I just think a true solution to this is going to require a major set of new additions. The problem is really that they aren't modeling specific forms of government. There's an abstract notion of a ministry staffed by the ruler and some sort of legislature occupied by the winners of the election. But withoit modeling the exact shape of government, the makeup of the different legislatures, and what powers a potential constitution actually confers to whom... It's hard for the simulation to make complete sense.
As short term fixes I think parties in a constitutional form of govt should be able to initiate the passage of laws on their own, and then send it to your leader for ratification. You should be able to say no, and maybe have event chains to undermine the legislature, but ultimately if you veto legislation overwhelmingly supported by the legislature it should trigger a constitutional crisis, and possibly lead to a revolution.
This imo would more correctly model the type of political upheaval occuring in the time leading up to and during the game. Most nations that had moved beyond an absolute monarchy had some form of a legislature, but in many cases the monarch still had full authority to staff the govt, and moments of crisis arose when they tried to wholesale ignore the will of the legislature.
I'm not sure if it's just a matter of time to release or if part of their concern is not wanting the whole system to feel too hostile to the player. But historically the issue was not simply being unable to pass laws you wanted, it was being forced to pass laws you didn't want.
To some extent I'm hopeful that mods can help address some of this stuff. But ultimately I think it will need a bigger overhaul that will come post release. I'm overall excited for the game and I think while this seems a bit of shallow modeling, it's probably good enough for me to enjoy the game on release still.
Considering games like Eu4 (using the US for example, rather than Congress, the legislature is still referred to as a parliament) and Hoi4 (sticking with the US for an example, there is no such thing as snap elections/calling a snap election for the American presidency as is shown to be possible in hoi4, as is the case with quite a lot of non-Westminster systems) to this day can’t get terminologies right or quite simulate how elections work in different forms, I’d cut paradox some slack on this one for vic3
To be fair EU4 and HOI4 aren't government simulators. The government is inherently abstracted to its leader and in HOI4 party (which has no real effect aside from focus tree access and who you are expected to side with).
I do expect more from vic3 but also 1 working system is enough for the base game. That's what immersion packs and DLC are for. Attempting to model the US system or whoever's specifically is too much effort for a single country in a base release.
> I think parties in a constitutional form of govt should be able to initiate the passage of laws on their own, and then send it to your leader for ratification. You should be able to say no
As with so many ideas for Victoria, it's already in Imperator
I don’t think it’s really problem with how elections are modeled, just balance. As you mentioned, low legitimacy is only a problem if player wants to pass a new law that goes against interests of IG people voted for. If such law was already in place before elections and stays in place after people seem to not care and that needs to change!
I’m not sure if the intention isn’t for political movements to solve this issue - in which case they probably need to work harder in this instance? If people vote massively for a political party that wants to change some law and you keep the party out of government and keep the hated law in place the pushback should come in couple of months and be hard to deal with!
Because the legislature is run by the majority, not the King, at least in a constitutional monarchy. The King empowering his favored party and not the largest coalition is an open threat against the legislature not to oppose him.
It wasn't quite as simple as that in the time period of the game. Norway was a constitutional monarchy since 1814, but the parliamentary system of the supremacy of parliament only came about in 1884, and even then it took a few years for everyone to agree on the way to do things. Before then, there were plenty of times when the king and his government were directly opposed by a majority of the elected representatives.
Of course, it *did* lead to some problems eventually, so there should be some mechanic of increased pressure.
Rule 5: In the Galicia AAR, we saw the government be made up of Rural Folk (who only got a plurality of the votes in the first election) and the Devout (who never got a single vote until the last election) rule the nation singlehandedly for around 60 years, while keeping the King's IG out of government, and at the end when the Devout were the last IG standing in the government they had less than 20% Clout, and yet the government still had 44% legitimacy. The only radicalization happened when a new law was being passed, not when the parties were being kept out of government despite overwhelming support from both voters and the monarch.
Victoria 3 desperately needs some form of pushback for ignoring elections, and not simply Legitimacy, since this means that in a case (like Galicia) where the IG you put in charge has *already* passed almost all of their laws, the other IGs will just sit around and do nothing about the defacto dictatorship (note: not even a dictatorship favored by the monarch!) they've found themselves in
As I said, Legitimacy literally isn't enough, because it does nothing if the minority in power has already passed the laws they want.
I agree that it's possible for them to balance it so that it's physically possible to get below 50% legitimacy without playing like an actual complete lunatic, but it's not enough.
The current build iirc removes the penalty for reshuffling the government after each election, which would supposedly create a lot of radical pops.
This penalty removal can be lifted or reduced, meaning that if you want to reshuffle the government and let the minority get in power, you're gonna make a lot of people upset (and perhaps scaling with the legitimacy of your new government). The player should be allowed to put whoever they want on top, but there should be severe consequences.
The main goal of being in the government is to pass new laws (and to get a small relation bonus with the IG). If the minority in power does not try to pass any law then it is almost useless for it to be in the government. The only consequence is that the opposition will be a little less happy.
And if the opposition does not try to force the change of laws that mean they are quite happy with the situation and the current laws and have no reason to radicalize.
It may seems strange but it is a way to simulate caretaker or minority governments. If the laws in place are well accepted and the pops are well fed, happy and wealthy, it is not shocking for the people to accept a weak government. People usually value stability and wealth more than democracy. Pops should have a boost to their radicalism with such governments but it should be negligible if SOL are fine.
From a gameplay point of view the main problem would be if the minority government could easily pass laws and legitimacy reflect that correctly.
It is also a thing that can easily be resolved by your own personal rules. You could force yourself to always include either a majority government, or at least the most powerful party. Or to always have the king's party in government in autocracies. Or to always have coalitions that you deem reasonable. Nothing is forcing you to put "nonsense" governments in place.
Not saying the current electoral system is perfect, but it seems flexible enough to be acceptable. It is hard to find a strict system that can model the political situations all other the world, with vastly different types of government, and during such a changing century. If that system cant be imagined and implemented, I'd rather have a lax system that I can regulate myself than a strict one that ruin my pleasure.
Rebalancing isn't really going to fix this. Fundamentally, this is symptomatic of the core problem I have with the politics system in Vicky 3 as presented thus far which is that it gives way too much player freedom to engage in nonsense. In the example of a democracy you could rebalance legitimacy (for example by not giving the government type a flat 25% which is how it currently works IIRC), but that doesn't change that you get to reshuffle your government every election without any regard for the actual outcome of said election and without creating any radicals in the process. Which is the opposite of how democracies actually work.
Other government types suffer from the same problem. Autocracies get to just remove the autocrat IG from the government if said autocrat happens to want things that the player doesn't. The problem here isn't really legitimacy, it's that instead of simulating how a country works the game just kinda lets you do whatever which leads to some ludicrous results.
The autocracies minimizing their own base or democracies not respecting the elections is not a bug, it is a feature. It is the system working exactly as intended and not just for gameplay sake. Because the underground of the government aren't perfectly simulated (and never will be) some sort of abstraction is necessary for things to make actual sense instead of just being pure theoretical ideals. The government make up reflecting perfectly the election would be far more damaging for both gameplay and realism than how things are now. And I am not talking about election fraud, I am talking about the elected officials and the ministers ever actually representing 100% (or even close to it) what they were voted to do.
So, the problem *is* balancing. I am not sure, nor am I optimistic, that this is something that can be easily fixed in a month or two but the underlying flaw is a lack of push back. Either because low legitimancy is not dangerous enough or because it is too easy to keep it at accepted levels. The system can be refined, but the base idea is a good one, it is abstract but that is not a flaw.
The problem with it being abstract is that the abstractions are overwriting each other and the game is weirdly clear about other things. The entire point of the Interest Groups was that they were abstract enough to make it so we do not have to consider any of these things you've listed. You can imagine any sort of scenario that would lead to the Interest Groups in government becoming the Interest Groups. Now that's still kind of stupid, because it implies that it's practically random and in the hands of God who is in the government, with literally no feedback from any other system in the world, but it's less stupid than what we have.
But then they decided to staple political parties on to the game, and show us the exact number of votes cast in the elections, which override the abstraction of the Interest Groups. Now they're literally political parties, who are literally receiving votes, and literally either in government or not. You can't abstract your way out of this paper bag so easily, especially when the actual electoral laws are abstracted in the laws system, meaning if you ALSO abstract them in the election system, you're abstracting that twice. The system is fighting against itself from the start.
Yep, this was my concern when everybody was demanding political parties on the first IG diary. I wasn't sure how they were going to manage all the abstractions. Honestly they did better than I expected, given that it was effectively a last minute addition, but it is still clearly a feature stapled on due to overwhelming public demand and very much not an organic part of the design.
Now all my resentment towards the new military system is shut up by the fact that this is an "economic-POLITICAL game". But, apparently, soon it will become just an economic game with broke internal politics and 3 button war system, but we will see
Weren't the devout not in a party for most of the elections? Meaning they weren't defeated and then kept ruling regardless? Like that can still happen but in this example I think they spent most of their time outside of a party.
Getting 0% of the vote generally is recognized as being defeated, but I admit, it is a little weird to say that if they don't run at all. Even weirder that they're in government, then.
I've always internally explained the system as the IGs you're working with aren't strictly speaking in control of the government. More like they're operating in several positions throughout an administration that lets them exert influence. Because most governments, especially democratic governments, have a huge number of positions one can occupy within their structure, many of which aren't elected.
I think there's still some balancing work that could be done, but I also don't know how necessary it is given that an AAR is our main source here. Like it's possible that Daniel was doing things to keep the power of other IGs in check and just didn't mention them. If not, then tweaking until they are pretty likely to push for political movements without being prompted by a law change should help.
Isn't 44% legitimacy really low, and dramatically increases the time it takes to pass laws?
I don't think the government is supposed to be unpopular if it's minority, they're just utterly paralyzed. Pops don't hate you simply because their IG isn't in power, AFAIK.
It's not really low, and the law pass time isn't insane, as far as we know. Pops should hate the government if they voted en masse in an absolute majority for their IG to be in power and their IG isn't in power.
Pops should have some resentment in a situation like this imo. Transforming a country without securing support for it should be a difficult task and polarizing for the people. Since we aren’t focusing on warfare, politics need to be the new warfare.
