Gormongous

The Other Paradox Games (Europa Universalis, Victoria, Hearts of Iron)

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If there's a vassal you can release in the HRE, then sell it more HRE provinces, that might work.

 

If you move your capital to Paris or something, you can get a four-node trade chain going on, which would be good.

 

I don't have any other ideas. I never push my overextension that high, but it seems to be working for you.

 

My HRE vassal refused to be fed HRE provinces just like my non-HRE vassal refused to be fed HRE provinces. They both had -1000 maluses about Austria being the emperor, which is no fun.

 

How would you structure your trade if Paris was the capital? All of my good trade buildings are around Andalucia so this would be suboptimal but possible. I guess I should be focusing on creating a linear chain for the forwarding % bonuses?

 

Chesapeake -> Carib -> Sevilla -> Bordeaux?

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My HRE vassal refused to be fed HRE provinces just like my non-HRE vassal refused to be fed HRE provinces. They both had -1000 maluses about Austria being the emperor, which is no fun.

 

How would you structure your trade if Paris was the capital? All of my good trade buildings are around Andalucia so this would be suboptimal but possible. I guess I should be focusing on creating a linear chain for the forwarding % bonuses?

 

Chesapeake -> Carib -> Sevilla -> Bordeaux?

 

That sucks about the HRE provinces thing. Is it too difficult to just remove them from the empire?

 

Trade power is increased by 20% each time it's forwarded, I think, which rewards long chains of trade nodes. You're only increasing your trade power in the end node by having a lot of trade buildings in the Seville node. Trade value increases the same way, so building a lot of manufactories in the Chesapeake Bay node would pay off a lot too. What you suggested looks peachy.

 

 

 

EDIT: Aaaand just about five minutes after all this smug-seeming advice to give, I have a humiliating blowout in my Tuscany-to-Italy game. Mega-France had boxed me out of the cardinal game, so once I united the peninsula, I tried switching to Protestantism, in order to push ahead with ideas and tech. Bad idea. Kids, unless more than fifty percent of your provinces are Protestant, you'll just lose yourself three hundred admin points and fifty prestige banging your head up against that fact. Thankfully, I accepted the rebels' demands in time so that I only lost the island of Sicily and a couple Alpine provinces, all of which I was able to recoup by the stroke of 1600. I think I'm pulling out of the HRE in the next decade, since breaking Styria and the Netherlands off of Austria failed to lose it the imperial crown. I need to get at least some of these maluses off me.

 

In a way, it sucks that the further you are from the HRE, the less chance you have of participating in the Reformation. But that's history. Luther's words ain't ever going to touch Italy, let alone Spain.

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Can't remove from Empire if it is not a cored province, unfortunately. HRE is kind of a pain in the ass if you are a spectator.

 

Did you take religious ideas? Clearly you needed a bigger army ;)

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Can't remove from Empire if it is not a cored province, unfortunately. HRE is kind of a pain in the ass if you are a spectator.

 

Did you take religious ideas? Clearly you needed a bigger army ;)

 

HRE is a pain in the ass even as a participant. Unlike the previous installment, Austria's never going to lose the imperial crown in Europa Universalis IV unless electors start converting or someone starts vassalizing them. So basically, you just watch the HRE consolidate down to ten or twelve states that are almost all Austria's besties, because they're the ones that are allowed to grow, and then suffer reform after reform. Escape while you can, I say!

 

I did have religious ideas for this exact situation, but converting put me at -1 stability (since I never go to +3 anymore, thanks comets), then a dead ruler put me at -2. Between 25% religious unity (yeah, I tried to convert with only a quarter of my provinces Protestant), 14% overextension (a province I forgot to core), and crap legitimacy (from changing republic to monarchy by forming Italy), it was something like 311 admin points to bump stability back up to -1, which wouldn't even have stopped the rebels, so I didn't bother. I just waited until the Catholics captured a province (which took way too long), then converted back, with only the lost stability and prestige from the conversion and the surrender. It was a really rookie mistake, all in all.

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Whatever. Sounds like a good story. Not quite a grenade rolling down a hill but you get the idea.

Is this the same game where you had unlimited cash? :)

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Whatever. Sounds like a good story. Not quite a grenade rolling down a hill but you get the idea.

