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TLDR at the bottom.


Paradox has been having their online event this week, running through their games, and showing off upcoming content (where appropriate). Their bigger games -

Crusader Kings 3 has a new expansion announced - Royal Court. You'll deal with your subjects while holding court, and get the opportunity to show off your power and splendor through the court room.

Europa Universalis IV - No big announcements, but that's not a surprise as an expansion was released at the end of last month.

Victoria 3 - Yes, I know that people are insisting that the brand new trailer labeled "Victoria 3" means that Victoria 3 is announced and on the way. Ignore this. It's false speculation and hype, and you're just building yourself up for another disappointment. Sorry, inside joke touching on how long people have been waiting for this game, and how desperate some people have been in looking for "clues" about its status. Victoria 3 has been announced. No real news at this date, except that it won't include mana, and that war and "painting the map" won't be the focus of the game (though it will still be important).

Hearts of Iron IV - Teaser trailer for the upcoming Soviet rework expansion, "No Step Back". No real information in the trailer, though. Word right now is that logistics and weather will get a rework in the accompanying free update to become more important in the game. Currently, they're mostly an afterthought unless your "allies" have placed enough of their useless divisions in your theater to cause a supply bottleneck.

Stellaris - Nemesis was just released, so there aren't any announcements for this game. However, you can play for free this weekend on Steam.

Cities: Skylines - Before PDXCon, Paradox teased that it had something it was working on with Colossal Order, but it's still too early to announce whatever this is. In the meantime, this game is also enjoying a free weekend on Steam.

And drifting to the less notable titles -

Imperator: Rome - Heirs of Alexander was released in February. There haven't been any announcements yet of new content at this year's PDXCon.

Surviving Mars - This game recently got a new pack of useful buildings, though aside from that Paradox seems to have been ignoring it lately. There's a free weekend going on right now on Steam.

Empire of Sin - the disappointing (from what I've heard) game about running your own gang in Prohibition-era Chicago will get a new expansion adding fixers and loan sharks to the game.

Note that the event isn't over, so more announcements could still be made.


TLDR - Stellaris, Cities: Skylines, and Surviving Mars free to play this weekend on Steam.
Victoria 3 announced.
Expansions announced for Crusader Kings 3, Hearts of Iron 4, and Empire of Sin.

Cities Skylines got some updated content too. A selection of over and underground train stations and transport hub buildings and a second pack which adds some new peers and several bridges for cards, trains and people.

In addition to those there's 2 new radio stations as well.


A llot of the new buildings appear to be from community members brought into CO to work for them on future content.

There's nothing ground breaking here, but they are nice additions and things like the bridges give you a lot more scope for variety of city designs and mean you can now much more easily do a city built over a riverway and such.

It was mentioned a month or so ago that Imperator is going into semi-retirement. It doesn't have an active team anymore and won't see updates any time soon.


EUIv wasn't mentioned because the new expansion really crapped the bed. A theme that seems to be happening a lot for paradox lately.

I'm kind of interested in the Ck3 expansion, but paradox games have been leaving me cold for the last couple years. Various DLC haven't brought all that much, and new releases have been poor, empty shells.

I really hope they can turn it around, I've always liked their attitude toward if a game did well, supporting it with more content over the years. I think the issue is whilst this works really well for a single game; when they then come to make a sequel many customers want the sequel to have everything the previous game had at the end of its life cycle; even though by that point the game has had many times its original investment in addon extras and improvements.

Is Stellaris worth picking up? I have a few friends who play and they all recommend it and have been trying to get me to play, but it appears to be a chunky investment if you want all the content. It does seem like a very in-depth game and one that I foresee being a huge timesink should I end up liking it.

The discount this weekend is decent enough that I'd consider picking up the base game and maybe a few "essential" dlcs if I think i'll get my monies worth.


Thoughts and opinions?

I enjoy it a lot. It's deep, but honestly its one of their more accessible games and I find that its game speed works well. In games like Crusader Kings 2 I could never find a comfortable game speed where it wasn't either so sluggish nothing happened or so fast that everything happened too fast.


With the way they've done it Stellaris is a lot like Sins of a Solar Empire; just with a lot more detail to planet and empire management.

There's a lot of scope and fun, but I find that its also not overwhelming. You will sometimes pause or slow things down, but the game runs along at a good steady speed.

Overall its a very solid game and a lot of fun for a space 4X. I'd say it fits a happy middle ground between something beautiful but simpler like Endless Space 2; and something less pretty but far heavier and more in depth like Distant Worlds.

Voss wrote:
It was mentioned a month or so ago that Imperator is going into semi-retirement. It doesn't have an active team anymore and won't see updates any time soon.

A shame. I understand that the game wasn't well-received. But it's an interesting period, so it's a shame that Paradox wasn't able to turn it around.

