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That was delightful.
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Apr 13, 2014 06:00
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I wonder what number Republic the French are up to at this point. Probably a pretty high one.
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Apr 13, 2014 06:12
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Rincewind posted:I wonder what number Republic the French are up to at this point. The Fifth Republic, same as they are now IRL. They have had, over the past five years, two separate Communist Republics (the second and fourth one), a crazed Anarcho-Liberal interlude (the third), and the democratic one they seem to have settled on (the fifth). Remember that until 1925 they were still under the Orleanist monarchy.
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Apr 13, 2014 06:15
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That was amazing, I think it might have been your most creatively-written update yet.
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Apr 13, 2014 06:20
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Captain Foo posted:That was amazing, I think it might have been your most creatively-written update yet. I'd say that it's a half-step off of the Nietzsche episode, but it was still a lot of fun to read.
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Apr 13, 2014 06:28
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I kind of love the resignation over labelling the quilt of British colonies.
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Apr 13, 2014 06:28
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Tulip posted:I kind of love the resignation over labelling the quilt of British colonies. I find a sort of morbid fascination that in this world the British lost India and yet are stronger than ever. The USA is on the verge of eclipsing them in raw score but the British still have their fingers in all sorts of pies given their massive international holdings and their gigantic sphere of influence. My statement that USA and China are the powers of tomorrow isn't hyperbole here: if this game were to extend on for a few more decades the UK and SGF are clearly going to crest and start to decline, while the USA-Chinese Empire alliance, bizarre as it is, can utterly stomp anything that it chooses to and their industries are slowly but surely taking over the global economy. At the moment, poor Japan keeps finding itself on the losing end of struggles with China, but the fact that Chinese troops marched into Paris this past update overland (with SGF military access) in a war with the USSR and France, should speak volumes.
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Apr 13, 2014 06:36
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What if the U.K. keeps grabbing more of the "pie" (so to speak) in further crises? Their immediate neighbours aren't exactly military powerhouses by any stretch of the imagination, and they've apparently been enhancing many of their overseas holdings, right?
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Apr 13, 2014 06:42
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Ahaha that verse
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Apr 13, 2014 06:45
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DentedLamp posted:What if the U.K. keeps grabbing more of the "pie" (so to speak) in further crises? Their immediate neighbours aren't exactly military powerhouses by any stretch of the imagination, and they've apparently been enhancing many of their overseas holdings, right? Gobbling up French and Italian Africa is totally possible for them (though the Italian Sahara provinces are now mostly 60-70% Italian because Italy's become such a mess that migrating to the colonies still looks like a good idea even when those colonies are in the most inhospitable places on Earth). The problem is that, at this point, French and Italian Africa themselves are pretty beat up. This is partially due to an event that fires every couple of years in one of your colonial states that gives you the option of either killing 5% of the people there or 20% of the people there. The AI will pick the latter 50% of the time and it just keeps firing, so between France's low birthrate, rebel occupation, and occasionally killing 20% of the people in Congo on a whim, French Africa especially is...kind of scarily underpopulated.
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Apr 13, 2014 06:49
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Patter Song posted:I find a sort of morbid fascination that in this world the British lost India and yet are stronger than ever. The USA is on the verge of eclipsing them in raw score but the British still have their fingers in all sorts of pies given their massive international holdings and their gigantic sphere of influence. I'm no vicky expert, but SGF's domination-through-culture always seemed like a long-term unsustainable strategy, since it doesn't snowball like industrial production does. Probably the only thing that can stop either the US or the Chinese is mutual war. Patter Song posted:Gobbling up French and Italian Africa is totally possible for them (though the Italian Sahara provinces are now mostly 60-70% Italian because Italy's become such a mess that migrating to the colonies still looks like a good idea even when those colonies are in the most inhospitable places on Earth). The problem is that, at this point, French and Italian Africa themselves are pretty beat up. This is partially due to an event that fires every couple of years in one of your colonial states that gives you the option of either killing 5% of the people there or 20% of the people there. The AI will pick the latter 50% of the time and it just keeps firing, so between France's low birthrate, rebel occupation, and occasionally killing 20% of the people in Congo on a whim, French Africa especially is...kind of scarily underpopulated. Schopenhauer composed his thoughts in French, in deference to their greater vocabulary for suffering.
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Apr 13, 2014 07:51
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Patter Song posted:(though the Italian Sahara provinces are now mostly 60-70% Italian because Italy's become such a mess that migrating to the colonies still looks like a good idea even when those colonies are in the most inhospitable places on Earth) Man, that happens even when the motherland's stable as a rock. Most of it's probably because the uncolonised provinces of Africa have no cores, so the natives assimilate in no time flat.
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Apr 13, 2014 08:57
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When I was playing a Divergences game as Austria-Germany Bohemia had a colony in Libya that became populated almost entirely by Czechs and North Germans after I conquered all of their continental territory.
