What is right and what is wrong with 1.7 and SoI: a simulation-lover's view

[yurcick]

Hi everyone.

Disclaimer: I really mean well. But I think Victoria should have stayed unique
I want to say some harsh words about the current update which the people seem to enjoy. Trust me, this comes from a place of love. Over these two or so years, I've enjoyed V3 a lot, I absolutely don't think it's a downgrade compared to V2 (which I also played a lot back in the day, as well as V:Revolutions), as I've seen people say, and I really hope that it will continue development for years, turning into the greatest game ever.
However, I believe, with SoI, a mistake was made, one that will be hard to correct without deliberation and societal pressure.
The general premise of the thread is that PDS games are all cool and meaningfully different and should be diversified beyond just eras in which they're set. HoI has a way deeper military mechanics that I would want in any other game. CK is uniquely character-focused. EU is kind of in-between everything, but it's the only game spanning completely different epochs, and its game design decisions are dictated by it: it has to operate on a higher abstraction level and be more mana-filled.
I think that these disctinctions are what makes PDS games stronger, and we should cherish and further these differences, not unify the games.
Now, what is the Victoria's specialty? It's a simulator (it even says so in promotional materials: "society simulator"). And in simulators, even if they are also games, we need to be moderate. reserved with the mechanics, they should have some representation in real life or at least be possible in real life and possible to be explained in real life terms. I think that 1.7 mechanics fail this criterion.

What 1.7&SoI did right
Of course, not everything in the new update is wrong. There are solid mechanical foundations that can be used for future development, and probably at least one of them will be.
I'll focus on two main ones:

• the new ownership system is definitely a great step forward, necessary from both the simulation and gameplay strategy/dynamics PoV. Now we finally have ways to dump our capital abroad, which is both the major reason for imperialism and allows us to keep developing in late-game (the old-as-life balance problem of "everything being already build by 1910" seems to be gone)
• the leverage system for blocs is decent and makes sense as something allowing the blocs to compete for influence. It is also very much less micro-heavy than the dreaded V2's sphering clickfest

What 1.7&SoI did wrong and why I am pessimistic
Unfortunately, with these solid foundations comes not-as-solid realization.

• The foreign investment is chaotic and untrackable. I would want much more data on why my Midlands capitalists invest in Brazil's coffee plants instead of Chile's sulphur mines or Midlands engine factories. I would also want much more ways to incentivize them to do what I want. Of course, the prerequisites to all this should be that investment pool purchasing decision be based on potential profitability (which, as I understand, is absent at the moment, but the reasoning for investing is now so unclear that I'm unsure). After that we need options to tip the scales, adding weigh to certain options, so that the investors would choose what we want. It can be done with decrees, or special mechanics of tax cuts, or promising something to them (like maybe "not expanding labour laws"), anything. I hope that this will be improved in 1.8 and further, but now it looks more like a placeholder
• Everything in blocs beyond the leverage mechanics is just absolutely terrible and out of place in Victoria. There's no other way to put it, this all ruins the simulation, providing insanely powerful bonuses, not rooted in anything historical or realistic.

What would be realistic? In my view, there are two acceptable bonus types that could be unlockable by tenets:​

1) something that eliminates international barriers, letting you treat the foreign states as yours or almost as yours and vice versa. Market unification (or, in mild cases, tariff reduction) is a perfect example. Enforced defensive pacts are good too.​

2) something that affects the weights in decision making of individual agents, especially if those agents aren't playable. For example, I wouldn't object to a couple "imperial propaganda" tenets that would raise migration attraction and investment attraction​

​

Unfortunately, that's not what we have, mostly. We are filled to the brim with tenets that create infrastructure from thin air, allow to steal money from private investors or provide magic innovation points. And this at the moment looks like the whole point of the bloc system. I'm sure adding all those is a big mistake. I'm also sure it's not a mistake that's easy to correct without mods, as first thing, it has to be acknowledged as a mistake, and second, some of the playerbase probably likes it, and deliberately chose to spend their money on it.​

​

What do I want now?
First, of course, to vent. Then, to understand whether this sentiment is shared by a part of the community.
And finally, I really want devs to reconsider the factual filling of the blocs mechanics. Nothing like "religious convocations" should have ever appeared in a simulator of a 19/20th century sociery. And while it's now hard to simply remove this feature without people crying "damn, we paid for it", I think that it needs to be done. V3 can be magnificently unique, it doesn't have to be a bad earthbound clone of Stellaris.

