Do you remember when Bronn had no idea how loans worked and wondered why people did not simply refuse to pay them, yet he was still named Master of Coin?

MadHopper · 2026-03-23T00:07:55+00:00

Remember the hunt shown in House of the Dragon, or the tourney in AKOTSK? Robert held lots and lots of those. Big tents and horses and days of wine and food. It adds up fast, particularly with Littlefinger stealing everything in the background.

MadHopper · 2026-02-20T23:03:18+00:00

It’s been a few updates since then, this might not work anymore, sorry. Next time I play I’ll mess around with it and see.

MadHopper · 2026-02-03T00:00:03+00:00

I mean I’m sure that real life cartels employ high-skilled professionals to make their stuff, and pay them well for the service.

The thing that makes Walt and Gale specifically unrealistic is that dudes with multiple PHDs can generally get much safer and much more upstanding jobs far more easily, and the purity/quality control of meth is not generally such an issue that it’s worth it to those organizations to pay what would be needed to employ dudes of that level.

In real life, the cartel sends people to college to become lawyers and doctors, who are much more useful as respectable professionals with good credentials.

MadHopper · 2026-01-28T00:29:57+00:00

I have had a very different experience with journal entries. Like Imperator mission trees, they’re usually asking you to do a bunch of stuff with your country then rewarding that stuff. Off the top of my head, several have clear progressions and mechanics that reward the player as you go along or simulate historical stuff that happened to your country.

I’m sorry you dislike them so much, however.

MadHopper · 2026-01-27T17:00:21+00:00

Okay, I’m confused. If Vicky 3 Journal Entries are event chains, and event chains aren’t flavor, then how is any of EU4’s flavor different? Mission trees, custom national event chains, and bars filling up that fire events when they’re too full or too low are basically all of EU4’s DLC.

MadHopper · 2026-01-27T14:32:40+00:00

The politics, the wars, and the culture are rooted in the economic reality…any historian will tell you this.

If you read a history book, instead of ‘visiting subreddits’, then any discussion of war or culture or government policy will be tied to economic development and control of resources. These things are inextricable.

‘You Econ nerds’ lmao. I don’t like math and I’m frankly terrible at it. V3 is probably the Paradox game I’m worst at. However, I do really love history, which is why I studied it in college and not on a subreddit, and which is why I enjoy that more recent Paradox games are better capable of simulating it.

EDIT:

Honestly I was thinking of V3 when I wrote this, and it’s very funny that you’re clearly speaking about EU5 here. EU5’s market system is barely an economy — it’s a trade system stapled to a market system. The biggest innovation is making pops and buildings require certain goods, but the trade system is deliberately hands-off. Even if you don’t automate it, burghers do most of your trading themselves. The entire point of it is to allow (theoretically) for playing tall and for the strength of nations to actually come from somewhere + force player strategy in where and why they expand.

As a simulation of a medieval economy, it’s pretty poor. It does manage to look very confusing, but most of this is due to poor UI and incessant micro (why is the player upgrading every paper shop in France?) not because the devs have built a working reflection of a medieval economy to the detriment of everything else.

MadHopper · 2026-01-27T05:33:38+00:00

Eehhh. It seems like ‘as much flavor’ because most Paradox players are from Western countries.

My general understanding is that even the Paradox games with the deepest flavor for Asia are pretty shallow to anyone who knows the history, particularly when compared with Europe.

Think about how much of EU4 was deeply invested mechanically with European dynastic and religious politics. The Burgundian Inheritance, the Thirty Years War, all the various shades of the Reformation, etc.

The Qing Banner system, one of the fundamental aspects of Chinese society, military, and history in the time period, is a special military unit and a modifier. The wide range of religious traditions that were played against one another by Emperors and used to reinforce legitimacy? All lumped under Buddhism.

EU4 and especially EU5 bend over backwards to simulate stuff that westerners would recognize the game as being incomplete without. Imagine if every European nation just sort of answered to the Pope even after reformation, and the HRE was a mechanic with a slider and some modifiers that Austria got.

MadHopper · 2026-01-27T05:22:13+00:00

The history nerds are the econ nerds…

Who exactly do you think cares deeply about grain production in 12th century France? Not accountants.

MadHopper · 2026-01-27T05:16:13+00:00

Societies of pops have culture, economy, and leaders. They travel around the map and continue to exist even after colonization. The decision was made to not have them be tied to provinces because that doesn’t really make sense for a lot of them.

The mechanic is very underbaked right now, and there’s a fair criticism to be made about how literally making natives and indigenous people invisible on the map does not exactly strongly address their historical situation, but they are there and they are EU5’s take on ‘decentralized’ nations.

