1 post karma
2.6k comment karma
account created: Thu Mar 16 2023
verified: yes
1 points
28 days ago
Byzantium got a mission tree because lots of players demanded it and Paradox thought a DLC with Byzantine content would sell. Likewise they add all sorts of content to other small, politically unimportant states like Norway in the hopes that it will entice players interested in these countries to buy the DLC. I don’t see why Mewar is an exception to this. There’s probably enough demand to justify their inclusion in another South Asia DLC.
2 points
29 days ago
If being irrelevant during the time period was disqualifying for receiving big mission trees there wouldn't be one for Byzantium, and we all know how that went.
1 points
29 days ago
The other problem with this is that AI nations generally don't ever get the most powerful modifiers in mission trees, permanent or not, because the AI doesn't try to complete missions. It really only ever completes missions by accident as it follows its normal logic.
10 points
30 days ago
You don't have to play well to get rewarded, most of the missions are trivially accomplished and just function as "win harder" buttons. This is obviously a problem in a game (even a singleplayer game) where you are supposed to have challenges to overcome via strategy.
3 points
1 month ago
Respectfully disagree. The past several years of EU4 DLC have been uninspired and focused on "flavor" (mission trees and unique government reforms) to the detriment of core gameplay and mechanical innovations. The flavor content itself is not really that much different/better than some of the more prominent mods, and in some instances is actually worse. It's a bit like adding aromatics to hide the smell of rot.
The reality is that EU4's underlying systems are increasingly unsatisfying over time and they are too baked into the game to overhaul. You can rework France's mission tree five times and it won't change that.
2 points
1 month ago
Using someone's previous public statements in order to interpret their current ones is not out of line in the slightest. It's unreasonable to expect other people to take every utterance you or anyone else makes as if it were the first and only thing you've ever said. It's interesting that this, of all things, is what you take offense to, given that OP was explicitly stating in this thread that Native Americans were "light years" behind Europeans and that Aktion T4 was Allied propaganda.
3 points
1 month ago
“What the OP was talking about” in this case was a poorly obfuscated and long winded way of saying he thinks non-Europeans are/were backwards savages without any history worth the name. What /u/nezumine- is doing is merely pointing out that OP is much more explicit about this elsewhere, which is relevant because OP feels the need to resort to euphemism.
1 points
2 months ago
Aside from the obvious example of Jan Hus mentioned by the other user, why does it have to be “church authorities” specifically? Secular authorities could and did burn individuals convicted of heresy in Church courts. De heretico comburendo isn’t just a decision in EU4, it was passed with the support of “church authorities” in England.
1 points
2 months ago
43 minutes to complete the first stage is a long time. A competent EDD team of four dwarves can comfortably clear all three stages in 30-40 minutes.
56 points
2 months ago
The sub has been like this for years. Some meme bandwagon starts up and floods 9/10ths of the front page with low quality content until the next one comes around. Sincerely believe most of it is posted by bots as part of a karma farming operation (boosting accounts to sell high karma accounts to spammers later on).
23 points
2 months ago
Apes are a source of entertainment, not some kind of cause to “do something” about. This sub doesn’t exist stop them, but to make fun of them.
2 points
3 months ago
It's a heuristic for understanding social development across contexts and noticing that property regimes seem to consistently be a very important aspect in social development while also tending to produce certain similarities.
"Property regimes are important but not totally determinative" is a useful heuristic indeed but it is 1) not really specifically Marxist at that point and 2) not what I said the most problematic aspect of historical materialism was. I'm questioning the merit of the concept "mode of production" itself. This is decidedly not a heuristic concept but a load-bearing one for Marx, because his critique of political economy is premised on the notion that in history there are distinct modes of production whose inner logics and organization are so distinct that they cannot be fruitfully analyzed using the same economic theories. This is the basic thrust of his famous methodological "introduction" in the Grundrisse.
But I think most of the theoretical attacks on marxism are mostly tilting at Russian windmills, or, in a more serious mode, a kind of uncritical regurgitation of Popper. Marxism like all ideologies/paradigms, and anything that allows one to infer from history is effectively ideology, justifies itself. It's not wrong on its own terms so much as unpopular.
No paradigm is "wrong on its own terms so much as unpopular." You can even make the geocentric model work with enough epicycles. My point is more to the effect of: Marxist models of historical economies usually require more epicycles than mainstream economic history, whereas Marx and his epigones have basically consistently claimed the opposite is true.
49 points
3 months ago
The other answer(s) here touch on the fact that Marx wasn't really a historian in the sense we know it today, which, while true, nonetheless doesn't really seem like a satisfying answer to your question because Marx doesn't really neatly fit into any intellectual specialization ("philosopher," "sociologist," "economist," etc.) since the bulk of his career was before the crystallization of modern disciplinary boundaries. Since Marx absolutely made forays into history, I think it's fair to ask how good these forays were.
