If you hate Victoria 3….

[Lazy Sorcerer]

Funnily enough, I believe that the reason why people tend to stick around so long even though they dislike the game is because of Paradox's history of radical reworks. People do not want to believe that they ended up wasting their money. They cling onto the idea that the game could change so that they will like it, because it has happened in the past and may happen again.

I give it maybe 5% chance the game turn into something I like, I mostly just want to let others know why I dislike it.

EDIT: It is probably why a lot of people are holding out though, I agree with your premise.

I find this to be a very generous take on Vic2.

Those mechanics if they worked perfectly would solve all those issues is what I meant by it.

 

[Kyoumen]

This is what frustrates me the most. After I played Victoria 2, I thought it was obvious that every Paradox GSG from then on should have mechanics like POPs, militancy, consciousness and autonomous private sector economy, because they elegantly solved almost all issues of GSG had with senless blobbing and being a omnipotent dictator of your country. They didn't do so perfectly, but I said to myself that this was just the initial version of these mechanics and they would get more refined in time. Victoria 2 wasn't some kind of ultra-complex economy and society simulator - it was a sequel to EU3, but with the added Chemical X of the above mentioned mechanics, which truly made the genre work.

Apparently Paradox didn't think so, because they they kept these mechanics boxed in the Victoria series (except Stellaris, but Wiz-era Stellaris is basicaly just a patient zero for everything wrong with Vic 3).

Ah, the "take the best of all the different series mechanics" approach.

They tried that in EU:Rome and Imperator.

Worked out perfectly!

Also, you might have considered there was something wrong with your analysis when it included the premise that Victoria 2 was a sequel to EUIII and not, say... Victoria.

 

[Lazy Sorcerer]

They tried that in EU:Rome and Imperator.

Imperator didn't suck because it had POPs.

 

[Lazy Sorcerer]

I will never stop saying this: Victoria 2 changed JUST AS MUCH frim Victoria. The games play very dissimilarly, including and especially how Vicky 2 cut out Victoria's primary game mechanic and automated it.

Yes, and I believe those changes were for the better and am happy that players who liked that about Victoria 1 were not listened to in the making of Victoria 2 and I make no excuses for my happiness. Just like those who love the changes made in Victoria 3 make no excuses for it either.

 

[Lord Lambert]

I will never stop saying this: Victoria 2 changed JUST AS MUCH frim Victoria. The games play very dissimilarly, including and especially how Vicky 2 cut out Victoria's primary game mechanic and automated it.

It's almost like no one is saying "change bad" and is instead saying "these specific changes are bad"

 

[grommile]

Those mechanics if they worked perfectly would solve all those issues is what I meant by it.

You don't let the people who disagree with you get away with "if they worked perfectly", why should the people who disagree with you let you get away with it?

 

[Kyoumen]

Yes, and I believe those changes were for the better and am happy that players who liked that about Victoria 1 were not listened to in the making of Victoria 2 and I make no excuses for my happiness. Just like those who love the changes made in Victoria 3 make no excuses for it either.

That's cool, but my problem here is the people who complain about Victoria 3 making major changes to mechanics and gameplay as an intrinsically bad thing, as if that's not what the game they like also did to its predecessor. It's simply a bad argument to make, and self-defeating in this case.

 

[Kyoumen]

Imperator didn't suck because it had POPs.

I'd say that in both cases, the games suffered from not having a strong identity of their own, and part of the reason for that was stuff like "we have pops, but it's not central to gameplay like Victoria". Imperator was very much EU:Rome 2 when it launched.

My point here is that it sounds good to bring the best parts of different games together, but there will inevitably be compromises, and those compromises may well make the result less than the sum of its parts.

 

[FluffayOne]

Glancing through the last page it just feels like it can all be summed up as "Old thing good, new thing bad, make old thing but new".

Which has been a thing for PDX games for ages so the tradition is kept alive.

As for this point specifically:

Apparently Paradox didn't think so, because they they kept these mechanics boxed in the Victoria series (except Stellaris, but Wiz-era Stellaris is basicaly just a patient zero for everything wrong with Vic 3).