Please share what you think.

 

[fodazd]

I agree with most of this. While I think that SoI is a very good update in general, power blocks are one of my least favorite parts of it. The main reason for this is that a lot of principle bonuses just don't make any sense from a simulation perspective.

 

[Froonk]

I think all tenet levels should be removed and tenets should only provide tangible bonuses like trade agreements, enforcing laws, defensive pacts, military access, technology sharing and things of that nature. Mandate meanwhile should only be a mechanic of being able to force things on bloc members and cohesion should mainly affect stability of the bloc and leverage towards potential members.

Victoria 3 doesn't need any of these abstract modifiers that don't even abstract anything at diplomatic level. Genuinely just simply removing tenet modifiers would be a straight improvement because devs added enough mechanics to carry power blocs and the modifiers are actually detracting from those mechanics. There is no need to cargo cult these bonuses from Stellaris or Civilization.

 

[Sirbab]

I agree on most of this, but i actually like the bloc mandates. Maybe not the exact bonuses but some of these are totally feasible due to increased attention to different aspects of the bloc.
The most egregious one to me is the - 50% infamy on unrec nations, that one just doesn't make sense to me.

 

[MatthewP]

I agree on most of this, but i actually like the bloc mandates. Maybe not the exact bonuses but some of these are totally feasible due to increased attention to different aspects of the bloc.
The most egregious one to me is the - 50% infamy on unrec nations, that one just doesn't make sense to me.

Some of the bonuses make sense as “our bloc is choosing to focus government efforts in this area.” But then, why does it take a bloc to do that? It’s hard to think of a reason why a nation couldn’t do the same focusing trick by itself.

Of course you can think of specific scenarios where a bloc would provide modifier-style benefits a nation can’t get alone: a technologically advanced nation providing assistance to other members, or one with a great military training up the others or providing military supplies when needed and so on. But the game doesn’t portray these; the bonuses you get spring from the nature of the bloc you select and not from and characteristics of its members. This cheapens the whole mechanic a lot IMO.

 

[chrism2012]

Some of the bonuses make sense as “our bloc is choosing to focus government efforts in this area.” But then, why does it take a bloc to do that? It’s hard to think of a reason why a nation couldn’t do the same focusing trick by itself.

This.
When I first read the DDs regarding power blocs and its 'principles' my immediate thinking was: Why do I need a power bloc for those principles in the first place? Why isn't this a nation's general plan, for the player to decide? Why don't the principles' positive modifiers come along with some negative ones (...though that concept goes for almost any PDX game by now?), and where the player has to make a decision on what negative debuffs to accept in order to gain his favorite ones? Why are those modifiers so high? Why do I have statues in power blocs only, why not in my country? (perfect example Germany 1871+ with many Bismarck statues in almost every village) ...

On answering yurcick's OP post:
- I agree on the new ownership concept which is a big step up for more immersion in regards to the Victorian age and the starting global money-investments and concentration as a whole. Those aspects should be more included into the corporation concept, though (I always think of J.P Morgan, Carnegie, Rockefeller etc. and the monopolies of that time).
- I'm not so much pessimistic about the out of thin air modifiers - as those can be (likely will be) debuffed by either the devs or else by some historical focus mods.
- I agree with the need for better clarifications as to why those investments happen, though I don't need them necessarily in the game (aka as a chart or data table).

All in all, SOI and v1.7 are a vast improvement of the game as a whole and I'm grateful for having another Vici game.

- What I am (somewhat) pessimistic about is the number of new mechanics added into the game with each patch and the (possible? / likely?) lacking capabilities of the AI at hand to work with them, and 2nd the more and more occurring errors / bugs because of the many mechanics - including according performance issues. I consider Wiz to be a very capable concept thinker and programmer, already back in Vic2 days. I've watched the increasing number of problems with v1.7 though, and many aspects are still open for further development (e.g. military and supply). At current, the devs (try to) 'fix' them but the problems keep on rising. I (again) have to wait for another playthrough because various aspects for my favorite country are still not working...and this goes on since v1.4. Right now I'm rather reluctant to start a new game due to (my fear of) major bugs stalling the playthrough...and it shouldn't be that way at all.

