Heart of Production

by on June 30, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the fifteenth in a series of reviews of Paradox’s empire management games. See the earlier reviews here:
Europa Universalis II: A Tale of Two Europas
Hearts of Iron: Europa of Iron
Victoria: Nineteenth Century Essay
Crusader Kings: A Dynastic Adventure
Hearts of Iron II: Return Engagement
Europa Universalis III: A Whole New World
Europa Universalis: Rome: Make a Desert and Call it a Game
Hearts of Iron III: One Plus Two Equals Three
Victoria II: Same But Different
Sengoku: Shogun: Only War
Crusader Kings II: The Second Crusade
March of the Eagles: A Minor EU
Europa Universalis IV: A Fantastic Point of View
Stellaris: Paradox Among the Stars

On January 23, 2014, Paradox announced that it was working on a fourth Hearts of Iron game, which would bring the series to the Clausewitz 2.0 engine introduced with Crusader Kings II, and, presumably, a more centralized set of mechanics, as seen in Europa Universalis IV.

Development took longer than normal, and the game was not released until June 6, 2016, a month after Stellaris, a game that was not even announced until a year and a half after the announcement of HoI IV. While HoI had traditionally been the big money-maker for Paradox, HoI IV has not generated anywhere near the same number of patches and expansions as Paradox’s three immediately preceding games. This review is specifically looks at the game as of patch 1.2.1, released on September 23rd, before the first expansion.

Overall, the game is similar to the previous entries in the series—a pausable real-time empire-management simulation. Thanks to the tight focus on on about a decade (1936-48) this means that you see hours go by and production and many tasks are evaluated by day (combat and movement is hourly). It is the most “wargamey” of their titles, but as a grand strategy game, combat happens without further input from the player, who is concerned with general orders, diplomacy, and development.

Production

Production in the earlier games had you producing entire divisions at a time, and/or complete air wings. Now, it switched to directly producing equipment. So instead of ordering up an armor division, and the appropriate tanks get produced, you assign an armor division to be formed, and it receives the tanks you have on hand. Or it sits as a ‘theoretical’ formation waiting for appropriate equipment to be produced. This also means that new equipment slowly trickles out to units in the field as it produced, instead of an entire unit upgrading all at once, as in previous games.

Even the basic equipment needed by infantrymen needs to be produced before they can head out. This is largely abstracted, but there are improvements (which need researching) over time. Factories are assigned to each type of production, and each one adds to an overall averaged total. Each production line has a production efficiency that starts low, and builds up over time, representing tooling time and economies of scale. At the start of the game, maximum efficiency is 50% (and a new production line typically starts at 20%), but this also goes up with further research.

A UI element that was lost on me for a while is that the icons of any technology that results in a new type of equipment to produce is given a larger icon than the ones that unlock an ability or extra bonuses. Thinking about it, I think they missed some opportunities here. Infantry equipment comes in four types, with a couple in-between bonuses, and sub-branches for things like anti-tank weapons, and artillery has similar sub-types. I wish there was more of this around other major equipment types.

Factories are divided between military and civilian, with only the military ones producing equipment. Civilian factories are needed to produce abstracted consumer goods, which takes them out of the production pool, and they also behind-the-scenes are used to create materials to pay for resources that you need to import (the list of raw materials is essentially unchanged from III), and if another nation imports some of your resources, you get to use their civilian factory. Remaining civilian factories are used to construct new on-map facilities, including new factories, infrastructure, RADAR stations, fortifications, and the like.

As war approaches, or is declared, you can pass more ambitious draft laws, and you need fewer factories devoted to consumer goods. Instead of all that capacity simply helping build your internal infrastructure, you can convert factories from one type to the other; this takes time of course. Also, there are naval dockyards, which are factories that only produce ships, though they, somewhat strangely, do not use the efficiency system at all; switch a dockyard from a battleship to a submarine, it’s all the same.

This is one of the main elements to HoI IV as a game, and its best feature. No other WWII game has really presented all the various elements that go into the industrial might that determined much of the character of the war. There’s several competing problems and priorities, and they’re fairly well represented here.

Experiencing Templates

Despite building individual tanks and the such, the basic maneuver element has remained the division. Like in the third game, these are made up of sub-units, battalions, which are grouped into regiments inside the division. Also like the last game, each country has pre-made division templates that existing units use. However, you are not free to change them however you like this time.

Instead, changing, or creating a new template, requires the use of army experience. This is something gained by combat or a few other limited sources, and is needed to re-form the army into (hopefully) more effective units. Creating a duplicate of an existing template is free, and the general practice is to create new templates rather than just changing old ones, as that forces every division using that template to undergo an immediate organizational change, impacting training and equipment. And if you want to add that new self-propelled gun to your armor divisions, every one will start clamoring for them while production is just tooling up.

Then, you can tell a division to change which template it’s using. (Even to a completely different type!) So you can pick just a couple units to go to the new style immediately, and wait on the rest until the equipment is ready. Sadly, while it’s not hard to find out how many divisions are using a previous template, finding where they are is not easily done.

Non-Standard Models

As ever, the technology sections for equipment have standard slots for everyone. Overall, it’s been simplified a bit, with (for instance) eleven standard models of tanks. Again, we have cosmetics without meaning, as all the major countries have their own names for each model even though they’re identical for everyone.

Or… are they? Part of the government options is that you can assign design bureaus for the major types of equipment, and those provide bonuses to the various statistics. These are not the same for everyone (except the minor countries all get the same set), so once those are in place, a German Medium Tank I won’t be quite the same as an American one.

Further, you can make improved models of all the tank, aircraft, and ship types through use of the relevant arm’s experience (this is the only use for naval and air experience; only army experience is also used to rebuild larger formations). Switching from a general model of tank to the next technology in line saves some production efficiency, and switching to an improved version saves most of the production efficiency. So, especially once the shooting’s started, you can customize the current models instead of waiting for the next major step to be researched and then do a major re-tooling for that.

At first, I was quite disappointed by another round of different names without difference, but once I saw how much you can change things, and the fact that you could imitate Germany’s constant parade of upgraded models during the war, and the production model ties in with this so well, it became a real plus for the game, even if I still have a bunch of nit-picky reservations.

Military Planning

Unlike in HoI III, there’s no corps or full organizational hierarchy this time. However, theaters and armies were retained in a new interface. Theaters are mostly a convenience, and armies are the only level where you appoint commanders now. Also, the idea of tracking if there’s enough officers to properly administer the units has been dropped.

An army has divisions assigned to it, and then you can assign all, some, or none of those divisions to various battle plans for that army. The most common plan is to assign it a section of the front to man, and then assign a place you want to go on the offensive from that line. You can also have units garrison an area, define a new defense line to fall back to, and the like.

