The tax stuff in EU4 is the exact kind of modifier-based abstraction of extraction that the article is saying is all-too-common of simulation/strategy games set in this period. EU4 is one of the most "board-gamey" Paradox games with probably the most abstraction of the individuals you're supposedly ruling over. The tax system is truly one of the most bland parts of the whole game. Saying this as someone with many hundreds of hours in EU4, it's a game I used to really enjoy.

Makes sense that they also developed Stellaris. Looks like I have a new game to buy and play.

Consider yourself warned: all Paradox games are highly addictive drugs. What you must have experienced with Stellaris is representative of most their games. EU IV is indeed a good choice if you liked Stellaris (I usually explain Stellaris to people as EU in spaaaaace).

I've been meaning to revisit Paradox games for a minute. Crusader Kings II hooked me the most. I never really delved into EU. The big problem I had with Stellaris is that I usually lose interest in the mid-game. I love the exploration, the building and even the initial diplomacy, but I just lose interest when everything levels out. I understand from AARs and the like that there are late game effects to disrupt the status quo, I've just never had the patience to wait for them.

You should adjust the "mid-game start year" and "late-game start year" sliders at game setup. Note that those are just the earliest possible start times, and the chance starts rolling yearly.

Definitely frustrating that you have to try to predict the game trajectory in advance. A game going well is almost a bad thing - you end up ahead of the curve and sit around doing nothing.

I personally find there's no depth to it: the winning strategy is to focus on growing your economic base and pump all spare capacity into research - by mid-game, you'll out-earn and out-tech every opponent other than the fallen empires.

In my last long playthrough, the second half of the game was literally me just racing against the victory condition clock to see how much megastructures I can cram in, so I can see what they do in a single game. It got briefly interesting for a moment, when a fallen empire decided to start their crusade at my doorstep - I had to engage in some micro-heavy delaying action for some of in-game years, until my exponential trajectory made me out-tech them and I could get back to building megastructures.

I mean, I like the game - but I wish there was some more meaning attached to things, for the actions to be more complex than scaling some numerical modifiers, for the tech tree to not be a tree and not be shared, for battles to be something more than "weapons are rock-paper-scissors, whoever brings more total points into the fight wins"...

Absolutely, it's been a long while since I booted up Stellaris. Something like Starnet and absurdly hard cling-to-life difficulties brings a little spice, but it's pretty much a solved game of tuning resource flows.

On launch they made a big deal about how they had the "cards" instead of a tech tree... turns out that's pretty much just a tech tree.

I don't feel like cards would be better :). I want the opposite - a kind of tech graph that's too large for any single player/NPC to explore thoroughly in a single playthrough, allowing a greater variety of opponents and games. I'd like different parts of the tree to offer different advantages, enabling different play styles.

Stellaris tries to enable variety by using "cards" to prevent you from seeing the entire tech tree - but you still know there is a tree. You'll still walk through most of it roughly in the same order. So will everyone else.

In this sense, my dream 4x is to Stellaris what StarCraft was to Dark Colony. Where StarCraft gave you 3 completely unique tech trees, each with its own mechanics, playstyle and lore, Dark Colony gave you 2 species that were really just clones with different sprites for the same units (and in few cases, slightly different stats).

(I could rant on and on. One day maybe I'll just write the damn game myself. I already have a sketch of a design doc assembled over the years.)

Exactly what I mean - the cards end up just being a tech tree in practice. The PDX games really do just need more _content_.

Haha - If you ever end up writing that game, send me a beta invite!

I agree that midgame is a bit of a slog: the most generic events, plus you're typically dominating the computer players. The for former, the Khan and L-cluster stuff have helped a bit (don't know if that was added before or after you tried it). For the latter, I've found that playing at max difficulty helps.

Under no circumstances you should get Crusader Kings 3. If you value your time at all that is.

I was kinda disappointed in it. Crusader Kings 2 were much better.

I once heard someone remark that for CK3 it is better dial back the grand strategy component and dial up the role playing aspect. Not to try to optimize an awesome long-term winning strategy, but to make choices with each ruler along their personality traits.

This may cause you to crash and burn with your kingdom, but it's probably more akin to how humans (and rulers) actually operated.

Ck2 was released roughly 10 years ago amd had tons of extensions.

I played recently ck3 and, even if the vanilla gamw is better than ck2, i got the same dull - boredom after 20 hours than i had when i played vanilla ck2 for thr first time. Give it some time :~)

Crusader Kings 2 and 3 are the only games that have ever recaptured the accidental all-night gaming session for me like Civ I and II did back in the day. Since discovering CK, I can't tell you how many times I innocently started a game on a Saturday night, have my partner come in and say good night... just to have my partner walk in the office and ask when I was going to sleep only to realize it's morning (my office has no windows). God I love it.

All you need to do is inject 3 Factorios and you'll be feeling all-nighters like it's your first time again.

Personally, I prefer Aurora and Distant Worlds: Universe. Paradox games are fantastic but these are Dwarf Fortress-level detail (if you’re into that sort of thing).

> I prefer Aurora

Is this that VB game that got eventually rebooted(?) in C#, that's full of annoying little glitches[0] that would be trivial to fix if the author wasn't aggressively against any and all kinds of modding?

I'm definitely looking for a 4X equivalent of Dwarf Fortress. Stellaris ain't it - I like it, but it gets too repetitive after first longer game, because the mechanics is just rock-paper-scissors with a hundred thousand numerical modifiers that have little qualitative impact on gameplay.

--

Like some number handling within the game being locale-dependent, so that unless you set your system locale to en_GB, it might behave unpredictably.

Ooh, interesting. I see Distant Worlds 2 is slated for release this year. I'll try it when it's out! Thanks.

Can't possibly be as good. We know how this goes.

AoE2 was better than AOE though. Same goes for Civ 5 vs Civ 4.

God, don't I know it. Between Crusader Kings and Stellaris I've burned a good-sized hole in my time budget haha. Great games, though. Stellaris' political modeling is one of my favorites in any sim game.