IMHO lack of tutorial was the biggest mistake in Vicky.
That, and the lack of information within the game. Tooltips are great to give you info on a particular item, but often you are looking for more global info...
- Why am I running a deficit?
- Which of my factories will give me the most profit if I expand them?
- How much
- What products do my POPs import?
- What does "HMS government" mean? How is this government type different from others?
- Which of my army stacks is currently fighting, and in which region is it stationed? Which army stack needs reinforcements?
- Which of the seven army stacks currently visible on the map is winning its fight, and which one is in danger of losing?
- What is the terrain type of the provinces my armies are advancing through? Are the enemy units standing along a mountain range or are those provinces flat ground?
That was pretty important info in Vic1, especially the economic questions. The game told you in a very informative way what your daily production numbers were, and how much each good costed, but I found it very difficult to figure out how any of this related to the overall performance of my economy.
Often you would come to a specific interface screen with a specific purpose: - you would check the factories screen in the ledger to see what the profit per POP in each factory is, because you want to expand some of them
- you would check the trade goods screen on the left hand pane of the map view to see if you are lacking any goods, because you might need to readjust your import settings if that is the case
- you would check the military units view in the left hand pane to see if you forgot any armies or navies in faraway regions
- you would cycle through the units on the map itself to see how your battles are progressing, and in what shape your units are.
However few of the interfaces were actually suited to these tasks. Cycling through the units on the map was a horribly time consuming job, it was one of the main reasons why during war you would spend 99% of your time in paused mode. On the map you could see where your units where, but you had NO info on vital information, such as
- in what shape are my units (are they in danger of annihilation? can they attack?)
- how is the battle going
- how many troops are actually in these seven divisions
You needed to cycle through the view to see this. I honestly hated it. In EU2 there used to be small horizontal bars below the units, which indicated what the strength of a unit was. This was not perfect but something like that would greatly have helped in Vic... an option that makes the game show green or red bars below the units, indicating how their strength (in relation to max.strength) was doing. Units in danger of being wiped out would be immediately visible.
Same with the terrain. The terrain view on the map was barely usable - all provinces had the same brown-greenish tone, so to see which province has which terrain (because you were for example planning the advance of your Russian armies into northern India, which is 40% impenetratanle mountains, 30% hills and 30% open plains) you needed to pause the game again, and click on a bunch of provinces. Then memorize which was which terrain. Simla: Mountains. Kandahar: Plains. Then order the advance of your armies.
Another thing: The factories page in the ledger. Oh how I hated it. The info was there, but to find the really crucial info (what is the per-POP productivity of each factory) you still needed to divide total profit by number of POPs, the page would not actually show you this info!!
See what I mean? Warfare was a chore in Vic because of the lack of interfaces. Running your economy required you to do calculations in your head which should have been there on the map.
Paradox games are great because they are complex. But when it comes to interfaces, i.e. letting gamers see the data, they just make a huge spreadsheed and dump all the raw, unprocessed data into it without a second's thought about WHAT THE GAMER WANTS TO SEE. That's what I mean about Paradox games not having good interfaces.
I have a meeting about the tutorial today.
Thank you for this news
