The Grand Strategy Game That Rationalises Tyranny
My review of Victoria 3 in all its flawed glory
As you can tell from my playtime…
I’m quite the fan of Paradox Interactive’s Grand Strategy games and on the 17th of June, Victoria 3 got a huge and long-awaited improvement to its trade and diplomacy systems so, looking for a little break from Mario Kart World, I booted up my PC to see if Charters of Commerce had finally completed Victoria 3: this video game that I have a long and unstable history with.
I hope you enjoy this review.
Everything the Light Touches
Victoria 3 is a grand strategy game based primarily around trade, politics and diplomacy during the Pax Britannica: the period of time spanning the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the beginning of the First World War during which the British Empire was the undisputed most powerful country in the world; the game begins in 1836 and ends in 1936. The player’s only real objective is to gain prestige and try to land yourself a spot among the Great Powers, of which there are typically 5-8 but no fixed amount exists. The top 4 are almost always Great Britain, France, Germany (if it unifies) and Russia but those final remaining spots are up for grabs by any pioneering nation. Most nations don’t even begin as recognised countries so you usually have to influential enough to get the Europeans to view you as an equal too.
The most outstanding feature of Victoria 3 perhaps is the size and depth of its simulation. Every person in the world has an employment status, a wage, a religion, is attracted to a certain political group, different cultures pine for certain luxury goods and scorn others, people can be loyalists or radicals, political interest groups can lobby for certain foreign policy objectives or economic agreements, you can nationalise foreign business, isolate your economy or focus on exports, becoming the breadbasket of the world, you can draft multi-layered treaties with other nations based upon the leasing of ports, goods transfers and rendering military assistance, you can levy harsh tariffs to build self-reliance or embrace imports to speed up modernisation and boost living standards, the options are almost limitless. When you get a compelling save going as your chosen nation, nothing is quite like Victoria 3.
It is also worth appreciating just how nice Victoria 3 looks. The strategy genre isn’t known for its good graphics and the almost always map-based grand strategy subgenre tends to be on the extreme end of this but Paradox have put a lot of effort into making the map and interface customisable and appealing.
With all of that being said, as were the times, unless you’re a population and resources heavyweight like China, Russia, the British Raj or even Brazil and the USA, the chances are that you’ll need to take a few colonies or dominions at some point. This is one of the game’s more frustrating aspects as colonisation is slow and tedious, relying on bureaucracy: a currency that extrapolates your nation’s ability to effectively govern territory, your deep pockets, your research into medicine for tropical diseases and Victoria 3’s horrendous combat system, where the only control you have is a simple attack and defend button and the ability to provide extra supplies and wages to the men for a morale bonus.
Another big issue with Victoria 3 is that this breadth and depth in its core systems leaves countries feeling very samey to play. Whereas in Hearts of Iron 4 most countries have a unique Focus Tree or in Europa Universalis 4 nations have unique missions to accomplish in Victoria 3 there’s next to nothing besides Russia, France, Brazil and a few others having these lame journal entries: a set of requirements to meet for good thing or bad thing to magically happen. It’s really poor.
No matter where you choose to play, be it Bahrain or Britain, you will generally always be doing the same things: get wood, build construction centres, fill out demand so wood is cheap for your construction industry, build tool workshops, get iron… and so on.
Even the obscure German microstates of the former-Holy Roman Empire are playable.
A Bleak History
I mentioned before that I’ve had a complex history with this game and so far most of my compliments have been a double-edged sword or followed up by some kind of criticism, that’s because after launching almost 3 years ago, Victoria 3 only now feels like a complete product. I’d actually completely given up hope on this game after the last DLC because it broke so much.
Paradox Interactive’s reputation for greed is quite well-founded.
As much as I’d like to praise the Swedish publisher and studio for their revival of Victoria 3 and its continuing march towards greatness, this isn’t a No Man’s Sky situation where it’s come out of free updates and years of quiet dedication, Paradox have charged for several, often dreadful DLC to get us to this point with only the most basic features coming for free; once or twice a year, me and other sad sacks have been shilling out £16 in the belief that we’d finally reach this point. This is a theme across their entire library of games with some having so many little expansions and country ‘flavour packs’ that they have their own monthly subscriptions.
It’s always hard to be completely positive about the future of any Paradox game for me, no matter how good it looks. After last year’s excellent Sphere of Influence expansion, they still broke a lot of Victoria 3 with Pivot of Empire: India’s Flavour Pack and even the indefatigable Hearts of Iron 4 has been on a bit of a losing streak as of late.
