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]

Postat inițial de NYC13:

Postat inițial de 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.

I can pretty much guarantee that it'll happen, though probably as a hybrid paid DLC/FLC update. Actually, we've already seen the first bit of this. Isn't the American buildings pack already locked behind the deluxe edition?

[Aluminum Elite Master]

Point #2 in the original post is what really, really ruins the game still IMO:

The functionality of the UI is the worst of all PDX games, and it's not even close. The sub-menus, the difficulty looking in on pops, the trade screen... the patch does help, but a lot is still bad enough to merit needing more work, and this patch itself took way too long to get to.


Point #1 is also true, but is less problematic as I assume if the game stays afloat, there will be DLC that helps there.


#3 is a mixed bag. If this was meant to be Anno: Victoria, the game probably would be received a lot better. I can see why the current play-loop does appeal to some. I think the downside though is that this wasn't meant to be Anno: Victoria... a lot of Vic 2 players and PDX fans in general assumed there would be more to the game.



Overall, Vic 3 feels overcooked, over-engineered, and yet somewhat hollow and annoying to interact with, all at the same time.

It's not the bottom of the barrel by any means... but I'd also rank it as my least favorite PDX game, and as a below average game overall given that it wasn't a $29.99 indie econ sim game, here.

[spasti696969]

"You should have been a better consoomer and known this product was going to be bad for years before you foolishly bought it"

I think I can see what's really happening here. Their older games like EU, CK2, and Stellaris were huge hits which added content for years afterwards through expansions and updates, keeping the games popular for far longer than is typical. They're essentially trading on that reputation. Content will be added down the road, this is normal, their other games do this, you should have known as much before you bought, consoomer.

Problem is, this ain't that. Functioning warfare, basic diplomacy, and an AI that isn't absolutely hideous is not the same as adding a dozen expansions over the course of 10 years. It feels like during the development process (which takes years) somebody said "hey it looks like we aren't even close to hitting our targets here. We can either let the project collapse or release it as is to at least get something out of it", and then this "roadmap" business is their way of patching things up after the fact.

Ck3 had some of these problems, but nowhere near on the same level. That game was largely developed before the Covid lockdowns started. Victoria 3 was developed at the height of the shutdowns. If you look at what happened with the school kids and their inability to do basic math thanks to distance learning, that's what happened to the Victoria 3 development process with everyone working from home.

[SIX]

I like the game but i agree with everything OP said warfare is not fun and the game ends when you are in a position to actually do interesting stuff. Its also missing a lot of flavor all around .I wish they would make a WW1 expansion so you can keep playing up to WW2 aka HOI4.

[Burma Jones]

Postat inițial de spasti696969:

"You should have been a better consoomer and known this product was going to be bad for years before you foolishly bought it"

I think I can see what's really happening here. Their older games like EU, CK2, and Stellaris were huge hits which added content for years afterwards through expansions and updates, keeping the games popular for far longer than is typical. They're essentially trading on that reputation. Content will be added down the road, this is normal, their other games do this, you should have known as much before you bought, consoomer.

Problem is, this ain't that. Functioning warfare, basic diplomacy, and an AI that isn't absolutely hideous is not the same as adding a dozen expansions over the course of 10 years. It feels like during the development process (which takes years) somebody said "hey it looks like we aren't even close to hitting our targets here. We can either let the project collapse or release it as is to at least get something out of it", and then this "roadmap" business is their way of patching things up after the fact.

Ck3 had some of these problems, but nowhere near on the same level. That game was largely developed before the Covid lockdowns started. Victoria 3 was developed at the height of the shutdowns. If you look at what happened with the school kids and their inability to do basic math thanks to distance learning, that's what happened to the Victoria 3 development process with everyone working from home.

Basically this. The team working on Vic 3 clearly wasn't equipped to make anything more advanced than a rip-off of Candy Crush. They dumbed down or got rid of major systems, removed player agency as much as possible outside of micromanaging buildings and developed by far the worst UI of any game I have ever seen.

