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Looking for some advice here, if there's any to be had: I'm playing Vicky 2, my first game ever of it actually, and I'm playing as Haiti. I've made it all the way to 1900 without issue, and industrializing has gone fairly well, but a problem that I'm running into is that my workforce simply isn't large enough to support more than 2 factories, making my economy insanely susceptible to market shifts. My three biggest exports, tobacco, liquor, and glass, all have fairly stable market prices, so I assume what's happening is that the prices are increasing on the materials my factories have to import (since Haiti produces nothing but tobacco from its RGOs). So, basically, every time the market prices of a select few commodities shift, my economy goes to hell because I have to subsidize the poo poo out of my two factories, since if I don't subsidize them they'll close and I'll have massive unemployment and that will probably permafuck me. Austerity measures simply aren't sufficient to pay for the massive gently caress-off subsidies I wind up paying. Is there anything I can do about this?
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Oct 7, 2013 23:30
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Baronjutter posted:Do the people who make maps like this ever actually play the games? Is "improving gameplay" even on their mind when they do poo poo like this, or is it just some weird obsessive compulsive disorder where they just HAVE to keep adding more useless provinces? Almost every bad mod or project does this. You can almost tell the quality of a mod by an inverse relation to the number of provinces added.
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Oct 7, 2013 23:56
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Nevets posted:Adding provinces is a simple, repeatable task that provides continuous feelings of accomplishment. Debugging/balancing/etc. is a thankless task that involves stepping on other peoples' toes by arguing that they just wasted their time on something that can't be included. Debugging/balancing/etc. your own contributions is never necessary because of course you got it right the first time And thus Steppe Wolfe was born. (but with tags and events instead of provinces)
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Oct 8, 2013 00:03
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DStecks posted:Looking for some advice here, if there's any to be had: I'm playing Vicky 2, my first game ever of it actually, and I'm playing as Haiti. What have you been doing if it's 1900 and you're still stuck on Hispaniola? You should own most of the Caribbean/Central America by now. Go start up a game as Brazil - that's a much better introduction to the game.
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Oct 8, 2013 00:12
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V for Vegas posted:What have you been doing if it's 1900 and you're still stuck on Hispaniola? You should own most of the Caribbean/Central America by now. All of the Carribean except me is under the direct control of great powers. Is it possible to take those smaller islands without getting the mother of all whuppings called down on me?
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Oct 8, 2013 00:28
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Probably a bit late now. You should have started expanding at the start - like this guy. If you're playing with HOD, try engineer a crises between the great powers holding land near you and then join on one side and try to scoop up some territory. Otherwise you're pretty screwed.
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Oct 8, 2013 00:42
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V for Vegas posted:Probably a bit late now. You should have started expanding at the start - like this guy. Yup. Just tried going for Puerto Rico, wound up at war with Spain, Austria, China, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire. I had nearly completed the occupation when the loving Ottomans show up with a stack 5x bigger than my entire military. Also by now my industry has tanked completely, since the factory employing most of my workers was terminally unprofitable, and the only thing keeping it open was my increasingly large subsidies.
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Oct 8, 2013 00:50
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DStecks posted:Holy gently caress, what? I genuinely laughed out loud at this picture. Baronjutter posted:Do the people who make maps like this ever actually play the games? Is "improving gameplay" even on their mind when they do poo poo like this, or is it just some weird obsessive compulsive disorder where they just HAVE to keep adding more useless provinces? Almost every bad mod or project does this. You can almost tell the quality of a mod by an inverse relation to the number of provinces added.
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Oct 8, 2013 01:09
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DStecks posted:Yup. Just tried going for Puerto Rico, wound up at war with Spain, Austria, China, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire. I had nearly completed the occupation when the loving Ottomans show up with a stack 5x bigger than my entire military. Are the Ottomans ruining everyone's games tonight? Playing EUIV as Portugal and I'd like to take over some more of the North African provinces that are in the Sevilla node, but Algiers allied the Ottomans and they keep showing up with their doomfleet, wrecking my poo poo.
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Oct 8, 2013 03:36
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DStecks posted:Yup. Just tried going for Puerto Rico, wound up at war with Spain, Austria, China, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire. I had nearly completed the occupation when the loving Ottomans show up with a stack 5x bigger than my entire military. Haiti is not an easy game and you should not play them until you're extremely comfortable with how to game the system and exploit the AI.
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Oct 8, 2013 03:39
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Okay, I think I've got the little cosmetic things like the colors figured out: It still looks like a hodge-podge of colors, but at least they are a little more inline with "Vic 2" standards (nothing too glaring). Now I need to add additional cores to various states and see about getting a few other break-aways in the game, and update Oklahoma. Any other suggestions? Should I break up parts of Mexico (Sonora, Chihuahua, etc) and Canada (Alberta and British Columbia)? I hope to have a beta sometime this week so you goons can give it a go.
