|
there's no way in hell they'll be able to pull this off, but if they manage even half of it, it'll be amazing
|
#
¿
May 21, 2021 20:50
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 16:45 |
|
|
A Buttery Pastry posted:Yeah, it is actually quite a strange decision to make a game where you can play as any country in the world, so centered around just one country. Sure, it was core driver of the war (in Europe), but in terms of designing gameplay it seems very strange. Like, they've built an entire gameplay system that seems designed specifically to make the player think "Well, this sucks", then let a couple of countries get around it, when it'd make far more sense to design the game to be fun for the vast majority of countries. It's hard to escape when the start date is 1936 and the player gets control over industrial development. The player knows WWII is coming, and so no matter what country they play, they'll pursue expanding their industry and building up their military way harder than most countries actually did historically in that period. Especially since HoI4 is a pure wargame where that's all you can really do in peacetime anyway aside from waiting for focuses to run. It's a design problem any WWII game has to deal with, and the more power and freedom is given to the player, the more things have to be railroaded or restricted to keep a historical-ish WWII possible.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2021 07:15
|
|
|
We don't have to hold off on discussing the allegations because of the devs, no one's saying that. But we shouldn't bother asking the devs for more details, nor should we expect them to tell detailed stories about it. People whose real identities are linked to their forum accounts are not going to tell us non-public information about poo poo that is currently getting their employer lots of negative press. I don't think anyone's saying we can't be mean to the Paradox employees who post here, they're just saying that we shouldn't be surprised if the Paradox devs stop posting here because they decide they have better things to do than get yelled at on an internet forum.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2021 16:36
|
|
|
Knightsoul posted:Gentlemen, let's been honest and put aside nationalistic egos: the main (not only) reason Germany lost the 2 world wars (especially WW2) was decided when the U.S.A. entered the wars with its immense industrial/military/call-it-what-you-want capability. I would love to hear what Germany would have been able to accomplish with more battleships in WWII. I can't even imagine it.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 21, 2021 21:48
|
|
|
Jabor posted:This is why I say you're missing the point, because it's not "all of those things" and never has been. The Zimmerman telegram was intercepted by the British, who had gone out of their way to ensure that any telegram traffic would pass through lines they controlled and could eavesdrop on. But even if the telegram hadn't been sent, the Germans resumed unrestricted submarine warfare around the same time, which seriously hurt American public opinion of Germany as US merchant ships were torpedoed. That had a pretty good chance of leading to US reentry to the war all on its own, as every sunken merchant ship recalled memories of the Lusitania. And the reason for both the Zimmerman telegram and the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare was the same: the "neutral" Americans were already so crucial to the Allied war effort that the Germans thought disrupting it was worthwhile, even if it led to open war with the US.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 23, 2021 07:25
|
|
|
looks like Groogy, having helped bring Vicky 3 into existence, is moving on to a new garrison https://twitter.com/SirVogelius/status/1465304544817164290 o7
|
|
#
¿
Nov 29, 2021 17:13
|
|
|
Communist Zombie posted:Is there a thread for Grey Eminence? People from MEIOU and Taxes are apparently making a grand strategy game, the globe from 1356 to 1956 with OVER A MILLION HEX TILES. And of course it has full pop system, religion framework , and weather system. I don't have high hopes. Those sound like extremely ambitious promises, and no matter how extensive their EU4 mod is, it's a far cry from making a game from scratch..
|
|
#
¿
Apr 3, 2022 03:14
|
|
|
Guildencrantz posted:Man, that project is not going to end well. Just by common sense, if you're a team of successful modders branching out into standalone games, your first project should be something smallish and tightly designed. Not "like those games we like but an order of magnitude bigger". Are you saying it's not tightly designed to take EU4, increase the number of provinces by two orders of magnitude, and then slap Vicky's POP system on???
