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[The_Explorer]

Counterpoint:
I find Stellaris, CK3, and Victorai 3 are fun to play.

By the numbers even New Paradox games are not fun. The market has spoken.

No one is arguing that no person in the world enjoys new Paradox. They are saying that they take away from the OG Paradox brand.

You are like someone replying to a thread about the old school historical Total Wars saying magic wizard fantasy Total War with a heavily streamlined Building system is fun. Or someone defending League as fun when people are talking about MOBAs crippling the RTS genre. What is your point?

this is a victoria 3 thread

[axiomsofdominion]

Counterpoint:
I find Stellaris, CK3, and Victorai 3 are fun to play.

By the numbers even New Paradox games are not fun. The market has spoken.

No one is arguing that no person in the world enjoys new Paradox. They are saying that they take away from the OG Paradox brand.

You are like someone replying to a thread about the old school historical Total Wars saying magic wizard fantasy Total War with a heavily streamlined Building system is fun. Or someone defending League as fun when people are talking about MOBAs crippling the RTS genre. What is your point?

this is a victoria 3 thread

Yes, we are all literate and capable of reading thread titles.

[Malus]

Counterpoint:
I find Stellaris, CK3, and Victorai 3 are fun to play.

By the numbers even New Paradox games are not fun. The market has spoken.

No one is arguing that no person in the world enjoys new Paradox. They are saying that they take away from the OG Paradox brand.

By... whose numbers? Steamcharts has CK3 consistently far above CK2 in terms of player count and that's probably the one modern Paradox game that really is just a worse experience all-around than its predecessor (with all DLC). Imperator failed, it's true, (though I think if it had *released* with its current systems, which are actually excellent for a map-painting game, things may have gone differently) but HoI4 is, at this point, just objectively better than HoI3. I still remember flamewars before launch over Paradox taking sliders out of EU4 and how it was clearly being dumbed down, now people complain about "bloat".

I encourage anyone who thinks Victoria 3 somehow represents a step backwards to actually sit down and play 8-10 hours of Victoria 2 HOD (vanilla, no HPM) instead of just comparing it to your rose-tinted memories. I won't go to bat for Victoria 3 and claim it's perfect or even excellent, but it's just obviously better than Vicky 2 no matter how you slice it. Trade routes, diplomatic plays, and production methods alone make it clearly just more complex than Vicky 2. You could argue about the simplification of combat but baiting the AI into fighting you in mountains with a tiny stack and then continually reinforcing the battle while you surround them with 1-stacks so you can wipe them is not, actually, better. I also won't miss manually optimizing stacks for the right number of engineers/artillery/hussars. If there's literally one strategy that is obviously optimal but following it is tedious, that's not "depth" or "complexity".

[The_Explorer]

Counterpoint:
I find Stellaris, CK3, and Victorai 3 are fun to play.

By the numbers even New Paradox games are not fun. The market has spoken.

No one is arguing that no person in the world enjoys new Paradox. They are saying that they take away from the OG Paradox brand.

You are like someone replying to a thread about the old school historical Total Wars saying magic wizard fantasy Total War with a heavily streamlined Building system is fun. Or someone defending League as fun when people are talking about MOBAs crippling the RTS genre. What is your point?

this is a victoria 3 thread

Yes, we are all literate and capable of reading thread titles.

Wooosh

I'll explain it further, since you seem to have misunderstood the point

want me to go and make a circle jerk in your game thread and tell you how you are such a bad developer (whether its even true or not) and to tell anyone who is excited about your game that he is ruining the conversation and what their point is?

Also as a heads up, I am not even that much a fan of victoria 3. Haven't played it since a week after release. But there are stuff I like about it more than victoria 2, stuff I dislike not as much. But not gonna go circle jerk on a thread and tell anyone they have no point if they say they like the game (or not, especially in a thread made for the game, hence why I said "this is a victoria 3 thread").

If this was a general paradox thread or I hate victoria 3 thread, then you'd have probably more of a point. But this is a thread for general discussion about victoria 3, for those that both like the game and dislike the game. And both are open to saying they dislike/like, yes?

[ndkid]

Counterpoint:
I find Stellaris, CK3, and Victorai 3 are fun to play.

By the numbers even New Paradox games are not fun. The market has spoken.

I have to admit, I am surprised to see you, someone who is developing what I'm sure even you will agree is a pretty niche game yourself, arguing that sales numbers are a proper metric of what is/isn't fun.
I'm hoping you're using "fun" here to mean "appealing to a smaller portion of the total gaming population", but even if I make that assumption, a forum that has been historically disinterested in the most "fun" games out there in favor of games that are less "fun" seems like precisely the place where people might enjoy a "less fun" game like V3, yes?
(Disclaimer: I enjoy both V2 and V3 more than CK3 or Stellaris, and maybe more than CK2 depending on the day, not that any of those games are particularly "fun" compared to GTAV, I guess.)

