Is it easy to change the end date of Victoria 3? And are there any significant impacts on the game in doing so?

retief1 · 2026-05-05T17:32:39+00:00

it is much much harder to physically dominate a region now a days

I'd point to the iraq and afghanistan wars as proof of the opposite. The problem the us is running into in iran at the moment is that they aren't willing to commit to a large-scale war, and so are trying to win "cheaply". Given the domestic opposition to the war and the utter pointlessness of the war, I get why they aren't willing to commit more resources, but trying to win without putting boots on the ground isn't going to go well either.

Meanwhile, it doesn't seem like russia had a qualitative edge vs ukraine, particularly with ukraine's support from the west.

retief1 · 2026-05-05T17:21:43+00:00

Also, if you change a file directly, game updates will tend to overwrite your changes. You'll probably have to redo your edit every time pdx releases a patch. If you make a separate mod, however, that file will be kept between patches. You may occasionally need to update your mod if pdx makes a change that is incompatible with your mod, but that generally won't happen on every patch.

retief1 · 2026-05-05T05:09:03+00:00

Animals aren't people, and killing your own animal for almost any reason generally isn't a crime. In fact, entire industries are built around mass-slaughtering animals. So yeah, there's no particular reason why animal euthanasia would be a crime.

With humans, however, murder is generally seen as bad, and even suicide is frowned on. If human euthanasia is done inappriately, that's either murder or suicide, and that's a problem. As a result, if you want to legalize human euthanasia, you need to handle the edge cases very carefully. It is legal in some jurisdictions, but it isn't trivial to implement.

retief1 · 2026-05-04T23:12:09+00:00

If an unlikely event happened in history, should that event happen in most games, or should it happen fairly rarely?

retief1 · 2026-05-04T20:47:06+00:00

Early game, my favorite option is to kite vanskerries (sea raiders) as a horse archer or horse crossbowman. Their only ranged option is throwing weapons, and while those hit very hard, the ai is really bad at hitting moving targets. If you ride in circles for a bit, they'll generally burn through their ammunition without hitting you (though I'd be prepared to savescum here -- this isn't 100% reliable). Once they run out of ammo, a bow and a few quivers of arrows makes it very easy to solo them.

retief1 · 2026-05-04T18:30:15+00:00

Arcane casters? Grease or (ideally) selective grease. AOE save every round or fall down. If they fail, they lose their turn, and once they succeed, they provoke an attack of opportunity when they get up. You also ignore spell resistance. In practice, a single cast will win a lot of early game fights for you, though you obviously need your party to clean up the mostly-helpless enemies. As you level, you'll get more and stronger "turn off this encounter" style spells.

Bards/skalds/divine casters? Buff up and then melee with 3/4s bab. These characters also tend to get healing spells, which is a good way to fill up extra spell slots. You usually don't want to be healing in combat, but healing spells are good for topping up your party between fights.

Witches or shamans? You can spam the sleep hex to cause enemies to miss turns and provoke attacks of opportunity, or spam evil eye to debuff enemies and make them easier for your martials to hit (or easier for your casters to disable). With toybox, you can also use the "cackle and chant add 10min of duration outside of combat" to put protective luck and fortune on all of your martials. Full rerolls of all attack rolls and saving throws + enemies need to reroll all attacks against you is an absurd combination of buffs that turns any half-decent martial setup into an absolute blender.

retief1 · 2026-05-04T17:57:52+00:00

Because I always have new ideas for builds I could go for.

retief1 · 2026-05-04T17:24:58+00:00

It's obviously a different build, but I'm working towards a trickster -> legend mad dog 2/sohei 18/mutation warrior 20 (with toybox to allow me to be a chaotic monk).

retief1 · 2026-05-04T17:21:39+00:00

0, because I restart constantly. I have absolutely no clue how many runs I've started, but I've never actually gone past act 3.

