Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #140 - 1.8 post-release thoughts

[guiskj]

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• Front splitting causing wars to become unmanageable or frustrating
• Units suddenly teleporting away when their front disappears
• Supply isn’t impactful enough and armies win battles they should really lose when facing critical equipment shortages
• Lack of a proper military access system, i.e. Prussia having to naval invade to reach Denmark
• Troop allocation to offensive vs defensive battles causing unexpected outcomes (for example, a general using all local troops to defend against one naval invasion causing another naval invasion to just walk in unopposed)

For the next update (1.9), our ambition is to take a crack at all of these issues and in particular try to find a proper solution for the front splitting and troop teleportation woes once and for all. Finding good solutions for these issues is going to be a fairly major undertaking, so you might have to wait a while for 1.9, but I promise we’ll try to make it worth the wait!

Thank you for the update and transparency. My main feedback here is that a long delay for 1.9 is going to be painful. I would MUCH rather have the promised Naval changes in 1.9 and a couple of the smaller Army fixes in 1.9 and let the front-splitting and teleportation rework wait for 1.10, then.

Front-splitting and teleportation are super annoying, but they don't happen every time. The Naval gameplay however, from buildings to fleet management to convoy raiding to naval invasion is a bloody nightmare every single time. Please don't make me wait for a long 1.9 and then for 1.10 to finally get naval gameplay in better shape!

 

[Álvaro Núñez de Lara]

Military has been the achilles heel of Victoria 3 since the system was elaborated on back in development and after two years I think we need to face the facts, the decision to go in this bold new direction (even if done for good motives) was probably the wrong call given how it is still the biggest complaint about the game and is widely perceived to be the element holding it back from wider audiences.

Given how critical the military aspect is to a grand strategy game and given how, well, borked it is right now, taking the time to properly sort it out once and for all is the right call even if that means delaying other content.

So long as the system IS fixed once and for all. I don't know if that will be in the form of an overhaul towards a more traditional system (though I think that is unlikely) or if they will try and refine the system they have to be far better (which I think is likelier) but whatever the outcome, they need to get war to a place where it stops being the thing everyone moans about.

Hopefully 1.9 accomplishes that.

Agreed. I just personally dont have any issue with the current military system other than the naval system. But I understand others might be a bigger issue for them. I just think some people will never be happy no matter how much they fix the current system and will always consider it "broken", just because it's not what they want.

 

[Prob32]

Removing pain points is good for the military, but I would also say adding more points of agency for the player is also important. Using the freed up time the player dedicated to micro towards macro concerns of supply, doctrines, generals, politics, tech, and diplomacy.

This is a great point- at the worst of times when your fronts are splitting and armies are teleporting its very frustrating. At the "best" of times its just a very very bland player interaction with lots of tedium to manage effectively.

My fear is the commentary was around bug fixing which is part of the problem but only 30-40% of the core issue.

 

[Álvaro Núñez de Lara]

At the "best" of times its just a very very bland player interaction with lots of tedium to manage effectively.

I dont understand this point. I dont micromanage war. I invest in cutting edge tech and have the army well supply. I click send to the front. I dont need to do anything else. Either the battles are won or lost. Its out of my control but i can focus on other things. How is that tedious to manage? Its not release version anymore.

 

[Basileus2]

There's a timeline of my experience with updates to Paradox games. The initial "Bugfixes! New changes! Bugfixes! Content! Bugfixes! Balancing!". Which gradually progresses into "There's a few bugs here and there. I've gotten a bit used to this content. Some of this stuff probably needs balancing. Then, the teasers and sneak-peaks for the next update often get me to a point where I can't play the current version because "It's annoying having to put up with this knowng it'll be updated in a few weeks."

What I'm saying while I don't expect to stop playing 1.8 just yet,

military update confirmed for 1. 9

is going to be featuring prominently in a lot of my thoughts from now on. Consider me hyped for the next patch <3

unfortunately i think the way they built the mechanics for it, war will never be satisfactory even if they fix the bugs and front splitting. we could've had a more high level, 'head of government's' view of war while still being true to how war was actually conducted throughout the game's timeline by continuing to have stacks, but by automating them like you can in EU4 / Imperator (perhaps a more advanced version of this) then unlocking a tech which allows you to chain them together into army groups and draw fronts for them like you do in HoI4. As things stand, the front system is far too abstracted, obtuse and opaque.