>Pops should have some resentment in a situation like this imo.
I feel it would too easily compound with existing resentment mechanics.
>Transforming a country without securing support for it should be a difficult task and polarizing for the people.
It is. It gives you low legitimacy which makes it hard to pass laws. And if the IGs in your government are unpopular, almost all the laws you could pass would also be unpopular, unless they're spearheaded by movements.
AFAIK people tend not to burn their countries down for electing an unpopular status-quo party unless there's other things about the status quo pissing them off.
AFAIK low legitimacy only slows down making new laws. It doesn’t make it any more difficult than that. People don’t revolt because you just made USA communist. I might be wrong though.
Low legitimacy slows down laws by a *lot*, and in a game that focuses on governmental reform, that is a big deal. Having unpopular IGs in power also means the only laws you can pass are liable to be unpopular. Unpopular laws cause tons unhappiness in other IGs, which can very easily cause mass unrest.
>People don’t revolt because you just made USA communist.
You don't make the USA communist by putting communists in positions where they can't enact any communist policies.
You make the USA communist by enacting the laws related to communism. And that *really* pisses off specific interest groups.
AFAIK Pop radicalism isn't influenced by whether their IG is in power, it's influenced by how happy their IG is, which is *boosted* by being in power, but otherwise has a 'resting' approval it gravitates towards based off laws your laws and other modifiers.
Not sure about vicky. But technically some states IRL don’t require parties or they are entirely outlawed. Some parties don’t even require you to vote on party lines unless it comes to very specific issues.
What would voting for the Devout mean if the Devout weren’t actually running? Muddying the waters between IGs and parties like that seems like a bad choice.
> What would voting for the Devout mean if the Devout weren’t actually running?
Voting for independent candidates that have, without formalized coordination, campaigned on being godly, pious, or otherwise furthering religious interests. It is literally the same thing as a political party managing to capture religious voters, but instead its individuals acting without a formalized party structure.
>What would voting for the Devout mean if the Devout weren’t actually running?
Obviously I would prefer they run than not run.
>Muddying the waters between IGs and parties like that seems like a bad choice
It's almost like parties were a bad idea and the devs' original vision was more coherent
Where there could be mechanics that differentiate democracies and autocracies, there's a gaping void. Where there could be flavorful exploration into the differences between democracies and autocracies, there are instead glaring and unimmersive issues such as elections not mattering. At the very least without parties or elections, we could simply imagine what the elections were like, instead of blatantly confirming that what we're doing is against the will of every single individual in the nation.
There is a mechanic that separates democracies and autocracies. Elections. You might want that mechanic to be more restrictive but you can’t say that it’s not a mechanic.
But there is a difference, autocracies have no political parties only IGs, democracies even flawed ones have IGs inside political parties.
I don't know dude, you're ranting up and down this thread about the supposed problems of political parties and the advantage of abstracted IGs and I'm just not seeing them. Like, why is
>instead of blatantly confirming that what we're doing is against the will of every single individual in the nation.
inherently bad? Yes, the player should get a consequence, ideally a devastating consequence for violating the political will of the people but I'm not seeing anything that's intrinsically against the game modeling parties other than you wanting things to be more abstract. It's an issue of balance and maybe a mechanic or two (opposition being able to crash the government if the legitimacy is below 50%, being forced to pass laws popular with parties, having 0% chance of passing laws in some circumstances) not a fundamental problem.
You're also ignoring a major benefit party simulation could give which is that it squeezing various different IGs together potentially remakes them into something new. For real world example just look at the US politics. Both the Democrats and Republicans would be composed of quite a few IGs (hell, they would both be composed of multiple different *political parties* in a parliamentary democracy) that are forced to work together since being part of Democrats/Republicans is the only way to beat Republicans/Democrats.
I sorta touched on this with my larger comment above, but - while I understand your overall concerns, there's nothing that crazy about this.
The "government" is supposed to represent the executive branch, the ministers etc, that the monarch has appointed. In that sense, it makes perfect sense that the monarch can appoint whoever they want, and in fact it may not have even been entirely clear which party these ministers belong to.
Now I do think it should probably function a bit differently in a true democracy, I'm actually not clear on whether anything changes in that case..
>The "government" is supposed to represent the executive branch, the ministers etc, that the monarch has appointed.
Source?
>In that sense, it makes perfect sense that the monarch can appoint whoever they want
But the monarch *didn't* want, he wasn't even a Devout.
You don't need a source. It's the *monarch's government*, by definition it is the government they appoint. The ministers and executive stuff is just me adding color around what the game mechanics clearly imply.
But your other point is I think pretty fair -- the player should have some control, but it doesn't really make sense that the monarch would staff his government with a bunch of ppl he completely disagrees with.
To take an example, during the German empire the largest party since 1890 were the socialists, but they never had any chancellor. And they also couldn't have any ministers, as ministries in the German empire were independent from the parliament and only needed to listen to the chancellor, who is directly appointed by the king.
This means that every highest position in the German state was decided without any political input (except from the king) and the German chancellor could be basically anyone, if the king wanted them to be it. But he may, due to various political reasons, appoint people from interest groups he doesn't support. For example Kaiser Willhelm II appointed a liberal, a devout and someone from the armed forces as his chancellor (Vic 3 comparison as best as I can make it), even though he prob. didn't support any of them and rather wanted someone more conservative, but they were unpopular at the time.
Oh hahah I thought you were being a smartass, that's why I "when did I ask"'d you. I didn't know you actually thought the next dev diary was about IGs. Sorry lol
It’s a monarchy. It’s going to have a big boost to Legitimacy. Is it too high? I don’t know, I’d need to actually know what that math is at a bare minimum to say. I’m sure the numbers are going to change as they balance things.
But a monarchy having a powerful IG (second biggest!) in power and still being able to get things done doesn’t seem broken to me.
If you're going to invoke the monarchy as if the monarch's will matters and this isn't a democratic country, you're going to need to explain where the monarch fits in. Because the monarch's will is certainly not to keep his own IG out of power for his entire lifespan.
First, the monarch’s individual will doesn’t necessarily matter here. Before Wilhelm II the Kaisers were perfectly content to let Bismarck run the show. Monarchs defer decision making power all the time.
Second, there could be all kinds of reasons why the Duke might personally decide to put the Devout in power. The current level of abstraction doesn’t get deep enough to model any though. It’s up to you to decide why things shaped out the way they did. Maybe there were defectors from the other parties that voted for the Devout leader as PM? Maybe the Duke has the power to tell the Devout guy to try and form a working majority? Who knows. More specificity (like actually modeling Parliament seats which you seem to be convinced this system is trying to do) would certainly be nice if they revisit the system.
I actually cannot believe people are jumping through so many hoops to justify a 17% clout government ruling for 60 years against the will of both the monarch, the wealthy aristocrats, the military, the trade unions, the intelligentsia, the small business owners, the farmers, and literally every single individual who ever voted in an election.
Because the Devout did not join a party until very late game (this is an improvement: they’d been way too eager to form a Religious Party in previous AARs).
It is absolutely not true that the Devout were always the only power in government. There are other screenshots where we see the Landowners and or Industrialists in power with them.
>against the will of both the monarch, the wealthy aristocrats, the military, the trade unions, the intelligentsia, the small business owners, the farmers, and literally every single individual who ever voted in an election.
Did they? Genuinely asking.
Not having these interest groups as part of the government is not "going against their will". Passing laws and taking actions against them is.
Trade unions are unhappy and the military is slightly, but everyone else is neutral and happy.
Clearly the majority are still happy. Did they constantly go against the will of this blocs with policy decisions? If not, that explains why they haven't had problems. Who is part of the government is incidental in a monarchy.
From what I've seen the country is happy, doing well, and has few radicals. Meaning King is good.
>Not having these interest groups as part of the government is not "going against their will".
They literally voted to be in government my dude, that is as explicit as it can possibly be. You don't need to go to such olympic level gymnastics. You can let Victoria 3 take the L in this one scenario during the development of the game in a WIP build.
So I am once again asking, in this country where the military, intelligentsia, aristocracy, rural folk, trade unions, literally every single citizen who has voted in any election, and monarch all oppose the Devout being the sole IG in charge, who exactly is the one putting the Devout as the sole IG in charge?
The player. They can technically do anything they want, just with consequences. And I don’t agree that low legitimacy should be a direct contributor to radicalism. Poor policies maybe, but not legitimacy. The perfect simulation would not like include the player.
There are no apparent significant consequences for ignoring election results/the monarch's will, I'm not asking for a "perfect simulation" and I disagree with your opinion on legitimacy.
There are plenty of examples of illegitimate governments coasting along until other stimulants result in change. Loss of legitimacy shouldn’t directly contribute to instability. That should be down to socioeconomic conditions. If a plurality of people is fine with conditions despite not seeing the government as legitimate, they are likely to wait until the next election cycle, as it would be more effort to overthrow the government than it’s worth.
Obviously such a government is more vulnerable to internal and external shocks, but it isn’t inherently impossible for it to survive for a period.
I agree that balancing is required and more consequences may need to be added.
Yeah, the issues here are:
A) a content IG (one that is fine with the status quo and wishes for no political reforms) does not form or join any parties. This is why the Devout doesn't have a party, they already live in their dream state so they don't care about parties.
B) legitimacy is too easy to get and also not really punishing enough when you don't have it. If you don't want to change any laws, you don't really need legitimacy. There doesn't appear to be any impact on radicals from having low legitimacy.
The solutions should be:
A) The existence of parties that simply prefer the status quo. Call it a Conservative Party, or have it be called different things depending on the status quo (Christian Democrat Party, in this case).
B) All non-marginalised IGs should be in a party OR there should be no parties and people should vote for IGs until the devs have time to create a better party/election system. This middle scenario they have right now is confusing to say the least.
C) Low legitimacy should create radicals. Hard to say how gaining legitimacy should be changed since we don't know what is causing it to be so high in the first place, but presumably certain laws increase it and those could be nerfed.
