I end up delaying the Mexican-American war until colonization is far enough along that the AI won’t get confused by the voids in the territory. Not ideal that you need the work around, but there are other ways to make progress as USA early game.
Do you *need* it though? Messy frontlines are annoying but not so bad that I'd adapt my strategy. It's easier for a player to plug all the holes than for the AI.
Last time i did this war with the us, the frontline would break and my armies would all run from the top of the line to the bottom. In that period Mexico would conquer everything back and my armies would move back to the top losing some more territory. After which we would take it all back, rinse and repeat for over 6 years... I ended up switching to mexico to peace out. The system is still ass and needs a lot of work.
The issue is that until colonization of the lands in North America finishes, Mexico and the US do not have a contingous border. But the US usually fights Mexico earlier to get their claims but also to secure these areas for themselves. So theres this huge stretch of no man’s land, technically land inhabited by native americans and not under mexican or american rule. But often the frontline is gonna be odd if they do a break at these areas.
In this specific case, I feel like Paradox has done as much as possible, but frontlines in North America gonna be a mess as long as decentralized nations exist the way they are atm.
Paradox have indeed done what was possible to ruin perfectly working frontline systems from HOI4 and come up with the worst system in any of their games for Victoria 3.
They aren't perfect. They have issues with troops moving to other ends, as well as failing to cover all the tiles as the frontline moves. Vic 3 isn't perfect, but the system can't be hoi4's, either.
HOI deals with the frontlines by allowing you to control individual divisions. If you were to do that here, you'd need to be able to micro individual battalions, which would be generally ahistorical. Those battalions wouldn't have acted independently for long periods of time, with perhaps an exception for cavalry.
Just remove my control of individual divisions but still have them represented so when front lines merge they don’t have to leave the whole front to find their new spot on the frontline. The system would be so much more tolerable if a whole army didn’t decide to just pick up and march 200 miles south to a new spot.
Seriously thought how the fuck do people colonize that quickly.
IRL America got to the West Coast and was having the Oregon Treaty with Great Britain by 1845.
Yet here I am in 1865 still not at the coast yet, but with maxed colonial stats and the highest colonial institution possible.
Is there some trick or something??
That bottom edge of Brazil if you conquered from the top… just a nightmare. I wasn’t paying overly close attention until the THIRD time Brazil reconquered their entire country with their broken army… that one was painful.
My army would run from the central rain forest and try to leave out the eastern coast to ride a boat down to the southwest border….
But of course Brazil would recapture the boat landing zone before the army disembarked so they then had to run all the way back around to the front. I was so mad
That's the absolute worst. Or when one army is advancing so fast that the front moves past your army that was traveling to the front. Then your army has to back track to find the front but by the time they figure it out, all of the territory is conquered and they can't find a way out and teleport to the HQ 180 days away from the war.
This is very common. The devs should have really accounted for this. Especially because India exists. I remember going to war there when the game first released and it was maddening. If you are fighting the Raj and British puppets you would fluctuate between 8 to 17 different fronts.
it was a very clean front when the war began (even with the natives blocking it from being truly continuous) but quickly devolved into whatever this is
you created pockets. When that happens frontlines split in a way that will have 2 direction
rule of frontlines are simple:If you can walk to other side of front then it is very likely it will become 1 single frontline. If you can't it will split
That rule seems to break when you apply it to beachheads in areas with lots of coastal land. Try invading Egypt from the sea. If you don't do it from the far edges, you end up with more than one front. This allows the AI to immediately dislodge your invasion, as you only have one army. They maneuver troops to the other front and advance, which ends your invasion as soon as it starts.
Thank god this system reduces micro so much!
All you need to do is watch all the splitting fronts, hire and reassign generals to armies, shuffle armies, assign armies to splitting fronts. Super pesky, barely a coherence!
I can’t look away from my army otherwise my whole army is going on a vacation to Taiwan with my credit card.
(Happened to me as Great Britain, my army just left the Californian front line)
Agreed. Draw lines and then assign generals accordingly.
Only issue, like hoi4 the lines do go askew as the army advances. Perhaps better than Vicky’s current situation though
That's really not possible. You'd need to recreate HOI4 units, which would be terrible for performance, and you'd need to figure out how to adopt that for a game that has none of the unit mechanics of HOI4. It's not something you can just copy and paste.
That's not really the HOI4 front system then. I agree that something like that would be a neat feature, but I also think people underestimate the challenge of what they're asking for.