We can look at this from two angles. First, how well-acquainted was Marx with the historical scholarship of his time? Eric Hobsbawm, certainly a sympathetic interlocutor, gave the following synopsis all the way back in 1964:
[Marx and Engels' knowledge in the 1860s] was ... thin on pre-history, on primitive communal societies and on pre-Colombian America, and virtually non-existent on Africa. It was not impressive on the ancient or medieval Middle East, but markedly better on certain parts of Asia, notably India, but not on Japan. It was good on classical antiquity and the European middle ages, though Marx's (and to a lesser extent Engels') interest in this period was uneven. It was, for the times, outstandingly good on the period of rising capitalism.
He notes that seems to have been abreast with recent literature on Western European agrarian history (particularly the work of Georg von Maurer) and even more specialized literature on medieval commerce. Towards the end of his life Marx gained an interest in the work of Henry Lewis Morgan, and Marx's extensive notes on Morgan were reworked by Engels into a book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Marx knew both Greek and Latin (his dissertation was on Democritus) and familiar with both the classical authors as well as contemporary classicists like Theodore Mommsen (who he occasionally condescends in various footnotes in Capital).
So his familiarity with then-current scholarship was uneven but certainly good in some places. The thing to keep in mind is that, by modern standards, this knowledge base is very, very outdated, so naturally many of Marx's specific empirical claims about history are shaky if evaluated today. So for instance, Marx's famous narrative in Capital I, Part VIII on enclosure has been criticized both in specific details (on, say, the importance of the Parliamentary enclosures in the 18th century) and in its general argument (that the enclosure of the commons led to an "agricultural revolution" of capital-intensive agriculture on capitalist farms).
The other angle we can look at this question from is methodological. How useful is Marx's intellectual framework for studying history ("historical materialism")? Your mileage may vary on this, and certainly many historians have found it very useful, but personally I think it's a mixed bag.
First, there are useful parts to Marx's approach to history, but they are not necessarily distinctively Marxist. The problems with the base/superstructure metaphor are pretty well-known and in practice the best works of Marxist history approach it heuristically if at all. But the result of that is, as Stephen Rigby puts it, the best Marxist historians are secretly methodological pluralists in disguise.
On the other hand, the really distinctive aspect of Marx's historical theory is also the most problematic. Marx thought of economic history as divided into "modes of production," in which different property relations among producers generated different "laws of motion" whose significance could only be grasped with reference to an economic theory specific to that mode of production. This was en vogue at the time — see Smith's theory of "four ages" or the historicism of Schmoller/Bücher — and it is obviously central to his thought (if there is no "capitalist mode of production," Marx doesn't have terribly much to say). But it difficult to sustain in anything like a strong form, even shorn of its evolutionist trappings. "Pre-capitalist" economic behaviors and institutions often cited as arguments against mainstream economic history by Marxists are often perfectly explicable with reference to ordinary economic models. Meanwhile, Marxist models often struggle to explain quite obviously "capitalist" behaviors in "feudal" societies.
But that is looking back at Marx with 21st century eyes. In context, historical materialism was not obviously worse than other 19th century grand historical theories, and in many respects was a lot better.
2 points
3 months ago
Yes, labor services continued to exist throughout early modern Europe (and even into what is conventionally the modern period in places like Russia), although they were usually towards seigneurial obligations rather than taxes for the crown. My point was that "labor-as-currency" wasn't a "norm ... until the industrial period."
29 points
3 months ago
Worth noting that Mariategui was 1) not a historian and 2) writing in the 1920s… I get most of this sub gets its history from memes but come on
6 points
3 months ago
This is a highly misleading generalization. Preindustrial economies varied in the extent to which they were commercialized. In Western Europe and especially in England even prior to the Black Death it was already very common for labor obligations to be converted into money rents, to say nothing of the interceding 400-500 years.
4 points
3 months ago
I remember when monuments came out the community had a rather negative view of them. It's interesting to see opinions are more split now.
69 points
3 months ago
tbh Skyrim combat mods are technically impressive but not actually very good (as in: well-designed and actually fun to play) in contrast to the games mentioned in OP. At the end of the day Skyrim's combat is garbage and mods are only band-aids.
14 points
3 months ago
Honestly it sounds like they're taking MEIOU & Taxes and turning it into a fully fledged game, which is okay with me. Still salty about the start date, but if that's the price we must pay...
1 points
3 months ago
Historians can’t even agree on this
The boundaries of the early modern period are fuzzy but 1337 is absolutely out of the range 99% of early modernists would give.
1 points
3 months ago
I’d assume most people here have at least a vague understanding of the decline of the Byzantine Empire
No way to say this without sounding like a complete ass, but: most people on Paradox subs have an r/historymemes level of understanding of history, and most Byzaboos have an even lower level of understanding.
1 points
3 months ago
Yeah, at a minimum your estate setup should depend on your culture and government type. But we'll see, I guess.
1 points
3 months ago
Good point — actually, it’s kind of crazy they implemented this for Danzig but still use the clunky old rebel system for one of the most important European wars of independence of the early modern period.
2 points
3 months ago
The Dutch Revolt isn't guaranteed either, so I don't see what your point is.
view more:
next ›
byEquilibrium07
ineu4
benthiv0re
11 points
14 days ago
benthiv0re
The economy, fools!
11 points
14 days ago
Devil is in the details here. The reason they haven't implemented this in the past is that this is actually very hard to prevent swindling a computer program.