Paradox Interactive is known for their incredibly deep historical strategy games and their newest release, Victoria II, is no exception to this. Victoria II is the sequel to the original which came out in 2003. This game takes place over the span of 100 years—from 1836-1935. You can start the game as nearly any country that existed in 1836, then lead your chosen country while balancing out the eight major aspects of the game.
The aspects are separated by an interface tab at the top of the screen and consist of the following: Population, Production, Budget, Technology, Politics, Trade, Diplomacy, and Military. The goal is to lead your nation in pursuit of ending the game as one of the Eight Great Powers of the World. While Victoria II is modeled after the original Victoria: An Empire Under the Sun game, Victoria II is a completely new game. Paradox Interactive took all the things that worked well about Victoria, improved them, and added quite a few concepts that they have had in games that have come between Victoria I and Victoria II. One of the major changes in Victoria II is that events aren’t hard coded to happen just because they happened at that time in actual history—events instead happen based on how you’re playing the game. If you chose to play as the USA, you can embark on a path of appeasment of the South and completely avoid the Civil War if you so choose. How you play the game is up to you and you can shape your country based on whatever ideals you wish your nation to have.
Population
The way your population is modeled is one of the unique concepts of Victoria II and this remains the same from the original game. The population of your nation is broken down into population units or POPs. Each POP represents a group of people that share the same culture, religion and occupation. The major difference is that you don’t directly control the population by assigning their specific job, as you could in the original. Based on factors such tax rate, ideaology, religion (and your government’s tolerance towards their religion) your POPs will become employed (or unemployed) and if all their needs are met and they have the opportunity, they might seek to become more educated and turn from common farmers and laborers to factory workers and clerks. Eventually they may even have enough money to become capitalists to start their own factories. Each POP has its own money and after buying all the things that they need, they can try to focus on improving their life. Each POP also has ratings in consciousness and militancy. Consciousness is how aware a POP is of opportunities to improve themselves. The more consciousness a POP has, the more likely they will push for reform to improve their quality of life. The second value, militancy, does exactly what it sounds like. The more militant a POP is, the more likely they are to either leave your country and go elsewhere or even go to violent means (even open rebellion) to achieve their goals. If you don’t give your POPs what they need they can become unhappy and eventually even turn into rebels and try to forcefully overthrow your government.
Production
Production is controlled at two levels: RGOs (Resource Gathering Operations) and factories. RGOs represent your basic mining/farming/gathering operations that get raw materials from the land. Factories take the raw materials and convert them into finished goods. Whether or not you are able to directly control the creation of factories depends on your government. If your government is a laissez-faire system you cannot control what factories are built and your capitalist POPs control everything based on what they want. If you want more direct control you have to wait until a party that has a planned economy form of government—then you can construct whatever factory that you want. If you are in a planned economy you can subsidize factories if they make an important product but are not profitable.
Trade
In Victoria II, all trade is done on the World Market. Your factories produce goods and then try to sell them on the open market. Capitalists who wish to construct factories will first look at the goods that you produce locally and buy directly from the factories or RGOs that produce the goods, then they will look at the World Market for their needs. Purchasing goods on the world market is done in order of world rank—Great Powers go first, then Secondary Powers and on down the line. So, if you have a need for rare materials, this is another motivation to increase your standing in relation to other nations. You can also place tariffs on incoming goods or subsidize trade if you wish.
Budget
The budget tab is where you control the monetary aspects of your nation. In this screen, you can control your tax rate for each of the three classes of your population (poor, middle class and rich) as well as control governmental spending on social programs, eduction, military spending, etc. You can also either place a tariff on trade with the world market (or subsidize trade.) If you do not balance your budget you can fall into debt and have to start taking out loans from other nations to keep afloat. If your debt gets too high those nations can use “gunboat diplomacy.” This is where a nation that has given you a loan that you defaulted on sends in their navy to force you into repayment. If you cannot repay your debts you can go into bankruptcy. This will eliminate your debt but you lose a huge amount of prestige and this gives you higher interest on future loans.
