Belgian Again

Okay, I'm back on my Paradox saddle again! I've been doing almost nothing for the last month other than working and playing Victoria 3; when I remember, I try to also sleep and eat. Now that I've gotten at least someway up the learning curve I'm having a blast. I keep thinking "I should write a blog post about what I've done and learned!", and then just play more Victoria for a while. Now that I'm finally starting to write this post, it will likely take me at least a week to finish. It is what it is!

 

Let's see... my last post was the end of my Sweden "training run". I planned to do Belgium next, based largely on the Paradox wiki indicating that it's one of the easiest countries and one of the best to learn with (along with Sweden). I got some ways into the game, felt like I was doing well for a while, but reached a point where my economy seemed to be permanently spiraling downward. After a patch update, I realized that Paradox had made a huge change to the game: previously, Political Concessions would add more influence to the faction which granted them, but now they also cost around 100-150 Authority per concession... including ones signed on previous savegames! There was no way I would ever be able to recover from this. But I was already planning on restarting to apply the various things I had learned, so I appreciated the nudge to get a blank slate.

I'm playing as Belgium again, and as I write this I'm now up to... hm, I think I'm in the 1860s or so. (Update: Nearly 1890!) I have fairly warm relations with all the major western European powers, although Prussia / North Germany / German Empire are making me a bit nervous. I've signed and maintained a Defensive Pact with Sweden, that hasn't come into play but I think it helped discourage a potential Netherlands conflict early on. I'm probably friendliest with France, which is the one major nearby power to have ejected its monarchy. 

 

 

In my very first Sweden game I'd joined the British Empire Power Bloc, then mildly regretted it as it seemed to only offer downsides. In my first Belgium game Britain made overtures and got mad when I rejected them. This time I avoided too many entanglements with Britain while still remaining friendly with them. I considered joining the French Free Commerce Committee, which at least seemed to offer some benefit, but decided it would be interesting to try and create my own Power Bloc. I ended up making my own Trade League, and it's been a lot of fun to grow it. I started off getting a lot of unrecognized African nations into it, which doesn't really help at all with Mandate but is economically beneficial and got me used to the recruitment mechanics. I made a big play for Brazil, which was a big help, and since then I've gotten almost all of South America and most of Africa to join, including regional and major unrecognized powers. Now that I have Mandate and Principles ticking up I'm really seeing the benefit. Power Blocs remind me a lot of Federations from Stellaris, which are one of my favorite mechanics from that game, although Victoria Power Blocs at least are a lot less militarily oriented.

 

 

I've also been making a big colonization play in this game.  Getting an Interest in Equatorial Africa was super hard, I tried to do it in my first Belgium game but never was able to do it. Kongo is the only centralized state you can interact with, and it's basically impossible to reach the required 1000 Influence with them to start colonizing. In this game I made every single treaty with them that I could that would increase interest, and eventually sent my navy down there to project power to push me over the threshold. Once I did have a high enough interest to create a colony, that made enough interest to keep it going. I did maintain the Kongo treaties to get all the way up to 2500 Influence for the Establish Missions decree.

 

As a side note: I mentioned in my previous post how I really like how colonization is visually depicted in this game, as "decentralized nations" that you are essentially invading rather than the "blank spots on the map" of Europa Universalis. The mechanics are a bit different as well. In EU, there is a "native uprising" progress bar that generally slowly ticks up over time as your colony progresses. You can manage this in various ways, like having a strategy of Native Appeasement (or whatever it's called) to slow down the progress rate; or station troops in the territory to suppress them; or just let it fire and reset. In EU4 a native uprising will wipe out some number of your settlers, but in some cases that might be preferable to permanently stationing a military force on the other side of the planet. I think that in EU3 an uprising would actually spawn a military unit in the territory that you would need to defeat, although it's been a while and I may be mis-remembering. Anyways, in Victoria there is a "Tension" meter that rises with nearby decentralized nations. It ticks up each time you expand a new province, and very slowly decays over time. If you are aggressively expanding (with a very high Colonial Affairs office and possibly an Establish Missions decree and/or focusing all your expansion on one or two colonies), then Tensions will very quickly rise to the maximum. But... at least in my game, this never had any consequence. According to the game, it should create a Diplomatic Play in the area as the decentralized power tries to shake you off; if you defeat them, you get a big boost to your expansion for some number of years; and like all other Diplomatic Plays, any other powers in the area can intervene, so what started as an indigenous uprising could expand into a global conflagration. But again, this never happened to me, despite me being at 100 Tension with many nations throughout Africa. I'm not sure if this is because my military was strong enough to dissuade them (it isn't that strong), or because I'm playing on an easier difficulty setting, or if it's some bug in this patch.

I mostly have Equitorial Africa to myself, except British Senegal has carved out some land and is currently killing itself in the Severe Malaria states. The other European powers (British, France, Denmark, Netherlands, Portugal) have all been competing on the Ivory Coast. I was originally planning to exclusively focus on inner Africa, but from peeking at the wiki I realize I need to secure some Oil supplies for the late game, and Sarahan Africa seems like my best chance for that. I made good process for a while, but got boxed out by France and my nemesis the Netherlands. So that was a good incentive for my first intentional war!

I started a Diplomatic Play to take the colony. My professional army was about 3x the size of theirs; they had conscripts to fill out the numbers, but I was pretty sure my army quality was better. The Netherlands did have a much larger navy than me, but I was pretty sure that navy was mostly busy in the Dutch East Indies and wouldn't be of too much concern to me. I felt good about fighting in the African colonies and in the Low Countries, and didn't have other interests overseas to defend.

