Victoria 3

[Syt]

Yeah, also waiting for a patch first. Tbh, I felt there was not enough foreign investment in late 1800s (e.g. England should be more active). Also power blocs didn't really expand (or new ones form eith the exception of France, but there seems to be a bug witg cohesion gain? There's a mod fixing some bugs, but it looks like a patch won't come before next week.

[Tamas]

Hotfix with like a hundred line of fixes coming tomorrow.

[Tamas]

I started a war because I had to do a diplomatic play against Prussia to keep a lobby group's IG on my side enough so I can pass a law without them radicalising.

I am sure (well, I know) there are plenty of bugs and balance issues, but this is the kind of stuff I was looking for from the game.

Now they just need to somehow better manage national minority unrest and it'll be golden.

[Tamas]

Power Blocs are ridiculous though. Austria getting blanket bonuses like -10% mortality and +10% food production just because he has like 3 Italian minors in its power bloc.

[Syt]

New dev diary: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/victoria-3-dev-diary-123-sphere-of-influence-post-release-thoughts.1691824/

[...]

However, with all that said, a release of this size and complexity will always bring with it some bugs and balance issues that we weren't able to discover and fix in time and which are now our top priority to address. When you are reading this, hotfix 1.7.1 should already have dropped as of a couple hours ago, and we are planning to follow it up with at least one more hotfix, tentatively planned to release early next week, and I'll wrap up this dev diary by listing a few select fixes that 1.7.2 will contain:

- Substantial improvements (through AI improvements and balance tweaks) to the AI's ability to execute on historical and historically plausible outcomes, particularly in nation-forming and ability to pursue Journal Entries such as the - Meiji Restoration and Tanzimat Reforms
- Setup improvements to relations and AI attitudes to more closely match history
- More aggressive colonial AI, particularly for late-game land grabbing in Africa
- Making it harder to get reparations by occupying insignificant colonies
- Fix for poor building browser performance when using scrollbar
- Improved leverage UX
- Allowing Unrecognized Major Powers to form Power Blocs
- Balancing the Great Game to be less biased towards Britain

The above is of course NOT an exhaustive list, and we are not ruling out additional hotfixes after 1.7.2 if needed - while I think we released 1.7 in a good shape, we still want to ensure that any significant new bugs and balance issues are dealt with as speedily as possible. For this reason a part of the team (myself included) will continue working for a few weeks into July (taking our vacations later in the year instead), so that we maintain the capacity to release fixes as needed.

That's all for today, but you'll be seeing me again next week as I make the customary roadmap update and tell you about some of what we have in store for 1.8, 1.9 and beyond. See you then!

And a post scriptum:

Since this dev diary was written, several more high profile issues have been identified that will be fixed for 1.7.2 and which I feel are worth mentioning (once again though, this is not an exhaustive list! There are many more fixes that aren't in either of the two lists posted coming for 1.7.2):

- Ensuring Persia/Afghanistan can properly win the Great Game
- Adjust Pacification of the Steppes to be more reasonable in its difficulty
- Fixing issues with the AI not building up its military correctly
- Fixing the issue where Treaty Ports sometimes stop functioning
- Fixing another case where autonomous investment overbuilds too much of the same building in a single state
- Fixed the issues with released countries not having properly initialized AI/investment AI and sometimes not becoming a subject when released as subject

[Tamas]

Fixing issues with the AI not building up its military correctly

This is what is really taking the wind out of my sails right now.

[Tamas]

Nice and comprehensive second hotfix has been out for a day now. I think this is a good time to (re-)pick up the game. But I'd play with low AI aggressiveness. They have made the AI want to conquer uncrecognised countries which I suspect will be useful to end up with the kind of European map-painting real history saw in this period, but it does cause Britain especially going absolutely ape with normal aggro. Low aggro feels quite nice so far.

[Syt]

 

[The Minsky Moment]

1.7 has been crashing on Steam Deck although I can run it fine through GeForce Now.

[The Minsky Moment]

Having run some test games as Japan and the US, I haven't seen that much ahistorical foreign investment spamming.  The UK starting invested in Japan ahistorically early, but it wasn't that extreme and it's not that unrealistic assuming an earlier Japan opening.  If it was Uruguay I'd feel differently.  The power bloc stuff hasn't been too game breaking either.  I still think the "statues" are stupid and the trade and military treaty one are way too OP. I'd just scrap them.  It seems like the patches have toned down some of the big reasearch and production bonuses.

