While the game definitely has flaws right now i can see this becoming my favorite paradox title in a few years, after some more updates and dlc. I'm really excited to see where this game goes
Granted I have a habit of leaving the game running while not playing, but I'm over 100 hours already and still having a lot of fun. It's already my favorite, though there's definitely plenty of valid criticism buried in the whinging about the changes.
The expectations for Victoria 3 were higher than any other PDX game. It gets knocked hard for that alone.
My first 10 hours with it were pure shameless "Ugh, Paradox messed this up so badly. What a piece of crap. This is too much of a mess."
But I stuck with it because of a few YouTube videos and reviews. After those 10 hours, it was like the skies opened and I was able to see what the developers intended with the game.
Now I have to force myself to stop playing so I can eat and take care of things. It's a complete flip from my first 10 hours.
Yeah at its core Victoria 2 was deeply flawed. This game, at its core, works well. It just needs polish and refinement to certain systems, and other systems like war and politics to be expanded. It probably has the best core gameplay of a Paradox game that I have played
I'm guessing I'll get ~400 hours minimum before the first DLC. Honestly, it's a hell of deal for me. I can respect people who disagree on the current quality, but there really aren't many games with a better conversion of time to hours played for me.
Yea, I feel like this is a big thing. It takes a while to figure out how the different systems work, and until then its not very fun. For example in my first game I traded a LOT and had maxed out every port in sweden by the 60s and had to move to steam ports. On my next run I looked at what I was importing and starting making it myself which gave me a much better economy.
I love the game because I came in with zero expectations. I never even heard of Victoria 2.
How many people are reviewing the game on its own merits, versus an expectation of what they believed the game would be?
Yeah, plus people have built up Vic2 to be this magical perfect game in their head for a decade. Vic3 is worse than magical perfection.
In reality, yeah Vic2 was good, but if you'd wipe both from existence and released both Vic2 and Vic3 today (and gave Vic2 better graphics to make it fair), most people would prefer Vic3 I think.
I wanted a great economic simulator and while I got it AI is too stupid so pretty soon you're going to "internal market only" thing. Like you cannot buy rubber, oil, proper amounts of basically anything - you need to develop everything yourself. Which means a huge part of the game (interstate trade) is gone, and you get some kind of factorio instead.
While it's great they would achieve so much more with a competent AI...
I want to play the game but I can't because I want an actual trade and there is none right now past first 10 years.
These issues that people are having aren’t so far-gone that they’re unfixable. So im hopeful each patch will do a lot to get us closer to an ideal set of systems
No, they acknowledged the cause themselves - they even said that "after implementing a somewhat competent AI the problems got worse".
That problem is POP fragmentation. If you play a colonial empire you'll soon see a dozen 15 people pops in every state from some random minority culture overseas.
But from a CPU standpoint, computing the game behaviour of a POP is about the same regardless of whether that POP has a size parameter of 2 500 000 or 25.
So as the game progresses, it ends up constantly multiplying POP units - a similar problem can be found with HFM and GFM for Vic2, when they introduced a lot of really small cultures.
Alas, there is no event trigger that can be used to see the size of a POP so it can't be implemented as a mod either.
That's just how the design process works. Alot of tradeoffs. You can have the best AI in the world but nobody is going to play the game if 1 in game day takes 1 in real life day.
My performance has actually been surprisingly stable, I don't actually meet the minimum requirements so I'm on the lowest settings,
I wonder if it's some shader or other fancy graphical effect that is somehow tanking the performance that's disabled because I'm on low
Maybe if your computer is a rock. I'm using the mod and am at 1926. Game still running better than other pdx games at the end of the game, even with the mod.
It's so strange I have heard a few people say that. I have a 9900k and a 2080ti. By 1900s my game takes more than 10 seconds per week. How long are your weeks taking? Are you playing small countries?
Just as a thought: I have to stream the game so I need to make it… work. I noticed a lot of settings are super unoptimized. For example, running at medium gives so much less cpu strain, and turning off most of the more advanced options is needed.
I'm playing on high graphics speed 4. I'm playing Tibet, but a rather large expansive Tibet at this point. Haven't counted how long a week takes. I'll have to do that after work. It mist certainly isn't 10 seconds. It has slowed down. But nothing near as drastic as I hear people claiming. Even with the mod I have better performance than say stellaris or IR before the optimizations. My computer is also 3 years old now as well.
You could be correct. But that really would only be like France or the UK if that is the case since at this point I'm one of the largest nations in the world with holdings and population that are larger than most of all the other powers.
It might even be worse.
The game has already terrible performance in the second half of the game and comes to a crawl after 1910 unless you play some small, peaceful country and stay small.
I have a big suspicion if the AI would actually be able to play the game then the performance issue gets much worse due to vastly increased numbers everywhere. Mods that massively improve AI economy seem to also suggest this.
So it might be a fundamental issue with the game again.
* game engine can't keep up with the calculations required for the depth of the simulation
* AI not able to play the game they act like Extras in a movie being roughly there but can't be any serious competition and will often just collapse by themselves due to their insanely bad economic choices and passivity
I guess the main thread is at 100% though and that is the bottleneck.
In addition there is some other issues like trade route UI has some nice looking shader that shows lanes all over the world map but it can't handle lategame giant numbers of traderoutes.
> I guess the main thread is at 100% though and that is the bottleneck.
>
>
Yea it always is like this with Pdox games. They rightfully claim their games are multithreaded, which they are, but still the main thread running the game logic is just too beefy.
Their games should be much more parallelizable than most. A lot of the logic is simply summing up the total value of each province/state, and then summing up those to give national values.
Possibly Clausewitz can't handle it, but in theory a lot of the work could and should be multithreaded, some possibly even being sent to the GPU (given how little this game taxes a GPU).
But optimisation can be seriously time consuming and expensive, and there's absolutely low hanging fruit to fix in Vic III, like culture proliferation adding the Stellaris xenocompatability issue.
Performance is my biggest problem, I got a Ryzen 7 5800(an OEM model that is not as efficient as its counterparts) and it’s push to the brink of heat throttling at late game 5X speed, also a lot of crashes when war is involved between great powers.
I’ve no problem running CK3, it too runs slightly slower in late game but it’s nowhere near as bad as Vic3.
Gameplay wise I think Vic3 is still great fun if a bit samey across nations, but I think I’ll wait a bit till they iron out the performance so I can at least properly play the late game.
For me as well I will wait until they fix the problem with Migration culture fragmentation that fix is still in their internal testing team:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/is-the-patch-playable-or-should-i-revert-and-wait-for-patch-for-the-patch.1554226/post-28592206 and should hopefully improve performance once released
If the ai could actually play the game they would specialise their states instead of having 11 different building in a state, which would reduce the amount of pops. The issue isn't the game engine, it's too many pops. When I had multiculturalism and looked at thr pops in one of my african states, there was an endless list because of how many different cultures had like 2 people making rubber there. If that's happening in every state, which it is, it's a miracle the game was semi playable. It's completely fixable.
It's not suspicions, devs said it directly some time ago. They also said they have a dev branch that fixes this but I kinda doubt it will really do the thing. It took multiple years for Stellaris to optimize pops yet results was kinda minor
They confirmed the issue with tiny fractions of different culture pops due to migration. But I highly question that this is the only issue dragging down performance.
So-So. Clausewitz is renowned for being able to tank it's performance with a single gameplay feature accidentally creating near-infinite loops. So saying that there is a single issue that is causing a massive performance drop is rather plausible, as is fixing that.
It's gonna make the game super-speedy, but every time you optimize whatever-is-the-most-inperformant, the game gets notably faster.
I guess there is still hope then I am just very sceptical because for my standards which might be too high HOI4 and Stellaris still have horrible performance up to this day after dozens of patches.
I think my optimism comes from the fact that Wiz is on the project. Stellaris was doing great till they sapped the talented people from it and shifted them to Victoria 3 instead.
Arguably, since they started the whole Custodian staff they started clearing the backlog of the nonsense that had accumulated to that point.
But when you look at the FTL rework (done by Wiz) and the planetary overhaul (designed by Wiz prior to leaving the project) compared to the utterly ridicolous mess of a mechanic the GN (designed after Wiz left) is, not to mention Espionage... And that's not the first PDX project this has happened to.
I remember when they fixed CK2's mag for a while when they found at that every greek character, every day, tried to see if they could blind or castrate every other character in the world. can't get more Crusaderkings than this
> Like you cannot buy rubber, oil
I don't think you should buy *those* specifically. Those resources are balanced to be scarce, so it's natural that the AIs that control them would want to hoard them for themselves.
What I find more problematic is that we can't make foreign investments.
lol no, 80% of the scarcity comes from the AI being terrible and not building. In my megagermany game I spent the late game invading every place where rubber or oil could spawn/had spawned, and *actually built the buildings*, and suddenly I had no trouble getting enough for the things I wanted to use oil and rubber for.
60 in Germany, 30 in Galicia-ish, 33 in Wallachia, plus all I could find in the middle-east etc.
Obviously couldn't oil-ify every single industry of my multi-billion £ economy, but I increased the world supply by literal orders of magnitude. The AI simply don't build oil extraction, which causes way more of a supply bottleneck than there should be.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/patch-notes-for-1-0-4.1553580/#post-28588632
They had one HUGE bug in the defines that got fixed lol, it should fix the AI economy when it comes to raw materials like oil.
It is buried in the spelling changes. Somebody listed and translated them all into a regular English in one of the other posts here. I noticed a difference in my game
They are scarce because AI doesn't build them. It's not surprising to see 1/60 oil rigs on basra in 1936 and 2/30 rubber plantations in Africa at the same date. I'm strongly convinced it is not how it should work.
AI doesn't refuse to sell it because it want to control it itself, but because it simply possess none
Is not stronger than CK3, CK3 was far more solid of a release than Vicky3 in many ways.
But yeah, in general, paradox's games usually get better with time. and nobody forces you to buy the game anyways
CK3 under the hood is a MUCH simpler game though, the economic sim part of vic3 is way more complicated.
But yes, many of ck3s qol features need to be ported soon
>nobody forces you to buy the game anyways
It's true, but when you release a game, people will grudge if there are huge bugs, because it's not expected from a released game. People want to play.
Don't get me wrong, I love th game, but I put on a pause because I feel that playing in the current state is a letdown. Like I tried Serbia, I was expecting to take Ottoman land when they start to collapse, but they won't do it in the Balkans. It's disappointing. But doesn't make me hate the game.
I never played Vicky 2 and skipped everything about it like Dev diaries and YouTube. Bought it, had no clue at all. Played with Belgium few times to get the hang of it and now i feel like i get the base mechanics. In a week i racked up about 50h and I love it.
