Paradox Grand Strategy: Tim Cook? How many divisions has he got?

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Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Groogy posted:

Pretty much says what it does on the tin

And how production affects works with trade? Not at all. It is not affected by the current state of the trade. It is however affected by how many goods you produce, the value of the goods you produce and modifiers on that value (the events you see from time to time that increase and decrease the price) But Production itself is completely detached from trade and trade is completely independent from production. That is probably you had a hard time understanding how they related, because they didn't.

Or are you referring to the goods produced mechanic itself and not the production income mechanic? Goods produced is just the base value to calculate how much trade value is generated in the province. So if price of my goods are 2, I produce two of these goods then my province is producing 4 trade value. It is all shown in the province view

This is all true but it doesn't really change his point that this is some of the most opaque stuff in the game for a new player. Kind of supports it actually, with the production/trade hair splitting - I don't think it's totally fair to say they're completely independent since they're both a product of goods produced.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2015 16:47

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 06:59

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

comes across as needlessly defensive.

It's a Wiz post so that's about par for the course.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2015 16:34

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Baronjutter posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRp7T5irXTQ
Stellaris gameplay vid. Lots of info from tool tips and such if you run in HD and pause and read poo poo !

This looks real slick.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2015 01:04

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Ghost of Mussolini posted:

Is there any knowledge of when HoI4 will come out? From the livestreams it looks almost done, and I understand it's in beta so far, so it is more a question of final polish hopefully.

February 9, 2016.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2015 20:21

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zedprime posted:

The relevant comparison is that HOI4 is finally in beta, while Stellaris screenshots are still getting marked as alpha.

I forget the whole discussion around the HOI4 delay, but now that they are rolling in cash didn't they say the whole plan to prevent new HOI3s (and to a lesser extent, CK2s but at least that was salvagable) was something like a minimum 6 month beta following what the director considers feature complete?

What's the story on the CK2 launch? I played it not too long after launch (definitely before the first expansion) and it was fine.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2015 22:08

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Rumda posted:

Has there been any rumours of a stellaris release date yet?

May 10, 2016.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2015 16:32

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Demiurge4 posted:

Is it weird that I don't want to use any FTL options besides node lanes in Stellaris? Because node lanes are cool and makes terrain matter. You can set up choke points and fortify key systems along the lanes of your empire and it neatly segments core and frontier worlds. I hope it's possible to set the game up in such a way that everyone uses them.

It's weird but only because the game isn't even close to out yet so none of us really have any idea which of the FTL options will be good/balanced/etc. or how they will really play out at all. Slow down there, champ.

# ¿ Dec 29, 2015 14:33

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Randarkman posted:

Actually the Stellaris model seems to be pretty similar in depth and customization options to the division designer they've shown for HoI4 which actually seems really cool and good, though I would guess land combat (and combat in general) to be more deep in HoI4 than in Stellaris.

e: Also with the 3 hull sections each having 6 systems we see from the Ship Designer screenshots it is also reminiscent of how you build spaceships in GURPS, which is kind of funny.

Hard to really say this early but HoI4's system looks spergy and unfun, too. There's no way I'm going to want to care that much about the makeup of an individual division when I have at least dozens of them.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2016 05:33

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Dibujante posted:

I think there's some genius in the HoI IV division design. This is my take.

If you don't want to plan a single division, this is probably not the game for you. However, if you don't want to plan 100 divisions, that's pretty understandable. There's probably a sweet spot between planning 0 divisions and planning 100, though.

What's tricky is deciding this sweet spot. In most games that have this mechanic, the sweet spot is "whenever you get too frustrated / lazy / apathetic to plan yet another division." This means that you've already hit the spergy and unfun point. This seems like a failure.

However, in HoI IV, there's a different rate limiter. Your available experience controls how many divisions you can plan. This is important because there's a chance that this limiter, properly designed, will stop you from designing further divisions before you hit the spergy and unfun point. That's a win.

