Grand Strategy Victoria 3

[Axioms]

Those official V3 forums are a mess. The shills are being downvoted, and a post like "no, the game just sucks, Happy?" is getting double digit thumbs up.

All the normies post on Reddit, not even Steam, much less the company forums. So there's no pushback against the dedicated high expectations bittervets. Which is good cause I agree with the bittervets.

 

[Victor1234]

Those official V3 forums are a mess. The shills are being downvoted, and a post like "no, the game just sucks, Happy?" is getting double digit thumbs up.

All the normies post on Reddit, not even Steam, much less the company forums. So there's no pushback against the dedicated high expectations bittervets. Which is good cause I agree with the bittervets.

No idea who goes to Reddit or Steam but the bittervets got kicked off the forum or left years ago to other places (notably Languish) because actually negative (not constructive negative) posts get people banned and threads buried sooner or later. The way Pdox seems to be pushing Discord, they want to make discussion even more of an echo chamber than the moderation did.

The forums have been around since 2000. Look at the thread you're talking about. The dude starting it joined 2022 and of all the maybe ~35 or so people posting, I counted 3 with join dates before V2's release in 2010 (one of whom has deleted their account since). What vets?

 

[Tyrr]

My experiences on the Paradox forums where the main reason why I today mainly only use neutral platforms to discuss a product.
You can't have a fair discussion when one side has all the power to censor everything they don't like.

 

[None]

The Victoria 3 forums are surely a fun browse right now. The only real dev responses you'll see is Johan being a boomer and reminiscing about days past. I've started to come around on him, and that makes me shudder.

Wouldn't surprise me at all if the majority of devs are hiding in their respective Discord servers, as was the case with CK3.

 

[turkishronin]

can you save confederates in this game

 

[Axioms]

Those official V3 forums are a mess. The shills are being downvoted, and a post like "no, the game just sucks, Happy?" is getting double digit thumbs up.

All the normies post on Reddit, not even Steam, much less the company forums. So there's no pushback against the dedicated high expectations bittervets. Which is good cause I agree with the bittervets.

No idea who goes to Reddit or Steam but the bittervets got kicked off the forum or left years ago to other places (notably Languish) because actually negative (not constructive negative) posts get people banned and threads buried sooner or later. The way Pdox seems to be pushing Discord, they want to make discussion even more of an echo chamber than the moderation did.

The forums have been around since 2000. Look at the thread you're talking about. The dude starting it joined 2022 and of all the maybe ~35 or so people posting, I counted 3 with join dates before V2's release in 2010 (one of whom has deleted their account since). What vets?

Anyone who joined within a year of CK2's release has been playing PDox games for a decade. I think that counts. I didn't check the join dates of every person. In any case I regularly see negative posts from people with 8+ years on their forums.

 

[Axioms]

can you save confederates in this game

Yes but the whole USA situation is a shitshow. Go look at some of the posts about it. Wild bordergore and spawned revolt countries and stuff.

 

[Axioms]

My experiences on the Paradox forums where the main reason why I today mainly only use neutral platforms to discuss a product.
You can't have a fair discussion when one side has all the power to censor everything they don't like.

I'm banned for dissing Johan way back during the "players are all assholes!" thing he did. Problem isn't the players. Problem is they target the new memer player base who only posts on Reddit or other social media whereas the forums are *mostly* only serious players who are proportionately much less happy with their current design direction.

Hell even Johan is basically subtweeting some of the Vicky3/CK3 devs in his posts.

 

[Victor1234]

can you save confederates in this game

Yes but the whole USA situation is a shitshow. Go look at some of the posts about it. Wild bordergore and spawned revolt countries and stuff.

Did anyone make a Confederate mod yet? V1 had one back in the day called Southern Revolutions, maybe V2 as well, but it was popular enough to get exported to HOI2/3 as Deo Vindice.

 

[what am i doing]

I think V3 basically has two problems.
1 is that it was rushed. Clearly. Just the amount of bugs and obvious "literally nobody fucking played this shit or bothered fixing it" stuff makes it clear enough.
2, more importantly, is that Paradox's developers just don't really understand how the world works.

