The need for Grey Eminence

>Development is still paused
>Likely to be at least a year before it resumes
I'll be waiting eagerly.
A reminder as to why this is necessary:
>EU4's economic model is nonsense (paid to import from abroad as though you were a trade company stockholder)
>The game comes down to stacking flat tag bonuses and changing country names for permanent advantages
>Techs are unimportant
>Internal politics don't exist
>Buildings produce constantly without need for inputs
>Markets are meaningless
>Loans are meaningless
>Navy is (mostly) pointless
>The gold/silver inflation that defined the era and created the impetus for global expansion doesn't exist
>Mana is all that matters
Grey Eminance promises to change this.

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  1. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Aborted fetus of a game
    Move on

  2. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Fingers crossed they resume development eventually, looked so promising

  3. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    >dude 500 years lol

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      Yeah...they really didn't need to go into the industrial period. Could've saved that stretch of development for later, at least...

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      600

  4. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    This was inevitable to everyone that wasn't moronic.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      I was skeptical of the technology not delivering on the promised calculations, because it's Unity. Not on the lead dev losing his savings on WallStreetBets.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        Grey Eminence would have not delivered what the average parashit target audience (both the zoomers and the pre-CK2 audience) wants out of a grand strategy game. You see it right there in the game's logo and on the map they used, they wanted to go with the hexshit approach. Paradox fans want map games in which they play on blobs instead of hexes because the borders looking neat and pretty matters more to a Paradox fan than having a map that tries to account for tactics through using hexes, it's why you never see anyone who started from a Paradox game work their way up to something like Supreme Ruler or a proper hexshit game. I've also never seen any screenshots that show how combat would work in this game; if it was going to not let players control their armies then it would have just been a repeat of Victoria 3 which is not what the players want.

        One of the most exciting things about Grey Eminence for me was that they were using a hex globe for the map. I know I just got done saying how I thought they weren't a good idea, but it's something that I've tried doing myself in Unity before but eventually failed to achieve, so I was looking forward to seeing how the GE team did it. There's an anon from /agdg/ in the /vg/ archives that tried generating the hexes within Unity and ended up with a very slow game, but my approach was to make the hex globe in Blender and then import it, and use the direction each hex was pointing in to determine which part of the earth that hex represents. Except for some reason Unity kept thinking certain hexes were pointing somewhere else, resulting in the globe having "holes" that I didn't want, and no matter what I tried I couldn't fix them, in the end me and the people on /agdg/ trying to help me wrote it off as a limitation of Unity in regards to how many vertices an object can have before Unity isn't able to mess with individual faces. It might have been a limitation of the shader tech too now that I think about it.

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          >Grey Eminence would have not delivered what the average parashit target audience (both the zoomers and the pre-CK2 audience) wants out of a grand strategy game.
          I thought you were going to say focus trees, but the hexes are something I've heard is oddly contentious.
          The devs have said that there will be a more aesthetic map view that shows it with more paradox-like provinces, but that's obviously not actually implemented yet.
          >I've also never seen any screenshots that show how combat would work in this game;
          That's because there is no combat yet. Even for the alpha they said there was only going to be a very barebones system that wouldn't be like the final system just to allow wars to happen and be tested to some degree.
          >if it was going to not let players control their armies then it would have just been a repeat of Victoria 3 which is not what the players want.
          They have explicitly stated that armies will be individually controllable down to the tile.
          As far as gameplay goes I would say my biggest concern with the game is how war will be handled. Implementing a good system that can give the player control without requiring micromanagement will probably be the biggest novel challenge.

          • 10 months ago
            Anonymous

            >The devs have said that there will be a more aesthetic map view that shows it with more paradox-like provinces, but that's obviously not actually implemented yet.
            That's very surprising to me. As I mentioned in my comment, from my personal experience it's much harder to implement a hex globe than a globe full of blobs, especially in Unity. It sounds like they originally intended on hexes because they thought they were a good idea, but after seeing how much controversy that decision caused they decided they'll be open to alternatives. Or maybe they want it to be like Civ 6's map where aesthetically it doesn't look like hexes even though it is.

