Why is this thread still going? Isn't it as simple as: "If you want to play WW1 timeline play Victoria 2."
Is there going to be a world war 1 timeline?
- Thread starter FizCap
- Start date
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
I've seen other people play for more than 5 hours as recently as last week on the stream. The game mechanics were in plain sight. Your argument suggests you don't know how a game works until you play it. If that was the case, why do so many watch tutorial videos in order to learn how to play a game? You can learn about something without actually doing it.
Honestly this would make about as much sense as cramming WW1 into EU4's mechanics. This thread is so full of stupid it hurts. The proponents of this idea need to go back to total war and leave EU to people who actually understand history.
You can only get a very cursory understanding from observing game mechanics. I can't watch a video of a really good player playing EU3 or EU4 or anything and say "Oh well now I'm a really good player too" Watching videos and reading diaries does not give you sufficient experience or understanding to evaluate the mechanics in the ways that people in this topic are evaluating them. Again, this point is not up for debate.
Dinosaurs in EU make as much sense as WW1 in EU.
People in this thread arguing that WW1 in EU would work.
Therefore...
OK Paradox, when's the Dinosaur DLC coming out?! :angry:
>mfw I realize the OP does not want to play Victoria 2 because he wants to play WWI in his Map Painting Simulator
I must disagree here, all you have done is say that any mechanics can be adapted into a WWI game and that previous adaptations (Star Wars, really?) of other games have proven successful. The EU series is not Age of Empires, nor is it Empire Earth. Adaptations are possible, of course. No-one here has said that it is impossible to adapt EUIV to include the WWI era. However, what the majority of people are arguing is that the mechanics, which appear to be an evolution of those present in EUIII, do not appear to suit such an extension. Of course no-one here has played the game (well, some lucky beta-testers may have but of course they can not comment on game mechanics) but we can make educated assumptions from what we have read, watched and experienced in previous EU games.
Thanks for the arrogant 'I'm right, you're wrong' stance, much appreciated. Nonetheless, I'll point you, as many others have, to Victoria II, which deals with the WWI era perfectly well. Again, of course Paradox could make a WWI era game with the EU mechanics however, they have chosen to use different mechanics to portray that era.
a proper WW1 game instead would be most welcome. But it is probably just a dream because PI has not started a new franchise for a while (a decade) if you do not count half-baked offshoots and byproducts such as EU:Rome, Sengoku or MoTE. So it is probably better to rely on mods rather than hope and ultimately be disappointed.
But an idea of WW1 in EU is not blasphemic IMO. Am I the only one who thinks that there is some kind of convergence between the franchises? To me it seems that core PI franchises actually converge. If you take a look at EU1-2, HoI1-2, vicky 1 and CK1 you see very different games with different tools and interfaces. Since EU3 and Vicky 2 I have observed some convergence - concepts have been transfered between games more often - In nomine introduced decisions, then we have decisions everywhere. Yeah, decisions are good (unlike national focus concept which started in EU and somehow found its way to plague Vicky) but what about unique tools, interface and mechanics? I hope that at least hoi4 will avoid this convergence. Hoi3 retains most individual patterns so far while EU3-Vicky-CK-EU4 starts to resemble a single blend game already. Is it that clausewitz engine is somehow more limited than Europa engine?
so what exactly is a problem with WW1 in EU when we have generic vague concepts such as national focus or "power" which can be used to do anything or buy anything? With this approach, using generic boring variables and similar tools and interfaces across different franchises, we could easily have WW1 or space colonization in EU.
turns out innovation could be a problem here. The recipe is good but eating the same meal over and over again is not fun. And it gets worse when you start mixing different kinds of food. Flavourless Soylent is the result. MoTE and some hints in EU4 diaries may raise some concern about this.
But an idea of WW1 in EU is not blasphemic IMO. Am I the only one who thinks that there is some kind of convergence between the franchises? To me it seems that core PI franchises actually converge. If you take a look at EU1-2, HoI1-2, vicky 1 and CK1 you see very different games with different tools and interfaces. Since EU3 and Vicky 2 I have observed some convergence - concepts have been transfered between games more often - In nomine introduced decisions, then we have decisions everywhere. Yeah, decisions are good (unlike national focus concept which started in EU and somehow found its way to plague Vicky) but what about unique tools, interface and mechanics? I hope that at least hoi4 will avoid this convergence. Hoi3 retains most individual patterns so far while EU3-Vicky-CK-EU4 starts to resemble a single blend game already. Is it that clausewitz engine is somehow more limited than Europa engine?
so what exactly is a problem with WW1 in EU when we have generic vague concepts such as national focus or "power" which can be used to do anything or buy anything? With this approach, using generic boring variables and similar tools and interfaces across different franchises, we could easily have WW1 or space colonization in EU.
turns out innovation could be a problem here. The recipe is good but eating the same meal over and over again is not fun. And it gets worse when you start mixing different kinds of food. Flavourless Soylent is the result. MoTE and some hints in EU4 diaries may raise some concern about this.
