Victoria 3: the 1960 german unification play comes with a few complications

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Victoria 3: the 1960 german unification play comes with a few complications

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Arrath: Apr 14, 2011

DJ_Mindboggler posted:

Oil scarcity is my #1 cause for engaging in unjust lategame wars of imperial aggression. Sorry Venezuela/Egypt/Gulf Emirates, but you're too underdeveloped to be allowed to sit on that oil deposit.

I appear to have overextended Chile in my attempted conquest of Venezuela for their sweet, sweet oil. France stepped in to defend them and we're stuck in trench war stalemates. I have to see if my navy can interdict their supplies, otherwise I'm hosed.

# ? Oct 31, 2022 02:06

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# ? May 29, 2024 18:27

hot cocoa on the couch: Dec 8, 2009

hot cocoa on the couch posted:

it's 1905 and i'm japan. i have claims on korea, having completed meiji restoration, and want to invade qing to take it. except now it seems i can't start diplomatic plays on anyone? is this a bug? i have them in focus (in fact, have 12 areas in focus since i'm a major power). has this happened to anyone else?

this was a bug btw. reloading the game fixed it

# ? Oct 31, 2022 02:07

Dramicus: Mar 26, 2010; Grimey Drawer

Just in case this hasn't been mentioned yet: Do not switch military equipment less than 1 year before a war. When you switch to a new type of equipment, you get a -75% malus to combat efficiency that slowly bleeds off over 12 months. I finally figured out why my troops were underperforming when I should have had absolute dominance. It's because they were fighting with a 75% debuff.

# ? Oct 31, 2022 02:16

Kraftwerk: Aug 13, 2011; i do not have 10,000 bircoins, please stop asking

Does stuff like oil, iron etc run out eventually? Or are the nodes permanent when you build the necessary extraction buildings?

# ? Oct 31, 2022 02:16

Traxis: Jul 2, 2006

Kraftwerk posted:

Does stuff like oil, iron etc run out eventually? Or are the nodes permanent when you build the necessary extraction buildings?

The only things I've seen run out are gold fields (not mines)

# ? Oct 31, 2022 02:17

Fray: Oct 22, 2010

Demon_Corsair posted:

I'm starting to hate this war system. I'm trying to fight Oman as Persian and I have a 4:1 numerical superiority in numbers and my general will only fight with equal or less numbers of battalions and has lost dozens of battles now.

Is there any way to make this not loving stupid?

Do you need to promote that general?

# ? Oct 31, 2022 02:23

Bold Robot: Jan 6, 2009; Be brave.

I�m playing as Belgium and the UK asked me to join their customs union. I understand that this would put me into their market, but is there an easy way to figure out whether this would be a good idea or not? I feel like a comparison of goods prices between their market and mine would be helpful here.

# ? Oct 31, 2022 02:37

uPen: Jan 25, 2010; Zu Rodina!

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

There are low population colonies that need workers?

Hokkaido has trouble hiring because everybody in the state is already employed

I haven't really had issues with colonies drawing population. Either they're tiny (pacific islands) in which case you don't need much pop to run the 10ish buildings you'll make there, or they're big and already have a huge population. The colonies you really want a ton of people in (gold, oil, rubber) have events to draw extra people automatically.

Having extra pops that are educated/loyal doesn't matter enough compared to generating extra tension to trigger revolts. The extra tension lets you just chain your way through Africa at a shocking rate.

# ? Oct 31, 2022 02:39

Demon_Corsair: Mar 22, 2004; Goodbye stealing souls, hello stealing booty.

Fray posted:

Do you need to promote that general?

He was may ruler and had 48 battalions under his command. He just wouldn't use them

Do provinces have size limits for fights tucked away somewhere? It was just a small costal territory.

Looking at a new game where they caved and didn't fight, it's not even its own province.

# ? Oct 31, 2022 02:41

hot cocoa on the couch: Dec 8, 2009

what's the best way of boosting my naval landing chances? aside from just making sure ships > battalions

# ? Oct 31, 2022 02:44

really queer Christmas: Apr 22, 2014

Man the Ottomans are a... thing. I like the law stuff in theory but the intellectuals being in government and hating everything about it so it's easy for them to suddenly be to angry to join the government and... modernize it is, sadly realistic, but sucks to try out. Has anyone tried them and had success with a strategy?

