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What are your expectations for the EU5 release?


  • Total voters
    83
  • Poll closed .
Heres the 10 minutes of gameplay Paradox graced us with, this is our real first impression of Afterworld.
The explorer aspect is very funny because it's obvious what's going to happen at some point. Paradox will introduce a Stellaris archaeology site analogue for flavour, but will retain the stupidity about needing to own the system/province/node to progress through it and having it accessible to everyone (so you can get ganked from the final reward).

Not a good sign at all when the framework is clearly Stellaris since this sort of setting isn't a good one for symmetric 4x gameplay. Asymmetry would fit much better, but modern Paradox doesn't have the talent anymore for that.
 
There are Paradox players that play CK3 and Stellaris on console
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Tried to give Stellaris another go with all the new DLC thoughtfully acquired by men of seafaring habits.

It still fucking sucks, holy shit. Ran into a dozen gamebreaking bugs, idiotic mechanics and just questionable design choices all around. The new "content" is all just stupid fucking gimmicks and the fun gets sucked out of the fun little events and sci-fi writing by 90% of the game being waiting for purple mana to tick up so you could actually do 4X stuff. They literally gated EVERYTHING to that shit.

Also, trade is now a mana that is supposed to be a currency, but energy is still a currency and the two are randomly used to pay for shit so its confusing and pointless as shit.
 
Also, trade is now a mana that is supposed to be a currency, but energy is still a currency and the two are randomly used to pay for shit so its confusing and pointless as shit.
I thought the trade changes into a passively collected resource were good compared to the previous iteration with trade routes running between starbases. The problem is that it was a bandaid not touching the root defects with trade as a whole. The entire system is pointless when the market operates as an infinite supplier since base resources (minerals, food, etc.) are ludicrously easy to acquire in bulk and lets you through their sale bootstrap the more critical items like alloys and motes/gases/crystals. Not helping is when every empire has access to an internal market that operates the exact same as the galactic market, only with different fees (no need to mention how there's hard ceilings for max and min prices too).

Distant Worlds gets closer to what the system should be, especially in terms of goods access per planet being dictated by physical transports moving things between producers and consumers. You can legitimately wage economic warfare in that game and it made playing mercantile empires far more interesting. Funnily enough this was one of the first complaints against Stellaris too.
 
Doesn’t this mean that the PC has to be physically turned on for this to work?
Yes, the PC has to be turned on. You can also use it with smart TVs, VR headsets, and other computers, and play local co-op games with it remotely. It's surprisingly versatile despite how unknown it is.
 
Yes, the PC has to be turned on. You can also use it with smart TVs, VR headsets, and other computers, and play local co-op games with it remotely. It's surprisingly versatile despite how unknown it is.
Not as versatile as using a VNC which lets you use your entire computer outside of steam.
 
thought the trade changes into a passively collected resource were good compared to the previous iteration with trade routes running between starbases. The problem is that it was a bandaid not touching the root defects with trade as a whole. The entire system is pointless when the market operates as an infinite supplier since base resources (minerals, food, etc.) are ludicrously easy to acquire in bulk and lets you through their sale bootstrap the more critical items like alloys and motes/gases/crystals.
More like, the root cause is like a dozen half-baked systems implemented one by one over more than a decade randomly interacting in boring and unfun ways before nerfed into their worst state ever.. Like, when they implemented trade, I actually enjoyed it first, finally giving reason to space out stations strategically, plan trade routes, put some life on the otherwise barren as fuck map. Then it quickly became a tedious as fuck busywork, micromanaging dozens of tiny corvette fleets that were destroyed every war and had to be remade or pirates spawned out of the ass. It was the most tedious shit ever, because of their nerfs to ship speed, so your fleets were now slow as molasses, taking months to go between three systems. Same with having to build bureaucrats to grow, it just sorta made sense that you have to squeeze in an administrative building here and there and in the midgame you start planning out these planets of bean counters as a specialty flavor. Then it got turned into "empire size" which just destroyed the game completely with its tech and policy cost scaling. You are literally punished for expanding in a 4x. after a while you DONT want to expand because adding even the most specialized research demon planet would not help you tech any faster. They resolved unity by not mattering at all though and nerfing all the perks to shit now. The current gimmicks, storms and breeding megafauna like space amoeba are so fucking bizarre and gimmicky though. They added all those traits, origins, storylines, events, buildings and extra shit about them and damn..... they don't matter at fucking all. Except polluting your tech cards with literal DOZENS of random ass techs that are completely fucking useless. Why on Earth I would want to breed space amoeba as worse spaceships, instead of just getting good econ tech or good ship type and weaponry techs? Sure, you can breed them and cull one every few years for a whopping 38 food. Fucking wow. That shit would be meager in the ten first years of the game, not after having to build a megastructure for those shits to frolic in.

