Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #145 - Military Improvements

[Wizzington]

I got to say it's simply not enough. Victoria 3's warfare just really needs a step back in its design and rethinking the whole thing, instead of constant bandaid solutions.

A while back I talked about just using Strategic Regions as the main tool for managing armies. Talking about how that would massively cut down on cheese, micromanagement and provide a much more solid foundation, to replace the frontline system. Maybe we could still use the frontlines, see them move, and occupy states the same way, but drawing armies from the pool from a Strategic Region HQ. It would mean we wouldn't suddenly have a problem, where a front splits and there's no army to defend it - an army in HQ defends all the local fronts. It would mean invasions wouldn't feel detached from the rest of the war, as sending armies to HQ would be totally normal.

The fact we are still getting just more and more tweaks to a frontline based system, which just doesn't work... it's disappointing. It's like there's not even an effort into making the warfare system work well, and just a big insistence on this system being actually great, and next time for real, next patch it will be amazing, just one more patch bro.

I am tired of seeing constant Development time being dedicated into perfecting a flawed system, instead of just changing it into something better.

One of the earlier (pre-release) iterations of the Victoria 3 military system was strategic region based - it really did not work out particularly well and created very similar issues to frontline splitting when you had theaters on the edges of multiple regions.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

Thanks for the dev diary.

One of the ways I found out when my generals died was because I'd get a notification on top of my screen sayin that an army was low on organization. Now that the organization will change over time, have you thought about reworking that icon? Maybe it should trigger when the organization target is below 50% instead of the actual organization value?

Yep, that makes sense.
Will take a look to ensure this is what we do already.

 

[PDX_Pelly]

Would you concider using a Beta for this? It is one of the fixes that might be hard to get all the edge cases out of. And it is quite a critical fix if it does work as intended.

No a beta wouldn't be used for this, with the timeframe to set it up and needed involvement from us it isn't feasible.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

Maybe stupid question, but what's exactly the point of going through Belgium in this game for Prussia/Germany?

The historical reason for the Schlieffen Plan was to spearhead to Paris and circumvent the defenses in Lorraine, then circle back and hit the fortified French positions along the front from the rear, to completely encircle the defenders there and force their surrender. Hammer and anvil.

But if the invasion feature works anything like naval invasions, the entirety of upper France is just part of the France HQ. All present armies/free generals will simply defend automatically against any attempt to "land" into France HQ from any direction. Let alone that the game has no forts or fortifications that need to be circumvented, nor does the game support encirclements to take out entire armies.

To me it seems that this feature tries to give the player historical options, while the game itself doesn't support the historical reality of warfare. Please, tell me, what am I missing here?

There's other use cases for which players have wanted to get military access, for example the Schleswig-Holstein problem for Prussia (forcing them to use naval invasion)

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

If I understood correctly Belgium and Germany are allies, that means that Germany gets military access through Belgium in a war with France (where Belgium is not a participant). In this case why would France get military access through Belgium to attack Germany?

Because it wouldn't feel good to just sit at the border as France, waiting for the attackers to come without having any agency to counter it.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

Lots of really interesting changes! It seems like these resolve a lot of issues which is great.

A few questions:

• It's great that home bases are more static, but I'd still worry about when they move, and joining the home base. E.g., if the US fights Canada, and the home base is on the Pacific, do we still end up with troops from the East coast hiking all the way over there before joining the fight? Or do they just march to the nearest border?

That shouldn't be happening now and it shouldn't be happening in the future.
If they find a valid position alongside a front, they will go there. Only when they can't they should travel home.

• When the frontlines move and the home base is no longer valid, will the new home base be the closest possible one? Taking US vs Mexico, when the frontline moves we don't want the home base to go from Texas to Baja California to Veracruz.

They should take the closest possible one.

• For an invasion via eg Belgium, would that be a 1-state wide front, or would the front be along the entire Belgian border?

1-state wide until the invasion has completed, then it can merge with others.

• I think the "no generals for 10 unit armies" is great especially for AI, but does this incentivize hundreds of 10-unit armies instead of one bigger army?

It shouldn't.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

Looks good, although I do think perhaps some of the front splitting seems a bit overtuned, only having two fronts on that entire map of India seems kind of silly IMO.