Last edited:
Like I said, the ridiculousness of your assumptions about the mechanics of a game that hasn't been released is not up for debate. This is not arrogance, this is fact. I won't address any statements about Victoria 2 as I'm discussing EU4 here, not Victoria 2. V2 is irrelevant to whether or not the EU4 engine can support the WW1 era.
Guys can we add the war on terror? We can even have Prince Harry as general!
Seriously?
I know about about your maymays and greenwords, you can't fool me.
Here, I'll toss in an out of the box idea.
We definitely do not need to keep bootstraping extra eras onto a single engine. The points made that the various games handle their respective eras better than any single terrifying monolithic engine is valid, before you say "you can't say this until you have played EU4 in every imaginable way and immersed yourself in its code like a mosquito in amber" code your own game that handles all of your suggested time periods well. We'll see where creativity meets the hard wall of actual programming.
What we need instead of an engine that poorly handles each era of history is a much more advanced way of handling saved games and history files so that they can be ported to the next game engine. My thought is mostly to advance the saved game editing tools so that you can, in essence, edit the period of time between where your game left off and the new engine begins so that "history" in the next game seems like a logical continuation of where you left off. This last bit has usually, from what I have seen, only been accomplished by players with the spare time and knowledge to produce a significant mod of the necessary files (the AlterVicky mods are fantastic examples). What tool would fill this gap between "those who edit history files" and "those who know what history they would like edited" is, of course, the sticking point.
There are any number of limiting factors even to the success of this approach, but it is much better than trying to stretch a game engine to the breaking point or make it so abstract that we all might as well just pick up a copy of Civilization.
And it would be either revenue neutral or enhancing to boot!
We definitely do not need to keep bootstraping extra eras onto a single engine. The points made that the various games handle their respective eras better than any single terrifying monolithic engine is valid, before you say "you can't say this until you have played EU4 in every imaginable way and immersed yourself in its code like a mosquito in amber" code your own game that handles all of your suggested time periods well. We'll see where creativity meets the hard wall of actual programming.
What we need instead of an engine that poorly handles each era of history is a much more advanced way of handling saved games and history files so that they can be ported to the next game engine. My thought is mostly to advance the saved game editing tools so that you can, in essence, edit the period of time between where your game left off and the new engine begins so that "history" in the next game seems like a logical continuation of where you left off. This last bit has usually, from what I have seen, only been accomplished by players with the spare time and knowledge to produce a significant mod of the necessary files (the AlterVicky mods are fantastic examples). What tool would fill this gap between "those who edit history files" and "those who know what history they would like edited" is, of course, the sticking point.
There are any number of limiting factors even to the success of this approach, but it is much better than trying to stretch a game engine to the breaking point or make it so abstract that we all might as well just pick up a copy of Civilization.
And it would be either revenue neutral or enhancing to boot!
They aren't assumptions. They are facts collected over a year of development displayed through dev diaries, articles, and most importantly LIVE STREAMS MORE THAN 3 HOURS LONG SHOWCASING THE NEW GAME MECHANICS.
What more have we to see? Are the devs going to post a diary or do a stream within a MONTH of release saying, "OH BTW, WE FORGOT TO MENTION THAT THIS GAME ALSO HAS A HORDE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL MODE. WILL THE HORDES RISE AGAIN OR CAN EUROPE BEAT BACK THE UNDEAD BEAST?"
The fact of the matter is that all the info from the streams, dev diaries, and journalist articles point to NOTHING that has anything remotely to do with WWI.
If you want to mod the 19th century in WWI into the game, I have no problem with that. Don't expect the devs to waste time on a project that will kill another fully developed game and series (Victoria). It doesn't make sense from a business standpoint.
No, I've never said it couldn't be adapted to another time period. However, I used the term jury rigged deliberately. EUIV's mechanics could definitely be adapted to a different time period; I even cited D&T's World War I scenario in my previous posts. The distinction is that the engine is operating outside the parameters it was initially designed for, and it would be a more awkward fit than simply making a new game.
