Victoria 3 Review – Golden Tomorrow

When the Game Over screen popped up after ruling the United States for a century for our Victoria 3 review, I looked back a hundred years, much different than what I knew from the history books. There was never a civil war: in Paradox’s version of the story, slavery was abolished more or less without incident in the 1840s, but we were close to a child labor revolution. years later. In 1936, we were no longer “the United States” at all: the nation was a hugely successful anarchist community known as the United Labor Unions of America.

Victoria 3 is loaded to live up to a decade of waiting and has made some bold changes to address the shortcomings of its predecessor. It’s arguably the most beautiful game Paradox has ever made, and perhaps the most welcoming to newcomers. It introduces a fundamental change in the way the series treats the ethics of slavery, work, colonization and the free will of indigenous peoples. However, Victoria 3 presents a shaky outlook at launch: bugs, glitches, and some disappointing design quirks make everything a bit half-baked.

However, the good news is that despite the occasional tremors under the hood, Victoria 3 is still an amazing great strategy game. As president, queen, or president of any country in the world since 1836, she will guide her country through a period of rapid growth throughout the world, primarily by supervising construction and managing industries. Each state or province in your country may have many rural and urban manufacturing centers, government buildings, and military installations where local people will work and earn a living.

What sets the Victoria series apart from other major Paradox strategy games is that it focuses on “pop” units that collectively mimic the various inhabitants of each country. Each population has its own culture, religion, profession, income level, political interests and needs. It is important to note that once they have access to the necessary funds, they will work to improve their lives or become radicalized if they are constantly ignored.

One could easily write a treatise, and has done in a detailed series of Paradox Developer Diaries, written to explain all the moving parts of this 19th century global economic and political model. Fiscal policy, the level of your investment in institutions such as health and welfare, the types of explosives to be used in your iron mines, the tactics your naval battle groups must use, etc. must all be taken into account. A lot depends on the country you choose to start with and your own goals: do you want to become a mighty military power, create a huge industrial empire, or work to create an ideal egalitarian society? Victory 3 is flexible and robust enough to accommodate any of these goals in the context of just about any nation, and I’ve always enjoyed the daily challenges that come with achieving these goals.

In the new industrial world of the 19th century, the answer to almost all questions is expansion and growth. Each industry depends on others both to produce the goods it introduces and to create the demand necessary for its profitability. If I want to make quality clothes, I need a source of dyes and silk; to expand my rail network I need coal, steel and engines. I could convert my furniture production to produce luxury sofas, but I would need experienced workers and special hardwoods, can I dedicate some of my sawmills to producing this material? Is my literacy level high enough to meet the additional demand for educated employees?

Victory 3 is an ever-evolving network of interconnected organizations, businesses, interest groups, armies, and fleets of merchant convoys. All of this takes place on a stunning world map that, when zoomed in, transforms from a shiny model railway to a colorful paper map with beautiful lettering when zoomed in. Industry, railways and wars come to life in close-ups, while active war fronts light up with raging fire on the paper map.

Warfare and diplomacy are handled by new systems in Victory 3. Any hostile action, be it an outright conquest or a request for a change of policy such as the abolition of slavery, begins with a diplomatic game that interests third countries. the region has the opportunity to have a say and influence the outcome. When it comes to armed conflicts, my contribution is limited to sending generals to specific fronts and activating recruiting posts: the officers themselves decide where to fight. It remains for me to determine where all the cartridges, tanks and recruits come from.

The new system does two things: it prevents Victoria 3 from veering too abruptly into wargame territory, and it elegantly illustrates the simple, modern truth that war itself is just another product of industrialization.

Because everything is interconnected in Victoria 3, it’s hard to talk about a particular element without finding a lengthy explanation of the entire game, however, the revamp of the outdated colonial system deserves special attention. Whereas in Victoria 2 the settlements were modeled as simply empty places on the map ripe for exploitation, the populated regions of Victoria 3 are controlled by indigenous peoples, collectively referred to as “delegated authorities”. This is a major design change that allows colonized humans to gain independence and then play as a sovereign nation for the rest of the game. For my next campaign in the United States, I plan to move to the Haudenosaunee, whose former land I am sitting on as I write this review.

Unfortunately, all of these ambitions come at a price. The version I was playing was somewhat glitch-prone (perhaps due to my ultrawide screen), and during my US campaign it slowed down to a painful rate as I used the new “lens” system to rapidly create many items from one and he himself writes. in all my states. The graph showing my weekly budget would often break and the line would stick out from the edge of the popup like an overzealous “tonks” meme. When revolutions began around the world, the names of the countries involved were often not displayed in diplomatic game windows. Instead, you would see a chain of encoded instructions to get those names.

This is something that could be fixed with patches early on, but there are more worrying issues with Victoria 3. By design, I don’t have direct control over my population, but some of the information is intentionally hidden and I thought it should be available. . For example, you should be able to see why people are being radicalized or which of the goods they need are too expensive. Instead, I have to calculate it in my head. Victoria 3 is great at giving me a lot of information about the demographics of my states, but it doesn’t allow me to “survey” a specific population to find out what their most pressing issues are.

This exacerbates the deeper problem of constantly feeling alienated from my fellow citizens. For a game that has so much to do with people, I feel like I always keep them at a distance. My decisions have a noticeable long-term impact, but I never see how they change anyone’s daily life. Instead, I am left to evoke that sentiment based on cold data on literacy, living standards, and interest group attractiveness.

All this to say that Victoria 3 remains an outstanding achievement and will only gain interest over time. It’s a lot to understand, but Paradox has integrated a new portable learning system into a work journal that will give you your main goals and tell you Why Are important. The magazine provides guides for different styles of play and also helps you get started on big projects like building your first skyscraper, mapping the South Pole, or building the Panama Canal. It’s a stylish way to attract newcomers and add a touch of history to what can sometimes be very commercial.

The most concise way I can describe Victoria 3 is that it is a fascinating working model of liberal international relations theory, a rejection, or at least a critique, of the simpler, more realistic notion that brute force is the way to go. only variable that really matters. . . Victory 3 shows that the internal structures, institutions and happiness of a nation are just as important as the number of battalions it can field or the number of warships at sea.