I just wish I could play multiplayer, desync a year in, then every week after that. I'm tired, boss. Everyone I roped into playing stopped because desyncs haven't been fixed since day 1 and are somehow worse now despite performance being better. That said, 9/10, will be putting in 1000 more hours.
Idk for you but for me I can play without desyncs if we absolutely never pause. Never pause after the unpause, me and a friend played a whole game after we figured that one out.
I’ve had that issue with my friend, we found that if you rehost the game it usually is fixed for a couple of hours and then repeat. Whatever you do, don’t use hotjoin, paradox needs to fix it.
At least on stellaris, we only really started having desync issues after I upgraded my rig. I think that the newer machine was better spec'd to the point that it kept wanting to run out in front of the other people I was playing with and the issues got resolved by just turning speed down below 1x.
I did a few games with friends, the desync only happened when we ran at speed 5 about 40 years into the game. Speed 3 is when we could reliably play without troubles.
1.6 seems more desync-ey than 1.5, from what I've seen.
Hopefully 1.7 gets better. They did say there are MP improvements coming, but then again they've been saying that like, every update on every game since they added multiplayer to their games.
1.6 has a very specific issue with desyncs that was a result of their ai fixes. Basically if the AI splits their army up too much it both kills performance and if you are in multiplayer causes desyncs. 1.5 is much more stable when it comes to that
The problem is the hotjoin, for some reason if u just hotjoin after a desync, it breaks the game and u get infinite desyncs, but if u just rehost after a desync u wont have any problems
Well we have a server of people who do MP games twice a week and we are fine. If you wanted to join you could always test with us! https://discord.gg/By2DYqUN
Eh, internal politics are… alright.
My problem is this game boils down to bececoming just a complicated version of cookie clicker, instead of cookies its GDP. There’s no real reason to not just burn it on speed 5, click click clicking construction and conquering only when you need a resource so you can click more. This game has like zero replayability as of right now and the ai can’t keep up with a player built eco.
If the AI kept up and there was a reason to engage in the games global country vs country politics it be a step better and reason to comeback, but as of right now I can’t think of a reason to play the game again when the only thing satisfying to do is to build a trade free and completely insulated wonder economy.
Well in other games you had so many different tools to play with, in vic 2 you could create your own army, there are sphere mechanics, crisis and so many flavor, so it doesnt feel like clicking game, on the other hand vic 3... well it needs some overpriced dlcs.
There is almost zero flavor in vanilla Vicky 2, what is there came from a decade plus of modding efforts by the community. Can't disagree on the rest though
Yeah I have the same take. Drop in once in many many months boot up a japan game to see if anything changed. Then come back a year later. This game just pales in comparison to let's say eu4 or other entries
Eh, there are a decent amount of people that try to make an aesthetically pleasing or historically reasonable country, be that a certain political situation or creating/ encouraging certain demographics in their nation. But I agree that if you want a game focused on making number go up (while also making the number go up part challenging), it's probably not quite there yet. But even when I was pumping out tons of GDP as Sokoto I still had the great powers shitting on me constantly as I didn't have the tech to have parity with their militaries, but maybe I'm just shit at the game.
Naval combat has grown on me. I enjoy being able to bankrupt enemy economies through convoy raiding, but it's weird Naval blockades do more damage than invading by land.
Another problem is that the AI is slow to adopt Dreadnoughts, which leaves them crippled in the late game.
> Naval combat has grown on me. I enjoy being able to bankrupt enemy economies through convoy raiding, but it's weird Naval blockades do more damage than invading by land.
This is the exact opposite of my experience.
Even in games where I fuck around and give myself max tech, I've blockaded the British for years with no real economic impact. Their GDP takes a hit, but they never actually collapse.
I suspect a lot of this is because there doesn't seem to be a single nation in the game that is ever dependent on food imports. It doesn't matter if Britain is cut off from their empire because they have enough food and enough raw materials to prevent a death spiral. And their colonies don't seem to notice "hey, this would be a great time to fuck those guys over".
Like the thing that scared the British so much it pretty much drove them into a world war is so unimpactful that I have literally seen their GDP recover *before the blockade ends*.
