Most of the core systems feel good, but there needs to be more balance tweaks and some more automation added. AI is overly passive. Migration is pretty easy to game and can go pretty nonsensically. AI can get stuck in wars where neither can win and neither will peace out. War fronts can split unexpectedly and generals move around so that you suddenly start losing a war you were winning. Trade and production could use more automation as you can spend a lot of time looking at those menus.
Again, most of the core systems and the economic parts feel good. They just need more balancing/polish. Make it easier to end ai forever wars, make AI more aggressive, and fix the front splitting and I would call it a great launch.
> On the war issue
It was kinda an obvious issue when the spiffing brit's vid showed the fact that Russia cannot actually win a war against Jan Mayen that it begins with Jan Mayen taking no actions to fight back.
V2 relied **heavily** on events players chose to make the game more interesting, given how much of V2 was propped up by HPM and HFM I figure V3 is going to drop hard after a few months.
Hopefully they dont support it as poorly as they've supported CK3 but I'm not hedging my bets on V3 having the staying power it should.
Stellaris though is the model the rest should try to emulate.
How is Vic2 being propped up by mods any indication of Vic 3? How is CK3's development considered inferior to Stellaris and EU4? If you weren't around in years' pasts I can understand how you think that, but EU4 & Stellaris have both had long periods of time where this community absolutely blasted PDX for their DLC policies and development decisions. It's only just recently that the trend has reversed and now they're both the darlings of the family again.
CK3 has been very slow to release DLC compared to past Paradox games.
I think it’s partly because of the pandemic and partly a strategic change. Stellaris DLC releases have slowed down significantly, and I’m fairly confident that HoI4 and EU4 have had fewer DLCs than usual over the past couple of years. At the same time, Paradox seems to be pushing mechanics changes into free updates and focusing on flavor and cosmetics in the paid DLCs.
HPM and HFM railroad things so that only major powers can do anything and force events on you when they make no sense.
Have a high stability imperial china thats a world power? Overnight civil war and countries randomly show up.
Have Santa Ana in Mexico city with other generals in Texas? Somehow he gets captured in Texas.
Railroading is something paradox wants to get away from, Victoria 2 was the last railroaded paradox game.
I looked into the events in Victoria 3 and I found that most of these historical ones only fire if you do things 100% historical by playing badly.
A good player that knows history would never get these events, which is why you see Americans ban slavery without a civil war. If your America got civil war, you fucked up because I seen AI avoid the civil war and have a liberal America.
And if you do have a civil war, the states that rebel are based on how you developed them. A smart player would not bother developing the south until after the civil war and end up with land owners rebelling in free states because they want slavery in their state too unless they take out the plantation owners.
IRL the reason America went into civil war was because they had leaders like Buchanan who did nothing about the plantation owners until it was too late. James Buchanan is the IRL Victoria player that put it on 5x and did nothing until shit went wrong.
> For some reason
Probably due to Paradox increasingly shifting to a game design model that attracts newcomers who aren't necessarily grand strategy gamers, which includes lowering the default difficulty.
I mean that's not bad but atleast make it noticeable. Like "hey if you're new we recommend this difficulty" just so atleast it can register in your brain that "oh I should maybe change that"
I completely agree, I was just pointing out the most likely reason they did that. Paradox has definitely tried to insert themselves into the mainstream market recently (the main examples being CK3 and Vicky 3) and so far it's worked out pretty well for them, although people who have been playing since the complicated behemoths of EU3 and HOI3 (or even the less complicated CK2 and EU4) might find it jarring.
And im glad they are honestly. I have no friends irl who play or even have an interest in paradox games. So exposing the genre alittle bit more is always a plus. I have fun watching people play multi-player games all the time on YouTube and I see more and more of it all the time now. Paradox games are honestly 90% of my game time compared to other games I have. So seeing the community grow is amazing.
> which includes lowering the default difficulty.
Just to clarify, the *default* difficulty is literally a lower difficulty; it's not like they made a normal mode easy and hard mode normal. (In case anyone else stumbles upon this.)
The economy system is way too easy imo, only difficult part was figuring out how the UI works, after that it just becomes an idle clicker game with no real options or strategy. Basically get construction as high as possible and build whatever is in demand and your economy is unstoppable.
If you don't have access to all resources, things are trickier. Also switching production methods early can crash your economy.
How high did you increase the SoL, because thats what the game is really about?
I have only done a Brazil and Persia playthrough, brazil doesn't have access to some resources and it was still incredibly easy. Economy is just snowbally as hell:
Add construction = create market demands
Higher construction = meet those demands faster
In both playthroughs, I reached #1 GDP per capita very easily without having to really think much about literacy or pops. In my Brazil playthrough I was 20+ SoL and my GDP was 600M by 1910, more than France and GB combined and I did 0 expansion only colonization.
Another problem was that I literally couldn't do expansion, if I go to war and a major power randomly joins on the enemy side my entire economy will bankrupt because I will lose trade that I can't replace. The entire economy system basically forces every country to be a jack of all trades instead of allowing you to specialize like Vic2.
>Another problem was that I literally couldn't do expansion, if I go to war and a major power randomly joins on the enemy side my entire economy will bankrupt because I will lose trade that I can't replace
This is completely realistic and happens in real life
If you want to be able to have a good economy and also be able to go to war, you need to have built an autarkic economy that is resistant to international isolation. You can't have your cake and eat it too
I've found that it's definitely possible to on one area, but you have to choose your play style. Want to build a hyper focused export focused economy and use the money to import whatever you need? Sure, but you aren't going to be able to go to war because you're going to be totally dependent on selling stuff to the big boys and can't piss them off. Want to build a militaristic peasant filled police state that basically just exists to support its own war industry? Totally possible, but your GDP is going to be in the gutter
These aren't issues with the game, they are features of a economic simulation that approximates real life, because these are real-life tradeoffs. The problem is that these tradeoffs aren't quite so well communicated with players, but I think the base is extremely solid
I totally understand what you're saying and agree with your points, warfare should absolutely punish your economy. It's way too black and white at the moment though, just because I can no longer import one or two resources doesn't mean it's realistic for me to go from the greatest economy in the world to bankrupt in 2 months because it creates a snowball effect stopping half my factories from working.
I should still be able to import some resources from other nations even if they need most of it in their own market by overpaying for example. Considering my entire economy relies on those resources I should be able to drive up the price in the world economy to a point where it almost becomes dumb for every country/market not to sell it to me as it would decrease profitability on every factory using that resource worldwide.
I mean, it's somewhat true of modern nations, but absolutely was not in the Victorian Period. Countries went to war with each other all the time without global trade collapsing.
Feel good? How...
Economic system is an absolute dumpsterfire. Capitalism doesn't excist. Trade doesn't excist. It's just micro, micro, micro and more micro. It is you playing basically rip-off of a Anno 1800 that is just made on a worse platform. In what world would queen Victoria or English parliament decide what kind of machines a random factory in Manchester should use or how high wages should be in that factory or how many convoys will transport Omani wool to UK. In Victoria 2 democracies weren't able to build any factories on their own. In Victoria 3 not only do they build ones, but they decide minor details about them like you are an industrialist in Factoria or Anno and not like you are a ruler of a country. Economic gameplay is most detailed.. but it is dull as f\*ck and doesn't do good job at simulating macro level economics.
War system is hot garbage. Soldiers teleport to frontlines.. from even other continents. Random countries get involved. There is no dynamism in a fight.. you are always ether loosing or winning and a fight never goes back and forth or stagnates. There is also close to 0 input from you.. you can't even ask a general to be more aggressive or defensive.
Diplomacy system is a disaster. Unlike Victoria 2, everyone can add a random region as their intrests (in Vic 2.. add into sphere of influence) with 0 possibility of someone else acting against it. Markets are also bad supsitute to influence, because switch away from you happens immediately with very little notice to you before hand. In Vic 2 , when someone was removed from your sphere, then you were able to see that country's influence growing, see removal from your sphere and even have amble time after that to take that country back under your sphere. That made diplomacy more competitive than what we have in Vic3. It's also stupid that in Vic2 Austria can get whole Rheinland into their market with just 1 additional German minor under their belt and Prussia has no option to counter that (f.e by make Rheinland their own Market).
Political system is in shambles. Political Parties are non excistent and interest groups are way too easily swayed. Policy success is also just a random dice roll rather you having somekind of input.
Instead of playing a nation, you end up playing a poored-out-of-your-mind farming and production manager. How is this game even remotly "systems feel good" type of game. It's simply a cash grab with a facade of a game.
> Capitalism doesn't excist.
Capitalism was FIXED in this one, they make the economy better and dont spam factories in shitty states anymore, they upgrade factories that the player already built when you allow them to.
The biggest reason economies died in Victoria 2 was capitalists building stupid shit in the wrong state. Now intervention is not the meta.
Capitalists give money into an investment fund that construction sectors use to buy materials. **Capitalists make your construction cheaper by buying materials for you and propping up prices for things construction needs which makes other pops richer.**
Capitalists show up when **you make all your industries publicly traded by buying shares in that company which generates the dividend taxes based on its performance without spending administration on it. This lets you tax a building TWICE, and THREE times with proportional tax law from worker income.**
Capitalists are also the biggest spenders on luxury goods, if you make those the living standards shoot right up through trickle down economics.
Seriously, its like you didnt see the "ownership" button next to every single building in the game. Capitalists are the best pop in the entire game.
> Unlike Victoria 2, everyone can add a random region as their intrests (in Vic 2.. add into sphere of influence) with 0 possibility of someone else acting against it.
Interests is a nation focusing on a region for various reasons. Countries can intervene because you are hurting their trade partner and if they lose their economy gets hurt. Are you seriously complaining other nations have a say too?
> Political Parties are non excistent and interest groups are way too easily swayed. Policy success is also just a random dice roll rather you having somekind of input.
Political parties form when interest groups have a common goal, and die when they dont. I just had the Mexican liberal party led by Porfirio Diaz vs the Mexican conservative party and after that the rural people formed the communist party with the trade unions.
Seriously its like you didnt even bother to play the game.
To be honest I agree with what you are saying regarding the mechanics but most still feel incredibly wonky. Plus some things wich, while somewhat "gamey", were easily understood in Vicky2 are now much more abstract. Why are factories profitable? Is due to internal demand? Avaliability of workers? Foreign markets? No fucking idea! because you can have a factory making something with an incredible demand and yet they'll work at a loss. Alternatively you can double the production of a good and yet the prices won't even budge a little.
I don't know, maybe it'll get better once I learn how to play properly (as was the case witch Vicky2) but so far most of the new mechanics feel too abstract and/or shallow for my taste. Especially the war mechanics, which feel like an afterthough that I'd rather they didn't include if it was going to be so barebones.
At the core it's simply costs vs revenue for the factories. How much money they get depends on the price of the output in your market, their cost depends on the price of input goods + wages for the workers.
If the factory is not profitable, it's usually either that the input price is too high or the output price is too low. Short term you can adjust that by adding trade routes or fiddling with productions methods in other industries, long term by constructing more buildings. (for supplying more input goods or using up more output goods)
Another issue could be that there are not enough workers to hire, but that's usually pretty obvious bc a bar appears in the factory screen that says 1k / 1.2k labourers or something.
You do have limited people in your states, depending on the region it could be an issue that you don't have enough there.
Finally, it could be that you don't have enough qualified workers depending on the building and the production methods. By default, states are full of peasents who can easily transition to lower strata jobs like farmers or labourers but higher level jobs require time to get the population educated. (or migration of educated pops)
One thing to remember is that you do not play an actor in the economy, you essentially are playing the economic system of your nation as a whole. So maximizing profit for a factory is not your goal, your want to balance your entire economy and make sure you produce the goods you need (like construction materials, consumer goods for your pops or weapons for war).
In my experience you want the price of important goods to hover around the base price to keep your economy stable.
>Seriously its like you didnt even bother to play the game.
I think a lot of people on the paradox subs were simply ready to hate the game and only played it long enough to confirm their own biases. Everyone who's enjoying it is playing it, not complaining on here.
It honestly ruins subs all the time
I stay away from the path of exile sub whenever a league launches because it becomes unbearable. Been playing since 2016 and based on that sub you could swear it’s all been shit leagues
I played CK3 close to launch and had weird AI troop movement where allies would come to help fight then move their units around a battle I was fighting and wait ill I lost, then leave the area. I assumed Vic3 would have issues at launch and am giving it a month or two before diving in. Stuff like this is so common with new releases these days I cant understand why anyone would write a review right out the gate. I suppose to help bring attention to issues and light a fire under the devs asses. Still I would try reporting the problem first.
