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Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles
I wonder how combat in these games would function if it wasn’t possible for additional troops to join a battle. Either by making battles last no more than one or two days, or by locking units out of provinces where battle is taking place. One of the things I’ve often found frustrating in EU particularly is how battles can drag on for months meaning if you’re a medium sized country taking on a large one, a 40k vs 40k battle can quickly turn into a 40k vs 120k before it’s over. Or a battle against the HRE starts out as your force versus a few thousand, then a few more thousand, then a few more thousand, just and endless train of additional troops for the battle until Austria’s doom stack shows up. Preventing units from joining in-progress battles would prevent this while opening up some actual risk-reward considerations for both carpet sieges and variable unit speeds.

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Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

ExtraNoise posted:

I've created a list of trade goods and have been mapping "modern" resources to replace them. Essentially I want to do as little work as possible (as a one-man operation, I learned this mistake during my HoI4 mod creation) so that it's simply a matter of Find/Replace and building a new map to utilize those resources. Here's my list so far (anything with a ? after it just means I haven't seen any screenshots or official references to its name):



Hemp is the one thing I'm totally :confused: about. I feel like it should be a utility resource, as the Romans were using it probably to make rope and such. The immediate mapping to Marijuana, while similar, probably doesn't fit the "feel" of the trade good itself.

If Hemp is a utility resource I'd see it being most likely needed for ship construction, for ropes as you mentioned but also for sails. I'm not sure there's an analogue for modern ships, something they need that other objects don't.

I'm assuming you're doing Elephant -> Steel because Elephants are going to be tanks. If so, maybe consider making Elephant into Composites/Synthetics (as lots of modern tanks use ceramic composite armor), Hemp into Steel (because you need way more steel for a ship than you do for a tank), and Iron into Aluminium (high quality automatic rifles need high quality aluminium alloys).

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

Farecoal posted:

I don’t this post apocalyptic America mod for Rome 2 will have tanks or aircraft carriers

I mean based on ExtraNoise's original resource list, military-grade synthetic polymers are still being made. I think a country which can make kevlar can probably take on the challenge of building a box that contains a gun and an engine.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

ExtraNoise posted:

This is basically how I'm imagining things. It's running and it can shoot, but it's not running or shooting great.

In my mind, the setting is somewhere between (not quite) Mad Max and (not quite) The Last of Us (sans zombies, obviously). The southwest will probably feel a little more Mad Max-y, but not with dudes playing guitars on the front of enormous trucks or anything.

If you've got any interest in reading about the practicalities of a post-apocalyptic world, I'd recommend The Knowledge by Lewis Dartnell as a really interesting book on the topic. It's a sort of pop-science book that goes through the basics of what you'd need to restart society--basic chemistry and metallurgy, medicine and electricity.

There's an interesting notion in the book that different fields are differently replicable by a post-apocalyptic society, some technologies are basically just knowing a reliable process that any society could replicate, while others rely on globalised trade networks and infrastructure it makes no sense to rebuild. So a post-apocalyptic society could easily look like a weird mishmash of medieval, industrial and modern technologies, because building, for example, modern houses is way easier than building modern ships.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

GrossMurpel posted:

That's almost exactly what Ultimate is.


Lies! GTA was developed in Great Old Bulgaria tag_bg_32 Scotland! How could this mod get history and the cultural legacy of my people so terribly wrong?

DrSunshine posted:

In all seriousness, although I see no real issues with this tech mechanic, the thought of someone going "Eureka! I've invented a new way to make speeches EVEN MORE CONVINCING" makes me chuckle.

Invention discovered: I Know You Are But What Am I?

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles
I’d like a CK3 to find a way to properly represent the Byzantine political system, since the way it has to rather awkwardly fit into CK2’s feudal system just doesn’t produce something that feels like the way things worked. e.g. losing the support of the people of Constantinople was basically game over for every emperor other than Justinian, and the viceroyalty system doesn’t really reflect the Themes because of how they interact with counts and landownership.

I think you’d need playable landless characters to do the Byzantines right, which would also be something I’d like in CK3.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

Red Bones posted:

In the same way that imperator Rome is a testbed for Eu5, a romance of the three kingdoms game would be a cool testbed for ck3.

