…What’s up with Distant Worlds 2? I see mixed reviews on Steam. Some reviews say the game isn’t finished?..
DW2 was a technical disaster on systems with AMD cards - terrible performance, terrible crashes. Has played decent to very well on my Nvidia system, which seems consistent with the broader community.
There have been many patches since release, that have improved performance even more for me, and apparently seriously improved it for AMD systems. To the point they are now doing more and more gameplay related fixes in weekly patches this and next week. It sounds like that trend will continue towards the normal sort of post release patching, on QOL and content issues, rather than emergency technical patches.
That of course ruined their review score at launch, which will be hard to come back from. If you’re picky or have plenty of other games to play, I’d let this one bake for another few months of patches, when it will be really excellent. I love it now, but it has been a rough diamond the last month.
It’s an interesting question how you’d avoid this. The player has a great deal of influence over how the country develops, including where arms-manufacturing industries and railroads are located. Factions would need to be sensitive to these factors as well as reactions to scripted events.
Indeed, and the player driven building in Vicky 3 seemingly makes that problem even harder. And I hope the Interest Group mechanic at least provides some pushback with the leadup to the Civil War in ways where there isn’t an obvious choice as far as a desired effect with those events. I’m just looking for some unintended consequences based on the simulation.
I’ll be interested in how this strategy plays out. In real life, that is somewhat what happened, not least because the South was agrarian and intended to stay that way. They were hostile to industrialization.
But in real life, if you had screwed over the South according to their expectations, you would almost certainly have been voted out of office. In the game, it sounds as though the most powerful pops can become angry, and passing laws can become difficult, but it is unclear to whether how that would matter to the player, given prior knowledge that war is coming regardless.
The way that the HOI IV team handled the spanish civil war and russian civil war in recent expansions is to have whatever side you want to play as horribly outmatched when the civil war kicks off unless you expend effort to set things up better. That way, the player is working to have their side on equal or slightly advantageous footing rather than working to have overwhelming advantage.
An update on how battles will be handled in the new system:
I hope we will eventually be able to select state-level avenues for advance, critical points to defend, willingness to give ground etc. Also hoping that state-level infrastructure plays a critical role in where troops can be supported (and therefore added to battles) along the front line.
Yeah, this is journal was basically what I assumed the battles would look like. I do also hope they add on to it some over time while forever avoiding the micro stuff they designed out.
Yeah, I’m really looking forward to the more hands-off approach to warfare. I don’t enjoy the marching armies around bit in EU4 or chasing armies around the map. It really fits well with the Vicky theme too.
I’m good with them adding more important decisions and indirect options. I’m sure they’ll be coming but for the vanilla game this looks pretty good to me.
A meter slowly filling up? In a Paradox game? Well, I never!
(Honestly though, I’m a little surprised there’s only one meter to fill…)
That’s what DLCs are for! ;)
I don’t know, when I think about EU4 my most fun memories are wars against larger foes that I somehow managed to win. It can also be a real chore, but that’s why I have loved the automation options that have been introduced in Paradox games for unit controls.
Well that’s just to kick off the battle which is then really just more meters filling up if you think about it.
See, and for me, it’s a big war kicking off that finally makes me groan and turn the game off for the night(at quarter to three, of course). Early game wars in EU4 are fun and often have the underdog thing going for them. But late game wars with huge territories and giant stacks everywhere are just tedious.
Elections!
Next up: how political parties work.
This part was a little gratuitously painful:
The actual makeup of your government is still up to you; just like the electoral systems of most modern countries, winning the popular vote does not automatically mean that a certain party or coalition of parties gets to form a government.
The devs responded regarding that aspect
The reason an election doesn’t simply cause “the winning” party to take power is because, outside of two-party states, we need to give the player a chance to build a ruling coalition. Say an election split the vote 50/30/20 between the Conservative, Free Trade, and Religious parties. I might not want the Conservatives in charge at all, and decide the Free Trade + Religious parties result in sufficient Legitimacy to get by - or I could sideline the Free Trade party entirely by putting the Conservative and Religious parties in charge. This is hardly even “gamey”, these kinds of post-election negotiations that set the terms for what might be politically feasible during the upcoming mandate period are virtually the norm in almost all democratic countries. We also permit free Interest Groups unaligned with any party to support a ruling party, if for example the Armed Forces have decided to stand outside party politics entirely but still have considerable Wealth-derived Political Strength due to consisting mostly of Aristocrats and well-paid Officers and supported by high-ranking Generals. So player input into which coalition should form (and support) the government is necessary.
Sorry for the confusion! I wasn’t complaining about the game mechanisms. More complaining about corresponding real-world election mechanisms and having Paradox rub salt in the wound by reminding me about it.
Oh I know! It was supposed to make you feel a little better in that the mechanisms they are trying to simulate are multi-party democracies rather than the current situation in a certain two-party country.
I wonder if I can be Ukraine and exact revenge on Russia in this game?
So there are no parliaments, except as abstracted through political power of interest groups? Going back to the dev diary on laws, it looks like putting a group in power lets you enact policies it favors more efficiently, so it seems, hopefully, like a good balance of gameplay and simulation.
A good percentage of Paradox customers buy the games for the express purpose of playing out nationalist revenge fantasies. I’m sure Victoria 3 will deliver on that front.
Based on what I’ve seen they are supporting official(without some of the hoops of past titles) switching to a country that splits off from the one you are playing. So presumably you could start a game as Russia, release Ukraine, and switch to Ukraine. I’m sure they’ll be a releasable tag in this.