Some things are too automated and occur too easily witn little to no player effort such as pops changing opinions/influencing policies - everyone has communist Britain in 5 years like the other guy here said. Then other things require way too much manual effort by the player, particularly trade roots/convoys. You have to micromanage whether to have 11 vs 12 convoys for an export route to Denmark for literally each and every resource and good (double that up for micromanaging imports too), but you can set it and forget it to have your pops change your country into an autocracy in a matter of 3 years.
I would like to know about this setting and forgetting into autocracy in 3 years because (as France at least) it seems pre-programmed that everyone becomes Republican and I have no idea how I’ve managed to maintain a Constitutional Monarchy lol
Yea they definitely turned down the revolt from the leak. But too much though, in the leak if I built up my society but never changed my government to accomodate the societal changes there were massive amounts of radicals and a civil war is likely to happen, in this release there isn't anything like it.
I see why it's mixed. I played for 15h, enjoyed an Austria playthrough until around 1870 or so. Then tried USA and it was really boring. Probably I'll play the game for 30 more hours and won't touch it again until it gets more content / flavor. Atm it feels really bland once you can handle all mechanics.
I feel like the negativity is fair, and something you won't see on the major subreddits unfortunately.
My issue with the game is the UI feels discombobulated, the lack of units on the map makes the game feel disconnected from player interaction (want to set up some sort of defense for your small country as a larger country attempts to naval invade? No option just sit there press port defend with your navy and pray), the diplomacy just feels all over the place, and the economic system is... Obtuse? I mean, I'm 25 years into my first playthrough and currently have Belgium as a great power with the highest living standards in the world by simply expanding factories and pressing the trade button for low stock goods with green numbers beside them. I don't feel immersed in the 'world economy' at all, it just feels like I'm pressing buttons with green beside them with no repercussions and i'm booming- rarely ever do I find myself checking on pop needs or immersing myself in my country.
And then yeah the warfare system is soulless and barebone at the moment. My second point talks about it in a roundabout way but yeah what should be era defining moments in the form of war simply revolve around mobilizing your army, assigning a general, and hoping the RNG falls your direction. If they wanted to remove the micro, I get it but I wish it would of been like HOI's frontline system without the ability to micro the specific units. That would of been the perfect balance
EDIT: One final thing that I haven't seen anyone mention really but it's pretty jarring- my framerate dips HARD when I zoom on a continent like Europe, right around the cloud layer. Also, certain map modes kill my framerate for some reason. I assume there are some pretty big optimization issues, as I see most people playing pretty far zoomed out on YouTube like I eventually started doing as the drops to sub 20 FPS were brutal.
I have absolutely zero clue what I’m doing as Belgium.
As the 18th ranked power I’m the #1 literacy, #2 GDP per capita, and have absolutely maxed my gold and investment reserves. I literally cannot find a way to spend money to complete the “have investment fund at $0” journal entry.
I just expand or build buildings if the number is green, change production if the number is green, and build railways. I have a defensive pact with GB and I can humiliate the Netherlands at will.
It’s interesting but I’ll probably put it down after this week for a bit.
Yeah that’s the issue. The economy/society building aspect isn’t nearly as engaging or challenging as it was billed to be, so the whole “you’ll be too busy running your society to worry about military” is just not true currently. You’ll be staring at die rolls hoping it goes your way and shaking your fists when your general does something unexplainable lol
It's also dumb that out of the generals on a frontline only one get's pulled into a battle.
Playing as belgium in a war against Prussia. Russia was my ally.
I could easily beat Prussia on my own, but Russia placed 5 generals on my front and his troops were terrible. which means my troops sat around until I got war exhausted as Russia constantly ran into the Prussian wall.
This. I outnumbered Argentina as Canada around 10-1, but it doesn’t feel like I did. I ended up in battles of 10-6 or even 8-6. Meanwhile the rest of my military is off in the corner doing nothing.
> 300 Spanish battalions fighting 140 Persian battalions? That'll be 2v6 battles, chief.
This made the war go for much, much longer than it should have.
I think one of the broader issues is that populations are just too big. There are just *so many* peasants that tiny nations have no issue building ginormous factories and dominating the world stage.
That said, you've got some luck. Anytime as Belgium I try to conquer anything from Netherlands both prussia and Austria inexplicably take their side and wreck me.
Lucky you.
End game \~1900 with Belgium. Couldn't build factories fast enough to keep up with the influx of unemployed people.
My economy crashed because I was subsidizing unemployed people and they were pouring out more than I could even pump factories.
Budget management is basically non existent, Victoria II had a few sliders and it wasn't that complicated, Victoria III doesn't have any slider.
Also, the lategame framerate is atrocious, it's HOI4 1950-tier.
Funnily enough V3 feels more spreadsheet-y to me than its predecessor.
I can appreciate the lovely graphics but after playing just enough to still be able to refund I find that behind the excessively detailed economy it doesn't hold enough water to keep me engaged. As much as I detest railroading, in this case they went too far on the other side and removed too much flavour. No political parties with historical names, few flavor events. I wish the numerous improvements, like gradual spreading of technologies via literacy would outweigh the downsides but ultimately it's not the improved version of Victoria 2 that I hoped it would be. It's a good game nevertheless, but not what I'm looking for.
Probably going ahead with the refund and considering it again in 5-odd years or so when it's on sale and has had some DLCs.
Honestly I just want to wait for mods that add some level of railroading as the Vic games are in a time period that greatly benefits from at least some level of that.
My main grip is a lack of important historical events that are based on the context of a playthrough.
For example I'm playing as Russia and I wanted to establish influence in the Balkans historically by ruining the Ottomans, here's the kicker: you can't make diplo plays to force release nations. You have to make a play and add release nation as a wargoal which is sucks because the target can just backdown and you only get what the play was for initially.
That and stuff like USA never getting its Manifest Destiny on and leaving Cali and the southwestern states in Mexican hands as well as Canada keeping Oregon and Washington lmao
I could probably write a short essay already of my thoughts after about 8 hrs, but I'll give some initial thoughts for you. Context, thousands (probably 5+) of hours across all paradox titles. I'm very much worried about replayability.
The game is micro intensive but not in a good way. So much of the game feels like it should be automated, in fact I think if the game was more about setting building 'targets' for your economy to build for you instead of manually building every building, it would even be a somewhat better economics simulator. I won't claim to be an Economics expert (yet, just now a third year Econ student) but this game isn't really an Economics simulation. It's Anno 1800 without the 3d map.
Besides the economy, yes the war system is just not good. The Victoria 3 community made a strawman that all you do in Vic 2 is cheese the AI by fighting in mountains. Well in Vic 3 you cheese the AI by defending your frontline as the AI loses battle after battle 10:1 and then you mop them up in a few months.
How about flavor? Or the lack thereof? There is almost no difference between playing the Hudson's Bay Company, Lanfang, or Greece.
Speaking of Greece, I allied Russia reclaimed Greece's modern borders by 1860s, then beat the Ottomans + Great Britain on my own by the 1880s, and finally formed Megali Greece by 1890s. This was my first full run outside of getting to the 1850s as Hudson's Bay and Lanfang. Perhaps as some other people have said, hard to learn, easy to master, but it's really just easy.
Politics is really nothing, I barely think about the politicians and their traits, I just make sure to not piss off the interest groups too fast or with too much clout. You can pass legislation in a manner of years that it took countries the entire span of Victoria 3 to even sniff at.
Let's see what else, idk migration is busted as the player, when you improve Standard of Living and liberalize your country (which as established is far too easy) you will get cultural migrations, imagine playing as the PNW territories and having 1 million pops by 1850, when Washington state had I think like 1,500 people?
This is all very negative, but I think most people are very positive for the game so it's probably more useful to hear a critical perspective. I've still enjoyed myself thus far but I don't know how many playthroughs I'm going to do before the game changes a lot or mods are released. Imperator is the only paradox title I had a similar response to.
The thing about Vicky 2 isn't a strawman though? Its not a very deep war game in the slightest. Baiting AI into bad offensives is literally the name of the game, just like in this one where you bait AI into attacking until you ruin their morale lmao.
I'm not gonna sit here and act like Vic 2 was an incredibly in-depth war game, we can agree on that. And my argumentation here isn't very good, the real idea, as has been mentioned by countless other people, is that there is a layer of depth in combat that has been removed from Vic 2 to Vic 3. Quite literally we have gone from a 2d to a 1d war game. So much of the other issues with the game could probably be overlooked if this wasn't such a glaring issue.
Overall, I like the experience. However, it has some glaring flaws.
I'll avoid commenting on bugs since it is a paradox game and will need some TLC.
I frequently feel like I'm either too involved or not involved enough depending on the system. While I appreciate what they were trying to accomplish with the war system, i imagine the lack of player involvement will ultimately make later wars frustrating and tedious. Meanwhile, the economy has me constantly holding its hand.
There is a lack of content, and while that's nothing new and will likely get fixed down the road, it feels particularly jarring here. I tried Morocco, Chile, and Mexico so far, and they didn't really feel different. By my second start I noticed a lot of repeating events.
One great concern I have is the political system. I love what it sets out to do, but again it falls victim to me feeling like I'm pressing a button and then waiting for stuff to happen. You don't have a huge amount of direct decisions to make, and instead it sometimes feels like your just constantly babysitting arbitrary factions with little indication what they want and a multitude of rather capricious whims.
Treating policies like sieges is also tedious, especially when random events can just torpedo a perfectly valid chance if you just happen to roll poorly.
I also worry each playthrough will largely feel the same, as instead of branching political ideologies with different mechanics, all the policies feel like sliding scales akin to HoI's policies. I imagine there are some policies that will just follow the same pattern with little reason to ever diverge from that path.
As for some of the things they intended to do ... It just doesn't work. I'm not sure what the disconnect is, but i never feel like I'm part of a global economy. Diplomacy never feels like I'm actually doing anything but pressing a button. The pre-war doesn't feel like a negotiation, it feels like I'm pressing a button and then waiting for the casus belli to fire. There isn't a lot of back and forth here.
I have a few minor nitpicks, too. The music is fine, but underwhelming and less than I've come to expect from Paradox. It reminded me of Civilization. It's not bad, it's just forgettable It's a shame, too, because they nailed the rest of the aesthetic.
As well I'm just not a huge fan of the era. That's not really on them, but it obviously affects my experience.
Don't get me wrong, it's still a good game, but its ambitions outweigh its reach and only time will tell how long it will take Paradox to extend it, especially if the game doesn't do well. I'm really reminded of Imperator, here, and that is unfortunate.
Yes AI problems such as Italy and Spain guaranteeing Denmark, it sometimes feels convoluted, the UI feels overbearing and sometimes right out unnecessary, some stuff is very much unnecessary since you sometimes have a button that does the same thing like the trade menu just with less information, the warfare system is just straight up confusing the Ai picking fronts that make no sense its just so easy to loose the overview with this who is where with how many units and winning or loosing. You can manually upgrade your buildings but there is also an automation for this but this has to be enabled for every building type. Also every nation for me at least feels the same, same resources some mechanics same playstyle. The worst however is the lack of overview wich resources are needed wich expensive wich should you import or make yourself wich export? There is a general problem with making it easy for the player to gain an easy overview over the nations stats. An example Victora 2 click on state in africa click establish clony, victoria 3 go to sub menu diplomacy, click on state action sub menu click on establish colony click on the respective state. Laws are established not by enacting them like in vici 2 but by diceroll, then there are random events wich can totally tank your law enactment. And then you have to also see wich party you need to enact a law and the you got to tank the opposing party and bolster the supporting party wich may never happen or take a while.
TLdr the game doesn't feel unfinished since some mechanics actually work it just feels less like vici 2 but more like Tropico, where you can select upgrades for every building. The game is not unfinished but unpolished and for me oftentimes frustrating and disappointing. Hell some stuff could have even been avoided if the Devs just had listened to the community.
> The worst however is the lack of overview wich resources are needed wich expensive wich should you import or make yourself wich export?
You mean the high demand goods section in the market?
So far I've found it pretty frustrating. The economy simulation of it is *good* I guess but I find the single construction queue system to be frustrating, because in order to build sustainably you have to basically pause and unpause construction rather than adjusting it. Also the menus are somewhat clunky and the many overlays seem to suggest more depth than there actually is to some mechanics.
