I’m absolutely loving it personally, but objectively it needs a lotta work. Even stuff i love has problems, I fully acknowledge that. So said problems affect my enjoyment of it? No. But I know why they affect it for others, and it definitely needs to work on making it so as many people can enjoy it as possible. Edit; geez didn’t expect to get this many likes. I’m just some dude putting his thoughts out there. Thanks!!!
The problem is not my enojoyment. I would probably enjoy it, but does it offer enough for you to unfasten your pursestrings. And the answer should be a resounding no. Atleast when you understand that buying this game will only embolden paradox to release their next title in even more of a unfeautered and unfinished state. If we keep buying their alpha-builds masquarading as games they are only going to get worse.
@@NB-yu4lj micro managing wars was my biggest issue with the game but i wanted that mechanic improved not removed. Victoria 3 is soooo much more micro managee than vic2, manually improve the guns, buy every recource on your own, build the roads, etc. vic2 had some bad parts i am not saying it was perfect but its better than v3 by a looooong shoot and that game is a decade old
My top 3 fixes in the future is a reworked UI, make war less janky (stop the fracturing of front lines and naval invasions more understandable), make countries have more specific events and modifiers so countries feel different. PS: Probably should have added this but I like the game and have high hopes. Also for “reworked UI” I meant I spend too much time going through tabs and finding specific info in hard to reach places.
Hopefully this get's the EU IV Treatment and we get years of updates, DLCs, hotfixes and Patches further increasing the depth of the game, fixing issues, etc. etc.
Not sure how much you played but really digging into different countries, they feel different by mechanics and not some weird ad on. Like I chose Chile as my tutorial nation and I was completely stunned about how different that country played out vs Belgium, another tutorial nation. imo add ons and country specific modifiers only exist when the game mechanics dont do a good job of inherently conveying it, and V3 does a damn good job.
Imperator, CK3, and Now Vic3, yeah they are spitting out new titles as if they were EA and they fail to bring what we love with these games, a difficult steep learning curve and endless replayability as the AI decisions will also effect you in a unique way each time around.
I really get the sense that Paradox hates their core playerbase and wants to replace them with casual GSG-newbies that just like games like Ck3 for the dumb reddit memes. Hard not to get this sense with how passive-aggressive they are in the dev blogs and how the company got rid of its old-guard of developers and is now run by people from the mobile game market. What they fail to realize is the fair-weather fans will stop playing after a week or two just like with Imperator
@@Chickidydow Imperator Rome is honestly even more tragic when you consider how much it’s been improved since release. It had so much potential, and I honestly believe that if it was released as it is now at launch it would’ve been a hit. I don’t think paradox will abandon Victoria 3 tbh. It’s the newest game in one of their staple franchises, so here’s hoping they patch it up and make it good.
@@thumbus4526 That’s the controversy I’m talking about. The last big updates for their other games have been pretty tepid too so unless they start making major updates for free I will remain unimpressed.
@@putz5872 I mean, the most recent eu4 update has been heralded by a large part of the player base as the best state the games ever been in with literally thousands of interesting playthrough concepts. The main issue eu4 has at the moment is performance. As a single core game from that's over 9 years old, and the sheer amount of expansions and content additions, it struggles on a wide array of pc's. Even ones that ostensibly should play it quite well.
About that warfare DLC speculation: didn't paradox recently state, that they don't want to split their community through DLC anymore, only release payed flavor packs and finance further mechanical updates for everyone that way? Which is exactly what the last event pack for CK3 was.
One of the devs mentioned that the war system isn't permanent and it was the kind of vibe the devs give when pointing at a potential DLC. So yeah, there's going to get a DLC about war.
Which is kind of insane when you look at how CK3 disappointingly turning out. It's still relatively bare bones compared to its predecessor with the mods carrying it hard.
Tbh recent hoi4 was that way, only flavour for countries came with dlcs, mechanics come from updates. They even moved some dlc mechanics to base game. Mods add way more flavour than dlcs can do anyway.
@@JamazVu On an ultrawide? It's a simple QoL thing that is in ALL of their other games, why omit it here? Indicates this was a rush job to get it out for Christmas
@@JamazVu This has been a standard QoL feature in previous Paradox titles, down to being able to customize what type of events do and don't pause the game. It's hardly a big ask to expect it to be in Vic 3.
Good for you man, if you can get through the 12 year old jank and clunkiness its a great game, I usually don't try to recommend it to newcomers any more though because most people will see the UI and be intimidated.
@@florianphilipps2370 yeah originally the UI did turn me off of the game but I tried it again, went through all the tutorials, and I only have about 10 hours in the game now but I can definitely see myself playing it more
@Li F same. Creating the divisions and building infrastructure etc always put me off, there just seems to be too much arbitrary nonsense for the meta that the game never actually tells you, you just have to go look it up for yourself. I never got the warfare down either, just wouldn’t work for me. It took me a while to get into EU4 too after trying multiple times and giving up. People always say VicII and CKII are two of the hardest ones to learn but they were the easiest for me. Everyone has that one or two paradox game(s) they’ve tried to get into a bunch of times and just never could and it’s always different for everyone.
@@theanonymousmrgrape5911 We can look at what’s happening now to CK3 for a guide too; they have had one flavor DLC to focus on an area in total and it still lags far behind CK2 on key features that should’ve been in the game in the first place. I guess we’ll just have to wait $200 for Vic3 to be any decent
@@moonshinei oh I’m well aware, and I don’t like that model. I’m still not that big a fan of ck3 despite the fact that I’ve put somewhere around 3,000 hours into the previous game. A lot of people seem to play it, though, despite its many issues, so for some games their model seems to be working much better than for others.
One gripe I have about dlcs in modern games is that more and more games are being released as somewhat lacking or unfinished, and the developing teams use dlcs as an excuse to patch it up. That wasn't the case back in the day... dlcs were additions on top of the already complete content, that fleshed it out further. They didn't exist as necessities or bugfixes
It's more that they feel obligated to make DLC for every game that releases, pencil pushing to brass demand they make the games consistently profitable, Dev's stick to the easy solution which is keep actual content for DLC, otherwise if they release a full and functional game, they might run dry on ideas of what to add/rework which would be worth (or appear worth) a DLC. It's tragic, but I feel it's just head Dev's licking the boots of the top brass because they want to keep their jobs and the PDX corporate heads mandate that the money must flow upwards into their pockets.
Yes but back in the day minor companies from Stockholm couldn't release games like these either. So you are nostalgic for a time where EA and Activision and the like were the gatekeepers of what could be published.
Do you consider Victoria 2 as "back in the day" or do you include it in the modern game category. If you think it is "back in the day" then how do you explain that the vanilla non dlc Victoria 2 is limited to version 1.3 where the most recent version is 3.04. The only way to get 3.04 is to buy both Heart of Darkness and A House Divided dlc. The dlc for Victoria 2 includes not only new features but balance and bug fixes. If you have the base game only, you are stuck with all the old bugs and bad balance. Victoria 3 will at least include bug fixes, balance changes and new features with the free updates as all newer paradox games do. That is an improvement on the Victoria 2 dlc model. It doesn't make Victoria 3 DLC model ok, just better than Victoria 2.
@@dexulescu I'm not going to comment on the DLC system for all games but the way I like to look at it with paradox is I will play their games for years with over 3000hours on eu4 compare that to any other game without DLC or what you'd call fully fleshed out like rdr2 i have maybe 60 hours. the constant updates and new features to keep the game fresh is what makes paradox games so great and the ability to add new things and change things that aren't as fun with the game is what makes them so good. there's no better game testing then that from the consumers. I'll happily keep paying for new content to support the developers but i do agree with some of the problems people have had in the past especially when the new DLC creates bugs but i don't think I'll ever fully understand people's hatred for the DLC system as a whole.
To be honest I am not so much against the ways are fought in this game. However, having played somewhere around 10 hours now, I have the feeling that the interactions with the other countries don't feel as intrecate as I hoped for. With EU4 there is a much clearer dynamic of creating oppertunistic allies and it is much clearer which countries like each other and which don't. Here the interactions with the other countries feel a bit bland. It often is a bit random and there are many click necessary to find information about the network of relations
Countries are also prone to change their mind on a dime, somewhat like allies desiring your land in EU4 before trust was introduced. I was allied to GB for a few years, until they suddenly backed an African native against me out of nowhere.
The war system is very jankky and I feel there are a lot of things hidden behind the miasma of numbers, etc. Overall, for an economic sim it's decent. I'm having fun with what it is.
@@Lady_Amelia-Eloise yeah but even still there’s some stuff I’d probably want to change abt the mechanics/UI just to make it clearer to the player what’s being conveyed and to make it a more interesting option while still retaining the feel of what the game is going for. Stuff like more interesting logistics, theaters, better fronts, and an officer pool mechanic (HOI3 OOB MICRO LETSSS GOOOOO) could all do a lot to make war a more interesting (but not necessarily ‘good’) option. Imo tho I think a military revamp should actually be a lower priority to other fixes/reworks of systems. The UI and AI both need heavy duty overhauls first. I can see what the devs were going for w some of the choices but there’s one or a few really frustrating decisions that I really thing are causing a lot of players grief because they don’t have the right info available except hidden by tooltips within tooltips. After that I honestly think diplomacy should come as next on the list. Most players in Vicky 3 are going to spend it at peace going through the Econ and diplomacy menus, so I’d want to see some more satisfying options present to make the diplo game a legit strat. Having talked and interacted w the devs on discord tho, I’m pretty happy with how they’ve communicated and what they’ve explained abt the choices they’ve made. During the IR launch there was definitely a feeling of ‘oh shit are we going to be okay’ from both devs and players, whereas here I just see more of “yeah dw we’ve put that UI change into the next patch, and we already know the problem areas.” In all honesty I think those in the know expected this launch and knew the game needs more in the way of polish, but that the core of it was good.
I find it weird they didn't include any economic system other than a command economy. I find it strange cause Vicky 2 did this very well. I don't know if this was design or coding issues.
I agree. I kinda wanted a cities skylines meets paradox game sim. My only complaint is it's a lot of "do X to make your numbers go up" and it's kinda....predictablr
Politics is only thing its good at. The economic system is unrealistic since every nation is essentially a command economy, you are unable to stockpile resources and your money caps once you fill up your vault. The diplo system is garbage since you cant reduce another nations influence on a certain region and nations on the other side of the planet will get involved in a conflict that gives them no benefit.
@@jready1455 I actually think not being able to stockpile money is a good thing. Besides you CAN stockpile quite a lot, but there is a cap, and that makes sense. If a government was just sitting on MASSIVE stockpiles, like idk 10 years of their GDP, their currency would probably suffer because of inflation. Ofc there is some other economy stuff which could and should be better, I think it’s a bit silly that your economy collapses throughout your entire nation because you’re building a food factory in one state for instance. As for things being predictable, I mean, yeah? It’s the industrial revolution, it’s not really like you can industrialise without coal and iron… also that criticism holds true for Victoria 2 as well.
If you don’t know already there’s a bug to teleport your army’s, click a general, have him defend a front, then switch to have him attacking that front, and boom he should be teleported anywhere in the world
Maybe I misunderstand what you mean, but traversing 2000 km in 60 days means an average speed of 0.75 knots. Ships at that time rarely traveled at an average speed of below 6 knots. So, ships were much faster in reality 200 years ago what you describe as 'teleporting' in the game.
If anything it should be faster because the average travel time for a ship to travel from Britain to most places in the world in the 1800’s was about 30-50 days
@@secworld3644 It’s just because we can’t see little army models moving that people feel like it’s teleporting. That and being used to something like EU4 travel when it takes like 2 months to travel from Alexandria to Constantinople
A lot of the criticism for the game comes from the Vicky 2 community. The game itself isn’t objectively bad at the core, but it’s a Victoria game in name only. It’s not a true sequel to Vicky 2 and I think that upset a lot of people, which is totally understandable. Criticism seems to be that paradox removed the things that made Vicky 2 unique when all they really wanted was a more updated and modernized Victoria 2. We’ll see how this game holds up over the next few months, but I’m worried this may get the imperator Rome treatment.
Like you said at it's core this is a pretty good game i wouldn't say that about Imperator on release and even with mixed reviews its still 20-30% better than Imperator was at its lows.
All i want is unit model in vic3 event if it doesnt do hoi4 and vic2 mechanic i just want to see my soldier instead all i see is fort vs fort during battle lol
As someone who has 1100 hours in Vicky 2 I guess I’m one of the Vicky 2 people. The main grip I have is that they really ruined the geopolitics of the Victorian era. The Victorian era was defined by a careful balancing act that made sure the great powers never fought colossal wars in the same vain as the napoleonic/revolutionary wars. That just isn’t a factor in ‘Vicky’ 3 and if they had made politics and diplomacy actually engaging I don’t think I would have been nearly as mad about the terrible war system. Overall the gutting of the geopolitics is a crime and Victoria 3 is not a Victoria game. It’s an economic sim that doesn’t even do that as well as Victoria 2 did… overall it’s immensely disappointing and I’d rather it not exist at all as a Victoria game. They just used the name for marketing
@@KentMansley_Noticer Fr lol, I never even played Vicky 2 yet I get annoyed how the supposed sequel does something entirely different from it's predecessor. Why not just make a new IP if you really wanted to make a more economically focused game? Because of this crap, we got the miserably awful war system that doesn't even represent the Victorian era. Need I mention the lack of Westernization
One of my main issues is that it is a command economy simulator. What I liked about vic 2 was that pops made factories and buildings. If Vic 3 did what vic 2 did in that regard, I would have less issue with the game. As it stands, I don't feel like I'm running a free-market capitalist economy
I think my main problem with the game are ALL THE TABS. I get lost sometimes and then I'm like "wait, did I pass that law or did I miss it" or "Wait why is this interest group angry- oh I forgot to click them"
I played for 20 minutes, I think it's possible to learn and get better, but I simply care more about warfare. The fact that it is completely passive and very underwhelming is disappointing. I literally see no point in this game. For me at least.
@@Ealdorman_of_Mercia A fair point. I just got done playing Serbia until 1858 to kind of get used to the economic and political mechanics without having to worry about a massive empire and ambitions. Was kind of disappointed by the fact that 48 revolutions didn't kick off
@@charliethenecromancer4422 They didn't for you? Every GP had a communist or proletariat revolution in my game around the 1890s. Maybe you didn't notice it because these revolutions are fucking broken and result in a communist revolution with an absolutist monarchy government. But, hey, even if they end up actually communist, they don't really differ all that much from all the other tags.
I feel like the main issue is that this latest version doesn’t have the soul of Victoria. Core mechanics from Victoria 2 have either been fully removed or super simplified. For example, capitalists just don’t exist in this game. Even though Victoria 2 had a working system with capitalists and the fact that this was historically when capitalism started to become the dominant economic system. I really want Vic 3 to succeed but right it feels as a more shallow version of Vic 2 with a nice map.
@@MonotoneCreeper but capitalists would build factories for you in Vicky 2. It was cool starting of the game with no capitalists most of time and slowly getting more of them to the point that the economy ran itself.
@@gamerrevolutionary6615 I mean capitalist autobuiod in Vicky 2 was ass. Building random shit anywhere and everywhere. Main reason I never liked playing US in that game, you can't go state capitalism.
@@gamerrevolutionary6615 You can still autobuild and basically let the economy run itself. The only difference now is that you don't have to hope that capitalists won't open a random factory that is never going to get input goods. Capitalists were dumb in V2
The issue with "economic and political simulator" is that it turns Victoria 3 into...not Victoria 3. As in not the long awaited and memed sequel to vicky2. A big part of what made Vic2 so great conceptually was the balancing of focus, it was not HoI which is focussed on one specific war, and it is not Anno 1800 but in a menu. Warfare was a very big part of Vic2, that gets shit on (in recent times, this has literally never been a point of discussion before the new warfare system was introduced by paradox) mostly because it has not been updated with the QoL that the games paradox supported more have received. Paradox didn't make Victoria 2 what it was, Victoria 2 pulled through DESPITE being the neglected child of the pdx franchise. And this is the crux for a lot of Vic2 players I have talked to. Conceptually, Victoria 3 is completely removed from Victoria 2. The Design Philosophy is unrecognizable, and it is evident in the way the games have been marketed. Victoria 2's main banner is Otto von Bismarck, leading troops himself. Victoria 3 instead has 2 people holding newspapers and looking happy. Victoria 3 is not trying to be a Grand Strategy Game in the traditional sense, Victoria 3 is its own new and to me very strange niche of Economic Simulator on a GSG style world map, with a ton of annoying menus. To me, Victoria 3 is essentially a mix of Anno 1800 and Realpolitiks (the warfare system honestly feels like it has been inspired by that mess lmao). Had they not called this game Vic3, I would not have objected to their decisions. The warfare system would still be boring, but it would be understandable that it is not what the game is actually about. But Victoria 3 SHOULD NOT be a "national gardening economic political simulator". It should be a Grand Strategy Game about the Age of Imperialism. That is what Victoria 2 was. Sequels are fine to change the concept somewhat. Sequels are not fine to be a completely different genre of game.
Hmm..."national gardening economic political simulator" is what I tried to play Vic2 as. Is it wrong that I am reading your complaints as a positive review? :P To each their own. I do sympathize though with the frustration of a series diverging from what you loved it for.
God I hate that in 2016 to the present, the main customers of PDX games became soyboys who live off their parents and have literally nothing in common with the old fans. Victoria 3 is a bust. No, it won't get better, and I wish you knew how bad things really were.
