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!