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

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Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Has anybody linked this week's HoI IV dev diary yet?

# ¿ Oct 2, 2015 18:48

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 20:06

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

I can write long paragraphs about gay Byzantines about Paradox game screenshots.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2015 01:53

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

There's a new Hearts of Iron dev diary!

This one's on weather and terrain. As usually, I'm struck by how absurdly pretty the map is. Even if I wind not getting too into HoI IV beyond whatever's necessary to wrestle ByzLP into some sort of conclusion, I'll enjoy just looking at the map, probably. :v:

# ¿ Oct 9, 2015 15:57

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

I'm weirdly excited for the France dev diary next week. I kind of want my first HoI IV game to be a successful defense of France, although I'm horrible at games so it probably won't go very well.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2015 16:49

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

unwantedplatypus posted:

It lists modern day Russia as a democracy.

It also apparently considers the Syrian Civil War as a war between the United States and Russia.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2015 18:59

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Lord Tywin posted:

Hah, me too, I figure that getting crushed by Germany will give some good insight into the mechanics of the game.

Learning HoI IV is going to be... rough, since everyone always says to play Germany and I refuse to play as Nazis on principle.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2015 21:51

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Gort posted:

Didn't you play Byzantium in a Let's Play?

Well, yeah, but the various bad things I did in that LP weren't reenactments of actual historical atrocities that happened within living memory, and by the time we got to the 20th century we were radical syndicalists intent on Smashing the Fash.

Larry Parrish posted:

lol

gosh why would i possibly not want to play as the perpetrators of the holocaust in a game series i enjoy for their emergent narratives

I mean, obviously I'm not saying that everyone who plays as the Nazis in any WWII strategy game is a bad person, or anyway-- I'm just talking about my own personal comfort level. But for me, what elevates Paradox games over other strategy games is the way they tell stories, of the way they take at least an abstraction of some real moment in history and then diverge from it in interesting ways, instead of just being an abstract system that's kind of history-themed, like Civilization, or whatever. Even when I'm not actually doing an LP of a Paradox game, the narrative the game creates is still at the front of my mind. And "how Hitler turned things around and won WWII" is not a narrative I really feel like seeing play out.

And, I mean, maybe that's hypocritical, since in other Paradox games you're probably still doing like twenty awful things a minute, but HoI IV feels a little different to me since it's both so much more recent and so specific-- it's not several centuries in which some stuff that may or may not be similar to real-world events might play out, it's 1936 and Hitler is already in power, and I (again, just speaking personally) can't get over the sense of just what that represents in the narrative of an HoI IV game and just appreciate the abstract strategy or it all, or be interested in the Man in the High Castle-esque historical counterfactual, or whatever.

Again, I'm not saying that everyone is morally obligated to feel like this, or that we shouldn't have WWII games, or whatever-- I'm just trying to articulate the reasons why I, personally, am kind of weirded out about playing as the Nazis. Like, it's fine that not everyone feels like that, but I hope it's at least kind of understandable why somebody might be?

# ¿ Oct 17, 2015 02:25

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

LaSalsaVerde posted:

that commy Germany mod for Darkest Hour was the best. Especially since you could go Radical Socialist instead of Stalinist/Leninist, but don't tell the tankies that, they'll kick me out of the internationale

Which reminds me-- how would HoI IV represent things like that or Kaiserreich syndicalists or whatever? Can communist countries be set to still have elections? Could a democracy have a communist party in power without immediately collapsing? I mean I'm sure all of that's

I've also wondered how non-fascist dictatorships are handled since so far we've only heard about democracies, communists, and fascists in the dev diaries.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2015 18:12

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Darkrenown posted:

The election system is pretty modable too, you can add new ideologies etc.

Music to my ears. :anarchists:

# ¿ Oct 17, 2015 20:00

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

New Stellaris dev diary on species and empires.

Monarchs, heirs, factions, ideology sliders, and POPs! I think Stellaris might be................ the perfect game.....................................

# ¿ Oct 19, 2015 16:04

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

q. what kind of support will stellaris provide for F U L L C O M M U N I S M

# ¿ Oct 19, 2015 17:23

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Chief Savage Man posted:

So if Sengoku was a buildup to CK2, and March of the Eagles was a buildup to EU4, is Stellaris really a buildup to V3?

Dreadnought designer?

HoI IV is buildup to Stellaris. :getin:

# ¿ Oct 20, 2015 21:43

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Post Heart of Darkness Victoria 2 is good and fun IMHO.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2015 02:50

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Has anybody linked this week's HoI IV dev diary yet in between all of the beta/V2 economy chat?

Is this the first time we've seen a completely uncropped national focus tree? I love how totally off-the-rails it can go just from the chart alone. French blitzkrieg? France joins Comintern? Franco-Italian ~*~*~army of aggression~*~*~?

