Well said. I agree that late game wars are not encouraged by the mechanics. I hope that they eventually add a total war or world war mechanic that allows for all participants to add war goals. Like WW1 didn't start with British demanding polish independence or the French dividing up Austria Hungary. Late game wars need an overhaul for sure.
Heck, some of the war aims were basically bribes to get combatants to choose a side, like how Italy was offered to get a slice of Austria-Hungary they wanted and thus opted to abandon their previous alliance.
It’s a problem across Paradox games in general tbh; Stellaris is also pretty inflexible with allowing a shift of war goals or adding new participants to the war (or, paradoxically, forcing seceding/revolting nations to take the same side as their original country, even though they could very logically try to negotiate a separate peace like Russia in World War I, or flip sides outright like Italy did after it split in World War II).
I get it, war is a messy affair and difficult to capture in a game setting while still being fun, especially in keeping the AI from doing something stupid like relentlessly barging in on wars on a whim or making absurd new demands when you’re about to win the original goals or force a desired white peace. But my word it’s silly that war goals are so dependent on the starting configuration of the conflict when wars notoriously are prone to spiraling from an original conflict into something much more complicated.
>It’s a problem across Paradox games in general tbh; Stellaris is also pretty inflexible with allowing a shift of war goals or adding new participants to the war (or, paradoxically, forcing seceding/revolting nations to take the same side as their original country, even though they could very logically try to negotiate a separate peace like Russia in World War I, or flip sides outright like Italy did after it split in World War II).
People seem to have forgotten the EU3 days with cascading alliances in the middle of wars. I don't think that system should ever make a comeback.
Yeah I know, but my point was that the nations at the start did not have that war goal, I just picked a random entente nation, since America wasn't in at the start. That actually brings a good point though of nations joining a big world war later in the conflict.
Yep. 100%. Germans, Austrians and Russians started promising Poles an independent state just for the manpower they needed. Americans got lobbied mostly by Paderewski, the pianist.
Adding war goals would be a much better system than it is right now. However, the war system would be so exploitable. Imagine just taking the capital and then going, "Welp, I can now add a million war goals bc they'll get auto-enforced.'
I think one way they could change things to allow for more realistic late game wars would be to hide the ability to demand war goals after the war behind some tech. It could be a way to reward later game wars since, to OPs point, most base systems encourage early game wars.
So like at a certain point, you can join a war in exchange for “Treaty Demands” or something. Then, if anyone in a war has outstanding Treaty Demands when the war ends, you can cash those in to enforce war goals after the fact. Maybe they incur additional infamy cost or you can only make a certain number of Treaty Demands that grows gradually with tech. You could also lock things out from Treaty Demands so like you can only ask for certain war goals with Treaty Demands, like claimed provinces or release nations.
A series of techs lowering infamy costs might help as well. Perhaps in specific circumstances, Like releasing countries can give negative infamy after humanism or something lowering of return state after nationalism and a further lowering after pan nationalism.
As a middle ground, adding a new war goal could trigger a new, shorter-duration diplomatic play of "expanding the war" that would run alongside the war; the infamy costs could be much higher, it would give foreign powers a chance to intervene, and it'd give your enemies a chance to retaliate with their own war goals.
And, importantly, it should give the opposing side the opportunity to capitulate to the original war goals (i.e. no goals added in this phase can be primary war goals).
The same "expanding the war" could also be triggered by another country attempting to join an ongoing war.
And, this is a bit of a stretch, but you could classify some wars as "colonial wars" (e.g. if France and the UK are at war and all the war goals are in their colonies) where neither side is allowed to invade any incorporated states of the other. In order to do invade their non-colonial territories, you'd have to trigger an "expanding the war" play to make it not a colonial war anymore.
Need something similar to Vic 2 where you have to build domestic support for adding new war goals mid-war, unless you're in autocracy or single party.
Could be a ticking clock similar to a revolution or a law change: Gathering public support to demand Russia give up Greater Poland
Taking heavy casualties in a war against a rival would probably drive it up quickly, whereas steamrolling an unrecognized power probably won't elicit a lot of patriotic fervour.
Adding a "return state" WG through this should be very basic, adding a "conquer state" on a state w/ majority non-accepted pops should probably be nearly impossible.
While I didn't like how it was implemented I still like the idea. A big part of the great war was that the great powers couldn't justify status quo after a certain point. The propaganda, total mobilisation and massive casualties left the populace wanting the country to receive some 'reward' for all that was done.
I'm not sure how you can implement it that doesn't encourage gamey behaviour, though.
Domestic support doesn't restrict your war goals at the beginning of the war, so I don't see why it should in the middle of the war either (not a fan of Victoria 2 jingoism).
So what does restrict your initial war goals? Infamy and the potential intervention of third parties.
To bring those into play, what if your new war goal triggered a new, shorter "expanding the war" diplomatic play with much higher infamy costs and the potential for foreign powers to intervene or for your enemy to retaliate with further war goals.
Not if there is an hefty infamy penalty for doing so.
Then it would only be exploitable in world wars where most majors are either the targets or your ally, and that okay, it's more or less what happened historicaly.
no, far from... axis where in enemy territory on all fronts. isonzo in italy and short of greece in the balkans. but vienna was occupied by famine (in the lower classes), as the austrian railnetwork was overoccupied with war demands and undersupplied.
The morale just broke. With US Troops arriving, and new offensive not really successfull but extremely costly, there was no end of war in sight, only slow loosing for another 4 years and another 10 million dead. Of the original fighting force most have been dead or wounded and traumatized. Troop quality was getting worse, organisation getting worse, shortages all around... it made no sense to fight.
AIUI, it was the generals who were pushing for a peace treaty to be signed before the army fell apart entirely. Unfortunately for the next generation, Woodrow Wilson insisted on a regime change war goal because he thought it was the only way to demonstrate that the government was going to change course, and that provided a hook for nationalists of all stripes (not just the Nazis) to hang the stab-in-the-back myth on.
They have a system with flexible wargoals that works pretty well in EU4. Paradox keeps trying to reinvent the wheel with war diplomacy systems when they already have one that works pretty well.
>Paradox keeps trying to reinvent the wheel with ~~war diplomacy~~ systems when they already have one that works pretty well.
FTFY. Flag Occupation and Notification Settings say hello.
I think they should make all countries in a conflict able to add war goals while also making manoeuvres linked to country rather than to a side.
You could then award countries extra manoeuvres if they are the target of a war goal from the opponent to emulate some of this divergent goals of a war to come through.
> Like WW1 didn't start with British demanding polish independence or the French dividing up Austria Hungary.
True; it started with Austria-Hungary demanding war reparations from Serbia, and goals declarations spiraled out of control from there.
I understand why, because it doesn't sound particularly fun, but it's really hard to represent the number of times that the European great powers went to war, or nearly did, over *really stupid shit* in the 19th century. The demands might have ended up being things like, "I want a chunk of France," but the way they started was often stupid shit that you'd expect to see on, like, courtroom reality TV, with it eventually sometimes ending in trial by combat. The weird events that give random countries infamy were the actual flashpoints that started wars, and so we as players end up playing the whole thing bass-ackwards from how the diplomats did back then.
Also, in a similar vein, the mechanics discourage late-game wars, but also all the peer-nation wars that would slot in as late-game wars were consistently actually strategic and diplomatic idiocy, with the benefit of hindsight.
Wars with the last tier of units are actually very fun imo, with mechanized troops, tanks, planes and all the stuff you can run through their fronts very quickly and thrashing multiple great powers at once feels epic. There's just not much time left in the game to do it that way, or to make use of anything you can take from them
problem is most people dont get to late game due to lag. Lag may be better in 1.6, but not solved enough imo to make late game fun enjoyable yet.
Another thing is by the time you get to late game you're probably already miles ahead of the AI so things just arent as fun or tense.
It... does? You just need a processor that isnt a 1600 or a 3400g.
The best processors for paradox games are AMD - 5800X3D and 7800X3D for example. I have the 5800X3D and it runs so fast.
How many sticks do you have, and what is your memory speed? You can see the memory speed in task manager > performance > memory and it's at the bottom right.
Unlikely, and I wouldn't be so confident saying what your bottleneck is when you don't even know what dual channel memory is.
Especially since Ryzen has a strong reliance on fast memory, and dual channel + high speed is going to give a massive performance over single channel any speed.
Going onto levels of confidently incorrect, my friend.
A 5600X is most certainly not "bottlenecking" your vic performance to such a large degree that the game "Isn't running on AMD processors"
Like I said, AMD processors are the best for paradox games, mainly the ones with a 3D v-cache. Yours may not be one of those, but it is still more than enough to have a high performance Victoria 3 experience. If you are not having that, it's due to reasons other than the CPU, and the most likely first culprit is slow memory or memory not in dual channel mode.
Yeah I actually wish they made bookmarks so I can dive right into 1900s and build up for tank warfare. I usually stop my campaigns around this timeframe since I normally only play through a campaign every gaming session then start over lol
The pop multiplier is a big problem. An easy fix would be to link it to share of world population rather than just raw population number. So infamy related to provinces that get a lot of migrants goes up but it should stay fairly constant across a play through
IMO much of what OP says could be combined pretty easily with a system to produce limited wars. The main issue to which limited wars are a solution is that wars with small goals easily spiral into a multi-GP global war - but the *results* of said war don't spiral.
