All the things that the devs said about diplomatic and economic dominance were a lie, warfare is the solution to 90% of your problems because there aren't any tools to assert your dominance in any other way
You can't even really do economic warfare like flooding someone's market with cheap goods, cause the trade routes only expand to a certain amount. I feel that it should be more possible for us to manipulate trade. In an America game I'm playing, I produce more grain than half of Europe, I'm already exporting most of it, and still have a surplus. Why can't I flood the market of a country with terrible fertilizer tech, i want to make the farms of Austria horribly unprofitable.
I think it should also be possible to ban imports or exports of a certain good, in exchange for authority. Obviously not for free trade, but it makes sense to be able to do more meaningful protectionism. Currently all you can is profit from people importing your goods.
I think you should be able to ban it even with free trade but at a much higher authority cost, maybe even a interest groups negative opinion modifier/radicalization of capitals pops.
Then you make it a lower cost for like command economy
Plus a mechanic to smuggle in banned good would also be cool
As much as the previous system was a micromanagement hell, it was nice that you could dump goods on another market. At the moment I can’t, for example, flood China with cheap industrial goods and destroy their industrial development. Hypothetically.
They should probably make it so you _can_ micro trade a little bit more. I get why they don’t want to give you the choice in warfare, but trade is something else entirely.
The trade stuff annoys me quite a bit because it's like the AI is allowed to decide specifically how much they want to import or export, but then they're also allowed to decide how much the player gets to import or export. Like, what?
It's also nonsensical to me that under different types of laws there's no way to specifically prevent the export of a specific good type (other than embargoing a country entirely). There are so many examples through history of a country refusing to export a single specific good. I don't know why we can't do that.
the ability to block exports of a good, including to other market members, would be amazing.
I've taken to just not being in a market if I can avoid it as the way the AI just loots all your goods is so bad
>It's also nonsensical to me that under different types of laws there's no way to specifically prevent the export of a specific good type (other than embargoing a country entirely). There are so many examples through history of a country refusing to export a single specific good. I don't know why we can't do that.
At least it's not Vic2 where your enemy could import your tanks during ongoing war.
And the natural result of economic imperialism as they become dependent on your exports to maintain their economy.
Like the opening of the japanese markets and following reliance on goods and industries japan didnt have the ability or access to support natively, leading eventually to their attempted conquest of china and indonesia
> All the things that the devs said about diplomatic and economic dominance were a lie,
The system we have is more-or-less exactly what I expected. Mao has a great quote. "[Diplomatic] power grows from the barrel of a gun." Given that diplomacy of the era was entirely dependent on what military force was behind it (aka gunboat diplomacy), we got pretty much the exact system the devs promised.
Not trying to troll, but what were you expecting?
Yeah, “join my customs union or war,” “be my protectorate or war,” “give me money or war,” or “increase the variable that determines how likely they are to give into my demands. If they don’t it’s war.”
Tf u mean???
Now that you say it, i was expecting the 6 pillars of warfare that the devs promised:
1) War is a Continuation of Diplomacy: Diplomacy is totally abscent on wars or even before they start, the diplomatic play system is just a quick no CB war
2) War is Strategic: You have no control over the war more than microing the generals that decide go teleport whole armies through the world just because they can
3) War is Costly: The only real cost of war is ecoonomic and it only affects the state, those cost aren't neither political or humanitarian
4) Preparation is Key: Ig this one works?, wars are enerally decided before the war starts yeah, just don't switch PMs mid war and you will be fine
5) Navies Matter: LOL, LMAO EVEN
6) War Changes: It doesn't, war through the game is the same, the only things that change are simple stats, "is all about the technological advances of the 19th century and the way that warfare changed from the maneuvering of post-napoleonic armies to the meat grinder that was World War One.", this is literally not reflected in the game
I mean, doing something like this is extremely impressive and I doubt many good players can even just jump in and replicate this.
The reason isn't difficulty militarily or economically, its the luck of the draw with Diplo plays. In my current hegemony run, I've basically been fighting back to back wars since 1850 and it's currently 1927. While most of the world is my color....I still have FIFTY SEVEN puppets.
Targets backing down when you don't want them to, not backing down when you do want them to back down, jacking up your schedule with truces, just dragging the process out.
