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I'll probably roll France for a first game, they're large and powerful enough to be forgiving of mistakes with room for expansion and the obvious goal of knocking those arrogant Anglos down a peg. Good enough for learning the game, plus I have a soft spot for their geopolitical position.
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May 25, 2021 10:09
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Also just checked out the Vickynomics pamphlet and I'm kinda excited for something that hasn't been talked about much - trade fleets. V2's magical "if a good is produced anyone in the market anywhere can buy it" economy always suffered from that particular weakness and I look forward to a world in which a naval arms race matters because you're trying as hard as you can to protect your trade fleets and raid those of your enemies in the event of war, and in which industry needs to be devoted to shipbuilding to increase the scope of your economy and bring in more imports while selling more exports.
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May 25, 2021 10:31
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really queer Christmas posted:Mexico lost all their prestige from losing to a bunch of yokels in Texas. They needed a lot more painters imo. I mean, by those standards Rome and Greece were great powers right up to WW1.
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May 25, 2021 16:45
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Cockblocktopus posted:I really appreciate that there's a way to stay relevant as a mid-sized country in V2 by pumping your prestige and the trade-off seems pretty obvious: you can pile up nice paintings but then a mid-sized power declares war on you, tears through your obsolete troops, and takes half your country in the peace deal. The Austrian experience! (Sort of)
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May 25, 2021 17:44
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Mans posted:playing as communist Russia and having to deal with creating every single factory myself was hell. I literally let the social democrats coup me just so I could focus on other things. I hope this changes in Vic 3 I always, always went liberal in Vicky 2 for this exact reason. AI capitalists may be dumb but I'll take AI inefficiency over micromanagement hell (unless playing a really small country I guess). And honestly, even though they did a lot of dumb stuff and I'd occasionally be pulling my hair out over their silliness overall the economy still seemed to do all right with them.
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May 29, 2021 17:05
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It's also worth noting that it's not just tea and it's not just the British - China historically traded large quantities of tea, silk, spices, and porcelain out to the west in exchange for silver for long ages. Romans were complaining about how their hard-earned gold and silver were getting traded away for "useless luxuries." A large strain of Victorian thinking was that if only the Chinese could be persuaded to open up there'd actually be a huge market for Western wares to be sold that could reverse the balance of trade, only those mean ol' mandarins were unfairly restricting free trade and preventing everyone from prospering, instead hoarding all the silver for themselves!
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Jun 2, 2021 17:49
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VostokProgram posted:I don't know much about the raj (even though I should). Why did they need to garrison it so heavily? In case of rebellion? Among other things, fear of another colonial power (say, Russia) trying to take it over.
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Jun 3, 2021 00:20
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Weren't a good chunk of secret alliances secret as much because of the potential domestic political backlash as because of the greater diplomatic repercussions?
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Jun 5, 2021 01:19
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:It was the opposite of secret. It was an over engineered intricate web of Bismarckian diplomacy that eventually everyone pushed a little too far and it all collapsed in on itself. Alliances of the time were primarily a form of deterrence - that’s less useful when it’s secret. You had to know this was coming.
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Jun 5, 2021 01:39
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Reveilled posted:When the Portuguese come for you, it will be for this post They have the dimension of an empire.
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Jun 10, 2021 16:42
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Kaza42 posted:This is a politically loaded map? What's contentious about it, it looks like a typical landmass comparison If I recall correctly it was put out by a nationalist government and the title translates to something like "Portugal is not a small country!", which it accomplishes by...overlaying its colonial holdings onto Europe. Cough cough.
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Jun 10, 2021 16:48
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fuf posted:I hope so but I was reading "countries start the game either Unrecognized or Recognized" from the dev diary as a bit ambiguous on that point. I don't think that line particularly suggests anything hardcoded? If anything it suggests otherwise - if you START in a given state that implies the possibility of change, otherwise you'd just say "countries are either Unrecognized or Recognized."
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Feb 2, 2022 14:17
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Ever wonder why steak tartare is called that? Now you know.
