Glassworks for Gelre

I continue to be obsessed with Victoria 3. I recently was on vacation for nearly a week, and for most of the time I caught myself thinking about my current campaign, hearing the music in my head, plotting strategy and reviewing previous decisions.

 

I'm now well into the 20th century. This game does a fantastic job at depicting the enormous changes that occurred in the world within the span of two generations: from a predominantly peasant-based agricultural society to one with telephones, airplanes, power plants and more. As well as an explosion in new ideologies and movements, including Communism, anarchy and fascism.

 

 

I'm mostly writing this post to jot down a few notes. I plan to play through to the 1936 end date - if so, it will be the first time I've ever actually finished a Paradox game!

 

 

One new mechanic in V3 is Expeditions. There are various options, like searching for the source of the Nile, mapping the American West, being the first to the South Pole, etc. The mechanics for this are fairly simple. You appoint a General or Admiral to lead the expedition, and pay a monthly fee to support the expedition costs. Each month, there's a chance of an event firing, which generally describes some scenario your expedition has encountered (suspicious natives, illness, rockslide) and lets you make a choice. You're trading off Progress and Peril: you want to fill your Progress bar before your Peril bar fills. Based on my experience, it seems like the best strategy is to avoid Peril whenever possible: it's better to pick a choice that makes Minor Progress and no Peril than one with full Progress and Minor Peril.

 

 

I'd successfully done a few African expeditions and thought I had a handle on them, then started the Tibet one, which turned out to be significantly different. This one doesn't have a Peril bar, and instead you're basically racing against the clock: you need to reach Lhasa and negotiate with the leader before your commander dies or war breaks out. At one point a Diplomatic Play triggered, and I got pretty confused. I went down a rabbit hole of demanding them to become a subject; they were Fearful but never backed down. When the war started, there was nothing to do: no Front ever appeared. I went so far as to write a post on the official Paradox forum to try and figure this out - I'll have more details below, but the upshot is that this expedition probably shouldn't have even been possible for me since I didn't share a land border with Tibet, and is likely one of the many wonky things that have cropped up in the wake of the Great Wave update.

 

 

I was able to reload a save game from just before the Diplomatic Play - fortunately V3 is more forgiving than other Paradox games and you can still get Achievements without Ironman enabled. The Diplo Play fired again. At first I tried to drag it out as long as possible - each time you add a War Goal or call another party into the conflict, the timer pauses for a bit, so I was hoping I could complete the Expedition before it fired. Tibet stayed Fearful for the entire time, but still wouldn't back down. I eventually let the timer proceed into the last phase, and this time they did back down. I think that it's because this time I had a very benign Primary War Goal - I think it was just Humiliation or maybe a small monetary fine - while my Secondary War Goals were more major, like subjecthood and lots of forced goods transfers. (I was trying to pick as many War Goals for as little Infamy as possible.) I think that, basically, they did the math that just giving in would be relatively harmless, while fighting and losing the war would be much more painful; in contrast, the first time around my primary goal was incredibly painful and I didn't have any secondary goals, so they didn't have anything to lose from war.

 

 

After they backed down, the expedition ticked a few more times and I completed it. The writing in this, like all of the events, is really good: the short vignettes are really powerful at setting atmosphere and stakes in just a sentence or two. The writing style reminds me a lot of Failbetter Games' writing; I know Alexis Kennedy helped with writing on Stellaris and am curious if he helped with V3 as well, or if Paradox has just learned good lessons from those games.

At the end of this I had Tibet as a subject, which is cool and all, but not all that helpful. Again, they're a distant, land-locked nation. They immediately demanded that I give them control of their own market; I initially refused, then realized that they did need it, since they had no way to access my own market. 

This gets back to the issue I had before with no Front. In Victoria 3, you can sign treaties with other nations for Military Access and/or Transit Rights, which respectively allow you to march armies through a nation's territory and to trade through their territory. Conceptually, I feel like if I have a treaty for movement through China, then I should be able to land troops in China and march them through to Tibet; or I should be able to trade from Tibet through China and out to my market via the ocean. As I've learned, though, this is not the case. You can't "land" troops or trade directly into a foreign nation, whether or not you have a treaty with them: they only allow you access starting from land you yourself own. This is where "treaty ports" come into play: these are small, single-province territories that generally have very few resources or arable land but do give you strategic footholds into distant lands. So, long story short, I should be prioritizing getting Treaty Ports if I want to conduct military operations on another continent. For trade, my general preference is to get a coastal nation to join my trading Power Bloc and then work my way inland; unfortunately, in east Asia all of the nations are insular, isolationist and xenophobic, so it's incredibly difficult to get the necessary Influence advantage. I'm still trying to figure out how to connect to Tibet.

