Gormongous

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

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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.

 

That's rough. Once Russia forms, it's never going to be very beatable without scorching all your land in the winter and letting them burn away troops. I don't suppose Austria or the Ottomans have blobbed big enough to be a reliable counter?

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Austia is firmly against me since I've been vassalizing and attacking various countries in the HRE. Hungary is on my side, and I'm working toward getting in with France. Losing the Poland/Lithuania/Bohemia block really hurt me as I was putting in a lot of resources to stay good with them and they were the only countries in a good location to be a reliable counter to Russia.

 

I've been watching a Scandinavia playthough on Youtube done by Arumba. There's been some good trade tips on there, so I think I'm going to hop on after work today and do my best to just dominate trade in my area and win by sheer amounts of cash. My income is already pretty crazy. Maybe I can bribe Russia to be my friend and we can divide England between us.

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Played a bunch yesterday and I think I figured out the problems I have with the game, illustrated with this nice story:

 

After a long time of peace, during which I got my trade in order and got my monthly income up near the 100 ducats mark, my relations with all my usual enemies had warmed some so I started un-declaring my rivalries and selecting those folks who were embargoing me so I could embargo them back. Suddenly, Bohemia and their ally Russia declare a war over the stupid island out in the Baltic sea that's between us. I didn't really want it anyway, but I didn't have any option to give it up. Russia alone has twice the troops I have, so they quickly eliminate my land forces and carpet siege my whole country. What they didn't plan for was the fact that I had more than 200 ships, mostly lights for trade but still a significant number of heavies. I completely decimate their navy and they are unable to land troops on the island that is actually the war goal. So here I sit, -70% warscore, unable to willingly give up the island since they don't occupy it, and they are unwilling to take any amount of money or other provinces. I just shifted the speed up to max and let time spiral by. The only thing that's keeping me from being able to keep it up indefinitely is my -15 monthly income, so I slowly accumulate loans over the course of 30 years of this. Everyone's war enthusiasm is in the toilet, but there is no physical way for me to surrender. Finally, a few months before I go bankrupt, they finally buckle and are willing to take a crappy side county that I didn't want anyway. All three of our countries are in complete disarray, multiple smaller wars have broken out against all of us, complete pandemonium.

 

There are two things that they could easily do to avoid this situation. First, they could give me the CK2-faction-style "accept demands" prompt when the war starts. I would have happily just given them the island if they'd asked and I'd certainly have handed it over if they threatened war. Second, not allowing me to give up whatever the hell I want to end the war is dumb, especially the war goal. If that island is all they wanted, why not let me give it to them.

 

There are also a couple of things that would be nice to make this situation more fair. First, making the improve relations thing actually do something. France has the top military in the world and they were my ally with a +200 opinion of me, yet they left me hanging out to dry. I was +50 with both Russia and Bohemia before the war started too. Obviously none of these things actually mean anything, so why even include it? Second, if they made the war goals that each country wants more transparent. I have no idea why every single thing on the surrender list had the red thumbs down on it. Some insight into these things would be helpful to at least know why my economoy was ruined for 30 years.

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I know you're not posting this here as a help thread, but I figured I'd drop what little knowledge I have where it would be helpful.
 

After a long time of peace, during which I got my trade in order and got my monthly income up near the 100 ducats mark...

 

Congratulations! A hundred ducats with full military maintenance is the beginning of the midgame.

 

...my relations with all my usual enemies had warmed some so I started un-declaring my rivalries and selecting those folks who were embargoing me so I could embargo them back.

 

The free embargo is good, but rivalries are usually used for the "enemy of my enemy" opinion boost (+20) and for the cheaper warscore costs. Embargoes is generally ineffective, since if both countries are embargoing each other it just decreases their overall trade efficiency.

 

Suddenly, Bohemia and their ally Russia declare a war over the stupid island out in the Baltic sea that's between us. I didn't really want it anyway, but I didn't have any option to give it up.

 

Nope! This is one of my big problems with the war system, too. You'll have fans defend it to the death on the Paradox forums, saying, "Well, if they're winning enough that you just want to give up, why would they let you?" It's stupid, unfun, and usually just punishment for not checking the diplomatic mapmode every ten minutes to check where your neighbors have claims. Someone suggested that a "demand" diplomatic option, where you ask a country to "sell" you a province where you have a claim under threat of war, that would be more interesting, but probably hard for the AI to grasp. They only just recently taught it how to value provinces in terms of cash.

