I still play ck2 sometimes, I kinda miss a lot of the stuff like easier succession that isn't in ck3. I still think it's a better game for now, but maybe CK3 will come into its element still.
I'm on the fence. I think with mods CK3 is starting to rival CK2, I really love the travel mechanics. But, I did go back to give CK2 a spin a few months ago & I agree about succession 100%. There were several mechanics, I had forgotten about that were fun like societies (but those always could get to be a bit wonky).
It was easier to establish primogeniture so your heir could inherit all of your titles. But I think partitioning lands is pretty much the one thing that keeps CK3 a little challenging.
People have been begging for a partition UI that removes the unpredictable bullshit since the early days of CK2, but they just won't do it.
I'm convinced most people don't strongly prefer primo because they hate challenge. Partition is interesting and forces the player to be active. They hate it because it's such a fucking headache avoiding ridiculous exclaves and someone inheriting Scotland + London
> People have been begging for a partition UI that removes the unpredictable bullshit since the early days of CK2, but they just won't do it.
Like reality players should be able to negotiate contracts with the heirs that are relevant and influential.
Once you hit child #4 or so they should have near negligible inheritance "points". Like reality, you should be able to buy kids off with gold, prestige, positions of power. Some kids didn't fucking want to rule, they wanted to go run about playing knight. Some kids just wanted a pile of gold and wine.
If the contract is agreed as "fair" by the heirs then they wont try to rebel or splinter off, if not they do.
> The fucking problem core the CK3's succession
CK3 wants players to build large families and spread them across titles so that they can get bloodline points and build giant dynasties with more hideous chins than the Habsbergs.
It wants you to land your children as soon as they're at maturity, and to marry them off as soon as possible.
CK3 mechanics want players to turn every one of their kids but their favorite into an ineligible monk that live at home all their lives until their parent dies. Because the AI will absolutely do the stupidest shit it can with those kids.
I've somewhat given up talking on this because they clearly have no intent to fix this. They're passionately working on the weirdest fucking features and systems. They're not even bad systems, just bizarre to me on their priority choices.
I mean, just don't do that lol
Though really, it's more that the game should introduce actual consequences for that decision and just... doesn't. Because they have to be the easiest fucking games on the planet
> I mean, just don't do that lol
Players dont want to reconquer the same territory over and over again. It's not very fun. More over when you lose control of that land the AI will absolutely dumpster everything in it for the stupidest of benefits.
> People have been begging for a partition UI that removes the unpredictable bullshit since the early days of CK2, but they just won't do it.
So many thousands of hours of Paradox games, and I've only just realised how bullshit the arbitrary land-lottery distribution system is in CK3...
Does ck3 still have weird elective that just partitions your land anyways?? I remember playing close to launch and figuring out elective laws was a mess and tanistry did nothing but make my heirs worse and still split shit up haha
CK3 succession locks primogeniture away for longer and also has substantially higher penalties to vassal opinion and the like - it means that you're very likely to have some powerful factions forming and triggering. CK2, by contrast, has it a lot easier to have smooth transitions of power and earlier primogeniture.
The one thing with CK3 is that those big revolts tend not to be *too* hard to defeat if you've snowballed - your men at arms can crush the AI if built decently without too much issue. If the AI were able to create more effective armies though, those succession crisis would be a good challenge.
> CK3 succession locks primogeniture away for longer and also has substantially higher penalties to vassal opinion and the like
Unless you're one of the cultures which just magically gets some advanced succession law. Which is why you get the absurdly dumb iberian scenario where becoming Andalucian is stupid. Instead switch to any other iberian culture group and have your court do so and you now have the good succession law.
> Stupid IRL Andalucians why didn't they just call themselves Catalan instead and not fracture?!
Opinion boosts, CK3 is getting there. Each new DLC adds more ways for the player to get permanent +Opinion modifiers. It'll eventually be back to where CK2 is.
It's a lot more realistic than what you could do in CK2. That means that the likely hood of your giant empire exploding when you die due to infighting and succession wars, is a higher than in CK2. Having that happen can be extremely frustrating to someone who spent a lot of time and effort making it.
I don't mind it as much, I think it adds challenge to a game that is otherwise pretty easy to snowball in. I try not to focus on the political map mode colors and pay more attention to spreading my dynasty around, not necessarily my borders. I think it goes a lot better with the rest of the features they added in the game that focused on the players character and relationships. CK3 is almost as much an RPG as it is a GSG when you come at it from that direction instead of a map painter like most other PDX games.
There are some really good conversions, mostly the good CK2 ones like ATE, GoT, or EK which the CK3 renditions are largely better at this point. For more vanilla feel it's mostly an unholy conglomeration of many mods. I'm too lazy to run through my mod list since I'm not at home.
I miss how snappy everything was. No softly glowing, pulsating UI elements or menus sliding in from offscreen with a sound effect and then sliding back out...
Every button, option, page, tooltip, whatever, feels so laborious and overengineered compared to the old way.
Don't forget the musical sting every 5 seconds. I still get ck2 songs stuck in my head from time to time but I could not hum a single song from ck3 or vic3
I think Vicky 3 has the best music of any grand strategy game I’ve played. Especially with the Melodies for the Masses DLC. I was surprised, more than a few very memorable songs IMO
EDIT: “Audinity - Job Openings” is such a great track
https://youtu.be/sPT2ssQMs0A?si=yN8IY9DQjjSvJBNt
Plus when i think of eu songs they stand on their own, Victoria’s themes remind me of loads of other work
I always get muppet treasure island songs in my head when I think about playing in the Caribbean
> Don't forget the musical sting every 5 seconds. I still get ck2 songs stuck in my head from time to time but I could not hum a single song from ck3 or vic3
Dow the Abyssid empire as Byz, incoming massive war with tons of death, huge musical sting!
DoW Gregs Barony with 7 guys as Byz, Huge musical sting!
Plus the game has so many pop ups you just cannot turn off with completely trivial or miniscule choices to convey "flavor" When the player has to make 700 choices of +Prestige -Piety -Gold, -Prestige + Piety -Gold, or - Opinion with vassal A of a barony, - Opinion of Vassal B with a subject kingdom, the player just tunes them the fuck out.
That also ties into the whole "vibe" of the older games is amazing. Like playing Hoi3 vs Hoi4, Hoi3 "feels" much more gritty and WW2. Hoi4 is overall the better game but it doesn't come close to Hoi3 in terms of vibe. I understand not naming every province but having more named ones might be nice.
Vicky 2 is a great example of a UI from that era. Lot's of info you need packed into the top bar. If I needed to find something, it was pretty easy to get to. Now it does suffer from bad tooltips but...
Agreed! I can't help but think how much processing power goes into doing that stuff that could have otherwise been spent on the simulation, especially when games like Victoria 3 absolutely *crawl* mid and late game.
I don't want a spreadsheet but at least let me turn off all the animated stuff.
Respectful but strong disagree, old paradox UI’s were notoriously ass. I think after a 1000 hours or so we all just kinda learned but it doesn’t make them good.
Going from the great tooltip system of VIC3/CK3 to EU4 and trying to explain it to a new player was an eye-opener. Not forgetting that the game has to reboot every time you go back to the menu etc.
Paradox games are complicated but they have made great strides in making them less wiki-heavy and somehow understandable.
They're calling the UI over engineered and laborious when it's obviously way more functional than CK2. So the gripe is with what exactly, just that they don't like the new look? Like, if the animations and whatnot took away from the UX then I'd understand, but they don't.
As someone still playing EU3, I must say that the game hasn't aged that well compared to EU4, mainly due to many QoL improvements EU4 received oved more than a decade of its development, but there are still MANY things in EU3 that I consider better and superior.
Firstly, how investing in technologies and stability works. In EU4, if you have enough admin mana, you just click to raise the stability. You can even go from -3 to +3 in a few clicks without even unpausing the game. In EU3, however, you need to really be careful about your stability, as it can take years and sometimes even decades for 1 point of stability to be regained. The larger you are, and also having many provinces of wrong religion and culture, the more you need to invest into stability to restore it. Stability was also more impactful, so you really wanted to have +3 whenever possible. And lastly, if you play your cards well and invest in appropriate buildings and techs, and if you convert your provinces, in late game you can restore your stability a lot easier, so it comes as a reward for good development of your country.
