Paradox Games

That may make it less of a problem when you're lacking heirs.

Yeah, I am curious about that. They weren't very clear if you can continue playing as another house in the same dynasty or if you need to keep inside your own house or is game over.

You can.

So there's finally a good reason to land and support your surplus sons (other than gavelkind). Nice.

Booted up cruaders kings 2 for the first time in months,it kept crashing when I got to the loading screen,that happened like 3 times forcing me to make sure the files were actually there

I'm currently playing Lithoids and man is some of this shit powered up. I've got a gas producing race that's partially funding itself by selling the stuff. Like .01 gas per pop per month so every new pop adds to that. Lithoids start with four special blockers that produce another pop each, plus the slums. It's to the tune of 750 minerals a pop, but that's five cheap populations right there. Oh, and since we're inorganic, we have full diplomacy options with driven assimilators. I know, I'm currently in a NAP and research agreement with one. Man this is fun.

Driven assimilators or determined exterminators? The former have full diplomacy with everyone too.

In other news, I like the federations update - even speaking as an empire player who favors Aggressive Negotiations to diplomacy.

Edited by Ramidel on Nov 2nd 2019 at 6:22:53 AM

Huh, I thought that was just with robots. Nifty to know Assimilators could befriend anyone if they're impressed enough.

Theoretically, they could but in practice, their policy of assimilating all organic life tends to make them unpopular

I know. My neighbors the Silicron Collectors got their asses handed to them so badly I was able to peacefully install myself as their overlord. And I'm not a pushover anymore. Only got 24 or so systems but most of them have something I can inhabit and I'm slowly building up my economy with a mix of my own Praku people, the Nu-Baol folk I pulled a Lazarus on, and robots I started with thanks to Mechanist. Plus odds and ends I picked up as part of a migration treaty with a neighboring megachurch.

Yeah, but trust and realpolitik can override that. While this isn't Starflight, and so there's no room for desperate alliances between Fanatical Purifiers, Driven Assimilators understand the concept of diplomacy.

Edited by Ramidel on Nov 2nd 2019 at 11:15:10 AM

I'm still waiting for my various ship mods to update >.> It seems like in spite of a bunch of different Workshop updates happening on Steam that none of them have been able to bring the mods up to 2.5 yet. Plus the Federations DLC coming out soon has also kind of killed my motivation to play.

I may start a persistent game in Crusader Kings 2 to try and get through one entire game before Crusader Kings 3 comes out. But where to start...

Oh that's easy. You shatter the world, find the viking analogues and you pick one on the borderland against another religion so you can get rich raiding. And just for shits and giggles, you lock the age slider at 16 and make the leaders half girls and half boys for the marriage alliance angle. Duh.

ETA: There's only two things I don't like about Lithoids so far. 1. The advisor voice isn't complete. It has a lot of cool lines and funny rock puns, but then you get the War Declared message and it's very clearly one of the other advisors. I forget which one, the higher pitched British one. 2. I'm absolutely sure a lot of the good points I noted earlier aren't there to stay. They're too good in at least the early game.

Edited by Journeyman on Nov 2nd 2019 at 1:40:50 PM

I just saw Portugal conquer Japan in EU 4. I don't think I've EVER seen the AI conquer Japan before.

Also, since the latest update, the Mingplosion seems to be a lot more common again.

New Hearts of Iron Dev Diary out now.

About yet another new patch.

Mods like Red World and CW;IC trying desperately to get out after months of hiatus are going to be disappointed.

Anyway, features include several balances and fixes, and a new ability to search national foci by, say, whether it gives political power or not. The launcher is also getting a redesign.

Speaking of a new launcher, has anyone here been able to play with any of their mods since that launcher came out? None of mine have apparently been updated enough and it's been over a month. I mean, they could all just be working on updates for it, but even cosmetic stuff isn't working.

Finally getting back into Imperator again and this is the current state of my coop game.◊

I started as Syracuse and the other player as Kush - a third player's been jumping in recently as that Nabataean nation in Arabia.

