VICTORIA III - Available now!

[al_infierno]

According to reviews there actually IS a mana system in this game despite Paradox proudly proclaiming there wouldn't be one >:(

[Jarhead0331]

Yeah...despite being really tempted, I think I'm going to try to holdoff. The war and combat system seems to be inexcusably shallow.

[Gusington]

^A lot of reviews on Steam saying the same about the combat, even with early reviews being 'mostly positive.'

[CJReich46]

al_infierno, what do you mean by mana system in terms of PDX? I don't quite understand.


I don't get PDX sometimes. Why do they do this? Is it to just get some stupid memes on you tube?

[Old TImer]

Ok I've played a little more and can say the following:
   This is not a map painting exercise.  I think that's a good thing.
   More of an internal improvements and internal political focus.
   I haven't gotten into any war yet so I can't comment on that area.
My 2 hours is almost up.  I don't think I'll refund the game.  It seems
there might be a decent'ish game in here.   It's not Imperator for sure.
I think I might have been too quick to judge as in not knowing what
you're doing doesn't necessarily make it a bad game.  That said,  the
tutorial sucks so I'm resorting to just exploring for myself. 

[al_infierno]

al_infierno, what do you mean by mana system in terms of PDX? I don't quite understand.


I don't get PDX sometimes. Why do they do this? Is it to just get some stupid memes on you tube?

Check out Rimmy Down Under's video on the topic, he explains it a lot better than I could:

I don't know to what extent this type of mechanic is included in Vicky 3.

As for your second question, I think you're spot on about youtube memes.  That's the only explanation I can give for why Crusader Kings 3 leaned so heavily into incest to the point that you can literally create the Engineers from Prometheus by inbreeding enough, which is just freaking bonkers.   

[CJReich46]

Thanks for that al_infierno.

[Old TImer]

I'm really going down the rabbit hole with this. They may have messed up the warfare part but
I haven't gotten into a war yet so no opinion on that. 
But this is a pretty epic economic and political simulator.   
So many levels of detail with how your society is set up.   

[Jarhead0331]

Pretty damning review on Steam:

After 1.1k hours of Victoria 2, 2.7k hours of EU4, 1.1k hours of CK2 and 400 hours of CK3 I can confidently say that this is by far the worst Paradox game i have ever played.
It disappoints in every aspect and there is absolutely nothing here that wasn't done better in Victoria 2.
Many are saying that this is some complex deep Economy/Society builder games. Seeing those comments i really have to wonder if they played more than 10 minutes.

Let's talk about the game's most important feature, the economy, which also happens to be its core gameplay mechanic.
If you click on the market tab, you can see the supply/demand of goods in your market.
Sort this by demand and then build the buildings producing high demand goods, or import them.
Rinse and repeat for the entire ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game because that is all there is to do.
Low iron? Let's build some iron mines! Low grain? Let's build some grain farms! Low infrastructure? Let's build railways!
That is literally all there is to do economically in this game, mind numbing building micro tedium.
Click trade tab --> check demand --> build high demand goods --> repeat.

But what about society? If you click on your government tab, you can see reforms you can pass. Go ahead and put the interest groups that support the reform you want into the government, then start passing it.
There isn't really a limit as to who can join the government. Which party wins an election doesn't matter because you can just invite the opposition into your government anyways.

When passing reforms, the most important thing is RNG. You will be spammed with events (Wickedness must be stamped out!) that either lower or raise pass chance. Initial pass chance doesn't matter. I passed a reform that had 10% chance to pass which eventually increased to 50%. I failed to pass a reform with 25% chance (it dropped to 0%).
In Victoria 2, you can clearly see who votes for what. High militancy will make your Upper House more likely to vote on stuff. Not a perfect system but at least you're not spending 20 years as the USA trying to pass universal suffrage.

Diplomacy doesn't seem to work well. When playing as Korea, i was unable to get any allies or help in diplo plays even though the relevant countries had attitudes that made them want to cooperate with me.
I tried allying japan who had very high relations and according to tool tip wanted an alliance or defensive pact. But no,
their ruler's focus on defending their borders made them not want a defensive ally for some reason...

Same with the USA, i was unable to do literally anything diplomatically because every AI kept saying no.
The diplomacy is comparable to EU4 on very hard difficulty, but at least the EU4 AI will ally you if it's friendly toward you.

As the USA, i started a diplo play to annex my vassal, the indian territories. For some ungodly reason France, who had good relations with me, joined the Indian territories in their war against me.
After that, despite improving relations, they kept hating me and eventually took a treaty port in Virginia. I was unable to retake the treaty port because the USA apparently has no claim to Virginia.

