Yay! I believe this is the first time Johan has responded to one of my posts. My language may have been a bit too harsh but it is based in truth. Anyway there are a lot of people to respond to. So go-go gadget, wall of text!
I challenge you to play a pre EU3 Paradox game through fully historically. There has never been a pre EU3 game that finished as in our reality. All of those games were missing dynamics that allow the game to unfold as it did in real life, and attempted to compensate by using events with marginal success. They did succeed in making one country feel different to another, and that is absolutely needed.
A challenge!? Ok this is true enough... simply because there are not enough events. The lack of events is the only thing stopping them from achieving this goal. There was obviously a lot to be desired in lots of places though, that is why I am here instead of still on the V1 board. As for the feel of a country we agree here 100%. EU3... I rest my case for that argument.
Events would frequently have nothing to do with how the game has been running up to that point, and two examples have already been given - the anschluss of everybody exploit, and a (Peruvian?) bankruptcy and mismanagement event. You could try adding more trigger conditions, but you're never going to cover every situation a cunning player will manage to set up.
I am refighting battles that have been fought before by others but ok... say it with me now Triggers! Once more I can hear you in the back... TRIGGERS! Very good. The events that are probably the easiest to stop are ones involving Anschlüsse (that is plural according to the dictionary). Are you at war with that country? Have you been at war in the last x amount of years? Answer no? The event triggers. Most events would need only that to stop them from firing inappropriately but any event can be stopped given the right conditions it is not
that difficult. As for the Peruvian event, well some triggers like is_bankrupt and a corruption meter tied to the event could probably eliminate 99% of the improper firings of that event or if worse came to worst then just exclude it? I don't know how pivotal a role it played in South America but I bet it could be worked around even though that would probably not be my first choice if it was a major event.
Sorry, please don't take that as being snarky or anything of the sort. This is all in a polite, reasoned, inquisitive tone, not adversarial. I just don't personally think events as used in Vicky are as wonderful as they're claimed to be. The best thing about them were that they made countries feel different, and they allowed fascinating event descriptions. In those regards, I completely agree that they were good. But they just don't work as ways to drive the game forward.
It is I who am sounding impolite I fear. So for the record I am not trying be an idiot and apologies if I come across that way, it sadly won't have been the first time. Those were mostly the things I enjoyed about them, as well as the satisfaction of seeing the world mostly historically at x moment in time. I actually don't think we are that far apart on our views.
What's the point of playing the game if it ends up completely as historical?
I guess some people understand this and some just do not. Some people have such entrenched positions in politics and religion and I fear I may never truly understand what makes them such a supporter of whatever it is. But I will say that I also like lots of specific, plausible a-historic events. And before the arguments come in about not being able to know all the possibilities. For the most part after
some a-historicness, you are just kind of put back on track. If you go way crazy then yes the events should stop firing and the game should pick up the slack and challenge you via AI and in game mechanics.
Sorry if I'm getting extreme, but history is overrated. I mean... what made WWI possible was not the assassination of Heir Franz Ferdinad, but the alliances structure. So, there would have uncountable (in literal terms) triggers for it... as well as it could not happen. Historical circumstances are not as important as structural situations (I know lot of historicians would argue but this is my position).
We are always shortage. Of time, of people working on the game, of potencial customers budget... As long as I'm expecting a enjoyable game from Paradox, I prefer PI people working on game mechanics that allow the generation of plausible (though un-historical) situations, rather than trying to find the whole triggers and outcomes of miriads of events. Finally, you can always mod it to make the game more historical... but you cannot mod it to plausibility.
Plausibility, rather than 'historicity', should be the criteria IMO.
I agree with the first part a bit actually. I have solutions for this but it involves expanding and building upon the event system not removing it, but I'll leave it at that. Bold part number 1 has yet to happen, even MM is not up to that level. I don't want to get into that either but imposing semi random and overly harsh effects on a player for expanding or starting a war or even having the misfortune of having a not so great king is a step down from events. At least when an event comes in to destroy your best laid plans, it tells you why and gives a historical context. MM just loads you up with terrible inefficiencies and BB and lets the AI attack mercilessly.
Please note some of that may be because I am bad at MM I see some merit (religious system) in MM but it is far from perfect.
Your choice atm is not "Plausibility, rather than 'historicity'" but chaos or order.
And there never was one for HoI2 or Hoi1 or Eu2 or Eu1 either...
Au contrair. I have seen with my own eyes games that ended historically in HoI2, at least more than enough to satisfy me. Most of the time it was not historical because of the AI not being able to land at Normandy or the US not having a naval range. Given those were with mods but even vanilla wasn't too far off. And btw I can see the potential in HoI3 and in time with some refining of how the game handles cores and some events and decisions, amongst other things I do predict it will be a worthy successor to HoI2. Why is that? I seem to recall someone saying events make sense for this game... who was that.
They make sense for every game! Although I think I understand where you are coming from as a dev I do think that events are a great solution too lots of problems. All I ask is that you make events as powerful as they were pre-Clauzwitz (HoI3esque with specific date triggers and as many as is possible triggers and effects), with the ability to tone down the AI when events are there to guide the game.
