Grand Strategy Victoria 3

[Talby]

 

[fantadomat]

 

[thesheeep]

Women I get.

But monkeys? What...
That's a bit more "alternate history" than I remember from what little I played Vic2...

 

[fantadomat]

Women I get.

I don't,most of the world don't. The idea of feminism and suffragettes is alien to most people in the world. It is entirely english problem and english reaction,most people around the world used their women for works and didn't see them as dolls that must stay at home and be useless. The whole idea sounds retarded to me. Both women and men have their rights and duties to perform,yet they are not identical.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Women I get.

But monkeys? What...
That's a bit more "alternate history" than I remember from what little I played Vic2...

CK2 also had a furry mode ("Animal Kingdom").

 

[Harthwain]

Women I get.

But monkeys? What...
That's a bit more "alternate history" than I remember from what little I played Vic2...

Could be the reference to Planet of the Apes.

Spoiler

Or the black people...

By the way, who is this Mikael Andersson? Did he do anything of note before Victoria 3? Because I am not buying the whole "here, at Paradox, we are so very queer, feminist and enlightened" from someone who looks like a shabby version of Santa Claus. I am guessing they decided they need someone to pretend they are progressive company for the sake of PR and this guy got singled out.

 

[Demo.Graph]

All that turbo queer is nice considering that Vicky pops count able-bodied males only. Females, children, elders, disabled, queers and monkeys were represented by productivity modifiers.
Are we in for a complete maths remake?

 

[AwesomeButton]

The harsh realization is that the world has been ruled by monkeys who have been ruled by women.

 

[what am i doing]

Because I am not buying the whole "here, at Paradox, we are so very queer, feminist and enlightened" from someone who looks like a shabby version of Santa Claus. I am guessing they decided they need someone to pretend they are progressive company for the sake of PR and this guy got singled out.

I wish I shared your optimism, but I think it's more likely they genuinely do support that garbage.

 

[Mikeal]

By monkeys he means playable African nations?

 

[Jonathan "Zee Nekomimi]

Women I get.

But monkeys? What...
That's a bit more "alternate history" than I remember from what little I played Vic2...

we had polar bears back in the day, way more superior. At least now we will be able to return to monkey and become a anprim society.

 

[Sranchammer]

One of my best gaming experiences was fighting the Union and Mexico as the Confederacy in the 1880s.

4 years of apocalyptic casualties had them Yankee invaders on the brink of surrender before perfidious Albion joined the fray. I have never forgiven them.

 

[Humanophage]

I'm trying to understand the normies' reverence for Victoria 2, but all I can explain it with is just that this period is less well-known than the Middle Ages or the Early Modern period.

Vicky 2 is full to the brim with stupid game mechanics, like the influence nation mechanic, the budget sliders (taken straight out of as HoI3 and going all the way back to EU1), the "AI Builds Factories=Laissez-Faire capitalism" concept, and many others, most of them transplanted directly from other games and not fitting the specific age.

It's a lot easier to name the good parts:
- Great powers club, getting special mechanics for being a member
- Growing from a late-medieval state to an industrialized regional power as Japan for example
- Playing the game of postponing reforms and haggling with political movements
- Condensed, in comparison to their other games, historical period being the focus of the game
- For once, a good soundtrack, because they took actual music instead of torturing people with their own compositions
- Probably a couple of other things I'm missing but not more than 2-3.
Edit:
- Oh yes, if you are the kind of illiterate gamer mixing up historical contexts - there is the giggles-inducing opportunity to play a cartoonish racist, with the joke being that the cartoon is drawn by the same rabid SJWs you claim to hate.

The valuable thing about Victoria 2 is that it is one of the less gamey strategies out there. It does not aim for balance and elegance, unlike regular strategies. Rather, it tries to simulate the outcome of its period such that you end up with a plausible historic result if you let it play out on its own (not just in terms of territory but also development, ethnic make-up, etc.) It gives you many parameters at which to look. E.g., the population is given correctly such that you can compare your country to the historic country over time, instead of in some gamey units. It needed to double down on this and give stats like GDP per capita and so on, child mortality, murder rates, average height, etc. It's the perfect timeframe for that kind of Galtonian poring over social statistics.

The AI builds factories concept is fine because it emulates having no control over the development of the economy and everyone screwing up development. It's quite preferable to a system of bonuses, for example, which is how economic policy is generally tackled in strategies. The resources are treated in a way that softly makes countries mimic their historical behaviour - e.g., the implausibility of industrial development in countries like Spain. Unlike other Paradox games, it has few cases where you press a button and something happens - even with things like research, most of the heavy benefits appear by chance if you have corresponding techs. It would have been good if they increased this gradualism and inability to directly influence things except via long-ranging policy.

