Paradox Interactive

Paradox Interactive is a scummy publisher of video games dead set on destroying the simulation genre by any means necessary. Their primary business strategy is to churn out new versions of Nazi Germany Manager 2012 set in slightly different time periods, and use the nazi gold money they make to buy up actually successful sim/RTS game studios so they can ruin their franchises.

History

Hearts of Iron fans on their way to buy Hitler's Legacy 3

Paradox Interactive got their start in Germany in 1938 making war games for Hitler. He liked them so much that he still funds their operations to this day.

After the fall of the Third Reich, Paradox continued to make 4x games for nazis into the early 2000s. Some of their most famous nazi games are Crusader Kings, Victoria, and Hearts of Iron. These games are purchased exclusively by bronies and white supremacists.

Majesty 2

In the early 2000s, Paradox bought the rights to Majesty: Fantasy Kingdom Sim and decided to churn out the worst sequel imaginable. If you were to make a sequel to a simulation game, you would expect more features, maybe new units, or at least recording new voice lines for the characters. Fuck no, Paradox released the laziest fucking sequel you could think of. It's a worse version of Majesty in 3D with awful pathfinding, AI, and no sandbox mode. They released an expansion that let you play as a monster faction, and this actually ruins the game further by making the monsters you fight basically identical to your existing heroes. Fuck it.

Age of Wonders

Hot off the heels of ruining one popular fantasy game franchise, Paradox bought up the Age of Wonders franchise and transformed a novel hybrid of RTS and HOMM gameplay into a generic 4X game. To top it off, they decided that the AI in this game won't play under any restrictions that players have to deal with, such as requiring buildings for certain units, or taking time to build stuff. The AI can literally summon armies to fight you whenever they want. If you raid an AI opponent you are actually throwing because they don't use those resources. In combat, the AI doesn't have any limitations on spellcasting, they can use any spell they want even if they don't have points in that element. It's ridiculous, how do you fuck up this bad?

The game released with like 4 base races, and currently has 10,000 DLC packs. This will be a recurrent pattern with Paradox games.

Cities Skylines 2

This one's a doozy. Paradox bought Colossal Order, developer of Cities Skylines, one of the most beloved city simulator games. Everyone loved this game because it has a really in-depth simulation of traffic, residents, public transit, economy, work/life/entertainment, and many other detailed systems. In the sequel, Paradox decided all these things are unnecessary compared to complex shaders and highly detailed models.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of things wrong with Cities Skylines 2:

• If you are running out of money, you will receive government subsidies to support all city services. If you are doing well, you will have to pay subsidies with the rate determined by how much money you have. This effectively means every player has about $10,000 at all times.
• People do not have to travel to their destination if they think it will take too long. They can choose to teleport if traffic is too bad or there's no direct route.
• All work shifts are synchronized. Shifts rotate at 9AM and 6PM. At these times, every employed citizen will path to their workplace or home. This causes a massive stutter and unusual traffic patterns.
• Cars follow lanes of roads arbitrarily, and will not anticipate needing to make a turn or exit. Citizens will ignore turning restrictions 100% of the time, and pull a Miami Slide at every highway exit.
• Citizens use public transportation as a leisure activity only. Citizens won't use public transit to path to a destination. Citizens will get off at a random stop and use a taxi to return home. Citizens do not use public transit to get to work or home.
• Citizens do not budget for rent, and will empty their wallets as soon as they're paid, meaning that living conditions anywhere in the city are too expensive. This was allegedly fixed in a patch, but still happens anyway.
• Citizens don't need to visit commercial properties to purchase virtual goods such as leisure and entertainment. This causes citizens to purchase unlimited virtual goods every tick from the comfort of their homes. This causes property value of commercial properties to skyrocket, and citizen wealth to plummet.
• Processed materials produced in your city are not used by businesses within your city. As soon as they are produced, they teleport to an outside connection. If a business inside your city requires processed materials, they will purchase and truck them in from an outside connection.
• As a result of materials not being simulated, raw materials are instantly processed and sold for their maximum value. This makes goods produced directly from raw materials, such as concrete, especially profitable. This causes property value of industrial properties to skyrocket.
• Skyrocketing property values cause businesses to become abandoned and prevent new buildings from being constructed, ever. Deadzones appear in high traffic areas because the land value is infinite.
• Citizens multiply the cost of housing by the distance to their workplace from the unit when determining whether to move in to a property. This is disproportionally affected by the altitude of the unit off the ground, making low density, single-floor homes significantly more enticing than high-density, low-rent apartments that locate their "units" at the top of the building. Citizens do not include their current pay in this calculation.
• Citizens pay for trash by unit collected, meaning they pay less the better your trash service is. Additionally, the new zoning system allows you to construct infinitely large landfills at no extra cost. This causes landfills to return 100x their upkeep in service profits.
• Building upgrades cannot be removed once placed. A patch allowed upgrades to be removed, but this only works for upgrades that are added to the perimeter of a building. Upgrades applied to the building itself are visually removed, but continue to operate as if the upgrade was installed.
• Taxi stands added to public transit stations will cause citizens to bunch up and call thousands of taxis to the building. Citizens only board taxis one at a time, meaning this creates an endless traffic loop.
• The new road placement tools have multiple edge cases related to creating 0-length roads and intersections that can produce unsolvable junctions and require a lot of fiddling to build even simple intersections.
• Road placement will not attempt to place or move pillars for elevated roads and tracks and still requires manual adjustment, which is sometimes impossible due to the above bezier curve edge cases.
• Building level is based on funds put into the building, subtracted from the building's owner. This means that industrial properties max out quickly, single family homes upgrade steadily, and commercial and high density residential buildings almost never level up.
• Restricted roads, such as bus-only and pedestrian roads, do not do anything and are effectively aesthetic.
• Cars will enter full parking lots repeatedly, creating massive traffic jams.

Also here's some annoying things that aren't game breaking or anything but are strange decisions:

• Dogs are immortal and will continue to live on even after their owners die. They will occupy residential properties and continue their owner's routines after death. Dogs will ride public transit alone, for free, and consume space in trains and busses. Dogs can even call taxis to taxi stands alone.
• There's only around 60 total zoned buildings in the base game, meaning most cities will be made up of a handful of different buildings.
• Train and subway tracks don't produce noise pollution, but tram tracks do.
• Hotels don't appear to function properly at all. A single low density hotel will block any other hotels from being constructed in the city, regardless of tourism.
• Fuel is always in high demand, because citizens drive everywhere. Nearly all low density commercial space will be used for gas stations.
• 3D spatial audio on airplanes is not properly balanced or dopplered, causing a massively loud, distorted roar when airplanes are on screen.

Prison Architect 2

It's never fucking coming out lmao. They delayed it after how badly Cities Skylines 2 was received. It is going to be the same DLC heavy mess as post-Paradox Prison Architect 1.