AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

Just pull them into a piddly easy war then declare war on the countries that they are guaranteeing.

Gaius Marius posted:

I really don't think paradox tried to put out a message of a game so they could spend years trying to fix it. It's far easier to believe that there wasn't a strong enough vision of the final product and the lead didn't reign in all the features that his designers kept designing.

Crusader Kings was a mess, but ckII managed to fix things and become quite the game. I have no doing that paradox can put out a good Stellaris 2 but they're going to have to throw out ninety percent of the first game to do it.

oddium posted:

Jeb Bush 2012 posted:

nah, they've made lots of good smart changes, but they still haven't fixed the awful grind of starbase & tile development

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

The nobles of the country would declare war on the nobles of the other country

Am I the only one who thinks EUs 2 and 3 are better than 4 at this point?

100% fewer mana bars

100% fewer expansions that add features seemingly unrelated to the theme of the expansion

100% fewer costing a thousand dollars to get game w/expansions

And frankly 100% more fun.

Communist Walrus posted:

As Byzantium I went to war with my ally Russia against the Mamluks. Spent most of the war wondering where the Mamluk armies were, because they mounted very little resistance. Eventually I zoomed out and discovered they'd marched to the east coast of Russia and spent the whole war sieging Russia's worthless eastern provinces.

The Mamluks did not win that war.

Azhais posted:

depends on the achievement. trying to get three mountains done without a little savescumming is a recipe for an ulcer

oddium posted:

my question is, what

Sage Grimm posted:

I'm guessing you haven't tried to sail against Great Britain before. There's a tiny problem of the vast navy they tend to accumulate at that point which prevents landings.

AG3 posted:

I'm the weirdo who picks Espionage sometimes purely for RP reasons.

BBJoey posted:

A lot of the complexity in Paradox games is honestly due to bad design exacerbated by feature creep in DLC. Take the EU4 combat system. On its face, an army is a mix of infantry, cavalry and artillery, easy enough. Now for modifiers: you have discipline, army morale, morale bonus, combat ability, professionalism, shock and fire bonuses (to attack and/or defence), flanking distance, combat width, tactics, terrain, generals. Remember that generals’ maneuver doesn’t affect combat except when crossing a river sometimes. Oh and also your units have their own shock and fire “pips”, and your available unit types are determined by your tech family, and you’ll often have a few to choose from. Oh and also also fire is useless early game due to a low modifier until you tech up. Oh and also also also some countries and/or cultures have special unique units, some of which have trade offs and some of which are straight upgrades (good luck finding the options to raise them if you’re not explicitly looking for them). Additional to this is the strategic layer of morale recovery, reinforcement, mercenaries, attrition, maintenance, drilling, force limits, manpower and sieges.

The sheer number of modifiers going on renders the system completely opaque to the new player, but the volume of numbers doesn’t actually add meaningful complexity to the game.

BBJoey posted:

More numbers does not a more complex system make, especially when as you say it’s not necessary to engage to any particular depth with combat mechanics to succeed.

It’s the same issue that the HoI3 OoB system had - in theory designing a complete organisational structure from theatre to division level adds significant complexity compared to grouping 9 infantry divisions and throwing a general on them, but in practice it’s just a two hour hassle at the start of every game that gives diminishing returns and alienates new players.

Fintilgin posted:

The best part will be how angry everyone will be when they gut and reboot some of these mechanics for EU5.

Ham Sandwiches posted:

It works absolutely great when you have a really strong vassal or HRE swarm in EU4 currently

It's really strange that "let the AI do the same dumb crap it does for non player tags" is some super advanced thing to be heavily considered. You can, of course, not use it if you don't want it.

BBJoey posted:

they shouldn't change the game's mechanics because it isn't built to deal with those mechanics because they shouldn't change the game's mechanics because

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

I certainly only like the actual map. The UIs in the 2D games were, uh, well,

not great

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

Who are your big three? I've been playing a lot of Total War lately and Creative Assembly seems to be sticking to the stuff you pay for is content/flavor (for 3K its faction-specific units and mechanics) while all QoL features get baked into the base game.