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Why is Victoria 3 not coming any time soon, my two cents...

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Johan said:
Ironically v2 has far simpler and cruder mechanics than imperator.

I coded both.. the politics/pop system for v2 is something that i wrote in a week..
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Well, Vic2’s POP system is simply amazing and adds so much depth to the game. Also it makes the map feel alive, which is what makes Vic2 so special and different from other Paradox games. There are actually people living on the provinces. In EU4 the dev system feels so empty and unorganic.

I think all of your games should have the POP system as a base.
 
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Johan said:
Ironically v2 has far simpler and cruder mechanics than imperator.

I coded both.. the politics/pop system for v2 is something that i wrote in a week..
Click to expand...

But how is that possible? Before 1.2 Imperator's pops were almost as flat and unengaging as development points from EU4, with a couple of differences (culture and religion were attributes of those "development points" instead of being tied to the province, and they increased by themselves over time instead of by clicks and spending monarch points - although, clicks were still required to change one "development type" to another or move them around). Now the situation is better, but the pops from Imperator are still significantly less "alive" and fleshed out than even pops from Stellaris (which have ideology, living conditions, actual jobs inside their social strata, can migrate abroad etc.), and can hardly be compared to pops from Victoria (which produce and consume goods, have political demands, actually die when they fight etc.). If there are some complexities inside the Imperator pop system, they are very well hidden, and I can't even imagine what exactly can be going on behind the scenes that would make Victoria pale in comparison.
 
Johan said:
Ironically v2 has far simpler and cruder mechanics than imperator.

I coded both.. the politics/pop system for v2 is something that i wrote in a week..
Click to expand...
No other Paradox Studio game has better economic mechanics than Victoria 2.
Imperator should not even be compared to Victoria, a second tier game that can only be considered better than March of the Eagles or Sengoku.
 
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Ololorium said:
But how is that possible? Before 1.2 Imperator's pops were almost as flat and unengaging as development points from EU4, with a couple of differences (culture and religion were attributes of those "development points" instead of being tied to the province, and they increased by themselves over time instead of by clicks and spending monarch points - although, clicks were still required to change one "development type" to another or move them around). Now the situation is better, but the pops from Imperator are still significantly less "alive" and fleshed out than even pops from Stellaris (which have ideology, living conditions, actual jobs inside their social strata, can migrate abroad etc.), and can hardly be compared to pops from Victoria (which produce and consume goods, have political demands, actually die when they fight etc.). If there are some complexities inside the Imperator pop system, they are very well hidden, and I can't even imagine what exactly can be going on behind the scenes that would make Victoria pale in comparison.
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If I had to wager a guess, Vic2's pop system was largely lifted from Vic1 when it was initially designed. I don't know exactly what else Johan means by his statement, but unless development was way more time efficient in 2009 than 2018, I'd have to assume it because of this.

Its also possible he only meant the politics portion of the pop's system; ie the support for various reforms, jingoism, religious policies, and thus political parties, which always seemed rather secondary in Vic2.
 
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The POP system in V2 is pretty simple, but it just feels so much more impactful than more complex systems in other games and ties so well into the rest of the games. It's just at the forefront of the game, and you really feel like your constantly dealing with your populous, even if the underlying system is simple. While in Imperator, while it has improved since launch, the pops just kinds fade into the background to a greater extent.

I think a lot of it has with how tangible the POPs feel. Workers, soldiers, etc. POPs all work somewhere. If you mobilize your army, it's those miners that should be bringing out your precious metals that are getting killed by gas-attack. And those London Capitalists never do what you want, and there is a worrying amount of fascists worker POPs in Bavaria...
 
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huyderman said:
The POP system in V2 is pretty simple, but it just feels so much more impactful than more complex systems in other games and ties so well into the rest of the games. It's just at the forefront of the game, and you really feel like your constantly dealing with your populous, even if the underlying system is simple. While in Imperator, while it has improved since launch, the pops just kinds fade into the background to a greater extent.

