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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- After they accept, turn off Fund Lobbies. Turn off Improve Relations if it's still going. Power Bloc Embassy will automatically cancel.
- 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!
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