The idea of just clicking a multiculturalism button and suddenly having all your minorities happy to live in your nation is a good example of this. In reality the whole issue of ethnic / cultural tensions actually works in two directions. Yes, there's top-down issues like state backed discrimination, but there's also bottom-up issues like a desire for autonomy (or better yet, sovereignty). A realistic GSG would feature both of these. You might have tolerant laws towards minorities, but there would still be nationalist movements, and quelling these would basically require giving substantial territorial autonomy to let them exist as a country within a country, as Austria did for the Hungarians, or Canada did for the Quebecois. And indeed you could actually have a minority that is catered to with autonomy who then enacts fairly intolerant laws towards relative minorities in their territory, as is the case with Quebec and English speakers in Quebec (Quebec has been trying to suppress the English language in Quebec for as long as they've had the power to do so while simultaneously demanding that the French language be supported in the rest of Canada; they also maintain a regional voting party, the Bloc Quebecois, a mechanic which again is missing from V3 and was missing from V2; there should be parties that aren't ideologically aligned but rather regionally/ethnically aligned), which in turn evokes discontent in the rest of the country's majority population, etc.

A good GSG would represent this sort of concern so that the player has various things they may want to balance out - do I cater to this minority or not, can I give this territory some amount of autonomy and how much, will it upset the rest of the country and why, etc. In V3 you just click the "stop being a bigot" button and suddenly everyone, from Czechs to Serbs to Romanians, loves D I R E C T R U L E F R O M V I E N N A. It's a game made by walking stereotypes of the idiot college-educated NPC who has no fucking clue how human society, economics, or anything works, with a pop culture level of knowledge of history and zero understanding of why historical events played out as they did.

Even if Paradox had put in the effort to make their game not broken, and waited to release until it was finished, it would still have these problems because the people making the mechanics don't understand the world they're trying to simulate.

 

[Average Manatee]

I think that was the intention. The game was built by people who wanted to make the statement that the best way to do everything is to always institute the maximum amount of leftist laws possible.

 

[whydoibother]

I think that was the intention. The game was built by people who wanted to make the statement that the best way to do everything is to always institute the maximum amount of leftist laws possible.

Its the period. The game is about economic class. About coal and rail and automatization driving people out of farms and workshops, and them becoming radicalized by their obsolescence.
It could've been about nations crawling out of the bellies of rotting empires, and crowned heads being removed from their torsos, but that would be a different game. You have to pick between economics&class or nation&culture, and they went with the former.

 

[thesecret1]

It does a shit job at simulating that then, because unemployment is never a problem in the game. On the contrary, you will hit a labour shortage sooner rather than later.

 

[Tyrr]

They just had to build up on Vic2, but no. That's why I'm angry about Vic3.
Vic3 is what DoW3 was to DoW2.

 

[Mortmal]

I think that was the intention. The game was built by people who wanted to make the statement that the best way to do everything is to always institute the maximum amount of leftist laws possible.

And then everything play the same with little replayability, i already shelved the game too.

 

[Axioms]

I think V3 basically has two problems.
1 is that it was rushed. Clearly. Just the amount of bugs and obvious "literally nobody fucking played this shit or bothered fixing it" stuff makes it clear enough.
2, more importantly, is that Paradox's developers just don't really understand how the world works.

The idea of just clicking a multiculturalism button and suddenly having all your minorities happy to live in your nation is a good example of this. In reality the whole issue of ethnic / cultural tensions actually works in two directions. Yes, there's top-down issues like state backed discrimination, but there's also bottom-up issues like a desire for autonomy (or better yet, sovereignty). A realistic GSG would feature both of these. You might have tolerant laws towards minorities, but there would still be nationalist movements, and quelling these would basically require giving substantial territorial autonomy to let them exist as a country within a country, as Austria did for the Hungarians, or Canada did for the Quebecois. And indeed you could actually have a minority that is catered to with autonomy who then enacts fairly intolerant laws towards relative minorities in their territory, as is the case with Quebec and English speakers in Quebec (Quebec has been trying to suppress the English language in Quebec for as long as they've had the power to do so while simultaneously demanding that the French language be supported in the rest of Canada; they also maintain a regional voting party, the Bloc Quebecois, a mechanic which again is missing from V3 and was missing from V2; there should be parties that aren't ideologically aligned but rather regionally/ethnically aligned), which in turn evokes discontent in the rest of the country's majority population, etc.

