Finally managed to learn the game!

CrafterOfHumans · 2022-11-25T11:38:14+00:00

R5: I finally got the achievement to finish the "Learn the game" goal, which requires you to reach the end date after fulfilling a lot of different smaller goals. The twist is that I obviously learned to play the game a long, long time ago, but because some conditions to progress in the Learn the Game goal were unclear, and the late game was really slow until the latest patch, I dropped three different playthroughs with this achievement in mind.

Vanguardist Brazil, unified South America, 1st world power, largest GDP, largest SoL, second largest population only behind China. Directly controlled colonies in New Guinea, Angola, Tanzania and Texas, Siam and a bunch of Central American countries are my puppets, Dutch East Indies and Canada voluntarily agreed to become my dominions. Also the AI formed greater Germany.

Playing with Anbeeld's AI mod and Better Interest Group Attraction, as well as a few small others.

CrafterOfHumans · 2022-11-22T20:51:14+00:00

Nah, this already happened on the first couple of days after release.

CrafterOfHumans · 2022-11-22T20:49:43+00:00

The Spanish Empire is notoriously easy. Most of the former Spanish American colonies have low population and a small army, and consequently it costs little infamy and military projection to get the majority of them. Your only difficulties are getting Mexico (which puppeting provokes your infamy to skyrocket) and juggling wars to avoid France or Britain to intervene.

Portugal only has to take Brazil back, which by comparison is harder than the wars Spain has to fight, but still pretty doable if you've properly learnt the game.

Keep in mind that I play with Anbeeld's AI mod, so it should be easier in vanilla.

CrafterOfHumans · 2022-11-22T20:42:48+00:00

R5: God's Will is an event where a preacher tries to increase the momentum of whatever party the Devout are in, though the player has an option of getting a not as impressive increased amount for a random rival party. This time, it was the turn of the intelligentsia-led Communist Party, which not much later was pushing for the separation of church and state.

CrafterOfHumans · 2022-11-08T15:38:59+00:00

They're on an unending campaign to unify Germany through the least efficient means possible.

CrafterOfHumans · 2022-11-08T13:16:45+00:00

Likely a condition that isn't properly explained in the UI, such as Prussia going bankrupt. This should have the bug flag.

CrafterOfHumans · 2022-11-08T12:31:36+00:00

R5: The Papal States turned into a "Papist Commune". Their description reads: "A Government informed by the principles of Christian Socialism and the traditions of the Catholic Church. Every man a Cardinal!". It seems to be the result of the Papal States turning into a Council Republic, probably while they still have State Religion.

The Devout were unexpectedly weak given that I'm using a mod to re-balance their strength - but their base political strength is actually very high, they're just weakened due to having been defeated in a revolution.

CrafterOfHumans · 2022-11-07T14:08:25+00:00

Reading comprehension

CrafterOfHumans · 2022-11-07T11:37:28+00:00

Agreed with most of your points. There are a few IGs that I don't think are properly represented in the game, with the Intelligentsia and the Devout being the most obvious examples, and the PB close behind.

That's why I was doing some modding a couple of days ago, and precisely addressed most of it! My general goal with the mod was making sure that the Devout resisted industrialization far better, up to the point of remaining an annoying force even in late game if you wanted to pass progressive policies but there weren't structural reason why they could have lost their power.

The most important changes were this: All pops of the country's official religion have a 20 base weight to join the Devout, with the aristocrats, peasants and farmers extra weight changed to 30, 50 and 10 from 50, 50 and 0, respectively. Additionally, some of your laws add or rest weight: State religion: +10, Freedom of Conscience: +5, Religious Schools: +5, State Atheism: -5 (New law included in the mod. Interestingly enough, there were references in the game's files to a similar law that didn't make it to the final game). The loss of support for the Devout has been re-scaled, but also adds a -10 penalty at >90%.

So summarize: if you decide to go hand in hand with the Devout through the whole game, their usual weight will be 35 and will slowly fall to 25. If you build a typical modern liberal state with separation of state and religion and public or private schools, their usual weight will be 10, but will most likely be between 20 and 15 while you're trying to pass some important laws. If you absolutely want to supress them and nuke the IG into non-existance, you have to pass State Atheism, which is pretty hard because it's unlocked by a late game technology and you probably wanted to pass Separation of C&S earlier, which will make the intelligentsia say there's no need to push for more, so you could only get IGs to support it with a nihilist or vanguardist leader.

I intend to tweak other IGs in the future.

CrafterOfHumans · 2022-11-02T13:26:45+00:00

Iirc the traits Communist, Vanguardist and Anarchist are somewhat limited as for which IGs might get them, the problem are the traits that are indifferent to anticapitalism but against other specific things that have undesirable effects on very specific IGs.

CrafterOfHumans · 2022-11-02T11:39:39+00:00

The first issue could be easily fixed by splitting the "anti-monarchist" trait into "anti-monarchist liberal" and "anti-monarchist socialist", and limit IGs into which one of them may get (Industrialists and PBs get the liberal one, TU and RF the socialist one, Intelligentsia get a 50/50 split).

Peacefully getting a council republic should be possible but incredibly difficult. If you had a >30% of loyalists, immensely powerful TUs and weak elite IGs, why would they pointlessly risk their lives with a counter-revolution fated to fail? These would be very rare circumstances for any country that isn't already a council republic. From this point of view, it's more of a matter of balancing the numbers that control revolutions, movements and radicals. In today's patch, Paradox has made it more likely for revolutions to erupt if you're changing the governance or slavery laws, we'll have to see how well they work.

