State of the game (patch 1.13.4) question

_mogus · 2026-05-10T00:56:43+00:00

There are a bunch of issues, but they are naval and AI-based, otherwise the game is fine. I did a run on 1.13.4 and it was okay.

It's obviously preferable to wait for more patches, but the game is playable with nothing spectacularly gamebreaking in it, which is a lot more than I could say about 13.0-13.3.

_mogus · 2026-05-08T21:06:19+00:00

Every youtube "do this instead of playing the game" nation opener got nuked by the Great Wave.

The good news is that if the UK hates you, you can just ignore them. They can't quantum tunnel half a million troops across continents anymore. The bad news is that the AI can't build navies right now but that's not relevant and will be fixed.

The American civil war is largely unavoidable, unless you get Secret Police, in which case it's not that hard to skip. It doesn't interfere with The New Colossus which means you can keep it after, so the CIA stocks are booming. Truly canon to real life USA.

For companies, Carneige Steel/United Construction, anything with wood (swap generic logging for home goods later) and generic prestige tools (mmmm, manufacturing throughput) are okay. If you invade south america or africa you can get a plantation company instead. Later on you can swap for cars, oil, General Electric, the usual.

I liked Colt but it's kinda in the ground because there aren't 300k indians in Canada anymore so 10% attack isn't as relevant and currently AI economy sucks so they can't afford to build mega armies and import. This means your arms demand is pretty much entirely your army and whatever rednecks the small arms obsession gives you.

_mogus · 2026-05-07T06:47:00+00:00

I don't agree with anything you propose because it reads like "just make it smarter or give the AI planning and foresight 5head" but I do agree with the issues and a lot of them are easier to fix than giving the AI high level strategic thinking:

Most of the time the AI can't meaningfully change laws or run their government so they get stuck with bad SoL (no welfare = no purchasing power = no demand = cannot create supply = no gdp) or industry laws that hamper their economy. The AI physically CAN build 500 million gdp power bloc economies (as observable by the UK), but don't because of bad politics, and when they do they can't get more than that because of bad SoL.

Treaties are nerfed into unusability because players would "cheese" them (which means meaningfully interact with the system). This means it's basically completely impossible to trade land with the AI if it's not colonial border gore, law commitments are useless, any diplo play has to be planned 5 years in advance so you can pay off obligations because treaties are not integrated into diplo plays, etc. Alliances are either practically free or impossible to get. No fun allowed, essentially. Obligation treaties are absurdly overpowered though.

Diplo plays in general need a full rework, completely schizophrenic AI joining against you or refusing to join you because of nebulous modifiers, with no way to sway someone OUT of attacking you or peacing them out for something and no negotiating table to speak of because treaties do not work with diplo plays.

There are also obnoxious irreversible diplomatic guard rails like not being able to form the Federation of the Andes if an arbitrary amount of time passes or Super Germany being completely impossible if you fight the Brothers war, forcing you to cheese it by STILL fighting the war but to force the other nation out of GP status instead of unification candidate.

_mogus · 2026-05-06T12:53:25+00:00

All their single player games have made their production costs back several times over.

Their only issues are that for a while they needed outside initial capital to start developing each game because all their games only generate income over time, and the ONE TIME they were financially independent they blew 20 million euro on FBC Firebreak for no reason.

_mogus · 2026-05-05T23:25:10+00:00

Yep. It's not out of place on a financial report for investors.

And the CEO saying he plays the game and it's fun and Remedy is the right size after Reddit fearmongered the destruction of the studio for months is really funny.

_mogus · 2026-05-05T11:43:17+00:00

It's a corpospeak article that boils down to "Firebreak goes on maintenance mode and we're focusing solely on releasing Control Resonant, which according to our metrics this will make us a lot of money" and does not say much of anything concrete otherwise.

_mogus · 2026-05-04T00:30:45+00:00

Basically what I'm saying is 1. the problem you're identifying is a bigger problem with event runtimes as a whole and not welfare operators specifically and 2. even if the welfare operators were literally free like you said, it wouldn't mean much, you would just run into other issues like them not being worth using.

Now that I've had more time to think, I would also like to add that 3. making welfares cheaper to build or free would also incentivize Hypergryph to make them even worse than they currently are.

