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If we can send unstoppable Peacekeeper ships to forcefully disarm lesser civilizations barely into the space age and still squabbling with each other, Stellaris will be GOTY. Grand Menaces are all good and well, but you know you've made it when you've become someone ELSE'S Grand Menace.
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Dec 4, 2015 17:30
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DrSunshine posted:It'd be neat if there were ways to simulate internal threats like the breakdown of a space empire due to stagnation or something. Like, say you've blobbed up pretty well and are stable for a while. If there was some kind of "Decadence" (but not annoying like CK2's Decadence) where your empire would gradually go into a stagnant period, decline, and start to break up, that would keep the late game a bit more dynamic. I'm thinking something like Asimov's Foundation series. The basic problem, of course, is "How do you make the slow destruction of all that you worked to build interesting?" I do like the idea, but finding a way to keep the player invested when they're going into decline is a bit of a challenge.
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Dec 4, 2015 18:19
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tooterfish posted:Isn't this basically historical though? Historically Sealion was so ill-conceived that the Royal Navy could have sunk half the invasion force just by sending a single destroyer tearing through fast enough that the bow-wave would capsize the cockleshells the Nazis had planned to use for transports. It was pretty much never a realistic threat. Not to mention that getting an invasion force across is one thing - supplying it is quite another.
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Dec 7, 2015 14:58
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Every pre-industrial culture I come across is getting the Shofixti treatment.
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Dec 14, 2015 21:52
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tables posted:I guess so, but for some reason ending the livelihoods of so many people at once for this one goal really took me aback. I mean, it's not the same as murder, but I just took out 20+ people out of the careers they worked so hard to attain. Maybe I'm desensitized to all the murder in the game. Remember - this is feudalism. You didn't just ruin their "careers," you gimped them out of their ancestral homes and social status, AND you screwed over their children's livelihoods, homes, social status etc, and their children's children as well, with little hope of ever recovering anything like what they used to have even generations later because social mobility sucks. You turned entire families into homeless beggars. You monster.
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Apr 11, 2016 09:47
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Phlegmish posted:Is that an expression I wasn't aware of? "Blowing your own horn" = bragging. I assume he means that the stream is talking someone else up.
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Apr 14, 2016 08:37
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Can't you make your own factions in HoI4 independent of the big three? Have an entire MP game spent courting America only for them to found their own "American Exceptionalism" faction at war with everybody. 
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Apr 16, 2016 06:57
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podcat posted:We are way past topics I had planned from the start now! Into unknown territory. A detailed dev diary about mo-capping the push-ups.
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May 13, 2016 14:26
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the 2 before that are all planned out though.
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Airfoil posted:Yeah, thanks Fixed that fer ya.
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May 18, 2016 19:13
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Neobdragon posted:Does anyone even know who the target audience of the "literature" released alongside paradox games is for. People who write and read those huge AARs that have only a tenuous connection to any actual in-game events. I remember a long time ago there was this massive, massive HoI2 AAR that was basically fanfiction starring Fu Manchu as the big bad behind all evil in the world, and co-starring every single fictional hero and villain who could conceivably be running around the time period. It had maybe one screenshot every five posts, each post being about a chapter's length in a decent novel. Phi230 posted:Everybody should read Lords Of The Sky, particularly the chapters on the Battle of Britain, instead if that wierd, bad thing I know the WW1 Biggles books were a decent lunchtime read, though I think I heard something about everything getting toned down and made more kid-friendly by the time WW2 rolled around. Tomn fucked around with this message at 19:36 on May 18, 2016 |
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May 18, 2016 19:34
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catlord posted:Not gonna lie, that sounds like it could be super fun. I assume it was on the Paradox forums and was not. I honestly don't recall what the quality of the writing itself was like, though I did read a fair way through when I was young and stupid and still thought Paradox AARs were pretty neat stuff. What I DO remember was that it kept adding subplot after subplot after subplot with no end in sight, ever. If you're curious and want to see for yourself, I dug up the old thread here. Notable points: - Apparently there were actually two AARs - the first in HoI1, the second in HoI2. - There are 165 pages in the second thread, albeit not all of author posts. - The first post of the second thread was set in October 21st, 1939, and was written in 2005. The last post was set in September 20th, 1940, and was written in 2011. - There are 22 paragraphs in the prologue of the second thread alone describing what happened in the first thread. - Apparently there never was an end and the whole thing is incomplete.