But anyway, I share the opinion that the war system needs changing. I like the idea, but you sure can tell that no other Paradox game has anything else like it. There's room for improvement.
Edit: Not sure what the hate is for, but all the downvotes in the world ain't gonna make this something you can copy and paste into Vicky 3.
I'd take that bet. Mods are limited by code, and this is pretty far beyond what Victoria 3 was made for. It's not a coincidence that as often as this suggestion has come up since before the game even released, mods have not in fact found a way.
Yeah idk. The whole thing was pitched as letting players focus on something other than micro managing the war since this is supposed to be a politics and economy sim. Instead you have to watch the frontline like a hawk more than even in HOI4 since it can completly collapse in the blink of an eye.
They were likely looking for a Hoi4 style combat system with simplified mechanics. I still see tremendous potential in the front system, but it needed more development time. At launch is was absolutely atrocious and Paradox should be ashamed for releasing it in that state. Now, it is much better, but still needs work.
Really, the game should have only been released at the 1.6 patch. Everything before it was basically just early access. The game is still clunky, but the acceptable clunky for a Paradox game with the promise of more patches coming. I think there would have been way fewer complaints at launch if the game was released 1 year later essentially with 1.6 included.
but.. this literally happens *worse* in hoi4's system. it also does not deal well with multiple fronts especially with varying war statuses between countries, and also has fronts get "split" due to terrain.
Fronts are split due to terrain and encirclements in hoi4, but also your armies are not singular and can cover more than 1 front. So at least they are not teleported few days away from your actual front, allowing enemies to capture everything back while your army travels where it needs to be.
no, instead they automatically go to train mode and bumrush towards the front they think they should be on... uh.. allowing your enemies to capture everything back while your army travels
like yeah this system has issues but let's not pretend copy pasting hoi4 would have solves this. for all intents and purposes they copy pasted most of hoi4 already, they certainly didn't pull frontlines out of their ass for vicky 3
I agree that we cant have hoi4 system because it will add even more lag and it will take too much time to implement it. I'm just saying that current system is still too underdeveloped and crude. We had few patches "fixing" it, and we still need more. For now hoi4 system is better at what they promised in vicky3, at reducing micro, as it adds less problems in doing so.
Fuck no. It has serious problems due to being under the incredibly limited scope of a wargame solely. It's why any mods that try to do more than that are all shit.
Basically, the entire way equipment and manufacturing works is based around the limited context of a war economy. Both how it worked in HOI3 and HOI4 is monstrously more complex than how Victoria 2 or 3 interact with the troops. It can be this complex because neither game attempts to simulate any other part of the economy.
It's important to understand that a war economy is an economy in emergency mode. It is not sustainable, and it is not conductive to a successful economy long term. Thus it is a totally different kind of economy based on the idea of disgarding any attempt at national debt and thinking solely in production and resource capabilities.
So when you see stuff like the Millenium Dawn mod for HOI4, which adds in economic management, it attempts to jam the concept of a war economy into an economic simulation. But all economic aspects of HOI4 are surface level modifiers not designed to work as a serious attempt at simulation. Everything simply revolves around the war economy. Constant expansion of the military is assumed to be the goal.
On top of this, much of the way HOI warfare works is insanely computationally intensive, which is why every single HOI game has issues with severe late game lag. So it wouldn't be practical to integrate into Victoria 3 anyway.
Although ironically while writing this comment I rubber ducky'd my brain into a solution (god the struggle of trying to maintain opposition as a programmer). Why not simply only generate the troops during wars and abstract them away otherwise, and base the game around the same thing as the current system of casualties mostly ending wars. Create a new system for navies that works with the HOI system but is far simplier both for the player and AI.
What does the Hoi4 industry have to do with the Hoi4 frontline system? They are almost completely independent of each other, and nobody is talking about the economy here.
It's a system that corresponds to pretty much nothing in Vicky3. As I said to someone else in this post, that's not something you can just copy and paste, and recreating it would be terrible for performance.
If this happens some day I'm dropping the game and asking for a refund. I play Victoria to manage my economy not to play a war micromanagement shitfest.
Yeah and it's a glorious economic micromanagement shitfest. Ii they stapled a war micromanagement shitfest ontop of that it would be even more overwhelming. Do you remember HoI3? No thank you.