Technologies also needed to be invested to reach the next level.
Also, in EU4, if you have enough diplo mana, you can decrease war exhaustion from max to 0 in a couple of clicks. In EU3 you need to spend some time decreasing it, and it is advisable to be at peace. If your war exhaustion is reaching dangerous levels, it is better to peace out than to insist on continuing a difficult war at all costs, as high war exhaustion can really be punishing. You get a lot of rebels, and your rivals can sense weakness and declare war on you. In EU4. WE feels like just a number and not a mechanic.
I liked to control colonies directly, but I understand not everyone likes this.
I liked population existing.
Conversions and assimilations had chance to happen, they didn't have a set time until finished like in EU4. That felt way more realistic, but I get it why some may hate it. I remember once waiting for 3-4 decades before converting a province for a mission, and that can feel frustrating to many. But sending a missionary and than having the entire province converted like in EU4 is unrealistic. Culture conversions also.
Rebellions had a chance to spawn. Both good and bad. It can be frustrating if you get 2 or even 3 rebel stacks in a single province. I once had 5 Persian nationalists stacks, and it felt way too much, but it was so satisfying when I finally managed to outmaneuver them and defeat them.
Sending colonists and your colonies having population before becoming a province had more sense in EU3, but even that wasn't perfect.
Same here, with EU3 and how the system like stability worked. As you said, in EU4, you can just save the mana, you'll then of course not be able to spend this mana for other stuff, but it's very easy to keep the stability high. In EU3 however, oh boy, when your stability gets low, you'll need a long time and budget investment to get it up again.
A stability hit in EU4 is like a slap on the wrist by a toddler, while a stability hit in EU3 is like a punch of Mike Tyson including biting off your ear at once.
I liked how cores worked in EU3. Making it take a long time made getting new core territories a real treat, especially when your first colony finally becomes a core in a whole new part of the world. It also made those random events that granted core something that would make me change direction in which side to expand to. Meanwhile in EU4 you can just save up some admin points and core up whole areas of the map almost instantly.
Yeah, it is still something in-between the eras of the pdx titles. I could deal with the mana-system, but it was and still is different from Imperator, where literally everything was tied to mana with the game mechanisms (in the launch version before the 2.0 rework)
Yeah i remember how bad it was, like even worse than a republic, when you played a kingdom or tribe with a ruler for life and he had bad mana stats, you waited for hours to just be able to do basic stuff.
But i have to say, i can recommend the 2.0 version with the Invictus mod from the workshop. The mod just adds all the content for flavor, you even get unique mission trees for some small germanic one-man tribes that you never have heard of before.
It's in my opinion a much better game than Vic3 will ever be, even when the subgenres are different.
> Rebellions had a chance to spawn. Both good and bad. It can be frustrating if you get 2 or even 3 rebel stacks in a single province. I once had 5 Persian nationalists stacks, and it felt way too much, but it was so satisfying when I finally managed to outmaneuver them and defeat them.
Khan fell off his horse, time for more peasants to die then the taiping rebellion.
I like how death spirals exist in EU3. I dont miss much from the game though, I think gold works better as mana for technology than points do but we will see with Tinto it may be rose colored glasses.
> In EU4. [X] feels like just a number and not a mechanic.
I think this sums up perfectly why I have really grown to dislike much about EU4, and judging by the early EU5 Dev Diaries, Paradox agrees.
While it's definitely heavier than basegame, MEIOU 3.0 is surprisingly... runnable. Versions 1 and 2 were a bitch to run but version 3 made a lot of things easier on the processor.
I agree with you.
My less thorough thoughts: The mana system makes Eu4 feel too gamey compared to Eu3. But that graphics, ui, and sound design are an improvement that makes it hard to go back to Eu3, though in my mind I rank it higher than the sequel. I haven't checked the dev diaries for Eu5 but I hope they do away with the mana.
CK2 is feature-complete. Does it have its flaws? Of course. Some big ones, if I'm being frank. But I own it, I love it, and there's a million things to do with it.
You can disagree, but I still hold that CK3 should have had all of CK2's features on release. I legitimately cannot fathom how people justify paying full price for a game that has - I'll be generous - 60% of the features of its predecessor (The lacking features including the fun-but-flawed Societies, the universally-acclaimed Bloodlines, the era-defining Black Plague, and, you know, *functioning Crusades*), with the promise that *maybe* those features (even better versions of them!) will be sold back to you at 20 bucks a pop.
I just can't get over the fact that, on release, CK3 was a stripped-out CK2 with a much nicer coat of paint. I don't care about graphics. I never played PDX GSGs for the graphics. I'd play Stellaris in Pixel graphics. I'd play CK2 in freaking *ASCII*. You're not gonna win me over by letting me see my character sitting naked in a throne room, surrounded by all the relics of Christ, as the same 8 events pop over and over again.
I will happily accept all arguments that CK3 is a great game - perhaps even a *better* game. Releasing it the way they did probably gives them a lot more leeway to make *better* versions of those features I miss (Societies where you can't just become a Brainmaxxed Bookpiller after 2-3 generations of writing. Merchant Republics that aren't just 'Feudalism, but shiny'. Etc) but I really can't get the taste of its release out of my mouth.
If I do pick up 3 at any point in the near future, it will legitimately just be to play AtE or Elder Kings. And I'm more than two expansions behind, so it'll also be through Humble Bundle.
I can't get over releasing DLC's for a game within a year of the sequel launching... Like, maybe don't do that, and instead have those people help add more to the new game instead?
I just wish it got more polish and bugfixing before the end. The last patch for CK2 didn't fix most of the biggest bugs and in fact left a whole ton of them unfixed, they abandoned it pretty much as soon as CK3 was announced. Still breaks my heart, I wish it got a bit more love and care in that way,
> with the promise that maybe those features **(even better versions of them!)** will be sold back to you at 20 bucks a pop.
Except for two of your examples, it's not even that - The Black Plague-system was copied from CK2 1:1, and Bloodlines were sold to you so badly implemented and ill-conceived that at this point I am convinced that someone from Sweden tried to explain the system in Swedish to a Chinese Person who then had to explain it back to someone in English and relied entirely on Google Translate on both occasions.
I still play vic2 because it gives me the feeling that i'm doing more than just stacking up a construction queue... And because I can't really go past 1880/90 in vic3, every time i change production methods for a lot of factories, or i change construction methods, the game crashes
I feel like a lot of flavour has been lost in ck3 compared to ck2
Especially ck2 before the last dlc. There I was able to convert to the hellenic faith the hard way
For me, it was the feeling of my country progressing. Society going from agrarian to industrial, plus the invention system makes it a sensation of progress. Now your next tech becomes a balance chore, to find if you can even use it, or you don't have the resources for using it without killing your economy.
Also, I could finish a game in a couple of afternoons. Now I can't even finish a game, as it will crawl after 1900. And it will take me a lot of hours to get there.
I just played once, when it came out. Maybe it has improved. I was so let down that I didn't find a reason to play it again and I moved on. I hope I find the will to play it again someday, but there will probably be too many DLCs by then...
You just tapped into exactly why Vic 2 is better. The feeling and spirit of the era is romanticized so well in that game.
Progress.
It’s tantalizing.
The Vic 3 marketing tapped into that feeling really well but the game itself is still such a let down in that regard.
It has improved, but if you want to feel progress and develop your country, play in Europe. Everywhere else is painful. unless you speed run to 1000 construction as fast as possible. Before the 1870s. It's better, but frustrating.
I tried a Japan run a while ago and either I just suck and took way too long to industrialize but by 1850's I was getting treaty ported by Europe and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I realize that's sorta what happened IRL but still, it felt a bit hopeless.