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Apr 13, 2014 11:29
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Next update will be followed by the epilogue and that will end the SGF chapter of our story. At that point, I want to show off an eccentric mod, and my inclinations were to run a few decades (not a whole campaign) in Secret Denmark mod, which many of you are familiar with by now. However, some people on Skype have been telling me that they want to see this monstrosity shown off. In my opinion, Victoria Ultimate is a terrible mod that also manages to be deeply boring and I'm not sure how well I could keep it interesting for long, but it might just be too eccentric to avoid showing off.
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Apr 13, 2014 17:40
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Secret Denmark is a singular creation; a lightning strike of procedural generation. Victoria Ultimate is boring by comparison, and anyway other people are posting little trip reports here and there and I'm skeptical it can stand up to actually being LPed.
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Apr 13, 2014 17:46
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It gets more fun (crazy) if you pick a later start date. I'd either start out in the 2000 scenario or in his silly future scenario. I had some fun with North Korea, but yeah, a long play through is probably not a great idea because it got boring after a while, not quite as crazy as Steppe Wolfe. Although I did see communists taking over the US and then Mexico conquering their old territories from the 19th century. That was after some very extensive nuking though.
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Apr 13, 2014 18:30
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Just show off a snippet of each scenario just to show how hideously broken it is.
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Apr 13, 2014 18:45
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Played to the end. Final update sometime in the coming week, not sure when yet.
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Apr 14, 2014 03:20
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Writer's block. Need...gimmick...for last update. Chapter XVII: Leonard Zelig's Munich Period: 1931-1936. ... Tempting, but no, back to the drawing board. Besides, I barely remember Zelig. My favorite of his films was always Love and Death, but the time for a Dostoyevsky-style update, serious or jokey, is long in the past. Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way. What do I need to convey in this update?   Hm...the update needs to describe social changes. I had resisted raising the minimum wage, limiting the workplace, and especially implementing workplace safety for so long because those reforms are horrible and directly hurt industry, but by this point gave in and gave them to the people anyway. How could I possibly justify that?  Chapter XVII: The People's Triumph (1931-1936) Nah, the Socialist Workers Party has been in and out of power for half a century and just now has suddenly decided to fix factories that have gears jammed with human flesh and bone? People will notice that I intentionally didn't move on workplace safety for half a century.   Also, Keynesianism was more the order of the day in this update than true socialist economics.   Besides, the economic news wasn't really rosy this update. SGF actually went into heavy debt, briefly, before dramatically hiking up taxes, hardly the picture of a healthy economy. Even if it were a cheerier picture, it's hardly the main story of the update.  Is the story of the update the rising tide of Fascism?  Fascism is a tempting topic to go with. It's compelling subject matter, and it confronts goons with how they outwardly pretend to despise it, but, deep in the secret recesses of their hearts, all have a burning desire to see half of any given map labeled GERMANY in gigantic letters. Chapter XVII: The Eagle's Cry (1931-1936)      But, though more countries than ever have voted fascist parties in power, few if adopted fascist dictatorships. In fact, Bastar overthrew their fascist dictatorship and went the other direction. I mean, Italy and Romania aren't dictatorships, just cheerful con mons that elect fascist parties to power (though I doubt Italy could vote Mussolini out of power if it wanted to force the issue). Fascism isn't what I want to do. I mean, goons might be closet fascists, but confronting them with it makes them uncomfortable. How about writing about naval affairs?   Chapter XVII: The Unsinkable Wagner (1931-36) Oh, wait, my fleet literally never left the harbor. Like I told the thread, I built up a ton of dreadnoughts because they were skyrocketing my score and couldn't really afford to accidentally lose one in actual combat. All that focus I put on naval tech was useless because my thread wanted me to be a European land power and not a colonial one, preventing me from showing off like a third of V2 because I had to save my infamy for European wargoals. That's it! They want to hear about the war. Wars, that is.    Chapter XVII: Cry Havoc And Let Slip The...No Pretension, Just Kill Everyone In France Again Like Henry V Did. (1931-1936)  This could be a winner, because I miscalculated that one battle at the very beginning! People will see my crushing defeat by the Italians of all people and go "maybe he's bitten off more than he can chew!"  Of course, this happened, like, a week later.    Yeah...I'm not sure that I can maintain suspense.  Why does Spain share the Latin American portraits again? I've never gotten that.  There was that week or so that the Germans were occupying Prague. I could write a thing about Gertrude Stein's house getting hit by a shell, tie it into the last update. Dammit, though, the only picture I have of NGF-occupied Prague is the one where I took Berlin, I can't keep suspense this way!  Maybe something about France's heroic, tragic, last attempt to lift the siege of Paris?  