Victoria 3

[Crazy_Ivan80]

now that's a special military operation...

[Syt]

September 1858 - the USA descends into Civil War. But Slavery was abolished, so what are they fighting over?

The "Revolutionary Confederate States" (Rural Folk and American Evangelicals fighting the Intelligentsia) want to move:
Right of Assembly => Censorship
Public School => Private School
Propertied Women => Legal Guardianship

 

[Razgovory]

The rising against the liberal media has begun.

[Syt]

I said before, but I wish countries were less passive. I'm happy that war is not the main focus, but I think it's overcorrecting. I wish that e.g. countries would go after homelands of their primary culture. If Italy is united, they should start going after the Italian homelands held by Austria (or whoever, for that matter).

And with pan-nationalism, it should create an incentive for right wing governments to liberate/grab/puppet territories of "adjacent" cultures, e.g. Russians for other Slavs, Germans for other Germanic cultures - though this might be hard to balance against liberty desire of "smaller" nations.

[Syt]

I was trying out the Great Rework mod:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2880441881

It's basically an algamation of mods, incorporating a bunch of tweaks/changes from other mods and also adding their own spin.

Overally, I think it's one of the better attempts, though I'm not on board with all their changes. I'm not sure how I feel about splitting some factories (e.g. fertilizer and explosives) - I kinda get the change (because having enough explosives late game is a struggle with vanilla fertilizer factories), but I'm also thinking it's more a way of bypassing a gameplay limitation to allow better min/maxing. Unsure yet where I come down on this - having separate factories makes sense, and having the balance of production handled via production methods feels like a gamey abstraction, but removing this restriction it makes it feel a bit too easy, maybe?

There's also added laws - e.g. centralization, or how officer commissions are gained (purchase, aristocrats only etc.) which seem good additions.

There's borderline cheat buttons (e.g. transferring states to/from your subjects) but on the whole it seems like a better thought out attempt at reworking the game.

However, there seems to be some issue with some countries, though. I noticed in one game the USA had Mexico on the ropes and then white peaced out, taking no territory. I reloaded and checked - they had mobilized all troops and went bankrupt, causing them to white peace. In another game I noticed they (and the split off CSA) had 0 construction sectors, while GB and France had close to 100, and Russia and Austria had more than that even.

I ran a few test games, and it seems that the USA somehow keeps falling into a bankruptcy spiral from which it doesn't recover. Haven't done much analysis on it yet, but it seems odd. I tried disabling all other mods, but same result. Guess it's back to playing Anbeeld only (at least it doesn't crash most countries' economies, and also gets around the current vanilla AI removing all its ports ...).

(On the plus side, it makes AI more active internationally - saw in one game France taking Navarra, Austria unifying Germany without Prussia, Romania unifying ...).

(Meanwhile I tried playing Greece - joined French market to aid my economy - and because they said "Protectorate or else!" ... within 20 years my population went from 1M to about 350k because jobs in France and its colonies were so much better )

[Zanza]

Currently playing a game as Spain. I enjoy it as Spain has potential, but is not overwhelming at the start. So far I took North Morocco and started some colonies.

I finally found time to continue this game.

It's late 1850s and I start running out of peasants, but my economy has almost reached the top economies. I guess I have to use more of the "green" production methods going forward to free workers for further expansion.

As far as map painting goes, I have outright conquered Uruguay and puppeted Chile, Venezuela and Colombia. Also conquered most of Morrocco and built random colonies all over Africa and Oceania.

I could also easily liberalize Spain within two decades. I still have a monarchy with oligarch power structure. But other than that, I passed laws for freedom of conscience, free assembly, etc.

I do enjoy the game, but selecting the next things to build is quite micro intensive at this point. Also the UX is missing some info. It is hard to see some stats on all states, e.g. free peasants, unemployed, migration, tax and infra capacity.  That would be useful to make the micro more user friendly. 

[Syt]

For the UI there's a number of mods that make info more easily available.

