Issues with all Paradox games (but Vicky 2 in particular . . .)

[FOARP]

I loved Vicky 1 when it came out, it had some great features, and pretty much everyone who played it agreed that if it was simply stream-lined in some ways, and adopted some of the features of the HOI series, it could be really great. This didn't happen with Vicky. Instead:

1) Much of the micro-management complained about in Vicky 1 was still there in Vicky 2. The most obvious example is that going communist requires the player to take over managing every aspect of the game in detail rather than just setting targets and quotas.
The infrastructure/fortification-construction micro-management that all Paradox games require are particularly prominent.

2) The military system sucks. Vicky, which covers the period of mass, front-to-front warfare, should use the move=attack feature. This is quite simply a much better way of simulating combat, requiring less micromanagement, reducing whack-a-mole, and allowing grand battle plans and enciclement battles. Get rid of occupation time as well - it doesn't represent anything that really happened, historically armies took effective control of the territory into which they advanced almost on arrival.

3) The game needs dynamic tag creation - What is this? Quite simply, this means that the game engine should be able to generate new tags for use by new states when needed. Why do this? Because it allows exisiting countries to be divided into parts oriented to one ideology or another. Basically, if Sweden experiences a communist uprising against the government, the game would produce a tag for "Communist Sweden" and assign a flag, and leaders to it using information already in the game (i.e., Sweden's communist flag and communist leaders), allowing a civil war to be fought between "Communist Sweden" and the rest of Sweden.

 

[unmerged(786310)]

Full disclosure: I haven't played much of Victoria 2, though one of my friends is obsessed with it so I've played it a fair bit.

1) I actually like the micromanaging because it gives me something to do whenever there's a lull in the game but it gets annoying if I'm trying to do something else and have to interrupt to do that. Maybe there could be a wider choice of settings. I can imagine something where you'd get three options for infrastructures: allow the AI to automatically detect places that don't have it and build it provided there are enough resources, have the AI detect it but ask you to authorize it via a pop-up box where you could pick yes or no (so that if you were busy doing something else, you could just click once and get things done), or have to do it all manually. That way you could choose between options depending on what you were doing at the time or your playing style.

2) I'm on the fence about this, but I mostly agree.

3) This would be awesome except it's just not feasible. New tags would be awesome and could maybe be done. Leaders could be more complicated, it seems like it's being done for East vs. West but you have to remember that Victoria 2 was released ages ago. Flags would be ridiculous. It would take forever for them to design each possible flag and research different symbols specific to every possible state to use on each variation, so the game would never see the light of day. Maybe a better option would be to make it easier to design and add to the game your own flags.

 

[Shadrol]

1) For me personally it's always fun when i'm still small duke or small kingdom in CK2 or minor in EU-series, but later micromanagement just get's tedious but that's the way it is. More Empire more to do. And if you want full econ control (state capitalist/planned eco) well you have to control it.

2) i think they tried to find a middleground between EU and HOI systems

3) This would be awesome except it's just not feasible. New tags would be awesome and could maybe be done. Leaders could be more complicated, it seems like it's being done for East vs. West but you have to remember that Victoria 2 was released ages ago. Flags would be ridiculous. It would take forever for them to design each possible flag and research different symbols specific to every possible state to use on each variation, so the game would never see the light of day. Maybe a better option would be to make it easier to design and add to the game your own flags.

3) Special tags would be relly nice. Taiwan wouldn't be possible in current state or an Division like Germany, Korea and Vietnam between ideologies but those are in the East vs. West timeframe. It's just hard to stick everthing into the rebels category, because it wokred differently in every country. Where some worked more like an independet nation in a nation, but not yet accepted by other nations. Others were maybe an organized mob, but had no state like system already in place

 

[Darkrenown]

2) The military system sucks. Vicky, which covers the period of mass, front-to-front warfare, should use the move=attack feature. This is quite simply a much better way of simulating combat, requiring less micromanagement, reducing whack-a-mole, and allowing grand battle plans and enciclement battles. Get rid of occupation time as well - it doesn't represent anything that really happened, historically armies took effective control of the territory into which they advanced almost on arrival.

The only point where that would make sense in Vicky is WWI, and only on the western front, which is a pretty small part of the game.

 

[Sarius1997]

I loved Vicky 1 when it came out, it had some great features, and pretty much everyone who played it agreed that if it was simply stream-lined in some ways, and adopted some of the features of the HOI series, it could be really great. This didn't happen with Vicky. Instead:

1) Much of the micro-management complained about in Vicky 1 was still there in Vicky 2. The most obvious example is that going communist requires the player to take over managing every aspect of the game in detail rather than just setting targets and quotas.
The infrastructure/fortification-construction micro-management that all Paradox games require are particularly prominent.

