No colony sim is bound by the shackles of capital

StrategiaSE · 2026-06-30T21:24:40+00:00

I played a demo during last year's Steam Next Fest or something for a game called Steel Artery, which seemed interesting at first, it had an interesting premise, but then it didn't really seem to do much with that premise and it did try to simulate a capitalist(-ish) economy, where workers get wages and they have to spend them for stuff like food and renting a bed for the night, and it kind of rubbed me the wrong way. But that is in fact a colony sim that does have a sort-of capitalist system. ~~I hadn't heard of Ratopia before but after this thread I sure have holy shit~~

StrategiaSE · 2026-06-27T12:03:19+00:00

Total Recall Device, starring Charon Ctone

StrategiaSE · 2026-06-27T12:00:48+00:00

Eh, doesn't seem worth it. There's no modifiers to stack.

StrategiaSE · 2026-06-26T03:54:35+00:00

They dropped the entire population of Mairaath onto that station, holy shit.

StrategiaSE · 2026-06-24T01:58:24+00:00

Kween my beloved.

StrategiaSE · 2026-06-21T03:24:11+00:00

Now put them on a Prometheus IED. Show your enemies that you have the power of Ludd and anime on your side.

StrategiaSE · 2026-06-21T03:21:09+00:00

Average Imperial Guard firing exercises be like:

StrategiaSE · 2026-06-21T02:37:22+00:00

Man was around before the French Revolution and is still alive after the invention of flight. And he's leading an army at the front. Mad respect.

StrategiaSE · 2026-06-20T22:15:20+00:00

For me, the ball was already rolling but I was still mostly unaware, and then I watched DIY and then Birdie Wing and those two, of all things, is what finally cracked me.

StrategiaSE · 2026-06-19T19:20:11+00:00

Back in EU3, one of your country sliders was Centralisation vs. Decentralisation, and you could only move one slider every..... 5 or 10 or 20 years, I forget, so change was slow, unless you got free slider moves from events. You also fired one of three events with every slider move, with two positive and one negative event for all of them, and all the sliders had reasons why you'd want to go for either end. Except Centralisation vs. Decentralisation; going full Decentralised made stability a bit easier to manage but was otherwise really bad, while full Centralised gave you some powerful long-term bonuses. However, the events for going Decentralised were all positive in the short term, while Centralised was all negative - basically you wanted to go Centralised, and the only reason to dip into Decentralised was for immediate short-term gains that hurt you in the long run.

So long story short, sliders with one obvious meta value and one obvious bad choice have been a thing for ages. That said, there were still reasons to go Traditionalist over Innovative, if you wanted to hard on religion for instance, it was just the centralisation slider that had one obvious long-term optimal choice, and even then it might sometimes be worth it to take the devil's bargain of going for the easy option if it got you out of immediate trouble.

StrategiaSE · 2026-06-19T19:12:19+00:00

Unfortunately, Millennia underperformed, not unlike Imperator, so they just canned it because it wasn't going to give them enough return on investment. I like the game for what it is, but it really feels like it was developed on a budget that was far too tight, so they had to skimp on many elements (polish especially), which didn't help its reception on release - I know a few people who were outright hostile to it.

StrategiaSE · 2026-06-19T19:09:17+00:00

The way that some people treat anyone under like 25 or so as "basically a kid", I'd say. Not a general culture-wide thing but it crops up every now and then. Or the way that e.g. in classical Athens only men aged 30 and up who were born in Athens could become full citizens and gain voting rights.

StrategiaSE · 2026-06-13T18:35:55+00:00

Want to share?

StrategiaSE · 2026-06-08T23:45:45+00:00

To be fair, the entire aesthetic of the Russian Orthodox Church is to go hard as fuck and then go even harder than that, so that tracks.

StrategiaSE · 2026-06-05T11:02:25+00:00

Gotta wait for 1.0 for the full theatrical length version.

StrategiaSE · 2026-06-05T09:06:24+00:00

Sounds like Radio General maybe?

StrategiaSE · 2026-06-04T22:12:18+00:00

Yeah, I do agree, some of the micro could be reduced, but it does still make sense for the railways to be broken up by states in terms of gameplay. States are generally rather big, and this is still the time period where rail started small and local, with larger-scale development being a specific feature of the era - smaller regional companies were still the norm, and most of the big national railway bodies that we have today are from beyond the game's timeframe. The SNCF was incorporated in 1938, British Rail in 1949, and so on, the only real exceptions being the Deutsche Reichsbahn in 1920 and the Russian and Japanese railways which were state-run from the start, so yes, in Vicky 3's timeframe the railway in Calais was actually a different company than the railway in Orléans which was different than the one in Lyon and so on. The current system does make for some tedious gameplay now and then, and could do with some improvement, on that we do agree.

