Has paradox ever considered removing wwi from victoria and creating an independent game. I simply feel like the sudden shift to modern warfare isnt suited for the mechanics of vic.
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I like the idea, but I'm unsure how it would work out.
In WWI there wasn't that much grand strategy going on it seems.
Unless they go HOI4 style (please no), the sides would be largely determined.
We all know how WWI will turn out to be a 'long' and bloody war instead of the swift victories which all sides expected.
Unless the game would be ahistorical, the Schlieffenplan will just be Germany stabbing itself by getting infamy, a much larger front and more enemies.
If the game would be ahistorical enough for Germany to beat France in 1914, the war would basically be over (there simply wouldn't be much of a point in continuing).
Same thing for France and their whole plan 17 (a suicidal attack on Elzass-Lotharingen).
Therefor a WWI would do better by not focusing on grand strategy like most other PDS games, but rather on strategic or even tactical level.
Most of the gains on the western front wouldn't even be representable even on HOI3's map, since the gains were just too small (unless an army voluntary retreated).
Although I would love to see more WWI games, I doubt a typical PDS game, with little to no control over battles, would be enjoyable.
They could ofcourse act as if trench warfare never happened, but then we'd be back to Victoria 2...
In WWI there wasn't that much grand strategy going on it seems.
Unless they go HOI4 style (please no), the sides would be largely determined.
We all know how WWI will turn out to be a 'long' and bloody war instead of the swift victories which all sides expected.
Unless the game would be ahistorical, the Schlieffenplan will just be Germany stabbing itself by getting infamy, a much larger front and more enemies.
If the game would be ahistorical enough for Germany to beat France in 1914, the war would basically be over (there simply wouldn't be much of a point in continuing).
Same thing for France and their whole plan 17 (a suicidal attack on Elzass-Lotharingen).
Therefor a WWI would do better by not focusing on grand strategy like most other PDS games, but rather on strategic or even tactical level.
Most of the gains on the western front wouldn't even be representable even on HOI3's map, since the gains were just too small (unless an army voluntary retreated).
Although I would love to see more WWI games, I doubt a typical PDS game, with little to no control over battles, would be enjoyable.
They could ofcourse act as if trench warfare never happened, but then we'd be back to Victoria 2...
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It isn't, but sadly a lot of people just don't want to accept this. Vicky 2 doesn't simulate WW1-style combat at all, and it's very hard to see how it could ever accommodate it properly as it requires very different mechanics to model it.
Really, if it belongs in any game, it's most likely HOI, put in as a stand-alone scenario (i.e., not a linked campaign), but we'll have to see what Paradox are considering in terms of DLC for HOI4 to know if they're going to do this. There are a number of WW1 mods for HOI though.
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WW1 indeed is very underrated/underappreciated when it comes to gaming. I'm happy Battlefield 1 (or Battlefield 5 or whatever you wanna call it) is bringing it into the limelight.
Just so many interesting players in that time period. The importance of opening up or attacking different fronts on your opponents so as to relieve another front. Strangling off supplies. Internal turmoil tearing countries apart. It was more than simply trench warfare (which was significant no doubt in the western front, but even the eastern front had mobility and back/forth movements).
just be kind of funny playing as Germany and running around trying to bail out your allies: "Austria...wtf are you doing in Serbia!? You need to stop Russia! Gosh damn it Ottomans!"
Just so many interesting players in that time period. The importance of opening up or attacking different fronts on your opponents so as to relieve another front. Strangling off supplies. Internal turmoil tearing countries apart. It was more than simply trench warfare (which was significant no doubt in the western front, but even the eastern front had mobility and back/forth movements).
just be kind of funny playing as Germany and running around trying to bail out your allies: "Austria...wtf are you doing in Serbia!? You need to stop Russia! Gosh damn it Ottomans!"
The problem is that it is really, really hard to make a proper stand-alone Paradox-style WWI GSG. WWII can be done because it is (in terms of politics and the evolution of the war) comparatively simple, but WWI was not - there was a lot of political baggage leading up to WWI and even during WWI. Furthermore, unlike during WWII, during WWI the things that Vicky represents, like POPs and industrialization, were major factors that need to be taken into consideration - especially with regards to the large multi-ethnic empires and conflicting ideologies at play (a conflict of ideology that went far past the relatively simple one we see in WWII). On the other hand, Vicky also isn't particularly good at representing the actual war-side of the equation.
