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So, Vicky 2 launched yesterday and astoundingly, Paradox appear to heave released a game without any obvious gamebreaking bugs. I've spent a while actively looking, and while there certainly are some bits that don't work quite right, Hearts of Iron 3 this is not. It is, to some degree at least, polished and actually ready for launch.

That's not to say that there aren't problems, of course. Chief amongst them, in my opinion, is the user interface. Paradox aren't exactly famed for being user friendly, and the first Victoria was the epitome of making things difficult to do. Vicky 2 has surpassed that benchmark, and in a big way. Wherever one screen was good enough in the first game, there are two in the sequel. It's like trying to navigate the fucking Minoan labyrinth, and I'm fairly sure that there's a minotaur in there somewhere that will leap out and squash me into a paste. My other major beef is the map display; it's really rather hard to make out individual provinces and, if you're not in the political map mode, entire nations. I spent ten minutes planning out how I was going to develop an area, only to find out that I'd been plotting to build factories on Bolivian territory, not Brazilian. Thicker, more visible national boundaries are required, methinks. People have complained about the combat system as well, but as far as I can gather, it's more or less the same as the one in the first game and it's adequate to the task, if admittedly not God's gift to grand strategy games.

The music isn't the awesome score of the first game, but it's not bad when considered on it's own merits, and the technology system is much improved. Gone is the incredibly frustrating random choice of techs to develop; now you can select anything you want from the list. It might have been semi-realistic, in that RL nations couldn't chose what they wanted to invent, but it was incredibly annoying when you wanted a certain option and said choice consistently failed to appear, especially when playing as an unciv.

It's also got a tutorial, and said tutorial is fairly comprehensive. It's nowhere near comprehensive enough, but it actually manages to explain most of the basics, which is something rather novel in a Paradox game. Full marks there.

Graphically, it actually looks fairly good. It's hardly the sort of game that lives or dies on it's graphics, but apart from the issue with borders being hard to see, it's not actively ugly. Some of the sprites are very good - I like the British ones, but I'm slightly biased.

Compared to HoI3, it's a masterpiece (not exactly hard, granted), and if the interface wasn't as impenetrable as a reinforced concrete bunker, I'd even say it was actually good. As it is, it's playable (thanks to the tutorial, although it's impossible not to fumble about like an idiot because it's still far too complex), which for a Paradox game on launch is something of an achievement.

Did they remember to label all the provinces in Russia and China this time? And did they add every kind of political party to every country so your 100% Socialist Arab nation doesn't keep electing the Reactionary Sheik Party because it's the only party on the ballot? Do the Free Soilers still win the presidential election of 1850?

I'm sorry, I'm an embittered ex-Paradox fanboy and I admit that freely.

The UI really is appalling. Lots of tiny text with tiny buttons and screen area devoted to useless things crammed in so tight they're tiny. Bluwolf and I were talking about this the other day, and the whole approach to UI appears to be wrong and focused more on information overload than decisionmaking or clarity.

I do often think Paradox caters to the "yay micro!" crowd a little much.

But then, they apparently get the biggest micro-whores on their forum as beta testers.

"Our beta testers didn't think auto-sliders were needed in HoI3."

Really? Well fuck them! I bet they're the damn tweakers who are all "lol vanilla infantry = best unit eva!" and such. The true Spreadsheets of Iron crowd.

Seeing who has the Vic2 Beta badge on the forums, I suspect the same thing is at play here as well.

I played the demo, was not particularly impressed. While the map at least looks like it's on planet Earth this time, it's still ugly as sin: terrain decals are visible in other map modes, making it impossible to discern province borders. The country colors are also so faded that they're practically indiscernable.

As already mentioned, the UI is god-awful. The trade screen is an incomprehensible mass of old Vicky1 graphics that they apparently didn't bother to fix up for better resolutions and it won't tell you basic information like what you're producing, where, and in what quantities (oh, but it tells you the top 5 producers of each product in the world! Gotta know that!). Basic information in other areas is absent too. Forget about being told how long it takes to move armies around, and forget about actually being told when your armies reach their destinations. Fortunately, the trading AI is actually reliable, at least so far as imports go, although I'm pretty sure it doesn't know how to stockpile anything. Economics is almost entirely automated: POPs convert on their own, so they may as well not exist. Consequently, you have to spend the first year or so of the game with decimated budgets, because your treasury's going to crater until the world market gets its act together.

The game runs much better than I remember HoI3's demo running, but there's still plenty of pretty obvious bugs around. You capture provinces at the same rate regardless of how many troops you have there, and a lot of people on the Paradox forum had been complaining about rebels completely overruning AI countries. Quite a few events have the text "NULL_STATE" in place of province names, too. Colonization appears to be pretty stupid; just pick a territory you want, select the colonization "national focus," and then dump half your army in it and watch that progress bar take off. By contrast, building factories, railroads, and doing research takes way too long (4 years for "Romanticism" as a great power? Really?)

