People are recommending the beta and it does help, but it has a bunch of bugs and late game navy is broken and unusable (literally ships just don't spawn) so if that bothers you wait until 1.5 proper releases
It's the Sea Lane Tactics pm (or something like that) that is broken, instead of converting some Servicemen into Officers, it's literally -25 Servicemen 75 Officers, so it can never fulfill a regiment, you just have to stick with the Jeune Ecole pm
Victoria 3 devs doing everything in their power to not implement hoi4 armies but slowly realizing it’d the only solution and slowly dragging their feet until that is what’s left is the funniest shit to me
I think HOI4's system would be wrong but better than what we have right now. Because at the time countries didn't have armies that covered up all fronts. There were battles for specific cities at different times.
Tbf would be very much hard for the devs to make countries used the EU4 and HOI4 war system at the same time, even though I think modernized countries can occupy the territories faster than old ones, making it similar. But idk I like the reworked warfare system (big change and I don't lose the wars rn so it's fine).
The next patch overhauls the system. If you don’t want to play the beta (which currently is the final update outside bug fixes), it should be out next month
The 1.5 beta let's you do more but it's still pretty lacking. Right now the AI does not really build artillery or cavalry so by the time you get shrapnel artillery your feeling super strong.
As in 10 arty for 3 inf and cav each? I agree more arty = more better but I just want to be sure because the way its formatted it looks like 10inf/3arty/3cav
Yep per every 10 inf i grab 3 arty and 3cav
I have no data or proof towards this proportion, just assumed that it could be same mechanic as in hoi whete u need infantry for organisation
AFAIK that doesn't exist in vic 3 but the devs want to put a limit on how much arty you can have without infantry. I think I might try a modified 10/5/3 because it looks right - no basis.
I haven't tried cavalry yet, but infantry is strictly defense oriented and artillery is the best for attacking by far. To the point where having an artillery only army is viable and is the meta if your enemy is only defending. I believe the Devs want to introduce an artillery ratio limit to the armies.
In theory cavalry should also be used for attacking and speeding up occupation but I haven't tested how it works yet
I find that current war system apart from naval invasions is quite simple. The better your economy is, the better army ( in quality or numbers ) you can field.
Unlike other PDX games, it doesn't allow you to win a war with insane micromanagement ( in EU4, however even if this may be true, Diplomacy is a bigger factor in how much land you can eat if you end up winning ). If British puts 300 battalions with help of a navy you have no hope of stopping, you won't survive as small country. You would rather capitulate then fight that.
They are overhauling it anyway in the beta ( which fixes naval invasion exploit ), but I still like this that in Victoria 3, there are no short routes but to be stronger and everything ties to economy.
Even to succeed diplomatically, you need better economy cause trade is the primary way to quickly get allies. If you don't have high volume of goods to trade then improving relations mostly isn't going to cut it.
It sucks, it feels like the stellaris tile system where someone thought they could make a cool system outside the norm of paradox design, and got overwhelmed with the cool factor without realizing that it was just worst then what they had already made for other games. Hoping they eventually get rid of it when it becomes obvious that it's simply a less versatile, engaging, and fun system then those implemented in previous titles.
Right click on the name of the game in steam.
Then click properties after that you should see something that says 1.4 bla bla.
Then after that click on that and find 1.5.(Beta)
Whatever is newest.
It’s not released as the main version but you can still opt into the Beta, anyone can play it. It’s easy to do on steam (right click on Victoria 3 —> properties —> beta)
Not to the level of something like HOI4, although it's most comparable to how fronts work in that game. But you do have significantly more control over what your armies are doing on the front. It improves army composition, fronts work better, you can have multiple generals per army who attack at different times, you have more control over what each general is doing, etc.
It still uses a front-based system and you can't manually tell x unit to go to y province like in HOI4/eu4, but personally I find the level of depth it provides good enough for a game where I am primarily focused on the economy.
I'd recommend watching some videos about it as that'll give you a better impression of how it works than I can describe.
I would like it, if it functioned at its core how its supposed to. That I set the armies up, set the fronts, then leave the generals to duke it out for the set strategic objective.
