Victoria 3 Preview: Grand Strategy, but Make it Grander
Victoria 3 is the latest grand strategy game from Paradox Development Studios, parking you on the throne, presidential seat, parliament, or oligarchic junta meeting table of a nation from 1836 to 1936. I recently had a week-long hands on with a development build of Victoria 3, and though aspects like user interface and AI weren't finished, what I found was a promising new paradigm for Paradox's niche strategy series.
At its heart, Victoria 3 is like many other grand strategy games: It's for people who like to watch numbers go up. The trick is that this is a game that focuses on building a society and building an economy—it's about the last explosive stage of the industrial revolution that brought on modern wonders like streetlights, trains, cars, and globalized trade.
That is the real strength I found in Victoria 3: It wasn't just army sizes and damage stats when you were looking for numbers to improve. No, I was looking at numbers like jobs created, hammers manufactured, universities built, literacy rates, laws passed, political party approval, loyal citizens, and immigration stats.
It's broadly built around two backbones: Society and economy. Everything else stems from there, and is much more abstract than the manipulation you do around who does what, when, and how well they eat while they're doing it. To address that you engage with a deep and interesting economic simulation that's simultaneously less complex and more believable than others like it.
It's first and foremost an open-ended historical sandbox, and the core is how it simulates population person by person. Everyone on earth needs food, clothing, warmth, and more. All those goods have to be produced somewhere, and contribute to overall quality of life for a
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