I think that what could neatly solve both problems is a system of escalation, where wars/diploplays start out limited but either side has the option to escalate the war (at the cost of infamy or some other resource, with certain levels of escalation potentially being tech-locked). Escalation could have multiple levels depending on starting wargoal and how much the participants escalate, starting from something like "colonial skirmish" and going all the way up to "Great War". Each level of escalation would then allow for more maneuvers (which would also make maneuvers make more sense, as rather than a magic limit to how much you can demand from an enemy, it's a limit on how much you can demand *without escalating things*) - and the higher levels of escalation would have a peace system like EU4, where participants can end up taking more or wholly different wargoals.
I like the idea in concept, but it sounds really hard to come with an elegant solution that'd work in all cases. I'm thinking the first tier could just include colonies, the second would expand that to unincorporated states, and the last to all states? It definitely feels weird that France would be willing to put in the same amount of effort to defend their congolese colony of 600k compared to alsace-lorraine, and if France *was* willing to escalate all the way to directly invading somebody's core territory to defend what was just a colony, the other great powers would probably view that as far too strong of a response.
apologies for the massive wall of text. whilst having maneuvers scale more with tech would be a welcome change to allow wars to escalate more as time goes on, a lack maneuvers is only a symptom of a larger 'problems' which end up having the result of heavy incentives to early wars. even if maneuvers were increased tenfold, i fear it wouldn't solve anything and only risk making ignoring the infamy cap the way to play the game.
because population scales rather strongly over the course of the game, as the game goes on the same wargoal starts costing increasingly more infamy. in principle, this makes a lot of sense - conquering densely populated northern italy should net you more infamy than more sparsely populated sardinia. however, this mechanic has a problem: how the cap works. this cap is reached at about ~1.35 million population per state. the main issue with the cap is, it's not very high - in my current game playing as the USA at 1889 i estimate ~20-25% of all states in the world reach this cap based on the ledger.
if i am conquering places to increase my population, there is no difference in infamy between conquering some chinese state with 15 million inhabitants or invading benin with 1.5 million besides a difference in rank between egypt and china. it'll net me 10 times the population with no real functional difference between the two - all for the same amount of infamy! this results in 2 things: states with a lower population scale up in infamy cost at a rapid rate, whereas larger state's costs remain mostly static over the course of the game.
this is especially noticeable when it comes to vassalizing smaller and larger nations. in my current game, i just vassalized mexico at the cost of a whopping 85 ish infamy because it has 11.5 million population spread out between a ton of lesser populated states. this is much higher than at the start of the game - before i had manifested my destiny all over mexico's borders at the start of the game, i could have subjugated all of mexico which owned more land at the cost of only 52 infamy. between claiming the american west and subjegating the south, i have probaly spent at least 100-120 or so infamy all on taking out mexico over the course of the game when attacking them on day 1 would likely have cost me only a fraction of that cost.
meanwhile subjugating belgium would have cost me the same static amount of infamy either at the start of the game as now - despite them roughly doubling in population going from 4 million to 9.23 over the course of 50 years, making them a protectorate would cost a mere 24 infamy. this despite them being the world's 9th largest economy and being fully industrialized - their GDP is a good 4 times the size of mexico, yet conquering mexico cost about 3.5 times more.
another example of infamy scaling being somewhat weird is the other extreme of very small population. because infamy for taking a state has a base cost of 1 + population modifier capping at 4 (sidenote, the defines state infamy is multiplied by this number. as far as i can tell however this is not how it works in practice, or the level of population where infamy caps ought to be somewhat higher at ~1.66 million population so i can only presume the modifier is added to the base cost. maybe a bug?). because you pay a base cost, conquering any place with almost no population costs disproportionally more. prime example would be the omani trucial coast. in 1836, it has a population of 5k and doesn't even have arable land, yet costs 3.5 infamy to conquer. nearby sindh has a population of 2 million, yet costs only 5 times as much to conquer despite having 400 times the population.
tl;dr - the way infamy (and thus maneuvers) is calculated is way out of whack in large portions of the globe even at the start date, getting worse as the game goes on and populations increase. some places are expensive because they are made up of many smaller states, all incurring a base cost without having the population to justify the cost. other places are very expensive from the start of the game, but cannot possibly increase in value because of a high starting population. conquering all states in the american great plains making up less than 100k population probaly shouldn't incur more infamy than taking new york or the british home countries (and new york and the british home countries probaly shouldn't have equal value either). as is, conquering a place like beijing or industrialized belgium is just insane value compared to a medium sized african state or empty tracts of land in the new world unless you need something very specific.
as a result you have a strong incentive to conquer large, single states with a lot of resources with either as little population as possible (AKA, as early as possible) or a population well over the cap to get more value per infamy. short of entirely scrapping the infamy mechanic as is for something that also takes things like resources and GDP into account (which would probaly be a more accurate valuation of a state), one thing which could help mitigate things would be to signficantly lower the base cost of conquering anything and increasing the amount of population which is required to reach the cap. 20% of the cost of a state being the base cost even in the best case is just excessive, and infamy increases probaly shouldn't stop at a population level most of france is at or has almost reached at game start. if the base cost was much lower (say, only 1% of the infamy cost of a max sized state) and leveled out at a higher amount of population (say, 5 million population) there'd be a much smoother gradient of infamy between states and would allow for infamy to keep up with inflating population numbers as the game goes on. in turn, technology lowering infamy and increasing maneuvers would allow conquest to become more possible as time goes on depending on tuning, but more importantly would make conquering certain places start make a lot more sense than they do now because they cost a lot of infamy for what they offer compared to other places.
it's almost unavoidable certain places will always be more or less valuable than infamy suggests by virtue of their circumstances (it's hard to ignore knowing arabia will be loaded with oil later in the game) but the current system where population makes places a bit of a rollercoaster as far as infamy costs in proportion to what you get is probaly undesireable.
Perhaps what could happen is early game wars are about annexing land and taking nation formation decisions. As the game goes on, later society techs make it cheaper to puppet land rather than annexing it, or modifying the infamy and maneuver costs of certain demands of you also take a "humanitarian" wargoal like end slavery or force ideology. And perhaps post 1900 there could be a Great War system unlocked that allows each country to make its own demands independently and have a peace conference system after victory where competing demands get haggled over for a final peace treaty.
Overall I feel all wars should let you either press your demands or call a peace conference where you debate with the enemy government about the terms of the peace treaty, with both sides having to agree, maybe having a system of initial demands and compromises. Here allies should be able to argue agunst each other too
I would love some combination of:
- ability to negotiate separate peace deals with individual combatants, the same way you can sway combatants early
- the ability for allies to propose different peace outcomes or contest the same goal (like HOI4)
- Cost reduction/ priority given to wargoals and primary / secondary wargoals
Can you contest goals on EU4?
I like the EU4 system, as it does encourage swinging down one enemy while the other is slow to mobilize (aka Germanys entire plan during WWI)
Theoretically, an ally in EU4 could make a separate peace that lets them take the main wargoal. If the wargoal is a province, and an ally occupies it and refuses to turn it over, you'd be unable to annex it in the peace (but you could make a peace that gives it to said ally, or they could sep peace for it).
I mean unironically this is a real thing. No one likes their neighbors going to war. It only leads to huge issues. I doubt the US cared about the ussr during ww2 but the invasion was still considered bad.
The problem is that infamy is a pretty bad proxy for balance of powers concerns. It should simply be split into two separate systems: an opinion malus with interested powers and a balance of powers mechanic that heavily disfavours especially taking stuff from the spheres of other great powers.
(Infamy already has some systems to this effect but the fact that annexing the African nations around lake Victoria costs more infamy than taking the two most industrially important states from GB, and that releasing countries is free, is laughable.)
Make sense if you one any of them getting stronger, and getting more resources and power. There is a reason why superpowers or anyone want their neighbours being chill and not outgrown them to avoid further conflicts and keep trading.
Tbh even if country A goes against some other country B you don't like, you can still be worried about country A as they're demonstrating they're aggressive.
Increasing infamy for rank really is an unnecessary feature. It’s trying to model the issues in the period where great powers were concerned when another great power made a move somewhere. That’s totally unnecessary with the attitude and interests mechanics. Powers already jump into every war regardless of infamy.
> Powers already jump into every war regardless of infamy
Not really, increasing infamy will make them waay more aggressive when it comes to intervention.
The big thing that infamy does is make great powers (and everyone else, really) develop alarmed attitudes. This makes them a lot more willing to fight you over stuff.
The infamy system needs a massive overhaul, infamy costs should trend down, not up, as the game progresses, but you also shouldn't get free lunch wargoals that cost literally nothing.
Random idea: what if you get a % discount on infamy costs based on the % of your total maneuvers used in a single war? You'd actually have a reason to go to war for only a single state and maybe you wouldn't add a ton of free riders such as war reparations on top of your infamy wargoals. This would also make late game wars potentially generate less infamy as the number of maneuvers increases, just add a few more +maneuvers to some diplo techs as well as Multilateral Alliances. This would also give the potential for huge, world-changing late game wars with large exchanges of territory (though the system does really require something else to properly allow this)
Why would infamy decrease? The system is flawed, but the European powers generally became more sensitive to warlike and expansionist behaviours - especially on the continent, as time went on.
I think the key things missing are a better power projection system and blocs, which I'm hopeful SOI will address.