The early game went as usual; I conquered the local Sicilian tribes and then started slowly expanding into Southern Italy. One thing I did this time around was allying with Rome to keep them off my back, as they're a notorious pain in the neck to fight and I didn't want them to suddenly invade me.

While they still gobbled up most of Italy, I managed to take over Calabria and turned Messapia into a tribal vassal.

I also managed to kick Carthage out of the area in multiple wars - I took their part of Sicily off the early on and when they later declared war on me later on, I took their holdings in Sicily (the rest used to be owned by the Etruscans and local tribes before I annexed them).

At some point Rome's AI became increasingly bi-polar, constantly shifting between "planning your demise" and "actually liking you", making me pretty paranoid about breaking out alliance. When they actually did, I immediately allied with Macedon to have at least somebody on my side.

That alliance with Macedon didn't hold for long because they somehow ended up in a war with Rome over Armenia and I couldn't be arsed to get myself beaten up by the Romans. Then something unexpected happen - somehow Rome lost the war and part of their territory became independent or owned by some tribes further north.

Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I promptly annexed the new neighbours, significantly enlarging my territory. I also allied with one of the remaining breakaway states further North - the Etruscans who were now back on the map and even owned most of Latium (excluding Rome, of course). While they were still kinda miffed about the whole annexation thing earlier, they were perfectly willing to ally with me.

So the next decades saw me essentially using Etruria as a distraction to slowly gobble up more and more of Rome, until Rome was left with only three cities: Rome, a city in Liguria and another one in Illyria. At this point I had pretty much decided to turn against Etruria and they made it easy for me by losing a war against some tribes, losing parts of their kingdom to newly independent tribes. So I marched in and annexed all of them.

Rome would vanish from the map after two more wars against various small states in the north, followed by a longer campaign in Illyria - I actually took most of that Illyrian coastline in one war, partly assisted by my new client state Epirus, which I aquired during the inevitable annexation of Messapia - I was trying to remove all pirate havens from Italy and the Messapians still had one, making me release them from vassalage to integrate them into the kingdom proper.

Long story short: I started off playing off my neighbours very carefully, until luck struck multiple times and allowed me to quickly became the dominant power in Italy. My next steps will be furthe expansion in Illyria and Cisalpine Gaul.

Culturally, most of Italy has been Hellenised, apart from a few Roman cities and the still predominantly Gallic areas in the north. Syracuse is absolutely massive◊, partly due to all the slaves I kept accumulating during my northern wars, especially against Rome.

Rome got actually sacked twice during those wars and while I had the option to completely raze it to the ground after my conquest, I decided to be lenient. Hopefully it'll turn into a proper polis in the long run.

While I'm allied with Macedon again, eventual conflict is pretty much inevitable, as I'm poised to establish my dominance over the Hellenic World, now that Egypt is experiencing a Kushitic resurgence and the Seleucids are in a state of collapse.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Nov 13th 2019 at 5:43:46 PM

If you mean the EU 4 launcher, yeah, I have that problem too now, even very basic mods that pretty much always worked now get flagged as being outdated.

Stellaris Dev Diary #160 - Origins Full Reveal

I was talking about Stellaris, but yeah, this problem seems to be consistent.

Maybe I just need to clear out every single mod and re-subscribe to them all...

The Origins seem to be pretty underwhelming as a whole, IMO.

Galactic Doorstep is a disappointment, I hoped it would be something like a L-Cluster start.

That's by far the most disappointing/underpowered one, I agree. The Federation ones look like they just stunt growth of every member by clustering them from the start.

The Hive Mind and Machine exclusives look ok.

The doomed homeworld looks like a fun spin, but its not something I'd do every run and I doubt the AI can handle it.

The former Civics...well they free up a slot.

Can't really judge the ones that have you start on Ringworlds/Habitats.

I like them. There's a good number of different ones.

I think there might be a problem with updating mods. One thing that worked for me is clearing the local mods map, making the game redownload them. That fixed the issue for me.