Dev Diary #44 - Battles

[Hammrtime]

i've suggested this once before. i wonder whether most people would be satisfied if the player could give a general a two-step plan i.e. 'first do A, then do B'

Maybe? If this plan fails or succeeds then what? Regardless, I am thinking more about building secure sourcing for weapons, how much spend on the military prep/leadership. Using a war to build national support so pops ignore other problems out of nationalistic fervor during war.

 

[Swirly Mango]

Can there be more than one battle at a time? So there's a point to stacking advancement modifiers, and you can overwhelm the enemy?

 

[wickermoon]

I don't know....I actually do not feel happy with how it currently is. I mean, I like not having to push little army men around, because it was annoying AF in EU4 and it's annoying in HoI4 as well (so I am somewhat thankful for the automatic border arrangement), but the utter lack of strategic depth is off-putting. I can understand that you want to get rid of the tactical depth, because this simple AI will never be able to cope with player cheese, but strategic depth, like a general war plan, I think is necessary.

If not against the AI, then against other players. In multiplayer, it would add so much to have that moment where you can be all smug and like "I cee my little battle plan has vorked! Vanna give up, little man(n)?", or the respective "NO! Vatt are you doing? I told you to go arround! Arround! Schlieffen!!!"

From what I know, this here is the battle system introduced in the dev diary about war and nothing has changed much...I thought Paradox already knew which systems don't work well, and which do. That was one of the arguments against player feedback from the leaked alpha version and I agreed with that argument. But seeing this...nothing being changed in the way of (stale) warfare, I start to doubt this is the case. And if this system is already being reworked/added to, then why put up this dev diary? It's...I don't know. You are NOT listening to the players and in this particular, singular case, it's to the detriment of the game. And I am disappointed with how you handle it.

 

[3arat]

You. Are. Managing. The. Economy.

It's interesting how, for some, Victoria evolved into a sequel of Capitalism Lab - contrary to what "The Vision" clearly stated.

 

[Praetorian44]

Question: how are fortifications handled in battles? The DD alluded to fortifications, but didn't mention anything specific. Or are there not fortifications in the game?

It's a shame that casualties are applied randomly though (outside of the one exception regarding culture). This results in elite units taking the same number of casualties as irregulars. Also doesn't make sense that a unit with tanks, artillery, and aircraft support takes the same number of casualties as an all infantry unit. And this isn't good for mods either, which might take place outside of vanilla's timeframe (or even in a fantasy world). Would be silly for an armored unit to take the same number of casualties as an unarmed one, or ranged units taking heavy casualties when they weren't involved in the melee battle.

Other than that, everything looks great. I still hold out hope that the ability to direct a front towards a particular objective gets added though.

 

[Jorlaan]

I truly believe this kind of system can work and be fun so long as we get some ability to tell our troops where to go. Players often have specific goals in mind and the games AI isn't capable of reading our minds and following through on it. Having the ability to tell your army to focus attack on this point rather than the whole front, take that city or avoid that area entirely would go a long way to making this fun.

We need some ability to tell our troops what we want them to do beyond "advance". That isn't working real well for some RL generals as we have seen recently...

 

[GrafKeks]

"It's a Society Sim" What is a society but an effort to safeguard against, and prepare for, war?

A social structure to enable technological and economical progress ( which go hand in hand, if investments in education and tech are made that is ), so more people can lead better lives. Or another way of saying it; a social structure to grow common welfare. ( Defense is by all means an unfortunate but necessary part of that ).

The 19th century was written in blood like any other, an emphasis on "society building" shouldn't preclude combat.

How is written in blood defined, microorganism commit far more destruction than humans ever did, even though wars greatly aid them in receiving new life culture medium. Although poverty is far better than war at taking.

Hooman mighty, war gud. Oh no fly species eat all food, war on fly species failed. Although war can be waged through complex auto-catalysators and dropkick even proved this to be cost-effective, the horrors of naturally occuring parasites are a whole different story.

Also, anyone who thinks this will not be the war system on launch is kidding themselves. They might tweak it, but the skeleton is going to be something like this. They'd probably realize by now if they were going to change it and wouldn't put out a diary with knowledge that the entire thing would be scrapped, or at least so I hope.

Fine with me if the econ side is good enough ( I do hope it gets more depth down the line though ).

Edit: I am honestly interested with what part specifically people are disagreeing, since it can't be the third, as that is fine with me and it's fine with me. It's either one, which would mean I do hope people disagree from a descriptive point of view, not from a normative one. Or two, in which case I would be sincerely interested, in what way people define written in blood. ( I am talking about medflies btw ).

 

[BeauNiddle]

How often does a war take more than one battle? If 2 even sides are at war, and there is a battle at the beginning with all troops taking part, is the war effectively over? Is there any reasonable chance of the losing side recouping and pulling off some defense in depth etc?

In the example in the DD the battle resulted in capturing only 2 provinces. So there will almost definitely be more than 1 battle per war.

Now how easy it is to recover from a crushing defeat - that is unknown. If you still have reserves / conscripts to call up then you have to decide how much the war is worth to you. In the early game where the battle timer will probably tick up slowly you might have time to recover.