# ? Oct 31, 2022 02:49

Archduke Frantz Fanon: Sep 7, 2004

hot cocoa on the couch posted:

what's the best way of boosting my naval landing chances? aside from just making sure ships > battalions

landing boats tech

# ? Oct 31, 2022 02:51

Traxis: Jul 2, 2006

Demon_Corsair posted:

He was may ruler and had 48 battalions under his command. He just wouldn't use them

Do provinces have size limits for fights tucked away somewhere? It was just a small costal territory.

Looking at a new game where they caved and didn't fight, it's not even its own province.

The way combat works is a general will be selected at random and then the number of troops will roll between 1 and the max they are commanding with additional reinforcements between 1-10. So 5 divisions of 20 would have a much lower average combat width than 2 with 50.

E: Forgot to mention there is also currently a bug that gives a larger penalty to the number of troops rolled by the attacker than intended:

quote:

code:
# Reduce final troops by up to one-third for attacker (random)
if = {
limit = {
exists = scope:own_commander
scope:is_advancing_side = yes
}
multiply = {
fixed_range = {
min = 0.33
max = 1.0
}
}
desc = "BATTLE_SIZE_LUCK"
}
The comment states that they intended to reduce the troops of the attacker by up to 1/3. But they multiply the number of troops by something between 1/3 and 1, resulting in a reduction of up to 2/3 of the total attacking troop count.
I find most of the other modifiers somewhat reasonable (although in-game documentation is necessary).

Traxis fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Oct 31, 2022

# ? Oct 31, 2022 02:53

Elendil004: Mar 22, 2003; The prognosis
is not good.

I was in a war w/ Mexico, as the USA, Russia was supporting the mexicans, but after a long while of kind of stalemate, they capitulated "the following wargoal was forced on russia: capitulation" what caused that?

# ? Oct 31, 2022 03:04

Dramicus: Mar 26, 2010; Grimey Drawer

Here's my Giga-France:

I probably could have hit 2 billion GDP if I had continued securing and developing oil deposits. But I got side-tracked with beating up Italy over and over, so I probably missed out on some growth. The SOL is misleading because I had loads of pops in Japan and China that were always like 5-10 points behind those in France.

I'd say the main limiting factor in my economy was oil and rubber. There are definitely such things as profitable wars (securing opium and later oil deposits) and unprofitable ones.

# ? Oct 31, 2022 03:05

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

Traxis posted:

The way combat works is a general will be selected at random and then the number of troops will roll between 1 and the max they are commanding with additional reinforcements between 1-10. So 5 divisions of 20 would have a much lower average combat width than 2 with 50.

E: Forgot to mention there is also currently a bug that gives a larger penalty to the number of troops rolled by the attacker than intended:

e: oh duh, instead of 0.33 make it 0.67

# ? Oct 31, 2022 03:06

DJ_Mindboggler: Nov 21, 2013

Elendil004 posted:

I was in a war w/ Mexico, as the USA, Russia was supporting the mexicans, but after a long while of kind of stalemate, they capitulated "the following wargoal was forced on russia: capitulation" what caused that?

Ddi you include any wargoals targeting Russia in the initial diplomatic play? If not, it just means they decided to cut their losses and hang the Mexicans out to dry. At present, there's no penalty for nations taking a separate peace when they have no war goals against them, not even prestige/diplomatic relations loss.

# ? Oct 31, 2022 03:09

Stux: Nov 17, 2006

Bold Robot posted:

I�m playing as Belgium and the UK asked me to join their customs union. I understand that this would put me into their market, but is there an easy way to figure out whether this would be a good idea or not? I feel like a comparison of goods prices between their market and mine would be helpful here.

w the market open you can click on the other market and see directly what its like

# ? Oct 31, 2022 03:15

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

Traxis posted:

The only things I've seen run out are gold fields (not mines)

yeah and gold fields convert directly into unbuilt mines, which are more efficient anyway once you have more than the basic mine production methods. you want your gold fields to deplete fast

# ? Oct 31, 2022 03:25

MonsieurChoc: Oct 12, 2013; Every species can smell its own extinction.

