/games/ - Games

Played for the first time since 1.8. Seems like a very different game now. That's the problem with these pseudo simulators, you just dial a few numbers here or there and everything comes out different in a chain reaction.

>>39969
Any game will always be an approximation of real life, not its carbon copy. And politics are such a biased field that some important data may be conveniently forgotten while tuning the game. And there's also a question of if something can even be turned into data.

>>39979
I'm just saying the whole chain of effects in such a complex game make it impossible to learn especially if they keep changing the rules.

I did another Haiti playthrough. I took someones advice and spammed tobacco plantations with no construction industry early game and it worked. I even paid off the debt to france by 1860 something but then I started just losing money like crazy I don't know how. It says my governent exspenses were through the roof even after setting them to the lowest and I only built gov to cover my trade with 0 institutions. You can only declare a single interest as Haiti and I set it to Brazil for tobaccy because they were offering insane money. I always end up with 0 unemployment and I can't do shit to attract migrants and can't get enough people to work my industries. If I subsidize one, it just pilfers workers from another lol.

>>39996
A lot to memorize in the game, you just have to know what products will be in demand in any given decade.

>>39996
It was funny too, when I finally switched to democracky, I had a government with just the agrarian party with 100 legitimacy but shit went off the rails. I could've sworn it gave you an estimated revenue when switching tax systems before, but maybe that was just a mod.

They need to help you understand what the fuck makes the income meter go up and down. Most of the games I noped out of I started debt spiraling for unknown reasons.

Oh yeah, for Haiti, most of the tech tree is useless. Well for most nations I've played as I guess which were the third world ones.
>If you're not trying to invade other countries
mil tech tree useless
>If you can't keep up an insanely deep supply tree
the production tech tree is useless
Which leaves just the society tech tree, but most of that is useless to so I mostly went for the ones that give you free money and bureaucracy whatever bonuses.

>>39996
Just ally with France, join their bloc and use their resources to industrialize.
You should avoid building gov admin in general but especially until you research better PMs for them.
I wouldn't build agriculture either, that empowers the landowners and rural folk
As for migrants, being a part of a larger market helps with that if your SOL is high. I believe there's a minumum # of states that you need to be eligible for mass migrations so expand a little. Ran into this problem during a Luxembourg run
>>40000
You'll want military techs for defence, economy techs for infrastructure and better PMs and society techs for better PMs and laws, especially multiculturalism

Ok, I speedran the debt this time. Kept taxation on max but I didn't even go crazy with the consumption taxes. Only did Tobacco and services and I paid it off by 1850.

>>40001
>You'll want military techs for defence, economy techs for infrastructure and better PMs and society techs for better PMs and laws, especially multiculturalism
Mil is useless as haiti unless ypu are going to invade. I did a playthrough where I cancelled the debt and France blockaded me until they gave up but were too pussy to invade. Other than that it is useless. It was way easier to pay it off by 1850.

>>40001
>Just ally with France, join their bloc and use their resources to industrialize.
Could join any bloc, why France? I guess it might help with migrants because they speak French? But Spain has countries in the carribean.
>>40001
>I wouldn't build agriculture either, that empowers the landowners and rural folk
What would you build then? Haito has no resources and starts with no literacy.

>As for migrants, being a part of a larger market helps with that if your SOL is high. I believe there's a minumum # of states that you need to be eligible for mass migrations so expand a little. Ran into this problem during a Luxembourg run
Yeah but expand where? Lol. Every cpuntry is part of a bloc that can stop me. I had an idea to do the Haitan naval power run.

>>40001
>>40003
Honestly I could've paid it off even faster probably. Already did less than 15 years. Not so odious with game magic.

>>40003
So what now? Just start doing everything I can to bribe people to move to Haiti? I got 8.79k+ on max taxation. I can set it probably to the second lowest now if I want. Too bad money is rather useless in this game. Only maintaining the inflows and outflows. Would be cool if you could use your massive reserves to do anything with them except for when some event comes up. My previous playthrough I fucked up by not getting the schools when the Catholics were popular. The rural folk don't want no schools. I'm already way high literacy than I was when I ended the last playthrough in the 1870s. I think the Catholics are going to help me get all the socdem policies I can bribe people to move to Haiti with.