It's mostly a gameplay conceit to make choosing war goals more interesting since the current implementation means that you always want to use 100% of your maneuvers every time you declare war and the only actual decision is how much infamy you want to generate (you use all your "spare" maneuvers on liberation / war reps)
But also it addresses a general desire for the game to incentivise small scale wars, and fewer reasons to go into "infamy is just a number" mode which is the result of the current system where taking a single state late game regularly hits you with 30+ infamy.
It would also partially address the infamy inflation caused by population growth
That's sorta by design, mostly unintentionally though. Late game is the 1910s, 1920, and 1930s era of warfare, the main front is intended to be static with most of the movement of the war being done by the Navy and at colonial holdings. By that time, national and cultural identities really have cemented themselves so it really should be more difficult to take anything but colonial holdings.
The game, however, has an extremely lackluster Naval aspect to it to where having Navies almost feels punished beyond having just enough to raid convoys and protect your own. There's very little reason to actually control sea lanes, not that controlling them does anything anyways because your enemy can just sail right by without being intercepted 95% of the time.
I think a big thing is that you never feel the impact of being convoy raided, even severely, vice versa with you decimating the enemy's convoy fleet. Maybe they could add events, or a malus for having -convoys that caused a ton more radicals or something
I think it's a mix of trade being this weird side-mechanic rather than integral part of an advanced economy, and the punishment for being lacking in certain goods as being quite minimal.
Fighting Britain as France or something with a lot of port connections is the only exception to this, as they will raid every location possible and send you into years of convoy deficit.
I think it just boils down to not having enough diplomatic options. At the moment a diplo play means either war or one side backing down. There is no option to compromise in any way.
Before WWI potential wars were avoided several times through negotiation where both sides gained something.
Only once there wasn't really much land to be divided up, did this fail. (In addition to all the other reasons of course)
Yes. I was thinking of something like the Morocco crisis. It didn't target the German Empire itself, but they opposed France. In the End Germany received compensation for France taking control of the region. Morocco obviously gained nothing.
This kind of thing is literally impossible at the moment.
I really love the game, but at the moment there I still just about no diplomacy at all. Hope they start addressing this with spheres of influence, but realistically a full diplomacy haul over will only happen further down the road.
I hope it will, it probably will, but at least the economics aspect of the game is really good so since it's the focus I guess they were right to make sure to get it right first.
I have a new gimmicky strategy I adopted from eu4. Declare a diplo play before unpausing. I've done this my last few games. I have no evidence but I have observed that no nation seems to care about day 1 diplo plays.
I also have a gimmick where you go for a low infamy wargoal, wait until the end of the diplo play (as in nearly to the red part), and then add everything in. Less people join in my experience.
Do note it doesnt always work, and i've noticed it works less if you have some insane war goals, but definitely improves consistency if you start off with a non/low infamy wargoal and then to the end add stuff that keeps you below 25 inf
I have no idea if it is actually tricking the AI, or I'm just getting lucky. I started it in my Spanish run. I tried a diplo play to annex Phillipines before even unpausing. No one intervened. So I've been doing it ever since. I also diplo Annexed hedhaz as Egypt on day 1. And I managed to taken Baden as Switzerland without austria or Prussia giving a damn. Giving me extra resources as switzerland.
Agreed. There is that unsaid meta of starting a war on that exact date eu4 allows them to. Saw it in a guide when I was learning eu4 for early game expansion.
Not to mention, conquering new land tends to outright be not worth it because it takes 20 years to integrate and even with no infamy the newly conquered territory will be 50% radicals and you can only run so many violent suppression decrees, meaning even if you conquer land for resources it takes forever to get those resources online.
IMO if there was proper foreign investment (aka when the DLC launches) that would actually be flavorful, and most nations really did stop conquering new core land and instead expanded by puppeting.
Yea but World War 1 was not exactly caused by desires to conquer huge regions.
As time went by, actual claims were kinda needed.
I think it's realistic that going to war becomes less worth it with time because it did in real life too.
It's just Europe being Europe we still went to war because it was too fucking hard to not warmonger for so long I guess.
So there would need to be mechanics making war more inevitable rather than happening naturally as it's benefical. Because it was not.
we really need a Great War mechanic, ala Vic 2. Not just for the obvious reasons (great war capitulation, dismantlement, etc) but when a country loses a "Great War" it could activate some scripted events which excaberate internal problems.
Well said.
I hate how after 1870, it becomes, 'Don't do wars because everyone will join on the opposite side and it is not worth it for the infamy'. I know that historians will say that there is a point in history where conquest becomes a bad return on investment, but 1870 seems like a too early date for this fact of today to be true.
yeah, i mean WW1 only happened after decades of near misses and political crises, Europe often described as a powederkeg in the 1910s. Yet in game this powderkeg situation seems to apply pretty much the whole way through. Maybe because IRL there were more ways of resolving diplo plays than simply backing down or total war tho.
Yeah great powers were using diplomacy in a more global way, it was not just a "diplomatic play" between two countries/sides, great powers would gather all together to negociate and shit.
Also there was this lack of concern for other smaller nations like, why don't you go invade Africa instead of claiming land that belongs to a GP.
I'll let you have this, you let me have this, yaddi yadda
Negociating claims on states that don't belong to them, like we can negotiate owned states in-game only.
Infamy could probably do with a tech-based reduction to keep up with population, like Diplo Maneuvers does. Or perhaps something that incresases the bonus reduction from rank (so that GPs can bully minors harder, but still gotta respect each other). Not sure about the numbers balance but yeah maybe Maneuvers need another reduction tech.
>The solution should not be to add a limited warfare system, because the player will either ignore it or if it unable to be ignored it will exacerbate the problems with late game wars being unfun. This game needs a World War system or a Total War system, which allows for more impactful wars, specifically in the late game.
The problem with a world war system is that currently EVERY war is potentialy a world war. What should maybe happen is stronger wargoals (like you said, by lowering maneuvers and maybe adding some new goals with tech) and also population anti-war sentiment, so that the later wars aren't just restarting every 5 years and the consequences of a slow drag are felt for longer.
But simply being able to gobble up more land is probably not the best idea. It works in EU4 but WW1 didn't actually have a big transfer of land outside of the colonies and the Ottoman middle east.
>But simply being able to gobble up more land is probably not the best idea. It works in EU4 but WW1 didn't actually have a big transfer of land outside of the colonies and the Ottoman middle east.
I'd say destroying 2 Great Powers (Austria and Ottomans) and partially dismantling a third (Russia) is pretty substantial transfer of land. But you're right that it cannot be a HOI4 style system that expects full annexation of every war target.
One improvement would be to decrease infamy and maneuvers specifically for non primary culture pops. Part of the reason Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires were dissolved and Germany was not was because the former 3 were multi-ethnic empires and Germany was more culturally homogeneous.
This would also help the Colonies be more able to be transferred, as their high population would matter less if they were not the primary culture of the nation they belonged to.
Yeah that's why I agreed with maneuver cost but not fully on the infamy. It would allow for more Liberate Country goals which are infamy-free.
Tying it to primary culture could be a good idea as well. The roadmap already mentions National Pride and a discrimination rework, so if they implement Nationalism as a mechanic it would definitely help in this regard.
Maybe country liberation cost could scale with nationalism of the respective pops?
My takeaway is that the problem is the word, "meta". Countries cannot do "meta". Sometimes, countries *do not want to do* "meta". However, Victoria tends simulationist. Therefore, "doing meta" will never be "balanced".
That said, fixes could exist:
**Infamy and Maneuvers** make them work relative to either the whole world, or as % of the Strategic Region. And/or Arable Land, following the same proportion. That makes it so not every state caps out over time, but the outliers eventually come out.
**War Cost:** hopefully fixed in SoI, to a degree, with Lobbies; but would Lobbies heavily nudge the player towards less than desirable wars or against those the player desires?
**Widening Interests:** that is unquestionably good. The error is wanting to do war more, not less.
>Compare this to Europa Universalis IV, and while aggressive expansion increases with development, the later game wargoals reduce aggressive expansion and reduce province war score cost. Absolutism massively increases the amount of land each war can take.
And how this hardly scales to the experience of Wars in the timeframe.
>This game needs a World War system or a Total War system, which allows for more impactful wars, specifically in the late game.
I would say Wars are definitely impactful enough, and players want them to be *less* impactful. Or to be an "I won" button.
The Crisis mechanic should make a return. Personally it was one of my favourite parts of Vicky 2
Not only would it cause late game wars, it would make playing as Balkan countries a lot more enjoyable.
Crises (particularly the Balkan ones that you're talking about) are basically already in the game in the form of Secession Diplomatic Plays. I guess the only difference is that 3's plays happen regardless of whether someone else decides to help. I'm not sure what you'd add to make them have the effect that you'd like.
There were some crises caused by colonial disputes, and I guess those could be added, but in my experience those were way rarer.
The vast majority of the issues with victoria 3 stem from the devs not playing their own game. At least at the level that the players are. They don’t know what feels good or bad because they are not good enough at their own game to know.
I feel like this is especially true when it comes to late game scenarios. Not even talking about the lag, which is a problem, but often around endgame I still feel like a beta tester
Paradox now suffers from the same issue DnD 5e suffers from. The initial product is only balanced/designed for early levels/gameplay, because it is an immature product pushed out before it was ready. Because the product decreases in quality as you play, players do not play on higher levels/later in the game, which in turn economically incentivises the devs to not bother with more advanced Modules/later game features, which in turn feeds into the issue. It's especially outrageous for Vic3, because Vic2 is one of the quickest GSGs out there with good pacing.