Gonna wait until the eternal revolution bug is fixed to try Lan Fang again.

Any tips on the Ottoman reforms? Finding thema ctually hard to pass in my two attempts.

# ? Oct 31, 2022 03:45

really queer Christmas: Apr 22, 2014

MonsieurChoc posted:

Gonna wait until the eternal revolution bug is fixed to try Lan Fang again.

Any tips on the Ottoman reforms? Finding thema ctually hard to pass in my two attempts.

My first attempt was actually much better than my second. Going after Egypt early seems like a trap. You need a strong economy which you get by building up and, hopefully, getting the bureaucracy fixed.

# ? Oct 31, 2022 03:49

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

MonsieurChoc posted:

Gonna wait until the eternal revolution bug is fixed to try Lan Fang again.

Any tips on the Ottoman reforms? Finding thema ctually hard to pass in my two attempts.

you have 20 years, which is honestly more time than you need

Education reform is important to do just to stay on pace, so go for that. Suppressing separatism.. uh? I have no idea how you can fail that reform.

So that leaves two - Syria is good to get back ASAP but you want to build a stable home front first, so spend your first decade consolidating.

I screwed up by going for bureaucracy for my other one - not because I think it�s a mistake, but it is tough to successfully do everything while pissing off your landowners already.

# ? Oct 31, 2022 03:51

mst4k: Apr 18, 2003; budlitemolaram

About to take on the Dutch east indies because I�m already killing every whale in the world for oil :/

# ? Oct 31, 2022 03:53

DurosKlav: Jun 13, 2003; Enter your name pilot!

I played Persia and Ottomans twice each for my first games and now I'm playing Prussia. It feels like I've been training on a planet with like 3x gravity of Earth and now that I'm actually on Earth everything is just so easy to do. You start with so many techs that took me like 30 years or so in those other countries. Starting with Steel, Munitions, and Chemical Plants.

# ? Oct 31, 2022 03:58

JosefStalinator: Oct 9, 2007; Come Tbilisi if you want to live.; Grimey Drawer

I'm trying a big power for the first time (Prussia) how do you do anything without France, Italy, and Austria just always opposing you? I can't sign alliances and getting obligations seems really hard (bankroll for a few years???), is there something I'm missing?

# ? Oct 31, 2022 04:03

Demon_Corsair: Mar 22, 2004; Goodbye stealing souls, hello stealing booty.

Traxis posted:

The way combat works is a general will be selected at random and then the number of troops will roll between 1 and the max they are commanding with additional reinforcements between 1-10. So 5 divisions of 20 would have a much lower average combat width than 2 with 50.

E: Forgot to mention there is also currently a bug that gives a larger penalty to the number of troops rolled by the attacker than intended:

It basically means that Oman is invincible. My 48 divisions will never field more then 3. So if they aren't cowed and give in during the diplomatic phaae, my much larger army can't win.

# ? Oct 31, 2022 04:07

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

wanna give the bugfix they recommended a shot? selfishly so i know if i should make the change lol

# ? Oct 31, 2022 04:15

Gamerofthegame: Oct 28, 2010; Could at least flip one or two, maybe.

it's obnoxious but you can grind them down over time

there's two different ways you can cheese things, though. first is having two, or a few, swole generals and then they can tag team and you just cross you fingers/micro that the guy who just burned through morale in a fight doesn't go for round two, while their's has. this is finicky and mostly thought up by a friend tho.

the second is to navally invade or do anything else that causes a new front, which swiftly overextends most AI

# ? Oct 31, 2022 04:15

Tomn: Aug 23, 2007; And the angel said unto him
"Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself."
But lo he could not. For the angel was hitting him with his own hands

If you have time I really, really recommend digging down into the pops and individual tooltip after nested tooltip to get into the guts of the game - it may or may not be helpful but there's a ton of things linking together at even low levels that you might not notice from your normal high level view.