But there's a history of their games coming out a bit light on content, because historically they were a small studio who worked with the intent of making solid grand strategy games, and people were willing to be patient and pay to support the work they produced.

They are now "cashing in" on the great reputation they developed from most of their older titles, opting to crank out shallow garbage and use marketing and social engineering to encourage expectations of long-term support towards a legitimately complex and replayable grand strategy game when in reality they're committed to a standard pump and dump method of production, churning out horribly shallow mobile-style games to keep costs down while banking on their reputation and sunk cost fallacy to keep sales up.

Of course what else should one expect from a publicly traded company these days? Paradox only wants to make money, they no longer care about making games.

[shadain597]

Y'know Burma, I think people would take you a bit more seriously if you weren't exaggerating to ridiculous degrees. Candy Crush rip-off? Really?

[Chocolayte]

In general, PDX now and in the future is aimed at the casual gamer, so they have just built and acquired many other studios to expand into many other genres in exactly the same way as EA (keep development costs as low as possible and sell the product at the highest price through a series of marketing campaigns). If you are really interested in GSG then I think you should look for indie-game studios that are developing current potential GSG's like Grey Eminence and World Warfare and Economy.

[Burma Jones]

Postat inițial de shadain597:

Y'know Burma, I think people would take you a bit more seriously if you weren't exaggerating to ridiculous degrees. Candy Crush rip-off? Really?

Improve relations!
Open trade route!
Close trade route!
Press "Cool! Generic flavor text!" when an event pops up!
Establish colony!
Hire general!
Attack front!

Like dude, this is obviously a mobile game. 99% of the interaction with the game is picking one of two options and watching the AI do things for you. Most event pop-ups are a simple one-or-the-other decision or just a button that amounts to "Okay, go away now notification" and not even a real decision or game action. Outside of setting up a construction queue, there's no real thinking involved. You subsidize or don't, you set a tariff or don't, you autoexpand or don't, you send a general to a front and picking attack or defend does nothing in practice beside slight combat modifier buffs.

The game seriously boils down to clicking away pop-ups and watching your GDP go up as your construction queue completes itself. It's horribly simple, the sad part is I'm not even slightly exaggerating.

[shadain597]

Postat inițial de Burma Jones:

Postat inițial de shadain597:

Y'know Burma, I think people would take you a bit more seriously if you weren't exaggerating to ridiculous degrees. Candy Crush rip-off? Really?

Improve relations!
Open trade route!
Close trade route!
Press "Cool! Generic flavor text!" when an event pops up!
Establish colony!
Hire general!
Attack front!

Like dude, this is obviously a mobile game. 99% of the interaction with the game is picking one of two options and watching the AI do things for you. Most event pop-ups are a simple one-or-the-other decision or just a button that amounts to "Okay, go away now notification" and not even a real decision or game action. Outside of setting up a construction queue, there's no real thinking involved. You subsidize or don't, you set a tariff or don't, you autoexpand or don't, you send a general to a front and picking attack or defend does nothing in practice beside slight combat modifier buffs.

The game seriously boils down to clicking away pop-ups and watching your GDP go up as your construction queue completes itself. It's horribly simple, the sad part is I'm not even slightly exaggerating.

If you aren't exaggerating, then is this a confession that you have no idea what Candy Crush actually is? Because anyone who has seen a single ad for it can tell neither game is a "rip-off" of the other.

This is exactly what I mean about ridiculous exaggerations taking away from otherwise valid points. Yeah, the actual ways in which the player interacts with the game are probably simple enough to be played mobile, (though good luck finding a mobile device that can handle the CPU requirements) but that doesn't make it a match-3 game for pre-diabetics.

[kgkong]

Postat inițial de shadain597:

Postat inițial de Burma Jones:

Improve relations!
Open trade route!
Close trade route!
Press "Cool! Generic flavor text!" when an event pops up!
Establish colony!
Hire general!
Attack front!

