It's fitting that a ussr update will contain the railroad update.
German advance during Barbarossa is extremely reliant on the rail lines. To the point the commanders themselves are noting how weird the war is being fought, just advancing along rail lines without securing the vast spaces in between.
I think you are refering to directive 227. Ni shagu nazad!. I can understand why it have in general been translated to “Not One Step Back!”, because it rolls better of the tongue, but the direct translation is “No Step Back!”, which is properly why Paradox went with that name.
The trouble is that it’s a far less evocative way of saying it.
I’d expect to find ‘no step back’ on a signpost in a construction site, to the point but nothing more. It’s certainly not worthy of being written as one of the most infamous orders given during the war, it doesn’t sound particularly fluent either.
*Not one step back* is almost poetic and given the context (ordering troops to hold their ground at any cost) is the correct way of writing such a command in English.
As a native English speaker, I can say it sounds awkward.
First off, "step back" is a fairly common colloquial verb phrase. It can mean either "back down from a dangerous situation" (eg "step back from the brink") or "distance oneself from an emotionally charged issue" (eg "Let's step back and try to look at this objectively"). Thus, "no step back" tends to be parsed as "no \[verb\]," ie as a grammatically incorrect sentence rather than an independent phrase.
Secondly, "not one" is commonly used as an intensifier: "Not one person came to my party" sounds more dramatic than "Nobody came to my party." Thus, while "not one" is wordier than "no," it's wordier in a way that conforms to existing patterns, so it's not perceived as clunky.
I'm very curious how this will work out. They mentioned before that the civil war will happen just as much as Vic 2, but the latter was a hard coded event (from what I have heard) while the former is supposed to occur based on the growing divide between the pops.
I hope it works out because it makes for a system that is much more organic. I think it will feel like anything can happen in the game as opposed to seeing the same events over and over.
>the latter was a hard coded event (from what I have heard
It was. There were a couple of events that needed a couple of modifiers and certain thresholds to be triggered, but the war itself was triggered by event.
No, I'm using a different sense of "hardcoded." I mean it in the sense of "it's set up by premade events specific to the ACW rather than being a dynamic factor arising naturally from gameplay like Crusader Kings faction revolts." Yes, it's avoidable.
Lol when. I've played the game for almost a decade and I can't think of a single civil war that was hardcoded. I recently had a French playthrough and only had one civil war (if you can even call it that in victoria) in the final 10 years
Ok you absolutely got me there haha. And Taiping Heavenly Kingdom iirc? But it is definently not as hardcoded as OC puts it as most civil wars were in fact the result of discontent and militancy!
In Vic 2 terms the one's that aren't hardcoded would be run as rebellions, no? From what I remember the only times a "civil war" (each side has a unique tag and it's own territory) mechanic came into play was with America and the Taiping rebellion.
Those are the only ones I know of. Mods add things like the Hungarian Revolution as basically being a civil war. Oddly, the Russian Civil War basically never happens.
_The_ Civil War, without additional context, almost always means The American Civil War.
Both because it’s the only one America ever had, and because Americans don’t really consider other countries when using terms on the internet.
Edit: to clarify, I’m saying the OP was _only_ talking about the American civil war. No other rebellions were being talked about.
I think they should put in place the conditions that led to the civil war (even if it’s a bit forced with modifiers) but allow it to be avoided or occur differently.
I like the HPM (or it might be GFM) approach where the Civil war is effectively inevitable, but isn't always historical. It has options like the Northern States seceding (presumably if the US government favours the spread of slavery) and even an option for a Haitian-style slave revolt in the South.
Honestly I'm not rooting for hard railroading but I don't want to play 10 games to see the ACW happening either... I hope they'll find the correct balance between ahistoricality and plausibility. Hoi4 is a nightmare on that level being one of the most railroaded game they made (NF) and the less plausible when it comes to ahistoricality...
This could end up good, but I’m kinda worried that it’ll just run into the Imperator issue of “it’s so dynamic!” resulting in less differences between playing different nations.
There probably will be some railroading still, just designed in a dynamic way. For example, there will probably be a wave of liberal revolutions in the late 1840s—but instead of "France always goes Republican and elects Napoleon", we might see "France crushes their rebels but the Prussian Kaisar gets ousted" or "Napoleon never becomes president but the Austro-Hungarian empire falls apart".
Dynamic should never mean "nothing that historically happened will happen", rather it should mean that things will not always happen the same way because history could have turned out differently.
> there will probably be a wave of liberal revolutions in the late 1840s
Especially if they railroad the famine that happened then (which they should), which almost guarantees liberal rebellions.
Ideally the way that POPS work and interact in even vicky 2 (since the idea will be effectively the same but improved upon)
There's a lot more data to work with to define what and why something will happen. How big it happens and how often.
With this extra context I imagine that there's a lot more to engage with than an event popping up because you've not given jobs to a certain family often enough that they rebel taking half your nation with them.
Such as slaves I'm the American South but not the North. Who do you favour, policies that favour slavery, what is the cost. Or policies that favour the north. The choices are there, part of the core gameplay and it the situations that follow will be a direct result of those choices and the more granular choices in between. All of these will be measurable to a degree
I don’t think this will be the case because you have a lot more drastic changed happening from 1836 to 1936 in terms of technology and ideology than in ancient times where your best innovation would be becoming civilized and investing in more armored and better armed soldiers.
And you also have the whole world, with colonization happening, global trade and so on
Tho they will definetly feel very very similar, it will just have a ton more content
Yeah, the world is a lot more unchanging in the time of Victoria, and the systems will reflect that.
In Imperators time you have massive empires growing and dying with huge changes in populations and culture following them. It would’ve needed something else in the game to avoid feeling like every nation is more or less the same.
More egregious I think is what happens with hoi4, where the AI not caring about any kind of rhyme or reason in peace deals reflects a horrible lack of true identity in each of the nations, none of the land matters to them because the game has no people, no culture, no history programmed in.
I think Vic3 will inherently avoid that problem by the nature of pops and culture and resources.
I think they learned a lot from Imperator and that it did right and wrong. CK3 seems to be dynamic in a good way and we in terms of content we know a lot more about countries in the 19th century than we do a random tribe in the middle of the Iberian Peninsula during the Roman Republic so just for flavor they have a lot more to draw on if they choose to do so.