For an example, let's talk about wages, ownership, and communism. So what actually happens when you institute a command economy and then a council republic? Well, when you create a command economy, you basically replace every capitalist in your building with bureaucrats on a one-for-one basis (assuming you were using public trading before). This will actually improve the productivity of your building because capitalists get x6 the basic wage for the building as wages, creating a large fixed cost to set against revenues, while bureaucrats only draw x4 the wages instead - thus, the building will make more money overall and you can afford to expand it more while still turning a profit. That extra profit then becomes dividends, part of which is skimmed off to join the investment pool and the rest of which is divided up amongst your bureaucrats to become money in the bank. On the downside, unlike capitalists bureaucrats don't get bonuses to how much they contribute to the investment pool from their dividends, so while they'll still contribute SOMETHING most of their dividend earnings are simply going to go to buying themselves enormous amounts of luxuries. This CAN increase the overall economy since it's still contributing to domestic demand, but it does mean that the investment pool becomes smaller, which in turn means that you the player don't have the same cushion of "free" funds with which to fund construction - and so a command economy, while more efficient at the production level, isn't able to grow as fast as a free market economy, and especially not as quickly as a laissez-faire economy which not only has capitalists pouring more of their dividends into investment but also comes with a huge loan interest decrease which effectively means that not only can you freely afford to spend more, you can even spend into debt without suffering as many ill-effects. Of course, if you have a strong, healthy economy you could possibly make up the difference with government taxation on the newly humming economy, but if you're not prepared for it and you're relying heavily on your investment pool to fund your construction sector switching to command may well cause a crash as you can no longer afford your old rate of growth, which in turn leads to economic shocks up and down the line as your construction sectors stop consuming resources your economy has come to depend on. That leaves aside the question of whether or not taxing richer economic activity is more efficient than capitalist investment in construction, which I'm not nearly mathy enough to answer.

But hey, that's one form of communism - what about council republics? Instead of having the government run everything, why not delegate power to the people and have everything owned through worker's collectives? Now things get even more interesting - instead of bureaucrats or capitalists, what ends up happening is that you end up hiring a slightly larger total amount of lower strata workers to replace the middle and upper classes that used to own the building, while now declaring that ALL lower strata workers for the building now own it and all share in the dividends. In terms of building productivity this means a big boost - lower strata worker wages are usually something like 1-1.5x the basic wage, which means that without capitalists or bureaucrats sucking up an outsized share of wages the building runs much more efficiently - again, not quite mathy enough to work out the details but as far as I can tell the increased amount of lower strata workers hired isn't enough to make their combined wages more expensive than a capitalist's 6x wages. But now the really interesting thing is what happens when the balance comes in, because after wages are spent all those higher profits become dividends and are shared out amongst every single lower strata worker. Instead of the profits of the factory mostly going to a small few people who become incredibly rich and spend that money on massive amounts of wacky luxuries, the profits instead become a bonus to a large number of people instead. Now, I haven't run with a council republic economy myself, but in theory depending on how strong your economy was when you made the switch, this might very well have some interesting effects that distort the consumer market as you no longer rely on a handful of ultra-rich to buy luxury products, but instead have a large mass of reasonably well-off people who individually consume fewer luxuries, but as a whole might actually end up consuming more if they're rich enough - and if not, then you've just shifted the consumer economy away from luxury goods and more towards basic goods of various kinds, which depending on how your economy has been structured up to now may very well caused some weird economic fluctuations as your luxury factories suddenly find themselves without as big a market as they're used to.

One other thing I want to mention as well - again, I actually haven't played around too much with being communist or socialist, but my understanding is that wage subsidies are based on a calculated "average wage." This means that in theory, if you're going to go heavy into welfare payments, you actually DON'T want excessively profitable buildings - or more accurately, you want EVENLY profitable buildings because a small handful of hyperprofitable buildings, relative to the size of the economy, can drive up the average wage enough that even gainfully employed people working at decent wages in less profitable buildings will end up receiving welfare subsidies to help them achieve the mythical "average" wage being skewed by the select wealthy few - and depending on the size of the economy and the degree to which the average wage is pushed up by your extremely profitable buildings, that can mean a massive drain on your treasury without a corresponding benefit to your economy as a whole. That sort of behavior might very well help explain why there's folks complaining here about how they went communist and found a combination of price shocks and welfare payouts to start crippling their formerly successful economy. Ideally in a fully communist economy you really want wages to be very nearly even across the board, with welfare payments only helping those few who happened to dip below the average, and even then paying out only a little at a time due to the low drop. Incidentally this also has some interesting implications for trade as well - people working in trade centers can become fabulously wealthy in large numbers if they score the right trade routes and there's no way to get them to split up their profits with the working masses, so if you run large trade routes as a communist nation you might very well find yourself paying out more and more in welfare as a result - which might explain why trade unionists tend to like more protectionist trade laws instead.

