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!
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