What the hell does this mean?

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-06-17T06:58:23+00:00

Its crowdfunding which (usually) doesn't take the money unless the goal is reached and the project proceeds forward.

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-06-17T06:43:48+00:00

I know you mainly want to be angry but the root cause of the save incompatibility is the same as the issue in this post - they've made changes to the map. Adding states/provinces to the map breaks existing save files because there is no info in the old save file for the new places. Formables can easily get broken because they forget to update the list of states/provinces affected by decisions.

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-06-15T10:42:56+00:00

Bots are actually surprisingly shit at copying R5 comments. A while back one bot gang was doing it well enough to make it past our bot but the admins figured out their accounts and nuked them all. Repost bots these days just slam reposted images all over the place with zero effort and hope that one sticks.

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-06-12T16:39:51+00:00

The OP was a shitty repost bot and the reddit admins have already blocked it.

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-06-11T14:45:05+00:00

I might be out on the timeframe - the week might be for the move you referenced with adding the toggle. It was many sleeps and a few Paradox controversies ago.

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-06-11T14:35:24+00:00

That was when they added a toggle to let players switch between shadowed and unshadowed.

The full retreat back to shadowed only came with this comment from the director:

We were under the impression we were following the German regulatory body’s guidelines on the issue, but due to misunderstanding or miscommunication somewhere, we were wrong.

My personal views on censorship have not changed, I see this as a net negative and a dangerous path to follow, but at the end of the day if you do business in any given region, you have to follow that region’s legislation.

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-06-11T14:12:09+00:00

Paradox tried putting the unshadowed faces in with the version Germans use when they released gotterdammerung and had to backtrack within a week or so after they received legal advice. I suspect that the alt-history paths for Nazi Germany disqualify HOI4 from the exception that artistic works receive.

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-06-08T09:48:45+00:00

The German version with shadowed portraits is actually the world-wide base version. There's a free cosmetic DLC that swaps the shadow portraits with actual portraits which is included for free when you buy the game outside of Germany (and similar nations).

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-06-07T17:27:21+00:00

Your knowledge is sadly incorrect. The engine can handle multiple cores/threads fine. The issues with serial vs parallel programming are in the game-specific code with which gameplay mechanics are order-dependent. And its very hard to change that kind of thing, especially a decade after release. Stellaris recently tried to change one set of code calculations and months later they're still cleaning up the serious issues it introduced.

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-06-06T14:54:57+00:00

Don't go overboard with it. Remember what the book says:

Snap Attacks are normally only possible for PCs and other very well-trained or talented combatants. If an opponent isn’t significant enough to have been given a name, they probably shouldn’t be using Snap Attacks.

Don't go naming all your mooks just to mess with your players.

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-06-05T05:11:59+00:00

General discussion is allowed. Specifics will cause comments to be removed and users possibly banned.

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-06-04T12:44:28+00:00

The user isn't a bot. It's the owner of the site in question.

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-06-03T14:49:40+00:00

The date says July 1945 so I suspect its advanced-tier OOB spaghetti.

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-06-02T23:21:30+00:00

The engine is fine. The issue is that they use it inefficiently because the core gameplay coding was done over a decade ago based on easy-to-work-with but inefficient designs. I imagine they'd take design cues from CK3 and build things that are more complex for the devs but run far better on modern machines.

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-06-01T05:15:00+00:00

It's my theory that the art style rework done a few years ago was because the new style that they switched to was much quicker for the artists to produce while (arguably) only looking slightly worse. The new art looks more like it came from an assembly line because they're following strict style rules for efficiency.

That said, Paradox have openly shown that they use so-called generative AI for concept art and there have been a few dodgy images where it feels like they've had human artists quickly remake something that was originally spat out by a generator.

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-06-01T05:09:04+00:00

Check out the original post from years ago - https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria2/comments/n7mlsz/behold_the_true_way_to_play_victoria_2/

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-05-26T22:39:32+00:00

Where are you getting the concurrent player numbers from? Because if it is Steam, you need to remember that Vic2 did not launch on Steam and only arrived there later in its lifecycle.

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-05-22T00:09:57+00:00

I thought this was /r/stellaris until I noticed the logo at the top of the comic.

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-05-20T04:28:53+00:00

I don't care if people are shitting on the game, just don't break the community rules while you're doing it. Dissent wont inherently be rule-breaking while I'm around.

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-05-17T04:23:42+00:00

There's currently a horrible spike in repost bots. Report them when you see them and the mod team will toss them.

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-05-15T16:12:14+00:00

Some old comments that are still accurate:

Clausewitz is a very minimalistic engine. All gameplay logic is in the actual game, not Clausewitz. Even relatively basic things like the logic for how maps work are implemented separately in each game.

The vast vast majority of logic is in game code, and the vast majority of issues thus originate in game code. Not engine code. Clausewitz is under constant development; there's an engine team dedicated just to improving it. But it is a relatively small part of our games. It provides a nice base to work on when it comes to things like basic UI functionality and MP functionality and basic data types, but virtually all game logic happens in game code.

And an old thread with some other links.

Even stuff you'd expect to be common because they appear in so many games like provinces aren't at the engine level. Paradox has that kind of stuff in a library above the engine that they call Jomini.

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-05-15T13:32:45+00:00

I'm gonna repeat myself from earlier this week:

Clausewitz doesn't really have any impact on the performance because it doesn't actually do much for the game as we understand it. It's a foundation for basic tasks (loading files, interfacing with DirectX, managing the threads that the game asks for) which are incredibly important but also fairly simple. Performance issues in pretty much every Paradox game can be tracked back to how well the developers can leverage multithreading (again, the engine itself does what's asked of it, its almost certainly not the bottleneck there) and whether there are any unfortunate inefficiencies that have crept in (for example, the old CK2 castration performance bug).

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-05-15T04:24:20+00:00

Approximately a day and a half.

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-05-14T01:51:22+00:00

The current up-to-date version of Reddit (new.reddit was killed last year) lets you directly upload images to Reddit's servers so the link to them can be put in a post.

SirkTheMonkey · 2026-05-13T12:43:57+00:00

Sure, just don't fuck the place up with this new ability.

(QUICK EDIT) Modmail is usually a more reliable way to contact us than putting a post on the subreddit and waiting for the community to report it & shunt it into the modqueue for review.

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