Europa Universalis IV

Otto Von Bismarck Simulator 2000.

 

V2 is fantastic. Yes, the game is more 'limited', in the sense that every playthrough ends up boiling down to one general trajectory in terms of industrialisation, influence, and political reforms - you're sort of starting with different mixes of conditions but everyone's trying to get on that one train track to being a modern power. But it sure does a good job at spinning the wheels for that one track - the elections, the factories, the spheres of influence (despite the stupid makework part of it).

I think one of my most fun games was forming Gran Colombia - the game starts, IIRC, right after GC's historical erosion, and the roughly plausible idea of reuniting GC under a strong territory also gives you a very nice historical narrative of "modernising but on our terms", perhaps stoking jingoist views, perhaps combining military aggression and protectionism with advanced industrialisation, and eventually achieving true independence through dominion of others.

It can sure be painful to stay free market (perhaps due to a political deadlock) at the wrong point in time and watch every factory close down, though. I opened each and every one with my own hands, motherfuckers, and as soon as Lula is out of prison I will oh wait

 

Great post, Tigranes .

Can I play custom music if I trhow them in the game music folder?

I wanted to try Vic2 with Arcanum of Steamworks & Magick Obscura.

 

Was this you playing? If so, very good. It seems colonization gave the player the push to the top of rank. Or maybe he fought England?

And how do I see my game final timeline like that? Is it a mod?

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/paradoxplaza/comments/gcr1zk/different_look_at_vic2_economy/

Also, kinda funny, especially from the 2020 perspective:

 

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Silva, have you tried Pride of Nations?

 

What is this? I've heard it somewhere before.

 

Dunno Comrade the game start in half of fifteen century and thus offers you much more choice, you play as Empire and try to purge the protestant heresy in its craddle, form Spain and go on huge gold and soul gathering adventure across the globe, play as China when it was great before the Quing took place, or even try to beat Turks as Byzantium, Trabezond and the last Gothic state or unite all Russias, much more nations which were actually playable outside Europe: India, Ethiopia, Japan, etc... In Victoria 2 you can only play as wanabie Victorian England there is no other way really as try to industrialize ASAP. If only the game started couple of years earlier than we could at least play as Napoleon or try to keep Spanish Empire from collapse, in 1836 it was all decided you either played as top fifteen nations or you were f.... ed.

 

Pride of Nations is a turn-based grand strategy by AGEOD set in the same era as Victoria and infamous for it's overlong AI turns, although I guess it's been quite a while since the last time I tried it so perhaps they fixed some of that? It however has even fewer playable nations than Victoria since you can only play as the great powers. It's a bit of a mess, to be honest. But who knows, maybe you'll like it.

 

My only problem with Vic2 is the awful wack-a-mole combat system, otherwise it probably is Paradox at their best. I would love to see them completely redesign combat from the ground up for all titles moving forward but its pretty clear that will never happen now.

 

I feel like those Pax Romana/Mongolica/Britannica/Americana eras are probably the worst settings for a grand strategy game. It's why I was never particularly interested in East VS West.

On the other hand, you could probably make something great by focusing entirely on the Renaissance Italy, for instance. You don't even need the rest of Europe.

 

It is deeply unsurprising that eras in which the map is dominated by major hegemonies are less interesting games than ones where the map is full of conflict and fighting. That's why you get games about Sengoku Japan and not Heian or Edo Japan. Nobody makes a strategy game set during then because there's nothing that happens. Peace is boring. It's similar to how China only gets featured in strategy games when it breaks, like the Three Kingdoms period. Although I wouldn't mind seeing a 10th century 5D/10K era game, that one seems decidedly underrepresented. Certain places and periods are decidedly overrepresented in games. WW2 is hella overdone, while WW1 seems to be pass mostly unmentioned and we have very little in the way of WW1 games. Korea barely registers, the forgotten war. The Biafran War is ripe material for a game. So is the Rhodesian War. We've had a game about the Falklands, but it's definitely underutilized as a setting, and with much of the information about it now coming to light, it's a good time to see a game revisit it.

 

Was there some legit significant declassification the Brits did recently?

 

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It looks really anaemic.

 

Wow, a whole dev diary about two mission trees. Are they that low on manpower? Is this some intern developing it? Each of those "missions" is just a small structure in YAML, with a handful of conditions (like "Own region X", "province Y has religion Z" etc.) and a couple rewards (epic rewards like +20 to prestige lol), plus check for whether previous mission in the tree was done. A modder can make a mission tree in a free afternoon, with the most time being spent on writing the text fluff. So when they go on about a "content-focused dev diary", I just gotta ask that's it? That's all the content they have? This took them a week?

 

Yeah,even i with zero moding experience managed to make my self a nice bulgarian mission three in a few hours. And it was a lot better that that shit lol.

 

Would be curious to see. :3

(Meant with complete sincerity, not being snarky. I dunno that much about Bulgaria's history after Basileus Basil II .)

 

Ahh we had killed each other with the gryphons plenty,the difference is that i am here and could shit talk them as much as i want while there is no Byzantines left .

 

Finally a release date on this thing, rather curious if it will be the final 'kitchen sink' DLC like Holy Fury and they announce EU5 sometime soon.

 

What would yiou want another DLC to cover? Kinda hate that even PDX do the yearly release cycle thing. And CK2 was released a year before EU4, so it'd add up in that way.