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From 120's Archives » Tanksy reviews: Parabox Interactive DLC
Alright fellow proletariat, this is Tanksy, the Tankie Banksy and people have been asking me to write up a review of the post fall of the Veil DLCs that Parabox has been putting out. While I would never endorse supporting the bourgeoisie oppressors that are Parabox, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Though I will still endorse [MEMETIC HAZARD REMOVED].
Heirs Of Alexander
Yeah no, still no updates for you. Suck it, Romeaboos.
The Crusaders 3
Cults and Wizards
Starting off strong, we have Cults and Wizards. This was a major expansion centered focused on having your character join one of the many secret societies and cults from around the time. Due to the whole "Truce of God" thing at the time, the usage of thaumic power in warfare was banned, though that did not actually stop anyone.
This essentially meant that there was a very complicated and interesting minigame of keeping your usage of magic secret while abusing it as much as possible. Expanding your secret society provided a lot of very powerful bonuses while also increasing the possibility of being discovered. The addition of other characters engaging in schemes that you don't know about also enhanced the nuance and flavor.
The Nälkä
Whoa boy, did this one spark up controversy. Parabox decided to include the lumpenproletariat that was the Sarkic (I will refer to them via the proper name they had under the USSR) areas of modern day Russia, RIP Soviet Union, you will not be forgotten. Parabox, in their desire to be "cool", decided to have the most extreme version of the Sarkics possible.
The DLC is lots of fun and has interesting ways to alter your character's flesh with none of the religion involved, as it should be. Thing is the Sarkics didn't think of it that way and raised a massive fuss over their dumb philosophy. To them, I say grow up.
Retrocausal Empires
Next, we have a significant let down in Retrocausal Empires. This expansion is Daevite themed, which, well, has some issues for a history game. A lot of the flavour events are cool and interesting, and do tell some very cool stories. The problem is the retrocausal shifts mechanic. The mechanic effectively allowed the Daevites to steal land from your kingdom at random based off of "retroactive shifts". These shifts have a tendency to completely screw up carefully developed plans by doing stupid things like shuffling alliances in addition to the whole stealing land thing. The fact that it was buggy as hell at launch did not help. Even with the Golden Horde hotfix added as a mechanic to help combat the Daeva retro shift, it's still quite unplayable most of the time due to buggy diplomacy with the Khan.
I recommend turning this DLC off when you can.
Nameless expansion
This expansion got its name stolen by an angry Fae. Given that this DLC is about the Fae, you can guess how well liked it was among said Fae.
As it turns out, brilliantly! The Fae that stole the very well received content's name was in fact an ex-Foundation member who was very pissed about his old org being shut down down for "crimes against humanity" (Those bunch of monarchist pricks).
Anyway, not much to say here. The Bread and Circuses provided by our corporate overlords adds in a few Fae Nexuses like Hy-Brasil and Esterberg as well as some unique government types. If you want to play as the Fae, then go ahead, I guess.
It is very important to mention Long Live the Queen, a very popular mod centered around the time of the Fae Empire, so pick it up if you want that.
Universal Europe 4
Yeah, they didn't make anything here and said that they wanted to make UE5, which launched in a disappointing state with complaints about there not being enough content.
Steam and Steal 3
Secret Societies
The big selling point of this one was the introduction of the Occult Groups. These act like corporations providing various bonuses to your nation, however unlike corporations, these guys have much stronger opinions on how your nation should be run (the fact that corporations have no political aims in this game is a clear sign of The Man influencing the game that the artists wanted to make). Said occult groups can either be free and effectively act as minor off map powers or bound making them subservient to the state. These Societies can be either state-formed, or arise based on various conditions and tend to act more like The Crusaders vassals than anything else. There is a disappointing lack of being able to shoot everyone involved in a society.
Also the "National Normalcy Preservation Group defects to the Foundation" event sucks hard. You build a nice subservient group and then they just bugger off.
Nexuses were also added, though these are frankly half baked. They are small states where you can build special industries with some restricted modifiers like no migration. These states are in your market but you don't control them and can't invade them. These Nexuses tend to be where you can find the newly added Fae and Yeren. While these do have some interesting applications that mods like OPH's Victoria Tweaks mod adds, the AI has zero idea how to actually build the useful buildings inside these things, making the whole thing useless.
Mechanically, this is considered to be a very good expansion, however, there are two major problems: Firstly, this game treated the Church of the Broken God and the Sarkics like magical cults akin to the Children of the Scarlet King which sparked a lot of controversy. The other issue is that this game manages to completely ignore the Foundation's genocide of the Fae and pretends like the whole thing doesn't exist, like Hitler's genocide of the Slavs.
This DLC is strongly recommended, unless you hate Parabox with the intensity of a thousand burning suns for misrepresenting your stupid opiate of the masses. I don't know, ask your non-existent god to fix it.
The GOAT.
The Great Occult War
The Sixth Occult War and its consequences….
The idea behind this DLC was to basically let you play out the 6th Occult War and the many minor occult wars that happened during the period. Upside, this update finally introduced limited and colonial wars. Downside, damn near every system is barely functioning and is complete jank.