There was a bit of a curveball when Spain decided to back the Netherlands - in the UI preview of the play it looked like nobody was open to being swayed, I'm curious if the Netherlands were able to call in a favor or if something else in the calculus changed to convince Spain to join. I did slightly expand my Diplomatic Maneuvers to demand Gelre as well - this is a "split state" that is mostly controlled by the Netherlands but with a decent slice in Belgium.

I do really like the overall shape of war in Victoria. Everything starts as a Diplomatic Play, and it's fairly common for them to be resolved before war - if a huge power declares on a tiny one, the tiny one will often give in rather than endure the expense and uncertainty of war. At some point you have to decide to start mobilizing your forces. As in the real-world 1800s, war is VERY expensive, so hopefully your economy is already on a solid footing before it starts. The actual progress of the war is fairly abstract: you have large Armies and Navies, each controlled by a General or Admiral, assign them to a Front and give them Orders (generally to Defend the front or Advance the front). The battles all happen automatically - you can click into them to see how they are progressing, but you aren't manually initiating them like in Europa Universalis or Stellaris. It feels a lot closer to Hearts of Iron, but with not as insane a level of operational detail.

In my case, I'd split my army into two parts, and moved a very small force into Africa so I could take the colony. This took ages! Apparently another effect from this recent patch is a total change in how the navy works, previously each ship could carry one army unit, but now my fleet of 12 ships could only carry 2 units at a time. So prior to the war I spent months ferrying back and forth. In retrospect I would have been totally fine with only 1 unit down there since the Netherlands didn't have any military in their colonies.

The larger armies remained in the Low Countries. As I'd hoped, my professional military basically wiped the floor with the conscript-heavy Netherlands forces. I was lucky that Spain mostly stayed at home and stared at us - they had a few battalions on the ground but not nearly enough to turn the tide. I did feel somewhat pleased by my going-in-blind strategic choices. I completely abandoned the Flanders front and focused my entire army on Luxemburg. They were crushed swiftly, wiping out the Luxemburgian (sp?) forces as well as their contingent of Dutch soldiers. That made my southern border completely secured and let me completely focus on the northern front. They hadn't had time to take many provinces, and once I arrived en masse we easily won nearly every battle, eventually pushing them back to the sea.

After exterminating the Dutch troops I was hoping to cash out for a nice payday - getting that African colony, but maybe also freeing Luxemburg, humiliating the Netherlands, and so on. I came to realize, though, that there's a key difference in warfare in Victoria 3 versus other Paradox games I've played. In order for a war to end, all parties must agree to it. In this case, the Netherlands had given up, but Spain hadn't suffered many losses and still had huge reserves, so they were more than willing to keep going. This is pretty different from, say, Europa Universalis or Stellaris where the War Leader can just make unilateral decisions. But I can kind of see the benefit of the Victoria approach - it's annoying when, say, the AI agrees to give away your territory in a peace deal, or if they white-peace out when you're steamrolling towards a total victory. And, on the other-other hand, Victoria 3 does allow for concessions on both sides, unlike other games where there is only one "winner" who can receive spoils. (Victoria is much more accurate to how wars in history have concluded!)

Unlike the other Paradox games, you also can't create separate peaces with multiple enemies: it's all-or-nothing. Fortunately, there is still a rough equivalent of a ticking war score, so once I had conquered both the colony and, uh, the entire Netherlands, each week both parties grew more and more willing to deal with me. I wasn't quite able to get everything I wanted, but I did manage to end the war taking the entire state of Gelre in addition to the colony. Gelre had been the runt of my three states, and I was pleased to see that the Netherlands had actually developed their larger share of it quite thoroughly.

 

 

Just from looking at the map, this seemed like a stupid war - the Dutch colony was so small - but it was 100% worth fighting over. I was able to start colonies on the other side, into Timbuktu and then into the Sahara. With my focused colonizing I was able to outflank the growing French colonies, and as I write this I have the entirety of inland northern Africa at my disposal. Which means that I'll be able to tap that precious, precious oil!

Other than that, I've avoided wars for the most part - I get tempted to jump in when Britain or France bullies one of my tiny African partners into their power bloc, but it just isn't worth the conflict at this time. Maybe one day I'll get them back. I do have a feeling that by the late-game I'll end up in a big war against someone. The German Empire seems the most likely, as they have claims on Wallonia; I also might want to eventually take a crack at Britain, as they are the 800-pound gorilla squatting on the #1 Great Power in the ranking charts.

 

 

Politically, Belgium starts off as a Monarchy, but a fairly progressive one with periodic elections. I've been loving the political aspect to this game, proposing laws and fighting to get them passed, cutting deals with interest groups and shaping the economy to produce the kind of electorate that will be conducive to my vision. I've focused on the law changes that seem to have good in-game benefits, particularly public education and graduated taxation. I used to also push for neutral-ish laws that didn't seem to have much of an in-game impact but that are personally appealing to me, like workers' protections and social programs. I now think that it might be better (from a realpolitik perspective) to hold off on those as they might be options to persuade recalcitrant interest groups to support other laws that they would ordinarily oppose, in a "If you give me X I'll pass Y" kind of way.

 

 

One of the most white-knuckle parts of my game so far was the transition to a Parliamentary Republic. I'd previously made some changes to the voting structure and stuff that went relatively smoothly, so I was not prepared for the intense reaction: a strong Monarchist movement swiftly appeared and began agitating against the law. This hurt its chances of advancement, created unhappy radicals in the population, and, judging from the tool-tip, was on its way to creating a full-fledged civil war. And alarmingly, the Monarchist movement was largely supported by the Armed Forces, so not only would there be a civil war, but an extremely challenging one.