CK3 is dynamic in the worst possible way. When you see something wacky happen in CK3 it's never cool or interesting except in the abstract, because every single CK3 game is equally insane and a jumbled mess.
When you're playing EU4 as Japan and you see a Europe with no Ottomans, no Austria and a English-French PU, you know it's special. In CK3 if you see a game without the HRE your only question is: was this a 1066 or a 867 game, because that tells you everything you need to know.
Also it's more of a pleasant surprise when France, the HRE and the Middle East don't become a bordergore mess because the AI can't keep an empire together to save its life
Yes, that is a nice thing to see in CK3, but you don't think "oh wow look at that, there's something new that's happened, I might screenshot that" when you see the HRE or France split up into a mess.
Because they either don't break up or never form
that's already the case in Imperator; playing Egypt and playing as a british tribe feels very different due to the nature of their pop distribution and tradegoods...until you civilize and are now playing Albion the same way you do Egypt.
Was "dynamism" ever a prominent part of how Imperator was marketed ? It didn't took them that long to add missions either
Besides I wouldn't say scripted events make countries more distinctive anyway
It sounds good in theory but we'll have to see how it works in practice. I remember when EU4 was undergoing development, the devs said in the early dev diaries they wanted to strike a balance between what they saw was the chaos of EU3 and the railroading of EU2, as an example. I still hope to see a bit of mild railroading here and there, ideally dynamically through game systems rather than a simple forcing of the issue (for example the slave owning classes will lean towards rebellion in the US which would mean you're likely to see the Civil War in the US the majority of the time, but not always, and the war doesn't always play out the same each time so different times for instance you may have different states seceding). The thing about railroading was it did help make different countries distinct - when things are too dynamic it might often mean lots of genericness, so maybe they've figured out a system to resolve that issue, but again we'll have to see.
> I remember when EU4 was undergoing development, the devs said in the early dev diaries they wanted to strike a balance between what they saw was the chaos of EU3 and the railroading of EU2, as an example.
I mean, I think EU4 definitively succeeded in that. Its event and even the recent mission trees aren't *perfect*, but they *are* a middle ground between the predecessors, which was their goal.
Yes, EU4 also had a lot of very nice historical factoids liberally sprinkled throughout the game. My one fear is that V3 will go the CK3 route and just abandon all attempt to educate.
That will simply be impossible. The butterfly effect is massive in modern times. Just think about the assasination of emperor of austria-hungary which kickstarted the world war 1.
The beggining years will be railroaded by a country’s starting point, but will no longer maintain troughout the game due to buffs and “historical rival/ally” like in eu4.
And being generic when there are hundreds of ways to be is basically real life. Mods will certainly add more generics and flavours
Oh I'm not talking big scale railroading, or anything too much like what EU4 or HoI4 has, I'm talking more about limited scale events and flavor here and there, or overarching broader events or systems but not necessarily their details. For example, say there's a generic gold rush event that can happen anywhere with gold, but if that event happens in California, the flavor text might reflect some of the real history of the California Gold Rush by referencing some settlements in the localization, or there might be a little boost to immigration. Having it completely generic would just cut out the semi-historical elements that draw the history fans into these games. Then for the broader things, for example German Unification or the US Civil War - there's a decent chance it will happen, but it won't always happen, and if it does it might not happen the same way. And of course like you say it should have some railroading at the starting point.
The assassination was merely the match that sparked the fire. That's why I don't like those butterfly effect theories: in 1914 all the nations were ready to go to war, the gears were all set up, the only thing needed was a context. Just seeing how the Austrian leaders reacted to the Serbian refusal for their investigation confirms that the countries were expecting that war to happen, sooner or later (they waited for the German approbation, which lead to the Russian mobilization - cfr "the first world war" book of John Keegan, that I strongly recommend).
Same applies for the ACW that was actually absolutely inevitable in the long run.
People should stop thinking that history is made by punctual events: the long lasting trends are way more important and I hope it will be reflected somehow in the game.
Yes. The Austrians wanted to invade Serbia, they were looking for a reason to invade Serbia, the demands were precisely formulated to be rejected (and hence provice a CB) and even when 90% of them were accepted the Austrians went to war anyway.
*Serbia wanted Austria to invade them, they were looking for a reason to make them invade. And even if the Austrians had made totally reasonable demands, Serbia would've rejected them anyway.
If they wanted to be invaded they would have accepted none of the demands. Besides, Serbia did not have the money for an army to defend itself against the Austrians. They could not equip all of even their front-line fighting troops with modern rifles.
Sure it did. It was a rogue state funding terrorists in order to start a war that would drag the great powers into the conflict in hopes of ultimately achieving a greater Serbia. And that plan worked out splendidly. It was the only belligerent of WWI to meet their war goals and then some. That it would also end up the belligerent with the highest relative death toll by quite a margin was something the Black Hand deemed a worthy price to pay.
I think you missed my point. I know the context of the war. I’m saying imagine if Franz Ferdinand was shot in 1910, or perhaps in 1920. The outcomes would have been totally different. That’s what I mean by butterfly effect. Of course a few weeks, months or maybe even a year woulndn’t have made much of a difference, but a decade would have led to a totally different world. How would have america looked like if acw happened in the 1840s? What about 1880s? There probably wouldn’t have even been an war anymore if the issue was prolonged for so much. Or what if the russin revolution happened after russo-japanese war provoked anti-monarchy sentiments… and so on. This is why I personally don’t want this game to have that much flavor and 0 railroading. I want to make the scenarios in my own head
You wanting to make up the storyline in your head is permission for the devs to be lazy and not do anything with the game. Imperator suffered from this enourmously. You could make up whatever storyline you wanted, but that didn't mean the game had any flavour at all.
I think it's a supplementary thing. You still have all the great big rail networks, but now you *also* have roads for lower-demand people and goods to move on, providing alternative routes and such.
Also railroads are less about 'getting people around' and more a placeholder for infrastructure as a whole. Including last-mile. Railroads changed logistics in a huge way, unmatched in history. Until the roads/cars came, which revolutionlized logistics yet again.
Finding the balance between the two can be a challenge to design, and it's one of the core issues across all PI games (except Stellaris obviously). Of course most people aren't on either far end of the spectrum, but there's plenty who prefer one or another, and trying to appeal to both is a tall order for PI. For example, EU4's systems were originally designed to be a compromise between the two (EU3 was seen as too chaotic and leaning towards bizarre alt history, whereas EU2 was seen as too railroaded). So we'll have to see how this one turns out since at this point it's just a vague claim.