 

 

Moving on to politics: I mentioned in my last post that I was having a hard time passing the Laissez-Faire law. The only interest group that ordinarily supports it is the Industrialists, and they were very unhappy with me due to my strong pro-labor positions, and had low clout due to my Universal Suffrage voting, and seemed particularly reluctant to join larger parties; when they did, the ideological incoherence tended to make those parties non-starters for forming government. I did eventually get to pass the law; I forget now whether that's because a Market Liberal became a party leader of another interest group, or if the Industrialists were finally able to make it into government. The Trade Unions were incensed that I was even considering the law, but I had banked a lot of approval with them from my earlier laws; I think I was able to neutralize their opposition by promising to pass Workplace Safety Protections or similar, so I was glad to still have that bargaining chip up my sleeve.

 

 

My private sector has grown a lot since adopting Laissez-Faire. I don't usually pay a ton of attention to it, it just grinds away in the background building stuff, and I'll pick up the slack for any necessary goods it under-develops. Every once in a while I'll peek into the Private Construction Queue and see what it's up to. One time I did that and burst out laughing. It had queued up twelve Railroads in Timbuktu. Timbuktu had a single railroad, which, granted, was running at capacity and earning a respectable profit; but still, it was a massive overinvestment into a remote backwater. I'm sure that the "dumb" AI just saw the current profit and decided to jump on board. But the thing that cracked me up is, that is exactly what happened historically with railroad constructions! The mid-to-late 1800s were filled with ventures where multiple competing railroads would pour into an area, overinvest, overbuild, and be left with too much infrastructure that was earning too little to be profitable. That story has cropped up in House of Morgan, Goliath, and more. Anyways, it just cracks me up that one thing can both seem like a really dumb AI bug and an accurate historical representation of our real-life stupidity.

It's been interesting to see how politics have shifted. In the monarchial days, I tended to have high Legitimacy with a power base that included the Intelligentsia and some other IGs, so I was able to generally progress through reforms I wanted. Once we switched to a democracy, I put a strong thumb on the scales for a Trade Union / Intelligentsia party; this had fairly low legitimacy, which I partially offset with low taxes and concessions. Over time this party grew very strong, and I finally started to have more Loyalists than Radicals due to the continued high legitimacy. More recently, the Catholic/Conservative party has consistently been stronger. Now that I no longer need to pass particular laws, I've shifted my strategy from boosting my preferred party to instead checking what party is in the best position at the start of an election, and then taking all the choices to further boost their vote. This ensures that they take office with a high Legitimacy; I've been able to run High Taxes while also maximizing my Loyalists for a couple of decades now. High Loyalists keeps all the Interest Groups in the neutral-to-happy zone (except the Landowners, but screw them). 

 

 

I think that the reason the conservative party has been stronger lately is because of my advancement and wealth. I've been shifting to more advanced production methods, which has more demand for skilled labor and middle-strata jobs; I think this results in a shift to a populace that proportionally is more likely to favor the Petite Bourgeois over the Trade Unions. Historical materialism, baby!

I've been really happy with the shift to Laissez Faire, which as hoped has turbo-charged my economy. The budgets have gotten really weird: for the first decade or so, I persistently ran a large deficit, and yet my treasury was usually near the max. I think this is because the private sector keeps buying government-owned buildings, which impacts the treasury with one-off transfers but doesn't show up in the budget. I slashed taxes and still had a hard time staying under the maximum reserves, until I eventually grew my military large enough to eat up the surplus.

Speaking of armies: as I mentioned in my last post, I've had a few wars against the Netherlands. I've surpassed them with my tech, economy and military, but I've had to be strategic in my wars so they don't call in too many powerful allies; in particular, I've tried to wait until Great Britain is tied up in a half-dozen conflicts. I eventually conquered their continental holdings, seizing the remainder of Gelre and all of Holland and Friesland. However, I did not take Luxemburg, which I now hugely regret. I'd been friendly to them, supporting their independence, and had a vague idea that I might be able to diplomatically annex them. That isn't a thing in Victoria 3, though. They did break free of the Netherlands, but were just their own state; I could guarantee their independence, but again, that wouldn't actually add them to my territory. This was a bummer because I just needed their province to be able to form the United Netherlands, one of my few concrete goals for this campaign.

 

They got gobbled up by the German Empire, which then prompted me to shift my entire diplomatic outlook. I ended my campaign-long rivalry with Russia and boosted my friendship with France, hoping that one of them would start a war that I could join against Germany, who I was no longer appeasing. I also seriously cranked up my military. I'd had far more than enough for the Netherlands, but not nearly enough for Germany; worse, Germany was allied to Britain, which is friendly with me but has the world's largest army and an even larger navy. I'd been neglecting military techs for most of the campaign, but made a concerted effort to try and get a generational advantage in my ship designs.

 

 

The actual war for Luxemburg was huge. I secured an alliance with France and declared on Germany specifically for that one teeny tiny province in German Wallonia. Britain joined Germany, and so did Russia. Britain was fighting a bunch of other wars at the same time and never landed troops in the continent, but I had to play hide-and-seek with their navies: I would sink supply ships and blockage ports around the North and Baltic Seas, then scurry back to Holland once Britain's stack of 120 Modern Ironclads appeared on the horizon.

 

 

The war was a slog - I had an advantage in quality, but Germany and Russia had infinite manpower to throw in front of me. I made gradual progress on the front along the Rhineland and Alsace-Lorrance, but no progress in Wallonia. I eventually set that as a Strategic Objective, which I think may have prompted my generals to change their focus along the front. I feel like they should have done that anyways, as getting the War Goal is so essential for victory. Once I did have it, I switched my generals' orders from Advance to Defend and waited a few months for the war enthusiasm to drop low enough. At last - tada! - I had my United Netherlands.

 

 

A little while after this, France somewhat surprised me by launching their own war against Sardinia-Piedmont. I shouldn't have been surprised, France has been fairly war-hungry for the whole game; now that I have Luxemburg I think I'll probably gracefully drop that alliance. But it ended up working out pretty well. Portugal answered Sardinia-Piedmont's call to arms, and in exchange for my own support I was able to make a secondary demand of Portuguese Angola. This is adjacent to my huge colonial holdings in the Congo, and covers a ton of coastline and adds significantly to my stock of potential rubber plantations (and, just as importantly, removed non-Belgian rubber from the World Market). Russia was also pulled into the war, with France making some nonsensical demand for like a regime change in Chechnya or something.

I was feeling good about this war, but was shocked to realize that all of my battalions were at 0% Organization, hamstringing their effectiveness. The UI for this was very unhelpful, claiming that there was a supply shortage and the "supply ships" were delivering 0 supplies. I eventually realized that it was due to a shortage of radios in particular. Which is weird, since I hadn't discovered radios yet - weirder yet, nobody on the planet had! I think that I had discovered a more advanced unit type (probably Mobile Artillery or something) and upgraded my battalions to that type, but that type apparently requires radios, even if they don't exist. Annoying. I think the game should warn you if you're trying to research and/or switch to a unit type you can't actually use. (Ideally the Radio tech would be a prerequisite for techs that require Radio, but I don't think they currently have any way to manage dependencies between the Production, Military and Social tech trees.)

So I switched up my research plans to drop everything and discover Radio. This took about 9 months; in the meantime, I was able to completely take the totally undefended Angola despite 0% Organization. I had a lot of troops along the Rhone front, I set them all to Defend and let France do all the heavy fighting. (Hey, they started the war!) Eventually I discovered Radio, was able to switch my existing Electrics Industries to start building them, and gradually get my forces Organized again and eventually assigned to advancing the front. Once we were all pushing together, we were able to take down Sardinia-Piedmont.

They surrendered, but the war continued. I'm still getting used to the Victoria 3 system of war. You can't negotiate a peace unless all parties in the war agree to it, including co-belligerants; but anyone can Capitulate at any time. If you do this you leave the war, but co-belligerants stay in it. S-P gave in on all the War Goals against them, but I still didn't own Portuguese Angola, because that goal was against an ally.