As long as it doesn't end up like the last game set in the far east made as a testbed for a new Crusader Kings, anyway.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles
Wiz getting hired turned the original CK2+ into base features of CK2, so with Ofaloaf's hiring I'm looking forward to CK3 being set in post-post-apocalyptic America.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles
Ofaloaf, when you get to Paradox HQ, can you please go to the Stellaris desk and ask that they make the background noise that plays during a crisis be controlled by the "ambient volume" slider instead of the effect volume slider, given that's it's an ambient effect please thanks

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

LordMune posted:

it's handled like a sound effect in code ok :mad:

but you're right :mad:

thank you the validation is all I really needed

jk, all I really need is 2.2

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles
I never thought I'd see the day where a publishing company:
buys up the creators of a product I enjoyed,
strips them of all their creative independence,
shuts them down as a seperate entity and merges them into the larger company,
publicly declares that their intent from now on is to license out the IP to others rather than doing in house development,

and my reaction to that would be "thank god".

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

Arrhythmia posted:

Yeah, lots of people. Pretty much anyone who doesn't have an interest in history uses BC/AD in my experience.

In my experience people who don't have an interest in history never say Anno Domini because if you're not interested in history dates before 1900 never come up in conversation, and nobody says "I was born in 1980 Anno Domini", they just say "I was born in 1980".

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

Gamerofthegame posted:

Paradox does have some awful QA, though. Stellaris and HoI iin particular have issues about this, with CK2 and EU4 in general being generic enough to skate by. Namely, things that are attached to a DLC do not tend to get updated with a new DLC/patch as necessary. In Stellaris, the newest big change tripped up gesalt empires because not everything was properly compensated for (though this was swiftly fixed, but not the point) and in HoI as a rule of thumb all countries with focus trees in Together for Victory break every new big DLC. For instance, when Waking the Tiger came out Germany could go not-Hitler, but a bunch of Commonwealth tries required Hitler to be Hitlering to actually progress whatsoever, like South Africa's Commonwealth branch. Man the Guns in particular is a huge mess for them, as pretty much all of their naval focus trees still point to the old designs for ships across the board, including giving you those old, now extremely overpowered ships if it gives you a free boat/design. This too was fixed by now, mostly, but still.

Maybe calling QA bad is an overstatement, as it's relatively rare they're trash happy. But the actual testing environment and double checking their work is weirdly awful.

I decided to have a game of Stellaris for the first time since the new pop system came out a few months ago. Played as materialist egalitarians, plodded along pretty normally, enjoying the new features, did the project to ascend my population into robot bodies.

Then, I noticed something odd. My bigger planets which were already full up on districts and buildings were suffering from crippling unemployment. That seemed weird since I had several colonies in my empire, so the behaviour I had expected to see was that the unemployed pops in my core worlds out to migrate out to the colonies. This had helped me fill up previous expansions before, why wasn't that happening now? Turns out in the current version of Stellaris synthetic pops cannot migrate, even if they have full rights, even if they're your own primary species that was perfectly happy to migrate before going synthetic. I can't tell is this is a bug, oversight, or design decision, but either way it compounds with my having to manually force every single planet to produce my new pops instead of other robots that it just leaves me wondering if anyone actually tested this new system on older things like synthetic ascension to really understand how they'd work.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

Poil posted:

Populations in Stellaris doesn't migrate as they did, now the setting just allows them to grow new pops on other planets. They never move. There is a decision you can enact which stops population growth on a planet. The only way to prevent the eventual unemployment and homelessness is to use that or manually force-moving populations yourself (if you have the tyrannical law enabled to do so). It's so fun to fiddle with that all the time.

Uh... unless you mean that synthetics which are built in robot factories cannot even do that. I haven't actually used them so I don't know. In the game I tried I got bored long before I randomly lucked into the required tech for synths.

I'm aware it has changed, but before ascension when the core worlds got overpopulated migration would increase pop growth elsewhere while causing decline on my homeworlds, which was functionally similar enough. Built pops are unaffected by migration, no decline, no growth elsewhere.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

The Cheshire Cat posted:

I don't really get the livestreaming thing where it's just watching someone play a game in realtime where no matter how informative they might be there's going to be a ton of dead air because games generally take a long time to play and it takes less time to talk about doing something than it takes to actually do it.

I generally don't mind livestreaming as long as there's multiple people playing, or at least multiple people participating, so there can be conversation going on at the same time as gameplay, and at that point it's kind of halfway between an actual LP and a podcast. Games with actual commentators can be fun to watch too, I like watching the Link to the Past Randomiser races that Speedgaming runs, which features two streamers racing each other with two separate commentators. Here's a good intro video to that game.