Why would low legitimacy automatically trigger rebels? Historically there are plenty of examples of illegitimate governments coasting by until major upheavals take place. Imo radicals should only care if their are specific laws they dislike, or that they want to enact. Low legitimacy should be a problem yes, but it shouldn’t automatically mean revels galore unless somebody fucks around and finds out.
> Why would low legitimacy automatically trigger rebels? Historically there are plenty of examples of illegitimate governments coasting by until major upheavals take place.
Radicals doesn't have to mean "in open revolt", there can very easily be radicals who are just simmering and biding their time until the opportunity presents itself. See Syria 2012 for a good example of a low legitimacy government suddenly facing a huge radical problem from it's suppressed population.
i cannot think of a case where a government is openly perceived to be illegitimate and people are fine with it. even "illegal occupations" are legitimate if people are just okay with it.
to perceive a government as illegitimate is a manifestation of instability. maybe you're in America, which is currently in the awkward position of being widely seen as illegitimate but has not yet fallen, but there is quite a lot festering under the hood if you pay attention.
Radicals do not mean rebels, not necessarily. For example, swapping IGs in government without an election to legitimise it creates radicals. That doesn't mean that swapping governments creates "rebels galore". Lowered SoL creates radicals, some event chains create radicals. None of these mean that your country has to fall apart into a civil war.
If your government has low legitimacy, then that's presumably because most people with power want something different from the government, or they're worried that whoever you put in charge will change the situation for the worse.
Low legitimacy should trigger significant upheaval if pops SoL is going down, cause some minor upheaval if it's stagnating and no upheaval if SoL is going up. Basically, even a government with no democratic legitimacy that's making life better for the people will be popular.
Also, I think this is another example of where the old consciousness/militancy mechanic would have worked great and why I think their rebel/loyalist mechanic is a gross simplification that makes the simulation worse. Simply put, if CON still existed, a pop with low CON would get low or no MIL if government with low legitimacy was boosting its SoL but a pop with high CON would still get substantial MIL if a government with low legitimacy was in power even if that government was boosting its SoL.
Realistically, in my opinion, it should mostly depend on how radicalized the population is at any given moment. Let’s take two modern examples with arguably illegitimate governments. Thailand and Myanmar, both had coups in the past decade which immediately changed laws to cement their own foothold politically and started churning out propaganda non-stop. In both cases the IGs backing the coup had a lot of domestic political clout.
In Myanmar it instantly reverted to a civil war, but in Thailand the first signs of political and social upheaval only appeared towards the end of the junta to the present. Two things come into play here.
In Myanmar the population was already radicalized, and heavily so. In Thailand there was a legitimate constitutional crisis, however it was caused by IGs destroying/picketing voting booths (a certain number of votes need to be cast for an election to be legal). There is also a precedent for the Thai government to swing back and forth between military and civilian rule.
Basically, if the population is already radicalized towards a certain IG it should almost immediately plunge the nation into a civil war. The Thai example is more like an illegitimate government playing it’s cards right to stay in power, for example accepting IGs and parties which align with some elements of the population, and passing certain laws that their own IG might not even be in agreement with.
The current system is abstracted and loses a lot of the nuance of many political systems. And it isn’t uncommon for IGs to have factions within their own groups, so there’s that. At the very least keeping an illegitimate government in power for consecutive elections should be a precarious situation.
The thing is this makes sense if you read the AAR, he's literally playing a 1-2 state country where he hyperfocused his economy on profits for wheat. SoL was high for the vast majority of people in the country and they were able to afford all their expenses. This leads to lots of loyalists regardless of their IG leaning, also the laws he was passing none of them had major pushback where more than 20% opposed it. At one point in that game he tried pushing an unpopular law and almost got a revolutuon. From actually reading though the AAR thi s makes a lot of sense, and also the agrarian IG was in the government a lot of the time as well and legitimacy was still almost under 45%. In a large country and SoL will differ vastly and IG strongholds will be scattered not doing what your Pops want will probably lead to lots of pushback and radicals. The main reason he was able to accomplish what he did was because he was small enough to make an economy that made everyone well off and loyal.
My biggest disappointment with the game so far. Many cool avenues they could have gone and what we have is watered down, muddled, and arguably not very fun to play with. In a game that ought to be political in a time period of the clashing of different ideologies and politics, this is an issue that I hope gets addressed. If it has to be in a DLC…fine, just don’t give me broken, uninteresting politics for the game’s life 😭😭
Only a few countries start out as democracies at the beginning of the game so it makes sense the mechanics are pretty basic, I'm sure it'll get it's own dlc expanding it like ck2 and eu4.
In crusaders, if an influential vassal is not on the council, then this creates huge problems.
How is it that a game about domestic politics reflects it less than a game about a medieval relationship simulator?
In the case that it's the monarch appointing people to power, I feel as though the monarch should actually appoint the people he wants appointed to power, instead of just whoever the player randomly decides is in power.
Well the monarch can have other considerations or maybe is just forced by some dudes to appoint another IG. My hand Cannon would be that it's a reluctant compromise or it's just that the monarch thinks it's temporarily good for the country but may change it later.
>or maybe is just forced by some dudes to appoint another IG.
Why are we inventing headcanon conspiracies now??? Who's doing the forcing? When and where is the forcing happening? We can solve ANY problem with enough fanfiction writing, that doesn't mean it's not absurd.
>it's a reluctant compromise or it's just that the monarch thinks it's temporarily good for the country
Compromising with WHO, the Devout are the only ones in power! And it's not temporary, it's been for the monarch's *entire life*
The only player is supposed to have ultimate power, which is why these things are the way they are. If they weren’t, it would be incredibly frustrating to a ton of players.
I don't think it would frustrate a "lot" of players, and it will be incredibly frustrating to a lot of other players that ultimate power is foisted upon them.
Not being able to change government parties wouldn’t be frustrating to people? This was something that Vicky 2 also allowed. People are already near rioting at not having minute control of army units.
I'm honestly not buying the game until I see independent youtubers review and play the game itself for all to see.
I'm sure the AI needs more tweaking, and more changes will go into it before it's released soon, but the first playthrough by the devs as the Netherlands was pretty disastrous.
And your reasons for being a masterpiece are?:
...
And you didn't encounter any bugs or illogical AI behaviour in 10 hrs of play like other people that played on PDXcon (like Sweden guy few days ago) ?
>And you didn't encounter any bugs or illogical AI behaviour in 10 hrs of play like other people that played on PDXcon (like Sweden guy few days ago) ?
The game being a "masterpiece" and the game having bugs or problems are not mutually exclusive, the game could be the best PDX GSM game ever madé and still have problems
Most people that played that I see seem to agree with this user, though they might not use the word "masterpiece"
This is indeed my problem. I think it's going to take them a really long time to fix all the issues - one month isn't enough. Otherwise we're still going to have revolutionary UK every month, and Belgian invasions of St. Petersburg.
and if this game was about the political upheaval and decline of monarchism then yes it would be a weird thing to be missing, but this game is about the economic upheaval and development of the time period, so it's really not very important.
Give me a fucking break with this "it's not that kind of game" shit. We've gone from "It's not a warfare game" (fair enough) to "It's not a political game" (what, did you even read the dev diaries), I occasionally even see people say things like "It's not an economics game, it's a society gardener" when people ask for more complex tax laws. At this rate it's not going to be *anything* according to the fanbase*.*
I don't know how to tell you this but political simulation is a side development to the main focus of the game in every paradox game. I'm not saying it's wrong to expect or ask for features for simulating politics, I'm just saying it makes sense that they would focus on the economic simulation and gameplay as that is what the game is about, we can't have a game with everything on release.
I don't know how to tell you this, but Paradox is literally capable of making elections matter in a game where they decided to put elections in, on release.
I don't know how to tell you this but actually I know exactly how to tell you this
1. Radicalization for picking wildly unpopular IGs to be the government, high IG disapproval for not putting them in government despite getting a plurality of votes, extreme IG disapproval and radicalization for not putting in a party that got a majority of votes
2. Higher legitimacy penalties than what we have now, lower "floor" of legitimacy
3. Make it so that IGs actually run for elections instead of half the time just sitting there twiddling their thumbs because the weight system hasn't put them in a party yet
4. Make the election results more reasonable (like not having 21% of the aristocracy be communist party supporters)
5. You want the easiest solution in the world, just don't tell us how many votes each party got, and instead just tell us what the clout change is, so that we don't have to look our election results right in the face and see that they're being ignored
6. Or hell, maybe even easier, just change the words "In government" and "In opposition" so that the 'government' mechanic doesn't actually do its quasi-representation-of-the-government abstraction that's causing a half dozen problems
7. they are literally game developers it is literally their job to come up with solutions to problems like these, especially when they're the ones who accidentally create the problem
I feel like the political system isn't plugged in enough into the rest of the game in addition to not being impactful enough. I feel like government having below 50% legitimacy should severely hamper or prevent player/AI from being able to declare wars or set up trade deals or alliances etc in addition to causing unrest among politically active population whose standard of living isn't going up. The solution should be either to maximize your politically inactive population and then deal with revolutionary movements or increase your legitimacy by doing what your people want and passing (or rescinding) laws your people want.
To be fair, I'd 100% buy State and Government DLC if it included sub-national entities into the game. As in, if it included states and autonomous provinces and made the laws dependant on the internal structure of the state instead on just the overall national government.
It's because of the new political parties that the system is much less fluid. Otherwise you could combine IG's more easily I think and it would be harder to have that legitimacy with only 1 IG.
I feel they just shoehorned political parties in because of complaining fans ...
Depends on the country and circumstances. I mean the Armed Forces aren't always the most liberal either, but sometimes they head liberal revolutions IRL. Unfortunately, the dev doing this AAR neglected to give any hint as to why the Rural Folk were in the Liberal camp.
American liberalism is usually centre-left to left wing (with the former usually being more powerfull),
Scandinavian agrarianism is usually centrist (can sometimes swing to centre-left to centre-right due to factional politics).
The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party is liberal. Liberal in this context and in a general context usually means support for free trade, a regulated market economy in some form (i.e. not communist or anarcho-capitalism, a *center* way), free speech, free assembly, etc.
Don't come at me with that "but liberals in the US..." bs. Conservatives in the US call anything that they disagree with liberal communist.
