|
Hellioning posted:So Henry VIII is an rear end for obvious reasons, but I would like to know what you hated that much about Cromwell. Yeah, he was a religious fanatic who betrayed the ideals of a supposedly republican revolution, but I feel there were a lot of those in history. This is honestly exactly one of the kinds of things I do think non-natives will always be at a disadvantage compared to natives on. I don’t have a clear reason for hating Cromwell; I can barely tell you what he did. I just remember the teacher talking with a vague tone of disgust, primary school children laughing about him, children’s history programs making jokes about him that I watched in the background as a kid. Just like how you’ll be passively exposed to folk tales and so on while growing up, it’s these kinds of things (ambiently picked up in primary school) that I think foreigners for whatever country will almost never match natives on, no matter how hard they study the place. Conversely, going back to Cromwell, any non-British that’s actually read about the guy could completely blow me out of the water with his actual significance and macro historical context and so on in a way I have no clue about.
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2021 04:58
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 06:38 |
|
|
Rynoto posted:Ro3K wasn't meant to be a history lesson at the time it was written, either. If you want the actual history you have to dig through some of the most amazingly boring accounts ever. The Book of Wei is basically the earliest account we have of the peoples of the Korean Peninsula and Japanese Archipelago (when Wei attacked Goguryeo and then romped around the vicinity doing an ethnographic survey, basically) so if you're interested in that it actually owns on the Yemaek posted:They always use the festival of the tenth month to do ritual service to Heaven; drinking, singing, and dancing day and night, they call this dancing to Heaven (mucheon). They also sacrifice to the tiger as to a divine being. If their villages violently transgress upon each other, they are always penalized by exaction of slaves, oxen, and horses; this they call exaction for outrage. One who kills another must die in retribution; there is little robbery among them. They make spears three chang in length, sometimes carried by three men at once. They are capable foot soldiers; the “sandalwood bow” of Lelang comes from their land.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2021 17:22
|
|
|
Eimi posted:That's where we have the first recorded ruler of Yamato being Himiko from, yeah? Yeah on Himiko posted:The country formerly had a man as ruler. For some seventy or eighty years after that there were disturbances and warfare. Therupon the people agreed upon a woman for their ruler. Her name was Himiko. She occupied herself with magic and sorcery, bewitching the people. Though mature in age, she remained unmarried. She had a younger brother who assisted her in ruling the country. After she became the ruler, there were few who saw her. She had one thousand women as attendants, but only one man. He served her food and drink and acted as a medium of communication. She resided in a palace surrounded by towers and stockades, with armed guards in a state of constant vigilance. There was for a long time an unfortunate tendency for (overwhelmingly male) historians to interpret the whole "few saw her" and "her younger brother assisted her in ruling the country" to mean she was only a spiritual figurehead and her brother did the actual ruling, totally ignoring that later well-accepted emperors are recorded as having assistants in the exact same way (with the same character and everything), which you might sometimes end up reading. There's a good analysis of that and of her in "Gendered Interpretations of Female Rule" if anyone's curious to read more. Women's status in ancient/medieval Korea and Japan seems to have been remarkably high as far as premodern state societies go, in sad contrast to their later histories; we fortunately have a lot of names of Japanese queens and empresses, but there's pretty compelling evidence for at least a few reigning queens in Korea too past just the 3 that were recorded, but that likely got written out of history by later Confucian historians.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2021 17:40
|
|
|
There was some confusion about trying to figure out who she's supposed to be when referenced against Japan's own dynastic annals, since she doesn't really fit any traditionally attested figure (she's often linked to Jingu but it's uh, kind of dubious), but that was mostly in the first half of the 20th century when nationalism surrounding those parts of Japanese history ran super deep. These days the Japanese records until about 500 are not considered remotely reliable, whereas The Book of Wei's account of Korea/Japan generally are,* and I don't think any mainstream historians doubt Himiko's existence; there are records of her over a long span of time and in a few different Chinese sources. *Reliable as in probably not having made things up, but still surely totally misunderstood/viewed in a Sinocentric lens lots of things about all these alien cultures it was recording for the first time. The figure Himiko almost certainly existed; the specifics of Yamatai court culture and her reign are probably not exactly as transcribed.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2021 19:32
|
|
|
CK honestly sounds fine for consoles to me; micromanagement is a core part of EU4/Stellaris (curious how well the console version works on that...) but really not for CK unless you're a turbonerd who powergames the fun out of everything. The game is basically just clicking through various event popups and clicking on the plot interface every 5 minutes or something; very little of it is particularly fiddly or time sensitive.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 1, 2021 04:12
|
|
|
