All it is is fricking marketing to appeal to morons who think "oooh so many provinces and buttons" despite there not being any semblance of real strategy. The only reason these games are so popular is all because paradox are experts in creating an illusion of complexity.
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It's called grand strategy because the game costs a grand when it's done.
Kek , you are probably troony who hate glorious history of germany !
they are the target demographics though
trannies and lovers of german "history"
can you stop jerking off, robbie
The end result of making a perfect war/politics simulator would be a game that is not fun, super frustrating and it's not possible anyways
They’re good because they have a wide array of simple systems that all tie back into each other. PDX is on the borderline where their games’ systems are just self-referential enough to be okay. Even Vic 3 was okay with how economics tied into politics.
All games are illusions. You can minimize any game into “all you’re doing is pushing buttons” because that’s what every video game is. It’s the context in which you push those buttons that makes a game fun. In Grand Strategy the idea is that pushing any one button is going to effect like three different things. It’s not common, and PDX is slipping at it, but that’s the ideal.
Only if you are talking about slop titles like eu4. Vicky2 actually has elements of real grand strategy i.e. long term decision making, though it's still not a very difficult game.
>le old game good
Wrong
moron
I got tired of EUIV when I saw guys like Zlewikk absolutely desecrated it with minmaxxing. Vic 2 is sheltered from behavior like that.
Vic2 also has a fair share of min maxing.
2-4% clergy, conqueoring uncivilized nations and encouraging soldier pops, annoying sphere of influence mini game where you can abuse the AI to win over anything, 100% tax rates, crashing the market by hoarding and selling goods.
You just never bothered to find out.
This.
Once you bother to delve into vic2 in any serious capacity the exploitation and min/maxing isn't any better. The more I played it the more I realized it wasn't very good either, it just has a couple systems that scratch a particular itch that no other games scratch.
honest question, what's wrong with minmaxing, you can roleplay all you want, but tbtbh making the game your b***h and transforming it into simple math is part of the fun of discovery and learning mechanics
Lack of BOTH narrative and a proper gameplay.
Yes, playing a game by its rules so you can win is not inherently bad. In fact, horning your skills and finding the most effective way is part of the fun. (Which is kinda ruined nowdays due to all the walkthroughs and autistis mining data)
For example, let's say I want more soldiers for Greece in Victoria II, so I can form the Byzantium. If I were roleplaying, I would simply encourage my pops into becoming soldiers and raise their salaries.
But the "most effective way" to achieve this would be conquering Tunis on day 1, and converting their population as soldiers, because the core Greek population is better used for other tasks such as raising literacy, industrialization, etc.
Greece 1836 invading Africa? This is pure nonesense both narrative and history wise, in a (alt) historical game. And when this set of actions is just a few clicks, you can notice how the gameplay itself is nothing but a convoluted excel spreadsheet, rather than reason and narrative driven nation management and political decision making.
It is especially exacerbated when achievementgays and compgays start complaining so the gameplay and balance patches start revolving around them instead of adding, say, flavors or straigtening out the gameplay narratives.
The problem is not as severe in games like Starcraft where you have to juggle with a bunch of units and buildings, which still fits the simple narrative of military management, even though it's called "asiaticclicks", but the hate is irrationally mixed with disdain towards metagays and compgays as the Western audience of this genre looks down on esportification of the games.
Nevertheless, in games like Vicky2 where narrative is everything, I cannot help but feel min-maxing ruins the experience for narrative driven players while also interfering with game developments.
But I'd generally blame the devs for poorly though out game structuring and designs, instead of the gamers themselves.
>she doesn't know about 4 INT 4 ART 1 HUS 1 ENG
>she doesn't know about how the tech tree is basically choosing between three possible orders of researching things in, mainly depending on what state the economy of your c**t starts out as
>part of the fun of discovery and learning mechanics
You don't really "discover" anything when you minmax, you read guides online that discover things for you and then play the game in repetitive ways. Then you go "this game isn't good because it's not deep" because you only tried out the minmaxed mechanics.
there is literally 0 reason to do consumer good factories outsides of reg clothes and liquor to prevent revolts
industry is just mil factory spam
For me it's fact, that there is no empire-management.
Rebels are whack-a-mole completely worthless because you know 10 years ahead where and when and how many of them will show up.
Estate system/disaster system is a mini-game to give you more mana, and ever a serious threat.
Armies don't require manpower to maintain so, combining this force limit, you end up in situations where you force limit is max and your manpower pool is max, so you end up recruiting new regiments just so that manpower doesn't disapear.
But I think my worst grip is teleportation.
Generals can teleport to other side of the world
Manpower is universal so if you acquire a province in the other side of the world, you can recruit 10K troops there without having ship them over.