 

Second, not allowing me to give up whatever the hell I want to end the war is dumb, especially the war goal. If that island is all they wanted, why not let me give it to them.

 

Back in EU3, it was fairly common practice to declare war on a country, give it some worthless out-of-the-way province that didn't even border them, and let rebels defect it back to you. It would break most of that country's alliances and give you five years of truce when the AI wouldn't touch you with a ten-foot pole, no matter what you did. Paradox fixed that by adding really harsh "length of war" and "capital not occupied" modifiers that more or less ensure any war will last at least eighteen months, enough time for the often-sleepy AI to react properly. I have problems with it, of course. Not only does it mean that the warscore displayed is not how the AI perceives the war going, to the point that you can occupy ninety percent of a country five weeks in and the AI will still refuse any concession, but also it means that wars often don't end if you're defeated yet the AI hasn't achieved its goal. It won't take anything it doesn't have a claim or core on, and if the country happens to be overextended, it won't take anything at all, which is a real pleasure, let me tell you.

My best advice is just to keep as much gold stashed away as possible. If it doesn't have its wargoal, the AI will always accept 31% or 32% warscore's worth of gold. It's dumb, yeah.

 

France has the top military in the world and they were my ally with a +200 opinion of me, yet they left me hanging out to dry. I was +50 with both Russia and Bohemia before the war started too. Obviously none of these things actually mean anything, so why even include it?

 

You're right, relations mean nothing. All that matters is a country's attitude toward you, indicated by the icon. Attitude is pretty much just determined by i) how big your army is in comparison to theirs, and ii) whether you have any territories the AI wants or sees itself ever wanting. If they didn't have a royal marriage with Russia, France probably didn't come to your aid because Russia was too far away, which overrides almost any possible relations score you could have with them. You can keep a country from attacking you briefly by keeping your relations over +100, but the AI will rival you or switch their attitude to Hatred when they want to fight, which will tank any relations score in couple years. Paradox has been criticized by some for exposing relations as a discrete and visible number, but then hiding the actual diplomacy calculations inside another, different black box called "attitudes". Most fans claim that they liked the old system anyway, so they're glad there's attitudes, because who wants to know when and why a country goes to war with you.

Generally speaking, I feel for you, because you've found a ideal situation to show what a failure so many of EU4's systems are. You were attacked without warning by a vastly superior force over an inconsequential island that you were unable to concede because the AI is programmed to fight to the death over nothing at all in order to give veteran players like me a challenge, even though it's a challenge I don't enjoy or even want. In a perfect world, the AI would see that it couldn't take its wargoal, despite having you beat, and would ask for cash instead, before war exhaustion took a real dive, but no. And I don't know why!

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Austia is firmly against me since I've been vassalizing and attacking various countries in the HRE. Hungary is on my side, and I'm working toward getting in with France. Losing the Poland/Lithuania/Bohemia block really hurt me as I was putting in a lot of resources to stay good with them and they were the only countries in a good location to be a reliable counter to Russia.

 

I've been watching a Scandinavia playthough on Youtube done by Arumba. There's been some good trade tips on there, so I think I'm going to hop on after work today and do my best to just dominate trade in my area and win by sheer amounts of cash. My income is already pretty crazy. Maybe I can bribe Russia to be my friend and we can divide England between us.

 

Do you have a link to that playthrough? I tried looking for it, but there are a lot of videos to go through...

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It's actually a Norway playthrough. It's nice becuase he actually makes some pretty big mistakes and manages to recover from them, which is teaching me a lot. It's especially surprsing all the loans he's willing to take out in order to win important wars. I've never been one to go into debt in these sorts of games, but I've been doing a lot better since I started being willing to pay Bohemia 2000 ducats to just go away.

 

 

I think what's really killing me at the moment is that I picked a lot of Military Ideas and I pushed hard for colonization which put me behind in Military tech without giving me much of real value. I'm pretty sure it's a terminal issue, but I've managed to get enough allies that I've had a good period of booming trade, province improvements, and general peace. At this point I'm trying to just round out the game without losing anything else. The game ends in 1850 or so right?

