Victoria 3

[Tamas]

He is right, too.

[Syt]

Yeah, this whole affair is a bit of a letdown. His comment about agitators not really being visible unless you have access to them hits at a main complaint I still have about the game - how invisible it is what's happening in other countries. Unless you obsessively check countries all the time you have no idea (or an easy overview) what their current laws are, their governments, their institutions, what political movements exist in the world, election results, if revolutions are brewing somewhere, where that agitator is that you exiled and is no longer on the list of exiles, what events are happening elsewhere (is a disaster affecting one of my trading partners for a crucial commodity?), let alone any history of any of those things.

I generally enjoy playing my country of choice, but it always feels like being two, three grades removed from what everyone else is doing.

[The Minsky Moment]

Further, I don't like how I managed to create a super-calm political environment by the mid 1860-s in Austria. Sure there are over 4 million radicals in the country due to discrimination, and the living standard average is deplorable (9-something) but there is no turmoil in any single province, and ALL IGs are in positive territory, most of the significantly, thanks mostly to laws that Austria has by default. It is the smoothest sailing I have ever had with Austria in this game, not a good first look for this patch.

Austria's starting laws are pretty favorable - interventionism, professional army, public schools, propertied women.  It seems like the main way the game models political turmoil is by making you want to pass laws that powerful early game IGs hate.  As implemented, Austria can side step that because its initial law set up is basically OK.  And you can move to better tax laws or appointed bureaucrats without pissing off landowners too much.

IMO EVERY Country should start with traditional economy except Britain and maybe the low countries, the US, and France.  Austria should definitely have it at start. Austria shouldn't have public schools either; I know there was some schooling but not at a level that justifies the in game bonuses.

The game also doesn't implement discriminated cultures well; it seems to be based on how the US treated racial minorities - lower wages and harder to get educational qualifications.  That doesn't really capture what was happening with discriminated cultures in Europe - e.g. Czechs in the Austrian Empire, Greeks in the OE, Jews in lots of places in Europe.  It also doesn't capture the administrative problems of empires with linguistically diverse populations, a problem impacting many states but the Austrians in particular.

[The Minsky Moment]

As for 1.3/pack, I haven't placed France and the agitators seem half-baked as implemented.  However, the main change in terms of gameplay impact seems to be the law enactment system which IMO is a big improvement.

[The Minsky Moment]

Yeah, this whole affair is a bit of a letdown. His comment about agitators not really being visible unless you have access to them hits at a main complaint I still have about the game - how invisible it is what's happening in other countries. Unless you obsessively check countries all the time you have no idea (or an easy overview) what their current laws are, their governments, their institutions, what political movements exist in the world, election results, if revolutions are brewing somewhere, where that agitator is that you exiled and is no longer on the list of exiles, what events are happening elsewhere (is a disaster affecting one of my trading partners for a crucial commodity?), let alone any history of any of those things.

I generally enjoy playing my country of choice, but it always feels like being two, three grades removed from what everyone else is doing.

What would be nice (and immersive) would be to get diplomatic dispatches of notable events in countries within your declared areas of interest - changes in government, election results, agitator activity, etc.

[Tamas]

Further, I don't like how I managed to create a super-calm political environment by the mid 1860-s in Austria. Sure there are over 4 million radicals in the country due to discrimination, and the living standard average is deplorable (9-something) but there is no turmoil in any single province, and ALL IGs are in positive territory, most of the significantly, thanks mostly to laws that Austria has by default. It is the smoothest sailing I have ever had with Austria in this game, not a good first look for this patch.

Austria's starting laws are pretty favorable - interventionism, professional army, public schools, propertied women.  It seems like the main way the game models political turmoil is by making you want to pass laws that powerful early game IGs hate.  As implemented, Austria can side step that because its initial law set up is basically OK.  And you can move to better tax laws or appointed bureaucrats without pissing off landowners too much.

IMO EVERY Country should start with traditional economy except Britain and maybe the low countries, the US, and France.  Austria should definitely have it at start. Austria shouldn't have public schools either; I know there was some schooling but not at a level that justifies the in game bonuses.

