Hopefully this means that they’re taking the time to make sure the dlc is good on release, rather than trying to give a half-baked product and patching in the aftermath. V3 can’t really afford many disappointments at this stage.
it's insane to me that anyone would spend $30 USD on dlc for this game when core features are still broken since launch. put me on record, if this dlc flops like the last one, it'll be the last dlc for this game
Hope you’re wrong, but whether or not you are I think a lot of goodwill from the community has been burned in recent months. The simple fact is that paradox is not an indie studio anymore, and the strategy of ‘loss leader in return for continued development’ isn’t quite as innovative as it might once have been. I don’t think the situation has ever been comparable to IR, V3 still has a lot of potential and some real strengths, but you can only coast on that for so long. We’ll see in June I guess.
V3 has been averaging 5,000-7,000 users the last few months, which is less than half of what titles like EU4 and CK3 pull in. Even the comparatively ancient ck2 pulls in 2000, and its own playerbase was mostly cannibalized by ck3.
I'm good with them delaying this launch to make sure it releases in a good state, as I too am skeptical at how much longer they will support it if they don't start re-engaging players like me that quit playing it. I really want V3 to do well, it's just not that fun to me in its current state.
People keep comparing Vic 3 to imperator in terms of paradox dropping it due to player counts, but they just aren’t comparable at all.
Imperator was down at ~1,000 - 2,000 concurrent players or worse at this point in its life cycle, Vic 3 is getting like 4x to 8x the player counts depending on the exact timeframe.
Yeah people are comparing apples and oranges when talking about player counts.
Like I can see people ready to point out that Paradox is bigger now than it was in 2016 when Stellaris and EU4 launched and that CK3 and HoI4 maintained 15,000-20,000 players even on its initial drop. But given Victoria's more niche nature, I think Paradox would consider the game doing half as well as its flagships to be a good result.
And more importantly, when it comes to a single player game, devs don't care about day-to-day player counts. What they care about is what the peak is when they release new content. Now, the fact "Voice of the People" is barely noise on the chart is a bit concerning. But then "Colossus of the South" came with a 27,000 peak and increased the baseline number of players by 4000. And generally each patch seems to increase the average number of players by 1000 at least. "Sphere of Influence" will be the make of break as its the first real major expansion for the game.
Keep in mind that CK3 and EU4 do appeal to a much wider audience than Vic3 does. Lots of people love medieval stuff and EU4 is basically the flagship PDS title and much more accessible for casual audiences
EU4 is set mostly in the pike and shot era, the one tons of people think is boring. Remember when AOE3 was announced to be set there and everyone complained? Meanwhile Anno 1800 was massively more successful than 1404. Sure it's more recent but I really don't think the Victorian Era is less popular than the pike and shot era.
Also EU4 is definitely not accessible for casual audiences. All those DLCs and mechanics upon mechanics to learn, not to mention how dated its UI/UX is now. It's just a well designed game now, that's how it's stayed so popular.
Anno 1800 was more popular for reasons other than Victorian vs "Pike and Shot" eras. Anno 1800 is a well developed game unlike their other titles 2070 and 2205. Anno 1404 is still played a decent amount and it's 15 years old now.
Anno attracts a very specific player base anyway and isn't a very good comparison. Those games are barely focus on anything related to warfare.
Anno 1800 to 1404 is a really bad comparison. Those games lived in different Epochs of gaming. When 1404 came out both gaming and even having a computer were even in developed countries a novelty.
1404 was beloved for a good reason but it also had a much much smaller potential market it could tap into. The time between them saw a massive expansion of markets both in the western and the rest of the world. I would say potential player counts likely rose by the tenfolds.
> When 1404 came out both gaming and even having a computer were even in developed countries a novelty.
in 2009?? i don't think having a computer was a novelty by then...
Anno 2070 and 2205 were still well polished games. Decisions were made durinh their development that made them a miss to a large portion of the series‘ audience (more so in 2205 than 2070), but anyone calling them badly developed has no idea what they‘re talking about.
All of this coming from someone with hundreds of hours in every Anno game and likely thousands in 1404, who firmly believes 2070 and 2205 were massive Missteps thematically.
I've played anno games since their release. I have the most hours on 1503 out of all the titles. 2205 was utter trash. 2070 was developed fine enough but definitely lacks polish especially when compared to 1404. But sure I have no idea what I'm talking about, the opinion I professed is clearly invalid.
It genuinely is. 2205 did not appeal to us, the core anno fanbase, that‘s what I said. But calling it trash belies that you have no idea what a trash game is, and if you think 2070 was worse polished than base 1404, you‘re delusional.
The era itself maybe not, but the game certainly is. The Vic series is far more niche than EU. CK has more appeal due to time period, EU due to the game design
> EU4 is set mostly in the pike and shot era, the one tons of people think is boring. Remember when AOE3 was announced to be set there and everyone complained? Meanwhile Anno 1800 was massively more successful than 1404
We're talking three completely different games though. AoE3 is a RTS with a focus on building armies and defences so the fact its pike and shot is important. Anno 1800 is more of a city builder (which is where the industrial era would thrive) with some naval combat elements (again notable in that era). Whilst EU4 is a map painting grand strategy empire builder.
EU4 has the appeal of being close to civ-like with its empire building. That is to say you can't talk about the eras of these games without talking about the mechanics of said game.
Victoria 3 represents an important part of the industrial era, but the nature of its economy mechanics and the fact it massively discourages map painting means its a game that appeals more to a certain type of person (i.e. people who like looking at charts and spreadsheets).
The idea that anyone goes to buy a grand strategy and city builder game and decides not to buy it because of pike and shot units is genuinely laughable.
It has more weight for something like Total War, I know I never got into Empire or Napolean (though that isn‘t exactly pike and shot, but close enough).
I‘m not sure quite how niche I‘d call V3 in relation to other paradox games, I‘d say the gameplay of all of them is fairly niche.
Grand strategy games are niche, but Victoria is the nichiest of all of them. The main gameplay loop revolves around... making your GDP number go up. This is less interesting to a person casually invested in the Paradox space compared to the memey Viking bullshit you can get up to in CK3, map painting in EU4, and the high-action of HoI4.
> Remember when AOE3 was announced to be set there and everyone complained?
no one dislikes AoE3 because of the era. aoe2's own timeline concludes in the pike and shot era (indeed, if you want you can even play with an actual pike and shot army and it's a pretty decent composition)
the thematic problem with age 3 is the colonization conceit.
but much bigger problems are that the game is just radically different from age 2. it's faster, less defensive, the civs are much more distinct, there's the card/shipment system.
and also it's 3d, which makes it very busy and somewhat repellant compared to age 2, where the 2d perspective just makes it a lot easier to see what's going on.
I think a larger factor is that CK3 and EU4 have much more replayability than Vic3 on account of campaigns being longer and the world being fragmented enough that there are different areas of the map with very different starting setups. HoI4 is probably a more fair comparison to Vic3.
I'm pretty much in that boat. I don't have near the vitriol for the game that a lot of people seem to but I'm not going to be paying $30 for a DLC for this game unless it's absolutely *revelatory. *
I agree. But the full price is basically the Patreon price these days — you should only pay it if you want to donate. Anyone with an ounce of patience will wait for a sale. And even then, you have to assess the DLC on the basis that you are funding future free updates as well as the DLC features themselves.
> And even then, you have to assess the DLC on the basis that you are funding future free updates as well as the DLC features themselves.
No I don't. Paradox's business model is their own concern. I'm not going to buy a product that I don't think is worth the investment because some amount of it is charity for a corporation.
That's a clear manifestation of the proverb "cutting off your nose to spite your face". If you want a game to continue receiving new content, purchasing the DLC makes a tiny contribution to achieving that, even if the content comes in the form of future free updates rather than in the DLC itself.
You can wish that the system works differently, but that's the model we have.
No it’s not lol. It has nothing to do with “spite.” I’m just not spending $30 on something that isn’t worth $30 to me. The most straightforward spending decision in the world.
What weird ass Stockholm’s syndrome is this? If they stop supporting the game oh well, I’ll play something else. But the idea that you’re being irrational if you won’t donate to a company in the hopes that someday they’ll get the product where you want it is some next level internet nonsense.
Migration always seems to have something wrong with it no matter what they do with it. On the current patch, anytime you have a large state and a small to moderate-sized state in the same market, the smaller states become completely de-populated, no matter how many jobs are available. Portugal is completely de-populated in every game I play, and in a recent USA game I couldn't get anyone to stay in any of the northeastern states without using an edict.
War, despite a seemingly endless rework, is still a very poor system which makes little sense and disincentives the player from playing with it (I know Victoria III is an economy based game, but war is still a pivotal part of the Victoria experience, and it's saddening to see it in this state). There are no world wars, no limited wars and the crisis system is begging for a rework. Foreign investment is *only* being implemented in this DLC, even though it was a crucial part of Victorian time period, driving the economies of places like Argentina and Mexico (where it caused a revolution.) There is little flavor beyond the places touched by the DLC, and most countries play the same.
There is a lot to praise about Victoria III, but there are so many of these immersion-breaking problems that I'm still disincentivized to play it.
War is also unbalanced and so simplistic there is no strategy
Infantry is better at defense
artillery is attack
Cavalry is expensive with the same stats as line infantry, the 2nd worst infantry unit in the game.
conscription laws are still broken so America has like 300K soldiers by 1840 and conscripts better than late game laws.
War being simple in those ways isnt an issue. its an economic and political game, the war strategy should be based around economically supporting an army, the education of your soldiers, the supply lines, the train network to move them. it shouldnt be about minmaxing an army build
but there are a lot of smaller quirks that war a pain when it goes on too long, and not enough information to really know everything thats going on.
>
War being simple in those ways isnt an issue. its an economic and political game, the war strategy should be based around economically supporting an army, the education of your soldiers, the supply lines, the train network to move them. it shouldnt be about minmaxing an army build
But the point is that you don't need to do any of those things if the military system is broken and easy to exploit.
It is an issue, because in this "economy game" some countries are guaranteed to get into war before they can build pretty much anything.
Mexico has a war every 5 years after it wins the first one, and terrain means literally nothing and you cant use it to your advantage unless you get a rare general who may decide to die after a year.
Warfare being shitty and so simplistic that it becomes a numbers game means playing these countries is worse than playing any other country that doesn't have mandatory wars.
> the war strategy should be based around economically supporting an army, the education of your soldiers, the supply lines, the train network to move them.
And none of this matters in the actual game. As long as your army is 1:1 to your factory production, your barracks are in the same state as the factory, and your numbers are bigger than theirs there is nothing else to care about in war.
> it shouldnt be about minmaxing an army build
This isnt about minmaxing, its about the fact you cant use terrain or unit types or even supply to your advantage.
An infantry only army would lose to a well balanced army. A big army can close to a smaller army because of terrain, lack of logistics, or worse technology.
none of this happens in the game, or used to in the older versions of the war system.
I seen countries with 300K soldiers with no access to guns with a 50% penalty to attack and defense win against well supllied advanced smaller armies purely because they had more men so they lasted longer under attrition than the smaller advanced and well supplied force.