All of your examples are of specific and separate games, or games that are substantially less complex than Paradox titles. Crusader King, Europa Universalis and Victoria all run on the same engine (which has been tweaked over time, admittedly), that does not prevent them from being rather different or having different characteristics. My previous points still stand however, they are all ill-suited to handling facets of history outside the time period they were developed for. Rome and Medieval 2 could not accomplish what Empire: Total War did to model a new era; it was not a DLC, they made an entirely new game. A Star Wars RTS using Age of Empire's engine is not the same as a game that covers the medieval and space fantasy periods, they can exist side by side without conflict; but combining them would be clunky at best. Regardless, the Total War franchise and RTS games are fine with a far more "casual" take on their history periods, making it easier for them to cover history in broad swathes. Civilisation is a good example (I am not saying Civilisation is a bad game), it can cover all of human history, but to do so, it has to deal with history at essentially a fantasy level.
You keep putting words in other people's mouth. I haven't seen a general consensus that any Great War game needs to be a carbon copy of Victoria, what I've seen is a discussion of the impediments to incorporating it into Europa Universalis. While you have gotten some flippant remarks to just go play Victoria, that is hardly all you have received. Personally, if Paradox made a game dealing with World War I exclusively, I would expect it to be rather different from Victoria. Victoria's devotion to economic, diplomatic and political intrigue as well as colonisation mechanics are somewhat wasted on a game covering such a specific time period. I would prefer for attention to be shifted to areas more concerned with exclusively World War I.
We know how trade works to a large degree. We know how National Ideas work to a large degree. We know how religion, colonisation and warfare work to a large degree. We know how governments work to a large degree. We know many of the more important states work on a smaller level. Do we know everything? No, but we have a good idea of what to expect from Europa Universalis at this point. Or at least, anyone who has been keeping abreast of all the released information does. Why exactly do you think Paradox is releasing all this information, if not to let potential buyers discern what is in the game? Shits n' giggles?
We actually know quite accurately how quite a few mechanics work, so it's actually not unreasonable to say whether they fit for a WWI game. The trade mechanic for example has been shown in detail, so we know, that unidirectional trade routes are its basis. For one thing trade routes originanting in Eastasia and the New World and ending in Europe simply stopp being remotely accurate at the end of the 18. century, due to the British textile industry. It is also rather obvious, that this system can't easely be stretched to simulate the scramble for ressources, that took place during WWI , to keep the war industries running, because national borders hardly figure into the system.
The HRE and the religous mechanics, are also ahistorical in WWI game, no matter how they are handled. Also it is not unreasonable to assume, that should EU4 have an in-depth mechanic to simulate pre- industrial manufacture, which could then be extended to cover industry, that this mechanic would have been mentioned by now.
So it is not ridiculous to say EU 4's mechanics don't fit in the WWI timeframe. What is ridiculous, is to suggest, that because a game like Empire Earth manages to depict most human eras at it's level of depth in one game, the same applies to a EU game, which has somewhat higher standards for historical depth.
Anyhow no matter how much we know about EU4, it is simly logical, that in depth mechanics developed to depict the world before the French and the Industrial Revolutions will be anachronistic and inadequate, for an era after, because these revolutions changed the world so radically.
Last edited:
Once more, this issue is not up for debate. I can't stress this enough, any argument as to why EU4 should not support the WW1 era cannot use the game mechanics as justification. Plenty of people have stated that Paradox would rather do WW1 in a separate game for business interests which is a good point but the issue here is that people are claiming that the EU4 game mechanics cannot support the mechanics of the era without having played the game. It is an argument based entirely on assumptions and is thus invalid. No amount of video streaming or reading or whatever is an adequate substitute for firsthand experience. Otherwise there would be no point in actually buying the game...You could just read about it and watch someone else play it and that would give you the full experience. Obviously PLAYING the game gives you a whole new perspective.
Think about it like this: Imagine in the 1990's that a group of people read about the upcoming release of Pixar's first Toy Story movie and after seeing one still image, proclaimed "this animation technique looks nice but it will never work for anything but movies about talking toys. Anything else just wouldn't work." A pretty absurd statement yes? This is the argument you're making when you say that the mechanics of EU4 can ONLY be applied to the time period of EU4. I hope that clarified things for you.
It is up for debate, we're having one right now. More accurately, I am trying to have one, while you are blithely dismissing everything. You haven't even addressed my points that I gave, it is entirely possible to be aware of game mechanics without playing a game. Once again, do you think Paradox does it for shits n' giggles? Being aware of game information is obviously not a substitute for playing the game, since you do not not experience it yourself. Doesn't alter that I can describe to you how trade, governments, politics, warfare, diplomacy, colonisation and national ideas work with reasonable accuracy, and be sure it will be relatively accurate.
That point also tied into the rest of my post, which you didn't address whatsoever.
In general, I don't believe that what you are suggesting is workable as well; if we ignore the specific constraints with EUIV and World War I.