Technology
Research is an important part of running your empire. In Victoria II, your research is broken down into Army, Navy, Commerce, Culture, & Industry sections. Upon discovery of a certain technology it gives an immediate effect as well as opens up the possibility of random inventions that further improve your nation in the area the discovery comes from. If you want to keep up with your rivals your definitely want to keep up your technology research.
Diplomacy
The Diplomacy tab is where you control your relation with other nations. If you are a Great Power you can influence other nations and add them to your sphere of influence. You can use this influence to increase their opinion of your nation or decrease their opinion of other nations. The Diplomacy screen is also where you’ll declare war upon your enemies. If you wish to declare war on an enemy you have to have a valid reason (they have taken your land in the past, they have land that you consider part of your “core” territory, they are holding nations in subjugation that you wish to free, etc) or you will take an infamy hit when you declare war on them. When you do declare war you set specific war goals and then those are the only things you are able to ask for in return when you sue for peace. If the war is going really well for you, you can always add more goals.
Military
This is where you’ll control your military units and construct more to increase your Army and Navy. Depending on your military research levels, the type and strength of your units will vary. The amount of military units you can support depends on the number of your POPs that have chosen to become soldiers. If you wish to increase this number you can increase your military spending as well as increase your population’s opinion of the military.
Politics
The last tab is politics. This is where you can shape the course of your nation based on your people’s wants (or ignore them altogether.) In this section you can see the leanings of your population’s political ideals. You can enact social and political reforms here as well as see the breakdown of the population’s ideology, and if you are a government type that allows such things, you can change the ruling party altogether. POPs in your nation can be liberal or conservative as well as reactionary and eventually socialist (and the more extreme political ideals of communist and fascist.) The politics tab is also where you can make national “decisions.” Depending on your nation, these become available and can be enacted once the requirements are met. They can be things like building the Panama Canal, applying to become a US State as the Republic of Texas, forming a Scandinavian Union as Sweden, and many others. You can hover over the decision to see both the requirements to enable the decision as well as the effects that it will have if you chose to enact the decision.
Maps, Multiplayer and the Rest
One of the coolest features of the game to me is the dynamic political map. The map, when zoomed all the way out, looks as if it is indeed a hand-drawn 19th Century map. As your nation becomes larger and gains territory, the size of the label text of your nation increases. Colonies are labeled by their controller and it adds a great feel to the game. There is nothing more satisfying than watching the size of your nation (and its name on the map) increase as you conquer and subjugate your enemies.
Multiplayer is something that I’ve never really tried in any of the other Paradox games, but I tried it out with a friend for this review. The multiplayer lobby is just a large world map where you select your nation. When everyone’s ready you begin the game. When I tried to join the game that was created (by direct IP connect) I was unable to connect until the host opened all his ports (even though the manual says what specific ports to forward.) The host of the game is the only one that can control the speed of the game (players can pause if they wish.) Anything above a speed of 2 caused sync issues (the game has five speed levels.) You can also play over LAN or on the servers that are maintained by Paradox if you have a registered game. Both of these options may increase the reliability of the connection to alleviate the issues that I had. The multiplayer issues aren’t that big of a deal to me because I don’t really see this as a multiplayer game due to the complexity and the fact that when I play I am contiually pausing the game to review my policies, buy goods on the market, increase and decrease my tax rates, consider new technologies to research and a myriad of other decisions this game requires, and that I would rather not make in real time.
Conclusion
I played the original Victoria probably more than any other Paradox title (and I’ve played nearly all of them.) I liked the original Victoria because the game was focused more on political and economic factors rather than warfare and I feel that Victoria II is an extremely worthy successor to the original. I can easily see myself putting many hundreds of hours into this game. The modding community is extremely large (and completely supported by Paradox) and they will definitely add even more replayability to this game. Overall, if you love grand strategy games, I think that you will definitely love this game. If you are new to this style of game but are interested in learning how to play, the tutorial is as complete and detailed as any I’ve ever seen in a complex strategy game like this. Can you lead your nation to power and glory? Pick up this game and you can find out.
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