Is it just me, or is this game pretty dead? Seems like the interest went away as soon as they decided to work on multiplayer instead of features.
I actually kind of hate Paradox multiplayer.
Its not even the style. I've played Defcom and Civilizations MP, so I'm fine with long games and I'm fine with real-time-with-pause. What I hate is two things. The first is that AI controlled actors have such a huge effect on the game, that's bad news for a multiplayer game (and unlike civ or defcom its not easy to have a satisfying game without the AI). But the bigger problem is the arbitrary nature of alliances. In civilizations and, say, Dominions, there is that cutthroat boardgame alliance making. But its balanced against the fact that in those games there's an explicit winner and there can be only one. So all alliances naturally favor their most powerful member and everyone knows that and thus has a reason to break the alliance (from a strictly trying to win standpoint). But in Paradox games nothing is stopping a few players from allying, deathblobbing everything, and then just declaring "hey peeps we won, eternal peace for all!" The best case scenario for the average 20 player Paradox MP game is to have 2 competing alliances of equal size, the worst case scenario is something like the near release Stellaris MP stream where it was literally just everyone joining the same alliance. I dunno, it just seems like SP ARRs are a lot more interesting than the MP ones.