There are a number of problems here. This is obviously intended as a more comprehensive version of the AI control seen in III, and the new order modes help, but the problem of not being able to tell the AI how you want it to do things remains. Worse, the UI is not entirely up to the job. It’s actually a good effort, and I expect in later patches it got better, but it takes a lot of practice to get past the problems (which can be gotten past, which is impressive itself).

You can ignore all this and do everything manually. You don’t have group everything into armies, you don’t have to give the armies any orders, but there are incentives for doing so. First, the AI is pretty good at things like distributing units along a line, though it does occasionally get confused. However, when you put in a plan with offensive lines and the such, not only does the AI put the units where needed, but those units will slowly gain a combat bonus. When you hit the ‘go’ button for the attack, that planning bonus helps them deal with the defenders, and you can’t get that manually, but neither can you get it instantly.

And I should note that I finally understand what the combat markers have been trying to say since HoI III, thanks to Stellaris. The two combat systems aren’t anything alike, but what they’re trying to report is similar. The HoI combat tag is a circle with a number from 1-100, that is green, yellow, or red. The latter tells you if you’re currently winning or losing, and the number should be how far through you are… except you can be 95 and red. Or the predicted time a battle will take differs widely when everything else looks the same. In Stellaris, the main combat display primarily shows the balance of combined hull points on each side. The number here (and a similar bar in the full display) is showing the combined balance of organization (effectively cohesion, and a concept that goes back to the original HoI, though only HoI and Victoria has used it), and the color tells you who, at the current rate of loss, will run out and be forced to retreat first.

Areas of Interest

Like in the previous two games, the world is divided into large zones for purposes of naval and air combat. With the new production system you establish air wings, and give them a maximum size, and planes get transferred to it. Once it has aircraft, you assign it to a region within the aircraft’s operating range, and then set the types of missions it will perform.

This isn’t too different from before, with a need to develop airbases, and assign aircraft, but now you can size them at will… and there’s no real guidance on what a good air wing size is.

Naval missions work much the same way, and now combat works much like it does in V II: Heart of Darkness, where ships go through a process of moving into position and picking a target. Light ships and submarines dart in to engage with torpedoes or take out the enemy pickets while the big ships go after their counterparts with the big guns. It’s a much better combat system, and as well suited to WWII naval combat as to pre-WWI, so this is a good upgrade for the series.

Fight With Power

Politics is nicely more complicated than in previous game. There are the usual three factions (Axis, Allied, Comintern), but not just those. The other possibilities are limited, but Japan, for instance, can form the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere as its own faction.

At the same time diplomacy works a bit more like other series from Paradox, so they aren’t quite as necessary, either. All the usual defensive alliances, military access, and the like are options here. Wars are similar in that you need to have a justification to go to war, and you can spend time to make a claim on territory to get that. But the peace negotiations are much different. You have to take most of a country to get them to capitulate, which starts a peace conference where everyone involved can start making demands like the more familiar systems in other games.

Some justifications are found in the national focus trees. These are a new system for the series, where eight major countries each have a specific set of focuses that help with the development of the nation (everyone else gets a generic one). These are arranged in trees, that follow a particular theme or goal. They are similar to ideas from EU IV, but those are sets to be chosen, and come in a straight path, while these are all pre-determined, and can have some complex dependencies (so maybe they’re closer to the national bonuses that ideas in EU IV unlock).

Actually unlocking these bonuses uses political power. The other use of political power is to modify the government. There’s always been a bunch of governmental offices, but they started out filled, and were easy to ignore. This time, they generally don’t start out filled, and you use political power to gain new bonuses (and the only penalty for changing bonuses is paying the power again). This is where the design bureaus come in, as well as ministers and military staff for more general bonuses.

In general, government structure hasn’t actually changed much from any of the previous games, but it has been made easier to deal with. The focus trees are an interesting addition, especially as they can guide the AI down non-historical paths. However, I feel they’re too much interference with the root game systems, and the low number of unique ones undermines the system.

Conclusion

For me, the new production model is the centerpiece of HoI IV, and does a lot to get at the nature of the industrial side of the war. Beyond what I’ve said above, equipment also has reliability, so some of it breaks down and needs replacing in use, in addition to the enemy shooting it up. The need to replace both kinds of losses naturally creates a maintenance drag on the industry of a country, and is a good use of a computer’s ability to track numbers not practical in board games.

My problems on the military side are largely down to correctable problems (the planner is way too likely to “drift” to odd frontages, and empty orders and the like), instead of fundamental philosophical differences. One bit I do miss from the previous game is the full unit hierarchy. It needed some more polish, but I was hoping to be able operate corps as a whole in crowded fronts, rather than the separate divisions. That aside, once you learn how to use the military planner (which is not a quick process), it’s pretty good, and lets you become a lot more hands off. In fact, one of the major challenges with it is to stop micromanaging as much as instinct says.

My biggest problem is the focus trees. They’re a neat idea (possibly with a bit of inspiration from Days of Decision, but that’s an international system of events rather than a purely internal one that very occasionally does something to someone else), but underbaked, with seven unique trees in the base game, plus one for Poland in a free DLC that came out at launch (so why isn’t it just part of the game?), and then a generic one for everyone else. While much bigger and more complex than the national bonuses in EU IV, those still point the way to making this much more palatable. The number of different bonus groups grew over time, but even at the start there were a number of generic sets for use with groups of nations. Having 3-4 generic trees from the start would have helped a lot (say one for Asia, one for Eastern Europe, etc.) to say that countries outside the prime movers had any importance in the game. As it is, only countries touched by an expansion have any unique decisions of their own, and countries like Finland are still stuck with the generic tree. (The upcoming ninth expansion for HoI IV will finally do something with them.)

So, once again, I think Paradox missed some major things with Hearts of Iron IV, but they got a lot of things right, and I think it’s the best iteration of the series. I know there are people who disagree, and they have some good points, but the pluses here are pretty big and try to pull back from the trap of more details for detail’s sake. It is still my least favorite series from them, but it is neck and neck with some of the other current games and I do look forward to playing it again.

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Paradox Among the Stars

by on June 2, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the fourteenth in a series of reviews of Paradox’s empire management games. See the earlier reviews here:
Europa Universalis II: A Tale of Two Europas
Hearts of Iron: Europa of Iron
Victoria: Nineteenth Century Essay
Crusader Kings: A Dynastic Adventure
Hearts of Iron II: Return Engagement
Europa Universalis III: A Whole New World
Europa Universalis: Rome: Make a Desert and Call it a Game
Hearts of Iron III: One Plus Two Equals Three
Victoria II: Same But Different
Sengoku: Shogun: Only War
Crusader Kings II: The Second Crusade
March of the Eagles: A Minor EU
Europa Universalis IV: A Fantastic Point of View

In August 2015, Paradox Interactive made a surprising announcement: Paradox Development Studio was working on a new game, and not only would it not be a sequel to an existing game (the last such being March of the Eagles two years before, and the last major one being Europa Universalis: Rome five years before that), but it would be a science fiction game instead of historical. In fact, Paradox was getting into the space 4X genre.