The game also doesn't implement discriminated cultures well; it seems to be based on how the US treated racial minorities - lower wages and harder to get educational qualifications.  That doesn't really capture what was happening with discriminated cultures in Europe - e.g. Czechs in the Austrian Empire, Greeks in the OE, Jews in lots of places in Europe.  It also doesn't capture the administrative problems of empires with linguistically diverse populations, a problem impacting many states but the Austrians in particular.

All good points. I never understood the Austrian laws, I am not even sure serfdom should be abolished in 1836.

[Syt]

What would be nice (and immersive) would be to get diplomatic dispatches of notable events in countries within your declared areas of interest - changes in government, election results, agitator activity, etc.

Even the newspapers from Vic2 would be nice to have back.

FWIW:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/victoria-3-1-3-known-issues.1586653/

Update 1.3 released on the 22nd May and has not been without some bugs and issues. Of which, we released a hotfix addressing a bug ommitting new lines in Chinese Localization (1.3.1).

Ever since the release, we have been hard at work catologing and addressing issues you have discovered, below you will see a list of known issues, that will be fixed in upcoming patches - the first of which will be coming next week. Where applicable information on a short term workaround is shared to use until the bug has been patched.

Known Issues:

• Out-Of-Sync issues due to Anarchist Ideology stances
• In some cases buildings (trade centers, ports) in split states get duplicated. This can cause big performance problems
• Political Movements may spawn and resolve repeatedly due to getting support only from Agitators
• Achievement "Shut the Door Behind You" is DLC locked when it shouldn't be
• "Vox Populi" achievement fails to trigger
• The Texture Streaming setting causes the border between the map and the table to look very blurry (workaround: disable Texture Streaming in Graphics settings)
• Divided Monarchist events might keep firing even when the JE has reached 100 progress
• Outliner does not show the radicalism of revolutionary movement
• Typo in Event text of 'When You Have A Hammer' in English locale ('supper' instead of 'support')
• Duplicate Napoleon due to the Bonaparte Restoration completing before the 'The Third Bonaparte' triggering
• Max Stirner may be spawned multiple times
• Event ig_revolutions.4 - 'Call for Intervention' might display 'Error' in Ruler's title
• Establish Colony map interaction checks State Region for claim adjacency rather than State
• Alfred Hugenberg has Emperor Norton's Interest Group and Ideology
• AI struggles with petitions and passing some laws
• In some cases an Agitator is not supporting a movement the tooltip claims they would
• Some text is cropped in the Technology Tree
• Agitator Popularity impacts Political Movement support too much
• Changing graphics setting in the main menu and entering the game results in all hidden map objects being displayed
• Revolutionary events that reference states as if revolutionary activities go on there sometimes occur in unincorporated states
• Building panel does not show employment bars for pop types that have no workers
• Characters of the wrong dynasty/ideology can be randomly generated during French revolts
• NULL_STATE buildings in single state revolutions/secessions: when queuing a lot of buildings in a single state following a revolution, leads to several null_state entries appearing in the building queue panel
• Some characters start with the wrong HQ, Commander Rank, or superfluous Traits
• Pop-up about Expiring Obligations shows the incorrect country
• Missing icons for the executables on Linux and Mac
• Mac - Crash reporter fails to send a report
• Manually saving the game may not work when playing as a revolutionary country in Russian locale (workaround: delete the default save game name entirely and rewrite it)
• Date missing year and day icons in Election panel in Chinese locale
• Text rendered on map in Chinese locale may get corrupted after playing for some time (workaround: quit to desktop, reload the game)
• Some notable historical characters lack Wikipedia links
• When the revolution clock is ticking and a new political movement is spawned or disbanded, the animation and sound of spawning the revolution clock is replayed
• Increase Relations tutorial does not trigger with any country with attitude less than/equal too cautious and with less than amicable relations
• German National Identity Journal Entry disappears after The Schleswig-Holstein Question JE is completed
• If you try to establish a colony on a sea node it will display a null_obj
• A game crash while in MP may block the game for other players, since the game cannot progress if one of the players is at least a week behind the rest (workaround: kick the crashed MP client from the session)
• Poor connection and high game speed during MP may cause unresponsiveness when manipulating the outliner categories
• Changing graphics preset after having exited a game to the main menu may crash to desktop
• Tutorial highlighting of lens options will not trigger if the lens option is not already visible when the tutorial step is reached
• AI may start wars against countries it can't reach

These known issues are in progress, we continue to look through our communities for the issues you are raising and doing our best to fix them in the shortest time we can so you can enjoy your playthroughs without concerns from bugs.