>>40004
>Mil is useless as haiti unless ypu are going to invade
Which you should if you want any meaningful amount of migration. I looked it up: "Each country has an attraction score which equals the average migration attraction of all its eligible states. Countries with fewer than 4 eligible states receive a penalty of 20% for each fewer state, up to 60% penalty for a country with only one eligible state."
If you don't want to expand, defence is important too. I'm surprised that France didn't invade. Even still, what about later in the game? It's not an either or thing anyway, you can get deep into all three tech trees by the end of the game even if you don't build universities.
>Could join any bloc, why France?
France often forms a Trade League bloc which lets you into their market. The US often does as well. Otherwise only Prussia starts the game with one. This may be less relevant if you have the DLCs, I do not.
>What would you build then? Haito has no resources and starts with no literacy.
I believe they have some lumber, no? Should be good for tools, furniture, paper, and glass. With so few pops it should be enough to delete the peasants and tide you over till you join a Trade League.
>>40004
>Yeah but expand where?
Anywhere. S. and C. America are close, or you can get cheesy and start taking valuable states in Africa/Asia

>>40007
> I looked it up: "Each country has an attraction score which equals the average migration attraction of all its eligible states. Countries with fewer than 4 eligible states receive a penalty of 20% for each fewer state, up to 60% penalty for a country with only one eligible state."
That's stupid, arbitrary, and how would anyone figure that out lol?

>If you don't want to expand, defence is important too. I'm surprised that France didn't invade. Even still, what about later in the game? It's not an either or thing anyway, you can get deep into all three tech trees by the end of the game even if you don't build universities.
No France will not try to invade unless you cancel the debt and even then it's easy to make a larger army than they will try to land with. The problem is they will blockade you until they get bored.

>France often forms a Trade League bloc which lets you into their market. The US often does as well. Otherwise only Prussia starts the game with one. This may be less relevant if you have the DLCs, I do not.
I do have the power bloc DLC.

>I believe they have some lumber, no? Should be good for tools, furniture, paper, and glass. With so few pops it should be enough to delete the peasants and tide you over till you join a Trade League.
Not much lumber at all. Hmm I guess I did forget lumber goes into tools and glass, but still it's a useless thing to get into because things like tools and whatever will be useless to trade to big countries, and small countries, you turn on the trade when it says +12 and in 2 months it will be -3. The small countries that need the advanced shit won't need them for long, they'll be satiated quite fast.

>Anywhere. S. and C. America are close, or you can get cheesy and start taking valuable states in Africa/Asia
I found they gang up on my when I do invasive stuff. It was hard enough as Brazil taking unalligned states in South America and also colonization is useless with no population. I guess I could setup micro colonies just to get past the immigration debuff. That's so fucking cheesey.

>>40008
Just started a Haiti run (2nd time a leftypol post has prompted me to do this) and the situation is much worse than I thought. You have a lot more peasants than I assumed, maybe more than the limited amount of lumber and relevant industries can provide for.
So far I maxed out taxes, bottomed out the gov expenses and deleted my army. This put me in the black/tiny defivit. Will see if industrializing is viable but I can definitely better understand your train of thought now

>>40009
I think it was also me last time. I've only been playing the smaller nations because I figured it would be easier to learn with less to manage. So far I played: Haiti, Persia, Ethiopia(Shewa), and Brazil.

Maybe we should do weekly challenges or something. That'd be fun. See who can get the farthest in a given nation, I'm thinking on vanilla. I guess I can also disable my DLC to make it fair, but you should get the Power Block one. I think it's one of those essential Paradox DLCs.

>>40010
> I'm thinking on vanilla. I guess I can also disable my DLC to make it fair, but you should get the Power Block one. I think it's one of those essential Paradox DLCs.
Or we could do 0 DLC + mods but we should be on the same update.

>>40011
>Or we could do 0 DLC + mods but we should be on the same update.
I mean and the same mods. We could make an official leftypol mod playlist.

>>40010
Debts paid off in 1847. Other than 2 livestock ranches, a rice farm and a dye plantation I only built resources and factories. All demand was satisfied domestically. One advantage of this approach, as far as paying off the debt is concerned, is that since I'm not reliant on trade I can downgrade the PM on the ports which saves quite a bit of money in government wages.
If I was to continue, I'd be able to take the newly freed up money and put it into construction, allowing me to keep the industrialization train going a bit longer, but at this point I'm definitely needing to either expand or join the trade league blocs that both France and the US have formed. I'd also be gunning for better economy and society techs for better PMs (higher SOL) and multiculturalism (more pops) respectively

>>40012
I found this collection in steam workshop for vic 3 collect mods related to communism.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3002033678

I am pretty sure if you use all of them combined your game will crash. Maybe there is a mod that makes almost all of them compatible, but i don't know, it has been so long since i played vic 3. The blocs thing confused me a lot.