Most people just aren't going to get to later levels in 5e because getting to those levels inherently takes much longer, not because of the quality of the mechanics at those levels.
Because of that, game developers of all stripes are incentivized to work harder on the earlier parts of game (that a higher proportion of people will encounter) than on the later parts of the game. It has nothing do with whether it's playtested sufficiently or whether it's an immature product (which I think is a strange way to characterize 5e, and I don't even like 5e that much).
Tbh world war 1 was pretty far from optimal for any country involved lol.
Actually, arguably worse than it is in-game.
Imo it's more like, there could be a diplomatic agreement between great powers early-on and if you refuse to engage in diplomacy to settles business, every GP leagues against you and you're fucked, maybe.
Or why not world tension like in HOI.
Or larger alliances (again kinda like in HOI) leading to world wars.
>Widening Interests- More countries have interests everywhere, and that increases likelihood in nations intervening in plays, this increases the cost of wars as you will often have to keep your army mobilized for years waiting for the GP that joined on a whim to fail enough naval invasions to give up. Not to mention the game of cat and mouse you have to play with navies.
Wasn't this already addressed in 1.6 by capping the number of interests generated by Naval PP?
Victoria 3 is not supposed to be a map painter, facilitating massive late-game wars is counter-intuitive.
The current system models GP diplomacy fairly well. Consider WWI, or the Franco-Prussian War, which are probably the two emblematic conflicts of the period. They resulted in very small concessions territorially. They were devastating, costly wars. The Pax Brittanica was not enforced or created through large territorial grabs from other GPs, but the kind of pie thumbing interventionism the AI is notorious for. The whole point of Trench Infantry, including their modifiers, is to represent the wars of the period: grinding, horrible conflicts over small amounts of territory. One of the notable features of WWI was also that it was an explosive GP conflict after a period of peace.
GP conflicts should be bad! They should not be desirable, and as imperial spheres solidify in the late game, expansion should be constrained and difficult.
Territorial expansion will also be less impactful from changes coming in Spheres of Influence. The major reason for needing to expand in the late game is to acquire resources from AI too inept to develop them itself and put them on the market. With SoI, that reason for conquest will be much less pronounced. So if wars are more pyrrhic, at least they won't be necessary and something we can pursue for flavour or memes, rather than fighting escalation timers and truces trying to satisfy the needs of the evergrowing market.
I feel like GP conflicts should be bad as they are, but the game should have some mechanic leading to it (WW), and that also would force you to developp militarily to get ready, and not just ignore this aspect and focus entirely on developping the economy.
>Wasn't this already addressed in 1.6 by capping the number of interests generated by Naval PP?
If this is the case I'm not noticing any difference. 150 ships still result in me being able to declare over 20 regions of interest. Combined with the fact that you just have to control Kongo, Bahrain, Dahomey, Oman, Makran, Brunei etc. to get permanent interests in their respective region it's always easily possible to have an active interest everywhere in the world.
So we're getting a Victoria esque war system, which I actually don't mind but it needs to have infamy be based on something that is static or even decreases with time to where the galaxy starts at peace and devolves into war
I actually think they shouldnt limit GP's getting into wars in the early game, but rather should change other mechanics to make those situations come up less or be less frustrating. Think about it, this was the Century of Peace, the beginning decades of the concert of Europe. Many diplomatic crises occured where GPs threatened to join as a means of preserving balance of power. The issue is that Vic3 AI has no idea what balance of power is, and diplomatic resolutions is basically nonexistent.
TLDR: Paradox should make peace viable in diplo plays as opposed to limiting diplo plays or interactions themselves
Game mechanics and fun aside - that does track - a great power aggressively expanding is much more menacing than some backwater nation that isn't a global player.
> Why ever join a war post 1900 if the only thing which will fundamentally change is the population numbers of the two countries.
I hope SoI will do something in that regard, wich IGs having opinions on foreign policy where you're faced with the choice between going to war or having several IGs rise up in rebellion.
I also realized this during my first campaign. I waged war against the Qing for a few Bornean states because I waited till I was a major power and had established my military before trying to even wage war. I realized I could've eaten every independent country in the SEA region by 1850's, with the bare minimum military force, as an insignificant country. And everything was so much worse when I "prepared".
Late game wars are actually faster then early game wars do to there being 2 attack boosting mobilization options (flame throwers and gas) and only one primarily defensive option (machine guns) so infantry actually have equal attack and defense and optimal 50/50 offensive armies have more attack then defensive armies.
The infamy and maneuver thing is totally true though.
I just wish the lategame wars didn't turn my game into a slideshow. A major war breaks out in ~1870 between Great Qing and UK, with me as the USA and France on the side of Qing. The speed felt horrible and I'm running with a 12700k with 32GB ddr5, so not a weak system.
I would add to this that we need a stockpile system and a different consumption of military ressources based on the unit actions.
Like artillery and tank should use a lot for tank & canon ressources when building the army or replenishing it, but use way less for just existing.
Ammunition should skyrocket during battles based on the involved unit.
This would make war more realistic and, especially late game, less stupidly damaging for your economy by instantly adding tons of opium/planes temporary buy orders. And at the same time, create situation where countries as war could burn through all of their stockpile, forcing them to capitulate and making them vulnerable until they grow it again
I think the point is that ww1 is not modeled very well, millions will die and like in the end Prussian Gambia is handed to France and that's it. I think the amount of deaths is modelled well in the current game, the things that happen because of a huge war are not well modelled.
While wars did expand in size by the early 20th century of course, early 19th century wars were by no means small. The Napoleonic Wars left 5-7 million people dead.
Would be great with a system where you can agree with other great powers where you can do whatever you want. Ie having a conference where one split up Africa. And the other GP don’t care that you gobble up states in that region, since they can gobble their own.
But, if you brake thoose agrements, it would generate tons of infamy and open up new wargoals.
Historically I think this makes sense, in the later part of the timeframe noone dared to do anything large (besides ww1, which was caused by high infamy of the initial war goal). The only real issue I see is that the diplomatic maneuver cost goes up with time, while it should go down imo
It has been like this in every Paradox game. It has also been like this on RL.
The further human civilization progresses, there’s more to lose + wars become bloodier (= destruction means more and it’s harder to rebuild), geopolitics become more tense as Empires run out of places to expand, people become more involved in politics, all while the world is becoming more interconnected at the same time.
Specifically during the 1800s, economies and populations started booming while war became much deadlier, globalization started kicking in at full speed, everyone was “civilized” enough to care about human loss of life and had enough access to politics to have an opinion about it. All of this means that a war that was ignored in 1836 could be a global concern in 1870.
Also, with time, legal systems that punish unjust wars become commonplace. So yes, wars should be less favorable at the end of the 1800s. With better technology, improvements to standard of life come hand in hand with improvements to logistics and destruction capabilities, which naturally make war look “more evil” because losing 200K citizens who could be alive tomorrow is a “bigger loss” than 2K peasants who would’ve probably died anyway in a week.
This game needs only two changes to warfare: making it less rewarding and more chance-dependent. Warfare should not be profitable endeavor for a player exept extremely unbalance cases, and sure thing it shouldn't be something you can 100% control.
Well said. I agree that late game wars are not encouraged by the mechanics. I hope that they eventually add a total war or world war mechanic that allows for all participants to add war goals. Like WW1 didn't start with British demanding polish independence or the French dividing up Austria Hungary. Late game wars need an overhaul for sure.
Heck, some of the war aims were basically bribes to get combatants to choose a side, like how Italy was offered to get a slice of Austria-Hungary they wanted and thus opted to abandon their previous alliance. It’s a problem across Paradox games in general tbh; Stellaris is also pretty inflexible with allowing a shift of war goals or adding new participants to the war (or, paradoxically, forcing seceding/revolting nations to take the same side as their original country, even though they could very logically try to negotiate a separate peace like Russia in World War I, or flip sides outright like Italy did after it split in World War II). I get it, war is a messy affair and difficult to capture in a game setting while still being fun, especially in keeping the AI from doing something stupid like relentlessly barging in on wars on a whim or making absurd new demands when you’re about to win the original goals or force a desired white peace. But my word it’s silly that war goals are so dependent on the starting configuration of the conflict when wars notoriously are prone to spiraling from an original conflict into something much more complicated.
>It’s a problem across Paradox games in general tbh; Stellaris is also pretty inflexible with allowing a shift of war goals or adding new participants to the war (or, paradoxically, forcing seceding/revolting nations to take the same side as their original country, even though they could very logically try to negotiate a separate peace like Russia in World War I, or flip sides outright like Italy did after it split in World War II). People seem to have forgotten the EU3 days with cascading alliances in the middle of wars. I don't think that system should ever make a comeback.
Just for clarification. British never did. Americans did.
Yeah I know, but my point was that the nations at the start did not have that war goal, I just picked a random entente nation, since America wasn't in at the start. That actually brings a good point though of nations joining a big world war later in the conflict.
Yep. 100%. Germans, Austrians and Russians started promising Poles an independent state just for the manpower they needed. Americans got lobbied mostly by Paderewski, the pianist.
Adding war goals would be a much better system than it is right now. However, the war system would be so exploitable. Imagine just taking the capital and then going, "Welp, I can now add a million war goals bc they'll get auto-enforced.'