But also, since it's still Thanksgiving weekend where I live, let me say I'm thankful for the B12 Other Games subforum, which is basically the only "gaming site" I visit daily, even when it makes me sad when people decide to spend their time yucking other people's yums.

And, since this is the V3 thread, I'll say that I spent my Thursday morning lying in bed trying to unite Central and South America, only to have those pesky British colonialists sticking their nose in and making a hash of things.

[axiomsofdominion]

Counterpoint:
I find Stellaris, CK3, and Victorai 3 are fun to play.

By the numbers even New Paradox games are not fun. The market has spoken.

No one is arguing that no person in the world enjoys new Paradox. They are saying that they take away from the OG Paradox brand.

By... whose numbers? Steamcharts has CK3 consistently far above CK2 in terms of player count and that's probably the one modern Paradox game that really is just a worse experience all-around than its predecessor (with all DLC). Imperator failed, it's true, (though I think if it had *released* with its current systems, which are actually excellent for a map-painting game, things may have gone differently) but HoI4 is, at this point, just objectively better than HoI3. I still remember flamewars before launch over Paradox taking sliders out of EU4 and how it was clearly being dumbed down, now people complain about "bloat".

I encourage anyone who thinks Victoria 3 somehow represents a step backwards to actually sit down and play 8-10 hours of Victoria 2 HOD (vanilla, no HPM) instead of just comparing it to your rose-tinted memories. I won't go to bat for Victoria 3 and claim it's perfect or even excellent, but it's just obviously better than Vicky 2 no matter how you slice it. Trade routes, diplomatic plays, and production methods alone make it clearly just more complex than Vicky 2. You could argue about the simplification of combat but baiting the AI into fighting you in mountains with a tiny stack and then continually reinforcing the battle while you surround them with 1-stacks so you can wipe them is not, actually, better. I also won't miss manually optimizing stacks for the right number of engineers/artillery/hussars. If there's literally one strategy that is obviously optimal but following it is tedious, that's not "depth" or "complexity".

Compared to actually popular games/genres. League, Magic Arena, COD, Elden Ring, BotW, etc.

Or even 4X. Stellaris has 80% the players of Civ 5, and 30% the players of Civ6. And if you go out on the street and talk to random normies they will have no idea what Civ6 is.

As far as Vicky 2, I've been playing a wide variety of games from adjacent genres, actually doing Banished at the moment, so I played multiple dozens of hours of Vicky 2 about 3 weeks or so ago. No mods, well after the first half of the time I did some custom mods, just taking India away from the UK so can country could try and colonize the whole thing. Scramble for India is pretty fun. Of course there are downsides to Vicky 2. But the issue is Vicky 3 had 14 years of advancements on Clausewitz, plus advancements in game design and also graphics, and it is still worse than Vicky 2: HOD. Not by a landslide, but the problem is that it should be *better* by a significant margin since Paradox has a vastly superior engine, computers are much more powerful, and Paradox is a much larger company with piles of cash.

I feel the same way about CK3, though to be fair CK3 only had 9 years between the release and the release of CK2. CK2 was arguably substantially superior compared to Vicky2, though.

I don't have to compare Vicky 3 to anything but the potential of Vicky 3 itself, and by that measure it is a massive failure. Same for CK3. I was actually a fan of Imperator. The politics kinda sucked but the pop management, the military, and so forth had many strong points. I'd say the trade/building system was moderately worse than FoG:E but IMO pretty comparable to EU4. Trade goods were simple to some degree but they were majorly powerful in a way they aren't in EU4 outside a rare few examples. Actually the new EU4 merc system ruined my favorite trade good, Cloth.

The thing is that war is a "sidegrade" in Vicky 3, at best. Not an advancement. Diplomatic plays and maybe some of the manufacturing could be called a step up from Vicky 2 but not enough to carry the game.

[axiomsofdominion]

Counterpoint:
I find Stellaris, CK3, and Victorai 3 are fun to play.

By the numbers even New Paradox games are not fun. The market has spoken.