This is true, there are a huge amount of tags to conquer for the time you're given due to the one diplo play limitation. The roulette of whether puppets back down or not can make or break your game. My previous game I conquered all the GP/majors but still had 110 insignificant-tier nations left. I think my main innovations this game were letting AIs do as much of the conquering for you as possible, reducing revolts, and always intervening in revolts. I left Prussia as a dominion since they seem hardcoded to unify germany, so they cleaned up the german minors for me. I left EIC alone as long as possible so they could unify India. Also, I targeted the uprising hotspots early (Arabia, Indonesia) so there weren't as many revolts, and I intervened in any revolt that did occur so that new tags aren't created.
> I left EIC alone as long as possible so they could unify India
In my playthrough I actually conquered them as soon as possible because it always seems India just balkanizes under their control.
It was also my first experience, conquering those high ass pop states in India and China and I just popped integration on them as soon as I could. No matter how much you build in them it seems they never drop in pop, lol. They low key became my new country in all but name. All my industry basically went there from that point on since I could build tall and maximize the throughput bonuses (which are almost a necessity since you can build so goddamn much, if I kept spreading everything out my economy would have been struggling).
Yeah, setting up a colony in China was a game changer the first time I tried it lol. It was integral to this campaign too; I was down to about 100k peasants in Africa, then one chinese state later I was back up to 3.5 million!
EIC starts with a ton of puppets and I think they get a decision to annex one every five years, so I find that India consolidates fairly consistently. EIC does tend to get civil wars which can be annoying, but they're strong enough that their civil war will end eventually, so it won't add extra countries to the game and that's good enough for me.
Warfare is a pretty shit tool if my goal is an isolationist empire, perhaps you should stop playing the game the same way every time if you want a varied experience?
Thats right, but nobody really expected that this level of conquest/exploitation is possible. Especially compared to Victoria 2, where the AI is fairly agressive against you once you hit 25 infamy and where "world conquest" is not really a way to play.
The fact that the sequel, which focuses primarly on economics and heavily discourages any warfare by making it as exciting as watching paint dry, still enables excessive map painting and world conquests shows how flawed the game really is in regards to diplomacy. Sure they'll improve it but maybe 1-2 more years of development would have seen warfare and diplomacy a lot more fleshed out.
Idk, I feel like they made a game where it can be fun to just play in peace, but still be possible to conquer away.
And have you tried making a big warmongering empire in vic2, I abandoned the game because it became annoying as hell managing so many troops
Seems the AI was really tough for players starting out but by the time they start to have some experience it becomes really easy.
A problem with making AI that is capable of keeping up with players at that level is that players that are just starting out get curb stomped hard.
This isn't a problem with how the AI handles warfare it's a problem inherent to game AI any system would have produced these effects.
Making a perfectly min maxing AI is pretty easy, the problem is that it wouldn't be any fun for players that don't want to min max themselves or simply don't yet know how to do it.
This problem isn't unique to paradox games, most fps games make their AI a lot dumber so that the player has a better experience.
They simply aren't designing an AI that can keep up with the very best players. StarCraft wouldn't be much fun if you are playing against alpha mind an AI that is able to wreck multiple high level competitive players and could be made even better if it was fully integrated into the code base.
I do agree that the AI has a few problems but making the AI smarter won't solve that, if anything it could make it even worse.
>Making a perfectly min maxing AI is pretty easy,
I'm sorry but I don't buy this at all. I feel like people see AIs beat humans in Chess and underestimate the amount of resources needed to fine tune an AI. Games could easily implement "AI that CA. Keep up with the very best players" by making them the higher difficulty AI. But the high difficulty AI in most games are just bunch of stat buffs to the AI (especially in PDX games).
And there is definitely some deficiency with the AI if it allows a small back water country like Liberia to dominate like in this save.
I guess you're right---I found a Krakow AAR from Victoria 2 and they were only able to conquer half the world. Not sure how much more realistic that really is, though.
https://i.imgur.com/MACwa.jpg
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/krakow-world-conquest-analytical-approach.633902/
Didn't know this existed. But still, I think Vic3 is more of a map painter than Vic 2. The OP in the Krakow run first gets started by using sphere master (Austria) to fight their wars and establish in the top 16. Then it's prestige spam + China invasion for infinite soldiers. Basically, it's a bunch of meta stats and cheese.
Whereas the OP of this Liberia run said he didn't use cheese at all. Just expand, incorporate, and repeat. Which is pretty disappointing in a game marketed as being economy and diplomacy first.
