Grand Strategy Victoria 3

[AwesomeButton]

Powerblocs are also a waste of time. When I formed Germany (Click Button, Receive Wurst) I somehow got parts of Austria and a bunch of random minors as subjects. So I formed a bloc to replace the Zollverein and tried getting my neighbors in. It takes ages to gain enough points to invite anyone to your bloc. Austria was a rump state that consisted mainly of Hungary, yet even with decades to spare I couldn't get them to join peacefully. You also can't really do shit as a bloc leader anyway.

This is a problem with their general approach. They used to get on a high horse when talking about how scripted events are a dead end and generic mechanics are the future. But once they put the theory into practice, their generic mechanics are too generic and too difficult to balance in order to provide a plausibly-looking experience in a history-themed game. Maybe it will be just fine in a fantasy-themed or sci-fi-themed game.

I'll use the Egyptian-Ottoman war as an example, because I'm just figuring out how to translate that into a simple event tree. I can present the war and the diplomatic crisis with their impact on the politics and society in France with 4-5 events. I can hook an event when a diplomatic play starts, where specifically the OE wants to take specific states from Egypt. Then I can use events to provide different paths of action to France with short- and long-term consequences which are not immediately evident, like it was IRL. I can use event effects in order to boost France's "leverage" over Egypt, making it easier to pull into a block. I can add a modifier "Egyptian army trained by French officers" for example, boosting leverage and relations. BTW a question worth asking is where is Paradox when it comes to giving custom treatment to specific situations such as a famous historical diplomatic crisis. The uncomfortable answer is - busy charging 25 EUR for 10 events and a couple of event images.

My point is that generic systems provide good hooks to use when writing custom scripts to represent a historical situation, but going just with generic mechanics makes the game feel barebones at best and a shitshow in most cases. On the other hand, if we lacked the systems, it would have been much more dificult to detect specific conditions when an event would make sense to be fired.

 

[thesecret1]

This is a problem with their general approach. They used to get on a high horse when talking about how scripted events are a dead end and generic mechanics are the future. But once they put the theory into practice, their generic mechanics are too generic and too difficult to balance in order to provide a plausibly-looking experience in a history-themed game. Maybe it will be just fine in a fantasy-themed or sci-fi-themed game.

It won't. Stellaris the only fun part of the game is the scripted events they put in, everything else is a below-average 4X. EUIV, you have Anbennar mod, which is the most successful fantasy adaptation of their formula. What does Anbennar stand on? Lots and lots of scripting... Generic mechanics are great to provide a solid gameplay loop, but if you want flavor, you gotta script it in.

 

[Fedora Master]

As can easily be seen, an unguided approach will result in bullshit.

 

[Axioms]

This is a problem with their general approach. They used to get on a high horse when talking about how scripted events are a dead end and generic mechanics are the future. But once they put the theory into practice, their generic mechanics are too generic and too difficult to balance in order to provide a plausibly-looking experience in a history-themed game. Maybe it will be just fine in a fantasy-themed or sci-fi-themed game.

It won't. Stellaris the only fun part of the game is the scripted events they put in, everything else is a below-average 4X. EUIV, you have Anbennar mod, which is the most successful fantasy adaptation of their formula. What does Anbennar stand on? Lots and lots of scripting... Generic mechanics are great to provide a solid gameplay loop, but if you want flavor, you gotta script it in.

Well Paradox games don't depict culture or religion in a meaningful way. And the limitations are obviously even greater for fantasy mods. So of course you can't have flavor.

As far as famous historical events, history is totally random. Of course you don't end up with anything like real history unless you literally railroad script it.

Unless Paradox substantially deepened the level and scope of their simulation there's nothing they can do. The problem is that they don't understand that.

The gameplay loop/experience of a Paradox game is also fundamentally incompatible with anything like history, even in CK3.

The only people dumber than Paradox devs are their fans, who just refuse to accept reality. You'd have to redesign the Paradox formula from the bottom up to have "emergent flavor".

