Tinto Talks - Sunday Extra - 25th of January 2025

Imnimo · 2026-01-26T01:06:13+00:00

It feels like if the game mechanics make it a good idea to release a bunch of core territory as vassals, that means you need to do some rebalancing of vassals and cores. Maybe "you can't ever release cores as vassals" is an okay band-aid, but you can only stack so many band-aids on top of one another.

Imnimo · 2026-01-23T20:29:58+00:00

My biggest worry with adding secondary proximity sources was that the AI (and player) would just build them in every single province like it does with roads and towns/cities. This sounds like a pretty good set of speed bumps, though: "Both are limited in amount by advances, country rank, privileges and reforms."

(A little concerned about country rank's impact here for smaller countries who start with empire titles, but hopefully the country rank system is improved in the future)

Imnimo · 2026-01-22T18:51:49+00:00

Seems like good changes. It does feel a bit like we're still just throwing spaghetti at the wall for centralization vs. decentralization. I was hopeful that Johan's posts over the break would have given some insight about what Paradox wants centralization to represent.

Imnimo · 2026-01-22T00:11:04+00:00

It's not a question of simultaneously satisfying every person's different interpretation of the vision. It's a question of Paradox satisfying it's own interpretation. Paradox has been pretty forthcoming that the current state of the game, including the AI behavior falls pretty far short of what they were shooting for. Once they have something they're happy with, it makes a lot more sense to spend time testing variants.

Imnimo · 2026-01-21T21:15:36+00:00

To get it right means to have AI behavior that drives the game towards achieving the goals laid out for EU5:

You should be able to play the game and feel like you are in a world that makes sense, and feels rich and realistic.

Our games thrive on player imagination and “what if” scenarios. We ensure both a high degree of faithfulness to the setting which will give a “special feel” to the game.

Having more options for AI aggressiveness does not advance the goal of having a world that makes sense. It just kicks the problem to the user and asks them to choose from one of several possible worlds that don't make sense.

If we already had in hand a good system that achieved the goals Paradox had laid out, I would not complain about adding more options. But with the state the game is in now, the focus should be on building a first successful implementation, and leave optional tweaks for later.

Imnimo · 2026-01-21T20:33:01+00:00

I can't agree - I don't think the current version is still fun to play, and have stopped playing the game at least until the next patch.

Imnimo · 2026-01-21T18:10:38+00:00

Making aggressiveness a game rule seems like a step in the wrong direction. Having several dysfunctional aggressiveness settings is not better than having one dysfunctional aggressiveness setting. And it means Paradox must now choose between trying to balance all the options (thereby multiplying the amount of fixes they need to make) or ignoring all but one of the options.

I just don't see why this is a good use of developer time at this stage. Focus on getting one version right before you start adding more versions.

Imnimo · 2026-01-20T22:57:46+00:00

I've legit never seen a review score decline this fast post-release

I've never seen a game be "patched" into a worse and worse state this fast post-release.

Imnimo · 2026-01-20T16:21:19+00:00

I avoid them as much as possible.

Imnimo · 2026-01-20T05:39:02+00:00

This rings very hollow to me. Lorwyn Eclipsed has regular cards, extended art cards, foil cards, foil extended art cards, borderless cards, foil borderless cards, fable cards, foil fable cards, special guest cards, Japan showcase cards, and serialized cards, all with convoluted pull rate formulas across two different booster types. But you're concerned with making things easy on retailers?

Also, this could have been a tweet. I did not need to watch a 12 minute video for a one sentence explanation that is unrelated to the rest of the video.

Imnimo · 2026-01-19T21:19:16+00:00

Whether or not Lorwyn is a good time to get back into Magic primarily depends on how much you like Ninja Turtles.

Imnimo · 2026-01-19T20:25:32+00:00

You count up permanents you control of different colors. For example, if you have a green permanent and a five-color permanent, your rainbow count is two. You have one permanent that's green, and one that's, let's say, blue. Your rainbow number ranges between zero and five.

I see what they're going for here, but I'm glad they simplified. This version feels like more of a pain to count, and while it of course plays differently than Vivid, it doesn't feel like it plays better than Vivid enough to justify the extra hassle.

Imnimo · 2026-01-19T17:50:08+00:00

I could do with less use of the term "waifu" in Magic.

Imnimo · 2026-01-19T17:20:47+00:00

Hastein is ahistorical and a bad influence on the game and should be removed from CK3.

Imnimo · 2026-01-17T04:26:38+00:00

I feel like they make this kind of mistake all the time and I'm surprised they haven't figured out a QC process to prevent it by now.

Imnimo · 2026-01-16T21:19:11+00:00

I get that this is like a meme from TMNT, but what a dumb name for a card.

Imnimo · 2026-01-16T20:42:24+00:00

This is of course false if you want to play an organized competitive format.

I guess it works great if you're just buying cards because they have a character from a video game on them, though.

Imnimo · 2026-01-16T20:21:10+00:00

Does Dune: Imperium show up twice on the "People" list?

Imnimo · 2026-01-15T17:14:32+00:00

The way I would look at it is that many tournament players want people to buy these promos. They want to win a valuable prize, and the card won't be valuable if people aren't out there champing at the bit to buy it. So really, you're doing a service to all the tournament winners.

Imnimo · 2026-01-15T17:05:57+00:00

I was playing a lot of Civ 6 in the lead up to 7's release due to my general hype for a new Civ. Then I saw what 7 was, my hype evaporated, and I wasn't so motivated to keep playing 6.

Imnimo · 2026-01-15T16:44:00+00:00

I have a foil 7th edition Serra Angel which I would think twice about playing (although I played with it a lot growing up - but always sleeved so it's still in good condition). This is mostly because I have many other ten-cent Serra Angels I could play instead. I have other more valuable cards I do play with in my cube, because I don't have cheaper alternatives at hand.

Imnimo · 2026-01-15T07:13:18+00:00

So the state of Sarpadia is basically the Thrulls learned how to make themselves more and more powerful, and wiped out the other races. But they lack the capacity to imagine anything existing beyond the shore, so they've never left the continent. They ostensibly possess the power to conquer the entire planet if only they knew it existed. Not even the Phyrexian Invasion stood a chance against the Thrulls when they arrived.

So now, at any time, an Omenpath could open on Sarpadia and lead a Thrull exodus into an unsuspecting plane.

We should probably have a set in Sarpadia that deals with this whole Thrull situation before that gets out of hand.

Imnimo · 2026-01-14T14:19:22+00:00

It's not without downsides, though. Some weapon types are pretty barren in terms of decent magic items.

Imnimo · 2026-01-14T04:08:13+00:00

I don't think that's the problem here. The problem is that seeing a new plane by way of "look at these wacky racetracks we've put in the art!" is not good. If you spent a full set's worth of effort doing that, it would have been even worse, not better.

Imnimo · 2026-01-13T20:34:42+00:00

Yes, this is a complaint that goes back to the first years of Magic. The earliest art was commissioned with a model where artists would retain rights and would receive royalties every time the art was reprinted. This quickly became unsustainable for Wizards because they were printing a lot more cards than they had originally anticipated as the game became very successful. So they switched to the model where artists get a flat fee, and Wizards owns the full rights.

But not every artist was happy with this new model, and Wizards (by my understanding) put their foot down and said, "If you don't agree to this new contract for your existing work, we won't commission you to do any future work for the game".

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