I think it’ll be the best selling Victoria game yet!
Seriously though, I don’t know how this would have gotten greenlit at PDX without some reason to believe it’ll be profitable. Their core audience has certainly grown since Vicky 2 and Anno 1800 showed that the timeframe isn’t necessarily a loser.
Yes, without a doubt it will enjoy strong sales at first at least. Who knows about the DLC tail.
There is definitely some backlash among traditional buyers. i know for me personally, the warfare change has made go from a day 1 purchase to a wait and see. I approve of the changes, but it also increases the chances of another Stellaris. So while there is an increased chance this Victoria 3 will become my favorite PDX, the risk of total bust is also higher.
It’s an appealing change for me. I believe they’ll deliver on the strategic complexity and make the technological and doctrinal war changes over the game feel meaningful. Feels more respectful of my time as a player, but not dumbed down.
That said, I only have dozens of hours in PDX games, not thousands, so please take one and pass…
Ooo, tomorrow’s dev diary sounds like it’ll be a good one. I’m really looking forward to seeing more details on the fronts.
Seems interesting. Fronts seem larger and with less control than I had imagined. The interactions between generals and politics, and the mechanics of the Barracks vs Conscription centers seems nice.
Really wondering if they will stick to a single front even if it’s a thousand miles long…
We did, in the past, play around with auto-splitting Fronts that went past a certain length into multiples. In the end it didn’t add anything to the game and resulted in a lot of logical headaches (how do these Fronts interact when they move? what if the border length decreases again, do the Fronts merge? what if one Front disappears but the other is still valid, what happens to the Generals assigned? etc). In the end what matters in this system is which General is assigned to lead their forces against which country.
I guess the hope is that some additional level of player control in terms of “defend this state” and “prioritise attacks on this state” makes it in.
They are pretty much what I expected. I was happy to see that part of the goal was to avoid making it so that player needed to pause the game (I still will at times I’m sure).
I do agree though I"m not sure that I want a single front for Germany’s invasion or Russia, or an American invasion of Mexico or Canada, they may be right having multiple fronts does not really add anything.
Another example is the American civil war. It would be a lot more immersive IMO to be able to split forces between the eastern, western and trans-Mississippi theaters and balance risks versus rewards rather than just piling everything into one front and pressing attack. Different parts of a long front will have radically different characteristics in terms of how many troops they can support, how densely populated they are and how much impact advancing one or two provinces will have.
If you are France attacking a coalition of German states, you will have fairly detailed control of your disposition across the front. If you are France attacking a unified Germany, you have one front and effectively one set of orders. I think it’s a lost opportunity.
So how would Britain fight the Crimean War in this system?
I’m no expert on the Crimean War, but I think it would take the form of a naval invasion in the Crimea which creates a front there which they can reinforce (and the French can reinforce). The next DD will talk about the naval model.
Really, for small fronts, I think the system sounds great (though I might want orders to be a bit more fine-grained). I’m just apprehensive of how this will work on large fronts.
This quote gives some idea of the flexibility of the system, being able to avoid giant stacks and control the size and balance of engagements a bit:
This matters because every numeric advantage in manpower is squared over time. So if the first battle was sized 100-20, it would assuredly win and would probably on average leave 93-10 battalions remaining. The next battle would have an even greater advantage, and so on.
But with the sizing of each battles being closer together, the outcome of any given battle is less guaranteed, and over time a numeric advantage is not squared in the same way. This doesn’t mean that there’s a good chance the country with 100 battalions will lose, but since war is a considerable expense the opportunity cost of maintaining those 100 mobilized troops vs the ease of winning will be greater than for the country with 20 battalions.
If battalions really are intelligently borrowed and released by generals sharing a front, this is going to be great. A lot hangs on the actual intelligence of these fellas. Would like to see some estimate of their effectiveness accomplishing their assignments in the UI, too. I might’ve missed it.
The way they describe these conjoined efforts across an entire border remind me of setting orders in Diplomacy. I like the idea of playing a simulated, non-deterministic game of 1800-1914 Dip.
After a long forum outage we have today’s DD on the naval side of things: Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #24 - Navies and Admirals | Paradox Interactive Forums
Seems to me like a far more straightforward version of the naval system in HoI4. Can’t wait to see how all of this works in practice.
It’s interesting to me that flotillas and battalions seem to be a form of goods storage. They take a flow of military goods and may take a long time to become “combat ready” - i.e. full of goods. Then when they are damaged they need more flow to fill them up again. I guess the same mechanism works when constructing or upgrading a building.
Big improvement over EU4 as well. Sounds good on paper, can’t wait to try it out.
Yeah, in theory the sailors mechanic was supposed to include some level of pushback on the ability to maintain a fleet in being and on mission.
In practice it was inconsequential except at the very early game and if you only had 1 or 2 port provinces and a lot of money. Basically it only ever seemed to limit Austria or Hungary to any meaningful extent.
This one is pure gold I think. All the short and long-term consequences of war, how armies are supported and deployed is great. I especially like this:
The intention here is not only to give the player a lot of economic levers to pull to prepare their country for war, although that is certainly part of it. A big reason for making wars approach the real-life cost is to encourage the player to think hard about the opportunity cost of war - that is, what you’re missing out on by spending your resources on war instead of something else - and incentivize solving your diplomatic conflicts before war breaks out. If war was a cost-effective way both of increasing your power and decreasing your enemy’s power, diplomacy would be relegated to nothing but faux formalities before fighting begins. But if neither party truly desires a war, no matter the power discrepancy between them, that’s when the Diplomatic Play intimidation game to see who blinks first can become real and tense.
It’s really taking the Vic2 benefits praised in ACOUP and doubling-down on them.
Best dev comment
I am really excited about this game. I have not read a single dev diary beyond the first one, purely because I am so excited reading the details will just make the wait seem even longer.
The big news about no more micro-managed units on the screen has even seeped into my dark cave, and I am really happy about it. Moving around individual armies in Victoria 2 was not anywhere close to being the most fun or engaging part of the game. The idea that we can remove it and (hopefully) deepen strategic/economic/political systems and give the AI an actual chance really interests me.
It reminds me to some extent of one of the few non-Paradox GSGs Realpolitik which is set in the modern world, it had a system where you sent armies to provinces then a battle screen came up showing results. I think it worked just fine.
There’s still lots of opportunities to move pieces around each inch of the map in the EU and CK universes.
Moving pieces around the map is bad in EU and CK too. hopefully this new way of modelling war will be used in every future Paradox game that isn’t focused exclusively on warfare.