Victoria is the best game Paradox ever made.

[Meanmanturbo]

It’s too dated now. I tried to play it a few years ago and couldn’t
I really wanted to play the first two HOI games also and it was the same thing

Of all the older games, HOI 2 is the one that holds up the best, and is the game different enough the be a totally different experience from any of its sequels. And according to me still the most fun of all the HOIs. Could go darkeat hour for the ultimate version.

 

[Fletz]

Of all the older games, HOI 2 is the one that holds up the best, and is the game different enough the be a totally different experience from any of its sequels. And according to me still the most fun of all the HOIs. Could go darkeat hour for the ultimate version.

Damn, thats so true! HoI2-DH still the best HoI, but I must confess a HoI2-DH with some of HoI4-features (Production) would be quite neat.

 

[harold lorre]

Victoria 3 needs to be completely revised economy. politics. Military. Graphics engine and ai. For me it should be economics than military

 

[Clophiroth]

Victoria 3 needs to be completely revised economy. politics. Military. Graphics engine and ai. For me it should be economics than military

What proposals do you have?

And I mean real proposals, no "Victoria must realistically represent the economy and the politics of the era" and thinking that is a whole, coherent message. If you were redesigning or revising it, how would you be doing it?

 

[Pass_West]

Don't you just love people who demand sweeping changes and improvements, but give no solid advice on how to do so?

 

[harold lorre]

Vittoria must represent the epoch the politics of the epoch.

Vittoria must represent the epoch the politics of the epoch.
Vittoria deve rappresentare l'epoca la politica dell'epoca.

Vittoria must represent the era the politics of the era.
Vittoria deve rappresentare l'epoca la politica dell'epoca.
Economics stock exchange. Big corporations big financiers banks economic gonglomerates. Finished and raw products States consistent borders accurate historical possibility of appointing kings and governors to the improved. Political institutional parties., Secret societies revolutions. Political economy adaptation for each period of the epoch

 

[coffeelingfine]

Victoria 2 is less dated and therefore better, like all PDX games

 

[grommile]

Economics stock exchange. Big corporations big financiers banks economic gonglomerates. Finished and raw products States consistent borders accurate historical possibility of appointing kings and governors to the improved. Political institutional parties., Secret societies revolutions. Political economy adaptation for each period of the epoch

How long do you want to wait for the game you want?

How much are you willing to pay for the game you want?

How much are you willing to pay for a computer that can run the game you want?

 

[harold lorre]

How long do you want to wait for the game you want?

How much are you willing to pay for the game you want?

How much are you willing to pay for a computer that can run the game you want?

All the time necessary 2 100 euros maximum 3 I am willing to change computers

 

[DanielPrates]

Not really.

I hold Vicky 1 in very high regard, but it's really dated now...

Same here, @Morrowind3. I still play Vic1 and I find it better than Vic2.

It sure is an eyesore tho. I guess I don't mind because I played it a lot when it was new so it feels familiar. If you didn't and try to pick it up now, I imagine it must be next to impossible to swallow it.

 

[LSF]

It depends on how you view the tradeoff. Having played both (with mods), I actually like 1 better.

Modded Victoria 1 (VIP)
The good: It produces randomized semi-historical results until ~1890 (when WW1 usually breaks out) very faithfully, with minimum player intervention. The economy, even late game, works and the AI can outbuild you. My favorite game ever was as Napoleon III France, focused on stealing UK's empire and getting west bank of the Rhine, only to find AI Austria had randomly elected liberals in 1848, which got it's many non-accepted pop groups as accepted via event and kept electing liberals with the unintended consequence of becoming the #1 industrial power by ~1880.

The bad: The cost of these semi-historical results is the very definition of railroading. UK tag will always get first dibs on colonizing Nigeria because they are tag UK, although if they refuse, or if they take it and you show up later, you can still take it too.

The ugly: You manually promote every pop. It sounds worse than it is, unless you're playing Russia or China, but then those countries weren't designed to have you create promotion goods via cheat console to turn every single pop into clerks or craftsmen in ideal ratios. If you wait until you can afford to buy or create those goods and promote as you get them, it's not an insane number of clicks because you definitely can't afford to make everyone in China a clerk.

Despite common misconceptions, the capitalist AI in Vic 1 did build railroads and factories automatically too, so only manual promotion and splitting of your own pops (the AI did it's own) was needed.

Modded Victoria 2 (PDM mod)
The good: Much more indirect influence, colonization probably handled better as a mechanism (although who can colonize what is probably worse...) and more diplomatic interactions (spheres and crisis system, even if badly implemented is better than RNG AI declaration of war).

The bad: Pretend you're on planet Fantasia, because even with some tag specific decisions and events, crazy stuff still happens. Your world will likely not even resemble our world by 1870 at the latest, and the longer it goes on the worse it gets. Victoria 2 was designed unfortunately with the EU3 phase of Paradox design philosophy in mind, as in, EU1/Victoria was too deterministic and railroaded, so let's free it up and make it almost entirely random! Yay Chinese Mexico! Yay Bavarian Venezuela! While EU3 had the mechanisms to let mods guide a semi-coherent direction for most countries, Victoria 2 is just bonkers and even mods can't make things make sense.

The ugly: The economy is broken, period. No matter what you do, there's a late game economic crash where it just stops working and there's nothing you can do. The mod softens the vanilla blow as much as possible but still. The military system is more micro intensive than V1 and probably broken, because since you can't manually promote pops, if you ever use your military at all, your brigades will eventually turn red icon and not be able to reinforce anymore since the soldier pop in that specific province promoted or demoted or died in battle. In Victoria 1, you can always promote more soldier pops of that same culture and keep your units, you just need X South Italian sized pops from any non-colony because they go into a national pool, and not necessarily only from Napoli.


My end result is that I've played dozens of (modded) Victoria 1 campaigns to the end in 1936, while I've never reached 1900 in Victoria 2, and it's not for lack of trying. It just keeps generating very silly results every single time I've tried.

I feel the same. Albeit I like the systems is Vic2 more, love the concepts of spheres and crisis, etc, I usually cant have 100 years in-game with Vic2, while I used to play Vic1 always to the 1930's.

 

[Ojodeaguila]

The problem of Victoria 2, is that the game was the Victoria 1 in a new engine, Victoria 3 is a new game, with a lot of changes and a new vision.

Victoria 1 was an amazing surprise the first time that your played it, Victoria 2 was a good game, without surprises.

 

[Victor1234]

The problem of Victoria 2, is that the game was the Victoria 1 in a new engine, Victoria 3 is a new game, with a lot of changes and a new vision.

Victoria 1 was an amazing surprise the first time that your played it, Victoria 2 was a good game, without surprises.

Victoria 1 wasn't really an amazing surprise for me, except for the POPs. That's really the innovation of the Victoria series. The game design and concepts were clearly heavily influenced by the Imperialism series of the 1990's, which makes it even more annoying that Paradox was never able to copy all of the best features of that game, to this day (we'll see with Victoria 3).

In Imperialism (from 1997), you can blockade sea zones with your navy, cutting off enemy trade (and naval transport) that passes through those seazones or blockade an enemy's home port, that cuts their access to the world market completely. Since only major countries are playable, there are no landlocked countries, which is probably why Paradox couldn't figure out how to implement this mechanic.

In the case of the former, the AI will assign escorts to their trade shipping so they can break your seazone blockades and in the latter, since the AI knows being cut off from trade completely is bad, they will bring their entire navy back from whatever they are doing to break your blockade, leading to a mega naval battle (so players learn to only home port blockade after they've either whittled down the enemy fleet in other battles or have built a lot of ships).

Once cut off from the world market, the enemy industry will either drop severely in output (the AI will keep building up industry as long as it can produce or import the raw materials) or stop completely for certain things (oil --> fuel especially), but either way, the rate at which they can replace land losses will be severely reduced, meaning if you are in an attritional war with the AI (which you usually are), you've just given yourself the eventual victory.

 

[Eruth]

All the time necessary 2 100 euros maximum 3 I am willing to change computers

Unfortunately, you are in such a minority in that opinion that PDX would never make their money back if they tried to do what you seem to want them to.
Harold, you just gotta accept that you want Victoria3 to be a different game than what it actually is, and the devs aren’t going to make what you want. It’s like asking the Halo dev team to make a hard core historical shooter— that’s fundamentally not what they want to make or are getting paid to make, so they just won’t.
Now, if you can come up with some reasonable suggestions that fit with the game pillars outlined in DD 1, we’d all be interested to listen. But you can’t just say “it must represent xyz”, because that’s not a suggestion- that’s another another pillar.

 

[harold lorre]

So you want a active agents inside of a financial system, that includes the stock market?
In addition you want institutional entities to be modelled as agents, that are influenced, consisting of and are owned by agents?

Not enough goods? I do kinda agree, but every good adds another layer of computations especially if those goods are part of a production chain or a need of pops.

So how is this to be achieved under the constraints of both time, computational complexity, and budget for a game?

It's a simulation-game, not a scientific simulation, the latter disregards multi-platform viability, the former has to reach as many people as possible with different hardware capabilities. You're looking for a scientific MAS that is run by a machine ( whether it'd be a cloud, ASIICS etc etc), that is far outside the budget of most people here on the forum.

If it's a simulation and not a historical simulation let's put the dwarves on it. Elves. Sauron is the same isn't it? For the problem of computers already explained, we improve the performance of computers. However, they get better every year. If we wait 2 years, who knows what computers will be like!

 

[GrafKeks]

If it's a simulation and not a historical simulation let's put the dwarves on it. Elves. Sauron is the same isn't it? For the problem of computers already explained, we improve the performance of computers. However, they get better every year. If we wait 2 years, who knows what computers will be like!

Efficiency in this aspect boils down to algorithms and functions as well, which are written by humans, although I'd argue overall skill caps in the industry increase. You can already check most planned hardware for the next few years. If you say we wait 20-30 years, that's gonna make a difference. If you are willing to wait that long not a problem at all, that's true, although standard consumer OSs become greedier as well ( WINstealurdata and overpriMACed ).

It's a simulation-game, not a simulation. And by historical simulation you mean how history specifically happened in our case, or a including possibilities that didn't happen, if it's the latter the game profits a lot from well-abstracted general-systems, like the military-system or the galactic market, marginal work-productivity etc. ( usually =/= always ).

Also your analogy is wrong, dwarves or sauron do not exist ( they do as a concept, they aren't agents though ) in the real world hence it fails to be a simulation.

Also abstractions are quite important, get an MAS-lib and try to make a good stock-market sim that has remotely explanatory power. You judge without trying, you criticize without suggesting meaningfully.

There are things that are sub-optimal, the devs are aware of it La and Wiz said several times they'd rather do X. They have constraints, so they have to maximize locally and I am relatively certain their preferences are strictly monotonic( ous? Am not native ) when it comes features, and reducing computational complexity.

 

[harold lorre]

Efficiency in this aspect boils down to algorithms and functions as well, which are written by humans, although I'd argue overall skill caps in the industry increase. You can already check most planned hardware for the next few years. If you say we wait 20-30 years, that's gonna make a difference. If you are willing to wait that long not a problem at all, that's true, although standard consumer OSs become greedier as well ( WINstealurdata and overpriMACed ).

It's a simulation-game, not a simulation. And by historical simulation you mean how history specifically happened in our case, or a including possibilities that didn't happen, if it's the latter the game profits a lot from well-abstracted general-systems, like the military-system or the galactic market, marginal work-productivity etc. ( usually =/= always ).

Also your analogy is wrong, dwarves or sauron do not exist ( they do as a concept, they aren't agents though ) in the real world hence it fails to be a simulation.

Also abstractions are quite important, get an MAS-lib and try to make a good stock-market sim that has remotely explanatory power. You judge without trying, you criticize without suggesting meaningfully.

There are things that are sub-optimal, the devs are aware of it La and Wiz said several times they'd rather do X. They have constraints, so they have to maximize locally and I am relatively certain their preferences are strictly monotonic( ous? Am not native ) when it comes features, and reducing computational complexity.

1 computers will evolve in less than 30 years 2 a realistic simulation that goes towards uchronia for choices, eg united italy from the Bourbon south, complicated for the economy of the southern kingdom but a possibility. if not a game of history why but a simulation we make a game like the throne of swords?

 

[grommile]

united italy from the Bourbon south

That was achievable in Vicky 2, and it will be achievable in Vicky 3.

The AI couldn't do it in V2 and probably won't be able to do it in V3, but that's in large part a case of "the AI is not very good at the game" and specifically "the AI cannot outsmart the AI".

 

[harold lorre]

That was achievable in Vicky 2, and it will be achievable in Vicky 3.

The AI couldn't do it in V2 and probably won't be able to do it in V3, but that's in large part a case of "the AI is not very good at the game" and specifically "the AI cannot outsmart the AI".

with many defects but not taking into account the historical reality, hardly in a historical simulation, taking into account the era, economy, politics the situation in Italy could happen you cannot move the capital to Rome or to Florence only to Naples, so it is anti-historical and artificial.
And making multiple topics on the same topic the military not too specific?

 

[Eruth]

with many defects but not taking into account the historical reality, hardly in a historical simulation, taking into account the era, economy, politics the situation in Italy could happen you cannot move the capital to Rome or to Florence only to Naples, so it is anti-historical and artificial

I actually do not know what you are trying to say in this post. Are you arguing that uniting from the south shouldn’t be possible? That if Naples unified the country they’d keep the capital south instead of moving it? I honestly cannot tell.