Paradox Games

Well, that's very historically accurate. The Vikings would gladly let their victims pay them off to leave... only to come back a few years later for more. So yeah, being screwed over by being merciful to the Vikings really was a thing.

Yeah, I figured. I'm surprised they came back so fast though (only a while, maybe a year, after the war was won) , I must have gotten the Fylkr's goat by winning the war. xD

Edited by theLibrarian on Jan 30th 2020 at 10:15:12 AM

Also, they are a warrior culture. Fighting you is their hobby.

Hey! When the forces of Hel rise up to claim the world and Fenrir swallows the sun, all those vikings that were killing you yesterday are going to buy you a few more seconds to kiss your own ass and wish your Christian God had more power over giant wolves and world encircling serpents.

On the upside fighting so many heresies and heathens will get me in good with the Pope along with getting me free money.

Literally in the last hour of my Hive Mind playthrough, I remembered there's an "Assimilate" option to deal with other races. Though it looks like that just tacks the Hive Minded trait onto the conquered species? So it probably would have been better to just keep purging them and replacing the populations with my uber-spliced super-plantoids.

Oh well, I had all but won and got bored, which brings me to the point of this post: I hate all the post-Mega Corp micromanagement, and have been playing the 2.1.3 legacy patch since then. But in the two games I've completed, I haven't seen any endgame crisis, even when they were set to start rolling in 2400 and it was past 2475 and I had literally nothing to do in the whole galaxy. I'm wondering whether I'm just unlucky, or there's something about that old patch designed to make things boring for players too stubborn to embrace the new content.

I wouldn't know, I have a bad case of new game syndrome so it's been a good long while since I've even reached the Endgame year. :V

Speaking of micromanagement, though - how exactly do Sectors work now? I mean, in the older version of the game I played on console, it was fairly straightforward - you create sectors out of planets to reduce your 'sprawl' or whatever the equivalent was called back then, and then those planets manage themselves in exchange for you ceding all direct control over them. But nowadays it doesn't seem to work that way? For one thing, the process to actually make a sector is kind of unintuitive, and then you can't manually assign planets to said sector, and they don't seem to run themselves, and they don't - as far as I can tell - reduce your sprawl, so what is even the point of them?

Admittedly, the micromanagent woes is a reason why I prefer to play Tall empires, besides the tech bonuses giving you the ability to become unstoppable (in theory). :V

The only Paradox game I've ever played to the end is EU 4. I'm aiming to go through a complete game of CK 2 though, since it's now feature-complete.

With EU 4, it is somewhat understandable, since something about really large countries seems to slow the game down quite a bit, and after 400 years or so, there are plenty of game-slowing blobs around.

Also, a lot of players seem to find the end-game rather unchallenging, since if they can reach that point, they are basically just steamrolling the AI at that point.

That also happens in Stellaris, though I have to wonder if it has more to do with the size of Empires or the number of Empires, since if you have a large galaxy and go by the default settings, you can get a lot of different Empires on screen at once. I personally always set things up so there's only a handful of pre-made Empires, which gives them a lot of room to expand.

I'm pretty sure it's the size. If you create a custom empire in the start screen (using a mod to give you more points), the game will noticeably slow down before it's even started. Interestingly, if you isolate the capital province from the rest of the empire, the lag disappears completely.

CK 2 is more difficult probably because it’s a game of individuals rather than nations.

They mostly affect which planets get which governor's bonus. You can choose to set a Sector Focus and allow the sector to develop itself if you trust the AI, but uh...that requires you to trust the AI.

A sector starts at the capital and extends three or four jumps in every direction. So be careful about which planets you make into capitals.

I liked the old way they made sectors, actually. There's no real way to mark where a sector starts with the new version unless there's a mapmode for it that I missed.

Anyway, tonight's DND so I'mma be playing Crusader Kings again. I hope I have better luck in war this time, unless I spent the entire time building up my kingdom and armies in order to have enough soldiers to fight the Vikings and their vassals at once.

Welp, that game's a wash. My King got captured by Viking raiders and died in their dungeons and then I was suddenly inundated by multiple Viking adventurers and a shitton of Viking raiders that were simultaneously rating every single one of my provinces, so fuck it.

Edited by theLibrarian on Feb 5th 2020 at 10:00:01 AM

The trick with Viking adventurers is that they make excellent vassals and just love to donate their plunder to their new overlord. Said plunder provides excellent tools for dealing with vassals who complain about their land being sold.

Of course, that makes you a sellout.

I'm serious though, they were swarming me. Like there were thousands in every province and I had no idea where they were coming from.

They probably have a lot of manpower because, as a warrior nation, they can effectively draft the entire male population.

Apparently there is a security flaw in most, if not all, Paradox games

Essentially a mod can fuck up your computer so, until they fix it, better avoid unknown mods.

...Huh. In my experience there's usually one or two such raiders swarming over my kingdom every now and then in the Viking Age, and I can usually let them collect off my vassals a bit before selling them vassal land. Thousands of raiders in every province sounds weird.

Well it doesn't help that the Vikings were doing very well in that game. They had a Fylkyr, a massive presence in the British Isles...Basically they became a major power that no one else could really deal with unless they were at an equal size.

Read the new Stellaris dev diary...hoo boy, Void Dweller might be a challenge.

Definitely.

I guess Xeno is on the menu.

I think my first origin will be Remnants. Possibly through another try at authoritarian spiritualists, because that combined with Remnants sounds like a perfect smug-sense-of-superiority type.