Gormongous

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

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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

 

Oh, I have such fond memories of EU3 Blobhemia...

 

tumblr_mwkmg1M77r1rdbszlo1_1280.png

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So, how's EU4 doing these days? Some of my CK2 friends are starting to play it and I'm debating if it's worth the purchase.

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So, how's EU4 doing these days? Some of my CK2 friends are starting to play it and I'm debating if it's worth the purchase.

 

I haven't touched it since 1.3, but according to Paradox's forums, 1.4 and the associated DLC are a mess. Except for the random map generator, nothing works as advertised... not the new "Western Europe" trade node, not the new colonial system, not the new protectorate system. Their new changes to Overextension and Warscore have made both even less comprehensible, to the point where you can go to war over an objective that's impossible to achieve and can improve some nations' opinion of you via the unjustified annexation of territory.

 

Judging from a couple lines in their developer diaries, most of Paradox's testing and balancing is coming from intra-office LAN matches between the developers. Not only does this seem to make them blind to basic bugs and oversights (like the Netherlands, one of the biggest trading powers of the era, not being able to reach the Western Europe trade node), but it also seems to be skewing their vision of the game's design in not the best ways. I really can't recommend picking up the game when its basic mechanics change wildly once a month with every new patch.

 

If there were a way to revert to 1.1, before Johan started designing EU4 to stump DDRJake, I would, in a hot second.

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My admittedly unsophisticated opinion is I'm really enjoying EU4 a lot, and it's an easier game for me to wrap my brain around than CK2, even if by a lot of measures CK2 is the better game of the two.

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My admittedly unsophisticated opinion is I'm really enjoying EU4 a lot, and it's an easier game for me to wrap my brain around than CK2, even if by a lot of measures CK2 is the better game of the two.

 

When it comes to the problems I have with EU4, my equally unsophisticated opinion is that there's no meaningful way to interact with the game save through conquest  since the diplomatic and economic only really change the conditions under which said conquest does or does not occur  and yet every patch serves to make conquest a more boring and more frustrating process, presumably out of some duty towards historicity. It really just feels as though Paradox isn't quite aware that there's nothing to do in EU4 except expand endlessly, but a time always comes by the eighteenth century where I have half the world's trade under my thumb, manufactories in every province, and maxed out tech, yet literally nothing left to spend my mountains of gold on except going over the land and sea forcelimits.

 

I hold out a sincere hope that the "Wealth of Nations" DLC will add a deeper economic game and the prospect of financial rather than military control, but considering the incredible mess that "Conquest of Paradise" has proven to be, I should probably just keep my hat on and my mouth shut.

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Yeah, it's unfortunate. I haven't checked out CoP but I haven't heard any great accounts about it which is really unfortunate because it sounded so good.

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Well, it was on sale for $15 at the humble store and my friends have been playing it, so I decided to grab it anyway. I guess we'll see how it goes.

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I would recommend against having your first game as a sub-saharan country. I saw all the cool stuff they added for Native Americans and figured that those same features would be available for natives elsewhere. Not so, you're stuck seeing all these options but aren't allowed to actually pick anything. They get all these huge penalties, but nothing good to offset them. It was a complete snore-fest.

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I would recommend against having your first game as a sub-saharan country. I saw all the cool stuff they added for Native Americans and figured that those same features would be available for natives elsewhere. Not so, you're stuck seeing all these options but aren't allowed to actually pick anything. They get all these huge penalties, but nothing good to offset them. It was a complete snore-fest.

 

Unlike Crusader Kings II, you really should play one of the recommended nations at a bookmark, because in Europa Universalis a nation is easier the bigger it is. As for the whole "play any nation in the world" thing, it's mostly a lie. European nations are interesting, Muslim nations can be interesting, everything else is garbage, and if you complain the Paradox forums will helpfully point out that it's Europa Universalis and not Mundus Universalis.

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Ug, I was playing Denmark for 6 hours, not really managing to make a whole lot of progress, but at least holding steady. Then suddenly Sweden sues for independence. I give it to them, because I'm not really interested in the Sweden/Norway thing anyway. Then they proceed to repeatedly declare war on me and beat me down. This last war, it wouldn't even let me surrender if I picked every thumbs up thing on the list, so I finally just quit.

 

Now I'm torn between wanting to get back in there and get some revenge and hating myself for blowing 6 hours on it and never wanting to play it again.

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Ug, I was playing Denmark for 6 hours, not really managing to make a whole lot of progress, but at least holding steady. Then suddenly Sweden sues for independence. I give it to them, because I'm not really interested in the Sweden/Norway thing anyway. Then they proceed to repeatedly declare war on me and beat me down. This last war, it wouldn't even let me surrender if I picked every thumbs up thing on the list, so I finally just quit.

 

Now I'm torn between wanting to get back in there and get some revenge and hating myself for blowing 6 hours on it and never wanting to play it again.