Edit: I also like how French nerf mechanics are like the WWII game equivalent of EU4 Ming nerfs.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2015 16:57

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Darkrenown posted:

It's not entirely complete, the air branch is offscreen to the right

The fact I didn't notice that there wasn't an air branch is evidence of the way all of the political/diplomatic stuff immediately caught my attention, I guess.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2015 17:12

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Have we seen what the generic HoI IV portraits look like yet? It's crazy impressive how many actual painted ones we've seen, even for edge cases like generals for smallish countries or a leader for alternate communist Norway.

Slime Bro Helpdesk posted:

edit- also the Amelia Earhart article has her not getting lost?

Oh wow, the fact that historical flavor events can play out differently is so cool-- it's always been kind of funny to me when some flavor event fires in Victoria 2 or Europa Universalis IV that mysteriously plays out exactly like it did in the real world every single time. I wonder if it's just a coinflip, or if the American player's actions actually affect Earhart's chances of success?

# ¿ Oct 26, 2015 15:58

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

BillBear posted:

It's funny how people bring up space nazis to justify white only portraits but when in reality if we knew about other intelligent life forms capable of loving us up Nazis would switch from race to species in choice of targets.

I think you're really overestimating the Nazis, here. Genocide was an end in and of itself to them-- when their entire country was tumbling around their ears they still put resources into carrying on the Holocaust.

gently caress Nazis.

Paradox should really... like... do something about all of the weird nazis and racists and reactionaries who have taken roost in their official forums.

It seems like it's a problem in the fanbase for these games in general-- the last time I played CK2 every time I hit shift-tab to bring up the steam overlay one of the guides was "How to expel the Jews" with a loving swastika as the icon-- but maybe cleaning up the trash on the official forums that Paradox actually has control over would be a good place to start.

# ¿ Oct 27, 2015 22:37

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

ZearothK posted:

Yeah, you read the wrong books, but I can understand where you are coming from. A major shift in nWOD design was not having major canon truths (like the Cain or Wyrm things), replacing them with different contradictory myths, and the politics mostly shifted to regional/city level instead of global conspiracies - and the books are full of awesome local stuff and conflicts -, which gives the whole thing a different flavour. It makes for a less interesting read, since there isn't a huge metaplot to piece together from the supplements, but works better as a toolset for GMs wanting to do their own thing.

The mechanics are also a lot better, so much that I use the nWOD ruleset when the nostalgia grips me and I need to revisit Masquerade. There's an official translation guide for the rules too, so it is not exactly an uncommon thing.

Yeah, I've always loved how mysterious nWOD was. There was a lot of good fluff, too-- I liked the VtR clanbooks in particular. I think the Mekhet book is my favorite WoD book of all, old or new.

# ¿ Oct 30, 2015 15:56

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Pimpmust posted:

Turn research into a SHMUP bullet hell minigame.

The Undertale of 4x games.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2015 06:23

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Baronjutter posted:

Paradox dudes, please let me beta test just this one time, been applying to every beta since Victoria 2

Also I assume the empire in war plan red is the british empire and the chain is to align the US with the soviets?!

That's correct.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2015 19:16

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Star posted:

HoI4 DD about civil wars

HoI 4 is gonna be really good; I can feel it.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2015 17:49

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Kavak posted:

He's just quoting a Paradox forums poster.

Kaiserreich doesn't even get mentioned until Page 2, for shame. Then again I loving hate the ACW and would be glad to see it purged altogether, despite my love of the Combined Syndicates and Pacific States, so I'm conflicted.

Just make the Syndicates crush everyone by default. :anarchists:

# ¿ Nov 23, 2015 16:49

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Funky Valentine posted:

LOOK AWAY, LOOK AWAY, LOOK AWAY, TRAITOR LAND

I like how his "yourself as a Victoria POP" issues include like no issues from the actual game, but I guess "moralism" and "jingoism" don't sound as cool.

EDIT: Hard science fiction can be cool, but if you have FTL you're already in the realm of "basically magic" and how "hard" or "soft" your setting is becomes mostly about aesthetics or what kind of story you want to tell and mood you want to evoke.

# ¿ Nov 23, 2015 21:51

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

This week's HOI 4 diary is up. Lend lease, "volunteers", and expeditionary forces.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2015 21:29

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Mister Adequate posted:

Yesssss this is so good

Also they wargamed it with some high-ups who had served in WW2, in both the British and German forces, a couple of decades back, and the conclusion was that it was possible Germany could have made landings in England (by no means certain, but not completely inconceivable either), but the land defenses were sufficient that they wouldn't get very far, the RN would cut them off from supply or evacuation, and we'd have to find something to do with all these krauts we just captured.

Operation Sea Lion (wargame)

quote:

Of the 90,000 German troops who landed only 15,400 returned to France. 33,000 were taken prisoner, 26,000 were killed in the fighting and 15,000 drowned in the English Channel. All six umpires deemed the invasion a resounding failure.

Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Dec 7, 2015

# ¿ Dec 7, 2015 22:45

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Pakled posted:

This is a good read on Operation Sealion, too.