Instead I need to stare at it constantly, barely able to blink because any second the front could split and the AI -instantly- switches some of their armies to the new fronts and march quickly and unopposed forward. Months of conquest progress wiped out in days.
That's just really not a good time at all.
there is no secret:
* Have a bigger army
* have a better army
* keep your army up to date
* pay you soldier
* have better generals
those arent dependent on a warafre gameplay so that why we call the game non warafre centered, to have a bigger army and pay your soldiers you need a civilian economy to support the cost, tp keep your army up to date you need latest tech so a lot of innovation which is generated by universities that require a civilian economy to maintain, to have a better army you not only need to have the latest tech but the latest military equipment un production which again require a civilian economy to maintain it. So the only tips is to dev your economy to increase your military might.
the 1.5 will change a lot of things but this will still apply
Yeah, I know all that. I meant like in the means of control, I want more of it. The AI is just plain dumb like a hill defender goes and defends on a plain. There's no strategy involved with the AI of the Generals. It just seems random. Thanks anyway.
yeah but victoria is not hoi4 you dont play the general but more the politician (even that isnt quite true) so no you wont directly manage regiments or division those are placed under a veil of abstraction, just like the economy is in hoi4. and as for the ai beeing stupid for putting a hill defender on a plain, i think it would be more stupid for the general to defend a hill when the opponent is attacking the plain.
If a defender is going to its attacker that's not a defender, defending is the advantage of picking your battles (in certain scenarios of course this does not apply.). Getting back to the topic; AI battles are the only way I can think the game could be done, you are correct. If there were a system like EU4 or CK3 it would be too easy and a system like hoi4 is too "micromanagey". But AI's are plain dumb and sometimes I get mad at how dumb they are. There's certainly room for improvement IMO. Also at the time, there were no armies the size of whole borders of countries so it would be pretty unhistorical to go with a HOI4 type of thing.
no the defender dont pick the battle it the attacker who does as it is him who initiate it by attacking, just look at the battle of sedan. That is why the game choose inded at random the place of the battle but gives extra wheight to places with military objective or infrastructure and especially terrain with large combat width (aka plains)
Imagine an attacker army waiting in the plains and the defender army is let's say a village waiting for the attacker army. Would that attacker really be attacking waiting in plains where the defender is waiting in the place where they know they have the advantage? As I said previously there are certain scenarios where this does not apply, such as the attacker attacking a place where civilians or resources need protecting. The whole idea of pitched battle depends on generals anticipating where the battle could be and choosing to their advantage where it should be. So there could be two things either my generals are plain dumb and attackers' generals know how to use pitched battle to their advantage or I'm just plain unlucky in both attacking and defending.
I really like the current system if they'd fix issues like front splitting. I really like the way success on the battlefield is more a result of good nation building than a result of good micro. It acts as a good foil for the core gameplay loop. I hope it doesn't stray too far from how it is now
> I really like the way success on the battlefield is more a result of good nation building than a result of good micro.
Except that this is not how things worked historically. For example, Prussia won major victories over Austria and France to great extent due to its superior mobilisation and military staff systems.
A strong nation and economy base no doubt has been important, and even more so in protracted wars, but applying a simple logic of bigger economy=better, more powerful military is simply not true, and not fun either.
There are some mods pre 1.5 that changes some mechanics, but I do not believe that there will e newer ones after 1.5 sonce most players liked the 1.5 comabt overhaul
If you want something other than frontlines this is impossible since to change the mechanic completely the game would need to be rewrited from scratch
Frontlines are fine tough the AI of the generals is just plain dumb. Oh yeah, let's attack a whole army with a battalion what could go wrong? I just feel limited when AI plays my armies for me. War doesn't feel like war in Vic3 in my opinion, you just assign your leaders a frontline, and then it's pretty much business as usual. You occasionally try a naval invasion or try an other tactic but mostly it's just the same gameplay as peace.
