Grand Strategy Where is Victoria III?

[Delterius]

its happening rn

wiz is working on victoria 3 as we speak

citation

 

[FreeKaner]

Well, to be clear on that, I am not for this. Maybe it was unclear in my initial post.
I still don't see how you being a ruler and giving an adequate budget, which will be spent on ALL military manners, is somehow more abstract than having two, three types of supplies, most of which you will largely not interact with outside of building a specific factory and then letting the game automatically buy up stockpiles. The result is the same and that is what I am arguing could be much better. Rather than representing a broad decrease in combat readiness (again, it's been a while, maybe I am calling it by the wrong name), there could be different, specific effects of missing out on specific types of production. While I think medicine inventions fill this out by a bit, it is too abstract, for you just get a flat boost to your shit after a specific time period. Which is fine, but it hardly interacts with fundamentals by saying "20% better" in completely abstract terms that are divorced from supplying, maintaining and organising those things through fleshed out game mechanics.

Well then, I assume by this you understand what I mean by difference between fundamentals and abstracts. What I am saying is Victoria 2 has more of the former, and EU4 has very little of it. While Victoria 2 also uses abstractions, its fundamentals interact in much more organic matter and is built upon by abstracts. In Victoria 2 your units start to disintegrate if they are not being supplied properly as they won't be reinforced. Medicine inventions also decrease the impact of casualties to your pops (I.E less amount of casualties taken in battle will translate into decrease in pop numbers, meaning vaguely that with more advanced medicine less of your troops are dying from wounds and such).

I disagree very strongly. To say those four centuries didn't amount to nearly as much, if not more, than that one century is to be extremely ignorant of history of that time period, nevermind individual centuries or even specific decades within that time period. What changed was literacy rates, governments, political institutions, economics, trade, society -- basically everything. It's difficult to argue with someone who can sweep all these things under the rug with a "Nuh-uh". I'd argue it would be difficult to properly represent 15th - 16th century from the traditional starting point of the EUIV and then for a hundred year long game the same way Vic2 represents it's age. Now adding three more vastly different centuries with exteme variety of historical trends and changes is an insanely difficult task.

I didn't mean that those things didn't change anything, I said that they are political changes that do not require complex fundamental mechanics to represent. You would broadly require two fundamentals, one is regarding the interaction between central control and regional autonomy, other is state authority and interest groups trying to keep their privileges. A lot of the struggles, including partly confessionalism and reformation & counter-reformation are related to these concepts. Essentially, at start of EU4 timeline the states should be aristocratic cliques, and at the end of it they should be modern states, which is a process of centralization, bureaucratization, institutionalism and breaking of traditional privileges of interest groups (peasantry and nobility alike). Other is economic systems, and the physical reality of trade routes as logistic questions. EU4 simply doesn't even remotely attempt to handle these questions as fundamentals, rather they are all abstracted as province autonomy, religion (always singular, there is no place for plurality), culture of a province etc., there is nothing fundamental in it. Its trade mechanics are very much deficient and don't simulate or represent anything except self-contained mini-game about pooling trade. Same goes for mercantilism, trade companies etc. that were dominant factors in this era.

Compared to this Victoria 2 attempting to even demonstrate how demographics were so important to states via pop dynamics and their interaction with literacy is beyond and above anything EU4 even is capable of with its layers of abstracts. We are talking about a game that's supposed to represent age of discovery that cannot even properly give you the same fundamental reasons to represent why Portugal or Venice acted as they did in this era, while in Victoria 2 you have same challenges and goals in mind while trying to modernize the Ottoman state as Ottoman sultans themselves did. EU4 is a game that's essentially risk with trade, but cannot represent how armies worked in this era, as a negotiation between state agents and private contractors at first to standing professional armies later. This is a game that cannot simulate how trade went from mercantilist zero-sum to global trade routes and joint-stock ownership. It is a game where walking an army from Iberia to India can be as easy as getting them to India via cape. EU4 just doesn't represent any fundamental ultimately, it is all abstract fluff gamey mechanics that are self-contained. While Victoria 2 tries to represent how countries transformed from agrarian autocratic monarchies to industrial rational states.