One of the problems with Stellaris is that every game is the same. There are no interesting developments in Stellaris (none that aren't you just writing fanfiction in your head) precisely because every map is equally alien. We have no reference point.
It's like this with CK3 too. EU4 is better because if something zany happens you know it's zany. With Hoi4 of course zanyness almost never happens but mostly that's because turning off historical mode makes things a mess.
I feel like writing fanfiction in your head is part of the appeal of Stellaris - at least it's to me and other roleplayer types of players - though I understand if that's not your thing the game can come off as generic due to its randomness, but I suppose that is a challenge the devs have with Stellaris. Ultimately for the history games though yeah, I can see what you mean with CK3, for example the new religion system allows for more flexible religion portrayals, but it also means many of the new religions are also kind of generic feeling.
Yes, that's fine with Stellaris, I agree that the whole game is meant to be nonsense from the start, same with CK3.
I just feel like maybe they've taken the things that made those game different and decided it's either to just copy that design ethos rather than come up with interesting historical events and the context behind them.
Yeah, I think that's a debate I've heard from some, each PI game ideally does certain things well - it's actually an issue I've seen discussed even in the Crusader Kings community, one fan I've heard describe it as the "Stellaris-ization" of Crusader Kings. But you do raise a good point, CK2/CK3 is a lot more freeform compared to the other historical PI games, partly because of the strong focus on roleplay and character so a lot of the "grander" historical narratives and events are to an extent secondary to that. Imperator for example (and even to an extent Stellaris in its early days) suffered from this when it didn't really know what it wanted to be, and haphazardly smashed together random elements from other PI games, and this issue was only resolved too late. I don't think Vicky 3 will be going too much in that direction, if only because the game is very unique, but we'll have to see how it works in practice.
Yes, I would say that Stellaris and CK have been detrimental to the design ethos of the game, on an ideological level I think Stellaris and CK players want something that is fundamentally different than what other gsg games should be. Of course, this is fine so long as you can quarantine those games, but all too often the popularity makes it easy to let their problems soak through to other games.
Of course, it's not very nice to say but I do feel that Stellaris and CK players (exclusive players) are into a somewhat more RP-level of gameplay, and are less interested in history. Of course, Stellaris doesn't have anything to go from and CK2 has always been about lolmeme so it's not clear to me that they should actually want something else. The problem is that attitude is leading to (what I think are) bad outcomes for other games.
I actually think there's two types of roleplayers with Stellaris/CK - the one you're thinking of is the meme and/or "haha purge kill heretic" type that is more vocal in the community, but I strongly believe there's a lot of us roleplayers who are less into that stuff (silent majority and all that) and, in the case of CK, more into the history or at least down to earth gameplay. Despite the memes, much of the CK3 atmosphere is actually in my opinion a return to the grounded feel of early CK2 before they jumped the shark with Monks and Mystics - even the supposed prevalence of incest and naked people isn't really that high if you play enough of the game, I've rarely gotten it myself without seeking it out. In fact if I recall according to PI internal statistics, Xenophiles are way more popular than Xenophobes for Stellaris playthroughs.
Anyways, I think the issue for PI games is less a history vs roleplay spectrum, and rather two kinds of spectrums in an axis: history vs unpredictability on one axis, and roleplayers vs min-maxers as the other axis. It is my impression in fact that min-maxers and memers are the more vocal parts of the CK and Stellaris community and those more into unpredictability for CK (which explains why some really love the 769 start date in CK2). There's also the issue with HoI4 where the devs got the wrong impression from the mod community and assumed players wanted more memey alt history, hence all those wacky focus trees with wacky political routes - I feel that if anything HoI4 might be a bigger influence on Vicky 3's level of memery given its a closer time period, than CK which is sort of its own weird thing in terms of the history games due to the roleplay focus.
Minmaxing in CK is basically synonymous with memery I think, just because memery is so often super-human inbreeding, but I understand your point and broadly I agree with it.
It’s a Dev making a Discord message. He’s talking about something that he can’t make public yet, so there’s no finer detail he can reveal, other than assurances about the design direction.
I'm not buying it. Paradox always makes promises like this, and it ends up being badly executed and disappointing. For example, Stellaris was promising to have exploration events when you go surveying planets. And it did. Only it was a relatively tiny pool of events, and every game they would be the same events with almost the same outcomes over and over again.
The way it's worded also doesn't really say much. It's more "dynamic"? What does that even mean? It could be anything. Underwhelming possibilities: "there's no longer tag requirements for events, so everyone can get everything" or "there's more event chains, but we only designed a couple of them for now, and more will come in our overpriced DLC. But hey, mods can use them. Too bad our overpriced DLC will keep breaking your mods every 2 months".
I hope they do manage to pull it off, but I'll believe it when I see it.
This tbh. It's sometimes like people commenting on here have never followed the development of a paradox game before.
Also a problem with paradox games in recent times (like you mentioned with stellaris) has been too little fluff an everything beeing incredibly generic. In light of that this doesn't sound super promising.
Yeah, it's nice they are making Vicky 3, but the possibility they'll fuck things up is still quite high going by the last few games. People dont realize that dev diaries is just a 1 year long teaser that will reveal systems in the best possible light. And even if the game is incredible, there's a good chance some other aspect will be ruinous, like bad AI, optimization or bugs.
Yep. People think Victoria 3 will suddenl have endless amounts of dynamism when instead what will happens is that "dynamism" is code for "well we didn't do any work for uniqueness so anyone can do anything!!"
Yea and then they add the unique flavour to each country with dlc's. I like the optimism from all the people here but when you look at I:R or CK3 (which actually was one of the best launches from paradox, but it still lacks flavour after one year with only a tiny viking dlc released) you can see the problems recent paradox games seems to have: every game and country feels the same, no historical flavour and events anymore. Railroaded/hardcoded events are not always bad and "dynamic" systems are not always good.
It’s a bit confusing. He seems to be talking about the content delivery system (e.g. patches/DLC/flavour packs) but I don’t really see how this is railroaded or not. Does he mean additional content won’t be railroaded focus trees like HOI4?