I think a lot of it has with how tangible the POPs feel. Workers, soldiers, etc. POPs all work somewhere. If you mobilize your army, it's those miners that should be bringing out your precious metals that are getting killed by gas-attack. And those London Capitalists never do what you want, and there is a worrying amount of fascists worker POPs in Bavaria...
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There is also this underlying feeling, whether or true or not, that it all is somehow a bit more realistic and believable. The material reality of which the pops and goods are a good representation feels like a real determiner of historical outcomes, and so even if the river of pops and resources is directed in a different way, there is still this flow of material historicity throughout everything that happens which keeps it feeling grounded. To be sure it is rough around the edges and you can have plenty of absurd outcomes but it was a time of outlandish ideas driven by the new material forces being unleashed and so it doesn't feel all that strange in the end. Huge changes were at work, empires grew and fell rapidly, and all across the globe people were interacting peacefully and violently in more varied ways than possibly at any other time. But right there in front of you ticking away like a great machine are all the little bits, the pops the goods, and even the political movements.

And I guess Vicky is always a little more interesting to me because at that point, names of rulers and dynasties weren't just changing but entire ways of living were being traded so rapidly and so it never quite feels just like a map painter, you are bringing something more than conquest with each victory, the changes brought about then would have profound effects on the trajectory of life afterward.
 
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any dev. how hard would it be to tinker together a proof of concept barebones framework of a vic3 game ripping from the new crusader kings. just letting modders fill in the blanks.
 
alexman said:
any dev. how hard would it be to tinker together a proof of concept barebones framework of a vic3 game ripping from the new crusader kings. just letting modders fill in the blanks.
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Why CKIII, Imperator already has pops and nothing they've said about CKIII suggests it will?
 
alexman said:
any dev. how hard would it be to tinker together a proof of concept barebones framework of a vic3 game ripping from the new crusader kings. just letting modders fill in the blanks.
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Well, that would be a terrible idea. Everyone is already complaining about how barebones Paradox games are at the release, and that's when the games are intended to be playable, can you imagine how hard the backlash would be if they ever tried to release "just a framework for the modders to work on" and sell it for money, but expect the modders to do the unpaid work of actually creating the game? Anyway, designing the base systems (POPs, economic system, trade system, political system, and merging them together into one incredibly complex interconnected whole, not to say about the AI who needs to learn how to manage all that, and making sure the computer doesn't explode trying to run this) is precisely the hard part. If it's done, creating the content for the game and balancing the numbers (something the modders are able to do) can be done in a year or so. And you can't base it on CK3 or any existing game, really, because none of them is designed with having "realistic" economy with supply and demand. Of course, such system can be hacked on top of the existing one, like it's being done in M&T mod for EU4, but if it's going to end up very heavy on performance, bug-prone, and very hard for the AI to manage.
 
Ololorium said:
Well, that would be a terrible idea. Everyone is already complaining about how barebones Paradox games are at the release, and that's when the games are intended to be playable, can you imagine how hard the backlash would be if they ever tried to release "just a framework for the modders to work on" and sell it for money, but expect the modders to do the unpaid work of actually creating the game?
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wait, aren't they doing that already? :eek:

just not explicitly... yet. :cool:
 
Ololorium said:
Well, that would be a terrible idea. Everyone is already complaining about how barebones Paradox games are at the release, and that's when the games are intended to be playable, can you imagine how hard the backlash would be if they ever tried to release "just a framework for the modders to work on" and sell it for money, but expect the modders to do the unpaid work of actually creating the game? Anyway, designing the base systems (POPs, economic system, trade system, political system, and merging them together into one incredibly complex interconnected whole, not to say about the AI who needs to learn how to manage all that, and making sure the computer doesn't explode trying to run this) is precisely the hard part. If it's done, creating the content for the game and balancing the numbers (something the modders are able to do) can be done in a year or so. And you can't base it on CK3 or any existing game, really, because none of them is designed with having "realistic" economy with supply and demand. Of course, such system can be hacked on top of the existing one, like it's being done in M&T mod for EU4, but if it's going to end up very heavy on performance, bug-prone, and very hard for the AI to manage.
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well lookings at mods for v2 pdm concert of europe modders are happy to do total conversions putting in 2 years of unpaid work for fun. same with hoi4 kaierreich and road 56 have 3 years unpaid total conversions. the barebones issue is by expectation in a final build u expect quality in an alpha u expect bugs.
 