A good GSG would represent this sort of concern so that the player has various things they may want to balance out - do I cater to this minority or not, can I give this territory some amount of autonomy and how much, will it upset the rest of the country and why, etc. In V3 you just click the "stop being a bigot" button and suddenly everyone, from Czechs to Serbs to Romanians, loves D I R E C T R U L E F R O M V I E N N A. It's a game made by walking stereotypes of the idiot college-educated NPC who has no fucking clue how human society, economics, or anything works, with a pop culture level of knowledge of history and zero understanding of why historical events played out as they did.

Even if Paradox had put in the effort to make their game not broken, and waited to release until it was finished, it would still have these problems because the people making the mechanics don't understand the world they're trying to simulate.

So what you are saying is you want to play Axioms?

Also realistically you just can't do that stuff in Clausewitz

 

[what am i doing]

I think V3 basically has two problems.
1 is that it was rushed. Clearly. Just the amount of bugs and obvious "literally nobody fucking played this shit or bothered fixing it" stuff makes it clear enough.
2, more importantly, is that Paradox's developers just don't really understand how the world works.

The idea of just clicking a multiculturalism button and suddenly having all your minorities happy to live in your nation is a good example of this. In reality the whole issue of ethnic / cultural tensions actually works in two directions. Yes, there's top-down issues like state backed discrimination, but there's also bottom-up issues like a desire for autonomy (or better yet, sovereignty). A realistic GSG would feature both of these. You might have tolerant laws towards minorities, but there would still be nationalist movements, and quelling these would basically require giving substantial territorial autonomy to let them exist as a country within a country, as Austria did for the Hungarians, or Canada did for the Quebecois. And indeed you could actually have a minority that is catered to with autonomy who then enacts fairly intolerant laws towards relative minorities in their territory, as is the case with Quebec and English speakers in Quebec (Quebec has been trying to suppress the English language in Quebec for as long as they've had the power to do so while simultaneously demanding that the French language be supported in the rest of Canada; they also maintain a regional voting party, the Bloc Quebecois, a mechanic which again is missing from V3 and was missing from V2; there should be parties that aren't ideologically aligned but rather regionally/ethnically aligned), which in turn evokes discontent in the rest of the country's majority population, etc.

A good GSG would represent this sort of concern so that the player has various things they may want to balance out - do I cater to this minority or not, can I give this territory some amount of autonomy and how much, will it upset the rest of the country and why, etc. In V3 you just click the "stop being a bigot" button and suddenly everyone, from Czechs to Serbs to Romanians, loves D I R E C T R U L E F R O M V I E N N A. It's a game made by walking stereotypes of the idiot college-educated NPC who has no fucking clue how human society, economics, or anything works, with a pop culture level of knowledge of history and zero understanding of why historical events played out as they did.

Even if Paradox had put in the effort to make their game not broken, and waited to release until it was finished, it would still have these problems because the people making the mechanics don't understand the world they're trying to simulate.

So what you are saying is you want to play Axioms?

No. I hope your game turns out to be good, and successful, but I'm not, personally, particularly interested in it. First of all, if I recall correctly, it will be procedurally generated, which immediately kills my interest in a grand strategy game (or 4x, which I don't typically play because they're customarily procgen).

Even if this weren't the case, there's not much substance on Axioms of Dominion so far. We've seen one or two screenshots, but most of what you've posted about it, that I've bothered to read (or skim through, honestly), have been design philosophy essays or "the game will be like this idea" in vague terms, but not concrete mechanics. This leaves me without much of an idea of what the gameplay's actually going to be like, so even if it was going to have a hand-crafted world, I still wouldn't have any excitement because there's nothing to go by. Same as Grey Eminence, which is hand-crafted (historical, in that case) but doesn't have anything of substance to back it up. Both it and Axioms of Dominion have plenty of ambition, but ambition for small indie projects tends to make me wary rather than excited, at least until something playable has come out to begin with.