I pulled out all the stops for this one: I slashed taxes to increase my government's Legitimacy, cut deals with every group I could to support the legislation, spent Authority to suppress the Monarchist movement (this didn't pause it but at least slowed its growth a bit), and used every Advance to boost my chance for success instead of society-wide benefits. At last, in the final Voting stage, the RNG handed me a Debate with a killer of a choice. The initial vote had failed, but an angry mob had stormed the palace and taken King Leopold prisoner. I could arrest the mob and insist on doing things the right way, giving a big boost to legitimacy and prestige but postponing the final vote by another three months. Or give in to the crowd and commit regicide.

I winced. Every bone in my body wanted to follow the legal system and ensure an orderly, bloodless transition. But... that Monarchist Movement was up in the 90s, and in just a few weeks that dreaded civil war would trigger. How could I hold one life against that of the tens of thousands who would be killed in a devastating internecine struggle? Even the life of a king? I gave the nod, a sickening "thwick/chunk!" sound effect played, the monarchy was ended and the United States of Belgium were born.

 

 

I came to recognize that this is a common shape to the major social and political upheavals depicted in Victoria 3. While we were debating the monarchy, tensions were incredibly high and society stood on the edge of a knife. But once it was decided, the tide swiftly turned. The monarchist movement gradually abated and eventually disappeared altogether as the final remnants of monarchism were stamped out. Traditional supporters of the monarchy like the Landowners moved on, and everyone adapted to the new republican order. I've seen similar things play out since, such as an incipient Communist uprising triggered by my (eventually defeated) attempt at implementing Laissez-Faire Economics, and a near revolt among indigenous communities when I enacted Women's Suffrage. Getting things done is really hard, but once they're done, the Overton window moves, the status quo updates, and you start to forget that things were ever any different.

 

 

Here are some random notes on things I've learned over the course of this game:

As the tutorial helpfully informs you, you don't need to worry too much about deficits. There's no intrinsic benefit to having money in your treasury, other than the ability to run future deficits (such as a protracted war). And deficit spending can grow your economy and put you on a much better footing. Overall, I usually try to keep my weekly expenses and income roughly equal.

 

 

I have noticed that the reported surplus/deficit will often swing strongly positive, like -6k one week, then +1k the second week, then -6k the third week. I think this happens when you're completing construction on a building, probably because you aren't paying for the full amount of Construction Goods that week. But when I would see that green number, I would go "Great!" and expand my construction sector or buy income-losing buildings like Universities, but then my deficit would immediately swing back into the red. Now, I'll usually wait for multiple consecutive weeks of budgetary surpluses before I switch to expensive investments. In the meantime I'll usually queue up some quick and profitable buildings like Logging Camps.

 

Construction units are (at least currently) split 50-50 between the public and the private sector, but I've belatedly learned that if one sector isn't building, the other sector will be able to take more units (but not all of them). I'm not sure what the exact formula is. When I had 40 total construction points and the Private sector wasn't building anything, I would get 24 units for public building. That's another thing that would throw off my budget, since your government expenses will jump up and down with the number of sectors you have. Now I track it more closely, but also I'm now constantly building both public and private buildings so I don't see that variation as often as I did earlier in the game.

In my Sweden game the private sector was building a ton from the beginning, but in my Belgium game it was really sporadic. They would take ages getting funds to start a single project, would finish it and then need to wait a while before their second project could kick off. I'm not 100% sure, but I think this might be because I had my tax rate set to Very High at the start of this game, which probably limited the profits that owners could add to the investment pool. Once the investors do start building, they quickly snowball, as the more buildings they own the more money they get to add to the pool to build more buildings. There's always a full queue now and I don't think they'll ever exhaust their investment pool.

As a side note, judging from the release date of this game it was probably being designed during the European Austerity regime, and I think in a lot of ways you can view this game as a specific rebuke to that perspective. You can see visually how the expanding bar of your nation's GDP is more important than the sliver of debt inside that bar - the sliver that will shrink in proportion over time. Getting out of a funk requires more investment, not less. 

 

 

That's just one of the many, many parts of this game that gets into broader economic and policy discussions, which were very relevant during the 19th century and continue to this day. Higher taxes do impede growth and slow down the expansion of the private sector. But higher taxes can also harm the wellbeing of pops, particularly in a regressive tax system. This will make working-class pops more radical, which can cause obstinance and harm productivity. So there are cases where raising taxes could theoretically limit long-term revenues, and lowering taxes could raise them, as the private sector grows faster and generates a larger tax base, in addition to employing more pops who then pay income taxes, and use their salaries to buy goods that fund consumption taxes and spur additional employment and investment for the goods they want. 

In this "learning" Belgium game, most of my decisions are driven by warnings: "silver" expensive goods, "gold" expensive goods, and shortages. Based on the description, shortages are the most serious of the three, as the price will rapidly rise in addition to imposing a penalty on the output. So if I saw a shortage for, say, Motors, I would order the construction of more Motor Industries and move it to the head of the build queue. After a few weeks the shortage would go away, even before the building finished. I would go "Huh, that's weird", and let the building complete. Then a year or so later the cycle would happen again.

I eventually clicked into the actual building, and saw that my Level-3 Motor Industries could support a workforce of 3000 laborers, and had a grand total of 7 people actually employed. Yikes!

