Stellaris give away

I feel like i'm talking to someone who's very clearly clueless on grand strategy games and has only played the few most recent games. I'm only annoyed because of you're incredibly broad "GRAND STRATEGY GAMES" genre as a whole, because you quite clearly haven't played enough of it. Certain GS games are primarily but some are not, like the HOI series (6 games lol), or even March of the Eagles.

>Why would there be a million nonsensical, non-beneficial larp paths in HOI4 for completely irrelevant countries if it was meant to be a competitive multiplayer game?

Because people complained there weren't any in hoi3, which to me seems very obvious you haven't played. In fact, it was ironically practically impossible to change your ideology unless you were in multiplayer.

>These games originated as digitized tabletop board games played against the computer with the later addition of multiplayer capability on top.

Like the only PDS game that didn't have multiplayer on launch was svea rike in 1997, and I'm pretty confident you didn't play svea rike since it only released in scandinavia. As I mentioned, Paradox had their own matchmaking service since 2000.

>player counts show that the vast majority of Paradox game players have no interest in multiplayer.

I would disagree purely in the basis that multiplayer mods are literally some of the most subscribed in the steam workshop, (total war and blackice within the 2 first pages) Redditors aren't the majority of gsg*mers.

I'm not saying that there aren't a lot of single players, I'm just saying that that the larpers aren't the majority of engagement and you obviously speak about the GSG genre too broadly when you've maybe played like 4 games from it. Most larpers don't even buy the DLC, since the DLC is there to sell the mechanics (i.e. multiplayer) and not the trees.