Victoria III – First Impressions

Agree with the tech tree, it's too short and you likely won't vary in the techs you get if you're playing a country with reasonable research points. I'd love some more country-specific flavour and actions; I understand folks don't want to be railroaded (having options to play a country any way you want is great), but it feels a little empty at the moment. Of course this can be modded in and filled out with DLC down the road.

If you enjoy this era of history or enjoy other Paradox games, I'd strongly recommend giving it a go.

https://www.filfre.net/2018/03/the-game-of-everything-part-2...

> Further, the ruthless zero-sum game implied by the “4X” label doesn’t actually exist in Civilization unless you, the player, want it to. Consider this extract from the original manual, found under the heading of “Winning”:

> > You win a game of Civilization in either of two ways: by eliminating all rival civilizations or by surviving until the colonization of space begins.

> > The elimination of all other civilizations in the world is very hard to accomplish. You are much more likely to win by being in existence when colonists reach Alpha Centauri. Even if the colonists are not yours, the successful direction of your civilization through the centuries is an achievement. You have survived countless wars, the pollution of the industrial age, and the risks of nuclear weapons.

> Bruce Shelley, who authored the manual, is thus explicitly discouraging the player from approaching Civilization as a zero-sum game: you win simply “by being in existence when colonists reach Alpha Centauri.” This doesn’t mean that all or most players played under that assumption — a topic I’ll return to momentarily — but it’s nevertheless kind of an amazing statement to find in a game like this one, implying as it does that civilization writ large truly is a global, cooperative project. There’s an idealism lurking within Civilization, this game that plays not just with economics and war but with the grandest achievements of humanity, that’s missing in the likes of Master of Orion. It’s notable that, while the history of gaming is littered with hundreds of galaxy-spanning 4X space operas, vanishingly few games beyond Civilization‘s own sequels have attempted to replicate its model of grand strategy.

> For me, all of this stuff of history and humanity that goes into Civilization is the reason that, although Railroad Tycoon or even Master of Orion might be better games in structural terms, they can never inspire my imagination in quite the same way. While I hesitate to tell anyone how they should correctly play any game, I’m always a little bemused when I see the folks in the hardcore Civilization community sharing exhaustive breakdowns of how to play every turn with maximal efficiency, as if they were playing a game of chess instead of a grand romp through history. Meier and Shelley must have felt much the same way when, shortly after releasing the original Civilization, they learned that players had developed strategies to beat the game by placing a tiny city on every other square, or by never researching any breakthrough beyond the wheel and the trireme, building endless hordes of chariots, and conquering the world by 1000 BC. They duly put together some patches to try to head off such exploits as much as possible, but they didn’t do so without grumbling that playing Civilization only for the purpose of winning wasn’t quite what they’d had in mind when they were designing it. “To me,” says Meier, “a game of Civilization is an epic story.”

> Meier and Shelley had envisioned a more experiential sort of player, one eager to get into the spirit as well as the mechanics of the game. Consider that standard practice among the hardcore of meticulously plotting a path through the Advances Chart in order to get to, say, the key advance of Railroads as quickly as possible. This sort of thing wasn’t what the game’s designers had intended at all. “That’s not how they [the real civilizations of history] did it,” says Meier. “They just figured out one thing at a time.” The designers had pictured a more free-wheeling game with far more space for the player’s experiential imagination, one where you might choose Mysticism as your next subject of research from among half a dozen choices not because it was a key advance on the road to Navigation but because you had chosen to play as a hierarchical, intensely religious society.

But we all know how easily the focus can become on just winning, especially when you are not sitting around a real table with friends playing a board game...

(But they only had a few decades worth of board and video gameplay refinements at that point...)

And when I watch at screenshots of other Paradox games they look like a skin on EU4, I didn't play them, I'm just talking about the visuals from the reviews so I'm reluctant to try them out.

Victoria II and III are headed in that direction with the POP mechanics, and modeling the ever-expanding reach of media in the 1800s (there is a reason that most countries centralized on a single national language for the bureaucracy).

But yeah, the only reason we haven't seen a credible Cold-War-era strategy game (aside from that one ancient Mac OS game) is because the era involved very little direct military conflict, and game-publishers have not yet figured out the mechanics of how to model a very nuanced conflict like that in a fun way.

> Alternatively, if you want to work it out yourself, you can just do what you like, and the tutorial will pick up again afterward.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/victoria-3-review

To model the Battle of the Somme with even some tactical fidelity is also likely not feasible within present constraints. I would look to niche war sim board games instead.

That said, one might be wiser to read the English war poets than search for such a game. The study of Great War tactics is perforce the study of a macabre failure in human imagination and morality. Even at the tactical level the war is proof of a human inability to learn and change - even when our choices lead inexorably to mass death.

