- Joined
- Mar 13, 2022
Wow, sounds like even the AI knows the french just give up.
Paradox Studio Thread
- Thread starter Payday
- Start date
Wow, sounds like even the AI knows the french just give up.
- Joined
- Feb 24, 2019
The French AI almost never gets rid of the disjointed government national spirit. So they always end up falling the second Paris is taken. (sort of like real life!)
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2019
This mods pretty good if you want to play Italy but cant wait for DLC btw, im sure there is a better one out there but this one is pretty adequate
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2022
God forbid Paradox releases a fully functional game that doesn't require at least 20 patches and 10 DLCs to make the game playable.
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2021
Italian rework dev diary.
Italian tree will work like Soviet tree. So lot of debuffs and you will spend lot of time fixing it. They didnt show alt history paths yet but So far there is no meme (Roman) political path yet.
And some mechanics are kinda interesting like balance of power of Dux vs Grand council of Fascism
Italian tree will work like Soviet tree. So lot of debuffs and you will spend lot of time fixing it. They didnt show alt history paths yet but So far there is no meme (Roman) political path yet.
And some mechanics are kinda interesting like balance of power of Dux vs Grand council of Fascism
Cringe newfag
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Feb 23, 2022
Isn't the actual original Fascism a meme Rome political path already, though.
So really you'd have two. The pragmatic spiritual sequel approach of Mussolini where you are reviving the Roman Empire but not in a totally literal way (soft meme politics), and a hardcore LARPer path where you properly rename everything (full meme politics)
God of Nothing
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 31, 2016
>play CK3 again
>start off in Finland
>quickly rise to the top
>have an armenian son from the daughter of some refugees that somehow made it to scandifuck
>have a bunch of children with my waifu and refugee concubine
>each and every single one gets an absolute shitty education
>die
>lands are split between all of them because they took out seniority succession from being selectable by everyone
>quit game
I'll stick to the Prince of Darkness mod for it, I guess. They surprisingly improved from CK2.
>start off in Finland
>quickly rise to the top
>have an armenian son from the daughter of some refugees that somehow made it to scandifuck
>have a bunch of children with my waifu and refugee concubine
>each and every single one gets an absolute shitty education
>die
>lands are split between all of them because they took out seniority succession from being selectable by everyone
>quit game
I'll stick to the Prince of Darkness mod for it, I guess. They surprisingly improved from CK2.
- Joined
- May 14, 2019
Italy into Rome is probably the least retarded meme path you could add to the game.
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2019
Unless the classified bit is genuinely interesting shit looks mid to me, like your regular focuses but split into five and renamed to cool things, and god forbid they made them all 70 days
- Joined
- May 14, 2019
Hiring an actual economist to design their economics model would go a lot better.
COMPLETE REWRITE OF POST
So, I have a background in academic economics, very familiar with building economic models. I realized at some point that I'd really been doing modelling since I was a kid, by drawing up designs for board games with realistic economic mechanics. This is an attempt to do some of that without using too much jargon.
What I found appealing specifically about Victoria II was it having a market that runs itself, and Vicky III could still end up being a better game to play in terms of its economy, but it's gay and lame that it took that away, especially seeing as the AI has to do it anyways. So, let's start with the AI.
In economics, there is a concept called a "utility function" which is basically a theoretical math formula that assigns numbers to different bundles of goods, which the idea being that if a bundle gets a higher number that means it's preferred. From a utility function, you can solve for the demand functions (you plug in prices of everything and income level and you get the amount the consumer would buy to maximize their utility, ie to get the best bundle they can afford). If you decide in advance that you're going to have all Pops use the same basic utility function, you don't need the computer to "solve" the problem, you just need the formulas and you calculate it each economic period (say, a week or month).
The two main utility functions we actually use on any regular basis are Stone-Geary and some other thing that I think we call log-utility, and assuming that it's additively separable across time periods. All that means, in normal English, is basically just that how much you have of something in one time period won't influence how useful it is in another time period. (Like, for example, if I have peanut butter today, then that isn't going to make me want jelly tomorrow more unless I also have peanut butter tomorrow.) Stone-Geary results in the consumer spending their income enough to meet minimum requirements for each good, and past that point they try to spend fixed percentages of their income on each good. Log utility is useful because in macroeconomic (big picture) models, you get a smooth rate of economic growth.
