Paradox Grand Strategy: Tim Cook? How many divisions has he got?

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A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

KOGAHAZAN!! posted:

Nah, the trade system isn't great. Probably my least favourite mechanic left in the game? It's a whole bunch of clicking- like, nightmare levels of clicking if you decide you want to do more that just get your cap bonuses. And the routes keep breaking because of wars and rebellions so you need to keep redoing everything, There's very little actual decision making in it, too- at most you might need to think about what your priorities for those cap bonuses are but that doesn't change much run to run. The click to decision ratio here is off the charts.

There are other things I don't like about it, like, external trade is a lot more valuable than external trade? So you want to keep a lot of minors around so you can run trade routes with them, like some sort of weird accounting shell game. And it falls hard into that traditional Paradox problem where a region's economic potential is inappropriately coupled to the number of arbitrary divisions it's been partitioned into. Worst, in my mind, is the fact that all trades are direct from producer to consumer, so production and trade aren't really separable axes of income. If you're rich in land then you're going to be rich in trade, and if you're poor in land you're going to be similarly poor in trade. There's no opportunity for man-in-the-middle profits. I don't even know if that's appropriate to the period or not, I just know it has a flattening effect on the game's economy.

Production is... alright? Again, I don't like the way it couples tile density to economic value, but the way the system works drives a lot of moment-to-moment gameplay in a way that's... satisfying to execute on, even if I don't think it amounts to what Radia would call an interesting decision. Lots of "Oh, there's honey here. I want to build a city on that.", or "This province has three grain tiles in it. I should slap farms on them and move a bunch of slaves there."

Thanks for the thorough reply. This is precisely why I asked, because what sounds good in a DD might not be so hot when you get your hands on it.

Gaius Marius posted:

The only reason they ever added it was because how mad the players got when they originally had very little control over their army. The game in general would be much better if you never had anything more than influence over anything but the most personal decisions.

Army composition out, actual dress-up minigame in.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2022 06:40

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 18:32

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

YF-23 posted:

I think I would have preferred a halfway approach where games get their big expansions and then support switches to a much more limited scope with just cosmetic or flavour releases (that don't introduce new mechanics) explicitly to maintain a revenue stream while the game is in its final form. But this is something that just came to me as something I would be satisfied with on the consumer side, and probably doesn't make as much business sense.

That was definitely also the model that came to mind for me when thinking on this. That said, you could also do a model where like every third major DLC consolidates the various features accumulated, trimming down/integrating/replacing features that are functionally parallel versions of the same underlying idea. Which would then create a more solid base on which to built new features, while reducing the risk of the game feeling bloated by having too many disconnected systems for the player to keep track of in any given game.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2023 17:17

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Lady Radia posted:

they would just reload and still call it easy, or more likely figure out how to know better about what is obscured from them and then you�ve created a skill floor without a corresponding skill ceiling increase

I think there IS something here, to be clear, but not in the traditional Paradox game at all. You need to be ready to fully embrace asymmetry to begin this designing

The skill ceiling increase would be how you deal with the disasters that it's now harder to avoid.

As for the issue of people reloading, I feel like you could get around that by having bad events get locked in but not fire right away. So for the Time of Troubles, something like:

- There's a page with possible disasters, which shows the visible factors affecting the likelihood of the event, things like legitimacy, number of heirs, how happy the nobles are, how many possible pretenders there are, and so on.
- Hidden from the player there's a counter that counts up to the disaster each month, based on the above factors - AND - a hidden randomized variable that reduces how much it ticks up each month or even makes it tick down.
- If the counter reaches 50%, the event gets locked in at level 1, where it triggers if the ruler dies, whether it's in a week or ten years.
- If the counter reaches 100%, the event gets locked in at level 2, where it will also just trigger within a random number of months
- After an event gets locked in, it can still be averted if the player manages to get the situation under control and the counter back down to 0% before the ruler dies.

The above system would make it transparent to the player what they need to care about, but not how much, and make it so you'd have to undo a lot more stuff to reload before things got locked in.

