Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #82 - Voice of the People

[Serensius]

Overall I'm looking forward to the new content, and agitators will definitely shake things up. However with the immersion pack I am concerned that the game is going into an extremely railroaded direction for countries, starting with France, comparable to the typical Victoria 2 mod. Hopefully the events and journals are dynamic enough to prevent the railroading.

Agreed. Hoping that the journal events are well tied into the game’s systems, and that the AI is well equipped to handle them.

This style of content dropping was prevelant in Crusader Kings II, but those times are no more. Stellaris, Crusader Kings III and HOI4 are all still using and refining the content delivered through ealier DLCs, as well as elements themselves get bigger and bigger throuout the lifespan of a game.

I can’t speak directly on Stellaris or CK3, but at least for HoI 4 the early DLC content was in a janky state for a long time after subsequent releases.

The focus tree system was never designed to interact with other focus trees, so once lots of nations got them you often saw weird results (like nations creating their own factions despite already being in one, or randomly attacking countries as soon as they got claims on them).

Or the fact that on ahistorical mode you might end up with a communist Japan, fascist US, and a monarchist Germany, and no sensible WW2


Also there was a level of power creep, rendering older focus trees weak on comparison.

There’s been some good efforts lately to rebalance stuff, but I think HoI 4’s DLCs are a bit of a mess and not a good example for Victoria 3 to follow

Will we be seeing the Revolutions of 1848 happening with this immersion pack? I'd love to see a major getting a revolution in or around '48 and causing a tidal wave of turmoil around Europe. If France is the originator all the better.

Sorry, I have one more question:

Will the DLC do anything about Nice? Currently, it just sits there in Sardinia-Piedmont, but with France getting more content, can we expect there to be some deals with Italy/SP happening?

Regarding both of these, and my comment above. IMO voice of the people is a great theme for a DLC and it makes sense to add more content for France.

But I hope that each DLC won’t slavishly follow the format of just adding content to a few nations. With HoI, that created the problem of short-sighted implementation of mechanics/triggers that made it messy. Instead it would be great to see effort going into making dynamic mechanics that can be reused for other nations and iterated on as new updates are dropped, even while the flavor is different.

The two quotes above illustrate that I think. Content for France is great, but it’s not worth much if there isn’t a proper Springtime of the People across Europe, or a way to interact with Sardinia-Piedmont and the Italian revolts. Everything is so connected in Victoria 3 and I hope the DLC content reflects that.

I have full faith in the team to do this though, and I’m excited to see what comes next!

 

[Less2]

Will the most well known political agitator of the 20th century make an appearance? I'm speaking of course about our good friend Adolf Hitler.

Don't tell me he's outside the scope of the time period, you're already including characters from the early 20th century and the beer hall putsch was in 1923.

 

[FluffayOne]

I spent money on almost all games and dlc to everything from EU1 to HoI4 but it is enough.

You'd think you would of learned your lesson with HoI4 being stripped and barebones for years on end, with the re-addition of fuel only being a recent addition several years well into the games lifespan.

That said, after 1.1 and 1.2's addition, as well as what was shown of 1.3? I'm more than fine with PDX putting some work on the DLC treadmill and I'm happy that they're sticking to the plan of making the vast, vast majority of additions part of the free experience. Depending on what the next few DD's before release show us and what's incorporated, I might or might not buy it more as a "Screw it, why not, I support what they've done so far and I'm going to keep playing anyway" more-so than any actual interest in additional characters or the exile mechanic (Since I assume the randomly generated agitators will have a country of origin they can be returned to anyway and any possible "IG's want you to Exile X" thing is going to be handled by event if it exists. If not, that's gonna be a rather annoyed purchase down the road during a sale), even if I prefer distancing the game from individual characters and their relationships as much as possible due to disliking that facet of the game in both I:R and CK.