Like dude, this is obviously a mobile game. 99% of the interaction with the game is picking one of two options and watching the AI do things for you. Most event pop-ups are a simple one-or-the-other decision or just a button that amounts to "Okay, go away now notification" and not even a real decision or game action. Outside of setting up a construction queue, there's no real thinking involved. You subsidize or don't, you set a tariff or don't, you autoexpand or don't, you send a general to a front and picking attack or defend does nothing in practice beside slight combat modifier buffs.

The game seriously boils down to clicking away pop-ups and watching your GDP go up as your construction queue completes itself. It's horribly simple, the sad part is I'm not even slightly exaggerating.

If you aren't exaggerating, then is this a confession that you have no idea what Candy Crush actually is? Because anyone who has seen a single ad for it can tell neither game is a "rip-off" of the other.

This is exactly what I mean about ridiculous exaggerations taking away from otherwise valid points. Yeah, the actual ways in which the player interacts with the game are probably simple enough to be played mobile, (though good like finding a mobile device that can handle the CPU requirements) but that doesn't make it a match-3 game for pre-diabetics.

I'm guessing he was more so just referring to the motonous repetition of clicking that Candy Crush has, as does nearly any keyboard and mouse PC game. You get down to the core of any game down to how the user interface let's the user play, you get the same game. Zoo Tycoon? Civilization? Age of Empires? Vic 3? Yea, they're all pretty much the same game, just with different skins to get the player interacting with the game mechanics.

Not to say I don't like Vic 3. Once in a while this gets to me, or get a lot of repeating trends in my playthroughs. But for me, it's all about role playing the experience with Vic 3.

[Burma Jones]

"I'm guessing he was more so just referring to the motonous repetition of clicking that Candy Crush has, as does nearly any keyboard and mouse PC game."

Literally everyone understands that is exactly the point of the comparison and it's true. I'd also extend that by saying the impetus behind the clicking is absurdly simple decision making. Press colored blob. Or in Victoria 3's case, red bad green good.

Saying that most mouse and keyboard games just comes down to monotonous repetition of clicking is only true on a fundamental mechanical level, what's important is what is behind the clicking, why is the player doing it, what impact does the click have on the experience.

In Victoria 3, the player is general met with nothing but extremely simple choices with few exceptions.

Red number? Close trade route. Green number? Open trade route.
Bad relations with country? Press improve relations button.
Want to "build a colony"? Press establish colony button.
Is there a native uprising? Press attack front.

Etc.

[kgkong]

Postat inițial de Burma Jones:

"I'm guessing he was more so just referring to the motonous repetition of clicking that Candy Crush has, as does nearly any keyboard and mouse PC game."

Literally everyone understands that is exactly the point of the comparison and it's true. I'd also extend that by saying the impetus behind the clicking is absurdly simple decision making. Press colored blob. Or in Victoria 3's case, red bad green good.

Saying that most mouse and keyboard games just comes down to monotonous repetition of clicking is only true on a fundamental mechanical level, what's important is what is behind the clicking, why is the player doing it, what impact does the click have on the experience.

In Victoria 3, the player is general met with nothing but extremely simple choices with few exceptions.

Red number? Close trade route. Green number? Open trade route.
Bad relations with country? Press improve relations button.
Want to "build a colony"? Press establish colony button.
Is there a native uprising? Press attack front.

Etc.

More or less, this doesn't seem to be a problem who find role playing with Victoria 3 relatively easy and enjoyable. This is why I am able to enjoy the game so much.
And when it comes to CK3, the doom stacks kind of take it out of me. You can just doom stack paint the world, and that takes me out of the role play if I'm not role playing to intentionally having some OP army.

To each their own. The game just doesn't seem like a good fit for you cause you seem to prefer more direct player agency aspects and less role play and indirect player agency.

[Burma Jones]

It's fine that you and the minority of the purchasers of Vic 3 who enjoy it and still play can role play and pretend there is depth and flavor there, but for me and many others, who have played a lot of Paradox games in the past, and are used to genuine depth, complex decision making, lots of variety, flavor and replayability, etc., Vic 3 is a massive departure in quality and depth.