And that's not to mention how it will affect the development of a Vicky game - by significantly cutting down the length of a game that is already rather short (you'd lose, at the very least 10% of the game's total length) you are making Vicky...well, shorter and less fun, because you have less time to plan for and to do things during. On the other hand, a dedicated WWI game will be rather static and not particularly interesting in a lot of places. So it would pretty much have to be a Vicky game.
The biggest problem for the next Vicky game going forward is going to be the big problem that faced the nations of this era historically (with regards to militaries) - the transition from Post-Napoleonic to Modern Warfare, and the rise of the industrialized war. In short, for an accurate and fun system, PDox is going to have to come up with a system that will allow for transitions from the big stack-on-stack type of warfare to modern warfare which relies on long fronts and significantly larger armies. The good thing is that PDox already has some of this in place - EUIV, Vicky, and HoI IV already have aspects of all these things in place - the problem is going to be how they could integrate it to make it mesh well. The HoI system for production of war material, supply, and strategic combat is perfectly adequate for WWI-era fighting - needing, at most, some slight modifications to represent the reality of the times. Likewise, the production and division design system are fairly robust and can represent the period well - although the production system will need tweaking to account for the way factories work in Vicky. On the other hand, the systems Vicky II had in place were pretty much perfect to represent the period up until WWI.
And that's not to mention how it will affect the development of a Vicky game - by significantly cutting down the length of a game that is already rather short (you'd lose, at the very least 10% of the game's total length) you are making Vicky...well, shorter and less fun, because you have less time to plan for and to do things during. On the other hand, a dedicated WWI game will be rather static and not particularly interesting in a lot of places. So it would pretty much have to be a Vicky game.
The biggest problem for the next Vicky game going forward is going to be the big problem that faced the nations of this era historically (with regards to militaries) - the transition from Post-Napoleonic to Modern Warfare, and the rise of the industrialized war. In short, for an accurate and fun system, PDox is going to have to come up with a system that will allow for transitions from the big stack-on-stack type of warfare to modern warfare which relies on long fronts and significantly larger armies. The good thing is that PDox already has some of this in place - EUIV, Vicky, and HoI IV already have aspects of all these things in place - the problem is going to be how they could integrate it to make it mesh well. The HoI system for production of war material, supply, and strategic combat is perfectly adequate for WWI-era fighting - needing, at most, some slight modifications to represent the reality of the times. Likewise, the production and division design system are fairly robust and can represent the period well - although the production system will need tweaking to account for the way factories work in Vicky. On the other hand, the systems Vicky II had in place were pretty much perfect to represent the period up until WWI.
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What would be cut from Victoria's timeline could be added before 1836, like making it start in 1815 and run till 190x?
I agree with the production part, but think that the warfare needs a special system instead of a modified hoi...
Simply because most gains in the west after the race to the sea were so tiny that even a hoi or ck map could not represent them.
Taking a few lines should be seen as a tactical victory and might boost morale, instead of it being counted as a defeat for not taking a whole province...
If they really want to go experimental, they'd dump the entire paradox-style and make it start in 1915 with only Europe and the middle east.
As for the stagnantion of Western Front following the Race to the Sea, that could be comparatively easily handled by adjusting bonuses to entrenchment and maybe the rate at which units wear down their org and the rate at which they suffer casualties. The actual combat system itself would need very little change - well fortified and/or entrenched regions would be nigh-impregnable, regions that have barely been entrenched would be easy to break through, and when tanks get introduced, they would make entrenchment increasingly less useful. The only thing that would really need adding is some kind of skirmishing system to allow armies sharing a front line to fight each other without having a full on fight, and I'm not certain that would be necessary either.
As for territory - there's no need to alter the current system. From the point a strategic perspective the vast majority of battles in WWI were highly inconclusive with regards to land grabbing - gaining a few meters of land doesn't alter the strategic picture - hell, in the vast majority of cases gaining just a few kilometers means rather little and the cases where gains were that big were few and far in between after the early period of WWI (at least in the West). Minute changes in borders is well represented by no change in borders at all.
Wouldn't that result in a 4 year waiting game while teching up for tanks?
Attacks would end in losses or you'd at best gain some useless province.
Battles like the Somme gained very little in ground (as that wasn't really the objective) but the impact of it was huge.
Same thing for Verdun and the Brusilov offensive.
If you'd go for a hoi style system, the great retreats would be the only 'victories' you'd get until trench warfare suddenly ends due to technologic advancements.