Despite the change in genre, mechanically it stuck with the pausable real-time empire-management format seen in every other game developed by them. (And like all the recent ones, it uses the Clausewitz Engine, with its standard helpful hoverover tooltips, alerts, launcher/main program format, and so on.) Like with any other space 4X game, you start with one well-industrialized planet, and start exploring and settling other star systems, meeting other players (/empires) and engage in war or diplomacy with them.

Stellaris was released on May 9, 2016 on Steam, and then on consoles (PS4 and XB1) on February 26, 2019. The game has gone through some major reworks since its initial release and this review is actually about the state of the game in patch 2.0 (after three expansions), which was released on February 22, 2018. I started playing after this patch, and it is also when Paradox started really reworking major game mechanics.

Systems

Stellaris features one of the more developed views of solar systems seen in computer games. Where too many 4X games just present the most worthwhile planet in a system, Stellaris shows the star, its planets, major moons, and some notable asteroids all as separate objects that may have some interactions.

To give some context, if you use the pre-generated empire United Nations of Earth, you start in our familiar solar system with the Sun, eight planets (sorry Pluto), four notable asteroids (Ceres, Vesta, Juno, and Pallas), and seven notable moons. Earth is the sole inhabitable planet, of size 16 (the largest is 25), though Mars can also someday be terraformed.

Scale is distorted, with each orbit being an equal distance from the next (action-RPG Star Control II still wins here with better-scaled systems), and they’re a static display, so the planets are always in the same relationship with each other. At this strategic scale, they’re all basically single points; there’s no split ownership of planets, or even systems, possible. (Though partial occupation of a system is, and it complicates warfare.)

However, the full range of possibilities are shown here. Asteroid belts appear in many systems, with a few larger asteroids picked out for exploration, and occasionally, exploitation. Gas giants are depicted, mostly so that they have moons, but they can also provide resources (usually energy, like stars).

Terrestrial planets are a bit more varied, with plenty of barren and frozen worlds, and a few molten and toxic worlds. And then there are the potentially habitable worlds. These exist in three groups (dry, frozen, and wet) of three types each. Each species is native to one of these nine types, and will find the other two in its group at least marginally habitable, whereas the other two groups are theoretically habitable, but the penalties would be large. (Personally, this is a pretty good system, but I prefer Free Orion’s ‘ring’ of seven habitable planet types.)

As usual with 4X games, the galaxy is created randomly, along with all the systems. A few non-random ones get seeded into the galaxy, however. Each expansion usually has one or more additional unique systems, and they all have events and story bits associated with them.

Exploration

Originally, the game featured three different types of FTL (much like Sword of the Stars), but it was found this caused too many problems with trying to make warfare (and fixed defenses) work, so in 2.0 they consolidated to just jump drives, which use a network of naturally-occurring jumplines from system to system across the galaxy. This naturally lets all fleets emerge in the outer reaches of a system, where they head towards its star, and the owner’s station there.

Similarly, those stations were new to 2.0. Previously, claims to an area worked on a cultural push-pull not unlike that seen in Galactic Civilizations II (and probably the rest of that series, but that’s the one I’ve played). Now, you claim a system by building a station in it, and in war, the enemy will come in to fight and disable that station and claim ownership, which may become official in the peace process.

Not having played the earlier version, I can’t say how well the original set up was or wasn’t working out. But the 2.0 system does work, and the game has built well on these basics.

Before you can claim a system by building a station, you must scan each major body with a science ship, and this is where some of the real magic of the game happens. Any time you scan a planet, there is a chance of discovering an anomaly. These are small events that need to be resolved by having a science ship work on it, which will often lead to a small one-time bonus or resource deposit being added to the planet. Some are much more extensive.

This is basically the idea of the “goodie huts” from Civilization applied to space, and made to feel like your ships are having their own Star Trek episodes happen to them. This adds a lot of character to exploration, and the galaxy in general, and makes the early game even more interesting to play through.

The bad part is the fact that you must scan everything to do more than just be able to move through the system. This leads to intensively scanning an area, and everything is discovered right at the start. Generally, you don’t get any sort of… continuing discovery; events that happen after the initial exploration. Now it does happen, there are events that can randomly happen later, and as time has gone on, it seems Paradox has gotten better about this, mostly with events that happen shortly after a planet has been colonized. But, generally there’s no new anomalies generated, which I’d like to see, though some anomalies will be way too advanced to be handled at the start of the game, and you’ll want to come back to them later.

Precursors

Part of the design goals for Stellaris was for the galaxy to feel like it was… “lived in”. As usual with a space 4X game, every player has the same basic start and technology at the same time. But many of the anomalies give hints of previous civilizations. (Like a message scrawled on the face of a moon by a bored mercenary.)

In the standard setup, not only are there the other player empires, but there will usually be a couple of special fallen empires. These are small, compact civilizations with fantastic levels of technology, and are well-equipped with fleets. They spend most of the game quiescent, but won’t put up with other powers trying to wage war in their territory and the like. They have a bunch of limiters on their government that keep them from doing more than replace destroyed ships fast, but in the ending stages of the game, it is possible for them to “awaken”, and become much more active and aggressive, putting a powerful new empire in play.

Also, as a player explores, there will usually be signs of a precursor empire. There are several of these (and the expansions often introduce new ones), but generally only one per game, so following up on the clues is something of a race, though in a single-player game, the AI players are unlikely to get to it. Generally, once the event chain is started, there will be a number of difficult anomalies found that provide clues to them. Once there’s enough clues, you get to see a brand new system that contains their (ex-)homeworld, which will have pretty nice bonuses of some sort.

In all, Paradox does well on their goal. Not great, you can’t assemble a unique lore-rich timeline of what has gone before each game, but given the limitations of the random game start, it’s still well-handled.

Colonies

Unlike most space 4X games, you claim a system by building a station in it, and then you can colonize habitable worlds there, instead of the other way around.

Scanning it tells you just how habitable it is for any species in your empire, and once you own the system, you can send a colony ship there to begin colonization. This is automatic with a button press (click on the world icon on the galactic map), but the ship takes time to build, to fly there, and then the colony (especially early on) takes time to turn into something you can interact with. While this is generally more time to get a usable colony than many other space 4X games, the amount of effort it takes to build a colony ship is much lower; usually a colony ship is much more expensive than the beginning military ships in a 4X game, and here it’s no more expensive than those.

And when the settlement time is done you have a planet with one population, and one building, the “Reassembled Ship Shelter”. This is the planetary capital, and can be upgraded as the population grows. Each point of planet size is one tile on a grid. Each tile can hold one point of population, which will generate whatever resources are native to the tile, or according to the building you build on it. (This system seems to be taken from the Galactic Civilizations series; I thought it was okay there and here, but far from great, and it would be replaced in Stellaris later.)

