7 ms·

Victoria III – First Impressions

142 points by BlueTemplar 4y ago

billfruit 4y ago
Paradox games esp EU4 and CK2 often feel like idle clicker waiting games, player often waiting for progress bars to fill. Also the role of the player in EU4 and Victoria seems ambiguous. Perhaps the role could have been fixed as the personna of the head of the executive, and the means and policies available restricted to only those which such an executive personna might have had.
- jcranmer 4y ago
  > Also the role of the player in EU4 and Victoria seems ambiguous. No more ambiguous than in the more popular Civilization games.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Not sure if the Civ series is, as of now, more popular than PDS games - for instance Hearts of Iron 4 is only slightly behind Civ 6 in terms of Steam players ! (And Vicky 3 is way above both, but that's normal for a brand new game with tons of advertising and hype...)
- aqme28 4y ago
  I’ve played a lot of Crusader Kings and a lot of idle clicker games. I do not understand where this comparison is coming from. I’m trying to think of two genres that are further apart and I’m struggling.
  - slothtrop 4y ago
    I'll bridge the gap for you: waiting is a core mechanic of the game, and you're having to elapse a lot of time for target changes to be reflected, or random events to pop up. Some games like dwarf fortress or rimworld don't share the same pitfalls because, notwithstanding events, you get fast and continuous results from your decisions, which translates to a lesser sense of "idling". I can only speak for CK since I never played Victoria. However, as something more analogous I have played Offworld Trading Company, having an economic focus, and in-game changes come rather fast there too.
    - aqme28 4y ago
      I don’t think that’s very fair, since CK gives you ways to move the time, and also plenty of stuff to micromanage if you want to. I feel like your comparison is just that time is an element, which is a pretty fundamental aspect of a lot of games.
    - ensignavenger 4y ago
      In CK, if you find yourself "waiting" for something to happen, you should probably just speed up the game simulation... I find that things are constantly popping up that need my attention, and if I am going through a long slog.... I constantly speed up and slow down the game, depending on what I am trying to do.
      - slothtrop 4y ago
        Indeed I have, and I disagree that attention is demanded in equal measure every instance. I still think there's a lot of leap frogging and waiting anyway for things to develop or interesting things to happen. Most of the time exploring the menu I'm anticipating what I would do, but have to wait for conditions to be met. Waiting is the name of the game.
    - dragontamer 4y ago
      I mean... based on how some people play Starcraft or Age of Empires, those are also idle games, lol. For these Paradox Games ... games... its not about "waiting" for time, but instead about "parallel" decisions. I haven't played Victoria, but it takes 2 years to build a Battleship in Hearts of Iron 3. You don't just, build one battleship and turn off your brain though. You decide to build a battleship, then move your troops around, or decide to equip artillery to all of your infantry divisions (which will take X months to build and deploy), or ... a myriad of other decisions. All decisions individually are simple. But these grand strategy games are about keeping "track" of all the individual decisions and building a larger picture from it all. ----------- I know some people cannot multitask and have no ambitions to learn the skill. But that's what these management simulators are all about (including competitive management simulators like Starcraft or Age of Empires :-p)
- triceratops 4y ago
  CK is almost never like that. Not sure what you're talking about.
- noSyncCloud 4y ago
  You should revisit Paradox games then, because you clearly didn't understand anything about what was happening while you were "idling".
  - jon-wood 4y ago
    They don't exactly make it clear what you "should" be doing at any given point though, my experience of all Paradox games is that they have a perfunctory tutorial which seems to cover little more than "here's a country, click things to view them, move armies by doing this, good luck" which then drops you into trying to work out which of the six billion barely explained options will do what you want to do. I won't even fault them for that, there's clearly a huge audience of people who really enjoy it, but I prefer my games not to require watching 20 hours of YouTube videos and reading a wiki to understand how they work.
    - BlueTemplar 4y ago
      Hmm, what about their celebrated multi-stage popups though ?
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > They don't exactly make it clear what you "should" be doing at any given point though The central aspect of the game is making that decision, correct.
- dmix 4y ago
  This was my experience with Stellaris 100% but there’s still plenty of strategy in between the endless cycles of clicking the same 10 buttons.
- ericd 4y ago
  There’s always something you should be doing in EU4/CK2, but it takes some thought to figure out what that is.
- 1123581321 4y ago
  You’re getting your head bitten off for that comparison :), but I understand what you mean, because you can sit back and watch the game occupy itself, and if you want to wait for game state to become favorable before you resume taking action (waiting for territory to change hands, for example), you can sometimes do that. There’s a term for Paradox’ grand strategy games I like, “data surfing,” that describes what it can be like to mostly passively experience its simulations. Most idlers or clickers progress along straightforward exponential curves, but they could absolutely be designed similarly.
- checkyoursudo 4y ago
  The balance between action (decision making, shooting, dialog, etc) versus waiting (travel time, crafting time, waiting for resources from previous actions, whatever) seems like an important consideration for game designers to make. Do you want the player to be instantly powerful or have to grind laboriously? Do you want them to run from place to place or fast travel? Craft/build instantly or take time? I think that good games often will give you other things to do while you wait for important things. Some of my favorite games will give you too many things to do so that you must prioritize correctly or you will lose it all.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  All their games have a problem with making you play parts of the game you aren't interested in and find tedious and for which the way you personally play it could easily be a preset that made you not have to worry about it any more. In many ways I love HOI3, for instance, but it's a bit love-hate because about 50% of the time I'm messing with shit I'd rather let an extremely simple "AI" handle. Or just give me some good preset templates (make them "historically inspired", that's cool, or not, either way) for the things that use templates, or, also acceptable, let me save some of mine between games and have them show up when I've researched enough to build them (looking at you, tank and aircraft editors, especially).
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Wait, I thought that PDS games were actually celebrated in how they're few of the rare games where you can just ignore part of them and the AI will (more or less incompetently) play those parts for you ?
- dragontamer 4y ago
  > Paradox games esp EU4 and CK2 often feel like idle clicker waiting games, player often waiting for progress bars to fill. I used to consume a lot of clicker games, but... for those who _haven't_ played them, they're basically management simulators. I dare say that Factorio is in fact, a clicker game (as it starts off with right-clicking to mine 1 iron ore at a time). The goal of _ALL_ clicker games is to build enough infrastructure to "stop clicking". The "click" is just the fundamental unit, the introduction to the game. In just 5 to 10 minutes, you'll already move onto automatic miners (Factorio), or Autoclippers (Universal Paperclips), or Heroes (Clicker Heroes), or Cookie Factories (Cookie Clicker), or whatever. The game then becomes one of resource allocation: you have 1000 iron in Factorio, do you build assembly machines or belts? You have 1000 paperclips in Universal Paperclips, do you get another autoclipper or do you start buying wires? ------- In fact, any management game can "turn into' a clicker game rather easily. And I think the "clicker mechanic" (ie: having the lowest-level action equivalent to a click from the user) helps solidify in the Player's mind the "value" of the cookie factory or the Assembly Machine 3 x 4x Speed Modules (or whatever). But yeah, a well designed clicker game is just a management sim like any other. No one actually plays clicker games by clicking on things.
- vintermann 4y ago
  In board games in this genre, "who you are" is often even more ambiguous. As the author points out, Crusader Kings III is more person-oriented, if that's what you want. Personally I like games where it's slightly ambiguous who you are, but things evolve in a "plausible" way if you play for your goals.
- SL61 4y ago
  As a longtime Paradox player, I have a similar issue with their recent games. They've really shifted in a more game-y direction over the years. I started with Hearts of Iron 2, where the systems were less abstract and mapped closer to real life. I felt like I was actually running a country and its military. There were more ways to cheese the older games, like the time I played as Guatemala and launched a successful coup to install a Guatemalan puppet government in the USA, but you could avoid those strategies if you wanted a more serious WWII wargame. Since EU4, or maybe CK2, they've abstracted a lot of the gameplay into those progress bars and point systems, the foremost example being the focus tree in Hearts of Iron 4. I still enjoy most of their newer games, but they constantly remind you that they are games. Gameplay feels less emergent and it feels like I get less agency as a player.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Hmm, other players are complaining that Vicky3 gameplay is too emergent, I guess you just cannot please everyone ?
    - SL61 4y ago
      I haven't played Victoria 3 yet, so it's possible they've addressed my concerns in it.
- w0de0 4y ago
  At their best, I’ve found Paradox games are indeed this - but one is waiting on the outcomes of an emergent system one has had only a part in guiding. This opposed to managing a holistic (modulo some rng variation) system, as in Factorio.
- fsn4dN69ey 4y ago
  I can't speak to CK2, but for EU4 there's always something you can be doing. I think it comes with experience - I play multiplayer with some friends, and one of them in our group has less experience and constantly says the same thing. Watching my screen though, it seems like I'm playing Starcraft. Yes, some things you need to wait for - there is always something else you can do in the meantime.
izacus 4y ago
I really love the fact that Victoria III turned even more away from war-centric designs of CK, EU and HoI series. I love those, but a change of pace more fitting for the time period is very very welcome.
- yxhuvud 4y ago
  Which is funny, considering how much map-painting happened during the time.
- nz 4y ago
  The possible perspectives that strategy games offer to players is vastly under-explored. Most assume that you control a drone-like army of soldiers, for the sole purpose of defeating an opponent. The Paradox games add much more nuance to this formula, but there is still a vast domain-space in the genre that is unexplored. For example, I'd like to see a game designed primarily around espionage and class warfare -- you cannot control or deploy armies directly, but you can build a network of allies, and use it to (attempt to) bring about changes in policy and dynamics. Victoria II and III are headed in that direction with the POP mechanics, and modeling the ever-expanding reach of media in the 1800s (there is a reason that most countries centralized on a single national language for the bureaucracy). But yeah, the only reason we haven't seen a credible Cold-War-era strategy game (aside from that one ancient Mac OS game) is because the era involved very little direct military conflict, and game-publishers have not yet figured out the mechanics of how to model a very nuanced conflict like that in a fun way.
  - goda90 4y ago
    You might want to check out Terra Invicta. I only played the demo a bit, but it's basically espionage and politics against competing factions to prepare the world for an alien invasion.
    - nz 4y ago
      Cool! Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out. Links (mostly a TODO for myself): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Invicta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Invicta https://www.reddit.com/r/TerraInvicta/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TerraInvicta/ https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/TerraInvicta https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/TerraInvict... https://terrainvictagame.fandom.com/wiki/Terra_Invicta_Wiki https://terrainvictagame.fandom.com/wiki/Terra_Invicta_Wiki
Jim_Heckler 4y ago
for paradox fans I highly recommend the author's series analyzing EU4's perspective of history[1]. the role of the player is peculiar in EU4 (and Victoria I believe) in that you play as the state itself, unlike Crusdar Kings where you play as an individual holding political power within a state. Brett discusses the narrative of history that this perspective presents. [1] https://acoup.blog/2021/04/30/collections-teaching-paradox-europa-univeralis-iv-part-i-state-of-play/ https://acoup.blog/2021/04/30/collections-teaching-paradox-e...
- skybrian 4y ago
  In Crusader Kings you play as a descendant after the person you're playing as dies, which is also little weird if you think about it. Any strategy game is going to give you more control than any single person had.
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    Typically I see it described as you play a “Dynasty”.
personjerry 4y ago
I'm enjoying the game so far. They really lowered the entry barrier and made the economic simulation understandable. And I always liked that the Victoria series focused on economy more than just painting the map your color, as is often the case in CK and EU, i.e. you have the option to play "tall". I also like all the abstraction changes like no more manual colonizing or moving units individually. That always felt like micromanaging to me, and as you blob up it made the game tedious. Now I almost enjoy playing wars! I'm sad that playing my first run I was finishing the tech tree some 30 years before the end of the game, which is 30% of the game time. I wish there was more end-game content. By the way, I've been playing on my M1 Macbook Air and it runs quite well!
- KuiN 4y ago
  Strongly agree with what you're saying. I think they've brought out a good game with a solid foundation for turning it into a great game with tweaks and expansions. I've put 26 hours into it since Tuesday and I'm loving it, so they've definitely done something right. Agree with the tech tree, it's too short and you likely won't vary in the techs you get if you're playing a country with reasonable research points. I'd love some more country-specific flavour and actions; I understand folks don't want to be railroaded (having options to play a country any way you want is great), but it feels a little empty at the moment. Of course this can be modded in and filled out with DLC down the road. If you enjoy this era of history or enjoy other Paradox games, I'd strongly recommend giving it a go.
- Folcon 4y ago
  Frustratingly I'm getting routine crashes when I've checked it out on my macbook, so just curious as to whether you did anything special or did they just not test it on enough intel macs?
  - personjerry 4y ago
    I did not do anything special. I set the graphic settings to Low.
    - 4y ago
nextstep 4y ago
[flagged]
- orwin 4y ago
  Why? Isn't it accurate?
  - nextstep 4y ago
    It’s very accurate. But I don’t think that will prevent hurt feelings.
    - w0de0 4y ago
      Ironically it is extremely bourgeoisie to have sensibilities which can be offended by a luxury consumable.
jmuguy 4y ago
My first paradox game was CK3, which I really enjoy. Victoria 3 has been pretty overwhelming but I'm sort of starting to get it. The UI has been difficult to understand. For instance I would like to see who all these "radicals" are but that seems difficult or impossible to drill into. Or how do I know if all my pops needs are being met. The tutorial basically walks you through two concepts and then says go for it (maybe it kicks in later but I played for another 20 minutes and 5 years in game without any further prompts). I found it really frustrating that suddenly gold fields appeared in a state, which got me out of a jam budget wise but how do I build gold mines there to further capitalize on them? And then sometime later they randomly decreased in size. I'm not really sure what I ought to be doing with diplomacy (I'm playing as Hudson Bay Company). Basically the only friendly options I have are improve relations. All that being said, CK3 was also overwhelming. And after a while the various systems started to click into place and its very fun. Victoria 3 (seems to) have a lot more complex systems though so we'll see.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  From the reviews I read, > Alternatively, if you want to work it out yourself, you can just do what you like, and the tutorial will pick up again afterward. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/victoria-3-review https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/victoria-3-review
the_only_law 4y ago
Imo not a great release, but not nearly as bad as the screechers say. The UX was surprisingly bad, which I wasn’t able to deduce from the screenshots during the dev diaries. It has a similar problem as Ck3 in that, the devs really don’t want to focus on warfare, but anything other than warfare is either tedious or just not engaging. Also, completely not important, but I feel the large state sizes will make grand campaigns even worse than Vic2. FWIW, like CK3, I think it has the foundations to be an amazing game, but will require EU4 years worth of DLC and mods to get there.
miamibre 4y ago
Oh man I love Paradox Games, they really scratch an itch which no other game gets close to which is giving history context through game mechanics. Playing through Hearts of Iron enough times and you really get a good understanding of why the cold war was more ideological than anything else and how certain governments would ally themselves with different factions depending on how wars played out. Play through Crusader Kings and you get an understanding of just how powerful France was before the formation of the UK and how HRE was simultaneously incredibly well organized and a mess. I absolutely adore these games too because unlike 99% of 4x games out there it's an actual sandbox. Rather than giving you set objectives you just have to survive until the end of the era which can be hundred of years or just a decade depending on the game. I never understood why there was such a focus on "Winning" in Civilization, felt like it was such a limiting factor in how i could play feeling more like a board game on a computer, especially in multiplayer. If you ever fell too far back you might as well check out early. Meanwhile every Paradox game is an actual sandbox. You want to play as a small group of tribesmen in medieval africa? Go nuts. Want to try creating a mercantile empire with your base of operations in the middle of Siberia. No problem. You might not reach your objective but as long as you survive you will never "lose". Experiencing the rise and fall of your nation is way more fun than just racing towards the finish line and honestly makes more sense than achieving a "Culture" or "Science" victory.
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  This resonates with me a lot! I play other such 'city builder' games like Tropico, Citystate with the same mindset. The game is just a system of rules and simulations; pushing it in one direction and seeing how the agents react and how the simulation plays it out is way more fun than reaching some 'win' condition.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  A focus on winning was never the intent of Meier and Shelley : https://www.filfre.net/2018/03/the-game-of-everything-part-2-playing-civilization/ https://www.filfre.net/2018/03/the-game-of-everything-part-2... > Further, the ruthless zero-sum game implied by the “4X” label doesn’t actually exist in Civilization unless you, the player, want it to. Consider this extract from the original manual, found under the heading of “Winning”: > > You win a game of Civilization in either of two ways: by eliminating all rival civilizations or by surviving until the colonization of space begins. > > The elimination of all other civilizations in the world is very hard to accomplish. You are much more likely to win by being in existence when colonists reach Alpha Centauri. Even if the colonists are not yours, the successful direction of your civilization through the centuries is an achievement. You have survived countless wars, the pollution of the industrial age, and the risks of nuclear weapons. > Bruce Shelley, who authored the manual, is thus explicitly discouraging the player from approaching Civilization as a zero-sum game: you win simply “by being in existence when colonists reach Alpha Centauri.” This doesn’t mean that all or most players played under that assumption — a topic I’ll return to momentarily — but it’s nevertheless kind of an amazing statement to find in a game like this one, implying as it does that civilization writ large truly is a global, cooperative project. There’s an idealism lurking within Civilization, this game that plays not just with economics and war but with the grandest achievements of humanity, that’s missing in the likes of Master of Orion. It’s notable that, while the history of gaming is littered with hundreds of galaxy-spanning 4X space operas, vanishingly few games beyond Civilization‘s own sequels have attempted to replicate its model of grand strategy. > For me, all of this stuff of history and humanity that goes into Civilization is the reason that, although Railroad Tycoon or even Master of Orion might be better games in structural terms, they can never inspire my imagination in quite the same way. While I hesitate to tell anyone how they should correctly play any game, I’m always a little bemused when I see the folks in the hardcore Civilization community sharing exhaustive breakdowns of how to play every turn with maximal efficiency, as if they were playing a game of chess instead of a grand romp through history. Meier and Shelley must have felt much the same way when, shortly after releasing the original Civilization, they learned that players had developed strategies to beat the game by placing a tiny city on every other square, or by never researching any breakthrough beyond the wheel and the trireme, building endless hordes of chariots, and conquering the world by 1000 BC. They duly put together some patches to try to head off such exploits as much as possible, but they didn’t do so without grumbling that playing Civilization only for the purpose of winning wasn’t quite what they’d had in mind when they were designing it. “To me,” says Meier, “a game of Civilization is an epic story.” > Meier and Shelley had envisioned a more experiential sort of player, one eager to get into the spirit as well as the mechanics of the game. Consider that standard practice among the hardcore of meticulously plotting a path through the Advances Chart in order to get to, say, the key advance of Railroads as quickly as possible. This sort of thing wasn’t what the game’s designers had intended at all. “That’s not how they [the real civilizations of history] did it,” says Meier. “They just figured out one thing at a time.” The designers had pictured a more free-wheeling game with far more space for the player’s experiential imagination, one where you might choose Mysticism as your next subject of research from among half a dozen choices not because it was a key advance on the road to Navigation but because you had chosen to play as a hierarchical, intensely religious society. But we all know how easily the focus can become on just winning, especially when you are not sitting around a real table with friends playing a board game... (But they only had a few decades worth of board and video gameplay refinements at that point...)
ogogmad 4y ago
Is there a game that helps you understand WW1 era battle tactics better? I find discussion of tactics in that era confusing - like the creeping barrage.
- w0de0 4y ago
  I don’t believe so. Few games take on the challenge of modeling battlefield tactics (as opposed to geo-strategy). In my view those of highest quality are a few of the Total War series and WARNO. These still far fall short for reasons of fantasy and feasible simulation size. To model the Battle of the Somme with even some tactical fidelity is also likely not feasible within present constraints. I would look to niche war sim board games instead. That said, one might be wiser to read the English war poets than search for such a game. The study of Great War tactics is perforce the study of a macabre failure in human imagination and morality. Even at the tactical level the war is proof of a human inability to learn and change - even when our choices lead inexorably to mass death. Battlefield mortality was exacerbated by commanders’ fixation on 19th century tactics. Creeping artillery barrages and over-the-top frontal assaults were finally effective only strategically, as economic and political weapons. This was not tactical innovation. It was an upscaled iteration of cannon barrages decimating bravely advancing line infantry.
  - ogogmad 4y ago
    > Battlefield mortality was exacerbated by commanders’ fixation on 19th century tactics. This is a cliche, and it doesn't explain the tactics. If that were the case, then surely there would've been an advantage to be gained for not "fixating on 19th century tactics". Given that they had 4 years to discover such tactics and failed, they didn't exist.
    - afterburner 4y ago
      > If that were the case, then surely there would've been an advantage to be gained for not "fixating on 19th century tactics". Given that they had 4 years to discover such tactics and failed, they didn't exist. Battlefield tactics did in fact change during WWI. Quite a lot. Infiltration, use of tanks, combined arms, how artillery was used and coordinated. Some of these innovations were kept and used successfully in WWI and beyond. However, the over-riding reason for stalemates in WWI was because static defensive firepower technology and tactics had, briefly, outpaced maneuver warfare technology and tactics. Accurate and fast-firing long distance firearms neutralized the millenia old technology of cavalry, and made mass advances extremely costly. Mechanized and air power had yet to counter this, but they were quickly developed. And armies had to learn new tactics as well. But that takes time, and losses.
ShredKazoo 4y ago
>...I do have something of an existing relationship with Paradox, though those of you who have read the Teaching Paradox series will know this does not stop me from criticizing their games, sometimes quite stridently. Does anyone know which Paradox game he regards as being most historically accurate?

142 points by BlueTemplar 4y ago

Paradox games esp EU4 and CK2 often feel like idle clicker waiting games, player often waiting for progress bars to fill. Also the role of the player in EU4 and Victoria seems ambiguous. Perhaps the role could have been fixed as the personna of the head of the executive, and the means and policies available restricted to only those which such an executive personna might have had.

jcranmer 4y ago
> Also the role of the player in EU4 and Victoria seems ambiguous. No more ambiguous than in the more popular Civilization games.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Not sure if the Civ series is, as of now, more popular than PDS games - for instance Hearts of Iron 4 is only slightly behind Civ 6 in terms of Steam players ! (And Vicky 3 is way above both, but that's normal for a brand new game with tons of advertising and hype...)
aqme28 4y ago
I’ve played a lot of Crusader Kings and a lot of idle clicker games. I do not understand where this comparison is coming from. I’m trying to think of two genres that are further apart and I’m struggling.
- slothtrop 4y ago
  I'll bridge the gap for you: waiting is a core mechanic of the game, and you're having to elapse a lot of time for target changes to be reflected, or random events to pop up. Some games like dwarf fortress or rimworld don't share the same pitfalls because, notwithstanding events, you get fast and continuous results from your decisions, which translates to a lesser sense of "idling". I can only speak for CK since I never played Victoria. However, as something more analogous I have played Offworld Trading Company, having an economic focus, and in-game changes come rather fast there too.
  - aqme28 4y ago
    I don’t think that’s very fair, since CK gives you ways to move the time, and also plenty of stuff to micromanage if you want to. I feel like your comparison is just that time is an element, which is a pretty fundamental aspect of a lot of games.
  - ensignavenger 4y ago
    In CK, if you find yourself "waiting" for something to happen, you should probably just speed up the game simulation... I find that things are constantly popping up that need my attention, and if I am going through a long slog.... I constantly speed up and slow down the game, depending on what I am trying to do.
    - slothtrop 4y ago
      Indeed I have, and I disagree that attention is demanded in equal measure every instance. I still think there's a lot of leap frogging and waiting anyway for things to develop or interesting things to happen. Most of the time exploring the menu I'm anticipating what I would do, but have to wait for conditions to be met. Waiting is the name of the game.
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    I mean... based on how some people play Starcraft or Age of Empires, those are also idle games, lol. For these Paradox Games ... games... its not about "waiting" for time, but instead about "parallel" decisions. I haven't played Victoria, but it takes 2 years to build a Battleship in Hearts of Iron 3. You don't just, build one battleship and turn off your brain though. You decide to build a battleship, then move your troops around, or decide to equip artillery to all of your infantry divisions (which will take X months to build and deploy), or ... a myriad of other decisions. All decisions individually are simple. But these grand strategy games are about keeping "track" of all the individual decisions and building a larger picture from it all. ----------- I know some people cannot multitask and have no ambitions to learn the skill. But that's what these management simulators are all about (including competitive management simulators like Starcraft or Age of Empires :-p)
triceratops 4y ago
CK is almost never like that. Not sure what you're talking about.
noSyncCloud 4y ago
You should revisit Paradox games then, because you clearly didn't understand anything about what was happening while you were "idling".
- jon-wood 4y ago
  They don't exactly make it clear what you "should" be doing at any given point though, my experience of all Paradox games is that they have a perfunctory tutorial which seems to cover little more than "here's a country, click things to view them, move armies by doing this, good luck" which then drops you into trying to work out which of the six billion barely explained options will do what you want to do. I won't even fault them for that, there's clearly a huge audience of people who really enjoy it, but I prefer my games not to require watching 20 hours of YouTube videos and reading a wiki to understand how they work.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Hmm, what about their celebrated multi-stage popups though ?
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > They don't exactly make it clear what you "should" be doing at any given point though The central aspect of the game is making that decision, correct.
dmix 4y ago
This was my experience with Stellaris 100% but there’s still plenty of strategy in between the endless cycles of clicking the same 10 buttons.
ericd 4y ago
There’s always something you should be doing in EU4/CK2, but it takes some thought to figure out what that is.
1123581321 4y ago
You’re getting your head bitten off for that comparison :), but I understand what you mean, because you can sit back and watch the game occupy itself, and if you want to wait for game state to become favorable before you resume taking action (waiting for territory to change hands, for example), you can sometimes do that. There’s a term for Paradox’ grand strategy games I like, “data surfing,” that describes what it can be like to mostly passively experience its simulations. Most idlers or clickers progress along straightforward exponential curves, but they could absolutely be designed similarly.
checkyoursudo 4y ago
The balance between action (decision making, shooting, dialog, etc) versus waiting (travel time, crafting time, waiting for resources from previous actions, whatever) seems like an important consideration for game designers to make. Do you want the player to be instantly powerful or have to grind laboriously? Do you want them to run from place to place or fast travel? Craft/build instantly or take time? I think that good games often will give you other things to do while you wait for important things. Some of my favorite games will give you too many things to do so that you must prioritize correctly or you will lose it all.
yamtaddle 4y ago
All their games have a problem with making you play parts of the game you aren't interested in and find tedious and for which the way you personally play it could easily be a preset that made you not have to worry about it any more. In many ways I love HOI3, for instance, but it's a bit love-hate because about 50% of the time I'm messing with shit I'd rather let an extremely simple "AI" handle. Or just give me some good preset templates (make them "historically inspired", that's cool, or not, either way) for the things that use templates, or, also acceptable, let me save some of mine between games and have them show up when I've researched enough to build them (looking at you, tank and aircraft editors, especially).
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Wait, I thought that PDS games were actually celebrated in how they're few of the rare games where you can just ignore part of them and the AI will (more or less incompetently) play those parts for you ?
dragontamer 4y ago
> Paradox games esp EU4 and CK2 often feel like idle clicker waiting games, player often waiting for progress bars to fill. I used to consume a lot of clicker games, but... for those who _haven't_ played them, they're basically management simulators. I dare say that Factorio is in fact, a clicker game (as it starts off with right-clicking to mine 1 iron ore at a time). The goal of _ALL_ clicker games is to build enough infrastructure to "stop clicking". The "click" is just the fundamental unit, the introduction to the game. In just 5 to 10 minutes, you'll already move onto automatic miners (Factorio), or Autoclippers (Universal Paperclips), or Heroes (Clicker Heroes), or Cookie Factories (Cookie Clicker), or whatever. The game then becomes one of resource allocation: you have 1000 iron in Factorio, do you build assembly machines or belts? You have 1000 paperclips in Universal Paperclips, do you get another autoclipper or do you start buying wires? ------- In fact, any management game can "turn into' a clicker game rather easily. And I think the "clicker mechanic" (ie: having the lowest-level action equivalent to a click from the user) helps solidify in the Player's mind the "value" of the cookie factory or the Assembly Machine 3 x 4x Speed Modules (or whatever). But yeah, a well designed clicker game is just a management sim like any other. No one actually plays clicker games by clicking on things.
vintermann 4y ago
In board games in this genre, "who you are" is often even more ambiguous. As the author points out, Crusader Kings III is more person-oriented, if that's what you want. Personally I like games where it's slightly ambiguous who you are, but things evolve in a "plausible" way if you play for your goals.
SL61 4y ago
As a longtime Paradox player, I have a similar issue with their recent games. They've really shifted in a more game-y direction over the years. I started with Hearts of Iron 2, where the systems were less abstract and mapped closer to real life. I felt like I was actually running a country and its military. There were more ways to cheese the older games, like the time I played as Guatemala and launched a successful coup to install a Guatemalan puppet government in the USA, but you could avoid those strategies if you wanted a more serious WWII wargame. Since EU4, or maybe CK2, they've abstracted a lot of the gameplay into those progress bars and point systems, the foremost example being the focus tree in Hearts of Iron 4. I still enjoy most of their newer games, but they constantly remind you that they are games. Gameplay feels less emergent and it feels like I get less agency as a player.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Hmm, other players are complaining that Vicky3 gameplay is too emergent, I guess you just cannot please everyone ?
  - SL61 4y ago
    I haven't played Victoria 3 yet, so it's possible they've addressed my concerns in it.
w0de0 4y ago
At their best, I’ve found Paradox games are indeed this - but one is waiting on the outcomes of an emergent system one has had only a part in guiding. This opposed to managing a holistic (modulo some rng variation) system, as in Factorio.
fsn4dN69ey 4y ago
I can't speak to CK2, but for EU4 there's always something you can be doing. I think it comes with experience - I play multiplayer with some friends, and one of them in our group has less experience and constantly says the same thing. Watching my screen though, it seems like I'm playing Starcraft. Yes, some things you need to wait for - there is always something else you can do in the meantime.

izacus 4y ago

I really love the fact that Victoria III turned even more away from war-centric designs of CK, EU and HoI series. I love those, but a change of pace more fitting for the time period is very very welcome.

yxhuvud 4y ago
Which is funny, considering how much map-painting happened during the time.
nz 4y ago
The possible perspectives that strategy games offer to players is vastly under-explored. Most assume that you control a drone-like army of soldiers, for the sole purpose of defeating an opponent. The Paradox games add much more nuance to this formula, but there is still a vast domain-space in the genre that is unexplored. For example, I'd like to see a game designed primarily around espionage and class warfare -- you cannot control or deploy armies directly, but you can build a network of allies, and use it to (attempt to) bring about changes in policy and dynamics. Victoria II and III are headed in that direction with the POP mechanics, and modeling the ever-expanding reach of media in the 1800s (there is a reason that most countries centralized on a single national language for the bureaucracy). But yeah, the only reason we haven't seen a credible Cold-War-era strategy game (aside from that one ancient Mac OS game) is because the era involved very little direct military conflict, and game-publishers have not yet figured out the mechanics of how to model a very nuanced conflict like that in a fun way.
- goda90 4y ago
  You might want to check out Terra Invicta. I only played the demo a bit, but it's basically espionage and politics against competing factions to prepare the world for an alien invasion.
  - nz 4y ago
    Cool! Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out. Links (mostly a TODO for myself): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Invicta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Invicta https://www.reddit.com/r/TerraInvicta/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TerraInvicta/ https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/TerraInvicta https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/TerraInvict... https://terrainvictagame.fandom.com/wiki/Terra_Invicta_Wiki https://terrainvictagame.fandom.com/wiki/Terra_Invicta_Wiki

Jim_Heckler 4y ago

for paradox fans I highly recommend the author's series analyzing EU4's perspective of history[1]. the role of the player is peculiar in EU4 (and Victoria I believe) in that you play as the state itself, unlike Crusdar Kings where you play as an individual holding political power within a state. Brett discusses the narrative of history that this perspective presents. [1] https://acoup.blog/2021/04/30/collections-teaching-paradox-europa-univeralis-iv-part-i-state-of-play/ https://acoup.blog/2021/04/30/collections-teaching-paradox-e...

skybrian 4y ago
In Crusader Kings you play as a descendant after the person you're playing as dies, which is also little weird if you think about it. Any strategy game is going to give you more control than any single person had.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  Typically I see it described as you play a “Dynasty”.

personjerry 4y ago

I'm enjoying the game so far. They really lowered the entry barrier and made the economic simulation understandable. And I always liked that the Victoria series focused on economy more than just painting the map your color, as is often the case in CK and EU, i.e. you have the option to play "tall". I also like all the abstraction changes like no more manual colonizing or moving units individually. That always felt like micromanaging to me, and as you blob up it made the game tedious. Now I almost enjoy playing wars! I'm sad that playing my first run I was finishing the tech tree some 30 years before the end of the game, which is 30% of the game time. I wish there was more end-game content. By the way, I've been playing on my M1 Macbook Air and it runs quite well!

KuiN 4y ago
Strongly agree with what you're saying. I think they've brought out a good game with a solid foundation for turning it into a great game with tweaks and expansions. I've put 26 hours into it since Tuesday and I'm loving it, so they've definitely done something right. Agree with the tech tree, it's too short and you likely won't vary in the techs you get if you're playing a country with reasonable research points. I'd love some more country-specific flavour and actions; I understand folks don't want to be railroaded (having options to play a country any way you want is great), but it feels a little empty at the moment. Of course this can be modded in and filled out with DLC down the road. If you enjoy this era of history or enjoy other Paradox games, I'd strongly recommend giving it a go.
Folcon 4y ago
Frustratingly I'm getting routine crashes when I've checked it out on my macbook, so just curious as to whether you did anything special or did they just not test it on enough intel macs?
- personjerry 4y ago
  I did not do anything special. I set the graphic settings to Low.
  - 4y ago

nextstep 4y ago

[flagged]

orwin 4y ago
Why? Isn't it accurate?
- nextstep 4y ago
  It’s very accurate. But I don’t think that will prevent hurt feelings.
  - w0de0 4y ago
    Ironically it is extremely bourgeoisie to have sensibilities which can be offended by a luxury consumable.

jmuguy 4y ago

My first paradox game was CK3, which I really enjoy. Victoria 3 has been pretty overwhelming but I'm sort of starting to get it. The UI has been difficult to understand. For instance I would like to see who all these "radicals" are but that seems difficult or impossible to drill into. Or how do I know if all my pops needs are being met. The tutorial basically walks you through two concepts and then says go for it (maybe it kicks in later but I played for another 20 minutes and 5 years in game without any further prompts). I found it really frustrating that suddenly gold fields appeared in a state, which got me out of a jam budget wise but how do I build gold mines there to further capitalize on them? And then sometime later they randomly decreased in size. I'm not really sure what I ought to be doing with diplomacy (I'm playing as Hudson Bay Company). Basically the only friendly options I have are improve relations. All that being said, CK3 was also overwhelming. And after a while the various systems started to click into place and its very fun. Victoria 3 (seems to) have a lot more complex systems though so we'll see.

BlueTemplar 4y ago
From the reviews I read, > Alternatively, if you want to work it out yourself, you can just do what you like, and the tutorial will pick up again afterward. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/victoria-3-review https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/victoria-3-review

the_only_law 4y ago

Imo not a great release, but not nearly as bad as the screechers say. The UX was surprisingly bad, which I wasn’t able to deduce from the screenshots during the dev diaries. It has a similar problem as Ck3 in that, the devs really don’t want to focus on warfare, but anything other than warfare is either tedious or just not engaging. Also, completely not important, but I feel the large state sizes will make grand campaigns even worse than Vic2. FWIW, like CK3, I think it has the foundations to be an amazing game, but will require EU4 years worth of DLC and mods to get there.

miamibre 4y ago

Oh man I love Paradox Games, they really scratch an itch which no other game gets close to which is giving history context through game mechanics. Playing through Hearts of Iron enough times and you really get a good understanding of why the cold war was more ideological than anything else and how certain governments would ally themselves with different factions depending on how wars played out. Play through Crusader Kings and you get an understanding of just how powerful France was before the formation of the UK and how HRE was simultaneously incredibly well organized and a mess. I absolutely adore these games too because unlike 99% of 4x games out there it's an actual sandbox. Rather than giving you set objectives you just have to survive until the end of the era which can be hundred of years or just a decade depending on the game. I never understood why there was such a focus on "Winning" in Civilization, felt like it was such a limiting factor in how i could play feeling more like a board game on a computer, especially in multiplayer. If you ever fell too far back you might as well check out early. Meanwhile every Paradox game is an actual sandbox. You want to play as a small group of tribesmen in medieval africa? Go nuts. Want to try creating a mercantile empire with your base of operations in the middle of Siberia. No problem. You might not reach your objective but as long as you survive you will never "lose". Experiencing the rise and fall of your nation is way more fun than just racing towards the finish line and honestly makes more sense than achieving a "Culture" or "Science" victory.

wildrhythms 4y ago
This resonates with me a lot! I play other such 'city builder' games like Tropico, Citystate with the same mindset. The game is just a system of rules and simulations; pushing it in one direction and seeing how the agents react and how the simulation plays it out is way more fun than reaching some 'win' condition.
BlueTemplar 4y ago
A focus on winning was never the intent of Meier and Shelley : https://www.filfre.net/2018/03/the-game-of-everything-part-2-playing-civilization/ https://www.filfre.net/2018/03/the-game-of-everything-part-2... > Further, the ruthless zero-sum game implied by the “4X” label doesn’t actually exist in Civilization unless you, the player, want it to. Consider this extract from the original manual, found under the heading of “Winning”: > > You win a game of Civilization in either of two ways: by eliminating all rival civilizations or by surviving until the colonization of space begins. > > The elimination of all other civilizations in the world is very hard to accomplish. You are much more likely to win by being in existence when colonists reach Alpha Centauri. Even if the colonists are not yours, the successful direction of your civilization through the centuries is an achievement. You have survived countless wars, the pollution of the industrial age, and the risks of nuclear weapons. > Bruce Shelley, who authored the manual, is thus explicitly discouraging the player from approaching Civilization as a zero-sum game: you win simply “by being in existence when colonists reach Alpha Centauri.” This doesn’t mean that all or most players played under that assumption — a topic I’ll return to momentarily — but it’s nevertheless kind of an amazing statement to find in a game like this one, implying as it does that civilization writ large truly is a global, cooperative project. There’s an idealism lurking within Civilization, this game that plays not just with economics and war but with the grandest achievements of humanity, that’s missing in the likes of Master of Orion. It’s notable that, while the history of gaming is littered with hundreds of galaxy-spanning 4X space operas, vanishingly few games beyond Civilization‘s own sequels have attempted to replicate its model of grand strategy. > For me, all of this stuff of history and humanity that goes into Civilization is the reason that, although Railroad Tycoon or even Master of Orion might be better games in structural terms, they can never inspire my imagination in quite the same way. While I hesitate to tell anyone how they should correctly play any game, I’m always a little bemused when I see the folks in the hardcore Civilization community sharing exhaustive breakdowns of how to play every turn with maximal efficiency, as if they were playing a game of chess instead of a grand romp through history. Meier and Shelley must have felt much the same way when, shortly after releasing the original Civilization, they learned that players had developed strategies to beat the game by placing a tiny city on every other square, or by never researching any breakthrough beyond the wheel and the trireme, building endless hordes of chariots, and conquering the world by 1000 BC. They duly put together some patches to try to head off such exploits as much as possible, but they didn’t do so without grumbling that playing Civilization only for the purpose of winning wasn’t quite what they’d had in mind when they were designing it. “To me,” says Meier, “a game of Civilization is an epic story.” > Meier and Shelley had envisioned a more experiential sort of player, one eager to get into the spirit as well as the mechanics of the game. Consider that standard practice among the hardcore of meticulously plotting a path through the Advances Chart in order to get to, say, the key advance of Railroads as quickly as possible. This sort of thing wasn’t what the game’s designers had intended at all. “That’s not how they [the real civilizations of history] did it,” says Meier. “They just figured out one thing at a time.” The designers had pictured a more free-wheeling game with far more space for the player’s experiential imagination, one where you might choose Mysticism as your next subject of research from among half a dozen choices not because it was a key advance on the road to Navigation but because you had chosen to play as a hierarchical, intensely religious society. But we all know how easily the focus can become on just winning, especially when you are not sitting around a real table with friends playing a board game... (But they only had a few decades worth of board and video gameplay refinements at that point...)

ogogmad 4y ago

Is there a game that helps you understand WW1 era battle tactics better? I find discussion of tactics in that era confusing - like the creeping barrage.

w0de0 4y ago
I don’t believe so. Few games take on the challenge of modeling battlefield tactics (as opposed to geo-strategy). In my view those of highest quality are a few of the Total War series and WARNO. These still far fall short for reasons of fantasy and feasible simulation size. To model the Battle of the Somme with even some tactical fidelity is also likely not feasible within present constraints. I would look to niche war sim board games instead. That said, one might be wiser to read the English war poets than search for such a game. The study of Great War tactics is perforce the study of a macabre failure in human imagination and morality. Even at the tactical level the war is proof of a human inability to learn and change - even when our choices lead inexorably to mass death. Battlefield mortality was exacerbated by commanders’ fixation on 19th century tactics. Creeping artillery barrages and over-the-top frontal assaults were finally effective only strategically, as economic and political weapons. This was not tactical innovation. It was an upscaled iteration of cannon barrages decimating bravely advancing line infantry.
- ogogmad 4y ago
  > Battlefield mortality was exacerbated by commanders’ fixation on 19th century tactics. This is a cliche, and it doesn't explain the tactics. If that were the case, then surely there would've been an advantage to be gained for not "fixating on 19th century tactics". Given that they had 4 years to discover such tactics and failed, they didn't exist.
  - afterburner 4y ago
    > If that were the case, then surely there would've been an advantage to be gained for not "fixating on 19th century tactics". Given that they had 4 years to discover such tactics and failed, they didn't exist. Battlefield tactics did in fact change during WWI. Quite a lot. Infiltration, use of tanks, combined arms, how artillery was used and coordinated. Some of these innovations were kept and used successfully in WWI and beyond. However, the over-riding reason for stalemates in WWI was because static defensive firepower technology and tactics had, briefly, outpaced maneuver warfare technology and tactics. Accurate and fast-firing long distance firearms neutralized the millenia old technology of cavalry, and made mass advances extremely costly. Mechanized and air power had yet to counter this, but they were quickly developed. And armies had to learn new tactics as well. But that takes time, and losses.

ShredKazoo 4y ago

>...I do have something of an existing relationship with Paradox, though those of you who have read the Teaching Paradox series will know this does not stop me from criticizing their games, sometimes quite stridently. Does anyone know which Paradox game he regards as being most historically accurate?