 

[Basileus2]

Removing pain points is good for the military, but I would also say adding more points of agency for the player is also important. Using the freed up time the player dedicated to micro towards macro concerns of supply, doctrines, generals, politics, tech, and diplomacy.

except we see no plan to implement the following points despite big outcries for it: supply chain and logistics (e.g. refusal to move to weapon & ammo stockpiling), no doctrine mechanics (e.g. no general staff, actual differentiation of general types / traits due to the overly abstracted war system), no internal politics other than event pop ups and law upgrades (no cabinets, no parliaments, no true election system or province governance, etc.)

 

[Ambereyed]

It's great to hear about focusing on military, but please, for the love of Wiz, think about reducing some micro. Building an army one regiment by one, keeping an eye on units ratio in every army, issuing orders individually to each of dozens generals, constantly switching trade routes/production methods in armament factories between peace/war time economy, predicting from a crystal ball how much resources my armies will need after I manually mobilize them... it's a chore. It's not fun. I believe front system was designed to reduce unnecesary micro and shift players attention to some "grander scope" of things. However it only changed where the micro is.

For beggining maybe add some army planner. Allow us to make and copy army/fleet templates and build them with one single click like in Stellaris. Allow us to give orders to whole fronts. Abolish individual army generals and make something like "general staff" and allow us to manually choose generals for only 3-4 countrywide posts (like Stellaris council), but with greater impact on internal politics and overall army effectiveness.

 

[Republic of Mercury]

I dont understand this point. I dont micromanage war. I invest in cutting edge tech and have the army well supply. I click send to the front. I dont need to do anything else. Either the battles are won or lost. Its out of my control but i can focus on other things. How is that tedious to manage? Its not release version anymore.

Well, sometimes you need to keep an eye on a front to ensure that the armies you assigned to it haven't all spontaenously decided to go somewhere else. Sometimes that front splits into two fronts, and all the armies happily grind down one whilst all the progress is undone on the one left undefended. Sometimes an army you wanted to push one vulnerable front finishes, then decides to do a Charge of The Light Brigade somewhere you were happy leaving as a defensive stalemate. It can get a bit annoying.

 

[Prob32]

I dont understand this point. I dont micromanage war. I invest in cutting edge tech and have the army well supply. I click send to the front. I dont need to do anything else. Either the battles are won or lost. Its out of my control but i can focus on other things. How is that tedious to manage? Its not release version anymore.

You don't find it tedious clicking around to add every single battalion to a specific state, making sure you count out exactly 50 infantry and 50 artillery? What about if you need to get a proper size naval invasion fleet of your big army? You don't mind clicking into a panel and typing or sliding exactly 25 inf- 25 arty to get a new army?

That's before we get into the fact that anytime there's a front split or a naval invasion you're panic splitting existing armies to try and cover the naval invasion or the new front split off.

There's a ton of micromanagement in the war system right now and none of it is additive decision making, if I'm taking time to do military stuff I want it to be making interesting gameplay choices and interactions not count 25 by 25 or split assigning.

 

[SeekTruthFromFx]

I feel like this really glosses over the core issue here- it's not that we need a simple *balance* tweak to make combat less effective when under shortage of military goods. Its that we fundamentally have no supply system or logistics system other than just a modifier. We need to see equipment goods originating in a military HQ then trying to move all the way across the map to a front and it being impacted by distance, rails and front size. A la hoi4...

Also our economy doesn't find itself under transportation shortage when all the trucks and trains are moving troops from warsaw hq to siberia. That's a huge issue.

This would be nice in an ideal world but I am concerned a supply system on the scale you propose would probably be a major performance hog. I would love to be proved wrong: it might be possible that they can somehow piggyback supply onto the existing trade route system. But IIRC that only works at sea, not on land, whereas you seem to want a system that covers land too.

In 2035 when we all have 24-core CPUs with 1GB cache that might be a great thing to do, but right now I'm not sure it would be my top priority for CPU cycles. We only have the bare bones of a naval system and I hope that one day we'll get more flavourful politics mechanics with Cabinet ministers, Presidential elections, dynastic succession struggles, and so on. I would rather have those things than a HoI-style supply system.

I would like a supply system that takes some account of distance (so we no longer have the entire Russian army fighting in Mexico without any logistic difficulties) but I'd hope that could be done without a complex graph and pathfinding. This is not a serious suggestion, more of an example, but could you cheaply calculate the distance from barracks to front using pixel coordinates?? Something like that might limit intercontinental supply without eating too much computation power and cache space.