Some tiles have blockers, which keep poplation from living/working there, and reduce the effective size of the planet. The homeworld starts with a number of these, which are marked as “slums” and the such, whereas colonies will have a few different types of blocking terrain depending on the planet type. All of these can be removed for a cost in energy, but only the homeworld types can be removed at the beginning of the game; all the others require new technologies to remove, and they don’t become available until you are actually colonizing a planet with that type of blocker. (Terraforming, because it changes the planet type, also removes all blockers.)

It should be noted that different species can inhabit the same world (a feature with a mixed history in 4X games). And it is also possible to find worlds with pre-sapient species to uplift into more working population for you.

Resources

Many space 4X games assume you always have enough resources to do whatever you want. Things may take time to accomplish, but the choke point is industrial capacity. The Master of Orion series, Reach for the Stars, Sword of the Stars, Neptune’s Pride and Free Orion, at a minimum, all largely work this way; the primary exceptions I can think of are StarWeb and Sins of a Solar Empire.

Paradox goes for a simple resource model not too far off of that seen in Hearts of Iron games (it would get elaborated on further in later patches from this basic version). Instead, if you have the resources, it all takes about the same amount of time to build, so industrial capacity is what’s being assumed here.

The three basic resources are energy (the primary “money” of the galactic economy), minerals, and food. Minerals are consumed to build anything, from a station to a planetary building, to a ship. Most of these things then require energy to operate. The early game especially is a struggle to bring in enough energy to maintain all the new stations you build, which will consume it. Food is consumed by your population and has a very low maximum amount compared to the others; once it is reached, excess food turns into faster empire-wide population growth.

There’s a few other things that operate as resources (such as influence), but the only other things to find on the map are the strategic resources. These operate like the resources in Civilization III and IV, where having one is enough to unlock advanced capabilities, and spares can be traded with other powers. (This is another system that would get a major rework later.)

Technology

Like any other space 4X game, technology plays an important role in Stellaris. Unlike most, there is no solid “tech tree” as introduced in Civilization. Paradox likens their system to a deck of cards, which is a useful analogy, but incorrect in detail.

Technology is broken into three fields: physics, social, and engineering, and the empire will always be researching one advance in each field (it is possible to not pick one, but there’s no cost to doing the research, so you’d just be wasting the research points). Each general field is broken into subfields, and some scientists have a bonus to a particular subfield. And there are six “levels” of advancement in any subfield, which are gated by getting enough technologies in the previous level before being offered the more advanced ones.

Some technologies are directly related to previous ones; you can’t get (level 2) UV lasers without first getting (level 1) blue lasers, for instance. But, while there are chains, there are few branches. There are some many-to-many relationships, but they all seem to be in weapons, and I don’t think it is ever more than two technologies at a time. Being used to complex branchings and the like, I don’t find it that satisfying.

No matter how many technologies you have access to, only a few will show up at a time. This is their ‘card’ system, where you are dealt a number as choices out of the current possible set. However, unlike cards, the chances of any particular entry are not equal. First, there are a few rare technologies that show up half as often as they otherwise should. Whenever you see a purple border on a technology, give it serious consideration, as you may not see it again for a while. Earlier/cheaper technologies will show up more often than later ones. And any technology that was offered in one set are only has half as likely to show up again next time.

Overall, the technology system works, but is not a favorite part of the game for me, and I much prefer how it is handled in Free Orion or Sword of the Stars, which have traditional tech trees. A final problem is that the list of technologies usually runs out well before the game ends. However, Stellaris has one of the best answers to that common problem, in that there are a number of technologies that repeat forever, giving bonuses to various things (mostly for military ships). So, research never becomes useless, even though nothing “new” is discovered.

Lastly, one very nice idea is that of stored research. When an event grants bonus research it doesn’t get immediately applied to the current technology under development, instead it is stored, and an amount equal your normal research is taken out each month and applied to the current project, basically doubling your speed for a while. Better yet in a real-time game, if you don’t immediately get to choosing a new technology to research, unused points are stored for when you do choose something, eliminating the need to pause the game for every new technology.

Ships

Ships are strongly segregated into military and non-military types. The non-military ships are colony ships, construction ships, and science ships. The latter need scientists (see “Interstellar Kings” below), and are the ones needed to scan all the objects of a system before you can set up a base in it. Also, troop ships fall under these rules, though they are technically ‘military’ ships.

These all have automatic stats and capability which can get better with technology, while the military ships have components that can be selected. The latter also have set hull sizes that get bigger as technology improves (all genre standard, though they call their small ships “corvettes” instead of the usual “frigates”). Somewhat like Sword of the Stars, ships have basic hull modules, which define what types of components can be mounted on them. The corvettes have a single module, while the larger ones have three, which can be mixed and matched.

Ship construction is the one place where there is a real industrial capacity bottleneck. Bases can be upgraded to take modules, and one of those is the shipyard. Ships can only be built or upgraded at a shipyard, so a vast military expansion will take a long time with the single shipyard that exists at the start of the game.

Common weaponry splits into kinetic weapons which are good against shields, and lasers, which are good against armor. Defense slots are of course shields and armor. This means it’s possible to tune your ships weapons and defenses to what your current enemy is using, or is more advanced in, but with just a two-way split, it is generally best to pick a balanced design, and not worry as much about it.

There are more advanced weapon types that have more interesting bonuses, but many of them are limited too. Overall ship design works, but isn’t quite an absorbing mini-game of its own like in the Master of Orion series. (Paradox has tried to address this too in a much later patch.)

Warfare

A side effect of getting rid of the cultural model of borders was you now spent influence to claim systems belonging to your neighbors (you also spend this to claim an unoccupied system by building a base), and they become places you may receive after a war. This moves wars to pretty much the classic Paradox model of having a reason to go to war, and then prosecuting the war to get those aims and force the other side to accept them. In territorial wars, you do not declare a particular system the overall war-goal like you do in Europa Universalis IV, but taking the places you want has a direct impact on the AI’s willingness to surrender to your demands.

As a matter of fact, most wars end with the “status quo”. Both sides retain whatever they currently hold that they have claims on. Usually this means one side gains some or all of its claimed territory, but it is possible for both sides to trade territory.

An exception to this is that some governments are “galactic threats” and act closer to the hordes out of EU III: Divine Wind, and no claims work or are needed for them. Instead, as soon as a system (and its inhabited planets!) is captured, it is immediately given to the capturing empire, and all peace agreements merely leave the border as-is.

With jump-drive being the only FTL system, upgraded starbases can be placed so as to be in blocking positions. Early in the game, a starbase can handle a fleet by itself, but while they get upgrades as the game progresses, ships get more powerful faster, and bases can help, not not defend a system by themselves in the late game.

Inhabited planets must be taken separately (and must be taken to count for war score and the like), which requires armies, which come automatically with troop transports. All inhabited planets come with free defensive armies, and capitals get more. These must defeated in a landing battle, which just pits the opposing units against each other.