Alison Brooks' post is such a usenet alternate history classic.

quote:

Then there is the example of the question of life jackets. Thousands of life jackets had been provided. However, despite all the best efforts of the planners, there were only sufficient for the first wave. The intention was, according to the plan, that these life jackets would be brought back again by the boats for the second wave. The problem was that these life jackets were worn beneath the combat pack. Those involved would be expected, on landing on an open beach while under fire, to first take off their pack, then their life jacket, and then don combat pack, and only then start doing something about those inconsiderate British soldiers shooting at them. One wonders what the veterans of Omaha beach would say about the viability of this.

Not that it would have been of the slightest use. While the Wehrmacht had been given strict instructions to do this, no-one had been made responsible for collecting the life jackets and return them to the boats. The boats, however, did have strict instructions not to wait once they had unloaded their troops. The life jackets would have piled up uselessly on the beach

EDIT: God, I could just empty-quote this whole thing:

quote:

One single main exercise was carried out, just off Boulogne. Fifty vessels were used, and to enable the observers to actually observe, the exercise was carried out in broad daylight. (The real thing was due to take place at night/dawn, remember).

The vessels marshalled about a mile out to sea, and cruised parallel to the coast. The armada turned towards the coast (one barge capsizing, and another losing its tow) and approached and landed. The barges opened, and soldiers swarmed ashore.

However, it was noted that the masters of the boats let the intervals between the vessels become wider and wider, because they were scared of collisions. Half the barges failed to get their troops ashore within an hour of the first troops, and over 10% failed to reach the shore at all.

The troops in the barges managed to impede the sailors in a remarkable manner - in one case, a barge overturned because the troops rushed to one side when another barge "came too close".

Several barges grounded broadside on, preventing the ramp from being lowered.

In this exercise, carried out in good visibility, with no enemy, in good weather, after travelling only a short distance, with no navigation hazards or beach defences, less than half the troops were got ashore where they could have done what they were supposed to do.

The exercise was officially judged to have been a "great success".

Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Dec 8, 2015

# ¿ Dec 8, 2015 19:53

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

I kind of want to continue my LP into Stellaris, which is probably a bit premature considering I'm still waiting for HoI IV to come out. :v:

# ¿ Dec 8, 2015 23:52

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Maybe this was based on Steppewolfe.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2015 18:33

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

canepazzo posted:

From a Paradox producer's twitter:

Oh no.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2015 18:25

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Submarine dev diary is up.

# ¿ Dec 18, 2015 17:38

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Jesus Christ I'm so happy the crisis fizzling bug is finally going to be fixed. I like Victoria 2 a lot, but it's just not right if it doesn't end with the world in flames and all those confident empires of progress lying in ruins.

# ¿ Dec 18, 2015 21:29

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

This week's HoI IV dev diary is about................ radio!

quote:

Gives you information on enemy units in the area. The better your decryption technology is versus their encryption technology the more info you can see (such as exact numbers, division types and roughly what battalions make up their divisions).

That's a pretty elegant way to model e.g. Bletchley Park.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2016 16:58

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Enjoy posted:

Hopefully there are intelligence countermeasures to enemy radio, like video

As we all know, video killed the radio star.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2016 17:29

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Groogy posted:

Have any of you tried the magical -debug command line argument? In CK2 it turns on something I made a few years ago called script asserts, will make the scripts run a bit slower but it will output to he error log the exact piece of code that failed when it tried to execute the trigger/effect and sometimes even have a informative message on what went wrong.

Whoa, that's super useful and I wish I'd known about it the last time I was making a mod. :v:

# ¿ Jan 11, 2016 19:37

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Has anybody linked this week's dev diary yet? Well, here it is.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2016 16:31

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Polygon has a pretty lengthy interview with Johan about HoI 4.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2016 17:56

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Let's Play! � Bull-men are the epitome of civilization! Europa Universalis: Rome

The first thing you should notice about that thread is that it is 857 pages long.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2016 22:59

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

YF-23 posted:

I don't really remember seeing much talk about it, but do you remember how we were talking in the thread about how CK2's DLC is poo poo what with always expanding it the wrong way? There's a new DLC to be released on February 2nd that is just the opposite of that, Conclave. It went so far under the radar that they only had time to make 3 dev diaries for it:

Conclave Dev Diary #1
Conclave Dev Diary #2 (mostly council mechanics, realm peace)
Conclave Dev Diary #3 (because this one was posted yesterday, a week before release, they are giving a huge infodump on literally every feature so prepare for a long read)

quote:

You�ll also find old friends such as the Centralization and Viceroyalty laws, along with the new addition of Status of Women (which is harder to pass than Imperial government in many cases!). While the early steps of the Status of Women gradually open up job titles for landed women, female dynasty members and nuns, the later stages enable Absolute Cognatic (equal inheritance for men & women) as well as being able to use women as generals in your armies!

Thank you for this precious gift, Paradox.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2016 00:50

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

I hope HoI 4 comes out before Stellaris so I can just seamlessly take ByzLP from WW2 to the stars. :v:

# ¿ Jan 30, 2016 03:23

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 20:06

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Have we seen the UK national focus tree in any of the dev diaries or interviews or whatever?

# ¿ Feb 5, 2016 17:40

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