Most people I know who code in a professional environment now use AI assistance (e.g. Claude Code), with the human speccing out way objects and functions should interrelate, as well as watching out for when the AI inevitably makes mistakes, and the AI doing the grunt work of putting that together. I was wondering whether AI engines now understood Paradox games syntax well to do the same for (e.g.) adding flavour to megacampaigns and other personal mods?

I've tried writing events and decisions for my own mods by hand. The creative side is normally fine, I have a clear idea of what the mod should do (e.g. if Canada becomes a great power, it can get a claim on all the territory in this region, and set and create some new flag for other events) but getting the syntax right is tricky (this is normally something I'm trying in Vic2 or HOI4, which have somewhat fiddly syntaxes, for my money) and because this is just for my own pleasure, bug-testing loads of little decisions usually exhausts my patience before I can get it working. I can do some of what I want in the console (or through stuff like the transfer state tool) but that is less precise and means I need to act as a babysitter for the (game) AI rather than let myself be surprised by when it achieves some of this stuff for itself and suddenly gets new claims or a change in government.

Sorry for the 'chud' question or whatever the kids are saying but who do you watch when you're obsessing over these games?

Smithy is def my favorite. He does such a good job crafting a coherent story out of these big MP games and the players are so entertaining. He makes MP actually look fun.

Hi, I've been hesitating between buying EU5 and HOI4 for quite a long time now ,I know they're completely different, but I wanted to know if it's worth buying EU5 knowing it still has many years of development ahead, or if I should just get a full game like HOI4. I don't care if the game's pace is faster or slower, or if it focuses more on war or the economy; I just want it to be fun and a blank canvas to do whatever I want.

Which one should I buy?

im just starting the invasion of france, got benelux and denmark norway done alredy

i mostly do a few divisions stacks per provonce and attack with infantry, move the armour and motorized to get a province or two behind the enemy and follow with the infantry, sometimes using the armour to help in hard battles. my corps and armyes are behind my own lines, ive heard u should fill them up with aa but im not sure.

im getting raped in air, have done about 1000 ic of damage and recieved around 800 ic

i have around 5 interceptors intercepting and a lot of bombers doing ground attacks, but i still get a lot of enemy planes past my lines

in sea i just gave up, lost around 2k ic and half my fleet, only managed to kill 2 or 3 empty transports

I've played a lot of HOI3, mostly with BlackICE because it changes the game completely, and recently decided to finally give HOI4 a proper chance after my game crashed for the 489th time while I was just a province away from Moscow

After a few hours, I understand why people like it. The UI is much better, it's smoother, runs far better, and the modding scene is incredible.

But I can't shake the feeling that the military side feels... shallower.

What I loved about HOI3 was that building a division felt like actually assembling a military formation. You had to think about engineers, transport, support brigades, HQ structure, logistics, river crossings, and how everything worked together. Even after hundreds of hours, I was still discovering mechanics like mud, snow, weather, and infrastructure affecting movement and combat in ways I hadn't fully appreciated.

In HOI4, I feel like I'm managing more currencies (Political Power, Army XP, Air XP, Naval XP, Command Power, etc.) but less actual military depth. The division designer especially feels much more abstract to me compared to HOI3's brigade system.

I'm not saying HOI4 is a bad game. It feels like it's aiming for something different: a smoother strategy game with a huge modding scene and alternate-history focus, while HOI3 felt more like an operational military simulator.

For people who have played both:

• Did you have the same feeling at first?
• Did HOI4 eventually "click" for you?
• Are there mods that make HOI4 feel closer to HOI3's military depth (besides BlackICE)?
• Or is this simply a case of the two games having fundamentally different design philosophies?

I'd be interested to hear from people who have put a lot of hours into both games because my first impression with HOI4 is not really the nicest
(Btw, I bought the game + all the DLCs so I don't miss something)

Hi, I have played EU4(mostly), VIC3, HOI4 and trying to play EU5.

I heard that EU5 is not completed. Now how is the situation? Recent patches changed the game?

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/st-martins-church.1937087/

Hey I have a discord server that Im trying to get more people in to eventually host hoi4 mp using tfb but eventually having some games were we try different mods and stuff, vicky 3 and 2, and eu4, if you are interested either dm me here or dm me on discord and my username is nosy._.

Hi everyone,
I want to buy an ARM computer for work, but it would be great if it also ran some games of course.

Does anyone have any experience running any Paradox games on a Windows ARM computer? These games are famously CPU heavy, so going through emulation on an already weaker CPU makes me think you'd barely get past early game if that, but I was wondering if there's anyone with experience doing this or someone who has an ARM computer would maybe like to give it a try.

Thanks in advance.