@@David-bh7hs I _AM_ an old fan. I've been a player of paradox titles since Europa Universalis 2, and remember excitedly playing the Victoria 2 demo, seeing all the things they changed from the original. What made Victoria unique wasn't its combat system, but the economic and social engine behind it. I'm glad they doubled down on that.
Aside from flavour, diplomacy is my main gripe after 15 hours and a few different nations. After trying to interact with the ai, they never seem to want to do anything, and it feels like rolling dice when starting a diplomatic play to see if they will go up against me or support me.
The most important thing is that the framework is there. Sure, there are a lot of things missing but it's important that they CAN be added, such as capitalists, more in-depth combat, more flavor and a better UI. It's not like the game is broken by design and they need to re-code a lot of the things (like how vic2 with GFM needs a million decisions to do the most basic of things). I'm 100% sure the game will get way better over time and especially with mods as long as there's enough push from the community to get these changes.
Exactly. Amazing to think how this game will grow with DLC. Just look at how far Stellaris has come. And CK3 in just a short amount of time. And imagine the mods. IMAGINE THE MODS.
zzzzzz, vic3 is sequel bait trash, same with ck3 because pdx is now making games for casuals instead of their actual audience the grand strategy gamers, the dumbed down warfare was too complex for newcoming casuals in ck3 so they just deleted it in vic3 LOL
@@bread2546 Have you seen the complexity of the economy of Vic 3? Do you see how much you can micromanage the economy when in Vic 2 you just had to deal with pops ?
For me, Victoria III could have been great. Victoria II had what could be possibly intensive economy development. You wanted to build your glass factories in coal producing regions and so forth. You could also control your army and with skill, win a war. Long story short, they could of kept the war system as it was instead of shaving it off the game almost entirely, expanded upon both it AND the economy system they wanted to implement. The best Paradox game to me is one that I can both fiddle with my economy to a great degree and also participate in wars to a great degree. Europa Universalis IV, I salute you.
Eu4 really is probably the current height of paradox games in that regard atm, bit of a shame that it’s being crushed under the weight of its own dlcs atm (I’m simultaneously both hoping for and dreading the announcement of eu5)
@@youthoughtaboutit6946 It’s rough. They could of literally copy and pasted Victoria II, but added more depth to economy and supply. It would be more of a masterpiece. The map graphics need work (when zoomed out). Once it starts loading mountains and cities, it’s BEAUTIFUL.
Why I'm not gonna buy it. - Even when you're a capitalist nation you still use top-down state run factories as you, and only you, decide which factories to build and even which production lines to use. That's a state run socialists/royalist economy and has nothing to do with the barons and capitalists this period was known for, it was the fall of kingdoms and the rise of capital based power. - If you watch you're footage back; it's like 60 percent building factories and tweaking them. That makes sense for Japan in this period but every other video on here was the same and often a lot more. - The pastel color or the map is hurting my head. That's a personal thing and I belong to a 1 percent group that has this problem. - The wars are static, nations can't join an already ongoing war (while this almost always happened in history, beating the losing guy a little more was almost a sport.) - I remember the Common Sense DLC and Imperator Rome (that was a barebones game as well), they're not getting the benefit of the doubt anymore. - Every tech tree is the same and therefor heavily unindustrialized nations can race techs and become the techleader for a specific resource. - Your citizens can't trade outside of your market (They can't trade at all because they don't exist) and economy is non-existent, there are no stockpiling of goods and the only thing you can effect is the base price. Don't know if this is true but someone said that even if your factory is only supplied for 25 percent it still had 100 percent effectiveness. Wouldn't be surprised. - There are objectively better choices in most of the laws making the choices that are there non-existent choices. - A steamfriend of mine actually had to wait "for 10 f*king years" for a law to finally pass due to the will of RNGesus. - The war system looks weak. - It looks just like the last "DLC framework"... game.. The cynical part of me believes Paradox does this deliberately and takes stuff out of the game and substitutes it for objectively worse stuff to be later sold in DLC that has a baked-in value proposition. The realistic part however is that Paradox has become beholden to share holders and are now obligated to rake as much money from their games as they can. That mass market appeal isn't why I came to love Paradox games and it's my conclusion that Paradox games are just not for me anymore. That's sad but was bound to happen eventually, the Common Sense DLC started this, their horrible change to pops in Stellaris and now they removed almost all the things I loved in Victoria 2 from Victoria 3.
Weirdly I have no issues with the war system. The issues are more with the UI which seems to love waste space with empty spaces while giving a million different tabs. Other than that, I also hate the look of the map. In a setting that's supposed to be more serious than ck3, the map is somehow even more cartoony, doesn't exactly capture the feeling of leading a nation through the industrial revolution. And I just try to ignore those abominable and unnecessary 3d humunculi Edit: also the first thing I did was rename the cloud texture in the files to remove that eye sore
Could've used an art style from the respected era that Victoria 3 is set in; Neoclassical, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, or Post-Impressionism. But, whatever.
Unlikely. Vic is a much more popular series, Imperator was a shot in the dark. From steamcharts data, peak yesterday was 70k players, Imperator's all-time peak (on release day) was only 13k, and it quickly fell to around 1k the next week
@@smlgd when games not fun they get abandoned. i asked for refund instantly during the first 2 hours of boredom. unlike eu4 or hoi4 there was no merit on its own and i love rome games more then anything.
I got into my first war yesterday. I mobilized my armies and realized after-the-fact they were going to bankrupt me. Then I realized you can't stand down armies. So it was literal game over.
this is the worst thing about it. disbanding generals makes your government go apeshit. armies on standby keep guzzling weapons and cannons. you cant move your armies before fronts pop up.
@@Oujouj426 Regardless, irl nations will pull armies out of wars that aren't financially feasible. The fact that this game doesn't have something that basic is absurd.
See I am the opposite. If I want that kinda war system I go play HOI 4. It was build for it and I don't have to deal with the economy and culture aspect. Vic 3 is the opposite, but I would like to see more depth in the war system from that perspective. My economy, industry, culture should all affect the war system. Give it more depth on that side of the system.
@@snoop101 Maybe people want to experience and partake in the American civil war, Franco-Prussian war, WWI, etc. Victoria 2 had a perfect balance. Just have the basic ability to control your own army.
Paradox went on about guiding a society through abstraction and top-down, policy action, with the option to micromanage if you choose. And now I'm manually choosing whether a specific furniture workshop in east siberia uses lathes or not. If it's supposed to be a society/economy simulator, and my factories are privately owned, why after unlocking lathes are individual factories not just able to automatically select different production methods in response to market conditions? If I'm managing the market conditions, the market actors should respond by themselves or why am I doing it. It's one directional right now - you can manage just your infrastructure and the market will respond, but manage your market and you infrastructure will sit there waiting for you to tell it to exploit your market changes.
Honestly i was treating the game with some sort of decent regard till like 3 hours into the game. I noticed that the combat is easily under explained and broken. Because even if you have an army of over 50 and dozens of ships(naval invasion) your combat width will only be the same of the opposing forces so 10v10 or 5v5 or 20v20 sometimes there can be a disparaging difference but watching u.k., france, and my self get besten back by a single german province with a force no larger than 14 units with some how over 118 defense when the game says the Highest in the world is 100. Besides that when going through the achievements, paradox included an achievement that wasn't supposed to be in yet for the native American which at this point cannot be played. I am assuming this is all due to a dlc. But this is in my opinion horrific. To know on game day launch that they are going tl make a dlc sure that's one thing. But find out that the dlc is really just cut content from an already "developed" game??? This is like buying a car but having to pay to add on the wheels.
I agree completely but you can actually play as a native nation but only one of them, that is a puppet of the usa i forget what its called but it has the same usa color and is in the oklahoma area
I havent played vic2 but I'm having fun with this one, I think its mainly a bias, I've learnt to expect nothing and enjoy whats in the present, for me its a thumbs up
@@Restrocket I'll give it a try at some point but as bad as it may sound to a vic veteran I prefer a "watered-down" version vic2 sounds like ALOT and I work for 17 hours a day sometimes. I dont really want a game to be as complicated as my life right now😅
@@Restrocket Eh to each their own, I enjoy and find looking at code and errors for hours fun doesnt mean everyone else should but I respect your opinion and will definetly give vic2 a try sometime
Looks like I'll be sticking with Victoria 2 with the GFM mod for a couple more years. By then hopefully it would have gotten updates, DLCs and mods that add more flavour and improve the combat. The game will one day be regarded as a masterpiece, it just needs more work
I have an honest question. I've played some Vic2 in the past, around 50 hours (so not a lot for a paradox game) and liked it. But the game felt really automated to me, like the majority of time was spent waiting and fast-forwarding. And now I see some people writing about Vic3 having less gameplay options etc. (excluding warfare), where I feel like I am able to influence much more in Vic3. Am I missing something about Vic2? Because I'm honestly a little confused.
@@dielewisformel Did you have the dlc and hpm mod? Cuz basegame vic2 is pretty unplayable without dlc and mods which gives me hope for vic3, just need to wait
Paradox keeps making the same mistake, which is launching games without all of the flavor mechanics and content previous games have had, which makes the playerbase angry and more importantly bored as soon as the game launches. They’re so concerned with making games that have problems for dlcs to solve that they have completely forgotten the game needs to be good in the first place for people to want to buy dlc. It’s especially silly when modders manage routinely to fill the yawning gaps in content within fairly short time windows, shortly after these games launch. To go back to some pretty old examples, think of CK2+ for CK2, or MEIOU for EU3. Both of those mods radically improved the existing game in a way the developers could have certainly done themselves if they weren’t so worried about dripfeeding dlc. Victoria 2 was pretty much the poster child for just how much mods could improve a game. Before Victoria 3 released, almost everyone playing Vic 2 was playing a vastly improved version like GFM or TGC or Victoria Universalis, or even just normal HPM. Those were the products paradox was competing with, and they easily could have if they had wanted to, and everyone would have loved the game. However, the dlc driven model has come into major conflict with delivering a product that people will like on launch.
0:05 this is half correct. Victoria II at launch was absolutely terrible and only after many updates and patches became the game we now all fondly remember.
@@jaydenshepard7928 Sure. Vic II's team was definitely bigger and still the economy in that economy game did not work properly. The only way in that game to increase the money supply was through metal extraction (gold) and so in the mid to late game when underdeveloped nations start to pump out goods in the global market a deflationary spiral takes place every time. And still, people keep saying Vic II was a good economy game when it really was not. It was and is funky and that's it.
So let me get this straight: you made a review where you praised Victoria 3 for being a "great" game with complex, engaging diplomacy and economic mechanics; but then you realized that a large (and growing) amount of vic3 players aren't happy with the game, you got some dislikes, read some negative comments/reviews, stuck your finger in the air to see where the wind was blowing and made a SECOND review where now you're finally talking about that negatives of the game? This looks like you took a handful of money from PDX (probably around $2,000, based on subs and channel views, maybe more), made a very positive review of the game with few criticisms to appease PDX and vic3 stans, and now you want to double-dip in the good ole RUclips ad rev honey jar (you'll make around $200 in ad rev for this video) by making a video talking about all the criticisms (that you didn't even mention in your original REVIEW OF THE GAME!) to appease the people who dislike the game because of how shallow and hollow it is, knowing that they will extort them with overpriced DLC that should have been in the game to begin with. This is all speculation and might not be the case (sure looks like it, though) but if it is then I have something for you: L
I enjoy it, it's fun, not perfect but fun. The major benefit I see is unlike past titles, a vast majority of nations are pretty well idealized, including resources, parties, backstory, etc. So I think they can focus on mechanics. My only hope is they make more things that already work (Think Stellaris and origins), and don't go the way of HOIV 4 and just keep adding more and more new features that require more balance (Fuel, designers, etc). Assuming the first DLC is a flavor DLC, I think they have a lot of options. New music, new events, new interactions, etc.
@@VipdonPlays I mean your welcome to your opinion. But I enjoy it, consider it's reviews are about 50/50 at the moment, it varies person to person, but clearly everyone does not find it boring.
@@royalrugby4869 if you go to a place to eat and 50% hate the food then the food is not good. Not all games are perfect but vic 2 was good this game is not even close and killed the feeling of the old game. Hate to say anything negative but this game is going to end up like emperitor at this point and you if you don’t see it then you enjoy watching paint dry
@@VipdonPlays If you got to a place to eat, and half love it, and half hate it. Then it's personal preference. Gaming is about preference. There are plenty of games I don't enjoy, but others still do. You don't like it, understood. I do like it. Both can exist. Neither opinion invalidates the other. Paradox has already far outsold Imperator on Vicky 3 so it has support.
Not true. The experience you have of queueing buildings while looking at your market on minute 0 and opening trade routes is the same experience you will have queueing buildings and opening trade routes in hour 500, You will just learn how to do it more efficiently.
From the 25 hours i have on steam plus the 50+ hours i had on the leak it the game loop of the game doesnt change, its an empty experience devoid of any satisfaction or payout from all the building up outside of watching graphs and numbers get higher, and some people like that but that is not what a GSG game should be. Specially not a successor to Vicky2.
Victoria 3 is decent and fun on the surface and released in much better shape than most Paradox titles, but under the hood there are a lot of problems. I like the overall aesthetic, it's fairly fun at least for a while and there's a ton of potential there. HOWEVER. Every nation plays almost exactly alike. They added unnecessary granular control and micro over the economy while excusing their atrociously simple and buggy war system for wanting a lack of same. They have way too many large buttons and icons and visual fluff and wasted negative space in the UI. The info you want is usually in a totally different part of the UI than the buttons you have to press related to the info you want. There seems to be hidden mechanics that have a really high preference for 21st century political sentiment when it comes to event decisions and enacting laws even when the political support or population numbers in the game make it seem like the opposite should be the case. Diplomacy with other states boils down to either: zero interaction, trade agreement, customs union or a "diplomatic play" that leads to war. Ah yes, war. The autopilot war system, where does one even begin? Dear God where does one even begin? Zero player involvement in the system besides "Mobilize general" and "attack front" or "defend front." No way to move generals or troops outside of war time. No way to choose how much cav/inf/art you want. The automatic front lines are too simple and warp oddly all the time. Troop numbers, technology level and dice rolls entirely dictate the outcomes of battles. I understand wanting something a bit simpler than Hoi4 or Vic2 for army control, but this is honestly worse than Risk. At least in Risk you can choose the number of units to move into provinces. Overall, I'm still having enough fun with the economy aspect of the game, but in true Paradox fashion they released a DLC framework and not a game. If their updates are strong and they add more player engagement and complexity to war and diplomacy, Victoria 3 could easily become their best game and really open up the grand strategy genre to a wider audience (despite my criticisms I do like a lot of the QoL and simplifications they've made, but they took it way too far with a couple systems). If they just laugh all the way to the bank with the huge preorder sales and let the game stay on its current trajectory, we've got the next Imperator on our hands.
I think it's important to keep in mind the amount of playtime that this game has had. There has probably already been more hours played by people in the last two days than even a hundred paradox employees would have been capable of before launch. Something that may have been obvious to a random player may not have even come up in bugtesting before.
17:54 people who say this, don't understand how taxing these map games are on the CPU, it's not a lot for the GPU to to do, but these types of games are one of the few cases where 8 core CPU will make a difference in gaming.
Don't want to seem pessimistic but I see a pattern in paradox games. You can see it as greed or just a business model. Paradox releases games with a basic operating system then flesh out individual areas. I have found paradox games are best bought a year or two after release. You can find bundle deals. Eu4 being $100 for all dlc versus like $300. It also prevents getting burned like with imperator Rome.
im legally blind and ive been playing paradox for years, from eu4 to ck3 in time span. honestly, and all i have to say is it is the best ui they have made for people with eyesight problems. the contrast of colors in the style is a massive help. makes it easier for my eyes to lock onto things and focus. and cant thank them enough, we can finally change the ui without restarting the game. also im not trying to be snarky i promise but i dont get the tab issue, just always press backspace to close it by habit. ps want a difficult game play united tribes of new zealand. im using it to learn the game because all your mistakes are immediate haha, not rich only making 1 million but my people are the richest and happiest in the world and we are finally industrializing and producing motors and all the mid game stuff. know that sounds awful but starting from scratch just feels so satisfying. get the games flawed and needs work but honestly i havn't felt frustrated at the game like i did for the other games with release. im not getting bothered by the lack of content but instead im so excited for whats to come. for the first time in ages.
also tip for playing a non industralized country. its worth just going without construction yards. don't need to pay for building supplies even if it has the draw back of it taking stupidly long to build in general
I've really appreciated the work Paradox has done to add accessibility to their work, from having easily moddable typefaces to having multiple colorblind modes to the UI scaling they've been experimenting with. I'm curious, do you ever struggle to distinguish map information at the closer zoom levels? I'm not particularly vision-impaired (I wear glasses for nearsightedness and an astigmatism) but the removal of closer zooms for the political mapmodes has been very frustrating for me in their recent games, *especially* when I was trying to manage a war in Vicky 3 last night.
@@DondarfSnowbonk the main things I struggle with is that in certain map modes like the production lens, the information on enpolyment isn't always in a reasonable place. So for the longest time...I mean literally took me 12 hours to realize thr production lens showed you the unemployed population in each state. And like for decrees the are to the side of the state. I'm guessing it's mainly because I havnt played larger than two states so never needed to manage while zoomed out. But yeah ummm only one I got confused on is traxd routes in the British market. The fact that there's a tiny number to the right of the bar is not distinct enough to shoe you have a active trade there. Honestly the is the first paradox game on release that hadn't made me feel like it's hiding information on thing. Hmm trying to think what stands out was difficult to see, oh oh the fact that notifications don't appear in the center of the screen. It's On the top left or on the map itself. And when your blind you kind of get tunnel vision on the left side the screen
Just for people who don't wanna read that tangent, Finding active trade routes in a shared market, the lenses information locations on the map, Event notifications being off to the side or on the map when honestly vixtoria 2 is all about the left half of the screen. So it can just pass you by, not a complaint because I think paradox is getting too much flack. It just would be nice for an option to have the notifications right in your face again like in their other game but I get why they didn't want to do that.
