Paradox Grand Strategy: From the Carnival of Lust to the Enlightened Times

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Paradox Grand Strategy: From the Carnival of Lust to the Enlightened Times

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Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

PittTheElder posted:

They're talking about V2, and I feel like you're talking about EU4.

Although, to be fair, managing to play as the Byzantines in V2 would be kind of an accomplishment.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2013 22:31

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 05:21

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

PleasingFungus posted:

'Benjamin of the House of Grog'?

Sounds about right to me.

It's a formable nation in vanilla. (Along with, IIRC, the equally historically plausible Babylon.)

Is there some playable nation that could plausibly reform into them (Greece?), or is it just something for bored Great Powers to release if they've smashed the Ottomans or whatever?

# ¿ Sep 13, 2013 00:53

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

NihilCredo posted:

The latter is arguably more plausible than the former:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Plan

Catherine the Great: officially the most Paradox world leader in history, I guess.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2013 01:22

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Wolfgang Pauli posted:

Time to put Plan Kim Stanley Robinson into action

Don't they mean the team here, not the players? Shogun was guilty of the same thing.

Antiquity deathly boring if you're not willing to invest the time to do justice to each nation. There's simply no way of generalizing a system of government out of this period. It's also boring since Paradox will never ever figure out migrations.

Maybe something based on the Victoria POP system? Western Roman empire falls due to governing party refusing to encourage German POPs to assimilate, etc.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2013 00:51

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Autonomous Monster posted:

Like I said upthread, I definitely interpreted the statement as referring to the players. But I fully admit that I could be wrong- Johan (bless his heart) is not the clearest speaker and my hearing is not the best.

Really, I think it's just a personal quirk of mine. Something about spending so much time with the Romans in school, it all just seems incredibly sterile to me.

Though, the period where the one empire did blob all over Europe does not seem to me terribly conducive to a dynamic geopolitical climate.

Ahahaha. That sounds like something out of Peter Heather's book. I think I favour the Wickham model; less a collapse and more of a radical decentralisation brought about by a perfect storm of overstretch, economic instability and various domestic and foreign threats.

Yeah, I was being kind of flip there. :v:

I do feel like any effort to make a Rome game would be better off trying to narrow its focus onto a specific part of Roman history-- ideally one where things weren't going so well and everything was in flux. The last years of the Western Empire would work. So would the Crisis of the Third Century, or the civil wars at the end of the Republic. The game could focus exclusively on the systems within the empire (or Republic) in that particular, instead of having the empire as a whole be just one playable faction among many, or try to model the Roman Republic's conquest of Italy, encirclement of the Mediterranean, transition into the Principate, the Antonine Golden Age, the crisis years, the Dominate, etc., etc. in one huge game.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2013 01:43

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

I'd also say that even though EU4 is still pretty polished and easy to pick up compared with other, earlier Paradox titles (My first Paradox game was Vanilla Victoria 1... it didn't go too well), CK2 probably still has a much gentler learning curve, and if you do screw up catastrophically it tends to be as fun and rich in narrative as when you succeed.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2013 06:46

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

So, what does everyone think of March of the Eagles? Pretty much my only exposure to it was seeing it used to model the wars between EU3 and Vicky 2 in Wiz's Azeri LP. :v:

# ¿ Sep 22, 2013 23:50

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

PleasingFungus posted:

The same reason there's a 'Turko-Semitic' culture group, I expect.

It seems to only really come into its own in multiplayer, and as a niche strategy game, it's really hard to find people to play it with!

Also, the British are both terrible at landing expeditions *and* infuriatingly invincible at sea. Even more so than historically, I guess.

Ah, it's too bad it's hard to find people to play with-- I've always wanted to try a multiplayer Paradox game, but I don't really want to coordinate one as incredibly long as an EU4 or CK2 campaign would be, so the narrower focus of MOTE sounded kind of neat. :v:

# ¿ Sep 23, 2013 02:41

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

gently caress it, I'll finally crack and buy Vicky II, even though heaven knows when I'll have time to play it. I'm still not entirely sure if it'll be my cup of tea gameplay-wise, since I'm still deeply traumatized by the Vicky 1 learning curve, but I do love the period of history it covers.

Well. Love reading about it. It was hellish for lots of people, obviously.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2013 02:32

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

I'd feel pretty awkward and unpleasant roleplaying any form of the CSA, really. :v:

# ¿ Oct 2, 2013 03:57

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

DStecks posted:

Holy gently caress, what? I genuinely laughed out loud at this picture.

I really love that Anticosti Island is its own region despite being almost enirely uninhabited, Labrador being 5 different regions is also pretty hysterical (less than 30,000 people live in Labrador proper).

Gotta give credit for the Southwestern Ontario region names though, can't say I've ever in my life seen Kitchener represented in a video game.

Check out that totally microscopic NYC zone, too. Obviously a ton of people live there, but imagine trying to click on that thing!