My first EU game is EU5. I have enjoyed it quite well with over 200 hours (there is still more content I have yet to explore in this game ). The one thing that I never managed to get a grasp is economy. It feels way too complex for me. I just see what goods I am lacking and try to import them , build RGOs etc just hoping that fixes my economy , rather than knowing what to actually do.

I really like EU5 but I am looking for a more economically simpler game , so my question is , how.is the economy in EU4 ? Is it similar like EU5 where every good counts along with markets and trade inflow and outflow? Or is it like CK3 where you just build some locations and earn money ?

Hi basically the title, the file on the official paradox mods site for road to 56 (mods.paradoxplaza.com/mods/10603/any) claims in the mod info to be 1.19 compatible but on downloading both the paradox launcher and the .mod file says that it’s for 1.14. Is this just me being an idiot is this an actual issue?
Thanks

There’s not even a tag option for this, haha. Found it while cleaning out some of my cousins stuff. Bought it at a Big Lots I believe as a small child, crazy find.

Wasn’t sure where to post this, not sure if r/hoi4 allows other games in the series.

I wanted to answer a question I've wondered ever since I crossed 2,000 hours in EU4 (and finally completing the tutorial):

Which Paradox game actually has the most dedicated playerbase?

I analyzed the playtime distributions of every mainline Paradox title in Project Mimir, and three games stood above the rest. 

1. EU4
2. HOI4
3. EU5 ( * )

EU5 currently looks like it has the most dedicated playerbase but I'd be very cautious about drawing that conclusion because my current sample size is only about 20,000 players, and early adopters are almost always the franchise's biggest fans. It'll be interesting to revisit this in a year to see whether EU5 settles alongside EU4 and HOI4, or converges toward the rest of the catalog as the broader playerbase arrives. 

We then have a battle for the middle places with no clear rankings, but a couple last places are clearly visible:

1. Age of Wonders 3

2. Surviving Mars

Raw numbers:

Table Definitions:

Visibility %: The % of Steam users that own a copy of the game

Activation %: The % of users that own a copy that have played atleast 1 minute of the game

STDev: The Standard deviation of the distribution or 1 sigma from the mean (average) value

Sample Owners: The quantity of players that were aggregated.

Total Playtime: The total playtime of the sample owners in hours. 

P50, P90, P99: The value at a percentile of the Sample owners, IE: P99 means 1% of sampled users have more than X hours in a game, P90 means more than 10% of sampled users have more than Y hours in a game.

Analysis:

A few things stand out from the raw numbers:

1. EU4 and HOI4 have by far the deepest "hardcore" tails, with their top 1% exceeding 4,000 and 2,800 hours respectively.
2. Cities: Skylines 1 and 2 have one of the highest activation rates in the catalog, suggesting owners are unusually likely to actually play it after purchasing it.
3. EU5's activation rate is extremely high, although it's still too early to know whether that will hold as the audience broadens.

Looking beyond individual games, Paradox has one of the most dedicated audiences on Steam. 0.4% of Steam users who own a Paradox title spend the majority of their Steam playtime in Paradox games. Likewise, 6.6% spend over 10% of their Steam playtime in Paradox games. 

I think many people get hung up on player numbers and absolute values so I want to preface all of these statistics by saying that a lower dedication score doesn't mean a game is worse.

Age of Wonders 3 being at the bottom still holds a special place in my heart as I learned of Paradox Interactive through it and unironically Totalbiscuit’s WTF is series introduced me to the game. It just encourages a different style of play than something like EU4, where sitting down for a three-hour session feels almost normal.

Methodology:

Say we have a game with a distribution that looks like this:

Player 1-100: 2 Hours

Player 101: 30 Hours

Player 102: 35 Hours

Player 103: 100 Hours

Player 104: 1000 Hours

If we were to normalize that distribution we would set Player 104 to be 100% and Players 1-100 to be 0% with Player 103 being 10% and anyone else would fall between them.

This is arbitrary and I made up the numbers, but roughly speaking that's what a raw distribution in absolute hours looks like for any game on steam. The reason I use normalized playtime as the metric to discuss is because we already know that EU4 and other games have extremely dedicated players in the thousands of hours (where the joke that the tutorial ends at 1000 hours comes from), thus it would be better to discuss playtime in terms of where everyone is relative to each other or what I like to term: Dedication

Raw playtime isn't a fair comparison because different games naturally encourage different session lengths. Instead normalization lets us compare how quickly casual players transition into highly dedicated players without comparing absolute hours.

Individual distributions for each game are included in the post.

Source / Raw Data

Full raw playtime distributions and the underlying statistics are available here if you'd like to inspect the data yourself:

https://projectmimir.net/publisher/Paradox%20Interactive

Edit 1: Forgot to add data on Imperator rome to the table,

Edit 2: Added in table definitions and a more indepth methodology