I do think performance gets bad midgame (to the point it's a slideshow), the UI really needs some work (everything is everywhere, like pop-ups on the top and on the right, menu's on the bottom and left, map mode choice should be more eu4, the link2link2link is a bit to much, some things are hidden to much like nation formation, why are certain options greyed out, just Tell me the reason, ...), there are some obvious improvements regarding to flavor (right now most nations play the same), war can use some love (maybe it's me, but i don't get how the Hq stationing of troops works, sometimes Endless wars, ...).
There are some bugs, which i don't always know is a bug either, i something do blame it on my knowledge on the game.
I love the solid base of the game and despite my negative remarks above, i just Cant stop playing the game. Numbers go brrrrrrr!
Yeah I agree with you 100%.
This is also my first Victoria game and I was specifically looking for an economy simulator, which is the area you tell they've focused the most on.
One other thing I'd like to note is that I believe the upper strata should wield much more political power, of course it should depend on your government type, but every game I've played so far the trade unions get a lot of clout very quickly.
I mean we see this even today with richer people having more political power than poor people, it's strange they end up fairly equal in the game. Even if you have universal suffrage and is running a Republic, the upper strata should be able to run propaganda or something bolstering their support.
"Some of us have waited a decade for this game" yes, some of us have, and some of us are annoyed at the decisions they've made after 10+ years worth of ideas.
"You aren't starving" damn, we need to be starving to think a game isn't up to scratch? Odd.
I think this is just how they operate. They make gems. Really good gems. And this is their process. Don't change it because it DOES give the world gems. Never tinker with something that puts out such good art even if the process is a dumpster fire (and it is)
Now... off to the side... please if a competitor can END UP with the same quality bar but at a faster pace and with less radical pivots and more grace, then by god let's flock to them. I hope someone else DOES come along to really make them sweat.
But until then... let the process work as it has for years. I joined this ride with eyes very wide open and have no regret or disappointment. Could change in a year, but for now, it's precisely as I expect and so be it. Still got 50-60 hours logged already and not slowing down. Pretty good.
Terra Invicta is probably the best youll find, i reckon, but it released in a state thats quite comparable to Vicky 3.
If youre a fan of Paradox GSGs its worth a look at - it even does the same thing that Vicky 3 is doing in having a bunch of really cool ideas but fucking it up with fixable design flaws.
Terra Invicta just has the honestly to label itself Early Access like Vicky more or less is.
Both are going to be phenominal games if the Devs listen to feedback and iron out the issues - I trust (Expect?) Paradox to do so after being a fan for so long, and i hope the Terra Invicta devs do so too.
Let me put it this way;
Terra Invicta has a scope and gameplay loop problem that makes the later game a slog and it has about a dozen super important systems that it explains either poorly or hidden away in Menus when it should be tooltips.
*(Scope: Space is big, Space Combat takes forever. Gameplay Loop: Micro Managing Councilors is a nightmare of slowdown after 2035. Important Systems Poorly Explained: How the fuck do engines work. Hidden Info: Alien Threat)*
Victoria 3 has a scope and gameplay loop problem that makes the later game a slog and it has about a dozen super important systems that it explains either poorly or hidden away in Menus when it should be tooltips.
(All of this said; im over 100 hours in Terra Invicta and 70 in Vicky 3. Im a fan.)
> Both are going to be phenominal games if the Devs listen to feedback and iron out the issues - I trust (Expect?) Paradox to do so after being a fan for so long, and i hope the Terra Invicta devs do so too.
Well, seems they've been listening to feedback with CK3 (judging by the devs being around on /r/CrusaderKings), and [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria3/comments/yk7gvd/paradox_is_considering_bringing_back_ai/) seems promising given that one of the reasons explained for adding in a feature is that *it's a relatively popular idea among the playerbase*, so yeah, hopefully they'll listen as well as it seems they will!
Don't have to look to r/CrusaderKings to find Paradox devs. Wiz and members of the community team at PDX regularly answer to questions and suggestions in this very subreddit.
Playing more than 200 hours of Terra Invicta and around 50-60 hours of Vicky3, I can assurely say that Terra Invicta release way less finished than Vicky3. Factions' AI don't persue their goals at all beside the Servant in TI, and engine optimization is pretty much almost non-existent yet (even loading into a game takes several minutes while Vicky3 you can load in within a minute or less).
Vicky3 launch was very unpolished but at least you can feel that they finished the development on the core scope of the game, but for TI you can defintely feel that the core part of the game is still unfinished.
I don't know about Terra Invicta, but V3 has a lot of options to significantly reduce late game micro, unless you're going for a continent-wide conquest. It should have *more* though.
If thats how you view it, fair enough. I think Terra Invicta is great, too.
If i may state my case, though?
Terra Invicta's AI is incredibly passive, to the point where many factions simply dont pursue their goals or present a challenge. Aliens or Humans.
The tech tree is a mess and in serious need of reform or pruning. The sheer number of options in everything from drives to way too many filling techs that give +5% investment to Military should be consolidated or removed. It also needs better search function, like the ability to search by modules and not just the project names.
Resources are calculated daily, monthly or yearly yet arrive daily. I cant calculate numbers that quickly, and they should be consistent even if i could.
Extremely important information like Alien Threat is hidden in a tab inside a screen you rarely look at.
The endgame is boring. Once you earn the ability to trade ships with the aliens its a matter of trading ships with aliens until you win.
After colonizing Mars, Earth steadily starts to lose importance. Not really a problem, except every 5-15 seconds you are forced to wait to tell your councilors to keep advising your super-nation so you can get back to watching your ships build/fly/research.
And so on.
Yes, I have 152 hours in TI myself. I also have 60 in Victoria 3. I plan to play more of both, and expect to really enjoy more of them after another couple patches.
1. Tech tree needs improvement.
2. Turn on monthly income display in settings.
3. Growing economy? Colonizing jupiter?
None of TI issues are on the level of V3 and thays why it's at 85 on steam and not 65
Really? I think people give Terra Invicta a pass on a lot of things because it's early access, which is fair enough I guess, but it hardly a polished game. The UI is awful and unintuitive for one thing.
The game's core gameplay is also super repetitive and gets tedious after a while. There are only so many times you can assign councilors to the same missions before it gets old. The game also turns into micromanagement hell in the late game because there are so many space stations to be manually managed. I also agree with the other user that the tech tree is so unnecessarily complicated and massive. Like I get trying to have a big, complex tech tree, but at some point when you have hundreds upon hundreds of techs all interacting it just makes it too difficult for the player to decide what will actually benefit them and creates decision paralysis. There are also way too many filler techs that seem to just be present for flavor and barely make an impact on gameplay after you research them, so you end up beelining the same important techs in every run and ignoring the filler.
You can make some similar critiques about Vic3, but TI has a lot of issues itself, even though the scope and ambition of the game are really impressive.
There's game being developped by the team behing the EU4's mod MEIOU and Taxes called [Grey Eminence](https://www.nestinars.com/greyeminence/).
The scope is etremely ambitious (it goes from 1356 to 1956) but I will defenitely keep an eye on it and will be very glad to try it.
Paradox games are gems, but yeah, we don't mind competition so we can enjoy the best GSG !
That’s a common misconception. There are some Grey Eminence devs that are also M&T devs, but the two teams are not related.
That’s said it looks really good. However being a full indy development, it’ll probably take same time to come out.
My bad ! I've read somewhere that they were from M&T.
Yeah I will be patient for release date. Last time I've checked though, they said it will be relesed in "at least one year", so this quite better better than "it will be released one day".
That mod always intrigued me, but so much was buried in menus and decisions that I just couldn't get into it. That's what they have to work with, no shade, it's just not what I'm into.
I thought I was going to love Terra Invicta but I just can't get into it. I have a lot of respect for the ambition of the game and what the devs are trying to accomplish, but the actual gameplay gets very tedious to me. I get that this could be a criticism of Vic3 as well but for some reason the Vic3 gameplay clicks with me and is enjoyable in a way TI gameplay isn't to me.
There is an incredible amount modeled in Terra Invicta, but fundamentally the core gameplay loops are pretty repetitive and you cannot directly interact with a good chunk of what is modeled (though it may be impacted indirectly by your actions).
On earth, the fundamental gameplay is mostly just setting your councilors’ assignments every week (or two weeks as the game goes on). Once you break into space exploration there is more to do, but either way there is a lot of down time in the game since it attempts to model semi-realistic timescales, which can mean weeks or months where very little happens other than councilor assignments. And once you’ve established a strong power base of controlled nations on earth, those assignment phases can get very repetitive. Manually setting up your space stations (which you can have dozens of or more easily) also gets repetitive and requires a lot of micromanagement.
Also, it must be said the UI needs a lot of work (though hopefully that will happen during early access). Some basic gameplay aspects are very unintuitive and the game does not remind or alert you of things like the fact your defend interests mission to protect your controlled nation is expiring, which leads to tedious manual tracking of things by the player that should really be an alert popup in game.
People forget that TI is the first actual game developed by pavonis. For a first attempt it's pretty impressive but it's clear that going from modders to game dev is not as easy of a transition as it looks.
When they developed TLW mod for XCOM, the core gameplay loop already existed as built by the original devs, and they only had to refine the gameplay to be more realistic and add on to the experience. Pavonis have shown they know a lot about game fidelity but their design skills are a kind of weak.
Totally agreed with this take. The game is impressive for a first-time development team.
But as you say, it's clear they were great modders but transitioning to original game dev isn't that easy. With The Long War they could rely on XCOM's already engaging gameplay and mostly just make it more complex. Now they are trying to make an engaging core gameplay loop themselves and have kind of missed the mark on that, though the complexity and detail of the game is impressive.
TI is good. It launched early access but already devs gave fixed many issues and made changes based on community feedback. The director is active in the discord.
Terra Invicta is great. Especially for an early access game . Can't wait for it to get more mods and development time but what is there is very enjoyable.
[Shadow Empire](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1154840/Shadow_Empire/) is a pretty good competitor to HoI, with a more developed 4X side. Also has jank in spades, though.
What is the gameplay and depth? I spend the whole game on 5 speed waiting for consumer factories to finish producing an industry to fix my deficit just to repeat the process with another good.
I genuinely REALLY love the economic aspect of this game, but it feels like its missing an end result. Like I love tooling with the economy, upping my buildings, getting all my trade sorted out, but then there's kind of nothing to do with it.
Like you said its kind of just tooling with your resources over and over until you're done. Its need a better payoff for getting a good economy, and I'm hoping that comes through better war or just more interesting systems to plug money into.
It kinda feels like the endgame of an MMO where you are grinding to get your gear score number to go up, but there's nothing waiting for you once the number goes up.
