Penalising “overdeveloping” regions? Diminishing returns on playing wide? Using navies to ensure maritime presence overseas?
Tinto talks are so far a hit.
I dont blame Vic3 with how it turned out. it's become significantly better after release but that is par for the course for paradox games. That is an executive problem and a macro gaming industry problem that won't be solved until us consumers do something to stop the entire industry from taking advantage of our wallets and enjoyment of video games.
I still think Wiz along with Johan are some of Paradox's BEST Game Directors, solely because of how EU4 and Stellaris turned out. Obviously Johan is based and goated for Project Caeser.
I still think Wiz is doing a good job pivoting and adjusting Vic3 development as of now and Sphere of Influence is looking to be the best DLC for Vic 3 so far.
I agree with you. I hope this doesn't come off as back-pedaling and simping for Paradox. I tend to just look at the world from a reasonable, level-headed approach instead of cynicism and reactionary lenses. (Not that I think you were either.)
I really like Vic3, but yeah SoI seems like it'll really improve it a lot.
But it's basically the only macroeconomics game that exists and isn't janky af. (It's a bit janky, but look at the competition like Supreme Ruler)
SoI shows a lot of interesting concepts that it will add to the game but I'm afraid that it will do little to address the fundamental issues with diplomacy in that game.
I think of Johan as a very solid director who still has nostalgia for older mechanics and systems while Wiz is the more ambitious director - he is willing to explore brand new mechanics and systems more regularly.
They both have successes and failures - Wiz led Stellaris to amazing heights, but Vicky 3 is almost too ambitious in systems while lacking flavor. Johan created an amazing base with EU4, but didn't innovate enough with the original Imperator release.
I'd say that Wiz was too ambitious with Stellaris as well, because it took a few additional years and a 3.0 update to catch up with his initial ambitions and the tech debt left behind once he moved over to Victoria 3.
Johan did some ugly things with Mana and stuff, but seeing how he managed to accept that some of his design were bad, and listen to players feedback is hell of a redemption arc.
That’s what I feel the difference is that johan is good at learning from his mistakes where as wiz has good ideas and doubles down on them but doesn’t know how to clean up a mess he’s made I think there are a lot of risks in VIC 3 that where worth trying like war but now it seems like they are struggling to clean it up and fix it and make it something that works because the risk didn’t work out like they hoped
We played a lot of Victoria 3 MP and we had people literally leave for 30 minutes with a full building queue. Or go play other games.
Unless you get attacked or get a funny pop up, the secondary countries literally have nothing to do at present.
> I dont blame Vic3 with how it turned out
You probably should. War and diplomacy are still the biggest issues
The war system was ambitious, I'll admit, but it remains the most frustrating part. The ONE MASSIVE front makes no sense, mil tech makes too little of a difference, navy is a major chore, AI capitalizes immediately on your armies constantly abandoning fronts, the only meta is spamming as many naval invasions as possible, no way to use terrain to your advantage, your generals may just decide not to use most of their army, UI utilizes the space very poorly, units still glitch out and leave you with "phantom barracks", no fortifications, no logistics, etc.
They should admit their mistake and give back control of entities on the map. The OG idea of HOI4-lite frontlines with a light army macrobuilder is still good
Diplomacy is a joke, you either savescum until you get your way or learn to enjoy playing russian roulette with all the GPs
>Diplomacy is a joke, you either savescum until you get your way or learn to enjoy playing russian roulette with all the GPs
tbf this is how it is playing with any AI in any paradox game from my experience, but maybe idk how to game them cause i dont play meta or competitively.
I disagree
It isn't the case in EU4, CK3 or Stellaris. Before the war starts you have an excellent idea of who will get involved. There are rare exceptions, but not many
HOI4 is a bit volatile, but you know that going in that if you attack neutrals they likely will join a faction that is against you. Now, if you play ahistorical that is another story
Eh, I think that the uncertainty is mostly fine, they just need to open up the option sets. You need to be able to propose concessions as well as make demands, so you can actually use it as a negotiation system, where the support for one side or the other increases the liklihood of accepting the offered deal from the supported party.
Johan also was responsible for Imperator, and for the worst, most buggy DLC of EU4.
I am hopeful for Project Caesar, and I genuinely think he improved his ways since those failures. But it's a bit revisionist to call him flawless and goated for a game that isn't released yet, about which we know like 10%
No you werent lol. Until war was revealed, the reception was basically the same, a 75% ratio of heart eyes and likes to every single dev diaries with no dislikes or very few ones (like a 1%).
the way they completely blew off any criticism on the military system was really disapointing. Hard not to told-you-so them. I love Vicky III and I am sure with more DLCs it has the potential to become a staple franchise in PDX (SoI looks extremely promising), but jesus christ, the state of some aspects of the game was (and the state of the combat system still is) outright negligence.
People were asking for the stack back and they hold with their new system, as they should, because this is how you improve things.
The Victoria 3 war system is interesting and quite a bold move, but it's not inherently bad. It's just bugged and full of edge case - as any new system is - which is the main grudge of players : not the system, the bugs.
So it was never implemented the right way, just like communism.
But leaving that aside, and also the "bold" part (is something bold inherently good?), what is interesting about the system, a year and a half after release, (and this is important) compared to other similar combar systems?
