Victoria 3 isnt focused in war and it hurts

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Again, I don't want to go stack hunting or carpet sieging.

Neither do I. Thats why I'm suggesting borrowing some elements from HOI3 and HOI4 for raising divisions and waging war with the HOI4 style as far as moving divisions on the map being it draw frontline and make warplan and click which would suit you on offense or defense or someone like me who takes a more intensive approach to warfare when not taking a more relaxed approach such as yourself.
 
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the Victoria series is not a wargame, so if your attention is constantly and necessarily drawn to unit management instead of factory management whenever a war starts up, which by necessity it is with previous warfare mechanics, then it becomes tedious and detracting from the gameplay.
I would whole heartedly disagree here. Considering The 100 years period of the game contain a lot of conflict between European countries in Europe and that they all act as prelude to WW2 which ended up giving Europe the longest period of peace since perhaps the OG Roman Empire.
Yes, the Victoria series is more than just war, it's also about evolution of society through science and technology, but war (as a continuation of politics and diplomacy) is pretty much central to the Victoria series.
Remember, this is the time period that coined the term gunboat diplomacy.
 
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So let me get this straight... managing 150 stacks late game is tedious micro, but actually a stack is just a regiment, so really we're talking about maybe 15 total armies. And every time you hit mobilize it creates a bunch of little armies too because for some reason we aren't using rallypoints with auto-merge, BUT apparently rally points don't even work well enough because literally every time you click a button or a province or a menu in your 8+ hour campaign to create a unit that's somehow "engaging in micro."

And yet this isn't tedius microView attachment 774003

Or maybe it is, and I'm just misreading things?
stop tempting the devs, or they might get rid of that micro too!
 
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I would whole heartedly disagree here. Considering The 100 years period of the game contain a lot of conflict between European countries in Europe and that they all act as prelude to WW2 which ended up giving Europe the longest period of peace since perhaps the OG Roman Empire.
Yes, the Victoria series is more than just war, it's also about evolution of society through science and technology, but war (as a continuation of politics and diplomacy) is pretty much central to the Victoria series.
Remember, this is the time period that coined the term gunboat diplomacy.
From Dev Diary #0, outlining the developers' vision for the game:

"Our vision for Victoria 3 is to create what we call a ‘Society Sim’ - a game that is first and foremost about the internal workings of the 19th-century country that you are playing and how its society is shaped over the course of the game. Politics, Economy and Diplomacy are the three most important parts of the game - Wars are of course a part of the game (just as they were a part of the Victorian age), but Victoria 3 is *not* a wargame or a game about map painting."

"Events outside your country’s borders can naturally affect your country in significant ways, but the game should never rely on war to provide the main source of enjoyment."

"War is a continuation of diplomacy, and everything that is achievable by war should also be achievable through diplomacy"

If you think Victoria 3 is a wargame or that war is central to the series, you have not been paying attention for a long time.
 
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It's all context dependent on what the core gameplay focus is, because the core gameplay naturally should require the most detail and player attention, and if other more minor aspects of the gameplay start intruding on the player's attention and taking player attention and time away from the gameplay focus, then it becomes tedious micro. So managing factories is not tedious micro in the Victoria series because the economic management is the core gameplay focus of the game so you expect to have most of your attention and focus on the economic aspect of the game. However, combat and unit management are not a core focus of the game because the Victoria series is not a wargame, so if your attention is constantly and necessarily drawn to unit management instead of factory management whenever a war starts up, which by necessity it is with previous warfare mechanics, then it becomes tedious and detracting from the gameplay.

Meanwhile, combat and unit management would not be tedious micro in, say, Hearts of Iron because it is specifically a wargame where that is the main gameplay focus and so you expect the most detail and player attention to be directed there. In that case, factory management on the level of Victoria being absolutely necessary in order to keep your economy going in Hearts of Iron would be tedious micromanagement, because the economy is not the focus of Hearts of Iron series so the player would not expect and does not want to have to direct that much of their attention to that part of the game. That's why factories and economic management in Hearts of Iron is abstracted to just two broad categories of civilian and military factories in order to not bog the player down with micromanagement in the economic aspect of the game.