A Clearer Picture
Despite my misgivings about Victoria 3’s time on the market so far, I do think that it improves upon its predecessor in most areas. Victoria 2 is 15 years old now: releasing in 2010 and is hideous in that eye-searing yet charming way that only strategy games of the era were; there were no attempts to implement even the most basic aesthetic pleasures or quality of life features into that game, just paper maps and spartan menus. Victoria 3 is much less opaque and points the player to pressing issues like goods shortages, high prices for staple goods and areas with poor infrastructure from the get-go.
Even with these improvements though, user interface issues are created and fixed with every update so I’d consider that an ongoing effort; my biggest annoyance: the fact that you need to use these stupid arrow buttons to move items around on your construction queue instead of just dragging and dropping has not been remedied since launch. There’s also the matter of Paradox locking the improved day/night cycle and city lights behind DLC… you can’t make this company up sometimes.
The research tree is also a bit of a point of contention as generating research points generally just comes down to spamming universities and some technologies are a lot further down the tree than they ought to be.
Possibly the best part of Victoria 3 though is its data and statistics, coupled with the slow realisation that in your quest for better numbers, prosperity, prestige and a larger economy: the sensation the community has affectionately named ‘line go up’ you have usually committed acts of pure tyranny.
Paradox has a history of glossing over some of mankind’s darker chapters in its historical strategy games so it makes a refreshing change for all these things to be depicted in Victoria 3. Most states outside of Europe still have legal and widespread slavery in Victoria 3 and are categorised as ‘unrecognised’ nations, meaning that while you build your economy and modernise as these nations, you have an underclass of non-citizens living untaxed, without healthcare and without protection from the law, tilling your fields and working your mines until they keel over, regional markets make it entirely possible for the player to manufacture crippling famines in rebellious regions in order to be rid of non-compliant ethnic groups, monopolies and foreign investment can be weaponised to puppeteer smaller states while your education system assimilates colonial populations to your faith and culture. There came a dark and poignant moment when I first played the game with a friend where deep into our multiplayer session, we remembered that a rebellious culture in one of our split provinces had gone quiet for some time, believing ourselves to be liberators and progressives we thought our efforts towards entrenching multiculturalism in our laws had bore fruit. We were wrong. They had been replaced by our own.
With the Scramble For Africa, colonisations of Australia, Canada and New Zealand along with the United States’ colonisation of the west all being modelled in game and able to be perpetrated by the player, Victoria 3 is a game that will often have the player rationalise tyranny in a way that no other has ever enabled.
A Set of Lies Agreed Upon
One of the more debated aspects of Victoria 3’s gameplay is its politics, election and laws system; some enjoy it, some hate but regardless of how the player feels it seems to get tweaked in every update or expansion, so Paradox clearly feel there is some work to be done. I mentioned before that the game has a staggering amount of options and this extends to your government type too, you can be a military Junta, a theocracy, a feudal monarchy, even a theocracy with ideologies like Fascism, Anarchism and Communism sprouting up as the game reaches its latter stages. These tend to have a higher prevalence in countries that are falling behind and still have entrenched aristocracy, so it’s perfectly possible for you to pull a Russia and have your aristocracy removed and enjoy a rapid industrialisation to catch up with the rest of the world.
Your electoral system and political parties also have a diverse array of possibilities. Your political interest groups form the political parties of your nation when you establish an electoral system, in the beginning this generally means you have a Conservative Party comprising your aristocrats and the church, a much smaller Liberal Party run by the rich industrialists and literate intelligentsia of your early-industrial nation and often you will have a tiny Agrarian Party run by wealthy farmers and a party for the military. The brilliance of this system is that nothing is set in stone, an interest group’s political affiliation, ideology, power and what strata of society it pulls its members from is rapidly evolving with the changing face of your country’s living standards, economic makeup and who holds the most wealth, so what starts as a very basic, binary system becomes a rich tapestry of competing parties, ideologies and possibilities for passing new laws once the player’s nation has a diverse economy with a democratic system.
While this all sounds amazing (and it often is) I do feel the heavy-hand of some hard-coded outcomes when I play in certain regions. When I play in the Middle East, no matter how powerful my industrial and intellectual classes are and no matter how literate and wealthy my population becomes, it is usually impossible for me to pass even the most basic liberal reforms without a civil war or swearing allegiance to one of the great powers, similarly, in Europe, I always seem to end the game as a welfare state or a Communist. This makes the game feel a bit too deterministic. the Europe of today wasn’t destined to become a hub of social democracy and welfare states, it was shaped that way by choices and history in the same way that Russia wasn’t destined for Communism, it was the perfect storm of the Great War, a lack of genuine democratic representation, a weak provisional government and exploitable public war weariness that allowed it to take hold.
Paradox violently funnels your late-game political system towards Fascism, Communism or Liberal Democracy in a way that feels inauthentic and ruins the variety of the early and mid-game political systems.
