Paradox Studio Thread - 🇹🇷🇹🇷🇹🇷 Türkiye respecters only 🇹🇷🇹🇷🇹🇷

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Hey does anyone think that Paradox should consider actually having less granular religion for non-organized religions and just heaping them together as Pagans?
It came to me with Old World. That one has an interesting thing going on in that there is a very sharp distinction between paganisms and organized religions, they're both religions in the game in terms of being things that a city can have, a character can have, etc., but they have totally different mechanics, and the game doesn't have it be that, like, Greek Mythology is somethign that propagates itself in the world like Buddhism does. This is I think way more true to how religion functions in the real world.
The big downside I see is that Old World still kind of did differentiate it on a civ-by-civ basis in that it still needed personalized god names and flavor text and what not. But when I picture it in my mind, looking at dumb shit like how (when I was playing it) all North American Indians are "Totemist" and all Africans are "Fetishist" and so on, as if these words even mean anything, I'd almost straight prefer that they all be marked "Pagan," Pagan that can't convert each other, and the flavor content be like indexed to the culture group they're in.

 

[Computer God Autism]

Hey does anyone think that Paradox should consider actually having less granular religion for non-organized religions and just heaping them together as Pagans?
It came to me with Old World. That one has an interesting thing going on in that there is a very sharp distinction between paganisms and organized religions, they're both religions in the game in terms of being things that a city can have, a character can have, etc., but they have totally different mechanics, and the game doesn't have it be that, like, Greek Mythology is somethign that propagates itself in the world like Buddhism does. This is I think way more true to how religion functions in the real world.
The big downside I see is that Old World still kind of did differentiate it on a civ-by-civ basis in that it still needed personalized god names and flavor text and what not. But when I picture it in my mind, looking at dumb shit like how (when I was playing it) all North American Indians are "Totemist" and all Africans are "Fetishist" and so on, as if these words even mean anything, I'd almost straight prefer that they all be marked "Pagan," Pagan that can't convert each other, and the flavor content be like indexed to the culture group they're in.

I'm fine with distinct Pagan religions mapped to cultural groups, which is functionally what pagan religions are, but yeah Pagan religions being able to behave mostly the same as actual religions is cancerous. CK2 kind of got it right but shot itself in the foot with reformations.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I'm fine with distinct Pagan religions mapped to cultural groups, which is functionally what pagan religions are, but yeah Pagan religions being able to behave mostly the same as actual religions is cancerous. CK2 kind of got it right but shot itself in the foot with reformations.

Reformations made sense to me as a gameplay mechanic for fun, but I can't say as I believe in them in the way the game depicts them. Old World, again, really has an interesting take on it in how there's just no religion by default (there may be paganism, but is unorganized), then shrines propagate it locally (now the paganism is organized with actual temples and such, institutional power, but it's still cultural and local, very geographically embodied, if the Oracle at Delphi burns there's not going to be martyrs spreading it to the four winds). Then the first power to organize two shrines gets to invent Zoroastrianism, the first ethical monotheism, because historically that's kind of what happened, it seems that there's a pattern that REALLY primordial man naturally invests a sort of pantheistic monotheism and states invent monotheism as a way to force centralization of the different religious institutions and capture it. Thus Akhenaten, Zoroaster, kind of Muhammad in a way (working at the fringes of the Abrahamic world with mostly pagans), Rome flirting not just iwth Christianity but also Mithra and Sol Invictus and Stoicism as a philosophical religion, Confucianism and Heaven as a god, possibly Genghis Khan centralizing everything around Tengri, Tecumseh doing the same shit again with the Great Spirit...

So if I was being real picky I'd say that the idea that you can reform Norse mythology or something into a universal organized religion with a Viking Pope and Viking crusader orders and a Viking Bible and all is ridiculous since it misses how this sort of shit happens, but... video game, not sociological treatise.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

Crown of Hispania, the CK2/EU4 inspired reconquista game is out now on early access on Steam

To celebrate ViveLeRoi has put out a meme video shilling his game doing a Cordoba into (((Cordoba))) playthrough.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I finally got King's Orders on sale (I'm posting about it here because back when Victoria III was first announced there was a whole discussion around whether taking away direct control of generals was totally retarded or had any upsides; my position is that it could really deepen the game, but it WOULDN'T deepen the game because Paradox didn't know what they were doing, which turned out to be the case). It reviewed mediocre but it looked like a cute small toy game for $6 the same way something like Ozymandias (which is genuinely wonderful) is.