There's also some experiences with video games you can never have twice, and those are the only sorts of games I'm generally willing to watch someone play solo completely unedited. things like watching people solve Return of the Obra Dinn or play their first Soulsborne game, where the enjoyment is watching someone struggle and overcome a challenge I once went through, or play a game like Undertale where its emotional impact is strongest on a first time player.

But to circle back round to this thread, I've never found a paradox stream enjoyable, bar the early pre-release livestreams of Stellaris.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles
I mean, to my mind there’s a relatively straightforward way to make a game which is set in WWII that doesn’t have to dip into the clean Wehrmacht theory: have the player not play as the Wehrmacht.

Not that every (or even many) game where you play as the allies does anything at all to dispel the clean Wehrmacht myth, but it’s a lot easier to accurately portray just how bad the Nazis and Wehrmacht actually we’re when they’re the enemies in your game.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

Chomp8645 posted:

Same as a weeaboo except instead of loving anime they love anime hilter-chan.

And instead of "she's actually 6000 years old" it's the clean Wehrmacht myth.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

Jack2142 posted:

I can't wait to play as Nicephorus Phokas or John Tsmiskes.

I've realised I can't read any of these names without hearing them in the voice of the History of Byzantium guy now.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

PittTheElder posted:

I mean I want it to be EU5 - and it would fit with the armor and sword - but that's hardly realistic given that they're still working on the final patch for 4

My money is on CK3.

CK3 seems likeliest if the sword and the armor are hints, but I would like to see something a bit more fantasy too. One of the problems with the fantasy thing though is making a world that's possible to jump right into as a grand strategy; Stellaris tried to resolve that by being a 4X early on but never stuck that transition to Grand Strategy promised pre-release.

A pre-existing IP could make sense for that. I'd be interested to see what Paradox could do with the Forgotten Realms, as an example.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

V for Vegas posted:

So Paradox have dumped Haemimont from making a sequel to their own game?

Maybe? I can't see any indication of developer one way or the other so it could be that Haemimont is making it. That said, Haemimon's own website lists "creating or expanding franchises" as being one of the company's specialities, so maybe Paradox owning the IP and being able to shop it to another developer was part of the plan from the start.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

Athas posted:

To me, this is exactly why CK is interesting. You can't just focus on short-term stability; you always need to take succession into account. Of course, sometimes it's fun to follow a branch of the family instead. The events in CK2 that make it possible to switch to a cadet branch when winning a crusade make that possible, but I suppose it could be made more general.

I had a really fun game once where I had my empire set up as Enatic Tanistry but all duchies were Agnatic Gavelkind (and all my own dynasty), and deliberately took nothing to do with succession, so there was a lot of back and forth as dukes tried to get their wife or daughter elected Empress, meaning the top title continually leapt around the huge and sprawling dynasty without ever coalescing arouund a few large and powerful branches.

Lots of kinslayers though. Can't kill anybody when everybody is family.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

Mirdini posted:

I've gotten more enthusiastic about CK2 and in turn CK3 recently, though it certainly wasn't because of PDXcon, which other people who attended have listed the problems with in here. CK2 itself still just has a really nice loop going and if they can maintain that for CK3 I think the particularities of holding distribution aren't going to matter that much re: enjoyment of the game. Really hoping they build it to be as mod-friendly as possible, though it being a paradox game I'd have to imagine they will.

I'd be remiss to post in here about how fun Crusader Kings is and not mention what got me back into it most recently: Hashim's current LP in Let's Play, where a bunch of folks are running the historical parliament of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Feel free to join in if you're reading this/enjoy CK2, it's been a wild ride so far.



I thought I was well and truly done with reading yet another legislative Paradox LP, but congrats, you sold me with the House of Groves.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

Empress Theonora posted:

Anyone remember Blood in the Bosphorus? That Byzantine mega-campaign let's play from, like, a million years ago?

anyway it's back


gently caress. Yes.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

cKnoor posted:

There is a massive difference between having different pricing options (which is what Ebba is talking about) and applying a possible EU4 solution across all brands. Like it's literally the first experiment on pricing, drawing any conclusion from that other than "they are experimenting with pricing" is a bit bonkers.

It's literally not the first experiment on pricing, loads of other companies have experimented with subscription models in their pricing, and people are quite reasonably extrapolating from the results of those previous experiments. PDS is no longer a special unique outfit, they're a division of a publicly traded video game company, it's not bonkers to expect they'll behave like other publicly traded video game companies.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

Torrannor posted:

I don't know how often we need to tell you that your Muslim game was not representative of this aspect of CK2. Muslims are locked to agnatic inheritance, which makes all those arranged marriage games etc. impossible. A title cannot fall out of a dynasty's hands unless the dynasty dies out, or outside forces (their liege, a faction, an enemy nation) intervene, by revoking titles, pressing claims, waging holy wars, etc.