With Victoria 3, Paradox is just finally taking that proper mindset of conservation of gameplay detail to make a game where warfare and unit management in an economy game requires as much attention as economy and consumer goods production management does in a wargame, and finally approaching it from the correct perspective that more detail on each in each game would just end up being tedious micromanagement distracting the player from the real meat of the intended gameplay.
Don't get me wrong here, since I appreciate the thought you put into your post, but I think you're missing the point I was trying to make. So first off, the joke was that the thing people were complaining about in this thread (unit micro) is actually not as micro-intensive as the economy can be/often is (depending on how much you want to optimize). The thing is, both the economy and military in Vic2 has a LOT of shortcuts that people often either don't bring up or seldom use (either because they don't know they exist or simply don't want to). For instance, Shift+Click upgrades all factories on the list near employment capacity, provided you have enough money. If you go further, you can even filter specific resource inputs/outputs in your nation and say, remove subsidies from all factories that use coal. Similar thing with the military. There's rally points, hotkeys, and even features like split half and balance armies (which, while not perfect, tends to allocate troop types pretty evenly which is basically what you want). And then on top of that, if you're really trying to play the game optimally you'll switch to LF in the late game, which means pretty much every aspect of the game aside from diplomacy and military will run itself, though you can still somewhat influence things in the budget screen.

And this leads me to my second point, which is your comment on Victoria as a "wargame." I think in regards to this you have the wrong impression on what that word implies. Basically, a wargame is something in which the goal and primary focus is on simulating warfare. Victoria has never claimed to do that, and having an in-depth war system doesn't make it a wargame either. In Hearts of Iron, all the mechanics revolve around warfare. Politics is only fleshed out so much as it sets the stage for WW2, the economy only exists to simulate the production of war materiel, and "population" only exists to determine how many troops one can draw from a given region. In Victoria, it's the opposite: the warfare system exists to show the impact it has on your people and economy. A deep warfare system with sophisticated logistics, equipment management, and combat serves to improve the economy side of Victoria: from supply shortages, starvation, equipment production (and the effects of switching from civilian to military has), all the way down to the effects occupation and bombing might have on the local populace and industry. In that sense, while warfare might not be a primary focus, it will always be a core component of the series.

And that's the thing: those of us who are arguing against the dev's warfare proposal in its current form don't want a wargame. What we want is an economy game/sim with some better level of detail and control in how we wage wars. Because (and I'll refer back to one of my earlier posts), increasing how much the player controls increases the amount of strategic planning and decisionmaking the player has. There's a notable difference in how one feels between "I started a war, lost a diceroll, and now my economy is in ruins" and "I started a war, made a tactical/strategic mistake, and now my economy is is ruins," and I think a lot of people would genuinely prefer the latter while the currently proposed system tends to favor the former, at least when it comes to evenly-matched conflicts.
 
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It's all context dependent on what the core gameplay focus is, because the core gameplay naturally should require the most detail and player attention, and if other more minor aspects of the gameplay start intruding on the player's attention and taking player attention and time away from the gameplay focus, then it becomes tedious micro. So managing factories is not tedious micro in the Victoria series because the economic management is the core gameplay focus of the game so you expect to have most of your attention and focus on the economic aspect of the game. However, combat and unit management are not a core focus of the game because the Victoria series is not a wargame, so if your attention is constantly and necessarily drawn to unit management instead of factory management whenever a war starts up, which by necessity it is with previous warfare mechanics, then it becomes tedious and detracting from the gameplay.

Since when are tediousness and core gameplay mutually exclusive from one another ?
If a game mechanism is repetitve, dull and unrewarding then it is tedious no matter if it is a core gameplay or a minor one.
And I'm not saying that managing your economy will be tedious in Victoria 3, I have no idea, but it certainly shouldn't be automatically excluded from criticism just for being the core gameplay. A core gameplay too needs to be careful about repetitiveness and need a certain level of variety to keep the player entertained.

I also don't think it's correct to say that a warfare mechanism involving the player more that what Victoria 3 is going to be would have taken the player's attention from the economy all the time. Unlike in Heart of Iron, in Victoria 3 the player will spend most of his time at peace so the interference would have been rather minor.
 
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Since when are tediousness and core gameplay mutually exclusive from one another ?
If a game mechanism is repetitve, dull and unrewarding then it is tedious no matter if it is a core gameplay or a minor one.
And I'm not saying that managing your economy will be tedious in Victoria 3, I have no idea, but it certainly shouldn't be automatically excluded from criticism just for being the core gameplay. A core gameplay too needs to be careful about repetitiveness and need a certain level of variety to keep the player entertained.

