Gormongous

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

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And not to double-post, but there's serious problems with Paradox and its fans after the 1.7 patch that accompanied the Res Publica DLC.

 

The DLC itself has been one of Paradox's better and more successful releases in recent months, but the patch contains a major change to the way truces interact with warscore. Now, a white peace gives both parties a five-year truce, but if warscore increases for either party, both instead get a truce that scales up to fifteen years with 100% or -100% warscore.

 

Naturally, in a game that already places several awkward and gamey obstacles in the way of player progression, this is almost entirely an unwelcome change, and the Paradox forums went so nuts that Johan waded into the changelog thread to defend what was revealed to be his decision here. His primary argument was that repeated wars every five years, with strategically ruinous peace deals, were being used in multiplayer games to cripple certain players permanently, so the fifteen-year limit was decided in order to guarantee that a player would have time to recover from any war, no matter how bad.

 

It went downhill from there. When asked about the effects on singleplayer and whether the AI understood the change, Johan said, "I don't give a **** about the AI in this issue. It's a matter of problem for the players vs. players." That's a literal quote. Still, he asserted anyway that the changes incentivized smaller and shorter wars, in which the AI tends to perform better, so the benefits to singleplayer would soon become clear. People pointed out that the "length of war" peace modifier prevents any war from lasting less than a year, during which it's almost certainly been totally won or lost, so changing the length of the resulting truce can only be a top-down effort to dictate player behavior. They also pointed out that adding a malus to a more optimal interaction does not actually incentivize the less optimal interaction. They also also pointed out that most high-level players break truces all the time and that the skills for doing so without messing up your game are rather easily learned and practiced.

 

To all those criticisms, Johan said he wouldn't respond. He said it would be like explaining algebra to a three-year-old, which is not a direct quote because the thread was closed and deleted shortly after this. So... yeah.

 

Basically, this confirms every complaint and every fear I have had about the way Europa Universalis IV has developed. It is abundantly clear that, whatever the skills of the team he leads, Johan is not a good designer and has no clear vision for the game beyond the most short-term reactions to however his latest multiplayer game went. He has turned Europa Unversalis IV from a masterpiece on release to a big old box of nope because he does not understand how to shape player behavior except through nerfs and penalties. There has been no patch that adds bonuses to a given style of play, only patches that add maluses to any style of play that does not conform to how Johan wants you to be playing the game. Hence the ever-increasing OE and AE values, the ever-increasing basetax requirements, and now the increased truce timers, which will continue to be tweaked and tweaked until that impossible time when enough magical fairy walls have been constructed that every player fights one or two limited wars every decade or so and otherwise waits patiently for everyone else to do their thing.

 

Related to this is his firm belief EU4 must be successful as a multiplayer game, even though the only evidence he has given that there is demand for multiplayer grand strategy games is EU4 itself, a game in which only fifteen percent of the players have even clicked on the "multiplayer" button.

 

My heart goes out to the rest of the EU4 team, especially Wiz, whom I knew on the forums before he was hired as a hardworking and inventive programmer, but the game they have made is bad, and what's worse, it's not accidentally bad like the old Paradox games that gave them such a reputation. It's bad because Johan's impulsive and arrogant personality has led him and his team to become obsessed with controlling player behavior in a sandbox game. It's a fool's errand and I'm done throwing any money their way. Maybe a year or two from now, when they're done releasing DLC, someone will tell me that EU4's design has reached an equilibrium and is no longer subject to the whims of reactionary and vindictive patch changes, I'll consider buying it at a deep discount and booting it up. For now, though, it's ALT-F4 and delete local content.

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I bought $15 worth of DLC for this game, because I am a crazy person. Folks on my Mumble channel called me an abused wife with the way I keep coming back to EU4 even though I hate it. Finally, I played multiplayer with one of my friends who's pretty good at these sorts of games and even with the both of us allied we got ground under twice by the AI. I'm really done, for real this time.