E.g. there's this suite of overhauled outliner items with more information: https://steamcommunity.com/id/kevni92/myworkshopfiles/?appid=529340

And there's this building list that shows you how many peasants/unemployed and free infrastructure are in a state, making it a lot easier to place buildings: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2883109872&searchtext=

While we're at it, this one adds more key data to the top bar (prestige, troops, infamy, convoys ...): https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2888391145&searchtext=

There's a bunch more, but I feel these already make things considerably easier.

(This might be the first Paradox title where a big chunk of the modding community is focusing on UI overhauls rather than gameplay changes )

[Zanza]

I guess I have to try that AI mod next. By the mid 1860s, the Spanish economy has surpassed all other great powers (Qing is still slightly ahead).

Infamy decay is fairly slow when map painting, but so far no one intervened in any of my diplo plays.

Colonization is too fast - as usual in Paradox games. There seems to be no cost or anything to it either?

[Syt]

Yeah, Anbeeld's mod is pretty good. It has a few settings in games rules that lets you tweak it a bit. Most crucially, it serves as a workaround for the current (1.1.2) AI's tendency for UK and other coastal nations to first go crazy on ports and then dismantling them all (which sucks for the British market members, obviously ... ).

Colonization has few downsides at the moment. Actually, it becomes only a downside if you incorporate the states, because your admin cost goes up, and - depending on citizenship laws etc. - you might enfranchise people who you don't want to vote and whose wages you'd like to keep low. The extra tax income may or may not be worth it.

[Zanza]

It is late 1860s in my game now and I have additionally puppeted Argentina. When I had a play to conquer the last Maroccan state, Russia intervened on their side, I swayed UK to mine. And then Morocco just backed down (like the three times before when I demanded one of their states). Threaten War almost never works in EU4, bit in Vic3 it is quite common for minors to give in. So my colonial empire grows.

Meanwhile my economy has grown a lot, but I have trouble with e.g. coal as so much is exported. I wonder if concluding multiple trade agreements actually helps me.

[Syt]

Dev diaries will return this week. Sneak peak at the new trade screen from Martin on Twitter:



In a recent game I had the US go to war with Mexico in the 1860s, trying to get Nevada, Utah, Arizona, California, New Mexico and Chihuahua. They were helped by Britain, Russia helped Mexico. The US managed to occupy 80% of their war goals, Britain kicked Russia. Russia and Mexico were at 0 war support, GB and US at 20 or 30-something.

And then they just white peaced.

I checked afterwards - I thought the US or GB were running into brankruptcy or something, but no - healthy economy, and in the green in income, no significant amount of radicals or anything. 

[Tamas]

I am like a broken clock I know but they desperately need to focus on the diplo and peace AI. They have a pretty good (if with issues) internal politics and economics engines linked up to a workable diplomatic system which is effectively broken because the AI is too retarded to use it. I am not even asking it to produce historical results, just plausibly rational ones, like Italy going after the Austrian provinces in, you know, Italy, instead of going into total war with America and losing hundreds of thousands of people over ending slavery in some obscure African country.

[Syt]

The Great Rework received an update. It includes more scripting/railroading of AI for historical results (AI also gets decisions to just add railroads to get market access in all states where it's lacking, same for admin buildings ...).

It adds the Morgenröte mod, too, which adds archaeology and astronomy. As part of the rise of print (or whatever the mod is called), it adds a number of books written in the era to a few countries (great powers, mostly) that you can select in the game rules to be just flavor, give prestige or have "special effects." The books are tied to fixed dates - which sucks, would rather have certain books (e.g. Mein Kampf or Uncle Tom's Cabin) be contingent on specific parameters.