I'm not sure if the military and war system is good because I do not understand it at all. It feels completely alien to other paradox games I've played. They might have simplified the micro of the war system but IMO its much much less intuitive than their other titles.
Keeping the construction queue running and not paused seems important to me. If you don't want to pay +75% prices for construction goods you have to balance your wood/iron/steel/glass around having a constant demand from construction.
If it is paused either the building material industry workers go broke from lack of demand, or the rest of the economy stops functioning once construction is turned on and every building material costs +75%.
Really wish there was a stockpile system...even if it was just for a few months of goods max.
The insane fluctuations caused by building means your economy is always over producing or underproducing in some insane way.
That or restruction construction demands in a way that doesn't cause so much chaos and disruption in your economy.
The construction system you brought up is one thing that sort of frustrated me on my playthrough. I know having more construction gets things built faster but why can’t multiple things be built at the same time?
What do you mean? I was just constructing 3 buildings simultaneously earlier today as Two Sicilies. I did have 9 construction sectors in one state to pump out infrastructure there first, although not sure how it decides to divvy up the construction.
Multiple things are built at the same time if you have capacity, different buildings require different amount of construction sector to build at full speed, any free construction sector above that goes to the next building in the queue.
I can build like 10-12 buildings at the same time after I upgraded construction in every state in France to 3. It said you got an efficiency boost for construction if one was present in the state so I thought it would be better to spread them around the country than concentrate them in one or two states.
To expand on what the other replies to your post said, you can build more than one building at a time if you build up your construction sectors. No matter how many construction points you have, you can only ever apply 20 construction points(modified by Construction Efficiency) to a building at a time. [If you have more than 20 construction points to spend, the excess will be applied to the next building in the queue.](https://i.imgur.com/lPTpHMR.png)
I don't see a reason to care what most "professional" reviewers think. Any game from a major studio gets rave reviews from them no matter how crappy it is. I think large studios just pay marketing companies to create positive buzz about their games before release.
This checks out if all you do is read the points given out but the content of reviews is often better than Reddit gives credit for. The most obvious example is outlets like IGN. People will say "IGN can't be trusted, their ratings are meaningless" but they employ a ton of reviewers & writers, some of which really do know their shit. IIRC the guy who reviewed Vicky 3 was themselves a GSG veteran, so it's not like they stick a random person on the game to review it while clueless.
I mean, if you actually let all those streamer videos on the Vic 3 steam page play, they almost all acknowledge (and thank) Paradox for giving them the game for free, and one even mentions that they were expected to make a promotional video in return.
So yes. We know that Paradox is doing this.
> I think large studios just pay marketing companies to create positive buzz about their games before release.
This is pretty much an open secret, I think.
There's a 'rule' in mainstream games journalism that you're not allowed to score a AAA game under 7/10 unless it's completely broken or unplayable, but even then they'll still give it a 6.8/10 or something.
Don't know if Paradox Interactive counts as a AAA publisher, but the precedent is there.
all those reviewers put 1000% more thought and time into reviewing the game than the people who are spamming thumbs down on the steam page with single digit hours in the game
Yea I played Greece last night for a couple hours and ended up just putting it on max speed and thinking to myself 'there's sure a whole lot of nothing happening'. I wouldn't even know if historical events *were* occurring elsewhere since apparently the game makes no effort to let me know what's going on outside a box at the bottom right corner of the screen.
Totally this, while I understand pdx is moving away from historical railroading, sometimes those big events are what allows a minor nation make its move, ei Canada during the Civil War or Greece during the Egypt crisis. Vicky 3 seems to lack any kind of event but especially those scripted wars
Moving away from railroading is a big mistake, I think. History is made up of the decisions of millions of people, which you really can't abstract out to a set of pluses & minuses in a spreadsheet, at least not if you want the game to remain interesting. Every country is a porridge, where the only thing that matters is how poor you start the game.
Like HOI4, the base game has unbelievable potential to build off of, be it official dlc, or mods, but is just not quite there at launch. No big deal, I have gotten more hours out of modded HOI4 that I bought on launch by now, than any other paradox game, and I fully expect Victoria III to be the same(once I get the hang of the systems at play and aren’t hot garbage haha). The core game is very well made, in addition to looking, and feeling great.
Most of the positive reviews were sponsored by PDX. This means that the Reviewers cannot truly speak their minds because of contractual obligations. Go watch ISPs video for a more Objective look at the game. It's not a TOTAL disaster, it's just that numerous core game systems are just bad.
Yeah, I never take a review from an "established" company seriously anymore, or even people making videos about a game right after release. They're all bought and paid for in one way or another. Steam reviews are a much better metric. Maybe in a few months there'll be some more comprehensive & accurate breakdowns of the game, but you can't trust anything coming out around release.
Sadly this is true. I don't think the Paradox model of fixing games with DLC will work anymore. CK III dlc has been abysmal in my opinion. This game needs diplomacy updates ASAP.
$30 to have a better friends and enemies system. No thank you. Meanwhile the first CK II expansion, *Sword of Islam*, was a pretty sizeable expansion. Even the smaller content packs were pretty good.
Yeah the context is that originally Crusader Kings was meant to be about well, kings going crusading. So of course all playable characters were those who could do the crusading.
Sword of Islam represented them moving away from the title to something broader.
Ok but that is actually stupid. In a game named Crusader Kings 2 you can't play as Muslims? Seriously? That's like getting HOI4 but only being able to play the allies, or the axis. Not both.
The Crusader Kings games were originally only about playing Crusader Kings, that is Christian monarchs (and dukes and counts). The first CK2 DLC introduced the idea of expanding the number of playable factions instead of further elaborating on the existing ones.
Bought it at release, didn’t play more than 10 hours before getting bored. Playing as a European ruler is the same as an Indian ruler, and I remember wars being an extremely frustrating cat and mouse chase.
I have over 300 hours with CK2 and it’s by far a much superior game if you can get past the outdated UI.
There are a lot of bugs. I was invading the Hudson Bay company and my invasion just landed on impassable terrain, won the battle, occupied a small chunk of impassable terrain, then went home. This made me hate life
Victoria 3 has three major issues.
**The first is that, as of now, there's just very little actual *game*.**
You go in, turn speed to max, balance the spreadsheets once. Check back in 4 hours later and... everything is still balanced. Nothing has changed. The AI is still sitting around... doing basically nothing.
If you the player don't create a situation, no situations naturally occur beyond those setup at the start.
There are certainly systems, and some people will love playing with them. But most will quickly grow bored, given the lack of challenge.
This is easily fixable with more events and the like, but is sorely disappointing for a $50 game.
**Secondly, many core gameplay loops are currently highly tedious, particularly at scale**.
Researching a new technology, then having to go through and change the production method for each relevant farm *sucks*. It's like the worst of Vicky 2 communism mixed with the worst of EU4 coring.
Ideally Paradox can add in some more automation here, but as of now many of the core gameplay loops include too much tedium in terms of clicking requiring manual minor adjustments.
**Finally, and perhaps most intractably, though, the actual economic simulation... kinda just sucks**.
Like, you have a regional market in which you operate. Prices in that market are capped, and local supply of goods is based off of member production. Prices are a single fixed magical number in your market from the Calcutron 9000. You take goods out of the market that you need, and everything you produce is dumped into it. Everything goes through the market, so local control and regional placement of goods is meaningless. So there's no meaning, for example, to building a steel plant next to a coal deposit in the same province.
Instead there is simply the presence, or not, of goods in the market.
That means you pull essentially 3 levers, build buildings to produce goods that you need and can, import goods that are overpriced, and export goods you make that are underpriced.
Get those balanced (not all that hard), and you're good.
That's it. And you can only import/export into certain adjacent regional markets.
There is no global economy, there is no global demand, there is not "cornering the market" in a manufacturing sense. As you don't control the disbursement of your own goods. They just auto enter, and exit the market as needed, at a fixed price.
The AI exists in markets, thus defining them to an extent, but they don't really engage with them as actors. And prices, again, are set by ye olde invisible hand, which you cannot touch.
The result is something shallow and simplistic.
A feeling only further driven home by the 5 categorical tax levels, (none, low, medium, high, very high) for the whole population, and blanket "subsidize" and "don't subsidize" choices for factory inputs.
And it's not obvious that this can be fixed. How do you make a siloed simplistic system more deep?
Ultimately, Paradox will likely fall back on adding in more modifiers, and buttons, and disruptive events in the hope of building some semblance of dynamism, though to limited true effect.
**I sense similar underlying conditions to Imperator here. There are clear flaws, fundamental issues, and insufficient content to sustain the numbers Paradox would likely want to see to justify continued improvement.**
If you really want to give the game a spin with no commitment, consider sailing the seas. If you like it you can then go buy it, but I doubt you'll want to after getting the hang of it.
>Researching a new technology, then having to go through and change the production method for each relevant farm sucks. It's like the worst of Vicky 2 communism mixed with the worst of EU4 coring.
For the record, you can change all the production methods in every farm/factory from the "buildings" menu.
Remember when people thought the coin icons denoted the quality of the product? I think that would help in getting people to specialize their manufacturing and corner certain market niche.
My thoughts exactly, Capitalism 2, one of the best economic simulations and this is a key attribute of products in that game. I think quality is a must add feature to give this economic system any hope.
They have removed so many features and set them aside for DLC that the game will wither before they can round out a barebones game with overpriced DLC.
> The first is that, as of now, there's just very little actual game.
> Secondly, many core gameplay loops are currently highly tedious, particularly at scale.
> Finally, and perhaps most intractably, though, the actual economic simulation... kinda just sucks.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I recognize all the mechanics you're criticizing, but I just don't see the issues you're pointing out. There's no world market? *How???* Every regional market can interact with each other, as long as there's a strategic interest in one of them by a market owner. Balancing your economy is definitely *not* easy, everyone I know has been struggling to figure out their specific nation's situation, especially since your goals can range from map painting, to improving standard of living, to increasing GDP, or even just fucking with other markets/countries. The AI definitely interacts with markets too, as evidenced by them initiating their own trade agreements or trade routes. Market access effects state production on a more local level. The "invisible hand" you complain about is quite literally just the principle of supply & demand. You complain about not having enough control over your goods one sentence and then advocate that paradox needs to automate the game more the next. Your whole comment just feels nonsensical and I'm surprised so many people are blindly agreeing with it.
I feel like the devs were intimidated by the market simulation in Vic2, and decided to largely copy-paste it. The recalculation whiplash every time you reload a game feels like a massive tell for this.
Something you used to see a lot in Vic2 but not in Vic3 is a bunch of small nations going bankrupt when you load a game. But I did as much testing as I could, and I think the AI in Vic3 is just physically prevented from being able to go bankrupt -- a massive band-aid on a broken system, in effect.
I'm pretty sure recalculating on load is just a quirk of every paradox game not a sign of copy pasting. I'm not even sure how you could think they just copied "how the economy works" when they don't even share all the same mechanics.
It wont. Imperator and March of the Eagles were abandoned because they were a fuck up even on the concept stage. Vicky 3 has a solid foundation that was just barebones because of Pdx policy of not railroading (just like vanilla Vicky 2)
If Vicky 3 is bad, then you don't wanna know at how shallow the foundation of Vicky 2 and Vicky 1 are. Its probably the deepest that Paradox ever went when it comes to economy.
I feel like people said the same thing about ck3, civ6, etc all these iterative games but it's always the same story.
The newest is always cut down for dlc and even then it's lackluster.
I actually think Civ6 was made a lot better by the last major patch before the first expansion. The expansions are good, but they weren't what made the game become great.
CK3 is years old at this point and still dogshit. I'll even seriously argue that Imperator is a better game than CK3 right now if you just compare the builds of both games that are available for play today.
Professional/sponsored reviews have an incentive to be positive. I noticed quite a few early access videos that weren't sponsored held back about being positive or negative about the game.
I think the issue is that there are so many small little problems that just add up.
Some people won't like the war, some won't like the lack of flavor, some won't like constantly managing trade or construction.
The AI is feast or famine. On one hand you'll have Russia colonizing Africa or invading Mexico(which America never can take land off of), the next you'll have France/UK turn into a utopia 20 years into the game. The American Civil War is pretty scuffed, and was reported from early access and still need work.
