Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #145 - Military Improvements

[lilcritt]

I'm pretty critical of the game, but I actually don't really mind the more hands-off part of war - so these changes and fixes look great... as a start. I hope it pans out and we see an end to death stacks fighting in remote areas.

That said, I can’t shake the feeling that this is just pouring more resources into what is arguably the most disliked part of the game. Every new patch feels like sunk cost piling up, making a full rework less likely or further away. I hope a feedback loop isnt swaying perception.

 

[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.

 

[47pik]

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.

 

[Diamond2323]

This would mean that for example any force you are naval invading with would be 100% wiped out if beaten back after taking a state, which I don't think would be great. In general you'd get a lot of army wipes where previously you had army teleportations. I don't think this is too realistic either - there are plenty of historical cases of armies stuck in enemy territory who were able to make their way home.

I don't really see this as a problem at all. If you succeed at landing but begin to lose, you should have the ability to retreat through assigning the army to another front, escaping through the sea. If you are unable to do so for some reason (lacking convoys?) or decide you are better served by those troops fighting until the end, they should stay there and be wiped. I understand this may be hard to program into the AI, but I think it would add a lot of added complexity into the Vic3 combat even with that small change of adding stackwipes.

Perhaps wipes need not be total: a portion of the manpower still present in the army can be sent back to the nation as population so your 50,000 strong army don't all turn into dust the second they get wiped.

 

[GoguRomania]

Absolutely gorgeous. However, I have a question.
While the invasion of France through Belgium happens, the fronts of Wallonia and Alsace-Lorraine are not merging? But they do once the invasion is successful?
It will be a bit odd to see two different fronts that are literally next to each other.

 

[lukesilveira]

Yes, they get the option to navally invade or through Belgium.
If you send a fleet along the army you selected, it will be a naval invasion. If you don't, they'll use the land route.

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

 

[Amallric]

This military access is the most stupid thing I've seen in like 25 years of Paradox gaming. Victoria 3 already had by far the most obtuse UX but now you really outdid youselves. What a mess.

 

[Rabid]

Sounds like no changes to naval landings so we're still going to be working on the "honour system" where, as a player, I have to intentionally avoid doing any of the things which make naval landings incredibly overpowered and broken.

Many of those exploits are things which make sense from a strategic position (for example feigning a naval landing to divert enemy troops away from another front) but due to a combination of weird mechanics, the landings themselves being almost completely free of any opportunity cost, and poor AI, just trying a basic strategy like this becomes a pseudo-exploit

 

[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.

 

[stormtemplar]

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.

 

[cyberrb25]

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.

 

[losnikita981009]

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.

 

[Jamey]

In my last game,I encountered a lot of problems with Russia fighting wars in Central Asia.

Beyond the front line problems (which were constant), the other major problem I encountered was armies that were sent back to the capital region by front line changes (or ending wars).

There was apparently no way to reroute them once they were en route, so if a war started soon after another war ended I would have armies which were nearby but had to go all the way back to St Petersburg before returning to where they stated to find a front.

Has anything been done to fix these issues?

 

[guiskj]

Blockades will absolutely be able to affect supply lines. We are also looking into increasing the overall supply use of armies deployed overseas (based on sea node distance) to make it harder to logistically support huge deployments far away.

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.

 

[Bisonmask]

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.

As long as ongoing invasions prevent invasions through the same country it should be fine

 

[Don_Quigleone]

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?

 

[FranklyJustNess]

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.

I don't really see why it would be a tougher thing to fix, than the unfixable system we have now, and were receiving constant fixes for the whole life of Vic3. Let's say you have a triangle of Strategic Regions A,B,C and two countries, Red and Green, which have armies in A and B

Green can decide to send some of their troops on "invade C" mission, get an unopposed "landing" initial occupation, and slowly start to occupy the entire region, sure, but what happens next? They still need to move into B and fight to do so, because there's soldiers defending it.

Meanwhile with the frontline system, the front might just break in one spot (because maybe there is a small neutral country in the way), and suddenly it's two different fronts, and this small army of Green is now taking land from B just attacking from behind, and occupies the whole country without firing a shot. Suddenly it's an issue of properly signaling to the player on a moments notice, that there's an undefended frontline, and making sure Red's army can even get to it on time, and making sure the front splitting happens as little as possible, and... And you start wondering if Vic3's system really does live up to its promise of being largely automated, and not requiring micro.

 

[RainOfTears]

Something we could potentially do is allow violate sovereignty on any country granting access to the enemy and make the AI much less likely to intervene to defend them, since they're not really being neutral.

In this case it would be good to prohibit invading through a country you have Military Access in if that country has a truce with the country you're invading, so that there isn't behavior like the country capitulating out and once again letting the Prussians through without consequences to themselves.

 

[Desseabar]

Blockades will absolutely be able to affect supply lines. We are also looking into increasing the overall supply use of armies deployed overseas (based on sea node distance) to make it harder to logistically support huge deployments far away.

Maybe one other option is just to say that overseas battalions must be <= navy size as a hard cap? That way the AI is prevented from shipping the Qing army to Europe. By just increasing the supply use, I suspect the AI might struggle to calculate that properly.

Put another way: for market areas outside of your capital which are not connected by land, each country can only sustain [battalion] <= [navy size] as a hard cap. That would also cover eg Sardinia-Piedmont can't sustain 50 battalions in Sardinia without a large navy, or prevent Denmark from waging a massive war in Togo.