Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #145 - Military Improvements

[Nafetz16]

Could you please also add presets for mobilization options? So one can quickly switch between attacking and defending options. Or actually tie them to the order that the army has, so different settings for attacking and defending that get switched whenever the player changes the order.

 

[stormtemplar]

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.

I'm glad this is the case (afaik it has not always been). But my broader point is that because anything short of a supply shortage has no military effect, only a financial one, it severely undervalues military industry, particularly as maintaining military industry is a financial penalty anyway. Anything short of a pure shortage can still be solved with money, which just isn't reflective of how military stuff worked, particularly toward the back half of this period.

I view it as kind of similar to the problem addressed by the food security system: additional costs simply aren't the only result of there not being enough food, and therefore low profitablity agriculture was less important that it ought to be under the old system. In a similar way, military goods shortages can't be purely abstracted away by price. I can imagine, for example, that if my furniture factory isn't able to get enough wood, the additional cost represents substitutions that are too granular for the game to track, like using more expensive alternative materials. This works well because factories are a purely economic unit, so they only care about cost anyway.

There's no amount of extra money that can conjure up guns and ammo you don't have, however, and the effects this would have on troops aren't well simulated by cost, nor are there really viable substitution options. Using anything other than purpose built military hardware would come with massive efficiency penalties IRL. (In reality even imports are problematic because of logistical and training concerns but even HOI isn't that granular so I don't expect Vicky to be)

 

[Troyen]

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

It should be the standard goods tooltip you see almost anywhere else. Total market buy/sell orders, price, and price trend. For grain it's not often a big deal, but some of the mobilization options require more niche goods (like Radios, Opium, or Wine) and it's important to know whether I'd be short 20 or 200 by enabling the option. For example, the morale booster choice between Tobacco and Chocolate requires toggling the option and comparing the increased cost to determine which is cheaper instead of simply being able to hover over the goods tooltip to check relative market price.

Actually, anywhere there are basic tooltips like "grain is used to feed people" they should be replaced with the full good tooltip showing market buy/sell orders and price. The military is one prominent example, but I think there are a few others scattered about (maybe the pop needs/SoL/wealth tooltips?) that every time I stumble across I need to manually close out what I was doing, go to the market window, filter for the specific good, pull up the information there, and then go back to what I was doing before. Since the whole game revolves around goods price management, having the market status of the good immediately available is immensely helpful everywhere the good is referenced.

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?

I don't think it's clear at all what the projected mobilization cost and overseas deployment cost will be for the army. We can see the peacetime unmobilized cost, but I've been playing since release and have never found the actual mobilization cost listed somewhere (especially since it's impacted by an increase in goods consumption). If that is hidden on a tooltip somewhere, I'd recommend making it displayed more prominantly on the military/formation screens.

I don't think conscription costs are listed either, but that may be more complicated to calculate.

 

[Bisonmask]

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.

I agree that this would be a lot of difficulty for not much benefit but this is *not* accurate to how the game currently plays. Launching multiple invasions is basically the "meta" strategy for getting GB out of wars because the wargoal and exhaustion systems almost always make invading the mainland a requirement

 

[Bisonmask]

I feel the armies problems would be far less severe if it kept to Vic II's system with refinements. It shouldn't be this hard.

Sorry for double posting

I really wish people would stop asking for this, the current system is far from perfect but Vic 2 had a worse system and one that was way more exploitable. Even the EU system is terribly abusable for single player and remains extremely hacky in multiplayer

If you miss running circles around the AI in wars you should lose I promise you can still do that in this game, just check a guide

 

[L-Histidine]

Well, it's largely band-aids in a situation where a fundamental rework is warranted, but I'm entirely in favor of good band-aids.

Aside from the missing band-aid, namely for the micromanagement of army composition (brought up on page 5). War exhaustion also needs serious work. Overseas supply may get looked at, at least.

Re. encirclements: they'd need accompanying changes to avoid trivializing the game in some scenarios, e.g. how we can currently counter-invade an opponent's successfully landed naval invasion and wipe the whole front from behind.

 

[VineFynn]

I assume the awfulness that is tuning army compositions will be looked at later?

 

[amocpower]

I hope "Large fronts" don´t cause armies move like ping-pong.

I have lots of Ottoman runs. Whole Russian front is only one front. Balkan and caucasian is one front. But armies are at begin of war in caucasia. They fight for Balkan,too. After push towers to north, the front HQ move suddenly to Balkan/Ukrania. Armies move from caucasia to Balkan/Ukrania. Whole front is many month undefended. After few moments its move back to caucasia. Russia didnt need to move around blacksee, so they have huge advance agains you.

Only "one front" around Blacksee is not working so good. I hope that will be not everywhere now.

 

[Jay9462]

slight tangent but, have you thought about making it eaiser to give/receive millitary assistance? I've found multiple times that when a rival of mine is fighting a war somewhere that I dont want to get directly involved in for whatever reason, if I try to offer millitary assistance to the other side to prop them up they often wont accept it unless we are arleady very good friends. I would think that at least during the war itself the AI should be more willing to accept help from otherwise neutral or even hostile powers as long as they're hostile to their enemy, and the AI should be willing to help thier rivals enemies out in a simular manner as well.

