Victoria 3: the 1960 german unification play comes with a few complications

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Victoria 3: the 1960 german unification play comes with a few complications

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A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

Digital Osmosis posted:

never mind, looks like Paradox isn't serious about their economic simulation at all. Capitalists choosing to invest profits into the wider society? loving ludicrous

This sounds more like the government going "Hey dude, if you invest in a Trans-Caucasian railway then you're gonna be rolling in cash in a few years when we take over Persia". It's the state and capital being in a symbiotic relationship, not capitalism working towards the good of the wider society.

Jazerus posted:

governments of that era were somewhat more effective at extracting surplus from capitalists than many modern governments, and when things like railroads were both "good for wider society" and extremely profitable, they were indeed the target of tons of investment. one of the strangest thing about the 1800s is witnessing capitalism in its semi-functional, tightly controlled early state rather than the decrepit shambling corpse we're all used to

Modern capitalism is literally just the resurgence of the capitalism that reigned supreme for most of the period covered by Victoria, just under material conditions where they're less likely to accidentally create improvements.

# ¿ May 22, 2021 06:54

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# ¿ Apr 16, 2024 09:44

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Vichan posted:

They'd better keep that obnoxiously loud factory construction noise or I'm cancelling my pre-order.

The volume goes up with factory level.

# ¿ May 22, 2021 13:33

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Edgar Allen Ho posted:

It�s 100% going to be a waldetoft score with maybe a dlc where sabaton sings about Prussians and Rorkes Drift

In an unfortunate decision, someone at Paradox bought the rights to Prussian Blue songs, thinking they were Prussian marches.

# ¿ May 22, 2021 18:32

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JosefStalinator posted:

I'm curious how immigration is gonna end up - I kinda don't like the idea of making it more deterministic and hardcoded to big events like the famine, if only because attracting immigrants and moving your population around is one of the more fun bits of the era.

ThatBasqueGuy posted:

From what I was reading it sounded like migration was way less deterministic, and was more a result of relative standards of living and freedoms, with crises like the irish potato famine happening as an organic result of gameplay

Yeah, I don't really see how they could make it more deterministic than the V2 version. Immigration based on standards of living, political freedom and cultural similarity is a MUCH better system than the "Immigration is for the new world, specifically the US" system. Like, historically, Denmark got quite a lot of Swedish immigration due to them getting a shot at a less adventurous journey to an economic wonderland, with a decent chunk never continuing the journey to the US. And AFAIK, Russia also had an idea about boosting its own population like the US was doing, though obviously it was not quite as attractive a proposition. A liberalized Russia though should probably be able to attract a bunch of people from neighboring regions.

The thing I'm most worried about here would be famines being natural disasters, rather than man made. Like, the reduction in production should be natural, but it should be the response of the government that determines if it's a famine - with some interests groups obviously not being in the business of helping people.

Frionnel posted:

Eh, doing that means you have to deal with the american wars of independence against Spain and Portugal right off the bat, which would be pretty hard to pull off dynamically. Makes more sense to start after the dust has settled.

Frionnel posted:

Plus, i'll fully admit that i'm biased since i'm from the region (Brazil) and would rather have a recognizable scenario where i get to play these countries right off the bat.

For a lot of them, you could, if you modeled them as satellite states rather than colonial territory.

Raenir Salazar posted:

South America starting on fire I think would work really well for experienced players who want to try their hand at forging their own destiny in a trial by fire; especially if it actually models things like the various larger than life personalities like Simon Bolivar running about; and combat/war is a bit more complex than the current EU4/V2 system of raising regiments and smashing stacks against other stacks or worrying about your debt/war exhaustion et cetera; commanding an insurgency could be fun and Paradox has a lot of untapped ground it could try its hand at with asymmerical gameplay.

Yeah, having one region of the map being in a state of flux right from the start seems cool to me. If they make the stateless societies work in a future DLC, then that might be a decent base to build your suggested asymmetrical gameplay.

# ¿ May 23, 2021 06:16

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karmicknight posted:

The classic Victoria piece of advice is always "Start in Brazil" because Brazil in Vicky is basically in the perfect position for the player to start slow and build up into being a power of relevance.

