It’s true that he left, and it’s true the code is a mess (and also not a very good model, sorry).
He’s been back for a while, though, working in a secret future project.
So, Vicky 3.
History of Rome is a great podcast.
Oops, see it mentioned above.
I can confirm I have been playing it on Win10.
Regarding the talk about the engine, Johan mentioned this on the forum:
Not sure if he expects anyone to know what a ‘Jomini layer’ is about.
Not sure if Jomini would like to be just a layer over Clausewitz. 😒
I was going to write a Clausewitz/Jomini joke that made fun of Ciil War generals and said something about aping methods and not using concepts and took a poke at Paradox as well, but then I got tired and remembered that I am tardy on a Political turn…
New dev diary is up and is about the map. They are subdividing the provinces into many smaller “cities” with the example given of Sicily being broken into 23 cities. This terrifies me and I hope they really do this in a way to make everything manageable and that such detail actually adds to the game. One slightly reassuring thing is that he mentions that more provinces didn’t work out so great with HoI3.
I’ve got a lot of opinions about their map that I need to organize into a proper rant, but here’s a few observations for now:
Why are there 23 cities in Sicily? Is it because that makes for good gameplay or is a good way to represent history? Or is it because there’s approximately 23 ancient cities in Sicily that we know the names of today? They would have included more if it was possible, because more is always better.
Over the course of development, we have used a great number of sources, texts and maps in order to craft what we believe, is an immersive, living world, which is as close to history as is possible.
I’d like to know what percentage of the provinces in the game we know anything at all about from 300 BC. What percentage are known from any source other than Strabo and Ptolemy? Does it really add anything to the game to put in some little province in northern Europe and under the name that Ptolemy used for it centuries later?
It’s Paradox Swedish-Fish Candy. Any resemblance to any historical product is purely coincidental. Just like in HOI when the Japanese conquer the world with their…Battleships…
No way to answer this yet, we’re going to have to wait and see how those cities are modeled and what they do. I’m curious as well!
The more I think about this the more I really have to imagine they have a good reason for doing it this way, and we just will have to wait to see the details later(hopefully sooner). Paradox/Johan aren’t exactly new at this and they’ve even screwed up this very thing before, so it’s hard to imagine they’d fall into the same trap for no real reason. It was a poor idea to tease this without giving a better justification, although you wouldn’t think that from reading the comments on the diary.
I’m just happy I can read the fonts without the use of mods
Why is India warped backward in such a weird way? Plate tectonics haven’t dragged India forward that much since the 1st century BC lol.
That’s the map that made flat-earthers brains snap.
The map looks great!
I like that they are focusing on one start, I always go for the earliest one in all of their games (except CK2 where it was the expansions that added earlier dates). The cities / province dichotomy seems like it could be a good way to combine the intelligibility of larger provinces whilst maintaining precise troop movement of small tiles and the tactical options that allows. I just hope we won’t have to siege down all 23 cities in sicily to take a couple in a peace deal!
I also liked the historical discussion in the dev diary, especially where they bent it a smidge for gameplay purposes (e.g. allowing experienced players to play as small dependent states like Judea instead of modeling them as a province in a larger territory).
I had to run, so apologies if I just dropped an image and left.
They’re just using a different map projection than what you’re used to seeing. The above projection has India similarly “skewed” from how we’re used to seeing it. The above is the Werner projection, I believe. I’m not sure if it’s what they’re using, but the different projections show different areas more accurately.
Speaking of maps, and sizes…
That’s a factor of roughly 3.2 over EU IV. That’s massive.
For anyone too lazy to click Craig’s link, it has Johan mentioning that the pixel count of the map is much increased over previous games. Which to me doesn’t necessarily mean a whole lot, as you can scale the map up or down depending on the resolution of the player’s pc. It does sound like this map will look even crisper on a 4k display which is great!
Also said by Johan in the thread: