Worries about too much player control

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ImperatorLJ

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This worry is eating at me, and I wanted to see if others feel the same. I'm really worried that a player will have so much control over their nation that it becomes "unfun."

Remember how Victoria 3 was compared to gardening? The fun of gardening is seeing what your choices do to a plant that's beyond your control. I'm afraid that in the pursuit of giving players more agency and action -- which is a good goal and intention -- that the plant no longer grows on it's own (the gameplay loses the randomness that makes it fun).

We obviously can't know this until the game is released, and I'm not talking about a specific feature that we know of so far. I'm more curious about the general philosophy of player agency in Victoria 3, and wanted to know what others thought it should be?
 
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The player creates the factory, but they don’t manually promote pops Victoria 1 style. The gardening metaphor still applies in my eyes. I spread the soil, plant the seed, provide water, protect against pests; then I watch the economy grow.
 
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There is definitely a point where giving the player too much control can take away some of a game’s challenge (sometimes I feel CK3 gets close to that line), but I generally think that the more control the better.

In a series like Vicky, where shaping your nation should be more like pruning a bonsai tree than it is like driving a car, I think there is plenty of room for more levers to shape your nation than there were in Vicky 2.
 
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I seriously don't know how people imagine their "free" capitalists. Neither competition between different brands nor different product qualities are simulated. It is also very questionable how a country AI should look like that reacts sensibly to such a kind of RNG by the capitalists. The same people will then complain about a game that is too easy.

Seriously, I haven't read a halfway sensible suggestion in this regard. What should it do and what should it look like? Ok, the capitalist gets missed paramtere after which he makes the investments. Which in practice means that he simply looks at the prices at the moment of the decision. A month later, several factories are bankrupt again. The "winner" does not buy up the loser's factories either. And the game has to keep asking the capitalists for their decisions for this great feuture. Which will delay the game unnecessarily. And the countries AI should somehow react to these great decisions.
 
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If you like randomness you can try an RNG based game, I love them, personally.
Victoria 3 is about nation building and as devs said they want to represent player's agency as the "spirit of the nation", not just the government. Laissez faire in Victoria 2 was terrible.
I just do not get it.
 
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For People and their gardening metaphor: Yes I like to see how my garden grows on itself but I like even more that I plant those seeds myself. Instead of watching a dude unload tons of random flowers in my backyard because they were cheap at the moment.
I feel like a lot of people have their nostalgia glasses on on this one. No one ever selected a liberal party at the start of a vicky 2 campaign (if they can chose) you'd only switch over to a more liberal economy when yours was big enough that a few economic faux-pas aren't that devastating anymore and ofc because you don't want to micromanage every state yourself.
But such fundamental changes to the gamepaly and overall quality of life shouldn't depend on the government form. Because then I am not adjusting that to the current situation or cannot play a campaign that I wanted to at all because I dont want to sit there on speed 5 as a liberal Belgium.
There are other ways to make those economic systems feel distinct and we have to be rough in our criticism when it comes to that. But I definetly support the decision of having the core gamepaly experience not locked behind goverment forms.
There will still be enough randomness in the game, just because you have an investment pool doesnt mean you can just build anything you want with it (or at least hopefully), the Interest Groups will be demanding and since you can't subsidize anything your factories also have to make profits, that the capitalists can pay the wages. Just building an artillery factory for war purposes will just go bancrupt without subsidies if its not efficient.
 
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How does capitalist competition work? One tries to increase capital by crowding out competitors and opening up new markets. This is more or less the micro level. The game cannot simulate that.

A factory is not a color, but an entire sector located in a particular province. Competition occurs only in the form of competition between economies. If a "factory" has to close, it does not mean that a capitalist has ousted someone here. The economy had to close a sector here in response to the market. It is not the case that the capitalist from the neighboring province gets the wonderful opportunity here to open his own factory with the same product.

You play the face of the country, which also includes the economy. The economic form decides on the forms of access to the added value and its distribution. Why you need a RNG mechanism that can hardly be programmed as an intermediate step, does not reveal to me.

Of course, I don't mind having every citizen simulated in Victoria X at some point, who can open their little shop and build their little house.
 
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In a way, it seems there is both too much and too little player control. Too much because the player could end up plopping down individual factories even in laissez-faire, and too little because we haven't seen tariffs, subsidies, and other American System tools (the way they worked in Vicky 2 was rather janky).

Of course, we know very little about the game so far, so all of this might be added in.
 