I haven't gotten past the (dreary) tutorial yet and I don't think the game has actual autonomous generals in the sense of them having the ability to do stupid shit and fuck you over; it is to my understanding just a programming game. It's already shitting in my cornflakes, though, with little issues of theming and it feels emblematic to me of what I think of Paradox/map painter brain infesting things. I remember a long time ago someone on here talking about being disappointed that Paradox games going mainstream just made history discussion online even worse, because the speds that brought in don't really read actual history, and I said that there's a world of difference between a guy who can name every elector of the Holy Roman Empire in 1550 and a guy who can actually explain to you why the Protestant Reformation happened. Or a guy who knows whether tobacco or cotton was the dominant industry in Mercer County, Kentucky, but can't visualize what an actual day in an actual yeoman farmer's life even looks like. You know what I mean?

Well, my bitchfit is that the game calls its church buildings "temples" and has you recruit generals and spies from an "academy." Incredibly petty, I know, but I've gotten like, real attuned to bullshit like this, I'm proud to be petty. Nobody is training a general in the Norman Army in 1060 Apulia at a fucking military academy. There is no West Point. There is no West Point equivalent. You don't recruit new soldiers by building a spear hut as if lack of physical access to spears is the thing that keeps you from making spearmen and if only we had another fucking barracks we could station more full-time professional spearmen (there are no fulltime professional standing armies running around).

You get what I mean? It's subtle, it's unimportant mechanically, but it's real flavor that's not there. The whole texture of feudalism, the way this is a roaming predatory caste of warrior men whose political and military world is based around charismatic leaders you have personal relationships with, that these armies are things cobbled together from glorified handshakes and can fall apart just as quickly, all of that just kind of evaporates the moment Sir John Hawkwood or King Richard the Lionheart graduated from Medieval Norman West Point. What the fuck. (Fix: call it the castle or something IDGAF.) Will I be allowed to build a local DMV and a post office for my Medieval kingdom too? And you get sludge like spies too. Spies obviously existed IRL and were important and what not, but it's like, every one of these historical games always has some generic "spy" who is like the James Bond of the Middle Ages and I don't buy that espionage looked anything like that. Look at how Shogun 2 handled agents, it was great, we all know a ninja is just a spy and a monk's a monk but something like a metsuke is so culturally specific that you really can't describe it without painting a whole picture of a man, his personality, his world. "Spy." Spy recruited at the academy. (Make him a merchant or monk. Isn't that what Medievals often used back then for this work?)

I can't even begin to wrap my head around it, but something like Grand Tactician: The Civil War gets it, Hearts of Iron III got it, it's too complicated to even learn how to recruit state militia on a three year contract versus a one year contract or whatever but it's soaking in the personality of its own era. This is sludge even when the map is immaculate and you get five campaigns.


Edit: If you want an example of another (practically unplayable) game that meets my high falutin standards, Mount and Blade: Viking Conquest. I hate it and it's no fun and I can't stop playing it when I start because everything sucks but it feels like the actual Viking Age. Down to stealing cattle being the trap I'm stuck in and paying poets to make poems about me.

 

[Computer God Autism]

it's like, every one of these historical games always has some generic "spy" who is like the James Bond of the Middle Ages and I don't buy that espionage looked anything like that. Look at how Shogun 2 handled agents, it was great, we all know a ninja is just a spy and a monk's a monk but something like a metsuke is so culturally specific that you really can't describe it without painting a whole picture of a man, his personality, his world. "Spy." Spy recruited at the academy. (Make him a merchant or monk. Isn't that what Medievals often used back then for this work?)