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Feb 3, 2022 02:38
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Vagabong posted:At least we got a lot of cool concept art out of it Yeah, I think the guys doing the paintings for the dev diary headers have done a fantastic job. I particularly like how they've generally focused on PEOPLE, rather than the big fancy Victorian tech. It adds an important humanizing touch to what might otherwise been an industrial game about making numbers bigger, reminding you that it wasn't just an industrial revolution going on but a societal one as well and that people were watching massive changes happening to their world while both just trying to live in it as well as trying to understand it. Indirectly makes me hopeful for the rest of the game since if such a clear vision was communicated to the art team, that same coherent vision would presumably be driving the design team as well.
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Apr 3, 2022 03:31
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The Cheshire Cat posted:Yeah this is why to date I've never actually played as the UK in Victoria 2. It's like, they've basically already won? There's not really anything interesting to do other than keep getting bigger. Germany and Italy and other formables have a much more interesting narrative arc. I never had the time or energy for it but I always thought a Vicky 2 legislative LP of the UK could be interesting. Most powerful country in the world, but what will you do with that power and how do you want to shape society with it? Putting that question up to goon democracy seems a good way of injecting interest into the concept. Also probably of rapidly no longer being the most powerful country in the world but like I said, interesting!
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Apr 11, 2022 22:13
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Victoria 3: Good thing there are infinite whales in the ocean
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Apr 19, 2022 02:07
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Popoto posted:You can be nice for any reasons you want, they're still not your friends. I hope Wiz still remembers my Creteposting fondly at least. 
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Apr 21, 2022 21:48
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I found this bit in the dev diary interesting:quote:This is where we've decided to engage with our own revolution mechanics in order to create a more dynamic American Civil War. If the Slavery Debate Journal Entry is active when a revolution over slavery erupts, the revolutionary government will turn into a secessionist government. Secession is determined by what states join the radicalized movements for preserving slavery or banning slavery, which means the strength of the secessionist government will vary depending on which IGs align themselves with the radicalized movement prior to the outbreak of revolution. If pro-slavery Interest Groups had been empowered again and again prior to their radicalization and revolution, then secessionists will control a large number of states, but if those same Interest Groups had been suppressed and their influence limited time and time again, then their government will be far smaller when war breaks out. Sounds to me like this is saying the most moral and effective way of preparing for the Civil War is making GBS threads on slaveowners every chance you get until they're too weak to effectively resist in the coming war. Which I'm pretty OK with.
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Apr 21, 2022 22:55
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DrSunshine posted:What if some designer decided to go all-in on the ship designer as the main focus of the game, and made a game all about designing spaceships? The combat, economy, etc, stuff is all abstracted, and your score depends entirely on the ship designs your shipyard comes up with! Design ships, send them off, get rewarded for better designs that perform better and get access to stronger weapons and bigger hulls!! There's Starship Corporation which sounds like almost exactly that, but reviews are mixed and I've not played it myself. But yes, a well-done Rule the Stars could be neat.
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May 17, 2022 00:59
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oscarthewilde posted:(much akin to the actual nazi's in post-WW2 west-germany!) Didn't the scandal about Nazis in government lead to most of the Nazis getting purged in West Germany, while the same thing not happening in East Germany lead to them staying on? I.E. the reason why far-right parties do better in former East Germany than in West Germany today. Come to think of it, to bring things back around to the actual thread topic, I wonder how the AI is programmed as far as garden-tending goes? A lot of the game mechanics are designed to allow you to steer your society the way you want it - but what does the AI try to do? Is a conservative monarchy always going to try and maintain the power of traditionalists? Are there randomly assigned AI personalities that strive for industrialization, prioritize militarism, or what have you? Are historical nations assigned historical AI priorities to aim towards what they tended to try to do? Are there various factors that determine a given AI's personalities sand goes? Does the AI just flow with the whims of whichever powerful interest groups that exist in their nation without trying to prune towards a specific goal? Or will the AI actively try to crush internal interest groups if they feel they conflict with the AI's goals? In other words, if an AI nation finds a whole bunch of fascists in their government (the game's scope still goes late enough for fascists to be a thing in-game, right?), how will it react? What determines if they try to suppress them, appease them, or support them?