            >That's because there is no combat yet.
            >They have explicitly stated that armies will be individually controllable down to the tile.
            This decision would have bit them in the ass very quickly if the WSB incident didn't kill the project off as soon as it did. If they're intending on having actual combat and not Vic3-style "combat", that's what they should have implemented first so that they can balance the game around it, if you do it last then you'd have to go back and change everything. I've been sperging out about the importance of a combat simulation first approach in most of the gamedev threads on /vst/, but after all the attempts I've had at making my own GSG it's something I truly believe in.

            • 10 months ago
              Anonymous

              >if the WSB incident didn't kill the project
              Anon, your timeline...

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                My bad, if them running out of money didn't kill the project off. I keep thinking that the WSB thing was what caused them to run out of money because it was talked about so much at the time, even though it's been shown that the WSB post was from before development of Grey Eminence kicked off.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >I keep thinking that the WSB thing was what caused them to run out of money
                Well technically it did, because they would've had enough money to finish development if he hadn't done it.

            • 10 months ago
              Anonymous

              >It sounds like they originally intended on hexes because they thought they were a good idea, but after seeing how much controversy that decision caused they decided they'll be open to alternatives.
              No, this was always their plan.
              >that's what they should have implemented first so that they can balance the game around it, if you do it last then you'd have to go back and change everything.
              I don't see how this follows at all.

  5. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    What does a game that contains the 19th century have to do with EU4?

  6. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Maybe just make a fricking time period game if you want to go down the dick hair on detail

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      >Maybe just make a fricking time period game
      No. These aren't limited to particular time periods. The rules didn't change or cease to apply. The way humans understood and worked around those rules changed.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        NTA, but we were talking about a studio whose only experience with game dev experience thus far limited to jury rigging PDX games, wanting the end all be all game we hoped Grey eminence would be is all well and good but expecting it to be delivered at all as a first product from these people was absurd.
        We would have been talking about a fresh faced indie team utterly clowning on an establish game dev drowning in autist money in their home turf in both detail and scale so hard that half of their game library would have been utterly and completely obsolesced in one fell swoop.
        I can't say I expected they were going to every meet that promise without a hellish amount of trouble, time and money and here we are.

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          I don't even hate the fact that you're right. It just hurts.

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          From what ive seen its seen still more playable than half their library anyways

  7. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    The devs have said that they don't plan on adding alternate start dates, but I think that's an absolute necessity if Grey Eminence is to dominate the market as much as it potentially could. Even if they're only released as DLCs, it would still be a huge boon for the game. Enabling people to jump right into a game that starts just after the end of the Napoleonic wars, before WWI, or before WWII would give it far greater reach in its target audience.
    With just that, mods could make up any differences to enable people to further dig into their favorite time period. If you squished the game down to just the final 30 years you could get away with having much finer detail and simulation, providing an even better experience of WWII.
    Speaking of mods, I'm really curious to see just how much mods will be able to do with this game.
    I do have to wonder how many people will stick with EU/HoI4 just because they like their focus trees and wacky zany alt history paths.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      >but I think that's an absolute necessity if Grey Eminence is to dominate the market as much as it potentially could
      No one uses alternate start dates in other games. Why would they here?

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        Because there are lots of people who would rather just play a HoI or Victoria timeline instead of starting all the way from 1356.

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          And those people would just play a period-focused game.

          • 10 months ago
            Anonymous

            Or they could play Grey Eminence because it can provide a better experience than a period-focused game anyways.

            • 10 months ago
              Anonymous

              Keep dreaming. Just because the developers promises something doesnt make it true. This is whats wrong with society

            • 10 months ago
              Anonymous

              Overall, yes. If you skip most of the game, no.

            • 10 months ago
              Anonymous

              >it can provide a better experience than a period-focused game
              It won't, though?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                It wont. Any one who thinks so have brain damage. Making the period as long as possible wont make it better. Its just a marketing ploy

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Making the period as long as possible wont make it better.
                It will if they can model the impact each change had on the systems being modeled, the game should work.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Good luck with that

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Good luck with that

                Personally, I don't think a long time span is necessarily a bad thing. And I think that it is possible to model changing time spans reasonably well; Victoria 2 does a decent job with industrialization, for example (yes, it has some issues, but it does handle the transition from "no factories, mostly illiterate farmers" to "lots of factories, literate urbanized population" decently). It's just a lot of work and it reduces the amount of "focus on only one aspect of the time period" that you can get away with. Europa Universalis for example really should have Crusader Kings level of interpersonal gameplay focused on monarchs; they were still very important for how countries operated. Even Victoria, to a lesser extent.