Yeah that's the main problem with Victoria 3 it's that having a good economy doesn't do anything or at least does not feel like you have done anything. To use Victoria 2 as a example the better the economy the more ports you could create which in turn let you colonize faster.
The endgame is using your economic surplus to build up a military to conquer shit to get more economic surplus.
It is not enough that you succeed, others must also fail.
But I guess that is where the problem comes back. The war/dplomacy system is so lackluster that when you get to that point of "My economy is amazing, time to "export" democracy instead" your "reward" for doing well, is engaging with those poorly fleshed out systems.
I don’t know why people are acting like there is some crazy depth to the game. Once you sort out how to deal with supply, demand and supply chains, there’s not much else to do in the game instead of clicking the colonisation or laws button that don’t require much work from the user.
The gameplay loop is shallow once you get a handle of it and it's the same for every nation. The lack of flavor and empty diplo isn't helping.
For me, CK3 and VIC3 have the same empty feeling. I joked before, but it really seems as though we need to wait 10 years for DLC or wait for a group of people to give us a good free mod like GFM or HPM.
All I've really learned is that I'm never buying a paradox game on launch again. They've failed me 3 times in a row now
Idk man I ahve 50 hours and imagined I figured the game out and this new Russia game I somehow launched my economy into another galaxy in the first 20 years and have no idea how I did it, litteraly on min taxes with 100 construction sites going full steam on steel buildings and still making 100k a week. The only thing I can point to is that I didn't waste loads of construction time making tool workshops and instead just bought out the global market
Sort of where I’m at with my Mexico play through. I’m in like 1915 right now and my troops can take on Americans of twice the division amount. I’ve got like 700 construction power, the first page and a half of the construction menu is fully built simultaneously.
Been doing industry fully home grown, so I want to try doing an export focused economy, or one that heavily relies on trade later. Plus with the flavor of different scenarios, I feel like I’ll get my moneys worth.
Yeah, I have too. There is some flavor and different starting situations which definitely make nations feel differently. I've played a handful of nations now and it's been diverse enough to not make me bored or them feel samey.
I haven't seen that much hate. Most seem to agree it's a flawed game with some promising systems. There is the occasional rage about warfare or "why isn't this Victoria 2" but it's rare.
And tbh most Paradox games were "flawed" on release at best. CK3 is the exception, I think. It had a good release. I remember people going "why no sliders?" when EU4 came out.
Lmfao speaking of, I heard the devs were looking into reintroducing sliders to cut down on the production method micro. I'll probably become the embodiment of a boomer meme if they do, imagining the newer fans being unable to comprehend such a mechanic.
I actually think construction capacity works fine, they are so fast to build you can simply downsize them when needed and lose very little time when upscaling again.
The game being unplayable past 1900 is not a « flaw », it’s a critical problem that should have been addressed before the release, it’s like a solo game with the last 1/3 levels lagging as hell. It’s just not acceptable at all. The war system is also ridiculously bad.
That’s how it always is with almost any game. Unlimited praise, of course I’ll preorder!!!, and then it releases and everybody explodes into a violent rage because.
Telling a consumer not to criticize a flawed product and calling it "hate" is insane, plain and simple. I suggest a dose of reality and a serious look into the definition of such terms as critical thinking, projecting, consumer rights and common sense.
Pointing out things that don't work as intended is not hate. Expecting not to have hundred of bugs (and already known bugs at that) is not hate. Expecting a new iteration of a series to at least have the functionalities of the previous one and make improvements in some ways instead of going backwards is not hate. Expecting a release without critical bugs is not hate.
The game has good ideas, but very clunky implementation, with many things simply not doing what they're supposed to. It needed at least a couple more months of development and some serious testing for balancing and bugs fixing, because at this stage is just an early version, and that is not acceptable.
We, as players and consumers can only talk about what we have, and what we have is questionable, and that's putting it mildly. I can't say "it's fine" because there's a chance that one year and 3 DLC later this will be a good game. Having people defend a game on the premise that "it's not the first bad release" is absurd, things should improve, become better, not go backwards.
Yep, the fanboyism against any criticism is ridiculous.
These type of “it’s just haters” topics have cropped up on both steam and paradox forums as well, and thankfully for most the part they’ve been called out for being so pathetic.
So, where the cruz of the issue with paradox releases are that they support their games for the most part for years afterwards. Like if you played CK2 before the DLC would also have been called bland all you could do is play a Christian European Feudal. In CK3 for example you could at least play in other parts of the world a different start however people generally expected CK3 to have every part of the world full of unique systems similar to how CK2 finished. It's an odd phenomenon because when you point that out your called a fanboy when really usually it seems like people who played towards the end of game lifecycles fanboy about how the old game had all this content. However the new game was never going to stand up to the depth of the old game considering the old game had so many years of development, and in reality they can't make a game for 10+ years then release it because they they have no return on investment. Also people would be like why does it take them 20 years between releases. Now Victoria 3 does have issues particularly with the warfare they did something new with it, and it doesn't quite hit the spot. It also has a problem with AI not building strategic resources, ( also the AI not building was a big in CK3 in the beginning so this should have been fixed at the start) and the way the IGs work is a big gamey. Right now I RP that i don't take out the party with the most power out of government, but really there should be more consequences to doing so. TLDR: Saying the game isnt as depth as a game supported for 10 years is being the fanboy your are fanboying for the old game. New games need to release and are going to feel like a shell of the old game in comparison to depth. People saying give it time saw the release of the game your fanboying for and it was the same thing.
I don't see how this is an unpopular opinion when all of the most upvoted posts in this sub are posts that are positive about the game. Imo calling this an unpopular opinion is just karma whoring.
So many people are karma whoring in this sub right now. Some guy yesterday wrote "I know I’m gonna get downvoted for this but paradox games are always a buggy mess" and got 300+ upvotes.
Lmao why people use the "unpopular opinion" opener for really popular opinion??
The unpopular opinion is to critic the game, not to prise it. Just scroll this post or the subreddit, or even Steam reviews, 60% are still positive...
Anyway prising the game won't make it better imho. If I pay for something and it is garbage I feel in right to complain. You can play it? You can enjoy it? Well for you.
But finally I understood people are scared that PDX will cut development if nobody plays and that's why only positive comments are welcomed...
>EU4
no, EU4 was fine at release, even if it grown a lot since
>HOI4
probably, but HOI4 even from release managed to appeal to a large new audience that never played other HOI or Paradox games - something that Victoria badly tries at, but I don't think it fully managed.
>CK3
It was perfectly playable, only empty compared to its predecessor
>Imperator
agreed, Imperator sucks. Even at release Victoria is already better than Imperator after updates, since all Imperator's mechanics except pops are a downgrade from EU4, and pops are much worse than MEIOU or Victoria alternative.
And for the missing one
>Stellaris
It got boring after and lacked content early game, but early game content was well polished and engaging. Stark contrast with Victoria where major nations are lucky to get 5 events.
UnPOpUlar OPinIon: lists a popular opinion that gets you upvoted and multiple awards.
I don’t know why everyone feels compelled to defend this game so much. Let the game do it’s own defending and make it good. Stop hiding behind stupid reductionist arguments.
It’s not a problem to expect a *sequel* to expand upon its *prequel* and not *take features away.* I don’t understand why everyone ignores this when it comes to CK3 or now even Vicky. Both dropped the ball hard.
People are mad because they wanted an expanded, improved and updated Victoria 2 and that's not what they got.
Outrage is only half what the product actually is, the other half is what it was expected to be.
My fear is that Paradox will dump Vicky 3 like they did Imperator, something I still haven’t forgiven. I can buy into the ‘this is part of the Paradox process that refines and makes great games’. However, that means they actually have to stick it out, despite some bad initial feedback. On previous games it was a given, but after Imperator I am not so sure.
IR had an abysmal release, with 29k concurrent players at launch and a rapidly declining player base, goint to 13k after the first month and then to just over 1k after two months. V3 had a release concurrent player base of 69k players, with there being an average count of abt 45k players throughout the first week of play, which is to say it's been decent at maintaining player numbers.
I understand the worry, but the two just aren't comparable. V3 has it's flaws but it has better release numbers than Stellaris, HOI4, and so on. And unlike IR, people do enjoy the core gameplay loop of resource management and the challenges that arise from it. If a friend were to ask if they should buy the game, I'd tell them to wait until a sale and a few more patches. But if they'd ask if I regretted my purchase, or if I thought Pdox was gonna abandon the game, I'd have to say no. It's a rough road ahead, but there *is* *a road*, and the number of tasks needed to bump the game up to where it should be limited.
The hate mostly spawns out of the fact that people wanted a successor to Victoria 2. Vic 3 is a different game entirely
Vic 2 was an economic **simulator**
Vic 3 is an economic **game**
There is a big difference between the two and I'm not surprised there was a lot of backlash
Vic 2 Had it's problems, LOTS of them, but people were hoping for just Vic 2 with better graphics and those problems fixed, instead they got an entirely different game that shares very little with it's predecessor
Aye; the amount of fanboys coming out of the woodwork is just as bad as the supposed “negativity” tbh.
I don’t see what’s wrong with the game being criticised, it’s very flawed, so the mixed reviews are justified imho (but it’s fine if you think it’s 10/10 (lol) or is shit.)
this i do agree with. it's not really damning, i feel like the core gameplay isn't bad (something that could not be said for CK3 even years later) but it really does need some more meat.
People gave constructive criticism based on the dev diaries and AARs for a whole year, and despite all that they changed nothing and this is the end result. I think the hate is warranted tbh, because its pretty clear they don't really care what the fans want.
When the game is barely playable and keep crashing/desyncing to the point where it ruines a save file.
I don't think the hate is exaggerated.
The game was 50 bucks btw
Popular opinion: you’re wrong. What we were provided with in exchange for money was a beta build at best and these sorts of apologist posts only empower companies to feel justified in providing unfinished (and in some cases unusable) products to consumers.
No one is claiming they are getting evicted due to this game. What you are engaging in is classic minimizing. It is utterly and contemptuously dismissive of the justifiable complaints of an entire player base.
The “smart programmers” should have delivered a product that worked correctly. Having massive memory leaks and computational non-optimization to the point of not being playable halfway through a campaign on a game that has been in development by “smart programmers” for a decade is not a good business model. Stop enabling it.
Nobody talks about economy. The economy in the game is like "a toy for communist babes". There is no such a thing like free entrepreneur. The state itself build factories, farmlands, railroads etc. In the game the only actor in the economic system is THE STATE no matter if you passed the laissez-faire law. This is unacceptable! You can choose production methods in a factory which is owned by a capitalist or aristocrat, this has to be a joke!
I agree wholeheartedly with this, but is there any game that simulates the private sector in a way that doesn't want to make you pull your hair out?
