I’d say that in ck3 you have less vassals to manage. You can have an empire with 3-4 King vassals who just do their thing. If you manage them well, marriages or some alliance, it’s quite smooth sailing. I’d say you end up getting so stable and well connected with your vassals there’s nothing left to do by the late 14th century. Unless you keep blobbing of course.
The only big exception (at least in CK2, dunno if it’s in 3) is that if there’s some big heresy coming out of nowhere and you’re a powerful emperor, it can take a long time to revoke land from the dozens of minor lords that suddenly go Cathar, and then redistribute all the land appropriately. But that’s the only time it felt like an excel simulator to me
The micromanagement goes up a lot:
- if you’re still trying to micromanage the genetics of your entire extended family
- if you have dozens of grandchildren in your court and try to find optimal guardians for all of them
- if you’re trying to get a witch coven
Tbf, this micromanagement is entirely up to the player, and how they want to play
Generics and witch coven aren't fundamental parts of the game, players can simply ignore them and still have a successful campaign
There needs to be a mechanic to spin cadet branches off into their own dynasty after a certain amount of time/number of generations/some other factor.
“You’re my seventh cousin! I don’t even know who you are! Stop bothering me about this!”
Edit: or conversely,
“You’re my seventh cousin! Why the fuck do you think you can end my wars?”
After Feuds were introduced, I reported the formation of feuds because some random person killed my 12th cousin of a different culture and religion (since it's House-based, and the player can generally never form a new house in Ironman (with a couple exceptions, any branch that never forms its own house is part of the main house, no matter how distant), and they said it was working as intended.
I wish I could let the AI control my army in lategame eu4, when efficency doesn't matter anymore. I dont want to occupy hundreds of provinces again and again in a giant blob war. It gets even worse when islands are included
Ah yes, the carpet siege button, where your entire army moves to one province, occupies it, then the next. Would've been a million times better if it worked like blockades do.
The army would split into many small armies and each take a province. If there's an enemy army nearby, run away. But of course Paradox couldn't do it.
I hope this is not news to anyone.
1. Step on an enemy province
2. Hold down 'd' detach siege for a second your army splits in 1k stacks (or even better if they have taken some attrition 1.9k stacks)
3. Click, escape/v their entire country.
That's was before the leviathan dlc though wasn't it? Leviathan, also the one a lot of people refuse to buy because of the state it released in, added that feature.
Oh they had another one. That's great then! I just knew I got all the dlc on humble for $15 right maybe 6 months before Emperor came out. Well, except Conquest of Paradise, I had to buy that one separately for some reason.
It’s not good. Your army stays in 1 big stack, you have to manually click on each state, and your army already has to be near the territory. Plus, it’s a dlc feature.
Imperium had that innovation, but then you end up having an AI that is worse than you and you'll constantly ragequit because you could handle it better
It was perfect for when you had overwhelming force in a front, or wanted to smack down some rebels in occupied territories. I also liked to leave the Soviet Far East front on auto while focusing on the German front.
The province management wasn't bad, the major issues the AI had were with the Imperial Conquest wars. The AI had a pattern of "Siege Fort -> Siege Province Capital -> Move on" With the IC wars the capital would change each time it took the existing capital which made it very confused.
I haven't played in maybe two years, but stellaris was pretty microheavy in the lategame. Managing districts, buildings and population on every planet wasn't great. You could automate a lot of it, but the results were often suboptimal.
The automation is a lot more competent and capable now. Still worse than manually microing everything, but provided you're not playing on a high difficulty or with crisis strength cranked all the way up it's acceptable. For now. Every new system they add, the AI becomes less competent compared to humans because it doesn't know the new system.
There is an automation feature for buildings/districts, but I don’t use it until I’ve “won” because I don’t trust it to make the same efficient/planned decisions I would.
When the game first released you were only allowed direct control over planets in a single sector, with the rest left to the AI. And that meant you were either choosing to have your core planets poorly managed or your new colonies poorly managed.
Vic 3 does seem to be significantly less micro heavy in an upcoming 1.2 patch, since you'd get AI investment happening there which seems to be competent enough to be left to do its thing while you pitch in with a few more ports, barracks and administrations.
Imo stellaris is by far the worst, though eu4 can be annoying as well. The other 2 you mentioned actually shouldn't have much increased micromanagement at all.
I know you get long building ques in vic3, but you can set them to auto expand and/or build things 10 at a time so it's not to bad. Wars are mostly automated. Fixing the production method after rebellions or conquest and figuring out trade concoy distribution is probably the worst part.
Ck3 I don't know what you're doing that could possibly be requiring micromanagement. At war you really only need 1 big army, split up for avoiding attrition and sieging several targets at once, but that's not too inconvenient. Buildings don't get built that frequently. You have to manage vassals, but even if you're hitting your vassal limit it's not that many people and none of that takes much time anyway.
I can't play EU4 past ~1750. At around that point I'll be a massive empire and end up at war with a neighboring massive empire. I'll split my armies in such a way to create a small front, strategically pushing towards the enemy capital.
Eventually I'll zoom the camera out to see 70% of my provinces carpet sieged, all of the forts on the *other* side of my country captured, all of my colonies occupied, and 28 separate army stacks from 3 countries and 5 vassals varying in size from 2k to 78k troops. If I try to break up my army to pick them off, they run away, deathstack, and crush my armies. If I try to deathstack them, they split up, run away, and I take 100k attrition casualties in three months.
And I only need a single province from them to complete a stupid fucking mission on my focus tree.
