I also went back and read one of the trade diaries and it mentioned that trade centers need to be staffed based on the level of trade they cover. So that means, in theory, a very trade dependent country could end up with a not insignificant percentage of the population working to maintain that trade.
I was content to skim this thread and let the game bake for a while after release, but I read that dev diary (not having read any others) and that was a mistake. Seriously considering the pre-order now, despite the fact that I know there’s nothing to be gained by it…
A pleasant exception to my general experience of AMA threads being a disjointed miss.
After reading her comments, I’m quite excited to play the game. Also based on her comments, I’m sure the AI is going to be sub-opimal for many months. So I’ll be doing lots of restarts, and try lots of different countries.
New Dev Diary today talking about their changes to regional interests. I love these changes. Always happy to see interesting ways to make the naval side of a game like this more important, and directly tying it to how wide your diplomatic/trade reach is in the world seems like a great way to do that.
Will read.
There was also a Japan stream this week… with some interesting balance passes missing. YMMV, but I think it’s kind of normal that complex interactions might cause some builds to have interactions lead to weird results. (not applicable to random province wargoals)
Yeah, that all sounds great.
Took me a few sessions, but I made it through One Proud Bavarian’s reactions to his time playing the game:
tldnw:
- The main game systems are very good, and they interact with each other very well.
- The complexity level is very, very high.
- He is concerned that players starting out will stumble badly, hardly knowing where to start.
- Partly because he does not think the UI is up to the level of complexity of the game.
- But also because, unlike many other games, enjoyment of the game depends on a deep understanding of your country’s situation and forming a clear goal as to where you want it to go. He thinks that it will be poorly received by players who just play reactively.
- Paradox knows that the game will be very niche and is okay with that.
I suspect they’ll continue to expand on the Journal system to provide additional structure for new players. If it does prove to be too niche and they only support it for the same length of time as Imperator I’ll be disappointed but not surprised. Anything more than that is gravy. But Paradox also has a vastly larger following than it did when Vicky 2 came out and that may help this one have staying power.
I think there is always a tension between simulation and game, and in this case, I am very focused on simulation. Almost like a nonfiction book, I am interested even if it’s not entertaining in the usual sense. But I am skeptical how widespread that view would be.
I think interesting game made out of a simulation is a generally underrepresented genre. That’s probably part of why I’m making one, even if that makes me a bit biased in this discussion. The thing that I enjoy about games like Railroad Tycoon and Transport Tycoon aren’t micromanaging routes, but seeing the world grow and respond to my actions. The other thing I realized is that not many games are actually interested in that type of setup. Railroad games are often more about setting up signals, and Factorio kicked off a whole different popular genre that is all about the player setting up all the automation. I think the colony sim boom is the closest thing out there to this genre that’s popular right now. While the player still dictates everything to be built, the people in your colony will act somewhat unpredictably and autonomously, as will the world around you.
The tricky thing is making sure the simulation isn’t the only thing having fun(to paraphrase Sid Meier) and that the player can be fully engaged with it, with visibility into what effects their pushing and pulling is having. On top of that, building a working simulation of the appropriate complexity is difficult. Then to expose points for the player to effect while making the rest of the simulation transparent enough for them to understand is another whole level of difficulty.
All that is to say that I think the designers of Vicky 3 know all of this very well and have learned a lot of lessons from Vicky 2. They identified that having capitalists generally being the thing that decide what factories(a huge factor in the game) get built in your country, and leaving the player feeling frustrated at how difficult it was to sway the course of industry, was a neat idea but one that negatively affected the actual gameplay. So they returned control of a bunch of those basic building blocks to the player and instead built out an intricate web of cause-and-effect with the pops based on what you do with those building blocks. And I think that has a good chance at threading the needle between simulation that is just fun to watch develop and one that I feel like I have a very real effect on. I really love their references to gardening when describing what the game is. You prepare the soil and plant the seeds, but ultimately only have so much control over how things grow.
Okay this is a bit worrying. I feel like the last few Paradox Grand Strategy UIs have been a really big improvement making the games much easier to understand. So it’s unfortunate hearing that the UI is not up to the task.
To be clear, he praises their efforts with the UI. And he thought they were working hard on the problem. Just that the complexity created such a high level of challenge.
He mentioned a couple specific weak points (the pop listing and the method of adding things to the outliner) that he saw as simply weaknesses. But my takeaway was that the main problem is that with so many interdependent systems, it’s very difficult to see these inter-dependencies… The price of X is sky high. So who is that benefiting and who is that harming? And how does that affect the political alignments in my country? And if it turns out that I want this price to come down, how would I go about bringing it down?.. Or, a separate example he gives, most countries at the start of the game, why will no one buy the things your new manufactury is offering for sale. (Answer: they are subsistence farmers with no money to spend. So what are you supposed to do about that?)
