One thing I want to note: I was hesitant about certain elements of power blocs throughout this video, but my opinion of them has honestly turned a bit more sour as I discussed the concept throughout the evening. There will be a dev diary that also discusses power blocs a bit more in two weeks - I will go into the details of what really MASSIVELY irks me about them then! Quick initial overview of my issues (not all mentioned): cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/216873247176654849/1220475518630101143/Discord_bj4wPvkbEG.png?ex=660f1366&is=65fc9e66&hm=4bb042c20ec58f8f71d27b8a2e1305fcaa04ca7f4462a65f2b5173b9b6cea6b3& Check out the dev diary here: forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/victoria-3-dev-diary-109-power-blocs.1636916/

The clostest historic thing to the statues I could of is how there was a large Lenin Statue in afaik every Warsaw Pact capital.

"can't think of a statue built the same all over the capitals of an empire" the bronze statues of George V have joined the chat

The historical reason for monuments I can think of would be something like statues of Lenin that were built around the Soviet Union. If they’d have shown a figure of a person rather than an elephant it may have come across better rather than a bit of a novelty item

Honestly i think how fun power blocks are will depend a lot on principles and how to implement them. I feel if the principles are unique rather than just a flat boost every time(like a new diplomatic sway, like joint diplomatic plays or something instead of just something like -25% infamy just as an example).

This statue system is really dissapointing to me, I thought it was just an iconic building/structure representing your power, like Eiffel tower, Hagia Sophia, Big Ben, and so on... instead, we get an elephant fountain for every capital :/

I completely agree to you on monuments. I think monuments in general hurt the immersion. And thank you OPB. Excellent video as always

I think it indeed is more clear in minor Power Blocs, like smaller trade leagues, where prestige swings can make the struggle real. But, even going to today's politics (I still feel that Cold War/Cold War II makes a lot of sense because the world still works today with Victorian mechanics), the EU does have power struggles between members and, while Germany is usually at the front, we've been seeing at times France and even Spain and Poland getting a bit of control over the direction of the Union, even more so recently. And yeah, the UK won't get swept by Australia, but Australia never got to be that prestigious as to reverse the Commonwealth...

I feel like its trying to do a Trafalga Square with the monuments and how much people like the little map details. Fittingly, it feels more like a Roman thing than an 19th century thing sonce this is real similar to Imperator Rome

Paradox needs to see your questions. Very insightful

I definitely think that only allowing one power bloc per nation is a bad thing. How would something like the Central Powers or Entente ever happen if every great power would likely prefer to just create their own empire blocs. Historically a nation would easily do both, as well as be in a trade league if they it to. It’s going to inevitably become a thing where “I do like this type of bloc, but this other one is so much more powerful/cooler. Inevitably there’s going to be power blocs that are never chosen because you only get one.

Devlet-i Aliye means "The Supreme State". Ottoman Empire was used to be called "Devlet-i Alîye-i Osmânîye" in Turkish :)

As i see it, devs added monuments because they needed one more item to the dlc feature list.

Some nations should be allowed to be in multiple power blocks. With some requirements: -Be on the border of 2 or more power blocks -Not a great or major power -Not a vassal. Making it not all or nothing allows buffer states to exist.

I wish the statue was more like a playing piece you would have on the map once your power bloc reached level 2/3.

A building on the map next to your capital based on your Bloc's leader/pillar would have been so neat!

I think the monuments just are one more example of the quite-not-very-good-really-bad aesthetics of Victoria 3... (characters, some flags, icons for battles, etc.). The 'cape' looks like something straight out of WH40k, not the 19th century.

Based on this, you can't have the French and British in the Entente without one giving up its power block?

I quite like the sound of this

16:45 as a Vermonter, this map made me laugh in delight 😄

I feel power blocs are an interesting system for smaller powers, allowing more than just two countries to come together to resist a Great Power more easily. I can also see it as a secondary system to expand influence as a great power without direct conflict; China no longer needs to be invaded as Britain to make sure you keep France and Russia away from them. It's almost like what happened in this time period where the great powers were leveraging their power and prestige to contain some of the efforts of the others without direct war. I hope they continue to expand and iterate on the system to make it as interesting as it can be, and not just a bland mechanic that offers an RP alternative to outright conquest. The first thing I thought of when you said statue was the Statue of Liberty. France gave it to the USA to represent the ideas of Freedom and Brotherhood they both shared. Your embassy buildings idea would be freaking awesome, though. I hope they do that in the future as well, even if it's not sure accurate. Having a Japanese castle show up in Berlin would be amazing imho I really hope with a few new types of diplomatic plays coming, that they decouple some of them so you can maybe have 1 or 2 that you initiate, as well as being able to join others, even while you deal with rebellions.

An Block style embassy or governor house if it’s a colonial state would maybe have been better and you then build it to secure better diplomatic relations with the government

Takeover of a power bloc could be something like an enduring Entente, depending on how the war would play out in your game. Maybe France comes out stronger, maybe a United States joins early and takes over. There could be a power struggle, but we also don't know enough yet anyway.

15:57 I hope that the threat of joining the bloc won't just be about war, but also about reducing our “presence” in that country. This could lead not just to our setbacks in decreasing our leverage, but also to economic challenges for the target country, prompting them to reconsider joining. It could even be possible to implement a system where, when the target country sees a simple cause-and-effect relationship, such as after its refusal, your leverage artificially begins to decrease significantly and with it, the economic development of the target country. For example, if a country refuses to join the bloc, as punishment, we could reduce investment or even close a couple of tool production factories, thereby damaging the economy of the target country and forcing it to reconsider its stance on joining the bloc. Unfortunately, despite being an economic cal and political strategy, we all understand that such mechanics will not be there at all. There will simply be a checkbox for "threat of war" and that's it... which is a shame.

To expand a bit on my other comment I'm not opposed to power blocs per say I think they could be an interesting mechanical system to represent things like the zollverein or entente I just dont like the replacing of individual country sphere of influences with these more multilateral organizations, I think the vic 2 sytem needed to be expanded and fleshed out not replaced entirely

This feels like dlcs from other games glued together. Uniform fashion and monuments, just why...

Vermont being a big name on the map is very funny

I wonder how the mechanics of power blocs and country unification requirements will work together

What happens when the leader country of a power bloc falls to revolution? Do we get a Kaiserreich scenario where the British Empire still exists even when the British Isles aren't part of it?

it's basically the Federations system from Stellaris, no?

This is my favourite timelapse AI only channel 🤩

JAIPUR MY BELOVED 0:59

I just don’t know exactly how historical the outcomes of this system will be. I’ll just have to wait and see

Did they fix the warfare?

If paradox were to develop euV, what advice would you give them to ameliorate their game?

Making Customs Union harder is a nice change. The main issue will be how well the AI can interact with and manage all these features as always.

Thank you for the great summary, I am very excited for SoI to arrive and the impacts, looks like it tackles really relevant issues of the game. Just my quick thoughts that came up: - i find these statues/buildings on power blocks also quite odd. The only historical example that comes up for me are these "soviet/communist" monuments you'd find throughout eastern Europe, however those were built mostly by the end of the game or even later. - An example of changing leadership within a Power Bloc could be seen in Germany, with Prussia taking over the contested leadership of the "Deutscher Bund". Sadly here Zollverein seems to be a Prussia dominated Bloc without Austria at the beginning of the Game allready. We shall see, maybe this opens up possibilities for a future DLC that tackles Central Europe/German Unification Mechanics 🥸 Excited for the next dev diary, the ownership and location unbundling + foreign investment are probably going to be my favourite parts of the DLC, if nicely done. I just hope, that overall Pdx keeps on following more a simulative approach rather than adding too much fan service .

I too wish custom unions happened less than they do, or at least for the mechanic to be more about trade relations and not literal market fusing.

So they´re just gonna turn into big hugboxes then? Likewise, how will this affect people without the Dlc?

The only statue use case I can think of is USSR Comintern statues of the Soviet star

I am only interested in the DLC if war among multi-great power blocs leads to truly great wars (with different mechanics than regular wars), which I think is not a feature of Sphere of Influence...

Is this a mod or did you release all of the countries yourself?

I had so high hopes on this after the first dev diary. This was the first time I was really, really disappointed with Victoria 3. Not everything was great, sure, but at least not too much of a damage. Closest was the removal of Ironman requirements for Achievements, but that's long time ago and less impactful. I have 2 point that got me disappointed and one of them is just my expectations while the other really makes me think the game may be worse with power blocks than without it. The first is just coming from the point they made if I remember correctly: Power block Comintern Google still shows the press release for SoI with the word Comintern while the page from Paradox does not (or no longer). Well, I hoped for power blocks of interest groups (just just Comintern was, a group of parties) and others like "Holy Alliance" could have worked the same way. Also they said it's multilateral but will... it's just One at the Top. No interest groups, no alliances of equals... that's bad enough. But point 2... That really hit hard. Only one block. In the era of overlapping systems and complex empires... - No way to be in 2 competing military blocks at one time (like Italy was at the start of WW1) - Then also China is not recognized so it's can't make a power block? - No way to be in one market union but in another military one -> No way to be in "Zollverein" and "Holy Alliance" at once. Or "Deutsche Bund". Or "Triple_Entente". Literally all 3 in the triple had their own empires. All this things are now impossible to happen. This change is insane. Before today the mechanics were missing. Bad enough. Now they will be added and actively forbid this interactions. That will keep this bad state for a long time. Literally all 3 in the triple had their own empires. I am deeply, deeply disappointed and don't see this as a way to a positive development. This "just" puts some complexity on things that aren't much more than common market + puppeting doing now. Just shiny stuff with the bad twist that complex relationships are harder to simulate than before. This looks more like Cold War than Victorian era.

Please update VTM

As a non great power such as Iran can I still form a trade power block with the Sikh empire, Afghanistan etc

Sounds like playing unrecognised will become even more comparatively lacklustre, that abstraction continues to pain me

HRE restoration and EU creation games incoming

Can’t think of an example of statues being built all over a power block. *points to Wikipedia page of “List of statues of Queen Victoria.” The only continent missing from the list is Antarctica and only 2 outside the UK proper are not colonially related.

monuments does seem like eye candy and not worth the spotlight, however as a special thing for blocs, maybe a big statue works better than a special building? bloc principles sounds decent, but gaining them sounds a little confusing, as with leverage, which active/relative leverage sounds rl weak

What about minors tech disadvantage ?

stellaris federations? that's it? that's the update?

Primary, secondary, third? What happened to tertiary? 😂

While I do agree with most of the criticisms and worries concerning SoI, I do think that there are genuine good ideas presented with the DLC. I also think that there is a bit of a misconception with the power blocks that existed before World War I and their less than formal nature. To be fair, the developers of V3 oversold their promise that the WW1 blocks could happen in their new DLC - but I think in retrospect they were talking more about bringing to bear whole colonial empires and spheres against each other, rather than the entente and central powers, which were far more fluid than I think people realize and having them be more rigid institutions such as the British empire (and to a certain extent the Zolleverein) would be both unrealistic and frankly frustrating for gameplay. All this to say, despite the goodwill that has been burned due to buggy patch releases and continuing issues in gameplay, I am going to give the V3 team the benefit of the doubt here and say that the vision behind power blocks, while perhaps marketed wrong, can still give us really solid and engaging gameplay - which at the end of the day is what we all really want.

Really don't like the idea you can only be in one block. Aka, why would Britain join the entente

YO HO! The statues have got to go!

Uni statues that build everywhere: lenin in soviet

power blocks cewl

I really don't like the indentity mechanic, it seems super artificial as a choice, I would have prefere a more organic evolution for it.

This is victoria 4

Pretty meh about the monument builder. Didn't find it that interesting in "Imperator:Rome" either. But I guess if the code already exist, may as well use it. *shrug*

👍

Ooo biiiiiiig China

Goodday

I'm still wary, this just seems like an overly compliclated and convoluted way to replace the simple and surprisingly immersive sphere of influence system of vic 2 (which had plenty of its own drawbacks and missed opportunities), I just want to be able to be say britain and have everyone else acknowledge that say nicaragua is in my sphere of influence and so I get investment priority and other countries will try to not interfere with them unless they want to worsen relations with me and be able to influence their domestic politics to be more like my own (or my in line with my potential interests), I really didnt ask for nor feel like I need any of these complicated mechanics or just get a weird victoria 3 version of stellaris federations, and I dont want to restrict myself to for example purely forming a trade league when I might have different interests elsewhere but are all within my own sphere of influence like say wanting to keep free trade with say europe but then exert more overt imperialistic power over asia or africa or try to change the politics of smaller american countries but this system makes everything the same and making us stuck with being required to negotiate with powers you want to dominate or dominate powers you would rather negotiate with because you have the wrong power bloc for that specific situation

I'm dissapointed at the implementation honestly. The cars and statues feel silly. It also feels too unilateral, I expected the unilateral one was going to be the "sovereign empire". Members have no saying in the power bloc? I thought principles was going to just be a way to customize but instead it's just a tier system. Also, if a member is stronger than the leader, instead of taking over they should just prefer to leave and form their own based on their opinion. Also, why principles unlock faster the more members the bloc has? The more members the slower it should take because you have to get more people on board. It feels to gamey.

Delvet-i Aliyyie means supreme state

I really do not like 3d cosmetics - it looks too much like Barbie than actual historical stuff. They should work on mechanics first, cosmetics seconds, or even third And yes, monument...why?

Honestly? I´m disappointed. It reads as just alliances/common markets with a bit new fluff.

Very expensive DLC , considering some of the mechanics were in the base game of VIctoria II as well adds insult to injury.. that being said I'll continue to buy their products even though it seems with time their DLCs contain less and less. I still do love their games but am very disappointed in the direction the company is heading. The subscription model they set up for their dlcs is seeming like a better option for me more and more.

It's just Stellaris Federations... disappointing.

hoi4 alliances for vic3 for 30$ garbage.

How can paradox work so hard for so long and even after all this time make a significantly worse game than Vic2. The SoI mechanics in Vi2, while flawed, are so much better than this.

So much fluff, no substance