Victoria 3 is one of the more accessible Paradox releases in memory but it's not the sort of triumph that Crusader Kings III was. It's fun but it's very thin, and the game finds itself stuck too much between RP and grand strategy. The bones are great though, and I look forward to the future updates and mods.

The time period is interesting and tumultuous, and Victoria 3 delivers that feeling. There is at least a veneer of, and often an actual, deep simulation of political interest groups, population/class dynamics and economic trade. I haven't spent enough time to be a master at any of this but so far it seems like the game does a fine job of telling you which lever to pull and responding like you'd think to any lever that gets pulled. Sometimes it doesn't feel engaging but at least it usually feels fine.

There are some odd elements that feel too easy or fast or low effort, specifically colonization. Colonizing territories is trivially simple and exceedingly fast. It requires almost no significant cost or effort. I can colonize the entire South Pacific and Africa in a matter of months as the USA in 1836.

But there are some very welcomed simplifications. Military engagements are super simplified in Vicky 3 which is ideal for the pace of the game. This isn't Hears of Iron and in fact it's not even so much Europa Universalis. The game is more about political maneuvering, economic simulation, internal politics and pop management. So removing a lot of the tedium from elements like warfare helps make the game more accessible and moves the gears quicker.

Where Victoria III really falls short at release is on flavor. The game is stunningly shallow and really lack flavor and detail. The bones and mechanics are really tremendous. They are accessible and engaging. But there's a major lack of flavor with regards to any specific country or even major international events. Just almost none at all. Playing any one country right now feels identical to any other country, the only difference being for their ranking on the great powers list. This also means there's a real dearth on the number of internal events and activities. You find yourself spending a ton of time just watching the clock tick, waiting for things to happen while you micromanage construction in different regions.

Playing smaller countries amounts almost entirely to attempting to conquer territories or just clicking import/export options every couple days. Because there is just a lot of waiting right now. Lots of waiting. The lack of flavor isn't just a shame but it's a real failure. The French Revolution and the Paris Commune and even the American Civil War are mostly missing or devoid of depth when they do happen. Just a real lack of engaging and frequent internal developments. It's more like playing Stellaris but with no exploration. Midgame Stellaris (i.e. the worst part of Stellaris).

The issue is that Victoria III feels at its best when the roleplay and circumstance immerses you within its world. The emergent storytelling that comes from the CK3 like experience is what drives Victoria III's best elements. But there's so little of it that you're often encouraged to drift into an EU-like map painting style of gameplay. Which is also devoid of much flavor either, it just gives you a way to spend your time.

Victoria III will inevitably change, substantially, as time goes on. As the game develops and DLC releases. And I'll be happy to be here for that. I'm certainly going to put a few hundred hours into Vicky 3. It just might not be the few thousand hours I put into Stellaris or CK.

Pontos positivos:
Sistema de economia complexo; sistema militar melhor que o vic ii; Hud menos confusa que a do vicii; e MODS!!

Pontos ruins:
Curva de aprendizagem gigantesca(demorei mais de 1 semana para entender o que tava acontecendo na tela); mal otimizado; preço salgado(levanto em conta as dlcs)

patch 1.5 was a step in the right direction, with the changes to the economic system (local prices in particular) moving the core of the game beyond its insipid state on launch - no more 'hit the build button on the good with the biggest blue number' anymore. unfortunately, the update also introduced many new bugs to join all the old ones that still haven't been fixed, and the ai still don't seem capable of playing the game at even a basic level. still an undercooked experience overall, so hopefully the big update coming out adds some dimension and gives the team a chance to take a break from overhauling systems to tighten the screws some

I asked for a whirling, living, breathing machine, and she gave me the hell I most desired.

Economics is kinda bullshit, okay? I’m a communist, plenty of you fuckers are communists, we’re obligated to believe that if nothing else. But wouldn’t it kinda be neat if economics had something to it, if everything was just supply and demand at various levels of scale, if you could feel the veins within the invisible hand of the market and twist them in any way you liked? Fundamentally, this is what Victoria 3 offers the player: You get to build an economy and make it run so goddamn good that you launch your country’s standard of living into the stratosphere.

The process of industrialization is the beating metal heart of this game. It starts, if you are a weak enough power, at the most basic level: You set up logging camps, use the wood you produce to build tools, use those tools in your logging camps to increase productivity, start mining iron with the tools you built, increase the efficiency of tools using that iron, and on and on it goes. It’s all very straightforward in a line by line description, but fails entirely to capture the dynamic energy that sets this apart from other grand strategy games like it. That energy comes from the populations. You’ll hear this come up whenever people discuss Victoria as a series: It’s all about population management. You want to meet their material needs, provide them with jobs, track what classes of society they come from and who you are empowering, so on and so forth. It’s all about the populations.

But there’s almost a sense that management is the wrong word entirely—left alone, your populations manage themselves. They’ll work on subsistence farms and provide their own needs, and everything will stay at a relatively good equilibrium unless a greater power swoops by and annexes your entire country out of the blue. Whoops! There’s a very real pressure to be better, be stronger, be more capable of resisting imperial powers, and this can only be managed with a directed vision. Pure reaction will never be enough. This is why resistance movements and rebellions in the real world do not merely dissolve once they have achieved their immediate goals—dissolution of the state creates a power vacuum that is just asking to be filled. (Vincent Bevins writes about this phenomena at length in relation to modern mass movements in his excellent new book If We Burn, as a side note. Please read it!)