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Oct 8, 2013 03:49
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ExtraNoise posted:Okay, I think I've got the little cosmetic things like the colors figured out: Yeah, that'd be fun! Just break up all of North and Central America into a mass of tiny states. Otherwise, Mexico and Canada would have way too much of an advantage. It'd be really wacky to do some crazy start, like Baja California or Prince Edward Island, and then go on to become a superpower. "Prince Edwardian Nebraska". "Yucatanian Nunavut".  EDIT: Man, Colorado is really silly as an independent nation. Look at us, marvel at our perfectly rectangular country. 
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Oct 8, 2013 03:53
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Yeah I think partitions of Mexico and Canada would help make the divided states not just get divided between Britain and Mexico. I don't think you need to make every single province independent, but at least break up each nation enough so that a coalition of 2-3 nations can stand up to any single nation no problem.
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Oct 8, 2013 03:58
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ExtraNoise, did you forget Alaska? Also, y'all should see what I sometimes get PMed. Someone had a photo of them self in a gas mask to use.  No, no it did not get in.Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:All you need for an authentic looking historical photograph is to add a black and white filter, right? Got that, and you're good to go! I'd honestly prefer it since the process and filters and junk we use kinda covers up/removes most unprofessional effects anyone could/would use (and sepia photos are made b/w for consistency and uniformity). Noise/dust effects? Those largely disappear. Cleans up historical photos too, but that's usually the resizing that does it. It's amazing how many years you can take off a historical leader's picture by shrinking those wrinkles away. NihilCredo posted:Dude, was that seriously the least goony picture of yourself that you had? No one's photo is guaranteed to get in.  It's the dirty secret we have but don't tell because it might scare off legitimately good submissions.It all ends up depending on how it looks shrunken anyway. Gorgo's photo was fine. Espy's was too. YF-23, you're still under review (I've been behind on images due to job searching). Espy posted:I'm Katerina, and I made sure not to wear makeup, make my hair frumpy, and put on a suit and glasses as well as not smile with an awkward angle to the camera to keep the tradition of bad photos going. Surprisingly, you looked similar enough to certain politicians I've come across in my work that I thought it was actually a pretty good job. For some reason many politicians didn't wear much make up for most of the period, just a little. I guess this was due to trying to seem professional in a male dominated environment or the older you get the less it mattered...? I've only read a little about the subject and it focused on the 80s business environment, so I can't say I have much to draw from. If you'd like to submit a different photo, just PM Garek Maxwell on those forums (it's me). Admittedly you do look a bit young, but we have historical leaders that look incredibly young too. See El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed. Also, if you're referring to Maria Gutierrez, we couldn't use her image anyway. I can't go into detail, since I'm still waiting for official word to go forth on why this changed for Corbis images. Phlegmish posted:So they are accepting literally all submissions? This is my chance to be immortalized. I'm sitting here in my hoodie and with an untrimmed beard, doesn't mean I can't be a suave Cold War double agent. You can try.
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Oct 8, 2013 04:01
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The biggest thing about the Divided States mod is that you need to kickstart the diplomacy or the AI just won't get it. Put some thought into it and iterate and you should have a really interesting scenario.
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Oct 8, 2013 04:09
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Either the Divided States' Oklahoma should have Sequoyah broken away from it or be outright replaced by it.
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Oct 8, 2013 04:23
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Man, I never realized that the state borders were so ugly until I saw them rendered in true Paradox fashion. I really want to download that mod just to fix that little problem. Through conquest 
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Oct 8, 2013 04:37
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Eh, it should probably be split up by the predominant tribe resettled there in the time period.
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Oct 8, 2013 04:37
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Little more playtest balancing: Virginia went on a rampage and gobbled up a bunch of small states around it. Mexico continued rolling over southwest states until it received too much criticism - I'm definitely going to have to find a way to stop this. Perhaps by removing cores from those states for Mexico? Or would that be too unrealistic? Tomorrow I hope to add a few of the new countries into the game (I added one already, Sequoyah).
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Oct 8, 2013 08:54
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In a game where the US is colonized from coast to coast with independent states that all have their own stable, sovereign government I wouldn't worry about Mexico losing some cores as being unrealistic. The whole point is to have some fun with a balkanized North America and you can't do that if Mexico immediately gobbles up a third of it.
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Oct 8, 2013 09:10
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ExtraNoise posted:Mexico continued rolling over southwest states until it received too much criticism - I'm definitely going to have to find a way to stop this. Perhaps by removing cores from those states for Mexico? Or would that be too unrealistic? You're doing a mod where the USA is broken up into its member states for no given reason (other than because it's fun). I don't think that realism is much of a concern here. If anything it might be worth breaking Mexico up a little bit as well.