Then again, given how much of a pain point this is for people, I suppose a little overcorrection isn't bad, it's not like it can't be loosened later as necessary.

Exactly, we can tweak this further.
We're going to experiment with a "distance-based gap" instead of the "one state wide gap" for example. So we're happy to listen to feedback once you all get your hands on this.
But so far every single person that's played with it has said it feels like a big step forward. So let's see

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

I know perhaps this is asking a bit too much but would there be a way to coordinate invasions? (Say, only start invasion A and B when both A and B have everything to start engaging, or after the naval phase ends). That would be chefs' kiss

This would be a lot more effort and honestly I'm not sure it's that valuable. You're unlikely to launch more than a couple invasions at once, they take the same time to prepare etc., so the benefit decreases a fair amount.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

The biggest concern I have with supply is that as I understand it, it only really considers if there are convoys reaching the army in question, it doesn't really care about actual military production. Atm, even if army goods are completely unsupplied, this has little to no effect beyond cost, meaning a sufficiently rich nation can seemingly conjure military equipment from thin air. While obviously adding stockpiles or making other fundamental changes to the purchasing system would be beyond the scope of this update, armies should, at the very least, take a significant org penalty when experiencing input good shortages.

Longer run, it's a significant design problem that fundamentally military industry *doesn't matter.* Because money is a sufficient substitute for military goods, there's way less reason than there ought to be to invest in military production. You can just use the accumulated revenue from that profitable industry to pay for the military goods at a slightly higher rate, rather than trying to sustain an industry that is fundamentally unprofitable. Hopefully the world market will help a bit since you can have an arms export industry without micromanaging exports to warring nations, but that's a band-aid. There should be a significantly military advantage for countries that can produce more arms and ammunition, *especially* as we get further into the game, and at the moment, there just isn't.

The big story of war across the period this game covers is the rising importance of military industry, the declining importance of men as opposed to guns, and ultimately the total redirection of economies to military production to win wars. At the moment, Vicky just doesn't really simulate that, and you can plausibly wage war throughout the entire game while barely paying attention to your military industry. Unlike a lot of people, I'm actually totally okay with the simplified front system being used to keep focus on the core economic gameplay. But for that to really work, that core economic gameplay needs to have *WAY* more impact. By the late game, it should be borderline impossible for a less industrialized nation to compete with an equivalent more industrialized one on the battlefield, *even given tech parity.* The Russian army was a mess in WW1 not because they didn't know how to make good rifles or artillery, but because they lacked the capacity to produce enough of them. The game in its current state cannot simulate that.

I'm not sure I quite follow the military goods industry not mattering.
If you have an army lacking supply, e.g. by having a goods shortage in small arms, they will suffer from offense, defense, morale recovery and recovery rate penalties.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

I hope that, with the pass for the military panels, that the consumption doesn't get a pitiful "The amount of <good> consumed by buildings" and have at least the regular cooltip we have for everything else. I know we can access the information for the good anywhere else, but it is a stark contrast that we have some of the most useless tooltips in the Military tabs – I don't ask for having military-specific tooltips and cooltips that explain the goods in terms of warfare, but at least to have the regular ones that let you move to other tabs to fix potential issues we could have on those departments.

View attachment 1282421

What exactly would you expect to see in this tooltip when you hover the increased Grain input cost on mobilization options?

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

Kinda worried about this military acces invasion option. (Perhaps I misunderstood). But If I got it right isn't it going to be weird to get invasion through the same country if both war parties have military access there. Like in example of Belgium. Prussians go to invade France, French soldiers going to invade Prussian lands through Belgium. In theory troops of both countrues simply pass by each other in middle of Belgian lands, wave at each other and proceed to attack? From game mechanic pov I understand. From point of view of immersion is kinda shaky.

Yeah, it's certainly not perfect and it was raised during design sessions of course.
The way that I see it now that kinda makes sense in my head is that the two parties are actually fighting for control in the wider belgian area (including the two states in France and Prussia that are being invaded by each other). Eventually, one side may be able to overcome the other one and it results in a regular front after capturing the full state. Once one of the invasions succeeds, the other one will disappear, indicating that one side has won, pushed the enemy out of Belgium and further back into their target country.
I of course see it's not perfect, but for me at least this kind of worked after playing with it.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

Are there any plans to change how you access information on enemy armies?