2) The military system sucks. Vicky, which covers the period of mass, front-to-front warfare, should use the move=attack feature. This is quite simply a much better way of simulating combat, requiring less micromanagement, reducing whack-a-mole, and allowing grand battle plans and enciclement battles. Get rid of occupation time as well - it doesn't represent anything that really happened, historically armies took effective control of the territory into which they advanced almost on arrival.

3) The game needs dynamic tag creation - What is this? Quite simply, this means that the game engine should be able to generate new tags for use by new states when needed. Why do this? Because it allows exisiting countries to be divided into parts oriented to one ideology or another. Basically, if Sweden experiences a communist uprising against the government, the game would produce a tag for "Communist Sweden" and assign a flag, and leaders to it using information already in the game (i.e., Sweden's communist flag and communist leaders), allowing a civil war to be fought between "Communist Sweden" and the rest of Sweden.

1.) I completly agree

2.) Well, i partly agree here. IMO it´d be perfect to have the current military system of VicII until the widespread deployment of machine guns. Until then the VicII system is, while not perfect, atleast acceptable. But after machine guns are invented, and used in both sides of a war; the military system should change to something like the one of HoI. I can imagine that this is hard to code in a game, but if this would make it into Vic3 i´d be sooooo happy.

3.) Again, true. This should (atleast partly and in the later part of the game) replace the current rebel system.

 

[FOARP]

The only point where that would make sense in Vicky is WWI, and only on the western front, which is a pretty small part of the game.

Have to disagree here. Wars were fought along fronts of more than a dozen miles long doing back to the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. The Russo-Japanese war being a classic example - the Russian lines at the Battle of Mukden were more than 30 miles long (that's three HOI3 provinces wide). Even if we're going to restrict this to WW1, are you really saying that the Balkan and Eastern fronts of that war weren't front-to-front wars? Really we're talking about half the game here - from 1870 onwards.

1) For me personally it's always fun when i'm still small duke or small kingdom in CK2 or minor in EU-series, but later micromanagement just get's tedious but that's the way it is. More Empire more to do. And if you want full econ control (state capitalist/planned eco) well you have to control it.

Yeah, but there's better ways of doing this. Lenin/Stalin didn't personally oversee the construction of factories, they set targets. Really, it should be more a case of saying how much of X should be made, with the AI trying to fulfill your commands.

 

[Jorlem]

This isn't so much a major issue, but it is an annoying one I've encountered in every Paradox game I've played: Long tooltips going off the top of the screen. It would be nice if the tooltips could automatically break themselves into multiple columns, so whole swaths of information don't become entirely unaccessable.

 

[FOARP]

This would be awesome except it's just not feasible. New tags would be awesome and could maybe be done. Leaders could be more complicated, it seems like it's being done for East vs. West but you have to remember that Victoria 2 was released ages ago. Flags would be ridiculous. It would take forever for them to design each possible flag and research different symbols specific to every possible state to use on each variation, so the game would never see the light of day. Maybe a better option would be to make it easier to design and add to the game your own flags.

I'm not sure you're clear on what I'm suggesting -

* Different ideology flags and country-namesare already in Vicky 2 for every country. That's why when the UK goes communist its flag changes to a communist one and its name changes to "The People's Republic of Great Britain" or whatever. Why would you need to create new ones?

* There's actually at least a couple of ways of implementing this is a new game:

1) You could allow the game to dynamically generate new tags on demand. This means that, for example, when there is a communist uprising in Sweden that divides the country into communist and non-communist parts, then the game would dynamically generate a new tag (SWE-C).

2) Alternate tags already exist in-game - say, numbered tags for use for by any new state from 000 to 100, which are used for new states as they are created. If Communist Sweden is to be created, and the game has already used 000 to create Fascist Poland for a civil war in Poland, and 001 to create Republican Britain for a civil war in Britain, then 002 should be used to create Communist Sweden

Either way, once the communist uprising happens, the game would automatically remove the communist-sympathising leaders/units/provinces from the parent country (SWE) and assign them, along with the correct flag and name, to the new state (SWE-C or 002). If communist Sweden is conquered then the information is returned to Sweden, or if the parent nation goes communist then parent and child states should be reunified, or if the communist government in Communist Sweden is overthrown and replaced by a democracy then Sweden etc. etc.

A feature like the above would greatly improve the Vicky series, and also be of great use for dynamically creating civil war scenarios for countries in the HOI and EU serieses.

