Randarkman posted:

Reminds me of FATAL

Slime Bro Helpdesk posted:

Since I don't have any great thoughts on Paradox's IPO, I wanted to babble on a bit about this article on some of the staleness of 4x games.

I think the thing that hits me about where 4x games are wearing thin on me is that while there are variations on the various micro-mechanics inside each game- different combat resolution systems, different tech tree concepts, innovations to diplomacy and economies- at the end everything still on a macro level comes back to 4x. Which I guess is a semantic problem- if your game isn't about explore-expand-exploit-exterminate then I guess you aren't technically a 4x game?

But to me not only does 4x feel overdone, it just doesn't jive with how I look at history or the world. I don't need verisimilitude or imagine it would make everything better, but I guess I look at 4x games and see a philosophy that your empire is the sum of its land and technologies mostly, and really not at all the sum of your people and cultures. I think that's one of the things that always brings me back to Vicky- that attempt to balance capitalists and socialists, reformers and conservatives just makes the game feel more about leading people than most other games. EU and CK hit that itch as well.

Fellblade posted:

Edit: I do worry that the apparent trend we are shown from paradox towards balancing around multiplayer is only going to make AI worse in future titles though.

Fellblade posted:

I’m not some madman raging that artists should be coding.

Fellblade posted:

I think it’s unfair to imply people are stupid because they speculate when the information required is unavailable to them but not you. Are you saying people should just not speculate at all?

Beamed posted:

To be fair, it's been both stated by a lead dev that Paradox only balances for MP, and some of the AI bugs (not upgrading buildings in Stellaris) definitely seem to support it.

Red Bones posted:

It's kind of hard for me to tell from the prerelease stuff what the enjoyable/interesting gameplay loops will be, in the way that Vicky leans heavily on economics and internal political development, etc, and EU4 is entirely conquest-driven, and CK2 has a lot of dynastic and internal power struggle stuff. That's what I'm most curious about, whether it is a retread of EU4's whole setup of their being a lot of mechanics but ultimately they all revolve around a loop of conquering more territory, or whether the systems function in a way that make maintaining a non-expanding nation's internal politics, economy, and foreign relations interesting in and of itself. I hope it's the latter.

PittTheElder posted:

That system really needs theatres though, I don't want my armies trying to march all the way across my empire to deal with some random rebels.

Krazyface posted:

I haven't really been following Imperator: Rome, but this LP that's just started does a really good job of laying out some of its mechanics.

He unpauses somewhere around the 21 minute mark.

trapped mouse posted:

This is a pro click. He seems to know the game better than I anticipated and he even actually edits somewhat well.

RabidWeasel posted:

Inventions are actually pretty neat, they're basically unlockable tech based permanent modifiers which you 'buy' like ideas in EU4 but there's no limit to how many you can have (unless you buy them all, I guess). Some of them are boring and weak but there are both powerful and interesting ones in there, and even 5% tax income is exciting when you've had it running for the entire game. It makes every tech level potentially exciting when it pops; though unlike in one of the early dev diaries, they unlocked in a fixed pattern and are not randomised at all.

Beamed posted:

This hasn't been true for awhile. Paradox releases of the full games since CK2 have been Pretty Good, even though I don't like HoI4.

canepazzo posted:

Is it the allied/owned forts area of control projecting occupation even on enemy land?

canepazzo posted:

Indeed! Now they need to add that + army automation to EU4

Dramicus posted:

Did you guys catch what Johan said when they interviewed him at the end of Dev Clash 9? It was something to the effect of: "The game needs more... Ah... Fun." And then sort of shrugged his way out of the statement. Don't get me wrong, I'm totally looking forward to the game, but I just thought it was something weird to say.

RabidWeasel posted:

Forts are forts from EU4.

Groogy posted:

On the "negative reviews on steam are useless or not" discussion. I look at reviews quite often as it is a source of information if I am doing a good job or not. And I can tell you some very interesting trends as of late in Steam Reviews. It is a lot more common for people to write negative reviews as things happen, as reactions to news, changes or as people called it memes (and the DLC avalanche incoming reviews are a meme). It doesn't necessarily have to do anything with the actual product in itself to spur the reviews to be written. A funny thing to notice is whenever Steam does a drive for reviews by rewarding badges or discounts etc we see a huge surge of positive reviews on our products. At least from what I've noticed, I haven't actually recorded day to day data on this so it's still anecdotal.

I am not saying that negative reviews are useless, but I am saying the culture around specifically Steam reviews is fundamentally broken.

some weirdo on the Paradox forums posted:

October 31st, 2012 is a day I will always remember. It was the day I became cynical, bitter, and distraught. You may call it an overreaction for me to feel this way simply because of the business practices of a single video game company, but let me explain what all of this means to me.

My life was thrown off balance and I never regained my footing after that day, because I lost my ability to respect. An essential part of being human is to feel respect for those who may or may not be deserving of it. But it is equally human to feel painful disillusionment when someone or something you respected turns out to be much less than you thought. But the level of betrayal I felt when Paradox announced their new DLC tore something from me that I'll never be able to recover. They tore away my ability to respect anything, and they tore away my ability to feel human.