Any criticism of Muslims as a playable religion is valid, and the devs themselves are on record that they were never happy with how they turned out. They received two overhauls, the last with the Sons of Abraham DLC that touched all three Abrahamic religions, but it never really worked. They were the first new playable characters unlocked after the base game's Christians, in the very first DLC, and they never got over their bad start (though they were always pretty powerful, just not that fun to play in comparison to most other faiths). But that doesn't mean that only Christians or pagans are worth playing. Hinduists, Buddhists, Jains, Taoists and Zoroastrians are fun, too.

And EUIV might be more complex than CK2, I have no beef in this fight. I didn't enjoy EUIV, while I have over 2000 hours in CK2. But the point is, that you don't have the capacity to judge whether it has more complexity than CK2, because your impression of CK2 as a game is not accurate from only having played Muslims. And I begin to suspect that you're arguing in bad faith, when you go on about how Muslims being not that good is that giant fatal flaw in Crusader Kings 2, while all regions and religions in EUIV offer so many diverse playstyles, and feel so different from each other.

There's an interesting parallel between the Muslims and Americans in each game: Historically relations between them and Europeans were a very significant part of their respective era's history, they were each the focus of the first DLC for their game, which in comparison to what was done later seemed very lackluster, they got a second DLC to try to improve them, but they still are kinda boring to play as and feel very shallow.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles
I do feel like the trade and production mechanics in EU are rather over-abstracted given that they're practically the single most era-defining feature of the period EU covers. As a power in the new world you don't have any real control over which resource your colonies produce, and you don't really care, because what difference is it if your province in Carolina makes cotton or tobacco? In the East, you grab some provinces and make them trade companies to increase your trade power, then gather up some merchants and plonk them down in nodes to steer the trade home. And if you are playing someone east of Persia, instead you just want to keep the Europeans out and stop your trade leaking out, forget about any foreign trade of your own. And to make things even more bizarre, trade goods and trade itself have almost exactly nothing to do with one another except as a tenuous numerical relationship.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

RabidWeasel posted:

Yeah, trade goods themselves in EU4 are very not interesting (except when you get a ton of high value ones in the same place) but dominating trade nodes and controlling river estuaries and trade ports is a big deal, and gives some shape to the geopolitical "value map" aside from pure geography.

Oh yeah, don't get me wrong, I agree it's a big deal, but it's also quite simplistic. Like, you want to control a river estuary, not because of any emergent reason like nations upriver deciding to send their trade down to the sea because that's the most profitable way to route their own trade, but because those provinces have a river estuary modifier which adds more number to your trade number.

I am no game designer, but off the top of my head my idea would be something like a slimmed down version of pop needs from Vicky, but on a slightly more abstracted state level. e.g. your country needs [x] grain [x] wool/cloth [x] iron each year, and desires [x] spices [x] wine etc. You could get those through a trade system, or make colonies & trade companies to take the resources yourself, and I dunno maybe your mercantilism score affects how much of your own produced goods you get to keep vs selling on the market for cash. Maybe the trade system lets you buy goods from the node your merchant is in at normal prices, with higher and higher tariffs depending on how many nodes away the source good is, so you'd be incentivised to try to get your merchants into faraway nodes or something, and then eventually do things like conquering India or Macau when the merchants become less cost effective.

Maybe that's too fiddly, I don't know, but I would like something more engaging for trade than "colonise Ivory Coast -> colonise Cape -> gradually monopolise all far eastern trade"

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

They really need to let you get cheevos with mods if dumb poo poo like "more clothing variants" is going to be breaking achievements in this game.

E: woops this isn’t the CK3 thread but point stands for all Paradox games tbh

I really do wish they'd follow the trend of similar games like Civ and just let you get achievements without Ironman. I have thousands of hours in these games and not one achievement because no loving way am I trusting these games not to throw out some weird bug that I have to use the console to fix, or risk losing my one save to corruption. Achievements are supposed to be fun little challenges, if you let people get them even though they cheated, they only cheated themselves, nobody else is worse off.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles
I think honestly that far more annoying than poor combat AI is poor infrastructure AI. I can live with the AI being pretty sub-optimal at combat and vulnerable to exploits and tricks, but what really put me off conquest in both Stellaris and Civ 6 is that when you actually take planets/cities, they're worthless. They're just so badly built, and when competent players could probably reduce their decision-making on city/planet construction to a flowchart that feels deeply dissatisfying.

