In fact it's made to fool the player into believing there's a simulation where there isn't one.

That's pretty much Paradox games in a nutshell lol, it's one of the reasons why I got extremely fed up with Stellaris and that's normally the sort of game that would be absolutely my thing and I did buy the base game legally back in the day. I mean the games already have a reputation on steam so I don't really need to post that much about their DLC practices, but once you strip down things to the core gameplay you realise there's very little content there despite how many DLCs they pump out frequently.

One thing I found amusing about Stellaris, when I started poking at the 'AI' I realised it had the exact same behaviour as the modern Total War games. Where the code was constantly scanning your systems to find out which one had the least amount of garrisoned fleets in it and it would immediately make a bee-line for that as part of it's 'tactical decision making' so that meant that you had to perfectly micro-manage especially as your empire got larger to make sure that they couldn't slip one past you because they will since there's very little in the way of an early warning you can do.

Sometimes I hate knowing code, because it makes the design flaws of games so much more obvious. The joke is as well because of the way the A* Algorithms they're inevitably using works it's very easy to exploit the pathfinding and make them derp out and I did this in Warhammer once and it was incredibly amusing. To a lesser extent you can do this for example when it comes to games like Skyrim too by positioning yourself in front of a table and wiggle about to bork the NPC pathfinding. They just don't know how to design pathfinding properly anymore and that doesn't really require coding knowledge just a functioning brain.

In fact it's made to fool the player into believing there's a simulation where there isn't one.

That's pretty much Paradox games in a nutshell lol, it's one of the reasons why I got extremely fed up with Stellaris and that's normally the sort of game that would be absolutely my thing and I did buy the base game legally back in the day. I mean the games already have a reputation on steam so I don't really need to post that much about their DLC practices, but once you strip down things to the core gameplay you realise there's very little content there despite how many DLCs they pump out frequently.

One thing I found amusing about Stellaris, when I started poking at the 'AI' I realised it had the exact same behaviour as the modern Total War games. Where the code was constantly scanning your systems to find out which one had the least amount of garrisoned fleets in it and it would immediately make a bee-line for that as part of it's 'tactical decision making' so that meant that you had to perfectly micro-manage especially as your empire got larger to make sure that they couldn't slip one past you because they will since there's very little in the way of an early warning you can do.

Sometimes I hate knowing code, because it makes the design flaws of games so much more obvious. The joke is as well because of the way the A* Algorithms they're inevitably using works it's very easy to exploit the pathfinding and make them derp out and I did this in Warhammer once and it was incredibly amusing. To a lesser extent you can do this for example when it comes to games like Skyrim too by positioning yourself in front of a table and wiggle about to bork the NPC pathfinding. They just don't know how to design pathfinding properly anymore and that doesn't really require coding knowledge just a functioning brain.