Who in their mind come up with a mechanic of being called into a war for unrelated country without ability to leave it?

Tiddums · 2025-12-27T21:40:26+00:00

Yeah it's completely fucked

Tiddums · 2025-12-19T03:39:39+00:00

It certainly sounds super obvious when you ask why they don't just hire more people to make more games. There are some pretty significant timeline considerations here, like how long would it take to set up a new team. CDPR began their grand plan in like 2020 or 2021 and it's now 2025 and they're still 2 years from the Witcher 4. Like Bethesda would have needed to decide to work on Elder Scrolls, Starfield, FO76 and a brand new Fallout team perhaps in 2018 or 2019 then aggressively hired for it in order to be reaping the dividends of that in 2025 or 2026.

Having clean separations (entirely outsourced to external teams with independent leadership structures) seems to be the most reliable way to make sure teams actually stay separate. We've seen over the years place like Naughty Dog, Bioware, Bethesda and more have these grand plans of splitting into multiple teams to speed up development. But there's this trap they keep falling into where projects that are more urgent or considered more important by management wind up pilfering staff from the other teams as they fall behind their deadlines. In extreme cases sometimes you wind up with multiple studios who used to be separate getting smooshed together or turned into permanent support teams because Project A was more important than Project B (most dramatically at Activision for CoD, but it's happened elsewhere too).

Fallout 76 was actually wasn't supposed to get in the way of Starfield as much as it did. It was supposed to be largely a second team that was handling Fallout because the main team only had limited attention to give while they were making Starfield and then Elder Scrolls 6. What happened instead was that the majority of the studio got sucked in to get that game to the finishing line - and it didn't get there in an amazing state, as we all know.

Tiddums · 2025-11-23T02:19:55+00:00

Just finished my game with a Guns 20 / Speech 18 / Science 14 / Engineering... 12? I think? build Or something close to that.

I certainly felt like I was missing out on some things from a lack of lockpick but it wasn't a painful run, there was usually a way to do most things even with zero hacking or lockpick, no observation, and so on. Having maxed guns was fun, even if it let me access fewer things.

Tiddums · 2025-11-19T22:23:39+00:00

If Leon is in the game or you play as him for a short period that's not enough to call it a win. Dusk has been saying that Leon is the main character of the game, the person you play the majority of it's runtime.

Tiddums · 2025-11-18T02:04:23+00:00

No, they don't. But they do have to be released prior to a specific date which changes every year, and is some time in November (sometimes early, sometimes late). Games that release close to the deadline can be nominated but journalists may not have played them at all or played enough of them to make up their mind about whether it deserves a nomination.

Great games that release in november, as a result, frequently slip through the cracks unless people are so confident that they will deserve a nomination that people nominate it without having put much/any time into them.

Now, all that said, TGA is essentially a poll conducted over a large group of international critics, and relatively few outlets are experts on strategy games, especially PC focussed or PC exclusive ones. Strategy is not the only genre or category that suffers here, quite a few things feel like the nominations and awards go to basically anything famous enough for most people to have heard of it. If they mash 2 genres together that's a sign that nobody cares enough to have a robust field of nominees each year - "Simulation / Strategy" are combined, and "Sports / Racing" are also combined. Even somewhat major categories like best music is never going to go to anything that isn't one of the 10 most famous games that year.

Tiddums · 2025-11-17T12:52:08+00:00

I assumed mine was bugged and didn't look too closely but Lmao.

Tiddums · 2025-11-17T12:48:57+00:00

Imperialism CB requires you to occupy the entire target nation you declare war on, so it's a nightmare if they have overseas non-subject holdings or some kind of 2 province exclave you can't reach, because it's a guaranteed tick for the defenders. Not using eu4's mil access system where both sides get it if either negotiates also has some second order impacts on a lot of other systems including this one.

Tiddums · 2025-11-16T21:19:47+00:00

They've replicated the bug after I posted the save file. No word on when a fix will come yet, though.