I shifted my focus to invading Iberia. I would have loved military access through Spain, but Spain hates me for reasons I no longer recall. So I did my first, and so far only, Naval Invasion. I think this is another new feature from the recent Great Wave update. I didn't have any Marines or anything, but I had a good-sized army of about 54 Infantry and Artillery, and a big Transport fleet to get them to Iberia. Portugal's armies teleported back from the Rhone, but they were pretty small. I was able to get a toehold, then could transport the rest of my armies there regularly. Before long Portugal surrendered and I got my Angola. As I write this Russia fights on, which is pretty funny - they don't have any War Goals assigned to them, so there doesn't seem to be any point, other than maybe inflicting pain on France. I don't really care about anything else in this war so I've preemptively demobilized my troops and am letting France do what it wants, which at the moment seems to be launching doomed naval invasions of Karelia.

That seems to be a good place to pause this update and jump back into the game! I don't have any other conquests planned on the horizon, and I think that once I end my alliance with France I should be free from getting pulled into or being targeted by other wars. The one other thing I'd kind of like to try and get is Multiculturalism, which seems to be even harder than Laissez-Faire since none of the Interest Groups support it, nor any of the major ideologies in Belgium/United Netherlands like Liberalism or Radicalism. It looks like I might need to trigger some sort of revolt or uprising to get it. Anyways, that's another system for me to try and learn; in the meantime, I'm having a blast just growing my economy, increasing my GDP and literacy rate and standards of living. Fun times!

Our Town is a Company Town

I've had Company Town by Madeline Ashby on my list for a while now. I think I was originally drawn to it via a warm recommendation from Charles Stross. I wasn't sure what to expect, as I wasn't familiar with the author and wasn't even sure exactly what genre it was. It ended up being a fun, exciting and thought-provoking read.

 

MINI SPOILERS

Like many of my favorite books in speculative fiction, the worldbuilding in Company Town is almost all implicit: nobody sits you down and says "This is How Things Are and How They Got To Be This Way". Over the course of the book, though, you gradually figure out the setting, in parallel with getting to know the characters and the actual plot.

So, laying down my impression, which is much more linear than the actual book:

Company Town is set in the mid-future: I'd guess a couple of generations from now, not multiple centuries. Nations still exist, but mostly as geographic descriptors, not political entities. This book takes place in what used to be Canada. The titular town is a massive offshore oil rig. Its primary economy is extracting oil, but there's a whole town that has grown up around that industry, which is larger than the work itself.

A few years before this book opens, a disaster occurred that killed many people in the town. They were able to rebuild, but at enormous expense, which has resulted in the town being sold to the Lynch Corporation. This is a wealthy and comparatively benevolent family concern, headed by the elder Lynch who has been pursuing life-extending treatments and so is overseeing multiple generations of his progeny.

The overall technology of this world is recognizable, with a few particular innovations standing out to me. Genetic screening and modification have recently become widespread and socially accepted, so parents will select their childrens' traits in advance. People are also significantly augmented, with bio-engineered limbic upgrades and eye enhancements and such. And speaking of eye enhancements, most people participate in a sort of shared augmented-reality version of the world: they select what image they want to project to others, and decide what images they want to receive. In general this allows people to edit out parts of their vision that they don't want to see or replace it with something more palatable.

The protagonist, Hwa, is kind of an oddity in this world. She was born near the tail end of non-genetically-selected humans. She has a birth defect that would horrify some people, except that since everyone else has selective vision, they don't see anything wrong with her. And she has, out of pride or poverty, rejected implants, making her way through life with just her own strength.

It took me a while to realize that Hwa is also a high-schooler. She comes across as significantly older in the opening chapters. One of the major industries in the town is prostitution, and Hwa is a bodyguard who escorts the escorts, picking them up from clients and making sure everything is consensual and safe. Many of the characters in this novel are prostitutes, and overall it seems to be pretty sex-work-positive, although there's also a lot of danger shown in the profession.