In this sense, it resembles the attempts to mimic the tabletop system without altering it, which is a common complaint that normies have about stuff like Pathfinder or even Baldur's Gate. This is a completely non-mainstream and rare approach, so I don't see why you think it is normie.

The big problem with Victoria is that it fails to handle culture very well, so it is too easy to uphold large empires. At least it tries with things like limiting foci. It would have been a great opportunity to introduce some hardcore anti-blobbing mechanics such that if you want to keep your unrealistic blob, you have to basically cleanse it of any population by the 1920s so it becomes worthless.

 

[Harthwain]

I wish I shared your optimism, but I think it's more likely they genuinely do support that garbage.

It's not optimism. I just find it uncredible that corporations genuinely support this. I am much more inclined to believe in them faking support for the sake of PR and because it happens to be the latest fad, but I bet you they would cease that support the moment they realize the big money (and public support) lies somewhere else. Just look at China-related stuff (such as the movies). In the end all corporations care for are money, regardless of how much they like to tell you about their supposed values.

 

[AwesomeButton]

it tries to simulate the outcome of its period such that you end up with a plausible historic result if you let it play out on its own

 

[what am i doing]

I wish I shared your optimism, but I think it's more likely they genuinely do support that garbage.

It's not optimism. I just find it uncredible that corporations genuinely support this. I am much more inclined to believe in them faking support for the sake of PR and because it happens to be the latest fad, but I bet you they would cease that support the moment they realize the big money (and public support) lies somewhere else. Just look at China-related stuff (such as the movies). In the end all corporations care for are money, regardless of how much they like to tell you about their supposed values.

My impression is the other way around; I think they do support it and want to push it on people, but not to such an extent that it would immediately alienate their audience; they would rather do it gradually until it is widespread enough that they can force it. The majority of the population has no interest in the poison they're pushing (so it isn't that they're just adopting it for financial purposes), it's just that they know the culture in the west is such that there won't be significant backlash and people will hold their noses and continue to do business with them despite mildly disliking the virtue signal, whereas they have to be more gradual/subtle in places like China (ie, nigger less prominent on posters for the Star Wars sequel in China, but still present in the film). Very few people are going out of their way to pick the company that exhorts the virtues of homosexuality over the one that just sells a product, and indeed it's usually the absence of a convenient "just sells a product" alternative that prevents people from just not doing business with the progressive company at all out of distaste.

 

[Space Satan]

DD

Hello and welcome back to another Victoria 3 dev diary! Today we will be talking about three of the four of the main ‘currencies’ of the game - namely Capacities (the last being Money, which we’ll of course come back to later).

We mentioned in the very first dev diary that there is no ‘mana’ in Victoria 3, and since this dev diary is about the game’s “currencies”, I want to be clear on what I mean by that. When we say there is “no mana” we mean that the resources in Victoria 3 arise and are spent in clearly defined ways that are parts of the simulation, not from an overly abstract concept or vague idea. There is, of course, some degree of abstraction involved (all games are abstractions after all), but we want all the game’s currencies to be strongly rooted in the mechanics and not feel arbitrary.

But enough about that and onto Capacities. What exactly are they?

Well, for starters, calling them currencies is actually not accurate. Capacities are not a pooled resource and are not accumulated or spent, but instead, have a constant generation and a constant usage (similar to for example Administrative Capacity in Stellaris), and you generally want to keep your usage from exceeding your generation. Each capacity represents one specific area of your nation’s ability to govern and is used solely for matters relating to that area.

As mentioned, Capacities are not accumulated, so excess generation is not pooled, but instead there is an effect for each Capacity which is positive if generation exceeds usage and quite negative if usage exceeds generation - a country that incorporates territories left and right without expanding its bureaucratic corps may quickly find itself mired in debt as tax collection collapses under the strain!

Bureaucracy represents a nation’s ability to govern, invest in and collect taxes from its incorporated territory. It is produced by the Government Administration building, where many of a nation’s Bureaucrats will be employed. All of a nation’s Incorporated States use a base amount of Bureaucracy which increases with the size of their population, and further increased by each Institution (such as Education or Police - more on those later!) that a country has invested in. Overall, the purpose of Bureaucracy is to ensure that there is a cost to ruling over, taxing and providing for your population - administrating China should not be cheap!

The Swedish Bureaucracy is currently a bit overworked and the country could certainly benefit from another Government Administration building or two.