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May 28, 2022 03:56
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Taking inspiration from Stellaris's Permanent Employment civic, I see.
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Jun 27, 2022 20:32
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Surprised nobody here has mentioned Italy, seems like a fun potential challenge for unification with less raw economic potential than the more overpowering Germans. Not sure which of the Italian states to go for but any might be neat.
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Aug 15, 2022 13:22
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Been reading a history of China and I’m kinda curious - will base Vicky 3 be able to simulate the Qing imploding into warlords and revolutionary governments? It’s not a dealbreaker if it doesn’t, given that such events would be well at the end of a play through and have a good chance of not happening depending on how the game shook out, but I do wonder if the base systems can accommodate that kind of splintering (and attempted reunification).
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Aug 30, 2022 16:56
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Hellioning posted:two button warfare Thank you, I’m now imagining Vicky 3’s warfare systems taking cues from One Finger Death Punch.
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Aug 30, 2022 20:05
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I think one thing to keep in mind about the warfare system is that so far the stream only showed off a small nation fighting small wars, with only one general and one admiral to move around. The system as described seems designed for handling larger wars, where you start having to decide which generals to assign where to do what keeping in mind not only which general is right for the role but also where their troops are drawn from, what political effects might result from a general becoming a war hero, which fronts you want to focus on, etc etc. it’s possible that a major Great Power war would give the system much more meat to chew on than the equivalent of Great Britain beating up the Lenape. I’ll also note that the economy seems to tie into war in interesting ways - I was struck by how a small brushfire war nevertheless drove up debt to nearly half of the Dutch credit limit, causing consequences and constraints on their actions for almost the entire rest of the stream. I note also that this seemed somewhat self-inflicted - they opted to promote their general so they could mobilize and deploy the entirety of their army, but they probably could have knocked over Brunei with only half the army for less cost. The war itself may have been straightforward, but the knock-on effects were not and I don’t know if they were actually drawing much real benefit from their conquest by the end of the stream. Lady Radia posted:papal communism honestly sounds rad as hell Taiping Tianguo with Western characteristics.
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Aug 31, 2022 09:22
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Takanago posted:This is why we should replace the streams with elaborate forum lps where people can get together and vote for exactly what they want Wiz to do. it could be like a virtual parliament... I feel like such a LP might benefit very well from being set in the birthplace of democracy, Greece!
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Aug 31, 2022 22:18
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I've honestly thought before that Victoria 2 could have made for a good British parliamentary LP - goons have control of the greatest and most powerful empire in the world at the dawn of an era of new possibilities. What will they do with it? Could have been an interesting contrast from something like Crete or Azerbaijan where they scrabbled upwards from tiny power to major imperial contender and instead simply started with all the power in the world to gently caress up or direct into weird social projects or internal squabbles with each other as they saw fit. With Victoria 3's increased emphasis on tending one's social garden, such a thing would be even more potentially interesting if the game lives up to its promise.
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Aug 31, 2022 23:19
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You know, now that it's been brought up I wonder if Vicky 3 models changes to subsistence output season by season or even year by year? Because while for in-game purposes it might work as a stable "holding cell" for non-productive pops, in reality one of the big things about subsistence farming is that there's so little surplus that a few bad years (or even one really bad year!) could knock a lot of people out and cause famines unless central granaries were opened up. Like, you talk about whether or not a nation consisting entirely of subsistence farms can grow its population and the answer is "Well that really depends on the weather and whether or not there's any major military/political upheavals disrupting normal farming routines, don't it?" Like, if you think subsistence farming is a stable no-growth equilibrium look at the Chinese dynasties and just how many were brought down by, among other things, a drought or other agricultural disaster breaking out at the worst time. For that matter I wonder if the other agricultural buildings are weather-reliant as well, or if there's some degree of randomization in their annual output at least.
