Tobold's Blog
Thursday, June 12, 2025
 
The price is right

The Switch 2 is now the fastest selling console of all times. And for me, there is a lesson in here somewhere about basic economics. A lot of people said that the Switch 2 was "too expensive", but I actually think that the price is right. How do I know? There are fewer scalpers around, and they aren't having the field day that the Playstation 5 gave them.

Lamborghini makes about 10,000 cars a year, and sells them all. If they sold their cars for half the price, they would still sell the same number of them, and just make less money. Lower prices only make sense if there is an oversupply (or infinite supply, like a video game), and selling more at a lower price makes more money than selling less at a higher price.

The PS5 launch was bad economics. Demand far outstripped supply, leading to scalpers shifting thousands of units. The problem is that this doesn't make the console cheaper, because customers still pay a higher price; and the money isn't going to the maker of the console, who could invest that money into making better hardware and software, but to scalpers, whose earning will never benefit the gamers.

Since the end of the pandemic-induced peak demand, gaming news have been full of stories of layoffs and studios closing down. Which is to say that currently the industry is often spending more money on making games and hardware than what they are earning. There aren't any good solutions for that. Either companies need to reduce costs, e.g. by using AI instead of humans to make games, or simply making cheaper and less good games; or they need to earn more money, e.g. by raising prices. Neither of these solutions will be popular. But the popular solution that we have seen so often in the tech sector is that the customer is getting more than he paid for, because investors sunk so much money into a company that is operating at a loss. That isn't a sustainable business model either.

Somebody saying that the Switch 2 is "too expensive" just means that it is too expensive *for that person*. An economic "too expensive" would be if the consoles would sit unsold on the store shelves, which clearly they don't. Economics in general is about how to distribute limited supplies, and while capitalism sure has its flaws, it is up to now the best answer humanity has found for that question. The people who want the console the most are identified by them being willing to pay for it. That would work better in a system with less inequality, but that isn't exactly Nintendo's fault. Me, I gladly gave my money to Nintendo for that Switch 2, and hope they are using the money to make more great games for that console.


- posted by Tobold @ 8:06 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments
Wednesday, June 11, 2025
 
That felt outdated

Yesterday evening, at my board game night, I ended up playing Betrayal at House on the Hill (3rd edition) twice. I don't think I got the full experience, because through the random selection of what actually haunts the house on the hill we ended up with both scenarios having no traitor, and just being cooperative against a common threat. And then the second game ended early for me, when the haunt on its first turn one-shotted my character, and I was out of the game at the earliest possible occasion the rules allow.

While it was interesting to play a classic board game, which was originally designed over 20 years ago, much of the design felt outdated. It is a game that very much follows the "Ameritrash" board game design philosophy, which is very thematic, but also very random, and doesn't allow for all that much long-term strategy. These days, even American board game designers do at least a hybrid, and allow for more player agency.

I think it was the lack of player agency more than anything else that made Betrayal at House on the Hill feel so outdated. The choices given to the player felt meaningless; for example you get to choose through which door to go, but then draw a random tile to determine the room behind the door, and quite possibly a random card indicated on that tile. I wasn't so much playing the game as rather experiencing it; stuff happened to me, up to my death happening to me, without giving me much control over what happened or very much I could have done differently. I died because the haunt rolled high on an attack, I rolled low on defence, and the difference was applied as mental damage, being more than what I had in mental stats, in spite of still having my starting stats. The same attack could have ended not damaging me at all, if I had rolled high, and the haunt had rolled low. It was just pure random bad luck.

As this was already near the end of the evening anyway, I was just able to leave. Which was better than still waiting for at least half an hour and watch the others finish the game. Getting eliminated early is a game design element you don't see very much anymore. But the high randomness and low player agency bothered me a lot more than losing the game did. The next time somebody invites me to a game of Betrayal at the House on the Hill, I will politely decline. Having said that, this might be more of a problem for people like me, who play a lot of board games. The lack of planning might actually be a feature for people who either play a lot less, or don't like to think hard when playing.

