So I've been playing the Victoria 2 demo and I've been enjoying it immensely, as someone who never really "got" the original game.
For those that don't know, Victoria 2 is a Grand Strategy Game like HOI or Europa Universalis. Where Europa Universalis is more focused on discovery and exploration, HOI more on warfare, Victoria 2 is more about domestic politics and economics. I know to many people that sounds boring, but honestly I think domestic politicking and economics is a very underutilized direction of game design. Granted, secretly, I'm a 19th Century European politics enthusiast so I shit my pants for this sort of thing.
If you go through the tutorials, the game is just as complex but 100% more intuitive than Victoria 1. After a couple of hours I was "getting" it much more than I did the original. If you get good at the game, you could probably influence the simulation for some very strange results. A communist United States or a democratic Russia? I like how those sort of policy issues aren't as simple as moving a slider... you really have to plan and engineer changes like these.
I still find it endlessly fascinating to see how little tweaks influence little demographic changes. It's cool how your capitalists go around building railways and factories without you telling them to do so. Next time, I'm going to engineer a Civil War that starts in the 1840's.
My only real complaint is that England seems to suffer from a lot of armed insurrections on the home islands, and there seems to be some buggy text. I feel I will be getting this game when I can afford it.
Ive been thinking about getting this, but im not sure id be able to give it the time it'll need at the moment, with elemental out soon and then civ5 the month after, ill probably get it after playing those to death.
Ive played, EU1 & HOI2&3 and liked them all, but they do put me in 'hermit mode'
Also, the music is fantastic and sets a great tone.
Lol, yes, I do lose track of time play Victoria. I guess that's a good thing...
I wish they had had someone actually play the demo before releasing it. The Null_text or whatever that error message is rather jarring and annoying and pretty much everyone runs into it.
I never played Victoria, but I've played their other games, EU, CK... I am not sure if I care for the map and or the message system. It's definitely a deep game, lots of meat even if it isn't the most pretty game.
They burned me on HOI 3. I will never buy another Paradox developed game. They still publish some good ones but they released an unplayable mess. They should be ashamed. So I'll speak the only way I can; with my wallet. Well and this message.
Victoria 2 sucks oodles of noodles it's worse than the first one. There's LESS to do. Plus any fool who buys this retail after the HOI III release is well just a fool. Vicky I was .99 cents after 3 weeks release. This one will fall in price also very soon.
What happend with HOI 3 that is getting Paradox so many "fans?" I am guessing bugs which Paradox doesn't seem to get away from. I thought it already had an expansion. Did they never bother to fix it?
Not my type of game I guess...[my favourite Paradox releases are -> EU:Rome + Crusader Kings ]
Paradox is devolving like Creative Assembly, Victoria 2 from what I hear is simplified, and at present has a game breaking bug in the release version that causes full scale revolts to explode across entire countries. If you play up to.. 1880 I think it was, you'll see dozens of countries just buried in rebels that never disappear locking the entire world in an anarcho liberal depression.
Victoria 1 was complex but good, though with some interface problems. Europa Universalis was fantastic but needed a better AI. HOI was more complex and detailed, though slow with too much army micro management.
Then come the sequels and Paradox for whatever reason forgets how to make video games. HOI3 was too "accessible" Aka simplified to the point of boring and riddled with bugs. The only thing they managed to improve was the warfare.
Victoria 2 is looking to be more "accessible" than the previous with its own mess of game ruining bugs, can't say more than that because I haven't played the full game yet. Holding off on a purchase until its own forums have something good to say about it.
I can offer a prediction too about how the next Europa might look, just think of a way it can be simplified and broken, and Paradox will do just that.
Paradox used to be one of my favorite developers, I don't know what happened to them. It's depressing.
Still broken naval and air combat.....
Many things considered as WAD by Paradox doesnt make any sense in WW2 game
AI waste huge ammount of fuel which result in broken Japan and Germany in many games
Paradox released already several broken patches - 1.3 version was broken for 4 months (superstacks, empty reserve divisions) and its Steam version was broken even more because Paradox screwed up sending files to Steam and they didnt bother to fix Steam release untill 1.4 patch which was 4 months later. Latest official patch 2.03B was released without ANY testing, it contain several gamebreaking bugs which any testing would discover in 10 minutes. After we complained we were told that all programers are on holiday and so work on any hotfix or patch wont start before end of August!!!!!!!
Fact that my account was banned for criticizing Semper Fi (HoI3 expansion which promised to fix original game - for 20€) shortly after its release didnt exactly improved my opinion about about Paradox (official reason for ban was that my post was "inflamatory" - well if game didnt have 10+ major bugs almost 1 year (and 1 paid expansion) after release my post wouldnt by so critical).
