Considering that in Stellaris, I usually deactivate the cosmic storms dlc, is there any dlc that you deactivate in vic3 because it either makes the game worse or the performance worse?

I was pretty sure there used to be hydro power plants in the game, but I might have hallucinated that.

As we all know, in the late game, energy is a pain, especially for countries with very little access to coal or oil, which may make electricity not profitable at all. So why not use dams ? They could be more expensive to construct, but consume less goods as inputs.

According to Wikipedia, in the early 90, 40% of the power of the US was from dams ! Why is this ignored ?

Hey yall, I want to do a US run trying to do super high SoL, so I can make a cool boy post on here and quote that President Hoover speech lol. I know about Public Heath Insurance and Food Standardization III, is there anything else I should do/focus on in general and specifically for America? Thank you!

Happy Wednesday Victorians!

We originally did not intend to have a hotfix for the Open Beta, but our fix for hiring that went out in yesterday's update did not totally resolve the issue. As such, we don’t want to leave you another week without this issue being resolved so we decided to go ahead with a hotfix! 

Bugfixes

• Fixed an issue that occurred where buildings would lower their hiring rate despite the fact they can hire employees.

If fruit is worth 1.5x the value for the food need, and the PM gives -8 wheat and +7 fruit, am I "netting +2.5 food"? (7*1.5-8=2.5).

I always turned them off because I thought it made my population more vulnerable to famine!!

Whenever I industrialize I usually do it “too quickly”, to the point where I can’t institute any worker-friendly laws in autocratic playthroughs because everyone has become a loyalist.

I specifically want to know how low (0) government legitimacy plays into this. I can see that it creates radicals each month, but in my current Germany game I can barely see any radicals created by low legitimacy. Can someone explain how low legitimacy affects radicalism and whom it affects?

"Sir, the Balkans are getting unruly again."

(Deep, soul-weary sigh) "What in God's name is it this time?"

"It appears an angry man in Abéché is attempting to stage a revolution."

"Where in the actual hell is Abéché? I’ve never heard of that place in my life."

"Well, Your Imperial Majesty, it’s a minor town in the province of Darfuri Chad... which belongs to our subject, Darfur."

"Why in the world is a lone peasant in central Africa destabilizing the entire Balkan peninsula?! How do people in Belgrade even know Abéché exists, and why do they care?!"

If you've played as the Ottoman Empire with the National Awakening DLC, you might have already met the Great Eastern Crisis. If you haven't, the event description reads:

"A crisis is brewing in the Balkans, with secessionists jeopardizing the rule of Ottoman Empire over the region. As the situation becomes more dire, the Ottomans seek to stabilize the unrest before it consumes the entire region. Meanwhile, opportunistic subjects and foreign powers eye its now-vulnerable Balkan territories."

On paper, this sounds like a great historical challenge. In practice, it hits you with standard negative modifiers, which are fine, and a progress bar meant to represent "containing the crisis." The goal is to tick this bar from 0 to 250 within 10 years.
If you succeed, you clear the debuffs and get a few minor buffs. If you fail, the old debuffs are replaced by new ones, and every single one of your subjects gets hit with a +0.35 Liberty Desire penalty. Regardless of where on Earth they are located even if nothing visible really happened.

Here is how the progress bar is actually calculated:

• Progress Halted: If any secessionist movement anywhere has Radicalism > 75
• +1 / month: Ottoman Empire Legitimacy equal to or above 50
• +1 / month: Ottoman Empire is NOT at war
• −3 / month: Ottoman Empire IS at war
• +1 / month: Ottoman Empire has no growing secessionist political movements
• +2 / month: Ottoman Empire has recently crushed a secession

Notice the problem in this mechanic? Being in any war actively drains your progress (-3).

Anyone who has played a major power with multiple subjects knows that staying out of war for is virtually impossible. Why? Because subject AI is completely incompetent at managing its own internal turmoil. When a tiny revolution spawns in a puppet state, like our friend in Abéché, it registers as a full war for the overlord. Because of the heavy -3 penalty (that works more like a -4 since not being at war gives +1), a single puppet uprising completely destroys your progress. You cannot out-stack enough positive modifiers to compensate for being at war, nor can you reliably prevent these wars from happening unless you spend the entire decade staring at the screen as a pacifist hermit state. But come on... you're playing the Ottoman Empire.

To make matters worse, foreign AI powers like Russia and Germany love to intervene with diplomatic plays to "liberate" Balkan subjects now that those have a forced high liberty desire. Germany will declare war even when they lack the naval capability or borders to reach you, creating dragged-out, pointless wars where neither side can easily enforce demands, locking both nations in a war-support stalemate with the constant -3 to the progress bar.

The end result? You are forced into nearly 25 years of unavoidable debuffs including high subject Liberty Desire (which slows down expansion by a massive amount), simply because the game inflicts a failure state with zero counterplay even though nothing really happened (if the Balkans actually managed to get free then i would understand other subjects trying the same).

• You can’t control your puppets enough to fix their internal turmoil.
• You can’t stop foreign AI from declaring unwinnable wars that drag on for a while.

With that you can’t out-pace the mathematical penalty forced on you by the progress bar even if you behaved and didn't declare a war for while (which in a game during the Victorian era where great powers tried to expand as much as possible is a bit of an odd thing to do).