This is not at all how it went IRL, for example, the Brusilov offensive captured very little ground (in Russian terms), but it basically handicapped the Austro-Hungarian army for the rest of the war. The Somme and Verdun were HUGE morale boosts for the Entente, while Tannenberg was for the Germans.
Hoi utterly fails to capture the impact of such battles as it would be represented as a minor setback. In the Victorian system, losing a battle can totally cripple your army by destroying the POPs that support it and crushing the morale. Also in the Victorian system battles give war exhaustion, which can change a war, if you let it accumulate.
Battles played a massive role in the development of new technologies and tactics. If not for morale or land related reasons, then as a testing area for new tactics and weapons would you want to attack. Note that the British had tanks in 1916 but only in 1918 did Germany surrender. Researching tanks should not be THE gamechanger. They played their part for sure, but even they were not enough to break the stalemate on the western front.
As for the Eastern front, I'm unsure how that could be modeled, giving the Russians a lower trench technology level would certainly be a weird way...
And ofcourse artillery would need a rework, since in ww1, they acted more like hoi's bombing planes than simply support attachments.
Artillery would often be concentrated on a certain sector and then the enemy would be bombarded quite heavily (they changed this later on).
And don't forget there are even more fronts, such as the Salonika front, the Gallipoli front, the Mesopotamian front, the Sinai front and several African fronts.
How would they be represented?
If you'd use hoi3's supply system, german africa is basically dead from day 1 due to a lack of supplies.
Hoi4's system might improve the situation, while Victoria's system would completely ignore supply :/
I do like your suggestion for the skirmishes.
I think to properly model ww1, you'd need a fatigue system for the early months and battles like Verdun.
The germans were pretty exhausted in those examples and thus couldn't perform as good as they'd normally would.
At Verdun, the French would keep on rotating their unit's to allow them to rest and reinforce. This made quite a difference.
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You more or less just described WWI - breaking through trenches didn't really become something you could do with any real degree of consistency until tanks became a thing. And by "became a thing" I don't mean they started being produced, but were being produced in sufficient numbers to matter and proper doctrines to allow their effective use had been developed.
But no, you wouldn't want to wait around, because that'd be four years you could be making gains that you don't.
Again, that's more or less what happened in WWI in the West.
The strategic effect of the Somme and Verdun are already reflected in game - the manpower and equipment cost that they incur, as well as the opportunity cost that comes with concentrating so much strength in such a comparatively small area (which was, in fact, the primary point of the Brusilov Offensive to begin with, to distract Germany from the Verdun offensive some). The only real effect was the morale effect, but that can be abstracted away, the same way that morale effects are abstracted away in HoI (losing entire divisions does nothing aside from losing the precious manpower and equipment and the time it takes to train them).
Land changed hands very little during WWI, but land is just one out of many valuable things you can gain from an offensive.
And again, that's fairly accurate for the Western Front for most of WWI.
It handicapped the Austrians by causing immense casualties to an already weak and under-equipped army that could barely replace the losses and the equipment. The manpower effect is especially well reflected by Vicky, where you have POPs that must be grown over time and you can't just arbitrarily increase your manpower pool...at least not without some massive sideffects as those are POPs that your economy needs to run.
Even more importantly, however, the Brusilov Offensive drew Germany from the West and forced them to shift large amounts of manpower towards to fight in the East. All of these things can be represented by the HoI IV systems already.
The morale boosting effect of those battles can be abstracted away, because while one could make the argument that morale affects one's ability and willingness to fight, that's a very slippery slope and is dependent on so many things that it's effectively impossible to properly program - Verdun could just as easily have resulted in a massive loss of French morale due to the losses sustain - many strategies in history have been conducted on the notion that an overwhelming victory would crush morale, only to have it backfire - likewise, there have been many cases where morale nosedived.
...No, that is not even remotely true. The loss of a quarter to half a million men (or the more recent, more extreme estimates that go up to a million or more) and their equipment is a huge loss, especially since you: 1) have to retrain those men which takes time, 2) and manpower, and that 3) you have to reproduce that equipment, which itself means that 4) you can't use that equipment to then equip new divisions, and 5) manpower and produced goods are both finite resources that you can't really afford to squander - especially in Vicky where MP is not just some abstract number that feeds your army, but represents actual pops who you need for your country to function.
So...you could add it? Although it would need to be so massively tweaked such that a war can be fought where millions of men are lost and you can still continue fighting.