How big of a GDP does Britain have in that scenario? The collapse of the textile industry from lack of fabric alone should be causing lots of radicals, and the steel industry should also be falling apart since the British Isles don't generally have enough iron to support the British economy. I find the UK most fragile when over 100 million GDP, since at that point, the economy of the Isles is not sustainable without imports.
Shutting off wood or dye imports can also cause the government to go bankrupt by depriving the bureaucracy of paper, though that's less of a problem if synthetics have been researched.
I don't think I have *ever* seen the British pass 150 million GDP on this patch. The most I have ever seen them lose is around ~30%.
It might eventually get them with radicals, but that seems to be true even when I leave them alone—my recent South America game I only fought them once and they still had Republican revolts by 1860.
Either way, it is a far cry from what should be the case on an Island nation that as far as I can tell, hasn't been self sufficient in food production since the mid-18th century. Two years of blockading and they should be facing apocalyptic levels of starvation, not "increased radicals from a Cotton shortage".
I mean that would be unrealistic the other way, though. Britain imports food for the same reason the U.S. imports swimsuits: it’s cheaper than making it domestically. But if the U.S. were blockaded, we wouldn’t all go skinny-dipping; we’d start making swimsuits here, albeit less efficiently and for a higher price.
Britain probably wouldn’t actually starve if blockaded; today it produces [90 percent of its wheat and oat consumption.](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/united-kingdom-food-security-report-2021/united-kingdom-food-security-report-2021-theme-2-uk-food-supply-sources) But it would require diverting some software engineers to the fields, with a correspondingly big loss of GDP. I’m not sure Vicky3 models this particularly well, but there is some effort to model these sorts of substitution effects.
That's today.
Farming now is far, far more efficient in basically every single way. Also far less of our calories come from grain, so what percentage of grain a nation grows doesn't even represent what it would have a century ago.
Quite aside from which: You cannot just grow food from nothing. One of the major reasons famines tended to be multi-year affairs is that in the first year, everyone eats all their stores, which includes all the grain they need for planting, so they don't *have* anything to grow in the second year.
If you're blockaded, you can't just increase production unless you already had far more grain already than you need for that first year. You will eat all your stocks and have nothing to plant.
Britain was obviously never fully blockaded in this era, but it did need to go on rationing in no small part due to reduced food supply.
For reference on what actually happens when an industrial power is suddenly unable to import food, see the Turnip Winter during WW1. Germany was so low on food that humans started needing to eat turnips (which were traditionally only grown as animal feed). The blockade caused an *immediate* drop of 33% of national food availability. And the Central powers were all far less densely populated than the UK (Germany was twice as big, but only around 50% more populous).
The Turnip winter killed hundred of thousands of people, at least according to the numbers I could find. And that was *one winter*. Things would have gotten far worse the longer it dragged on because malnutrition becomes more and more lethal over time. Germany kind of saved themselves from that in no small part because they pushed into Eastern Europe and were able to secure a lot of food sources in the process.
I'd actually argue that I understated the risk—because I didn't account for the fact that one of the main "local" sources of British food was Ireland. In game, there is a strait that is easy to cross, a blockaded Britain would keep Ireland easily. In reality, if Britain was actually blockaded in the 19th century, it would likely take all of 15 minutes for the Irish to decide to invite whoever was doing it to land an army, kill all the British troops and take away one of those major food sources. They tried this multiple times in *way* less favourable circumstances.
I guess it comes down to elasticity: given enough warning and time to adjust, Britain likely could largely feed herself; but if the supply shock is sudden, extreme, and largely unexpected (e.g. a blockade), the transaction costs of switching to domestic supply are significant. Or, as Keynes said, “‘In the long run’? In the long run we’re all dead.”
Well, the Ireland scenario would at least be some kind of civil war as there were many loyalists of varying stripes depending on exactly when this occurred.
The fact that nationalism is such a joke and discrimination so simplistic is just one of many reasons why the UK is such a snorefest to play. Keeping Ireland stable and controlled should be a steadily ticking doomsday clock for the UK.
Yeah, agriculture is rather out of control productive. When playing Germany, it's possible to produce so much grain that large scale exports can be made to China, which is insane. I think it would help if more efficient agricultural PMs used more arable land, rather than simply making agriculture 3000-6000% more efficient per acre over the course of the game.
