Victoria 2

[Faeelin]

First impression: Upon launch, the game crashes.

Played until 1861 with Two Sicilies

Few comments:
- I like the justification of War things. makes it a bit random (infamy)
- I conquered Tunis asap. And Tunisia was 55% South Italian by 1845.  Within 6 years! lolz. The immigration is broken. or just not working properly. I understand if there ware 60% S. Italians by 1890. but within 6 years  more than a million Italians got there.
It could be also that assimilation is broken. either of the 2.
- I was a GP within a few years. (before 50s) yet its impossible to form Italy. You can't get the other states out of Austria's or France's sphere without a war. Only managed it with Lucca.
I build all their railroads and a few factories, but nope
- I like a few minor additions. But to say it was worth the €20, no not really. If the game was €40. This expansion shouldn't be worth more than €10. It doesn't add that much.

Woo?

[Cecil]

Steam dropped the ball today. I dont think 1.69 euro was the intended list price. 

[The Minsky Moment]

- I was a GP within a few years. (before 50s) yet its impossible to form Italy. You can't get the other states out of Austria's or France's sphere without a war.

Hmm . . . don't think it should be possible to form Italy without a war with Austria/

[Tamas]

Some nice features with the expansion, most notably the world economy showed no signs of imminent final collapse in the 1890s, as it used to. Also the rebel factions taking their sweet time, spreading peacefully before appearing as military units is nice, and make it feel more real. And the hunt rebel button for stacks is oh so great.
An other funny thing is that the Casus Belli system isn't really stopping the AI from some serious regular wars despite potentially fatal alliance combos. I guess they wanted an unpredictable game.

But otherwise, it feels the same game in the not so great ways. I already did my vanilla mini-modding of drastically reducing assimilation, boosting nationalist rebels (altoug both were somewhat better in AHD than vanilla), and now trying to make the springtime of nations actually trigger in Europe.

[DGuller]

Serbia, my homeland seems a lot weaker in this expansion. Why, Johan also is there a new feature that allows me to enslave a population, say if i go to war with the albanians for example.

What would Vicky forums be without Balkantards?

[Habbaku]

The guy has a point, though.  Why shouldn't we be allowed to correct one of the greatest wrongs in history by enslaving Serbia?

[Faeelin]

So there's a bit of a debate over on the paradox forums about whether it's a big deal that the game misses the Taiping Rebellion entirely; it starts in 1862, when the rebellion was pretty clearly going to lose but on its way out.

Paradox argues that it wasn't important in global history, and so isn't worth including; this seems wrong to me on several levels (It and the Nien rebellion led to the decentralization that made reform so difficult for the Qing, among other problems); but I'm curious what others thing.

Also, there are no events for the CSA upon achieving independence.

[Tamas]

*sigh*

So spotting the same retard assimilation rate (the coder of the expansion, podcat, specifically said how this is much better now), I tried to mod it seriously down like I did with vanilla. I sure hope I failed by giving a bad value or forgetting something, because by the 1890s about 60% of Austria is German, and the Balkans is about 70% full of Turks. Not sure if the Nationality mapmode was in vanilla, but it sure as hell makes the game look bad after 60 years

Really too bad because:
-the game is supposed to have multicore support so there should be no need to worry about number of pops (podcat said that much)
-with the expanded rebellion model, there would be a system to model the nationalist movements, but there is simply no pool for them after a little while

Also, in vanilla, lowering the requirement to 17% literacy made it easy to have the liberal revolution event chain start in europe, in fact it fired a bit too soon. Now it is not enough for some reason. It just wouldn't happen, period. Gotta' check what's wrong.

The economy still appears to be much better, altough I assume it must be quite hard with small nations, after everything is much more expensive.

An other plus thing is that with a slight addition to their likelihood, I saw some acceptable Redshirt rebellions in Italy. As Austria, I had to bring in my main army to defeat the largest, about 45k rebs marching on Rome. I was the one to defeat a couple of other attempts in other states as well.
Also when Two Sicilies became a GP for a while it had a very good push to SoI the Italian minors. With the 3-hurraed Germany pushing for my peeps Saxony and S. German Federation at the north, I had to retreat influence-wise from all Italian states but Tuscany to maintain my important presences.

So all in all some interesting and promising things together with some totally un-understandably stupid design decisions.
There is no doubt I will drop this game like it never existed once I get my hands on CK2, but in the meantime I will try to fix this assimilation nonsense. It might be that the fuckin' pops assimilate when they upgrade to an other type?

[DGuller]

You Balkan people really need to think about something other than population makeup in the Balkan provinces. 

[Tamas]

You Balkan people really need to think about something other than population makeup in the Balkan provinces. 

Please.

What I am thinking about, is the age of nationalism getting some, you know, nationalism. The way things stands now, the only impact nationalism has, is that every once in a while, in some very odd cases, one of them easy to defeat rebel stacks will be some kind of nationalistic pricks. And that's next to impossible unless you beef their chance of appearing up in the config files,

And even then, they are like a passing fashion as the Balkans become Turkish, the Serbs in Hungary Austrian, and India goes more English than fish and chips.

As hard it is for Paradox to understand, the key driving force behind the fuckups of this period was nationalism, not Swedish angst over lack of proper welfare.

[Fireblade]

You Balkan people really need to think about something other than population makeup in the Balkan provinces. 

As hard it is for Paradox to understand, the key driving force behind the fuckups of this period was nationalism, not Swedish angst over lack of proper welfare.

Lesz meg....

V2 is so formulaic. Unless you're trying to roleplay by emulating the GOP, your first order of business in any game is figuring out how to piss off your people enough to create a 21st century Swedish welfare state so you get full population growth. Then you wait for all your RGOs to fill up so you can at least watch your industry score soar while you wait for a CB manufacturing event or for your badboy score to drop low enough to go to war without England getting pissed off because you stole too much land. 

[Josquius]

I was just talking to a friend who did get the expansion. Turns out it is: broken.
Limited colonial wars inevitably spill out into WW1.
Which....I guess is kind of fitting of the time but...when even despite all that you're still restricted to taking a province at a time lest you manufacture multiple CBs...sounds kinda bad.
Overall he made me glad CK2 is occupying my excitement.

[Faeelin]

Too bad. There's a mod that adds a great war casus belli, which lets you annihilate certain empires if you win. A shame it's not in this.

[Solmyr]

Thinking of giving this a spin (I have a mild 19th century boner atm). Got the expansion, any mods that I absolutely need to get?

[Phillip V]

Possible Vicky 2 expansion coming: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?660800-Secret-Document-Clue-one.