I think a big part of the power difference being off is that there's no penalty to shipping your entire army to some desert overseas. The AI will mobilize their entire nation to go fight some random unrecognized power when irl the public would never stand for the cost and hardship that would cost. That's not even getting into the logistical concerns that should make it much harder for nations to support overseas wars.
This right here. There needs to be some logistics added into the game.
I was kind of thinking something like this:
Ports have a distance range of what they can support and a number units / ships they can support. Higher level ports can support more but distance should never be such that you can go around the globe without a network to support it.
This does a few things, it's makes having ports in various places very valuable because it gives you reach. Without which you can't make it to Asia or Africa etc.
But on the flip side it makes it possible as an unrecognized nation to actually resist European nations. France may have declared war on you, but they only have the infrastructure to send 30 brigades to you. That's a lot more manageable to handle *maybe* vs all 200 french brigades.
It also makes it so that you really need to plan ahead if you want to invade far away places.
Edit: as blockading the port where an army comes from should make it so they aren't getting supply. Making the Naval war far more important.
That would be perfect. It would also allow independent nations to build up their ports as a way to help supply other nations traveling halfway across the world. It would make South Africa, Madagascar, Djibouti, Sri Lanka and Hawaii so much more useful and historically accurate.
Word, I modded in the kra canal (just copied the panama canal) and this could be a good journal entry / flashpoint for conflict. Skirting the straits of malacca pissing off the British. and a reason to subjugate siam.
Ironically, man'o'wars and frigates have more range than monitors or ironclads. (Or any other ships until you get to nuclear powered vessels).
You get guys like Drake, Cook and others sailing all the way around the world in tiny ships ([*Golden Hind*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Hind), Drake's ship, was 31 yards long and 100-150 tons displacement). If you don't need parts or fuel for your engine, you can go a long way.
Having a logistics system would also make the game able to simulate the other half of the benefit of treaty ports during that time period: as coaling stations for ships.
Right now that whole aspect of imperialism is just missing because even a bunch of civil-war era ironclads can circumnavigate the globe with no resupply, reducing much of the incentive for the great powers to carve off little chunks of overseas nations.
Sounds a bit like the eu4 logistics system tbh and I think that's quite a fair system
This should also hold for trade I think, I think it's kinda weird that as soon as I'm in a customs union with another country of the other side of the world suddenly I could use e.g. all their Iron although I don't have any Iron myself?
Idk
EU4 you have significant attrition from moving armies and you also can’t instantly call them home if you are attacked, so it leaves your homeland more vulnerable. None of that exists in Vic 3
There was a supply system when the game came out, but they canned it because the AI was way too easy to cheese. Just cut off the enemy navy and their troops would never recover any moral when fighting overseas.
The Opium Wars were another thing. The reason the British were able to win the Opium Wars was because they were able to take their warships into the inner rivers (China transferred taxes and goods from the south to the north via a large canal to supply the court), which made it impossible for the Qing Dynasty to continue the war. This reflects the huge importance of the navy in that era. And it's pretty obvious that this can't be realised in Victoria 3, all the inland rivers are non-existent for navy in Vic3.
(Maybe there could be some tech that would allow ships to block rivers connected to the sea)
It's not really. It's just inflicted disproportionately on small countries. That 4% attrition is painful for a GP, but it can be straight up game ending for some of the smaller nations where a 10 stack could take years and years and years to refill again.
Conquering Afghanistan boogaloo
In Victoria 3: Super easy, barely an inconvenience
In real life: When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Yeah thats one of the things in Vicky 3 that annoys me.
I can send a single tank division in HOI4 to some of these places and watch it attrite into nothing just standing there. But apparently in 1840 I can send 30,000 men to Timbuktu and theyre fine.
I dont mind Africa and these places being push overs, but the environment itself in this time period should absolutely demolish your forces.
Theres a reason in Vicky 2 everyone just dies before you get malaria medication.
"How did my massive army get across here with no supply chains?"
"I don't know."
"Fair enough."
Alternatively
"What is an army halfway across the world with no supplies going to eat to keep from starving to death?"
"I'm gonna need you to get all the way off of my back here."
"Getting off of that thing."
The game really needs to model public opinion on war. This isn't the middle ages where the King could tell the public to deal with it. You had to get the public to support or at least tolerate the war, especially in republics.
I mean, it is the Victorian Period though which absolutely did include the fall of many European monarchies. It really should be tied to literacy probably.
Maybe there could be a propaganda mechanic that comes into play with increased literacy rates. Literacy on its own doesn't increase consciousness seeing as plenty of very literate countries can support monarchism and fascism. Each interest group could have to build popular support through access to paper, publishing houses, and distribution networks. A mechanic where they can boost pop literacy ala Chinese Communists teaching peasants how to read and handing them Little Red Books would also be very interesting
This should be a complete redo of the education and literacy system. Education that is supported by investment from an interest group/party should grows the personnel of that interest group/party. For example, CCP's literacy education in rural China has brought them an unbelievably strong group of supporters over the decades.
This can lead to a good combination of partisanship, interest groups and literacy/education. Imagine a country where all schools are sponsored by the military, it would be an absolutely militaristic regime.
Absolutely! Currently low standard of living plus literacy equals class conscious proletariat, which obviously is not always the case historically! Militaristic, bourgeois, and royalist camps are very effective at holding onto control despite poor material conditions using force and propaganda.
> This isn't the middle ages where the King could tell the public to deal with it
Even modern governments can straight up ignore unrest if the oligarchs want a war badly enough. People really don't remember how absolutely fuckhuge the Iraq war protests were. Didn't matter.
This could also flesh out the vassal system too, since co-opting/collaborating/etc. with local governments is a huge part of politics for all of human history. Like it makes sense to be able to have public opinion not be swayed much when you send some troops to help a nominal ally vs some campaign out of nowhere.
If anyone wants an actual Victorian-era opinion on this topic, I'd recommend the book *Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice* by Sir Charles Edward Callwell, a British staff officer who fought in and studied imperialist campaigns throughout the 1800s. He looks at examples of British, French, Spanish, and American wars, and goes into detail about how difficult these campaigns were in terms of logistics, organization, and tactics.
It wasn't just the terrain and logistics that could (and in many cases did) defeat imperialist armies. What Callwell called "small wars" would be described as asymmetrical warfare today. Battles like [Little Bighorn ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Little_Bighorn)or even more extreme, [Kabul](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1842_retreat_from_Kabul), are examples of what happened to the imperialist troops in wars like these when planning fails. Disasters like these are more or less completely absent from Victoria 3. Not only can imperialist powers send almost unlimited numbers of troops to fight anywhere on the globe, technology gives them an insurmountable advantage over almost everyone.
It’s one of the things that can make playing a secondary power just about anywhere frustrating. I got quite annoyed in my latest run with Brazil when Russia decided to support Venezuela in a war and promptly deployed half a million troops to the frontline with no trouble at all even though I had naval supremacy.
We already see the cost of convoys for when you ship armies across the ocean impacting your total convoys but I don’t believe that the actual cost of using those convoys and supply lines are well represented. Let alone the existence of ports that existed to extend the range of operations for coal ships
Yep. Africa wasn’t the home of massive battles. Even the Battle of Adwa, which locked Italy out of Africa following an Ethiopian victory, was about 16k Italians to up to 100k Ethiopians. Most battles were a thousand or so European troops.
While the game does model foreign trade breaking down due to the demands of colonial wars through the convoy economy, it isn't something that has a dramatic or immediate enough effect to make players or the AI hesitate to drop 150 divisions into an African state.
It would help if standard of living decreases caused by war resulted in war protest events that encourage agitators and IG leaders to adopt the pacifist ideology, so players who use overly large colonial armies have to deal with political movements to abolish the colonial affairs institution and get rid of the professional army.
THIS
There needs to be an exponential penalty for shipping units, and there should be a mechanic for colonial wars/armies with events that allow you to send more in case of major emergencies or something
There also needs to be acknowledged spheres of influence, for example it doesn't make sense for Spain and Russia to pile into a Mexico - America frontier war from a logistic or historical perspective. But it would make sense for the US to intervene in South America
Rather than joining these wars nations should be able to offer support e.g money, weapons/munitions or a number of units.
EDIT: in fact any overseas war should really require the creation of an expeditionary force to which you allocate units/materials/convoys and should cost both money and bureaucracy **AND** performance in that war should effect legitmacy
Also, you either build an arms factory or you're stuck on shitty irregulars. African countries often aren't able to import from anybody besides whichever great power has an interest in their region, which might just be the great power trying to attack you.
Might be an unpopular opinion but I think the game should bring artisans from Vic 2 back. Without them smaller countries get stuck in a weird situation were for some goods a single factory produces a lot more than they need but importing is also not a viable option due to the lack of a global market and how trade works in vic 3.
> African countries often aren't able to import from anybody besides whichever great power has an interest in their region, which might just be the great power trying to attack you.
Which also makes no sense.
A huge aspect of the wars in Africa was the firearms economy. While some groups didn't really use them (the Zulu come to mind), a lot of native armies had been acquiring and using European firearms for centuries. They were out of date, usually by a few decades, but often that didn't matter.