If you notice anything else, and have the time to spare, please report the issue on our bug reporting forums using the link here.

This is not a complete list of known issues! If you are experiencing a bug not on this list, we may be aware of it and working on it - especially if you have submitted it in a bug report already.

[Tamas]

As for 1.3/pack, I haven't placed France and the agitators seem half-baked as implemented.  However, the main change in terms of gameplay impact seems to be the law enactment system which IMO is a big improvement.

Yes, and while we are doing positives, I have modded in some changes and restarted as my benchmark (Austria). I don't think my changes had anything to do with it but in 1865 a countdown to revolution over Cultural Exclusion started (which is how the game translates of minorities not wanting to be discriminated anymore).

Much like the law enactment system, the revolution countdown seems much improved. The cycles of upticks seem more deliberate and meaningful, and the events I have been getting are especially nice - they were mostly around making choices between violence (can be effective to quell things, or fuel to the fire) and non-violence (you largely relinquish your chance to quell in exchange of avoiding a truly bad result) - it's neat because it isn't a truly ideological choice - you may not want to use violence but it often feels the better gamble than just letting things escalate on their own.

So there's definitely promising stuff under the layers of disappointment. Now the key is to have whoever designed these two reworks to wrestle back control from whoever required and approved the DLC content.

[The Minsky Moment]

Victoria 3 is still getting "mixed" ratings on Steam as opposed to Victoria 2 which is "mostly positive."  And there are bunch of recent Victoria 2 reviews saying how much better the game is than Vic3.

I played a lot of Vic 2 - more than any other Pdox game other than EU2.  I liked the game but Victoria 3 at version 1.2 was already far better game than Victoria 2 in its final form in terms of gameplay, "historical realism", "immersion," or pretty much any category you can think of other than stress on system resources.

[Syt]

Yesterday's DD:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/victoria-3-dev-diary-87-voice-of-the-people-post-release-update.1586802/

Hello! It's going to be a short and sweet development diary today as we're all very busy working on... well, the stuff I'm going to be talking about today!

As you all know, Update 1.3 and Voice of the People launched a few days ago. It's a big update, particularly to the political subsystems in the game, and it hasn't been without some bugs and balance issues. We have already rolled out a fix for the bug that omitted newlines in Chinese localization (1.3.1). We have another set of bug fixes (1.3.2) in the pipe, scheduled for next Tuesday if all tests clear. This update should fix a number of issues on the list.

We are also working on cataloging and incorporating your feedback on the new Journal Entries and events into a future update. For example, we're planning on increasing both the interactivity and challenge of the Divided Monarchy Journal Entry. Stay tuned for more on when this update will be released!

Victoria 3's Immersion Packs are meant to enhance the depth of a particular aspect of the game. For Voice of the People, that aspect is political agitation and revolutions. France is a great country to showcase these mechanics with, and we also used French aesthetics for the wealth of new art also included in Voice of the People, but the intent is not to make it a "country pack". The new map, UI skin, and command room table are available even if you don't play as France, and with the theme selector we are rolling out with Dawn of Wonder (the Art pack coming in Q3 - more on this below) you will be able to customize which theme combinations you want. Historical Agitators appear across the world, and several of the new character interactions relating to Agitators as well as coups apply regardless which country you play. Rest assured we will be rolling out country-specific content in other expansion products and updates in addition to Immersion Packs.

After the release, we received feedback suggesting that Update 1.3 - released alongside Voice of the People - has had a greater impact than the DLC itself. This is partially because we needed to introduce a significant number of new events to support the new Agitators and revamp the revolution progression system. However, the main reason for this perception is our approach to DLC development, where we don't want to lock essential mechanics behind paywalls. Mechanics spread out over multiple DLC tends to fragment the community, makes mod management harder, complicates building new features on top of old ones, and can cause features to become unbalanced over time. As an example of this approach, based on your feedback, we elected to include the Exiles mechanic in the free update rather than the DLC to address concerns about future game balance. While there is a risk this reduces the perceived value of the DLC, it ensures that the core gameplay experience remains intact and allows for future expansion without limitations.

