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• gamedeal user

  Oct 26, 2022

  So Vicky 3 is here, what about it? Well Victoria 3 is a society builder game, and despite what some might say it is a fairly deep and connected game in some but not all areas. More on that in a bit. When it comes to economics, Victoria 3 is not a realistic interpretation of Victorian economics at all, but neither was Victoria 2. What Victoria 3 does right with it's economics is making them all connected and giving the feeling of growing and developing a real economy in the era which goes a long way considering this is all the game currently has to offer in most cases. When you start you will usually begin by building many different buildings to help your economy grow, researching technologies to get laws that you can pass to get more buildings or techs to change production methods to help grow your economy. It's a fairly interesting gameplay loop and it can at times be very rewarding when the game itself works as intended. Victoria 3 is a gem in the way that it makes itself appear like a very deep and complicated game, and don't get me wrong, in some aspects it is. However the game constantly falls short just as you are starting to get deep into it. While I was playing I kept finding myself running into many things that seemed odd, or were just very bland. An example would diplomacy. On first sight it seems very deep, especially when tied into the diplomatic play system and how the AI can react depending on the situation. However after about 12 hours of game time it's clear that the diplomacy is Ok and best and very shallow at it's worst. When dealing with other nations, mostly in diplomatic plays, there are only a few ways to get them involved. The primary way being diplomatic obligations. What are these? Well imagine Prussia is about to go to war with Denmark, the Danes naturally don't want to get rolled by the Prussians and their chances of winning on their own seem slim. So they tell the French, "Hey, I'll owe you... something if you help." More likely than not, if you didn't whore yourself for good relations with the French (which many times still isn't enough) France will, without hesitation or care in the world, throw itself into the fray, sending waves upon waves of men crashing upon your borders. "Oh? You withstood the professional army? Well I guess I should just sur- SIKE HERE COMES THE CONSCRIPTS BABY, TOTAL WAR FOR MY DANISH BROTHERS!!!!!" Do not misunderstand me, the Victorian era was an era were maintaining the balance of power was very important to the great powers, and this was sometimes done by force as we can see with the Crimean War. However to the extent that I am seeing in game? Where every war I fight is a life or death war where conscripts must be raised even if it is for a nation as small as Denmark? In many cases in real life the balance of power was upheld by pen and paper. Just look at the 1878 Treaty of Berlin. For as deep as diplomacy is meant to be and the fact that war is supposed to be the "last resort" in many cases it feels like the only resort. There is no real deep diplomatic dealings you can do with other nations outside trade agreements, there is no diplomatic dealings to settle a war before it begins. There is nothing, it is so bare bones it's almost laughable that they marketed it as if it were "deep". This sadly isn't all though. Let's have a quick fire off to see what else is wrong with diplomacy, war diplomacy and war itself. AI constantly backs down from diplomatic plays, even if their very independence is threatened. This also goes for native uprisings and revolutions. (I once took Greece as the Ottomans without firing a shot. Likely story.) AI will throw anything and everything at you for the smallest most insignificant nation in existence. War is not properly explained. Generals constantly enter battle with smaller amounts of troops than the enemy, even if you field the larger overall army. Modifiers are poorly explained and usually put deep within hidden menus such as why your men enter battle with lower moral etc. Terrain and seasons are very bland. As far as the game is concerned it is always summertime so there is no debuffs to movement in say Winter in the Italian Alps, Spring in Russia, etc. None of that matters it's just random modifiers assigned when the battle starts. You cannot add wargoals mid war. You cannot give allies land before, during, or really after wars. You cannot join wars in progress. I feel like I don't have to explain why this is an issue in a game set during the Victorian era. Lack of any real diplomatic options whatsoever when it comes to discussing peace, preventing wars, or modifying the outcomes of wars Treaty of Berlin style. Very very shallow. You essentially see a nation with a green thumbs up and say "I CHOOSE YOU!" There is no scramble for Africa. No treaties. Nothing. AI barely if at all colonizes. Revolutions of 1848? What are those? Never happened. Never seen Hungary revolt yet, haven't see any semblance of turmoil at all during the so called Spring of nations. This brings me to something else. This game is in desperate need of some railroading. The Japanese Empire almost never forms, the Ottomans are replaced by Egypt almost as soon as the oriental crisis as none of the GPs get involved at all, even if you have high relations with them in most cases. It's clear the devs somewhat intended this with events but it just doesn't happen. American Civil War is never normal. Most times the CSA is just the US East Coast. Taiping Heavenly Kingdom more often than not is spawning in the most ISLAMIC parts of China. And do you know why this happens? It's because these "rebellions" are meant to fire off where ever this in unrest. Yea, I'm sure you can see the issue with this as well. The border gore is outside of this world thanks to the lack of railroading. I have seen several times where the British just let the Chinese ban opium. Revolutions, when they do actually happen, are actually pointless as they only change one or two laws. They are never actually true radical revolutions. If the USSR ever forms it is always because of silent reform that the Tsar must essentially do himself. The railroading doesn't need to be 100% like hoi4 historical AI. But it's clear that this Vicky 3 AI is dumb as rocks and clearly needs someone to hold it's hand. Hell, I got so tired of watching the Ottoman's get eaten entirely by Egypt that I had to install a mod for it. ON LAUNCH DAY. There is no late game content essentially. Nothing. The world just kinda. Does it's thing. No Berlin Conference. No Colonial conflicts, no NOTHING. The game just goes. And it just does. And it makes me very sad. I can safely say that after engaging with this game, the steps they took for war were a massive over correction and there needs to be at least a small amount of micro. If not that at least of the love of god make the diplomacy deeper in regard to these things, please. This game launched as a foundation as many people say, but is the foundation even really there? I was constantly supportive and excited for this game only be given... absolute mid. This game does a lot of things better than Victoria 2. But the thing is that Victoria 2 has been around for 12 years and it has mods, it has things that make it a deeper experience that has grown on people for over a decade. And it's like Paradox didn't even care about at least trying to make seem like a preferable alternative to Victoria 2 at launch. I am literally, on day one, praying that there are some mods soon that can turn this into a better experience than what I've unfortunately gone through so far. Conclusion? Did I spend $80 on this game? Yes. Am I sad about? No. Will I keep playing this game? Sadly. Hopefully PDX can patch it up. Or at least the modders. Personally I don't think this game will be abandoned. There's too much at stake for them to do that. At least that's what the cope in me is saying.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 27, 2022

