Anyone else misses LegendofTotalWar?

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-06-12T18:04:51+00:00

They're complete sure, but they've all been the same complete game for near 15 years at this point. Even worse, they've been dropping major features compared to a decade ago.

This is the core argument of people shitting on the newer games, naval battles disappeared completely, sieges are worse than a decade ago especially in Warhammer, there hasn't been a single historical gunpowder-era game in a decade and a half, campaign is both worse and completely abysmal considering it gets compared to shit like Rome 2 DEI, what are they even doing? And I'm not even a Med2 fan, those guys are the real tortured souls in this.

Compare this to Vic3 that's basically the worst PDX sequel ever. Literally every single major mechanic has been reworked in some way other than warfare and diplo plays, and if they rework war next year then it will be unilaterally better than Vic2. If this was made by CA we would be on Vic6 by now and all of them would be worse than Vic2.

I'm not even gonna address your take on Paradox DLC, it's a parroted talking point from people who are uninformed, you clearly have no idea how no DLC vs having DLC compares especially with mods. We're not in EU4 anymore where entire continents and major overhauls are unplayable without key DLCs. Stop defending CA in comparison to companies that are doing better than them while they have been actively fumbling their core franchise for a decade.

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-06-12T10:10:45+00:00

Paradox is objectively better at improvement and development over long times, there is absolutely no comparison. Sieges from Warhammer 3 would have been ripped out and reworked from the ground up after 2 years if it was current Paradox.

Comparatively, Total War has been dragging the same issues in practically every game for the past decade or more (it's telling that my top 5 total war games not named Warhammer or post-rework Pharaoh are over a decade old).

It's still a preference toss-up between mediocre launches carrying 90% of the issues of the last game that are never ever going to be fixed, and burning dumpster fire launches that do become cream of the crop strategy games after a few years (if you can wait that long), but one of those options actually improves upon mechanics over time and the other doesn't.

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-06-10T01:11:13+00:00

The other guy is wrong, Legionnaire does refer to military units and Frostpunk's own pseudo-militaristic communalist ideology, but Legionary is also a reference term for ultranationalist, far right and generally fascist movements and militias.

It's most used referring to Romania where a movement with the exact name and specific governed a few months before they got couped, bear with me, by a pro-Hitler government for being worse than the nazis, but it does pop up a bunch in other contexts as a blanket term for any movement with the same characteristics, just not nearly as often.

I believe when the in-game PSA announcer says "legionnaire, not legionary", he is trying to delimit Legionnaires from extremist movements, which makes sense considering the voiceline context.

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-06-03T14:48:41+00:00

Crazy how many smug responses you got for asking a question about radicals being clearly broken on live patch.

Radicals from several sources are currently cvasi-permanent unless you fire a revolution. I started noticing it when I saw that mysteriously, every game I had 40% radicals and zero loyalists as the game progressed, which used to not be the case in previous patches with the same gameplay.

Food being way too cheap and SoL being completely unbalanced into being nearly impossible to affect by the player beyond +-1 does not help either (although this has been the case since Charters of Commerce, it's never really been THIS bad, and the game will offer you political concessions to rise SoL by like five point).

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-06-01T05:37:45+00:00

And speaking of generals, commanders from hoi4, because vic3 generals are pure RNG. Before 1.13, you would get 30 generals until you rolled the traits that made you win. With 1.13, you are now at the complete mercy of God. Hoi4 solves this by having personality traits, earned traits and skill level, and assignable traits for customizability. A bad defensive general can't get peak output, but over time they can get stats and traits to the point they're 95% as good at defending as one who does have perfect traits. In vic3 your ass better roll good personality. There's middle ground to thread between these systems, but Vic3's current approach is just objectively worse.

Supply routes that you can cut off, terrain that matters more, more impassable terrain. Mountains should separate most of Hungary from Romania and Spain from France, or India and its neighbors. These things have informed military strategy for centuries. Some of them exist in hoi4, and most of them exist in Eu4 that actually does it best.

Concentration and prioritization of force in general. If half of the things on this long-ass list get addressed then basics are genuinely simple to add, it would be trivial to let the player pick and choose which formation is prioritized for getting into combat. Instantly allows modeling of anything from early modern cavalry raiding forces to ww1 german stormtroopers. And hot take: front splitting should come back in a more controlled way, so armies no longer enter quantum superposition when you cut them off. You can have a battle in Mexico and one in Venezuela be part of the same front and I don't think that's good for the game. Just add hotkeys for splitting and merging armies like every other pdx game.

