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tl:dr what should I pick to play in this anbennar mod thing? Hello thread, I've recently started playing Anbennar mod. I'll skip the introductions, and only say that I have terminal mapbrain and my steam is showing 2,500 hours for Hearts of Iron IV. What's a good starting kingdom/country/nation? I have no idea how EU4 works, so mainly I was just futzing around with a few different tags before rage quitting. Tried Gawed for a day but the starting economy is so awful and it feels pretty impossible to deal with Lorent at the start, as someone who has 0 idea about what they're doing. For the past three days/weekend i've been messing around with the sun elves in Bulwar. Mainly Sareyand, and Birsartanses yesterday. Those mission trees were also super annoying because they require you to blob up specific territories but they all have alliances with like 50k armies and 150k manpower or something any time I look at the war declaration screen. Like Sareyand is a pain in the rear end to expand west because the Jadd is always coming for your rear end from the east and draining your manpower. Birsartanses sucks because the one obvious ally has rivalry by default at the start of the game, and you have no choice but to try and for gimmick alliances with everyone that you will be stabbing in the back in like 5 or 10 years. So this mod, like pretty much every other Paradox game mod has a problem of telling someone new what the gently caress to play. Because the "Hey this is a fun country to play" paradox approach doesn't work, when the mod developers made the list like 5 years ago and never updated it again since then or something. P.S., Also yes, EU4 user interface looks incredibly ugly and dated. When I saw the red text on screen for the first time I thought there was something wrong with my monitor. Until I was looking up screenshots somewhere else and it looked equally hosed up there. P.P.S., Whoever said anbennar is good, lied. I don't know if it's EU, or if it's the mod, but it's very annoying and frustrating in a lot of stupid ways. I obviously have some kind of brain damage because I'm still trying to play it.
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Apr 25, 2023 21:17
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:*If you're coming from HOI- and to a lesser extent, any other Paradox series- you may underestimate how central diplomacy is to EU. Oh no, playing around with sun elves in Bulwar I've got some idea about diplo since it's pretty much a clusterfuck of three way alliances stabbing each other in the back followed by battle royale blob'em upathon. And yeah I've got the part where you're supposed to mainly go north with Gawed, and I wasn't maintaining a large enough army or had enough allies to deter the Lorent AI from attacking me. Anyway, seems like a few votes for Jadd, they were pretty popular on reddit too. Most of the threads were about how drat popular they were, when I just wanted to figure out what they were so god drat overpowered and slaughtering my armies even with a 2:1 advantage. Edit: also I would say it's not that HoI diplomacy doesn't exist, it just works based on WWII/Cold War logic. Where alliances and relationships between states are based on ideology. So you don't improve relations or send diplomants, but send volunteer armies into civil wars and do coups or something, well ok I don't think anyone does coups seriously. But the point is that you don't agree to an alliance, so much as you lock in a mission/focus tree path for a country, that sets their political ideology and makes them your ally by default. The world war is guaranteed, you're just making everyone pick a side before the slaughter fest starts. Lostconfused fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Apr 26, 2023 |
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Apr 26, 2023 03:30
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I'm not going to play vanilla, I tried colonizing the caribean as spain two years ago and the mission tree broke and that was that. Not to mention the whole RNG of the personal union of Aragon and Castille and forming spain in the first place. I just want to paint the map, I don't really care enough about history to do a replay of it. That's why the holy roman empire does nothing for me, especially in all of its video game incarnations like warhammer total war. I barely know anything about it, and care for it about as much. And even if I play vanilla I'd pick something stupid like trying to form the russian empire and blob up everything. And that's why I'm probably going to drop the Birsartanses run in 1518 or something. I've blobbed up too much and too fast, while their mission tree is mostly sitting back and teching up I guess, since you need to have some innovation going for the early missions. It also got kind of boring because only Sareyand was left and they were allied whoever it was that blobbed up Elizna. And there was nobody for me to ally with. The manpower and armies were pretty even though, but I didn't feel like dealing with the hassle of fighting it out, and just got kind of bored. Wafflecopper posted:Elven military. Elven militaries get large movement speed and discipline (strong combat stat) buffs in exchange for large penalties to manpower. Yes you were playing an elven-led nation too but many (maybe all?) of the "elven" nations in the main part of Bulwar, including Sareyand, have elven administrations with human militaries. Jadd have elven military. Depending how quickly they beat Zokka they might be low on manpower and if you can survive long enough you might be able to win a war of attrition. This would be a lot easier with a solid grasp of the combat mechanics. Edit: I guess I could have tried to form more vassals instead of blobbing. But that makes for less pretty borders, and honestly a pain in the rear end sometimes dealing with the stupid AI. Edit2: THE BAR posted:If you've been eating nations left and right, you've probably garnered a ton of aggressive expansion. There's a little icon next to the DECLARE WAR button, that tells you if people have had enough with your shenanigans and start forming a coalition against you. Lostconfused fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Apr 26, 2023 |
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Apr 26, 2023 15:42
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Well, I wouldn't be surprised if Paradox managed to break something hard enough in any of their games that the sun doesn't rise.