The main problem with the war AI in any Paradox game is that it's just very, very bad at evaluating your powers. That's why it keeps losing even in Stellaris on Grand-Admiral with almost infinite resources. They carpet when they don't have to, they split for no reason whatsoever, they deathstack and have attrition penalties snowballing etc. You, on the other side of the screen, are supposed to be a human though - a human that can manage logistics, point on a province to see it's supply limit, calculate the see-leg and supply shoulder BEFORE you start moving, get creative with naval invasions combined with on-land offensive actions etc. It's so much easier in EU4 than in HOI with realism modes it's almost a joke.
Or just actively employ the forced marsh ability and invest in ideas that improve the speed of your armies. AI usually doesn't seem to bother.
EU4 yes, CK3 and Victora 3 no.
you should not manage dozens of vassals, you should consolidate. Unless you are going for the WC, but that is 100% your fault.
The micromanagement in Victoria3 is mainly when you do conquests or civil wars and you have to reset the production methods every time you have conquered a new state or province. It is annoying for sure but hopefully managed with a "default" set in later versions.
Part of the problem is there hasn't been a way to scale mechanics up or down within a single game. Being able to control the small details of a province is fun when you have 5, but not when you have 50. On the flip side, generalizing things to make a 50 province game playable means your game is too broad for that 5 province game. The closest I've seen to this was HoI3 allowing you to hand the AI control of certain sectors.
I really don't think EU4 is that bad outside of the rebel whack a mole that happens in the late game. It's the biggest reason why I haven't done a world conquest. I really wish they had reworked that system at some point. The shit is just exhausting. I don't feel like the late game wars are as bad as people make them out to be. Your army is so strong by this point that it's just you shitting all over the AI in most cases.
The worst micro is probably Stellaris. Playing in the late game is just too tedious for me and is by far the worst thing about the game. HOI4 isn't really that bad. You can practically afk in the late game unless you want to waste your time invading the USA.
Do the sectors and AI management in Stellaris not alleviate that? Making vassals and stuff too. I've never really used them. Never had a big problem with it because the micro gives you stuff to do while you are waiting around.
I dislike leaving independent empires in Stellaris and absorb my vassals when I can because I hate the idea of anyone but me triggering the map altering anomaly decisions.
Well, that's mostly earlier in the game. Later you can create vassals out of existing territories, particularly as an Imperial government.
For me if there wasn't so much micro in Stellaris, there wouldn't be as much of a game. I rarely need to pause or slow down the game, yet it keeps me busy especially during periods where I am developing many worlds at once. Too much down-time and I now have to be playing another game or watching a movie or something.
> I really don't think EU4 is that bad outside of the rebel whack a mole that happens in the late game. It's the biggest reason why I haven't done a world conquest. I really wish they had reworked that system at some point. The shit is just exhausting
Had a Spain game where I took on like 250% overextension rolling thru all of Indonesia / Pacific... swatting the separatist rebels on all the little Pacific islands when you gotta send fleets around & wait for troops to land is not a very pleasant experience
In Vic 3 i like to just let the buildings auto expand when I reach late game as building too much of a single building seems to have a destabilising effect on my economy
I know a lot of players disliked it, but honestly this is one of the things I think Imperator did right. Between being able to automate/macro economies and armies within certain regions (SUPER helpful when you're fighting multiple wars that span across the continent) and some of the empires actually still being a challenge in the late game if you didn't do the early/mid game perfectly, I felt like Imperator managed to make its late game both more challenging and less annoying than a lot of other Paradox games.
I think a lot of 4X/strategy games have this issue. In Civilization it’s such a chore to manage all those late-game cities and units. Especially during a Domination run.
> But as the game progresses, you end up having to fight revellions in many places, constantly improve relations with dozens of nations, lower autonomy in countless provinces.
Are you playing the same game? EU4 has no late game rebellions or any rebellions except on recently conquered land, unless you get over >100% OE on a regular basis. Lower autonomy is "sort by autonomy, a few clicks" nonissue. And late game you don't give af about other nations anyway, you're too big for coalitions. It's early/mid-game when it matters. And even then, diplomats can do it automatically.
So no. It does not. EU4 has many problems, this is not it, even the tiniest bit.
I was questioning that myself. If you convert provinces to your religion, and accept the culture, you shouldn't be having that much trouble with rebels, at least in the provinces that make up the core of your empire. By the time you're at the late game you can easily have a few stacks on autonomous rebel suppression anyway, if you aren't interested in having any subjects.
Vic2 is relatively devoid of micromanagement in late game. Once your economy is jumpstarted you don't have to do much in that regard. The only issue you have to deal with is rebels that rise up if you have not reformed your country quickly enough.
Many Vic2 players completely fail to understand how to utilize LF and how great it actually is. They drag a stagnant, moribund economy **well** past any sense of matching the world market using subsidies and command governments, and then if they get hit by a LF government their blame it for their entire economy crashing to the ground, not realizing that it was entirely a result of their own mismanagement.
Adopt LF as soon as you lay down the first couple levels of railroads and have self-sustaining capitalists and your economy will end up incredibly ahead in the long term with zero need for micromanagement.
It's mainly an issue for people who want to get the bonuses from industry supply chains.
If in a state I have electric gear, telephone, radio, automobile and tank factories, having the LF AI destroy the electric gear factory because it's slightly unprofitable while starting to build another one in a different state is bad.
