:marx-hi:

    • Changeling [it/its]
      ·
      2 years ago

      This is actually a common question raised in political science: why do countries go to war with each other when it will weaken both of them to do so?

      I’ve always thought it was obvious that rulers are using stolen wealth to send the peasants’ children to war rather than their own, but maybe that’s more of a truism than a legit theoretical construct lol

      • iridaniotter [she/her, she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        :wojak-nooo: Nooo you can't just go to war if it'll be disadvantageous to both parties!!

        :porky-happy: Haha resolving the crises of overproduction go brrrr

      • HamManBad [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Nah that's pretty much the correct answer. I'd add that a lot of people in the ruling class do legitimately fall for their own nationalist propaganda though, which plays a role

      • 420blazeit69 [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        To make it more theoretical you could describe it in terms of exactly who bears the costs and who reaps the rewards.

        Basically "if there was a button that would give you a billion dollars but kill a million poor people, how many world leaders would push it?"

      • jizzong [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        why do countries go to war with each other when it will weaken both of them to do so?

        I remember reading an argument about politicians who support illegal military campaigns or get involved in shady proxy wars or greenlight questionable CIA operations. These type of decisions could spell the end of their careers but they support them anyway because being able to make decions that shake up the lives of millions of people gives them a hard fucking dick.

      • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        WW1 was pretty disruptive to capital though. My theory is that they are just that stupid and bad at running a state

        sure it was the workers who paid the cost in blood for the most part but like what were they buying with that blood it didn't make the rich better off it just killed everybody

      • ElGosso [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Peasants and working class are still key to production to both monarchs and capitalists. While the person doing the fighting obviously bears the brunt of the war it's short-sighted to say that's its only effect.

  • SerLava [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    :che-smile: it's not my fault if reality is Marxist

    • PROMIS_ring [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 years ago

      I have been scrolling the vic 3 sub all day lol

      this isn’t a political statement but this game has overrepresented marxism and extreme left views and ideas within the society it simulates. there was not a single communist country established for around 4/5ths of the game’s time frame, and yet you can do it and become a communist state with minimal opposition in quite a few countries thanks in part to random dice rolls.

      i fear that the V3 may have a small case of alt-history-itis. they probably got it from hoi4

      marxist alt history, in my Industrial revolution grand stategy game?? :confusion:

      • Leon_Grotsky [comrade/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        This guy is very wrong, but in another thread I saw someone bring up how over-represented middle-class supporters of industrialists and Intelligentsia are, and they correctly point out that there isn't enough pop support for the clergy/devout and petite bourgeoisie which contributes to some other complaints I've seen here on hexbear about there not really being much militant opposition to revolution.

        • PROMIS_ring [he/him]
          hexagon
          ·
          2 years ago

          There is some sort of overflow error where if you have like a bazillion trade Unionist they have negative clout or something lmao

      • GenderIsOpSec [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        i wonder what their takes would be if you could easily become a fascist state? :thonk:

        oh, and if it's possible well that just shows you how :reddit-logo: "people" truly have never seen a fascist state they could not apologize for

        • hypercube [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          lol yeah if you had any core territory you don't occupy in vic2 (bare in mind loads of provinces have cores of multiple nations on em) it'd be fascism time for you as soon as it developed. with that said (and admittedly without playing it), it is weird & utopian that in vic3 you can go communist entirely through reform with no armed opposition whatsoever. like, even if you successfully Allende your own nation, there's gonna be external interests trying to put you down

        • alcoholicorn [comrade/them, doe/deer]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Fascism did develop with minimal external opposition (actually significant external support), whereas the USSR was invaded by every liberal state that still had an army after WWI.

  • happybadger [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I kind of want to do what Well There's Your Problem started out as, Roz playing Cities: Skylines and talking about urbanism concepts. Victoria 3 is a good example of Marxist ideas like overproduction, modes of alienation, labour theory of value, the separation of town and country, and imperialism/colonialism being driven by the tendency of the rate of profit to decline. The only thing the game is missing is an environmental component to balance the pollution of industry. There's a real niche there to just talk about Marxism while using the game as cheap ambient footage.

    • Coolkidbozzy [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      A pollution mechanic to increase mortality from smog and drive disease into urban centers along trade routes would be really cool

      I think the game technically has disease and famine mechanics, but they don't seem very important at the moment

      • happybadger [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Mortality is also a non-issue at the moment. Lead mines and whalers are the only industries which specifically increase it. Population growth always outweighs it to the point that a healthcare system is my lowest priority.

        • TyMan210 [he/him, comrade/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I switched tabs and forgot the context of this post for a minute, so I just spent a little bit trying to parse your comment as some really weird political take lol

        • Leon_Grotsky [comrade/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          It might be there's more going on that isn't immediately apparent, there was no tooltip for it I found but I'm pretty sure in my Oman/Zanzibar game the other night my population was being impacted by Malaria despite the tooltip only listing the colonization malus as an effect.

        • barrbaric [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          All mines get mortality if you set them to use nitroglycerin IIRC but I just never bother because the increase in production seems fairly negligible.