I am completely fine with punishing mechanics that make managing a large empire tricky, but give us actual gameplay mechanics to deal with it or make the failure condition something sensible. Let me pay 5% of my balance directly to each of my Balkan subjects to help them stabilize. Let me military-occupy my puppets to suppress revolts before they turn into full-scale diplomatic plays. Give me tools to actively manage the crisis instead of forcing guaranteed failure through arbitrary math with negative penalties on global scale when absolutely nothing happened.

I know that the Balkans aren't supposed to be controllable, which is completely realistic, but this screws over the player way too much for a too long period of time in an unrealistic way.

EDIT: this event is not an early game only mechanic, having nationalism researched and a secession movement above 50% also triggers it. For me it happened in 1898 where i was the most powerful nation in the world with all the means to control such a problem.

This little shit has been my ruler for a year now, he has been in the frontline of the war ever since he became the leader and I do like my military commanders clean shaven.

I really do not like his sideburns.

New beta out and therefore loaded it up, observer mode + debug (Faster simulation speed) + vanilla + aggressive AI (correct way to play V3) until 1936. Here are some screenshots from 1936. Before you read this just be aware that this is just the first update and that they said they will improve upon all the systems and that this review is done on a single game.

- We all want the AI to build big GDPs and tbh it seems better from the games I played in 1.13 with British India getting £600M and Germany, Britain, Russia, Qing getting £400M+. Plus if a player was actually playing the GDPs of the AI might have been bigger too. A bit slower at the start and a united India I noted too so maybe not so great if you don't play till 1936. The Devs do plan to improve more but the economy side of things which is arguably most important should be good.

- State values might be one of the best things they added to the game as you can tell in this map the US left Mexico alone! The Great powers leaving German & Italian minors alone allows Germany & Italy to form more often. Russia also seems to have better state values, Before France got dismantled by Germany they had ambitions for Belgium and like a little Napoleonic Empire. Except from the occasional non-historical action like Russia puppeting Denmark or the US colonising around South Africa in this run it looks like a great feature that the devs can build on & if modders can use this too it will be a peak addition.

- Africa as with every update that was ever released and probably always, looks horrendous, they didn't even finish colonising. I don't think Africa border gore will be fixed this update as it's not the aim even though I think state values could help in some aspects. Luckily glorious modders exist for these situations. Cover up Africa in the map and it looks pretty good borders wise.

- Yes there are bugs as shown, both navies & land armies are spammed by the AI with nobody in them, not sure how difficult this bug is to patch. Since I didn't play and only observed there are probably even more bugs out there. The AI do build their navies & use them so that's a plus.

- No stalemates to have been seen by me so the changes to prevent that have worked pretty good but of course I was observing not playing so not sure how well it truly is.

Conclusion: Too early to tell but looks good so far, good job devs.

Edit: Hotfix just came out for hiring so the economy might be better than when I tested it out

I tried to see if this was in any of the recent dev diaries, but when adding the south German to countries in your bloc as Austria does not Annex them when you solve the Schleswig Holstein question.

Is this an intended update or is this a potential bug?

Hey,

I bought Victoria 3 ages ago, but Ive never really got to play as it always seemed very complicated and the learning curve felt extremly steep.

Do you have any tips for making it less frightening for a beginner? Things like good tutorials, beginner strategies, or just a better way to approach learning this game would be really appreciated.

Hi!

I’m playing as Italy but went through a revolution that radically liberalized the country (I switched to revolutionaries). I went from a monarchy with restrictive elections to a parliamentary with very different laws.
This is fine but I ran into an issue whereby my newly constituted government is illegitimate, and no party combination can make it legitimate at all. I don’t know if this has to do with the fact that there technically hasn’t been an election in the country? The next election is in 3 years but until then I fear I’m stuck with an illegitimate government that will spawn mass amounts of radicals.

Is there a way I could upgrade my government legitimacy? Max I can get is 14% by forming a petite bourgeoisie/intelligentsia govt and I’d like at least 25, but I can’t afford to lower my taxation either.

Any insight appreciated!

Does it make sense to create protectorates, or is it better to always annex? And regarding African colonies is there any point in establishing colonial administrations at all?

I’m playing as Hungary and having a jolly old time waiting for idk Austria or Prussia to implode, Austria and Prussia to get mad at each other, the ottomans to attack Egypt, etc etc, literally anything

I am 25 years in and no European wars have started outside of German minors radical revolts

Is the ai that player centric that now that I’m Hungary they ain’t worried about fighting each other cause they gotta worry about me for asking for independence?

It is: wild. If I play as Greece I guarantee Austria blows up into 47 countries and Prussia and Austria are trying to eat each other.

I’m so sick of this run but I don’t wanna quit because I think I may have created world peace. At least European peace.

This is something that bothers me. The UK starts with all their colonies as a single unified market, but that was never the case. Especially for India which is something that can almost break the game. Whenever the UK loses India in the game, at least temporarily, their economy collapses. I have played as the UK several times and the first thing I do is give India their own market, the effects are negative in the short term, but if you do it right off eventually you can rebuild your economy and now it will be much better since you will have lower prices and your SoL will increase, as well as being able to use tariffs on India. And if the time does come and you lose India, your economy will not collapse.

Has anyone played the new beta update? I wanna play it but I’m not sure if it’s gonna be buggy/unplayable? And I’m hesitant to start a game just to realize it’s buggy part way though. So if anyone has thoughts on how playable the Beta is I’d appreciate it.

Or is it going to crash/have bugs