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Victoria 3’s Pop system is so detailed that your country basically doesn’t need you aroundBut it’s more fun if you are
But it’s more fun if you are
I’m going to level with you: I’m not a GSG player. I play strategy, sure, butgrandstrategy has always been a bit beyond me. I’m a fundamentally un-grand person; I spend most days dressed like a 14-year-old fan of Tony Hawk, I do not like olives or scallops, and I’m unable to predict the consequences of actions if they exist outside of, say, a 12 month timeframe. A game likeVictoria 3, where the whole point is making decisions that have country-wide effects and outcomes years in the future, is essentially operating in a different language to any I understand.
I’m trying to learn new languages, though, so it’s not an unwelcome challenge. The problem is that previewingVictoria 3is quite an advanced level to dive in, the Paradox GSG equivalent of being a live translator for a UN summit when you’re only just about able to read the French version of The Famous Five. In a presentation before I and others were let loose on the better part of a week with the game, it was claimed that Victoria 3 is the best yet for onboarding newcomers, with a deep and detailed tutorial system. And to that I say: kinda. Luckily, the AI in Victoria 3 is so advanced it’s better at playing the game than I am.
Victoria 3 - Gameplay TrailerWatch on YouTube
Victoria 3 - Gameplay Trailer
The Swedish market includes Norway because they used to be a Kingdom together, and then were in a personal union. The map in Victoria 3 is very educational vis. global history.
It’s not reasonable of me to expect the devs to provide a two hour video essay explaining things I don’t know about economics. I had a quick squiz through Google off my own bat, but I was burning daylight. So I thought, “Fuck it, let’s take over Denmark.”
War, huh? What is it good for? Absolutely everything, apparently.
This was intended as a kind of LOL move, so that at least I’d have a wild anecdote to share with you if I achieved nothing else in the rest of the preview. War is a risky move in Victoria 3, because it can be expensive and demoralising. Surprisingly, however, I won my war very quickly. It was just something that happened while I continued running Sweden. War needs keeping an eye on, but if you have a strong-ish military before going in, and, crucially, all your target’s allies are indifferent or too far away to join in, your odds are okay. So a) the region of Denmark that had Copenhagen in it was now Sweden and b) the war super-charged my economy. The next pop-up in the tutorial said it was going to teach me the finer points of politics and diplomacy, which was pretty good timing.
Okay, and you’re telling me things aren’t going that well in the south?
As well as a bunch of my smaller neighbours starting to eye me with deserved anxiety, I had also accidentally starved a bunch of my people. A lot of the Pops in Sweden were well below their expected standard of living, and were getting plenty mad about it. But starting and winning a war on a whim had both convinced me that wars are good, and that I could just embrace the Victoria 3 ethos of trying things and making mistakes, rather than searching for an objective measure of success. There are so many things to juggle that you have to keep your big clown unicycle of a nation moving at all times. Not having actions queued up is anathema to the game.
Plus, sometimes you just want to welly a ball off in a random direction and see what happens. The next goal in the tutorial was to change the health system to one of socialised medicine, which would take quite a while (I played the tutorial for over ten hours and got, optimistically, about a quarter of the way through the century). Instead, I started thinking in countries, in the way Portal trains you to think in portals. I imported loads more wheat and invested in intensive farming methods in the more stable north of the country. I spent years suppressing thebloody Industrialists, who spent decades on the verge of revolution, and were a systematic thorn in my side. I also started bolstering my navy, in preparation for another war, and booted the church out of government, instantly giving it about 20% more legitimacy. As soon as my peace treaty with Denmark timed out, I took over the Northern chunk of Denmark. Everything’s coming up Sweden!
Vive la France!