# ¿ Oct 7, 2013 22:26

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Wolfgang Pauli posted:

Kind of disappointed that you don't have the Dakotas or Virginias split for a "No True Scotsman" CB. I suppose you can still do that with the Carolinas. With interlocking alliances in place, it could kick off a pretty huge war.

Also realizing now that you'll probably have to seed the militaries of each state if you want them to actually build them in a reasonable amount of time. Day 2 is going to slam the world market with unit resources and it'll take ages for those supplies to actually trickle down to these low prestige nations. They'll need a helping hand or it'll all just fall apart.

I think Assert Rectangularity would be applicable to Deseret, New Mexico, and Nevada. Like Colorado and Wyoming could get Rectangularists in power that would have CBs on all states that are not quite rectangles. Destroy the pretenders.

Rectangularist radicals declare Western Massachusetts independent from Greater Boston and Cape Cod!

# ¿ Oct 9, 2013 22:41

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:

Michigan is rectangularist-proof. Just try and pull something, I'd like to see them try.

After the rectangle revolution, Michiganders will indicate where they live by pointing to their balled fist.

# ¿ Oct 9, 2013 22:48

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Smoking Crow posted:

Is there a way to play these games on Mac without resorting to running parallels or bootcamp?

CK2 and EU4 both have Mac versions which seem to run about as well on my computer as the Windows version did in Bootcamp.

Vicky 2, mysteriously, doesn't have a Mac version. Oh well.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2013 06:27

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Smoking Crow posted:

Thanks. I've been wanting to play a turn-based strategy game for a while and X-Com wasn't cutting it.

Careful, though-- these are 4X grand strategy games, but they aren't turn based-- although you can always pause at will to issue orders and queue up buildings or marry your idiot king or whatever.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2013 06:42

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Yeah, it absolutely doesn't come down to reflexes. Even if for some insane reason you didn't pause for an entire game things would still mostly move slowly enough to handle in realtime unless you're fighting a two front war against two sprawling empires or half your vassals just revolted or something. It's not like playing Starcraft or whatever. (I've pretty much accepted that I'll never be able to play Starcraft :v:

)

# ¿ Oct 14, 2013 07:48

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

NihilCredo posted:

If you've ever played a SimCity game, it's the same thing.

Yeah, that's a better way of putting it. Successions in Crusader Kings 2 are like when your city catches on fire. The HRE piling into a war you're in is like the monster showing up. The Timurids rolling into town is picking every disaster on the menu at once.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2013 08:17

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

That screenshot kind of owns since it indicates a huge change to history without any goofy borders at all.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2013 16:51

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Fintilgin posted:

It's their 'Rest of the World' historical research library.

Oh man, that's harsh.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2013 19:36

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

It looks like a Great War is about to break out in 1934 in my Victoria 2 game. Is there any way to extend the playtime so I can at least see how the war would end?

Edit: Crisis averted, none of the other Great Powers wanted to ally with Fascist half-France I guess. It'd still be nice to know for future reference, though.

Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Jan 6, 2014

# ¿ Jan 6, 2014 03:10

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

PleasingFungus posted:

Let's hold off on suggesting that new mechanics be brought to other games before we see them actually work in the original game.

Personally, I have low confidence; I haven't seen anything out of the Conquest of Paradise dev diaries that makes me think they've finally cracked the colonial-revolutionary nut. We'll see.

Open <gamedir>/common/defines.lua. (It's a text file.)

You should see a line reading "end_date = '1935.12.31',", near the top. Change that.

Ah, thanks! I'll do that if something interesting is happening in 1935 the next time I play.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2014 04:15

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

I had fun just playing with New Nations Mod, which didn't really add any new mechanics but led to lots of neat new tags popping up.

I'm playing on a brand new computer though so YMMV re: slowdowns caused by a proliferation of tags.

I'm also looking forward to Wiz releasing the V2 scenario from his Azerbaijan mega-LP.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2014 00:56

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

ZearothK posted:

Yeah, also on the subject of tags slowing down the game... That was a big deal back in the EU3 days, but not really in the current incarnation of Clausewitz. Active tags can increase overhead (since there are more countries making calculations), but just their existence doesn't do that much, at least from my experience. Someone more familiar with the engine may correct me.

Doesn't V2 use the old EU3-era version of Clausewitz, though?

I mean, I wouldn't know how that affects tag performance since my computer seems to run it like a champ regardless, but I guess I guess just assumed that the current incarnation of Clausewitz wasn't around until the CK2/EU4 era.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2014 06:22

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Rogue0071 posted:

I've pretty much stopped thinking of EvW as a cold war game and now think of it as a (probably bad) WW3 game. Every bookmark is a war, the one politics dev diary revealed it will have a less complex internal government system than even HOI2 with only head of state/head of government for countries, and almost all of the dev diaries have been about war.

Why are all the flags in EvW super raggedy for no reason?