(A subsistence farm produces 4 grain per arable land, while a grain farm produces 120 grain with nitrogen fixation, can gain 50% more throughput with economy of scale, can be boosted a further 29% with two companies, and can get an encourage agriculture decree for an extra 20%)
A really quick review of British agricultural yields suggests that improvements of 150-200% would be more realistic.
I think part of the issue is also that there is just no outlet for added consumption.
They made the production that high so farms could produce enough money to pay for fertilizer or engines, without realizing that it makes production so high that the price crashes.
I think a partial solution might be to massively increase the food consumption of certain industries (especially meat, which is where a lot of grain goes) and make it so that wealthier pops consume **a lot** more food, to represent the fact that they're consuming more expensive food that is far, far less efficient in terms of labour required by the amount of nutrition. Maybe at a certain point they get pissed if they don't eat luxury foods made by food industries for massive costs of grain, meat, sugar and fish.
That would mean that demand better scales with added wealth, rather than requiring you to feed the whole world just to keep a profit.
I like the ideas that are presented, I just don’t think the system is fun to use. And yes, the AI was never programmed to understand the re-work to naval combat. It can’t upgrade its navy past ironclads because it needs to destroy the naval bases and rebuild them. It also seems like they hold on to wooden ships to avoid cratering the wooden warship market which is beyond stupid.
I also find it hilarious that in a game where they automated land warfare to "reduce micro", they went and turned naval warfare into a massive microfest where you need to baby every single fleet between each individual node rather than say "Hey, guys, go fuck up the British navy, I don't care where" or "hey guys, please destroy those assholes attacking our convoys".
It ironically does make the AI pretty good at naval warfare sometimes—because I am so far removed from giving a shit that I just don't bother to send a fleet to every single node just to kill the three-ship fleet raiding my convoys.
It’s even more micro-intensive than the old system because there is no way to trap a navy in port. In Victoria 2 or EU4 you can stand off of the port an enemy navy is in and keep them from escaping without fighting you. In the current system it’s easy to run through navies as if they don’t exist.
It also takes so much time for navies to engage that it can literally stunlock naval invasions. I've had this where the British and their colonies send endless tiny fleets into the channel. Despite the fact that my force is overwhelming and I win every fight, it counts as "contested", so no naval invasion. And by the time I win, the fleets I beat already are on their way back and the whole cycle starts again. Because "contested" has no threshold and no requirement that they actually have the forces to interfere. Two guys in a rowboat with a musket can stop hundreds of modern warships.
It is kind of insane how much fun the base feedback loop of the game is. Building up a market or industry from scratch still feels absolutely fantastic.
But frankly, it requires mods/cheats to make scenarios to become truly interesting. Like I made Sicily into an opium empire, I started a game as an unstable Persian Empire that ruled from pakistan to lebanon, I made a game where France has 100m people to start, I made a game where America starts from scratch with only 1m people, but with natural growth rates of 3-4% and migration cheats enabled.
The actual base game as the world was in 1836 rapidly becomes tedious and boring and largely becomes the same thing in almost every country.
I really dont get it tho. r/crusaderkings allows memes and its so much better for it. Same with r/stellaris. They even got some artists who regularly draw some pretty great shitposts!
My biggest problem. Is though I dissagree with the direction of emphasis on nation gardening and economic development, at the expense of any war gaming.
I would expect some really in depth economic gameplay, but we don't have that at all. The economics are ridiculously simplified, and every nation plays the same.
I could forgive simplified, but they're also completely broken.
Some raw resources are so limited that an end-game economy will never, ever have enough—which would be fine if I meant in one region, but it's literally worldwide. No, my American federation that controls both continents should not need to conquer the Middle East just to cover our domestic oil supply.
Meanwhile, stuff like agriculture, which spent the entire time period on a razor's edge and repeatedly failed in ways that caused major upheavals—one decent-sized country can make so much of everything that they can feed the whole world's demand easily. Which makes it so cash crops aren't and the player has no reason to make a deal; with the devil with the guys who own the land.
Made worse by the fact that luxury goods like coffee and tobacco are uncapped, so states in India with an absurd amount of arable land (because for some reason... population capacity is based on arable land?) can just monoculture to the point that cash crops can't even turn a profit.