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Nope! This is one of my big problems with the war system, too. You'll have fans defend it to the death on the Paradox forums, saying, "Well, if they're winning enough that you just want to give up, why would they let you?" It's stupid, unfun, and usually just punishment for not checking the diplomatic mapmode every ten minutes to check where your neighbors have claims. Someone suggested that a "demand" diplomatic option, where you ask a country to "sell" you a province where you have a claim under threat of war, that would be more interesting, but probably hard for the AI to grasp. They only just recently taught it how to value provinces in terms of cash.

 

If you ask me, every war should start with a demand that you can acquiesce to if you so choose. Unfortunately, I'm in a situation where everyone is fabricating claims on me constantly, so the claims map mode became worthless a while back.

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I'm watching him getting destroyed in a war he shouldn't have started, so that's been fun :)

 

I highly recommend his playlists that are multiplayer with Mathas and NorthernLion. A little less informative, but a lot funnier.

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I think what's really killing me at the moment is that I picked a lot of Military Ideas and I pushed hard for colonization which put me behind in Military tech without giving me much of real value. I'm pretty sure it's a terminal issue, but I've managed to get enough allies that I've had a good period of booming trade, province improvements, and general peace. At this point I'm trying to just round out the game without losing anything else. The game ends in 1850 or so right?

If you ask me, every war should start with a demand that you can acquiesce to if you so choose. Unfortunately, I'm in a situation where everyone is fabricating claims on me constantly, so the claims map mode became worthless a while back.

 

Unfortunately, because of base tax and core distribution, the Baltic and Black Seas are the directions that most big countries blob towards uncontrollably. If you're not strong enough to challenge Russia one-on-one by now, which probably won't happen if you don't have Quality and Defensive ideas plus military tradition high enough to trigger the Swedish military reforms event chain, holding fire is probably the best choice. The game ends in 1815, with the historical defeat of Napoleon.

 
To be honest, general consensus even among the devs is that province improvements are a bigger and more wasteful drain on MP, simply because they only affect one province and can be destroyed, while ideas and tech are forever and universal. Some people build temples to bump up base tax for diplo-annexing, though. The building system's kind of fucked too, come to think of it.

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I haven't been building too many military buildings, just the cost reducing ones in my core provinces where I build guys a lot. I've found that the trade boosting buildings have been invaluable however, and I'm now dominating trade in Lubeck, Baltic Sea, and doing pretty good in the North Sea as well. Russia has the second biggest army in the game, second only to France, and they conquered a lot of the larger Native American nations so they have a decent new world presence as well. Theyr'e also three military tech levels ahead, so I'm certainly not going to be in any position to challenge them before the end of the game.

 

I don't think I ever saw the Swedish military reforms event chain, so I'd guess my Military tradition is quite low. To be honest, I've been concentrating on Navy and the two tradition stats are kind of opague to me.

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I finished my Victoria II game recently, so I've just been kind of mulling it over for about a week. Overall, it's my best game since I tried to carry the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to Italian unification, which had the result of a weak and backwards Italy that needed France's permission to exercise any power on the world stage. For the curious, this is how maybe two third of Victoria 2 games go, coming stillborn into modernity and waiting for a Great Power to stumble so you can kick its shins for brownie points elsewhere.
 
Anyway, like I've said here and elsewhere on the forum, Belgium is a great starter country. You are densely populated and have good relations with everyone you need to get a booming economy. Even playing not at all efficiently, I still managed to secure a permanent position among the great powers by 1840 through low taxes, subsidized imports, and education spending, ultimately becoming the richest and most literate nation per capita from 1860 to 1900. After that, it was all downhill. I'd predicted that the communist Britain I'd helped create was going to wreck me, but that never came to pass. I was always able to sell some small portion of my international prestige to postpone the showdown another decade, but thank heavens the game's timeline ended when it did.
 
No, the problems I had were more just fundamental to playing a small, rich country like Belgium. I never had enough population, hence enough money, to keep my industrialization going up that exponential growth curve like France, Britain, and the US could, so even though I ended the game with thirty million citizens, almost three times the current population of Belgium, I was still just small potatoes, with a half million-man army mostly of illiterate Yoruba conscripts and an economy that was, pound for pound, the equal even of the United States but only one tenth the size. Wars were still happening and I was one of the winners, but I wasn't the winner anymore, so a decline was inevitable, even if the game didn't make me play it out in full.
 
