Another interesting thing mentioned in Your comment is burning out infamy. I wonder whether it will work like this in vic3, but I can certainly imagine an interesting problem - player's position on international stage is damaged by some aggresive movements, and yet they have to keep pushing for more because of internal pressure. I think that's what happened to Japan before ww2.
Yeah, something like that would be great. Although here I would be a little bit more careful from a game design perspective: it can easily become frustrating if the threat/infamy/whatever mechanic pushes against you for trying to be aggressive while the internal politics mechanic pushes against you for trying to be peaceful. I don't mind the scenario of being caught between a rock and a hard place in a tough moment, but this sounds like it could easily be a downward spiral in either direction that you cannot escape from.
But your mentioning of infamy (which we know isn't a thing in Vic3) brings to mind how penalties for military aggression and expansionism are modeled in the game. In all other Paradox games (and presumably Vic3?) this is something that accrues on the nation level. If I expand as Prussia in EU4 it is
France who dislikes me for it.
I wonder if that makes sense for a population modeling game like Victoria though. Shouldn't it be the
French population who dislikes you, which then becomes a political problem for the French government unless they go to confront Prussia? This leads us back to a much more realistic and immersive situation than before, and exactly mirrors what happened with the Franco-Prussian war.
As a further benefit, the <insert synonym for infamy> mechanics would then also apply to the player without "forcing" any actions on them. If a nearby power breaks international norms, your population expects you to act against them.
This isn't exactly the same as what Paradox is trying to model as "Threat", which is a more realpolitik and utilitarian way of looking at expansionist powers, but could be a good tool to model revanchism and the sense of national pride in the population (or at least, certain interest groups in the population).
As excited as I would be for such a system, it could result in meme situations as easily as any of paradox's current political systems.
I'm assuming that everyone here is familiar with "We Love the King Day" from Civ, yeah? Their desires were completely arbitrary, since they had to be randomly generated. I'm afraid that your pops' desires in terms of foreign policy will be equally arbitrary.
While I could envision the historical American public being excited about annexing the whole of North America (Manifest Destiny and all that), I can't imagine the historical British public being quite so excited about annexing the whole of Europe. How would a pops system model such a difference? And in such specific circumstances?
Not to mention, how would the game decide what your pops deem to be of "strategic interest?" Will the Luxembourgian public expect its government to obtain the Suez?
In order for such a system to not be a royal pain, it would have to be extensively programmed and tested in order to prevent absurd demands from being made -- perhaps even railroaded in some cases, as much as the idea normally puts me off.
In my opinion, the population/IG preferences should be for anything
but strategic interests. You're right that the public usually doesn't think strategically in their foreign policy preferences, that's what the government does. And their thinking is alrady reflected in the player: as a player we are inclined to want to make strategically optimal choices (to the best of our ability).
Pop/IG desires should be the spanner in the works that makes it hard to make those strategically optimal choices. I don't think such desires are that hard to derive in a way that is historically intuitive, for example:
- religious and conservative IGs should support wars against powers with minorities of their religion, especially if their rights are limited (French and Russian wars against the Ottoman Empire)
- capitalist/industrial IGs should support wars that expand access to resources, e.g. colonial wars
- capitalist/industrial IGs should oppose wars / support cooperation with nations that buy their products, e.g. the US with the UK
- religious IGs should support wars against decentralised nations that can be proselytized
- people should favour cooperation with nations that share their culture/heritage, like how the German immigrants in the US opposed war with Germany
- people in general, but maybe particularly low education pops, should support revanchism and nationalism, i.e. recovering lost territory and bringing territory of the same culture under your control
- prestige should factor into this in general (i.e. the prestige outcome of your actions should affect opinion accordingly)
This doesn't have to be too punishing, it's not like the entire country riots in the streets because you aren't protecting Ottoman Christians (although maybe it's a different question when prestige enters into the equation). But it would cost you some opinion with an IG that is maybe the crucial support for the law you want to pass.
Also, I think this perspective could also offer opportunities to the player, not just limitations. We have no idea how casus belli work in this game, but I am hoping for something more substantial than "fabricate claim". It seems like a golden opportunity to root casus belli in the IGs in your government instead. Like, the religious IG wants you to go to war with the Ottomans as protector of the Christian faith? Great, invite them into your government and suddenly you get that useful "Protect our brothers of faith" CB against the Ottomans. Of course that may spell trouble if you actually want a liberal government to pass progressive reforms. Is the CB worth stalling your reforms? It would be such a good way to further intertwine domestic and foreign politics.
Apart from Twitter, there is something called newspapers, I think was quite common source of info in Victorian era
Those 1820s kids and their newspapers!
Literacy 1836 start date:
- Prussia 63,1 %
- France 58,3 %
The society, the common people, almost never want war, especially not over some nuisances between their big bosses.
As others have pointed out, that is not actually the case in the 19th century. Famously even for WW1 people initially were excited to go to war, and public opinion pushed the involved governments to seek confrontation, not avoid it.
Part of the reason is that until WW1 (and the ACW in the United States) war was a much more limited affair: most men would not have to join the army to fight, much of the economy could operate on terms similar to peace time, and war wasn't nearly as destructive to the territories it was fought on. Think about it less in terms of how modern societies think about capital-W War but rather how people these days talk about air strikes or missile strikes. Maybe objectionable on moral grounds, but nothing to be too upset by because they don't pose a risk to yourself or people like you.
