So it’s time for another Paradox post! I’m sorry, but they keep doing stuff and seeing as they’re one of my favorite developers (Against my better judgment!) I’m going to have to keep writing about them!
Today I got around to downloading the Crusader Kings 2 demo that was released recently and gave it a whirl. And I have to say, yet again, Pox are really knocking it out of the park of late. I’ve played CK1 a little but could never really get into it very well – not so here. I was riveted to my bloodline’s fortunes! I found a wife, then we had children, then we had twins! She was a good wife. Then I had to decide, for example, who the children were schooled under. I also really pissed off the Bishop because I removed him from my Cabinet, but some gold sorted that out. A corrupt man of the cloth?! Who’d have thought!
After repeated attempts to marry my son to my neighbor’s daughter I got fed up of his constant rejections and decided to just acquire her lands (He had died by this point) by force. I sent one of my cabinet out to forge claims, and after a few years he had done so! A war later and voila, my territory had doubled. I gave it to my second son, because I had changed to a succession law whereby my first son gets EVERYTHING, which understandably upset the rest of them. Especially wee Brebinn, my first-born. She was not happy. Not at all.
Sadly the game does not have immortal Pony princesses, nor can you banish anyone to the moon. Should be able to send them to Scotland though, I suppose.
And then the time limit ran out and that was that. But I think, despite a couple of bugs (Some of the events don’t seem to be properly written, especially) that I’ll be picked this one up in a couple of days when it comes out, because I clearly don’t yet have enough Paradox Sperg Games!
In technical terms Pox have carried on their wizardry from A House Divided. This thing runs incredibly quickly and smoothly, as well as looking gorgeous. Definitely give the demo a try if grand strategy games are your kind of thing! And if they’re not, well, this blog must bore the crap out of you!
Yesterday the latest offering from Paradox Interactive was released, the expansion for Victoria II known as A House Divided. As you may surmise from the name, the expansion’s centerpiece is the American Civil War (As a Brit all I can say is we had our Civil War before it was cool). So let’s get this out of the way immediately; the Civil War scenario entails a new starting date, which seems to be reasonably well put together, and just about nothing else. If you win as the CSA, there’s nothing much that makes them a unique nation. There are no events to, for example, remove the USA’s cores on your territory. So every few years they will take another swing at reabsorbing you.
It is strange that the expansion’s centerpiece would be its weakest element, but there it is. The scenario is anemic and underdeveloped, and doesn’t really add a great deal that you wouldn’t have in the normal starting point of 1836.
On the other hand, “Loads of Small but Great Improvements” wouldn’t make for a very snappy expansion title, now would it? But that’s what it contains. I played an entire game yesterday as Persia and it was the most fun I’ve had with Vicky 2 by a fair way. The new elements work extremely well. The new method for modernizing countries that don’t start out that way seems very arduous at first, but soon reveals itself to be a very well-judged mechanic that is a lot more involving than the previous system. Similarly the new way you generate Casus Belli before you’re allowed to declare war (most of the time) was something I was very wary of, but in practice it’s a really clever mechanic that not only helps you feel involved, but becomes something rather tense as you hope you manufacture a war goal without being detected. It also helps keep the AI on a sensible path. Their need to make CBs means they seem to be acting rather more sensibly than they did beforehand, which is good!
The economic changes are similarly positive, or at least they seem to be, because Vicky 2 is rather hard to wrap your head around in that regard. Money is definitely scarcer, and you need to make decisions about what you are funding and how much. No more can some podunk middle-rank power field a first-class army, navy, and civil service all at once!
The Persian Empire shall again rule!
The one other negative thing is China, or more properly China and the new Substates system. See, in vanilla Vicky 2 China was something you really wanted to get into your Sphere of Influence. They were huge in every way, and getting first dibs on their market was immense, it would single-handedly keep you on top in industrial terms. To counter this we’ve got the new Substates system, where China is divided into six or seven different entities who are locked together as unbreakable satellites. Ahistoric nonsense. And it’s not like the 19th century was a time of unconstrained positivity for China! Where is the Taiping Rebellion for example? It’s a lazy and strange way to work around the problem. That said, using the substates system for, perhaps, the Confederacy, might be a very interesting way of doing things!
