Epilogue
Farewell
Farewell
So, the morale of the story is: "Next time I want to relax after exstensive modding, I won't be playing a Paradox game. I will probably choose some casual game like Pirates! or a flash-game or something like that. And I definitely won't write an AAR about it
" Writing an AAR is not something to be taken lightly. Unless of course you don't want to do it right. At times, it almost felt like a chore to continue writing, something I had to do even if I didn't feel like it, because I set the rules for myself and they said that a new Chapter should be posted every week. And to be honest, conquering the World can become quite tedious For this Epilogue Chapter, I had two things in mind: showing you how the World ended up like after my glorious one hundred years of reign and to tell you my thoughts and feelings about the whole thing. And I will do these in reverse order, so you will have to read through my musings before you can get to the shiny coloured pictures™
Frist of all, the mod. The Victoria Improvement Project is a wonderful mod with tons of content, and probably thousands of man-hours of development time invested. Problem is, it is not meant for me. An even bigger problem is, it is not really able to adapt to the situation, which might hemper the efforts of anyone wanting to get a-historical. And let's be honest, you can't really be historical for 100 years!... Again, this doesn't mean that VIP is a bad mod, or that I would not recommend it to others, only that you should stick to mostly historical scenarios if you play a mostly historical mod. VIP is not really exceptional in this regard, and I guess it sould be much harder to implement a mod in this engine with similar design philosophy to Magna Mundi. I hope something more in those lines will be made for Victoria II somewhere down the road.
About game mechanics. I had plenty of complaints about them. Most of them didn't really bother me in the past because I had a different play style, but as this AAR turned into an almost-WC kind of game, I had to adapt. In my opinion, the best thing in Victoria is that you can do tons of things beside waging war. Actually, waging war becomes a tool rather than the goal. If you take Hearts of Iron, war is the goal, the rest are the tools. In Crusader Kings, while war itself is not the goal (in the best case scenario, it is expansion, in the worst case scenario it is survival), but it is the most readily available and most efficient tool. Sure, you can (in theory) convince other lords to become your vassals, but that rarely actually works. Defeating them in battle on the other hand does work. The character building system is nice, but mostly reactive. (I'm not complaining though. Crusader Kings is a very good game, I'm looking forward to the sequel!) In Europa Universalis, you have more peaceful options (and you gain more and more with every expansion for the third game), but still, waging wars or avoiding wars is usually the focal point of that game too. The Victoria franchise is the only one where you can have a very enjoyable game with no wars at all, and without spending the entire game actively avoiding wars...
But I'm wandering off... The point is that I fought a lot more wars in this particular game then I usually do when I play Victoria. And that brought to light some interesting things, that might be considered serious balance issues. (Of course it doesn't really matter now, but still.) I will list the mechanics that I have problems with.
Badboy. This score seems very important, and usually it is, but in case of certain nations, it is absolutely meaningless. One such nation is the United States of America. If you reach enough badboy points, the AI will be less likely to make diplomatic deals with you, and if you go even further, it will start to pre-emptive declare wars on you. So far so good. While the later sounds very logical and realistic, the former does not. Or to be more precise, it should be a factor in determining the reactions of other nations, but not the only, and not even the most dominant one. And in the case of the later, it is exactly that: an important factor, but not the most important one. You might have noticed that I was only attacked up to a certain point: the rest of my wars were all my doing. (I don't remember exactly and won't read back, but I think the last war actively declared on me was during the unification of Africa.) When the AI realized that I'm much stronger, it stopped its foolish attempts at bringing me down. (Actually, it did even this too late, because of my undisputed naval supremacy, but that is mostly specific to the US.) I believe that the AI should similarly consider military (and diplomatic, ie. including allies') strength with a much greater weight in determining its foreign policy. If the World's greatest power offers an Alliance, you won't say "No, you bastards!". You will say "Yes! Whatever you say! Just don't hurt us! Please?".
Vassallization. Forced vassallization by wars is far too easy. I could make the United Kingdom my vassal for crying out loud! Italy had like a hundred divisions when they accepted my proposal! Sure, I already got half their country, but I had practically 0 chance to get the rest. Same for the UK. Sure, they couldn't really fight back from Ireland, especially with no navy to speek of, but come on! Not to mention China, who gave up their independence after me taking about 5% of their territory... And while we are at it. Your vassals will also work by the same rules as the rest, regarding their policy towards you. If you have a vassal, and you have too many badboy points, they won't trade with you. (Or at least won't give you stuff. They will still accept gifts, the bastards...) Because of this, I used the "neville" cheat quite frequently to force deals with my vassal, the United Kingdom. And I don't feel ashamed.