Minenfeld! posted:

What in the flying gently caress is that thread? Why do these games make people so angry?

that same weirdo posted:

"It was an expansion intended to completely disregard any historical accuracy, and instead shock the entire world with its lunacy. Paradox Interactive had gone off the deep end and raised the middle finger to everybody who stayed loyal to them."

"The pain I felt from this betrayal has destroyed me on an emotional level, and has deprived me of my primary source of entertainment. No longer can I play Grand Strategy games without remembering the day I ceased mattering to people I devoted myself to. Paradox had not just destroyed me or their company, they had destroyed the one force of stability in the world: Trust."

pdxjohan posted:

Could just be that i’ve lost touch, and should just stop making games.

KOGAHAZAN!! posted:

e: a more worse omission is of differential labour efficiency. One dude labouring to produce grain in Siberia will, all other factors being equal, produce exactly as much per time unit as a dude doing the same in the black earth belt.

Beamed posted:

I'm okay paying $20 more if it's at least a cheap, flawed, but still good game.

Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:

People generally don't act so utterly irrationally as to buy games with core features they already know they won't like.

Drone posted:

The EU4 mana system is good and fine. I:R's mana is far inferior.

Military Mana: you can basically ignore this and then once every few years you unlock a tradition with it. Does it even have another use?
Civic Mana: you use this for almost everything, to such a degree that it becomes frankly ridiculous
Religious Mana: you use this for occasionally clicking the Stability button, activating an omen every couple years, and (completely optionally it seems) converting pops to your religion
Oratory Mana: I honestly don't know what this does off the top of my head and I'm not going to load the game just to find out. That I don't know what its used for immediately is a sign that maybe it's bad.

Mana as a concept is absolutely 100% fine. I find the implementation of mana in I:R to just be extremely spotty and wildly unbalanced.

Red Bones posted:

Is forming Bharat one of the exceptions to the whole "you've achieved all your goals before the end of the 1600s" thing in EU4, or am I just being slow? I started as a Nepalese princedom and by the 1690s I only own the big top half of India, I've still got to betray my ally who owns all of Deccan and eat them. I kept on running into the state limit and just focused on assembling some big marches instead of doing more conquering, was this the wrong choice?

Often Abbreviated posted:

Until you can kidnap Hitler and cut his dick off this will not be true.

Gobblecoque posted:

Personally I think the new estate system looks great and I always kinda disliked everything about the old one.

ilitarist posted:

I repeat again and again: Civilization caused huge harm to people understanding of history and life and whatever. Almost every concept in it is an understandable simplification of reality and no one consciously thinks about it as a historical simulator, but interactive media are powerful that way. They make you feel for granted a lot of things like there's a line between a barbarian and civilization, there's a clear scientific progress measurement, bigger cities and empires are good as long as they can keep it up, everyone can look like modern America if they play their cards right and so on and so on.

Paradox is not perfect of course but it has more nuance and somewhat less glorifying. Not like it tells you "good job on colonizing this are and destroying whole cultures" but at least it doesn't pretend that history is a joyful march of liberty and progress.

Gort posted:

Are you on Windows?

ilitarist posted:

There was a big recent NVidia drivers update. They've changed a lot, added some new gpu scaling things. I notice some problems when changing screen resolution now, other people have bigger problems. It might not work well with Paradox games, especially if you're not playing on a native resolution.

Arrhythmia posted:

KOGAHAZAN!! posted:

Drivers are software same as everything else, and can have bad patches same as everything else. It doesn’t happen very often but it does happen.

Drakhoran posted:

In short, you should only tell someone to learn the game with Portugal if you want to convince them that Paradox makes horrible games only played by hardcore masochists.

Drone posted:

I feel like they'd have gotten a better reaction if they replaced "here's a subscription that gets you all of EU4" with "here's a subscription that gets you all of Paradox" a la Origin Access / Gamepass / Uplay Plus.

Of course the financials on that might not work at Paradox's scale... but at least right now they are putting most of their stuff (in basegame form) on other subscription-based services like Gamepass.

ilitarist posted:

I dunno, I don't see myself playing more than a single GSG in any given month. Might be cause I play a lot of other games. But usually those subscriptions are about giving you hundreds of games you can comfortably play or just a single one. Like you can get XBox pass for how much, $5/month? And Humble is $10-15? And XBox pass even includes some Paradox games.

KOGAHAZAN!! posted:

The context of this is a discussion of a potential rebalance of the "expel minorities" mechanic in EU4. People were mad that it was useful, so they're making it useless (I abridge only slightly).

KOGAHAZAN!! posted:

In seriousness, it's maybe too easy to monoculture your empire with it. But I have no idea why I'd want to use the proposed new version. You ship your development off to the colonies? No thanks?

Weebus posted:

The expel minorities feature as it currently exists is ridiculous and I'm glad they're neutering it. And honestly, the changes make sense. Expelling a few minorities from a province shouldn't result in wholesale conversion of the province. Maybe expelling should give the province a modifier that makes it easier to convert later on.