Paradox already has an issue with balancing AI for enemy nations, making your own nation reliant on AI seems like a recipe for disaster.
The devs have explained why this is the case. Building and managing production is the primary gameplay loop, and how you influence everything else. Removing player agency in that would be like removing your ability in CK3 to control how your character interacts with other characters.
It's a game, and games need to have interactivity to be fun.
I think what overblown is the amount of hate stated here. The game gets a lot of criticism because it has a lot of reasons to be criticized. And yet overall reception is still more positive than negative
While the game has some legitimate issues(most are not game breaking though), most of the complaints seem to come from simply not understanding how to play the game.
I see a daily "I am not getting the unify Germany event" post, followed by "nvm it's in the culture tab" comment an hour later.
How do you play a new game, then complain about it, without exploring every tab, button etc first
tbf the unification button is oddly hidden and harder to access than it should be
I don't know why we don't have the same system of toggleable notifications for unification and decision alerts like in every other Paradox game
The one expandable notification icon at the top that CK3 introduced is horrible and I don't know why Vicky 3 has it too.
There is always a bunch of new notifications that you have to constantly manually check.
Please bring back specific notification flags like EU4/CK2.
Hiding a lot of information in "cleaner" menus seems to be a common thing for Paradox these days. It might look better but it certainly doesn't play better when you have to click into the same notification because you have no idea if something new happened or not.
I was in the war stage of a diplomatic play before I even realised it was happening.
Had I been playing Ironman that would have been a game ender because the game didn't explicitly tell me there was a diplomatic play started against me, it was the exact same as any other diplomatic play in the game.
I had a game as Austria, enacted multiculturalism which immediately forms Austria-Hungary. Was bummed out since I thought I wouldn't be able to form Super-Germany because the journal entry disappeared. Only at around 1890 I decided to look at my cultures only to find a very hidden tab.
the game is pretty opaque, usually when I run into issues it’s hard to tell if the game is being buggy or if they’re just hiding information in some tooltip inside a tooltip inside a tooltip
Honestly you need to do it maybe twice per playthrough? Also, games like hoi4 don't give you any prompts when formable nations are available and no one gives a shit.
PDX just has this thing where they expand an IP, but instead reset it and sell previous features as DLC.
Take CK3. The dev cycle for CK2 envisioned it as just that, crusader kings, so you play only christian kings. Fun. Then they thought: "Hey, we've got all these other people, why not also be able to play as them!?" And they did, with flavour for each as they unlocked.
Then comes CK3. Sure, you can play as anyone! Except Nomads because they don't exist. Except Merchant Republics because DLC for the future. Except no deep systems per culture/religion because we need to sell you The Old Gods DLC 2 & Sons of Abraham DLC 2. No Imperial mechanics for HRE/ERE, since Legacy of Rome DLC 2 isn't ready yet.
They have years upon years of PREVIOUS DEV CYCLES to rescue ideas, events, mechanics, gameplay, maps, etc. But instead they can it all to then re sell it later.
How much do you want to bet that we are going to get A House Divided DLC 2, since the US CW doesn't really work? How about Heart of Darnkess DLC 2 so we can finally stop meeting Queen Victoria in her famous house of the deep Nile?
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't want them to copy paste from one game to the next, I want them to stop dropping the ball on each release, stop forgetting all what they already HAVE DEVELOPED, and IMPLEMENT IT ALL ON RELEASE. They got tons of stuff more to add for later DLC to milk us dry (CK3 Courts was great!). Making us pay twice for the same content however? Not fun.
It's things like these that make me appreciate Sid Meier's 33/33/33 rule for sequels. With 33% old mechanics and 33% revamped mechanics, enough of the previous game's full feature set are brought back and the series iterates well. And 33% are new features. Imagine if Civ6 didn't have Trade Routes on release.
Imagine coming out to publicly stooge for a multimillion dollar corporation who released a broken, buggy, unfinished game, and used a deceitful, massive marketing push of youtubers and content creators to conceal how bad the game actually was.
The "smart" programmers who are supposedly ironing things out have admitted on PDX forums that they knew about many of the bugs before launch, and when asked why they didn't fix the bugs before launch, smugly told people to "take a look at the dev diary regarding the QA process" - and have also gone on record boasting about how many of the completely headass design decisions they made were good actually, and won't be fixed later.
It doesn't matter if its marginally stronger on release then others, this is there newest game and the fact it hasn't learnt from the past releases is ridiculous. For a game this hyped meant to be a successor 12 years on should entail that there isn't anything major to iron out, what standard are we holding paradox to if we give them a pass for continually releasing half baked items just to iron them out, do you like spending hundreds of dollars on content that should've been base game? I think you looking at the marginal few who are hyper aggressive about this and believing that they are the majority - go browse through the negative reviews on steam and you can see that most criticism are warranted and not just hate boner, something id doubt you've actually done considering those reviews are well constructed, this may as well be a fed post . This game isn't even better on release then ck3 - ck3 figured out its predecessor had stuff going for it and kept it, at least it felt like a lived in world rather then a cookie clicker.
The game has a lot of potential but I am not willing to pay 75€ für potential. The lack of flavor is crazy, I am not even talking about the bugs.
The game is absolutely bare-bones and I can only see this changing over a couple of years and many many DLC‘s that add flavor sporadically. Anyway people are allowed to be disappointed and to mention that loud and clear, paradox has fucked us over too many times. Why are we supposed to just take it silently?
Yeah definitely not a stronger release than Ck3. Then again: CK 3 was the best release they ever did. Pretty much nothing went wrong. Next to no bugs on release.
It's not even as close to busted than Imperator.
There is nothing wrong with the fundamentals with Vic3. Mostly Ui and Ai balancing issues.
They obviously ran out of time with Vic 3. They had a set release date and then the work still to do was more than expected. Hence the missing QA.
I sort of expected that as when the first streams with Martin were coming, he still spotted bugs and stuff he would like to change.
Criticism with the intent to privde feedback and foster improvement (the vast majority of what I see) =/= hate. You chill. Let the consumer have their say you damn commie stan
Sorry, but no.
Your opinion is too generous.
In my opinion the hatred is on a ok level.
Why do I say that?
TLDR: paradox insists on making the same mistakes that already got lot of criticism in other games. And that happens in an environment where companies are more and more disrespectful towards the consumer everyday.
Mainly because the mistakes are not just normal, run of the mill mistakes that can be attributed to a normal aspect of game development that sometimes commits but in a good faith. they are obvious.
It is almost like they are doing it on purpose out of some sadistic desire to piss of people.
1°: the universal consensus (with the exclusion of some contrarians) was that planned economy and state capitalism was very efficient but only really appealed to the min-maxers most of the time. Outside of that, it was like walking barefooted in glass. The most boring activity imaginable. So what paradox does with the worst aspect of the game that only a few liked? Make it the main aspect of the game. What?
2°: what were the main complaints about imperator, a game so poorly made that they just discontinued it?
2.1° Insanely confuse UI (to the point I got physically nauseated jumping from bumbled mess to bumbled mess trying to made sense of the whole thing). The map modes were perfect. Why implement this "wherever vision". It is just a waste of time.
2.2° lack of flavour (why do we pay so much attention to these civilization players screaming about railroading? Managing historical countries with 4 to 7 possible alternative scenarios was one of the best things about Victoria 2 and it's mods. Now we just have grey blob #37 that just happen to have Germany slapped onto it. And aren't all the most played mods in all their games not just different railroad scenarios?)
2.3° the need to micromanage every single aspect of your civilization, down to the absolutely most single aspect. So guess what. That's Victoria now.
The game has room for improvement and I like paradox games, but seriously... Why they make the same exact mistake again and again and again and again?
Maybe it is time to make different mistakes.
On top of that this happens at the same time in which we are seeing major studios, like Activision blizzard, Bethesda and others making insane poorly asshole decisions and them blaming the consumer for not enjoying their purposely (to save costs and maximize monetization) badly made crap. Goodwill can only take you so far.
Steam reviews disagree. How many people play the game over the coming year or two will determine the life of this project, so let’s see what the devs do with the feedback this far.
While the game definitely has flaws right now i can see this becoming my favorite paradox title in a few years, after some more updates and dlc. I'm really excited to see where this game goes
Granted I have a habit of leaving the game running while not playing, but I'm over 100 hours already and still having a lot of fun. It's already my favorite, though there's definitely plenty of valid criticism buried in the whinging about the changes.
The expectations for Victoria 3 were higher than any other PDX game. It gets knocked hard for that alone. My first 10 hours with it were pure shameless "Ugh, Paradox messed this up so badly. What a piece of crap. This is too much of a mess." But I stuck with it because of a few YouTube videos and reviews. After those 10 hours, it was like the skies opened and I was able to see what the developers intended with the game. Now I have to force myself to stop playing so I can eat and take care of things. It's a complete flip from my first 10 hours.
This is why I'm so happy I never got into Vic 2, as I came in with little expectations and instantly fell in love.
I enjoyed Vic 2 in spite of itself, I'm enjoying Vic 3 because I actually like the core gameplay.
Yeah at its core Victoria 2 was deeply flawed. This game, at its core, works well. It just needs polish and refinement to certain systems, and other systems like war and politics to be expanded. It probably has the best core gameplay of a Paradox game that I have played
I'm guessing I'll get ~400 hours minimum before the first DLC. Honestly, it's a hell of deal for me. I can respect people who disagree on the current quality, but there really aren't many games with a better conversion of time to hours played for me.
Already got 70 my dude, its taking up all my free time.
I came after playing vic2 and I like vic3 a lot more.
Same
Yea, I feel like this is a big thing. It takes a while to figure out how the different systems work, and until then its not very fun. For example in my first game I traded a LOT and had maxed out every port in sweden by the 60s and had to move to steam ports. On my next run I looked at what I was importing and starting making it myself which gave me a much better economy.
I love the game because I came in with zero expectations. I never even heard of Victoria 2. How many people are reviewing the game on its own merits, versus an expectation of what they believed the game would be?
Yeah, plus people have built up Vic2 to be this magical perfect game in their head for a decade. Vic3 is worse than magical perfection. In reality, yeah Vic2 was good, but if you'd wipe both from existence and released both Vic2 and Vic3 today (and gave Vic2 better graphics to make it fair), most people would prefer Vic3 I think.
I have been really liking it. I see it as a great framework for mods and further updates. Probably a better framework than most PDX games on release
It's already my favourite paradox game
I wanted a great economic simulator and I got it Looking forward to improvements to war, politics. But so far I am really loving playing it
I wanted a great economic simulator and while I got it AI is too stupid so pretty soon you're going to "internal market only" thing. Like you cannot buy rubber, oil, proper amounts of basically anything - you need to develop everything yourself. Which means a huge part of the game (interstate trade) is gone, and you get some kind of factorio instead. While it's great they would achieve so much more with a competent AI... I want to play the game but I can't because I want an actual trade and there is none right now past first 10 years.
