The Victoria Megathread

Driven by Apathy said:
Has Paradox finally fixed how Victoria III handles colonies?

I've played exactly one game of Victoria III, unfinished, but fairly long-running. At first, it was really satsifying to play a grand strategy game where I could measure success in something other than "amount of territory conquered".
I played as Haiti, and I managed to both get out of the downward spiral the place is in at the game's start, as well as to eventually achieve a quality of life for my people at least equal to, if not superior to that enjoyed by most European populations.

And then I realized, that the same was true of the British African colonies... and the French... and actually just about any place in the world colonized by a European power. Under the Victoria III economic system, the White Man's Burden ideology is objectively correct. Getting colonized really is the best thing that can happen to an undeveloped nation. Quality of life will almost inevitably skyrocket as a result of becoming part of the colonizer's economic sphere.

Realizing that sucked all the fun right out of the game for me.

If I play as an undeveloped nation and manage to develop it to be on par or better than the established powers, I want it to be an hard-fought achievement. And if I play as an established power with colonies, and I genuinely invest in and develop those colonies rather than suppressing and exploiting them, I want it to be a major strategic sacrifice with a long-term payoff to match. Sadly, Victoria 3 did not deliver when it comes to that, instead delivering unintentional colonialist propaganda.
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I seem to remember it being said that such was not intended behavior, but I can't find evidence of that now. In any case, looking at my own current game while the standard of living in the existing colonies is occasionally oddly high there does seem to be an evidential bias in where that prosperity goes looking at the population breakdowns of the states. The farmers might be generally prosperous in Great Britain's African colonies, but the ones that have converted to Protestantism are doing generally better than the animists, and the converts aren't doing as well as the Englishmen and Scots - and the largest part of the natives are filtered into the laborers, who aren't doing quite so good. So I would hesitate to call it "fixed," necessarily, but I might suggest it's better than before. I'm also not sure how the calculations for the standard of living are done or anything, but the game generally seems to prefer to grab the colonizer's culture for top-level representation of the standard of living over the natives, for what that's worth.

Oh, and the less-direct colonies are definitely rebalanced, the direct holdings in Africa may be Middling to even the rare Secure but the Crown Colonies of India et al have absolutely bottom-level standard of living.
 
The Vicky 3 beta has to be the most frustrated I've ever been with a pdx game. So many good changes and then there's the weird unit changes apparently based on nothing other than someone thinking EU4s army system is the be-all end-all.

At least it should be possible to mod arty and cav into support options under the mobilization tab where they obviously belong. Which is really just the barracks production methods except hidden away for no reason... If for some reason that's not possible I seriously doubt I'll be playing it very much in the future.
 
I don't think it's weird? I'll take your word about the execution but the old system of adding new regiments to an HQ by building barracks was always janky and unnecessarily finicky.

I wouldn't be surprised if they need to add some iterations to the replacement but their motivation isn't hard to comprehend.
 
Vannifar said:
You know, I can't actually think of another PDX DLC of any sort that focused on South America, save maybe as part of an Iberia or Mesoamerican expansion.
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EU IV did one on Aztec, Maya, and Inca that was decent enough as I recall, mostly religion based. In all fairness to Paradox, the Americas aren't even in Crusader Kings outside the Sunset Invasion meme, and no one would claim South America was a major theater of WW2. Europa Universalis and Victoria are the only series where it makes sense to flesh out South America.
 
Armies and navies are better to control than their initial form. The wrinkle is that the AI doesn't seem to upgrade their units so line infantry and skirmish infantry and going up against tanks and artillery. The extra step of dismantling bases for some unit types to upgrade is probably tripping them up since I'm seeing ironclad and torpedo boat fleets when I'm boating with cruisers, battleships, and carriers.
 
Well played for the first time in a while and decided to play Spain, so far I had to smack down no less than three revolutions against the Monarchy by 1857.

The first time the landowners apparently didn't take kindly to abolishing slavery, neither did Britain or the US apparently given apparently they decided to turn hostile towards me afterwards.

Then after being quiet for a while as I pushed though reforms with little issue, the landowners got angry over census suffrage and launched another uprising.

Then finally the Arm Forces faction decided to launch their own uprising over legislation to allow freedom of Assembly which I barely put down with the help of the French Republic.
 
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Not really, but the next update seems to be decoupling owner pops from buildings so that they don't need to be in the same state, so fingers crossed.
 
They also corrected the way countries were too eager to become accepting so the colonies should suffer more discrimination. But the ease of building them up economically is still there I think.
 
Parzival said:
Dev Diary 109 out!
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Basically a return of V2 spheres isn't it? Probably good though. There was a bit of a gap if you were pulling close to smaller countries but didn't want to make them subjects.

I like that they're jumping from historical examples. Trying to fit the Zollverein and British Empire is likely to result in a feature that's historically appropriate.

