I probably spent somewhere between 100-200€ on EU4 back in the day over a couple of years. Still missing half the DLC. Still can’t play any African nation without all my troops and advisors looking like Prussians. Still don’t have access to some of the special mission trees and mechanics needed to do an interesting playthrough of many nations.
They apparently want another 212€ for me to get the full game, or pay a subscription of 8€/month.
Fuck them please pirate their games or don’t play them at all.
I usually only buy necessary DLCs and on discount, but I’ve always been a Paradox loyalist because that model ensures continued development for about a decade. Their big titles are the best simulators in their respective genres. Victoria 3 is Marxism: The Game and I want it to become as detailed as possible for as long as possible. Alternatively they’d have to release more frequent sequels which would fragment the modding communities and result in a string of increasingly mediocre games that still cost the same. I much prefer their model to Civilisation/Battlefield/sports games.
The problem with that is EU5 is out now and seems to do the exact same shit but with more detail (I played like an hour and it seems like there’s literally 2x the types of goods and inputs) so hahaha welp
I’m happy that HOI4 and Victoria 3 are separate games even if one starts the same year the other ends. Different eras have really different metagames. If they represented those as expansion packs it’d feel like their half-assed expansion packs. EU5’s setting is so different from CK3 or Victoria 3 that it was a day one purchase for me, and I expect that like their other games they’ll find its unique identity after a couple years of patches.
no i mean what’s the fucking point of Victoria 3 now when at a cursory glance EU5 has all of the same systems and more.
I think you’re looking at it wrong. If you’re the kind of person willing to learn a really intricate grand strategy game and be entertained by staring at a static map for hours, small variations in that map are significant. The same map in the 10th, 15th, 19th, and 20th century is different enough to be four really detailed separate games diverging in four different paths. Victoria 3 shipped as EU4 plus a few army mechanics from HOI4, now it’s a very different experience from both. That was a really rough launch like most Paradox games where most of the new systems didn’t mesh well together.
If EU5 is improving on current-patch Victoria 3 as its starting place, awesome. They’ve bypassed the underwhelming launch by learning from their most detailed game. Its setting is so inherently different from Victoria 3’s that I don’t see a content overlap even if there’s mechanical overlap, and the mechanical overlap is doing what already works well for the basic systems. The pops and trade systems in Victoria 3 are great and should be the standard for any kind of societal simulator. They’re still expanding in Victoria 3 with all the 19th and 20th century specific context. They’ll be utilised differently by pre-industrial countries that have totally different historical circumstances in EU5, changing with the patches to better reflect that era. I’ll still be playing Victoria 3 because a 19th century mod for EU5 won’t achieve it any more than Victoria 3’s 15th century mods achieve EU5.
Idk dawg i just opened it up and it’s a seemingly more detailed economic simulator right out of the gate (Vic3 doesn’t even have gold—> minting as a resource, plus inflation, etc) which is Vic3’s like entire point, but then on top of it it seems to have actual flavor and variation between countries (i think idk I just fucked around as the Mayans for a minute before going “oh everything is constrained by construction industry input, just like Victoria 3”)
That just doesn’t make Victoria 3 any less appealing to me. I’m really interested in the historical period that Victoria 3 depicts and how those specific conditions shape political economy. If HOI5 launched tomorrow and it was a WW1 simulator, even that wouldn’t diminish Victoria 3 for me because WW1 is only an event in that game and could be a 100gb world of base-superstructure feedback loops in itself.
When I say Victoria 3 is a Marxism simulator, it’s not just that it’s demonstrating Marxist theory. It’s the specific conditions Marx was living through and writing about. You can actually make socialism and it isn’t a quirky idealist primitive accumulation thing. If EU5 isn’t replicating the historical period then the economic simulator is just the Marxist ideas I want applied to another really interesting period. Mods provide whatever content I feel is lacking in Victoria 3 until it’s officially developed, and the good EU5 ideas will crosspollinate just like the good Victoria 3 ones did to EU5.
I’m playing it some more tonight and idk I just don’t know what to tell you, I think the granularity and scope of the simulation are what make it a “marxism simulator” because marxism is the idea that shit is based on and follows from material conditions. So here in EU5 we have the same sort of interactions with the economic system, you’re building resource extraction and processing in the same way as in Victoria but on a seemingly more detailed level. I saw a post on the reddit where someone turned Ceylon into like 40% laborers, 30% burghers, etc etc. How is that any different than the depeasanting “you’re building capitalism, then maybe socialism” gameplay loop of Vic 3?
You say you’re interested in the historical period and that’s cool like I get it but all that means is that a good EU5 mod set in the 19th century will blow vic3’s dick off just because it’s a much more detailed simulation. I saw some old reddit thread saying it doesn’t have global markets but like, neither did Vic3 for like 3 years
I like vic3 and it’s been the main game I’ve been playing for the last since it’s been out, so like, don’t get me wrong, I just feel like wow it’s still kinda dogshit after all this time, compared to what’s been put into this game
It doesn’t even have shit like, okay so I just hit an Age change, I get to choose from a set of paths with different advances? Wow, choices, flavor, holy shit
Even with mods like Morgenrote Vic3 still has like hardly any flavor whatsoever, every country ends up feeling the same in the end, it’s just a choice of starting resources and “who doesn’t like you and how much”
But it has!
No it had gold as a “you get magic money” there’s no physical supply chain of gold or silver required to mint at all with subsequent shortages impacting efficiency and there’s no such thing as inflation