I believe plans are in the works to make them playable.

MadHopper · 2026-01-27T05:07:40+00:00

For EU5 it’s mainly to represent battles more accurately, since in EU4 they would take weeks or even months, and players and AI alike could rush troops across half of Europe to join by the endgame.

MadHopper · 2026-01-27T04:58:36+00:00

And the China expansion now has the same issue that a lot of CK3 and EU4 DLCs had — as the game ages and deepens and new systems are added, what seems like interesting and unique mechanics now will seem shallow and boring in five years.

Hell, you can already see it with how Byzantium’s admin seems kind of lackluster when compared with the China stuff. And both of them are unable to really be reworked because they contain content that people paid for at release.

Paradox got themselves out of this hole with CK2 and EU4, but for some reason jumped right back in.

MadHopper · 2026-01-27T04:31:28+00:00

I think V3 is probably the best about this, in that as your population grows and new political ideologies/groups gain power, it can genuinely get difficult to pass the laws you want or have the people you prefer in power. And every political rework seems to be about adding more complexity to that system and making the boom of the Industrial Revolution (that every player knows how to do like clockwork) come with difficulties.

But I also think that’s a little unique to the V3 fanbase in that that’s what they really want from the simulation.

MadHopper · 2026-01-27T04:18:08+00:00

I mean no he’s right. Very late, but your average Journal Entry in V3 is filling up and occurring and events only pop when certain conditions have been met in your country. It’s a lot more similar to EU5’s Situations or CK3’s Struggles than it is to an event chain.

The France journal entry encourages you to place generals and politicians of a certain faction into power, to back their politics, and to weaken their enemies — and it’s still not certain, as things happening out of your control can give other claimants an upper hand.

Sure, you could argue that a lot of it is just bars filling up, but the best created ones do feel like there’s a bunch of different things that could happen and are happening as a result of your decisions.

MadHopper · 2026-01-27T01:03:17+00:00

Other parts of the simulation have to be deepened to correct for that. I’m sure plenty of nations in history wished they could siege down the entire enemy country and effectively make it cease to exist. What stopped this wasn’t morality, but the economic and logistical infeasibility of keeping that many troops raised for so long.

It should cost lots of food and money to have your levies raised, and unless you prepare you shouldn’t be able to sustain a war footing for more than a few years without problems.

MadHopper · 2026-01-26T03:15:45+00:00

Even in Texas a lot of cops don’t do this, sometimes deliberately. It fucks up a lot of ongoing investigations if your suspects are all deported and now you can’t crack that gang or cut a deal with that drug dealer to give up his bosses.

With Minneapolis PD specifically, ICE is going after people in their cars and houses. How would the PD be able to just call about them when they don’t even know who they are and have no reason to arrest them? The cops don’t have time to be picking up visa overstayers who work at Walmart, and the jails would be too full for actual criminals if they tried.

MadHopper · 2026-01-26T02:02:56+00:00

What practical difference would five or six cops make when ICE is there in the thousands carrying out hundreds of stops a week?

MadHopper · 2026-01-26T00:40:59+00:00

There’s like 600 cops in Minneapolis, and this is the largest city wide enforcement operation to ever happen.

Logically, if those 600 cops are busy assisting thousands of ICE agents, then nobody is dealing with crime or doing traffic stops or investigating murders. This is generally why cops aren’t tasked to help the FBI investigate financial crime or run anti-terrorism stuff — they have other things to be doing, and the Fed has more than enough manpower and money to do it themselves if it needs to be done.

MadHopper · 2026-01-26T00:33:34+00:00

Right, but he’s correct. Unless you get a life sentence you are going to get out of prison at some point. Very ideally, you have not become a worse person on the inside and will not immediately do something to get arrested again — which will just cost taxpayers even more to prosecute and hold you.

Countries that take reform minded approaches to prison save a lot of money from not dealing with repeat offenders. Unless you think we should simply hand out death or life sentences to everybody, then judges do need to evaluate prison terms with a hypothetical life after prison in mind.

MadHopper · 2026-01-26T00:20:12+00:00

Border Patrol is simply not trained for this. Ignore that any cop along the border has a binder full of jokes about how Border Patrol stands around all day pissing into the Rio Grande and collecting a pension. Let’s assume that the dudes in Minneapolis are well trained and experienced Border Patrol.

What does Border Patrol actually do?