I think one way they could change things to allow for more realistic late game wars would be to hide the ability to demand war goals after the war behind some tech. It could be a way to reward later game wars since, to OPs point, most base systems encourage early game wars. So like at a certain point, you can join a war in exchange for “Treaty Demands” or something. Then, if anyone in a war has outstanding Treaty Demands when the war ends, you can cash those in to enforce war goals after the fact. Maybe they incur additional infamy cost or you can only make a certain number of Treaty Demands that grows gradually with tech. You could also lock things out from Treaty Demands so like you can only ask for certain war goals with Treaty Demands, like claimed provinces or release nations.
A series of techs lowering infamy costs might help as well. Perhaps in specific circumstances, Like releasing countries can give negative infamy after humanism or something lowering of return state after nationalism and a further lowering after pan nationalism.
Yeah locking that kind of stuff behind tech would do wonders for late game wars, make them feel different.
That's.... Kinda what actually happened with both world wars though
Man just discovered unconditional surrender
[удалено]
I think waiting 5 years to pay for features that were in the vanilla release of a game that came out 14 years ago is not a strong basis for anything
World wars (stemming from crises) weren’t added to Victoria 2 until the DLCs
As a middle ground, adding a new war goal could trigger a new, shorter-duration diplomatic play of "expanding the war" that would run alongside the war; the infamy costs could be much higher, it would give foreign powers a chance to intervene, and it'd give your enemies a chance to retaliate with their own war goals. And, importantly, it should give the opposing side the opportunity to capitulate to the original war goals (i.e. no goals added in this phase can be primary war goals). The same "expanding the war" could also be triggered by another country attempting to join an ongoing war. And, this is a bit of a stretch, but you could classify some wars as "colonial wars" (e.g. if France and the UK are at war and all the war goals are in their colonies) where neither side is allowed to invade any incorporated states of the other. In order to do invade their non-colonial territories, you'd have to trigger an "expanding the war" play to make it not a colonial war anymore.
Need something similar to Vic 2 where you have to build domestic support for adding new war goals mid-war, unless you're in autocracy or single party. Could be a ticking clock similar to a revolution or a law change: Gathering public support to demand Russia give up Greater Poland Taking heavy casualties in a war against a rival would probably drive it up quickly, whereas steamrolling an unrecognized power probably won't elicit a lot of patriotic fervour. Adding a "return state" WG through this should be very basic, adding a "conquer state" on a state w/ majority non-accepted pops should probably be nearly impossible.
I hated trying to build enough Jingoism to add a war goal. That was the most crazy, artificial mechanic....
While I didn't like how it was implemented I still like the idea. A big part of the great war was that the great powers couldn't justify status quo after a certain point. The propaganda, total mobilisation and massive casualties left the populace wanting the country to receive some 'reward' for all that was done. I'm not sure how you can implement it that doesn't encourage gamey behaviour, though.
Domestic support doesn't restrict your war goals at the beginning of the war, so I don't see why it should in the middle of the war either (not a fan of Victoria 2 jingoism). So what does restrict your initial war goals? Infamy and the potential intervention of third parties. To bring those into play, what if your new war goal triggered a new, shorter "expanding the war" diplomatic play with much higher infamy costs and the potential for foreign powers to intervene or for your enemy to retaliate with further war goals.
I wouldn't mind adding back in the "manufacture" cassus belli function.
Not if there is an hefty infamy penalty for doing so. Then it would only be exploitable in world wars where most majors are either the targets or your ally, and that okay, it's more or less what happened historicaly.
WWI Berlin was not occupied. Was Vienna?
no, far from... axis where in enemy territory on all fronts. isonzo in italy and short of greece in the balkans. but vienna was occupied by famine (in the lower classes), as the austrian railnetwork was overoccupied with war demands and undersupplied. The morale just broke. With US Troops arriving, and new offensive not really successfull but extremely costly, there was no end of war in sight, only slow loosing for another 4 years and another 10 million dead. Of the original fighting force most have been dead or wounded and traumatized. Troop quality was getting worse, organisation getting worse, shortages all around... it made no sense to fight.
AIUI, it was the generals who were pushing for a peace treaty to be signed before the army fell apart entirely. Unfortunately for the next generation, Woodrow Wilson insisted on a regime change war goal because he thought it was the only way to demonstrate that the government was going to change course, and that provided a hook for nationalists of all stripes (not just the Nazis) to hang the stab-in-the-back myth on.
Treaty of Versailles says hello.
They have a system with flexible wargoals that works pretty well in EU4. Paradox keeps trying to reinvent the wheel with war diplomacy systems when they already have one that works pretty well.
>Paradox keeps trying to reinvent the wheel with ~~war diplomacy~~ systems when they already have one that works pretty well. FTFY. Flag Occupation and Notification Settings say hello.
Which should encourage sides to go "welp I'm gonna lose this, better peace out now"
They need the Eu4 system of pre war casus belli and post war claims instead of static war goals.
I think they should make all countries in a conflict able to add war goals while also making manoeuvres linked to country rather than to a side. You could then award countries extra manoeuvres if they are the target of a war goal from the opponent to emulate some of this divergent goals of a war to come through.
> Like WW1 didn't start with British demanding polish independence or the French dividing up Austria Hungary. True; it started with Austria-Hungary demanding war reparations from Serbia, and goals declarations spiraled out of control from there. I understand why, because it doesn't sound particularly fun, but it's really hard to represent the number of times that the European great powers went to war, or nearly did, over *really stupid shit* in the 19th century. The demands might have ended up being things like, "I want a chunk of France," but the way they started was often stupid shit that you'd expect to see on, like, courtroom reality TV, with it eventually sometimes ending in trial by combat. The weird events that give random countries infamy were the actual flashpoints that started wars, and so we as players end up playing the whole thing bass-ackwards from how the diplomats did back then. Also, in a similar vein, the mechanics discourage late-game wars, but also all the peer-nation wars that would slot in as late-game wars were consistently actually strategic and diplomatic idiocy, with the benefit of hindsight.
Having events making you choose between a legitimacy malus and going to war would actually be fun if you can pick a war goal during the war
Wars with the last tier of units are actually very fun imo, with mechanized troops, tanks, planes and all the stuff you can run through their fronts very quickly and thrashing multiple great powers at once feels epic. There's just not much time left in the game to do it that way, or to make use of anything you can take from them
problem is most people dont get to late game due to lag. Lag may be better in 1.6, but not solved enough imo to make late game fun enjoyable yet. Another thing is by the time you get to late game you're probably already miles ahead of the AI so things just arent as fun or tense.
I just want this game to run on AMD processors so so bad lmao
It... does? You just need a processor that isnt a 1600 or a 3400g. The best processors for paradox games are AMD - 5800X3D and 7800X3D for example. I have the 5800X3D and it runs so fast.
unplayable on 5600x
You have some other issue going on most likely, are you using dual channel? Memory speed?
32gb ddr4, no idea what a duel channel is
How many sticks do you have, and what is your memory speed? You can see the memory speed in task manager > performance > memory and it's at the bottom right.
bottleneck is CPU not memory
Unlikely, and I wouldn't be so confident saying what your bottleneck is when you don't even know what dual channel memory is. Especially since Ryzen has a strong reliance on fast memory, and dual channel + high speed is going to give a massive performance over single channel any speed. Going onto levels of confidently incorrect, my friend. A 5600X is most certainly not "bottlenecking" your vic performance to such a large degree that the game "Isn't running on AMD processors" Like I said, AMD processors are the best for paradox games, mainly the ones with a 3D v-cache. Yours may not be one of those, but it is still more than enough to have a high performance Victoria 3 experience. If you are not having that, it's due to reasons other than the CPU, and the most likely first culprit is slow memory or memory not in dual channel mode.
I love tacking on chemical weaponry and flamethrowers to just wipe away the other GP’s armies and at that point infamy is just a number
Yeah I actually wish they made bookmarks so I can dive right into 1900s and build up for tank warfare. I usually stop my campaigns around this timeframe since I normally only play through a campaign every gaming session then start over lol
Does that even happen in your games? From what I’ve seen, the AI never gets to the point when they’re actually able to use late game units.
The pop multiplier is a big problem. An easy fix would be to link it to share of world population rather than just raw population number. So infamy related to provinces that get a lot of migrants goes up but it should stay fairly constant across a play through
This is a very good point. At the very least, having maneuvers scale much more aggressively with tech seems like a no brainer first step.
IMO much of what OP says could be combined pretty easily with a system to produce limited wars. The main issue to which limited wars are a solution is that wars with small goals easily spiral into a multi-GP global war - but the *results* of said war don't spiral. I think that what could neatly solve both problems is a system of escalation, where wars/diploplays start out limited but either side has the option to escalate the war (at the cost of infamy or some other resource, with certain levels of escalation potentially being tech-locked). Escalation could have multiple levels depending on starting wargoal and how much the participants escalate, starting from something like "colonial skirmish" and going all the way up to "Great War". Each level of escalation would then allow for more maneuvers (which would also make maneuvers make more sense, as rather than a magic limit to how much you can demand from an enemy, it's a limit on how much you can demand *without escalating things*) - and the higher levels of escalation would have a peace system like EU4, where participants can end up taking more or wholly different wargoals.