# ¿ Jan 10, 2014 10:37

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Who should I message about being reinvited to ParaSkype? I guess I left it when I'd gone a while without playing Paradox games.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2014 03:56

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

So, are there any decent LPs of March of the Eagles floating around? The MotE segment of Wiz's Azerbaijan LP has always made me curious about it, but not curious enough to plonk down $20 for it yet. :v:

# ¿ Jan 14, 2014 09:52

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

I think that in order to capture the furious streetfighting seen in battles like those at Stalingrad or Berlin, HoI4 should have provinces for individual city blocks.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2014 04:09

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

grancheater posted:

Um, of course none of the secret projects is Rome 2. The new Rome game is a reboot.

Also one way to make the dynastic religious game possible would be to basically turn CK2 into a CYOA game when you get unlanded, but that'd take a ton of effort to write. It's also kinda no longer grand strategy.

The AGOT mod kind of does that if you play as Daenerys before she gets set up as queen of Mereen, but it's very on rails and not really a basis for a full game.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2014 02:41

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

We'll find out on January 23rd.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2014 20:55

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

DrSunshine posted:

Help how do I industrialize as the Shire??!

You need to get sphered by Isengard and hope that the Scouring of the Shire event never happens.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2014 23:51

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Patter Song posted:

Sengoku's biggest problem was the tiny scope. You can't do what Toyotomi Hideyoshi did and send all your problematic samurai off to die in a meat-grinder war in Korea because Korea's not on the map. You can't even play as Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the first place because the game starts 100 years before his birth. The most famous parts of the Sengoku cannot be modeled in Sengoku.

If we did get CK2 for Japan, I'd hope it wasn't Sengoku, but the power struggles in the 11th and 12th century at the end of the Heian period, with the powerful but declining Fujiwara who had puppeted the Emperors for six hundred years, the rising Taira and Hojo, and the ever-present threat of a Mongol invasion in the 13th century.

Also, the Hojo clan's insignia is literally the Triforce.

I'd love to try to keep the Fujiwara in business.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2014 20:44

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Pakled posted:

As much as people complain about geographical inaccuracies in Paradox games, they've really taught me a lot of geography. All the time nowadays I come across references to small and obscure cities in Europe and find myself thinking "Hey, I know where that is! I fought a war over it once."

I've gotten really good at guessing the answers to geography questions on Jeopardy, anyway.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2014 00:49

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

NihilCredo posted:

I think the not-so-hidden secret here is that it's a CK2 story happening in a WW2/Cold War setting.

16-year-old lovers, of course. The triggered event 'Edward Maxis II is now known as "The Drunk"' happens almost word-by-word. As for Trotsky, he just had a +25 "Tolerant of Jews" and a +100 "Gave me a Ministry" bonus overriding any ideological differences. The Polish ~~spymaster~~ Chief of Intelligence was hanging out in his court after being banished, and one day sent him a letter "My Emperor, I think I would do a better job than [current spymaster]" because he had higher Intrigue.

Unfortunately I don't think I've yet seen a "ninja flip out dual wield eagle attack" event in CK2. I am sure the devs will rectify this shameful omission by next patch.

Well, there is the martial skill improvement ambition event chain with the mysterious warrior from the east...

# ¿ Feb 23, 2014 11:29

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Patter Song posted:

So Paradox did a cool thing on their forum for International Women's Day and put up posts listing various famous and influential women from the periods covered in their games. Predictably, the two I checked both had people who are upset about even giving women one day of focus every 365 complaining, and I'm sure the other threads were similar.

The posts themselves are a pretty cool thing that Paradox did, anyway.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2014 21:02

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

BBJoey posted:

Meanwhile a poster in the HoI 4 How We Changed the World thread has uncovered the truth behind International Women's Day :

Spoilers: turns out he's a stormfront member too! What a nice crowd they have over at the Paradox forums.

Wow, yikes. Yikes.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2014 01:18

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

YF-23 posted:

I'm thinking about how clausewitz games are made and how they run and I think about your suggestions and I'm 90% certain the games would run slow as hell and take up way too much RAM if they got that kind of redesign.

What if instead of bothering with abstractions like "provinces" or "trade goods", Paradox just made the game a 100% accurate simulation of every individual person and object in the world?

# ¿ Mar 16, 2014 23:24

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Drone posted:

Unfortunately NNM is no longer being updated, right?

(Then again, I'm pretty sure Vicky 2 itself is also no longer being updated, sooo...)

NNM worked fine with the last V2 game I played like a couple of months ago, and it hasn't been patched since then.

# ¿ Mar 23, 2014 10:39

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

So what's a good country to pick for learning the ropes in March of the Eagles? Is it better to just jump right in as France or Britain or something, or play one of the middle-tier great powers like Austria or Prussia or whatever?

# ¿ Mar 26, 2014 22:39

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

And here I was hoping we could discuss what a nice job Paradox did designing a female character without some goon posting about whether or not they'd like to have sex with her.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2014 08:48

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 05:21

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Really, I'm not really sold on the idea of any WW2 games that let you play as the Nazis.

Which is most WW2 games, I guess.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2014 09:49

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