Grand Strategy Games

What is Veeky Forums opinion on GSGs? I get it, it's not exact history or perfect, but as a tool to visualizing how complex, real time historical events played out/might have played out certainly is invaluable for education no? I never heard people talk about things like the Burgundian Inheritance till eu4 came out. I play eu4, victoria 2 and hoi4 myself to unwind. What y'all think?

I can't get into GSG. I feel overwhelmed early on. Am I a brainlet?

Honestly, I felt that way at first, you just gotta dive in tho. Lots of videos out there on it. It's crazy tho, cuz you can play it for 1000 hours and still learn new things. I like that variety personally.

Nah, you're probably just trying to do too much at once. Just pick a strong country and go at it with more humble goals. Watching videos and reading strategies will help, but the games themselves will be your greatest teachers (which is ironic given how shit their actual tutorials are). Also, don't feel obligated to learn every facet of these games at once. I didn't even bother fucking with trade nodes until I had several games under my belt, and when I gave it an honest try it turned out to be much less complicated than I thought.

Trade is so easy tho. You just transfer to your home node and collect in downstream/end nodes. Also only do it where you have high trade power and put light ships in nodes to strengthen them.

I know, which I why I said it was much less complicated than I thought it was going to be. My point was that a lot of these games' mechanics can look incredibly daunting on the surface and deter you from the entire game itself, when they're actually not that bad at all. However, if you go at a single game trying to master every aspect at once then it may turn daunting, not because the mechanics are individually hard, but that trying to learn everything from scratch all at once can make otherwise simplistic mechanics come off as overwhelming.

/gsg/ is 99% neo Nazi /pol/ autists. That's all I need to know

>can play GS games like a pro
>get overwhelmed by total war
Am I a brainlet bros?

I think they're just ironic nazis tho. They just like the idea of cultural genocide and nationalism cuz it makes the map modes nicer. They'd never support that irl imo.

>This

>They'd never support that irl imo.

This applies to so many things on Veeky Forums since its inception

Never played Total War (OP btw) and it does seem a bit daunting to control armies real time. I prefer managing economies and grand military strategy while Total War is for people who like commanding the armies in the field it seems.

No. Total War and GSGs just hone different skills. GSGs take more skill in long term management while Total War tests your management skills in real time. In a sense Total War is "micro-strategy" while GSGs are "macro-strategy." If you suck at Total War it's likely that you're either going at it with the wrong approach, or that you're getting overzealous. Go through some practice battles to try and get a better feel for the flow of the game before jumping into a campaign.

Yes, yes you are.

I forget the name of it, but there is a law of the internet that states that you can never tell whether someone is being serious or not online. This is basically that.

>They'd never support that irl imo
Poe's Law. It's true that some of them are being ironic, and that the community may have started out that way, but you're being naive if you think there aren't any legitimate stormfags there.

Poe's law. And it's about political extremism.

>I prefer managing economies and grand military strategy
None of the current grand strategy games let you do this with any major agency. Ckii isn't my thing but it's a marriage simulator, EUIV is a mana management simulator with laughable military and economic control and Vicky IIs military system is trash too with the economy in vanilla being broken as fuck. I only play Hoi3 these days at least making an autistic OOB and manually controlling research and individual air/land/sea units I built makes me feel like I'm doing something

I play hoi4, it's incredibly flawed but I manage to enjoy it, I wish people would stop basing lots of their ww2 knowledge of it though or only getting their knowledge on a certain figure from the kaiserreich mod.

>This

>Poe's law

More like /pol/'s law

autism simulators and nothing more. not a good source for learning about history.

Care to explain desu?

Fun for historical fantasy though its pretty hard to explain to somebody why i enjoy recreating the roman empire or playing a duke or some other autistic thing i do.

They're good in throwing out the names of historical events and concepts so you can study them further, but you only care about them insofar as they're used in relation to game mechanics.
Just playing Paradox games gets you retards who play HOI4 and think they're experts on WW2 by saying Sealion should have happened.

True.

You should Play HoI3 or Darkest Hours instead.

anyone else here play Darkest Hour?

>tfw I can play Darkest Hour easily, but don't understand how Hearts of Iron 4 works

This pic is a prime example of why GSGs are gay

HOI4 is a lot simpler. All the Hearts of Irons are honestly terrible games in the end.

>still believing in le ironic fascism meme
useful idiot detected

What mod is this? Looks great

paradox armchair historians are a real issue on this board, the type that get all their historical knowledge from alternate history abstracts, and think it to be totally legitimate.
however, with there feet dipped in the water, they then have the confidence to argue on topics they havent read any actual literature on, which promotes lots of simplification and partial truth. e.g:
>austrian habsburgs married the thrones of bohemia and hungary!
>all peoples in (x) area are homogeneous because victoria 2 said so!
>national prestige is a tangible and worthwhile cause that matters more then industry and military strength
>industrialisation happens when intellectuals are a high enough percentage of the population and capitalists/the state invest to fulfill liquor demand
>the games themselves arent that bad though, just basic abstractions that shouldnt be used to replace actual historical learning

the games themselves arent that bad though, just basic abstractions that shouldnt be used to replace actual historical learning*

I guess I just find it hard to believe there are unironically so many people who are so historically illiterate irl that they'd fall for this bullshit twice.

>What mod is this? Looks great
Literally says it's Darkest Hour in the post you twat.

Actually, the mod is BlackICE. Darkest Hour is a completely separate game that's based on HOI2's engine.