Argh, the screenshots don't lie. However, there is the matter that I was unable to set a wargoal in the Soviet campaign because of low Jingoism. That's it! There's my gimmick! The war-weary people of SGF putting their feet down and saying "No" to the thread's rampant jingoism and insistence that we spend all of our time in V2's boring meat-grinder warfare rather than interfacing with the economy or colonialism.  But I kind of enjoy that meat-grinder...  Though I mainly love vassal-swarming and letting minor allies like Madagascar do the heavy lifting.   Seriously, though, I'll never convince anyone I don't enjoy doing this.    It is me, I am the one reducing my beloved complex economic and political simulator to the level of a subpar and rather nonsensical prequel to Hearts of Iron.   Still regret not getting USSR to release its share of Poland, though. The thing is, there's not much to the wars. At least, not to the wars I fought. Maybe I could talk about international affairs more?  The Middle East is dull, but there was some excitement in India, and of course there was the Japan situation, and Argentina and Bolivia had their periodic fight. Hm...  Chapter XVII: The Thread Told Me To Crush All My Opponents And Ended Up Causing Hungary to GP And Lost Me My Most Critical Vassal. (1931-1936) ... No, that title is a bit too on the nose. I need something a bit more subtle.  It is disappointing that after all France did to unite under their republican Fifth Republic, they had to throw it away and descend back into anarchy, but I had my orders.  Really, though, the Japan story is amazing. Why they would decide to take on China and the United States simultaneously in a quixotic quest to liberate Mongolia is beyond me. They had to know what would happen.  It's a shame that war didn't end by the time the game's time ran out, but Chinese and American troops were both occupying parts of the Japanese home islands. It's one of the biggest miscalculations I've seen the AI do with the Crisis mechanic, and because Japan's score was mostly based on its naval power, once that navy sank, so did Japan's station in the world. How can I justify this happening? The sheer arrogance of the 1930s Imperial Japanese leadership in thinking that they could take on both China and the United States is totally unrealistic, no country would provoke a fight it so obviously could not win in real life. It does, however, offer good story potential about the sheer power of the Chinese/American juggernaut and how that alliance would dominate this world's future. Maybe I'll use that in the epilogue.   SGF isn't a pariah, I suppose, but only because everyone around it is either utterly demolished and unable to answer or an ally of it.  I'm glad Persia finally got to work on Baluchistan, but I wish they'd grabbed Kalat as well, it would've made labeling the map easier. Damned Ukraine asking me to release Holstein and making me use that tiny font on the map...  Why did I have the "Dai Viet Westernizes" thing on the Miracle on the Vistula screenshot? I have this great narrative at play on how Poland defeated an NGF army larger than it through some miracle of dice rolls and defeated NGF in this war, conquering Krakow and even acquiring land, but I was going to use it to discuss Vietnam? What was I thinking?    If nothing else, Poland has a taste for eliminating stupid enclaves like east Prussia. Of course, Poland is like 70% North German and its capital of  If nothing else, having Poland and Ukraine both eyeing it should make Ruthenia an even more loyal vassal to the SGF. I should put that in the update, especially contrasting it with disloyal archtraitor Hungary. Hungary's not going to last long on its own, anyway. I've been killing their rebels for years now. On its own, the Absolute Monarchy of Hungary has about two or three years of life in it. They're just lucky that they left their bondage to me with only months left before the game ended.  If nothing else, AI Bolivia has me interested in doing a game as them, someday. The whole time, all of South America wants a piece of them, and they managed to more or less win. Admirable, I suppose.  Of course, there's also India, the persistent loser of my thread. I remember when I force-released them I thought that they'd be a player, but they just lost two more states to Beroda and Hyderabad in a war they started. India is probably the biggest underperformer of the LP, and that's an LP where Portugal lost Macau to China.  Dammit, I just can't think of a theme. Chapter XVII: Writer's Block. 1931-1936 I guess I've just run out of things to say. Population of SGF  Politics of SGF  The World, 1936 
Patter Song fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Apr 22, 2014 |
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Apr 22, 2014 04:41
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Bravo! Bravo! Well written throughout, and highly entertaining.
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Apr 22, 2014 04:50
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Thanks Patter, I had a lot of fun reading this LP.
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Apr 22, 2014 05:16
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Why wouldn't Spain want Christmas Island? Seriously, it's really nice there. Anyway, thanks for the whole LP! I enjoyed reading the alternate world history, and one writer's block episode doesn't even dent the mass of really creative ones you've turned out. I think you can coast on the credit from the Zarathustra-themed update for quite a while, honestly.
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Apr 22, 2014 05:17
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I can't wait for you to rip Ultimate Victoria II a new one. 
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Apr 22, 2014 05:34
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Everyone should make sure to expand the world map— there's a lot of interesting stuff in there. Also, this LP owned a lot.
