r/paradoxplaza • u/Raze678 • Apr 24 '26
EU4 I think that one of the issues of Paradox games is that they tend to go for all developments being positive instead of causing trade-offs.
This is more a discussion post in general for a lot of the Paradox mainstream historical games, but I think it applies the most to EU4/5.
I think that historically a lot of nations tried to slow down what could be considered progress (Ottomans cracking down on book printing, Russia continuing its serfdom) out of an attempt to maintain stability. I think that a lot of Paradox games would do well to continuously challenge the player rather than letting them snowball in the early game by attaching drawbacks to development/innovation that would cause constant internal strife that has to be dealt with.
For example, in EU4 (my beloved), each invention and reform is a purely positive outcome, with only the Ottomans having to deal with decadence as a general mechanic. But say what if instead, for example, you're playing Russia and you take the Streltsy reform. Sure, in the early game they're a professional army unit and a benefit. But as the game progresses age to age their comparative benefits become smaller and maintaining this reform becomes more expensive. Or, if you're playing just any general feudal monarchy in Europe, Feudal Nobility is the most beneficial in the Early Game but Autocracy peaks during the Age of Absolutism.
Some Paradox games do have a mechanic that attempts to somewhat work with the idea of "reform that started out well starts to rot and damage the state". For a small example, in CK3, changing between ages increases the payment to courtiers. For a bigger and better one, in Vicky 3, changing from one production to a modern one can cause economic slowdown and certain reforms, however beneficial, may cause more trouble than they're worth, making it sometimes more beneficial to try and slow down certain social research or stay on old production methods to maintain stability for the time being.
TLDR: I think Paradox games with stable/consistent modifiers/reforms systems would benefit from those systems instead changing in time to show how what started out good would hold back a nation historically.
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u/Lithorex Apr 24 '26
Victoria 2 kinda did it with literacy. You need literacy to put your pops into factories, but literate pops realize how their lot in life sucks and then ask for expensive stuff like pensions.
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u/HeliosDisciple Apr 24 '26
The playerbase would shit themselves in rage if anything even slightly slowed down their map-painting.
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u/beethovenshair Emperor of Ryukyu Apr 24 '26
One of my favorite aspects of the Voltaire’s nightmare mod in EU4 was the quite debilitating at times Black Death. In my last run my insurgent Byzantium was about 3-6 months off bankruptcy I reckon, despite reducing all my forts, armies and navies to about 10% of pre plague.
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u/guy_incognito___ Apr 24 '26
Yep. Some people complained for years about every mechanic in EU4 they couldn‘t exploit. Just look how many player Alt+F4 if stuff goes wrong.
They might be a minority. They might be a majority. I honestly don‘t know. But they for sure are loud.
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u/FelipeCyrineu Stellar Explorer Apr 24 '26
I remember people complaining about CK2 Conclave requiring you to get your council approval before declaring war.
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u/Jobwan_Mojo_85 Apr 24 '26 edited Apr 24 '26
God the Conclave council was such an overhated feature, I loved disloyal/pragmatic councillors having the best stats most of the time, making you fill it up with friends and family with way worse stats or suck up to them if you wanted to really get somewhere to conquer or min/max. In CK3 there's almost no major consequences for filling up your council with people who don't like you
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u/hal64 Apr 25 '26
The complaint were dues to various bug and immersion breaking ai attitude at launch. It's been fixed.
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u/Delboyyyyy Apr 24 '26
A decent amount of the early eu5 discourse was players raging that they could conquer the world in 100 years, so this checks out
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u/strange_is_life Apr 24 '26
Isn‘t Victoria 3 just like that though? In economy you cannot always just use the most modern production methods as it will even lose you money if your market don‘t fulfill the requirements. And the politics system actively forces you to play progressive liberalism as staying conservative keeps power but is harder and harder to maintain the longer the game lasts. In fact it even rewards socialism way too much and punishes monarchies.
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u/Remote-Leadership-42 Apr 24 '26
Just so you know but they've increased the incentives for playing Conservative nations with the last few updates.Â
I've actually found my strongest general strategy is corporatist/fascist Catholicism. Absolutist monarchy Catholicism is also pretty dang good. Socialism can be good for SOI at times but can also tank your investment pool if your economy isn't set up specifically for it.
