Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Minenfeld!
Aug 21, 2012



Why does everyone want to play a game that they can't understand so badly?

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Pakled
Aug 6, 2011

WE ARE SMART

Minenfeld! posted:

Why does everyone want to play a game that they can't understand so badly?

Dehumanize yourself and face to POPs

Prav
Oct 29, 2011

Minenfeld! posted:

Why does everyone want to play a game that they can't understand so badly?

when you can't tell a good move from a bad move ahead of time it's not possible to play badly

CharlestheHammer
Jun 26, 2011

YOU SAY MY POSTS ARE THE RAVINGS OF THE DUMBEST PERSON ON GOD'S GREEN EARTH BUT YOU YOURSELF ARE READING THEM. CURIOUS!

Minenfeld! posted:

Why does everyone want to play a game that they can't understand so badly?

Most players don’t understand the games they play.

Only really hardcore players understand games in the way people want to understand Vicky.

It’s honestly kind of weird.

Pakled
Aug 6, 2011

WE ARE SMART
Seriously, though, Victoria 2 is cool because it offers you a look at the regular people of your country moreso than any other Paradox game. CK2 may have deep characters, but it only represents the elite of your country. The only interaction you have with anyone who isn't part of the ruling class comes from random events. In EU4 and HoI4, you're basically painting a map, and your people are kind of a means to that end. Vicky 2 is different, though. In Vicky 2, you paint the map for the sake of your people, not the other way around. You can see exactly how your policies affect the day-to-day lives of your people. Your population has their own ideologies and complex reasons for following them. I love Vicky 2 despite it being a janky, broken mess because The People are the most important part of the game, not the state. This degree of simulation tickles the little megalomaniacal part of my brain better than any other Paradox game.

Prav
Oct 29, 2011

i never got pops to be anything but numbers to be manipulated until they're better numbers tbh

it's me. i'm the industrial monster

Jazerus
May 24, 2011


Minenfeld! posted:

Why does everyone want to play a game that they can't understand so badly?

in the victorian era nobody understood the economy except marx and horrible decisions were made because of it

it's more authentic to the period to have everyone desperately stumbling around grabbing random colonies to try to get the market to go their way, with a vague understanding of the mechanics but a lot of unseen pitfalls to fall into also

Agean90
Jun 28, 2008


Minenfeld! posted:

Why does everyone want to play a game that they can't understand so badly?

rember when u were a kid and get we're all these strange unknown things and u didn't know enough about them to guess plot twists or common gameplay elements so it was like working out a puzzle

It's like that but with imperialism

ZombieLenin
Sep 6, 2009

"Democracy for the insignificant minority, democracy for the rich--that is the democracy of capitalist society." VI Lenin


[/quote]

Jazerus posted:

in the victorian era nobody understood the economy except marx and horrible decisions were made because of it

it's more authentic to the period to have everyone desperately stumbling around grabbing random colonies to try to get the market to go their way, with a vague understanding of the mechanics but a lot of unseen pitfalls to fall into also

Amen, sir, amen. I too worship at the church of Marx.

Minenfeld!
Aug 21, 2012



Jazerus posted:

in the victorian era nobody understood the economy except marx and horrible decisions were made because of it

it's more authentic to the period to have everyone desperately stumbling around grabbing random colonies to try to get the market to go their way, with a vague understanding of the mechanics but a lot of unseen pitfalls to fall into also

That sounds awful.

Beamed
Nov 26, 2010

Then you have a responsibility that no man has ever faced. You have your fear which could become reality, and you have Godzilla, which is reality.


not knowing what you're doing puts a pretty loving significant end of life on your game, which is either determined by "when they figure out" or "when they're too frustrated to keep caring". These "ideas" really miss the mark on what makes a game like Victoria so much fun.

However I'm 100% in favor of the next Victoria being all about fermenting a proletarian revolution in a country.

EDIT: yes, it's more realistic for it to work this way, but that's not..really an argument.