Anyways, gave it a try and ... ugh. In 1839, one month already takes about 40 seconds at speed 5, or 8-10 minutes per year. Don't want to think about what that looks like in 1870 or 1910


Saw this thread on the forums. Now, I don't fully agree with this take (and Martin acknowledged a number of issues - though in recent weeks it was only Johan posting from Paradox on the Victoria 3 forums ... ), but I can also kinda see where they're coming from. Tbh, I'm very much in the "wait for more patches" camp for now. Though at 300+ hours I can't say I didn't get my money's worth out of this.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/i-am-no-longer-asking-for-anything-to-actually-matter.1565018/

So when Victoria 3 came out, I pretty much abandoned any Vicky 3 communities, partially out of fatigue from having absolutely no indication that the devs were willing to acknowledge any problems at all. I think it's pretty obvious that on release, the problem with the game was that it didn't work at all (I.E. navies being practically nonexistent, the game crashing all the time, generals becoming unusable, etc.), and right now, the problem with the game is that performance tanks beyond belief at around halfway through the game to the point where just about nobody wants to play past 1880.

But these are solvable problems, assuming the devs even know they exist, which to be fair, I can understand if you have doubts that anyone on the dev team has ever played Victoria 3 given the fact that they seemed unaware of the most obvious bugs imaginable that anyone playing the game would notice, such as eternally dead navies, missing generals, a quarter of the pop types just not engaging in politics ever unless they were in trade centers, or even down to the fact that one of the devs in the discord was unaware Farmers existed in Victoria 3 a few days prior to release. But they've slowly been working through these bugs.

I think more damning is the fact that nothing really seems to matter ever. Elections don't matter, votes have a pretty minor effect on legitimacy and seem to be distributed on a practically random basis, with massive swings between parties for no particular reason, and often a decent portion of the IGs simply sit out and don't even run for election in the first place. Culture doesn't matter, just click "multiculturalism" in 1850 and you're done with that entire mechanic. Religion doesn't matter, just click "Total separation" and you're done with that entire mechanic. Religious institutions like charity hospitals and religious schools have no point because there are blatantly better versions, so even locking those behind non-separation laws is pointless.

Alliances don't matter, the AI acts completely randomly and will pretty much never honor any agreements, and even if they did, most of the time they're too stupid to send troops to your fronts, and even if they did, most of the time they're too stupid to know when to attack or not, and will lose your land without any input from you. Diplomacy in general doesn't matter because the AI has such a great malus to every diplomatic action that you are pretty much out of luck unless you want to ask to become a protectorate. The difference between being a great power or a minor unrecognized basically doesn't exist, because it affects incredibly little, and infamy scaling is so off-the-wall that the game considers it equally scary for you to take West Java from the Dutch East Indies as it does for you to take London from the UK.

Colonization mechanics don't really matter, because you just want to start an uprising and annex the natives through war rather than through colonizing (I forgot this was even a thing, because I've been playing with a mod that removes native uprisings for so long). Naval barely seems to matter even when they're working, because the AI doesn't seem to even recognize it's getting blockaded, and it doesn't affect war support except in the most roundabout way by maybe causing an increase in radicals which might affect the ticking war support by, I dunno, 0.08.

Vassalizing other powers doesn't seem to matter, because they are under no obligation to be useful to you at all, generally existing only to consume your electricity and clothes, and not help you in any wars at all or produce any sort of working economy for you to extract money or resources from. Because of this, liberating subjects from your enemies doesn't seem to make any difference at all either.

As for country-specific content, it seems almost completely pointless. I have, in around 120 hours of playtime, never once seen China collapse, Japan modernize, Germany form, the Suez or Panama Canal get built, or America manifest destiny, unless I was specifically the one instigating it. And even so, I still have never seen China collapse, despite actively trying to make it collapse as Japan by disrupting the Chinese economy to cause radicals (Of which there were quite literally hundreds of millions, who still never caused a civil war), so I don't even know what that mechanic looks like. To Paradox's credit, I have seen Austria-Hungary form twice, and the American civil war has happened two or three times--but in such a hilariously stupid fashion that it barely resembles even an attempt at depicting the civil war, usually being over the issue of something like agrarianism vs interventionism, with both sides supporting slavery. I've never seen Australia form, I've only seen Canada once, and Italy has only ever been formed by Two Sicilies.