                I think Grey Eminence failed because it's vapourware by modders, not because the idea itself was bad.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                I agree with the last paragraph

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                I fail to see how long timeline would even work, people dislike to lose and a country that is well run would snowball into global hegemony by 1600-1700.
                >b-but realism
                Countries are not run by god-like figures that live for 5 centuries, can save-scum and can optimize the shit out of everything, if you remove player agency and put randomness then you don't make a fun game.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Randomness is bad, decreased player control is good. Victoria 2 had the right idea but didn't go far enough.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >and a country that is well run would snowball into global hegemony by 1600-1700.
                That assumes they use the same expansion mechanics EU4 does, have no rebellions, and incentivize blobbing in a game where ducats are just useful for preventing bankruptcy. Further, losses have, on occasion, been useful in changing the shape of internal politics to serve an economic advancement. Losing the Americas diminished the slave lobby in Britain, leading to abolition as a means of attacking their neighbors, and increased wages.
                Rentiers, monopolists, and foreign tax farmers can all provide considerable benefits in the long run, but they tilt the country away from the reforms that'd be useful for an industrializing state.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Countries are not run by god-like figures that live for 5 centuries, can save-scum and can optimize the shit out of everything, if you remove player agency and put randomness then you don't make a fun game.

                Those are not the only 2 options though. You could also make a game with reasonable player agency AND good AI opponents so that the player can't just blob, but not because of random factors.
                Try Victoria 2 with Crimeamod (a mod that focuses on making the AI as good as the modding tools allow it) and there you have a game with player agency and significantly less blobbing than other games. It may be shocking, but it can be done.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                The problem is that the player nation always has a unique advantage because it's led by someone who is, in effect, an immortal and incorruptible leader who will always do what is best for the country and has a degree of precognition.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                The AI could be like that too bro, if only developers made good AI

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                How 'bout you start role-playing Black person?
                Min max is for Massive homosexuals

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                [...]

                is that way

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                The AI could be like that too bro, if only developers made good AI

                The result of 2 actors like that is not exactly going to sustain a realistic world for 5 centuries.
                If the AI gets terrible disasters like the Ming->Qing transition or whatever else then the player will pull ahead and the player most likely won't like getting such events.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                That's not even an event. That's a country's political elites wearing the skin of another country's elite until they control all of it. The disaster came from natural disasters and a sudden silver drought that couldn't be recognized in time to amend an inflation-reducing tax law.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >because the idea itself was bad.
                The idea WAS bad, it should have been released as 6 different standalone chapters (with save converters), imagine if they had just made a late medieval world simulator up to 1456, it would have been a lot more believable and after that first release you could have sold the same system to audiences interested in different time periods

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >making six different games with wildly diverging gameplay
                >vs making one bigger game that has the gameplay well-integrated

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >>vs making one bigger game that has the gameplay well-integrated

                yeah bro just make the game take place over 1600000 years bro and all the systems are dynamic bro we just made the systems work bro it has everything you want bro it has economy and pops and industrialization and time appropriate warfare and money and politics and sliders and domestic and international and trade and resources
                it has it all and it just works TRUST ME BRO we just "integrated it" see paradox didnt "integrate it" we just "integrated it" donate to the kickstarter give us money bro i promise it will all work naturally and intuitively and organically and it will be literally better than every other game in the genre IT JUST WORKS bro
                >no gameplay videos
                >no one's played it
                >cancelled

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >bro we just made the systems work bro it has everything you want bro it has economy and pops and industrialization and time appropriate warfare and money and politics and sliders and domestic and international and trade and resources
                Yeah. You make one system that covers these, then apply it to a timespan going from 1356 to 1956. They've already shown a pretty low-budget abstraction for the way trains impact markets.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >You make one system that covers thes
                Wouldnt work in practise. It will just make it more shallow. This is just a nerd dream. Gamers fricking always asks for more no matter if its better for the gameplay or how long it would take to develop