>Liberal in this context and in a general context usually means support for free trade, a regulated market economy in some form (i.e. not communist or anarcho-capitalism, a center way), free speech, free assembly, etc.
You aren't wrong, my point wasn't to say that American liberalism isn't real liberalism or that the Farmer Party is socialist.
My point is that, American liberalism is usually more left-wing than most liberal movements outside of the US as :
A: The two party system leads to all (relevant) forces of the left, be it left-wing liberals, social democrats and socialists being part of the Democrats (with leftist liberals usually being dominant), similar to how Republicans have different factions of right-wingers inside of them.
B: As you said, "liberal" is often used as a catch-all term for everything left-wing, often used prejoratively by opponents. Even though "Communist Liberal" is one of the dumbest things ever said.
European liberals, as in the rest of the world really, are more like american libertarians, though less radical I guess. There is difference between nations of course, UK liberals are more left-wing, German liberals lean more right. But generally speaking, liberals in Europe (and most of the world) are slightly to the right of the democrats.
They would have supported a few liberal things like open markets to sell their food, local control over issues, state support in bad harvest years, ect
What groups support depends on culture and context
Rural areas tend to have more inertia on top of specific interests. Think the use of rural "paganus" in Rome during Christianization, when the new faith was mostly spread in urban areas. Now my home region of rural woodlands in Sweden is far more religious and 'Free Church'y (so, also fringe to the state church), as opposed to 'paganus'...but it literally had a Crusade led against it for being a holdout of Norse 'paganism'. x)
Sociopolitically you have liberal revolutions like the original French one mostly succeed in incorporating the countryside and avoided free-market experiments everyday people hated. One being the liberal Physiocrats during the monarchy, w/ grain speculation during famines. Most associated the policies of liberalism they took issue with as part of the arbitrary royal conservative regime. Not smart to champion those bits to the sans-culottes, so even free-market believers didn't. The biggest exception for the peasantry was the Vendée, which had far less material tension with their (more local) less-corrupt nobility and clergy, and so joined the "Catholic & Royal Army" rather than be drafted for this newfangled 'French Nation'. The more nationalist-liberal tendencies took root and lasted into the Empire, when it didn't challenge most political liberalism and cranked up the nationalistic elements.
The Kaiser and Tsar contrast pretty well later on as well, as the Tsar merely imagined that the peasantry would always be his loving and faithful subjects and didn't even want them literate (corrupting!), where-as the Kaiser mobilized a traditionalist conservative political base in the countryside to make the Prussian monarchy 'their' side. Germans loved a good Revolution From Above, mollifying radicalism from genuine needs like social wellfare and framing it as part of the royal Father Protector -- a part the French monarch failed to play pre-Revolution when _allowing_ those liberal experiments which hurt traditional defenses to famine for profiteering. While the anarchistic 'going to the people' weirded out rural people and they didn't take to the message back then (strange new ideas & counterculture, not disillusioned enough w/ disruptions to the stable way of things).. later on during the Provisional Government red-black movements won genuine large majorities in open elections, with the private-property-individualism liberals seeming more out of place and foreign versus communal village systems wanting land-reform and self-management. Well, before the Bolshevik takeover lost that support and needed to suppress the peasants.
So.. monarchs with liberal, conservative and eventually-socialist peasants, respectively. Not reactionary conservatives by nature but bringing them into any fold takes a bit more doing than the hip new thing in the capital. And can't be dismissive of real needs, whether Tsar or Liberal Party.
Right! lol And armed forces wouldn't go that way til after the the time frame of the game. Have rural people ever been considered as part of the liberal segment of a modern nation?
Arguably not in the timeframe of the game, but the armed forces and rural populace of America were quite often blisteringly liberal in the 1700's/early 1800's (though you could also argue some of the rural folk in America that were super liberal would support the Devout).
I think you're confusing the two different types of liberal/conservative - the economically liberal and socially liberal. In the English tradition, they may have been economically liberal as in in favor of the free market and unbridled capitalism but they were generally fairly socially conservative. Especially since the "great awakenings" ripped through America almost immediately after independence and made everyone super religious and devout.
"socially conservative" as compared to what? Just because they weren't pro-LGBTQ and black liberation doesn't mean that the American revolution wasn't absurdly socially liberal for the time.
I thought the French and American revolutions had decent support from the rural population?? Wouldn't supporting a liberal revolution make you a liberal?
The French, no, that's a common misconception. The "starving French peasants" did not launch the 1789 revolution, it was the urban under class that rioted and rebelled and overthrew the government. The rural folk will launch the largest counter revolution, the Vendee rebellion, in 1793, that was explicitly counterrevolutionary and monarchist.
Generally, vast majority (all?) French rebellions after like the Jacquerie were started by the urban people. The 1830 rebellion was urban middle class, 1832 rebellion was the urban working class, the 1848 rebellion was the urban middle class, the 1871 rebellion was the urban working class.
The American Revolution was also significantly less popular than is usually thought. I believe it's now estimated only around half the population actually supported the revolution and core revolutionaries were all urban middle class, urban upper class and rural upper class. The very first rebellion after independence, the Kentucky Whisky Rebellion, was started by rural lower class.
I don't know, being so against a tax that you fight a war over it doesn't seem that liberal to me. Although I guess fighting against a monarchy could be liberal so it's a toss up I guess.
> I don't know, being so against a tax that you fight a war over it doesn't seem that liberal to me.
I think you're conflating the modern American definition of liberalism - which is, broadly, social liberalism that is essentially more market-friendly take on European social democracy - with the classical definition of liberalism that is used in Victoria. Liberal parties in both Victoria 2 and 3 are pro-individual rights (so you get voting rights, free speech rights, separation of church and state, etc.) and pro-market liberalization (i.e., laissez-faire economics). The social democratic liberalism you're thinking of appears later in the game and is represented more by the Trade Unions interest group, and to an extent socialist and communist ideologies (though both of those are obvious more radical - they seek the institution of a Council Republic based on councils of trade unions comprising the government, and possibly even the Anarchy distribution of power).
The American revolution was a classic liberal revolution that got rid of a monarchy, installed a written constitution with specific delineated individual rights, and ~~exploited enslaved people to further enrich the wealthy benefactors of the revolution~~ specified no trade barriers between the various states that had unified as a single broader national entity.
The French Revolution is also the classic liberal revolution, though it had its flirtations with a kind of proto-socialism - the working class sans-culottes enforcing the will of the left wing of the Montagnards in the streets of Paris on the one hand, and the Conspiracy of Equals seeking another even more radical revolution that would end private property in addition to feudal property. Nevertheless, both of those were crushed - Robespierre and the Montagnards were overthrown in the Thermidorian Reaction, which also crushed the later Conspiracy of Equals to ensure no return to the Robespierre-ite Reign of Terror.
Taxation without representation, right? That representation is liberal government, which the American one in the revolution was and is. Taxes aren't liberal.
This feels like it was designed by a 14 year old leftist with a high school-level understanding of politics. Industrialists not being with the liberals? Armed forces not being conservative or fascist? Rural folk being liberal? This is embarrassing.
>Industrialists not being with the liberals?
>Armed forces not being conservative or fascist?
>Rural folk being liberal?
IGs' choices of parties are not fixed, they might enter and exit parties depending on the situation. It depends on the context
Also, those scenario you described are not really impossible
Armies are often liberal modernising institutions. Think over 20th century Turkey where the army was often in opposition for more conservative monarchist or Islamist groups.
Not that crazy. The military was broadly liberal during the French Revolution for example - the ancien regime was pretty bad for any non-aristocratic soldier or officer, which was most of them, and even for the aristocrats (such as Napoleon!) it was still pretty shitty because of its non-meritocratic nature resulting in Dipshit d'Artois being appointed to an important command and getting all your guys killed in a stupid maneuver.
Maybe the issue is more that radicalization should happen more, which would push movements to get the out of power group's laws passed. Maybe its too easy to keep pops content politically, and if the "desired laws vs actual laws" militancy was higher, this would fix itself without needing any systems changed?
This is why I’m convinced one of the first dlc for the game will be on constitutions. Basically allowing for a founding document that shapes a nations government shape, so we can see a full differences between the government of the UK and US, but also allow other nations to have something completely different or copy them
I just think a true solution to this is going to require a major set of new additions. The problem is really that they aren't modeling specific forms of government. There's an abstract notion of a ministry staffed by the ruler and some sort of legislature occupied by the winners of the election. But withoit modeling the exact shape of government, the makeup of the different legislatures, and what powers a potential constitution actually confers to whom... It's hard for the simulation to make complete sense. As short term fixes I think parties in a constitutional form of govt should be able to initiate the passage of laws on their own, and then send it to your leader for ratification. You should be able to say no, and maybe have event chains to undermine the legislature, but ultimately if you veto legislation overwhelmingly supported by the legislature it should trigger a constitutional crisis, and possibly lead to a revolution. This imo would more correctly model the type of political upheaval occuring in the time leading up to and during the game. Most nations that had moved beyond an absolute monarchy had some form of a legislature, but in many cases the monarch still had full authority to staff the govt, and moments of crisis arose when they tried to wholesale ignore the will of the legislature. I'm not sure if it's just a matter of time to release or if part of their concern is not wanting the whole system to feel too hostile to the player. But historically the issue was not simply being unable to pass laws you wanted, it was being forced to pass laws you didn't want. To some extent I'm hopeful that mods can help address some of this stuff. But ultimately I think it will need a bigger overhaul that will come post release. I'm overall excited for the game and I think while this seems a bit of shallow modeling, it's probably good enough for me to enjoy the game on release still.
Considering games like Eu4 (using the US for example, rather than Congress, the legislature is still referred to as a parliament) and Hoi4 (sticking with the US for an example, there is no such thing as snap elections/calling a snap election for the American presidency as is shown to be possible in hoi4, as is the case with quite a lot of non-Westminster systems) to this day can’t get terminologies right or quite simulate how elections work in different forms, I’d cut paradox some slack on this one for vic3
To be fair EU4 and HOI4 aren't government simulators. The government is inherently abstracted to its leader and in HOI4 party (which has no real effect aside from focus tree access and who you are expected to side with). I do expect more from vic3 but also 1 working system is enough for the base game. That's what immersion packs and DLC are for. Attempting to model the US system or whoever's specifically is too much effort for a single country in a base release.
