{"id":1026,"date":"2008-08-14T14:40:03","date_gmt":"2008-08-14T18:40:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/08\/14\/if-you-dont-use-this-feature-well-make-you\/"},"modified":"2008-08-16T13:43:49","modified_gmt":"2008-08-16T17:43:49","slug":"if-you-dont-use-this-feature-well-make-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/08\/14\/if-you-dont-use-this-feature-well-make-you\/","title":{"rendered":"If You Don’t Use This Feature, We’ll Make You"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paradox just released the 1.3 patch for Europa Universalis: Rome<\/em>, a game that is still a strong competitor for “Most Disappointing Game” of 2008. The patch adds some British tribes, a couple of new resources, changes to the economy and lots of new events and interface tweaks to get you more involved in your characters’ lives and rivalries.<\/p>\n

Design wise, the most curious events are related to the omens. In the game you can ask your High Priest to call upon the gods for a specific blessing. If it works, you get a bonus. If it doesn’t, you get a penalty. Since the success rate is, for some bizarre reason, tied to the worldwide power of your religion, you run a big risk of failure if you’re not playing the Greeks or if you don’t use a later Roman start date.<\/p>\n

So, of course, many smart players didn’t even bother with omens. Why would you run the risk of a 25% hit to your trade income, even if you have a two thirds chance of success? But Paradox introduced these omens as the centerpiece of their religious “system”, so what to do? How could they fix it?<\/p>\n

How about just have random events that will give you good or bad omens for a random deity? That’s what they did, and it’s really annoying. Things are going swimmingly and then, bang, Mars frowns on you and your troop morale falls. Or all of a sudden your population explodes, which is a good thing.<\/p>\n

I have nothing against random events, but I can’t think of many random events that force you to interact with a system that you are purposely ignoring. You can still choose to invoke the gods, but if you don’t they will come after you anyway.<\/p>\n

Of course, the new system is more “realistic”, whatever that means. The ancients didn’t always choose which god to pay attention to; as often as not an annoying priest would point out that Jupiter was pissed off. But the event system does nothing to fix the basic problem with the game’s religious aspect – it isn’t very interesting and would be better off either re-written or killed.<\/p>\n

And that’s my general feeling about the patch, too. The interface changes are great, since I can now tell what event is doing what to whom, but there are still too many characters to track in too many different places. Forcing me to put a governor in every single province means that their stats generally mean little – you will want your best generals as generals and your high finesse people doing research, so your government is a sea of mediocrity. The AI will still do stupid things; a tiny Gallic nation will start assassinating Roman generals, giving me the casus belli I need to plow straight to the English Channel. The AI is still incompetent as a military planner, breaking up large armies so they can be ferried one component at a time.<\/p>\n

At next week’s Games Convention in Leipzig, Paradox will announce its new game. Code named “Project Mayhem”, members of the official forum seem to want a new Victoria<\/em><\/a>. I’d prefer a new Crusader Kings, or a completely original design altogether. I do hope that they have learned some lessons from Rome<\/em>, however. It’s gotten some very good reviews, but overall it is faring more poorly in critical and fan opinion than their EU based games historically have.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paradox just released the 1.3 patch for Europa Universalis: Rome, a game that is still a strong competitor for “Most Disappointing Game” of 2008. The patch adds some British tribes, a couple of new resources, changes to the economy and lots of new events and interface tweaks to get you more involved in your characters’ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[27,44],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-gy","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1026"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1026\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}