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Wouldnt work in practise. It will just make it more shallow.
                We've already seen the systems. They're fine.
                >Gamers fricking always asks for more no matter if its better for the gameplay or how long it would take to develop
                It's just slapping modifiers on provinces and buildings to represent improvements in productivity.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                show me the systems then

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Wouldnt work in practise. It will just make it more shallow.
                And you base this on... what, exactly?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >butthurt hyperbolic ranting
                Compelling argument.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Holy shit for real?!
                Where i can donate for this game that you've made?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Donate so the dev can gamble it all on meme stocks?
                Dead game, Aborted fetus

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Civ takes places under a way longer time period than any pdx game or grey eminence and its one of the best selling strategy games. Stop taking drugs man.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                It's not a history game. It's a mostly-abstract game with historic themes.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                civ's gameplay is also objectively a very straightforward and simple turn-based strategy game with no simulation elements really whatsoever. going through history in civ just means you went down a tech tree and the unit models change.
                so completely apples and oranges comparison. incredibly moronic, completely facile. totally irrelevant when talking about how on-it's-face stupid it is to claim you have build a pop and economics and trade and diplo and politics and warfare sim that is all a dynamic simulation with no railroading and its history accurate just emergently from 'the systems' lol

                >bro we just made the systems work bro it has everything you want bro it has economy and pops and industrialization and time appropriate warfare and money and politics and sliders and domestic and international and trade and resources
                Yeah. You make one system that covers these, then apply it to a timespan going from 1356 to 1956. They've already shown a pretty low-budget abstraction for the way trains impact markets.

                >just make the system bro

                >butthurt hyperbolic ranting
                Compelling argument.

                it's really not hyperbole it's pretty much exactly the "vision" that the grey eminence devs were selling
                read the fricking steam page for the game, which part of that specifically is hyperbole

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >it's really not hyperbole it's pretty much exactly the "vision" that the grey eminence devs were selling
                Well I'm not talking about the grey eminence devs you moron.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >The idea WAS bad, it should have been released as 6 different standalone chapters (with save converters)
                That'd be a needless hassle. If the same systems are being used for all parts of the game, why would you divide them up and alienate supporters who wanted to play a 17th-century Chinese governor?

            • 10 months ago
              Anonymous

              and you base that on what you fricking moron? it's a game that's been cancelled that nobody's played

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                The systems that we know the game will have.
                >it's a game that's been cancelled that nobody's played
                Neither of those are true.
                Why do you want this game to be dead so much?

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Because its true? A troony wanting to be a woman doesn't make him a woman, so in your case. You are mentally ill and delusional

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >appeal to transvestites
                >it's true because I want it to be true
                >projecting said appeal to transvestites

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                2 more weeks and the game is out then

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                2 years for an unironic time.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                See you here complaining in 2 years

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                I'll be complaining about mods, primarily.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                if it's not cancelled then when is it coming out
                if somebody's played it where is unedited gameplay video we can watch
                who is this person we can talk to

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >if it's not cancelled then when is it coming out
                Over a year from now.
                >if somebody's played it where is unedited gameplay video we can watch
                Nowhere, because there hasn't been anything released for non-devs to use.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >there hasn't been anything released for non-devs to use
                yet you're convinced it'll be the best thing since sliced bread, based exclusively on the empty words of the people selling the product to you.
                you're either extremely naive, or a shill

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Every gamer is fricking naive. Welcome to the real world

  8. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Sorry gay eminonces, I'm going to focus my attention on games that'll actually come out like Espiocracy and Gilded Destiny

  9. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Meiou and Taxes already exists

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      MEIOU&Taxes made itself so complex that the devs decided to automate most of the systems, so you're not even playing the game. You're just trying to guess how much investment you ought to put into a given industry at a given time.
      Also, government changes happen via you choosing to improve the bureaucracy until they have the political power to push a resolution through.

      Grey Eminence would have not delivered what the average parashit target audience (both the zoomers and the pre-CK2 audience) wants out of a grand strategy game. You see it right there in the game's logo and on the map they used, they wanted to go with the hexshit approach. Paradox fans want map games in which they play on blobs instead of hexes because the borders looking neat and pretty matters more to a Paradox fan than having a map that tries to account for tactics through using hexes, it's why you never see anyone who started from a Paradox game work their way up to something like Supreme Ruler or a proper hexshit game. I've also never seen any screenshots that show how combat would work in this game; if it was going to not let players control their armies then it would have just been a repeat of Victoria 3 which is not what the players want.

