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[Victoria 3] Party Like It's 1836
Zavian
universal peace sounds better than forever warRegistered User regular
universal peace sounds better than forever warRegistered User regular
SHAPE A GRAND TOMORROW
Paradox Development Studio invites you to build your ideal society in the tumult of the exciting and transformative 19th century. Balance the competing interests in your society and earn your place in the sun in Victoria 3, one of the most anticipated games in Paradox’s history.
THE ULTIMATE SOCIETY SIMULATOR
Lead dozens of world nations from 1836-1936. Agrarian or Industrial, Traditional or Radical, Peaceful or Expansionist... the choice is yours.
Detailed population groups with their own economic needs and political desires.
Reform your government and constitution to take advantage of new social innovations, or preserve the stability of your nation by holding fast to tradition in the face of revolutionaries.
Research transformative new technology or ideas to improve your national situation.
DEEP ECONOMIC SYSTEM
Expand your industry to take advantage of lucrative goods, taxing the profits to improve national prosperity.
Import cheap raw materials to cover your basic needs while finding new markets for your finished goods.
Secure vital goods to fuel your advanced economy and control the fate of empires.
Balance employing available labor force with the needs for new types of workers.
PLAY ON A GRAND STAGE
Use your diplomatic wiles to weave a tangled global web of pacts, relations, alliances, and rivalries to secure your diplomatic position on the world stage.
Employ threats, military prowess and bluffs to persuade enemies to back down in conflicts.
Increase your economic and military strength at the expense of rivals.
Accumulate prestige and the respect of your rivals as you build an industrial giant at home or an empire abroad.
https://youtu.be/eOI-RJGHJxcAvailable on Steam
Release Date: October 25th, 2022
System Requirements:
MINIMUM:
OS: Windows® 10 Home 64 Bit
Processor: Intel® Core™ i3-3250 or AMD® FX 8370 (AVX support required)
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: Nvidia® GeForce™ GTX 660 (2GB) or AMD® R7 370 (2GB) or Intel® HD Graphics 630 or AMD Radeon™ Vega 8
Storage: 10 GB available space
Official New Player Resources: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/player-resources.1549501/RECOMMENDED:
OS: Windows® 10 64 Bit or Windows® 11
Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-6600K or AMD® Ryzen 5 2600X (AVX support required)
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: Nvidia® GeForce™ GTX 1660 (6GB) or AMD® RX 590 (8GB)
Storage: 10 GB available space
Official Basic Tutorial Series:
Zavian on
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I was a GP until I enacted universal suffrage and had a civil war, my economy recovered quickly but my prestige never did. Most of the other differences are probably because I was playing the tutorial, and just clicking on things to see what happened, it wasn't a very carefully planned economy. It was going well, with no unemployed or peasants, until I set welfare and minimum wage too high and suddenly everyone was unemployed.
You can select learn, egalitarian, hegemony etc and there will be a button to select any county as well. So you can select learn the game and choose any country you want and work on the achieve and the pointers from the tutorial if you want.
I did succeed in taking this absolute monarchy and, ultimately, transforming it into a communist society. And I only suffered one revolution when a coalition of aristocrats, clergy, and farmers wanted to take the vote away from women again. They lost because I somehow managed to get Italy on my side.
Ah very interesting. I had no unemployment for a while, and then immigration started really kicking in. I will say that the game does not necessarily do a good job in making information easy to find, but I was kind of expecting that because there is just so much going on. Like I can't figure out what I need to be able to increase my education institution beyond level 3, or how I go about making a skyscraper. I think I might need to switch to steel frame buildings in my construction sectors to be able to build a skyscraper, which would make sense but is also pretty insanely expensive. The game also does not seem to do a terribly good job of predicting profitability in many cases, which can be frustrating.
It's the late 1870s in my game, and I'm pretty sure the US never had a civil war. At the very least, they still have legacy slavery. Also their borders are absolutely awful. Prussia did finally managed to defeat Oldenburg and annex them, but I really don't think they're going to be forming Germany since Hanover and several other North German states are outside of their market. Austria-Hungary is doing well, though, with Italy in their market (and Italy would be a Great Power if they weren't the junior partner in a customs union). I also have a fair number of radical pops, but I have no idea if I am close to a civil war kicking off or not.
