[miamibre]

Oh man I love Paradox Games, they really scratch an itch which no other game gets close to which is giving history context through game mechanics.

Playing through Hearts of Iron enough times and you really get a good understanding of why the cold war was more ideological than anything else and how certain governments would ally themselves with different factions depending on how wars played out. Play through Crusader Kings and you get an understanding of just how powerful France was before the formation of the UK and how HRE was simultaneously incredibly well organized and a mess.

I absolutely adore these games too because unlike 99% of 4x games out there it's an actual sandbox. Rather than giving you set objectives you just have to survive until the end of the era which can be hundred of years or just a decade depending on the game.

I never understood why there was such a focus on "Winning" in Civilization, felt like it was such a limiting factor in how i could play feeling more like a board game on a computer, especially in multiplayer. If you ever fell too far back you might as well check out early. Meanwhile every Paradox game is an actual sandbox. You want to play as a small group of tribesmen in medieval africa? Go nuts. Want to try creating a mercantile empire with your base of operations in the middle of Siberia. No problem. You might not reach your objective but as long as you survive you will never "lose".

Experiencing the rise and fall of your nation is way more fun than just racing towards the finish line and honestly makes more sense than achieving a "Culture" or "Science" victory.

[wildrhythms]

This resonates with me a lot! I play other such 'city builder' games like Tropico, Citystate with the same mindset. The game is just a system of rules and simulations; pushing it in one direction and seeing how the agents react and how the simulation plays it out is way more fun than reaching some 'win' condition.

[krzyk]

I'm on the other side, I prefer games like Civilization, I tried to get into EU4 but it felt boring.

And when I watch at screenshots of other Paradox games they look like a skin on EU4, I didn't play them, I'm just talking about the visuals from the reviews so I'm reluctant to try them out.

[BlueTemplar]

A focus on winning was never the intent of Meier and Shelley :

https://www.filfre.net/2018/03/the-game-of-everything-part-2...

> Further, the ruthless zero-sum game implied by the “4X” label doesn’t actually exist in Civilization unless you, the player, want it to. Consider this extract from the original manual, found under the heading of “Winning”:

> > You win a game of Civilization in either of two ways: by eliminating all rival civilizations or by surviving until the colonization of space begins.

> > The elimination of all other civilizations in the world is very hard to accomplish. You are much more likely to win by being in existence when colonists reach Alpha Centauri. Even if the colonists are not yours, the successful direction of your civilization through the centuries is an achievement. You have survived countless wars, the pollution of the industrial age, and the risks of nuclear weapons.

> Bruce Shelley, who authored the manual, is thus explicitly discouraging the player from approaching Civilization as a zero-sum game: you win simply “by being in existence when colonists reach Alpha Centauri.” This doesn’t mean that all or most players played under that assumption — a topic I’ll return to momentarily — but it’s nevertheless kind of an amazing statement to find in a game like this one, implying as it does that civilization writ large truly is a global, cooperative project. There’s an idealism lurking within Civilization, this game that plays not just with economics and war but with the grandest achievements of humanity, that’s missing in the likes of Master of Orion. It’s notable that, while the history of gaming is littered with hundreds of galaxy-spanning 4X space operas, vanishingly few games beyond Civilization‘s own sequels have attempted to replicate its model of grand strategy.

> For me, all of this stuff of history and humanity that goes into Civilization is the reason that, although Railroad Tycoon or even Master of Orion might be better games in structural terms, they can never inspire my imagination in quite the same way. While I hesitate to tell anyone how they should correctly play any game, I’m always a little bemused when I see the folks in the hardcore Civilization community sharing exhaustive breakdowns of how to play every turn with maximal efficiency, as if they were playing a game of chess instead of a grand romp through history. Meier and Shelley must have felt much the same way when, shortly after releasing the original Civilization, they learned that players had developed strategies to beat the game by placing a tiny city on every other square, or by never researching any breakthrough beyond the wheel and the trireme, building endless hordes of chariots, and conquering the world by 1000 BC. They duly put together some patches to try to head off such exploits as much as possible, but they didn’t do so without grumbling that playing Civilization only for the purpose of winning wasn’t quite what they’d had in mind when they were designing it. “To me,” says Meier, “a game of Civilization is an epic story.”

> Meier and Shelley had envisioned a more experiential sort of player, one eager to get into the spirit as well as the mechanics of the game. Consider that standard practice among the hardcore of meticulously plotting a path through the Advances Chart in order to get to, say, the key advance of Railroads as quickly as possible. This sort of thing wasn’t what the game’s designers had intended at all. “That’s not how they [the real civilizations of history] did it,” says Meier. “They just figured out one thing at a time.” The designers had pictured a more free-wheeling game with far more space for the player’s experiential imagination, one where you might choose Mysticism as your next subject of research from among half a dozen choices not because it was a key advance on the road to Navigation but because you had chosen to play as a hierarchical, intensely religious society.

But we all know how easily the focus can become on just winning, especially when you are not sitting around a real table with friends playing a board game...

(But they only had a few decades worth of board and video gameplay refinements at that point...)