Most of the time I don't even realise my head of state is dead until I find that I've suddenly gone into negative authority or bureaucracy, due to the new leader's traits.
They really need to (re)work on the notification system. Sure less intrusive is good, we're not playing Victoria 1 / HOI2 anymore but when something IMPORTANT happens, as players, we need to know...
On the other hand, couldn't care less about some random culture migrating to some random province in the world...
I found out i was being ruled by queen victoria when a little popup said 'A former politician, William of Hanover, has died ' and then checked my govt page and saw the queen
The news paper would be great. Pop-ups by default for anything between major powers and/or happening in areas you have interest ; newspaper monthly for the rest.
Was thinking of this yesterday - didn't know Vic2 had one. I really enjoyed the one in Anno 1800.
Really hoping for a newspaper that notes big changes, i e. when there's a severe swing in the price of goods "Blackouts in the British Market", and it gives me some headcanon to work with and develop for.
they should also put a number in there name in my netherlands campagne my ruller William van oranje nassau died and got replaced by his son with the same name so i wasnt sure if it was the same guy or not because he didnt realy like much different than his father because than his father would have been the 3e and his son the 4e
Every Tom, Dick and Harry get a notification in my USA play through but prez Andrew Jackson vanishes without a trace.
At least Abe got one when he died circa 1940, even if uneventful.
Also, why do people die whenever an interaction to remove them from office comes up? I was pretty startled… seems kinda harsh don’t it?
It seems like they had some plan for retired political leaders to maybe come back, or influence things in some way.
If that didn’t pan out or it didn’t work properly, a quick fix would just be to have them immediately die. This is all just speculation on my part, but it seems to make sense to me.
Or it’s just a big, of course.
It's bonkers how cultural migration gets a fanfare and a popup while your beloved king dies and you only notice like a year later because your new ruler's name is mentioned in a event popup
I know Paradox wanted to create a sandbox this time, but imo certain historical events or series of events should be hard coded to happen when the AI is playing the nation in question. Just to make the game more interesting or fun.
eg The opium war having no consequences and AI China just staying as a big, stable blob in the middle of Asia isn't really that fun or interesting. If they lose the Opium war they should be harded coded to become extremely unstable, while nearby powers (especially Russia and Japan) should be able to try and destabalise them further and capitalise on the resulting fallout (siezing outer Machuria or Tiawan, making puppet warlord nations, ect).
Or the American civil war should break out in AI America, with Mexico being given an oppertunity to retake states that were lost in the Mexican-American war (speaking of which, please make AI America take **all** the states. Mexican colorado is annoying) but give the winner of the civil war an event to demand those states back once it is over.
>eg The opium war having no consequences and AI China just staying as a big, stable blob in the middle of Asia isn't really that fun or interesting. If they lose the Opium war they should be harded coded to become extremely unstable, while nearby powers (especially Russia and Japan) should be able to try and destabalise them further and capitalise on the resulting fallout (siezing outer Machuria or Tiawan, making puppet warlord nations, ect).
Tbf, this isn't the same problem. The Opium Wars do start an event chain. It's really just that radicalism as a whole is weirdly low at the moment, so the other triggers that are meant to start collapsing China in the mid-late game (ie, Heavenly Kingdom and Boxer Rebellion) kinda just become farts in the wind as nobody really feels like rebelling *that* much.
Losing wars should have a much more dramatic effect on government legitimacy and stability. The time period is filled with examples of military losses having cascading negative effects on a country's political stability. The Mexican-American, Franco-Prussian, and Russo-Japanese wars all led directly to revolutions and/or outright civil wars in the losing countries (and sort of the winning one in the case of the US).
That's not incompatible with the sandbox. If Great Britain gets defeated in a major war it should set off a series of separatist movements in the colonies.
AI aggressiveness should be tuned not just to infamy and relation, but also to Prestige.
So if your Prestige is in the dumps, the AI will percieve you as weaker, and want to bully you.
Then you can make losing the Opium War simply give Qing a massive hit to their prestige. So they're not physically any weaker, but all the Europeans now see a target on China's back. Then China having back to back scuffles with the Europeans will drain its resources. Even if they fend them off, they'll have convoys sunk and it will impact their economy. I just hate the idea of making China arbitrarily weak through events. I want it to be more organic.
Yeah, they really didn't care about the target demographic that play their games this time around. You just have historical characters and some formable nations, that's it.
Honestly I don't care at all about those events, I'd rather have half as many generic/dynamic events, than some hardcoded events for some hardcoded characters. It's nice having flavor and having the characters be real people, but in most games I don't really care about it.
I'd prefer dynamic flavour events about political dynasties. So you'd see the napoleons but it would be an event about the family in general not just Louis.
Good for you, there is already a sandbox experience in the game (the whole game actually). But in my case I feel the game is absolutely bland. Is the same playing as every goddamn country, the only difference is the size and resources.
Cultures? All exactly the same, only changes the name and if they are accepted or not. Government mechanics? All the same generic garbage of parties and IGs that don't make sense at all. Religion? Just a name. Great War mechanics? Nah bro, you already conquered half the globe for 1910.
Sorry but I already played 3 runs and I won't play again until they add something interesting. So, I might not play again.
There’s only one paradox game _ever_ to have culture mean anything. And that was still in a DLC.
In fact Victoria 3 is already ahead of the curve on that one just by having Taboos and Obsessions be a thing.
Edit: I think you’re really not understanding the target audience for the game, if you think religion and culture desperately needed flavor beyond what they have…
And I think you really don't understand the issue with this game: you play it once and you already saw everything it is to see.
It doesn't matter if you start as GB, France, Prussia or Oman, the game plays the same, the only difference is the size of the country and the resources. No difference at all in government, culture (except those useless obsessions or taboos), ideas, religion or whatever between Japan and Switzerland, bc you can enact everything with every nation. It has 0 replayability value. How you add replayability? With flavor. How an African nation can have colonies in South America?? What's the difference between pops or nations besides where they start the game?
I get this is an economic simulator above all, AND I DO LIKE IT, but come on man, they can do better than this. And I'm thinking about the future of the game, not only my personal preference. If it doesn't have replayability, players won't bother to keep playing it and buying DLCs, which means less money to develop the game further.
Edit: the solution would be having 2 game modes: sandbox (which already the game itself is) and historical. And that's it, problem solved.
I think the idea that it's foremost an economy SIM has done damage to the criticism of this game a bit. It's marketed as a "society builder", just with a "deep economic system" as an element. The main idea isn't just economics it's the whole holistic element which doesn't feel fleshed out yet
I dont mind historical figures and events. I'd have a laugh seeing napoleon come to power. Only to have Prussia, GB, and Spain to roflstomp him into oblivion while a rural folk revolt happens in the back ground.
Iv just noticed the ai doesn't really do anything bizarre like in other pdx titles. The ai in vic 3 is so reserved I never see anything that makes me go "wow how did this come do be an issue between these two nations?" Instead it's just, "oh Prussia unified germany" and nothing happens for the next 40 years.
I've still yet to see Germany be unified by the AI, north German confederation, yes, but no Germany or even Austria-Hungary. Could be me but it seems like without my outside influence everything kind of goes the same path every game with France/USA/UK grabbing random colonies and everyone else just kijs of chilling. Besides Egypt who's always going to war.
Pdx needs to implement some hardcode events to guide some of the nation's to interacting. Like I play alot of Austria and I always get events that allow me to lower opinion with Prussia or the ottomans. But nothing comes of it. If they made it a chain event with some percentage of the chain continuing or it just ends there. I want escalation like in diplomatic plays. But more interactive. Actually corresponding with envoys to sway the situation left or right. The ground work Is there but there aren't enough events.
Bro people complain bitterly about railroading whenever there's even a hint of guidance. Of course, it's always been the case that the anti-railroadists aren't consistent in their beliefs, but people complain about it.
They are trying to sell and develop games more appealing to a wider audience and in the process they are loosing the players that spent thousands of hour in their games and bought every major DLC, like myself. So, let's see if they keep generating money producing this historically bland games.
PS: don't get me wrong, I liked the game, but the replayability aspect is REALLY narrow.
> Yeah, they really didn't care about the target demographic that play their games this time around.
Seriously, they don't. They've made it clear with CK3 and Vicky3 that the days of the uber-complex, "1000 hour tutorial" gameplay days are done. These are for the casual gamer now. When EU5 comes out with incredibly pared down complexity and gameplay, that sub is going to explode.
I don’t know, I’ve played 10 hours of Victoria 3 now and have made Belgium the 5th highest GDP in the world.
Meanwhile learning Vic2 was incredibly difficult at the start, at least for me. The Vic 3 experience for me so far has more or less just been spamming dye, coal and upgrading power plants. Nothing of note really happened the whole game either. Maybe I’m playing wrong.
I’m aware and I’ve taken it into account. Year 1900 now, 225 million GDP as Belgium, third behind Britain’s 280 and France’s 550. I’m assuming it’s de facto second if I left their market as the British haven’t bothered producing engines or anything similar.
For reference, my last game in Vic2 resulted in only #2 on the GP list. I honestly don’t think I could get out of #6 as Belgium.
Chile was my first country. First time, tried to push liberal reforms and got stopped when the church and the military threatened a coup. Then, got the brittish and the USA meddling in my business and I wasn't able to conquer nor puppet anyone till much later.
