Game is still fundamentally garbage

[Burma Jones]

TLDR:
1.2 was almost entirely a positive patch in terms of what it did do. Performance is still an issue but noticeably better. A lot of bugs got taken care of. The AI is a lot better at managing auto expansion of buildings. Unfortunately that's about all it did.
If your only concern or issue with the game was performance, it's probably worth reinstalling or keeping an eye out for a sale. If your concern regarded lacking content and weak gameplay, definitely keep avoiding this travesty.

Warfare and diplomacy are simply too boring and poorly made to a degree where they ruin the game, and the economics and internal politics are way too shallow and simple to be considered anything remotely close to "economic simulation" let alone "grand strategy." For a game whose setting is an era with rapid industrialization, the Crimean War, mass colonization and migration, two Schleswig wars, German unification and the Franco-Prussian war, regular civil unrest and separatist movements, World War 1, and the shaky peace period leading up to World War 2, having these 4 key systems range from mediocre to egregious is unacceptable.

_______________________________

The three biggest issues weren't even slightly alleviated by 1.2:
1. Every single nation plays the same. Other than where you start out, you go for the exact same things.
The main cause of this is the sheer lack of flavor content, e.g. unique IG names, politics differing between different nations/regions/cultures, special historical events, regional music, unique sounds for different event types, etc. Yes it's more superficial things but having the same names, events and sounds for every country makes them feel the same. This seems like a pretty simple and straight forward thing to address besides adding music, it's pretty appalling literally nothing has changed about this from day 1.

The secondary cause of this is the really bad distribution of arable land and resources. Every country ends up with access to everything because of how easy it is to acquire everything. You would have to go out of your way picking some landlocked, decentralized nation to find yourself truly lacking. It makes it so there's no regional specialization. Trade feels no different than current day globalized access. It's ridiculous.

2. This game has, without a doubt, the worst UI of any game I have ever played. There are so many problems with it I can't even list all of them in a reasonable time frame, but some include:
Way too many unnecessary clickthroughs and windows;
unactionable elements with info separated from actionable elements missing key info;
high priority info or actions being buried, missing or only available indirectly (e.g. state unemployment);
zero interaction with the map or units or what amounts to the game world or any representation of the player on it;
layout of the UI forces continual looking back and forth across the screen and dragging of the mouse back and forth across the screen;
way too many pointless bells and whistles exist (e.g. building icons on the terrain zoom level);
a lot of spam clicking required to get through necessary actions;
a lot of obnoxious jumplists and pop-ups, causing regular accidental clicks;
unavoidable overlapping of elements, causing regular accidental clicks or dragging out rote tasks;
horrible organization on several tabs, forcing too much scrolling and tabbing;
tons of oversized elements, forcing too much scrolling and tabbing;
the horizontal orientation of lists in the different lenses;
I am bored of listing things now but sadly that's not an exhaustive list.


3. The main gameplay loop is boring, mindless tedium. The majority of it is just queuing construction, micromanaging the building tab (production methods, auto expansion resetting itself, etc.) and opening or closing trade routes. Outside of that, it's mostly wrestling with pop-up events and notification spam and the occasional initiating button press that only leads to RNG timers or waiting on the AI (e.g. enacting laws, warfare, politics, colonization, basically everything except construction and trade).
I'm sure they didn't add real units or battles on the map because of how terrible the performance already is without them, but nonetheless their exclusion really ruins the game and their stated reasoning of "less tedious micro" is an obvious lie.

Having no real interaction with the map or world itself kills immersion and fun immensely, and instead of getting that we have this obnoxious AI-run system that somehow requires more micro and tedium and clicking than just letting us move units ourselves.
I'd much rather choose general from a list, assign them to an HQ, and then assign recruited units to generals, who I can then move myself. That's more fun and less tedium than what Vic 3 forces you to go through:
click on the military tab;
click recruit general;
scan list to see which HQs have excess troops;
click on HQ;
spam hire/fire to get generals with good traits;
mouse over each general in list to see which HQ they are in to make sure you promote the right generals so they can take up the excess troops;
mobilize general;
select advance/defend front;
set strategic objective and hope it actually does something.

