why not just make ironman optional for achievements?

[jonjowett]

As @Reman and @TheMeInTeam said above, this seems to be a conscious choice by Paradox for all of their games.

Game devs seem to have two basic choices here:

1. Achievements can only be earned in unmodded games

• Consequence:
  • Most people play without mods
  • Modding community is relatively small
• Advantage:
  • People who get achievements feel they have earned them legitimately
  • Bug reporting and tracking is a lot easier (because everyone understands that only one version is officially supported)
• Disadvantage:
  • All bugs and issues affect the vast majority of players
  • All bugs and issues need to be fixed by the dev team

2. Achievements can be earned in modded games

• Consequence:
  • Many people play with mods
  • Modding community is a bit larger
• Advantage:
  • Many bugs and issues can be fixed near-instantly by passionate modders (and these can be used as inspiration for the dev team's "actual fixes")
• Disadvantage:
  • Fragmentation of the playerbase (because everyone has their own unique modlist)
  • (Over-)Reliance on modding community
    • Devs are not incentivised to fix anything in a timely manner, because the modders will do it for them
    • If the modders leave, for any reason, the game is toast

(I've probably missed a few points for/against each approach, but hopefully you get the drift.)

Would EU4 (and many other Paradox games) benefit from shifting from a type-1 to type-2 approach? Maybe. It seems like a good idea on the surface - but such a complete change of direction probably has a significant amount of risk associated with it.

 

[MachopPower69]

As @Reman and @TheMeInTeam said above, this seems to be a conscious choice by Paradox for all of their games.

Game devs seem to have two basic choices here:

1. Achievements can only be earned in unmodded games

• Consequence:
  • Most people play without mods
  • Modding community is relatively small
• Advantage:
  • People who get achievements feel they have earned them legitimately
  • Bug reporting and tracking is a lot easier (because everyone understands that only one version is officially supported)
• Disadvantage:
  • All bugs and issues affect the vast majority of players
  • All bugs and issues need to be fixed by the dev team

2. Achievements can be earned in modded games

• Consequence:
  • Many people play with mods
  • Modding community is a bit larger
• Advantage:
  • Many bugs and issues can be fixed near-instantly by passionate modders (and these can be used as inspiration for the dev team's "actual fixes")
• Disadvantage:
  • Fragmentation of the playerbase (because everyone has their own unique modlist)
  • (Over-)Reliance on modding community
    • Devs are not incentivised to fix anything in a timely manner, because the modders will do it for them
    • If the modders leave, for any reason, the game is toast

(I've probably missed a few points for/against each approach, but hopefully you get the drift.)

Would EU4 (and many other Paradox games) benefit from shifting from a type-1 to type-2 approach? Maybe. It seems like a good idea on the surface - but such a complete change of direction probably has a significant amount of risk associated with it.

So it is a double-edged sword at best?

 

[jonjowett]

So it is a double-edged sword at best?

I think that if they changed then some things would get better and others would get worse. Whether that's better overall is down to personal taste.

 

[leefnmajors]

• Most people play without mods
• Modding community is relatively small

I know that the modding community isn't small; it's not Skyrim huge, but for the game's size there's a pretty healthy chunk of maintained mods and it's fairly easy to write your own.

But as to the first point, I really wonder many people never use mods/spend a large amount of time with no mods/play with nothing BUT mods. Just going off Steam Achievement percentages, just under 30% of people have done the most basic achievements (get a royal marriage, win a war, take a province). It's off-topic, but I wonder how many people actually do hunt for achievements in this game (as a percentage).

 

[jonjowett]

I know that the modding community isn't small; it's not Skyrim huge, but for the game's size there's a pretty healthy chunk of maintained mods and it's fairly easy to write your own.

Yeah, I know it's not small, I was trying to say it's smaller than it might otherwise be if the policy was different.

Still, I kinda pulled that opinion out of nowhere, so I went through and gathered some stats on the total number of workshop mods for the various strategy games in my library (as well as some that are known to be heavily-modded), and the results were interesting:

CK2: 3,279
EU4: 8,616
HOI4: 35,918
Stell: 23,095

TW:W2: 12,320
Civ5: 10,616
Civ6: 5,620

Rimworld: 23,302
Skyrim: 28,170

First, yes, I'm aware that total number of mods is not a good way to measure the activity and quality of the modding community. But anything else would take more than a minute to gather the info. So, equally, you can't really draw strong conclusions from these figures.

Still, I think the Paradox games have a lot more mods than I was expecting. For the historical games, maybe this is because they are based on real geography, so patriotic modders are motivated to add detail for their country/region? (This is probably why HOI4 has 36k mods...)

Would there be more modders (and therefore more mods) if modded games could earn achievements? Maybe, but now I'm not so sure it'd be a big effect.

But as to the first point, I really wonder many people never use mods/spend a large amount of time with no mods/play with nothing BUT mods. Just going off Steam Achievement percentages, just under 30% of people have done the most basic achievements (get a royal marriage, win a war, take a province). It's off-topic, but I wonder how many people actually do hunt for achievements in this game (as a percentage).