 

At least I will be after I finish my imported India game, so I can at least say I got some value out of that $15.

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Side note: DDRJake, the Paradox forum member whose theoretically impossible Ryukyu world-conquest AAR was the inciting incident for a lot of the more questionable design decisions in post-release Europa Universalis IV, has started another world conquest as Ryukyu. It's actually quite interesting to watch and read, because according to him, one of the best if not the best EU4 player in the world, most of Paradox's mechanics introduced to fix exploits have instead led to exploits that are even more cheesy and less fun than what was replaced. If nothing else, it's an impressive refutation of "negative" design, the goal of which is simply to prevent certain player behaviors.

 

High point so far: protectorates don't get coalitions, so DDRJake forces the Knights, a diplomatically isolated OPM, to make him their protectorate so he can conquer all of East Asia in a handful of decades with no retaliation whatsoever.

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I think that I may be the only person that likes the changes that came in with the Wealth Of Nations and Res Publica patches. I felt it made it less Risk-like.

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My second game of Crusader Kings II, didn't quite catch me the way the first one had, so I've moved on to Europa Universalis IV for now and I'm liking it so far. One thing I'm not sure about at the moment is how to best deal with allies' wars. The punishment for declining a call to arms seems rather harsh. If I join and let them negotiate for me, I end up with a bunch of crap I don't want (or worse they give away some of my stuff if they lose), if I don't let them negotiate for me I don't seem to get anything out of it for all my effort and if I negotiate a separate peace with favourable terms for myself, they hate me. Am I missing something here?

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Nope. EU4 is structured around being very careful who your allies are because they can dump a world of hurt on you.

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yeah, being allied is a two way street...you can screw them just as hard fyi, if not harder and without the optional lube...

 

 

Has anyone taken a look at the new Art of War expansion that is coming out Oct 30th? It seems a true expansion, lots of new things and revamps....it was stated that conquest will be made easier starting passed 1628 or somewhere there abouts (simulating Napoleonic conquests - not correct time period, but they want you to have time to play with the mechanics) and the farther in the game you go the easier it will be to create a large empire. I think the idea being, early you'll be restricted the same as now, small wars spread out over time. However, as time progresses those restrictions will be lessened through revamped ideal groups allowing more rapid expansion on the order of Napoleonic France.

 

 

I'm still looking to see if the 15 yr truce will be changed or not, as that is a major buzz kill....I've always thought that the peace treaty should be something negotiable, part of the war score...100% warscore should mean you can dictate whatever length of peace you want, maybe at the risk of higher AE penatly (other nations viewing a shorter peace as a sign of intent to aggressively expand) ....would work something like demanding money except have AE attached below a certain thresh hold....

 

 

Vassals are being reworked, there will be more interaction with them and the ability to turn them into a buffer state (march) and press their claims means you'll no longer be prodded to absorb all your vassals...they can remain....after a certain time (1628) you'll also be able to create custom vassals to begin feeding too. 

 

 

New revamped religious stuff

 

 

more provinces (probably a nerf to world conquest actually now that I think of it) 

 

New Rebel mechanics

 

....lots more

 

 

thoughts?

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It's not just Napoleonic conquest that it's simulating. It's the period that was set off with the 30 Years War.

 

I'm really intrigued by the idea that you can go to war on behalf of rebel factions in other nations, which gives the protestant reformation a much needed boost that it was missing. The wars of religion don't really materialize in the current game.

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So, I've been watching a bunch of EU4 videos lately. What's the state of the game at the moment? I feel like I'm dancing on the edge of getting back into a horrible relationship.

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I am really suspect to talk about, because I do really like their games. But right now I found it to be very good. Here is some random thoughts:

 

Eldorado:

- Playing with the Aztecs and their neighbors is actually very fun and hard, the whole Doom system keep you in check and the small area mean quickly that two blocks of alliances might spawn and wrong timing in your actions can result in disaster.

- Playing with Inca gives a more less frenetic experience, but still good.