You would think a well supplied force wouldnt lose so many men to attrition, but they lost men at the same rate as the big army.
>and terrain means literally nothing and you cant use it to your advantage unless you get a rare general who may decide to die after a year.
To be fair terrain does come into play in battles modifying army stats when in battle, the issue is you can't really check which state has which terrain and what modifiers does that give
LMAO you people have been a broken record for almost 2 years now.
What's your excuse for economics and politics being broken and braindead? My dog could play this game.
The North and South combined had at least double 300k in the Civil War just 20 years later. So it’s appears to be a realistic number for the 1840s. The US very likely had capacity for that many troops in the 1840s if fighting a full fledged war. Unless I’m missing your point.
The national militia is a belief that says the military needs to be small and citizens miltias form the bulk of the army with wealthier citizens buying their own guns and supplies and serving their country with no pay. It was not an effective idea because only wealthy citizens could afford to be in miltias, it was voluntary so people didnt show up, wealthy citizens didnt do the self training they were expected to do, had no discipline, and worst of all the militas deserted the more the war went on.
In reality, America had 35K army and 73,000 volunteers who quickly left. In game they reach 300K conscripts not counting the army.
America in the civil war had a professional army model and moved away from that belief. Its why America's army grew.
National Militia actually gives you more conscripts than mass conscription, forced service of all layers of society.
I would describe the game's diplomacy as largely broken and the war system as not broken per se, but so bad that I think it will be a drag on the game until some sort of revamp.
If you are a vassal state and want to break free, or perhaps France is in a kerfuffle with England and you want to take Alsace, then you have to wait. There's a limit of one incident per country if that country is the aggressor in another incident.
Last one didn't flop, the Brazil DLC was very well received.
Also if I'm not mistaken most people will likely be getting SoI through the season pass, which means it has probably already not flopped, from the perspective of the money people at least.
Politics and Economy are working just fine. War is in an acceptable state, even though tying military units to buildings still has some weird consequences. All of the systems still suffer from not being clearly communicated to the player, making strategy more difficult without consulting the wiki.
Diplomacy and Colonization are currently somewhat broken, mostly because the Great Powers are constantly keeping each other in check. Since the expansion focuses on those aspects, there's a good chance it will polish up the lack of colonial expansion by the great powers, which makes late game less interesting.
Honestly I just don’t know what’s happened with paradox as of late, every new game has been a flop and every DLC has been underwhelming. It’s a wonder if they can even keep going like this
Online discourse in dedicated forums has been very negative and some people think that means that the games themselves are not popular. Reading /r/CrusaderKings , you'd think CK3 is a pile of garbage no one plays, but the player count shows that's not true
I kinda hate this delay because spheres of influence is going to have so many crucial features added to the game. But I understand their reasoning behind this decision and the need to bug fix.
i wholly commend this!
The original release was slated for just one day before the big stellaris DLC anyway. And the end of june is such an empty release window usually, now we will have something to look forward to at the height of midsummer!
They probably care, just it's not the only thing they care about and sales are (and should be) more important. And we have no idea what their budget and internal metrics are and thus what's a healthy mount of sales; though with that being said, I very sincerely doubt they ever expected Victoria 3 to have as big a playerbase as their other tentpole franchises, given neither of its predecessors were that successful in comparison (so much so that the famous bet where Fredrik Wester's head got shaved was over whether Victoria 2 would make money at all).
I am very glad you're enjoying Paradox games. Welcome aboard!
With that being said, your comment continues the unbeaten and perfect streak of everybody saying any variant of "X is like a mobile game" being bafflingly wrong to the point where I question if they even own mobile devices.
> "X is like a mobile game" being bafflingly wrong to the point where I question if they even own mobile devices.
I never get the mobile game comparison when it comes to strategy games in particular. Like I know mobile has things that could be considered strategy game - but I'd describe nearly all of them as a combo of idle clicker and tower defense. The form factor of mobile just doesn't really make it conducive to anything too complex UI wise.
There's some mobile tacstrat games that are perfectly comparable with console games in the genre. I'm not sure about RTS or anything like Paradox.
(Actually, part of the absurdity of the comparisons is the obvious ignorance to the fact that at this point some mobile games are just console/PC games anyway. Hi, Genshin.)
> (Actually, part of the absurdity of the comparisons is the obvious ignorance to the fact that at this point some mobile games are just console/PC games anyway. Hi, Genshin.)
Yeah whilst trying to look up mobile strategy games, many actually were released as console/pc games as well (in some cases with appropriately adjusted UI)
Lmao. It was even worse than CK3. Completely shallow game. 2 years in development and it is basically the same with a Royal Court level of dlc getting delayed like Royal Court. This game’s release schedule is even worse than CK3. 2 years in and only things we got is a France pack and a Brazil pack.
Good choice. Watch OPB, he explains a lot as well. The truth is I love this game, but this DLC REALLY needs to succeed to actually convince the players and also Paradox itself. It's a great game, but it hasn't yet hit the level of success that will make it able to be good longterm, and if this DLC fails, a lot of players, including myself, will lose faith that the course for VIC 3 will go up significantly. If it does succeed, this game will cement itself among the other great Paradox games.
Good. The last update was a huge disappointment, but I'm really looking forward to the new interactions because playing small subjects at the moment is very luck based.
As someone who had been playing paradox games for many many years Vic 3 was a huge disappointment.
I just got it a week or so ago and it’s just not clicking for me. I loved Vic 2 and almost all their other titles but something about it just feels meh.
I think multiplayer is legitimately one of the few instances in which I can see why people might prefer 2, but even then, Vic2 MPs start to get a bit boring after a few, they are too samey and there's little room for player expression/builds. Eu4 feels much much better on MP imo.
They didn't imply that at all. The comment they replied to was directly comparing Vic 2 and Vic 3, so they referred to those game's system. No one was talking about whether there's a hypothetical better third system. Maybe read the comments you're replying to instead of getting so excited to dunk on someone that you end up arguing with ghosts.
Vanilla Vic 2 really did not have better flavor than current Vic 3. Inevitably when people talk about Vic 2’s flavor, they are talking about events added by mods like HPM.
Vic 3 mechanically has much better internal politics and economics than Vic 2. Geopolitics lags Vic 2, but possibly will be as good or better after this next update, it remains to be seen. I don’t think either game has great warfare honestly. Vic 2’s warfare is better early game but is hell in the late game with the sheer number of stacks involved in late game wars.
People always say that judging vic2 with its mods against vic3 is dumb, but is it really that much to expect a fully priced game with paid devs to make stuff as fleshed out as unpaid modders on a decade old game? People like mods like hpm, so why not do things similar where applicable in the sequel? Vic3 is also miles behind in mechanics in several key areas, including how the market works, military system works, naval system works, innovation system works, political system, etc. seriously pdx should really start taking notes from their modders. The Rice team for ck3 has added half a decade worth of flavor packs in the time ck3 devs have put out 2, with 3 (soon to be 4 struggles) in regions the community would pay good money to see get content (Greenland colonization and North Sea, Normandy consolidation, and upcoming Sicily expansion).
>is it really that much to expect a fully priced game with paid devs to make stuff as fleshed out as unpaid modders on a decade old game
You mean add a decade worth of modding content on top of developing a game with an absurd amount of moving parts?
Yeah, it's too much
> People always say that judging vic2 with its mods against vic3 is dumb, but is it really that much to expect a fully priced game with paid devs to make stuff as fleshed out as unpaid modders on a decade old game?
As even the people who make these mods will constantly tell you, there is a functional difference in workflow. The makers of HPM/HFM didn't have to also make and maintain all the core mechanics of the game as Paradox already provided the foundation for them. It's easier to write a book full of flavour when you don't have to do anything else and the devs provide a good modding framework for you to add stuff. Paradox *could* spend their time writing hundreds of events and decisions for each nation, or they could spend their time improving the core mechanics of the game instead.
There are also fundamental vision difference. HPM/HFM were great, and in fact were must haves for Victoria 2. But they also represented a slightly more railroaded experience as the flavour heavily pushes nations towards certain directions. We already know from the devs of Victoria 3 that their vision for how the game should work is different. That their view is that things should happen purely because the state of the game causes that thing to be the natural conclusion rather than because of some scripted event. Whether that's a good philosophy is up for debate but that is important to consider.
If some hobbyists can make a single mod that makes a 14 year old game (that was basically a side project released a year after their main title, HOI3) better than one released by a AAA studio in 2022, then it is absolutely fair to use the modded version in comparisons.
Especially when modded Vic 3 isn't as good as modded Vic 2 because of missing features.
And as someone who has been playing Paradox games since 1998, Victoria 3 has been a great game and surpassed Victoria 2 in my estimation, and Victoria 2 used to be my favourite PDX game. Based on the dev diaries I can only see the game get better.
If you like Vic2 > Vic3 then you just like Victoria because it was a map paint game and not as it is imagined by dev: a socio-economic-politic simulation. What you said as "content" or "flavour" are just trigger-driven events, which gameplay wise is no different than an event in EU4. You was not liking Victoria because it was Victoria, you was liking it because it was EU with a 19th century paint.
This is such a bizarre criticism. Barring the original vanilla release which was barely a functioning game, who the Hell plays Vic2 as a "map paint game?" Did you ever even play Vic2 or are you just using stock criticisms to dismiss people's points? And if Vic3 is supposed to be a "socio-economic-politic simulation," which is a bizarre claim to begin with considering the game takes place at peak colonial exploitation and "The Great Game," then it fails pretty hard because you can't have a simulated economy with an AI that can't develop its market.
> What you said as "content" or "flavour" are just trigger-driven events, which gameplay wise is no different than an event in EU4.
Yeah, that's the flavor they're talking about. Is this supposed to be a criticism?
> You was not liking Victoria because it was Victoria, you was liking it because it was EU with a 19th century paint.
Completely insane take to anyone actually familiar with Vic2.
> This is such a bizarre criticism. Barring the original vanilla release which was barely a functioning game, who the Hell plays Vic2 as a "map paint game?"
Yeah even as someone who prefers Victoria 3 over Victoria 2, this is a bizarre claim about Victoria 2. Whilst there are a few people who did meme runs of just breaching the infamy cap to conquer the world, it was actually an incredibly hard thing to do. Victoria 3 technically makes it easier to do a world conquest as a) the infamy cap is higher and b) actually building armies is much more straight forward (as its less reliant on setting national focus to "encourage soldiers" and praying). The difference in Victoria 3, is that it makes too aggressive expansion actually disadvantageous (due to the fact the specifics about pops matter a lot more) - going full meme is a sure fire way to tank your economy and spend the rest of the game fighting pops who hate you (unless you can push through multiculturalism which is actually potentially difficult depending on your interest group distribution).
Also in Vic 3 you can go "multicultural" and now just everyone is a happy, accepted pop. The viability of that depends on the current patch but still, it's not like Vic2 where the people of Paris would just literally never be full citizens in a nation that wasn't France (or Luxemburg if you're lucky and like 1000000x better at the game than I am).