Indeed, I think a lot of people aren't worried about achievements. But I think that the reason for the low percentages for easy achievements is not related to mods - instead, I think it's because most people don't play in ironman mode. (I certainly didn't, for my first few runs.)

Overall, I still think that games where you can only earn achievements without mods will have fewer modders, because you're splitting your passionate playerbase in two parts: those who care about achievements, and those who don't. (Only those who don't care will become mod creators, unless they have an unholy amount of free time on their hands, because playtesting your mod takes a surprisingly huge amount of time.) However, either this effect is not as large as I'd initially thought, or there's some other effect that increases the prevalence of modders in Paradox games compared with others (eg. my patriotism hypothesis).

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Devs are not incentivised to fix anything in a timely manner, because the modders will do it for them

Interestingly, for 6+ years I could have given a list of bugs Pdox largely ignored in every single patch, and I would have disregarded this given the patch history.

But with the switch to the newest team, they started fixing them. Even the old/pet peeve ones.

Still, I think the Paradox games have a lot more mods than I was expecting. For the historical games, maybe this is because they are based on real geography, so patriotic modders are motivated to add detail for their country/region? (This is probably why HOI4 has 36k mods...)

HOI 4 is a special animal, in a few ways:

• The core design of the game has serious issues (war score, peace conferences, espionage/tech interaction, bizarre navy meta, sometimes awful unforeseen focus tree interactions). This results in mods that try to redesign aspects of the core experience.
  • One of the most popular mods actually just deletes the logic for score/peace conferences entirely and lets players choose who gets what, regardless of what happened during the war. Because even that's preferable to a lot of people than the "logic" the game uses.
• The UI is incredibly clunky, and sometimes flat out inaccurate. Yes, this is a problem in EU 4 as well. But in HOI 4, the battle planner is a central part of the UI design and problems with it bleed into the experience in a unique way.
• Alt history is incredibly common, both for larping and just to create interesting scenarios.
• While focus trees are rigid and create all kinds of interaction/rule bypass problems if not handled well, they also allow for tuning in a way that even EU 4's missions can't match
• Speaking of "special animal", one of the best-put together mods in all of HOI 4 is the pony mod, which puts you in an awkward position of choosing between skipping the best focus trees/mod balance I've seen to date vs having your steam friends see you leading a nation with a horse pun and reasonably asking questions

I don't think the selection effect is too strong for achievements...it seems most players either don't play for achievements at all, or only do so for a fraction of their time with the game. HOI 4 definitely needs the most help from mods. Its core gameplay/actually doing the building/wars is fun (when it works), but so much of what surrounds it is a mix of design problems and bugs.

In contrast, CK2 is probably still the most polished experience in this genre. Mods that "fix" things with the game therefore be less common, and the game allows a lot of larping w/o mods. So stuff like total conversion/new map/etc will be a higher % of total mods, I'd estimate.

 

[jonjowett]

Interestingly, for 6+ years I could have given a list of bugs Pdox largely ignored in every single patch, and I would have disregarded this given the patch history.

But with the switch to the newest team, they started fixing them. Even the old/pet peeve ones.

Well, yes, and it's great that they're finally cleaning things up.

What I was thinking about here were games that have prominent community patches that everyone uses - to the point where people complaining about bugs get told to just install the community patch. (I'm thinking of the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series in particular.) Maybe the devs come back later to fix some things... or maybe not. (For Fallout/TES, I think most of the bugfixes were driven by the large proportion of players on console, who didn't have easy access to mods. Which is a different situation to Paradox games, whose principle market is PC.)

 

[Ninaran]

The OP is vastly underselling the problems with the current setup:

• It's trivially easy to circumvent through to anyone who has access to Google and 5 minutes of spare time. Ways to do so include, but are not limited to:
  • Making separate save files in the save file directory
  • Creating or downloading a python script that does this automatically
  • EU4ConsolePatcher.exe
  • Cheat Engine
  • Steam Achievement Unlocker
• Some people find the mandatory autosave annoying, especially if they're playing on an HDD. It breaks the flow of the game and is largely unnecessary.
• Some new players vastly overestimate the integrity of the ironman symbol and end up feeling "betrayed" when certain Youtubers are suspected of having "cheated", which causes a bunch of drama (a particular incident happened recently).
• Game-ruining bugs are harder to fix in ironman, and can potentially ruin runs altogether.
• It hurts the modding community by forcing a choice between mods and achievements. Other games like Civ allow modded games to earn achievements and are just fine. While it's quite easy to circumvent ironman to trivialize achievements, it's quite hard to hack the game in ways that allow for mods and achievements simultaneously.
• Since mods and achievements conflict, any changes the devs make are effectively forced on players. If the devs make silly decisions in Rimworld or Civ, I can just trivially mod them out. If the devs make silly decisions in EU4, I have to live with them if I still want to get achievements, or at least use hacky workarounds like playing a modded game and fulfilling the achievement unofficially, then using one of the methods mentioned above to actually get the achievement officially. Think how obvious it is that spamming courthouses is extremely micro intensive and annoying. Think how easy the problem would be to solve by just giving courthouses +1 building slot like universities, which could be done in a single line of code. Reflect on the fact that the devs still haven't done anything to ameliorate this issue in over 18 months.
• With easy modding out, complaining LOUDLY to the devs becomes the only real recourse many players have to improve the game. This amplifies the number of complaints in terms of both quantity and severity. Sometimes the issues get fixed. Other times the devs get too many complaints and start avoiding the forums, denouncing them as "toxic" and breaking a critical link with the community thereby causing all sorts of issues.