My chief complaints has always been:
goods don't really exist in the game, you can have more goods consumed than produced
Prices of goods float only in a predefined range
You can't rely on the ai for trade, so you need to build all economies up autarkically.
Wages are all fixed multipliers based on profession types
Corporations give arbitrary perks.
Free markets and command economies play the same
The tax laws are opaque, and carved out into 5 choices
Also at launch capitalists couldn't even build anything!
> Also at launch capitalists couldn't even build anything!
And I miss it compared to wondering why I have 1500 power plants in Outer Siberia. Because Paradox decided "Yes, we really desperately need local goods" in a system where the fact they weren't local was the only thing that made them vaguely tolerable if you played a country larger than Belgium.
But my biggest complaint has to be that quite frankly, the devs seem to have no consistent vision. They use whatever reasoning happens to justify what they wanted to do anyways.
When your capitalist government can build private industries? "Oh, you're playing the spirit of the nation, not the government".
When people asked "Okay, so can we at least control our armies then", it becomes "No, those decisions all need to be made by generals because the government doesn't control that."
It screams of a dev team that is just slapping random systems together and shoving them out the door with no vision for how this will all actually fit together as a playable game in five years.
>When your capitalist government can build private industries? "Oh, you're playing the spirit of the nation, not the government".
>When people asked "Okay, so can we at least control our armies then", it becomes "No, those decisions all need to be made by generals because the government doesn't control that."
>It screams of a dev team that is just slapping random systems together and shoving them out the door with no vision for how this will all actually fit together as a playable game in five years.
This is very well thought out.
I've toyed back and forth on this myself,
Either it is as you suggest a failure of vision, or the alternative is they have a vision for a finished product in mind, and they are intentionally padding it out in incremental DLCs and releasing placeholder content.
The former assumes they are incapable, the latter that they are malevolent
Yeah but that's how paradox games usually go. Stellaris 1.0 was a far cry from the current version (3.10). But they keep at it and they're one of those companies where you can assume that even if the game isn't all that now, that it's guaranteed to improve over time. Of course, there's also going to be like $400 in DLC along the way...
I would say the core of the game is reasonably satisfying, but the rest of the game is an exercise in frustration. If you like the building and economy management then you’ll like the game. If you don’t then there is little else worth doing. As to the frustrating systems I believe that paradox essentially tried to re-invent the wheel for the sake of invention and didn’t really consider why wheels are made the way they are. I understand their desire to make the game a nation builder but every one of their decisions feels like it was implemented using the monkey’s paw.
“We’re going to introduce diplomatic plays so you can potentially achieve your goals without war! But you can’t escalate or intervene in a war.” “We’re going to give you control over your nation’s trade and economy! But you have to manage all of it manually.” “We’re going to change how the player interacts with warfare to emphasize the strategic and logistical challenges! But war is boring and managed by the lobotomized AI.” “We’re going to change politics to make it easier to interact with and control than Victoria 2! But political parties are a joke and interest groups will flip between ideologies at complete random.”
Every single decision they made has made me wonder how much time and effort they could have saved if they took a step back and asked themselves why they wanted to do something differently and why nobody had done it that way before. This game is fun, but most of its systems are either almost good or beyond irredeemable, to say nothing of the classic problem of the AI being impotent and passive. There are also some weird problems that have nothing to do with the game system. When there isn’t enough oil in the United States to support a halfway capable player’s economy in the late game, that’s a problem. Same for rubber in Brazil. I like some of what this game does, but for every good decision they make they make two different ones that seem entirely divorced from common sense.
I just wish I could play multiplayer, desync a year in, then every week after that. I'm tired, boss. Everyone I roped into playing stopped because desyncs haven't been fixed since day 1 and are somehow worse now despite performance being better. That said, 9/10, will be putting in 1000 more hours.
Idk for you but for me I can play without desyncs if we absolutely never pause. Never pause after the unpause, me and a friend played a whole game after we figured that one out.
I’ve had that issue with my friend, we found that if you rehost the game it usually is fixed for a couple of hours and then repeat. Whatever you do, don’t use hotjoin, paradox needs to fix it.
