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The Cheshire Cat posted:Yeah I've always felt one of the key problems with the pops in Stellaris is that there is functionally no impact on them in warfare, unless you are losing. You can get a million of your own ships blown up, send a million armies to their doom trying to assault planets, but so long as none of your own planets get occupied/bombarded, none of this has any impact on your population, because these are all things that are produced with resources and the people are abstracted out of the equation. This is definitely one of the best parts of Victoria for me; but there are some considerations I feel, some of them sadly and frustratingly meta. There is one problem with this approach where since everyone who plays Victoria knows that this is the case, everyone who has any experience in the game at all will be incentivized not to go to war, and will as I've seen repeatedly in countless multiplayer games, actively refuse to go to war and go to elaborate oligarchic behaviours to insure they never have to. The Haves keep everything, and the Have-Nots just have to suck it and cannot meaningfully challenge the status quo. Imagine a game where UK, France and Russia agree to basically never let the Italian and Prussia players unite their nations because these are players whose roles incentivize them to actually pick fights and picking a fight is the last thing any of these three other players want; and their risk adverseness results in them being more willing to make concessions to the other great powers than to let the possibility of a war break out. Basically the effect is as if everyone in I dunno, 1836 got all the memories of 1916 and all of history from then on changed to account for the same collective memory of national tragedy resulting in Britain, France and Russia deciding to put the boot on everyone who could possibly come to challenge the status quo. This informs a huge reason why I favour quality of life improvements that make war more interesting and a little easier to fight in terms of clicks per minute because the above phenomena would be a good recipe for "Edge Nations" to challenge and disrupt complacent "Center Nations" but the actual concrete gameplay mechanics of Victoria 2 in particular make actually executing and fighting a war so annoyingly difficult and frustrating that it just serves to trickle up all the power to the Center Nation Oligarchs. It's not very fun to see the game state become stale even when opportunities to make things interesting present themselves but you can't actually do anything because the game basically won't let you.
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Aug 21, 2021 04:13
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bob dobbs is dead posted:devereaux has another dealio out, with an implicit question to pdx A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
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Aug 22, 2021 01:44
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:War is often harder on the aggressor than the aggressed As are most miscarriages of justice.
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Aug 22, 2021 18:52
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I assume he'll double back to war in the third series because the way the systems work may discourage European wars but absolutely push you towards kicking the poo poo out of less technologically advanced nations to fund your unused border garrison armies. Colonial wars pay very well (depending on the colony of course) for very little Pop-loss. Unless I scrolled right by that paragraph? I am on my phone after all lmao
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Aug 22, 2021 19:39
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DaysBefore posted:I assume he'll double back to war in the third series because the way the systems work may discourage European wars but absolutely push you towards kicking the poo poo out of less technologically advanced nations to fund your unused border garrison armies. Colonial wars pay very well (depending on the colony of course) for very little Pop-loss. He mentioned that early/mid-game war, especially war against minors/uncivs, was still profitable. The implication was that late game most/all less technologically advanced nations that you'd want to target are sphered by other great powers.
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Aug 22, 2021 19:43
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DaysBefore posted:I assume he'll double back to war in the third series because the way the systems work may discourage European wars but absolutely push you towards kicking the poo poo out of less technologically advanced nations to fund your unused border garrison armies. Colonial wars pay very well (depending on the colony of course) for very little Pop-loss. I think he mentions that the third part is going to cover uncivilised nations in general.