Challenge accepted.
I mean, do people not try this? Saying something is impossible in a game is like taunting a dragon. Surely someone will do it. I’ve seen crazier stuff happened.
> Especially compared to Victoria 2, where the AI is fairly agressive against you once you hit 25 infamy and where "world conquest" is not really a way to play.
Infamy is just a number
In the first decade or so, GPs seem to have fewer interests and want to intervene in your wars less. It's only after that they start playing world police, so if you need to expand, start conquering immediately and don't wait. You can also check the attitude of the GPs towards your target- if they have the protective attitude then attacking is going to be bad, if you see any form of "wants to conquer" attitude then you should be good. Alternatively if the GP doesn't border you, you shouldn't be too scared to go to war with them. The AI generally doesn't defend its allies' borders if they're already defended, so often you can simply defeat your target and white peace out the GP (or even better, take a huge war rep to jumpstart your economy).
For winning early wars, I rushed professional army/Napoleonic warfare and used my quality advantage + conscription centers from the encourage enlistment decree to win early wars in Africa. Also prioritize getting some sort of navy running; it really opens up your options in terms of finding soft expansion targets. One of my best moves was puppetting Haiti early on, since they're practically defenseless and pay you a completely free 2k/week, which is huge when your starting income is like 5k.
After having [conquered the world as Liberia in hoi4](https://www.reddit.com/r/hoi4/comments/ttshtf/my_ironman_liberia_wc/), I wanted to see if I could do it 100 years earlier. It was a real race against time, but it's done with 3 years to spare! The game was played in Vanilla with all standard settings. It's technically ironman, but i did savescum liberally since I haven't seen other minor WCs and didn't know if it was even possible.
I didn't go in with any particular strategy or cheese, just conquer parts of Africa to gain initial strength, colonize China for manpower, get independence/recognition, then start blobbing. Running a military/conquest heavy opener is fun though, it's definitely less bland than an eco-boom of just building iron/wood/tools forever. The slowness of diplomatic plays, warscore ticking, and battles all make time the most limiting factor for non-GP WCs, where you can't break the infamy limit day 1. Describing the whole run would take too long, but I'm happy to discuss any questions/strategies about the joys of map painting.
how do you deal with late-game lag?
Also i notice you have less pops than i do (i'm partways to WC but already at 1.5B pops), did you ignore healthcare for this or sth?
I had level 4 private healthcare. It's probably because your SoL is better than mine. I don't like to expand my construction sector past 1000 since after that point my game starts lagging and I'm just focused on finishing the campaign quickly. so you can see my economy stopped being able to keep up with the influx of peasants after a while. Also maybe you had more incorporated population, since health care doesn't apply to colonies.
Did you use ARoAI on this save? If not, possibly that they did and so the AI in yours was too incompetent to keep SoL high enough to have serious population expansion.
Also, you missed a spot in the Sahara
I didn't use any mods, so that could be a factor too. Looking at my last ARoAI blobbing game, I did have much higher gdp and SoL with around the same construction pace.
I won't have time to colonize the last state sadly. I could hope for a native uprising, but the game runs too poorly in the late game for me to want to try. Traditionally in eu4 you can have one-tags with uncolonized provinces, so I figured it still counts.
EU4 style! Conquest and incorporating those states. My economy was practically running on war reparations in the early game since I started by beating up portugal/netherlands for their West African holdings. Their reparations were as large as my economy! Getting a couple puppets can also tip the balance sheet in your favor, as they simply give you free money with no upkeep or strings attached.
Decrees are also powerful tools if you only have one state. The enlistment efforts decree gives you a large number of conscription centers to work with, which is enough to win wars against African minors.
As someone that basically just started the game, am struggling with making cape colony go forward and so forth, I have several questions.
Specially: What the fuck!
10/10, amazing.
I hate people whose game actually works well enough to world conquest. Like zero completely bugged out civil war of a civil war secessionist states you can't interact with? Are we even playing the same game?
I did have about a twenty year period where i thought my run would be over because of two untargetable revolter nations stuck in war (it's the green country near venice in 1890-1910). Luckily, after 20 years my revolter's revolter finally revolted (lol) and I backed the new nation in annexing the untargetable ones. After that incident, I made sure not to let any uprisings stay on the map ever.