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Apr 27, 2023 01:46
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Is there a music mod for Anbennar that works with the bitbucket version? Quick google search doesn't seem to find anything, so I assume not. The main menu theme is great and fits the fantasy adventure mood, and while the vanilla Europa Universalis music is good but it's not quiet the same.
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Apr 28, 2023 15:44
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I see the computer controlled armies are about as smart as they are in hearts of iron Edit: Don't ask me why I'm involved in this mess at all though. Edit2: Anyway, since I've taken a sidetour before trying the Jadd, someone on reddit recommended people to try a a bunch of fundamentalists human supremacists that want to do to elves what the elves did to them. Reddit seems obsessed with elven genocide, but then again, try to name a more common pair than paradox gamers and genocide. There's probably no way I can win this holly waroff but I'll still see what happens. 
Lostconfused fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Apr 29, 2023 |
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Apr 29, 2023 15:19
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It went better than expected. Their ally was some random nobody that was 2 tech levels behind in military, and had three or four armies wiped out to a tune of about 100k from a one or two battles. It was, uh, a bit unfair. Edit: Also, I'm not genociding the elves anymore. Upgrading the country rank freed up all the culture slots, so I might as well let them in there I guess. Lostconfused fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Apr 29, 2023 |
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Apr 29, 2023 20:19
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Yeah, subject loyalty is very weird because it's hard to tell how to change it. Just going up in military tech level by one also looks like a huge swing because of whatever it's doing to calculate relative military strength. Also improving relations helps a tiny bit. Lostconfused fucked around with this message at 13:42 on Apr 30, 2023 |
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Apr 30, 2023 13:38
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Man trade is loving weird, merchantalism is the only valid economic model. gently caress you, I'll just collect 100% of the trade power from every single one of my nodes, which nets me more money and less for you. Free trade is for losers.
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Apr 30, 2023 21:19
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Terrible Opinions posted:Each merchant collecting decreases profits. The best plan is to form a line of above 50% trade power nodes, collect only from the last one and have everything else transfer.    Collecting it a trade node where I have like 90 something percent trade power is more profitable than passing it along to be collected at an end node where I have like 60 to 70 something percent trade power. Edit: One thing I didn't realize until now is that I should send a merchant and a bunch of gunboats to THE end node.  Edit2: Treaty ports in EU4 when? Lostconfused fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Apr 30, 2023 |
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Apr 30, 2023 21:32
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It's because you can't pull trade back, but you can pull it forward. If you start collecting all the trade in your node, other tags will be forced to send merchants there to pull some of it forward to their nodes, and ultimately some trade is passed forward anyway. So you're losing out on maximum profits at the end node, but you're still earning more profits overall because you're collecting more of the trade along your trade routes. So the more economically dominant countries ahead naturally want to send traders to your nodes to pull that trade value to theirs. There's also no penalty to moving that trade value forward. So the only way to counter them is to suck up as much trade as possible in your node. Transferring trade forward is still important though, but only in the "steering" part. It's worth it to make sure that all the value is flowing to your nodes, but you don't always need traders for it. Some nodes depending on trade power will just naturally send all the trade your way. Lostconfused fucked around with this message at 03:39 on May 1, 2023 |
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May 1, 2023 03:30
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Can always roll back to the previous update, unless there's some huge important change in the new expansion.