I have a feeling that today's board game night is going to be a complete opposite experience. I am going to play Aeterna for the first time, and for all I hear this is a game that is very much about advance planning, with very little randomness. There is a random distribution of cards at the start, but then those cards are drafted, which diminishes the effect of randomness; and for the rest of the round there are no other random elements other than the unpredictability of your fellow players. What makes Aeterna special, is an Unrest mechanic, which punishes overextension. Play too risky, and you could end up turning your victory point lead into a total loss due to maxing out Unrest; play too conservatively, and your Unrest will be fine, but you won't make all that many victory points.

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- posted by Tobold @ 10:14 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Saturday, June 07, 2025
 
Zelda Notes is game-changing

Both Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom have a $10 upgrade for the Nintendo Switch 2. You get them for free if you are subscribed to Nintendo Online, but I never was. So I paid for the upgrades, and was mostly expecting prettier graphics, higher frame rates, and faster load times, all of which I got. But I also got Zelda Notes, which is part of the Nintendo Switch App on iOS and Android. And it turns out, that this actually changes the games quite a bit.

Besides a bunch of smaller functions, Zelda Notes has two major additions to both games: A navigation app, and an item sharing function. The navigation app is an interesting compromise between the original version, in which you had to discover everything by yourself, and an "Ubisoft" type of open world, where every point of interest is marked on your map. The navigation running on a separate device makes it less intrusive, and you choose yourself what types of points of interest you want to have on that map. For example, I am mostly just using the map for the Koroks. In Tears of the Kingdom there are 800 Korok locations, and many of them are not obvious to find. For example there are a lot of Koroks hidden under rocks, but there are even more rocks in the game without a Korok under them. As you need the Korok seeds to enlarge your inventory, previously you had to either literally leave no stone unturned, or use a third party map app. Having this now as official part of the game is great, especially since the app can also remove the found locations from the map automatically, being linked to the game.

The item sharing function didn't sound all that interesting, until I tried it. I don't have anybody to share game items with. But the name is deceiving, the function can be used for a lot of other things. For example I started a new game of Tears of the Kingdom, and used the item sharing function to transfer some items from my old save game to the new game. With some materials being hard to farm, I really didn't want to do all that farming a second time, and item sharing provided a convenient workaround. But you can also share items just with yourself, which transforms the function into an added inventory, which is extremely useful in the Zelda games. Everybody who played Breath of the Wild and/or Tears of the Kingdom had those situations where he found another weapon he liked, but his weapon slots were all already taken. Now you just send some lesser used weapons from the game to your mobile device, until you need them and send them back. I haven't tried it, but I was wondering whether you couldn't actually use that to duplicate items, by making a save, then sending an item, then reloading your save with the item now both in your inventory and on the mobile device.

The rest of the Zelda Notes app is cute, but with less impact. There are some added voice memories, an achievement system, game stats that can be compared with global play data, a daily "wheel of fortune" game bonus, added support for amiibos, and a photo studio. There is also an autobuild sharing function, which has potential, if Tears of the Kingdom still has enough active players to make this take off. Building complicated machines is a bit fiddly sometimes, and being able to download other player's blueprints and autobuild them could be quite interesting.

All in all, I didn't regret paying for those upgrade packs. And as I said, all together it encouraged me to start another run of Tears of the Kingdom. I have played the game to the end in 2023, but hadn't explored all parts of the map, and certainly not all Koroks. Maybe a map app was what I needed.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:34 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Thursday, June 05, 2025
 
A console premiere

I am not the world's biggest console fan. As a result, I am not usually rushing out to buy the latest and greatest new generation. I never got a PS5, and never owned any version of an XBox. The Nintendo Switch, released in March 2017, I got for Christmas of that year. So today is a premiere: I just received and am currently installing a Switch 2, on release day. The very first time I get a console on the day of its release.

Installation up to now went relatively well. One detail I missed was that my old Micro SD card from the Switch isn't compatible with the Switch 2, so I needed to order a Micro SD Express card from Amazon for delivery tomorrow. But there is a way to transfer my system from the old Switch to the new wirelessly, although it was a bit fiddly to set up, and required me to first update both consoles.