Beamed fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Jul 26, 2018

Phlegmish
Jul 2, 2011



Pakled posted:

Seriously, though, Victoria 2 is cool because it offers you a look at the regular people of your country moreso than any other Paradox game. CK2 may have deep characters, but it only represents the elite of your country. The only interaction you have with anyone who isn't part of the ruling class comes from random events. In EU4 and HoI4, you're basically painting a map, and your people are kind of a means to that end. Vicky 2 is different, though. In Vicky 2, you paint the map for the sake of your people, not the other way around. You can see exactly how your policies affect the day-to-day lives of your people. Your population has their own ideologies and complex reasons for following them. I love Vicky 2 despite it being a janky, broken mess because The People are the most important part of the game, not the state. This degree of simulation tickles the little megalomaniacal part of my brain better than any other Paradox game.

Yeah, I absolutely love that demographic aspect, there's no other series quite like it. It serves quite well as a perfunctory introduction to the sociology of the era it's set in.

What I like about Vicky in general is its tight thematical focus on industrialisation and the rise of the nation-state - if game length is a little short because of that, so be it. That's probably what some people are afraid of when it comes to Imperator, it being just another map-painting game, EUIV set in antiquity. That they decided on a fairly early end date is an encouraging sign.

reignonyourparade
Nov 15, 2012

Minenfeld! posted:

Why does everyone want to play a game that they can't understand so badly?

If you can UNDERSTAND the market you can CONTROL the market, and i like that in vicky 2 You Can't Control The Market.

aphid_licker
Jan 7, 2009


The thing about the market irl is that everyone else is reacting in real-time along with you and that would make for a cool game if your most profitable factories became useless because everyone else jumped on the same train and you have to decide whether to slap a tariff, subsidize, diversify etc. Going to war over my neighbor's dildo tariff wrecking my dildo-based economy.

Nothingtoseehere
Nov 11, 2010


I honestly think Vicky 2 is too long, at least at the end - it should run to 1920, not all the way to 1936. It doesn't really handle the rise of fascism and the world economy in that period as well as earlier, and the jankyness becomes more apparent. Possibly should start earlier, around 1820 so you get the full transition from the Napleonic and a bit more room for alt-history.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Nothingtoseehere posted:

I honestly think Vicky 2 is too long, at least at the end - it should run to 1920, not all the way to 1936. It doesn't really handle the rise of fascism and the world economy in that period as well as earlier, and the jankyness becomes more apparent. Possibly should start earlier, around 1820 so you get the full transition from the Napleonic and a bit more room for alt-history.
Way I see it, the end date of Vicky should be less of an exact date and more a range - a soft definition that changes depending on what's actually going on in-game. The whole thing should lead up to the end of long 19th century, the Great War, and that war should definitely not get cut off by an arbitrary end date on a regular basis. Basically just have a check for whether a Great War is in progress, or has happened, and then extend the end date based on that - like the earliest end date is 1920, latest 1930, and then the exact end date is "end of Great War +2 years". If you end up getting cut off by the 1930 date you've managed to make the war last more than 10 years, which should probably be an achievement in itself.

As for the start date, I'd push it back to 1750 - just because that allows for so much more alternate history, while having a really solid core of Vicky-thematically appropriate history. Like, the French Revolution seems precisely the kind of poo poo that should be in Victoria, and if you can make the lead up and aftermath enjoyable too then you've basically created 80% of the game systems that are required to make the long 19th century enjoyable.

Crazycryodude
Aug 15, 2015

Lets get our X tons of Duranium back!

....Is that still a valid thing to jingoistically blow out of proportion?


The systems required to properly represent the 1750's and the systems required to represent the 1920's are so incredibly and massively different that there is zero chance you could ever fit them into one single game. The pace of technological change is just so massive that you'd need to basically build about three entirely different games and then just package them together as "one." Just to give the example that immediately springs to mind, a combat system designed to represent dudes standing in lines shooting smoothbore muskets cannot ever in a trillion years do machine guns and tanks and planes well, and vice versa, so major fundamentals about how the game works would have to change halfway through to the point that it's really just a new game if it's going to be at all fun to play.

I never really got why some people are so into moving the start date back, 1836 is already a bit early for a game where the focus is really supposed to be the peak of the Industrial Revolution/Victorian Era/1880's-1910's. The world economy went through massive and total paradigm shifts just from 1836-1936 that the game has trouble with, trying to go back even further to the even more massively different world economy of the 1750's would completely destroy any chance of it being good. 1836 is certainly acceptable and it was probably a smart idea to set it early enough to include the Springtime of Nations and all that, but I wouldn't go any earlier.