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Sep 8, 2022 04:40
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To be honest, I like Stellaris a lot personally because as limited as the pop and ideology system there was, it was the closest thing to Victoria’s pop system in a modernized Paradox UI and almost the only modern Pdox game that allowed you to shape societies in a meaningful way. There’s a bunch of emergent narratives available just from watching other AI nations shift in ideology, and I still remember the one time I played an aggressive aristocratic slaving empire that, upon conquering a broad new swathe of alien territory, allowed them to remain as the upper class of their own planets while steadily shifting my own imperial pops into the new planet until I had enough in place to change the laws and depose the old alien leadership in favor of my own people. So yeah given all that even if it’s jank, and it probably will be, V3 is an easy preorder for me what with being pretty much exactly what I’ve been groping towards in various games.
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Sep 12, 2022 15:22
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The whole point of subsistence farming is that you can provide for all your own needs, albeit at a subsistence level. This isn’t necessarily true of poorly paid wage labor.
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Sep 14, 2022 14:17
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Hmm, a whole bunch of new posts in the Victoria thread all of a sudden, I wonder what that's about? Some new revelation? Major debate over some aspect of gameplay? Oh it's just Raenir Salazar being incredibly tedious and earning his avatar again.
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Sep 14, 2022 23:04
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MuffinsAndPie posted:The Paradox game thing where you don't want to play the game because you're waiting for the new patch, but instead it's you can't play Vicky2 while you wait for 3, it's finally gotten to me. Honestly, I tried firing up Vicky 2 again a little while ago and I just couldn't do it. It's kinda impressive how far Paradox has come in terms of UI and design coherence - one of the things I thought interesting about the V3 streams was that it was still more or less possible for a watcher who hadn't played the game to understand what was happening and even to critique the decisions the streamers were making. Figuring out Vicky 2 cold (when you haven't played in a while) even when you have the game is...considerably more difficult, the UI is actively hostile, and a lot of the game mechanics tend towards the unintuitive at best. "Yeah so OK you're playing a second string power so you have an army but you can't actually afford it so what you need to do is to raise taxes to 100% (don't worry, it's inefficient so you're not ACTUALLY taking 100%) and meanwhile cut supplies to the army to the bone (don't worry you don't really NEED the army right now) and then accumulate funds to build a factory and when you have enough just force yourself into a reactionary party because of your country's parties that's the only one that allows state capitalism and allows you to build factories yourself instead of waiting for your non-existent capitalists to do it, and by the way you've been researching art for Maximum Prestige this whole time, right? Otherwise you'll have issues on the world market, just saying."
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Sep 17, 2022 18:29
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Lady Radia posted:It’s a production method and not a law IIRC. Privately owned Vs. Market/publicly owned vs collectively owned Vs who knows what else I have the vague memory that the production methods are gated by laws, though? I.E. You can't use collective production methods unless you've passed Communist laws.
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Sep 20, 2022 01:46
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The main thing I remember from V2 was that I rarely engaged in wars at all because they were a giant pain in the rear end to fight even if you knew you could win and late-game eternal hellbattles where two sides kept feeding mobilized conscripts into one gigantic knockdown brawl in a single province. War was the least interesting aspect of V2. The only time I thought there was an interesting war was when I was playing the US, cut the bureaucratic budget significantly when I discovered myself overstaffed, and found myself facing wave after wave of rebellions by angry unemployed bureaucrats, and that was only interesting because of the social aspects, not any part of actually fighting the wars.