It also means that, since experience is a limited resource, there might actually be a psychological incentive to design divisions. You're not doing busywork; you're using all of your resources as effectively as you can. This might have the added effect of making the division design work you do before the rate limit point feel more rewarding than it would otherwise be.

I'm theorycrafting about a game that isn't out yet, of course. But I think this could work. I think it's important to both limit the extent to which players have to do "busywork" like this, as well as to reward players for doing the limited amount that the game requires.

I guess I just don't want to sperg that hard about even one division. I would be totally cool with just using the system from HoI2, where there were basic types of divisions and you could put a brigade on them if you really felt like it. It feels like Paradox is trying to pander to Matrix Games players who need an obsessive level of detail.

For me it just comes down to whether it's a meaningful choice - if not then I don't care about the feature. Like, EU4 in theory has "division design" since you can have exactly the mix of inf/art/cav that you want. In practice you want the same unit makeup the vast majority of the time, so there's not much meaningful choice there. In HoI it's different of course because there are different types of divisions, but I guarantee you there ends up being an optimal makeup for each of infantry, armor, mountain, etc. divisions that you almost never want to deviate from. Like, you know there are going to be guys coming into the thread complaining about getting their rear end kicked and the standard goon advice will be "oh you fell into a trap in the unit designer, here just make your divisions like this." I'd love to be proven wrong but as of right now it looks like complexity with no payoff.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2016 19:39

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Old Guards are still totally usable, just second-tier since they don't gain experience and thus won't improve very much. If it's anything like HoI2, an Old Guard is still much better than no leader at all.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2016 17:04

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Seems like a ton of effort and complexity given that we'll have almost no control over combat. Maybe I'm missing something but is anyone actually going to want to watch the combat play out other than maybe the first few times and occasionally after that? Like imagine if EU4 went into a little Total War minigame when combat happened, but you couldn't do anything other than order a retreat - it'd be cool a few times but overall pretty pointless. This feels like a lot of bells and whistles when something much more abstracted would play better.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2016 14:33

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

zedprime posted:

I don't know, it sounds simpler than the CK2 combat sim for example. Paradox games don't exactly have the most simple combat sims compared to the rules of thumb that spring up that serve a player well enough. Although I do like when they tend toward the EU4 level and all my complaints about the ship editor have already been laid out last week.

This is exactly what I'm concerned about, yeah. Few people bother to really figure out the CK2 and EU4 combat sims because you can get 90% of the way there by following a rule of thumb that some sperg figured out years ago in both games. In CK2 you basically just show up with more guys, maybe a Welshman, and keep an eye on terrain. In EU4 you have roughly equal numbers of inf and art and a couple cav, maybe keep a reinforcement stack around, and keep an eye on terrain. Neither of these games would be improved by having combat play out in real time - the level of player feedback and involvement is pretty good in both.

I'd love to be wrong but the system just looks way too deep for how much I imagine the player is going to care about it. Unless combat is way rarer than in CK2 or EU4 I imagine there will be a consensus fleet composition that you'll throw into combat and (hopefully be able to) autoresolve.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2016 14:59

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Koramei posted:

Oh cool. How ahistorical are you guys planning on going with DLC? Like say would it someday be possible to pull a DDRjake as Bhutan and build the a-bomb and a fleet of supercarriers?

When Stellaris first leaked it had a late-February release date on the Steam page. I'm assuming that's probably not gonna happen, but compared to HOI where they just did a dev diary showcasing changes to a feature they'd showed in an earlier dev diary, the Stellaris ones seem like they've mostly got it down already? I'm not expecting it really but I wouldn't be shocked either if it's a Q1 title. Johan explicitly said they're not gonna release HOI and Stellaris close together, so if HOI is still a 2016 deal then I don't think Stellaris is so far off.

