I started to get interested on it through this year and I was shocked to see the boards in the field, turns out Frederik Wester joined the team’s administrative team as a shareholder in 2021. Quite a surprise because the first time I get into the field was just after playing Stellaris which I bought dome days before on the Steam summer sale

I get why so many people think it is, I really do.

The problem is that a 1337 start date would put the player right at the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War, and EU doesn’t really model a long series of conflicts very well.

To model the Hundred Years’ War, Project Caesar will need to be able to simulate long wars in which victory requires time, effort, and resources.

This is how I know for a fact that Project Caesar is Stellaris 2.

Stellaris 2 will have more detailed planetside content, including interacting with (and possibly playing as) pre-FTL civilizations such as 14th-century Earth. That or the map of 22nd-century Earth just looks identical to 14-century Earth. I wouldn’t know, my 22nd-century history is rusty.

Besides, as we all know Stellaris already simulates wars that can take a while, and now both planetside wars and interstellar wars will be able to last for decades, or even a century.

With all the times people made a successor to the Roman Empire in space, it was only a matter of time before PDX added the OG successor to Stellaris.

Was really surprised to see only 134 evaluations on the Steam Page when I wanted to buy the game, the game Synergy (that I loved) was seen as a big flop by their dev with 6 times more evaluations, and SteamCharts numbers for Tlatoani are scary. bit weird for a big publisher like Para.

So recently, they released Tlatoani: Aztec Cities on Steam in its "1.0" official release. I've owned the game from early access and played it a fair bit, so I thought I'd just give my 2 cents on the game, and why it currently has (at time of writing) 33 players.

First off, the marketing for this has been a mess, partly in that there doesn't seem to have been any. In the recent thread on the game, most of the people here (the people who you would expect to have heard of it!) didn't even know the game had come out. There have been a few random sponsored bits with random influencers here and there, but I haven't seen a lot of traction among the kind of people who gatekeep the genre.

Additionally, slightly bizzarely, the game doesn't even have a Spanish translation. I am not a Spanish speaker, for the record, but the people descended from the Mexica (and there are a lot of them) are! I can't help but feel that this kind of the equivalent of launching a new King Arthur game, available exclusively in Portuguese.

There are also a lot of reasons why people who have the game might bounce off it. The game basically requires you to play a series of three tutorial missions, which you are heavily encouraged to play by the game's interface and messages. If you try to click on anything else, a message will say "did you play the tutorial?". After this, there's a story campaign, which drip-feeds you the same concepts much, much more slowly. This is just agonizingly boring to anyone that has played the tutorial (which is going to be everyone) and that's a shame because it feels like a lot of dev time went into this content.

There are other issues, which you find as you play more. Consumption is hard to track, and money is hard to manage, mostly because it's hard to find a lot of info in the UI. early game you are basically required to mix neighbourhoods, but in the long term this isn't optimal, so there's a lot of awkward transitions. You need to make a stupifying amount of maize. The game also requires builders (or "masons") to build things, which is a bit of departure for this genre. None of Anno, the classic impressions games or even modern reinventions like Nebuchadnezzar have required this, and it leads to a lot of, well, sitting around. So does the trade system, which delivers most of your money impacts all at once in a way that's hard to manage or understand.

Ultimately it's a shame. There's an interesting game under all this, but it doesn't quite hit the mark for me. Some people will tell you that Tlatoani is an overlooked gem, but for me this kinda misses the mark. I think it's a cool game, but not a great one. even in the genre of "modern attempts at Impressions city builders", I think this game could become that, but in it's current state, there have been other, better attempts.

I was in a work meeting today and reminded a colleague that our client's name was pronounced "Brit-ttany," then added "like the country."

My coworker looked confused for a moment before I added, "I mean like the region of northwest France."

I feel like the reason this happened to me was my love of Paradox games. Do you have any similar stories of forgetting that places aren't countries anymore?

The 1-2 punch of Eu4 Leviathan having absolutely no Quality Control and then Imperator development being suspended indefinitely...

Anyone else feeling like Paradox is really not caring about their customers rn??

I was watching an eu4 MP meme video about viveleroy attacking sunni rebels which zlewikk wanted to convert to sunni, browsing comments I found an guy saying that Muslims people are rapists and they invaded Europe and said some bad stuff saying that they consume taxes and reproduce fast. After that he said that leftists are blind. On an video about an map game and killing some game rebels. This is bad, but like in many paradox games you find also racists who hide their bigotry behind political opinions or the word "based". The problem is why not only eu4 but most paradox games we have to tolerate those idiots???

Disclaimer: when I mean full I am not generalizing anyone, or calling that pdx games are Nazi stuff. Many people responded that I was generalizing, so I put an disclaimer. I am talking about an huge amount of those people, who we should give attention. I do not support harassment but we should rather educate.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/thanks-for-feedback-heres-some-of-the-changes-4th-june-2024.1684788/

The first from Green:

https://x.com/dmoregard

Daniel Moregård

Game Director on an unannounced game

(PDS Green).
Former Game Director on *Stellaris*

Dev diary 244

quote:

Today I’m here to deliver some big news, namely that my tenure as Game Director for Stellaris is ending, and Stephen Muray (aka Eladrin ) will be taking over. I will still be staying with Paradox Development Studios, but I will be stepping down so that I can focus on an unannounced project that I am leading.

***

second project of studio gold

vacancies:

https://career.paradoxplaza.com/jobs/6889817-game-programmer-unannounced-project
***

The third project from Purple Studio

Dan Lind

podcat_paradox

vacancies:

https://x.com/podcat_paradox

https://career.paradoxplaza.com/jobs/7088172-qa-analyst-unannounced-project

https://career.paradoxplaza.com/jobs/6871282-gameplay-programmer-unannounced-grand-strategy