  This is really hard, because I love the idea of an economic game that doesn't focus on war. With effort and ten years, this will be the greatest Paradox game of all time. For starters, I initially loved the new war system, however, after playing with it, I now agree with its detractors that it's way too simplistic and lacking any real depth. The meta is to simply raise all your armies and make sure they all have better tech and numbers than your enemy. Fronts are created randomly, and I have no idea how troops are assigned along the front line. I disliked Victoria II's micro-management of armies, but this game takes it too far in the other direction. Simply porting over the frontline and battleplans mechanics from Hearts of Iron IV would work perfect for this game. On the other hand, the economy involves too much micro. Even as a capitalist country, you're a command economy as you build - Every. Single. Building. (Even setting it to auto-build merely expands existing buildings, and doesn't actually "build" any new ones in different provinces.) The only difference between capitalism and communism is that maybe some of the money used to build things may come from the capitalists as well, thus reducing the total cost to build it. But the impetus on building things is on you. For a game about creating a dynamic economic system and simulating the lively social changes and pressures of the 19th century, the game feels very dead. You're not reacting to the pops more as the pops are reacting to you. Governments and politics are a joke, as you can add or remove interest groups willy-nilly with no real consequence; thus your "opposition" immediately becomes your ally. Therefore, paying attention to who wins an election is pointless as you can simply change what a party believes in after it is already in office. Likewise, the game suffers from a bunch of small issues that individually don't matter much, but taken together add up to feel very half-baked and incomplete. Cities are named after people or places decades after the actual start of the game, or simply placed in the wrong geographic place. Borders are likewise oversimplified or outright wrong. West Virginia is a state of America at game start, even though West Virginia didn't exist until the American Civil War nearly thirty years after game start when it broke off from Virginia. Likewise, the ACW is nonsensical, with states like New York joining the Confederacy. I understand wanting the game to be dynamic, but this is too much. (The game already tracks Free States vs Slave States, so why not include a simple modifier that makes Free States way less likely to secede?) Other countries, such as Japan, China, or Russia make extremely ahistorical and "memey" decisions and their AI is likewise braindead and lacking any initiative. Things like Abraham Lincoln being president at 28 (legally you cannot be president until you are 35) or random events that I suspect are supposed to make each playthrough more unique currently treat the subject matter like a joke. (Abraham Lincoln shouldn't be a serial killer because of a random event!) This game needs to treat its subject matter more seriously and reduce the amount of "joke" events that make real political leaders and historical figures bumbling bafoons or cartoon characterizations like in Crusader Kings 3. For a game that includes racism and slavery, the use of random events and modifiers with real historical figures is a jarring contrast that cheapens the impact of the world it intends to portray. In terms of length, I found two hours had passed and I was already 50% through the game. That's way too fast. Because of a lack of deep systems, the game feels like its running on ultra-easy mode. The solution isn't to give the AI unfair buffs and cheats on harder difficulties, it's to make the game more complex and deep, thus making the pace of gameplay slower and more methodical. Currently, it somewhat reminds me of an iPhone clicker game. The UI is fresh, but I hate the new "lenses" feature and wish for the old mapmodes that I could check on a whim. I strongly dislike having everything be on the bottom of the screen as well. I currently have to click on too many buttons in too many panels to get to what I want to see. While I suspect this will be fixed with updates and DLC's, the game feels shallow, and lacks unique content and depth for the regions and countries involved. I do believe that if Paradox doesn't abandon this game like it did Imperator, all these issues can be fixed. But man, that's a lot of issues, and that's gonna take a lot of time.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 29, 2022