Warfare, the core of the gameplay is also more tedious than ever. Apparently, countries can join and leave at random and there are always these nomads around, so every fight quickly turns into a melee as the goldfish poop gang joins in one by one. Of course, it means your warscore is fucked now, so you can destroy hundreds of ships, dozens of stations, occupy a an entire galaxy arm worth of systems and planets without losing a single ship, as the AI is still retarded of course and not a single dinky system of yours ever getting touched, only for the AI to completely refuse to surrender and your war exhaustion being head to head. If you lose a few ships, even if you can easily replace them and your planets are all happy and productive and you are tearing through the enemy core, you are suddenly forced to peace out out of the blue. No choice, not a debuff that you could manage, just enforced hard peace. What a fucking retarded concept. And of course, this means if you want to vassalize a neighboring empire or get attacked, you can possibly get stuck in a war that is completely pointless, unchallenging, boring, tedious busywork where you have to fully conquer and occupy an entire quadrant of the galaxy before they part with a few planets next to you or finally get to vassalize a a minor next to you. Words cannot describe how fucking unfun it is to be hard enforced by the game to leave territory that you have easily conquered and will have to occupy atleast 4-5 times before you finally get there and annex everything, cause you are obviously still purple mana gated. The wargoal system is also complete ass and cannot enforce or even add wargoals against an entire coalition against. Like, you get jumped in a 5v1, beat them all and you can only vassalize the one who started it. What sort of fucking system is that? It takes the reward out of fights, you cannot ever have a big victorious war where you rearrange the galaxy map from being an underdog.

And yeah, I agree that the trade system is completely stupid, making all types of resource mana to be freely interchangeable just takes out any possible challenge from building a good economy, as you can just trade into infinite everything instantly. Not like that it ever had a good economy simulator with resources, manufacturing, supply routes, efficiency, etc. Atleast they did remove trading all those "Favors"(the galactic senate shit is so useless that its actually funny),sensor links and contacts for infinite resources from the galaxy in the moment you uncover all the ayys on the galactic map. It used to be hilarious how could you pull 80-100k resources and just win the game right there.
 
More like, the root cause is like a dozen half-baked systems implemented one by one over more than a decade randomly interacting in boring and unfun ways
You'd think the big X.0 reworks would be a great time to increase system interconnectivity but no.
Why does pdx have a pathological aversion to making dlc systems that meaningfully interact with each other? I'm split on if it's caused by incompetent devs or by retarded company policies and it'd be very interesting to know what their internal guidelines for things like this look like.
 
You'd think the big X.0 reworks would be a great time to increase system interconnectivity but no.
Because they ultimately have no idea what the game should be about or how the mechanics should interact in a fun way. They are throwing shit at the wall as the redditors who like to "roleplay" and autistic about "multiplayer balance" at the same time will happily eat it up anyway. Who else would buy species pack shit if not redditors?