V2 had dynamic diplomacy with often changing alliances, and an actually somewhat intelligent diplo AI that would seek out
beneficial allies. You'd have Germany and Italy allying against France and Austria, France and Russia allying against Germany, UK and Germany allying against France etc.

On topic of AI behavior, I noticed some interesting things. Italy forms in 1840 without Modena and Lucca, and the just sits there doing nothing and not conquering any of their cores. This happened in both games i played and also in every YT video on Victoria 3 I saw where the player doesn't interfere in Italy. The NGF isn't formed in 1870 and a bunch of random North German minors are still independent. Austria never collapses or loses any territory because of their massive army.
Tai Ping rebellion happens in North West China where the muslim minority is even though it was caused by a christian sect. ACW is nonsensical with states like NY joining the CSA.

Forming Germany in V3 is worse than in V2. In V2 you fight Denmark for Sleswig-Holstein, then Austria to get all German minors in your sphere, and finally France for Alsace-Lorraine. This is pretty much how Germany formed irl.
Meanwhile in Victoria 2 you just passively annex German minors with high relations and can form Germany without even fighting any wars. It makes for a much less engaging experience than V2.

The war system is horrible, you have no control over your armies. Fronts will split up randomly, there is only ever one battle per front, said battle can have dumb numbers like 30 vs 5 brigades even if both sides have large armies, said dumb battles aren't reinforced so you lose territory because of bad RNG. Navy doesn't seem to do anything, i set my Navy to patrol coast yet still got naval invaded without a naval battle happening, i did my own naval invasion and it just never happened for some reason.
A warfare system without the ability to move armies on the map offers some interesting possibilities such as having multiple armies in the same province without them fighting a decisive battle, which would finally allow for asymmetric warfare in a paradox game.
Of course paradox hasn't taken advantage of any of these possibilities. After all, you're supposed to micro your buildings...
But I'm sure there will eventually be a 30$ DLC to address these concerns...

To summarize, this game is horrible with the only somewhat developed mechanic being the very basic and boring economy 'gameplay'. It fails in every other aspect and makes for a much worse experience than Victoria 2 with GFM, HFM, CWE, DoD or similar mods or even vanilla.

[Grim.Reaper]

Not at all saying the person is wrong, but always find it interesting how all these conclusions can be drawn so quickly with these types of games, the person had played it 3.5 hours.  Maybe all his past experience helped but I admire people who can wrap their heads so quickly and figure this all out so quickly.

I'll be lucky to even get out of the tutorials in that amount of time....

[FarAway Sooner]

Most games these days aren't released in truly finished state.  Depending on the title, you often have to wait six months or a year to reach a final conclusion on how good a game might be.

This can be especially hard for games where we loved (and had grown accustomed to) the eventually polished prequels.  None of those observations mean that the author of the review above is incorrect.  But there's always a flood of backlash against newly released game that seeks to follow in the footsteps of a beloved prequel.  I've started planning to mostly buy games 3-6 months after release, just to save myself the heartbreak.

I've also missed out on a couple games that ended up playing quite well because they had a bumpy start (e.g., Master of Orion III).

[Old TImer]

Hmmm, how he came to that conclusion after 3.5 hours of gameplay escapes me.

I'm about 3 hours in and I'm still doing the tutorials.   To each their own.

[Jarhead0331]

Hmmm, how he came to that conclusion after 3.5 hours of gameplay escapes me.

I'm about 3 hours in and I'm still doing the tutorials.   To each their own.

I mean, I get that 3.5 hours isn't a great deal of time in the grand scheme of things, but I think its more than enough time to develop an overall impression of the major systems, like economy, diplomacy and war...particularly in comparison to the other titles in the series.

I'm not saying the guy's opinion is the end all be all, but he isn't the only one leveling these concerns and I don't think 3.5 hours of play time is too little to justify writing off the opinion completely.

I'm certainly glad to hear that you are enjoying it and have high hopes, so I'm looking forward to your ongoing impressions!

[SirAndrewD]

I just still can't bring myself to get this. 

It's impossible to convince me that in a year's time the combat system along with a large percentage of the game won't be an entirely different experience with DLC. 

The current Paradox system has put me off getting vanilla releases pretty much from now on.

[al_infierno]

The current Paradox system has put me off getting vanilla releases pretty much from now on.

This, Paradox have set us up to expect game-changing DLCs that add whole new (often sorely lacking from vanilla) features, so I might as well wait and see until the game mechanics are fully developed before springing.