So far an enjoyable game, but it definitely needs more polishing. Which I expected, because there are so many intertwined systems that I can confidently state that this is the most complex video game I have ever played.
Yeah it seems to be a pretty common complaint that the US civil war goes off the rails, either starting very late or having very weird results.
Seems like the kind of thing that may need a special mechanic DLC to solve like spain in crusader kings 3.
The game definitely has some UI/UX issues that need to be worked out (although I do think this is easily the most accessible of PDX's games and really gives make me excited for them to bring that same care to HOI and EU for the next effort), and this initially confused me too, but I think the way they have this set up makes sense: the institution unlocks are spread across Laws and Tech and don't have to be unlocked in order. So, there's no "You need this tech to unlock the next level of this institution", it's "You have this level of institution due to these factors." For education, as a fairly developed state this is going to be from Compulsory Child Schooling. Otherwise, 3 is the max.
I think it might actually be "three from institutions, and two from laws."
It’s on the official “Known Issues” list:
Also if you’re doing Expeditions another known issue to be aware of:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/victoria-3-release-known-issues.1551311/
As far as I can tell the profitability listing when building something(in the screen where you select the state) is always wrong, or else its trying to calculate something other than what I think it is. I've built 100+ factories at a time where it said every single one would lose money only to turn massive profits.
From trying to figure it out its like the game is calculating the wages and the effect the additional goods would have on the market but its leaving out the part where its adds in the money from the additional goods.
I will say, I think at least five hours of my playtime with the game has been Googling some of the terms and events referenced in this game. Like I've heard the phrase "petite bourgeoisie" my whole life, but never was interested in figuring out what that meant, but here I've gone down a rabbit hole checking out what life was actually like for people when the PB's and ther B's were a thing and. . .god damn. Glad I'm experiencing it through a game only. Still interesting period of time.
Another thing I've found myself doing is trying to apply gameplay concepts to real world issues. Like "Yeah, if I started having to pay more in my income to taxes and the price of goods also were going up and my wages were going down, I'd probably get angry and start going to meetings and reddit threads with people talking about doing radical things." Or, "Yeah I guess if Joe Biden won the Presidency in 2020 and kept Bill Barr as Attorney General, I might question the legitimacy of his government."
. . .what I'm trying to say is I'm being learned by this game and I'm love it.
Yeah I've just ignored all the estimates from the builds, or, as mentioned, what its calculating isn't what players are expecting.
Who are you playing as? Your laws/population/market situation are going to change how you can best make money quite significantly.
Note that losing money while constructing is completely normal; its only if you're losing money to fixed expenses that you have a problem.
PartyElite has a video up on this. I haven’t watched this one, but I’ve seen a lot of his other stuff including some of his Victoria 3 content and, in general, he’s very solid and he focuses on strategy games, so Victoria 3 is definitely right in his wheelhouse:
Similar experiences for me. In preparation for Victoria 3 I started going through Barbara Tuchman’s “The Proud Tower” which covers from 1890-1914. I’ve only gone through 1/4 of the book, but it has been really a fun read. The whole chapter on anarchists was quite eye opening. I suppose I had vague notions that there were anarchists attempting to assassinate rulers at the time, but I had no idea how extensive the movement was. The chapter on British aristocrats was also quite a trip.
Definitely move to "fix" your internal infrastructure, though all buildings don't have to be green to have an efficient economy (I don't think), though the fix to get it into green could probably be really easy (especially in the early game when everything isn't balanced on top of everything else).
You could share your file for people to look at (not sure what the rules on linking non-photos is though).
I ran into two situations during my Chile Tutorial playthrough that almost resulted in my economy completely crashing.
In one case I had strike issues. There was a General Strike threat, that I think might have been the cause. I thought I had succesfully negotiated an agreement that if I passed certain laws, the strike would be averted, the timer was still running clearly indicating I had time to pass the agreed upon law. But when I went in and checked individual buildings, some of the buildings had major throughput drops. One of the buildings I checked had two strike status effects on it, one for -50% and one for -25%. It’s very hard to run an economy when some of your buildings are only outputting 25% of their regular output.
In another case my Bureaucracy took a hit. I’m still not clear on what happened to it — possibly lose of Bourgeois support and subsequent loss of their +10% Bureaucracy bonus. In any case, being down by about 50 Bureaucracy points put my Tax Collection in the dumper, and at the time, I already was carrying a fair amount of debt. So I was in a situation where I was losing Tax to Tax waste, and couldn’t afford to pay for a new Government Building to raise more Bureaucracy points. I ended up raising taxes to max level, cutting salaries to the bone, dumping trade routes to free up Bureaucracy points, and somehow managed to squeak out of it. But it was very close to a collapsing spiral.
Anno 1800 Music: Mod adding Anno 1800 to the game, though I don't see how this could possibly be legal; also will corrupt your save if it ever gets removed.
Complete Pop List: Shows all the pops in your population screen. Probably get really nasty for campaigns where you've got a ton of culture in your country, but works well so far.
Dense Trade Routes: Another one that puts more information up front; smallerizes the trade route icons so everything is just as concise as the Market Tab (and the List Tab for buildings in a state). Makes it MUCH easier to see exactly what is going on in your nation import/export wise, so you can see even more clearly where the shortages are coming from.
They've mentioned the mod support for this new engine is more robust and "free" than the previous games, so I'm sure we'll be getting even more awesome mods for this game (the UI mods for CK3 were really well done as well and shows how powerful, and important, this engine will be for PDX).
Oh wow, haven't had either of those events (though I haven't played around much outside of Sweden learning the ropes. . .slowly). And yeah that sounds like it would do it, especially if those were pillars of your economy.
I THINK it only calculates the first order effects. Like producing more iron will drive the price of iron down and this iron mine won't be profitable. But producing iron drives the profitability of steel up and that makes your motor business better and the standard of living increases so you have two industries making more money and more pops paying more taxes. But that iron mine is still going to "lose" money (until the increased steel production etc drives the price of iron back up).
Another place where you see this is in "unprofitable" trade routes. That trade route for paper isn't making you money, but if you cut it, the price of paper is going to go through the roof and then your gov expenses skyrocket because they use paper. So yeah, that trade route, by itself, is "losing" money. But the goods it's bringing in are keeping a more important thing cheap.
This seems to be the case across almost everything given how closely everything is interconnected. It's rarely about just one good. To be fair to the game, I have NO idea how they'd calculate all those second and third order effects....
Also started using "debt". . .perhaps not efficiently, but recognizing that stockpiling gold is dumb. I didn't even realize there was a "credit" system, and that credit is what a lot of countries use to fund things; like you're going for a "healthy" economy not just a full treasury. I'm still no better than Mac and Dennis in understanding truly what's going on, but I'm getting there.
It actually is! New Zealand is named after Zeeland, a province in the Netherlands.
I tried to play as Britain, and holy crap. They just have so much going on at day one, I've got no idea what to do. It's like hopping into someone else's half finished world conquest campaign. I think I'll play Sweden or something a few more times first.
There might be something with peer and near peer conflicts in terms of defending with specific generals on certain fronts and advancing with a concentration of force on other fronts, but frankly, the fronts always seems to merge together anyways and the RNG for determining how many divisions end up in battles makes a mockery of trying to concentrate force on a front. Maybe there are hidden complexities that I'm not aware of (it's Paradox: there DEFINITELY ARE) but mostly it seems to be "have the most best armies and mash it against the other side."
My Belgium run that had a revolution that kicked me off the british market stabalized acutally heh. I then proceeded to make a welfare wonderland and everyone migrated to my country and bankrupted me. Got to love pdx games.
I don't think warfare needs to be HOI4 (as much as I enjoy that game) but right now it feels very rng. Needs more than "hit the war button and wait for war to end, maybe raid some convoys."
Honestly, as much as I am enjoying this game (and it's single handedly saved what was a disappointing second half of gaming), there's just way too much hidden behind the scenes. I STILL don't know how ranking is calculated. Maybe its opaque to prevent really cheesy rush strategies (I mean there's obviously already strats to get number one, but it is frustrating in a game seeing my rank drop and having no clue why. If this info is already in, it is really well hidden.
Also every time I play this I get like 30 years into the game and feel like I understand everything so much more that I should just start over.