Paradox games

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Re: Paradox games

Postby cmsellers » Sat Jun 11, 2016 3:51 am

I'm probably not going to buy Stellaris until it's at least 50% off, however Patrick from PopeHat (a site I mostly like for Ken White's excellent writings) has a review. It sounds like his biggest complaint is the diplomacy options, something Paradox still gets a lot of criticism for in EU4. Maybe the first expansion will focus on diplomacy? That would be nice.
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Re: Paradox games

Postby Krashlia » Sat Jun 11, 2016 4:33 am

Eh, i have two.

Mount and Blade: fire and sword
Crusader Kings 2

... anyone one ever pulled the old Uriah plot? Or slept with a court woman then married her off to a foreign court before she was showing? Or cuckolded her homosexual husband?
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Re: Paradox games

Postby Krashlia » Sat Jun 11, 2016 4:39 am

cmsellers wrote:I'm probably not going to buy Stellaris until it's at least 50% off, however Patrick from PopeHat (a site I mostly like for Ken White's excellent writings) .


Unrelated: Popehat? do you happen to be familiar with Slate Star Codex?
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Re: Paradox games

Postby Blackfish » Fri Jul 01, 2016 3:34 am

cmsellers wrote:I'm probably not going to buy Stellaris until it's at least 50% off

Bit late, but that does seem like the smart play. It's really more of an early-access quality release right now. Paradox is actively patching the game, so it'll eventually be very good, but if you're on the fence and not a hardcore Paradox fan I'd wait half a year or so, or until the first DLC comes out.

June 2017 edit: So, after a couple of expansions (Leviathans, then Utopia), it's better. But I would say it's not quite there yet. The current patch (1.6, "Banks") also broke a bunch of stuff that wasn't broken before. If you're on the fence, give it another half a year or so.

August 2019 edit: so, at this point it's safe to say Stellaris will always be a hot mess. At this point it's an interesting hot mess though. Would probably recommend if you like the space setting and are familiar with 4X or grand strategy.
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Last edited by Blackfish on Sat Aug 10, 2019 9:48 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Paradox games

Postby cmsellers » Mon Oct 02, 2017 3:10 am

I fee like I'm done with Paradox, but we'll see what happens.

Basically, after several runs where I failed to complete the same objective, for a variety of reasons that are annoying but won't make sense if you don't play EU4. In the meantime, I was looking forward to the new DLC, which I hoped would fix a lot of these issues. And I realized that they didn't. In one case, what they did to fix a longstanding issue was really underwhelming, so I commented on it on the forums. I tried to be as polite as possible and put a positive spin on it, but still got overwhelmingly downvoted.

The thing is, I've known that Paradox's forums are toxic for awhile, with tons of stupid rules and any criticism of Paradox getting flooded with downvotes and random people downvoting things for stupid reasons. But I realized that I really have to bite my tongue on the forums to minimize my downvotes and there's some things I just still can't say. And though I don't know why, I've seen several users I mostly agree with who have had their accounts on probation, likely for violating one of the forum's many inane rules. So I realized I just can't take the forums anymore. And that's a problem because a lot of the appeal of Paradox was how engaged with the community the devs are.

Then, the next dev diary, I saw that they were determined not to fix a longstanding issue that would be easy to fix. And that was the final straw for me. This isn't a bug so much as a design choice, but Paradox makes a lot of baffling design choices which draw strong criticism (given the fanboyish nature of the forums, any criticism which comes up a lot and usually gets more upvotes than downvotes I count as a strong one), but they double down on anyways. Paradox games seem to be designed firstly around multiplayer and secondly around achievement hunting, which in a supposedly sandbox game where 25% of people play Ironman and around 5% of people play multiplayer is incredibly irritating if you're in the non-Ironman, non-MP majority.

Then there's the issue of the cost of Paradox games. Already they've stopped offering old DLCs at 75% off (they'd previously stopped offering them at 90% off before I played), and they've always refused to bundle DLCs or incorporate really essential parts of them into the base game. I thought I might still try Stellaris on the summer sale, but it seems like they're also waiting well over a year before that's more than 50% off. Which means that instead of trying other Paradox games, I tried Civ V.

And I was amazed at how well the DLC work together in Civ V, and how good the peacetime mechanics are, as well as how Civ V makes playing tall viable. In fairness to Paradox their diplomacy system and how they handle war is way better than Civ V, and I have way more hours on EUIV than I'll ever have on Civ V. But one of the things I liked about EUIV was the immersion, and new patches and DLC have reduced the immersion and increased the micro.

Basically, Paradox seems to be moving in the wrong direction. Their games were always known for being buggy, but despite finally becoming a big-name company they've decided to double down on DLC that increase micro, break immersion, and don't play well with existing DLC. They balance around a minority of their players, who just happen to be the majority of members on their forums. They encourage community participation via those forums whose rules I've never much liked, and which have become toxic. And I just feel like I'm done.

But we'll see. Maybe the DLC after this one will get me psyched on EUIV again, maybe I'll buy Stellaris when it finally hits 75% off and love it. If I make it a year without playing EUIV or buying Stellaris, it's safe to say I actually am done. It's a pity, because I really liked EUIV at first.
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Re: Paradox games

Postby cmsellers » Wed Jan 24, 2018 3:06 am

I ended up buying Cradle of Civilization at full price because I am weak and I realized that by the time they'd have had it at 50% off they'll probably have a maximum DLC discount of 33% off.

However I firmly resolved at that point that I wasn't going to buy any other Paradox titles, nor start playing ones I already have but have no DLCs for.

Then someone shared on Discord that there's a Humble Bundle sale on Paradox games. The only things in the bundle that I want and don't already have are the Old Gods DLC for CKII, which without several other DLCs isn't worth it, and the base Stellaris game, which is currently a really good price.

However Stellaris is also subject to Paradox's DLC pricing, which means that at most you'll get DLCs 50% off, and that's assuming that they don't raise the discount floor again. They've already raised it from 90% to 75% to 67% to 50%. Stellaris's first DLC is well over a year old, and I still haven't seen it at 50% off, so I know that if I buy it an like it I'll end up buying those DLCs too at full price. So I'm going to try very hard to resist buying it the base game even at this price.

However if you want to try the Stellaris base game and the DLC prices aren't an issue, or if you want to try out some older Paradox titles, this is a good opportunity. I would note that while Paradox is known as a Linux-friendly publisher I believe that Stellaris and CKII are the only Linux-friendly titles in this bundle. I think all of these titles are fine on Mac though.
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Re: Paradox games

Postby Absentia » Mon Feb 26, 2018 4:49 pm

They just dropped the 2.0 update to Stellaris to go with the new DLC last week. I haven't tried the DLC yet but the update is excellent. They reworked a lot of the worst aspects of the game and the overall experience is much improved. It's good to see the game finally starting to live up to its potential.
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