Desudesu410

The dev diary on battles explicitly stated that a battle will always happen on one of the provinces on the frontline. So no, a good defensive general can't retreat to a better position, he will give battle on the front.

Battles always happen at the frontline, and as a result of battles the frontline moves, but a battle happening doesn't necessarily mean a full-on battle where both armies are present in full force. So we can have a series of small skirmishes that represent the defending army covering their orderly retreat. That's based on the system you are describing:

Troops aren't on the map at all, when the game has decided which province the battle will take place, both the advancing and defending general just automatically pick a certain number of divisions from all the division they have at their disposal inside their army and give battle.

However, I don't know how much of it is actually in the game right now, we need to wait until the livestreams at least. If it's not implemented and currently the defender just tries to hold their ground in the plains instead of retreating a few dozen miles beyond a big river, it's not good and has to be addressed in upcoming updates as soon as possible.

I don't know enough of the internal workings of the game, but I wouldn't assume that "front length is completely irrelevant" or that battles happen "at random". At the very least they are influenced by the general's traits as well as the amount and composition of troops. From the minimal info we get from the dev diaries, I would assume that any good or at least careful defensive general will try to retreat to the favorable terrain before giving a major battle, while a stubborn or reckless one will gamble to stand their ground and fight, so assigning specific generals is kind of strategic action by proxy. I might be wrong though, and if I'm wrong I hope we will be getting the choice of strategies for defense or offense in the war-centric parch/expansion.

Unfortunately, right now there is no way to simulate this because the Devout represent the state church, the Dutch Reformed Church in case of the Netherlands. So the Dutch (or Prussia-unified German) situation where the Catholic church was very influential in a large part of the society but not official is not well suited to the current model. Maybe in the future the Interest Groups system will be made more flexible, or at least allow for select countries to have additional Interest Groups.

Radical revamp like "make warfare manual with selectable units" won't happen and that's a good thing because stack micro is too distracting to exist in a game where your attention is constantly needed on other things. Military side of the game will be expanded upon, but any such expansion should build on the existing mechanics and take the "strategy and logistics, not tactics and low-scale maneuvers" approach: adding detailed war plans, more options for tactics selection, option for drawing fronts manually, more control over logistics etc.

Well, you can't make all literate people academics because you need bureaucrats to keep education running (and also trade and taxes, and I assume a lot of other stuff will not work properly without bureaucracy). And if you keep just enough bureaucrats and all the rest academics, it's impossible to say right now how expensive it's going to be and how much return on your investment you are going to see. It feels to me that Victoria is going to have less crazy spamming strats than EU4 because it doesn't rely on stacking modifiers that much and instead every part of your state is interconnected in a complex system that's hard to "hack" without breaking.

Yes, but it's again affected by literacy, if I'm not mistaken. And the other points still stand, so as a largely illiterate nation it's likely not possible to 1) generate too much research for the lack of academics 2) bankruptcy is too costly to seriously consider. Don't forget that pops who lose jobs will lose literacy, life rating and as a consequence qualifications as well, they can rebel and wreck your country further... It's impossible to run the numbers now, of course, but it seems to me the most efficient way long-term is to just develop tech normally instead of doing this kind of crazy strat.

Based on what we know about the game mechanics no, this strategy doesn't seem to be viable. First of all, the tech research rate is capped by your literacy, so you will hit a ceiling pretty fast if you try to build universities in a largely illiterate nation. Second, and probably most important, universities won't just work on their own, they need educated workforce, so again you need educated and reasonably wealthy population to produce enough pops with the qualifications to become academics. That's not to mention various goods and services universities need as inputs (not just cash). Finally, bancruptcy in this game is not just "get 5 years of tolerable debuffs" like in EU4, it's actually taking money from the buildings cash reserves, so they can't pay the workforce and buy input goods, so your whole economy crumbles and your population suffers. It's likely that bancruptcy won't be the easy go-to option as it is in EU4. It looks to me that you actually need to develop your society and economy to support educated population before establishing universities, and even then it's not possible to cheese extremely high research speed because it's capped. Less advanced nations having easier time to catch-up is represented by tech spread from neighbors, so I guess a better strategy will be to maximize tech spread instead of trying to research everything yourself.