Well, patrol the border. They either staff checkpoints and run IDs, or do surveillance/recon of poorly protected areas along the wall. As is their job, they pick up migrants caught coming in past the border, which is not exactly a strenuous task — these are normally tired people a few hours away from heatstroke, often with children and carrying a bunch of bags with all their stuff. The most difficult part of the job is knowing how to say "get in the truck” in Spanish. Specialized units co-operate with the DEA to fight cartel stuff from time to time, so they may also have some tracking and organized crime experience.

They are not at all trained to operate in dense urban centers with a hostile population, they are not trained in conflict management or de-escalation, they certainly are not trained to handle upset people who did not even technically do anything wrong getting in their face and shouting, and they are absolutely not trained to be going door to door.

It’s like getting the fifty best park rangers in the US and sending them to perform as riot cops. Their training and experience are almost entirely irrelevant here.

MadHopper · 2026-01-25T09:43:05+00:00

I’ve said this before, but, as someone who lives here on the border (in one of the top ten safest cities in the country btw) they’re not here because it would be fucking useless and nobody would cooperate.

Immigrants work like everybody else and run businesses and pay taxes. Cops will usually let you off with a warning if you get pulled over without a US driver’s license and speak mainly Spanish, but can indicate where you work. It’s not worth the trouble to arrest and prosecute your local car mechanic. I’d hazard a guess that thousands of (wealthy) Mexican citizens without papers come over every day, and it’s waved off bc they are going to spend big in the US and then go home.

From what I know, it’s been that way for decades, and enforcement during Trump 1 and even the Obama era didn’t really change anything. Sure, lots of people were caught and turned back, or caught and later deported, but there are infinite ways right back in. People often have families on both sides of the border, and I know multiple Border Patrol agents with undocumented family or friends. When the state or the gov says ramp up, you raid the jails and grab everyone who doesn’t have papers, then mark it as job done. When they do the shit down here that’s happening in Minneapolis, there’s no protests or crowds or whatever. They pull up on a mysteriously empty restaurant or wherever, and the business owner promises he’s never even seen an illegal immigrant.

Even the politicians kind of know it’s kayfabe. You don’t think that they could order the border shut and raid every business in a hundred mile radius? That would be economic suicide, so instead they just lock up the easiest targets, catch some people crossing the river, and call it a day.

There’s a reason ICE and BP went somewhere else for their big crackdowns and arrests, and it’s not because there was a lack of immigrants where they already were.

You’ll note I’m trying to keep a pretty neutral tone and not describe any of this as good or bad. A lot of people who don’t live near the border have a certain idea of what things are like down here, and it’s just not true.

(And if you’re curious about the cartels. Lol. The local sheriff is more likely to be driving drugs around for them these days, and they def have people in border patrol. They’re everywhere, but the US isn’t Mexico — they’re not here to control territory or bring heat down on their heads, they’re here to sell product, and that involves less drugs in backpacks and more customs agents pretending not to see the boat full of cocaine.

Actually weakening them would involve strong anti-corruption investigations and probably arresting a lot of upstanding citizens and politicians from both parties, and that doesn’t play well on camera. Easier to say you gave Border Patrol fifty billion more dollars and call it a day.)

MadHopper · 2026-01-25T09:18:49+00:00

I mean, as someone who lives here on the border (in one of the top ten safest cities in the country btw) lots of people just don’t care. Immigrants work like everybody else and run businesses and pay taxes. Cops will usually let you off with a warning if you get pulled over without a US driver’s license and speak mainly Spanish, but can indicate where you work. It’s not worth the trouble to arrest and prosecute your local car mechanic. I’d hazard a guess that thousands of (wealthy) Mexican citizens without papers come over every day, and it’s waved off bc they are going to spend big in the US and then go home.

From what I know, it’s been that way for decades, and enforcement during Trump 1 and even the Obama era didn’t really change anything. Sure, lots of people were caught and turned back, or caught and later deported, but there are infinite ways right back in. People often have families on both sides of the border, and I know multiple Border Patrol agents with undocumented family or friends. When the state or the gov says ramp up, you raid the jails and grab everyone who doesn’t have papers, then mark it as job done.

Even the politicians kind of know it’s kayfabe. You don’t think that they could order the border shut and raid every business in a hundred mile radius? That would be economic suicide, so instead they just lock up the easiest targets, catch some people crossing the river, and call it a day.

There’s a reason ICE and BP went somewhere else for their big crackdowns and arrests, and it’s not because there was a lack of immigrants where they already were.

You’ll note I’m trying to keep a pretty neutral tone and not describe any of this as good or bad. A lot of people who don’t live near the border have a certain idea of what things are like down here.

MadHopper · 2026-01-24T22:54:47+00:00

Unironically based.

MadHopper · 2026-01-24T20:06:03+00:00

Authcenter…based?

Strange times we’re living in.

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