Fellow stygamitism haha whats up my comrade XD. Honestly ck3 is the worst for me. The ui...it's like two uniform, Vicky and the other games had very destuingished color paletes. Like stylized I guess. But stelli and ck3 the ui all just kind of blends together my eyes can't lo onto anything. But like the building screen having the building name in that bold pale color, then the actually state to state options being broken down into that deep blueish green. Very easy to find where I want to click.
It makes sense to limit our comparisons to Victoria 2, but I think it's also important to look at the design philosophy of the game and see how it differs from what long-term Paradox fans have come to expect. When we moved from EU3 to EU4, we got a mana system, which a lot of players really hated. When we moved from HOI3 to HOI4, we lost a huge amount of intricacy and complexity. In both instances, a substantial part of players were alienated. In both bases, the games got better, more complex, and brought in veteran and new players alike. My sense with Vic3 is that Paradox is not all that interested -- for now -- in what Vicky2 veterans want to see. They'd like to see what new player base they can build with this game. At that point, they'll decide which mechanics to focus on based on player response over time. Vic2 was a fantastic game (and I likely won't be buying Vic3 for some time), but its player base was very small and its gameplay was niche. From a business sense, if I were Paradox, this is what I would be asking: "Vicky 2 wasn't commercially viable. What kind of successor would be viable?" We'll see with time.
Yeah, I don't think the changes are any kind of deliberate snub to players of Vicky 2 or anything like that, which some people seem dead-set on believing. I'm also not convinced that commercial viability was their central design consideration either (although obviously that does play a part). I think, as they laid out in their original dev diary, they decided on some central tenets and decided to build the entire game around them with modern design sensibilities. Many Vicky 2 veterans are going to be upset at this not because this is a bad way to design games or because Paradox actually dislikes them and wants to alienate them and move on to a new audience, but because it's natural for a person to get upset when something they like and have invested a lot of time into liking is replaced with something that isn't the same. Some of them eventually get over it, realize the new thing is also good in its way, and become part of the playerbase, and some of them don't.
@@DondarfSnowbonk I think you've expressed my thoughts more clearly than I! Agree 100% I think with time, the new player base will embrace richer, more complex mechanics (probably added by DLC)
There is no shortage of games I don't like. I don't buy them, and I move on with my life. I have played Victoria since it's first instance, and I am very much enjoying its third instance. I assume that like every other game I have ever played, there will be no shortage of people who don't like Victoria 3... so?
I’ve had a ton of fun playing this multiplayer, however, it’s very fragile and we found when desyncs occur you need to just go to the next month and then rejoin. It’s just not the most stable with a lot of people but still super fun and serviceable.
I’m fine with DLCs. I think the cold hard fact that most gamers ignore when hating on post-release content is that developers have bills to pay, lots of them. Most games do the bulk of their sales in the first few months, and after that it drops off greatly. People want devs to support their games for 5-10 years, and so do I, but understand that to do that they have salaries to pay, electric bills and leases, cloud infrastructure, etc. A big factor in how they can support games long term is via DLC packs that help pay for that. People already scoff at $50-60 a copy, but the reality is games would cost $100-200 minimum if the release model didn’t include future paid DLC, it’s part of how pricing has stayed where it is for 30+ years. Anyways, I’m having a ton of fun with Victoria 3. I haven’t played a Paradox game since the very first Hearts of Iron when I was a kid, and I didn’t realize how much I had missed the realm of grand strategy (I mostly play RTS and city builders). It definitely has lots of kinks to work out, but my bet is in 1-2 years it’ll be a very fun and complete game. For now I’m glad to be playing it and financially supporting the devs, early access or not.
I personally refund the game when I realized I can't have any engagement in War. I can't play a game like that if I can't use tactic or at least play with my army. I don't care too much about ui but I want my war. The frontline system is not fun, not when you compare it to Victoria 2. I believe that why there is mixed review on steam.
My problem with the game is figuring out how much I am producing and how much I need. Also how importing or exporting will actually cost. For example as the USA I started both to increase income based on the green numbers, but it ended up losing money overall. I think the UI honestly needs more work. But I am having a blast with the game. The warfare feels good to me.
Yes, the materials tab is actually quite confusing, as it jumbles together the things you produce with your imports. That'd be fine if there was an additional column with both values seperate, but there isn't. The UI overall is quite confusing, to the point that I've just resolved to try and produce whatever is the most in the minuses. Everything else can be handled by the auto-build button.
Well, it's more so a quirk of economics than a fault in the UI. When you expand an industry supply increases but demand stays the same. If you want to keep prices the same (or even raise them) you either need to create demand or lower supply. Artificial scarcity is a viable strategy for certain goods. A luxury item like wine is only consumed by the rich so keeping supply low is a good idea. Grain is consumed by everyone so ideally it should be cheap. If you create an artificial scarcity of grain you will certainly earn a lot of money but people will also starve. Iron is consumed by your industry so even if the price is high nobody is going to die. Unfortunately, if iron is too expensive your industry grinds to a halt. In iron's case we need to create demand. How do we do this? We can't just build mines since that would crash the price. If iron's too cheap the mines won't be profitable. In this case we can start a tooling industry. Tools are great since essentially every major industry requires them. When tool demand is satiated prices will drop again. Fortunately for us iron can be turned into steel. We start a steel mill which needs iron and tools so demand for tools increases again, increasing the price of iron. Now iron is too expensive and the steel mill shuts down. Not to worry, we build another iron mine. Now it's expensive enough so that tools and steel are profitable. There's no demand for steel so the factory's a bust anyways. If we're clever we start a motor industry which consumes steel... but there's no demand for motors either. This is why we build a railway. The railway increases market access, it provides plenty of jobs and it fills the basic need for transportation. To pull the carts we need trains, trains are built by the motor industry and the motor industry needs steel. If we make a surplus we can export it abroad. Suddenly all levels of your industry profit. From the mines to the railways. If you've built too much of something, find a use for it!
As a long time Paradox player I must say it took me some time to get into V3 and actually start enjoying the game. It takes a while to understand how moving the levers available to you influences the economy and politics, and how really diplomacy and warfare are really the supporting elements to the socio-economic core. The economic system I think is the best I've ever played. The UI to manage it needs improvement as the core information I want when deciding how to prioritise my construction queue (where I end up spending a lot time adding, tweaking) isn't available through the construction queue so I'm constantly having to switch. For example I haven't seen how I can tell if adding a building to a given state will push me over the infrastructure level within the state, as I'd prefer to keep that ahead of the game. I appreciate this is difficult to do and having widespread input from the player base can really help Paradox make the UI better, i.e. I think this is "good enough" for a launch. I do like the concept of the frontline based warfare, and I still think it could be made to work. At the moment though the AI and system are so utterly inept it is much more frustrating and requires more micromanagement than Hoi4 battleplans. For example, Generals seemingly randomly allocate and de-allocate from front lines where new fronts are being formed or disbanded. This just results in chaos. I have repeatedly seen all my generals abandon an active front, losing months of progress before I can reassign them. This is immensely frustrating and massively detracts from the overall experience. IMO this is so bad it should not wait for DLC to fix and Paradox should take urgent action to remediate. My suggestion is simple rules for ensuring when Generals reallocate to front lines they do so a bit more intelligently. For example the priority should be to reallocate to a front without another friendly force (present or in transit to that front). Any front with enemy forces allocated taking priority, followed by those with enemy forces en-route. If there are multiple options then the shortest redeployment time should be used. Only once all fronts have generals allocated then look at the relative strength on the front and assign to the weakest. Generals should never go to standby on their own initiative and should retain their advance/defend order. It also appears so far that the AI is equally poor at distributing its own generals across fronts, and perhaps isn't having enough generals to cover its front lines, so is relatively easy to contain on one front whilst you can push unopposed on others. So this would help the AI as much as improve the player experience.
The problem is that they changed the product. Half of Victoria I and II was Colonialism and War, that's the whole point of the Era. Now they give us something completely different.
to resolve the AI a bit they could make it a bit more aggressive or have nations have a optional real 'historical' path decision making preference mode like in hoi4
I mean, there's a lot of 10+ hours negative reviews of the game, i even saw a negative review with a 40+ hours (it was from someone that probably received the game pre launch from paradox). There's also a bunch of meme positive reviews, and i feel like people are not pointing this out. Not everyone is complaining that this game is not vic 2 or about the war tho. IMO the worst part is that everything is the same, a game like Age of History 2 has a lot more diverse content than vic 3 right now and i would rather recommend people to go play it than vic 3. EDIT: About the mobile part. When people say this game looks like a mobile game is not the same as saying this will run in a mobile device.
Very good coverage. Despite your positive feelings on the game, you gave more than enough information for me to glean that its not something I would want to buy (right now) because of how clearly you described the issues.
Hoi4 is the worst Paradox game to me and I see a great deal of comments stating people want Victoria 3 to have been HoI 4. This is very different game and it is judged too harshly by what the game is not. Naturally the game has many flaws which can and hopefully will be improved upon in the years to cone. But Victoria 3 is an economics simulator not a casual map painter like some of Paradox's other games. It is alright for Victoria 3 to exist as its own thing and should not be judged for being what it is not.
To everyone who has a complaint about the game, I recommend checking the mods. 3 days in and there are already journal fixes for Canadian unification, the Canada-US border, and keeping Egypt from claiming territories in Europe when it beats the Ottomans. That's only the start, more is to come. We MUST remember that V2 was most playable only with one of the modded reworkings of the game, and that same devotion of modders is in effect with Victoria 3.
@@Lacertos if the base game requires mods then the base game is bad. And only works as a framework for mods. Fallout 4 is like that for me. It's a bad base game, but good when modded.
@@owllegostopmotion7633 Sure, but Vic 3 doesn't *require* mods. It will be improved by mods, of course, but the base game is already good and playable.
Yeah I completely agree about the different countries. They do all feel just about the same, only different are how gov starts (same names) and what their starting states have for resources
So far the only thing that has genuinely bothered me about the game is the turmoil system, or may be just me not knowing where to look, but it's very frustrating that the game gives you so much information but at the same time, fails to tell you why your pops are angry and you just don't know what to do about it. But again, it may be just me not knowing where to look.
Previous paradox games have always been some of the peak in UI design in my opinion. One of the major rules they never broke was having almost no full screen menus, recent games slowly dropping this has been disappointing its why I didnt get CK3, especially when every one seems bloated and unessesarily empty.
The macroeconomics dont even make sense at all to me. The construction sector is entirely state owned, and will build new buildings at the cost of the state for the private sector for free. Sometimes the costs incurred by the state are offset by the investments of individuals. The private sector is entirely unable to construct anything for itself at all and relies solely on the state taking initiative. The state also mandates what is and is not imported or exported, it however cannot mandate the quantity of the specific good exported or imported. The state owns all ships that are used to transport cargo and all ports. The state is a bizzare totalitarian entity and the influence from stellaris is clear. The war system is fustrating. Having my general of 100 brigades enter a battle with only 40K men against an opponent of 70K is just silly. The way the armies teleport when their front no longer exists is also annoying. For example, I was playing as the Netherlands and fighting in Borneo. The front disapears and my army teleports back to Europe, where I have to wait two monts to send them back to Boneo, by which time the defenders have retaken all of their lost land. I then have to set up a naval invasion and wait a month for the troops to prepare their invasion. Encirclements also aren't possible, and the encircled army will just teleport away. I don't feel like saying that the Victorian era was relatively peaceful, etc, etc and is more known as a time of great progress, etc, etc is a reasonable justification for the way things have turned out. The literal second largest conflict in all of human history occurs within the game's time span. They also removed great wars. The diplomacy doesn't really make sense either. All war goals and participants within a war are decided before the war itself begins, and has no capacity for escalation after it begins. Great wars can't even occur organically. The game suffers from a lack of flavour, and for me lacks replayability. Every economy is more or less the same, and if, a player finds themself without access to certain recources they will abuse colonisation to access them easily. The game could do with some railroading as well.
Its important to note Hoi4 had very much similar issues as this at launch, for example flavor was horrible, there was like 3 focus trees in total. Now theres like 20. Not to mention mods
I really like Victoria 3, but it obviously still needs a ton of work to match historical accuracy. It's pretty fun to play though, especially some minor nations.
"Economic and political simulator" The problem is- no matter how much we try to pretend it to be otherwise, it's not. Victoria series have always been about economy, politics, diplomacy and warfare. Paradox got the balance out of whack. If Paradox really wanted to, they should have came up with a new IP, non-grand-strategy, their own version of 19th century Factorio. You get the gist. A 19th century grand strategy game from Paradox should have all the aforementioned areas (almost) equally balanced.
The war needs more spice and it's a huge departure from vic 2. its not bad, but very different. more intricate diplomatic options are needed when dealing with territory transfer imo.
The biggest problem for the warfare system for me, is that in Vic2 if you were outnumbered and outgunned you could still win if you commanded your armies well enough. In Vic3 if your behind on tech and don't have enough troops, the best you can do is make your generals defend and pray you get good dice rolls. The reason this is a problem is that the AI will for some reason take states they have no reason to take (I.E Russia taking Kyoto) making border gore and if your the victim of that you have no way to prevent it unlike vic2.
@@luciusrex I don't think you understood what I meant, I mean the current warfare system doesn't allow you to defeat powers that are more powerful than you, in Vic2 if Russia attacks as Japan for the northern islands I can outsmart them, in vic3 I can't do anything. Even if you build as many barracks and rush mil tech as fast as possible and recruit the best generals in the world you won't have enough time for it to matter. I wouldn't mind surrendering the northern islands of Japan but for whatever reason they demand random states in Japan that they shouldn't care about.
Being able to cheese the AI is not a good thing. If you’re technologically inferior and have a smaller army, you should lose. If you beeline military tech you can beat a larger opponent much more easily than you could in Vic 2
@@MonotoneCreeper I never said anything about cheesing A.I. Historically Japan defeated Russia in the Ruso-Japanese war despite having a disadvantage in technology, manpower, and resources. If you beeline mil tech as a minor nation you don't have a large enough economy to afford it on your army, which is fine and realistic but terrible with the current system.
@@itriedtochangemynamebutitd5019 Japan defeated Russia in the Russo Japanese war precisely because they had *better* military doctrine, technology and tactics. The Russian effort was a shambles, and they thought Japan was just a backwards Asian nation that they could walk over. Japan's navy was ahead of the Russians, and used Torpedo boats and modern battleships to their advantage. They didn't just park their army in a mountain and wait for the stupid AI to attack over and over despite the terrain penalty.
In theory, the idea of the warfare system is interesting. However, it really stands out when you can directly control armies in all the other Paradox games. Also, I agree that there are too many things I need to micromanage with too little information to base my decisions on. If I want to upgrade my mines with the latest tech, it never seems easy to find whether my economy is producing enough of the materials needed to do that.
I think it's a reflection of the way wars were fought during the time period. HOI4 doesn't allow you to control your troops either and the main wars in both games (American civil war, ww1 and ww2) were, historically, where wars began to be won by industrial output rather than manpower
@@stephenchurch1784 that's not true, sure industry had a big role in the wars in the Victorian Era but tactics and strategy played still played a major role. Example: Parley from industrial perspective the south didn't stand a chance against the north, but becouse of generals like Lee who were veterans from the Mexican-american war the south repeatedly beat multiple union armies in North verginia. Franco Prussian war was also Wan by generals and the military (it lasted about 1 year I belive, although the war was decided in just a few major engagements, the rest was cleaning up) It is not till 1915 does industry really kick in as a deciding factor. Becouse belive it or not Germany had a good chance of victory in the beginning year but tha definitely as time passed and attrition kicked in. All this to say Vic 2 reflected that reality well. While Vic 3 by removing the warfare system failed from the get go. Why? Giving the player agency over the military allows a chance to win against a stronger opponent, wich is what characterized the Civil War and the Franco Prussian war.
I have to agree with all that was said. I can really live with most of the smaller "issues" and feel like its a base for an amazing game to come (like all Paradox games on release). One thing that never really seems to come up is the atmosphere. The Music and graphics are just amazing for this size of a game. When ever I play I just feel pulled in. I think once the war system gets a rework (which I actually don't mind it, though I wish I could micromanage more from a higher up level and not like HOI) and we add difference between regions and countries to make them play differently, then I feel it would be one of the better if not best game of this type out there.
Thank you for this video! I'm playing the Victoria series for the first time after taking my first real dive into these sort of games with Crusader Kings 3, and I'm loving it. Its dense, it feels VERY different from Stellaris and CK3, and the art and music is wonderful. I absolutely see where it needs to have things filled in and added, but I have no doubt that will happen over time with expansions and free updates. I know some people are frustrated not everything came through from Victoria 2, but for me as a new player this is an amazing entry point in.
Well said! I’m a brand new player to Victoria, and haven’t played a PDX game since the very first Hearts of Iron when I was a kid. I’m absolutely loving this game but agree with everyone that the UI is junk and needs some big improvements. The biggest thing I keep wondering about people comparing 2 to 3 is that 2 had a ton of DLCs, so are those people comparing vanilla 2, or 2 after years of improvement? I suspect after a year or two people will look at Victoria 3 as a masterpiece. Glad we’re all getting to play, even if it’s not fully baked yet.