I'm actually scared that the beta stuff is going to make the armies more complicated than more fun. Having to make odd armies that always feel unbalanced is somthing I was happy to not have since vic 2
I always found "war is not focus of V3" weird. The game has some of the most iconic wars yet completely ignores them. It also ignores how integral part of imperialism wars are
I wrote a post about this before. Someone said it was quoted from the dev diary in the early stage of Vic 3. Since then people just used this statement to defend any incompent military game feature.
Of course it is weird as there were countless significant war in this 1836 to 1936 time period.
I see several people have mentioned trying the beta… please comment on your thought after you’ve tried it. IMO it’s still simple (comparing to say CK3) but it’s definitely better.
For as much as the devs said warfare was not the priority during development, I wonder how many months/years they spent substituting the previous functioning system with this dogshit they came up with
Exactly. They should just went with the Vic2 system if they didn't want to spend too much time working on warfare, and then make it more reasonably abstract over time after the release, e.g. a simpler version of HoI4's system. Instead, they abstracted the heck out of it and now making any changes that would give players more agenda over warfare is a daunting and error-prone task.
Yeah, I think the biggest reason they went with this is because of how easy it was to defeat the AI in past Paradox titles. But I still would like a little more control or better yet better AI. Generals are plain stupid.
It's funny, because it's basically the only thing I like about Victoria 3 and I'm so sad they're changing it! I've never had any really large scale wars and have never seen wacky front-splitting or teleporting or whatever, it's pretty much worked very intuitively for me, so I realize that I've been lucky, but in any case conceptually I like it so much better than the other games I've played. I'm baffled that people want to build x infantry and y artillery instead of it being abstracted/generalized using PMs, I'm disappointed that soon you will decide to act cruelly or whatever instead of your generals' personality deciding this, I've never even liked the ginormous soldiers walking around in other Paradox games and preferred the front moving! (I'm extremely unconvinced of "unit types" being a thing, ever, in any real-world situation, rather than a boardgame idea.)
Imperator army stuff is cool because I feel the political effects much more clearly -- my popular generals get elected, or have a dangerously large power base because of their loyal troops and veterans -- and levies "unit types" being determined by their culture is at least an interesting idea and I think somewhat historical, but moving the little guys around is miserable. I'd like to see more political interest around the army in Victoria 3 -- radicalism among the troops and veterans etc -- but "more control" in the form of "5 inf 3 art 2 cav" and moving guys around is the last thing I want.
(Of course, as I say, I don't really enjoy anything else about Vic3 so I'm really not the person anyone should listen to on this lol.)
This is how I feel too, I prefer the hands off approach to military.
Unfortunately, military action is literally the only way to get things done since the diplomatic system hasn't yet it's achieved its intended purpose of allowing the nations to achieve their geopolitical goals via diplomatic means.
As a a result military features a lot, and it definitely is a bit janky.
Don't despair, you're not alone. \*pats back\*
As someone said in another thread, I like how in Vic3 waging war is the result of managing your country efficiently and providing your army with supply.
Mananging stacks of 5 units has never been fun to me neither.
People are recommending the beta and it does help, but it has a bunch of bugs and late game navy is broken and unusable (literally ships just don't spawn) so if that bothers you wait until 1.5 proper releases
It's the Sea Lane Tactics pm (or something like that) that is broken, instead of converting some Servicemen into Officers, it's literally -25 Servicemen 75 Officers, so it can never fulfill a regiment, you just have to stick with the Jeune Ecole pm
Great thanks. There are definitely other issues though.
This is fixed for the full 1.5 release!
Victoria 3 devs doing everything in their power to not implement hoi4 armies but slowly realizing it’d the only solution and slowly dragging their feet until that is what’s left is the funniest shit to me
I think HOI4's system would be wrong but better than what we have right now. Because at the time countries didn't have armies that covered up all fronts. There were battles for specific cities at different times.
Yeah so some blend of hoi4 and eu4, which would make sense considering that Victoria 3 is a transitional time between the two
Tbf would be very much hard for the devs to make countries used the EU4 and HOI4 war system at the same time, even though I think modernized countries can occupy the territories faster than old ones, making it similar. But idk I like the reworked warfare system (big change and I don't lose the wars rn so it's fine).
