Very. If they retract it in future games, I’ll consider a purchase. It’s sad. Paradox was one of very few publishers whose games I bought automatically. No more.
For me it was HoI2 that convinced me never to buy another Paradox game. Ambitious, detailed and so terribly, terribly, flawed. HoI2 you were supposed to be a thing of beauty! Agh, but the pain it still hurts…
Could you elaborate a bit? I’d be interested to hear the reasons since HoI2 was just Paradox design as usual, pretty much, albeit less intuitive.
Huh, I actually consider HoI2 the most focused of the Paradox games, and much of the design is streamlined (in a good way) from HoI1/Victoria. It’s still my favorite of the bunch (btw what will probably be the final patch for the game is due next month).
I’m willing to give their new Roman game a try, it seems as though they’re going for a more Crusader Kings feel for the title which could be interesting in the Roman Republic period.
I really enjoyed HoI2, EU3, not as much. I agree that the difficulty for HoI2 is like a vertical wall to scale, but once done it plays quite well. If I dinged it for anything, it’s that the actual enjoyment of the manual, and move planning is completely undone with their style of turn play. I don’t get as much of the “just one more turn” that I do with say, Civ4. So I find it way too easy to start a game and then walk away from it, never to finish.
I too would play a Roman oriented game. I think it would play into Paradox’s game system well.
Based on comments in this thread, I picked HoI2 on the weekend. It seems like a pretty good game. I like the economic model overall and I like the concept of unit organization.
I’m sure this comment comes up all the time, but I think I’d like it better as turn-based game. There’s a lot of things going on all at once, and your attention keeps getting yanked from one place to another. You can sort of simulate turn-based by stopping at regular intervals, but that’s not optimal play because you often want to respond to an attack in progress and so on.
I guess. Pausing a lot became second nature to me, and once you figure out what you’re supposed to be doing most of the decisions aren’t that timedependant. The only time I feel the press of realtime is when I’m coordinating massive advances.
To be honest I counted the time freeze as nearly the same thing as a turn based game. (Yes I know it’s not, but still, there’s only so much you can do, you end up using it a lot, or I did anyway …) I agree with you I like that, but as a whole, my interest would wane over the course of a game.
I didn’t try the expansions though, they might have added a lot that I would enjoy.
Does EU2 need to be patched? If so, is the latest official patch enough or are there fan patches and such? I have the game but haven’t installed it.
Yes, definitely.
Get the latest patch, and you probably want the latest AGC-EEP fan patch with extra historical events on top of that.
You want the latest official patch and the AGCEEP fan patch. I’m too lazy to hunt up links for you, though. AGCEEP is a merger of the 2 best fan mods, the Advanced Grand Campaign and the Event Exchange Project. Really deepens the game, with many historical and flavor events for all nations.
I guess I’m thinking particularly of the USSR '41 scenario. You generally want to launch attacks at dawn in order to get as many hours of daylgiht fighting time in as possible. More commonly, I’d like to respond quickly by counter-attacking to help defend an adjacent province ( to take the steam out of the attacker). There are also narrow windows to counter-attack when the side generally on the offensive has just claimed a province with a few lead elements but the bulk of the forces haven’t arrived yet.
Oh I definitely agree. The East Front is the worst offender by far. It gets a little easier a couple months in since you can focus on smaller sectors when you’re no longer pushing for a general advance along the entire front.
Well, part of it is that - design as usual. I like my games to be more or less complete at release and Paradox games are nigh-unplayable at that point. To be fair, they do a good job at post-production support, but what’s often overlooked is the sorry state of the game at release. If I want to play a paradox game, i’ll wait a year and get it in the bargain bin and i can be assured the game will be mostly what’s advertised on the package.
As for the game in particular - out of the box, it was broken. The ai was inept, many of the mechanics clearly broken. It’s funny, but it looks like everything is great with fow on - but when you remove it, the blinders really come off: you seen units bouncing back and forth between areas way behind the lines, literally hundreds of units stationary behind the lines, doing nothing, air and ship units run ragged to the point of being ineffectual(was that the readiness stat?), allied ai that didn’t know how to perform an amphibious landing(kinda important) and then the dreaded ai stop bog(where it just stops doing anything)
In some ways, i forgive it for alot(hence the ambitious) - my mind kinda boggles at what the cpu must be tasked with, what 100+ countries each with economy, dipolomacy, research, production, air/land/sea movement, battles, etc and all in real time - it’s just enormous.
You can find the AGC-EEP patch at the website - agceep.net - agceep Resources and Information.
you can find the latest patch at - http://www.paradoxplaza.com/downloads/eu2_1.09.exe
A new EUIII expansion was announced today. Here’s the post from the Paradox forums…
EU III EXPANSION “IN NOMINE” REVEALED
While the developers are busy putting their finishing touches on EU: Rome, the team is already thinking ahead and we are thrilled to announce the next expansion for EU III - “In Nomine” (requires Napoleon’s Ambition). This is what Producer Johan Andersson had to say about the expansion:
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Start in October 1399, at the coronation of Henry IV of England. Experience over 50 more years of gameplay, experiencing the Byzantine Empire, Tamerlane and the end of the Hundred Years War.
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Se exactly what is required to make the decisions that will shape the future of your country. Strive to create Great Britain, Make Paris worth a Mass, or institute an East Indian Trade Company. Act, rather than react, and implement decisions on both country and province level, with the new decision system, including hundreds of different decisions depending on situation.
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Experience our new Mission System, where the player and AI will both be given goals to achieve, providing endless replayability by guiding history along different tracks every time.
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In Nomine will feature Rebels with a Cause. There are countless types of rebels, with different goals, and different abilities. You may get colonial rebels in your colonies determined to get representation or independence, you may get reactionary nobles rising up to put the serfs back where the belong. Crush them by force, or negotiate with them, or even worse, watch them enforce their demands on your country.
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Religious tolerance now depends on the ideas and decisions you take, making it a new layer of strategy. As cardinals stay loyal longer, the power of the Papa Controller has grown, as he can now excommunicate rulers, and call crusades against infidels.
Revised AI, focusing on strategic top level goals, with support for fully scriptable logics.
“In Nomine” is scheduled for release before the summer. Head over to our forums if you want to discuss this game.
Nothing in that uninspiring list to make me change my mind about boycotting Paradox. Try harder next time, guys–it sounds more like a patch than an expansion.
Yeah, EU2’s timeline went from 1420 to 1820. Paradox is still playing catchup. I would REALLY like to see EU2 ported to EU3’s engine instead of the non-deterministic weirdness they seem wedded to.
They’ve been issuing ‘megapatches’ for $5 lately (one for Victoria and one for HOI2) so I suspect this would be similar. It’s probably worth $5, but no more.
The mission system is back? Wow.
At least all the Paradox Cult of Byzantium will be happy.
Troy
That’s the Paradox patch policy in a nutshell. Bug or feature? When in doubt, charge money for it. Anything that resembles a feature or UI improvement gets put on the backburner until it can all be shoveled together in an “expansion”. Quite frankly that kind of post-release support pisses me off more than if they hadn’t bothered fixing the game in the first place…