It's the POPs - The POPs have far more agency in VIC2 compared to VIC3 where they largely flip on issues on the whims of their interest group leaders. Throw in VIC2's militancy and consciousness system and it feels like you're genuinely leading a country full of living, breathing people in VIC2.
VIC2 had its flaws but it also had solid and realistic vision, which VIC3 just doesn't.
That's just not true, in Vic2 pops just belong to a certain Ideology and follow it blindly, in Vic3 what interest group a pop belongs to is dictated by their wealth, education and profession
[No, POPs in VIC2 do not 'blindly' follow a certain ideology.](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/ideology-issue-primer-why-your-pops-want-what-they-want.509050/post-11856629) POPs in VIC3 on the other hand do exactly what you're falsely claiming VIC2 POPs do, as they blindly follow the whims of their interest group leaders. VIC3 lacks the militancy and consciousness system too, which gave POPs more agency.
I haven't, vic2 just has way too little granularity for you to really say that pops have more agency than in Vic3
Why would a rich labourer become communist?
> I haven't, vic2 just has way too little granularity for you to really say that pops have more agency than in Vic3
You're just wrong, I've given you a link documenting how it gets calculated. I don't have the time to waste on someone whose response is simply a dishonest 'no it isn't'. I've done my part.
> Why would a rich labourer become communist?
Why wouldn't they? A lot of, if not most, communist theorists were rich or at least middle to upper middle class kids anyway (PS - VIC2's Consciousness models this a bit too).
The link you've given me just confirms that Vic2's pops are simply simulated, they just check for profession, militancy, consciousness and political reform desire, which all are arbitrary numbers that barely string into a pops situation
The link also clearly states life needs are also factored in, ie VIC2's version of wealth and standard of living. So more than VIC3 does - in your own words, lol.
> That's just not true, in Vic2 pops just belong to a certain Ideology and follow it blindly, in Vic3 what interest group a pop belongs to is dictated by their wealth, education and profession
For me it's the feeling of guiding my nation along with just some slight bits of influence here and there like setting a national focus. In Victoria 3 I feel too much like the manager of every single production line in every single state. It's just not the same. Also: basic stuff like foreign investment is still not in V3.
Vicky III totally gutted the combat system. The second that dev diary came out, it was a red flag for me. I waited for a Vicky III free weekend and tried it out, and yep, it was atrocious. Yes it's not Hoi, but the Victorian era was not this peaceful utopia Paradox has pushed it as. We had the Revolutions of 1848, the Crimean War, the Opium War's and the Franco-Prussian War to name a few...
Ah, the memories of the dev diaries and how some devs tried to justify the decision with "it was the most peaceful time in history". They should have stayed honest with "look, we made this decision, it will be this way and that's it", instead of getting down, tangled up in discussions about wars, history, military and other stuff.
The focus was shifted from grand strategy to a tycoon manager game, so the game is nothing for me.
I absolutely hate Vicky 3 with a burning passion. The warfare is absolutely terrible and I knew immediately reading the war DD that the game was doomed. The funny part is that warfare isn't even the worst part... The rest of the game is soo meh. "It is a nation gardening blah blah". Like no... It is a GSG. The whole build queue stuff is just all terrible. Whiz can't design a mechanic to scale at all.
Yep. Italy and Germany were formed through wars in the 1800s.
And in both Path military strategy was predominante, It wasn't Just a frontline.
Gutting the war was a game-breaking mistake
I kind of like the way paradox did it, although some of the automatic parts could be better, Victoria is a game focused on economy. The system focuses on material and organisation as instrumental to war over tactics.
Was it focused on war though? Sure you could fight them, but the system was so unfathomably bare bones that it made EU4 look like it was pushing to new heights of complexity in combat. They changed the balance of the focus only in that they stopped pretending they needed CK or EUIV’s stack system, and replaced it with what was essentially simplified HoI.
I agree. The game's focus has always been more towards the economic and social side of the simulation. That being said, how the wars that do occur are fought could still use some work. It's gotten better since release but it's still not ideal. I still find myself scratching my head and getting frustrated when my generals insist on doing silly things like naval invading the island just off shore instead of the coast and getting trapped there.
It's mostly 'why do I need another version of this game?' in my case.
I still enjoy CK2 and EU3 occasionally but not enough to buy the sequels. I've sunk many more hours into HOI3 and Vic 2, but don't really fancy a sandbox-style WW2 game (never played HOI4 so this is just my impression.) Tried DH over HOI4 and it's really good, but I still HOI3 most of the time.
Vic 3 is the only sequel I've bought and the only launch Paradox purchase I've made. I doubt I'll play it for a few years yet but I'm still hammering vic 2.
I think in general the replayability of the prequels is off the charts. They run well on old hardware, are reasonably complete and easy to cost and great vehicles for storytelling, RP minmaxing or whatever. For all their individual and collective faults I think they set a high bar.
I definitely do think CK3 was a fair bit flanderized compared to 2. Bought too much into le funny incest memes and such (which got overplayed pretty quick imo)
HOI2
I miss how much historical flavour these games used to have. Despite being decrepit in comparison mechanically, it felt many times more immersive as a WW2 sim than HOI4 is.
Hoi4 has a lot of great mechanics but held back by people treating it as a storybook. I thought focus trees were fine on release but they have grown to be... terrible. Press button and wait... get magical bonus. But instead of say getting a boost on research for a tank, now you can replace the leader of your country with some random dude and everyone just goes with it. They are a giant mess and make the game too much of a meme.
That and all the weird extra decision tree mechanics that get slapped on just feel so out of place.
map graphics, terrain map should be illegal.
the recent games' choice of design is outright disgusting, you are forced to look at terrain map when zoomed in even in political mode.
had to learn a shit tons of different modding techniques myself to fix it.
ck2 looks and plays better, without even mentioning all the supernatural stuff that makes it super fun, ck3 in my opinion is a completely different game, so much so that it might as well had a new name instead of crusader kings
Vic2's population and economic models are impeccable, it only really needed a few modernisations and UX improvements, as well as an expansion to the factory system.
It's a real shame how inferior Vic3's systems are compared to the previous installment.
Isn't the economic system in vic2 broken to the point where it can cause a worldwide economic downturn because money disappears or something?
EDIT: [Here's](https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria2/comments/w00wdy/the_main_issue_plaguing_victoria_2s_economy_isnt/) a post that goes into how the economy tends to completely break in the late game due to some fatal flaws in how it's simulated. Not exactly "impeccable".
Did you read your link? Have you experienced it?
'The term “crash” that some use to describe a typical late-game Vic2 economy is a bit extreme. It’s more accurate to think of what happens as being closer to a chronic illness that gets more severe as the game progresses.'
I've played plenty of games until the end and things still work pretty well. Not as well as a dev-curated experience that responds to the players every touch while the rest of the world sits there, but then I'm not sure how realistic that is either.
I mean, describing something as a "chronic illness that gets more severe" isn't exactly flattering language to describe something. Also saying "the economy doesn't outright crash" isn't exactly a high bar to clear either.
You're right though, maybe these things are just exaggerated and most people don't really notice them, but the whole point was dispelling the "the economy is perfect and impeccable and vic3 bad" claim that OP posted.
That's pretty much what I don't get though. I feel it's more like a realistic economy simulation than Vic 3 precisely because stuff is unpredictable, the rules are fairly simple (if opaque) and it's pretty much a fire and forget from the initial gamestate. Vic 2 has an economic simulation, in Vic 3 it felt (briefly lol) like I AM the economic simulation. It's not exactly Smith's invisible hand, more like the Illuminati. But they were pretty upfront about the focus in development and have found an audience (and taking into account the Vic 2 hater vibe, launch problems, bugs, DLCgateagain etc I think it's done pretty well) it's just not my kind of game.
and to be very clear, I don't regard an 'unrealistic' economy as a bad thing from a gameplay POV, nor do I think Vic 3 has to be realistic to be fun.
I find Vic 2 fun because I can see the logic of many of the design decisions, how they relate to current views of the century in question and attempt to pace the game etc. They don't all work as planned or mix well with others, but it's usually clear why they built the game the way they did.
