Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
Rules
Byzantium is one of the countries that are built to fail, not quite Great Yuan or Dehli Sultanate tier but thereabouts. I wouldn't recommend playing them first, second or fifteenth. That said, byzantium fans are ecstatic about it in the Discord and that's before the first DLC which is Byzantium focused.
So yeah, the game is much less of a railroad than EU4 but like every PDX release the starting position matters a lot on the short term.
It's less the starting position that matters and more that the devs just constantly throw shit events at you. Random ones, whatever, but having every single playthrough give me an event where I either lose legitimacy or 600 ducats, when I'm making none? Fuck them. Then it always prompts to upgrade the theodosian walls and it's like, cool, I guess I'll just never do that.
I have a successful game going now but it's literally only because the coup disaster fired first instead of the succession crisis and that let me get up to 69 legitimacy, so <10 months (of 5% per month to fire) to get up to 80 to avoid it, enabling me to invade the ottomans and fuck them up good. I also somehow invaded Georgia for a personal union so that's cool
P.s. i wish they'd hurry the fuck up fixing the automation in this game, like, why does it constantly switch to production methods where it knows there will be shortages that cause the building to produce nothing? I always have to turn it off playing Cocom because it tries to make tools out of iron WITH NO IRON, no matter what.
The army manager fucked me like this because it prompted me to UPGRADE varangian guard and cataphract units but as far as I can tell the armored cavalry and the uhhh can't remember the greek footman thing name are just straight up worse, so I downgraded two units with that shit
It's less the starting position that matters and more that the devs just constantly throw shit events at you.
You misunderstand: the shit events are a part of Byzantium's starting position. It is meant to fail and you're supposed to succeed in spite of all the shit events. Starting position here is understood as broader than the basic game mechanics like geography or resources or demographics. PDX games do try to emulate the short-term tendencies of the world. Although EU5 is still being adjusted in many ways, the shittiness of playing Byzantium in the first few decades is pretty much as envisioned by everybody. This is different from, say, the entirety of the Andes forever dying of hunger because everything there is a placeholder.
I don't expect Byzantium to be any less shitty to play once the first DLC comes around - if anything I expect it to be worse because by then the Ottoman AI might be better at early expansion. But I do expect Byzantium to get more of a bang for its early game suffering.
It's weird that Byzantium even has Varangians in this time period, I had completely forgotten about that. I suppose the issue there is with side-grades, since I assume you didn't upgrade your infantry into Age 2 Professional Army type levies.
also what the fuck were these idiots thinking setting this game right before the black death, so every playthrough is like, you build up a little, you're improving, oh I'm sorry here's a wrecking ball. When I think of fun I think of building a house of cards only to have it knocked over every time
like literally just set it ten years after so we're playing the recovery and not the upward slope and precipitious "fuck you" decline
I think the pre-black death starting point was to show that even catastrophes are not necessarily "game ending", that it is possible in many instances to recover from setbacks and whatnot. I am kinda just talking out my ass though because I'm not a big EUhead, I mostly play hoi4 where losing basically means total defeat, so I think the concept is interesting but maybe it doesn't play as cool as it sounds.
yeah like maybe it sounds interesting but in practice it's like I barely scrape my way to stability and then oh here comes that ol' scripted event
see you at 300k people and spending the next fifty years just waiting for people to populate the buildings that are already there!
Would you have more fun if there were no obstacles?
also nerd the point is the hypocrisy with "we have an ideological opposition to railroading you so good bye mission trees" and "i'm sorry you have to either pay so much money you'll be in debt until 2025 or say hello to your civil war" on a guaranteed date in every single fucking playthrough
I don't think there is any hypocrisy between straddling Byzantium with debt and representing their misfortunes at the time like the Earthquake in Gallipoli or repeated civil wars with events so you have to react to them and navigate them within game mechanics and the game rewarding you doing exact same steps in exact same order with rewards that bypass game mechanics and give you bunch of free stuff so you can take everything easily once you survive the first few years.