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Apr 22, 2014 06:17
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Rincewind posted:Everyone should make sure to expand the world map— there's a lot of interesting stuff in there. If there is one thing i've learned from Guha, it's that Goa isn't really worth fighting very hard over. I look forward to Patter Song's next LP, that Zarathustra update is one of my top favorites.
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Apr 22, 2014 07:32
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This world would have one hell of an Ottoman empire if it survives until oil becomes as important as it is. Libya, Iraq, Syria, Arabia's west coast..
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Apr 22, 2014 09:57
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Ubern00b posted:This world would have one hell of an Ottoman empire if it survives until oil becomes as important as it is. Libya, Iraq, Syria, Arabia's west coast.. It's why I usually vote for them when the option comes up in HOI LPs.
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Apr 22, 2014 10:01
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Awesome LP, can't wait to see more!
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Apr 22, 2014 13:43
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Too meta for me. Bravo!
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Apr 22, 2014 14:31
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This was a really great thread. Thanks for making it entertaining throughout.
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Apr 22, 2014 16:06
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Tomorrow we'll do an epilogue, with descriptions of the various major countries and the ledgers. Then...I might take a week off the thread, but it will be back with more content. EDIT:  For now, just a hint of the ledgers to come, and a warning: Though the Ottoman Empire is utterly gigantic, it has almost exactly the population of modern Iraq. Iraq by itself, that is. Spread out over the entire Middle East and Balkans. I'm not sure they have the manpower to exploit their oil resources. Patter Song fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Apr 22, 2014 |
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Apr 22, 2014 16:15
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Patter Song posted:Next update will be followed by the epilogue and that will end the SGF chapter of our story. At that point, I want to show off an eccentric mod, and my inclinations were to run a few decades (not a whole campaign) in Secret Denmark mod, which many of you are familiar with by now. Tried to search for this mod and managed to find only some mentions on various forums. Where can I download it?
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Apr 22, 2014 16:45
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Patter Song posted:For now, just a hint of the ledgers to come, and a warning: Though the Ottoman Empire is utterly gigantic, it has almost exactly the population of modern Iraq. Iraq by itself, that is. Spread out over the entire Middle East and Balkans. I'm not sure they have the manpower to exploit their oil resources. Though that's not that much lower than in our world, though for the time, is it? Checking, it looks like Iraq, for example, in our world didn't even hit five million until the 1950s. And of course, most of the oil-rich Arab states today rely on cheap foreign workers more than local manpower anyway.
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Apr 22, 2014 16:52
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Gantolandon posted:Tried to search for this mod and managed to find only some mentions on various forums. Where can I download it? Can't find the link to the mod anymore. Maybe I'll put it up if I can't find it again. http://imgur.com/a/jU28b Enjoy this in the meantime!
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Apr 22, 2014 17:37
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Just read half the thread in a day... and I don't know what's best/worst: Soviet Inland-Canada, French Inland-Rhodesia, the clusterfuck that is non-British Nonetheless, this was one heck of a ride. One heck of a ride that makes me not want to touch this seeming clusterfuck of a game with a 10-foot pole, but still. I see it, I want to love it, but when you look at all the terrible things it does... I dunno.
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Apr 22, 2014 18:55
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For what it's worth I think that last update was the best you've written. It's a good encapsulation of late game victoria's nihilistic themes of "this doesn't make any loving sense, nothing makes any loving sense" and "The whole world has gone to poo poo and now it's all shitted up, gently caress."
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Apr 22, 2014 19:16
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Angry Salami posted:Though that's not that much lower than in our world, though for the time, is it? Checking, it looks like Iraq, for example, in our world didn't even hit five million until the 1950s. And of course, most of the oil-rich Arab states today rely on cheap foreign workers more than local manpower anyway. It's not, no. According to Wikipedia, in 1912 they had 24 million people with roughly the same borders as the lp's version. So yeah that's been some crazy population growth for a century. Good thing they didn't win WWI I guess  .
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Apr 22, 2014 19:59
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How is the population of Germany so massive in this timeline?
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Apr 22, 2014 20:50
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ChaosSamusX posted:How is the population of Germany so massive in this timeline? It's mostly due to both NGF and us making a beeline for universal health care, which leads to a crazy population explosion. My population was growing by about 25k pops (100k actual people) a month for about the last twenty years. I'd need to check, but I have a suspicion that the least populated province in the SGF is larger than the most populated province in the Ottoman Empire.
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Apr 22, 2014 20:54
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I liked that, the exploration of why we bother with these perspectives was a rather effective finisher. It was one mad ride, Patter, and I will be looking out for more. If you still want to do V2 after Secret Denmark, might I suggest using NMD and playing as either an unciv or a colonial power for a change of pace? Those would be pretty fun to show.
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