Did I absolutely need a Switch 2? Probably not. But it is my preferred mobile console to play on holidays. The backward compatibility with my old library of games was a huge selling point for me. But I have still to look into buying "upgrade packs" for older games, that make them prettier on the new console. Ultimately, I bought the Switch 2 because I believe that future games I want to play, like the next Zelda, will come out on the new generation of the console.

Availability of the Switch 2 here in Belgium was good. I preordered the console from a Belgian electronics store with no hassle at all for €470, and got it delivered to my doorstep on release day. No need to stand in line anywhere. I can see the Switch 2 still being listed as available on the same website, as well as on other European electronics online stores. I don't know how the availability of the Switch 2 is in the US, due to the time zone difference it is too early to get news. But I am wondering how much tariffs Nintendo had to pay for the consoles made in China, and how much that affects the availability in the US. If their profit margin is much lower or negative at $450 due to tariffs, and supply is limited, would they ship that supply preferably to Europe?

- posted by Tobold @ 10:43 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments
Wednesday, June 04, 2025
 
AI doom

It is a sad reality of today's content creation economy that the more outrageous and disturbing your claims are, the more clicks and therefore revenue you generate. One of the recent widespread subjects is based on a prediction by Goldman Sachs that 300 million jobs could be replaced by AI. Thus various content creators are making AI doom videos, saying how we all will be unemployed in the future. Nobody mentions that we have been there many times before, and it turned out that this is not how economy works.

Today's AI doom predictions of widespread unemployment very much mirror what was said by the Luddites between 1811 and 1816, railing against spinning and weaving machines, and often breaking those machines in protest. But rather than leading to economic doom, the machines ultimately grew the English textile industry by a factor of three over the next 50 years. Jobs changed, but people moved to better-paying and less back-breaking jobs in the industry.

"Bullshit Jobs: A Theory" is a book by anthropologist David Graeber, published in 2018. The book explores the phenomenon of work that is perceived as meaningless, unnecessary, or even destructive, despite generating income for those involved. Graeber argues that a significant portion of modern jobs fall into this category, and these jobs can negatively impact individuals' mental health and social well-being. And guess what, these are exactly the jobs that are first in line for being replaced by AI. AI is best at repetitive tasks that do not need much human judgement, expertise or decision-making. The bureaucratic nature of many of these bullshit jobs means that they are easily replaced by AI without the need for investment in machines or robots.

Is it theoretically possible to build an AI-powered robot that works as a plumber? Yes, but that technology is still years away. And more importantly, the economics of a robot plumber probably don't work out for many more years: The median salary for a plumber in the US today is just over $60k, so replacing him by a robot that costs millions just doesn't make sense. Amazon tried "just walk out" cashier-less AI technology in stores, and ended up ditching the technology and bringing back cashiers; and it turned out that part of the technology was actually outsourced to India, where humans instead of AI watched video feeds. As that happened with several different companies touting AI, the running gag is now that AI stands for "Actually Indians". Even where AI can work, it shifts jobs rather than totally replacing them: AI-generated legal documents are now double-checked against hallucinations by the same paralegal staff that used to be writing those documents. Nobody trusts AI to calculate the statics of a bridge or building without human supervision.

Given that at the same time there are predictions of economic doom due to a lack of qualified people and demographic decline, the prediction that AI will make everybody unemployed seem especially silly. That is not to say that there won't be problems, e.g. how to get an employee the skills needed to supervise an AI when the entry-level job that was replaced by the AI doesn't exist anymore. But economic theory and two centuries of human experience with automation make it extremely likely that people will be still employed in the future, and have more productive jobs.

Maybe the AI doom among social media content creators is due to the fact that many of them are working a bullshit jobs that can easily be replaced by AI. If you create content that only caters to the algorithm rather than being your own creative expression, an AI can probably do it better.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:22 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments
Monday, June 02, 2025
 
Failure is relative

As any fan of the Civilization series of games, and you will hear that Civilization VII was a huge failure: On Steam the recent reviews are "mostly negative", and Steam user numbers tell us that on any given day both Civ 5 and Civ 6 have more players than Civ 7. But there is another side to that story, which isn't as obvious as it seems.