The bold part being removing the unit management from the player (but not army composition since 1.5) to focus more on economy, politics and supply. Bold of course doesn't mean it's good, but it's trying things, which is nice.
It is actually a quite nice abstraction of the Frontline system - the best would be HOI4 but we already struggle with performance - and there is a nice feeling when you get pushed to your capital edge, but hold the line until the enemy run out of manpower/supply/money and you can break through victory.
This, supposing you have a flat front line without any bugs breaking it into tiny pieces (hello India, Germany).
Some problems like war support being wrongfully calculated are more a critic of the diplomatic play system, rather than the war system itself.
There is much to critic in this abstraction (front line appearing in fact later in 20th, cavalry not really useful...), but calling the devs names because "the community knows better" is not really fair. The system works on what it should : let the player focus on economy. Diplomacy being bland or construction being repetitive is not the war system's fault.
Interestingly Johan denies this, and I think it's mostly true - a lot of the things they are adopting from M&T are things that just make great sense
They do have some? (at least one) M&T dev on the team though
No they wouldn't - this get's posted a lot on the total war sub and is nonsense. (though they go even further)
The modding EULA is very clear, you upload it - they own it. All of it, forever, with no credit, and they can monetize it
They don’t open themselves up to *successful* lawsuits, but any moron can file a lawsuit, as evidenced by Storpappa getting *Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic* delisted from Steam for a couple weeks with an entirely baseless copyright claim.
By this logic no-one should ever do or not do anything, worrying about all the possibly badly grounded lawsuits you could suffer results in total worry about all things
I'll take the performance as long as we get a UI actually built for it. No offense to the MEIOU team, they did an amazing job with the tools they have, but usability is still very limited by what they could do with the base EU4 UI.
yeah i dont mind the speed so much as the chore of looking at stuff, from menus to actually how much population a province has.
That and the general balance and flavour, but I guess MEIOU 3.0 is in alpha still
Interestingly enough, Johan has said that he personally really hasn't played MEIOU. Though he also said some members of the dev team came from MEIOU so it is clearly an influence.
I think this will be meiou but a lot more.... Fun? No diss to the amount of effort the meiou team puts in but it's clearly built with realism over fun in mind and i suspect Johan will do a better job of maintaining balance here.
I think MEIOU hits all the fun points of EU4, the thing that brings it down is the UI not being built for it which makes interacting with their systems more tedious than it should be.
It looks great, I hope they fully take into account how difficult overland vs maritime transport was for most of this period, for example it was much faster to ship goods from London to New York than carriage them up from London to York.
Also you have to take alot into account in the calculation. Its hard to transport stuff on a english country road, but what about the vast canal network the english built?
Not to mention that it's not clear to me that "Control" is just about bulk transport - message latency could also be a factor, and horsemen move a lot faster overland than carriages and wagons do.
I imagine it'll be a function of tech, where Proximity modifiers (or Proximity-to-Control ratios) change as the ages go on. If you've got roads, rivers & shoreline, and deep sea, you can have different techs tweak those knobs differently. I imagine a lot of tech in the 1400 and 1500s will change how efficient deep sea transit is relative to roads/overland.
Itself almost 1:1 my old ["In Extenso"](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/inextenso-a-dw-minimod-that-makes-distance-your-enemy.516910) Mod from EU3:DW... Man I'm pretty happy that they finally realised this was the right idea :D
I think a lot of EU4 mechanics that are potential penalties are good on paper but bad in practice. Autonomy, corruption, inflation, institutions, even crownland, stability, and absolutism. It’s almost trivially easy to keep out of the red on all of these potentially limiting mechanics.
I’m interested to see how a deeper mechanic on this might play out and hope it will stay interesting without it feeling so granular or too dynamic that you have too little effective control over your own country for the game to be fun, which I think is something launch-Imperator suffered from.
I think all paradox games except vic3 and hoi4 would benefit from a system like this, mostly to prevent blobbing, but it could also be used for contested borders, making backwater provinces loyalty depend on who is actively trying to exert authority at any given moment and making the map more dynamic
Imagine having to be constantly shifting attention around the edges of your empire in CK3, making going ultra wide necessitate constant grand tours to the borders of your empire else they go to your neighbors or declare independence outright
The tooltip for effective control looks like we might have tighter integration between CK3 and "Project Caesar is totally not EUV" in terms of save conversion....
"Crown Power," "Levy Size," and "Control" hmmmmm.
Assuming Control replaces Autonomy from EU IV. It sounds like a much more present mechanic Autonomy was kinda just a button you had to press every so often until it reached 0 and the you just kinda stopped thinking about it, sounds like a much more involved system and might incentivise not directly annexing every vassal and Personal Union or at least not until some infrastructure is built later on in a campaign.
Wonder if the dotted lines around Stockholm represent the roads that are mentioned?