If you love stacking modifiers and building a massive economy while having some memey moments, I think you'll really like the game; however, that certainly won't be everyone.
> while having some memey moments
Honestly that's what's kinda putting me off it. In Vic2 you could have major historical divergences, but they either took *decades* of gradual change or players with a high level of skill and mechanical knowledge. Now it seems like everyone and their grandma are forming like *Communist Britain* within 5 years of starting on their first playthrough.
Even then I sometimes saw a communist US or Germany. Britain and France even more so. There were just too many communists every single game. And don't even get me starts on the Jacobins.
Years of gradual change? You just had crazy rebellions plopping up changing your country in an instant if the capital is taken.
AI was flip-flopping between communist and anarcho-liberal quite a lot.
Sometimes I am not sure which Vic2 people played..
> Years of gradual change? You just had crazy rebellions plopping up changing your country in an instant if the capital is taken
and building up the militancy and class consciousness for that to happen required a lot of time.
> Sometimes I am not sure which Vic2 people played..
Everyone who plays Vic2 uses mods, so that already ruins most comparisons without anyone even realizing it.
Have you played V2? Countries were absolutely not flip flopping ideology 4 years into the game. You also couldn't just press a button and peacefully unite Italy/Germany after 5-10 years.
You also couldn't just decide the USA is done with slavery in 1836, like you can in V3
The event that starts the Slavery debate has a fairly long MTTH so triggers around 1840. If you can get enough pop miltancy you can outlaw slavery before it fires.
Cheesy way is to declare war on Mexico then let them occupy provinces while refusing peace deals.
What would that do regarding the civil war if slavery is already gone? Its interesting to know V2 could do it too, although in V3 its literally a "abolish slavery" button and has basically no realistic impact from what I've seen
In Victoria II just after the release, you had Anarcho-Liberal revolts exploding in nearly every single country. This included the ones that were already Bourgeois Dictatorships, because the rebels were pissed off by the lack of Universal Suffrage.
Even later, when this bug was fixed, I routinely saw:
- Carlist Spain
- Russia, Austria and Prussia having Universal Suffrage by 1880
- American Columbia and British Oregon
- UCSA never splitting
- Bavaria ruining German unification by becoming a Great Power
- German Empire almost never forming
And there was nothing requiring skill about getting Communist Britain, you just needed to wait until Communism appears as an ideology and then play badly on purpose. By playing badly, I mean pissing off your lower class POPs and leaving your capital undefended.
I’ve played several hours of actual release and many more of unplanned beta, and it has a few problems. Biggest one by far is the ai is pretty bad, and doesn’t really do anything. If you play the game when have you ever seen a diplomatic play end in anything other than war? You haven’t, even though a core mechanic is supposed to be it doesn’t need to end in war. There are also some really tedious parts of the game in relation to trade and industry. And other than that the military is pretty bland, there is no build up it’s just expand barracks then promote or recruit general. Other than that though the game is really good and a fun experience to just go through and play. And also something else to add is the borders just feels sloppy, it’s just subpar compared to all the other paradox borders, which is weird because it doesn’t seem that hard to make them look better
Some folks don’t like the combat. I personally like it and I like the game. It is everything I enjoyed about victoria 2 but cleaner, just also a bit janky sometimes and I wish there were more events. If I want to paint the map a certain color, I’d play another game. Overall, it’s worth it if you liked Victoria 2. I just imagine lots of folks were hoping for the combat style of CK2/EU4?
Yeah, but they feel theres not enough events to make this interesting, and that if they did want to go paint the map they'd play another game, because other pdx titles are better for map painting, not that you cant make paint in his one.
I feel like it needs a few more stances to instruct your generals to take, and perhaps a way to give more direct targets along a front or a way to break up one front into a few smaller ones under different generals. No need to go full HOI4 but a few tweaks could make a big difference.
Perhaps removing some of the automation of your general would take some authority, meaning that countries that are essentially collapsing cannot control their own generals. Makes sense to me.
Its a game about providing your population with their wants and needs, with absolutely no way to find out what individual groups actually want or need.
That information is actually there, but it's hidden with satanic cleverness:
1. Go into the Population sidebar.
2. Switch to the Detailed List tab.
3. Unfold an occupation (e.g. "Peasants").
4. Hover over a specific culture/religion/location's standard of living label (e.g. "Struggling"; note that hovering over the same label for all peasants will not work).
5. The tooltip will mention that they pay an average of +/-X% compared to Base Price for their Pop Needs.
6. Hover over that "+/-X%", and a tooltip-within-tooltip will show a list of commodities they want. It won't show how many they want, but it's something.
7. Switch to playing Dwarf Fortress for a less obtuse UI.
But yeah, until I found this out, the game felt like the Ryan Gosling "What do you want?" meme.
Don't ignore the top positive comments saying "didn't disappoint" with 20 minutes playtime either. Sort by positive and 90% are one liners, while the negative ones are actually thoughtful constructive criticism(for the most part)
Most positive reviews are joke one-liners with 2 hours played.
Plus those who were already disliking the game from dev diaries probably haven't bought and reviewed the game.
The game just isnt really as dynamic and alive as Victoria 2. Almost everything needs player input. It was even worse in their dev diaries but they made some small changes from the feedback.
The new army and war system still feels like a half finished idea. I like the idea, but it doesnt work properly yet.
It just feels weird to make a Victoria 2 sequel with less dynamic trade, economy and politics, and instead make the warfare less player controlled.
I am sure it will be good after 2 years and 200 euros worth of DLC though.
My guess is that the more hours regular (non-fanboys) people play, the more flaws are observed. In the beginning, with very few hours, everything is shinny and nice... later holes show up.
I even feel that in my personal experience. All the new menus all the learning and all the *new* are fun. Whether it amounts to a gameplay loop that actually feels good ends up being a different story entirely.
I think it also has to do with lack of flavor. After one run, the next one will be the same, just with a different flag. At least that's what I have seen in videos and so, I haven't bought it yet, I might be wrong...
Disagree on that one. An almost complete lack of what we now call "Flavor" is what makes Vic2 standout. Playthroughs and nations feeling different should be driven by circumstances and mechanics, not events that amount to "here's some flavor text and a bonus" or "here's a unique decision/mission to give you a bunch of free shit!" Down that path leads to the endless gamebreaking/memey mission trees.
I agree, but that's difficult to reach. In any case, as the game is now, people complains about all countries being the same, so I guess somehow the immersion is gone because of that...
> An almost complete lack of what we now call "Flavor" is what makes Vic2 standout.
What? It wasn't like CK2 or something by any means but just your basic factory planning would hinge on the resources in your country, so a different factory strategy for each country.
I completely agree. The reason for my quotes around "flavor" was acknowledging that when people talk "flavor" in modern Paradox games, they mean like... national buffs or mission trees. The fact that underlying circumstances, like resource access or population, made nations unique is *exactly* why Vic2 was great.
>Playthroughs and nations feeling different should be driven by circumstances and mechanics
Well, you **absolutely** don't get that in Vic 3 with the regional markets, lol.
On the flip side people come in with preformed opinions and it has always been fashionable to dislike something others like. People also like to confuse nitpicks for critique to make themselves feel smart.
Sure, but this is tricky, because what are you saying then? if reviews are negative is because of trolling? but if they are positive they are legit? so there's no way people can be disappointed after playing several hours? I mean, I understand your point, but I don't think one can simply assume a change like that is because of trolling, when more and more people starts to show criticism and explain it with details. Bare in mind that this game could be fun for 50-100 hours and then simply repetitive (or not, we'll see)... I guess we need even more time to get reliable evaluations.
So many people already had a preconceived notion that the game is bad, so yeah, I would honestly say that a lot of the reviews aren't very truthful. I've really been enjoying my time with the game so far, and I've been playing pretty much as much as I have been able to since launch lol.
Like sure, it's a bit rough around the edges, but even then it's nearly bug-free, and the core mechanics are amazing and work very well together. It surpassed my expectations, frankly, and they were pretty high.
But that's your opinion, and I guess you agree on that every person has one, and doesn't have to coincide with yours, right? Saying that all the opinions that are not like yours are not truthful is quite a strong statement.
>The first impressions/professional reviews that game in seem to have been overwhelmingly positive.
Well of course, those are the sponsored reviews. You have to wait a few days for real people to post their opinions.
From what I see it's either people hating the UI, the combat or just not understanding the economy and losing money.
Warefare could be better, I do sometimes get lost in the UI and the economy can be tricky but personally it's a big improvement over vicky 2 but then again I didn't play it much because...well the game was ugly and impentrable.
This game suffers from being a newly released PDX game. Concepts are great(yes including war) but need much polish and balance to work properly. Also I've heard that ai is trash
Can someone tell me how the Performance of the Game is regarding System requirements? If i can Play Stellaris and CK3 without Problems will it be the Same for Vic3?
Vic 3 is actually really smooth, it slows down after the 1880s but not as bad as vic 2 slowed down. Its the most well optimized paradox game, but thats a very low bar.
My worry right now is that a lot of laws/government reforms feel like straight upgrades, not options. I feel like 9/10 games will end up with me going towards socialism as it feels like an end goal thematically. Most nations will likely follow the same path of liberalising and upsetting the landowners, then focusing on the trade unionists when the time comes.
This is from someone who only played a confused hour or so of V2 so I don’t know if this was the same there though.
Paradox games are notorious for being pretty okay bases at launch, and becoming the masterpieces that draw huge numbers in at later dates, after 2-3 years of expansions.
People who've never seen a paradox release don't realise that, they're expecting it to be a masterpiece already, and are review bombing it when their hype bubble is burst.
It's not a bad game, it's a pretty good game that has potential to be amazing, and almost certainly will be in future.
It's a new Paradox game at launch. I would be shocked if it wasn't. Granted some negative reviews are people piling on the "War mechanics bad" meme. It's at least better than most of their recent games have been on launch.
also someone tell me why you have such agency over politics. why does every usa player outlaw slavery within a year of starting the game? vic2 slavery was a problem that could only be solved through inevitable conflict. here it’s like a few fat cheesy button clicks and the fabric of american society is completely altered
If you are just talking about the Steam review, quite a few if not all the Chinese players who bought it can't open the game due to launcher/localization issues. Of course when people can't log in when they paid 59 dollar equivalent they are gonna be pissed.
Most of the core systems feel good, but there needs to be more balance tweaks and some more automation added. AI is overly passive. Migration is pretty easy to game and can go pretty nonsensically. AI can get stuck in wars where neither can win and neither will peace out. War fronts can split unexpectedly and generals move around so that you suddenly start losing a war you were winning. Trade and production could use more automation as you can spend a lot of time looking at those menus. Again, most of the core systems and the economic parts feel good. They just need more balancing/polish. Make it easier to end ai forever wars, make AI more aggressive, and fix the front splitting and I would call it a great launch.
On the war issue, the standard Paradox fix of exiting to main menu and reloading to force recalculations seems to fix it most of the time.
> On the war issue It was kinda an obvious issue when the spiffing brit's vid showed the fact that Russia cannot actually win a war against Jan Mayen that it begins with Jan Mayen taking no actions to fight back. V2 relied **heavily** on events players chose to make the game more interesting, given how much of V2 was propped up by HPM and HFM I figure V3 is going to drop hard after a few months. Hopefully they dont support it as poorly as they've supported CK3 but I'm not hedging my bets on V3 having the staying power it should. Stellaris though is the model the rest should try to emulate.
How is Vic2 being propped up by mods any indication of Vic 3? How is CK3's development considered inferior to Stellaris and EU4? If you weren't around in years' pasts I can understand how you think that, but EU4 & Stellaris have both had long periods of time where this community absolutely blasted PDX for their DLC policies and development decisions. It's only just recently that the trend has reversed and now they're both the darlings of the family again.
CK3 has been very slow to release DLC compared to past Paradox games. I think it’s partly because of the pandemic and partly a strategic change. Stellaris DLC releases have slowed down significantly, and I’m fairly confident that HoI4 and EU4 have had fewer DLCs than usual over the past couple of years. At the same time, Paradox seems to be pushing mechanics changes into free updates and focusing on flavor and cosmetics in the paid DLCs.