Besides Byzantium is favorite country if every deus vulting GSG fan so they get the first DLC anyway above and before many other countries and regions both ascendant and troubled at this time so complaining about them specifically is silly too. We will likely see them given silly amount of momentum for recovery that they compete with Ottomans on expansion into Balkans and Anatolia soon enough.
"there's no difference between no obstacles and a brick wall of obstacles grinding your nuts off"
when the game gives you a bunch of random good events (in one out of literally 15 playthroughs) and it's still not enough to avoid a pretender rebellion firing right before you can war dec the ottomans without going to -50 stability and fucking yourself further and then afterwards you're left with <90% of your strength while the Ottomans get their shit rocked in a war with genoa and recover from on par with you to 20x stronger than you within two years with genoa as a vassal I'm just gonna say fuck the eu5 devs and fuck you too if you wanna be a reddit argument lord about how I should actually be having so much fun with that
That's right little Byzantium you are in Ottoman country now, enjoy the earthquakes.
play portugal there's two back to back earthquakes destroying all the buildings in lisboa wow I'm having os much fun over here
EU5 balance with byzantium seems a bit off, because even with all that--that's easy mode compared to irl. lose 70% of your territory in 1341 because the other side in a civil war called Serbia and Bulgaria in
But Constantinople seems to be way too easy to capture early-game. ought to be a hard requirement for a sea blockade & periodic events firing in italian states to save byzantine rolls/enter the war
EU5 balance with byzantium seems a bit off, because even with all that--that's easy mode compared to irl. lose 70% of your territory in 1341 because the other side in a civil war called Serbia and Bulgaria in
I feel like IRL Byzantium COULD AFFORD TO BUILD A BUILDING in between all of that time period
I had a 1/15 playthrough lucky event streak that let me somewhat stabilize but woops fuck my ass I invested the scraps of money I could get into expanding the gold mine you get BUT NOBODY WOULD MOVE TO FUCKING WORK THERE EVEN WITH A 100 SKILL ADVISOR ENCOURAGING MIGRATION
COULD AFFORD TO BUILD A BUILDING
youd be surprised, the amount of grifting late byzantines had to do despite owning the passage to/from the black sea is staggering
This Game Brought to You by Catholicism Gang
"Imperium Graecorum deleatur" - Catholicism Gang
even with a fucking random +10 legitimacy event I immediately get the fucking earthquake and it's either -10 legitimacy and other shit or I go so far into fucking debt that it becomes impossible to ever get out of it, what the fuck is this shit, there's "hard" and there's "this is literally impossible and also fuck you in particular for trying"
"would you rather there be no challenge"
the native americans are literally not even designed to be played and they are easier to play than this, where the fuck is all of byzantium's money? they have a gold mine but when I play as the fuckin' mayan's I'm 1000x richer, okay that's just good game design I guess
Sounds a wee bit frustrating, I guess the logic of a natural disaster being unavoidable makes sense though. In a “what if” alt history sim you can make different decisions than the real rulers did in the past but you can’t really do anything to prevent an earthquake. Kinda sucks from a gameplay perspective but from a design standpoint I think you have to either not include big historical natural disasters at all or make them consistent so you can plan accordingly instead of getting royally fucked by RNG.
The only paradox game I’ve played extensively is Vicky 3 but I can’t recall any significant events you couldn’t avoid or significantly mitigate with the right plays (opium war for Qing being a complete non issue if played right and boxer rebellion can be avoided entirely). I am excited to try EUV whenever I’m finally reunited with my pc but things like this sound super frustrating to encounter
I'm winning now BTW so don't "skill issue" at me this is just stupid hard, and you wanna know why I'm winning? because I no cb'd the ottomans at the right time, made enough money from that to juice my legitimacy, got the COUP DISASTER INSTEAD OF THE SUCCESSION CRISIS so that let me get up to 69 (heh) legitimacy without being eligible for the succession crisis, and from there it was only another 10 months to 80 legitimacy to avoid it entirely. Gamey ass shit, took literally 20 tries for the stars to just align
wait why not?