The big plus of the power blocs is it really ups the importance of the diplo game, and the lobby system complements it really nicely by giving options and creating headaches.  For the first time in a Vic game, I am really feeling limited by lack of sufficient influence points.  Overall, nicely done but I would still tone down some of the bonuses.

I've never had an issue with their military changes, which I think made perfect sense for the 19th century grand strategy game. (the Vic2 system was such a horror show).  But there are still issues with fronts. Playing US in the Mexican war, my superior armies got stuck in limbo bouncing back between fronts without ever reaching them, allowing Mexico to seize parts of Colorado and start counting down war score.  Amusingly, the only way I got around it was replicating history by launching a naval invasion at Veracruz.  So I guess you could say WAD?, but no that is obviously not the appropriate or intended mechanism.

[The Minsky Moment]

Fixing issues with the AI not building up its military correctly

This is what is really taking the wind out of my sails right now.

So in the Japan game I was pleased (and yet also not so pleased) to see that while Qing maintained hordes of crap irregular infantry decades into the game, they also built out some elite armies with skirmisher tech etc that could hold their own.

[The Minsky Moment]

Military still needs a lot of work. I know Pdx is working on the naval side and the need is really urgent there.  Naval battles are basically just land battles in sea zones, with "ships" just being placeholders for packets of manpower. Under the naval invasion rules, an invasion can be blocked by a superior naval force. But as long as a country owns some land overseas or its ally does, it can transport infinite troops over any distance with no ships to speak of, and against a vastly superior naval force.  As Japan, this resulted in Austria Hungary sending vast armies to defend the Philippines. It also can create weird results given the large size of HQ areas; e.g. the entire Qing army available to assist in the defense an invasion of Taiwan despite it having no navy to speak of.

A related problem but one that impacts land battles as well is the failure to take into account reasonable logistics and supply lines. I crushed the Qing easily because my Russian ally was able to send his entire army through the vast Chinese interior, apparently tracing supply through the Gobi desert.  In another war involving the Qing, the British sent a vast army swarming around the badlands of western China, ultimately annexing most of those remote provinces for no apparent reason.

[Tamas]

Yes, very valid points.

I have been really enjoying the game (I am using the unofficial patch mod, and an AI mod which I am not sure how much effect it has), but all the improvements in other areas are kind of highlighting the points you raised.

I don't think they can be modded away either.

Apart from those points, the only major thing missing I feel is a better representation of independence movements for ethnic minorities. Currently a minority pop that is radicalised will essentially seek to better their lot by standing behind some political movement, never by striving for independence, not until a province's Turmoil reaches the very very high value of 85.

Now, that is realistic to a degree I guess - even in 1848 independence was a controversial topic among the Hungarian revolutionaries. And the fact that you get radicalisation from discrimination kind of shows that these minorities are harder to govern.

But the discrimination itself is handled in a way that totally doesn't fit countries like Austria or the Ottomans. For Austria especially, because of the citizenship laws either you discriminate everyone but South Germans, or you don't discriminate anyone. Which is ridiculous because even without legal efforts to discriminate, racism and such don't go away.

To get around this at least to a minor degree, I am trying to mod the discrimination events so they fire if a pop is non-primary not when it is discriminated. I'll need to find how to get the console out so I can force-trigger them and see if they work. I did manage to have one even trigger post-discrimination but I forgot to change the options so the event was bugged

[Syt]

An Economist Plays explaining his 1.7.5 modlist:

Not a fan of some of his mod picks (e.g. IMHO making electricity a local good instead of an Empire wide one was a great change and I'd like to keep it that way), but overall I think a decent overview of what's out there.

Still haven't started a proper 1.7 playthrough

[The Minsky Moment]

I think the concern with the local goods was concerns that colonies and peripheral areas keep having shortages.  I haven't played enough late game to see how bad that gets.  But I played a little- seems like it could be legitimate WAD.  Peripheral areas did suffer from shortages of infrastructure, energy and services during that period (and this is a problem up to today). When colonial powers had key extractive industries overseas they put real resources into building railroads, laying telegraph etc.  If the player tries to build out resources or especially industry without building out services and infrastructure in a colony or outlying province, there should be shortages.  (admittedly the RR profitability tweak may be needed)