EU4 could very well represent at least some of the fundamentals of the era, sure 377 years is a long time, but I think if Victoria 2 can represent how agrarian monarchies transformed into industrial modern-states. EU4 can at least represent how struggle between state and interest groups worked. At the very least, it should try to attempt to represent the challenges of raising standing armies or maritime trade.

No, I am thinking of HPM. It is absolutely rail-roaded and most of the games are literally the same. Play as Italy? Unify. But NOT by your own agency. Just wait until a specific event. Maybe then take a few lands in MENA or Balkans. Germany? Muhgrossgermaniums. But NOT by conquest, just wait until a specific event that is always choreographed the same exact way. France? Don't get smashed by Prussia. And so on. I'm not saying it shouldn't be an option, but the game heavily leans on these outcomes, especially when the AI plays. While some determinism is necessary in these games to give an illusion of historicity, it would be nice to see a game where Germany doesn't overflow into France. Between the start time and the historical date of Franco-Prusso war there's enough time that the game might take it's own course given that it has variables to do so, but 9/10 it will happen the same it has happend in almost all the other games you've played.

This is absolutely untrue, I am not sure when you last played EU4 but events and mission-trees railroad much more than Victoria 2 does. Formation of certain states is also entirely based on technologies (such as Spain, which Iberian wedding is an event in the first place for example or the entirety of Burgundian crisis). Victoria 2 is not more railroaded, it is more constrainted because of its focus on demographics.

...except they do. They represent compability between the state and the populous. Conquering an European culture with the same religion boosts some penalty for rebels. Conquering an entirely different religion with an alien culture makes for a MUCH bigger increase in likelyhood of rebellion. You're using a poor example.

They do not because you can readily accept other cultures, convert entire religions by click of a button, or spend some mana to change the cultures. It is an abstract obstacle. If you don't do that, at best you'll just get some rebel spawns as a number that you can squash, because the mismatched culture & religion is just a malus to your manpower (and not even entirety of it, apparently you can census-draft entire populations, even unaccepted culture and religions to your armies, in early modern era, that's a bold assumption). While in Victoria 2 if you have unaccepted cultures in your country, and you draft them to your army, that unit of soldiers might rebel. You cannot readily assimilate or accept them at the click of a button at the cost of one type of mana or another either. You have to nudge your populations to pass the required reforms so that they aren't as unaccepted.

That's hardly my experience, at least with the AI nations, HPM included or not. Mostly what changes the game is what nation I play, thus the player is usually the only element that disrupts the equilibrium and allows for a truly different game. Even then the tempting route to take is one that the nation historically has, and quite often it is a boring one, as you are not really playing the game, but doing a to-do list for a very specific event that sometimes feels like cheating, i.e. unification events. There is not much emergent gameplay in Vic2. The traditionally rail-roaded experience of Victoria 2 becomes boring very quickly if you've experienced it just once or twice.

Victoria 2 is a more passive game, but that's essentially because it represents the dynamics of the era well. You cannot transform a backward nation into an industrial power house easily, nor shift the balance of power by conquering entire half of the globe as Ryukyu. That's however a good thing in what it is trying to represent with great power dynamics and demographic shifts of the era.

Well, I am not going to argue against that as I am not even an EUIV apologist. I already explained why I believe the game has failed to do this, and it has to do with its ambitious scope.
Added in some last-minute edits to make more sense in parts.

I am not critical of EU4 as someone who doesn't care for the period, but as someone who is intimately familiar with it. It is a disappointing game, and shows fundamental misunderstanding in game design. EU4 is bad game not because of faulty execution, but because faulty aims and ambitions.

 

[Herzog]

I didn't mean that those things didn't change anything, I said that they are political changes that do not require complex fundamental mechanics to represent.