The Voice of the People DLC still offers a range of unique content such as new events, stunning artwork, and exclusive mechanics for owners. While we understand that the number of features and improvements in the free update can lead to a lower perception of value for the DLC, we do not believe that the answer here is to simply paywall more features. Instead, we will strive to learn and improve from the criticisms of the content in Voice of the People without compromising our principal focus, which will remain on the core gameplay experience.

On the topic of lessons learnt, in case you missed it, what was originally a pre-order bonus for Voice of the People - the Agitators Jules Brunet, Georges Clemenceau, and Alexis de Tocqueville - were made available to everyone who owns Voice of the People the day after release. We didn't realize quite how valuable these characters would be to you, so thank you for making it known how you felt about this and we hope these brilliant gentlemen will help improve your great nations!

Finally, a note about the more distant future. Many of you noticed that with the availability of an Expansion Pass to upgrade from the base game to the Grand Edition, two additional products for Victoria 3 were soft-announced: the aforementioned Dawn of Wonder Art pack, and Sphere of Influence, our first major expansion. We can't get into a lot of detail on these on the Steam pages yet and as a result I've seen a lot of speculation around them. There are a few things I'd like to clarify prior to the official announcement.

First off, yes, Dawn of Wonder will include a Day/Night cycle. It is super customizable (naturally you can turn it on and off, but you can also for example scale it to in-game time so a full cycle could take 1 day or 1 year depending on your preferences - or even sync it to your computer clock for cozy nighttime play) and looks terrific in action.

It doesn't have any effect on the paper map view, of course, but if you enjoy watching and listening to your little towns while playing, it really makes the world come alive. The Day/Night Cycle isn't everything in the Art pack, there will also be a hefty assortment of the kinds of things we also included in the Voice of the People Immersion Pack (thus why a theme selector will also be included).

Secondly, regarding Sphere of Influence. As mentioned in the description, among several other features this major expansion will add Power Blocs, which lets you spread your influence across the world via soft power. I have spotted a few concerns that a Sphere of Influence mechanic that served this same purpose was already included in the Victoria II base game, so I wanted to clarify what this expansion actually contains.

Victoria 3's base game already has features to model the Sphere of Influence mechanic from Victoria II: subjects, and customs unions (in fact, it's not uncommon to hear players refer to forcing nations into customs unions or subject relationships as 'sphering'). Members in a customs union share a unified market but have no other diplomatic ties, while subject nations are also forced to participate in their overlord's market but have a number of diplomatic restrictions placed on them as well. The ability to influence, cajole, or dominate other countries to force them into your market / sphere is already something you can do in Victoria 3 using a mix of diplomatic and military tools.

The idea behind Power Blocs is to make a shared market merely one of numerous ways in which countries can cooperate with (or exploit) one another. The most fundamental of these, and the core mechanic itself, will be part of the free update delivered alongside the expansion. Much like with Voice of the People, we don't want to fall into the trap of making the base game on its own obsolete over time by locking key mechanics behind paid expansions. The various ways in which players can customize Power Blocs should help make different Great Powers more distinct, enhance interaction and dependencies between nations, make Influence and Prestige feel more meaningful, and so on. While some of these options will be in the free update, others will be in the paid expansion.

So then I hear you wonder, why call the expansion Sphere of Influence? Simple answer: it's a terrific term to describe what sorts of features it contains! It may evoke the memory of one beloved mechanic from Victoria II, but the expansion itself is intended to be a broad enhancement to diplomatic gameplay with a variety of features. And as always, the fundamentals will not be paywalled.

On that note, the Sphere of Influence expansion blurb also says that investing into foreign economies will be a feature, and there have been concerns that this means we're going back on our earlier promise of making foreign expansion available in a free update. To be clear, we are always going to allow for foreign expansion in your subject nations, with or without the Sphere of Influence expansion. The expansion will add a great deal more options to Power Blocs, foreign expansion, interference in other countries' politics, and much more - but the core systems will be in the free update, since that's how we keep them current and fresh and can build on them in the future.