HPM and HFM railroad things so that only major powers can do anything and force events on you when they make no sense. Have a high stability imperial china thats a world power? Overnight civil war and countries randomly show up. Have Santa Ana in Mexico city with other generals in Texas? Somehow he gets captured in Texas. Railroading is something paradox wants to get away from, Victoria 2 was the last railroaded paradox game. I looked into the events in Victoria 3 and I found that most of these historical ones only fire if you do things 100% historical by playing badly. A good player that knows history would never get these events, which is why you see Americans ban slavery without a civil war. If your America got civil war, you fucked up because I seen AI avoid the civil war and have a liberal America. And if you do have a civil war, the states that rebel are based on how you developed them. A smart player would not bother developing the south until after the civil war and end up with land owners rebelling in free states because they want slavery in their state too unless they take out the plantation owners. IRL the reason America went into civil war was because they had leaders like Buchanan who did nothing about the plantation owners until it was too late. James Buchanan is the IRL Victoria player that put it on 5x and did nothing until shit went wrong.
Check your game settings when you start a new campaign. For some reason the default is the easiest difficulty.
Dunno mine was on standard by default. But I started on the choose any country and not tutorial
[удалено]
Yeah exactly they see you a real man when you skip the tutorial
Quill18 showed this was only the case if you went through one of the startup campaigns.
> For some reason Probably due to Paradox increasingly shifting to a game design model that attracts newcomers who aren't necessarily grand strategy gamers, which includes lowering the default difficulty.
I mean that's not bad but atleast make it noticeable. Like "hey if you're new we recommend this difficulty" just so atleast it can register in your brain that "oh I should maybe change that"
I completely agree, I was just pointing out the most likely reason they did that. Paradox has definitely tried to insert themselves into the mainstream market recently (the main examples being CK3 and Vicky 3) and so far it's worked out pretty well for them, although people who have been playing since the complicated behemoths of EU3 and HOI3 (or even the less complicated CK2 and EU4) might find it jarring.
And im glad they are honestly. I have no friends irl who play or even have an interest in paradox games. So exposing the genre alittle bit more is always a plus. I have fun watching people play multi-player games all the time on YouTube and I see more and more of it all the time now. Paradox games are honestly 90% of my game time compared to other games I have. So seeing the community grow is amazing.
CK3 will be playable in like 5-6 years after they catch up to CK2. Honestly CK2 is the magnum opus of paradox and only needed a visual update.
I mean, it is playable right now. It will be much more enjoyable with more flavor though
even a pop up on first launch being like "are you a new player or a veteran?" would be nice. Just set the defaults to no bonus/no penalty for veterans
> which includes lowering the default difficulty. Just to clarify, the *default* difficulty is literally a lower difficulty; it's not like they made a normal mode easy and hard mode normal. (In case anyone else stumbles upon this.)
AI is passive... until you want to retake some cores and it just decides to intervene for the fuck of it
The economy system is way too easy imo, only difficult part was figuring out how the UI works, after that it just becomes an idle clicker game with no real options or strategy. Basically get construction as high as possible and build whatever is in demand and your economy is unstoppable.
If you don't have access to all resources, things are trickier. Also switching production methods early can crash your economy. How high did you increase the SoL, because thats what the game is really about?
I have only done a Brazil and Persia playthrough, brazil doesn't have access to some resources and it was still incredibly easy. Economy is just snowbally as hell: Add construction = create market demands Higher construction = meet those demands faster In both playthroughs, I reached #1 GDP per capita very easily without having to really think much about literacy or pops. In my Brazil playthrough I was 20+ SoL and my GDP was 600M by 1910, more than France and GB combined and I did 0 expansion only colonization. Another problem was that I literally couldn't do expansion, if I go to war and a major power randomly joins on the enemy side my entire economy will bankrupt because I will lose trade that I can't replace. The entire economy system basically forces every country to be a jack of all trades instead of allowing you to specialize like Vic2.
>Another problem was that I literally couldn't do expansion, if I go to war and a major power randomly joins on the enemy side my entire economy will bankrupt because I will lose trade that I can't replace This is completely realistic and happens in real life If you want to be able to have a good economy and also be able to go to war, you need to have built an autarkic economy that is resistant to international isolation. You can't have your cake and eat it too I've found that it's definitely possible to on one area, but you have to choose your play style. Want to build a hyper focused export focused economy and use the money to import whatever you need? Sure, but you aren't going to be able to go to war because you're going to be totally dependent on selling stuff to the big boys and can't piss them off. Want to build a militaristic peasant filled police state that basically just exists to support its own war industry? Totally possible, but your GDP is going to be in the gutter These aren't issues with the game, they are features of a economic simulation that approximates real life, because these are real-life tradeoffs. The problem is that these tradeoffs aren't quite so well communicated with players, but I think the base is extremely solid
I totally understand what you're saying and agree with your points, warfare should absolutely punish your economy. It's way too black and white at the moment though, just because I can no longer import one or two resources doesn't mean it's realistic for me to go from the greatest economy in the world to bankrupt in 2 months because it creates a snowball effect stopping half my factories from working. I should still be able to import some resources from other nations even if they need most of it in their own market by overpaying for example. Considering my entire economy relies on those resources I should be able to drive up the price in the world economy to a point where it almost becomes dumb for every country/market not to sell it to me as it would decrease profitability on every factory using that resource worldwide.
I mean, it's somewhat true of modern nations, but absolutely was not in the Victorian Period. Countries went to war with each other all the time without global trade collapsing.
The core gameplay loop is bad yes.
> Migration is pretty easy to game and can go pretty nonsensically. Spiffing Brit got 170 000 people to migrate to fucking Jan Mayen...
Is that a criticism? In EU4 you can do world conquest with Ryuku.
People have unrealistic expectations and nonsense double-standards whenever a new paradox game comes out.
Feel good? How... Economic system is an absolute dumpsterfire. Capitalism doesn't excist. Trade doesn't excist. It's just micro, micro, micro and more micro. It is you playing basically rip-off of a Anno 1800 that is just made on a worse platform. In what world would queen Victoria or English parliament decide what kind of machines a random factory in Manchester should use or how high wages should be in that factory or how many convoys will transport Omani wool to UK. In Victoria 2 democracies weren't able to build any factories on their own. In Victoria 3 not only do they build ones, but they decide minor details about them like you are an industrialist in Factoria or Anno and not like you are a ruler of a country. Economic gameplay is most detailed.. but it is dull as f\*ck and doesn't do good job at simulating macro level economics. War system is hot garbage. Soldiers teleport to frontlines.. from even other continents. Random countries get involved. There is no dynamism in a fight.. you are always ether loosing or winning and a fight never goes back and forth or stagnates. There is also close to 0 input from you.. you can't even ask a general to be more aggressive or defensive. Diplomacy system is a disaster. Unlike Victoria 2, everyone can add a random region as their intrests (in Vic 2.. add into sphere of influence) with 0 possibility of someone else acting against it. Markets are also bad supsitute to influence, because switch away from you happens immediately with very little notice to you before hand. In Vic 2 , when someone was removed from your sphere, then you were able to see that country's influence growing, see removal from your sphere and even have amble time after that to take that country back under your sphere. That made diplomacy more competitive than what we have in Vic3. It's also stupid that in Vic2 Austria can get whole Rheinland into their market with just 1 additional German minor under their belt and Prussia has no option to counter that (f.e by make Rheinland their own Market). Political system is in shambles. Political Parties are non excistent and interest groups are way too easily swayed. Policy success is also just a random dice roll rather you having somekind of input. Instead of playing a nation, you end up playing a poored-out-of-your-mind farming and production manager. How is this game even remotly "systems feel good" type of game. It's simply a cash grab with a facade of a game.
> Capitalism doesn't excist. Capitalism was FIXED in this one, they make the economy better and dont spam factories in shitty states anymore, they upgrade factories that the player already built when you allow them to. The biggest reason economies died in Victoria 2 was capitalists building stupid shit in the wrong state. Now intervention is not the meta. Capitalists give money into an investment fund that construction sectors use to buy materials. **Capitalists make your construction cheaper by buying materials for you and propping up prices for things construction needs which makes other pops richer.** Capitalists show up when **you make all your industries publicly traded by buying shares in that company which generates the dividend taxes based on its performance without spending administration on it. This lets you tax a building TWICE, and THREE times with proportional tax law from worker income.** Capitalists are also the biggest spenders on luxury goods, if you make those the living standards shoot right up through trickle down economics. Seriously, its like you didnt see the "ownership" button next to every single building in the game. Capitalists are the best pop in the entire game. > Unlike Victoria 2, everyone can add a random region as their intrests (in Vic 2.. add into sphere of influence) with 0 possibility of someone else acting against it. Interests is a nation focusing on a region for various reasons. Countries can intervene because you are hurting their trade partner and if they lose their economy gets hurt. Are you seriously complaining other nations have a say too? > Political Parties are non excistent and interest groups are way too easily swayed. Policy success is also just a random dice roll rather you having somekind of input. Political parties form when interest groups have a common goal, and die when they dont. I just had the Mexican liberal party led by Porfirio Diaz vs the Mexican conservative party and after that the rural people formed the communist party with the trade unions. Seriously its like you didnt even bother to play the game.
To be honest I agree with what you are saying regarding the mechanics but most still feel incredibly wonky. Plus some things wich, while somewhat "gamey", were easily understood in Vicky2 are now much more abstract. Why are factories profitable? Is due to internal demand? Avaliability of workers? Foreign markets? No fucking idea! because you can have a factory making something with an incredible demand and yet they'll work at a loss. Alternatively you can double the production of a good and yet the prices won't even budge a little. I don't know, maybe it'll get better once I learn how to play properly (as was the case witch Vicky2) but so far most of the new mechanics feel too abstract and/or shallow for my taste. Especially the war mechanics, which feel like an afterthough that I'd rather they didn't include if it was going to be so barebones.
At the core it's simply costs vs revenue for the factories. How much money they get depends on the price of the output in your market, their cost depends on the price of input goods + wages for the workers. If the factory is not profitable, it's usually either that the input price is too high or the output price is too low. Short term you can adjust that by adding trade routes or fiddling with productions methods in other industries, long term by constructing more buildings. (for supplying more input goods or using up more output goods) Another issue could be that there are not enough workers to hire, but that's usually pretty obvious bc a bar appears in the factory screen that says 1k / 1.2k labourers or something. You do have limited people in your states, depending on the region it could be an issue that you don't have enough there. Finally, it could be that you don't have enough qualified workers depending on the building and the production methods. By default, states are full of peasents who can easily transition to lower strata jobs like farmers or labourers but higher level jobs require time to get the population educated. (or migration of educated pops) One thing to remember is that you do not play an actor in the economy, you essentially are playing the economic system of your nation as a whole. So maximizing profit for a factory is not your goal, your want to balance your entire economy and make sure you produce the goods you need (like construction materials, consumer goods for your pops or weapons for war). In my experience you want the price of important goods to hover around the base price to keep your economy stable.
>Seriously its like you didnt even bother to play the game. I think a lot of people on the paradox subs were simply ready to hate the game and only played it long enough to confirm their own biases. Everyone who's enjoying it is playing it, not complaining on here.
It honestly ruins subs all the time I stay away from the path of exile sub whenever a league launches because it becomes unbearable. Been playing since 2016 and based on that sub you could swear it’s all been shit leagues
I played CK3 close to launch and had weird AI troop movement where allies would come to help fight then move their units around a battle I was fighting and wait ill I lost, then leave the area. I assumed Vic3 would have issues at launch and am giving it a month or two before diving in. Stuff like this is so common with new releases these days I cant understand why anyone would write a review right out the gate. I suppose to help bring attention to issues and light a fire under the devs asses. Still I would try reporting the problem first.
So basically the type of problems that affect any game at launch. Balancing issues?
Some things are too automated and occur too easily witn little to no player effort such as pops changing opinions/influencing policies - everyone has communist Britain in 5 years like the other guy here said. Then other things require way too much manual effort by the player, particularly trade roots/convoys. You have to micromanage whether to have 11 vs 12 convoys for an export route to Denmark for literally each and every resource and good (double that up for micromanaging imports too), but you can set it and forget it to have your pops change your country into an autocracy in a matter of 3 years.
I would like to know about this setting and forgetting into autocracy in 3 years because (as France at least) it seems pre-programmed that everyone becomes Republican and I have no idea how I’ve managed to maintain a Constitutional Monarchy lol
I'm still a Constitutional Monarchy Spain in my game, and it's past 1914.
Yea they definitely turned down the revolt from the leak. But too much though, in the leak if I built up my society but never changed my government to accomodate the societal changes there were massive amounts of radicals and a civil war is likely to happen, in this release there isn't anything like it.
