Victoria 3 is to sim economics like Crusader Kings 3 plays fuck, marry, and kill with medieval popes. Paradox’s latest grand strategy is a vivid and captivating depiction of a world in rapid transformation, and plunges you headfirst into its politics, social reforms, and bewildering technological changes. Your focus may be on building steel mills and train stations rather than murdering next of kin, but the impact of these infrastructure projects is often just as immediate and just as comforting.
Just like Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis before it, Victoria 3 lets you choose a specific nation-state and use it however you want. While there are some game modes that focus on specific goals like economic or military advantage, Victoria 3 is ultimately a giant strategic sandbox that lets you channel the winds of change however you want. You can turn Victorian England into a socialist republic, place a crown on Abraham Lincoln’s temple, or try to conquer the world as the East India Company.
While the options are extensive, they all come together through the same basic mechanics, the core of which is your country’s economy. Every country starts out differently, but all economies are built on a combination of developing natural resources, building industry, and trading with other countries. Crucially, these industries (and the products they produce) exist in a simulated market where commodity prices are constantly influenced by the laws of supply and demand. These laws can have a profound impact on the efficiency of your industry and the economy as a whole.
As a simple example, let’s talk about coal, the fundamental resource of the Industrial Revolution. Coal is used in countless different industries in Victoria 3, so demand is always high. You can meet this need in a number of ways, the easiest of which is to expand your existing mines (or create new mines in states where they are available). But mining coal requires tools, another basic resource that is in high demand. As you expand your coal mine, the number of tools required increases, which means the price also increases. If tool prices rise too high, it could make your coal mine unprofitable.
Of course, you can compensate by simply expanding your tool workshop, but doing so will in turn affect the prices of other resources like wood and iron. Alternatively, you can adapt the production process of the tool with new technology, such as switching from manual assembly to using a water tube boiler. This reduces the number of workers your tool shop needs to hire, which in turn reduces the wages you need to pay. However, running a water tube boiler requires – you guessed it – coal. This increases the demand and price of coal, and now this affects the price of the tools you need to mine coal in the first place.
Here is a simple example. Victoria 3 has dozens of different industries. Farms, fishing, whalers, sulphur mines, steel mills, chemical plants, glass factories, shipyards, car manufacturers, munitions factories, and more. All of these are interrelated and affect the prices of the various goods they consume and produce. The market is further influenced by a range of other factors. Trade, for example, lets you establish import and export routes for individual goods and set general tariffs to encourage or discourage any of these activities. You must also ensure that the industry is supported by adequate infrastructure within its specific area, and your railroads and ports can handle the business that flows through them.
If all this sounds complicated, congratulations, you’re ready to read! This is a very intimidating system when first encountered. Fortunately, Victoria 3 is an excellent teacher. Paradox has designed a comprehensive tutorial activity (you can play the role of any country) that walks you through every system and concept you need to learn. Like Crusader Kings 3, the UI hides a huge library of nested tooltips that appear when you hover over icons or highlighted words. But the tutorial activity also turns the game log (used elsewhere to record optional objectives) into an interactive manual. Here, each tutorial objective has two buttons labeled “Tell me how” and “Tell me why”. These respectively guide you through how to perform a specific action and why.
Once you get the hang of it, Victoria 3’s economic simulation is completely engaging, creating the ever-fluctuating challenge of understanding which industries need what and how to give it to them at a price that won’t break them. Its response is also amazing. Sometimes you implement a new production technology in a specific industry and your economy takes off like a rocket.
The scenarios this can lead to are often mesmerizing. It is often worthwhile to run certain industries at a loss, as long as they produce enough resources to support other, more lucrative industries. Sometimes it pays to run an entire economy at a loss. Victoria 3’s economy is based on the gold standard, and if you have too much gold, your currency will depreciate. So you need to find ways to spend money or lose money temporarily, such as increasing construction, cutting taxes, or getting involved in a good and expensive war.