@@MeticulousTechTV you're both too new. You think Vicky 2 has years of work in lmao, no it got two DLCs and that's it yet it's still better than this piece of shit
@@MeticulousTechTV they started milking dlc after vic 2 I think ck2 was the first game they did this in so vic 2 only has two dlcs, it dose have updates but not too many dlc Also the idea that the game will be seen as a masterpiece in a year or 2 is far off and sounds what people where saying about imparator Rome when it was a mess at it's release
I'm brand new to the game/franchise, but something that's bugging me and I'm curious if they'll fix/add complexity to with DLC is the lack of historical texture, re: royal marriages/bloodlines/key figures. I tried playing as Austria and kept waiting for Empress Elisabeth to factor into the game but... she doesn't. Instead I got a bug where the Kaiser who actually abdicated in favor of his son just... kept living/ruling until he was 80 and I finally figured out a cheat code to kill him. It's such a missed opportunity to have an Empress Sisi buff that would factor into the Hungary part of the game, as happened in actual history. I'd love an "overthrow monarch" option/install a regency option. If I'm playing as Bayern, I want to look forward to Mad King Ludwig II! If I were to jump into a Russia play, I want to see the real ramifications of all those Romanov quirks (and succession of dying tsars making poor choices). Marriage alliances were just such a thing in Europe but that aspect of politics is absent and as a fresh player I was surprised (b/c Europa Universalis did have that). In the long run, that lack of historical complexity is going to bug me more and more, I suspect.
Having played some, but still not extensively enough to be extensive, my impressions so far: - Some things are much easier to visualize compared to Vicky 2, yet some things I still can't figure out like in the Law UI. - The war system does make sense for the era and scale, Vicky 2 wars could get pretty large and was very easy to cheese. Just place some guards on mountains, GG you win all wars. New war system does capture that warfare is changing towards a frontage style of war that we would see with WW2 (HOI). But it is also pretty era accurate that armies were becoming too large for generals to micro manage like throughout history going all the way through to Napoleonic era. So, it does take away the player's micro and also just bypasses cheese strats... which I can see why it upsets some players. Instead it focuses on the prep-work going into the war, economy, trade, and relations play a big part. In multiplayer that means plots, secret agreements, betrayals, etc rather than being an encirclement micro master. - The naval side I havn't had time to get into yet, does seem pretty limited there. - I started with persia and sokoto to learn some very small economies and early techs... and yes you do feel like you arn't different from a modernized/westernized nation. Reforms are flavored the same as western nations and quite generic. Which isn't terrible, but I can see why it feels shallow. - Single player AI seems whack, as Persia I ended up joining the Russian market to see what it'll be like... big mistake, -3,000 wood trade deficit from over trading. Dx So I assume they suck at getting supplies needed for running their economy and military.
One thing with most of the steam reviews. Most are less than 5 hours. I have played 8 and I feel hardly able to give a review of the game yet. After maybe 200 I will but people are judging it far to quickly.
@@snowbear163 Yup. People aren't even trying to learn or understand the game and are just hating it for it not being like the last game or the fact the combat system is not hoi4. Looking at people like TommyKay who hated it at the start but then since it was kinda his job had to keep playing it for content, You can see how even he started warming up to the game.
@@snowbear163 How much do you think most of those people either 1. Never played a paradox game before in their lives, or 2. Played hoi4 and thought it would just be something like that without the micro managing of armies.
My first playthrough has been as Spain and many of the criticisms I have lineup with this video. It doesn't feel like Spain is very unique despite its position during the time periods of the game. I do have a lot of settings on the low end since I am still trying to practice with the system, but even then there isn't a lot of missions/decisions/events that make it feel unique. I do think this game could be great. I just wish they took more time with it.
I think the best way to put it is that the various nations have a lack of identity. There are some that are good: Greece forming Byzantium, the Ottomans, Canada, New Grenada with grand Columbia, United central America, etc. But the biggest issues I have with the game is flatly that, despite all the menus and options, some information is just extremely opaque. An example: turmoil. Sometimes when you conquer a new nation, you have turmoil that fades as they adjust to the new reality. Other times, it just... lingers. Why? What's causing the turmoil? Or as many have complained, randomly your nation will just hit a downward economic spiral out of nowhere. It can require going over your economy with a fine toothed comb to figure out what caused that just to find out you ran into a lumber shortage and everything ground to a halt. Sometimes the game will inform you of why it happened, other times it doesn't. I like the game, and feel in time with updates, I could grow to love it. But it definitely feels like it needed a few more months of in depth development and fleshing out.
A lot of people complaining about the war system also are under false assumptions of what Victoria 3 is. Ex. I am France playing with Belgium and Bavaria. Bavaria is trying to unite southern Germany and has decided to take a militaristic approach. Due to the functions in the game nearly any nation with an interest in a region can join wars (especially in Europe). Bavaria did not understand this, and when they went to war with everyone in Germany and got the world crashing down on them, they said the game and war system was broken, unpolished, and “stupid”. Meanwhile my experience with war has been nothing but a good because I am taking into account of my own strength militarily and economically; choosing my battles. I encourage people to buy the game and don’t be a Bavaria.
I still don't understand how it's acceptable to think "Well, the systems not up to scratch but it'll be fixed/improved in a DLC"... DLC should add MORE content to a game, not tweak or change it because it wasn't working well in the first place. You're essentially making customers pay for a redesigned system. The WAR system is fine, but it needs WAY more depth. I don't mind that it isn't micro-managing, but the whole "War isn't the focus of this game" is ridiculous. War and Diplomacy go hand in hand, and there were many wars (including WW1) that were significant in shaping the political and economic side of things. Also, the player needs to be less micro on the industry, yes, you should be allowed to micro your economy. But you should also be able to take a hands off approach without the AI imploding your nations economy. Also, there was a point early on that the devs pointed out that "Everything that can be achieved through war should be achievable through diplomacy". That means taking states, trading, ousting governments etc. Which afaik very little of that can you do via diplomacy.
I think while people should be criticizing the game to make it into the best version of itself as possible. People also seem to be giving up on the game, making assumptions that the game will never get better. Now while paradox may be money hungry, one thing that is consistent about them is that they tend to maintain their mainstream titles with constant updates and Victoria 3 is like their entire personality right now so it’s clear Vic3 will be getting updates ASAP.
Imperator exists too. I don't think they will abandon Vic3 though but the precedent is certainly there. Imperator has actually solid foundations and could have been a great game, it suffers from lack of content. It is unacceptable that Paradox still releases games devoid of any flavor or content.
@@mehawimes629 Imperator aka Europa Unversalis: Rome 2 was always a side-game (to the point people were legitimately surprised it got a sequel as EU:R has always been a niche bastard child of CK and EU), not a main grand campaign title.
I never Had so much fun and felt so Connected with the Nations you Play in an Paradox Game. In generall it is a such well done experience turning a medival state into a Nation
"It's not a bad thing" yes it is, they made a horrible war system that you have almost no control over and then in a year they will "fix" it with a $20 DLC when they should have just made it good from the start. I would not be shocked if they made some things worse just so they could charge for the solution in a DLC later, it is paradox after all...They can make some decent games but the DLC practice is just horrible, it's basically the sims.
Vic 3 is a great game, let's install patch 1.0.0 to see how junky it originally was - time traveler from 2025. Check out original versions of Eu4 or hoi4
As someone who has played EU4/CK/HOI4 I really like the war system in this. Stack warfare is such a pain in the butt and so annoying. It takes away from the immersion of the game itself. I hope they keep it the way it is but no doubt enough people shout they will dlc it at some point...
I just really hope they overhaul the visuals of the war system, i personally think the hands off approach is *fine* but sometimes it difficult to visualize what’s happening. Make the occupation zones and ring of war more clear and distinct and have more VFX going on and maybe models to spruce it up and I think it’ll be satisfactory
I agree with this 100% I think the hands off approach is welcome, it's different to everything we've had before and it's a breath of fresh air in that sense. But you are right, seeing the towns begin to burn and crumble, seeing artillery explosions taking place along the line leaving behind it destroyed trees, ruined earth and small craters and then seeing them slowly normalise over time would be brilliant. If we are essentially being asked to watch the wars play out then they should at least make it a somewhat cinematic and engaging experience to do so. But, even though I am still learning the game, and the warfare is visually dull, I am really enjoying it and it really is one of the most beautiful games I have ever played.
I personally love the game and have very little to complain about it to be completely honest (Although I did have one bug where I was an ally in a war, we won the war but my ally and the enemy never set peace terms for months upon months and it got to the stage where I had to choose between capitulate or go into gold reserve debt and eventually bankruptcy, so I capitulated...luckily no war goals were set against me). I haven't played Victoria 2 although I do enjoy Crusader Kings 3 thoroughly and I do like Hearts of Iron 4 as well and to a lesser extent Stellaris (only because I'm more into historicals, it's a good game). I find the CK3 hovering over highlighted words to bring up a box which you can go into box into box very helpful for me to see exactly what that thing is and means and all of the information about it and I was glad to see it in Victoria 3. I also enjoy the wars a lot, I was able to hold off France as Belgium during the war I mentioned earlier in the comment because I had a technologically superior army despite them having more numbers of low quality troops. I also took some land from the Netherlands and freed Luxembourg, I find it quite fun and rewarding. I also enjoy balancing the buildings that I have and their productions, I enjoy having to balance inputs and outputs within my market and the global market. As for the AI, I'm not personally too skilled strategy games and I don't necessarily try to be. I don't know or look up metas or watch videos past beginners guides, I usually set myself some goals and go out to try achieve them, they might be far from optimal and sometimes its so bad that I get clipped back severely or straight up lose but I have fun regardless and I find normal to be enough of a challenge for me in CK3 and HOI4 so I don't expect it to be different here and so far it hasn't been. Overall in my opinion, I really like Victoria 3 and there is literally nothing in the world absolutely perfect, nothing. Perfection is impossible. However I do think that its a solid game and nothing inherently wrong with Victoria 3 and is a fantastic base for future updates and content additions from Paradox as they build upon the absolutely solid foundations they've laid. I'd give it an 8/10.
The only real dealbreaker for me is the War System. It completely breaks my immersion and my fun. It makes no fucking sense, its completely disengaging and clunky and I just hate everything about it. When I first heard about frontlines I was thinking of the great implementation of Hoi4 but man this is nothing like it. It bothered me so much that I actually refunded the game, my first paradox game where I did this. I will wait until that is fixed.
I knew many months ago that this was likely how this game was gonna be. Kind of a Paradox trait at this point to release a very buggy, incomplete, and unrefined game then slowly improve it over 3 years with 20 different paid expansions and updates just to get it to the state it should have been in at launch. That's why I was not in a rush to buy this game, nor had any reason to pre-order it. I'd rather play it in the state that it should be in, even if that means waiting a bit.
"emergent gameplay" is just bad if its only that, for exempla: The AI simple cant forme Imperial Japan, they simple cant, its impossibel to it, and this is one of the most important events of the era, paradox even sponsored a video about that to market vic3
This was a nice and refreshing level headed take on Victoria 3. Thank you, I think a lot of the criticism has been unfair and the mixed rating on steam is low. I agreed when it was 70-75% but it is better then a mixed.
So my thoughts on the game so far, it’s good, needs dlc to flesh it out like every paradox game. The reviews should be more in the first week or so, you need very little time to hate a game for bugs, crashes or issues, you need maybe a couple hours to hate the gameplay. You might need 50 hours to leave a proper good review, a positive review with 2 hours played means literally nothing to me, it’s like when you look at factorio and see a positive review with like 40,000 hours played you know that their option matters.
@@atlas4536 nah the game is still good, I’ll get my money worth out of it, but like every paradox game dlc will take it to the next level. Or mods, but I don’t often mod my paradox games, I know it’s a slippery slope and I’ll end up spending more time looking for mods than playing.
@@nicholasoneal1521 How do you determine if you got your moneys worth? I paid $50 Canadian for Vic 3. If I put in over 50 hours and enjoyed that time, then it was worth it. If I then buy a DLC and put in more time, then its worth it. I seen tons of games that are rated good and people (like myself) put in a couple hours and never go back.
once you learn the game deep enought to maintain everything in your market and slowly build a great economy, its all fun, this game is one of the best iv played so far(I played thousand of games especially grand strategies) , as paradox said this game is all about the economy, politics, and society....not wars not anything else
So far, I like what I am seeing but I probably won't buy it until there has been some updates and a dlc or two. What I think Vic 3 needs is more flavor. The 19th and early 20th Century were such pivotal and explosive times in world history. So many things and events happened, which need to be in the game or implemented in some way. I know there are revolutions that can happen but it doesn't seem to be much depth to them. Like France was in such a time of turmoil and revolutions, this needs to be added. The German Revolutions as well. I'm sure more of these things will be added as the game progresses, but it's missing flavor. Also, I would love to have more control of the army. Like I want to see the troops moving and how I can help win a battle. Also, I need a rework of fronts. They seem to chaotic and unorganized. Overall I'm impressed, just need more!
I don’t see a controversy. I see people who wanted Vichy 2 with an updated UI whining and complaining as if there were thirty other companies who make games like this. Vichy 3 is much better than Vichy 2. The only thing 2 had that 3 is lacking is the way the major empires practiced imperialism on the minors. 3 doesn’t hVe the same feel.
I’m absolutely loving it personally, but objectively it needs a lotta work. Even stuff i love has problems, I fully acknowledge that. So said problems affect my enjoyment of it? No. But I know why they affect it for others, and it definitely needs to work on making it so as many people can enjoy it as possible.
Edit; geez didn’t expect to get this many likes. I’m just some dude putting his thoughts out there. Thanks!!!
I mean you would like it if they were fixed yes so they do affect your enjoyment in some way right
@@PrettierNPastel yes of course. I shoulda worded that better.
The problem is not my enojoyment. I would probably enjoy it, but does it offer enough for you to unfasten your pursestrings. And the answer should be a resounding no. Atleast when you understand that buying this game will only embolden paradox to release their next title in even more of a unfeautered and unfinished state.
If we keep buying their alpha-builds masquarading as games they are only going to get worse.
@@generictotheextreme2566 sail the high seas for now like I do until the "actual" game comes out
@MikeProductions1000 there’s kinda strata tax levels in the laws. Land tax for example is way worse for the peasants
The amount of micro-management in this game makes USSR's economy look like an ancapistan.
This is Wiz at work. Stellaris wasn't good until he was no longer the head of that project.
Command economy should be unlocked and default for every nation.
@@NB-yu4lj micro managing wars was my biggest issue with the game but i wanted that mechanic improved not removed. Victoria 3 is soooo much more micro managee than vic2, manually improve the guns, buy every recource on your own, build the roads, etc. vic2 had some bad parts i am not saying it was perfect but its better than v3 by a looooong shoot and that game is a decade old
I love it, then again most games I play are basically excel spreadsheets with fancy graphics.
@@BigBossJ
Hard disagree, the turn Stellaris took was absolute dogshit and I will never touch it again because of it.
My top 3 fixes in the future is a reworked UI, make war less janky (stop the fracturing of front lines and naval invasions more understandable), make countries have more specific events and modifiers so countries feel different.
PS: Probably should have added this but I like the game and have high hopes. Also for “reworked UI” I meant I spend too much time going through tabs and finding specific info in hard to reach places.
makes sense, I don't understand why some people are up in arms about the UI but I acknowledge it needs some improvements
Don't worry you'll be able to buy all that over the next 5 years
The UI is fine
Hopefully this get's the EU IV Treatment and we get years of updates, DLCs, hotfixes and Patches further increasing the depth of the game, fixing issues, etc. etc.
Not sure how much you played but really digging into different countries, they feel different by mechanics and not some weird ad on. Like I chose Chile as my tutorial nation and I was completely stunned about how different that country played out vs Belgium, another tutorial nation.
imo add ons and country specific modifiers only exist when the game mechanics dont do a good job of inherently conveying it, and V3 does a damn good job.
It’s not the Victoria 3 controversy, it’s the Paradox controversy.
Imperator, CK3, and Now Vic3, yeah they are spitting out new titles as if they were EA and they fail to bring what we love with these games, a difficult steep learning curve and endless replayability as the AI decisions will also effect you in a unique way each time around.
I really get the sense that Paradox hates their core playerbase and wants to replace them with casual GSG-newbies that just like games like Ck3 for the dumb reddit memes. Hard not to get this sense with how passive-aggressive they are in the dev blogs and how the company got rid of its old-guard of developers and is now run by people from the mobile game market. What they fail to realize is the fair-weather fans will stop playing after a week or two just like with Imperator
@@Chickidydow Imperator Rome is honestly even more tragic when you consider how much it’s been improved since release. It had so much potential, and I honestly believe that if it was released as it is now at launch it would’ve been a hit. I don’t think paradox will abandon Victoria 3 tbh. It’s the newest game in one of their staple franchises, so here’s hoping they patch it up and make it good.
@@thumbus4526 That’s the controversy I’m talking about. The last big updates for their other games have been pretty tepid too so unless they start making major updates for free I will remain unimpressed.
@@putz5872 I mean, the most recent eu4 update has been heralded by a large part of the player base as the best state the games ever been in with literally thousands of interesting playthrough concepts.
The main issue eu4 has at the moment is performance. As a single core game from that's over 9 years old, and the sheer amount of expansions and content additions, it struggles on a wide array of pc's. Even ones that ostensibly should play it quite well.