Authority represents the Head of State’s personal power and ability to enact change in the country through decree. It is generated from your Laws - generally, the more repressive and authoritarian the country, the more Authority it will generate - and is used by a variety of actions such as enacting decrees in specific states, interacting with Interest Groups and promoting or banning certain types of Goods. Overall, the purpose of Authority is to create an interesting trade-off between more and less authoritarian societies - by shifting the distribution of power away from the Pops into the hands of the ruler, your ability to rule by decree is increased, and vice versa.

The Swedish King has more Authority at his disposal than he is currently using, slightly speeding up the rate at which laws can be passed.

Influence represents a country’s ability to conduct diplomacy and its reach on the global stage. It is generated primarily from your Rank (Great Powers have more Influence than Major Powers and so on) and is used to support ongoing diplomatic actions and pacts, such as Improving Relations, Alliances, Trade Deals, Subjects and so on. Overall, the purpose of Influence is to force players to make interesting choices about which foreign countries they want to build strong diplomatic relationships with.

Sweden has plenty of unused Influence and could certainly afford to support another diplomatic pact or two!

That’s all for today! Join us again next week as I cover something yet another topic that’s fundamental to Victoria 3: Buildings. See you then!

 

[AgentFransis]

And here's the mana

 

[AwesomeButton]

Well, this sounds just as bad as mana. It's basically the HoI4 "resources".

 

[what am i doing]

Nothing they've described currently indicates that it is mana (ie, a resource which is not a direct representation of an actual thing, due to having multiple uses which each represent different actual things). Sure, it might end up being mana on release, but right now it doesn't appear to be. Additionally, it appears that they've replaced the buffer system from Victoria 2 (where you stored things like influence or diplo points and could end up wasting them if you reached a cap and didn't manually spend them on something) with a functional system (in the programming sense of the word), which is a welcome change.

 

[Axioms]

We can argue about whether this is the *ideal* system but it is 100% or even 200% better than mana. For one you can't spend it on ideas. The non-accruing aspect is good as well. And is distinct from mana. In Axioms I believe I handled this a lot more with characters and building networks. This is a bit of an abstract meta thing compared to building networks. Like you go from total workers to abstract value without intervening steps, but again much better than mana. I would say this is about even with "prestige" and "piety" although the mechanism is slightly different.

Like how could you improve this aside from adding the intervening steps? That would make it functionally similar to real life.

Mana is clearly a level or two of abstraction higher. Ergo this is better.

 

[Kalin]

IT'S SHIT

 

[AwesomeButton]

You've let yourself be fooled by going with Paradox' arbitrary description of "what mana means for the purposes of discussing resources in our games".

What you are seeing is a resource where decreasing teachers and increasing law enforcement happens from the same resource pool.

 

[Tigranes]

"Is it mana or isn't it mana" is a pointless debate. Just about every single thing in every Paradox game could be described as mana if we were inclusive enough (e.g. Stability, AE/badboy, Loyalty), as long as it's some unified quantitative count that you use one way or another to get shit done... well of course, because every Pdox game is modifiers bouncing off one another in a gamey, abstract fashioon. That's literally what Pdox games are.

The real question is whether it gives you realistic/interesting control levers to actually customise your nation, or you're mainly sitting there not able to do anything until an arbitrary money pot fills up. E.g. how bureaucratic / authority capacities interact with each other via laws and other decisions, whether you can move towards / end up with nations where overgrown bureaucracies then have other consequences.

(Influence seems to be just a reskin of diplomatic capacity in games like Imperator, just a cap on how many diplo contracts you can have that scales with your blobsize. Eh.)

 

[Axioms]

"Is it mana or isn't it mana" is a pointless debate. Just about every single thing in every Paradox game could be described as mana if we were inclusive enough (e.g. Stability, AE/badboy, Loyalty), as long as it's some unified quantitative count that you use one way or another to get shit done... well of course, because every Pdox game is modifiers bouncing off one another in a gamey, abstract fashioon. That's literally what Pdox games are.

The real question is whether it gives you realistic/interesting control levers to actually customise your nation, or you're mainly sitting there not able to do anything until an arbitrary money pot fills up. E.g. how bureaucratic / authority capacities interact with each other via laws and other decisions, whether you can move towards / end up with nations where overgrown bureaucracies then have other consequences.

(Influence seems to be just a reskin of diplomatic capacity in games like Imperator, just a cap on how many diplo contracts you can have that scales with your blobsize. Eh.)

One way I might improve Vicky3 specifically is to have workers actually used for stuff, instead of a resource, mana or otherwise. Like a spy network requires various amounts of relevant pops. Maybe a few characters. Similar for administration. They did that in a very simplistic way with needing 1% bureaucrats or w/e but I think you could add stuff to that and it would better than pop % plus a building.