Now to flip things around, let's talk about capitalism a little. The benefit of capitalism as I described above is that it allows for more and faster growth, which is great for a young economy but eventually growth is going to be limited by demand - even if you have tons of funds in the investment pool, if no new buildings can be made profitable they're so much waste. So capitalism is going to need more and bigger markets to retain their competitive advantage, and odds are your domestic market can't sustain your rate of growth forever - and that's why capitalists love the free trade law, because if your OWN markets aren't big enough the solution is to dig into OTHER markets to find people to sell to, and having cheaper trade routes with larger volumes is just what you might need to do so. Possibly "trade route competitiveness" helps with that as well but to be honest I have no idea what that stat actually does, practically, and I can't find any tooltips that explain in further detail. The downside is that you'll end up very vulnerable to shocks if trade is interrupted, and there might very well come a point where labor starts becoming your bottleneck for growth instead of demand. It honestly might be interesting to play a hypercapitalist country focused on ultimate free trade and an attempt to establish treaty ports in literally every market of possible value to ensure permanent, uninterrupted trade no matter what at highly beneficial prices to your traders as they no longer have to suffer from tariffs. And if in so doing you manage to distort the economies of the world into becoming a market for your luxuries and an endless source of raw resources as nothing else is profitable, why, so much the better!

There's stuff like that everywhere you look if you dig deep enough, weird little interactions on a micro level with very big effects, some of which were almost certainly planned, others of which possibly were unintended. This kind of stuff is why whether I'm playing the game or not, it's dug its hooks right into my brain. Even if the overall simulation might end up pretty janky, the amount of thought that went into planning out this degree of interconnectedness is staggering, and in some ways it's honestly kinda impressive that it works as well as it does.

Mind you, it also leaves me deeply frustrated at the niggling inadequacies of the UI when it fails to provide information that it suggests exists. For example, how is the basic wage calculated? According to tooltips, a factory's basic wage depends on "the average wage needed to prevent losing wealth levels in the country (or possibly the state?)" - but given that this listed average wage can vary wildly from building to building even in the same state, what does that actually mean? No further tooltips exist to explain how this number was arrived at exactly. I know there's some relationship to trying to entice people to work there from other factories and wage competition, but what does that actually all mean? I'm not sure. Is there a way to see what factors are going into the overall birth rate, or how much of an effect the mortality rate is having on your population as a whole? Not really, just gotta investigate individual pops one by one I guess! Or how using the radical mapmode allows you to mouse over states to find how exactly how many radicals there are in a nation, but expanded out to be 71262 radicals instead of 71.2k radicals like they're presented in almost every other part of the game - and even knowing how many radicals are in a given state isn't as helpful without knowing what percentage of the population they represent. Or the aforementioned "trade route competitiveness" issue. All kinds of little weirdness and screwiness that makes it more frustrating than you'd think to dig into the guts of the game.

# ? Oct 31, 2022 04:26

DurosKlav: Jun 13, 2003; Enter your name pilot!

Gamerofthegame posted:

it's obnoxious but you can grind them down over time

there's two different ways you can cheese things, though. first is having two, or a few, swole generals and then they can tag team and you just cross you fingers/micro that the guy who just burned through morale in a fight doesn't go for round two, while their's has. this is finicky and mostly thought up by a friend tho.

the second is to navally invade or do anything else that causes a new front, which swiftly overextends most AI

2nd is what I usually do in wars, although I dont think its a cheese strat. Cant break their front line? Go in through the side door.

