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As a big Paradox GSG fan, I can safely say that despite visual similarities between Hearts of Iron, Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Imperator and Victoria,
by ecshafer 4y ago
As a big Paradox GSG fan, I can safely say that despite visual similarities between Hearts of Iron, Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Imperator and Victoria, the games are entirely different.
Crusader Kings deals a lot with individual characters, their relationship, and has a lot more roleplaying in it. You can have a character that starts as a count in say Germany, and because of inheritance and marriage you set up your son to inherit Poland so when you die you are now playing the king of poland and your brother is ruling that county in Germany. The combat, trade, province development, etc is much lighter.
Europa Universalis is much more focused no war and map painting, its basically a complicated game of Risk. There is more focused on trade routes, and developing your nations provinces. But you just play a country, you can change dynasties or change to a republic. It doesn't really matter. You might change the country you are playing, say if you start as the Duchy of Milan, and you conquer Italy and crown yourself the Kingdom of Italy. But there's always a direct line.
Imperator is a Roman era game that is a mix of these two ideas, more character interactions but more focused on the country.
Victoria is an 1800s victorian era game that is really focused a lot more on technologies, ideology, and economics. You play a country and Its about industrialization and colonization and trade. The war is usually a bit more simplified, but the economy is a lot more in depth with resources being consumed to create new resources for production.
Hearts of Iron you also play a country but in WWII. But its also relatively simplified economy and ruling of a country. Instead you focus on conquering and has the most in depth war mechanics where you are really managing a lot of minutae of battle lines.
- fphhotchips 4y agoMeanwhile, in Stellaris: > pew, pew. pew pew pew! Seriously though thanks for this. I picked up EUIII a little while ago and also Crusader Kings, but couldn't work out how either of them worked really. Stellaris took me a little while, but I got there. I think you might have convinced me to pick up Victoria.
- dmitriid 4y agoI watched a few playthroughs of Crusader Kings (esp. by Quill18 on Youtube) before I understood enough to play without cheats.
- wellthisisgreat 4y agoGive CkIII a fair shot, it’s amazing and unique
- cptnapalm 4y agoFor CK, the advice for becoming familiar with it was to start out in Ireland. It's more isolated, so fewer moving parts.
- ecshafer 4y agoVictoria II is my favorite personally, and Victoria III is coming soon. Victoria is the only strategy game that has made just internal economic development interesting. I like Stellaris, but its more of a standard 4x game so I didn't feel the need to include it. If you've played Galactic Civilization, Civilization, Sins of A Solar Empire, Sword of the Stars, Endless Space, etc. You pretty much understand stellaris I think.
- fphhotchips 4y agoWould you recommend picking up Vic II as largely a finished (and probably heavily discounted) game with all the DLC, or should I pick up Vic III when it comes out?
- djbebs 4y agoVictoria 2 is a very good game, and you can get it fairly cheaply (5€ when I bought it on steam), so it is well worth the money. That said it is a very old game, and it shows in terms of functionality and game play. If you’re just getting started when it comes to paradox games, and you're looking to victoria, then I'd recommend waiting until the 25th of this month when victoria 3 comes out, and get that instead. It will have issues, but will be much more familiar to a "modern gamer" than the 10+ year old victoria 2.
- deaddodo 4y agoIf you enjoy Stellaris, the mechanics are similar on a base level. Ultimately, almost anyone is fairly novice at Paradox (and, grand strategy in general) games for the first few runs. Mastering the mechanics is part of what fans enjoy, so it might be worth it to just play and learn. All of the games have deep wikis to help you along with understanding the mechanics (religion, influence, wars, relations, etc).