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May 18, 2016 23:24
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I haven't really minded any of the DLC changes to EU4 or CK2 myself, but I will say that Paradox isn't really great about documenting what's new and changed with each DLC/patch within the game itself. You pretty much need to look up dev diaries and the wiki to get a proper grasp on whatever's been added, and often how it works. I know there's a lot of tooltips lying around the place to help explain what's going on, but finding them and the features attached to them is still kinda like going home to a cluttered house and then finding out that someone added and rearranged a bunch of stuff and attached post-it notes to everything they changed - you'll figure out all that's happened eventually, but it'd take longer than you'd think to find everything and get used to it. I dunno if there's really a better solution than what Paradox does now, given how complex everything is and how any mini-tutorials would need constant patching, but it'd be nice if a solution could be found.
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May 25, 2016 21:19
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PleasingFungus posted:...also, I haven't played it in a few years, but calling TF2 'terrible' seems unfair. Pretty sure Poe's Law is in effect considering that he's moaning about how you need to buy every single hat and weapon to enjoy TF2.
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May 29, 2016 03:02
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CK3 will be released when VR technology has advanced enough to allow you to personally slap any vassals that are giving you a hard time. The entire game will be spent staring at a cloth map in your courtroom.
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May 30, 2016 07:57
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I don't know what's planned for Vicky 3 but I hope they keep the naval arms race. Nothing like sinking the Royal Navy with a shiny, tiny fleet of ironclads. Actually as long as I'm daydreaming, one thing I'd love to see in V3 is a greater focus on the uses of a peacetime navy. Almost every game in the world is purely focused on the navy as something that participates in fleet actions and massed combats, but I'd like to see a scenario where having a large overseas empire basically requires far-flung fleet outposts to maintain order, keep the trade lanes clear, impress local governments, and provide a fast military response to local emergencies below the level of a full scale war - some silly bastard getting his wife kidnapped by a pirate lord in Borneo, for instance. I know there's a Gunboat Diplomacy option in V2, but it's incredibly useless.
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May 30, 2016 16:50
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If Paradox ever does get around to tackling the Victoria 3 challenge I hope they'll do their best to try and preserve the feel of being in charge of a living, breathing nation. Imperialism was a fun and good game and all, but it's also explicitly a game where your pawns exist only to help you win the game. Victoria 2 had plenty of faults, but it's also one of the very few games in existence that gives you a sense of your nation being its own thing and not just an extension of your godlike will in your contest against the other nation-gods.
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Jun 2, 2016 23:05
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Viral Warfare posted:How playable is it, is it one of those games that tries really hard to be realistic and simulationist and just winds up being absurd/buggy/broken? Price tag looks really high If I recall correctly I played one of the earlier games in the "series" and I spent most of my time as Obama trying to seduce the wives of every national leader I could find. It's a pretty terrible game tho.
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Jun 3, 2016 10:56
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Vanilla Mint Ice posted:It's hilarious to me people going REMEMBER EU4 are the people who really need to remember EU4. The release complaint about EU4 was that it was essentially EU3.5, not that it lacked content or had major systems filled with bugs. For what it's worth, though, if you're complaining that EU4 didn't go far beyond the baseline of EU3, isn't that effectively complaining about a lack of (new) content? It IS interesting to look at Stellaris's development as a completely new IP, though - I think I forgot or didn't realize how much of Paradox's development relies on iterating upon and refining systems already set in place. Sure, sometimes they took out or heavily modified existing systems, but most of the time this was within the context of the existing, proven design. It looks like creating an entirely new design from scratch is a skillset that Paradox still needs to develop as a company.
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Jun 4, 2016 23:13
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PleasingFungus posted:In a very pedantic sense, maybe, but the final effect is very different. Someone playing EU4, especially a new player, would have a solid experience; someone playing Stellaris... Same thing in terms of complaining about Paradox, though. If people were complaining that Paradox is bad and lazy because EU4 was just EU3 with a facelift, Stellaris 1 is essentially Stellaris 0 with a facelift so it's less a new and unprecedented level of bad laziness and more "they didn't have a base they could fall back on this time." Not that I personally think Paradox is bad and lazy, mind you, just noting that the complaints about fundamentally about the same problem in a different context. I agree that consumer-side it does work out pretty differently, but given how space 4Xes tend to do I'm inclined to think that maybe the genre just fundamentally needs more time and money nowadays than most other genres not to come out looking half-baked. A lot of people mention Distant Worlds, but point of curiosity (not a rhetorical point) - did anybody here play Distant Worlds without the expansions? What was that like?
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Jun 4, 2016 23:37
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So as to try and get the thread to focus on something other than "Paradox is a good/bad company and you're a bad person for arguing otherwise," what would you guys want to see out of Rome 2, anyhow? We've had pretty recurring conversations about what made Victoria 1/2 good and what we'd like to see and keep in a possible Victoria 3, but Rome 2 never seems to get much detail beyond "Rome 1, but gooder."