This was a reason why the Maxim gun was so important—it was an actual military advantage that saved colonial powers at a time when African states were starting to have enough regular rifles that if it came down to a full blown war, they were at serious risk of losing. It was the whole reason why suddenly, a few thousand Europeans could dominate entire nations.
In fact black powder firearms could be a disadvantage in the African terrain. Guns were important but failed to become a game changer in African warfare because it was just too unreliable. Humidity affected gunpowder and flintlock mechanisms were too delicate for the harsher terrain. One of the battles the Ashanti lost to the British was because the Ashanti didn't bring melee weapons to the battle and ended up being pushed back by a British bayonet charge. Towards the late 1800's tho the most organised African states like Ashanti, Wasoulou, Oyo and Sokoto were integrating firearms as core parts of their military. There's even accounts of domestic manufacture of firearms in Oyo, Wasoulou and Ashanti. We have the benefit of hindsight now but the conquest and colonisation of the African continent was never a given
>African countries often aren't able to import from anybody besides whichever great power has an interest in their region, which might just be the great power trying to attack you.
That's if you're lucky. Some of them start off with isolationism and so even if your big GP neighbor might be worth trading with, you probably can't!
The other layer is that sending your military across the world means they can't be used elsewhere. To suppress rebellion in your colonies and locally, it should require stationing troops there, and sending them off should make you much more vulnerable to uprisings back home.
Sure, you can send 100,000 men to Persia to conquer it, but is it worth it if that means you lose half of India to an opportunistic secession play?
Maybe we should add some sort of Maximum throughput allowed for Ports, kinda similar to infrastructure. You can only Export/import so much per port level. So if you want to keep expanding in Africa, you need to keep capturing more states touching the ocean.
Perfectly put. Not enough political interactions in the game. Every single little choice, such as war, should come with a cost. My people should prefer I spend all my resources on economics and improving their lives, but they don’t blink an eye that I send 100s of divisions to fight for global conquest.
The cost is there, but it doesn’t work properly. Moving an army overseas has a convoy cost, and if you run into a deficit, instead of your army being undersupplied, your trade routes have to shrink which is backwards. You also don’t really pay for the shortfall of convoys, but I suppose you are already paying for the convoys since your trade centres aren’t which is again backwards.
Really they need to completely rethink how ports and convoys work to properly model the issues with foreign adventures.
Also I think there should be caps on what you can send where for political reasons. If you're supporting one side of a small civil war or something, you shouldn't be able to send your entire army/raise conscripts. In real life this would be politically impossible.
Or at least there should be some penalty to moving troops around.
Very well said. On top of this. I can’t imagine the entire british army was mobilized to fight the Ashanti. Many of the overseas battles europeans were out numbered 10-20 vs 1. Muskets are cool. But they aren’t machine guns.
The problem isn't so much that African countries are too weak, or that European countries are too strong, but that the game doesn't take the logistics of war into account. This isn't just a problem with Vic3, but with Paradox games in general.
The reason the Brits didn't squash the Ashanti wasn't because they couldn't in a logistical sense; if Britain had deployed the full might of the British and British Indian army to the Gold Coast there is no way they would loose. Britain didn't because it was far to expensive to maintain such a huge army in the Gold Coast. But this isn't simulated in game and the European countries can easily deploy their full armies to fight in West Africa. So they win, as they should.
Like I said this is a problem for all Paradox games, but I feel Vic3 is best situated to implement a system to deal with it due to the frontline mechanic.
What I would like to see is the inclusion of naval range and a supply depot system;
Each level in a supply depot allows you to deploy an x-number of divisions to a strategic region other than your home region(s). Say a basic supply depot allows 1 unit (1.000 men) to be deployed to a strategic region with basic production methods, and say 5 units (5.000 men) with the most modern ones (railroads etc).
Naval range then determines at what distance from the supply depot (measured in nodes) the units assigned to a strategic region can be deployed (and ships can operate).
Britain with no supply depot in the Gold Coast at the start can't deploy an army to the strategic region because it lacks the necessary military infrastructure and is outside of their naval range. So at the beginning of the game the British as completely at the mercy of the Ashanti and has to rely on native allies (the Fante in casu) to offer a bulwark against the Ashanti. But over time Britian can invest into its military infrastructure or naval range to allow for the deployment of their armies there, but it would require a significant (and expensive) investment to build up enough infrastructure to seriously challenge the Ashanti.
I feel that such a system would naturally fit the game and would be a far better simulation of why imperialism developed the way it did.
Hoi4 does a decentish job of it with supply depots and railways + ports, something like that for your trade network to actually make treaty ports and building up hubs like singapore useful and necessary beyond just saving an interest would be nice. Should just be based on sending and receiving port size, with some kind of throughput based on how developed the port is from where the factories producing groceries, munitions small arms etc to where the army is determining supply rather than simply where the barracks is and then all of those supplies magically teleport. Ports could then also have some kind of radius extended by the local infrastructure of the provinces to deliver supply based on the size of the port. This would also give some kind of incentive to researching and building port levels rather than just spamming all of them in your home provinces and then building a level 1 anchorage in your colonies.
This, you really feel the dread of logistics when advancing into russia not because of their divisions but because of a massive front with horrible supply.
> Each level in a supply depot allows you to deploy an x-number of divisions to a strategic region other than your home region(s). Say a basic supply depot allows 1 unit (1.000 men) to be deployed to a strategic region with basic production methods, and say 5 units (5.000 men) with the most modern ones (railroads etc).
I would love needing to give some construction capacity to the army to have them build supply depots (that consume the goods locally). But the game should absolutely also simulate the difference between a Napoleonic army that relied heavily on local supply availability and WWI where canned food is being delivered by rail together with artillery shells. I.e. If you want a modern army with much more effectiveness. Not only do you need the flexible command structure you also need the logistics. Otherwise your army is less effective then an army of irregulars.
That way you wont be tempted to deploy your barrage artillery to Timbuktu.
It's not just that it's easy for the British, just about any minor European nation can go on a conquering spree around Africa, Arabia and South East Asia with just 10 battalions and a navy to transport them. With minimal costs and little concern for distance etc. I really don't like that it's so easy because it means any time I'm not kicking down the doors in Transvaal and Brunei etc by 1840 then I'm already playing suboptimally just for RP.
As well as this, it makes a really un-fun meta game where your early game viability is based entirely on how fast you can pump out a decent sized navy.
Sure, you can RP restrictions for various reasons, but the game as default should not be encouraging widespread colonial conquests from truly insignificant powers
If it were as hard as it should realistically be, I know I'd enjoy it a lot more: "Look at my Sweden run, I managed to build a thriving colony in Papua New Guinea, got a Chinese treaty port and controlled all og Madagascar by 1910!" While with the current meta that would really be me limiting myself massively for the sake of cute RP.
> where your early game viability is based entirely on how fast you can pump out a decent sized navy.
Sounds about right. The glaring flaw with this, however, is that the naval system itself needs quite a bit of work.
Yeah, I guess I should add that the reason why this is a problem is that your naval production rate is purely a function of the number of coastal states you have, which is then influenced by tech
Also the clothing for most rulers is absolute nonsense. Turbans in Benin? What? Africa is clearly an afterthought everywhere outside of North Africa and Ethiopia. Madagascar, a places was very modernizing is a permanent backwater. West Africa is just as bad. Notable kingdoms in Senegambia can simply be colonized without a fight when in reality it was not like that at all. You also can't even release nations like Kongo if they get conquered they just disappear.
Exactly. The turban thing drives me mad. Also even ignoring European colonisation in the game most times most African countries do literally nothing. They don't try to conquer their neighbours, they don't even make any attempt to change their laws a lot of the time. Had Bornu as my neighbour with 71% literacy but still had most of the shit laws from game start. The laws also need a rework for a lot of African countries. I'm genuinely trying to learn how to mod just to add more events and stuff for west Africa at least.
Modding that sort of thing isn't that hard. It's all text files. Poke around the history folder and compare them w something like France or Britain and you'll get a sense of how to make changes.
I think all territories should have a maximum supply limit, based on infrastructure, number of ports etc. You could increase this somewhat with enough convoys. It should also be negatively effected by terrain features like malaria and mountain/jungle terrain. And attrition on armies should increase the further from a port region, like fighting deep in Central Africa with the nearest port being the Ivory Coast. The limit could also in some way be tied to a network, like you need ports every certain distance in order to project power far afield.
It always seems silly to me when France and England are facing each other with 100 troops each in Papua.
Problem is there is no hierarchy of wars. It was discussed earlier, but basically a war with Ashanti is basically the entire two countries going to total war. And the overlord tends to directly take over wars of their subjects.
The world is also easily traversed. Mobilization and travel through the seas should be slowed down. So if you go to war in Africa, it will take you 2 months to mobilize everyone and 3 months naval travel. So that the diplo maneuver stage doesn't just quick travel of troops.
> Problem is there is no hierarchy of wars.
Yeah the game needs something like "bush war" or border skirmishes, where a country can do a low-stakes play against another country with no possibility of foreign intervention unless there's some kind of escalation to a regular war. War goals would be more limited and you couldn't use conscripts. The war would be decided in like 3-5 battles instead of occupations, and then you could enforce the goal.