 

[AlleyTheToaster]

These types of reworks are always welcomed! imo this is very fresh system. And once you refine it well could be used in more games and mixed and matched with other mechanics in the future.

 

[Rudawitz]

Hello
Just asking here a question, or better, trying to understand why a certain situation happens in my games.

When I assign an HQ to one of my Armies the idea is to have them in a certain area for a specific objective. For instance if I am playing as Netherlands, and I am afraid of possible revolts and/or theater of war in Indonesia, I will assign an Army HQ there, in order to immediately enter the theater, without having to wait for them to come back from Europe. That at least is how I interpret the HQ mechanics. However usually after a war, some or part of my HQ reset them self and I have to rearrange them from the beginning. Is this something that will be fixed in 1.9, is it a bug or simply me not understanding this specific mechanics? Thanks in advance

This happens in all of my games as well.

 

[AntonVisby]

Mostly exited for these changes. The military access is a much needed feature. However, I don't like that it goes both ways. In the Prussia - Belgium - France case I think France should get the option to drag Belgium into the war if they see fit. I think that would balance way better, as it would become much more risky for countries to grant military access. If its just a freebie for Belgium they can just give it to anyone.

Are you looking at rebalance of units? I think tech and unit levels should have way more impact than currently. Right now its possible to beat trench inf with machine guns by spamning enough line infantry. I would like to see bigger gaps between tech. Maybe skirmish inf would mainly buff attack, while trench inf would buff denfense a lot more. It should get to a point where it's almost impossible to break trench infantry until you get tanks and squad based inf. I would think this could be a lot more interesting, just by giving some units more attack and some more defense. If not I might have to make my first mod

 

[Aloraand]

Could you sprinkle in some number balancing (for instance good consumptions etc.) to make the system different to use?

As far as I can tell, besides the military access giving you some more strategic maneuverability, the rest of the changes here are just bug fixes. This means that 90% of games will play the same military wise, but maybe without some frustration if the features here are delivered. For a patch that took so long to deliver, I'd like some novelty to the areas addressed so I have to re- think how I use them. This could be achieved by just playing around with the numbers, without being another feature you have to develop. E.g. making armies consume more goods (especially artillery) as the game progresses or making military industries output less but at a higher price.

 

[yurcick]

By the way, can we get an ability to transform any unit to any other one, at least within the category?
Even if we can find narrative explanations on why shrapnel artillery can be turned into siege artillery, but not into heavy tanks, this still absolutely isn’t worth the headache.

 

[GaussianCopula]

Great changes except for the "military access" part.

Attacking another country through a third country would by the standards of the 19th century make this country automatically a belligarant in the war. This question was a major factor leading to the Battle of Sedan, as Belgium would not allow French troops to slip from the Germans through their territory, as even this would have been seen as an act of aggression by Belgium against Germany.

 

[AntonVisby]

Maybe I'm getting this wrong, but this can still happen.

Imagine I want to invade Switzerland and get military access from Sardinia Piedmont, but border neither.
Now I can invade Switzerland, but all they can do is defend when I decide to show up.

This is so important. There is no consequences for Sardinia Piedmont for giving military access and not much to do for Switzerland. Switzerland should have the ability to drag Sardinia Piedmont into the war with a humiliation war goal or something.

 

[GaussianCopula]

This is so important. There is no consequences for Sardinia Piedmont for giving military access and not much to do for Switzerland. Switzerland should have the ability to drag Sardinia Piedmont into the war with a humiliation war goal or something.

The ideal setup - that is also consistent with the diplomatic play system - would be that during the diplomatic play a country can announce their willingness to provide military access and the opposing side can decide whether they accept this or escalate them into a full participant, in which case they can put wargoals on them as they please.

Being able to provide military access during a running war would be a nightmare for MP games.

 

[Dani9714]

Ciao,
Mi piacciono questi miglioramenti e apprezzo il vostro continuo lavoro.
Vorrei chiedervi se in futuro aveste la possibilità di inserire e conservare maggiori informazioni/dettagli statistici sulla nazione di gioco come se fosse un riepilogo di ciò che è successo di più importante durante la partita come le guerre svolte per diventare un impero (forse esiste qualcosa ad esempio in eu4, ma simile c'è anche nei titoli total war).
Infatti mi dispiace che subito dopo che una guerra finisce non posso più vedere da nessuna parte quanto mi è costata in termini di denaro e in termini di soldati anche in ottica di un conflitto successivo.
Insomma un sommario di eventi e statistiche non sarebbe male (almeno per me che mi piace questo genere di informazioni)
Grazie mille!

 

[alexdukhnovsky]

The front system is really awesome, I’m really glad you’re polishing it. Will we see fog of war, line of sight, reconnaissance, sabotage, and the ability to plan attacks and defenses on different parts of the same front to enable military maneuvers?

 

[Commander Pioneer]

I do not know if the Developers know of the Ultra Historical Mod Series for Vicky 3 but they add a very specific feature that I think massively improves military gameplay - the production methods get added as tech you can use in the mobilization law, usually for the cost of consuming more guns in exchange for more stats. I think this adds just a little bit more depth and I'd like to know if the devs considered a similar feature?