Should national values stay or go?

[KaiserBismarckll]

I know to a lot people NVs were mostly important for the reserve mobilization stats and other miscellaneous bonuses, but the to me their greatest feature was a national bias towards a certain ideological group. The US, for example, was the land of liberals and any attempt to steer it towards conservatism, socialism, fascism, communism, or "reactionaryism" would be hard-pressed to succeed. (A 'dictatorship of the bourgeoisie' is plenty American, though). The US was liberal, and that was that. Britain and Germany were conservative, reactionary or Fascist, and France was Socialist/Communist. HPM changed this a little, having there be 1 'non-political' NV, 1 for each "moderate" ideology, and one favoring all four ideological dictatorships.

While I assume something as artificial an bolted on as the old NVs are probably going to be absent from Vicky 3, the question remains, should different countries have ironclad political biases difficult, if not impossible to overcome? Should the player be allowed to change them? Should they change on their own? How broad or narrow should they be, considering that both vanilla and HPM's systems can be criticized for separating parties ought to be together or uniting parties ought to be separate?

 

[LucasG21]

I think there should be inbuilt biases towards certain ideologies: i.e. the USA's interest groups should support liberal economic policies (excluding, of course, the Southern Planters who are decidedly anti-liberal (for ACW reasons)). Since there are already traits for IGs (i.e. the Prusssian industrialists are monarchists despite many industrialists being more liberal), I think they should simply add traits that reflect the existing tendencies of political factions at the time.

As for the static parts, the devs have already suggested that IG ideology traits can change over time, so it seems that the same IGs will continue to exist, but will experience mechanical changes as the demands of their pops shift as a result of societal and economic progress.

 

[General WVPM]

If you ask me, static national values should go.
Cultures evolve, China, France and Russia all went from a hierarchical aristocratic 'Order' national value to a more socialism focused one.
Nations should be defined by their population and geography, not inherited traits or something. Genetic research has already debunked the idea that certain races are more conservative or others are more liberal. Victoria 2 already had enough systems to represent differences between pops, like language, religion, technology, wealth, administration, taxes, occupation and much more. Static inherited national values are redundant and unrealistic.

 

[Will Steel]

I think they should stay, BUT, they should be -

1. Changeable and evolving (i.e. as said above, not static). Static values like old Vicky2 just took freedom away from the player and railroaded the game, no matter what you did.

2. More of them. Vicky2 only had 3, which was quite boring. I recall some mods has 10+ values which (unlike vanilla) not only affected political alignment of pops, but national attitude towards other things like science, cultural hegemony, wealth and militarism as a whole. We don't need that many, but there should still be more than 3 at least.

Ability to change and evolve is the most important thing if they are to stay.

For example - USA starts out with "Liberty" national value, and you somehow successfully turn it into a dictatorship early on, I don't think the following generations of people 70 years later would be clamouring for liberty that much. Same goes for other American nations that begin with liberty value, and turn into dictatorships or restore authoritarian monarchies. France in 1860s was more authoritarian and conservative compared to France of the 1890s.

Same goes for things like Revolution of 1848 succeeding in Germany (which it nearly did, until a political split allowed nobility to regain control of the military and crush the rebels). Instead of a very conservative, militarist imperial Germany like in real life ('order' national value), you would get a different German empire geared towards liberty, constitutional monarchy and freedom based on Frankfurt rather than Berlin/Vienna.

 

[alanschu]

I like them being evolving yes. Revolutions being something that greatly changes them, ideally in a way that reflects why they were revolting in the first place IMO.

 

[Belph]

I think they should go. It creates a very deterministic outlook that arbitrarily defines what a nation will find "acceptable" with no regards for what has happened in the game. I think having some weighting for when the country is controlled by AI is fine, but these absolutely shouldn't apply to the player and shouldn't be that strong.

 

[EUnderhill]

When the change is big enough to change the tag, the value then can follow.

 

[Leoreth]

I am not sure how they worked in Vic2, but we have heard Paradox say that Prussian Junkers are relatively speaking more conservative, so the approach seems to still exist in some form.

I don't think that's inherently a problem: the world did not come from a vacuum in 1836, the political beliefs in a given nation were shaped by history and every place has a different history, which results in different beliefs. To erase that would make the game less historically immersive.

That said, I hope it isn't too deterministic. "Americans are liberal, screw you" only makes the game less fun if you want to do something different. So I would like to see a system where there is a system of evolving preferences, preferably tracked by pop type and culture. And the preferences at the start of the game are nothing more than that, starting values, subject to be changed by what happens around them in the next 100 years.

 

[grommile]

Honestly, I would say that in-period, the great bulk of America was not nearly so much "liberal" as "localist".

 

[Morrowind3]

This might also be handled through the cultural trait system depending on how they plan on implementing that. It will nudge Americans towards liberalism when e.g. the cultural concept of the american dream lowers class consciousness. Though the ceveat of that is the american dream also attracted immigrants, so the modifier should logically also apply to them

 

[Varren]

The US, for example, was the land of liberals and any attempt to steer it towards conservatism, socialism, fascism, communism, or "reactionaryism" would be hard-pressed to succeed.