I'm more interested in Princes' Fortune, being made by some anon on /vst/, because it (A) has a hand-crafted world, even if I have specific criticisms for some of the lore & naming schemes, and (B) has a more realistic scope, as it features a relatively small landmass, there's already video footage of observer mode with the AIs warring and taking territory from one another, etc, I believe it can be made and will be made. I'm not super excited because the dev hasn't given us a lot of mechanics detail, but at least there's something there, and he has gone over some of the mechanics (such as combat resolution) in a concrete if simple fashion.

Again, I'm not saying this to be negative, I do genuinely wish your game all the best, but currently there's nothing about it that makes me think I want to play it.

 

[Average Manatee]

It does a shit job at simulating that then, because unemployment is never a problem in the game. On the contrary, you will hit a labour shortage sooner rather than later.

Yeah, the only time you really get radicalization because of unemployment is because there's no way to smoothly transition from various production methods, it's all just "you unlocked electricity, now either everything needs electricity and will have less profit until its finished or you need to construction a bunch of electricity planets that will also be unprofitable until you switch things to use it". But as long as you manage things semi-decently (i.e. not a complete retard like the AI), it fixes itself fast. The only time radicalization actually becomes a problem is if you get in a situation where jobs keep hiring and then firing people in alternation which gives them militancy each time. And funny enough that ends up happening more often when there's too many jobs, because pops go back and forth between jobs.

Maybe the solution should be that inventions and production methods should not be controlled by players. The industry should be fully managing itself for maximum profit and it should be the player who has to cope with a new invention that results in firing 1/2 the work force.

 

[thesecret1]

Maybe the solution should be that inventions and production methods should not be controlled by players. The industry should be fully managing itself for maximum profit and it should be the player who has to cope with a new invention that results in firing 1/2 the work force.

They took the factory micro from V2, the thing everyone not playing tiny countries left up to automation, and built the game around that. If you let it to manage itself, there will be nothing left for you to actually do in the game. The factory micro IS the game, as insane as that may sound. The fact that the AI fails at it, despite actually handling it being mostly a tedious, repetitive task, is frankly amazing

 

[Average Manatee]

The factory micro IS the game, as insane as that may sound.

Which explains a lot about why diplomatic plays and war are such a shitshow. You can feel that they had no testing beyond "does the american civil war work fine? Does Britain win the opium wars? Does Germany form at least half the time? OK lets ship this game"

 

[Axioms]

I think V3 basically has two problems.
1 is that it was rushed. Clearly. Just the amount of bugs and obvious "literally nobody fucking played this shit or bothered fixing it" stuff makes it clear enough.
2, more importantly, is that Paradox's developers just don't really understand how the world works.

The idea of just clicking a multiculturalism button and suddenly having all your minorities happy to live in your nation is a good example of this. In reality the whole issue of ethnic / cultural tensions actually works in two directions. Yes, there's top-down issues like state backed discrimination, but there's also bottom-up issues like a desire for autonomy (or better yet, sovereignty). A realistic GSG would feature both of these. You might have tolerant laws towards minorities, but there would still be nationalist movements, and quelling these would basically require giving substantial territorial autonomy to let them exist as a country within a country, as Austria did for the Hungarians, or Canada did for the Quebecois. And indeed you could actually have a minority that is catered to with autonomy who then enacts fairly intolerant laws towards relative minorities in their territory, as is the case with Quebec and English speakers in Quebec (Quebec has been trying to suppress the English language in Quebec for as long as they've had the power to do so while simultaneously demanding that the French language be supported in the rest of Canada; they also maintain a regional voting party, the Bloc Quebecois, a mechanic which again is missing from V3 and was missing from V2; there should be parties that aren't ideologically aligned but rather regionally/ethnically aligned), which in turn evokes discontent in the rest of the country's majority population, etc.