I have to admit, I am surprised to see you, someone who is developing what I'm sure even you will agree is a pretty niche game yourself, arguing that sales numbers are a proper metric of what is/isn't fun.
I'm hoping you're using "fun" here to mean "appealing to a smaller portion of the total gaming population", but even if I make that assumption, a forum that has been historically disinterested in the most "fun" games out there in favor of games that are less "fun" seems like precisely the place where people might enjoy a "less fun" game like V3, yes?
(Disclaimer: I enjoy both V2 and V3 more than CK3 or Stellaris, and maybe more than CK2 depending on the day, not that any of those games are particularly "fun" compared to GTAV, I guess.)

But also, since it's still Thanksgiving weekend where I live, let me say I'm thankful for the B12 Other Games subforum, which is basically the only "gaming site" I visit daily, even when it makes me sad when people decide to spend their time yucking other people's yums.

And, since this is the V3 thread, I'll say that I spent my Thursday morning lying in bed trying to unite Central and South America, only to have those pesky British colonialists sticking their nose in and making a hash of things.

That specific comment wasn't about the objective funness of Paradox games, new or old, since there is no such thing. But the point is that fanboys love to attack straw men. Vicky3 has a larger playerbase than some older Paradox titles, and clearly *some* people enjoy it. But it is objectively moving away from the old Paradox brand and objectively, as in devs have stated this and the userbase bears it out, moving towards different goals and pushing a large number of old Paradox fans aside. Additionally Vicky3 benefits player base wise merely from being the newest iteration, regardless of the quality comparison between Vicky 2 and Vicky 3.

The post I responded to is junk. It is actually yum yucking itself, and without even any points to be made. It would be like going to Paradox plaza and writing a post saying "I hate new Paradox" and literally nothing else. OP also specifically addressed the existing discussion, rather than addressing no one, and didn't write up a defense of the games either. And also as far as "this is the Vicky 3 thread", they mentioned 2 games that aren't Vicky 3, and one that isn't even historical grand strategy but space 4X. So I don't think such a statement is a refutation of my point. It is also vacuous regardless of that fact.

Of course like Paradox games modern forum software, which has been pushed aside generally in favor of Reddit and Twitter and so forth, has to moved forward meaningfully for years. It would of course be convenient if you could attach "sub-threads" to a thread, and/or enable a "complaints/criticism" sub thread by default. Then no one would have to see it if they didn't want to. And format wise it is superior to having separate threads. At best our only option is to make a "New Paradox" criticism threads, or enable subforums in other games or something. And obviously it would be unreasonable to expect mods to do the latter manually, and forum software doesn't enable any sort of "automatic popular topic subforum creation" or anything.

[Salmeuk]

this thread and the arguments contained within support my general theory that video games take place entirely in the minds of the players, interpreted according to their own preconceived notions of an ideal story. so when developers change the fundamental systems that define the player's ability to write these ideal stories they are in effect challenging the creative, philosophical potential of the player experience

this is why you get so many frustrated people talking about objective systems and material reality of gameplay. lost in the forest of mechanics they fail to realize that progress HAS occurred, just not in the way they expect it to. That is, the story the developers are asking you to tell has changed, and this is unacceptable for a lot of people, and it feels like a personal violence, since again these stories only exist (unconsciously, often) in the minds of the consumer.

So the first group encounters a new version of a game and they just play it. not unthinkingly, I am not dismissing this, in fact I think it is the natural, social way to interact with games. but they play along with the game and systems, and the stories are created in a relaxed manner

The second group will focus intensely on the reality of the systems and contrast these functions with previous iterations of story-telling devices (sorry, games) and stop everything to complain about how they can no longer tell the same kind of story as they once did.

things are not black and white and every individual applies both perspectives, sometimes towards the same game. . .

the progress of games is a convenient myth for the capitalists that make them. there is no 'better game', only better equipped storytellers. so - does Vic 3 support better storytelling? or does it stifle your creativity? do you really need to direct little army men around a board to feel self satisfied that your nationbuilding is up to scrap? why is it the case that state violence needs to take the form of a specific, measurable battle, and not the zoomed-out logistical challenge that is (afaik) the newest form?

[Dorsidwarf]

CK3 in the state it is now, is nowhere near as being good as CK2. And to be fair, you can chalk it up to CK2 being heavily pegged upward by the DLC it has, and CK3 barely having any... but in the same amount of years of CK3 being released have passed, CK2 had more DLCs out by now. And almost all the DLCs for CK2 within that aforementioned timespan, are leagues better than the DLC currently released for CK3.

I'll give CK3 a little bone; baseline CK3 definitely incorporated of minutiae things (and emphasis on minutiae here) from CK2+DLC to stuff it up on release.. but CK3 misses core gameplay mechanics that make it subpar compared to CK2.