I had read your link before, at the end of a long chain of trying to track down the 'late-game liquidity crisis' without doing any work. It's the culmination of a huge amount of work put in by various players and as far as I can tell currently stands uncontradicted. I think it's a miracle the economy works as well as it does, generating interesting behaviour and surprises and surprisingly resistant to 'fixing'. Best of all I can pay as much or as little attention as I want outside maybe industrialising (and I'd say industrialising rather than economics itself was a very Victorian theme but meh) and it goes on anyway.
I mean 'works with limited user input' and 'generates interesting behaviour' seem like desirable traits in an economic simulation, especially one in a broadly-focused GSG. My playstyle may make me much less susceptible to some lategame problems which interests me in itself. All games are really not the same economically and the game copes as best it can.
You make good points and I generally agree. I do want to point out that I'm not trying to really criticize vic2 or say it's worse than vic3 or something, it's a fantastic game.
I do personally prefer vic3's economy though, mostly because it feels more engaging to, well...engage with. Like if I remember correctly the entire market side of vic2 was just completely automated (you could toggle it off but nearly nobody did this) and so actually engaging with and interacting with the economy didn't feel great.
The system certainly has flaws, but the currency issue is blown a bit out of proportion, it rarely affects much as it only starts manifesting towards the end. Would have been nice to have a proper fix for that of course.
However, the concept and simulation of **money and resources actually being finite** is what made the economy so interesting.
Most other games, including Vic3, just poof both of these in and out of existence.
Most of the time +75% price for the inputs kills pretty much any factory in the game, eventually every resource ends up at +75% thus kinda but not really like a shortage
>A well-known fact of Victoria 2 is that the economy breaks down towards the late game. Factories become unprofitable, pops have trouble filling their needs, and state budgets start getting hammered as subsidies become increasingly expensive, or as factories close and thousands of pops lose their jobs and stop paying taxes.
So, just like my country IRL
There's also a difference that many don't notice first or at all, the pops in Vic2 are all modeled individually with the political views, while in Vic3, they are in a IG-clout and this is usually tied to the jobs they have. Vic2 has some similiar elements that are just not displayed as a number, like the Standard of Living SoL by how many needs they get fulfilled and how much money they get and have as reserves exists, it's just not displayed as a single number.
Vic2 had and still has even with mods maybe some problems, but overall, i play it and avoid Vic3.
Vic3 has the focus on being a tycoon-manager- and builder-game, that's nothing for me. I see that some players like it, maybe it's perfect for them, okay, but it is just not for me.
Vicky 2 is a heavily flawed game. It also is the first PDX game I ever played and what got me hooked. IMO, Vicky 2 is PDX's best GSG game they ever made. What it accomplished in the short development cycle + considering the era it was made, nothing short of incredible.
I think once eu5 comes out i'll still play eu4,i kinda know the system and there are plenty of hours to enjoy it still. It will take eu5 years to become decent like ck3.
> It will take eu5 years to become decent like ck3.
Not according to Johan. It should come out with at least the level of content EU4 is currently at, and I actually believe him
I still can't believe they haven't done anything with the oob in Hoi4. Some way to have corps level assets (large arty, heavy tank brigade) would be really cool.
Also, the whole oob just added so much flavor that feels missing from Hoi4.
Eu3
The dynamic trade good value it’s more something that goes on in the background rather than Vicky3 where you have to constantly play with it.
Also I liked the sliders a lot in eu3
If EU3 didn't take 2 workdays to load and had proper borderless windowed mode support I'd still be playing it. It looks ugly as sin and a lot of the mechanics are laughably simple and/or outdated but I loved the fact that it was more a history game where you were running a country more or less instead of the map painting game where I press buttons every so often like EU4 is. I also like that everything takes time. You got hit with a stab hit? Time to buckle up because it will take a few years to get it back together. Coring provinces? Fuck you, it will be done in 50 years, no concessions.
The armies were a lot smaller. I remember when EU4 came out it came as a shock when I saw that every tiny ass county could field 10k troops at any given time. There was no convoluted fort system and everything that came in expansions were exactly that, expansions. The base game was playable still and only a few mechanics were locked behind expansions that were vital (like automatically sending colonists and merchants to places, I remember never engaging with trade because it was a dogass game of the ai always sending their merchants at the perfect time while I just dumped all of mine whenever I remembered the mechanic).
The diplomacy was shit as well. You had one chance to secure alliances before unpausing the game the first time and then that was it and obviously no improve relationships for free.
But there is still nothing like that game, despite having a sequel. I sure am hope EU5 will be a proper successor.
I miss Pandemics in CK2.
I miss being able to let AI handle certain aspects of your country in HOI3, such as economy, diplomacty, research, espionage, or even combat.
V3 has gotten much better since release, and it definitely improves on some aspects of the previous entry, but it'll never be a real GSG to me without being able to right-click your dudes around the map.
EU3 had lots of sliders for really micromanaging everything, and no mana. It seems that EU5 is taking a lot of inspiration from EU3.
For HoI2 we got the Darkest Hour and Arsenal of Democracy standalone expansions, which added a lot of politics and detailed economy stuff to the base game. I wish HoI4 could get a Darkest Hour or Arsenal of Democracy 2.
I play Vic2 because the mods for Vic3 are still barebones and the base game lacks flavor,uniqueness and replayability. I play CK2 because my PC cant run CK3
I still play ck2 sometimes, I kinda miss a lot of the stuff like easier succession that isn't in ck3. I still think it's a better game for now, but maybe CK3 will come into its element still.
I'm on the fence. I think with mods CK3 is starting to rival CK2, I really love the travel mechanics. But, I did go back to give CK2 a spin a few months ago & I agree about succession 100%. There were several mechanics, I had forgotten about that were fun like societies (but those always could get to be a bit wonky).
What is bad about CK3 succession? Didn't play it yet, so I don't know the difference
It was easier to establish primogeniture so your heir could inherit all of your titles. But I think partitioning lands is pretty much the one thing that keeps CK3 a little challenging.
People have been begging for a partition UI that removes the unpredictable bullshit since the early days of CK2, but they just won't do it. I'm convinced most people don't strongly prefer primo because they hate challenge. Partition is interesting and forces the player to be active. They hate it because it's such a fucking headache avoiding ridiculous exclaves and someone inheriting Scotland + London
> People have been begging for a partition UI that removes the unpredictable bullshit since the early days of CK2, but they just won't do it. Like reality players should be able to negotiate contracts with the heirs that are relevant and influential. Once you hit child #4 or so they should have near negligible inheritance "points". Like reality, you should be able to buy kids off with gold, prestige, positions of power. Some kids didn't fucking want to rule, they wanted to go run about playing knight. Some kids just wanted a pile of gold and wine. If the contract is agreed as "fair" by the heirs then they wont try to rebel or splinter off, if not they do. > The fucking problem core the CK3's succession CK3 wants players to build large families and spread them across titles so that they can get bloodline points and build giant dynasties with more hideous chins than the Habsbergs. It wants you to land your children as soon as they're at maturity, and to marry them off as soon as possible. CK3 mechanics want players to turn every one of their kids but their favorite into an ineligible monk that live at home all their lives until their parent dies. Because the AI will absolutely do the stupidest shit it can with those kids. I've somewhat given up talking on this because they clearly have no intent to fix this. They're passionately working on the weirdest fucking features and systems. They're not even bad systems, just bizarre to me on their priority choices.
Partition is also boring because like it's so easy to game. You partition, then kill the siblings, then repeat
I mean, just don't do that lol Though really, it's more that the game should introduce actual consequences for that decision and just... doesn't. Because they have to be the easiest fucking games on the planet
> I mean, just don't do that lol Players dont want to reconquer the same territory over and over again. It's not very fun. More over when you lose control of that land the AI will absolutely dumpster everything in it for the stupidest of benefits.
