I'd like to preface this thread by saying that I am probably around the median skill level of those who will be playing Victoria 3 at its release. I base this off the fact that I've played Vicky 2 (in HPM), and I understand it well enough to achieve things like unifying Germany, Italy, and Japan, developing South American nations into GPs, and even defeating Qing as Korea and then westernizing successfully. I may not be the kind of insane player who can form the PLC as Krakow, but I would say I was decent.
Because of this, I believe that I'm in a good position to diagnose an issue with Victoria 2's difficulty curve, one that affects all of my campaigns. Starting as a GP is fairly easy because you already have what you need to dominate the world: strong armies, a prefab industrial base, and good enough prestige to keep your rank. However, as a non-GP, getting to the point of being an actual GP is unreasonably difficult.
I don't mean that actually getting to rank number 8 is difficult. That's incredibly easy: All you have to do is simply spam prestige techs, and when a Great War happens and someone gets dismantled, you'll shoot up and take their spot. But the player isn't an actual GP at that point. Being an actual GP means, for example, not fearing the powers in the GP slots below you, and merely having prestige isn't enough to give you that.
To illustrate what I mean, take a Chile game I was just playing. I was hovering in the secondary power zone until around 1900, when, thanks to high prestige and the fact that I was finally able to get socialists in charge to let me industrialize, I was able to crank my score up and fly to rank number 6. But I was not rank number 6, not in any meaning of the word. I had started the game with low literacy, leading to a tech deficit that I was still working to overcome. I had 73 brigades, half as many as any other GPs. I had something like five core provinces, with little room for more factories. Despite cranking up immigration by cheesing reforms early in the game, I was still hanging out at around 11 million core pop, which was, again, far less than most of the other GPs. My navy, which had started piddlingly small, was not large or modern enough to give me much colonial power, because I hadn't been able to invest in researching techs for it or in keeping my naval bases up to date. My colonial empire comprised only part of Manchuria, most of Nigeria, Gabon, Yemen, and Ethiopia.
Beyond that point, I was stuck. All the other GPs had much larger armies than I did, and much larger industrial bases as well, so I couldn't defeat anyone else in a head-to-head contest. I realized that rising further in the GP rankings would entail simply joining Great Wars on the winning side and hoping that I could steal the scraps of the losers' colonial empires; otherwise, there was no way for me to raise more troops or secure more resources. When my allies, Japan and Germany, didn't invite me to their carve-up of the British Empire, thus removing my main opportunity to get more colonies, I knew that I didn't have the will to play any longer.
What are some of the problems I encountered? Among the most irritating was influence. My industrial base relied on, among other things, Colombian and Peruvian coal, Venezuelan oil, and iron from all over the place, but even keeping those few nations in my sphere was more difficult than it should have been. The AI plays the influence game much better than the player because it has all the information it needs at all times and can do a thousand things at once, whereas I only checked the influence screen once every few in-game months or years, only to find that my embassy had once again been banned from Bolivia. The outliner contains limited information about influence, in the form of tiny green and red numbers that tell you about half of what you need to know, but it was difficult to pay attention to that when there were other things demanding my attention as well. How can Britain manage having half the globe in its sphere, if I couldn't even get half of its second-least-populous continent? I just felt like I was trying to play a game a computer would have been far better at, and that just wasn't fun.
The same thing went for colonization. Even focusing the resources needed to build up a navy was difficult, between tech, naval bases, and simply clicking the buttons for more ships every few months. But the colonial races presented the same problem that influence did; it was hard to focus on them all. Because they were visible on the map, it wasn't quite as bad, but I still found myself thwarted at every turn. I did get a few colonies, but most of "Chilean Africa" was the result of my justifications on uncivs, not on colonization.
Lastly, wars were almost impossible to fight. When I did join Great Wars to try to get some nice colonies, I constantly found myself overwhelmed. All of a sudden, troops were swarming all over my far-flung holdings; everywhere I turned, I would be losing ground. In some areas, I gathered my troops for an offensive and managed to gain ground, but would then find that I had lost more to the AI in other corners of the globe than I had gained in my little theater of war. Navies added a whole new dimension of pain, because ship stacks that were too large ate too much supply to be refitted in low-level naval bases, meaning that I had to use many smaller stacks that were, again, almost impossible to micromanage effectively.
Some reading this might say that I simply needed to "git gud." To which I say: Well, fair enough. If I was a better player, I would be able to handle to handle these problems more effectively. But how many of these better players are there? Vicky 2 averages about 1300 players on Steam. That means that there are, say, 50,000 people who boot up the game at least occasionally. I'm better than many of these players, meaning that the number of people who are willing to handle the level of pain Vicky 2 can bring is actually very small. If Paradox wants to find a wider playerbase with the sequel, they'll need to solve some of these issues.
I'm not talking about massive things, either. Influence needs to be reworked so that it's a bit simpler and easier to manage every few months, rather than continuously and extremely carefully. The way colonization works will, I'm sure, be completely overhauled. And wars would be a lot easier to manage (although not necessarily easier) if there were alerts for naval invasions and land and sea battles like in HOI4, as well as maybe tech bonuses for techs that, say, five of the eight GPs had already researched, which would help low literacy nations catch up later on if their literacy improved – historically, this did happen to an extent. Paradox games have gotten more accessible recently, and for a game as complex as Vicky 3 will be, accessibility is critical.