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May 1, 2023 14:20
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I dunno, I've gone back to trying to play Gawed for the past week, and it's still an incredibly frustrating experience. You have to constantly keep your boot on Lorent's neck to survive. Their economy is so much better at the start that any time you wipe out their army, they just buy themselves a whole new one out of mercenaries.
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May 5, 2023 16:40
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Ok, this is about as far as I got before getting bored again. Cannor doesn't seem fun at all. The wars are tedious, the colonies rum themselves, and it's all just holy war after holy water. Where are the fun bits?
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May 7, 2023 21:59
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Yeah, I'm not brave enough to fight a coalition. It's just too much work to fight an equal force. It's fine in hearts of iron because that's the majority of the game, but here I would prefer not to get dragged into decades long wars.
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May 7, 2023 22:57
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I mean the Gawed tree is pretty straight forward. It tells you to go conquer the north trade node, colonize the western trade node, and also probably go take the trade node in Lorent and maybe Dameshead. You end up becoming the dominant economic and military power when you're half way through that list. I just thought there would be more interesting things happening along the way as you do that, but no, not really, that's all there is. Edit: I only got as far as the northern trade node and the colonies. It was just too much work to fight Lorent and the Empire. Those are the only two you really need, it's impossible to turn a profit on the rest without actually killing half of cannor to thin out the trade market competitors. Lostconfused fucked around with this message at 00:34 on May 8, 2023 |
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May 8, 2023 00:31
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BBJoey posted:By rights gawed and lorent should each have a disaster if not two. Theoretically the halfling revolt acts as one but in practice I’ve never seen it fire because the ai will always accept a halfling culture Halffling revolt does fire, it's super easy for it to happen since all it takes is one conquered province. I had it happen during my run. It still happens even if you acceptthe halffling culture because the separatism debuff can still be high enough to trigger it. My real disaster was Lorent intervening in one of my wars, it went so badly that I gave an unconditional surrender. Of course I turned around and smacked them 15 years later hard enough that they didn't look my way again for a hundred years. That part, wasn't very fun. An emotional rollercoaster, but mostly it just made me mad. Yuiiut posted:Yeah, you see this a lot in the big overhauld mods - centerpiece countries tend to have a lot of minors which have their gameplay revolve around you, so after years of development the notion of reworking a major is a truly immense undertaking - the endless German rework in kaiserreich being another example of this in paradox modding. Lostconfused fucked around with this message at 16:02 on May 8, 2023 |
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May 8, 2023 11:48
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cock hero flux posted:meanwhile Varaine, a one province minor that usually gets owned within the first decade, has a mission tree that is more than twice as big, comes with a unique estate and mechanics, and has content that stretches across the entire game timeline
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May 8, 2023 22:03
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skasion posted:All the sun elf nations are completely nuts with the nuttiest being the Jadd Sybot posted:(i.e. more evil than the usual imperialistic EU4 country) The elves aren't nearly as nuts as the humans that want to do 400 years of reverse genocide as payback.
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May 14, 2023 19:38
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I managed to muddle through without development most of the time, so it's not a must thing you need to do. But yeah everyone already gave a decent explanation for it. For dwarves you want to develop until you unlock the next level of hold upgrade. Remember that you can only manually upgrade your capital hold. Also remember that it takes for loving ever to upgrade it, so make sure you do whatever you need to do with it first. Like building a fort and ramparts. There's also some missions that expect you to do development to get an institution. Like for example one of the first Sareyand missions in Bulwar want you to get 30 development and get Renaissance institution in your capital. Which is close to what you need more or less to force it to show up there. As for economy, I would say it depends on what your primary source of income is. If it's trade, then you'll only really start to get a lot of money when you dominate the local trade node and can suck up most of the wealth in it. One thing to remember for trade is that you can upgrade your trade nodes to at least level 2 all of the time, you can also upgrade infrastructure, and increase development. Personally I would also recommend save scumming in Anbennar. Too much of that poo poo is RNG dependent. Like if you're not a well established major player that can brute force through bad RNG, it can really sink you a lot of the time.