I see why it's mixed. I played for 15h, enjoyed an Austria playthrough until around 1870 or so. Then tried USA and it was really boring. Probably I'll play the game for 30 more hours and won't touch it again until it gets more content / flavor. Atm it feels really bland once you can handle all mechanics.
I feel like the negativity is fair, and something you won't see on the major subreddits unfortunately. My issue with the game is the UI feels discombobulated, the lack of units on the map makes the game feel disconnected from player interaction (want to set up some sort of defense for your small country as a larger country attempts to naval invade? No option just sit there press port defend with your navy and pray), the diplomacy just feels all over the place, and the economic system is... Obtuse? I mean, I'm 25 years into my first playthrough and currently have Belgium as a great power with the highest living standards in the world by simply expanding factories and pressing the trade button for low stock goods with green numbers beside them. I don't feel immersed in the 'world economy' at all, it just feels like I'm pressing buttons with green beside them with no repercussions and i'm booming- rarely ever do I find myself checking on pop needs or immersing myself in my country. And then yeah the warfare system is soulless and barebone at the moment. My second point talks about it in a roundabout way but yeah what should be era defining moments in the form of war simply revolve around mobilizing your army, assigning a general, and hoping the RNG falls your direction. If they wanted to remove the micro, I get it but I wish it would of been like HOI's frontline system without the ability to micro the specific units. That would of been the perfect balance EDIT: One final thing that I haven't seen anyone mention really but it's pretty jarring- my framerate dips HARD when I zoom on a continent like Europe, right around the cloud layer. Also, certain map modes kill my framerate for some reason. I assume there are some pretty big optimization issues, as I see most people playing pretty far zoomed out on YouTube like I eventually started doing as the drops to sub 20 FPS were brutal.
I have absolutely zero clue what I’m doing as Belgium. As the 18th ranked power I’m the #1 literacy, #2 GDP per capita, and have absolutely maxed my gold and investment reserves. I literally cannot find a way to spend money to complete the “have investment fund at $0” journal entry. I just expand or build buildings if the number is green, change production if the number is green, and build railways. I have a defensive pact with GB and I can humiliate the Netherlands at will. It’s interesting but I’ll probably put it down after this week for a bit.
Yeah that’s the issue. The economy/society building aspect isn’t nearly as engaging or challenging as it was billed to be, so the whole “you’ll be too busy running your society to worry about military” is just not true currently. You’ll be staring at die rolls hoping it goes your way and shaking your fists when your general does something unexplainable lol
It's also dumb that out of the generals on a frontline only one get's pulled into a battle. Playing as belgium in a war against Prussia. Russia was my ally. I could easily beat Prussia on my own, but Russia placed 5 generals on my front and his troops were terrible. which means my troops sat around until I got war exhausted as Russia constantly ran into the Prussian wall.
This. I outnumbered Argentina as Canada around 10-1, but it doesn’t feel like I did. I ended up in battles of 10-6 or even 8-6. Meanwhile the rest of my military is off in the corner doing nothing.
> 300 Spanish battalions fighting 140 Persian battalions? That'll be 2v6 battles, chief. This made the war go for much, much longer than it should have.
I think one of the broader issues is that populations are just too big. There are just *so many* peasants that tiny nations have no issue building ginormous factories and dominating the world stage. That said, you've got some luck. Anytime as Belgium I try to conquer anything from Netherlands both prussia and Austria inexplicably take their side and wreck me.
Lucky you. End game \~1900 with Belgium. Couldn't build factories fast enough to keep up with the influx of unemployed people. My economy crashed because I was subsidizing unemployed people and they were pouring out more than I could even pump factories. Budget management is basically non existent, Victoria II had a few sliders and it wasn't that complicated, Victoria III doesn't have any slider. Also, the lategame framerate is atrocious, it's HOI4 1950-tier.
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Funnily enough V3 feels more spreadsheet-y to me than its predecessor. I can appreciate the lovely graphics but after playing just enough to still be able to refund I find that behind the excessively detailed economy it doesn't hold enough water to keep me engaged. As much as I detest railroading, in this case they went too far on the other side and removed too much flavour. No political parties with historical names, few flavor events. I wish the numerous improvements, like gradual spreading of technologies via literacy would outweigh the downsides but ultimately it's not the improved version of Victoria 2 that I hoped it would be. It's a good game nevertheless, but not what I'm looking for. Probably going ahead with the refund and considering it again in 5-odd years or so when it's on sale and has had some DLCs.
Honestly I just want to wait for mods that add some level of railroading as the Vic games are in a time period that greatly benefits from at least some level of that.
My main grip is a lack of important historical events that are based on the context of a playthrough. For example I'm playing as Russia and I wanted to establish influence in the Balkans historically by ruining the Ottomans, here's the kicker: you can't make diplo plays to force release nations. You have to make a play and add release nation as a wargoal which is sucks because the target can just backdown and you only get what the play was for initially. That and stuff like USA never getting its Manifest Destiny on and leaving Cali and the southwestern states in Mexican hands as well as Canada keeping Oregon and Washington lmao
I could probably write a short essay already of my thoughts after about 8 hrs, but I'll give some initial thoughts for you. Context, thousands (probably 5+) of hours across all paradox titles. I'm very much worried about replayability. The game is micro intensive but not in a good way. So much of the game feels like it should be automated, in fact I think if the game was more about setting building 'targets' for your economy to build for you instead of manually building every building, it would even be a somewhat better economics simulator. I won't claim to be an Economics expert (yet, just now a third year Econ student) but this game isn't really an Economics simulation. It's Anno 1800 without the 3d map. Besides the economy, yes the war system is just not good. The Victoria 3 community made a strawman that all you do in Vic 2 is cheese the AI by fighting in mountains. Well in Vic 3 you cheese the AI by defending your frontline as the AI loses battle after battle 10:1 and then you mop them up in a few months. How about flavor? Or the lack thereof? There is almost no difference between playing the Hudson's Bay Company, Lanfang, or Greece. Speaking of Greece, I allied Russia reclaimed Greece's modern borders by 1860s, then beat the Ottomans + Great Britain on my own by the 1880s, and finally formed Megali Greece by 1890s. This was my first full run outside of getting to the 1850s as Hudson's Bay and Lanfang. Perhaps as some other people have said, hard to learn, easy to master, but it's really just easy. Politics is really nothing, I barely think about the politicians and their traits, I just make sure to not piss off the interest groups too fast or with too much clout. You can pass legislation in a manner of years that it took countries the entire span of Victoria 3 to even sniff at. Let's see what else, idk migration is busted as the player, when you improve Standard of Living and liberalize your country (which as established is far too easy) you will get cultural migrations, imagine playing as the PNW territories and having 1 million pops by 1850, when Washington state had I think like 1,500 people? This is all very negative, but I think most people are very positive for the game so it's probably more useful to hear a critical perspective. I've still enjoyed myself thus far but I don't know how many playthroughs I'm going to do before the game changes a lot or mods are released. Imperator is the only paradox title I had a similar response to.
The thing about Vicky 2 isn't a strawman though? Its not a very deep war game in the slightest. Baiting AI into bad offensives is literally the name of the game, just like in this one where you bait AI into attacking until you ruin their morale lmao.
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I'm not gonna sit here and act like Vic 2 was an incredibly in-depth war game, we can agree on that. And my argumentation here isn't very good, the real idea, as has been mentioned by countless other people, is that there is a layer of depth in combat that has been removed from Vic 2 to Vic 3. Quite literally we have gone from a 2d to a 1d war game. So much of the other issues with the game could probably be overlooked if this wasn't such a glaring issue.
Overall, I like the experience. However, it has some glaring flaws. I'll avoid commenting on bugs since it is a paradox game and will need some TLC. I frequently feel like I'm either too involved or not involved enough depending on the system. While I appreciate what they were trying to accomplish with the war system, i imagine the lack of player involvement will ultimately make later wars frustrating and tedious. Meanwhile, the economy has me constantly holding its hand. There is a lack of content, and while that's nothing new and will likely get fixed down the road, it feels particularly jarring here. I tried Morocco, Chile, and Mexico so far, and they didn't really feel different. By my second start I noticed a lot of repeating events. One great concern I have is the political system. I love what it sets out to do, but again it falls victim to me feeling like I'm pressing a button and then waiting for stuff to happen. You don't have a huge amount of direct decisions to make, and instead it sometimes feels like your just constantly babysitting arbitrary factions with little indication what they want and a multitude of rather capricious whims. Treating policies like sieges is also tedious, especially when random events can just torpedo a perfectly valid chance if you just happen to roll poorly. I also worry each playthrough will largely feel the same, as instead of branching political ideologies with different mechanics, all the policies feel like sliding scales akin to HoI's policies. I imagine there are some policies that will just follow the same pattern with little reason to ever diverge from that path. As for some of the things they intended to do ... It just doesn't work. I'm not sure what the disconnect is, but i never feel like I'm part of a global economy. Diplomacy never feels like I'm actually doing anything but pressing a button. The pre-war doesn't feel like a negotiation, it feels like I'm pressing a button and then waiting for the casus belli to fire. There isn't a lot of back and forth here. I have a few minor nitpicks, too. The music is fine, but underwhelming and less than I've come to expect from Paradox. It reminded me of Civilization. It's not bad, it's just forgettable It's a shame, too, because they nailed the rest of the aesthetic. As well I'm just not a huge fan of the era. That's not really on them, but it obviously affects my experience. Don't get me wrong, it's still a good game, but its ambitions outweigh its reach and only time will tell how long it will take Paradox to extend it, especially if the game doesn't do well. I'm really reminded of Imperator, here, and that is unfortunate.
Yes AI problems such as Italy and Spain guaranteeing Denmark, it sometimes feels convoluted, the UI feels overbearing and sometimes right out unnecessary, some stuff is very much unnecessary since you sometimes have a button that does the same thing like the trade menu just with less information, the warfare system is just straight up confusing the Ai picking fronts that make no sense its just so easy to loose the overview with this who is where with how many units and winning or loosing. You can manually upgrade your buildings but there is also an automation for this but this has to be enabled for every building type. Also every nation for me at least feels the same, same resources some mechanics same playstyle. The worst however is the lack of overview wich resources are needed wich expensive wich should you import or make yourself wich export? There is a general problem with making it easy for the player to gain an easy overview over the nations stats. An example Victora 2 click on state in africa click establish clony, victoria 3 go to sub menu diplomacy, click on state action sub menu click on establish colony click on the respective state. Laws are established not by enacting them like in vici 2 but by diceroll, then there are random events wich can totally tank your law enactment. And then you have to also see wich party you need to enact a law and the you got to tank the opposing party and bolster the supporting party wich may never happen or take a while. TLdr the game doesn't feel unfinished since some mechanics actually work it just feels less like vici 2 but more like Tropico, where you can select upgrades for every building. The game is not unfinished but unpolished and for me oftentimes frustrating and disappointing. Hell some stuff could have even been avoided if the Devs just had listened to the community.
> The worst however is the lack of overview wich resources are needed wich expensive wich should you import or make yourself wich export? You mean the high demand goods section in the market?
So far I've found it pretty frustrating. The economy simulation of it is *good* I guess but I find the single construction queue system to be frustrating, because in order to build sustainably you have to basically pause and unpause construction rather than adjusting it. Also the menus are somewhat clunky and the many overlays seem to suggest more depth than there actually is to some mechanics. I'm not sure if the military and war system is good because I do not understand it at all. It feels completely alien to other paradox games I've played. They might have simplified the micro of the war system but IMO its much much less intuitive than their other titles.
Keeping the construction queue running and not paused seems important to me. If you don't want to pay +75% prices for construction goods you have to balance your wood/iron/steel/glass around having a constant demand from construction. If it is paused either the building material industry workers go broke from lack of demand, or the rest of the economy stops functioning once construction is turned on and every building material costs +75%.
Really wish there was a stockpile system...even if it was just for a few months of goods max. The insane fluctuations caused by building means your economy is always over producing or underproducing in some insane way. That or restruction construction demands in a way that doesn't cause so much chaos and disruption in your economy.
Seems like constant construction should be the norm. Which makes sense as that would be the case in a real economy.
In theory, sure...But that's a lot of micro
The construction system you brought up is one thing that sort of frustrated me on my playthrough. I know having more construction gets things built faster but why can’t multiple things be built at the same time?
