. EU4 is much more traditional and broad rather than deep game. As in there's no value in the game that you can't affect directly or affect the value which it depends upon. This may sound like a condemnation and for many people this makes the game too "casual", but there's a lot to be said for its width and thickness. There are many mechanics unique to specific religions or cultures or countries, the mechanics are usually easy to grasp but you won't ever feel fully in control because of the number of actors, and they mostly interact through trade offs between main resources, the infamous monarch points often labeled as mana. The UI might be an issue cause it's not so friendly as CK3 or Victoria 3 where you have a suggestions widget, cascading tooltips, automatic switching between map modes and shortcuts between screens. E.g. in many cases when the game shows you list of provinces (for religious conversion or potential rebelions) you have no quick way to jump to said provinces. Mods like MEIOU and Taxes that people mention here have this problem very much intensified. Famous mod Anbennar is relatively good about it even though it's harder to grasp than vanilla too.
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Mar 20, 2024 10:17
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April 1st 1337 startdate confirmed for EU5.quote:So there has been a lot of speculation on the start date, where many of you have figured out the correct start date of 1st of April 1337.
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Mar 23, 2024 12:59
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Im getting hyped for this not-EU game
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Mar 23, 2024 13:01
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That sure is a leet and funny start date. Won't moving the start and end dates 100 years earlier just mean people stop playing in the 1600s instead of the 1700s? 
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Mar 23, 2024 13:08
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Mentioning a bunch of stuff that's about to happen makes me wonder if historical events are going to be coming back in some way to guide nations on their path a bit more.
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Mar 23, 2024 13:11
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1337 also predates the Christianisation of Lithuania so there's room for European pagan gameplay in here. There was also a 4th dev diary that hadn't gotten shared here. I quite like the stuff we're seeing so far.
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Mar 23, 2024 13:14
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Dr Kool-AIDS posted:Mentioning a bunch of stuff that's about to happen makes me wonder if historical events are going to be coming back in some way to guide nations on their path a bit more. From the Johan files: quote:"This game will definitely have a lot of DHE [Dynamic Historical Events], more than any game we have ever released. However, that is only one way of many we have to get historical immersion in the game." The whole thing is worth a read, it basically contains every tidbit of information we have so far.
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Mar 23, 2024 13:17
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Elias_Maluco posted:Im getting hyped for this not-EU game Just need to add a note about having family trees for royalty and I think they've cleared my entire suggestion list. Poil posted:That sure is a leet and funny start date. Johan also appears to be aiming for a slower pace of expansion, in which case you might be further from your goals than you'd normally expect to be in EU4. If they manage to make expansion somewhat match history, the real expansion of map painting for Russia/France/England only really happened in the 17th century.
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Mar 23, 2024 13:41
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Poil posted:Won't moving the start and end dates 100 years earlier just mean people stop playing in the 1600s instead of the 1700s? This depends a lot on the pacing. To be honest, EU4 felt already too long for me, I'd prefer it to be denser, especially now that Tinto focused on bringing more flavor and special events and missions to countries. I enjoy playing late game EU4 due to how evolved and transformed the wolrd becomes, but still it feels like the same systems can't handle Medieval armies and dynastic policies at the same time as Napoleonic warfare and Great Power games.
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Mar 23, 2024 13:43
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I wonder how they’ll model the early warfare situation for England. It’s notable that in EU4 Great Britain pretty much always forms by England conquering Scotland very early on and then just waiting for Admin tech 10, and it usually stomps all over Ireland similarly early despite the challenges of actually ruling Ireland meaning they couldn’t actually make any conquest stick until the late 16th century. 1337 nominally starts with England in an even more commanding position—sure, they’re losing a war to effectively vassalise Scotland, but will the AI actually accept defeat or just turn around and win that war most of the time, starting the unification of the isles even earlier than in EU4? If England does vassalise Scotland, in EU4 this would effectively create a docile client, but in practice all it ever did was create a constant rebellious ulcer as Scotland just kept trying to win its independence over and over and over again. Any attempt to subdue the Irish Lords mostly just led to them saying “OK, yes England, you’re in charge” and then going right back to ignoring them the second the armies were gone. In neither case could England just annex a bit of Scotland or Ireland in one war, then another bit in a second war, then finish them off in a third war, which is exactly what happens in EU4 almost every time. Not to say that these problems of simulation are unique to Britain and Ireland, they’re just the area I’m familiar with. Mostly I just worry that all the reasons why European monarchies couldn’t get larger before the birth of the administrative state won’t be adequately modelled and we’ll just see the map painting shifted back a century.
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Mar 23, 2024 13:52
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I'm pretty excited about this project. 4 definitely started out a bit too similar to 3, and it doesn't seem like they're going to have that problem this time. That doesn't mean it'll necessarily be good, but it should at least be interesting.
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Mar 23, 2024 13:55
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