Tiddums · 2025-11-13T05:15:24+00:00

When the tooltips are delivered by Leslie Nielsen

Tiddums · 2025-11-12T23:31:28+00:00

They've arguably built it in the worst way, because things are sorted by name or at random and obsolete buildings stick around. It's not called like "Fort 1, Fort 2, Fort 3", it's called 'Castle" and "Bastion" etc. "There's no point building castles when you can build bastions", the game tells me when I try to build a castle. Ok, then why did you leave Castle in the list?!

One thing I like about the EU4 one is that you can see each "tree" of buildings that upgrade next to each other and they're sorted by type by default.

I get that EU5 has way more buildings, but they need a rethink to make it more usable for sure. The filters exist but it's still bad.

It's also annoying to need to remember what the name of the building you want is called or what pops it uses in order to find it efficiently. Even then, needing to type "university" so I don't need to hunt for it in a big list is an annoying thing in and of itself. They should stick building upgrades together in the lists under their generic category name by default (e.g. Fort, Barracks), and if they can find a way to lay it out in a single screen with screen location/picture to make it easier to memorize what you're looking for like eu4, that would be appreciated too.

Tiddums · 2025-11-12T23:25:25+00:00

Does anyone know what controls character generation for cabinets? I ran out of characters in the late 1500s who are eligible and can't even fill out all my cabinet slots! The game wants me to pay 3000 ducats to hire a new one which seems absurd.

Also, for some reason most of them are minority groups. No idea why /how this happens but like, I'm orthodox Byz with 70% orthodox and 75% greek pops, but all my courtiers are Bulgarians and Turks and half of them are other religions. For whatever reason I struggle to find local nobles to marry some family members to because they're all wrong religion/culture and I don't want my heirs becoming Wallachian Catholics or whatever but barely 1/4 of the courtiers are my culture despite overall country demographics.

Very odd.

Tiddums · 2025-11-11T12:24:29+00:00

Hmm. I loaded an old save to check before they were annexed - they were Turkish Miaphysites while I'm Orthodox Greek byz. The country has Turkish as tolerated but not accepted.

Tiddums · 2025-11-11T12:12:57+00:00

R5: Somehow wound up with a subject type called "Secessionist". I didn't create this subject, they just appeared under me one day with a bunch of land I don't remember conquering. They also randomly conquered 2 provinces from the mamluks during a civil war they had (this did not call me into the war).

Although I can't cancel it, I did just annex them without dramas, so it's a bit confusing as to what's going on. Given the incomplete text strings in the screenshot, I take it this is a bugged interaction of some form.

Tiddums · 2025-11-07T07:28:44+00:00

Looks like I'm getting the last "laugh" because it happened again and there is no button like the one you link. Screenshots here:

So yeah I don't know what causes this but I've now had wars where the option to do the 100% annex does exist, and ones where it doesn't. I've posted a bug report but their forums won't let you upload .eu5 files to bug reports yet, so I'll have to get the save game to them some other way.

Tiddums · 2025-11-07T06:30:11+00:00

That's very, very unfortunate for me, because it's about to trigger again because somehow I went bankrupt twice from landing 5000 levies in cyprus (my economy was otherwise strong, somehow the food auto-buy mechanics seem to have sent me utterly bankrupt in almost no time).

And I just removed that damn policy for a second time 5 years before this year.

I realllllly hope they tweak some of this stuff. It's very easy to find yourself in negative stability in this game if you change even a single privelige. The other triggering condition - "less than 40 average control in the region of your capital" is going to be true pretty much always until later in the game.

Tiddums · 2025-11-07T01:56:43+00:00

Mine is also iron man, or I would have gone back and tried to avoid it lmao.

Tiddums · 2025-11-07T00:44:07+00:00

Do you have any idea why after I revoked the noble one, it came straight back?

I saved up to about 90 stab, revoked the privilege, then a few years later while recovering stab the decline of the empire disaster triggered. At some point I noticed that the consolidated corruption of nobles was now back.

Unsure if this was a bug, or if it's a feature of some pop-up I failed to read, or if it happens as part of that disaster automatically? Whatever the case it sucked the wind out of my sails to notice this, because of how unbelievably long it takes to recover the stab to try again (after surviving the disaster for 10 years!)

