Paradox – why?

[Dregvant]

I built up Italy and conquered half of France, then I applied the patch, and my income dropped from over 1,000 ducats a month to -400; the cost of the food I buy has tripled, whereas before I had a substantial surplus.

So I tried building 100,000 ducats’ worth of structures to produce food.
I’m still at -144 ducats a month.

What on earth have they done with this patch?
Do they even test their updates?

[Azunai]

major updates usually break saves. the smart thing to do is to use the betas feature to roll back to the previous version if you want to finish your old campaign.

[Supreme Soviet]

major updates have a tendency to break old saves regardless of the game you're playing. Roll back your game version in the steam settings if you want to continue the campaign.

[Dregvant]

A new game with the Kingdom of Naples – after a few years, there’s a food shortage again.

I think I’ll put the game aside again for a year and see how it goes.
This is the fifth time I’ve had to restart the game because of patches, updates or fixes. Frankly, I’m fed up.
I’ve clocked up 376 hours of play and I can’t get past 1650 because some patch messes everything up.
Perhaps two years after release, Paradox will realise what sort of game they want to make; in the meantime, I’m not going to stress about it and I’ll get on with other things.

[ABoxFullOfKittens]

Hmm.

[Azunai]

i've played multiple long campaigns in this game.

simple rule: never play a new major update. they always mess that up. wait a couple of months until the update was patched to a playable state.

[stef]

I tried both Granada and Morocco in the patch. Both times, my income started out fine and then suddenly declined continuously. Either the trade automation does not work or the whole economic/budget system seems to need a rebalancing. Highly frustrating!

[Dregvant]

Originally posted by stef:

I tried both Granada and Morocco in the patch. Both times, my income started out fine and then suddenly declined continuously. Either the trade automation does not work or the whole economic/budget system seems to need a rebalancing. Highly frustrating!

The problem is that the developers want to slow down the management of warfare by making conscription and the professional army more ‘expensive’.
I agree with that too.
I also agree with the idea of making food a central factor, at least up until the 1700s.
Basically, I always develop my economy from the bottom up.
Plenty of basic resources at the start and then moving upwards – it’s an approach that pays off hugely in the long term, and it WOULD pay off here too if the merchants weren’t greedy b4st4d$ with no ability to think ahead.
As it worked in the Middle Ages, rulers imposed heavy duties on food exports AND passed laws to block certain exports entirely in the event of famine.

Now, certain mechanisms need to be established in advance, precisely to avoid what is currently happening in the countryside.
In fact, even if you have a very thriving agricultural economy, what happens is this:

The warehouses fill up (for the winter) and the merchants realise that food costs more abroad.
The merchants EMPTY the storehouses.
The kingdom goes hungry, food prices rise within the kingdom, the merchants BUY food at prices higher than what they sold it for, the peasants have no money – YOU have to pay to keep them from starving whilst the bourgeoisie grow rich.

In a typical medieval kingdom, after the first winter like this, we’d have the nobility hanging the bourgeoisie, seizing their money, and the kingdom immediately passing a specific law to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

[Xom]

THe food system was reworked in last patch; on some markets it's seems the same, but in others the food really ruins the economy.

I'm playing for Viatka (north russian) and initially have a foreign market of Kazan that it located in steppe region full of food. Then I stole some money and build own market, that has spreaded in my beatiful region full of wood and nothing more. Then I immidiately faced a food problem, that can be avoided just by... ignoring - set food spend to 20-30%. Then I conquerred Kazan and DESTROYS their market (mwahaha losers), so the food problem fade away forever.

Another example - in MP game: I'm playing for Trubchevsk (central russian) and invade in steppe region up to Astrahan and Sarai-Juk; there are only food RGO in my territory and food problem is just a joke for me. But in the north my friend plays as Riga (Baltic region) and have a huge food shortages - in some time it get -140g per month (at the same time I have -0.5g). He focused on food production, optimised trade and can balance your food ecomony - food consumption reduced to 5-10g.

It seems very strange, because baltic region have good food resource base, but initially he's focused on urbanisation and convert most food region to towns. I just have no money for such urbanisation. :)))

[truehunter]

They have a very, VERY specific idea in mind and they only want players who will play the game exactly how they want.

Let's see if the average active player base keeps dropping or not. Maybe they end up with 1000 hardcore players? That's certainly enough to make money on dlcs right? Right?

[ABoxFullOfKittens]

Originally posted by truehunter:

They have a very, VERY specific idea in mind and they only want players who will play the game exactly how they want.

Let's see if the average active player base keeps dropping or not. Maybe they end up with 1000 hardcore players? That's certainly enough to make money on dlcs right? Right?

Distant worlds would kill for those numbers.

[alex]

>Do they even test their updates?
Sure they let the ai run at speed 5 and check that the game works on their machine without thorough QA or actually trying to play it for fun

[KroganCharr]

I'm just going to echo what everyone else is saying: do not update the game if you have an ongoing campaign you want to finish. Only update once you are ready to start a new run.