Great news.
I’ve been waiting for the new patch before starting my next game, since my suspicion was the Pop fragmentation wasn’t going to be retroactive. Looking through the patch notes, it looks like I might have been overly cautious.
Been doing well with my Belgium game. Took Sindh as a dominion because I am chronically short of opium. But I can’t build ports and I have access to only a fraction of the precious opium, which my people rightfully crave. In hindsight I probably should have just conquered them. Does anyone know what the difference between making a dominion, making a puppet and making a vassal is, and why they are better than just conquering?
Edit: Looks like making a puppet would have given me the option of annexing them later. Still dont know why I wouldn’t have just conquered them outright. Now where will my people get their opium?
Also, I am at 92% revolution. Many angry people. If I want to de-radicalize a particular group of people, do I want to give them jobs to make them happy and increase their standard of living, or take away their jobs to decrease their numbers?
Also, is there a way to see what percentage of a strata of population are radical?
And… I lost the revolution. Game over. I wish there were better tools to understand unrest and how to prevent it - if anyone has any tips/pointers, I’m listening. Also, the military interface is awful. I have no idea how to fight a war, let alone win one.
I’ll give it a try but looks like the migration target getting stuck issue that derailed my last game hasn’t been fixed. Probably worth avoiding playing a small country focused on migration.
If you lay off a bunch of radicals, they don’t just disappear. Even if they can’t find other work, it will take a long time to bleed off standard of living and start to starve. In the meantime they will be highly incentivised to topple your government.
It can help long term to create fewer openings for professions who tends to support interest groups you don’t like. For instance, if I don’t want the Devout blocking everything, I can try to switch to non-religious production methods where I can. Moving peasants out of subsistence farms also removes the associated religious jobs.
I’m now playing Prussia, but I’m growing a bit bored with the game. The economy is quite good, but the rest of the game is pretty bland. I don’t fully grok the diplomacy. I try improving relationships or occasionally decreasing relationships, but I find it hard to get other countries to accept my custom unions or puppet them.
I’m in the process of unifying Germany and occasionally a small state will join me, but I not sure why they are it seems somewhat random.
I also identified my earlier problems with using Armies. It wasn’t so much me not understanding the interfacing as trying to do something that the game is determined to prevent; moving generals/armies.
You can send a General to the front but that is pretty much it. You can’t transfer them from Headquarters A to B. So one of my colony’s growth triggered a conflict with an African tribe. Now IRL, a leader addresses this problem by sending troops to the region and if war breaks out, you demonstrate the power of artillery to the natives. Not in Vicky 3, you can make a naval invasion, or you build barracks to recruit local troops.
I have to imagine this makes playing as the British painful. I’m fine with not allowing troop micromanagement of troops and not letting the political leader hand-pick the troops and the general. But it seems like a pretty basic ability of the leader to be able to send X number of troops to a specific location.
Edit: I see based on the 36-page warfare thread in the PDX forums, that my complaint is a common one.
I don’t understand. If a war breaks out, you can’t assign a general from the home region to this front line? Or do you mean you can’t preposition the general in the region once the diplomatic play is launched but before there’s an actual front line?
One thing that annoyed me: I could conquer Brunei as Japan, but I couldn’t leave an occupation force from the main Japanese army to keep a lid on the inevitable uprising. Having barracks in the conquered territory didn’t help because they were all of the nationality that was rebelling. So I had to wait for them to break away, wait for the diplomatic play to time out and only then could I re-invade, crush the rebellion and hopefully act fast enough to bring radicals down before they split off again (which did work - full employment and rapidly rising wages do wonders to make the radicals forget the past).
This.
That general is permanent-locked to whatever front you initially assign them to.
In my particular case after the war started, there wasn’t actually a front established for reasons I don’t understand. So the actual answer is both. I could either let the war drag on or send a Naval invasion. I only had 6 Men of war which was sufficient to transport a 20 battalion Army, who knows why. In other countries, I’ve played I have been able to naval transport units to front when war breaks out. So I think it was a bit of fluke perhaps related to an impassable desert, IDK.
Prepositioning during the diplomatic play is my main issue, for exactly the reasons you had with Brunei.
The British were smart historically, they often took colonial troops from say India and used them in Africa to avoid them siding with the hometown rebels. There is really no reason to not allow players to do things that were done historically. The workaround that you figured out, is really a kludge. It doesn’t save the player any time or reduce micromanagement.
I really think warfare is probably the system that needs to be reworked more than anything else
It sounds like your problem is the lack of front to start. Otherwise, fronts are set up during the initial diplomatic play and you have plenty of time to mobilize the generals and stage them at the appropriate front before the war breaks out. But yeah, if things aren’t set like that suddenly war becomes a huge pain since you ask for military access from another country like in EU4. I started a diplo play to attack a country that bordered an ally but not me. That ally then broke their alliance with me leaving me hurtling towards a war that wasn’t going to go anywhere. And the complaints about the colonial rebellion stuff are all valid too, there are just a lot more special cases they need to figure out a way to handle.
I really hope they can smooth out/improve the war system to the point where it really lives up to its promise. Because it’s such that I no longer avoid a great power vs great power fight just because there are too many troops to babysit. Instead, I avoid the wars that are going to produce too many fronts or need fronts to be established in the first place. Granted, needing to think long and hard before naval invading a country is probably more authentic.
They probably also need some way to model a colonial nation having a significant amount of troops tied up in the colonies long term to assert control and not just when a full-scale rebellion occurs. You can pull them out if absolutely necessary due to a large war on the continent, but at severe risk of uncontained rebellions breaking out or plays for those colonies to gain some amount of autonomy.
I think they put too much faith in the front system, working as intended in all cases. In practice, there is too many special cases. Having troops tied to a general and HQ, with the ability to teleport during the diplomatic phase is a non-intuitive way of fighting a war, that I think causes as many problems as it solves.