|
|
#
¿
Apr 3, 2022 22:14
|
|
|
Phlegmish posted:I'm still struggling a bit with industrialization. Not only are at least half of my factories unprofitable, they also seem to oscillate between profitability and insolvency without rhyme or reason, so I'm constantly opening and closing (occasionally deleting) them. It's actually rather tiring to keep track of them that way, but if I didn't I'd end up hemorrhaging money from giving massive industrial subsidies. When I first industrialized I hadn't figured this out yet, and I almost went bankrupt. Is it supposed to be this way, or am I doing something wrong? This is with nearly all of the industry-influencing techs researched, too. Don't worry too about profitability, especially early on - early factories aren't very productive or efficient, and the global markets won't be that demanding for stuff. Rather than that, focus on: a) factories that operate using the resources you already produce in your nation, so you don't have to buy stuff from overseas just to run your own factories. if you have to buy stuff from overseas to run your factories, that cuts deep into your profits b) essential goods for building stuff you're going to need a lot of, like cement for factories or canned food for soldiers. because one of the great powers can randomly decide to buy up the entire world supply of something important, leaving you completely unable to obtain enough for your own needs As your country and the world at large industrialize, your factories will improve enormously and the world market will get hungrier for goods, allowing factories to become a real moneymaker.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 2, 2022 03:23
|
|
|
Factories in Vicky are not the typical "build things as much as possible for more profits" building you usually see in strategy games. They take specific inputs (goods, pops) and generate outputs. Depending on your trade settings, some of those outputs go into your stockpile (where they can be used for various production) and the rest get sold on the markets at a price that depends on global economic conditions. Because of that, it's important to take your available resources and economic conditions into account when deciding how to do factories. It's not like the typical mapgame system where you can just slap down a building and assume it'll automatically provide a benefit over the long-term, nor is it something where you have full control over the inputs and it's just a matter of tweaking things and optimizing. If you mouse over the various elements in the factory interface, you can see info about why the factory is unprofitable. How much it's paying for the input goods, how much it's selling the output goods for, how many employees the factory has, and so on. I popped open your save, ran the factories for a bit, and picked one off as an example.  Why is this factory unprofitable? In this case, it's simple - it's unable to obtain any Coal. You have a bunch of factories that use coal as an input good, and even after buying up all the Coal available to you on the global market, you still don't have nearly enough Coal to supply all your factories. As a result, this factory isn't able to produce anything, and you don't make any money at all. But as long as the factory is still open, you still have to pay upkeep for it in the form of Cement and Machine Parts. And since you don't produce enough Cement and Machine Parts domestically to supply all your factories, you have to spend money to buy those goods off the global market. Now, what's the solution? There isn't one, really. World demand for coal exceeds world supply for coal right now in your save, you can't really do anything about that. You pretty much just have to leave the unprofitable coal-using factories closed. If global coal supplies catch up with demand, they might reopen and maybe even start making a profit (though that also depends on Oil demand). The same goes for a lot of your other factories, too. Just focus on upgrading and improving the factories that are consistently profitable, rather than trying to get all your factories profitable. Use the profit numbers as a guide to which factories are worth investing more into. You can't control supply and demand, but you can let it guide you.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 2, 2022 18:50
|
|
|
Phlegmish posted:Thank you for this explanation, that makes things significantly clearer. I guess it's generally good advice to close factories that have trouble getting at least one of their inputs? For the most part, yeah. Watch it for a little while to see if it's an intermittent supply issue (in which case subsidizing through the bad times might be appropriate), but a factory that consistently can't get enough raw materials to make anything is useless. The market simulation in Vicky 2 means that sometimes you'll just get screwed out of a good for a while and have to deal with it. Sometimes countries just aren't producing enough excess material to meet demand. And higher-ranking countries get first dibs on the global market, so a mere secondary power might be left with nothing because the Great Powers bought up the whole supply of whatever wasn't enough to go around. And supply and demand works on prices, too, so even if you manage to get some it'll be more expensive than normal.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 2, 2022 21:42
|
|
|
retpocileh posted:I'm looking to get into one of these games. I see that the OP says CK3 would be the easiest to start with. Would y'all definitely recommend that over EU4 and Vic3? Do you like character-focused emergent storytelling and the Middle Ages? Go with CK3. Do you love in-depth economic simulations and the Industrial Revolution? Go with Vicky 3. Do you love wargaming and moving piles of NATO counters around while managing their supplies and making an alt-history WWII? Go with Hearts of Iron 4. If you're really not sure, Crusader Kings 2 is free-to-play and Victoria 2 is twenty bucks. They're old and janky (especially in the case of Vicky 2, which is over a decade old) but the core gameplay is fairly similar to their successors.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 4, 2022 07:40
|
|
|
Honestly, I wouldn't say that having player input into army composition in CK2/CK3 ever worked particularly well. There was never really any interesting decision-making involved, the effects were obscure unless you read the wiki, and it mostly just served to let the player punch way above their weight against AIs.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2022 05:45