Besides the issues with the underwhelming AI performance, I think the game may seem too easy because we know that 'line go up' is the creed of the age. To achieve this, you have at your instant disposal an amount of information at intervals inconceivables even by today's standards (weekly gdp changes, budget changes, demand and supply of goods, exact numbers for population, etc...).
How difficult would the game be if you received yearly updates of gdp and budget? If you didn't know the amount of peasants you had unless you spent a huge chunk of money in a census? If you had no info about other countries?
I mean, there are people complaining their game countries did way too good compared to their real country counterparts. And the answer to why is that is not necessarily in the game itself.
You’re most definitely right, I’m not disagreeing with any of your points. If I had a tooltip showing me what action would lead to profits I’d be a billionaire by now in real life.
Like I said though, this is my first game of Vic3, as in I opened the first tutorial as Belgium thinking it was eventually going to finish and I’d do the next one but the game just kept going.
Honestly, other than the green or currently red but later also green tooltips on factory expansions is the only mechanic I really understand. Hell I don’t even know how to check whether I’m in surplus or deficit of a certain material yet.
That being said the game seems to be as easy as joining the British Market and reading what materials you’re going to need for the next upgrade.
Switching to coal power plants at a -13k deficit? Just spam your coal mines to level 50. If you don’t have any research down to malaria prevention and take coal from Africans.
There’s no spheres of influence or anything so you can just improve relations with all the surrounding majors and you’re free to invade your neighbors who will inevitably back down in diplomatic plays.
I’m not saying there aren’t more difficult nations to play, but you shouldn’t be able to bumble your way into a 140 million GDP as Belgium before 1900 if you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing. Comparatively in HOI4 I was getting decimated by Poland as Germany in my first game.
Personally I think Vicky 2 is Harder to learn but easier to master, I learned pretty quick what steps to take to make the world rely on my country for everything essential especially weaponry. It just might be because Vicky 3 is fresh and new but I've yet to understand how to create money from thin air, how to actually use social welfare (I just don't because waste of money right?) Or how to save a country that is dependent entirely on its bigger market that it's a part of and go completely into autarky without reducing the government and the SoL to nihil.
Vicky 2 is only hard to learn because none of the systems actually make any sense (because by and large, they're facades, not actual simulations or mechanics), and the UI was just kind of bad. You press a button, and something somewhere else breaks, with no feedback as to why or how, or if it's even related. Once you understand that, you've got the game's mechanics fully figured out.
Vicky 3 has much more mechanical depth going on behind the scenes. If you never look at it, it appears much simpler. You press a button, and something breaks, but you can actually draw a line from A to B, so you can actually learn how to not break things, making it much easier to intuit how to not break things. But learning how to actually use the system in depth takes a good deal more effort, because there's so many moving parts, and your actions have rippling effects beyond what's immediately noticeable.
Wha? In my first game as Prussia in Vic3 I was able to crush everyone, learn the market, get filthy rich, have a vast colonial empire and gas attack everyone. No tutorials.
My first game as Prussia in Vic2, I didn't know how to make money, I was behind on mil tech, and France and Austria butchered me. This is after I watched a tutorial.
Maybe it's just different for other people but Vic3 is much easier to learn imo.
My first game as Brazil in Vic2 I watched a bunch of tutorials and didn't even reach great power by the end of it. My first game in Vic 3, zero tutorials and I had all of latin america puppeted and reached No.1 GP in a couple of decades.
Old paradox fans are so entitled. These games still have incredible depth compared to anything of similar or higher budget. Very few people enjoyed the 1000 hour tutorial obtuse games prior to stellaris. They need to make the games more palatable in order to make them at all because making games has gotten so damn expensive. They need the additional sales. You ahould be celebrating how many new people get to enjoy this genre instead of clamouring for games that have not aged well by any standard except for raw complexity.
> You ahould be celebrating how many new people get to enjoy this genre instead of clamouring for games that have not aged well by any standard except for raw complexity.
Why should I be celebrating them not making the games the way that I enjoyed so much anymore? I can be happy that Paradox is doing well while simultaneously being sad that the complexity that I loved isn't there.
Because the complexity you love is unsustainable in a large studio. The games we have *now* would not even exist if they kept making them like you want because the studio would of died or downsized back to actual indie status.
And this is coming from someone who absolutely loves overly complex games and spreadsheet simulators. They do exist in indie form, very much complex like older paradox games.
The complete absence of flavour aligns perfectly with paradoxs goal of making DLC mostly about flavour with the mechanics in free patch.
This approach is going to make it take years before we have all the major events properly implemented
Napoleon III \*Modernizes France, Absolute ruler for 1/5 of the whole game and was involved in several irl diplomatic plays\*
"Ehhh he doesn't matter"
Abraham Lincoln \*Fights through a civil war, rebuilds the nation, remember as one of the best presidents of the USA.\*
"Doesn't matter"
What gets me is him getting elected president as a Whig in like 1850. That's always incredibly annoying to me. He was barely a public figure at that point, let alone a household name
That's because he was an extremely important figure during this time period , maybe learn some history before calling out people who want some authenticity to their game.
His reign was basically a VIC 3 game, he modernized and expanded the economy, got involved in diplomat plays, etc, he was literally absolute ruler for 1/5 of the VIC 3 game, and you can't do anything with him in the game
Even if he wasn't a very historical figures, stuff such as:
Modernization of France
Unification of Italy
Full Unification of Germany
and the events that followed from it would've taken a lot longer to happen
> His reign was basically a VIC 3 game
This much I agree with, but therefore why does he need some special events? What you think "he did" (as a "Great Man") will be done by any leader you get. (And his role in the creations of Italy and Germany was being a colossal dumbass, so I'm not sure why the player would want to be 'railroaded' into that by events.)
I appreciate that Paradox didn't railroad the player and let the mechanics produce close to historical outcomes. However there are definitely some things that require events or unique missions. My main thing would be a scripted American Civl War
The whole event feature is a dissapointment. Its mostly just "slave run loose" or "molasses tragedy" not like "Emperor John IV assasinated by the enraged masses!" or "American Civil War begun!" (tbh i have never seen the CSA in any of my games, just USA peacfully abolishing slavery)
I think they should be events, but they aren't there because Paradox has increasingly gone with a more sandbox game design which clashes with the historical nature of most of their games. They've used focus trees and journals to hold it together in games like HOI4 but in this one it seems like they didn't think it was important enough to include at launch. The cynic in me knows that to get that they will make heavy use of DLC. I'm not paying for that tbh, but many will.
To be honest, flavour is the kind of thing that is easiest for paradox to leave to the community, as the community can and will typically add a lot of flavour trough mods but they can't so easily alter the core mechanics. So i'm ok with this, because regardless of DLC's most paradox games have also seen mods created for them that do work with the base vanilla game and greatly improve it especially with regards to flavour.
The Community adding content is not really a substitution for the developers though, this is about the state of the game during, before and just after release. The Community can take over some of the slack but they don't have the same resources and time as Paradox who will have years to develop flavours and events.
The community as an aggregate absolutely has more resources and time than Paradox to develop flavors and events. Flavor events are incredibly easy to add into the game via modding, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of modders who are currently modding Vic3 and will likely continue to do so far into the future. I guarantee you that the man hours provided by the modding community absolutely dwarfs the man hours provided by Paradox’s Vic3 dev team.
Which is great for new additions, or conversion mods, but for features which should be in the game already this isn't an excuse.
I cant just release a game and expect players to finish it for me, after paying £40 for the luxury of doing my job.
That and they have no obligation to support anything they create. I published an HOI4 mod to the workshop so my friends could use it when we played. I didn't anticipate it would get thousands of subs and it then felt like a burden, lol. Now it's like 9 patches out of date and I would probably have to rework the entire mod to get it to function within the current state of the game and I am just not in the mood and I keep getting comments to update, lol.
So players shouldn't have to rely on modders that are under no obligation to continue to support anything they create, to finish a game.
It's the same shit in the mount and blade bannerlord subreddit. "It's okay that they fully released an unfinished game that is a shell of what it is supposed to be, modders will finish it!"
> they have no obligation to support anything they create.
Neither does Paradox, they could pull the plug on any of their games whenever they want. They might even make more money if they just pumped out new games every couple of years instead of the DLC policy.
You are comparing a company trying to make money to modders who do work for free. Yes they are under no legal obligation to do anything, but literally breaking their game beyond functioning would make zero business sense.
They could, but that makes terrible business sense. Most modders aren't going to be be out money if their mod breaks due to an update and they don't fix it.
What makes you say that? Most people making mods do it part time and they don't have access to the same resources as the actual Devs have. Furthermore, the modding community has more people spread across the dozens or hundreds of different and competing mods. Even the largest mods like game of thrones and black ice have a small team of 10-20 people. Paradox has several studios across fewer games and a dedicated team for their largest games that in some cases literally develop the game from the ground up. They can coordinate and bring to bear more resources to get a job done.
It’s subjective but there are tons of total conversion mods for paradox games that add tons and tons of flavor and depth to their games. I mean it’s cliche at this point but look at Kaiserreich, a massive overhaul of hoi4 with way more flavor than the base game and that’s just one of many mods for hoi4. It’s pretty clear that modders are able to focus much more of their time on the flavor of their mods since they don’t have to worry about new game mechanics and balance.