I wonder if I could have prepared for Belgium to have unlimited growth somehow, back when I started my game. If I promoted population growth early on, rather than controlling it to make universal literacy easier to achieve, I might have been able to spin it into a baby boom that could have kept me ahead of France, but it would also have kept me out of the Great Powers for a few more decades. Who knows if that would have made no difference or if Belgium's wealth would have been siphoned away to French factories and markets, leaving me forever impoverished. It's such a huge game, how could anyone know? As it turned out, I'm just fascinated that my determination to be both a liberal government and a Great Power made me into Cecil Rhodes overnight. That's video games.
 
Anyway, here's the world as it looks in 1950. The United States of America is still a slave-holding nation, the only one in the world, and is mostly uninvolved in global politics, so scared are they of another slave revolt and of fellow Great Power Canada deciding to do something about it. Britain is called the Worker's Commonwealth and is the second-rank Great Power, despite having lost two world wars and much of Africa. They are friends with fascist Germany, who lost the next two world wars and not much else. Russia is also fascist, but not even a Great Power anymore, having been dismantled in the fifth world war over the union of Yugoslavia with Bulgaria. China broke into civil war around 1900 and no one's bothered to put them back together again.
 
belgium_world_1950.png
 
Probably more helpful is the map just of my own direct holdings and satellites.
 
belgium_sphere_1950.png
 
What this map doesn't show is my sphere of influence, which represents economic but not political control. In addition to direct control of the Republic of Kamchatka, all the Turkic republics are in my sphere, along with Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and most of South America. With them all together, I control closer to three quarters of Africa, rather than just half. Good game, good game. I immediately wanted to start another, but I don't think I have the time or the energy, not after this...
 
belgium_1950.png

 

EDIT: Looking at Germany's flag, they actually aren't a fascist dictatorship anymore. When did that happen?

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I did it! I managed to get enough will power to Alt-F4, delete local content. No more EU4 bitching from me.

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I did it! I managed to get enough will power to Alt-F4, delete local content. No more EU4 bitching from me.

 

Whoa, really? I didn't know you were hating it that much.

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My colony (which I can't get rid of even if I wanted to) got in a war which France and Lithuania refused to join. Thus I lost all my allies, then the HRE, Russia+Poland, and Norway all attacked me at once. The only saving grace to this arrangement was that none of them could get 100% war score since they all occupied different bits of my country. I had 60 troops defending, against Norway's 19, with roughly comparable generals, and them with a river crossing penalty, and I still lost. That's when I realized that the last 30 years of the game would just be me getting beaten up repeatedly, and that I'd played for 10 hours in the last two days and maybe had 2 hours of actual fun, and was finally able to pull the rip chord.

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My colony (which I can't get rid of even if I wanted to) got in a war which France and Lithuania refused to join. Thus I lost all my allies, then the HRE, Russia+Poland, and Norway all attacked me at once. The only saving grace to this arrangement was that none of them could get 100% war score since they all occupied different bits of my country. I had 60 troops defending, against Norway's 19, with roughly comparable generals, and them with a river crossing penalty, and I still lost. That's when I realized that the last 30 years of the game would just be me getting beaten up repeatedly, and that I'd played for 10 hours in the last two days and maybe had 2 hours of actual fun, and was finally able to pull the rip chord.

 

That sucks hard. It's funny, Crusader Kings II is so easy to learn when you're small, but the rest of Paradox's grand strategy become more manageable the bigger the country. Spain is usually the best starter country in EU4 and Brazil or France in Victoria 2. You probably picked one of the hardest starts as a mid-ranked power with desirable land, but why am I trying to talk you out of it? I quit the game a few months ago myself.

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People have told me in the past that Denmark is an easy start. Maybe I was misinformed.

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People have told me in the past that Denmark is an easy start. Maybe I was misinformed.

 

I think it's one of the most straightforward and obviously interesting nations with which to start, since you get to focus on integrating Norway and Sweden and then on either colonizing the new world, grabbing bits from the Holy Roman Empire, or reducing Russia to second-rate status. But no, it's not easy. EU4 is a military game, so it's all about plentiful money and manpower, neither of which are to be found in Scandinavia until much later in the game. Spain for colonization or the Ottomans for military are my recommendations, if you feel like trying the game again after a break of at least a few months, which it does sound like you need.

