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[Il Palazzo]

Can somebody summarise all the ways in which this instalment differs from V2?

[Karlito]

Can somebody summarise all the ways in which this instalment differs from V2?

Kind of a tall order. I'll try to hit the big points, and also point you toward this review since comparing the two is the main point of discussion.

-Global market is replaced by various national markets which can trade with each other
-RGOs and factories are replaced by a system of buildings, which accept various inputs and employ POPs to produce certain outputs (goods, but also things like bureaucratic capacity for your government buildings, the ability to build more buildings for your construction industry, or regiments for your army for your barracks)
-All war declarations now go through something like the V2 crisis system "Diplomatic Plays" where various powers can take sides and someone might decide to back down before matters escalate to war.
-The concept of "Westernization" is gone. Instead states like China and Japan are "Unrecognized", which is essentially simply a diplomatic penalty (recognized powers take less infamy from attacking unrecognized states I believe). You can achieve recognition through a Diplomatic Play (modeling the Russo-Japanese war essentially)
-Regions on the map which would have been empty "uncolonized territory" are now occupied by "decentralized" states. These are non-playable, but fully model POPs, and may also try to resist colonizing powers.
-Army control is completely different from other Paradox titles and is much more abstracted. No more moving little men around on a map. I haven't played with it much, but the idea is that the player's role is more "politician yelling at the generals over the phone" rather than "general directing the campaign"
-Politically conscious POPs join various interest groups which compete to control the government. Managing the happiness and relative power of the interest groups to achieve your desired configuration of laws is the main goal of the political management part of the game.
For example, many countries are dominated by Landholding Aristocrats at the start of the game (who might be 1% of the population but have a majority of the political power). Their power comes from both the economic makeup of the country and the system of laws. A common playbook for those who want to liberalize is to create a class of wealthy capitalists (wealth = power) which form a secondary powerbase and then try to gradually pass reforms to erode the power of the aristocrats- replacing feudal levies with a centrally controlled army (empowering the Army), replacing hereditary bureaucrats with those appointed by merit (empowering the Intelligentsia), and eventually ending Serfdom (which totally wrecks the power of the Aristocrats)

Overall, I'm enjoying it. The base systems seem pretty solid. Currently I think they need to do a lot of work on UX (it's hard to find the information I want), as well as adding more country and region specific content (which I imagine is going to be the main focus of the monetization model).

[Shooer]

I def see combat getting overhauls in the future from the free patches that come with major DLC.  Along with more features within those DLC for combat.

I like the combat though, it's a more hands-off version of the HOI4 combat.  Fits with the setting, and a lot less micromanagey.

A common playbook for those who want to liberalize is to create a class of wealthy capitalists (wealth = power) which form a secondary powerbase and then try to gradually pass reforms to erode the power of the aristocrats- replacing feudal levies with a centrally controlled army (empowering the Army), replacing hereditary bureaucrats with those appointed by merit (empowering the Intelligentsia), and eventually ending Serfdom (which totally wrecks the power of the Aristocrats)

Or you can do the opposite and make the Kingdom Of Texas.

[forsaken1111]

I just really hate when my general's front merges/splits and rather than join a new one they just fuck off to the HQ and can take weeks to return.

[Lidku]

I personally see no point in getting Victoria 3. From what I've seen, it's heavily broken and barebones - which presumably (if not certainly) will be "fixed" with DLC. The fact that armies don't even if exist is a major reason WHY I'm not getting this.

Relying on the AI for warfare.. has never been a positive with almost all Paradox titles (in regard to how allies usually behavior in other games). Also, every single war being somesort of crisis was an abjectly poor decision. I've seen silly cases where the British Raj joins the side of Mexico against America during their war with one another.

Not only that, the graphics and UI for Victoria 3 look like something straight out from a mobile game. I can't take it seriously... this "mobile-like" aesthetic Paradox has adopted recently since CK3 and onward, screams of genericness.

And genuinely, I am getting tired of Paradox's overall DLC policy. If their released games as of late were high quality, I wouldn't mind stomaching down DLC. But their recent games.. haven't been to my personal liking at all.

No point in wasting money on a game I know Paradox deliberately underdeveloped, as a means to sell DLC down the line.

[forsaken1111]

That's fair. I've been enjoying it quite a bit myself.