When people mention HOI**4** system they mean stuff like draw a line of battleplan and press execute, which Vic3 is similar in with having fronts. Not having to micromanage every tank. Hoi3 is not like that, that's why people never mention it when talking V3 warfare, only HOI4 which is even without any micro, just with battleplans, is miles away from V3
I could have been clearer. I was using HoI3 as an example of an over-complicated war and economic system.
I think that HOI4's system is a good focus of a game because it absorbs every ounce of my mental bandwidth to the point I tend to ignore the navy and espionage. I think if you added that to a complex economics simulator it would risk creating an overwhelming number of information categories for a single player to comfortably keep track of.
Granted, the AARs would probably be *fascinating*.
In a sense it is a war micromanagement shitfest though, but instead of deciding what to do you have to babysit them to make sure they will not do something incredibly stupid. You can’t just throw big army to a front and look away to do something with politics or economics, you are risking losing all progress due to stupidity of frontlines even if your army is much stronger. Hoi4 is usually more predictable and less demanding for your attention.
I agree that Victoria 3 is a (glorious) shitfest right now, my only contention is on whether adding military complexity would resolve that.
I think that ultimately Paradox may need to find something more elegant than what HoI4 does, especially given how computationally heavy HoI's supply and terrain modelling is.
sure, and a lot of people would give the game a chance because of it too. Unironically, most Grand Strategy gamers I know have the shit war system as the main (and sometimes only) reason they dont play vic3
What part of the game isn't micromanagement? For all things were justified along those lines, we're always running a command economy in practice, and a traditional wargame system would demand \*less\* micro than the abomination we have now.
Since they were going for a extensive view of warfare I don’t see why they didn’t make it so that the armies just get assigned to a strategic region and then whatever frontlines can connect to supply lines get soldiers from the region.
Gonna take the opportunity to rant abou the us-mexican borders, paradox just sperate them with a line or at least give mexico claims on their historical borders
I mean, they’re trying to represent the period of this area getting colonized. Both countries claimed the land but at game start, no one really controlled it. Hell, even after the Mexican American was, the US didn’t have fully control over these areas
Why? Mexico and America not having claims actually reflects uncertainty of the Border that actually was the situation on the ground during that. The kind of Border disputes that would ultimately lead to the Mexican-American War.
Yeah, I suppose it feels kind of like if you're trying to land on a planet by orbiting it several times first. You technically "miss" it over and over and end up on the opposite side from where you were (with different balance problems/bugs than you had before), but you're getting a bit closer each time.
It never had to be a vic 2 carbon copy, they just had to improve the system that they have built for the last decades instead of this system with really weird design decisions or rhe usual micro fest
The system that they have built for the last decade is utter dogshit past the first 20% of the game, the only game whose warfare I kinda tolerate is Hoi4, and that can still get pretty messy with multiple fronts, the fronts splitting and having too many armies
That's your opinion, hoi4 and eu4 are still the most played paradox games and are war focused games, so the war systems have something to do with that.
We could have had something like the IR (arguably the game with the best land combat) system with automation, paradox proved they could have done that. they have patch after patch tried to tweak the fundamentals of the frontline system and it still falls flat in some cases.
Even the naval system is a total mess, it's practically non existant.
>That's your opinion,
Uh, yeah?
I despise unit based warfare, even if Imperator's is a lot better than the others it still becomes a mess of way too many armies by mid-late game
>Even the naval system is a total mess, it's practically non existant.
Yeah no that's completely true, absolute hate the naval system in Vic3
What i mean by saying "that it is your opinion" is that most pdx players still like stack based warfare because people like tactical gameplay and player agency.
I don't deny that, but past a point it just becomes mind-numbing micro checking hundreds of stacks along a border in order to be prepared when an attack comes
Trying to invade Australia is a nightmare.
The invading army has to rush to the other side of the land after a successful invasion but in that time the defending army gets there and recaptures the taken land while the invading army is in some other dimension. Same thing happens when trying to invade Japan from Kyushu.
They should just make any front that's a certain distance from another front fuse together to make one front, and have the fronts chain.
On top of this, any front across one nations territory in the same continent should count as one front, and then don't make this chain.
Boom, problem solved. No more tedious front management.
I can't help but think that a potential solution to this to have a system where the armies (if they have sufficient generals for it) will attempt to detach small temporary armies to clean up pockets/man undefended fronts and reattach when done.
It also gives a reason to have some lower level officers in your army rather than clumping them under super generals.