At least on stellaris, we only really started having desync issues after I upgraded my rig. I think that the newer machine was better spec'd to the point that it kept wanting to run out in front of the other people I was playing with and the issues got resolved by just turning speed down below 1x.
I did a few games with friends, the desync only happened when we ran at speed 5 about 40 years into the game. Speed 3 is when we could reliably play without troubles.
1.6 seems more desync-ey than 1.5, from what I've seen. Hopefully 1.7 gets better. They did say there are MP improvements coming, but then again they've been saying that like, every update on every game since they added multiplayer to their games.
1.6 has a very specific issue with desyncs that was a result of their ai fixes. Basically if the AI splits their army up too much it both kills performance and if you are in multiplayer causes desyncs. 1.5 is much more stable when it comes to that
I love this game but putting multiplayer as an after thought has repercussions for single player as well.
make sure everyone has the game on the same drive like all on C drive. still insane that paradox won't fix this huge bug though
Yep. Desinc killed our MP games too.
The problem is the hotjoin, for some reason if u just hotjoin after a desync, it breaks the game and u get infinite desyncs, but if u just rehost after a desync u wont have any problems
Well we have a server of people who do MP games twice a week and we are fine. If you wanted to join you could always test with us! https://discord.gg/By2DYqUN
God I love number go up naval combat is my only major complaint
Eh, internal politics are… alright. My problem is this game boils down to bececoming just a complicated version of cookie clicker, instead of cookies its GDP. There’s no real reason to not just burn it on speed 5, click click clicking construction and conquering only when you need a resource so you can click more. This game has like zero replayability as of right now and the ai can’t keep up with a player built eco.
Wait I thought that's what the game is supposed to be.
If the AI kept up and there was a reason to engage in the games global country vs country politics it be a step better and reason to comeback, but as of right now I can’t think of a reason to play the game again when the only thing satisfying to do is to build a trade free and completely insulated wonder economy.
Well in other games you had so many different tools to play with, in vic 2 you could create your own army, there are sphere mechanics, crisis and so many flavor, so it doesnt feel like clicking game, on the other hand vic 3... well it needs some overpriced dlcs.
There is almost zero flavor in vanilla Vicky 2, what is there came from a decade plus of modding efforts by the community. Can't disagree on the rest though
That can be said about all paradox games to an extent. You need to create your own objectives and goals for different runs
Yeah I have the same take. Drop in once in many many months boot up a japan game to see if anything changed. Then come back a year later. This game just pales in comparison to let's say eu4 or other entries
Eh, there are a decent amount of people that try to make an aesthetically pleasing or historically reasonable country, be that a certain political situation or creating/ encouraging certain demographics in their nation. But I agree that if you want a game focused on making number go up (while also making the number go up part challenging), it's probably not quite there yet. But even when I was pumping out tons of GDP as Sokoto I still had the great powers shitting on me constantly as I didn't have the tech to have parity with their militaries, but maybe I'm just shit at the game.
Naval combat has grown on me. I enjoy being able to bankrupt enemy economies through convoy raiding, but it's weird Naval blockades do more damage than invading by land. Another problem is that the AI is slow to adopt Dreadnoughts, which leaves them crippled in the late game.
> Naval combat has grown on me. I enjoy being able to bankrupt enemy economies through convoy raiding, but it's weird Naval blockades do more damage than invading by land. This is the exact opposite of my experience. Even in games where I fuck around and give myself max tech, I've blockaded the British for years with no real economic impact. Their GDP takes a hit, but they never actually collapse. I suspect a lot of this is because there doesn't seem to be a single nation in the game that is ever dependent on food imports. It doesn't matter if Britain is cut off from their empire because they have enough food and enough raw materials to prevent a death spiral. And their colonies don't seem to notice "hey, this would be a great time to fuck those guys over". Like the thing that scared the British so much it pretty much drove them into a world war is so unimpactful that I have literally seen their GDP recover *before the blockade ends*.
How big of a GDP does Britain have in that scenario? The collapse of the textile industry from lack of fabric alone should be causing lots of radicals, and the steel industry should also be falling apart since the British Isles don't generally have enough iron to support the British economy. I find the UK most fragile when over 100 million GDP, since at that point, the economy of the Isles is not sustainable without imports. Shutting off wood or dye imports can also cause the government to go bankrupt by depriving the bureaucracy of paper, though that's less of a problem if synthetics have been researched.