 

Yeah, if the AI has any sort of CB on you, it will hate you no matter what. If the math shows that it is stronger than you, it will declare war. Opinion scores and so on are much more like guidelines than in Crusader Kings 2. Sweden had cores on you and you weakened yourself by releasing them, so of course they attacked.

 

Incidentally, this sort of hard-math AI-driven wargame design is exactly why I've fallen so out of love with EU4 myself. I hope it works out better for you!

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I went back again and basically punched everyone in the face that had wronged me before and now have managed to form Scandinavia. I didn't really want Norway and Sweden, but i didn't see any way to keep them off my back besides annexing them. I did get to do what I wanted to do, and was the second country to colonize the new world in 1496, just behind Portugal. It's basically Portugal, Castile, and I sparking multiple wars over colonial rights for the last 50 years or so. I like the game a lot when it goes well, but when it goes badly there's no way to really recover, it's merciless.

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Ally chains in EU4 are the most pain in the butt thing in the world. I finally got big enough to actually stand up to Austria, who's been kicking me around for more than 100 years. Then they allied with Poland (my former allies.) What I didn't know is that Poland was allied with Bohemia, who were allied with Russia (the biggest country in the game right now.) So I thought I had this managable war but ended up with Russia carpet sieging me and then forcing me to give up most of the land that I've gained since game start. So frustrated! :(

 

I've also been working the colonization angle, but it doesn't seem to really benefit me much. The tarrifs I'm getting from over there are maybe a couple of ducats a month. Am I missing something there?

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I've also been working the colonization angle, but it doesn't seem to really benefit me much. The tarrifs I'm getting from over there are maybe a couple of ducats a month. Am I missing something there?

 

Tariffs are chump change. Colonies are all about routing trade goods back to the motherland.

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Colonialism is easily the part of EU IV I enjoy the most. But yeah, it's expensive. You need to maintain an army to deal with the natives (and to invade neighboring colonies), you need a navy with all types of ships to transfer troops around, collect trade money, and heavy ships to fight off pretenders to the throne, and you need to spend money on colonial maintenance so colonists arrive at the fastest rate possible. I find myself constantly running out of money, taking out loans, and starting up wars so I can add war taxes to my coffers (which, you know, all sounds pretty historically accurate).

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Colonialism is easily the part of EU IV I enjoy the most. But yeah, it's expensive. You need to maintain an army to deal with the natives (and to invade neighboring colonies), you need a navy with all types of ships to transfer troops around, collect trade money, and heavy ships to fight off pretenders to the throne, and you need to spend money on colonial maintenance so colonists arrive at the fastest rate possible. I find myself constantly running out of money, taking out loans, and starting up wars so I can add war taxes to my coffers (which, you know, all sounds pretty historically accurate).

 

There's really no reason you should be driving yourself bankrupt colonizing. Sure, most national economies can only handle three or four active colonies at a time, but that's usually all you need to box out Spain or Portugal from sniping a province in the Chesapeake Bay trade zone. In my most successful colonization run as Britain, I had maybe ten heavy ships to chase off pirates and twenty transports to ferry troops. Maybe it's changed with colonial nations now, but the AI has always been very poor at being aggressive over colonial possessions (probably because they're worth almost no warscore and so the AI doesn't prioritize them), so I've never had to work that hard defending my colonies, except from natives (and the genocide option is so cheap, only a few military points and your own sense of decency!).

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I'm playing as Castille in this game. I mostly need the heavy warships because I spent most of the game pissing off France and England (I pissed off Portugal too, but they're not really a threat as Morocco successfully invaded them), and they both have pretty substantial navies and I hold territories in Europe that they have potential claims on. I refuse to show any weakness however!

 

I'm also playing a pretty aggressive game. It's not even quite 1500 yet, but I have a substantial foothold in both Africa and South America with about 4 or 5 colonies in each continent. I'm enjoying stretching things out to see how far I can take things, I suspect any potential/inevitable implosions should be pretty impressive. So far I haven't encountered any problems though, no matter how many loans I take out I never seem to have any problems paying them back.

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Tariffs are chump change. Colonies are all about routing trade goods back to the motherland.

 

Except I started as Denmark so my main trading hub is a few layers deep from the new world, so I can't divert trade directly. Maybe I just don't understand how trade works.

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Except I started as Denmark so my main trading hub is a few layers deep from the new world, so I can't divert trade directly. Maybe I just don't understand how trade works.

 

Yeah, you're probably having trouble getting anything past the 'Western Europe' trade node, right? That's been one of the more controversial decisions Paradox has made lately, designed to keep Spain and Portugal from making infinite money routing trade around Africa but in the process making small-time colonizers without huge naval range unable to compete at all. If you can't go through Hudson Bay to the North Sea, I'd just take the penalty for not collecting in your home node and collect in the New World.

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I wonder if Wealth of Nations will address that? That's supposed to totally redesign how trade works...