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Why you need a RNG mechanism that can hardly be programmed as an intermediate step, does not reveal to me.
You think of it as just some weird rng mechanism. But you could also put the entire game into excel and say that it all just numbers with some functions.
I think of this "mechanism" as independent economical agent in my country that makes his own decisions, spends his resources and earns his profit which i, as player, could tax/subsidise. It would be cool to have more of these agents competing with each other inside country via changing wages, investing into processing efficiency, etc and add different ways to interact with these agents, but even just one like in vic2 was already adding a lot of fun and liveliness to simulation. At least to me.
 
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You think of it as just some weird rng mechanism. But you could also put the entire game into excel and say that it all just numbers with some functions.
I think of this "mechanism" as independent economical agent in my country that makes his own decisions, spends his resources and earns his profit which i, as player, could tax/subsidise. It would be cool to have more of these agents competing with each other inside country via changing wages, investing into processing efficiency, etc and add different ways to interact with these agents, but even just one like in vic2 was already adding a lot of fun and liveliness to simulation. At least to me.
An AI asks for parameters over and over again, and decisions are made based on these parameters that are aimed at a specific goal. The pops cannot be programmed that way. They just don't get their own AI, but at most queries without a goal. At most one would add one RNG factor here, so that the same "factory" is not built everywhere on the basis of a query regarding the prices. To simulate a competition, the owners of a factory would have to have a type of Ki like the countries and corresponding mechanics: a company would have to be able to take over other companies.
 
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If you like randomness you can try an RNG based game, I love them, personally.
Victoria 3 is about nation building and as devs said they want to represent player's agency as the "spirit of the nation", not just the government. Laissez faire in Victoria 2 was terrible.
I just do not get it.
If you like managing private industry you can try Rise of Industry. I love it, personally. Great game.

Vic3 is about playing as the State and trying to steer your nation and its citizens with the limited government tools you have.

You can try and expand your tools, for example, if you want to control your countries industry, you can implant a Planned Economy policy in your country. That's how it worked in Vic2 and that's how it should work in Vic3.

Because, if we are able to control capitalists POPs, where's the limit? Should we be able to control farmers POPs too? Should we increase our population growth just by clicking a "have babies" button? Why do we collect taxes anyway? Why are we only able to control capitalists money and not all of our citizens money? Why can't we decide were POPs live? We should control everyone living inside our country because we are the "spirit of the nation", right? Or are you trying to say that capitalists are the "spirit of the nation" but farmers are not part of that "spirit of the nation"?
 
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An AI asks for parameters over and over again, and decisions are made based on these parameters that are aimed at a specific goal. The pops cannot be programmed that way. They just don't get their own AI, but at most queries without a goal. At most one would add one RNG factor here, so that the same "factory" is not built everywhere on the basis of a query regarding the prices. To simulate a competition, the owners of a factory would have to have a type of Ki like the countries and corresponding mechanics: a company would have to be able to take over other companies.
Not all agents are born equal. Of course there is a main type of agent in pdx game: The Tag. But it doesn't mean that The Tag should be a monolithic object. In vic2 The Tag was divided into Player agent and Capitalists agent (Capitalists AI no matter how dumb it was, was working quite good for it's goal). Coexistence and interaction between these agents added a lot to the game: this agent could be even considered as something you try to feed, groom and from whom you will gather great profits if you will patiently care about him until he gets strong. You could do it with different strategies that could include even taking control of some actions of him. I would loved futher division of The Tag into coexisting independent agents like Capitalists, Landed Nobility, Academy, Local Peasantry or even Armed Forces, etc that interact between each other, with Player, with Provinces, with Market, collect and spend wealth and maybe even interact with agents from other Tags, so it is not necessarily "competing firms from tales about perfect free market". But this idea of division of The Tag and making it a representative of an alive and developing society contradicts to desire to give as much tools as possible to player. And it seems that The Tag is a united Blob again, it had consumed it's Capitalists child, but i am waiting for influence groups futher info, hoping for the best.
 
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Fair enough, but I like the fact that in the game primarily about internal country management I'm gonna have more internal stuff to manage. At this point we know extremely little though so I'm just hoping whatever mechanics they decide to implement are immersive and interesting and fun. I'll just have to wait to see more!
 
And will that mean late game we are swamped with handling all those factories? I know then diary said there will be tools to help us but this also worries me. In V2 with a government that allows building factories it was a PITA checking on raw materials, getting the proper factories that supply intermediate items etc.

Sometimes it worries me that this is what the gameplay will end up being.
 
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How does capitalist competition work? One tries to increase capital by crowding out competitors and opening up new markets. This is more or less the micro level. The game cannot simulate that.
Do you mind elaborating why the game cannot simulate that? It doesn't need to be a perfect simulation usable for real world economic decisions. As everything else in the game it only needs to be a reasonable approximation of realistic behaviour. And I am not convinced you even need to simulate that to make the game work.

A factory is not a color, but an entire sector located in a particular province. Competition occurs only in the form of competition between economies. If a "factory" has to close, it does not mean that a capitalist has ousted someone here. The economy had to close a sector here in response to the market. It is not the case that the capitalist from the neighboring province gets the wonderful opportunity here to open his own factory with the same product.
In the game terms it simply means that environment has changed and nobody in that sector can make money. It is not the case of some capitalist opening business that goes bankrupt due to poor management. The job of the player is to avoid changing environment in a way that would collapse important sector of economy. Of course, if that's what player actually wants changing environment on purpose is also an option.
 
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An AI asks for parameters over and over again, and decisions are made based on these parameters that are aimed at a specific goal. The pops cannot be programmed that way. They just don't get their own AI, but at most queries without a goal. At most one would add one RNG factor here, so that the same "factory" is not built everywhere on the basis of a query regarding the prices. To simulate a competition, the owners of a factory would have to have a type of Ki like the countries and corresponding mechanics: a company would have to be able to take over other companies.
You seem to have some specific implementation in your mind which may not have anything to do with Vic3 implementation (unless you have insider knowledge). I don't see any point involving AI and RNGs here, because while you can try to find decisions by simulating on micro level, you can find local optimum quicker and cheaper by analytic means. I am sure there are other ways of implementing it too.
 
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This worry is eating at me, and I wanted to see if others feel the same. I'm really worried that a player will have so much control over their nation that it becomes "unfun."
I have some of a similar worries, but so far I haven't seen much to confirm them. It seems a lot of discussion is going about free market economies, but even if the worst comes true it just a single type of gameplay that is affected. While it would be disappointing, it is only a fairly small part of the game.

I think the warfare DD will be a critical one - I am waiting for it with fear and anticipation
 
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If you like managing private industry you can try Rise of Industry. I love it, personally. Great game.

Vic3 is about playing as the State and trying to steer your nation and its citizens with the limited government tools you have.

You can try and expand your tools, for example, if you want to control your countries industry, you can implant a Planned Economy policy in your country. That's how it worked in Vic2 and that's how it should work in Vic3.

Because, if we are able to control capitalists POPs, where's the limit? Should we be able to control farmers POPs too? Should we increase our population growth just by clicking a "have babies" button? Why do we collect taxes anyway? Why are we only able to control capitalists money and not all of our citizens money? Why can't we decide were POPs live? We should control everyone living inside our country because we are the "spirit of the nation", right? Or are you trying to say that capitalists are the "spirit of the nation" but farmers are not part of that "spirit of the nation"?
So far the only sort of power you describe we have confirmed is investment pool building. But remember also that capitalists are part of an Interest Group. You may be able to use their money at your will but they would be able to pull your strings at pushing their own benefitial laws. It would be interesting if the richer we help this capitalist population to grow, the more influential they are, but that's just my ideas. We know for now that capitalists are an actual political force, so there isn't a full control over them (as well of the rest of POPs ig)
 
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I don't think old grognard players actually remember how bad laissez faire was, and how absolutely inexplicable it was for a new player. You're playing and then there's an election with Liberals and suddenly every machine parts factory has closed, you're going to have a revolution but at least the clipper factories are rising up in a late 1910s comeback tour.

Laissez Faire could function but it created a very stale meta where the same logic applied every time - you state capitalize until you have enough factories, then switch to LF and let it run. This is not very intuitive, and in the process the capitalists made very bizarre decisions and could and did crash economies. At the other end of the scale, planned economy is unplayable, especially as it comes at the end of the game where you're likely to have a huge number of factories.

It's really bad as a game. Part of what a game is supposed to do is use direct interaction to teach you core mechanics. Since Victoria 2 so often had capitalists at the helm players had far less opportunity to learn the essential parts of their economy. This may be somewhat 'realistic' in that in reality economic systems are far less legible than a game presents it as, but it is a really serious problem for actually teaching players how to play the game. Investment pools and having actual choices that you have to make around factories early on are a teaching tool for learning how to interact with the economy.

Sure, there should be automation options, but LF was an awful, awful way of presenting this to the player. Nothing about it is intuitive, nothing about how the AI behaves in it is sensible. The player should be forced to interact with the system to learn how to play the game because that's what games are for: interaction. I like the idea of LF, but the implementation was so lacking that it was anti-fun.
 
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