After watching it more closely, I think that this happens when you have a very limited or intermittent need for a good. If nothing needs the good and there isn't demand on the world market or trade capacity for it, then nobody will buy the good, so the factory doesn't want to make any of the good and will gradually lay everyone off. Once an order does come in for, say, One Engine or One Explosive, then at first that good might have a price of something like 3 pennies. That isn't enough for the owners to justify making them; their potential laborers are probably making higher salaries over at the full-capacity Iron Mine. The shortage is created here.

The price of Engines or Explosives will gradually tick up.  The factory owners will look to hire, but not find laborers willing to take the job. Over weeks the owners will gradually offer higher wages, until eventually they are high enough to persuade peasants to leave their subsistence farms or existing workers to switch careers. Then the employees will build One Explosive, then there will be no more demand, everyone will be laid off and the cycle starts over again.

Now that I know how this works, whenever I see a Shortage warning I'll first make a sanity check to see if I already have at least one building that Makes The Thing, and if so, what its employment looks like. It's almost always nearly completely vacant. If it was a capacity shortage, it would have shown up as an Expensive Good long before becoming a Shortage Good.

In practice, I'll usually just wait a few weeks and the shortage will resolve itself. It does mean some unnecessary expense that has a slight cascading effect through the economy, but The Invisible Hand Of The Free Market will eventually take care of it.

I did recently experience a larger-scale version of this that gave me pause. Some time previously I discovered Rubber, and began creating some Rubber Plantations (in Africa, and the Belgians do). But I didn't have any real need for Rubber, so the plantations stood mostly idle. Some time later, I discovered Vulcanization, which unlocked Machined Steel Tools in my Tooling Workshop. This finally gave me an application for Rubber, and would give a significant boost to these buildings' productivity. But all of my Tooling Workshops were so huge that changing even one to demand Rubber would create a Rubber Shortage. I knew (or hoped) that it would eventually be filled; but I would need a lot of Rubber and didn't know how long it would take.

I rolled ahead with this approach, switching my smallest (but still large) Tooling Workshop over, eating the Shortage for maybe a month or so. The larger workshops were a smoother transition: the jump from, say, 100 Rubber to 300 Rubber is much gentler than the jump from 0 Rubber to 100 Rubber. Rubber got expensive, but not to a shortage level.

But anyways, I realized after the fact that this is probably the perfect use case for Subsidies. This is an option where the government will make up the difference between what the private sector is willing to pay and the wage that will ensure full employment in that building. I could have started Subsidizing my rubber plantations, or at least a single one of them, to bring up the supply, and then turned on the demand for rubber, then turned off the subsidy once the market had become self-regulating. Which, now that I write it out, is at least in theory what subsidies are often for in the real world as well! When you think of things like renewable energy or EVs, it can be really hard for market forces to get a new industry off the ground even when it is superior; once it is established, it can easily pay its own way.

Topic shift: As I've mentioned before, the political aspect of this game might be my favorite part. I've mostly been doing everything to promote my preferred Interest Groups. Very roughly speaking, for me this looks like:

• Best: Intelligentsia > Trade Unions
• Neutral: Armed Forces
• Situational: Industrialists > Devout > Petty Bourgeois > Rural Folk
• Nope: Landowners

So usually, when election season rolls around, I'll do everything I can to boost the groups/parties high on the list and shiv the ones below. This yields inconsistent results: my beloved Intelligentsia usually have a tiny share of the vote, so if they're in a party by themselves, even giving them every available boost still leaves them with very little support. And there's a lot of randomness in the Momentum that starts each election. If the odds start off in my favor, I can turn a victory in a landslide; if not, I might turn a defeat into a deadlock.

 

 

But after experiencing several election cycles and passing a ton of laws, I now think that it might make sense to alternate between parties in power, rather than trying to keep the same party in power but with varying levels of mandate. The specific example I'm thinking of at the moment is that I mostly want policies pushed by the Trade Unions, but I also really want Laissez-faire, and it's really hard to implement that. I can't even start debate on it since none of my preferred factions support it. And on the other hand, when I try to implement the 5th law in a row supporting workers' rights, the opposition is utterly irate at me, making enactments an uphill battle.

 

 

If I pursued more of an alternating-parties strategy, I could let the bloc with the Industrialists into power, and use their term to implement Laissez-Faire. During their term the conservative groups' disapproval would gradually diminish as memories of past legislation cooled. Then once the left came back into power, I could mount a fresh push for the sixth law supporting workers' rights, with hopefully more tepid opposition. This would also keep all the parties busy during their terms. I'm at a point now where I've passed all the laws that I've unlocked that I want to and can pass; I don't want to implement Council Republic or No Migration or anything like that.

 

 

I briefly mentioned Power Blocs before, but going into a bit more detail: it's been a really fun part of the game. I like how it gives a sense of expansion without requiring conquest: I'm expanding my influence throughout the globe, but doing so based on my economic and political power instead of through military dominance. (Although merely having a large military does add to power projection, which adds more weight to your political power!) My general approach is:

1. Identify a target. I'm looking for someone who is still Unaligned, and is fully independent without an Overlord. Hovering over my Leverage in that nation's screen will show how much Leverage other Power Blocs have. Ideally nobody else has too much influence already.
2. If I don't have at least a Level 2 Interest in the Strategic Region, start working on that. A lot of this will come naturally through the following steps, but it might also be necessary to Improve Relations with some other countries or take other steps to bump it up.
3. Start Improving Relations with my target - as I learned early on, merely having the required Leverage isn't enough to make them join your Bloc, they need to like you as well. Improved relations will get you ready for that final step, and also make them more likely to agree to treaties with you.
4. Sign treaties. I'm looking for ones that they will agree to (Ideally 100% chance, I might try at 70%+ but also might wait for relations to increase). While details vary, usually I'll start off with an exchange of Trade Privileges. This works well as a pair, as they'll usually have a slight malus in giving privileges and a large bonus in receiving privileges.
5. I'll offer a Power Bloc Embassy - this automatically gets canceled after they join the Bloc, so it's even more temporary Diplomacy points than the others.
6. The biggest one I want is Investment Rights. This gives a good amount of Influence and Leverage by itself, and also lets my expansion-hungry private sector start constructing buildings in their land for even more Leverage. Depending on their situation, I might be able to get this right off the bat, but often I'll need to wait: I need to get to Level 2 Interest in the Region, and they need to like me better if they don't need the investment.
7. Around this time I'll check in again on the Leverage preview. The popup shows the current and projected leverage, and how quickly it is ticking up. For small countries I'll likely be on track already for the necessary 200 point advantage, so I'll shift my focus and wait for it to tick up. For larger countries, ones with more leverage resistance or other bloc competitors, I'll need to push it up more.
8. Guaranteeing Independence, and later maybe even offering a Defensive Pact will give a huge amount of Leverage, and countries will almost always agree to these. So far I haven't gotten pulled into any wars as a result of it.
9. Funding Lobbies is a good option. Sometimes I do this even on the tiny countries: it's super-cheap for them, and if it speeds up their admittance, it also means I'll be able to dial down my investments more quickly.
10. This is usually plenty for almost everyone. The powers I ran into in my game where it wasn't immediately sufficient were Egypt and Persia, huge and relatively wealthy and powerful unrecognized powers. In this case, I'll start to directly invest in buildings in their country through my government construction queue. It's expensive and takes a while, so if the projected gap is more than 10-20 points or so, I'll call it quits here and move on.
11. Eventually, you'll get the notification that you can invite them. If you've been improving relations from the start they will agree to join, otherwise you might need to offer them a Favor or wait longer for their opinion to tick up.
12. After they accept, turn off Fund Lobbies. Turn off Improve Relations if it's still going. Power Bloc Embassy will automatically cancel.
13. Whenever the treaties expire, Withdraw from them. There's no penalty to this, and you usually have plenty of Influence and Leverage through their Bloc membership to keep them in the Bloc and your Interest high enough in their Strategic Region. The one treaty I keep is Investment Rights - it's cheap, and will ensure their loyalty over time.

 

 

I've lost a handful of Bloc members - if a revolution overturns the government, the new nation will usually exit, though you can get them back through the above steps if you want. A couple of times they've just left for seemingly no reason. Occasionally they've been conquered, usually when African unrecognized coastal nations get defeated by European colonizers. I've been tempted to weigh in on the Diplomatic Plays here to defend the nations but haven't done it yet. I might get to a point where my military is strong enough to scare opponents into backing down, or I may reach a day where I want the excuse for a war against European frenemies, but for now it just isn't worth it: there are plenty of fish in the sea, for every nation I lose I'm gaining another 5-10. 

 

 

A few final thoughts before I wrap up this post:

The music is awesome! I've hit that point that I generally reach in Paradox games where it's running through my head all day long, even when I'm away from the computer. This music has a distinct sound, occupying a separate space from Stellaris's orchestral splendor, Europa Universalis's frenetic heavy-metal driving force, and Hearts of Iron's nostalgic mid-century tunes. I've recognized quite a few Victoria melodies as coming from hymns, while others are rousing marches. Overall the music tends to be very pretty and pleasant, which is great because I'm listening to it a lot!

I'm really enjoying the "tall" gameplay of this particular game, with my core homeland of Belgium just being 2.5 states in Europe while I'm still getting involved in sprawling global webs of economic dominance, colonization and power-bloc shenanigans. While I'm sure that a "wide" game would be more complex, I also am getting the sense that it wouldn't be as complex as a wide game in Stellaris or EU. In particular, you have a single national Construction Queue that defines what your nation as a whole is building, unlike Stellaris where each planet has its own queues and EU where each province has a queue. If two countries are equally rich and advanced, they'll be building the same amount of stuff, it's just that a smaller country will be building lots of things in a few states while a larger country will be building fewer things in more states. And because your nation shares the same market, to some extent it doesn't matter a ton either way - you'll be making glass, whether it's all in Gelre or scattered across multiple continents. The thought of playing Great Britain still sounds overwhelming, but I think I'd be up to try playing, say, America or Spain or something.

All right, that's it for now! I'm enjoying this game so darn much, and it feels like it's flying by. I think the game runs 1836-1936, so I'm already more than halfway through. I don't think I've ever actually finished a Paradox game (unless you count blowing up the galaxy when I Became The Crisis in Stellaris), but so far it's feeling like things shouldn't get too sloggy in the endgame, so this may become a first for me! 

Primary Colors

New year, new county, new ballot!

This was an interesting one, with a high-profile wide-open governor's race in the top spot, and lots of lower-profile positions that I needed to educate myself on. While details vary, I find that my California November ballots generally have very easy lesser-of-two-evils or good-versus-bad choices, while the spring primary can be a lot more fraught, often with my heart and mind tugged in opposing directions. While researching, I also noticed that these days I have fewer trusted sources for endorsements. When I first moved out to California my first stop for election guidance was usually the major newspapers' editorial boards; but these days all media has been corporatized and homogenized, and I usually don't even think to check them, outside of very local minor races.