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Jun 5, 2016 23:47
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Rome's democratic political system was a pretty interesting experiment, where internal politics would restrict your foreign policy decisions and you needed to actively juggle the Senate in order to push through your agenda, or else groom a charismatic, unifying superleader who can push through whatever you want except oops, he's gone and made himself dictator now that he enjoys widespread popular support. I vaguely recall it being kinda frustrating at times to actually play with, though, with a fair lot of micromanagement involved in juggling factions and I'm not sure if faction influence was ever very well balanced, being hard to reduce the influence of certain factions once you've laid down the foundations for their rise without tearing down half the empire. Not to mention of course how you'd tear your hair out if for whatever reason the Senate resolutely refused to accept a favorable peace treaty in a war you have no chance of winning. Man, I kinda want to fire up EU:Rome now just to see how it compares to my extremely hazy memories of it. Cantorsdust posted:I think something overlooked in Rome was that it made the province resource and trading system mean something mechanically, which is something that CK2 completely lacks and EU4 mostly lacks (aside from the resource monopoly bonuses, which you don't really plan for). Rome had strategic resources in each province, some required to make army units, some improved building, navy, etc. It gave you a reason to trade and conquer that you don't see again until Victoria. I'd like to see that system return again. The idea of trading strategic resources with very tangible benefits is worth keeping, but holy poo poo was trade a micromanagement nightmare in Rome 1.
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Jun 6, 2016 14:50
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Gully Foyle posted:I think you could do something with a point-buy system, where the success of your family dynasty until its fall will give you a certain amount of score based on certain things, and then you can 'purchase' your next family, with a more powerful dynasty costing more. Or you could choose to start with a weaker family and spend the remaining points on certain bonuses or traits. If balanced correctly, it would encourage you to fight civil wars to the bitter end in order to strengthen the next family. Regardless of which game it's in I personally really, really like the idea of game mechanics not just allowing but encouraging you to lose gloriously. It's something to break up the otherwise uninterrupted and snowballing rise to power that usually shows up in strategy games.
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Jun 6, 2016 17:26
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Oh lord their forums must be melting down. There are a surprising amount of people who are violently, viscerally opposed to hyperlanes as being the worst scourge on God's green earth since the Huns.
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Jan 8, 2018 23:38
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Finally, Paradox will release a game covering the Fertile Crescent during the dawn of civilization.
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Feb 8, 2018 19:01
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Crazycryodude posted:Bronze Age game and MotE II, calling it now Bronze Age nothing. Have you ever considered Crusader Kings...set in the Stone Age? Every man in the levy is an individual character with thoughts and hopes and dreams!
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Feb 8, 2018 19:08
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Yeah all kidding aside if it's not either Rome 2 or Vicky 3 or both, I'll be very surprised. Surprised and disappointed. (Could be a Blorg VN dating sim come to think of it)
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Feb 8, 2018 19:45
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Man, forget history. Forget pre-history! You guys remember SimLife? The announcement is gonna be that Paradox bought the rights to develop its sequel.
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Feb 9, 2018 01:09
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Cantorsdust posted:These things combined into the hilarious clusterfuck that was the Crete LP that probably half the posters in this thread participated in. I don't know if people have been getting name changes or if I just don't remember some of them, but I don't recall seeing THAT many old faces around here (by now).
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Feb 10, 2018 00:48
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Not the Messiah posted:Is there a link to this? I love reading about these shenanigans. Here you go. You'll need archives, and there's probably going to be missing images here and there, but the debates, arguments, and hilarity remain. Keep an eye out for The Saurus! He was Trump before Trump was a thing.
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Feb 11, 2018 10:24
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One point about influence is that influence is always limited - it's sometimes possible to score an influence coup by throwing a trickle of influence at some unrelated country you don't care about, forcing your opponent to divide their attention while you pump as much as you can into your REAL target after they're nice and distracted. That being said if you're a German nation trying to compete for influence in Germany against both Austria and Prussia, both of whom rightly regard Germany as critical to their interests, yeah, you might need to just go to war because they ain't giving up their key territories easily. Fortunately there's a CB specifically for Germans to beat up other Germans to steal influence. Also waiting until the last minute to boot you out is just pro play, it forces you to waste as much time and influence possible so that the controller can maintain their grip with minimum cost and effort. The AI kinda has an unfair advantage in that regard since unlike a human player it won't accidentally forget to boot you out at the last moment. StashAugustine posted:he also got banned for a racist meltdown during the election lmao I am completely unsurprised.