There was a longish Polygon interview with Johan that got posted a few pages back. It reported that the goal is to have the game out "later this year" I think. It also said or at least implied that Johan got brought into the project in like 2014-15 because it wasn't looking very good and he's been whipping it into shape.

# ¿ Jan 29, 2016 22:27

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Oh yeah I shoulda specified, I was commenting on the HOI4 aspect of that dude's post. :downs:

# ¿ Jan 29, 2016 23:05

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Autonomous Monster posted:

that's a bit like trying to build a chocolate factory by painting a drawing of a chocolate factory on a lion.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2016 00:43

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Westminster System posted:

Stellaris is wedged between May releases now

What does this mean?

# ¿ Feb 13, 2016 18:26

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Dibujante posted:

My understanding was that Roman agricultural slavery was merely brutal - long days of hard work, but survivable. Roman records are actually pretty spotty on the topic of slavery! But from what I've gathered, latifundia slaves often even had families.

Opposed to this, Roman mine slavery was indisputably a death sentence, and soon, for anyone forced to do it. Life expectancy was measured in months.

Plantation slavery in most of the New World is more similar to the latter than the former. While life expectancies were longer than for Roman mine slaves, they were still usually much less than a decade. I don't have a good number handy but something like 80%+ of new world slaves were worked to death, murdered, or died in accidents.

What's the story on the mine slavery?

# ¿ Feb 14, 2016 16:13

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Can we get a recap for people who weren't able to watch the stream? Sounds like the gist of it is:

- Stellaris May 6
- HOI4 June 6
- Another game...?

# ¿ Mar 16, 2016 03:02

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Psychotic Weasel posted:

1. Yes
2. Yes
3. Some sort of kickstarter for a card game or something? And Obsidian is making some Diablo or Arcanum clone with more details to come.

A kickstarter? Why would anyone donate money to a profitable company that is about to do an IPO?

# ¿ Mar 16, 2016 03:14

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Bold Robot posted:

May 10, 2016.

I'd like to point out that I almost exactly nailed the Stellaris release date back in December.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2016 16:56

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Espionage systems are never fun, I can't think of a game (let alone a Paradox game) where I actually enjoyed one. 100% find with it being left out of HOI4 and Stellaris unless/until they find a good way to do it.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2016 00:08

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Drone posted:

Ostensibly because warcrimes aren't modeled, but gas attack is present in Victoria 2, so who knows.

It wasn't a crime during that time period, maybe? :shrug:

# ¿ Mar 29, 2016 15:47

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Vivian Darkbloom posted:

No good reason, but it looks to me like it's licensed to Virtual Programming which is probably the legal reason why it's on the App Store rather than Steam. Current generation Mac and Linux ports are now done in-house which is a much better situation for players.

Ugh I forgot about that whole arrangement. It was a nightmare getting any sort of tech support.

# ¿ May 2, 2016 15:03

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Not going to this con or whatever but I was in Stockholm briefly last month, here are some random tips for goons:

- Swedes are nice/chill, but less outgoing than Americans.
- When beer was involved people seemed very friendly and outgoing
- I got a few beers at this place called Katarina Olkafe and really enjoyed the selection and vibe. I think it's near Paradox HQ, which I googled the location of but did not try and stop by.
- Get a kebab pizza.
- The Vasa Museum owns.

# ¿ Dec 31, 2016 00:20

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Skylines is at its best when treated like a digital version of a model train layout. You can make some really stunning cities with it and it's great to watch them come to life, but there is not much actual game there. It's pretty much nerd bonsai once you get past the initial hurdles of learning how to manage traffic. This is not really a bad thing and I've got like 500 hours played, lack of challenging gameplay notwithstanding - I find it very relaxing.

Bold Robot fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Mar 3, 2017

# ¿ Mar 3, 2017 20:31

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Agean90 posted:

Moral of the story: never invest in kickstarters

# ¿ May 18, 2017 16:49

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

popewiles posted:

Well now that they are public they have a legal duty to attempt to maximize shareholder return, so expect more of this kind of thing.