 

- In my current game, as Mali, I found that Westernization isn´t over complicated as used to be, but still not exactly easy. Now you must have enough points which came from you powers, but several events might help or hinder. But to get new goverment types you need the decision to reform the goverment, which gives you a -5  stability and drains your power (if memory right now, don´t fail me). In fact, my Mali game is right now is very fun, managed to westernize (but not change goverment), once was a protectorate of Portugal (New option, which make you somewhat a Vassal, but you have to struggle with the Liberty Desire, but this give you some room to survive), and somehow I managed to survive a war against Portugal and now I have colonies around the world.

 

- Only issue so far: I haven´t figured how the gold fleets really work.

 

- Colonial Nations form themselves after a certain number of provinces are colonized, they act as vassals and do have a Liberty Desire, which your actions can make strong or weaker. I liked that, since you now longer have to build gazillions of Fortress or Temples everywhere.

 

- In my current game, Portugal and Spain (right followed by Britain) while did manage to build colonial empires, they haven´t take over everything as they used to be. Most of the kingdoms around Mali still alive and many have westernized (some even managed to get the goverment change).

 

- I did once used the Support rebel to put islamic rebels in power in another kingdom.

 

Art of War

- I am saying this based in a experience close to release, might have changed. Once the war itself start was quite armageddon, I mean it was a imense alliance of catholics vs protestants, with huge armies clashing over.

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So, I've been watching a bunch of EU4 videos lately. What's the state of the game at the moment? I feel like I'm dancing on the edge of getting back into a horrible relationship.

 

Honestly, it's not terrible. The balancing of the patch is closer to release (the best state of the game, in my opinion) than ever before, with most of the over-corrections to aggressive expansion, coalitions, vassal-feeding, and tech groups having been smoothed out by time. It's still a game of surprisingly low agency in places -- for instance, the hammer comes down with blinding speed if you take too many provinces, about which the game still doesn't know quite how to warn you, and there's literally nothing you can do to stop a coalition from happening in the near future, besides buying a lot of mercenaries to win it -- but in general, the features added by the DLC have made it a better game overall.

 

I mean, the steppes are still a mess, because someone high up in the development team firmly believes that all horde nomads should be exterminated three hundred years ahead of schedule, and "lucky" nations like France and Austria never falter without player intervention, but I'm enjoying a recent game as Savoy. Really, I wish I'd intervened sooner, because right now I'm blocked by France to the west, Austria to the east, and Spain to the south. I literally have nowhere I can expand and I'm afraid of upsetting the great powers, all of whom are as stable as a rock.

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I got a chance to play about 4 hours of Common Sense by linking up with a friend. The new style of building and improving provinces is cool, but still has the basic conflict of trying to figure out whether spending monarch points on this new stuff is worth delaying tech for. Except it's more obfuscated. I don't think it's a bad change, but I don't feel like it's a good change either. I have a feeling I've already screwed myself doing too much development and not enough other stuff, but I guess we'll see.

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I got a chance to play about 4 hours of Common Sense by linking up with a friend. The new style of building and improving provinces is cool, but still has the basic conflict of trying to figure out whether spending monarch points on this new stuff is worth delaying tech for. Except it's more obfuscated. I don't think it's a bad change, but I don't feel like it's a good change either. I have a feeling I've already screwed myself doing too much development and not enough other stuff, but I guess we'll see.

 

Yeah... I had my aforementioned game of Savoy-to-Italy go to the 1750s before the patch broke it, and I just kept thinking that the biggest design flaw of EU4, the most unalterable one, is that the most limited and most powerful resource in the game cannot be anything but monarch points, the lion's share of which are determined by purely random chance. The overwhelming drive in the game is to get your nation's economic engine up to the point that you can hire top-level advisors to keep the inevitable stint as a low-level monarch from crippling your game for several decades, and even at that point, monarch points are entirely too valuable to be used for anything besides tech and maybe ideas when the ahead-of-time penalty for tech is more than a decade. Everything in the game is ultimately devoted to widening the bottleneck of monarch points, if only because tech is king in EU4 and only monarch points get you tech, so the new "national focus" mechanic helps a little, but it's still a design that strongly discourages particularly creative play, even when compared to other Paradox titles like Crusader Kings 2.