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Aug 22, 2021 21:18
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Baronjutter posted:I'm really curious if you're going for a classless society if that's even possible within the game mechanics. Absolutely you'd have worker-owner factories, but I wonder if there will be special laws to equalize all wages in factories so labourers and machinists and engineers all get the same wage. Raenir Salazar posted:This is definitely one of the best parts of Victoria for me; but there are some considerations I feel, some of them sadly and frustratingly meta. That's diplomacy at work right there. If a sixth player was running as the Otomans or Austria-Hungary, then the have not players would be able to conspire much better and get concessions, but three human players running as Brits, French and Russians are basically playing in co-op mode, since the interests of all three are so conveniently converged. I think war in vic 3 should be as equally violent and costly for your economy, but as you say, how to handle war itself should be much easier on the player than it currently is, since it's incredibly tedious to set up rally points to gather up all the mobilized infantry that's scattered all over the place. Some sort of frontline and army system like HoI can benefit it, but it would also feel very unnecessary or weird during the first half of the game. I'm sure they'll come up with something great. JosefStalinator posted:As are most miscarriages of justice. There are millions of Vicky 2 players like me, and we're getting sick of people like you blaming your problems on us. We outnumber you, and the people that think like you. DON'T gently caress WITH US.
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Aug 23, 2021 01:20
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That doesn't work because the game isn't real life, the IRL rulers don't have historical context plus benefit of hindsight of dozens of previous games to let them know what the result will be from listening to those overtures. Basically there's an implicit step your missing here from my previous post: That the Germany and Italy players are completely locked out of playing the actual game; and its actually impossible to convince the other players. Diplomacy as you understand it ceases to be a meaningful part of the gameplay experience.
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Aug 23, 2021 01:32
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Having played dozens of MP games at this point I can pretty confidently say that scenario is rare, and requires (as someone upthread said) a game of five players where the two weakest are on Prussia/Italy. Also you underestimate how much a cascade of minor conflicts can end up distracting folks long enough for the have-nots to slip through the cracks
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Aug 23, 2021 01:34
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I mean multiple player strategy games are basically a completely different beast to single player experience and you really can’t balance one with the other in mind
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Aug 23, 2021 01:45
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To emphasize, the main thing I want to see is the same sort of QoL improvements we've seen in other paradox games where organizing and using your armies isn't in of itself a physically painful part of the experience; because part of why at least in my own experiences diplomacy tends to get so stagnant that the lesser powers, regardless of skill level (nothing to do with them being the weakest, you could put the "best" players there and if they can't peel off a GP to back them then they can't peel off a GP to back them) don't feel there's much of a point to challenging the status quo because of how painful it is. Army Whack A Mole, a lack of front lines, armies just disintegrating when there's a rebellion, difficulty with organizing stacks of armies according to a specific organization; difficulties even fielding armies in the first place from a lack of market access to army supplies. Regardless of single player vs multiplayer; even in single player fighting wars was mechanically unfun in the UX experience and painful in totally unnecessary ways; as I've mentioned before I hope they experiment with a hybrid approach between CK3 and Hoi4.
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Aug 23, 2021 02:04
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CharlestheHammer posted:I mean multiple player strategy games are basically a completely different beast to single player experience and you really can’t balance one with the other in mind Paradox alone has taught us this 100 times at least.
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Aug 23, 2021 02:12
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Mans posted:Some sort of frontline and army system like HoI can benefit it, but it would also feel very unnecessary or weird during the first half of the game. I'm sure they'll come up with something great. Honestly just having a point in time - like "sufficient numbers of countries have discovered this tech or progressed to this level" - be set by default to switch systems from little man stacks and unlock fronts would work, I think. It'd seem kinda clunky, but it'd also be a nice marker of when the world had reached a certain era.
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Aug 23, 2021 02:43
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Honestly at this point it would be refreshing for paradox to break from the whole “stack of units” paradigm. Especially in a nation gardening simulator like vic3 is going to be. The front line is anywhere opposing forces touch. You can assign priority to certain parts of the line and it gets extra troops. Draw an axis of advancement and extra troops will be pulled in and used for the advance. You could dynamically draw the front line across the province to represent the progress of the offensive. We are never going to get it but I can dream.