Imagine, France and England being involved in a war with little action. Some of the French colonies in North Africa rebelled. Now, in real life, France is going to have trouble transporting troops with the British navy patrolling, but in the game, you mobilize a general or two in Paris and send them on their way to the Morocco front. In real life, a careful French leader would have some battalion stations in Morocco so they are not dependent on reinforcements from Paris.
Right now I have very little incentive to build a navy as Prussia/Germany.
I think a bug is killing my current Siam game. Russia wanted me to join their custom union using an obligation. I didn’t want to take the hit from refusing so agreed. I’ve lost 1/3rd of my GDP apparently due to 0% market access. I have ports and a surplus of 650 convoys. I don’t have an infrastructure deficit and there are no wars to block trade. I can’t figure out why my access is blocked and I can’t leave the union for ten years. My economy won’t last a year the way it’s headed.
Maybe its a convoy shortage at the Russian end? I seem to remember some Canada playthroughs suffering due to lack of access to the British market. At least the game should be telling you why.
Russia market is at 97% convoy capacity. It has 1144 convoys from me and Finland and 44 from Russia. Russia has no ports in western Russia. Just in Iraq, New Guinea, Alaska and Sakhalin Island. God damnit that’s probably why I can’t reach the market. Eastern Russia says impassible on the trade map and the stupid ai has no ports that can reach the market capitol in the west so I’m screwed.
Wow so they lost St. Petersburg? And the black sea ports I guess. Even the arctic?
They have them still. No lost territory. Russia ai just closed them I guess. Probably saw negative salary and said “nope, can’t have that”
That’s about as smart as a tech company closing its engineering department becuase it’s a “cost center”.
Started a new game as Sardinia-Piedmont and so far everything seems to be running smoothly technically. Granted, late game is where things slow down and get crashy and I’m not close to that yet.
Two Sicilies is clearly an easier path to form Italy in V3 but I went with the classic Sardinia-Piedmont start. Not sure if there is an established easy path to the unification so I’ve just been going my own way. Tried to gobble up some of the smaller northern Italian states early on with the idea being I’d befriend Tuscany and The Papal States from there before trying to launch the unification play. Problem is that people are really into defending those little states in the north. My first war to annex Modena I managed to avoid Austria joining in and instead had Great Britain take their side. I was able to use that to sway France by adding a war goal to humiliate the UK. The actual conquest went quickly before settling into a staring match across the channel. Since I got my annexation and Modena no longer existed with their war demands I was able to safely capitulate to the UK seemingly without penalty.
A few years after that Prussia and Austria were at war so I figured it was a safe time to go after Lucca. Austria still decided to come to their aid, but I had Switzerland and France ready to join in again. That allowed me to pretty confidently add an additional war goal to take Lombardy. That war was pretty quick and painless but basically doubling my population in one chunk destabilized my economy quite a bit. Spent the next 15 years trying to develop before going after anything else. Although I have been investing heavily in colonization, both keeping the institution as high as possible as well as rushing Quinine. The result being that I have a nice slice of West Africa from Guinea up into Mali as well as now Kenya pushing down into Tanzania. After West Africa was fully colonized I noticed that colonization in South America was barely happening so I jumped in down there with the hopes of securing some of the mineral wealth I know exists on the east side of the Andes.
I’ve since had Two Sicilies launch their unification play and then back down when I recruited some heavy hitters on my side. Too bad because I would have gotten Tuscany out of it had it escalated to war. Since I believe that means they can’t compete for unification anymore even though they are still a great power I’ve been focused on trying to elevate myself to a great power to see if I can manage unification. All the while I’ve had Parma sitting free and independent right in the middle of my beautiful country just taunting me. Sadly, Austria is pretty much guaranteed to come to their aid and I’ve not had any good opportunities to stack the odds against them. A shame, because I’d really like to liberate Venice too.
Is it possible to take some of the states in a “friendly” manner? From watching Quill18’s video on Canada, it looks like he’s able to gobble up the other Canadian provinces without a fight.
Also what’s the state of the other Italian principalities once you take them over? Are they hostile and full of radicals or are they happy to be joining the new proto-Italian entity?
I’ve got Italian reunification on my list for TBD at some point. I had no idea it involved constant warfare though. Are most of the other Italian’s puppeted by a great power at the start of the game? I’ve never actually studied the Risorgimento.
Right now I’ve only done standard conquests to try to build strength in the north. Using standard means there are no friendly ways to absorb a nation, best you can hope for is that they back down during the diplo play for conquering them. So yeah, that’s had all the devastation and radicalism associated with conquests.
There is a Risorgimento journal entry that I don’t totally understand. What I do understand is the unification play that exist for Germany and Italy. Basically, once I’m the only GP(or all other GPs have capitulated on the war goal where they give up their unification aims) who could form Italy I can launch a special diplo play for unification. All states that will be part of unification can either then choose to side with or against the unifier. So if played correctly you could have all the other nations agree to unify peacefully at that point.
I’m not sure how the Canadian and Australian confederation stuff works so I don’t know how that compares exactly.
I loaded up the game when I was writing my post this morning to make sure I was getting things right and accidentally played for a bit. The Mapuche launched a native uprising against Argentina, so I was faced with the prospect of Argentina conquering all the land I was trying to colonize. So I backed the Mapuche and together we routed the Argentinians and restored a bunch of land to Mapuche rule. I think proceeded to aggressively colonize that territory until the Mapuche rose up against me and I conquered the whole thing. I’m sure the Argentinians wouldn’t have done much with Buenos Aires anyway. It’s dumb how beneficial it is to have native uprisings happen as a player. Hope that’s on the list to address.