Why not? I think it could be interesting game that centers around reformation and it's effects. A more fleshed out religious system with meaningful gameplay around. A man can dream... and the way you described a theoretical game centered around those doesn't sound too bad. Unfortunately such an undertaking is far too ambitious for anyone, in large part for the things you've described and how complex it would be. We are talking of modern Paradox after all.

While in Victoria 2 if you have unaccepted cultures in your country, and you draft them to your army, that unit of soldiers might rebel.

This is one of my favourite things about Victoria. Not enough games make you weary of your own military. Especially if you leave them unchecked and pay no mind to whatever insurgents. Although I did find it fairly retarded having to mow down tens of thousands of liberals, communists and whatever partisans at some point in the game.

They do not because you can readily accept other cultures, convert entire religions by click of a button, or spend some mana to change the cultures.

...I might have been a bit lenient to forget that it is this simple to merely transform the culture of conquered people's in this game.

This is absolutely untrue, I am not sure when you last played EU4 but events and mission-trees railroad much more than Victoria 2 does. Formation of certain states is also entirely based on technologies (such as Spain, which Iberian wedding is an event in the first place for example or the entirety of Burgundian crisis). Victoria 2 is not more railroaded, it is more constrainted because of its focus on demographics.

You might be correct that EU is more railroaded than VIC2, but both games, as do all Paradox games, suffer from this same issue. They're always too similar to one another. I might be very biased because I prefer more freeform games with less historicity tied in it - at least less intrusive historicity - and as such more random outcomes.

Victoria 2 is a more passive

Which is a little lame as quite often I find myself merely waiting for time to pass while I play. I was almost tempted to reinstall the game during this discussion, but now that I really think of it, I am glad I am only talking about it and not playing it anymore.

 

[Delterius]

Which is a little lame as quite often I find myself merely waiting for time to pass while I play. I was almost tempted to reinstall the game during this discussion, but now that I really think of it, I am glad I am only talking about it and not playing it anymore.

your opinions are now disqualified you may now claim your eu4 player cone hat

 

[Herzog]

your opinions are now disqualified you may now claim your eu4 player cone hat

I'd rather watch paint dry than touch a Paradox title again.

 

[Tigranes]

While I love Victoria II to death, it's a very strange game in the sense that nothing seems to make sense and the mechanics are very opaque at first, and then once you get the hang of it, almost every country/game involves taking them through one single arc. It's some kind of absurdist skit about how the arc of history always bends in the same way and modernisation just involves carefully planned factories propped up by government subsidies mutating into free market and so on. The mechanics even accidentally encourage some weird dialectics of capitalism to communism. The game systems lack a robust support for truly different ways of playing, and aside from the factory & voting, it lacks specific modelling of the era in the same way that all Pdox games tend to.

All that is to say, I'm almost amazed that V2 is great as it is, and it's hard to see how a Paradox in decline could do anything adequate besides turning it into a mana-driven blobber. Let's face it, it was a good run, at times a beautiful romance, but it's over. Paradox, that is.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

The mechanics even accidentally encourage some weird dialectics of capitalism to communism.

 

[Delterius]

^try playing china where you can't manually improve factories fast enough and you fall to revolutions from the sheer amount of people that became unemployed this month

 

[Keyboard Vomit]

Like, they reduced the fucking Cabanagem to some guys rioting in Belém in the first Vicky.

Cabanagem was a couple of mostly peaceful riots, mister.

 

[Fedora Master]

It's almost as if people cared even less about South America than they do about China.

 

[FreeKaner]

Worth remembering that for all of Vicky 2's goodness, it has serious historicity issues. The whole "Africa is a big bland 'here be dragons' ready for colonization"... is not how colonization worked.

South America is also done horribly. The Vicky period is like one of the most exciting periods in the continent, with multiple wars and revolts occurring in those countries. And yet... its just so meh.

Like, they reduced the fucking Cabanagem to some guys rioting in Belém in the first Vicky. It doesn't even happen in the second one, even through it was pretty much inevitable by the time the game starts. 35% of the population of Grão-Pará (which is the entire north, not just modern-day Pará that's just a large chunk) was straight out killed during years of war to the knife. Farroupilha is a bar-room brawn by comparison. They also ignore the Malés and the Sabinada.