The boss of Take-Two, publisher of Civilization VII, last month said that "sales are strong", and confirmed that "We're really happy with how it's going". That isn't just corporate speak, the stock of Take-Two is up over 20% since pre-release on February 6. So, what happened? Previous iterations of Civilization were primarily PC games, with console versions existing, but often with less support, less frequent updates, and later releases. Civilization VII was on consoles on day 1, with much of the UI adapted to consoles (which is part of what the PC players hate about it). Civ 7 sold more copies on the Switch than on PC, and on the Playstation sales were even higher. Industry analysts estimate that only 17% of the sold copies of Civ 7 were on PC. Overall Civ 7 is currently the 8th best selling game of 2025 in the US, which is far from being a failure.

This shows that Steam is a platform which is surprisingly transparent with commercially relevant data of every single product they sell. Consoles are not. Every YouTuber can make a "data driven" video about the failure of Civ 7 on Steam, while the success of Civ 7 on consoles is mostly invisible to the public.

Commercially, making Civilization better on the console makes sense. To have had a "good" release on Steam, PC Civ 7 would just have had to sell two to three times more, while on consoles it sold six times more than on PC. But I am sure that Take-Two isn't happy that if you search for Civ 7 on YouTube, you get mostly videos of what a failure the game is. Maybe Firaxis should have made the two versions of the game on PC and consoles more different, instead of making a "one size fits all" game. A mouse and keyboard control is fundamentally different from a gamepad control, and PC gamers weren't happy with a simplified UI for gamepads which then lacked the more detailed information they were used to from previous UIs designed for mouse and keyboard.

On the other hand, maybe it is impossible to make a Civ game that makes both console and PC players happy. Or a Civ game that is attracting new players and satisfying for veterans. Paradox is going the exact opposite way with Europa Universalis 5, making it more detailed than EU4, and nobody dreams of making a new player friendly version that is playable with a gamepad. EU5 is a game made by Europa Universalis veterans for Europa Universalis veterans, and that limits it to PC. The crazy consequence is that if EU5 is in decent shape at launch, it will be better reviewed than Civ 7 was, while making significantly less money.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:40 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
 
Small Western Trail

Earlier this year I bought Great Western Trail: El Paso, and yesterday I got it to the table for the first time. I had studied the rules, but we were 4 players who never had played the game before. Setup, explanation, and a full 4-player first time playthrough took us 2.5 hours. Which was a good length for my typical board game nights, as we usually have a maximum of 3.5 hours, and we play different games with different people, so it is rare that everybody has already played the game before.

Since the original Great Western Trail from 2016, there have been a second edition, variants like Argentina or New Zealand, and an expansion called Rails to the North. All of these easily take 3 hours to play, which doesn't include rules explanation time and the added delay when playing with new players. Which is why I never played any of these games, they are simply a bit too long for my game nights. Experienced players who don't suffer from analysis paralysis can certainly play Great Western Trail in under 3 hours, but for my typical player round the risk would be high to get kicked out of the game store at closing time without having reached the end of the game.

Thus the big advantage of Great Western Trail: El Paso being shorter, and I very much enjoyed my first game. Having said that, I have mixed feelings about other aspects of the downscaling strategy. They made the game not only shorter, but also smaller, and cheaper. The game board is made out of cloth, leading to the first time of me ironing a game board, as it gets creased when folded in the box. The cards are smaller than in the original game, and the money tokens are so flimsy cardboard that I used some metal coins I had in reserve instead. While all this make El Paso also a lot cheaper than its bigger brothers, the result was a bit substandard for my tastes. I generally prefer board games with quality components, tokens, and cards.

In Civ7, Antoine de Saint-Exupery is quoted as saying: “An engineer has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away”. While I haven't played the other Great Western Trail games, I am certain that they do have a deeper decision space. But getting to a very similar gameplay experience with fewer game mechanics and rules is an achievement. And I can think of several other board games which would benefit from the same treatment. If a game has a weight of over 4 on BoardGameGeek and takes 4+ hours to play, you could probably turn it into a shorter and more accessible game by taking things away. And if that is well done, the fundamental game experience can remain similar, just easier. Which makes the game accessible to more people, and could therefore improve sales. What's not to like?