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Oct 8, 2013 09:13
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Baronjutter posted:Do the people who make maps like this ever actually play the games? Is "improving gameplay" even on their mind when they do poo poo like this, or is it just some weird obsessive compulsive disorder where they just HAVE to keep adding more useless provinces? Almost every bad mod or project does this. You can almost tell the quality of a mod by an inverse relation to the number of provinces added. Adding more provinces to a game like HOI makes sense in the context of maneuver warfare: The only way Germany is going to win against the Soviet Union is if it repeatedly encircles large swaths of the Red Army in order to destroy whole divisions, instead of letting them retreat into Siberia and refill with bottomless manpower, but in order to do that, your map needs to have enough provinces to allow Panzers to drive around armies in the first place. Where Iron Cross and this other mod (and arguably HOI3) fails at is adding provinces where it counts, getting the province count right, and keeping the province count manageable: You don't really need a billion provinces in South Africa because that's a miscellaneous theater of war in WW2, unless perhaps you were writing a mod for Domination of the Draka or something. Getting the province count right means taking into account the productive capacity of the nations involved, because even if we grant that Poland is the centerpiece of 1939, if there are so many provinces that the Polish Army can't actually build enough units to cover the front line, then the gameplay experience is going to unpleasant anyway (setting aside that the historical deployment of the Poles was in fact something like this). Finally, even if you add provinces in the right place, and add provinces only in correct proportion to the number of forces that could potentially be involved, if actually managing the forces across the provinces is also too much micromanagement, then that sucks as well. DStecks posted:Looking for some advice here, if there's any to be had: I'm playing Vicky 2, my first game ever of it actually, and I'm playing as Haiti. I've made it all the way to 1900 without issue, and industrializing has gone fairly well, but a problem that I'm running into is that my workforce simply isn't large enough to support more than 2 factories, making my economy insanely susceptible to market shifts. My three biggest exports, tobacco, liquor, and glass, all have fairly stable market prices, so I assume what's happening is that the prices are increasing on the materials my factories have to import (since Haiti produces nothing but tobacco from its RGOs). Playing as a small country, you really have to be aggressive and take over more land to expand your population, because there's really no remedy to "I don't have enough Craftsmen to support more than 3 factories" besides conquering more Craftsmen.
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Oct 8, 2013 09:19
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Make all of the states Mexico has cores on be rebelling against Mexico like texas is. Maybe grab the Native Mesoamerican tags from New Nations Mod and have them rebelling in the south too.
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Oct 8, 2013 09:34
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What's an ideal army comp in Vicky 2 these days?
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Oct 8, 2013 14:31
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1. You want enough cavalry (later Airplanes) to get 100% scouting efficiency, which is 10% of the whole stack. 2. You also want enough Engineers (later Barrels/Tanks) to get 100% siege efficiency, which is 10% of the whole stack. 3. You want as many Infantry as you have Artillery to act as meatshields for the Artillery 4. You want maybe 2 or a few more Guards to act as front-line damage dealers. I'm not sure which is the best cavalry between the three types nor if Barrels/Tanks are economical/powerful enough to replace Engineers entirely. A basic army composition would be 4 Infantry, 4 Cannon, 2 Guards, 2 Engineers and 2 Cavalry for a 14 brigade army of 42,000 men. You could go as high as 7 Inf, 7 Arty, and 2 each of Guards, Engis and Cav.
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Oct 8, 2013 16:15
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gradenko_2000 posted:Adding more provinces to a game like HOI makes sense in the context of maneuver warfare: The only way Germany is going to win against the Soviet Union is if it repeatedly encircles large swaths of the Red Army in order to destroy whole divisions, instead of letting them retreat into Siberia and refill with bottomless manpower, but in order to do that, your map needs to have enough provinces to allow Panzers to drive around armies in the first place. That's exactly the pitfall this map is falling into, and it makes even less sense because the areas with the highest province count are the areas that need them the least. A developer posted in the thread and told them that this might work for battle scenarios, but not for any kind of campaign because of its sheer size. I'm also pretty sure nobody has actually played on this map yet, because that'll probably be the moment it falls apart.
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Oct 8, 2013 16:29
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gradenko_2000 posted:1. You want enough cavalry (later Airplanes) to get 100% scouting efficiency, which is 10% of the whole stack. My experience, which coincides with what others have said, is that Barrels are actually pretty bad (slightly worse than engineers at ten times the price), and only useful for spiking your military rating through spending. Can't say I've used them all that much, though, so I could be wrong.