But who listens to advice?

Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:

Constantinople's fate was already set in stone by the time EU4 starts. The Byzantine Empire should die 99% of the time.

The same argument works for the Spanish possessions in the Americas.

# ¿ May 23, 2021 07:13

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Veryslightlymad posted:

I'm most intrigued by the immigration mechanic, as its worded in the post. It seems like the right combinations of factors between two countries could create big shifts of very specific populations to a very specific destination. Which is definitely a thing that happens.

It's pretty fascinating stuff.

If you've ever been to the Museum at Ellis Island, they do a whole thing about it.

Could this be the game that can organically recreate Suriname, a South American country where the largest ethnic group is East Indian, and the official language is Dutch?

Yeah, immigration more like this is actually something I modded into V2, though obviously never to the degree they're suggesting here, so I'm definitely excited for it. Plus the whole immigration waves thing might also throw a spanner in the works in some scenarios. Like, what happens if one takes place right as the US is fighting a bloody civil war? Would a war discourage immigration, and send the Irish to Peru instead? That sounds like a pretty cool thing to have happen occasionally, with a confluence of circumstances causing one country to be greatly boosted and the balance of power in a region shifting irrevocably.

# ¿ May 23, 2021 08:25

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Charlz Guybon posted:

This did not seem to happen in real life

True. Looking it up, the average over that period was only like a 5% drop compared to the previous 5 years. The fact that the main immigration areas were the ones essentially not affected by the war probably did a lot of heavy lifting there though, so an earlier war where the South was in a stronger position might tip the scales enough that people decide against going to the US.

Beamed posted:

something else i hope organically happens is that players will stride into 1914 arrogantly thinking "well ive definitely eclipsed all the other powers, time to steamroll them for their colonies", and then their entire country falls apart in an apocalyptic hellwar their economy couldnt possibly handle

Yeah, the game encouraging you to go all in on beating up your rivals, and being willing to risk it all because you're pretty sure they'll break before you do, would really be the ideal way to end a campaign where you're serious about being THE great power.

Actually, that has to be an achievement, right? Being the sole Great Power, every other country being too insignificant to claim the title?

# ¿ May 23, 2021 09:11

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CharlestheHammer posted:

They probably didn�t announce a release date as with their current issues they do not need a delay or worse yet an absolutely broken release.

So it�s better to announce a date when your sure you can make it

Yeah, the announcement without a date gets them like 95% of the hype, given how thirsty people were for the game. This way they avoid a delay, and get to juice the hype again later.

# ¿ May 23, 2021 11:49

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Wiz posted:

Not my fault you guys aren't asking the important questions

I asked you the most important question: Have you read Das Kapital?

# ¿ May 23, 2021 12:34

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Fuligin posted:

in my hours of daydream-designing about a future Vicky 3, one thing i've always though would be neat is some way of competing for prestige by means of exploration/archaeological pillaging; so, say, you could sponsor expeditions to climb the highest mountains, reach the poles, explore 'darkest' Africa and the interior of the Amazon, exploit and steal the cultural memory of other nations to stock your museums. This would be more likely to be DLC fodder than base game stuff, but im curious if anything like that is intended for the release candidate

As long as the stolen artifacts undermine your relationship with countries you stole it from. Also, no one�s poo poo should be off the table. Like, the Museum of Cairo puts Stonehenge next to the Great Pyramid of Giza to mock a defeated UK.

# ¿ May 23, 2021 17:47

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Vivian Darkbloom posted:

It seems like you could reasonably start the game in 1825, which is about when the independence wars in Spanish America wound down. Did something special happen in 1836 for the sake of the game?

I feel like it�s just 1936-100.

# ¿ May 23, 2021 20:56

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Barnaby Barnacle posted:

Start date should be 24th of May 1819, surely.

24th of August 1818.

# ¿ May 23, 2021 21:04

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Randarkman posted:

I'm not really a fan of the end date being as late as 1936 to be honest. The world before and after WW1 is just too different and the Victoria games were never good at actually simulating WW1 or its aftermath.