Crazycryodude fucked around with this message at 15:06 on Jul 26, 2018

Pakled
Aug 6, 2011

WE ARE SMART
I feel like the absolute earliest you could push back Vicky's start date would be post-Waterloo, and even that's a bit of a stretch.

Ms Adequate
Oct 30, 2011

Baby even when I'm dead and gone
You will always be my only one, my only one
When the night is calling
No matter who I become
You will always be my only one, my only one, my only one
When the night is calling



Love too experience the incredible jank that stems from any Modern Day Mods in various Paradox games, and seeing modders try to kludge the space race into Vicky 2 or nukes into EU4 :allears:

StashAugustine
Mar 24, 2013

Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

pretty sure you can simulate the chaos of the world economy by just making it unpredictable and influenced by tons of external and internal forces without making it impossible to understand what's going on

like the board game john company about the EIC has an insanely simple economic simulation (put down money for goods and ships, send those ships to territories to satisfy demand) but there's tons of calculated risks (semi-random events that can cause rebellions or depressions to gently caress up trade, trade missions require an outlay of money to increase chance of success) and multiple interest groups (different players jockeying for position in the company- trying to make their department profitable and gently caress around with other peoples' and maybe crash the company if they think they'd do better after deregulation, plus 'ai' indian empires running around conquering territory) so it winds up going all over the place

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
A bit late to the conversation but like, I don’t understand why people are saying you need to fully understand a game to enjoy it. Can you not play Hearts of Iron before you look up the specific minutia of how combat resolves? Is it not enough to know that “more attack is better”? You don’t need to fully understand Victoria 2’s economy to understand that “oh there’s a shortage of machine parts and that’s why all my factories are failing”. Like even with Vicky 2’s kind of poor presentation of data that level of detail is still easy enough to get.

axeil
Feb 14, 2006

The Cheshire Cat posted:

A bit late to the conversation but like, I don’t understand why people are saying you need to fully understand a game to enjoy it. Can you not play Hearts of Iron before you look up the specific minutia of how combat resolves? Is it not enough to know that “more attack is better”? You don’t need to fully understand Victoria 2’s economy to understand that “oh there’s a shortage of machine parts and that’s why all my factories are failing”. Like even with Vicky 2’s kind of poor presentation of data that level of detail is still easy enough to get.

I have a really bad habit of min/maxing if I can and it ends up sucking a lot of the more organic fun out of the game. I literally can't play CK2 the same way I did 3 or 4 years ago because I know way too much about breeding uber-heirs and abusing systems to expand my empire.

It's kind of sad, but since no one has figured out how to min-max Vicky 2 it's still always a fun, exciting experience.

StashAugustine
Mar 24, 2013

Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

what if, you had a system that was understandable, and also not brokenly easy to exploit

Agean90
Jun 28, 2008


StashAugustine posted:

what if, you had a system that was understandable, and also not brokenly easy to exploit

what if instead of that lame rear end poo poo we had multiple economic models included and pick one to activate at random at the start of each game :unsmigghh:

Arrhythmia
Jul 22, 2011

Agean90 posted:

what if instead of that lame rear end poo poo we had multiple economic models included and pick one to activate at random at the start of each game :unsmigghh:

also it switches throughout the game

Agean90
Jun 28, 2008


Arrhythmia posted:

also it switches throughout the game

You can also research economic techs which will show more information about the economic system but it's not guaranteed to be accurate or even working on the same model early on

axeil
Feb 14, 2006

Agean90 posted:

You can also research economic techs which will show more information about the economic system but it's not guaranteed to be accurate or even working on the same model early on

This would be awesome.

Model the uncertainty and amateur theories of early economics where some of the info is right and some is wrong, have it culminate either with Marx writing Das Kapital or Keyens where you finally have a complete picture of what's going on.

ThatBasqueGuy
Feb 14, 2013

someone introduce jojo to lazyb


If it can also model stateless societies (endgame goal to create a strong nationstate with the #1 industry then dissolve it :unsmigghh:) it would become the bestest game

feller
Jul 5, 2006


StashAugustine posted:

what if, you had a system that was understandable, and also not brokenly easy to exploit

Are you talking about V2 or people's wishes for V3?

AnoHito
May 8, 2014

And all the constants it uses are randomized.

