Eh, just like the Intel vulnerabilities lately, this is hardly surprising. CPUs nowadays are incredibly complicated systems, and engineers have a limited timeframe to design and test them. Once they're out in the world, however, anyone can spend however much time they like looking for unforeseen interactions and exploits. Of course people are going to find vulnerabilities and exploits in them; it'd be surprising if they didn't.

It's like Hal Clement, the sci-fi author said: an author only has so long to write a book, readers have all the time in the world after it's been published to look for errors. :)

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPNobody is saying there shouldn't be any DLCs, but there is a sweet spot here. 2-4, I'd say. Not 10-99+.
After that, a complete game package just becomes too expensive to be reasonable. And unfortunately, some of those DLCs really are mandatory if you don't want a severely limited experience. Not only limited in flavor content, mind you, but actual functionality.

I think we're coming at this from very different viewpoints. Let me use an analogy here:

Michelangelo took four years to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and whatever your personal feelings on it it's widely considered a masterpiece of art. Now imagine if the Pope came in after one year and was like: "Michelangelo, stop! One year is enough for any painting! There's no way additional time spent developing it can possibly be worth the increased cost of paying you for that long!" We'd be deprived of the final finished work due to an arbitrary restriction on the amount of time an artist is allowed to work on their product, or an arbitrary limit on how much they can sell their work for. People are allowed to sell artwork for whatever price they want, as long as someone is willing pay it, and this allows people to make a living doing it because it takes time to make art and people need money to support themselves; why shouldn't I be allowed to pay whatever price I like for a video game, if I likewise deem it worth the price?

Now, even though I quite like it, I'm not claiming EU 4 is "the Sistine Chapel ceiling of games." But I do think it's very good and still has potential for improvement, which is why your attitude personally distresses me so much: I see it as potentially cutting off something artistic before it's reached completion, for what is, to me, a completely arbitrary limit to how much games should cost or how long developers should be allowed to work on them.

I can agree with you that development probably shouldn't be stretched out indefinitely; at some point you'd like the team to wrap it up, and five or so years later come out with EU 5. But given that we've now finally reached the end of CK 2's lifespan, I think we've seen how long Paradox plans to support the games in their current system. I highly suspect that Emperor stands to EU 4 in much the same relation as Holy Fury did to CK 2. Over a year between expansions, lots of quality of life improvements, the two games are at about the same age…we might get one or two small DLCs after this (like Rule Britannia/Third Rome/Golden Century size), or maybe one last normal one (people have requested a south-east Asia overhaul for a long time and it's one of the last places not majorly touched), but I'd be surprised if we see any beyond that.

Quoting: TheSHEEEPThere's also the question how other developers manage to support their games for years just as well - without requiring a yearly/bi-yearly payment of 20€.

Different development team size, perhaps? If Eric Barrone makes $5 million (just throwing out numbers) off of Stardew Valley he can probably live of it for the rest of his natural life and continue making new updates for free. If the EU 4 team makes that much money, it'll probably run the team for, I dunno, a couple of years? (Taking into account salaries for all the people involved, rent and utilities for the whole company, etc.)

Plus, EU4 is undoubtedly a very complex game (both in the sense of the engine, and in all its interconnected systems); supporting it requires pretty skilled programmers/scripters/game designers/etc., so likely has commensurately higher costs than for a simpler game.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPThe game was released 7 years ago. S-E-V-E-N!!!
Any DLC at this point, no matter if it is actually a good one or not, is milking.
When you need to spend hundreds of <insert your currency> to get a complete game, something is very, very, very wrong.

They should have been working on EU5 since years ago. Instead we got Rome... and we all know how that went.

Whereas spending hundreds of <insert your currency> on EU5, EU6, and EU7 instead is somehow better…how, exactly? :wink: I'd personally rather pay hundreds for one truly great game refined over seven years than a few mediocre ones churned out and abandoned after a year or two.

And boy oh boy, quite apart from the DLC I can hardly wait for all the quality-of-life changes in the free patch that have been mentioned in dev diaries! :woot: Some long-standing issues that are finally being resolved, and ones I didn't even know I wanted.

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Hopefully this expansion/patch really fleshes out the whole diplomacy system a bit more, which for me at this point is one of the few things still lacking in Stellaris. Like, if I could have the breadth of options that EU4 has for diplomacy between countries, that'd already be a big step forward. It sounds promising from following the dev diaries, and even if I don't use the new federations the new origins system sounds pretty fun (some of the new origins, especially!).

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1.5 already? I haven't even managed to experience half the content from the last update yet! :D

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Quoting: MicromegasI think the soundtrack of "Faster than Light" is an amazing piece of art with it's careful sound variations of simple tunes but it's maybe not for everyone.

Also: Valve should add the soundtrack feature to their mobile app to listen to them on the go without hassle.

I knew I was forgetting something! :D

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Thanks for the tip on how to view screenshots <3 —I don't do it often, but I did notice that the button wasn't working recently.

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Seasons After Fall has a seriously amazing soundtrack, done almost entirely by a string quartet utilizing all kinds of "extended technique" to get some really interesting and unusual sounds out of the instruments. Can highly recommend as a lover of both classical music and video game soundtracks. :D

Stardew Valley's is also really good. Surviving Mars was surprisingly good for listening in the background while being creative (and I love how almost all the tracks are named after chemical elements or substances). Thomas Was Alone has some haunting and really enjoyable bits. I like Paradox grand strategy game soundtracks typically as well, pretty much anything by Andreas Waldetoft. The Team Fortress 2 soundtrack has some great work, though I wish they'd update it with the music from Jungle Inferno. Oh yeah, the Octodad: Dadliest Catch soundtrack has some interesting stuff including remixes of songs that aren't found in-game.

I've got soundtracks for several other games, but these are the ones I typically tend to listen to more often.

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Wow, I got incredibly lucky and unlocked five ships in my first three runs since I started playing again, including the Crystal Cruiser via event chain. :D In that run I completely took the Flagship apart with a boarding crew of four Mantises and two Crystals, and no cloaking to boot!

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Nice! LMDE was the first distro I used when I got into using Linux at home (instead of at work), and while I migrated to Debian a year later I think I still have it on a partition. (Makes a good backup when I mess up with my primary OS…:whistle: ) And yeah, I picked Cinnamon coming from Windows as a very similar replacement, and I've been satisfied with it enough that I've never even really looked into other options. Still always nice to get improvements for it, of course! :)

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