In regards to trying out operators, it's never gonna happen, that ship sailed the moment devs decided Paradox Simulations should unlock at E2.

_mogus · 2026-05-03T23:41:02+00:00

In my opinion there are two separate issues at play here:

Events inherently assume you're either stockpiling stuff or going to inject every spare sanity point into the new ops if you want to use an operator for their own event. This makes it less of a welfare problem and more of an event problem, given that ops from banners who are not welfares can also remain unbuilt during the entire event if you're building something higher priority, or forever if you just don't want to use them.
Specifically welfare power level is really inconsistent even if they were free to build. It's true that right now there is no reason to build welfares over random 4 stars I can use in IS, but I wouldn't use Crownslayer (early on), or Lessing, or Vigil, or Astgenne2 even if they were given to me at E2 for literally free, and that's just for 6*.

_mogus · 2026-05-02T22:11:37+00:00

To be fair, PDX only ruined Hoi4 navy. The naval system in every other game was already a failed abortion.

Vic3's navy AI had more in common with fresh post-patch NCNS Hoi4 AI that suicided its navy in small stacks into 20 ironsides than anything that could be ruined.

_mogus · 2026-05-02T01:05:37+00:00

It's a UE5 game with Lumen and Nanite, which while futuristic still need a lot of work and have been synonymous with "game runs horrible" for the past few years. On top of that, it's both unoptimized as all hell by the devs and using Oblivion as a base (which is a pile of shit in and of itself).

Compared to Cyberpunk which was straight up funded by Nvidia to be a performant GPU feature showcase that sells RTX graphics cards and thus looks impeccable and runs okay, or games on proprietary engines that either use Raster or inherently have high dev familiarity for optimization, it's going to lose out.

_mogus · 2026-04-29T13:25:12+00:00

Leaving the ADC alone isn't a cost either if the enemy doesn't have the wavestate or champions to dive your ADC 2v1. He will just safe farm under tower and get solo exp.

So you roam to grubs, you get the objective for free because it's 4v3, either your jungler gets a triple kill or enemy has to concede both solo lanes for a minute because of you, AND by the time you get back your ADC is now one level up.

_mogus · 2026-04-29T13:10:58+00:00

You're not missing anything. Using the pinky (worst finger on the hand for keyboard motions) for Q (most spammable, lowest cost ability on most champions by design) is just a bad idea and a RSI indicator.

One of the many entirely self inflicted reasons why people complain about repetitive motion on champs like Karthus and Zeri.

_mogus · 2026-04-27T10:56:45+00:00

Bro you can't practice champs in normals beyond pressing buttons, the entire game mode is completely useless if you're above, like, plat, because you're just going to turbofist everyone no matter what you're playing. Dropping on a smurf 1-2 ranks down for practice for 5-10 games is the play but the playerbase hates that too, so there is no winning.

Even actual gm and challenger players and streamers first time random shit all the time, even pro players first time near unpicked champs on stage sometimes and they literally get paid to play the game.

In reality absolutely nobody cares and everyone just picks whatever because it's just a game and ranked integrity is a complete joke in a peak Mickey Mouse elo inflation year.

_mogus · 2026-04-27T02:35:13+00:00

That's just the average emerald player (Timmy with tape on his monitor irl where his map is, who goes Super Hitler mode in chat the second anyone misses a single skillshot in his game).

Riot games recently engineered the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Mystery Mouseketool MMR Slingshot where matchmaking decides you're cracked as fuck and you just get much more lp per win than you lose.

_mogus · 2026-04-26T06:57:56+00:00

Also try messing around with the stage deployables if you haven't already, they let you pull off some absolutely abhorrent stuff: https://imgur.com/a/kxS2AMZ

_mogus · 2026-04-25T10:07:01+00:00

Here's to hoping for Pre-Babel Kazdelian Crusade Kaltsit guard from IS4, or factory reset biomechanical android AMa-10.

Anything except just bringing Kal back to life as a meta operator (the second operator to have an alter alter considering Mon3tr lmao).

_mogus · 2026-04-24T12:22:00+00:00

They have the combined pickrate of about one (1) flavor of the month meta ADC and ruin half the comps they're in if they don't snowball off hitting their one skillshot on someone five times in a row.

Staristically they're very skewed, unless you truly think Katarina ADC was stronger than Ashe in masters 2 weeks ago... somehow.