Obviously "forcing" events on the player like this would probably necessitate making them more interesting challenges, with clear goals for how you make them stop. So like, in the above scenario, the player chooses from one of the pretenders and then gets clear instructions on what actions will help calm things down again. Like capturing/killing rivals, proving their martial prowess by beating up invaders and so on.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2023 08:27

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Lady Radia posted:

this isnt any different from what mods or even some EU4 event chains do today, except that it hides more from the player. in fact it�s just Worse because players will remember across replays, so again it is just a knowledge check, it�s not actually fleshing out or adding a system

How do you remember across replays? You mean reloading and knowing that the civil war will kick off the moment your king dies unless you really get all your poo poo under control fast and hope for the best? The randomized variables could be re-rolled whenever you load up a save, leaving you only with the knowledge that poo poo kicked off but not when it got locked in or how much you need to do avoid it in the future. Hell, the timeline for a locked in level 2 rebellion could also be changed on a reload, meaning you might reload three years back and then have the rebellion kick off within six months, leaving you no better off. Just like reloading means you don't know when your king will croak.

Obviously you can just keep going back through your saves, but you can't really get around that as a developer except by like removing manual saves. As long as beating up the rebellion actually comes with some upsides*, I think just a slight bit of resistance to the act of simply reloading, would go a long way towards making people just play that poo poo out.

*it's mechanically engaging, and possibly mechanically rewarding if you do it really well. Like giving the winning dynasty a long-lasting legitimacy boost and your country a stability to boost because the civil war made it very obvious who was on top.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2023 18:14

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ilitarist posted:

Not in terms of quantity of course, but I can imagine those games getting an overall facelift. If we'd get EU7 this year instead of the expansions we got it would probably have half of the mechanics but, first, maybe we'd be better off without some of them or never notice they're gone. Second, you'd get cohesive UI with modern features like a proper font renderer, nested tooltips, accessibility options, etc. Devs make improvements on UI from time to time but it's still a mess that would never look like that if the UI was made from the ground up.

Half the mechanics are just a different way to model a thing already in the game, so I definitely agree we'd be better off or not notice them being gone if they were replaced with a more cohesive and modern vision.

# ¿ May 19, 2023 13:26

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The Cheshire Cat posted:

4X means turn-based. Grand Strategy means realtime.

Paradox games aren't real-time.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2023 05:20

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GrossMurpel posted:

That's also conclusive proof that Total War and Train Simulator are grand strategy, which we all knew in our hearts

The Sims too.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2023 15:36

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Mandoric posted:

Could always split the difference--let mod tracks use the preexisting tagging system yet, or better yet include custom weighting code, then let modders convert the playlists and sidestep having to handle licensing oneself. One of the V3 megapacks apparently made some progress towards this, but they don't go into much detail as to how.

Isn't this how it currently works? I'm pretty sure I made a custom playlist with weighting for EU4 at some point. Though I suppose Paradox might have hosed up the modability of that at some point, just like they did with the map.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2023 12:27

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Staltran posted:

They might be chopping off a century or so from the end of the EU timeline too. But if it isn't EU5, well, no way it's CK4 either. It would have to something completely new, likely overlapping both CK3 and EU4. And it would probably have to extend significantly into the EU4 timeframe for the Americas and the ocean lanes to be significant. If they did 1337-1648 or something like that for not-EU5, where would that leave an eventual EU5? Not that they can't have two games in the same timeframe, but it seems pretty unlikely to me.

I mentioned it in the EU thread, but Europa Universalis is a much more appropriate name for a 1736-1836 game, given that that is the period where Europe actually starts snowballing in Asia. Make the game heavily focused on warfare, this escalating series of European conflicts to determine who is going to be top dog, and you have a distinct historical and gameplay niche to differentiate it from the more balanced traditional EU-style game and the economy focused Victoria.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2024 18:18

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Magissima posted:

Yeah the pressure to get stronger at the same pace as your rivals and threats is really the only reason to expand outside of pure map painting. The game stops being fun when there's no one who can threaten you, and the only way to have threats throughout the campaign (other than introducing new ones like the mongols or Anbennar's obsidian dwarves) is to slow down the player's scaling or make the AI at least somewhat competitive, which in EU4 it is definitely not. If I get outscaled on a reasonably level playing field by EU5's AI I will be extremely satisfied.