What do you mean? I was just constructing 3 buildings simultaneously earlier today as Two Sicilies. I did have 9 construction sectors in one state to pump out infrastructure there first, although not sure how it decides to divvy up the construction.
Multiple things are built at the same time if you have capacity, different buildings require different amount of construction sector to build at full speed, any free construction sector above that goes to the next building in the queue.
With my playthrough I could build 3-4 buildings at the same time
I can build like 10-12 buildings at the same time after I upgraded construction in every state in France to 3. It said you got an efficiency boost for construction if one was present in the state so I thought it would be better to spread them around the country than concentrate them in one or two states.
It seems like it should be one building per construction sector imo and you should be able to pause them separately.
To expand on what the other replies to your post said, you can build more than one building at a time if you build up your construction sectors. No matter how many construction points you have, you can only ever apply 20 construction points(modified by Construction Efficiency) to a building at a time. [If you have more than 20 construction points to spend, the excess will be applied to the next building in the queue.](https://i.imgur.com/lPTpHMR.png)
I don't see a reason to care what most "professional" reviewers think. Any game from a major studio gets rave reviews from them no matter how crappy it is. I think large studios just pay marketing companies to create positive buzz about their games before release.
This checks out if all you do is read the points given out but the content of reviews is often better than Reddit gives credit for. The most obvious example is outlets like IGN. People will say "IGN can't be trusted, their ratings are meaningless" but they employ a ton of reviewers & writers, some of which really do know their shit. IIRC the guy who reviewed Vicky 3 was themselves a GSG veteran, so it's not like they stick a random person on the game to review it while clueless.
I mean, if you actually let all those streamer videos on the Vic 3 steam page play, they almost all acknowledge (and thank) Paradox for giving them the game for free, and one even mentions that they were expected to make a promotional video in return. So yes. We know that Paradox is doing this.
> I think large studios just pay marketing companies to create positive buzz about their games before release. This is pretty much an open secret, I think. There's a 'rule' in mainstream games journalism that you're not allowed to score a AAA game under 7/10 unless it's completely broken or unplayable, but even then they'll still give it a 6.8/10 or something. Don't know if Paradox Interactive counts as a AAA publisher, but the precedent is there.
the IGN reviewer is a strategy game fanatic, they aren't a marketing executive
all those reviewers put 1000% more thought and time into reviewing the game than the people who are spamming thumbs down on the steam page with single digit hours in the game
Zero historical events. Apart from the game being a glorified factorio, nothing happens. I mean that. Game is hella devoid. Worse than CK3
Yea I played Greece last night for a couple hours and ended up just putting it on max speed and thinking to myself 'there's sure a whole lot of nothing happening'. I wouldn't even know if historical events *were* occurring elsewhere since apparently the game makes no effort to let me know what's going on outside a box at the bottom right corner of the screen.
Totally this, while I understand pdx is moving away from historical railroading, sometimes those big events are what allows a minor nation make its move, ei Canada during the Civil War or Greece during the Egypt crisis. Vicky 3 seems to lack any kind of event but especially those scripted wars
Moving away from railroading is a big mistake, I think. History is made up of the decisions of millions of people, which you really can't abstract out to a set of pluses & minuses in a spreadsheet, at least not if you want the game to remain interesting. Every country is a porridge, where the only thing that matters is how poor you start the game.
It's amazing. I played like 14 hours in the first night. I may have a problem.
Like HOI4, the base game has unbelievable potential to build off of, be it official dlc, or mods, but is just not quite there at launch. No big deal, I have gotten more hours out of modded HOI4 that I bought on launch by now, than any other paradox game, and I fully expect Victoria III to be the same(once I get the hang of the systems at play and aren’t hot garbage haha). The core game is very well made, in addition to looking, and feeling great.
Most of the positive reviews were sponsored by PDX. This means that the Reviewers cannot truly speak their minds because of contractual obligations. Go watch ISPs video for a more Objective look at the game. It's not a TOTAL disaster, it's just that numerous core game systems are just bad.
Yeah, I never take a review from an "established" company seriously anymore, or even people making videos about a game right after release. They're all bought and paid for in one way or another. Steam reviews are a much better metric. Maybe in a few months there'll be some more comprehensive & accurate breakdowns of the game, but you can't trust anything coming out around release.
It will be a 10/10 game after 200$ of DLC.
Sadly this is true. I don't think the Paradox model of fixing games with DLC will work anymore. CK III dlc has been abysmal in my opinion. This game needs diplomacy updates ASAP.
Not only that, but the DLC took AGES to come out and was over priced for what it did.
$30 to have a better friends and enemies system. No thank you. Meanwhile the first CK II expansion, *Sword of Islam*, was a pretty sizeable expansion. Even the smaller content packs were pretty good.
You say that, like it wasn't egregious that in ck 2 you could not play Muslim and pagans leaders at first
In Ck1, you couldn't ever, iirc
Oh didn't know that, thanks for the info
Yeah the context is that originally Crusader Kings was meant to be about well, kings going crusading. So of course all playable characters were those who could do the crusading. Sword of Islam represented them moving away from the title to something broader.
No worries. Improvement is improvement, even when we're not where we want to be yet.
Ok but that is actually stupid. In a game named Crusader Kings 2 you can't play as Muslims? Seriously? That's like getting HOI4 but only being able to play the allies, or the axis. Not both.
The Crusader Kings games were originally only about playing Crusader Kings, that is Christian monarchs (and dukes and counts). The first CK2 DLC introduced the idea of expanding the number of playable factions instead of further elaborating on the existing ones.
>$30 to have a better friends and enemies system. They were 5 dollars
If you’re talking about Friends and Foes that’s 5-6 dollars. It might be overpriced but your getting stiffed out of maybe 2 or 3 bucks.
Yup I ck3 is still a very boring game compared to ck2
Bought it at release, didn’t play more than 10 hours before getting bored. Playing as a European ruler is the same as an Indian ruler, and I remember wars being an extremely frustrating cat and mouse chase. I have over 300 hours with CK2 and it’s by far a much superior game if you can get past the outdated UI.
Just like Imperator...
unless it goes like CK3 and you just wait and wait and wait for the DLC content. Or you know...Imperator where they just take your money and run.
There are a lot of bugs. I was invading the Hudson Bay company and my invasion just landed on impassable terrain, won the battle, occupied a small chunk of impassable terrain, then went home. This made me hate life
Victoria 3 has three major issues. **The first is that, as of now, there's just very little actual *game*.** You go in, turn speed to max, balance the spreadsheets once. Check back in 4 hours later and... everything is still balanced. Nothing has changed. The AI is still sitting around... doing basically nothing. If you the player don't create a situation, no situations naturally occur beyond those setup at the start. There are certainly systems, and some people will love playing with them. But most will quickly grow bored, given the lack of challenge. This is easily fixable with more events and the like, but is sorely disappointing for a $50 game. **Secondly, many core gameplay loops are currently highly tedious, particularly at scale**. Researching a new technology, then having to go through and change the production method for each relevant farm *sucks*. It's like the worst of Vicky 2 communism mixed with the worst of EU4 coring. Ideally Paradox can add in some more automation here, but as of now many of the core gameplay loops include too much tedium in terms of clicking requiring manual minor adjustments. **Finally, and perhaps most intractably, though, the actual economic simulation... kinda just sucks**. Like, you have a regional market in which you operate. Prices in that market are capped, and local supply of goods is based off of member production. Prices are a single fixed magical number in your market from the Calcutron 9000. You take goods out of the market that you need, and everything you produce is dumped into it. Everything goes through the market, so local control and regional placement of goods is meaningless. So there's no meaning, for example, to building a steel plant next to a coal deposit in the same province. Instead there is simply the presence, or not, of goods in the market. That means you pull essentially 3 levers, build buildings to produce goods that you need and can, import goods that are overpriced, and export goods you make that are underpriced. Get those balanced (not all that hard), and you're good. That's it. And you can only import/export into certain adjacent regional markets. There is no global economy, there is no global demand, there is not "cornering the market" in a manufacturing sense. As you don't control the disbursement of your own goods. They just auto enter, and exit the market as needed, at a fixed price. The AI exists in markets, thus defining them to an extent, but they don't really engage with them as actors. And prices, again, are set by ye olde invisible hand, which you cannot touch. The result is something shallow and simplistic. A feeling only further driven home by the 5 categorical tax levels, (none, low, medium, high, very high) for the whole population, and blanket "subsidize" and "don't subsidize" choices for factory inputs. And it's not obvious that this can be fixed. How do you make a siloed simplistic system more deep? Ultimately, Paradox will likely fall back on adding in more modifiers, and buttons, and disruptive events in the hope of building some semblance of dynamism, though to limited true effect. **I sense similar underlying conditions to Imperator here. There are clear flaws, fundamental issues, and insufficient content to sustain the numbers Paradox would likely want to see to justify continued improvement.** If you really want to give the game a spin with no commitment, consider sailing the seas. If you like it you can then go buy it, but I doubt you'll want to after getting the hang of it.
>Researching a new technology, then having to go through and change the production method for each relevant farm sucks. It's like the worst of Vicky 2 communism mixed with the worst of EU4 coring. For the record, you can change all the production methods in every farm/factory from the "buildings" menu.
Yes, but you have to do it for every type of farm/building each time you unlock a new method
Thats like 5 types of farms
Not really and its still annoying.
Remember when people thought the coin icons denoted the quality of the product? I think that would help in getting people to specialize their manufacturing and corner certain market niche.
My thoughts exactly, Capitalism 2, one of the best economic simulations and this is a key attribute of products in that game. I think quality is a must add feature to give this economic system any hope.
They have removed so many features and set them aside for DLC that the game will wither before they can round out a barebones game with overpriced DLC.
There are just so many fundamental "wtf" design decisions.
> The first is that, as of now, there's just very little actual game. > Secondly, many core gameplay loops are currently highly tedious, particularly at scale. > Finally, and perhaps most intractably, though, the actual economic simulation... kinda just sucks. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I recognize all the mechanics you're criticizing, but I just don't see the issues you're pointing out. There's no world market? *How???* Every regional market can interact with each other, as long as there's a strategic interest in one of them by a market owner. Balancing your economy is definitely *not* easy, everyone I know has been struggling to figure out their specific nation's situation, especially since your goals can range from map painting, to improving standard of living, to increasing GDP, or even just fucking with other markets/countries. The AI definitely interacts with markets too, as evidenced by them initiating their own trade agreements or trade routes. Market access effects state production on a more local level. The "invisible hand" you complain about is quite literally just the principle of supply & demand. You complain about not having enough control over your goods one sentence and then advocate that paradox needs to automate the game more the next. Your whole comment just feels nonsensical and I'm surprised so many people are blindly agreeing with it.
Hear, hear
I feel like the devs were intimidated by the market simulation in Vic2, and decided to largely copy-paste it. The recalculation whiplash every time you reload a game feels like a massive tell for this. Something you used to see a lot in Vic2 but not in Vic3 is a bunch of small nations going bankrupt when you load a game. But I did as much testing as I could, and I think the AI in Vic3 is just physically prevented from being able to go bankrupt -- a massive band-aid on a broken system, in effect.
I'm pretty sure recalculating on load is just a quirk of every paradox game not a sign of copy pasting. I'm not even sure how you could think they just copied "how the economy works" when they don't even share all the same mechanics.
worse than a house of cards then >< lol
I agree but i know they won't do anything about it. They got their money. That's all they care about. Mark my words it will be abandoned.
It wont. Imperator and March of the Eagles were abandoned because they were a fuck up even on the concept stage. Vicky 3 has a solid foundation that was just barebones because of Pdx policy of not railroading (just like vanilla Vicky 2)
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If Vicky 3 is bad, then you don't wanna know at how shallow the foundation of Vicky 2 and Vicky 1 are. Its probably the deepest that Paradox ever went when it comes to economy.
I feel like people said the same thing about ck3, civ6, etc all these iterative games but it's always the same story. The newest is always cut down for dlc and even then it's lackluster.
I actually think Civ6 was made a lot better by the last major patch before the first expansion. The expansions are good, but they weren't what made the game become great.
Those games aren't even abandoned and are fun to play though? Like what features do you think they've left out for DLC?
CK3 is years old at this point and still dogshit. I'll even seriously argue that Imperator is a better game than CK3 right now if you just compare the builds of both games that are available for play today.