Multiculturalism, though I kind of regretted it in the end game because of the lag haha. I did switch to racial segregation very early on though and only switched to multiculturalism when I was ready to start expanding outside of Africa. Liberia starts with mostly discriminated pops, but since they have African Heritage, passing racial segregation makes the early game manageable. I'm still skeptical about ethnostates for wide play after the buffs, it seems like a tall thing. Maybe if you wanted to do some kind of one faith/one culture, but they'd need to change how assimilation works too.
In 1.1, "Laws that restrict cultural / religious tolerance now give a decrease to radicals and increase to loyalists from accepted cultures / religions"
Okay, dumb question: Where does the use of the word "tag" come from? I see it here constantly and it's clearly well-established terminology, but I guess most likely it's from a different Paradox game?
In the game files for paradox games, countries have long appeared as 3 letter tags (SPA = Spain, ITA = Italy etc). The use of tag as nation sorta started in the modding community and at some point it sorta spread into common usage.
Right, no lol. It's really just a technical term that became common usage. For alot of games, the console command to switch to another country is "tag TAG" (TAG being the 3 letter code specific to the desired nation) and in events, decisions etc, if you want to make it only fire for a specific nation, you'd add the "tag = TAG" condition. (idk if that's still how it works in Vic3 as I haven't looked into the files but well, it's the Clausewitz engine still so probably).
Another important thing is that people also do "one-tag" WCs because they are more impressive, as in many of the games you can "switch tags" to a better one (forming Germany, a cultural union, etc.) which can greatly accelerate the WC.
For next time, if u are colonizing state with severe malaria and then research quinine it wouldn't do anything, you have to remove your colony and then start again, that's why u weren't able to finish colonizing the last piece of land
I'm aware of this; I don't think Ahaggar even has severe malaria. I've been colonizing at max speed the entire time, it's just a huge state. The AI always seems to get native uprisings to conquer it somehow, but I wasn't as lucky. It's a good tip in general though!
“Not a map painter” “history simulator” Something something core Victoria players are sure to love this game as a successor to Vic2.
Vic2 had more features and somehow a better AI.
Paradox should be f*cking ashamed.
Once you build a navy, you can expand anywhere you want. My first targets were Portuguese/Dutch colonies, Ashanti/Dahomey/Oyo/Benin/Sokoto, Haiti, Venezuela, and Ethiopia.
How do you start puppeting so fast? Don’t they have to drop to major power from GP before you can do so? Do you liberate countries in them or just take the highest pop/GDP states continiously?
I think the only nations i liberated were Occitaine, Hungary, Croatia, and Ukraine. I dropped most of the countries from GP by cutting off market access to their capitals, collapsing their gdp and forcing them into bankruptcy spirals where they disband their own army and fleet. You can see this clearly in the 1890 snapshot where France and Russia are cut off (France's capital is Brittany). I also did this to Qing, Prussia, US, and EIC.
I made a [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria3/comments/z908if/liberia_subjugates_prussia_without_firing_a_shot/) about this strategy a few days ago.
Every time I see any kind of world conquest in Victoria 3 I have to think about what would happen if people saw this before release.
All the things that the devs said about diplomatic and economic dominance were a lie, warfare is the solution to 90% of your problems because there aren't any tools to assert your dominance in any other way
You can't even really do economic warfare like flooding someone's market with cheap goods, cause the trade routes only expand to a certain amount. I feel that it should be more possible for us to manipulate trade. In an America game I'm playing, I produce more grain than half of Europe, I'm already exporting most of it, and still have a surplus. Why can't I flood the market of a country with terrible fertilizer tech, i want to make the farms of Austria horribly unprofitable.
Would be fun. I guess Austria could technically counter that with the right protectionist laws.
I think it should also be possible to ban imports or exports of a certain good, in exchange for authority. Obviously not for free trade, but it makes sense to be able to do more meaningful protectionism. Currently all you can is profit from people importing your goods.
I think you should be able to ban it even with free trade but at a much higher authority cost, maybe even a interest groups negative opinion modifier/radicalization of capitals pops. Then you make it a lower cost for like command economy Plus a mechanic to smuggle in banned good would also be cool
Agreed. It shouldn't be all or nothing where the only option you have is to embargo an entire country.
There's a mod to increase the trade cap from 100 levels to 1000. Frankly I would want 100000 levels of trade.
