My impression from watching the Quill18 Canada Victoria 3 series is that it’s super easy, barely an inconvenience. Here’s a screenshot from my own unfinished (barely started) Australia game. Basically once you’ve got Nationalism researched, every two years you can confederate with one other chunk of your future state as long as it is under the same overlord, you have good relations with it, and you have a higher GDP.
I assume this is about upcoming developer diary.
Yeah, most assuredly for the dev diary, they usually tweet a preview the day before.
Has anyone had the graphics performance take a nose dive in this latest version? Even with the game paused things have been chugging moving the map around in 1880 and the memory usage is way higher than I believe it used to be.
I haven’t noticed any issues, but that’s with a couple of big caveats.
I’ve messed around with both starting an Australia campaign (yet again, but as before, I’m really, really not sure what to do with them as a puppet with no control over their own market) and poking around with Brazil, but not getting very far. So just very early game in both cases, with a lot of time spent studying provinces, looking at the state of the market, checking out the government, IGs, and Laws, but only a few years of actual play.
Also I tend not to zoom in at all, playing on a 4K TV with a mid-powered non-gaming laptop (Surface Laptop Studio with a RTX 3050 TI) so the zoomed in view looks a bit pixelated, so I generally don’t tdo it.
As was said in previous dev diaries, this patch (1.1) is going to primarily focus on game polish: bug fixing, balancing, AI improvements and UI/UX work, while the next major free patch (1.2) is going to be more focused towards making progress on the plans we’ve outlined in our Post-Release Plans DD by iterating on systems like warfare and diplomacy. Hotfix (1.0.6) should be out for you all with performance improvements and some bug fixes in the meantime.
I’m sure the oil expansion is needed, it is just not something I care about because. I’m not going to play the end-game until probably 1.2, although I may give a shot after 1.1 is out.
The changes to warfare can’t come soon enough, IMO.
Some of the new oil distribution seems a bit weird to me but hopefully it helps with the severe oil shortages. Hopefully it doesn’t become too widely available as hitting the oil era and feeling like my only choice was to invade some oil rich countries felt very appropriate.
Also nice to read some of the dev responses from Alastorn that are showing up in the comments on that DD now. Seems to be a fresh set of eyes on the project(this is always really valuable) going in with a very data-driven approach to some of the balance issues. Obviously that can go too far and lead to a situation where resources are too regularly dispersed removing any real resource tension.
In my current Sweden game, I joined a custom’s union with France and everything was hunky dory until France decided to have a civil war. My income went from + to -130K! I ended the custom union thinking it would save my economy but it seemed to make it worse. I’m totally fucked and I don’t know how to pull out of this freefall. Standard of living is down to impoverished and 70% of the populace is becoming radicalized.
ZOMG! Maybe it’s just because I’ve never played any major European powers, but I can’t even imagine -130K. Even 1/10th of that would mean huge problems for any of the nations I’ve played.
Maybe try to join another Customs Union? Worse case, get someone to take you on as a Protectorate. I’d imagine another country with a large market such as the UK should have comparable pricing to what France had. That will at least let you stabilize the economy.
Annnnnnd game over I lost to the revolutionaries.
I wanted to custom union another nation but nobody would accept because my GDP was going to hell. Britain entered a trade agreement but it was too little too late.
RIP Sweeden 1836 - 1899. It was a good run too. Had social saftey net, women’s suffrage, compulsory school, and I was able to get lazy fair and free trade for the capitalists.
I think in a lot of ways, being part of another country’s market is really tricky. It’s not easy to keep track of what state you’d be in if you lost that connection.
Has anyone tried playing Chile? It’s one of the “tutorial” nations, but I’ve tried it a few times and can’t seem to get off the ground.
I played the Chlie tutorial as my first game. I don’t remember having any particular issues (although it was on the launch version, not 1.06). I’d also watched several developer play streams, so I came in with pretty good knowledge of how the game was supposed to work.
What specifically are you having issues with?
Can’t seem to get my economy off the ground. Can’t build up construction sector without going into the red. Production methods have to be finely micromanaged. Trade partners are limited. Not sure what I’m doing wrong. Belgium and Sweden were far easier by comparison, at least until i mismanaged several revolutions.
You should be going into the red with your construction early on, effectively borrowing to expand your economy. That said, you can’t go too far too fast. I think I was stuck on one or two levels of basic construction for quite a while, until I could drop the price of more advanced building materials.
Chile has an abundance of natural resources, so building the industries that use the resources you have will raise standard of living and be quickly profitable. Furniture and clothing are probably good bets; you also have iron, so tools will be valuable and later steel.
As far as exports go, luxury furniture should sell to someone.
You have plenty of authority early on, so a tax on services and anything else that looks profitable will help keep your balance from dipping too far.
My recollection was I focused almost entirely on the internal market (it was my first game, so I wasn’t really sure what all the tools available to me were).
If your construction seems too high, you might also want to look at how much construction inputs are. Maybe cost of wood and fabric are really high?
Also I didn’t build up my construction sector much at all at the start. I haven’t played Belgium or Sweden, but I’d imagine they start with a much larger economy and can support a lot more construction buildings at the start of the game. Keep in mind the more you’ve built up your construction sectors the fast money is going to be going out of your coffers when you build. Also AIUI you still need to be paying salaries even when you’re not building. So larger construction sector means larger fixed expense.
Yeah I think people on the forums are a bit too enthusiastic about going deep into debt to industrialize faster. I’m pretty allergic to 20% interest rates to start. I dont think most buildings have quite that yield compared to their construction cost, at least not in taxes.
Trick is to find the sweet spot where your gdp grows at the same rate as your debt so that the debt bar doesn’t grow too much. Because you’re right, interest gets out of control if you go too far. I do often make a point if grabbing the techs that decrease interest early on.
I also try to make sure I keep wood oversupplied so that the construction industry ends up as cheap as possible. Although easy access to iron makes me look hard at investing in that and tools to try to switch up to iron frame construction fairly early. But never be afraid to drop your construction production method back down if you get too far into debt.
It is certainly a lot easier to eat the interest charges early on as a major power, since being of a lower power status can really jack up the amount of interest payments you will have to doll out. You have to be a bit more conservative\careful at the beginning with your construction sectors and debt spending when starting from a lower/smaller economic base, such as with Cape Colony.
Once you establish enough of an economic base to exponentially increase the rate of expansion though, that is when the fun begins. Which can be half the fun of the game when starting out as a smaller nation\power it would be bland if every nation had the same ability to just massively ramp up industrialisation, similar to the politics of Persia or Japan being a refreshing challenge.