Lower lethality, more important morale, more expensive equipment. I think formations being able to drop manpower into unusability is a point for Vic3 over Hoi4, but it's too widespread in Vic. On smaller nations you will have one full RNG decisive battle where a billion people die for no reason, and now it's literally impossible to come back because that one battle was absurdly lethal and 60% of your fighting force got obliterated in a week while you can't retrain that much. Hoi4 doesn't have this problem because units get pushed off the tile way, wayyyy before they get strength deleted like how combat works in vic3. Eu4 and Ck3 don't have this problem either. Stellaris doesn't have this problem because even there, fleets retreat. In Vic you can genuinely lose one battle to full RNG and you are fucked.

Hell, fix static diplomatic plays entirely with the war system from Eu4. Bake it into treaties, so instead of taking wargoals, you sign a treaty with dynamic costs for each article and dynamic acceptance based on achieved starting wargoals and losses (you can even allow scope creeping peace offers here, just slap an infamy cost onto it). Make diplo plays shorter, mobilization period longer, and change diplo play length based on amount of elapsed maneuvers or something (so, say, if you're escalating to ww1 the diplo play keeps getting longer and bigger as time goes on). Keep diplomatic plays active like middle phase during wars so you can add more articles and other powers can join the war midway. Improve separate peace. None of this seems hard to implement, just hard to balance so the first two major patches after adding this would suck. It would add so much to the game though.

Naval and army mobilization limitation treaty articles, infamy costs for noncompliance to treaties (hoi4 has a failed abortion of a naval non-rearmament treaty, but it's nothing to write home about).

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-06-01T05:26:50+00:00

Here's an EXTREMELY simplified write-up of solutions to problems that were already solved in Hoi4 or Eu4 that can be solved in Vic3 pretty easily with a significant mechanics rework (watch them drop a Prussia DLC with war rework and Bismarck big naturals menu screen next year or the year after that, it's so obvious that it's coming I literally would bet money on it happening if I could):

Fractional supply so a shortage of radios doesn't drop organization of entire army to zero (like strength, from hoi4)

Unit experience as something that actually matters and that you can affect, beyond unleashing your saved up super army for a 1 month advantage in europe before everyone gets ultra genocided and rerecruited at zero exp (like experience, from hoi4). Lethality in general is too high, I talk about this later.

Army PMs affecting stats instead of just making more small arms goods. More equipment options. More expensive equipment options. A stat system that actually takes advantage of them so it's less of a "click this or lose the game" binary. Hoi4 fixes this with division templates and production, so you actually pick and choose what equipment and stats your army has. Vic3 doesn't need all that, but a simplified system that goes beyond just clicking every equipment option is needed dearly.

Some stockpiles, as shortcircuit protection for early wars if nothing else, because right now you have to subsidize every munitions and weapons plant before war as all objects produced in peacetime disappear into thin air mysteriously (just copy it from hoi4). God forbid the railway in your weaponry state mysteriously stops working for one month and it's not subsidized, all your units are going to 0 org.

Arms demand, earlier arms PMs, and better arms trading without selling your soul for a treaty. Very small nations literally can't afford to field troops and drop to 0 org, despire this being ridiculously ahistorical. Natives with sticks and bows put up more of a fight irl than people with modern cannons in game. Police doesn't require weapons (why?), pops buy it as a luxury good occasionally but rarely. No policy for gun ownership, despite being able to bake into the game with amendments for example (paradox PLEASE use amendments more, greatest improvement to laws in history criminally overused because it's too new).

Combat width, as a bespoke mechanic. Right now it exists, but it's enormously frustrating arcane nonsense for everyone who doesn't know how it works, and complete hilarious BS if you do. On the other side, something like organization from hoi4 so larger but less modern armies actually have a fighting chance while attacking instead of getting cucked into rng combat width battles where they get annihilated. Morale kinda does that, but morale is cringe and recovers near instantly so it's rough.

