Taking your first steps into Victoria 3 is a little intimidating. Representing an age when warfare is far from the only way to get what you and your country wants, there’s a depth and focus here that is missing from most strategy games. Sure, you can try to stomp across the map and conquer the world, but perhaps it’s better to eke out an economic victory, or seek a more enlightened approach by creating a truly egalitarian society.
Even by the standards of the rest of Paradox Interactive’s grand strategy games, Victoria 3 feels peculiarly abstracted in how you play and manage your country. Instead of directly controlling and managing your nation, you’re more like a grand engineer tweaking and modifying the machine to steer it into one course of action or another — managing the environment as much as you can to ensure continued growth and success.
So yes, you might be able to directly command the construction of a certain industry, but ownership might be in the hands of capitalists or industrialists instead of the state. Your direct benefit will be from the taxes that it provides you, as well as the physical resource passing into your supply chains that support your country’s further industry and requirements — it helps to have a paper mill to create the paper for your government’s bureaucracy, or a tooling workshop to create the fundamentals for more advanced construction, instead of relying on expensive imports, for example.
Each building will also have several different options that affects its output and profitability. Agricultural buildings can have side hustles to create wine, for example, while the aforementioned paper mill can be modified to creating high-quality paper using chemicals to bleach it into the lovely white sheets we’re familiar with today. But, that requires a chemical processing plant to support it. You’re enriching the building and the supply chain, and that in turn helps to enrich your country. Additionally, you must consider both supply and demand, and how all of this affects prices on the open markets and through trade with other countries.
Compared to your typical strategy title, you might be directly commanding that certain buildings are constructed in certain regions, but they don’t fall under your direct control and don’t output to easily glanced-at pools of resources. Similarly, you can’t just pick up segments of your population and move them around at will. Instead, you’re trying to draw people to regions in search of jobs and a good standard of living. Instead of micromanaging, you’re working with the big picture.
All of the world’s roughly 1 billion people are represented and simulated in-game, abstracted into Pops, just as they were in Victoria 2. These are then represented by Interest Groups that feed into the structure of you government, helping to decide the laws that you can try to pass, and what you need to do in order to succeed. From theocracy to full-blown democracy, all of the options are there, but depending on your country’s starting position, you’ll have more challenges to get to where you want. A military junta isn’t going to loosen its grip on power quickly, but might be happy to be the predominant force in a government alongside another party, and if that party is formed of the Intelligentsia alongside the unions, then you might be able to start passing more liberal laws and bring social reforms.
Try to push for changes too hard and too fast, doing so before you have enough widespread support for a particular reform, and you could find yourself staring down the barrel of a messy rebellion and civil war.
Education is key to this, as a more educated population is more likely to stand up for themselves and push for their rights. This, however, affects the key ‘Capacities’ that are the main resources you can spend. More rights for your people means less blanket Authority to do as you wish, for example. There’s also the simple march of time and spread of technologies. You can research along a trio of distinct technology trees, but ideas will spread between nations and speed things up for you.
Diplomacy has often been a weakness of big strategy games such as this, especially as gamers are used to getting what they want, when they want it in video games. “Oh, you don’t want to give me that patch of territory, Ghandi?” you might think, “Well, I’ll just declare war and take it!” In certain settings and peninsulas of the world, that might be a completely realistic course of action, but through the era of grand empires that followed the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, there was a period of relative peace. Diplomacy got to take centre stage, and that’s something that Victoria 3 has sought to capture through the Diplomatic Plays.
In essence, they’re a form of political manoeuvring. You make your demands and stake your claim, seeking to force the other side to simply give in. Of course, they’ll make a counter claim and you’ll then be stuck in a period of diplomatic bickering. During this time, interested parties can state their support for one side or the other, whether that’s through an alliance or simply an empire with a vested interest in the region trying to find an angle. You might be Mexico trying to expand your territory to the south, but the British Empire is sure to have some thoughts on the matter. So you might try to appeal to them to swing them to your side and strengthen your hand.
It can all eventually break down into war, but it’s costly to mobilise your armies and march forth – you don’t have direct control over your army’s actions but send generals and admirals in control of troops and fleets to do your bidding in a region. Sometimes it will be better to swallow the loss and the shame of failure, but then again, it’s better to do that sooner rather than later in order to minimise the growing counter-claims that can emerge. The AI can ‘blink’, though, and backdown in a closely fought war of words. There’s an internal AI personality that goes a bit beyond the raw numbers running through the diplomatic system, and a degree of randomisation, with the general rule of thumb being that the AI will look to minimise their losses, unless you’re threatening their very existence.
Through all of this, Paradox has done a great job of building on top of their modern game engine and simulation. Zoom in from a world map to a particular region and you’ll see the build up of cities, industry, agriculture and more represented on the map. It’s quite striking to look at. They’ve also sought to try and make the game as intuitive as possible, bringing in the excellent tooltips system from recent games, featuring some more tutorialised scenarios to try out.
I don’t think there’s any getting away from the fact that Victoria 3 is still a tricky game for players to grasp its inner workings. While there’s a certain cachet and audience that will lap it up, for newcomers it’s one that will have to grow on players. At the same time, it’s also pleasing to be able to pick a country and see a way to build it tall and centralised, looking inward for progress, as opposed to endlessly pushing outward.
Victoria 3 is coming out for PC in just a couple months on 25th October 2022.