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Aug 23, 2021 03:15
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I agree that warfare is the least important part of Victoria 3 but I do still want to click on enemy armies with my own and watch them get owned, especially in multiplayer
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Aug 23, 2021 03:20
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People keep saying a HoI style front system would be "weird" at the start of Victoria's time period... but would it really? "Army, go to this border and push towards this target" is simple enough and wouldn't be too weird, would it? Maybe the width of the front or number of places you can attack simultaneously goes up over the course of the game so you can have general offenses in WWI, while you can only make a b-line for Paris in the Franco-Prussian war or something. I don't know military history well enough to know if this is some sort of problem for historical reasons, but in terms of gameplay it doesn't seem like it'd be too awkward or out of place. You wouldn't really even need stacks anywhere, but if you really must have marching guys with numbers next to them they could just automatically do your orders like in HoI. And if you really wanted to do things the old fashioned way, there's nothing to stop you from ordering your guys to just to to a place rather than a front. I sat down and seriously played HoI for the first time near the start of the pandemic when a bunch of old friends wanted to do stuff online, so we did HoI. I'm not into military stuff or WWII, so I was just kind of along for the ride, but the basic system for controlling troops is pretty easy and intuitive. There's a whole bunch of complexities I never got, but "go to front, do a thing" isn't too hard to grasp. As long as it isn't too hard to program, I don't see why you wouldn't have a system like that for a game that covers the Great War.
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Aug 23, 2021 03:28
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I think Vicky is a great game to experiment, you can have warfare not be the focus of Victoria III but still get a fresh look at the fundamentals to make it something that fits the everchanging technological conditions much better than the previous system; on top of Quality of Life improvements to make it more akin to Hoi4/CK3/Late-DLC EU4 so army management is more convenient and presents all the information you need at a glance and fighting a war is less carpel tunnel inducing. I like the idea that the front line manager from Hoi4 could be an interesting thing to introduce; partly to make managing large empires less tedious because in real life the government has large bureaucracies to handle that, why should the player do everything themselves? I think a front line manager could be good to add some abstraction to warfare, make control of armies a little more indirect and more inline with the ongoing depicted vision of Victoria 3 being more of a bonsai garden simulator. If you aren't expected to micro your economy, then maybe also the expectation shouldn't be to micro armies either; and warfare could be more abstracted by designating an area of operations in which armies are deployed and through the use of timers to add a delay you assign overall orders that the AI attempts to carry out; you have two kinds of orders; General Orders and Specific Orders; the former is the overall Mission; the latter is to correct for information you have the AI doesn't and to correct for fuckery with markers that aren't Exact orders but are basically like assigning heavier weights so the AI tries to better conform to what you're suggesting (the ability to tinker with weights is a feature very sorely missing from the front manager in Hoi4). I think it would be more interesting than just re-using how the Airwar works in Hoi4 and probably fixes a bunch of deeper more systemic problems with how warfare in the various Paradox engines work where the various details and abstractions create a version of warfare that doesn't really fit any period.
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Aug 23, 2021 05:16
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The classic reasoning is to make frontlines slowly emerge from a more eu4 stack system as you research miltechs and develop your officer staff/battle plans, which I hope they pull something similar
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Aug 23, 2021 07:09
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A potentially interesting thought would be a gradually increasing "max frontline length."
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Aug 23, 2021 07:14
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I really really hope they try something new with the warfare system, ideally involving more abstraction I'm gonna be so bummed when we see the same old little 3d dudes moonwalking around
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Aug 23, 2021 11:54
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theres always..... counters
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Aug 23, 2021 11:55
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quote:But since a “building” does not represent a single factory but rather a whole industrial sector across a large area, and we assume the individual businesses in that sector compete with each other rather than engage in cartel behavior to extort consumers, this adjustment of wages to maximize employment makes sense. This is a bold assumption.
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Aug 23, 2021 12:33
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Orange Devil posted:This is a bold assumption. I’m taking that statement as so on the nose that there’s surely going to be corruption mechanics the same as other Paradox titles which possibly change this behaviour or apply a <wage depression/price increase/employment reduction> modifier to represent a cartel forming.
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Aug 23, 2021 13:13
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HOI4 had some clever stuff going on with brush wars etc in the Chinese civil war. I feel like in this era you need to model a few things though: wars by great powers against pre-industrial countries should usually be a cakewalk but you also need to accommodate Ethiopia kicking the poo poo out of Italy and Japan wiping the floor with Russia.