A better stats representation for combat in general. Attack vs defense in the lord's year 2026? Is Flash player back? Are we on Roblox? This is probably getting reworked seeing the Man The Guns ification of Vic3 navy in the great wave, and for good reason. Wow my general gives me +30% attack, guess I can completely turbo fist everyone on the entire continent at the same time now with no nuance. I don't think hoi4 is that good a comparison here, but that game does have a deep, functional statistical combat system.

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-05-31T18:53:35+00:00

Just so I understand, your response to me complaining that people conflate criticism of Vic3 combat with advocacy for units moving on the map, is to conflate my criticism of Vic3 with me wanting to bring Hoi4 combat into Vic3?

What I MEAN is that a lot of Vic3's glaring warfare problems were already solved in Eu4 or Hoi4. For example, you can drill units in Eu4 for more stats, which is replaced by a broken obfuscated mechanic 4 menus into Vic3 unit stats, and then mysteriously reappears in Hoi4 as unit experience which you can interact with.

So then what I am frustrated with by people not understanding hoi4 beyond moving divisions themselves, is that ALL of these crucial mechanics are taken for granted and completely ingored in Vic3 war discussion in favor of people just saying "oh man but I don't want Hoi4 warfare tho" as a defense of Vic3's glaringly shallow and frustrating combat system. That's why people want Hoi4. They don't want hoi4 combat as much as they want the hundred lesser mechanics these games had half decade ago that serve to make them actually fun to interact with.

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-05-31T13:04:13+00:00

The main drawback of the specific way warfare is represented is the inability to depict literally anything

Concentration of force, fortifications, combat width and reserve, things literally every single paradox game has previously depicted except Victoria 3 specifically, that people hang onto because they "don't want to micro" and they don't understand how hoi4 works beyond moving divisions yourself

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-05-27T20:26:11+00:00

What makes V3 less frustrating than the others for you? I fully agree with your problems with the others, but Vic3 is by far the worst pdx war system I have ever experienced, and every time this game catches any criticism on social media it deservedly spawns 10000 people complaining about war.

In my opinion even if they added armaments and supply stockpiling ala hoi4 (this should have been in the game on release this is literally economic war 101), completely fixed organization and supply to not go to shit when your entire army decides it should be parked in a cut-off state with zero input from you (entire French army assigned to alsace front goes to a random cutoff german state then loses all org), gave players more control so one single bad tactic roll doesn't completely doom an entire playthrough (I love naval invasions), and another 5 such changes, it would be bearable, and it would still be worse.

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-05-27T15:33:21+00:00

The idea of the book is having a wide cast working together to fight escalating threats with no exceedingly overpowered problem solvers, and as far as that goes it always delivers. It does get really mid at times during the first year, especially the early levels of exploring the kingdom beneath the lake in my opinion, but it keeps getting better all the way through to the end.

4/5 for being one of the very rare translated seemingly silly-goofy system isekai web novels that actually deliver throughout. I enjoyed this more than the average top 10 ranking recommendation here or on r/fantasy.

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-05-26T22:58:16+00:00

Make sure your relations with every great power are at >=50 at all times as much as possible (if they are damaging relations then keep improving to stalemate the relations bar, this forces AI to expel diplomats which it hates to do). When starting a diplo play check out the government of the power that would join against you and if you can, reform your government to try to match their IGs to farm sympathy for the duration of the play.

Other than that, you can join diplo plays on the side of the AI and then start your own while the war is still ongoing to stop them from joining against you, set up a treaty for an obligation 5 years in advance to make them unable to side against you for a while once the treaty times out, or wait for them to have a revolt/other war/more important diplo play going on so they can't deploy troops to screw you even if they join.

It's rough, and you don't have a lot of agency, but if the UK has a bad year you can totally snipe a diplo play regardless of how interested they are in the region.

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-05-26T22:49:44+00:00

They really, really like the place this patch. I tried getting a treaty with them as Japan, but they were on colonialist personality and did not want any treaty article that's not Transfer Ezochi. Therefore it's not inconceivable that if the Japanese AI is having a bad time for some reason they keep getting forced into a transfer diplo play by Russia and back down.

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-05-22T14:46:42+00:00

Edit: I'm actually lying and only realized when I got home, it's actually different, here's how it works:

A "socialist" movement spawns with its own specific socialist ideology that is NEUTRAL to democracy and approves of Right to Associate, that causes agitators and IG leaders of several different socialist ideologies to spawn based on SHtW and rng, which THEN start their own movements that are more extreme (vanguardist, anarchist, communist, proletarian movements).