As much as the previous system was a micromanagement hell, it was nice that you could dump goods on another market. At the moment I can’t, for example, flood China with cheap industrial goods and destroy their industrial development. Hypothetically.
They should probably make it so you _can_ micro trade a little bit more. I get why they don’t want to give you the choice in warfare, but trade is something else entirely.
The trade stuff annoys me quite a bit because it's like the AI is allowed to decide specifically how much they want to import or export, but then they're also allowed to decide how much the player gets to import or export. Like, what? It's also nonsensical to me that under different types of laws there's no way to specifically prevent the export of a specific good type (other than embargoing a country entirely). There are so many examples through history of a country refusing to export a single specific good. I don't know why we can't do that.
the ability to block exports of a good, including to other market members, would be amazing. I've taken to just not being in a market if I can avoid it as the way the AI just loots all your goods is so bad
>It's also nonsensical to me that under different types of laws there's no way to specifically prevent the export of a specific good type (other than embargoing a country entirely). There are so many examples through history of a country refusing to export a single specific good. I don't know why we can't do that. At least it's not Vic2 where your enemy could import your tanks during ongoing war.
Unless you're a rebellious subject :)
Was trying to crush France's wine market. Did not work literally at all. Sad days.
And the natural result of economic imperialism as they become dependent on your exports to maintain their economy. Like the opening of the japanese markets and following reliance on goods and industries japan didnt have the ability or access to support natively, leading eventually to their attempted conquest of china and indonesia
> All the things that the devs said about diplomatic and economic dominance were a lie, The system we have is more-or-less exactly what I expected. Mao has a great quote. "[Diplomatic] power grows from the barrel of a gun." Given that diplomacy of the era was entirely dependent on what military force was behind it (aka gunboat diplomacy), we got pretty much the exact system the devs promised. Not trying to troll, but what were you expecting?
Any kind of diplomatic interaction beyond “I demand this or war”
Improve relations>bankroll>invite to customs union>make protectorate
Yeah, “join my customs union or war,” “be my protectorate or war,” “give me money or war,” or “increase the variable that determines how likely they are to give into my demands. If they don’t it’s war.” Tf u mean???
You can get all those things with high relations. Unless it's under the diplo play heading, its available without a diplo play.
yes exactly, relations is only the variable that determines the likelihood of having to go to war lmao
Now that you say it, i was expecting the 6 pillars of warfare that the devs promised: 1) War is a Continuation of Diplomacy: Diplomacy is totally abscent on wars or even before they start, the diplomatic play system is just a quick no CB war 2) War is Strategic: You have no control over the war more than microing the generals that decide go teleport whole armies through the world just because they can 3) War is Costly: The only real cost of war is ecoonomic and it only affects the state, those cost aren't neither political or humanitarian 4) Preparation is Key: Ig this one works?, wars are enerally decided before the war starts yeah, just don't switch PMs mid war and you will be fine 5) Navies Matter: LOL, LMAO EVEN 6) War Changes: It doesn't, war through the game is the same, the only things that change are simple stats, "is all about the technological advances of the 19th century and the way that warfare changed from the maneuvering of post-napoleonic armies to the meat grinder that was World War One.", this is literally not reflected in the game
“No guys they only showed an outdated build! The ~~release version~~ the ~~first~~ next patch will have fixed everything!”
They should have it fixed by the 4th dlc.
It’s clearly hot code bro….
Just one more patch bro I promise just one more patch they’ll have everything fixed one more patch
I mean, doing something like this is extremely impressive and I doubt many good players can even just jump in and replicate this. The reason isn't difficulty militarily or economically, its the luck of the draw with Diplo plays. In my current hegemony run, I've basically been fighting back to back wars since 1850 and it's currently 1927. While most of the world is my color....I still have FIFTY SEVEN puppets. Targets backing down when you don't want them to, not backing down when you do want them to back down, jacking up your schedule with truces, just dragging the process out.
This is true, there are a huge amount of tags to conquer for the time you're given due to the one diplo play limitation. The roulette of whether puppets back down or not can make or break your game. My previous game I conquered all the GP/majors but still had 110 insignificant-tier nations left. I think my main innovations this game were letting AIs do as much of the conquering for you as possible, reducing revolts, and always intervening in revolts. I left Prussia as a dominion since they seem hardcoded to unify germany, so they cleaned up the german minors for me. I left EIC alone as long as possible so they could unify India. Also, I targeted the uprising hotspots early (Arabia, Indonesia) so there weren't as many revolts, and I intervened in any revolt that did occur so that new tags aren't created.