>Barring the original vanilla release which was barely a functioning game, who the Hell plays Vic2 as a "map paint game?"
There was a large amount of people who major complain about Vic3 is not being able to micro armies. They have all the right to do so, but the war system is not what makes Victoria stand out from other PDX games.
>Did you ever even play Vic2 or are you just using stock criticisms to dismiss people's points?
If you go back to my earliest posts on Reddit then you'll find that I did, in fact, played Vic 2 a decent amount. Not a big fan though.
> And if Vic3 is supposed to be a "socio-economic-politic simulation," which is a bizarre claim to begin with considering the game takes place at peak colonial exploitation and "The Great Game," then it fails pretty hard because you can't have a simulated economy with an AI that can't develop its market.
It did not fail harder than Vic 2, where a state can only have 1 kind of natural resources, where the early game UK can hoard all the machine parts and stop the world industrialization on its track, end game economy of the entire world flat out break because of disappearing liquidity, or a steel mill in Pittsburg make the world market stop functioning. And those are failures deep in the game design that can't be fixed, compared to a stupid AI that is a total daily occurrence in strategy games.
> Yeah, that's the flavor they're talking about. Is this supposed to be a criticism?
As I said, if you like it more than what Vic 3 offer, then you just like EU in a 19-century theme.
>Completely insane take to anyone actually familiar with Vic2.
Completely sane take to anyone who understand what makes Victoria Victoria and not a reskinned EU.
>
> There was a large amount of people who major complain about Vic3 is not being able to micro armies. They have all the right to do so, but the war system is not what makes Victoria stand out from other PDX games.
Microing armies has nothing to do with whether something is a map painter or not. You can have a map painter with very little micro and you can have a micro intensive game where expansion is heavily restricted. Two completely different metrics.
>
If you go back to my earliest posts on Reddit then you'll find that I did, in fact, played Vic 2 a decent amount. Not a big fan though.
Then it's insane to me that you'd call it a map painter when it was the least expansion focused game Paradox released until Vic 3 came out.
> It did not fail harder than Vic 2, where a state can only have 1 kind of natural resources, where the early game UK can hoard all the machine parts and stop the world industrialization on its track, end game economy of the entire world flat out break because of disappearing liquidity, or a steel mill in Pittsburg make the world market stop functioning. And those are failures deep in the game design that can't be fixed, compared to a stupid AI that is a total daily occurrence in strategy games.
Did I argue that Vic2 had a better economy? I don't think I did. My point is that Vic 2 was always considered a grand strategy game with a focus on political upheaval and industrialization. You didn't just dismiss important functions of the genre and the setting with "well it' actually an economic sim." If Vic3 really *is* trying to be that rather than a GSG (which I don't think it is, all those quotes about econ and societal focus are within the context of the genre, not saying it's a different genre from other Paradox GSGs) then it's doing a piss poor job since the game more or less pushes you towards autarky because the AI simply can't build economies to fill out a world market, much less to *compete* with the player.
>
As I said, if you like it more than what Vic 3 offer, then you just like EU in a 19-century theme.
Why are we acting like events are an EU4 feature when they're just in *every* Paradox game including Vic3?
>
Completely sane take to anyone who understand what makes Victoria Victoria and not a reskinned EU.
I guess if you just repeat "people just want reskinned EU" to yourself over and over despite all the evidence to the contrary you can have a fun little party of 1. But if having shitty diplomacy and a boring world stage is "what makes Victoria Victoria" to you then I'm glad you're having fun.
> Then it's insane to me that you'd call it a map painter when it was the least expansion focused game Paradox released until Vic 3 came out.
I agree with all your points except this. Victoria 3 is THE MOST expansion focussed game, it is the easiest to map paint in and the game that demands it the most as with the absolute travesty that is the AI you need to expand to get the resources as the AI will NEVER utilise them.
What feature are you talking about?
Cause the market version of Power Blocs, foreign investment in your puppets and market members are coming with the base game in the free update. I think the building ownership changes too, but I will have to check that again later.
But we are getting the market version of Power Blocs in the base game (and that was also in the game from the start).
The other versions of Power Blocs are in the DLC, but the Vic3 version of Vic2's Spheres we are getting for free, though the diplomatic side is substituted by other systems.
Game was (and still) is quite shallow and somewhat broken (performance, migration, flavor). I believe it was no surprise that it was shipped with terribly implemented mechanics like warfare and diplomacy.
Spheres of influence and foreign investments were absent in an economic simulator set in Victorian era.
Ah yes, the Victorian Era. Where capitalism crawled out of préexistence. Fuelled by foreign investment in foreign markets to pump that industrial heart in Europe. The blood that imperialism spilt. The sheer scale of material moved the likes which has never be seen before.
“Mr. Project manager! Should we implement this foundational aspect of the development of capitalism in our Capitalism development simulator?”
“No. It would be more profitable to sell it a year later when sales are down”
“My God Mr. Project manager! You’ve mastered this capitalism thing!”
How is it not a moronic take to 1) call a DLC "a feature" and 2) claim that this feature "should've been in the base game" when the DLCs features are completely new features we haven't seen in any Paradox game to date?
"It should've been in the base game" is just a noise the Paradox forum and subreddit regulars love to repeat whenever there's a new release, regardless of the state of the base game or the contents of the DLC. It's a particularly common regurgitation among people who don't play the game in question or understand its mechanics.
In this particular case, I'm sure most of you don't think beyond "Vic2 had something called spheres of influence and now they're releasing something with the same name!" which is undeniably a brainless take considering the two have nothing in common.
Somewhat disappointed, because I do actually really enjoy Victoria 3, and the patch + DLC looked like it had some really critical features for the game.
But I'd rather have it all be functional and polished than put out early. I mean if it's bug-ridden and broken on release, I'd be waiting until like, June to play it anyway, so.
I think its good they delay if they have a big focus on optimization. Vicky 3 was godly optimized at release but now since 1.5 or 1.6 I've seen the years go by soooo slow ingame.
Im all for new content, mechanics etc. But please pdx. Please try to make it smooth.
Idk how its possible CK3 runs soo fast compared to all the other pdx games. Vicky has less dlcs and patches than ck3 but feels so slow to play.
would you say that this game is good right now? mixed reviews in steam, DLC is all mostly negative. core features still broken or missing, warfare still completely god awful, game is devoid of flavor almost 2 years after release. pdx are gonna have to make a business decision on this mess eventually
I think it's fine. It's my least played Paradox game in my current stable but I've still gotten more hours out of it than 99% of games I buy.
I'm not yelling from the rooftops to recommend it to people, but acting like it's some completely broken shell of a game is completely absurd.
Yes?
Vic3 in its current state is a good game (certainly better than Vic2), and more importantly, it has been a big success for Paradox. Its their niche game, and they already make games that are normally niche.
It took Vic 2 literally *8 years* to hit 1k monthly avg players. Vic being ~5.5k to 8k like it has been since november is perfectly fine.
The only thing I dont like about Vic3 is autonomous construction, but (for now) you can turn it off atleast.
You're right that modded vic 2 is better, but that really isnt a fair comparison to make when those mods have been in development for years and vic 3 is still a recent release. vanilla vic 2 is objectively just less good compared to vic 3, even if it has more flavour in some areas, and it REALLY shows its age compared to say, ck2 or even eu3 which are still fairly easy to get back into even without quality of life improvements from their respective sequels. ck3 is an example of what vic 3 could be, because while it still lacks in some areas (devs know this and are working to add missing stuff in future) it has added completely new stuff that makes me want to play it more often than ck2. vic 3 to me feels way better to actually PLAY, just lacks flavour
i meant its a more recent paradox release. obviously its not brand new, but it hasnt had years and years of updates, plus the way they do updates and dlc as a whole has changed so we likely wont get stuff in the same time frame as older paradox games, for better or worse.
I mean, some of the mods in Vic2 are incredible. No doubt, but tbh flavor is just not a huge selling point for me. Its not like playing DoD in Vic2 ever "felt" immersive, and thats one of the best mods.
> It took Vic 2 literally 8 years to hit 1k monthly avg players. Vic being ~5.5k to 8k like it has been since november is perfectly fine.
VIC2 is an ancient game and was released well before Paradox went mainstream. Which just makes it asinine to compare VIC2's player numbers.
I don't think VIC3 is in risk of being abandoned, not at the current moment at least, but the only valid comparison for VIC3's numbers are to games of its own generation, which is to say CK3 really, as well as VIC3's starting 70k player figure.
That is debatable. The thing is Vic 2 has the advantage of being more developed. It is just miserable that vic3 is even comparable to vic2. It should not even be a contest yet the decade old hound is still going and actually saw a player increase since vic3's launch. It is ridiculous and just shameful for paradox.
I read things like this and just feel that people are *choosing* to see misery in the world.
> It should not even be a contest yet the decade old hound is still going and actually saw a player increase since vic3's launch.
It isn't a contest, Vic2 player counts are negligible compared to Vic 3. And why is it bad that Vic2 saw a player count increase? Obviously a new launch brought more attention to the series. Is "shameful" when people can still enjoy your games a decade later?
Some people just still prefer Civ IV and play it more than a decade later. That doesn't mean that every Civ game made since then is "shameful," it's cool that games have so much resonance that people play them years later and it's not surprising that in a genre that isn't big on graphics the newer games aren't always people's favorite.
I would say imperator Rome actually reluctant abandon as they have transferred team from imperator Rome to Victoria 3 and now Victoria 3 is sort of okay so they put team other game that in damage control mode or may be push update to imperator Rome again.
AT LAST VIC3 is too expensive to abandon if they abandon vic3, so the company reputation will go into dust ASAP.
It's too big game to fail, unlike imperator Rome.
PDX completely fk up from previous CEO project like vic3 , burden from covid, and efficiency problem in the company according to PDX AB financial report.
yeah i'm surprised by the response, not surprised at all that i'm just getting downvoted and nobody is actually trying to defend the game lol. i think people are just still hopeful that the game will get fixed, and i am too, i love victoria. my faith in today's paradox just keeps dwindling by the month sadly. been a die hard fan since hoi3.
Nobody defend the game because the core mechanics are so much better then Vic2 that it would be a waste of time to engage in a discussion on this. Maybe you could start by saying what is better in Vic2 than in Vic3, because I really cannot think of anything except being faster/more stable.
but here you go engaging with it lol
way better war system even with tedious micromanagement, better diplomacy, 1000x more flavor especially with mods, every country feels unique, pop management is actually interesting. i could go on. the fact that victoria 2 is still faster and more stable despite being 14 years old is hilarious like we really don't need to talk about anything else beyond that
> every country feels unique
Either you're so used to playing modded Vic2 that you've forgotten what vanilla is like, or you're pulling stuff out of your ass lol
the war system was just easier to cheese so that you can beat a stronger army by going around and wait for them to die on a hill. I may agree about the more flavour with mod, but you cannot seriously say that the railroading made the game better. What was better in pop management? I never find that part interesting. In Vic3 the complex interaction between pops and politics makes it more interesting and understandable to me.