I also don't think it's correct to say that a warfare mechanism involving the player more that what Victoria 3 is going to be would have taken the player's attention from the economy all the time. Unlike in Heart of Iron, in Victoria 3 the player will spend most of his time at peace so the interference would have been rather minor.
in the topics we speak only of armed war but not of economy, state, economy, monopolies, ideology. social classes, states, borders, as we have already said hoi is above all a period of war, vettoria and a longer period and above all of peace
 
From Dev Diary #0, outlining the developers' vision for the game:

"Our vision for Victoria 3 is to create what we call a ‘Society Sim’ - a game that is first and foremost about the internal workings of the 19th-century country that you are playing and how its society is shaped over the course of the game. Politics, Economy and Diplomacy are the three most important parts of the game - Wars are of course a part of the game (just as they were a part of the Victorian age), but Victoria 3 is *not* a wargame or a game about map painting."

"Events outside your country’s borders can naturally affect your country in significant ways, but the game should never rely on war to provide the main source of enjoyment."

"War is a continuation of diplomacy, and everything that is achievable by war should also be achievable through diplomacy"

If you think Victoria 3 is a wargame or that war is central to the series, you have not been paying attention for a long time.
Everything that is achievable by war can also be done through diplomacy. Agreed, it's just that this diplomacy is about, to paraphrase an American president, "talking softly, but also carrying a big stick".
Let me see you be a part of the Partition of Africa without the gunboats. I am not advocating for a map painter, far from that. But again, the Victorian Age was filled with conflicts. The vast majority because diplomacy failed. One can argue that Diplomacy and War are 2 sides of the same coin. Japan won the war against Russia but lost the peace treaty. It was the fact that Japan got so little in reparations from that war (in some part because of American intervention) that in some ways led the path to increasing Japanese aggression up to World War 2.
 
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Everything that is achievable by war can also be done through diplomacy. Agreed, it's just that this diplomacy is about, to paraphrase an American president, "talking softly, but also carrying a big stick".
Let me see you be a part of the Partition of Africa without the gunboats. I am not advocating for a map painter, far from that. But again, the Victorian Age was filled with conflicts. The vast majority because diplomacy failed. One can argue that Diplomacy and War are 2 sides of the same coin. Japan won the war against Russia but lost the peace treaty. It was the fact that Japan got so little in reparations from that war (in some part because of American intervention) that in some ways led the path to increasing Japanese aggression up to World War 2.

They also won the war and peace against China up to the triple intervention. But won't be able to simulate that either without direct control.
 
lol... now a single regiment is already an army?

gee, some people are really getting desperate with defending a completely indefensible design choice to replace warfare with a bunch of buttons and rng animations

No, not every Regiment is an Army, but it is usefull to not max every stack on a province because of attrition. March divided, fight united Moltke would say. My standard Stack in the Endgame is 14 Regiments, 42.000 Men. This allowes me to move over mountains without attrition.
In Wartime I put them along the borders in several Rows and let the enemy attack me and during the battle other armys join in to defend together. I may even move Stacks in Provinces surrounding the Province the battle is in to whipe them entirly.

With 14 Regiment stacks it is very easy to get an absurd amount of Armies moving arround.
 
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No, not every Regiment is an Army, but it is usefull to not max every stack on a province because of attrition. March divided, fight united Moltke would say. My standard Stack in the Endgame is 14 Regiments, 42.000 Men. This allowes me to move over mountains without attrition.
In Wartime I put them along the borders in several Rows and let the enemy attack me and during the battle other armys join in to defend together. I may even move Stacks in Provinces surrounding the Province the battle is in to whipe them entirly.

With 14 Regiment stacks it is very easy to get an absurd amount of Armies moving arround.
it's pretty safe to say that nobody is asking for a micro hell as know from eu4. i for once was very happy with the direction they took when automatising several army management aspects in imperator:rome. it's not as good as hoi4's system (which is the best amongst all paradox titles), but definitely a foundation to build on

in vic3 they all of a sudden are making the decision to remove warfare at all. they're not replacing it with any engaging strategic gameplay, they're simply removing it. so you don't even get intellectually demanding combinatorics like you've got in chess, effectively you're merely getting a massive rng simulator: click on a bunch of buttons and see rng go brrrrr....
 
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I will think 150 actual stacks and then ask how big they are. Considering EU4 DOES HAVE an army template builder that automatically merges everyone together is one of the reason EU4 isn't as grindy as Vic2.
In my mind, by default a stack is as many troops as the supply limit allows in the province. Not 3k stacks

Vic2 had a merge system with gathering points etc but the EU4 one, after numerous DLCS is rather good now, templates, split in half etc
 
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No, not every Regiment is an Army, but it is usefull to not max every stack on a province because of attrition. March divided, fight united Moltke would say. My standard Stack in the Endgame is 14 Regiments, 42.000 Men. This allowes me to move over mountains without attrition.
In Wartime I put them along the borders in several Rows and let the enemy attack me and during the battle other armys join in to defend together. I may even move Stacks in Provinces surrounding the Province the battle is in to whipe them entirly.

