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by DanAndersen 3122 days ago
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.

1 comments

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).

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...

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