Generals are permanently attached to headquarters in specific regions, which limits where they can actually fight, and you can't reassign them. But that doesn't change the fact that armed conflicts can be very fiddly and confusing. I respect Victoria 3's decision not to focus on war, especially when it excels at most of the things it does focus on. The bigger problem is that wars themselves aren't that great. This can be a fun little game of chicken, as ultimately choosing when to mobilize your troops can give you an edge but also increase tensions, while either side has the option to back down for smaller concessions before it turns into a full-blown war. Launching a Diplomatic Play allows you to make demands, like taking land or forcing someone into a common market, after which both sides can bid to try and bring other countries in on their side. The way conflicts begin is fairly interesting. If you do, though, you'll run into what is probably the weakest area of Victoria 3: warfare and international relations. Opposing interest groups in your own country provide plenty of pushback and make compelling antagonists, even if you never set foot outside your own borders. I love that Standard of Living is its own metric I can measure my success on aside from having the largest GDP or painting the map. This is all well and good if you just want to shape your nation internally and watch a rustic, feudal society morph into a modern metropolis with radios and telephones, which is my preferred way to play. It doesn't really matter that they've "cheated" in some places, because what we got is a system that behaves, in practice, so much more like a real economy, which is awesome. There is a lot of give at the margins to this economic model, like the fact that high and low prices are capped at a certain point and having more buy orders than sell orders doesn't limit the strict availability of basic goods – it just maxes out their price.īut trust me when I say whatever fudging is going on behind the scenes creates a much more robust and authentic simulation than Victoria 2, which tried to be a bit more "realistic" and inadvertently created a lot of problems for itself. Lower prices mean people can afford more things, but also that those industries are less profitable and the people making the things don't get paid as much, so there are a lot of interesting trade-offs to navigate. Supply and demand are modeled by a clever system of buy orders, which represent people wanting things, and sell orders, which represent industries making things, from grain and clothing all the way up to cars and electricity. The richer and more educated someone is, the more things they want, so an illiterate peasant in the 1840s will be happier with less than his great-great-grandkids who are part of the burgeoning, urban middle class in the 1900s. Since wealth will always confer political power, even in a democracy where everyone gets a vote, truly putting power in the hands of the people requires economic reforms just as much as political ones – a bit of realism I rarely see replicated in these types of games.īeneath all of this is a rich economic simulation in which every person – organized into groups called "pops" based on their culture, religion, profession, and place of residence – has a list of needs that they wish to fulfill. However, you'll also be creating barons of the new world: factory owners and captains of industry who want low taxes and no child labor laws. Their power comes from a variety of sources, but early on it's mostly wealth and land ownership, so a handful of aristocrats might have more sway than the millions of peasants they lord over. Political power in your nation is neatly organized under interest groups, which could be anything from the Evangelical Church in America to the educated Literati in China. The main balls you'll be juggling at any given time in Victoria 3 are politics and economics, both of which are deliciously deep and sometimes frightening to interact with. Even with all of that, though, I would still rank Victoria 3 as one of the hardest Paradox games to learn – more in line with Hearts of Iron than Crusader Kings. This is something I'd love to see in more strategy games, since simply explaining what all the buttons do – Tell Me How – usually doesn't give you a working idea of when to press them – Tell Me Why. The best teaching resources Victoria 3 offers are a nested tooltip system, and the ability to select "Tell Me How" and "Tell Me Why" on important game concepts. There is a dynamic tutorial scenario in which you can play as any country, and that will give you a grasp of the basics but not necessarily set you up for mastery.
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