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Oct 8, 2013 16:44
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Barrels really aren't that great. Save your money on engies, and load up even more infantry/artillery for killing. If you need to break through a province, barrels and guards might be more useful, but for day-to-day stuff they're overpriced. This will last for one battle before you switch to your conscripted masses.
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Oct 8, 2013 18:19
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Your Jefferson borders are a little off, it should hold some of the southwest portion of Oregon.
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Oct 8, 2013 20:39
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JGBeagle posted:Your Jefferson borders are a little off, it should hold some of the southwest portion of Oregon. Unfortunately there is only one territory for western Oregon and I didn't want to sacrifice it to Jefferson. It does have a Jefferson core on it, though. Edit: vvv Wolfgang Pauli posted:How are you going to set them up for war and Interesting Stuff at start? You'll need to actually define alliances and stuff. Leaving it blank seems like it would allow for it to form organically, but the game really needs the help of that initial state. I've outlined a number of cores in various states that historically held cores as colonies/territories in those states. For example, Oregon wants to reform its territory. California has cores on Baja California. Virginia is looking to become a world power (see my last play test). Events are absolutely needed, but I need to get the rest of the starting countries in first, including those in Canada and Mexico. If you have suggestions, please let me know. There's nothing at this point that can't be changed or altered completely! ExtraNoise fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Oct 8, 2013 |
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Oct 8, 2013 20:52
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How are you going to set them up for war and Interesting Stuff at start? You'll need to actually define alliances and stuff. Leaving it blank seems like it would allow for it to form organically, but the game really needs the help of that initial state.
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Oct 8, 2013 21:07
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I'd suggest some cores and decisions, maybe some alliances/satellite relations to start off with. Like, maybe the states could have decisions to form more united regions (the way Prussia goes to NGF - > German Empire) if enough territories are owned/are in their sphere of influence. Kind of like this map (from this somewhat military wanky what-if scenario).  Once formed, those regions could have a decision (like Manifest Destiny) to core all the other states and restore the USA in their image.
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Oct 8, 2013 21:32
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DrSunshine posted:I'd suggest some cores and decisions, maybe some alliances/satellite relations to start off with. Poor Florida doesn't get any friends
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Oct 8, 2013 23:09
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:Poor Florida doesn't get any friends Based on the article, it isn't "friends", its "places the main states could immediately occupy". And Georgia is one of the main states for the purposes of the article, so it blocks Florida from the starting gate.
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Oct 8, 2013 23:50
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Ongoing progress on Divided We Stand: I've added a bunch of cores to various areas, which incite war between the states. I've done some balancing too, so the states are all a little more on even ground. The eastern states are still more developed than the western ones, but that's to be expected. I also modified the names of a few based on history of those areas (most notable: Empire where New York once was). I created a few new countries as well. There are two Columbia's and they HATE each other. Good, good. I cant wait to see the names of the wars they will wage. Still to do: Figure out why my California cores aren't showing up in Baja California. Also divide the Mexican and Canadian states/provinces up into smaller nations. I also want to add the nation of Nickajack near the Appalachians. Then onto the beta and event writing?
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Oct 9, 2013 06:41
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DStecks posted:Based on the article, it isn't "friends", its "places the main states could immediately occupy". And Georgia is one of the main states for the purposes of the article, so it blocks Florida from the starting gate. ExtraNoise posted:I've added a bunch of cores to various areas, which incite war between the states. I've done some balancing too, so the states are all a little more on even ground. The eastern states are still more developed than the western ones, but that's to be expected. I also modified the names of a few based on history of those areas (most notable: Empire where New York once was).
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Oct 9, 2013 07:15
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ExtraNoise posted:I created a few new countries as well. There are two Columbia's and they HATE each other. Good, good. I cant wait to see the names of the wars they will wage. In a similar vein of rivalry, Colorado and Wyoming should have permanent "Assert
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Oct 9, 2013 12:02
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YF-23 posted:In a similar vein of rivalry, Colorado and Wyoming should have permanent "Assert Dear god, imagine if Colorado or Wyoming annexed the other. 
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Oct 9, 2013 14:54
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DrSunshine posted:Dear god, imagine if Colorado or Wyoming annexed the other. Obviously they would have to continue expanding until the owned the entire continent, and then build earthworks until North America was perfectly rectangular.
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Oct 9, 2013 15:01
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Kavak posted:That's exactly the pitfall this map is falling into, and it makes even less sense because the areas with the highest province count are the areas that need them the least. A developer posted in the thread and told them that this might work for battle scenarios, but not for any kind of campaign because of its sheer size. I'm also pretty sure nobody has actually played on this map yet, because that'll probably be the moment it falls apart.
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Oct 9, 2013 15:07
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