It truly cannot qualify as economic simulation or grand strategy, it is just too simple. And this is a trend in their recent titles, not solely Vic 3, though in my opinion it's the worst game they've made to date. CK3 is simpler and worse made than CK2 as well. I think some of the things wrong with Stellaris are very similar to what's wrong with Vic 3.

You compare the depth, attention to detail, replayability, amount of content, variety in different nations and so on of EU4 or HOI4 or Vic2 to Vic 3, and it's simply incomparable. And I'm granting some leeway here because of the sheer volume of DLC and mods for the older games. The problems with Vic 3 aren't just simple "wait for some flavor packs" type of problems. It is fundamentally too simple of a game to be strategy, it's only a strategy game in the most superficial way.

You are welcome to like the game. I am glad that you do. Unfortunately over 90% of people who bought the game don't feel that way, me included. There is nothing wrong with you enjoying what there is. There is nothing wrong with me not enjoying the game for what it is, for what it could be, for how it compares to similar games.

It's great that you can roleplay and ignore a lot of the problems and shortcomings and feel like you're some economic wizard playing tall on a tiny, obscure country and have fun. I truly am glad for you.

But let me ask you this, and answer directly and honestly as possible:
If Victoria had the OPTION for players to control their own units,
if there were more depth to diplomacy and economics,
if different nations played and felt more unique from one another,
wouldn't that make the game BETTER for you?

Doesn't it make more sense for you to want the game to improve, have more flavor, more replayability?

You post as if it will ruin the game for you if it sucks less. I really don't comprehend your position.

[kgkong]

But let me ask you this, and answer directly and honestly as possible:
If Victoria had the OPTION for players to control their own units,
if there were more depth to diplomacy and economics,
if different nations played and felt more unique from one another,
wouldn't that make the game BETTER for you?

No. Actually, this is what made Victoria 3 specifically standout to me from the rest of the games. It focusing on other elements of gameplay over doom stacks and a more raw warfare, gives me enough of a unique feeling that I don't feel like I'm playing the same game (a problem I have with EU and CK, but there's been enough flavor content released for both games that this is a bit easier to overlook now). If I wanted to have the same options from the other games to play during the Victoria era, I'd get a mod or make my own mod for the other titles personally.

I'm also becoming more of a casual gamer the older I get, and it's nice that Victoria 3 is also taking a bit of a turn towards this demographic for the game. It actually makes getting back into the game a lot easier than the other games. Albeit the learning curve in Vic3 absolutely sucks and the UI could be more efficiently organized. Game has it's problems, but I'm reading the dev diaries and keeping posted to what the devs are up to on this. The patches are slow to roll out for making the improvements to the game, and I'm fine with that, because at least with each major patch it's been a step in the right direction for a lot of users, myself included.

[Burma Jones]

Good for you and the sub-10% of the user base who thinks the game is good enough or headed in the right direction but your position still doesn't make sense.

If the option existed for players to control units, you could still use the automated AI system where you can press verb the front and let an orange line take care of itself.

If diplomacy and economics had more depth, you could still just play like you do now and not engage with the deeper layers and occupy yourself just building and trading.

If different nations played and felt more unique from one another, there would be a reason for you to play other nations and you would have more variety in gameplay. It literally makes ZERO sense that you don't want this.

You could only be positively affected by such changes. The game could only be better for you.

In other words, instead of just PRETENDING it's a good game and IMAGINING you're doing all this stuff, why not have Victoria 3 be a REAL grand strategy game instead of a garbage cookie clicker? That way you could ACTUALLY do the stuff you're only currently PRETENDING to do.

Side note: Every Paradox game lets you pause. You can take all the time in the world to do anything. It's already inherently casual and pressure-free to play. It doesn't need to be egregiously dumbed down to be a casual friendly game. Their games always have been casual friendly in that regard, and having more "meat on the bone" just adds to replayability and longevity, moreso for casual players who would rather learn at a slow pace.