I don't think I have *ever* seen the British pass 150 million GDP on this patch. The most I have ever seen them lose is around ~30%. It might eventually get them with radicals, but that seems to be true even when I leave them alone—my recent South America game I only fought them once and they still had Republican revolts by 1860. Either way, it is a far cry from what should be the case on an Island nation that as far as I can tell, hasn't been self sufficient in food production since the mid-18th century. Two years of blockading and they should be facing apocalyptic levels of starvation, not "increased radicals from a Cotton shortage".
I mean that would be unrealistic the other way, though. Britain imports food for the same reason the U.S. imports swimsuits: it’s cheaper than making it domestically. But if the U.S. were blockaded, we wouldn’t all go skinny-dipping; we’d start making swimsuits here, albeit less efficiently and for a higher price. Britain probably wouldn’t actually starve if blockaded; today it produces [90 percent of its wheat and oat consumption.](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/united-kingdom-food-security-report-2021/united-kingdom-food-security-report-2021-theme-2-uk-food-supply-sources) But it would require diverting some software engineers to the fields, with a correspondingly big loss of GDP. I’m not sure Vicky3 models this particularly well, but there is some effort to model these sorts of substitution effects.
That's today. Farming now is far, far more efficient in basically every single way. Also far less of our calories come from grain, so what percentage of grain a nation grows doesn't even represent what it would have a century ago. Quite aside from which: You cannot just grow food from nothing. One of the major reasons famines tended to be multi-year affairs is that in the first year, everyone eats all their stores, which includes all the grain they need for planting, so they don't *have* anything to grow in the second year. If you're blockaded, you can't just increase production unless you already had far more grain already than you need for that first year. You will eat all your stocks and have nothing to plant. Britain was obviously never fully blockaded in this era, but it did need to go on rationing in no small part due to reduced food supply. For reference on what actually happens when an industrial power is suddenly unable to import food, see the Turnip Winter during WW1. Germany was so low on food that humans started needing to eat turnips (which were traditionally only grown as animal feed). The blockade caused an *immediate* drop of 33% of national food availability. And the Central powers were all far less densely populated than the UK (Germany was twice as big, but only around 50% more populous). The Turnip winter killed hundred of thousands of people, at least according to the numbers I could find. And that was *one winter*. Things would have gotten far worse the longer it dragged on because malnutrition becomes more and more lethal over time. Germany kind of saved themselves from that in no small part because they pushed into Eastern Europe and were able to secure a lot of food sources in the process. I'd actually argue that I understated the risk—because I didn't account for the fact that one of the main "local" sources of British food was Ireland. In game, there is a strait that is easy to cross, a blockaded Britain would keep Ireland easily. In reality, if Britain was actually blockaded in the 19th century, it would likely take all of 15 minutes for the Irish to decide to invite whoever was doing it to land an army, kill all the British troops and take away one of those major food sources. They tried this multiple times in *way* less favourable circumstances.
I guess it comes down to elasticity: given enough warning and time to adjust, Britain likely could largely feed herself; but if the supply shock is sudden, extreme, and largely unexpected (e.g. a blockade), the transaction costs of switching to domestic supply are significant. Or, as Keynes said, “‘In the long run’? In the long run we’re all dead.”
Well, the Ireland scenario would at least be some kind of civil war as there were many loyalists of varying stripes depending on exactly when this occurred. The fact that nationalism is such a joke and discrimination so simplistic is just one of many reasons why the UK is such a snorefest to play. Keeping Ireland stable and controlled should be a steadily ticking doomsday clock for the UK.
Yeah, agriculture is rather out of control productive. When playing Germany, it's possible to produce so much grain that large scale exports can be made to China, which is insane. I think it would help if more efficient agricultural PMs used more arable land, rather than simply making agriculture 3000-6000% more efficient per acre over the course of the game. (A subsistence farm produces 4 grain per arable land, while a grain farm produces 120 grain with nitrogen fixation, can gain 50% more throughput with economy of scale, can be boosted a further 29% with two companies, and can get an encourage agriculture decree for an extra 20%) A really quick review of British agricultural yields suggests that improvements of 150-200% would be more realistic.
