Video Games

Victoria 3 Preview: Grand Strategy, but Make it Grander

Victoria 3, the latest grand strategy game from Paradox Development Studios, puts you at the meeting table of a nation’s throne, presidential seat, parliament, or oligarchic junta from 1836 to 1936. Aspects like the user interface and AI were unfinished, but it proved to be a promising new paradigm for Paradox’s niche strategy series.

Victoria 3, like many other grand strategy games, is for people who like to watch the numbers go up. The trick is that this is a game focused on building a society and building an economy. This is about the final explosive phase of the Industrial Revolution that brought modern wonders such as street lights, trains, cars and globalized trade.

Screen – Victoria 3

That’s the real strength I found in Victoria 3. Army size and damage stats weren’t the only numbers we were looking for to improve. No, I was looking at numbers like job creation, hammers manufactured, universities built, literacy rates, laws passed, political party endorsements, loyal citizens, immigration statistics.

Broadly, it is built around two backbones: social and economic. Everything else stems from it and is much more abstract than manipulating who, when, what, and how much they eat. To deal with it, you work on a deep and interesting economic simulation. This is less complicated and more reliable than others like.

First and foremost, it is an open-ended historical sandbox.


It’s first and foremost an open-ended historical sandbox, and at its core is a way to simulate a population individually. Everyone on Earth needs food, clothing, warmth, and more. All of these commodities must be produced somewhere and contribute to people’s overall quality of life.

It’s all a simple supply and demand principle based on the base price of each item compared to what’s actually sold. Abundance lowers prices, need raises prices. How much it snowballs in profits and how much the people who work there are getting paid…it affects how much they can afford. It’s complicated, sure, but it’s made familiar by a clear, unambiguous screen outlining how the market does or doesn’t work. A lack of clothing on the market may encourage you to invest your money in more textile factories. Maybe your economy isn’t producing enough fabric to support the extra input. increase.

easy to obtain. However, AI has its own goals, ranging from obvious and clever diplomatic alliances to quirky and seemingly random economic choices. Nor did I always understand when to withdraw from a fight. The developers of Paradox made it clear that the nuances of the AI ​​were very unsophisticated and need improvement before release. That’s when we start looking at our developing neighbors. Victoria 3 doesn’t force you into colonization or colonialism, but you certainly understand why it developed. Your strong economy will always come at someone’s expense.

Well, if it’s not someone else’s, then it’s probably your own population bearing the bills. These are pretty abstract, but they still exclude real people from the economy who might work in the fields and factories. These populations, or pops, fall into broad categories such as lower, middle, and upper, and are drilled down by occupation and education. People flock to broad interest groups that must be appeased, appeased, and incorporated into government.

Who is in charge determines the laws that can be passed. Laws can change the basic rules of the game, abolish serfdom and slavery, modernize economic structures, establish functioning health care systems, and more. In short, these political maneuvers allow you to pass laws to improve or change society to suit your vision.

Political maneuvering allows you to pass laws to improve or change society to suit your vision.


However, people get angry when you change things, especially when you change them too quickly. create a police force? The lower class will not like it very much. Force the upper classes to pay a proportionate percentage of taxes? They don’t like it either. Pissing off a group in quick succession radicalizes part of their base. If enough groups with enough things in common become radicalized, they face rebellion. How bad a rebellion is depends on who you offend. Overall, revolution or not, blaze or not, I had a killer time with Victoria 3.

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