A good GSG would represent this sort of concern so that the player has various things they may want to balance out - do I cater to this minority or not, can I give this territory some amount of autonomy and how much, will it upset the rest of the country and why, etc. In V3 you just click the "stop being a bigot" button and suddenly everyone, from Czechs to Serbs to Romanians, loves D I R E C T R U L E F R O M V I E N N A. It's a game made by walking stereotypes of the idiot college-educated NPC who has no fucking clue how human society, economics, or anything works, with a pop culture level of knowledge of history and zero understanding of why historical events played out as they did.

Even if Paradox had put in the effort to make their game not broken, and waited to release until it was finished, it would still have these problems because the people making the mechanics don't understand the world they're trying to simulate.

So what you are saying is you want to play Axioms?

No. I hope your game turns out to be good, and successful, but I'm not, personally, particularly interested in it. First of all, if I recall correctly, it will be procedurally generated, which immediately kills my interest in a grand strategy game (or 4x, which I don't typically play because they're customarily procgen).

Even if this weren't the case, there's not much substance on Axioms of Dominion so far. We've seen one or two screenshots, but most of what you've posted about it, that I've bothered to read (or skim through, honestly), have been design philosophy essays or "the game will be like this idea" in vague terms, but not concrete mechanics. This leaves me without much of an idea of what the gameplay's actually going to be like, so even if it was going to have a hand-crafted world, I still wouldn't have any excitement because there's nothing to go by. Same as Grey Eminence, which is hand-crafted (historical, in that case) but doesn't have anything of substance to back it up. Both it and Axioms of Dominion have plenty of ambition, but ambition for small indie projects tends to make me wary rather than excited, at least until something playable has come out to begin with.

I'm more interested in Princes' Fortune, being made by some anon on /vst/, because it (A) has a hand-crafted world, even if I have specific criticisms for some of the lore & naming schemes, and (B) has a more realistic scope, as it features a relatively small landmass, there's already video footage of observer mode with the AIs warring and taking territory from one another, etc, I believe it can be made and will be made. I'm not super excited because the dev hasn't given us a lot of mechanics detail, but at least there's something there, and he has gone over some of the mechanics (such as combat resolution) in a concrete if simple fashion.

Again, I'm not saying this to be negative, I do genuinely wish your game all the best, but currently there's nothing about it that makes me think I want to play it.

That comment is just related to things specifically mentioned by you in your post. It is sort of like a joke rather than a sincere statement. Like Axioms has the very specific things you are talking about. Actually it is even a bit more detailed than that.

Now as you say it is fantasy and uses procedural world gen, so someone would need to make a handcrafted historical Earth map for it to be historical. That's very easy though, relatively anyways.

I do appreciate someone who understands that GE hasn't actually demonstrated anything meaningful. They have cute mockups and a couple working things and they got posted on some discords for EU4 mods but it seems like people don't understand that they haven't actually shown anything serious yet. Very similar to That Which Sleeps as far as the marketing and response. Always annoys me.

If you read the design posts on Ideology, which I don't expect you to but if you did, and Administration and Assimilation/Integration, the intended mechanics are pretty similar to what you describe. There's no "Multicult" button. You have to engage in long term, and active, processes to achieve a pluralism directed society. You, or characters associated with you, need to engage in character based social interaction and maybe some Propaganda that targets Populations and also you have to do stuff like decide who has what rights and obligations and who can serve as an administrator, priest, military officer etc, and set up and/or manage existing administrative structures and positions.

So like for a hypothetical Roman Empire mod you'd have all the historical Roman magistrates. What race/gender/religion etc are allowed to hold those positions?

Imperator: Rome has a simplified "citizenship" system, Axioms is like that but with more detail and flexibility. You can't just say accept or maybe set a few checkboxes. You'd have to personally appoint relevant characters to positions, and do other stuff. And Populations have an Ideology that reacts to those actions making them dislike both individual Characters as well as the overall government/society. When a Population has characteristics that have full rights in society they are happier and the converse as well. Also they like or dislike the percentage of "Offices" they can/do hold.

Propaganda is a unique Axioms system that can slowly push Ideology of Characters and Populations, directly modify Opinion in Population and/or Character relationships and so forth.

Axioms is the only game, as far as I am aware, which has even expressed the *intention* of doing this. So while it is true that some people want to see more low level details or watch videos or w/e none of that is even relevant for any other game since like CK3 or Vicky3 they have put in their design plans that they absolutely *won't* be simulating this stuff.