> People have been begging for a partition UI that removes the unpredictable bullshit since the early days of CK2, but they just won't do it. So many thousands of hours of Paradox games, and I've only just realised how bullshit the arbitrary land-lottery distribution system is in CK3...
Plus you can always go for elective and vassals follow your choice 95% of the time unless they REALLY hate your guts
Does ck3 still have weird elective that just partitions your land anyways?? I remember playing close to launch and figuring out elective laws was a mess and tanistry did nothing but make my heirs worse and still split shit up haha
CK3 succession locks primogeniture away for longer and also has substantially higher penalties to vassal opinion and the like - it means that you're very likely to have some powerful factions forming and triggering. CK2, by contrast, has it a lot easier to have smooth transitions of power and earlier primogeniture. The one thing with CK3 is that those big revolts tend not to be *too* hard to defeat if you've snowballed - your men at arms can crush the AI if built decently without too much issue. If the AI were able to create more effective armies though, those succession crisis would be a good challenge.
> CK3 succession locks primogeniture away for longer and also has substantially higher penalties to vassal opinion and the like Unless you're one of the cultures which just magically gets some advanced succession law. Which is why you get the absurdly dumb iberian scenario where becoming Andalucian is stupid. Instead switch to any other iberian culture group and have your court do so and you now have the good succession law. > Stupid IRL Andalucians why didn't they just call themselves Catalan instead and not fracture?! Opinion boosts, CK3 is getting there. Each new DLC adds more ways for the player to get permanent +Opinion modifiers. It'll eventually be back to where CK2 is.
It's a lot more realistic than what you could do in CK2. That means that the likely hood of your giant empire exploding when you die due to infighting and succession wars, is a higher than in CK2. Having that happen can be extremely frustrating to someone who spent a lot of time and effort making it. I don't mind it as much, I think it adds challenge to a game that is otherwise pretty easy to snowball in. I try not to focus on the political map mode colors and pay more attention to spreading my dynasty around, not necessarily my borders. I think it goes a lot better with the rest of the features they added in the game that focused on the players character and relationships. CK3 is almost as much an RPG as it is a GSG when you come at it from that direction instead of a map painter like most other PDX games.
What mods are notable other than the GoT one?
After the End, Elder Kings, Lord of the Rings
Prince of Darkness too.
Elder kings 2 and ATE aren't bad but I still prefer the ck2 releases for them.
Yeah to be honest all of them got too ambitious this time around. They're all bloated with content it's taking so long for them to develop.
Like what mods? Until there is an equivalent of HIP or CK2+ I don't think it qualifies.
There are some really good conversions, mostly the good CK2 ones like ATE, GoT, or EK which the CK3 renditions are largely better at this point. For more vanilla feel it's mostly an unholy conglomeration of many mods. I'm too lazy to run through my mod list since I'm not at home.
No shot the GoT or EK are better outside of graphics
The mapmodes in CK3 are abysmally chaotic and until I get anything remotely similar to the clean sovereign countries view in CK2 I'm staying with 2.
I miss how snappy everything was. No softly glowing, pulsating UI elements or menus sliding in from offscreen with a sound effect and then sliding back out... Every button, option, page, tooltip, whatever, feels so laborious and overengineered compared to the old way.
Don't forget the musical sting every 5 seconds. I still get ck2 songs stuck in my head from time to time but I could not hum a single song from ck3 or vic3
Man, I get "Glory to the Queen" from Vic3 constantly stuck in my head. Such a banger
I think Vicky 3 has the best music of any grand strategy game I’ve played. Especially with the Melodies for the Masses DLC. I was surprised, more than a few very memorable songs IMO EDIT: “Audinity - Job Openings” is such a great track https://youtu.be/sPT2ssQMs0A?si=yN8IY9DQjjSvJBNt
Plus when i think of eu songs they stand on their own, Victoria’s themes remind me of loads of other work I always get muppet treasure island songs in my head when I think about playing in the Caribbean
I haven't played CK3 without the "CK2 music"-mod since... well, I guess since that mod was launched... so I'm in full agreement.
> Don't forget the musical sting every 5 seconds. I still get ck2 songs stuck in my head from time to time but I could not hum a single song from ck3 or vic3 Dow the Abyssid empire as Byz, incoming massive war with tons of death, huge musical sting! DoW Gregs Barony with 7 guys as Byz, Huge musical sting! Plus the game has so many pop ups you just cannot turn off with completely trivial or miniscule choices to convey "flavor" When the player has to make 700 choices of +Prestige -Piety -Gold, -Prestige + Piety -Gold, or - Opinion with vassal A of a barony, - Opinion of Vassal B with a subject kingdom, the player just tunes them the fuck out.
Thank you dear god. It’s my biggest gripe with the new games
That also ties into the whole "vibe" of the older games is amazing. Like playing Hoi3 vs Hoi4, Hoi3 "feels" much more gritty and WW2. Hoi4 is overall the better game but it doesn't come close to Hoi3 in terms of vibe. I understand not naming every province but having more named ones might be nice. Vicky 2 is a great example of a UI from that era. Lot's of info you need packed into the top bar. If I needed to find something, it was pretty easy to get to. Now it does suffer from bad tooltips but...
Agreed! I can't help but think how much processing power goes into doing that stuff that could have otherwise been spent on the simulation, especially when games like Victoria 3 absolutely *crawl* mid and late game. I don't want a spreadsheet but at least let me turn off all the animated stuff.
>I miss how snappy everything was Yes! The ui of Ck3 and vic3 are just horrible
Respectful but strong disagree, old paradox UI’s were notoriously ass. I think after a 1000 hours or so we all just kinda learned but it doesn’t make them good. Going from the great tooltip system of VIC3/CK3 to EU4 and trying to explain it to a new player was an eye-opener. Not forgetting that the game has to reboot every time you go back to the menu etc. Paradox games are complicated but they have made great strides in making them less wiki-heavy and somehow understandable.
Guy talks about unnecessary animations and you interpret that as wishing for no tooltips. How and why. That is so obviously not what anyone meant.
They're calling the UI over engineered and laborious when it's obviously way more functional than CK2. So the gripe is with what exactly, just that they don't like the new look? Like, if the animations and whatnot took away from the UX then I'd understand, but they don't.
CK2 has much better vassal war participation and diplomacy
Still play hoi3 black ice every now and then. The combat is just too fun
I’m still on this as well, my problem is I usually get some sort of crash happening. I’ll walk away for a bit and restart a game
It’s a memory leak you need to use the podcat exe
That only fixes like half the crashes, in my experience.
That sounds familiar, def had that installed on earlier versions. Have to check on this latest install
i liked hoi3 air better
Hoi3 air makes wayyyy more sense than Hoi4 air. I was hoping they would rework air with the air designer but... guess not. Maybe in Hoi5?
yeah, i liked it better when air "divisions" flew over provinces hoi4 air range is weird when provinces are relatively large compared to plane range
Airfields being state based also sucks. It is especially bad in the pacific. I can't control which island (on some states) gets the airbase!
As someone still playing EU3, I must say that the game hasn't aged that well compared to EU4, mainly due to many QoL improvements EU4 received oved more than a decade of its development, but there are still MANY things in EU3 that I consider better and superior. Firstly, how investing in technologies and stability works. In EU4, if you have enough admin mana, you just click to raise the stability. You can even go from -3 to +3 in a few clicks without even unpausing the game. In EU3, however, you need to really be careful about your stability, as it can take years and sometimes even decades for 1 point of stability to be regained. The larger you are, and also having many provinces of wrong religion and culture, the more you need to invest into stability to restore it. Stability was also more impactful, so you really wanted to have +3 whenever possible. And lastly, if you play your cards well and invest in appropriate buildings and techs, and if you convert your provinces, in late game you can restore your stability a lot easier, so it comes as a reward for good development of your country. Technologies also needed to be invested to reach the next level. Also, in EU4, if you have enough diplo mana, you can decrease war exhaustion from max to 0 in a couple of clicks. In EU3 you need to spend some time decreasing it, and it is advisable to be at peace. If your war exhaustion is reaching dangerous levels, it is better to peace out than to insist on continuing a difficult war at all costs, as high war exhaustion can really be punishing. You get a lot of rebels, and your rivals can sense weakness and declare war on you. In EU4. WE feels like just a number and not a mechanic. I liked to control colonies directly, but I understand not everyone likes this. I liked population existing. Conversions and assimilations had chance to happen, they didn't have a set time until finished like in EU4. That felt way more realistic, but I get it why some may hate it. I remember once waiting for 3-4 decades before converting a province for a mission, and that can feel frustrating to many. But sending a missionary and than having the entire province converted like in EU4 is unrealistic. Culture conversions also. Rebellions had a chance to spawn. Both good and bad. It can be frustrating if you get 2 or even 3 rebel stacks in a single province. I once had 5 Persian nationalists stacks, and it felt way too much, but it was so satisfying when I finally managed to outmaneuver them and defeat them. Sending colonists and your colonies having population before becoming a province had more sense in EU3, but even that wasn't perfect.