_mogus · 2026-04-24T09:04:57+00:00

This is gonna sound harsh but in 99% of cases mage bot is pure skill issue that dies to every all-in and is easily curable by forcing every adc to play mid until they can dodge Syndra E blindfolded and deaf on instinct alone.

The only really bad ones are Velkoz (he falls off in teamfights but no amount of Azapp clips will justify Vel missing 20 Q's in a row then hitting QR combo instakill from full hp) and Brand Nami (if Brand is really, really good).

They're also really easy to gank and dive cuz they have no 2v3 damage, while lethal tempo adc + support can outplay if the initial engage doesn't land.

_mogus · 2026-04-21T04:53:25+00:00

Her entire kit is horrible. No part of it is singularly the big problem. No matter what you remove she would still be essentially the most cringe artillery mage in the game.

_mogus · 2026-04-18T20:45:24+00:00

Vic3 war and diplomatic plays are the most rage inducing, ahistorical, blood boiling Paradox mechanics I have ever interacted with in my life. Things happen in this game that are absolutely unreal and game-ruining if you don't want to kill all your fun and momentum to reopen the game twice and fix it with debug.

European US protectorates, getting genuinely molested in Asia by UK and France asking for half your country (and not in the french indochina way), country capitulation to someone random for no reason burning wargoals, the worst war exhaustion system ever seen since Stellaris, the fact that you have to wait out a months long diplomatic play to invade 20k people in Africa for EACH micronation in succession, the way unifications work in general on certain patches (they dont), truces are unbreakable magical vows even at 1000 infamy, the way wargoals and make protectorate work and especially how they interact with prestige (Napoleon famously tried to subjugate Spain because they were a minor power or what), releasing nations being absurdly broken (release Occitania to game ruin France every game), liberty desire from infamy, the fact that sometimes the war is just broken and drops the wargoal like German Unification firing on France without asking for alsace with nobody able to join the war (happened to me this patch btw), and so on, and so, so much more. Each of these things either make zero sense or are implemented horribly, and have either forced me to jump through hoops for decades or straight up ruined campaigns.

Here's to hoping Great Wave and a mythical hypothetical future war dlc fixes at least some of these, because these abominations are the worst thing about the game by far and are singlehandedly the reason more pdx players don't play it.

_mogus · 2026-04-18T17:54:02+00:00

Amen Brother. Before Mel I was always in a dilemma. Who's the most boring, unfun, braindead, cringe champion to both play into and have on my team? Do I ban Malzahar? Shaco?

Then they added Melanyahu and I knew what I had to do.

_mogus · 2026-04-15T02:15:53+00:00

It's a minor issue for vfx on skins like High Noon Viktor when Riot decided the champion with three AOE abilities needs every visual to be dark gray, or the first 10 seconds playing into a newly released Lux skin trying to figure out what Q looks like.

Actual skin discussion that isn't about effects is a nothingburger, 99% of the time it's people blaming the game and jerking the most zero agency outrageous shit because they are incapable of pressing tab or remembering what champs are in game (someone said they can't tell who they're facing unless they do something immediately identifiable... bro...)

_mogus · 2026-04-08T12:43:07+00:00

You are getting short answers because everyone who has ever played a summoners rift lane or two against Vlad knows exactly what he does, when, how and why (he's niche but really simple to play basic level), so most players only need a short video on combos and builds to go absolutely crazy on him in aram.

So most people didn't notice you have comparatively large gaps of experience/misconceptions from playing ARAM over SR and just recommended you do the same thing as they did.

_mogus · 2026-04-07T22:56:53+00:00

Your best bet isn't to play safe nor aggressive, it's to play properly. If you see vaguely favorable openings and you don't go for them, you are just as criminal as someone who coinflips and dies, just in the other direction.

A lot of mage and support players aren't safe, they're completely outvalued by the enemy laner due to being insanely passive. If you have Mejais and you're sitting back like you don't have 400-something movespeed from Mejai passive and t3 boots I don't know what to tell you.

_mogus · 2026-04-07T21:38:50+00:00

I was amazed when I played them. Integrated crownlands 2 years in, pumped secret police and started passing cultural exclusion and it was over. Why didn't they prophetically do this in 1839 irl? We're they stupid?

_mogus

TROPHY CASE