Scanlines’ Mexico: it’s not heaven but at least it isn’t hell.
Victoria O Muerte
I’ve played a few countries now with this most recent update and expansion. I built a small colonial empire as Yemen, I became wealthy off making the gold-rich Morocco my dominion as Spain but as always, I found myself drifting to the classic Mexico: my favourite nation to play in Victoria 3. I’ve always felt Victoria 3 is at its best when you play middle powers or countries with high potential but significant challenges: countries like Brazil, Persia, China or Mexico, nations that might have ended up among the most powerful but for one reason or another were not able to get the ball rolling.
In our own timeline, Mexico was hamstrung by political instability, weak governance and invasions by France and the USA so by 1850: after just 29 years of independence, it had lost a staggering 55% of its overall territory to Uncle Sam and wouldn’t see a stable government until the 1870’s during the Porfiriato: the dictatorial reign of General Porfirio Diaz, which saw an erosion of democratic freedoms and unpopular policies while modernising Mexico, stabilising the nation and growing its stagnant economy.
But my Mexico turned out a little different.
Victoria 3 begins in Mexico’s Age of Santa Anna and during Texas’ War of Independence. Unfortunately, I ensured that nobody would remember the Alamo… because I wiped the floor with these revolutionaries. The army began with poor morale, a shortage of weapons and with plans to attack that almost certainly would result in the capture of Santa Anna and our defeat, so I spent a significant amount of the treasury on wage increases for the men and subventions for weapon imports while ordering the army to stay put; we would let the revolutionaries come to us. After a disastrous Texan offensive and the resulting restoration of Mexican morale combined with a fresh wave of imported weapons from Europe, we occupied Austin and the secession of Tejas was put to an end.
The previously cold Washington could now no longer contain its displeasure.
While I had my diplomats work to improve relations with the United States, it was clear that war was inevitable: both of our nations claimed and were actively colonising the gold-rich Rockies, both of us were competing to attract rich, educated European migrants and both of our nations had a vested interest in denying the other the fetile fields and future oil hotspot of Tejas. I was under no illusion: my outdated, small and dubiously supplied military and industry were no match for the USA, so while our little cold war bubbled beneath the surface I embarked on a massive program of reform, industrialisation and reciprocal military expansion. When the USA formed 5 more divisions, I formed 10, when they opened an artillery foundry, I did too while simultaneously restructuring the political and economic framework of the nation to keep the generals out of government, the aristocracy and industrialists contributing to local investment and the state able to focus on the army.
By 1856 my Mexican Republic was unrecognisable. The GDP had quadrupled, the population had doubled and the prestige of Mexico was such that we had come to be seen as the pre-eminent power of the Spanish-speaking world and second only to the USA itself among the nations of the New World.
And then the declaration came.
Disquieted by Mexican competition and hungry for gold, Washington sent its army across the border; while Great Britain and France held preference for an American and a Mexican victory respectively, they chose to sit out the conflict leaving our two nations to duel mano a mano.
The war went well at first, strong Mexican defensive positions and a flourishing domestic military industry allowed my forces to maintain the line along the rivers and mountains in the north, dealing heavy losses to the invaders but the staggering size of the US’ population: about double our own, meant that once they began to draft conscripts into the army, our forces were quickly overrun and pushed back. It slowly became clear that Mexico had lost the war.
While the enemy claimed about 55% of Mexico’s territory and seemed poised to occupy it, public outrage at the draft, staggering American losses and Mexico’s own conscription efforts starting to bear fruit meant that Washington wanted out of the war quickly, therefore, I signed a treaty ceding the territories of New Mexico and Arizona: a face-saving deal for a United States that was at risk of civil war after a much worse than expected performance. I figured that a USA where the Union had won the Civil War would make for a better neighbour than one where the Confederacy did.
Ultimately? Despite our loss of 2 sparsely populated states and a frontline collapse at the end of the conflict, I considered our war a success… but success isn’t enough, I wanted the USA to fail.
Immediately after the dust settled and the army had stood down, I began to make plans for the reclamation of our northern territories.
The Mexican economy had reached a point where private business and the remaining aristocracy were collectively wealthy enough to finance the construction of buildings to meet the ever-growing populations needs and to facilitate profitable trade with the outside world, this left the state: me to entirely focus on the coming struggle. Mexico’s biggest weakness in the first war had been numbers; no matter what I could do, the USA would always have a larger population than us, even while our slightly better living standards were attracting more immigrants from Europe, so instead I decided we’d be best served focusing on quality over quantity. From California to Chiapas I laid railway tracks and founded new universities, up and down the country, the greatest minds of Mexico were put towards making it further along in the military research tree while I expanded the standing army with an increasing emphasis on battlefield support like modern artillery, first aid and benefits like extra supplies over fielding vast numbers of conscripts. This fusion of technology, constant building and the need to pull more and more resources from the nation’s soil to feed the armed forces’ insatiable appetite for materiel propelled Mexico into the economic and geopolitical elite of the world with the 9th largest economy, 8th largest military and a position of 7th out of the 9 great powers.
In the late 1870’s under a newly elected, militarily popular Conservative President, I took Mexico to war, to reclaim what we’d lost, to end the threat of Uncle Sam once and for all and to show the other Great Powers that we belonged amongst the top dogs.
The Mexican Army spilled across the border and we quickly occupied New Mexico and Arizona against an unprepared, conscript-reliant US Army lacking modern artillery and repeaters, while the cost of fielding the enormous, almost 1 million strong army and granting it extra supplies and luxuries like chocolate and tobacco accrued a large amount of public debt it was a price I was willing to pay and within the year, Mexico had won a convincing military victory over the United States… we won!
As of writing, it is now 1898 in my save and we’re still riding high but institutions like health care and education have fallen behind the rest of the recognised world, for the remainder of the game I will reform these institutions and introduce greater workers’ rights while attempting to exert influence over Mexico’s southern neighbours. The recovered New Mexico has been renamed Aztlan: the mythical northern homeland of the Aztec people as a mark of our sovereignty over the state. The spectre of the USA still looms large but efforts to rebuild relations have been fruitful and their humiliating defeat against the Russian Empire after they attempted to seize Alaska by force has left Uncle Sam greatly diminished in the eyes of the world and a Russian colony sitting in Oregon and Utah.
In Victoria 3, you will have your own stories to tell exactly like this one.
Drafting A Conclusion
Victoria 3 is the worst-best strategy game ever made. On one hand, the almost 3 year wait for it to reach this point, the several required DLC, appalling combat mechanics and frequent optimisation and balance issues make it impossible to praise for me But on the other hand… this game is seriously fun, deep and addictive. Victoria 3 offers a strategic experience that other Paradox games lack and the level of roleplay possible is staggering; I cannot imagine how fun a lobby with 5-10 people would be with this game.
Victoria 3 is an investment. On top of the base game you are required to fork out extra but the experience is top-tier so if you’re a strategy game fanatic like me, I recommend setting aside some funds and getting it ASAP with its DLC, you will spend hundreds of hours with Vicky 3. However, if you haven’t played a grand strategy game before or are limited in the funds department, seek out something like Hearts of Iron 4 and its expansion pass instead.
Verdict: An excellent game that has taken far too long to come into its own, begrudgingly, I highly recommend it
I really hope that you enjoyed today’s review! If you’d like to support Scanlines’ Journal please like and subscribe and consider donating to my Ko-Fi for as little as £1 ($1.34) as always, I’m happy to discuss the post with anyone who takes the time to comment below.
I enjoy reading about Paradox games more than I enjoy playing them. I want to get into them but the learning curve is brutal. Nevertheless, am looking forward to the HoI4 review!
This is an interesting review, but did you ever play Vicky 2?
My main Paradox game -- and most played game on Steam -- was CK2, followed by EU4.
I don't think I have the stomach to invest in another Paradox DLC train. I own all of the non-cosmetic DLC for CK2, but with EU4 I stopped around 2018-2019 and continue to occasionally play a version of the game that dates back to that period.
I do own Vicky 2, along with the expansions for it. But I didn't enjoy it. I had mixed experiences with the HOI games (having played 2-4) but ultimately have big problems with their design. I think my problem with all of these games is that they are overly meticulous simulations that do not simulate reality.
With HOI, the problem is very abundantly clear. You have this IMMENSELY detailed combat model, which nonetheless is optimally exploited with "gamey" strategies. I remember at one point in one of the HOI games, there was this incredibly complex model for naval combat, and yet the optimal strategy was to build nothing but submarines. So all of this complexity was in service of nothing. They might as well have just abstracted your fleets into a single "force" value, and not modeled out individual ships, and they would have had a better design.
In HOI4, you are often asked to make incredibly petty decisions. Should I increase the air speed of my second-gen tactical bomber by +5%, or its "agility"? I HATE being asked this question, it reduces the fun of the entire game for me. As a purely gamey experience, I don't want to know how air combat is modeled well enough to know which is better. And as a matter of historical simulation: no one was asked this question in real life! At least not without being provided with a ton of context about what these different priorities mean, and what feedback from pilots in the field is telling us.
I don't know why my aircraft can't just have a single "quality" score.
It's been longer since I played Vicky 2, but I remember it also bombarded me with inconsequential questions. Or maybe "inconsequential" is the wrong word: more like questions that, after answering them dozens or even hundreds of times, eventually maybe amounted to something, I guess, but I was never quite sure what.