About that warfare DLC speculation: didn't paradox recently state, that they don't want to split their community through DLC anymore, only release payed flavor packs and finance further mechanical updates for everyone that way? Which is exactly what the last event pack for CK3 was.
DLC can be free or paid, don’t forget
One of the devs mentioned that the war system isn't permanent and it was the kind of vibe the devs give when pointing at a potential DLC. So yeah, there's going to get a DLC about war.
Which is kind of insane when you look at how CK3 disappointingly turning out. It's still relatively bare bones compared to its predecessor with the mods carrying it hard.
I played ck2 but still can’t understand why is it better than ck3
Tbh recent hoi4 was that way, only flavour for countries came with dlcs, mechanics come from updates. They even moved some dlc mechanics to base game. Mods add way more flavour than dlcs can do anyway.
The moment you realise the game doesn't pause when you get an event and can't change that in the options...
... just move your eyes, check the time thing and if it's moving just press space bro, not that hard, jesus.
@@JamazVu On an ultrawide? It's a simple QoL thing that is in ALL of their other games, why omit it here? Indicates this was a rush job to get it out for Christmas
@@JamazVu This has been a standard QoL feature in previous Paradox titles, down to being able to customize what type of events do and don't pause the game. It's hardly a big ask to expect it to be in Vic 3.
@@JamazVu just add a pause when getting events option in the settings, not that hard, jesus.
@@JamazVu cattle. Continue to consume.
I just want to thank Vicky 3 for getting me into Vicky 2
Good for you man, if you can get through the 12 year old jank and clunkiness its a great game, I usually don't try to recommend it to newcomers any more though because most people will see the UI and be intimidated.
@@florianphilipps2370 yeah originally the UI did turn me off of the game but I tried it again, went through all the tutorials, and I only have about 10 hours in the game now but I can definitely see myself playing it more
@Li F same.
Creating the divisions and building infrastructure etc always put me off, there just seems to be too much arbitrary nonsense for the meta that the game never actually tells you, you just have to go look it up for yourself. I never got the warfare down either, just wouldn’t work for me.
It took me a while to get into EU4 too after trying multiple times and giving up.
People always say VicII and CKII are two of the hardest ones to learn but they were the easiest for me.
Everyone has that one or two paradox game(s) they’ve tried to get into a bunch of times and just never could and it’s always different for everyone.
Me too
@@florianphilipps2370 I think both DLCs + either Blood and Iron or ccHFM mod is needed for sure. Vanilla is cursed, DLCs and mods makes it great imo
It’s when if the “wait for updates” moments same thing happened to hoi4 until they fixed basically everything.
Because that’s certainly what happened to IR…
Ka ching may friend
@@moonshinei IR is what happens when people aren’t interested enough in the product as it is, to wait.
@@theanonymousmrgrape5911 We can look at what’s happening now to CK3 for a guide too; they have had one flavor DLC to focus on an area in total and it still lags far behind CK2 on key features that should’ve been in the game in the first place. I guess we’ll just have to wait $200 for Vic3 to be any decent
@@moonshinei oh I’m well aware, and I don’t like that model. I’m still not that big a fan of ck3 despite the fact that I’ve put somewhere around 3,000 hours into the previous game.
A lot of people seem to play it, though, despite its many issues, so for some games their model seems to be working much better than for others.
One gripe I have about dlcs in modern games is that more and more games are being released as somewhat lacking or unfinished, and the developing teams use dlcs as an excuse to patch it up.
That wasn't the case back in the day... dlcs were additions on top of the already complete content, that fleshed it out further. They didn't exist as necessities or bugfixes
It's more that they feel obligated to make DLC for every game that releases, pencil pushing to brass demand they make the games consistently profitable, Dev's stick to the easy solution which is keep actual content for DLC, otherwise if they release a full and functional game, they might run dry on ideas of what to add/rework which would be worth (or appear worth) a DLC. It's tragic, but I feel it's just head Dev's licking the boots of the top brass because they want to keep their jobs and the PDX corporate heads mandate that the money must flow upwards into their pockets.
yeah but a good chunk of games back then was also just shit. And they had to stay that way forever with no way of using their potential
Yes but back in the day minor companies from Stockholm couldn't release games like these either. So you are nostalgic for a time where EA and Activision and the like were the gatekeepers of what could be published.
Do you consider Victoria 2 as "back in the day" or do you include it in the modern game category. If you think it is "back in the day" then how do you explain that the vanilla non dlc Victoria 2 is limited to version 1.3 where the most recent version is 3.04. The only way to get 3.04 is to buy both Heart of Darkness and A House Divided dlc. The dlc for Victoria 2 includes not only new features but balance and bug fixes. If you have the base game only, you are stuck with all the old bugs and bad balance.
Victoria 3 will at least include bug fixes, balance changes and new features with the free updates as all newer paradox games do. That is an improvement on the Victoria 2 dlc model.
It doesn't make Victoria 3 DLC model ok, just better than Victoria 2.
@@dexulescu I'm not going to comment on the DLC system for all games but the way I like to look at it with paradox is I will play their games for years with over 3000hours on eu4 compare that to any other game without DLC or what you'd call fully fleshed out like rdr2 i have maybe 60 hours. the constant updates and new features to keep the game fresh is what makes paradox games so great and the ability to add new things and change things that aren't as fun with the game is what makes them so good. there's no better game testing then that from the consumers. I'll happily keep paying for new content to support the developers but i do agree with some of the problems people have had in the past especially when the new DLC creates bugs but i don't think I'll ever fully understand people's hatred for the DLC system as a whole.
To be honest I am not so much against the ways are fought in this game. However, having played somewhere around 10 hours now, I have the feeling that the interactions with the other countries don't feel as intrecate as I hoped for. With EU4 there is a much clearer dynamic of creating oppertunistic allies and it is much clearer which countries like each other and which don't.
Here the interactions with the other countries feel a bit bland. It often is a bit random and there are many click necessary to find information about the network of relations
Countries are also prone to change their mind on a dime, somewhat like allies desiring your land in EU4 before trust was introduced. I was allied to GB for a few years, until they suddenly backed an African native against me out of nowhere.
@@Oujouj426 Victoria 2 had a similar problem. GPS would randomly break their alliance with you all the time
GPs*
The war system is very jankky and I feel there are a lot of things hidden behind the miasma of numbers, etc. Overall, for an economic sim it's decent. I'm having fun with what it is.
I mean it’s a new system so it’s going to take time for people to learn it
@@Lady_Amelia-Eloise yeah but even still there’s some stuff I’d probably want to change abt the mechanics/UI just to make it clearer to the player what’s being conveyed and to make it a more interesting option while still retaining the feel of what the game is going for. Stuff like more interesting logistics, theaters, better fronts, and an officer pool mechanic (HOI3 OOB MICRO LETSSS GOOOOO) could all do a lot to make war a more interesting (but not necessarily ‘good’) option.
Imo tho I think a military revamp should actually be a lower priority to other fixes/reworks of systems. The UI and AI both need heavy duty overhauls first. I can see what the devs were going for w some of the choices but there’s one or a few really frustrating decisions that I really thing are causing a lot of players grief because they don’t have the right info available except hidden by tooltips within tooltips. After that I honestly think diplomacy should come as next on the list. Most players in Vicky 3 are going to spend it at peace going through the Econ and diplomacy menus, so I’d want to see some more satisfying options present to make the diplo game a legit strat.
Having talked and interacted w the devs on discord tho, I’m pretty happy with how they’ve communicated and what they’ve explained abt the choices they’ve made. During the IR launch there was definitely a feeling of ‘oh shit are we going to be okay’ from both devs and players, whereas here I just see more of “yeah dw we’ve put that UI change into the next patch, and we already know the problem areas.” In all honesty I think those in the know expected this launch and knew the game needs more in the way of polish, but that the core of it was good.
I find it weird they didn't include any economic system other than a command economy. I find it strange cause Vicky 2 did this very well. I don't know if this was design or coding issues.
@@patmccall1818 “Vicky 2 did it well” okay lmfao let’s not get too ahead of ourselves.
@@Vee_9001 it did not every country in 1856 was the USSR
I actually liked it. If you are looking for a war game, it is a bad idea. But as a society building Sim, it was actually nice.
I agree. I kinda wanted a cities skylines meets paradox game sim. My only complaint is it's a lot of "do X to make your numbers go up" and it's kinda....predictablr
Politics is only thing its good at. The economic system is unrealistic since every nation is essentially a command economy, you are unable to stockpile resources and your money caps once you fill up your vault. The diplo system is garbage since you cant reduce another nations influence on a certain region and nations on the other side of the planet will get involved in a conflict that gives them no benefit.
@@jready1455 I actually think not being able to stockpile money is a good thing. Besides you CAN stockpile quite a lot, but there is a cap, and that makes sense. If a government was just sitting on MASSIVE stockpiles, like idk 10 years of their GDP, their currency would probably suffer because of inflation. Ofc there is some other economy stuff which could and should be better, I think it’s a bit silly that your economy collapses throughout your entire nation because you’re building a food factory in one state for instance. As for things being predictable, I mean, yeah? It’s the industrial revolution, it’s not really like you can industrialise without coal and iron… also that criticism holds true for Victoria 2 as well.
Paradox always advertised it as a society builder sim, not a war game. I really do not understand why people expected otherwise.
@@FilAnd01 why not add inverse inflation simulation where your stockpile gets deflated (inflating all prices will create a mess)
Just fix the problem of European armies being able to teleport across a 2,000km ocean in 60 days and this game will be perfect for me.
If you don’t know already there’s a bug to teleport your army’s, click a general, have him defend a front, then switch to have him attacking that front, and boom he should be teleported anywhere in the world
@@burtreynolds8030 nothing personal kid as the entire British army teleports into Beijing
Maybe I misunderstand what you mean, but traversing 2000 km in 60 days means an average speed of 0.75 knots. Ships at that time rarely traveled at an average speed of below 6 knots. So, ships were much faster in reality 200 years ago what you describe as 'teleporting' in the game.
If anything it should be faster because the average travel time for a ship to travel from Britain to most places in the world in the 1800’s was about 30-50 days
@@secworld3644 It’s just because we can’t see little army models moving that people feel like it’s teleporting. That and being used to something like EU4 travel when it takes like 2 months to travel from Alexandria to Constantinople
A lot of the criticism for the game comes from the Vicky 2 community. The game itself isn’t objectively bad at the core, but it’s a Victoria game in name only. It’s not a true sequel to Vicky 2 and I think that upset a lot of people, which is totally understandable.
Criticism seems to be that paradox removed the things that made Vicky 2 unique when all they really wanted was a more updated and modernized Victoria 2. We’ll see how this game holds up over the next few months, but I’m worried this may get the imperator Rome treatment.
If it dies, it dies. Paradox has been cruising for this kind of failure for a while now.
Like you said at it's core this is a pretty good game i wouldn't say that about Imperator on release and even with mixed reviews its still 20-30% better than Imperator was at its lows.
All i want is unit model in vic3 event if it doesnt do hoi4 and vic2 mechanic i just want to see my soldier instead all i see is fort vs fort during battle lol
As someone who has 1100 hours in Vicky 2 I guess I’m one of the Vicky 2 people.
The main grip I have is that they really ruined the geopolitics of the Victorian era. The Victorian era was defined by a careful balancing act that made sure the great powers never fought colossal wars in the same vain as the napoleonic/revolutionary wars.
That just isn’t a factor in ‘Vicky’ 3 and if they had made politics and diplomacy actually engaging I don’t think I would have been nearly as mad about the terrible war system.
Overall the gutting of the geopolitics is a crime and Victoria 3 is not a Victoria game. It’s an economic sim that doesn’t even do that as well as Victoria 2 did… overall it’s immensely disappointing and I’d rather it not exist at all as a Victoria game. They just used the name for marketing
@@KentMansley_Noticer Fr lol, I never even played Vicky 2 yet I get annoyed how the supposed sequel does something entirely different from it's predecessor. Why not just make a new IP if you really wanted to make a more economically focused game? Because of this crap, we got the miserably awful war system that doesn't even represent the Victorian era. Need I mention the lack of Westernization
One of my main issues is that it is a command economy simulator. What I liked about vic 2 was that pops made factories and buildings. If Vic 3 did what vic 2 did in that regard, I would have less issue with the game. As it stands, I don't feel like I'm running a free-market capitalist economy
The game was 100% made by a socialist economist. You can tell by a lot of the policies and there effect.
@@HARMstudio6 I mean the system they have is cool if you wanted total control
@@007eagletalon Ya I agree I’m just saying the game 100% incentivizes planned economies.
Redditors will kill you for saying that.
@@HARMstudio6 it doesnt. Lassiez faire law can be quite good.
I think my main problem with the game are ALL THE TABS. I get lost sometimes and then I'm like "wait, did I pass that law or did I miss it" or "Wait why is this interest group angry- oh I forgot to click them"
I played for 20 minutes, I think it's possible to learn and get better, but I simply care more about warfare. The fact that it is completely passive and very underwhelming is disappointing. I literally see no point in this game. For me at least.
@@Ealdorman_of_Mercia A fair point. I just got done playing Serbia until 1858 to kind of get used to the economic and political mechanics without having to worry about a massive empire and ambitions. Was kind of disappointed by the fact that 48 revolutions didn't kick off
@@Ealdorman_of_Mercia That's so true
@@Ealdorman_of_Mercia it's just no game for you. Meanwhile I hate Hoi4 because warfare is boring to me
@@charliethenecromancer4422 They didn't for you? Every GP had a communist or proletariat revolution in my game around the 1890s. Maybe you didn't notice it because these revolutions are fucking broken and result in a communist revolution with an absolutist monarchy government. But, hey, even if they end up actually communist, they don't really differ all that much from all the other tags.
I feel like the main issue is that this latest version doesn’t have the soul of Victoria. Core mechanics from Victoria 2 have either been fully removed or super simplified. For example, capitalists just don’t exist in this game. Even though Victoria 2 had a working system with capitalists and the fact that this was historically when capitalism started to become the dominant economic system. I really want Vic 3 to succeed but right it feels as a more shallow version of Vic 2 with a nice map.
Capitalists do exist in Vicky 3. They contribute to your investment pool which is used to fun construction.
@@MonotoneCreeper but capitalists would build factories for you in Vicky 2. It was cool starting of the game with no capitalists most of time and slowly getting more of them to the point that the economy ran itself.
@@gamerrevolutionary6615 I mean capitalist autobuiod in Vicky 2 was ass. Building random shit anywhere and everywhere. Main reason I never liked playing US in that game, you can't go state capitalism.
@@gamerrevolutionary6615 You can still autobuild and basically let the economy run itself. The only difference now is that you don't have to hope that capitalists won't open a random factory that is never going to get input goods. Capitalists were dumb in V2
Hope this game dies
The issue with "economic and political simulator" is that it turns Victoria 3 into...not Victoria 3. As in not the long awaited and memed sequel to vicky2. A big part of what made Vic2 so great conceptually was the balancing of focus, it was not HoI which is focussed on one specific war, and it is not Anno 1800 but in a menu. Warfare was a very big part of Vic2, that gets shit on (in recent times, this has literally never been a point of discussion before the new warfare system was introduced by paradox) mostly because it has not been updated with the QoL that the games paradox supported more have received. Paradox didn't make Victoria 2 what it was, Victoria 2 pulled through DESPITE being the neglected child of the pdx franchise.
And this is the crux for a lot of Vic2 players I have talked to. Conceptually, Victoria 3 is completely removed from Victoria 2. The Design Philosophy is unrecognizable, and it is evident in the way the games have been marketed. Victoria 2's main banner is Otto von Bismarck, leading troops himself. Victoria 3 instead has 2 people holding newspapers and looking happy. Victoria 3 is not trying to be a Grand Strategy Game in the traditional sense, Victoria 3 is its own new and to me very strange niche of Economic Simulator on a GSG style world map, with a ton of annoying menus. To me, Victoria 3 is essentially a mix of Anno 1800 and Realpolitiks (the warfare system honestly feels like it has been inspired by that mess lmao). Had they not called this game Vic3, I would not have objected to their decisions. The warfare system would still be boring, but it would be understandable that it is not what the game is actually about. But Victoria 3 SHOULD NOT be a "national gardening economic political simulator". It should be a Grand Strategy Game about the Age of Imperialism. That is what Victoria 2 was. Sequels are fine to change the concept somewhat. Sequels are not fine to be a completely different genre of game.
Hmm..."national gardening economic political simulator" is what I tried to play Vic2 as.
Is it wrong that I am reading your complaints as a positive review? :P
To each their own.
I do sympathize though with the frustration of a series diverging from what you loved it for.
God I hate that in 2016 to the present, the main customers of PDX games became soyboys who live off their parents and have literally nothing in common with the old fans. Victoria 3 is a bust. No, it won't get better, and I wish you knew how bad things really were.
@@David-bh7hs to each their own
@@David-bh7hs I _AM_ an old fan. I've been a player of paradox titles since Europa Universalis 2, and remember excitedly playing the Victoria 2 demo, seeing all the things they changed from the original.
What made Victoria unique wasn't its combat system, but the economic and social engine behind it. I'm glad they doubled down on that.
@@David-bh7hs 🤡🤡🤡🤡
Aside from flavour, diplomacy is my main gripe after 15 hours and a few different nations. After trying to interact with the ai, they never seem to want to do anything, and it feels like rolling dice when starting a diplomatic play to see if they will go up against me or support me.
