First Impressions of Victoria 3

Weltpolitik for a new age

The long ago vanished world of the 19th and early 20th centuries is sometimes remembered as the last great summer idyll before the coming storm; in the words of the historian Christopher Clark, it appears to us an Edwardian costume drama complete with “effete rituals and gaudy uniforms, the ornamentalism of a world still largely organized around hereditary monarchy.” But this was also a dynamic world convulsed by wars, revolutions, revolts, and regime change. It’s a world of great romance and possibility but also lurking danger.

Victoria II, released in 2010, was one of the games to which I most frequently returned. It was never the best grand strategy title, but it was certainly among the most audacious, the most experimental, the one that exerted the most powerful influence on my imagination. If Crusader Kings has all the brash, swaggering confidence of a medieval prince, and Hearts of Iron has all the rigid discipline of a modern general, then Victoria represents the wealth and refinement of a gilded age industrialist, whose business is conducted in the hushed secrecy of an ostentatious, smoke-filled drawing room.

It seems hard to believe now that Victoria II is more than 12 years old. The game first arrived during a period of immense ferment and change for Paradox as a company. This period bridged the gap between their old, inscrutable game design and their newer, user-friendly one. The scars of this transition are still evident in the game’s many flaws, including the lack of transparent tool tips, the tedious micromanagement of great power relations, and the famously capricious and esoteric economic system.

But on the whole, Victoria II had a glint of brilliance about it. The attention to detail, in both great powers and minor ones, felt almost encyclopedic in its scope, and the entire milieu of the industrial era (captured in the wonderfully sublime phrase from the economist Brad DeLong, slouching toward utopia) was irresistible for an historical junkie such as myself. It was the small flourishes that really made the game special to me. I never missed the opportunity to showcase my country’s growing cultural clout by hosting the World Fair or winning a Nobel Prize. I also enjoyed the strange historical anachronisms and ironies, such as inventing Quantum Theory as Persia or reaching the North Pole first as Egypt. One time, while playing as Australia in the POP Demand Mod, I became such a beacon of immigration and liberty that I ranked near the top in total population. Yet no matter which country I played as, I somehow always ended up forging an anarcho-liberal paradise (despite the questionable economic stewardship of the AI).

Time will tell whether Victoria III ever lives up to the prodigious legacy of its predecessor. Judging by the initial reactions, it has already left a polarizing mark on the fanbase. Overall, I agree with some of the major reservations and criticisms leveled against the game, and yet I still find a lot to like in its clever mechanics. A brief caveat: I have only spent about 20 hours with the game so far; none of my campaigns went longer than 1900.

The most important question for me coming into Victoria III was how accurately it represented the diplomatic brinkmanship, the fierce rivalries and competitions that laid the groundwork for the great disasters of the 20th century. On this front the game is a firm improvement on Victoria II, but the overall result is uneven. In place of defined spheres of influence, Paradox has substituted a strategic interest system by which nations declare an area of concern to meddle with. Nations no longer just simply declare war but instead launch diplomatic plays that have the potential to draw in local nations or interested global powers. This arrangement arguably gives states more flexibility to declare allegiances and negotiate with fence-sitters as they exploit the fear of war to pursue their own interests and objectives against their rivals. I had long been requesting a similar feature in EU4, and I’m glad to see it incorporated here. The possibility of an unexpected diplomatic maneuver invests each conflict with an air of added danger and uncertainty. I really appreciate the fact that it’s now a viable strategy to bully and bluster your way through a crisis by running completely roughshod over weak and timorous opponents, even as it has the potential to blow up in your face.

In some ways, this is a far more accurate depiction of the era’s turbulent conflicts than the old crisis system from the Heart of Darkness expansion, which focused too much energy on flashpoints and liberation movements to the exclusion of everything else. But the true test of the diplomatic system is whether it could recreate the sense of a world hurtling from one crisis to the next. The historical models for this system should have been the first Moroccan crisis, the Agadir crisis, and the Bosnian annexation crisis. The game should likewise give me the possibility to engage in a good bit of gunboat diplomacy. For example, when Britain and Germany brought their guns to bear on Venezuela in 1902, hoping to extract major debt concessions from the beleaguered South American country, it put to the test Teddy Roosevelt’s famous “big stick” policy in relation to America’s sphere of influence. While the aggressors eventually backed down from outright confrontation, they still extracted a price from Venezuela, in effect rewarding them for their belligerence. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to engineer a similar outcome in the game, because diplomatic plays seem to result in only a binary choice: one side either backs down or presses on until the fatal resolution is reached. There is no room for opposing sides to swap concessions or settle for less than they asked. Nor can you force a crisis upon other nations to pry apart alliances or shape the international landscape in your favor. This takes away from the intended richness and nuance of diplomacy.