[AlStar]

No point in wasting money on a game I know Paradox deliberately underdeveloped, as a means to sell DLC down the line.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I think that this statement is rather unfair to Paradox. They're pretty open with how they're constantly iterating and modifying the systems in their games.

Stellaris, for instance, has had several pretty much ground-up rejiggering of how populations and planets work throughout its life.

While it's entirely possible that they'll move to improve armies in an upcoming DLC, I don't think there's a developer in some backroom steepling their hands and muttering "excellent" to themselves as they read player's complaints about the game's current state of warfare.

[LuuBluum]

I find myself in a fun position. I need to conquer portions of Austria-Hungary to properly form Yugoslavia. I don't think I can bait Austria into attacking me (maybe?) which would be the easiest way for this to go down, because I have a defense pact with Italy. I could become Italy's protectorate and instigate things that way.

To put it simply, in order to form Yugoslavia I have to instigate WWI. About a decade late, but nonetheless. This hasn't been the most ideal playthrough of this campaign, but there were a lot of good takeaway lessons. Mostly involving abusing protectorate status, though depending on just how screwed the Ottomans get (my playthrough had one of the modifiers not get triggered so they didn't quite get throttled by Egypt as much as they should) I might be able to work out the necessary territorial claims without having to rely on protectorates. Though dealing with Austria is always going to require instigating WWI.

The real irony here is that I'm not even loosely referring to WWI as "big war involving a lot of great powers". I'm literally referring to WWI. The only thing more ideal here would be if I could instigate it by assassinating a high-level Austrian politician, to get them to declare war on me instead.

I personally see no point in getting Victoria 3. From what I've seen, it's heavily broken and barebones - which presumably (if not certainly) will be "fixed" with DLC. The fact that armies don't even if exist is a major reason WHY I'm not getting this.

Relying on the AI for warfare.. has never been a positive with almost all Paradox titles (in regard to how allies usually behavior in other games). Also, every single war being somesort of crisis was an abjectly poor decision. I've seen silly cases where the British Raj joins the side of Mexico against America during their war with one another.

People keep saying this as if the decision to do the military combat this way was some sort of cost-saving measure and not, like, deliberate. Moving men around on the map isn't coming back. Not as a DLC. Not as a later-patch improvement. It's also not "relying on the AI for warfare"; the entire operation is different.

But yes, thank you for demonstrating my point that the bulk of the negative reviews are people complaining about the military system.

Also in hindsight I realize that the "wargoal" bit doesn't actually matter for the sake of pressing a war goal. The way to win a war is to simply make them no longer want to fight. My taking of Thessaly was simple: conquer the territory proper, and then sit defensively on the Eastern Thrace front and watch Bulgaria try (and fail) to attack into Constantinople. I don't lose much from the battles, but it slowly but surely devastates the territory and puts the Ottomans in a more and more economically perilous situation. Only thing I had to do was sit back, defend, and wait for victory. Similarly I had to fend off Russia when at war with Crete (who I popped off from Egypt after they sided with the Ottomans in the war over Thessaly; I also popped off Cyprus but no one defended them when I reduced them to a puppet), and it wasn't all that hard to fend off despite Russia's numerical superiority.

My biggest issue with the future war against Austria is just that the front is too damn big.

[Lidku]

My main hope overall, is that I hope that the trend of Paradox de-emphasizing armies doesn't become a trend. From CK3 with the warfare being decidedly "simplified" compared to CK2; to Victoria 3 basically have no armies at all as we can see now.

The main problem was that, in some past games, Paradox focused too much on the war aspect and nothing else. CK2 had this problem where there was little to do between wars, besides waiting for new events to pop-up that might be related to your rulers focus. EU4 has this problem too, but even worse as EU4 you play as an embodiment of a state instead of an interesting character.

Now it seems these newer Paradox games as I noted before, are out-of-nowhere gutting warfare mechanics.

Even games that actually had semi-frequent events or things of interest to do besides war, like Stellaris and Imperator, sometimes can be exhausted of said events or the same ones repeat over-and-over again. That basically just leaves POP management in a given game in either of those two, but that aspect of mechanic in Paradox games have always held my interest for some time if left down to it.