Old Total War did a great job of how it handled agents - a spy was just some guy you could recruit a tavern who, at best, could cause some unrest or potentially open the gates of a settlement, but more likely was just being used to scout. And that's historically what they were. Half the time 'professional' spies were just travellers partially in the employ of someone who would detail what they saw in the course of their actual jobs or travels (speaking of old TW, the Tsardoms mod for TWM2 is so devoted to this that it has people like Bertrandon de la Broquiere be spies).

Even EU4 gets this; your diplomats are your spies. If anything it didn't go far enough by incorporating merchants and missionaries into espionage.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Old Total War did a great job of how it handled agents - a spy was just some guy you could recruit a tavern who, at best, could cause some unrest or potentially open the gates of a settlement, but more likely was just being used to scout. And that's historically what they were. Half the time 'professional' spies were just travellers partially in the employ of someone who would detail what they saw in the course of their actual jobs or travels (speaking of old TW, the Tsardoms mod for TWM2 is so devoted to this that it has people like Bertrandon de la Broquiere be spies).

Even EU4 gets this; your diplomats are your spies. If anything it didn't go far enough by incorporating merchants and missionaries into espionage.

EU4 also fucked up having them just be named (that never change, at least last I played which was a long time ago) tokens to sit on things. I've always wished Empire Total War had gentlemen be fleshed out characters and it would have worked just as well for the whole timeframe of EU4. You have dudes. That dude can be a general, pirate, governor of a colony, court favorite, merchant adventurer, revolutionary, missionary, a million things over the course of a life with traits attached. CK2 actually did an excellent job of that, it's just that... I don't think we need a simulation that deep to get the effect, but nobody, Paradox included, has ever managed to pull that off properly in a non-CK context since. I don't think Paradox even understood, mechanically, what they did that made CK2 work.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I can go ahead and say this King's Orders is looking real bad and for reasons unrelated to its central premise.
Everything is issued by means of orders, but not all things need to be written up in orders for the premise of orders to work. I want to build a mine? I have to draft an order. I want to recruit pikemen? I have to draft an order. i want to send my units to reinforce an army in the same province? Order. All of this shit, even with order delay, could just be done by the same means as any other RTS game. What I pictured in my mind was drafting detailed plans of attack for generals that go tits up in interesting ways and maybe have some level of contingency in them. There's no reason to make me navigate a menu to build a blacksmith. Even with the generals the most basic kind of order is attack which even in Grand Tactician you'd literally just click the unit and tell it to attack and it would have a delay, it would have to rev up, right, but it's that simple. The more I think about it, the whole novelty of the mechanic, which is why I got it, is alreayd served at a tactical and operational level in Grand Tactician, at least in the sense of delay.

Frankly, this is a clusterfuck. I may even refund it even at $6. I can't tell if the core concept is good or not because the UI built around it is both unnecessary (doesn't disprove the core concept) and awful.

 

[Red Dragon]

Look at how Shogun 2 handled agents, it was great,

I'm not disagreeing with you, but I love TW Three Kingdoms' spy system. You send a suitable guy from your faction towards your target and, if he is good enough, he will be hired by that faction. The AI can also send their guys to you, so you have to be careful about who you're hiring. And if your guy is discovered, besides the usual execution/banishment, he can be hired by your target to spy on you.

There's a whole lot of possibilities depending on how your guy is employed by your target, it's really cool.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I'm not disagreeing with you, but I love TW Three Kingdoms' spy system. You send a suitable guy from your faction towards your target and, if he is good enough, he will be hired by that faction. The AI can also send their guys to you, so you have to be careful about who you're hiring. And if your guy is discovered, besides the usual execution/banishment, he can be hired by your target to spy on you.

That doesn't sound like a generic spy system at all, though. Sending dudes on some pretext to plant them is exactly the kind of way real spycraft is done, compared to the gary stu supercommando whos day job is spy that runs aroudn sabotaging facilities and carrying out assassinations.