 

[Axioms]

Maybe the solution should be that inventions and production methods should not be controlled by players. The industry should be fully managing itself for maximum profit and it should be the player who has to cope with a new invention that results in firing 1/2 the work force.

They took the factory micro from V2, the thing everyone not playing tiny countries left up to automation, and built the game around that. If you let it to manage itself, there will be nothing left for you to actually do in the game. The factory micro IS the game, as insane as that may sound. The fact that the AI fails at it, despite actually handling it being mostly a tedious, repetitive task, is frankly amazing

Yes this is pretty much the major issue. Many streamers and youtubers have talked about how they spend most of their time in the building tab changing production methods and so forth. The devs claim to be inspired by Factorio so I guess it make sense. Also it should be very obvious the AI wouldn't, and possibly couldn't handle the system well. What you want to be happening is a moving target and the AI has limited processing available for each AI. A major issue for me is that I suspect the economic model is *too modern/global*. Immigration is too easy as well. Most countries should be able to survive decently without a ton of trade and construction.

The most longstanding problem in Paradox games, IMO, is that the situation on the map is not built up organically through history. So the game systems immediately go nuts as soon as you hit Play, trying to arrive at an equilibrium actually directed by the game systems. Paradox has never made any attempt to deal with this, and this applies to every single Paradox game. Moreover it is unclear they have the mental capacity to do so even if they wanted to.

Also the game systems are designed for an extremely volatile map state. There's nothing simulating the reasons why geographical barriers are meaningful for instance. Cores or de jure territory or w/e nonsense don't exert a meaningful pull on this and nothing else in the games even tries.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Maybe the solution should be that inventions and production methods should not be controlled by players. The industry should be fully managing itself for maximum profit and it should be the player who has to cope with a new invention that results in firing 1/2 the work force.

They took the factory micro from V2, the thing everyone not playing tiny countries left up to automation, and built the game around that. If you let it to manage itself, there will be nothing left for you to actually do in the game. The factory micro IS the game, as insane as that may sound. The fact that the AI fails at it, despite actually handling it being mostly a tedious, repetitive task, is frankly amazing

Yes this is pretty much the major issue. Many streamers and youtubers have talked about how they spend most of their time in the building tab changing production methods and so forth. The devs claim to be inspired by Factorio so I guess it make sense.

If true, then the devs don't understand factorio.
You're actually supposed to build in Factorio and expand to exploit materials so you can continue building, not look at a tab all game.

 

[Victor1234]

I think V3 basically has two problems.
1 is that it was rushed. Clearly. Just the amount of bugs and obvious "literally nobody fucking played this shit or bothered fixing it" stuff makes it clear enough.
2, more importantly, is that Paradox's developers just don't really understand how the world works.

The idea of just clicking a multiculturalism button and suddenly having all your minorities happy to live in your nation is a good example of this. In reality the whole issue of ethnic / cultural tensions actually works in two directions. Yes, there's top-down issues like state backed discrimination, but there's also bottom-up issues like a desire for autonomy (or better yet, sovereignty). A realistic GSG would feature both of these. You might have tolerant laws towards minorities, but there would still be nationalist movements, and quelling these would basically require giving substantial territorial autonomy to let them exist as a country within a country, as Austria did for the Hungarians, or Canada did for the Quebecois. And indeed you could actually have a minority that is catered to with autonomy who then enacts fairly intolerant laws towards relative minorities in their territory, as is the case with Quebec and English speakers in Quebec (Quebec has been trying to suppress the English language in Quebec for as long as they've had the power to do so while simultaneously demanding that the French language be supported in the rest of Canada; they also maintain a regional voting party, the Bloc Quebecois, a mechanic which again is missing from V3 and was missing from V2; there should be parties that aren't ideologically aligned but rather regionally/ethnically aligned), which in turn evokes discontent in the rest of the country's majority population, etc.