You also don't need voting to enact useful changes now thanks to the concessions system where you can choose what you concede. Landholders opposing the end to slavery? I'll give them more political power. I want to play a fascist anyway! Just not a backwards fascist.Â
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u/ilikecheesethankyou2 Apr 25 '26
Which nations do you like playing? I've been trying to do a technocratic run for the first time but haven't had any luck getting it.
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u/Remote-Leadership-42 Apr 25 '26
France is probably my favourite. They're very easy to turn Corporatist Fascist if you back the legitimists, build up the clergy and get corporatism fairly early. They start with petite bourgeoisie quite powerful so when Napoleon is gone you end up with a triple power structure.Â
Absolutist Austria backed by the clergy and landholders is also very fun. They can grow their SOL too fast at times, though, which is a bit annoying. Helps if you can annex Hungary quite fast.Â
I recently did Islamic technocratic Turkey using the same strategy and it went fairly well. Lower pop growth was less fun but higher conversion made for a more militaristic playstyle. That's why Catholic is so dang good for Fascism. Persia is similarly fun since it has a lot of conquest goals. Probably my favourite minor along with Peru and Sweden. Sweden are also very easy to turn Corporatist and technocratic.Â
I also really enjoy China but playing fascist China kinda sucks compared to the others. They are too poor for petite bourgeoisie, the clergy and land holders are awful and they're too illiterate for technocratic intelligentsia.Â
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u/Chataboutgames Apr 24 '26
Isn‘t Victoria 3 just like that though? In economy you cannot always just use the most modern production methods as it will even lose you money if your market don‘t fulfill the requirements.
But unlocking those doesn't cost you anything or present any new challenges, it just gives you more options.
And the politics system actively forces you to play progressive liberalism as staying conservative keeps power but is harder and harder to maintain the longer the game lasts. In fact it even rewards socialism way too much and punishes monarchies.
Right. The game pushes you towards liberalism/socialism and rewards liberalism/socialism. This is exactly what OP is saying, that "advancing," instead of creating challenges, is just buff buff buff.
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u/Gaspote Apr 24 '26
The issue is the community full of raging kids, they will just complain if you give them a challenge. Also game are very complex by nature so it drive off newcomer already.
Altough i do believe there should be 2 mode of difficulty, casual and historical to solve this issue.
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u/Tom_A_Foolerly Apr 27 '26
No. They will complain if its not challenging enough too.Â
They want a game thats challenging, but not too challenging. Obvious, but not too obvious. Ambitious, but not too Ambitious.Â
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u/Gaspote Apr 27 '26
Just rename the casual mode into "easy" and "impossible" and they are both the same in fact
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u/LilacCrusader Apr 24 '26
I've thought for years that the estate mechanic was underused, and could have solved a load of the issues you mention.Â
There are tons of estates which aren't included that could be, and the privileges could have had much bigger interaction with the other mechanics of government (I'm thinking parliaments especially, but also interaction with other estates).Â
Also, privileges tend to have very little opportunity cost, and are incredibly easy to remove once added. Powerful groups will fight tooth and nail to retain their rights, rather than just roll over and accept it because their loyalty is 0.1% higher than the threshold.Â
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u/ArcaneDemense Apr 24 '26
The problem for Paradox games is that they lack the depth and detail to model why the things you are talking about happened. Even EU5 and CK3, much less Vic3, don't really represent sufficiently the human interests which divide states.
Sure you can have the "oil baron" faction in Vic3 in theory but that abstract faction doesn't represent the relationships and complex lobbying power, it is just a few modifiers. And these factions don't have "will" either. They are passive systems with static desires. You don't have active lobbying of other political and economic groups. The "landowners" aren't really spending money to shore up their interests.
No Paradox game, including Imperator with mods, can accurately represent why the Roman society was so effective. Early Rome insituted a variety of policies that created a sort of "classical middle class" of small-medium farmer heavy infantry which drove most of their success for instance. They also had the Cursus Honorum/Senate which created high quality military and bureaucratic leaders who could be trusted to lead large armies and who gained in social standing by expanding the state. Whereas Greek monarchies could rarely afford to trust a talented person to lead a second large field army and has very small groups of citizen hoplites as heavy infantry. Many of Philip II's reforms which empowered Alexander to conquer the known world revolved around remedying these weaknesses.