The most important thing is that the framework is there. Sure, there are a lot of things missing but it's important that they CAN be added, such as capitalists, more in-depth combat, more flavor and a better UI.
It's not like the game is broken by design and they need to re-code a lot of the things (like how vic2 with GFM needs a million decisions to do the most basic of things). I'm 100% sure the game will get way better over time and especially with mods as long as there's enough push from the community to get these changes.
Exactly. Amazing to think how this game will grow with DLC. Just look at how far Stellaris has come. And CK3 in just a short amount of time.
And imagine the mods. IMAGINE THE MODS.
zzzzzz, vic3 is sequel bait trash, same with ck3 because pdx is now making games for casuals instead of their actual audience the grand strategy gamers, the dumbed down warfare was too complex for newcoming casuals in ck3 so they just deleted it in vic3 LOL
imagine paying for dlc that adds stuff the previous game had
@@bread2546 Have you seen the complexity of the economy of Vic 3? Do you see how much you can micromanage the economy when in Vic 2 you just had to deal with pops ?
@@bread2546 victoria 2 warfare complex? lol
For me, Victoria III could have been great.
Victoria II had what could be possibly intensive economy development. You wanted to build your glass factories in coal producing regions and so forth. You could also control your army and with skill, win a war.
Long story short, they could of kept the war system as it was instead of shaving it off the game almost entirely, expanded upon both it AND the economy system they wanted to implement.
The best Paradox game to me is one that I can both fiddle with my economy to a great degree and also participate in wars to a great degree. Europa Universalis IV, I salute you.
Eu4 really is probably the current height of paradox games in that regard atm, bit of a shame that it’s being crushed under the weight of its own dlcs atm (I’m simultaneously both hoping for and dreading the announcement of eu5)
@@youthoughtaboutit6946 It’s rough. They could of literally copy and pasted Victoria II, but added more depth to economy and supply. It would be more of a masterpiece. The map graphics need work (when zoomed out). Once it starts loading mountains and cities, it’s BEAUTIFUL.
Why I'm not gonna buy it.
- Even when you're a capitalist nation you still use top-down state run factories as you, and only you, decide which factories to build and even which production lines to use. That's a state run socialists/royalist economy and has nothing to do with the barons and capitalists this period was known for, it was the fall of kingdoms and the rise of capital based power.
- If you watch you're footage back; it's like 60 percent building factories and tweaking them. That makes sense for Japan in this period but every other video on here was the same and often a lot more.
- The pastel color or the map is hurting my head. That's a personal thing and I belong to a 1 percent group that has this problem.
- The wars are static, nations can't join an already ongoing war (while this almost always happened in history, beating the losing guy a little more was almost a sport.)
- I remember the Common Sense DLC and Imperator Rome (that was a barebones game as well), they're not getting the benefit of the doubt anymore.
- Every tech tree is the same and therefor heavily unindustrialized nations can race techs and become the techleader for a specific resource.
- Your citizens can't trade outside of your market (They can't trade at all because they don't exist) and economy is non-existent, there are no stockpiling of goods and the only thing you can effect is the base price. Don't know if this is true but someone said that even if your factory is only supplied for 25 percent it still had 100 percent effectiveness. Wouldn't be surprised.
- There are objectively better choices in most of the laws making the choices that are there non-existent choices.
- A steamfriend of mine actually had to wait "for 10 f*king years" for a law to finally pass due to the will of RNGesus.
- The war system looks weak.
- It looks just like the last "DLC framework"... game.. The cynical part of me believes Paradox does this deliberately and takes stuff out of the game and substitutes it for objectively worse stuff to be later sold in DLC that has a baked-in value proposition. The realistic part however is that Paradox has become beholden to share holders and are now obligated to rake as much money from their games as they can. That mass market appeal isn't why I came to love Paradox games and it's my conclusion that Paradox games are just not for me anymore. That's sad but was bound to happen eventually, the Common Sense DLC started this, their horrible change to pops in Stellaris and now they removed almost all the things I loved in Victoria 2 from Victoria 3.
It reminds me of ANNO and Tropico where you had to go into buildings and tinker for various reasons, just on a more grand-strategy level.
Weirdly I have no issues with the war system. The issues are more with the UI which seems to love waste space with empty spaces while giving a million different tabs.
Other than that, I also hate the look of the map. In a setting that's supposed to be more serious than ck3, the map is somehow even more cartoony, doesn't exactly capture the feeling of leading a nation through the industrial revolution.
And I just try to ignore those abominable and unnecessary 3d humunculi
Edit: also the first thing I did was rename the cloud texture in the files to remove that eye sore
UI will probably get an overall, and Map changes will probably become something that is fixable through mods if I'm going to be hoenst
I actually really like the map lol, but I do agree the UI needs a serious rework and the devs seem to be moving to fix those issues first.
I like the map and it feels good moving around. I do think the character models are quite shit and a huge downgrade from ck3
Could've used an art style from the respected era that Victoria 3 is set in; Neoclassical, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, or Post-Impressionism.
But, whatever.
I hope they don't abandon the game. Imperator Rome died because they abandoned it
it's a flagship game. they won't.
Unlikely. Vic is a much more popular series, Imperator was a shot in the dark. From steamcharts data, peak yesterday was 70k players, Imperator's all-time peak (on release day) was only 13k, and it quickly fell to around 1k the next week
@@smlgd when games not fun they get abandoned. i asked for refund instantly during the first 2 hours of boredom. unlike eu4 or hoi4 there was no merit on its own and i love rome games more then anything.
I got into my first war yesterday. I mobilized my armies and realized after-the-fact they were going to bankrupt me. Then I realized you can't stand down armies. So it was literal game over.
this is the worst thing about it. disbanding generals makes your government go apeshit. armies on standby keep guzzling weapons and cannons. you cant move your armies before fronts pop up.
Bankruptcy is hardly as big of a deal as RUclipsrs will have you think.
@@Oujouj426
Regardless, irl nations will pull armies out of wars that aren't financially feasible. The fact that this game doesn't have something that basic is absurd.
I really wish they kept the naval warfare of Vic 2, and the war system to be like Vic 2 with a more hoi4 style to it
See I am the opposite. If I want that kinda war system I go play HOI 4. It was build for it and I don't have to deal with the economy and culture aspect. Vic 3 is the opposite, but I would like to see more depth in the war system from that perspective. My economy, industry, culture should all affect the war system. Give it more depth on that side of the system.
@@snoop101 Maybe people want to experience and partake in the American civil war, Franco-Prussian war, WWI, etc. Victoria 2 had a perfect balance. Just have the basic ability to control your own army.
Paradox went on about guiding a society through abstraction and top-down, policy action, with the option to micromanage if you choose. And now I'm manually choosing whether a specific furniture workshop in east siberia uses lathes or not. If it's supposed to be a society/economy simulator, and my factories are privately owned, why after unlocking lathes are individual factories not just able to automatically select different production methods in response to market conditions? If I'm managing the market conditions, the market actors should respond by themselves or why am I doing it. It's one directional right now - you can manage just your infrastructure and the market will respond, but manage your market and you infrastructure will sit there waiting for you to tell it to exploit your market changes.
Honestly i was treating the game with some sort of decent regard till like 3 hours into the game. I noticed that the combat is easily under explained and broken. Because even if you have an army of over 50 and dozens of ships(naval invasion) your combat width will only be the same of the opposing forces so 10v10 or 5v5 or 20v20 sometimes there can be a disparaging difference but watching u.k., france, and my self get besten back by a single german province with a force no larger than 14 units with some how over 118 defense when the game says the Highest in the world is 100.
Besides that when going through the achievements, paradox included an achievement that wasn't supposed to be in yet for the native American which at this point cannot be played. I am assuming this is all due to a dlc. But this is in my opinion horrific. To know on game day launch that they are going tl make a dlc sure that's one thing. But find out that the dlc is really just cut content from an already "developed" game??? This is like buying a car but having to pay to add on the wheels.
I agree completely but you can actually play as a native nation but only one of them, that is a puppet of the usa i forget what its called but it has the same usa color and is in the oklahoma area
@@pictochatesex * I was very wrong*
9:30
Don't mistake width with depth.
Victoria 3 is wide að the pacific and deep as a puddle...
I havent played vic2 but I'm having fun with this one, I think its mainly a bias, I've learnt to expect nothing and enjoy whats in the present, for me its a thumbs up
Try vic2 it's way better in every aspect
@@Restrocket I'll give it a try at some point but as bad as it may sound to a vic veteran I prefer a "watered-down" version vic2 sounds like ALOT and I work for 17 hours a day sometimes. I dont really want a game to be as complicated as my life right now😅
@@someone5502 vic3 is more complicated but in boring way.
@@Restrocket Eh to each their own, I enjoy and find looking at code and errors for hours fun doesnt mean everyone else should but I respect your opinion and will definetly give vic2 a try sometime
@@Restrocket I've poured hundreds of hours into Vic2 and it is most definitely not better in every aspect.
Looks like I'll be sticking with Victoria 2 with the GFM mod for a couple more years. By then hopefully it would have gotten updates, DLCs and mods that add more flavour and improve the combat. The game will one day be regarded as a masterpiece, it just needs more work
I have an honest question. I've played some Vic2 in the past, around 50 hours (so not a lot for a paradox game) and liked it.
But the game felt really automated to me, like the majority of time was spent waiting and fast-forwarding. And now I see some people writing about Vic3 having less gameplay options etc. (excluding warfare), where I feel like I am able to influence much more in Vic3. Am I missing something about Vic2? Because I'm honestly a little confused.
@@dielewisformel Did you have the dlc and hpm mod? Cuz basegame vic2 is pretty unplayable without dlc and mods which gives me hope for vic3, just need to wait
Gfm🤢
@@STEP107 The irony,Paradox NEVER changed lmao.(This is not a bit on Vicky 2,I love it,just funny that its true).
@@benisign what's wrong with GFM? Genuinely asking, I found it better than HPM and HFM. Which one would you recommend using instead?
Paradox keeps making the same mistake, which is launching games without all of the flavor mechanics and content previous games have had, which makes the playerbase angry and more importantly bored as soon as the game launches. They’re so concerned with making games that have problems for dlcs to solve that they have completely forgotten the game needs to be good in the first place for people to want to buy dlc.
It’s especially silly when modders manage routinely to fill the yawning gaps in content within fairly short time windows, shortly after these games launch. To go back to some pretty old examples, think of CK2+ for CK2, or MEIOU for EU3. Both of those mods radically improved the existing game in a way the developers could have certainly done themselves if they weren’t so worried about dripfeeding dlc.
Victoria 2 was pretty much the poster child for just how much mods could improve a game. Before Victoria 3 released, almost everyone playing Vic 2 was playing a vastly improved version like GFM or TGC or Victoria Universalis, or even just normal HPM. Those were the products paradox was competing with, and they easily could have if they had wanted to, and everyone would have loved the game. However, the dlc driven model has come into major conflict with delivering a product that people will like on launch.
0:05 this is half correct. Victoria II at launch was absolutely terrible and only after many updates and patches became the game we now all fondly remember.
True but there wasn't a decade of anticipation then. They made a game from little to no help to draw from when these original games came out.
@@yolobuck2553 Victoria II must be the sequel of Victoria duh
@@blakedake19 Victoria I and the company that made it at that time were so tiny and primitive that they arent even worth mentioning at this point.
@@jaydenshepard7928 Sure. Vic II's team was definitely bigger and still the economy in that economy game did not work properly.
The only way in that game to increase the money supply was through metal extraction (gold) and so in the mid to late game when underdeveloped nations start to pump out goods in the global market a deflationary spiral takes place every time. And still, people keep saying Vic II was a good economy game when it really was not. It was and is funky and that's it.
@@blakedake19 I like the term a "janky masterpiece"
So let me get this straight: you made a review where you praised Victoria 3 for being a "great" game with complex, engaging diplomacy and economic mechanics; but then you realized that a large (and growing) amount of vic3 players aren't happy with the game, you got some dislikes, read some negative comments/reviews, stuck your finger in the air to see where the wind was blowing and made a SECOND review where now you're finally talking about that negatives of the game?
This looks like you took a handful of money from PDX (probably around $2,000, based on subs and channel views, maybe more), made a very positive review of the game with few criticisms to appease PDX and vic3 stans, and now you want to double-dip in the good ole RUclips ad rev honey jar (you'll make around $200 in ad rev for this video) by making a video talking about all the criticisms (that you didn't even mention in your original REVIEW OF THE GAME!) to appease the people who dislike the game because of how shallow and hollow it is, knowing that they will extort them with overpriced DLC that should have been in the game to begin with.
This is all speculation and might not be the case (sure looks like it, though) but if it is then I have something for you: L
Ding ding ding
Holy shit, I didn't know L survived his death
I enjoy it, it's fun, not perfect but fun. The major benefit I see is unlike past titles, a vast majority of nations are pretty well idealized, including resources, parties, backstory, etc. So I think they can focus on mechanics. My only hope is they make more things that already work (Think Stellaris and origins), and don't go the way of HOIV 4 and just keep adding more and more new features that require more balance (Fuel, designers, etc). Assuming the first DLC is a flavor DLC, I think they have a lot of options. New music, new events, new interactions, etc.
Lies, lies, it is booooooooring af
@@VipdonPlays I mean your welcome to your opinion. But I enjoy it, consider it's reviews are about 50/50 at the moment, it varies person to person, but clearly everyone does not find it boring.
@@royalrugby4869 if you go to a place to eat and 50% hate the food then the food is not good. Not all games are perfect but vic 2 was good this game is not even close and killed the feeling of the old game. Hate to say anything negative but this game is going to end up like emperitor at this point and you if you don’t see it then you enjoy watching paint dry
@@VipdonPlays If you got to a place to eat, and half love it, and half hate it. Then it's personal preference. Gaming is about preference. There are plenty of games I don't enjoy, but others still do. You don't like it, understood. I do like it. Both can exist. Neither opinion invalidates the other. Paradox has already far outsold Imperator on Vicky 3 so it has support.
People reviewing it after just few hours can't be taken seriously. They didn't even learn the game mechanics yet.
Are you referring to the positive or negative reviews? Even still, things like the UI don't change with more time
Not true. The experience you have of queueing buildings while looking at your market on minute 0 and opening trade routes is the same experience you will have queueing buildings and opening trade routes in hour 500, You will just learn how to do it more efficiently.
From the 25 hours i have on steam plus the 50+ hours i had on the leak it the game loop of the game doesnt change, its an empty experience devoid of any satisfaction or payout from all the building up outside of watching graphs and numbers get higher, and some people like that but that is not what a GSG game should be. Specially not a successor to Vicky2.
This is the whole "You can't critique a chef's food because you can't cook well yourself!" logic. It just doesn't work
Victoria 3 is decent and fun on the surface and released in much better shape than most Paradox titles, but under the hood there are a lot of problems. I like the overall aesthetic, it's fairly fun at least for a while and there's a ton of potential there. HOWEVER.
Every nation plays almost exactly alike.
They added unnecessary granular control and micro over the economy while excusing their atrociously simple and buggy war system for wanting a lack of same.
They have way too many large buttons and icons and visual fluff and wasted negative space in the UI.
The info you want is usually in a totally different part of the UI than the buttons you have to press related to the info you want.
There seems to be hidden mechanics that have a really high preference for 21st century political sentiment when it comes to event decisions and enacting laws even when the political support or population numbers in the game make it seem like the opposite should be the case.
Diplomacy with other states boils down to either: zero interaction, trade agreement, customs union or a "diplomatic play" that leads to war. Ah yes, war.
The autopilot war system, where does one even begin? Dear God where does one even begin?
Zero player involvement in the system besides "Mobilize general" and "attack front" or "defend front."
No way to move generals or troops outside of war time.
No way to choose how much cav/inf/art you want.
The automatic front lines are too simple and warp oddly all the time.
Troop numbers, technology level and dice rolls entirely dictate the outcomes of battles.
I understand wanting something a bit simpler than Hoi4 or Vic2 for army control, but this is honestly worse than Risk. At least in Risk you can choose the number of units to move into provinces.
Overall, I'm still having enough fun with the economy aspect of the game, but in true Paradox fashion they released a DLC framework and not a game. If their updates are strong and they add more player engagement and complexity to war and diplomacy, Victoria 3 could easily become their best game and really open up the grand strategy genre to a wider audience (despite my criticisms I do like a lot of the QoL and simplifications they've made, but they took it way too far with a couple systems). If they just laugh all the way to the bank with the huge preorder sales and let the game stay on its current trajectory, we've got the next Imperator on our hands.
I think it's important to keep in mind the amount of playtime that this game has had. There has probably already been more hours played by people in the last two days than even a hundred paradox employees would have been capable of before launch.
Something that may have been obvious to a random player may not have even come up in bugtesting before.
17:54 people who say this, don't understand how taxing these map games are on the CPU, it's not a lot for the GPU to to do, but these types of games are one of the few cases where 8 core CPU will make a difference in gaming.