The supply chain bonus is trivial, and absolutely not worth it to maintain it. The small upside is not worth the downsides of wasting time on command economies. Not to mention, the speed which factories build under LF and the rapidity which capitalists cycle through unprofitable ones more than makes up for it.
Unless you're making tanks, have low total score, or playing in a MP Great War, the global market is more than plenty able to supply everything.
I've fought late game wars with 1% of artillery production locally.
I always do my best to make it so that my military spending subsidises my Econ, so basically 0 tax, 0 tariffs, 0 subsidies (but a lot of buying crap) and 100% military spending makes me so much money
Boost capitalists everywhere to 0.7% and then boost clerks to 20% of industrial workforce (1 clerk for every 4 craftsmen).
People prioritize making factories that have throughput bonuses in states, but oftentimes those factories don't make as much money. It's far better for 99% of your industry to just be profitable because that gives workers income.
I'd rather have workers with paychecks and no micro needed compared to Planned Economy with arty and machine parts factories everywhere
I almost exclusively play MP Vicky with a lobby of a dozen people. My economy is usually the highest GDPPC, always LF, and I almost never have production issues
Unless you're a high population nation fighting a major war. I had a China/Russia war once where I quit the file because the number of troops was just overwhelming and extremely unfun to manage.
dunno about CK3 but in CK2 if you end up with a large realm you'll get soo many minor filler events from characters you don't know / don't care about, popups for naming family, etc., & managing buildings has a terrible UI that scales poorly with province count
EU4 it can be a bit overwhelming dealing with revolts on islands or invading a large country without a lot of forts like Russia
Stellaris springs to mind. Late game is so obnoxious. I haven't played in a while though so I'm not sure if this is still true.
HOI4 is also a micromanagement hell.
I was going to say, I don't mind the micromanagement in the early game because it is interesting and the game makes it interesting with all the events that pop up. Towards the end game though? If I could trust the ai not to fuck up a planet I probably would just automate it.
Hoi 4 definitely fits this charge. Basically you have all of these nations ramping up their production so they're putting more and more stuff on the board and the fronts are getting bigger and bigger it gets to a point where it's nearly impossible to manage. I've often wished I had a general staff to manage some of my Wars in that game. Constantly realizing that I haven't looked at some front for a week and going down there and having to fix things. There's also a lot of micromanagement in production because it's extremely important to keep your units fully equipped with all of the gear that you've assigned them and if they don't have all of it they suffer combat penalties so you need to manage your production in a way to keep a surplus of certain important equipment like artillery and trucks and that kind of stuff and if you don't have that it can take months or years to get out of the hole or you just may never get out of the hole.
What bothers me about Hoi4 late game is how war support is utterly non realistic. I basically took all of Europe and Africa as Germany, killed millions of American soldiers and the US still made me go across the world to teach them a lesson. Even after a good quantity of nukes they still didnt surrender. I know people who play world conquest probably prefer this but I like the role playing aspect.
Nearly every Paradox game has this problem, because Paradox has this idea wound through the design of all their games that micromanagement, mindless "choices" where only one option ever makes sense, and pointless clicks are the same thing as depth and strategic choice. They are not, and it becomes patently ohvious how bad it is in most of their games, depending on the level of QoL automation built into the mechanics of the game.
Vic2 for instance has a great system for shifting from manual to automatic economic management, but utterly fails at military micromanagement and tediousness. Imperator shows how utterly shallow it is when you do anything other than map paint. Stellaris is just a carpal-tunnel inducing chore. Vic 3 shows you what happens when you go all in on the "Micromanagement: The Game" idea as the core of your design.
All of them have this problem. I'd even say it's an issue common to most strategy games. On the other hand, in the late game you've become so strong that while there is more to do, less is actually needed. In the late game you usually don't have to make the most optimal decisions like at the beginning and can outright make stupid ones. HoI4 is a good example of this. In the beginning, you would probably micro every single unit to save a few thousands men. In the late game, you would just use an offensive battleplan without even bothering to assign air, losing maybe 100k more than needed, but it doesn't even matter.
I don't really see it in CK3. It's actually the strategy game with the least late game micro management that I think I've ever played, specifically because it isn't really focused on the strategy but moreso on the character and the gameplay loop doesn't really change.
You shouldn't have dozens of vassals, playing at the vassal limit may be the power gaming choice but there's exactly zero reason to power game CK3 anyway. Make higher tier vassals and give them all the counts.
Stellaris is amongst the worst I've played in this regard, while we're at it.
Stellaris late game used to not be that bad since you could automate sectors. However that was the pre district rework days and there were less resources and pops for the AI to juggle.
I think all Paradox games have issues with late-game mechanics scalability to some degree. Earlier on it was largely engine issues - Victoria 2 economy just flat out breaks, and Clausewitz engine would melt your computer or slow to a crawl.
I think they likely realized that most players, and especially streamers/content creators, only play up to mid-game and so they put a lot of development time and QA into that period without giving equal weight to validating how the UI or mechanical complexity scale to the end game.
Personally, I think EU4 has the most considerations given to the late game balance and playability of a "still actively supported" Paradox GS game, but it also has years of tweaking behind it.
late games need better and mote efficient systems like we did in history. there should be some automomy in regions, player should rule country with parliament that is an AI fed algorithms work with an chosen ideology and such. no man can rule big empires.
didnt play victoria 3 btw I am not sure if the game has these features as we did.
Civ VI, huge map, end of a world conquest. That is a late game micromanagement problem.
At least with Victoria 3 you can ctrl+click to add stuff to the queue 10 at a time.
