Paradox Interactive - Forums

Forums

One of the key features of the Paradox gaming experience is participation in the active Paradox forums. The complex nature of the games encourage players to collaborate to improve gameplay. The forums allow players to learn from the experiences of other players. Besides strategy discussions, the forums feature active communities involved in creating mods and writing after action reports on games.

Much of the gameplay information used by the engine is contained in uncompressed text and bitmap graphic files. The ability to freely edit these files has allowed an active modding community to develop. The Paradox forum is highly active and provides a way for players and modders alike to collaborate and improve gameplay and develop complex new scenarios for each title. Svea Rike III included two user created scenarios (the unhistorical "Independent Europe Scenario", and the expanded "Alternative Grand Campaign") that came directly from forum contributors, rather than by game developers. Europa Universalis III was developed in close collaboration with experienced players of the earlier titles through discussions on the forum; the game's fourth expansion, Divine Wind, was developed after a forum poll that let fans choose which franchise they would prefer the company developing an expansion for. Paradox has also licensed the Europa game engine, which its previous-generation games are based on, to independent developers among the modding community, resulting in the release of games like Darkest Hour: A Hearts of Iron Game. Several of their more prominent games, such as Hearts of Iron III, Victoria II, and Europa Universalis III run off the in-house Clausewitz Game Engine.

After action reports, usually abbreviated as AARs on the forums, provide a way for players to discuss their own gameplay in unique ways with other players. AARs are reports written by players about their experiences with a game, ranging in style from simple presentations of the development of the game with screenshots to highly embellished character-driven stories only loosely based on the events in the game. They are generally serialized in a forum topic, with every update post corresponding to a period of gameplay, and with comments and suggestions made by readers between updates.