 

[UBERWASP]

The implication of dividend cap is that human species, governments will always be corrupt and always mismanage resources in all circumstances. That’s what dividend cap, all that money getting deleted, evaporated to air implies. This was supposed to be a historical alternative history game right? Give me anti corruption mechanics that can %100 the dividend amount.

 

[masteriw]

This.
When I first read the DDs regarding power blocs and its 'principles' my immediate thinking was: Why do I need a power bloc for those principles in the first place? Why isn't this a nation's general plan, for the player to decide? Why don't the principles' positive modifiers come along with some negative ones (...though that concept goes for almost any PDX game by now?), and where the player has to make a decision on what negative debuffs to accept in order to gain his favorite ones? Why are those modifiers so high? Why do I have statues in power blocs only, why not in my country? (perfect example Germany 1871+ with many Bismarck statues in almost every village) ...

Do you know why do you need a power bloc for accessing those principles?
Because these features should have been in the base game, and since they aren't, they can't just sell a DLC that overrides the whole game (which is exactly what this game needed). If they did that, the base game (without the DLC) would be much harder to maintain, since you would then have different versions of the same mechanics live at the same time.
So that's why whenever they implement something that was supposed to be in the base game, they need to come up with a layered manner to deliver those features. They want to pretend the base game is fully supported (it isn't) but the non-paying customer needs to be able to boot the game up and advance the game clock without too many issues.
So basically, this is why you need a "power bloc" to actually rule your country in a more interesting way.
Next time, when they announce the political or military revamp DLC, the new features will probably be in a new screen that will be unlocked by, say, "tradition points". So the base game will continue to work and no free features will be unnecessarily rolled out to the non-paying crew.

 

[Splorghley]

I've been banging the drum on stopping artificial bonus creep since the Monuments dev diary, through the addition of Companies, and now this. These kinds of abstract, artificial bonuses don't add anything - they actively detract from, and undercut, the core game mechanics. The existence of a "+10% widget" bonus is a disincentive to carefully planning out the expansion of one's widget production. For a while, 'conquer the Mosque of Djenne' was standard advice for improving literacy, which naturally undercuts the actual education mechanic (it's since been nerfed to undercut this exact strategy, without addressing the underlying problem). And so on and so forth.

On the one hand there is an intricate simulation of emergent phenomena with which the devs want people to engage, which is the part of the game that's meant to be deep and fun, and on the other there is an ever-expanding smorgasbord of random bonuses to choose from, which entails clicking a button and achieving largely the same thing. So people naturally gravitate towards the easy bonuses, incentivised to do so by every new DLC, and then complain, unsurprisingly, that the game feels shallow.

I've got monument effects turned off, I have never played with any companies established, but I will be forced to engage with the power bloc mechanics since important diplomatic features are now all jumbled up with the soup of artificial bonuses. Hopefully a game rule or mod emerges to disable all / the most egregious parts of it, but I'm not thrilled with the direction of travel for V3 DLC to date (the patches, on the other hand, have been excellent).

 

[Secret Master]

I would also want much more ways to incentivize them to do what I want.

The chaotic nature of investment and not knowing what’s going on is something I agree with.

But after my first game, I realized I was way too liberal in getting/giving investment rights. It your investors are not investing at home, you gotta just put an end to investment agreements. And pick and choose puppets carefully.

 

[iTomes]

I feel like power blocs should primarily center around harmonizing laws between member states and the benefits associated with that rather than arbitrary modifiers and entirely new laws you can't get any other way.

For example, there's a tenet that lets you have regulations on the food your people eat. This has positive effects on mortality rate and SOL. This effect makes sense. My people are eating higher quality food which allows them to live longer and be happier. But why is this something that requires that I run a power block? Why isn't this a law I can just pass? The way it should work imo is that there should be laws regulating goods that come with penalties when trading with countries that don't have those same laws instituted, with power blocks allowing you to enforce those same laws on member states in turn enabling you to both have regulations in place and indulge in the benefits of international trade.

