Every country is bland and lifeless. Victoria 3 seems like an early access product, and to get a version that feels reasonably finished you have to buy all of the DLC.
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Russia in Victoria 3 is bland and lifeless
- Thread starter Nigerian_Prince
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Too much wasted development effort. Keep Victoria 3 a sandbox.
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You're taking a dump on HOI4's focus trees but isn't HOI4 literally Paradox's most successful game ever? Lmao
Isn't variety in starting situations, resource availability etc literally railroading? Why doesn't paradox just place 600 rubber plantations in Yorkshire?
Additionally, those types of variety only offer a very limited amount of flavour. Resource variety doesn't give legs to the game, its the presentation of history or a narrative of history. That's why people who are interested in history play these games
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What? I literally suggested two mechanics to make Vic3 a genuine sandbox to simulate (instead of script) historical events.
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Focus trees aren't good because they dominate the entire game.
EU4's mission trees are better, because they allow more freedom while also allowing some direction.
But imo even they railroad too much, and ideally there would be some sort of dynamic alternative tree so you don't objectively lose out by doing your own thing (you shouldn't be punished for not doing the historical thing).
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This is a historical game, so there should be a historical background to it. Otherwise they should make a fantasy game.
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Thanks for making me realise that I made a major omission from the initial list. I mean paradox were supposed to simulate all this diplomatic wrangling in Europe instead of having everything be solved by war, but neglected to include a Congress system.
I feel like a lot of HOI4 focus trees tend to have a decent amount of choice in them. First of all the strategic choice of picking which focuses to do and what order, which is a major strategic concern, as well as some foci being multiple choice in nature, with branching political paths or paths emphasising tactical bombers versus CAS, as an example.
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Funny that you say that, because this was literally the system they had in place before the mission trees. They are a godawful addition and don't fit EU4 at all.
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Try playing a sandbox game and watch everything get ruined by AI making alt-history choices. There are too many combinations the game can't account for.
Also, the focus tree becomes so dominant that the only paths open to you are available through the options it provides. It tells you what leaders you can have, what countries you can core, and what generals/officials you can get, as well as severely punishing any play outside of the tree with no cores and no free casus bellis. Once the focus tree is finished, the game feels completely dead, because that entire game is based around the focus tree.
Further, sometimes you might research techs before you get them for free in the focus tree, and often won't have time to do the military choices before war. You can get locked into terrible outcomes, and too much being scripted means that your game can basically be ruined by one RNG failure with the focus tree and events as they work together.
To say nothing of the growing inconsistency in tree quality over time, and how further expansions made past trees feel much more incomplete.
But overall, you don't get much freedom to customise the details of your country in a way that feels like you're building something new. The game offers you a few storylines of consequence for your country: you pick one, and hope that RNG doesn't ruin your game.
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what is most annoying to experience was that i saw ai russia import wood or i couldnt build a better road network or dig a canal in ural only to wait for researching railroad. During my playthrough as russia i got annoyed with the warfare system, i helped ottoman against egypt things looked chaotic.
I had no feel my manpower mattered as well as no view on pops who needed a job
I had no feel my manpower mattered as well as no view on pops who needed a job
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It's a problem that is probably never really going to be solved. This game is by design a sandbox and Paradox has stated it's against forcing actual history down the players throats. So most historical events won't be happening. The second the game is unpaused the history of the game is diverging from real life history.
Yeah look listen I was defending the focus trees for HOI4 because I think they're unfairly maligned sometimes, but I still think they aren't a good fit for Victoria 3 because HOI4 is over so much of a narrow historical period and it kind of needs railroading on historical anyway.
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Completely agree. And most of these things could've included in the game using core mechanics and/or Journal entries.
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I agree with you. I also think that its not like the only option for adding flavor and history is a mission/focus tree. Unique decisions, formable tags, and even just unique events/journal entries that are at least correlated to initial conditions within nations (looking at you, US Civil war) can all be sufficiently flavorful to actually make players interested in playing different nations, without necessitating the player or AI be railroaded into the historical outcomes of those nations
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I mean, I import wood when I play Russia as well. Why shouldn't the AI do it? I'd rather build tool factories or iron mines first, if I can import wood for cheap.
You can make quite a buck to import wood and then sell it to others via tarrifs. It also creates trade centers in your states, which creates middle strata jobs.
