jadam said:
Maybe since I started wargaming with the likes of Panzer Leader, Luftwaffe and Squad Leader - 3D graphics just never felt that important in a strategy wargame
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Why is this game losing clout?
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Maybe since I started wargaming with the likes of Panzer Leader, Luftwaffe and Squad Leader - 3D graphics just never felt that important in a strategy wargame
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Alexspeed said:
So maybe the answer is not to go to the store expecting to buy a game but instead going on-line for your game purchases. There are niche market (war gaming) companies selling quality games on-line (and will ship you a boxed game with CD) if you know where to look.
To all the people griping about EUIII, it would be helpful if you clarified
--whether you have upgraded to EUIII:NA
and/or
--whether you have tried one of the mods (especially, for example, any of the recent Magna Mundi versions), but still find EUIII (with mods) so unsatisfying.
Maybe some of the complainers who tried EUIII and dismissed it early on without trying the NA expansion and/or one of the better mods--maybe they don't know what they're missing.
Just curious.
--whether you have upgraded to EUIII:NA
and/or
--whether you have tried one of the mods (especially, for example, any of the recent Magna Mundi versions), but still find EUIII (with mods) so unsatisfying.
Maybe some of the complainers who tried EUIII and dismissed it early on without trying the NA expansion and/or one of the better mods--maybe they don't know what they're missing.
Just curious.
No, since my primary problem would not be eliminated by NA (lack of autominting).berto said:
The heightened determinism of MM turns me off to it.
berto said:
I fail to see why that would matter. I buy expansion packs for added content, not bug fixing. I expect patches to do that.
It is not a reasonable demand to ask people to buy an expansion to get their original game fixed. Regardles, from what I've heard and read, NA won't make much of a difference for me.
Hive said:
You are, of course, aware that the NA expansion patch *does* add content.
FAL said:
Of course I am, but that's besides the point. A lot of people, you included, respond to "I don't like this gamebreaking bug in my game" with a "pay €20 extra to have it fixed in NA". And I don't find that to be reasonable.
berto said:
Yes, you are right,... I was highly suspicious about buying games online before, but if i cant get the games i want in the store there will be only this way i guess. I just like to see and grab and feel a game in my hands before i buy it... kinda old fashioned, i know (i miss the big game boxes too
) Edit2: get box with online order, needed some time to relaize it in your post, miss big boxes anyway
If just everyone would stop buying dumb games (subjective to anyone what he feels is a dumb game) they would have to stop selling them and change their ways to smarter games. i know, thats nothing that will happen
whatever... i am allways willing to buy games that are bug-free and have a deep and challanging gameplay or a great story... but it seems those are the exception nowadays.
berto said:
EU3 plus NA and with the latest MM Mod.
I wouldnt think of playing EU3 without MM and i bought the extension just becouse of the mod. It is so much better with MM...
BUT it still lacks the history feel that EU2 had and the AI is so stupid that it kills the fun after short time for me. (Big AI Armies, Inflation, free AI minting, peace deal behaviour, ect...)
And i wouldnt mind to post here and tell you that, if i wouldnt like it to be fixed and if i would hate eu3... i really want to play it and have fun with it... but its hard to oversee all the flaws.
Edit: BUT its still one of the better games today... (at least for me), thats the sad point in the whole rant.
I think if Rome will be the same category like its EU3 now... a light game without much deepness for the dumb masses that just have seen Troja, 300 and Alexander.... then i will refuse to buy it i guess.
Altough it really hope it will be a good one.
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Judging by Dev Diaries, it surely has potential to be a great game. EU basis(and of course not icky looking like EU3) + CK-like character system + Vicky-like population system + (much) more depth & events than EU3 = Droolmaster 3000Alexspeed said:I think if Rome will be the same category like its EU3 now... a light game without much deepness for the dumb masses that just have seen Troja, 300 and Alexander.... then i will refuse to buy it i guess.
Altough it really hope it will be a good one.
Hive said:
That's fine, but then stop saying 'An expansion should add features', because that's exactly what NA is doing
Mr. Domino said:
The competitive AI that leads to blobbing, the leveling of the playing field where everyone and my dog can get QftNW (or any other idea) in 1453, the very sugared way badboy is treated (30 badboy as a basic limit is far, far too much, advisors to clean BB in a few years, etc), the surrender changes that allow (almost) for the concept of total wars, the randomnness of the "game board", making it unpredicatable for a multiplayer, competutitive environment, but unplausible for a single player who wants to "experience" the game within some realistic parameters, the lack of a pause function when a window poped up, the lucky nations that only make blobbing worse and add another small fantasy tier to the experience of playing... all these were consequences of a multiplayer minded development of an emminently single player game.
It is true that many of these things were fixed later in patches/NA (kudos for Paradox to correct the shot!), but that does not preclude their inclusion in the original game design, in some instances crippling the game until now (blobbing, for instance).
jadam said:
Bullseye. Posted something to that effect some months back. From a pure economic point of view the risk Paradox is running is to alienate its core audience while keeping the engine far too complex to be played by the 7 minute generation. In the first days of release many, many messages were posted on the mainstream sites not understanding the game, old timers compared it to EU2 and the result was far from stellar and of course, others still enjoyed it. With time passing and the disapearance of the impulse buyers (all mainstreamers, of course) things polarized between the last two groups.
From a developer point of view it is sensible. You'll sell more units with a beautiful presentation or shelf space than with a plain one. Of course, from a pure gameplay point of view nothing recomends a 3D presentation for a strategy title. Anyway, as long as the 3D is well done, I can understand the move, even if it is not to my liking.
Knight Richard said:
That is all very well, but probably your tastes, like mine, are not representative of "the people" who buy games.