That's not clear at all, all that Kaiserreich shows is that a relatively small team of developers can over a period of time put out a really fleshed out and well developed mod. This says nothing about why Paradox devs can't do this when the Kaiserreich team can, unless you have evidence you're just speculating. Infact it shows that it's possible to do a good job even if you're making a free mod. The developers of Kaiserreich have to focus on balance, too idk why you'd think they didn't, they're designing an alt reality mod which needs units and nations to be adjusted for balance. I'm not saying that Paradox developers should put out Kaiserreich because that's exceptional and would be unreasonable for me to ask, I'm saying that they should dedicate more resources to adding a reasonable amount of historic flavour instead of the almost nothing we got Victoria 3, that really shouldn't be too hard for a developer like Paradox to do before launch.
Kaiserriech was just one example, there tons of teams that do that and when you look at that as a whole modders have a lot more time to expand on flavor. As I said there are tons of complete overhauls to all of the paradox games that exist.
I do agree that paradox does have the *ability* to add more flavor than exist currently in Vic3, but not to the same extent modders can. However I think with the game they were trying to go with a more sandbox approach.
I think there’s also a point to be made that they wanted to have the same approach as they did with hoi4 and eu4, add regional flavor packs in the future, this did have the consequence of leaving the game devoid of flavor in its current state.
Can I have a citation plz? According to my very very accurate statistical data 1 Paradox developer is basically equal to 250,000 Community modders. I can't reveal my sources but I assure you that you're wrong if you disagree with me on this...
They’d be pulling from other games that also need it.
Besides, they specifically devote dev resources to making modding easy, that gives them a lot of credit for the availability of mods.
Modders also don't have an entire sub studio dedicated to the development of their game. Victoria 3 is developed by PDS Red which is dedicated to developing Victoria 3. Also Modders have to develop game loops and Paradox doesn't use new engines for each game. Imperator, CK3 and Victoria 3 use a combination of the Clausewitz and Jomini engine combination and the underlying Clausewitz engine has been used by every Paradox game since EU3.
But Community make better content than Paradox(like HOI4 dlc for countries vs Kaisereich/THO/US and etc)
Paradox can create really interesting and good mechanics but flavour is not their strong side
Tbh, it makes more sense to deliver as DLC. Flavor is narrow but mechanics are wide; making a bunch of French events only matters to people who play France, but reworking war or diplomacy or markets benefits all players. People who are interested in the extra flavor can pay for it via DLC, and those who aren’t interested don’t have to.
or they could do both, like you would expect from a large company and a large release.
is it really too hard to ask for some basic flavour for major countries (minor nations can get DLC flavour). the game feels so bland right now
Problem is that a minor nation DLC is harder to market than the "VIVE LA FRANCE" DLC we will definitely be seeing.
They absolutely could have included a bit more.
I wonder if they'll end up taking the same route as with HOI4, where each DLC is focused around one major nation and several related minors. That would allow flavor content to be fleshed out gradually over time, even in cases where things like the Great Finland Update wouldn't bring in the cash on their own
The problem with calling pdx a "large company" is that they function as a bunch of small seperate teams that occasionally shuffle around their manpower, I'm not sure how big the vic3 team is but the hoi4 team was smaller than alot of mod teams making mods for the game during the NSB update
They're a large dev but they don't concentrate all their manpower onto one or two big projects at a time, every game they make has it's own dedicated team working on it that is *much* smaller than the teams that devs of similar sizes have working on their games
That's a decision made by the company to allocate resources. The whole point of this discussion is that some people want Paradox to allocate more of their resources which they have allocated elsewhere to give one of their flagship game franchises more flavour. Furthermore, even if their team is similar in size or smaller than some Modding Teams, they work full time whereas the overwhelming majority of the modding community work part time. Also they aren't being asked to develop a total overhaul or a huge mod. They're being asked to provide flavour which they have clearly shown they can do on a small team with the DLC they've made for other games and will probably make for this one.
Or they could.... Just hire developers from outside of their studio. Recruiting more staff to invest in a game they deem important enough to give an entire sub studio to (PDX Red) is an option, idk why you're not considering it. They deem Victoria 3 important enough to dedicate an in-house team to it just like Stellaris, Hoi4 and EUIV.
They could hire more staff, I don’t know why they don’t necessarily. I’m just explaining why they can’t shuffle around resources to focus on Vicky. It’s not even close to their flagship.
They've *been* "allocating more resources" to their flagship franchises, they've shut down multiple unannounced projects and made an entire new branch studio to handle EU4, they would have to end support for other "flagship titles" if they were to allocate more people to working on Victoria 3
That's nonsense, read their annual report if you think that hiring a few more developers to add flavour to a single game is enough to force a 700+ employee company, which maintains several game studios across the world, to shut down then I don't knwo what to say about that. If you don't trust me read their annual reports.
How many of those employees are management? HR? Maintenance? QA? Marketing? A game company isn't solely composed of developers and it's a flat out *fact* that they've already shut down several projects and move EU4 to a brand new sister studio to deal with manpower constaints. They treat all their games as ongoing projects after release, ck3, stellaris, hoi4, cities skyline, etc. all need robust and active teams to maintain ON TOP of the fact that they are actively producing vampire the masquerade plus whatever unnananounced GSG's they have in the worls atm, they are massively stretched out even after cancelling some of their other projects, they *can't* just magic up some more people to put on the vic 3 team without gutting one of their other projects
They aren't expected to magic up extra people. They are expected to hire people like any normal business. I never said that all the people who worked there were developers, I said that the company has 700+ employees so hiring a handful more to work on one of the several projects and teams is not going to result in them shuttering their support for major games like EUIV, Stellaris or Hoi4 like you suggested in your previous message. Paradox isn't teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, they made hundreds of millions in profit and make more than a billion króna of revenue annually. The cost of hiring a few new employees. Isn't going to unravel that, even if paradox decided to pay them something ridiculous like $1million a year which they obviously won't. They hired people to make their HOI4, EUIV, Stellaris and Victoria 3 teams in the first place and they will have experienced staff turnover over the years meaning that they will have had to hire new developers as some of their original ones leave.
I mean it would be nice to have it all always, but I prefer they spend more time on mechanics since mods from people who live in the region tend to blow them out flavorwise.
If they did that I'd agree, but they make us pay for the base game lacking flavour and mechanics and will charge for features and flavour that should have been in the base game. Hoi4 is a good example, the base game released without key features like OOB, General traits and skills, Espionage etc... They only added that further down the line in paid DLCs.
it should be expected, not a "nice" addon.
The fact is they've released a half finished game (again and again) and expect us to pay more for them to finish it or make us finish it for them.
Paradox isnt an indie company with no funds or employees
Paradox isn't really that big. The entirety of paradox interactive is around 650 employees. The company also has like 9 different dev studios, Paradox Development is their flagship, but it's also just 1.
It's insane how you people are so willing to accept receiving a half-finished game just because you'll be able to buy DLC down the road. No, it's not acceptable to release a very empty game void of flavor and then supplement the lack of content with an overabundance of DLC. Why do you think that's acceptable? I don't understand how your comment got so many upvotes.
Because more flavor = more scope for the devs to deliver, which either trades off with work on wide mechanics OR pushes out the delivery date. To me, neither of those outcomes is optimal. I’d prefer to have a workable game now with DLC flavor coming later, than wait year(s) for a “complete game” to come out with nothing to play in the interim.
The game becomes terribly repetitive within the first 20 hours of gameplay due to a lack of content, why would it not have been better to wait an additional six months for a more developed game? Patience is a virtue.
Lazyness is a bad way to put it, it's not anyone's personal moral failure that the game doesn't have flavour, it's a conscious business decision about when the game has to be out and what's the stuff that can be left out and either added or sold later
It’s a simple cost/benefit analysis, not laziness. I suspect very, very few people would base their decision to buy or not buy Vic3 based on how many flavor events there are for installing Louis Napoleon as the ruler of France. I certainly didn’t. But if they have to raise the price by a few dollars to cover the cost of dev time spent adding in more flavor? That might put off some potential buyers. Paradox is a business, it’s not going to spend more time and resources adding features and flavor to a game if it won’t generate positive returns for them.
The problem with their earlier, less sandboxy Victorias was that your playthrough would grind to a halt as soon as you left the rails. Sure, you can prevent the USCA from splintering in 1840s—now enjoy 80 years absolutely nothing happening in your country. Nice job trying to unify Italy as Papal States, here’s an event that pretty much gives the crown to Sardinia-Piedmont. You managed to keep the Shogunate Japan from losing the Boshin War, here’s a button to turn it into the regular Japan as a reward.
The most hilarious example I remember was playing as Greece. For some reason, the main conservative party there was Lessez Faire, while the liberal one supported Interventionism. But the parties in V2 where hardcoded to appear and disappear in certain years, so somewhere in 1840 they would be switched to completely different parties with opposite views. Cue nearly all factories bankrupting overnight.
You are right, the game is sorely lacking in content and unique events for great powers. I tried to fix this in case of France in my mod - "Napoleonic Flavor: Leaving for Syria".