With no further ado, here's how I'm casting my ballot!

Governor: Tom Steyer (!!!!)

I know, I'm at least as shocked as you are. I came into this election with a strong preference for Katie Porter, who built a fantastic track record in Congress taking on evil megacorps and championing the smallfolk. But I've been very soured by her embrace of "slopulism" in this race, with a good-headline-but-terrible-policy promise to eliminate all income taxes under $100k of income. I could write a whole blog post on this, but it's so terrible on multiple levels. Fundamentally we need to return to an ethos of collective vision, us as a society investing in our nation, creating a civil state that works for us. Moving to an oligarchal system that's exclusively funded by the wealthy will alienate the majority of citizens and place the real power in the hands of the elites who Porter has traditionally questioned.

I can't believe I'm voting for a billionaire, but Steyer is the best of the major contenders. I was moved by the support from Rebecca Solnit and the California DSA (!!!).

Lieutenant Governor: Oliver Ma

Secretary of State: Shirley Weber

Controller: Malia Cohen

Treasurer: Anna Caballero

Attorney General: Rob Bonta

Bonta is probably my favorite person in California politics at the moment. I'm a little surprised he's staying in this position instead of angling for something else, but he's been doing fantastic work, and I'll enjoy seeing him continue, especially in these critical coming years.

Insurance Commissioner: Ben Allen

California's insurance market is another thing that could merit an entire blog post. This is a pretty wide-open race, I feel the most optimistic about Allen in actually navigating the difficult road ahead of us.

Insurance Commissioner is also such a weird race. I think people get elected by denigrating and attacking insurance companies, but when in office the most important job is working productively with them.

State Board of Equalization 2nd District: Sally Lieber

Sally's great!

12th Congressional District: Lateefah Simon

18th Assembly District: Mia Bonta

Superior Court Judge Office #13: Cabral Bonner

Superior Court Judge Office #19: Selia Warren

State Superintendent of Public Instruction: Nichelle Henderson

County Superintendent of Schools: Alysse Castro (uncontested)

District Attorney: Ursula Dickson

Measure A (Peralta community college property tax): Yes

Oakland Measure C (tax exemption for small businesses): Yes

I'm very conflicted on this one! It feels bad to hand out tax cuts while the city struggles with a budget deficit. Every reputable source I could find is endorsing this, so I'll jump on board.

Oakland Measure D (modernize an obscure and mostly defunct retirement system): Yes

Oakland Measure E (property tax): Yes

So, that's that! I hope that the angst around the governor's race this year finally convinces California to adopt ranked-choice instant-runoff voting at the state level. The Top Two primary system has served us pretty well in the last couple of decades, but we've entered a phase now where it's cynically manipulated by leading Democrats to boost Republicans to ease their own elections. The now-fading specter of an all-Republican general election race for Governor will hopefully be enough of a warning call for the state and the party to fix this and get us a more democratic system that lets people vote their conscience instead of keeping an eye on strategy.

IKEA

Another (hopefully) little post on Victoria 3. I've finished my first "training" run. With any new Paradox game, I assume the first game (or three, or five, or ten...) will be a learning experience: I'll make some dumb decisions, belatedly realize why they were dumb, see whether they're recoverable, and get an overall rough sense for how the basics of the systems work. I think I've reached that point in my Sweden run. From the start in 1836, I've played nearly twenty years, through the Year of Revolutions and many other significant events. In that time I think I've done a decent (not perfect) job at growing my economy, and I have radically reformed the laws of Sweden. It's all ended up in an amusing conflagration, though: after losing one war against Russia to defend a breakaway Finish republic, I'm now losing a much larger war against Russia and Prussia for Finnish independence (despite the best effort of my allies Great Britain and the Netherlands), and furthermore, a monarchical revolution has broken out in central Sweden, leading to me fighting on like six different fronts. I'm doomed, but it's fun!

 

Backing up a bit: as I mentioned before, one thing I really love about Victoria is that it is primarily focused on the economic and social aspects of grand strategy games, which (along with technology) are the parts I enjoy most; in other games I'll often grumble when I "have" to fight a war. There's a lot going on in Victoria, but I think the core of the game is trying to make your GDP as large as possible. That directly increases your Prestige, and also allows you to, say, operate a larger military, fund lobbies to increase your involvement, fully fund your social safety net and university researchers, and so on.

 

 

As I figured out how the economy worked, I started to smile: it's exactly like The Wealth of Nations! You're basically encouraging the specialization of your nation's workforce, coaxing peasants to leave their homesteads and take jobs in large farms or buildings in the cities. They become laborers who start earning higher wages, which they use to buy goods and services, which raises demand for more products, which creates more job openings, and so on.

 

 

There's also an element of Thinking Fast and Slow. As your country industrializes, your population's wealth will increase and their standard of living will rise. However, this won't necessarily lead to happiness! If someone was a peasant and starts to work as a laborer, then their income has increased, and they will be a happy pop: loyal to the regime, working hard, increasing their birth rate. But if someone was a clergyman and had to become a laborer because the administration is now secular, they will earn the same wage, but they will be unhappy, and more likely to become Radical.

