Augustus - Teaser #10 - 5th of August 2015

[Zylathas]

I really like the graphics, but I guess I am the only one at that.

 

[RavenR]

how has nobody re-purposed the old sunset invasion quote yet, let me fixt that:

August 5th, 2015 is a day I will always remember. It was the day I became cynical, bitter, and distraught. You may call it an overreaction for me to feel this way simply because of the business practices of a single video game company, but let me explain what all of this means to me.

My life was thrown off balance and I never regained my footing after that day, because I lost my ability to respect. An essential part of being human is to feel respect for those who may or may not be deserving of it. But it is equally human to feel painful disillusionment when someone or something you respected turns out to be much less than you thought. But the level of betrayal I felt when Paradox announced their new game tore something from me that I'll never be able to recover. They tore away my ability to respect anything, and they tore away my ability to feel human.

Paradox Interactive was a company I respected, and their employees were people I looked up to. Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Victoria, and Hearts of Iron were all quality game series that combined historical accuracy with sandbox game worlds. These games may have been cartoony and humorous at times, but deep down they were always realistic and crafted with a level of detail and skill that won appreciation from gamers all across the internet. CK2 was their newest release, and the internet was in unanimous agreement that it was of unparallelled quality. Following it's long awaited release, Paradox began releasing quality DLC that raised the bar ever higher for Grand Strategy Games.

Then Stellaris was announced. This was not just an announcement of a new game, it was announcement of Paradox Interactive's suicide. It was an game intended to completely disregard any futuristic accuracy, and instead shock the entire world with its lunacy. Paradox Interactive had gone off the deep end and raised the middle finger to everybody who stayed loyal to them. They had announced that they didn't care anymore, that they didn't care for their community, and they were going to go out of their way to sabotage everything they had spent years creating.

The pain I felt from this betrayal has destroyed me on an emotional level, and has deprived me of my primary source of entertainment. No longer can I play Grand Strategy games without remembering the day I ceased mattering to people I devoted myself to. Paradox had not just destroyed me or their company, they had destroyed the one force of stability in the world: Trust.

 

[Darkath]

Saying you want someone's project to fail because you know what they really should be doing is incredibly disrespectful.
It's an alpha. The art is going to get much, much better. You should look at the pictures of CK2 in alpha. They look terrible compared to the release.

Apparently the new policy at paradox is not to announce game early in development anymore, and only start showing them when they're nearing completion. So don"t expect it to be drastically remastered.

 

[TheDungen]

Yep:

It was goofy as hell.

I think I'll be waiting for a remake then...

 

[Feliks D]

But there isn't a hex grid over the unowned parts of the map. Look at any other screenshot and they don't support a hex grid, either.

The area outside "owned space" might be "unexplored" and thus under a sort of "Fog of War". The other pictures are clearly to another scale than the first, and doesn't need a hex-grid..

 

[MilosM]

Once thing we know for sure is that Space is dark (we don't know if it's full of terror, yet). Most space strategy games like Gal Civ, SotS, SoaSE etc, serve us the same soup that has an explosion of colors and bright light effects with explosions and stuff to fill up the dark place that is space. And thus the essence itself of space, the void, is lost under all those special effects..

If paradox wants to release a new IP that is set in a fictional universe, it has to establish a strong visual identity to stand out from its peers. Endless Space managed it to an extent with its crisp UI and minimalistic looks (too bad there wasn't much of a game inside).

The sense of awe we have when we get the first pictures of Pluto, or when we get vague information about a distant Kepler star is something i find lacking in most space game. When we put get pictures, we don't find lava lakes and bright orange glowing things on planets.

I'd expect of GSG space game, paradox-style to have a more realistic approach to space and don't fall into the easy space opera tropes with space magic, glowing things everywhere.

When i play Crusader Kings or EU4, i enjoy the nice graphics but i don't need the entire thing to glow.

Agree with everything this man said.

 

[Beric Dondarion]

That may have been true for sunset invasion but applying it here is just being melodramatic.

it was a joke, but i forgot jokes aren't allowed here

 

[Vegas2010]

Someone please make an "Nazi's on the dark side of the moon" mod.

 

[Alectron]

About 3 and 7...
Paradox is made out of 7 letters, and contains 3 vowels.

 

[LostAlone]

From these screens it looks like it will feature some kind of real time battle system, wouldn't it be very tiresome to manage this if the war system is somewhat similar to their other GSG's. I sure as hell wouldn't want to load into a real time battle in EU4 to chase rebels.