Played purely as an optimization challenge, Victoria 3 is a lot of fun. But that’s only part of the overall scope of the game. In addition to market forces, Victoria 3 also simulates political forces. Like economies, political systems vary from country to country, but whether you lead a monarchy or an anarchist state, all governments are made up of competing factions representing different segments of the population, and are You’ll need to contend with these factions when new laws are introduced. Pushing a new law will inevitably anger at least one faction, and if you annoy them too much, they’ll radicalize and decorate your city with crimson revolutionary flags.
So be careful with the laws you carefully crafted, what you push, and what you compromise. If kids get out of the mines and into schools, maybe it’s worth letting industrialists own their free-trade economy. Maybe sticking to the monarchy is tolerable if you get public health from it. Conversely, it is also possible to create an oppressive military dictatorship, as is simply going after money to create the most profitable state. Sometimes you have no choice in the matter. Don’t expect atheistic anarchist communes to be established anytime soon if elections put a devout landlord party in power.
While Victoria 3 systematically portrays the politics of broad interests and demographic groups, sometimes these huge social shifts are tied to specific faces. Pushing new laws takes time, and there are regular events where individuals surface. Perhaps the Duke of Wellington was involved in a brothel, damaging the reputation of the industrialist he represented. Or maybe your main proponent of the new tax code has died suddenly, sparking a debate about the decency of continuing the lawsuit without him. In this way, Victoria 3 makes the push-me-pull you of everyday political debate understandable on a personal level.
In fact, while Victoria 3 doesn’t feature Crusader Kings’ dramatic family soap opera, it’s a very distinctive game in its own right. Many countries have their own specific events to deal with, for example, the UK saw a Jack the Ripper-inspired mystery with a truly surprising twist, all related to the game’s simulation of a nascent police force. This role is also evident in the overall presentation, from the elegant, refined user interface to the way the country has changed dramatically over time. Cities sprawled, railroads stretched their filaments across the map, and sailboats were slowly replaced by tin steamers.
As a game of political and economic tricks, Victoria 3 was a huge success. It’s so much fun to take over a country and shape it however you want. However, the game is less effective when dealing with other countries. Diplomacy is divided into diplomatic games (war) and diplomatic actions (everything else). There are plenty of options for both, but they’re both fairly binary, one-to-one interactions. You are either pleading with another country or declaring war on it for a very specific reason. The system lacks gimmicks and the ability to pit countries against each other for their own national interests.
Meanwhile, war is the least interesting part of Victoria 3. Managing Wars Much like previous Paradox games, conflict is ultimately determined by your nation’s willingness to fight, which can be influenced by factors such as attacking trade routes, winning battles, and occupying enemy territory. But you can only deploy troops on auto-generated fronts, which can lead to some weird situations. I ended up with a war with Austria due to complicated diplomatic reasons, but had no available front to send troops, and due to some obscure game rules I could only lower the enemy’s war score to a certain level, while mine was free like sterling The same plunge. As a result, I ended up having to pay compensation for losing a war I never fought directly against the enemy.
To be fair, it sounds like it probably happened in a 19th century war. However, from a gaming standpoint, it’s not very interesting. That being said, wars are often fascinating from an economic point of view, like some strange fire between Russia and Japan that ends up destroying your most lucrative trade routes, or pushing the price of ammunition into the stratosphere.
There are a few other urchins in the works worth mentioning. The tech tree is mainly used for gating purposes. Ultimately, you want pretty much everything on it, and it’s layered in such a way that pushing a specific technology is only occasionally worthwhile. Also, as a large power, managing trade routes is a headache as they constantly exceed the number of fleets you have available, and there is no way to prioritize a particular trade route if you really want to import or export an item.
Victoria 3 could be better in some ways, but it’s ultimately a game about the development of a modern nation, and with its powerful economic engine, that theme is lively, while the political aspects of the game are for you will handle large numbers. Comparisons to Crusader Kings 3 naturally abound, and it’s hard to beat a game that actually makes you eat kings. But the fact that Victoria 3’s order to build the Lancaster mine was just as remarkable was a remarkable achievement.