Wow, a lot of Paradox hate! I found Victoria I (and HOI 3) to be absolutely impenetrable, so making it "accessible" is not a problem for me. For that matter, the only Paradox game that I can get into is EU3. The bugs you are talking about do worry me though, and in some AARs I've read the countries aren't very faithful to the real-world counterparts in some cases (i.e. a lot of "Canadian Nationalist" revolts, AI USA doesn't reach West Coast very well, Britain is much more unstable than it was historically), although Prussia and Austria do compete with one another very nicely. I guess I will see how the patches fix things before putting money down.
Interesting, thanks for the information. I can't say that I've seen the kind of support you'd hope from Paradox myself. Crusader Kings has been a broken buggy game long before the last patch which was and is beta since 2008. EU3 seems pretty clean now, but I didn't really play that early on when they could have been doing the same thing with that series.
I noticed that as well. The developers and moderators on their forums are some of the worst I've seen in the gaming industry. I also don't like how they segregated the forums by requiring you to buy the game in order to READ them (example: the bug forum). That's such bullshit.
Their only game that I liked was Hearts of Iron 2 - which was a damn good game. After that, they just stopped making good games.
I think they did that starting with the Rome based game. I was pretty unhappy with that too. I went to the technical part of the forums to see just how bad these games were at release or where they were in the getting fixed department. Now I am less inclined to buy their games because I can't see if the patch has been setting in beta for 6 months combined for 2-3 hot fixes which implies a problem.
Arsenal of Democrycy is very good standalone expansion of HoI2 which was made by another company. I hope same people will some day create sequel based on HoI3. I am currently playing 1936 game as USSR on hard diff. against agressive AI and so far its very nice chalange.
I enjoyed EU Rome but there were just too many crashes, it got frustrating (admittedly I got it cheap to start with). They are very addictive to begin with but buggy buggy buggy
It seems I can't quote you without keeping the previous quote as well... this will look messy. As for EU3, even at release, it has been a fairly stable game, with a fraction of the bugs you will (still) see in HoI3. It may well be their best title for a long time to come.
While the moderators over there are rather draconian, and have deleted entire threads they shouldn't have, I completely understand why they've gone the route they have in regards to their forums. Piracy is a real issue, without a lot of counters, and as people here on these forums (including devs, moderators) have said: developers shouldn't offer technical support to pirates. Keeping people without valid serial keys from accessing technical support forums is one way to achieve that.
I like Paradox, but HOI3 was a bad and bug ridden game for me, and the AI did very bizarre things such as defenders leaving entire fronts open for the invader to conquer, and stacking of units in strange and pointless locations (jokingly, people would say they are just on vacation). Gladly, I only bought it for $7 (sale) a while back. I love EU3: HttT and CK. There is a large rumor they are making CK2 right now.
I've been reading on the Paradox forums about Vicky 2, and there are problems. Such as for some reason there is a drastic global iron shortage in a very large amount of people's games, which even if your country produces iron as a product, you still can't stockpile it before it's sent off to the great powers (GP's get first dibs). Also the revolts are irritating, you need large standing armies all over your nation because sooner or later they will be popping up no matter how pleased your people are.
I know with the EU series, I felt like where EUII got free patches, with EUIII it was three expansions, and they never finished the beta patch for their last expansion in over a year.
Paradox had a great run, but they've declined.
Well they have an official facebook page on it and some silly thing about announcing CK2 if they get 25k accounts on it, barely over 5k though. If they do CK2, and I hope they do, I want them to trash most of the CK code. That's been their excuse the whole time with the issues with CK, that it wasn't their code and they can only do so much with it. I'll only accept that excuse so many times.
It's not a if anymore, it's been announced.
Victoria 2 is a playable game, at least for most greater countries and the first 20 years. After that you will problem with the expanding bureaucracy, and all AI countries are dealing with never ending revolutions from factory workers who for some reason needs to eat 100 times as much a farmer, and thus goes to bed hungry every night (Paradox have even claimed this consumption is working as intended). The moderations on the forums have gone mad, but Vicky2 is actually a playable game from launch it just doesn't cover all of the 80 years it should, but only 20-30.
By contrast EU3 and HOI3 wasn't playable until the first expansion. Four months and twelve months respectively. The latest HOI3 patch is not horribly broken, it just broke feature that makes the game a lot more annoying to play.
I knew it felt strange when I was reading criticism of the game on their forum about the horrendous game breaking bugs and people would always lace their posts with things like 'I really love this super awesome game, but...' and then reiterate how much they love the game after they talk about the bug.
The amount of sitting around doing nothing in this game is appalling. I feel like it's MOO3 where the game just plays itself and there's little a player can actually do. Quite a huge step back from EU3.
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