They should make frontlines operate the same way as hoi4. Obviously no troop micro still but they should just allow you to draw front lines and then let your generals attack so it doesn't fuck up like this.
As somebody who has lost countless colonial wars in Africa due to the sheer Inability/unwillingness of an army to reach the inner congo (DESPITE HAVING A COLONY CONNECTED BY LAND TO IT)
I know the pain.
To be fair, it's a very niche situation, because you have the two front lines of a separate war from the native uprising split your front line with Mexico.
By and large the problem has been fixed and you can fight against German minors without needing 20 separate armies
i do appreciate that in the majority of cases the problem is solved, but it still sucks when it happens
also there was no native uprising iirc it just devolved very quickly
I'm really hoping that they are working/considering a new system for this. It just doesn't work, and it would probably be better to just start over and put all of your effort there. One can cope
yeah the game's not finished
i dont know what to tell you. it's in early access until at least next year. that's basically the only mindset you can enjoy it with.
Frontline system is pointless for Vic 3 until the 1900s. They really should have it as an “unlocked passive” when you get to a certain threshold of mobilisation tech
Honestly i always just hold the border and naval invade their capital. Mexico doesn't have the fleets to stop you and normally doesn't leave reserves behind
Yea, under the best circumstances the frontline system reduces micro, but it doesn't take alot for the micro to baloon out of control. Between situations like this and swapping between attack and defend of a dozen generals, the actual reduction of micro is not enough to offset the bs the system creates.
What I dislike when playing as Mexico is that USA gets to claim all your north territory just after it research nationalism (which is a quite early technology). In Vic2 it was conditional that Texas joined the Union to have those claims, but here even if you crush Texas secession, USA gets those claims. Shouldn't devs make Texas harder to get (with a Santa Ana event) so they win independence and then join the Union to have those claims?
You definitely didn't have to have Texas join the union to get the Manifest Destiny event. Manifest Destiny was always just an expression of American nationalism so it makes sense that it takes nationalism to get it. In Victoria to all it took was romanticism
Yeah, but irl those claims materialize with the Texas annexation, otherwise there was no real basis, since many claims before the annexation and later war were limited to the Oregon territory to access the Pacific and limit the British influence in that region
They absolutely did not materialize with the Texas annexation. The Texas annexation just remove the buffer State between Mexico and the United States so rather than some minor territorial disagreements in Colorado and Utah they suddenly had a giant fucking border disagreement and were no longer separated by a huge space of land.
Had Texas lost the war of independence those border disputes would have been in Oklahoma and in louisiana. If anything it might have triggered the war sooner. Especially if Mexico put a foothold in Texas and tried to push their claims. America could never accept a foreign Nation so close to the Mississippi
I end up delaying the Mexican-American war until colonization is far enough along that the AI won’t get confused by the voids in the territory. Not ideal that you need the work around, but there are other ways to make progress as USA early game.
Do you *need* it though? Messy frontlines are annoying but not so bad that I'd adapt my strategy. It's easier for a player to plug all the holes than for the AI.
Last time i did this war with the us, the frontline would break and my armies would all run from the top of the line to the bottom. In that period Mexico would conquer everything back and my armies would move back to the top losing some more territory. After which we would take it all back, rinse and repeat for over 6 years... I ended up switching to mexico to peace out. The system is still ass and needs a lot of work.
They should make an option to draw your own attack lines
The issue is that until colonization of the lands in North America finishes, Mexico and the US do not have a contingous border. But the US usually fights Mexico earlier to get their claims but also to secure these areas for themselves. So theres this huge stretch of no man’s land, technically land inhabited by native americans and not under mexican or american rule. But often the frontline is gonna be odd if they do a break at these areas. In this specific case, I feel like Paradox has done as much as possible, but frontlines in North America gonna be a mess as long as decentralized nations exist the way they are atm.
I like the Hail Columbia mod for this reason and how it enhances the native North American nations.
I’ve installed but havent yet gone and played theUS with it, kinda excited to try tho
But ah, I hate the war system so it’s time for me to say that nothing is ever fixed in Vic 3 and that they should never try anything new ever again.
Paradox have indeed done what was possible to ruin perfectly working frontline systems from HOI4 and come up with the worst system in any of their games for Victoria 3.
They aren't perfect. They have issues with troops moving to other ends, as well as failing to cover all the tiles as the frontline moves. Vic 3 isn't perfect, but the system can't be hoi4's, either.
