After much heartache and heavy cost, the brave warriors of the Union of Social Democratic Tribes of Oceania have bought their freedom from the Perfidious English, liberated their comrades in Polynesia and Australia, and created a land where everyone from Freed American slaves to Flemish Refugees to Chinese Socialists can join together. Soon the Parliament will be dissolved in favour of a Council Republic.
Two problems remain
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Taking most of Australia somewhat suddenly means that now I have tanked my economy and standard of living having to provide Public Healthcare and Education to a few million starving semi-literate anglos.
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The Fucking French! HAAATTTTTEE!
The Fucking French! HAAATTTTTEE!
Me playing Haiti and seeing half of my budget went to repaying slave owners.
Me knowing that this is what happened in real life :agony-deep:
How do you end the french payments?
I got the UK to protect me, so I can afford a war.
Edit: So there's a decision tab behind the journal tab.
The tabs behind tabs is pretty atrocious in this game. Didn't realize there were three tech trees for like a decade
Did you have to pay tens of millions of dollars to citibank though?
Masterpiece :cmnd-marcos-pog: :fidel-salute-big:
On a scale of 1 to 10, how "on rails" is the progression in Vic3 as a nonwestern/un"developed" nation? Cuz if you can do something like this, it might be worth it. Is it possible to go even further and drive the Dutch out of Indonesia, for example? And obligatory fuck the french
So, the primary issue is "Unrecognised" status, which means that the Euros are super racist towards you. China et al enjoy this shitty status despite having the largest pop and GDP. Not only does it reduce prestige, but it also means others can declare war against you more easily, fuck you over without infamy, etc.
As far as I can tell, the only way out is to win (or at least risk) a war with a great power to force them to recognise you as a war goal. Kicking the Dutch out of Indonesia (a future goal) is definitely a way to do this.
In terms of economic and military power, only your development is an issue. In terms of prestige/ranking, you need to get out of Unrecognised status and force the Euros to see you as an equal.
I won the opium wars as China after convincing France to join so in the end the war was fought in the Caribbean after like 400 units crushed the 180 unit British Portuguese incursion from south China. So now the Brits are paying reparations and forced to recognize China. I’m also executing all the opium smugglers that keep demanding to see the British ambassador.
I think the whole "unrecognized" system is a lot better than the way they did it in Vic2. Where you start as "uncivilized", go through a process of "westernization", and then finally you can become "civilized"
Certainly it's worded better, but realistically you are pushed heavily towards adopting western economic and political systems just to survive, though you do have some leeway in "how" you do it.
well was that not the main struggle of the era for most peoples and nations ? Try to adopt western technology like industrialization to defend themselves but at the cost of their own traditions and way of life. This was the century capitalism conquered the world, and there's a reason why most people who resisted in that moment lost :sadness:
Yeah, but because other cultures aren't fleshed out, it's hard to, for example, achieve the cultural synthesis Japan managed in the 19th century. You Will Develop Romanticism. You Will Use Western Monoculture Agricultural Practices
you are pushed heavily towards adopting western economic and political systems
I mean, considering how Capitalism spread by forcing people to adopt it and conquering those who didn't, this seems pretty spot on. Traditional tribal relations may be more egalitarian and good for the people living in them, but they don't exactly maximize rifle production.
Climate change will be reversing all of that and it's shame it takes catastrophe to do that.
Ah, yeah, that's not the best. The fact that the a lot of the "unrecognized" nations are even on the map is progress in itself, but I feel like it shouldn't be that hard to just do it justice in one go, rather than taking baby steps towards it.
Once I get a handle on the game I want to do an Indian Territory run, that seems like it would be fun, once you get going at least lol
I have a sneaking suspicion that they're gonna flesh out the "unrecognized" nations, but it's gonna be like a "Native Lands" DLC.
At least it has good modding support so we'll see overhauls that add better stuff for the colonized nations
Oh yeah I would honestly be surprised if they didn't do that at some point. I'm also looking forward to mods though, I bet we'll see some really good ones pop up before too long. If it goes the direction of HOI4, it might be a case where the game just serves as a bare-bones platform for mods that are much more fleshed out
a few million starving semi-literate anglos.
White Australians are indeed useless
There is a robust re-education going on. Luckily, they're not a majority, and not even the largest group South Australia is mostly Melanesian, and Queensland is 40% Native American somehow.
and Queensland is 40% Native American somehow
Fleeing American genocide by going to the land whose natives successfully took power over their euro colonizers, maybe? Could be a good rp.
