Paradox games esp EU4 and CK2 often feel like idle clicker waiting games, player often waiting for progress bars to fill.
Also the role of the player in EU4 and Victoria seems ambiguous. Perhaps the role could have been fixed as the personna of the head of the executive, and the means and policies available restricted to only those which such an executive personna might have had.
> Paradox games esp EU4 and CK2 often feel like idle clicker waiting games, player often waiting for progress bars to fill.
I used to consume a lot of clicker games, but... for those who _haven't_ played them, they're basically management simulators.
I dare say that Factorio is in fact, a clicker game (as it starts off with right-clicking to mine 1 iron ore at a time).
The goal of _ALL_ clicker games is to build enough infrastructure to "stop clicking". The "click" is just the fundamental unit, the introduction to the game. In just 5 to 10 minutes, you'll already move onto automatic miners (Factorio), or Autoclippers (Universal Paperclips), or Heroes (Clicker Heroes), or Cookie Factories (Cookie Clicker), or whatever.
The game then becomes one of resource allocation: you have 1000 iron in Factorio, do you build assembly machines or belts? You have 1000 paperclips in Universal Paperclips, do you get another autoclipper or do you start buying wires?
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In fact, any management game can "turn into' a clicker game rather easily. And I think the "clicker mechanic" (ie: having the lowest-level action equivalent to a click from the user) helps solidify in the Player's mind the "value" of the cookie factory or the Assembly Machine 3 x 4x Speed Modules (or whatever).
But yeah, a well designed clicker game is just a management sim like any other. No one actually plays clicker games by clicking on things.
You’re getting your head bitten off for that comparison :), but I understand what you mean, because you can sit back and watch the game occupy itself, and if you want to wait for game state to become favorable before you resume taking action (waiting for territory to change hands, for example), you can sometimes do that.
There’s a term for Paradox’ grand strategy games I like, “data surfing,” that describes what it can be like to mostly passively experience its simulations. Most idlers or clickers progress along straightforward exponential curves, but they could absolutely be designed similarly.
As a longtime Paradox player, I have a similar issue with their recent games.
They've really shifted in a more game-y direction over the years. I started with Hearts of Iron 2, where the systems were less abstract and mapped closer to real life. I felt like I was actually running a country and its military. There were more ways to cheese the older games, like the time I played as Guatemala and launched a successful coup to install a Guatemalan puppet government in the USA, but you could avoid those strategies if you wanted a more serious WWII wargame.
Since EU4, or maybe CK2, they've abstracted a lot of the gameplay into those progress bars and point systems, the foremost example being the focus tree in Hearts of Iron 4. I still enjoy most of their newer games, but they constantly remind you that they are games. Gameplay feels less emergent and it feels like I get less agency as a player.
I’ve played a lot of Crusader Kings and a lot of idle clicker games. I do not understand where this comparison is coming from. I’m trying to think of two genres that are further apart and I’m struggling.
I'll bridge the gap for you: waiting is a core mechanic of the game, and you're having to elapse a lot of time for target changes to be reflected, or random events to pop up. Some games like dwarf fortress or rimworld don't share the same pitfalls because, notwithstanding events, you get fast and continuous results from your decisions, which translates to a lesser sense of "idling".
I can only speak for CK since I never played Victoria. However, as something more analogous I have played Offworld Trading Company, having an economic focus, and in-game changes come rather fast there too.
In CK, if you find yourself "waiting" for something to happen, you should probably just speed up the game simulation... I find that things are constantly popping up that need my attention, and if I am going through a long slog.... I constantly speed up and slow down the game, depending on what I am trying to do.
Indeed I have, and I disagree that attention is demanded in equal measure every instance. I still think there's a lot of leap frogging and waiting anyway for things to develop or interesting things to happen. Most of the time exploring the menu I'm anticipating what I would do, but have to wait for conditions to be met. Waiting is the name of the game.
I don’t think that’s very fair, since CK gives you ways to move the time, and also plenty of stuff to micromanage if you want to. I feel like your comparison is just that time is an element, which is a pretty fundamental aspect of a lot of games.
I mean... based on how some people play Starcraft or Age of Empires, those are also idle games, lol.
For these Paradox Games ... games... its not about "waiting" for time, but instead about "parallel" decisions. I haven't played Victoria, but it takes 2 years to build a Battleship in Hearts of Iron 3.
