So as anyone having restored the glorious Byzantine Empire as Greece and taken back the righteous Finnish lands as Sweden, I'm looking forward to Victoria 3.
But looking at the recent paradox games which came out this year, I made a nightmare.
Paradox finally announces Victoria 3. First features get summerized as "Victoria 2 better and with more". Hype goes toward the maximum level. And then hell breaks loose. As development goes on, the devs realize that, as with Stellaris and HOI4, they were too ambitous.
The economy they planned to be easier to understand and to manage while being still complex and interconnected turns out to be either uninteresting, too simplified, a load on the CPU or the 3 of them.
The system of Great Powers remains, but it is scrapped from its special interactions (influence, interventions...). Minor/Major powers get the same diplomatic possibilites as "it's no fun to get limitations on your game because of your country". But Great Power status is "still beneficial as it will give you bonuses in science and prestige". Those bonuses are bland +X% and random events giving you money/science. Losing your GP status IG now hardly makes you raise an eyebrow IRL.
Minor power can initiate crisis freely. Those crisis are limitated to only themselves at first, then propagates to their neighbours and the GP. While good on paper, this system leads you to recieve 3 crisis alerts each month. Devs hastily fix this by giving a time modifier on crisis you can get and you'll likely never be able to involve yourself in the crisis you want as RNG god gives you the crisis for independance of Guatemala 3 times a row.
On politics, the devs understood the need to fix the clickfest that were the events during the elections. Therefore, politics get simplified on 4 2 dimensional axis : autocracy/democracy, militarism/pacifism, socialism/capitalism and protectionnism/free trade. You chose to push your people's opinion in one direction for each of the axis, for each state, and forget about it the rest of the game. Playing Russia, this task takes you 15 minutes every new game. 1 month after release, everyone gears towards the OP combination of autocratic pacifists favouring free trade and socialism (aka carebear fascists). As getting information about the various political parties of every country and their stance on each of the axis is too tedious, they are reduced to 3 parties for each country, while the 8 majors of 1836 having unique ones, and the other countries generic ones. However the devs promise a political party creator soon after release, once major issues are fixed.
Colonies get kinda the same system as before, but the devs finally introduce a window which lets you manage your colonies by having a clear view of which areas you are colonizing, and letting you automate their development by choosing which priority you give to each of them. However, as there is not much to do during the game considering the uselessness of economy (you get tons of money once you have built 2 cigar factories) and the useless crisis spam by minors, colonies are divided in roughly 20km² areas you have to colonize by hand. As the artist team is quite unnecessary on the rest of the game, they focus on this part by giving it artworks, 3D modelization of colonized areas, and lots of different events randomly spamming. Those events give you pointless bonuses most of the time. Complaints from players asking for an automatisation of colonization finally leads to the devs announcing this feature, but not for the early game and only if a certain tech is researched, as they feel that "there is always a cost involved in automating core parts of the game experience". This can be understood as "ok, we failed to make that part of the game interesting, but there is, like, 40% of workhours of the game development which went down that feature, it's kinda hard to totally throw it away, because that's what it's going to be as everyone is gonna skip it if we give the option to."
The military gameplay doesn't get any changes, for lack of dev time due to the other issues. It turns out to be the only functionning and mildly interesting feature of the game. The AI, however, is keen to declare war to all its neighbours at the same time.
At that point I wake up swearing and I wonder if I really want to see Victoria 3 at all. Some months ago, I was as impatient as most of you...
But looking at the recent paradox games which came out this year, I made a nightmare.
Paradox finally announces Victoria 3. First features get summerized as "Victoria 2 better and with more". Hype goes toward the maximum level. And then hell breaks loose. As development goes on, the devs realize that, as with Stellaris and HOI4, they were too ambitous.
The economy they planned to be easier to understand and to manage while being still complex and interconnected turns out to be either uninteresting, too simplified, a load on the CPU or the 3 of them.
The system of Great Powers remains, but it is scrapped from its special interactions (influence, interventions...). Minor/Major powers get the same diplomatic possibilites as "it's no fun to get limitations on your game because of your country". But Great Power status is "still beneficial as it will give you bonuses in science and prestige". Those bonuses are bland +X% and random events giving you money/science. Losing your GP status IG now hardly makes you raise an eyebrow IRL.
Minor power can initiate crisis freely. Those crisis are limitated to only themselves at first, then propagates to their neighbours and the GP. While good on paper, this system leads you to recieve 3 crisis alerts each month. Devs hastily fix this by giving a time modifier on crisis you can get and you'll likely never be able to involve yourself in the crisis you want as RNG god gives you the crisis for independance of Guatemala 3 times a row.
On politics, the devs understood the need to fix the clickfest that were the events during the elections. Therefore, politics get simplified on 4 2 dimensional axis : autocracy/democracy, militarism/pacifism, socialism/capitalism and protectionnism/free trade. You chose to push your people's opinion in one direction for each of the axis, for each state, and forget about it the rest of the game. Playing Russia, this task takes you 15 minutes every new game. 1 month after release, everyone gears towards the OP combination of autocratic pacifists favouring free trade and socialism (aka carebear fascists). As getting information about the various political parties of every country and their stance on each of the axis is too tedious, they are reduced to 3 parties for each country, while the 8 majors of 1836 having unique ones, and the other countries generic ones. However the devs promise a political party creator soon after release, once major issues are fixed.
Colonies get kinda the same system as before, but the devs finally introduce a window which lets you manage your colonies by having a clear view of which areas you are colonizing, and letting you automate their development by choosing which priority you give to each of them. However, as there is not much to do during the game considering the uselessness of economy (you get tons of money once you have built 2 cigar factories) and the useless crisis spam by minors, colonies are divided in roughly 20km² areas you have to colonize by hand. As the artist team is quite unnecessary on the rest of the game, they focus on this part by giving it artworks, 3D modelization of colonized areas, and lots of different events randomly spamming. Those events give you pointless bonuses most of the time. Complaints from players asking for an automatisation of colonization finally leads to the devs announcing this feature, but not for the early game and only if a certain tech is researched, as they feel that "there is always a cost involved in automating core parts of the game experience". This can be understood as "ok, we failed to make that part of the game interesting, but there is, like, 40% of workhours of the game development which went down that feature, it's kinda hard to totally throw it away, because that's what it's going to be as everyone is gonna skip it if we give the option to."
The military gameplay doesn't get any changes, for lack of dev time due to the other issues. It turns out to be the only functionning and mildly interesting feature of the game. The AI, however, is keen to declare war to all its neighbours at the same time.
At that point I wake up swearing and I wonder if I really want to see Victoria 3 at all. Some months ago, I was as impatient as most of you...
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