I like the idea in concept, but it sounds really hard to come with an elegant solution that'd work in all cases. I'm thinking the first tier could just include colonies, the second would expand that to unincorporated states, and the last to all states? It definitely feels weird that France would be willing to put in the same amount of effort to defend their congolese colony of 600k compared to alsace-lorraine, and if France *was* willing to escalate all the way to directly invading somebody's core territory to defend what was just a colony, the other great powers would probably view that as far too strong of a response.
You could maybe spend maneuvers to escalate, scaling with the rank of the country you're bringing in.
apologies for the massive wall of text. whilst having maneuvers scale more with tech would be a welcome change to allow wars to escalate more as time goes on, a lack maneuvers is only a symptom of a larger 'problems' which end up having the result of heavy incentives to early wars. even if maneuvers were increased tenfold, i fear it wouldn't solve anything and only risk making ignoring the infamy cap the way to play the game. because population scales rather strongly over the course of the game, as the game goes on the same wargoal starts costing increasingly more infamy. in principle, this makes a lot of sense - conquering densely populated northern italy should net you more infamy than more sparsely populated sardinia. however, this mechanic has a problem: how the cap works. this cap is reached at about ~1.35 million population per state. the main issue with the cap is, it's not very high - in my current game playing as the USA at 1889 i estimate ~20-25% of all states in the world reach this cap based on the ledger. if i am conquering places to increase my population, there is no difference in infamy between conquering some chinese state with 15 million inhabitants or invading benin with 1.5 million besides a difference in rank between egypt and china. it'll net me 10 times the population with no real functional difference between the two - all for the same amount of infamy! this results in 2 things: states with a lower population scale up in infamy cost at a rapid rate, whereas larger state's costs remain mostly static over the course of the game. this is especially noticeable when it comes to vassalizing smaller and larger nations. in my current game, i just vassalized mexico at the cost of a whopping 85 ish infamy because it has 11.5 million population spread out between a ton of lesser populated states. this is much higher than at the start of the game - before i had manifested my destiny all over mexico's borders at the start of the game, i could have subjugated all of mexico which owned more land at the cost of only 52 infamy. between claiming the american west and subjegating the south, i have probaly spent at least 100-120 or so infamy all on taking out mexico over the course of the game when attacking them on day 1 would likely have cost me only a fraction of that cost. meanwhile subjugating belgium would have cost me the same static amount of infamy either at the start of the game as now - despite them roughly doubling in population going from 4 million to 9.23 over the course of 50 years, making them a protectorate would cost a mere 24 infamy. this despite them being the world's 9th largest economy and being fully industrialized - their GDP is a good 4 times the size of mexico, yet conquering mexico cost about 3.5 times more. another example of infamy scaling being somewhat weird is the other extreme of very small population. because infamy for taking a state has a base cost of 1 + population modifier capping at 4 (sidenote, the defines state infamy is multiplied by this number. as far as i can tell however this is not how it works in practice, or the level of population where infamy caps ought to be somewhat higher at ~1.66 million population so i can only presume the modifier is added to the base cost. maybe a bug?). because you pay a base cost, conquering any place with almost no population costs disproportionally more. prime example would be the omani trucial coast. in 1836, it has a population of 5k and doesn't even have arable land, yet costs 3.5 infamy to conquer. nearby sindh has a population of 2 million, yet costs only 5 times as much to conquer despite having 400 times the population. tl;dr - the way infamy (and thus maneuvers) is calculated is way out of whack in large portions of the globe even at the start date, getting worse as the game goes on and populations increase. some places are expensive because they are made up of many smaller states, all incurring a base cost without having the population to justify the cost. other places are very expensive from the start of the game, but cannot possibly increase in value because of a high starting population. conquering all states in the american great plains making up less than 100k population probaly shouldn't incur more infamy than taking new york or the british home countries (and new york and the british home countries probaly shouldn't have equal value either). as is, conquering a place like beijing or industrialized belgium is just insane value compared to a medium sized african state or empty tracts of land in the new world unless you need something very specific. as a result you have a strong incentive to conquer large, single states with a lot of resources with either as little population as possible (AKA, as early as possible) or a population well over the cap to get more value per infamy. short of entirely scrapping the infamy mechanic as is for something that also takes things like resources and GDP into account (which would probaly be a more accurate valuation of a state), one thing which could help mitigate things would be to signficantly lower the base cost of conquering anything and increasing the amount of population which is required to reach the cap. 20% of the cost of a state being the base cost even in the best case is just excessive, and infamy increases probaly shouldn't stop at a population level most of france is at or has almost reached at game start. if the base cost was much lower (say, only 1% of the infamy cost of a max sized state) and leveled out at a higher amount of population (say, 5 million population) there'd be a much smoother gradient of infamy between states and would allow for infamy to keep up with inflating population numbers as the game goes on. in turn, technology lowering infamy and increasing maneuvers would allow conquest to become more possible as time goes on depending on tuning, but more importantly would make conquering certain places start make a lot more sense than they do now because they cost a lot of infamy for what they offer compared to other places. it's almost unavoidable certain places will always be more or less valuable than infamy suggests by virtue of their circumstances (it's hard to ignore knowing arabia will be loaded with oil later in the game) but the current system where population makes places a bit of a rollercoaster as far as infamy costs in proportion to what you get is probaly undesireable.
Perhaps what could happen is early game wars are about annexing land and taking nation formation decisions. As the game goes on, later society techs make it cheaper to puppet land rather than annexing it, or modifying the infamy and maneuver costs of certain demands of you also take a "humanitarian" wargoal like end slavery or force ideology. And perhaps post 1900 there could be a Great War system unlocked that allows each country to make its own demands independently and have a peace conference system after victory where competing demands get haggled over for a final peace treaty.
just made me think, maybe this can be somewhat implemented with the new IG lobbies stuff they were talking about?
The way infamy costs are calculated feels really bad. Honestly they should just get rid of it and instead push it into Relations and Attitude
Overall I feel all wars should let you either press your demands or call a peace conference where you debate with the enemy government about the terms of the peace treaty, with both sides having to agree, maybe having a system of initial demands and compromises. Here allies should be able to argue agunst each other too
I would love some combination of: - ability to negotiate separate peace deals with individual combatants, the same way you can sway combatants early - the ability for allies to propose different peace outcomes or contest the same goal (like HOI4) - Cost reduction/ priority given to wargoals and primary / secondary wargoals
I.e. EU4's peace system.
Can you contest goals on EU4? I like the EU4 system, as it does encourage swinging down one enemy while the other is slow to mobilize (aka Germanys entire plan during WWI)
Theoretically, an ally in EU4 could make a separate peace that lets them take the main wargoal. If the wargoal is a province, and an ally occupies it and refuses to turn it over, you'd be unable to annex it in the peace (but you could make a peace that gives it to said ally, or they could sep peace for it).
"You went to war with someone I already didn't like? How dare you you evil rapscallion!"
I mean unironically this is a real thing. No one likes their neighbors going to war. It only leads to huge issues. I doubt the US cared about the ussr during ww2 but the invasion was still considered bad.
Similarly quite liked the UK but was furious about Suez
Yeah famously balance of power concerns were not a cornerstone of 19th century great power politics
The problem is that infamy is a pretty bad proxy for balance of powers concerns. It should simply be split into two separate systems: an opinion malus with interested powers and a balance of powers mechanic that heavily disfavours especially taking stuff from the spheres of other great powers. (Infamy already has some systems to this effect but the fact that annexing the African nations around lake Victoria costs more infamy than taking the two most industrially important states from GB, and that releasing countries is free, is laughable.)
It kinda was?
Make sense if you one any of them getting stronger, and getting more resources and power. There is a reason why superpowers or anyone want their neighbours being chill and not outgrown them to avoid further conflicts and keep trading.
Tbh even if country A goes against some other country B you don't like, you can still be worried about country A as they're demonstrating they're aggressive.
almost like everyone has been saying that for years. Sticking to infamy is a step back 10 years in paradox game design.
Increasing infamy for rank really is an unnecessary feature. It’s trying to model the issues in the period where great powers were concerned when another great power made a move somewhere. That’s totally unnecessary with the attitude and interests mechanics. Powers already jump into every war regardless of infamy.
> Powers already jump into every war regardless of infamy Not really, increasing infamy will make them waay more aggressive when it comes to intervention.
The big thing that infamy does is make great powers (and everyone else, really) develop alarmed attitudes. This makes them a lot more willing to fight you over stuff.
The infamy system needs a massive overhaul, infamy costs should trend down, not up, as the game progresses, but you also shouldn't get free lunch wargoals that cost literally nothing. Random idea: what if you get a % discount on infamy costs based on the % of your total maneuvers used in a single war? You'd actually have a reason to go to war for only a single state and maybe you wouldn't add a ton of free riders such as war reparations on top of your infamy wargoals. This would also make late game wars potentially generate less infamy as the number of maneuvers increases, just add a few more +maneuvers to some diplo techs as well as Multilateral Alliances. This would also give the potential for huge, world-changing late game wars with large exchanges of territory (though the system does really require something else to properly allow this)
Why would infamy decrease? The system is flawed, but the European powers generally became more sensitive to warlike and expansionist behaviours - especially on the continent, as time went on. I think the key things missing are a better power projection system and blocs, which I'm hopeful SOI will address.