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Yeah, monarch points have always been a sour point of EU4.  It has its goods (good for newbies to grasp the game faster) but overall I think it is a net negative :/

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The problem is that there aren't really any other limited resources for a skilled player after 100 years or so.

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I still feel bad about turning on the AI. "Denmark trusts you utterly" is such a difficult thing to see, but they have land in the empire and someone has to take it back.

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I still feel bad about turning on the AI. "Denmark trusts you utterly" is such a difficult thing to see, but they have land in the empire and someone has to take it back.

 

Well, the AI certainly doesn't give a shit about imperial integrity. My last game, I actually saw Austria give away parts of Bohemia to its ally Poland during a war. I feel like that should get you fired as emperor... so I can take their place.

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My buddy and I are playing together as HRE members and I screwed up and gave a bunch of provinces away to keep my allies happy. Now that we're powerful enough, it's time to try and restore imperial integrity.

 

Edit: I take solace in the fact that the AI will just suddenly change attitude for no reason, so it also feels like revenge.

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Hi Everyone,

 

I don't have much past experience with games but have been playing a lot of strategy games since I was given a new computer.  I picked up CK II and EU IV in the Steam Summer sale and I'm throughly enjoying both although I decided to start my first full play though on EU IV rather than CK II as I prefer that time peroid.   I'm kicking myself for not buying Hearts of Iron when it was on sale but I didn't know about it and when I saw it recommended in my mind I confused it with Company of Heroes which one of my friends plays.

 

Hearts of Iron with the DLC is only £30 on Steam though so I am going to buy it anyway.  I found the tutorials for both EU IV and CK II rather poor and although I completed them I learned the basics through watching "Let's Plays" on YouTube and making few mistakes along the way of course.  I can't find a good Let's Play of HoI III on YouTube if you know of anyway would you be so kind as to let me know either in a reply or a PM and do you have any tips for HoI III  Many thanks for your time.

 

 

Edie x

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Hey Edie, if you are still interested in HoI3...

 

To get the very basics, doing Spanish Civil War is a good place to start (start as Spain in 1936 and I believe you can choose which faction to control when it fires?).  SCW is a good place to get hang of game's rather dense interface and mechanics.

 

Once you got the basic hang of things, I recommend jumping straight into Germany first since it is a very powerful country that has very nicely scaling opponents as war goes on.

 

Core concept is building army and fighting mobile encirclement focused warfare.  This basically means you have your infantries holding the line while tanks and motorized troops try to break through the line and encircle enemies to cut off supplies for huge wins.

 

So first thing I would recommend is, play as say, Germany in 1936 and do the following.

 

Research doctrine techs

Research manpower and IC boost techs

 

Then focus on these units only

Infantry

     - Artillery

Medium Armor

Interceptor

Tactical / CAS (I prefer CAS since it shares research with Interceptor as small frame crafts but TACs do more bang per wing)

 

Create really basic divisions of 3inf 1art for your infantry divisions

2 med arms and 1 mot for tank divisions (later add SP-art but that's way down the road so don't worry about it)

 

Those two will be your land force.  Bulk of your army will be infantry divisions and you want at least 10 tank divisions

Interceptors will keep your sky clear.

TAC / CAS will give your army more concentrated firepower.

 

Everything else is either really tangential or beyond the immediate scope (some players for example, prep carriers to eventually invade UK and USA but for learning curve I say focus on stomping Poland and France).

 

So first is Poland-Germany border is setup to help you appreciate the power of encirclement... the border starts you off already ready to encircle western part of Poland.  Try having your tanks punch through north and south, meeting up in center and watch the cut off Polish army in the west just melt away.  That is the core essence of HoI... make army and then encircle other armies with it.