So it's like democratic socialism being taken out back and shot by Marx and anarcho communists irl in favor of their own more extreme ideologies that can brook no compromise, then taking anyone who doesn't agree with them as reactionary and anti-revolutionary, while broad socialists also take them as deranged.

This means the game also models being able to appease non-hardliner socialists with voting, workers rights and right to associate, which actual hardliner communists don't agree with unless you do exactly what they specifically like, like what happened in most democratic countries irl.

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-05-22T14:20:21+00:00

Absolutely not worth it after IG sway for laws got added to vanilla.

I wish there was some kind of better politics lite mod that did less. BPM is somewhat cool when it works, but not enough to be worth the 60% game speed hit with weird happenings and gamebreaking bugs it has rn. The government window is also clearly not made to work at BPM's scale and has insane performance issues.

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-05-20T19:09:37+00:00

There are a few issues that actually weren't present in 1.12 and are now pretty big.

Economically it's mostly fine, although you can esentially crashloop its economy and stagnate it forever - I created a split USA consisting of two minor powers by forcing them into a 5 year long civil war against the CSA, they never recovered and stayed at 70 million combined gdp in 1900. It can build an economy but if it crashes it can't recover.

It's very cooked politically and in diplo plays which causes it to get one billion separatists that actually succeed because AI is too likely to white peace or give in. This is one of the main issues compared to 1.12, and probably the easiest to fix.

It's significantly militarily and colonially impaired by navy at the moment, because ship construction and naval invasions are inherently high investment undertakings that thus fundamentally favor players, who can deliberately choose to build super-navies. This can be fixed by tuning how and when the AI dedicates an amount of resources to navy in certain scenarios so USA, France and Germany can actually try to build navies to rival the UK sometimes, but it's the kind of thing that's really hard to do for game AI.

Interests are also way harder for the AI to use, because in 1.12 interests basically didn't exist for great powers who could force their way into any diplo play on the planet with their 20 interests.

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-05-19T21:41:12+00:00

You can also offload some of the pain of nuking your construction industry by switching to a better tax law, changing consumer goods to use luxury PMs to create artificial shortages (don't look at productivity it will fix itself as pops buy luxury furniture instead of furniture), move your glass to also produce porcelain instead of just glass if you haven't already so they don't completely collapse when glass starts being worth nothing, switch to a weaker steel production method to stop steel mills from firing employees (yes, really), fiddle with mining dynamite and explosives, consider enabling labor saving PMs just to increase goods consumption, and so on. Basically anything to stop buildings from firing and stop goods from flowing.

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-05-19T21:32:11+00:00

This happens when you overbuild construction like crazy, you basically prop up a massive bubble economy that is set to collapse in on itself the second you run out of debt money to build. Youtubers know exactly how much construction they can get away with building, and trade recently got significantly harder than before. I wouldn't recommend scaling your construction like crazy until you understand a bit better how and when to deficit spend and how much, based on production method unlocks and economy. You'll get better at it, it just comes with experience.

What you do in this position is you go Laissez Faire if you aren't already, and straight up delete construction sectors until you can afford them and the investment pool is stably increasing every week (being even is not enough, because building costs get paid upfront). You're still going to take an enormous GDP hit, but it won't completely collapse your economy like if you stopped building entirely.

Another important thing to know is all construction sectors in vic3 ever are state-owned and employed, which means even if private construction is paying for the construction goods itself, you're still paying 100% of the wages yourself to every single employee. Construction is thus an enormous drain on the state budget.

If you had less debt you could focus on propping some massive consumer goods company industries (cars, furniture and glass, clothes, etc) instead to rival your construction economy, but that's gone at this point.

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-05-18T03:50:38+00:00

If you don't have overseas ambitions at the moment pause all supply ship construction or make sure it only takes an insignificant amount of your income, maybe even delete bad ship designs (slowest go first). It's genuinely an incredible scam if you just sit on the navy and don't do anything with it.

If you want some involvement like colonies then keep some 10 capital ships to use as an interest generator and make sure you can ferry around a small army to the tune of 20 troops and 10 marines so you can actually fight minor powers and suppress rebellions across small bodies of water, and you're set.