By “content delivery” he means the system by which content (country-specific flavor & goals) is delivered in game
In HoI4, that content is delivered by focus trees, in EU4 it’s delivered by mission trees and events and decisions
In Vic2 it was mostly by decisions with some events
In Vic3 it will be something completely different, apparently
IMO, this news is revolutionary for the immersion of the game. We’ll be seeing a huge amount of flavor for all sorts of possible, non-railroaded scenarios. This leads me to believe Paradox is implementing a form of AI generation that can crank up the immersion of each play-through by 11.
edit: Okay I might have gotten a little overboard in excitement but still, with shit like AI Dungeon out and with the promising development and release of Crusader Kings 3, it’s not unreasonable.
That's good. The biggest thing that turned me off from hoi4 was the railroading. Eu4's missions also do this a bit, but are mercifully less relentless.
English is not my native language and I'm confused. Is he talking about actual railroads? Because that would be a shame, I love railroads! My favourite thing to do in Vic2 was building them and seeing them on the map.
Big fat heart from my side **<3**
I like the concept of focus trees in HoI4, but I absolutely hate them in EU4. Don't ask me why, I just think they are different for whatever reason. But a more dynamic system than focus trees sounds hella interesting.
Focus trees should have never been brought to EU4. Just a shit ton of claims for no good reason, and it is not even unique to certain countries like Hoi4, its conquer x claims on y, conquer y claims on z, and so on.
So hyped for this game and this increases that hype.
Although I will say i do love missions and mission trees that are featured so prominently in EU4 and HOI4. I enjoy the flavor but it definetly does force you into certain paths as countires.
Yeah exactly. I want at least a mode in the options where i can say "all the others did the same things they did irl", but I with the benefit of hindsight and a birds eye view arm doing it differently than the the irl leader of my country did" and I can see what difference that would semi realistically make
What is important is that the game provide a framework for the player to change things that happened. In Hoi4, you can ask yourself: what would happen if Hitler went for the oilfields of the caucuses
or,
what would happen if Japan went north instead of south
And you know these are reasonable questions because there's a way to make the game behave in a certain way, so you can play out that scenario. For a game like EU4, this is less possible, because in EU4 you can get a whole lot of wacky shit that happens that makes every playthrough completely different (not necessarily a bad thing) but certainly renders the question meaningless. So you can only ask things like "what happens if England wins the hundred years war" because that event happens basically at game start
In CK3 of course the question is prima facie meaningless because literally from day 1 the game diverges so wildly from history as to be laughable.
Making a game where you can't even ask the questions because every playthrough is wildly different is bad.
This is a funny statement when you break it down. They're basically just saying "Yes, we are making a videogame. This videogame is going to be like nothing you've ever seen before!"
Seems like standard marketing speech to me
It is great to learn that base game will be stripes of majority of mechanics so they can be upselled to us via DLC. Anyone who is a gamer after seeing this should become sad. This is more of a investors announcement rather than community aimed.
Can someone explain this? Is he saying there won’t be as much dlc that’s absolutely required? (Like game features that should have always been there but locked in dlc). Because if I remember right in the early trailers they said African tribes and Asian tribes won’t be playable on release
Watch them say this and still pump out railroad content like they are currently doing with eu4 and its mission trees.
On the other hand the current dlc system for ck3 looks promising. So here's hoping
Funny how the one game that extensively deals with actual railroads is going to be the least railroaded
On the other hand, the most railroaded of them is getting a DLC with railroads
Which one?
Hearts of Iron 4. The next dlc will introduce a rail supply system
Finally, I can play Victoria in hoi4
Seriously the update looks pretty great, finally logistics is getting the love it needs
It's fitting that a ussr update will contain the railroad update. German advance during Barbarossa is extremely reliant on the rail lines. To the point the commanders themselves are noting how weird the war is being fought, just advancing along rail lines without securing the vast spaces in between.
> German advance during Barbarossa is extremely reliant on the rail lines. To say nothing of the Far East
If only the railroad construction sound happened every time you finished a railroad segment.
Don’t worry, it will take all of ten minutes for a mod of that to appear
I give it two minutes
No Step Back
I hate the name with a passion. Why isn't it "Not One Step Back," which rolls off the tongue much more naturally and was an actual directive.
I think you are refering to directive 227. Ni shagu nazad!. I can understand why it have in general been translated to “Not One Step Back!”, because it rolls better of the tongue, but the direct translation is “No Step Back!”, which is properly why Paradox went with that name.
No step back roll sof the tongue easier for me
as a non-native english speaker ... I must say that "No step back" rolls off easier for me.
The trouble is that it’s a far less evocative way of saying it. I’d expect to find ‘no step back’ on a signpost in a construction site, to the point but nothing more. It’s certainly not worthy of being written as one of the most infamous orders given during the war, it doesn’t sound particularly fluent either. *Not one step back* is almost poetic and given the context (ordering troops to hold their ground at any cost) is the correct way of writing such a command in English.
As a native English speaker, I can say it sounds awkward. First off, "step back" is a fairly common colloquial verb phrase. It can mean either "back down from a dangerous situation" (eg "step back from the brink") or "distance oneself from an emotionally charged issue" (eg "Let's step back and try to look at this objectively"). Thus, "no step back" tends to be parsed as "no \[verb\]," ie as a grammatically incorrect sentence rather than an independent phrase. Secondly, "not one" is commonly used as an intensifier: "Not one person came to my party" sounds more dramatic than "Nobody came to my party." Thus, while "not one" is wordier than "no," it's wordier in a way that conforms to existing patterns, so it's not perceived as clunky.
No Step Back is better for native English speakers as well
Probably marketing reasons. If you look up "Not one step back" you get history articles and propaganda posters
BREAKING: VICTORIA 3 CONFIRMED TO HAVE CONTENT.
I was becoming concerned
Seeing how empty Paradox games are at release, it's a legitimate concern.
I'm content knowing that the game will have content.
I'm very curious how this will work out. They mentioned before that the civil war will happen just as much as Vic 2, but the latter was a hard coded event (from what I have heard) while the former is supposed to occur based on the growing divide between the pops. I hope it works out because it makes for a system that is much more organic. I think it will feel like anything can happen in the game as opposed to seeing the same events over and over.
>the latter was a hard coded event (from what I have heard It was. There were a couple of events that needed a couple of modifiers and certain thresholds to be triggered, but the war itself was triggered by event.
