For me:
- Hearts of Iron 4: Yeah, it's a pure map painter game, but I think it does it very well. I find the strategic and tactical mechanics engaging without being overwhelming and the many countries give different challenges that require you to master different aspects of the game (defense in depth as the USSR, lend lease and naval warfare as the US, air war and puppet management as the UK, etc.). Plus, it helps a lot that one of the colors you can paint the map is red. :back-to-me-shining:
- Victoria 2: I really like the in-depth economic and political systems and the modeling of the historical and material basis of the rise of things like socialism and fascism. There is a fair amount of wonkiness in some of the actual mechanics of those things ("socialism is when labor unions and welfare, communism is when labor unions and welfare but also no democracy) and if Vic 3 addresses those issues it will be a very welcome addition to the series.
- Stellaris: It's fun for a while, but once you establish and entrench yourself, you're left doing a whole lot of waiting around. The only thing you really have to worry about until a crisis pops up is managing your economy, and that's quite easy. I think the game would benefit from more smaller crises (especially ones whose solution isn't "throw a big enough deathball at it") and (a la Victoria 2) more demanding and high-stakes internal politics.
- Crusader Kings 3: I fail and die because I am absolutely terrible at securing decent marriages. I do like how it gives you a fair amount of latitude to set your own goals and the emergent stories that develop, though.
- Europa Universalis 4: Played it a few hours, couldn't really get into it. Not sure why exactly, it just didn't resonate with me.
Haven't played any others, so I can't comment on them.
For me it’s CK2, Victoria 2, Stellaris, Eu4, Hoi 1-4. Each of these I’ve have several hundred hours in but the only ones I keep coming back to are Ck2 and Stellaris. Victoria 2 is up there just because it was my gateway paradox game and also because I’m hype as hell for Vicky 3.
Vic 2 is my least favourite. The game has a multitude of systems, very few of which you can interact with directly. The game seems complicated but is fundamentally very simple due to how little you the player makes an impact, and how much is automated. This is mostly compounded by how dated the UI is. IMO the game has an undeserved reputation as the most complex PDX game. The time-frame is also very easily the least interesting to me.
Crusader Kings comes next. I conceptually find the game interesting, but in practice, the micro-management of characters (and the prospect of doing it) just ends up turning me off from my campaigns very soon. I always need a chart and spreadsheet to properly plan eugenics and getting inheritable traits into the dynasty, the thought of slowly revoking and granting titles to clean up internal borders always makes me feel sick and extending said eugenics programme to courtiers to create generations of competent advisors makes it feel even worse. Then there's the fact that after like 1 generation my dynasty has so many children it becomes tedious to ensure all of them have a good tutor, good marriages, children of courtiers also notwithstanding etc. Love the time period, but it tends to very quickly devolve into tedious character micromanagement for me. The series is also just piss-easy. Despite all of my complaints, I will somehow manage to convince myself to try it again every few months.
Imperator has some of the best systems nowadays, but Antiquity is second only to the Victorian era in my disinterest and the glaring lack of content means that every run just ends up feeling samey. The character management is tedious too, and mostly just serves as an annoyance. It's overall just the skeleton of what could be Paradox's best game.
Hearts of Iron IV has decent enough land combat, but the air war is a complete travesty and the naval system is an a-historic mess, though I have yet to see an interesting Naval Strategy game save Rule the Waves which is basically unplayable for me now because my lizard brain needs pretty visualisations. Peacetime is awful and I would love for there to be a GDP mechanic to make the buildup to war be more impactful and in depth because at the moment the industrial queue for most majors is basically a flowchart nowadays. Also one tiny nitpick is that there are no mods out there which have high quality Cold-War style unit models - stuff like camouflage, assault rifles etc. TNO's really don't look that great, and the unit sprites in PDX games are actually something I care a whole lot about. The lack of negotiated peaces means that every War ends up with the victor hard painting the Map to stupid degrees, unless peace deals are scripted like again in TNO, which at this point is basically funner to me than vanilla.
Stellaris has the best replayability and allows the most different game styles in my view. The game itself is simplistic and still suffers from classic PDX snowballing, and even with my limited experience I find myself surpassing the AI economically and technologically very quickly. I find that it actually has the best funniest foreign affairs. The Galactic Community is really a fun UN-esque thing that lets you almost have a diplomatic victory condition, which is rare in Paradox's games. With mods, Stellaris also looks great, and I catch myself slowing the game down to watch late game combat unfold a lot of the time though the systems themselves are lacking - chasing tiny stacks is not fun, and land combat has absolutely no redeeming factors. I normally play on 13x Crisis difficulty, and the Crises are probably one of the coolest features as it gives you something to prepare and test your tag against, which I find tends to be lacking in a lot of Paradox games, most notably EU4. The Mongols are supposed to be this I imagine in CK, and they work ok in CK2 but tend to fall flat on their faces in CK3, and WW2 doesn't really count for HOI4 in my mind as that is literally what the game is about. CK2 has Sunset Invasion too, which is nice.