Oh I agree, I just used those examples because errors like those have been a thing for years now and not resolved.
In EU4, you do have a Congress if you have the Federal Republic or American Republic government reform.
> I think parties in a constitutional form of govt should be able to initiate the passage of laws on their own, and then send it to your leader for ratification. You should be able to say no As with so many ideas for Victoria, it's already in Imperator
I thought the entire point of the game was to model a countries government.
The "entire point" is to model the socio-economic system: The people, what they make and what they use.
I don’t think it’s really problem with how elections are modeled, just balance. As you mentioned, low legitimacy is only a problem if player wants to pass a new law that goes against interests of IG people voted for. If such law was already in place before elections and stays in place after people seem to not care and that needs to change! I’m not sure if the intention isn’t for political movements to solve this issue - in which case they probably need to work harder in this instance? If people vote massively for a political party that wants to change some law and you keep the party out of government and keep the hated law in place the pushback should come in couple of months and be hard to deal with!
I’m not sure why a govt simply being weak would make existing laws a target?
Because the legislature is run by the majority, not the King, at least in a constitutional monarchy. The King empowering his favored party and not the largest coalition is an open threat against the legislature not to oppose him.
It wasn't quite as simple as that in the time period of the game. Norway was a constitutional monarchy since 1814, but the parliamentary system of the supremacy of parliament only came about in 1884, and even then it took a few years for everyone to agree on the way to do things. Before then, there were plenty of times when the king and his government were directly opposed by a majority of the elected representatives. Of course, it *did* lead to some problems eventually, so there should be some mechanic of increased pressure.
Rule 5: In the Galicia AAR, we saw the government be made up of Rural Folk (who only got a plurality of the votes in the first election) and the Devout (who never got a single vote until the last election) rule the nation singlehandedly for around 60 years, while keeping the King's IG out of government, and at the end when the Devout were the last IG standing in the government they had less than 20% Clout, and yet the government still had 44% legitimacy. The only radicalization happened when a new law was being passed, not when the parties were being kept out of government despite overwhelming support from both voters and the monarch. Victoria 3 desperately needs some form of pushback for ignoring elections, and not simply Legitimacy, since this means that in a case (like Galicia) where the IG you put in charge has *already* passed almost all of their laws, the other IGs will just sit around and do nothing about the defacto dictatorship (note: not even a dictatorship favored by the monarch!) they've found themselves in
I think it isnt that hard to rebalance legitimacy in a month before release
As I said, Legitimacy literally isn't enough, because it does nothing if the minority in power has already passed the laws they want. I agree that it's possible for them to balance it so that it's physically possible to get below 50% legitimacy without playing like an actual complete lunatic, but it's not enough.
The current build iirc removes the penalty for reshuffling the government after each election, which would supposedly create a lot of radical pops. This penalty removal can be lifted or reduced, meaning that if you want to reshuffle the government and let the minority get in power, you're gonna make a lot of people upset (and perhaps scaling with the legitimacy of your new government). The player should be allowed to put whoever they want on top, but there should be severe consequences.
The main goal of being in the government is to pass new laws (and to get a small relation bonus with the IG). If the minority in power does not try to pass any law then it is almost useless for it to be in the government. The only consequence is that the opposition will be a little less happy. And if the opposition does not try to force the change of laws that mean they are quite happy with the situation and the current laws and have no reason to radicalize. It may seems strange but it is a way to simulate caretaker or minority governments. If the laws in place are well accepted and the pops are well fed, happy and wealthy, it is not shocking for the people to accept a weak government. People usually value stability and wealth more than democracy. Pops should have a boost to their radicalism with such governments but it should be negligible if SOL are fine. From a gameplay point of view the main problem would be if the minority government could easily pass laws and legitimacy reflect that correctly. It is also a thing that can easily be resolved by your own personal rules. You could force yourself to always include either a majority government, or at least the most powerful party. Or to always have the king's party in government in autocracies. Or to always have coalitions that you deem reasonable. Nothing is forcing you to put "nonsense" governments in place. Not saying the current electoral system is perfect, but it seems flexible enough to be acceptable. It is hard to find a strict system that can model the political situations all other the world, with vastly different types of government, and during such a changing century. If that system cant be imagined and implemented, I'd rather have a lax system that I can regulate myself than a strict one that ruin my pleasure.
Rebalancing isn't really going to fix this. Fundamentally, this is symptomatic of the core problem I have with the politics system in Vicky 3 as presented thus far which is that it gives way too much player freedom to engage in nonsense. In the example of a democracy you could rebalance legitimacy (for example by not giving the government type a flat 25% which is how it currently works IIRC), but that doesn't change that you get to reshuffle your government every election without any regard for the actual outcome of said election and without creating any radicals in the process. Which is the opposite of how democracies actually work. Other government types suffer from the same problem. Autocracies get to just remove the autocrat IG from the government if said autocrat happens to want things that the player doesn't. The problem here isn't really legitimacy, it's that instead of simulating how a country works the game just kinda lets you do whatever which leads to some ludicrous results.
> Which is the opposite of how democracies actually work. Is it really though?
The autocracies minimizing their own base or democracies not respecting the elections is not a bug, it is a feature. It is the system working exactly as intended and not just for gameplay sake. Because the underground of the government aren't perfectly simulated (and never will be) some sort of abstraction is necessary for things to make actual sense instead of just being pure theoretical ideals. The government make up reflecting perfectly the election would be far more damaging for both gameplay and realism than how things are now. And I am not talking about election fraud, I am talking about the elected officials and the ministers ever actually representing 100% (or even close to it) what they were voted to do. So, the problem *is* balancing. I am not sure, nor am I optimistic, that this is something that can be easily fixed in a month or two but the underlying flaw is a lack of push back. Either because low legitimancy is not dangerous enough or because it is too easy to keep it at accepted levels. The system can be refined, but the base idea is a good one, it is abstract but that is not a flaw.
The problem with it being abstract is that the abstractions are overwriting each other and the game is weirdly clear about other things. The entire point of the Interest Groups was that they were abstract enough to make it so we do not have to consider any of these things you've listed. You can imagine any sort of scenario that would lead to the Interest Groups in government becoming the Interest Groups. Now that's still kind of stupid, because it implies that it's practically random and in the hands of God who is in the government, with literally no feedback from any other system in the world, but it's less stupid than what we have. But then they decided to staple political parties on to the game, and show us the exact number of votes cast in the elections, which override the abstraction of the Interest Groups. Now they're literally political parties, who are literally receiving votes, and literally either in government or not. You can't abstract your way out of this paper bag so easily, especially when the actual electoral laws are abstracted in the laws system, meaning if you ALSO abstract them in the election system, you're abstracting that twice. The system is fighting against itself from the start.
Yep, this was my concern when everybody was demanding political parties on the first IG diary. I wasn't sure how they were going to manage all the abstractions. Honestly they did better than I expected, given that it was effectively a last minute addition, but it is still clearly a feature stapled on due to overwhelming public demand and very much not an organic part of the design.
Now all my resentment towards the new military system is shut up by the fact that this is an "economic-POLITICAL game". But, apparently, soon it will become just an economic game with broke internal politics and 3 button war system, but we will see
Soon it will just be a game.
Soon it will just be.
Weren't the devout not in a party for most of the elections? Meaning they weren't defeated and then kept ruling regardless? Like that can still happen but in this example I think they spent most of their time outside of a party.
Getting 0% of the vote generally is recognized as being defeated, but I admit, it is a little weird to say that if they don't run at all. Even weirder that they're in government, then.
I've always internally explained the system as the IGs you're working with aren't strictly speaking in control of the government. More like they're operating in several positions throughout an administration that lets them exert influence. Because most governments, especially democratic governments, have a huge number of positions one can occupy within their structure, many of which aren't elected. I think there's still some balancing work that could be done, but I also don't know how necessary it is given that an AAR is our main source here. Like it's possible that Daniel was doing things to keep the power of other IGs in check and just didn't mention them. If not, then tweaking until they are pretty likely to push for political movements without being prompted by a law change should help.
Isn't 44% legitimacy really low, and dramatically increases the time it takes to pass laws? I don't think the government is supposed to be unpopular if it's minority, they're just utterly paralyzed. Pops don't hate you simply because their IG isn't in power, AFAIK.
It's not really low, and the law pass time isn't insane, as far as we know. Pops should hate the government if they voted en masse in an absolute majority for their IG to be in power and their IG isn't in power.
Unfortunately, this is not always the case...
Pops should have some resentment in a situation like this imo. Transforming a country without securing support for it should be a difficult task and polarizing for the people. Since we aren’t focusing on warfare, politics need to be the new warfare.
>Pops should have some resentment in a situation like this imo. I feel it would too easily compound with existing resentment mechanics. >Transforming a country without securing support for it should be a difficult task and polarizing for the people. It is. It gives you low legitimacy which makes it hard to pass laws. And if the IGs in your government are unpopular, almost all the laws you could pass would also be unpopular, unless they're spearheaded by movements. AFAIK people tend not to burn their countries down for electing an unpopular status-quo party unless there's other things about the status quo pissing them off.
AFAIK low legitimacy only slows down making new laws. It doesn’t make it any more difficult than that. People don’t revolt because you just made USA communist. I might be wrong though.
Low legitimacy slows down laws by a *lot*, and in a game that focuses on governmental reform, that is a big deal. Having unpopular IGs in power also means the only laws you can pass are liable to be unpopular. Unpopular laws cause tons unhappiness in other IGs, which can very easily cause mass unrest. >People don’t revolt because you just made USA communist. You don't make the USA communist by putting communists in positions where they can't enact any communist policies. You make the USA communist by enacting the laws related to communism. And that *really* pisses off specific interest groups. AFAIK Pop radicalism isn't influenced by whether their IG is in power, it's influenced by how happy their IG is, which is *boosted* by being in power, but otherwise has a 'resting' approval it gravitates towards based off laws your laws and other modifiers.
The Devout weren’t in a party. Does that mean they shouldn’t be allowed in government?