Policies. I don't like how the politics work in this game. As a matter of fact, I'm not really satisfied with how they work in Victoria II either. I'm talking about the policies of the governing party. In Victoria II, that might be less important because you don't have direct control over your POPs, but in Victoria, if you are a multi-cultured country, then Full Citizenship is ridiculously unbalanced. I already mentioned this with China. If you have the ability to build factories (have the technology), you have such a large population and you can even promote/demote them, you've pretty much won the game. The only problem is that Full Citizenship is practically restricted to Communist parties. What's even more unbalancing is that these parties tend to create a Proletarian Dictatorship, banning all other parties, so the newly gained voting rights of every minority will practically go to waste, and your soviet will remain in power indefinitely. Nice trick. (And come to think of it, it actually did work in China...)
Warfare. A very nice part of Paradox games and the most important reason why each game should stick to its time period is that they depict warfare differently in each game, reflecting the fact that warfare was very different throughout the ages of civilization. I especially like the way of recruitment in Crusader Kings: you don't have a standing army at all, you have to levy troops when you go to war from your provinces, and if you lose men in battle, you will have less to call upon next time. I also like the new Hearts of Iron 3 mobilization system: you can build reserve units, which have reduced strength, and only get up to full strength if you mobilize. There are also differences in how the actual mechanics of battle work. In Hearts of Iron (or at least from the second game) movement is attack, so if you start to move into a province occupied by enemy troops, battle will start immediately, and you can only enter the enemy province if you defeat the units there. Not so in the other games: you can march into any province you want, and if two enemy armies meet, they will fight where they are. So far so good. And the Victora way is a good model up until World War I. Yes, I know, there's no actual World War I in the game, but the point is that warfare canged drastically in the first two or three decades of the twentieth century, and this game now goes into the thirties. I really missed the ability to use my Aircraft in proper Aircraft roles
Still, you can't really change the core mechanics during the game, so I'm cool with that. But it supports my point that the games should be kept in their intended timeframe. (World War I is a somewhat special case. The "movement is attack" mechanism could work, but the independent air command is not really authentic.)Cores. This game is a strange case. In Crusader Kings, there are no cores, because it has no meaning in the context. Nationality didn't exist yet, people were part of the village they lived in, or the tribe they were part of, but not a nation. In the era of Europa Universalis, the idea of Nationalism slowly started to take root in peoples' minds, so that game has cores, but cores can change during the course of the game. In Victoria, this is no longer the case. Or more precisely, events can change cores, but they won't change by themselves. You can have claims on a province for a hundred years and it won't change a bit. You can also hold a colony for a hundred years, and it won't be considered any more yours than it was at the start of the game. I'm not sure if it is really a problem or not though. (What I'm sure about is that Europe Universalis: Rome shouldn't really have the core concept, as at the time, it wasn't really "invented" yet. In that game, culture and especially religion should have a much bigger impact on provinces, but whatever.)
But enough of my ranting! (Was it really ranting? I didn't really mean it to be... I really like this game! Except for the mod maybe, but that isn't bad either, only not meant for me...) The time has finally come for the shiny coloured pictures™!
North America. As I suspected, the Cree-Athabaska tribe was only scripted to give up land to Canada, so they still even own my cores! Bah...
Central America. This was a nice quiet place, except for the scripted revolution somewhere in the first decades of the twentieth century. I even decided to release some of them minors in the Caribbean after the Aristocrats turned into Capitalists there and went through a Factory-building race.
South America. That unclaimed part is funny, isn't it? For whatever reason, Brazil never actually built a claim building on the last province (they started with claims on the other three), so that State was uncolonized during the whole game. Something is missing from the AI file? Equador caused my a lot of problems, because they failed to form a standing army, and thus couldn't suppress their revolters... Arrgh!
Europe. Ah, the many wars I fought on thy soil! They were some of the bloodiest, too! And there was still some bastions of resistance in two small, irrelevant, backwater countries when the game ended! The symbol of my failure... But at least they didn't actually make it in the Great Powers list in the end
Western Africa. This was an easy ride. Except for the parts when I forgot some of my divisions in parts with abysmal living conditions, and they started to slowly wither away...
South Africa. Such a shame that South Africa has to keep its British Dominion flag. And the lack of modern releasable countries in Africa in general! I felt that I shouldn't release the same nations that I just annexed in Africa, but I also didn't really wanted to keep those mostly worthless territories... (I didn't need them at least.)
Middle East. Again, I would have released an Arabian Federation, but not a Hedjaz or Nejd or some such. Oh, whatever.
India. I would have prefered if India was a separate entity at the game's end, but at least it is not the fragmented mess it used to be
Far East. China and Korea both have trouble with revolts. Which is a perfect example of SEP (Someone Else's Problem).
Australia. Not really much to report here. A big, ugly and uninteresting island.
Oceania. Similar to Australia, but instead of one big ugly, uninteresting island, you have many small, ugly uninteresting islands.
Now, I would like to thank everyone that read it this far, I hope it wasn't a complete waste of time, and I would like to wish you a merry Christmas! (Unless you don't want me to, which is perfectly alright by me. Your loss.)