  Look, if you're a masochist like me who owns every Paradox game and most of the DLCs, no review of Victoria 3 is going to affect your purchase decision. You're going to buy it, play for hundreds of hours, and then complain about how much it sucks to anyone who'll listen. This review isn't for me or people like me. This review is for people who haven't played Paradox games extensively, and saw this on Steam and are checking the reviews to see if it's worth buying. If that describes you, I do not recommend buying Victoria 3 in its current state. This is for a pretty simple reason: Victoria 3 is embarrassingly unpolished. I'm writing this review a few days after release with 31 hours played. In that time I've encountered an enormous number of bugs, poorly balanced design choices, bizarre and stupid AI, repetitive events, insufficient flavor for even the largest countries, and major mechanics (like diplomacy and war) that are so bare-bones I can only describe them as downright incomplete. If Paradox were still a humble indie studio releasing $20 games developed by a dozen people, I wouldn't be so hard on Victoria 3. But Paradox is a major publisher who priced this game at $50 ($80 if you bought the Grand Edition) and released it despite it clearly needing several more months of balancing and bugfixing. This isn't the first time they've done this, and they clearly haven't learned their lesson from Imperator and Leviathan. So if you're not sure whether you want to buy Victoria 3, heed my words: DON'T. Spend your time and money on a game that's actually finished, and wait at least a few months to see if this game gets fixed.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 29, 2022

  I reckon the way I feel about this game is the same way that those who never played ck2 feel about ck3. Pretty good, but no idea what it's missing.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 30, 2022

