Recent reviews by Alice

Fun little goofy card selling game

What is balance in this game?

I started playing this game roughly 10 years ago at this point I have watched all the changes and controversy's of this game during the majority of it's lifespan, there is no such thing as a perfect game however there is such a thing as games that exploit their player base thinking they're stupid well recently Gaijin you've been proven wrong we are not stupid and we will not be pushed any further.

Aircraft in this game were the first thing I had tried although initially I wasn't as keen on aircraft as I have become over the years however throughout that time I have watched how certain aircraft have slowly been decreased in br's to dominate certain br ranges or create less variety first you will come across the XP-50, VL Pyörremyrsky and Wyvern spam alongside a couple other vehicles that don't really require much effort to use against the tech tree counterparts whilst some of those tech tree counterparts have remained ridiculous in repair cost just because they were at one point much more common such as the Spitfire Mk Vc/trop however when I play that br range now I do no see any of these planes.

Although that br range isn't to much of an issue compared to later down the line it's the start of the cancerous trend which follows to the jet era, we next come across the broken Su-11's costing barely anything, outperforms pretty much the majority of aircraft they can fight whilst also being in some cases 5x cheaper even with their own tree the MiG 9(l) is almost 5x more expensive to repair whilst being far less powerful.

Next we move towards the 8.0 and beyond where everything becomes so expensive I don't see how anyone these days can realistically afford to play anything that hasn't atleast got some good missile and flares as Gaijin has shafted that whole range so hard thanks to their need of introducing rank vi and vii premiums which consist of the majority of vehicles until you reach top tier where you usually meet teams of F-16's F-14's, MiG 23's and 29's and thats usually the majority of vehicles you will see.

If Gaijin wants variety why would they make jets like the Sabre's cost up to 18k+ in some cases engage against premium spamming jets with missiles such as all aspect Aim-9L's and the R-60M's this is a Korean war era jet with no missiles it should not be fighting these at all let alone being 3x more expensive whilst requiring actual skill to use effectively that a newer player grinding up the jet lines would not be able to deal with and as the awful algorithm this game has proved you can just have some veterans artificially inflate a br of the CL sabre's to prove a point that Gaijin clearly doesn't care about the quality of their game.

Let's also not mention at this point the majority of these high tier premiums are also better than their tech tree counterparts of the same br range cause that't totally no obvious from pretty much every nation especially with another blatantly pay to win vehicle the Su-39 coming next update.

Next up tanks and yet again Gaijin doesn't know how to balance vehicles, they've constantly changed the br's of vehicles making nations like the soviets and germans uncontested at certain br's. I remember when the Panzer IVH was 4.7 it is now 3.7, the Jagdpanzer IV's and it's 5.3 counterpart are also stupid to deal with for the average player I've played those 2 quite enough to know they do not require skill or effort to play with their armour making them bounce shells pretty easily whilst being able to one shot their enemies these are medium tank destroyers not heavy, the american's have suffered with their jumbos constantly being moved up even though nobody agreed to the jumbo 76 going to 6.3 yet there it sits now unable to realistically achieve much when you can just skip to the 6.7 american heavies and actually do something.

You go towards the higher end of the ground tree and you get vehicles like the Leopard 1 still sitting at 7.3 even though that thing should be 7.7, the Object 906 is 7.7 and should go up in br whilst niche vehicles like the shturm are double the repair cost of vehicles like the BMP-2 which can do almost everything the shturm can do but not be limited by map options for efficient use, I don't see how any ground vehicle should be almost 10k to repair especially not niche ones like that. alongside planes going up to above 20k in repair costs.

Lets also mention how unbalanced your light vehicles in this game are in a realistic scenario they should not have the same firepower as the mbt's or tanks of their br range which is true for the majority of the lower br ones however once you get to vehicles like the M41 you get more effective vehicles that can go through the majority of vehicles they face with heatfs although the M41 isn't the worst offender it is one of the earlier ones in the tree that does this, once you get down to the 105 armoured cars you get many vehicles that have a lot more capabilities than their mbt counterparts of the br range such as having thermals before their mbt counterparts this was most apparent in the Chinese tree when the PTL 02 used to be 7.7 with that.

Lastly we get to Gaijins lazy additions to tech trees to "improve them" no copy paste doesn't make for good content nor does it show Gaijin putting any effort into an update many examples come to especially in recent times with the Finish tree, F-16's (although it's quite hard not to do the F-16 one when almost nation in-game has operated an F-16), Israeli tree just being full of Magach's with a new flavour of Magach each update, the constant addition of a T series tank every update or 2 updates with Germany and Sweden receiving one recently and Sweden gaining a squadron vehicle T-80 to showcase that Gaijin really doesn't care about putting effort into their minor nations

Lets not forget about Gaijins ability to shaft certain trees such as the French tree, whilst they give the soviets and germans 3-5 vehicles each update nations like France get 1-3 on average max with exceptions being stuff like the introduction of a naval tree or a helicopter tree. Gaijin also has constantly shafted the British tree you want anything in that tree good luck getting it, their WW2 section is barely completed at all, there is none of their Scorpions, Scimitars, barely any of their armoured cars so variety was chucked out the window with their tree whilst Germany gets a new prototypes including the addition of the Puma also and the Soviets constantly get new toys to use, Even the American's although they're quite well in the air department they don't get the same love in their ground tree.