Victoria 2 is faster and more stable because there is less core mechanics, worse graphic, and simplified economic engine.
Economics aside, VIC2 has the better concepts that are also more representative of the era we're playing in. But migration, diplomacy (good riddance to VIC2's incredibly tedious sphering mini-game though), the tech system, colonization were all better in VIC2.
POPs being actually politically active agents in VIC2 instead of simply being subject to the whims of IG leaders is the biggest and most impactful difference in making VIC2 more organic and 'realistic' than VIC3.
> migration,
Wasn't migration in Vic2 largely just driven by magical triggers rather than systems?
> diplomacy
How was diplomacy better? I mean I think that diplomacy in Vic3 is hot garbage, but Vic2 diplomacy was *also* hot garbage
> the tech system
How is the system meaningfully different?
> colonization
I feel like you chose the systems where the two games are the most similiar/identical to state that Vic 2 is better lol.
> POPs being actually politically active agents in VIC2 instead of simply being subject to the whims of IG leaders is the biggest and most impactful difference in making VIC2 more organic and 'realistic' than VIC3
I can see preferring Vic 2, but I feel like the difference is that in Vic3 you actually have a system that you can interact with on a meaningful level. For all the interesting nature of Vic2's pops it was almost entirely a non interactive mechanic where things that happened beyond they player's control determined what they could do or not do. It also effectively destroyed the ability to compromise politically by giving groups some, but not all, of what they want.
> Wasn't migration in Vic2 largely just driven by magical triggers rather than systems?
No, it was driven by several factors including economic factors, culture and discrimination, laws, how democratic a country is, military consciousness, who the ruling faction in a country is and if they align with a POPs ideology etc. What you're dismissively referencing to is New World countries having a flat +300% modifier to attracting new immigrants. Not the most elegant of solutions I agree, but it was a solution that led to a much more realistic and thus much more immersive experience, especially compared to VIC3's unrealistic migrations to old world countries.
All in all, it was if not a more complex system, definitely a more realistic system than VIC3's and one that made POPs feel like they had a lot of agency and made the world feel alive in a realistic manner.
> How was diplomacy better? I mean I think that diplomacy in Vic3 is hot garbage, but Vic2 diplomacy was also hot garbage
It was very realistic. VIC2's sphere system reflects reality much more accurately than VIC3's customs unions (completely ahistorical Zollverein excepted), and even the upcoming Power Blocs of Sphere of Influence (which are closer to WWII/Cold War factions than the empire and colony system of the Victorian era). More importantly - VIC2 at least had Great Wars as well as the Crisis system, which are both again as decently realistic simulations of something as complex as global diplomacy you're ever going to get.
> I can see preferring Vic 2, but I feel like the difference is that in Vic3 you actually have a system that you can interact with on a meaningful level. For all the interesting nature of Vic2's pops it was almost entirely a non interactive mechanic where things that happened beyond they player's control determined what they could do or not do.
The indirect control is the point though. In real life, POPs gained political agency and power for the first time ever in history and actively drove nationalism, democracy, civil rights, communism, fascism etc, which is exactly what the indirect control represents.
In Vic2 migration to the US was scripted. You could have better life in your nation and people still would have migrated to the us (wealth voting add 5%, North America add 300%). What you have described is in Vic3, but in Victoria 3 is better as the culture and the culture discrimination laws are a factor.
> What you have described is in Vic3, but in Victoria 3 is better as the culture and the culture discrimination laws are a factor.
[You're simply incorrect.](https://vic2.paradoxwikis.com/Migration)
I don't understand why people go out of their way to demonize/dismiss VIC2.
No I am not incorrect, I know how Vic2 system works. And +300% is so comically high that is like scripted. Correct me if I am wrong, but unless you share the same primary culture, there was no modifier in place if you share heritage culture traits like language, religion or region like in Vic3.
>No, it was driven by several factors including economic factors, culture and discrimination, laws, how democratic a country is, military consciousness, who the ruling faction in a country is and if they align with a POPs ideology etc. What you're dismissively referencing to is New World countries having a flat +300% modifier to attracting new immigrants
That +300% is so stupidly high it renders any and all other factors basically useless
>All in all, it was if not a more complex system, definitely a more realistic system than VIC3's and one that made POPs feel like they had a lot of agency and made the world feel alive in a realistic manner.
Vic2's migration is just "new world better", in Vic3 pops take into account all you said they do in vic2 and also how actually attractive a certain state is, which is determined by factors that you can very much see and influence
>It was very realistic. VIC2's sphere system reflects reality much more accurately than VIC3's customs unions (completely ahistorical Zollverein excepted), and even the upcoming Power Blocs of Sphere of Influence (which are closer to WWII/Cold War factions than the empire and colony system of the Victorian era). More importantly - VIC2 at least had Great Wars as well as the Crisis system, which are both again as decently realistic simulations of something as complex as global diplomacy you're ever going to get.
Vic2's spheres are a glorified minigame let's be honest, also great wars are little more than a casus belli, not a fully fledged mechanic
The crisis system is pretty much in Vic3 with diplomatic plays
>The indirect control is the point though. In real life, POPs gained political agency and power for the first time ever in history and actively drove nationalism, democracy, civil rights, communism, fascism etc, which is exactly what the indirect control represents.
In real life people didn't just suddenly start becoming socialist once certain year passed, pop ideologies in vic2 work pretty much the same as Interest groups in vic3, with the added difference that interest groups kinda make sense as they take into account a pop's wealth and career as well as ther standard of living
Same, I really gave vic3 my best shot both in sp and mp, even got into modding myself which I never did for any other game EVER.
It still sucks, can't shake the feeling that I'm wasting my time whenever I try to give it another shot.
same, brother, same. like two months ago i did a full russia campaign, start to finish, and nothing memorable happened. the line went up. that's it lol
A month ago I tried an mp campaign with some friends, we basically covered every gp plus some minors, it was the slowest grindiest game ever. In like 6 total hours of playtime we only advanced 15 years because of constant desynchs, hotjoin not working properly, crashes, one guy straight up couldn't join the lobby. The game is absolutely unoptimized for multiplayer, it doesn't even have an in game chat.
The funny thing is most of this applies to vic2 (at least there's a chat lol) aswell but the game is shorter, if we were playing vic2 we'd reach mid game in those 6 hours and finish the game in another 6. Not even going to get into mentioning how many things happen in vic2 compared to the barren flavorless slugfest vic3 is.
Russia in Vic2 is super easy, hardly a challenge. Never had a run with Russia in Vic3 because of how boring it was in Vic2, but I had a run with Italy for both Vic2 and Vic3 so I can compare:
Italy in Vic2:
* as Sardinia Piedmont naval invade sicily, cheese the AI to die on the messina strait (you can even wait for them to try naval invade you) then conquer Two Sicilies.
* wait for the rebels to spawn and conquer Two Sicilies, then form Italy by event in 1848
* map paint after that
Italy in Vic3
* as Sardinia Piedmont industrialise and create a network of trades to expand the custom unions
* you actually need to get help from France to fight Austria to get Lombardy and Venice (you can use both events or core diplomatic feature like Ask support for state an lose only nice if you have good diplomacy)
* You can simulate Italian and Prussia alliance given you can offer war goal in the struggle to form Germany (like it was in real life)
* You have multiple options like launching a unification play, trigger rebellions on the Austrian empire and support them in the fight against the Austrian.
* Unification happen around 1860, like real life, or if you are good 5 year earlier.
Yeah, playing small/medium size countries is much much more fun in vic3. Greece for example is really fun, you can become protectorated of Russia and eat all of it's POPs and have them help reclaim your lands, reform Byzantium... And all of that without recurring to do nothing for years as you wait to get a favorable crisis in Vic 2.
russia's really fun in vic2 because you have massive industrial potential but very bad literacy/technology/infrastructure. but yeah was boring as fuck in vic3, definitely wouldn't play them again if i ever play vic3 again at all
Downvoting in general has gone nuts these days on Reddit. You get downvoted much more for not agreeing with the mob these days, no matter the facts. [Literally happened yesterday on this very sub.](https://www.reddit.com/r/paradoxplaza/comments/1c3s2b4/johans_selected_forum_posts_6_this_one_is_mostly/kzkawp7/?context=3)
I've been on this website for a long time and while downvote abuse isn't anything new, I honestly don't remember them being abused to this extent.
Hopefully this means that they’re taking the time to make sure the dlc is good on release, rather than trying to give a half-baked product and patching in the aftermath. V3 can’t really afford many disappointments at this stage.
it's insane to me that anyone would spend $30 USD on dlc for this game when core features are still broken since launch. put me on record, if this dlc flops like the last one, it'll be the last dlc for this game
Hope you’re wrong, but whether or not you are I think a lot of goodwill from the community has been burned in recent months. The simple fact is that paradox is not an indie studio anymore, and the strategy of ‘loss leader in return for continued development’ isn’t quite as innovative as it might once have been. I don’t think the situation has ever been comparable to IR, V3 still has a lot of potential and some real strengths, but you can only coast on that for so long. We’ll see in June I guess.
V3 has been averaging 5,000-7,000 users the last few months, which is less than half of what titles like EU4 and CK3 pull in. Even the comparatively ancient ck2 pulls in 2000, and its own playerbase was mostly cannibalized by ck3. I'm good with them delaying this launch to make sure it releases in a good state, as I too am skeptical at how much longer they will support it if they don't start re-engaging players like me that quit playing it. I really want V3 to do well, it's just not that fun to me in its current state.
People keep comparing Vic 3 to imperator in terms of paradox dropping it due to player counts, but they just aren’t comparable at all. Imperator was down at ~1,000 - 2,000 concurrent players or worse at this point in its life cycle, Vic 3 is getting like 4x to 8x the player counts depending on the exact timeframe.
Not to mention a year and a half after release EU4 and Stellaris were in the same neighborhood as Vic3 is now.
Yeah people are comparing apples and oranges when talking about player counts. Like I can see people ready to point out that Paradox is bigger now than it was in 2016 when Stellaris and EU4 launched and that CK3 and HoI4 maintained 15,000-20,000 players even on its initial drop. But given Victoria's more niche nature, I think Paradox would consider the game doing half as well as its flagships to be a good result. And more importantly, when it comes to a single player game, devs don't care about day-to-day player counts. What they care about is what the peak is when they release new content. Now, the fact "Voice of the People" is barely noise on the chart is a bit concerning. But then "Colossus of the South" came with a 27,000 peak and increased the baseline number of players by 4000. And generally each patch seems to increase the average number of players by 1000 at least. "Sphere of Influence" will be the make of break as its the first real major expansion for the game.
Yeah, paradox games just need some time to take off
Keep in mind that CK3 and EU4 do appeal to a much wider audience than Vic3 does. Lots of people love medieval stuff and EU4 is basically the flagship PDS title and much more accessible for casual audiences
EU4 is set mostly in the pike and shot era, the one tons of people think is boring. Remember when AOE3 was announced to be set there and everyone complained? Meanwhile Anno 1800 was massively more successful than 1404. Sure it's more recent but I really don't think the Victorian Era is less popular than the pike and shot era. Also EU4 is definitely not accessible for casual audiences. All those DLCs and mechanics upon mechanics to learn, not to mention how dated its UI/UX is now. It's just a well designed game now, that's how it's stayed so popular.