The release dates for Dawn of Wonder and Sphere of Influence listed on Steam are placeholder dates until their respective announcements, but do roughly reflect reality. Sphere of Influence is scheduled for early 2024, to allow sufficient time to implement new features of considerable complexity, but that's not how long you have to wait for another major update! We are also planning for another major free update - with an open beta - before 2023 is over, similar in scope to our 1.2 release. Some of the improvements to the diplomatic gameplay we're currently developing for the update alongside Sphere of Influence is targeting this release rather than the one in Q1 2024. You will hear a bit more about that next week when we return to give you an update to our post-release plans!

I hope this has cleared up a few of your questions and concerns! In closing, we are very happy to see the big uptick in player numbers since Update 1.3 and Voice of the People, and we hope you are all enjoying your time with it!

Further down in the thread:

Please consider focusing on war mechanics in the near future. The only time I really need to change the speed to normal from fast is when I'm in a war. It's the least fleshed out part of the game but requires the most coddling. Moron generals opening up random fronts with no units can quickly ruin a game. I thought the whole goal of war in this game was to be hands off but despite that, it's the most player intensive because AI is just too stupid and the mechanics are wonky.

One of the main focuses of the next major free update will be addressing issues with warfare.

[Tamas]

OMG the game is so slow again. At 1890 and I am ready to give up because of the crawling top speed.

[Syt]

Patch notes:

- Fixed an issue where Divided Monarchists events could keep firing even after reaching 100 progress
- Fixed an issue where events could give you a second Napoleon III after already having one Napoleon III
- Reduced the impact of Agitator Popularity on Political Movement Support
- Safeguards added to hopefully prevent an issue where some mods could cause buildings to get duplicated in split states
- The "Shut the Door Behind You" achievement no longer requires Voice of the People to unlock
- Fixed the Anarchist ideology having duplicated stances on Economic System laws
- Fixed a texture streaming issue that caused the border between the paper map and the table to look blurry when zoomed out
- The Vox Populi achievement should now work properly
- Fixed an issue where Agitators would sometimes not join the correct Political Movement
- Fixed an issue where agitator supported political movements could repeatedly form and disband
- Agitator support tooltip is now shown correctly for Agitators with 0 popularity
- Radicalism of revolutionary political movements is now shown correctly in the outliner
- Fixed a bug where civil wars could break the Divided Monarchists Journal Entry due to incorrectly setting a variable
- The Paris Commune now inherits the Journal Entries and variables of France if it ends up victorious and annexes France
- Fixed NULL_OBJ being shown in event 'Pébrine Outbreak'
- Fixed a typo in the event 'When You Have a Hammer'
- Fixed incorrectly formatted text in the event 'Devout Call For Intervention'
- Fixed an issue where the German Unification chain of Journal Entries did not work correctly for Lübeck
- Fixed an issue where the Schleswig-Holstein Question Journal Entry would incorrectly resolve without taking Holstein
- Fixed an issue where the German National Identity Journal Entry could complete before the Schleswig--- Holstein Question Journal Entry, potentially breaking the whole German Unification chain
- Fixed an issue where Max Stirner could end up spawning multiple times
- Fixed an issue where NULL_STATE entries could appear in the Construction Queue due to revolutions/secessions splitting states
- The AI now correctly understands how to resolve the Government Petition Journal Entry
- Fixed a localization issue with numerous triggers relating to unification where the name of the unification would not be shown
- Fixed an issue where some sound effects for free features such as Exile Agitator were incorrectly DLC locked
- Fixed an issue where exiling an Agitator would not remove their support from the Political Movement they were a part of
- Fixed a crash to desktop issue in the virtual file system
- It is no longer possible to colonize inland states that you do not border just because the state region they are a part of is coastal
- Fixed an issue where saving the game was blocked in certain languages when playing as a revolution due to country name formatting

[Tamas]

Thanks. Nothing there about improving performance.

[Valmy]

- Fixed an issue where events could give you a second Napoleon III after already having one Napoleon III

I have this image of the Spiderman meme but with Napoleon IIIs.

[The Brain]

Surely in EUIV you can get a Dmitry even if you already have a Dmitry?