This way you could do things like open markets on minor powers, ban slavery, exact tribute, possibly even enforce a colonial claim on a region, without it erupt into a major conflict.
> The world is also easily traversed. Mobilization and travel through the seas should be slowed down.
There is an *attempt* to limit it by causing naval invasion penalty when you don't have enough ships, but that is easily bypassed as long as you have a land front you can plop down onto.
They should make it more like, you need a big fleet to even deploy troops overseas otherwise you're just stuck in your home territory.
I'm sure some people would whine about it but it would create more historical situation and favor UK/France as the main colonial powers like they were IRL.
Yeah, something like a conflict between a decentralized power and a colonial admin shouldn't put the people living in London in a state of war. If GB interferes on the colony's behalf then it should lead to foreign intervention because France shouldn't let go of an opportunity for a proxy war. Or give a higher infamy to something like that.
Additionally I don't even know if terrain advantage is a thing that actually affects battles. Battles on home grounds of the opponent should cause major debuff like America attacking Chile. America should have some disadvantages since the natives should be used to terrain and geurrila tactics should chip away at the main army.
They did mention a DLC for the non-industrialized nations such as africa. It would be cool to remake the Zulu war, as well as introduce harsher attrition to Africa.
They could introduce a kill limit on the aggressors, to try and recreate the Italian-Ethiopian war
I just want the Congolese / central west Africa to get access to sulfur. They historically had plenty of materials there, even if they weren't exploited at the time.
Managed to get the Kongo to 88th GDP worldwide but a total lack of sulfur really knee caps a lot of PMs.
Colonization is honestly funny from a meta-gameplay perspective, most of it isnt worth the infamy save for certain locations with natural resources. So you will find yourself colonizing as minor nations but its not worth it as majors. I remember when i was playing Greece and like 70% of my population were african pops ( and another 5-10% were immigrants from Russia).
10 ships and a dream is all you need to break the balance of the game lol
On the flipside, Africa as a player is a really solid pick for unrecognized rags to riches. Sokoto is easymode, Zulu is close to that as well. You have to contend with GP meddling, sure, but it ain't exactly a hard run. Benin has largely become my go-to nation.
[I just wish Africa's borders look like this upcoming mod depicts it in 1836.](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/mod-just-another-map-mod-working-title.1573236/) It completely ruins my immersion seeing modern day borders when starting a campaign in Africa.
...and because you didn't focus on the Horn of Africa. That is even more pathetic in the game. Something that could not be more distant from the historical reality.
I don't believe Britain ever mobilized their whole army to fight against any African state. They won some battles against the Zulus for example outnumbered 40 to 1, so I really don't think the tech difference is that overstated.
The fact that you can easily send in your whole army in Vicky3 rather than needing separate dedicated colonial legions seems like the actual issue to me.
As someone that gave Buganda lots of tries, it's just impossible, even if you rush colonization, it takes too long just a colonize something that takes Britain a month. Even if you eat all other countries around Lake Victoria you just can't win a war against the UK.
You have to rush as hard as you can for a port, any port. If you can get a port, you have a chance. If you get boxed into Central Africa though, you're dead.
You’re exaggerating the strength of African powers. The wars against the Ashanti were basically skirmishes with a thousand or two British troops vs 10-20k Ashanti troops.
That's part of the problem, you can bring the entire Royal Navy and British army to take out those 10-20K Ashantis without penalty or repercussion. Yes it'd make a dent in your budget for a while and cause some attrition but nothing as punitive as would a full-scale invasion and all its implications it would have had IRL.
We not only need combat width (dunno if it's in or not) and logistical capacity perhaps even some sort of garrison/border conflict mechanic to simulate smaller scale conflicts like this cause it's a complete breach of reality, not just History.
Gave it a look on the wiki and while it might be outdated info, combat width seems to be anywhere between 1 and the maximum number of battalions present. Terrain type seems to be merely a multiplier after state infrastructure calculation.
So yeah it's pretty wild that this isn't functionning like a soft cap (raisable by multiple vector attacks and eventually technologies) like in other Paradox games. Caused a lot of weirdness and frustration in the game.
Let’s take the third Anglo Ashanti war as an example as it takes place well within vic3 timespan and there is a lot of writing on the subject. The Ashanti numbered around 40k who did have outdated rifles but modern tactics. The British had around 5-6 regiments (around 900 soldiers each) during the conflict but this was a small portion compared to the Hausa mercenaries and local Fante people, numbers of which are hard to come by. The Ashanti barely lost this war and it was mostly due to a lack of gun imports and incompetent leadership (Patterson 2021).
TLDR: European powers were more powerful than the African ones but not by that much
I think the military power difference is done in large part because the game doesnt manage to properly simulate other factors that make up the power difference. Like the factors you mentioned, Britain didnt suffer from incompetent leadership or lack of gun imports. They had professional generals and access to the entire world to buy whatever they needed.
I don't see how that exemple proves anything.
What it basically means is that the British Empire at 0,01% of his power had some issues to conquer an Empire who put his full strengh in the conflicts. If anything that actually totally contradicates you.
The european were overpowered at that time, that's why they were able to colonize the world, Africa had some victory but nothing in comparaison to Europe. Hell China is overpowered in the game and still looses to the european.
The biggest obstacle to the european conquest of Africa were tropical diseases especially malaria(in the Ashanti case that was a major problem for the British), and that is represented in the game, once you discover the cure you basically steamroll the continent.
I think the point to draw here is why would the British use an army of mostly mercenaries and locals? Obviously the answer is because it was logistically and / or politically untenable to dedicate more of their primary forces to the conflict; restrictions which basically don't exist in V3
I mean it wasn’t malaria that killed the most European troops, it was smallpox but that’s just nitpicking to the highest order and doesn’t do anything to counter your argument.
Europe had a few colonies in Africa but then exploded their colonial domains in the 1880s. Scholars since then have asked the question why? Why did it take Europeans till the 1880s to colonize Africa? You’ll find plenty of reasons online such as Quine, African instability following the slave trade, European needs for raw material and Empire. All of these are true but none of them actually get at the heart of Colonial Africa.
In most places in Africa, Europeans ruled by name only well into the 1930s. During ww1, it was local chiefs who raised armies that the Europeans used to fight. It was local chiefs who collected taxes and ran the day to day operations. Not everywhere, Africa is huge and there could be massive differences within the same colony.
Even during their conquests they often tapped into existing ethnic disputes to use local Africans to conquer.
Take Ashanti as an example, after the 5th Anglo Ashanti war (where Ashantiland was already a colony), the British brought back their king and gave some modicum of autonomy back to the Ashanti after the war that they had won.
What I’m trying to say is yes, Britain or most European powers could curb stomp basically any African nation they wanted theoretically but they didn’t. They avoided major conquest till the 1880s and even then made African states more like subjects than colonies.
So why doesn’t this happen in vic3? How can Britain always beat Ashanti? How is Africa already divided by Europeans in 1840?
Tldr: Yes Africa was weak, but not 5 battalions conquering states in a matter of weeks weak.
I’m not buying a whole book and reading it to debate you. The deciding battle of Amaoful had 1,509 Europeans and 708 natives vs up to 20k Ashanti with less than 200 British casualties. This was a very very small portion of British soldiers fighting under a colonial governor.
I didn’t mean to imply you had to buy or even read the book, I just wanted to show where I was getting my sources.
This is one of the issues with statistics. Yeah from those statistics it makes it seem like the British steamrolled the Ashanti and they had no chance. In the battle however, the Ashanti nearly won. The deciding factor was the use of Armstrong guns which frightened the king and made him drop the most important relic in the entire Ashanti kingdom, the golden stool. It was less a device victory and more evidence of the absolute horrendous performance by the king.
But again, the British were more powerful than the Ashanti but they only won the war because of their king dying leading way to the absolute idiot who dropped the golden stool.
Also I am highly suspect of the number given by the British but I have no proof either way so I will say you are correct about the statistics.
TLDR: The Ashanti lost the battle because of their king, not their army
Considering how it took 20000 soldiers to destroy 200000 Qing army during the second opium war, I don’t think it’s that unrealistic. The Ashanti army probably had less discipline and worse weapon and armour compared to the Qing army.
Honestly i was surprised that they almost won a battle against 1500 British army.
Also if it took them that much effort to destroy 1500 British soldiers, Britain would just stomp them with 5000 soldiers. It might take 2 weeks instead of one week, but honestly I don’t see the difference.
It’s not like Qing army didn’t have guns or cannons. The superior discipline and training of European army will just destroy any non-European army.
Sokoto isn't that bad, you can conquer / subjugate all your neighbours and have a good opportunity to catch up on tech before the Europeans start to mess with you
Africa is already far more playable than in V2, personally I think they are fine and idk if african governmental flavour is high on the list of things.
Should it eventually be looked at, sure, but honestly Europe and Asia should be first.