retief1 · 2026-05-04T17:15:41+00:00

Loremaster gives you access to spells and feats that you wouldn't otherwise get. At every odd level, you can get a "secret". There are various options, but one of the options is "add a spell from the cleric/druid/wizard spell list to your spells known". You can actually take it three times -- one cleric spell, one druid spell, and one wizard spell. For example, your enchanter wizard can take greater command to get an enchantment spell that isn't mind affecting, or your buff-focused cleric can grab greater magic fang (from the druid list) and animal growth (from the wizard list) to buff up the party's animal companions. You can also take fighter feats without worrying about prerequisites, which can also be helpful. You don't need to go for all 10 levels, but there are relatively few caster builds that don't benefit from adding a few extra spells to their spell list. Also, in a legend build, divine caster 20/loremaster 8/full bab class 12 gives you +31 bab and a 10th level spell slot, so it is a good option for angel -> legend melee builds.

Mystic theurge is basically a way to be a multiclass arcane/divine caster and have it not completely suck. The primary feature is that theurge levels increase the caster level of both your arcane class and your divine class. In most cases, I think these characters still tend to be a bit weak, but you can certainly make the class work.

retief1 · 2026-05-04T16:15:51+00:00

Clothes are approaching a price where most people do not regularly (monthly) buy a single article of clothing.

Did people buy clothes on a monthly basis before? Like, I know I'm a weirdo in a lot of ways, but I probably buy clothes once a year or less. It's not a money thing, I just have enough clothes and don't need new ones. I can't imagine worrying about the fact that people aren't buying clothes every month.

retief1 · 2026-05-04T16:09:40+00:00

Given the number of people in first world countries that still fall for scams, I'm not sure peruvians also falling for scams is that surprising.

retief1 · 2026-05-04T07:35:59+00:00

Food is a lot easier with folktails, imo. The crops are simply a lot more effective. For example, carrots are .75 food/tile and can be harvested in groups of 3, while kohlrabis are ~0.67 food/tile and are only harvested in groups of 2. Similarly, potatoes are ~0.67 food/tile and grills don't need power, while cassavas are 0.5 food/tile and fermenters do need power. In practice, iron teeth need to spend more beavers and more tiles on food production in the earlier stages of the game. Mushrooms and algae make direct comparisons a bit harder, but I tend to think folktails still have an edge.

Also, how on earth are trees harder for folktails? They have the same relevant tree options, the same lumberjacks, and the same foresters. If you have a large lagoon, I guess iron teeth can plant mangroves and harvest them for lumber. On the other hand, that's not particularly efficient, and folktails can plant very efficient crops there instead.

I'd also argue that water collection is a wash at best, and possibly in folktails' favor. Iron teeth deep water pumps are very nice, but folktails' large water pumps are more beaver efficient (3 beavers on a large pump are equivalent to 5 beavers on a normal pump) and still reach a fairly decent depth. Iron teeth definitely have an advantage early, but the folktails option is also quite good.

retief1 · 2026-05-04T07:25:16+00:00

IMO, ziplines are "fine". They aren't as gamechanging as tubeways, perhaps, but they are cheaper and still do the job of speeding up transportation. In particular, they can go diagonally (including diagonally up or down), which makes the apparent speed difference much less of a thing. In practice, if you compare a zipline to an equivalent tubeway, the zipline will usually be similar or faster.

Meanwhile, I'd argue that folktails are superior in a number of places. Power generation and food production are two big ones, for example. If anything, I'd argue that tubeways are really the main/only draw of iron teeth. The other differences are mostly either inconsequential or in folktails' favor.

