Ask Paradox (almost) Anything Thread (no support/tech or code questions)

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Hello,

have you ever considered designing a grand strategy game in high fantasy settings?

You can combine race mechanics from Stellaris, RPG elements from CK, add some magic and you will create a game many gamers would die for (or I would, at least).

In any case, thank you for the great games you have created (and others you have published).

Thanks
 
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How do you get the historical data for your games? Are there some existing databases for provincial economics and assessed skills of generals and so forth, do you go thru huge piles of books and archival records to create your own assessments, or just guess something and wait for possible corrective suggestions by users? Assuming not guessing, do you credit your sources as in scientific articles, if so, where? If you do your own research, how far is it from being a publishable scientific article, eg. "economic development accross the world in 1444"?

Do you have separate coders and historians (and of course artists and marketing and whatever) or "just" coders with historical interest?

I haven't noticed (perhaps my bad) competition in the grand strategy market with similar level of detail. Is it just due to the size of the market, or are there relevant copyright/plagiarism/etc issues? Eg. if someone was to produce a game in which a 1444 map would look a lot like EU4, could Paradox sue them?
 
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Hello,

have you ever considered designing a grand strategy game in high fantasy settings?

You can combine race mechanics from Stellaris, RPG elements from CK, add some magic and you will create a game many gamers would die for (or I would, at least).

In any case, thank you for the great games you have created (and others you have published).

Thanks
Im watching so many super hero movies. Id like a super hero using to control the world game. thats a terrible idea haha

but ya i cant wait to see whats next

i like stelarris but some of the voice acting dlc is really not meeting paradox standards
 
How do you get the historical data for your games? Are there some existing databases for provincial economics and assessed skills of generals and so forth, do you go thru huge piles of books and archival records to create your own assessments, or just guess something and wait for possible corrective suggestions by users? Assuming not guessing, do you credit your sources as in scientific articles, if so, where? If you do your own research, how far is it from being a publishable scientific article, eg. "economic development accross the world in 1444"?

Do you have separate coders and historians (and of course artists and marketing and whatever) or "just" coders with historical interest?

I haven't noticed (perhaps my bad) competition in the grand strategy market with similar level of detail. Is it just due to the size of the market, or are there relevant copyright/plagiarism/etc issues? Eg. if someone was to produce a game in which a 1444 map would look a lot like EU4, could Paradox sue them?

Honestly a lot of it is from wikipedia and other online sources these days (the HoI oobs rely heavily on Niehorster etc.). We do have a research library, and add books to it when we need some more in-depth info on a specific issue. But the historical facts are only a starting position, before balancing starts. So with a general for example, we would look them up either online or in the library, and see what is known about this person. If they were famous defenders they get a bonus point to defense skills for example, but if that turns out to be too powerful, we might remove it again.

While I think our games have started to edge close to being a very comprehensive picture of the world at the various starting dates, I don't think it would stand up to scientific scrutiny, because of the balance concerns overriding strict historical accuracy. Our game mechanics are also always, to a certain degree, abstractions and generalizations, and historical precedent is a set of extremely messy specific cases. Every game has their one famous edge case that is historically correct, but runs counter to the entire underlying structure and mechanics of the game (the Duke of Normandy for CK3 being both King of England but a vassal of the King of France comes to mind) We also don't usually update our databases when new research becomes available, we only really update when we are reworking some content anyway.

As for historians, we have both. Our Content Designers and Game Designers are the people mostly concerned with the historical starting setups, and quite a few have history degrees (some even PhDs), but we also have a lot of people in other disciplines who have a keen interest in history. We don't have any dedicated historians whose only job it is to research stuff - that is generally done by the CDs and Game Designers.

The reason why there have been few successful attempts at Grand Strategy Games outside of Paradox is primarily, I think, because making a GSG is not a small task by any definition, and it isn't very scalable. You can't really make a "small" GSG - you'd just make a regular strategy game. Game Development is a lot about risk management, and there are few companies where you can come and say "hey, I would like to pay a person half a million Swedish Crowns per year to figure out what the political structure of central India in the 11th century was like, down to the level of individual baronies. This isn't going to make us any money directly, but we can build a game on that research. That's gonna take a lot more people and several more years, but it'll be good, trust me, once we have added the other 20 game mechanics that all have to be there to make the game work." That is a big outlay of money with no guaranteed return on that investment. Paradox mitigates that risk by having a) a bunch of people who have shown that they can figure out the political structure of southern India in the 11th century and b) a large database where that work was already done from previous games.

I'm not going to comment on the legal issues because copyright law is difficult at the best of times and a lot would depend on the specific case.
 
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Our Content Designers and Game Designers are the people mostly concerned with the historical starting setups, and quite a few have history degrees (some even PhDs), but we also have a lot of people in other disciplines who have a keen interest in history. We don't have any dedicated historians whose only job it is to research stuff - that is generally done by the CDs and Game Designers.
Have you considered having an equivalent to "freelance beta tester" for this sort of thing? I for one would be very interested in contributing to Paradox in this way. I am retired and in no need of full time work, but I have decades of interest and reading in military, economic and technological history and in all forms of gaming. Plus a career in engineering and supply chain management. I'm sure that there are several keen Paradox GSG players who are similarly placed and inclined.
 