 

[FeelsAmazingMan]

I'd just like to add as I haven't seen in it yet that the war score/ticking system is connected to all the war feels weird comments, but hope someone else can help in leaving some expansive feedback

 

[Prob32]

This would be nice in an ideal world but I am concerned a supply system on the scale you propose would probably be a major performance hog. I would love to be proved wrong: it might be possible that they can somehow piggyback supply onto the existing trade route system. But IIRC that only works at sea, not on land, whereas you seem to want a system that covers land too.

In 2035 when we all have 24-core CPUs with 1GB cache that might be a great thing to do, but right now I'm not sure it would be my top priority for CPU cycles. We only have the bare bones of a naval system and I hope that one day we'll get more flavourful politics mechanics with Cabinet ministers, Presidential elections, dynastic succession struggles, and so on. I would rather have those things than a HoI-style supply system.

I wouldn't like a supply system that takes some account of distance (so we no longer have the entire Russian army fighting in Mexico without any logistic difficulties) but I'd hope that could be done without a complex graph and pathfinding. This is not a serious suggestion, more of an example, but could you cheaply calculate the distance from barracks to front using pixel coordinates?? Something like that might limit intercontinental supply without eating too much computation power and cache space.

Honestly I'm at the point where I think we start ripping out cultures and religions and other pop mechanics I don't interact with to get the logistics system and go from there. That's just me though.

 

[47pik]

I think it would be 1.10 after 1.9 cause of the goofy naming system devs chose, I feel like navy is possible in 1.9 if it focuses on military.

It’s not goofy, it’s called semantic versioning and it’s very important in developing software. 2.0 inherently following 1.9.x would be truly goofy as it would render all the numbers meaningless.

 

[Republic of Mercury]

I'd just like to add as I haven't seen in it yet that the war score/ticking system is connected to all the war feels weird comments, but hope someone else can help in leaving some expansive feedback

I think progress on that will probably happen with fundamnetal changes to how peace-negotations work, which I don't expect to come with 1.9

 

[lilcritt]

I also want to take a moment to talk about the release and reception of Pivot of Empire. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback about the flavor it adds to India and how much more interesting playing in the region has become, which of course we’re very happy to hear!

The positive feedback:

When its not outright been broken its frustrating and lackluster.

 

[47pik]

A bit disappointing to hear the next patch is another army rework instead of the much more needed navy rework, but hey, if this is what makes more sense from a fundamentals perspective, I’m with it (I’m guessing some of this supply/logistics stuff might underpin those eventual navy changes that have been talked about). Plus maybe this will stop every topic on this forum from being crying about military.

Just kidding, most people crying about military will never stop until they get their toy soldiers. But regardless, supply and logistics will be a huge benefit to the game, as will the other things you’re talking about, and I look forward to a more complete vision of this games version of armies.

While you’re doing this rework though, please do commit to your vision further and reduce the micro on armies themselves, it’s very tedious and I would much rather be engaging with the macro-scale mechanics (and these new logistics/supply ones)

 

[starchitect]

Id really love to see a rework of the Italian unification events, especially after the discrimination rework, it really seems like the risogimento should directly impact the Italian national movement in austria, or the radical movements in other Italian states rather than just adding radicals. The first Italian war never happens around 1848 (springtime of the peoples could certainly use some love as well) and when what should be the second eventually does happen (often well past the 1860s) you tend to get Trieste and Trento joining in which makes it all or nothing- with the crush the secession war goal Austria either gets everything back or nothing. There is no chance for splitting off Lombardy or Venetia separately. There is also no Confederation of Central Italy or any real role for the Pope/papal states beyond simply dissolving when Italy finally forms- a series of events that reduce the Papal states to only Lazio before final unification as well as impacts on traditionalist/catholic movements related to treatment of the Pope are sorely needed.

Edit: why the disagrees for a suggestion to apply the new movement mechanics to an old JE that needs some work anyway?

 

[Ranamar]

• We need to rethink how we set rewards for Journal Entries so that they feel appropriate to the challenge of completing them. We also need to get better about telling the player what those rewards are going to be so they don’t have to make a guess or check the wiki when deciding whether or not to try and complete a JE.