As someone who worked as a VIP beta in the past, leggbros, you should know very well just how difficult it was to keep Victoria:Revolutions historical even with the massive bodice and corset of events, AI script changes and the like that VIP as of VIP:R 0.3 has.
African colonization, we still don't have it perfectly historical. Even if the events all go perfectly historical (and for some we did keep ahistorical chances happening) there is nothing to say that the AI Euro nation might not just peace out in a colonial war with an African minor, or the events might not fire before their expiry date because the involved AI nation is involved in an ahistorical war the AI started with another AI nation.
I definitely know some things can be difficult but what I saw was pretty good. If there were a team of coders being paid to write events then I think 90% of all games would run to the players satisfaction. I know this is not what paradox wants to do, it is simply a hypothetical
.
All of the problems in that second paragraph can be solved with a refined game engine that is built for events and history, or at least one that is capable of handling such a mod, and an AI that knows its goals and its own power, be they event driven or otherwise. Most of our limitations came because of the engine not functioning as we wanted it, not because we couldn't handle some events.
The reality is that even all the events and AI changes VIP has made to the mod over the years, the reality is that the further from the start year you go, the more ahistorical the game ends up. I have yet to see a VIP save game that by 1914 is perfectly historical, even playing "hands off" and just watching the world go by. I can not recount the number of times during testing of events that I would have to restart the game because of some choice an AI nation made in ahistorical choice for event or deciding to go to war ahistorically, so that I could test some new events in a "proper historical environment".
This is very true and I also have yet to see a game that way. I would always say "Africa is not correct again" or "Ireland is independent" or "The US Mexican borders are not as they should be". I know Johan treated it as a joke, an option to allow the AI to always make the historical choice, but many of us like that option, and thank you FtG I will purchase eventually. Anyway I think even in Vicky as it is now, VIP could eventually foresee many possible outcomes and most of the time end historically or near historical should the player choose. There is a problem when things go off the rails but that is a game problem again.
There are a lot of things that are right with VIP. But let's not kid ourselves, we are only improving the historical feel of the game with the mod from what, without it, is a fairly open-ended base game. Even VIP is not a historical simulator, and one of the things I worked very hard on when I was working on development for the last couple releases was ensuring that triggers were more aware of potential human player exceptions so that events we did have did not fire in gameplay conditions the human player created where the events made little sense contextually (a process that still continues, because as said above, it is well nigh impossible to think of every situation a player can create in gameplay that a particular event should be exempt from firing in) because one of the most common areas of player feedback from the mod was that there was too little freedom for players wanting to strike out on their own ahistorica paths already in what VIP was doing with events and AIs.
I've kind of covered bits and pieces of this but once more, I advocate and event driven primary approach covering all major and many medium historical events with very major alternate possibilities covered (as a minimum, mods can add more). If a player decides to go off the track then the AI will be more independent. The fact that Vicky's AI had to be guided did not help matters.
If we look at what Magna Mundi has accomplished in the past couple years as a mod for EU3, I think we can agree that it is possible to create a mod that attempts to bring in the best of both worlds - a game engine that is more responsive to player behavior AND a system of decisions and events etc created by the modding community for those players who wish for a, for the lack of a better word, deeper historical feel to their game. It will take some time to develop, but I am convinced that VIP will evolve a similar style of mod for the next generation of Victoria. But the reality is that the players of VIP really are only a fraction of the whole Victoria player community (I've been tracking the number of downloads of VIP, so I have a fairly good idea of how big the player community is. And even if I got US$0.25 for each download, I'd still not be able to buy a new car, not even a KIA), and in the end it makes much more sense from a business perspective for Paradox to focus on games that are more "open ended" and "sandbox" in their style, even if that goes perhaps a bit too far in the potentials of what the AI might be able to do, and then have the modding community develop the deeper gameplay that what in the end is still a minority of all players of the game, seek from their gameplay experience.
I must admit I have not tried the most recent iterations of MM. I think I had MMP so I'm sure they've made many improvements in MMP2 but from what the dev diaries sounded like I got the impression they made it harder but not too much more historical (in a historical specificity sense). Some countries are obviously better than other in MM for history but, at least I, still felt very generic. I suspect that VIP will also evolve into a similar state as well. It seems to me that when Paradox makes a game like Eu2 or Vicky where events are a larger component then mods spring up to improve that component. When events are not important (or non-existent ala EU3) mods are just there to improve game play, which is bad for those of us who like to be more immersed in history. I guess we will see how mods develop for HoI3. If a historical event-decision driven mod develops then I suspect there may be hope yet for "my" side and whilst I see some hopeful stuff, I am sadly skeptical. Could you buy a
Tata Nano ?
Perhaps I am being as idealistic as those I criticize for wanting "plausibility". And I understand Paradox's resources and vision for the future but I have to add my voice to the rest so that I can say to my grandkids I tried *tear.
If you'll excuse me I need to see how civilization has progressed whilst I was writing this. Apologies all around for mistakes, idiocy.
