Victoria 3: The Great Wave - Expansion DLC

I'm a huge Victoria 3 fan, but I can't recommend this DLC. Despite all the patches, it's still full of bugs. Naval warfare is now far more tedious than it used to be, with a ridiculous amount of micromanagement. It also feels completely out of place compared to the rest of the game's warfare mechanics. Army supply is a nightmare to deal with. €30 for this is just way too much.

On release, the update and DLC were a dumpster fire. It's fixed now and it's overall great. The lesson that Paradox doesn't want you to learn is that you shouldn't buy their products at release because they are almost always unfinished.

While the AI is bad the dlc is solid, its alot more fun to play because you actually need to build influence and shipbuilding is more fun. the ai remains the biggest issue, i can't recommend until the ai is fixed

I love vic3 it's my favorite grand strategy game and I'll always play it, but I really do not like the new naval system. It makes no sense to me lol

Quite a bad expansion that actively regressed the game in several ways.

It requires a level of effort to make a dlc so trash that it makes the already annoying mechanics in the game even more annoying to play with. very limited content that been added in this dlc is being asked to pay 30 euro's for it. absolute trash. avoid this hole game

The micro this dlc creates is awful. I would not recommend paying for a dlc that makes the game less fun and more work to play and engage with. It is also egregiously priced for the experience it gives you.

At this point, I think I've played enough of this DLC to be able to offer some feedback on it. I don't write reviews often, but Victoria 3 had been my "turn brain off and chill" game for years and this DLC poured acid into my coffee. The TLDR is that I'm not mad, I'm just very disappointed. Games should be fun and not exhausting trials of bugs and bad user interfaces. With this DLC, I wonder if the devs lost sight of that a bit due to deadlines? I'm going to divide this review into sections, and I'll preface this by saying that despite my rant below, I really like the Japan content, I do think strategic regions improve the game, and I think that the naval battles (when you can find them) are quite good. 1. Battle Visibility - Why can't I see when a naval battle is going on? Particularly one that I'm losing badly. There is literally no indicator for an ongoing battle unless you're zoomed in on the area, so if you're doing something other than staring right at it to see what's happening, your entire navy can be slowly stackwiped without you even seeing it vanish. Seriously? What's the point of making those cool naval battle animations if we never get notified that there's a naval battle going on? (Especially if I'm losing it. Every other Paradox game lets me know when my navy is being decimated, but not this one. I can't understand this decision.) (Like, can I at least get after-action reports like in HOI4? Anything? Anything at all?) 2. User Interface - Speaking of visibility. There are many, many bits of information that you need to be able to use your navy in this update. Unfortunately, you will not have easy access to them. Victoria 3 has never had an incredible user interface, but the tooltip hades in this DLC hits a whole new level. Want to blockade a port? Good luck figuring out which port you need to blockade to have the maximum impact, or what the new location is after it changes instantly to a port on the opposite side of a nation. Want to do piracy? You'll need to do an elaborate dance through tooltips and screens to figure out the best way to do this. Want to scout out what a potential enemy's naval capabilities are prior to war? No worries, just click the country and then hover over each navy one by one and try to click the button in the tooltip to pull it up... Was the interface just an afterthought? Why is it so obtuse? 3. Strategic Region Micro - Speaking of this... If you are playing as a country that doesn't start as a large country and a naval power and you want to build up to being one, the flaws compound. The new strategic region system is brilliant, but requires far too much naval micro to be able to get established in a region. In a game that's supposed to be about managing the spirit of the nation, it takes me right out of it to have to constantly look at the little number for the amount of regional impact a navy needs to have, shift it around endlessly to get a better number, and then finally be able to do basic diplomacy. (This could be solved by not splitting a navies power projection between every region by an ocean node. Just keep it constant, so I don't need to pull out a calculator to figure out if my navy is good enough. For anyone playing a "zero to hero" style run, the impact of splitting power projection just feels very penalizing.) 4. Naval Supply - Well, it's essentially pointless. It has no limiting impact on any country with a halfway decent economy. Large nations in particular can stockpile tens of thousands of supply ships. Want to raid supply ships to weaken an army? Yeah, that's not going to work at all. They have practically unlimited supply ships. They don't care how many you sink, so this became a pointless feature. 5. Army Movement & Supply - I know that the next major patch is supposed to address this, but it was shocking to me to see how bad army supply was on release and even now. I can have an army sitting right in a frontline next to its headquarters as a landlocked nation, and it shows zero supply because *no supply ships are reaching it*. This is not a rare thing to happen. Warfare in Victoria 3 was never good, but as of this release, it's gone from survivable to horrible. You will be constantly clicking the five buttons required to move armies manually using your fleets, trying to understand why the army isn't being supplied, watching army organization collapse to zero while helpless to do anything as the enemy steamrolls you. If the user interface for moving an army was better, it would help quite a bit, but the supply issues need to be resolved to make the game playable for countries that don't already start out with overwhelming advantages. Making all of this even better - political movements will splinter from your country and magically spawn super soldiers at the highest level of military tech available to you at the time, without supply needs. This, combined with your own supply weaknesses, turns the warfare system into a living hell of intense supply-driven micro. 6. AI - So, that last point is critical. The AI can't cope with these changes very well at all, especially the magical political movement super soldiers. This means that most large countries will fracture endlessly. I have not seen AI France survive in any of the games that I have recently played. It's dispiriting, because I only play single player, and prior to this update, AI mods could sort of patch over the existing flaws. That is no longer the case. There isn't much that AI modders can do to fix the current issues, because they are systemic and based on fundamentally missing parts of the AI system - the AI simply doesn't know how to manage a navy, and the endless rebellions destroy AI economies. 5. Bugs, bugs, bugs - I clicked a button to move my army using my navy from one island to another. Simple, right? No. The navy picked up my army, carried it halfway around the world, and then dropped it off in a completely different location. Wat. Okay, fine. Now, I want to deploy an army to a frontline... Wat... The entire army was randomly deleted and my navy is not bouncing around in confusion? Well, I mainly play as small nations... That army was half of my forces. I didn't get any messages, so I guess I have to reload old saves to see where things went wrong and then try to continue from there... The amount of bugs are overwhelming. Early on, I tried to report as many on the forum as I could, but in the end, I was so overwhelmed, I had to just step away for a while. And, I guess that's where I'm at now. The current state of the game just isn't very fun for me, and I blame this DLC. I think that some user interface improvements, AI improvements, and bug fixes will possibly improve things. I think the naval mechanic needs distance limits on navy deployment (instead of the current infinite supply nonsense). These things would "fix" the current release. BUT, I feel like the release should have been delayed (or maybe they should have pushed a beta) rather than pushing out something that damaged the reputation of a game that I really think has more potential than just about any current offering among grand strategy games.

This is terribly implemented. For now don't buy until they fix it when the sun blows up + 2 weeks.

It is honestly insane that over a month after release this still isn't in a playable state. Paradox really needs to get their ♥♥♥♥ together.