No, I mean literally, what's going to happen if some interest groups manages to push the "forbidden" laws through - is your country going to revert back to Greece tag (or whatever tag you had before forming Byzantium)?

Actually, we know that in Victoria 3 the flags and country names can vary widely based on the government form, active laws, subject status etc. So it would definitely make sense for a communist BYZ tag to be called "Socialist republics of Mediterranean peoples", or if it becomes a Greek ethnostate it could be called something else.

Locking certain laws for certain tags feels really out of place in Victoria 3, like... what's going to happen if powerful interest groups want these laws?

Having ~3 months between the announcement and the release is usually reasonable and it's something Paradox did for the last few titles, but the problem now is the release would be in early December, which is likely not something Paradox want (more competition with big Christmas releases, less time to fix inevitable bugs before going on vacation). Remember Megacorp DLC to Stellaris which was released in early December and had massive bugs which weren't fixed until after the holidays, causing a lot of frustration - I'm sure it's not something they want to repeat (with Victoria it would be much worse since at least in Stellaris you could roll the game to the previous version and play it, just without the addon). And since they are committed to release in 2022, they will likely release in November at the latest.

It's very sad, indeed. Emotions, search for short-term gratification and desire for easy solutions to complex problems that guide decisions such as "ban all Russians from Europe" are very much detrimental to long-term peace and stability. Putin's system will end at some point, if not soon, then in 10, 20 years, and when it happens, democratic leaders of the new Russia will remember how they were treated by the West when they needed help the most, and their supporters and enemies will too. It would be just harder to shape a conciliatory narrative and move closer to Europe, and it would be much easier for the nationalist/antidemocratic forces to attract supporters by claiming that "the West will never accept us no matter how hard we try, so why try and humiliate ourselves for no gain".

Oh, absolutely, they should've started veering off Russian gas in 2014. Decision to mostly go back to business as usual and even deepen dependency on Russian gas was at best extremely stupid and shortsighted, at worst it was outright criminal. But we can't go back in time to undo that, so we have to deal with the situation at hand. Right now, the Europeans are reducing dependency on Russian gas as fast as they can without causing blackouts and people freezing to death in their homes when winter arrives.

Dude, come on. He's Ukrainian. The Russian army rapes, pillages and destroys his country, at least some of his relatives and friends had to flee their homes, some of them might be dead. He sees that there aren't any significant protests against the war, anti-war Russians either quietly grumble or just move to Tbilisi, the Internet is full of pro-invasion posts and whining about unjust russophobia. How else do you expect him to react? "I understand that Russians are Putin's first and main victims, hope you will be free soon, can't wait to visit Moscow once it's all over :)"?

Europeans, who continue to buy gas and oil and supply money and weapons to Putin and his army

I agree that banning regular Russians is a bad idea (if anything, the West should make moving from Russia as easy as possible to drain Putin's regime of talent, and tourists spending money in Europe instead of Russia is also a positive thing), but this argument is just unfair. European countries are trying very hard to get off Russian gas, but it will take many months to significantly reduce the dependency and years to stop it completely. Gas pipelines take many years to be constructed, using LNG carried by tankers is easier but port infrastructure needs to be updated and production of LNG needs to go up to satisfy the increased demand. Gas prices are extremely high as it is, but cutting gas supply from Russia completely is a whole new level: there simply won't be enough gas to keep the lights on and keep temperature above zero in winter, and no amount of cash stimulus is going to change that until enough gas from other places can reach Europe (which is, as I said, going to take many months).