For most of the novel, Hwa's job is protecting the young Lynch scion, putting her bodyguard skills to use protecting him from an unknown enemy; they also attend class together, collaborate on science projects and go to a dance. Hwa also grows closer to Daniel, a protector/enforcer for the Lynches, which turns into a pretty great slow-burning romance.

MEGA SPOILERS

The brutal murders continue to pile up as the novel progresses. There's a pretty fun twist near the end, when you realize that all along the killer has been trying to stop Hwa, not murder Joel Lynch. I was surprised by who the killer actually turns out to be, although we've spent fairly little time outside of the main cast and so I struggled to remember what we knew about him.

The book definitely seems to set up a sequel when it ends, particularly with the revelation that the killer(s) were not the entity that had sent the threatening notes about Joel. I have no idea what to make of that.

END SPOILERS

I really enjoyed this book - I read it during a vacation, and it was a great place to lose myself during long flights and while nestled in quiet spaces. As far as I can tell it doesn't look like there's a sequel, but the author has written several other books and I'll likely be looking for them in the future. Overall it was a fun read with good action, some really witty dialogue, nicely twisty plotting, and an intriguing world to reveal. 

What's So Great About the Great Books

I like reading books, and I like writing about reading books, and I like writing about reading books that write about reading books!

I just finished "What's So Great About the Great Books?", the latest book and first non-fiction book from Naomi Kanakia. It's a great, thoughtful, gently persuasive case for the seemingly-daunting task of reading through "the classics", the received-wisdom (but surprisingly amorphous) list of the greatest books ever written. She roams around a bit, looking at the contents of the books themselves but also directly addressing the many reasons why people may be reluctant to embark on such a time-consuming project.

 

 

For the last few years I've followed along with this project through her blog Woman Of Letters, which launched as a Substack in part to promote this book's project, and since then has also become a place to read intriguing short fiction (as well as some really fun and occasionally catty inside-baseball glimpses of the literary fiction world). Some topics from this book have been previously discussed on there, such as the importance of taste and the value in reading authors from diverse eras as well as diverse cultures. I liked how everything came together in this volume, each chapter is nicely focused but the book as a whole coheres and can easily refer back to previous points.

While this isn't exactly a memoir, it does draw on a lot of autobiographical material, both the overall course of her life and specific meaningful moments within it. This doesn't feel at all gratuitous: the book aims to show how reading the Great Books can change your life, and shows that in a concrete way. She also shows how her own understanding of the Great Books has changed: when she started reading them, she was an aspiring science-fiction author, and assumed that all writers and publishers were immersed in the Great Books. Only many years later did she realize that most writers have not seriously studied these books, either in school or outside of it, and that today that classics have only marginal influence inside academia.

I like how Naomi keeps restating the premise of the book - she uses different language at different points, but the overall thrust is that reading the Great Books is a good use of your time, because it will help develop your sense of taste. It does this by exposing you to very well-written literature, and literature from cultures unlike our own, so being exposed to this greatness helps you recognize greatness. Having this taste won't directly transform your life: it won't make you more employable or popular, but it can improve the quality of your life and make you more thoughtful. In her own experience, she can't say "Reading X helped me do Y", but the overall experience of reading Proust was profound, and reading about the struggles of characters in eighteenth-century novels gives language for us to describe our own situations.

The book spends a lot of time considering the intersection of politics and the Great Books. Historically, the Great Books as a concept started as a middle-class American invention in the post-WW2 era. This was a time when the elite institutions like Harvard stopped requiring Latin and Greek, so there was a desire to still share those ancient stories to a larger audience. Academics thought that people reading these great books would help make the populace more educated, thoughtful, better citizens. Encyclopedia Britannica sent its salesmen door-to-door selling subscriptions to the Great Books; their direct goal was profit, and the vision they sold was that people would be able to raise their social and cultural capital by learning to speak about these great books. Interestingly, this was especially effective in many African-American homes, and you can still see a lot of Great Books on the bookshelves of older black peoples' homes.  In a survey Encyclopedia Britannica commissioned to study who was buying the books, they found that they tended to be weird, loner nerds, who loved books but felt awkward in high society, and saw the books as a potential gateway to entering that world.