If they leaned into the idea that countries actually cared about the balance of power, and let the AI care a lot more about keeping any country getting uncomfortably large down, then you would get push-back before you got too big to shrug that off. Like, everyone in Western-to-Central Europe should want to cut down to size a France that gobbles up Burgundy, only chilling out a bit if say Austria united the HRE with their other territories and created an eastern counter-balance to France. That would do a lot to add some friction during the part of the game where the player usually starts snowballing.

I guess it could be part of the difficulty settings, to define how much the AI cares about that, kept separate from other aspects of the difficulty.

Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:

Johan has been vocal about how much he disliked the In Nomine start date (1399), so it's a little hard to believe he'd go even earlier.

That's obviously just because nothing interesting happened in 1399.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2024 05:33

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Radia posted:

the problem - and i think it is a problem, i'm not sure how to solve it - is that ok, you get the AI caring a ton to keep a single country from becoming too powerful. eventually the player will beat that, and probably not much longer than currently.

now we're back to square one. without reflecting internal politics or tensions or what-have-you, I don't think you can solve this via just external factors

I don't know. If it's sensitive enough, I think it could hobble the vast majority of players. It's OK if it's an imperceptible speed bump to the "World conquest in 1500" players, since the kind of solutions that would contain them would suffocate a regular top 20% player.

I do agree that you need some sort of internal mechanism to prevent snowballing, to the point that I basically take it for granted that this is necessary. EU would in my mind benefit a lot from a system of diminishing returns for territories that outpace your capacity to control them, meaning even relative minor countries could put up a real fight against their far larger neighbors in the early game, with only later-game improvements letting the big boys push ahead. From a game mechanics point it's perfect as an (early) anti-snowball measure, it mirrors the historical process of minor states becoming increasingly irrelevant, but also allows a minor state to push ahead in its administration and thus be able to fight the big boys on a more equal footing and ideally grow to the point that it still has a chance when the big boys catch up.

Magissima posted:

Something like V3's diplomatic plays could work well. If France or Austria or Aragon try to expand in Italy, everyone else who's interested in Italy would have a chance to intervene if the aggressor has AE or is at a certain power rank (iirc Imperator's connection of diplomatic options to rank had good ideas), but wouldn't necessarily join a generalized coalition. Try to make each war as an aggressive and blobbing power have aspects of coalitions coming together to oppose you instead of having the coalition be a massive all or nothing war that can be juked around.

That sounds kind of unfun in EU4 but hopefully they can make large wars more manageable and ideally find a way to keep wars contained to one region, or like x regions at a time where x depends on war goals, raised army size, tech, etc.

Regional coalitions sound like a good idea, and a nice way to make an improved coalition/containment system get more play. Austria might not be hegemonic in Europe, but in an Italian context it's a big scary monster. Really, you could just make it so any country in a region under attack by a power that's seen as a major threat, can just join the war on the defender's side. So like, the Italians can attempt to dog pile Austria because it's too powerful in their context, but France can't do the same because Austria's attempt at conquest is a European issue where Austria isn't powerful enough to justify the intervention. Conversely, a French attempt to conquer Milan might justify an Austrian response, because France is powerful enough that every European power is justified in trying to curtail their growth.

As you say, some adjustment to the game mechanics to make interventions something you want to avoid for sensible in-world reasons, rather than because it because unmanageable from a purely game mechanics stand point would definitely be nice. First option would be to make it so armies are limited to fighting in the region where the intervention takes place, so the anti-Austrian coalition sticks to defending Italy rather than attacking the Austrian Netherlands or whatever. In the scenario where the intervention against Austria is on a European level, it would of course be fine to attack everywhere in Europe, but now you're avoiding having to deal with annoying attacks on like Austrian Australia.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2024 14:50

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

I hate the period and I heard so many bad things about the game back in the day that I never bought it.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2024 15:48

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Elias_Maluco posted:

Im getting hyped for this not-EU game

Literally every system/concept sounds like an answer to one of my suggestion/complaint posts, so it's hard not to get a little hyped.

Just need to add a note about having family trees for royalty and I think they've cleared my entire suggestion list.

Poil posted:

That sure is a leet and funny start date.

Won't moving the start and end dates 100 years earlier just mean people stop playing in the 1600s instead of the 1700s?