Because Vic 2 didn't move enough copies. We have a guarantee that it turned a profit with the whole hair shaving incident back in the day, but it was released for 40$ and according to vg insights, it only made a revenue of 9.7M after 13 years with 808k copies sold on Steam. This is discounting the DLC. CK2 is 6.1M units sold at 99M revenue (Obviously numbers are inflated since it went F2P). EU4 is 85.6M in revenue at 3M copies sold.

All of these games were released in a 3 year time-window. Meanwhile, Vicky 3 has equal number of copies sold to Vicky2 at 33.7M, just to drive home how many copies of V2 were bought at heavy discount after it became a cult classic gem due to youtube. You can go look at HoI3 to see its numbers for something more close to the truth for Vicky 2, arguably worse numbers because HoI3 came off Darkest Hour which was a gem and V2 came off V1 which was a trashfire. HoI3 grossed 2.3M in revenue from 368k units sold and it released one year before Vicky 2.

Games become more expensive to create with time. Prices change. Markets grow. The fact V3 got born out of a damn meme and some possible damage control after Imperator is hilarious as hell, but nobody in their right mind would focus on a sequel to Vicky because, obviously, compared to the other franchises it performed fairly meh. The only reason V3 is even successful in this day and age is because EU4 and HoI4, with all its cries of casualization and "ruining the franchise" early on its life allowed PDX to expand its consumer base massively.

 

[Lazy Sorcerer]

play tall rather than wide.

This right here is the problem - pandering to players who want to make the game more boring. Tall is easier, safer and less effort and requires less strategy than playing wide. Any "struggles" that a tall "player" will face is something that a wide player will also face, but on a wider scale. Playing wide requires more diplomatic skill, since you tread on more toes. Tall should never be a valid alternative to wide.

The limit to expansion should be alliance webs and the cost of war and the cost of actually occupying enemy territory (in all Paradox games, including Victoria, this just magically happens without requiring any permanent troop investment), not making war unfun.

 

[Lazy Sorcerer]

"Vicky 3 is more like an experimental spinoff than a direct sequel to Victoria 2".

Would those people still complain if the experimental spinoff was good?

 

[Lord Lambert]

Because Vic 2 didn't move enough copies. We have a guarantee that it turned a profit with the whole hair shaving incident back in the day, but it was released for 40$ and according to vg insights, it only made a revenue of 9.7M after 13 years with 808k copies sold on Steam. This is discounting the DLC. CK2 is 6.1M units sold at 99M revenue (Obviously numbers are inflated since it went F2P). EU4 is 85.6M in revenue at 3M copies sold.

All of these games were released in a 3 year time-window. Meanwhile, Vicky 3 has equal number of copies sold to Vicky2 at 33.7M, just to drive home how many copies of V2 were bought at heavy discount after it became a cult classic gem due to youtube. You can go look at HoI3 to see its numbers for something more close to the truth for Vicky 2, arguably worse numbers because HoI3 came off Darkest Hour which was a gem and V2 came off V1 which was a trashfire. HoI3 grossed 2.3M in revenue from 368k units sold and it released one year before Vicky 2.

Vicky 2 was of the older generation of PDX games. Pretty much everything post CK2 should be in its own category and really not compared as they followed drastically different business models. That, and the fact that Paradox absolutely ballooned in size since then mean that comparisons for copies sold is just substanceless padding on your argument.

 

[FluffayOne]

Vicky 2 was of the older generation of PDX games. Pretty much everything post CK2 should be in its own category and really not compared as they followed drastically different business models. That, and the fact that Paradox absolutely ballooned in size since then mean that comparisons for copies sold is just substanceless padding on your terrible argument.

Hearts of Iron 3 released August 7, 2009
Victoria 2 released August 13, 2010
Darkest Hour released April 8, 2011 (130K units sold, 800k revenue)
Sengoku released September 15, 2011 (25k units sold, 160K revenue)
Crusader Kings 2 released February 14, 2012
Europa Universalis 4 released August 13, 2013

A House Divided came out in 2012 (CK2 era) and Heart of Darkness came out in 2013 (EU4 era). Compare it with any imaginary era you had of PDX in your mind, Vicky 2 wasn't the smashing hit success you like to think it was. CK2 got several DLC's in its first year, a model that could of been easily transferred over to Vicky 2 if the numbers were there for it. Coulda done the same thing in 2013 when EU4 got 4 DLC's during its first year as well. Are the numbers above perfect? No. It's using vginsights. But they're good enough starting points.