Tell me more about Swedish corporate law :allears:

# ¿ Jun 17, 2017 21:44

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Meldonox posted:

I'm always getting these turn-based strategy and grand strategy games and I can rarely ever figure out just what in the hell I'm doing and wind up either behind the curve militarily or turtling until I pull off some boring economic/scientific/cultural victory. Even in my one long-running winning campaign of EU3 I was only able to expand throughout the New World with minimal conflict because I was best buds with Burgundy (who had somehow annihilated France in the first few years and grew to be enough of a massive continental bully that everyone ignored me). Has anyone else had and successfully broken out of that habit?

Ask questions, even what you think are dumb questions, either here or in one of the game-specific Paradox threads. People are happy to help. It's not that hard to get to a place where you are decent and feel comfortable playing.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2017 00:50

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

ExtraNoise posted:

Paradox Interactive Will Announce Two New Games At PDXCON 2018

https://www.gamewatcher.com/news/2018-08-02-paradox-will-announce-two-new-games-at-pdxcon-2018

I think we all know what this means. Hearts of Iron 5 and Crusader Kings 3.

May 19-20, according to the link, for anyone else who was wondering.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2018 19:02

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

HoI4 isn�t a bad game but it has really low replay value by Paradox standards, for a few reasons. Air and naval are really bad which put me off playing any country that relies too heavily on those. The AI is not very good and you can get to a point pretty quickly where you know how to exploit and beat it. The focus trees are not super interesting (I understand this last point may have improved since launch).

I got a good 40-50 hours out of it shortly after launch but haven�t picked it up since then. I got my money�s worth but 40-50 hours for a Paradox game is peanuts, so I was a little disappointed. The first couple of DLCs didn�t interest me at all. I hear good buzz about whatever the next one is, but haven�t followed it at all.

I would love a game that is a straight-up remaster/remake of HoI2. That game was awesome.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 01:32

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

DrSunshine posted:

Hmm. Well, I find that I play on top speed a lot when playing CK2 and Stellaris, and seem to keep my finger on the pause button on the keyboard, which seems to make my wrist a little tired after 4-hr long sessions. Maybe programming a pause button on the mouse would help relieve that? Not sure! I've googled this cursorily and all I can find is a discussion where EU4 players say that a gaming mouse is largely wasted on it.

Pause button is the only thing I can think of that might be useful to have on the mouse. I don�t think a mouse with a ton of buttons would do much for you on Paradox games. I guess you could work out a way to play the game one-handed if you really got into setting the various hotkeys to mouse buttons? But I don�t see why you�d need to do that unless you actually only have one hand or you want to jerk off to maps.

That�s not to say it�s not worth it to buy a nice mouse, which might happen to be branded as a gaming mouse.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2018 20:10

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Trogdos! posted:

Good thing Stellaris is getting better over time at least.

To be fair EU4 got better over time too - a lot better over a long time. But it peaked a few years ago and is now a cautionary tale about the dark side of the Paradox DLC method. Lord knows what CK2 is like these days, I heard they added China or something?

# ¿ Mar 28, 2018 17:48

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Baronjutter posted:

You guys should hire Extranoise he really likes to make arts and little mods and poo poo and will make good things and he's a nice boy.

+1, EN is a great dude and I have spent countless hours playing content he developed.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2018 22:14

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WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

What are even the stats on the amount of people who play multiplayer? I couldn't imagine it's a huge amount of the thousands of hours people have pumped into the game?

The devs play a decent amount of MP and as a result MP-focused features and changes get overrepresented, I think Johan has admitted as much.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2018 13:52

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Yuran M. Bazil posted:

While i see why it needed a different name once it was an actually visible variable i miss the days of people talking about "badboy" tbh

# ¿ May 2, 2018 03:59

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

CK2 is unique among Paradox games in that there are multiple starts worth trying. Old Gods and 1066 are the best, but 1081 is also good for certain areas. The Charlemagne start is alright too.