The 1600s have the advantage of, at least on the European side, including things like the Thirty Years' War. A war that will probably feel right popping off at any point during the 17th century, will be easier to ensure the conditions are right for so it actually happens consistently, and where it's easier to ensure a good balance between the different sides because a country can intervene for purely strategic reasons. That's a far better setup than the French Revolutionary Wars, which simply require too many things to go right/wrong to pop off, and where it's unlikely that they'll feel satisfying to fight out if they do happen. (Outside the chance of you playing the revolution and getting to steamroll)

Johan also appears to be aiming for a slower pace of expansion, in which case you might be further from your goals than you'd normally expect to be in EU4. If they manage to make expansion somewhat match history, the real expansion of map painting for Russia/France/England only really happened in the 17th century.

# ¿ Mar 23, 2024 13:41

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Reveilled posted:

I wonder how they�ll model the early warfare situation for England. It�s notable that in EU4 Great Britain pretty much always forms by England conquering Scotland very early on and then just waiting for Admin tech 10, and it usually stomps all over Ireland similarly early despite the challenges of actually ruling Ireland meaning they couldn�t actually make any conquest stick until the late 16th century. 1337 nominally starts with England in an even more commanding position�sure, they�re losing a war to effectively vassalise Scotland, but will the AI actually accept defeat or just turn around and win that war most of the time, starting the unification of the isles even earlier than in EU4? If England does vassalise Scotland, in EU4 this would effectively create a docile client, but in practice all it ever did was create a constant rebellious ulcer as Scotland just kept trying to win its independence over and over and over again. Any attempt to subdue the Irish Lords mostly just led to them saying �OK, yes England, you�re in charge� and then going right back to ignoring them the second the armies were gone. In neither case could England just annex a bit of Scotland or Ireland in one war, then another bit in a second war, then finish them off in a third war, which is exactly what happens in EU4 almost every time.

Not to say that these problems of simulation are unique to Britain and Ireland, they�re just the area I�m familiar with. Mostly I just worry that all the reasons why European monarchies couldn�t get larger before the birth of the administrative state won�t be adequately modelled and we�ll just see the map painting shifted back a century.

IIRC, England (possibly the British Isles in general) were very overdeveloped in EU4 compared to where it should be at the time, basically as if you pulled the early 18th century version back in time. Even if that imbalance was uniform across the islands, the fact that it skewed the balance between France and England might've done a lot to let England run wild. Based on the numbers I find doing a quick Google, the population disparity between England and the rest of the British Isles should be much much smaller than it is today, which combined with France being more of a threat (and prize!) might be enough to keep Scotland free.

Hopefully vassals and personal unions are just generally unruly if they don't feel like they're being respected, so even if England does vassalize Scotland it can just choose to rebel the moment England attempts poo poo in France.

# ¿ Mar 23, 2024 15:56

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Reveilled posted:

One of the other factors, I think, are the game�s truce mechanics. If England fights off France, they�ve then got 5+ years of an uninterrupted free hand in Ireland and Scotland because trucebreaking costs loads of stability and aggressive expansion (and as far as I know, the AI never does it). But historically if France and England signed a peace treaty and the next year the English king then got tangled up in Ireland, France would be invading England�s continental holdings within a month or two, peace treaty be damned, and neither French society nor the wider diplomatic world would much think him the lesser for it.

Would be interesting, making truces a bit less binary. Like, in the above example, France could basically be exempt from diplomatic (and internal) consequences, because the French and everyone else agree that the French crown has a claim on those English-ruled territories. Perhaps in another situation, it does piss off your neighbors, but your own country is fine with it because it believes those territories rightfully belong to it despite what everyone else thinks. Or like, it's a holy war, so your people just appreciate you doing the Lord's work. A country that is being sufficiently aggressive might also justify breaking a truce against, in the other eyes of everyone else feeling threatened.

Lot's of possibilities really, and something that could switch up the diplomatic gameplay from previous games.

# ¿ Mar 23, 2024 18:37

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ilitarist posted:

Hight time for gamedesigners to start using ‱ symbol. You can get +100‱ and feel good about it.

But really when I have an issue with numbers it's because of the sheer number of modifiers. No single bonus feels important after early game cause you have so many ideas, estate modifiers, permanent bonuses from missions, dozen government reforms and so on. Sadly EU4 went through a period where every expansion was obliged to add a new important value onto the systems.

