I know Wiz did this with Stellaris, but I think replacing the core mechanics like the price level stuff is less likely in Vic3. It was super painful to do in Stellaris and I think they took that lesson to heart and spent a lot of time on the core foundations in this game.
For sure. It’s always a question of how far down the rabbit hole you go. I guess I just want to say that while there are tricky consequences of having a more realistic price setting mechanism, there are also tricky consequences of having a less realistic mechanism.
It probably won’t be to the same extent as stellaris, but I think it’s inevitable that once the game is being played by thousands of players some fairly deep flaws would surface and need to be addressed. The systems they are trying to model are simply too complex to get right on v1.0, either in terms of verisimilitude or playabilty.
I think that’s true, but I think the problems will be addressed by things like the change to profit calculation for trade routes. They tried it one way, found a deep problem, and decided to work around the problem because that is about 100x less development and testing time than addressing the deep problem. Honestly if I were in charge I’d be wary of cracking everything open at the core as well, since there is no guarantee that deep surgery is going to work out versus something more narrowly targeted at the particular gameplay problem.
I’m delighted they are reversing the rule that you can only earn achievements on ironman mode. I have 2,000 hours on HOI IV and I have two achievements.
There are games I play ironman, like Kerbal. But I don’t play Paradox games in ironman for several reasons, First, the games are complex, I can have hundreds of hours and still not fully understand how a new system works. Second, they have bugs, on my occasion, I’ve been able to choose a different path to avoid a bug, and finally, I definitely like my scum saves.
Well, I am very disappointed by this decision. Looking at the percentage of players that have each achievement is something I often did with other paradox games to order the difficulty of them, and seeing the flowing border of a particularly hard achievement in my profile was fun for me. Achievement runs have been 90% of my paradox games since EU4.
Now none of that has any meaning. It isn’t just the lack of ironman requirement, it is the lack of a checksum requirement. Unlocking all the achievements is now a trivial exercise that can be done without even playing the game.
The reaction to this is inevitably “but you can earn the achievements exactly how you did before”, but psychologically it is fundamentally different. Achievements in steam are like grinding to unlock a top tier weapon in a classic mmo. They are one of the few ingame commodities in modern gaming that are legitimately rare and can’t be wrecked by microtransactions.
I understand how a team could make this decision, to help players like @Strollen who don’t want to play ironman. But there are winners and losers to these types of choices, and I am firmly in the latter.
I prefer playing ironman cause it feels like a “fair” approach. Like without it my performance is defined only by my pacience, with savescumming I can achieve anything I want. It’s ok for curated linear experiences but in a dynamic game like this it’s like having a clairvoyance.
But it’s fine achievements are unlocked. People who would want to savescum won’t affect thes statistics a lot. There were ways to cheat achievements before too if you really wanted them. They still require vastly different effort to achieve.
I’d prefer achievements remain iron man only. I read one suggestion that an achievement without iron man have one icon, and with ironman have a highlighting border - that would be a decent compromise I think.
Or at least keep some of the achievements as “In Ironman…”.
Although for me the checksum thing is annoying if I ever want to check out some small mods but have to choose between that or achievements.
Paradox games are certainly one of the few places I care about achievements as they often provide a goal or two each game once I’ve put in enough time to need something new to try for. That said, I can’t imagine the number of people who will just cheat unlock all the achievements will be so high as to ruin all the percentages on Steam.
Yeah, it’s very annoying how CK3 mods that add new cosmetics or affect UI turn off achievements. Even if I don’t plan on getting any specific achievement I feel like I’m judged. I play on ironman anyway and I feel something lost from my soul when I realize that I’ve actually legitimately completed the achievement but I don’t get the icon because my rulers had modded fancy hats.
If we can’t use achievements to sort good people (honest, capable, and hardworking, worthy of respect and even admiration) from bad people (cheaters and liars, losers in video games and in real life), what is even the point?
Never cared about them, what happens happens and the rest is a waste of time, especially at the cost of QoL. Thought about using hack tools to ruin the stats for the git gud crowd, but that would be caring, which I don’t, so I didn’t.
I just wish I could turn off the annoying pop-ups, which Ironman did for me. I do like the salt, especially the “why only 40% of players played the real game™”.
I wanted to get archievements in Paradox games, but i like to try some mods with it, especially in Stellaris. So i learned about hexediting the game .exe
And now i get achievements with mods. Best thing ever.
FYI Paradox are doing a first stream of the game in 45 minutes, along with release date announcement and preorders on steam being up:
I am a little torn. I have successfully avoided reading any of the developer diaries (in an attempt to not overhype myself and just enjoy what games are available). Now that I am so close, I am tempted to do something I have never done since picking up EU3 on a whim many years ago: go into a Paradox grand strategy game completely blind!