The general point is true of WWII as well. All wars have developments in doctrine and technology and tactics from experience, that is as true of ancient warfare as it is of modern warfare as it was during WWI and WWII.
As for tanks - yes, it took time for technology, production, and military theory to catch up to make tanks into the trench-busting tools they were by the end of the war. That is fairly easily represented by the tech system of Vicky.
No, there's no real need to model it in the East. Entrenchment takes time and the Russian front was so large that it never became an issue, because it was so large that you could always go around the trenches. If you try to heavily defend any area you are going to end up with other areas that are so badly defended or equipped that they can be trivially pierced through.
The system as is now works fine. Concentration of artillery is effectively the same as divisions with more artillery present.
Those would already be covered for the same reason Russia is. Relatively large areas with low supply and complicated supply routes for the little supply that there is. Not being at the center of the fighting also helps, since most of the fighting would be on the homeland of the main powers (Europe), and not the fringes, meaning they would be lower priority and thus have fewer men, and if we are talking about well equipped, well trained men the number is even smaller.
That's why you'd use HoI4's supply system.
Even ignoring war exhaustion being a thing in Vicky already, the cost of those battles would still be massively felt by the effect of the POPs and equipment being lost.
Badly supplied/Badly trained/Badly equipped troops do worse in combat. The issue is a non-issue.
That kind of cycling is already doable in HoI, or any PDox game, really. A division is getting attacked on the front line, you have a reserve division behind it. You send the reserve division up front, when it arrives you send the division that was originally there to retreat to where the reserve division ones, and you just keep cycling them.
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You know that Paradox games don't each have a monopoly on their respective time periods, right?
For Victoria, just keep Victoria from 1836 (or 1821) to 1936, but also make a World War One game that lasts from maybe 1910 to 1920, or something like that. In addition, build both games up with making a converter in mind, so when Vicky players reach 1910 in their game, they can chose to convert it to a proper WW1 style game, or simply keep playing from their Victoria game. Even if Paradox doesn't make a converter, there will definitely be a fan made one.
The thing is, unless it can be mechanically justified there is no real reason to make a WWI specific game. If we start with CK - EU make sense because it is so mechanically different from CK, Vicky makes sense because it is so mechanically different from both CK and EU, and HoI makes sense because it is so very different from all three of the aforementioned series. If you only want to model WWI in and of itself, then this can be rather well modeled by a slightly tweaked version of HoI and there really isn't much reason to make a dedicated WWI game when a WWI start for HoI would do.
On the other hand, if you made it into its own game it would feel rather unfulfilling as you'd essentially have what could, and probably should, have been a piece of HoI DLC being sold as a full-on title.
If you integrated it into Vicky, however, you could reflect the slow evolution from post-Napoleonic to modern warfare during the late 19th/early 20th centuries with a war system that slowly morphs along with technology and time as happened in actuality. It would also make warfare in Vicky a hell of a lot more interesting, which is needed, since warfare is by and far Vicky's largest weak point.
I'm not even going to get into converter, because converters are, at best, spotty in properly translating features, especially as the game expands and is developed by future DLC.
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I don't think the mechanics of either HOI or Vicky could do justice for WW1. Vicky because well, Vicky2 did a very poor just simulating the evolution to trench warfare, the change from having EU4-style army stacks to HOI4 fronts and I'm uncertain as to how well a Vicky3 would do.
I don't think HOI4 because political lay speaking it's extremely shallow, and doesn't at all simulate pops as Vicky2 does (which are important to WW1, having pops with different economic and nationalist interests).
That's why a hybrid style game, a game that drew mechanics from both Vicky and HOI4, I think would work the best.
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It's already agreed that Vicky 2 had a terrible warfare system, which is why no one is suggesting that Vicky 3 use it entirely.
On the other hand, while it's true that the HoI 4 political layer is extremely shallow, if you are only covering the period of WWI then it is sufficient, if not overkill. Many of the political layers and alliances that resulted in WWI were the result of decades of rivalries, events, and machinations - it is simpler to decouple the alliances and factions of WWII within the given time period than it is the factions/alliances of WWI (in other words, WWII is able to stand by itself from a political perspective far more than WWI).
