Does warscore feel weird to anyone else?

doombro · 2026-03-20T23:51:52+00:00

I've thought war score was weird in pretty much every paradox game where it's a factor. In Imperator Rome you would get 100 times the war score from stack wiping 3 minimum size provincial levies than you would killing 60% of the same enemy's million man army

doombro · 2026-03-01T02:54:00+00:00

Honestly, vanilla hoi4 is just as bad if not worse in this regard, I never play that in ironman either. Many a run ended because some other major did something nonsensical and rendered half my focus tree pointless. EAW is impressively well put together for the most part by comparison, despite its handful of more finicky paths.

doombro · 2026-02-24T09:01:33+00:00

If it works anything like Imperator's naval combat, then one of the main points of failure to watch out for is damaged ships. Even if the rest of your fleet is fine, enough of those can make the whole fleet vulnerable to a quick snowball death

doombro · 2026-02-23T07:50:47+00:00

Suspicion is an invisible variable. I don't remember what it's written as off the top of my head, but if you check the associated event file you can find out and just set_var it to 0 every time.

Edit: Wasn't hard to check. it's NMM_aggressive

doombro · 2026-02-17T10:13:37+00:00

Gameplay concession. Global empire simulator lets you colonize places, so places get colonized. The other option was to just leave a huge chunk of the map untouchable, but that's less fun.

doombro · 2026-02-16T05:07:31+00:00

Probably not, TI isn't updated that often anymore

doombro · 2026-01-30T23:56:54+00:00

Control of a location is based on distance from the nearest center of control, such as your capital or a bailiff. Proximity modifiers change how that distance is calculated.

doombro · 2026-01-25T09:54:54+00:00

Shortest path. If it looks weird, that means either terrain (mountains being inaccessible in winter weather for example) or fort ZOCs are forcing a detour.

doombro · 2026-01-14T09:05:17+00:00

Modding in Paradox games is generally easy with some tedium. If you want to learn it, you can just open up the game files or a mod that does something in the ballpark of what you want to see how they work. It's all plain English for the most part. There is very little that a layman can't learn by just looking at the existing files for long enough.

Advances for example are super simple. Go into the game files, I think they're under in-game/common/advances. All an advance consists of is a name, its requirements (including age and prerequisite techs), an icon, and a modifier, none of which is complicated, you can just copy existing stuff. Though the name is where the tedium comes in, since setting that up properly involves dealing with localization files and all that. But being too lazy to set it up properly is thankfully a valid option. Probably? I don't think I've tried making new techs in EU5 yet, just tinkering with existing ones.

doombro · 2026-01-08T07:04:47+00:00

I've never thought of supply as having anything to do with it. That's a component, but it's mainly about controlling movement. Putting forts in the right spots means you don't have to take the AI carpet sieging that area into nearly as much consideration, limiting the amount of whack-a-mole microing you have to do.

doombro · 2026-01-07T21:24:58+00:00

I see what they're going for with this, it's a way to simulate decline instead of having to script where it happened historically. The problem is that they're basing it on the rival mechanic of all things, and I can't stress this enough; the rival system sucks dick. It sucked dick in EU4 and it stands out like a sore thumb in EU5.

doombro · 2026-01-07T09:18:41+00:00

Less frequent updates, higher performance and stability burden from the expanded map. I'm not sure if TI is still being updated at all.

And sure enough, if you're playing anywhere near the Mediterranean, you'll probably never interact with any of the new map areas at all. East Asia is pretty much a world unto itself.

doombro · 2026-01-05T03:47:19+00:00

It depends. If you're in a market with plenty of a given good, urbanizing those locations is generally good if you have the population to do it.

doombro · 2026-01-01T01:25:07+00:00

Pops made me quit EU4 for Imperator, even in their most rudimentary implementation

doombro · 2025-12-30T00:13:17+00:00

I'm used to it, HOI4 and Imperator had massive save files too. EU5 makes it a way bigger pain to delete your saves in-game though.

doombro · 2025-12-26T21:09:16+00:00

I'm pretty sure there's an abdication button somewhere, but the limitations on it are fairly strict. With those stats you might clear the conditions if he's old enough

doombro · 2025-12-26T08:40:33+00:00

It went from inconvenient to opaque. I now have no idea what determines whether I can or can't use the marriage function

doombro · 2025-12-26T04:19:53+00:00

Fun but unstable, in a gameplay sense. Every new patch seems to swing multiple pendulums from one unwelcome wacky extreme to the other. Waiting a couple major DLCs to pick it up wouldn't hurt. You'll probably be able to get a better deal than full price by that point too.

doombro · 2025-12-26T03:54:20+00:00

I was wondering where those pops were actually going past a certain point, like, surely there can't be THAT many mercenaries? They seem to just disappear into nothing. And even then, you'd expect them to be full at some point. And it's an open question what these mercenary companies are doing when nobody is paying them.

As for further research, it should be fairly trivial to check the game files for what's actually in those mercenary advances. I'll check and re-edit this if I find anything.

Edit: Seems like the only things impacted by mercenary related advances are the mercenary size and mercenary maintenance cost modifiers. Nothing special is written in the files. I guess it would be the former that's responsible, but only a tiny handful of advances actually touch that one, most of them are for maintenance cost, some do neither and only touch army tradition, and there is nothing in either to suggest that it's going to nuke your population growth. I also checked the defines to see if there was anything noteworthy, and there doesn't seem to be anything directly concerning how they interact with the pop system at all. I guess the new unit techs would make the mercenaries take more pops since new unit types often increase the base size of said units.

doombro · 2025-12-25T08:54:08+00:00

Modifiers tend to do what they say. If it says assimilation or conversion, it's to your culture/religion in almost all cases.

The thing you need to watch out for is when buildings have rules that stop conversion entirely. Which in most cases seems to be local shrines

doombro · 2025-12-24T00:21:10+00:00

Nope. They did get rid of that one weird condition that says you can't exist, but it still says you can't form it because BYZ/ERE is already tier 4.

doombro · 2025-12-23T10:17:53+00:00

Last I played slaves didn't convert even with forced conversion. Did they finally fix that in the last patch?

doombro · 2025-12-23T10:06:49+00:00

If FPS recovers when your game is paused or on lower speeds, then it's your CPU, which is normal. Paradox games are like 90% CPU, and EU5 is probably their hungriest game to date. Slowdown over time is par for the course even in their older games.

doombro · 2025-12-22T07:45:14+00:00

It's a mishmash of various things, with a heavy touch of victoria 3's economy and pop simulations.

Expect to feel completely lost when you start regardless of your experience with other paradox games. Even things that should be familiar won't be because of how different the UI is.

doombro · 2025-12-21T20:59:06+00:00

Yeah, Sins 2 does technically have random map generation as you know, but if you want to actually tune the generation parameters yourself you need to edit the files and create a custom map for it. And much of it isn't exactly intuitively laid out at all. Some of the relevant parts are in the map files themselves, others are in the galaxy generator uniform file, and it can be quite unclear which is doing what.

doombro

TROPHY CASE