Think of it as a board game with nigh-infinitely deep mechanics that you don't need to fully understand to enjoy. You can hop in, do some basic map-painting and feel good about yourself, and then one day you look a little more closely at a menu and realize there's an entire other mechanic you've never touched that lets you squeeze just a bit more efficiency out of, only to realize there's another, and another.
Paradox games are tar traps for nerds in the best possible way. The kind of people who are good at these games make those people who play Dark Souls on a banana look like amateurs in sheer nerd-dom.
Dark souls doesn't require any spreadsheeting if you know the core mechanics you can beat it with a shit build sorry to be annoying but comparing everything to a fighting game with rpg mechanics that gradually change weapon damage by like 4% to get over the threshold from 3 to 4 hit kill or some combo of specials and regulars thereof kinda irks me
Like I said it depends. CK series could be concidered more 'choose your own adventure' visual novel + other stuff on an increasingly growing - or shrinking - strategic level, whereas HOI series could be considered a pseudo-RTS but on a strategic level, whereas Victoria series could be considered a sort of city-builder sort of game but also on a strategic level
Thats description is how paradox games work. you stack modifiers of +2 gold +0.1% growth +20% combat eficiency +2attack, etc. Some of those are given randomly so you savescum so the rng gives you the modifier you want.
8Thats because its cheap to implement and adjust such mechanics. When they are selling a new dlc every other week, they cant follow a simulation aproach. So they put together a script with a bunch of events that give random modifiers.
But even back then when they tried a bit, there were still lots of such modifiers and events. Its just that they were hidden or made sense in world. Now its all just hoarding abstract types of mana and casting the modifiers.
That being said making a simulation is incredibly hard. Back then chris king even build his world around marxist materialist ideas(he gave a presentation on this once) but it produced wierd bugs, liquidity crises, general gluts, etc were very common. The economy would often run out of coal and iron mid 19th century, and so on. Nobody could tell why things that worked worked or viceversa. It was somewhat fixed by balancing the coeficients, adding events and adding infinite dumps of resources and infinite workspace in provinces, so the company does not wamt to get into that mess again. Even then a lot of the game was stacking moddifiers but it was more subtle and somtimes counter intuitive.
At the end of the day you have your equations regulating how the game works, and there are several coeficients that balnce and adjust them, changing those coeficients is the easy way to change the outcomes.
menu games and map games interest me because hypothetically they could have deep mechanics like some dwarf fortress shit but yeah i can see some appeal of what they end up being ig, it's like people keep rerolling until they finally get pure himmler world with the weird mods, not for me personally,
Think of it as a board game with nigh-infinitely deep mechanics that you don't need to fully understand to enjoy. You can hop in, do some basic map-painting and feel good about yourself, and then one day you look a little more closely at a menu and realize there's an entire other mechanic you've never touched that lets you squeeze just a bit more efficiency out of, only to realize there's another, and another.
Paradox games are tar traps for nerds in the best possible way. The kind of people who are good at these games make those people who play Dark Souls on a banana look like amateurs in sheer nerd-dom.
Dark souls doesn't require any spreadsheeting if you know the core mechanics you can beat it with a shit build sorry to be annoying but comparing everything to a fighting game with rpg mechanics that gradually change weapon damage by like 4% to get over the threshold from 3 to 4 hit kill or some combo of specials and regulars thereof kinda irks me
<insert paradox game here> doesn't require any spreadsheeting if you know the core mechanics you can beat it with a shit build sorry to be annoying
but those core mechanics are just tweaking your state stats right?
It depends.
I mean the visual novel part combined with that sounds liek a fun enough intersection of game mechanics to add depth
Like I said it depends. CK series could be concidered more 'choose your own adventure' visual novel + other stuff on an increasingly growing - or shrinking - strategic level, whereas HOI series could be considered a pseudo-RTS but on a strategic level, whereas Victoria series could be considered a sort of city-builder sort of game but also on a strategic level
Thats description is how paradox games work. you stack modifiers of +2 gold +0.1% growth +20% combat eficiency +2attack, etc. Some of those are given randomly so you savescum so the rng gives you the modifier you want.
It's just like weird to me because it sounds like roguelike esque mechanics in a world map instead of a dungeon
8Thats because its cheap to implement and adjust such mechanics. When they are selling a new dlc every other week, they cant follow a simulation aproach. So they put together a script with a bunch of events that give random modifiers.
But even back then when they tried a bit, there were still lots of such modifiers and events. Its just that they were hidden or made sense in world. Now its all just hoarding abstract types of mana and casting the modifiers.
That being said making a simulation is incredibly hard. Back then chris king even build his world around marxist materialist ideas(he gave a presentation on this once) but it produced wierd bugs, liquidity crises, general gluts, etc were very common. The economy would often run out of coal and iron mid 19th century, and so on. Nobody could tell why things that worked worked or viceversa. It was somewhat fixed by balancing the coeficients, adding events and adding infinite dumps of resources and infinite workspace in provinces, so the company does not wamt to get into that mess again. Even then a lot of the game was stacking moddifiers but it was more subtle and somtimes counter intuitive.
At the end of the day you have your equations regulating how the game works, and there are several coeficients that balnce and adjust them, changing those coeficients is the easy way to change the outcomes.
menu games and map games interest me because hypothetically they could have deep mechanics like some dwarf fortress shit but yeah i can see some appeal of what they end up being ig, it's like people keep rerolling until they finally get pure himmler world with the weird mods, not for me personally,
On the one hand its cheper to program the rolls than a deep mechanic. On the other rolling the dice is increadibly addictive.
So their bussines model is to sell a new type of dice every month and milk the nerds.
Even if you are a pirate like me the constant updates makes it imposible to play strategically. But its very profitable.