>>40015
Ok I tried again with your suggestions to just do resource(which means logging because that's the only resource Haiti has besides fish) and then manufacturies that only use inputs I can make myself. I didn't manage to pay off the debt but I did boss out the GDP more than you. I don't even know how because all my shit looks fucked up and retarded.

>>40017
Another big thing I learned is you have to use that social mobility decree to increase the qualifications

>>40017
>I didn't manage to pay off the debt
Hmm. Besides what I already mentioned (deleting army, max taxes/minumum wages, downgraded port pms), adding consumption taxes (I put them on services, tobacco, luxury clothes and furniture), cancelling trade routes that I didn't need (not sure if this makes a difference but I ended the game with just the tobacco export that you start with) and researching banking might have made the difference. I also get charity schools/hospitals ASAP but again, don't know if that will make a difference.
Nice GDP tho, easily clears me and ya like I said without joining a larger market or making more demand largely through construction sectors the economy isn't exactly thriving.
>>40018
Yep, super important. I'll run it on the most populous states until well into the game on most countries. I also add greener grass campaign on as many states as possible and a road maintenance on whatever state I'm building in for the construction efficiency. Nice run.

>>40019
oh and one more thing, I set stuff to privatize stuff as soon as I build it. gotta monetize that investment pool somehow while you don't have any construction sectors. i don;t think much of it sold but every little bit helps

>>40019
Ok now I need to attack New Grenadine, they're unalligned, not that strong, and have coal and iron. After failing at invading one time, trying to invade through Antioqua, I managed to successfully invade through Panama. Problem is my cash flow ended up so negative even deleting my whole military couldn't save me. Goddamn this mil thing is so hard. I read that the best for a naval invasion is an even lancer infranty mix so I tried that. It take forever to train the damn navy so next time I build up my mil I'm definitely going to start with the navy. I just don't know how I go from crazy positive money every turn, to removing every subsidy and deleting the military does nothing. It will turn green for a second then just immediately start dropping down to red.
>oh and one more thing, I set stuff to privatize stuff as soon as I build it. gotta monetize that investment pool somehow while you don't have any construction sectors. i don;t think much of it sold but every little bit helps
Yeah I think I'm going to start doing that too. I tried doing it when I needed it but it didn't give me any moneys.

>>39996
>I'm just saying the whole chain of effects in such a complex game make it impossible to learn especially if they keep changing the rules.
The game is a work-in-progress essentially.

>>40016
Nah i have playlists with a shotload mods.no crash no gamebreaking bugs, but like I said, who knows what mjnor tweaks in tge numbers does until you experiment with a full playthrough shain and again. You told me about the immigrstion debuff i had no idea about. What if every mod had undocumdnted no warning debuffs?

Le butterfly effect is wha i'm sayin. Nah mean?

John Leno

Not a lot of activity here lately. How are you guys feeling about Charters of Commerce? Imo it's 100% the best update to the game so far, and with 1.9.0 the majority of the game's systems seem to be in a reasonably mature state. Trade is actually viable now and you don't have to basically be an autarky as Belgium anymore in order to build your economy.

So what's next for you guys? I know a lot of people are still clamoring for more in-depth warfare, but I think focusing on diplomacy, technological advantages and supply chains instead of military tactics is pretty accurate to the era and lays the focus more on where Vic's strengths already lie. My Marxist heart would love a DLC focused on late-game politics, i.e. economic crises, the rise of fascist and communist movement and inter-imperialist conflict (I suspect the new treaty mechanic will be expanded later in order to better "regulate" colonization). Call it "Crisis of Capital" or something. Save this for when it happens

>>43131

My most critical wants, in order of importance, are:

1. Making goods physical with one to one penalties to output if there are shortages, & stockpiling mechanics (government & private).

2. Goods needing actual transportation to be traded within & between regions.

3. A complete end to money appearing and disappearing out of thin air (from anything except minting or potentially banks).

>>43137
1 is definitely a good call. Atm, it's maybe a bit too easy to swap PMs for most of your industries at once after researching a new tech, with your econ doing ok even though you're facing massive shortages (especially late-game inputs like oil, rubber, etc.)