No, management implies that you are creating from the ground up the forces of society. But these forces arise naturally—they are a structure inherent to any group of people interacting at scale, though they may manifest in different modes. Our role is not to create, but to direct as best we can the immense forces that we already possess. This is the feeling you have when your country begins to industrialize and you see the basic production you had at first start to swirl in self-powering feedback loops, profits seemingly arising from nowhere by the sheer nature of the movement of money between industry and consumer and government. There is no better feeling than when you painstakingly direct the production methods of each factory and construction company and mine, one by one transitioning to the new tools you have access to, causing your country’s productive capacity to explode exponentially, only ever growing bigger and bigger. Your standard of living increases, industrialists and the petite bourgeoisie grow more powerful, and demand more and more—

And so you become a monster, lost to pure momentum.

My favorite thing to do in this game is to play as marginalized and minor powers across the world. It’s incredibly satisfying to do that initial work of building something from nothing. With the way that this game encourages you to think about populations at all times, it almost feels tangible how many people you are pulling out of poverty. But with smaller nations, there’s always a ceiling. This takes one of two forms: resource shortages, or population shortages. The first of these is not such a big deal—this is what trade fundamentally solves. Sometimes you have way too much iron and need more oil. The solution presents itself. But population shortages? If you run into these, you’re fucked.

See, this machine of pure human and industrial momentum is always stealing just a little bit from the future. The process of industrialization is a challenge to outrun the consequences which you necessitate by engaging in industrialization. Your profits come from constant expansion and growth. Your citizens are happier when you are doing more, cutting down more trees, mining more iron, squeezing every last drop of steel out of the resources you have. But what if there is no expansion left in the interior? You can’t build any more factories, you don’t have people to work in them! In fact, given how much of your economy depends on the construction sector, you'll even start to implode, unable to sufficiently create demand for all the goods you've been producing, if you're unable to keep building. How can you continue to compete? If you don’t compete with the global market, they will overtake you, grow more powerful, be able to raise a greater army, and then you will be back where you started—just a minor power swept away by the colonizers and conquerers that surround you. What can you do when you don’t have any of your future left to steal from? You steal it from someone else.

This is the enticing trap of colonialism, for once your country tastes the labor, the goods, the blood of one colony, they will never be satisfied. Interest groups are often a mechanic that feels a little half-baked and oversimplified, but on this point they feel fundamentally correct: Basically no group within a colonial power opposes colonization. It’s just objectively profitable for them, when the world is filtered through this lens of economics to such an extent that all is consumed by it. Even when your society has more than anyone else in the world, they still desire to just consume more and more and more. I’d almost say this game is cynical if it wasn’t so fucking on point. When the world is all an abstract map of economic affairs, the desire to paint your color across the world is almost natural. For a moment, I understand how we got to where we are.

But then I zoom in on the world and it comes alive, and I can understand no longer.

- - -

A post-script as thanks for reading:

I find recently that most of my media analysis tends to find itself drawn magnetically to human nature as a concept in one way or another. Sometimes it's an obvious connection, like Killers of the Flower Moon, and sometimes it's a little more obtuse, as with this review. But even here we made the connection at the end: "the desire to paint your color across the world is almost natural." I think this actually comes full circle to the comment I made about economics being bullshit at the beginning of the review, a connection which I'll explore in a moment. I think it's probably a very important idea to focus on because it seems to deeply underpin basically all of how we understand the world, and I think we don't get to the center of that nearly often enough. How can you deconstruct an ideology without understanding its foundations?

There's this pretty fundamental assertion that every regressive, conservative, etc. etc. likes to make in their art, which is that on some level This Is Just How Things Are, which always takes the form of telling us that some particular tendency is just part of human nature. Isn't it just so convenient that those who did horrific evil in order to claw their way to the top of hegemony, and who continue to employ great violence at their behest in order to maintain that power, didn't really do anything bad because if everyone does something how can it really be bad? It's a deeply false but psychologically necessary claim: That the evil I do is not evil, and you would have done it too if you were me.

It's the same reduction that is made to turn humans into economic machines—understanding us simply as a set of material inputs and outputs who consume and produce things. It's a claim that if you had the same material conditions, you would necessarily do the same thing. But this denies the "you" in you, doesn't it? Think about yourself for a moment. Find where "you" are, the consciousness and the observer of the consciousness, whatever that means to you. How is this amorphous primal beast of a thing reducible to deterministic inputs and outputs? Do you really believe that? This is merely an assertion of their axioms of truth onto yours, a refusal to negotiate reality with you but instead an insistence of their own experience, a complete and utter denial of the real of the subjective, of the concept of a You! It is the ultimate solipsism, the greatest sin, the making of man into machine with a computerized brain, the ooze of capital left behind in the creases of everyone's brain from its utter hegemonic power in the ideological realm.