 

[Xain]

You mean nothing changed between the dev diary screenshots the are a month old and the leaked build that is a month old?

Well... yes? Ahah!

I actually meant to imply "the impression you have from the screenshots is correct, since that is how it works in the leaked build as well".

 

[chopak]

Sorry @KaiserJohan, but this is one of the worst DD I've read. Nothing is explained. From the read of it, battles go like this:
Generals are chosen (randomly)
Battle location is chosen (randomly)
Units are selected (randomly)
Battle Condition is selected (randomly)
Casualties and morale dmg is calculated.
If it's over the threshold, battle ends and random province(s) is occupied by the winner.
Else, next round of battle starts.

That like does not tell us ANYTHING and make battles a boring black box. And I'm not talking about the lack of Player Input in these battles, because we were already told that we would not be able to directly command armies. So... How about telling us what we actually CAN do and how battles actually work?
How do production methods impact battles? Is this just newer=better?
What's the difference between more (better) infantry vs more (better) artillery?
How are generals and provinces selected?
Are Battle Conditions dependent only on General traits (and Attack/Defend order) or do our laws or techs also impact it?


Literally every second sentence in this DD screams for [1]How? annottation.

 

[Zhetone]

Sorry to say but yeah this is bad imo. This is entering mobile game territory imo.

calling something a "mobile game" is maybe the most meaningless criticism possible, and it would be infinitely more helpful to everyone if you explained what you actually meant, because I'm pretty sure I've never seen a mobile game that works like this, nor are these mechanics quintessentially "mobile" in nature

 

[TheNoobNoob]

Soo, if its ww1 and i launch an offensive battle in my enemies territory, lose while having men back in the trench and ya know survivor retreating there, those men in the trenches would just retreat and the evemy undoes all my progress cuz epic paradox gamedesign?

 

[kviiri]

The only thing humans have consistently been good at through out history is war but I guess the devs don't get that. War is not a continuation of politics it is a failure or ignorance of it as can be seen most recently in Ukraine, the west tried pretty much all diplomatic solution but Russia did not care it wanted to go to war, it chose to.

Is this not exactly what Victoria 3 does better than other Paradox games? Wars are something you normally try to avoid, you have an entire mini-game built around coercing a solution you want without escalating to military action.

 

[Kondio_patrona]

What about POWs?

 

[prismaticmarcus]

In multiplayer, it would add so much to have that moment where you can be all smug and like "I cee my little battle plan has vorked! Vanna give up, little man(n)?", or the respective "NO! Vatt are you doing? I told you to go arround! Arround! Schlieffen!!!"

you were typing with a german accent weren't you? i can hear it!

 

[DreadGrunt]

To expand on my earlier thoughts in the thread I think I've finally realized my biggest problem with this system. It isn't that it's new or different, it's that it fundamentally seems like this system was designed with the singular goal of reducing micro and nothing more instead of actually making a new and better warfare system for the game. It's focused on taking something away instead of expanding and breathing more life into the game, which is a shame because the more I look at it this system actually could be pretty good if mixed with elements of micro. If I could set strategic targets for my armies to prioritize capturing and plan wider strategic stuff like HoI4's batteplanner this could actually be really cool and you could even have it tied to techs in game where you unlock newer and better battleplans like combined arms stuff as it gets later into a playthrough. But none of that is there, because the design goal is focused on removing my control above all else, seemingly even being given higher priority than fun factor, and that's a damn shame.

 

[Lord Cirdan]

Good stuff! Any plans to add a mechanic for prisoners of war? I’ve always missed that in earlier titles.

Further, as it stands right now, the ratio of KIA to WIA and POW seems disproportionately high when compared to conflicts of that time, for example the austro-prussian war.

 

[dav77-b]

This isn't HOI4. Or Reddit. People need to stop obsessing over encirclements.

Encirclements were very important in the era and should be modelled.

 

[Axe99]

Cheers for the DD KaiserJohan, and the extra info from you and Iachek It all sounds very good, and while I expect depth may be added down the track, at the very least lays a robust foundation for Vicky-3 era warfare

I do have a point of order, though. The DD is called "Battles", but it really it's talking about "Land Battles" - sea battles should be just as important. I expect (not least based on previous DDs) that you haven't forgotten them and the title of the DD is just subconscious bias (of a very harmless variety), but in case it's useful to mention, some of the most well-known naval battles in history took place in the era covered by the game's period, and it'd be a shame if there wasn't a maritime corollary for the battles fought on land.

Getting back to the topic rather than the title of the DD, though, another thing that developed in the period was the direct influence of naval vessels on combat. During WW1, a whole class of warships was built purely to influence battle on land (monitors, although these are very different to the Ericsson variety). Is it possible for naval forces to influence warfare within range of the coasts? Bonus points for riverine forces making an impact

For a naval-themed land battle pic, here's artwork of a British 15inch-gunned monitor firing. The turret is so far up because the mount was designed for battleships, and because monitors were of much shallower draught,a lot more of the turret's barbette is showing than on, say, a Royal Sovereign class battleship.

 

[DanubianCossak]

This system feels like a de-evolution of Paradox games. Its a game killer for me. I really hope we dont see this in EU5.