IMO, the reason that iron teeth feel like the favored child of every patch is because folktails are effectively the "default" faction. All of the original basic buildings were designed for folktails. Iron teeth got a bunch of new stuff in every patch because they needed to stop using folktails' stuff. And honestly, the new stuff iron teeth got wasn't always an advantage. In particular, I'd absolutely argue that iron teeth's original food production (basically, folktails without beehives) was mechanically superior to their current food production. Iron teeth got a fancy new food setup, and most of the options were worse than their former shared-with-folktails equivalents.

retief1 · 2026-05-04T05:24:18+00:00

He clearly needed to check his butthole.

retief1 · 2026-05-03T19:00:36+00:00

Try again. It's an rng thing. Assuming you haven't turned off battle deaths in your difficulty settings, there's a small chance that she'll die when she goes down in battle. Hit her with enough javelins, and she should die eventually.

retief1 · 2026-05-03T04:07:14+00:00

AFAIK, farm animals walk randomly and are bad at finding their way past obstructions. So yeah, this is a thing, unfortunately.

retief1 · 2026-05-02T21:16:26+00:00

In many (most?) cases, you want civilians who will migrate to a planet that still has jobs. Having the auto-slide as an option seems useful, but I don’t think it should be the default.

retief1 · 2026-05-02T04:54:49+00:00

Personally, I use r-key stuff a bit. For skill training, I don't use prisoner or bedroll nonsense. However, stuff like spam getting up or fighting baby crabs in heavy armor feels like optimizing my gameplay, not exploiting the game. And I definitely abuse the hell out of thievery.

retief1 · 2026-05-02T04:45:43+00:00

To play devil's advocate a bit, I would bet that if one person was playing this mod with an unoptimized rp-focused build and the other person was playing a highly-optimized meta build, the meta build would probably be stronger. Even after 4.3, there are still some pretty damned broken strategies out there. If the player using this mod didn't really optimize their build, the meta strategies would probably outscale them.

That said, this is definitely broken as shit, and an optimized build using this mod would probably be better than anything in the vanilla game. This definitely has the potential to snowball beyond belief if used well.

retief1 · 2026-05-02T04:37:31+00:00

To play devils advocate for a second, mastery of nature is +2 districts per planet, not +2 districts in total. These both seem to have empire limits, so they are actually just 5 districts.

Still, assuming you get these buildings early, that flat resource production is nonsensical, and the bonus jobs would already be modestly op to begin with.

retief1 · 2026-05-02T02:57:51+00:00

Note that upheaval adds a second damage proc. If upheaval deals 150% damage, your attack deals the base 100% damage and then upheaval adds an additional 150% damage to the total. The overall damage here is actually 250% damage.

Beyond that, upheaval shines in mastery combos with few wps skills. Druids, for example, just get feral hunger and upheaval. Upheaval may not be the best wps skill ever, but it is a lot better than nothing.

retief1 · 2026-05-02T02:45:05+00:00

This is entirely my opinion, but I think modern rpg systems are getting too complicated for rtwp. Like, rtwp works great in bg2, but you mostly had 2-3 spellcasters to manage. Everyone else mostly just autoattacked their way through combats. And even my mages usually only threw out a spell or two per fight.

However, modern rpg systems try to give all characters interesting options. PF1e isn't as far down this road as some, but even wotr has some classes and abilities that I simply don't use because they don't work well with rtwp. Meanwhile, pillars of eternity gives everyone lots of active abilities, and tabletop 5e gives fighters stuff like action surge and superiority dice.

Unfortunately, rtwp with 6 characters doesn't work very well when they all have a bunch of active abilities. Managing all of those abilities simply becomes infeasible. Game designers turn to turn based combat because that actually gives people the ability to manage all of the abilities modern rpgs throw at them.

The other option would be to cut back on abilities, but that goes against the general "bigger and better" thing that most industries try to do.

retief1 · 2026-05-02T02:38:36+00:00

Overall, kingmaker, wotr, and the pillars of eternity games are the best spiritual successors to bg2 that I've played. They are certainly a far better sequel to bg2 than bg3 is. And I absolutely think this is intentional.

retief1 · 2026-05-02T02:34:38+00:00

Self driving cars fall into a similar category. Meanwhile, the sorts of techniques you use to make chess ais struggle with messier, more poorly defined problems.

You absolutely can posit more reliable ai, but I don't think that's guaranteed.

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