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- posted by Tobold @ 12:53 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Sunday, May 25, 2025
 
Active vs. passive gaming

I had honestly planned to start playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 last week, but then played it for only half an hour before deciding to start playing Europa Universalis IV instead. That was not because Expedition 33 is a bad game, or Europa Universalis IV is "better". I simply wasn't in the mood for the active nature of Expedition 33, and rather preferred the passive gameplay of EU4.

In a game like Expedition 33, nothing happens when you aren't doing anything. You could stand in place for hours, and the game state wouldn't change. A few role-playing games have some sort of day / night cycle with NPCs performing a semblance of a day's activity, but other than the location and availability of quest NPCs, that doesn't change anything. The evil villain isn't getting any stronger because you were idling, nor does anything else interesting happen in the game world. That forces the player to be constantly active to make stuff happen, because otherwise the game is very boring. And that requires a certain amount of energy from the player to move things along.

In contrast, simulation games like EU4 have the possibility to unpause and let the game play for itself. Often the player is even forced to do that and wait, e.g. in EU4 while waiting for a truce to end, or your aggressive expansion to go down, before you can start another war. Or to finish constructing buildings, ships, or the recruitment of soldiers. And while the player waits, interesting stuff happens between the non-player nations. I'm currently in a game of EU4 in which I am playing the Teutonic Order, and what happens between Poland and Lithuania is of high interest to me. I actually spent one war just to break their personal union, trying to divide them, and prevent them from forming the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Well, they still reformed a military alliance afterwards, so I'm not sure whether this was worth it.

In any case, sometimes I just unpause EU4, wait, and watch. It is a far more passive sort of gaming. I still need to pause the game from time to time and give commands, but a good chunk of my time is spent watching how things work out and see my plans succeed or horribly go wrong. It requires a lot less energy from me as the player, and thus there are periods where I prefer that sort of gaming.

The other reason I prefer this right now, is that my activities in EU4 are more cerebral in nature. I plan, make a strategy, devise tactics, manage stuff. In Expedition 33 the activities are more action-focused, even if combat is mostly turn-based. But much of what you do during a game session is running around and interact with various points of interest, whether that is NPCs to talk to, or enemies to fight. There is of course some tactics involved in combat, and some strategy in character development, but that is only a part of the game. I am sure that at some point my mood will change, and I will be in the mood for this more active and less cerebral sort of gaming. Until then, I'll play Europa Universalis IV.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:35 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments
Thursday, May 22, 2025
 
Compound interest in games

Albert Einstein purportedly said, “The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest”. In a previous post of mine about Crusader Kings 3, I mentioned that this poses a bit of a problem in historical games: Any economic game system that allows you to accrue compound interest in a game that spans several centuries will end with the player getting crazy rich. So it is interesting to see how that works in Europa Universalis 4.

Many countries in EU4 start with a tech level of 3, and at administrative tech level 4 you can build temples / churches. Somewhat unintuitively, these are economic buildings, as they raise the tax rate in the province you build them in. In a typical developed European province, building a church for 100 gold results in a raised income of 0.2 gold per month, or 2.4 gold per year, thus 2.4 yield, taking you a bit over 40 years to get your investment back. Which already means that over 400 years you get 10 times your investment back. And as long as you reinvest that into other buildings with similar financial yields, you can get that compound interest train rolling and be relatively rich later in the game.

But weirdly that isn't even the best or earliest method. Even before you unpause for the first time in 1444, you can already make a much more impactful financial decision, available to many countries: Razing all your fortresses. A fortress costs 200 gold to build, but costs 1 gold per month, 24 gold per year in maintenance. If you destroy your fort, within 8 years you earn the money to construct it back. And while higher level forts can have a big impact later in the game, the level 2 forts you have at the start of the game aren't terribly useful, especially on flat land. A mountain fort at your borders can have a bigger impact in a war, but if your warfare has economic problems, razing your forts and putting the money into your army probably has a better effect.