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Aug 23, 2021 14:06
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The taliban beat the US this year with muzzle loader enfields captured in the fifteenthish anglo-afghan war 150 years ago still in active service. I hope at least in a dlc there's mechanics that make it so you can't just steamroll the world by having a maxim gun.
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Aug 23, 2021 14:25
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https://twitter.com/PDXVictoria/status/1429805637261791241?s=19
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Aug 23, 2021 15:01
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:The taliban beat the US this year with muzzle loader enfields captured in the fifteenthish anglo-afghan war 150 years ago still in active service. Not to take away from your overall point which could lead to more interesting gameplay, but there's a difference between defeating an invasion by a colonial power, defeating a colonial occupation, and toppling a puppet government half-heartedly propped up by a colonial power, even in 19th century Afghanistan.
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Aug 23, 2021 15:07
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Raenir Salazar posted:That doesn't work because the game isn't real life, the IRL rulers don't have historical context plus benefit of hindsight of dozens of previous games to let them know what the result will be from listening to those overtures. If the UK, France and USSR players wanted to box the German and Italian players in, they would send volunteers to Ethiopia and Spain, make no appeasement in the Munich treaty and the two axis players would be done in 1938. And if the French, English and Muscovite (maybe polish for a more fitting comparison) wanted the Prussian and Milanese player not to unite their countries, then they simply wouldn't. Your scenario has three human players playing a co-op game using the three of the most military powerful nations available, nothing short of another three player alliance would break that mold, be it in Vic, EU, hoi, civilization, dominions or any other strategy game.
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Aug 23, 2021 15:19
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:The taliban beat the US this year with muzzle loader enfields captured in the fifteenthish anglo-afghan war 150 years ago still in active service. No, they beat the US with brand new Chinese PK machine guns which they bought with all the protection money everyone in Afganistan was paying them to not attack them, specifically.
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Aug 23, 2021 15:32
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I think part of the trouble with colonial wars is that the AI - in like every strategy game ever to be fair - has never really understood the idea of a 'limited' war. I think HoI 4 has a system for that but I have no idea how well it works. I just don't want a repeat of Victoria 2, where the AI mobilises for full-scale war everytime some tiny backwater goes to war
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Aug 23, 2021 15:34
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Tuna-Fish posted:No, they beat the US with brand new Chinese PK machine guns which they bought with all the protection money everyone in Afganistan was paying them to not attack them, specifically. I mean realistically they beat them because the US had no way to win this war as the taliban had local support and the US puppet government barely existed without the US to prop it up. What guns they had didn’t really matter
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Aug 23, 2021 15:34
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DaysBefore posted:I think part of the trouble with colonial wars is that the AI - in like every strategy game ever to be fair - has never really understood the idea of a 'limited' war. I think HoI 4 has a system for that but I have no idea how well it works. I just don't want a repeat of Victoria 2, where the AI mobilises for full-scale war everytime some tiny backwater goes to war To be fair if it had been a simple thing in the Crimean war to just take Moscow by siege (or in the 7YW to have occupied Paris / London) presumably the belligerents would have done it. What PDX games don’t model are the factors that made those outcomes impossible, which are mostly diplomatic or logistical. I don’t know if it’s even possible to make a grand strategy game with plausible logistical constraints that would allow for Cortez to conquer Mexico and the EIC to take Bengal, but annihilate Napoleon’s army in Russia and prevent Ming from marching across Siberia.
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Aug 23, 2021 16:11
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Tuna-Fish posted:No, they beat the US with brand new Chinese PK machine guns which they bought with all the protection money everyone in Afganistan was paying them to not attack them, specifically. I look forward to funding rebels in another country in Vicky3.
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Aug 23, 2021 17:19
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Like the Chinese would charge someone for something that would be used to gently caress with the US. That's something I always felt was missing from 2 - your options for loving around in the internal affairs of other countries are extremely limited. You can only use national focuses to build tension in an area if it's one of your own cores.