Today, interest in the Great Books in America tends to be aligned with Christian, traditional, conservative groups. The classics tend to be either ignored or viewed with suspicion by progressive or liberal readers, which includes most of secular academia and the publishing world. Naomi seems to be primarily writing to this latter group, and many chapters consider the objections people might have. Are these books racist? Do they harm society? Can reading them trigger you and cause psychological damage? She takes these concerns seriously, looking at the reasons they are raised and what valid arguments could be made, but continually concludes that the benefits outweigh the risks. In some cases, these books are great because they swim in murky and uncomfortable waters. Or we can learn to see the beauty of their art and not be distracted by the author's prejudices.

I have to say that I think I personally lean more towards the perspective of Naomi's wife, who questions the company that these books keep. I mentally sort art as inferior to politics: beauty is wonderful, but survival is more important than beauty. That said, What's Go Great About the Great Books? comes at politics-and-art from a slightly different angle. I'm used to arguments about, say, whether we should praise and study works like "Triumph of the Will" or "Birth of a Nation" that are impressive artistic achievements with horrendous messages. Naomi, though, sees art as inherently individualistic. Experiencing a work of art doesn't mechanically move you in a given direction. If it moves you at all, the effect will depend on your own private history, culture, community, prior beliefs, concerns in life, and so on. As one example, Anna Karenina is beloved by many people who identify as leftist, even though the novel is explicitly about traditional morality. Reading Anna Karenina won't mechanically transform you into a traditional moralist.

Or to directly quote from the book: 

To reduce the Great Books to politics is to make a fundamental mistake about the nature of reading. A book does not make us do or think anything. In reading the book, we might alter our own beliefs, but we changed ourselves - the book does not change us. So, to say certain books are bad is to, as its core, make an assumption about free will: to assume that books can act mechanically on human beings, such that human beings are helpless to judge or resist them. But if human beings can determine their own beliefs, then books cannot be pernicious; they can only be better or worse tools for achieving whatever purpose the reader intends for them.

Then a footnote adds:

An exception to this statement is books that lie. These are books that make arguments that are easily disproven, using either surface-level logic or empirically attained evidence.

Reading that, my mind immediately goes to books that have had a pernicious effect on civilization: the Turner Diaries, the Malleus Malleficarum, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The latter two books definitely lie, the former is a novel. What does it mean for a novel to "lie"? And does it matter that most people believed the lies? To be fair, I don't think any of these books or books like them are part of the Great Books canon, but still, I think there's a gap between our ideal vision of a noble reader thoughtfully and sensitively communing with a work of literature, and the actual measured impacts that some books have caused in generating murders.

Naomi says that books with "perfect politics" can't be Great Books, because they're too flat, missing the complexity and contradiction that reflect real life and are present in great literature. Emile Zola has complicated politics, Upton Sinclair has perfect politics, but The Jungle isn't a good book, because its protagonists are too perfect. I agree that complexity is essential for greatness, but I also think that you can have good complexity or bad complexity. George Saunders might be my Platonic ideal of good complexity - his characters are messy and flawed, but there's a keen moral voice at work in his work. You can still wrestle with a hard problem and its rough edges while always being within a bounded moral area. Would Saunders' stories be better if they earnestly espoused racism or homophobia? They'd be more "complex" but worse.

I'm reminded of recent discourse on and about Bluesky - there's a recurring charge that it's an "echo chamber". Which is kind of funny, because there's nonstop heated argument and debate on there. But on Bluesky it's mostly leftists arguing with liberals. Would the discourse be elevated if the Bronze Age Pervert and Matt Walsh and Curtis Yarvin were a key part of the discourse? I think not - it would be more "complex", but wouldn't elevate worthy ideas above their current exercise. As in the Brain-Dead Megaphone and Nexus, adding more information does not always and mechanically bring us closer to goodness or truth. It has to be good, true information to begin with.

But again, I think all this is somewhat orthogonal to Naomi's thesis. We aren't talking about the Turner Diaries, we're talking about Huckleberry Finn and Aristotle and Nietzsche. These are specifically great books, written by people who died a long time ago and were writing to and about a world that no longer exists. There are good things we can get out of those books, and we shouldn't let our present concerns prevent us from their goodness.