  • YouKnowIt [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Not to defend reddit brains too hard, but the base game AI is pretty messed up. Like the AI basically doesn't exploit resources unless it's profitable, but the profitability calcs seem pretty broken so they just won't create the buildings for oil or rubber so you end up having to do a bunch of colonialism yourself to get any oil or rubber. And the immigration system doesn't require any transportation, so you'd get millions of immigrants out of thin air if you do the right policies

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      you’d get millions of immigrants out of thin air if you do the right policies

      Someone let a Texas Republican do this block of code.

    • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      There's a few small issues that seem to make a huge difference. For example, you can't directly invest in any other country, even protectorates and vassals. A lot of the rubber/oil problems could be resolved by just letting you build in client states, balanced by the risk of losing your investment and upending your economy if they flip sides or get conquered.

      • YouKnowIt [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Yeah, it's weird that they cut out foreign investments like they had in vic 2. If I remember correctly, it wasn't an issue in 2 because resources were a by state thing that automatically got produced by pops. I rather like the new system with the building upgrades unlocked by tech over that, but it's a really basic gameplay issue that should've got caught by some quick testing

        • Farman [any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Havent played 3 but in 2 the investment and sphere sustem caused a bug were resources would multiplied themseleves

      • Leon_Grotsky [comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        could be resolved by just letting you build in client states

        It's interesting that you can do this in CKIII despite not really having a good in-game reason to do so.

      • GVAGUY3 [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        It’s not a paradox game unless the AI sucks extreme ass

        And it still beats the shit out of me

  • MitchFucko [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    this game worth pirating? mostly enjoyed CK2 but find these kind of games really hard to get into for the first 4-5 hours

    • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      It's really good at modeling internal stuff that most other 4x games ignore. Like you aren't just playing "against" other countries, you're also dealing with your internal economy and population.

      It's also neat how you can't just unlock socialism, you have to create the population classes needed for it. Like bolstering industrialists to oust the landed gentry then bolstering the trade unions to oust the industrialists.

      You also need to do bad things to radicalize your growing proletariat (that grows based on the productive capacity of your internal economy) that forces them to create a militant communist party.

        • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Marxism is just a really good model of industrial society, if you're making a game about industrial society it's basically a necessity to use Marxist theory at some point to model it's behavior otherwise it'd be stale and boring like neoliberal city builders.

      • solaranus
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        deleted by creator

        • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I'm near the end of my Qing run and nobody got radicalized enough to even give me the option of council republic or command economy. I keep trying to do Communism and my people are too lib to let me :deeper-sadness:

          • solaranus
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            deleted by creator

        • Eris235 [undecided]
          ·
          2 years ago

          council Republic from a monarchy

          Not even doing Anarcho-Monarchism, what's the point?

    • Kuori [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      like with most paradox titles you're better off waiting a few months for patches, dlc, and mods to pop up that add to the experience

      but from what i've seen people here seem to be enjoying it

    • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      I torrented it and it’s the first paradox game I’ve been able to kind of understand. I still really don’t understand why my income and power will be seemingly fine one second and then terrible the next after nothing visible changes, but I am able to play the game and make progress

      • Coolkidbozzy [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        There's a lot of stuff going on in the background that isn't super accessible to the player in the current UI, from my understanding

        like, wage laws only apply in incorporated states, so your unincorporated state might be outcompeting your incorporated state if they produce the same goods, causing your welfare costs to skyrocket as people become unemployed, and then they start consuming less as their standard of living decreases, and then boom everyone is unemployed

      • edge [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        it’s the first paradox game I’ve been able to kind of understand

        wth how? Victoria is by far the most complicated of them, except maybe EU4 but I haven't really played it. Not dragging you, it just amazes me that it's the inverse for you.

        • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I also haven’t played that many paradox games. I’ve only played Stellaris, HOI4, and Crusader Kings 3. Stellaris didn’t grab me. HOI was so complicated and I immediately got in a war and didn’t understand even slightly how to run it. Crusader Kings I honestly hardly remember at all, I think maybe I had some computer issues or my old laptop couldn’t run it well?

      • happybadger [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Check the government construction goods cost and the price for construction commodities. That's where the bulk of my income variability is. Boosting steel/glass/tools/paper/explosives usually brings it down significantly.

          • happybadger [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            I still haven't figured out the right balance to leave some kind of crisis mode when expanding industries use those same inputs, but with a combination of very high taxes (except during revolts)/consumption taxes on services, and keeping an eye on glass/steel/tools/explosives in particular I usually stay 50-100k in the green.

      • ElGosso [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        There's a YouTuber called potatomcwhiskey who does very good instructional videos for 4x/grand strategy games and he's doing a Victoria 3 run right now, might want to check that out

    • PROMIS_ring [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      Took me a few aborted runs before things clicked

      For context I put many hours into ck2, completely bounced off of eu4, and I've done a few ck3 runs.

      I'm kind of burned out on ck feudalism sim, so the Vic politics is a nice change, and I think its a more interesting period than eu4

      If you played a paradox game before you will probably get a handle on the systems relatively quickly.

    • edge [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      If you enjoyed CK2 but haven't played CK3, you should pirate that first.

  • ElGosso [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I don't have this game (computer won't run it) but it's really interesting watch other people play it and stumble into economic staples, both Marxist interpretations and liberal ones.

  • RedDawn [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    I downloaded this game and kind of regret it as I think its just too complicated and hard for me. I tried the tutorial and basically ended up with my country in default in short order, I have no clue what the fuck to do. SOMEBODY HELP ME PLZ