1681

As usual, you couldn’t be more incorrect.

1682

My experience has been that the Paradox forums are extremely inaccurate as to the state of the game (for CK2 and Vicky2). It always seems to be that some posters on there have found some arcane exploit or minor feature that the AI ignores and declared that that one thing breaks the game for them. I haven’t played CK2 for the last two or three DLC at this point (last one I have is Old Gods), but I’ve never found CK2 to be unplayable.

1683

This.

The games may not always be working as intended, but rarely have they been unplayable. I’ll admit that the update that changed the way annexing vassals worked really annoyed me, but that was my own personal thing. Also it screwed up the end game of a campaign I’d been playing for months, there went my long term planning…

But yeah, the Paradox forums have some really aggressively unpleasant folks who like to cry and moan over everything. Just try and say something positive about coalitions there, you’ll need to don a fire retardant suit first.

And pg? thanks for that :) Large empires aren’t always impressive because a dedicated player can do a lot, but growing an ally that size? Impressive. Especially one such as Byzantium.

1684

Well, damn. Here I thought I played the new EU4 expansion throughout the evening yesterday. Some sort of delusion or dream, I suppose.

Damn. I was doing really well, too!

1685

Well, that’s an opinion.

My experience instead is that the forums are extremely reliable to understand the state of the game. It takes a lot of hours to judge by yourself, so looking at people who already played the game extensively tells you a lot of the experience you’re going to have once you start digging instead of simply playing casually for two hours.

On the matter of “unplayable” instead it’s for me the nature of these games. Being very complex there’s a lot of stuff that can break, and the problem is that it’s also VERY HARD to figure out whether you found a bug or there’s some system that you haven’t figured out completely.

This means that in my experience I always bump into something and I end up spending more time researching why something happens (and it often ends with an actual bug) than playing and enjoying the game. It’s just not fun constantly wondering if the game broke or if you need to looking into some rule you don’t know. Stuff happens, you don’t know why, look up the forums, and find out it’s a bug.

And often, the bug-free experience is just because you don’t know the game well enough to realize all the things are going wrong, and the more you invest time, the more you reveal an uglier picture. This is the opposite of fun.

So for me these games become only fun when they are really polished, because being very complex there’s always a thousand things that end up breaking and ruining the experience.

1686

As you say, there’s a thousand things that can break at any time, though.
It’s key to enjoy a Paradox game to not let it bother you if a few of the 950 things that are essentially irrelevant to the game as a whole don’t work completely as intended.

Attacking a mountain province from a swamp province with ethiopian camel dung throwers gives 5% less bonus than it should if the leader has a shock value of 3 or more? That’s it, I’m shelving this unplayable bugfest!

rezaf

1687

We are simply going to have no choice but disagree. Your definition of ‘unplayable’ is utterly daft to me. Is the game bug free? Hell no. Does it have things I think could be improved? Sure. But I have hundreds of hours playing these games, and have thoroughly enjoyed it.

Plus you seem to imply that we simply do not understand the game well enough if we don’t agree it is a broken mess. To which I laugh. I know this game exceptionally well. I know the intricacies of combat. I also think your ‘broken’ comment is overly dramatic hyperbole. Sorry, but the existence of edge cases where things don’t work 100% as intended does not ruin the game for me, and I would appreciate if you refrain from insinuating my opinion is either wrong or uninformed for disagreeing.

1688

No experience with EU4.

The problem for CK2 at least, is the last few patches really have been stupidly buggy. Not unplayable as a whole, but there are many things that are not functioning correctly. The latest patch/DLC has resulted in:

  • CTD on opening the religion menu for certain religions if Sons of Abraham is not owned/installed
  • Republics being completely broken, where succession simply did not function correctly if the new doge was of a different house than the previous one, resulting in destruction of the republic
  • Viceroyalties, a major feature of the DLC, being bugged to hell and back causing infinite stacking opinion penalties and also are unavailable on a loaded game
  • Some pagan religions missing holy sites resulting in inability to reform religion
  • Tribal conversion to feudal/republic being ridiculously poorly balanced
  • Norse unable to raid

The previous patch/DLC also had its share:

  • various crashing issues
  • broken multiplayer and OOS
  • bugs with the newly introduced revolt system resulting in huge numbers of vassals becoming independent when they shouldn’t be
  • major graphical issues
  • Muslims eating insane stacking opinion penalties due to a bug with auto assignment of tutors for their children

I mean, yeah, you could just not play Norse, not play republics, not play pagan in the current patch; and not play Muslim in the previous patch until said bugs are fixed, but there’s no avoiding all the bugs that show up with a new patch these days.