# ¿ May 21, 2018 13:44

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

HOI4 has potential but air and sea are both pretty bad which limits replay value. It�s solid as Germany or USSR but other counties are eh.

# ¿ May 22, 2018 03:49

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Mister Bates posted:

I would never advocate anyone actually spend any money on a Geopolitical Simulator game (the current one is Power and Revolution), but I made the mistake of doing so once, and I kind of want to run through it on here sometime just so others can share in my horror.

They're awful games in basically every way. Everything about them is just deranged and illogical, like it was made by white-nationalist aliens from Venus. The data they use for their simulation seems to be mostly pulled directly from their asses, to the point that they'll get basic poo poo like national government types wrong (in addition to Angola, other nations which are run by Marxist-Leninists in the Geopolitical Simulator version of the present day include Afghanistan). The UI is atrocious and it's rarely clear what exactly you're doing or what effect it's having. The vast majority of the game consists of setting up meetings with various public figures - government ministers, leaders of parties and special interest groups, leaders of terrorist organizations, etc. - and in these meetings, which are all inexplicably voice-acted and have terrifying animated 3D talking heads jawing at you, you are presented a dialogue tree, in which the options for nearly every one are basically 'ask for support', 'ask for money', 'offer coffee', 'offer booze', 'compliment', and 'attempt to have sex with'.

bizarrely, the game both requires extremely granular micro-management and grants you almost no control over things. as the leader of an underground movement or guerrilla organization, you have to control budgetary allocations down to individual dollars and cents to every branch of the organization, plan every event and action, set up meetings and build up your network yourself - but you can't decide where or when to establish camps, position your units, or do much of anything to directly control what the group is actually doing (until they start fighting for control of a city, at which point the game expects you to zoom in and control every individual unit in the street-fight yourself in a tacked-on RTS mode). As the leader of a political party, you can give your parliamentary representatives voting recommendations - but they'll just vote in line with your party's ideology no matter what your recommendation is, so it does literally nothing. If you recommend they vote against your party's ideology the game will yell at you, if you don't give them a recommendation at all the game will yell at you. You can't change your party platform, and if you make campaign promises that don't jive with your party's hardcoded platform the game yells at you, and doing that too much is actually a failure state for the game - which means there are certain countries where the player simply can't implement certain pieces of legislation, because there isn't a political party for every ideology in every country.

it's also, as previously mentioned, pretty racist. European countries are depicted in excruciating detail (there's like a dozen playable parties in Ireland alone), African countries get jack poo poo. Muslims and the 'Chinese Mafia' are pervasive global threats while far-right militants literally don't exist. Left-wing groups have to petition for funding from a 'left-wing billionaire' character who is an obvious standin for George Soros. Native-American Indians and Indian-Subcontinent Indians get mixed up.

It's Steppe Wolfe with a budget and a pricetag (one hell of a pricetag at that)

You got any screenshots? It sounds like there is more comedy here.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2018 01:42

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

Has Paradox ever released data on how many people play in India in CK2? I always got the impression it was not very many so even aside from this dumb debate about the title of the game I�m surprised to see they are including India. I know nothing about India during this time period so I�m not exactly chomping at the bit to play there, for what it�s worth.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2018 19:28

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 06:59

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

chaosapiant posted:

So to be clear, I'm not at all afraid of losing or loving up a game, that's the best way to learn. My issue is that ok I clicked a button and I'm married. So? And then I have a blind heir with AIDS or my king dude gets migraines or whatever, tons of stuff going on but I can't tell what any of it means and what it affects.

I don�t know whether this is still true but Ireland 1066 was at one point considered a good tutorial area for new players. Pick a dude there, try to become King of Ireland, and by the end of that game you should have a general idea of what to do and why.

# ¿ Jul 25, 2018 21:51

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Paradox Grand Strategy: Tim Cook? How many divisions has he got?

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