This isn't so much a major issue, but it is an annoying one I've encountered in every Paradox game I've played: Long tooltips going off the top of the screen. It would be nice if the tooltips could automatically break themselves into multiple columns, so whole swaths of information don't become entirely unaccessable.

Yeah, I can't remember seeing this recently but I do remember it happening in HOI2.

 

[Jorlem]

Yeah, I can't remember seeing this recently but I do remember it happening in HOI2.

It is still an issue, in EU4.

 

[FOARP]

It is still an issue, in EU4.

Ah yeah, now I get what you're talking about. Yes this does happen in every P'dox game, and not just with tool-tips but with other dialogue boxes.

As another more general moan - why isn't manpower/attrition better handled in P'dox games? Let's run it down:

1) CK2 - MP pool per-province based on province structures. This is OK I guess for the period, though the devs have had to introduce permanent armies, and you suffer micro-army spam, and doom-stacks etc. etc. etc.

2) EU - MP pool based on total available pop. Again this does the basic job, though attrition can be very confining and results in ahistorical situations (i.e., you can't concentrate a hundred thousand soldiers at Leipzig without a large number of them dying), and there doesn't seem to be any play-off between the number of men you take for your armies and how your country performs economically.

3) Vicky - Vicky 1 actually handled this mostly in a satisfying, though micro-management-tastic way. If you got caught up in a massive war, you could selectively take population out of the civilian economy and turn them straight into soldiers to feed your war-machine, though, again, attrition was too restrictive on the player. This was good because it meant that you could not only simulate the civilian economy suffering dur to mobilisation, but also decide which sectors were going to suffer. Vicky 2 actually went donw-hill from here, taking away that direct control and instead making it reliant on spending and encouragement that takes a long time to have any effect.

4) HOI - Actually, the more I look at how HOI handles MP, the less I like it. Attrition is handled fairly realistically, but manpower is just another province resource. In reality countries took their manpower out of the civilian economy - getting more manpower should result in productivity suffering.

A typical HOI war in Europe ends with Germany suffering defeat in 1942-3 at the hands of the USSR due to exhausting their reserves of manpower - but this is actually not what happened historically. Historically German military manpower actually looked like this:

1940: 5,600,000
1941: 7,200,000
1942: 8,600,000
1943: 9,500,000
1944: 9,100,000

As you can see, the manpower of the German armed forces actually increased by 10%+ every year to 1943, and after that declined only by ~4-5%. The German army did not run out of soldiers, but what did happen was the quality of those soldiers greatly decreased, and German industry became incapable of properly arming and equipping them, resulting in a desparate situation on the battlefield.

An ideal system for HOI might look like this:

• Industry is divided into two sectors - civilian and war industry.
• War industry is the industry that is directly available for constructing and repairing units. Civilian industry produces consumer products (alternately, civilian/war industry can be simulated just by putting limits on the sliders)
• The higher your level of mobilisation, the more civilan industry is made available for converting into war industry.
• Each industry point requires a certain amount of manpower to run it. Deactivating this industry point releases the manpower for military service.
• Once you've used up your original pool of volunteers and reservists (who should be highly experienced and have high morale), manpower should be drawn directly out of industry (which should be progressively worse and worse in terms of experience and morale).
• Manpower being drawn from industry should result in the progressive de-activation of industry points.

This would be much closer to the kind of situation described with Germany above - you can still increase your manpower, but you'll eventually find yourself fielding poorly-armed cannon-fodder if you do.

A Vicky version of this could be similarly implemented (i.e., a mobilisation/conscription slider that take men from consumer-oriented industries first, and war-industries last), but the kind of hands-on mobilisation you could do in Vicky 1 wouls also ideally be implemented.

 

[Eh up me duck]

The problem with Vicky 2 is that it's possible to set the sliders at game start, change them maybe once or twice throughout the entire game, and that's pretty much it as far as the game is concerned. Click on a new tech every year or so but other than that there's simply bugger all to do. The economic system is so arcane and unfathamable that it's pointless trying to get into it, which paradoxically makes it worse than Vicky 1. At least then you knew that goods would sell for a decent price and you understood a rough level of supply and demand. Vicky 2 you may as well slaughter a chicken for all the good it will do in understanding how the economics works.

 

[Wowwars]

I fully Support & agree with this! Dern With the Vicky 2! Vicky 3 Should be a combo of Smaller HOI3 combat system/EUIV's Smoothness/Map style & Functionality, and Less Microing, and Less clicking Yes/No every damn week. I think El Presidente should be optional when it comes to talking to the people & deciding stuff.

Maybe a Transition from EUIV's Combat to HOI3's Combat mid game? Naval Combat has to change mid game too due to the Vast array of Naval Warfare.