And while HRose’s is hyperboling as always, I am sympathetic to the viewpoint that these pileups of minor bugs or the rare major bug is pretty damn frustrating. I didn’t touch 2.1 until one and a half months after it was released. I’m doing the same for 2.2. I do love that Paradox lets you maintain a patch level through the Steam beta system for this.

But this is still annoying in a game that up until this year was really issue free.

1689

By the way, from reading the forums the impression I have is this:

EU4 is in a better state than CK2 and has been since last year, when CK2 went from relatively polished to a rather buggy mess. EU4 seems more stable, bug-wise, but there are a lot more complaints about actual game mechanics that people don’t like.

Right now, it seems that for some people EU4 has some game-breaking bugs, like crashing on launch or not being able to save at all, or running much worse than previous versions. Though people say the expansion has made the game more fun. On the other side CK2 seems much more messed up, whereas EU4 is probably just a few patches from being relatively smooth.

Oh, and to complete the picture if you listen to those who sink many hours into these kind of games the best Paradox game is neither CK4 nor EU4. But Victoria 2, and by far.

1690

Why is that?

1691

Not my own experience, I just read what other people write but I didn’t find a decent explanation. Usually CK2 and EU4 are considered the wide public games with big accessibility but lack of depth. Victoria 2 is instead considered more of a pure experience that hasn’t been “dumbed down” for the big public.

Though it also needs its own expansions, otherwise it’s considered shit.

1692

Thanks for the heads up fdsaion, I haven’t played CK2 in a good while and wasn’t aware Paradox were moving back to their own “good old times” where every game/patch they released was a horribly broken mess until a few more patches/hotfixes.

I maintain my point that you gotta be able to ignore/live with 50 of the 1000 things going on at any point not working properly in a Paradox game, but if that number is now more like 200 (i.e. 5 of the 25 really IMPORTANT things going on at that point don’t work), I can see that being problematic.

rezaf

1693

“Dumbed down” should be your trigger phrase to ignore the idiot on a Paradox forum.

Victoria 2 is a decent enough game, it just is the last of the old-school Paradox games. It’s not any less dumbed down, it just has that old-school Paradox clunk. See HOI3 for another example. I like that game a lot, but goddamn.

1694

I actually have had a great time with both CK2 (up to Old Gods) and Vicky2 (+AHD+HoD). I could see how one would think Vicky2 to be less “dumbed down” (the economy, mainly), but honestly they were both complex enough that I needed to just let things go on their own and not worry about controlling every little facet of my kingdom/nation.

I think if one is the kind of person who considers CK2 dumbed down compared to Vicky2, then, well, I could say some uncharitable things about one’s use of free time, but instead I’ll leave it at “then one has a significantly different expectation for video games than I (or most people) do, an expectation that I think is rather unrealistic.”

1695

Haha, HRose you’re a funny guy. Do you play any of these games BTW? Victoria 2 is weird compared EU4 and CK2. It’s an alright game with some unique ideas and mechanics but it’s honestly still somewhat of an unfinished mess. Last time I played it my economy was running negative but I was turning a profit, go figure. I long ago gave up on playing it. I’d love to see a ‘fixed’ Victoria 3 however on their new engine.

My take on the Paradox forums is this, the guys who post there are literally the biggest fans Paradox has. They probably have like 5000 hours played of EU4 and there is a thin line between love and hate sometimes! There is a lot of good info there but their perspective is easily warped. Guys who do world conquests aren’t the average player. I think by my posts here you’ll know I’m very into EU4 and frankly the guys on the Paradox forums scare me!

I love the new balance changes I’ve seen so far. England is sooo rich now thanks to the new trade node and mothballing. I haven’t seen how the AI does with them yet but I suspect it’s much improved. Definitely their best EU4 expansion yet and it’s probably going to take me a few months to get around to playing in all the various parts of the world to understand everything.

Performance is holding up as I get farther into the game. It’s only a little loss in speed overall.

1696

I agree that Victoria 2 is weird by comparison, but I didn’t get the idea that it was an unfinished mess. I played a game with the USA halfway to completion (~1900 ish) on AHD and one with France through to completion. I certainly wasn’t terribly challenged (but what do you want from playing as the USA and France) and I certainly, certainly didn’t understand every detail of everything, but I had enough of the grasp on stuff to understand what was what. I thought it did a wonderful job of having the scramble for Africa and WWI emerge “organically” from the game rules, so to speak.