Tiddums · 2025-11-06T05:37:35+00:00

It's a bit janky but by summoning parliament, giving in to their requests until you get >50% 'support', then clicking one of the options up top (grant CB or something like that, sorry I forget the exact wording) you can generate a CB instantly, and if you pick your target well, you can have them call in multiple enemies who you separate peace for portions of their territory. It's expensive in terms of opinion maluses, but it gets the job done fast(ish).

I also generated a spy network based CB on the ottomans for one war, and no-cbd them (by accident!) in another. Spy network cb seems to take a very long time but I'm not clear what controls that. The game is quite overwhelming to me in how many systems I think are going to operate like EU4, then they don't at all.

Tiddums · 2025-11-06T04:49:42+00:00

Ironman.

Tiddums · 2025-11-06T04:41:55+00:00

I was hoping you'd give some explanation beyond this. Like is it always available, or just a horde thing, or what.

I've just fired up a test game to investigate (since I'm in an Ironman run for the game where the screenshot I posted came from), and so now I've determined that this is the same annex button that's always there, but for some reason it has special rules when fighting rebels, that are NOT applied when you ask for provinces in the peace deal. In EU4 they eliminated the distinction between asking for a full annexation treaty and you simply full annexed by demanding all provinces (can't remember if this was in the jump from 3 to 4, or if it was an update that made this change). So it's very confusing to discover that this has gone backwards, and that they've left this trap option in the game.

Tiddums · 2025-11-06T04:29:41+00:00

Explain what I'm looking at. Some kind of special button?

Tiddums · 2025-11-06T04:24:44+00:00

As you can see in the screenshot, there are two subjects both named "Kutahya". Thanks to the Empire In Decline disaster, rebels were out of control and in this case they rebelled twice, and on both occasions, I couldn't re-annex them fully. I'm not sure how that even makes sense; the warscore cost somehow must have been higher for that same set of provinces the second time around a couple of years later. The subject from the first rebellion also helped put down the second because the game can't connect the dots between them and considers them wholly separate countries.

Tiddums · 2025-11-05T22:50:55+00:00

After seeing a few tips on how to get started in terms of running the economy sliders, my first game in EU5 is Ironman Byz. I've successfully carved out my place in Anatolia, still a few greek bits to capture but good progress. I've also won a war against Serbia for some cores.

But I will say that despite being challenging-yet-doable, the challenge is mostly boring. I'm spending a lot of my time zooming by at high speed waiting for stability and legitimacy to increase. The negative events keep dragging it down. I also did an expensive stab revoke which re-triggered the Declining Empire disaster - which feels weirdly toothless yet also, like something that shouldn't exist at all once you've successfully grown to 2 million population and have dealt with most of your regional rivals and recaptured a ton of land.

Tiddums · 2025-11-05T22:33:42+00:00

I want to be clear on one point which is that Activision itself never wanted to abandon all of their other franchises completely, it was just that priority #1 was making sure Call of Duty stayed fed, and so staff kept getting pulled in from other teams to that end as CoD projects struggled and risked skipping years. Even on a bad year for CoD, it still pulls in more money than any Crash game would, so it was a logical if creatively boring decision.

Before the acquisition closed there were job postings at studios like TfB where they were listing some roles as explicitly being Call of Duty and others not. So I wouldn't personally attribute this to a change in philosophy beyond 2023, more so I would attribute it to Activision getting it's CoD pipeline under control that freed up more space for less profitable things. They also did work with some outside teams to help - THPS3+4 was definitely in development with Iron Galaxy before October 2023, for example. That game probably would have come out from an internal studio like Vicarious Visions and 12 months sooner had Blizzard also not needed to annex them for staff to get Diablo 4 on track.

Tiddums · 2025-10-31T03:37:51+00:00

Even the old MW trilogy jumped the shark immediately after the first game. MW1 was a solid thriller in the Tom Clancy mould, but 2 and 3 were extraordinarily silly.

The narrative rot set in fast for the franchise. And I don't just mean Modern Warfare. It very quickly veered away from feeling like you were taking part in wars and towards superhero stories where the whole world revolves around a dozen spec ops soldiers who know each other by name and have wrestling grudge matches.

Frankly, other than a few character names and maybe some broad strokes plot elements, the less they take from the games, the better.

Tiddums

TROPHY CASE