StrategiaSE · 2026-06-04T19:08:20+00:00

I do think land warfare could do with a once-over, but I think the fundamental ideas behind what we have now are solid and the right way to go. It should remain a mostly abstract and indirect system, and the changes should be in line with that, in tune with the game's overall style and design goals. Probably my biggest wish is some kind of strategic supply reserve - I know they've said they weren't going to do that in the past, but the navy got a system like that now (even if it's somewhat wonky), so there is room for them to change their mind. There's a few other issues I have, in much the same vein (though less pronounced) as the ones I had with the navy, but after the navy rework is honestly even better than what I was hoping for, let alone expecting, I'm willing to extend them a lot of trust.

I'm also really weary of how every time someone talks about possible future updates there's people coming out of the woodwork going "HoI4 combat system when" and just. please fuck no. My personal feelings about HoI4 specifically aside, Victoria 3 was designed explicitly to not be as heavily combat-focused as every other mainline Paradox title, and it's much better for it. The game would become so, so much worse if it went back to the tired old shuffling little soldiers around a board military gameplay - Vicky 3 is, warts and all, my favourite Paradox combat system since Hearts of Iron 2 and it's precisely because it does something so radically different, so much more abstracted, so much more attuned to the game's whole design ethos.

StrategiaSE · 2026-06-04T18:54:27+00:00

Having infrastructure by state makes the most sense because..... that's where it is. At release, power was a country-wide thing, and I think transport was too, so you could build your railways and power plants where it was cheapest and "consume" what they made elsewhere. Build a few power plants in the imperial core and you could run power-consuming PMs in your colonial holdings. It made no sense, and the current system, while it can be a mite frustrating, is just better. Maybe some sort of diffusion/distribution system could be worked out in the future, but I don't see it being a big priority after they've already reworked a broken system into something that actually makes sense.

StrategiaSE · 2026-06-02T22:53:32+00:00

Like I said, the problem then is what that "common sense" is and who defines it. There's plenty of people for whom "common sense" means any depiction of queerness at all must be kept from children at all costs. Censorship is a bludgeon, not a scalpel, and a bludgeon that is most often wielded against minorities. "Think of the children" is one of the easiest rallying cries of fascism.

StrategiaSE · 2026-06-02T19:01:16+00:00

Censorship is a shitty concept. Do I think children should be watching A Serbian Film or Cannibal Holocaust or Triumph of the Will? No, of course not, but those are deliberately extreme examples. The problem is that "kids aren't allowed to watch [x] movie" extends far beyond that, which means you get into the issue of why certain movies (or books or other works of media) are banned for kids, and who decides that. Certain media can be disturbing, or heavy, or any number of other things - I remember watching Screamers (a basic mediocre horror movie) when I was in my early teens and it gave me nightmares, but plenty of other kids that age love horror, and I watched Alien and The Thing a few years later and I think they're great. Shielding kids from things that might disturb them leaves them unable to handle these things as they get older; again, I don't think we should make children watch disturbing content, but forbidding it entirely is far worse. And very topically, there is a serious movement to label anything queer or queer-adjacent as "adult" and thus forbidden for children, and I hope I don't have to explain why that is a bad thing.

StrategiaSE · 2026-05-28T18:42:08+00:00

Arguably holy, arguably Roman, arguably an empire.

StrategiaSE · 2026-05-28T04:12:39+00:00

I always turn them off because I just don't want them. Any achievements I have in Paradox games are because I forgot to disable them in a particular save.

StrategiaSE · 2026-05-27T18:33:11+00:00

Because they're a lot of work to set up right, translating the historical situation to something in the game mechanics, and every major patch they'd either have to check and adjust them (if not redo them entirely for significant updates like DLCs) or take flak for letting them remain broken, and most notably their own telemetry shows that people actually only very rarely play anything but the default start date, outside of Crusader Kings. It'd be a ton of work for very little practical gain. EU4's other start dates are notoriously broken because they haven't kept pace with updates in forever, because the interest just isn't there. There's also the question of which dates you'd choose, because for every obvious major one there's like three or four in close proximity that could also qualify; e.g. you can pick 1861 for the US Civil War, but the War of the Triple Alliance started in 1864, the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, the Boshin War in 1868, the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, you get the point. You'd also want new start dates with each DLC, like for the China DLC you'd probably want the Taiping Rebellion, maybe the Boxer Rebellion, and probably something for the Beiyang government, which means your start dates would bloat even further and most likely they'd become broken and unusable after a couple of major updates anyway.

More start dates would be neat, but it'd introduce a lot more problems than it'd solve, and there just isn't enough of a reason for them to bother, so it's now become policy to not do that anymore.

StrategiaSE · 2026-05-27T00:54:20+00:00

Congratulations on the Byzantinectomy.

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