 

[AwesomeButton]

Of course you don't end up with anything like real history unless you literally railroad script it.

Tnat's not true. You regularly have the Oriental crisis on time, and the second French empire on time without them being railroaded.

Yet one problem I have is that often the JE's conditions for a historically plausible consequence are divorced from the IRL historical condition, teaching kids wrong history.

 

[Axioms]

Of course you don't end up with anything like real history unless you literally railroad script it.

Tnat's not true. You regularly have the Oriental crisis on time, and the second French empire on time without them being railroaded.

Yet one problem I have is that often the JE's conditions for a historically plausible consequence are divorced from the IRL historical condition, teaching kids wrong history.

Journal entries are railroading.

 

[Fedora Master]

For some reason you don't even get a fucking reminder that the Oriental Crisis kicked off. I guess as Britain and Russia maybe but Greece of all places should get it too.

 

[AwesomeButton]

For some reason you don't even get a fucking reminder that the Oriental Crisis kicked off. I guess as Britain and Russia maybe but Greece of all places should get it too.

You need to have an interest declared in "Arabia" to see the diplomatic play. As France, you get an event to notify you of something happening, and you can say if you care or not, which will add the interest if you have unassigned interests and you don't have one in that area. I have to check the game files to see why I'm getting it as France, and what are the conditions.

Journal entries are railroading.

They are optional objectives which don't have to specify how you should achieve them, just what you should achieve.

Without reductio ad absurdum, most people who complain that enforcing balance- or scripted limitations to narrow the set of possible developments in Paradox' GSGs really have no measure of what is a plausible alternate history when compared to implausible meme-history. In fact there is an already huge range of plausible alternative scenarios, so eliminating the implausible ones won't hurt replayability that much. But that would cost significant scripting work. Paradox are just picking the easy route instead of utilising the tools they have themselves created, to make the game both fun and educational at the same time.

 

[darkpatriot]

Journal entries are railroading.

They are optional objectives which don't have to specify how you should achieve them, just what you should achieve.

Without reductio ad absurdum, most people who complain that enforcing balance- or scripted limitations to narrow the set of possible developments in Paradox' GSGs really have no measure of what is a plausible alternate history when compared to implausible meme-history. In fact there is an already huge range of plausible alternative scenarios, so eliminating the implausible ones won't hurt replayability that much. But that would cost significant scripting work. Paradox are just picking the easy route instead of utilising the tools they have themselves created, to make the game both fun and educational at the same time.

I don't agree with Axioms on a lot regarding opinions about Paradox games, but I do here.

I despise JE/Focus in HOI4/Missions or whatever they are called in EU Rome 2. They are just trying to railroad you and the AI to do certain things to try to achieve certain historical outcomes. And you are punished if you don't want to do those things and don't get those rewards.

Paradox made the right call with their focus on generic mechanics, and should focus more on improving those systems with historical events as inspiration for the types of generic events there should be.

Many players, including many of the people here in this thread, seem to want a game where history pretty much plays out as they expect it to with the exception of the player, who is allowed to go off the rails. But then still want the AI to react meaningfully to how the player goes off the rails, anyway.

But not me. I want every game to be unique, different, and interesting. Not the same events with the same countries usually happening each playthrough. I agree that the generic events and their weighting should be looked at if certain important things that happened in history almost never have similar things happen in game. But that should be addressed without just putting things on rails.

 

[thesecret1]

But not me. I want every game to be unique, different, and interesting.

If you rely on generic mechanics, every game will be the same. Imperator relied on this approach, the result being that playing a Greek city state and a celtic tribe in northern scotland was practically identical, because they both relied on the same set of generic mechanics.

 

[darkpatriot]

But not me. I want every game to be unique, different, and interesting.

If you rely on generic mechanics, every game will be the same. Imperator relied on this approach, the result being that playing a Greek city state and a celtic tribe in northern scotland was practically identical, because they both relied on the same set of generic mechanics.

I don't think that is true though. Greeks had to deal with a lot of powerful neighbors, while fringe nations focused much more on expansion. So I think they were meaningfully different in the challenges you had to deal with.

However, I would say that there wasn't that much difference between a Celtic tribe in Northern Scotland and some barbarian tribe on the Baltic coast. They both had pretty similar gameplay.

But I think the fix for that isn't to make more National Missions to add 'flavor' (my most despised part of Imperator), but to make it so the challenges they face and resources they have to deal with those challenges are different for different nations. Not that I am opposed to all flavor. I think making more meaningful distinctions between cultures and the options they have available (which could be considered resources) would be a good way to add in that diversity.

But I am opposed to railroady flavor. Like giving a nation a bonus if they conquer a region they historically did.

 

[thesecret1]

But not me. I want every game to be unique, different, and interesting.

If you rely on generic mechanics, every game will be the same. Imperator relied on this approach, the result being that playing a Greek city state and a celtic tribe in northern scotland was practically identical, because they both relied on the same set of generic mechanics.

I don't think that is true though. Greeks had to deal with a lot of powerful neighbors, while fringe nations focused much more on expansion. So I think they were meaningfully different in the challenges you had to deal with.

However, I would say that there wasn't that much difference between a Celtic tribe in Northern Scotland and some barbarian tribe on the Baltic coast. They both had pretty similar gameplay.

But I think the fix for that isn't to make more National Missions to add 'flavor' (my most despised part of Imperator), but to make it so the challenges they face and resources they have to deal with those challenges are different for different nations. Not that I am opposed to all flavor. I think making more meaningful distinctions between cultures and the options they have available (which could be considered resources) would be a good way to add in that diversity.

But I am opposed to railroady flavor. Like giving a nation a bonus if they conquer a region they historically did.

Making each nation wholly unique in terms of mechanics is unrealistic what with the amount of nations present in the average Paradox game, and once any nations gets big enough (gets past early game) the gameplay blends together regardless of their starting position. Paradox tried to address this by having various regional mechanics (ie. technology group in EU3 and early versions of EU4, religion mechanics in CK2, etc.) but while those can alleviate things somewhat, they lead to everyone in said region playing the same and only rarely make that much difference past mid-game. The countries therein become indistinguishable color blobs. The best solution found for that so far is flavor. And I don't mean necessarily mean missions (I think Paradox's implementation of that is rather unfortunate, actually) but rather unique content on a per-faction basis. If I'm playing as BYZ, I want an event if I conquer Rome, because it makes sense it'd be a big deal for the Roman Empire. If I conquer all of Britain as Wales or Cornwall, I'd like an event or decision acknowledging that I've reversed centuries-long losses from the times when angles invaded, and perhaps even have a decision whether to do with them as they did with the celts, or extend an olive branch. If I conquer China as Japan, I'd like the game to react in some way to the fact I've just achieved the dream of generations.

All this is unique content, not generic mechanics. Without this kind of flavor, I see no point to even play an ostensibly historical game, as the "history" part won't extend past the starting setup – at that point, you may as well start each game with a random map generator that'll give you unique setup and randomly generate country names or something. Playing a historical game is, in large part, about roleplaying, and unique content helps roleplay tremendously.

 

[whydoibother]

I despise JE/Focus in HOI4/Missions or whatever they are called in EU Rome 2. They are just trying to railroad you and the AI to do certain things to try to achieve certain historical outcomes. And you are punished if you don't want to do those things and don't get those rewards.

Europa Universalis and HoI4 missions are like another tech tree, you always want to do them and get the meaningful reward.
In Victoria 3, journal entries aren't something you MUST do, and they can even have them without any rewards, just to give you a bit of a road to follow. Don't like it? Don't do them!
I'd even say you should be able to import generic journal entries. Like midgame saying you want to do the egalitarian social justice stuff, click that its a goal, and it populates your journal with a bunch of entries and variables to track. These can be generic stuff, doesn't need to be specifically tailored to Brazil or Japan. No mechanical reward needed, just a modal window with a picture and a bar getting filled up.

 

[darkpatriot]

I despise JE/Focus in HOI4/Missions or whatever they are called in EU Rome 2. They are just trying to railroad you and the AI to do certain things to try to achieve certain historical outcomes. And you are punished if you don't want to do those things and don't get those rewards.

Europa Universalis and HoI4 missions are like another tech tree, you always want to do them and get the meaningful reward.
In Victoria 3, journal entries aren't something you MUST do, and they can even have them without any rewards, just to give you a bit of a road to follow. Don't like it? Don't do them!
I'd even say you should be able to import generic journal entries. Like midgame saying you want to do the egalitarian social justice stuff, click that its a goal, and it populates your journal with a bunch of entries and variables to track. These can be generic stuff, doesn't need to be specifically tailored to Brazil or Japan. No mechanical reward needed, just a modal window with a picture and a bar getting filled up.

I was wrong to lump the JE in with the Missions then. It has been a moment since I played Victoria and misremembered how that had worked, apparently.

Those kinds of JEs aren't that objectionable, then.

 

[darkpatriot]

All this is unique content, not generic mechanics. Without this kind of flavor, I see no point to even play an ostensibly historical game, as the "history" part won't extend past the starting setup – at that point, you may as well start each game with a random map generator that'll give you unique setup and randomly generate country names or something. Playing a historical game is, in large part, about roleplaying, and unique content helps roleplay tremendously.

I actually want random map generators with Paradox games, and really appreciated when CK2 added that in. I can't speak for everyone, but for me I like historical games for the overall settings and don't ever really have a desire to replay history, or even explore alternate history.

Any attempt to get the game to have certain events occur is always going to lead to railroading, which undermines the gameplay that I am actually there for.

But this debate has happened since EU3 (which was the game that Paradox started using there generic event theory, IIRC) over and over. Some players definitely want a game where history largely plays out as expected with the player being the one with agency to alter history if desired (although still having mechanisms for the AIs to react meaningfully to the way the player deviates), and others want more open games within certain settings/periods.

I am firmly on the more open games camp.



And pretty much all strategy games have the issue of the game getting very samey once you are powerful. The best they can generally do is give different factions different gameplay mechanics so different factions play differently or support different methods of winning to support different strategies.

But when games have fairly unified mechanics for all players, the end game being very samey is going to happen. A lot of that having to do with the fact that most players play each game with largely the same tactics and strategies. And Paradox games definitely fall into that category, although I can't think of other games with unified mechanics that effectively avoid that issue.

In a way, that is kind of just the snowball problem of most strategy games restated in a different context. The beginning and middle part of the game will be the part of a strategy where the player is most having to deal with challenges and limitations that put them on a more unique gameplay path. By end game the player generally has the resources to force their will onto the game and minimize any need to adjust their approach based on limitations or challenges.

EDIT: Sadly, Victoria 3 is a terrible game to have this discussion about. Because as far as all countries playing the same, this is the Paradox game where that is most true due to every nation having the same basic industrialization gameplay path. Some countries just have more difficulty getting started down that path than others.

 

[thesecret1]

I actually want random map generators with Paradox games, and really appreciated when CK2 added that in. I can't speak for everyone, but for me I like historical games for the overall settings and don't ever really have a desire to replay history, or even explore alternate history.

Any attempt to get the game to have certain events occur is always going to lead to railroading, which undermines the gameplay that I am actually there for.

But this debate has happened since EU3 (which was the game that Paradox started using there generic event theory, IIRC) over and over. Some players definitely want a game where history largely plays out as expected with the player being the one with agency to alter history if desired (although still having mechanisms for the AIs to react meaningfully to the way the player deviates), and others want more open games within certain settings/periods.

I am firmly on the more open games camp.

Different target audience, I guess. Without the larp, Paradox games lack any kind of merit for me.

 

[AwesomeButton]

They are just trying to railroad you and the AI to do certain things to try to achieve certain historical outcomes. And you are punished if you don't want to do those things and don't get those rewards.

This just does not correspond to reality. You don't know how the games work. There are AI strategies at play and pre-determined initial attitudes between AIs, this has little if any connection to the JEs.

But not me. I want every game to be unique, different, and interesting

 

[AwesomeButton]

Many players, including many of the people here in this thread, seem to want a game where history pretty much plays out as they expect it to with the exception of the player, who is allowed to go off the rails. But then still want the AI to react meaningfully to how the player goes off the rails, anyway.

If a scenario begins historically and then develops into an absurd one, what's the point of having a historical start?

The problem for you, as much as I understand, is that there is a roughly reproducible development of campaigns, i.e. there shouldn't be such. The problem for me is that this roughly reproducible scenario is not accurate to history and doesn't provide a good explanation of why things developed this way. The player has enough opportunities to make that scenario go off track. I see sense in driving it somewhat off track, but dethroning Victoria and turning Britain into a progressive presidential republic with Charles Dickens as president, who with any interest in real, non-meme, history, cares about such an alt-history. Because that's possible in Vic 3.

 

[Axioms]

But not me. I want every game to be unique, different, and interesting.

If you rely on generic mechanics, every game will be the same. Imperator relied on this approach, the result being that playing a Greek city state and a celtic tribe in northern scotland was practically identical, because they both relied on the same set of generic mechanics.

Well the problem is that the game doesn't simulate what made the different societies different. So of course it feels the same. How else could it be?

 

[Axioms]

But not me. I want every game to be unique, different, and interesting.

If you rely on generic mechanics, every game will be the same. Imperator relied on this approach, the result being that playing a Greek city state and a celtic tribe in northern scotland was practically identical, because they both relied on the same set of generic mechanics.

I don't think that is true though. Greeks had to deal with a lot of powerful neighbors, while fringe nations focused much more on expansion. So I think they were meaningfully different in the challenges you had to deal with.

However, I would say that there wasn't that much difference between a Celtic tribe in Northern Scotland and some barbarian tribe on the Baltic coast. They both had pretty similar gameplay.

But I think the fix for that isn't to make more National Missions to add 'flavor' (my most despised part of Imperator), but to make it so the challenges they face and resources they have to deal with those challenges are different for different nations. Not that I am opposed to all flavor. I think making more meaningful distinctions between cultures and the options they have available (which could be considered resources) would be a good way to add in that diversity.

But I am opposed to railroady flavor. Like giving a nation a bonus if they conquer a region they historically did.

Making each nation wholly unique in terms of mechanics is unrealistic what with the amount of nations present in the average Paradox game, and once any nations gets big enough (gets past early game) the gameplay blends together regardless of their starting position. Paradox tried to address this by having various regional mechanics (ie. technology group in EU3 and early versions of EU4, religion mechanics in CK2, etc.) but while those can alleviate things somewhat, they lead to everyone in said region playing the same and only rarely make that much difference past mid-game. The countries therein become indistinguishable color blobs. The best solution found for that so far is flavor. And I don't mean necessarily mean missions (I think Paradox's implementation of that is rather unfortunate, actually) but rather unique content on a per-faction basis. If I'm playing as BYZ, I want an event if I conquer Rome, because it makes sense it'd be a big deal for the Roman Empire. If I conquer all of Britain as Wales or Cornwall, I'd like an event or decision acknowledging that I've reversed centuries-long losses from the times when angles invaded, and perhaps even have a decision whether to do with them as they did with the celts, or extend an olive branch. If I conquer China as Japan, I'd like the game to react in some way to the fact I've just achieved the dream of generations.

All this is unique content, not generic mechanics. Without this kind of flavor, I see no point to even play an ostensibly historical game, as the "history" part won't extend past the starting setup – at that point, you may as well start each game with a random map generator that'll give you unique setup and randomly generate country names or something. Playing a historical game is, in large part, about roleplaying, and unique content helps roleplay tremendously.

The reason all the nations play the same, and this is roughly true regardless of which game you are talking about, is because the mechanical differentiation between nations/factions is non-existent. People say Paradox has tried generic mechanics but they really haven't. They've only made generic mechanics representing like 5-10% of what comprises a society.

They tack modifiers on top of that, but the modifiers are so abstract they don't change the gameplay experience at all. For instance for Britain the game doesn't represent the historic advantages the British had like their understanding of scurvy, their large population of experience sailors, or their shipwrights, or anything really. They don't represent the archery aspect of the culture. They don't engage at all with the geographical causes of the majority of British internal history or regional history.

Trade and naval systems are non-existent even in V3 IMO.

So in that sense the infamous "flavor" is basically required.

I think there is an issue where so many portions of the audience have totally different goals and the games can't satisfy them all. Lucky for Paradox there is minimal competition for any of their varied sub-audiences so everyone has to eat shit and play a game that is a 6/10 in their area of interest.

 

[Axioms]

Many players, including many of the people here in this thread, seem to want a game where history pretty much plays out as they expect it to with the exception of the player, who is allowed to go off the rails. But then still want the AI to react meaningfully to how the player goes off the rails, anyway.

If a scenario begins historically and then develops into an absurd one, what's the point of having a historical start?

The problem for you, as much as I understand, is that there is a roughly reproducible development of campaigns, i.e. there shouldn't be such. The problem for me is that this roughly reproducible scenario is not accurate to history and doesn't provide a good explanation of why things developed this way. The player has enough opportunities to make that scenario go off track. I see sense in driving it somewhat off track, but dethroning Victoria and turning Britain into a progressive presidential republic with Charles Dickens as president, who with any interest in real, non-meme, history, cares about such an alt-history. Because that's possible in Vic 3.

The scope of Paradox grand strategy games is way too large to represent history. And realistically even a small amount of mechanics rather than event scripting will prevent historical results. While there were broad arcs in our history even these were largely still randomly generated.

Rome collapsed in the specific time and way that it did because of climate change. Since Paradox games don't represent climate change they can't effectively represent the fall of Rome.

 

[AwesomeButton]

So in that sense the infamous "flavor" is basically required.

Yeah, the mechanics are too abstract to "teach" anything without the text box popping up specifically.

Rome collapsed in the specific time and way that it did because of climate change.

I realise you are oversimplifying here, but want to mention that explaining whys of this sort of scale is probably too ambitious for any game. Serving some facts and hammering them in thanks to multiple playthroughs made, however, is completely possible.

 

[Stavrophore]

But not me. I want every game to be unique, different, and interesting.

If you rely on generic mechanics, every game will be the same. Imperator relied on this approach, the result being that playing a Greek city state and a celtic tribe in northern scotland was practically identical, because they both relied on the same set of generic mechanics.

Well the problem is that the game doesn't simulate what made the different societies different. So of course it feels the same. How else could it be?

Solution to that would cause accusations of racism.

 

[Fedora Master]

Purely on a gameplay level, the developing history should largely mirror real history but with a small chance of deviation. So you get "those" games where Germany never forms or the Confederates take over the US. It shouldn't be the norm and during an average game history should unfold as it did, discounting player intervention.

Right now historical development in Vic3 is just random and massively held back by the AIs ability to industrialize.

 

[thesecret1]

Purely on a gameplay level, the developing history should largely mirror real history but with a small chance of deviation. So you get "those" games where Germany never forms or the Confederates take over the US. It shouldn't be the norm and during an average game history should unfold as it did, discounting player intervention.

Darkest Hour works this way, and is an amazing game.