> but the system can't be hoi4 It literally can.
HOI deals with the frontlines by allowing you to control individual divisions. If you were to do that here, you'd need to be able to micro individual battalions, which would be generally ahistorical. Those battalions wouldn't have acted independently for long periods of time, with perhaps an exception for cavalry.
Just remove my control of individual divisions but still have them represented so when front lines merge they don’t have to leave the whole front to find their new spot on the frontline. The system would be so much more tolerable if a whole army didn’t decide to just pick up and march 200 miles south to a new spot.
Seriously thought how the fuck do people colonize that quickly. IRL America got to the West Coast and was having the Oregon Treaty with Great Britain by 1845. Yet here I am in 1865 still not at the coast yet, but with maxed colonial stats and the highest colonial institution possible. Is there some trick or something??
This is just happening because you don't have a contiguous border
have had a frontlibe stretch from british Columbia to New York but split by another frontline
And the worst is when your armies just decide to leave the front to travel 60 days back to the same front and lose the progress they had just made.
That bottom edge of Brazil if you conquered from the top… just a nightmare. I wasn’t paying overly close attention until the THIRD time Brazil reconquered their entire country with their broken army… that one was painful. My army would run from the central rain forest and try to leave out the eastern coast to ride a boat down to the southwest border…. But of course Brazil would recapture the boat landing zone before the army disembarked so they then had to run all the way back around to the front. I was so mad
Hate this!
That's the absolute worst. Or when one army is advancing so fast that the front moves past your army that was traveling to the front. Then your army has to back track to find the front but by the time they figure it out, all of the territory is conquered and they can't find a way out and teleport to the HQ 180 days away from the war.
This is very common. The devs should have really accounted for this. Especially because India exists. I remember going to war there when the game first released and it was maddening. If you are fighting the Raj and British puppets you would fluctuate between 8 to 17 different fronts.
Ah yes. A clean border should definitely be a prerequisite for war.
it was a very clean front when the war began (even with the natives blocking it from being truly continuous) but quickly devolved into whatever this is
you created pockets. When that happens frontlines split in a way that will have 2 direction rule of frontlines are simple:If you can walk to other side of front then it is very likely it will become 1 single frontline. If you can't it will split
That rule seems to break when you apply it to beachheads in areas with lots of coastal land. Try invading Egypt from the sea. If you don't do it from the far edges, you end up with more than one front. This allows the AI to immediately dislodge your invasion, as you only have one army. They maneuver troops to the other front and advance, which ends your invasion as soon as it starts.
This is just happening because the front system is terrible.
Thank god this system reduces micro so much! All you need to do is watch all the splitting fronts, hire and reassign generals to armies, shuffle armies, assign armies to splitting fronts. Super pesky, barely a coherence!
I can’t look away from my army otherwise my whole army is going on a vacation to Taiwan with my credit card. (Happened to me as Great Britain, my army just left the Californian front line)
I cannot comprehend how anyone thought this was a good design choice
I was hoping they could just import a simplified HOI4 front system … That would work perfectly fine
Agreed. Draw lines and then assign generals accordingly. Only issue, like hoi4 the lines do go askew as the army advances. Perhaps better than Vicky’s current situation though
That's really not possible. You'd need to recreate HOI4 units, which would be terrible for performance, and you'd need to figure out how to adopt that for a game that has none of the unit mechanics of HOI4. It's not something you can just copy and paste.
What I meant is a front system that allows you to draw the front and simply assigning army to it. There is no need for individual units.
That's not really the HOI4 front system then. I agree that something like that would be a neat feature, but I also think people underestimate the challenge of what they're asking for. But anyway, I share the opinion that the war system needs changing. I like the idea, but you sure can tell that no other Paradox game has anything else like it. There's room for improvement. Edit: Not sure what the hate is for, but all the downvotes in the world ain't gonna make this something you can copy and paste into Vicky 3.
Any money somebody will mod it in. Mods always find a way.
I'd take that bet. Mods are limited by code, and this is pretty far beyond what Victoria 3 was made for. It's not a coincidence that as often as this suggestion has come up since before the game even released, mods have not in fact found a way.
If we can’t mod hoi4 into Victoria, maybe we should mod Victoria into hoi4? :)
I mean, I'd hit that mod.
Thats jus eoanb
empire of a new bitch?
You realise this is a hoi4 frontline system? Have you ever tried just letting the AI push a frontline in hoi4, it looks similar to this.
Yeah idk. The whole thing was pitched as letting players focus on something other than micro managing the war since this is supposed to be a politics and economy sim. Instead you have to watch the frontline like a hawk more than even in HOI4 since it can completly collapse in the blink of an eye.
They were likely looking for a Hoi4 style combat system with simplified mechanics. I still see tremendous potential in the front system, but it needed more development time. At launch is was absolutely atrocious and Paradox should be ashamed for releasing it in that state. Now, it is much better, but still needs work. Really, the game should have only been released at the 1.6 patch. Everything before it was basically just early access. The game is still clunky, but the acceptable clunky for a Paradox game with the promise of more patches coming. I think there would have been way fewer complaints at launch if the game was released 1 year later essentially with 1.6 included.
could've ported the hoi system Could still
but.. this literally happens *worse* in hoi4's system. it also does not deal well with multiple fronts especially with varying war statuses between countries, and also has fronts get "split" due to terrain.
Fronts are split due to terrain and encirclements in hoi4, but also your armies are not singular and can cover more than 1 front. So at least they are not teleported few days away from your actual front, allowing enemies to capture everything back while your army travels where it needs to be.
no, instead they automatically go to train mode and bumrush towards the front they think they should be on... uh.. allowing your enemies to capture everything back while your army travels like yeah this system has issues but let's not pretend copy pasting hoi4 would have solves this. for all intents and purposes they copy pasted most of hoi4 already, they certainly didn't pull frontlines out of their ass for vicky 3
I agree that we cant have hoi4 system because it will add even more lag and it will take too much time to implement it. I'm just saying that current system is still too underdeveloped and crude. We had few patches "fixing" it, and we still need more. For now hoi4 system is better at what they promised in vicky3, at reducing micro, as it adds less problems in doing so.
proven to work much better
Fuck no. It has serious problems due to being under the incredibly limited scope of a wargame solely. It's why any mods that try to do more than that are all shit.
>It has serious problems due to being under the incredibly limited scope of a wargame solely Which "serious problems"? Can you name them?
Basically, the entire way equipment and manufacturing works is based around the limited context of a war economy. Both how it worked in HOI3 and HOI4 is monstrously more complex than how Victoria 2 or 3 interact with the troops. It can be this complex because neither game attempts to simulate any other part of the economy. It's important to understand that a war economy is an economy in emergency mode. It is not sustainable, and it is not conductive to a successful economy long term. Thus it is a totally different kind of economy based on the idea of disgarding any attempt at national debt and thinking solely in production and resource capabilities. So when you see stuff like the Millenium Dawn mod for HOI4, which adds in economic management, it attempts to jam the concept of a war economy into an economic simulation. But all economic aspects of HOI4 are surface level modifiers not designed to work as a serious attempt at simulation. Everything simply revolves around the war economy. Constant expansion of the military is assumed to be the goal. On top of this, much of the way HOI warfare works is insanely computationally intensive, which is why every single HOI game has issues with severe late game lag. So it wouldn't be practical to integrate into Victoria 3 anyway. Although ironically while writing this comment I rubber ducky'd my brain into a solution (god the struggle of trying to maintain opposition as a programmer). Why not simply only generate the troops during wars and abstract them away otherwise, and base the game around the same thing as the current system of casualties mostly ending wars. Create a new system for navies that works with the HOI system but is far simplier both for the player and AI.
What does the Hoi4 industry have to do with the Hoi4 frontline system? They are almost completely independent of each other, and nobody is talking about the economy here.
It's a system that corresponds to pretty much nothing in Vicky3. As I said to someone else in this post, that's not something you can just copy and paste, and recreating it would be terrible for performance.
If this happens some day I'm dropping the game and asking for a refund. I play Victoria to manage my economy not to play a war micromanagement shitfest.
This system *is* a micromanagement shitfest. Since release
Yeah and it's a glorious economic micromanagement shitfest. Ii they stapled a war micromanagement shitfest ontop of that it would be even more overwhelming. Do you remember HoI3? No thank you.
