[jwdunne]

Oh man, I've sunk countless hours into CK2. Such a rich game and I highly recommend it.

This post pretty much lays out a facet of what I love and alludes to the bigger picture: start with a historical setting and run with it, often diverging.

One game I became the king of Ireland and then somehow the king of Britanny. I then only had female child heirs. They got overthrown and ended up cast out of Ireland.

I was intrigued by that so I started a game as a count in Britanny. Worked my way up to the petty king of Britanny. Somehow engineered inheritance of another duchy - became a proper king of Britanny and then somehow became king of Aquitaine (so the king of half of modern day France).

EU4 is another fantastic game based on the same engine. Less focused on dynasties and more geopolitics/colonisation, this also throws you into historical settings. As Portugal, I became holy Roman emperor - they got into a fluff where no one liked each other so I was the only choice even though I wasn't in the HRE.

I'd love for Paradox to officially "link up" all the games so you can go from ancient Rome all the way to say the modern world. That would mean EU: Rome and Victoria on the new engine and also a new cold war era game they definitely need to make (focusing on modern geopolitics).

Clearly a secret Paradox fanboy!

[DanAndersen]

Paradox games like CK2 are great because they have enough complexity in them to create decent variety from game to game, so it's your own personal story that's unfolding. CK2 in particular, because of the human drama element, is very good at this.

The point about historical divergence is spot-on; a lot of the fun is in having some familiarity with the way things actually turned out, and comparing it with whatever ended up happening. During lulls in activity in my own kingdoms, for example, it's enjoyable just to look around the map and see what the heck is going on elsewhere.

Speaking of alternate history, I recently started getting into Hearts of Iron IV (which takes place during WW2), but actually have been getting a lot more enjoyment out of the mod "Kaiserreich" instead of the base game. Kaiserreich is an alt-history mod where Germany wins the First World War, and so by the time the game starts in 1936, the world is already quite different-yet-familiar (the US on the brink of a second civil war, France and Britain taken over by syndicalist revolutions, the British royal family exiled to Canada and attempting to retake the Home Islands, etc). Definitely recommend looking into it, if for no other reason than to read the lore on their project wiki ( http://kaiserreich.wikia.com/ ).

I've also thought about how interesting it would be to link up the Paradox games, and there are importing tools that kind of do the job, but having everything in a single game would be hard to achieve and still have the deep complexity that we enjoy. Modelling the feudal world of medieval Europe is fundamentally different than the nation-state-focused world in EU4 a few centuries later. I fear that any attempt to merge the two would end up like the Civilization games, which achieves a start-to-finish continuity but at the expense of losing a lot of interesting detail.

[jwdunne]

I've been meaning to play HOI for a while. I was put off by the short time frame it's set in - feels like I need to understand how they handle that compared to multi-hundred year timeframes in EU4/CK2. Mind Vicky is roughly 100 years but still great replay value but still 100 years is longer than a decade or two? The mod might be the push I need to check it out :)

By "link up", I didn't mean the same game. I meant something like a save converter that takes your CK2 save and you can use it to seed the world in EU4. Then it's just a case of doing that up the chain and filling in gaps with new games (I believe timeframes of CK, EU and V sit back to back).

[stryan]

They do have an official save converter[1]. Not sure if it works with the latest versions of CKII and EU4 but it's definitely worked in the past.

Hell, you used to be able to do the "Grand Campaign" where you play CKII->EU4->Vicky->HOI to cover about a millennium of history. Once again though, not sure if the save file converters have been updated enough to do that now.

[1]:https://ck2.paradoxwikis.com/Europa_Universalis_4_Save_Conve...

[erikb]

with HOI you play in hours though, not in days. The number of rounds might not be so different I believe.

[madez]

Paradox is doing most things right, not like some of their competitors. No pay-to-win or other ingame buys, but optional DLCs, that actually enhance the game, and constant development and care over years for their games, and excellent multiplatform support. Also, they are successfully producing some of the games with the highest (hours of gameplay)/(price) ratio, second only to some indie games and the unbeatable Dwarf Fortress.

These games are not for everyone. Also, not entirely unlike Dwarf Fortress, they might seem a bit off-putting due to their complexity. But they have a much better GUI, and learning the basics is faster. It still takes time, though.

[WesleyLivesay]

I like that they are doing, but I think their DLC strategy is starting to cause some concern in various online gaming circles.

People loved it with CK2 because it expands the game so much, and it was unlike what they were doing before. This helped people forgive the fact that the base game was just okay at launch. Contrast that to HoI4 where the base game was not fantastic at launch (but probably not much worse than CK2 at launch in terms of stability and systems) and then the DLC train started and I saw a lot more negative comments online. There were similar conversations around the Stellaris launch "Oh they are going to make us pay or features that should have been in the game in post launch DLC".