With 14 Regiment stacks it is very easy to get an absurd amount of Armies moving arround.
Just to clarify man, you had 150 stacks of 42k troops each?
 
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From Dev Diary #0, outlining the developers' vision for the game:

"Our vision for Victoria 3 is to create what we call a ‘Society Sim’ - a game that is first and foremost about the internal workings of the 19th-century country that you are playing and how its society is shaped over the course of the game. Politics, Economy and Diplomacy are the three most important parts of the game - Wars are of course a part of the game (just as they were a part of the Victorian age), but Victoria 3 is *not* a wargame or a game about map painting."

"Events outside your country’s borders can naturally affect your country in significant ways, but the game should never rely on war to provide the main source of enjoyment."

"War is a continuation of diplomacy, and everything that is achievable by war should also be achievable through diplomacy"

If you think Victoria 3 is a wargame or that war is central to the series, you have not been paying attention for a long time.

Negative. Just because it is a society sim does not mean you can just give warfare this bare bones approach they are trying to go far. Warfare and nuances of it are too important for such. Isn't this the same era where it was said warfare is too important to leave to the generals. As it so happens, yes Clemenceau said that in 1917 near the end of WW1. That is not only within the game timeframe but also well within the game towards the late half. And yet here they are trying to leave it to the generals, but one of the big three of WW1 said the exact opposite.

Some of the very key and central events that happen during the era of Victoria are the wars themselves. The Civil War, The Crimean War, The Austro-Prussian War, The Franco-Prussian War, the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese war, the First World War, the Spanish American War, the Opium Wars (which also can't be simmed here), the Boxer Rebellion and the 8 Nation Alliance. All of these can be far better simulated and handled with more direct player intervention and control, not this bare bones approach that is being laid out for us.

By the way, no where in my argument did I mention map painting. Only that player control is essential if you're going to have war in this game and my suggestions in other threads and here where I suggested merging elements from HOI3 and HOI4 would achieve the best results as it is an incremental approach from what we know worked before as opposed to a radical departure that is quite jarring.
 
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Can we drop to 150 stacks story? It doesn't serve any purpose.

It may or may have not been actual 150 stacks, and whether it was or wasn't doesn't detract from the fact that late game wars could be incredibly frustrating due to a large number of armies/brigades.

You're just beating a dead horse.
 
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The Civil War, The Crimean War, The Austro-Prussian War, The Franco-Prussian War, the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese war, the First World War, the Spanish American War, the Opium Wars (which also can't be simmed here), the Boxer Rebellion and the 8 Nation Alliance.
I would add the Spanish-Morrocan War, the American-Indian wars and of course, all the British Colonial wars in Africa and India which made them an Empire, the very Empire the game is based on.


I think the Mexican American war could be replicated with their 'innovative' system to be fair but that's about it
 
Don't get me wrong here, since I appreciate the thought you put into your post, but I think you're missing the point I was trying to make. So first off, the joke was that the thing people were complaining about in this thread (unit micro) is actually not as micro-intensive as the economy can be/often is (depending on how much you want to optimize). The thing is, both the economy and military in Vic2 has a LOT of shortcuts that people often either don't bring up or seldom use (either because they don't know they exist or simply don't want to). For instance, Shift+Click upgrades all factories on the list near employment capacity, provided you have enough money. If you go further, you can even filter specific resource inputs/outputs in your nation and say, remove subsidies from all factories that use coal. Similar thing with the military. There's rally points, hotkeys, and even features like split half and balance armies (which, while not perfect, tends to allocate troop types pretty evenly which is basically what you want). And then on top of that, if you're really trying to play the game optimally you'll switch to LF in the late game, which means pretty much every aspect of the game aside from diplomacy and military will run itself, though you can still somewhat influence things in the budget screen.

And this leads me to my second point, which is your comment on Victoria as a "wargame." I think in regards to this you have the wrong impression on what that word implies. Basically, a wargame is something in which the goal and primary focus is on simulating warfare. Victoria has never claimed to do that, and having an in-depth war system doesn't make it a wargame either. In Hearts of Iron, all the mechanics revolve around warfare. Politics is only fleshed out so much as it sets the stage for WW2, the economy only exists to simulate the production of war materiel, and "population" only exists to determine how many troops one can draw from a given region. In Victoria, it's the opposite: the warfare system exists to show the impact it has on your people and economy. A deep warfare system with sophisticated logistics, equipment management, and combat serves to improve the economy side of Victoria: from supply shortages, starvation, equipment production (and the effects of switching from civilian to military has), all the way down to the effects occupation and bombing might have on the local populace and industry. In that sense, while warfare might not be a primary focus, it will always be a core component of the series.