|
|
|
Koramei posted: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. The problem is that if you hide information from the player, and the player doesn't have some way of figuring that information out through clues, then they don't really have control over the results of their actions. They're just at the mercy of random factors, and that's generally unfun. But if you do give them clues, then either they'll memorize all the best and worst outcomes over time or they'll open up the game's wiki and check a list of which clues mean what. That's not unsolvable, but it does mean that this information asymmetry has to be incorporated pretty heavily into the gameplay in some way.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2023 04:37
|
|
|
Koramei posted: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. Being at the mercy of opaque randomness can make the game's systems feel richer and deeper if the game has been specifically designed around having the player manage and hedge against the RNG's whims. Otherwise, it just feels like you lack control. And Paradox stuff is very much not designed for that. There's way too much Stuff in each game to pay close and consistent attention to everything you need to know, you don't actually interact with any individual entity all that often, and the consequences for making a really bad pick can be fairly disastrous. That doesn't mean Paradox hasn't tried to take a crack at replicating the "sometimes a ruler appoints a huge dumbass to an important position and has just has to deal with their terrible skills" dynamic that happens in history, though. Things like the CK council system and Vicky 3's generals system both try to pit political considerations against stats considerations, pressuring the player to consider factors besides statistics when appointing these important positions. Even though the player has perfect information, the mechanics are designed to try to exert pressure from different directions so that there isn't always one clear optimal choice. It's not always successful, but they're trying.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2023 16:45
|
|
|
Reveilled posted:The fact that Anbennar has practically taken over the EU4 thread is I think testament to the idea that maybe we’re getting a little bored of always knowing what’s coming up. Your second time through the Rianvisa or the Hoardcurse will be nowhere near as hard as the first, but so what? EU4 is approaching its tenth anniversary, so the fact that the thread's still active at all suggests Paradox did a decent job with replayability.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2023 18:35
|
|
|
Edgar Allen Ho posted:But wouldn't most people say that Stellaris is a 4x, not a "grand strategy"? What's the difference between 4X and grand strategy? Other than the traditional genre conventions (one tends to be space focused, the other tends to be real-world focused), there isn't really a clear distinction between them. The four Xs that make up a 4X are "explore", "expand", "exploit", and "exterminate". Going by that, I'd say the EU games arguably qualify as 4Xs - you explore the map and reveal new lands, you expand into both unclaimed lands and into your neighbors, you exploit resources in areas you control to build up your empire, and you crush your neighbors and destroy your rivals. That's all four Xs right there.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2023 18:13
|
|
|
Party In My Diapee posted:Victoria 2 (modded, but that is what you have to compare with) has some major issues, but the important thing is that it attempts to place you in the period, has lots of flavour depending on which country you are, plausible outcomes, and you can have a major impact on the political side of things which is pretty major in a paradox game. Victoria 3 might as well be set in a generic fantasy world where anything can happen, and is primarily about the economy to the exclusion of everything else. Purely as a game Victoria 3 it might be objectively better, but i am too limited and everything is generic. A big part of paradox for me isn't the gameplay systems, but the historical atmosphere. New Paradox games feel "generic" because they generally focus on getting the basic systems right first, and then start adding flavor and country/culture-specific stuff in later updates. That goes back at least to CKII, where at launch all you could play was feudal Christians. It's not like EU4 launched with mission trees for basically every single country on the planet either, that was stuff that was added in bit by bit over a decade of updates and DLCs. That said, Vicky 3 already has plenty of country-by-country flavor in its politics.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 8, 2023 00:06
|
|
|
Elias_Maluco posted:They are taking too much time to do that, imo Oh yeah, definitely It's forgivable for Vicky 3 because hey, it's a new Vicky game But we're now three years into CK3's life. Three years into CK2's life, the following DLCs had already been released:
Compared to that, CK3's DLC list is pretty sparse.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2023 00:44
|
|
|
there's definitely some a decent number of country-specific events in Vicky 3, but you don't know about them unless you play that specific country, and most of them are just penalty events for example, China gets negative events reflecting opium addictions and stopping it will likely trigger the Opium Wars. and it also has at least one scripted rebellion that triggers if certain conditions are met. which means that while Chinese decline isn't guaranteed, it's certainly likely personally i prefer the less-railroaded differences, like the significant differences in countries' starting economic and political situations, which matter far more than the start differences in CK and EU tend to. or how interest groups' preferences will vary from country to country, though there's not really enough of that yet i'm a bit sour right now, though, because I started an Egypt game yesterday without realizing that it springs a rather nasty scripted war on you a few years in, and takes away most of your good provinces if you lose. that's not really the kind of railroads I'm playing Vicky for
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2023 22:45