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May 22, 2023 20:05
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The only thing I don't get right now about serpentspine is the Marrhold. It's actually good that it's cutoff from serpentspine trade routes, otherwise you'd just be leaking more trade into Escann. I have no idea why any of the dwarves would want to restore it outside of some stupid self destructive obsession with the past.
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May 22, 2023 23:08
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That sounds cool. But I think just splitting the trade flows like this might also work well. It would certainly give everyone an incentive to fight over control of trade nodes in the area  Really though Serpentspine is probably one of the coolest parts of the mod I've seen so far. It starts out really fun. But I would love it if it got a fleshed out end game. Where you form some kind of federation or empire of holds spanning the entire mountain range.
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May 23, 2023 01:09
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They could probably use some tweaks yeah. It seems like it would be easy to trigger the Hoard Curse if you just hoard gold from expeditions. I got up to 8K while still with less than 70 monthly income. And if all the other values are scaled to monthly/annual income, it seems like a pretty easy thing to deal with. You can also probably gimmick it even more if you hand out monopolies to your estates, giving you large lump sums of gold instead of a ticking income. Not sure if the event values account for that or not. On the other hand it also completely hosed my drunk dwarf attempt. Being forced to go into bankruptcy right next to The Command is not a fun time.
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May 23, 2023 02:41
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Seriously though I would ask for some fun tag recommendations again. Because I've tried a bunch of them, and honestly, a lot of the stuff is not that great in my opinion. Yeah I hosed up my first time as Gawed, but in general it's kind of simple, but also not very interesting or exciting, and gets pretty boring before 1700. Corintar, adventurer countries are fun at the start, but if you don't speed run majority of your mission tree for the deluge and league war then it becomes totally meaningless. Like there's just nothing going on after that, consolidating Escann is kind of a big nothing tbh. Same goes for Sons of Dameria tbh. Lots of narrative in their mission tree, but they have a lovely start compared to say Corintar, and the early missions are very frustrating and annoying. I honestly didn't get very far with them. Varaine is surprisingly good yeah. But also incredibly dull and slow for huge chunks at a time as you wait for bad boy points to go down. Also the last third of the mission tree is designed entirely around having a bunch of vassals or colonies, and you should have been working towards that the entire time, and oh whoops if you didn't read ahead. Humans in Bulwar are good fun, better than elves imo. Elves having to deal with vassal mechanics is annoying as poo poo. But unifying Bulwar is fairly simple and rewarding since you dominate a long trade route, a good time in general imo. But leaves large chunks of the game out since you're likely never fighting other major powers or colonizing. Jaddari, I don't know. Everyone says they're good. But I think their mission tree is convoluted, and has a bunch of pitfalls. You need to read and plan ahead, honestly not a fan of having to go through something two or three times before you figure out what to do. Dwarves are fun though. You really get some kind of sense of progression at the start. Although it's really impossible to tell which ones are the fun ones just by looking at them, especially since you don't even see the mission tree until you restore the hold. Although the Diamond Dwarfs up north, definitely seemed cool for the first 50 years or so that I've tried them. Also yeah, someone mentioned that Anbennar starts out with even/fair balance for tags. And ooooh boy, I really have to disagree there. At least with stuff like Corintar starting out far far ahead compared to like Sons of Dameria, and I assume every other Escann tag. Or dwarven expeditions being entirely dependent on the RNG placement of expeditions at game start.
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May 23, 2023 03:09
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I thought I was using simple enough words, but if that's too difficult then I'll include some pictures too. Here's the starting position of Corintar:  Now I can't imagine the AI is scripted to take advantage of it, but it has a ton of advantages there. The most obvious one is that it already starts with Tier 4 government reform. It even has the reform you need, end the green tide. Now the setup here is pretty clear, once you have some understanding of how these mechanics play out. Settling forces you to claim all the tribal land around you at a huge gold and administrative power cost  If you were to settle right now, it would cost 500 gold and 250 administrative power because the starting area is surrounded by 5 greentide provinces. But luckily you start with "end the greentide" reform. This lets you fight two or three quick wars and claim all the territory around you. After which you're free to settle without any penalties for 50 government reform. You also start with a free tier 2 trade node, so you don't want to migrate because you'll lose that if you do. It's a pretty nice start. Where's other adventurers start like 20 years behind or something  Whether this matters or not is obviously subjective. But honestly, I'm not sure why you even wanted to argue this point but I hope it's clear now.