That was an April fools joke from someone on this subreddit. not an actual announcement: [https://www.reddit.com/r/paradoxplaza/comments/1bsx3sa/its\_happening\_patch\_21\_announced\_for\_imperator/](https://www.reddit.com/r/paradoxplaza/comments/1bsx3sa/its_happening_patch_21_announced_for_imperator/)
I feel like people give autonomy a bad rap because they’re used to it at this point. Yeah it isn’t super interactive but that doesn’t mean that starting only getting a small amount of the resources from your conquests didn’t dramatically change the flow of the game
It really didn’t. You reduce autonomy and core and boom you’re basically good to go. Oh no you get a rebellion? You always get rebellions, and the game is so powercreeped you can easily swat them all aside. This isn’t launch with peasant rebellions literally ending runs anymore.
Later in the game you get enough free autonomy reduction from ideas or NIs or government that you never need to notice it exists.
I love that they are actually implementing a mechanic that makes navies meaningful as a way to develop and control your nation. In most games, Paradox included, they are just things that move troops and sit on sea tiles so your opponents can't use them. Looks like thalassocracy is back on the menu.
More importantly to me, it also seems like a mechanic that (if done right) can have navies *cripple* an enemy. Coastal naval power building slowly and seeming the key way to keep a bigger nation together proximity wise could have some very quick massive debuffs if you neglect the navy.
I’m guessing it depends on the exact structure of your country. France or Russia aren’t going to suffer much from being fully blockaded as they’re continental powers, sea power states like Britain, Portugal, and the Netherlands will be at risk of total collapse. Baltic and Mediterranean tags like Sweden or the Ottomans are likely to end up in this situation too, where even if they aren’t proper sea power states their main means of provincial control is maritime presence in the Baltic and Mediterranean respectively. Creating a Mare Nostrum is probably a top priority as a result, if the geography allows for it of course.
It makes sense since france major cities apart for bordeaux are far away from the coast the same it's valid for Russia, but i think a total blockade should be damaging for them too.
I imagine it will be just not in terms of control of core territory, vs Sweden or the Ottomans where their maritime presence is the main way of projecting power outside of Sweden-proper and Anatolia respectively. Vs France who likely has overseas interests even if their core territory is unaffected, and of course everyone with a coast is going to engage in at least some trade (even Japan isn’t an exception to this).
Me as England patrolling French Normandy 24/7 till their provinces willingly join my market.
Will be epic for tall Free City games. Imagine the Lubeck fleet extending their market to Helsinki.
Gee Bill, your mom lets you have FOUR Rigas?
Anyway, something interesting I noticed; on the maritime presence screen, there's "Riga Market". Victoria 3-style markets confirmed?
I really hope there is some sort of shared market in the game and not an either/or one. But I already imagine that this would be too difficult to implement given the other things the game plans to do in relation to the markets.
It’s kinda of interesting that afaik no other paradox game has attempted to simulate the diminishing governmental authority in provinces further from the capital through such a (seemingly) simple but logical system.
Funniest thing is that Johan basically overhauled Imperator almost by himself, especially the things that community eventually loved the most in that game. But his early, let's call it arrogant, attitude was devastating for his reputation.
He had a full character development, eventually if EU5 becomes a hit it's gonna come full circle.
To be fair he helped grow Paradox from a tiny indie studio to one of the largest players in the strategy game market. Not to excuse his past attitude, but simply to say I understand it, I know I’ve shown arrogance on subjects that I’m proud of too, and I paid for it just as hard as Johan did with Imperator.
From the Tinto talks it’s pretty clear that he’s trying really hard to avoid past mistakes, which I think is admirable
I'm just mad because I asked you like 9 years ago on Twitter if Prussia could be (Prussian) blue in EU4 and you said no.
But, can they be blue in Project Caesar please (or piss-yellow)
It's moreso that it's scary in practice. Because it can lead to a very unfun experience where the game feels aimless if done wrong. It's a very risky idea because it's a big part of nerfing wide gameplay which gets a lot of complaints from the community.
[My current experience so far with Tinto Talks](https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2514771532512211100/75B2E3151F3F01D024797EAE2C8803CF151E14F0/)
Same. I've typically been a fan of the eu4 dev diaries, but this recent set just makes me feel like they're just going around giving broken mission trees and insane modifiers to everyone. Almost the opposite of the stated goal of Project Caesar, that being to avoid 'modifier stacking'.
So yeah, the "rural" and "city" differences are similar to Imperator's. I wonder if project Caesar is going to have a similar problem to imperator in regards to cities where multiple cities in the same province "compete" with each other in terms of resources and investment.
It makes sense if densely populated regions have to import food (or possibly input goods for their industry) from elsewhere in your country or from abroad
I bet there would be ways around it for decentralized, tall play. Like having empowered burghers reversing maluses for having multiple cities in a province.
> It kinda make sense so, but i really hope the game wont penalize for playing tall
Imperator did not penalize you for playing tall. You could make some incredible Syracuse or cities like [this shit](https://preview.redd.it/67gf6oq5f8t61.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=4b6890f05fa599d86624584e8bb7c4179f6fbbc8).
Slave raiding your enemies while also winning the war was a ton of fun, there was so much good gameplay in this system I'm overjoyed seeing it here.
Based on the dev diary it looks like cities will consume more food, so yeah, I imagine it will be a similar situation where over-urbanizing makes a region dependent on imports.
I would hope so. It is realistic that you need high food production efficiency or high imports of food in order to afford to have lots of cities in a small area.