For the producer, the concern is just profit-maximization. Economics predicts that, in the presence of perfect competition, the price will in the short-run be bid down to the marginal cost of producing it (cost of producing the last unit you make, such that if you went beyond your profits would go down) and in the long-run there are no profits at all (because profits attracts entrants who raise the supply, reducing that price even more). This is something Victoria II really sucked at, and I don't know why, but the capitalists in that game just didn't make logical decisions. Ideally, your Pops would invest into the highest-profit industries at any moment, but it would also be weighted (the Asset Ownership part goes into some more detail) towards things the Pop is interested in like industries it has always built (rather expand an existing one then start a new one), industries that have a logical complement in the province (build a textile mill next to my cotton plantations), etc.
The rest of this post will be split up by topic.
I don't really want to be an economist, I want to be a games designer or a historian.
Edit: Here's another little thing, the Construction system for Victoria III is baffling because it builds construction anywhere. Now, I know you'll never make a game that satisfies every autistic little detail of reality, but I was thinking about this with regards to the American railroad and the Chinese, where they didn't even stay. I think some jobs ought to have a feature where the worker does not have to "live" where they work. If you want to get real detailed (Railroads and Canals DLC for $20) then you could have Construction factories be on the move, like Hell on Wheels, so the Pops move where the work is, such as Utah or Panama. I think the Chinese in particular deserve some attention, I don't know if Chinese Exclusion is going to get any representation as journal events but it could have really changed demographics if they had been allowed to stay: imagine an American West that is as Chinese as the OTL West is Mexican.
Don't recall if this is currently represented in any way, but housing should be treated like a facility that produces housing (I mean, housing is the service you buy), which in turn can be self-owned or rented and self-built or constructed by others. Seeing some sort of economic difference between Pops being housed in log cabins, well-built farmhouses, tent colonies, shanties, tenements, etc. would be interesting, especially as it evolves over the course of a game.
If Victoria III were really well-designed it would be designed with modern day mods in mind.
COMPLETE REWRITE OF POST
So, I have a background in academic economics, very familiar with building economic models. I realized at some point that I'd really been doing modelling since I was a kid, by drawing up designs for board games with realistic economic mechanics. This is an attempt to do some of that without using too much jargon.
What I found appealing specifically about Victoria II was it having a market that runs itself, and Vicky III could still end up being a better game to play in terms of its economy, but it's gay and lame that it took that away, especially seeing as the AI has to do it anyways. So, let's start with the AI.
In economics, there is a concept called a "utility function" which is basically a theoretical math formula that assigns numbers to different bundles of goods, which the idea being that if a bundle gets a higher number that means it's preferred. From a utility function, you can solve for the demand functions (you plug in prices of everything and income level and you get the amount the consumer would buy to maximize their utility, ie to get the best bundle they can afford). If you decide in advance that you're going to have all Pops use the same basic utility function, you don't need the computer to "solve" the problem, you just need the formulas and you calculate it each economic period (say, a week or month).
The two main utility functions we actually use on any regular basis are Stone-Geary and some other thing that I think we call log-utility, and assuming that it's additively separable across time periods. All that means, in normal English, is basically just that how much you have of something in one time period won't influence how useful it is in another time period. (Like, for example, if I have peanut butter today, then that isn't going to make me want jelly tomorrow more unless I also have peanut butter tomorrow.) Stone-Geary results in the consumer spending their income enough to meet minimum requirements for each good, and past that point they try to spend fixed percentages of their income on each good. Log utility is useful because in macroeconomic (big picture) models, you get a smooth rate of economic growth.
For the producer, the concern is just profit-maximization. Economics predicts that, in the presence of perfect competition, the price will in the short-run be bid down to the marginal cost of producing it (cost of producing the last unit you make, such that if you went beyond your profits would go down) and in the long-run there are no profits at all (because profits attracts entrants who raise the supply, reducing that price even more). This is something Victoria II really sucked at, and I don't know why, but the capitalists in that game just didn't make logical decisions. Ideally, your Pops would invest into the highest-profit industries at any moment, but it would also be weighted (the Asset Ownership part goes into some more detail) towards things the Pop is interested in like industries it has always built (rather expand an existing one then start a new one), industries that have a logical complement in the province (build a textile mill next to my cotton plantations), etc.
The rest of this post will be split up by topic.
Something both Vicky II and III drop the ball on is saying who owns what. Vicky III at least includes it as a setting on buildings, but it's not tied to a specific province. I want EVERY piece of infrastructure/productive capital to have an owner Pop, or to have shares of ownership, and I want assets to be tradable goods.
There could be restrictions on asset ownership, like requiring a Pop to have a certain education level/valuation level to even consider investing in a specific type, or being banned from types with certain jobs, etc. What I mean here is, if for example a Dixie Aristocrat becomes a major shareholder in a dozen factories and harbors and lumber mills, is he even an Aristocrat anymore? And would a Farmer actually farm if he could work fulltime as a Capitalist? One idea I have here is that, tacked on to the utility function, you might tack on a number for binary decisions (these are called "indicator functions") like choice of occupation, so if you don't have a choice of workhours built in, then that could be used to represent how shitty a job feels. Then you could have things where a laborer may dabble a bit in investment but if wealthy enough would prefer giving up their "day job," or a time limit on ownership (it takes time keeping track of your assets, so you either hire managers or just hit your limit).
Under certain circumstances (like a highly profitable factory) it may be reasonable for Corporations to spawn in, entities which are capable of owning and coordinating different buildings, so that the Pop doesn't own stock directly in the facility but owns Corporate Stock of a corporation that owns buildings. Corporations should be active political players, like Interest Groups, and if large enough should be able to implement monopoly/monopsonist pricing. I mostly just see this as a thing where the corporations can fund money into lobbying that makes it advance reforms they want (or, equivalently, revoke unwanted reforms) or imposing political costs on the player, stuff like that, and sometimes event-based missions representing their fuckery. Corporations would be able to do things like vertically integrate (buy out facilities that produce inputs to their own production process, then sell the output to themselves at cost) and form cartels with each other. Similarly, Corporations could in some circumstances (like very poor Pops in rural areas) establish Company Towns, which would give them a captive labor force that they only pay subsistence wages to, and unions should be a part of the game (closed shop, open shop, form dynamically or form through government regulation, labor conflict being a part of the game). In this period government/corporate repression of unions was a huge deal.
If corporations had their own characters, they could have traits, and it could play into a philanthropy thing where corporations set aside some portion of their income to charitable giving (positive modifiers), and traits would give bonuses to specific kinds (like I imagine Vanderbilt getting bonuses to abolitionist causes since he funded the Nicaraguans against Walker, and Carnegie getting bonuses to literacy programs).
There could be restrictions on asset ownership, like requiring a Pop to have a certain education level/valuation level to even consider investing in a specific type, or being banned from types with certain jobs, etc. What I mean here is, if for example a Dixie Aristocrat becomes a major shareholder in a dozen factories and harbors and lumber mills, is he even an Aristocrat anymore? And would a Farmer actually farm if he could work fulltime as a Capitalist? One idea I have here is that, tacked on to the utility function, you might tack on a number for binary decisions (these are called "indicator functions") like choice of occupation, so if you don't have a choice of workhours built in, then that could be used to represent how shitty a job feels. Then you could have things where a laborer may dabble a bit in investment but if wealthy enough would prefer giving up their "day job," or a time limit on ownership (it takes time keeping track of your assets, so you either hire managers or just hit your limit).
Under certain circumstances (like a highly profitable factory) it may be reasonable for Corporations to spawn in, entities which are capable of owning and coordinating different buildings, so that the Pop doesn't own stock directly in the facility but owns Corporate Stock of a corporation that owns buildings. Corporations should be active political players, like Interest Groups, and if large enough should be able to implement monopoly/monopsonist pricing. I mostly just see this as a thing where the corporations can fund money into lobbying that makes it advance reforms they want (or, equivalently, revoke unwanted reforms) or imposing political costs on the player, stuff like that, and sometimes event-based missions representing their fuckery. Corporations would be able to do things like vertically integrate (buy out facilities that produce inputs to their own production process, then sell the output to themselves at cost) and form cartels with each other. Similarly, Corporations could in some circumstances (like very poor Pops in rural areas) establish Company Towns, which would give them a captive labor force that they only pay subsistence wages to, and unions should be a part of the game (closed shop, open shop, form dynamically or form through government regulation, labor conflict being a part of the game). In this period government/corporate repression of unions was a huge deal.
If corporations had their own characters, they could have traits, and it could play into a philanthropy thing where corporations set aside some portion of their income to charitable giving (positive modifiers), and traits would give bonuses to specific kinds (like I imagine Vanderbilt getting bonuses to abolitionist causes since he funded the Nicaraguans against Walker, and Carnegie getting bonuses to literacy programs).
For the production function, the only big things I have to say are that some goods in Victoria II did require "machine goods" as a resource, but in general the game kind of ignored that, mostly it was about building factories in discrete units. And that's more fun - it's more satisfying to say you have 34 factories and built a 35th - but is less realistic.
A compromise I've come up with is having production, broadly speaking, consist of these things:
Resources (subject of production); The raw materials that are transformed into the product. Is always used in fixed proportions.
Capital (means of production): Equipment that is not fixed in place, so it can be bought and sold freely.
Labor: The workers who use the means of production (and energy) on the subject of production to create the product
Energy: Raw materials used to make capital/facilities functionable (that is, things like coal and electricity)
Facilities: The location and fixed machinery in which work takes place
Additionally, a more complex model can include things like different types/grades of capital and labor, as well as resources that increase the efficiency of other resources, like:
Mechanics: Increases the productivity of capital
Management: Increases the productivity of labor
Corporate Management: Increases the productivity of all production, across all locations
In economic models we tend to assume that production is constant returns to scale, that is, if you scale up all your inputs by a certain amount then you scale up your output by that same amount. If you only scale up some inputs, though, then you get diminishing returns: production never goes down, but it will go up by less and less. Here, capital and labor are really what's doing the work, is the one thing that by itself (think the self-employed farmer or craftsman) turns the resources into the good, but in bigger operations there can be a demand for management, and if top-level management is fixed in supply somehow, then you get an upper limit to how large a company can grow.
With Facilities, I imagine these coming in discrete units, so that as you "fill up" a factory it becomes less productive (the factory just doesn't have enough floor space to prevent inefficiency), but the factory never becomes unproductive. Thus, there is a certain point of congestion in which if you build a new factory and split your capital and labor between them, you are as well off as before. With that, you can have small numbers of factories on map (easy to look at, expand, understand), but the economy is always expanding or declining in a smooth way.
A compromise I've come up with is having production, broadly speaking, consist of these things:
Resources (subject of production); The raw materials that are transformed into the product. Is always used in fixed proportions.
Capital (means of production): Equipment that is not fixed in place, so it can be bought and sold freely.
Labor: The workers who use the means of production (and energy) on the subject of production to create the product
Energy: Raw materials used to make capital/facilities functionable (that is, things like coal and electricity)
Facilities: The location and fixed machinery in which work takes place
Additionally, a more complex model can include things like different types/grades of capital and labor, as well as resources that increase the efficiency of other resources, like:
Mechanics: Increases the productivity of capital
Management: Increases the productivity of labor
Corporate Management: Increases the productivity of all production, across all locations
In economic models we tend to assume that production is constant returns to scale, that is, if you scale up all your inputs by a certain amount then you scale up your output by that same amount. If you only scale up some inputs, though, then you get diminishing returns: production never goes down, but it will go up by less and less. Here, capital and labor are really what's doing the work, is the one thing that by itself (think the self-employed farmer or craftsman) turns the resources into the good, but in bigger operations there can be a demand for management, and if top-level management is fixed in supply somehow, then you get an upper limit to how large a company can grow.
With Facilities, I imagine these coming in discrete units, so that as you "fill up" a factory it becomes less productive (the factory just doesn't have enough floor space to prevent inefficiency), but the factory never becomes unproductive. Thus, there is a certain point of congestion in which if you build a new factory and split your capital and labor between them, you are as well off as before. With that, you can have small numbers of factories on map (easy to look at, expand, understand), but the economy is always expanding or declining in a smooth way.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about the nature of markets (as in, literal markets and stores). As I see it, there is a time cost (obviously) to shopping, as either the producer has to go to the consumer, or the consumer has to go to the producer, or both meet each other somewhere, and that's a huge pain in the ass if you have a lot of different products to buy, but so much more convenient if everybody would just go to the same place to do their selling. Then, it may be that some people have some special advantage/skill at trade that they can do it more efficiently than the business can, so they can save enough money on it that they can buy low and sell high, and there you go, a marketplace.
Mechanically, that's all way too much to deal with, but maybe you have a thing where there is a certain amount of "capacity" in a province for the exchange of goods, and in the absence of markets it's really low, but Marketplaces expand it and generate some extra wealth somehow, maybe they raise the Pop's well-being/utility while getting some of their income. Transportation would be used to link these. I do like that Victoria III tries to do transportation, but it's real shitty.
A huge problem with transportation is that, if you don't have transportation, you can model higher quality goods as being equivalent to having more goods (well, leaving aside resource issues too), but if you do have transportation that would imply that high quality goods are bulkier, which is not real good. It's a problem I have no solution to.
Postal service should be a service - frankly, a huge service for this time period - and with the invention of the mail-order catalog it should also be able to provide a trickle of goods.
Mechanically, that's all way too much to deal with, but maybe you have a thing where there is a certain amount of "capacity" in a province for the exchange of goods, and in the absence of markets it's really low, but Marketplaces expand it and generate some extra wealth somehow, maybe they raise the Pop's well-being/utility while getting some of their income. Transportation would be used to link these. I do like that Victoria III tries to do transportation, but it's real shitty.
A huge problem with transportation is that, if you don't have transportation, you can model higher quality goods as being equivalent to having more goods (well, leaving aside resource issues too), but if you do have transportation that would imply that high quality goods are bulkier, which is not real good. It's a problem I have no solution to.
Postal service should be a service - frankly, a huge service for this time period - and with the invention of the mail-order catalog it should also be able to provide a trickle of goods.
Banking mostly comes down to people smoothing out lifetime earnings (preparation for retirement, saving for college, borrowing during emergencies, etc.) and borrowing for business expansion. What I'd say here is to maybe abstract it all and just assume that banking makes consumers able to buy more (like, include a restriction on how much income they can actually spend, and if a bank is present that raises the level while also costing them a little, so their spendable income at any moment has gone up but their total income has gone down) and raises their utility, and could do a similar thing with investment (like increasing pop promotion, increasing the size of the investable amount of rich income, etc.)
Trying to do anything with fiat currency is a big problem, and I think probably not worth it for this time period, but even when gold was dominant fractional reserve banking also existed so banks did still basically create money out of thin air.
Trying to do anything with fiat currency is a big problem, and I think probably not worth it for this time period, but even when gold was dominant fractional reserve banking also existed so banks did still basically create money out of thin air.
I think that maybe instead of having leisure hours be chosen by the worker, which is a shitty assumption of actual economic models that I don't like (when have you ever walked into a job interview and told them how much you wanted to work?), have jobs and locations have characteristics - work hours, danger, physical gruel, etc. - which determine a single score, and then the Pop just compares how high their utility is from one job versus another considering both the job itself and the income from it, and when migrating the Pop would consider its expectation of what kind of job it has and what sort of place its moving to, also a cost to migrate as well. (This was very relevant in the European immigration to America, wealthier people were the ones who could afford a ship, and in the colonial era it was the poor ones who were indentured servants, basically being a debt mechanism). Let's assume for simplicity that wages are competitive across workplaces, and the businesses set their workplace policies (work hours, safety standards, harassment of women, etc.) based on the assumption the workers will move to them, so when they simultaneously move you get internal reform. But, labor conflicts can also kick off where the workers do strikes/industrial sabotage to demand those changes, or government going in and regulating it themselves.
In this time period child labor and women in the workplace were relevant things, and I am glad Victoria III is representing that. I would say that the Pop could be thought of as just dedicating time to school and market work and whatever's left over is thought of as leisure, regardless of if it's actually chores or not, but advances in things like home appliances or purchasing servant services would make "home" time more pleasurable (higher utility). In the real world people did prioritize getting children out of the workplace and into school as soon as they could afford it. Women, on the other hand, were always workers, it's just that in the past working did take place at home. Having a housewife was mostly a middle-class thing. So basically, the Pops will commit their children and women to work if they can't afford to put them in school/home production.
In this time period child labor and women in the workplace were relevant things, and I am glad Victoria III is representing that. I would say that the Pop could be thought of as just dedicating time to school and market work and whatever's left over is thought of as leisure, regardless of if it's actually chores or not, but advances in things like home appliances or purchasing servant services would make "home" time more pleasurable (higher utility). In the real world people did prioritize getting children out of the workplace and into school as soon as they could afford it. Women, on the other hand, were always workers, it's just that in the past working did take place at home. Having a housewife was mostly a middle-class thing. So basically, the Pops will commit their children and women to work if they can't afford to put them in school/home production.
The Vicky III standard of living concept sounds like bullshit. I'd suggest that you have a, maybe hidden, utility score for a Pop, and then you can see their real income, and then their perceived level of satisfaction. Thing is, people's satisfaction depends entirely on their expectations of what the world owes them, based on historical experience, how they were brought up, how their peers are doing, etc. So a population could be really rich in the late game in absolute terms, but if there's wickedly bad inequality it's still going to want to go Communist, which is how it played out IRL.
I'd also be very interested to see Health portrayed as its own thing, wholly separate from the Pop. Really, you could have a general "Life Satisfaction" score for the Pop that includes its economic utility function, how it feels about the political situation, health, social life, etc., and then if Life Satisfaction is low the Pop fixates on the worst problem at the moment and throws a shitfit (revolutions, terrorism, riots, etc.) about it. Health should be going up with medical technologies, but moreso if the Pop can afford Medical Services and Herbal Medicines or Pharmaceuticals. On the other hand, Opium and Liquor and such should reduce Health and even Life Satisfaction overall (the Pop's still going to buy it, but it isn't happy about the world it's made for itself). Sanitation in cities should be a huge deal - like, building sewers should be as important as electrification. I think it'd be interesting if the game could portray (not that this is important) things like how American slaves' health was good before emancipation and bad afterwards (due to them having the choice of living unhealthy lifestyles/losing free medical care), dynamic movements for shit like Prohibition, and if managing public health crises like cholera outbreaks could happen in a dynamic way.
I'd also be very interested to see Health portrayed as its own thing, wholly separate from the Pop. Really, you could have a general "Life Satisfaction" score for the Pop that includes its economic utility function, how it feels about the political situation, health, social life, etc., and then if Life Satisfaction is low the Pop fixates on the worst problem at the moment and throws a shitfit (revolutions, terrorism, riots, etc.) about it. Health should be going up with medical technologies, but moreso if the Pop can afford Medical Services and Herbal Medicines or Pharmaceuticals. On the other hand, Opium and Liquor and such should reduce Health and even Life Satisfaction overall (the Pop's still going to buy it, but it isn't happy about the world it's made for itself). Sanitation in cities should be a huge deal - like, building sewers should be as important as electrification. I think it'd be interesting if the game could portray (not that this is important) things like how American slaves' health was good before emancipation and bad afterwards (due to them having the choice of living unhealthy lifestyles/losing free medical care), dynamic movements for shit like Prohibition, and if managing public health crises like cholera outbreaks could happen in a dynamic way.
Arts is something I've always felt like Paradox games really neglect, for how big it is in history. It's not like it isn't a strategic concern of states, either. I think it's real stupid how the Art Academy is what produces art in Vicky, as if all the art and music of hte world came out of universities and not just people doing their thing. This is the era when things like a 'music industry" came into existence, as well as stuff like advertising (so you get the emergence of things like commercial radio).
It's easier to model arts in a pre-Internet, pre-TV world. Some ideas on this are:
In news media in this time period, newspapers tended to be subsidized by parties; they were explicitly partisan and were often sold at a loss for the party. Media could probably be represented as having no cost to the consumer and being funded out of the upper class, establishing newspaper/radio companies that increase support for their ideology, but a Pop will consume more news from a source that's already aligned with them, so media polarizes a population more than it drags it in one direction. It would be fun if news interests could result in shit like yellow journalism and Spain/WW1 style Remember the Maine/babies on bayonets bullshit.
In the arts, folk art is basically just a baubles/home decorations good, while high art should be like a really expensive luxury good mainly or exclusively bought by middle/upper classes. There could also be a supply of antiquities. (How fun if you could form archaeological expeditions to find more antiquities!) Museums, private or state, could purchase Fine Art and Artifacts (I'd consider things like paleontology a source of artifacts). Would be really cool if paleontology and Egyptology, the race to find Troy, etc. were parts of the game in the same way finding the source of the Nile and polar exploration are. There ought to be some sort of limit on how much fine art you can produce, though, like a limit on what percentage of your population can be employed in its production and then buildings that raise that limit (the Art Academy, obviously, being one of them). Music should come in two forms, Musical Performances as a service and then (after the gramophone is invented) Recorded Music and Music Radio.
It'd be real great if there was a sort of competition for Prestige over arts, but arts also had political effects. The "type" of art could be like a production technique or just a good (Impressionist Art, Romantic Art, Modern Art, etc.), so if your Painters are assigned to Romanticism you get more liberalism and nationalism in your educated population, and if your Musicians are making jazz then you're going to get higher support for socialism, etc. Art styles themselves could have a Prestige score (is Romanticism still fashionable, or is Impressionism taking over now?), influenced by global events. Nations that corner the market on a prestigious art style should themselves get big Prestige bonuses, but being a prestigious society should also make your art style prestigious (if a nation does really well, people start copying it). And art is political, governments are interested in it (visual, music, literature) because of how it spreads certain ideas or values, like you see with many reactionaries and fascists' wars on subversive art and equivalently socialists' promotion of it.
Literature would be a straight-up good, you buy and sell books and they're accessible even to the lower class. I'm not real worried about quality since for every Charles Dickens you had a million penny dreadful authors, but having a lot of high-quality "Novelist" Pops should make it more likely to get Prestige-raising events about creating a great work of literature (could have names for different nations, like the US may see The Red Badge of Courage, for example).
Advertising would come in with late-game newspapers and radio, it would do like financial services by making the Pop happier (they're finding new products/think the products are better) and more willing to spend.