I almost feel like the Great War should be left out of the simulation all together and be a dynamic game over condition, though I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be terribly popular and might be bad at actually incentivising players to build up large standing armies alliance networks.

You're assuming WW1 happens on schedule. If you accept the necessity of capping off the game with a WW1, then you also need to leave room for a delayed version.

And yeah, the awareness that a WW1 is likely on the horizon might very well be necessary to put the player in the right mindset for the 20th century years, making it less important that the actual war itself is perfectly simulated, because the real point is the influence on domestic policy leading up to it, and the effects of the war on domestic policy afterward.

That said, they can for sure make the actual end of the war more satisfying, more seemingly final, and make the aftermath more interesting.

Gaius Marius posted:

I thought Victoria did a reasonably good job of simulating the Great War. The shift from horses to planes, making gas so powerful without a counter, and the increasing reliance on mobilization and the devastating effects it could have on your country were all very well done.

What I don't think it does well is the six subsequent Great Wars that fire off between absolutely crippled countries.

Yeah. It might not be perfectly realistic in terms of how the fighting happens (though provinces designed solely for movement in Vicky 3 might solve a lot of that), but the game does a pretty good job at shifting the style of war with tech.

Definitely need to add something to prevent subsequent Great Wars though. Making any conscripted pops far more pacifist and radical would help, as would making something akin to the League of Nations that strongly encourages beating up minor countries over having big confrontations. The end of the war triggering rebellions and independence wars all over the place could also help distract the GPs, by making them want to win the peace rather than start off some new trouble.

Takanago posted:

The game should have a Commonwealth variant with a Union Jack in the corner for every single tag in the game. British France, British Prussia, British Brittany, etc.

I feel like the idea is that EVERY combination is possible, because the country in charge just superimposes their own flag on the canton. That sounds like the easiest way to do it by far, rather than having to custom make tens of thousands of flags.

# ¿ May 24, 2021 05:46

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Tuna-Fish posted:

So much of HoI4 could be lifted as is and make wars better.

*stuff*

So I get how that would be too much for a non-wargame, but my dream is that it's at least possible to mod in. Because of the superb modding abilities of Imperator, I have high hopes...

I feel like just making a generic army composition that can be fed more and more equipment would help offset some of the complexity here. No need to have to find the correct composition of 5-10 unit types, just define a couple of types of armies (elite/standing army vs. standard vs. colonial) and the equipment just scales to the size of the army.

I'm not actually into HoI at all, but the whole logistics side of things does actually feel meaningful to the period. I know the Danish leadership decided against more advanced firearms leading up to 1864 because it felt the army would chew through its ammunition too fast, which is sort of a parallel issue to the weapons themselves being expensive to replace. Obviously important to hit the right balance here, but if as you suggest they tie it into diplomacy, with the sale of older models (or even better, state of the art models) being a way to recoup some of the investment monetarily and/or diplomatically, then the focus could be shifted pretty convincingly away from like a HoI style war focus.

If not part of the base game, "War Is a Racket" could be a decent DLC, and making it obvious that it was the economic side of war that was the focus would temper expectations of a full-on HoI style war DLC.

Torrannor posted:

I admit, I never even tried Vicky 1 or 2 because of the time period. I'm simply turned off by "modern" weapons. Sword and lances and bow (and optionally magic)? Sign me up. Ion cannons, plasma rifles, antimatter bombs? They're my jam!

Ballistic rifles, artillery, tanks, airplanes? I don't care for that at all. And I did my mandatory 9 months conscription service in Germany (before we abolished conscription), and I didn't really hate it, but something about that period in military history (up to the present) just generally doesn't interest me. It's a problem I have with the Total War games as well, I've never enjoyed the combat in Empire or Fall of the Samurai. I played Empire: Total War basically purely for it's mapgame, because I autoresolved every single fight, which is probably not the proper way to play a Total War game, but I still got some enjoyment out of it.