 

 

A big part of the mechanics of the game is based on building. You, acting through the government, decide what buildings to create and where - a new Iron Mine in Svealand, a Trade Center in Gotland, a Textile Mill in Scania. However, there is also a "private construction" queue. I think the way this works is, as pops in your country gain profits (aristocrats from farms, capitalists from factories, etc.), they create an "investment pool", and then use that money to construct buildings on their own. This runs autonomously of the government. In practice they seem to focus on making profitable buildings and not necessarily ones that follow your own strategy; but these are always good regardless, as they create more jobs, provide more goods (thus lowering market prices), require more inputs (thus creating demand for other goods and stimulating production), and hopefully generate more profit, allowing the private sector to create still more buildings.

An interesting wrinkle is requesting or offering "investment rights" with another country; for example, you could allow Great Britain to build in your own country, or you could get permission to build in the Kongo. This leads to a situation where a building is in Country A, giving it the benefit of job opportunities and producing goods for its market; but the profits go to Country B. Depending on your perspective this is either symbiotic or exploitative, and there are valid reasons to pursue or deny such investments. This aligns with one of the veins of Thomas Piketty's writings in Capital in the Twenty-first Century and Capital and Ideology, and is generally a big subject of discussion through to the present day, and I love seeing it represented in the game like this. 

 

 

I really dig the technology system in this game. Technology passively spreads to you, I think if you have one or more neighbors who have researched it, and more than half of my discoveries have come that way. You can also focus your research on a specific technology; if you already had some passive spread then you will be part of the way there already. Some techs seem to take around 3 years to research, others 10 or more; I focused on the shorter ones in this case, prioritizing ones that provide passive benefits over ones that unlock new equipment or building configurations. Anyways, I like the combination of focusing and driving your priorities while also never worrying about falling too far behind in, say, military tech.

 

 

I also like how colonizing is presented here. In Europa Universalis colonizable land looks empty - there are technically "natives", but visually it's just blank space. Here they are "decentralized" territories, each led by a "chieftain". The game is still depicting the historically accurate European domination over indigenous lands (by this time period primarily African territories), but it's also very clear that there were already people there with their own society, culture and leadership, not empty lands waiting for settlers to arrive.

That said, I never figured out how to colonize in my game. I enacted a law and started a Colonizing Institution which should let me colonize overseas provinces. The thing tripping me up seems to be that you need to have an "interest" in a region to begin a colony there. I was able to get some "interest" by signing various economic pacts with some African states like Kongo, Gaza and Natal. I think that I somehow need to bring "interest" to an even higher tier, but I was never able to figure out how to do that in this game. Which isn't terrible, I didn't necessarily want Sweden to become a colonizing force, but that's the one mechanic I'm aware of that I wasn't able to engage with in this game.

 

 

While construction is probably the most satisfying part of the game for me, politics is the most exciting. This seems to generate the lion's share of events, as things will occur during election season or while debating a new law that will require you to make a decision. The system here is strong: it's primarily oriented around "interest groups", such as Rural Folk or Armed Forces. Each interest group has its own ideology, describing the laws they would favor or dislike; each interest group also has "clout", describing the total amount of power they wield.

 

 

Early in the game, the "Landowners" interest group is very powerful and tends to run the government. Let's say that, long-term, you want to put the Trade Unions in charge. This is a non-starter: while they are plentiful, they are very poor and have almost no power. However, the Industrialists and the Petite Bourgeois are interested in, say, moving from Landed Voting to Wealth Voting. You can pursue a law change to the franchise, which will shake up the factions' clout. Now the Landowners are less powerful, the Trade Unions still don't have power, but the Industrialists and Petite Bourgeois do. This can crack open the door for some other reforms, like more equitable taxation or a public school system, that will materially improve the lives of the working class. This allows them to generate some wealth and improve their standard of living, letting them get a foothold in the Wealth Voting system. Then you might be able to move towards Census Suffrage and eventually Universal Suffrage. The whole system makes sense, is historically accurate, and is basically quoting The Communist Manifesto, hence I love it!

Okay, that's it for now on the Sweden game. I think that next I'm going to try Belgium, one of the other recommended "learner" countries. Wish me luck in the Low Countries! 

Victoria 3

I'm in a short-ish-blog-post kick lately, so let's keep that going! I just started my first game of Victoria 3, the latest in a long line of gifts generously given by my brother. Victoria 3 is yet another grand strategy game from Paradox, the makers of Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron, Stellaris, Crusader Kings and other games of that ilk.

 

 

Starting a new one of these games is always an interesting experience, as certain elements will feel very familiar, but there is still a huge learning curve for the game as a whole. While I may revisit it one day, I was never able to really get into Hearts of Iron IV - I love the idea behind the alternate-history and minor-power scenarios is apparently offers, but the actual gameplay never really clicked for me. So far I'm feeling better about dipping my toes into Victoria - it still feels daunting, on the verge of overwhelming, but for whatever reason I'm finding it a gentler onramp.

 

 

One reason I've been looking forward to Victoria is that its time span, the century from 1836 to 1936, happens to be the era I've been most interested in for the last decade or so. It was the birth of the modern world, of industrialization and capitalism and socialism and railroads and telegraphs and airplanes and electricity. It's the setting of The Birth of Plenty and Against the Day and The Communist Manifesto.

 

 

Just launching up the game, I can immediately tell that it's more modern than my mainstays of Europa Universalis IV and Stellaris. It feels slow to boot up the game and launch, but it's very pretty. Yes, you're still panning over a map of the world and looking at Excel spreadsheets, but they are pretty spreadsheets. And the event-style interactions that pop up here are very attractive, often with some parallax that brings a feeling of depth and motion to what's still a static image. As with the popups in EU4 the images don't always match the text - I would see, like, a group of men in turbans while reading about Swedish industrialists - but I'm not complaining, they still add great atmosphere.