In my fantasy Uber-Victoria, you'd even have the music and clothes and UI aesthetic change over time, so by the end of the game you have big band-style soundtracks playing.
I think it's a real shame that Paradox never did something like this with EU4, where it fits perfectly with the Renaissance start. An art minigame would also be great for playing tall, like those real-life Italian city-states did.
It's easier to model arts in a pre-Internet, pre-TV world. Some ideas on this are:
In news media in this time period, newspapers tended to be subsidized by parties; they were explicitly partisan and were often sold at a loss for the party. Media could probably be represented as having no cost to the consumer and being funded out of the upper class, establishing newspaper/radio companies that increase support for their ideology, but a Pop will consume more news from a source that's already aligned with them, so media polarizes a population more than it drags it in one direction. It would be fun if news interests could result in shit like yellow journalism and Spain/WW1 style Remember the Maine/babies on bayonets bullshit.
In the arts, folk art is basically just a baubles/home decorations good, while high art should be like a really expensive luxury good mainly or exclusively bought by middle/upper classes. There could also be a supply of antiquities. (How fun if you could form archaeological expeditions to find more antiquities!) Museums, private or state, could purchase Fine Art and Artifacts (I'd consider things like paleontology a source of artifacts). Would be really cool if paleontology and Egyptology, the race to find Troy, etc. were parts of the game in the same way finding the source of the Nile and polar exploration are. There ought to be some sort of limit on how much fine art you can produce, though, like a limit on what percentage of your population can be employed in its production and then buildings that raise that limit (the Art Academy, obviously, being one of them). Music should come in two forms, Musical Performances as a service and then (after the gramophone is invented) Recorded Music and Music Radio.
It'd be real great if there was a sort of competition for Prestige over arts, but arts also had political effects. The "type" of art could be like a production technique or just a good (Impressionist Art, Romantic Art, Modern Art, etc.), so if your Painters are assigned to Romanticism you get more liberalism and nationalism in your educated population, and if your Musicians are making jazz then you're going to get higher support for socialism, etc. Art styles themselves could have a Prestige score (is Romanticism still fashionable, or is Impressionism taking over now?), influenced by global events. Nations that corner the market on a prestigious art style should themselves get big Prestige bonuses, but being a prestigious society should also make your art style prestigious (if a nation does really well, people start copying it). And art is political, governments are interested in it (visual, music, literature) because of how it spreads certain ideas or values, like you see with many reactionaries and fascists' wars on subversive art and equivalently socialists' promotion of it.
Literature would be a straight-up good, you buy and sell books and they're accessible even to the lower class. I'm not real worried about quality since for every Charles Dickens you had a million penny dreadful authors, but having a lot of high-quality "Novelist" Pops should make it more likely to get Prestige-raising events about creating a great work of literature (could have names for different nations, like the US may see The Red Badge of Courage, for example).
Advertising would come in with late-game newspapers and radio, it would do like financial services by making the Pop happier (they're finding new products/think the products are better) and more willing to spend.
In my fantasy Uber-Victoria, you'd even have the music and clothes and UI aesthetic change over time, so by the end of the game you have big band-style soundtracks playing.
I think it's a real shame that Paradox never did something like this with EU4, where it fits perfectly with the Renaissance start. An art minigame would also be great for playing tall, like those real-life Italian city-states did.
This is generally more important for EU4 (I've played with models of this for MEIOU and Taxes' New World), but some industries make more sense if you think of them as spread out over an area. Anybody involved in transportation of goods probably contributes to a pool of labor that covers an area much larger than just the province they house their family in. Fishermen and whalers range pretty dang far (Yankees from New England would go all the way to the Pacific) harvesting from the same global commons as everybody else. Frontiersmen, more relevant to EU4 than Victoria, hunted and trapped over long distances. Eastern American Indians did the same, having small core areas where they actually lived (built permanent villages, housed their women, grew crops) while hunting over vast unpopulated areas.
So, basically, certain industries SHOULD be able to draw labor from a radius of provinces around them instead of just one province and things like fishing and whaling would do well to have resource loads (if you think in terms of ecological S-curves and equilibrium, more fishermen would mean lower productivity by the fishermen) in certain seas.
I don't think we'd ever see a Paradox game built in this functionality, much less cover this era, but in a Cold War/modern game you'd want to have some ability to represent sea ownership for offshore oil drilling (workers' families live on the land, but the rigs are out at sea and potentially subject to attack/occupation at sea).
So, basically, certain industries SHOULD be able to draw labor from a radius of provinces around them instead of just one province and things like fishing and whaling would do well to have resource loads (if you think in terms of ecological S-curves and equilibrium, more fishermen would mean lower productivity by the fishermen) in certain seas.