That could just mirror changes in players being hyper-sensitive to DLC/Monetization strategies these days, and probably don't bother the people who are really into Paradox games and put hundreds if not thousands of hours into them.

I am very interested to see what they do next with Crusader Kings, since they have mentioned a few times they plan on ending the DLC soon. Transitioning to a CK3 seems incredibly difficult given how barebones it will feel.

[distances]

Civilization solved this by including most of the content in Civ5 DLCs to the base game in Civ6. They did start the DLC train immediately with highly priced extra civilizations though, and got major flak for doing that.

[jwdunne]

I read about that actually. They use a 3rds model: retain a 3rd of existing systems, improve on a 3rd of existing systems and bring in a 3rd of totally new gameplay systems.

I don't bother with non-gameplay DLC. I don't get these story packs. I'd prefer DLC that overhauls some aspect and provides deeper gameplay.

[jwdunne]

Yes. The first time I played a paradox game, I closed it due to the overwhelming UI. Takes a bit of perseverance if you want a rich, fully featured strategy experience.

After a Paradox game, although fun, Civ just doesn't cut it.

[distances]

Indeed. After Paradox games Civ definitely has a "casual strategy" feeling to it. Plus there are simply no emergent storylines forming in Civ games. I do still enjoy both, though.

[eropple]

Rome would be a difficult thing to model (IIRC some Paradox folks have talked about this) given the way their games usually work. The biggest problem with Rome itself is the amount of internecine warfare and plotting that doesn't map to the CK2-style feudal mode. And that doesn't map to a lot of other powers in Europe and the Near East at the time. In CK2 and EU4, most players operate under very similar rules (like, Islam in CK2 is basically a slightly tweaked European feudalism)--a Rome game would have to come out of the box with a number of compatible-but-divergent systems in the ballpark of what CK2 was 2-3 years after release to seem like it fit with the rest of the games they do.

Which is not to say I wouldn't love to see it happen, but it's a hard problem.

[jwdunne]

They released a Rome game on their older engine that's now quite dated. It was pretty fun and I'd recommend it.

Because they're so moddable, a total conversion would be possible. I know the mechanics are similar but the game of thrones mod is breathtaking (I recommend this too)!

A good place to start would be the time when Rome was merely a small kingdom and take it from there. Lots of Mediterranean based conflict with other civilisations like the Greeks, Egyptians, Estruscans, Carthage, etc. The end result might not even be a Roman Empire but, however unlikely, a Gaulish empire or a Carthaginian empire. That sounds like a lot of fun.

[eropple]

Yeah, I recall the old one (though TBH I thought it was not particularly great). I think it'd be fun to have a modern spin on it for sure, I just don't know how you put together the actual game and make it work. I tried to spec one out not that long ago and getting bogged down by trying to adequately represent, if not everything, then a reasonable subset thereof. The winnowing down of models of government and religious aspects into a more manageable few after the Western Roman Empire "fell" helps a lot from a design point of view.

[jwdunne]

No, it wasn't EU4 / CK2 / Stellaris grade. I just love the Roman period and RTW doesn't cut it (Caesar III satisfies city management in a way).

I guess I can't argue if you've sat down and tried to model it - the culling of establishment structures makes sense now.

Given me inspiration to take a stab, if only to come to your conclusion. A decent, historical early Rome grand strategy game is too much to let go of.

Hopefully an impetus to put some code down on a game I want to play.

[eropple]

Hey, go for it! It's a fun problem. Shoot me an email if you'd like to chat offline - email in profile.

[jcranmer]

In my most recent playthrough, I've found that some of the mechanics don't make a lot of sense from an ontological perspective:

"Friends, countrymen. The rampaging horsemen of Kirghiz have long plundered the world and burned down cities and used the bones of our fellow Christians to fertilize their fields. We have heard from our friends in Gotland that Kirghiz intends to do the same to their houses, and we shall prevent this. Sound the alarms, muster the levies!" Two months later: "Er, never mind, Gotland surrenders." And a month later, "Friends, countrymen…"

Beyond that, it can be fun to watch just how screwed up the game can get sometimes. I had one playthrough where the Kingdom of Andalusia was located in Hungary, the Kingdom of Africa in Italy and the Kingdom of Italy in Africa.

[alien_at_work]

They do have an importer between all games, afaik. I know you can take the saves from CK2 and import them into EU4. It's a DLC on steam.