While the 6th Occult War was known for being a highly chaotic affair with no fixed front lines and no one knowing WTF was going on, the Steam and Steal version of it is a highly-ordered battle between specific states with well-defined front lines, because the S&S3 engine cannot do anything nuanced with warfare…
The continued usage of the front-line mechanics does produce some really ahistorical occult wars, though now teleporting armies can be justified as aportation. The bigger problem is that these wars are kinda completely pointless. Winning them nets you a tiny amount of prestige and may transfer an occult org but they are more likely going to cause one of your orgs to defect to the Foundation.
In short, pointless wars that are jank and rely entirely on dicerolls as opposed to any strategy.
Journey to the Center of the Earth
This expansion added in Druv'tuul, the vast underground city of the Yeren. Without this DLC, they simply don't exist. Now, there are some complications as basically nothing happened in Druv'tuul during the long 19th century, so basically everything interesting is alt history. This does mean that if you are playing anyone other than Druv'tuul, the addition of this tag does nothing but add in a shitton of lag.
On the other hand, Druv'tuul has a very different economy to the rest of the world and managing that is really fun. The Great Work journal entry is really cool, and if you want to do the only proper thing and chop off the king's head, there are some fantastic ways to do that. Of course, if you do decide to go alt hist, you can actually interact with the rest of the world.
Verdict: Only buy it if you want to play Druv'tuul or if you want to convert your computer into more of a space heater. Otherwise, it is a waste of electricity. If you want to pointlessly burn energy because you hate the environment, try Bitcoin instead.
Iron Hearts 4
Race for Solomon's Gate
This was Parabox's first post Veil DLC, and it shows. There are basically no new mechanics in this expansion and a bunch of flavour that doesn't actually meaningfully change the game. While playing through this is fun once, it loses its luster very fast. Most players hated this particular expansion for being a lazy cash grab (as opposed to everything else the gaming industry makes which is low-effort to medium-effort cash grabs).
Normally I would advise people to skip this DLC, however Parabox deviously put in the reworked German focus tree into this pack, making it a must buy for anyone wanting to properly make Germany the Kommunistischer Staat it was meant to be. Social Democrats remain a stain on society at large.
Verdict: Buy it if you want a good German focus tree, but make sure to download the "no 7th Occult War" mod after your first play-through, unless you are one of those weirdo TNO players who refuse to read a book unless there was a map to stare at in the background. Those people liked it.
Behind the Veil
Here, Parabox actually decided to fix the problems with Race for Solomon's Gate and decided to actually include mechanics! The core was another map layer for anomalous divisions, with Ways acting as a totally different map topology, effectively allowing you to fight both the regular war as well as the occult wars.
The problem is the preservation score system. In game, there are certain actions you could take that weaken the Veil for various advantages, with a weaker Veil causing more and more sporadic problems. Then, when you hit 100% Veil failure, everyone gets a game over. This was not a good mechanic in general and required far too many multiplayer house rules.
Of course, without the DLC, you were stuck with Veil preserving options, so ehhhh.
In short: While this update added a lot of very cool mechanics, the actual DLC content was kinda nothing. Ways and Veil degradation is kinda ehh.
Gotta kill those Nazis.
Anomalous escalation
This is the first occult DLC that actually worked for this game. Parabox decided that they actually wanted players to have fun with their wizards, so they decided to let you actually do a full wizard WW2 for once. Essentially, as soon as the Veil breaks, you get a whole bunch of new magic techs you can throw into your units.
Parabox did do a great job at making the magic feel actually magical as opposed to just being +10% soft attack. Total breakdown actually makes you feel like the war has fundamentally changed. The significant modding support added also helped really give a lot of mods their own flavour.
In particular, Equestria at war now basically depends on this DLC for all of its pony murdering needs (Stalliongrad rework when?).
Xenocidus
Flesh Reborn
Parabox finally did something right here and added actually interesting genetic engineering. In comparison to their work with the Daevites in the Crusaders, Parabox actually did some research! While this did make biological ascension totally broken, the integration of Sarkic flesh crafting was done really well.
There is a bit of an issue that Parabox completely reworked how pops work again… making everything worse for no reason, again. TL;DR, worse than Megacorp.
Memetics
Well, this was a very interesting one. While this is an outsourced DLC to Quintessence games, they still did a good job. Memetics was a species pack for beings that exist entirely as memes. The pictures were kinda weird and for some reason there is far too much fivefold symmetry. Quintessence did go and add a bunch of moderately interesting species and empire options, as far as I can remember. The antimemetic cloaks were a completely useless addition that acted like regular cloaking except different for no reason.
Of course, the most fun part of this DLC was the many, many new and interesting anomalies, both memetic and antimemetic. Some even required researching new levels of mnestics to unlock! The new precursor chain where you investigate a civilization destroyed by a hyper virulent meme was also quite interesting.
Is it any good? Who cares! The GOC shut the whole thing down for "dangerous memetic influence". Bunch of Liberal Fascist pricks.
Ortothans
After Flesh Reborn did such a good job being "respectful" to the Sarkics, Ortothans manages to completely misread the whole damn thing. They added in a cool new origin based around them, which to put it in one way, set half the internet on fire.
The whole blood sacrifice mechanic was not well received, despite being really dynamic and interesting. The first contact bonuses were quite flavourful as well.
The pattern screamers were so poorly implemented that they somehow managed to actually summon the damn things. The GOC is not even sure how they managed to do that!
Buggy mess all around, you can probably skip this one.
Summary
Go burn down a Walmart instead of staring at map games.
Do it.
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