This right here is the problem - pandering to players who want to make the game more boring. Tall is easier, safer and less effort and requires less strategy than playing wide. Any "struggles" that a tall "player" will face is something that a wide player will also face, but on a wider scale. Playing wide requires more diplomatic skill, since you tread on more toes. Tall should never be a valid alternative to wide.

Playing wide is less skillfull, it's just pandering to bad players who don't do any real development and just bumrush the AI nation in the early game before it can set itself up properly to counter a human player, annex them, take over all their development, and go on a conquering spree until no AI nation can stand up to him. Playing wide is easier, safer, and less effort and requires less strategy than playing tall. A tall player has to actually think about what he's doing with his limited resources while any "struggle" a wide player has he just steamrolls over because he just snowballed out of control.

Anybody can say stupid crap to feel smug. Stop having the equivalent of a shower argument 2 days after you got roasted by someone and finally came up with a good comeback in a public forum, do it in the privacy of your shower like the rest of us do.

 

[Lazy Sorcerer]

Playing wide is less skillfull, it's just pandering to bad players who don't do any real development and just bumrush the AI nation in the early game before it can set itself up properly to counter a human player, annex them, take over all their development, and go on a conquering spree until no AI nation can stand up to him. Playing wide is easier, safer, and less effort and requires less strategy than playing tall. A tall player has to actually think about what he's doing with his limited resources while any "struggle" a wide player has he just steamrolls over because he just snowballed out of control.

The opposite of map painting and snowballing is not playing tall. It's having to make interesting strategic choices where, how and when to expand alongside interesting peacetime gameplay. Neither of which Victoria 3 has.

Anybody can say stupid crap to feel smug. Stop having the equivalent of a shower argument 2 days after you got roasted by someone and finally came up with a good comeback in a public forum, do it in the privacy of your shower like the rest of us do.

This isn't a chatroom, I can respond to older posts.

 

[Major Malfunction]

That's cool, but my problem here is the people who complain about Victoria 3 making major changes to mechanics and gameplay as an intrinsically bad thing, as if that's not what the game they like also did to its predecessor. It's simply a bad argument to make, and self-defeating in this case.

Change for the sake of change is not a progress. Somethime, there are obviously bad design choices, like with V3 warfre mechanics.

Also, Vic3 rating seems to be slowly increasing with time.

Uh-huh

I give it maybe 5% chance the game turn into something I like, I mostly just want to let others know why I dislike it.

With Paradox games there's always a chance- once some mechanic proves to be a really bad design decision an overhaul could follow.
Stellaris: Tiles=>pops, FTL rework, some performance drama (not the best example of community-dev communication),
EUIV - ZoC forts rework, westernization=>institutions, estates rework, Espionage rework, curia micrimanagement hell etc.
So when after several reworks it will become obvious that no amount of tweaks and fxes will help current garbage of a warfare "system" - there may be a decision to actually implement decent warfare mechanics, worthy of a Paradox title. After all,we already have provinces and only need to add units with HoIIV-like fronts or such.

 

[Star Seeker]

Uh-huh

I was talking about the "Mixed" Steam rating, not the player count.

Also, that chart is extremely disigenous because it is analyzing the current numbers, not the release numbers. Here is a comparison with release numbers. Note how Victoria 3 is doing almost the same as Stellaris, but still similar to the other titles except CK3.

 

[Major Malfunction]

And see how players abandon the game after initial release enthusiasm have been crushed by horrible Ui and defunct systems, warfare only being the worst offender.

 

[Star Seeker]

You just kinda ignored what I said.

And see how players abandon the game

As you can see with the comparison above, that is expected, and it doesn't look it is game-ending.

 

[Lord Lambert]

As you can see with the comparison above, that is expected, and it doesn't look it is game-ending.

Lets just hope that Vic3 follows the Stellaris model for post release support, and gets a couple of colossal overhauls that dramatically change entire systems at the conceptual level!

 

[Star Seeker]

Lets just hope that Vic3 follows the Stellaris model for post release support, and gets a couple of colossal overhauls that dramatically change entire systems at the conceptual level!

Just because they are doing similarly doesn't mean the solutions are the same. As far as we can tell, what is necessary might be major improvements to UI/UX, perfomance and AI, or the changes outlined in the post-release DD.