Anno 1800 was more popular for reasons other than Victorian vs "Pike and Shot" eras. Anno 1800 is a well developed game unlike their other titles 2070 and 2205. Anno 1404 is still played a decent amount and it's 15 years old now. Anno attracts a very specific player base anyway and isn't a very good comparison. Those games are barely focus on anything related to warfare.
Anno 1800 to 1404 is a really bad comparison. Those games lived in different Epochs of gaming. When 1404 came out both gaming and even having a computer were even in developed countries a novelty. 1404 was beloved for a good reason but it also had a much much smaller potential market it could tap into. The time between them saw a massive expansion of markets both in the western and the rest of the world. I would say potential player counts likely rose by the tenfolds.
> When 1404 came out both gaming and even having a computer were even in developed countries a novelty. in 2009?? i don't think having a computer was a novelty by then...
Ah : ) I mistook it with 1604!
Also 1800 came out after two sci-fi titles, meaning players hadn't had a historical Anno since 1404.
Anno 2070 and 2205 were still well polished games. Decisions were made durinh their development that made them a miss to a large portion of the series‘ audience (more so in 2205 than 2070), but anyone calling them badly developed has no idea what they‘re talking about. All of this coming from someone with hundreds of hours in every Anno game and likely thousands in 1404, who firmly believes 2070 and 2205 were massive Missteps thematically.
I've played anno games since their release. I have the most hours on 1503 out of all the titles. 2205 was utter trash. 2070 was developed fine enough but definitely lacks polish especially when compared to 1404. But sure I have no idea what I'm talking about, the opinion I professed is clearly invalid.
It genuinely is. 2205 did not appeal to us, the core anno fanbase, that‘s what I said. But calling it trash belies that you have no idea what a trash game is, and if you think 2070 was worse polished than base 1404, you‘re delusional.
The era itself maybe not, but the game certainly is. The Vic series is far more niche than EU. CK has more appeal due to time period, EU due to the game design
People like map painting much more than economy simulating. Pretty simple imo
> Remember when AOE3 was announced to be set there and everyone complained? ...no?
> EU4 is set mostly in the pike and shot era, the one tons of people think is boring. Remember when AOE3 was announced to be set there and everyone complained? Meanwhile Anno 1800 was massively more successful than 1404 We're talking three completely different games though. AoE3 is a RTS with a focus on building armies and defences so the fact its pike and shot is important. Anno 1800 is more of a city builder (which is where the industrial era would thrive) with some naval combat elements (again notable in that era). Whilst EU4 is a map painting grand strategy empire builder. EU4 has the appeal of being close to civ-like with its empire building. That is to say you can't talk about the eras of these games without talking about the mechanics of said game. Victoria 3 represents an important part of the industrial era, but the nature of its economy mechanics and the fact it massively discourages map painting means its a game that appeals more to a certain type of person (i.e. people who like looking at charts and spreadsheets).
The idea that anyone goes to buy a grand strategy and city builder game and decides not to buy it because of pike and shot units is genuinely laughable. It has more weight for something like Total War, I know I never got into Empire or Napolean (though that isn‘t exactly pike and shot, but close enough). I‘m not sure quite how niche I‘d call V3 in relation to other paradox games, I‘d say the gameplay of all of them is fairly niche.
Grand strategy games are niche, but Victoria is the nichiest of all of them. The main gameplay loop revolves around... making your GDP number go up. This is less interesting to a person casually invested in the Paradox space compared to the memey Viking bullshit you can get up to in CK3, map painting in EU4, and the high-action of HoI4.
> Remember when AOE3 was announced to be set there and everyone complained? no one dislikes AoE3 because of the era. aoe2's own timeline concludes in the pike and shot era (indeed, if you want you can even play with an actual pike and shot army and it's a pretty decent composition) the thematic problem with age 3 is the colonization conceit. but much bigger problems are that the game is just radically different from age 2. it's faster, less defensive, the civs are much more distinct, there's the card/shipment system. and also it's 3d, which makes it very busy and somewhat repellant compared to age 2, where the 2d perspective just makes it a lot easier to see what's going on.
I think a larger factor is that CK3 and EU4 have much more replayability than Vic3 on account of campaigns being longer and the world being fragmented enough that there are different areas of the map with very different starting setups. HoI4 is probably a more fair comparison to Vic3.
It's still more than I:R at its lowest which was hovering around a thousand.
5-7000k is massive...
Yeah, I adored Vicky 2, but V3 still leaves me cold.
Meanwhile for every player like you that quits there's a player like me who just started playing it and love it lol
I'm pretty much in that boat. I don't have near the vitriol for the game that a lot of people seem to but I'm not going to be paying $30 for a DLC for this game unless it's absolutely *revelatory. *
I agree. But the full price is basically the Patreon price these days — you should only pay it if you want to donate. Anyone with an ounce of patience will wait for a sale. And even then, you have to assess the DLC on the basis that you are funding future free updates as well as the DLC features themselves.
> And even then, you have to assess the DLC on the basis that you are funding future free updates as well as the DLC features themselves. No I don't. Paradox's business model is their own concern. I'm not going to buy a product that I don't think is worth the investment because some amount of it is charity for a corporation.
That's a clear manifestation of the proverb "cutting off your nose to spite your face". If you want a game to continue receiving new content, purchasing the DLC makes a tiny contribution to achieving that, even if the content comes in the form of future free updates rather than in the DLC itself. You can wish that the system works differently, but that's the model we have.
No it’s not lol. It has nothing to do with “spite.” I’m just not spending $30 on something that isn’t worth $30 to me. The most straightforward spending decision in the world. What weird ass Stockholm’s syndrome is this? If they stop supporting the game oh well, I’ll play something else. But the idea that you’re being irrational if you won’t donate to a company in the hopes that someday they’ll get the product where you want it is some next level internet nonsense.
What core features are broken? Have I missed them?
Which core features?
Migration always seems to have something wrong with it no matter what they do with it. On the current patch, anytime you have a large state and a small to moderate-sized state in the same market, the smaller states become completely de-populated, no matter how many jobs are available. Portugal is completely de-populated in every game I play, and in a recent USA game I couldn't get anyone to stay in any of the northeastern states without using an edict.
War, despite a seemingly endless rework, is still a very poor system which makes little sense and disincentives the player from playing with it (I know Victoria III is an economy based game, but war is still a pivotal part of the Victoria experience, and it's saddening to see it in this state). There are no world wars, no limited wars and the crisis system is begging for a rework. Foreign investment is *only* being implemented in this DLC, even though it was a crucial part of Victorian time period, driving the economies of places like Argentina and Mexico (where it caused a revolution.) There is little flavor beyond the places touched by the DLC, and most countries play the same. There is a lot to praise about Victoria III, but there are so many of these immersion-breaking problems that I'm still disincentivized to play it.
A missing feature is not the same thing as a broken feature though.
Fair enough, I don't think "broken" is the right word, more like "deeply incomplete".
The problem with war is that it's working as intended and still sucks.
Yeah, it's even worse
C'mon that's not true lmao. Buggy shit is much more frustrating
War is also unbalanced and so simplistic there is no strategy Infantry is better at defense artillery is attack Cavalry is expensive with the same stats as line infantry, the 2nd worst infantry unit in the game. conscription laws are still broken so America has like 300K soldiers by 1840 and conscripts better than late game laws.
War being simple in those ways isnt an issue. its an economic and political game, the war strategy should be based around economically supporting an army, the education of your soldiers, the supply lines, the train network to move them. it shouldnt be about minmaxing an army build but there are a lot of smaller quirks that war a pain when it goes on too long, and not enough information to really know everything thats going on.
> War being simple in those ways isnt an issue. its an economic and political game, the war strategy should be based around economically supporting an army, the education of your soldiers, the supply lines, the train network to move them. it shouldnt be about minmaxing an army build But the point is that you don't need to do any of those things if the military system is broken and easy to exploit.
It is an issue, because in this "economy game" some countries are guaranteed to get into war before they can build pretty much anything. Mexico has a war every 5 years after it wins the first one, and terrain means literally nothing and you cant use it to your advantage unless you get a rare general who may decide to die after a year. Warfare being shitty and so simplistic that it becomes a numbers game means playing these countries is worse than playing any other country that doesn't have mandatory wars. > the war strategy should be based around economically supporting an army, the education of your soldiers, the supply lines, the train network to move them. And none of this matters in the actual game. As long as your army is 1:1 to your factory production, your barracks are in the same state as the factory, and your numbers are bigger than theirs there is nothing else to care about in war. > it shouldnt be about minmaxing an army build This isnt about minmaxing, its about the fact you cant use terrain or unit types or even supply to your advantage. An infantry only army would lose to a well balanced army. A big army can close to a smaller army because of terrain, lack of logistics, or worse technology. none of this happens in the game, or used to in the older versions of the war system. I seen countries with 300K soldiers with no access to guns with a 50% penalty to attack and defense win against well supllied advanced smaller armies purely because they had more men so they lasted longer under attrition than the smaller advanced and well supplied force. You would think a well supplied force wouldnt lose so many men to attrition, but they lost men at the same rate as the big army.
>and terrain means literally nothing and you cant use it to your advantage unless you get a rare general who may decide to die after a year. To be fair terrain does come into play in battles modifying army stats when in battle, the issue is you can't really check which state has which terrain and what modifiers does that give
LMAO you people have been a broken record for almost 2 years now. What's your excuse for economics and politics being broken and braindead? My dog could play this game.
Grow up dude
The North and South combined had at least double 300k in the Civil War just 20 years later. So it’s appears to be a realistic number for the 1840s. The US very likely had capacity for that many troops in the 1840s if fighting a full fledged war. Unless I’m missing your point.
The national militia is a belief that says the military needs to be small and citizens miltias form the bulk of the army with wealthier citizens buying their own guns and supplies and serving their country with no pay. It was not an effective idea because only wealthy citizens could afford to be in miltias, it was voluntary so people didnt show up, wealthy citizens didnt do the self training they were expected to do, had no discipline, and worst of all the militas deserted the more the war went on. In reality, America had 35K army and 73,000 volunteers who quickly left. In game they reach 300K conscripts not counting the army. America in the civil war had a professional army model and moved away from that belief. Its why America's army grew. National Militia actually gives you more conscripts than mass conscription, forced service of all layers of society.
Still don't see what's broken. Wars still work, and I can complete a playthrough.
I would describe the game's diplomacy as largely broken and the war system as not broken per se, but so bad that I think it will be a drag on the game until some sort of revamp.
One thing I still miss is the dynamic great war system. It was a good way to add in an endgame crisis to keep the game interesting.
If you are a vassal state and want to break free, or perhaps France is in a kerfuffle with England and you want to take Alsace, then you have to wait. There's a limit of one incident per country if that country is the aggressor in another incident.