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I wonder if Wealth of Nations will address that? That's supposed to totally redesign how trade works...

 

I really don't know. They haven't been terribly forthcoming on how the DLC changes will affect the base game. Then again, maybe they don't know yet. The WETN was an eleventh-hour change inspired by a particularly contentious game of office multiplayer, which is mostly how Paradox goes about balancing the game now.

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If any of you can't tell, I've kinda cooled on EU4 and I got bored halfway through my first try at a CK2 world conquest, so I picked up Victoria 2 again. I described my current game up until 1904 in the thread on video games and capitalism, but things have taken a tense turn since then.

 

Basically, it's 1920 and I've become a paper tiger. Communist Britain has rearmed and I failed to do anything with the millions of pounds in reparations money that they paid me besides piss it away in the Congo. Almost all modern nations have caught up to me economically, so all I have over them is an incredibly high prestige from my golden age in the late nineteenth century, when I actually outpaced the research curve and had to let my universities sit idle until new tech unlocked in 1900. That'd be great, prestige is the way to stay on top as a small country, except my prestige is over twice the next highest Great Power, which is France, so I have a nine out of ten chance of being a leader whenever a crisis breaks out. If you haven't bought the Hearts of Darkness DLC, crises are a new mechanic to start world wars with frightening regularity. If a nation with a high combination of militancy and consciousness holds cores of another nonexistent nation, tensions built slowly until a crisis breaks out. Two Great Powers with the highest prestige get assigned for and against the status quo and the rest of the Great Powers have to pick sides lest they lose prestige themselves. If neither side backs down, a war breaks out, and if both sides have at least two Great Powers, which is a virtual certainty, a Great War breaks out, which is like a regular war except there are no separate peaces and the losing side gets fined millions of pounds over ten years for losing, which tends to break nations pretty quick, hence the Worker's Commonwealth that replaced the United Kingdom.

 

Anyway, I've now been the aggressor in five crises. Two I've averted by buying the friendship of France and Russia, one turned into the Great War over Istria in Austria-Hungary that I used to break Britain, and two have been Great Wars over Hungarian independence. The first was a mild scuffle between Britain, Germany, and me, which yielded no results, but the second destroyed Germany and Russia, who are both suffering massive Fascist revolts that I'm not sure they'll be able to put down. If they flip, all their diplomatic relations reset, so I'll be left with no allies besides France, which has a massive but shockingly backwards military and a secret hatred of me over my nonexistent designs on Luxembourg, and the USA, which just sits on its ass afraid to move because it managed to avoid the Civil War and now won't move for fear of slave revolts. I can't fight these wars by myself! I tried to grow my army, but it just took workers from the factories and tanked my economy so I couldn't afford the army I already had. Against all odds, I do have half a million men under arms, but most of them are poorly trained levies from the Congo that I recruited and brought to Europe to convince the AI that I'm a threat. In a battle they'll crumble, I'll be partitioned into Flanders and Wallonia, and the game will be more or less over for me.

 

Sooner or later, the Hungarians are going to want their independence again and they're going to ask me for help. I don't want to say yes, but I can't say no. And then the Worker's Commonwealth will eat me alive.

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Yeah, you're probably having trouble getting anything past the 'Western Europe' trade node, right? That's been one of the more controversial decisions Paradox has made lately, designed to keep Spain and Portugal from making infinite money routing trade around Africa but in the process making small-time colonizers without huge naval range unable to compete at all. If you can't go through Hudson Bay to the North Sea, I'd just take the penalty for not collecting in your home node and collect in the New World.

 

My problem has actually been the North Sea trade node. Though I have Scandinavia and have a few areas bordering it, England is simply dominating there and I can't get any trade out of it. I ended up finally sending all my traders east toward Russia as they didn't seem to be rocking the trade quite as hard. I've tried collecting directly in the new world, with fairly lousy luck, but that might just be where I decided to colonize. The fact that I used the random new world option makes any recommendations there kinda pointless however.

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My problem has actually been the North Sea trade node. Though I have Scandinavia and have a few areas bordering it, England is simply dominating there and I can't get any trade out of it. I ended up finally sending all my traders east toward Russia as they didn't seem to be rocking the trade quite as hard. I've tried collecting directly in the new world, with fairly lousy luck, but that might just be where I decided to colonize. The fact that I used the random new world option makes any recommendations there kinda pointless however.

 

Honestly, the only way to beat Britain from eating your lunch in the North Sea is getting them trapped in a series of wars until you can destroy their navy or get them to release Scotland. It's not as bad as it sounds, if you do want to look west then Britain is your main competition, but you'll have to spend a century or so making it happen, chances are.

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I did manage to get the better of Britain with my navy, but then Russia's land forces came in and ate my lunch. Both of them blobbed pretty hard right off the bat and now they're allied somewhere in that convoluted chain I posted a few posts ago.

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