alexman said:
well lookings at mods for v2 pdm concert of europe modders are happy to do total conversions putting in 2 years of unpaid work for fun. same with hoi4 kaierreich and road 56 have 3 years unpaid total conversions. the barebones issue is by expectation in a final build u expect quality in an alpha u expect bugs.
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Total conversion mods made by Paradox fans are amazing, but they can't alter the fundamentals of the game. For example, PDM for Victoria can tweak numbers related to pop demands, add new goods types, new events, decisions, modifiers etc. But it can't do more interesting stuff, like adding new POP types, making services work in a different way than the factory goods, changing the trade mechanic (which is one of the most annoying and unrealistic things in V2), modify the way the population is modelled (currently, a POP always represents a family with 1 working man and 3 members of his family who aren't employed, which blocks the game from representing women entering the workforce, the problems of demographic transition, and - irrelevant for the game's timeframe, but very important for modern day mods - ageing of the population), etc., etc. And relying on scripts, events and other mechanisms which were intended to be used on a limited scale makes the game much slower and less stable, while AI can't use them properly.
The thing is, any "barebones prototype" which can model all the fundamental mechanics is already a 80% completed game, because it has a the hard parts - designing the systems the game is based on, writing the algorithms for these systems to work, creating AI which understands these systems, testing and fixing bugs. After that, creating the main scenario and balancing the numbers system is going to operate with (how much goods POPs demand, how much bonuses the research give, etc.), something the modders can do, is the relatively easy part. So why would Paradox not do the easy part at the end, if they already are almost there?
 
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Johan said:
Ironically v2 has far simpler and cruder mechanics than imperator.

I coded both.. the politics/pop system for v2 is something that i wrote in a week..
Click to expand...

I don't even... Honestly? This sounds like you're trying to oversell Imperator qualities more than anything... Don't get me wrong, I really like what you did with I:R pops and the way you can fine tune the whole thing with buildings and cities and all. It's great. But you can't compare pops in both games and tell me with a straight face that V2 pops are simpler, because it's simply untrue. V2 at large is indeed a pretty crude game as far as gameplay goes, that can feel a bit too hands-off at times, but the underlying systems are, at the very least, some of the most elegant (if not the most complex, yes) you've ever designed. Don't try to pretend otherwise, please.

First, V2 has a living, dynamic economy, which is admittedly quite wonky and prone to sudden crashes, but it's still miles ahead of what I:R has, which is not an economy at all, only an abstraction of one. Meanwhile, in V2 it's the pops that harvest, extract and produce goods, and then buy them, because they've got savings, money, a job, a life. They grow and die by the thousands every passing day. And V2 economy doesn't need inputs from the player and the nations AI to exist and evolve. That's elegant, as I said.

Also, let's take, for instance, opinions. In I:R pops have happiness and that's it. They're happy or they're not, and all it does is affecting they're productivity, the amount of secondary ressources you can get from them (money, manpower, research points). It's a binary system that does not even lead to anything on the political scale of things, since even slave revolts are driven by events, and revolts/politics at large are character driven. So what about V2? Pops have Militancy and Consciousness, the latter representing their level of political awareness, and the former standing for their will to enforce those political beliefs, violently if needed - and I love this distinction. And it ties into revolts dynamically and of course, political opinions, ever shifting, when pops have specific societal concerns and belong to specific ideologies, affecting their votes etc... and in return what you can do as a player, being restricted by the ideologies of the ruling party... If that's not complex and "deep" and "realistic", in a way, hell, I don't know what is.

All in all, V2 has by far the most elegant, fascinating and "believable" pop system of the two, and of any game in the history of gaming, I do believe. If only its economy could be fixed and made more... I don't know, better... And of course, one would need to improve the gameplay loops around that system, and make more ways to interact with it. Because, yeah, V2 is mainly lacking in player agency, in solid and more varied gameplay, indeed. But the core systems are awesome, especially the pops.

Finally, when you say that you wrote the whole thing in a week, well, maybe, but let me tell you something. In France, we have a saying that goes: le temps ne fait rien à l'affaire (roughly translated: time has nothing to do with it.) Which means that the time you take to do something doesn't matter so much and is not necessarily representative of the quality of your work (or the lack thereof, by the way.) Sometimes inspiration means way more than actual labor, when everything clicks in a flash. Maybe you were very much inspired then.
 