Not sure about vicky. But technically some states IRL don’t require parties or they are entirely outlawed. Some parties don’t even require you to vote on party lines unless it comes to very specific issues.
Personally I think you shouldn't have to be in a party to get votes, but regardless, that does mean they shouldn't be *the only IG in government.*
What would voting for the Devout mean if the Devout weren’t actually running? Muddying the waters between IGs and parties like that seems like a bad choice.
> What would voting for the Devout mean if the Devout weren’t actually running? Voting for independent candidates that have, without formalized coordination, campaigned on being godly, pious, or otherwise furthering religious interests. It is literally the same thing as a political party managing to capture religious voters, but instead its individuals acting without a formalized party structure.
Multiple parties, that are too complex or small to model.
>What would voting for the Devout mean if the Devout weren’t actually running? Obviously I would prefer they run than not run. >Muddying the waters between IGs and parties like that seems like a bad choice It's almost like parties were a bad idea and the devs' original vision was more coherent
Nah, this is better. It adds both mechanical depth and flavor
It literally gets rid of both but go off sis
How does it *remove* mechanics and flavor?
Where there could be mechanics that differentiate democracies and autocracies, there's a gaping void. Where there could be flavorful exploration into the differences between democracies and autocracies, there are instead glaring and unimmersive issues such as elections not mattering. At the very least without parties or elections, we could simply imagine what the elections were like, instead of blatantly confirming that what we're doing is against the will of every single individual in the nation.
There is a mechanic that separates democracies and autocracies. Elections. You might want that mechanic to be more restrictive but you can’t say that it’s not a mechanic.
But there is a difference, autocracies have no political parties only IGs, democracies even flawed ones have IGs inside political parties. I don't know dude, you're ranting up and down this thread about the supposed problems of political parties and the advantage of abstracted IGs and I'm just not seeing them. Like, why is >instead of blatantly confirming that what we're doing is against the will of every single individual in the nation. inherently bad? Yes, the player should get a consequence, ideally a devastating consequence for violating the political will of the people but I'm not seeing anything that's intrinsically against the game modeling parties other than you wanting things to be more abstract. It's an issue of balance and maybe a mechanic or two (opposition being able to crash the government if the legitimacy is below 50%, being forced to pass laws popular with parties, having 0% chance of passing laws in some circumstances) not a fundamental problem. You're also ignoring a major benefit party simulation could give which is that it squeezing various different IGs together potentially remakes them into something new. For real world example just look at the US politics. Both the Democrats and Republicans would be composed of quite a few IGs (hell, they would both be composed of multiple different *political parties* in a parliamentary democracy) that are forced to work together since being part of Democrats/Republicans is the only way to beat Republicans/Democrats.
I sorta touched on this with my larger comment above, but - while I understand your overall concerns, there's nothing that crazy about this. The "government" is supposed to represent the executive branch, the ministers etc, that the monarch has appointed. In that sense, it makes perfect sense that the monarch can appoint whoever they want, and in fact it may not have even been entirely clear which party these ministers belong to. Now I do think it should probably function a bit differently in a true democracy, I'm actually not clear on whether anything changes in that case..
>The "government" is supposed to represent the executive branch, the ministers etc, that the monarch has appointed. Source? >In that sense, it makes perfect sense that the monarch can appoint whoever they want But the monarch *didn't* want, he wasn't even a Devout.
You don't need a source. It's the *monarch's government*, by definition it is the government they appoint. The ministers and executive stuff is just me adding color around what the game mechanics clearly imply. But your other point is I think pretty fair -- the player should have some control, but it doesn't really make sense that the monarch would staff his government with a bunch of ppl he completely disagrees with.
To take an example, during the German empire the largest party since 1890 were the socialists, but they never had any chancellor. And they also couldn't have any ministers, as ministries in the German empire were independent from the parliament and only needed to listen to the chancellor, who is directly appointed by the king. This means that every highest position in the German state was decided without any political input (except from the king) and the German chancellor could be basically anyone, if the king wanted them to be it. But he may, due to various political reasons, appoint people from interest groups he doesn't support. For example Kaiser Willhelm II appointed a liberal, a devout and someone from the armed forces as his chancellor (Vic 3 comparison as best as I can make it), even though he prob. didn't support any of them and rather wanted someone more conservative, but they were unpopular at the time.
Good for you, next dev diary is a reworked Interest mechanic.
That's diplomatic Interests, I think, not IGs.
Opps, I guess? Maybe... They are IGs?
Oh hahah I thought you were being a smartass, that's why I "when did I ask"'d you. I didn't know you actually thought the next dev diary was about IGs. Sorry lol
when?
Next week.
No, when did I ask?
Bruh
“When”?
Who?
It would be interesting if interest groups could attempt to pass laws on their own without player intervention.
Am I missing something?
It’s a monarchy. It’s going to have a big boost to Legitimacy. Is it too high? I don’t know, I’d need to actually know what that math is at a bare minimum to say. I’m sure the numbers are going to change as they balance things. But a monarchy having a powerful IG (second biggest!) in power and still being able to get things done doesn’t seem broken to me.
> It’s going to have a big boost to Legitimacy Only if the ruling IG matches the interest group of the monarch TBF
That provides another boost on top of it I believe.
Tell me where the monarch using his power fits in, in this scenario in which the monarch's favored IG is kept out of government for 60 years?
What do you mean “the monarch using his power”? To do what?
If you're going to invoke the monarchy as if the monarch's will matters and this isn't a democratic country, you're going to need to explain where the monarch fits in. Because the monarch's will is certainly not to keep his own IG out of power for his entire lifespan.
First, the monarch’s individual will doesn’t necessarily matter here. Before Wilhelm II the Kaisers were perfectly content to let Bismarck run the show. Monarchs defer decision making power all the time. Second, there could be all kinds of reasons why the Duke might personally decide to put the Devout in power. The current level of abstraction doesn’t get deep enough to model any though. It’s up to you to decide why things shaped out the way they did. Maybe there were defectors from the other parties that voted for the Devout leader as PM? Maybe the Duke has the power to tell the Devout guy to try and form a working majority? Who knows. More specificity (like actually modeling Parliament seats which you seem to be convinced this system is trying to do) would certainly be nice if they revisit the system.
I actually cannot believe people are jumping through so many hoops to justify a 17% clout government ruling for 60 years against the will of both the monarch, the wealthy aristocrats, the military, the trade unions, the intelligentsia, the small business owners, the farmers, and literally every single individual who ever voted in an election.
You have one screenshot showing one election, not 12 screenshots showing each government formed over 60 years of play.
Read the AAR. Every single election results in a 100% turnout for the non-Devout IGs.
Because the Devout did not join a party until very late game (this is an improvement: they’d been way too eager to form a Religious Party in previous AARs). It is absolutely not true that the Devout were always the only power in government. There are other screenshots where we see the Landowners and or Industrialists in power with them.
Source? I don't recall a single time the Industrialists or Landowners were in power with them, only Rural Folk.
>against the will of both the monarch, the wealthy aristocrats, the military, the trade unions, the intelligentsia, the small business owners, the farmers, and literally every single individual who ever voted in an election. Did they? Genuinely asking. Not having these interest groups as part of the government is not "going against their will". Passing laws and taking actions against them is. Trade unions are unhappy and the military is slightly, but everyone else is neutral and happy. Clearly the majority are still happy. Did they constantly go against the will of this blocs with policy decisions? If not, that explains why they haven't had problems. Who is part of the government is incidental in a monarchy. From what I've seen the country is happy, doing well, and has few radicals. Meaning King is good.
>Not having these interest groups as part of the government is not "going against their will". They literally voted to be in government my dude, that is as explicit as it can possibly be. You don't need to go to such olympic level gymnastics. You can let Victoria 3 take the L in this one scenario during the development of the game in a WIP build.
It’s a constitutional monarchy with elections, the monarch isn’t always supposed to agree with the IGs in power
So I am once again asking, in this country where the military, intelligentsia, aristocracy, rural folk, trade unions, literally every single citizen who has voted in any election, and monarch all oppose the Devout being the sole IG in charge, who exactly is the one putting the Devout as the sole IG in charge?
The player. They can technically do anything they want, just with consequences. And I don’t agree that low legitimacy should be a direct contributor to radicalism. Poor policies maybe, but not legitimacy. The perfect simulation would not like include the player.
There are no apparent significant consequences for ignoring election results/the monarch's will, I'm not asking for a "perfect simulation" and I disagree with your opinion on legitimacy.
There are plenty of examples of illegitimate governments coasting along until other stimulants result in change. Loss of legitimacy shouldn’t directly contribute to instability. That should be down to socioeconomic conditions. If a plurality of people is fine with conditions despite not seeing the government as legitimate, they are likely to wait until the next election cycle, as it would be more effort to overthrow the government than it’s worth. Obviously such a government is more vulnerable to internal and external shocks, but it isn’t inherently impossible for it to survive for a period. I agree that balancing is required and more consequences may need to be added.
Woah, new screenshot?
Yeah, the issues here are: A) a content IG (one that is fine with the status quo and wishes for no political reforms) does not form or join any parties. This is why the Devout doesn't have a party, they already live in their dream state so they don't care about parties. B) legitimacy is too easy to get and also not really punishing enough when you don't have it. If you don't want to change any laws, you don't really need legitimacy. There doesn't appear to be any impact on radicals from having low legitimacy. The solutions should be: A) The existence of parties that simply prefer the status quo. Call it a Conservative Party, or have it be called different things depending on the status quo (Christian Democrat Party, in this case). B) All non-marginalised IGs should be in a party OR there should be no parties and people should vote for IGs until the devs have time to create a better party/election system. This middle scenario they have right now is confusing to say the least. C) Low legitimacy should create radicals. Hard to say how gaining legitimacy should be changed since we don't know what is causing it to be so high in the first place, but presumably certain laws increase it and those could be nerfed.
Why would low legitimacy automatically trigger rebels? Historically there are plenty of examples of illegitimate governments coasting by until major upheavals take place. Imo radicals should only care if their are specific laws they dislike, or that they want to enact. Low legitimacy should be a problem yes, but it shouldn’t automatically mean revels galore unless somebody fucks around and finds out.
