Dalisclock said:
CK2 I think I was trying to figure out how to manipulate the marriage system into getting more power due to the war system being....complex(at least compared to a lot of other games) but I suspect that was way overthinking it for early game. I'm kinda used to Paradox being a decent to good base game and then pick up the DLC you like to enhance it, so I have a couple for each(often when they go on sale).
Stellaris I know apparently has been rejiggered a few times from earlier, especially in presumably how fleet combat works, though admittedly I haven't had too much problem with battles against the AI. I'm not sure how the economy changed but apparently it has something to do with economic/bureaucratic burdening, aka a bunch of the traditions/tech tree is built around reducing wastage/overhead(the Administrative Cap), which reminds me of Civ 5 in how they try to limit you from blobbing all over the map(CK2 just required or heavily encouraged vassalage). Actually a lot of Stellaris reminds me of Civ 5, not that that's a bad thing.
CK2 marriage game is only worth doing to grab large kingdom that would take decades to capture trough military means (or allied territory you can't attack), it can be fun to do, but it's still very dependent on randomness so you'll usually need to have multiple scheme running at the same time so that one of them succeed (ie marry one kid to France, another to Italy one to Spain then arrange for whichever one end up in good position to succeed you). The war system is both very complex and very simple, you can try to play with unit composition and terrain and commander and all that, but 95% of battle you'll deal with will be determine by who got the biggest army and you don't really need to care about the specific, just find the people in the world with the highest martial stats that are willing to join your kingdom, place them in charge of the three wing of your army, pool all your troop together and steam roll the enemy. If the enemy is stronger than you, look toward hiring merc or wait until they split up there army. But for most small territory, send in your chancellor to fabricate a claim, should take maybe 5 years or so, and then just capture it. But DLC are pretty required to make the games fun, a lot of feature are barebone in vanilla, at minimum grab way of life (add stuff to do for your character) and conclave (much needed internal politic), with reaper due (disease) and monk and mysthic (add society, more stuff to do) also being very good addition.
Stellaris is almost completely unrecognizable compared to what it was at release, actually the only aspect that barely changed is combat. The economy system used to be pretty basic, with most planet being more or less "finished" within a decade (at that point you just gave them to a sector to deal with and ignored them), if you personally held too many planet yourself you'd get pretty sever penalty. Administrative cap was sorta always in the game, the more planet/population you had, the more expansive tech were, but it used to not be very transparent. Stellaris was initially supposed to be like CK2 in space but pretty heavily migrated toward civilization in space over time. At present the upside for expanding wide are higher than the downside, but the micromanagement get pretty insane when you juggle 50+ planets, so few people do that and there are system in place to make sure smaller empire are at least not too disadvantaged. Stellaris is also a bit more complex than most space 4x, honestly space 4x mostly suffer from terrible UI that make them appear more complex than they are. There complexity is always upfront and appear, but mastering an action game or twin stick shooter is just as complex or even more so, but they initially appear simpler since you don't have 20 numbers on screen at all time.