Play EU3 then, it has no mana bullshit and no warning of upcoming rebels.
Not him, but I might actually do this, bros. I picked it up again last year and got frustrated by cascading alliances, but someone said if you focus on the war leader they're not too bad, so I'm willing to have another go at the game. What country should I play as? My longest-lasting campaigns from back in the day were Lithuania and Sweden; I was considering Castile since that's babby mode and I haven't touched the game in forever, but I'm open to other suggestions.
Eu3
>play as France
>Basically ignore everything except building armies and annexing everything asap
>royal marriages? Alliances? Frick off. Have a french cavalry stack invading your ass instead.
>Build massive army constantly at war
>Oh so the Golden Horde wants to frick with me? frick you with this unbeatable stack of French cav
>bad boy = good cos it means more wars = more territory to take
>laugh as I obliterate army after army, nation after nation
>make sure to wipe out every colonial power first so they cant spread. Frick you Spain, England and Portugal.
>never create colonies
>constantly pillage the native Americans and Africans for gold. Once they run out of gold wipe them out.
>wipe everyone out leaving papal state to last, no vassals left, annexed them all. Frick you Ming, frick you Japan, you aren't safe from a french cav stack, even in the year 1550AD
>total world conquest before 1590AD. Entire map colored blue.
I am obviously a superior person. Get down on your fricking knees and worship me, plebs.
>not starting out as *ngland so that you can blob even faster
I think they had a CB or whatever to take over all of France, though that might have been with a mod.
EU3 England starts already at war with France (it's 1399) and the war goal gives you a PU if you win
The real reason is because map painting is fun, I used to paint maps on microsoft paint back in 1999 before I even knew Paradox existed.
might as well play age of history moron. At least then you wouldn't have to pay soo much money for all the dlcs. Also 1999? You're old asf gtfo
i think hoi map painting is more fun. for some reason i find it much more immersive
Honestly the board games are way better. Play those with friends for good times
Are there more complex political/military simulators out there?
I get being upset that the 'state of the art' hasnt really progressed much, but there is a lot more complexity in paradox titles than stuff like civ.
Also the ability to create a believable illusion is a sizable chunk of what makes a game developer good. If you think you can make a fun game that is more "strategic" and complex then go for it, id love to see more competition in the space. Pdx gets away with a lot of bs because no one else is in that market
>The only reason these games are so popular is all because paradox are experts in creating an illusion of complexity.
I think they're popular because they appeal to nationalist sentiment or ideology. People just want to make their country bigger on the map. Gameplay has little to do with it.
then why isn't Superpower popular?
it's okay man they just aren't for you
go back to games with no "illusion of complexity" like diablo or a first person shooter or whatever and have fun
I've been into this genre for too long
I never saw the improvements I was dreaming about, if anything things got actively worse
Wanted to see a more intensive economic and population simulation in EU3, instead I got EU4 mana simulator that grew into a button/modifier bloatfest as the DLC kept being pumped out
Wanted to see advanced peace negotiations in CK2, logistics, better diplomacy and internal mechanics. Instead over a decade later we get the same thing but with 3d models (which apparently makes it a 10/10 for zoomers), teleporting troops, waterwalking and farting event spam
Loved V2 for its closed/circulating economy system and pop simulation, one of the few of its kind, despite the imperfections. V3 releases and it completely abandoned this concept, you can pass "anti-racism" and make the entire planet an accepted culture and warfare consists of "attack" and "defend"
Also disappointing how throughout all these years no company ever managed to seriously challenge Paradox's market share, meaning that Paraisraelites are actually getting rich for destroying the genre
What's funny is that all these years later I've now heard of boomers who think that even the games in the Paradox library that (You) cherish are trash.
Some people thought EU3 was trash compared to EU2 because it was too non-linear, so the world you'd get were way more ahistorical than what EU2 produced (though I think they were talking about modded EU2 as it's currently presented in For The Glory on Steam, so that might not be a fair comparison). I've also been told that Victoria 1 had a more detailed military simulation than Victoria 2 somehow, though I still need to verify this myself (haven't had time lately to learn a new game, but Vic1 is currently first on my backlog). HOI3 was basically rejected by most of the community during its lifetime, most people were playing modded HOI2 (Darkest Hour, Kaiserreich, whatever shit Pavlos made that got memed to high heaven). So basically these games were never good, you and me just remember them being good because back then they were the only games that catered to the autists that made alternate history maps in MS Paint.
