14 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 25.7 ms ] thread
What's a Paradox Game Converter?
Paradox publishes many grand strategy games that focus upon different eras and regions. These programs appear to convert the game save files between different titles so people can play megacampaigns. I don't know what this actually looks like since it's the first time I've heard of it, but it sounds like an interesting concept.
Kinda makes me wonder what an equivalent save-file quine would be. A multi-game playthrough where you always finish with the same score, use the previous save to start the next game, and finally produce the original save-file by completing the last game and converting back to the first?
That doesn't quite apply here, because the games cover different (but overlapping and consecutive) time periods. So you take a world shaped by the alternate medieval history of your Crusader Kings playthrough, run it through the converter and load it as a Europa Universalis game, and carry it forward to the modern day in Victoria and Hearts of Iron.

There's not a reasonable way to go back and say "after the second world war, it's the year 867 again, and the world operates under feudal politics."

Maybe if we add an option in Stellaris to bomb a planet back to the Stone Age? Or Iron Age would be more useful.
Well, there is the "Outside Context" achievement in Stellaris that might work for something like that: "Invade pre-FTL Earth while it is in the midst of a world war."
I think it's bugged currently, but "Armageddon Bombardment" is a thing. It turns the planet (after several years) into a tomb world.
> bugged currently

Yep, sounds like a Paradox game.

Play strategy games in historic order; at the conclusion of a game, export the game state for import into the next one.

• Imperator (antiquity)

• Crusader Kings 2/3 (middle ages)

• Europa Universalis 4 (renaissance/early modernity)

• Victoria 2 (modernity/Great War)

• Hearts of Iron 4 (World War 2/Cold War)

• Stellaris (galaxy colonisation)

Example videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfYx9rQgpqU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj3UqbhHckE

Is it a requisite that all games must run on the Clausewitz engine, for a converter to be technically feasible ?
not necessarily if u can find a way to put the data u extract into another game then it's >feasible.

in pdx games all the data about the history of the world is stored in a save game file. this includes tags(countries), province development/population, technology, etc. how u would say 1 Econ development in eu4 is x tax base in some other gsg is the sort of question u would have to answer

No, but the similarity of the data structures and game concepts between games makes it significantly easier.

I did a bit of work on the vic2 to hoi4 convertor, it reads state from your save file and rebuilds the world in the next game to match. You could read the save file from any conceptually similar game and make it rebuild the world to match, it would just be a lot of work.