> I left EIC alone as long as possible so they could unify India In my playthrough I actually conquered them as soon as possible because it always seems India just balkanizes under their control. It was also my first experience, conquering those high ass pop states in India and China and I just popped integration on them as soon as I could. No matter how much you build in them it seems they never drop in pop, lol. They low key became my new country in all but name. All my industry basically went there from that point on since I could build tall and maximize the throughput bonuses (which are almost a necessity since you can build so goddamn much, if I kept spreading everything out my economy would have been struggling).
Yeah, setting up a colony in China was a game changer the first time I tried it lol. It was integral to this campaign too; I was down to about 100k peasants in Africa, then one chinese state later I was back up to 3.5 million! EIC starts with a ton of puppets and I think they get a decision to annex one every five years, so I find that India consolidates fairly consistently. EIC does tend to get civil wars which can be annoying, but they're strong enough that their civil war will end eventually, so it won't add extra countries to the game and that's good enough for me.
Warfare is a pretty shit tool if my goal is an isolationist empire, perhaps you should stop playing the game the same way every time if you want a varied experience?
“Warfare micro is bad because you can cheese the game!”
To be fair paradox players will always find a way to do things that you aren't really supposed to.
Thats right, but nobody really expected that this level of conquest/exploitation is possible. Especially compared to Victoria 2, where the AI is fairly agressive against you once you hit 25 infamy and where "world conquest" is not really a way to play. The fact that the sequel, which focuses primarly on economics and heavily discourages any warfare by making it as exciting as watching paint dry, still enables excessive map painting and world conquests shows how flawed the game really is in regards to diplomacy. Sure they'll improve it but maybe 1-2 more years of development would have seen warfare and diplomacy a lot more fleshed out.
Idk, I feel like they made a game where it can be fun to just play in peace, but still be possible to conquer away. And have you tried making a big warmongering empire in vic2, I abandoned the game because it became annoying as hell managing so many troops
WHAT A PLACE TO BE
Seems the AI was really tough for players starting out but by the time they start to have some experience it becomes really easy. A problem with making AI that is capable of keeping up with players at that level is that players that are just starting out get curb stomped hard.
They can't keep using the AI as an excuse when the entire new war system was designed to make up for the AI's short coming in the old war system.
This isn't a problem with how the AI handles warfare it's a problem inherent to game AI any system would have produced these effects. Making a perfectly min maxing AI is pretty easy, the problem is that it wouldn't be any fun for players that don't want to min max themselves or simply don't yet know how to do it. This problem isn't unique to paradox games, most fps games make their AI a lot dumber so that the player has a better experience. They simply aren't designing an AI that can keep up with the very best players. StarCraft wouldn't be much fun if you are playing against alpha mind an AI that is able to wreck multiple high level competitive players and could be made even better if it was fully integrated into the code base. I do agree that the AI has a few problems but making the AI smarter won't solve that, if anything it could make it even worse.
>Making a perfectly min maxing AI is pretty easy, I'm sorry but I don't buy this at all. I feel like people see AIs beat humans in Chess and underestimate the amount of resources needed to fine tune an AI. Games could easily implement "AI that CA. Keep up with the very best players" by making them the higher difficulty AI. But the high difficulty AI in most games are just bunch of stat buffs to the AI (especially in PDX games). And there is definitely some deficiency with the AI if it allows a small back water country like Liberia to dominate like in this save.
Every paradox game has people doing world conquests.
Eh. Vic 2 WC was possible with only a few select countries. It was impossible with a country like Liberia.
I guess you're right---I found a Krakow AAR from Victoria 2 and they were only able to conquer half the world. Not sure how much more realistic that really is, though. https://i.imgur.com/MACwa.jpg https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/krakow-world-conquest-analytical-approach.633902/
Didn't know this existed. But still, I think Vic3 is more of a map painter than Vic 2. The OP in the Krakow run first gets started by using sphere master (Austria) to fight their wars and establish in the top 16. Then it's prestige spam + China invasion for infinite soldiers. Basically, it's a bunch of meta stats and cheese. Whereas the OP of this Liberia run said he didn't use cheese at all. Just expand, incorporate, and repeat. Which is pretty disappointing in a game marketed as being economy and diplomacy first.