Is this the same game where you had unlimited cash? :)

 

I wish! Nah, my first game as Burgundy was the one where I was getting seven hundred gold a turn and had a hundred thousand saved up by the end of the game. I conquered all of the Antwerp node and most of the Bordeaux, Genoa, Lübeck, and Frankfurt nodes, plus a fleet of three hundred light ships pulling most of the London node forward. I basically was reaping the profits of half of Europe (along with their colonial empires) at that point, since no one could compete with me in a node where I had all the provinces. It was pretty egregious.

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Here's the 1821 world-state for the Tuscany-to-Italy game I've been moaning about for a week:

 

italy_1821.png

 

No further comment, besides that I'm so so so lucky that France ate half of Spain and half of the Empire during the last decades of the seventeenth century, putting the entire world in an anti-French coalition that I used to break it up into its constituent countries. It moved its capital to Ghana ten years later and started eating Mali, leaving me free to take the Balkan peninsula out from under the Ottomans.

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I need to make a new promise not to go on the Paradox forums anymore. My active involvement in the Crusader Kings II mod scene had left me with the belief that they were something other than an exclusionary bastion of self-congratulatory pedants, as the furor over the 1.2 patch changes reveal yet again.

 

 

Long story short, a controversial AAR began about six weeks ago, detailing what would turn out to be a second-try Ironman world conquest by Ryukyu, which is generally thought to be the poorest and most isolated country in the game. The author, DDRJake, talked at length about the many loopholes and exploits that made such a theoretically impossible feat actually quite doable. Almost certainly in response, Paradox released their first major patch for Europa Universalis IV, the majority of which changes were devoted to closing said loopholes and exploits. Overnight, the most accessible game in the series, perhaps in their entire catalog, became infinitely more foreboding and unforgiving.

 

For my part, I'm on the side of the 1.2 detractors. Sure, there was a lot of easy cheese in Europa Universalis IV at release, but trying to eliminate it gets the wrong message from the Ryukyu WC. DDRJake mostly showed that, although many of EU4's built-in disincentives to gamey or cheesy play involve hitting the player with a heavy initial malus to force them to backtrack or reevaluate their choices, an advanced player should weather the maluses in order to enjoy the outcomes that they supposedly disincentivize, which are almost always a net gain on the part of the player. Thus you get hit with overextension and aggressive expansion if you take too many provinces at once, but if you ignore the negative results and just keep taking provinces, you eventually break the power curve of those maluses and become unstoppable. Likewise, there's a -5 stab hit to breaking a truce, but if you're good enough to keep your income high and your revolts low at negative stab, you can break all the truces you want and wreck your enemies with nonstop war.

 

Instead of tweaking the mechanics that these maluses protect in order to encourage less gamey or cheesy play, Paradox's solution in the 1.2 patch has been to increase those maluses even more, to the point where a single lost battle or a year of negative stability will send a country into an unrecoverable death-spiral. And yeah, that stops the power-gamers from conquering the world by 1700, but it also makes for an extremely unforgiving game that hardly ever explains to you why your country went to shit in the span of a single week. My first 1.2 game as Brandenburg (actually four separate tries, with the same outcome) ended because my first non-core conquest -- Danzig, as recommended by the game's own mission system -- caused all my allies to break with me and put the entire Holy Roman Empire into an anti-Brandenburg coalition. They all declared war within the year, took away Danzig, and put me a hundred gold in debt. As an experienced player, I'm a little miffed. As a newbie, even just to EU4, I'd be flabbergasted. Paradox has not only decided to cater to the hardcore, but to the perverse, with stuff like a "Claim Throne" diplomatic option that now only gives a country a -50 opinion modifier except under extremely specific and undocumented circumstances. I can't imagine this all being a sustainable decision.

 

Ugh. And with Total War: Rome II being such a humongous flop, I was really enjoying my time with EU4. I guess I'll finish Papers, Please or something.

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I lied, I played a game as Brandenburg-to-Prussia-to-Germany, but man, I didn't really enjoy it much. Especially after you've reached about a hundred provinces, any new province puts everyone around you in a coalition for at least a decade. I only got as far as I did through diplomatic annexation, although becoming emperor stopped even that. Still, I'm proud of my bright aquamarine blog, even if I'm hemmed in because Russia inherited Hungary and Great Britain.

 

germany_1821.png

 

Oh yeah, I also played a game as the Ottomans, in an attempt to reunify Islam. Castile inherited a united Holy Roman Empire, so that was more or less the end of that. I did have a lot more fun, just because in its current state, Europa Universalis IV fucks with you less when you start out big. It's pretty much the opposite of Crusader Kings II in that respect.