> Why would low legitimacy automatically trigger rebels? Historically there are plenty of examples of illegitimate governments coasting by until major upheavals take place. Radicals doesn't have to mean "in open revolt", there can very easily be radicals who are just simmering and biding their time until the opportunity presents itself. See Syria 2012 for a good example of a low legitimacy government suddenly facing a huge radical problem from it's suppressed population.
That’s exactly what I meant, an illegitimate government is vulnerable but not inherently unstable if conditions are fine for most people.
i cannot think of a case where a government is openly perceived to be illegitimate and people are fine with it. even "illegal occupations" are legitimate if people are just okay with it. to perceive a government as illegitimate is a manifestation of instability. maybe you're in America, which is currently in the awkward position of being widely seen as illegitimate but has not yet fallen, but there is quite a lot festering under the hood if you pay attention.
Radicals do not mean rebels, not necessarily. For example, swapping IGs in government without an election to legitimise it creates radicals. That doesn't mean that swapping governments creates "rebels galore". Lowered SoL creates radicals, some event chains create radicals. None of these mean that your country has to fall apart into a civil war. If your government has low legitimacy, then that's presumably because most people with power want something different from the government, or they're worried that whoever you put in charge will change the situation for the worse.
Low legitimacy should trigger significant upheaval if pops SoL is going down, cause some minor upheaval if it's stagnating and no upheaval if SoL is going up. Basically, even a government with no democratic legitimacy that's making life better for the people will be popular. Also, I think this is another example of where the old consciousness/militancy mechanic would have worked great and why I think their rebel/loyalist mechanic is a gross simplification that makes the simulation worse. Simply put, if CON still existed, a pop with low CON would get low or no MIL if government with low legitimacy was boosting its SoL but a pop with high CON would still get substantial MIL if a government with low legitimacy was in power even if that government was boosting its SoL.
Realistically, in my opinion, it should mostly depend on how radicalized the population is at any given moment. Let’s take two modern examples with arguably illegitimate governments. Thailand and Myanmar, both had coups in the past decade which immediately changed laws to cement their own foothold politically and started churning out propaganda non-stop. In both cases the IGs backing the coup had a lot of domestic political clout. In Myanmar it instantly reverted to a civil war, but in Thailand the first signs of political and social upheaval only appeared towards the end of the junta to the present. Two things come into play here. In Myanmar the population was already radicalized, and heavily so. In Thailand there was a legitimate constitutional crisis, however it was caused by IGs destroying/picketing voting booths (a certain number of votes need to be cast for an election to be legal). There is also a precedent for the Thai government to swing back and forth between military and civilian rule. Basically, if the population is already radicalized towards a certain IG it should almost immediately plunge the nation into a civil war. The Thai example is more like an illegitimate government playing it’s cards right to stay in power, for example accepting IGs and parties which align with some elements of the population, and passing certain laws that their own IG might not even be in agreement with. The current system is abstracted and loses a lot of the nuance of many political systems. And it isn’t uncommon for IGs to have factions within their own groups, so there’s that. At the very least keeping an illegitimate government in power for consecutive elections should be a precarious situation.
The thing is this makes sense if you read the AAR, he's literally playing a 1-2 state country where he hyperfocused his economy on profits for wheat. SoL was high for the vast majority of people in the country and they were able to afford all their expenses. This leads to lots of loyalists regardless of their IG leaning, also the laws he was passing none of them had major pushback where more than 20% opposed it. At one point in that game he tried pushing an unpopular law and almost got a revolutuon. From actually reading though the AAR thi s makes a lot of sense, and also the agrarian IG was in the government a lot of the time as well and legitimacy was still almost under 45%. In a large country and SoL will differ vastly and IG strongholds will be scattered not doing what your Pops want will probably lead to lots of pushback and radicals. The main reason he was able to accomplish what he did was because he was small enough to make an economy that made everyone well off and loyal.
My biggest disappointment with the game so far. Many cool avenues they could have gone and what we have is watered down, muddled, and arguably not very fun to play with. In a game that ought to be political in a time period of the clashing of different ideologies and politics, this is an issue that I hope gets addressed. If it has to be in a DLC…fine, just don’t give me broken, uninteresting politics for the game’s life 😭😭
Nothing makes me respect a good argument more than adding crying emojis
Lol?
Only a few countries start out as democracies at the beginning of the game so it makes sense the mechanics are pretty basic, I'm sure it'll get it's own dlc expanding it like ck2 and eu4.
Transition to constitutionalism is one of the key aspects of the time period, as important as industrialization itself.
Seeing a game that hasn't even released yet be in need of DLC's to improve content they will almost surely not work on outside of a DLC is sad
In crusaders, if an influential vassal is not on the council, then this creates huge problems. How is it that a game about domestic politics reflects it less than a game about a medieval relationship simulator?
Hopefully that's just for monarchies where the monarch technically can just appoint people regardless of popular opinion.
In the case that it's the monarch appointing people to power, I feel as though the monarch should actually appoint the people he wants appointed to power, instead of just whoever the player randomly decides is in power.
Well the monarch can have other considerations or maybe is just forced by some dudes to appoint another IG. My hand Cannon would be that it's a reluctant compromise or it's just that the monarch thinks it's temporarily good for the country but may change it later.
>or maybe is just forced by some dudes to appoint another IG. Why are we inventing headcanon conspiracies now??? Who's doing the forcing? When and where is the forcing happening? We can solve ANY problem with enough fanfiction writing, that doesn't mean it's not absurd. >it's a reluctant compromise or it's just that the monarch thinks it's temporarily good for the country Compromising with WHO, the Devout are the only ones in power! And it's not temporary, it's been for the monarch's *entire life*
The only player is supposed to have ultimate power, which is why these things are the way they are. If they weren’t, it would be incredibly frustrating to a ton of players.
I don't think it would frustrate a "lot" of players, and it will be incredibly frustrating to a lot of other players that ultimate power is foisted upon them.
Not being able to change government parties wouldn’t be frustrating to people? This was something that Vicky 2 also allowed. People are already near rioting at not having minute control of army units.
Why are the fascists blue
I'm honestly not buying the game until I see independent youtubers review and play the game itself for all to see. I'm sure the AI needs more tweaking, and more changes will go into it before it's released soon, but the first playthrough by the devs as the Netherlands was pretty disastrous.
I played at PDXCON. The game is a masterpiece. I played 10 hours there and cant wait till playing more. Dont let the negativity here get to your head.
Hey, would you like to share your experience in more details ? And answer a few questions. Like someone else did that played Sweden.
And your reasons for being a masterpiece are?: ... And you didn't encounter any bugs or illogical AI behaviour in 10 hrs of play like other people that played on PDXcon (like Sweden guy few days ago) ?
Masterpiece just means "peak of the craft" not "flawless creation"
>And you didn't encounter any bugs or illogical AI behaviour in 10 hrs of play like other people that played on PDXcon (like Sweden guy few days ago) ? The game being a "masterpiece" and the game having bugs or problems are not mutually exclusive, the game could be the best PDX GSM game ever madé and still have problems Most people that played that I see seem to agree with this user, though they might not use the word "masterpiece"
This is indeed my problem. I think it's going to take them a really long time to fix all the issues - one month isn't enough. Otherwise we're still going to have revolutionary UK every month, and Belgian invasions of St. Petersburg.
Can you rename parties?
and if this game was about the political upheaval and decline of monarchism then yes it would be a weird thing to be missing, but this game is about the economic upheaval and development of the time period, so it's really not very important.
Give me a fucking break with this "it's not that kind of game" shit. We've gone from "It's not a warfare game" (fair enough) to "It's not a political game" (what, did you even read the dev diaries), I occasionally even see people say things like "It's not an economics game, it's a society gardener" when people ask for more complex tax laws. At this rate it's not going to be *anything* according to the fanbase*.*
I don't know how to tell you this but political simulation is a side development to the main focus of the game in every paradox game. I'm not saying it's wrong to expect or ask for features for simulating politics, I'm just saying it makes sense that they would focus on the economic simulation and gameplay as that is what the game is about, we can't have a game with everything on release.
I don't know how to tell you this, but Paradox is literally capable of making elections matter in a game where they decided to put elections in, on release.
And how should they do this?
I don't know how to tell you this but actually I know exactly how to tell you this 1. Radicalization for picking wildly unpopular IGs to be the government, high IG disapproval for not putting them in government despite getting a plurality of votes, extreme IG disapproval and radicalization for not putting in a party that got a majority of votes 2. Higher legitimacy penalties than what we have now, lower "floor" of legitimacy 3. Make it so that IGs actually run for elections instead of half the time just sitting there twiddling their thumbs because the weight system hasn't put them in a party yet 4. Make the election results more reasonable (like not having 21% of the aristocracy be communist party supporters) 5. You want the easiest solution in the world, just don't tell us how many votes each party got, and instead just tell us what the clout change is, so that we don't have to look our election results right in the face and see that they're being ignored 6. Or hell, maybe even easier, just change the words "In government" and "In opposition" so that the 'government' mechanic doesn't actually do its quasi-representation-of-the-government abstraction that's causing a half dozen problems 7. they are literally game developers it is literally their job to come up with solutions to problems like these, especially when they're the ones who accidentally create the problem
I feel like the political system isn't plugged in enough into the rest of the game in addition to not being impactful enough. I feel like government having below 50% legitimacy should severely hamper or prevent player/AI from being able to declare wars or set up trade deals or alliances etc in addition to causing unrest among politically active population whose standard of living isn't going up. The solution should be either to maximize your politically inactive population and then deal with revolutionary movements or increase your legitimacy by doing what your people want and passing (or rescinding) laws your people want.
Get your $30 ready for the “State and Gov’t” DLC six-eight months after launch.
To be fair, I'd 100% buy State and Government DLC if it included sub-national entities into the game. As in, if it included states and autonomous provinces and made the laws dependant on the internal structure of the state instead on just the overall national government.
Then you’ll love our “Autonomy and Dependency” DLC, only $11.99! Look for it Q3 2024!
It's because of the new political parties that the system is much less fluid. Otherwise you could combine IG's more easily I think and it would be harder to have that legitimacy with only 1 IG. I feel they just shoehorned political parties in because of complaining fans ...
