Driggsd said:
Some people dont want to manage an economy or deal with little things like how to feed your troops. Becuase some people dont want to deal with that much detail....... That is dumbing the game down.
Depends.
If people demand REMOVING features that were in HOI II, that's dumbing the game down.
If people are against adding new "features" that make the game overly complicated (again, Vickynomics being an example) that's not "dumbing the game down" - that's "keeping the game manageable".
I do understand that PD wants to reach a broader market. The earlier post about about die hard fans dieing was just dumb! Lord Of the Rings has been a historicaly "nerd" passion, until there was an action movie made out of the series. But even though some old die hard fans died more kids picked it up and loved it.
First off, I didn't say "died", I say that die hard fans will leave (due to dieing, losing interest, etc), and Paradox HAS to attempt to create new die hard fans.
Second off, apples and oranges. Once someone has read the Lord of the Rings once, even if they lose interest afterward, it doesn't really matter, because, well, he's already purchased all the Lord of the Rings book and read them. Whereas, with Paradox, if someone loses interest in their games, then it means that person will NOT purchase Paradox's newest games.
Third off, Lord of the Rings didn't get new fans magically. It got them through word of mouth - because people were telling one another "I think you'd like this book".
It's not something Paradox should rely upon for their games. It's a very slow marketing strategy (word of mouth works over months and years, not over the weeks that game sales tend to be measured in), and, more importantly, it's something that requires an extremely positive fanbase.
The EU III and EUR forum show the Paradox fanbase to be anything but positive. "Big whiners" probably come closer to describing us.
Whiners do not make positive word of mouth.
As to dumbing down the game. Yes I miss-spoke by saying Pardox was dumbing down HOI. But I do stand by what I have said in here that it is the attention to detail and intracacies of the time periods that has made all the Pardox games so supperior. And I would hate to see them dumbed down just to reach a broader audiance.
Attention to detail and intricacies of the time period, yes, but at the same time, they cannot make the economic system so complicated that it takes the focus away from the game the majority of potential customers will want to play: a game about encircling enemy divisions with blitzing tanks (even if that's not the most accurate representation of blitzkrieg), sinking enemy battleships from above, and demolishing convoys.
Not a game about setting up convoys, and about producing aluminium from bauxite and energy at an aluminium plant, which you can then combine with foods at a canned good factory, which you can then ship on a hand-organized convoy (ie, you manually transport the convoys and resources) to your far off supply depots, which you have to manually organize and relocate every which way, and....
Yes, these things (convoys, supplies, possibly food - I'm not opposed to that being added in) need to be represented in the game. But not to the point where they are so detailed and require so much management that you have to interrupt your war-fighting every five second to adjust your economy and supply lines.
I think the economic system we saw in HOI II was exactly what it should be for a world-war-focused game. Some minor tweaks and modification, I'm all for, maybe even adding a ressource or two (adding food, maybe splitting rares into rubber and some other), but anything more than that would just be a bad case of "Detailing down" the game (ie, making it worse by adding too much detail to secondary game elements)