I'm curious, how do you see transportation being used for goods? The way I see it, it's a bit of a confusing right now since it's not clear what it entails exactly. E.g. railways generate both infrastructure and transportation, ports only infrastructure and public trams in urban centers only transportation.

Imo, this reflects the idea of transportation as (primarily) a pop need and infrastructure as a state's capacity to integrate its industrial output with the wider region. But then you have labor-saving PMs like railroads for mines and logging camps that use transportation anyway. I think PDX has painted itself into a corner somewhat, since the ambiguous relationship between infra and transportation will become difficult to untangle. What do you think?

>>43168

Thanks for the support on the physical goods issue. The current quasi+virtual nature of goods has bothered me since before Vic3 even released tbh.

For transportation itself, I think it could be divided into teo services: Local which brings goods to market within a region, and inter-regional which transport it from one region to the next. With the way they have reworked trade centers recently, I think this is eminently doable. It would also eliminate the beed for local proces to create/delete money, since the relative efficiency or inefficiency of local production or transport from other places would be simulated directly by extra transport costs

As far as infrastructure goes, I am not against the idea of certain of goods or services needing infrastructure capacity in order to operate (and that some level of government involvement is necessary for this).

I think it would however it might make more sense to completely detach transport (and later electricity and maybe even telecom) provision from the infrastructure that carries it. So have the railway itself seperate from the train operator (or transport logistics company). All operating companies could only expand up to the infra capacity. Basically this would simulate the eminent domain / long term infrastructure layout planning & regulation that governments do.

I also strongly believe this infrastructure should be disaggregated further (roadways, railways, waterways, ports, electricity, maybe even telecoms, irrigation & sewage later on)

>>43168

Oh another smaller set of changes, not nearly as essential:

Make it possible for governments to own company HQs.

For scale economies to be limited by number of buildings owned by a given owner, rather than spill over all owners in a given region. If this is fone then there comes a potential emergent benefit from granting a company or the state s monopoly in the form of potentially higher scale economies. (And this simulates things like why infrastructure is often a government granted monopoly in real life, because multiple grids tend to be extremely wasteful duplication, triplication, or worse)

>>43170

* need for local prices

Victoria 3 is really fucking fun, here is my swiss investment fund liberal democratic market capitalism run where i try to invest everywhere to get return. Diplomacy still is horribly flawed and you have to eventually use mods to make AI german/italian unification possible and achievable, still it happens

Also i grow horribly fed with some of victoria 2 favoritism considering they tend to complain about every mechanic of the game and the political simulation, look at this clownish of review

https://steamcommunity.com/id/Coeco/recommended/529340/

Anyone use the E & F mod? If so, how is it? Is it too ahistorical or does it actually make the economy more realistic?

I'd like to play but 50% of the time I unpause after starting a new game/loading a save the game crashes so hard that I have to restart my computer.

>>43217
The new update is cracked, through treaties, investments, obligations you can buy your way to be the economic investor and hegemon without expanding, making actually viable tall playthroughs btw. Here is a calculation

National GDP: 19.6 mi
Actual GDP: 11.8 mi
FGDP: Foreign GDP
FINV: Foreign Investment
Totalized Ownership: AGDP (NGDP-FINV) + FGDP = 11.8mi + 106.8mi = 118.6 million
This means that swiss investors or capitalists own the equivalent of 118.6 million of global GDP, add it with swiss companies being the third or fourth best global competitors, owning buildings everywhere in the world. all that while annexing nothing, surpassing the french and british economies without foreign investments, and clapping the rest of economies despite being a small country! Victoria 3 has legit one of the best economic simulations

>>43131
Just played for the first time since the 1.9 update. I like that they revamped that stupid trade system where you have to keep checking the trade window constantly to see which of your trade deals turned unprofitable. Although now it seems so confusing to even figure out what is going on with trade at all. Where is a window where you can just see what goods you are actually trading and how much profit each of them are making and etc.? I guess you don't absolutely need it since you can just see on the buildings which ones are more productive.

Fucking immigration seems bugged as fuck. I read that basically their is a mass immigration desirability for your country as a whole you can see in the ledger, and if any other country in your culture is more desirable, everyone will move there instead, which makes no sense. I found this made it absolutely impossible to get immigrants in my Colombia playthrough I'm doing.

