Recent reviews by IronSlug

It's a gem of a game and a lesson in game design. It's been a long time since a game made me this happy to play it. You like city builders? Just buy it blindly. You love them? Oh man how happy you're gonna be.

Game is quite different from most historical Paradox games, more aimed on the economical side. It has a city builder feeling so I think you have to like this genre to enjoy it (I do).
Despite what you can read on the internet, it's actually very war focused too, but it's way less enjoyable than the economic part.
The political side is interesting mechanically wise, but not a challenge, it will just delay your law enactment. You will probably want to enact the exact same laws every game, since there are obviously more powerful ones.

The real problem with it sadly is that it was released in a deplorable state, the game cannot be considered in a release state and it's not really getting better.

The AI is practically nonexistent, which is a major issue in an economical game, but if you want to map paint it's quite easy. AI countries will not develop and die to constant revolts. It's diplomatic behavior is okay during peace, but crazy during war, your allies often siding with your enemies because it loves to receive "obligations", a sort of diplomatic meta currency which is indeed strong, but not to the point of starting a world war against you allies. Of course, while eager to join one, it perform very badly in war. Unmodded game is extremely easy.

The UI is quite terrible both unhandy and uninformative, but again there are tons of excellent mods to improve it.

I have enjoyed it around 200 hours, but 99% percent of the time I was playing with a heavy modlist (around 25 items), mostly aiming at bug fixing, Ui improving and making it more challenging and I have a beast of a computer, which is mandatory to run a game to the end because of well documented performance issues. My issue was there is generally not much too do anymore past 1900 except world conquest, so a good amount of those hours I was doing something else, waiting for end game to win some achievement.

To add insult to injury the team will have no problem releasing "patches" with new bugs that will kill your games, since older bugs you already knew about you probably fixed with mods.

Replayability is low, since the main difference between countries is their starting state and available achievements, they pretty much all follow the same path to end game, they just start at a different point on it.

If you love economic games and spend a decent time on curating a modlist, you can expect 100-150 hours of gameplay before getting bored, vanilla maybe 30-40, when you will have got the hang of it.

tl;dr; Not a bad game at its core despite a low replayability, but an absolute mess and bug fest since launch, can't recommend it in good faith. Kind of fun in a city builder fashion, but there are way better alternatives in this genre. That's my first ever negative review, and it's to warn against this game and its studio very bad practices.

Juste une tuerie visuelle, sonore et ludique...

Pas besoin d'être fan du genre Hack & Slash pour surkiffer cet excellent jeu ! C'est beau, sombre, complet. L'arbre de progression est immense et commun à toutes les classes. Et tout les gadgets inutiles qui surchargent inutilement les autres jeux du genre ont été virées. Que du bon !

farm, loot, farm, loot, farm, loot, craft
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