Yeah, that's kinda my feeling. It's a problem in every game it's been a part of, including Total War, but perhaps most importantly in Stardrive. Stardrive pretty much IS exactly a GSG in space. Everything is real time and you control all your fleets everywhere all at once with active pause. And it's awful. It's essentially unplayable at any speed and the CPU is at a massive advantage in combat.

If it has real time battle on their own map (like in Stardrive 2 or Endless Space) then that has it's own subset of problems. Both those games have auto resolve but it grinds everything to a halt because every time a battle comes up the MUST pause (to let you choose to fight or auto resolve) and that's murder to game flow. An even bigger problem is that as a player you can't really trust the AI to fight battles reasonably except the most ludicrously outnumbered, so you need to fight very many very similar battles over and over just to make sure that the AI doesn't flush your fleet down the crapper.

Both of these approaches have problems and while I trust PDS to make a decent game, I don't see any real answer here. That's why pretty much every 4X game is pretty heavily flawed to some extent. That's very much why I am not hyped. For all of PDS's ability there are certain limitations that you just can't get around in this genre.

 

[RavenR]

Well, i expected a game in ancient time. Where the romans ruled the world or greeks fought against the persians, but what did i got? A space game.
Really paradox?

After creating Grand strategy games like hoi, vic, ck and eu you gave us a space game. I once looked up to you, but you betrayed your community by giving us Stellaris.
What does this game have to do with history? Nothing, indeed.

Just another prick in the wall...

 

[TheDungen]

Once thing we know for sure is that Space is dark (we don't know if it's full of terror, yet). Most space strategy games like Gal Civ, SotS, SoaSE etc, serve us the same soup that has an explosion of colors and bright light effects with explosions and stuff to fill up the dark place that is space. And thus the essence itself of space, the void, is lost under all those special effects..

If paradox wants to release a new IP that is set in a fictional universe, it has to establish a strong visual identity to stand out from its peers. Endless Space managed it to an extent with its crisp UI and minimalistic looks (too bad there wasn't much of a game inside).

The sense of awe we have when we get the first pictures of Pluto, or when we get vague information about a distant Kepler star is something i find lacking in most space game. When we put get pictures, we don't find lava lakes and bright orange glowing things on planets.

I'd expect of GSG space game, paradox-style to have a more realistic approach to space and don't fall into the easy space opera tropes with space magic, glowing things everywhere.

When i play Crusader Kings or EU4, i enjoy the nice graphics but i don't need the entire thing to glow.

Actually space is not dark. It only seems like that to city dwellers who havent seen the night sky in complete darkness. If we cna see that many stars from within an atmosphere then immagine how many we'll see from a ship in outer space.

 

[Demarque]

I meant "Turn based" like Gal and Civ.

Sigh.

It isn't turn based. Take a look at the upper right corner of the screenshots, and you will see that it is a pausable real time game with the proper buttons to increase and reduce time. Just like every other Pdox game.

 

[Sonereal]

Someone please make an "Nazi's on the dark side of the moon" mod.

I am announcing my first mod for Stellaris! Here is a trailer!

 

[TheDungen]

it was a joke, but i forgot jokes aren't allowed here

Who said I was angry? Read my signature. Now read my comment again, bearing that in mind.

 

[LostAlone]

I really like the graphics, but I guess I am the only one at that.

Then graphics just look like pretty much any space ship game to me. Extremely generic. The strategic map looks exactly like Endless Space, the ships too.

 

[Beric Dondarion]

Who said I was angry? Read my signature.

i will never pass up an opportunity to make fun of the guy who had a meltdown over SI

 

[Denkt]

The game allready have a release date from the steam page screenshot: 16 February I think it was. Im pretty sure paradox have said they will only announce games which have a know releasedate from now on.

You probably don't have to control battles. It look to be on a smaller scale then other paradox games with only a few factions, you maybe will not have many ships and planets given it seems to be heavily based on characters.

Still they could be doing a two game announcement, the second being a Roman game using hint 7&3 as a hint to two games with hint number 3 and 7 being the most important hints who point at two different games.

 

[dav77-b]

I definitly want a HoI4 to "Nazis on the Moon" Converter.

 

[Darkath]

Actually space is not dark. It only seems like that to city dwellers who havent seen the night sky in complete darkness. If we cna see that many stars from within an atmosphere then immagine how many we'll see from a ship in outer space.

Something like this i guess ? (taken from ISS)

Anyhow i didn't mean to say space was pitch black, but the scale of things really put things in perspective, the supermassive fiery ball that is the sun only appear the size of a ping pong ball from earth. And although having space to scale would be unplayable and i'm not asking for this. Toning down the lighting and colors to have something that is bit more realistic would be welcome in my opinion.