Shifting topics a bit: Kant comes up several times during this book. I haven't read him, but I really like the idea presented here that we can know an object or truth through intuition, not through reason. Logic and reason let us communicate ideas, but those ideas only exist within our minds; actual objects do exist, but we cannot discover them through reason. But art can be a way for us to directly experience and understand those things which cannot be explained. This reminds me a little bit of Kierkegaard, who I have read and enjoyed, and similarly draws a strong boundary between logic and faith: faith isn't necessarily less valuable or important than logic, but exists independently of it.

The appendix to the book includes the list of Great Books that Naomi has been following. As she explains, while plenty of people are eager to extol the virtues of The Great Books, they tend to be very cagey about exactly what books are on or off the list. A handful are indisputable (no list would omit The Odyssey or Shakespeare), but when you start deciding who is in or out you'll inevitably get drawn into arguments. So it's mostly coincidental that this is the specific list she's followed.

Anyways, I like lists too! Just for fun, I noted below which of these Great Books I've read. Ones I mark with a * are cases where I've read only part of a book (typically a collection of poems or essays). Like Naomi, I count books that I know I've read even when I don't remember them well. I think I read The Mayor of Casterbridge for English class in either my junior or senior year of high school, but I couldn't tell you anything about it today.

I read a lot of these books in high school or in college: I was an English Literature major, so many were very relevant! I more clearly remember the ones I've read since then as an adult. I am not counting plays that I've seen but not read, and obviously not adaptations like movies. 

Anyways, I have read: 

The Epic of Gilgamesh by Anonymous

The Iliad by Homer

The Odyssey by Homer

Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

Antigone by Sophocles

The Histories by Herodotus

Lysistrata by Aristophanes

The Birds by Aristophanes

Protagorus by Plato

Phaedo by Plato

The Aeneid by Virgil

* The Divine Comedy by Dante Aligheri

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Prince by Machiavelli

The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare

Henry IV, Part 1 by Shakespeare

Henry IV, Part 2 by Shakespeare

Hamlet by Shakespeare

King Lear by Shakespeare

Macbeth by Shakespeare

Othello by Shakespeare

The Tempest by Shakespeare

* Selected Sonnets by Shakespeare

* Selected Works by John Donne

Discourse on Method by Descartes

Paradise Lost by Milton

* Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan

* Second Treatise of Government by John Locke

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

* Basic Documents in American History by Thomas Jefferson and others

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

Kubla Khan by Coleridge

Pride and Prejudice by Austen

* Nature by Emerson

* Selected Essays by Emerson

The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne

* Selected Tales by Hawthorne

* On Liberty by John Stuart Mill

* Short Stories and Other Works by Edgar Allen Poe

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Walden by Thoreau

Civil Disobedience by Thoreau

The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels

Moby-Dick by Melville

Bartleby the Scrivener by Melville

* Selected Poems by Whitman

Madame Bovary by Flaubert

Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky

* Collected Poems by Emily Dickinson

Huckleberry Finn by Twain

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

Ulysses by James Joyce

The Trial by Kafka

The Castle by Kafka

Brave New World by Huxley

The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner

* Short Stories by Hemingway

Labyrinths by Borges

Dreamtigers by Borges

Pale Fire by Nabokov

Animal Farm by Orwell

Nineteen Eighty-Four by Orwell

* Collected Poems by Auden

The Plague by Camus

The Stranger by Camus

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez

 

Looking through this list, the biggest surprise for me is my lack of Dickens - he has a lot of books on this list, I've read some of his work but nothing on the list. The list and Naomi's recommendation also reminds me that I want to read more of the great Russian novelists - Crime and Punishment was an incredible book, and A Swim in a Pond in the Rain exposed me to a lot of great short stories from Russians. I'm pretty sparse on poetry and drama, and feel fine about that; most poetry leaves me cold, and I'd usually prefer to see a staged performance of a play than read the text.

What's So Great About the Great Books? was a treat. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect when I picked it up, and I'm still not sure how best to describe it (a manifesto? an essay? a memoir?), but I know I enjoyed it. I've been a lifelong reader, but definitely an aimless one, veering between authors and subjects based largely on whims. I admire the dedication and earnestness in pursuing such a daunting life-long project to read through all these Great Books. As Naomi says, not everyone will, can or should follow this path: some people are too busy curing HIV to read Proust. But for those of us with the leisure time and attention spans to read, we can get a lot from these old, great books.

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!