The game impact of compound interest in Europa Universalis 4 is lessened by gold being not the most important currency. Monarch power points in administration, diplomacy, and military are far more important, with an excess in the first two of those categories being easily transformed into gold income by spending them on province development. Most players with a decent gold income will transform that into monarch power points by hiring advisors. An advisor costs around his level squared in gold per month, that is a level 1 advisor around 1 gold, a level 2 advisor around 4 gold, and a level 3 advisor 9 gold. And that is only at the start of the game, the cost goes up by 0.5% per year, so in 1644 they all cost twice that. Hiring advisors will drain your gold, so most people won't constantly reinvest gold into buildings that get them more gold over time, and compound interest isn't such a big game design problem. If you played without advisors, it would also be likely that you'd run out of investment opportunities, as without spending monarch points on province development, you run into building limits quickly. On the other hand, developing provinces and increasing tax base and production results in a higher yield for your buildings.

Ultimately the effect of expansion in Europa Universalis 4 is a lot more powerful than economic gameplay. Playing "wide", that is to say conquering a maximum amount of provinces, is a lot easier than playing "tall", that is to say building up the value of existing provinces. That is not only true for the player, but also for the AI. In consequence, the map that starts out as quite a patchwork in 1444 tends to consolidate a lot in the centuries that follow. It will be interesting to see whether this remains the same in Europa Universalis 5, which starts over a century earlier. Because if it does, the EU5 map in 1444 would look a lot less patchworky than in EU4.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:50 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Wednesday, May 21, 2025
 
DLC subscription

I have now played 40 hours of Europa Universalis 4, and I like it a lot. I played my first country (Aachen, turned later into Westphalia) for 200 years, into the Era of Absolutism, and then decided to stop that run. While theoretically you can play nearly 400 years, and do a world conquest with even a one province start, that feels somewhat silly and ultimately tedious. The more interesting part is following the mission tree, which either has some historical perspective, or proposes an interesting ahistorical alternative. The problem is, that not every country has an interesting mission tree.

I saw a streamer playing the Teutonic Order, and the mission tree looked interesting, so I decided to try that. Then of course there was a disappointment: That interesting mission tree wasn't included in the starter edition of Europa Universalis IV, I needed the Lions of the North DLC for that. On Steam that would cost €15. With EU4 having so many DLC, buying all of them over time can get rather expensive. Fortunately, there is a better alternative, a subscription: On Steam, you can subscribe to access to all EU4 DLC content, for which I paid €15 for three months. A €8 for one month option is also available.

I really like this option, especially for older games that have a lot of DLC. I might actually be interested in a DLC subscription for other Paradox games, like Crusader Kings 3 or Victoria 3. Realistically, I usually play these games for some weeks or months, and then leave them be for a few years before returning. A subscription business model suits me a lot better for that than a purchase model. Especially for EU4, where I probably will buy EU5 at some point, and thus a large investment into permanently owning a lot of DLCs would be kind of a waste.

From what I can see in the previews, EU5 is a bigger game, even bigger than EU4 with the DLCs. But I already heard one reviewer complaining that only 60 countries have large mission trees. I guess that DLCs with mission trees for a specific region (like Lions of the North for EU4) will be coming out for EU5 as well and keep the ongoing development financed. I'm okay with paying for DLCs (to own or subscribe) when they contain added content. I like it a lot less if it feels as if somebody deliberately cut content from the base game to sell it as DLC, or when the purchase of a DLC becomes necessary to access new game mechanics.

I can see how the option of DLC subscription won't be available for EU5 anytime soon. The game isn't even released yet, and nothing has been announced about DLCs. And a DLC subscription only makes sense when there are already several of them. I can see EU5 having something like a "season pass", with which you prepay for several DLCs in advance, but I find that business model a bit less attractive.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:41 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Tuesday, May 20, 2025
 
A message of hope

It is possible that with age comes serenity. More likely, having lived through many decades, an older person has already had experiences that serve to put today's news into context and give a point of comparison. The result is that, viewed by me as an older person, life today isn't as bad as some people think it is. So, to give you some hope, I'd like to talk why that is so.