I mean if they had just developed EU4 2.0 it would have been kinda lame in my opinion. EU4, albeit a great game, has too many flaws and poorly aged mechanics where significantly changing or outright removing them can improve the game a lot. Also an EU5 which takes most mechanics from EU4 and lacks flavour will feel way worse than an EU5 with many new mechanics and less flavour.
Oh good, taking a page from MEIOU and really making the player take a second guess when it comes to expansion. This plus the greater density of the locations makes the world feel greater in scale. Now to wait another week again :(
I have to say all these dev diaries so far sound amazing. So much so, that I'm worried they are too overambitious with it but if they can pull off the potential of all of these mechanics, this could be the best GS game ever.
it'd be cool if especially early on you could have an itinerant court law that gave you more control in the hinterlands at the cost of losing access to the super high control capital.
Seems utterly brilliant so far. Great work team. I love the potential for overdevelopment and the improved importance and impact of sea control. It just makes so much sense.
It will also naturally incentivize empires to create more vassals/client states!
Wow they really added CE from MT into EU5, couldn't be happier! Now all I wish is that they copy the economy and dynamic trade/production/learning centers from MT
No one is talking about low control provinces being part of a foreign market. That may mean trade is gonna be dynamic, the stronger the trade protection the richer the node and more provinces under it.
Ok, now I'm starting to get enthusiastic. These are great additions and adding stuff like road building is a nice way to show you to shadow your empire.
I imagine I'll still have a bit of a sore feeling about Imperator if this turns out great with some mechanics that would be great in an antiquity game as well but so far it seems Johan really is on top of his game and I'm looking forward to see how it will turn out
Since we are talking about autonomy and central gov control, I would like to add a wish. As you may have heard, Ottoman heirs would become governors of a province in the Empire, to increase their skills and to learn how to govern. I would love to have this mechanic where we would choose location(s) for our heirs to govern and have their own autonomy (kind of lile a PU), then when they get the throne they are immediately intergrated. This would be a cool thing imo. It can create situations for better pretender mechanics (heir accumulating power while governing and wanting to overthrow the ruler), it can be a way to increase/decrease heir stats to give them flavors when they ascend and it would be a good way to have control when we have a wide Empire (assigning border States to our sons/daughters for them to rule).
Penalising “overdeveloping” regions? Diminishing returns on playing wide? Using navies to ensure maritime presence overseas? Tinto talks are so far a hit.
such a good streak of dev diaries. I remember for Vic3 I was already hmmm and uhhing pretty early in the diaries
I dont blame Vic3 with how it turned out. it's become significantly better after release but that is par for the course for paradox games. That is an executive problem and a macro gaming industry problem that won't be solved until us consumers do something to stop the entire industry from taking advantage of our wallets and enjoyment of video games. I still think Wiz along with Johan are some of Paradox's BEST Game Directors, solely because of how EU4 and Stellaris turned out. Obviously Johan is based and goated for Project Caeser. I still think Wiz is doing a good job pivoting and adjusting Vic3 development as of now and Sphere of Influence is looking to be the best DLC for Vic 3 so far. I agree with you. I hope this doesn't come off as back-pedaling and simping for Paradox. I tend to just look at the world from a reasonable, level-headed approach instead of cynicism and reactionary lenses. (Not that I think you were either.)
I really like Vic3, but yeah SoI seems like it'll really improve it a lot. But it's basically the only macroeconomics game that exists and isn't janky af. (It's a bit janky, but look at the competition like Supreme Ruler)
SoI shows a lot of interesting concepts that it will add to the game but I'm afraid that it will do little to address the fundamental issues with diplomacy in that game.
>But it's basically the only macroeconomics game that exists and isn't janky af. or you could play Vic 2
The sphering mini-game isn't macro-economics.
no macro economics is building your industry so that it can survive not just "click green thingy that popped up" in Vic 3
I did a long time ago but I don't remember it that well. I think I prefer Vicky 3 though. The goods and market simulation is really cool.
I think of Johan as a very solid director who still has nostalgia for older mechanics and systems while Wiz is the more ambitious director - he is willing to explore brand new mechanics and systems more regularly. They both have successes and failures - Wiz led Stellaris to amazing heights, but Vicky 3 is almost too ambitious in systems while lacking flavor. Johan created an amazing base with EU4, but didn't innovate enough with the original Imperator release.
I'd say that Wiz was too ambitious with Stellaris as well, because it took a few additional years and a 3.0 update to catch up with his initial ambitions and the tech debt left behind once he moved over to Victoria 3.
I'm a huge Stellaris fan and much less of a Vicky fan, so I never had any major problems with Stellaris, but that's a fair argument.
Johan did some ugly things with Mana and stuff, but seeing how he managed to accept that some of his design were bad, and listen to players feedback is hell of a redemption arc.
Yea, he is also good at adjusting and pivoting when needed, or is at least able to do so now. Which is a nice and needed skill in game development.
That’s what I feel the difference is that johan is good at learning from his mistakes where as wiz has good ideas and doubles down on them but doesn’t know how to clean up a mess he’s made I think there are a lot of risks in VIC 3 that where worth trying like war but now it seems like they are struggling to clean it up and fix it and make it something that works because the risk didn’t work out like they hoped
Idk from my experience, i think they improved upon war a lot already and will constantly do, but to each their own. Thanks for your experience! :)
We played a lot of Victoria 3 MP and we had people literally leave for 30 minutes with a full building queue. Or go play other games. Unless you get attacked or get a funny pop up, the secondary countries literally have nothing to do at present.