I will say, I do love the artstyle direction the game has for anything that involves 2D portraits/scenery and I do wish we'd have more of than and less of the 3D models. It's understandable that it'll be jarring as hell with the mandatory randomly generated portraits for made-up people and way too much of an investment cost for little return, but I do hope we get more stuff from the art department in one form or another that's drawn by hand instead of 3D models.

 

[Aloraand]

I'm super excited that we are getting to the stage of the devs being satisfied with the base game and giving us new features that are not just what the community asked for, but out of the box thinking and what the game needs.

That said, will the characters appear based on the material condition or based on historicity. I'm not particularly fond of Marx appearing at the country that first researches socialism, as that could be Qing for all what we know and that doesn't make a lot of sense given the logic of the game.

Edit: added missing thinking

 

[vyshan]

Better get working on that secession rework so because I want to see wall to wall Fenians (and of course Daniel O'Connell and CSP).

Fenian raids would be cool. I am also imagining it for the balkans and the many revolts there.

 

[RaccoonCity]

France, one of the most, in my humble opinion, in need of a healthy dose of content​

The Immersion Packs DLC model is not a bad thing on its own, but the fact that you have the base game absolutely EMPTY of flavour content makes it a scam.

Basically you released the game empty of historical content, the events and journal entries for specific countries are almost non-existant.

I think you should add a little bit of flavour to the 15-20 countries most important of the game, because most of them, don't even have a single specific event or journal entry for them. Every Paradox game like EU4, CK3, HOI4 or even Vic2 had specific country events/decisions for a bunch of countries in the base game. Base game of Victoria 3 has almost nothing.

Immersion Packs DLCs? Yes, it's a good idea to grab money for keeping the game development going.
Immersion Packs DLCs when the base game has almost non existan flavour content? No. You should have added more base game content before starting the release of Immersion Packs.

And also this is gonna make the game look very unbalanced regarding flavour content. Now France will have a lot of content while all the other countries in the game are all generic and have almost no specific events or journal entries. Making an Immersion Pack for a specific country (France) when all the other countries, even important ones, have no content, is gonna look extremely weird.

You should release with 1.3 Free Update a bunch of basic content for the 15-20 countries most important of the game, I'm not being very ambitious here, not any specific mechanics, just some events and journal entries to fill up a little bit the world of historical immersion.

 

[riadach]

Fenian raids would be cool. I am also imagining it for the balkans and the many revolts there.

US picking up all Irish agitators as generals.

Australian colonies using them as governors.

 

[Moe 3mperor]

Will the mechanism under French Dynastic Struggle open for modding? Can I mod the same mechanism to other countries if I own the DLC?

 

[Ghostdevil]

Really like this, thanks pdx.

 

[Woifee]

How will agitators behave if the country he is in seizes to exist. Like he is in Frankfurt, Austria forms Germany and frankfurt stops exisiting. Does he move somwhere else, will he be in Germany?

 

[RaccoonCity]

I'm glad we got rid of focus trees as the basis for DLCs and moved on to journals. Plus ça change....

But Journals are just the typical "decision system" of Paradox games.

I'm actually missing some kind of "historical paths" mechanic besides events and decision, something like HOI4 focus tree, or EU4 mission tree, or Imperator Rome mission tree.

In Victoria 3 we didn't get anything new, just the same event system and decision system like in other PDX games, and the mechanic regarding "missions/focus tree" was just removed and not replaced by anything else.

 

[wilcoxchar]

I am glad we are getting more uses for characters however. I'd like to see Cabinets, sub-IG's, and maybe even full Parliaments represented some day.

Please no. A few new characters that are still effectively just there to add a little flavor to mass movements is fine, but stuff like cabinets and parliaments would really tilt the balance away from POPs and toward individuals and characters in a way that would get rid of what really makes Victoria unique among Paradox games, the influence of the POP system.

 

[BrotherJonathan]

But Journals are just the typical "decision system" of Paradox games.

I'm actually missing some kind of "historical paths" mechanic besides events and decision, something like HOI4 focus tree, or EU4 mission tree, or Imperator Rome mission tree.