- No playable Merchant Republics

- No dynamic Nomad system for Central Asia

- No unique government structure and mechanics for the Eastern Roman Empire

- No College of Cardinal system

- No joinable Warrior Lodges for pagan characters

- No Canonization of deceased characters of high virtue by the Papacy

- No coronations

- Complete lack of Secret and Public Societies characters can join

- No trade routes

- The basic inability to serve as a commander in your Liege's armies

- All the army unit models being the same Infantry model, instead of changing dynamically based on the amount of units you have in it (so for instance you had more heavy cavalry than all other types in your current army; it'd show a nicely made and detailed graphic unit of a heavy cavalry sprite on the map. Try the same with CK3 and you'll get the same basic footman unit sprite everytime)

..and many, many more things. So your claim that Paradox is making games with better "gameplay" in mind.. is truly bizarre.

To be honest, all the above of what I said should've probably been put in the CK3 or CK2 thread, but really it just serves as a case-example of Paradox as a whole.

Paradox does not care about gameplay. They care more about making gradually oversimplified games, in which they get picked up by YouTubers to farm easy content off of and make bank from the people who'll buy their games for the meme value, then stop playing it a few days later after being bored. Victoria 3 proves this readily as more and more people are beginning to drop it, and the Steam reception reviews for it only going up by 1% from 63% to 64% in the weeks it has been out already.

That's the real transition of Paradox game design, not them making better "gameplay" in their games.

I've gotta say, of all the criticisms of CK3 I'm quite surprised that "Base game for sequel does not contain every single possible side and booster mechanic from the prior games 12 major DLCs therefore it is bereft of core gameplay mechanics" hasnt died its quiet death yet. Half the features involved are stuff that was only added after years of whining and never really meshed with the core feudal loop anyway.

Coronations were like one of THE last things added to the game. No warrior lodges? Those were just dlc-selling wildly OP character boosters.
The only thing on the list that has any real merit complaining about not being in a game at launch is the second - last one, and that's not really solvable in the CK3 engine due to the totally different way that armies are handled there.

[Sime]

I think the underlying problem with Paradox games, is that their  philosophy of game design that prioritises world-centricism,  bottom-up simulation, and realtimeness   is fundamentally unsuited  to the development of deep and meaningful single-player games .   Their approach cannot scale up for this task, nor can it improve upon the problems and limitations that are inherent in their earlier games (poor AI,  inflexible game design,  countless bugs and  unmanageable complexity).     The fundamentals of the Paradox approach are mostly suited to the development of multiplayer beer and pretzels  war games of the Risk boardgame variety.

With respect to single player games, it is better to create a plausible  illusion of a world in which the player is the centre of narrative gravity, than to create a mechanically rigid and ultimately implausible 'real' world  in which the player is actually superfluous. 

[Chiefwaffles]

[snip]

Dude. I’d really appreciate it if you chilled it with some of that hostility.


Ultimately, I think some people here are reading too deep into their own personal experiences and trying to paint way too broadly with the conclusions thereof. It is obviously perfectly fine to not like Victoria 3. It is perfectly fine to not like any modern Paradox games.
But realize these opinions are just that: opinions.

We’re here to share opinions, but there’s no need to wax poetic about the ~objective~ decline of paradox because their games aren’t selling as much as call of duty(???).

[forsaken1111]

Can you guys use the paradox thread to bitch about/defend/whatever paradox please?

[ZebioLizard2]

Can you guys use the paradox thread to bitch about/defend/whatever paradox please?

Most of it is on topic with the Vic 3 complaints.

[Chiefwaffles]

I’m inclined to agree with Forsaken here.

[forsaken1111]

Most of it is on topic with the Vic 3 complaints.

If you say so.

Anyway I'm slowly learning how the game really works, learned a lot about the economic systems during my current run as Egypt. I've managed to stretch the market of Egypt across the world. It now resides on every continent, and incorporates I think 9 different countries. I've managed to push them up to rank 10 globally and raised the average quality of life by a good 40% since game start.

The constant tweaking of the economy and buildings is getting tedious though. Activating and deactivating production methods in response to market changes, etc. I'd love some better meta-level tools for managing the economy, even if they're a bit less efficient. It's hard to feel like a ruler when I'm micromanaging the forging process of every steel mill in the country and tweaking the ownership style of every farm, etc.

Similarly I'd really love an overlay of who would accept various diplomatic overtures. For example, in TW:Warhammer 3 I can pull up a list of who would possibly accept a trade agreement, an alliance, etc. In this game it just shows a list of valid targets and I have to mouse over every entry in the list to see what their acceptance/refusal status is. It's already a number, seems like an easy win to just put that score on the list itself. It would make things easier to see.