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Rumor is that Rajas of India will be released on Tuesday, so I think I'll just play that :)

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Rumor is that Rajas of India will be released on Tuesday, so I think I'll just play that :)

 

Yeah! The patch notes had some really nice stuff for vanilla CK2 too, especially the implementation of the CK2Plus mod's best feature, revolts that group all revolters under a temporary title, in order to make them fight like a single group.

 

With that implemented, there's only one other CK2Plus feature I'm missing, which is Wiz's faction overhaul that made factions not short-term groupings for petty goals but power blocs based around mutual interests. There were the princely, court, republican, and church factions, each of which had a certain configuration of crown laws and title distributions that made them happy. It was really, really cool to come to the throne and reduce church taxes to please the church faction of archbishops and pious dukes, knowing that in a few years you could make them all individually happy enough to raise taxes back up. It was so cool and gave a given realm a great character, especially when a line of dukes was always in the court faction (read, the loyalists) and you began to love them for it. Sadly, Wiz got hired by Paradox and is now working on making EU4's military AI airtight, which is great and all but the people with whom he left the mod are such bickering idiots that you might as well just play vanilla.

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RoI looks great. I have a hard time with CK2 because I just suck at following the web of individuals that make up the feudal system and that ends up being a frustrating experience for me, but I'm definitely considering picking that up, and jumping in again.

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Oh... Weath of Nations came out yesterday. I'm not falling for their tricks after RoI. I'll wait a bit.

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Oh... Weath of Nations came out yesterday. I'm not falling for their tricks after RoI. I'll wait a bit.

 

It seems like that was a good call on your part. I haven't bought the DLC, but the patch is even worse than the last EU4 or CK2 patch. More than anything, I'm disappointed that the vaunted "power projection" system that was supposed to make rivaling other nations a more interesting mechanic doesn't actually work at all in singeplayer, because you're only allowed to rival neighbors of equal score and even an average player will outdistance their neighbors in score by the first century of a playthrough, now incurring huge penalties for even minor success, which incidentally is a theme of post-release EU4 development. It's so blatantly another feature that was devised and tested only in office multiplayer, which is the same faulty design process that inspired the huge nerf to hunts and education in CK2 and that encourages the ever-increasing AE penalties in EU4, as Paradox struggles to force a fanbase of smart people to play a game the way they play it and want others to play it.

 

At this point, I really don't know when Paradox is going to get my money again. Conquest of ParadiseRajas of India, and Wealth of Nations have all been barely-tested yet still full-price DLCs full of half-baked design ideas mostly intended to spite the strategies of fellow developers and overreact to the exploit of the month on the forums. Someone in the "official" feedback thread said it best: smaller patches, community testing, and a bigger focus on singleplayer. Paradox's sudden obsession with multiplayer is making inferior games and it's indefensible. I can only pray that I'll be able to come back in six or nine months and rave about the turnaround.

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I've heard that the new patches to CK2 to fix the online and mistakes from RoI are pretty good, but I haven't had a chance to sit down and try it out yet.

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I've heard that the new patches to CK2 to fix the online and mistakes from RoI are pretty good, but I haven't had a chance to sit down and try it out yet.

 

Yeah, I don't mean to sell Paradox short. They're good people who want to make good games and usually do. It's just that there was this big push for there to be a "new" Paradox, from the release of the final Victoria 2 DLC in August 2010 until the release of Europa Universalis IV in August 2013. Their games had always been worth buying, but Paradox said that now they would be worth buying on release, and they were for a while. That was exciting! I could recommend Paradox titles to people without hedging or reminding them a couple years later once the game was stable and balanced enough to play.

 

I don't know what happened, I guess they've just gotten far enough away from the old days that they're backsliding now. They have a hardcore contingent on their forums who'll praise any decision they make and buy any piece of content they release, because those fans have confused "being the only ones who do what they do" with "being the best ones who do what they do". It's hard for me not to get frustrated. I might check out Rajas of India more once the sale lets me catch up on all the CK2 DLC, which at least is not nearly the mess that is EU4.

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