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Look, I love history as much as anyone, but I would rather have a game capable of producing emergent outcomes through its mechanics alone than one based on scripting for the same limited number of "historical" or "plausible" narratives that attempt to force particular outcomes. That to me isn't a game with legs, because it's not a game with a consistent and entertaining puzzle to master, it's a game which relies on the novelty of being constantly fed events to read.
There's a middle ground somewhere, and there are definitely cases in V3 where a little more scripting wouldn't hurt, but adding "uniqueness" in the form of arbitrary events, one-off mechanics and random bonuses only available to specific tags is incredibly shallow, particularly when a lot of the more overly "immersion breaking" stuff can likely be fixed with small tweaks to the simulation given enough time.
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I personally hate this mindset for Vicky3 and the open-ended sandbox nature of the game is one of its biggest flaws in my opinion, and this is coming from someone that actually likes the game. Do I want the possibility to shape stuff so it ends up different from historical events? Absolutely, that's not even a question. Everybody wants that possibility, even those who are historical purists. But I don't want a sandbox that opens up and offers nothing but my input past the first 5 years.
The problem with the sandbox design for Vicky3, and games that rely on "open sandbox" stuff in general, is that a sandbox that is set in stone and doesn't offer anything of its own is boring as hell. Games like Stellaris and Roguelikes/Roguelites can make sandboxes fun because of the randomization inherit in their systems and -- mostly in regards to the later category -- the progression which is maintained across runs. The current sandbox implementation of Vicky 3 reminds me more of Open-World games from Ubisoft where, yes, you do have a "large spanning sandbox where you can do what you want" but it's lifeless, it's empty, and it's honestly good for nothing but being a time sink and giving a false sense of scale. I can imagine Todd smiling at me and saying "See that Monarchy? You can communist it!" whenever people say they don't want any scripted guidance in Vicky.
The journal tool is a potent system in allowing a modicum of boundaries and rails within the sandbox that the player can choose to follow or to break over their knee but it's woefully underused and underdeveloped at the moment. Use it more. Make it possible for important historical events to play out through it when the criteria's are met, the same way it happens through events, to give the game a sense of direction that the player can actually interact with. Make an option akin to HoI4's historical AI setting, where certain journals and certain event decisions are given an extreme weight for the AI to pursue if its turned off while randomizing the respective weights when its turned off. This can allow people to enjoy the open-ended sandbox that currently exists while giving the game more focus.
But as it stands, assuming the player is a spectator or a nation not directly controlling the ones mentioned next? Players will not see the culmination of several centuries of despotic Russian rule result in any real revolution or powerplay between the Tsar/Boyars and the Peasantry to maintain the old order. Players will not see the Japanese be forced out of isolation or their triumphant fight over the new world to be left alone as a hermit kingdom. Players will not see the currents of western liberalism break the old order of Chinese beaurocrats and their grip over the empire or a resurgent empire attempt to bring back the uncivilized barbarians back under subservience to the Emperor.
Whatever happens in one part of the world, no matter how close or far away from another, will not have an impact on the world past the first few years of the game start and even that is limited. Hell, whatever happens in your own country will, generally speaking, have absolutely no impact. Russia is a great example of this, as to my knowledge it has a history mired in boyars fighting against industrialization and the liberation of serfs and the ideal of Panslavism which neither really mean anything.
A sandbox that is just that, an open pit of sand with nothing in it, is boring as hell. A sandbox that has a few sand castles already built, that has a delimitation that can be bent, expanded, or broken, offers so much more to do, from breaking everything inside it to start anew, to expanding the pit by pouring sand off to its side, to building on whatever is already there.
I really do feel that the people who want absolutely nothing pushed onto the game are the people that want another CK3 or base game Stellaris or, God forbid, thought the diversity in Imperator was actually fine. I genuinely don't.
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I don't understand this mindset because attempts were already made to replicate this with the Opium Wars and the Tanzimat/Sick Man of Europe journal entries for the UK and Ottomans respectively. They dipped their toes in moving away from the sandbox and then just went 'eh after the first ten years they should just be too busy increasing their GDP to care anyway' or else they deliberately left a lot of nations in the lurch content-wise so they can sell DLC later to add flavour where there is literally no flavour. It's hilarious how much of a content black hole Russia is specifically. I think there was one unique journal entry where you had to build railroads in like 10 provinces and then you get a buff for the Trans-Siberian Railway. There may have been one or two other unique ones but I can't remember them
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