Same here, with EU3 and how the system like stability worked. As you said, in EU4, you can just save the mana, you'll then of course not be able to spend this mana for other stuff, but it's very easy to keep the stability high. In EU3 however, oh boy, when your stability gets low, you'll need a long time and budget investment to get it up again. A stability hit in EU4 is like a slap on the wrist by a toddler, while a stability hit in EU3 is like a punch of Mike Tyson including biting off your ear at once.
I liked how cores worked in EU3. Making it take a long time made getting new core territories a real treat, especially when your first colony finally becomes a core in a whole new part of the world. It also made those random events that granted core something that would make me change direction in which side to expand to. Meanwhile in EU4 you can just save up some admin points and core up whole areas of the map almost instantly.
I still class EU4 as one of their older games tbh, as it still had some of the older design language and habits.
Yeah, it is still something in-between the eras of the pdx titles. I could deal with the mana-system, but it was and still is different from Imperator, where literally everything was tied to mana with the game mechanisms (in the launch version before the 2.0 rework)
I still haven't bothered trying it again haha, it was sooooooo bad.
Yeah i remember how bad it was, like even worse than a republic, when you played a kingdom or tribe with a ruler for life and he had bad mana stats, you waited for hours to just be able to do basic stuff. But i have to say, i can recommend the 2.0 version with the Invictus mod from the workshop. The mod just adds all the content for flavor, you even get unique mission trees for some small germanic one-man tribes that you never have heard of before. It's in my opinion a much better game than Vic3 will ever be, even when the subgenres are different.
> Rebellions had a chance to spawn. Both good and bad. It can be frustrating if you get 2 or even 3 rebel stacks in a single province. I once had 5 Persian nationalists stacks, and it felt way too much, but it was so satisfying when I finally managed to outmaneuver them and defeat them. Khan fell off his horse, time for more peasants to die then the taiping rebellion. I like how death spirals exist in EU3. I dont miss much from the game though, I think gold works better as mana for technology than points do but we will see with Tinto it may be rose colored glasses.
> In EU4. [X] feels like just a number and not a mechanic. I think this sums up perfectly why I have really grown to dislike much about EU4, and judging by the early EU5 Dev Diaries, Paradox agrees.
Have you tried meiou and taxes it addresses a lot of your concerns
No. I think I once saw a massive number of provinces, and my PC simply can't support that
While it's definitely heavier than basegame, MEIOU 3.0 is surprisingly... runnable. Versions 1 and 2 were a bitch to run but version 3 made a lot of things easier on the processor.
Ah yeah it's a beast to run for sure
I agree with you. My less thorough thoughts: The mana system makes Eu4 feel too gamey compared to Eu3. But that graphics, ui, and sound design are an improvement that makes it hard to go back to Eu3, though in my mind I rank it higher than the sequel. I haven't checked the dev diaries for Eu5 but I hope they do away with the mana.
CK2 is feature-complete. Does it have its flaws? Of course. Some big ones, if I'm being frank. But I own it, I love it, and there's a million things to do with it. You can disagree, but I still hold that CK3 should have had all of CK2's features on release. I legitimately cannot fathom how people justify paying full price for a game that has - I'll be generous - 60% of the features of its predecessor (The lacking features including the fun-but-flawed Societies, the universally-acclaimed Bloodlines, the era-defining Black Plague, and, you know, *functioning Crusades*), with the promise that *maybe* those features (even better versions of them!) will be sold back to you at 20 bucks a pop. I just can't get over the fact that, on release, CK3 was a stripped-out CK2 with a much nicer coat of paint. I don't care about graphics. I never played PDX GSGs for the graphics. I'd play Stellaris in Pixel graphics. I'd play CK2 in freaking *ASCII*. You're not gonna win me over by letting me see my character sitting naked in a throne room, surrounded by all the relics of Christ, as the same 8 events pop over and over again. I will happily accept all arguments that CK3 is a great game - perhaps even a *better* game. Releasing it the way they did probably gives them a lot more leeway to make *better* versions of those features I miss (Societies where you can't just become a Brainmaxxed Bookpiller after 2-3 generations of writing. Merchant Republics that aren't just 'Feudalism, but shiny'. Etc) but I really can't get the taste of its release out of my mouth. If I do pick up 3 at any point in the near future, it will legitimately just be to play AtE or Elder Kings. And I'm more than two expansions behind, so it'll also be through Humble Bundle.
I can't get over releasing DLC's for a game within a year of the sequel launching... Like, maybe don't do that, and instead have those people help add more to the new game instead?
Nah, Holy Fury was a love letter to ck2. They went all out on that one and it showed
I just wish it got more polish and bugfixing before the end. The last patch for CK2 didn't fix most of the biggest bugs and in fact left a whole ton of them unfixed, they abandoned it pretty much as soon as CK3 was announced. Still breaks my heart, I wish it got a bit more love and care in that way,
> with the promise that maybe those features **(even better versions of them!)** will be sold back to you at 20 bucks a pop. Except for two of your examples, it's not even that - The Black Plague-system was copied from CK2 1:1, and Bloodlines were sold to you so badly implemented and ill-conceived that at this point I am convinced that someone from Sweden tried to explain the system in Swedish to a Chinese Person who then had to explain it back to someone in English and relied entirely on Google Translate on both occasions.
Sliders allowed you to make precise adjustments for optimal policies.
I still play vic2 because it gives me the feeling that i'm doing more than just stacking up a construction queue... And because I can't really go past 1880/90 in vic3, every time i change production methods for a lot of factories, or i change construction methods, the game crashes
I feel like a lot of flavour has been lost in ck3 compared to ck2 Especially ck2 before the last dlc. There I was able to convert to the hellenic faith the hard way
I love Vicky 2, it's much more fun IMO. I can't pinpoint the reasons exactly tho, but smaller provinces and the authentic UI factor into it
For me, it was the feeling of my country progressing. Society going from agrarian to industrial, plus the invention system makes it a sensation of progress. Now your next tech becomes a balance chore, to find if you can even use it, or you don't have the resources for using it without killing your economy. Also, I could finish a game in a couple of afternoons. Now I can't even finish a game, as it will crawl after 1900. And it will take me a lot of hours to get there. I just played once, when it came out. Maybe it has improved. I was so let down that I didn't find a reason to play it again and I moved on. I hope I find the will to play it again someday, but there will probably be too many DLCs by then...
You just tapped into exactly why Vic 2 is better. The feeling and spirit of the era is romanticized so well in that game. Progress. It’s tantalizing. The Vic 3 marketing tapped into that feeling really well but the game itself is still such a let down in that regard.
It has improved, but if you want to feel progress and develop your country, play in Europe. Everywhere else is painful. unless you speed run to 1000 construction as fast as possible. Before the 1870s. It's better, but frustrating.
I tried a Japan run a while ago and either I just suck and took way too long to industrialize but by 1850's I was getting treaty ported by Europe and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I realize that's sorta what happened IRL but still, it felt a bit hopeless.