In Victoria 3 we didn't get anything new, just the same event system and decision system like in other PDX games, and the mechanic regarding "missions/focus tree" was just removed and not replaced by anything else.

This is probably one of the most divisive issues across PDX games. For every person who agrees with your position, you'll find someone else who sees this as railroading and won't touch it with a 10 foot pole.

 

[$ilent_$trider]

Please no. A few new characters that are still effectively just there to add a little flavor to mass movements is fine, but stuff like cabinets and parliaments would really tilt the balance away from POPs and toward individuals and characters in a way that would get rid of what really makes Victoria unique among Paradox games, the influence of the POP system.

I mean, if we could get stuff like 30% of Rural Folks support communism, 50% are reactionary and 20% are vanguardists and you are able to assign a RF communist minister to a cabinet position to help facilitate (at the cost of some radicalization of the RF) some worker’s right law, I would be okay with these characters being a representation of the people pushing individuals into positions of leadership.

 

[gela1212]

i think folks are perhaps using rose-tinted glasses to remember the amount of flavor for specific countries that was in vanilla in paradox's other games.

eu4 release had a slightly tweaked version of the old mission system from eu3 and most of the missions you got were generic with a handful of specific ones for significant countries, which is not particularly different from what we have here in v3

i do agree that it is kind of odd that the ottoman empire is randomly one of the most flavorful nations in the entire game while france is basically flavorless but that's a priority rather than absolute quantity problem

 

[wilcoxchar]

I mean, if we could get stuff like 30% of Rural Folks support communism, 50% are reactionary and 20% are vanguardists and you are able to assign a RF communist minister to a cabinet position to help facilitate (at the cost of some radicalization of the RF) some worker’s right law, I would be okay with these characters being a representation of the people pushing individuals into positions of leadership.

The problem I see happening with this is you completely lose the representation aspect because the player then focuses their attention entirely on the "who is in the cabinet position" decision and not the "how much of the Rural Folk support this" part. It's about keeping the player's attention and decision-making centered on changing the makeup of POPs, and adding cabinets for the player to fiddle with inherently shifts much of that gameplay focus to manipulating characters instead of manipulating POPs.

 

[Soranya]

Too soon, base game is not solid enough to spare man power on expansions.
And i am not sure if the Bread Cenatur is a late Aprils Fool joke?

 

[BrotherJonathan]

i think folks are perhaps using rose-tinted glasses to remember the amount of flavor for specific countries that was in vanilla in paradox's other games.

eu4 release had a slightly tweaked version of the old mission system from eu3 and most of the missions you got were generic with a handful of specific ones for significant countries, which is not particularly different from what we have here in v3

i do agree that it is kind of odd that the ottoman empire is randomly one of the most flavorful nations in the entire game while france is basically flavorless but that's a priority rather than absolute quantity problem

Definitely. In unmodded Vic II it always kind of annoyed me that the USA bascially didn't have any unique content for the 2/3 portion of the game after the Civil War ended. Most playable nations having little or no unique content on release is generally standard for PDX games and has been pretty much ever since they abandoned the Jomini engine and it's rigid, scripted historical behavior.

 

[$ilent_$trider]

The problem I see happening with this is you completely lose the representation aspect because the player then focuses their attention entirely on the "who is in the cabinet position" decision and not the "how much of the Rural Folk support this" part. It's about keeping the player's attention and decision-making centered on changing the makeup of POPs, and adding cabinets for the player to fiddle with inherently shifts much of that gameplay focus to manipulating characters instead of manipulating POPs.

Oh, I see what you mean there. I mean, that sort of happens already in politics right? There’s a long discussion in political science about how much the “elites” of a party influence the supporters and how much the grassroots affect what becomes the leadership.
You should certainly have the option to assign a leader to a cabinet position that currently doesn’t have a full support of its IG, or you should try to convince the IG on changing their support to your chosen leader.

 

[StivKobra]

Baguette centaur.

That's it, already worth it.