Paradox Games

and : I don't mean during the war, I mean actually annexing the land itself.

If I attacked their home duchy in a holy war and they were forced to hand over their capital during surrender, does that have any more effect on them than any other loss of territory?

edited 16th Aug '15 3:32:32 PM by KnownUnknown

If you do a Crusade, your vassals don't lose opinion if their levies are gone for too long, do they?

The main advantage is that the top liege's capital is usually the most advanced and developed county in the realm. When you take that, you get the top liege's powerbase and add it to your own.

They shouldn't unless something is bugged or changed. Or you're also in a non-crusade offensive war.

edited 16th Aug '15 3:36:48 PM by Balmung

Taking the liege's primary demesne hobbles his levies for quite a bit and if you take it all they usurp another title, which can tick their vassals off.

Okay, what the fuck, Reformation? I can get a COR flipping a province that was being converted from one form of Christian to another, but I converted it to NORSE before the COR could try to flip my clay.

Regarding de jure empires, to be honest I'd rather see the majority of the vanilla map's empires scotched. The only de jure empires that should be there at the start are the Byzantine Empire, the Persian Empire (de jure but not de facto as of Charlemagne and Old Gods), the HRE (post Old Gods), and a titular Arabian Empire in 769 and 867. Every other empire should be custom-created by someone who was manly enough to grab all the clay.

edited 16th Aug '15 11:03:17 PM by Ramidel

Dude, do you realize how difficult it is to form an DIY empire? If you aren't Muslim and therefore can't take advantage of their giant landed sibling prestige bonus, you'll never get to 8K prestige in a ruler's lifetime. De jure empires are the only realistic way for other religions to form an empire.

The only reason I didn't do just that in my Zunbil game was because I was going for a particular cheevo that required Persia and Rajastan. Had the prestige on my finest Shah, easy.

If you want to make it easier, reduce the prestige requirement to 5000 or so. That's do-able for a properly badass king who's regularly getting his war on, throwing feasts, or otherwise doing stuff that expands his prestige, while still keeping "I made an empire ex nihilo" a major accomplishment.

edited 17th Aug '15 8:29:40 PM by Ramidel

The player having to spend a lot of prestige to make a brand-new empire is fine.

However AI is also required to have a truly massive amount of prestige before it can even consider forming even a custom kingdom - unless an AI character is proud or ambitious, it needs 15,000 prestige to get access to the found a new kingdom decision (5,000 with one or both of those traits). For an empire, without those traits, it requires a truly ridiculous sum of 120,000 prestige, and a mere 40,000 prestige with one or both of those traits. And no, I didn't misplace any of those zeroes. The actual "allow" value is the same, but the AI can't even "see" the decision, much less take it without those massive amounts of prestige stated in the potential scope.

So even a truly impressive AI ruler will never (or very close to never) get enough prestige to found an empire if it doesn't have the fortune to be in one of the areas so blessed as to have a pre-existing empire that passes the special-imperial-snowflakes test in the area. And, of course, if the potential prestige requirement is lowered for the AI, then the new complaining flavor of the month will be "wah, AI is making super ahistorical empires everywhere and everyone has an empire again and there's no way that a Lithuanian empire could have been founded".

edited 17th Aug '15 9:36:34 PM by Balmung

What, you mean the AI can't be forced to play according to the same rules as a player?

...oh, right, these are the Paradox fora we're talking about.

(IMO, the AI should be able to form empires if the AI can actually make the requirements that the player needs to make. 5000 prestige is hard for anyone who isn't already an empire, I think - 8000 is hard even for the player.)

edited 17th Aug '15 10:42:27 PM by Ramidel

Very few fora are good places. Most are overrun by whiny snot-nosed kids in adult bodies. Or not even in adult bodies, in a lot of cases.

Stellaris sounds like an upgraded Endless Space. I enjoy Endless Space. This should be fun and I'm keeping my eyes open about it.

Yeah. The Paradox fora (outside of Modding) are just particularly useless.

... Really? I've had more than a few questions answered well in the EU4 section of the Paradox fora.

I've found them to be pretty useful as well. And many of their common complaints (at least on the CK 2 fora) have plenty of merit.

The complaints have plenty of merit, but I've found that endless arguments about the Decadence mechanic really get...tiresome after a while. Maybe I'm just burned.

Perhaps, but the mechanic is broken and has been enjoyable as a root canal since SOI came out. Even after all their changes, it's still tedious for players and just renames AI blobs.

I typically avoid the main forums entirely and just focus on the modding and After-Action Report ones (because I enjoy reading those when I have a little downtime).

So, need advice. I'm Queen of England (with a female heir) and about to inherit Serbia. Any tips on keeping together a disparate realm with a bunch of modifiers that make vassals hate your guts?

Lots of spy use to break up factions, and if all else fails lots of overwhelming force - get yourself some allies if you can, try to ensure that your vassals aren't so unified that all of them fight against you at once (in cases where everyone hates you, this can be more important than getting them to like you again), and just in case those don't work save up some money for mercs.

Eventually the vassals will sloooowly start to, if not like, then tolerate you, especially once you start winning wars against them, revoking their titles and putting people you can trust control in their place.

edited 1st Sep '15 11:03:41 AM by KnownUnknown

You might also assassinate those that can be the most danger to you, if you can. I've done it multiple times myself and it's caused relatively powerful factions to disband afterwards. Also give out promotions, transfer weaker vassals to the control of those closest and most loyal to you, things like that. Then they won't make factions against you.

edited 1st Sep '15 11:15:03 AM by theLibrarian

If your ruler isn't awful you should be able to get non-Zealous vassals to convert pretty easily. Other than that the foreigner penalty shouldn't be too awful, if you've educated for diplomacy and vassal opinion (and beyond the early game there is no reason not to).

Your biggest challenge regarding Serbia is probably the ERE (if it exists and is in decent shape), who will go after their Empire de jure claims if they feel like they can beat you.

In other news, Elder Kings is starting to get more and more dev diaries and will probably be updated pretty soon.

edited 1st Sep '15 12:26:59 PM by Rationalinsanity

And now it's confirmed that neither Elder Kings nor A Game of Thrones will be updated until a patch fixes some fundamental modding issues. And since the dev team only releases serious patches that come to with DLC that breaks new stuff (and that's assuming they don't get too ambitious and try for a China expansion or something like that)...it looks like a long wait.

I've been having a ton of fun with Vicky2 lately. I'm honestly bummed that Paradox is going back to HOI 4 instead of Victoria 3 or East vs. West.

Well, HOI III is an older title than Vicky II, so it makes sense that HOI is getting a new title sooner.

EVW was apparently a developmental clusterfuck.

On the upside, Stellaris will have at least one feature from Vicky that people seem to keep demanding in everything else - POPs

EvW had issues with the dev team not meeting standards and deadlines, more or less on a constant basis.