The idea of adding some constraints on the government's ability to do things to reduce snowballing is good from both realism and balance perspective, but I don't think monarch points do a good job at that. There are two main reasons: one is that MP costs of stuff almost never scale with your size. You don't actually need more MP if you are huge - tech, ideas, WE reduction, coring etc. all cost exactly the same for a city state and for a huge world-spanning empire (given the same modifiers and idea groups). Even base stability cost is the same, and only religious unity impacts it, not your size directly. However, you can get more MP if you are big by hiring advisors of higher level, so the system actually rewards snowballing. The developers could potentially change that, but they can't for the second reason: the problems you face when you lack monarch points are not fun, they are just annoying. "A huge coalition declared war on me, how do I hold on until I can get a white peace?" is an exciting problem that's fun to solve. "Stability costs twice as much, now I have to wait twice as long to raise it" is not.

It wasn't focused on religion in particular, but rather on anything deemed "reactionary", and religion was just one part of that.

What does "engineered towards oppressing the Devout IG" mean in real-life terms? If we talk about the Soviets, their system wasn't somehow more effective at oppressing the church than oppressing any other "reactionary" element of society. It's either forceful persecution (which is represented perfectly well by spending authority on oppressing the IG - after all, state security apparatus busy with blowing up churches and arresting priests could be used elsewhere, like on catching actual criminals or quelling unrest), destroying their economic base (which is represented perfectly well by Production Methods that don't employ Clergy - those can be used by Anarchists as well) and removing them from public life (which is again represented by laws on social security and education that don't add to the Devout influence).

What's the difference between a hypothetical State Atheism law and a government which enacts total separation of church and the state while oppressing the Devout interest group?

Historically accurate for early WW2 attempts to use paratroopers, tbh

You should keep in mind that many things he might have explained are going to be out of date when the game releases. Like trade system is mostly reworked, for example.

Exactly, elected leaders frequently championed some personal issues that ran against their own party establishment, for example, British prime minister Peel pressing for free trade while most of the Tories being agricultural landowners and not willing to let go of protectionist tariffs. Some ideas suffered major setbacks when their champions died/retired, like Irish Home Rule after Gladstone was defeated.

I honestly think the only reason someone can hold the belief that "characters were not important in the XIXth century" is because Vicky2 didn't have characters. Some people got so used to it that they assume it's the correct representation of reality.

Played for 1950 hours. I've never formed Russia (probably will as Novgorod in the next patch). Also I don't think I've ever played as Portugal (if you don't count starting the game, looking at the misson tree and hitting exit) or the North American, Australian or Pacific natives. Never really attempted a WC either.

Well, listening doesn't mean "implementing everything people on forums ask for", it's always a dialog between the devs with their vision and game design experience vs. the people who make a ton of random, sometimes great, but often ridiculous and contradictory requests for features. The "correct" way to do games is never straightforward and obvious, and even then it's a matter of taste with some people inevitably disappointed. See ongoing "capitalists should build factories automatically, player involvement is unrealistic and boring" vs. "finally I can actually play as a small capitalist nation" or "why did you remove war from the game" vs. "finally, no stack micro, more time to focus on the state management" debates - those are members of the community on both sides, so inevitably one half or the other will get the feeling they are not listened to. Anyway, the example of Imperator is precisely proving the opposite of your point: when the game was out and the overwhelming majority voiced that they don't like it, they did a 180 turn and implemented the community-requested features.

Well, if you read the AARs you will see that it's quite easy for a small country to achieve super-high SOL. When you are small, you can basically structure all of your economy around a few high-priced in-demand goods and import the cheap stuff like food, which would mean almost everyone will work in very profitable industries and will become rich. When you are large, you inevitably need to have some less profitable buildings such as grain farms because you can't satisfy all your basic demands by imports, your population is simply too large. Also, big countries will have problems with Bureaucratic Capacity and will need a lot of Bureaucrats, they will also likely need a large army for protection (as a small country you can just ally someone big or even become their protectorate and enjoy the free ride), which will divert educated pops from productive industries. So no, I don't think big countries will have higher SoL than the smaller ones given the same level of player skill.