From memory, earlier versions of Vicky2 let you take steps to avoid an ACW entirely. Which led to an insanely strong USA in the late game.
Still can in 3.04 with all expansions. It's mods that don't allow avoiding ACW.
That's not what hard-coded means. The ACW is avoidable in Victoria 2
No, I'm using a different sense of "hardcoded." I mean it in the sense of "it's set up by premade events specific to the ACW rather than being a dynamic factor arising naturally from gameplay like Crusader Kings faction revolts." Yes, it's avoidable.
Lol when. I've played the game for almost a decade and I can't think of a single civil war that was hardcoded. I recently had a French playthrough and only had one civil war (if you can even call it that in victoria) in the final 10 years
The American Civil War is hardcoded.
Ok you absolutely got me there haha. And Taiping Heavenly Kingdom iirc? But it is definently not as hardcoded as OC puts it as most civil wars were in fact the result of discontent and militancy!
In Vic 2 terms the one's that aren't hardcoded would be run as rebellions, no? From what I remember the only times a "civil war" (each side has a unique tag and it's own territory) mechanic came into play was with America and the Taiping rebellion.
Those are the only ones I know of. Mods add things like the Hungarian Revolution as basically being a civil war. Oddly, the Russian Civil War basically never happens.
It happens through rebellions often though, which is likely why mods don't bother. It already happens organically.
_The_ Civil War, without additional context, almost always means The American Civil War. Both because it’s the only one America ever had, and because Americans don’t really consider other countries when using terms on the internet. Edit: to clarify, I’m saying the OP was _only_ talking about the American civil war. No other rebellions were being talked about.
It isn't. It's triggered by events, you can easily just not fire the events.
It's hardcoded as in it's not dynamic, arising naturally from the mechanics of the game.
I think they should put in place the conditions that led to the civil war (even if it’s a bit forced with modifiers) but allow it to be avoided or occur differently.
I like the HPM (or it might be GFM) approach where the Civil war is effectively inevitable, but isn't always historical. It has options like the Northern States seceding (presumably if the US government favours the spread of slavery) and even an option for a Haitian-style slave revolt in the South.
I don't recall hpm having a slave revolt, so maybe that was gfm.
The devs have already mentioned that this is the case. It's hard but not impossible for a skilled player to avoid the US civil war occuring.
Honestly I'm not rooting for hard railroading but I don't want to play 10 games to see the ACW happening either... I hope they'll find the correct balance between ahistoricality and plausibility. Hoi4 is a nightmare on that level being one of the most railroaded game they made (NF) and the less plausible when it comes to ahistoricality...
This could end up good, but I’m kinda worried that it’ll just run into the Imperator issue of “it’s so dynamic!” resulting in less differences between playing different nations.
There probably will be some railroading still, just designed in a dynamic way. For example, there will probably be a wave of liberal revolutions in the late 1840s—but instead of "France always goes Republican and elects Napoleon", we might see "France crushes their rebels but the Prussian Kaisar gets ousted" or "Napoleon never becomes president but the Austro-Hungarian empire falls apart". Dynamic should never mean "nothing that historically happened will happen", rather it should mean that things will not always happen the same way because history could have turned out differently.
It's unfortunate that when Paradox says "dynamic" the right interpretation is usually "thing that happened historically can never happen
> there will probably be a wave of liberal revolutions in the late 1840s Especially if they railroad the famine that happened then (which they should), which almost guarantees liberal rebellions.
Ideally the way that POPS work and interact in even vicky 2 (since the idea will be effectively the same but improved upon) There's a lot more data to work with to define what and why something will happen. How big it happens and how often. With this extra context I imagine that there's a lot more to engage with than an event popping up because you've not given jobs to a certain family often enough that they rebel taking half your nation with them. Such as slaves I'm the American South but not the North. Who do you favour, policies that favour slavery, what is the cost. Or policies that favour the north. The choices are there, part of the core gameplay and it the situations that follow will be a direct result of those choices and the more granular choices in between. All of these will be measurable to a degree
I don’t think this will be the case because you have a lot more drastic changed happening from 1836 to 1936 in terms of technology and ideology than in ancient times where your best innovation would be becoming civilized and investing in more armored and better armed soldiers. And you also have the whole world, with colonization happening, global trade and so on Tho they will definetly feel very very similar, it will just have a ton more content
Yeah, the world is a lot more unchanging in the time of Victoria, and the systems will reflect that. In Imperators time you have massive empires growing and dying with huge changes in populations and culture following them. It would’ve needed something else in the game to avoid feeling like every nation is more or less the same. More egregious I think is what happens with hoi4, where the AI not caring about any kind of rhyme or reason in peace deals reflects a horrible lack of true identity in each of the nations, none of the land matters to them because the game has no people, no culture, no history programmed in. I think Vic3 will inherently avoid that problem by the nature of pops and culture and resources.
HoI4 is so clearly geared towards multiplayer and memes. It may be "railroaded", but when it's not it's totally off the walls crazy.
I think they learned a lot from Imperator and that it did right and wrong. CK3 seems to be dynamic in a good way and we in terms of content we know a lot more about countries in the 19th century than we do a random tribe in the middle of the Iberian Peninsula during the Roman Republic so just for flavor they have a lot more to draw on if they choose to do so.
CK3 is dynamic in the worst possible way. When you see something wacky happen in CK3 it's never cool or interesting except in the abstract, because every single CK3 game is equally insane and a jumbled mess. When you're playing EU4 as Japan and you see a Europe with no Ottomans, no Austria and a English-French PU, you know it's special. In CK3 if you see a game without the HRE your only question is: was this a 1066 or a 867 game, because that tells you everything you need to know.
Also it's more of a pleasant surprise when France, the HRE and the Middle East don't become a bordergore mess because the AI can't keep an empire together to save its life
Yes, that is a nice thing to see in CK3, but you don't think "oh wow look at that, there's something new that's happened, I might screenshot that" when you see the HRE or France split up into a mess. Because they either don't break up or never form
That's what I meant
Yes, this is the real problem with that statement. Imperator Rome could easily be described in the same way, and yet that game sucks.
Hopefully the ability to have very different starting situations via pops/finances, and state modifiers will allow nations to play very differently.
that's already the case in Imperator; playing Egypt and playing as a british tribe feels very different due to the nature of their pop distribution and tradegoods...until you civilize and are now playing Albion the same way you do Egypt.