      One of the most exciting things about Grey Eminence for me was that they were using a hex globe for the map. I know I just got done saying how I thought they weren't a good idea, but it's something that I've tried doing myself in Unity before but eventually failed to achieve, so I was looking forward to seeing how the GE team did it. There's an anon from /agdg/ in the /vg/ archives that tried generating the hexes within Unity and ended up with a very slow game, but my approach was to make the hex globe in Blender and then import it, and use the direction each hex was pointing in to determine which part of the earth that hex represents. Except for some reason Unity kept thinking certain hexes were pointing somewhere else, resulting in the globe having "holes" that I didn't want, and no matter what I tried I couldn't fix them, in the end me and the people on /agdg/ trying to help me wrote it off as a limitation of Unity in regards to how many vertices an object can have before Unity isn't able to mess with individual faces. It might have been a limitation of the shader tech too now that I think about it.

      >Grey Eminence would have not delivered what the average parashit target audience (both the zoomers and the pre-CK2 audience) wants out of a grand strategy game.
      Not the target audience.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        Then who is paradox targeting as their audience?

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          PDX targets anyone who wants more out of GSG and history games than just Civ 5.
          Grey Eminence would provide an alternative. It's not really trying to snipe PDX fans, although some would inevitably move over, just by virtue of it being closer to the product they want.

          • 10 months ago
            Anonymous

            >It's not really trying to snipe PDX fans
            >game covers the timespan of Europa Universalis, Victoria, and Hearts of Iron all combined
            >has characters like Crusader Kings
            >has economy like Victoria but cranked up to the max
            It's basically marketing itself as the GSG to end all GSGs.

            • 10 months ago
              Anonymous

              >game covers the timespan of Europa Universalis, Victoria, and Hearts of Iron all combined
              And if it covered everything back to the days of Caesar, you'd say it was also trying to be Imperator and CK.
              >has characters like Crusader Kings
              An important part of the way politics worked during this time.
              >has economy like Victoria but cranked up to the max
              Because Victoria is the only game that attempts to simulate the economy. It's what the other games would do if they were dedicated simulations.
              >It's basically marketing itself as the GSG to end all GSGs.
              No. It's marketing itself as the best economic simulation of the period, which is a low bar because their only competition is PDX.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >An important part of the way politics works
                ftfy

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          People who want casual games filled with with leftist politics and meme events that they can post to reddit.

  10. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    I really hope it does eventually come out, i love Eu4 MEIOU to death so playing a gsg made by the ex meiou people with focus on pops and economy would be peak kino

  11. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Also, military must be an extension of economics and politics. If you want a military general game, play HOI4.

  12. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    It's fricking dead moron.

  13. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Is anyone actually anticipating this game coming out? I was always skeptical of this. Basically they said "You can expect all the best features from every Paradox game across all the time periods." They were like "Oh it's got Vic2 Pops and Pop Attitudes and economy with inputs and goods moving and industrialization, but CK2 characters and internal politics, and EU4 scale, and HOI4 warfare, and you get all 600 years, and best part is, it's all a dynamic simulation"
    That sounds like a straight up impossible pipe dream unless it's all just incredibly shallow and just like "Oh when you research Industrialization now the clothes maker on the hex gets +20% output because it's a factory now" or whatever.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      There's a handful of Grey Eminences being announced every year that come and go, I think the sentiment on here was "this will fail like the others... unless?". IIRC it was announced at around the same time as Espiocracy, and now they're both kill and the chinese Vic2 knockoff and the competing western Vic2 knockoffs are the new things to get hype and disappointed about.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        >as Espiocracy, and now they're both kill
        Wut? What happened to Espiocracy?

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          nothing, he's still mad the dev took a break from making diaries over the summer

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          Dev took the publisher bucks and fricked off out of poland and now lives in belize

  14. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    >The need for Grey Eminence
    more like the need for a gf lol

  15. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Come home, Grey man.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      >scamerports behind you
      >unsheathes grift
      Heh, nothin personal kid

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      >emotional scam

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