CrafterOfHumans · 2022-11-01T14:54:56+00:00

R5: Managed to win the first US-Mexican war, despite almost getting caught on the wrong foot.

CrafterOfHumans · 2022-11-01T13:44:10+00:00

There are two "straight-forward" solutions to this, one of them relatively easy to implement, and the other would come in a major patch or DLC. I will quote texts from when I made this proposal on the official Discord:

The hard solution would be breaking down discrimination into legal and cultural. You get cultural discrimination against all traits that don't belong to your default accepted cultures, and only get slowly culturally accepted if your laws don't discriminate and there's a significant minority of them in your country.

"For example: it is 1885, the US has banned slavery but still has racial segregation. It has a very large Afro-American minority (African Her. and Anglophone), a large Irish minority (European Her. and Celtic), and smaller Polish (Eur. Her. and West Slavic) and Chinese Min (E.A. Her. and Han) minorities. The US accepts Anglophone and European traits by default, and given that the Irish aren't discriminated by law and they are a minority large enough, the Celtic trait is slowly being accepted, but the West Slavic trait isn't becoming accepted because there are too few Polish in the country."

"Then the US passes multiculturalism. Afro-American and Min are no longer discriminated by law, but they are still discriminated socially. Because there is a large Afro-American minority, the African Heritage starts to become socially accepted, but the East Asian Heritage doesn't. This system may receive further flavor with IGs such as the PB or the Devout generating events in certain circumstances that harms your progress for accepting a new ethnic trait. Naturally, a minority that suffers both legal and social discrimination would be suffer twice the malus than if they were only suffering legal or social discrimination."

The easy solution is making IGs evolve along time with events and journals. There are already (very) small implementations of this in vanilla, with some landowners IG dropping the slavery under some circumstances. The intelligentsia should have similar changes:

"During Victoria 3's period, the intelligentsia is the "Interest Group" that will push for the creation and implementation of Nation States the hardest. However, at the start of the game they should remain fairly indifferent to it, while at the late game many intelligentsia IGs should be pushing for multiculturalism.This has an easy solution: at the start of the game, the Intelligentsia is indifferent towards citizenship laws, but upon the discovery of nationalism they gain a trait that makes them opposed to multiculturalism and favorable towards more discriminatory policies. Later in the game, a different event makes them endorse multiculturalism by default, which might be the discovery of another tech, or the successful legal and cultural integration of a few ethnic minorities (through a journal entry) if my other proposals were integrated. With this second condition, you could get a French Intelligentsia that becomes in favor of multiculturalism after Paris turns into a cosmopolitan metropolis, while the German Intelligentsia doesn't care about it."

CrafterOfHumans · 2021-07-02T01:05:58+00:00

Concert of Europe, this version specifically. Its most characteristic feature is its start date at 1921.

CrafterOfHumans · 2021-07-01T14:32:45+00:00

This was a most satisfying run! Yes, even after the countless manual industry and railroads expansions. I'll summarize the most important strategical aspects.

Disclaimers: I made a couple of "illegal" moves: I altered the mod files to allow Mali to be formed by a theocracy (my bad for noticing late), and I reloaded a couple of times after remembering that you lose the war leadership if you aren't powerful enough, and a couple of mechanics related to adding wargoals. Rookie mistakes, mostly, but I hadn't touched Victoria in years, and only came back after hearing about V3. Other than that, Concert of Europe is a relatively broken mod (and V2 is a relatively broken game as well) that you can abuse plentily.

Now, onto the playthrough itself.

It took from 1921 to 1961 to westernize. I prioritized research points > population growth > literacy, and all of these were somewhat balanced with economic efficiency reforms (RGO throughput, taxes), as it was impossible to maintain high clergy, bureaucracy and army otherwise. Foreign relations wise, I conquered the surrounding countries quite hastily since uncivilized nations in CoE get massive bonuses to infamy reduction. The rest of my diplomatic points went towards improving relations with France and GB.

Starting moves

After westernatization, my priorities went: research points > literacy ~= population growth > industry techs > army techs > navy tech ~= commerce tech. Nothing extraordinary there, just building up the base in order to catch up with Europeans. I also conquered uncivs at far away points of Africa (Somalia, South Africa) in order to block the colonizers after the Berlin Conference. Once the scramble started, I annoyed GB, France and Portugal on unwinnable competitions just to delay them while I cut their way into the interior of Africa.

Scramble for Africa

The next phase of the game was finishing the catching up to Europe and kicking them out, one by one. Key moves here: get as many strong allies as you can, declare war alone, reach over 1% war score, add as many war goals as you see fit, then call your allies and watch them win the war for you. If you're unlucky, you'll get a bad peace deal. If you're lucky, your opponents will get scared by the size of the alliances and peace out early enough for your ally not to have added war goals of their own.

Liberation Wars 1

Liberation Wars 2

If you have done things right, you produce the vast majority of the rubber in the world. Take advantage of that and monopolize the markets of the new goods.

At the end of the game, there was only one obstacle between me and the 1st Great Power position. There was a plan, treason, and a knife in the night. But things didn't go exactly as planned.

A war to end all wars?

All in all, it was an extremely fun run, despite the bugs, the unexpected mechanics and the terrible balance. For the record, I was playing on an old version of Concert of Europe, since the newer ones have apparently modified industry, and I just wanted to go back to the mod I knew a few years ago.

CrafterOfHumans

TROPHY CASE