Victoria 3

[The Minsky Moment]

Started up USA

Rural Folk IG has Jackson as leader is in the "Progressive Party" but ruling in coalition with the Democratic Party which has the Southern Planters IG.    Jackson is Bigoted and Experienced Diplomat.

Whig Party consists of Intelligentsia IG - mostly clerks, acadmeics, engineers, some educated "aristocrats"

So overall it kind of fits, not as bad as I feared. 

Industrialists are in the "Free Trade Party" and are staunchly free trade.  That makes more sense that I would have thought because the pop tab indicates that this group mostly consists of merchants (trade center capitalists) in New York and New Orleans.  However it also includes New England mill owners who should be more protectionist.

[The Minsky Moment]

Gonna break for a while.
Playing this game is going to take for a while as I keep getting distracted by looking at stuff in the info tabs.

[Syt]

Well, spent a good 6 hours as Belgium in the tutorial scenario. Granted, a good hour was just going through all the screens, with my brain struggling to take it all in. And browsing the gorgeous map.

Iron was pretty much a luxury good for much of the run so far, but Wallonia is now basically one big iron pit.

I have (with help from the British) secured a treaty port from Dahomey. And, 12 years in, I'm finally running a budget surplus again (and thanks, France, for taking on my debt ). My government is run by Industrialists, Intelligentsia and Workers' Unions. I've managed to marginalize the Catholic Church for now and kick them out of my universities and bureaucracy. I'm ranked #10 in the world. Though 10% of my population has been radicalized. Should maybe not rock the boat too much and pay attention to whether or not changes in my factories kick people to the curb. I'm struggling to get my chemical plants productive. I guess I'll have to add more farms.

Main complaint so far: event sounds interrupting the game soundtrack. Would go on playing, but it's 12:30 am, and I should get some sleep for now.

[crazy canuck]

spent a little while playing the tutorial scenario as Sweden - gotta be OP right?

right off the bat, this looks like exactly the game I hoped it would be.

But to be honest, I haven't actually "played" the game much, just looking through everything I can do and all the information the game gives is worth the price of admission. 

[Syt]

Andy's Take has created a 2 hour tutorial video:

[Syt]

The POTUS in my game in 1848.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elie_A._F._La_Vallette

(The age is wrong, but I think history-inspired characters have certain spawn chances and may adjust some numbers/stats?)

[Jacob]

Man... you guys are seriously tempting me to get this game....

[The Minsky Moment]

Got up to early 1842 as USA. 
Texas statehood is pretty straightforward; they just need to survive their war and it appears there is a capture Santa Ana event to help them.  Then you just need to get relations up and they join.

US has a good gold reserve and good starting tech but like everywhere else you need to build out a bunch of stuff to avoid shortages - PA iron mines is an early priority.  I've been very reactive, just addressing actual and prospective shortages.  I invested a lot in construction early to keep up a good production flow - maybe did too much on that.  I'm sure my production and trade play is suboptimal but it's a learning game, right?

Didn't realize until 1841 that if I want the Mexican lands, I need to research Nationalism to trigger the Manifest Destiny options.  Oops.

In politics, the game followed history - the Democrats swept to a big victory in 1836, but then the Whigs edged them out in 1840 (with coalition of Intelligentsia and Evangelicals - Rurual Folk defected from the Democrat coalition when Andrew Jackson died).  Less historically, Abe Lincoln died after a vicious caning from Calhoun.  The Whig victory also gave enough votes to attempt an early abolition of slavery, now standing at at over 60% enact chance.   (Henry Clay went abolitionist and leads the Whigs)
Will see how that goes...

[Syt]

Ok, here's an interesting one.

During the first few years, the Petite Bourgeoisie (with the Catholic Church) were a thorn in my side when it came to reforms, so I suppressed them for a while till I could remove them from government. At the time they were eager to join the Catholic Party.

