Victoria 3

[Valmy]

One of my biggest criticisms (and I even told Martin directly) is that there DEFINITELY needs to be WAY more international pressure if you decide to go communist or especially anarchist. Currently, it's almost none. I was anarchist Switzerland and had +100 relations with monarchist France.

Like in my mind, everyone should try to kill you immediately. Maybe that's a bit further than they want to go, but I'd love a game rule at least that's like "International Shit Fit Reaction to Communism: Lenient / Default / Realistic." At least if the country in question has a Powerful or Influential Industrialist and/or Landowners IG. Your relations should go to like -50 for council republic, -100 for Anarchism. Might fuck around and write a mod.

I mean, one of my gripes with Victoria 2 was that the cleanest, universal, and really quite easy, way to dominance was to beeline toward a modern Scandinavian-style social democracy. I don't dispute the superiority of such a system, but rather the fact that there were a lot of countries in the 19th and early 20th century, where if you tried to do that, they would had fallen apart (Austria-Hungary, Russia, to name a couple) or would had seen a lot of upheaval from vested interests and the like both internally and externally. Whereas in the game you just had to decide to go for it and it was fine.

To Swedes there are clearly only two ways of doing things. The Swedish way and the wrong way.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Totally agree with Minsky about the generals. But this seems easy to fix to me; generals could turn up with their reputation with their real stats being revealed by experience.

It would be both hilarious and realistic to slowly realise that the military genius with the impressive beard was really a bit useless 

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Totally agree with Minsky about the generals. But this seems easy to fix to me; generals could turn up with their reputation with their real stats being revealed by experience.

It would be both hilarious and realistic to slowly realise that the military genius with the impressive beard was really a bit useless 

maybe a bit early for a Putin simulator?

[Syt]

It is a very ambitious game; really looking forward to playing it but also expecting problems of one sort or another.

I'll give them my money from the get-go just for trying 

That's the thing, though, isn't it? No one but them is really trying to do something similar in scope. AGEOD were about the only ones with Vainglory of Nations, and we know how that went. It's why I'm back to try and learn HoI4, because while there's plenty of tactical, strategic or operational WW2 games of varying complexity, from Panzer General to GG's War in the East and War in the Pacific, there's nothing really like HoI that tries to cover pretty much all aspects. The closest are maybe the Making History games and the Strategic Command ones, with the latter very much being in the beer & pretzels category (I like them, but they have nowhere near the attempt at scope as HoI).

It's also why, for all its flaws I still enjoy Stellaris, because it's the most flexible "throw every sci-fi concept into it" space 4X sandbox. Incidentally, it's also one of the few Paradox games I usually play with mods that increase the variety of stuff (more events, more planet modifiers, more planet types, etc.) and I cna just enjoy RPing some weird empire without going too crazy on the min/max (i.e. my main gripe with EU4 ).

[Richard Hakluyt]

I tend to semi-RP and avoid min/max too. With the state of the AIs it is best not to do too much work studying the minutiae. So in HOI4 I don't optimise the combat width of my divisions and so on. A flaw in EUIV is that the min/max is a bit too obvious 

The Victoria series have an extra layer compared to EU series. So in EUIV you end up putting all the buildings in a fishing province that will fit as you may as well. In Victoria 3 you might not develop a fishing industry because, with luck, unemployment will drive the workers into the steel industry next door 

[Josquius]

More than any of the other paradox  games bar CK I do wonder whether Victoria suffers a bit much from being a map game.

I struggle to think of another good way to do it than with the map as the central screen.

[Syt]

Wel, there's the Democracy series, but it's entirely focused on internal politics, not external ones (and is, ultimately a puzzle of which numbers to increase/decrease to make others go up or down).

[Syt]

Someone posted this on Reddit under "Literally unplayable:"

[Habbaku]

Bowing to modernism, how droll.

[Syt]

The evolution of cover art from V1 => V3, with Revolution still being the worst of them all (including all major DLC).

[Alcibiades]

CDKeys somehow has a 31% discount now. 

https://www.cdkeys.com/victoria-3-pc-steam

Caved and bought it, thanks for the link.

[Alcibiades]

It's also why, for all its flaws I still enjoy Stellaris, because it's the most flexible "throw every sci-fi concept into it" space 4X sandbox. Incidentally, it's also one of the few Paradox games I usually play with mods that increase the variety of stuff (more events, more planet modifiers, more planet types, etc.) and I cna just enjoy RPing some weird empire without going too crazy on the min/max (i.e. my main gripe with EU4 ).

Take a look at Distant Worlds franchise (the original is great...distant worlds 2 is still a bit rough around the edges but will get there, eventually.)  A much deeper and better game than Stellaris in my opinion, and the economy aspect is like comparing little league with professional sports.

[Syt]

I've played a lot of Distant Worlds, from before it came onto Steam. It's very good, but compared to Stellaris it's severely lacking in flavor (and Universe's UI doesn't scale well in 4K ). DW2 doesn't seem to have caught up to what DW:U was yet, so I'm waiting for patches. DW may be the better strategy game, mechanically, but its immersion factor is fairly low for me, compared to Stellaris or even the GalCiv series.

I think it comes down to different foci: DW tries to be more of an Empire sim, Stellaris a space opera story sandbox; both have their place, and I will play one or the other depending on mood, just how I might sometimes play Strategic Command,, and sometimes John Tiller games.

[Tamas]

If you want to listen to Proud Bavarian go on about his hands-on experience with Victoria 3 for almost two hours, you can do it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywyhcFNEUzw&t=4s

[jimmy olsen]

Looks good

https://www.pcgamer.com/creating-utopias-and-dystopias-by-gaslight-in-victoria-3/