Paradox got a ton of credit for including the Taiping Rebellion this time only for it to turn out they didn't script a single bit of flavor to make it happen in the right place or for the right reasons, literally any revolt will be Taipings which is why it constantly happens in Xinjiang. People pointed out it would be as simple as just requiring the Taipings be a Han nationalist revolt (it was) spawning in coastal provinces, perhaps dependent on a treaty port having been opened. They also didn't bother adding the Mormon or God Worshipper religions at all despite including Deseret and Taiping as playable "Protestant" states. (I'm sure there will be at some point a DLC which lets you play as Norse and sacrifice people at Blots, though.)
The reason the CSA spawns with half the North is because, shocker, even in 1860 most of the economy is agrarian. People asked about if it made sense to have landowners in general be Plantation Owners and they were ignored. (Makes one wonder, too, about them lumping all religious together as Devout instead of having sectarian interests.
) This is as simple a fix as just having separate "Planter" and "Landowner" classes, WHICH SHOULD HAVE DIFFERENT FUCKING IDEOLOGIES, but nope. (I don't know if Paradox even included an ownership method to represent non-subsistence family farms - the basic American family - in contrast to large landowners and pure subsistence.)
Also, I don't remember what it was I read, but apparently literally everything about the economic system is fucked up and doesn't work right.
This Interest Group shit was an awful idea, Victoria II was already perfectly adequate in how it just had class put a drift on Pops towards the appropriate ideology. They should have made ideologies be traits Pops could pick up and lose, perhaps on top of a basic fundamental worldview ideology (ie, Reactionary with a Confucian trait, Liberal with an Abolitionist trait, etc.)
By the way, I don't know if these people were always Victoria fans (I doubt it, I think a lot of outsiders latched onto Vicky and started preaching about what it should be), but I've figured out why the nu fans are so retarded.
They're fucking city builder gamers. They all compare it to Anno 1800 and go soyface over number-go-up.
I'm not a city builder gamer. I've considered getting Anno 1800, and I played Tropico back in the day (that series jumped the shark, I wanted a dictator simulator and it just got way too goofy), but it's not why I play a map game. I want history simulators that have enough structure to represent interesting historical and alt-historical scenarios and a good base of mechanics for filling out the rest dynamically.
These jackasses are just in it to play dolls with their little factories and railroads. And the "national gardening" metaphor doesn't even work all that well because minor government interventionism is the equivalent of gardening, but here you have to do literally everything. I don't know if you can even salvage the game, MEIOU and Taxes or Grey Eminence when it comes out may just be the better option at this point.