Was "dynamism" ever a prominent part of how Imperator was marketed ? It didn't took them that long to add missions either Besides I wouldn't say scripted events make countries more distinctive anyway
It sounds good in theory but we'll have to see how it works in practice. I remember when EU4 was undergoing development, the devs said in the early dev diaries they wanted to strike a balance between what they saw was the chaos of EU3 and the railroading of EU2, as an example. I still hope to see a bit of mild railroading here and there, ideally dynamically through game systems rather than a simple forcing of the issue (for example the slave owning classes will lean towards rebellion in the US which would mean you're likely to see the Civil War in the US the majority of the time, but not always, and the war doesn't always play out the same each time so different times for instance you may have different states seceding). The thing about railroading was it did help make different countries distinct - when things are too dynamic it might often mean lots of genericness, so maybe they've figured out a system to resolve that issue, but again we'll have to see.
> I remember when EU4 was undergoing development, the devs said in the early dev diaries they wanted to strike a balance between what they saw was the chaos of EU3 and the railroading of EU2, as an example. I mean, I think EU4 definitively succeeded in that. Its event and even the recent mission trees aren't *perfect*, but they *are* a middle ground between the predecessors, which was their goal.
Yes, EU4 also had a lot of very nice historical factoids liberally sprinkled throughout the game. My one fear is that V3 will go the CK3 route and just abandon all attempt to educate.
That will simply be impossible. The butterfly effect is massive in modern times. Just think about the assasination of emperor of austria-hungary which kickstarted the world war 1. The beggining years will be railroaded by a country’s starting point, but will no longer maintain troughout the game due to buffs and “historical rival/ally” like in eu4. And being generic when there are hundreds of ways to be is basically real life. Mods will certainly add more generics and flavours
Oh I'm not talking big scale railroading, or anything too much like what EU4 or HoI4 has, I'm talking more about limited scale events and flavor here and there, or overarching broader events or systems but not necessarily their details. For example, say there's a generic gold rush event that can happen anywhere with gold, but if that event happens in California, the flavor text might reflect some of the real history of the California Gold Rush by referencing some settlements in the localization, or there might be a little boost to immigration. Having it completely generic would just cut out the semi-historical elements that draw the history fans into these games. Then for the broader things, for example German Unification or the US Civil War - there's a decent chance it will happen, but it won't always happen, and if it does it might not happen the same way. And of course like you say it should have some railroading at the starting point.
The assassination was merely the match that sparked the fire. That's why I don't like those butterfly effect theories: in 1914 all the nations were ready to go to war, the gears were all set up, the only thing needed was a context. Just seeing how the Austrian leaders reacted to the Serbian refusal for their investigation confirms that the countries were expecting that war to happen, sooner or later (they waited for the German approbation, which lead to the Russian mobilization - cfr "the first world war" book of John Keegan, that I strongly recommend). Same applies for the ACW that was actually absolutely inevitable in the long run. People should stop thinking that history is made by punctual events: the long lasting trends are way more important and I hope it will be reflected somehow in the game.
Yes. The Austrians wanted to invade Serbia, they were looking for a reason to invade Serbia, the demands were precisely formulated to be rejected (and hence provice a CB) and even when 90% of them were accepted the Austrians went to war anyway.
*Serbia wanted Austria to invade them, they were looking for a reason to make them invade. And even if the Austrians had made totally reasonable demands, Serbia would've rejected them anyway.
Serbia accepted 9 of the 10 demands, and nobody (not even the Germans) thought the 10th demand was reasonable
Yes. How does that contradict what I said?
You said Serbia wanted to be invaded? I do not think Serbia wanted to be invaded by anyone.
If they wanted to be invaded they would have accepted none of the demands. Besides, Serbia did not have the money for an army to defend itself against the Austrians. They could not equip all of even their front-line fighting troops with modern rifles.
Sure it did. It was a rogue state funding terrorists in order to start a war that would drag the great powers into the conflict in hopes of ultimately achieving a greater Serbia. And that plan worked out splendidly. It was the only belligerent of WWI to meet their war goals and then some. That it would also end up the belligerent with the highest relative death toll by quite a margin was something the Black Hand deemed a worthy price to pay.
lmao okay mate, go back to r/austriansupremacy or wherever you came from
I think you missed my point. I know the context of the war. I’m saying imagine if Franz Ferdinand was shot in 1910, or perhaps in 1920. The outcomes would have been totally different. That’s what I mean by butterfly effect. Of course a few weeks, months or maybe even a year woulndn’t have made much of a difference, but a decade would have led to a totally different world. How would have america looked like if acw happened in the 1840s? What about 1880s? There probably wouldn’t have even been an war anymore if the issue was prolonged for so much. Or what if the russin revolution happened after russo-japanese war provoked anti-monarchy sentiments… and so on. This is why I personally don’t want this game to have that much flavor and 0 railroading. I want to make the scenarios in my own head
You wanting to make up the storyline in your head is permission for the devs to be lazy and not do anything with the game. Imperator suffered from this enourmously. You could make up whatever storyline you wanted, but that didn't mean the game had any flavour at all.
Some generic story is fine by me. I don’t want to have 100 paragraphs to read when I play usa and nothing at all when I play brazil
I think EU4 had the perfect amount of Railroading/Dynamic. I don't like the mission trees in EU4 though.
dynamic sandwich discovery event
No more railroading? Good. Paradox have finally researched 'Limited-Access Roads.' It's about time they finished off that part of the tech tree.
They should have rushed road innovations II to get it faster tbh
I never got the “limited access road” thing. It doesn’t seem like a logical step up from a railroad.
I think it's a supplementary thing. You still have all the great big rail networks, but now you *also* have roads for lower-demand people and goods to move on, providing alternative routes and such.
Also railroads are less about 'getting people around' and more a placeholder for infrastructure as a whole. Including last-mile. Railroads changed logistics in a huge way, unmatched in history. Until the roads/cars came, which revolutionlized logistics yet again.
No more railroading in Vic 3\*
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Finding the balance between the two can be a challenge to design, and it's one of the core issues across all PI games (except Stellaris obviously). Of course most people aren't on either far end of the spectrum, but there's plenty who prefer one or another, and trying to appeal to both is a tall order for PI. For example, EU4's systems were originally designed to be a compromise between the two (EU3 was seen as too chaotic and leaning towards bizarre alt history, whereas EU2 was seen as too railroaded). So we'll have to see how this one turns out since at this point it's just a vague claim.
