It sucks for you but thanks for sharing your experience. I too will never buy non officially supported proton games.

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Sectors are basically gone. The only function they have is that you can assign a governor to get his bonuses on (well, you can try to use AI and let it develop the planets... but pdx has a horrible history on AI programming and I didn't even try. Given the flame threads on their forum I think you shouldn't either). Just forget about them, turn them off from the map. Only use it late in game when you swim in energy to exploit governor bonus traits (you're no more leader capped, so you can indeed hire 50-60 governors if you can afford it).

The new economy instead is interesting since, as you already figured out, developing a planet is not a matter of mindlessly fill tiles and click the upgrade button. Now buildings consume strategic resources and produce nothing, they only unlock jobs. Jobs that require actual pops before producing something.

So mission accomplished here! Finally you actually have to think what to build and when to build it (and also, what to build first and what to replace it later).
The bad news though is that worlds in 2.2 require this attention consuming babysitting all time long and as you move to later stages of the game managing like 50 or more worlds becomes is an impossible chore. They really need to figure out a sensible way to delegate a competent AI to planet development for later stages of the game.

Which also makes me think that nobody at paradox actually tested the changes for other kind of empires that are not corporations or some kind of pacifists variant. Anything that is not vertical build just get out of hands later in the game for the sheer crazy amount of babysitting you have to do give to planets and their economies. Not to mention the crazy bugs and regression they had for previous paid DLC content like Utopia ascension paths or Synthetic dawn machine empires. Seriously, I warn you here. Don't try ascension paths or machine empire unless you're in for some miserable gaming time. Neither expect interesting rewards from leviathans or DLC events either as before.

And this frankly speaking is a despicable move. The game now is unbalanced when not just plain broken for the majority of empires you can play... except the ones released in the last paid DLC! As it now it seems only mega corps and little more make for a pleasant non micro hell experience. It shouldn't be like that. As a developer you should show respect also for customers that already gave you money, not just customers that still have to. Pdx has very loyal fans. Sometimes some of them sound like zealots more then customers to me. But admittedly I too like their great strategy games so much that I'm fine in forgiving some missteps on their side. But as they continue to expand their customer base I dunno how many of their new, less fanatical customers will be so forgiving.

Now for automatizing planet management for large empires, let's get real: I don't think there is anything quick they can do. Developing good and performing AI is a long trial and error process. It's better if they take their time and do something that works well in 2.3. But I hope that at least they fix up the previous DLCs content in the coming patches because as of now this to me this looks like a gratuitous lack of respect.

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Ok cool but... what the hell is a "used digital game"?!? A digital game with some scratches on the pixels of the loading screen or the colors of the main character weared down? :D

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyI'll be able to trade for it--except I can't currently extract any strategic resource to trade with.

I'm pretty sure that you can also produce them with jobs by converting basic resources aka minerals/energy/food though ofc harvesting them directly is much cheaper. In other words you won't be stuck to lower tiers if you don't have access to strategic resources.

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Since I already own Stellaris I gave 2.2 a try. As I imagined this is a very good patch. Finally there is something interesting to do in peace time. Developing your economy is an engaging and interesting activity. You will screw everything up if you don't plan it carefully. I approve it. Ofc there are some adjustments to do but overall it's a very solid rework.

Sadly warfare and diplomacy still remain pretty weak in the game. For the former I don't see much hope given the fact that it was remade in 2.0. But hopefully diplomacy should get a revamp in 2.4 or 2.6. When it happens I think that for me there will be enough stuff to do in peace time to make me forget about the miserable flat chore that is warfare and go back actively play the game. As for now I approve the patch but I will still keep Stellaris on froze and play the other Pdx grand strat games.

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Quoting: elmapul4- are games cheaper, because epic just takes 12%? ubisoft games cost the same on uplay and steam.
yes, ubisoft had an bad time with self publishing, still they are doing it anyway, most triple A companies are doing, epic may have a chance to compete because many companies will give up leaving steam if steam change their cut, the economics of scale will not compensate the cost of self hosting

Games won't become cheaper just because market fees are lower. Digital non essential goods prices are not made taking into account fixed costs and by undercutting competition. They are sold at the highest price possible at each market. That's why prices in Russia or south America are lower and in Australia are higher. And that's why prices drop after a while: after I sold the game full price to everyone that wanted to pay that amount, I have no reason to not lower the price and sell to the people who only buys with lower prices. New copies are "produced" for free. People don't buy out of necessity so they can pass over a pricey game. But at the same time they have no alternatives (I buy apples instead of oranges) since every game is unique. Making game prices is completely different than making prices for stuff like cars or bread.