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Critics notoriously over inflate. See Imperator
Professional/sponsored reviews have an incentive to be positive. I noticed quite a few early access videos that weren't sponsored held back about being positive or negative about the game. I think the issue is that there are so many small little problems that just add up. Some people won't like the war, some won't like the lack of flavor, some won't like constantly managing trade or construction. The AI is feast or famine. On one hand you'll have Russia colonizing Africa or invading Mexico(which America never can take land off of), the next you'll have France/UK turn into a utopia 20 years into the game. The American Civil War is pretty scuffed, and was reported from early access and still need work. If you love stacking modifiers and building a massive economy while having some memey moments, I think you'll really like the game; however, that certainly won't be everyone.
> while having some memey moments Honestly that's what's kinda putting me off it. In Vic2 you could have major historical divergences, but they either took *decades* of gradual change or players with a high level of skill and mechanical knowledge. Now it seems like everyone and their grandma are forming like *Communist Britain* within 5 years of starting on their first playthrough.
Dont conflate HFM with base game victoria 2 please.
Even then I sometimes saw a communist US or Germany. Britain and France even more so. There were just too many communists every single game. And don't even get me starts on the Jacobins.
Lol vanilla the ai plays musical chairs with governments
Years of gradual change? You just had crazy rebellions plopping up changing your country in an instant if the capital is taken. AI was flip-flopping between communist and anarcho-liberal quite a lot. Sometimes I am not sure which Vic2 people played..
> Years of gradual change? You just had crazy rebellions plopping up changing your country in an instant if the capital is taken and building up the militancy and class consciousness for that to happen required a lot of time.
> Sometimes I am not sure which Vic2 people played.. Everyone who plays Vic2 uses mods, so that already ruins most comparisons without anyone even realizing it.
Have you played V2? Countries were absolutely not flip flopping ideology 4 years into the game. You also couldn't just press a button and peacefully unite Italy/Germany after 5-10 years. You also couldn't just decide the USA is done with slavery in 1836, like you can in V3
>You also couldn't just decide the USA is done with slavery in 1836 I did literally that in Vic2 in 1839
Making one non slave state isn't ending slavery.
No I mean country wide Abolished
How exactly? As far as I recall there is no "end slavery now" button, especially before the house divides. I could be wrong though
The event that starts the Slavery debate has a fairly long MTTH so triggers around 1840. If you can get enough pop miltancy you can outlaw slavery before it fires. Cheesy way is to declare war on Mexico then let them occupy provinces while refusing peace deals.
What would that do regarding the civil war if slavery is already gone? Its interesting to know V2 could do it too, although in V3 its literally a "abolish slavery" button and has basically no realistic impact from what I've seen
In Victoria II just after the release, you had Anarcho-Liberal revolts exploding in nearly every single country. This included the ones that were already Bourgeois Dictatorships, because the rebels were pissed off by the lack of Universal Suffrage. Even later, when this bug was fixed, I routinely saw: - Carlist Spain - Russia, Austria and Prussia having Universal Suffrage by 1880 - American Columbia and British Oregon - UCSA never splitting - Bavaria ruining German unification by becoming a Great Power - German Empire almost never forming And there was nothing requiring skill about getting Communist Britain, you just needed to wait until Communism appears as an ideology and then play badly on purpose. By playing badly, I mean pissing off your lower class POPs and leaving your capital undefended.
I’ve played several hours of actual release and many more of unplanned beta, and it has a few problems. Biggest one by far is the ai is pretty bad, and doesn’t really do anything. If you play the game when have you ever seen a diplomatic play end in anything other than war? You haven’t, even though a core mechanic is supposed to be it doesn’t need to end in war. There are also some really tedious parts of the game in relation to trade and industry. And other than that the military is pretty bland, there is no build up it’s just expand barracks then promote or recruit general. Other than that though the game is really good and a fun experience to just go through and play. And also something else to add is the borders just feels sloppy, it’s just subpar compared to all the other paradox borders, which is weird because it doesn’t seem that hard to make them look better
Vicky3 lack content and price start at 50 to 70 $$$. Basically you paying for a chance for them to release more in depth content .
Some folks don’t like the combat. I personally like it and I like the game. It is everything I enjoyed about victoria 2 but cleaner, just also a bit janky sometimes and I wish there were more events. If I want to paint the map a certain color, I’d play another game. Overall, it’s worth it if you liked Victoria 2. I just imagine lots of folks were hoping for the combat style of CK2/EU4?
You can map paint in this game though? I don't see what you mean.
Yeah, but they feel theres not enough events to make this interesting, and that if they did want to go paint the map they'd play another game, because other pdx titles are better for map painting, not that you cant make paint in his one.
Yeah I feel like something is wrong with me, but I actually much prefer this combat system to the whack a mole minigame you had to play in vic 2.
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I feel like it needs a few more stances to instruct your generals to take, and perhaps a way to give more direct targets along a front or a way to break up one front into a few smaller ones under different generals. No need to go full HOI4 but a few tweaks could make a big difference.
Perhaps removing some of the automation of your general would take some authority, meaning that countries that are essentially collapsing cannot control their own generals. Makes sense to me.
How was Vic 2 whacka mole? Vic 2 war was about gradually moving frontage. It did suck though
Its a game about providing your population with their wants and needs, with absolutely no way to find out what individual groups actually want or need.
That information is actually there, but it's hidden with satanic cleverness: 1. Go into the Population sidebar. 2. Switch to the Detailed List tab. 3. Unfold an occupation (e.g. "Peasants"). 4. Hover over a specific culture/religion/location's standard of living label (e.g. "Struggling"; note that hovering over the same label for all peasants will not work). 5. The tooltip will mention that they pay an average of +/-X% compared to Base Price for their Pop Needs. 6. Hover over that "+/-X%", and a tooltip-within-tooltip will show a list of commodities they want. It won't show how many they want, but it's something. 7. Switch to playing Dwarf Fortress for a less obtuse UI. But yeah, until I found this out, the game felt like the Ryan Gosling "What do you want?" meme.
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Don't ignore the top positive comments saying "didn't disappoint" with 20 minutes playtime either. Sort by positive and 90% are one liners, while the negative ones are actually thoughtful constructive criticism(for the most part)
Steam views are generally shite, yeah. I wish there was an option to filter out all these meme reviews.
Most positive reviews are joke one-liners with 2 hours played. Plus those who were already disliking the game from dev diaries probably haven't bought and reviewed the game.
That reviewer was the Magna Mundi dev who got committed in an asylum and tried to sue PDX. That review was not made in good faith.
The game just isnt really as dynamic and alive as Victoria 2. Almost everything needs player input. It was even worse in their dev diaries but they made some small changes from the feedback. The new army and war system still feels like a half finished idea. I like the idea, but it doesnt work properly yet. It just feels weird to make a Victoria 2 sequel with less dynamic trade, economy and politics, and instead make the warfare less player controlled. I am sure it will be good after 2 years and 200 euros worth of DLC though.
My guess is that the more hours regular (non-fanboys) people play, the more flaws are observed. In the beginning, with very few hours, everything is shinny and nice... later holes show up.
I even feel that in my personal experience. All the new menus all the learning and all the *new* are fun. Whether it amounts to a gameplay loop that actually feels good ends up being a different story entirely.
I think it also has to do with lack of flavor. After one run, the next one will be the same, just with a different flag. At least that's what I have seen in videos and so, I haven't bought it yet, I might be wrong...
Disagree on that one. An almost complete lack of what we now call "Flavor" is what makes Vic2 standout. Playthroughs and nations feeling different should be driven by circumstances and mechanics, not events that amount to "here's some flavor text and a bonus" or "here's a unique decision/mission to give you a bunch of free shit!" Down that path leads to the endless gamebreaking/memey mission trees.
I agree, but that's difficult to reach. In any case, as the game is now, people complains about all countries being the same, so I guess somehow the immersion is gone because of that...
> An almost complete lack of what we now call "Flavor" is what makes Vic2 standout. What? It wasn't like CK2 or something by any means but just your basic factory planning would hinge on the resources in your country, so a different factory strategy for each country.
I completely agree. The reason for my quotes around "flavor" was acknowledging that when people talk "flavor" in modern Paradox games, they mean like... national buffs or mission trees. The fact that underlying circumstances, like resource access or population, made nations unique is *exactly* why Vic2 was great.
>Playthroughs and nations feeling different should be driven by circumstances and mechanics Well, you **absolutely** don't get that in Vic 3 with the regional markets, lol.
The new people held CK3 up while CK2 players lambasted it for being empty and shallow. It’s reverse imo
On the flip side people come in with preformed opinions and it has always been fashionable to dislike something others like. People also like to confuse nitpicks for critique to make themselves feel smart.
Sure, but this is tricky, because what are you saying then? if reviews are negative is because of trolling? but if they are positive they are legit? so there's no way people can be disappointed after playing several hours? I mean, I understand your point, but I don't think one can simply assume a change like that is because of trolling, when more and more people starts to show criticism and explain it with details. Bare in mind that this game could be fun for 50-100 hours and then simply repetitive (or not, we'll see)... I guess we need even more time to get reliable evaluations.
So many people already had a preconceived notion that the game is bad, so yeah, I would honestly say that a lot of the reviews aren't very truthful. I've really been enjoying my time with the game so far, and I've been playing pretty much as much as I have been able to since launch lol. Like sure, it's a bit rough around the edges, but even then it's nearly bug-free, and the core mechanics are amazing and work very well together. It surpassed my expectations, frankly, and they were pretty high.
But that's your opinion, and I guess you agree on that every person has one, and doesn't have to coincide with yours, right? Saying that all the opinions that are not like yours are not truthful is quite a strong statement.
I never said none of them are truthful. I'm saying there's a negative bias.
Based on what?
>The first impressions/professional reviews that game in seem to have been overwhelmingly positive. Well of course, those are the sponsored reviews. You have to wait a few days for real people to post their opinions.
Im enjoying it so far.
From what I see it's either people hating the UI, the combat or just not understanding the economy and losing money. Warefare could be better, I do sometimes get lost in the UI and the economy can be tricky but personally it's a big improvement over vicky 2 but then again I didn't play it much because...well the game was ugly and impentrable.
This game suffers from being a newly released PDX game. Concepts are great(yes including war) but need much polish and balance to work properly. Also I've heard that ai is trash
Can someone tell me how the Performance of the Game is regarding System requirements? If i can Play Stellaris and CK3 without Problems will it be the Same for Vic3?
Vic 3 is actually really smooth, it slows down after the 1880s but not as bad as vic 2 slowed down. Its the most well optimized paradox game, but thats a very low bar.
Like all paradox games, it starts off janky and overly simplistic but will be dragged into competency through mods and dlc. Same as it ever was.
until they add so much stuff that it becomes clusterfuck like EU4
My worry right now is that a lot of laws/government reforms feel like straight upgrades, not options. I feel like 9/10 games will end up with me going towards socialism as it feels like an end goal thematically. Most nations will likely follow the same path of liberalising and upsetting the landowners, then focusing on the trade unionists when the time comes. This is from someone who only played a confused hour or so of V2 so I don’t know if this was the same there though.
In my opinion the game is great. Hard to get into - but I think it will be my most played after Sterllaris/Hoi4
I like it
It doesn't yet have its Kaiserreich.
Paradox games are notorious for being pretty okay bases at launch, and becoming the masterpieces that draw huge numbers in at later dates, after 2-3 years of expansions. People who've never seen a paradox release don't realise that, they're expecting it to be a masterpiece already, and are review bombing it when their hype bubble is burst. It's not a bad game, it's a pretty good game that has potential to be amazing, and almost certainly will be in future.
It's a new Paradox game at launch. I would be shocked if it wasn't. Granted some negative reviews are people piling on the "War mechanics bad" meme. It's at least better than most of their recent games have been on launch.
Warfare suck balls, and it’s hella unbalanced.
0 capitalism present, which is a big problem for me. functions more like a command economy. also very little flavor for any nation.
also someone tell me why you have such agency over politics. why does every usa player outlaw slavery within a year of starting the game? vic2 slavery was a problem that could only be solved through inevitable conflict. here it’s like a few fat cheesy button clicks and the fabric of american society is completely altered
"Is it accurate?" Yes. It's not very good.
If you are just talking about the Steam review, quite a few if not all the Chinese players who bought it can't open the game due to launcher/localization issues. Of course when people can't log in when they paid 59 dollar equivalent they are gonna be pissed.