  Victoria 3 is the long-awaited sequel to Victoria 2, a 12 year old cult classic. Although it was a buggy, janky, fundamentally broken mess, the economy of Victoria 2 was unique among games. It featured a closed loop economy, where every good bought or pound spent by one entity is a good produced or a pound earned by a different entity. The entire thing operated and changed by itself. You could not control it, only influence it. It had many bugs and design flaws, but it was a truly unique economic system for a videogame. The surrounding systems like diplomacy and war were simple and lazy, in the old Paradox style, but just functional enough. In comes Victoria 3. Looking at it as a sequel to Victoria 2, it disappoints in most ways. The unique economic system is gone, and the economy more closely resembles Anno. Your goal is to grow your economy using your construction sector, and your main activity is fixing the economic impacts of the last thing you did. Supply, demand, and prices change instantly. Nothing in your country happens without your input, and you have absolute control over every production building in your country. Making new buildings and changing how they operate is your primary gameplay loop, making you feel more like a middle manager than a country. While balancing production methods in every backyard moonshine-still is fun once as a small country, it devolves into tedious micromanagement quickly when playing anything larger than Liechtenstein. The only thing that happens without your input is other countries setting up trade routes, but this is mostly just infuriating. Because everything is in short supply and the AI is incompetent at growing their own economy, these trade routes mostly just steal your resources and rarely if ever sell you anything of substance. Protecting particular goods could have been an interesting gameplay mechanic, but it isn’t. You can’t stop a good from being exported. You can only embargo entire countries. So trade boils down to you trying to steal resources you’re short on, the AI doing the same, and you embargoing the AI if it starts stealing too many of yours. Devolving into isolationism becomes an appealing prospect, if only to remove the micromanagement and instability. Speaking of the AI: In typical Paradox fashion, it's terrible. As a result, singleplayer is a bland, sterile experience. You are playing in a sandbox with other kids, but the other kids are just balloons with faces drawn on them. It would be nice to believe that the AI will get better with some patches, but this is unlikely given the reputation of Paradox and Victoria 3’s game director. The AI nations in Victoria 3 are slow to grow, constantly in turmoil due to mismanagement, and regularly destroy themselves over the tiniest diplomatic disputes. Those diplomatic disputes are probably the one aspect where Victoria 3 actually has some interesting innovation. Most hostile interactions are no longer just a button, but executed through a ‘Diplomatic play’ mechanic involving all major powers with an interest in the region. Diplomatic plays are a neat concept, but they are sadly underdeveloped, and let down further by the bad AI. There is no real distinction between a small colonial engagement and major war in Europe. Both become plays potentially involving every country with an interest committing their entire army. It’s impossible to ensure a nation’s neutrality beforehand. If you plan to simply befriend the other powers, or convince them to stay out once it’s started, good luck. Friendly nations will turn on you in a heartbeat during a play, and major AI powers will join a diplomatic play for the most insane reasons. The US will fight to the death to defend Danish Holstein in exchange for an IOU. China will sacrifice millions to keep an Indonesian province out of Dutch hands because they were promised war reparations. The East India Company will happily fight a war against its overlord over some border dispute between Indian nations, before magically returning to being an obedient dominion once the war ends. This entire experience is wrapped up in a UI more hostile to the end-user than a suicide vest. Tooltips can be helpful, but the endless recursion of tooltips on your tooltips on your tooltips, ad infinitum, invokes an Escherian feeling of endlessness that makes you feel more lost than before you started. This wouldn’t be as bad if these tooltips did not contain important information that can’t be found elsewhere. The game will only tell you the most important information at a glance, such as the number of radicals in your country, but make it impossibly difficult to find out exactly who is radical and what caused it. Critics have said the game looks like a mobile game, and while this is unfair to the gameplay, the UI does lean heavily towards modern mobile-friendly UI trends. Lists and tables are frowned upon, while grid layouts are preferred whenever possible. The amount of information allowed on the screen at any one point is extremely limited, forcing you to constantly swap between windows. Multiple lists simply can’t be sorted at all, and no list ever takes up more than a third of your screen width. A full screen table with all the information you could want is anathema. Buttons are large, and the UI scaling is very high by default, unless you have a widescreen monitor, in which case it defaults to unreadably tiny. The game defaults to tree maps instead of pie charts, suggesting that the UI designer had some very strong personal convictions about design without necessarily having the understanding of visual data comprehension to back them up. I have yet to mention the political system, because it hardly matters. Unless you are trying to change a particular law that’s affecting your gameplay, like isolationism, it’s possible to forget it exists entirely. The interest groups controlling your government do nothing to stop you from changing the economy and eroding their power, so the power of interest groups is just a result of what buildings you build rather than an interesting mechanic. Ultimately, the game is an exercise in making a line go up for the sake of the line going up. Every country plays exactly the same, and there is no real payoff at the end. Warfare could theoretically provide something to work towards, but the war system is so barebones, clunky, and dysfunctional that warfare is more frustrating than fun. There is no micromanagement of units, as that system has been replaced with automatic AI fronts, but fronts split, merge, and disappear so much that the micromanagement is somehow just as annoying. Since the fighting happens automatically, wars are heavily affected by arcane mechanics behind the scene that the player can’t see or interact with, such as the number of troops that participate in a battle, or the direction a general advances. The reward for dealing with this system is often lackluster, since wargoals are decided during the diplomatic play phase and cannot be altered during the war. Victoria 3 isn’t a terrible game per se. It is simply mediocre as a game, and bad as a Victoria sequel. If it had been an early-access indie game for 30 euros with a different name, it would have been received very well, with praise for some of its innovative ideas and its potential. As a released full-price sequel to a cult classic developed by a major studio, it is disappointing. The arguments about its potential ring hollow in the context of a studio known for selling buggy, half-baked products that had potential but failed to deliver. If you are looking for a complex economic simulator, this isn’t it. If you are looking for a game focused on diplomacy and war, this also isn’t it. If you are looking for a cute Anno-style economy game that you can play with friends so you can bicker over who ate all the tools in the market, this is actually alright, though buggy and overpriced.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 31, 2022

  Like other reviewers, I recommend this lukewarmly only because I don't think it's bad enough to warrant a NEGATIVE review and I had fun with the base mechanics enough to not call it a waste of money. But the critiques are valid, and paradox will really lose the trust of their base if they turn their back on this the way they did Imperator.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 7, 2022