Now I do like the politics of the Vicky period, but as I said, I simply don't enjoy the warfare aspect of that time. Reading your post filled me with a bit of dread, I seriously considered dipping my toes into a Victoria game for the first time with Vicky 3, especially with the announcement about warfare being... deemphasized? I don't have to know about muzzleloaded vs needle firing rifles, do I? Make detailed tactical plans how to counter an enemy's heavy gun howitzers? I really appreciate Crusader King's warfare system for making army composition in a way less important. If it's important to really understand 19th century warfare, then Vicky 3 might not be for me

I don't feel like anything Tuna-Fish posted really necessitated knowing anything about war in the period. The whole thing boils down to a dilemma of new = better vs. new = expensive and what you prioritize. The historical names are just flavor, it's really just Small Arms 1, Small Arms 2, and so on, and it's not like anything happens at a scale where you actively deal with things in detail - you just smash armies into each other.

A Buttery Pastry fucked around with this message at 11:28 on May 24, 2021

# ¿ May 24, 2021 11:22

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Randarkman posted:

One of the devs said on a discord that they (personally) were playing with an idea of making political parties/factions a dynamic label you get dependent on what Interest Groups you're pulling support from, somewhat simialr to the government flavor names in Stellaris. I at least thought this was a very neat idea.

Yeah, that was what I was gonna suggest too, a purely flavor thing. Anything more, and I feel like it would just feel anemic unless they really went all-in, at which point it's probably better left for an expansion if it's not something that has really been in the plans until now.

# ¿ May 24, 2021 18:05

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Zedhe Khoja posted:

I really doubt the thinking behind the way the purges work was that Paradox is a hive of Grover Furr acolytes and more like "what if there was a way Trotsky could become leader lol".

Doesn't really matter if the developers are committed Stalinists or they just did it for gameplay, the outcome is the same.

# ¿ May 26, 2021 15:08

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BillBear posted:

Won't be worse than the "uncivilised" stuff for virtually all of native Africa and Asia in Vicky 2, which was all sorts of yikes. It's clear Paradox have done plenty of learning and maturing since then, so if anything it'll probably come down to accidentally making ancaps the best form of government or something, which is more funny than anything else.

Also, the Steam forums of course has someone crying because they removed the uncivilised name and replaced it with something more historical. Some guys are legit mad that places like Japan, Iran or Qing aren't painted as barbarians for *some* reason. Couldn't imagine what.

Is it more historical?

I suppose uncivilized is not quite racist enough for the period.

# ¿ May 26, 2021 16:12

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DrSunshine posted:

EDIT: And yeah, the fact that the colonial powers of Europe can beat up on you for no penalty. You can even become a recognized power by defeating one in combat, like in the Russo-Japanese war. I really like this system because it highlights the Eurocentric/colonialist viewpoint.

Imagine if it was possible to beat up a country hard enough that you drop it down to untecognized.

Actually, now I�m wondering if it would make sense for China to start out as recognized and becoming unrecognized due to getting easily beaten up by Europeans?

# ¿ May 26, 2021 16:36

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LostCosmonaut posted:

Not only do I demand that the US states and Japanese daimyos are modeled as independent countries, but I want a start where every releasable nation is independent and playable.

Which US states should start off as unrecognized?

# ¿ May 26, 2021 18:07

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yikes! posted:

texas and the 13 colonies are the only ones to have won wars at game start, so are the only recognized states

Texas should be unrecognized, as it is a breakaway state at game start. (Unless they changed the start date.)

# ¿ May 26, 2021 18:20

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AnEdgelord posted:

Sure but i more meant to ask if when I do a United Fruit Company to some latin american countries do they just ahistorically turn into European Great Power-style colonies or does something else happen thats more reflective of their actual relationship?

What is the meaningful difference between the two, not captured by US economic/political differences relative to for example the UK?

# ¿ May 26, 2021 18:23

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really queer Christmas posted:

Any kind of disease management would be dlc, likely similar to reapers due for ck2. Which was a neat dlc, though I'm not sure how much you could wring out of that for an empire compared to when you're controlling an actual dude/dudette

A general "Health & Safety" DLC covering everything from local disease outbreaks to droughts to organizations like the Red Cross might make sense, though the challenge is to give it enough upsides that people will want it. A DLC that's purely about killing/crippling your pops (Do mangled vets end up as Dependents after a war? That might make war an even worse prospect than them simply dying.), whether through natural means or your capitalist exporting all the food in your famine stricken nation, might not be the easiest sell.