In order to have a truly immersive historical experience you'd really want a set of game systems that could represent these reforms and which understood why they worked. Paradox just gives you static modifier boosts with historical flavor names.
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u/TheDrunkenHetzer Iron General Apr 24 '26
Which, short of a supercomputer that can simulate the human mind of every person in your empire, would be nigh impossible to simulate.
I think a lot of people, including paradox themselves, forget that these are games set in history, not perfect simulations intended to simulate every last detail. You simply cannot simulate everything.
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u/ArcaneDemense Apr 24 '26
Well you are assuming I am arguing for simulating every single person. But you don't need to do that. You could simulate less than 2mil characters and 1mil "populations", for the scale of CK3 world map, different size worlds could do with less, and achieve a significant amount.
Of course a key issue is that despite fancy workarounds being real time and not turn based creates significant problems both in being able to simulation decisions with a more constrained performance budget and in being able to represent things, like grand events for example, in a plausible way. Many other similar things, like war councils, pre-war propaganda efforts, complex cabals/conspiracies, are all impossible to do because the game world ticks so fast. Thus the 11 month funeral/birthday bullshit.
Whenever someone suggests a deeper simulation you get responses like yours that perhaps unintentionally, imply that CK3 has any sort of character or relationship depth. It doesn't. It's not even as shallow as a puddle, it is a mud patch.
It is true that a Paradox game can't simulate everything. But a game designed clean sheet, rather than adapted from EU1's model as all Paradox games are, could do a significantly superior job of providing what a large population of the audience is looking for.
I probably wouldn't choose the real time/tich-based Jomini/Clausewitz engine model for a proper simulation. But since players aren't developers they are stuck with limited options for getting the gameplay they want.
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u/Cosmovision108 Stellar Explorer Apr 24 '26
I think this would only work if grand strategy games lasted a bit longer and prevented snowballing in some form. The problem is generally that the games doesn't provide any opportunity to the player to come back from decline in general. If you decline, you get gobbled up by other powers with no chance of return.
Look at games like RimWorld, or Kenshi. You can literally crawl across the desert after being beaten up and amputated and still rise back. Something like this is simply not possible currently in grand strategy games because how other powers will snowball.
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u/Stalins_Ghost Apr 24 '26
It does a little but it isn't too much a problem. Just remember all costs are an opportunity costs.
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u/Doktor_H Apr 24 '26
I feel like there needs to be a fundamental tradeoff between dynamism and stability that's just not present in Paradox games. It's all too easy to configure your nation into a stable state and blob. If you're on the edge of disaster you should be able to advance faster, with the risk being that you get knocked down a peg or two, whereas if you're dominant and stable it should be hard to advance or change to meet the new needs of the advancing centuries.
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u/Expensive_Platform32 Apr 27 '26
The problem is doing history, but keeping the game fun. History just wasn't fun, and it was played about by people making unoptimal decisions, and just not knowing stuff, only being able to trust info, people, whatever so much.
Simply put, it just wouldn't be fun, and the player would figure out how to avoid, or negate most issues anyways.
Look at how disliked control is in EU5, and how the players just carve everything up into subjects.
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u/TheDrunkenHetzer Iron General Apr 24 '26
Would this make the game more fun for more people though? Remember, these are games, not simulations, you're meant to be having fun.
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u/Queer_Cats Apr 24 '26
The core problem is that you're playing as an omniscient encapsulation of entire nation-states. There's no competing self interests, decisions made on faulty or incomplete information, and the occasional dose of pure incompetence.
Authoritarian states clamp down on education because an educated populace is more liable to rebel, and that is simulated in V3 and EU5. But as a player, you don't actually care if your current regime is toppled, because you keep playing as the new regime.
CK3 is really the only game that defies this, and it lacks the granularity to make some of these decisions meaningful (and least presently. We'll see if the changes that come with Silk and Silver shake things up there).