EUIv wasn't mentioned because the new expansion really crapped the bed. A theme that seems to be happening a lot for paradox lately.

Either way, I doubt that they would have said much. Nemesis was much better received, from what I understand, but I don't think the Stellaris team had much to say, either.

I'm kind of interested in the Ck3 expansion, but paradox games have been leaving me cold for the last couple years. Various DLC haven't brought all that much, and new releases have been poor, empty shells.

I've got CK3 and the pass, so I've already paid for the DLC. But the last time I played was before the Northern Lords expansion was released. I suspect that my lack of interest in the game is a combination of the launch focus (I'm not really interested in Europe; my games have all been in Russia so far, and anything further east probably isn't well-modeled right now), and the marketing focus of the really screwball. Bragging about how players can create religions that endorse public nudity just makes me roll my eyes in annoyance.

Overread wrote:A llot of the new buildings appear to be from community members brought into CO to work for them on future content.

They did something similar with Surviving Mars a couple of months ago, releasing a buildings pack full of buildings created by a community modder. It's a good way to add extra content for their city-building games, and it also benefits those modders that have been particularly skilled at creating new stuff that the community likes (Paradox gets a cut too, of coures).

I think the issue is whilst this works really well for a single game; when they then come to make a sequel many customers want the sequel to have everything the previous game had at the end of its life cycle; even though by that point the game has had many times its original investment in addon extras and improvements.

I think part of the problem is that back in the day, they'd only release one or two expansions for a game. Victoria II, for instance, only has two DLCs - Heart of Darkness, and A House Divided (plus customization packs, but those can be ignored). So Victoria III won't have much trouble incorporating the good stuff from Vic 2 right off the bat (assuming that they developers don't just up-end everything, and start over from scratch). Crusader Kings 2 was in a similar situation - there wasn't much to bring in from the original game. But with Crusader Kings 3, that's no longer an option. There's just too much stuff. As it is, they still kept a lot of stuff, and CK3 appears to have a lot more features than CK2 did at launch. But if you like running steppe nomad tribes, then you're probably better off sticking with CK2 for now since CK3 doesn't treat them differently than the settled nations.

Snrub wrote:Is Stellaris worth picking up?

Try it out. It's free to play this weekend, along with Cities: Skylines and Surviving Mars.

 Snrub wrote:
Is Stellaris worth picking up? I have a few friends who play and they all recommend it and have been trying to get me to play, but it appears to be a chunky investment if you want all the content. It does seem like a very in-depth game and one that I foresee being a huge timesink should I end up liking it.

The discount this weekend is decent enough that I'd consider picking up the base game and maybe a few "essential" dlcs if I think i'll get my monies worth.


Thoughts and opinions?

Poor. The early game is decent and Nemesis improved it. But the mid and late games are just waiting for various numbers to tick up and roll over enemies or wait around for the late game crisis and faceroll that. Meanwhile hope that the game doesn't slow down too much in the late game (which it does more often again with Nemesis). But mostly its a spreadsheet game watching numbers tick. The early exploration and diplomacy (ie the interesting bits) functionally goes away and nothing happens unless you build your empire wrong and enemies can swarm you (or you hack off fallen empires or open L-gates before you're capable of stomping them). The galactic senate equivalent basically auto-passes everything that comes up until you outpace (and steamroll) all the other empires, same with tech and fleets.

The AI is dumb as a stump and mostly mass builds stations with modules that increase their fleet cap, because it can't function without that particular building propping up its fleet limit.


Some people really like it, but I find the early game very deceptive- it looks far more engaging than it actually is later on. And after a few attempts, you'll see most of the events. And see them again. And again. And again.

So, it just occured to me to wonder- no mention of Vampire- Bloodlines 2? Is that _still_ just sitting in limbo with no mention at all since they fired the dev studio back in February?

AFAIK, yes. There's been no announcement that it was dropped, but there's also been no other news about it.

 Snrub wrote:
Is Stellaris worth picking up? I have a few friends who play and they all recommend it and have been trying to get me to play, but it appears to be a chunky investment if you want all the content. It does seem like a very in-depth game and one that I foresee being a huge timesink should I end up liking it.

The discount this weekend is decent enough that I'd consider picking up the base game and maybe a few "essential" dlcs if I think i'll get my monies worth.


Thoughts and opinions?

Stellaris is pretty neat both as an SP and MP game, I've sunk nearly 700 hours into it and I'm still getting events I've not seen before. I've found doing achievement runs is a pretty fun way to play and doing some cheeky RP can give you a challenge as well. It goes on sale pretty often as well so it's relatively cheap to pick up.
However, there's a heck of a lot of choices regarding species/government/ethics traits and there are some absolutely cheesy combos that can and will ruin MP games if you don't have some rules. The mid-late game can drag but you can alter when they start to make the game quicker (i.e game start 2200, midgame start 2275, endgame 2325, victory year 2375).