The example that probably has the most data is crime statistics vs. fear of crime. Time and time again, and in different countries on different continents, there have been many recent examples where polls showed that people are increasingly afraid of violent crimes, while various statistics clearly show that the probability of becoming a victim of violent crime is decreasing. Much of the difference between reality and perception can be explained by how media evolved over the past 30 years: We have a lot more news sources today than we had 30 years ago, and in the competition between these news sources, exaggeration brings more revenue. Any given crime that happens today is both far more likely to be reported, and also likely to be reported in the most lurid way possible. That influences everybody's perception, and makes the world look a lot more dangerous than it is.

Increased reporting sometimes goes hand in hand with increased understanding, adding another important factor to our perception: The broadening of definitions. For example, our understanding of mental health has improved, which leads to people getting more easily diagnosed for depression or autism, which leads to statistics that suggest that depression and autism is a lot more prevalent today than it was in the previous century. Another example of better understanding leading to more reporting is when during the me too movement, the reported rape cases in the US shot up to nearly double in the span of 5 years. The sad reality is that rape cases were simply very much under-reported due to shame before, just like depression cases were under-reported before. It is very hard to say whether these things actually went up or down, we are just very much more aware of them. In Germany this year a politician lost his seat in parliament due to accusations of "sexual violence"; while part of that was due to an intrigue and somebody in his party making false statements under a false name, the proven misbehavior of that politician was described as "flirting" and "touching a woman's arm". That sure was inappropriate, especially from a man in a position of power towards younger women, but wouldn't have registered as sexual violence in the previous century. In reality, the situation in the previous century was worse, but the broadened definition and increased reporting is making women feel a lot less safe today.

Sometimes the increased fear is simply due to younger people not having been around when things were actually worse. I remember reading Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising in the mid-80's, when it came out, and Third World War scenario of a Soviet Union launching a conventional attack on Europe was scary as hell, because it very much reflected our fears at that time. I read the same book 20 years later, and it had stopped being scary, due to the fall of the Soviet Union. While Putin is certainly a nasty piece of work, the actual threat he poses ranks a lot lower than that of the Soviet Union in the 80's. Another example is society's treatment of queer people: When I was a kid, homosexuality was still illegal in many western countries. In the USA, the supreme court decision of Lawrence vs. Texas that ended the last anti-sodomy laws was in 2003. Having your sexual identity getting embroiled in today's culture war certainly isn't pleasant, but objectively speaking the situation for queer people in first world countries has much improved over the past 50 years. Feeling that something that happens today is a lot worse than things were before is natural, and the lack of awareness of how much worse things actually were before gets even worse when we go beyond a typical human lifespan. The Covid-19 pandemic was bad, but the Spanish Flu or the Black Plague were objectively much worse, there just aren't many people other than historians that have this point of comparison.

Finally, society's attitude towards victimhood and towards sensitivity have changed a lot. 50 years ago, the last thing you wanted was to be seen as a victim; today some people revel in victimhood. I'm currently watching the TV series Will Trent, in which the two main characters are constantly depicted as traumatized victims of their childhood in foster care, while still solving crime cases. If you are used to detective series or films from the previous century, that seems quite weird, but is simply a reflection of how attitudes have changed.

Of course, many of these societal changes have been powers for good, and have been responsible for today's situation being better than things were half a century ago. You can't improve things if there is no awareness. But my message of hope is that increased awareness of bad things is a good thing, because it leads to improvement, and doesn't mean that these bad things suddenly happen now, when they were unknown before. Catholic priests didn't suddenly become paedophile in the 1990s, it was our awareness of their behavior that suddenly increased, and probably led to lot fewer of them being able to act with impunity today. We might feels poorer today, and beset by dangers, but in reality the world is a lot richer today than it was before, life spans have increased, and a lot of dangers are actually a lot lower than they were before. We are just more sensitive to whatever bad things are left.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:14 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Friday, May 16, 2025
 
Early thoughts on Europa Universalis 4 and 5

I now played 8 hours of Europa Universalis 4. Which is nothing in a game in which people who played it for 2,000+ hours call people who "only" played for 1,000 hours "noobs", as they probably haven't seen and understood every game mechanic yet. Other Paradox grand strategy games concentrate on one aspect: Hearts of Iron on warfare, Crusader Kings on characters and dynasties, Victoria on economy. Europa Universalis does everything, which makes it a lot more complicated. I have to agree with the commenter on this blog who said that I should use "complicated" instead of "complex", because Europa Universalis simply has a lot of small game mechanics, instead of having a few with complex interactions.