StashAugustine
Mar 24, 2013

Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

Senor Dog posted:

Are you talking about V2 or people's wishes for V3?

does v2 strike you as understandable or difficult to exploit? :v:

feller
Jul 5, 2006


StashAugustine posted:

does v2 strike you as understandable or difficult to exploit? :v:

yes

Drone
Aug 22, 2003

Incredible machine
:smug:


StashAugustine posted:

does v2 strike you as understandable or difficult to exploit? :v:

don't need to understand anything beyond "put socialists in power ASAP" if you want to win the game

much like real life tbh

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Crazycryodude posted:

The systems required to properly represent the 1750's and the systems required to represent the 1920's are so incredibly and massively different that there is zero chance you could ever fit them into one single game. The pace of technological change is just so massive that you'd need to basically build about three entirely different games and then just package them together as "one." Just to give the example that immediately springs to mind, a combat system designed to represent dudes standing in lines shooting smoothbore muskets cannot ever in a trillion years do machine guns and tanks and planes well, and vice versa, so major fundamentals about how the game works would have to change halfway through to the point that it's really just a new game if it's going to be at all fun to play.
Tanks and planes come in basically at the finish line, and shouldn't even really make much of an impact on the game play surrounding warfare - that should be determined by logistics. Machine guns of course do come in about halfway through the game in the current version of V2, and it doesn't seem to cause any problems - it just makes your armies much more formidable. Don't see why previous weapons technology couldn't do the same - letting the West slowly push away from the rest of the world in weapons technology and really start dominating. This also makes "Westernization" a more natural part of the game, rather than a sort of side-feature for "savages".

Crazycryodude posted:

I never really got why some people are so into moving the start date back, 1836 is already a bit early for a game where the focus is really supposed to be the peak of the Industrial Revolution/Victorian Era/1880's-1910's. The world economy went through massive and total paradigm shifts just from 1836-1936 that the game has trouble with, trying to go back even further to the even more massively different world economy of the 1750's would completely destroy any chance of it being good. 1836 is certainly acceptable and it was probably a smart idea to set it early enough to include the Springtime of Nations and all that, but I wouldn't go any earlier.
Given Paradox's tendency to make their games less Eurocentric, the pre-Industrial Revolution economies of much of the world should be better modeled in any case though - so why not just have both industrial revolutions in-game? The example of how warfare changes over the course of V2 is a pretty nice example of how the same core system can produce vastly different results - as long as you change the inputs. I don't really see a reason why the economy should be modeled differently in 1750 than 1850, at its core it's still just production, consumption, transportation costs and tariffs - but technology can change the balance and cause the paradigm shifts you're talking about.

As for the focus being whichever one of those you choose, it doesn't have to be. Ideological struggle, nation building, and imperialism, seems like more of a core identity to me, and pushing the game back to 1750 gives you way more of that.

DrSunshine
Mar 23, 2009

Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!
Are we back on "Fantasize about Victoria III" chat? Oh goody!

So I had an idea -- what if the spread of the Industrial Revolution was taken in an approach like the spread of institutions in EUIV? You could use more or less the same mechanics, with various sort of "components" of the Industrial Revolution spreading outwards from its historical starting spots.

Pacho
Jun 9, 2010

DrSunshine posted:

Are we back on "Fantasize about Victoria III" chat? Oh goody!

So I had an idea -- what if the spread of the Industrial Revolution was taken in an approach like the spread of institutions in EUIV? You could use more or less the same mechanics, with various sort of "components" of the Industrial Revolution spreading outwards from its historical starting spots.

Instead of a tech tree just inventions and discoveries that pop-up and spread from province to province. Invention chance depends on literacy/education/infraestructure, some inventions are pre-requisite for the next. So, a mix of current EU4 and Stellaris

wukkar
Nov 27, 2009
Release a game that spans 1820-1821. Then release a different game that spans 1821-1822 with different core mechanics. Repeat this 100 times. Absolutely no save file converters. Unique names and a dozen DLC for each.

Arrhythmia
Jul 22, 2011

wukkar posted:

Release a game that spans 1820-1821. Then release a different game that spans 1821-1822 with different core mechanics. Repeat this 100 times. Absolutely no save file converters. Unique names and a dozen DLC for each.

Turns are based by the minute

Flavius Aetass
Mar 30, 2011
no, they're real-time games. as in real time

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

alsothere
Oct 14, 2014
Taco Defender

Flavius Aetass posted:

no, they're real-time games. as in real time

Turns based by Planck time

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply