Victoria 3

That bitch Victoria stole all the swag. Why does this game require being progressive in order to succid ?? I thin it is cringe and communist propaganda. But inspite of that the game looks awesome for a strategy game. Has a lot of interesting events and funny knowledge. Really a lot of history and political moments. The developers are consistently adding new fucking shit and improve on the old fucking shit. #history #goodgrades #holocaust #9/11 #historicalswag #virginityrocks #incelmary #war #fightersforfreedom #1453ottomanontopoftheworld #freekurdistan #europeswag #russiasucks #liberties #slavaukrainei #modernpolitics1836-1936 #maga

I was a big fan of Victoria II. My relationship with the rest of Paradox' output is a bit less positive. I find a lot of their games to be pretty wide but lacking in depth as soon as you get into the specifics. I find HOI4 mechanics to be comical. I find Stellaris to be a pretty OK 4x game, but I would hardly call it a great 4x game. I enjoyed CKII, but for some reason struggled to get into CKIII. I still enjoy EUIV, but I've played the game to death; mostly I play with MEIOU.

Why tell you all of this? Because if you share my views on the individual games, it's a strong predictor of whether you'd agree with me or not.

The economy of this game is 'pretty cool.' I don't think it's really as complicated as I'd hoped, in fact, I hope mods and DLC add more depth, as the supply + demand + trade mechanics (both the trade system and the related laws) are, in my eyes, very simplified and gameified and this leads to an extremely formulaic gameplay loop. The trade micro is primarily busywork, which feels like a lost opportunity.

I am actually pretty OK with the war system everyone hates. I wish the controls you had over the fronts were a bit more granular, such that you could decide more precise paths of attack/defense/etc., and perhaps this coupled with more granular terrain efffects and penalties + supply lines. But this would require them to basically rewrite the game map, so I don't expect it to happen. I don't really understand why people want an EUIV or HOI style units-on-abstracted-hex system. I also think there's a lot of lacking depth in terms of doctrines, institutions, technology, unit experience and regimental traditions, etc. that was missed there.

The politics system is becoming quite good with more updates, the only thing is it is good until something nonsensical happens, for reasons born out of the mechanics, that break immersion. I don't really have good fixes for this, some of the way those mechanics work is to avoid other things from happening that would be worse in that respect.

This game still has a lot of potential to improve with DLC + the modding community. But, as it stands, this game plays like a cheap map-focused ripoff of Factorio with some Victorian flavour and competition between 'factories,' which is just far less fun than that game, and wherein each faction on said map plays pretty much identically.

I do keep playing it, but I think it's because I really want to find something in it that I just don't find in it as of v1.5.13.