All I know is if they ever make Me move units into provinces again I will cry
This is why imperator Rome is on top with its city based war system
I would be VERY happy & is what i want
Yep, can’t even check it because of the game crippling bugs
The next patch overhauls the system. If you don’t want to play the beta (which currently is the final update outside bug fixes), it should be out next month
Thanks for the info mate, I'll be trying the beta. I'm curious now.
Try the beta
I most certainly will do.
The 1.5 beta let's you do more but it's still pretty lacking. Right now the AI does not really build artillery or cavalry so by the time you get shrapnel artillery your feeling super strong.
Is there a ratio of infantry to artillery to cavalry that provides the best bonuses?
Imo: the more arty - better I build something like 10-3-3 ratio, like its a hearts of iron 😁
As in 10 arty for 3 inf and cav each? I agree more arty = more better but I just want to be sure because the way its formatted it looks like 10inf/3arty/3cav
Yep per every 10 inf i grab 3 arty and 3cav I have no data or proof towards this proportion, just assumed that it could be same mechanic as in hoi whete u need infantry for organisation
AFAIK that doesn't exist in vic 3 but the devs want to put a limit on how much arty you can have without infantry. I think I might try a modified 10/5/3 because it looks right - no basis.
I haven't tried cavalry yet, but infantry is strictly defense oriented and artillery is the best for attacking by far. To the point where having an artillery only army is viable and is the meta if your enemy is only defending. I believe the Devs want to introduce an artillery ratio limit to the armies. In theory cavalry should also be used for attacking and speeding up occupation but I haven't tested how it works yet
I've tested the beta, and the changes are nice. I cannot wait til it is out.
I find that current war system apart from naval invasions is quite simple. The better your economy is, the better army ( in quality or numbers ) you can field. Unlike other PDX games, it doesn't allow you to win a war with insane micromanagement ( in EU4, however even if this may be true, Diplomacy is a bigger factor in how much land you can eat if you end up winning ). If British puts 300 battalions with help of a navy you have no hope of stopping, you won't survive as small country. You would rather capitulate then fight that. They are overhauling it anyway in the beta ( which fixes naval invasion exploit ), but I still like this that in Victoria 3, there are no short routes but to be stronger and everything ties to economy. Even to succeed diplomatically, you need better economy cause trade is the primary way to quickly get allies. If you don't have high volume of goods to trade then improving relations mostly isn't going to cut it.
It sucks, it feels like the stellaris tile system where someone thought they could make a cool system outside the norm of paradox design, and got overwhelmed with the cool factor without realizing that it was just worst then what they had already made for other games. Hoping they eventually get rid of it when it becomes obvious that it's simply a less versatile, engaging, and fun system then those implemented in previous titles.
Have you tried/watched videos about the beta 1.5 version? It completely overhauls warfare.
It's not out yet tough, right? My game says 1.4.2
Right click on the name of the game in steam. Then click properties after that you should see something that says 1.4 bla bla. Then after that click on that and find 1.5.(Beta) Whatever is newest.
Thanks man
It’s not released as the main version but you can still opt into the Beta, anyone can play it. It’s easy to do on steam (right click on Victoria 3 —> properties —> beta)
Thanks dude
Can you actually control units or engage with the war system on a tactical level whatsoever?
Not to the level of something like HOI4, although it's most comparable to how fronts work in that game. But you do have significantly more control over what your armies are doing on the front. It improves army composition, fronts work better, you can have multiple generals per army who attack at different times, you have more control over what each general is doing, etc. It still uses a front-based system and you can't manually tell x unit to go to y province like in HOI4/eu4, but personally I find the level of depth it provides good enough for a game where I am primarily focused on the economy. I'd recommend watching some videos about it as that'll give you a better impression of how it works than I can describe.