  I want with all my heart to recommend this game. It had a rocky release, not super well received on Steam but I enjoyed it because I believe it's the framework for something great. For the 1.1 patch, they introduced a bug that makes capitalists be permanently politically inactive. This completely breaks the game in ways it wasn't even broken on release. This is something easy to spot if you play test the game AT ALL. This was reported on their bug report forums almost immediately. Two days later, and it has not been hotfixed... modders have fixed it though. It makes me wonder why Paradox gets to keep all the money and the modders that are fixing what they're shovelling out get nothing but extra homework with every patch.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 19, 2022

  TL;DR - Has the bones of a great game, but severely lacks depth and replay-ability. To start off - yes, I have at the time of the review 364 hours in the game, and have obtained the 45 achievements which were included in base game. I felt that after getting all the achievements I'd have a good understanding of what the devs intended as the proper experience, on top of playing a wide range of nations with a wide set of goals. As the game stands now, I cannot recommend it at its current price. It feels like a public beta, with severe and frustrating bugs prevalent throughout the initial release to the current version 1.1.2. These range from mild to game-breaking depending on when and how they happen, with whole achievements rendered unachievable after 30-40 hours of play due to a bug. My biggest example would be the achievement you get for completing the Tutorial missions - I was playing as Sweden and doing a chill game of 'follow-the-objectives' when the journal chain actually broke and never gave me any new objectives. I played through to the end-date in the hopes that it would fix itself to no avail. Another example is when I was playing as the Sikh Empire for the Empire Under the Pun achievement and there was a revolt in the East India Company that won their independence war against the East India Company, but weren't able to have war declared on them. In regards to replay-ability - there is a severe lack of unique features between the different nations around the world. Yes there are minor things - the Qing dealing with the Opium Wars and Opium Addiction, Japan having a couple of objectives to modernise the state, or the Ottomans trying to fix their sickly empire - but by and large the game play loop was the exact same no matter which nation I played. It's pretty much: Weaken the Landowners if present, get Colonialism in place, rush Malaria Prevention, colonise Zanj before France gets a chance to and colonise half of Africa before the AI manage to get any sort of foothold on the continent. If the nation was too hard to get colonising before Africa was blocked off then the gameplan was conquer Sindh, build opium plantations, declare war with Qing to get them on Free Trade if GB hasn't already, and export Opium to them. If that was too hard, then research Mil Tech until you have an advantage over the Qing, then enslave half of China to work in your factories. There is also a severe lack of depth in everything other than the internal economy. The AI will frequently suicide their economy by taking an obligation from an African Minor Nation despite the player having a good relationship with them and supplying their market with the majority of their consumer goods, leading to a significant drop in their GDP and SoL. Warfare can sometimes be summed up as "I lost against Switzerland because they took a tiny chunk of my land and despite me winning all the offensive battles my army never actually reconquered what the Swiss were occupying, forcing me to surrender to war reps." The naval combat is a complete joke, with there being no significant advantage to teching up the ships and Man O' Wars managing to win against Battleships a bit less than half the time in an actual game (which is ridiculous). There are also minor things which are annoying: Luxembourg starts as a Vassal of the Netherlands but has 0% market access at game start, and can freely declare an independence war without the Netherlands being able to get their troops through Belgium or Prussia to fight you. You have no control over the economy of your vassals or colonial subjects, leading to much-needed resources going untapped. You can't create new colonial nations at all. There is currently a mod in the Steam Workshop that makes the AI's economy significantly better than base-game using a scuffed method of in-game scripts and triggers, and no actual changes to the game's code (which is better than what the Developers have managed to do in the patches since release). Even if fancy clothes are dirt cheap and regular clothes are experiencing a goods shortage, your peasants and farmers will refuse to buy the cheaper alternative, leading to Clothes Factories in the late-game often having extremely cheap luxury clothes and extremely expensive standard clothes. There is no way to peacefully annex your vassals - it will always lead to a diplomatic play with the chance of France or another Great Power deciding to meddle in your affairs. You can't annex vassals that have a high opinion of you, even if your tech is far greater than theirs and you have a significantly higher SoL. You can't share your technology with your vassals, leading to them often building low-tech factories which are inefficient and waste all of the basic resources. It's basically No. 1 priority as Great Britain to annex your colonies and directly rule over the lands so they stop being parasitic leeches on your market. That's not to say I haven't had fun playing the game, and I do enjoy watching the GDP go brrrrrr, but I can't recommend that anyone buys the game in its current state.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 28, 2023

  this game will be great in three years..
• gamedeal user

  Feb 13, 2023

  another in an annoying trend of underdeveloped paradox games that will take multiple DLCs at $20-$30 to be actually finished, yet those DLC will be considered "optional" by paradox as a way to deflect valid criticism of their business practices.