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Aug 23, 2021 17:21
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Beefeater1980 posted:I don’t know if it’s even possible to make a grand strategy game with plausible logistical constraints that would allow for Cortez to conquer Mexico and the EIC to take Bengal, but annihilate Napoleon’s army in Russia and prevent Ming from marching across Siberia. I'd say one of the biggest problems in here is not the mechanics but the nature of videogames. Cortez maybe had 10% chance to succeed in his adventure and he gambled cause he was a single dude in control of several hundred other dudes. Napoleon might have had, I don't know, 30% chance of invading England and taking London (don't argue about this number, imagine I'm talking about Spain attacking Lissabon directly instead of waging colonial wars or whatever else) but failing that would have doomed France and definitely himself. To simulate border conflicts and almost impossible gambles you'll have to teach AI about the concept of risk and reward. Is it worth it to send a thousand dudes across the ocean knowing people from there won't retaliate and at worst you'll just lose a couple of ships? Yeah. Do you really need to defend a colony half a world away while your enemies in Europe are following your every move? Maybe a little, but you won't commit to that.
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Aug 23, 2021 17:35
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Beefeater1980 posted:To be fair if it had been a simple thing in the Crimean war to just take Moscow by siege (or in the 7YW to have occupied Paris / London) presumably the belligerents would have done it. What PDX games don’t model are the factors that made those outcomes impossible, which are mostly diplomatic or logistical. The British IIRC were considering or did raid with a small force neat St. Petersberg and Vladivostok but yeah; One way of solving this is to create like a region mode tied to CB's so wars are funnelled to largely take place where they should; where your troops face penalties that scale to how far away you are from crisis point (with the AI's weighting the area it is supposed to be heavily, only sniping easily taken locations outside that area). But there is probably a better more holistic solution. Such as trying to more properly model logistics and the difficulties in fielding expeditionary armies so it's not just a matter of loading a 80k on boats and moving them; but you might need to actually setup a supply line or depots before/as you send troops and this limits the total number of troops that can actually be fielded there. Another thing is incentive systems; war score is one already existing one, you can only win if you take the objective; fighting somewhere that isn't near the objective clearly isn't as prestigious and doesn't add to your war contribution as much. You could add something on top of ticking warscore like ticking prestige gain/loss that depends on you actually fighting the war where you should, combined with proper logistics to limit your deployments to where it makes sense. For something like the Crimean War they didn't just ship troops on over; supplying the effort was a significant part of the conflict and involved its own effort, their own encampments, depots, and field fortifications to prevent them from being driven into the sea. It could be interesting for something like overseas conflicts for there to be an added layer, like preparing your supply routes and building your initial supply depots before you can try to push in that by modeling proper logistics first should create a natural next step being how to secure your supplies to further your efforts. CharlestheHammer posted:I mean realistically they beat them because the US had no way to win this war as the taliban had local support and the US puppet government barely existed without the US to prop it up. It'd be neat if an insurgency could be modeled as this parallel stateless thing. Like you have a province on the map and there's enemy troops consisting of rebels that exist there but they're "invisible" to the province owner until they click the "Uprise" button, and the province owner has their own mini game of collecting intel and organizing their occupation forces to try to sus out informants, arms caches, disrupt meetings, gatherings, secret hideouts and bases, etc. With some provinces being better for counter insurgency and some better for hiding out. Mountainous or heavily jungled/swampy/forested land, far away from the imperial core should be much easier to hide in; and as long as you keep getting supplies can keep going and gathering support. That basically easily models a bunch of different movements that existing during the period and could be combined with the unrecognized nations to add some complexity to warfare in the rest of the world. The British invading India is complicated if there's guerilla warfare happening as well; which is something paradox games even in Hoi games hasn't really modelled except in a really abstract way. Mans posted:But if this was EU or HoI, it would be the same thing. So here's the thing, for Hoi, you have the fact that there's predefined teams. You can try to contain Germany early, but most games aren't that free form, and many have various house rules to insure "something vaguely like WW2 happens when it should happen", Hoi4 MP is its own beast with its own absurdities. With