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Have you considered having an equivalent to "freelance beta tester" for this sort of thing? I for one would be very interested in contributing to Paradox in this way. I am retired and in no need of full time work, but I have decades of interest and reading in military, economic and technological history and in all forms of gaming. Plus a career in engineering and supply chain management. I'm sure that there are several keen Paradox GSG players who are similarly placed and inclined.
We do have a beta program, and those people do help out a lot with historical research.
 
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We do have a beta program, and those people do help out a lot with historical research.
Where do I register interest/availability for that? In individual game forums, or...?
 
Where do I register interest/availability for that? In individual game forums, or...?
just 'follow' the main forum for the game. they advertise there.
 
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I was looking back at the forum when they began to open up the license. I of course know it was stopped after the.... problems with some of the projects outsourced (Magna Mundi and EvW off the top of my head) but I wondered: Is there a list of all the Europa/Clausewitz licensed games that were initially approved and had at least a chunk of development put into them but never saw release?
 

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I just happened to go through the 2021 Year End Report and, if I'm understanding Note 9 correctly, the Warrant Scheme 2019/2022 warrants hit their exercise price on June 15 when the stock closed at SEK 177/share. I spent a few minutes searching the forum and didn't find any posts on this, so I'm guessing that this is the best place to post about it.

I'm a month and a half late, but congratulations to everyone at Paradox who exercised their warrants. As a long time and (usually) happy customer, I'm glad that each of you got your piece of the company.

One of my favorite parts of capitalism is when companies distribute stock to their employees. So I'm curious, and hope someone is willing to answer some questions about the warrant exercise:

First, could you take your choice of cash or stock? For example, could you sell the stock back to the company for SEK 177/share that day and keep the profit of SEK 156 or 160/share (177-21 or -17) as cash? Or did you have to take it as stock by paying the SEK 17 or 21/share and then transferring the stock to your brokerage account?

Second, how were the warrants distributed among the employees? Did every employee get the same number of warrants? Or was the number of warrants each employee got based on something like the employee's salary level?

Third, did you have to work for Paradox in 2019 to get warrants?
 
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I have loved a ton of the games that you have developed/published and I want you guys to know how much I appreciate your talent! I still go back and play the older games - recently I've picked up the HeroCraft mobile games Majesty and Majesty 2 again (I've beaten them multiple times, but I'm trying to beat each level on the hardest difficulty and I'm having a lot of fun with it). I wanted to know if you guys have any kind of Majesty remake (PC or Mobile) planned - and if not what we could do to have that happen!

Thank you again!
 
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This might be a "personal question" but I hope you guys wont mind me asking :eek:

Prologue: I recently went back to EU3 just to see what it is like after years and years of EU4. There are things EU4 does better, and there are things EU3 does better. I wont start a discussion by revealing who does what the best (in my opinion) but I'm curious if you can share any thoughts about your experiences after EU 3 and EU 4, and if there are any lessons you would remember when making a future EU 5.
 
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Right... so the question I have, and so far i got no answer to since last year, is:
When is the Paradox Store due back?
And no, I'd like to avoid Steam, not to mention any other store.
 
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Right... so the question I have, and so far i got no answer to since last year, is:
When is the Paradox Store due back?
And no, I'd like to avoid Steam, not to mention any other store.

I’d assume if they were ready to release that information they would have done so already!
 
Makes sense.
 
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This might be a "personal question" but I hope you guys wont mind me asking :eek:

Prologue: I recently went back to EU3 just to see what it is like after years and years of EU4. There are things EU4 does better, and there are things EU3 does better. I wont start a discussion by revealing who does what the best (in my opinion) but I'm curious if you can share any thoughts about your experiences after EU 3 and EU 4, and if there are any lessons you would remember when making a future EU 5.

Not many of us around that worked on EU3 and EU4.

from the EU3 team, only me and Besuchov still work for paradox. The entire eu3 team was 8 people.. and only 3 of us were still working when we started EU4, and King left a few years ago.

I don't remember super much about what we did during eu3, as it was done between 15-17 years ago.
 
Not many of us around that worked on EU3 and EU4.

from the EU3 team, only me and Besuchov still work for paradox. The entire eu3 team was 8 people.. and only 3 of us were still working when we started EU4, and King left a few years ago.

I don't remember super much about what we did during eu3, as it was done between 15-17 years ago.

Thank you kindly for the reply, Johan. I cant even imagine how there was only eight of you that created EU3, that's impressive! As far as my question went, I guess I was curious about the design philosophy between the two titles, as one have sliders while the other has mana. Is mana the way forward from here, or could there be a mix between the two in the future? Personally I have no idea, I'm not a dev and I'm just thinking out loud here.

One thing that I would love to see again though, is the way provinces could flip and the impact of rebellions. (what I do not miss, is the constant royal marriage need for prestige)


Oh, and one last question I promise: since your titles uses the same engine, is it possible that the music player could be "cross game" in the future? Meaning that all soundtracks used the same folder and that you could load all soundtracks in all games? :D