Don't want to seem pessimistic but I see a pattern in paradox games. You can see it as greed or just a business model. Paradox releases games with a basic operating system then flesh out individual areas. I have found paradox games are best bought a year or two after release. You can find bundle deals. Eu4 being $100 for all dlc versus like $300. It also prevents getting burned like with imperator Rome.
im legally blind and ive been playing paradox for years, from eu4 to ck3 in time span. honestly, and all i have to say is it is the best ui they have made for people with eyesight problems. the contrast of colors in the style is a massive help. makes it easier for my eyes to lock onto things and focus. and cant thank them enough, we can finally change the ui without restarting the game. also im not trying to be snarky i promise but i dont get the tab issue, just always press backspace to close it by habit.
ps want a difficult game play united tribes of new zealand. im using it to learn the game because all your mistakes are immediate haha, not rich only making 1 million but my people are the richest and happiest in the world and we are finally industrializing and producing motors and all the mid game stuff. know that sounds awful but starting from scratch just feels so satisfying.
get the games flawed and needs work but honestly i havn't felt frustrated at the game like i did for the other games with release. im not getting bothered by the lack of content but instead im so excited for whats to come. for the first time in ages.
also tip for playing a non industralized country. its worth just going without construction yards. don't need to pay for building supplies even if it has the draw back of it taking stupidly long to build in general
I've really appreciated the work Paradox has done to add accessibility to their work, from having easily moddable typefaces to having multiple colorblind modes to the UI scaling they've been experimenting with.
I'm curious, do you ever struggle to distinguish map information at the closer zoom levels? I'm not particularly vision-impaired (I wear glasses for nearsightedness and an astigmatism) but the removal of closer zooms for the political mapmodes has been very frustrating for me in their recent games, *especially* when I was trying to manage a war in Vicky 3 last night.
@@DondarfSnowbonk the main things I struggle with is that in certain map modes like the production lens, the information on enpolyment isn't always in a reasonable place. So for the longest time...I mean literally took me 12 hours to realize thr production lens showed you the unemployed population in each state. And like for decrees the are to the side of the state. I'm guessing it's mainly because I havnt played larger than two states so never needed to manage while zoomed out. But yeah ummm only one I got confused on is traxd routes in the British market. The fact that there's a tiny number to the right of the bar is not distinct enough to shoe you have a active trade there. Honestly the is the first paradox game on release that hadn't made me feel like it's hiding information on thing. Hmm trying to think what stands out was difficult to see, oh oh the fact that notifications don't appear in the center of the screen. It's On the top left or on the map itself. And when your blind you kind of get tunnel vision on the left side the screen
Just for people who don't wanna read that tangent,
Finding active trade routes in a shared market, the lenses information locations on the map,
Event notifications being off to the side or on the map when honestly vixtoria 2 is all about the left half of the screen. So it can just pass you by, not a complaint because I think paradox is getting too much flack.
It just would be nice for an option to have the notifications right in your face again like in their other game but I get why they didn't want to do that.
Fellow stygamitism haha whats up my comrade XD. Honestly ck3 is the worst for me. The ui...it's like two uniform, Vicky and the other games had very destuingished color paletes. Like stylized I guess. But stelli and ck3 the ui all just kind of blends together my eyes can't lo onto anything. But like the building screen having the building name in that bold pale color, then the actually state to state options being broken down into that deep blueish green. Very easy to find where I want to click.
It makes sense to limit our comparisons to Victoria 2, but I think it's also important to look at the design philosophy of the game and see how it differs from what long-term Paradox fans have come to expect. When we moved from EU3 to EU4, we got a mana system, which a lot of players really hated. When we moved from HOI3 to HOI4, we lost a huge amount of intricacy and complexity. In both instances, a substantial part of players were alienated. In both bases, the games got better, more complex, and brought in veteran and new players alike.
My sense with Vic3 is that Paradox is not all that interested -- for now -- in what Vicky2 veterans want to see. They'd like to see what new player base they can build with this game. At that point, they'll decide which mechanics to focus on based on player response over time.
Vic2 was a fantastic game (and I likely won't be buying Vic3 for some time), but its player base was very small and its gameplay was niche.
From a business sense, if I were Paradox, this is what I would be asking: "Vicky 2 wasn't commercially viable. What kind of successor would be viable?" We'll see with time.
Ive never been into games like this but loved Civ, so when I saw all the Civ youtubers playing it I gave it a go and liked it a lot
Yeah, I don't think the changes are any kind of deliberate snub to players of Vicky 2 or anything like that, which some people seem dead-set on believing. I'm also not convinced that commercial viability was their central design consideration either (although obviously that does play a part). I think, as they laid out in their original dev diary, they decided on some central tenets and decided to build the entire game around them with modern design sensibilities. Many Vicky 2 veterans are going to be upset at this not because this is a bad way to design games or because Paradox actually dislikes them and wants to alienate them and move on to a new audience, but because it's natural for a person to get upset when something they like and have invested a lot of time into liking is replaced with something that isn't the same. Some of them eventually get over it, realize the new thing is also good in its way, and become part of the playerbase, and some of them don't.
@@DondarfSnowbonk I think you've expressed my thoughts more clearly than I! Agree 100% I think with time, the new player base will embrace richer, more complex mechanics (probably added by DLC)
A political simulator without warfare is like a sandwich without bread.
All politics is rules enforced by military might.
Everything else is toppings
There is no shortage of games I don't like. I don't buy them, and I move on with my life. I have played Victoria since it's first instance, and I am very much enjoying its third instance. I assume that like every other game I have ever played, there will be no shortage of people who don't like Victoria 3... so?
I’ve had a ton of fun playing this multiplayer, however, it’s very fragile and we found when desyncs occur you need to just go to the next month and then rejoin. It’s just not the most stable with a lot of people but still super fun and serviceable.
Honestly for me right now the worst thing is war, if they change that it would be a great game
I’m fine with DLCs. I think the cold hard fact that most gamers ignore when hating on post-release content is that developers have bills to pay, lots of them. Most games do the bulk of their sales in the first few months, and after that it drops off greatly. People want devs to support their games for 5-10 years, and so do I, but understand that to do that they have salaries to pay, electric bills and leases, cloud infrastructure, etc. A big factor in how they can support games long term is via DLC packs that help pay for that.
People already scoff at $50-60 a copy, but the reality is games would cost $100-200 minimum if the release model didn’t include future paid DLC, it’s part of how pricing has stayed where it is for 30+ years.
Anyways, I’m having a ton of fun with Victoria 3. I haven’t played a Paradox game since the very first Hearts of Iron when I was a kid, and I didn’t realize how much I had missed the realm of grand strategy (I mostly play RTS and city builders). It definitely has lots of kinks to work out, but my bet is in 1-2 years it’ll be a very fun and complete game. For now I’m glad to be playing it and financially supporting the devs, early access or not.
I personally refund the game when I realized I can't have any engagement in War. I can't play a game like that if I can't use tactic or at least play with my army. I don't care too much about ui but I want my war. The frontline system is not fun, not when you compare it to Victoria 2. I believe that why there is mixed review on steam.
My problem with the game is figuring out how much I am producing and how much I need. Also how importing or exporting will actually cost. For example as the USA I started both to increase income based on the green numbers, but it ended up losing money overall. I think the UI honestly needs more work. But I am having a blast with the game. The warfare feels good to me.
Yes, the materials tab is actually quite confusing, as it jumbles together the things you produce with your imports. That'd be fine if there was an additional column with both values seperate, but there isn't. The UI overall is quite confusing, to the point that I've just resolved to try and produce whatever is the most in the minuses. Everything else can be handled by the auto-build button.
Well, it's more so a quirk of economics than a fault in the UI. When you expand an industry supply increases but demand stays the same. If you want to keep prices the same (or even raise them) you either need to create demand or lower supply. Artificial scarcity is a viable strategy for certain goods. A luxury item like wine is only consumed by the rich so keeping supply low is a good idea. Grain is consumed by everyone so ideally it should be cheap. If you create an artificial scarcity of grain you will certainly earn a lot of money but people will also starve. Iron is consumed by your industry so even if the price is high nobody is going to die. Unfortunately, if iron is too expensive your industry grinds to a halt. In iron's case we need to create demand.
How do we do this? We can't just build mines since that would crash the price. If iron's too cheap the mines won't be profitable. In this case we can start a tooling industry. Tools are great since essentially every major industry requires them. When tool demand is satiated prices will drop again. Fortunately for us iron can be turned into steel. We start a steel mill which needs iron and tools so demand for tools increases again, increasing the price of iron. Now iron is too expensive and the steel mill shuts down. Not to worry, we build another iron mine. Now it's expensive enough so that tools and steel are profitable. There's no demand for steel so the factory's a bust anyways. If we're clever we start a motor industry which consumes steel... but there's no demand for motors either. This is why we build a railway. The railway increases market access, it provides plenty of jobs and it fills the basic need for transportation. To pull the carts we need trains, trains are built by the motor industry and the motor industry needs steel. If we make a surplus we can export it abroad. Suddenly all levels of your industry profit. From the mines to the railways. If you've built too much of something, find a use for it!
As a long time Paradox player I must say it took me some time to get into V3 and actually start enjoying the game. It takes a while to understand how moving the levers available to you influences the economy and politics, and how really diplomacy and warfare are really the supporting elements to the socio-economic core. The economic system I think is the best I've ever played. The UI to manage it needs improvement as the core information I want when deciding how to prioritise my construction queue (where I end up spending a lot time adding, tweaking) isn't available through the construction queue so I'm constantly having to switch. For example I haven't seen how I can tell if adding a building to a given state will push me over the infrastructure level within the state, as I'd prefer to keep that ahead of the game. I appreciate this is difficult to do and having widespread input from the player base can really help Paradox make the UI better, i.e. I think this is "good enough" for a launch.
I do like the concept of the frontline based warfare, and I still think it could be made to work. At the moment though the AI and system are so utterly inept it is much more frustrating and requires more micromanagement than Hoi4 battleplans. For example, Generals seemingly randomly allocate and de-allocate from front lines where new fronts are being formed or disbanded. This just results in chaos. I have repeatedly seen all my generals abandon an active front, losing months of progress before I can reassign them. This is immensely frustrating and massively detracts from the overall experience. IMO this is so bad it should not wait for DLC to fix and Paradox should take urgent action to remediate.
My suggestion is simple rules for ensuring when Generals reallocate to front lines they do so a bit more intelligently. For example the priority should be to reallocate to a front without another friendly force (present or in transit to that front). Any front with enemy forces allocated taking priority, followed by those with enemy forces en-route. If there are multiple options then the shortest redeployment time should be used. Only once all fronts have generals allocated then look at the relative strength on the front and assign to the weakest. Generals should never go to standby on their own initiative and should retain their advance/defend order. It also appears so far that the AI is equally poor at distributing its own generals across fronts, and perhaps isn't having enough generals to cover its front lines, so is relatively easy to contain on one front whilst you can push unopposed on others. So this would help the AI as much as improve the player experience.
The problem is that they changed the product. Half of Victoria I and II was Colonialism and War, that's the whole point of the Era. Now they give us something completely different.
to resolve the AI a bit they could make it a bit more aggressive or have nations have a optional real 'historical' path decision making preference mode like in hoi4
I mean, there's a lot of 10+ hours negative reviews of the game, i even saw a negative review with a 40+ hours (it was from someone that probably received the game pre launch from paradox). There's also a bunch of meme positive reviews, and i feel like people are not pointing this out. Not everyone is complaining that this game is not vic 2 or about the war tho. IMO the worst part is that everything is the same, a game like Age of History 2 has a lot more diverse content than vic 3 right now and i would rather recommend people to go play it than vic 3.
EDIT: About the mobile part. When people say this game looks like a mobile game is not the same as saying this will run in a mobile device.
Very good coverage. Despite your positive feelings on the game, you gave more than enough information for me to glean that its not something I would want to buy (right now) because of how clearly you described the issues.
Hoi4 is the worst Paradox game to me and I see a great deal of comments stating people want Victoria 3 to have been HoI 4. This is very different game and it is judged too harshly by what the game is not.
Naturally the game has many flaws which can and hopefully will be improved upon in the years to cone. But Victoria 3 is an economics simulator not a casual map painter like some of Paradox's other games. It is alright for Victoria 3 to exist as its own thing and should not be judged for being what it is not.
To everyone who has a complaint about the game, I recommend checking the mods. 3 days in and there are already journal fixes for Canadian unification, the Canada-US border, and keeping Egypt from claiming territories in Europe when it beats the Ottomans. That's only the start, more is to come. We MUST remember that V2 was most playable only with one of the modded reworkings of the game, and that same devotion of modders is in effect with Victoria 3.
Well relying on mods to make a game better doesn't make the game good. It makes it bad in fact.
@@owllegostopmotion7633 That's such a bad take. Literally any game could be tinkered or improved with mods.
@@Lacertos if the base game requires mods then the base game is bad. And only works as a framework for mods. Fallout 4 is like that for me. It's a bad base game, but good when modded.
@@owllegostopmotion7633 Sure, but Vic 3 doesn't *require* mods. It will be improved by mods, of course, but the base game is already good and playable.
@@Lacertos sure if you think that. But that doesn't seem to be the thoughts of the original commenter
Yeah I completely agree about the different countries. They do all feel just about the same, only different are how gov starts (same names) and what their starting states have for resources
So far the only thing that has genuinely bothered me about the game is the turmoil system, or may be just me not knowing where to look, but it's very frustrating that the game gives you so much information but at the same time, fails to tell you why your pops are angry and you just don't know what to do about it.
But again, it may be just me not knowing where to look.
You can see why pops are being radicalized by clicking on the radicalized pops number at the top but it does have a lack of info it feels.
Previous paradox games have always been some of the peak in UI design in my opinion. One of the major rules they never broke was having almost no full screen menus, recent games slowly dropping this has been disappointing its why I didnt get CK3, especially when every one seems bloated and unessesarily empty.
Ck3 also has no multiplayer chat.
I find it super annoying that as the US it can take 4-5 wars to Annex the historical borders from Mexico.
The macroeconomics dont even make sense at all to me. The construction sector is entirely state owned, and will build new buildings at the cost of the state for the private sector for free. Sometimes the costs incurred by the state are offset by the investments of individuals. The private sector is entirely unable to construct anything for itself at all and relies solely on the state taking initiative. The state also mandates what is and is not imported or exported, it however cannot mandate the quantity of the specific good exported or imported. The state owns all ships that are used to transport cargo and all ports. The state is a bizzare totalitarian entity and the influence from stellaris is clear.
The war system is fustrating. Having my general of 100 brigades enter a battle with only 40K men against an opponent of 70K is just silly. The way the armies teleport when their front no longer exists is also annoying. For example, I was playing as the Netherlands and fighting in Borneo. The front disapears and my army teleports back to Europe, where I have to wait two monts to send them back to Boneo, by which time the defenders have retaken all of their lost land. I then have to set up a naval invasion and wait a month for the troops to prepare their invasion. Encirclements also aren't possible, and the encircled army will just teleport away. I don't feel like saying that the Victorian era was relatively peaceful, etc, etc and is more known as a time of great progress, etc, etc is a reasonable justification for the way things have turned out. The literal second largest conflict in all of human history occurs within the game's time span. They also removed great wars.
The diplomacy doesn't really make sense either. All war goals and participants within a war are decided before the war itself begins, and has no capacity for escalation after it begins. Great wars can't even occur organically.
The game suffers from a lack of flavour, and for me lacks replayability. Every economy is more or less the same, and if, a player finds themself without access to certain recources they will abuse colonisation to access them easily. The game could do with some railroading as well.
Its important to note Hoi4 had very much similar issues as this at launch, for example flavor was horrible, there was like 3 focus trees in total. Now theres like 20. Not to mention mods
I really like Victoria 3, but it obviously still needs a ton of work to match historical accuracy. It's pretty fun to play though, especially some minor nations.
I think the lack of historical accuracy is one of the positive things about Victoria 3 however they proubably should have a historical accurate mode
"Economic and political simulator" The problem is- no matter how much we try to pretend it to be otherwise, it's not. Victoria series have always been about economy, politics, diplomacy and warfare. Paradox got the balance out of whack. If Paradox really wanted to, they should have came up with a new IP, non-grand-strategy, their own version of 19th century Factorio. You get the gist. A 19th century grand strategy game from Paradox should have all the aforementioned areas (almost) equally balanced.
The war needs more spice and it's a huge departure from vic 2. its not bad, but very different. more intricate diplomatic options are needed when dealing with territory transfer imo.
The biggest problem for the warfare system for me, is that in Vic2 if you were outnumbered and outgunned you could still win if you commanded your armies well enough. In Vic3 if your behind on tech and don't have enough troops, the best you can do is make your generals defend and pray you get good dice rolls. The reason this is a problem is that the AI will for some reason take states they have no reason to take (I.E Russia taking Kyoto) making border gore and if your the victim of that you have no way to prevent it unlike vic2.
thats a peace conference AI thing, not the warfare system itself your having problems with
@@luciusrex I don't think you understood what I meant, I mean the current warfare system doesn't allow you to defeat powers that are more powerful than you, in Vic2 if Russia attacks as Japan for the northern islands I can outsmart them, in vic3 I can't do anything. Even if you build as many barracks and rush mil tech as fast as possible and recruit the best generals in the world you won't have enough time for it to matter. I wouldn't mind surrendering the northern islands of Japan but for whatever reason they demand random states in Japan that they shouldn't care about.
Being able to cheese the AI is not a good thing. If you’re technologically inferior and have a smaller army, you should lose. If you beeline military tech you can beat a larger opponent much more easily than you could in Vic 2
@@MonotoneCreeper I never said anything about cheesing A.I. Historically Japan defeated Russia in the Ruso-Japanese war despite having a disadvantage in technology, manpower, and resources. If you beeline mil tech as a minor nation you don't have a large enough economy to afford it on your army, which is fine and realistic but terrible with the current system.
