Randarkman posted:

There's also a lot of people viewing both Victoria 1 and 2 with very rose-tinted glasses, and that's speaking as someone who played and loved both of them. If I were to guess I'd imagine that many of these are people who never actually played them that much (I'm not saying you are one of them, don't really know, but if I were to guess I'd say you'd played them), but know them mostly through discussions, let's plays/AARs and possibly having played some ~20 hours of Victoria 2 when Heart of Darkness came out, in any case they mostly like what they've heard/seen but would much rather play a Victoria 3 than go back to Victoria 2.

sauer kraut posted:

Armies slowly walking around like Total War? Not asking for ambush setups and pixel fine control to determine battle starting positions, but something rather than warping around to and fro into diceroll battles.

Another Person posted:

so here's my big thoughts said aloud to nobody in particular about imperator rome after playing epirus waaaay late into the game; it is too easy to conquer land and too easy to keep it

the game needs more CB types which make it harder to outright conquer land. make direct provincial conquest an expensive endeavour until you are massive, forcing you to take subject conquest until you big enough. that I, as one province Epirus, can conquer 6 province Macedon in two wars is a bit much. AE isn't the solution to this problem imo, much more expensive warscore costs and tiered CBs are.

also, kingdom succession needs to be messier? right now i am basically inheriting perfectly fine every time and even if i wasn't i think i'd be able to avoid a civil war because it is quite easy to keep under control. as such, i suggest adding in a sorta crowns system to the game where you hold crowns of specific territories, which when you die are given to each of your kids. make it a mix between euiv PUs of indirectly held lands, and CK2 gavelkind, where on death your successor sometimes needs to mop some poo poo up. basically each ruler slowly builds up, then is distributed among heirs, so there is a bit of a cycle going on. right now the family politics feels kind of stale and succession is somewhat simple and smooth, i think this would add more dynamics to both of them.

Eimi posted:

Conquest SHOULD be easy. Holding it should be the hard part. Even more so than any other time in history, you should be able to point at land and go, I want that, it's mine, and the trouble is having to hold it. Of course even the game's base UI doesn't make that easy, as there's no easy way to see provincial breakdown of culture. As well to parallel other games, I think culture should be a bigger driver of that rebellious nature than religion, and there should be incentive to spread out conquered pops to other areas of your empire, essentially splitting up the cultural block. The ability for this to be in the game, and even the ability to manage it, are present, albeit very obtuse.


In a way, yeah, I wanted to play CK2 with stuff appropriate to this time period. Our history of this era is very 'character' driven, just by virtue of how it was left to us, we know the names of Phyrrus, Marius, Sulla, Scipio, and so on. The EU nation approach is a rather odd framework to view things from. And in the case of everything but Republics things, sort of function as in CK2. If your ruler loses a civil war, you're out. You're just not out if the dynasty dies out.

As well a feature from CK2 that I like is the ability to play as a proper subject and rule the nation from the inside. Rome's start date has some super powers from the start that playing a minor can be very hard, and having the ability to swear fealty/client status/what have you, to eventually emerge as the ruler is satisfying gameplay. You could even differentiate say clients and vassals, client behaving as marchers from EU, military vassals that you cannot integrate but that add some military power on your border. If you played as one you couldn't interact much with the internal politics of your master, as you're still different states. Meanwhile vassals could be integrated, but would impact internal politics of the kingdom/republic they are subject to.

Playing as a family rather than a nation could also introduce some incentive for you to care about the personal wealth of your character. I saw a holding 0/1 on some provinces, and while I have no idea what role that serves, I think it would be a neat layer of gameplay if each prominent family was aiming to control those holdings, setting up villas, latifundiia, and all the various other things that the mega wealthy did in their spare time. This would incentivize you to give governorship's to family members, and maybe even encourage corruption when you ruled, because no siphoning away the state coffers could confer some benefit to you.

Ultimately, I guess i'm frustrated because it's a time period I massively love, and unlike EU4, there's some effort put into characters, emergent narrative, and the rp aspects, it's so close to being what I want, but what I want is ultimately not what the game is.

Beamed posted:

Bactria is fun until all your armies disintegrate during a thousand mile march. You don't even start with elephants


Yeah and Paradox didn't release tons of DLC afterwards to try to patch them up. I had the list of games here and when their respective patch to make it kinda playable and then respective expansions (for ones not abandoned or which never got expansions, like EU2 (got support at least) or Sengoku (lol)), but I don't think we're necessarily arguing different things, you just made poo poo up to support your claim.

KOGAHAZAN!! posted:

Nah, he's talking about quantity. Expansion or DLC, whatever term you want to use, pre-CK2 a Paradox game would get one, maybe two and about three patches per XP/DLC. EU3's count of four was exceptional (and those DLC were pretty drat slender, truth be told).

Beamed posted:

yeah remember when EU2 was released as broken, then had an expansion come out which fixed it?


In awe at the size of this reading incomprehension. Absolute unit.


More on topic, is there a way to specify in the Trade Overview macro builder to exclude resources you already have the capital surplus for?

Beamed posted:

that wasn't hard i just had to follow the train up. if you're gonna argue years worth of DLC and tons of DLC aren't literally the same words then okay ya got me, but calling me an rear end in a top hat over semantics because of that is, uhhhh

Stop melting down about it, especially after two self-owns in a row, I actually really like Paradox's current business model. It's how much it stands in contrast to their old model I was highlighting.

Chomp8645 posted:

Is this guy trying to make a coherent point or is he just saying "I like EU4" in a really weird way?

Descar posted:

Since you can't have governors local troops in your capital province, Ironic enough it's the capital region that has the most unrest.
Nice one paradox.

steinrokkan posted:

No, there haven't. The idea that CKII was somehow bad at launch is blatant revisionist history fueled by wishful thinking. Games that are bad on launch overwhelmingly remain bad, and Paradox games especially. They never fixed HoI3, or original Rome, or Stellaris, according to the majority of the people who disliked it originally, or EU4 according to people who disliked its framework (like me)... And even if you are right about their mystery powers of fixing bad games, they sure as hell aren't going to be fixing Imperator if it tanks.

steinrokkan posted:

Ah yes, bad games are best distinguished by the fact that people like them and vice versa.

Beamed posted:

NoNotTheMindProbe posted:

While a "boycott" may seem harsh and unproductive, I do believe it is a necessary evil in order to convince paradox to change its corrupt business policy.
I have bought the game five times with different accounts in order to increase the amount of negative reviews per person, and very much convinced my friends to do the same.
Change doesn't come easy, but if we want it to happen, some limbs have to be cut.

PederP posted:

It's difficult to explain without sounding like a bragging buffoon. But for me it's the other way around - years ago I used to play games in the fashion you describe. But these days I simply don't get enjoyment from winning over an AI. There are a few exceptions. But Paradox games are not among them. They have no element of intellectual challenge, so it simply doesn't make sense for me to approach them like you describe. But as you mention they're excellent vehicles for story-telling. Especially when they have arbitrary and unfair elements to them (like CK2).

Stellaris is fun because it has lots of clicking. Actions carry the impetus for future actions. It's certainly not a challenge, but it's cathartic. I:R playing tall is a lot of waiting for points to shuffle around pops until they're optimal and then... nothing. I get annoyed more than anything. Perhaps the difference sounds like naught, but it is a very tangible difference to me. On the other hand playing conquer the world in I:R is decently fun, which I don't think it is in Stellaris.

Descar posted:

This game is so uninformative, it's really damaging it.

So i had a disloyal clan chieftain, that was aiming for civil war.
Everything was fine, until my king died, and 3 other chieftain died in rapid succession, leading this disloyal dude to have 50% of the nation cohorts.
with 0 loyalty, i couldn't just bribe him either.

So i could either prepare for civil war, or give him his own country.
It did say he would form Maran, and take his family with him. but nowhere did it say what he would take.
So i checked if it was a region, no, checked if it was a province, nope.. i search, and i find a single city named maran.
With no other hints or clues, i think maybe he will take one city like the barbarians do, when you create a client state. so why not, better then a civil war right?

So one click, no warning or eye opener to what he will get, this dude just take half my loving country, about 1/3 of the landmass.
But not only that, the civil war countdown didn't stop somehow(maybe he took all the loyal provinces, i dont know), and a month later it breaks out, taking another 1/3 of my country with it.

Not only didn't I prevent the civil war, but I lost twice the amount of land. not to mention the border gore.

Btw, i was playing samartia, about 2500pops from english channel to the black sea, and this disloyal dude had about 150 cohort retinue.
now i'm stuck with 700+, and one hell of a cleanup job to do... it looks like 3 nations fused together randomly.

chaosapiant posted:

I agree with the sentiment that no opinion is invalid or illegitimate. And honestly I wish I was on the end of the spectrum where I knew the game so well that I could find it shallow or boring.

Firebatgyro posted:

I like the game but it seems incredibly lazy to me that they didn't go through all the QoL DLC improvements from EU4, pick out the most well received, and put them in IR.

The lack of the macro builder is pretty inexcusable and I think would fix, or at least alleviate, a lot of the current problems (Diplomacy, Buildings, Converting/Promoting).

Chomp8645 posted:

Siri, set timer for four years.

indigi posted:

does this apply to CK2? I've really enjoyed the last few DLCs

Fuligin posted:

Tbh pompey is pretty fun and solid right now. Makes sense to beta cicero early, given it changes everything and will inevitably require a ton of rebalancing and they only have like two months, one of which is vacation time

Imperator is already better than stellaris as an actual strategy game imo

ilitarist posted:

I don't know, has it ever really worked historically? You hear about kings like that in legends and that is good enough reason to include them. But first you usually hear it about Biblical times or medieval fairy-tales, not about antiquity. And second I wonder if it's a myth created right after the ruler is replaced. In Roman and Greek world you don't have long-lasting reigns of terror, people like Sulla usually murdered all the political opponents and went back to business probably appeasing to remaining politicians in a more traditional way.

appropriatemetaphor posted:

Had a strange bug?

One of my armies suddenly turned into someone else's army? Like they have my general and my army now.

It's the revolt army of some rando in Italy (i'm Syracuse). The army now says it's the "Tarentine Revolt".

What.

RabidWeasel posted:

https://twitter.com/Arheo_/status/1364987442101641221/photo/1

Double posting because this is a pretty nice improvement, I'm not sure why they bothered to make the current trade UI if they were immediately going to iterate on it with a better version but I'm glad that they're not pretending that the UI is perfect now.

hot cocoa on the couch posted:

Yeah, again, I'm not saying sieges were unimportant in this time period. I'm saying that EU4 style mechanics encourages EYW-esque wars where I can win without ever facing the enemy. I just think epic fortifications like at Rhodes, Syracuse, etc. should be rarer and not every drat siege, and that battles should give more warscore