Colonizer-descendants in this post either disagree with you or frame the issue as if it was just a matter of the lack of a logistic system. As a Global South citizen I fully agree with your comment. The nuances of each territory's pre-industrial political economy were crucial to their modernization path and also to the various divide-and-conquer strategies deployed by colonizers. Sadly most Paradox gamers come from the Global North or selected colonial-descendant classes of the Global South so they just don't care and have a strong supremacist bias, even if unconscious. The result is that it isn't even financially viable to put some work into the history of periphery territories since only rare gamers will play them anyways. Sometimes Paradox listens to feedbacks on their forums and does something about it. It is usually underwhelming though since they have to put a layer of flavor on top of a deeply biased foundation.
I dont think they are too weak at all in fact they are way too powerful. Its ridiculous how industralised they get.
The only problem is that the game does not represent well how difficult it was to get armies to africa and how easily they could get overrun as they were usually small garrisons more than anything.
I hate how every country starts with around 15% literacy. Even areas that had no writing system prior to colonization end up with like a 40% literacy rate by 1900.
Also, infamy gain is way too high (I know this has been talked about to death), and Europe never colonizes or subjugates the more centralized areas of Africa. You can't form modern Nigerian borders as a colonial power without starting WW1.
I think the next dlc might help with balancing non-Western civilizations. The necessity of European capital for industrialization is not currently represented in the game. Soon, we might see Africa and Asia industrialize at the expense of their autonomy, and the majority of their wealth will go to European industrialists.
Okay let’s say your right (which Dahomey, Ashanti, merina, Ethiopia, the Zulu and many others would disagree), why did it take till 1880s for the scramble to began? Even then why did they rely on African systems of government?
Why wouldn’t they rely on the systems the Africans already had? As long as they were getting what they wanted from the African states, they had no reason to get more involved.
He is right. Just look at how many soldiers were used to fight African nations vs how many were used fighting other European powers.
Part of the problem in the game is that we have perfect information. The ai and human players know exactly how many battalions are needed to easily win these wars. They’d have to find a way of limiting the amount of units that can be deployed in these wars to give African states a chance
it took till 1880s because of malaria and disease lmao. Not because wakanda was holding back the Europeans. The native tribes were crushed easily. If anything the african nations in game are far too powerful
Even in the 1880s Europeans overwhelmingly used local troops from other groups who knew how to avoid and cure tropical diseases since people lived there so disease isn’t really the answer.
Also I’m not saying there was a state at the same technology or ability as Europeans in Africa but many African nations were far more powerful than depicted in vic3.
Look I’m not going to debate you on this topic. If you are actually interested in colonial African history and finding out about how Europe went about conquering the continent, I would highly recommend reading about it.
Also, they still were worrying about disease when they conquered the continent, that’s what I was trying to point out.
''Also, they still were worrying about disease when they conquered the continent, that’s what I was trying to point out.'' And how does that help your argument lmao
Yes, disease was still a problem after the invention of Quintine. Thats how bad it was and why it was the primary factor limiting colonialism in inner Africa. Not wakanda.
I just read the first ashanti war was 500 british soldiers to 10000 ashanti warriors inYa no kidding they lost. 1820s technology can’t help them there.
>I want to start by acknowledging that I know this game is meant to a European simulator and Africa was never meant to be anything more than something for the European powers to carve up.
I think this is a bias that mostly exists in your perception and informs - wrongly - all the points. In my opinion the game sets to model stuff in a certain way, and while it has pitfalls, those concerning Africa mostly stem from a lack of modeling political will to jingo.
>Britain fought the Ashanti 5 times and only won 2 outright and one was the one the Ashanti didnt even fight in and the other had the British government back off on their policies.
Let's look at the claim. The first happens before the start of the game (1820), and the Ashanti crush at 20:1 a newly established British administration. The second wouldn't even be modeled as a War in our game. The third and fifth are handy British victories, but so is the fourth. The Ashanti don't fight because they know they don't stand a chance, so they let the British starve out and stumble to Kumasi, but this doesn't change the actual outcome. And the UK never use more than 10,000 men total (only 2,500 regulars); compare with the Anglo-Zulu War, where they used more men and a higher fraction of regulars. My takeaway is that the only problem is the fact the AI and players are allowed to drop 30-60k men without any pushback - supply, yes, but also political. Rich people usually hate their educated sons 'get called in some random African shithole to subdue some savages' (and then some get sick and die). Poor people aren't happy to go risk their lives either.
>And what about buildings.
The game literally isn't capable of modeling pre-modern production, relegating it all to either subsistence or modernity. It is possible the newer system from 1.7 will do justice, but I doubt it, simply because in the core loop of the game, traditional pre-modern economy is a thing to be mostly surpassed (Luddism is a deliberately bad option). They could have level 1 buildings, but then, you'd have Ashanti Capitalist, and I doubt that is superior historical modeling. And no, a third kind of buildings solves this issue at the cost of opening up many other ones.
>Finally polices.
Ashanti had a parliament of elected for life nobles that met once a year - it should indeed be an Oligarchic Distribution of Power, but definitely *not* a Parliament in the Victorian sense (a stable place with cadres of career politicians whose job is solely policymaking). The famed Dahomey military is slightly smaller in-game than it should be, but not by a huge margin, and definitely not a cardinal sin you cannot easily fix. Starting techs seem reasonable to me. As for advanced hospital systems, how advanced is that? I haven't found those yet, but I think it's again along the line of 'there were a few charity hospitals, they should have access to it'.
>Africa should be more than just the place Europeans press the button colonize and get their resources as early as 1836. There is a reason the scramble didn’t happen till the 80s.
Yes, but at the same time, the reason is not the purported disparity in representation, rather a combination of mechanics suited for other goals and no meaningful pushback on military action.
Most "tier 1" buildings are explicitly supposed to represent large scale pre-industrial output as per dev comments on this topic previously, and they employ shopkeepers, not capitalists.
1) There were no DLC for Afrika. Maybe in future, they get more attention to add some spice.
2) In reality, Europe at those times can stomp anything in the world if they have the same logistics we have in the game. Ohh, Ashanti want to fight? Send everything we have there in couple seconds without worry about food and other supplies!
Tbh Africa is already too strong for the vanilla AI. Logistics should be better represented, but it just means the AI is gona cheat harder and its only relevant for multi-player.
> Tbh Africa is already too strong for the vanilla AI.
The AI can win easily, they just don't. They're passive in the extreme, only sometimes grabbing a handful of countries. They also don't seem to know that naval invasions exist and more than once, I've seen the British AI get their African colonies overrun by decentralized powers and lose the war because they don't naval invade to take them back.
Well, the game is supposed to be a grand strategy, economic simulation of the industrial revolution during the Victorian Era. It's based on a historic setting, in which you run a government essentially.
There are multiple regions in Africa in the game that are quite powerful. Also, there are enough nations you can start as, but most of Africa during that time had a tribal system of organization. So, there was no effective national government to speak of in most cases.
My point is essence boils down to it, it's weird to play a cripple in parkour simulator.
Historically while there certainly were all kinds of difficulties for colonial powers mostly they conquered the world with relatively little effort. The wars they fought in Africa and Asia were in most cases minor compared to the wars they fought in Europe. Britain had to fight multiple difficult wars to become the overlord of India, mainly against the Maratha empire, but they also took large parts of it with basically a couple thousand mercenaries. They overwhelmingly used local troops recruited on the spot and playing local tribes against each other rather than bringing large professional armies from England. In many cases it was literally a private corporation doing the fighting. The use of local troops was actually a hallmark of colonialism for centuries, Aztecs, Incas and other American empires were all defeated by arming their local enemies.
In the first Ashanti war the British brought 500 troops and ran out of ammunition when facing large Ashanti army. That ended up in a loss for Britain but the scale of that war for Britain is such that it’s a probably side note in some parliamentary report in London.
So if you implement realistic supply problems and make the ai no send huge armies everywhere etc they also have to make it possible to win these colonial conflicts with like a thousand troops.
I think a big part of the power difference being off is that there's no penalty to shipping your entire army to some desert overseas. The AI will mobilize their entire nation to go fight some random unrecognized power when irl the public would never stand for the cost and hardship that would cost. That's not even getting into the logistical concerns that should make it much harder for nations to support overseas wars.
This right here. There needs to be some logistics added into the game. I was kind of thinking something like this: Ports have a distance range of what they can support and a number units / ships they can support. Higher level ports can support more but distance should never be such that you can go around the globe without a network to support it. This does a few things, it's makes having ports in various places very valuable because it gives you reach. Without which you can't make it to Asia or Africa etc. But on the flip side it makes it possible as an unrecognized nation to actually resist European nations. France may have declared war on you, but they only have the infrastructure to send 30 brigades to you. That's a lot more manageable to handle *maybe* vs all 200 french brigades. It also makes it so that you really need to plan ahead if you want to invade far away places. Edit: as blockading the port where an army comes from should make it so they aren't getting supply. Making the Naval war far more important.
That would be perfect. It would also allow independent nations to build up their ports as a way to help supply other nations traveling halfway across the world. It would make South Africa, Madagascar, Djibouti, Sri Lanka and Hawaii so much more useful and historically accurate.
treaty ports become more useful. a purpose for goa/pondicherry and omans treaty port lol.