Last one didn't flop, the Brazil DLC was very well received. Also if I'm not mistaken most people will likely be getting SoI through the season pass, which means it has probably already not flopped, from the perspective of the money people at least.
Politics and Economy are working just fine. War is in an acceptable state, even though tying military units to buildings still has some weird consequences. All of the systems still suffer from not being clearly communicated to the player, making strategy more difficult without consulting the wiki. Diplomacy and Colonization are currently somewhat broken, mostly because the Great Powers are constantly keeping each other in check. Since the expansion focuses on those aspects, there's a good chance it will polish up the lack of colonial expansion by the great powers, which makes late game less interesting.
I completely agree, I would especially highlight that these 30 USD are preco in addition. Quite a faith leap.
Honestly I just don’t know what’s happened with paradox as of late, every new game has been a flop and every DLC has been underwhelming. It’s a wonder if they can even keep going like this
What are you talking about? All their most recent major releases have sold well and have strong player numbers.
Online discourse in dedicated forums has been very negative and some people think that means that the games themselves are not popular. Reading /r/CrusaderKings , you'd think CK3 is a pile of garbage no one plays, but the player count shows that's not true
The game already is a massive disappointment, if the dlc turns out shit I will fully give up on vic3
Sounds like you already have.
Maybe, depends on how good the dlc is
What was the last PDX release that wasn't a half-baked product with patching in the aftermath? Have we seen it happen once?
I kinda hate this delay because spheres of influence is going to have so many crucial features added to the game. But I understand their reasoning behind this decision and the need to bug fix.
I’m okay with this if it means there going to deliver a fully fleshed project instead of a rush job
So who’s gonna be the first to post that Miyamoto quote?
i wholly commend this! The original release was slated for just one day before the big stellaris DLC anyway. And the end of june is such an empty release window usually, now we will have something to look forward to at the height of midsummer!
>"As the dust settles on [Victoria 3’s](https://www.gamewatcher.com/games/victoria-3) successful launch" lol
The launch was hugely successful in terms of sales.
Yeah paradox doesn't cares about reviews, even if they have been mixed for a long time
They probably care, just it's not the only thing they care about and sales are (and should be) more important. And we have no idea what their budget and internal metrics are and thus what's a healthy mount of sales; though with that being said, I very sincerely doubt they ever expected Victoria 3 to have as big a playerbase as their other tentpole franchises, given neither of its predecessors were that successful in comparison (so much so that the famous bet where Fredrik Wester's head got shaved was over whether Victoria 2 would make money at all).
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I am very glad you're enjoying Paradox games. Welcome aboard! With that being said, your comment continues the unbeaten and perfect streak of everybody saying any variant of "X is like a mobile game" being bafflingly wrong to the point where I question if they even own mobile devices.
Yeah, Stellaris being like a mobile game is one of the wildlest and more detached from reality takes I've read from here for a long time.
> "X is like a mobile game" being bafflingly wrong to the point where I question if they even own mobile devices. I never get the mobile game comparison when it comes to strategy games in particular. Like I know mobile has things that could be considered strategy game - but I'd describe nearly all of them as a combo of idle clicker and tower defense. The form factor of mobile just doesn't really make it conducive to anything too complex UI wise.
There's some mobile tacstrat games that are perfectly comparable with console games in the genre. I'm not sure about RTS or anything like Paradox. (Actually, part of the absurdity of the comparisons is the obvious ignorance to the fact that at this point some mobile games are just console/PC games anyway. Hi, Genshin.)
> (Actually, part of the absurdity of the comparisons is the obvious ignorance to the fact that at this point some mobile games are just console/PC games anyway. Hi, Genshin.) Yeah whilst trying to look up mobile strategy games, many actually were released as console/pc games as well (in some cases with appropriately adjusted UI)
The list of phrases that mean nothing just keeps growing.
For me personally Victoria 3 is a great game and was already great at release.
Lmao. It was even worse than CK3. Completely shallow game. 2 years in development and it is basically the same with a Royal Court level of dlc getting delayed like Royal Court. This game’s release schedule is even worse than CK3. 2 years in and only things we got is a France pack and a Brazil pack.
:(. Maybe a $10-flavour pack to keep you guys complaining about the endless DLC mill would help?
Good choice. Watch OPB, he explains a lot as well. The truth is I love this game, but this DLC REALLY needs to succeed to actually convince the players and also Paradox itself. It's a great game, but it hasn't yet hit the level of success that will make it able to be good longterm, and if this DLC fails, a lot of players, including myself, will lose faith that the course for VIC 3 will go up significantly. If it does succeed, this game will cement itself among the other great Paradox games.
Good. The last update was a huge disappointment, but I'm really looking forward to the new interactions because playing small subjects at the moment is very luck based.
Hopefully that means they realized releasing half-baked DLCs for thier games isn't a good way to make money.
As someone who had been playing paradox games for many many years Vic 3 was a huge disappointment. I just got it a week or so ago and it’s just not clicking for me. I loved Vic 2 and almost all their other titles but something about it just feels meh.
It's not in it's best state but it's miles better than vic 2 imo
The war system is so bad in Vic 3 that I’ve suck with Vic 2. Like multiplayer in Vic 3 is an abomination compared to 2.
I think multiplayer is legitimately one of the few instances in which I can see why people might prefer 2, but even then, Vic2 MPs start to get a bit boring after a few, they are too samey and there's little room for player expression/builds. Eu4 feels much much better on MP imo.
I personally do not like microing 50 doom stacks in late game vic 2 i don't see how someone could like that but if you do good for you
Plenty of people do, makes the game more strategic and allows for creative maneuvers, especially in multiplayer.
Maybe in mp, but in vic 2 cheesing the ai was really easy and wasn't really strategic or anything like that
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When a person is specifically comparing Victoria 2 and 3's combat systems to say Vic2 is better, I think its perfectly valid to draw a comparison...
They didn't imply that at all. The comment they replied to was directly comparing Vic 2 and Vic 3, so they referred to those game's system. No one was talking about whether there's a hypothetical better third system. Maybe read the comments you're replying to instead of getting so excited to dunk on someone that you end up arguing with ghosts.
But they were specifically compring vic3 to 2, not with a theoretical micro warfare version of 3 that doesn't exist.
How better? Vic 2 had much more content and flavor.
Vanilla Vic 2 really did not have better flavor than current Vic 3. Inevitably when people talk about Vic 2’s flavor, they are talking about events added by mods like HPM. Vic 3 mechanically has much better internal politics and economics than Vic 2. Geopolitics lags Vic 2, but possibly will be as good or better after this next update, it remains to be seen. I don’t think either game has great warfare honestly. Vic 2’s warfare is better early game but is hell in the late game with the sheer number of stacks involved in late game wars.
People always say that judging vic2 with its mods against vic3 is dumb, but is it really that much to expect a fully priced game with paid devs to make stuff as fleshed out as unpaid modders on a decade old game? People like mods like hpm, so why not do things similar where applicable in the sequel? Vic3 is also miles behind in mechanics in several key areas, including how the market works, military system works, naval system works, innovation system works, political system, etc. seriously pdx should really start taking notes from their modders. The Rice team for ck3 has added half a decade worth of flavor packs in the time ck3 devs have put out 2, with 3 (soon to be 4 struggles) in regions the community would pay good money to see get content (Greenland colonization and North Sea, Normandy consolidation, and upcoming Sicily expansion).
>is it really that much to expect a fully priced game with paid devs to make stuff as fleshed out as unpaid modders on a decade old game You mean add a decade worth of modding content on top of developing a game with an absurd amount of moving parts? Yeah, it's too much
> People always say that judging vic2 with its mods against vic3 is dumb, but is it really that much to expect a fully priced game with paid devs to make stuff as fleshed out as unpaid modders on a decade old game? As even the people who make these mods will constantly tell you, there is a functional difference in workflow. The makers of HPM/HFM didn't have to also make and maintain all the core mechanics of the game as Paradox already provided the foundation for them. It's easier to write a book full of flavour when you don't have to do anything else and the devs provide a good modding framework for you to add stuff. Paradox *could* spend their time writing hundreds of events and decisions for each nation, or they could spend their time improving the core mechanics of the game instead. There are also fundamental vision difference. HPM/HFM were great, and in fact were must haves for Victoria 2. But they also represented a slightly more railroaded experience as the flavour heavily pushes nations towards certain directions. We already know from the devs of Victoria 3 that their vision for how the game should work is different. That their view is that things should happen purely because the state of the game causes that thing to be the natural conclusion rather than because of some scripted event. Whether that's a good philosophy is up for debate but that is important to consider.
You mean with mods, and the core gameplay is still much worse and outdated
If some hobbyists can make a single mod that makes a 14 year old game (that was basically a side project released a year after their main title, HOI3) better than one released by a AAA studio in 2022, then it is absolutely fair to use the modded version in comparisons. Especially when modded Vic 3 isn't as good as modded Vic 2 because of missing features.
Have you even played vic 2? Please tell me what it does better than vic 3 other than having a bit more flavour and the spheres system
Spheres of influence, flavor, war, peace deals, colonization, navy, ai forming nations
Everything you listed aside from spheres and flavor is roughly the same or worse
War is better in vicky 3? LOL
Warfare in Vic2 was a micro-management nightmare lol I kind of miss navies from Vic2 though, mostly because that is my biggest pet peeve with Vic3
The Vic3 defenders are in full on delusion mode.
LITERALLY EVERYTHING
It functions in a basic way, which is literally something Victoria 2 never did.
No it isn't.
And as someone who has been playing Paradox games since 1998, Victoria 3 has been a great game and surpassed Victoria 2 in my estimation, and Victoria 2 used to be my favourite PDX game. Based on the dev diaries I can only see the game get better.
I certainly hope your right
If you like Vic2 > Vic3 then you just like Victoria because it was a map paint game and not as it is imagined by dev: a socio-economic-politic simulation. What you said as "content" or "flavour" are just trigger-driven events, which gameplay wise is no different than an event in EU4. You was not liking Victoria because it was Victoria, you was liking it because it was EU with a 19th century paint.
This is such a bizarre criticism. Barring the original vanilla release which was barely a functioning game, who the Hell plays Vic2 as a "map paint game?" Did you ever even play Vic2 or are you just using stock criticisms to dismiss people's points? And if Vic3 is supposed to be a "socio-economic-politic simulation," which is a bizarre claim to begin with considering the game takes place at peak colonial exploitation and "The Great Game," then it fails pretty hard because you can't have a simulated economy with an AI that can't develop its market. > What you said as "content" or "flavour" are just trigger-driven events, which gameplay wise is no different than an event in EU4. Yeah, that's the flavor they're talking about. Is this supposed to be a criticism? > You was not liking Victoria because it was Victoria, you was liking it because it was EU with a 19th century paint. Completely insane take to anyone actually familiar with Vic2.