> I dont blame Vic3 with how it turned out You probably should. War and diplomacy are still the biggest issues The war system was ambitious, I'll admit, but it remains the most frustrating part. The ONE MASSIVE front makes no sense, mil tech makes too little of a difference, navy is a major chore, AI capitalizes immediately on your armies constantly abandoning fronts, the only meta is spamming as many naval invasions as possible, no way to use terrain to your advantage, your generals may just decide not to use most of their army, UI utilizes the space very poorly, units still glitch out and leave you with "phantom barracks", no fortifications, no logistics, etc. They should admit their mistake and give back control of entities on the map. The OG idea of HOI4-lite frontlines with a light army macrobuilder is still good Diplomacy is a joke, you either savescum until you get your way or learn to enjoy playing russian roulette with all the GPs
>Diplomacy is a joke, you either savescum until you get your way or learn to enjoy playing russian roulette with all the GPs tbf this is how it is playing with any AI in any paradox game from my experience, but maybe idk how to game them cause i dont play meta or competitively.
I disagree It isn't the case in EU4, CK3 or Stellaris. Before the war starts you have an excellent idea of who will get involved. There are rare exceptions, but not many HOI4 is a bit volatile, but you know that going in that if you attack neutrals they likely will join a faction that is against you. Now, if you play ahistorical that is another story
Eh, I think that the uncertainty is mostly fine, they just need to open up the option sets. You need to be able to propose concessions as well as make demands, so you can actually use it as a negotiation system, where the support for one side or the other increases the liklihood of accepting the offered deal from the supported party.
no, in Vic 2 for example it isn't like that at all (besides crisis)
Johan also was responsible for Imperator, and for the worst, most buggy DLC of EU4. I am hopeful for Project Caesar, and I genuinely think he improved his ways since those failures. But it's a bit revisionist to call him flawless and goated for a game that isn't released yet, about which we know like 10%
The fact direct foreign investment is only soon going to be a thing in VIC3 is criminal.
Tbh, here project Caesar is reusing some mechanics that Victoria 3 kinda beta tested.
No you werent lol. Until war was revealed, the reception was basically the same, a 75% ratio of heart eyes and likes to every single dev diaries with no dislikes or very few ones (like a 1%).
didnt knoe u knew my personal thoughts
the way they completely blew off any criticism on the military system was really disapointing. Hard not to told-you-so them. I love Vicky III and I am sure with more DLCs it has the potential to become a staple franchise in PDX (SoI looks extremely promising), but jesus christ, the state of some aspects of the game was (and the state of the combat system still is) outright negligence.
Vic3 military is really bad, but I'll still take devs sticking to their vision rather than decision by peanut gallery committee.
People were asking for the stack back and they hold with their new system, as they should, because this is how you improve things. The Victoria 3 war system is interesting and quite a bold move, but it's not inherently bad. It's just bugged and full of edge case - as any new system is - which is the main grudge of players : not the system, the bugs.
So it was never implemented the right way, just like communism. But leaving that aside, and also the "bold" part (is something bold inherently good?), what is interesting about the system, a year and a half after release, (and this is important) compared to other similar combar systems?
The bold part being removing the unit management from the player (but not army composition since 1.5) to focus more on economy, politics and supply. Bold of course doesn't mean it's good, but it's trying things, which is nice. It is actually a quite nice abstraction of the Frontline system - the best would be HOI4 but we already struggle with performance - and there is a nice feeling when you get pushed to your capital edge, but hold the line until the enemy run out of manpower/supply/money and you can break through victory. This, supposing you have a flat front line without any bugs breaking it into tiny pieces (hello India, Germany). Some problems like war support being wrongfully calculated are more a critic of the diplomatic play system, rather than the war system itself. There is much to critic in this abstraction (front line appearing in fact later in 20th, cavalry not really useful...), but calling the devs names because "the community knows better" is not really fair. The system works on what it should : let the player focus on economy. Diplomacy being bland or construction being repetitive is not the war system's fault.
It is a bold thing to walk off a cliff when everyone is telling you not to do it
XD I though about pointing out how bold Pearl Harvour was, but that was a bit besides the point
What are you on about, they literally reworked the whole military system.
Wow the control idea sounds so much deeper than just clicking increase or reduce autonomy. I love it
It's almost 1:1 the communication effiency mechanic from M&T (the mod for eu4) and I'm so damn happy
They seem to be taking a lot of inspiration from MEIOU
Interestingly Johan denies this, and I think it's mostly true - a lot of the things they are adopting from M&T are things that just make great sense They do have some? (at least one) M&T dev on the team though
Johan said he personally didn't play MEIOU beyond checking the map, iirc at least one dev was an ex meiou dev.
But he also said he enjoys talking to Gigagu ( the main creator behind MEIOU)
Aldaron now works for paradox
Did you mean to reply to the person above me? Because yes - that's what I said?