The size of the planet determines the combat width, or how many units actually fight at a time, with the rest in reserve until needed (this is fairly standard to all Paradox games going back to at least EU III). Normally, there’s little difference between units, though some species get bonuses to ground combat, and there are special types that can become available from events. Fleets are also capable of doing orbital bombardment to soften up the defenders. Surprisingly, this doesn’t scatter damage across the entire defense, but simply reduces the health of the first unit in line until it is destroyed. Of course, this also damages everything else on the planet, so one that has undergone a long bombardment will take quite a while to recover, with wrecked industry and reduced population.

Interstellar Kings

Stellaris uses characters for particular key jobs. Unlike Master of Orion II (the earliest space 4X game to do this that I know of), this is expected to be a regular thing that you hire, and not just notably special people that you pick up through events (there are a couple of those too). This too was changed down the line, but the essentials of how characters work have stayed the same.

The first job that will get noticed is scientists. You automatically start with one in the starting science vessel, and three more in charge of the three fields of research. When you build a new science vessel, you will need a new scientist before it can do anything useful. You also start with a head of government. Later, you will want to hire admirals for fleets, generals for armies, and governors for any new sectors you create to group systems together.

These are vastly simplified from the character system in the Crusader Kings series or even EU: Rome, with no primary characteristics and the like, but they do have a simplified version of the trait system introduced back in the original Crusader Kings. And while there’s no characteristics, they do have levels and experience, which is new for Paradox.

And, as actual characters, they have an age, and they will eventually grow old and die, needing to be replaced. Democratic governments regularly elect a new leader from the pool of all the ones you have, so occasionally a character gets called away from an important post, and you need to replace him.

Traits are what you mostly notice, but for scientists especially, levels are very important, as they regulate how long tasks take. As scientists level up, surveying systems is faster, and investigating anomalies takes much less time, and has a higher chance of positive results. In fact, anomalies are rated by difficulty, which relates directly to the level of scientist which should ideally work on it.

Interestingly, governments also have traits. Instead of a bunch of predefined government types that you unlock as technology improves, as in the EU series, there are base methods of governance (democratic, oligarchic, etc). Ethics then define the main guiding principles of the society, and exist in four paired opposites. Each of these exist in a moderate and an extreme version, and governments on opposite sides of the ethics scale (say spiritualist and materialist) have penalties for getting along with each other. (Or there is the “gestalt consciousness” ethic in the middle for empires made up of a collective consciousness like a hive mind or the Borg.) All of these have in-game effects as bonuses, and restricting what actions can be taken.

Then there are civics to grant specific bonuses. These represent more detailed elements of the empire, and are used to grant particular bonuses. Both civics and ethics can be modified as the game goes on, but civics are much easier to modify, and it is possible to get more civics, while any change to ethics is rearranging the same number of elements.

And of course, species have their own traits, allowing for a wide variety of customization options in the tradition of many other space 4X games, but much wider ranging because of the three different sets that interact here.

Crisis

Along with making the early game more interesting with anomalies, Paradox planned to make the late game exiting with the end-game crisis. This is analogous to the Antarans in Master of Orion II, but more sudden and dramatic in effect.

The exact timing can be set when setting up the game, but usually after 300 years of game time, one of several different large events can fire. There is one default one, and most of the rest require specific things to happen for them to go off instead.

Generally, you can expect to see an extra-galactic invasion from very powerful and advanced fleets, that will be a threat to all the empires of the galaxy. It is creditably a very big threat, especially if the AI refuses to drop its wars and do something productive.

I don’t know that the crisis system really works as well as Paradox wants. Especially since it doesn’t end the game, so if the galaxy is well prepared, it may be over soon, leaving everyone to go back to business as usual before reaching the end date and getting victory on points. Defeating the crisis really should be an end itself.

Conclusion

My understanding is that any opinion of Stellaris at launch was likely to be mixed. There’s never enough space 4X games to go around, and Paradox’s try at the genre was sure to have its own unique take. But it was, at best, a bit bland.

The first few expansions helped with that, and version 2.0 also, with some work, put the game on a much more solid footing. Once I finally got it in 2018, I devoured it, and spent a lot of time with it, just like on the launch of CK II and EU IV earlier. The game has had some major changes since, that I think have generally improved the game, and I consider it one of my two favorite games from Paradox along with Europa Universalis IV. And it is also now one of my top space 4X games.

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Paradox’s Sea

by on May 5, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the eighth in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Europa Universalis IV. See the previous reviews here:
Europa Universalis IV: A Fantastic Point of View
Wealth of Nations: National Trade
Res Publica: A Tradition of the People
Art of War: Reform-Minded Patch
El Dorado: Expansion of Gold
Common Sense: Uncommon Changes
The Cossacks: Cossack Estate

Paradox’s next expansion for Europa Universalis IV mostly concentrated on naval matters, which also caused a bunch of changes in the free patch. The patch also redid espionage, and Mare Nostrum and patch 1.16 came out on April 5, 2016, with patch 1.17 re-balancing the new espionage mechanics on May 11th.

Stating Territory

The map had always been divided into areas (collections of provinces) and regions (collections of areas), but they had no real effect on the game. Now, areas came to the forefront with the new patch. Each area that a country has provinces of may be a territory or a state in that country.

Provinces in a state act pretty much as normal (except that they can’t be given to a trade company from Wealth of Nations). Territories have a minimum of 90% autonomy and reduced missionary effect, but they are cheaper to turn into a ‘core’ to eliminate overextension effects. In fact, a territory only needs half as much administrative power to become a core, but once a territory becomes a state, the province is still a ‘territorial core’ with 90% autonomy. You then have to pay the other half to make it a regular province (but this, at least, is instant, unlike the normal process).

There are two reasons not to turn a province into a state: First, there is a limit on how many states a country can have (with various modifiers, but administrative tech levels are the main way to get further states). Second, each state requires maintenance in money per month. These costs go up with development and distance from the capital, and thankfully the game has some very good tooltips on whether a province can be a profitable state.

As ever with these systems, it lends a bit of artificiality as you become concerned about preexisting arbitrary lines on the map. At the same time, it does add some interesting decisions, and a bit of a brake on larger countries. Overall, it’s a net plus, acts much better than the equivalent mechanics from Victoria II, and replaces the ‘overseas’ mechanic that had been in the series forever, and which could also be quite arbitrary.

Jack Tar

Paradox also decided to add more detail around manpower to the game, adding sailors to crew navies to go along with the manpower that is needed to build armies, and a new slot in the top bar was added to show them. Each coastal province contributes sailors to the nation, dependent on its development level, with bonuses for those that have trade modifiers.

Ships now need a number of available sailors, as well as money, to build, and when away from port on missions will also consume a small number per month. Repairing a ship also needs new sailors to replace injured crew, so being at war will consume a fair number of sailors for a maritime nation: large fleets on blockade, new ship crews, and repairing damage from naval battles will all consume this resource.