A very minor one on this is that I wish things were less vague when it says, "a new character will appear". Sometimes this is an agitator. Sometimes, this is an IG leader. I realize that usually it says "person XXX will resign" if they're replacing the IG leader, but somehow that feels easier to miss than if "a new character will appear" was followed by "as an agitator" or "as a leader".

 

[ThePlayerBG]

For the next update (1.9), our ambition is to take a crack at all of these issues and in particular try to find a proper solution for the front splitting and troop teleportation woes once and for all. Finding good solutions for these issues is going to be a fairly major undertaking, so you might have to wait a while for 1.9, but I promise we’ll try to make it worth the wait!

Press X to doubt

 

[Nicthecat]

I'm excited to see that military will be getting some attention. The three facets that I think drag it down the most:

1. Outcomes of engagements are so important that they have my full attention yet I have little agency regarding their circumstances and I can't do anything to influence them once they begin.
   • I can't move troops to help an ongoing engagement
   • I can't order troops to retreat early
   • I can't deterministically pick the state where my advancing troops fight in (I know about setting a strategic objective and it doesn't work well enough to be an adequate solution for this).
   • The quality of admirals/generals is too random for a game without the ability to get significant modifiers elsewhere. If my opponent has the same production methods and mobilization options as me, but has an experienced defensive general or trench rat, whereas I can't find any offensive generals, I just can't win assuming all else is equal. There are no national ideas to my country to make me stronger, there are no institutions I can persue to give me an advantage, I can't micro my units to attack/defend in beneficial terrain.
2. The UI is clunky
   • I appreciate the new feature to right click a front to send my army to it but why does a big window pop showing the army configuration?
   • If a front is "busy", it's impossible to click on what I want to. Since a lot of things pop up or get larger when hovered, I often have to zoom in to the furthest extend just to see or click on the circle that represents the balance of power on each side of a front
   • Mobilization options are nice, but having to micro manage them for every single army makes me want to have the fewest possible number of armies. Once I unlock a higher quality food option, why wouldn't I always want it enabled?
   • The system of landing troops from boats feels very gamey and arbitrary. The fact that only one landing can take place per state is also annoying. If I want to land, I should be able to do it without waiting for my allies to fail their landings first.
   • I never want to engage with the navy system outside of landings because I never get to see the impact of my efforts and so it feels meaningless.
     • I see when someone else absolutely destroys my convoys and I lose all my trade routes. Why is there no way for me to tell how badly I'm hurting the enemy economy or military effort? I am aware that you can see the convoy network of the enemy at a lower % (on a screen you have to scroll to find the right person on), but this isn't impactful enough information.
     • Hunting down enemy navies convoy raiding is annoying because they can just move nodes with no consequence. I don't want to keep having to pause my game to move my boats one node over.
     • I'm not given enough information to know which nodes are the most worthwhile for raiding or defending. Is there even a difference between all the nodes on your coast? I have no idea.
3. It's opaque and always will be unless the military system returns to having discrete units on the map I can right click to move to a province similar to every other game.
   • Navies can move through my navies occupying a sea node without combat. This is because naval combat can only happen if two players both decide they want it to happen at a particular sea node. Why can't I force an enemy navy out of port so I can destroy it?
   • The difference between 10 armies of 10 troops and 1 army of 100 troops plays out in a gamey fashion. With 10 armies you can have 40 generals which means you can create a bunch of battles at the same time. However, when attacked, it seems like fewer troops are selected? I've noticed something similar with navies where if I have one admiral on 40 boats vs a fleet of 70 boats but with 4 admirals, the enemy will always select fewer boats than me to fight with. Something about this feels wrong, and micro managing generals to achieve particular outcomes takes me out of the game. Maybe only one admiral/general per army and when that general attacks/defends, they only bring their troops, limited by infrastructure. This at least takes out the randomness.
4. Misc
   • Why does a failed attack allow the defender to regain territory? The defender didn't do anything to get that territory back, and it creates issues with allies losing territory you've gained because RNG determined it was their turn to attack, or they attacked when you don't want them to.
   • Why is there an arbitrary limit of barracks per state depending on your law? There is an unlimited number of factories you can build in a state, so it's not a realism issue. This creates an unecessary difference in potential power between nations that have small states vs larger states.

Thank you for all your effort, I will continue to play the game regardless of if these issues are fixed, I just won't be enjoying my time at war.