izigame.me

I will be honest, I really, really used to like Suzerain
The game used to be an great political text game/simulator. It was difficult, but not overwhelmingly difficult, allowing you to actually get better and it gave you a great experience in booth main game and Rizia DLC
Then came the 3.1 and everything went to shit
The devs obsessions with "Balancing" the game leaded to situation where it's comically unbalanced. For example: Taxation used to cost 2 Budget for Reduction of large corporation and 1 for small and medium corporations, meaning that overall tax decrease costs 3 Budget which is a lot, an equivalent to megaproject price, but managebale with good planning. Now however, an overall decrease costs over 7 Budget, in other words an ENTIRETY of your starting Budget money, with 4 Budget for Large and 3 Budget for small and medium companies, you basically can never afford lowering taxes now
Or the EPA issue. Nobody picked anything bellow 49% EPA because 20% and 10% EPA were just bad options with no benefits whatsover. Instead of actually making other options viable and interesting, Torpor made so that if you dare to pick 49% EPA on planned economy then you will get mixed economy (Which is considered a failure) no matter what you do. No thought put here whatsover, just punnishing the player for picking a good option instead of actually making other options viable
Speaking of Planned economy, this approach became next to impossible now. It arleady costed you a lot of money to pull it off, but it was manageable before 3.1. Now however, you will spend three times amount of money you used to for no reason. Meanwhile, market economy which arleady was pretty easy to recover economy and gain budget with, got even easier and gives you even more budget. Like what the heck ? That's the opposite of balancing things ! Torpor took more or less balanced choice beetwen planned economy and market one and then broke it by making planned economy next to impossible while market economy floods you with money now. They literally broke the balance !
And then there's Rizia... There's too much to say about Rizia to be honest. Ever since the relase, Torpor was constantly nerfing Rizia for no reason. Rizia was supposed to be an rich and stable kingdom, but now it fells to be even worse than Sordland. For comparisment: Rizia, an supposedly rich country found on gold extraction, by default starts with only 5 Budget. Sordland, an country in middle of economical recession and on verge of economic deppresion, starts with 7. Or see how you manage threats in booth stories: In sordland, you get briefed about issue that arises or you get clues about it through foreshaddowing and are given some field to manevour around, allowing you to mess few times but still prevail in the end. In Rizia, things just happen for no reason and no warning every single turn and unless you perfectly solved the issue before it even arrisen, it's game over for you
And by now there's nothing you can learn from loosing the game. There are soo many variables and events game never explains to you that you never know what went wrong and are left with no clue what you should do now
So you naturally go find a guide, which basically became an dependancy now. Instead of giving player more freedom and ways to play the game, Torpor's balancing made so that you are basically forced to play the game the optimised way and with guide in your hand, which sucked the fun away from the game
So what Torpor did with all that ? Did they listened to community feedback ? Did they rollbacked their "balancing" ? Did they finally realised that there are correct and wrong options in this game ? Of course not ! Instead, they gave us difficulty levels to "Fix" things over...
... And I will tell you, they fixed nothing. They very concept is wild and doesn't make sense: An difficulty level in a game that's primary an political text based game. There's no difficulty here, just correct decision making and prior knowledge about the game and how it works. But to be fair, Torpor's effort destroyed that aspect, Suzerain became resource management game first and its story and message became not important anymore
All those things I mentioned before ? Still there, absolutely no change, except you can now start with 2 Budget more or less and have slightly moddified Public opinion. That's it, difficulty levels actively give nothing of value to the game, if you wanted more startin budget, you could have just moddified your save
But the worst part ? Community is buying all that, chewing on the bone they were given with no self-reflection on how it's nothing whatsover
So to sum it up: Torpor decided to "Fix" the issue that didn't existed, Procceded to break completely balanced elements of the game and instead of actually doing something to actually fix their game now, procceded to give us difficulty levels that changed absolutely nothign
Torpor, I have enough of you. This thing here is an abusive relationship I do not intend to be part of, even if you rollback your changes and go away with your horrible "Balancing" policy, me and many other people aren't comming back as you fundamentally lost our trust with what you have done
Goodbye. Thanks for creating a great game, but you keep ruining it for no reason