1697

In the matter of Victoria 2 I pointed out that it’s considered good ONLY with the 2 expansions and latest patch, so it might be it’s an unfinished mess if you played a version without those.

On the matter of “dumbing down” it depends a lot on game design and the style of game you want. For example for me HoI3 was greatly dumbed down by the “neutrality” mechanic, which existed only to build artificial walls on the control you have on a nation. Since Paradox couldn’t script the game to behave historically, they made solid walls in order to FORCE it going a certain way.

But this destroys the point of these game, that is having the control and see the game evolve on the decisions you make. Removing decisions means removing some of the fun and the flexibility of the game.

Same as having a complex and intricate tech tree where each choice has complex tactical consequences, compared to a tech tree that is just a straight line. I’d rather play a game with the first option than the second.

There’s definitely a trend of removing complexity and number of moving parts. Meaning that the more recent games by Paradox are more like boardgames than grand strategy simulations. They become more accessible because it takes less time to master the game, but on the longer term you notice the game has less to offer, less control and less choice.

We’ll see what they do with HoI4, since I’m rather skeptical of what they are doing and I expect a disaster. Already HoI3 isn’t overall better than HoI2, just because HoI2 has way too many things that are simply better, despite HoI3 is much more advanced in certain other aspects. With HoI4 I really do wonder if it can manage even try challenging the previous two. I do wonder who they think their public is. The risk is that they don’t go for their core public and in the end they get neither the core public nor anyone else.

1698

I think you should just pack it in at this point. Since this is a thread about EU4, in what ways did EU3 have more choice or moving parts than this game? Compare EU4 and EU3 at both releases and EU3 is a joke in comparison, playing every nation was vanilla and it lacked alot of the more interesting features that are taken for granted now in both games. Even with all the expansions, I can’t think of any major moving part or choice paradigm that EU3 possessed that hasn’t been improved/expanded in EU4. By improved I don’t mean simplified either, although in many cases more accessible through greater transparency. Policy sliders do not represent more freedom of choice than ideas, either.

Last point, try to play EU4 or CK2 as a boardgame and it will probably take you a year just to do all the dicerolls and calculations in your head to progress one game day. Boardgame?!

1699

Yeah HRose, I’m sorry I have no way reasonably approach understanding here. Your point is so foreign and alien on EU4 to me. A boardgame? Nononono, about as polar opposite really.

You also can’t begin to say HOI3 is ‘dumber down’. Sorry, not buying it. It is by far the most fiddle, intricate, and unwieldy of the Paradox Interactive line. If anything it needs some more streamlining. Much of plying that game is a chore, things like the manufacturing interface.

EU3 to EU4 is also not a case of dumbing down. The interface is improved. Systems like trade got massively reworked to be the opposite of ‘dumber down’, they’re more intricate now! The monarch points increases the number of interesting decisions you make, as you have to decide if you increase a tech, get an idea, build a building or whatever off the limited point pool. If you don’t like those trade offs I can respect that. I can totally get how you may not like being able to build that barracks because you used harsh treatment, but it is a new set of choices. It adds depth to the game that EU3 did not have.

I adore EU3, but EU4 has more important choices, and more depth in many areas. It also has a better interface, which makes the game more accessible.

The Paradox forums are crazyland. To act as if certain people, and I know who some of those critics are as I’ve had my run ins with them, have a better view on the game is simply not going to fly for me. Have I gotten annoyed by changes or bugs at times? Hell yeah. But dumber down or unplayable are not adjectives that can reasonably be asserted.

1700

I loved EU1 because it was the first. It was a mess, but it was new, fresh, unique, challenging (and a very many games were a mess back then and it never seemed to bother young me).

EU2 was iterative and most things were subtly improved upon + fantastic modding scene.

EU3 was different, and most of the changes seemed to be ‘just for the sake of it’. Even with all the expansions (I tried Vanilla and then didn’t play it again until the second from last expansion) I never found it superior to EU2. In many ways I found it had taken retrograde steps trying to fix/change things that weren’t broken. I would still go back to EU2+AGCEEP over EU3.

EU4 was a revelation. Issues aplenty, but it improved. Lessons were learned. Paradox seemed to have a genuine direction and focus when creating the game rather than the ‘Ok guys, we have to make a sequel to EU2 now. It’s been 6 years, any ideas?’ ‘Uhhhh…’ of EU3