You can also forget about the game following anything resembling history (Robert E. Lee rallying Confederate troops in the face of advancing Brits is the main-menu screen). In the demo, Mexico was consistently fielding armies of 50,000 in its war against Texas. Wars between great powers tend to happen at the drop of a hat (Prussia vs. Austria in my game, on top of a Dutch reannexation of Belgium). I lost track of how many people talk about the South seceding by 1850. Honestly, I think this "historical sandbox" is just a cop-out for their always-crummy AI. Combat's still the same bludgeoning matches that drag on for weeks/months, except now it takes like a week before you can order retreats.

I wouldn't buy it, and I liked the original game.

Damn now I feel like grabbing the demo for terrible amusement.

TC Pilot wrote:You can also forget about the game following anything resembling history (Robert E. Lee rallying Confederate troops in the face of advancing Brits is the main-menu screen).

Wait what? This I must see....

The demo is really poorly advised; the limitations of the demo kill all the strengths of the game but it still shows off the stupid AI, the awful UI, and the other flaws. It's worth it for a laugh, though.

MKSheppard wrote:Wait what? This I must see....

Either download the demo or just do a Google search for "Victoria 2." It's not the exact same image, but there's old box art (now it's Bismarck of all people) of Lee vs. Brits. A couple other concept art-turned-loading graphics convey the same sort of alt-history feel: some Russian sailor hoisting a commie flag up a battered dreadnought, British colonial troops shooting at covered wagons.

Stark wrote:The demo is really poorly advised; the limitations of the demo kill all the strengths of the game but it still shows off the stupid AI, the awful UI, and the other flaws. It's worth it for a laugh, though.

I think it's their way of trying to convince people that are sick of buying broken games that it's ok to spend money on this. On the other hand, it gives the nutjobs who preordered, of all things, the chance to validate their decision. It's really stunning to read how positive most of the comments are.

So far as I can tell, Paradox has turned into a company developing niche games for Paradox fans.

I like the time period for this kind of strategy game, but i'm not in the mood to teach myself one of Paradox's unbelievably bad UI's again. As it is i'm already pouring enough time teaching myself DCS: Black Shark because the game has no built in training system at all and the down loadable video tutorials are almost useless.

Oops sim gamers make games for themselves and then wonder why no one buys their games.

I've got a buddy who played through it, ran a full game as Japan. There are serious bugs-he had Russia and Mexico completely overrun with rebels, owning every province, and they never founded new governments. Because their provinces were held by rebels, they never actually produced any resources, causing a global shortage on the world market. As a result, Britain, given she was #1 in prestige, was the only country actually able to acquire enough resources to power her industry. This including his own domestic Japanese iron production, which didn't go into Japanese factories but rather British ones despite all he could do. Coupled with this was the United States automatically borrowing every cent it could from his national bank, preventing his capitalists from acquiring loans to expand industry.

Needless to say, the game has bugs. I'll pick it up three or four patches in, as I always do. On the other hand, after three years and three expansion packs, EU3 is now a virtual masterpiece. HTTT added all sorts of improvements and fixes that should've shipped in the original game.

Haha, so, I've succeeded in finding a couple of other major bugs (or, alternatively, terrible design decisions since two of them are apparently WAD).

First, minimum wage will collapse your economy at indeterminate levels. Once it's enacted, even factories that are turning a massive profit will lay off all their workers and close once they reach full employment. This one is definitely a bug, since it apparently doesn't happen in the demo, only 1.1.

The other two are the fact that that at game start, and until a major producer researches Cheap Iron, there's not enough iron in the entire game to meet demand. This could be WAD, since iron demand was skyrocketing at this point, but the complete lack of growth of supply for decades is fucking annoying.

Last, but by no means least, craftsmen. They've got the highest life needs in the game, in excess of even capitalists. It's more or less impossible to keep them promoted, because it's very difficult for them to afford 500 tea and 200 grain, amongst other madness. This has been explicitly confirmed as WAD by Paradox, which merely indicates their level of madness. It's the reason that the AI often completely fails to industrialise, and it's bloody annoying. Fortunately, it's easy enough to fiddle with, and even reducing the values by 90% doesn't seem to imbalance the game. I guess it might be terrible if they're balanced for the late game, but on the other hand, most of the game is earlier than that, sooo...

They've just announced Crusader Kings 2, so I'm guessing patches/the-inevitable-expansion for this will be slower than usual to release.

Of course, they're Paradox. They want to make the game but hate having to actually clean it up or beta test it. So they figure they'll just use the first buyers as beta testers, and maybe leave a handful team behind to occasionally fix break the game again.

