The Official Paradox Games Tier List

Responding to popular demand with an overview of the games that define a shockingly important genre.

About one month ago, I broke from my usual routine of writing about current events to publish something a little bit different. Drawing from my lived experience as a Zoomer who has played grand strategy games for more than a decade, I wrote a history of my wallet’s greatest enemy, Paradox Interactive, and the massive, accidental influence it has had on American politics. Although I had some hopes that it would get some interest from outside of my usual audience, I was quickly blown away by how much attention it received. As things stand, it is ranked by Substack as the fifth biggest article I have ever published and is my first article to be translated to a foreign language.

I believe that the sheer degree of attention this article received speaks to something larger: that the Paradox community has been woefully underserved by its content creators. Despite the fact that the company’s games are some of the most popular titles in the gaming world right now, it is quite hard to find many good videos or articles about them. As things stand, the vast majority of videos and writing about the games exist in an awful middle-ground dead zone: both too obtuse for outsiders and too low-brow and repetitive for those who are deeply engaged with the games.

I hope that the two articles I published last week helped provide something better than that, and I’d like to continue on them here. So, without further ado, here’s my official ranking of the modern era of grand strategy gaming, starting with the games that are best worth skipping and ending with the ones that you should consider essential purchases.

F Tier

N/A

To start off, I want to use the F Tier to illustrate what I consider to be the most remarkable fact about the past 15 years of titles from Paradox’s Big Four franchises: none of them are outright terrible. While the company is no stranger to striking out in the genre—they went through with not one but two ultimately-failed attempts at creating new franchises in the 2010s alone—they’ve never truly screwed up with their long-running franchises since I’ve been playing their games. Given how vastly their different tiles have differed in design philosophy, commercial intent, and the very aspects of history that they have attempted to represent, this is a massive achievement, especially in light of the fact that the company was essentially inventing the entire genre wholecloth over this timespan.

So, with this said, what actually makes a good Paradox game? To my mind, it is how much it succeeds in two central categories: a), how much fun it is to play, and b), how well it represents the history it is attempting to portray. The best succeed at both, the good succeed at one and are at least serviceable in the other, and the worst either go too far in one direction or simply fail at both. As for what the politics of each game might be, I don’t think it really matters. There are good Paradox games that portray history in a heavily abstracted and even conservative fashion, just as there are more mediocre ones that present history in a way I personally agree with. In my mind, those of us on the left shouldn’t be put off at all by the former. In fact, just by playing them and keeping a bit of distance, you can get a firsthand view of what makes the right so compelling to people while actually having fun—an incredibly important political experience that is otherwise impossible to find nowadays.

Unfortunately, even this isn’t the case for the company’s most popular game, which is their most conservative by a considerable margin, nearly unsalvageable from a gameplay perspective, and incredibly expensive.

D Tier

Hearts of Iron IV (2016)

Time Period: 1936-1948

Gameplay Focus: Wargaming