Edit: and a good excuse to eventually liberate America.
Yeah, there's also a lot of Polynesian and Afro American culture. I was really afraid going multicultural with open migration would result in a flood of white settlers but the opposite happened.
My goal is a communist United States with independent tribal nations. In my first attempt I couldn’t figure out how to get them recognition without going to war with them so now I’m trying a new method of “let the US finish out the colonization while I deal with slavery and then grant them independence afterward” because I accidentally did that to the Cherokee in my first attempt and it made them a recognized country
We're communist now. Military decided it wanted to form some councils and the Trade Unions jumped ship from the Succdems (Also, recall the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party has some good moments.) Still can't kick out the French but sooooon.
For all yall who played it, do you think Vic 2 was substantially better than 3 in its current form? All the negative reviews I see begin with "I have 9001 hours in Victoria 2 and 1337 hours in EU4 and this is the worst game I've ever played"
I think. right now, Vic 2 is slightly better. But Vic 3 will be better in a patch or two. They both have natural strengths.
They've simplified the economy in some ways, but now it behaves much more like an economy. You really, really feel the material conditions, so with NZ for example, I just didn't have the population to go agrarian, so I had to coddle the industrialists and develop mining and industry tech ASAP. There is no way to press the Socialism button before you've developed enough productive forces, and if you're a high pop nation like South Africa farms are way more viable.
Even now, a sexist asshole running the Trade Unions is fucking over me giving the vote to women.
The one weakness is that there is no direct military control. You assign fronts and hope for the best (see, the French drubbing me in my second war for the South Island.) but it's clearly a placeholder mechanic.
it's clearly a placeholder mechanic.
I think I remember one of the devs saying that they simplified warfare so they could focus on the economics aspects.
It's worth considering that paradox are allergic to releasing finished games, so in a year's time it will probably be much better (after some stupidly expensive dlc). Also as much as I enjoy Victoria 2, I always play with HPM to the point that I forgot how boring the base game can be after a while
Ae an hpm player do you know if the sepoy rebellion events are still around? During the last game i beat the british in a war before the triger date, but it never trigered even after i killed all their regular units. I was playing afghanistan so i rage quit after that.
Yes I think it is definitely better than vic2 and I have a good amount of experience with that game. A lot of people think they dumbed down the economy somehow in Victoria 3. This is incorrect, they just made it actually understandable. A lot of people are confusing the opacity of Victoria 2's economics with complexity. Vic2's economics honestly sucked, like it was better than most other games, but there were many fundamental errors. Prices didn't even move with supply and demand correctly, which is kinda the basis for how a market works. Let alone all the weird hacks mods had to use to fix issues like money being destroyed (not spent, just vanishing), capitalists being brain dead when it came to industrial expansion (also a vital thing to get right for the era).
Most of these issues come from the fact that one (1) guy made the entire economy code for Victoria 2 and then left the company. Not even the other developers knew how it worked so they couldn't fix it even if they wanted to.
Victoria 3 has functional supply and demand. Trade that you can actually direct instead of just praying for. Dynamic political groups. It's an overall improvement in every aspect... even (controversially) warfare in my opinion. I always found the Victoria 2 warfare to be excessively tedious and disconnected from the rest of the game. It was fine, but it felt like the Europa Universals series. In Vic3 war is very much a sideshow for the economy, it even tells you how much the war has cost you. It's definitely simplistic and I'm sure they will expand on it, but I do not have any problem with the new fronts system at its core.
My only experience with paradox games is playing HOI4 for a couple hours and being totally confused, especially by the warfare. Vic3 it makes way more sense enough that I can at least just point my generals at the enemy’s borders and it seems to mostly work
I havent played 3 but in 2 the prices do move with suply and demand its just tbat the way it is calculated is very convoluted. There are several mechanisms the game uses for this and some are really wierd.
As for the war thing. In 2 it was often the only way you could get an advantage over europeans or the us. How am i suposed to beat the us as mexico in the starting year, so bad i teiger a civil war in the early 50s without micromanaging the military?
No Idea, played NZ Maoris and he would have appeared on my final absorbing of AU.
i have like 8 hours in the game and I still struggle with this question.
It is a game about politics, trade, and productive chains.
not really spoilers, just saving space
You, as the player, are "The Spirit of the nation" not playing as a "character" like say CKIII.