Paradox should be developing both warfare AND non-warfare mechanics in tandem. There shouldn't be a reason why both should be neglected.

[MorleyDev]

I'm going to say something probably controversial, but I don't think warfare gameplay in a Grand Strategy game can not be shit.

Ultimately the player isn't in control at all of battles, they simply have a part in setting up the pieces, the battle is a zero player game, then you deal with the output of that zero-player game. From a gameplay design pov, this is terrible. There's no meaningful decisions or commands to issue during a battle, no control over the battle itself, and players are largely not looking for that in a grand strategy.

What percentage of Stellaris players do you think pay any attention to the ship designer? It's probably a rather small percentage. No amount of UX improvements will fix that either, most players will just throw bigger number at enemy and ignore that element of the game entirely.

So it's a bit of a sticky situation. Players expect some form of military combat, and the settings basically demand it, but players also don't want to actually spend a large amount of their time engaging in managing the military combat. Development time spent on making it more complex is both time wasted on most players, and means adding extra complexity and focus on the military upfront, which is counter to what most players want to focus on most of the time.

And if there's a trend in Paradox's last few games, it's in tying results more strongly to player control. Stellaris requiring you to individually claim systems and CK3 using a point-based tree for growing character stats are two examples. Warfare as currently envisioned in Grand Strategy games is fundementally counter to that notion.

Ultimately, so long as battles are zero-player I don't think there's ever going to be a way to make warfare fun. And to make it not zero-player whilst allowing players to still autoskip it would require making a whole other game mode ala Total War (even if not as dramatic a shift), which doesn't seem to be what players go to this kind of Grand Strategy for in the first place.

[ndkid]

To add to the controversial opinions... the idea that this is a grand strategy game where I'm not simultaneously pretending to be every army commander and central command all at the same time makes me _more_ interested in Vic3. One of the things I really appreciate about, say, Rule the Waves, or Alliance of the Sacred Sun, is holding to the notion that you represent a piece of a country's leadership, rather than the whole. You can influence the decisions of other parts, but you don't get to directly control them. I appreciate that layer of verisimilitude, as "Grand Strategy" is often implemented in a way closer to the God Game Genre than I care for.

[axiomsofdominion]

The key in my opinion is to create a situation where you aren't an omniscient and omnipotent general but you still can have impact on a lot of key areas. Broadly where the armies should be like province wise but with lots of variation on when the battles happen, creating a fun military organization, reasonable logistics, diplomatic maneuvering, maybe some level of intel gathering. I'm not sure you can do much interesting stuff combat wise in a real time game.

[LuuBluum]

Alright, gonna try another Serbia playthrough but this time, try to tend to something more historical. Let the Ottomans hit the "Dead Man of Europe" event to become independent, and then start waging war for a bunch of territory, and not taking Montenegro but instead letting it exist and eventually nabbing it as a part of my cultural unification into Yugoslavia.

[EuchreJack]

I'm gonna save $100 and buy this packaged with DLC in a year or so.

[LuuBluum]

So, rather than doing Serbia and dealing with a bunch of geopolitical nonsense while trying to refine my understanding of the economic model, I decided to do Belgium. It went well, until it all came crashing down.

Life advice: only turn on auto-construct for agriculture. You will, 100% of the time, want to max out some agriculture in any territory you have. Do not, and I mean do not, do this willy-nilly on every single industry that seems "reasonable" to want to expand in perpetuity. Why?

Well, it's quite simple. Auto-expansion is entirely dictated by maxed-out cash reserves and construction capacity to spare. It will keep building and building until the building becomes unprofitable. But what if it never becomes unprofitable?
Then it builds until it starts siphoning employees from every other industry, until it can no longer sustain itself due to the implications on the rest of your industry. Which is to say, due to having so many auto-constructing bits of industry in Belgium, I literally built up so much of an economic powerhouse that I ran out of people to work. Which cratered my economy. Why does this crater your economy? Well, simple: not everything is tradable, like electricity or services. Meaning that those industries being underemployed results in failures along the rest of the system.

Basically, build to your population. Don't build beyond your population. Reduce unused arable land to 0 as you go. Also feel free to max out resource exploitation as you go. Urbanization happens on top of that as you take advantage of whatever seems to be relevant for that given territory. Don't overbuild; you will live to regret it.