Even if we go with the excuse of "It's an economic simulator," that's just straight up more tedium and clicking than traditional Pdx warfare systems and the time they've had to spend messing with AI and buggy automatic front formation has most certainly detracted from the rest of the game. Call the more classic warfare system "map painting" or "toy soldiers" all you want, it's patently more functional and efficient, and most players highly prefer it. Warfare is an unavoidable and integral part of the game, it needs to be better.

Watching GDP and a map timelapse is not a proper strategy game, period.

[shadain597]

I assume they're planning on addressing #1 in the future, especially with DLC, similar to how HoI4 had DLCs updating specific nations, though I think that even the base game had a bit more country variety than can be found in Vic 3 currently.

I'm quite certain there's worse UIs out there but yeah, it deserves plenty of criticism. One of the things that seems to be missing, unless I'm just an oblivious idiot and missed it, is a way to quickly and easily locate buildings that are unprofitable/stuck in the hiring&firing loop. It's absurd that the loop exists to begin with, but if they won't fix it they can at least make it easy to spot before a lone building churns out tens of thousands of radicals.

As for #3, it sounds like the biggest issues you have there stem from the aforementioned poor UI and warfare as a whole, which is another thing that I suspect will have major updates in DLC. (obviously, that doesn't invalidate criticisms of the current system)

[Fatbill]

Player numbers are consistently below 5k concurrent now, I guess the 1.2 patch did not do as much as the boosters of this game believed.

[Burma Jones]

Originally posted by Fatbill:

Player numbers are consistently below 5k concurrent now, I guess the 1.2 patch did not do as much as the boosters of this game believed.

Turns out green line go up wasn't what players wanted. Let's see if the vocal minority shilling for this game finally accept objective reality.

[kgkong]

Honestly, if you bothered to read the dev diaries Burma, you'd be able to stay ahead of this and keep yourself from playing a game that is obviously not your cup of tea, because if you read the dev diaries, you'd be understanding where the development is at and where it's going. But you keep coming back to each new patch, not reading the dev diaries, and making the same complaints.

[Burma Jones]

Originally posted by KingGorillaKong:

Honestly, if you bothered to read the dev diaries Burma, you'd be able to stay ahead of this and keep yourself from playing a game that is obviously not your cup of tea, because if you read the dev diaries, you'd be understanding where the development is at and where it's going. But you keep coming back to each new patch, not reading the dev diaries, and making the same complaints.

Honestly, if you bothered to actually think about what feedback is, you'd realize people understand where development is at and where it's going, and that they are expressing that it's been bad, is bad, if it doesn't change substantially it will continue to be bad.

But you keep coming back and reply to literally every single thing I post, making the same complaints about people pointing out why this game sucks so bad, making the same nonsense excuses for why it sucks so bad.

[kgkong]

You keep coming to play a game with expectations that it'll be something it isn't, nor did the devs ever indicate the game would be what expectations you have for Victoria 3. How you even came to some of the conclusions of what the game should be, I have no idea, because reading the dev diaries and the readup on the game even before it released, showed it wasn't gonna match your expectations you built up for it on your own opinion of what it should be.
And you know, that's fine.

And yes, your feedback here in this thread has improved a lot from a lot of the other comments you made. Good job there. But that's not what I'm commenting on.

What I'm commenting on, is how you seemed to have built false expectations and reality out of what Vic3 was going to be, despite there being ample information available to the public because the devs had been fairly transparent about it. You could have avoided a lot of the disappointment you have in this game if you were more honest to yourself and the information about the game before you bought it.

We could go into the discussion on how the pops aren't as deep as they were originally planned to be, but we've covered this already.

[Burma Jones]

You have this obsession with trying to counter my negative feedback then act is if I'm forcing you into arguments (e.g. pops thread), even if my feedback is correct or reasonable (which it generally is).

It's not up to you what my or anyone else's expectations for the game are except your own. Get over it. Reading and replying to literally every single post I make isn't going to stop me from sharing my opinion.

[Clemente]

Originally posted by Fatbill:

Player numbers are consistently below 5k concurrent now, I guess the 1.2 patch did not do as much as the boosters of this game believed.