He does praise the tutorial highly, however.
I can see how dealing with these feedback loops in the UI is an inherently difficult task. I guess they are also suffering a bit from being innovators in general. The economic mechanics in strategy games tend to live within a certain portion of design space that people are used to thinking about and conveying in a UI. It seems that V3, with it’s interlocking mechanics is even more outside this “well explored” region of design space than it’s predecessors.
This also puts all the simplifications in a different light. A lot of the changes I’d like to see for the sake of a more interesting and dynamic simulation would make the effects of player decisions even harder to puzzle out.
In the dumb things I do dept. I decided to reinstall Victoria 2 this last week (5 weeks ahead of Victoria 3 being released)
i bought Vic 2 on day one and played it obsessively for a week. Got frustrated with bugs and came back a few weeks later after the 1.1 patches came out. At the time various people posted the combination of broken simulations, bugs, horrid AI and the game became more frustrating than fun, and uninstalled and never looked back.
This time I picked up the two DLC for $5, and discovered that Paradox really made Vic 2 into a playable game at least for the first 40 years. I’m up to 1869 in my Sweden game and have dabbled with Brazil, US and Spain. In Vic 2, Sweden is a peaceful country and you are trying to get the country to modernize as fast as possible. The best way is to install a liberal party that wants Laize faire as economy policy and free trade. Once I got that it really accelerate industrialization and I start making a
lot money so I could afford a navy and army. The downside is once capitalism take over they give the player virtually nothing to do, except pick research. It is also frustrating because the AI is typically brain dead about building factories at the right spot. So instead of building the steel factory in the state, which has coal and iron, giving the factory a bonus, it builds it on an island whose RGO is fish.
Now realistically dumb capitalists may do stupid shit like that. (I see entrepreneurs try to build a stupid business in Hawaii all the time). It didn’t matter that much in vanilla version of Vic 2, where a factory was built but after Hearts of Darkness it does.
I’m concerned that may have built some much complexity into Version 1.0, that it will overload not only the AI, and the QA dept, but possibly the player base.
But most of us figured out Old World, so QT3 should be fine…
Honestly, is there that much added complexity in Vicky 3? I see the breakup of the world market and the Interest Groups as kind of the biggest things. What else am I missing? I guess the military stuff is more complex since they took it out of the player’s hands, but I also consider that kind of a side concern in Vicky. As long as it isn’t so broken as to make war unwinnable or something, I don’t much care at release.
A lot of the rest of the complexity was there in Vicky 2, just arranged differently.
This + the unfixable world market are kind of what sunk Vicky 2. Oh, and the UI.
To me, just about the coolest thing about Victoria 2 was how the importance of prestige forced you into doing things you didn’t really want to do. Like, joining that big war and colonizing Africa are both probably a lot more expensive than they are helpful, and it would make a lot of sense to avoid both, but if you don’t do those things, you’re going to lose a ton of prestige and fall out of the 8 great powers, which really stings.
So you end up with a lot of the same dilemmas, and making a lot of the self-defeating decisions, as European countries really did in the 19th century, which felt pretty nifty and clever bit of game design.
Anyway, I am just hoping Victoria 3 has something similar.
A lot of the prestige stuff seems to be similar. Although, interestingly, in rereading the dev diary it doesn’t mention direct prestige from colonization, it seems it may be more of a side effect of doing things like cornering the market on goods production and things like that.
I do like the variable number of major powers, assuming the UK can’t just completely run away with prestige every game.
Quite insightful. As Sweden,I didn’t get a chance to get Denmark before Prussia/Germany got her in SOI. So tech wise I’m all set to participate in the great African colonization race, but I don’t have port within range. So Ottoman goes bankrupt, giving me a CB to collect the debt. Maybe I can grab province in Egypt or Libya. So I and 4 allies declare war, my army is small, but so is my population. The navy is modern but also small, and I don’t yet have an ironclad. Unfortunately, France decides to help out the Ottoman. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Anyway, I am happy they continue to have an investment in the art, polar expeditions etc as way of gaining prestige as well as economic and military factors.
Cause, when I think about Sweden really is a very high prestige country. I constantly remind folks on P&R who argue why can’t we have the social services of Scandinavian countries, that 99.6+% of the world population doesn’t live in Scandinavia. They are elite countries.
Complex resource chains with swappable production methods with large economic effects; internal “government” power limits.
The resources could be a problem, although I think the player has a lot more control over how many raw resources they can produce. The RGO system in previous versions were tougher to manage. Granted, the AI nations will need to handle that stuff well which is added complexity on that side.
The government resource stuff just feels like a balancing issue to me but I could certainly be wrong there.