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! 

Solstice

And, just to put a bow on it, I've wrapped up Heart of Winter, the ancient expansion to Icewind Dale. In some ways this feels similar to Tales of the Sword Coast in that it's an expansion that can either be played as part of the main campaign or at the end. But this experience is a lot more locked-in, and tells a focused story while you're in it as opposed to the more wandering feel of TotSC.

 

On the whole, it feels like a literal "expansion" to Icewind Dale, in that it continues forward the feel and gameplay of the main entry as opposed to changing flavors. You're still in the icy North, visiting tiny hamlets, exploring large lairs and fighting enormous armies of baddies.

 

One thing I neglected to mention in my previous post is that these games have reminded me of just how much I love (and miss) 6-person parties in RPGs. It makes the game feel much more tactical and not just strategic: you can build a proper front line, need to manage your space, try to block out encroaching enemies, and scramble to adapt if you get flanked. I went with a pretty standard loadout for these campaigns with three frontliners, two missile fighters and one useless bard. I know from experience that you can run many other types of parties - in Baldur's Gate 1 it can be fun to run with six archers and nuke down all the enemies from range. I do really think we lost something when RPGs moved to smaller parties; each character gets to shine with more powerful individual abilities, but we've lost the sense of space and positioning and the "shield wall" from those older games.

 

 

I was fairly impressed by the graphics in this expansion, which seem really good for the era. There's one particular cave where creepy eyeballs appear out of nowhere, blink ominously and then fade away. Throughout the game we get various ghostly apparitions, along with the very colorful spells that Infinity Engine did so well.

 

 

For my playthrough, I chose to start a new Heart of Winter campaign from the main title screen, importing characters from my final save from Icewind Dale.  This proved to be slightly tricky, as the Level 1 NPCs I rolled for the start of Icewind Dale also appeared in the party-selection menu and it wasn't very easy to differentiate the inexperienced from the veteran versions. It took just a little trial-and-error to get the whole party set up. Everything imports pretty cleanly, including inventory and spells, with the notable exception that all containers are removed: gem bags, potion bags, Bags of Holding. For the most part I didn't miss the items in those containers, but losing the containers themselves was slightly annoying as I had to do some old-fashioned inventory wrangling. One thing that did bum me out was losing my Potions of Wisdom that I'd been carefully stocking; in the expansion I eventually learned the Limited Wish and Wish spells, but never found any Potions of Wisdom for loot or sale and so my high-level mage wasn't able to safely cast them.

 

MEGA SPOILERS

The specific reason why I disliked losing my containers is because I got zapped to the Luremaster's castle almost immediately after starting the expansion. This is just random bad luck, if I had happened to wander east instead of north I would have hit some shops before visiting the tavern and been able to get new containers.  The Luremaster segment is good story-wise but mechanically it felt rough to be immediately thrown into it without any option to back out (short of loading an earlier save - if I had been underleveled and hadn't kept multiple named backups, it could have been a permanent game-over for me). The Luremaster section seems to have harder enemies than anywhere else in the game. Besides not having access to things like Gem Bags for managing loot, it also doesn't sell many consumables like magic arrows and bullets, and despite coming into the expansion with a huge armament I was nearly empty by the end with no hope of restocking.

 

 

 All those gripes aside, I did really enjoy how unique the Luremaster experience was. It's easy to compare it to Durlag's Tower and Watcher's Keep in that it's a fairly large, optional, stand-alone crawl with its own separate story. But Luremaster brings some big differences: unlike the others, you're locked into the experience from the start and can't dip in and out. The antagonist is especially interesting, and it's cool to gradually get to learn his story: he's an adversary but not necessarily a villain. The puzzles feel decent for this era and game engine.

 

 

By the time I beat the Luremaster, I officially had a Very Powerful Party, and didn't feel very challenged for the whole rest of the game. A big turning point had been getting Iron Skins and Stoneskin on two of my front-liners. There's some magical attacks in this game, so they don't block everything, but the vast majority of attacks are physical and your ranged attackers can usually interrupt enemy spellcasters, so while I wasn't reckless I also didn't feel much need to buff before fights. Looking back, I think the hardest fight in the whole game for me was Yxunomei near the end of... Chapter 2, maybe? That was the only battle where I really needed to do a lot of buffing and laying out some cheese.

 

 

The actual story is cool, though. The backdrop is a tense standoff between the native "barbarian" tribes of the North and the Ten Towns, settlers from the south who have built a small set of trading villages. I think the game pretty overtly references real-world tensions with indigenous people's ownership of land being usurped by powerful outsiders, and how that gets more complicated many generations in to a dynamic.

 

 

As you eventually learn, there's an even older dynamic at play: the great ice dragon Icasaracht  originally ruled these lands before being defeated by humans, and has seen descendants of those same humans being displaced by invaders. The sword that originally killed her kept her soul from being reborn, but the sword was removed at some point. Her spirit merged with that of Wylfbane, a respected chieftain of one of the northern tribes, and brought him back from the dead. Due to the ancient animosity between the tribes and the dragon, the hybrid Wylfbane claimed to have been possessed by the spirit of Jerrod, a legendary hero we've learned of from the original Icewind Dale.

 

 

Wylfbane calls the tribes to a council. The Ten Towns are nervous, anticipating an attack. As traders and craftsmen, they don't have a military to defend against the tribes should they choose to fight. You enter the game around this point to try and negotiate a peace with the tribes. You eventually learn Wylfbane's true identity and reveal it to the tribes. Most of them rebel against her, though the Dragon Clan remains loyal. You eventually hunt down the dragon and kill her. Along the way you've met a woman known as The Seer who helps you, and you eventually realize that she's the one who is narrating the animated scenes between chapters, much like Belhifet narrated the main campaign.