The money that developers save will be used for better and more games in case of small devs, will become revenues for larger devs.

The good about Valve was that a part of that money was redirected into innovation and openness instead of becoming pure profit.

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Am I the only one to believe this more competition thing is going all wrong?

As a consumer what I want to see is less fees and more money in the pockets of indie developers since they can only do one thing with those pennies: better and more games.

For big publishers though I don't think, as a consumer, that leaving more money in their coffers instead of valve's will translate in better gaming for me. Valve has a very good record in investing in infrastructure and innovation for the whole industry, be it VR, steamplay platform, open source infrastructure for open source OSs (I keep the plural here, just to play Epic game). Whilst for the rest it's more for allowing shareholders to 'invest" in islands as Christmas present for their children.

Yet what's going to happen now is that fees are going to be reduced for large players whilst small keep the burden o the "innovation tax".

Then, as for Valve competitors, to often their contribute to the gaming world stops to a buggy launcher with some nasty DRM at worse and no DRM at all at best. Do these "perks" really justify, as a buyer, a 12% or whatever cut on what you pay?
I'm all for competition. But what I want to see is qualified competition, not just lechers that suck out money from the industry by lowering the quality standards. I hope that Epic, if and when it establishes its store ofc, will distinguish itself from the mass and play the game right. Valve has been left alone to push the industry for to long.

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EU4 is a mature game. It doesn't need overhauls anymore, but there are ample spaces of optimizations when considering individual areas of the world. That's the reason why recent DLCs (not just immersion packs) are heavily area focused. Indeed Dharma sucks if you don't play in India but at the same time you can skip it with no real consequences.

It's worse when they make an area focused DLC and then add a global balance altering mechanic in said DLC like professionalism was in cradle of civilization. When that happens the game has to be balanced for stronger armies, but without the DLC you don't have access to this strength. Remain behind a few "mandatory DLCs" and your game experience deteriorates.

All in all the last ones, Rule Britannia, Dharma and Golden Century are just fine. They are DLC you can happily skip if you don't play that region. For Golden Century I would argue that it's only game changing if you play Portugal.

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Ok since I couldn't wrap my head around I tried to get literate about the app.

Apparently if your tv is not smart or the native app is garbage like in my Samsung case, in the post-link world you're supposed to go with an Android TV. The android app says it officially supports Steam and Xbox One S controllers but I bet it works also with all the stuff that is Android compatible (including m+k devices) as regular ones. I bet that for officially supported they mean controllers that work with steam API and give access to profiles and that kind of stuff.

On a second thought it doesn't look that bad of a decision. All the world wants to be android compatible to get in reach of the endless hordes of people playing microtransaction baked heavy farming android games out there. By jumping on android platform Valve devs should be free to spend less time on drivers (and hardware maintenance) and more on actual features which doesn't sound that bad. The Android TV itself may cost more than a link but it also includes the same features of a Chromecast, a Firestick, it's google assistant compatible and has all the android apps including games that every serious gamer should play daily like angry birds and the fans favorite Diablo Immortal. All in all it's better value I guess and much less cabling behind the TV.

Personally I'm sticking to my link until it lasts (I already have a Chromecast and since I'm not a serious gamer I don't care about angry birds or Diablo Immmortal :) ). Then again I guess privacy champions won't be happy to be forced to have a Google product spying their gaming achievements in the living rooms...

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Crap. I just finished to wire my link in my new Living Room.

So what's the alternatives supposed to be now? TV embedded apps? Honestly the link is just superior. It has all the connectivity in the world: from 3 usb ports to bluetooth with an endless list of drivers. I've got a Samsung TV. Samsung link app doesn't support xbox one S wireless controllers for instance. Or PS4 controllers. I don't like this guys, I don't like it at all.

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