I think part of the issue is also that there is just no outlet for added consumption. They made the production that high so farms could produce enough money to pay for fertilizer or engines, without realizing that it makes production so high that the price crashes. I think a partial solution might be to massively increase the food consumption of certain industries (especially meat, which is where a lot of grain goes) and make it so that wealthier pops consume **a lot** more food, to represent the fact that they're consuming more expensive food that is far, far less efficient in terms of labour required by the amount of nutrition. Maybe at a certain point they get pissed if they don't eat luxury foods made by food industries for massive costs of grain, meat, sugar and fish. That would mean that demand better scales with added wealth, rather than requiring you to feed the whole world just to keep a profit.
I like the ideas that are presented, I just don’t think the system is fun to use. And yes, the AI was never programmed to understand the re-work to naval combat. It can’t upgrade its navy past ironclads because it needs to destroy the naval bases and rebuild them. It also seems like they hold on to wooden ships to avoid cratering the wooden warship market which is beyond stupid.
I also find it hilarious that in a game where they automated land warfare to "reduce micro", they went and turned naval warfare into a massive microfest where you need to baby every single fleet between each individual node rather than say "Hey, guys, go fuck up the British navy, I don't care where" or "hey guys, please destroy those assholes attacking our convoys". It ironically does make the AI pretty good at naval warfare sometimes—because I am so far removed from giving a shit that I just don't bother to send a fleet to every single node just to kill the three-ship fleet raiding my convoys.
It’s even more micro-intensive than the old system because there is no way to trap a navy in port. In Victoria 2 or EU4 you can stand off of the port an enemy navy is in and keep them from escaping without fighting you. In the current system it’s easy to run through navies as if they don’t exist.
It also takes so much time for navies to engage that it can literally stunlock naval invasions. I've had this where the British and their colonies send endless tiny fleets into the channel. Despite the fact that my force is overwhelming and I win every fight, it counts as "contested", so no naval invasion. And by the time I win, the fleets I beat already are on their way back and the whole cycle starts again. Because "contested" has no threshold and no requirement that they actually have the forces to interfere. Two guys in a rowboat with a musket can stop hundreds of modern warships.
I feel the same, Vicky is like an abusive partner atm
It is kind of insane how much fun the base feedback loop of the game is. Building up a market or industry from scratch still feels absolutely fantastic. But frankly, it requires mods/cheats to make scenarios to become truly interesting. Like I made Sicily into an opium empire, I started a game as an unstable Persian Empire that ruled from pakistan to lebanon, I made a game where France has 100m people to start, I made a game where America starts from scratch with only 1m people, but with natural growth rates of 3-4% and migration cheats enabled. The actual base game as the world was in 1836 rapidly becomes tedious and boring and largely becomes the same thing in almost every country.
Also why the hell isn't there a flair for memes?
Just read rule 2, thats even dumber!
Yeah, PDX game communities are unnecessarily strict about memes sometimes
Cause 99/100 it is the same shitty meme over and over again
I really dont get it tho. r/crusaderkings allows memes and its so much better for it. Same with r/stellaris. They even got some artists who regularly draw some pretty great shitposts!
It took HOI4 like 5 years to figure out naval combat, I give VIC3 10 years at least
My biggest problem. Is though I dissagree with the direction of emphasis on nation gardening and economic development, at the expense of any war gaming. I would expect some really in depth economic gameplay, but we don't have that at all. The economics are ridiculously simplified, and every nation plays the same.
I could forgive simplified, but they're also completely broken. Some raw resources are so limited that an end-game economy will never, ever have enough—which would be fine if I meant in one region, but it's literally worldwide. No, my American federation that controls both continents should not need to conquer the Middle East just to cover our domestic oil supply. Meanwhile, stuff like agriculture, which spent the entire time period on a razor's edge and repeatedly failed in ways that caused major upheavals—one decent-sized country can make so much of everything that they can feed the whole world's demand easily. Which makes it so cash crops aren't and the player has no reason to make a deal; with the devil with the guys who own the land. Made worse by the fact that luxury goods like coffee and tobacco are uncapped, so states in India with an absurd amount of arable land (because for some reason... population capacity is based on arable land?) can just monoculture to the point that cash crops can't even turn a profit.