Why does pdx have a pathological aversion to making dlc systems that meaningfully interact with each other? I'm split on if it's caused by incompetent devs or by retarded company policies and it'd be very interesting to know what their internal guidelines for things like this look like.
Its fairly commonly known that is a company policy across all games, to prevent people not owning the DLC getting locked out of playing. Which would be admirable in itself, but in practice it just leads to half baked shit in every game, see HoI4s espionage system.

Also, systems and mechanics not working together properly is hilariously common now, full of closed beta tier bugs. For example, just from my last gamepla:

I was the satrapy of the great khan(imma give you a hundred credits to fuck off) but I was at war with empire A when it happened. Later empire A became a satrapy too. Then the great khan dies and its successor decides to turn it into a federation of empires A, B, the khanate successor itself and empires C, D, E, my original vassals, who get auto-converted and transferred to satrapies, because stellaris doesn't to space-CK tiers of vassals. I leave the federation, because federation mechanics are so cringe that it makes me cry, but I get a message that empire A is plotting on me. I don't really care, because I sign the federation associate shit, that gives me automatic NAPs with all federation members, and we still have an active truce. Then A declares war on me, and somehow empires B,C,D,E are all pulled in along. Unluckily for them, cause I had the purple mana to add defensive war claims(no idea why its not a wargoal itself) so despite ending up with a status quo enforced peaceout with A, all the other participants, empires B,C,D,E got fully annexed. The game treated the war as a loss anyway.

Another bug was, when the Unbiden arrived, they spawned in the other half of the galaxy, but started coming through a wormhole in my territory: I was super puzzled why, then it turned out that despite having the Wormhole Exploration tech, I left one wormhole out, and despite having not only the astral seal space magic, but the Daedalus Seal relic active, I wasn't able to shut them off, as it doesn't apply to unexplored wormholes.

I also found a bug, where you try to colonize a planet from the planner in an exclave, but the alien empire shuts off access while the colony ship is en route, it just disappears instead of going MIA, but you cannot colonize the planet anymore, as the button is greyed out and says "planet already has a colony planned"

There is also a bug about spy missions trying to enlighten pre-FTLs are just quietly getting dropped. Not even a real failure, they just get canceled without an error message and of course, the purple mana is wasted. Interestingly not all of them did this, happened once or twice on some planets, happened a lot on a f few and one was just immediately dropping any attempted mission at the end of each month. Why? No why

Not even starting on the many retarded shit with nomads do, found a very reliable CTD with it and a funnier one where one somehow got annexed and gave me 30 undeletable stations that counter against my station cap. Although this might be a wider bug, as mercs and extradimensional fleets that shouldn't have counted against my naval cap did anyway and because mercs are undeletable, it would have wrecked my economy if not for a convenient space monsters to send them into.

If the game would be the funny sort of jank with everything thrown in and able to be broken in funny ways like Morrowind I could get behind it, but being so restricted and hemmed in by hard-coded restraints while no being able to trust game mechanics to work in your favor is just an atrocious experience. And remember, this is not just some beta where bugs are expected, this game came out over a DECADE ago, in 2016 May. They had ample time to solve shit like this. The version I played would have costed me 285 dollars out of the box too,
 
Its fairly commonly known that is a company policy across all games, to prevent people not owning the DLC getting locked out of playing. Which would be admirable in itself, but in practice it just leads to half baked shit in every game, see HoI4s espionage system.
Yeah this particular policy, while on paper was laudable, probably fucked them in the ass in the long term. EU4 had a similar issue, and by the end of the lifespan you were turbo-fucked if you did not at least get the DLC that enabled development.
 
If you go back to Stellaris on release it was clear the original aim was spiritual successor to Sword of the Stars (which was a extremely deep game with as much documentation as deprecated 20 year old tanning booth control software) combined with elements from Civ/SMAC (pops working discrete tiles) on an expandable but generic pastiche of SciFi tropes. I suspect the drive came from SOTS2 development and release being a massive shitshow top to bottom.