Stellaris has probably changed a fair bit, but back when I played it, my expansion flowchart was something like:
If any resource in deficit and pops unemployed, build appropriate building or district. Otherwise, colonise.
If Planets < 6, build a Balanced planet (Balanced planets should be self-sufficient and produce sufficient food and energy to feed and power themselves, then the rest should be minerals and goods/alloys.)
[Once I have a core of well balanced planets, every other planet would be dedicated to one thing for simplicity]
If Food < +10, and food stockpile not at max build a Food planet
If Energy < +x, build an Energy planet
If Minerals < +y, build a Mineral planet
Else build a goods/alloys planet.

And basically the only thing that would change as the game went on was the size of x and y. This is simplified a bit and I might be misremembering slightly, I don't think I've played Stellaris in about two years now. My gut feeling is that this sort of flowchart priorities system shouldn't be too hard for an AI to follow, but if it is, I'd much rather the AI just flat out cheats so that when I'd capture a planet I'd think "Oh, nice! I captured a forge world." instead of what I actually experienced, which was "Oh, I captured a trash world where nothing's been built and what has been built is useless and insane. Again."

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

My bet would be on Forgotten Realms Kings (not that I want it)

I wonder how they'd actually do that given that monarchy is pretty much the exception in FR rather than the rule, Faerun's pretty much wall-to-wall republics when you actually run through it. Lots of little local lords, but mostly ruling councils at the top.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles
Looking forward to the day when focus trees look like Path of Exile's passive tree:

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles
What is the Third E-state?, by Abbélle Delphine

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles
I don't think Guy Fawkes is really a villain or a hero in modern British culture*. I'd actually say there's remarkably little value judgement on what he was attempting to do; most brits know he was trying to blow up parliament, but I expect most couldn't tell you why, and those who could tell you why probably have the context to understand that the matter isn't really black and white. So he's not a monster or a saint, he's just a...guy.

*Offer not valid in Lewes, where societal attitudes have not materially changed 1700

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

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Crazycryodude posted:

Not that I'm here to stan Cromwell but if the English don't like someone I'm automatically well-disposed towards them because if you're pissing off the English you must have done something right. Don't @ me about Hitler.

He's not actually hated by the English, in a BBC poll for the TV show 100 Greatest Britons, he was #10. A tory plan to refocus history education away from "political correctness" included an unveiling of a proposed "12 greatest britons" that the curriculum could focus on, one of which was Oliver Cromwell. There's a huge fuckin statue of him right outside the Houses of Parliament.

The roundheads are the "good guys" in traditional British historical narratives. The regicide and the republic are regarded basically as just getting carried away a touch and having taken things a bit too far, and the atrocities in Ireland are either ignored, downplayed, or justified, depending on what century you're getting your education in.

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles
UK education also varies depending on which part of the UK you're in, since Scotland and Northern Ireland have different education systems from England and Wales. My history education went, basically, The History of Glasgow and the Clydebank Blitz in primary school, and then in secondary school we covered an ethnographic history of Scotland, the Scottish Reformation, Tenement Life (social history of 19th and 20th century Scotland), the causes of WWI and Nazi Germany and the Holocaust (focusing on the demise of the Wiemar Republic and the anti-Jewish laws passed by the Nazis as they came to power). If you count Classical studies we covered the fall of the Roman Republic too.

As to history teachers, I do remember our teacher opening the course on Scotland's ethnographic history with a weird take on how the Scots were a "mongrel race", on account of all the various ethnicities which had come to the country from Norse to Irish to Indian and Pakistani, and that like a mongrel dog, this made us a better and healthier society than one focused on purity that refused to accept its immigrants as part of itself. Which, like, I agree with the general sentiment on accepting others, but that's a bit of a questionable choice of phrasing!

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

fuf posted:

https://www.breakit.se/artikel/3002...-tystnadskultur

I dunno what this says but seems significant according to twitter

Some highlights courtesy of google translate (so pinch of salt for machine translation):

quote:

In August, the two unions Unionen and Sveriges Ingenjörer conducted an employee survey at Paradox Interactive. The survey concerned the work environment and it was conducted in the Swedish part of the business.

