Quick question to anyone playing Victoria 3 - is the warfare still broken or did Paradox finally come to their senses and reworked it to include proper units?
The reasons that V3's combat was broken wasn't actually due to no units to micromanage. It was due to:
Front splits & merges breaking frontlines (in most cases sending everyone home, so you'd have to redo them),
No real decisions to make in terms of army composition and extra supplies
1 battle at a time per frontline, regardless of how large the front was (Russia Vs China? Enjoy a 10 year war due to that issue)
No ability to designate a priority target for your military
All of these issues and more have been fixed. V3 is not a game about warfare, it's a game about industry and the social changes that industrialization brings. Micro-managing a war would be outside the scope of the game. Micro-managing the exact inputs, with more supplies stressing your economy and national expenditure for more combat power if/when you go to war is exactly inside the scope.
The reasons that V3's combat was broken wasn't actually due to no units
Yes, it was.
Victoria 1 had proper units with the brigade attachments. It had two kinds of attack (normal and shock) impacting either strength or morale. It worked a treat, I actually enjoyed it more than HoI.
In Victoria 2 they screwed it up by picking Europa Universalis system instead of V1 system. It is worse than V1, although not broken.
In Victoria 3 some utter cretin made a moronic decision to remove proper units. It ended up in unplayable mess. Paradox Devs were told about it upfront, but they are arrogant bunch of arseholes.
What they should do is to remove the almighty mess they created and go back to V1 basics.
Everyone's entitled to their opinion, so I'm not going to say you're right or wrong, and if this is the deal-breaker for you then no skin off my nose.
With all that said, I heavily disagree with you. The game on launch was an unplayable mess, yes, but that wasn't to do with the overall concept of the combat system.
Combat in V3 should be decided by technology level, logistics, the general's skill and numbers. The combat system does this. Manually moving around units to exploit the AI does not help the verisimilitude of the simulation. Conversely, if you aren't exploiting the AI, then it's just busywork that can be automated... which they did. This is not a game where player skill expression in terms of unit placement makes sense.
Manually moving around units to exploit the AI does not help the verisimilitude of the simulation. Conversely, if you aren't exploiting the AI, then it's just busywork that can be automated...
Complete rubbish. History is full of examples of small forces outsmarting and outmaneuvering larger forces. The same applies here.
I don't think you understand what Victoria is or at least was before V3 mess came out. It is NOT an economy simulator. It is a geopolitical simulator and war is inherent part of it - or was in Vic1&2.
History is full of examples of small forces outsmarting and outmaneuvering larger forces.
Yes, but not every war forever for whichever nation the player is piloting. Once you've "solved" combat in a game like this, then suddenly every general for the rest of history for every nation you ever play is a super-genius, which feels pretty ridiculous and gamey.
It is a geopolitical simulator
Yes. Completely agree. Micro-managing individual battalions doesn't fit very cleanly into a game about geopolitics. War is a part of it, but not at that granular a level. To take this into hyperbolic extremes to illustrate a point, just because a game includes warfare doesn't mean it has to have a first person shooter segment.
Yes, but not every war forever for whichever nation the player is piloting.
And you don't have to (and often you are unable to), but least you have an opportunity to do so. A choice.
Micro-managing individual battalions doesn't fit very cleanly into a game about geopolitics.
Battalions? Not necessarily. Divisions (like in V1) or brigades (V2) very much so. If you want to make a ridiculous strawman argument at least try to stay accurate.