fasquardon said:
What I wish they'd do is merge the economic focus of Victoria with the excellent military model of HoI.
fasquardon
Good heavens no, thank you very much.
There is already enough to do during a war having to ensure your home front stays stable and productive to have to add an additional couple of spinning plates to the mix by having to individually assign routes to ships for patrol duty. It's like having to worry about individual elements of supply consumption rather than having it all nicely and neatly elided into a hit on national income generated from your economic production, adds a lot more minute details to something that does not have to be so complex.
Just because an element is useful in making warfare more realistic doesn't mean its not also a potential micromanaging headache. if Victoria was a war game like HoI, where the ultimate goal is winning a war, then I could see the need to emphasize military elements more. but Victoria is not a war game. it is about managing the transformation of societies from traditional agricultural to modern industrial production, and the social, political and cultural transformations that result. Warfare is one aspect of the game, in the end not the most important one, and is only supportable if your internal base of power is stable and productive. Players already complain that there is too much micromanaging in Victoria, why add yet more micromanaging just because it has to do with elements of warfare in a game that in the end is not primarily centered around war.
Keep up your naval technology so you have the best, most powerful ships on the planet. Then put the ships in your coastal zones if you want to protect your coasts at home and in the colonies, and if you plan on making sea landings, have screening ship forces strong enough to ensure that your transports are not sunk by enemy ships. no need to worry about patrols, if the enemy ships come into your coastal ocean provinces, your forces are there ready and waiting. Easy to control for the human player while trying to ensure that his economy is stable and productive, POP militancy is not rising too rapidly due to war exhaustion, and land forces are doing what the player wants them to do.
The only aspect I do agree could be improved is the impact of blockading, but here the issue is less the running of the ships but rather reflecting the impact on accest to trade from overseas. And here you run into all sorts of problems with how to reflect the impact of neutral shipping and the existence of neutrals on the borders of nations at war with another nation. Should the human player of say the Netherlands, neutral in a war between Britain and Germany, have its own access to the world market cut, or should it be able to export and import freely. What does this mean for Germany - sure the ENG navy can block its sea routes, but if HOL is neutral, it could still buy production from HOL and any other neutral on its land borders. in the end, given the current base construction of how the world economy works in Victoria, it will take development of a Victoria 2 to really develop something that will reflect the nature of blockades in a way as to make them a real presence without prejudicing a human player of a neutral nation.
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