Feedback Wanted: Diplomacy!

[yurcick]

I filled out the survey a few days ago but it got me thinking about what really is frustrating about diplomacy and the game in general

What really feels bad is this game has all these amazing systems for political and economic interaction, but at the level of the players interaction it's extremely abstracted and apolitical. Spam construction, change a law if the percentages are decent, wait for a character with a trait to appear.

What I mean by this is there is 0 Policy making. The game does not simulate government even though it could. There is no negotiation diplomatically, there is no negotiation domestically.

I wish I had a cabinet with a foreign minister, who could negotiate foreign policy with other powers over our spheres of influence.

I wish I could set a trade policy, negotiating with domestic IGs and foreign governments

I wish I could negotiate a budget within my government, and create industrial policy with subsidies and trade instead of doing state construction and selling it immediately to the private sector which makes no sense.

The game is a simulator in the sense that it has interlocking numbers creating a virtual economy, but it's not a simulation of government. Giving the entire game a feeling of an interesting mechanical toy, but not a real political and economic simulation.

We need the level of player interaction to be one of political negotiations and tough compromises. Rn it has many mechanics that could easily do that but at the level of the player the mechanics become extremely simple.

Keeping cohesion in your bloc up is one of the worst examples. Instead of actually engaging in an interesting negotiation and settlement of various political interests within the bloc. You just level up bloc tiers and slowly clamp down on autonomy.

A huge fault of this is the commitment to 0 railroading of any kind leading there to be 0 events or characters that are actually interesting. Everything is a generic event or a lazy journal entry. No characters have any "character" and you can make marx or Tubman a fascist because they are just a placeholder with a name for memes.

We need text boxes, we need lore, we need events that give us real political nuance and drama. And we need policy making and government simulation, not just hitting buttons on a calculator

I was totally with you until the railroading part.

V3 does have less railroading than most PDS GSG titles (probably less than any title except Stellaris, and there — for obvious reasons).
However, I disagree that there is zero of it.
I would like it to have less railroading, definitely.
While some uniqueness is tolerable (e.g. I don't think Alaska acquisition or Mexican Cession should be reworked into comprehensive mechanics applied to many parts of the world and all qualifying countries), there are things which shouldn't have been custom-made, like populating the Americas or radicalisation of Northern Italians. I'm totally not a fan of Paris Commune either, until we are able to have a London commune or a District of Columbia commune.
Anyway, regardless of my personal opinion, I don't think it can be argued that there is "zero railroading".

We can and we should have an enjoyable simulator. Going with custom stuff "because it happened historically precisely there" actively harms simulation, IMO.

 

[Vicite]

In short, I want for the dev team to take Wilian Spaniel's crash course international relations 101 and have the game model political science like it models economics. Specially in dipplomatic plays it should try to simulate a rationalist explanation of war as outlined in his lectures.