Your goal is to take any country on the map and... do something with it; it really depends on the material context of the country.
Much of what you are doing is building, expanding, and managing the inputs/outputs of your productive facilities, balancing the wishes and needs of the population of your country, and interacting with the other powers of the world through diplomacy. The "Goal" of the game is whatever you want to do with no real "Victory" like in say Civilization. You just have 100 years to manage a country in the Victorian era, achieving personal goals by creating conducive environments and finding ways to cajole pops into doing what you want.
Want to drive back the Yankees as the Oklahoma territory?
Regional dominance as Haiti?
Destruction of the *nglo empire?
Indian liberation?
Karl Marx showing up in Polynesia and building World Communism from the Pacific?
Well you can do any of these things so long as the conditions are right.
ummm
well
economy needs things, gets bigger
I don't fuckin know man :angery:
GIGO algorithm, your life will be better if you never play it
t. person who's never played it
I'm...not sure I even know how the game works yet. I'm not sure anyone is.
To add to what others are saying, one thing I thought was interesting as a first time Victoria player was the way changing the government works. Your government always has the 'groups of interest' that support it, and oppose it. You can only pass laws that at least some of the current government members support, and the decisions may radicalize some groups. Groups being stuff like landowners, Catholics, Rural folk, intellegencia, etc.
But those groups are just floating ideas, they're actual people, with your groups of 'pops' beloning to one or more groups (so, your iron workers might be Trade Union and Catholic for example).
To actually manage to change the laws in your country in ways the populace disprove of, you need to actual get the populace at least somewhat behind your ideas. So like, building more factories will eventually result in more Trade Union Members, or alternatively, you can use propaganda to increase/decrease attractions to groups, so overtime you can bleed support away from the Catholics. But even then, you're not going to be able to 'get rid' of the Landowner faction unless you actually lower the amount of landowners.
It actually feels pretty damn materialistic, even if the core gameplay idea of a guiding 'spirit of a nation' definitely is not, and some of the execution is lacking at times.
FWIW, I can see how its broken down
Your buildings give how much of each type 'worker' you have
Each type 'worker' has a pool of Groups of Interest they could be interested in (though the game only ever has one or two 'active' for each individual, based on weightings, so like factory works could be Trade Union, or Industrialist, or Catholics, or maybe some others) But the overall spread of who supports what is all based on percentages.
You program the starting Worker->GoI weighting, but the 'drift' mechanics can change (within set bounds) what percentage of each type of worker supports which GoI.
That gives you your number of GoI, that show up on your government screen.
Each GoI has preprogrammed what they think about each law
From there, its trivial (for a computer) to calculate overall populace approval, and if you do something to 'radicalize' catholics (like implementing seperation of church and state) its trivial to backtrack specifically which worker are now radicals.
Each lil step there is pretty easy to program and relatively simple on its own, the trickier part of actually balancing it, cause it is a system with a LOT of 'moving parts', lots of weightings and balances, not to mention a pretty decent amount of stuff to do 'by hand'. There's a couple hundred laws, and I have to image they just went though each possible GoI and law by hand to set the approval. Similarly, a lot of type of 'workers' to weight for what GoI they start allied with, and what bounds they have to work in.
There even more complexity I'm skipping over, like each set of populace also has an amount of political enfranchisement, so (accurately) at the start, the landowners and other aristocracy are heavily 'over-represented' in political sway, in terms of GoI power and populace approval. So you need to appease them to get anything done... Or figure out another way to get fewer landowners :owl-wink:. But, as the lower classes get more educated and better living conditions, and as you change voting laws or protest laws, they gain enfranchisement.
Probably other shit I missed too, I'm not that deep in the game yet. But overall, I can definitely feel out how the game is just a towering pile of little systems all interwoven. So, I'm not really impressed with the programming complexity, but the balancing complexity.
Can you play as Guatemala? Would love to do an AU where Arbenz kicks out the CIA and then proceeds to form the Communist Federation of Central America.
Yes you can play as Guatemala, though it is not an independent nation at game start, it is part of the "Central America" federation.
Although this is the case, if you start as CAF you can release Guatemala as an independant nation at game start.
Oh damn they actually implemented the CAF? I can just keep it as is and make it turn Communist. Probably taking Panama and parts of Mexico too.
Uncertain but there are certainly a lot of little nations down there. Only the less organised non-European nations are unplayable. I think you can even play one of the Patagonian first nations and fuck over Chile