Jazerus posted:EU Rome always made me feel like paradox had designers with interest in every era of history except the classical era, and imperator didn't really feel different in that regard. i'm not saying that the content designers didn't know their ancient history, but it never seemed like they understood the period on a visceral level, unlike CK, EU, vicky, etc. Something about Imperator has been bothering me for ages but I could never put my finger on why exactly, but now you say this, I think this is totally it. Aside from a hypothetical first-millennium-Korea grand strategy game the Classical era is by far my favorite period, but in a way that Imperator just completely doesn't capture. To be fair I feel what I truly want out of games in the setting is atmosphere and feel -- and probably one as much informed by pop culture as any kind of deep historical understanding, but it's one that the vast majority of games in the period capture really nicely. I guess this is all just based on a hunch, but it would make a lot of sense if that's because most games focusing on it are by designers that actively picked the period, whereas for Paradox, it was basically the only major setting they hadn't already covered so they did it out of some feeling of obligation more than interest. True or not, interest is obviously pretty important in making an engaging themed game. It makes me think, in the threads calling for China in CK3 (and at one point, Imperator  ) what seems to be the most common rebuttal is along the lines of "it would be better for it to just get its own game in the period," which... was always flatly disingenuous since there's no way they're doing that again after Sengoku, but even if they were to, it probably wouldn't feel right at all. A genuinely invested interest in a setting is kind of important to pulling it off right.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 1, 2021 05:36
|
|
|
PittTheElder posted:I want them to gather a team to make a completely separate China game, if only so that they don't waste time fully simulating China in CK. They never will though; the reason people clamor for it being shoehorned into CK2 is because it's the only way we're actually getting a Medieval East Asia grand strategy. And like I said a bit ago, unless they hire a whole bunch of new people I really think a standalone Asia game would be a reach for Paradox to pull off properly even if they were to try it again. An expansion is much more attainable.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2021 09:43
|
|
|
Did the Imperator launch coincide with one of the gamer rage moments against Paradox or am I misremembering? There've been so many now it's hard to keep track but I vaguely recall the launch got tangled up in some stuff. IMO the biggest issue was just a lack of personality. A thousand different factions and all of them were basically indistinguishable at launch, it made it really hard to even make any kind of informed decision about where to play as. Going back to that discussion from a bit ago, I think the classical period really is more popular than the early modern, it's just that it's a popularity condensed around a lot of stuff that all happens in like 5 places, which makes for an extremely boring map to look at. EU4's advantage is that we know all the names. I don't think it's at all an insurmountable problem for a strategy game (Total War manages fine) but I do think it was a poor choice of era to expand the province count 10-fold for.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2021 10:00
|
|
|
Eiba posted:It was the same basic idea that Europe's complex geography gave it a long-term technological advantage over easily unified China. Not coming down on you specifically, because I know this is a really common assumption, but the notion that bodies of water are the only meaningful barriers is really a pretty flawed one; China’s geography is really not any more suited towards unification than Europe’s is — there are huge changes in climate even in the traditionally Han regions, mountain ranges criss-crossing major chunks of the landscape, and while there are navigable ones too, there are large stretches of river that are very difficult to navigate. Chinese unification was a long, slow process largely in spite of all of that, and even its heartlands are like 4-5 separate geographical regions.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 20, 2022 16:13
|
|
|
Popoto posted:I haven't really bought DLC since The Art Of War, I'm guessing the monthly subscription is better for me if all I intend is one campaign in the next month or two yeah? Just looking for some map painting before the 25th of October basically Yeah, I’d recommend it, it gives you literally everything for while you’re subscribed and wasn’t a pain at all to cancel. I’m at the point where I only play like 1 campaign annually and its perfect for that sort of thing.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 25, 2022 18:12
|
|
|
CK3 would also be a great choice but I'd definitely pick Vicky 3 for a new player at the moment, I totally agree with the comment upthread that the best moment to jump into a Paradox game is when it first launches. The buzz and interest and also lack of people having triple-analyzed all the systems to death counts for a lot imo for ease of getting into it. EU4 is a fantastic game but way too bloated. I honestly wouldn't recommend Paradox games by period so much, definitely not as much as e.g. Total War where the flavor counts for so much.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 4, 2022 02:01
|
|
|
Hellioning posted:Plus, most people care less about that era of history than you would think, especially once you get outside of Rome. I don't think this is true really, Rome 2 has very consistently been top of the Steam charts for historical Total War games. I'd definitely wager it's a more popular period than the early modern on the whole, especially once you discount the few popular things like pirates that aren't particularly represented anyway in EU4. I'm definitely of the opinion (/agreement with what I've gathered is a loose consensus) that Paradox really didn't leverage the period to their advantage though. Game systems that don't meaningfully represent what people actually want out of the time, a focus on depicting literally every tribe mentioned in any ancient text ever rather than having fewer but more fleshed out ones (there was almost no regional flavor at all on launch), and then yeah also probably the wrong start date on top of that. I really do hope they'll take some of the lessons about what flopped with Imperator and come back to the period, even if it takes another decade. It has a lot to offer, the makeup of societies in the ancient world is so different to anything that came later too that it should really be able to carry a distinct Paradox game.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2022 22:47