I think what the game really needs is some kind of multilateral congress system that can resolve combustible conflicts and disputed borders. Infamy is too blunt an instrument to properly represent the delicate nature of international relations during this period. Instead, the ideal should be something like the Congress of Berlin, in which the great European powers met together and reshaped the borders of the Balkans for a generation. Perhaps it is unfair to ask Paradox to design a completely new system of geopolitical relations in which all great powers have a say on vital world-shaping issues. This problem is particularly fraught when it involves asking the AI to engage in complex multilateral negotiations. But at the moment, diplomatic plays are too anarchic, random, and parochial, just one event happening after another, with no overarching sense of connection. I think a brazen play should have enormous ramifications on the international landscape. The losing side should feel like Russian diplomat Alexander Izvolsky during the Bosnian annexation crisis, who (in his telling) was hoodwinked by the betrayal of the Austrians, destroying cooperation in the Balkans for years to come. Would it to be too much to ask if treaties were represented in the game as discreet contracts that nations can sign, stipulating what they’re expected to do and which borders they need to respect? I wouldn’t even mind if the developers borrowed the world tension system from Hearts of Iron, and every time great powers broke a treaty or launched a major diplomatic play against other powers, the chances of global war would rise.

Overall, I think it’s fair to say that diplomacy didn’t quite receive the attention I think it deserved. The economic system, on the other hand, has clearly been developed with a great deal of thought and sophistication in mind. I need more play time to get a comprehensive grip on the entire system and all the various macroeconomic implications; I would still like to test whether it’s possible to establish a comparative advantage in a specific industry or cripple another nation with export controls. But so far the economy seems simultaneously more responsive and nuanced than Victoria II. In my 20 hours with the game so far, I never really felt that I was misunderstanding some vital aspect of my country’s economy (although I do question the utility of the predicted profit calculations). For a game of this complexity, that is quite an accomplishment. I haven’t spent as much time with POPs as I would like, because they seem to fill out any open positions pretty well without my interference, but I would like to interact more with them as I come to grips with the system. The only other observation I’ll add is that I wish there was some kind of mechanism to simulate economic crashes, but it would be difficult to pull this off without feeling like punishment to the player.

Politics, another vital part of the game, currently feels like a work in progress. Interest groups are a great foundation on which to build, for they represent the shifting allegiances and alliances within a country’s political order, but the party system (which was a late addition to the game after they were requested profusely by the forum) seems like a potential area of improvement. In my first play through as Prussia, it proved surprisingly easy to shift from autocracy to limited suffrage without a single revolt or uprising against me. I even managed to purge Junker influence from my government with nary a word of protest. Although a plurality of my population supported the change, I feel that the old order should have put up more resistance, for they had the most to lose from the new political arrangement. I suspect it will take some time for the developers to get all of these pieces right. Perhaps they over-learned the lessons from Victoria II, where radical uprisings occurred like clockwork, covering the country in a sea of protests no matter how many times they were crushed.

The one part of the game that isn’t quite functioning well at the moment is warfare. As someone who always thought the act of maneuvering troops around in Victoria II was an annoying distraction (and not particularly faithful to the era), I tentatively welcomed the new war system. It was never a pleasant feeling to lose huge parts of my army or territory because I was busy fiddling with the economy. But the new system has also brought a few annoyances to the fore. First, warfare absolutely needs far more visual representation on the map. Sometimes it is hard to tell what is happening in the moment as armies and navies shuffle around the board, appearing at random in various places. Second, I suspect the game would benefit greatly from a HOI-lite system that gives players slightly more control over troop movement, tactics, supply routes, or some combination of these three. At the moment, warfare is simply not interactive enough to hold my interest, and it’s been the cause of major frustration even when I win.

Despite the intensity of my complaints, Victoria III really does provide an excellent foundation on which to build. It’s a fun game at launch that has the potential to be special over the long term. While this is a common refrain for just about any newly launched Paradox game, I think it’s far truer of Victoria III than Crusader Kings 3, which felt fairly complete to me at launch. I hope future updates focus on adding more depth to the political system, more forms of international cooperation or conflict, and of course, more control over warfare. I especially want more options to draw other nations into my web of influence. It should be possible to exert control over a nation’s political order through economic or diplomatic levers without overt acts of aggression. Investment should be diplomacy by other means. At some point, I may write up a list of requested features I have for future expansions. My greatest worry with the game is whether the economy will start to reveal hidden depths or feel like a real chore after just a few campaigns. I hope my sentiment won’t be that the developers spent too much time on the economic micro at the expense of politics, diplomacy, and warfare. This is supposed to be the centerpiece of the game. If it doesn’t work, then nothing will.