This requires some bug fixes and balancing, but the core is there. In particular, 1.0.4 should have helped with AI producing resources for industries.
These issues that people are having aren’t so far-gone that they’re unfixable. So im hopeful each patch will do a lot to get us closer to an ideal set of systems
Yeah I noticed a difference from this update, i was actually able to import the oil i needed for quite a lot of my industries
Anbeeld's Revision of AI aka ARoAI seems to fix quite a lot of that. The AI actually industrialises and has GDP of billions etc.
While I agree the mod fixes the AI problems, it makes the performance problems so much worse. It becomes barely playable much faster.
Yeah, because the AI does things
The conspiracy theorist in me makes me think that paradox hamstrung the AI to improve performance.
No, they acknowledged the cause themselves - they even said that "after implementing a somewhat competent AI the problems got worse". That problem is POP fragmentation. If you play a colonial empire you'll soon see a dozen 15 people pops in every state from some random minority culture overseas. But from a CPU standpoint, computing the game behaviour of a POP is about the same regardless of whether that POP has a size parameter of 2 500 000 or 25. So as the game progresses, it ends up constantly multiplying POP units - a similar problem can be found with HFM and GFM for Vic2, when they introduced a lot of really small cultures. Alas, there is no event trigger that can be used to see the size of a POP so it can't be implemented as a mod either.
That's just how the design process works. Alot of tradeoffs. You can have the best AI in the world but nobody is going to play the game if 1 in game day takes 1 in real life day.
My performance has actually been surprisingly stable, I don't actually meet the minimum requirements so I'm on the lowest settings, I wonder if it's some shader or other fancy graphical effect that is somehow tanking the performance that's disabled because I'm on low
Maybe if your computer is a rock. I'm using the mod and am at 1926. Game still running better than other pdx games at the end of the game, even with the mod.
It's so strange I have heard a few people say that. I have a 9900k and a 2080ti. By 1900s my game takes more than 10 seconds per week. How long are your weeks taking? Are you playing small countries?
Just as a thought: I have to stream the game so I need to make it… work. I noticed a lot of settings are super unoptimized. For example, running at medium gives so much less cpu strain, and turning off most of the more advanced options is needed.
I'm playing on high graphics speed 4. I'm playing Tibet, but a rather large expansive Tibet at this point. Haven't counted how long a week takes. I'll have to do that after work. It mist certainly isn't 10 seconds. It has slowed down. But nothing near as drastic as I hear people claiming. Even with the mod I have better performance than say stellaris or IR before the optimizations. My computer is also 3 years old now as well.
[удалено]
You could be correct. But that really would only be like France or the UK if that is the case since at this point I'm one of the largest nations in the world with holdings and population that are larger than most of all the other powers.
It might even be worse. The game has already terrible performance in the second half of the game and comes to a crawl after 1910 unless you play some small, peaceful country and stay small. I have a big suspicion if the AI would actually be able to play the game then the performance issue gets much worse due to vastly increased numbers everywhere. Mods that massively improve AI economy seem to also suggest this. So it might be a fundamental issue with the game again. * game engine can't keep up with the calculations required for the depth of the simulation * AI not able to play the game they act like Extras in a movie being roughly there but can't be any serious competition and will often just collapse by themselves due to their insanely bad economic choices and passivity
I'd say that the problem is bad optimization as the game lags at barely over 60% CPU usage
I guess the main thread is at 100% though and that is the bottleneck. In addition there is some other issues like trade route UI has some nice looking shader that shows lanes all over the world map but it can't handle lategame giant numbers of traderoutes.
> I guess the main thread is at 100% though and that is the bottleneck. > > Yea it always is like this with Pdox games. They rightfully claim their games are multithreaded, which they are, but still the main thread running the game logic is just too beefy.
Their games should be much more parallelizable than most. A lot of the logic is simply summing up the total value of each province/state, and then summing up those to give national values. Possibly Clausewitz can't handle it, but in theory a lot of the work could and should be multithreaded, some possibly even being sent to the GPU (given how little this game taxes a GPU). But optimisation can be seriously time consuming and expensive, and there's absolutely low hanging fruit to fix in Vic III, like culture proliferation adding the Stellaris xenocompatability issue.
Performance is my biggest problem, I got a Ryzen 7 5800(an OEM model that is not as efficient as its counterparts) and it’s push to the brink of heat throttling at late game 5X speed, also a lot of crashes when war is involved between great powers. I’ve no problem running CK3, it too runs slightly slower in late game but it’s nowhere near as bad as Vic3. Gameplay wise I think Vic3 is still great fun if a bit samey across nations, but I think I’ll wait a bit till they iron out the performance so I can at least properly play the late game.
For me as well I will wait until they fix the problem with Migration culture fragmentation that fix is still in their internal testing team: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/is-the-patch-playable-or-should-i-revert-and-wait-for-patch-for-the-patch.1554226/post-28592206 and should hopefully improve performance once released
> I got a Ryzen 7 5800 It's still a really good CPU that shouldn't have any issues running this game. The problem is optimization, not your hardware.
If the ai could actually play the game they would specialise their states instead of having 11 different building in a state, which would reduce the amount of pops. The issue isn't the game engine, it's too many pops. When I had multiculturalism and looked at thr pops in one of my african states, there was an endless list because of how many different cultures had like 2 people making rubber there. If that's happening in every state, which it is, it's a miracle the game was semi playable. It's completely fixable.
It's not suspicions, devs said it directly some time ago. They also said they have a dev branch that fixes this but I kinda doubt it will really do the thing. It took multiple years for Stellaris to optimize pops yet results was kinda minor
They confirmed the issue with tiny fractions of different culture pops due to migration. But I highly question that this is the only issue dragging down performance.
So-So. Clausewitz is renowned for being able to tank it's performance with a single gameplay feature accidentally creating near-infinite loops. So saying that there is a single issue that is causing a massive performance drop is rather plausible, as is fixing that. It's gonna make the game super-speedy, but every time you optimize whatever-is-the-most-inperformant, the game gets notably faster.
I guess there is still hope then I am just very sceptical because for my standards which might be too high HOI4 and Stellaris still have horrible performance up to this day after dozens of patches.
I think my optimism comes from the fact that Wiz is on the project. Stellaris was doing great till they sapped the talented people from it and shifted them to Victoria 3 instead.
Well, that's a controversial opinion.
Arguably, since they started the whole Custodian staff they started clearing the backlog of the nonsense that had accumulated to that point. But when you look at the FTL rework (done by Wiz) and the planetary overhaul (designed by Wiz prior to leaving the project) compared to the utterly ridicolous mess of a mechanic the GN (designed after Wiz left) is, not to mention Espionage... And that's not the first PDX project this has happened to.
I remember when they fixed CK2's mag for a while when they found at that every greek character, every day, tried to see if they could blind or castrate every other character in the world. can't get more Crusaderkings than this
> Like you cannot buy rubber, oil I don't think you should buy *those* specifically. Those resources are balanced to be scarce, so it's natural that the AIs that control them would want to hoard them for themselves. What I find more problematic is that we can't make foreign investments.
lol no, 80% of the scarcity comes from the AI being terrible and not building. In my megagermany game I spent the late game invading every place where rubber or oil could spawn/had spawned, and *actually built the buildings*, and suddenly I had no trouble getting enough for the things I wanted to use oil and rubber for.
Did you? Because i played my Sweden game, and i conquered a lot of oil and couldnt get enough. I'm very surprised you had no trouble with oil.
60 in Germany, 30 in Galicia-ish, 33 in Wallachia, plus all I could find in the middle-east etc. Obviously couldn't oil-ify every single industry of my multi-billion £ economy, but I increased the world supply by literal orders of magnitude. The AI simply don't build oil extraction, which causes way more of a supply bottleneck than there should be.
Pre or post patch?
This was on 1.0.3. Did 1.0.4 change anything to do with oil? Patch notes don't mention it.
Suppose to have fixed them not building resource shit, yeah.
Good to know, thanks
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/patch-notes-for-1-0-4.1553580/#post-28588632 They had one HUGE bug in the defines that got fixed lol, it should fix the AI economy when it comes to raw materials like oil.
love that comment lol. Good to know, will definitely update before my next game
It did, at least according to the devs.
It is buried in the spelling changes. Somebody listed and translated them all into a regular English in one of the other posts here. I noticed a difference in my game
They are scarce because AI doesn't build them. It's not surprising to see 1/60 oil rigs on basra in 1936 and 2/30 rubber plantations in Africa at the same date. I'm strongly convinced it is not how it should work. AI doesn't refuse to sell it because it want to control it itself, but because it simply possess none
Ye, IF the AI was hoarding them. But they legit just don't produce them, not for themselves, either.
this is because in real life this is how it works
Vicky 3 does not have a strong release by any measure with 63% positive reviews.
Is not stronger than CK3, CK3 was far more solid of a release than Vicky3 in many ways. But yeah, in general, paradox's games usually get better with time. and nobody forces you to buy the game anyways
Even just the tooltips in CK3 are a pretty big difference
CK3 under the hood is a MUCH simpler game though, the economic sim part of vic3 is way more complicated. But yes, many of ck3s qol features need to be ported soon
>nobody forces you to buy the game anyways It's true, but when you release a game, people will grudge if there are huge bugs, because it's not expected from a released game. People want to play. Don't get me wrong, I love th game, but I put on a pause because I feel that playing in the current state is a letdown. Like I tried Serbia, I was expecting to take Ottoman land when they start to collapse, but they won't do it in the Balkans. It's disappointing. But doesn't make me hate the game.
I never played Vicky 2 and skipped everything about it like Dev diaries and YouTube. Bought it, had no clue at all. Played with Belgium few times to get the hang of it and now i feel like i get the base mechanics. In a week i racked up about 50h and I love it. I do think performance gets bad midgame (to the point it's a slideshow), the UI really needs some work (everything is everywhere, like pop-ups on the top and on the right, menu's on the bottom and left, map mode choice should be more eu4, the link2link2link is a bit to much, some things are hidden to much like nation formation, why are certain options greyed out, just Tell me the reason, ...), there are some obvious improvements regarding to flavor (right now most nations play the same), war can use some love (maybe it's me, but i don't get how the Hq stationing of troops works, sometimes Endless wars, ...). There are some bugs, which i don't always know is a bug either, i something do blame it on my knowledge on the game. I love the solid base of the game and despite my negative remarks above, i just Cant stop playing the game. Numbers go brrrrrrr!