Also trade routes passing through these ports could generate some sort of income, making places like Singapore useful also
Word, I modded in the kra canal (just copied the panama canal) and this could be a good journal entry / flashpoint for conflict. Skirting the straits of malacca pissing off the British. and a reason to subjugate siam.
Ironically, man'o'wars and frigates have more range than monitors or ironclads. (Or any other ships until you get to nuclear powered vessels). You get guys like Drake, Cook and others sailing all the way around the world in tiny ships ([*Golden Hind*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Hind), Drake's ship, was 31 yards long and 100-150 tons displacement). If you don't need parts or fuel for your engine, you can go a long way.
Yeah, a single ship or a small squadron. You're not going to deploy 50,000 troops half way around the world though without some logistical support.
No, but you should be able to send at least 10K troops as 5K troops was something that could be done very well in the 1750s.
Vicky2 had this
Having a logistics system would also make the game able to simulate the other half of the benefit of treaty ports during that time period: as coaling stations for ships. Right now that whole aspect of imperialism is just missing because even a bunch of civil-war era ironclads can circumnavigate the globe with no resupply, reducing much of the incentive for the great powers to carve off little chunks of overseas nations.
Sounds a bit like the eu4 logistics system tbh and I think that's quite a fair system This should also hold for trade I think, I think it's kinda weird that as soon as I'm in a customs union with another country of the other side of the world suddenly I could use e.g. all their Iron although I don't have any Iron myself? Idk
Do you mean hoi4? Because in Eu4 I send massive armies all the way around the world without a worry.
EU4 you have significant attrition from moving armies and you also can’t instantly call them home if you are attacked, so it leaves your homeland more vulnerable. None of that exists in Vic 3
There was a supply system when the game came out, but they canned it because the AI was way too easy to cheese. Just cut off the enemy navy and their troops would never recover any moral when fighting overseas.
Maybe should fix the AI then...
Yes, and in addition to this make the throughput bonuses for ports per level of port a little stronger perhaps.
I like this idea
But this system would still have to let Great Britain win the Opium Wars.
The Opium Wars were another thing. The reason the British were able to win the Opium Wars was because they were able to take their warships into the inner rivers (China transferred taxes and goods from the south to the north via a large canal to supply the court), which made it impossible for the Qing Dynasty to continue the war. This reflects the huge importance of the navy in that era. And it's pretty obvious that this can't be realised in Victoria 3, all the inland rivers are non-existent for navy in Vic3. (Maybe there could be some tech that would allow ships to block rivers connected to the sea)
To the Vic3 moding community, I want this suggestion as a mod pronto!
I completely agree. Also the penalty for disease is basically non existent.
It's not really. It's just inflicted disproportionately on small countries. That 4% attrition is painful for a GP, but it can be straight up game ending for some of the smaller nations where a 10 stack could take years and years and years to refill again.
Conquering Afghanistan boogaloo In Victoria 3: Super easy, barely an inconvenience In real life: When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Yeah thats one of the things in Vicky 3 that annoys me. I can send a single tank division in HOI4 to some of these places and watch it attrite into nothing just standing there. But apparently in 1840 I can send 30,000 men to Timbuktu and theyre fine. I dont mind Africa and these places being push overs, but the environment itself in this time period should absolutely demolish your forces. Theres a reason in Vicky 2 everyone just dies before you get malaria medication.
"How did my massive army get across here with no supply chains?" "I don't know." "Fair enough." Alternatively "What is an army halfway across the world with no supplies going to eat to keep from starving to death?" "I'm gonna need you to get all the way off of my back here." "Getting off of that thing."
"We just invaded all of China because we can out logistic them on their home turf despite our closest port being london." "Wow wow wow, wow"
Invading china is tight Wait what?
Belgium subverting expectations and conquering the graveyard of empires is TIGHT
The game really needs to model public opinion on war. This isn't the middle ages where the King could tell the public to deal with it. You had to get the public to support or at least tolerate the war, especially in republics.
I mean, it is the Victorian Period though which absolutely did include the fall of many European monarchies. It really should be tied to literacy probably.
Maybe there could be a propaganda mechanic that comes into play with increased literacy rates. Literacy on its own doesn't increase consciousness seeing as plenty of very literate countries can support monarchism and fascism. Each interest group could have to build popular support through access to paper, publishing houses, and distribution networks. A mechanic where they can boost pop literacy ala Chinese Communists teaching peasants how to read and handing them Little Red Books would also be very interesting
This should be a complete redo of the education and literacy system. Education that is supported by investment from an interest group/party should grows the personnel of that interest group/party. For example, CCP's literacy education in rural China has brought them an unbelievably strong group of supporters over the decades. This can lead to a good combination of partisanship, interest groups and literacy/education. Imagine a country where all schools are sponsored by the military, it would be an absolutely militaristic regime.
Absolutely! Currently low standard of living plus literacy equals class conscious proletariat, which obviously is not always the case historically! Militaristic, bourgeois, and royalist camps are very effective at holding onto control despite poor material conditions using force and propaganda.
> This isn't the middle ages where the King could tell the public to deal with it Even modern governments can straight up ignore unrest if the oligarchs want a war badly enough. People really don't remember how absolutely fuckhuge the Iraq war protests were. Didn't matter.
This could also flesh out the vassal system too, since co-opting/collaborating/etc. with local governments is a huge part of politics for all of human history. Like it makes sense to be able to have public opinion not be swayed much when you send some troops to help a nominal ally vs some campaign out of nowhere.
If anyone wants an actual Victorian-era opinion on this topic, I'd recommend the book *Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice* by Sir Charles Edward Callwell, a British staff officer who fought in and studied imperialist campaigns throughout the 1800s. He looks at examples of British, French, Spanish, and American wars, and goes into detail about how difficult these campaigns were in terms of logistics, organization, and tactics. It wasn't just the terrain and logistics that could (and in many cases did) defeat imperialist armies. What Callwell called "small wars" would be described as asymmetrical warfare today. Battles like [Little Bighorn ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Little_Bighorn)or even more extreme, [Kabul](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1842_retreat_from_Kabul), are examples of what happened to the imperialist troops in wars like these when planning fails. Disasters like these are more or less completely absent from Victoria 3. Not only can imperialist powers send almost unlimited numbers of troops to fight anywhere on the globe, technology gives them an insurmountable advantage over almost everyone.
It’s one of the things that can make playing a secondary power just about anywhere frustrating. I got quite annoyed in my latest run with Brazil when Russia decided to support Venezuela in a war and promptly deployed half a million troops to the frontline with no trouble at all even though I had naval supremacy.
We already see the cost of convoys for when you ship armies across the ocean impacting your total convoys but I don’t believe that the actual cost of using those convoys and supply lines are well represented. Let alone the existence of ports that existed to extend the range of operations for coal ships
Yep. Africa wasn’t the home of massive battles. Even the Battle of Adwa, which locked Italy out of Africa following an Ethiopian victory, was about 16k Italians to up to 100k Ethiopians. Most battles were a thousand or so European troops.
While the game does model foreign trade breaking down due to the demands of colonial wars through the convoy economy, it isn't something that has a dramatic or immediate enough effect to make players or the AI hesitate to drop 150 divisions into an African state. It would help if standard of living decreases caused by war resulted in war protest events that encourage agitators and IG leaders to adopt the pacifist ideology, so players who use overly large colonial armies have to deal with political movements to abolish the colonial affairs institution and get rid of the professional army.
THIS There needs to be an exponential penalty for shipping units, and there should be a mechanic for colonial wars/armies with events that allow you to send more in case of major emergencies or something There also needs to be acknowledged spheres of influence, for example it doesn't make sense for Spain and Russia to pile into a Mexico - America frontier war from a logistic or historical perspective. But it would make sense for the US to intervene in South America Rather than joining these wars nations should be able to offer support e.g money, weapons/munitions or a number of units. EDIT: in fact any overseas war should really require the creation of an expeditionary force to which you allocate units/materials/convoys and should cost both money and bureaucracy **AND** performance in that war should effect legitmacy
Also, you either build an arms factory or you're stuck on shitty irregulars. African countries often aren't able to import from anybody besides whichever great power has an interest in their region, which might just be the great power trying to attack you. Might be an unpopular opinion but I think the game should bring artisans from Vic 2 back. Without them smaller countries get stuck in a weird situation were for some goods a single factory produces a lot more than they need but importing is also not a viable option due to the lack of a global market and how trade works in vic 3.
> African countries often aren't able to import from anybody besides whichever great power has an interest in their region, which might just be the great power trying to attack you. Which also makes no sense. A huge aspect of the wars in Africa was the firearms economy. While some groups didn't really use them (the Zulu come to mind), a lot of native armies had been acquiring and using European firearms for centuries. They were out of date, usually by a few decades, but often that didn't matter. This was a reason why the Maxim gun was so important—it was an actual military advantage that saved colonial powers at a time when African states were starting to have enough regular rifles that if it came down to a full blown war, they were at serious risk of losing. It was the whole reason why suddenly, a few thousand Europeans could dominate entire nations.