>Also disappointing how throughout all these years no company ever managed to seriously challenge Paradox's market share, meaning that Paraisraelites are actually getting rich for destroying the genre
The way I've understood it is that what Paradox was putting out back then was meant to compete with Total War, except this was autistic Total War for people who always hit auto resolve. Now it's developed into its own niche, and you'll sometimes see companies try to release competing products, but the problem is that Paradox fans aren't into strategy games but are into Paradox games and won't accept things that are similar but different. For example, there are a shitton of WWII hexshits out there that do a better job of simulating the war than HOI4, but Paradox fans playing HOI4 care more about putting Trotsky in charge of Mexico, or modding the game to make Trotsky the leader of Mexico at the start.
Bro you just described ck2/ck3 perfectly for me. I hate lowest common denominators.
Gilded Destiny is a competitor. Age of History III is a competitor. Espiocracy is a competitor. I swear paracucks are blind and actually like being cucked.
hardly can call a bad attempt at copying the original a competitor. now if they've seen any success or tried new and genuinely good things, that would be a different discussion. the level of development that paradox games have right now puts any new contestants lightyears behind.
now don't get me wrong, i loathe paradox just as much as i loathe creative assembly for how they've basically monopolized the genres, but for me to try your game which is very obviously building on the core of something else, it needs to actually represent something other than jealousy of success.
>hardly can call a bad attempt at copying the original a competitor
>Gilded Destiny is a competitor.
>Espiocracy is a competitor.
Let's cool it a moment; 2/3 games that anon mentioned haven't even released. If they do, and they are good, they certainly will be valid competitors instead of cheap knockoffs like you are implying.
Hopefully they don't ended up being vaporware.
Tried this game years ago but was overwhelmed by the cluttered UI with a million buttons and had no idea what to do or what to click. There's no tutorial. Never touched it again. I don't understand why there is so many paradox games threads.
I've learnt the game by getting completely trounced by Europeans as Inca and vowing to take revenge by any means necessary.
Vicky and GOY$ trannies
Didn't we already had this thread? "Grand" strategy is a term of art, it means strategy devised at the highest level. You roleplay not an army but an entire state, and direct the entire state's activity toward whatever end you set. There is no greater authority you report to, and you contend with other entities of the same level of authority you have - other countries in a state of anarchy with one above all of you
Technically a giant portion of /vst/ games are grand strategy. any map painter is. any 4X.
4X isn't grand strategy
I like grand strategy, because of how I can choose where to expand, instead of having some kind of story campaign that makes no difference regardless of how well or how poorly I do, other than a game0over if you lose completely. in gsg's If I frick up, I suddenly play a completely different story about a country trying to come back from a humiliating defeat, and If I do incredibly well, I can feel it in what I can do from there onwards, rather than everything playing outt the same as if I just barely won.
offtopic, but this is why I like the ponymod for Hoi4, the focus trees, which I usually don't really like as a railroading tool rather than a toolset for you to use in Hoi4, usually account for you failing to do stuff you're supposed to, and/or doing better than what was expected.
That feeling of agency to outcome is what I chase in all my vidya, and not just strategy games.
I think of them like weeb gacha games. They're built for a very specific audience of insufferable people. Just replace "anime" with "Germany/Rome/Ottomon Empire"
Tell us more about how both your grandfathers fricked your arse.
projecting much
wehraboo can't handle the truth
Close, but no cigar. The gay analogy should have tipped you off it was a actually turkaboo.
>OP still has the best argument in the thread
This board doesn't deserve to exist.
But hes right. The games are basically management sims. You have so many resources of different types, its up to you to channel them them into outcomes called "a win". Once you understand the most cost effective means of using those resources, and the internal game mechanics, then "winning" becomes trivial. All the rest is just window dressing to create an illusion of complexity. Which works becasue many dullards like to play these games and stroke their egos. That's why so many of them have a mental breakdown when someone "games the system" and carries out historically impossible "wins". Whether its CK, or EU, or HOI.
>This board doesn't deserve to exist.
I disagree. It functions as a good place to laugh at imbeciles and to remind yourself that most people shouldn't be allowed to vote.
Because it's been said before and since then no other comparable games have been released.
EU4 has the perfect amount of depth imo. The military mechanics were a significant improvement over Vic2. I call arcade-grand strategy. There is a reason its going strong more than 10 years after release.
the reason its going "strong" 10 years after release is because paradrones are shit eaters
they're popular because they're an rpg but you're not ready for this conversation
Political dynasties in EU4 when?
And I don't mean only monarchies, I wish influential families of Nobles and Merchants had their place on the map instead of being referenced once in a consort event, and never again. Would make those "Side with one family" events seem like something more than filler, and make Polish, Czech and Hungarian gameplay make way more sense.
How do I keep the game fun after 1600?
Release every country you can as Independent starting from the smallest ones, play as one of the countries you released, preferably not the strongest one, but one that doesn't need to struggle to survive