Even the fucking states map is wrong and stupid. Google existed at the time so what the fuck.

Game also fails hard at really simulating the great issues with slavery that both the United States and Brazil had at the time.

Also, I feel like Vicky really ignores politics and general... well, people. Straight out abstracted those away.

Victoria is a good foundation, but to properly despict the era, they really need to go further beyond.

Did you play the game without the DLC? (and HPM, of course).

 

[Tigranes]

I mean, yeah. The game really has no clue how to handle slavery or any of those other things, because it's essentially a kind of "what would the fat cat capitalist do when presented with a blank slate world?" skit. I build factories! If I choose the right factories and keep the numbers up I will become rich! Sometimes I pass new policies in a mostly linear evolution track towards a more free market society (kind of?) so that the factories do better! And the issue with Victoria III is it's a real headache as to where you go from there: it's challenging to overhaul the little factory game thing to try and make it better, but it's also challenging to actually tackle everything else about that historical period (both in and beyond the West) that the game has mostly ignored.

 

[IDtenT]

The game should focus more on 1776 and less on the 19th century.

Build your game around it.

It's the perfect start date.

Focus more on Law and its role in society. How it structures a parliament and so on. Would need some proper parliamentary shit, but it can't be impossible. Separations of powers, etc.

 

[Delterius]

The game should focus more on 1776 and less on the 19th century.

I think the post napoleonic Concert of Europe is an unique situation and rather important for the Vicky experience. Start Victoria 3 too early and you get the same weird situations as in EU4, where everyone hates forced things such as the dutch revolt. As opposed to Vicky2 where you already begin with the italian and german unification movements poised to strike.

 

[IDtenT]

Easy solution is mutliple start dates and triggers. Not like they've never done that before.

 

[JarlFrank]

We all know how a modern Paradox game would look like.

Vicky 3 would have:

- all nations, be they European, American, Asian or African, would work with the same mechanics initially
- each nation group (European, American, Asian, African) will get its own DLC "expansion" consisting of 3 new features and a bit of flavor
- 5 years after release we will finally have reached a point where there's enough DLC to give features and flavor to every playable nation, but it will cost 500 bucks to buy it all

 

[thesheeep]

We all know how a modern Paradox game would look like.

Vicky 3 would have:

- all nations, be they European, American, Asian or African, would work with the same mechanics initially
- each nation group (European, American, Asian, African) will get its own DLC "expansion" consisting of 3 new features and a bit of flavor
- 5 years after release we will finally have reached a point where there's enough DLC to give features and flavor to every playable nation, but it will cost 500 bucks to buy it all

- 1-2 years after release, there will be mods with more content than all future DLCs combined, putting the official releases to shame. These mods will continue to be improved so that no matter how many paid packs Paradox releases, vanilla will never catch up to the quality of certain mods.

 

[Fedora Master]

Also everything would be BALANCED because of MP.

 

[what am i doing]

The game should focus more on 1776 and less on the 19th century.

I think the post napoleonic Concert of Europe is an unique situation and rather important for the Vicky experience. Start Victoria 3 too early and you get the same weird situations as in EU4, where everyone hates forced things such as the dutch revolt. As opposed to Vicky2 where you already begin with the italian and german unification movements poised to strike.

I think there's a middle ground if you allow it to go either way depending on how the player handles things. EU4 railroads things too hard - if they gave the player ways to intervene or handle the event in an alternative way, then it would be alleviated a lot. The Victoria 2 mod Divergences of Darkness handles this kind of thing well. There are events that can happen to push the game in certain directions - such as England or France rebelling against the Dual Monarchy, Scandinavia attempting to control the whole Baltic coast, the League of Berlin rebelling against Bohemia, a variety of paths towards Italian unification, etc... but in most cases (barring some RNG here and there) the player is able to prevent these things from happening, or, if they really want them to happen, helping them along.