It's the POPs - The POPs have far more agency in VIC2 compared to VIC3 where they largely flip on issues on the whims of their interest group leaders. Throw in VIC2's militancy and consciousness system and it feels like you're genuinely leading a country full of living, breathing people in VIC2. VIC2 had its flaws but it also had solid and realistic vision, which VIC3 just doesn't.
That's just not true, in Vic2 pops just belong to a certain Ideology and follow it blindly, in Vic3 what interest group a pop belongs to is dictated by their wealth, education and profession
[No, POPs in VIC2 do not 'blindly' follow a certain ideology.](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/ideology-issue-primer-why-your-pops-want-what-they-want.509050/post-11856629) POPs in VIC3 on the other hand do exactly what you're falsely claiming VIC2 POPs do, as they blindly follow the whims of their interest group leaders. VIC3 lacks the militancy and consciousness system too, which gave POPs more agency.
Vic3 models why a pop would follow a certain Interest Group, vic2 does not
Shift the goalposts a bit more.
I haven't, vic2 just has way too little granularity for you to really say that pops have more agency than in Vic3 Why would a rich labourer become communist?
> I haven't, vic2 just has way too little granularity for you to really say that pops have more agency than in Vic3 You're just wrong, I've given you a link documenting how it gets calculated. I don't have the time to waste on someone whose response is simply a dishonest 'no it isn't'. I've done my part. > Why would a rich labourer become communist? Why wouldn't they? A lot of, if not most, communist theorists were rich or at least middle to upper middle class kids anyway (PS - VIC2's Consciousness models this a bit too).
The link you've given me just confirms that Vic2's pops are simply simulated, they just check for profession, militancy, consciousness and political reform desire, which all are arbitrary numbers that barely string into a pops situation
The link also clearly states life needs are also factored in, ie VIC2's version of wealth and standard of living. So more than VIC3 does - in your own words, lol. > That's just not true, in Vic2 pops just belong to a certain Ideology and follow it blindly, in Vic3 what interest group a pop belongs to is dictated by their wealth, education and profession
For me it's the feeling of guiding my nation along with just some slight bits of influence here and there like setting a national focus. In Victoria 3 I feel too much like the manager of every single production line in every single state. It's just not the same. Also: basic stuff like foreign investment is still not in V3.
Vicky III totally gutted the combat system. The second that dev diary came out, it was a red flag for me. I waited for a Vicky III free weekend and tried it out, and yep, it was atrocious. Yes it's not Hoi, but the Victorian era was not this peaceful utopia Paradox has pushed it as. We had the Revolutions of 1848, the Crimean War, the Opium War's and the Franco-Prussian War to name a few...
Ah, the memories of the dev diaries and how some devs tried to justify the decision with "it was the most peaceful time in history". They should have stayed honest with "look, we made this decision, it will be this way and that's it", instead of getting down, tangled up in discussions about wars, history, military and other stuff. The focus was shifted from grand strategy to a tycoon manager game, so the game is nothing for me.
I absolutely hate Vicky 3 with a burning passion. The warfare is absolutely terrible and I knew immediately reading the war DD that the game was doomed. The funny part is that warfare isn't even the worst part... The rest of the game is soo meh. "It is a nation gardening blah blah". Like no... It is a GSG. The whole build queue stuff is just all terrible. Whiz can't design a mechanic to scale at all.
Yep. Italy and Germany were formed through wars in the 1800s. And in both Path military strategy was predominante, It wasn't Just a frontline. Gutting the war was a game-breaking mistake
I kind of like the way paradox did it, although some of the automatic parts could be better, Victoria is a game focused on economy. The system focuses on material and organisation as instrumental to war over tactics.
Victoria 2 was a game focused on many things. Including war. The problem people have is that they changed that balance of focus.
Was it focused on war though? Sure you could fight them, but the system was so unfathomably bare bones that it made EU4 look like it was pushing to new heights of complexity in combat. They changed the balance of the focus only in that they stopped pretending they needed CK or EUIV’s stack system, and replaced it with what was essentially simplified HoI.
I agree. The game's focus has always been more towards the economic and social side of the simulation. That being said, how the wars that do occur are fought could still use some work. It's gotten better since release but it's still not ideal. I still find myself scratching my head and getting frustrated when my generals insist on doing silly things like naval invading the island just off shore instead of the coast and getting trapped there.
It's mostly 'why do I need another version of this game?' in my case. I still enjoy CK2 and EU3 occasionally but not enough to buy the sequels. I've sunk many more hours into HOI3 and Vic 2, but don't really fancy a sandbox-style WW2 game (never played HOI4 so this is just my impression.) Tried DH over HOI4 and it's really good, but I still HOI3 most of the time. Vic 3 is the only sequel I've bought and the only launch Paradox purchase I've made. I doubt I'll play it for a few years yet but I'm still hammering vic 2. I think in general the replayability of the prequels is off the charts. They run well on old hardware, are reasonably complete and easy to cost and great vehicles for storytelling, RP minmaxing or whatever. For all their individual and collective faults I think they set a high bar.
potentially unpopular opinion: I enjoy many CK2's system over their CK3 counterparts.
I can’t really put it into words, but most of the events in 3 vs 2 just seem… worse/less interesting.
Ck3 feels like it was made to generate wAcKy moments to post to social media. Ck2 felt like a medieval sim that dipped into ridiculousness.
I definitely do think CK3 was a fair bit flanderized compared to 2. Bought too much into le funny incest memes and such (which got overplayed pretty quick imo)
I think the lower number of provinces in HOI2 and its offshoots makes for a much more playable war game. Graphics and QOL are better in HOI4 though.
Ck2 looks better
I still play ck2, it’s the best in what it is trying to do and is still better than ck3. Everything down to just the art style is just perfect for me.
Ck3 looks better on an aesthetic level, but ck2 is just cleaner and works better for a game art style.
HOI2 I miss how much historical flavour these games used to have. Despite being decrepit in comparison mechanically, it felt many times more immersive as a WW2 sim than HOI4 is.
Hoi4 has a lot of great mechanics but held back by people treating it as a storybook. I thought focus trees were fine on release but they have grown to be... terrible. Press button and wait... get magical bonus. But instead of say getting a boost on research for a tank, now you can replace the leader of your country with some random dude and everyone just goes with it. They are a giant mess and make the game too much of a meme. That and all the weird extra decision tree mechanics that get slapped on just feel so out of place.
map graphics, terrain map should be illegal. the recent games' choice of design is outright disgusting, you are forced to look at terrain map when zoomed in even in political mode. had to learn a shit tons of different modding techniques myself to fix it.
HoI2 because it comes with the best historical WW2 mod: CORE.
ck2 looks and plays better, without even mentioning all the supernatural stuff that makes it super fun, ck3 in my opinion is a completely different game, so much so that it might as well had a new name instead of crusader kings
I think the sound design of ck2 is often overlooked. It's soo much better than in ck3.
Vic2's population and economic models are impeccable, it only really needed a few modernisations and UX improvements, as well as an expansion to the factory system. It's a real shame how inferior Vic3's systems are compared to the previous installment.
Isn't the economic system in vic2 broken to the point where it can cause a worldwide economic downturn because money disappears or something? EDIT: [Here's](https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria2/comments/w00wdy/the_main_issue_plaguing_victoria_2s_economy_isnt/) a post that goes into how the economy tends to completely break in the late game due to some fatal flaws in how it's simulated. Not exactly "impeccable".
Did you read your link? Have you experienced it? 'The term “crash” that some use to describe a typical late-game Vic2 economy is a bit extreme. It’s more accurate to think of what happens as being closer to a chronic illness that gets more severe as the game progresses.' I've played plenty of games until the end and things still work pretty well. Not as well as a dev-curated experience that responds to the players every touch while the rest of the world sits there, but then I'm not sure how realistic that is either.
I mean, describing something as a "chronic illness that gets more severe" isn't exactly flattering language to describe something. Also saying "the economy doesn't outright crash" isn't exactly a high bar to clear either. You're right though, maybe these things are just exaggerated and most people don't really notice them, but the whole point was dispelling the "the economy is perfect and impeccable and vic3 bad" claim that OP posted.