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May 23, 2023 05:22
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AnoHito posted:Did you...finish consolidating Escann? because there's a whole lot of stuff you can do when you win the wars of consolidation. Yeah, that was one of the screenshots above.  Finished the tree and got the little bit extra at the end there to the south west. I stopped because there wasn't anything left to do besides wage holy wars against the court or ravelians, or maybe just absorb Grombar. Although I'm not sure why I would really want to do the latter unless I also wanted to fight Gawed over the Bay of Chills trade node right after, and maybe forcefully convert them.
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May 23, 2023 05:28
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Yeah, I kind of ended that game on saturday I think, and started messing around with the dwarves some more.
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May 23, 2023 05:49
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MonsieurChoc posted:Nuugdan Tsarai is great if you don’t make the classic mistake of forming Guuwamud before owning all of Yanshen.
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May 24, 2023 15:35
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They're not bird lords until someone imports a chocobo model to replace the cavalry.
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May 24, 2023 16:43
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The orcs were already pretty strong in the previous updates because of uh whatever combat mechanics were for tribal nations. Adventurers would take way more manpower casualties than the orcs, so there was a good chance to lose against them through attrition. Maybe something in the update made it even worse.
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Jun 8, 2023 02:37
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If you're not save scumming then you're playing Anbennar wrong.
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Jun 19, 2023 20:50
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Save scumming a year isn't a big deal when it's the really huge stuff like that or the magic pregnancy thing.
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Jun 19, 2023 21:28
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Wafflecopper posted:So winning and not needing to save scum is playing wrong? You don't need to do anything at all to win, that's not hard or anything.
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Jun 19, 2023 22:55
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Tree of stone is the region of Serpentspine. So you need to have an army of that size in a province that exits out of the mountain into the Rahen region. For chain grasper Rahen would be the part of the map south of it.
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Jun 19, 2023 23:26
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Wafflecopper posted:Didn’t you kool aid man into the thread saying an anbennar was bullshit because you got rolled as gawed? Yeah, I made some mistakes that first time because I wasn't familiar with some of the basic gameplay stuff. There's a lot less to micro manage and exploit the computer stupidity than Hearts of Iron. But that doesn't mean that this isn't just another paradox game. Edit: I'd say HoI4 is a lot easier because the computer is still playing EU4 in that game instead of HoI4. Lostconfused fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Jun 20, 2023 |
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Jun 20, 2023 01:13
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Is it a good podcast?
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Jun 21, 2023 17:22
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MonsieurChoc posted:Make the ne t dlc disaster focused. Brand new disasters, Anbennar levels of hosed. But it already sounds like the halfling revolt???
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Jun 24, 2023 14:05
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I feel like the new Muscovy tree/update makes use of all of that. Your entire army can be made up of special units between streltsy and cossack regiments. You're also kind of forced to work with the boyar estate, and are expected to use several of the cossack privileges but are not forced to. But like as far as the game goes the spaghetti design is everywhere. The entire UI is a mess crammed with buttons and icons that do or not do stuff depending on a bunch of different things, and if you don't already know about them there's nothing in the game that tells you they exist or what you should be doing with them. Lostconfused fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Jul 3, 2023 |
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Jul 3, 2023 20:30
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I never mentioned how my not mongol/chinese empire game ended, because I dropped weeks ago out of boredom in like 1650. I tried to game it out on saturday, but I just sat around and did nothing for 100 years besides taking more bites out of whatever was left of the command. The big disaster is also incredibly trivial if you just read the one government reform you have. Overall fun if you want to paint the map, but bad pacing, and uneven since a lot of it depends on when your ruler dies. Anyway, dominating the region gives me a bigger trade note than anything in Cannor. Military hegemon seems nearly impossible or really stupid though, like amassing a million sized army is a gigantic pain in the rear end. Also I guess you can have a lot of artificer capacity if you play long enough, but I never do. 
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Jul 3, 2023 21:08
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You either know about it already or need to scour through every part of the menu and tab to see if there's something you can interact with.
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Jul 4, 2023 00:01
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