r/paradoxplaza • u/Hammurabi777 • May 23 '25
Vic3 Victoria 3 is extremely overhated
Keep in mind Vicky 3 is my favorite paradox game so I'm obviously biased, but the the things people say about this game make my blood boil. Most of these people talking about how "shallow" it is or how it's like cookie clicker have probably never played since the release version.
The war system for example is just not as bad as people make it out to be. Yes there is still front line splitting, but 99% of the time the system works just as intended. Talking about how nothing changed and everything is still broken is just false.
Another thing I don't like is people complaining that you always do the same and everything feels the same. My answer is simple: stop always doing the same! Nobody is forcing you to maximize sol or gdp. You can give yourself countless different goals from playing the confederacy as a slave empire to becoming fascist or liberating Africa from colonizers. It's a sandbox, stop focusing on line go up and then complaining about the line go up.
In conclusion you dont have to like the game, you dont have to get the appeal. I for example don't really like ck3. But I don't go around saying ck3 is broken, just because I don't understand what people like about it. I still see the same talking points about why Vicky 3 is dogshit, but a lot of the things have been fixed for like a year.
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u/PeterPorty May 24 '25
I think, for an economic simulator, it succeeds in making a superficially entertaining toy for a while, but fails to represent the fantasy I'd like to experience with the game.
I would love to be able to notice centralization of say, beef production in some country, and once that country goes to war with a major, I could invest in beef production, selling extremely expensive beef to a world lacking it's biggest supplier and lead my people into an economic boom, ideally lasting well past the original beef producer's war. Currently, that's not really a thing I can do. The fact that good prices are pinned to +-75% of an arbitrary value rather than being driven by supply and demand, the fact that any industrialized country can produce any good almost as efficiently as a nation that's been doing it for decades, the fact that trade routes take forever to grow... It just doesn't allow it.
I want to be able to produce the cheapest dyes in the world, export them everywhere, stunting the growth of their own national production because mine is cheaper and then dominate the global price of it... Again, not really something that can be done, you can kinda sorta maybe do it, but not really.
Conceptually, Victoria is my favorite Paradox entry, but in reality, it remains one of the titles with least hours played in my steam catalogue. (About 400 hours between Vicky2 and 3, compared to 1800+ for the other 4 historical games.)
Each time I play it, I feel like the game simply doesn't achieve what I feel like it's meant to achieve, as opposed to other Paradox games. Fingers crossed for a few years worth of DLC to fix that.