If they don't add a basic working warfare mechanic to this game, I'm afraid this game will go the way of Imperator Rome.

[The Greg Machine]

I enjoy the game, and I really like the idea of not directly controlling your armies. I think it just needs more flavor events and some mechanical fluff.

[spasti696969]

I don't really understand the "who cares about warfare because it's an economics game" position. It comes off as a knee-jerk fan boy defense. Their other games like Stellaris and EU have economics and warfare and a lot of other stuff missing here. And in the Victorian era economics and warfare were often intrinsically entwined.

[Ole "Slim Jolo" the Hobo Hero]

yea 1.2 is only even a mere blip of how expansive the economy focus of the game SHOULD be, I think criticizing how much of the game is spent dealing with build queue and such isn't really economy sim, sadly. Should be way more layers to it in general, seems like much of the game was just placeholder at release and we're only now just starting to get some of what should have been in the base game.

It is a shame too that the gap is left to be filled by modders. There are elements to how society / clout I see working, but it's just not all there yet and the lack of flavor makes most play throughs seem similar. Mods do definitely make it better.

[Spartak]

Perfect analysis, couldn't agree more. Maybe We have to wait til 2025 for Hearts of Iron 5 to get a proper game.

[shadain597]

Originally posted by Ole "Slim Jolo" the Hobo Hero:

Should be way more layers to it in general, seems like much of the game was just placeholder at release and we're only now just starting to get some of what should have been in the base game.

I mean, that's a Paradox title for you. If you really want a complete game, wait ~5 years then snag said game + key DLCs during a sale. If enough people do it, it will also be a consumer vote against releasing half-baked games and pretending they are worthy of being called 1.0 launches.

It is a shame too that the gap is left to be filled by modders. There are elements to how society / clout I see working, but it's just not all there yet and the lack of flavor makes most play throughs seem similar. Mods do definitely make it better.

From what I'm seeing, it's looking like they're outsourcing some development to modders, especially UX. Release something barebones, wait to see how modders improve it, then copy that. I get that modders will at times come up with better or interesting ideas the devs didn't have, and its not a terrible thing to implement good ideas officially, but this seems more like a planned, cost-cutting tactic, which doesn't sit right with me.

[Burma Jones]

I'm fine with them directly lifting workshop mods as long as they give some sort of compensation to the modders doing their job for them. I'd just like some genuine statement from Pdx on the elephant in the room.

I'm not opposed to a more hands off system, something like a simplified battle planner would do wonders. I was expecting them to make unit production and management simpler, like an improved stack system from older games that turns into a slightly simplified HoI style battle planner with trench warfare being researched or something.

Having them straight up remove units, map tiles and player control entirely was something nobody expected or wanted. What we have for a system now is autoresolve with a lot of unnecessary tedium.

I guess there's always OpenVic2 in the future if Vic3 ends up like Imperator because Pdx doesn't do anything substantial to fix war and diplo.

[NYC13]

Originally posted by shadain597:

I assume they're planning on addressing #1 in the future, especially with DLC, similar to how HoI4 had DLCs updating specific nations, though I think that even the base game had a bit more country variety than can be found in Vic 3 currently.

I'm quite certain there's worse UIs out there but yeah, it deserves plenty of criticism. One of the things that seems to be missing, unless I'm just an oblivious idiot and missed it, is a way to quickly and easily locate buildings that are unprofitable/stuck in the hiring&firing loop. It's absurd that the loop exists to begin with, but if they won't fix it they can at least make it easy to spot before a lone building churns out tens of thousands of radicals.

As for #3, it sounds like the biggest issues you have there stem from the aforementioned poor UI and warfare as a whole, which is another thing that I suspect will have major updates in DLC. (obviously, that doesn't invalidate criticisms of the current system)

Re: DLC for number 1, I REALLY hope they don't expect to charge for that. In a game that's supposed to be a global socio-economic simulation, charging people extra to not have the same flat vanilla experience in every campaign would be absurd. HOI I was more fine with the DLC charges because there still were some unique national focus trees at launch and each nation definitely was a different experience each time. Victoria 3 that would be kind of crazy to charge for it at this stage.