The leverage system is more speculative, I'm tentatively hopeful.

  • Economic dependence (which we'll cover in more detail in a future Dev Diary, but which includes e.g. trade routes between the countries)
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I really like that part of it and I hope it works out as intended.

Kinda don't love that power struggles are just keeping prestige up for a year. But at least it gives more purpose to the prestige ranking, which it kinda lacked.
 
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Teutonic_Thrash said:
Well that is appropriate for Moderate Liberals. It's the Radical Liberals, Agrarian Populists, and later various Socialists you'll want to boost in order to get the more progressive reforms.
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yeah, fair. i still think "Market Welfare" is stupid as hell.

Unrelatedly, the AI seems completely incapable of dealing with better politics+industry expanded, i think. Evidence: USA has had 4 major civil wars, has the same GDP as it had before the first, has not taken the western states off Mexico, is in the british market (???) and somehow has 8.3 avergae SOL (??????). (and is sending me mass migration in Chile, which is what made me check)
 
Hmm, my last game was as Mexico and saw me bring back the Mexican empire after crushing Texas's attempt at Independence, apparently by bringing back the House of Iturbide.

Never had a US invasion but had a war with the Apache and then two civil wars, one caused by the arms forces revolt while another was the landowners both over reforms they didn't like and apparently it was considered a big enough crisis that apparently Britain decided to get involved in each of the civil wars, yet the US never took the chance to enact its ambitions.
 
I didnt like the "Better" Politics mod due to the stupid ass decision to make it so that if you dare to end up with an interest group who's approval is over 10, you actively get punished for it and then worse having the gall to say its because of corruption. Just because a group is happy with how things are done doesnt mean they are going to go and be corrupt. It just means they are happy with you and are not actively opposing you on a societal level. If you want to simulate corruption, use a Journal Entry and add laws for Anti-Corruption that allow you to take different kinds of actions to deal with it, events revolving around the issue that have their possible choices actually determined by your current such laws.
andrewopk said:
yeah, fair. i still think "Market Welfare" is stupid as hell.

Unrelatedly, the AI seems completely incapable of dealing with better politics+industry expanded, i think. Evidence: USA has had 4 major civil wars, has the same GDP as it had before the first, has not taken the western states off Mexico, is in the british market (???) and somehow has 8.3 avergae SOL (??????). (and is sending me mass migration in Chile, which is what made me check)
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The issue is Industry Expanded. Industry Expand makes it so that you need to use Copper to use many of the mid game PMs, most importantly machine parts, itself also needed for other mid game PMs. The catch being that the sole early game PM using Copper is Tools. But thefes basically no nation in the game that possesses the means to use the Bronze Tools PM that doesnt already also have the ability to use the pre-existing Vanilla pm of Iron Tools...and many of them are of alreadu using said PM. And Iron Tools makes as many tools as Bronze. So the AI never almost uses Bronze Tools and so almost never sees the need early on to make more Copper unless they were lucky enough to start with copper mines and machine part factories to demand copper...only to suddenly need Copper the moment they want to switch to more productive mines. This is then piled onto the Vanilla issue of not building enough Construction Sectors and not caring to prioritize constructing them first. Seriously, just using IE in 3 seperate games, all of them had the rise of the John Calhoun Regime which was totally a democracy and totally not a military dictatorship backed by the south.

I actually ended up prefering Heart of Appalachia as an industry expansion mod...and its an atompunk fantasy mod. It does mess around woth a few early game PMs, but it only does so by making a few buildings need an RnD resource that is ALSO a luxury good that pops will buy and so the AI will actually know to build the building that produces them. Even better, the early on means to get uranium also produce nuclear fuel in small amounts, which is seen as a heating good. Aka Pops will buy it. This means the AI will have at least a small amount of Uranium production when it comes time to actually use the uranium.
 
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Daedwartin said:
I didnt like the "Better" Politics mod due to the stupid ass decision to make it so that if you dare to end up with an interest group who's approval is over 10, you actively get punished for it and then worse having the gall to say its because of corruption. Just because a group is happy with how things are done doesnt mean they are going to go and be corrupt. It just means they are happy with you and are not actively opposing you on a societal level.
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I think they're reworking the Approval effects at some point. The effects themselves aren't that impactful anyway.
 
andrewopk said:
the steam version. mostly annoyed by them preferring the middle tiers reforms to the later ones.
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Funnily enough, I'm actually on the development team for that mod.
The Steam version is missing a lot of features compared to the Github version (last time I remember, that version didn't even give the Unions a pro-union ideology). On your specific complaint of the Moderate Liberals being too conservative, my fellow devs are working on some revamps to the Liberalization Journal Entries that will give them more progressive stances for citizenship and voting.

Edit: The Github beta for 2.1 also has pretty large changes for law passing and the base-game Journal entries in the works.
 
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