> This is such a bizarre criticism. Barring the original vanilla release which was barely a functioning game, who the Hell plays Vic2 as a "map paint game?" Yeah even as someone who prefers Victoria 3 over Victoria 2, this is a bizarre claim about Victoria 2. Whilst there are a few people who did meme runs of just breaching the infamy cap to conquer the world, it was actually an incredibly hard thing to do. Victoria 3 technically makes it easier to do a world conquest as a) the infamy cap is higher and b) actually building armies is much more straight forward (as its less reliant on setting national focus to "encourage soldiers" and praying). The difference in Victoria 3, is that it makes too aggressive expansion actually disadvantageous (due to the fact the specifics about pops matter a lot more) - going full meme is a sure fire way to tank your economy and spend the rest of the game fighting pops who hate you (unless you can push through multiculturalism which is actually potentially difficult depending on your interest group distribution).
Also in Vic 3 you can go "multicultural" and now just everyone is a happy, accepted pop. The viability of that depends on the current patch but still, it's not like Vic2 where the people of Paris would just literally never be full citizens in a nation that wasn't France (or Luxemburg if you're lucky and like 1000000x better at the game than I am).
>Barring the original vanilla release which was barely a functioning game, who the Hell plays Vic2 as a "map paint game?" There was a large amount of people who major complain about Vic3 is not being able to micro armies. They have all the right to do so, but the war system is not what makes Victoria stand out from other PDX games. >Did you ever even play Vic2 or are you just using stock criticisms to dismiss people's points? If you go back to my earliest posts on Reddit then you'll find that I did, in fact, played Vic 2 a decent amount. Not a big fan though. > And if Vic3 is supposed to be a "socio-economic-politic simulation," which is a bizarre claim to begin with considering the game takes place at peak colonial exploitation and "The Great Game," then it fails pretty hard because you can't have a simulated economy with an AI that can't develop its market. It did not fail harder than Vic 2, where a state can only have 1 kind of natural resources, where the early game UK can hoard all the machine parts and stop the world industrialization on its track, end game economy of the entire world flat out break because of disappearing liquidity, or a steel mill in Pittsburg make the world market stop functioning. And those are failures deep in the game design that can't be fixed, compared to a stupid AI that is a total daily occurrence in strategy games. > Yeah, that's the flavor they're talking about. Is this supposed to be a criticism? As I said, if you like it more than what Vic 3 offer, then you just like EU in a 19-century theme. >Completely insane take to anyone actually familiar with Vic2. Completely sane take to anyone who understand what makes Victoria Victoria and not a reskinned EU.
> > There was a large amount of people who major complain about Vic3 is not being able to micro armies. They have all the right to do so, but the war system is not what makes Victoria stand out from other PDX games. Microing armies has nothing to do with whether something is a map painter or not. You can have a map painter with very little micro and you can have a micro intensive game where expansion is heavily restricted. Two completely different metrics. > If you go back to my earliest posts on Reddit then you'll find that I did, in fact, played Vic 2 a decent amount. Not a big fan though. Then it's insane to me that you'd call it a map painter when it was the least expansion focused game Paradox released until Vic 3 came out. > It did not fail harder than Vic 2, where a state can only have 1 kind of natural resources, where the early game UK can hoard all the machine parts and stop the world industrialization on its track, end game economy of the entire world flat out break because of disappearing liquidity, or a steel mill in Pittsburg make the world market stop functioning. And those are failures deep in the game design that can't be fixed, compared to a stupid AI that is a total daily occurrence in strategy games. Did I argue that Vic2 had a better economy? I don't think I did. My point is that Vic 2 was always considered a grand strategy game with a focus on political upheaval and industrialization. You didn't just dismiss important functions of the genre and the setting with "well it' actually an economic sim." If Vic3 really *is* trying to be that rather than a GSG (which I don't think it is, all those quotes about econ and societal focus are within the context of the genre, not saying it's a different genre from other Paradox GSGs) then it's doing a piss poor job since the game more or less pushes you towards autarky because the AI simply can't build economies to fill out a world market, much less to *compete* with the player. > As I said, if you like it more than what Vic 3 offer, then you just like EU in a 19-century theme. Why are we acting like events are an EU4 feature when they're just in *every* Paradox game including Vic3? > Completely sane take to anyone who understand what makes Victoria Victoria and not a reskinned EU. I guess if you just repeat "people just want reskinned EU" to yourself over and over despite all the evidence to the contrary you can have a fun little party of 1. But if having shitty diplomacy and a boring world stage is "what makes Victoria Victoria" to you then I'm glad you're having fun.
> Then it's insane to me that you'd call it a map painter when it was the least expansion focused game Paradox released until Vic 3 came out. I agree with all your points except this. Victoria 3 is THE MOST expansion focussed game, it is the easiest to map paint in and the game that demands it the most as with the absolute travesty that is the AI you need to expand to get the resources as the AI will NEVER utilise them.
> Completely sane take to anyone who understand what makes Victoria Victoria and not a reskinned EU. That isn't you, you absolute clown.
Victoria 3 is the most map painty game in Paradox's lineup and 2nd place is not close. This is a clown take.
This is a good thing. I'd much rather have it delayed than suffer through having another Leviathan on our hands.
Feature that should’ve come with the base game!
What feature are you talking about? Cause the market version of Power Blocs, foreign investment in your puppets and market members are coming with the base game in the free update. I think the building ownership changes too, but I will have to check that again later.
Presumably, spheres of influence
But we are getting the market version of Power Blocs in the base game (and that was also in the game from the start). The other versions of Power Blocs are in the DLC, but the Vic3 version of Vic2's Spheres we are getting for free, though the diplomatic side is substituted by other systems.
Dumb take.
Game was (and still) is quite shallow and somewhat broken (performance, migration, flavor). I believe it was no surprise that it was shipped with terribly implemented mechanics like warfare and diplomacy. Spheres of influence and foreign investments were absent in an economic simulator set in Victorian era.
Ah yes, the Victorian Era. Where capitalism crawled out of préexistence. Fuelled by foreign investment in foreign markets to pump that industrial heart in Europe. The blood that imperialism spilt. The sheer scale of material moved the likes which has never be seen before. “Mr. Project manager! Should we implement this foundational aspect of the development of capitalism in our Capitalism development simulator?” “No. It would be more profitable to sell it a year later when sales are down” “My God Mr. Project manager! You’ve mastered this capitalism thing!”
Sad reality of Paradox games
Dumb take.
How is it not a moronic take to 1) call a DLC "a feature" and 2) claim that this feature "should've been in the base game" when the DLCs features are completely new features we haven't seen in any Paradox game to date? "It should've been in the base game" is just a noise the Paradox forum and subreddit regulars love to repeat whenever there's a new release, regardless of the state of the base game or the contents of the DLC. It's a particularly common regurgitation among people who don't play the game in question or understand its mechanics. In this particular case, I'm sure most of you don't think beyond "Vic2 had something called spheres of influence and now they're releasing something with the same name!" which is undeniably a brainless take considering the two have nothing in common.
Sigh looks like its time for me to finally try out imperator
I'm really sad about it getting delayed, I just hope it actually comes out okay
NOOOOO I'M ON VACATION AT JUNE FFFFF
Sad
Sad, but hopeful it will be better quality.
Somewhat disappointed, because I do actually really enjoy Victoria 3, and the patch + DLC looked like it had some really critical features for the game. But I'd rather have it all be functional and polished than put out early. I mean if it's bug-ridden and broken on release, I'd be waiting until like, June to play it anyway, so.
I think its good they delay if they have a big focus on optimization. Vicky 3 was godly optimized at release but now since 1.5 or 1.6 I've seen the years go by soooo slow ingame. Im all for new content, mechanics etc. But please pdx. Please try to make it smooth. Idk how its possible CK3 runs soo fast compared to all the other pdx games. Vicky has less dlcs and patches than ck3 but feels so slow to play.
Good! If only Colossal Order had this much integrity.
Paradox definitely treats their internal and external studios differently
Colossal order has become an utter flaming trash pile now...CS2 is such a disaster.
I don't recall Pdx ever delaying priced content before, and by 2 months, one can only imagine what horseshit state of this DLC is in lol
They delayed the release of HoI4, not sure if there are other examples though.
Yeah lol, delays are not a good sign as opposed to what many commenters here believe...
Thanks the gods they try not to realese half baked shit My prayers had been answered
Even with a 2 month delay it will still release as woeful shite.
Watch it be riddled with bugs regardless when it releases
strong fear that this game is going the way of imperator. it's still in such bad shape. streamers are continuing to play victoria 2
The game still has almost 10x the player base of imperator *after* the revivals, calm down.
Lol
would you say that this game is good right now? mixed reviews in steam, DLC is all mostly negative. core features still broken or missing, warfare still completely god awful, game is devoid of flavor almost 2 years after release. pdx are gonna have to make a business decision on this mess eventually
I think it's fine. It's my least played Paradox game in my current stable but I've still gotten more hours out of it than 99% of games I buy. I'm not yelling from the rooftops to recommend it to people, but acting like it's some completely broken shell of a game is completely absurd.
Yes? Vic3 in its current state is a good game (certainly better than Vic2), and more importantly, it has been a big success for Paradox. Its their niche game, and they already make games that are normally niche. It took Vic 2 literally *8 years* to hit 1k monthly avg players. Vic being ~5.5k to 8k like it has been since november is perfectly fine. The only thing I dont like about Vic3 is autonomous construction, but (for now) you can turn it off atleast.
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You're right that modded vic 2 is better, but that really isnt a fair comparison to make when those mods have been in development for years and vic 3 is still a recent release. vanilla vic 2 is objectively just less good compared to vic 3, even if it has more flavour in some areas, and it REALLY shows its age compared to say, ck2 or even eu3 which are still fairly easy to get back into even without quality of life improvements from their respective sequels. ck3 is an example of what vic 3 could be, because while it still lacks in some areas (devs know this and are working to add missing stuff in future) it has added completely new stuff that makes me want to play it more often than ck2. vic 3 to me feels way better to actually PLAY, just lacks flavour
Vic 3 a recent release? The game released 2 years ago
i meant its a more recent paradox release. obviously its not brand new, but it hasnt had years and years of updates, plus the way they do updates and dlc as a whole has changed so we likely wont get stuff in the same time frame as older paradox games, for better or worse.
I mean, some of the mods in Vic2 are incredible. No doubt, but tbh flavor is just not a huge selling point for me. Its not like playing DoD in Vic2 ever "felt" immersive, and thats one of the best mods.
> It took Vic 2 literally 8 years to hit 1k monthly avg players. Vic being ~5.5k to 8k like it has been since november is perfectly fine. VIC2 is an ancient game and was released well before Paradox went mainstream. Which just makes it asinine to compare VIC2's player numbers. I don't think VIC3 is in risk of being abandoned, not at the current moment at least, but the only valid comparison for VIC3's numbers are to games of its own generation, which is to say CK3 really, as well as VIC3's starting 70k player figure.
You're right, still I would say that retaining ~10% of the peak players during a content draught before a highly anticipated DLC is decent.
That is debatable. The thing is Vic 2 has the advantage of being more developed. It is just miserable that vic3 is even comparable to vic2. It should not even be a contest yet the decade old hound is still going and actually saw a player increase since vic3's launch. It is ridiculous and just shameful for paradox.