EU4 is my favourite even though it's probably one of the less good PDX games nowadays, because the core gameplay loop of painting the map is executed in a manner that makes it deeply satisfying to me. MEIOU & Taxes is also an excellent mod that really breathes new life into a game that at this point is honestly just really bloated and nearing the end of its lifespan. Not much about the game holds up in comparison to modern standards, the game feels extremely sterile and impersonal, yet I will somehow almost always have fun painting the map with a different colour.
I've only ever played CK3 and Stellaris.
CK3 became one of my favorite games when I figured out how to play it.
Stellaris I want to love, all of the systems in the game are super cool on paper but all of them seem to be off just a tiny bit. I also loathe combat in it, it's so tedious.
Cities Skylines is fun until I have to manage traffic, then I just delete the game and come back 6 years later
lmao I forgot about Cities Skylines until now but this is my exact experience with it
CK2 is the best, the sheer variety of stories and events make for new experiences almost every game for quite a while.
CK3 in second. It's a good baseline, but when I last played I felt like I'd found the "optimal" way to play and it needs more content.
EU4 and Stellaris are about the same. EU4 is decent but has so many core features locked behind expensive DLC, while Stellaris is fun once but doesn't really have the depth or historical context to make repeat playthroughs interesting.
HoI4 is basically garbage and getting gud feels more like finding exploits than the other games to me. Mods make it better. EDIT: Oh yeah and naval warfare is so bad I will never play a country that requires a navy to function (US, Japan, UK).
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Crusader Kings 2 - Fascinating game, got me to actually think about the world and power structures a fair deal. The actual game is very slow and rather easy (you can increase difficulty, but only of your starting position, which is kind of the opposite of what anyone would want). Still a really cool simulation though.
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Cities Skylines - Mostly a sandbox with a traffic simulator built onto it, rather than an actually deep simulation or a challenging game. I hear there are approximately ten billion mods though, and I really need to go back and check those out. Maybe some added actual gameplay.
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Stellaris - I played 8 hours, reached a galaxy state you'd get to in about 20 minutes of Master Of Orion, and made fewer meaningful decisions than I would have in those 20 minutes of MOO. Garbage.
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Of the ones I've played:
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CK2. By far the best one, it adds a lot of human elements and roleplay potential which really spices up the game and makes it unique. Incredible replayability with a bajilion different starts, and different inheritance rules can make the game feel wildly different. Haven't tried 3 yet tho. My favorite, go-to run is to start as an Irish duke/petty king, unite and modernize the kingdom, then forge alliances and pick up territory to face off against England
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Stellaris. Lots of customizability in terms of what kind of civilization you run, how you build up, etc. Very slow paced, however.
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EU4. Main draw for me is having the whole map available to you, so you can play whatever you want. Unfortunately, if you start far from Europe you suffer severe tech penalties, which it's possible to get around through development but it makes it feel like you're "supposed" to play in Europe, at which point I'd rather be playing CK2. The descriptions for each nation are nicely detailed tho and the objective trees are cool.
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HOI2. I find the combat to be pretty tedious and annoying. You have to constantly remind planes and ships to support, and often you have to do it one group at a time. Naval combat is the worst because by default the game only tells you when it's resolved, rather than when it starts, so you find out that your entire fleet of transports decided to fight to the death against the enemy fleet - I find naval combat in Paradox games is generally very frustrating an un-fun (another reason I like CK2). I don't like playing as the USSR bc it's too large to manage, and a lot of the world (India, for instance) isn't available because it's colonized. Germany honestly gives you the most flexibility but then ofc you're playing as Hitler. Communist China is alright but the game has no way of simulating a widespread popular movement so it's very hard.
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HOI3. I don't know why I tried this after not liking 2, but it took one of the few things I liked from 2, the tech tree, and split it up into a bajilion tiny advances, which I didn't like. So I haven't really played it much. Tbh I don't really like the WWII scenario, it's just a bad time for everybody tbh.
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My favourite was eu4, i found getting the more difficult achievements really satisfying, though i havent played since the last expansion since it was completely broken and unbalanced and that turned me off from the game
My second favourite is stellaris, i like the micromanaging of the economy although it gets tedious late game, also you can play as space communists
My third favourite is hoi4, i only play kaiserreich because base game feels barebones compared to it
My fourth favourite is ck2, a lot of micromanaging late game, but with not as satisfying economic development as in stellaris
My least favourite is cities skylines, i felt aimless playing it and got bored
I have enjoyed both CK3 and Stellaris. No idea what im doing in Hoi4 and EUIV though.
- CK3 - The most well polished of the ones I've played. Not overly complex. Satisfying when things go right. Understandable when things go wrong, even if that is from random chance a bit too much. Things going wrong is part of the game anyway, since it's focused on telling a story of a dynasty. Also I re formed Rome which is cool.
- HOI4 - haha army go brr (until they don't and I have no idea why because army stats are super complicated).
- CK2 - Good concept, a bit complex, just overall supplanted by CK3.
- Stellaris - I haven't played in a while, AFAIK there have been some major updates since, but it was a decent 4X. Also I'm pretty sure you can be FALGSC swole dolphins.
Not ranked: Vic3. From what I've seen of others playing Vic2 it seems like a really fun concept, but from the very little bit I've tried it's kind of obtuse. Vic3 seems to be getting the CK3 polish so I'm excited for it.