Reman talking big sense again. Kudos.

Lots of people just think they're so much better than anyone else because they play Ironman when it literally doesn't change anything. Weirdly elitist and gatekeeping for something as trivial as Steam achievements.

 

[ianchen12345]

seems like a pointless way to antagonize the player given its so easy to work around.

Imagine a youtube video thumbnail ... "Conquer the whole world as Ryukyu" in one month? WHAT???????"

 

[Josar]

from the perspective of gameplay, how would earning an achievement be any different if I just could hit *save* rather than copy-paste the save file to an outside folder?

Most people who play Ironman don't try to cheat the system by copying a save, what would be the point of going for a achievement in the first place if you just keep reloading saves?

 

[jamal bakr]

Most people who play Ironman don't try to cheat the system by copying a save, what would be the point of going for a achievement in the first place if you just keep reloading saves?

Because 90% of an achievement run is just "cleaning out the birdcage", with maybe 45-1 hour of actual critical gameplay. I have other things I rather do than spend 8-16 hours re-setting up the autopilot part of an achievement run!

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Most people who play Ironman don't try to cheat the system by copying a save, what would be the point of going for a achievement in the first place if you just keep reloading saves?

You can make an identical case for repeatedly starting the game until you get favorable RNG though.

There are enough hidden/undocumented mechanic interactions that saving in advance of significant decisions is probably a good idea. Lest one fall into another "60 > 60" type moment.

 

[MachopPower69]

Imagine a youtube video thumbnail ... "Conquer the whole world as Ryukyu" in one month? WHAT???????"

That sounds like a SpiffingBrit type of video

 

[Secuter]

I don't really understand that either. Who actually care about achievements beyond those that want them? I find the game infinitely more fun to play with friends, but I can't get achievements with friends. Sure, you could easily help each other to said achievements - and who cares?

I've played Total War Warhammer 2 - and other TW games, and you could gain achievements in MP too. Even modded games allowed you to gain achievements.

In the end, you only go for achievements for your own pleasure or to have a goal. So why not just open it up for none-ironman games? Ironman is just a way to ensure yourself that you also have consequences.

 

[Sharples88]

I don't see why we shouldn't use mods for achievements, they are tied to my account and only mine so why should other people care if I used a 10x mod or a Yellow Prussia mod to get them?

This is one of the reasons why achievements are just completely vanilla and boring. The developer should provide the achievements, but the consumer should be able to go at it any way they want; Cheats or not.

 

[Blust]

I don't understand how so many people can write "I don't care about achievements" and at the same time "I want to have achievements while modding my game however I want". The Iron Man only ensure a majority of those Iron Man players will play on the same game, with the same rules and difficulty.

 

[Josar]

Because 90% of an achievement run is just "cleaning out the birdcage", with maybe 45-1 hour of actual critical gameplay. I have other things I rather do than spend 8-16 hours re-setting up the autopilot part of an achievement run!

You can make an identical case for repeatedly starting the game until you get favorable RNG though.

There are enough hidden/undocumented mechanic interactions that saving in advance of significant decisions is probably a good idea. Lest one fall into another "60 > 60" type moment.

Most achievements don't require rng to complete, they require patience or an alternative playstyle.

People think France needs Burgundy to get Big Blue Blob for instance, when they should just ignore that event altogether.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Most achievements don't require rng to complete, they require patience or an alternative playstyle.

I am aware. I am not asserting that achievements require RNG. I am asserting there is almost no meaningful difference between save scumming vs start scumming, in terms of the spirit of the achievement or in terms of tangible benefits offered.

Outside of the rare positions where you can be declared on/killed with minimal counterplay in the first year or so with bad luck, there aren't many positions where RNG is actually determinant in getting the achievement.

 

[MatthewP]

I am aware. I am not asserting that achievements require RNG. I am asserting there is almost no meaningful difference between save scumming vs start scumming, in terms of the spirit of the achievement or in terms of tangible benefits offered.

Outside of the rare positions where you can be declared on/killed with minimal counterplay in the first year or so with bad luck, there aren't many positions where RNG is actually determinant in getting the achievement.

Yeah, Start scumming is really a type of save scumming. So it seems like the corollary for this thread is that paradox should make start scumming easier and add a “reroll rivals” button and an option for players to pick whatever outcomes they want for all events in the first 5 years.

 

[Nostalgium]

I don't really understand that either. Who actually care about achievements beyond those that want them?

I mean, who cares about anything except the people who do?