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Plastic_Duke said:
I don't even... Honestly? This sounds like you're trying to oversell Imperator qualities more than anything... Don't get me wrong, I really like what you did with I:R pops and the way you can fine tune the whole thing with buildings and cities and all. It's great. But you can't compare pops in both games and tell me with a straight face that V2 pops are simpler, because it's simply untrue. V2 at large is indeed a pretty crude game as far as gameplay goes, that can feel a bit too hands-off at times, but the underlying systems are, at the very least, some of the most elegant (if not the most complex, yes) you've ever designed. Don't try to pretend otherwise, please.

First, V2 has a living, dynamic economy, which is admittedly quite wonky and prone to sudden crashes, but it's still miles ahead of what I:R has, which is not an economy at all, only an abstraction of one. Meanwhile, in V2 it's the pops that harvest, extract and produce goods, and then buy them, because they've got savings, money, a job, a life. They grow and die by the thousands every passing day. And V2 economy doesn't need inputs from the player and the nations AI to exist and evolve. That's elegant, as I said.

Also, let's take, for instance, opinions. In I:R pops have happiness and that's it. They're happy or they're not, and all it does is affecting they're productivity, the amount of secondary ressources you can get from them (money, manpower, research points). It's a binary system that does not even lead to anything on the political scale of things, since even slave revolts are driven by events, and revolts/politics at large are character driven. And what about V2? Pops have Militancy and Consciousness, the latter representing their level of political awareness, and the former standing for their will to enforce those political beliefs, violently if needed - and I love this distinction. And it ties into revolts dynamically and of course, political opinions, ever shifting, when pops have specific societal concerns and belong to specific ideologies, affecting their votes etc... and in return what you can do as a player, being restricted by the ideologies of the ruling party... If that's not complex and "deep" and "realistic", in a way, hell, I don't know what is.

All in all, V2 has by far the most elegant, fascinating and "believable" pop system of the two, and of any game in the history of gaming, I do believe. If only its economy could be fixed and made more... I don't know, better... And of course, one would need to improve the gameplay loops around that system, and make more ways to interact with it. Because, yeah, V2 is mainly lacking in player agency, in solid and more varied gameplay, indeed. But the core systems are awesome, especially the pops.

Finally, when you say that you wrote the whole thinig in a week, well, maybe, but let me tell you something. In France, we have a saying that goes: le temps ne fait rien à l'affaire (roughly translated: time has nothing to do with it.) Which means that the time you take to do something doesn't matter so much and is not necessarily representative of the quality of your work (or the lack thereof, by the way.) Sometimes inspiration means way more than actual labor, when everything clicks in a flash. Maybe you were very much inspired then.
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If you walk as good a game as you talk, you already enjoy a lucrative career in game design, I assume?
 
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RedRalphWiggum said:
If you walk as good a game as you talk, you already enjoy a lucrative career in game design, I assume?
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All I wrote was my honest opinion, and nothing more, obviously, and I get that you disagree with it, but why the sarcasm? Did I came across as too patronizing, maybe? In this case, I'm sorry, didn't really mean to. What I meant essentially was that Johan intervention seemed (to me) like he was mainly trying to promote Imperator - which is a game I actually like - by, counterintuitively, and dare I say ungracefully, smearing V2's reputation of complexity. Which I didn't like. And I then tried to explain why.

Also, back on topic now, I'm personally confident that V3 has been in the making for quite some time already, and will happen when it's done. And despite my unconditional love for V2 complexity (I insist), I'm not even against a more abstracted version of the previous installment. Let say, for instance, the economy. If you really can't make it work in the V2 style, I understand, maybe nobody can, and so, dumbing it down a bit to ensure its stability and predictability is okay, I guess. On the other hand, the purely political side of the game should be made more complex and more interactive, frankly, it's already pretty dumb as is, with only the "elections" mechanic you have to force every year to have a slight chance to influence the opinions of your pops in the long run... I'd like to appoint ministers, for instance, like in HOI, and interact with a parliament, like the Senate in Imperator, when my country has one, more than randomly, through events only.

But, at this point, I don't really care anymore what a V3 would look like, honestly. I just want, no I need a new PDS game set in the Victorian era. I'm so desperate to again suddenly turn a poor old unsuspecting agrarian society, still semi-feudal at first, into a nationalistic industrial hell hole yearning for safety regulations, pensions, paid leaves and a first world war... the wait is killing me at times. Let me teach once more to those filthy peasants the way of progress, hopefully before 2022!
 
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