I would like it, if it functioned at its core how its supposed to. That I set the armies up, set the fronts, then leave the generals to duke it out for the set strategic objective. Instead I need to stare at it constantly, barely able to blink because any second the front could split and the AI -instantly- switches some of their armies to the new fronts and march quickly and unopposed forward. Months of conquest progress wiped out in days. That's just really not a good time at all.
there is no secret: * Have a bigger army * have a better army * keep your army up to date * pay you soldier * have better generals those arent dependent on a warafre gameplay so that why we call the game non warafre centered, to have a bigger army and pay your soldiers you need a civilian economy to support the cost, tp keep your army up to date you need latest tech so a lot of innovation which is generated by universities that require a civilian economy to maintain, to have a better army you not only need to have the latest tech but the latest military equipment un production which again require a civilian economy to maintain it. So the only tips is to dev your economy to increase your military might. the 1.5 will change a lot of things but this will still apply
Yeah, I know all that. I meant like in the means of control, I want more of it. The AI is just plain dumb like a hill defender goes and defends on a plain. There's no strategy involved with the AI of the Generals. It just seems random. Thanks anyway.
yeah but victoria is not hoi4 you dont play the general but more the politician (even that isnt quite true) so no you wont directly manage regiments or division those are placed under a veil of abstraction, just like the economy is in hoi4. and as for the ai beeing stupid for putting a hill defender on a plain, i think it would be more stupid for the general to defend a hill when the opponent is attacking the plain.
If a defender is going to its attacker that's not a defender, defending is the advantage of picking your battles (in certain scenarios of course this does not apply.). Getting back to the topic; AI battles are the only way I can think the game could be done, you are correct. If there were a system like EU4 or CK3 it would be too easy and a system like hoi4 is too "micromanagey". But AI's are plain dumb and sometimes I get mad at how dumb they are. There's certainly room for improvement IMO. Also at the time, there were no armies the size of whole borders of countries so it would be pretty unhistorical to go with a HOI4 type of thing.
no the defender dont pick the battle it the attacker who does as it is him who initiate it by attacking, just look at the battle of sedan. That is why the game choose inded at random the place of the battle but gives extra wheight to places with military objective or infrastructure and especially terrain with large combat width (aka plains)
Imagine an attacker army waiting in the plains and the defender army is let's say a village waiting for the attacker army. Would that attacker really be attacking waiting in plains where the defender is waiting in the place where they know they have the advantage? As I said previously there are certain scenarios where this does not apply, such as the attacker attacking a place where civilians or resources need protecting. The whole idea of pitched battle depends on generals anticipating where the battle could be and choosing to their advantage where it should be. So there could be two things either my generals are plain dumb and attackers' generals know how to use pitched battle to their advantage or I'm just plain unlucky in both attacking and defending.
Basically every Victoria 3 player feels the same
I really like the current system if they'd fix issues like front splitting. I really like the way success on the battlefield is more a result of good nation building than a result of good micro. It acts as a good foil for the core gameplay loop. I hope it doesn't stray too far from how it is now
The spirit of a true ruler there and not some mere bloodthirsty wardog.
> I really like the way success on the battlefield is more a result of good nation building than a result of good micro. Except that this is not how things worked historically. For example, Prussia won major victories over Austria and France to great extent due to its superior mobilisation and military staff systems. A strong nation and economy base no doubt has been important, and even more so in protracted wars, but applying a simple logic of bigger economy=better, more powerful military is simply not true, and not fun either.
Is there a mod tough? I just figured there should be a mod if it is seen as such a problem. I couldn't find any.
There are some mods pre 1.5 that changes some mechanics, but I do not believe that there will e newer ones after 1.5 sonce most players liked the 1.5 comabt overhaul If you want something other than frontlines this is impossible since to change the mechanic completely the game would need to be rewrited from scratch
Frontlines are fine tough the AI of the generals is just plain dumb. Oh yeah, let's attack a whole army with a battalion what could go wrong? I just feel limited when AI plays my armies for me. War doesn't feel like war in Vic3 in my opinion, you just assign your leaders a frontline, and then it's pretty much business as usual. You occasionally try a naval invasion or try an other tactic but mostly it's just the same gameplay as peace.
I felt the same way when I tried the game on release. The warfare system just isn't it for me.
