I am not sure how EU4 is a strategy role playing game, every tiny role-playing element in the game was added by DLC and is trivial anyway. The game was built to be paint the map by color, and it is vastly superior to most other strategy games for this purpose because:
It simulates (in its own way) the historical world, so people with knowledge and a sense of history can get great satisfaction to changing world events and taking a nation that really existed down a different path.
Asymmetric start. The game has great AI, but to be honest it doesn’t even need it because the best way to tune difficulty is to start as a smaller nation. There are so many nations in different parts of the world no two playthroughs will have the same strategic situation in the early and mid game, and no two will have exactly the same level of difficulty. Symmetric start strategy games always have the problem that once you figure out how to outcompete the standard AI you either have to resort to versing cheat AI or just let go of the game.
I could go on and on but I think the two above are the main things.
And that, right there, is what I mean by a “strategy role playing game.” Getting that sense doesn’t require painting the map your color. Hell, painting the map your color completely breaks any sense of history IMO, it’s why I avoid it.
Stellaris, the Cities: skylines of the space 4X genre! Well, not exactly since Skylines isn’t really about the stories it’s about the creation of a pleasing city layout.
I guess at this point we’re just engaging in semantics, as I think we mean the same thing. For instance, if you play as the Ottomans and conquer Rome, that is a very immersive accomplishment and means something to you as the player, much more than say playing CIV and conquering the random town that was called Rome on a randomly generated map.
Regardless, the core gameplay loop of EU4 is waging war, taking provinces in peace deals, and then waging more war. It is extremely addictive and well done, and it is the main reason the game is so popular. I would agree with your “strategy role playing game” argument for CK2, as the map painting in that game was pretty poor but the role playing was so good. CK3 is a bit different, as I think both aspects of the game are very good.
I’m talking specifically about world conquest (painting the whole map your color) as being anethema to the whole “touching history” aspect of these games. In past iterations WC wasn’t even possible in these games, but there’s been a lot of push from a certain segment of players to make it moreso.
It’s funny, I’ve aggressively bounced off CK2 at least a dozen times now, despite the fact that it seems like exactly what I want. I liked CK1. Maybe I’ll get along better with 3.
I beg to differ. I did WC all the way back in EU1 and EU2 (even wrote an AAR on the second one). The game mechanics have always been kind of exploitable in that respect. It was extremely tedious in the first one, though - since you could only get max 3 provinces per war, IIRC. And the second one required a lot of boring time trying to colonize all those far off places in Siberia, et al.
It’s hard to say, he doesn’t seem very outspoken, and not being able to be on camera makes it even harder to say. In his defense, though, the game was already a salad that the revamp, interesting as it might’ve sounded, made even more so, with all the civics and policies and etcs giving you a lot of levers that are much more indirect than the dreaded +x modifiers. If you’re filling someone’s beloved shoes, it’s understandable you wouldn’t want to fundamentally change them soon.
My second game after Megacorp was a return to modded 2.1, and it was fun. It wasn’t the competitive 4x it never tried to be, but things flowed, the AI wasn’t silent as actual trade existed, wars weren’t as easy as the planet management wasn’t awful and you didn’t spend so long changing them to adapt to your economy. Sometimes, abstraction is good, many variations of buildings that affect your game through 3 layers of indirection, not so much. It doesn’t help that the diplomacy game, as far as it isn’t broken for a year, cares more about distance than anything common goals.
We’ll see what the patch (well, the patch’s second patch, yawn) changes and fixes, some of that magic can come back. But it will never be the another 4x puzzle box, ugh :P
I definitely had way to many alerts in CK2, as I could never figure out the menu, but I liked that I could easily know what was going on and what my “rival” and other “interesting” families were up to. In 3, I just see some territories changing colors. Ok, partially because I’m not that used to the UI yet, but it feels something’s missing if you want to care for more than your immediate family. France splintered into duchies, what happened? Is it a bug? I have no idea, and no idea how to find out.
Yes, that’s exactly the right word, “exploitable.” It was considered breaking the game to do that, at the time, to the point where when straightforward ways to do it were found they would be patched out.
Attempted to be patched out, I’d rather say. Sometimes it just made things worse, as when tweaks to Badboy actually made it much easier to conquer everything, since you’d end up with everyone ganging up on you, usually resulting in massive player conquests (because the AI has always been inept) at much lower cost than if the player had to do all those war declarations individually. Fun times.
Though honestly - I really can’t think of any time when WC was anathema to these games - and I’ve played them from the very start (still have my original German version of the EU disc somewhere - it didn’t come in English until months later). I think the only one I did not play very much was EU3. It’s always been a “paint the map” game - even more so in the early iterations, IMO, because there wasn’t much more to the game back then. I think it’s more the hardcore fanbase that went on about this rather than Paradox themselves; they always - even back in the early days- played the “it’s not history” card.
The Paradox games are so fascinating to analyze because they’re so different:
The first thing to note is that they’re all based on what would normally be considered ‘fixed scenarios’ in other strategy games. Most computer strategy games have randomized starts for longevity, but Paradox games (except for the glaring exception of Stellaris) have set maps and start conditions. The longevity comes from the fact that there are a lot of possible start conditions, since a whole world map is simulated. This is so radically different.
The second thing to note is the lack of victory conditions. Unlike other strategy games, nobody’s trying to win. Instead, the goals are either based on missions the game suggests to you, or your own personal goals. This seems to be a big deficiency, but it actually settles the dichotomy between the AI playing to win and playing in a ‘realistic’ way that every other strategy game has. Additionally, it frees you up to choose weak starting nations that couldn’t possibly defeat stronger nations in any sense of victory.
The third thing to note is the number of entities in the game. Most strategy games have a maximum of 6-8 races or competitors. Having a lot more entities in the game means that it’s much easier to play various entities off each other. Diplomacy can now be much more sophisticated: alliances can always be found somewhere, and everyone has allies and enemies. The web of connections between entities mean that the diplomatic-political part of the game feels a lot richer than in any other strategy game.
The province-based map view is sufficiently high level that the player isn’t usually concerned with building up as much as in other games. Similarly, you generally don’t have as much building-related micromanagement as is required for workers and settlers in the earlier Civ games.
On the other hand, the downside of there being no real competition with other entities, is that there’s no real optimization problem to solve, which is the heart of strategy. A player might be completely unaware of entire systems within the games, and yet so long as they accomplish their goals (either personal or mission-based), what does it matter? (This is why so many Paradox DLCs add new systems - they can be used or ignored and it makes little difference to the game). Does it matter if the player accomplishes his goals faster or more slowly? Unless the mission is time-based, the answer is no. Paradox games are the sandboxes of strategy games, and it’s not clear that they are strategy games at all.
These are the points where I think Stellaris made some mistakes. There is too much detail at the planet level (even with the starting economy and the new economy is way more complex). That and the way ships are handled limited the scalability of the game, which limited the diplomacy. Also, the star map doesn’t have an “ocean”, so it limits the number of useful interactions.
I haven’t played it in a long, long time but when I did I played with 3 other people with really no problems. I mean we didn’t do much with each other except chat and talk about our day as well as the game. The bigger issue is normally wars which is where you have to slow it down.
It’s the same group I would play CK3 with and Civ games so the length is never an issue. The game just sort of, well it was awful around where it starts to deal with war and diplomacy
I gave up on the game awhile ago, but the other two tried to play and couldn’t connect to each other. I should check to see when the last time it was they tried.
If you’re playing with people you know and can save/continue a campaign over the course of multiple sessions I think it works well. If you’re talking about jumping into a random game, that’s really not my bag but I know there’s a community for it.
