Victoria 3 Review
My very first blog post was regarding the announcement of the game. Its hard to believe in 1.5 years the game is out and playable. I’m glad the game was announced though since it motivated me to bring my hobby focus back to tactical battles.
The game’s economic simulation is impressive, but I ultimately had more fun reading the dev-blogs than actually playing the game. Most of the pain points have already been discussed by others in forums so I’ll try to cover points that are more specific to me personally:
I miss the condensed UI theme of the victoria 2 game. It wasn’t necessarily user-friendly but the small icons and small text allowed for dense information. I like playing the game casually and so I don’t want to deal with clicking through multiple menus or scrolling. Likewise the “touch-friendly” buttons in Victoria 3 are just so unnecessary.
The map is uglier. The tilt-shift 3d models zoomed in are fun but ultimately distracting. When zoomed-in its painful to visualize country borders and the state of the diplomatic world. I really liked Abbadon’s form post which highlights how much less fidelity there is in the map. I also in general like the 2D maps in general vs the 3d terrain map since you can fit more information to the viewer without having to constantly zoom-in and out.
What can be said about warfare that hasn’t already been discussed? Well first off there were numerous occasions where I didn’t realize I was automatically about to be brought into a war by an ally until the war actually broke out. I find the occupied territory flag textures to be visually unappealing. Armies that teleport to the front-lines is extremely non-intuitive to the player, and so its hard to predict how a war will go until it actually breaks out. And “front-lines” would hardly be appropriate to warfare until 1914. The civil war and franco-prussian war both involved “snaking” through enemy territory. Most wars were limited and still involved decisive contests. I would argue that keeping warfare simple could have easily been achieved by still having army models but with less micro required.
There was plenty of opportunities to keep Victoria 2’s system but improve its experience. Conscripted units could have automatically been assigned to armies. Army templates would have automated regular unit recruitment. Victoria 2’s weakest military gameplay was in the WW1 period, but that could have resolved by increasing the effective “radius” of armies and introducing a mechanic were armies can inflict attritional casualties on neighboring enemy armies without them necessarily entering into a direct province battles. This would have allowed for “trench-warfare” style on the map while still having more heavy “verdun” style battles on single provinces. We can also prevent “sliding” past idle enemy armies which would prevent annoying front-line leakage.
What else? They lost the supply state of provinces! Or if it does exist, it has no affect on player decisions. One of the best things about infrastructure in Victoria 2 was that it affected how armies were maneuvered on the map. The game kept terrain modifiers for battles even though there was no way to control where battles are fought.
Ultimately Victoria 3 has done really well as a tycoon game but it lacks a lot of the experience of Victoria 2 when it comes to competing against rival nations. Bringing a small nation to economic dominance is fun, but once you get into the realm of great-powers it just isn’t fun to be forced to micro the economy. My ideal game would be one where industry steers itself and the player can focus on the grand schemes of the nation: securing strategic resources, securing trade routes, and out-maneuvering other countries diplomatically.