Its Black ICE mod for Hoi3

Try to be less of an overly aggressive cunt because it makes you look like an absolute pelican when you're wrong

Not him but while the games are representations of their respective eras at the beginning and have a few events to try to emulate what actually happened, the fact that the games are inherently sandbox in nature means that outside of broad strokes and a few railroad events, it's almost impossible for the games to be a match for real life, especially once you get the player involved.

They're fine if you just look at the country select screen and go, "Wow! I didn't realize there were Christians in Africa." but after 100 years, don't be surprised if your gay son fucked the Pope, the Ming have conquered Asia and discovered the Enlightenment, and the world is solely ran on Liquor.

MemeICE
On the whole I think it is good but it can occasionally get retarded

I felt this way at first, but you can get good at TW (and RTS in general)with just practice and repetition. It's a pretty quick and noticable progression too. Especially if you drink a bit of coffee beforehand.
The trick is to not use the pause or the slowdown functions, EVER. Play in real-time, always, and just have fun playing poorly. Dont be bothered by the the losses and the shitty battle outcomes. Play on lower difficulty if you have to. Keep doing this and you'll improve really fast.

yea ur right lol

Guys, when do you think Paradox will finish Hoi4? How much has it been? A year, a year and a half since the early access? It's taking them long time if you ask me.

Hoi3 has one the most ugliest maps I ever saw. Only CK2 could top it.

Depends on the "era" for TW games for me. I find medieval/rome/atilla fairly easy because the tactics are all pretty simple. Napoleon and >Empire aren't that bad either.

I find the warhammer games have too much going on, they seem like trying to play a MOBA and a RTS at the same time.

Start with EU2 or For The Glory. They're vastly more simple to get into, since each iteration of these games adds new mechanics or expands on the old ones. I personally prefer FtG to EU3, for instance, since it follows a more historical path so you're more constrained. It will also run on a toaster.

Hoi3 and Vic2 are the only good ones

I never understood games like HoI etc. You just look at the fucking map. You can't actually control your armies besides moving them on map and after battle you just get a result in numbers. Your cities are represented by markings on map, not actual buildings you can overview etc etc

I personally see games like GS as a quick and easy way to get the rush of blobbing and winning without going through 200+ battles like in Total War, where if you're halfway competent, you can beat the AI in all but the most extremely stacked/fucked situations, but you're forced to fight most of them, since auto-resolve can fuck you over more than manually fighting it out would.

Also, these games are held together with fucking duct tape and string they crash so fucking much.

They maybe be ironic nazis, but they're legitimately autistic. I haven't seen a general that bad in a long time. Even /twg/ talks about Warhammer, but you can't even talk about Vicky 2 in the last month without a deluge of shitposting and complete inane babbling. MEIOU/EU4 and CKII posters are ironically the least cancerous part of the threads.

I think games in historical settings are a good way to get people interested in the past. There are a lot of people who are utterly ignorant of basic history.


In an intro to business course the professor had a huge world map and pointed in the europe area, asked "where did the romans go, what did they conquer" and no one in the room could even begin to guess. The look in his eyes was so disappointed I started naming countries and he made his point quickly.


The state of normies is a dire one as far as history goes.

>Literally says it's Darkest Hour in the post you twat.

The game is about higher level strategy than individual battles. There are just as many interesting decisions to be had in deciding where to attack, what to research, what to produce, etc. than there are interesting decisions in tactical scenarios.

Not a fan myself of EU of HOI i just prefer the actual tactical strategy games like Total war.
ROME 2 and Atilla being my favorites, i like to use battle tactics famous generals of the times used and see if it works in game.
Pretty fun desu
Other than that i play Realistic FPS's

I can tell you exactly what your problem is.
Not having your armies in the right places along your frontiers and bad battle micromanaging.
Am i right?
Youll get the hang of it trust me, learning when to reach out and take ground with your armies and when to stand your ground to defend frontier settlements and province capitols is a bit tricky especially since the AI is sneaky as fuck.

Most of gsg is shit posting and they honestly hate Prussian and german blobs as all hell. They spam memes like this and tell cumskims to fuck off as a defense mechanism against /pol/.

...

>top kekkies I posted the epic minekid meme again XD

painfully unfunny

The first one was okay but the second one was really shit.

>lmao what did generals even do? I could beat every WW2 general easily.

>FUCK DRUMPF AND FUCK WHITE PEOPLE

>EvW stuff
Still pissed off

Grand strat games are just getting worse overtime. HoI4 is the best example. It's in many places worse than it's predecessor and you're being sold focus trees and features that should have been there from the start. It took them a long time to realise (yet again) that having a completely open map with no boundaries is a mistake, that way you don't have have belgian tank divisions sitting in the sahara.
I'm having to make a slow move over to more complex games to get what I want, like War in the West/East/Pacific. I've been trying to get others into playing AGEod games but no ones bites either, AI in those games is trash.

Only gotten into EU4 so far although I have vanilla CKII. I like it a lot so far. Didn't take too long to get the hang of it. Play on very easy as a big nation. Fuck up a lot. Reroll on normal when you finally know what's going on.

Currently unifying Italy under Florence and have colonies in West Africa and Brazil. Just got raped in a war with Burgundy though.

I got my first Total War but haven't played it yet. Need to lead Napoopan to victory!

I love eu4 but fuck me the combat needs a rework

...

>Dear god

Might as well do all of Europe at that point