 

ottomans_1821.png

 

But hey! Apparently there are even more serious bugs going on. A forum member did a systematic test of the combat system, since everyone was feeling that year-long battles in the eighteenth century meant that something was off, and discovered that combat modifiers are not being applied at all. Basically, while unit types can improve in tech, the weapons the system has them use are not being improved, so by 1800 you have Napoleonic infantry, with crazy high morale and discipline, still fighting with bows and catapults. I expect to see this hotfixed within the week, but it's still enough to put me off the game some more.

 

This is why no one should be allowed to review Paradox games until they've been out for six months. Even more than Creative Assembly, Paradox has become the masters of "feels right, but isn't" with gameplay and systems.

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That stuff about rebalancing the variables to sew up exploits is really interesting.

Do you think the exploits could be dealt with better? Can they be dealt with well by changing modifiers, or would it require the introduction of additional systems (in your opinion)?

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That stuff about rebalancing the variables to sew up exploits is really interesting.

Do you think the exploits could be dealt with better? Can they be dealt with well by changing modifiers, or would it require the introduction of additional systems (in your opinion)?

 

In my opinion? I think it's a shortfall in design philosophy. In a game that's so big and so complex, it's impossible to sew up every exploit, not without making the game unplayable for lower-tier players, which I think it almost is right now. Regardless, it's a chimera of a design goal. Paradox needs to balance its variables and modifiers so that the exploits are what is difficult and boring, not the proper gameplay.

 

By doubling down on the existing penalties, Paradox has shown the "right" way to play the game is not the one it seems to be designed for. Progressive conquest of neighbors through claims is aggressively punished, while the gamey "catch-and-release" tactic with vassals is not, so the latter is how they want us to play, it seems. Either overextension, aggressive expansion, and the opinion/attitude system need to be redesigned to punish only player exploitation rather than any player action, or... I don't know. I just know that currently the game is entirely about military conquest, since there's pretty much nothing else to spend money on, but most of the options given for doing so aren't really options because the penalties are so harsh, in order to discourage edge-case exploitation.

 

Sorry, I know that's not very lucid. I'll think about it more during the class I'm teaching and then get back to you.

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I wonder if the AI has to operate under the same restrictions, or if the added penalties are a player only thing.

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I wonder if the AI has to operate under the same restrictions, or if the added penalties are a player only thing.

 

The AI has the same restrictions, but the AI knows exactly what they are and always stops short of them, while the player has to keep a spreadsheet open to get the same results.

 

The specific problem with the AI and difficulty is more that the 1.2 patch drastically overhauled how the AI responds to player actions. In the launch version, the relations score (kind of like the opinions score in Crusader Kings II, but between nations) dictated everything, with "attitudes" just giving a general modifier to said score. That was found to be exploitable (see the trend here), so most of the player's diplomatic options towards a given AI nation is now determined by that AI's attitude, which is determined by hidden goals that the AI recalculates on a regular basis. For instance, even if you do nothing to AI Bohemia as Brandenburg, they'll hate you (as in, set their attitude to "Hostile," making almost all diplomatic options irrelevant) for taking Neumark, one of Brandenburg's cores, just because the AI is programmed to covet rich nearby provinces and hate their owners regardless of short- or long-term strategic feasibility. It makes the diplomatic game a crapshoot, because a two-centuries-long alliance can be broken in an instant when you take a province that your AI ally has no claim on and has never made any move to take themselves but secretly wants anyway.

 

The real irony is that one of Europa Universalis IV's selling points was that the new "relations score" system made diplomacy completely transparent. But apparently transparent systems are exploitable and that's a no-no, so they just abstracted the weird black-box nature of EU3 diplomacy one level out, into these attitudes, which are as inscrutable as ever.

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Ug, I'm glad I didn't pick it up then. Paradox is wierd because of the way they want to model things realistically happen basically puts a straight jacket on any sort of player choice. I remember quitting Hearts of Iron because I was playing as Germany and decided to help Italy actually take some land, but when we hit a certain number of providences taken, some sort of wierd treaty event scrambled everything around and made most of my efforts worthless. I started to go into the code to try and deactivate a bunch of those random events, but I eventually gave up and just shut it off.

 

Strangely, that's been the hugest pain in Crusader Kings as well. I don't understand why so many viking decide they want to raise a host and come all the way down to Georgia to stir up shit. At one point I was targeted by two Viking raids and a Succession host all in the same time period, in Georgia for gods sake.