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:Victoria 3 beginner's question: The Market screen will show the total production and consumption of a good within your market if you hover your mouse a good. The number of Sell Orders is how much production there is, and the number of Buy Orders is how much consumption there is. The Balance column is just buy orders minus sell orders, so if it's negative for a good then that means you're consuming more than you're producing. It's worth noting that you don't actually need enough production to match your consumption. If your industry consumes more than you're producing, the only immediate consequence is that the market price for that good will increase beyond the base price. You don't actually run into shortages and factory slowdowns until your demand is more than double your supply; until then, your economy will magically conjure the missing goods out of nowhere in exchange for higher prices. On the other hand, if your produce more than you consume, the market price for that good will be lower than the base price, so it can be good to overproduce to a certain extent, especially for fundamental base materials like wood and iron that you're never going to have trouble using up. In general, I just use the market price as a guide for what I need to produce more of. If the price of something is higher than base, then I'm not producing enough of it, so I increase production. If I want the price lower than base, then I produce even more. If I'm trying to plan out production more precisely, I look at the Balance value to determine my current actual surplus/deficit of the good. The basic national economic model is actually quite simple that way, though the market access price modifiers tend to complicate things in the early-game. gradenko_2000 posted:Do you mean this? Not quite, because exporting is going to happen regardless of whether you have a surplus or not, and goods do not prioritize your local production over exporting. Your trade centers have just as much of a claim on those goods as your factories do, the game won't prioritize one over the other. Your sell orders are 328 and your buy orders are 427, so you have a deficit, which is causing Iron to be probably 10-20% more expensive in your market than base price. The fact that your domestic production is only about half of that and that the deficit is caused entirely by exporting doesn't actually matter. You have to start building more iron mines, because your economy can't really afford much more of a deficit. You won't have actual shortages until your buy orders reach 656, so your factories can continue running at full speed despite this deficit, but the elevated iron prices are substantially cutting into your factories' profit margins. It's pretty much impossible to build yourself into actual shortages, because rising prices will drive your factories into bankruptcy and your trade routes to ruin long before your market deficit gets high enough to get slapped with the "shortages" modifier. Your government is making some profit by exporting iron, and that should be a fairly profitable trade route since you're exporting a fair amount of iron at higher than base price. But by exporting that iron, you're driving up the iron prices in your own domestic economy, making it more difficult for your factories to make a profit, which in turn means that your workers and capitalists are making less money, which in turn means that your population isn't as happy and doesn't have as much money for you to tax. It's a common mistake - a lot of stuff that seems to bring in money for your government actually comes at the expense of your population or industry, which slows the growth of your economy, leaving you less able to bring in money through taxation. If you had a massive surplus of iron, then sure, you could export some (you don't want the iron mines to go bankrupt from overly-low prices either), but I'd aim to balance the production and export levels such that the iron price remains lower than its base price even with the exports. Iron's just too important for industrial production. Vizuyos fucked around with this message at 15:02 on Mar 15, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Mar 15, 2024 14:59
|
|
|
the problem with sliders is that they're awkward from a game design perspective if there's only a few spots on the slider that are worth picking, then just give the player those few spots and get rid of the stuff in between if every single spot on the slider could potentially worth picking depending on the exact timing and circumstances, then congrats, you've probably damned the player to a confusing micromanagement hell if they can just leave the slider in the middle and be fine the entire time, then the slider doesn't matter and there was no point in adding it in the first place if you give the player an "auto" setting that takes care of the slider setting for them, then why is the slider even there? it's better to have 5 options and have all of them matter, rather than adding 10 options the player might use and 90 options they won't ever touch
|
|
#
¿
Apr 11, 2024 06:20
|
|
|
Enjoy posted:Taxes should be as high as possible for a given state's ability to enforce its will on its subjects. "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy". so said Charles I of England, who very much wished that he had some tax sliders
|
|
#
¿
Apr 11, 2024 20:10
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 16:45 |
|
|
Gort posted:The main thing with the landowners faction is to reduce their political power however you can, but take things slow so you don't start a revolution over it - revolution should really be seen as a political fail state (except for the more scripted ones like the American Civil War where you can get African American as an accepted culture as a reward). Day one this means firing any generals or admirals they have, and looking for any laws that you can change to lower their power that they don't hate. After that it's generally just a case of letting their hatred of your last change dissipate a bit before you impose another one - I know it's annoying to research a much better set of laws and be unable to implement them. Revolution isn't necessarily a fail-state. Once you've reduced their influence enough that the whole nation doesn't side with them, letting them rebel can be a decent way of finishing them off. The factions involved in a failed revolution get an enormous penalty to clout which slowly diminishes to zero over a few years, giving you an opportunity to pass a couple of laws without any interference at all from them. So once you've weakened them a fair bit already, letting them kick off a revolution you know you can win can be a quicker way of getting rid of the remaining laws propping up their political power.
|
|
#
¿
May 13, 2024 15:05
|
|