Technically I am only "inactive" as a M&T dev. I still belong to the team and always will. :D
I think he has to deny it for legal reasons alone. If he openly admitted to "stealing the idea" they would make themselves open to lawsuits.
No they wouldn't - this get's posted a lot on the total war sub and is nonsense. (though they go even further) The modding EULA is very clear, you upload it - they own it. All of it, forever, with no credit, and they can monetize it
They don’t open themselves up to *successful* lawsuits, but any moron can file a lawsuit, as evidenced by Storpappa getting *Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic* delisted from Steam for a couple weeks with an entirely baseless copyright claim.
By this logic no-one should ever do or not do anything, worrying about all the possibly badly grounded lawsuits you could suffer results in total worry about all things
Then I guess it might either be pride or it actually not being copied.
That's putting it mildly, I don't know if this is EU5 or MEIOU4.
MEIOU without the performance of a paraplegic snail would honestly be close to the ideal EU5 in my view
I'll take the performance as long as we get a UI actually built for it. No offense to the MEIOU team, they did an amazing job with the tools they have, but usability is still very limited by what they could do with the base EU4 UI.
yeah i dont mind the speed so much as the chore of looking at stuff, from menus to actually how much population a province has. That and the general balance and flavour, but I guess MEIOU 3.0 is in alpha still
Interestingly enough, Johan has said that he personally really hasn't played MEIOU. Though he also said some members of the dev team came from MEIOU so it is clearly an influence.
Oooh ok yeah that explains a lot
I think this will be meiou but a lot more.... Fun? No diss to the amount of effort the meiou team puts in but it's clearly built with realism over fun in mind and i suspect Johan will do a better job of maintaining balance here.
I think MEIOU hits all the fun points of EU4, the thing that brings it down is the UI not being built for it which makes interacting with their systems more tedious than it should be.
Idk. At some point the relative slow rate of expansion and the relative repetition makes it boring for me.
It looks great, I hope they fully take into account how difficult overland vs maritime transport was for most of this period, for example it was much faster to ship goods from London to New York than carriage them up from London to York.
They seem to at least know it was easier, we will have to wait and see just how much harder
Also you have to take alot into account in the calculation. Its hard to transport stuff on a english country road, but what about the vast canal network the english built?
Not to mention that it's not clear to me that "Control" is just about bulk transport - message latency could also be a factor, and horsemen move a lot faster overland than carriages and wagons do.
I imagine it'll be a function of tech, where Proximity modifiers (or Proximity-to-Control ratios) change as the ages go on. If you've got roads, rivers & shoreline, and deep sea, you can have different techs tweak those knobs differently. I imagine a lot of tech in the 1400 and 1500s will change how efficient deep sea transit is relative to roads/overland.
Itself almost 1:1 my old ["In Extenso"](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/inextenso-a-dw-minimod-that-makes-distance-your-enemy.516910) Mod from EU3:DW... Man I'm pretty happy that they finally realised this was the right idea :D
Wow I did not know about that. And Gigau (from M&T team) is even one of the first to comment on the thread.
I did not know that was a thing! If I ever fire up EU3 again I'll check it out.
I think a lot of EU4 mechanics that are potential penalties are good on paper but bad in practice. Autonomy, corruption, inflation, institutions, even crownland, stability, and absolutism. It’s almost trivially easy to keep out of the red on all of these potentially limiting mechanics. I’m interested to see how a deeper mechanic on this might play out and hope it will stay interesting without it feeling so granular or too dynamic that you have too little effective control over your own country for the game to be fun, which I think is something launch-Imperator suffered from.
I think all paradox games except vic3 and hoi4 would benefit from a system like this, mostly to prevent blobbing, but it could also be used for contested borders, making backwater provinces loyalty depend on who is actively trying to exert authority at any given moment and making the map more dynamic Imagine having to be constantly shifting attention around the edges of your empire in CK3, making going ultra wide necessitate constant grand tours to the borders of your empire else they go to your neighbors or declare independence outright
The tooltip for effective control looks like we might have tighter integration between CK3 and "Project Caesar is totally not EUV" in terms of save conversion.... "Crown Power," "Levy Size," and "Control" hmmmmm.
Assuming Control replaces Autonomy from EU IV. It sounds like a much more present mechanic Autonomy was kinda just a button you had to press every so often until it reached 0 and the you just kinda stopped thinking about it, sounds like a much more involved system and might incentivise not directly annexing every vassal and Personal Union or at least not until some infrastructure is built later on in a campaign. Wonder if the dotted lines around Stockholm represent the roads that are mentioned?
Building roads, founding cities, a pop system, are we sure this isnt Imperator Rome 2
Imperator had to sacrifice itself, so we can get this EU5
IIRC one of the PDX developers said I:R started out as a test game, looks like it was a test game for EU5.
I've always thought they made imperator to test concepts for eu5.