A good GSG would represent this sort of concern so that the player has various things they may want to balance out - do I cater to this minority or not, can I give this territory some amount of autonomy and how much, will it upset the rest of the country and why, etc. In V3 you just click the "stop being a bigot" button and suddenly everyone, from Czechs to Serbs to Romanians, loves D I R E C T R U L E F R O M V I E N N A. It's a game made by walking stereotypes of the idiot college-educated NPC who has no fucking clue how human society, economics, or anything works, with a pop culture level of knowledge of history and zero understanding of why historical events played out as they did.

Even if Paradox had put in the effort to make their game not broken, and waited to release until it was finished, it would still have these problems because the people making the mechanics don't understand the world they're trying to simulate.

So what you are saying is you want to play Axioms?

No. I hope your game turns out to be good, and successful, but I'm not, personally, particularly interested in it. First of all, if I recall correctly, it will be procedurally generated, which immediately kills my interest in a grand strategy game (or 4x, which I don't typically play because they're customarily procgen).

Even if this weren't the case, there's not much substance on Axioms of Dominion so far. We've seen one or two screenshots, but most of what you've posted about it, that I've bothered to read (or skim through, honestly), have been design philosophy essays or "the game will be like this idea" in vague terms, but not concrete mechanics. This leaves me without much of an idea of what the gameplay's actually going to be like, so even if it was going to have a hand-crafted world, I still wouldn't have any excitement because there's nothing to go by. Same as Grey Eminence, which is hand-crafted (historical, in that case) but doesn't have anything of substance to back it up. Both it and Axioms of Dominion have plenty of ambition, but ambition for small indie projects tends to make me wary rather than excited, at least until something playable has come out to begin with.

I'm more interested in Princes' Fortune, being made by some anon on /vst/, because it (A) has a hand-crafted world, even if I have specific criticisms for some of the lore & naming schemes, and (B) has a more realistic scope, as it features a relatively small landmass, there's already video footage of observer mode with the AIs warring and taking territory from one another, etc, I believe it can be made and will be made. I'm not super excited because the dev hasn't given us a lot of mechanics detail, but at least there's something there, and he has gone over some of the mechanics (such as combat resolution) in a concrete if simple fashion.

Again, I'm not saying this to be negative, I do genuinely wish your game all the best, but currently there's nothing about it that makes me think I want to play it.

Propaganda is a unique Axioms system that can slowly push Ideology of Characters and Populations, directly modify Opinion in Population and/or Character relationships and so forth.

Axioms is the only game, as far as I am aware, which has even expressed the *intention* of doing this. So while it is true that some people want to see more low level details or watch videos or w/e none of that is even relevant for any other game since like CK3 or Vicky3 they have put in their design plans that they absolutely *won't* be simulating this stuff.

Chris King (lead designer on Victoria 1) did a space game called Galactic Inheritors in 2015 that did exactly that. It was called media manipulation instead of propaganda though. He started working on it circa 2013 and the dev diary on that specific topic was a fascinating read but it's gone now. Especially as it was just a few years before 'FB is manipulating us/Russia stole the elections' drama unfolded, so it was very prescient. The game ended up flopping since it was ugly and buggy, but it had some good ideas.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/galactic-inheritors-4x-strategy

 

[Axioms]

I think V3 basically has two problems.
1 is that it was rushed. Clearly. Just the amount of bugs and obvious "literally nobody fucking played this shit or bothered fixing it" stuff makes it clear enough.
2, more importantly, is that Paradox's developers just don't really understand how the world works.

The idea of just clicking a multiculturalism button and suddenly having all your minorities happy to live in your nation is a good example of this. In reality the whole issue of ethnic / cultural tensions actually works in two directions. Yes, there's top-down issues like state backed discrimination, but there's also bottom-up issues like a desire for autonomy (or better yet, sovereignty). A realistic GSG would feature both of these. You might have tolerant laws towards minorities, but there would still be nationalist movements, and quelling these would basically require giving substantial territorial autonomy to let them exist as a country within a country, as Austria did for the Hungarians, or Canada did for the Quebecois. And indeed you could actually have a minority that is catered to with autonomy who then enacts fairly intolerant laws towards relative minorities in their territory, as is the case with Quebec and English speakers in Quebec (Quebec has been trying to suppress the English language in Quebec for as long as they've had the power to do so while simultaneously demanding that the French language be supported in the rest of Canada; they also maintain a regional voting party, the Bloc Quebecois, a mechanic which again is missing from V3 and was missing from V2; there should be parties that aren't ideologically aligned but rather regionally/ethnically aligned), which in turn evokes discontent in the rest of the country's majority population, etc.