EU4, for vanilla at least I think its much harder because everyone starts out roughly equal and there's a lot more players; the GP's aren't usually that far ahead of middle powers and vanilla EU warfare isn't such a slog that people can't gang up on the GPs unless they all literally form a team in which case GG anyways. In a converted EU4 game from CK it depends on the map, if most of Europe converts from CK as blobs then the game's balance is probably extremely hosed and you're playing the waiting game of whether the new RotW player slots can consolidate fast enough to not get picked off, but that's more of a failure of the converter rules or anti-blobbing measures in CK. Victoria 2 is the only game where actually fighting a war is unfun, even in single player against AI; and I don't mean the consequences of pops dying, but the fact that its a very old game missing many of the QoL features of later games. The war/peace mechanics are bad, the fact that every war especially against the AI is basically has to be total war to gain more than a handful of states, the lack of EU4's style of "click on a map for what you want" peace mechanics, the lack of an indicator of what the AI is willing to accept and why; that you can't define templates to be refilled automatically; and what other people said about logistics resulting in very unintuitive results like people invading with large armies in the middle of nowhere. You also have things like where the AI can split and micro managing a million tiny stacks of troops which is aggravating to the player which the player can't really respond and the way province occupations are just kinda arbitrary and don't seem to mean or indicate anything other than making warscore tick up very slightly. The player doesn't really know if these occupations are doing anything to help with winning the war when given the economy simulator aspect of Vicky should mean that occupying like, Silesia, or the Ruhr should be crippling to the war economy of a given country and it'd be neat if the adverse affects were better indicated. Like, "We estimate we're occupying 30% of the enemy's steal production, the war will be over by christmas!". The way taking territory is just very uninteresting which is bad given how often you have to do it.
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Aug 23, 2021 17:43
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ilitarist posted:I'd say one of the biggest problems in here is not the mechanics but the nature of videogames. Cortez maybe had 10% chance to succeed in his adventure and he gambled cause he was a single dude in control of several hundred other dudes. Napoleon might have had, I don't know, 30% chance of invading England and taking London (don't argue about this number, imagine I'm talking about Spain attacking Lissabon directly instead of waging colonial wars or whatever else) but failing that would have doomed France and definitely himself. To simulate border conflicts and almost impossible gambles you'll have to teach AI about the concept of risk and reward. Is it worth it to send a thousand dudes across the ocean knowing people from there won't retaliate and at worst you'll just lose a couple of ships? Yeah. Do you really need to defend a colony half a world away while your enemies in Europe are following your every move? Maybe a little, but you won't commit to that. The problem is that most of these dilemmas dont really exists for most games because usually sending armies across the globe is fast, easy, and have little consequence, even if it goes bad (at most you all have to spend some money on rebuilding those armies or wait for some numbers go up again)
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Aug 23, 2021 17:46
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Occupying those sort of states is crippiling to a war economy and house rules exist in v2 games too?
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Aug 23, 2021 17:51
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CharlestheHammer posted:I mean realistically they beat them because the US had no way to win this war as the taliban had local support and the US puppet government barely existed without the US to prop it up. ilitarist posted:I'd say one of the biggest problems in here is not the mechanics but the nature of videogames. Cortez maybe had 10% chance to succeed in his adventure and he gambled cause he was a single dude in control of several hundred other dudes. Napoleon might have had, I don't know, 30% chance of invading England and taking London (don't argue about this number, imagine I'm talking about Spain attacking Lissabon directly instead of waging colonial wars or whatever else) but failing that would have doomed France and definitely himself. To simulate border conflicts and almost impossible gambles you'll have to teach AI about the concept of risk and reward. Is it worth it to send a thousand dudes across the ocean knowing people from there won't retaliate and at worst you'll just lose a couple of ships? Yeah. Do you really need to defend a colony half a world away while your enemies in Europe are following your every move? Maybe a little, but you won't commit to that.
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Aug 23, 2021 18:06
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almost?
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Aug 23, 2021 18:17
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