This gives the game a lot of flavour because you have scripted event chains that are written and planned by human beings rather than just random blobbing (so they make sense and build an alternate-history narrative) but they're provided enough branching outcomes that it doesn't lock the game into one path every time, and enough player control over them (ie, as the Dual Monarchy you can prevent the rebellions altogether if you take a balanced path between English and French and secure certain regions) that the player never feels arbitrarily fucked over like they do in EU4 when the Netherlands goes from total contentment to "fuck burgundy" overnight.

 

[Delterius]

EU4 railroads things too hard

No it doesn't. There's no railroading in EU4 beyond the fact that the dutch will revolt. That's why players hate it. By 1650 there's been 200 years of change and no matter what you do, nothing short of cultural genocide of the dutch prevents the dutch revolt. EU4 is a free sandbox. You can do whatever. By comparison Vicky2 is very deterministic. The problem is that if you start before the French Revolution then its not longer a game about the 1800s. There is no way to simulate the outcomes of the french revolution without heavy scripting. At that point you go from characteristic Vicky2 geographic determinism to just EU2 esque railroading of everything.

Personally I wouldn't change the startdate at all. Or at most bring it back to 1820s. But I think it would be cool if turns were smaller than a day. Spend twice as much time in the same century, I'd say.

 

[FreeKaner]

Making it start at 1836 and make the days day/night turns (whereby daily work hours reforms can also impact) would be good. Absolutely no reason whatsoever to start it any earlier.

 

[Space Satan]

What bugs me the most is how population growth is handled in Victorian era. Timespan is just too short to allow several great wars, generations could not regenerate even with Victorian large families. Small conflicts could do but several big wars will deplete continets of manpower for decades. Victoria II handed it...badly. With rebellions being bigger than possible population often and not impacting population at all.

 

[Jugashvili]

My main concern is that if they ever make Vicky III not only will the history be sanitized for Current Year™ sensibilities, they'll also continue to go deeper down the Alt-History rabbit hole. I'm not against players being able to alter the course of history to a moderate and plausible extent, but lately their games seem to have gone full clown shoes with the "Australian aboriginals conquer Europe" and "Mexico singlehandedly wins WWII" wish fulfillment bullshit.

 

[Hace El Oso]

My main concern is that if they ever make Vicky III not only will the history be sanitized for Current Year™ sensibilities, they'll also continue to go deeper down the Alt-History rabbit hole. I'm not against players being able to alter the course of history to a moderate and plausible extent, but lately their games seem to have gone full clown shoes with the "Australian aboriginals conquer Europe" and "Mexico singlehandedly wins WWII" wish fulfillment bullshit.

We're doomed by generational drift in this case, I think. The overwhelming majority of western/westernized zoomers(and millennials were already bad enough) have only ever learned reddit-style meme history, anything else makes them bored, confused or uncomfortable. Neil deGrasse Tyson, not Carl Sagan.

 

[Space Satan]

My main concern is that if they ever make Vicky III not only will the history be sanitized for Current Year™ sensibilities, they'll also continue to go deeper down the Alt-History rabbit hole. I'm not against players being able to alter the course of history to a moderate and plausible extent, but lately their games seem to have gone full clown shoes with the "Australian aboriginals conquer Europe" and "Mexico singlehandedly wins WWII" wish fulfillment bullshit.

The very point of Paradox historical games is to make alt-histories. No one ever want to play "historical" roleplay arties more than once bceause it is boring as hell. Who would ever want to play HoIIV with WWII being historical? Who will buy EUIV should it streamline historical gameplay? At least Paradox realized that they should at most draw some lines like Russia expands to steppes, Spain favors colonies, England favors navy etc. without making gameplay revolve around them. They are nice bonuses that represent said counry's historical stranghts.
With Victoria III it is an age of revolutions, spring of nations but it is very very turbulent. No compared to timespan of CK or EU. Only HoIIV is shorter and it is not even hard cap - game will last until last war will be won.