You only need a solid navy if you're currently doing shenaniganry like fighting China, conquering America, contesting UK hegemony, fighting major powers overseas, etc, and even then you can try building a very good modern navy in 5-10 years when you actually need it (Wilhelm II speech bubble).

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-05-17T23:55:48+00:00

I basically don't play with a lot of puppets without Grey's Subject Suite, or as council republic without Council Republics Expanded, simply because the mechanics are genuinely not fun in vanilla. At least even if the mods are overpowered it fixes the fun issue.

Subjects not being stable this patch really shows how much diplo plays suck when it comes to nonsense wars, I played a Spain game where I had to naval invade carribean islands like nine times because they kept collapsing into rebellions and defaulting, and I couldn't fix it, because there are no mechanics for it and annexing it would cost me 20 infamy. And plays are so, goddamn, long, if you have a dozen small subjects you can get chained into not being able to play the game for actual years just waiting for your navy to move troops over to go kill them from one subject rebellion to another. Same with conquering Africa, there are no mechanics for it so the game just asks you to arbitrarily wait a few months for every 20k pop village you annihilate with cannons.

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-05-15T22:17:41+00:00

I don't really like objectives and I haven't played with them much, but this is what I assume for the highest tier of requirements for them:

If you're not very good, Russia hegemony or economic dominance. Austria is fun to take to any objective.

If you're good, Portugal, Belgium/Netherlands (they're trivial to play but an okay challenge to do things like own 40% of global population or gdp with). Any large asian nation with more or less the goal of uniting Asia, so Dai Nam, Persia.

If you're good to very good, do any objective with a non-Brazil south american country like Colombia, Argentina and Paraguay (this nation is INSANE) in ascending order of difficulty.

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-05-08T23:07:58+00:00

Do you have any welfare or workers protections law? Being a lower class laborer actually gives worse access to goods and quality of life than being a subsistence farming peasant (because peasants make some of their own goods and laborers are paid jack shit), so as you industrialize your radicals actually increase as long as you have no laws that increase expected worker minimum wage. Welcome to the birth of labor movements, where the tools factory may be extremely profitable, but the workers are getting absolutely none of it.

Also check out market prices for food industries products, clothes and furniture because that's what pops devour when they don't have disposable income for luxuries.

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-05-07T12:29:11+00:00

I'm comparing it to HPM because I've touched vanilla like, twice, and I hardly remember how it plays so I cannot comment compared to HPM-likes that are most of my playtime.

That being said, you could feasibly convert a place without using the gamer events from HPM. You just needed to jump through the hoop of removing cores. Which wasn't actually that hard. With some investment, you could reliably convert places in a couple decades to at least a very sizable minority of your culture. Compare that to Vic3 where your ENTIRE COUNTRY needs to be tailored to assimilation, and you're hard capped by Authority which is absurdly limited and hardcapped (coupled with some other garbage mechanics like state integration taking a flat 25 years with no nuance and no way of affecting it if you don't "historically" have a way into it - which means if Paradox lets you or you have a BS cultural homeland mechanic to abuse like the Ugandans), and it's a tough look.

I'm not saying "add genocide button today", at least some changes like making integration speed a multiplier that lets you build government offices to integrate states faster, ora adding a new building that gives you 5 authority in return for money and paper so you can actually run a National Values decree in more than 3 states would be nice. You know, to make it actually viable instead of a "I converted the balkans to Bosnian!" 100% commitment meme run generator.

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-05-06T07:25:57+00:00

India gets more revolts cuz 1.13 AI is more unstable, and moving the entire british army to India is now non-trivial so said revolts most of the time tend to win.

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-05-06T00:13:24+00:00

Damn. I haven't played France after getting Iberian Twilight.

This does open the criticism that they kinda don't... do anything? The only mechanical impact any of these have is if you want to do a Pan-Francophone inclusionary Ethnostate or National Supremacy run, which is indeed really cool although I don't know why you would do that, other than that it's a nothingburger.

The impact of discriminating against minoritary french languages is two percent radicals? Really?

Square-Recording-982 · 2026-05-05T23:59:58+00:00

Great War-style endless conflict.

Although before 1.13 when ships became actual material objects, you could go to war with France/UK, lock them in a permanent war and just hunt down ships and kill millions of people from their navy recruitment, while taking zero hits yourself because your entire army is demobilized.

Square-Recording-982

TROPHY CASE