TC Pilot wrote: They've just announced Crusader Kings 2, so I'm guessing patches/the-inevitable-expansion for this will be slower than usual to release.

I wonder if I should do for CK2 what I did for CK1: buy it a year and a half after it was released.

That's pretty smart; it'd be really smart if you just stopped gving them money altogether. The Vic2 demo is astounding - anyone who pays full retail for that game is extremely strange.

Akhlut wrote:I wonder if I should do for CK2 what I did for CK1: buy it a year and a half after it was released.

I wouldn't know. The only Paradox game I've bought on launch is Victoria (which was so bad at launch I've never done it again), and at that point, the only other PI game I owned was Hearts of Iron 1 (which apparently freezes at December 8, 1941 on the release version; how do you miss that in testing?), which had already been out for years (and was before the era of expansion packs).

Of course, you'll also have to wait for the half dozen expansion packs they'll release to put in things like "diplomacy" or "AI."

Tried the demo - too much micromanagement for me (especially the diplomacy and SOI).

Like the Graphics though.


EU3 with all three expansions is a bloody good game - like many people I dont touch PI games at launch.

So.... how the fuck do you accompilish anything in this game? I started as Prussia, and fiddled with everything I could, but ten years into the game I am falling behind in the industry score (even though I have build at least one factory in every state, I just can't get enough craftsmen) and despite having a massive stockpile of money and military spending set to 100% I can only build the 55 brigades I already have. Reactionary rebells are growing stronger and there seems to be nothing I can do about that. Oh and even though I have a numerical advantage, Austria allways wins our brother-war.
People said that its the first Paradox game with a good tutorial, but the tutorial doesn't prepare you for the game. I can't even begin to know what to do.

So...I think I will change the title to "Broken on launch". I mean, this is the age of mass industrialization. So how the heck do you forget to actually betatest whether mass industrialization actually works?

Its widely acknowledged that the capitalist AI is broken in game and even if you build factories youself as noted above craftsmen are too scarce.

Also in an AAR and barely industralized Japan just conquered the whole of China in a couple of years.


Two years might be enough time for this game to become playable though,,,,,,

TC27 wrote:Its widely acknowledged that the capitalist AI is broken in game and even if you build factories youself as noted above craftsmen are too scarce.

It's about 1890 in socialist America, and I have a completely different problem; I have hundreds of thousands of unemployed craftsmen who refuse to migrate to places where there are actually jobs because migration is broken.

The craftsmen shortage is, as Psychic_Sandwich mentioned earlier, caused by Paradox giving the craftsmen pops insane goods needs that they can't possibly meet, including enough steel to build factories in their own homes. Anytime anyone becomes a craftsman, he spends all his savings trying to fill his quota, fails, and then devolves into something else so he can eat. You can fix this by changing the pop file to something sane, but then you just make the late game demand collapse even worse. See, once you actually make being a factory worker survivable, industrialization builds nice and normally till about 1900, when supply eclipses demand and prices collapse, potentially throwing everyone out of work to try to restore equilibrium. You can then either let the free market work and go broke or you can spend all your money trying to keep your factories running with subsidies and go broke anyway. I suppose you can edit the pop files every ten years to increase needs and demand, but there should be a gradual demand increase as the game progresses to keep this from happening.

Also, rolling revolutions start in about 1870 and can only be pruned back with reforms that you can only enact by raising militancy so that your senate will actually vote for them. Eventually, though, you'll run out of reforms, so I'm interested in seeing if that happens before in 1936. Even if that problem is avoided, eventually the reforms just replace Jacobin and Liberal rebel hordes with Reactionary hordes.

Oh, and the reforms decrease pop needs, making the demand crash worse.

Eventually, this game will be patched, expansioned and modded (V.I.P. 2) to goodness, but that's a while from now.

I bought HoI1 and enjoyed it, bought Victoria and hated it (I found it completely incomprehensible), bought HoI2 and hated it (because it sucked compared to HOI1).

Never bought another.

Vaporous wrote:See, once you actually make being a factory worker survivable, industrialization builds nice and normally till about 1900, when supply eclipses demand and prices collapse, potentially throwing everyone out of work to try to restore equilibrium. You can then either let the free market work and go broke or you can spend all your money trying to keep your factories running with subsidies and go broke anyway. I suppose you can edit the pop files every ten years to increase needs and demand, but there should be a gradual demand increase as the game progresses to keep this from happening.

I imagine you could make some custom events and just set them to fire when you hit certain technologies or dates, though it's ridiculous that one would even need to do that. Though part of me can't help but comment that fears of overproduction were actually historically appropriate for the era.

On that note, does anyone know what Paradox's beta testers actually do, if not find such hugely obvious game-ruining problems? Or are the developers just completely blind?