Conquest of Paradise: +0.1 to numbers
Wealth of Nations: +0.2 to numbers
Res Publica: +0.15 to numbers
Art of War: +0.05 to numbers
El Dorado: +0.05 to numbers
Common Sense: +0.05 to numbers
The Cossacks: +0.25 to numbers
Mare Nostrum: +0.05 to numbers
Rights of Man: +0.1 to numbers
Mandate of Heaven: +0.1 to numbers
Cradle of Civilization: +0.35 to numbers
Dharma: +0.05 to numbers
Emperor: +0.05 to numbers
Leviathan: +0.05 to numbers

# ¿ Mar 24, 2024 06:18

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ilitarist posted:

Initially Common sense added a lot more numbers but they were retroactively moved into the base game. Still it makes sense to use patch version, not DLC specifically when evaluating the number of numbers. I am sad to say I am left unsatisfied with your analysis.

I based the number entirely on the short description I found on a list of DLC, haven't even played like half of those.

# ¿ Mar 24, 2024 14:00

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PittTheElder posted:

Let's have some innovation in this bad boy. It shouldn't just be a toggle for whether the Roman Empire is called it's correct name, or the ERE, or the Byzantine Empire, but if you pick the exonym settings to get Byzantium, it should also call the HRE the Kingdom of Germany, France can be Frankia the whole game etc.

The Kingdom of Germany was not synonymous with the HRE, hell, it wasn't even synonymous with the German-speaking parts of the HRE. It should be called the Empire of the Franks, or as a parallel to the Byzantine Empire, the Aachenine Empire.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2024 17:13

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PittTheElder posted:

No I know, that's just what the Romans generally called it from the Ottonians forward. Exonyms for everyone!

You're the only person I've seen claim that they used that title, rather than referring to the Franks. Information is pretty sparse overall by googling though, so I'm not saying you're wrong, but it wouldn't be the first time "Frank" was used as a more catch-all term rather than the old tribal group.

PittTheElder posted:

Aachenian Empire would be hilarious though. Johan please make it happen

Add a slider for how many naming sliders you have to deal with before launching the game, with the final option being one that opens up every country to be renamed according to its endonym or a Byzantine-style naming scheme.

Elias_Maluco posted:

What about buttons to move a slider

You should click on the "Increase/Decrease" button and then wait as the game slowly moves the slider towards your chosen option, the speed of which depends on the proximity of your territories to the capital, as well as tech.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2024 05:38

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PittTheElder posted:

Frank is absolutely the name they used for the people (including westerners more broadly, and Roman Catholics generally), and also the empire when it included the Western bits, but shifted to using King(dom) of Germany to refer to the state and it's ruler post-Otto.

You can see the usage in the Alexiad, among other places

So all this time the Byzantium super fans have pretended like they're the victims of a linguistic attack, when in fact they had started the conflict with a far worse naming. Paradox should include an option for naming Byzantium the Empire of Greece to balance the scales.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2024 06:56

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PittTheElder posted:

I mean jokes aside the linguistic and academic attack by westerners were very real, and extremely unfounded. And not hard to understand the pain over it honestly, given that whole Fourth Crusade business.

But we just established that the Byzantines put that poo poo about the Kingdom of Germany in writing before any of that business, and their calling the HRE "Germany" was more unfounded than calling the ERE the Byzantine Empire. It's hard to feel sorry over this "disrespect" when the Byzantines dished out worse themselves.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2024 16:08

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YF-23 posted:

I am sorry but this is an insane post.

It is far worse being called a German than a Greek.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2024 05:28

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OddObserver posted:

....

Also:

Maybe I should reinstall this, though... What's the flavor nose everyone's been playing with again?

I come to bury Imperator, not to praise it.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2024 18:18

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gradenko_2000 posted:

Simcity 2013 was incredibly bad, yeah, but the path from 1 to 2000 to 3000 to 4 was pretty good series of iterative (if not evolutionary) improvements.

I think Paradox Tinto being farther away from the money people and presumably can do their thing without as much getting-hosed-with is a good step in this direction

It's too far away for Paradox to control, and if they try to reign in Johan he'll just rebel.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 17:13