Victoria 3 Difficulty Is Equaled By Its Playability

Victoria 3 Difficulty: Victoria 3 has what may be the greatest tutorial I’ve seen in a strategy game. In addition to the “Tell Me How” explanations that come after each goal, here is why. In fact, it has nothing to do with the game’s enticing visual style or its smart nested tooltips, each of which is a link to the game’s glossary.

It’s so simple and yet so right that I’m surprised I’ve never seen it before: You can get some background on your first steps into this massive civilization simulator by clicking the “Tell Me Why” option, which can be found immediately below the “Tell Me How” button.

“Crusader Kings 3 increased the bar for accessibility, which of course is something we want to accomplish,” says game director Martin Anward. We’d want to develop a sophisticated economic simulation tool. However, we’d want it to be playable by a wide audience.

Victoria 3 Difficulty

Victoria 3, unveiled for the first time at PDXCON in May of last year, is the sequel to Paradox’s 2010 grand strategy, similarly set in the century from 1836 to 1936. In the twelve years afterward, the developer has found fresh success with simplified versions of its traditionally intricate grand strategy games like Crusader Kings 3 and the galactic-scale Stellaris.

Having played a pre-release version of Victoria 3, I can say with confidence that the long-awaited sequel has not lost any depth or choice in its evolution to the modern Paradox platform. The ability to finally understand the function of each control is a welcome adjustment.

OK, let’s circle back to those pivotal three words. Please explain why this is the case. In Victoria 3, I quickly discover, there is very nothing a country’s ruler can do without major consequences. If you flood your home market with too much of a given resource after opening a new import channel, the ensuing decline in price might be terrible for your economy.

An increase in support for one party may be temporary, but the other could cultivate the political discontent that leads to a revolution if the legislation were to be passed. Victoria 3’s lessons instill early confidence and insight into the inner workings of your country by letting you fully comprehend the macro, or the long-term impacts and spider web of consequences underlying every action. But it’s up to you to decide whether that assurance really means anything.

While there is no definitive way to win in V3, players may choose from three different societal challenges (Egalitarianism, Hegemony, or Economic Dominance) and a list of recommended nations in the game’s main menu. These are only recommendations; you are free to choose any nation outside of decentralized powers. To paraphrase Anward, your “pops” in V3 are the backbone of your civilization; you won’t have any control over them, but their living circumstances, jobs, desires, needs, and political leanings will affect the functioning of your society as a whole.

The greater the political clout of a certain group (Servicemen, Laborers, Clergymen), the more weight their viewpoint will have in determining the outcome of your efforts to bring about change. With certain simplifying assumptions, V3’s massive simulation includes the entire human population of 1836—somewhere about a billion people. “Everything in the game is meant to either work on or be inspired by these pops,” explains game director Mikael Andersson.

Anward uses crops, notably opium, to illustrate the difficulty of striking a balance between sandbox options and historical authenticity inside that simulation. In theory, it could be cultivated everywhere. Therefore, if we just used the paradigm of “Can you grow it here?” we would plant it everywhere. But that’s odd because of the cultural, forbidden undertones involved. Instead of stating, “Hey, Sweden has potential for opium,” we placed it where it had been produced in the past or where it seemed conceivable that someone would grow it.

Andersson notes that such accommodations are common when weighing “what seems historically accurate” against “how might history have turned out?” There are a wide variety of assessments that must be made on a case-by-case basis. However, I believe we profited greatly from having a team composed entirely of history buffs. Simply fans that like learning more in their leisure time.

The construction of structures, as pointed out by Anward, is a key component of the game’s economic simulation alongside pops. These companies not only provide fuel for your economy, but they also influence supply and demand by acquiring and disposing of input and output commodities. A well-managed structure increases profits, albeit not for the player directly but for the staff. Instead, you’ll get financial rewards from taxation.

The capitalists at the top live in considerably nicer buildings than the workers they employ, who are drawn from a wider range of socioeconomic backgrounds. You can’t suddenly throw up the doors of a building and start dispersing wealth, but a well-thought-out strategy that includes strategic trade agreements, innovative technologies, and legislative reforms might help bring about a more equitable society over time.

Resource management in V3 boils down to a few fundamental tenets, despite the vast array of alternatives at your disposal. Of course, there’s cash, and there’s maintaining a robust economy, which includes avoiding the accumulation of an excessive gold reserve. Additionally, there are three primary abilities: Management on the inside of the state makes advantage of the bureaucracy created and maintained by government facilities.

A ruler’s authority is their capacity to make decisions and implement them, whether by decree or by lending support to political interest groups. Finally, there’s Influence, your diplomatic clout, for dealing with the outside world. All of them have far-reaching repercussions by their own nature, but here’s one: The introduction of file cabinets into government offices may assist with organization, but if there is a lack of paper, the bureaucracy will suffer since records cannot be kept efficiently.

V3’s ability to make even the introduction of file cabinets seem as strategically significant as the invention of planet-mining lasers in Stellaris is a credit to the clarity with which the game depicts the trade-offs inherent in every choice. Despite the seeming ordinariness of the subjects, all of the brain-tickling, number-crunching, one-more-week pulls that have come to characterize Paradox’s finest works are there.

While I can’t say for certain that V3 will be as successful at attracting new players as CK3, it’s evident that a lot of effort was put in to make the transition smooth for them. Certainly, it’s not a “pick up and play” experience, but what may have been scary in less capable hands has become fascinatingly intricate in yours.

There is so much more specific information I could provide, but suffice it to say that V3 not only rewards micromanagement, but also necessitates several specially appointed bureaucratic offices to sign, seal, and deliver every syllable of the word micromanagement to a secret council, where its long term effects will be painstakingly forecast for the months ahead.

The game is shaping up to be an astonishingly intricate civilization simulator, even if it lacks the interpersonal drama of Crusader Kings and the sheer sci-fi splendor of Stellaris. I want to stress again how highly I regard those guides.

Final Words

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