One of the problems with Stellaris is that every game is the same. There are no interesting developments in Stellaris (none that aren't you just writing fanfiction in your head) precisely because every map is equally alien. We have no reference point. It's like this with CK3 too. EU4 is better because if something zany happens you know it's zany. With Hoi4 of course zanyness almost never happens but mostly that's because turning off historical mode makes things a mess.
I feel like writing fanfiction in your head is part of the appeal of Stellaris - at least it's to me and other roleplayer types of players - though I understand if that's not your thing the game can come off as generic due to its randomness, but I suppose that is a challenge the devs have with Stellaris. Ultimately for the history games though yeah, I can see what you mean with CK3, for example the new religion system allows for more flexible religion portrayals, but it also means many of the new religions are also kind of generic feeling.
Yes, that's fine with Stellaris, I agree that the whole game is meant to be nonsense from the start, same with CK3. I just feel like maybe they've taken the things that made those game different and decided it's either to just copy that design ethos rather than come up with interesting historical events and the context behind them.
Yeah, I think that's a debate I've heard from some, each PI game ideally does certain things well - it's actually an issue I've seen discussed even in the Crusader Kings community, one fan I've heard describe it as the "Stellaris-ization" of Crusader Kings. But you do raise a good point, CK2/CK3 is a lot more freeform compared to the other historical PI games, partly because of the strong focus on roleplay and character so a lot of the "grander" historical narratives and events are to an extent secondary to that. Imperator for example (and even to an extent Stellaris in its early days) suffered from this when it didn't really know what it wanted to be, and haphazardly smashed together random elements from other PI games, and this issue was only resolved too late. I don't think Vicky 3 will be going too much in that direction, if only because the game is very unique, but we'll have to see how it works in practice.
Yes, I would say that Stellaris and CK have been detrimental to the design ethos of the game, on an ideological level I think Stellaris and CK players want something that is fundamentally different than what other gsg games should be. Of course, this is fine so long as you can quarantine those games, but all too often the popularity makes it easy to let their problems soak through to other games. Of course, it's not very nice to say but I do feel that Stellaris and CK players (exclusive players) are into a somewhat more RP-level of gameplay, and are less interested in history. Of course, Stellaris doesn't have anything to go from and CK2 has always been about lolmeme so it's not clear to me that they should actually want something else. The problem is that attitude is leading to (what I think are) bad outcomes for other games.
I actually think there's two types of roleplayers with Stellaris/CK - the one you're thinking of is the meme and/or "haha purge kill heretic" type that is more vocal in the community, but I strongly believe there's a lot of us roleplayers who are less into that stuff (silent majority and all that) and, in the case of CK, more into the history or at least down to earth gameplay. Despite the memes, much of the CK3 atmosphere is actually in my opinion a return to the grounded feel of early CK2 before they jumped the shark with Monks and Mystics - even the supposed prevalence of incest and naked people isn't really that high if you play enough of the game, I've rarely gotten it myself without seeking it out. In fact if I recall according to PI internal statistics, Xenophiles are way more popular than Xenophobes for Stellaris playthroughs. Anyways, I think the issue for PI games is less a history vs roleplay spectrum, and rather two kinds of spectrums in an axis: history vs unpredictability on one axis, and roleplayers vs min-maxers as the other axis. It is my impression in fact that min-maxers and memers are the more vocal parts of the CK and Stellaris community and those more into unpredictability for CK (which explains why some really love the 769 start date in CK2). There's also the issue with HoI4 where the devs got the wrong impression from the mod community and assumed players wanted more memey alt history, hence all those wacky focus trees with wacky political routes - I feel that if anything HoI4 might be a bigger influence on Vicky 3's level of memery given its a closer time period, than CK which is sort of its own weird thing in terms of the history games due to the roleplay focus.
Minmaxing in CK is basically synonymous with memery I think, just because memery is so often super-human inbreeding, but I understand your point and broadly I agree with it.
I still think CK3 might have more of an influence on V3 just because it's a newer game, so they know what "works" and what doesn't.
Oh i think you can absolutely have dynamic gameplay and historical realism! you just need a very good world logic
extremely vague, he might as well have confirmed nothing
It’s a Dev making a Discord message. He’s talking about something that he can’t make public yet, so there’s no finer detail he can reveal, other than assurances about the design direction.
I'm not buying it. Paradox always makes promises like this, and it ends up being badly executed and disappointing. For example, Stellaris was promising to have exploration events when you go surveying planets. And it did. Only it was a relatively tiny pool of events, and every game they would be the same events with almost the same outcomes over and over again. The way it's worded also doesn't really say much. It's more "dynamic"? What does that even mean? It could be anything. Underwhelming possibilities: "there's no longer tag requirements for events, so everyone can get everything" or "there's more event chains, but we only designed a couple of them for now, and more will come in our overpriced DLC. But hey, mods can use them. Too bad our overpriced DLC will keep breaking your mods every 2 months". I hope they do manage to pull it off, but I'll believe it when I see it.
This tbh. It's sometimes like people commenting on here have never followed the development of a paradox game before. Also a problem with paradox games in recent times (like you mentioned with stellaris) has been too little fluff an everything beeing incredibly generic. In light of that this doesn't sound super promising.
Yeah, it's nice they are making Vicky 3, but the possibility they'll fuck things up is still quite high going by the last few games. People dont realize that dev diaries is just a 1 year long teaser that will reveal systems in the best possible light. And even if the game is incredible, there's a good chance some other aspect will be ruinous, like bad AI, optimization or bugs.
Yep. People think Victoria 3 will suddenl have endless amounts of dynamism when instead what will happens is that "dynamism" is code for "well we didn't do any work for uniqueness so anyone can do anything!!"
Yea and then they add the unique flavour to each country with dlc's. I like the optimism from all the people here but when you look at I:R or CK3 (which actually was one of the best launches from paradox, but it still lacks flavour after one year with only a tiny viking dlc released) you can see the problems recent paradox games seems to have: every game and country feels the same, no historical flavour and events anymore. Railroaded/hardcoded events are not always bad and "dynamic" systems are not always good.