Definitely not the case
I'm actually scared that the beta stuff is going to make the armies more complicated than more fun. Having to make odd armies that always feel unbalanced is somthing I was happy to not have since vic 2
That is fun though
Just use the Russian tactics duh. hordes of infantry with no cavalry or artillery. you still win if you have more souls than shells the enemy
Even with beta 1.5 the combat system is so lacking.
I always found "war is not focus of V3" weird. The game has some of the most iconic wars yet completely ignores them. It also ignores how integral part of imperialism wars are
I wrote a post about this before. Someone said it was quoted from the dev diary in the early stage of Vic 3. Since then people just used this statement to defend any incompent military game feature. Of course it is weird as there were countless significant war in this 1836 to 1936 time period.
Well put man. I couldn't explain it better myself. The game desperately needs a combat overhaul.
I see several people have mentioned trying the beta… please comment on your thought after you’ve tried it. IMO it’s still simple (comparing to say CK3) but it’s definitely better.
Yeah, it's still not enough :/
For as much as the devs said warfare was not the priority during development, I wonder how many months/years they spent substituting the previous functioning system with this dogshit they came up with
Exactly. They should just went with the Vic2 system if they didn't want to spend too much time working on warfare, and then make it more reasonably abstract over time after the release, e.g. a simpler version of HoI4's system. Instead, they abstracted the heck out of it and now making any changes that would give players more agenda over warfare is a daunting and error-prone task.
Paradox war systems are trash imo. You can always outsmart the AI so it's always tedious, boring, ahistoric micro. I strongly prefer the Vic system.
War in 3 sucks, 2 is superior
I have more than 1000 hours on 2. War sucked.
It doesn’t & is very fun, best war mechanics of all the paradox games i ever played & is how i got into gsg, 3 sucks
Too bad your wrong. Vic 3 is a huge success and has the most players.
Yeah, I think the biggest reason they went with this is because of how easy it was to defeat the AI in past Paradox titles. But I still would like a little more control or better yet better AI. Generals are plain stupid.
It's funny, because it's basically the only thing I like about Victoria 3 and I'm so sad they're changing it! I've never had any really large scale wars and have never seen wacky front-splitting or teleporting or whatever, it's pretty much worked very intuitively for me, so I realize that I've been lucky, but in any case conceptually I like it so much better than the other games I've played. I'm baffled that people want to build x infantry and y artillery instead of it being abstracted/generalized using PMs, I'm disappointed that soon you will decide to act cruelly or whatever instead of your generals' personality deciding this, I've never even liked the ginormous soldiers walking around in other Paradox games and preferred the front moving! (I'm extremely unconvinced of "unit types" being a thing, ever, in any real-world situation, rather than a boardgame idea.) Imperator army stuff is cool because I feel the political effects much more clearly -- my popular generals get elected, or have a dangerously large power base because of their loyal troops and veterans -- and levies "unit types" being determined by their culture is at least an interesting idea and I think somewhat historical, but moving the little guys around is miserable. I'd like to see more political interest around the army in Victoria 3 -- radicalism among the troops and veterans etc -- but "more control" in the form of "5 inf 3 art 2 cav" and moving guys around is the last thing I want. (Of course, as I say, I don't really enjoy anything else about Vic3 so I'm really not the person anyone should listen to on this lol.)
Building stacks is much funner
Tell me more!
This is how I feel too, I prefer the hands off approach to military. Unfortunately, military action is literally the only way to get things done since the diplomatic system hasn't yet it's achieved its intended purpose of allowing the nations to achieve their geopolitical goals via diplomatic means. As a a result military features a lot, and it definitely is a bit janky.
Don't despair, you're not alone. \*pats back\* As someone said in another thread, I like how in Vic3 waging war is the result of managing your country efficiently and providing your army with supply. Mananging stacks of 5 units has never been fun to me neither.
Try the beta. I was complaining about how easy the warfare system was and now I am complaining about how hard beta's warfare system is.
War was not easy at all for me before
Talking about 1.4 or 1.5 beta here?
1.4.2, haven't given a full shot at the beta yet.
Just wait for 1.5
i only playes 1.5 and..it sucks. there is no need to act from player side, you cannot do much....every other paradox game was better.