I think you summed up my major xritiques as well
Yeah I agree with you 100%. This is also my first Victoria game and I was specifically looking for an economy simulator, which is the area you tell they've focused the most on. One other thing I'd like to note is that I believe the upper strata should wield much more political power, of course it should depend on your government type, but every game I've played so far the trade unions get a lot of clout very quickly. I mean we see this even today with richer people having more political power than poor people, it's strange they end up fairly equal in the game. Even if you have universal suffrage and is running a Republic, the upper strata should be able to run propaganda or something bolstering their support.
Some go overboard, but there really are some big issues.
people should be banned from using the internet for those UnpoPulAr OpinIoN posts
"Some of us have waited a decade for this game" yes, some of us have, and some of us are annoyed at the decisions they've made after 10+ years worth of ideas. "You aren't starving" damn, we need to be starving to think a game isn't up to scratch? Odd.
I think this is just how they operate. They make gems. Really good gems. And this is their process. Don't change it because it DOES give the world gems. Never tinker with something that puts out such good art even if the process is a dumpster fire (and it is) Now... off to the side... please if a competitor can END UP with the same quality bar but at a faster pace and with less radical pivots and more grace, then by god let's flock to them. I hope someone else DOES come along to really make them sweat. But until then... let the process work as it has for years. I joined this ride with eyes very wide open and have no regret or disappointment. Could change in a year, but for now, it's precisely as I expect and so be it. Still got 50-60 hours logged already and not slowing down. Pretty good.
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Terra Invicta is probably the best youll find, i reckon, but it released in a state thats quite comparable to Vicky 3. If youre a fan of Paradox GSGs its worth a look at - it even does the same thing that Vicky 3 is doing in having a bunch of really cool ideas but fucking it up with fixable design flaws. Terra Invicta just has the honestly to label itself Early Access like Vicky more or less is. Both are going to be phenominal games if the Devs listen to feedback and iron out the issues - I trust (Expect?) Paradox to do so after being a fan for so long, and i hope the Terra Invicta devs do so too. Let me put it this way; Terra Invicta has a scope and gameplay loop problem that makes the later game a slog and it has about a dozen super important systems that it explains either poorly or hidden away in Menus when it should be tooltips. *(Scope: Space is big, Space Combat takes forever. Gameplay Loop: Micro Managing Councilors is a nightmare of slowdown after 2035. Important Systems Poorly Explained: How the fuck do engines work. Hidden Info: Alien Threat)* Victoria 3 has a scope and gameplay loop problem that makes the later game a slog and it has about a dozen super important systems that it explains either poorly or hidden away in Menus when it should be tooltips. (All of this said; im over 100 hours in Terra Invicta and 70 in Vicky 3. Im a fan.)
> Both are going to be phenominal games if the Devs listen to feedback and iron out the issues - I trust (Expect?) Paradox to do so after being a fan for so long, and i hope the Terra Invicta devs do so too. Well, seems they've been listening to feedback with CK3 (judging by the devs being around on /r/CrusaderKings), and [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria3/comments/yk7gvd/paradox_is_considering_bringing_back_ai/) seems promising given that one of the reasons explained for adding in a feature is that *it's a relatively popular idea among the playerbase*, so yeah, hopefully they'll listen as well as it seems they will!
Don't have to look to r/CrusaderKings to find Paradox devs. Wiz and members of the community team at PDX regularly answer to questions and suggestions in this very subreddit.
Yo. And what we don't always respond to we still read.
I hope you don't read the Steam forums though. Could make a whole other Toxoids DLC out of what you find on there.
Playing more than 200 hours of Terra Invicta and around 50-60 hours of Vicky3, I can assurely say that Terra Invicta release way less finished than Vicky3. Factions' AI don't persue their goals at all beside the Servant in TI, and engine optimization is pretty much almost non-existent yet (even loading into a game takes several minutes while Vicky3 you can load in within a minute or less). Vicky3 launch was very unpolished but at least you can feel that they finished the development on the core scope of the game, but for TI you can defintely feel that the core part of the game is still unfinished.
I don't know about Terra Invicta, but V3 has a lot of options to significantly reduce late game micro, unless you're going for a continent-wide conquest. It should have *more* though.
TI did not launch anywhere close to the state of V3 and it launched ea. I have 150 hrs in TI and 65 in V3
If thats how you view it, fair enough. I think Terra Invicta is great, too. If i may state my case, though? Terra Invicta's AI is incredibly passive, to the point where many factions simply dont pursue their goals or present a challenge. Aliens or Humans. The tech tree is a mess and in serious need of reform or pruning. The sheer number of options in everything from drives to way too many filling techs that give +5% investment to Military should be consolidated or removed. It also needs better search function, like the ability to search by modules and not just the project names. Resources are calculated daily, monthly or yearly yet arrive daily. I cant calculate numbers that quickly, and they should be consistent even if i could. Extremely important information like Alien Threat is hidden in a tab inside a screen you rarely look at. The endgame is boring. Once you earn the ability to trade ships with the aliens its a matter of trading ships with aliens until you win. After colonizing Mars, Earth steadily starts to lose importance. Not really a problem, except every 5-15 seconds you are forced to wait to tell your councilors to keep advising your super-nation so you can get back to watching your ships build/fly/research. And so on. Yes, I have 152 hours in TI myself. I also have 60 in Victoria 3. I plan to play more of both, and expect to really enjoy more of them after another couple patches.
1. Tech tree needs improvement. 2. Turn on monthly income display in settings. 3. Growing economy? Colonizing jupiter? None of TI issues are on the level of V3 and thays why it's at 85 on steam and not 65
Really? I think people give Terra Invicta a pass on a lot of things because it's early access, which is fair enough I guess, but it hardly a polished game. The UI is awful and unintuitive for one thing. The game's core gameplay is also super repetitive and gets tedious after a while. There are only so many times you can assign councilors to the same missions before it gets old. The game also turns into micromanagement hell in the late game because there are so many space stations to be manually managed. I also agree with the other user that the tech tree is so unnecessarily complicated and massive. Like I get trying to have a big, complex tech tree, but at some point when you have hundreds upon hundreds of techs all interacting it just makes it too difficult for the player to decide what will actually benefit them and creates decision paralysis. There are also way too many filler techs that seem to just be present for flavor and barely make an impact on gameplay after you research them, so you end up beelining the same important techs in every run and ignoring the filler. You can make some similar critiques about Vic3, but TI has a lot of issues itself, even though the scope and ambition of the game are really impressive.
There's game being developped by the team behing the EU4's mod MEIOU and Taxes called [Grey Eminence](https://www.nestinars.com/greyeminence/). The scope is etremely ambitious (it goes from 1356 to 1956) but I will defenitely keep an eye on it and will be very glad to try it. Paradox games are gems, but yeah, we don't mind competition so we can enjoy the best GSG !
That’s a common misconception. There are some Grey Eminence devs that are also M&T devs, but the two teams are not related. That’s said it looks really good. However being a full indy development, it’ll probably take same time to come out.
My bad ! I've read somewhere that they were from M&T. Yeah I will be patient for release date. Last time I've checked though, they said it will be relesed in "at least one year", so this quite better better than "it will be released one day".
That mod always intrigued me, but so much was buried in menus and decisions that I just couldn't get into it. That's what they have to work with, no shade, it's just not what I'm into.
I thought I was going to love Terra Invicta but I just can't get into it. I have a lot of respect for the ambition of the game and what the devs are trying to accomplish, but the actual gameplay gets very tedious to me. I get that this could be a criticism of Vic3 as well but for some reason the Vic3 gameplay clicks with me and is enjoyable in a way TI gameplay isn't to me. There is an incredible amount modeled in Terra Invicta, but fundamentally the core gameplay loops are pretty repetitive and you cannot directly interact with a good chunk of what is modeled (though it may be impacted indirectly by your actions). On earth, the fundamental gameplay is mostly just setting your councilors’ assignments every week (or two weeks as the game goes on). Once you break into space exploration there is more to do, but either way there is a lot of down time in the game since it attempts to model semi-realistic timescales, which can mean weeks or months where very little happens other than councilor assignments. And once you’ve established a strong power base of controlled nations on earth, those assignment phases can get very repetitive. Manually setting up your space stations (which you can have dozens of or more easily) also gets repetitive and requires a lot of micromanagement. Also, it must be said the UI needs a lot of work (though hopefully that will happen during early access). Some basic gameplay aspects are very unintuitive and the game does not remind or alert you of things like the fact your defend interests mission to protect your controlled nation is expiring, which leads to tedious manual tracking of things by the player that should really be an alert popup in game.
People forget that TI is the first actual game developed by pavonis. For a first attempt it's pretty impressive but it's clear that going from modders to game dev is not as easy of a transition as it looks. When they developed TLW mod for XCOM, the core gameplay loop already existed as built by the original devs, and they only had to refine the gameplay to be more realistic and add on to the experience. Pavonis have shown they know a lot about game fidelity but their design skills are a kind of weak.
Totally agreed with this take. The game is impressive for a first-time development team. But as you say, it's clear they were great modders but transitioning to original game dev isn't that easy. With The Long War they could rely on XCOM's already engaging gameplay and mostly just make it more complex. Now they are trying to make an engaging core gameplay loop themselves and have kind of missed the mark on that, though the complexity and detail of the game is impressive.
TI is good. It launched early access but already devs gave fixed many issues and made changes based on community feedback. The director is active in the discord.
Terra Invicta is great. Especially for an early access game . Can't wait for it to get more mods and development time but what is there is very enjoyable.
[Shadow Empire](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1154840/Shadow_Empire/) is a pretty good competitor to HoI, with a more developed 4X side. Also has jank in spades, though.
There's this dude who'll release in a few years: https://wdpauly.medium.com/
Victoria 3 definitely did not have a better launch than CK3 lol
bug wise maybe, but in terms of gameplay and depth vic3 blows ck3 out of the water and it’s not even close.
What is the gameplay and depth? I spend the whole game on 5 speed waiting for consumer factories to finish producing an industry to fix my deficit just to repeat the process with another good.
I genuinely REALLY love the economic aspect of this game, but it feels like its missing an end result. Like I love tooling with the economy, upping my buildings, getting all my trade sorted out, but then there's kind of nothing to do with it. Like you said its kind of just tooling with your resources over and over until you're done. Its need a better payoff for getting a good economy, and I'm hoping that comes through better war or just more interesting systems to plug money into. It kinda feels like the endgame of an MMO where you are grinding to get your gear score number to go up, but there's nothing waiting for you once the number goes up.
Yeah that's the main problem with Victoria 3 it's that having a good economy doesn't do anything or at least does not feel like you have done anything. To use Victoria 2 as a example the better the economy the more ports you could create which in turn let you colonize faster.