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Ug, I'm glad I didn't pick it up then. Paradox is wierd because of the way they want to model things realistically happen basically puts a straight jacket on any sort of player choice. I remember quitting Hearts of Iron because I was playing as Germany and decided to help Italy actually take some land, but when we hit a certain number of providences taken, some sort of wierd treaty event scrambled everything around and made most of my efforts worthless. I started to go into the code to try and deactivate a bunch of those random events, but I eventually gave up and just shut it off.

 

Strangely, that's been the hugest pain in Crusader Kings as well. I don't understand why so many viking decide they want to raise a host and come all the way down to Georgia to stir up shit. At one point I was targeted by two Viking raids and a Succession host all in the same time period, in Georgia for gods sake.

 

It'll be a great game in a year. Right now, there is obviously some kind of battle going on between the Europa Universalis IV design document (which was all about transparency and elegance) and the traditional Paradox design philosophy (which answers any sort of systems shortfall with more complexity). So the game has all these systems that are simple in theory but arcane in practice.

 

For instance, the trade system at launch was a beautiful example of a fun, effective mechanic that rewarded the time you put into it, but it was found to be exploitable, so now it takes an enormous investment (setting up merchants at the right points, embargoing the right nations, putting ships along the right routes) that most players won't realize they have to make in order for it to be cost-effective. Like with diplomacy, if the system doesn't produce the intended effect, Paradox just adds a few more variables and leaves them undocumented, letting opacity and mystique serve as good, challenging design. Compounding it is the fact that Paradox still prides itself to some extent on the difficulty and inaccessibility of its games, even if their stated mission has moved away from that the past few years. I don't doubt that the attitude on their forums that anything else is a baby game helps very much. Paradox really needs to stop catering to those five thousand active people on the forum, since most of them get their fun from having no clue why they just got their ass kicked and therefore are a terrible echo chamber for good design.

 

I don't know. I still have a lot of fun playing EU4 as it is now, but the game just kicks me in the balls way more often than it should. And, you know, I actually wouldn't mind being kicked in the balls, if only I had i) warning, ii) an explanation, and iii) something that I could even pretend to do to prevent it.

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The 1.3 patch, which has been a month coming, has failed to do anything more than tweak a couple of the changes put into place by 1.2. Well, that's not fair. They half-fixed the horribly wonky combat system, but managed to break all hotkeys and scroll bars, in addition to various little "off" things like rebel suppression. So it's more like they're still at square one.

 

I bought Total War: Rome II a couple months ago and spent a week feeling incredibly burned. But I've left it behind and don't pay it a single thought anymore. The slow degeneration of Europa Universalis IV back into so many of the mistakes in previous installments, plus some brought over from other PDS titles, is much harder to ignore. I feel deeply sorry for anyone who bought this game on Rob's or someone else's recommendation as the simplest, most elegant, and most rewarding of Paradox's games, only to play it two patches out from those reviews and discover a confused and difficult title that is all about giving with one hand, taking with the other, and calling it "balance." The devs have said over and over that, despite all theme and UI evidence to the contrary, direct conquest is not supposed to be a viable means of expansion; instead, you're supposed to feed provinces to your vassals and then integrate them. Too bad that both are multi-step processes with several dozen undocumented "quirks" for players to learn the hard way! No matter, if you don't figure it out quick, a coalition of every neighboring nation will wipe you off the map, so you needn't worry about getting stuck in an invisible fail-state. Just play four or five games, until you stumble upon the right playstyle, then keep playing only that way. That's how Paradox likes its "sandboxes" nowadays!

 

I have no idea whom this game is for anymore.

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Okay, so what's the best way to learn EU IV? Please tell me its not the tutorial the game comes with...

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Okay, so what's the best way to learn EU IV? Please tell me its not the tutorial the game comes with...

 

No, the tutorial actually gives bad advice now, thanks to the changes detailed above. I think the wiki's about as good as it gets right now. The Ottomans, Castile, or France are good, failure-proof countries, since EU4 is pretty much the opposite of CK2, where smaller is more manageable.

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Cool, thanks for the advice! Maybe I'll try and dive into this during the long holiday weekend.

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hey everyone, I'm terrible at grand strategy but I love this tumblr and thought you'd appreciate it too, if it hasn't already been linked to

 

This is great! Thanks for sharing!

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