Paradox Plaza (official forum) can be unpleasant for devs

Will add that the AI still needs to be taught how to manage the new systems beyond the first 100 years or so, but that’s something of an evergreen issue that is most often solved by mods (thankfully).

Which in turn makes me ask what the preferred AI mods are these days. I last played seriously three years ago so I’m almost certainly out of date on many, many things.

Not sure that he has anything that counts as a tutorial vs. long plays like Quill18, but consider browsing what Pravus has. Just stumbled on him recently and find his stuff excellent.

I hear the base game was broken too with the patch, but I haven’t played EU4 in years, so I can’t confirm it.

Thanks. I am subscribed to him, but haven’t watched any yet.

That I’m unsure of now, but when I last played at length I liked this one most, it seems up to date still.

There’s a bunch of people doing videos for Paradox games, who knows why, maybe because they’re not terribly easy to get into? :D

But pick any popular Paradox game and I’m sure you’ll find someone doing decent to good videos every time there’s a big expansion or even just a patch to fix things.

Of course if you dislike videos, it’s not going to help, but it is what it is, the times of big, thick manuals that people could read like novels isn’t coming back, as that really old series Malcolm in the middle said, the future is now.

The trouble with video is that I don’t need an 8 hour introduction to the game, I need the two minutes where they explain that one mechanic that I don’t quite get. I guess as text-to-speech improves maybe it’ll become possible to text search for the part of the video you actually need. That would be the future.

Thanks @AK_Icebear. I think Gravius (or something like that) was the standard back when I last played.

… :O

I find it very hard to watch videos of Paradox games. I think it has to do with their interfaces. They’re small and take up tiny chunks of the screen, and their gazillion tabs and doohickeys mean that it’s really hard to know what the player is doing. I don’t have the same issue with other strategy games, where the interface takes over the screen and tends to be clearer.

I mean for this case that is, specifically, what the game wikis are for. The PDS game wikis are very good for this type of thing, and are actually maintained and up to date.

Like you want to know exactly how trade steering and trade power work in EU4, and how they are used to calculate retained trade value, as well as how trade forwarding increases values across the nodes? Those formulas are there and you can dig in to see exactly which modifiers you want to manipulate.

You want to try and spawn various institutions? The criteria and calculations are present. So you can see exactly what you need to do to try and maximize your chances.

So for most applications the information you want does already exist in text form.

Of absolutely, for games with well-maintained wikis this isn’t a huge issue.

The double whammy is games that don’t have an adequate tutorial and have wikis that are out of date. Bonus points for when some pages are more outdated than others and present conflicting information.

It seems they’ve learned their lesson, because they are no longer admitting it. This is the Head of Communication in a recent forum post:

“First, and I think this has been raised by everyone who made that point before: we welcome feedback and people being critical of your games, business, and/or actions. I don’t believe we’ve ever silenced, banned, or stopped working with someone because they were critical of us.”

Not talking about Paradox but game devs in general: none of them get paid nearly enough to deal with the torrent of shit gamers throw at them. It’s driven good devs like Travis Baldree out of the industry entirely.

If I were in the industry there is no way I would have “fan” interaction. I’d pay someone to be the interface, I’m not dealing with that. And I’m certainly not going to pour months of time designing something I’m really proud of just to have it torn apart and shit on by every moron with an armchair and a keyboard that hasn’t even tried it yet let alone thought through some of the finer points of why things were done a particular way.

Paradox devs write up dev diaries nearly every week. They stick around and interact with fans. I get angry just reading those threads and I’m a bystander. The Paradox forums are just a cesspool, I don’t blame any one of their developers for not wanting to maintain that kind of contact with the customer base any more.

I agree 💯 with what’s written above. I miss the days when games were made and we just played them, not watched them be played and designed by committee over years and maybe never actually being complete.

There is a place for some of that for sure, but it seems like that’s how every game outside the three console makers’ first party offerings are made now.

And obviously if you do it your way as a dev, you can easily get massive backlash even while selling millions like Last of Us 2 did last summer.

While some games are awful in the design by committee way, other games have become real gems because of it.

As I said, sometimes it works out, but far too often too many cooks spoil or create generic broth.

I’m with DaveLong. I like when a game has a clear vision, and goes for it even when it’s flawed. Though I know games that took feedback and improved by leaps and bounds (AI War 2 being such an example). But between “designing by comittee” and “commiting to a vision”, I’ll usually prefer the latter.

When it comes to strategy games, you have to have a ton of testers to iterate over ideas and mechanics, and even if you do have them internally (only the big companies do), even the best internal testers don’t match the quality of the dedicated community members. So there really isn’t much of a choice not to interact with the community. Long gone are the days when Sid Meier brought a new floppy to work every day and Bruce Shelley would give him feedback that same afternoon.