It seems that Brazil is guaranteed to attack you at some point to try and reclaim the Amazona territory you control. I restarted like 2 times and I noticed that one time they did it in like the first 5-10 and then the next time like 15-20 or longer even, don't remember the exact date. France is very easy to sway to your side by just offering an obligation, and I don't think they even ever redeemed it on me, or I didn't notice. But then you can just add war goals to take as much of Brazil as you like pretty much, I spent the extra to make them all primary goals because I wasn't sure if they would capitulate before and I wouldn't get them, but since I am the war leader on my side, that''s my choice right? So I could've taken a lot more of their territories probably. The whole trick is the French need to do all the work for you. The problem is the AI will kinda randomly decide to move their troops to French Guyana a little immediately or a little later, and they may or may not decide to move them to your territory and help you defend your front. This makes all the difference, because if they don't move their troops to your front, and the AI doesn't divert enough troops away from the New Grenadine front to fight the French, they can bumrush the capital and you lose the war. So really everything in the game is extremely RNG. That's something you don't really think with all the complex numbers and systems, you think it's math, but just try playing through a war a few times and you'll see the outcome is almost completely RNG. So because I spent the maneuver points making them primary I only ended up with like 3 provinces. I think I should've just taken their best states instead of worrying about making it contiguous or spending extra to make them primary goals.

Then after that I did pretty well for myself, I never tried invading any other states. I found armies in the game to be mostly pointless unless you want to conquer, because most of the time you'll never get invaded in most countries. They're just a huge drain of resources. Only worth it if you need to push your prestige up over the next threshold.

Then in the 1900s the first Power Block asked me to join in the whole run and it was Britain, which was still number 1. I was at 20K+ plus per week in the income, then I join, and immediately my income started falling all the way to the negatives. I didn't see any increased migration either. Also all my private construction started privatizing buildings throughout the British Empire which didn't seem to do anything for me but bankrupt me. Good I saved right before I accepted the offer so I'm going to go back and not accept.

>>43429
I was playing only Power Block DLC, + Morgenrote, Tech & Res, + Kuromi AI, but I don't think that made that big a difference.

I think a lot of the game as it stands is too much tedium and not enough to do. They've reduced the tedium by revamping the trade system so the computer can just automatically make the trade routes, which is nice. But still managing the economy is a lot of pointless tedium. Like an easy quality of life feature they could make, why is there not a global turn privatization on or off? I just toggle all my privatization on, on every building, but you'll find if you do that, you can have so much privatization quickly, it will overfill your max reserves and then you're just absolutely wasting money. So the best way is manually going through and toggling them on and off, but that is incredibly tedious.

>>43431
Oh yeah and if you're playing a minor power, everything in war is about which great power will back you up or the enemy up, but there is no way to really no that until you get into the war preparation phase. So you have to savescum to figure out when a much stronger country will throw in behind this small territory you're invading, or when a group of small countries will all throw in with them. It's very RNG and just encourages savescumming. I used to do this playing RPGs where every attack is RNG with the savestate on emulators, and it just makes it like cheating. You can always 100% guarantee a critical if you savescum enough times. This game is really like that as well with how RNG it is.

>>43431
Tbh, I'm still cautiously optimistic when it comes to tedium. Feels like Vic 3's development trends toward automating an increasing amount of econ mechanics so the player can focus on politics and diplomacy, which in turn informs the development of the national economy. Trade is a big one, obviously - I have a feeling some amount of autonomous PM management is next. In every case, I'm happy with each step the game takes since I remember the bad old days when there was no private construction pool (lmao)

Be honest with me, in its current state, is it better than modded Victoria 2?

Could I play this on a 6 year old PC or do I need to upgrade?

>>43448
Neither Jewish nor Black

The upcoming patch to nationalism looks amazing. Using imagined communities as the basis is great both as a realistic model of the time period, and as a means to give engaging levers and consequences to gameplay.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/victoria-3-dev-diary-154-imagined-communities.1855098/

The only improvement i would change would be to break the cultures down further, and then to allow them to be amalgamated/constructed as part of gameplay; e.g. a national italian cultures being created upon formation of the nation state, that can then gradually assimilate regional italian cultures based on state building and agitation. This could then be expanded to allow any empire to try and form some kind of greater civic national identity as was the case historically - it should be much more difficult based on the degree of differences between groups which you seek to integrate however.

I'm not 100% certain how this would fit in with existing abstractions on 'culture = nation', and all pops needing a culture, but it would also be neat to have 'a-national' hyper-localised peasantry at the start of the game that can be nationalised via literacy and middle class agitators.