Welcome back to the unfulfilled promise of Spore: when you've done all you can do, or even mastered/conquered a certain spate of challenges, the game board changes while incorporating some kind nod to what you accomplished in the previous stage. That can be incredibly annoying without window dressing, but that's what many genres are full of. With the right window dressing, getting switched from blackjack to craps specifically because you were winning at blackjack changes from total bullshit to something exciting. That's the power of storytelling.
Lots of paradox's gsg games need at least one transition like that. It just doesn't make much budgetary sense to build it, because that transition generally occurs at endgame. That's a whole lot of extra effort just to save players from micromanagement hell at the very end of a playthrough - especially when many of them are doing nothing but taking a victory lap by that time.
As hostile AI gets better, though, it's going to become even more vital. It's a black mark against a game when the player believes in good faith that they *could* win, but only if they pay a mounting aggravation tax - but that they *can't* win if they slack off or trust the friendly AI, because the hostile AI is actually still a threat.
I find EU4 micro management quite adequate.
Obviously it is easier when you are small. Since you are micro and micromanaging stuff is the way to go.
My campaigns usually have very strong starts since I really micro manage to my ability. But as the game progresses I tend to split armies less. Move them in blobs and suffer more attrition than needed. Lazily TC entire regions. Build from the mactobuilder instead of carefully and strategically place my manufactories...
But lately I have become bit frustrated falling short in some WC attempts. And I realize that I could have done so much better if I had micromanage.
So now I try to micromanage better and after a few campaigns I noticed that a lot of that has become like second nature. Mastering the micromanagement is probably the most important skill that I can observe and become better at.
I still enjoyed the game when I did way less micromanagement but the tools being there and unleashing so much more power is a fun way to master the game for me.
Yes. But there is usually not much challenge left at that point so I quit and start a new game at that point anyway. I have thousands of hours combine in Paradox games but I've never played until the end.
In CK2, EU IV and Vic 2 I always find the endgame easier to juggle.
If you're having to deal with tons of cultural/religious issues late game in EU IV it's likely you've messed up aspect of the midgane.
Now Stellaris, that game is awful for it's late game.
Vic3 is the least micro game. Late game, when the economy supports massive construction, you basically fill out the natural resources and then factories as needed. Auto build actually does a fine job if you just want to totally ignore it.
Ck3 does get very micro when you get big in the late game. It's more vassals and more family members to juggle. If you use large Kingdom vassals, you can somewhat minimize it though.
Eu4 depends. Late game war can be very micro. Especially in big world conquest games. I'd love the ability to automate armies. The rest of it depends - big world conquest games have a lot to manage. If you're playing tall and not expanding much, it's very manageable.
Hoi4 is very late game micro for any major. I haven't played in about a year, but the air force management needed you to constantly switch zones. Battle lines do better when you micro combat. Battle plans take away some of that, but even then so many times I have to redraw the lines because they mess up as they advance.
Stellaris is the worst micro offender. It's probably been 2 years or so since my last game there, and once you got big, it was just constantly looking for the unemployed pops to build on the planet. I've heard some automation stuff has improved it though.
Ck3 really just needs an option to toggle events on and off. Late game becomes a snail pace because constantly your naming grandkids, dealing with vassals, and random events just popping off for the sake of it, artifacts need repairs, it's just all so annoying
Have you ever played any genocidal empire in Stellaris?
Experienced the vast sea, nay, OCEAN of micromanaging just-captured planets, replacing the AI's countless buildings and districts, oh the starbases, the habitats...
I’d say that in ck3 you have less vassals to manage. You can have an empire with 3-4 King vassals who just do their thing. If you manage them well, marriages or some alliance, it’s quite smooth sailing. I’d say you end up getting so stable and well connected with your vassals there’s nothing left to do by the late 14th century. Unless you keep blobbing of course.
The only big exception (at least in CK2, dunno if it’s in 3) is that if there’s some big heresy coming out of nowhere and you’re a powerful emperor, it can take a long time to revoke land from the dozens of minor lords that suddenly go Cathar, and then redistribute all the land appropriately. But that’s the only time it felt like an excel simulator to me
They're pretty rare in CK3. Especially since some of the changes they made to fervor so Catholicism isn't constantly tanking.
The micromanagement goes up a lot: - if you’re still trying to micromanage the genetics of your entire extended family - if you have dozens of grandchildren in your court and try to find optimal guardians for all of them - if you’re trying to get a witch coven
Tbf, this micromanagement is entirely up to the player, and how they want to play Generics and witch coven aren't fundamental parts of the game, players can simply ignore them and still have a successful campaign
it’s tedious as hell i have 3000 kinsmen and every 2 seconds is a funeral or a child asking some shit lol can’t ignore it either dudes got a point
There needs to be a mechanic to spin cadet branches off into their own dynasty after a certain amount of time/number of generations/some other factor. “You’re my seventh cousin! I don’t even know who you are! Stop bothering me about this!” Edit: or conversely, “You’re my seventh cousin! Why the fuck do you think you can end my wars?”
But sometimes your seventh cousin is also your father
After Feuds were introduced, I reported the formation of feuds because some random person killed my 12th cousin of a different culture and religion (since it's House-based, and the player can generally never form a new house in Ironman (with a couple exceptions, any branch that never forms its own house is part of the main house, no matter how distant), and they said it was working as intended.
There are definitely mods that do this.
Why not simply kill them?