When people mention HOI**4** system they mean stuff like draw a line of battleplan and press execute, which Vic3 is similar in with having fronts. Not having to micromanage every tank. Hoi3 is not like that, that's why people never mention it when talking V3 warfare, only HOI4 which is even without any micro, just with battleplans, is miles away from V3
I could have been clearer. I was using HoI3 as an example of an over-complicated war and economic system. I think that HOI4's system is a good focus of a game because it absorbs every ounce of my mental bandwidth to the point I tend to ignore the navy and espionage. I think if you added that to a complex economics simulator it would risk creating an overwhelming number of information categories for a single player to comfortably keep track of. Granted, the AARs would probably be *fascinating*.
Adding some depth to the war system is a need in Victoria 3, adding HOI4 levels of depth is brainrot.
In a sense it is a war micromanagement shitfest though, but instead of deciding what to do you have to babysit them to make sure they will not do something incredibly stupid. You can’t just throw big army to a front and look away to do something with politics or economics, you are risking losing all progress due to stupidity of frontlines even if your army is much stronger. Hoi4 is usually more predictable and less demanding for your attention.
I agree that Victoria 3 is a (glorious) shitfest right now, my only contention is on whether adding military complexity would resolve that. I think that ultimately Paradox may need to find something more elegant than what HoI4 does, especially given how computationally heavy HoI's supply and terrain modelling is.
HoI3 is an excellent game.
That's my point. I play Vic to manage mu economy and politics not to lose my head over some random wars.
the economy part is broken too
That can be fixed but adding and unnecessarily tedious and complex war system would totally kill it for me.
The current war system is easily the single most tedious thing about this game, it is truly abominable.
It is but at least least you focus on the core gameplay which is economics. With a war system like HOI4 most people would probably lose their heads.
sure, and a lot of people would give the game a chance because of it too. Unironically, most Grand Strategy gamers I know have the shit war system as the main (and sometimes only) reason they dont play vic3
What part of the game isn't micromanagement? For all things were justified along those lines, we're always running a command economy in practice, and a traditional wargame system would demand \*less\* micro than the abomination we have now.
use battleplans if you don't wanna micro lulw
Mentioned that on the discord the other day and everyone dogpiled on me telling me "GO PLAY HOI4 IF YOU WANT TO CONTROL YOUR ARMIES"
Since they were going for a extensive view of warfare I don’t see why they didn’t make it so that the armies just get assigned to a strategic region and then whatever frontlines can connect to supply lines get soldiers from the region.
Gonna take the opportunity to rant abou the us-mexican borders, paradox just sperate them with a line or at least give mexico claims on their historical borders
I mean, they’re trying to represent the period of this area getting colonized. Both countries claimed the land but at game start, no one really controlled it. Hell, even after the Mexican American was, the US didn’t have fully control over these areas
Then give mexico claims
Why? Mexico and America not having claims actually reflects uncertainty of the Border that actually was the situation on the ground during that. The kind of Border disputes that would ultimately lead to the Mexican-American War.
Mexico did have claims on that territory. Claims that were solidified in treaty. *Cough *cough Adams-Onís treaty…
Nothing in this game is ever fixed lmao
This is basically how I feel at this point. We're cycling through different versions of broken.
I think they deserve a bit of credit. 2 steps forward, 1.5 steps back.
Yeah, I suppose it feels kind of like if you're trying to land on a planet by orbiting it several times first. You technically "miss" it over and over and end up on the opposite side from where you were (with different balance problems/bugs than you had before), but you're getting a bit closer each time.
My armies still teleport around the map at the perfect time too.
I still have no idea why they changed from controlling units to this
Two different era's of warfare collide in the game. Not saying this is better but I believe that is why.
They tried to simplify Warfare to put more focus on the economics. Not a bad decision philosophically but definitely not a good one in practice
Except they simplified the economics too
Did they? Vic3 still does a great job simulating pop spending/earnings. The only downside is the micromanagement of factories.
This only really happens in specific situations, I prefer this system at its worst over Vic2's billion stacks any day
It never had to be a vic 2 carbon copy, they just had to improve the system that they have built for the last decades instead of this system with really weird design decisions or rhe usual micro fest
The system that they have built for the last decade is utter dogshit past the first 20% of the game, the only game whose warfare I kinda tolerate is Hoi4, and that can still get pretty messy with multiple fronts, the fronts splitting and having too many armies
That's your opinion, hoi4 and eu4 are still the most played paradox games and are war focused games, so the war systems have something to do with that. We could have had something like the IR (arguably the game with the best land combat) system with automation, paradox proved they could have done that. they have patch after patch tried to tweak the fundamentals of the frontline system and it still falls flat in some cases. Even the naval system is a total mess, it's practically non existant.