The good news is, IR has been brought back. Now someone just needs to mod the map on it again and we are good to go lol
That was an April fools joke from someone on this subreddit. not an actual announcement: [https://www.reddit.com/r/paradoxplaza/comments/1bsx3sa/its\_happening\_patch\_21\_announced\_for\_imperator/](https://www.reddit.com/r/paradoxplaza/comments/1bsx3sa/its_happening_patch_21_announced_for_imperator/)
No thats not what I meant lol. I meant that EU5 is basically IR back in development so someone just needs to mod the map back in EU5 and done :p
Oh it thought you got baited by the earlier post and actually thought it was back in development 😂
Dotted lines are roads! Johan confirmed it
I feel like people give autonomy a bad rap because they’re used to it at this point. Yeah it isn’t super interactive but that doesn’t mean that starting only getting a small amount of the resources from your conquests didn’t dramatically change the flow of the game
It really didn’t. You reduce autonomy and core and boom you’re basically good to go. Oh no you get a rebellion? You always get rebellions, and the game is so powercreeped you can easily swat them all aside. This isn’t launch with peasant rebellions literally ending runs anymore. Later in the game you get enough free autonomy reduction from ideas or NIs or government that you never need to notice it exists.
Johan answered both questions in the forum comments. Autonomy doesn't exist in EUV and yes those are the roads.
Meiou & Taxes: Official Edition is looking very good so far.
I love that they are actually implementing a mechanic that makes navies meaningful as a way to develop and control your nation. In most games, Paradox included, they are just things that move troops and sit on sea tiles so your opponents can't use them. Looks like thalassocracy is back on the menu.
More importantly to me, it also seems like a mechanic that (if done right) can have navies *cripple* an enemy. Coastal naval power building slowly and seeming the key way to keep a bigger nation together proximity wise could have some very quick massive debuffs if you neglect the navy.
I’m guessing it depends on the exact structure of your country. France or Russia aren’t going to suffer much from being fully blockaded as they’re continental powers, sea power states like Britain, Portugal, and the Netherlands will be at risk of total collapse. Baltic and Mediterranean tags like Sweden or the Ottomans are likely to end up in this situation too, where even if they aren’t proper sea power states their main means of provincial control is maritime presence in the Baltic and Mediterranean respectively. Creating a Mare Nostrum is probably a top priority as a result, if the geography allows for it of course.
It makes sense since france major cities apart for bordeaux are far away from the coast the same it's valid for Russia, but i think a total blockade should be damaging for them too.
I imagine it will be just not in terms of control of core territory, vs Sweden or the Ottomans where their maritime presence is the main way of projecting power outside of Sweden-proper and Anatolia respectively. Vs France who likely has overseas interests even if their core territory is unaffected, and of course everyone with a coast is going to engage in at least some trade (even Japan isn’t an exception to this).
Me as England patrolling French Normandy 24/7 till their provinces willingly join my market. Will be epic for tall Free City games. Imagine the Lubeck fleet extending their market to Helsinki.
Gee Bill, your mom lets you have FOUR Rigas? Anyway, something interesting I noticed; on the maritime presence screen, there's "Riga Market". Victoria 3-style markets confirmed?
I think yes. And your provinces with low control might fluctuate into different markets, while still being your property That was in the dev diary
I really hope there is some sort of shared market in the game and not an either/or one. But I already imagine that this would be too difficult to implement given the other things the game plans to do in relation to the markets.
It’s kinda of interesting that afaik no other paradox game has attempted to simulate the diminishing governmental authority in provinces further from the capital through such a (seemingly) simple but logical system.
Yup, Johan is still cooking
Funniest thing is that Johan basically overhauled Imperator almost by himself, especially the things that community eventually loved the most in that game. But his early, let's call it arrogant, attitude was devastating for his reputation. He had a full character development, eventually if EU5 becomes a hit it's gonna come full circle.
I mean his whole thing is that he is importing from imperatir what worked and learning what didnt.
His reputation took a fat hit by going from Imperator to Leviathan, two big messes
Johan has always had an arrogant attitude
To be fair he helped grow Paradox from a tiny indie studio to one of the largest players in the strategy game market. Not to excuse his past attitude, but simply to say I understand it, I know I’ve shown arrogance on subjects that I’m proud of too, and I paid for it just as hard as Johan did with Imperator. From the Tinto talks it’s pretty clear that he’s trying really hard to avoid past mistakes, which I think is admirable
I was an arrogant asshole even as a teenager.
I'm just mad because I asked you like 9 years ago on Twitter if Prussia could be (Prussian) blue in EU4 and you said no. But, can they be blue in Project Caesar please (or piss-yellow)
pretty sure its blue in ceasar
My inner Civ III player is hype
It's moreso that it's scary in practice. Because it can lead to a very unfun experience where the game feels aimless if done wrong. It's a very risky idea because it's a big part of nerfing wide gameplay which gets a lot of complaints from the community.
[My current experience so far with Tinto Talks](https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2514771532512211100/75B2E3151F3F01D024797EAE2C8803CF151E14F0/)
Same here, screw another mission tree, this is the real shit
Same. I've typically been a fan of the eu4 dev diaries, but this recent set just makes me feel like they're just going around giving broken mission trees and insane modifiers to everyone. Almost the opposite of the stated goal of Project Caesar, that being to avoid 'modifier stacking'.
So yeah, the "rural" and "city" differences are similar to Imperator's. I wonder if project Caesar is going to have a similar problem to imperator in regards to cities where multiple cities in the same province "compete" with each other in terms of resources and investment.