When the answers from the 133 employees who chose to participate in the survey (the company has a little more than 400 employees in Sweden) were to be compiled, it turned out that almost half, 44 percent, have experienced abusive / incorrect treatment, or "mistreatment" as it is called in the English data that Breakit has read.

...

Among the female employees, who make up 26 per cent of the respondents in the survey, the answers were even worse - 69 per cent answered that they had experienced abusive treatment. The corresponding figure for men was 33 percent.

"Offensive treatment is a systematic and far too common problem at Paradox," reads the conclusion from the unions concerned.

...

When Breakit [spoke to] Fredrik Wester on Thursday, he knew about the employee survey, but said that he had not had time to get acquainted with the results. Instead, he referred to the company's HR manager Marina Hedman.

When asked what role the employee survey played in Ebba Ljungerud's departure, Wester replied "None."

[We asked], But what views do you and Ebba not share then?

"We will discuss it another time. I can get back to you when I can answer that, maybe next week ", replied Wester.

...

"Paradox is now in the process of bringing in an external, neutral company to conduct a thorough review of our processes and a comprehensive employee survey," Paradox's communications manager wrote on Friday.

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Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles

A Buttery Pastry posted:

I think you're confusing things. The external company was union busters, the company itself was the one with war criminals. Unless the union busters were also war criminals, which to be fair, is not out of the question.

I assumed Mokotow was referring to White Wolf dragging Paradox into an international incident over the war crimes in Chechnya, rather than Blizzard hiring some trump admin people.

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Apr 19, 2007

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fuf posted:

wasn't there a board game where you spend the whole game designing train routes and then at the end the big reveal is that the trains are carrying people to concentration camps?

You're thinking of the game Train, but rather, the game doesn't explicitly say it's about the holocaust at any point. The game however is played on tracks placed over a literal broken window, using rules typed up on a 1940s german typewriter and you're putting a whole bunch of yellow pawns into trains. After you load up one train to its destination, you draw one of the destination cards with the name of a death camp on it, and that's supposedly the reveal that you're playing a game about the holocaust, but if you didn't realise what you were playing when you sat down to play this, well:

Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles
Yep, I put it off for a long time since I didn't think it would be much good but it really has completely reinvigorated EU4 for me. It's truly remarkable what they've done with the base mechanics of EU4, and in a certain sense the gamey abstractions of EU4 feel more appropriate to fantasy settings. The way stuff gets mixed and matched is really cool, so for example, the religion that uses the catholicism mechanics doesn't spring up until around 1650 when an enlightenment-influenced monotheistic religious movement with a single centralised church springs up.

The new world also ends up much more interesting, as adventuring companies and settlers from various places strike out on their own and establish independent countries very early into the colonisation process, so you have a much more diverse place that means it's not just an endless parade of sending colonist after colonist.

My first game I took the Goblin tribe squatting in the Central Station of the dwarven railway and turned them into a nation of Victoria 2 players, obsessed with trains, factroys, and political reforms. Now I'm Corintar, on a holy mission to honour their risen goddess, building bridges between the Human and Orcish communities of Escann, and one day soon, waging war on the Emperor of Anbennar to secure Corin' receives the support she needs to win the war in the heavens.

It's a good mod.

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Reveilled
Apr 19, 2007

Take up your rifles
I played a few games of CK3 but my enthusiasm just fell away because everything felt so same-y. All the various starts and regions were all so broadly similar in playstyle and form, it was like a big sandbox in which briefly it looked like there was lots to do, until you realised the only thing in the sandbox was sand.

Arguably when you apply the same critical light to CK2 you could say the same thing, but CK2 came out eleven years (and one day) ago , and my starting expectations of that game were based on CK1. And unfortunately I still remember my initial impressions of CK2, which were that Paradox had, for the first time, released a game that felt like it was in a finished state, relatively free of crippling bugs, and that was superior in every single way to its predecessor. CK3 did not feel like that, and admittedly it had a much tougher bar to clear, but it definitely felt like a return to the old Paradox, the one that releases buggy, half-finished games and then fixes them with patches--except that now the patches include paid-for DLC.

CK3 isn't all that much different from CK2 in terms of the overall experience, but I had my fill of that experience over the course of nine years. CK3 just didn't bring much that was new to the table, it just put down a new tablecloth and took a bunch of the plates away. When the first major DLC promised the return of the inventory system (which I'd have put at the absolute bottom of the list of "things from CK2 which need reintroducing") and took almost two years to come out I just checked out. Ultimately I didn't even buy Victoria 3 because based on CK3, I expected it to be another buggy mess that its own AI can't play.

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