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Feb 11, 2018 19:01
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Lucas Archer posted:Well that's convenient. I'm currently researching that. Keep in mind that Prussia gets to use it, too. It’s specifically there to simulate Prussia pushing Austria’s poo poo in to dominate Germany. Even if you don’t plan to fight Prussia, plan for them fighting you. Don’t forget about mobilisation; techs that increase the size of your mobilisation pool can be very powerful, and it’s a valid strategy to have the regular army mostly consist of artillery and a little cavalry that you can plug into your conscript hordes to give them real oompf come a war. Note that fancy units usually don’t decide a war; they’re nice to have, but the bulk of the fighting, dying, and killing is going to be down to plain old infantry backed by artillery. Techs that improve the base importance of either in battle are much more important than unlocking new unit types. Machine guns in particular is a key tech if you can pick it up before your enemies, and unlocking gas allows truly absurdly lop-sided battles if your enemy doesn’t have gas masks. Be sure to keep current in military tactics, too, that adds significantly to Defense.
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Feb 11, 2018 21:07
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Lucas Archer posted:Fantastic, thanks. Yeah, it's been a while since I played V2 so I wasn't willing to comment too much earlier, but subsidizing factories heavily is a BAD thing - it allows an inherently unprofitable factory to keep on trucking instead of closing it down for something that actually makes money. That being said having a lot of factories going, even unprofitable ones, are probably all that's giving tiny little Bavaria the industrial score needed to compete as a GP, so, uh, cost of doing business really. Try to check what caused the economy to tank - are your factories not selling what they're making? Are they not getting the input they need to produce what they're trying to sell? The odds are that the problem is probably the former, in which case what you need to do is to secure markets for yourself. This is done by either conquering new territories to add to your population (colonialism!) or adding new territories to your sphere of influence, which puts them in your internal market and forces them to buy their poo poo from you before anyone else (as well as selling to you before anyone else). Competing for the low-population, heavily-contested states of Germany might be an issue - try looking further afield at low-tech, high-pop nations elsewhere and plan to unify Germany by war later (or, y'know, just go to war when you think you have a chance and unify Germany and its markets by force). It might also be worth noting that tariffs actually affect your economy - if you have high tariffs and a tiny sphere, that means everything that your factories need which needs to be imported gets slapped with a swingeing tariff, making their production more unprofitable. Depending on how high your tariffs are, you might actually see an economic boost if you lower your tariffs. That being said you'd need to make up your budget shortfall by raising taxes, and if your sphere is small and you rely mostly on selling to Bavarians, you may well be taxing your population's ability to buy into your economy, shooting it in the foot via another avenue. Re: Cavalry, no, cavalry is basically useless on its own. Its only value is having one or two per stack to add recon bonuses and flank a little bit, which is important but you've never really got any reason to have a full army of them. Also changing governments by fiat DOES actually increase militancy somewhat for the various pops involved. Not a big deal if you do it once or twice, but if you do it regularly you might find yourself staring down Communists or something in the near future. Edit: Damnit, now I'm reinstalling V2. Tomn fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Feb 12, 2018 |
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Feb 12, 2018 00:18
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Lucas Archer posted:After taking a quick glance, it looks like I didn't have enough materials to make the stuff in the factory. In any case, I've decided to let my capitalists run the factories for now - I have enough that they've been opening them on their own. That's probably the South German Confederation - it's basically a stepping stone to becoming Germany, allowing you to annex all the South German states to give your country the boost it needs to finish the job of unification. I don't really know if there's a better way of checking which states you need other than plain clicking and checking, though. Also, really, you're short of materials? That's actually kinda new to me - might be a bigger issue if you're using stuff like luxury furniture factories that rely on rare tropical wood, though. In any event, the solution is pretty much the same: Identify where the resources you need come from, and either conquer or sphere them. Demiurge4 posted:I can see that, I think the game looks cool but I also wish for more gritty survival games and less hopeful optimism in my space games. Civ: Beyond Earth did the same thing where they wanted to be like SMAC, without being like SMAC apparently, and ended up with something in between that was unsatisfying to everyone. The problem with Beyond Earth had less to do with optimism and more to do with the fact that their writers suuuuuuucked. A better writer could have done a lot of interesting things with fundamentally optimistic, yet competing transhumanist visions. Instead we get as a leader quote "Robots build better than humans? Then build more robots!" (only slightly paraphrased)
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Feb 12, 2018 13:25
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Honestly, Bavaria was kind of a brave choice for a starter country. V2 requires a fair bit of finesse to play a secondary or worse power well, doubly so if said power is land-locked and can't get easy access to overseas uncivs. Throw in the fact that Prussia kinda has the deck stacked in its favor to unite Germany, and you're looking at a real challenge for a beginner. For your next game, I'd recommend picking France, Prussia, the USA, and maybe Austria or Russia, so you can get a better idea of what success looks like. The UK is powerful, but it's also massive and sprawling and overwhelming, and the Ottomans/Spain are going to be a breakneck race to retain your GP status. Prussia in particular benefits from having a very natural progression, starting as a moderately respectable power and then provided clear paths to become stronger and stronger until you unite Germany and start thinking about challenging the Royal Navy. Also, it wouldn't really matter given that you're at war, but during peacetime, if you're not expecting any trouble it's perfectly acceptable to cut back on military national stockpiling to save money for the budget. Just remember to kick the stockpiles back to full again when you're expecting trouble. Also the military rating is a bit of an unreliable way to gauge national strength - it's heavily influenced by big fancy battleships and how many leaders you have, neither of which are really relevant for a land-locked war where you only have a few stacks. It also doesn't take into account reserves you haven't mobilized yet - a country with a large population and mobilization-increasing techs might have a small standing army and look militarily unimpressive on paper, but come a war it can drown smaller countries with bodies.