# ¿ May 27, 2021 18:51

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Baronjutter posted:

I don't want to read dev diaries, I want wiz to read them to me in his handsome victorian outfit.

Dev diaries as a duet between an aristocrat and a factory worker.

# ¿ May 27, 2021 19:50

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Jazerus posted:

My favorite absurd thing about v2 is that you can choose a socialist ruling party as an absolute monarch in europe without having austria or prussia come down on you like a ton of bricks. there's no sense that the various powers are ideologically committed in any way, which couldn't be further from the overall historical narrative of the 19th century

I feel like it shouldn�t even have to be a socialist party. Any kind of liberal or nationalist group in power should piss off reactionary powers. Or even supporting one of those groups incidentally. Russia stopped Prussia with a sternly worded letter in 1848, because it was seen to be siding with nationalist rabble.

# ¿ May 28, 2021 10:07

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Denmark banned the slave trade as "early" as 1792, with Britain following up in 1807 and actually trying to enforce it on other countries (including Denmark de facto it has to be said.) So yeah, it was much reduced by the start of the game. Still, the Atlantic Slave Trade survived until 1870, and even had a resurgence in the US in the years leading up to the Civil War.

I can see why you'd want to not push the slavery angle even more, but from an entirely detached perspective, slaves as goods do actually make sense in terms of the design goals of Vicky and where the world was at the start of the game.

Raskolnikov38 posted:

yeah oceanic slave trading was largely over by the time the game starts but the US had a gigantic internal slave trade

Though given that it'd effectively be the same pops selling to themselves, it might make sense not to model? It's basically a bunch of aristocrat pops just exchanging slaves.

A Buttery Pastry fucked around with this message at 20:41 on May 28, 2021

# ¿ May 28, 2021 20:39

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Raenir Salazar posted:

It'd be interesting to include slavery is a proper contentious issue; especially for megacampaigns where maybe there's alternate histories where slavery is still going strong and its the minority of nations who are trying to fight the slave trade and to make it possible for Abolition to be a more robust mechanic that any nation can try to deal with. I.e see Serfdom in Russia.

In terms of game mechanics, what would be the actual difference between Russian serfdom and slavery? They're both agricultural laborers bound to the land they work, so the main thing would be if you add major trade of slaves, where the Russian sale of serfs would be massively overshadowed by the slave trade.

That said, perhaps serfdom should be just one end of a spectrum dealing with the emancipation of rural laborers, which prevents them from emigrating, with the other end being peasants having ownership over the land they work (thus getting the full profits), the equivalent of the co-ops of urban laborers. The lack of ability to move off the land is probably the most important thing separating serfs and other agricultural laborers in terms of what Vicky models.

e: Also the fact that serfdom made it easier for less advanced states to conscript the populace. Administrative reforms making the state less dependent on local landowners is at least the reason why serfdom was ended in Denmark. Serfdom giving a bonus to available recruits until you've sufficiently upgraded your administrative capabilities would be a pretty good way to make the player want to maintain it for a while.

A Buttery Pastry fucked around with this message at 05:41 on May 29, 2021

# ¿ May 29, 2021 05:36

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Panzeh posted:

Yeah, honestly, I think Russian serfs would probably be better modeled as peasants as 'peasants' is a much more useful catch-all for pre-modern subsistence agricultural workers. American chattel slaves are really not in the same category as Russian serfs.

They pretty much are for the purposes of the game though, unless Paradox has expanded the mechanics.

# ¿ May 29, 2021 10:54

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Panzeh posted:

A specific pop for pre-modern agricultural workers was added for victoria 3. That's what peasants are for.

A serf isn�t just a pre-modern agrucultural worker, they�re a pre-modern agricultural worker who is not free to emigrate or change their class.

# ¿ May 29, 2021 11:03

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CharlestheHammer posted:

Yeah even after serfdom was abolished changing class from a tenant farmer was functionally impossible. Serfdom works better as a descriptor for a system not so well for an individual pop

That's fair. I suppose the only thing that's really needed is to have laws dealing with how restricted emigration/immigration is in a given country, so serfs are just peasants living in a society which doesn't allow emigration for the lower classes.