The specializations of the other Paradox games sometimes frustrated me. You know, the situation where your main character in Crusader Kings 3 unexpectedly dies and the duchy you built up is divided among his heirs, leading to a sharp drop in your power. Or the situation where you research advanced technologies in Victoria 3, and then can't use them, because the world doesn't have enough trade in the required raw materials like rubber or oil yet. By being less specialized, Europa Universalis sometimes is actually easier to play than those other games. It is also the game that makes the least effort to remain historically accurate. At its core, Europa Universalis 4 is a simple game of territorial expansion. Even in my game, starting as the one-province city state of Aachen, after 8 hours I control already 4 provinces making up the whole of the Lower Rhineland area. A lot of the game mechanics are simply there to stop the player from expanding too fast. Taking provinces causes "aggressive expansion", and if you collect too much of it too fast, everybody gangs up on you and beats you down. So after every episode of expansion comes an episode of consolidation, in which you deal with new provinces to reduce their unrest, and wait for your aggressive expansion to slowly dissipate.

What is really good in Europa Universalis 4 is the mission trees, which make countries more different from each other than they are for example in Victoria 3. They also provide some guidance about possible goals. Taking the whole Lower Rhineland was a mission for Aachen, and forming Westphalia would be next, with forming Germany as a long-term goal. Play well enough, and you can take a one-province start all the way to controlling a whole continent. As I said, not much effort to remain historically accurate. My least favorite part of Europa Universalis 4 is the combat system, which has the same problem as in Crusader Kings 3, where chasing the enemy army all over the map to actually get into a battle is the hardest part of warfare.

At the very least, I am now better able to understand the discussion around the just announced Europa Universalis 5. The good news about that game is that is Swen Vincke compliant, that is to say an obvious passion project from a senior developer at Paradox who wants to make the best Europa Universalis possible. He does that by adding more of everything. Where EU4 had 3k provinces, the smallest unit of land in the game is now a "location", and EU5 has 27k of them. And it has 60k population groups distributed over those locations, leading to a staggering amount of possible detailed micro-management. With EU4 already being daunting even for experienced strategy players, the obvious question is whether there is even a market for an even more complicated and detailed game. And with a huge amount of detail and so many different game mechanics, we don't know yet whether the developers will manage to turn all this into a reasonably balanced good game with decent flow.

Europa Universalis 4 is one of those rare games which today has more players (average peak in May 2025: 25k) than on release (August 2013: 15k). I actually made a mistake by buying the starter edition which included some DLCs, and then buying a few DLCs I needed to access specific features like army drill or the ability to curry favors. It would have been cheaper for me to buy a subscription for $8 a month or $15 for 3 months that would give me access to all DLCs. The player numbers aren't huge, but by keeping up those player numbers for over a decade and being able to sell DLCs and subscriptions, Europa Universalis 4 is certainly a good and reliable money maker for Paradox. Replacing such a lifestyle game is fundamentally hard, as Firaxis just found out with Civilization VII. While looking at videos on how various features of EU4 work, I found that the "expert knowledge" of EU4 veterans very often involves knowing all sorts of exploits, like selling crown land you don't actually own, or selling the province Maine as France before you lose it in a fixed event. A lot of that expert knowledge will become obsolete when switching to EU5. For me, as a "new" EU4 player, I would certainly welcome some modernization changes, like a better user interface. For EU4 I needed to fiddle with a UI scaling setting labeled "experimental", just so that I could actually read the small text on a 27" screen. All this to say that it isn't obvious in how far EU4 players will all switch to EU5, or whether it is possible to grow that user base. Kudos for trying!

- posted by Tobold @ 10:17 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
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