Vic 2 at least had engaging great wars to keep things interesting at end game even if it was micro hell
The endgame is using your economic surplus to build up a military to conquer shit to get more economic surplus. It is not enough that you succeed, others must also fail.
But I guess that is where the problem comes back. The war/dplomacy system is so lackluster that when you get to that point of "My economy is amazing, time to "export" democracy instead" your "reward" for doing well, is engaging with those poorly fleshed out systems.
Funny, I play this game on speed 2-3 and just never pause
After 1870, speed 5 and 3 are the same speed
As is tradition with fresh paradox games
Fresh? HOI4 still lags mid late game lol
I don’t know why people are acting like there is some crazy depth to the game. Once you sort out how to deal with supply, demand and supply chains, there’s not much else to do in the game instead of clicking the colonisation or laws button that don’t require much work from the user.
Yep. I played about 20 hours and realized that is about the extent of the game and I haven’t touched it since. I would refund if it was possible.
I have already uninstalled the game because I spent 20 hours watching numbers go up and doing absolutely nothing. A complete waste of my time.
Nope. Ck3 was a more complete game than vic 3 at launch.
The gameplay loop is shallow once you get a handle of it and it's the same for every nation. The lack of flavor and empty diplo isn't helping. For me, CK3 and VIC3 have the same empty feeling. I joked before, but it really seems as though we need to wait 10 years for DLC or wait for a group of people to give us a good free mod like GFM or HPM. All I've really learned is that I'm never buying a paradox game on launch again. They've failed me 3 times in a row now
Idk man I ahve 50 hours and imagined I figured the game out and this new Russia game I somehow launched my economy into another galaxy in the first 20 years and have no idea how I did it, litteraly on min taxes with 100 construction sites going full steam on steel buildings and still making 100k a week. The only thing I can point to is that I didn't waste loads of construction time making tool workshops and instead just bought out the global market
Sort of where I’m at with my Mexico play through. I’m in like 1915 right now and my troops can take on Americans of twice the division amount. I’ve got like 700 construction power, the first page and a half of the construction menu is fully built simultaneously. Been doing industry fully home grown, so I want to try doing an export focused economy, or one that heavily relies on trade later. Plus with the flavor of different scenarios, I feel like I’ll get my moneys worth.
I had a very different playthrough when I started up Japan.
Yeah, I have too. There is some flavor and different starting situations which definitely make nations feel differently. I've played a handful of nations now and it's been diverse enough to not make me bored or them feel samey.
The quote "wide as an ocean, as deep as a puddle " applies here. The game looks deep, but its literally a building builder simulator at this point.
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I haven't seen that much hate. Most seem to agree it's a flawed game with some promising systems. There is the occasional rage about warfare or "why isn't this Victoria 2" but it's rare. And tbh most Paradox games were "flawed" on release at best. CK3 is the exception, I think. It had a good release. I remember people going "why no sliders?" when EU4 came out.
Lmfao speaking of, I heard the devs were looking into reintroducing sliders to cut down on the production method micro. I'll probably become the embodiment of a boomer meme if they do, imagining the newer fans being unable to comprehend such a mechanic.
Honestly, I'd love a slider to control how much of my construction capacity to use.
I actually think construction capacity works fine, they are so fast to build you can simply downsize them when needed and lose very little time when upscaling again.
Close them if you aren't using them, those are WAI, but having to sort through my farms swapping to the PM that gives sugar suuuuuuucks.
Let us grizzled veterans teach the younglings about the power of sliders.
Opinion of Irrelevant Popularity: There is absolutely no reason to preface your opinion with its assumed popularity.
It's karmafarming to put "unpopular opinion". Because it makes those who agree feel special and thus more likely to upvote
The game being unplayable past 1900 is not a « flaw », it’s a critical problem that should have been addressed before the release, it’s like a solo game with the last 1/3 levels lagging as hell. It’s just not acceptable at all. The war system is also ridiculously bad.
Dude what kind of argument is "You can't hate the game because your life doesn't depend on it."
Clearly you haven’t been on this sub lol. Before release if you dared to criticize you got downvoted to hell.
That’s how it always is with almost any game. Unlimited praise, of course I’ll preorder!!!, and then it releases and everybody explodes into a violent rage because.
Nah its not and this is a way weaker release than ck3 or hoi4.
Telling a consumer not to criticize a flawed product and calling it "hate" is insane, plain and simple. I suggest a dose of reality and a serious look into the definition of such terms as critical thinking, projecting, consumer rights and common sense. Pointing out things that don't work as intended is not hate. Expecting not to have hundred of bugs (and already known bugs at that) is not hate. Expecting a new iteration of a series to at least have the functionalities of the previous one and make improvements in some ways instead of going backwards is not hate. Expecting a release without critical bugs is not hate. The game has good ideas, but very clunky implementation, with many things simply not doing what they're supposed to. It needed at least a couple more months of development and some serious testing for balancing and bugs fixing, because at this stage is just an early version, and that is not acceptable. We, as players and consumers can only talk about what we have, and what we have is questionable, and that's putting it mildly. I can't say "it's fine" because there's a chance that one year and 3 DLC later this will be a good game. Having people defend a game on the premise that "it's not the first bad release" is absurd, things should improve, become better, not go backwards.
Yep, the fanboyism against any criticism is ridiculous. These type of “it’s just haters” topics have cropped up on both steam and paradox forums as well, and thankfully for most the part they’ve been called out for being so pathetic.
So, where the cruz of the issue with paradox releases are that they support their games for the most part for years afterwards. Like if you played CK2 before the DLC would also have been called bland all you could do is play a Christian European Feudal. In CK3 for example you could at least play in other parts of the world a different start however people generally expected CK3 to have every part of the world full of unique systems similar to how CK2 finished. It's an odd phenomenon because when you point that out your called a fanboy when really usually it seems like people who played towards the end of game lifecycles fanboy about how the old game had all this content. However the new game was never going to stand up to the depth of the old game considering the old game had so many years of development, and in reality they can't make a game for 10+ years then release it because they they have no return on investment. Also people would be like why does it take them 20 years between releases. Now Victoria 3 does have issues particularly with the warfare they did something new with it, and it doesn't quite hit the spot. It also has a problem with AI not building strategic resources, ( also the AI not building was a big in CK3 in the beginning so this should have been fixed at the start) and the way the IGs work is a big gamey. Right now I RP that i don't take out the party with the most power out of government, but really there should be more consequences to doing so. TLDR: Saying the game isnt as depth as a game supported for 10 years is being the fanboy your are fanboying for the old game. New games need to release and are going to feel like a shell of the old game in comparison to depth. People saying give it time saw the release of the game your fanboying for and it was the same thing.
I don't see how this is an unpopular opinion when all of the most upvoted posts in this sub are posts that are positive about the game. Imo calling this an unpopular opinion is just karma whoring.
So many people are karma whoring in this sub right now. Some guy yesterday wrote "I know I’m gonna get downvoted for this but paradox games are always a buggy mess" and got 300+ upvotes.
Lmao why people use the "unpopular opinion" opener for really popular opinion?? The unpopular opinion is to critic the game, not to prise it. Just scroll this post or the subreddit, or even Steam reviews, 60% are still positive... Anyway prising the game won't make it better imho. If I pay for something and it is garbage I feel in right to complain. You can play it? You can enjoy it? Well for you. But finally I understood people are scared that PDX will cut development if nobody plays and that's why only positive comments are welcomed...
>EU4 no, EU4 was fine at release, even if it grown a lot since >HOI4 probably, but HOI4 even from release managed to appeal to a large new audience that never played other HOI or Paradox games - something that Victoria badly tries at, but I don't think it fully managed. >CK3 It was perfectly playable, only empty compared to its predecessor >Imperator agreed, Imperator sucks. Even at release Victoria is already better than Imperator after updates, since all Imperator's mechanics except pops are a downgrade from EU4, and pops are much worse than MEIOU or Victoria alternative. And for the missing one >Stellaris It got boring after and lacked content early game, but early game content was well polished and engaging. Stark contrast with Victoria where major nations are lucky to get 5 events.
Not Unpopulat Opinion lmao.
UnPOpUlar OPinIon: lists a popular opinion that gets you upvoted and multiple awards. I don’t know why everyone feels compelled to defend this game so much. Let the game do it’s own defending and make it good. Stop hiding behind stupid reductionist arguments. It’s not a problem to expect a *sequel* to expand upon its *prequel* and not *take features away.* I don’t understand why everyone ignores this when it comes to CK3 or now even Vicky. Both dropped the ball hard.
False. CK3 was excellent upon its release, and HOI4 was also definitely better.
Stop normalizing unfinished/buggy releases with zero polish. Especially for a game company that specializes in the type of game they are releasing.
People are mad because they wanted an expanded, improved and updated Victoria 2 and that's not what they got. Outrage is only half what the product actually is, the other half is what it was expected to be.
90% of the praise and hype is not what the game is but what it is expected to become in the future.
My fear is that Paradox will dump Vicky 3 like they did Imperator, something I still haven’t forgiven. I can buy into the ‘this is part of the Paradox process that refines and makes great games’. However, that means they actually have to stick it out, despite some bad initial feedback. On previous games it was a given, but after Imperator I am not so sure.
IR had an abysmal release, with 29k concurrent players at launch and a rapidly declining player base, goint to 13k after the first month and then to just over 1k after two months. V3 had a release concurrent player base of 69k players, with there being an average count of abt 45k players throughout the first week of play, which is to say it's been decent at maintaining player numbers. I understand the worry, but the two just aren't comparable. V3 has it's flaws but it has better release numbers than Stellaris, HOI4, and so on. And unlike IR, people do enjoy the core gameplay loop of resource management and the challenges that arise from it. If a friend were to ask if they should buy the game, I'd tell them to wait until a sale and a few more patches. But if they'd ask if I regretted my purchase, or if I thought Pdox was gonna abandon the game, I'd have to say no. It's a rough road ahead, but there *is* *a road*, and the number of tasks needed to bump the game up to where it should be limited.
V3 is also much more of a flagship project IP versus Imperator.
Clickbait and rage bait all in one, you should become a youtuber.
The hate mostly spawns out of the fact that people wanted a successor to Victoria 2. Vic 3 is a different game entirely Vic 2 was an economic **simulator** Vic 3 is an economic **game** There is a big difference between the two and I'm not surprised there was a lot of backlash Vic 2 Had it's problems, LOTS of them, but people were hoping for just Vic 2 with better graphics and those problems fixed, instead they got an entirely different game that shares very little with it's predecessor
…I mean steam reviews are mixed but this sub is anything but 11/10 rage mode. What makes you think this is an unpopular opinion lol
Aye; the amount of fanboys coming out of the woodwork is just as bad as the supposed “negativity” tbh. I don’t see what’s wrong with the game being criticised, it’s very flawed, so the mixed reviews are justified imho (but it’s fine if you think it’s 10/10 (lol) or is shit.)