So overall I would say that if you only care about the American Civil War, this expansion probably won’t prove to be very interesting. However, every other aspect of the expansion is pretty much golden, and I highly recommend you get a hold of it if you’re a Vicky 2 player! Oh, and it runs far more smoothly and never really seemed to slow down for me.
A blog called Critical Distance provides writing prompts for game bloggers, and I’ve decided to give this one a go (although I can’t promise how successful I’ll be). Here’s the prompt:
Being Other:
Games, like most media, have the ability to let us explore what it’s like to be someone other than ourselves. While this experience may only encompass a character’s external circumstances–exploring alien worlds, serving with a military elite, casting spells and swinging broadswords–it’s most powerful when it allow us to identify with a character who is fundamentally different than ourselves–a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion. This official re-launch of the Blogs of the Round Table asks you to talk about a game experience that allowed you to experience being other than you are and how that impacted you–for better or for worse. Conversely, discuss why games haven’t provided this experience for you and why.
I imagine that a lot of responses are talking about gender or race. Which are very valid things to talk about as we approach games critically. However, I’m going to touch on something a little different. I’m going to provide a sequel to my earlier post “A Spreadsheet With a Soul” and talk about what it’s like to be the bad guy in a game. I’m not talking about picking the dark side path in a Bioware RPG. I’m not talking about roleplaying a jerk character in an MMO. Here, let me show you what I’m talking about.
I’ve been on a big Europa Universalis 3 kick lately. Currently I’m playing Portugal and taking over the Americas, just for giggles. Let me tell you how that went down: I sailed over to the new world and found some unclaimed land (denoted as gray on the ingame map.) Some of this land was inhabited by “natives”, which was no big deal, because my infantry could destroy them in a matter of seconds if they chose to fight. I slaughtered several thousands of these natives that way as I slowly began to turn the map from gray to green.
Then I encountered something else. Aside from the nameless “natives”, there were actual native nations on North America. Huron, Iroquois, Cherokee, Shawnee, and others all had little patches of color on the map denoting their territory. If I clicked on their territory I could see the names of their leaders. I could also see that they were eying me rather warily.
At first I decided to be nice. They weren’t bothering me and I was taking land that was rather far from theirs, so I gave them gifts of gold in order to befriend them and then I let them be.
For about, oh, fifty or sixty years or so.
Because that was when my lust for territory had taken me all the way down to them and their little blobs of color on the map were interfering with my lovely solid green. I checked the technology chart– they had nothing compared to me. I clicked on their territory to see what they thought of me. We weren’t friends, by any means, but they “trusted me implicitly”, probably due to decades of peace and the gifts I’d given them.
No matter. I declared war, stormed in, easily killed off their little armies and occupied all their territory. (The “casus belli”– cause for war– that I gave here in order to not take such a hit in various game attributes was that they “owned territory that was rightfully mine”.) They sent me peace treaty after peace treaty– first just begging me to stop and then offering to give up some of their land– and I turned them all down. I wanted nothing but full annexation. I wanted them gone from the map.
See that brown? It was bugging me.
It didn’t take long. First the Iroquois were gone. Then the Huron a few years later. I let Cherokee and Shawnee live for another decade or so (they were more out of my way), at which point they banded together and declared war on me and I retaliated by annexing them. Just as I’d wanted, these cultures were now gone from the map and it was all mine.
Now I know what some of you are probably thinking. That this is an absolutely awful and atrocious game and how could I play it in good conscience and how could anyone find this fun?
Well here, let me tell you something. By the time I quit WoW I had over ten thousand PvP kills on my main character alone, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of NPCs that I’d killed, and I never batted an eye or thought about the implications of it.
I’ve killed hundreds of people in Skyrim and not blinked.
I’ve Planet Bustered away portions of entire continents in SMAC and giggled.