A good GSG would represent this sort of concern so that the player has various things they may want to balance out - do I cater to this minority or not, can I give this territory some amount of autonomy and how much, will it upset the rest of the country and why, etc. In V3 you just click the "stop being a bigot" button and suddenly everyone, from Czechs to Serbs to Romanians, loves D I R E C T R U L E F R O M V I E N N A. It's a game made by walking stereotypes of the idiot college-educated NPC who has no fucking clue how human society, economics, or anything works, with a pop culture level of knowledge of history and zero understanding of why historical events played out as they did.

Even if Paradox had put in the effort to make their game not broken, and waited to release until it was finished, it would still have these problems because the people making the mechanics don't understand the world they're trying to simulate.

So what you are saying is you want to play Axioms?

No. I hope your game turns out to be good, and successful, but I'm not, personally, particularly interested in it. First of all, if I recall correctly, it will be procedurally generated, which immediately kills my interest in a grand strategy game (or 4x, which I don't typically play because they're customarily procgen).

Even if this weren't the case, there's not much substance on Axioms of Dominion so far. We've seen one or two screenshots, but most of what you've posted about it, that I've bothered to read (or skim through, honestly), have been design philosophy essays or "the game will be like this idea" in vague terms, but not concrete mechanics. This leaves me without much of an idea of what the gameplay's actually going to be like, so even if it was going to have a hand-crafted world, I still wouldn't have any excitement because there's nothing to go by. Same as Grey Eminence, which is hand-crafted (historical, in that case) but doesn't have anything of substance to back it up. Both it and Axioms of Dominion have plenty of ambition, but ambition for small indie projects tends to make me wary rather than excited, at least until something playable has come out to begin with.

I'm more interested in Princes' Fortune, being made by some anon on /vst/, because it (A) has a hand-crafted world, even if I have specific criticisms for some of the lore & naming schemes, and (B) has a more realistic scope, as it features a relatively small landmass, there's already video footage of observer mode with the AIs warring and taking territory from one another, etc, I believe it can be made and will be made. I'm not super excited because the dev hasn't given us a lot of mechanics detail, but at least there's something there, and he has gone over some of the mechanics (such as combat resolution) in a concrete if simple fashion.

Again, I'm not saying this to be negative, I do genuinely wish your game all the best, but currently there's nothing about it that makes me think I want to play it.

Propaganda is a unique Axioms system that can slowly push Ideology of Characters and Populations, directly modify Opinion in Population and/or Character relationships and so forth.

Axioms is the only game, as far as I am aware, which has even expressed the *intention* of doing this. So while it is true that some people want to see more low level details or watch videos or w/e none of that is even relevant for any other game since like CK3 or Vicky3 they have put in their design plans that they absolutely *won't* be simulating this stuff.

Chris King (lead designer on Victoria 1) did a space game called Galactic Inheritors in 2015 that did exactly that. It was called media manipulation instead of propaganda though. He started working on it circa 2013 and the dev diary on that specific topic was a fascinating read but it's gone now. Especially as it was just a few years before 'FB is manipulating us/Russia stole the elections' drama unfolded, so it was very prescient. The game ended up flopping since it was ugly and buggy, but it had some good ideas.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/galactic-inheritors-4x-strategy

Damn, a Paradox lead designer trying to do cool stuff? I think the Axioms system is a little more intense than what is in that article, and sadly there's no fancy design blog to read, but good for him. Very interesting timing as well. I posted a bit about Propaganda in Axioms around 2-122014. Must have been something in the water those years.

Note that Propaganda is a system which impacts every other system in Axioms and does not replace Diplomacy, as "Media" appears to do in Galactic Inheritors. Mechanically the systems are trying to achieve different goals. But the GI concept certainly shakes up GalCiv style 4x game mechanics in an interesting way.