 

 

From what I've seen so far, the laws and technology look a lot like what Hearts of Iron has, an almost Civilization-style tree where you follow from prerequisites to unlocked techs, unlike the more abstract single-pathed advancement of EU4. Unlike EU4 but like Stellaris, Vic3 also has "pops", discrete representations of the people populating your empire, which in turn drive systems like factions, ideologies, needs and so on. But so far the Vic3 pops seem to be presented pretty differently in the UI: in Stellaris you could directly see individual pops on your planet, in Vic3 I've only see the rolled-up summaries of overall numbers.

 

 

Following the game recommendation, I'm starting off with Sweden, which seems like a great choice: they're at peace, are pretty friendly with their neighbors except Denmark, are decently large but nowhere near as sprawling as Britain, have a decent existing base of infrastructure and a ton of choices for growth. I'm finding the tutorial very helpful; I particularly like the buttons "Tell Me How" and "Tell Me Why", that patiently walk through the series of buttons to click to find a particular switch to toggle, and also explain the game concepts that are impacted by this mini-mission.

 

 

So far my focus has been getting a handle on the economy; another thing that's attracted me to this game is the idea that industrial, technological and social advancement are more prominent than military conquest, which aligns with my preferred activities in these games anyways. The economy here seems pretty different from the other Paradox games but I'm digging it so far. There's the overall national economy, which you can slightly influence over the long term but don't directly control: people are automatically finding jobs, migrating, setting prices for things, achieving a certain standard of living, etc. Then there's the smaller sphere of public spending which you can immediately impact through things like adjusting the tax rate and setting public salaries. So some stuff you can immediately act on but has only a minor effect, while other things take a long time to organically grow but ultimately have a far bigger impact.

 

 

The game seems to actively discourage budgetary surpluses, which I found really interesting. There's a cap on how many reserves you can store in your treasury, and exceeding that amount won't benefit your nation. This violates my normal gaming instinct of "Make Number Go Bigger", but it does make sense, both gameplay-wise (spending money today will grant your nation immediate benefits, while saving it will postpone those benefits into the future) and historically (the indebted nations like Britain were the most powerful nations). I'm at a point now where my people are still considered poor, but I can't spend all the money my treasury is taking in even after slashing taxes and boosting spending. Not the worst problem, I guess! But peeking ahead, future laws and reforms will unlike things like educational systems and health care, which I'm eager to fund with my socialist Scandinavian krona.

 

 

Not much story-wise to share just yet. I've researched Railroads, built a few farms, made friends with Prussia, adopted Private Schools and Church Hospitals, and recently adopted Wealth Based Voting, which makes my constitutional Monarchy considerably more dynamic. In general I'm trying to boost the Intelligentsia, and maybe some Industrialists and/or Trade Unions and/or Petite Bourgeoisie, to unlock some more interesting-looking Laws; but in the meantime the Clout is dominated by Landowners and the Church, so I'm trying to maintain overall societal stability while managing a transition.

 

 

If my other Paradox games are an indication, I'll probably keep poking away at this Sweden game for a bit while I get a handle on the interface and at least some understanding of the main systems, then will embark on a "real" game at some point. It's early days yet, but so far I am enjoying them! 

Clowning Around

Just a quick post on a relatively quick and fun read: I devoured Dave Barry's memoir Class Clown over the course of about a week. I've been a fan of Dave's humor writing since I was a kid. Growing up, my family had a collection of his books, which I would read and re-read and return to over the years. My favorite was "Dave Barry Slept Here", a satirical textbook history of the United States, and to this day I still remember a ton of it, including The Monroe Doctrine ("1. Other nations are not allowed to interfere in the Western Hemisphere. 2. But we are. 3. Ha ha ha!"), the Hawley-Smoot Tariffs, "We all go heppin down the wiff-bane", the French and Indian War (which America didn't realize it was supposed to be involved in until several years in, by which time the confused French and Indians had started fighting one another), and so on. It's one of those things along with Weird Al where as I've grown older I've belatedly come to understand the full joke behind something I already thought was funny.

 

He was also a columnist, writing for the Miami Herald but syndicated nationally. I don't recall whether his columns were reprinted in our local paper or not, but I definitely know that in the years since then I've always enjoyed his "year in review" wrap-ups along with any other pieces I see from him.

The memoir is written in his voice and is very funny. He does touch on some sad elements related to his parents early on in the book; despite the limited space available in a book, he gives a fully rounded view of them, emphasizing their love and amazing actions and enormous influence on his humor, while also unflinchingly sharing the struggles they endured and ultimately succumbed to. Other than that and a brief mention of how much worse the political and media landscape has become since the 2016 election, this is a consistently upbeat and amusing book. As he says, and I have no reason to doubt him, he's been lucky to have one of the best jobs in the world.

Dave liberally quotes from columns throughout the book. When he experienced some major event, like appearing on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson or writing for the Oscars with Steve Martin, he definitely got a column out of it, and he'll excerpt from that column here. Probably 90% of those were new to me; there were a few I recognized from one of his books or some other writing, but those also made me chuckle. I think the hardest I laughed during this book was his description of attending a French sommelier competition, which I don't recall having ever heard about before.

I got a big kick out of this book, and definitely recommend it to anyone who already enjoys Dave's writing. It's amazing to see how sharp and funny he is today years after officially retiring. It also reminds me that he's written a lot of books since I was a kid, none of which I've read before now, so there's an unexplored trove of light, hopefully fun and funny books out there for me!