These were all clearly fiction. The enemies were not real. It was all abstract and didn’t matter.
EU3 is different. EU3 is making you recreate events that actually happened (or would have happened, in some crazy world where Portugal took over North America). EU3 has made me stop and think about myself. Sure, I can rationalize every day that I wouldn’t ever do something like this in real life. But you know what? I bet the monarchs back in Europe in the 17th century were seeing it exactly as I was. These other cultures were offending patches of the wrong color on their maps.
Maybe we weren’t so different after all. What a thing to chew on.
It’s just a game, sure. But it’s a game that lets you step into the shoes of history, for good or for ill, and because of that, it’s a very valuable experience.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – George Santayana
It’s the motto of Dwarf Fortress: Losing is Fun. And it’s one you need to take to heart with that game, because until you get the hang of it (And even after you do) you’re going to lose, a lot. But that’s not quite what I’m aiming at here. In conventional games you may often die a lot as well, but you’ll come back at the last checkpoint or save and carry on.
What I am thinking of, however, is something fairly unique to strategy gaming, which is to say, losses that don’t end the game, but rather that are just a part of the game, a thing you endure, carry on from, and ultimately recover from.
But does that happen? See, in a ‘regular’ game like, say, Halo, when you die you just come back from it. You try again. You succeed, or not, and that’s that. In a game like DF you may lose a lot of work, but in these cases the loss is indeed part of the fun. It comes about because of a silly mistake, or because of hubris, or because you just got bored and wanted to watch the world burn. But in a strategy game losses are different.
Decisions, decisions
In the real world of course no country is in permanent ascendance. Not even Rome enjoyed uninterrupted growth, and Rome eventually fell, as all powers do. So a strategy game must surely account for this as well. Yet in my experience, when you lose a city in Civilization or are forced to cede provinces in Europa Universalis III, it doesn’t feel good. It does’t feel like it’s part of the proper flow of the game. In a strategy game you do expect to be in permanent ascendance, and to not be is irritating and may well turn one off playing. I recall reading an interview with Sid Meier years ago where he said his original intention with Civ had been for your civ to go through periods of contraction and decline, but he found it was far from enjoyable to have it work like that.
Partly I think this is a case of momentum. In a strategy game, when you gain something, that something goes towards helping your empire grow. Overextension and the like are rarely simulated, and almost never simulated well, and in fact when that is attempted (As in the Magna Mundi mod for EU3) it often comes off as very arbitrary and pointlessly constricting.
How about you? Am I alone here, or do others feel the same and dislike accepting losses? Are there examples of games which do this well, and don’t make it feel arbitrary or unfair?
I don’t really have a lot to report today– a particularly interesting round of Europa Universalis 3 has been eating up most of my free time– so I’m here to make one of the posts that our dear Mister Adequate usually makes around these parts and ask: what will you be playing this weekend?
As for myself, well– the Paradox bug has bit me nice and deep and I keep having to scratch the resulting itch, so I’m guessing there will continue to be a lot of EU3 and possibly some Darkest Hour as well. I’m also still slowly but surely working on Final Fantasy 2– although I keep getting sidelined from it by delicious strategy games– and there are a couple of indie games I’ve been having fun messing with, as well (The Binding of Isaac and Aquaria, in this case.)
Speaking of indie games, I’d also like to bring your attention to a new indie-bundle-type site that has popped up, called The Indie Gala. I’ve refrained from buying the package there yet– although I’m a sucker for cheap games so that may change quickly once my latest paycheck is direct deposited– but I figured I’d get the word out!
I was recently reading this preview for an upcoming game by Paradox, Crusader Kings II. Here’s the final paragraph of the review:
Of course there are problems in a game of this scope, when the mechanics become obscure and events make no sense. When he was five Harold invaded Scotland, forcing the Duke of Lothian to surrender his claim on Northumberland, but a month into the ceasefire he managed to usurp it back and even Harold’s babysitter doesn’t know how. So once again, the only way to really work out the game’s nuances is by sticking with it and putting in the hard graft. The hard graft though, is that much more enjoyable than in the rest of Paradox’s strategy games. We’ll see if it can still be as engaging in the long run when it’s released in February, but the preview does leave a distinct impression: it’s still a spreadsheet, but it’s a spreadsheet with a soul.