|
|
|
What the hell, I can't  harder at the model hate going on here about CK3. The 2D portraits in CK2 are hideous, they were straight up the major reason I didn't play more of that game. CK3's characters have so much more personality and it fits in so much better with the genealogy stuff to not be relying on a few dozen canned noses and eyes for all your characters.TwoQuestions posted:I'll hard agree with this. The best PDX content is in the writing and mechanics, not the flashy 3D models. Improving/adding more 2D representations of people/institutions would make me a lot happier, along with the UI improvements they're making. The artists working on the character models are different people to the writers doing the writing, and at this point Paradox can definitely afford both. Yeah the turnaround per asset is gonna be a little bit higher which might limit variety from the dev team compared to with 2D, but especially for technically inclined modders, the workflow for 3D takes so much less skill to pull off to a convincingly high quality (especially for hard surface things like crowns) than 2D that mods have made up plenty of the difference. All that said yeah definitely feeling the same vibes about the game at large as other people here. I loved the base game but 2 and a half years later I was expecting there to be more.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 15, 2023 19:53
|
|
|
I feel like there's a lot of gameplay systems we've settled on as basically ubiquitous in modern strategy games that definitely, like, work, but probably aren't the only way games could be made. I've been wondering a lot about transparency lately too, since it seems to be the current consensus that Transparent Is Better, both for judging AI decisions but also for getting to see literally everything going in on your country. It'd definitely make for a different game if you couldn't, and one that would have to be designed more centrally around, but it'd also be one that mimics way more closely the actual experience of a ruler in history in a way I wish more games might capture.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2023 01:05
|
|
|
I definitely think there's something out there that nobody's hit on yet that can break strategy games like these out of their niche at least for a bit. I've been wondering about a roguelike-style one; people are a lot less averse to gently caress-ups if each playthrough is only an hour long, whereas they (I say they; me too, to be fair) get a lot angrier about them in a longform campaign.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2023 02:09
|
|
|
I mean, that's basically the reasoning behind it becoming practically settled that all strategy games have to be fully transparent now. But I really don't agree it's necessarily better, or that everything you're pointing out has to be bad. Being at the mercy of opaque randomness can be irritating at times, but I disagree that it's always or even usually unfun. Like was mentioned upthread, it can also make the game's systems feel richer and deeper. Even if in actuality they aren't, often the feeling of it is what actually matters. For the people that powergame or stringently check wikis yeah opacity is probably just gonna be a worse option, but not everyone plays like that, and as I think has been alluded to, it's a common thread in comments about modern strategy games that there's an emptiness about them compared to ones from back in the day, and imo this is a big part of why. Now I do think the culture surrounding these games is such now (with checking the wikis practically being expected) that it's basically impossible to pivot away from transparency at this point, but I think that's a shame. A strategy game that made fog of war / misinformation the central mechanic would be dope as hell but I don't think it has to go that far.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2023 05:10
|
|
|
Some way to have powers uncoupled from the territorial system would be cool, although we've been saying that about every Clausewitz game for like 10 years now. Was disappointed the origin in one of the recent expansions with a ship of freed enslaved people just dumps you on a planet like every other start rather than making you start out on that ship.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 21, 2023 01:29
|
|
|
Huh, not a crossover I expected but I'll have to give that a listen. Considering for years Ming didn't get a mission tree "nobody on the team is intrested in Chinese history" particularly
|
|
#
¿
Jun 21, 2023 13:55
|
|
|
poo poo, call me hyped. Is there an indication it's actually a civ-like though, rather than just starting in the same era of humanity? Obviously wouldn't work with your standard Paradox game style, but I could totally see something vaguely more approximating Stellaris working out.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 15, 2023 23:24
|
|
|
Oh neat. Do we know if it's a PDS game or just the publisher? I guess I see civ-like as eras of history plus hex-based and turn based, though. I feel like you could approach the same "path through history" concept with a more freeform map and real time. Either way should be interesting though.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 15, 2023 23:34
|
|
|
