Apart from the fact that you throw together developer and publisher. Let's just mention that the Crusader Kings 2 DLC "Sword of Islam" was fully integrated via a free patch. Only if you actually wanted to play Muslim leader, you had to buy the DLC.

Your rant sounds like it was written in 2002.

Wow, there's not one thing in that entire rant that's true. How funny.

You're free not to like Paradox games, but reducing Europa Universalis or Hearts of Iron to "Risk mods" is just laughable.
They're completely different games, even to each other, and yes they're actually quite original considering they're the only company I know of that tries to make reasonably accurate historical strategy games.

They sell expansions that are big game improvements, yes, but hardly essential.
The base Crusader Kings 2 for instance, is perfectly playable without any of the DLC, they've already released 6 free patches for it, including one that adds most of the features of the Sword of Islam DLC.

Also, I own just about every Paradox games, and while they're usually quite buggy at release they support their games well enough that they become almost bug-free in the end.

Except for EU3: Divine Wind, that is still unplayable for me... Every god damned war turns into medieval World War, because of cascading alliances. They fixed it only a little bit with patches.

Now "it's not a bug, it's a feature" :P

Have you tried the beta patches? My last game I had no visible problems with the old cascading alliances.

But I was playing China, so I wasn't really in the thick of it...

They changed it that only major powers can now cascade.

Well, maybe it is realistic, that declaring a war against Great Britian will turn out to be huge, paneuropean conflict, but I don't really like it :-/

Try to use the latest beta patch and set the AI at low aggressiveness in the options when you start a game. That should fix it.
I've played a game as Holland recently and the wars stayed reasonable, at least until the rise of Protestantism when there were a few wholesale religion wars (which is historical after all).

But I agree that they went a bit overboard with that whole world war thing, obviously they didn't quite anticipate some of the consequences of the changes in the whole alliance thing and countries joining wars thing.
I mean, they were obviously trying to make wars like the 30-year war possible, but those should be really rare.

Was just going to say the same -- since I installed the beta patches it's been like a whole new game :)
Dude, we used to own half the planet. Of course it's realistic :)