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Feb 12, 2018 19:17
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Lucas Archer posted:I got the game a few years ago with all the expansions, so I'm up to date there. Huh. The reason it was suggested that you get the expansions is because you're missing expansion features - you should have separate sliders for army, navy, and construction stockpiles, colonial power, and newspapers among the more obvious visual indicators. Is China multiple smaller countries, or just one gigantic country? If the latter, you don't have the expansions active.
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Feb 12, 2018 19:57
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Change is bad and scary and always leads to negative consequences, without fail, always. Every time. Definitely.
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Feb 13, 2018 19:42
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Phi230 posted:HoI4 and Stellaris send their regards I bounced hard off HoI2, gave up fast on HoI3, and only started enjoying myself with HoI4. Also I personally consider Stellaris to be tied with V2 for best Paradox game. But maybe I’m just a filthy casual ruining Paradox games for the ~real fans~, who knows?
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Feb 13, 2018 23:31
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Baronjutter posted:I don't really care about the military strategy elements, I just want to create crazy alternative timelines where Czechoslovakia managed to rope the allies into an early war and annexed Austria, Hungary, and Croatia and somehow controls east and west germany and northern italy as puppets becoming a socialist central european superpower. Or how a neutral switzerland managed to opportunistically take over Italy while the axis were busy dealing with the allies, then raised a navy and carved out a huge african empire after the axis more or less conquered all of Africa because the allies forgot how boats work and is now a huge unaligned 3rd power between the western allies and soviet union. Is that really less of a thing in HoI4 than HoI2? Again, I admit I bounced off HoI2 so I can't gauge this very well myself, but from hearing about it I'd always understood that one of HoI2's big weaknesses was that if something derailed The War so that the right events failed to fire fire the AI pretty much shits the bed and becomes almost completely passive, relying solely on the player to drive events. Meanwhile, for the next big HoI4 DLC/patch, there'll be literal focus trees for Germany deposing the Furher and putting Wilhelm II/III on the throne, Czechslovakia can try to create a Balkan Entente to take on all comers, and there's nothing really stopping Switzerland from taking on the world. I will admit that making the wackier stuff happen basically involves going down focus trees, which isn't the most compelling gameplay - maybe that's your issue with it?
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Feb 14, 2018 00:29
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:I don't think anyone here is trying to call people that like Stellaris or HoI4 bads or whatever. It's just that some of the flaws in those games are so bad to us that it makes them bad games, to us. That's fair. Beamed posted:Yeah, I think it depends on what you enjoy most about the Victoria games. For me, political stuff was fun, but sort of second to industrialization; Victoria 2 is definitely the better game, but when it came to transforming your country from a rural, poor mess to a modern industrial behemoth, you had control over that in Ricky. In Vicky 2, it just..sorta happens. (And, of course, industrialization is a trap in Vicky 2, in pure economic terms). I will readily admit that my favorite part of V2, the autonomous economy you nudge towards success which has hard-to-notice knock-on effects on your pops, is objectively problematic game design and would probably be the first thing to go in a hypothetical V3.
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Feb 14, 2018 12:02
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Tahirovic posted:Imagine if Vicky had achievements. I'd still be playing it right now. Equal Treaties: As China, have the UK in your sphere as well as at least one opium-producing province.
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Feb 15, 2018 11:39
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