Likewise simulating POPs is not all that meaningful if you are just focusing on a short time period, the most of which will be centered on war. POPs are meaningful when you are simulating relatively long-term effects - but during the period of the war POPs can pretty much be discarded for the sake of just MP as is done by HoI. It doesn't really matter that you just lost 10 million men and would have a shattered economy ten years down the line, because the game itself only runs for ten years - whether you lost farmers or factory workers is pretty much besides the point. This is why HoI can get away with it, while Vicky can't - because it is a reasonable trade-off for HoI given that it's a game focusing on a short 12-year span with a focus solely on the war, whereas Vicky has to focus on ~100 years of development and evolution and how massively populations and their beliefs can change in that short time span.
I believe A WW1 (keep in mind this also entails the build up to World War One) game would need to simulate pops because of the political and social conditions of the time.
Take for instance the Russian Empire. It ended up in, quite frankly, a clusterfuck civil war between Bolsheviks, Anarchists, Fascists, Tsar Loyalists, Independence Movements, Republican Forces, Social Revolutionaries, and more. Even the Russian Revolution in which the Tsar was politically disposed of and a republic came into being was rather complicated, and needs to be simulate properly for it to work. In order to simulate that, you would need different factions in the Empire, each with different levels of militancy, standards of living, quantity of membership, and what their general ideology is. In addition there needs to be a time of war exhaustion for pops to simulate how discontent they are with the current war (and something which is not present in HOI4).
Other examples I think would be beneifical would be countries like Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, two unstable and ethnically divided nations that need some time of pop system to help create the internal issues of each Empire. You also have the German Empire, which needs anti-Monarchist pops or factions that can help cause something akin to the real life German Revolution (1918 - 1919), and also Communist pops for various other states that were quickly formed and then collapsed throughout the time.
What about pops with independence movements in things like the Balkan Wars, or various uprisings found in the colonial world, or pops that want to stay neutral (the USA, I also feel aleady the isolationism for the US is off in HOI4 as it is).
Pops should not be a dominating factor like they are in Vicky2, but they were still important in the spreading of 20th century ideology, industrialization (assembly line, anyone?), nationalist movements (the collapse of both Austria-Hungary, and the overthrow of the Ottoman Sultanate into a Turkish State), and therefore should be simulated.
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well stated. pops and nationalism were definitely important during WW1, not only regarding the outbreak itself but the stability/effectiveness of certain countries like Austria-Hungary, and the issue of war exhaustion must somehow be incorporated to reflect what happened to countries like Russia and Germany. that inner turmoil cannot be left out of the game.
Everything you just stated is as equally true, if not more true, of WWII as WWI (from ethnically diverse empires to nationalism and the political mess going on in many nations at the time) - yet there are a multitude of reasons that they are seldom reflected - because in the grand scale of things they don't contribute much to the war at hand. It's why HoI 4 no longer has the half a dozen+ different political ideologies that were in older games, or why it doesn't reflect things like Tyrol being a point of contention between Germany and Italy, or any of the Balkan disputes, and so on. Because those can be easily enough abstracted without the huge performance hit that would be POPs, because everything that would actually make POPs matter would require a lot of time to actually show. There's no point tracking something to ten decimal points if you are only concerned with the first three - likewise there is no point in using a heavy-weight system like pops to measure something that can be far more easily added through events and other methods that don't weigh down performance like a howitzer to the face.
The claim that what POPs simulate was somehow more important during WWI than WWII is simply not true. The reason why that is pretty much never simulated in WWII games is because it is unneeded and cumbersome to do, and would result in very little change to what you can do by just using events.
The claim that what POPs simulate was somehow more important during WWI than WWII is simply not true. The reason why that is pretty much never simulated in WWII games is because it is unneeded and cumbersome to do, and would result in very little change to what you can do by just using events.
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The Vicky system represent socio economics well, but is not really good at war. A WW1 game would basically need to have Vicky socioeconomics combined with HoI warfare.
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A WWI scenario for this game wouldn't of been a bad Idea or expansion such a shame they went over to EUIV as the closet we get the great war in this game is when random wars like that can possibly break out much later in game as I would've loved to rebuild Germany back up from defeat in WWI and then continue it in HOI III or now IV.
Really what should happen, is in V3 make it awesome. Then have an expansion dedicated to this to make it great
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Vicky does not WW1 very well.
1. Forts do not block movement (which they would).
2. there is either combat; or not. That is not how the Western Front works.
3. Fortifications cannot be built in enemy territory (which they would have to: the trenches are IIRC, level 5 forts).
For the Eastern Front the whole bit works well enough, but for the Western Front you cannot possibly depict the complete stalemate 1915-1918.
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