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Sep 28, 2022 20:30
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CharlestheHammer posted:To be honest the person who builds the better military economy winning seems kind of really dumb? War might as well not even be there if it obviously doesn’t matter I mean, rewarding careful preparation for war over some brilliant battlefield maneuvers seems in line with the period? Prussia didn't become a military superpower because they had Frederick the Great 2, they won because they'd invested heavily in their military and their military staff, developments that took decades to prepare and nurture and to maintain in the face of changing technology. To be honest throughout most of Vicky's period I'm having trouble thinking of any wars that were decided because of a single brilliant general outmaneuvering his foes to achieve stunning upsets - some generals could be more or less competent but it was the development of the overall military as an institution that decided wars, not one guy drawing lines on a map a la Napoleon. And sure it matters - how you prosecute the war and what costs it incurs makes a big difference to a game focused around the economy and politics. Choosing to win the war with a massive mobilization that results in your economy in utter chaos despite victory is a choice. Deciding to only mobilize a handful of regiments to keep costs down and getting surprisingly curbstomped by a minor is a choice. Assigning your best general, who also incidentally happens to be a fascist, to your most important front and thus improving the stature of fascists is a choice. Deciding that a peace where you cede a few border territories is better than a drawn-out war that you could possibly prosecute to a victory at the cost of losing an entire generation of men is a choice. The interesting question that Vicky asks isn't "How to fight a war?" but "What impact does the war have, and what will it cost?" That's something worth modeling even if the war itself is fairly hands-off.
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Sep 28, 2022 23:11
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SnoochtotheNooch posted:I’m not saying the old system was the perfect balance, but that old system is why there is so much intense interest in the new version. Admittedly the micro of a huge multi continental empire was unfun, there can be improvements. I'm not sure I'd agree with that. Victoria 2 was many things and held many points of interest, but I don't think the military was ever really one of them for me. It was just an adaptation of the EU system, which was itself functional but not anything really standout to me. The most interesting aspect of Victoria 2 warfare was the mobilization system and how it tied in to the population and economy, how getting a bunch of your troops killed could actively impact both a future generation of soldiers and your existing manpower - and these are things that are still relevant to the Victoria 3 combat system and if anything modeled even more closely now that mobilization isn't an all-or-nothing deal anymore. The naval system was also pretty disappointing - in wartime, it was difficult to employ a navy to any real effect, and blockades were both a giant pain in the rear end to micromanage (especially if the enemy had any kind of navy at all) as well as not being all that effective. The only worthwhile part of the naval system was the way technological changes made keeping up with the Joneses vital for being a contender for naval power as well as how fleets were an important part of national prestige, but otherwise I can't say I miss moving fleets around (and I'd argue that the EU system of naval movement into sea zones and combat is fundamentally bad at modeling the fluid and mobile nature of naval warfare anyways and the new V3 system might honestly be better at given its more hands-off nature - we'll see). Your mileage might vary, but for my own part I don't know if there was really that much about Victoria 2's combat that generated much interest to begin with. It was there, it was functional, and it could lead to wacky results, but it wasn't anything special.
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Sep 29, 2022 01:54
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Goast posted:that makes me think how they missed an opportunity not adding a co-op to v2 multiplayer "Modernized China's economy" and "microfreak" in V2 sounds like more or less the same thing to me. Especially under Communism. Admittedly a different kind of micro but still.
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Sep 30, 2022 02:14
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chadbear posted:Not having little soldier men to click around will lead to fewer people moan about NATO counters so that’s a win Sorry, I don’t frequent the Paradox forums much - are there actually people who wanted NATO counters in Victoria 2?
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Sep 30, 2022 10:40
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A Buttery Pastry posted:I think a simple way to balance adding more war goals for yourself would be having casualties and economic damage justify additional war goals. As long as the required damage is high enough, that should do a lot to prevent gaming the system, while still allowing a Great War equivalent to escalate over time. Other than that, I guess doing a diplomatic play to get another country to enter the war on your side should be another way to expand war goals, though obviously those goals would reward your ally and not yourself. Mussolini posted:I only need a few thousand dead so that I can sit at the peace conference as a man who has fought.
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Oct 2, 2022 01:11
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Paradox has mostly gotten better about having functional releases. The games themselves may or may not be well filled-out, but we're a ways away from the horrific bug-ridden "wait a few months for basic playability" of early Paradox.
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Oct 4, 2022 18:32
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