# ? Oct 31, 2022 04:32

Tomn: Aug 23, 2007; And the angel said unto him
"Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself."
But lo he could not. For the angel was hitting him with his own hands

Beefeater1980 posted:

How do naval blockades play into war support? Is it that if you�re raiding their convoys, it lowers their SOL and pushes up radicalism or is there more to it than that?

This might explain the opium war thing for the poster up above, if the UK is sinking all their convoys?

So the way convoy raiding works is that it doesn't directly lower SOL - instead, what it does is reduce effective market access to a whole bunch of states - every state with a port, possibly? Not sure if it has much impact on inland states. It might also have effects on trade routes as well. The effects are fairly subdued at first, with a successful major raid knocking off a few percentage points of market access, but if you can effectively keep it up potentially you can really knock down market access across the board, and that could really gently caress up an economy already stressed by conscription - and once you've done that, well, there's your radicals! Doubly so if convoy raiding affects trade routes as well, which could see vital imports/exports reduced in volume.

# ? Oct 31, 2022 04:37

Stux: Nov 17, 2006

yeah in a council republic, once you get everyones sol up to where the upper class are in some nations, you get an obscene market demand for luxury clothes etc.

a lot of my late game eco building was endless silk dye production and luxury clothing and the infastructure around that. the porcelain is only as fufilled as it is because i switched every glass factory into it relatively early and just built tons of them for my glass requirements. my regular clothes demand was only 2k higher than luxury.

# ? Oct 31, 2022 04:43

CuddleCryptid: Jan 11, 2013; Things could be going better

Traxis posted:

The way combat works is a general will be selected at random and then the number of troops will roll between 1 and the max they are commanding with additional reinforcements between 1-10. So 5 divisions of 20 would have a much lower average combat width than 2 with 50.

E: Forgot to mention there is also currently a bug that gives a larger penalty to the number of troops rolled by the attacker than intended:

That makes more sense for why my 50 member army seemed to only squeeze in four soldiers in every battle.

# ? Oct 31, 2022 05:13

Demon Of The Fall: May 1, 2004; Nap Ghost

Playing a chill Jamaica game and enjoying numbers going up. We have world renowned glassmaking and food production industries, with people flocking from all over the place to enjoy our expanding businesses.

I had a bunch of Chinese move over to where they are like 30% of my pops, and now opium demand has skyrocked. Stay off drugs you silly immigrants!

# ? Oct 31, 2022 05:13

Lawman 0: Aug 17, 2010

I tried the "no native uprisings" mod and I'm pretty satisfied with how much it cut down on colonial speed and border gore.

# ? Oct 31, 2022 05:50

Arrath: Apr 14, 2011

Traxis posted:

The way combat works is a general will be selected at random and then the number of troops will roll between 1 and the max they are commanding with additional reinforcements between 1-10. So 5 divisions of 20 would have a much lower average combat width than 2 with 50.

E: Forgot to mention there is also currently a bug that gives a larger penalty to the number of troops rolled by the attacker than intended:

What file is that from?

# ? Oct 31, 2022 06:04

Tomn: Aug 23, 2007; And the angel said unto him
"Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself."
But lo he could not. For the angel was hitting him with his own hands

Other reasons to dive into pop details from time to time:

There's some kind of zany life story here.

# ? Oct 31, 2022 06:35

Traxis: Jul 2, 2006

Arrath posted:

What file is that from?

/common/script_values/command_values.txt

There is a mod that changes it and sets it to a fixed amount: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2880945323

# ? Oct 31, 2022 06:52

Goa Tse-tung: Feb 11, 2008; ;3; Yams Fan

Tomn posted:

There's some kind of zany life story here.

paying tribute to the spirit of *googles* Loch Batang Ai

# ? Oct 31, 2022 06:56

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# ? May 29, 2024 18:27

Blorange: Jan 31, 2007; A wizard did it

It's odd that some of the B-side production options like Hardwood, Orchards and Wine don't scale with technology at all. My arms and furniture industries are devouring the world's supply of hardwoods, and the only way to get more is to conquer Indonesia.

# ? Oct 31, 2022 07:31

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Victoria 3: the 1960 german unification play comes with a few complications

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