That's another place CK2 had it right, like, take assassinations. For the most part, you don't hire a man with a knife and a cloak to go stab someone to death by pulling an Assassin's Creed. You have conspiracies and someone around is in charge of organizing the conspiracy, could be one of your own diplomats or a plant in the court or whatever.

BTW everyone don't forget that Espiocracy is a thing and the devs already confirmed you will be able to whack JFK as the CIA in it.

 

[Morridowfag]

BTW everyone don't forget that Espiocracy is a thing and the devs already confirmed you will be able to whack JFK as the CIA in it.

Don't worry, I'm keeping it on my radar since it might just fill the hole that East vs West left when it got canceled.

 

[Open Face]

BTW everyone don't forget that Espiocracy is a thing and the devs already confirmed you will be able to whack JFK as the CIA in it.

I've been waiting ages for this. The dev diaries have been really interesting.

 

[Blackstar]

Turks are currently review bombing paradox games as a response to one of them being banned from the paradox discord for having an Ataturk pfp

 

[>tfw no Asian gf]

Turks are currently review bombing paradox games as a response to one of them being banned from the paradox discord for having an Ataturk pfp

I was about to post this, I saw tbat Stellaris was on sale and wanted to check it out only to see that the most recent reviews are Mostly Negative.
>Check inside
>A massive horde of Turks seething
Funnily enough they're calling Paradox Interactive a racist and anti-Turk company and in bed with Armenia.

What's with Turks on the internet being so easily tilted? It reminds me of Argentineans or Indians with how quickly they crash out over the smallest things.

Also do you guys recommend actually buying the game? Because I'm getting really tired of every couple of months having to pirate it again and have to manually install every mod again and again.

 

[Blackstar]

Also do you guys recommend actually buying the game? Because I'm getting really tired of every couple of months having to pirate it again and have to manually install every mod again and again.

Fuck no lmao

 

[Computer God Autism]

What's with Turks on the internet being so easily tilted?

Balkans mentality mixed with Islamic tribalism. Back in the glory days of the Paradox Plaza ragebaiting them was the communal past time.

 

[Karakhalkin-Gol]

Turks are currently review bombing paradox games as a response to one of them being banned from the paradox discord for having an Ataturk pfp

These posts from Paradox’s discord which explain it further. (Yes I grabbed it from Turkish twitter)

also, quite a few strategy game-related servers got raided on stream.

0:35

1:45

 

[East_Clintwood]

What's with Turks on the internet being so easily tilted? It reminds me of Argentineans or Indians with how quickly they crash out over the smallest things.

It will never not be funny to me watching third worlders spazz out and review bomb games. It's always over the literal most petty and retarded tribalisist shit as well.

Also do you guys recommend actually buying the game? Because I'm getting really tired of every couple of months having to pirate it again and have to manually install every mod again and again.

That's up to you and whether you wanna support Paradox with money. I will say I did basically that, buying cheap base game only keys during massive sales just for the convenience of using the steam workshop for basically the same reason. Nothing like getting the itch to play a game once in a blue moon and then having to spend a couple of hours bouncing between steam workshop and smods trying to figure out what shit I needed to update.

 

[Radola Gajda]

Balkans mentality

We wuz Europeanz and shieeet.

I was about to post this, I saw tbat Stellaris was on sale and wanted to check it out only to see that the most recent reviews are Mostly Negative.
>Check inside
>A massive horde of Turks seething
Funnily enough they're calling Paradox Interactive a racist and anti-Turk company and in bed with Armenia.
View attachment 9606116
What's with Turks on the internet being so easily tilted? It reminds me of Argentineans or Indians with how quickly they crash out over the smallest things.

Also do you guys recommend actually buying the game? Because I'm getting really tired of every couple of months having to pirate it again and have to manually install every mod again and again.

Sultan Erdogan has been fanning flames of Turkish nationalism for most of his reign. And many Turks like pajeets believe that they are going to be next(islamic) superpower.
Also there is large cohort of Turks who are living in Germany and other places on gibs of Euro taxpayers. So they have plenty of free time to seethe on social media if their national izzat is touched.

 

[Blackstar]

The Turks won, it's 1453 all over agian.