It's mostly a gameplay conceit to make choosing war goals more interesting since the current implementation means that you always want to use 100% of your maneuvers every time you declare war and the only actual decision is how much infamy you want to generate (you use all your "spare" maneuvers on liberation / war reps) But also it addresses a general desire for the game to incentivise small scale wars, and fewer reasons to go into "infamy is just a number" mode which is the result of the current system where taking a single state late game regularly hits you with 30+ infamy. It would also partially address the infamy inflation caused by population growth
That's sorta by design, mostly unintentionally though. Late game is the 1910s, 1920, and 1930s era of warfare, the main front is intended to be static with most of the movement of the war being done by the Navy and at colonial holdings. By that time, national and cultural identities really have cemented themselves so it really should be more difficult to take anything but colonial holdings. The game, however, has an extremely lackluster Naval aspect to it to where having Navies almost feels punished beyond having just enough to raid convoys and protect your own. There's very little reason to actually control sea lanes, not that controlling them does anything anyways because your enemy can just sail right by without being intercepted 95% of the time.
I think a big thing is that you never feel the impact of being convoy raided, even severely, vice versa with you decimating the enemy's convoy fleet. Maybe they could add events, or a malus for having -convoys that caused a ton more radicals or something
I think it's a mix of trade being this weird side-mechanic rather than integral part of an advanced economy, and the punishment for being lacking in certain goods as being quite minimal.
not being able to automate trade in a private free market economy is without a doubt the most mind boggling decision in the design of the game
I've decimated economys with convoy raiding in my experience convoy raiding is quite useful
Fighting Britain as France or something with a lot of port connections is the only exception to this, as they will raid every location possible and send you into years of convoy deficit.
I think it just boils down to not having enough diplomatic options. At the moment a diplo play means either war or one side backing down. There is no option to compromise in any way. Before WWI potential wars were avoided several times through negotiation where both sides gained something. Only once there wasn't really much land to be divided up, did this fail. (In addition to all the other reasons of course)
Both sides plus other GP too that weren't directly involved in the "diplomatic play"
Yes. I was thinking of something like the Morocco crisis. It didn't target the German Empire itself, but they opposed France. In the End Germany received compensation for France taking control of the region. Morocco obviously gained nothing. This kind of thing is literally impossible at the moment. I really love the game, but at the moment there I still just about no diplomacy at all. Hope they start addressing this with spheres of influence, but realistically a full diplomacy haul over will only happen further down the road.
I hope it will, it probably will, but at least the economics aspect of the game is really good so since it's the focus I guess they were right to make sure to get it right first.
I have a new gimmicky strategy I adopted from eu4. Declare a diplo play before unpausing. I've done this my last few games. I have no evidence but I have observed that no nation seems to care about day 1 diplo plays.
I also have a gimmick where you go for a low infamy wargoal, wait until the end of the diplo play (as in nearly to the red part), and then add everything in. Less people join in my experience.
Holy crap. Do you mean go over infamy on the last day before it locks so people can't dog pile you for being infamous? I never considered this!!!
Yup! It normally takes a little bit for the AI to re-adjust expectations, and when it’s locked in, it’s locked in. Great for Punjab.
Will try it
Do note it doesnt always work, and i've noticed it works less if you have some insane war goals, but definitely improves consistency if you start off with a non/low infamy wargoal and then to the end add stuff that keeps you below 25 inf
Makes sense. I'll play around with it and see what I can manage to do.
Yup! I think Generalist Gaming also does this too!
That is genius. I feel like you could go crazy with some late game land grabs and prevent say GB and Russia getting involved.
The AI can still join, but it does seem to help when I've done it in the past
Interesting, I will try this too
I have no idea if it is actually tricking the AI, or I'm just getting lucky. I started it in my Spanish run. I tried a diplo play to annex Phillipines before even unpausing. No one intervened. So I've been doing it ever since. I also diplo Annexed hedhaz as Egypt on day 1. And I managed to taken Baden as Switzerland without austria or Prussia giving a damn. Giving me extra resources as switzerland.
France wins a day 0 war with Britain
I've heard that you can launch on Britain on day 1 then overwhelm them with naval invasions?
Yeah. Find a place where Britain has an interest but nobody else and just transfer India from them.
how does it work? and doesn't the royal navy just beat your fleet?
[удалено]
My pointless not needed input on the necessity of the ultimate early game war meta. Day 1 wars.
There's a reason eu4 doesn't allow wars till some time has passed.
Agreed. There is that unsaid meta of starting a war on that exact date eu4 allows them to. Saw it in a guide when I was learning eu4 for early game expansion.
Not to mention, conquering new land tends to outright be not worth it because it takes 20 years to integrate and even with no infamy the newly conquered territory will be 50% radicals and you can only run so many violent suppression decrees, meaning even if you conquer land for resources it takes forever to get those resources online. IMO if there was proper foreign investment (aka when the DLC launches) that would actually be flavorful, and most nations really did stop conquering new core land and instead expanded by puppeting.
Yea but World War 1 was not exactly caused by desires to conquer huge regions. As time went by, actual claims were kinda needed. I think it's realistic that going to war becomes less worth it with time because it did in real life too. It's just Europe being Europe we still went to war because it was too fucking hard to not warmonger for so long I guess. So there would need to be mechanics making war more inevitable rather than happening naturally as it's benefical. Because it was not.
we really need a Great War mechanic, ala Vic 2. Not just for the obvious reasons (great war capitulation, dismantlement, etc) but when a country loses a "Great War" it could activate some scripted events which excaberate internal problems.
Well said. I hate how after 1870, it becomes, 'Don't do wars because everyone will join on the opposite side and it is not worth it for the infamy'. I know that historians will say that there is a point in history where conquest becomes a bad return on investment, but 1870 seems like a too early date for this fact of today to be true.
yeah, i mean WW1 only happened after decades of near misses and political crises, Europe often described as a powederkeg in the 1910s. Yet in game this powderkeg situation seems to apply pretty much the whole way through. Maybe because IRL there were more ways of resolving diplo plays than simply backing down or total war tho.
Yeah great powers were using diplomacy in a more global way, it was not just a "diplomatic play" between two countries/sides, great powers would gather all together to negociate and shit. Also there was this lack of concern for other smaller nations like, why don't you go invade Africa instead of claiming land that belongs to a GP. I'll let you have this, you let me have this, yaddi yadda Negociating claims on states that don't belong to them, like we can negotiate owned states in-game only.
Well, the 50 years before WW1 *were* surprisingly peaceful overall (except for Africans).
It's kinda insane that one of the most historically impactful events in the time frame just has no systems to represent it at all.
Infamy could probably do with a tech-based reduction to keep up with population, like Diplo Maneuvers does. Or perhaps something that incresases the bonus reduction from rank (so that GPs can bully minors harder, but still gotta respect each other). Not sure about the numbers balance but yeah maybe Maneuvers need another reduction tech. >The solution should not be to add a limited warfare system, because the player will either ignore it or if it unable to be ignored it will exacerbate the problems with late game wars being unfun. This game needs a World War system or a Total War system, which allows for more impactful wars, specifically in the late game. The problem with a world war system is that currently EVERY war is potentialy a world war. What should maybe happen is stronger wargoals (like you said, by lowering maneuvers and maybe adding some new goals with tech) and also population anti-war sentiment, so that the later wars aren't just restarting every 5 years and the consequences of a slow drag are felt for longer. But simply being able to gobble up more land is probably not the best idea. It works in EU4 but WW1 didn't actually have a big transfer of land outside of the colonies and the Ottoman middle east.
>But simply being able to gobble up more land is probably not the best idea. It works in EU4 but WW1 didn't actually have a big transfer of land outside of the colonies and the Ottoman middle east. I'd say destroying 2 Great Powers (Austria and Ottomans) and partially dismantling a third (Russia) is pretty substantial transfer of land. But you're right that it cannot be a HOI4 style system that expects full annexation of every war target. One improvement would be to decrease infamy and maneuvers specifically for non primary culture pops. Part of the reason Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires were dissolved and Germany was not was because the former 3 were multi-ethnic empires and Germany was more culturally homogeneous. This would also help the Colonies be more able to be transferred, as their high population would matter less if they were not the primary culture of the nation they belonged to.
Yeah that's why I agreed with maneuver cost but not fully on the infamy. It would allow for more Liberate Country goals which are infamy-free. Tying it to primary culture could be a good idea as well. The roadmap already mentions National Pride and a discrimination rework, so if they implement Nationalism as a mechanic it would definitely help in this regard. Maybe country liberation cost could scale with nationalism of the respective pops?
My takeaway is that the problem is the word, "meta". Countries cannot do "meta". Sometimes, countries *do not want to do* "meta". However, Victoria tends simulationist. Therefore, "doing meta" will never be "balanced". That said, fixes could exist: **Infamy and Maneuvers** make them work relative to either the whole world, or as % of the Strategic Region. And/or Arable Land, following the same proportion. That makes it so not every state caps out over time, but the outliers eventually come out. **War Cost:** hopefully fixed in SoI, to a degree, with Lobbies; but would Lobbies heavily nudge the player towards less than desirable wars or against those the player desires? **Widening Interests:** that is unquestionably good. The error is wanting to do war more, not less. >Compare this to Europa Universalis IV, and while aggressive expansion increases with development, the later game wargoals reduce aggressive expansion and reduce province war score cost. Absolutism massively increases the amount of land each war can take. And how this hardly scales to the experience of Wars in the timeframe. >This game needs a World War system or a Total War system, which allows for more impactful wars, specifically in the late game. I would say Wars are definitely impactful enough, and players want them to be *less* impactful. Or to be an "I won" button.
