Teaching Paradox, Victoria II, Part I: Mechanics and Gears | Hacker News Reader

Teaching Paradox, Victoria II, Part I: Mechanics and Gears

acoup.blog

86 pointspicture15 comments

Here is link to author's previous blog series about Europa Universalis IV: https://acoup.blog/2021/04/30/collections-teaching-paradox-e...

Vic II was the first paradox game I played seriously. Later I bought EUIV after playing Victoria II, and while it naturally has prettier graphics and UI and maybe "better" designed, I was disappointed that EUIV didn't have the pops model.

This is a little off topic but EU4 completely got ruined with the last DLC. And this isn't another annoying complaint, universally on steam people despise it. It's the lowest rated item on steam. It's dramatically slower compared to when ticks were lightning fast several years ago. Buggy and broke the balance of the game ridiculously.

Ever since paradox stopped focusing on performance of their games and just said "add more features, who cares about speed!" I stopped playing. A full EU4 campaign at 4-5 speed should take at most, 80-200 hours. Not double that because I gotta wait for ticks because they added an absurd amount of additional checks.

I was an avid Paradox player, but I pretty much stopped when they started pumping out DLCs at a rate I couldn't follow with, in the CKII/EUIV era. I played EUIV a bunch but I probably still have more hours on EUIII

Well, CK2 is now complete, and you can often find it with all DLCs for a decent price.

Ck2 is nice because it doesn't run slow like EU4, Stellaris, or HOI4

Yeah, CK2 runs nicely on a laptop. The newer games are just a bit much. I wish we could have the same gameplay and systems with a less-fancy engine.

I bought CK2 years back, in a pack with all the then-existing DLCs. Then they added a lot more. I'm just defeated, I give up. I refuse to deal with products that don't have a clear feature-set and pricing. You don't have to deal with those studios when there are so many out there that don't actively try to squeeze you.

Stellaris is having the same issues. It feels like every dlc adds some issues and they've just slowly been piling up. The game isn't even playable most of the time if you don't own all of the dlc due to the balance being horrible.

I had 1500+ hours in EU4, but then I discovered CK2, and just couldn't go back to EU. You see, the very sketchy dynasty games were always unsatisfactory for me in EU. You can't really protect your dynasty or force a Personal Union on somebody, that was always very annoying. I'd play EU5 with more detailed family mechanics...

The latest update to EU IV (or expansion, I'm not sure which actually has it) lets you spend influence to place an heir from your dynasty on a foreign throne.

I thought this was only the case with the polish elective monarchy where you can send a diplomat to support heir. Can you do this to other countries?

With the latest expansion, you can spend favors to do it. As Bohemia, I managed to get my heir on the thrones of 4 other countries.

Last time I played it was in 2016 or so, so this expansion wasn't available yet.

(And yeah, I'm not sure I want to buy all that stuff they've rolled out in the past five years!)

The complexity of Victoria II makes it one of my favourite games out of Paradox's library. I am super looking forward to Victoria III. I hope they expand the scope and modding somewhat (i.e. like EU4 has an "extended timeline" mod that spans all the way from the Roman era to the modern era)

VicII was and still is a great game.

I'm afraid they will ruin the franchise like they did with HoI if they ever release VicIII.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com