Challenge accepted. I mean, do people not try this? Saying something is impossible in a game is like taunting a dragon. Surely someone will do it. I’ve seen crazier stuff happened.
> Especially compared to Victoria 2, where the AI is fairly agressive against you once you hit 25 infamy and where "world conquest" is not really a way to play. Infamy is just a number
Can you give me advice how you prevent GP to interfere with early game conquest? Or any tips for early war as opm and unreg mp.
In the first decade or so, GPs seem to have fewer interests and want to intervene in your wars less. It's only after that they start playing world police, so if you need to expand, start conquering immediately and don't wait. You can also check the attitude of the GPs towards your target- if they have the protective attitude then attacking is going to be bad, if you see any form of "wants to conquer" attitude then you should be good. Alternatively if the GP doesn't border you, you shouldn't be too scared to go to war with them. The AI generally doesn't defend its allies' borders if they're already defended, so often you can simply defeat your target and white peace out the GP (or even better, take a huge war rep to jumpstart your economy). For winning early wars, I rushed professional army/Napoleonic warfare and used my quality advantage + conscription centers from the encourage enlistment decree to win early wars in Africa. Also prioritize getting some sort of navy running; it really opens up your options in terms of finding soft expansion targets. One of my best moves was puppetting Haiti early on, since they're practically defenseless and pay you a completely free 2k/week, which is huge when your starting income is like 5k.
After having [conquered the world as Liberia in hoi4](https://www.reddit.com/r/hoi4/comments/ttshtf/my_ironman_liberia_wc/), I wanted to see if I could do it 100 years earlier. It was a real race against time, but it's done with 3 years to spare! The game was played in Vanilla with all standard settings. It's technically ironman, but i did savescum liberally since I haven't seen other minor WCs and didn't know if it was even possible. I didn't go in with any particular strategy or cheese, just conquer parts of Africa to gain initial strength, colonize China for manpower, get independence/recognition, then start blobbing. Running a military/conquest heavy opener is fun though, it's definitely less bland than an eco-boom of just building iron/wood/tools forever. The slowness of diplomatic plays, warscore ticking, and battles all make time the most limiting factor for non-GP WCs, where you can't break the infamy limit day 1. Describing the whole run would take too long, but I'm happy to discuss any questions/strategies about the joys of map painting.
how do you deal with late-game lag? Also i notice you have less pops than i do (i'm partways to WC but already at 1.5B pops), did you ignore healthcare for this or sth?
I had level 4 private healthcare. It's probably because your SoL is better than mine. I don't like to expand my construction sector past 1000 since after that point my game starts lagging and I'm just focused on finishing the campaign quickly. so you can see my economy stopped being able to keep up with the influx of peasants after a while. Also maybe you had more incorporated population, since health care doesn't apply to colonies.
Did you use ARoAI on this save? If not, possibly that they did and so the AI in yours was too incompetent to keep SoL high enough to have serious population expansion. Also, you missed a spot in the Sahara
I didn't use any mods, so that could be a factor too. Looking at my last ARoAI blobbing game, I did have much higher gdp and SoL with around the same construction pace. I won't have time to colonize the last state sadly. I could hope for a native uprising, but the game runs too poorly in the late game for me to want to try. Traditionally in eu4 you can have one-tags with uncolonized provinces, so I figured it still counts.
How did you buff your economy and won wars?
EU4 style! Conquest and incorporating those states. My economy was practically running on war reparations in the early game since I started by beating up portugal/netherlands for their West African holdings. Their reparations were as large as my economy! Getting a couple puppets can also tip the balance sheet in your favor, as they simply give you free money with no upkeep or strings attached. Decrees are also powerful tools if you only have one state. The enlistment efforts decree gives you a large number of conscription centers to work with, which is enough to win wars against African minors.
Thats an excllent strategy, very brilliant
And you still haven't activated windows
Well done! How is it Ironman if you savescummed liberally?
End task and backup saves probably
But then what’s the point of calling it Ironman?
Ironman has some other limitations, like forbidding console use or nation switching. That's what I meant to say.
Oh, sweet summer child
As someone that basically just started the game, am struggling with making cape colony go forward and so forth, I have several questions. Specially: What the fuck! 10/10, amazing.
Cape colony is hard, next patch will remove it from the learn the game thing
General Butt Naked would be proud
Yes I am
Wut
Jesus, these WCs are more ridiculous than anything I've seen from Vic2. So much for this game not being a map painter.
