^There's more to war than people just shooting big guns at each other. Vicky2 correctly models the fact that the wars of this period(at least in the West) were largely decided before they started, through smart political, economic and diplomatic management.
In large part, so does HoI. Minors will always be screwed in HoI and the only thing keeping them from not being screwed is that the AI needs to be handheld to even find its way to the front some times.
Vicky2 is actually really, really bad at modelling industrial warfare. It's okay at modelling industrial economies, but with regards to modelling industrial wars it falls completely flat for the reasons I've already mentioned. HoI has always done a much better job at this. HoI IV especially, which its specific production system, but even HoI III with its very imperfect production model, didn't just magically give upgraded equipment to units across the board.
You can't say that war is adequately modeled when Vicky completely and utterly fails to model the logistical, production, or strategic side of the war, when those are some of the most important aspects of modern war. In real life modernizing a navy is really,
really expensive, even if you modernized your navy only ten years prior. In Vicky 2 you spend virtually nothing because you got gun upgrades that magically increased the caliber of all the guns on your ships, and increased the armor and engines of all your ships, and all of this at no cost when in reality, to have achieved that you would have needed to fully scrap your fleet and start all over.
Vicky is very good at modelling the industrial age and the evolution of industrial economies, but in terms of industrial warfare, Vicky falls very flat. And by falls very flat I mean it fails to adequately represent pretty much everything about war. Now, it is very good at demonstrating the
demographic effects of war, but that is another matter entirely and a game which is primarily about politics and economics
should model that, especially since the game, unlike HoI, is only concerned with the period of the war.
It makes for deeper, more complex wars, which are vastly more entertaining than babysitting some NATO counters along a line to see who has the bigger stick.
Ignoring the political and economic side of war is bound to make for a bad model of warfare. However, ignoring the proper strategic and operational methods of war makes for an equally, if not larger, failure.
The Russians didn't stand a chance against the French, British or Japanese for far larger reasons than simple matters of military ineptitude.
Sure...and in HoI the side with more industry is disproportionately more likely to win as well. While HoI does abstract pretty much all economy besides the war aspect, that is in large part because it has no real need to, and it helps it better model the war. Just like Vicky isn't trying to model industrial warfare, so much as it is trying to model the industrial period as a whole and, thus, must make abstractions and simplifications with regards to its warfare model to be able to function.
In the ACW, The agrarian South was bound to lose against the North, which had enormous advantages in infrastructure, population and industrial output.
Sure, but that Vicky is absolutely atrocious at modelling the Civil War and that it's pretty much always an easily won war in game demonstrates just how badly Vicky models even mid-19th century warfare.
The Danes, The French, nor the Austrians stood a chance against Prussia, which had effectively industrialized its army before its adversaries. All of these wars were decided well before the armies entered the field. The armies were simply there to make inevitability a reality.
Err, no. During the both the Prusso-Austrian war and the Franco-Prussian war, Prussia was actually the industrial and economic underdog. In fact, Prussia's saving grace was that it was so operationally successful from the onset, because it allowed them to conclude the war very quickly as a long war would have been very disadvantageous to them as they would have been industrially outmatched. If anything, the wars initially, at least on paper, seemed to prefer the side that ended up losing. The Battle of France is another very clear example - on paper that war should have lasted years. In reality it lasted a few scant months.
Case in point being that while industry did play a large role in wars, oversimplifying it to say more industry = automatic win is just plain wrong, as is the assumption that all wars are over before they begin.
Anywho, small history lecture aside, that the side with the greater war production is more favored is modeled in HoI as well. It is, in fact, significantly better modeled in than in Vicky.
And it's not just stacks. Vic2 and EU4 model armies deployment in two lines. It's not the best available solution but you need to reach a compromise between a detailed tactical / operational approach and a grand strategy approach. You see a soldier figurine on a province and its stack strength but there are numbers crunching in the back, complex calculations modeling the battlefield, it's not as simple as the bigger stack wins the battle.
No, I agree. Vicky's model isn't game breaking or terrible (although Paradox, really,
please fix the warfare during the second half of the game), it's an abstraction necessary to make the game function. Vicky in large part would have tons of trouble using HoI's model, because HoI's model uses a lot of resources just to run the war model, whereas Vicky devotes a huge amount of resources to just running the economies and politics of the game.
I'm not saying that Vicky 2's warfare ruins it, but the argument that Vicky 2's warfare model is by any stretch the best is just...crazy. Vicky 2 is objectively the worst model of warfare in any of the games. And this is fine, because Vicky 2 is by and large not about warfare, it's about the industrial era, economies, and political change.