It’s an interesting attempt at an extra bit of simulation for the game. A rich nation can’t just build itself a huge navy, it needs to find the manpower for it as well. Of course, there’s all sorts of detail built into various bonuses, like impressment. Even better, with the expansion, some nations can get the coastal raiding idea, letting them raid other nations for more sailors (slaves forced into the galleys), which is another big part of the period otherwise ignored. However, the AI was never able to properly manage its sailors, and was vulnerable to being deliberately run out of them, and Paradox was forced to let the AI never run out of sailors in a later patch, undercutting the entire system.

Raiding and Other Missions

The interface for naval missions was reworked, allowing the player to set how much damage a fleet could sustain before automatically seeking a friendly port for repairs.

But the bigger reason was so the number of types of missions could be expanded. With the expansion, it is now possible to set a fleet to automatically blockade as many ports in a region as possible (splitting it up as needed), hunt down weaker enemy fleets or try to intercept fleets with transports in them. I’ll admit I haven’t quite trusted the AI enough to try these, but the new interface is an improvement.

Also, the Barbary nations (north coast of Africa) get a mission for raiding nearby shores, letting them loot the province (in peacetime), and take slaves, which go into the sailor pool. This sort of thing was endemic to the Mediterranean for the entire period (American efforts to stop it are where the “shores of Tripoli” line comes from in the Marine Corps Hymn), so its a nice bit to work in. Later, the mission would be reused in Golden Century.

Espionage Networks

Espionage was completely reworked. Instead of directly attempting to do something underhanded (such as claim a neighbor’s territory), you now send a diplomat to a nation to create a spy network (which then has a size from 0 to 100).

The speed at which this happens uses all the old modifiers to spy efficiency, and the diplomat can be discovered and sent home, which will also take a cut out of the network and keep you from sending a diplomat back for a while.

You then spend part of the network’s size for the same actions that the diplomat used to do directly, whether this be creating a claim, supporting a rebellion, or other actions. Overall, it makes the system a little more streamlined (since you can decide what to do after sending the diplomat, instead of before), but isn’t a major change to the results, even though the process changed.

Corruption

Another new statistic on the top bar is corruption, which tracks how well a country’s administration is running, and acts as a potential brake on larger countries. As it rises, spy network creation and detection become slowed, all monarch power costs increase, local autonomy increases, but the estates will tend to be more loyal (i.e., the loyalty value they tend towards over time goes up).

The main drivers of corruption are being overextended, and having a low religious unity. Being further ahead in one technology can also drive up corruption, though being ‘ahead of time’ in administration or diplomatic technologies also brings corruption down (in addition to the tax and trade efficiency bonuses introduced in patch 1.7).

Overall, its a minor system most of the time. It’s an extra thing for a new player to be overwhelmed with, but safe enough to ignore while learning the game. When you do successfully conquer new territory, it does become a potentially major problem, and is a generally worthwhile attempt to show the stresses on a fast-growing empire.

Grant Unconditional Surrender

An interesting new option in war was the ability to just give up on a hopeless war. The enemy may need to spend a lot of time (and possibly troops) besieging fortresses and taking territory to drive up the war score to something that allows a peace offer that the attacker wants.

Unconditional surrender automatically puts all unoccupied territory under the enemy’s control, and all your armies under “exiled” status, and unable to fight. On the other side, the country surrendered to gets 100 war score, a notice of the surrender, and after a couple months his war exhaustion will start ramping up.

This gets what could be a protracted and depressing situation over with quickly, and can let the country get back to other matters; perhaps a different war that can be won….

It’s actually a smart idea, though one that’s largely beyond the ability of the AI to judge, so it will almost never offer one. On the other hand, the AI can be very stubborn about slowly prosecuting a war that it’s essentially already won, while rejecting peace proposals, and this can be a good escape hatch from that.

Conclusion

Overall, the changes to “coring” that came with the new state and territory feature is the most important and widespread change in the game. It made it a bit rougher to administer your country, but the interface lives up to the challenges, and the cheaper “territorial” cores actually make things easier for an expanding nation in the short run. The diplomacy changes (especially around espionage networks) were also nice improvements. Those alone make patches 1.16 and 1.17 a net positive to the game.

On the other hand, sailors added more complexity, and the development team bit off more than the AI could chew. The instincts around them were good, but in the end its an extra system I think the game was better off without (I’d consider it neutral to slightly positive if not for the AI problem). Corruption is also yet another minor worry that can blow up into a big one, and joins a fairly tall stack of things that a new player should ignore for quite a while.

But while the patches were an overall benefit for the game, the expansion itself is more of a collection of minor quality-of-life features, some of which I haven’t even talked about. Unconditional surrender is the best feature of the bunch, as it can end a war that the AI is insisting on dragging out for no reason. Along with the extra naval missions, there’s extra espionage missions that I’ve barely noticed, the ability to rent out troops (condottieri, potentially important), and the ability to increase mercantilism (and income) at the cost of the loyalty of your colonies. While these are nice features, I don’t consider this expansion any sort of “must have”. Get it as part of a package, or on a really good sale—there’s no reason not to have it—but it is at the bottom of the priority list.

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Lords of the Realm

by on November 19, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the eighth in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Crusader Kings II. See the previous reviews here:
Crusader Kings II: The Second Crusade
The Old Gods: That Old-Time Religion
Sons of Abraham: A Little of Everything
Rajas of India: My Elephant for a Kingdom
Charlemagne: Back in Time
Way of Life: The Short Way
Horse Lords: For the Horde

Paradox took a while while to announce the another CK II expansion after Horse Lords, but when they did, it turned out to be focused largely on the inner workings of the realm (while most expansions had been focused on expanding the scope of the game), and hoped to increase mid- to late-game challenge.

Conclave came out on January 1, 2016, alongside patch 2.5, which featured the same ability to log into your Paradox account from the launcher that had recently been introduced to EU IV.

Shattered Combat

Combat came in for a round of changes again. In this case, the number of casualties from each day of combat was reduced. This only has a moderate effect in modest realms as a multiplier was taken out that was causing what was considered excessive losses in huge armies. Overall, the plan was to make combat less decisive, so that one battle would not make the main army useless, and not decide a war completely on that basis.

To aid with this, shattered retreat was brought over from EU IV, so that a defeated army will automatically try to retreat some distance to somewhere ‘safe’, where it can regain morale. Also, an army in friendly territory will start regaining a few men every month, instead of them going to the appropriate muster/garrison.

Overall, the differences are somewhat subtle. The ability to rotate armies ‘home’ for some reinforcing is welcome, but outside of large realms (admittedly, this is more aimed at the experience of the Holy Roman Emperor), shattered retreat isn’t accompanied by the ‘blocking’ action of forts in EU IV, so its still not too hard to chase down a defeated army for another defeat, and so just makes the ‘ping ponging’ that Paradox was working to eliminate take longer.