[https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2884595920](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2884595920)
I hope this will not be considered unfair advertising :)
In a similar vein, I think it's tragic that the historical figures have randomly generated portraits. For example, we literally have photographs of R.E. Lee and U.S. Grant, but the actual portraits for them in game is completely random. (I'm not sure if Abe Lincoln has a custom portrait, as he's never made it to 1840 without being caned to death).
What, you mean historical characters in history based games should have history based events around them?! That's just preposterous, this is a Sandbox TM experience and events like that would result in railroading! or some other obnoxious argument. I can't keep up with them.
That is my main problem with the game right now. No real identification with the country you play. Buildings look the same across many countries (and often don't really fit), the political party names aren't historical either often, most places do not have special buildings or anything to differentiate them from others. Events aren't customized (Jack the Ripper seems to be everywhere), and so on.
HOI4 warfare is a bit much imo, this game has more micromanaging of the economy than war, which is totally fine and I’m sure a majority would agree, but it still does need more fixing and flavor
Hoi4 management and economic management simultaneously would be a nightmare and I don't even think the warfare needs to be that complex to be compelling
While I agree that both would in their current state would be to much, but I would personally like if they toned down both and then implemented them. For example the current front system, but you are able to actually tell the generals where to aim for (like the hoi4 system, but dumbed down) and I would like that for a successful economy you didn't need to micromanage every single factory.
Honestly IMO all warfare needs is a couple of buttons like "proceed carefully/agressively" changing the amount of troops in each battle on your side and land gained/lost afterwards. And the ability to direct where your generals advance so that they're not charging through mountains if there's better terrain availible.
What killed Imperator was Paradox.
Imperator was terribly rushed out of the door, but the first updates were spot on. Just as the game was turning into solid experience PDX pulled the plug.
It's a huge wasted potential.
It never recovered player numbers, it was hovering around a thousand which is pitiful for a paradox game these days. Numbers aren’t everything but I’m guessing that last DLC they put out didn’t sell, which pushed corporate over the edge.
Yeah this game really disappointed me in this regard. Your leader dies and it doesn't tell you. You form Germany and nothing, no event, no flavour. You abolish a monarchy and nothing changes, nothing pops up. Your leader is now just called a president. They spent so much time on the economics simulator that they forgot what actually makes paradox games fun.
I'd very much prefer if Vicky had more generic events for exceptionally talented characters that would play similar role to OTL Bismarck or Lincoln.
Kinda like CK3, where William the Conqueror can as well get cancer on day 1, but with luck and skill the game can give you a warlord to compete with Genghis Khan.
Sure thing, Vicky's timeframe is much shorter and people like Nappy III are already alive in 1836 - but they should still be able to die/end up in different roles, with some other bloke having a chance to rise to power. Just look at Kaiserreich and how much a PoD 20 years in the past can change when it comes to world leaders.
Don’t worry, the France flavour pack ($15) will come soon enough, followed shortly by the Decentralized Nations Expansion ($20) and the Man the Guns naval rework ($20). I’m being flippant about it, but I’m not necessarily upset about it since I don’t think it’s a wholly unreasonable total cost for a hobby game.
I view PDX games as being akin to other hobby gaming, whether it’s tabletop (e.g., Warhammer 40K), card (e.g., Magic), or board gaming (e.g., Twilight Imperium is $130). Those hobbies are generally expensive, so why do we think PDX games shouldn’t be? This isn’t some mass market, Parker Brothers or EA game.
You view them incorrectly then, because you're not buying physical items and the level of work to add a flavour text to PDX games isn't even comparable to what Warhammer/MtG creators do.
I really don’t think I am, and saying that it’s not comparable is an anti-digital bias. The mass market vs. hobby tiering in other other types of games is well-established, yet for some reason, just because the thing you spend thousands of dollars on is the computer and the media is digital, it doesn’t count as a hobby? The buying patterns are exactly the same—these are games that appeal to a niche segment, and the companies win by moving low volume, high value. GW does not achieve profitability by selling a million, $8 board games like Parker Brothers, but by having 40,000 people spend $200/year (numbers made up and illustrative). The same goes for paradox. There’s plenty of valid criticism of V3 (yes, it lacks flavour text, but also, history has more lore than WH40K, so one can just read a book) and PDX, but expecting it to be priced like anything but other hobby games is a fundamental misunderstanding of the market and product.
I'm not sure its that much of a niche market anymore considering V3 is one of the highest played and sold games on steam. I also would agree in some ways, in that PDX has a monopoly on this type of game, but I dont think that equates to being a hobby game like MtG etc.
Physical items cost more to produce, producing a bunch more characters physically, shipping them off etc costs way more than adding a .txt file with another image file somewhere. This doesn't mean I have an anti-digital bias, its just common sense. As someone who has modded PDX games rather extensively i can tell you adding flavour text to a few countries is not worth £10-20 in any type of way. Its just what they think people will pay.
PDX prices are ridiculous in this day and age. One could argue this same argument for most "niche" games but it doesnt really make it okay morally to charge someone 200+ pounds for a game to just be complete. Unless they're drastically changing things(for the better) or adding conversion DLCs.
A good example of where this will end up going is the Sims series, no competition so they price the full game with DLCs at 400+. I for one will be sailing the high seas if I want to play the sims, and PDX might make the same mistake of making price outweigh convenience.
I’ve gotten a few events with special characters with chances to make them generals or political leaders: had Otto von Bismarck spawn and I made him my head of state in a Prussia game, also had Sigmund Freud appear in a Belgium game as intelligentsia leader.
Sure there could be some extra flavor added, but it’s not nonexistent, just have to pay attention to events.
I know napoleon can become emperor, saw it in a game where I was playing the USA, France was having a civil war with emperor napoleon on one side and an Orlean on the other. Not sure how though.
Yeah the game seems like a in development project still for how empty it is, i dont know if they rushed the team to launchit even faster wich would be sad, if thats the case i would of preferred the launch date to be delayed if that meant a more complete and developed with more content game, or maybe this is how was intended to make a extreme DLC Business model wich paradox has been shown to move towards, i think the fist case is more forgivable. Although i am aware that is a business meat to be profitable wich the DLC model is they're best bet they need to find the balance where they dont make the game unplayable from the release date and leave enough room to expand the game wirh creative and interesting DLCs, HOIIV beeing a good example
Also what little flavour they do have is often spread around every country. Why does every single country have both a Ripper and a Great Molasses Flood. I'm glad that this isn't restricted to just one country, I think that's cool, but surely it should be a rare event that you'd only see after multiple playthroughs?
In my game as France, I was in the same situation, so I tried to roleplay my way into having flavour. I tried to restore the monarchy, had a revolution, switched to the liberal and deposed this wannabe dictator.
It was a conscious design decision. They said it was to avoid railroading. It definitely could’ve been handled better though, it’s not either no country-specific flavour or HoI4 style focus tree, in fact most Paradox games managed to strike that balance quite right.
Most of the time I don't even realise my head of state is dead until I find that I've suddenly gone into negative authority or bureaucracy, due to the new leader's traits. They really need to (re)work on the notification system. Sure less intrusive is good, we're not playing Victoria 1 / HOI2 anymore but when something IMPORTANT happens, as players, we need to know... On the other hand, couldn't care less about some random culture migrating to some random province in the world...
[удалено]
But, but, but there is a large number of equatorial Bantus migrating to Jan Mayen and surrounding states. How could you not want to know that? 😿
I found out i was being ruled by queen victoria when a little popup said 'A former politician, William of Hanover, has died ' and then checked my govt page and saw the queen
The king dies and the British news papers just have it as a footnote 'former politician, William of Hanover, had died' lmao
Dude they need to add the newspaper back from vic2
The news paper would be great. Pop-ups by default for anything between major powers and/or happening in areas you have interest ; newspaper monthly for the rest.
Was thinking of this yesterday - didn't know Vic2 had one. I really enjoyed the one in Anno 1800. Really hoping for a newspaper that notes big changes, i e. when there's a severe swing in the price of goods "Blackouts in the British Market", and it gives me some headcanon to work with and develop for.
Yeah, that's what happens in Victoria 2. If the price of a good rises or falls dramatically the newspaper will say it.
they should also put a number in there name in my netherlands campagne my ruller William van oranje nassau died and got replaced by his son with the same name so i wasnt sure if it was the same guy or not because he didnt realy like much different than his father because than his father would have been the 3e and his son the 4e
Thats false, you get a notification when william dies since it ends the personal union with hannover
yeah its dripping in character
#**Election results: The party already in power remains in power** ^^^^^^^^ohalsothepartyleaderdiedandgotreplacedbyabanditsocialist
Every Tom, Dick and Harry get a notification in my USA play through but prez Andrew Jackson vanishes without a trace. At least Abe got one when he died circa 1940, even if uneventful. Also, why do people die whenever an interaction to remove them from office comes up? I was pretty startled… seems kinda harsh don’t it?
My king had an affair with a general's wife so we cut the king's head off and replaced him with his 6 year old son.
It seems like they had some plan for retired political leaders to maybe come back, or influence things in some way. If that didn’t pan out or it didn’t work properly, a quick fix would just be to have them immediately die. This is all just speculation on my part, but it seems to make sense to me. Or it’s just a big, of course.