Half of the wargoals seem pointless too. "Regime change" either does nothing at all, or appears to change laws completely randomly: As a constitutional monarchy in Austria, with universal suffrage, protected speech, franchised women, etc., all the liberal laws accessible to me in 1860, I have invaded Russia with the Regime Change casus belli. The only thing that changed was Russia went from Landed Voting to Autocracy, and Agrarianism to Interventionism. I was Laissez Faire, for the record.

The "liberate country" wargoal rarely works, too. If you contain any land which counts as a cultural homeland for the culture you're releasing, you can't do it, so as Austria I could never liberate Ukraine to create a buffer state, for instance. Which isn't the worst thing in the universe, I suppose, but it was particularly frustrating in my game as Siam where I came to the realization that you literally cannot disband the East India Company because the current war system has absolutely no method of doing so. There is no way to liberate countries in 80% of the Raj's territory, and even if you annex the entire subcontinent and try to release it, your only option is to release a couple OPMs and then release the British Raj, which still contains pretty much the entire coastline and a good amount of the interior, and is still--infuriatingly--English. So essentially there is nothing to do about the Raj unless you want to annex the entire subcontinent.

The war system in general utterly fails at its designed goal, too. It is just as finnicky and demanding as ever. Depending on the country I'm playing and the war I'm in, I am constantly, incessantly having to order my generals around, because the front will consistently break into multiple small fronts, which will either result in my general teleporting halfway around the world to where he's not needed at all, or insisting on taking a small inaccessible pocket of territory that is undefended, yet he still somehow only captures one province every two weeks, while the enemy spearheads towards my capital. Speaking of capitals, the fact that so many wargoals require the occupation of a specific state in order to win the war, makes the inability to direct where your generals advance infuriating. If you're not going to let us direct our generals to specific states, I don't know why some of the wargoals seem to require occupation of the capital, and half of the others require occupation of specific 'goal' states. This isn't even to get into how opaque the naval system is, and how many clicks it requires to get any scraps of information at all on how the war at sea is going--not that you need to, since the war at sea is completely pointless and only exists to service naval invasions against the specific states you need to win, which again makes the inability to direct your generals completely pointless.

The layout and infrastructure of your country is pretty much pointless, given that the only thing that matters is access to the capital, which can be gained just by making railroads in Iowa and then trekking across the vast barren wastelands of the Great Lakes to New York somehow. Oh, Britain mismanaged its convoys, and you can't connect from Nova Scotia to London? Now the entire rail system of Canada is useless, none of the Canadian provinces can trade with each other, and Canada can't trade with the US. Let's also not forget how building social services, industry, infrastructure, and even the population of your states is entirely pointless, because eventually a series of disasters will strike, which will take 10% of your weekly income, no matter how much income you're making or what was in the state. Oh yeah, that typhoon in the Ryukyu Islands? That requires exactly 10% of the income of the entire Japanese Empire for the next two years, milord. No more, no less. The same as if it hits Kyoto.


Victoria 3 continues the Paradox trend of having practically no mechanics interact with any other mechanics except in the most minor of number adjustments, which are often entirely pointless, or by making it so that one mechanic completely cancels out the other. I don't even know why the discrimination mechanic exists in this game, given how almost-offensively bad it portrays the struggles of minorities in the Victorian era (just enact multiculturalism dummies lmao), or why elections are a thing given that they're apparently random and usually have very little effect compared to the clout of the IGs in the party. This is the same problem they have with Crusader Kings 3, where no decisions have any impact on each other, and events are entirely randomly determined and have almost no checks for the traits of the characters it picks out to play them.

War is pointless, diplomacy is pointless, management of your pops is pointless. The only thing that matters is staggering out your construction queue so that it's one iron mine, then one tool factory, and repeat. I am no longer asking for anything to actually matter, because as far as I can tell, most of the mechanics being pointless is the intent of Paradox rather than an oversight.

[grumbler]

Even more problematic for me is that the game turns into a slide show by 1870.  It's unplayable.

[FunkMonk]

Haven't played much apart from the first 30 hours after I bought it. Life happened and my rare game time turned to other, more accessible games.

Is the consensus now that Victoria 3 is a failure as is?