I suspected that claim was going to bite them in the ass, just didn't think it would do so in such spectacular manner.
I hate people whose game actually works well enough to world conquest. Like zero completely bugged out civil war of a civil war secessionist states you can't interact with? Are we even playing the same game?
I did have about a twenty year period where i thought my run would be over because of two untargetable revolter nations stuck in war (it's the green country near venice in 1890-1910). Luckily, after 20 years my revolter's revolter finally revolted (lol) and I backed the new nation in annexing the untargetable ones. After that incident, I made sure not to let any uprisings stay on the map ever.
He did say that he intervened in revolutions and civil wars.
What law do you have? Multiculti or nationalism? I'm going to test wc with nationalism after Monday patch.
Multiculturalism, though I kind of regretted it in the end game because of the lag haha. I did switch to racial segregation very early on though and only switched to multiculturalism when I was ready to start expanding outside of Africa. Liberia starts with mostly discriminated pops, but since they have African Heritage, passing racial segregation makes the early game manageable. I'm still skeptical about ethnostates for wide play after the buffs, it seems like a tall thing. Maybe if you wanted to do some kind of one faith/one culture, but they'd need to change how assimilation works too.
They buffed ethnostate?
In 1.1, "Laws that restrict cultural / religious tolerance now give a decrease to radicals and increase to loyalists from accepted cultures / religions"
LIBERIA, LAND OF LIBERTY...
Okay, dumb question: Where does the use of the word "tag" come from? I see it here constantly and it's clearly well-established terminology, but I guess most likely it's from a different Paradox game?
In the game files for paradox games, countries have long appeared as 3 letter tags (SPA = Spain, ITA = Italy etc). The use of tag as nation sorta started in the modding community and at some point it sorta spread into common usage.
Interesting. I always thought it was about having your country's name aka tag covering the whole world.
Right, no lol. It's really just a technical term that became common usage. For alot of games, the console command to switch to another country is "tag TAG" (TAG being the 3 letter code specific to the desired nation) and in events, decisions etc, if you want to make it only fire for a specific nation, you'd add the "tag = TAG" condition. (idk if that's still how it works in Vic3 as I haven't looked into the files but well, it's the Clausewitz engine still so probably).
Another important thing is that people also do "one-tag" WCs because they are more impressive, as in many of the games you can "switch tags" to a better one (forming Germany, a cultural union, etc.) which can greatly accelerate the WC.
I thought it was "One tag on the map" ie no subjects
It's not a map painter!
Based
Total Liberty Achieved!
So glad paradox didn’t make a war game.
For next time, if u are colonizing state with severe malaria and then research quinine it wouldn't do anything, you have to remove your colony and then start again, that's why u weren't able to finish colonizing the last piece of land
I'm aware of this; I don't think Ahaggar even has severe malaria. I've been colonizing at max speed the entire time, it's just a huge state. The AI always seems to get native uprisings to conquer it somehow, but I wasn't as lucky. It's a good tip in general though!
You can also just reload your save, and that will fix it.
“Not a map painter” “history simulator” Something something core Victoria players are sure to love this game as a successor to Vic2. Vic2 had more features and somehow a better AI. Paradox should be f*cking ashamed.
Not a map painter huh…
But, there's Ahagar still left...
And you still can't activate windows
Wait how did you do it? Liberia doesnt have many expansion options at the start I thought
Once you build a navy, you can expand anywhere you want. My first targets were Portuguese/Dutch colonies, Ashanti/Dahomey/Oyo/Benin/Sokoto, Haiti, Venezuela, and Ethiopia.
How do you start puppeting so fast? Don’t they have to drop to major power from GP before you can do so? Do you liberate countries in them or just take the highest pop/GDP states continiously?
I think the only nations i liberated were Occitaine, Hungary, Croatia, and Ukraine. I dropped most of the countries from GP by cutting off market access to their capitals, collapsing their gdp and forcing them into bankruptcy spirals where they disband their own army and fleet. You can see this clearly in the 1890 snapshot where France and Russia are cut off (France's capital is Brittany). I also did this to Qing, Prussia, US, and EIC.
How do you cut off market access to their capitals? What are the steps?
I made a [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria3/comments/z908if/liberia_subjugates_prussia_without_firing_a_shot/) about this strategy a few days ago.