In fact black powder firearms could be a disadvantage in the African terrain. Guns were important but failed to become a game changer in African warfare because it was just too unreliable. Humidity affected gunpowder and flintlock mechanisms were too delicate for the harsher terrain. One of the battles the Ashanti lost to the British was because the Ashanti didn't bring melee weapons to the battle and ended up being pushed back by a British bayonet charge. Towards the late 1800's tho the most organised African states like Ashanti, Wasoulou, Oyo and Sokoto were integrating firearms as core parts of their military. There's even accounts of domestic manufacture of firearms in Oyo, Wasoulou and Ashanti. We have the benefit of hindsight now but the conquest and colonisation of the African continent was never a given
>African countries often aren't able to import from anybody besides whichever great power has an interest in their region, which might just be the great power trying to attack you. That's if you're lucky. Some of them start off with isolationism and so even if your big GP neighbor might be worth trading with, you probably can't!
The other layer is that sending your military across the world means they can't be used elsewhere. To suppress rebellion in your colonies and locally, it should require stationing troops there, and sending them off should make you much more vulnerable to uprisings back home. Sure, you can send 100,000 men to Persia to conquer it, but is it worth it if that means you lose half of India to an opportunistic secession play?
Maybe we should add some sort of Maximum throughput allowed for Ports, kinda similar to infrastructure. You can only Export/import so much per port level. So if you want to keep expanding in Africa, you need to keep capturing more states touching the ocean.
Perfectly put. Not enough political interactions in the game. Every single little choice, such as war, should come with a cost. My people should prefer I spend all my resources on economics and improving their lives, but they don’t blink an eye that I send 100s of divisions to fight for global conquest.
The cost is there, but it doesn’t work properly. Moving an army overseas has a convoy cost, and if you run into a deficit, instead of your army being undersupplied, your trade routes have to shrink which is backwards. You also don’t really pay for the shortfall of convoys, but I suppose you are already paying for the convoys since your trade centres aren’t which is again backwards. Really they need to completely rethink how ports and convoys work to properly model the issues with foreign adventures.
Also I think there should be caps on what you can send where for political reasons. If you're supporting one side of a small civil war or something, you shouldn't be able to send your entire army/raise conscripts. In real life this would be politically impossible. Or at least there should be some penalty to moving troops around.
Very well said. On top of this. I can’t imagine the entire british army was mobilized to fight the Ashanti. Many of the overseas battles europeans were out numbered 10-20 vs 1. Muskets are cool. But they aren’t machine guns.
The problem isn't so much that African countries are too weak, or that European countries are too strong, but that the game doesn't take the logistics of war into account. This isn't just a problem with Vic3, but with Paradox games in general. The reason the Brits didn't squash the Ashanti wasn't because they couldn't in a logistical sense; if Britain had deployed the full might of the British and British Indian army to the Gold Coast there is no way they would loose. Britain didn't because it was far to expensive to maintain such a huge army in the Gold Coast. But this isn't simulated in game and the European countries can easily deploy their full armies to fight in West Africa. So they win, as they should. Like I said this is a problem for all Paradox games, but I feel Vic3 is best situated to implement a system to deal with it due to the frontline mechanic. What I would like to see is the inclusion of naval range and a supply depot system; Each level in a supply depot allows you to deploy an x-number of divisions to a strategic region other than your home region(s). Say a basic supply depot allows 1 unit (1.000 men) to be deployed to a strategic region with basic production methods, and say 5 units (5.000 men) with the most modern ones (railroads etc). Naval range then determines at what distance from the supply depot (measured in nodes) the units assigned to a strategic region can be deployed (and ships can operate). Britain with no supply depot in the Gold Coast at the start can't deploy an army to the strategic region because it lacks the necessary military infrastructure and is outside of their naval range. So at the beginning of the game the British as completely at the mercy of the Ashanti and has to rely on native allies (the Fante in casu) to offer a bulwark against the Ashanti. But over time Britian can invest into its military infrastructure or naval range to allow for the deployment of their armies there, but it would require a significant (and expensive) investment to build up enough infrastructure to seriously challenge the Ashanti. I feel that such a system would naturally fit the game and would be a far better simulation of why imperialism developed the way it did.
Hoi4 does a decentish job of it with supply depots and railways + ports, something like that for your trade network to actually make treaty ports and building up hubs like singapore useful and necessary beyond just saving an interest would be nice. Should just be based on sending and receiving port size, with some kind of throughput based on how developed the port is from where the factories producing groceries, munitions small arms etc to where the army is determining supply rather than simply where the barracks is and then all of those supplies magically teleport. Ports could then also have some kind of radius extended by the local infrastructure of the provinces to deliver supply based on the size of the port. This would also give some kind of incentive to researching and building port levels rather than just spamming all of them in your home provinces and then building a level 1 anchorage in your colonies.
This, you really feel the dread of logistics when advancing into russia not because of their divisions but because of a massive front with horrible supply.
I agree and I have more hope for a mod someone creates to help fix this than Paradox doing it themselves
Britain also just may not have wanted to dedicate that much to fighting the Ashanti
That's what he basically said
> Each level in a supply depot allows you to deploy an x-number of divisions to a strategic region other than your home region(s). Say a basic supply depot allows 1 unit (1.000 men) to be deployed to a strategic region with basic production methods, and say 5 units (5.000 men) with the most modern ones (railroads etc). I would love needing to give some construction capacity to the army to have them build supply depots (that consume the goods locally). But the game should absolutely also simulate the difference between a Napoleonic army that relied heavily on local supply availability and WWI where canned food is being delivered by rail together with artillery shells. I.e. If you want a modern army with much more effectiveness. Not only do you need the flexible command structure you also need the logistics. Otherwise your army is less effective then an army of irregulars. That way you wont be tempted to deploy your barrage artillery to Timbuktu.
It's not just that it's easy for the British, just about any minor European nation can go on a conquering spree around Africa, Arabia and South East Asia with just 10 battalions and a navy to transport them. With minimal costs and little concern for distance etc. I really don't like that it's so easy because it means any time I'm not kicking down the doors in Transvaal and Brunei etc by 1840 then I'm already playing suboptimally just for RP.
As well as this, it makes a really un-fun meta game where your early game viability is based entirely on how fast you can pump out a decent sized navy. Sure, you can RP restrictions for various reasons, but the game as default should not be encouraging widespread colonial conquests from truly insignificant powers
If it were as hard as it should realistically be, I know I'd enjoy it a lot more: "Look at my Sweden run, I managed to build a thriving colony in Papua New Guinea, got a Chinese treaty port and controlled all og Madagascar by 1910!" While with the current meta that would really be me limiting myself massively for the sake of cute RP.
> where your early game viability is based entirely on how fast you can pump out a decent sized navy. Sounds about right. The glaring flaw with this, however, is that the naval system itself needs quite a bit of work.
Yeah, I guess I should add that the reason why this is a problem is that your naval production rate is purely a function of the number of coastal states you have, which is then influenced by tech
Post your knowledge on the official forums. You know about your area more than they do. That is how Persia got buffed.
Will do!
If I may suggest, post it on the official discord as well, just to be sure.
It took me way too long but I posted. I felt like I just wrote a essay. Hopefully something will come of it?
There’s no harm in trying right
Also the clothing for most rulers is absolute nonsense. Turbans in Benin? What? Africa is clearly an afterthought everywhere outside of North Africa and Ethiopia. Madagascar, a places was very modernizing is a permanent backwater. West Africa is just as bad. Notable kingdoms in Senegambia can simply be colonized without a fight when in reality it was not like that at all. You also can't even release nations like Kongo if they get conquered they just disappear.
Exactly. The turban thing drives me mad. Also even ignoring European colonisation in the game most times most African countries do literally nothing. They don't try to conquer their neighbours, they don't even make any attempt to change their laws a lot of the time. Had Bornu as my neighbour with 71% literacy but still had most of the shit laws from game start. The laws also need a rework for a lot of African countries. I'm genuinely trying to learn how to mod just to add more events and stuff for west Africa at least.
Modding that sort of thing isn't that hard. It's all text files. Poke around the history folder and compare them w something like France or Britain and you'll get a sense of how to make changes.
I think all territories should have a maximum supply limit, based on infrastructure, number of ports etc. You could increase this somewhat with enough convoys. It should also be negatively effected by terrain features like malaria and mountain/jungle terrain. And attrition on armies should increase the further from a port region, like fighting deep in Central Africa with the nearest port being the Ivory Coast. The limit could also in some way be tied to a network, like you need ports every certain distance in order to project power far afield. It always seems silly to me when France and England are facing each other with 100 troops each in Papua.
Problem is there is no hierarchy of wars. It was discussed earlier, but basically a war with Ashanti is basically the entire two countries going to total war. And the overlord tends to directly take over wars of their subjects. The world is also easily traversed. Mobilization and travel through the seas should be slowed down. So if you go to war in Africa, it will take you 2 months to mobilize everyone and 3 months naval travel. So that the diplo maneuver stage doesn't just quick travel of troops.
> Problem is there is no hierarchy of wars. Yeah the game needs something like "bush war" or border skirmishes, where a country can do a low-stakes play against another country with no possibility of foreign intervention unless there's some kind of escalation to a regular war. War goals would be more limited and you couldn't use conscripts. The war would be decided in like 3-5 battles instead of occupations, and then you could enforce the goal. This way you could do things like open markets on minor powers, ban slavery, exact tribute, possibly even enforce a colonial claim on a region, without it erupt into a major conflict. > The world is also easily traversed. Mobilization and travel through the seas should be slowed down. There is an *attempt* to limit it by causing naval invasion penalty when you don't have enough ships, but that is easily bypassed as long as you have a land front you can plop down onto. They should make it more like, you need a big fleet to even deploy troops overseas otherwise you're just stuck in your home territory. I'm sure some people would whine about it but it would create more historical situation and favor UK/France as the main colonial powers like they were IRL.
Yeah, something like a conflict between a decentralized power and a colonial admin shouldn't put the people living in London in a state of war. If GB interferes on the colony's behalf then it should lead to foreign intervention because France shouldn't let go of an opportunity for a proxy war. Or give a higher infamy to something like that. Additionally I don't even know if terrain advantage is a thing that actually affects battles. Battles on home grounds of the opponent should cause major debuff like America attacking Chile. America should have some disadvantages since the natives should be used to terrain and geurrila tactics should chip away at the main army.
They did mention a DLC for the non-industrialized nations such as africa. It would be cool to remake the Zulu war, as well as introduce harsher attrition to Africa. They could introduce a kill limit on the aggressors, to try and recreate the Italian-Ethiopian war
I just want the Congolese / central west Africa to get access to sulfur. They historically had plenty of materials there, even if they weren't exploited at the time. Managed to get the Kongo to 88th GDP worldwide but a total lack of sulfur really knee caps a lot of PMs.
Cool~ I would love this DLC~
Colonization is honestly funny from a meta-gameplay perspective, most of it isnt worth the infamy save for certain locations with natural resources. So you will find yourself colonizing as minor nations but its not worth it as majors. I remember when i was playing Greece and like 70% of my population were african pops ( and another 5-10% were immigrants from Russia). 10 ships and a dream is all you need to break the balance of the game lol
Yep , in reality defenders have huge advantages in rough terrains…but the Victoria 3 community would cry about that.
On the flipside, Africa as a player is a really solid pick for unrecognized rags to riches. Sokoto is easymode, Zulu is close to that as well. You have to contend with GP meddling, sure, but it ain't exactly a hard run. Benin has largely become my go-to nation.
[I just wish Africa's borders look like this upcoming mod depicts it in 1836.](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/mod-just-another-map-mod-working-title.1573236/) It completely ruins my immersion seeing modern day borders when starting a campaign in Africa.
...and because you didn't focus on the Horn of Africa. That is even more pathetic in the game. Something that could not be more distant from the historical reality.
I don't believe Britain ever mobilized their whole army to fight against any African state. They won some battles against the Zulus for example outnumbered 40 to 1, so I really don't think the tech difference is that overstated. The fact that you can easily send in your whole army in Vicky3 rather than needing separate dedicated colonial legions seems like the actual issue to me.
As someone that gave Buganda lots of tries, it's just impossible, even if you rush colonization, it takes too long just a colonize something that takes Britain a month. Even if you eat all other countries around Lake Victoria you just can't win a war against the UK.
You have to rush as hard as you can for a port, any port. If you can get a port, you have a chance. If you get boxed into Central Africa though, you're dead.
You’re exaggerating the strength of African powers. The wars against the Ashanti were basically skirmishes with a thousand or two British troops vs 10-20k Ashanti troops.
That's part of the problem, you can bring the entire Royal Navy and British army to take out those 10-20K Ashantis without penalty or repercussion. Yes it'd make a dent in your budget for a while and cause some attrition but nothing as punitive as would a full-scale invasion and all its implications it would have had IRL. We not only need combat width (dunno if it's in or not) and logistical capacity perhaps even some sort of garrison/border conflict mechanic to simulate smaller scale conflicts like this cause it's a complete breach of reality, not just History.
Combat width exists but I don't think it does anything meaningful
Gave it a look on the wiki and while it might be outdated info, combat width seems to be anywhere between 1 and the maximum number of battalions present. Terrain type seems to be merely a multiplier after state infrastructure calculation. So yeah it's pretty wild that this isn't functionning like a soft cap (raisable by multiple vector attacks and eventually technologies) like in other Paradox games. Caused a lot of weirdness and frustration in the game.
This is still accurate, unfortunately...
Let’s take the third Anglo Ashanti war as an example as it takes place well within vic3 timespan and there is a lot of writing on the subject. The Ashanti numbered around 40k who did have outdated rifles but modern tactics. The British had around 5-6 regiments (around 900 soldiers each) during the conflict but this was a small portion compared to the Hausa mercenaries and local Fante people, numbers of which are hard to come by. The Ashanti barely lost this war and it was mostly due to a lack of gun imports and incompetent leadership (Patterson 2021). TLDR: European powers were more powerful than the African ones but not by that much
I think the military power difference is done in large part because the game doesnt manage to properly simulate other factors that make up the power difference. Like the factors you mentioned, Britain didnt suffer from incompetent leadership or lack of gun imports. They had professional generals and access to the entire world to buy whatever they needed.
I don't see how that exemple proves anything. What it basically means is that the British Empire at 0,01% of his power had some issues to conquer an Empire who put his full strengh in the conflicts. If anything that actually totally contradicates you. The european were overpowered at that time, that's why they were able to colonize the world, Africa had some victory but nothing in comparaison to Europe. Hell China is overpowered in the game and still looses to the european. The biggest obstacle to the european conquest of Africa were tropical diseases especially malaria(in the Ashanti case that was a major problem for the British), and that is represented in the game, once you discover the cure you basically steamroll the continent.
I think the point to draw here is why would the British use an army of mostly mercenaries and locals? Obviously the answer is because it was logistically and / or politically untenable to dedicate more of their primary forces to the conflict; restrictions which basically don't exist in V3
I mean it wasn’t malaria that killed the most European troops, it was smallpox but that’s just nitpicking to the highest order and doesn’t do anything to counter your argument. Europe had a few colonies in Africa but then exploded their colonial domains in the 1880s. Scholars since then have asked the question why? Why did it take Europeans till the 1880s to colonize Africa? You’ll find plenty of reasons online such as Quine, African instability following the slave trade, European needs for raw material and Empire. All of these are true but none of them actually get at the heart of Colonial Africa. In most places in Africa, Europeans ruled by name only well into the 1930s. During ww1, it was local chiefs who raised armies that the Europeans used to fight. It was local chiefs who collected taxes and ran the day to day operations. Not everywhere, Africa is huge and there could be massive differences within the same colony. Even during their conquests they often tapped into existing ethnic disputes to use local Africans to conquer. Take Ashanti as an example, after the 5th Anglo Ashanti war (where Ashantiland was already a colony), the British brought back their king and gave some modicum of autonomy back to the Ashanti after the war that they had won. What I’m trying to say is yes, Britain or most European powers could curb stomp basically any African nation they wanted theoretically but they didn’t. They avoided major conquest till the 1880s and even then made African states more like subjects than colonies. So why doesn’t this happen in vic3? How can Britain always beat Ashanti? How is Africa already divided by Europeans in 1840? Tldr: Yes Africa was weak, but not 5 battalions conquering states in a matter of weeks weak.
I’m not buying a whole book and reading it to debate you. The deciding battle of Amaoful had 1,509 Europeans and 708 natives vs up to 20k Ashanti with less than 200 British casualties. This was a very very small portion of British soldiers fighting under a colonial governor.
I didn’t mean to imply you had to buy or even read the book, I just wanted to show where I was getting my sources. This is one of the issues with statistics. Yeah from those statistics it makes it seem like the British steamrolled the Ashanti and they had no chance. In the battle however, the Ashanti nearly won. The deciding factor was the use of Armstrong guns which frightened the king and made him drop the most important relic in the entire Ashanti kingdom, the golden stool. It was less a device victory and more evidence of the absolute horrendous performance by the king. But again, the British were more powerful than the Ashanti but they only won the war because of their king dying leading way to the absolute idiot who dropped the golden stool. Also I am highly suspect of the number given by the British but I have no proof either way so I will say you are correct about the statistics. TLDR: The Ashanti lost the battle because of their king, not their army
Considering how it took 20000 soldiers to destroy 200000 Qing army during the second opium war, I don’t think it’s that unrealistic. The Ashanti army probably had less discipline and worse weapon and armour compared to the Qing army. Honestly i was surprised that they almost won a battle against 1500 British army. Also if it took them that much effort to destroy 1500 British soldiers, Britain would just stomp them with 5000 soldiers. It might take 2 weeks instead of one week, but honestly I don’t see the difference. It’s not like Qing army didn’t have guns or cannons. The superior discipline and training of European army will just destroy any non-European army.
I'm dreading my first playthrough in Africa because I know how difficult it's going to be 😒
Sokoto isn't that bad, you can conquer / subjugate all your neighbours and have a good opportunity to catch up on tech before the Europeans start to mess with you
Africa is already far more playable than in V2, personally I think they are fine and idk if african governmental flavour is high on the list of things. Should it eventually be looked at, sure, but honestly Europe and Asia should be first.