TL;DR: Some mechanics in Vicky 2 make the game a nightmare for human players and favor the AI because they are so hard to keep track of for a player of reasonable skill. Vicky 3 should improve on this.
Because of this, I believe that I'm in a good position to diagnose an issue with Victoria 2's difficulty curve, one that affects all of my campaigns. Starting as a GP is fairly easy because you already have what you need to dominate the world: strong armies, a prefab industrial base, and good enough prestige to keep your rank. However, as a non-GP, getting to the point of being an actual GP is unreasonably difficult.
I don't mean that actually getting to rank number 8 is difficult. That's incredibly easy: All you have to do is simply spam prestige techs, and when a Great War happens and someone gets dismantled, you'll shoot up and take their spot. But the player isn't an actual GP at that point. Being an actual GP means, for example, not fearing the powers in the GP slots below you, and merely having prestige isn't enough to give you that.
To illustrate what I mean, take a Chile game I was just playing. I was hovering in the secondary power zone until around 1900, when, thanks to high prestige and the fact that I was finally able to get socialists in charge to let me industrialize, I was able to crank my score up and fly to rank number 6. But I was not rank number 6, not in any meaning of the word. I had started the game with low literacy, leading to a tech deficit that I was still working to overcome. I had 73 brigades, half as many as any other GPs. I had something like five core provinces, with little room for more factories. Despite cranking up immigration by cheesing reforms early in the game, I was still hanging out at around 11 million core pop, which was, again, far less than most of the other GPs. My navy, which had started piddlingly small, was not large or modern enough to give me much colonial power, because I hadn't been able to invest in researching techs for it or in keeping my naval bases up to date. My colonial empire comprised only part of Manchuria, most of Nigeria, Gabon, Yemen, and Ethiopia.
Beyond that point, I was stuck. All the other GPs had much larger armies than I did, and much larger industrial bases as well, so I couldn't defeat anyone else in a head-to-head contest. I realized that rising further in the GP rankings would entail simply joining Great Wars on the winning side and hoping that I could steal the scraps of the losers' colonial empires; otherwise, there was no way for me to raise more troops or secure more resources. When my allies, Japan and Germany, didn't invite me to their carve-up of the British Empire, thus removing my main opportunity to get more colonies, I knew that I didn't have the will to play any longer.
What are some of the problems I encountered? Among the most irritating was influence. My industrial base relied on, among other things, Colombian and Peruvian coal, Venezuelan oil, and iron from all over the place, but even keeping those few nations in my sphere was more difficult than it should have been. The AI plays the influence game much better than the player because it has all the information it needs at all times and can do a thousand things at once, whereas I only checked the influence screen once every few in-game months or years, only to find that my embassy had once again been banned from Bolivia. The outliner contains limited information about influence, in the form of tiny green and red numbers that tell you about half of what you need to know, but it was difficult to pay attention to that when there were other things demanding my attention as well. How can Britain manage having half the globe in its sphere, if I couldn't even get half of its second-least-populous continent? I just felt like I was trying to play a game a computer would have been far better at, and that just wasn't fun.
The same thing went for colonization. Even focusing the resources needed to build up a navy was difficult, between tech, naval bases, and simply clicking the buttons for more ships every few months. But the colonial races presented the same problem that influence did; it was hard to focus on them all. Because they were visible on the map, it wasn't quite as bad, but I still found myself thwarted at every turn. I did get a few colonies, but most of "Chilean Africa" was the result of my justifications on uncivs, not on colonization.
Lastly, wars were almost impossible to fight. When I did join Great Wars to try to get some nice colonies, I constantly found myself overwhelmed. All of a sudden, troops were swarming all over my far-flung holdings; everywhere I turned, I would be losing ground. In some areas, I gathered my troops for an offensive and managed to gain ground, but would then find that I had lost more to the AI in other corners of the globe than I had gained in my little theater of war. Navies added a whole new dimension of pain, because ship stacks that were too large ate too much supply to be refitted in low-level naval bases, meaning that I had to use many smaller stacks that were, again, almost impossible to micromanage effectively.
Some reading this might say that I simply needed to "git gud." To which I say: Well, fair enough. If I was a better player, I would be able to handle to handle these problems more effectively. But how many of these better players are there? Vicky 2 averages about 1300 players on Steam. That means that there are, say, 50,000 people who boot up the game at least occasionally. I'm better than many of these players, meaning that the number of people who are willing to handle the level of pain Vicky 2 can bring is actually very small. If Paradox wants to find a wider playerbase with the sequel, they'll need to solve some of these issues.
I'm not talking about massive things, either. Influence needs to be reworked so that it's a bit simpler and easier to manage every few months, rather than continuously and extremely carefully. The way colonization works will, I'm sure, be completely overhauled. And wars would be a lot easier to manage (although not necessarily easier) if there were alerts for naval invasions and land and sea battles like in HOI4, as well as maybe tech bonuses for techs that, say, five of the eight GPs had already researched, which would help low literacy nations catch up later on if their literacy improved – historically, this did happen to an extent. Paradox games have gotten more accessible recently, and for a game as complex as Vicky 3 will be, accessibility is critical.
TL;DR: Some mechanics in Vicky 2 make the game a nightmare for human players and favor the AI because they are so hard to keep track of for a player of reasonable skill. Vicky 3 should improve on this.
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