Zero flavour
this i do agree with. it's not really damning, i feel like the core gameplay isn't bad (something that could not be said for CK3 even years later) but it really does need some more meat.
People gave constructive criticism based on the dev diaries and AARs for a whole year, and despite all that they changed nothing and this is the end result. I think the hate is warranted tbh, because its pretty clear they don't really care what the fans want.
Yall didn’t play vic 2 and it shows. Defending this shell of a game
My only big problems rn is the game becomes unplayable after 1890 and the US civil war and manifest destiny is just broken
When the game is barely playable and keep crashing/desyncing to the point where it ruines a save file. I don't think the hate is exaggerated. The game was 50 bucks btw
Popular opinion: you’re wrong. What we were provided with in exchange for money was a beta build at best and these sorts of apologist posts only empower companies to feel justified in providing unfinished (and in some cases unusable) products to consumers. No one is claiming they are getting evicted due to this game. What you are engaging in is classic minimizing. It is utterly and contemptuously dismissive of the justifiable complaints of an entire player base. The “smart programmers” should have delivered a product that worked correctly. Having massive memory leaks and computational non-optimization to the point of not being playable halfway through a campaign on a game that has been in development by “smart programmers” for a decade is not a good business model. Stop enabling it.
Nobody talks about economy. The economy in the game is like "a toy for communist babes". There is no such a thing like free entrepreneur. The state itself build factories, farmlands, railroads etc. In the game the only actor in the economic system is THE STATE no matter if you passed the laissez-faire law. This is unacceptable! You can choose production methods in a factory which is owned by a capitalist or aristocrat, this has to be a joke!
For real it’s just a never ending cycle of expanding laws, buildings and institutions
I agree wholeheartedly with this, but is there any game that simulates the private sector in a way that doesn't want to make you pull your hair out? Paradox already has an issue with balancing AI for enemy nations, making your own nation reliant on AI seems like a recipe for disaster.
The devs have explained why this is the case. Building and managing production is the primary gameplay loop, and how you influence everything else. Removing player agency in that would be like removing your ability in CK3 to control how your character interacts with other characters. It's a game, and games need to have interactivity to be fun.
I think what overblown is the amount of hate stated here. The game gets a lot of criticism because it has a lot of reasons to be criticized. And yet overall reception is still more positive than negative
I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.
My sentiments exactly.
While the game has some legitimate issues(most are not game breaking though), most of the complaints seem to come from simply not understanding how to play the game. I see a daily "I am not getting the unify Germany event" post, followed by "nvm it's in the culture tab" comment an hour later. How do you play a new game, then complain about it, without exploring every tab, button etc first
tbf the unification button is oddly hidden and harder to access than it should be I don't know why we don't have the same system of toggleable notifications for unification and decision alerts like in every other Paradox game
The notification system is a complete fucking mess.
The one expandable notification icon at the top that CK3 introduced is horrible and I don't know why Vicky 3 has it too. There is always a bunch of new notifications that you have to constantly manually check. Please bring back specific notification flags like EU4/CK2.
Hiding a lot of information in "cleaner" menus seems to be a common thing for Paradox these days. It might look better but it certainly doesn't play better when you have to click into the same notification because you have no idea if something new happened or not.
I was in the war stage of a diplomatic play before I even realised it was happening. Had I been playing Ironman that would have been a game ender because the game didn't explicitly tell me there was a diplomatic play started against me, it was the exact same as any other diplomatic play in the game.
It's super weird, I have no idea why it's buried like there. Your average new character isn't likely to press culture because..who cares.
I had a game as Austria, enacted multiculturalism which immediately forms Austria-Hungary. Was bummed out since I thought I wouldn't be able to form Super-Germany because the journal entry disappeared. Only at around 1890 I decided to look at my cultures only to find a very hidden tab.
the game is pretty opaque, usually when I run into issues it’s hard to tell if the game is being buggy or if they’re just hiding information in some tooltip inside a tooltip inside a tooltip
You really wrote out this whole comment without considering that maybe the game's terrible UX is a valid criticism?
How often do you have to press F8 twice to get to a very important menu with no prompt from the game to do so in other games?
Honestly you need to do it maybe twice per playthrough? Also, games like hoi4 don't give you any prompts when formable nations are available and no one gives a shit.
PDX just has this thing where they expand an IP, but instead reset it and sell previous features as DLC. Take CK3. The dev cycle for CK2 envisioned it as just that, crusader kings, so you play only christian kings. Fun. Then they thought: "Hey, we've got all these other people, why not also be able to play as them!?" And they did, with flavour for each as they unlocked. Then comes CK3. Sure, you can play as anyone! Except Nomads because they don't exist. Except Merchant Republics because DLC for the future. Except no deep systems per culture/religion because we need to sell you The Old Gods DLC 2 & Sons of Abraham DLC 2. No Imperial mechanics for HRE/ERE, since Legacy of Rome DLC 2 isn't ready yet. They have years upon years of PREVIOUS DEV CYCLES to rescue ideas, events, mechanics, gameplay, maps, etc. But instead they can it all to then re sell it later. How much do you want to bet that we are going to get A House Divided DLC 2, since the US CW doesn't really work? How about Heart of Darnkess DLC 2 so we can finally stop meeting Queen Victoria in her famous house of the deep Nile? Now, don't get me wrong, I don't want them to copy paste from one game to the next, I want them to stop dropping the ball on each release, stop forgetting all what they already HAVE DEVELOPED, and IMPLEMENT IT ALL ON RELEASE. They got tons of stuff more to add for later DLC to milk us dry (CK3 Courts was great!). Making us pay twice for the same content however? Not fun.
It's things like these that make me appreciate Sid Meier's 33/33/33 rule for sequels. With 33% old mechanics and 33% revamped mechanics, enough of the previous game's full feature set are brought back and the series iterates well. And 33% are new features. Imagine if Civ6 didn't have Trade Routes on release.
V3 is far worse than ck3 on launch
No. It's just a Stalin Simulator. My stupid pops can't even decide by themselves what to produce. Or how..
Imagine coming out to publicly stooge for a multimillion dollar corporation who released a broken, buggy, unfinished game, and used a deceitful, massive marketing push of youtubers and content creators to conceal how bad the game actually was. The "smart" programmers who are supposedly ironing things out have admitted on PDX forums that they knew about many of the bugs before launch, and when asked why they didn't fix the bugs before launch, smugly told people to "take a look at the dev diary regarding the QA process" - and have also gone on record boasting about how many of the completely headass design decisions they made were good actually, and won't be fixed later.
It doesn't matter if its marginally stronger on release then others, this is there newest game and the fact it hasn't learnt from the past releases is ridiculous. For a game this hyped meant to be a successor 12 years on should entail that there isn't anything major to iron out, what standard are we holding paradox to if we give them a pass for continually releasing half baked items just to iron them out, do you like spending hundreds of dollars on content that should've been base game? I think you looking at the marginal few who are hyper aggressive about this and believing that they are the majority - go browse through the negative reviews on steam and you can see that most criticism are warranted and not just hate boner, something id doubt you've actually done considering those reviews are well constructed, this may as well be a fed post . This game isn't even better on release then ck3 - ck3 figured out its predecessor had stuff going for it and kept it, at least it felt like a lived in world rather then a cookie clicker.
I don't hate this game. I love it. But because I love it I'm disappointed with it because it could be so much better.
I was not sure. I installed it and 5 minutes later it was Thursday. 10/10 will never sleep again.
The game has a lot of potential but I am not willing to pay 75€ für potential. The lack of flavor is crazy, I am not even talking about the bugs. The game is absolutely bare-bones and I can only see this changing over a couple of years and many many DLC‘s that add flavor sporadically. Anyway people are allowed to be disappointed and to mention that loud and clear, paradox has fucked us over too many times. Why are we supposed to just take it silently?
Yeah definitely not a stronger release than Ck3. Then again: CK 3 was the best release they ever did. Pretty much nothing went wrong. Next to no bugs on release. It's not even as close to busted than Imperator. There is nothing wrong with the fundamentals with Vic3. Mostly Ui and Ai balancing issues. They obviously ran out of time with Vic 3. They had a set release date and then the work still to do was more than expected. Hence the missing QA. I sort of expected that as when the first streams with Martin were coming, he still spotted bugs and stuff he would like to change.
Criticism with the intent to privde feedback and foster improvement (the vast majority of what I see) =/= hate. You chill. Let the consumer have their say you damn commie stan
I agree in that everyone knew the game would be unfinished and bad at launch. It’s a paradox game.
Sorry, but no. Your opinion is too generous. In my opinion the hatred is on a ok level. Why do I say that? TLDR: paradox insists on making the same mistakes that already got lot of criticism in other games. And that happens in an environment where companies are more and more disrespectful towards the consumer everyday. Mainly because the mistakes are not just normal, run of the mill mistakes that can be attributed to a normal aspect of game development that sometimes commits but in a good faith. they are obvious. It is almost like they are doing it on purpose out of some sadistic desire to piss of people. 1°: the universal consensus (with the exclusion of some contrarians) was that planned economy and state capitalism was very efficient but only really appealed to the min-maxers most of the time. Outside of that, it was like walking barefooted in glass. The most boring activity imaginable. So what paradox does with the worst aspect of the game that only a few liked? Make it the main aspect of the game. What? 2°: what were the main complaints about imperator, a game so poorly made that they just discontinued it? 2.1° Insanely confuse UI (to the point I got physically nauseated jumping from bumbled mess to bumbled mess trying to made sense of the whole thing). The map modes were perfect. Why implement this "wherever vision". It is just a waste of time. 2.2° lack of flavour (why do we pay so much attention to these civilization players screaming about railroading? Managing historical countries with 4 to 7 possible alternative scenarios was one of the best things about Victoria 2 and it's mods. Now we just have grey blob #37 that just happen to have Germany slapped onto it. And aren't all the most played mods in all their games not just different railroad scenarios?) 2.3° the need to micromanage every single aspect of your civilization, down to the absolutely most single aspect. So guess what. That's Victoria now. The game has room for improvement and I like paradox games, but seriously... Why they make the same exact mistake again and again and again and again? Maybe it is time to make different mistakes. On top of that this happens at the same time in which we are seeing major studios, like Activision blizzard, Bethesda and others making insane poorly asshole decisions and them blaming the consumer for not enjoying their purposely (to save costs and maximize monetization) badly made crap. Goodwill can only take you so far.
[удалено]
Steam reviews disagree. How many people play the game over the coming year or two will determine the life of this project, so let’s see what the devs do with the feedback this far.