The preview’s implication, if you read the whole thing, is that this game adds a personal touch to what would otherwise be another Paradox game by focusing on people and families more than countries. This, the article states, gives the game a “soul”.
It’s an intriguing idea, and it sort of got me to wondering what gives a game this mythical quality of “soul”. Can this soul be found in other games– even games that are widely considered “spreadsheets”?
I'd play a pony spreadsheet game, for the record.
I’ve been playing Hearts of Iron 2 pretty solidly over the past few days inbetween working on my NaNoWriMo. I’ve been playing as Canada, which I find really fun to play for some reason. My main goal of the game was to turn Canada into a surprise industrial powerhouse while also providing some backup for my brothers in arms across the Atlantic.
One of the benefits you have as a player in a video game based on a historic event– in this case, World War II– is that you know when things are going to start happening and you can prepare accordingly. In this case, I was able to shuttle some troops across to France and line them all up along the Maginot Line. My hope was that maybe, if I could provide enough help, we could thwart Germany’s advance into France entirely and mess with history a bit– isn’t that the point of Paradox games, after all?
This didn’t happen. We put up quite a nasty fight but in the end the Nazis overran us. My forces retreated into one lone province, and I remember watching quite helplessly as they put up a last stand there against the Germans. And you know, for one fleeting minute there, I felt that I had failed. Not as a player. Not as a strategist. But as a leader. Suddenly, for a few brief seconds, I could see in my minds’ eye the desperate last fight of a group of soldiers facing the numberless hordes of the enemy. I thought about how a few in-game years prior I had made them say goodbye to their families and friends and sent them across the ocean to a foreign country. I wondered what they must be thinking, there in their little province surrounded by Nazis. I wondered if they thought this was the beginning of the end of the world. I wondered if someone made a stirring, spur-of-the-moment speech, inspiring them not to go down without a fight. I wondered what their last thoughts were.
I wondered all of this and then seconds later they were gone.
They weren’t “real”, per se. They were bits of computer data represented by a couple of pixels on my monitor. But they represented real events and real emotions that have happened before and will happen again, and because of that, for those few brief seconds, I found the soul in the spreadsheet.
And that is one of the many reasons why I will always love this medium.
So, as you’ve no doubt gathered if you’ve been reading this blog for a length of time, I’m a fairly big fan of Paradox’s grand strategy games such as Europa Universalis. My favorite however is probably Hearts of Iron II: something about it just really, really appeals to me, and I’ve had weeks where I play nothing but that game or one of its innumerate mods.
All kinds of hilarity
So you’d have thought Hearts of Iron III would be a pretty big thing for me, right? So did I. Then I played it.
I really can’t put my finger on what it is. It’s not a bad game, though it had the usual panoply of Paradox bugs on release. It does a lot of interesting things and objectively looks like an improvement over its predecessor. I don’t want to be some kind of old stick-in-the-mud but at the base of it, it’s not enough like II for my tastes. It took a long time to get into II, and now that I’ve got it all figured out I’m somewhat reluctant to move on.
But I can see the appeal of III. So I’m giving it another try! This time I’ve said screw the base game though, I’m going to dive straight into a mod that does stuff I like, so I’m rolling with the Historical Plausibility Project, which seeks to allow plausible in-game outcomes based on what happens without being either too sandboxy or hewing too closely to reality. Exactly how I like my Paradox.
What I REALLY want is Silent Hunter with Admiral Rarity, though there is an Equestria mod for Vicky 2
So let’s see how this goes! Have you guys ever had a game which you know you should like, but don’t? Have there been games which you’ve had to try several times before you get into them? Are there some you’ve just given up on, and retreated to a preferred predecessor?