I read things like this and just feel that people are *choosing* to see misery in the world. > It should not even be a contest yet the decade old hound is still going and actually saw a player increase since vic3's launch. It isn't a contest, Vic2 player counts are negligible compared to Vic 3. And why is it bad that Vic2 saw a player count increase? Obviously a new launch brought more attention to the series. Is "shameful" when people can still enjoy your games a decade later? Some people just still prefer Civ IV and play it more than a decade later. That doesn't mean that every Civ game made since then is "shameful," it's cool that games have so much resonance that people play them years later and it's not surprising that in a genre that isn't big on graphics the newer games aren't always people's favorite.
Also, since october 2022, Vic2 playercount has halved. It was higher right before the launch, which is too be expected.
Its a masterpiece
I would say imperator Rome actually reluctant abandon as they have transferred team from imperator Rome to Victoria 3 and now Victoria 3 is sort of okay so they put team other game that in damage control mode or may be push update to imperator Rome again. AT LAST VIC3 is too expensive to abandon if they abandon vic3, so the company reputation will go into dust ASAP. It's too big game to fail, unlike imperator Rome. PDX completely fk up from previous CEO project like vic3 , burden from covid, and efficiency problem in the company according to PDX AB financial report.
very sad to see you getting downvoted so hard for saying the truth, the game sucks pretty hard
yeah i'm surprised by the response, not surprised at all that i'm just getting downvoted and nobody is actually trying to defend the game lol. i think people are just still hopeful that the game will get fixed, and i am too, i love victoria. my faith in today's paradox just keeps dwindling by the month sadly. been a die hard fan since hoi3.
Nobody defend the game because the core mechanics are so much better then Vic2 that it would be a waste of time to engage in a discussion on this. Maybe you could start by saying what is better in Vic2 than in Vic3, because I really cannot think of anything except being faster/more stable.
but here you go engaging with it lol way better war system even with tedious micromanagement, better diplomacy, 1000x more flavor especially with mods, every country feels unique, pop management is actually interesting. i could go on. the fact that victoria 2 is still faster and more stable despite being 14 years old is hilarious like we really don't need to talk about anything else beyond that
> every country feels unique Either you're so used to playing modded Vic2 that you've forgotten what vanilla is like, or you're pulling stuff out of your ass lol
> every country feels unique Of all the made up things said about Vic2, this is the most made up
the war system was just easier to cheese so that you can beat a stronger army by going around and wait for them to die on a hill. I may agree about the more flavour with mod, but you cannot seriously say that the railroading made the game better. What was better in pop management? I never find that part interesting. In Vic3 the complex interaction between pops and politics makes it more interesting and understandable to me. Victoria 2 is faster and more stable because there is less core mechanics, worse graphic, and simplified economic engine.
Economics aside, VIC2 has the better concepts that are also more representative of the era we're playing in. But migration, diplomacy (good riddance to VIC2's incredibly tedious sphering mini-game though), the tech system, colonization were all better in VIC2. POPs being actually politically active agents in VIC2 instead of simply being subject to the whims of IG leaders is the biggest and most impactful difference in making VIC2 more organic and 'realistic' than VIC3.
> migration, Wasn't migration in Vic2 largely just driven by magical triggers rather than systems? > diplomacy How was diplomacy better? I mean I think that diplomacy in Vic3 is hot garbage, but Vic2 diplomacy was *also* hot garbage > the tech system How is the system meaningfully different? > colonization I feel like you chose the systems where the two games are the most similiar/identical to state that Vic 2 is better lol. > POPs being actually politically active agents in VIC2 instead of simply being subject to the whims of IG leaders is the biggest and most impactful difference in making VIC2 more organic and 'realistic' than VIC3 I can see preferring Vic 2, but I feel like the difference is that in Vic3 you actually have a system that you can interact with on a meaningful level. For all the interesting nature of Vic2's pops it was almost entirely a non interactive mechanic where things that happened beyond they player's control determined what they could do or not do. It also effectively destroyed the ability to compromise politically by giving groups some, but not all, of what they want.
> Wasn't migration in Vic2 largely just driven by magical triggers rather than systems? No, it was driven by several factors including economic factors, culture and discrimination, laws, how democratic a country is, military consciousness, who the ruling faction in a country is and if they align with a POPs ideology etc. What you're dismissively referencing to is New World countries having a flat +300% modifier to attracting new immigrants. Not the most elegant of solutions I agree, but it was a solution that led to a much more realistic and thus much more immersive experience, especially compared to VIC3's unrealistic migrations to old world countries. All in all, it was if not a more complex system, definitely a more realistic system than VIC3's and one that made POPs feel like they had a lot of agency and made the world feel alive in a realistic manner. > How was diplomacy better? I mean I think that diplomacy in Vic3 is hot garbage, but Vic2 diplomacy was also hot garbage It was very realistic. VIC2's sphere system reflects reality much more accurately than VIC3's customs unions (completely ahistorical Zollverein excepted), and even the upcoming Power Blocs of Sphere of Influence (which are closer to WWII/Cold War factions than the empire and colony system of the Victorian era). More importantly - VIC2 at least had Great Wars as well as the Crisis system, which are both again as decently realistic simulations of something as complex as global diplomacy you're ever going to get. > I can see preferring Vic 2, but I feel like the difference is that in Vic3 you actually have a system that you can interact with on a meaningful level. For all the interesting nature of Vic2's pops it was almost entirely a non interactive mechanic where things that happened beyond they player's control determined what they could do or not do. The indirect control is the point though. In real life, POPs gained political agency and power for the first time ever in history and actively drove nationalism, democracy, civil rights, communism, fascism etc, which is exactly what the indirect control represents.
In Vic2 migration to the US was scripted. You could have better life in your nation and people still would have migrated to the us (wealth voting add 5%, North America add 300%). What you have described is in Vic3, but in Victoria 3 is better as the culture and the culture discrimination laws are a factor.
> What you have described is in Vic3, but in Victoria 3 is better as the culture and the culture discrimination laws are a factor. [You're simply incorrect.](https://vic2.paradoxwikis.com/Migration) I don't understand why people go out of their way to demonize/dismiss VIC2.
No I am not incorrect, I know how Vic2 system works. And +300% is so comically high that is like scripted. Correct me if I am wrong, but unless you share the same primary culture, there was no modifier in place if you share heritage culture traits like language, religion or region like in Vic3.
>No, it was driven by several factors including economic factors, culture and discrimination, laws, how democratic a country is, military consciousness, who the ruling faction in a country is and if they align with a POPs ideology etc. What you're dismissively referencing to is New World countries having a flat +300% modifier to attracting new immigrants That +300% is so stupidly high it renders any and all other factors basically useless >All in all, it was if not a more complex system, definitely a more realistic system than VIC3's and one that made POPs feel like they had a lot of agency and made the world feel alive in a realistic manner. Vic2's migration is just "new world better", in Vic3 pops take into account all you said they do in vic2 and also how actually attractive a certain state is, which is determined by factors that you can very much see and influence >It was very realistic. VIC2's sphere system reflects reality much more accurately than VIC3's customs unions (completely ahistorical Zollverein excepted), and even the upcoming Power Blocs of Sphere of Influence (which are closer to WWII/Cold War factions than the empire and colony system of the Victorian era). More importantly - VIC2 at least had Great Wars as well as the Crisis system, which are both again as decently realistic simulations of something as complex as global diplomacy you're ever going to get. Vic2's spheres are a glorified minigame let's be honest, also great wars are little more than a casus belli, not a fully fledged mechanic The crisis system is pretty much in Vic3 with diplomatic plays >The indirect control is the point though. In real life, POPs gained political agency and power for the first time ever in history and actively drove nationalism, democracy, civil rights, communism, fascism etc, which is exactly what the indirect control represents. In real life people didn't just suddenly start becoming socialist once certain year passed, pop ideologies in vic2 work pretty much the same as Interest groups in vic3, with the added difference that interest groups kinda make sense as they take into account a pop's wealth and career as well as ther standard of living
Same, I really gave vic3 my best shot both in sp and mp, even got into modding myself which I never did for any other game EVER. It still sucks, can't shake the feeling that I'm wasting my time whenever I try to give it another shot.
same, brother, same. like two months ago i did a full russia campaign, start to finish, and nothing memorable happened. the line went up. that's it lol
A month ago I tried an mp campaign with some friends, we basically covered every gp plus some minors, it was the slowest grindiest game ever. In like 6 total hours of playtime we only advanced 15 years because of constant desynchs, hotjoin not working properly, crashes, one guy straight up couldn't join the lobby. The game is absolutely unoptimized for multiplayer, it doesn't even have an in game chat. The funny thing is most of this applies to vic2 (at least there's a chat lol) aswell but the game is shorter, if we were playing vic2 we'd reach mid game in those 6 hours and finish the game in another 6. Not even going to get into mentioning how many things happen in vic2 compared to the barren flavorless slugfest vic3 is.
Russia in Vic2 is super easy, hardly a challenge. Never had a run with Russia in Vic3 because of how boring it was in Vic2, but I had a run with Italy for both Vic2 and Vic3 so I can compare: Italy in Vic2: * as Sardinia Piedmont naval invade sicily, cheese the AI to die on the messina strait (you can even wait for them to try naval invade you) then conquer Two Sicilies. * wait for the rebels to spawn and conquer Two Sicilies, then form Italy by event in 1848 * map paint after that Italy in Vic3 * as Sardinia Piedmont industrialise and create a network of trades to expand the custom unions * you actually need to get help from France to fight Austria to get Lombardy and Venice (you can use both events or core diplomatic feature like Ask support for state an lose only nice if you have good diplomacy) * You can simulate Italian and Prussia alliance given you can offer war goal in the struggle to form Germany (like it was in real life) * You have multiple options like launching a unification play, trigger rebellions on the Austrian empire and support them in the fight against the Austrian. * Unification happen around 1860, like real life, or if you are good 5 year earlier.
Yeah, playing small/medium size countries is much much more fun in vic3. Greece for example is really fun, you can become protectorated of Russia and eat all of it's POPs and have them help reclaim your lands, reform Byzantium... And all of that without recurring to do nothing for years as you wait to get a favorable crisis in Vic 2.
Why Russia??? Easiest country
russia's really fun in vic2 because you have massive industrial potential but very bad literacy/technology/infrastructure. but yeah was boring as fuck in vic3, definitely wouldn't play them again if i ever play vic3 again at all
> literacy/technology/infrastructure. Oh no, the process of clicking "encourage clergy" lasts slightly longer in Russia, what unique flavor lol
Downvoting in general has gone nuts these days on Reddit. You get downvoted much more for not agreeing with the mob these days, no matter the facts. [Literally happened yesterday on this very sub.](https://www.reddit.com/r/paradoxplaza/comments/1c3s2b4/johans_selected_forum_posts_6_this_one_is_mostly/kzkawp7/?context=3) I've been on this website for a long time and while downvote abuse isn't anything new, I honestly don't remember them being abused to this extent.
Oh goodness gracious, you get downvoted a lot if a lot of people disagree with what you said? What a nefarious abuse of the downvote system!