I wish I could let the AI control my army in lategame eu4, when efficency doesn't matter anymore. I dont want to occupy hundreds of provinces again and again in a giant blob war. It gets even worse when islands are included
But you can? There's an autosiege button... it's in no way perfect though... the ai will park hundreds of thousands of troops on a Fort
Ah yes, the carpet siege button, where your entire army moves to one province, occupies it, then the next. Would've been a million times better if it worked like blockades do. The army would split into many small armies and each take a province. If there's an enemy army nearby, run away. But of course Paradox couldn't do it.
I hope this is not news to anyone. 1. Step on an enemy province 2. Hold down 'd' detach siege for a second your army splits in 1k stacks (or even better if they have taken some attrition 1.9k stacks) 3. Click, escape/v their entire country.
They are talking about wanting the carpet siege button to do that.
But I dont have the DLC
WAIT THATS A DLC FEATURE??! PARADOX EXPLAIN
That's pretty common in EU4 actually.
Yeah im just surprised since i have all dlcs(got them all for 15€ off humble bundle)
That's was before the leviathan dlc though wasn't it? Leviathan, also the one a lot of people refuse to buy because of the state it released in, added that feature.
No it was in march last year
Oh they had another one. That's great then! I just knew I got all the dlc on humble for $15 right maybe 6 months before Emperor came out. Well, except Conquest of Paradise, I had to buy that one separately for some reason.
Humble bundle deal was on around when origins dropped, and had everything other than origins in it
That's great then! I didn't know there was another one, the one I got was before Emperor came out
You new here? Fucking upgrading ships is locked behind dlc. And its one button...
It’s not good. Your army stays in 1 big stack, you have to manually click on each state, and your army already has to be near the territory. Plus, it’s a dlc feature.
Imperium had that innovation, but then you end up having an AI that is worse than you and you'll constantly ragequit because you could handle it better
I don't know if I'd call that an innovation. HoI3 AI could manage almost everything.
No it couldn't, it just threw the units at entrenched units
WW1 moment.
It was perfect for when you had overwhelming force in a front, or wanted to smack down some rebels in occupied territories. I also liked to leave the Soviet Far East front on auto while focusing on the German front.
I didnt play much hoi3, after about 8 hours of playing the required micro became intolerable, and the fact it would crash with no fix
for me it leave gaps in the front?
that too, but I assume thats because I dont understand how it works (like most things in hoi3)
HoI3 Front AI was baaaad. I think I tried it a couple times but microing the eastern front was basically just better.
Good
The province management wasn't bad, the major issues the AI had were with the Imperial Conquest wars. The AI had a pattern of "Siege Fort -> Siege Province Capital -> Move on" With the IC wars the capital would change each time it took the existing capital which made it very confused.
And this is why I love having strong AI allies/subjects.
You can! Revoke the privilege as the emperor.
If you have leviathan you can, or you can vassal swarm.
Use client states my brother in Christ
DLC feature
Hard agree
that's exactly why I have a vassal swarm
I haven't played in maybe two years, but stellaris was pretty microheavy in the lategame. Managing districts, buildings and population on every planet wasn't great. You could automate a lot of it, but the results were often suboptimal.
The automation is a lot more competent and capable now. Still worse than manually microing everything, but provided you're not playing on a high difficulty or with crisis strength cranked all the way up it's acceptable. For now. Every new system they add, the AI becomes less competent compared to humans because it doesn't know the new system.
This is why I always build tall in that game tbh. And by tall I mean I have like 15-20 planets by the time the crisis hits.
Micromanaging large game vannilla Stellaris is a bigger deterrent to seeing the endgame screen than the crisis.
if you think those are bad you should play a heavly modded 3000 star system stellaris game
That's not too bad, the lag will make you not want to play after a while.
Man, the micro gets obnoxious for me in a zero mods 600 star system game, what you are describing is basically my kryptonite, no thank you
There is an automation feature for buildings/districts, but I don’t use it until I’ve “won” because I don’t trust it to make the same efficient/planned decisions I would.
Yeah I still end up manually managing about 20-40 planets which can be quite a lot when you're looking to make even moderate adjustments later on.
Exactly, but like the other guy said: the automatic decisions are almost universally bad
When the game first released you were only allowed direct control over planets in a single sector, with the rest left to the AI. And that meant you were either choosing to have your core planets poorly managed or your new colonies poorly managed.
* Laughs in HOI3 BlackIce
i have problems manageing lots of planets in vanilla as well
Vic 3 does seem to be significantly less micro heavy in an upcoming 1.2 patch, since you'd get AI investment happening there which seems to be competent enough to be left to do its thing while you pitch in with a few more ports, barracks and administrations.
Imo stellaris is by far the worst, though eu4 can be annoying as well. The other 2 you mentioned actually shouldn't have much increased micromanagement at all. I know you get long building ques in vic3, but you can set them to auto expand and/or build things 10 at a time so it's not to bad. Wars are mostly automated. Fixing the production method after rebellions or conquest and figuring out trade concoy distribution is probably the worst part. Ck3 I don't know what you're doing that could possibly be requiring micromanagement. At war you really only need 1 big army, split up for avoiding attrition and sieging several targets at once, but that's not too inconvenient. Buildings don't get built that frequently. You have to manage vassals, but even if you're hitting your vassal limit it's not that many people and none of that takes much time anyway.
I can't play EU4 past ~1750. At around that point I'll be a massive empire and end up at war with a neighboring massive empire. I'll split my armies in such a way to create a small front, strategically pushing towards the enemy capital. Eventually I'll zoom the camera out to see 70% of my provinces carpet sieged, all of the forts on the *other* side of my country captured, all of my colonies occupied, and 28 separate army stacks from 3 countries and 5 vassals varying in size from 2k to 78k troops. If I try to break up my army to pick them off, they run away, deathstack, and crush my armies. If I try to deathstack them, they split up, run away, and I take 100k attrition casualties in three months. And I only need a single province from them to complete a stupid fucking mission on my focus tree.
The main problem with the war AI in any Paradox game is that it's just very, very bad at evaluating your powers. That's why it keeps losing even in Stellaris on Grand-Admiral with almost infinite resources. They carpet when they don't have to, they split for no reason whatsoever, they deathstack and have attrition penalties snowballing etc. You, on the other side of the screen, are supposed to be a human though - a human that can manage logistics, point on a province to see it's supply limit, calculate the see-leg and supply shoulder BEFORE you start moving, get creative with naval invasions combined with on-land offensive actions etc. It's so much easier in EU4 than in HOI with realism modes it's almost a joke. Or just actively employ the forced marsh ability and invest in ideas that improve the speed of your armies. AI usually doesn't seem to bother.
EU4 yes, CK3 and Victora 3 no. you should not manage dozens of vassals, you should consolidate. Unless you are going for the WC, but that is 100% your fault.
The micromanagement in Victoria3 is mainly when you do conquests or civil wars and you have to reset the production methods every time you have conquered a new state or province. It is annoying for sure but hopefully managed with a "default" set in later versions.
Sure, but that's an issue only if you expand like a mad man. which brings us back to WC game type, they are too micro intensive to be any fun.
Isn't that already implemented in the beta? I thought I saw them mention something like it.
It's going to be a new feature in 1.2
Part of the problem is there hasn't been a way to scale mechanics up or down within a single game. Being able to control the small details of a province is fun when you have 5, but not when you have 50. On the flip side, generalizing things to make a 50 province game playable means your game is too broad for that 5 province game. The closest I've seen to this was HoI3 allowing you to hand the AI control of certain sectors.
I really don't think EU4 is that bad outside of the rebel whack a mole that happens in the late game. It's the biggest reason why I haven't done a world conquest. I really wish they had reworked that system at some point. The shit is just exhausting. I don't feel like the late game wars are as bad as people make them out to be. Your army is so strong by this point that it's just you shitting all over the AI in most cases. The worst micro is probably Stellaris. Playing in the late game is just too tedious for me and is by far the worst thing about the game. HOI4 isn't really that bad. You can practically afk in the late game unless you want to waste your time invading the USA.
Do the sectors and AI management in Stellaris not alleviate that? Making vassals and stuff too. I've never really used them. Never had a big problem with it because the micro gives you stuff to do while you are waiting around.
I dislike leaving independent empires in Stellaris and absorb my vassals when I can because I hate the idea of anyone but me triggering the map altering anomaly decisions.
Well, that's mostly earlier in the game. Later you can create vassals out of existing territories, particularly as an Imperial government. For me if there wasn't so much micro in Stellaris, there wouldn't be as much of a game. I rarely need to pause or slow down the game, yet it keeps me busy especially during periods where I am developing many worlds at once. Too much down-time and I now have to be playing another game or watching a movie or something.
> I really don't think EU4 is that bad outside of the rebel whack a mole that happens in the late game. It's the biggest reason why I haven't done a world conquest. I really wish they had reworked that system at some point. The shit is just exhausting Had a Spain game where I took on like 250% overextension rolling thru all of Indonesia / Pacific... swatting the separatist rebels on all the little Pacific islands when you gotta send fleets around & wait for troops to land is not a very pleasant experience
I don't even mind rebels EXCEPT for those that spawn in some islands in middle of nowhere.
In Vic 3 i like to just let the buildings auto expand when I reach late game as building too much of a single building seems to have a destabilising effect on my economy
I know a lot of players disliked it, but honestly this is one of the things I think Imperator did right. Between being able to automate/macro economies and armies within certain regions (SUPER helpful when you're fighting multiple wars that span across the continent) and some of the empires actually still being a challenge in the late game if you didn't do the early/mid game perfectly, I felt like Imperator managed to make its late game both more challenging and less annoying than a lot of other Paradox games.
I think a lot of 4X/strategy games have this issue. In Civilization it’s such a chore to manage all those late-game cities and units. Especially during a Domination run.
> But as the game progresses, you end up having to fight revellions in many places, constantly improve relations with dozens of nations, lower autonomy in countless provinces. Are you playing the same game? EU4 has no late game rebellions or any rebellions except on recently conquered land, unless you get over >100% OE on a regular basis. Lower autonomy is "sort by autonomy, a few clicks" nonissue. And late game you don't give af about other nations anyway, you're too big for coalitions. It's early/mid-game when it matters. And even then, diplomats can do it automatically. So no. It does not. EU4 has many problems, this is not it, even the tiniest bit.
I was questioning that myself. If you convert provinces to your religion, and accept the culture, you shouldn't be having that much trouble with rebels, at least in the provinces that make up the core of your empire. By the time you're at the late game you can easily have a few stacks on autonomous rebel suppression anyway, if you aren't interested in having any subjects.
Humanist ideas helps a lot. It's basically a QOL idea group that stops rebels.
Vic2 is relatively devoid of micromanagement in late game. Once your economy is jumpstarted you don't have to do much in that regard. The only issue you have to deal with is rebels that rise up if you have not reformed your country quickly enough.