@@itriedtochangemynamebutitd5019 Japan defeated Russia in the Russo Japanese war precisely because they had *better* military doctrine, technology and tactics. The Russian effort was a shambles, and they thought Japan was just a backwards Asian nation that they could walk over. Japan's navy was ahead of the Russians, and used Torpedo boats and modern battleships to their advantage. They didn't just park their army in a mountain and wait for the stupid AI to attack over and over despite the terrain penalty.
In theory, the idea of the warfare system is interesting. However, it really stands out when you can directly control armies in all the other Paradox games.
Also, I agree that there are too many things I need to micromanage with too little information to base my decisions on. If I want to upgrade my mines with the latest tech, it never seems easy to find whether my economy is producing enough of the materials needed to do that.
I think it's a reflection of the way wars were fought during the time period. HOI4 doesn't allow you to control your troops either and the main wars in both games (American civil war, ww1 and ww2) were, historically, where wars began to be won by industrial output rather than manpower
@@stephenchurch1784 that's not true, sure industry had a big role in the wars in the Victorian Era but tactics and strategy played still played a major role.
Example: Parley from industrial perspective the south didn't stand a chance against the north, but becouse of generals like Lee who were veterans from the Mexican-american war the south repeatedly beat multiple union armies in North verginia.
Franco Prussian war was also Wan by generals and the military (it lasted about 1 year I belive, although the war was decided in just a few major engagements, the rest was cleaning up)
It is not till 1915 does industry really kick in as a deciding factor. Becouse belive it or not Germany had a good chance of victory in the beginning year but tha definitely as time passed and attrition kicked in.
All this to say Vic 2 reflected that reality well.
While Vic 3 by removing the warfare system failed from the get go.
Why?
Giving the player agency over the military allows a chance to win against a stronger opponent, wich is what characterized the Civil War and the Franco Prussian war.
I have to agree with all that was said. I can really live with most of the smaller "issues" and feel like its a base for an amazing game to come (like all Paradox games on release). One thing that never really seems to come up is the atmosphere. The Music and graphics are just amazing for this size of a game. When ever I play I just feel pulled in. I think once the war system gets a rework (which I actually don't mind it, though I wish I could micromanage more from a higher up level and not like HOI) and we add difference between regions and countries to make them play differently, then I feel it would be one of the better if not best game of this type out there.
it's a nice clicking sim
Thank you for this video! I'm playing the Victoria series for the first time after taking my first real dive into these sort of games with Crusader Kings 3, and I'm loving it. Its dense, it feels VERY different from Stellaris and CK3, and the art and music is wonderful. I absolutely see where it needs to have things filled in and added, but I have no doubt that will happen over time with expansions and free updates. I know some people are frustrated not everything came through from Victoria 2, but for me as a new player this is an amazing entry point in.
Well said! I’m a brand new player to Victoria, and haven’t played a PDX game since the very first Hearts of Iron when I was a kid. I’m absolutely loving this game but agree with everyone that the UI is junk and needs some big improvements.
The biggest thing I keep wondering about people comparing 2 to 3 is that 2 had a ton of DLCs, so are those people comparing vanilla 2, or 2 after years of improvement? I suspect after a year or two people will look at Victoria 3 as a masterpiece. Glad we’re all getting to play, even if it’s not fully baked yet.
@@MeticulousTechTV you're both too new. You think Vicky 2 has years of work in lmao, no it got two DLCs and that's it yet it's still better than this piece of shit
@@MeticulousTechTV they started milking dlc after vic 2 I think ck2 was the first game they did this in so vic 2 only has two dlcs, it dose have updates but not too many dlc
Also the idea that the game will be seen as a masterpiece in a year or 2 is far off and sounds what people where saying about imparator Rome when it was a mess at it's release
Warfare, westernization, colonization, and capitalism all need work.
I'm brand new to the game/franchise, but something that's bugging me and I'm curious if they'll fix/add complexity to with DLC is the lack of historical texture, re: royal marriages/bloodlines/key figures. I tried playing as Austria and kept waiting for Empress Elisabeth to factor into the game but... she doesn't. Instead I got a bug where the Kaiser who actually abdicated in favor of his son just... kept living/ruling until he was 80 and I finally figured out a cheat code to kill him. It's such a missed opportunity to have an Empress Sisi buff that would factor into the Hungary part of the game, as happened in actual history. I'd love an "overthrow monarch" option/install a regency option. If I'm playing as Bayern, I want to look forward to Mad King Ludwig II! If I were to jump into a Russia play, I want to see the real ramifications of all those Romanov quirks (and succession of dying tsars making poor choices). Marriage alliances were just such a thing in Europe but that aspect of politics is absent and as a fresh player I was surprised (b/c Europa Universalis did have that). In the long run, that lack of historical complexity is going to bug me more and more, I suspect.
Having played some, but still not extensively enough to be extensive, my impressions so far:
- Some things are much easier to visualize compared to Vicky 2, yet some things I still can't figure out like in the Law UI.
- The war system does make sense for the era and scale, Vicky 2 wars could get pretty large and was very easy to cheese. Just place some guards on mountains, GG you win all wars. New war system does capture that warfare is changing towards a frontage style of war that we would see with WW2 (HOI). But it is also pretty era accurate that armies were becoming too large for generals to micro manage like throughout history going all the way through to Napoleonic era. So, it does take away the player's micro and also just bypasses cheese strats... which I can see why it upsets some players. Instead it focuses on the prep-work going into the war, economy, trade, and relations play a big part. In multiplayer that means plots, secret agreements, betrayals, etc rather than being an encirclement micro master.
- The naval side I havn't had time to get into yet, does seem pretty limited there.
- I started with persia and sokoto to learn some very small economies and early techs... and yes you do feel like you arn't different from a modernized/westernized nation. Reforms are flavored the same as western nations and quite generic. Which isn't terrible, but I can see why it feels shallow.
- Single player AI seems whack, as Persia I ended up joining the Russian market to see what it'll be like... big mistake, -3,000 wood trade deficit from over trading. Dx
So I assume they suck at getting supplies needed for running their economy and military.
As it stands, it's just a Victorian-era GDP simulator with an Imperator coat of paint.
One thing with most of the steam reviews. Most are less than 5 hours. I have played 8 and I feel hardly able to give a review of the game yet. After maybe 200 I will but people are judging it far to quickly.
@@snowbear163 Yup. People aren't even trying to learn or understand the game and are just hating it for it not being like the last game or the fact the combat system is not hoi4.
Looking at people like TommyKay who hated it at the start but then since it was kinda his job had to keep playing it for content, You can see how even he started warming up to the game.
@@snowbear163 How much do you think most of those people either 1. Never played a paradox game before in their lives, or 2. Played hoi4 and thought it would just be something like that without the micro managing of armies.
The game is great for me, this is a typical paradox release game, it will get better in time. So far i am 100% happy with the purchase
The only thing that annoyed me was the lack of control in which province I want to colonize.
My first playthrough has been as Spain and many of the criticisms I have lineup with this video. It doesn't feel like Spain is very unique despite its position during the time periods of the game. I do have a lot of settings on the low end since I am still trying to practice with the system, but even then there isn't a lot of missions/decisions/events that make it feel unique.
I do think this game could be great. I just wish they took more time with it.
I think the best way to put it is that the various nations have a lack of identity. There are some that are good: Greece forming Byzantium, the Ottomans, Canada, New Grenada with grand Columbia, United central America, etc.
But the biggest issues I have with the game is flatly that, despite all the menus and options, some information is just extremely opaque. An example: turmoil.
Sometimes when you conquer a new nation, you have turmoil that fades as they adjust to the new reality. Other times, it just... lingers. Why? What's causing the turmoil?
Or as many have complained, randomly your nation will just hit a downward economic spiral out of nowhere. It can require going over your economy with a fine toothed comb to figure out what caused that just to find out you ran into a lumber shortage and everything ground to a halt.
Sometimes the game will inform you of why it happened, other times it doesn't.
I like the game, and feel in time with updates, I could grow to love it. But it definitely feels like it needed a few more months of in depth development and fleshing out.
A lot of people complaining about the war system also are under false assumptions of what Victoria 3 is.
Ex.
I am France playing with Belgium and Bavaria. Bavaria is trying to unite southern Germany and has decided to take a militaristic approach. Due to the functions in the game nearly any nation with an interest in a region can join wars (especially in Europe). Bavaria did not understand this, and when they went to war with everyone in Germany and got the world crashing down on them, they said the game and war system was broken, unpolished, and “stupid”. Meanwhile my experience with war has been nothing but a good because I am taking into account of my own strength militarily and economically; choosing my battles. I encourage people to buy the game and don’t be a Bavaria.
Always been an economic sim than warfare
I want 3 things. Delegation of economic responsibility, a manageable war system, and a better UI. I'm tired of not having a production screen.
I still don't understand how it's acceptable to think "Well, the systems not up to scratch but it'll be fixed/improved in a DLC"... DLC should add MORE content to a game, not tweak or change it because it wasn't working well in the first place. You're essentially making customers pay for a redesigned system. The WAR system is fine, but it needs WAY more depth. I don't mind that it isn't micro-managing, but the whole "War isn't the focus of this game" is ridiculous. War and Diplomacy go hand in hand, and there were many wars (including WW1) that were significant in shaping the political and economic side of things. Also, the player needs to be less micro on the industry, yes, you should be allowed to micro your economy. But you should also be able to take a hands off approach without the AI imploding your nations economy. Also, there was a point early on that the devs pointed out that "Everything that can be achieved through war should be achievable through diplomacy". That means taking states, trading, ousting governments etc. Which afaik very little of that can you do via diplomacy.
I think while people should be criticizing the game to make it into the best version of itself as possible. People also seem to be giving up on the game, making assumptions that the game will never get better. Now while paradox may be money hungry, one thing that is consistent about them is that they tend to maintain their mainstream titles with constant updates and Victoria 3 is like their entire personality right now so it’s clear Vic3 will be getting updates ASAP.
Imperator exists too. I don't think they will abandon Vic3 though but the precedent is certainly there. Imperator has actually solid foundations and could have been a great game, it suffers from lack of content. It is unacceptable that Paradox still releases games devoid of any flavor or content.
@@mehawimes629 Imperator aka Europa Unversalis: Rome 2 was always a side-game (to the point people were legitimately surprised it got a sequel as EU:R has always been a niche bastard child of CK and EU), not a main grand campaign title.
I never Had so much fun and felt so Connected with the Nations you Play in an Paradox Game. In generall it is a such well done experience turning a medival state into a Nation
"It's not a bad thing" yes it is, they made a horrible war system that you have almost no control over and then in a year they will "fix" it with a $20 DLC when they should have just made it good from the start. I would not be shocked if they made some things worse just so they could charge for the solution in a DLC later, it is paradox after all...They can make some decent games but the DLC practice is just horrible, it's basically the sims.
Vic 3 is a great game, let's install patch 1.0.0 to see how junky it originally was - time traveler from 2025.
Check out original versions of Eu4 or hoi4
As someone who has played EU4/CK/HOI4 I really like the war system in this. Stack warfare is such a pain in the butt and so annoying. It takes away from the immersion of the game itself. I hope they keep it the way it is but no doubt enough people shout they will dlc it at some point...
Agreed, microing stacks is the least compelling part of any PDX game to me. If people want that they can always play basically any of the other games
I just really hope they overhaul the visuals of the war system, i personally think the hands off approach is *fine* but sometimes it difficult to visualize what’s happening. Make the occupation zones and ring of war more clear and distinct and have more VFX going on and maybe models to spruce it up and I think it’ll be satisfactory
I agree with this 100% I think the hands off approach is welcome, it's different to everything we've had before and it's a breath of fresh air in that sense. But you are right, seeing the towns begin to burn and crumble, seeing artillery explosions taking place along the line leaving behind it destroyed trees, ruined earth and small craters and then seeing them slowly normalise over time would be brilliant. If we are essentially being asked to watch the wars play out then they should at least make it a somewhat cinematic and engaging experience to do so. But, even though I am still learning the game, and the warfare is visually dull, I am really enjoying it and it really is one of the most beautiful games I have ever played.
I personally love the game and have very little to complain about it to be completely honest (Although I did have one bug where I was an ally in a war, we won the war but my ally and the enemy never set peace terms for months upon months and it got to the stage where I had to choose between capitulate or go into gold reserve debt and eventually bankruptcy, so I capitulated...luckily no war goals were set against me). I haven't played Victoria 2 although I do enjoy Crusader Kings 3 thoroughly and I do like Hearts of Iron 4 as well and to a lesser extent Stellaris (only because I'm more into historicals, it's a good game).
I find the CK3 hovering over highlighted words to bring up a box which you can go into box into box very helpful for me to see exactly what that thing is and means and all of the information about it and I was glad to see it in Victoria 3. I also enjoy the wars a lot, I was able to hold off France as Belgium during the war I mentioned earlier in the comment because I had a technologically superior army despite them having more numbers of low quality troops. I also took some land from the Netherlands and freed Luxembourg, I find it quite fun and rewarding. I also enjoy balancing the buildings that I have and their productions, I enjoy having to balance inputs and outputs within my market and the global market. As for the AI, I'm not personally too skilled strategy games and I don't necessarily try to be. I don't know or look up metas or watch videos past beginners guides, I usually set myself some goals and go out to try achieve them, they might be far from optimal and sometimes its so bad that I get clipped back severely or straight up lose but I have fun regardless and I find normal to be enough of a challenge for me in CK3 and HOI4 so I don't expect it to be different here and so far it hasn't been.
Overall in my opinion, I really like Victoria 3 and there is literally nothing in the world absolutely perfect, nothing. Perfection is impossible. However I do think that its a solid game and nothing inherently wrong with Victoria 3 and is a fantastic base for future updates and content additions from Paradox as they build upon the absolutely solid foundations they've laid. I'd give it an 8/10.
The only real dealbreaker for me is the War System. It completely breaks my immersion and my fun. It makes no fucking sense, its completely disengaging and clunky and I just hate everything about it.
When I first heard about frontlines I was thinking of the great implementation of Hoi4 but man this is nothing like it.
It bothered me so much that I actually refunded the game, my first paradox game where I did this.
I will wait until that is fixed.
I knew many months ago that this was likely how this game was gonna be. Kind of a Paradox trait at this point to release a very buggy, incomplete, and unrefined game then slowly improve it over 3 years with 20 different paid expansions and updates just to get it to the state it should have been in at launch.
That's why I was not in a rush to buy this game, nor had any reason to pre-order it. I'd rather play it in the state that it should be in, even if that means waiting a bit.
"emergent gameplay" is just bad if its only that, for exempla: The AI simple cant forme Imperial Japan, they simple cant, its impossibel to it, and this is one of the most important events of the era, paradox even sponsored a video about that to market vic3
Lol, it's so bad that in some playthroughs, I don't even see Prussia form Germany nor Sardinia form Italy.
@@PeruvianPotato you will never see the AI forming Imperial Japan btw, the AI cant make the Meiji Restoration
This was a nice and refreshing level headed take on Victoria 3. Thank you, I think a lot of the criticism has been unfair and the mixed rating on steam is low. I agreed when it was 70-75% but it is better then a mixed.
So my thoughts on the game so far, it’s good, needs dlc to flesh it out like every paradox game.
The reviews should be more in the first week or so, you need very little time to hate a game for bugs, crashes or issues, you need maybe a couple hours to hate the gameplay.
You might need 50 hours to leave a proper good review, a positive review with 2 hours played means literally nothing to me, it’s like when you look at factorio and see a positive review with like 40,000 hours played you know that their option matters.
A game is not good, especially on release, if the expectation is that “oh dlc will fix it”.
@@atlas4536 nah the game is still good, I’ll get my money worth out of it, but like every paradox game dlc will take it to the next level.
Or mods, but I don’t often mod my paradox games, I know it’s a slippery slope and I’ll end up spending more time looking for mods than playing.
@@luggy9256 You won't really get your money worth if you have to pay for hundreds of dollars worth of DLC
@@luggy9256 "i'll get my money's worth with dlc" is colossal cope
@@nicholasoneal1521 How do you determine if you got your moneys worth? I paid $50 Canadian for Vic 3. If I put in over 50 hours and enjoyed that time, then it was worth it. If I then buy a DLC and put in more time, then its worth it. I seen tons of games that are rated good and people (like myself) put in a couple hours and never go back.
once you learn the game deep enought to maintain everything in your market and slowly build a great economy, its all fun, this game is one of the best iv played so far(I played thousand of games especially grand strategies) , as paradox said this game is all about the economy, politics, and society....not wars not anything else
So far, I like what I am seeing but I probably won't buy it until there has been some updates and a dlc or two. What I think Vic 3 needs is more flavor. The 19th and early 20th Century were such pivotal and explosive times in world history. So many things and events happened, which need to be in the game or implemented in some way. I know there are revolutions that can happen but it doesn't seem to be much depth to them. Like France was in such a time of turmoil and revolutions, this needs to be added. The German Revolutions as well. I'm sure more of these things will be added as the game progresses, but it's missing flavor. Also, I would love to have more control of the army. Like I want to see the troops moving and how I can help win a battle. Also, I need a rework of fronts. They seem to chaotic and unorganized. Overall I'm impressed, just need more!
I don’t see a controversy. I see people who wanted Vichy 2 with an updated UI whining and complaining as if there were thirty other companies who make games like this.
Vichy 3 is much better than Vichy 2. The only thing 2 had that 3 is lacking is the way the major empires practiced imperialism on the minors. 3 doesn’t hVe the same feel.
The cultural map sucks, it didn't improve since Victoria 2
Vic3 is my fav pdx game. Needs lots of polish but it’s a real good start. It’ll get years of support and will get better each DLC and free patch.
More paid DLC than free patch