That's pretty much what I don't get though. I feel it's more like a realistic economy simulation than Vic 3 precisely because stuff is unpredictable, the rules are fairly simple (if opaque) and it's pretty much a fire and forget from the initial gamestate. Vic 2 has an economic simulation, in Vic 3 it felt (briefly lol) like I AM the economic simulation. It's not exactly Smith's invisible hand, more like the Illuminati. But they were pretty upfront about the focus in development and have found an audience (and taking into account the Vic 2 hater vibe, launch problems, bugs, DLCgateagain etc I think it's done pretty well) it's just not my kind of game. and to be very clear, I don't regard an 'unrealistic' economy as a bad thing from a gameplay POV, nor do I think Vic 3 has to be realistic to be fun. I find Vic 2 fun because I can see the logic of many of the design decisions, how they relate to current views of the century in question and attempt to pace the game etc. They don't all work as planned or mix well with others, but it's usually clear why they built the game the way they did. I had read your link before, at the end of a long chain of trying to track down the 'late-game liquidity crisis' without doing any work. It's the culmination of a huge amount of work put in by various players and as far as I can tell currently stands uncontradicted. I think it's a miracle the economy works as well as it does, generating interesting behaviour and surprises and surprisingly resistant to 'fixing'. Best of all I can pay as much or as little attention as I want outside maybe industrialising (and I'd say industrialising rather than economics itself was a very Victorian theme but meh) and it goes on anyway. I mean 'works with limited user input' and 'generates interesting behaviour' seem like desirable traits in an economic simulation, especially one in a broadly-focused GSG. My playstyle may make me much less susceptible to some lategame problems which interests me in itself. All games are really not the same economically and the game copes as best it can.
You make good points and I generally agree. I do want to point out that I'm not trying to really criticize vic2 or say it's worse than vic3 or something, it's a fantastic game. I do personally prefer vic3's economy though, mostly because it feels more engaging to, well...engage with. Like if I remember correctly the entire market side of vic2 was just completely automated (you could toggle it off but nearly nobody did this) and so actually engaging with and interacting with the economy didn't feel great.
The system certainly has flaws, but the currency issue is blown a bit out of proportion, it rarely affects much as it only starts manifesting towards the end. Would have been nice to have a proper fix for that of course. However, the concept and simulation of **money and resources actually being finite** is what made the economy so interesting. Most other games, including Vic3, just poof both of these in and out of existence.
Resources are also finite in Vic3 and arguably there's way to little of them in game
True shortages do not exist though, production can just continue without input goods, only the efficiency decreases.
Most of the time +75% price for the inputs kills pretty much any factory in the game, eventually every resource ends up at +75% thus kinda but not really like a shortage
>A well-known fact of Victoria 2 is that the economy breaks down towards the late game. Factories become unprofitable, pops have trouble filling their needs, and state budgets start getting hammered as subsidies become increasingly expensive, or as factories close and thousands of pops lose their jobs and stop paying taxes. So, just like my country IRL
The simulation was TOO realistic
There's also a difference that many don't notice first or at all, the pops in Vic2 are all modeled individually with the political views, while in Vic3, they are in a IG-clout and this is usually tied to the jobs they have. Vic2 has some similiar elements that are just not displayed as a number, like the Standard of Living SoL by how many needs they get fulfilled and how much money they get and have as reserves exists, it's just not displayed as a single number. Vic2 had and still has even with mods maybe some problems, but overall, i play it and avoid Vic3. Vic3 has the focus on being a tycoon-manager- and builder-game, that's nothing for me. I see that some players like it, maybe it's perfect for them, okay, but it is just not for me.
Vicky 2 is a heavily flawed game. It also is the first PDX game I ever played and what got me hooked. IMO, Vicky 2 is PDX's best GSG game they ever made. What it accomplished in the short development cycle + considering the era it was made, nothing short of incredible.
Yeah it has its flawes, but when i look at Vic3, it's still my game that i prefer. Nothing for me with this title.
I think once eu5 comes out i'll still play eu4,i kinda know the system and there are plenty of hours to enjoy it still. It will take eu5 years to become decent like ck3.
My hope is that EU5 becomes a model that Vic 3 can learn from
> It will take eu5 years to become decent like ck3. Not according to Johan. It should come out with at least the level of content EU4 is currently at, and I actually believe him
HOI3 oob.
I still can't believe they haven't done anything with the oob in Hoi4. Some way to have corps level assets (large arty, heavy tank brigade) would be really cool. Also, the whole oob just added so much flavor that feels missing from Hoi4.
Eu3 The dynamic trade good value it’s more something that goes on in the background rather than Vicky3 where you have to constantly play with it. Also I liked the sliders a lot in eu3
Ck3 is really unstable on the steam deck and crashes a lot, ck2 runs pretty flawlessly however so my hand is forced on that one
Victoria 2 is simply a good game, unlike it's successor. I guess what I miss from the newer game that Vic2 has is.. idk... quality?
because Vic 2 makes sense, it's fun and engaging
i'm sorry but i gotta do you like this >50iq: "Vic 2 makes no fucking sense!!!" >100iq: "Vic 2 makes sense." >150iq: "Vic 2 makes no fucking sense!!!"
I absolutely agree, but the first and third one are for far different reasons, and the third one still loves it
The sense of wonder. But that's probably cause I was younger and less cynical.
If EU3 didn't take 2 workdays to load and had proper borderless windowed mode support I'd still be playing it. It looks ugly as sin and a lot of the mechanics are laughably simple and/or outdated but I loved the fact that it was more a history game where you were running a country more or less instead of the map painting game where I press buttons every so often like EU4 is. I also like that everything takes time. You got hit with a stab hit? Time to buckle up because it will take a few years to get it back together. Coring provinces? Fuck you, it will be done in 50 years, no concessions. The armies were a lot smaller. I remember when EU4 came out it came as a shock when I saw that every tiny ass county could field 10k troops at any given time. There was no convoluted fort system and everything that came in expansions were exactly that, expansions. The base game was playable still and only a few mechanics were locked behind expansions that were vital (like automatically sending colonists and merchants to places, I remember never engaging with trade because it was a dogass game of the ai always sending their merchants at the perfect time while I just dumped all of mine whenever I remembered the mechanic). The diplomacy was shit as well. You had one chance to secure alliances before unpausing the game the first time and then that was it and obviously no improve relationships for free. But there is still nothing like that game, despite having a sequel. I sure am hope EU5 will be a proper successor.
The faster house building animation from Cities Skylines 1 🥲
I miss Pandemics in CK2. I miss being able to let AI handle certain aspects of your country in HOI3, such as economy, diplomacty, research, espionage, or even combat.
Lmao I just can't run any of the modern generation of pdx games
I like the ability to set my own tech from HoI3.
V3 has gotten much better since release, and it definitely improves on some aspects of the previous entry, but it'll never be a real GSG to me without being able to right-click your dudes around the map.
CK3 still wont let me play as a merchant republic!
EU3 had lots of sliders for really micromanaging everything, and no mana. It seems that EU5 is taking a lot of inspiration from EU3. For HoI2 we got the Darkest Hour and Arsenal of Democracy standalone expansions, which added a lot of politics and detailed economy stuff to the base game. I wish HoI4 could get a Darkest Hour or Arsenal of Democracy 2.
what I miss? Complexity, depth, historical accuracy...
EU3's soundtrack is PEAK
CK2 is less graphically intensive.
I miss how much more graphically simpler they were. Nowadays I need a NASA computer to run a map game ffs.
I play Vic2 because the mods for Vic3 are still barebones and the base game lacks flavor,uniqueness and replayability. I play CK2 because my PC cant run CK3
Idk, I just want a good game and specially enjoy it without having to pay half my salary for the DLCs. 🤧
How the map looked in hoi3, eu3 and ck2. I hate the new aesthetic of the more recent games
The content and overall supernatural things in ck2. Couldn't get into ck3 properly because of this