I don't think we'd ever see a Paradox game built in this functionality, much less cover this era, but in a Cold War/modern game you'd want to have some ability to represent sea ownership for offshore oil drilling (workers' families live on the land, but the rigs are out at sea and potentially subject to attack/occupation at sea).
I don't really want to be an economist, I want to be a games designer or a historian.
Edit: Here's another little thing, the Construction system for Victoria III is baffling because it builds construction anywhere. Now, I know you'll never make a game that satisfies every autistic little detail of reality, but I was thinking about this with regards to the American railroad and the Chinese, where they didn't even stay. I think some jobs ought to have a feature where the worker does not have to "live" where they work. If you want to get real detailed (Railroads and Canals DLC for $20) then you could have Construction factories be on the move, like Hell on Wheels, so the Pops move where the work is, such as Utah or Panama. I think the Chinese in particular deserve some attention, I don't know if Chinese Exclusion is going to get any representation as journal events but it could have really changed demographics if they had been allowed to stay: imagine an American West that is as Chinese as the OTL West is Mexican.
Don't recall if this is currently represented in any way, but housing should be treated like a facility that produces housing (I mean, housing is the service you buy), which in turn can be self-owned or rented and self-built or constructed by others. Seeing some sort of economic difference between Pops being housed in log cabins, well-built farmhouses, tent colonies, shanties, tenements, etc. would be interesting, especially as it evolves over the course of a game.
If Victoria III were really well-designed it would be designed with modern day mods in mind.
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- Oct 21, 2018
thats already in the game i think. never played italy in sp...
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- May 5, 2022
As someone who needs too much ritalin for HOI 3, I feel depressed looking at HOI 4.
Bush King
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- Mar 21, 2022
Anyone interested in Hearts of Iron at all should just play Darkest Hour. 1/5th the price off sale, typically goes for $1.50, has the OoB like HoI3, has more tiles than HoI2, has a far better decision system than HoI4, has a much better alt-history timeline than HoI4, retains resources stockpiles, better industry, goes until 1964 with full techs as well, has far more and more useful techs and units, etc. It's basically a far more detailed and yet still more accessible version of HoI3. Minors are also realistically viable- they don't suddenly become a super power because of a few focuses like in HoI4, but you can still nuke Britain as Hungary in 1946 if you play your cards right.
Bobbobson
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Currently it's a decision separate from the focus tree you can take as Italy if you control all the required land. I would imagine that DLC will add some focuses allowing Italy to larp as Romans earlier as Roman Republic or something before they conquer all the lands and become Roman Empire.
In Royal Court, inheritance at early ages becomes almost a non-issue if you rush to a kingdom tier title early. Royal courts have an event where vassals come to pay you homage and give 50-75 renown for free. You get constant supply of renown and prestige you can use to disinherit useless heirs. While this way you get your dynasty legacies slower, I'd say that stability provided far offsets bonuses you loose from lack of legacies.
Other trick is to marry only older women who have only few years of fertility left in them. This way they won't pump out too many babies.
One of the early learning traits allows you to become celibate at any time.
If you have only two sons you can hold one duchy title where you don't have any lands. When you die, your second son will inherit this title but won't get any lands you hold.
One of the hunting events allows you to murder your heir although it's rng if you get it or not.
Finally if you have sadistic trait you can start murder plots against your children.
I think succession in CK3 is easier to manage than in CK2 since they give way more tools to deal with your children. I never liked going seniority inheritance since you had little control over who's your heir and you usually suffered short reign penalty because fuckers didn't last long. Initially when I started playing CK3 I could go from emperor of France to game over in 10 years because of partitions. At this point it only happens in a very early game if I'm unlucky and my ruler dies too soon.
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- Nov 22, 2020
God of Nothing
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- Aug 31, 2016
oh i know
it's just not a single one of my children had a good education trait, so it felt pointless and i really hate doing fuck all in CK
field rice mouse
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- Mar 18, 2022
Remember when EU3 and Vic2 only needs at most three expansion packs and they are pretty much stable after the final expansion (Divine wind and Heart of Darkness)?
I stopped playing EU4 for a year to find out I need to pay more than double the base game price to use what's supposed to be base game mechanics.
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God of Nothing
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- Aug 31, 2016
Yeah, I don't get that either. It's not like your main heir is a woman with a weak claim.
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- Apr 15, 2019
Has anyone ever done an Iceland play? I assume you start by raiding the British Isles and claiming from north to south, but I've never done it.