AI AI AI AI AI AI AI
More than most anything else in gaming, the proof will be in the pudding for AI.
Are their difficulty levels besides aggression and behavior?
Well, as you know the nice thing about Paradox games is the asymmetry. A lot of difficulty is factored in based on what country you start with, so we’ll have that. Aside from that, looks like it’s just aggression and behavior settings.
CK3 also didn’t have difficulty level and I think it’s fine. The game does not just has asymmetrical starting positions but open ended goals. You can start as France and have an easier game than Korea, but world conquest as France is probably harder than making Korea a mere regional power.
After I conquer the world as Jan Mayen, I want to go back and try something really difficult!
You guys raise good points, there is a big difference between playing as the UK and some uncivilized African tribe.
I think in the dev responses to this journal somebody asked about a difficulty setting that would give the AI nations bonuses. The reply was that those would be easy enough to mod in but they don’t plan to have them by default as it doesn’t fit for their vision for how the game should be.
But yeah, half the fun once you are “good” at a Paradox game is picking interesting challenges to try. That’s why I actually like the achievements in Paradox games because it ends up being a menu of challenges that I can browse through and find one or two that I like(which is what I’m doing with EU4 currently). A lot of the achievements I have no interest in either because they require more mastery than I’ll ever have or I don’t think they are that interesting, but I’m happy to just ignore those. Victoria 3 will probably be even better with the open-ended goals because you’ll have so many internal mechanics to include.
That makes sense. AI nations getting a 25% bonus to goods production or something could make a mess of the world economy and market.
Indeed, and I don’t think most people playing a sandbox want it to be unfair where the AI gets stuff the player never can. The setting to make AI players treat the player worse seem like they’ll already be a pretty big boost in difficulty. The other overall AI aggressiveness setting is interesting, seems like it will pretty substantially change how the world will play out.
Yeah, I can’t think of a strategy game where things don’t start breaking down once you get to certain difficulty levels and it makes the games super boring for me. Stuff like the inability to starve out an opponent or interdicting trade meaning anything. I was always frustrated in Civ5 where the AI got heaps of free “happy faces” so that it made any sort of luxury depravation pointless. “I could go take out their gold mine… but it won’t matter”.
Old RTS games were like that, StarCraft 1 for example. Modern games shy away from that stuff. Even in Civ4-5-6 AI will be hampered by the denial of luxury goods, but not as much as the real player.
For me, the issue with Civ difficulty is that it’s very much front-loaded. The biggest issue is them starting with more than one settler and technologies, if you survive the early game none of AI bonuses matter. Symmetrical 4X like that must have difficulty levels but they have to be smart and don’t just make some specific strategy the right choice. Civ5 is famous for that as higher difficulties make trade much more important as trade will bring you science if you trade with someone who has more technologies than you - and on higher difficulties, AI starts with more technologies than you. But those games can just live on hard starts and hard achievements.
Ouch, a bug scuttled today’s Egypt stream. After a couple of tries they switched to playing Zulu instead. I’m just now catching up so I have no idea how that goes.
But, early on with Egypt they did confirm that there is a re-tooling penalty when switching production methods. So there is a cost to switching those.
HAHAHA, they figured out the conditions for the bug so now switched back to Egypt to try again on I guess a different build?
For all the crap Paradox come up with, they are the best map makers in the business. This thing is just ‘chef’s kiss’.
Yeah, that is one nice looking map. Imperator may lose its crown as best looking Paradox map.
They’ve sure made big leaps since their early 3d maps cough EU3 cough. They’ve gone from something you look past to works of art.
Finally, i think this will be a fantastic game, and the use of battleplans is genious, I never liked the micro in Eu4 , and now we can focus on building a country and being perfectionists…
Think about how much time you use in Civ 6 building perfect cities and how disconnected warfare feels, Victoria 3 does away with this, and keeps you connected even at war…genious.
Thanks for posting that video, @SamS . I watched the whole thing. It looks great. The narrator says the hands-off implementation of combat is controversial, but I hope they have pulled it off. I have lots of wargames; I don’t have many economic-political simulations.
And yeah, the map looks great! It’s a 3D map, I assume? Or is it just a very clever 2D map?
Is this safe to pre-order you think? Seems there’s some small pre-order bonus’s.
I’m sure it’ll be worth it.
I’m not buying until the first DLC discount, but that’s because I have so many good games backlogged to get to. In general I don’t buy anything full cost anymore, except for maybe 1-2 titles a year from smaller/niche devs that I really want to support.