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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   794 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 15, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I stood @ToaKraka up the other week on Victoria 3 mods.

While I don't have as many as him, this is what I've been playing with:

  1. Regional HQs are a shitty game mechanic. They absolutely hijack your investment pool, and they're a pain in the ass to remove (made better in 1.9.8) and impossible to remove from Vassals or if they have investments in a third party country. They're also poor game design as they are a "click this button every time if it's available" option, which isn't good game design (good game design is all about making interesting choices).

Thus, I changed AI weights so they never pick them, and I never pick them.

  1. late game performance is awful, because of pop fragmentation. I increased the defines for both assimilation and pop consolidation by a factor of 10x. I think a lot of the background stuff is hard-coded because it really didn't seem to do much. I have a late game save right now that's basically unplayable now (I also fucked up and conquered too much of the world, so multithread performance dropped), so I'm going to try 1000x and see if that helps, I don't think it will.

I did notice that my assimilation did increase dramatically for a while when I had a +25% assimilation buff, so I will test that out eventually (more on this later).

  1. infamy calculation is fucking stupid as it's based off population and not GDP (african states are so expensive it's so stupid). It also scales incredibly poorly in late game. My attempts to rebalance thus far have gone poorly, I can get it to a good place in early game or a good place in late game, but there isn't a good unified set of defines for both I've found yet. I think I could probably add more infamy reduction to later game tech, but my willingness to spend my free time balancing a paradox game for free was low.

  2. clicking "build power plant" a million times makes me want to kill myself. I modded power plants to have 4x output and 4x input. This makes them somewhat overpowered, I don't care, I now click 4x less.

  3. I increased the amount devastation recovers per state. The war goal system is AWFUL which causes AIs to get locked into wars no one can end for a while, which means if one is occupied that whole time it gets inadvertently genocided (population loss has 0 effect on war exhaustion, lmao, and it wouldn't matter if it did, LMAO). Making devastation recover faster mildly helps with this. I think they just fixed this somewhat in 1.9.8, but frankly the AI needs all the buffs it can get in this game.

  4. I changed the law enactment time from 180 days to 50 days. I think this may make the game easier? Although now movements/revolutions are still mad after the law they hate is passed, so I think it's okay. The law passing mechanism is fucking atrocious, and could easily waste YEARS of times bouncing around with "+10%"..."-10%"... etc. This makes it snappy. The challenge of passing a law is maneuvering your political structure into place so it's passable at all. Once you can pass it, it's just a matter of how many de-buffs you take along the way. I'd prefer to pay the cost and move on, not watch a random number generator slowly tick.

Side note, but the paradox communities' acceptance of "save scumming" as an acceptable part of the game, but console commands as "cheating" absolutely sends me. It's literally the same thing, except one is a horrible use of your time. I once (only once) spent 30-45 minutes micro-ing and reloading to pass a very low % law. It was probably the worst use of 30-45 minutes of my free time. I don't understand why people do this in a single player game.

Something I would like to do, is get better at event modding. I want to set up some AI only global events that would trigger in ~early mid game to kick the AI all off traditionalism/serfdom as those laws are crippling and AI sucks at government management.

I also am considering setting up a global event for like +50% assimilation as that seemed to be much more effective than my define tweaks.

I also would like to make a mod that gives the AI +10 goods production of every good in their capital. I think it'll help them bootstrap supply/demand cycles for new goods. I'm not sure how they're doing at electricity production, etc

Finally, I don't know if I can, but I really want to 1) make the AI better at upgrading units as it current SUCKS at doing this and 2) make the AI stop making 30 individual armies, as that provides 0 tactical benefits to the AI, and makes the game noticeably laggier.

EDIT: ONE MORE

migration in this game is in an AWFUL state right now. If you get a Chinese or Indian country in your market, they flood your country at absurd rates (although I do plan to do an India run where I take Canada/Australia and fill em up, for historical accuracy purposes lol).

And mass migrations are basically "human only" because you GDP/capita and SoL maxxxxx and then absorb like 80% of the mass migrations regardless of you're Brazil or Vietnam, which is so fucking stupid.

I need to figure out how to give the new world a massive buff to mass migration attraction.

Side note, but the paradox communities' acceptance of "save scumming" as an acceptable part of the game, but console commands as "cheating" absolutely sends me.

Depths of stupidity on brand for Paradox paypigs. Console permits you to tailor the experience to your liking, resolve balance issues, and save AI from itself mechanically, tactically and strategically. Imagine not using it.

Also, for anyone considering Vic 3

The game has improved significantly with 1.9, but still has some glaring issues. I think by 1.11 it'll be an un-ironically good game.

I recommend buying vanilla on sale, as access to Steam workshop is MANDATORY (seriously, mods make this game so much better). It's incredibly easy to CreamAPI the DLC for free once you own the base game.

You can also make do with manual mod management on non-steam game installation, just need that workshop/forums access. Good enough if it's just one or two big mods you want to run, a bit of a pain otherwise, of course.

But looking into it now, apparently CreamAPI account risk is negligible. Huh.

I have like 40 steam mods (happy to share list if anyone cares) so vic3 was an easy $50. I've also never paid for a Paradox game and put an ungodly amount of hours into Eu4/Vic2/Stellaris (less for this one) so it felt fair lol. Still never paying for DLC tho.

CreamAPI account risk is negligible. Huh.

I do worry about this, it seems like it would be easy for Steam to book and aligned with their incentives to do it (they profit from DLC being sold) but they don't seem to care and I love farming free DLC so it's a risk I'll take.

Plus my stream library is pretty small, I'd have made a burner if I paid for more games.

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