Education

Children got a rework in the expansion. Normally, they had need of a guardian/educator at age 6, and were then with that character until something happens to him or until the child is considered an adult at 16, when he/she gets all their main traits. Along the way, the child had a chance of picking up traits from the guardian, as well as some form of the guardian’s education trait (and… could even pick up that character’s religion and culture).

With Conclave, childhood is in three parts (including the 0-5 pre-education phase which didn’t really change). In childhood (6-11), they get a focus (akin to the ones used in Way of Life), which determines what kind of (new, child-specific) traits they get. At age 12, they switch to an education focus, which will eventually turn into the education trait at 16.

A lot of the effect of the guardian is taken out, and you can’t really drift cultures and religions that way anymore. The childhood focus generally determines what childhood traits are likely, and those determine which educational focus will be the best fit, with poor fits causing lower-level traits, and good fits making high-level ones likely. Similarly, primary attribute growth is more directly tied to the parents’ base attributes, though the educator can intervene, if he has an appropriate trait and direct the child towards a positive, rather than negative trait.

There are ten childhood foci (two per attribute, just like the normal ones in WoL), all with their own likely traits, which then tend to turn into adult traits. So overall, it’s a much more robust and natural system. I’m not sure how much difference in attribute scores there tends to be between the two, but the results certainly feel more natural.

Diplomacy & Favors

The diplomatic system was overhauled, with marriages now creating non-aggression pacts, which can then lead to alliances. This requires good relations with the ally as well as… relations. Close relatives can also become allies, and while they are rarer, alliances can now automatically pull someone into a war, making them a bit more certain than in the past.

A version of EU IV’s coalitions showed up with the patch as well, though they were renamed defensive pacts in a patch to give a better idea of their purpose. Conquering land generates a threat value with everyone around you, and when it gets high they start entering defensive pacts with each other (this is almost a direct return of ‘badboy’ ratings from earlier EU games). If you go to war with one member, all the other members automatically go to war with you.

Threat does decline over time, and members of the pact will drop out again once threat gets low enough. But it’s not too hard for the pact to feel futile, as the defensive pact is still too small to deal with your expanding realm. But of course, taking land from them drives up threat, and the pact gets bigger….

And finally, the expansion introduced favors, akin to what had just appeared in EU IV: The Cossacks. However, there it was just a brake on using an alliance offensively, and here it’s a more full-featured system in keeping with the personal nature of the game. I find the favors are a little rarer in use than I’d like to see, but there are a number of ways to get one (including providing a hefty amount of cash, though that also requires that they like you). Once a character owes you a favor, you can use it to pressure them into certain actions, such as leaving a faction, or joining yours.

Council

The central feature of the expansion however was the council. Along with the original five positions that help with certain ‘realm scores’, and do tasks such as aiding research and diplomacy, the men in those positions are on the council, which can have little, or great effect, depending. Additionally, kings have an extra advisor seat on the council, and emperors have two.

A new faction goal is to increase the council’s power. The first step is to empower it as a potential decision-making body at all, and then there are seven types of things that can be made into a council decision, instead of the ruler’s, including declaring wars, granting titles, and so on. This is a new tab in the laws section, which got a general overhaul as part of this.

Whereas before council positions were generally a matter of appointing the most qualified person who liked you enough not to stab you in the back (quite literally for the spymaster), now your most powerful vassals expect to be on the council, and get very upset (making them more likely to plot against you, or join factions) if they are not. You can still ignore this, but since they are the powerful nobles, it’s not a group you can afford to have angry with you, even if they are all simpletons.

Once on the council, a character has an attitude that determines largely how they will vote. The three general attitudes are pragmatist (opposes challenging wars, and creating other strong vassals), glory hound (favors a strong realm and wars against stronger opponents), and zealot (favors enforcing his religion in the realm). Some may also be loyalists (who will generally follow the liege’s lead) and malcontents (will oppose anything the king wants that doesn’t grant him power).

All of this adds to the power tug-of-war that CK II has built in to its structure for some time. A relatively weak and unpopular king can be bullied into signing away much of his power to the council (largely through faction demands), limiting his (and his heir’s) options. On the other hand a council can be a way of approving a number of centralization options as the council gets a say in it. Not only can a well-respected king swing members of the council around, but favors can be used to get votes.

Conclusion

This is the second time CK II looked more internally than just expanding the scope of the game, and is very successful at it. Way of Life is a ‘take it or leave it’ expansion, that is generally good, but doesn’t necessarily add a lot to the game as a whole. Conclave is a great expansion of one of the core features that is important to every titled character, and does a good job with it.

I’m a little more iffy on the changes to combat in the patch, but it didn’t really break anything either. The overall changes to diplomacy are something of a wash… except that favors are also a big help to the council system. My biggest disappointment is that I feel the rework of childhood should have gone into the main game, rather than splitting it off into the expansion.

If you like CK II as a medieval drama generator (which is the main reason to like it), this expansion delivers more of that. This is the best ‘general use’ expansion, and short of wanting one of the “scope” features of another expansion, this would be a good first expansion to get.

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Cossack Estate

by on May 23, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the seventh in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Europa Universalis IV. See the previous reviews here:
Europa Universalis IV: A Fantastic Point of View
Wealth of Nations: National Trade
Res Publica: A Tradition of the People
Art of War: Reform-Minded Patch
El Dorado: Expansion of Gold
Common Sense: Uncommon Changes

The seventh expansion for EU IV largely concentrated on the internal politics of countries, adding a whole new internal mechanic for players to balance along with everything else. At the same time, there was a focus on central Asia and the horsemen of the steppes (following the lead of CK II: Horse Lords released five months earlier), who also got their own mechanics.

Patch 1.14 also featured a slightly revised launcher, which allows you to sign into to your Paradox (not Steam) account to participate in leaderboards and the like. The patch was was released on December 1, 2015 alongside The Cossacks, with revision patch 1.15 following on January 27, 2016.

It’s a New New World

Part of the patch was actually revising a previous expansion. The ‘random New World’ feature from Conquest of Paradise had been disappointing. Not only for the ‘names in a blender’ problem I mentioned in the original review, but the geography generally came out fairly poor (especially when looking at the details; the overall forms could come out strategically interesting, though it was far from guaranteed).

Instead of trying to render a completely random New World every time, Paradox came up with a series of pre-rendered template land masses which could then be fit together into fresh patterns every time. The pre-rendering allowed for more detail, and making sure they looked natural, while not chewing up lots of end-user processor time on the effort. Better, the new system was open for them to add more ‘tiles’ as they had time later, and others could be introduced through mods. In addition, ‘scenarios’ would be applied to the random New World, generating new countries of various types, with new (generally appropriate-sounding) names, instead of just trying to completely re-use the non-random version.

