fusijui wrote: ↑Sun Apr 24, 2022 10:23 pm
I wonder if the difficulty in modding Vic2 isn't at least in part due to its modeling of populations on a pretty detailed/complex level, which isn't part of the later games' models (or engines).
Working with pops is actually generally fine. The bigger issue is that the older versions of the Clauswitz engine the game is based on are
extremely finnicky and picky with the randomest of things. To give some examples of nonsense:
- If a file ends in a number, the number will interpreted as zero. You need extra whitespace in order for it to be interpreted as its actual value.
- If a localization file contains a blank line, sometimes it causes errors in the localization.
- Land provinces may not be more than 20,000 pixels in size, otherwise the game will crash while loading trying to pre-render provinces. Sea provinces may be any size, however.
- If there is even a 1 pixel mismatch between land/sea provinces in terrain.bmp and provinces.bmp, the game crashes.
- terrain.bmp and rivers.bmp must be saved with a custom bitmap table. Otherwise, the game crashes.
- In decision/event modding, sometimes, the variables in the condition and effect scopes have the same name. But other times, they're slightly different. And if you use the wrong one, it not only completely messes up that event, but literally every other event afterwards in the entire file.
fusijui wrote: ↑Sun Apr 24, 2022 10:23 pm
(I'm looking forward to what Victoria 3 has to offer, BTW!)
I played the leaked beta and have mixed feelings on things. I like how they're doing German+Italian unification. However, I'm not a fan of the new trading system, budget system, how rebellions work now, the new military system, pop management, or the new side ledger. Although I recognize the last few could be fixed by release, I'm not sure trading is 'accidentally broken' but working as intended.
The trading system is just so fundamentally broken, I'm really not sure how it could be fixed without completely redesigning it from scratch. So, to give an example. Since the AI is completely incompetent at managing their production, they have to rely on stealing player resources. So here's what happens:
- You're low on tools, so you build a tool factory.
- France/the UK/Austria/etc creates a new trade route to import all the new tools you just made.
- You're low on tools, so...
You can create new trade routes to re-import those tools back, but only about half of what they unjustly steal from you, and there's no way you can import from
everyone else with your convoy supply, so you just have to suffer with constant goods shortages with little recourse unless you can afford to build a new tool factory every month. Embargoing a good does very little to stymie their imports, as does setting tariffs to max. I wish I could set tariffs to something crazy like 1000%, so that at least I could make money off their theft...
The budgetting system currently feels a bit too simple. In particular, there is a single discrete scale for tax that has five settings. High tax also doesn't seem to negatively affect pop standard of living, but rather allegedly just causes more people to join rebellions, but since everyone is always part of a rebellion against you anyways, there is never a noticable difference.
Speaking of rebellions. Paradox seriously needs to set thresholds higher. Literally half of Europe is in rebellion at any given time. Austria is usually dealing with 2-3 simultaneous rebellions at a time. A few decades into the game, and there are usually 2-3 Polands, 1-2 Romanias and 1-2 Prussias, and a few Canadas and Australias. As long as you sit around and pass no laws, as a civilized nation, you can probably get GP status in a decade or two even as some minor like Paraguay about half the time, as long as you don't succumb to a random rebellion, since having rebellions (not losing to one, but HAVING one) seems to nuke about half your prestige every time one happens. Also, instead of rebels merely enforcing their demands, you lose the game. Uncivs never deal with rebellions as far as I've seen. The worst part is the rebellion notification cannot be closed due to an interface glitch and is extremely laggy, and several often appear at the same time, especially when loading saves. I once had 21 simultaneous rebellions spring up in foreign countries simply by loading a save. At that point it game just crashes and the save is trashed, so you have to start a new save. The solution to rebellions is simple:
- Enacting the
gestapo internal security policy and setting the scale to MAX funding. Rebellions will still try to form, but they will have great difficulty achieving widespread support.
- Increase autocracy. Decrease democracy.
- Enact laws slowly, at least until the other things are finished. Then never enact any new laws.
- Once you are done enacting whatever laws you need, use your excess authority to decrease support for rebellious factions and increase support for loyal ones. If you have excess authority, good options are to add a tax on a trade good or increasing agro output.
The first bullet point is especially effective. If you don't have more pressing things to research, I would recommend choosing techs that increase authority, or enable higher internal security levels.
Alright, so military. This one I would actually like if they fix the bugs, even though it's really confusing at first, but right now I would basically just recommend either not declaring wars, or using console commands to force the war to end how you think would be 'fair'. Oftentimes wars between other nations last literally forever, and probably mess with the AI, so every few years or so I would recommend quickly scanning the map and using the console whenever you notice a war taking too long. If you don't want to use console commands, I would also recommend not starting any wars yourself, and setting AI aggression to low so they don't screw themselves over with unending wars.
On the same note I would also advise against ironman in the beta build. There is a bug where the game freezes when you try to exit in ironman. Also, since you're gonna be using the console to fix the game anyways, you shouldn't be using it.
Pop management is virtually nonexistent. It is very difficult to find population statistics. This will probably be fixed in release though, so I'm not too worried about it. The side ledger needs to be more compact. I also wish I had more control over what went into it. Again though, this will likely be fixed in release, so I'm not too worried. The performance of the game is also pretty bad, likely due to lack of optimization, which will again likely be fixed in release. Unfortunately, it looks like they're dropping support for Windows 7 (And probably 8 too, as the game requires DX12), so I have to use my laptop to run the game, which probably adds to the performance issues.
Overall though it is a fun experience, albeit one
very different from V2. So if you do play the beta just keep that in mind.