Similarly, the education tenet could enforce education laws in member states and significantly boost tech spread between signatories as researchers cooperate. You could end up with a large power bloc of highly literate countries that share their advances with each other in a rapid manner, something that would still be extremely powerful but also more realistic.

 

[yurcick]

The chaotic nature of investment and not knowing what’s going on is something I agree with.

Well, I didn't say that I want to dictate where my capis invest, I said I wanted to incentivize domestic investment (for both my and foreign capis), which is very realistic and doesn't contradict most of what you say.

Investment should have a significant degree of randomness, be chaotic, as you put it, I agree with that. It doesn't mean this randomness is not weighed or influenceable.

However, I absolutely don't think "not knowing what's going on" is a feature.

 

[the_unnamed]

Investment should have a significant degree of randomness, be chaotic, as you put it, I agree with that. It doesn't mean this randomness is not weighed or influenceable.

Apart from providing infrastructure, attracting pops in certain states, providing education, and in interventionalism subsidising buildings, I don’t think that states with market economies should influence investment decisions.

 

[yurcick]

Apart from providing infrastructure, attracting pops in certain states, providing education, and in interventionalism subsidising buildings, I don’t think that states with market economies should influence investment decisions.

Why though?

IRL investment considerations revolve around, slightly simplified, two factors
1) what the return of the investment is expected to be
2) what is the risk to lose everything

The expectations for profits and confidence in stability are not only taken from present things (like current infrastructure and education) and past things (like historical profits), they're prognostic by nature. And making investors reevaluate their forecasts for the better is definitely in government's purview.

1) Return on investment depends on future profits which depends on demand and taxes. Promising "there will be demand for your output" or "taxes will not rise in 10 years" is definitely something that country leadership can meaningfully do to raise investors' expectations on this point
2) The risks of nationalization or internal instability significantly affecting asset's ability to generate profits are also political in nature, and both lowering those risks in practice and persuading potential investors that the risks are low is government's (and player's) job

 

[the_unnamed]

1) Return on investment depends on future profits which depends on demand and taxes. Promising "there will be demand for your output" or "taxes will not rise in 10 years" is definitely something that country leadership can meaningfully do to raise investors' expectations on this point
2) The risks of nationalization or internal instability significantly affecting asset's ability to generate profits are also political in nature, and both lowering those risks in practice and persuading potential investors that the risks are low is government's (and player's) job

This might be correct but it is not related to publicly steered investment. To steer investments to certain states, you can build a factory there and then privatise it. For more player’s agency in these contexts, command economy exists.

 

[yurcick]

This might be correct but it is not related to publicly steered investment. To steer investments to certain states, you can build a factory there and then privatise it.

This, while not completely unheard of in the era, happened on orders of magnitude smaller scale than the game portrays.
I think the government directionism should be significantly lowered across the board (under LF there should be no government construction of industries, under interventionism the govt construction share should be around 10% etc; also effective taxation levels should be lowered several times over).

You could argue that this ahistorical focus on government construction is good for gameplay purposes, this is a contentious topic on which I wouldn't agree.
I think the main argument for building stuff is "what else is there to do", and I offer solutions to precisely this problem (along with expanding war, diplomacy, lawmaking and other clearly government-led stuff):
1) there should be a lot of strategic work to ensure investment attraction and overseeing tactical projects of regional development (usually without manual construction)
2) generally the socioeconomic gameplay should center around balancing between different IGs' (and other power groups') interests. For example, you promised your overlord's capitalists that you wouldn't expand labour protection institutions in the next 5 years. They built a lot of industries on your soil. Now the empowered TUs threaten you with a general strike if you don't expand these institutions. Whom will you upset?

 

[Vellsi]

I'd agree with the criticism that the investement-AI has shortcomings and it would be preferable to have a way to incentivize it to build up certain industries, in certain areas/nations or building up for future strategic considerations, but that's something they might integrate eventually. I think the player feedback is unanimously clear that stupid AI decisions cause frustration, so the developers are bound to work on that. However, I can not see how that should spark pessimism about the game's future.