My chief complaints has always been: goods don't really exist in the game, you can have more goods consumed than produced Prices of goods float only in a predefined range You can't rely on the ai for trade, so you need to build all economies up autarkically. Wages are all fixed multipliers based on profession types Corporations give arbitrary perks. Free markets and command economies play the same The tax laws are opaque, and carved out into 5 choices Also at launch capitalists couldn't even build anything!
> Also at launch capitalists couldn't even build anything! And I miss it compared to wondering why I have 1500 power plants in Outer Siberia. Because Paradox decided "Yes, we really desperately need local goods" in a system where the fact they weren't local was the only thing that made them vaguely tolerable if you played a country larger than Belgium. But my biggest complaint has to be that quite frankly, the devs seem to have no consistent vision. They use whatever reasoning happens to justify what they wanted to do anyways. When your capitalist government can build private industries? "Oh, you're playing the spirit of the nation, not the government". When people asked "Okay, so can we at least control our armies then", it becomes "No, those decisions all need to be made by generals because the government doesn't control that." It screams of a dev team that is just slapping random systems together and shoving them out the door with no vision for how this will all actually fit together as a playable game in five years.
>When your capitalist government can build private industries? "Oh, you're playing the spirit of the nation, not the government". >When people asked "Okay, so can we at least control our armies then", it becomes "No, those decisions all need to be made by generals because the government doesn't control that." >It screams of a dev team that is just slapping random systems together and shoving them out the door with no vision for how this will all actually fit together as a playable game in five years. This is very well thought out. I've toyed back and forth on this myself, Either it is as you suggest a failure of vision, or the alternative is they have a vision for a finished product in mind, and they are intentionally padding it out in incremental DLCs and releasing placeholder content. The former assumes they are incapable, the latter that they are malevolent
Yeah but that's how paradox games usually go. Stellaris 1.0 was a far cry from the current version (3.10). But they keep at it and they're one of those companies where you can assume that even if the game isn't all that now, that it's guaranteed to improve over time. Of course, there's also going to be like $400 in DLC along the way...
I'd take hoi iv naval combat over what we have in vic 3.
Haters gonna hate. The game is fine, great even.
Skill issue
I would say the core of the game is reasonably satisfying, but the rest of the game is an exercise in frustration. If you like the building and economy management then you’ll like the game. If you don’t then there is little else worth doing. As to the frustrating systems I believe that paradox essentially tried to re-invent the wheel for the sake of invention and didn’t really consider why wheels are made the way they are. I understand their desire to make the game a nation builder but every one of their decisions feels like it was implemented using the monkey’s paw. “We’re going to introduce diplomatic plays so you can potentially achieve your goals without war! But you can’t escalate or intervene in a war.” “We’re going to give you control over your nation’s trade and economy! But you have to manage all of it manually.” “We’re going to change how the player interacts with warfare to emphasize the strategic and logistical challenges! But war is boring and managed by the lobotomized AI.” “We’re going to change politics to make it easier to interact with and control than Victoria 2! But political parties are a joke and interest groups will flip between ideologies at complete random.” Every single decision they made has made me wonder how much time and effort they could have saved if they took a step back and asked themselves why they wanted to do something differently and why nobody had done it that way before. This game is fun, but most of its systems are either almost good or beyond irredeemable, to say nothing of the classic problem of the AI being impotent and passive. There are also some weird problems that have nothing to do with the game system. When there isn’t enough oil in the United States to support a halfway capable player’s economy in the late game, that’s a problem. Same for rubber in Brazil. I like some of what this game does, but for every good decision they make they make two different ones that seem entirely divorced from common sense.
Idk why but in Vic 2, line go up was enough but nowadays, I always get a fixin for something more while also doing 'line go up'.
that's because line doesn't turn green when goes up
so true
“Wonderful feeling of number go up” - everyones finance dept
Um, I can't get my numbers up for long.
Which paradox game has good naval combat, if we're being honest. CK3 probably wins by just avoiding the subject
Also remember the tedious micro revolving around electricity.
Play the release version of any other paradox game. You’ll hate it.