I checked again now (the Catholic Party being in opposition) and see that they now want to join the Liberal Party. What happened? Their stances haven't changed - they still are strongly in favor of Theocracy or Monarchy governments. However, their current leader is a nihilist who opposes both and is in favor of full separation of church and state. He's also a Political Operator, adding 5% to their strength - without him they would be marginalized, actually.

Not sure if this is WAD, but it creates a scenario where an interest group can get "captured" by someone who acts against their interests, so you can utilize their political clout for a while.

[The Brain]

How is its treatment of the bakufu? UwU

[Tamas]

I am playing very reactively so far but political and economic systems are looking great so far. In diplomacy the diplomatic plays are a great idea, and they salvage that area of the game a bit because otherwise it looks very meh.

I haven't been in a war but as an observer my only problem with it is the AI's tendency to keep fighting pointless wars when its clear they have lost and the war goals ain't that important anyhow. But I realise it must be hard to teach an AI when something like this is key or not.

If I want to mention one possible concern on the politics side is a bit of a worry of nudging things toward where the player wants them to go. What I mean is, I really wanted public schools so I started enacting the law even though it had just 21% of chance. Sure it took a while but eventually I had an event that gave me a choice of "do you want +20% chance and a small boost to the IG you want strong anyhow, or some other effect you really don't care about?" and then a similar one not very long after.

I realise it could had been a fluke but I hope the game won't make it so that low-chance laws get help from events if you want to pass them, because otherwise this seems like a neat system - you need to nudge your society toward views and fitting IGs toward strength if you want a given set of laws and if you cannot manage than you are stuck with conditions your population wants.

[Syt]

I've been thinking about that too, and I think there's trade offs.

1. You may have to create the majority in government first, i.e. have IGs with the necessary clout in power. Doesn't help if you have 70% approval for a law, but they're in opposition (their votes don't count). Or you may have to boost them first or suppress opponents.
2. With low probability of success you will eventually get the law. However, it will take longer than if you had a strong majority for it, so that's time you're not enacting other laws, or have to spend resources on massaging the clout of your IGs so that your majority holds and not too many opponents get radicalized to an unacceptable degree.

[Syt]

I need to use trade more. As Belgium I joined the British market early (you start with an agreement that you can expand). But when goods are scarce or expensive my immediate go to move is "build production for that" instead of checking trade first. Which means I currently have something like 2 pages of build orders for my 2 main provinces and my treaty port in Africa.

[Tamas]

I've been thinking about that too, and I think there's trade offs.

1. You may have to create the majority in government first, i.e. have IGs with the necessary clout in power. Doesn't help if you have 70% approval for a law, but they're in opposition (their votes don't count). Or you may have to boost them first or suppress opponents.
2. With low probability of success you will eventually get the law. However, it will take longer than if you had a strong majority for it, so that's time you're not enacting other laws, or have to spend resources on massaging the clout of your IGs so that your majority holds and not too many opponents get radicalized to an unacceptable degree.

Yeah, good points, will need to play more to get a better feel for it.

I was sad to hear in OPB's review on Youtube that he has never once seen the Ottoman Empire fall apart from nationalist movements, that was a problem with Victoria 2 as well. Then again I guess it can be argued that historically it was external forces that allowed the Balkan nations to get independent and grow strong enough to then partially dismantle the Ottomans.

[Syt]

Yeah, saw that too, but I hope he's right that its a matter of balancing and not a systemic problem.

I watched some of the release stream yesterday, and they mentioned that balancing things can be a bit of a pendulum swinging back and forth (over-correcting can be a real issue). To be fair, considering what they attempted I'm impressed that the game runs at all with some semblance of reasonable gameplay; I can't imagine what kind of nightmare this was to build and get up and running

One things this game desperately needs, though, is more filters and sortable slists for ... pretty much everything. But especially POPs. Let me filter for ones not meeting their Standard of Living expectations. For religion, groups they support, employment status (including unemployed). With their focus on making the game easy to interact with (glad they brought over the right-click functionality for pretty much anything from CK3, Imperator etc.), this seems like a really weird omission, unless the expectation is for the player to deal with the high level overviews and not go through stuff on a pop by pop basis.