I found the old system acceptable (other than the names), but it was, at best, a bit bland. The new system definitely helps.

The Estates

The main feature of the expansion looked at detailing the internal administration of your country. So, with the expansion, there are now (usually) three estates in the country, which can provide bonuses, but can also cause major problems.

At base, each estate has a loyalty of 50%, and it will naturally go back towards that level after anything which raises or lowers it. At this base, neutral, level it will provide a single bonus to the country; if it is pushed up to 60% loyalty or higher, there’s a second bonus, and if it falls below 40%, the first bonus is instead reversed.

In addition, estates are rated for influence, and generally, more influential estates provide a stronger version of the bonuses generated by their loyalty. However, an estate that reaches 100% influence starts a timer on a disaster where that estate effectively tries to take total control of the country in a coup.

Each estate expects to be given control over a certain number of provinces, which means that autonomy cannot go below 25% in that province (though the autonomy is also negated for a particular category, like a noble estate always contributes the full amount of manpower). Refusing to give enough provinces to an estate cripples its influence, but also sucks away their loyalty.

The nobles generally help with manpower and army maintenance. They can be used to create army leaders, and gain military monarch points. When playing with Common Sense, parliamentary governments don’t have this estate at all (generally leaving them with two), with the separate parliament interaction taking its place.

The clergy help with taxes, stability, and any religious power the country has (e.g., theocratic devotion, protestant church power, etc.) when loyal. They can help with administrative power, gaining particular minister types, or even colonization efforts.

The burghers help with trade efficiency and development cost (which at the time required Common Sense to use…). They can help some with direct income, or gaining admirals, or even getting some new heavy ships.

As implied above, there’s a bunch of interactions with each estate, which can shuffle around the influence and loyalty stats, and can also be used to gain bonuses from them. Smart play can involve a fair amount of interaction, as you use them to gain monarch power, or get extra income or other goodies. You can also generally keep interactions to a minimum, but occasional events, and the need to grant new provinces to estates in a growing country mean that you can’t completely ignore it.

There are also a few other estates with limited availability. Cossacks are only available to eastern tech group countries, and provide bonuses to cavalry. Dhimmi are available to Muslim nations, and provide bonuses to tolerance and technology.

National Revenge

After losing a large war, a country can easily be in dire straights that it can’t recover from. The army is decimated, manpower has been drained dry, the treasury is empty, and 10% of income is going to the victor….

The patch included a new mechanic to help out such shattered countries. Revanchism is gained in proportion of the war score cost of any peace deal against them. This goes down at 10% per year, so even a maximum 100% revanchism is gone by the time a standard 10-year truce is over, but it will help with the rebuilding in between, and during any other wars that happen.

As it helps with tax income, manpower, and unrest (along with several other less prominent things), it really does help a country recover and rebuild, though of course it doesn’t actually replace what was lost.

For the Horde

The expansion introduced a third legitimacy replacement: horde unity. This is used solely by the Steppe Nomad government, which will use legitimacy without the expansion. Unlike the other governmental mechanics, it will always decrease over time, though the rate can be slowed. On the other hand, the larger (/more developed) the country is, the faster it’ll fall.

There are of course, ways of raising it again. Like anyone else, nomad armies will loot enemy provinces they are occupying, and the money earned from that will raise unity again. You can also raze your own (non-core) provinces, reducing development (…which does make it cheaper to turn into a core), but generating money, monarch power, and unity.

Unity itself affects unrest and discipline. The +5% discipline from 100 unity isn’t too bad (there are plenty of other effects that grant a similar bonus), but is available from the start, and one of the government bonuses is to shock damage in clear terrain, and it is easy to get lots of cavalry with a horde. Early in the game, this makes a potent military combination.

In fact, hordes get their own tribe estate (the only one they get), which aids manpower recovery and cavalry costs when loyal. One of the primary interactions with the estate is to raise a host, providing several cavalry units for free, just leaving problems of paying the monthly maintenance.

In all, they don’t feel quite as dangerous as in EU III: Divine Wind, where the automatic war with everyone and territory seizing made them a major short-term problem. However, with all cavalry, and all the shock bonuses, their military can feel nearly unbeatable in the early going, making them a major problem for their neighbors.

I Need a Favor

The expansion also added several features to diplomacy. Countries can now declare ‘places of interest’; this is basically something the AI always did, as it determined what areas it wanted to expand into, but now this is surfaced to other countries (and a human player), and the player can now do the same, warning other countries away from interfering.

In addition, the player can now choose diplomatic stances like the ones the AI uses. It can limit what you can do, but it also signals your vassals on what to do (they will generate claims on bordering provinces of countries you are hostile to, for instance). Also, setting your attitude to ‘threatened’ makes rivals of that country more likely to ally with you.

The annoying part of this is that alliances get a hit from the nerf-bat. Ordinarily, as soon as you have an alliance, you can declare war on a country, and your allies may come along, if they have enough reason to. With the new diplomacy system, you have to use favors for anyone to come along in your war. Now, you can promise them territorial gains in the war, but this only works if there’s something they can gain of course. Failing to carry through will also cause massive relations problems, assuming that you won (the AI will be understanding about a losing war). Otherwise, you gain one favor per year of alliance, and it takes ten favors to drag someone into an offensive war, so alliances are… more unwieldy than they used to be, which really is annoying, though possibly truer to life. Defensively at least , alliances are unchanged.

Tengri

Tengri had been separated out from the general Animist religion a few patches ago, occupying much of of Central Asia. With the expansion, it now gains its own mechanic, like several other religions from the previous few expansions.

By default Tengi countries always gain a discount to raising new land units, and can use a higher proportion of cavalry. Now, they can gain additional bonuses as a syncretic faith.

This means that a second religion can be chosen to be a part of the Tengri faith, and countries and provinces of that religion will be counted as the same as the nation’s (this second religion can be changed later, but it costs prestige to do so). In addition, new national bonuses will be granted, based on that religion’s bonuses.

Conclusion

Estates would turn into another feature too big for an expansion. Like development, this feature moved to being part of the base game with patch 1.26 (before development, actually), but just for the basic three; the variant ones still need this expansion. Personally, I generally feel like you gain far more annoyance from estates than you gain interesting decisions.

In principle, dealing more with the internal stresses of a country is a good idea (and was a much-requested one). The general thrust of the estates is not bad (handing partial control of parts of your country over in return for bonuses), but the entire thing feels way to impersonal. The diplomacy and AI system of other countries gives a certain feeling of ‘personality’ to various countries, but the estates purely react to your interactions, leaving them flat and impersonal. Moreover, their goals (for they don’t really have any) do not grow and change with your country.

On the other hand, the other mechanics work out, and the new horde governments are nicely effective. Similarly, the rework of the random New World was needed, and great to see. With estates in the main game now, this expansion is really just worth getting to round out the collection of religious mechanics and government types, and so is just for the completist.

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