 

 

END SPOILERS

Heart of Winter ended up being longer than I expected, I got nearly two weeks of gameplay out of it. I was going to say that I recommend picking it up, but I think it comes for free with any copy of Icewind Dale you can buy in 2026, so definitely play it as part of the game. For me it worked well as an expansion past the end of the main campaign, and I think the difficulty is tuned to this level, but in the unlikely event I replay Icewind Dale I'd at least try it during the course of the main game. More snow, more ice, more monsters and weapons and XP, along with some juicy Level 9 Mage Scrolls: What isn't there to love? 

Rosy

As was foretold, I have finished Philip Pullman's latest trilogy, The Book of Dust. The final volume The Rose Field is the longest entry yet. A lot happens in it! Let's jump right into some

 

 

MINI SPOILERS

The Rose Field picks up immediately after the end of The Secret Commonwealth, without a time-jump like there was between the first two books. We're pretty firmly in Lyra's world throughout the whole trilogy, primarily following the story of Lyra and Malcolm, but an increasing number of ancillary characters pop up, along with returners from The Secret Commonwealth and a few cameos from His Dark Materials.

This book felt more like The Golden Compass. The Secret Commonwealth had more of a focus on the mundane-ish world of universities, business, politics and religion, while The Rose Field had more monsters and mythical beings, as well as the return of witches and angels and other supernatural elements.

In particular, there's a great long-running side-plot about griffins: we meet some individual griffins, learn about their society and ambitions. This eventually leads into a fantastic assault on a sorcerer's fortress built into a volcanic mountain. This story feels pretty stand-alone, but the characters in it are all very well-drawn, as are the factions and rivalries and things.

I was slightly surprised by how rarely the people in this book referenced the events of His Dark Materials. There are a couple of times when Lyra mentions how she "went north", but she shares (and thinks) almost nothing about the other worlds she discovered. It seems like a really huge deal that The Authority was killed in The Amber Spyglass, but it doesn't seem to have made any impression on Lyra or the Magisterium. That isn't necessarily shocking or a huge problem - I interpreted Lyra's reaction as a PTSD walling-away, and the Magisterium might be cruising along on institutional inertia - but it felt odd to not even reference it in these books.

MEGA SPOILERS 

 I'm not complaining that the trilogy ends here, but as I was getting to the last 50 pages of this book I started to assume that we were in for a fourth novel. It felt like there was way too much stuff to wrap up, and a bunch of new things that dropped immediately before the end of this book, most especially the discovery of the Rose world. It does end, and a lot of stuff isn't wrapped up or explained. It's fine not to know, but to me this felt more like a Neal Stephenson ending where the author runs out of pages, as opposed to a Murakami novel that is peppered with deliberate lacunae.

I won't recount all the loose ends here, but a few that stand out to me include the Asian research station. We get a nice little story over a few scattered chapters about the survivors, the rebuilding, reconnecting with someone who went to the Red Building, an attempt to sell the station, and.... nothing. There's Alice's second life in London as a disavowed Oakley Street spy passing on secret messages; but I don't think we ever learn what those messages were about, or anything that Oakley Street has actually done since passing on the writing stones. There are intriguing insinuations that Thuringa Potash has been involved in the corruption of the Rose World, but their exact role is very unclear. I also was expecting to better understand exactly how the Red Building was staffed: were the guards from the other world maintaining a sort of embassy in Lyra's world, or was this an ancient Lyra-world operation that reached into the other world? And what exactly did Ionides and his lady-friend do in the Rose World? It seems positive, but there's zero indication of what actions they took, and what impact if any that will have on traffic between the worlds.

This book and The Secret Commonwealth seem to have been teasing a Lyra/Malcolm romance. It seems like it gets ejected at the end of The Rose Field, which I'm happy with. There's a suggestion that Malcolm reunite with Alice, which makes me much happier, especially given their bond in La Belle Sauvage. I do wonder what the point of this romance-suggesting was, though. I thought it just made the reader feel uncomfortable and it didn't seem to resolve into anything meaningful.

It was weird to have Bonneville kind of redeemed at the end. He was a very pathetic and put-upon character throughout this book, which had made me feel some sympathy towards him even though he still seemed like a terrible person. It seems like Ionides set him up to be a very effective assassin. I suppose it's never too late for people to turn to good.

Speaking of the assassination, it felt extremely anti-climactic for the Magisterium to lead an army of all of Europe across half of Asia and then never do anything with that army. After all that logistical maneuvering, a couple of soldiers blow themselves up and Delamare gets shivved, The End. There's so much deception swirling around Delamare and I'm still not completely clear on what the purpose of the army was: did he intend to invade the other world? It seems like huge overkill to just blow up the opening when a handful of soldiers have managed all the other portals.

END SPOILERS

There's kind of an explicit wrapping-up of values near the end, but even to the characters in the book it seems a bit tenuous and tentative. The idea of "Imagination" has loomed large over the last two volumes, with characters struggling to even define what it means, to understand why it is important, where it comes from and why it might disappear. I think that, between this trilogy and His Dark Materials, we're left with an impression that as humans we need a combination of imagination and rationality, that the interplay between the two are key to being complete people.

I did enjoy reading this series. It's been a while since I read the first trilogy; I didn't like this one quite as much, but I'm not sure how much of that is due to the books themselves and how much is due to myself. My favorite was La Belle Sauvage, which works really well on its own. Taken as a whole, these do a good job at further fleshing out Lyra's world, adding more mystery and ideas and some great adventurous tales peppered with some almost cinematic scenes. Not a must-read, but a good read.