All of which is why I say that economics (or rather, the mainstream capitalist understanding of economics) is bullshit—it is a fundamental reduction of humans to being consumers and producers, and that can never meaningfully capture the picture of any social structure that emerges from how we interact with one another. You've gotta look elsewhere to understand that. It's stuck too deep in the realm of asserting its own axioms, that great circular reasoning, to hold any real truth. It's fundamentally inflexible and immobile in a way that the absolute reality of what we call a political economy can never be reduced to.

Victoria 3 captures all of this incredibly concretely, a little glimpse of the irreducibility behind economy, the first of the shapes in its stages of dialectical development on the way to understanding what that irreducibility even is. It's an astounding achievement, even if it is limited at times by the boundaries of its understanding and imagination.

Um bom jogo mas ainda precisa melhorar muito. Falta mecanica e melhoria de qualidade de vida. Eu particularmente acho que a Paradox esta no caminho certo, melhorando o jogo a cada update. Mas tem um porem muito grande: a DLC Voice of the People foi um tiro no pe, puro scam e adiciona quase nada a um jogo que carece de muita coisa ainda. Eu gosto de Victoria 3, acho que tem muito potencial, mas precisa ser polido e aprofundado. Espero que isso venha a partir de updates gratuitos e não de DLCs pagas com features que deveriam estar no jogo base.

Adoro questo gioco, ma mi trovo ancora impotente di fronte all'aggressivissima AI che mi spacca il culo se non ho nessun grosso alleato (gran bretagna e russia una garanzia da questo punto di vista)
Le mie campagne migliori le ho fatte con la Prussia (quella più bella secondo me) e la Francia. Formare l'Italia mi ha richiesto troppo tempo e nel momento in cui l'ho formata, l'Austria era diventata potenza numero 1 ed il suo alleato, la Russia, era al secondo posto. Ciò mi ha impedito di prendere anche l'Alto Adige e Trieste. E vbb è momento di diventare bravi a giocare e metterla in culo all'AI da quanto bravo sarò diventato.

This game is currently in the Humble Choice for April 2024, and this is part of my coverage of the bundle. If you are interested in the game and it's before May 7th, 2024, consider picking up the game as part of the current monthly bundle.

Yet another Paradox game.

Victoria 3 is what Paradox is known for, games that have a large multiple-nation world where you can choose to rule any nation and try to do… anything you want. There are no set victory conditions so it’s just a chance to simulate running a country and building it up like you want. You set the production queue, try to get bills passed, and try to avoid civil war or upsetting too many groups in your country.

Or as someone suggested in my chat, just let the game run at top speed and get about the same result rather than pausing and trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And I think he was right. I’m sure there’s a way to micromanage this stuff, but also a lot of things took minutes of just waiting for actions to be taken or laws to be put in place.

Pick this up if you like Paradox games. Their games tend to need players to watch hours of tutorials or play the game for twenty to forty hours to decide if they like the title. However, I also have heard from people who love these games say that Victoria 3 was pretty weak for Paradox, whereas Victoria 2 was better. Overall though I don’t think this delivers anything I’d want to play again or spend tens of hours learning to realize I don’t want to play it again.

If you enjoyed this review or want to know what I think of other games in the bundle, check out the full review on or subscribe to my Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/8q4m_yRP5xw

There's a frustrating mix of genuinely clever ideas that improve upon the framework left behind by Victoria 2, and an overall experience that is just glaringly half-baked. The player is given a lot more fine tuned control over the economy now, regardless of economic laws, with the result that every country plays out the same repetetive loops of construction queues. The AI economy seems insensitive to the profit potential of critical commodities, with the result that the mechanisms of indirect economic hegemony feel useless; You need to directly invade and occupy territory to make sure oil rigs and rubber plantations are actually built. AI nations will attempt to pursue their relevant ambitions, but if they hit a speed bump they can't figure out how to recover or develop a backup plan, and fall into holding patterns for the rest of the game. The Balkans never destabilize, China never collapses properly, there's never a proper World War, and none of the alternate histories these outcomes entail are lively or dynamic. And so on.

I do genuinely like the war system. This kind of indirect strategic control, where preparation is key and the national government doesn't directly command the movements of every soldier, is exactly what I wanted from this game in general. It's baffling to me that they reigned in player management on the war system only to give us direct control over where every infrastructure building in our nation goes.

I am a big time lover of these Paradox 4x games for about as long as I can remember, with Vicky 2 probably my all time favorite. So when they announced and were developing 3 I followed it so closely!

And this week I finally played it and it’s good. It’s fine! It’s as addicting as ever, and there were a couple days I just utterly lost because I was sucked in so much!

But 3 compared to 2 is missing a bit of…magic? It’s hard to describe, but I I’m still more pulled to Vicky 2 or EU4

Paradox games have always been enjoyable but always complicated. They will be aware of this in their new games, so they started to prefer interfaces that make games easier in order to fix this complexity in their games. I think they achieved this in Crusader Kings 3, but I can't say the same for Victoria 3. The learning process of the game seemed extremely difficult and boring. You probably need to play 50-100 hours to start enjoying this game, but I don't have that patience. Maybe I will try again in the future.