# ¿ May 29, 2021 12:41

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Panzeh posted:

Yeah, if we're going to get into spectrums of unfree labor, you really can't ignore the colonies, where even though the colonial power officially banned slavery, debt peonage was very common.

Or, in the case of the US, where slavery was never outlawed.

# ¿ May 29, 2021 15:58

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Charlz Guybon posted:

We should introduce Matty Y to Victoria

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1398767305891495938

The man definitely has the right attitude, what with his obsession with America having a billion citizens so it can stand up to China.

# ¿ May 30, 2021 06:25

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Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Personally I like games that function instead losing a many-hour campaign because Bengal exists

I don�t think I�ve ever noticed anything gamebreaking happen in V2.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2021 12:44

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bob dobbs is dead posted:

all that basilisk poo poo is eschatology dressed up with pullin poo poo out of their rear end

It is not the Christian God, but yes, it most definitely is a theistic belief system.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2021 17:22

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Zeron posted:

Confirmed that you can destroy the British Empire by stealing all their tea. Game owns.

And as someone says in the comments, make Americans addicted to guns.

Kinda sounds like V3 will make an excellent base for a Cold War mod.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2021 17:44

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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:

Just gotta keep in mind that it's nothing more than a concept which may be modelled, and certain models support different viewpoints not necessarily supported by any rigorous study.

Or necessarily not supported by any rigorous study.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2021 20:47

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karmicknight posted:

That's literally just the way Victoria games work. It's almost as if the century following World War Two was not that different in a grand sense from the century proceeding it.

Pops getting addicted to certain goods dynamically is new though, and a pretty central missing feature for dealing with modern marketing/consumer culture.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2021 11:44

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Kaza42 posted:

Even if functionally this works very similarly to mana, I like the capacity approach a ton better. It feels more connected to the game world, and isn't a hard on/off system

Yeah. I mean, we haven't actually tried it, but it seems like this level of abstraction might actually work pretty well for EU5 too. No need to go super deep, but expanding all these capacities over the course of the game - while also expanding the ways you can use them - would do a lot to sell the idea of growing state power.

Eiba posted:

I've always felt this kind of capacity system is more satisfying than saving up a pile of ??? and spending it on a thing.

That said, I'm not totally sold on the implications of "authority." I get the idea of letting the player do more things the more centralized their state is, but with the "road maintenance" example I'm not sure authoritarian states should really be presented as more effective at doing things. How good were Czarist Russian roads? I guess the balance could be that Russia has way more things they need to do with their authority because their society is falling apart.

Alternately it would be fine if the effect was only a bonus to represent shifting resources and, for instance, a workers council would maintain their own roads without player input, at the cost of not giving the player a choice in the matter.

The more I think about it, the more I may be worrying about nothing, depending on implementation, but I saw "road maintenance" and thought about the old myth of fascists making trains run on time and it rubbed me the wrong way.

I think you have to consider the interest groups here. Just because you CAN decree a bunch of poo poo doesn't mean everyone is gonna just accept it. Something as simple as passing something by decree resulting in a greater negative reaction (and possibly a smaller positive one) compared to passing it through slightly less autocratic means might do a lot to not make the game have a pro-autocracy slant in terms of mechanics. On top of that, authority being that centralized should arguable undermine your ability to build up a bureaucracy to some degree, which could result in longer-term issues that haunt the state well after the autocrat has been forced to relinquish power.

Of course if you manage to balance things well, authority should be extremely powerful in terms of carrying out specific visions. Stalin's rule probably couldn't have been replicated in the Third Republic.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2021 18:35

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golden bubble posted:

China actually started almost all the reforms that Imperial Japan did as well. It's just that Japan managed to carry out the reforms to the end, and China had all of them consumed by Qing corruption and/or reactionaries. At the Battle of the Yalu River, the Qing Beiyang fleet had more ships, larger ships, and more technologically advanced ships. But corrupt Qing officials had sold all the cordite in the training shells, so the Chinese sailors had almost zero gunnery practice. And corrupt Qing officials had also sold most of the cordite in the actual battle ammunition. So the Chinese battleships were entering battle with 10% or less of their supposed ammo capacity. Predictably, the Japanese won a crushing victory in that battle. That is the level of corruption you are working with.