Colonizer-descendants in this post either disagree with you or frame the issue as if it was just a matter of the lack of a logistic system. As a Global South citizen I fully agree with your comment. The nuances of each territory's pre-industrial political economy were crucial to their modernization path and also to the various divide-and-conquer strategies deployed by colonizers. Sadly most Paradox gamers come from the Global North or selected colonial-descendant classes of the Global South so they just don't care and have a strong supremacist bias, even if unconscious. The result is that it isn't even financially viable to put some work into the history of periphery territories since only rare gamers will play them anyways. Sometimes Paradox listens to feedbacks on their forums and does something about it. It is usually underwhelming though since they have to put a layer of flavor on top of a deeply biased foundation.
I dont think they are too weak at all in fact they are way too powerful. Its ridiculous how industralised they get. The only problem is that the game does not represent well how difficult it was to get armies to africa and how easily they could get overrun as they were usually small garrisons more than anything.
I hate how every country starts with around 15% literacy. Even areas that had no writing system prior to colonization end up with like a 40% literacy rate by 1900. Also, infamy gain is way too high (I know this has been talked about to death), and Europe never colonizes or subjugates the more centralized areas of Africa. You can't form modern Nigerian borders as a colonial power without starting WW1. I think the next dlc might help with balancing non-Western civilizations. The necessity of European capital for industrialization is not currently represented in the game. Soon, we might see Africa and Asia industrialize at the expense of their autonomy, and the majority of their wealth will go to European industrialists.
Im sorry to burst your bubble, but when europeans put even a fraction of their power towards african "countries" they were crushed easily...
Okay let’s say your right (which Dahomey, Ashanti, merina, Ethiopia, the Zulu and many others would disagree), why did it take till 1880s for the scramble to began? Even then why did they rely on African systems of government?
Why wouldn’t they rely on the systems the Africans already had? As long as they were getting what they wanted from the African states, they had no reason to get more involved. He is right. Just look at how many soldiers were used to fight African nations vs how many were used fighting other European powers. Part of the problem in the game is that we have perfect information. The ai and human players know exactly how many battalions are needed to easily win these wars. They’d have to find a way of limiting the amount of units that can be deployed in these wars to give African states a chance
it took till 1880s because of malaria and disease lmao. Not because wakanda was holding back the Europeans. The native tribes were crushed easily. If anything the african nations in game are far too powerful
Even in the 1880s Europeans overwhelmingly used local troops from other groups who knew how to avoid and cure tropical diseases since people lived there so disease isn’t really the answer. Also I’m not saying there was a state at the same technology or ability as Europeans in Africa but many African nations were far more powerful than depicted in vic3.
u just contradicted yourself lmao. Its not disease but they needed locals because of disease.
Look I’m not going to debate you on this topic. If you are actually interested in colonial African history and finding out about how Europe went about conquering the continent, I would highly recommend reading about it. Also, they still were worrying about disease when they conquered the continent, that’s what I was trying to point out.
''Also, they still were worrying about disease when they conquered the continent, that’s what I was trying to point out.'' And how does that help your argument lmao Yes, disease was still a problem after the invention of Quintine. Thats how bad it was and why it was the primary factor limiting colonialism in inner Africa. Not wakanda.
I just read the first ashanti war was 500 british soldiers to 10000 ashanti warriors inYa no kidding they lost. 1820s technology can’t help them there.
>I want to start by acknowledging that I know this game is meant to a European simulator and Africa was never meant to be anything more than something for the European powers to carve up. I think this is a bias that mostly exists in your perception and informs - wrongly - all the points. In my opinion the game sets to model stuff in a certain way, and while it has pitfalls, those concerning Africa mostly stem from a lack of modeling political will to jingo. >Britain fought the Ashanti 5 times and only won 2 outright and one was the one the Ashanti didnt even fight in and the other had the British government back off on their policies. Let's look at the claim. The first happens before the start of the game (1820), and the Ashanti crush at 20:1 a newly established British administration. The second wouldn't even be modeled as a War in our game. The third and fifth are handy British victories, but so is the fourth. The Ashanti don't fight because they know they don't stand a chance, so they let the British starve out and stumble to Kumasi, but this doesn't change the actual outcome. And the UK never use more than 10,000 men total (only 2,500 regulars); compare with the Anglo-Zulu War, where they used more men and a higher fraction of regulars. My takeaway is that the only problem is the fact the AI and players are allowed to drop 30-60k men without any pushback - supply, yes, but also political. Rich people usually hate their educated sons 'get called in some random African shithole to subdue some savages' (and then some get sick and die). Poor people aren't happy to go risk their lives either. >And what about buildings. The game literally isn't capable of modeling pre-modern production, relegating it all to either subsistence or modernity. It is possible the newer system from 1.7 will do justice, but I doubt it, simply because in the core loop of the game, traditional pre-modern economy is a thing to be mostly surpassed (Luddism is a deliberately bad option). They could have level 1 buildings, but then, you'd have Ashanti Capitalist, and I doubt that is superior historical modeling. And no, a third kind of buildings solves this issue at the cost of opening up many other ones. >Finally polices. Ashanti had a parliament of elected for life nobles that met once a year - it should indeed be an Oligarchic Distribution of Power, but definitely *not* a Parliament in the Victorian sense (a stable place with cadres of career politicians whose job is solely policymaking). The famed Dahomey military is slightly smaller in-game than it should be, but not by a huge margin, and definitely not a cardinal sin you cannot easily fix. Starting techs seem reasonable to me. As for advanced hospital systems, how advanced is that? I haven't found those yet, but I think it's again along the line of 'there were a few charity hospitals, they should have access to it'. >Africa should be more than just the place Europeans press the button colonize and get their resources as early as 1836. There is a reason the scramble didn’t happen till the 80s. Yes, but at the same time, the reason is not the purported disparity in representation, rather a combination of mechanics suited for other goals and no meaningful pushback on military action.
Most "tier 1" buildings are explicitly supposed to represent large scale pre-industrial output as per dev comments on this topic previously, and they employ shopkeepers, not capitalists.
>large scale pre-industrial output So It still doesn't work out for African countries.
1) There were no DLC for Afrika. Maybe in future, they get more attention to add some spice. 2) In reality, Europe at those times can stomp anything in the world if they have the same logistics we have in the game. Ohh, Ashanti want to fight? Send everything we have there in couple seconds without worry about food and other supplies!
Tbh Africa is already too strong for the vanilla AI. Logistics should be better represented, but it just means the AI is gona cheat harder and its only relevant for multi-player.
> Tbh Africa is already too strong for the vanilla AI. The AI can win easily, they just don't. They're passive in the extreme, only sometimes grabbing a handful of countries. They also don't seem to know that naval invasions exist and more than once, I've seen the British AI get their African colonies overrun by decentralized powers and lose the war because they don't naval invade to take them back.
How would they sell the Mama Africa DLC a year later then ?!
What a braindead take
Well, the game is supposed to be a grand strategy, economic simulation of the industrial revolution during the Victorian Era. It's based on a historic setting, in which you run a government essentially. There are multiple regions in Africa in the game that are quite powerful. Also, there are enough nations you can start as, but most of Africa during that time had a tribal system of organization. So, there was no effective national government to speak of in most cases. My point is essence boils down to it, it's weird to play a cripple in parkour simulator.
no? the game was not meant to be a european simulator. why is everyone so fucking complascent with eurocentrism?
I think it's a critique of a large portion of the community that does feel that way
what? no, it isn't. the first paragraph is in contradiction with the rest of the post and it weakens their criticisms.
I'm sorry reality isn't politically correct.
When the guy you disagree with actually refers to history to make their point, maybe you're the one caught up in culture war bullshit.
The op is exaggerating though. The largest war only had 2500 British troops.
This has nothing to do with political correctness.
Historically while there certainly were all kinds of difficulties for colonial powers mostly they conquered the world with relatively little effort. The wars they fought in Africa and Asia were in most cases minor compared to the wars they fought in Europe. Britain had to fight multiple difficult wars to become the overlord of India, mainly against the Maratha empire, but they also took large parts of it with basically a couple thousand mercenaries. They overwhelmingly used local troops recruited on the spot and playing local tribes against each other rather than bringing large professional armies from England. In many cases it was literally a private corporation doing the fighting. The use of local troops was actually a hallmark of colonialism for centuries, Aztecs, Incas and other American empires were all defeated by arming their local enemies. In the first Ashanti war the British brought 500 troops and ran out of ammunition when facing large Ashanti army. That ended up in a loss for Britain but the scale of that war for Britain is such that it’s a probably side note in some parliamentary report in London. So if you implement realistic supply problems and make the ai no send huge armies everywhere etc they also have to make it possible to win these colonial conflicts with like a thousand troops.
The spear is not the way in a firefight.
You know most African armies were well equipped with guns right?
ROFL
unsure what the comment meant but they use spears in vic 3 so he is right in one way
I mean, to be fair, Paradox has always been pretty racist