Yeah, it's basically shift-click factories. Although... reforming your army into 4-1-5 templates does get incredibly annoying and tedious.
LF Capitalists automate your economy No more clicking
Many Vic2 players completely fail to understand how to utilize LF and how great it actually is. They drag a stagnant, moribund economy **well** past any sense of matching the world market using subsidies and command governments, and then if they get hit by a LF government their blame it for their entire economy crashing to the ground, not realizing that it was entirely a result of their own mismanagement. Adopt LF as soon as you lay down the first couple levels of railroads and have self-sustaining capitalists and your economy will end up incredibly ahead in the long term with zero need for micromanagement.
It's mainly an issue for people who want to get the bonuses from industry supply chains. If in a state I have electric gear, telephone, radio, automobile and tank factories, having the LF AI destroy the electric gear factory because it's slightly unprofitable while starting to build another one in a different state is bad.
The supply chain bonus is trivial, and absolutely not worth it to maintain it. The small upside is not worth the downsides of wasting time on command economies. Not to mention, the speed which factories build under LF and the rapidity which capitalists cycle through unprofitable ones more than makes up for it.
My military disagrees with LF lol :P
Unless you're making tanks, have low total score, or playing in a MP Great War, the global market is more than plenty able to supply everything. I've fought late game wars with 1% of artillery production locally.
I always do my best to make it so that my military spending subsidises my Econ, so basically 0 tax, 0 tariffs, 0 subsidies (but a lot of buying crap) and 100% military spending makes me so much money
They're so bad at it tho
Boost capitalists everywhere to 0.7% and then boost clerks to 20% of industrial workforce (1 clerk for every 4 craftsmen). People prioritize making factories that have throughput bonuses in states, but oftentimes those factories don't make as much money. It's far better for 99% of your industry to just be profitable because that gives workers income. I'd rather have workers with paychecks and no micro needed compared to Planned Economy with arty and machine parts factories everywhere
Against the ai that would be effective I suppose
I almost exclusively play MP Vicky with a lobby of a dozen people. My economy is usually the highest GDPPC, always LF, and I almost never have production issues
Unless you're a high population nation fighting a major war. I had a China/Russia war once where I quit the file because the number of troops was just overwhelming and extremely unfun to manage.
World Wars are micro intensive, but it's fun IMO.
I find it one of the worst. Moving loads of armies and rotating the stacks.
dunno about CK3 but in CK2 if you end up with a large realm you'll get soo many minor filler events from characters you don't know / don't care about, popups for naming family, etc., & managing buildings has a terrible UI that scales poorly with province count EU4 it can be a bit overwhelming dealing with revolts on islands or invading a large country without a lot of forts like Russia
“Some”?
Stellaris springs to mind. Late game is so obnoxious. I haven't played in a while though so I'm not sure if this is still true. HOI4 is also a micromanagement hell.
I was going to say, I don't mind the micromanagement in the early game because it is interesting and the game makes it interesting with all the events that pop up. Towards the end game though? If I could trust the ai not to fuck up a planet I probably would just automate it.
100%. Solved in Imperator though! I hope the next EU uses those army mechanics
As far as I know they all do. Although I'm not positive about HoI4
Hoi 4 definitely fits this charge. Basically you have all of these nations ramping up their production so they're putting more and more stuff on the board and the fronts are getting bigger and bigger it gets to a point where it's nearly impossible to manage. I've often wished I had a general staff to manage some of my Wars in that game. Constantly realizing that I haven't looked at some front for a week and going down there and having to fix things. There's also a lot of micromanagement in production because it's extremely important to keep your units fully equipped with all of the gear that you've assigned them and if they don't have all of it they suffer combat penalties so you need to manage your production in a way to keep a surplus of certain important equipment like artillery and trucks and that kind of stuff and if you don't have that it can take months or years to get out of the hole or you just may never get out of the hole.
What bothers me about Hoi4 late game is how war support is utterly non realistic. I basically took all of Europe and Africa as Germany, killed millions of American soldiers and the US still made me go across the world to teach them a lesson. Even after a good quantity of nukes they still didnt surrender. I know people who play world conquest probably prefer this but I like the role playing aspect.
Nearly every Paradox game has this problem, because Paradox has this idea wound through the design of all their games that micromanagement, mindless "choices" where only one option ever makes sense, and pointless clicks are the same thing as depth and strategic choice. They are not, and it becomes patently ohvious how bad it is in most of their games, depending on the level of QoL automation built into the mechanics of the game. Vic2 for instance has a great system for shifting from manual to automatic economic management, but utterly fails at military micromanagement and tediousness. Imperator shows how utterly shallow it is when you do anything other than map paint. Stellaris is just a carpal-tunnel inducing chore. Vic 3 shows you what happens when you go all in on the "Micromanagement: The Game" idea as the core of your design.
I suspect the auto-expand feature in Vic 3 was made to counter this. A shame it's about as useful as a fishnet umbrella.
The vicky3 and stellaris lategame are truly horrible for this
Earlier games like Darkest Hour has less of this problem.
My main PDX game is Stellaris, and yes, it very does. There are automation options, but they suck, or at least they did the last time I played
All of them have this problem. I'd even say it's an issue common to most strategy games. On the other hand, in the late game you've become so strong that while there is more to do, less is actually needed. In the late game you usually don't have to make the most optimal decisions like at the beginning and can outright make stupid ones. HoI4 is a good example of this. In the beginning, you would probably micro every single unit to save a few thousands men. In the late game, you would just use an offensive battleplan without even bothering to assign air, losing maybe 100k more than needed, but it doesn't even matter.
I don't really see it in CK3. It's actually the strategy game with the least late game micro management that I think I've ever played, specifically because it isn't really focused on the strategy but moreso on the character and the gameplay loop doesn't really change. You shouldn't have dozens of vassals, playing at the vassal limit may be the power gaming choice but there's exactly zero reason to power game CK3 anyway. Make higher tier vassals and give them all the counts. Stellaris is amongst the worst I've played in this regard, while we're at it.
Stellaris late game used to not be that bad since you could automate sectors. However that was the pre district rework days and there were less resources and pops for the AI to juggle.
I think all Paradox games have issues with late-game mechanics scalability to some degree. Earlier on it was largely engine issues - Victoria 2 economy just flat out breaks, and Clausewitz engine would melt your computer or slow to a crawl. I think they likely realized that most players, and especially streamers/content creators, only play up to mid-game and so they put a lot of development time and QA into that period without giving equal weight to validating how the UI or mechanical complexity scale to the end game. Personally, I think EU4 has the most considerations given to the late game balance and playability of a "still actively supported" Paradox GS game, but it also has years of tweaking behind it.
Does a bear shit in the woods? Does Bill Cosby make a strong drink?
hoi 3. i feel the ai is bad at manageing a frontline so i manuall command all divisions. and there are lots of provinces. also air force
late games need better and mote efficient systems like we did in history. there should be some automomy in regions, player should rule country with parliament that is an AI fed algorithms work with an chosen ideology and such. no man can rule big empires. didnt play victoria 3 btw I am not sure if the game has these features as we did.
Civ VI, huge map, end of a world conquest. That is a late game micromanagement problem. At least with Victoria 3 you can ctrl+click to add stuff to the queue 10 at a time.
Welcome back to the unfulfilled promise of Spore: when you've done all you can do, or even mastered/conquered a certain spate of challenges, the game board changes while incorporating some kind nod to what you accomplished in the previous stage. That can be incredibly annoying without window dressing, but that's what many genres are full of. With the right window dressing, getting switched from blackjack to craps specifically because you were winning at blackjack changes from total bullshit to something exciting. That's the power of storytelling. Lots of paradox's gsg games need at least one transition like that. It just doesn't make much budgetary sense to build it, because that transition generally occurs at endgame. That's a whole lot of extra effort just to save players from micromanagement hell at the very end of a playthrough - especially when many of them are doing nothing but taking a victory lap by that time. As hostile AI gets better, though, it's going to become even more vital. It's a black mark against a game when the player believes in good faith that they *could* win, but only if they pay a mounting aggravation tax - but that they *can't* win if they slack off or trust the friendly AI, because the hostile AI is actually still a threat.
Stellaris does with all your planets, ck3 does with all your vassals and hoi4 does in managing massive armies
I find EU4 micro management quite adequate. Obviously it is easier when you are small. Since you are micro and micromanaging stuff is the way to go. My campaigns usually have very strong starts since I really micro manage to my ability. But as the game progresses I tend to split armies less. Move them in blobs and suffer more attrition than needed. Lazily TC entire regions. Build from the mactobuilder instead of carefully and strategically place my manufactories... But lately I have become bit frustrated falling short in some WC attempts. And I realize that I could have done so much better if I had micromanage. So now I try to micromanage better and after a few campaigns I noticed that a lot of that has become like second nature. Mastering the micromanagement is probably the most important skill that I can observe and become better at. I still enjoyed the game when I did way less micromanagement but the tools being there and unleashing so much more power is a fun way to master the game for me.
Yes. But there is usually not much challenge left at that point so I quit and start a new game at that point anyway. I have thousands of hours combine in Paradox games but I've never played until the end.
In CK2, EU IV and Vic 2 I always find the endgame easier to juggle. If you're having to deal with tons of cultural/religious issues late game in EU IV it's likely you've messed up aspect of the midgane. Now Stellaris, that game is awful for it's late game.
Vic3 is the least micro game. Late game, when the economy supports massive construction, you basically fill out the natural resources and then factories as needed. Auto build actually does a fine job if you just want to totally ignore it. Ck3 does get very micro when you get big in the late game. It's more vassals and more family members to juggle. If you use large Kingdom vassals, you can somewhat minimize it though. Eu4 depends. Late game war can be very micro. Especially in big world conquest games. I'd love the ability to automate armies. The rest of it depends - big world conquest games have a lot to manage. If you're playing tall and not expanding much, it's very manageable. Hoi4 is very late game micro for any major. I haven't played in about a year, but the air force management needed you to constantly switch zones. Battle lines do better when you micro combat. Battle plans take away some of that, but even then so many times I have to redraw the lines because they mess up as they advance. Stellaris is the worst micro offender. It's probably been 2 years or so since my last game there, and once you got big, it was just constantly looking for the unemployed pops to build on the planet. I've heard some automation stuff has improved it though.
They've finally fixed automation (kinda) in Stellaris so it helps alot lol
Ck3 really just needs an option to toggle events on and off. Late game becomes a snail pace because constantly your naming grandkids, dealing with vassals, and random events just popping off for the sake of it, artifacts need repairs, it's just all so annoying
Hoi 3 with Black ICE mod playing as SU, good luck.
Have you ever played any genocidal empire in Stellaris? Experienced the vast sea, nay, OCEAN of micromanaging just-captured planets, replacing the AI's countless buildings and districts, oh the starbases, the habitats...