EDIT: Although that exact scenario would be really unfun for a player. No one likes to enter a battle where they have more combat stats overall, but then get crushed because they rolled a natural 1 on their corruption check.

The last bit could be avoided by making it obvious to the player that their military is only strong on paper. A bit unrealistic perhaps, but seems like a decent compromise between not modelling something that prevented China from doing a Japan and loving the player over randomly.

Raenir Salazar posted:

I think if instead corruption is something that can spread and takes effort to fight would be interesting. Like as an example; what if individual ships above a certain size (and then flottilas if below) could get different kinds of corruption modifiers (or positive modifiers in the inverse, like "Superb Gunnery Training: +33% reload speed") and to specifically root them out you need to assign an official to take care of it possibly in addition to some kind of Edict.

Thus you can have a nation like China play different from other nations because the nature of the specific challenges are different and hold equal depth and complexity.

A global "Navy/Army Professionalism" score that acts as a direct modifier on all appropriate units would do most of the work I feel. That could go in both directions, based on the level of corruption and how much you invest into drilling, and would make it pretty obvious to the player that their navy might not be up to snuff.

If you wanted to make corruption hit a little harder, or have it vary between the various areas of state (bureaucracy/army/navy), then a corrupt bureaucracy could also change the rating from a single number to a range. So like, you just see "Navy Professionalism" 30-70%, with the upper bound perhaps being good enough that more ships can overcome the handicap, but 30% being a disaster. Shifting some of the modernization/reform issues over to dealing with corruption rather than beating up reactionary rebels seems like it'd be good too.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2021 05:43

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

Figuring out a way to handle corruption is going to be hard to do in a way that's realistic, because ultimately it represents a disconnect between what's true on paper, and the factual reality.

In some games it's really fun to have psychological effects where your character hallucinates enemies that aren't really there. But in a strategy game, it'd basically be having phantom units/pops/resources.

I think that's a really fun premise for a game built around that, but it'd be tricky to drop on a player who doesn't realize what's going on.

But it'd be pretty easy to not just drop on a player. Like, the player has more information than they really should no matter what, so no reason you couldn't give them the unrealistic knowledge of exactly how corrupt the state they control is. If you make that bit clear, and indicate where that comes into play in regards to relevant numbers, then you're not really dropping anything on the player.

Zohar posted:

I'm not sure that's exactly what corruption is, it might contribute to that but bribes and embezzlement and so on are corruption regardless of whether the state is 100% aware of them happening. Corruption is modelled fairly precisely as a drain on state resources of various kinds, not so much fog of war stuff imo.

I feel like it starts shifting kind of into fog of war stuff when corruption is allowed to run amok. Corruption might start off skimming a little off the top, making military procurement more expensive, but at least you're actually getting what you're paying for. When officials start selling off state property to a major degree, you get into the territory of the state not even knowing its own strength, nevermind that of the enemy.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2021 20:17

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# ¿ Apr 16, 2024 09:44

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Randarkman posted:

Just going to throw out here that when people talk about "secret" diplomacy and alliances, it's not the existence of the alliances that are secret, it's the exact terms of those alliances.

That part should at least be somewhat easy to include, it's not really that different in terms of outcomes from what happens in EU4 wars. It's not predetermined, but if you have to countries that are allied and both see you as a rival, then you can basically treat it as if their secret terms are that they're gonna go all-in on kicking your rear end and trying to reduce your strength. If pops can have negative reactions to fighting with/against certain countries, then leaving the hit until you're actually fighting the war would basically be all that's required to really make it obvious that the people in charge aren't asking the populace for permission.

That said, being able to establish an alliance against specific countries with promises of in the vein of "If we end up in a war, we'll fight for these war goals" would be neat. Actually, how common were functionally universal alliances in the period?

# ¿ Jun 5, 2021 15:34

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