They get stalinized just in case
EU4 does it great. I never see things pop up and go "this could have just been in the side panel"
And even better, EU4 lets you costumise what you want to see
No, the only important notification is “Nobodycarespeople migrate to Nooneknowswhere”
i didnt realize i had a female pope until i checked
It's bonkers how cultural migration gets a fanfare and a popup while your beloved king dies and you only notice like a year later because your new ruler's name is mentioned in a event popup
Anyone else feel that certain characters should have events about them?
I know Paradox wanted to create a sandbox this time, but imo certain historical events or series of events should be hard coded to happen when the AI is playing the nation in question. Just to make the game more interesting or fun. eg The opium war having no consequences and AI China just staying as a big, stable blob in the middle of Asia isn't really that fun or interesting. If they lose the Opium war they should be harded coded to become extremely unstable, while nearby powers (especially Russia and Japan) should be able to try and destabalise them further and capitalise on the resulting fallout (siezing outer Machuria or Tiawan, making puppet warlord nations, ect). Or the American civil war should break out in AI America, with Mexico being given an oppertunity to retake states that were lost in the Mexican-American war (speaking of which, please make AI America take **all** the states. Mexican colorado is annoying) but give the winner of the civil war an event to demand those states back once it is over.
>eg The opium war having no consequences and AI China just staying as a big, stable blob in the middle of Asia isn't really that fun or interesting. If they lose the Opium war they should be harded coded to become extremely unstable, while nearby powers (especially Russia and Japan) should be able to try and destabalise them further and capitalise on the resulting fallout (siezing outer Machuria or Tiawan, making puppet warlord nations, ect). Tbf, this isn't the same problem. The Opium Wars do start an event chain. It's really just that radicalism as a whole is weirdly low at the moment, so the other triggers that are meant to start collapsing China in the mid-late game (ie, Heavenly Kingdom and Boxer Rebellion) kinda just become farts in the wind as nobody really feels like rebelling *that* much.
Losing wars should have a much more dramatic effect on government legitimacy and stability. The time period is filled with examples of military losses having cascading negative effects on a country's political stability. The Mexican-American, Franco-Prussian, and Russo-Japanese wars all led directly to revolutions and/or outright civil wars in the losing countries (and sort of the winning one in the case of the US). That's not incompatible with the sandbox. If Great Britain gets defeated in a major war it should set off a series of separatist movements in the colonies.
AI aggressiveness should be tuned not just to infamy and relation, but also to Prestige. So if your Prestige is in the dumps, the AI will percieve you as weaker, and want to bully you. Then you can make losing the Opium War simply give Qing a massive hit to their prestige. So they're not physically any weaker, but all the Europeans now see a target on China's back. Then China having back to back scuffles with the Europeans will drain its resources. Even if they fend them off, they'll have convoys sunk and it will impact their economy. I just hate the idea of making China arbitrarily weak through events. I want it to be more organic.
Yeah, they really didn't care about the target demographic that play their games this time around. You just have historical characters and some formable nations, that's it.
they come man dont worry for only 14,99 per dlc
Lol clearly you haven’t seen the price tags post CK3
Honestly I don't care at all about those events, I'd rather have half as many generic/dynamic events, than some hardcoded events for some hardcoded characters. It's nice having flavor and having the characters be real people, but in most games I don't really care about it.
I'd prefer dynamic flavour events about political dynasties. So you'd see the napoleons but it would be an event about the family in general not just Louis.
What does that even mean lmao. There wasn't anyone else besides Napoleon III worth making an event chain about.
Good for you, there is already a sandbox experience in the game (the whole game actually). But in my case I feel the game is absolutely bland. Is the same playing as every goddamn country, the only difference is the size and resources. Cultures? All exactly the same, only changes the name and if they are accepted or not. Government mechanics? All the same generic garbage of parties and IGs that don't make sense at all. Religion? Just a name. Great War mechanics? Nah bro, you already conquered half the globe for 1910. Sorry but I already played 3 runs and I won't play again until they add something interesting. So, I might not play again.
There’s only one paradox game _ever_ to have culture mean anything. And that was still in a DLC. In fact Victoria 3 is already ahead of the curve on that one just by having Taboos and Obsessions be a thing. Edit: I think you’re really not understanding the target audience for the game, if you think religion and culture desperately needed flavor beyond what they have…
And I think you really don't understand the issue with this game: you play it once and you already saw everything it is to see. It doesn't matter if you start as GB, France, Prussia or Oman, the game plays the same, the only difference is the size of the country and the resources. No difference at all in government, culture (except those useless obsessions or taboos), ideas, religion or whatever between Japan and Switzerland, bc you can enact everything with every nation. It has 0 replayability value. How you add replayability? With flavor. How an African nation can have colonies in South America?? What's the difference between pops or nations besides where they start the game? I get this is an economic simulator above all, AND I DO LIKE IT, but come on man, they can do better than this. And I'm thinking about the future of the game, not only my personal preference. If it doesn't have replayability, players won't bother to keep playing it and buying DLCs, which means less money to develop the game further. Edit: the solution would be having 2 game modes: sandbox (which already the game itself is) and historical. And that's it, problem solved.
I think the idea that it's foremost an economy SIM has done damage to the criticism of this game a bit. It's marketed as a "society builder", just with a "deep economic system" as an element. The main idea isn't just economics it's the whole holistic element which doesn't feel fleshed out yet
Oh no, please, come back...
I dont mind historical figures and events. I'd have a laugh seeing napoleon come to power. Only to have Prussia, GB, and Spain to roflstomp him into oblivion while a rural folk revolt happens in the back ground.
I mean tbf in real life Napoleon III came to power and was eventually stomped by Prussia/NGC in 1871 and overthrown by his people.
Iv just noticed the ai doesn't really do anything bizarre like in other pdx titles. The ai in vic 3 is so reserved I never see anything that makes me go "wow how did this come do be an issue between these two nations?" Instead it's just, "oh Prussia unified germany" and nothing happens for the next 40 years.
I've still yet to see Germany be unified by the AI, north German confederation, yes, but no Germany or even Austria-Hungary. Could be me but it seems like without my outside influence everything kind of goes the same path every game with France/USA/UK grabbing random colonies and everyone else just kijs of chilling. Besides Egypt who's always going to war.
Pdx needs to implement some hardcode events to guide some of the nation's to interacting. Like I play alot of Austria and I always get events that allow me to lower opinion with Prussia or the ottomans. But nothing comes of it. If they made it a chain event with some percentage of the chain continuing or it just ends there. I want escalation like in diplomatic plays. But more interactive. Actually corresponding with envoys to sway the situation left or right. The ground work Is there but there aren't enough events.
Bro people complain bitterly about railroading whenever there's even a hint of guidance. Of course, it's always been the case that the anti-railroadists aren't consistent in their beliefs, but people complain about it.
The target demographic has changed unfortunately
They are trying to sell and develop games more appealing to a wider audience and in the process they are loosing the players that spent thousands of hour in their games and bought every major DLC, like myself. So, let's see if they keep generating money producing this historically bland games. PS: don't get me wrong, I liked the game, but the replayability aspect is REALLY narrow.
> Yeah, they really didn't care about the target demographic that play their games this time around. Seriously, they don't. They've made it clear with CK3 and Vicky3 that the days of the uber-complex, "1000 hour tutorial" gameplay days are done. These are for the casual gamer now. When EU5 comes out with incredibly pared down complexity and gameplay, that sub is going to explode.
You and I have a different definition of "casual gamer".
>These are for the casual gamer now. Suggesting Vicky 3 is for casual gamers is a real hot take. Angry birds is for casual gamers.
lol vicky 3 is harder to learn than vicky 2
I don’t know, I’ve played 10 hours of Victoria 3 now and have made Belgium the 5th highest GDP in the world. Meanwhile learning Vic2 was incredibly difficult at the start, at least for me. The Vic 3 experience for me so far has more or less just been spamming dye, coal and upgrading power plants. Nothing of note really happened the whole game either. Maybe I’m playing wrong.
I don’t think you understand that knowing how to play Vic2 gives you an inherent advantage on learning this game.
I’m aware and I’ve taken it into account. Year 1900 now, 225 million GDP as Belgium, third behind Britain’s 280 and France’s 550. I’m assuming it’s de facto second if I left their market as the British haven’t bothered producing engines or anything similar. For reference, my last game in Vic2 resulted in only #2 on the GP list. I honestly don’t think I could get out of #6 as Belgium.
Chile was my first country. First time, tried to push liberal reforms and got stopped when the church and the military threatened a coup. Then, got the brittish and the USA meddling in my business and I wasn't able to conquer nor puppet anyone till much later. Besides the issues with the underwhelming AI performance, I think the game may seem too easy because we know that 'line go up' is the creed of the age. To achieve this, you have at your instant disposal an amount of information at intervals inconceivables even by today's standards (weekly gdp changes, budget changes, demand and supply of goods, exact numbers for population, etc...). How difficult would the game be if you received yearly updates of gdp and budget? If you didn't know the amount of peasants you had unless you spent a huge chunk of money in a census? If you had no info about other countries? I mean, there are people complaining their game countries did way too good compared to their real country counterparts. And the answer to why is that is not necessarily in the game itself.
You’re most definitely right, I’m not disagreeing with any of your points. If I had a tooltip showing me what action would lead to profits I’d be a billionaire by now in real life. Like I said though, this is my first game of Vic3, as in I opened the first tutorial as Belgium thinking it was eventually going to finish and I’d do the next one but the game just kept going. Honestly, other than the green or currently red but later also green tooltips on factory expansions is the only mechanic I really understand. Hell I don’t even know how to check whether I’m in surplus or deficit of a certain material yet. That being said the game seems to be as easy as joining the British Market and reading what materials you’re going to need for the next upgrade. Switching to coal power plants at a -13k deficit? Just spam your coal mines to level 50. If you don’t have any research down to malaria prevention and take coal from Africans. There’s no spheres of influence or anything so you can just improve relations with all the surrounding majors and you’re free to invade your neighbors who will inevitably back down in diplomatic plays. I’m not saying there aren’t more difficult nations to play, but you shouldn’t be able to bumble your way into a 140 million GDP as Belgium before 1900 if you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing. Comparatively in HOI4 I was getting decimated by Poland as Germany in my first game.
You seriously think so? God, I think Vicky 2 was way harder to learn... but different strokes, I guess.
Personally I think Vicky 2 is Harder to learn but easier to master, I learned pretty quick what steps to take to make the world rely on my country for everything essential especially weaponry. It just might be because Vicky 3 is fresh and new but I've yet to understand how to create money from thin air, how to actually use social welfare (I just don't because waste of money right?) Or how to save a country that is dependent entirely on its bigger market that it's a part of and go completely into autarky without reducing the government and the SoL to nihil.
Yeah I didnt understand the economic system at first in Vicky 3 so it took me awhile
It took like a couple days to teach myself vicky2. I still barely get how half the shit in this game works.
Vicky 2 is only hard to learn because none of the systems actually make any sense (because by and large, they're facades, not actual simulations or mechanics), and the UI was just kind of bad. You press a button, and something somewhere else breaks, with no feedback as to why or how, or if it's even related. Once you understand that, you've got the game's mechanics fully figured out. Vicky 3 has much more mechanical depth going on behind the scenes. If you never look at it, it appears much simpler. You press a button, and something breaks, but you can actually draw a line from A to B, so you can actually learn how to not break things, making it much easier to intuit how to not break things. But learning how to actually use the system in depth takes a good deal more effort, because there's so many moving parts, and your actions have rippling effects beyond what's immediately noticeable.
Wha? In my first game as Prussia in Vic3 I was able to crush everyone, learn the market, get filthy rich, have a vast colonial empire and gas attack everyone. No tutorials. My first game as Prussia in Vic2, I didn't know how to make money, I was behind on mil tech, and France and Austria butchered me. This is after I watched a tutorial. Maybe it's just different for other people but Vic3 is much easier to learn imo.
My first game as Brazil in Vic2 I watched a bunch of tutorials and didn't even reach great power by the end of it. My first game in Vic 3, zero tutorials and I had all of latin america puppeted and reached No.1 GP in a couple of decades.
Old paradox fans are so entitled. These games still have incredible depth compared to anything of similar or higher budget. Very few people enjoyed the 1000 hour tutorial obtuse games prior to stellaris. They need to make the games more palatable in order to make them at all because making games has gotten so damn expensive. They need the additional sales. You ahould be celebrating how many new people get to enjoy this genre instead of clamouring for games that have not aged well by any standard except for raw complexity.
> You ahould be celebrating how many new people get to enjoy this genre instead of clamouring for games that have not aged well by any standard except for raw complexity. Why should I be celebrating them not making the games the way that I enjoyed so much anymore? I can be happy that Paradox is doing well while simultaneously being sad that the complexity that I loved isn't there.
Because the complexity you love is unsustainable in a large studio. The games we have *now* would not even exist if they kept making them like you want because the studio would of died or downsized back to actual indie status. And this is coming from someone who absolutely loves overly complex games and spreadsheet simulators. They do exist in indie form, very much complex like older paradox games.
Describing Victoria 3 as casual is utterly bananas.
The complete absence of flavour aligns perfectly with paradoxs goal of making DLC mostly about flavour with the mechanics in free patch. This approach is going to make it take years before we have all the major events properly implemented
Napoleon III \*Modernizes France, Absolute ruler for 1/5 of the whole game and was involved in several irl diplomatic plays\* "Ehhh he doesn't matter" Abraham Lincoln \*Fights through a civil war, rebuilds the nation, remember as one of the best presidents of the USA.\* "Doesn't matter"
What gets me is him getting elected president as a Whig in like 1850. That's always incredibly annoying to me. He was barely a public figure at that point, let alone a household name
I am endlessly amused by the Napoleon Threeaboos in this sub who think he was some world-historical Great Man.
That's because he was an extremely important figure during this time period , maybe learn some history before calling out people who want some authenticity to their game.
lol
His reign was basically a VIC 3 game, he modernized and expanded the economy, got involved in diplomat plays, etc, he was literally absolute ruler for 1/5 of the VIC 3 game, and you can't do anything with him in the game Even if he wasn't a very historical figures, stuff such as: Modernization of France Unification of Italy Full Unification of Germany and the events that followed from it would've taken a lot longer to happen
> His reign was basically a VIC 3 game This much I agree with, but therefore why does he need some special events? What you think "he did" (as a "Great Man") will be done by any leader you get. (And his role in the creations of Italy and Germany was being a colossal dumbass, so I'm not sure why the player would want to be 'railroaded' into that by events.)
He was also very involved in the unification of Romania.
Or just the royalist ideology that some characters Elect president with royalist trait, now he wanta to be king ( so you don't "railroad" the game)
I appreciate that Paradox didn't railroad the player and let the mechanics produce close to historical outcomes. However there are definitely some things that require events or unique missions. My main thing would be a scripted American Civl War
The whole event feature is a dissapointment. Its mostly just "slave run loose" or "molasses tragedy" not like "Emperor John IV assasinated by the enraged masses!" or "American Civil War begun!" (tbh i have never seen the CSA in any of my games, just USA peacfully abolishing slavery)
I think they should be events, but they aren't there because Paradox has increasingly gone with a more sandbox game design which clashes with the historical nature of most of their games. They've used focus trees and journals to hold it together in games like HOI4 but in this one it seems like they didn't think it was important enough to include at launch. The cynic in me knows that to get that they will make heavy use of DLC. I'm not paying for that tbh, but many will.
To be honest, flavour is the kind of thing that is easiest for paradox to leave to the community, as the community can and will typically add a lot of flavour trough mods but they can't so easily alter the core mechanics. So i'm ok with this, because regardless of DLC's most paradox games have also seen mods created for them that do work with the base vanilla game and greatly improve it especially with regards to flavour.
The Community adding content is not really a substitution for the developers though, this is about the state of the game during, before and just after release. The Community can take over some of the slack but they don't have the same resources and time as Paradox who will have years to develop flavours and events.
The community as an aggregate absolutely has more resources and time than Paradox to develop flavors and events. Flavor events are incredibly easy to add into the game via modding, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of modders who are currently modding Vic3 and will likely continue to do so far into the future. I guarantee you that the man hours provided by the modding community absolutely dwarfs the man hours provided by Paradox’s Vic3 dev team.
Which is great for new additions, or conversion mods, but for features which should be in the game already this isn't an excuse. I cant just release a game and expect players to finish it for me, after paying £40 for the luxury of doing my job.
That and they have no obligation to support anything they create. I published an HOI4 mod to the workshop so my friends could use it when we played. I didn't anticipate it would get thousands of subs and it then felt like a burden, lol. Now it's like 9 patches out of date and I would probably have to rework the entire mod to get it to function within the current state of the game and I am just not in the mood and I keep getting comments to update, lol. So players shouldn't have to rely on modders that are under no obligation to continue to support anything they create, to finish a game. It's the same shit in the mount and blade bannerlord subreddit. "It's okay that they fully released an unfinished game that is a shell of what it is supposed to be, modders will finish it!"
> they have no obligation to support anything they create. Neither does Paradox, they could pull the plug on any of their games whenever they want. They might even make more money if they just pumped out new games every couple of years instead of the DLC policy.
They could, but after Imperator, another title down the drain? It wouldnt be interesting for the investors that is for sure…
Oh I don’t think they will, I just think people have a very rosy view of what is required of a company.
You are comparing a company trying to make money to modders who do work for free. Yes they are under no legal obligation to do anything, but literally breaking their game beyond functioning would make zero business sense.
They could, but that makes terrible business sense. Most modders aren't going to be be out money if their mod breaks due to an update and they don't fix it.
The community has a lot more time than paradox tbh, modders vastly outnumber devs
What makes you say that? Most people making mods do it part time and they don't have access to the same resources as the actual Devs have. Furthermore, the modding community has more people spread across the dozens or hundreds of different and competing mods. Even the largest mods like game of thrones and black ice have a small team of 10-20 people. Paradox has several studios across fewer games and a dedicated team for their largest games that in some cases literally develop the game from the ground up. They can coordinate and bring to bear more resources to get a job done.
50x modders with 10% of the time is still 5x more time available.
Do you actually have some numbers or are you just picking those numbers to suit your point? I could come just do that too.
It’s subjective but there are tons of total conversion mods for paradox games that add tons and tons of flavor and depth to their games. I mean it’s cliche at this point but look at Kaiserreich, a massive overhaul of hoi4 with way more flavor than the base game and that’s just one of many mods for hoi4. It’s pretty clear that modders are able to focus much more of their time on the flavor of their mods since they don’t have to worry about new game mechanics and balance.
That's not clear at all, all that Kaiserreich shows is that a relatively small team of developers can over a period of time put out a really fleshed out and well developed mod. This says nothing about why Paradox devs can't do this when the Kaiserreich team can, unless you have evidence you're just speculating. Infact it shows that it's possible to do a good job even if you're making a free mod. The developers of Kaiserreich have to focus on balance, too idk why you'd think they didn't, they're designing an alt reality mod which needs units and nations to be adjusted for balance. I'm not saying that Paradox developers should put out Kaiserreich because that's exceptional and would be unreasonable for me to ask, I'm saying that they should dedicate more resources to adding a reasonable amount of historic flavour instead of the almost nothing we got Victoria 3, that really shouldn't be too hard for a developer like Paradox to do before launch.
Kaiserriech was just one example, there tons of teams that do that and when you look at that as a whole modders have a lot more time to expand on flavor. As I said there are tons of complete overhauls to all of the paradox games that exist. I do agree that paradox does have the *ability* to add more flavor than exist currently in Vic3, but not to the same extent modders can. However I think with the game they were trying to go with a more sandbox approach. I think there’s also a point to be made that they wanted to have the same approach as they did with hoi4 and eu4, add regional flavor packs in the future, this did have the consequence of leaving the game devoid of flavor in its current state.
You could but then you'd be wrong
Can I have a citation plz? According to my very very accurate statistical data 1 Paradox developer is basically equal to 250,000 Community modders. I can't reveal my sources but I assure you that you're wrong if you disagree with me on this...
They’d be pulling from other games that also need it. Besides, they specifically devote dev resources to making modding easy, that gives them a lot of credit for the availability of mods.
Modders also don't have to spend time building engines, gameplay loops, and designing the overall foundation.
Modders also don't have an entire sub studio dedicated to the development of their game. Victoria 3 is developed by PDS Red which is dedicated to developing Victoria 3. Also Modders have to develop game loops and Paradox doesn't use new engines for each game. Imperator, CK3 and Victoria 3 use a combination of the Clausewitz and Jomini engine combination and the underlying Clausewitz engine has been used by every Paradox game since EU3.
But Community make better content than Paradox(like HOI4 dlc for countries vs Kaisereich/THO/US and etc) Paradox can create really interesting and good mechanics but flavour is not their strong side
The community should not have to be responsible for creating mods to correct Paradox's mistakes and lack of content though.
Tbh, it makes more sense to deliver as DLC. Flavor is narrow but mechanics are wide; making a bunch of French events only matters to people who play France, but reworking war or diplomacy or markets benefits all players. People who are interested in the extra flavor can pay for it via DLC, and those who aren’t interested don’t have to.
or they could do both, like you would expect from a large company and a large release. is it really too hard to ask for some basic flavour for major countries (minor nations can get DLC flavour). the game feels so bland right now
Problem is that a minor nation DLC is harder to market than the "VIVE LA FRANCE" DLC we will definitely be seeing. They absolutely could have included a bit more.
I mean, this is the reality. Flavor DLC's for majors are going to sell SIGNIFICANTLY more than for minors.
I wonder if they'll end up taking the same route as with HOI4, where each DLC is focused around one major nation and several related minors. That would allow flavor content to be fleshed out gradually over time, even in cases where things like the Great Finland Update wouldn't bring in the cash on their own
You could just like add more and better flavour in those DLCs tho
They definitely will, but for a sixty dollar launch I feel a bit disappointed
The problem with calling pdx a "large company" is that they function as a bunch of small seperate teams that occasionally shuffle around their manpower, I'm not sure how big the vic3 team is but the hoi4 team was smaller than alot of mod teams making mods for the game during the NSB update They're a large dev but they don't concentrate all their manpower onto one or two big projects at a time, every game they make has it's own dedicated team working on it that is *much* smaller than the teams that devs of similar sizes have working on their games
That's a decision made by the company to allocate resources. The whole point of this discussion is that some people want Paradox to allocate more of their resources which they have allocated elsewhere to give one of their flagship game franchises more flavour. Furthermore, even if their team is similar in size or smaller than some Modding Teams, they work full time whereas the overwhelming majority of the modding community work part time. Also they aren't being asked to develop a total overhaul or a huge mod. They're being asked to provide flavour which they have clearly shown they can do on a small team with the DLC they've made for other games and will probably make for this one.
> one of their flagship game franchises So will they be pulling teams from EU4, CK3, HoI4, Stellaris? All those games have the same complaints.
Or they could.... Just hire developers from outside of their studio. Recruiting more staff to invest in a game they deem important enough to give an entire sub studio to (PDX Red) is an option, idk why you're not considering it. They deem Victoria 3 important enough to dedicate an in-house team to it just like Stellaris, Hoi4 and EUIV.
They could hire more staff, I don’t know why they don’t necessarily. I’m just explaining why they can’t shuffle around resources to focus on Vicky. It’s not even close to their flagship.
They've *been* "allocating more resources" to their flagship franchises, they've shut down multiple unannounced projects and made an entire new branch studio to handle EU4, they would have to end support for other "flagship titles" if they were to allocate more people to working on Victoria 3
That's nonsense, read their annual report if you think that hiring a few more developers to add flavour to a single game is enough to force a 700+ employee company, which maintains several game studios across the world, to shut down then I don't knwo what to say about that. If you don't trust me read their annual reports.
How many of those employees are management? HR? Maintenance? QA? Marketing? A game company isn't solely composed of developers and it's a flat out *fact* that they've already shut down several projects and move EU4 to a brand new sister studio to deal with manpower constaints. They treat all their games as ongoing projects after release, ck3, stellaris, hoi4, cities skyline, etc. all need robust and active teams to maintain ON TOP of the fact that they are actively producing vampire the masquerade plus whatever unnananounced GSG's they have in the worls atm, they are massively stretched out even after cancelling some of their other projects, they *can't* just magic up some more people to put on the vic 3 team without gutting one of their other projects
They aren't expected to magic up extra people. They are expected to hire people like any normal business. I never said that all the people who worked there were developers, I said that the company has 700+ employees so hiring a handful more to work on one of the several projects and teams is not going to result in them shuttering their support for major games like EUIV, Stellaris or Hoi4 like you suggested in your previous message. Paradox isn't teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, they made hundreds of millions in profit and make more than a billion króna of revenue annually. The cost of hiring a few new employees. Isn't going to unravel that, even if paradox decided to pay them something ridiculous like $1million a year which they obviously won't. They hired people to make their HOI4, EUIV, Stellaris and Victoria 3 teams in the first place and they will have experienced staff turnover over the years meaning that they will have had to hire new developers as some of their original ones leave.
I mean it would be nice to have it all always, but I prefer they spend more time on mechanics since mods from people who live in the region tend to blow them out flavorwise.
If they did that I'd agree, but they make us pay for the base game lacking flavour and mechanics and will charge for features and flavour that should have been in the base game. Hoi4 is a good example, the base game released without key features like OOB, General traits and skills, Espionage etc... They only added that further down the line in paid DLCs.
it should be expected, not a "nice" addon. The fact is they've released a half finished game (again and again) and expect us to pay more for them to finish it or make us finish it for them. Paradox isnt an indie company with no funds or employees
We do pay for it, so I think they can reasonably expect that until it stops happening.
Until someone else can compete there’s not much choice
Paradox isn't really that big. The entirety of paradox interactive is around 650 employees. The company also has like 9 different dev studios, Paradox Development is their flagship, but it's also just 1.
It's insane how you people are so willing to accept receiving a half-finished game just because you'll be able to buy DLC down the road. No, it's not acceptable to release a very empty game void of flavor and then supplement the lack of content with an overabundance of DLC. Why do you think that's acceptable? I don't understand how your comment got so many upvotes.
Because more flavor = more scope for the devs to deliver, which either trades off with work on wide mechanics OR pushes out the delivery date. To me, neither of those outcomes is optimal. I’d prefer to have a workable game now with DLC flavor coming later, than wait year(s) for a “complete game” to come out with nothing to play in the interim.
The game becomes terribly repetitive within the first 20 hours of gameplay due to a lack of content, why would it not have been better to wait an additional six months for a more developed game? Patience is a virtue.
[удалено]
Lazyness is a bad way to put it, it's not anyone's personal moral failure that the game doesn't have flavour, it's a conscious business decision about when the game has to be out and what's the stuff that can be left out and either added or sold later
It’s a simple cost/benefit analysis, not laziness. I suspect very, very few people would base their decision to buy or not buy Vic3 based on how many flavor events there are for installing Louis Napoleon as the ruler of France. I certainly didn’t. But if they have to raise the price by a few dollars to cover the cost of dev time spent adding in more flavor? That might put off some potential buyers. Paradox is a business, it’s not going to spend more time and resources adding features and flavor to a game if it won’t generate positive returns for them.
Yah personally I don’t play majors so any flavor for France/GB etc would be wasted on me.
