Thinking back to the time I spent shaping my Victoria 3 experience with a preview version of Paradox’s next great 19th century strategy game, there are a few specific highlights: the passing of certain early electoral laws in Sweden, the reform of the tax code Brazilian, and the abolition of slavery in the United States without sparking a bloody civil war. You went into Victoria 3 with big ambitions, but found that in the game from moment to moment, I spent most of my time building things.
There is always something to build. I want trains to reach my iron-rich provinces, I need more universities to produce more qualified candidates for technical jobs, more ports to serve my trade routes that bring in materials I cannot produce, and ship goods I sell abroad. to offset my growing construction budget. I need more logging camps, more barracks, more workshops, more farms.
However, Victoria 3 is not just a building game. As game director Martin Anvard explained to me, this is a game about freedom of action. Whichever nation you choose to lead, Victory 3 will be filled with different people, each with their own goals, abilities, and obstacles to your own ultimate power. As circumstances change in their country, these groups take turns finding common ground or contradicting each other. Determining how much power you have and how much you need to collaborate with these groups is at the heart of Victoria 3.
An example might be helpful here. Maybe I want to move to a more efficient filing process for my government employees, more tax opportunities, and a more efficient workflow in general. To do this I will need more bureaucrats and employees, but my educational system does not exist and more than half the country is illiterate. One answer to this dilemma is public schools, but the aristocrats and clergy, powerful and influential groups in my country, are strongly opposed, making passing a public school law almost impossible in the foreseeable future.
To create a public education system, I have to find groups that already support this idea. Unionists agree wholeheartedly, but in the 1840s they are marginalized and politically powerless. If I can change that and get them represented in government in the next election, the future for public schools could be a little brighter. At the same time, I have to look for opportunities to undermine the position of the aristocracy and the church, but this will most likely cost me valuable income later on and risk the radicalization of these interest groups.
There’s a lot of information to sift through in Victoria 3, and the developers made a smart move to put it at your fingertips. The new objective system provides shortcuts to much of this, allowing you to open the respective panels and map mode for trade, war, politics, and more.
Paradox has also taken a big step forward in the learning approach of Victoria 3. When you start a new game, Victoria 3 asks you to select a target. You can choose economic dominance, military superiority, or an egalitarian society. You can also learn to play. You can choose from four suggested starter nations or choose your own; Either way, Victoria 3’s helpful journaling system will ensure a constant supply of quests to complete. When you play Learn to Play the Active Game, the magazine will also tell you exactly how to complete each task and provide the rationale, but only if you ask. The first targets include buttons that say “show me how” and “tell me why,” as well as a button that allows you to skip a particular lesson entirely.
Anvard told me that the Victoria 3 tutorial design is an attempt to address some recurring issues with Paradox’s current approach. The team wanted to make sure players didn’t feel “coached” through a very guided experience and allow them to choose the country they want instead of being forced to leave, something specific like Ireland, Italy or Spain. . Using a registration system that works with any nation also eliminates the need to completely rewrite the manual every time there’s a major update, making it less of a constant hassle in the future.
It works in conjunction with the nested tooltip system introduced in Crusader Kings 3 to make exploring Victoria 3, the last of Paradox’s most notoriously ridiculous grand strategy games, the smoothest experience ever, though naturally it will have a advantage if you do. I’ve spent some time before on Hearts of Iron IV or Crusader Kings 3. For those of us in this camp, being able to skip some of the basics means the Victory Mode 3 “tutorial” is always worth it. a few times and you can go directly to the parts of the new idea.
When I previewed Victory 3, I never participated in a major war, so I don’t have full impressions of the diplomatic gameplay and combat yet. While conceptually I’m pleased with Victoria 3’s innovative approaches in both areas, in practice, during my campaigns, they felt a bit flat. The diplomatic games that emerged almost always functioned as countdowns to war rather than opportunities to resolve crisis in a different way, but that may be due to the limited circumstances in which they emerged in my particular games. .
As Paradox explained, you don’t have direct control over Victory 3 units and that would definitely be a controversial move. In Brazil I fought a ragged uprising on two fronts, but my role was simply to appoint generals and send them to the fronts where the most troops were needed. Thematically, this system makes sense (after all, presidents and prime ministers aren’t interested in the operational command of individual brigades and divisions), but in practice, it didn’t have much to do except build new weapons factories and look for better ones abroad. . trade in arms and warships.
The wars I took part in were also small enough that I never felt a real economic sting from them, although Paradox said making war more expensive was the main design goal of Victory 3. My Economy when I finally got release, but in the local border. wars I participated in, the cost, both in terms of treasures and lives, was easily manageable.
Veterans of Victoria II will no doubt be a bit surprised at how abstract trading here has become. Trade routes between countries are open or not, you don’t have to worry about how much goods you import or export – the right market conditions will determine how much you ship. Seems like another smart move to me: one to-do/less, but it simplifies the decision-making process while creating a more believable simulation of the import/export economy.
There are things I’d still like to see in Victoria 3, like a short list of my open trade routes or a way to quickly open an information panel for a country when I zoom in on one of its components. . states I want the build queue to appear even when I select a state that is not under construction. These drawbacks are more than offset by the number of clever design choices that combine to make Victoria 3 an incredibly enjoyable experience.
While I was impressed with Crusader Kings 3’s beautiful paper map and scenic landscapes, Victory 3 is hands down the best looking Paradox game to date. You can almost feel the ocean breeze as you zoom in to see coastal cities like Stockholm and Boston. Autumn leaves swirl as the train leaves Brussels for Luxembourg, and another beautifully illustrated paper map is revealed on the return journey, with updated cartographic details marked in majestic geodesic script. The presentation, from the map to the user interface, is a visual feast of pleasing semiotics.
Although it is still early. Victoria 3’s release date is October 25, and the preview version we played still had some rough edges: lines of code instead of explanatory text in places, and text marked “the player should never see that” .
However, the overall picture was encouraging. The Victoria 3 dev diaries over the past year have painted a hugely ambitious picture of something like a grand Gestalt strategy game, a Leviathan built from interdependent systems as part of a cohesive whole. From the time I’ve spent with him, I have to say it looks like they managed to pull it off, or at least come close.
“We wanted a game where economics was about politics and politics was about economics,” Anvard told me after the preview period ended. As he explains, the big idea behind Victoria 3 is to let your little ones shape their own future. “How ideologies were formed and how people came to want or not want what they want or don’t want in the game is one of the areas where I think Victoria 3 really shines and where this game is very different from most. ”
Source : PC Gamesn