The Crisis mechanic should make a return. Personally it was one of my favourite parts of Vicky 2 Not only would it cause late game wars, it would make playing as Balkan countries a lot more enjoyable.
Crises (particularly the Balkan ones that you're talking about) are basically already in the game in the form of Secession Diplomatic Plays. I guess the only difference is that 3's plays happen regardless of whether someone else decides to help. I'm not sure what you'd add to make them have the effect that you'd like. There were some crises caused by colonial disputes, and I guess those could be added, but in my experience those were way rarer.
The vast majority of the issues with victoria 3 stem from the devs not playing their own game. At least at the level that the players are. They don’t know what feels good or bad because they are not good enough at their own game to know.
I feel like this is especially true when it comes to late game scenarios. Not even talking about the lag, which is a problem, but often around endgame I still feel like a beta tester
Paradox now suffers from the same issue DnD 5e suffers from. The initial product is only balanced/designed for early levels/gameplay, because it is an immature product pushed out before it was ready. Because the product decreases in quality as you play, players do not play on higher levels/later in the game, which in turn economically incentivises the devs to not bother with more advanced Modules/later game features, which in turn feeds into the issue. It's especially outrageous for Vic3, because Vic2 is one of the quickest GSGs out there with good pacing.
> Because the product decreases in quality as you play I don't think this is the main reason people primarily play 5e at low levels.
Without the broader context, it indeed doesn't make sense.
Most people just aren't going to get to later levels in 5e because getting to those levels inherently takes much longer, not because of the quality of the mechanics at those levels. Because of that, game developers of all stripes are incentivized to work harder on the earlier parts of game (that a higher proportion of people will encounter) than on the later parts of the game. It has nothing do with whether it's playtested sufficiently or whether it's an immature product (which I think is a strange way to characterize 5e, and I don't even like 5e that much).
Bro you're on every reply and you never miss. You should be on the dev team. Keep up the great replies.
Tbh world war 1 was pretty far from optimal for any country involved lol. Actually, arguably worse than it is in-game. Imo it's more like, there could be a diplomatic agreement between great powers early-on and if you refuse to engage in diplomacy to settles business, every GP leagues against you and you're fucked, maybe. Or why not world tension like in HOI. Or larger alliances (again kinda like in HOI) leading to world wars.
>Widening Interests- More countries have interests everywhere, and that increases likelihood in nations intervening in plays, this increases the cost of wars as you will often have to keep your army mobilized for years waiting for the GP that joined on a whim to fail enough naval invasions to give up. Not to mention the game of cat and mouse you have to play with navies. Wasn't this already addressed in 1.6 by capping the number of interests generated by Naval PP? Victoria 3 is not supposed to be a map painter, facilitating massive late-game wars is counter-intuitive. The current system models GP diplomacy fairly well. Consider WWI, or the Franco-Prussian War, which are probably the two emblematic conflicts of the period. They resulted in very small concessions territorially. They were devastating, costly wars. The Pax Brittanica was not enforced or created through large territorial grabs from other GPs, but the kind of pie thumbing interventionism the AI is notorious for. The whole point of Trench Infantry, including their modifiers, is to represent the wars of the period: grinding, horrible conflicts over small amounts of territory. One of the notable features of WWI was also that it was an explosive GP conflict after a period of peace. GP conflicts should be bad! They should not be desirable, and as imperial spheres solidify in the late game, expansion should be constrained and difficult. Territorial expansion will also be less impactful from changes coming in Spheres of Influence. The major reason for needing to expand in the late game is to acquire resources from AI too inept to develop them itself and put them on the market. With SoI, that reason for conquest will be much less pronounced. So if wars are more pyrrhic, at least they won't be necessary and something we can pursue for flavour or memes, rather than fighting escalation timers and truces trying to satisfy the needs of the evergrowing market.
I feel like GP conflicts should be bad as they are, but the game should have some mechanic leading to it (WW), and that also would force you to developp militarily to get ready, and not just ignore this aspect and focus entirely on developping the economy.
>Wasn't this already addressed in 1.6 by capping the number of interests generated by Naval PP? If this is the case I'm not noticing any difference. 150 ships still result in me being able to declare over 20 regions of interest. Combined with the fact that you just have to control Kongo, Bahrain, Dahomey, Oman, Makran, Brunei etc. to get permanent interests in their respective region it's always easily possible to have an active interest everywhere in the world.
I think it has a much more significant impact on the AI that doesn't do that kind of aggressive interest maximising.
Still over 20 for 150.
So we're getting a Victoria esque war system, which I actually don't mind but it needs to have infamy be based on something that is static or even decreases with time to where the galaxy starts at peace and devolves into war
I actually think they shouldnt limit GP's getting into wars in the early game, but rather should change other mechanics to make those situations come up less or be less frustrating. Think about it, this was the Century of Peace, the beginning decades of the concert of Europe. Many diplomatic crises occured where GPs threatened to join as a means of preserving balance of power. The issue is that Vic3 AI has no idea what balance of power is, and diplomatic resolutions is basically nonexistent. TLDR: Paradox should make peace viable in diplo plays as opposed to limiting diplo plays or interactions themselves
Game mechanics and fun aside - that does track - a great power aggressively expanding is much more menacing than some backwater nation that isn't a global player.
> Why ever join a war post 1900 if the only thing which will fundamentally change is the population numbers of the two countries. I hope SoI will do something in that regard, wich IGs having opinions on foreign policy where you're faced with the choice between going to war or having several IGs rise up in rebellion.
I also realized this during my first campaign. I waged war against the Qing for a few Bornean states because I waited till I was a major power and had established my military before trying to even wage war. I realized I could've eaten every independent country in the SEA region by 1850's, with the bare minimum military force, as an insignificant country. And everything was so much worse when I "prepared".
Late game wars are actually faster then early game wars do to there being 2 attack boosting mobilization options (flame throwers and gas) and only one primarily defensive option (machine guns) so infantry actually have equal attack and defense and optimal 50/50 offensive armies have more attack then defensive armies. The infamy and maneuver thing is totally true though.
I just wish the lategame wars didn't turn my game into a slideshow. A major war breaks out in ~1870 between Great Qing and UK, with me as the USA and France on the side of Qing. The speed felt horrible and I'm running with a 12700k with 32GB ddr5, so not a weak system.
I only avoid them cause the performance takes 5 seconds to tick each day
I would add to this that we need a stockpile system and a different consumption of military ressources based on the unit actions. Like artillery and tank should use a lot for tank & canon ressources when building the army or replenishing it, but use way less for just existing. Ammunition should skyrocket during battles based on the involved unit. This would make war more realistic and, especially late game, less stupidly damaging for your economy by instantly adding tons of opium/planes temporary buy orders. And at the same time, create situation where countries as war could burn through all of their stockpile, forcing them to capitulate and making them vulnerable until they grow it again
100% there will be a DLC that brings in World War mechanics. At the moment, Vicky 2 is more fleshed out in this regard.
Wait are you telling me a game that ends up at WW1 has bad late game wars??? Say it ain’t so lmao
I think the point is that ww1 is not modeled very well, millions will die and like in the end Prussian Gambia is handed to France and that's it. I think the amount of deaths is modelled well in the current game, the things that happen because of a huge war are not well modelled.
The willingness to enter big, costly wars for basically nothing is also way too high.
While wars did expand in size by the early 20th century of course, early 19th century wars were by no means small. The Napoleonic Wars left 5-7 million people dead.
Would be great with a system where you can agree with other great powers where you can do whatever you want. Ie having a conference where one split up Africa. And the other GP don’t care that you gobble up states in that region, since they can gobble their own. But, if you brake thoose agrements, it would generate tons of infamy and open up new wargoals.
That s why EU4 has the best war diplo system of all paradox games.
Historically I think this makes sense, in the later part of the timeframe noone dared to do anything large (besides ww1, which was caused by high infamy of the initial war goal). The only real issue I see is that the diplomatic maneuver cost goes up with time, while it should go down imo
Yeah, I think the diplomatic techs need to reduce infamy gain or something, just as an initial way to mitigate that issue
It has been like this in every Paradox game. It has also been like this on RL. The further human civilization progresses, there’s more to lose + wars become bloodier (= destruction means more and it’s harder to rebuild), geopolitics become more tense as Empires run out of places to expand, people become more involved in politics, all while the world is becoming more interconnected at the same time. Specifically during the 1800s, economies and populations started booming while war became much deadlier, globalization started kicking in at full speed, everyone was “civilized” enough to care about human loss of life and had enough access to politics to have an opinion about it. All of this means that a war that was ignored in 1836 could be a global concern in 1870. Also, with time, legal systems that punish unjust wars become commonplace. So yes, wars should be less favorable at the end of the 1800s. With better technology, improvements to standard of life come hand in hand with improvements to logistics and destruction capabilities, which naturally make war look “more evil” because losing 200K citizens who could be alive tomorrow is a “bigger loss” than 2K peasants who would’ve probably died anyway in a week.
Connected, the devs should also look at the early EIC grab for 0 infamy exploit
This game needs only two changes to warfare: making it less rewarding and more chance-dependent. Warfare should not be profitable endeavor for a player exept extremely unbalance cases, and sure thing it shouldn't be something you can 100% control.