Battlefield mortality was exacerbated by commanders’ fixation on 19th century tactics. Creeping artillery barrages and over-the-top frontal assaults were finally effective only strategically, as economic and political weapons. This was not tactical innovation. It was an upscaled iteration of cannon barrages decimating bravely advancing line infantry.

A brief summary:

“What I want to focus on here is the disconnect between the popular conception of how trench warfare actually worked and the actual conditions that produced trench warfare. This week, we’re going to look at the problem: both the popular perception of what the problem is and what the actual problem of trench warfare is. This is both to set the groundwork for the next post, which will discuss the ways that this stalemate was and wasn’t broken, but it also serves to handily dismiss some of the ‘easy’ solutions that are often offered which don’t solve the actual problem but merely solve the imaginary one.”

There were essentially two problems for the attacker. First, infantry charging into fixed machine gun nests were suicide. Second, if they are able to clear out the enemy and take over a trench line, they would need re-supply. Meaning, eventually, another trench would have to be dug to connect the newly won trench with your own lines. Meanwhile, the enemy is counter-attacking.

The creeping barrage (Allied) and blitzkrieg (German) solves the first problem of how infantry can attack machine gun nests. The Allies would closely synchronize artillery a few hundred feet in advance of their attacking infantry. The creeping barrage of artillery fire suppresses the enemy so the infantry can charge. The Germans developed the first steps towards blitzkrieg tactics. Basically small squads armed with grenades were empowered to make tactical decisions. They would advance when resistance was soft. They would move laterally when resistance was stiff. The metaphor was like the ocean wave crashing against a rocky beach. The wave would advance but would bypass stiff defensive points. Eventually those defensive points would fall when they run out of ammo. Either side did not effectively solve the re-supply problem. At that time trains would bring forward supplies, trucks would then transport to communication trenches, and soldiers would have to hoof the last mile. All of which was difficult when someone was shooting at you.

No more ambiguous than in the more popular Civilization games.

There’s a term for Paradox’ grand strategy games I like, “data surfing,” that describes what it can be like to mostly passively experience its simulations. Most idlers or clickers progress along straightforward exponential curves, but they could absolutely be designed similarly.

Do you want the player to be instantly powerful or have to grind laboriously? Do you want them to run from place to place or fast travel? Craft/build instantly or take time?

I think that good games often will give you other things to do while you wait for important things. Some of my favorite games will give you too many things to do so that you must prioritize correctly or you will lose it all.

In many ways I love HOI3, for instance, but it's a bit love-hate because about 50% of the time I'm messing with shit I'd rather let an extremely simple "AI" handle. Or just give me some good preset templates (make them "historically inspired", that's cool, or not, either way) for the things that use templates, or, also acceptable, let me save some of mine between games and have them show up when I've researched enough to build them (looking at you, tank and aircraft editors, especially).

I used to consume a lot of clicker games, but... for those who _haven't_ played them, they're basically management simulators.

I dare say that Factorio is in fact, a clicker game (as it starts off with right-clicking to mine 1 iron ore at a time).

The goal of _ALL_ clicker games is to build enough infrastructure to "stop clicking". The "click" is just the fundamental unit, the introduction to the game. In just 5 to 10 minutes, you'll already move onto automatic miners (Factorio), or Autoclippers (Universal Paperclips), or Heroes (Clicker Heroes), or Cookie Factories (Cookie Clicker), or whatever.

The game then becomes one of resource allocation: you have 1000 iron in Factorio, do you build assembly machines or belts? You have 1000 paperclips in Universal Paperclips, do you get another autoclipper or do you start buying wires?

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In fact, any management game can "turn into' a clicker game rather easily. And I think the "clicker mechanic" (ie: having the lowest-level action equivalent to a click from the user) helps solidify in the Player's mind the "value" of the cookie factory or the Assembly Machine 3 x 4x Speed Modules (or whatever).

But yeah, a well designed clicker game is just a management sim like any other. No one actually plays clicker games by clicking on things.

As the author points out, Crusader Kings III is more person-oriented, if that's what you want. Personally I like games where it's slightly ambiguous who you are, but things evolve in a "plausible" way if you play for your goals.

They've really shifted in a more game-y direction over the years. I started with Hearts of Iron 2, where the systems were less abstract and mapped closer to real life. I felt like I was actually running a country and its military. There were more ways to cheese the older games, like the time I played as Guatemala and launched a successful coup to install a Guatemalan puppet government in the USA, but you could avoid those strategies if you wanted a more serious WWII wargame.

Since EU4, or maybe CK2, they've abstracted a lot of the gameplay into those progress bars and point systems, the foremost example being the focus tree in Hearts of Iron 4. I still enjoy most of their newer games, but they constantly remind you that they are games. Gameplay feels less emergent and it feels like I get less agency as a player.

Yes, some things you need to wait for - there is always something else you can do in the meantime.