To the rest, however, I disagree with. For me 1.7 and SoI were great (aside from bugs) and I like the Power Blocs (in combination with the political lobby system) a lot, as they profoundly change how the nation in charge of the Bloc gets to affect the global landscape. The biggest advantage is that other nations now get to see visually, in a convenient UI, what a major nation does focus on in the long run. Prior to that important aspects of global expansionist policies were hidden in layers of menus, internal politics and governmental policies of many different (and sometimes very small) nations.

I get the obsessions with historical accuracy but I love replayability and what-if scenarios a lot, so I also approve of the way Power Blocs drastically alter certain gameplay strategies. At the same time Power Blocs properly enable playstyles that would have relied on synergy with other nations, which is something that was neither visualized or working well beforehand. Theoracies or communist nations always ended up alone unless RNG made them have other friends in the world. Now a powerful nation could drag others along, one step at a time, so they finally get to share the world with others at the end of the journey. I think that's a pretty neat feature for new players, too.

 

[yurcick]

I love replayability and what-if scenarios a lot, so I also approve of the way Power Blocs drastically alter certain gameplay strategies. At the same time Power Blocs properly enable playstyles that would have relied on synergy with other nations, which is something that was neither visualized or working well beforehand. Theoracies or communist nations always ended up alone unless RNG made them have other friends in the world. Now a powerful nation could drag others along, one step at a time, so they finally get to share the world with others at the end of the journey. I think that's a pretty neat feature for new players, too.

I agree with that, some bloc and international influence mechanics was needed.
But nothing in this quote requires or justifies +33% infrastructure tenets and other similar stuff, which is aplenty.

 

[Froonk]

I'd agree with the criticism that the investement-AI has shortcomings and it would be preferable to have a way to incentivize it to build up certain industries, in certain areas/nations or building up for future strategic considerations, but that's something they might integrate eventually. I think the player feedback is unanimously clear that stupid AI decisions cause frustration, so the developers are bound to work on that. However, I can not see how that should spark pessimism about the game's future.


To the rest, however, I disagree with. For me 1.7 and SoI were great (aside from bugs) and I like the Power Blocs (in combination with the political lobby system) a lot, as they profoundly change how the nation in charge of the Bloc gets to affect the global landscape. The biggest advantage is that other nations now get to see visually, in a convenient UI, what a major nation does focus on in the long run. Prior to that important aspects of global expansionist policies were hidden in layers of menus, internal politics and governmental policies of many different (and sometimes very small) nations.

I get the obsessions with historical accuracy but I love replayability and what-if scenarios a lot, so I also approve of the way Power Blocs drastically alter certain gameplay strategies. At the same time Power Blocs properly enable playstyles that would have relied on synergy with other nations, which is something that was neither visualized or working well beforehand. Theoracies or communist nations always ended up alone unless RNG made them have other friends in the world. Now a powerful nation could drag others along, one step at a time, so they finally get to share the world with others at the end of the journey. I think that's a pretty neat feature for new players, too.

Realism is a problematic and ultimately useless term. What matters here is the simulation. Victoria 3 aims to simulate its outcomes which is why it has these very performance taxing POP and goods calculations. When you are tacking on modifiers that sideline the fundamental mechanics it actively detracts from simulation, it has got nothing to do with realism.

Usual counter-argument to this is that you can't feasibly simulate everything so you will need to abstract some more directly. Which is true yet modifiers added are also not simulating anything real, they are bonuses to be bonuses that don't even fit the dynamic of the mechanic they are part of. That's where one can argue where exactly 25% research bonus just because you have Benin in your power bloc comes from when you are playing as Sweden, that's where you can ask what does this abstract in reality.

 

[TitaniumMan91]

I don't get all the concerns with bonuses, they're tangible ways to represent things that game just doesn't simulate. "Why does X reduce MAPI?" Because it represents standardized logistics done with intention; instead of everyone (or every state) having their own railroad gauge, the power block is actively working to have a single universal gauge so all products can get everywhere in the market. It sounds like an obvious thing to do, but look at the CSA during the civil war (railroad network had been built to get from the plantations to a harbor, not to get from market center to market center) or Austria in WWI. They're all trying to represent the difference between doing something alone vs the pressure (both soft and hard) of doing that same thing under the implied threat of violence that a sphere of influence represents.