The key word in your sentence is "industry". "Industry" destroys creativity, the search for a better game is replaced by the quest for more sales and things get dark for any non mainstream consumer.
Even if in EU3 there was a conscious effort to take the game from the niche market, raising its sales, I thing Paradox is far from a mainstream company.
Alexspeed said:
I would say it is safe to assume Rome is not for the mainstreamer who enjoyed 300!
I'm afraid I can't let that pass. Most of your objections are actually attempts to fix the (perceived) flaws of single-player EU2.ubik said:
The "competitive" AI (who wants an uncompetitive one?), the blobbing, the lucky nations, the changes to peace resolution so you couldn't strip a 6-province nation to its capital in one war were all designed to fix the biggest gameplay problem in EU2 SP - namely that it all got very easy less than halfway through. Win the first war (use loans/mercenaries if you need them), take three provinces, win the second war, take five provinces, win the third war, congratulations, you're a major power even if you started as Byzantium. By 1550 the AI cannot threaten you and the only remaining consideration is whether to go for world conquest. EU3 stacks the deck to throw up 60-100 province AI monsters that are (intended to be) a challenge in the endgame.
Likewise BB. BB isn't an issue in multiplayer - the other players are always a bigger brake on all-out imperialism than the AI could hope to be. It's strictly an SP mechanic to slow down blitz-from-year-one world conquerors. The problem with the EU2 incarnation was (a) all the game really cared about was the hard cap at 36BB, so you could run up 30BB with no downside & (b) once you approached the BB limit, your only choices were to start the BB wars or cease expanding while BB crawled down at the rate of one point every 4-8 years. There are a lot of SP players out there whose idea of fun does not include twiddling their thumbs for 50-100 game years waiting for BB to go down.
Random development? Multiplayer is "random" by definition - turn 3-8 humans loose on a game and you can guarantee it won't go the same way twice. In single-player I want the game to develop differently each time, rather than knowing in advance which countries will be doing what fifty years before they do it. Nor do I want the best strategy for a given country to be a matter of learning that X event will always hit on Y date and if you take Option A (and subsequently Option B in event Z) you will be able avoid the scripted disaster that will otherwise strike regardless of the game-situation. EU2 always suffered from being over-deterministic, and the price of EEG-AGC-style improvements was to make this worse, to the point where the player had very limited choices about which way the game would develop.
Level playing-field? A tough one. I personally don't like it - I would much rather have a system with 100 tech-levels, the Europeans starting on 40, the Chinese on 30, the Indians on 20 and so on - but in EU2 the pagan nations were virtually unplayable (sit for 150 years because you can't explore, Europeans arrive and kill you, the end). How many complaints have you seen about the silly Westernisation events? I can't remember any, but I can remember multiple whine threads about Muslims/Indians/Chinese not getting them. It may not be your cup of tea, but there are plenty of players out there who want to build a Danish colonial empire, conquer China as the Mongols or Europe as the Aztecs, and Paradox has to try to cater for all of them.
Paradox made a decision with EU3 to make it more of a wargame and less of a historical simulation. It may have been the wrong choice, but it had nothing to do with MP.
Why is it that people in this thread are so quick to say that everyone besides them is some sort of stupid twelve-year-old who simply cannot comprehend their own genius, ands all games they don't personally find interesting must logically be total crap designed for morons?
The whole 'I bought every one of your games until EU3, but I guess now you're just pandering to the slobbering masses! Just wait until you go bankrupt without the money of me and all 27 likeminded individuals, your TRUE HARDCORE FANBASE' movement reeks of snobbery.
The whole 'I bought every one of your games until EU3, but I guess now you're just pandering to the slobbering masses! Just wait until you go bankrupt without the money of me and all 27 likeminded individuals, your TRUE HARDCORE FANBASE' movement reeks of snobbery.
L'Afrique said:
Very well said. There sometimes seems this assumption with some people here that anything they don't like must be designed for the 'dumb masses' and 'obviously' lacks any kind of depth, as they are clearly sophisticated intellectuals
. Some here don't like the game, thats fine. I agree that there are elements in the game design that are far from perfect. However, I'm just not buying it that the game was 'dumbed down'. There are more choices you have to make in EU3 than in EU2 IMHO.
Octavio said:
Real problem is not how it looks on full zoom. When you design a game, you should take in consideration which zoom in is used most of the time, what view is used most of the time, then optimize combination of those to get the best effects.
Instead, we have the least used view having the best gfx, silly "doll-like" unit sprites and half of the zoom that is not even needed in game of grand strategy. So all bells and whistles are completly wasted, while they hang on your PC computing power still. Yes, on the most used view (political, half back zoom) it looks like early 90-ties.
I hope Paradox will improve that in Rome and make political view the best looking, cut some crap from max zoom which is useless and does something about unit sprites (I'm a big fan of sidebar with unit details of HoI series, especially part 2 with fantastic moddable gfx component). Imagine simple gfx for unit on board (clean, easy to spot and move), but detailed bar with historical picture of the unit, maybe with some nice commander pic?
To elaborate a bit - everything in game should have purpose, ESPECIALLY if it's interface. What is the purpose of max zoom in EU3? I tried to use it once for something other then checking how terrain looks (which everyone does once after installing the game, then never again bothers). It was zooming to the max to Azores isles to load my infantry unit on the ships in harbor. Guess what, even on max zoom I wasn't able to target my ships - instead each click was targetting land unit. So this view was completly useless even for most obvious purpose - manipulating units in very small provinces. What's the point then?
EU3 was step back in gfx department compared to HoI2 to be honest, despite whole 3d hype.
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