 

France is not so obviously shaped and is lot bigger but same principle applies and it's still quite weak compare to what you should have.  Then the eastern front is where the main course of this game is at.

 

Remember geography matters a lot.  you want to try to find a plain terrain with no river crossing or your tanks suffer some abysmal penalties.

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I don't really play EU4 anymore, but I saw that one of the developer diaries for the upcoming DLC expansion, Mare Nostrum, introduces the idea of "states" versus "territories," with the former being considered the central part of the nation and the latter being treated as overseas possessions within the game's systems. I think we can say now that we've officially reached Peak Paradox Feature Creep, with two systems for "cores" now being laid on top of each other with little in the way of logical interaction between them: when you acquire a province outside of your starting region, it is initially a territory that you pay to core, but eventually you'll probably upgrade that region to a state, at which point you basically have to core the province again or suffer an autonomy penalty (autonomy, of course, being a softened re-implementation of over-extension that exists alongside the latter mechanic). Two tiers of cores: core cores and non-core cores!

 

Also disappointing is that EU4 has basically borrowed the "realm size" mechanics from latter-day CK2 patches, but that's only fair when CK2 borrowed aggressive expansion and coalitions from EU4 a few patches back.

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Oh yeah feature creep has been pretty bad with EU4.

 

Wide range of expression in game is good, but this isn't just wide, it's unnecessarily complicated.  Granted part of PDX game's allure is that it is overtly complicated system but I rather see reusing of a single value that can scale well than 10 different binary values.

 

IMO core is so archaic now that autonomy is in the game.  Autonomy system does everything that core/noncore/state/territories does in single scale that is easy to comprehend and is just way more expressive.

 

Only thing autonomy doesn't convey well is CB (cause CBs are very binary) but even then, they can just port autonomy's scaling aspect into CB so that warcost/AE per base tax scale based on how autonomous it is, reflecting how 'other' it is to your nation's core identity.

 

Shit, writing this post I'm realizing autonomy is such a good design.  It can convey core (<25), overseas(>75), territory(>50?) in single value.

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Hm, EU4 on Steam sale for the next few days.  After bouncing off EU/EU2 years ago, CK2 actually worked for me in the more recent past. 

 

Should I take the plunge?  And if so, the CK2 thread recently had a great breakdown of DLC, what are the must haves/must avoids for EU4?

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Hm, EU4 on Steam sale for the next few days.  After bouncing off EU/EU2 years ago, CK2 actually worked for me in the more recent past. 

 

Should I take the plunge?  And if so, the CK2 thread recently had a great breakdown of DLC, what are the must haves/must avoids for EU4?

So with *mumble mumble* hundred hours of play my opinion of the DLCs ( http://www.eu4wiki.com/Downloadable_content for a list of major features).

  • Conquest of Paradise: Not unless you want the random new world to explore or want to play a native american tribal nation.
  • Wealth of Nations: Must have, it makes trade sensible.
  • Res Publica: Not unless you want to play a merchant republic or one of the Dutch republics (and I'd say you want to)
  • Art of War: Must have, so many quality of life improvements for army management and warfare.
  • El Dorado: Very much for colonisers. Also making custom nations is a lot of fun. This is also essential if you want to play one of the American Empires (Inca, Aztec and Mayas).
  • Common Sense: Must have. Adds the provincial improvement system and lots of subject interaction quality of life.
  • The Cossacks: Essential if you want to play a Stepe Horde nation. The diplomatic improvements are good. Reaction to the Estates system is mixed.
  • Mare Nostrum: Must have Better espionage and naval management. Condottieri (hiring out your army) are fun when you're at peace and waiting for something to happen.
  • Rights of Man:  Since it came out yesterday, your guess is as good as mine, my feeling is that it will be a must have as the Institution based technology system is such an improvement on the Westernisation/Tech Groups for people playing outside Western Europe.

 

Of course I'd say take the plunge. I found EU3 very cold but got hooked on CKII and love EU4.

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