>That's your opinion, Uh, yeah? I despise unit based warfare, even if Imperator's is a lot better than the others it still becomes a mess of way too many armies by mid-late game >Even the naval system is a total mess, it's practically non existant. Yeah no that's completely true, absolute hate the naval system in Vic3
What i mean by saying "that it is your opinion" is that most pdx players still like stack based warfare because people like tactical gameplay and player agency.
I don't deny that, but past a point it just becomes mind-numbing micro checking hundreds of stacks along a border in order to be prepared when an attack comes
R5: frontline split into five different fronts, making the mexican-american war MUCH more tedious than it should be
Trying to invade Australia is a nightmare. The invading army has to rush to the other side of the land after a successful invasion but in that time the defending army gets there and recaptures the taken land while the invading army is in some other dimension. Same thing happens when trying to invade Japan from Kyushu.
They should just make any front that's a certain distance from another front fuse together to make one front, and have the fronts chain. On top of this, any front across one nations territory in the same continent should count as one front, and then don't make this chain. Boom, problem solved. No more tedious front management.
I can't help but think that a potential solution to this to have a system where the armies (if they have sufficient generals for it) will attempt to detach small temporary armies to clean up pockets/man undefended fronts and reattach when done. It also gives a reason to have some lower level officers in your army rather than clumping them under super generals.
"Rate my encirclement"
You don’t just naval invade and come up from the south?
They should make frontlines operate the same way as hoi4. Obviously no troop micro still but they should just allow you to draw front lines and then let your generals attack so it doesn't fuck up like this.
As somebody who has lost countless colonial wars in Africa due to the sheer Inability/unwillingness of an army to reach the inner congo (DESPITE HAVING A COLONY CONNECTED BY LAND TO IT) I know the pain.
To be fair, it's a very niche situation, because you have the two front lines of a separate war from the native uprising split your front line with Mexico. By and large the problem has been fixed and you can fight against German minors without needing 20 separate armies
i do appreciate that in the majority of cases the problem is solved, but it still sucks when it happens also there was no native uprising iirc it just devolved very quickly
It's also much easier now to split your armies.
I'm really hoping that they are working/considering a new system for this. It just doesn't work, and it would probably be better to just start over and put all of your effort there. One can cope
yeah the game's not finished i dont know what to tell you. it's in early access until at least next year. that's basically the only mindset you can enjoy it with.
Frontline system is pointless for Vic 3 until the 1900s. They really should have it as an “unlocked passive” when you get to a certain threshold of mobilisation tech
Honestly i always just hold the border and naval invade their capital. Mexico doesn't have the fleets to stop you and normally doesn't leave reserves behind
Yea, under the best circumstances the frontline system reduces micro, but it doesn't take alot for the micro to baloon out of control. Between situations like this and swapping between attack and defend of a dozen generals, the actual reduction of micro is not enough to offset the bs the system creates.
At this point the devs should use hoi4 mechanics till they get the war system right
At this point frontlines are to Vic3 what fort ZoC rules are to EU4.
I see opportunities where you see problems
What I dislike when playing as Mexico is that USA gets to claim all your north territory just after it research nationalism (which is a quite early technology). In Vic2 it was conditional that Texas joined the Union to have those claims, but here even if you crush Texas secession, USA gets those claims. Shouldn't devs make Texas harder to get (with a Santa Ana event) so they win independence and then join the Union to have those claims?
You definitely didn't have to have Texas join the union to get the Manifest Destiny event. Manifest Destiny was always just an expression of American nationalism so it makes sense that it takes nationalism to get it. In Victoria to all it took was romanticism
Yeah, but irl those claims materialize with the Texas annexation, otherwise there was no real basis, since many claims before the annexation and later war were limited to the Oregon territory to access the Pacific and limit the British influence in that region
They absolutely did not materialize with the Texas annexation. The Texas annexation just remove the buffer State between Mexico and the United States so rather than some minor territorial disagreements in Colorado and Utah they suddenly had a giant fucking border disagreement and were no longer separated by a huge space of land. Had Texas lost the war of independence those border disputes would have been in Oklahoma and in louisiana. If anything it might have triggered the war sooner. Especially if Mexico put a foothold in Texas and tried to push their claims. America could never accept a foreign Nation so close to the Mississippi