Right now it's possible to determine the rough army composition of an opponent (if their armies are line infantry or skirmish infantry etc.) but this information is buried behind a half dozen nested tool tips which are extremely obtuse.

Are there any plans to simplify this to make it easier for players to roughly gauge the strength of the AI?

I'll poke our UX designer about it. No promises as time is short at this point, but certainly a good topic for future improvements if we can't make something now.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

Are you of the opinion that this should be the case?

With unlimited resources and time, maybe.

More realistically looking at this, I would not want to commit the resources this requires to it anytime soon. Having a supply status based on availability of goods + secure shipping lanes works well enough for all our games I'd say.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

Would it be possible to get some tooltips or stats regarding the cost to supply a standing army in addition to the projected costs of mobilizing the army? The actual cost of supplying a specific army would be great too. I think *some* of this is in there, but it's not very intuitive.

Love the other improvements!

I wanna say all the info you're looking for is already in the game.
You can see the total cost of an army while not mobilized in its formation window.
When hovering the mobilize button, you will see the predicted additional cost this would incur for this formation and if you do, the cost is added to the summarized cost of the formation.

Maybe I'm missing something that you'd like?

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

Do troops invading via military access suffer from the amphibious landing penalty?

No amphibious landing penalty because it's not an amphibious landing But also no other penalty at the moment.

Also, are there any restrictions on military access when it's overseas or only one party benefits, e.g. a Zimmermann telegram situation where Germany invades US with Mexican military access?

No restrictions currently planned. I'll have a think if that's necessary but intuitively I'm leaning no.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

Hi Lino,

Is there any chance we will see changes to the UI for merging and splitting armies? It feels like making this process the click of a single key on my keyboard would make it so much easier to respond to things like naval invasions or front splitting, which of course will still exist as per the dev Diary.

We have some things on our mind for a quick split and merge, but unfortunately this will likely have to wait for a later update.
But certainly aware of improvement potentials

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

Looking forward to the changes!

One small request. Can we add a hotkey to mobilize the selected army(s)?

Now that we can drag to select an army and right click to send that army to a front from earlier patches, the only thing holding me back from not having to interact with the army menu on the far left of the screen at all is having a hotkey to mobilize.

This would be just a small but impactful change to help the user efficiently prepare for a war which is

I've taken a note.
Bulk mobilizing is on our list to work on eventually, but would be required before a hotkey for these situations could be implemented.
For a single army, this should be much more doable.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

Out of pure curiosity, with the new "close-enough" merging of fronts, would it be possible for the frontlines to move along provinces without having small pockets along the coast or neutral territories create new frontlines? Essentially how it was pre-1.5, just without having to split an army to deal with 1-province pockets on the coastlines.

Theoretically, maybe.
Unlikely to be turned into practice though as it would invalidate so much work and would bring back a lot of old issues again.
Interesting thought though

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

I love all the changes that you make, it will make the war better. Will you consider to make your vasalls or allys don't attack with your troops when you are in a defence stand because that can really make you lose a war

You can turn off lending your units to ally attacks already.
In the formation screen, look at the bottom under "Formation Settings"

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

For 1.9? Please! I need something to make naval invasions make a lick of sense. I also hope that this change in supply cost would affect how AI distributes their troops.

Lastly, please make the supply cost based on sea node distance be based on each army's Barrack location and not HQ. And if done so, we would need the UI to help players visualize their Barrack location distribution for a given army, so that we can correctly manage this and not be slapped with crazy supply costs after the fact.

Since I'm not sure which part exactly you're referring to with your question "For 1.9?":
- Blockades are introduced with 1.9
- We're looking to see if we can get the supply cost scaling in for 1.9, but can't guarantee it right now. I'm gonna say it's likely it makes it, but not 100%

On HQ vs. Barracks distance: I'm not sure there's crazy amounts of value for making it Barracks based, which is a lot more work because it requires general passes over the whole system and also should be a lot more computation heavy than checking the HQ. But who knows, I'm not a programmer, maybe one of our guys has a smart idea for it.