The Soviets have the most research tt vehicles in every category except bluewater navy which is currently held by the British and is only one of two areas in the game the Russians have less vehicles in which the other being premium helicopters which America has the most in.

Let's not even discuss how shafted the naval mode is nobody really plays it anyways the community for that side is so small and anybody wanting to go to that side of the game get's to enjoy ships with 50k repair costs down the line and also a very slow research speed to get down the tree's whilst the vehicles cost as much as their other tech tree counterparts such as rank vii tanks and rank viii air for the same price as a Rank V costal vessel or bluewater vessel, in the costal vessels case more than the bluewater case this makes so little sense than a rank v should cost as much as a rank viii jet whilst also being 3.3, 3.7, 4.0 etc.

Lastly Gaijin has constantly nerfed the rewards in this game to the point where they sometimes feel none existent despite the game have 2400 vehicles of which about 1600 of them are able to be researched and for casual players who may only play say a maximum of 10 hours a week they will be spending years just to get to top tier in one line whilst being forced to buy premium or a premium vehicle to make money.

Victoria 3 in it's current state although playable it is a mess of a game which I hope like other paradox games will be developed properly just like every other Paradox starting release. Although not as bad as HOI IV or Imperator Romes release it still has to be one of the worst out there for bad paradox releases.

Lets start with the biggest elephant in the room, the war system and oh boy is it such a mess of mechanics. The war system in this game doesn't really do anything you upgrade your army whenever you get the tech and weapons to do so then beat up enemies by letting the ai rng their way to victory. This system needs the biggest area of improvement as it's current state is just awful.

Next diplomacy I've played only 6 hours in the game so far as multiple different nations but I have seen no real reason to use diplomacy unless it's to go to war or unifying a colony like Australia by improving relations with the United Kingdom. When going to war no matter how much improved relations you have with another nation they may and half the time will join the enemy side of a war for no reason often either doing nothing or just allowing for a one sided game of numbers.

Another issue with the game is how they've reintroduced trade goods and needs. In Victoria 2 all of this was displayed on a single page on what your countries needs where and what the country was overproducing in, this system also had an automated and manual trade function (even if you could cripple the game with some of the manual trade options). In Victoria III if i wanted to check out the needs for a pop group I now need to wait and open several tabs to look up the goods instead of just a simple ledger or a pie chart to tell me what they need, this also goes for scrolling with trade goods before all goods could be seen together with no need to tediously scroll to look at certain goods and they also had sections to tell the person what type of good they were.

Moving back to the trade system in Vic 3 I have issues with understanding why they added it to requiring mana points of all things to trade with other nations whilst in other paradox games you either had limited trade partners to deal with like in Imperator Rome, automatic trade like in Victoria 2 and EU IV (EU IV also used a system of using merchants to increase trade). It just feels like a step back from previous paradox games.

One of the things Vic III has done right though is the map changes. With the United Kingdom not being in control of the whole empire manually is a great step up from Victoria II and keeps the British army much smaller than what it could achieve in VIC II from owning all of India. More nations over the globe does give more playable nations in the future once they sort out some of the issues the game currently has with diplomacy and military.

Another improvement is the industry although i'm not the biggest fan of it yet it has improved vastly over Vic II factories in many ways other than construction speeds where the majority of nations feel the same in playing because of the industry system especially in pretty much all minor nations starting with 5 regardless the status, size and regions on the map.

There is to many negative issues with the game as of yet but hopefully the game will improve and be developed to be a much better game in the future.

An interesting game with many ways to improve and add stuff to it if the developers continue with the intresting concept of blueprint builds which could be intresting to implement blueprint tanks in which you use the crafting area to make parts for the blueprint tank so you have one of a kind, Musuem I would rather prefer to have as many spots as tanks you can gain so you can have them all on display.
I wouldn’t mind the game going pre WW2 and more post WW2 aswell which would be fun to say excavate a Centurion or a T-54.
Overall the game has a few things it needs to patch up but still has a lot of potential even if I was a bit confused on were object in the game were but I found them easily after like 2/3 minutes of exploring.

Casual and Competitive mode in this game are pretty unbalanced especially Casual which seems to always have one crappy team vs one tryhard team, The only thing really making this game good at the moment is custom servers but even then that can't help that the game hasn't had a proper update in years.

Great fun game to play easy to handle and learn in a few hours and plety of scenarios and countries to play as. The only downside is the amount of DLC's however most are worth it and are the only way to play the new patchs usually.