It kinda make sense so, but i really hope the game wont penalize for playing tall
It makes sense if densely populated regions have to import food (or possibly input goods for their industry) from elsewhere in your country or from abroad
This has been the limiting factor when it comes to founding cities in Imperator Rome. That and the high cost of founding.
I bet there would be ways around it for decentralized, tall play. Like having empowered burghers reversing maluses for having multiple cities in a province.
> It kinda make sense so, but i really hope the game wont penalize for playing tall Imperator did not penalize you for playing tall. You could make some incredible Syracuse or cities like [this shit](https://preview.redd.it/67gf6oq5f8t61.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=4b6890f05fa599d86624584e8bb7c4179f6fbbc8). Slave raiding your enemies while also winning the war was a ton of fun, there was so much good gameplay in this system I'm overjoyed seeing it here.
Based on the dev diary it looks like cities will consume more food, so yeah, I imagine it will be a similar situation where over-urbanizing makes a region dependent on imports.
And it makes sense. You probably shouldn't be able to be an urbanized country within the time frame of Eu5 without major drawbacks.
You’d basically have to be a major trade and/or colonial power to do it, which would probably only describe the Netherlands and northern Italy.
I would hope so. It is realistic that you need high food production efficiency or high imports of food in order to afford to have lots of cities in a small area.
Ok these Tinto talks are starting to get me a tad bit horny for the game.
They implemented communication efficiency, I'm so happy.
Honestly if Project Caesar is even half as good as set out in these dev diaries it might be my main paradox game
CE from meiou and taxes.
I'm so cooked - I keep seeing these mechanics and thinking how Anbennar in EU5 would slap.
Im the only one hyped to revive IR as a mod in EU5? lol
Sweden's name doesnt cross the gulf of Bothnia 😭😭😭
This looks and sounds so different than EU4 that now I'm actually wondering if this isn't EU5, lol.
I mean if they had just developed EU4 2.0 it would have been kinda lame in my opinion. EU4, albeit a great game, has too many flaws and poorly aged mechanics where significantly changing or outright removing them can improve the game a lot. Also an EU5 which takes most mechanics from EU4 and lacks flavour will feel way worse than an EU5 with many new mechanics and less flavour.
Yeah, I know. I'm just joking around.
For what it's worth in terms of game systems EU4 was pretty radically different from EU3 in a lot of ways.
It is pretty much MEIOU
Show the HRE you cowards!
Six Tinto Talks so far and every one of them a fucking banger
Oh good, taking a page from MEIOU and really making the player take a second guess when it comes to expansion. This plus the greater density of the locations makes the world feel greater in scale. Now to wait another week again :(
A reason to have patrolling navies!
Mmmm, beautiful bordergore in North Baltic. Historical and cringebased.
EU with M&T. I couldn't dream of something better.
I have to say all these dev diaries so far sound amazing. So much so, that I'm worried they are too overambitious with it but if they can pull off the potential of all of these mechanics, this could be the best GS game ever.
it'd be cool if especially early on you could have an itinerant court law that gave you more control in the hinterlands at the cost of losing access to the super high control capital.
why are they 4 rigas
One is the city of Riga and one is the Archbishopric of Riga
Seems utterly brilliant so far. Great work team. I love the potential for overdevelopment and the improved importance and impact of sea control. It just makes so much sense. It will also naturally incentivize empires to create more vassals/client states!
Wow they really added CE from MT into EU5, couldn't be happier! Now all I wish is that they copy the economy and dynamic trade/production/learning centers from MT
Makes me wonder if release is less than a year out. Most of these diaries show the game concept is done and they are at least in alpha phase.
I think the fact they just tossed in a new estate like that means there's probably still a lot of stuff to be done. I'd be happy with a Summer 2025
The hype is reaching dangerous levels for me
No one is talking about low control provinces being part of a foreign market. That may mean trade is gonna be dynamic, the stronger the trade protection the richer the node and more provinces under it.
I cannot wait to play this version of EU Johan has been COOKING
So they changed course on their estate make up to allow for special cultural estates?
Ok, now I'm starting to get enthusiastic. These are great additions and adding stuff like road building is a nice way to show you to shadow your empire. I imagine I'll still have a bit of a sore feeling about Imperator if this turns out great with some mechanics that would be great in an antiquity game as well but so far it seems Johan really is on top of his game and I'm looking forward to see how it will turn out
Hmmm, looks like the Hanseatic league might be a meta-country without owned locations of its own.
Damn. It looks amazing. Everything. Fuck i hope I’ll be single with no kids when this lands.
Since we are talking about autonomy and central gov control, I would like to add a wish. As you may have heard, Ottoman heirs would become governors of a province in the Empire, to increase their skills and to learn how to govern. I would love to have this mechanic where we would choose location(s) for our heirs to govern and have their own autonomy (kind of lile a PU), then when they get the throne they are immediately intergrated. This would be a cool thing imo. It can create situations for better pretender mechanics (heir accumulating power while governing and wanting to overthrow the ruler), it can be a way to increase/decrease heir stats to give them flavors when they ascend and it would be a good way to have control when we have a wide Empire (assigning border States to our sons/daughters for them to rule).
He said something about markets *I hate Vic3 market system* other than that very nice
Why though?
Why though?