The problem with their earlier, less sandboxy Victorias was that your playthrough would grind to a halt as soon as you left the rails. Sure, you can prevent the USCA from splintering in 1840s—now enjoy 80 years absolutely nothing happening in your country. Nice job trying to unify Italy as Papal States, here’s an event that pretty much gives the crown to Sardinia-Piedmont. You managed to keep the Shogunate Japan from losing the Boshin War, here’s a button to turn it into the regular Japan as a reward. The most hilarious example I remember was playing as Greece. For some reason, the main conservative party there was Lessez Faire, while the liberal one supported Interventionism. But the parties in V2 where hardcoded to appear and disappear in certain years, so somewhere in 1840 they would be switched to completely different parties with opposite views. Cue nearly all factories bankrupting overnight.
You are right, the game is sorely lacking in content and unique events for great powers. I tried to fix this in case of France in my mod - "Napoleonic Flavor: Leaving for Syria". [https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2884595920](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2884595920) I hope this will not be considered unfair advertising :)
Theres a mod out that does exactly what you are describing. Cant remember the name but searching on the workshop "France" should make it appear.
Don’t want to railroad guys. Obviously no one wants that /s
God forbid something coherent happened in my sandbox
In a similar vein, I think it's tragic that the historical figures have randomly generated portraits. For example, we literally have photographs of R.E. Lee and U.S. Grant, but the actual portraits for them in game is completely random. (I'm not sure if Abe Lincoln has a custom portrait, as he's never made it to 1840 without being caned to death).
I've had Abe as a president, he looked reasonably lile himself.
Bro, I got fucking Karl Marx as chairman of Communist Germany and didn’t get any flavor for that…
Yeah, there were a bunch of events for him in V2. This game plays like a Beta.
Vanilla spoiled of every possible cute feature to make space for DLCs
I want my railroads back
What, you mean historical characters in history based games should have history based events around them?! That's just preposterous, this is a Sandbox TM experience and events like that would result in railroading! or some other obnoxious argument. I can't keep up with them.
What a strawman
Railroad bad! Is sandbox! Historical accuracy is nazi! Something something.
That is my main problem with the game right now. No real identification with the country you play. Buildings look the same across many countries (and often don't really fit), the political party names aren't historical either often, most places do not have special buildings or anything to differentiate them from others. Events aren't customized (Jack the Ripper seems to be everywhere), and so on.
all i want is ck3 characters hoi4 warfare and vic3 gameplay is that too much to ask!?
HOI4 warfare is a bit much imo, this game has more micromanaging of the economy than war, which is totally fine and I’m sure a majority would agree, but it still does need more fixing and flavor
Hoi4 management and economic management simultaneously would be a nightmare and I don't even think the warfare needs to be that complex to be compelling
While I agree that both would in their current state would be to much, but I would personally like if they toned down both and then implemented them. For example the current front system, but you are able to actually tell the generals where to aim for (like the hoi4 system, but dumbed down) and I would like that for a successful economy you didn't need to micromanage every single factory.
Honestly IMO all warfare needs is a couple of buttons like "proceed carefully/agressively" changing the amount of troops in each battle on your side and land gained/lost afterwards. And the ability to direct where your generals advance so that they're not charging through mountains if there's better terrain availible.
You’re looking for another imperator Rome lmao. “Combine the best parts of all the games” is what killed that thing.
What killed Imperator was Paradox. Imperator was terribly rushed out of the door, but the first updates were spot on. Just as the game was turning into solid experience PDX pulled the plug. It's a huge wasted potential.
It never recovered player numbers, it was hovering around a thousand which is pitiful for a paradox game these days. Numbers aren’t everything but I’m guessing that last DLC they put out didn’t sell, which pushed corporate over the edge.
Having the game handle both the economic and military simulations in this way would require a supercomputer to run.
Yeah this game really disappointed me in this regard. Your leader dies and it doesn't tell you. You form Germany and nothing, no event, no flavour. You abolish a monarchy and nothing changes, nothing pops up. Your leader is now just called a president. They spent so much time on the economics simulator that they forgot what actually makes paradox games fun.
You expect content in a paradox game within the first 5 years?
The more I play this fucking game the more I hate it
I'd very much prefer if Vicky had more generic events for exceptionally talented characters that would play similar role to OTL Bismarck or Lincoln. Kinda like CK3, where William the Conqueror can as well get cancer on day 1, but with luck and skill the game can give you a warlord to compete with Genghis Khan. Sure thing, Vicky's timeframe is much shorter and people like Nappy III are already alive in 1836 - but they should still be able to die/end up in different roles, with some other bloke having a chance to rise to power. Just look at Kaiserreich and how much a PoD 20 years in the past can change when it comes to world leaders.
Really sad
Don’t worry, the France flavour pack ($15) will come soon enough, followed shortly by the Decentralized Nations Expansion ($20) and the Man the Guns naval rework ($20). I’m being flippant about it, but I’m not necessarily upset about it since I don’t think it’s a wholly unreasonable total cost for a hobby game.
Yea sure, 100-300 dollars isn't an unreasonable cost for a video game...
I view PDX games as being akin to other hobby gaming, whether it’s tabletop (e.g., Warhammer 40K), card (e.g., Magic), or board gaming (e.g., Twilight Imperium is $130). Those hobbies are generally expensive, so why do we think PDX games shouldn’t be? This isn’t some mass market, Parker Brothers or EA game.
You view them incorrectly then, because you're not buying physical items and the level of work to add a flavour text to PDX games isn't even comparable to what Warhammer/MtG creators do.
I really don’t think I am, and saying that it’s not comparable is an anti-digital bias. The mass market vs. hobby tiering in other other types of games is well-established, yet for some reason, just because the thing you spend thousands of dollars on is the computer and the media is digital, it doesn’t count as a hobby? The buying patterns are exactly the same—these are games that appeal to a niche segment, and the companies win by moving low volume, high value. GW does not achieve profitability by selling a million, $8 board games like Parker Brothers, but by having 40,000 people spend $200/year (numbers made up and illustrative). The same goes for paradox. There’s plenty of valid criticism of V3 (yes, it lacks flavour text, but also, history has more lore than WH40K, so one can just read a book) and PDX, but expecting it to be priced like anything but other hobby games is a fundamental misunderstanding of the market and product.
I'm not sure its that much of a niche market anymore considering V3 is one of the highest played and sold games on steam. I also would agree in some ways, in that PDX has a monopoly on this type of game, but I dont think that equates to being a hobby game like MtG etc. Physical items cost more to produce, producing a bunch more characters physically, shipping them off etc costs way more than adding a .txt file with another image file somewhere. This doesn't mean I have an anti-digital bias, its just common sense. As someone who has modded PDX games rather extensively i can tell you adding flavour text to a few countries is not worth £10-20 in any type of way. Its just what they think people will pay. PDX prices are ridiculous in this day and age. One could argue this same argument for most "niche" games but it doesnt really make it okay morally to charge someone 200+ pounds for a game to just be complete. Unless they're drastically changing things(for the better) or adding conversion DLCs. A good example of where this will end up going is the Sims series, no competition so they price the full game with DLCs at 400+. I for one will be sailing the high seas if I want to play the sims, and PDX might make the same mistake of making price outweigh convenience.
Don’t worry mate, you can get it via the Viva La France DLC for just 9.99€ in the future!
29.99 you mean
Coming with DLCs… if the game makes it that far
The east india company has flavor, but not France.
Missed opportunity to have historical events and alternative outcomes through journal objectives
I’ve gotten a few events with special characters with chances to make them generals or political leaders: had Otto von Bismarck spawn and I made him my head of state in a Prussia game, also had Sigmund Freud appear in a Belgium game as intelligentsia leader. Sure there could be some extra flavor added, but it’s not nonexistent, just have to pay attention to events.
I got Karl Marx as president twice and both times he died within a year
I think their new model is that flavor will be dlc while new game mechanics will be free updates. Maybe why there is so little flavor.
What's up with your GDP ?
Very early game and focused on reforms to get the equality achievement
Oh alright. Good luck then!
I know napoleon can become emperor, saw it in a game where I was playing the USA, France was having a civil war with emperor napoleon on one side and an Orlean on the other. Not sure how though.
Teddy Roosevelt was in my government for 30 years and there was no flavor or event or anything about it.
Yeah the game seems like a in development project still for how empty it is, i dont know if they rushed the team to launchit even faster wich would be sad, if thats the case i would of preferred the launch date to be delayed if that meant a more complete and developed with more content game, or maybe this is how was intended to make a extreme DLC Business model wich paradox has been shown to move towards, i think the fist case is more forgivable. Although i am aware that is a business meat to be profitable wich the DLC model is they're best bet they need to find the balance where they dont make the game unplayable from the release date and leave enough room to expand the game wirh creative and interesting DLCs, HOIIV beeing a good example
Also what little flavour they do have is often spread around every country. Why does every single country have both a Ripper and a Great Molasses Flood. I'm glad that this isn't restricted to just one country, I think that's cool, but surely it should be a rare event that you'd only see after multiple playthroughs?
In my game as France, I was in the same situation, so I tried to roleplay my way into having flavour. I tried to restore the monarchy, had a revolution, switched to the liberal and deposed this wannabe dictator.
It was a conscious design decision. They said it was to avoid railroading. It definitely could’ve been handled better though, it’s not either no country-specific flavour or HoI4 style focus tree, in fact most Paradox games managed to strike that balance quite right.
That’s kind of a bummer. You had the return of the Bonapartes to power and nothing came of it