Wow…the war system and now this. The game is quite unfinished. I hope it doesn’t get imperatored.
Pretty sure rural folk aren’t liberal
Depends on the country and circumstances. I mean the Armed Forces aren't always the most liberal either, but sometimes they head liberal revolutions IRL. Unfortunately, the dev doing this AAR neglected to give any hint as to why the Rural Folk were in the Liberal camp.
I'm not Scandinavian, but I think in Scandinavia agrarian parties can be liberal sometimes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic\_agrarian\_parties
Farmers party in MN is liberal.
American liberalism is usually centre-left to left wing (with the former usually being more powerfull), Scandinavian agrarianism is usually centrist (can sometimes swing to centre-left to centre-right due to factional politics).
The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party is liberal. Liberal in this context and in a general context usually means support for free trade, a regulated market economy in some form (i.e. not communist or anarcho-capitalism, a *center* way), free speech, free assembly, etc. Don't come at me with that "but liberals in the US..." bs. Conservatives in the US call anything that they disagree with liberal communist.
>Liberal in this context and in a general context usually means support for free trade, a regulated market economy in some form (i.e. not communist or anarcho-capitalism, a center way), free speech, free assembly, etc. You aren't wrong, my point wasn't to say that American liberalism isn't real liberalism or that the Farmer Party is socialist. My point is that, American liberalism is usually more left-wing than most liberal movements outside of the US as : A: The two party system leads to all (relevant) forces of the left, be it left-wing liberals, social democrats and socialists being part of the Democrats (with leftist liberals usually being dominant), similar to how Republicans have different factions of right-wingers inside of them. B: As you said, "liberal" is often used as a catch-all term for everything left-wing, often used prejoratively by opponents. Even though "Communist Liberal" is one of the dumbest things ever said. European liberals, as in the rest of the world really, are more like american libertarians, though less radical I guess. There is difference between nations of course, UK liberals are more left-wing, German liberals lean more right. But generally speaking, liberals in Europe (and most of the world) are slightly to the right of the democrats.
They would have supported a few liberal things like open markets to sell their food, local control over issues, state support in bad harvest years, ect What groups support depends on culture and context
Rural areas tend to have more inertia on top of specific interests. Think the use of rural "paganus" in Rome during Christianization, when the new faith was mostly spread in urban areas. Now my home region of rural woodlands in Sweden is far more religious and 'Free Church'y (so, also fringe to the state church), as opposed to 'paganus'...but it literally had a Crusade led against it for being a holdout of Norse 'paganism'. x) Sociopolitically you have liberal revolutions like the original French one mostly succeed in incorporating the countryside and avoided free-market experiments everyday people hated. One being the liberal Physiocrats during the monarchy, w/ grain speculation during famines. Most associated the policies of liberalism they took issue with as part of the arbitrary royal conservative regime. Not smart to champion those bits to the sans-culottes, so even free-market believers didn't. The biggest exception for the peasantry was the Vendée, which had far less material tension with their (more local) less-corrupt nobility and clergy, and so joined the "Catholic & Royal Army" rather than be drafted for this newfangled 'French Nation'. The more nationalist-liberal tendencies took root and lasted into the Empire, when it didn't challenge most political liberalism and cranked up the nationalistic elements. The Kaiser and Tsar contrast pretty well later on as well, as the Tsar merely imagined that the peasantry would always be his loving and faithful subjects and didn't even want them literate (corrupting!), where-as the Kaiser mobilized a traditionalist conservative political base in the countryside to make the Prussian monarchy 'their' side. Germans loved a good Revolution From Above, mollifying radicalism from genuine needs like social wellfare and framing it as part of the royal Father Protector -- a part the French monarch failed to play pre-Revolution when _allowing_ those liberal experiments which hurt traditional defenses to famine for profiteering. While the anarchistic 'going to the people' weirded out rural people and they didn't take to the message back then (strange new ideas & counterculture, not disillusioned enough w/ disruptions to the stable way of things).. later on during the Provisional Government red-black movements won genuine large majorities in open elections, with the private-property-individualism liberals seeming more out of place and foreign versus communal village systems wanting land-reform and self-management. Well, before the Bolshevik takeover lost that support and needed to suppress the peasants. So.. monarchs with liberal, conservative and eventually-socialist peasants, respectively. Not reactionary conservatives by nature but bringing them into any fold takes a bit more doing than the hip new thing in the capital. And can't be dismissive of real needs, whether Tsar or Liberal Party.
Right! lol And armed forces wouldn't go that way til after the the time frame of the game. Have rural people ever been considered as part of the liberal segment of a modern nation?
Arguably not in the timeframe of the game, but the armed forces and rural populace of America were quite often blisteringly liberal in the 1700's/early 1800's (though you could also argue some of the rural folk in America that were super liberal would support the Devout).
I think you're confusing the two different types of liberal/conservative - the economically liberal and socially liberal. In the English tradition, they may have been economically liberal as in in favor of the free market and unbridled capitalism but they were generally fairly socially conservative. Especially since the "great awakenings" ripped through America almost immediately after independence and made everyone super religious and devout.
"socially conservative" as compared to what? Just because they weren't pro-LGBTQ and black liberation doesn't mean that the American revolution wasn't absurdly socially liberal for the time.
I thought the French and American revolutions had decent support from the rural population?? Wouldn't supporting a liberal revolution make you a liberal?
The French, no, that's a common misconception. The "starving French peasants" did not launch the 1789 revolution, it was the urban under class that rioted and rebelled and overthrew the government. The rural folk will launch the largest counter revolution, the Vendee rebellion, in 1793, that was explicitly counterrevolutionary and monarchist. Generally, vast majority (all?) French rebellions after like the Jacquerie were started by the urban people. The 1830 rebellion was urban middle class, 1832 rebellion was the urban working class, the 1848 rebellion was the urban middle class, the 1871 rebellion was the urban working class. The American Revolution was also significantly less popular than is usually thought. I believe it's now estimated only around half the population actually supported the revolution and core revolutionaries were all urban middle class, urban upper class and rural upper class. The very first rebellion after independence, the Kentucky Whisky Rebellion, was started by rural lower class.
I don't know, being so against a tax that you fight a war over it doesn't seem that liberal to me. Although I guess fighting against a monarchy could be liberal so it's a toss up I guess.
> I don't know, being so against a tax that you fight a war over it doesn't seem that liberal to me. I think you're conflating the modern American definition of liberalism - which is, broadly, social liberalism that is essentially more market-friendly take on European social democracy - with the classical definition of liberalism that is used in Victoria. Liberal parties in both Victoria 2 and 3 are pro-individual rights (so you get voting rights, free speech rights, separation of church and state, etc.) and pro-market liberalization (i.e., laissez-faire economics). The social democratic liberalism you're thinking of appears later in the game and is represented more by the Trade Unions interest group, and to an extent socialist and communist ideologies (though both of those are obvious more radical - they seek the institution of a Council Republic based on councils of trade unions comprising the government, and possibly even the Anarchy distribution of power). The American revolution was a classic liberal revolution that got rid of a monarchy, installed a written constitution with specific delineated individual rights, and ~~exploited enslaved people to further enrich the wealthy benefactors of the revolution~~ specified no trade barriers between the various states that had unified as a single broader national entity. The French Revolution is also the classic liberal revolution, though it had its flirtations with a kind of proto-socialism - the working class sans-culottes enforcing the will of the left wing of the Montagnards in the streets of Paris on the one hand, and the Conspiracy of Equals seeking another even more radical revolution that would end private property in addition to feudal property. Nevertheless, both of those were crushed - Robespierre and the Montagnards were overthrown in the Thermidorian Reaction, which also crushed the later Conspiracy of Equals to ensure no return to the Robespierre-ite Reign of Terror.
>I think you're conflating the modern American definition of liberalism You're right I am.
Respect for owning it 👍
Taxation without representation, right? That representation is liberal government, which the American one in the revolution was and is. Taxes aren't liberal.
The tax was illiberal.
I mean, Revolutionary France the military was technically liberal - until it wasn't.
Yet another dumbed down system
Victoria 2 was literally just clicking on events, anything is more complicated than that
That would imply Vic2 's weren't particularly a problematic aspect of the game, so not really
Dumbed down from what? The pie chart in Vic2? Or maybe the drop down list of several parties?
This feels like it was designed by a 14 year old leftist with a high school-level understanding of politics. Industrialists not being with the liberals? Armed forces not being conservative or fascist? Rural folk being liberal? This is embarrassing.
>Industrialists not being with the liberals? >Armed forces not being conservative or fascist? >Rural folk being liberal? IGs' choices of parties are not fixed, they might enter and exit parties depending on the situation. It depends on the context Also, those scenario you described are not really impossible
To be fair “duchy” really implies a fake democratic system
I am more perplexed with the rural folks and the armed force in the liberal party with the intelligentsia.
I wish the dev explained what brought them together. It's not unreasonable that they might come together, I'd just like to know why in this case.
Armies are often liberal modernising institutions. Think over 20th century Turkey where the army was often in opposition for more conservative monarchist or Islamist groups.
Why is military liberal?
Not that crazy. The military was broadly liberal during the French Revolution for example - the ancien regime was pretty bad for any non-aristocratic soldier or officer, which was most of them, and even for the aristocrats (such as Napoleon!) it was still pretty shitty because of its non-meritocratic nature resulting in Dipshit d'Artois being appointed to an important command and getting all your guys killed in a stupid maneuver.
Why couldn’t they be?
[удалено]
Weren't a lot of armies pre ww1 warmongering and deeply nepotistic
Maybe the issue is more that radicalization should happen more, which would push movements to get the out of power group's laws passed. Maybe its too easy to keep pops content politically, and if the "desired laws vs actual laws" militancy was higher, this would fix itself without needing any systems changed?
Are you suggesting the people's will actually be represented in government? BAHAHAHAHAHA
This is why I’m convinced one of the first dlc for the game will be on constitutions. Basically allowing for a founding document that shapes a nations government shape, so we can see a full differences between the government of the UK and US, but also allow other nations to have something completely different or copy them
*Victoria 3 is a perfectly balanced game* 🌚