Recently, I decided to sit down and play victoria 3.
Some of PDS decision regarding it are so baffling to me:
You don't have army battles anymore, you don't declare war, you just assign your armies to fronts and then raise tensions with diplomatic plays. This means you don't directly control the armies, they battle automatically and over time.
In Vic 2, laissez-faire economic policy was very serious, you privatised your whole economy and lost any direct control over it. In Vic 3 this just means that companies can buy your buildings, you can still build, subsidize and intervene on companies at will, with barely any disadvantages.
Also your companies make the most stupid investment possible, the company is a steel mill cooperative, and they will be building a tea plantation in Congo that has no connection to your market.
If you are playing a country like Belgium or France, and you have 70% literacy, you will notice that some shit hole in middle of nowhere like the Baltic states have 90% literacy. This is because your country both attract uneducated immigrants and have good healthcare to prevent your uneducated elderly pops to die. The game also doesn't show you literacy rate growth, you have to guess it yourself.
The game also follows EU4 trade routes. If you are not trading with a country through land, that means you can only export down wards, thus if you are france for example, you can't export to Sweden or Russia, just import.
What is Bernd opinion of this?