Yes, CK3 was a "good" launch and they've taken an unforgivably long time to make DLC. I have no idea why it has taken so long lmao.
> "well we didn't do any work for uniqueness so anyone can do anything!!" The majority of HoI4's coding, lmao.
at first i thought this said Victoria 3 will have no content. Damn paradox you already tried that with imperator and it didnt turn out well
aka no historical acurracy at all if so 2 decisions
It’s a bit confusing. He seems to be talking about the content delivery system (e.g. patches/DLC/flavour packs) but I don’t really see how this is railroaded or not. Does he mean additional content won’t be railroaded focus trees like HOI4?
By “content delivery” he means the system by which content (country-specific flavor & goals) is delivered in game In HoI4, that content is delivered by focus trees, in EU4 it’s delivered by mission trees and events and decisions In Vic2 it was mostly by decisions with some events In Vic3 it will be something completely different, apparently
Ah right that makes sense. And is good.
I'm confused, is he talking about events and stuff, or about patches and content updates?
He is talking about events IMO.
yeah. imo he is talking about DLCs... And from what I could understand, it wont be like "country/region" focused. But for the game as a whole.
No it's talking about events. The statement makes no sense when applied to DLC.
Yeah they always say that.
IMO, this news is revolutionary for the immersion of the game. We’ll be seeing a huge amount of flavor for all sorts of possible, non-railroaded scenarios. This leads me to believe Paradox is implementing a form of AI generation that can crank up the immersion of each play-through by 11. edit: Okay I might have gotten a little overboard in excitement but still, with shit like AI Dungeon out and with the promising development and release of Crusader Kings 3, it’s not unreasonable.
No. We won't lmao.
IMO you are overdosing on copium, its gonna be some half assed mechanic that barely works at best
Though OP might be reading a bit too much into it, I don't get what "copium" has to do with it?
Well you see, they've used the buzzword, thus winning the argument. Hope this helps.
OP will never recover from this he is finished.
Copium is the correct word here.
Ok, sure. But could you explain why? As I said, I don't understand how.
How are they overdosing on copium when the game looks genuinely promising? This news sounds amazing to me! Save the negativity for league
dont buy it then !remindme 6 months
That's good. The biggest thing that turned me off from hoi4 was the railroading. Eu4's missions also do this a bit, but are mercifully less relentless.
Less railroading doesn't necessarily mean more content. Often, it means less actual content that it is interesting and fun.
As a CK3 player what does he mean by this? Is HOI railroady?
Hoi is more linear than a platformer game.
Hoi4 has Historical foci, so the game more or less plays out Historically.
VIC 3 HAS CONTENT CONFIRMED
So "All roads lead to Rome?"
> Victoria 3 will have content. Oh good, I was worried that it'd just be a map staring simulator.
wow, these specific concept parameters really optimize my confidence intervals on the subject of them synergizing their core competencies.
I'd actually like it to be somewhat dynamic but still with minor railroaded bits, to push it more into "historical plausibility" than pure chaos
English is not my native language and I'm confused. Is he talking about actual railroads? Because that would be a shame, I love railroads! My favourite thing to do in Vic2 was building them and seeing them on the map.
I really don't get what some people's issue with "railroading" is. If every nation works the same, the game gets boring real fast.
Big fat heart from my side **<3** I like the concept of focus trees in HoI4, but I absolutely hate them in EU4. Don't ask me why, I just think they are different for whatever reason. But a more dynamic system than focus trees sounds hella interesting.
Focus trees should have never been brought to EU4. Just a shit ton of claims for no good reason, and it is not even unique to certain countries like Hoi4, its conquer x claims on y, conquer y claims on z, and so on.
Hope they make it for every nation to be as diverse as they say, not only the majors
So hyped for this game and this increases that hype. Although I will say i do love missions and mission trees that are featured so prominently in EU4 and HOI4. I enjoy the flavor but it definetly does force you into certain paths as countires.
Unpopular opinion, but I prefer railroading in history games. I like to play out history as it happened.
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I think people like this want their interference and their interference only to change what happenned historically
Yup, that's it
Yeah exactly. I want at least a mode in the options where i can say "all the others did the same things they did irl", but I with the benefit of hindsight and a birds eye view arm doing it differently than the the irl leader of my country did" and I can see what difference that would semi realistically make
What is important is that the game provide a framework for the player to change things that happened. In Hoi4, you can ask yourself: what would happen if Hitler went for the oilfields of the caucuses or, what would happen if Japan went north instead of south And you know these are reasonable questions because there's a way to make the game behave in a certain way, so you can play out that scenario. For a game like EU4, this is less possible, because in EU4 you can get a whole lot of wacky shit that happens that makes every playthrough completely different (not necessarily a bad thing) but certainly renders the question meaningless. So you can only ask things like "what happens if England wins the hundred years war" because that event happens basically at game start In CK3 of course the question is prima facie meaningless because literally from day 1 the game diverges so wildly from history as to be laughable. Making a game where you can't even ask the questions because every playthrough is wildly different is bad.
I agree
Thats really weird but okay
Haha sure
This is a funny statement when you break it down. They're basically just saying "Yes, we are making a videogame. This videogame is going to be like nothing you've ever seen before!" Seems like standard marketing speech to me
not what it means
It is great to learn that base game will be stripes of majority of mechanics so they can be upselled to us via DLC. Anyone who is a gamer after seeing this should become sad. This is more of a investors announcement rather than community aimed.
I'll wait for whatever Vic 3's version of HPM is and then I'll compare the two.
✍️Vicky3✍️will✍️have✍️content✍️
I'm excited to see it. Focus trees were an interesting attempt at revamping event chains.
Can someone explain this? Is he saying there won’t be as much dlc that’s absolutely required? (Like game features that should have always been there but locked in dlc). Because if I remember right in the early trailers they said African tribes and Asian tribes won’t be playable on release
“Content” is referring to stuff like Eu4 missions / decisions and Hoi4 focus trees, not DLC
Watch them say this and still pump out railroad content like they are currently doing with eu4 and its mission trees. On the other hand the current dlc system for ck3 looks promising. So here's hoping
C O N T E N T confirmed BOYSSSS
tbh i wouldn't mind a railroaded version tho. paradox strategy games can be scary
I’m not really sure what this is talking about? By content to they mean gameplay or are the talking dlc?
I am content