They really should've put a lid on Stellaris like three major patches ago, do a postmortem on what worked and what didn't and develop Stellaris 2.
 
I've managed to win the 100 years as England, subjugate Aragon, and take Aragonese land back from Castile. Half of the HRE hates me because I dared to also subjugate Franche-Comté. France is in a PU and currently being annexed.

eu5 is a mobile game.png

Any ideas to make this run more interesting? I'm already the strongest country in Europe.
 
spiritual successor to Sword of the Stars

I disagree.

The basics of SoTS (that was developed by proto-lolcow central Kerberos Studios, the SoTS2 saga should be studied) were a somewhat simplified 4x layer with a real-time tactical battle engine with some real depth. Races in SoTS were incredibly fucking important and they all played very differently, with different engine systems and different weapon priorities. It's the complete opposite of Stellaris "anything you do doesn't really matter because all the game is waiting for mana regen and larp".

The only thing I can think they had in common in the beginning were the different FTL travel methods: and maybe the fact that SoTS was considered "newbie's first Space 4x" in being kind of simple and flashy with the tac battles.

And of course, there's the little detail that SoTS is fun and not a mana regen waiting game.
 
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If you go back to Stellaris on release it was clear the original aim was spiritual successor to Sword of the Stars (which was a extremely deep game with as much documentation as deprecated 20 year old tanning booth control software) combined with elements from Civ/SMAC (pops working discrete tiles) on an expandable but generic pastiche of SciFi tropes. I suspect the drive came from SOTS2 development and release being a massive shitshow top to bottom.
They openly said it way, waaaay back in the early 2010s that it was meant to be an experiment, a crossover between 4x and grand strategy that focuses on emergent gameplay from stuff interacting, basically a semi-sandbox. It was fair enough concept, the early versions had a lot more random stuff going on. Like, I had a memorable game where a group of space amoeba just randomly jumped into my system right after I unpaused, killed my dinky starter fleet, my civilian ships and my starbase and I had to kerbal myself back to space again. Or another time in a later version with where I was playing Fanatic Pacifist-Xenophiles when the Fanatic Xenophile became active Naturally, because of this immense disagreement over who gets to embrace the galaxy in peace and love, we had to fight a massive war which by pure chance happened in the Sol system. Around a million fleet power on each side clashed and because this was the version with no gay swoocing out and not a single soul in the galaxy knew what a "fleet command limit" was, both doomfleets fought to the last naked corvette, giving one hell of a lightshow for the peasant monkeys on Sol III. I'm still elated about how such a cool emergent thing happened and just shows how much potential the game would have had if it just embraced being a janky space sandbox where you just throw in all the random stuff, do something on your own and cool sci-fi shit might happen. I also really enjoyed how asymmetric things were, starting with FTL, but in the end they homogenized that too.
They really should've put a lid on Stellaris like three major patches ago, do a postmortem on what worked and what didn't and develop Stellaris 2.


Oh they absolutely did that. Stellaris has been like, five different games sharing the same engine by now and keeps having closed beta tier reworks and bugs. Unfortunately, they found what worked. They found a VERY profitable niche of redditor retards who like to larp out sci-fi concepts and are willing to pay THREE FUCKING HUNDRED DOLLARS for it but being redditors they are too much of a dunce to understand strategy games, so it must be heavily curated and balanced to avoid going them off the rails. They are like the hall monitors of having fun and want everything brought to line in a very reddity way. Speaking of reddit, they have finally added the highly expected fourth crisis and its some girlboss who keeps girlbossing all over the galaxy and forces the empires work for her and she is actually totally meaning good but she was hurt before and she is lashing out. And if you have that quantum space gun shit that destroys systems and try to shoot her in the moment she spawns instead of working for her, she girlbosses all over you and and you accidentally hit your own capital, haha silly, girl power is too strong!! I was quite mad but can't say I was surprised the least.
 
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