Empires don’t fall in civ; I’d love it if they do incorporate that but it’s hardly a hard requirement. Definitely think it’d need to be a different take on the paradox formula a la stellaris than just a normal province based map game though. E: honestly I wonder if an *extremely* enterprising modded couldn’t turn stellaris into a civ-like flow of history game Koramei fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Sep 17, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Sep 17, 2023 18:36
|
|
|
ilitarist posted:Funny how it works, as Humankind - the other Civ-like - is so aggressively against the Great Man Theory it deliberately doesn't put any person in the game (except for players who are explicitly above it all) and might suffer from it in terms of flavor. There are no Civ-like great people, no quotes on tech, no generals or hero units, nothing, just faceless nations. I mean this is kind of troubling, but I feel like this is exactly why that Romantic poo poo all has such a hold. Great Man Theory history, and honestly (when it's not our culture) Orientalism and Primitivism, are just kind of appealing to our monkey brains in a way that makes for extremely damaging understandings of history and other humans, but colorful and engaging stuff in games. And movies, art, etc.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 26, 2023 01:22
|
|
|
I played a whole bunch of Vicky 3 when it came out but generally haven't been playing Paradox games like I used to. I chalk it up to changing time commitments though. Honestly can't quite fathom how I put more than 1000 hours into EU4 in a little under 4 years. Just the general notion of starting up a campaign knowing it'll take at least 30 hours to see through to the end feels daunting.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 7, 2023 21:41
|
|
|
It's tricky because Paradox took a shitload of (imo pretty unfair) flack for being the company that piled on stupid amounts of DLC to their games, so clearly they've been trying to go for a quality over quantity thing lately. 3 has a lot less than 2 did, but what it has is mostly considerably deeper. But then I think shallower content that covers a lot of variety is... this is kind of dumb, but psychologically fulfilling? I can buy the Indian DLC and even if 90% of my games are as countess in Hesse, I feel like "wow there's so much more I could be doing in this game" that makes it all feel richer and deeper than it is. Just like how games back in the 1990s are actually often mechanically surprisingly shallow, but guides being so much less thorough made them all feel so much more complex than they were. I think some of the choices for DLC topics (still think Royal Court, while apparently being pretty good, was a huge mistake to start on) definitely don't help, but part of the issue is kind of out of Paradox's hands. I bought the super-edition on launch that came with the first few DLCs bundled but I still haven't gone back (despite liking what I played) because it still feels like they haven't touched half the map.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2023 01:18
|
|
|
ilitarist posted:I think the longevity of EU4 is there because of Mission Trees. On forums I see plenty of people saying stuff like I don't want to play as this country, they have unique MT but it wasn't updated for a long time. I don't know if I agree with this. The timing might be pure coincidence but Mission Trees were pretty controversial when they launched, and while I don't wanna claim they specifically drove away a chunk of the playerbase, it's somewhere around that time that EU4 started to turn into people playing Anbennar or just putting it down, whereas before then it'd been pretty constant buzz. A whole bunch of things were happening at around that time so maybe it's not fair to fault the trees specifically as much as what seemed like kind of a philosophical shift in the game's development in general. I think Mission Trees make each country more unique to play once, but then a lot less interesting every time afterwards. But since for a lot of people the game is about playing the same few countries a bunch of times, I don't know if that's a good tradeoff. I'd already mostly stopped treating EU4 like my day job like a year before they were added but they're part of a bunch of things that generally make the game feel kinda off to me now.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2023 19:38
|
|
|
That looks like, 98% Stellaris but with a nicely done Star Trek skin. Not exactly against it I suppose.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2023 21:51
|
|
|
Yeah didn't they say it actually had the most events of any of their launches? Although I recall a similar statement about Imperator. I dunno what's rose tinted glasses and what's Paradox putting events in the wrong places but something doesn't line up.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2023 18:42
|
|
|
I mean I feel like # of events it the sorta thing that should be easily independently verifiable not that I care to do so. But I sorta doubt they'd outright lie
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2023 18:52
|
|
|
Slightly odd gloat in a game with literal nazis in it but you do you
|
|
#
¿
Nov 13, 2023 10:28
|
|
|
Frionnel posted:You could subscribe for a month or two to get all the DLCs. I'd recommend this, it's what I've been doing the past couple of years when I want to play. No issues at all in unsubscribing. If you're the type that wants to play constantly I guess that's a different matter but EU4 has always been a 'binge for a month then drop for 6' kind of game, I feel.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2024 03:36
|
|
|
A grand strategy game revolving around that kind of obfuscation is probably my dream game, but I don't think that game can be EU. Players rely too much on having total information; I think one that put you in a blinder spot would have to be designed to revolve around that mechanic.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 11, 2024 05:26
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 06:38 |
|
|
I'll agree relatability is a major plus for games, but I think you can get people interested in unknown factions if you do it right. Total War tends to nail it, and Imperator utterly failed.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 21, 2024 19:02
|
|