And that's the thing: those of us who are arguing against the dev's warfare proposal in its current form don't want a wargame. What we want is an economy game/sim with some better level of detail and control in how we wage wars. Because (and I'll refer back to one of my earlier posts), increasing how much the player controls increases the amount of strategic planning and decisionmaking the player has. There's a notable difference in how one feels between "I started a war, lost a diceroll, and now my economy is in ruins" and "I started a war, made a tactical/strategic mistake, and now my economy is is ruins," and I think a lot of people would genuinely prefer the latter while the currently proposed system tends to favor the former, at least when it comes to evenly-matched conflicts.
"I started a war, made a tactical/strategic mistake, and now my economy is is ruins," and I think a lot of people would genuinely prefer the latter while the currently proposed system tends to favor the former, at least when it comes to evenly-matched conflicts.

i mean, you are right, thats what i want in vic3, but the problem is, the actual warfare system is to oversimplified for a game with so much depth like victoria 3, i am not against removing frontlines, but making them more realistic, you dont need player control to make it realistic, generals are good, in fact is th eonly good thing about the system, but the interface, straight copy pasted from realpolitiks is so bad, even the warfare is still a diceroll, the units still have a chance of winning thanks to a diceroll kind of system, and without talking that quality=quantity, that means, that forgett about simulation, if you reserach a better artillery, you dont get an updated good, but you just get more quantity and is easier to produce, so if your modern army lose agaisnt some african tribe, is because they have more rifles, and not because they have modern rifles. lmao
 
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Can we drop to 150 stacks story? It doesn't serve any purpose.

It may or may have not been actual 150 stacks, and whether it was or wasn't doesn't detract from the fact that late game wars could be incredibly frustrating due to a large number of armies/brigades.

You're just beating a dead horse.
The whole point is that they don't have to be frustrating. Look at Eu4 and its late game wars in mp. I think it's rather decent, albeit with 1k regiments (therefore more stacks).

The question is not personal (You might not have experience in the game or you might indeed find them frustrating)
 
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Negative. Just because it is a society sim does not mean you can just give warfare this bare bones approach they are trying to go far. Warfare and nuances of it are too important for such. Isn't this the same era where it was said warfare is too important to leave to the generals. As it so happens, yes Clemenceau said that in 1917 near the end of WW1. That is not only within the game timeframe but also well within the game towards the late half. And yet here they are trying to leave it to the generals, but one of the big of WW1 said the exact opposite.

Some of the very key and central events that happen during the era of Victoria are the wars themselves. The Civil War, The Crimean War, The Austro-Prussian War, The Franco-Prussian War, the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese war, the First World War, the Spanish American War, the Opium Wars (which also can't be simmed here), the Boxer Rebellion and the 8 Nation Alliance. All of these can be far better simulated and handled with more direct player intervention and control, not this bare bones approach that is being laid out for us.

By the way, no where in my argument did I mention map painting. Only that player control is essential if you're going to have war in this game and my suggestions in other threads and here where I suggested merging elements from HOI3 and HOI4 would achieve the best results as it is an incremental approach from what we know worked before as opposed to a radical departure that is quite jarring.

To be fair, most of those wars couldn't be simulated under previous system either, so a lot of them had to be scripted. Let's not allow potential flaws of the new system blind us to the fault of the old system.

Personally, I don't demand (or particularly desire) direct control over army units. It's just that it seems there won't be much ability to influence wars during wars themselves, and there might be potential problem with front sizes. They might work on a limited scale, but what happens when there's one giant border, like maybe if rising China goes to war against Russia while the war goal is some island in the Pacific? Or the opposite, when there's two giant armies over a tiny land border, like a huge Brazil that is in control of most of South America vs a giant US that controls North and Central America and the border is in Panama?

Such situations must be taken into account.
 
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The whole point is that they don't have to be frustrating. Look at Eu4 and its late game wars in mp. I think it's rather decent, albeit with 1k regiments (therefore more stacks).

The question is not personal (You might not have experience in the game or you might indeed find them frustrating)

Late game wars are frustrating for me in EUIV as well. After 1650 or so, it becomes quite boring.
 
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