You don't just, build one battleship and turn off your brain though. You decide to build a battleship, then move your troops around, or decide to equip artillery to all of your infantry divisions (which will take X months to build and deploy), or ... a myriad of other decisions.
All decisions individually are simple. But these grand strategy games are about keeping "track" of all the individual decisions and building a larger picture from it all.
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I know some people cannot multitask and have no ambitions to learn the skill. But that's what these management simulators are all about (including competitive management simulators like Starcraft or Age of Empires :-p)
Starcraft's Campaign AI doesn't rush you ever. Nor does the Campaign AI group up or mass up their units. So even singular ships (ie: single Battlecruisers) can make surprising progress.
Those players then come into multiplayer mode and get wrecked by the multiplayer AI or humans of course. But that doesn't change the fact that I've met these people (ie: my more casual friends who thought they were hot stuff in Starcraft back in the day).
Right, it's not completely impossible, but still requires a ridiculously specific set of circumstances...
And while controlling a single hero unit might work in the campaign scenarios featuring them (and not even all, good luck dealing with air units even as a hero firebat !),
it's not going to work if you for instance decide to leave to your military buildings and units alone the job of winning the mission while only do resource production !
I mean, i played MP Stellaris, Eu4 and Hoi4, and did learn a lot from it, but GP is right. You do have slow phases, but once it's war on a competitive server, especially if you're a major, your APM should be near one hundred, around the same as a diamond SC2 player, except you have to ingest a lot more data. Even at speed 3.
The balance between action (decision making, shooting, dialog, etc) versus waiting (travel time, crafting time, waiting for resources from previous actions, whatever) seems like an important consideration for game designers to make.
Do you want the player to be instantly powerful or have to grind laboriously? Do you want them to run from place to place or fast travel? Craft/build instantly or take time?
I think that good games often will give you other things to do while you wait for important things. Some of my favorite games will give you too many things to do so that you must prioritize correctly or you will lose it all.
Not sure if the Civ series is, as of now, more popular than PDS games - for instance Hearts of Iron 4 is only slightly behind Civ 6 in terms of Steam players !
(And Vicky 3 is way above both, but that's normal for a brand new game with tons of advertising and hype...)
I can't speak to CK2, but for EU4 there's always something you can be doing. I think it comes with experience - I play multiplayer with some friends, and one of them in our group has less experience and constantly says the same thing. Watching my screen though, it seems like I'm playing Starcraft.
Yes, some things you need to wait for - there is always something else you can do in the meantime.
All their games have a problem with making you play parts of the game you aren't interested in and find tedious and for which the way you personally play it could easily be a preset that made you not have to worry about it any more.
In many ways I love HOI3, for instance, but it's a bit love-hate because about 50% of the time I'm messing with shit I'd rather let an extremely simple "AI" handle. Or just give me some good preset templates (make them "historically inspired", that's cool, or not, either way) for the things that use templates, or, also acceptable, let me save some of mine between games and have them show up when I've researched enough to build them (looking at you, tank and aircraft editors, especially).
Wait, I thought that PDS games were actually celebrated in how they're few of the rare games where you can just ignore part of them and the AI will (more or less incompetently) play those parts for you ?
At their best, I’ve found Paradox games are indeed this - but one is waiting on the outcomes of an emergent system one has had only a part in guiding. This opposed to managing a holistic (modulo some rng variation) system, as in Factorio.
In board games in this genre, "who you are" is often even more ambiguous.
As the author points out, Crusader Kings III is more person-oriented, if that's what you want. Personally I like games where it's slightly ambiguous who you are, but things evolve in a "plausible" way if you play for your goals.
They don't exactly make it clear what you "should" be doing at any given point though, my experience of all Paradox games is that they have a perfunctory tutorial which seems to cover little more than "here's a country, click things to view them, move armies by doing this, good luck" which then drops you into trying to work out which of the six billion barely explained options will do what you want to do. I won't even fault them for that, there's clearly a huge audience of people who really enjoy it, but I prefer my games not to require watching 20 hours of YouTube videos and reading a wiki to understand how they work.
Also the role of the player in EU4 and Victoria seems ambiguous. Perhaps the role could have been fixed as the personna of the head of the executive, and the means and policies available restricted to only those which such an executive personna might have had.