Victoria 2, a fun, yet incomplete, experience.
Victoria 2 is a real time strategy game developed by Paradox Studios and launched in 2008, being a continuation of the first installment dating back from 2003. The gameplay is focused on the 19th century colonialist nations and their efforts in expanding their empires, economies, and influence across the globe.
The truth is that there are two Victoria experiences that you can play. The first is the original one with the official expansions and the second is the modded version, which is overall much more gratifying than the former one. In this review I am going to evaluate the base product, and subsequently why you need to play with mods to get the full experience.
The most basic aspect of the game is the pop system. The world is divided into provinces, and each province has a population which is itself divided in ethnicities, social classes, religions, ideologies, their needs, and subsequently their desires. Managing those chunks of people, knowing when to make concessions to their wishes, when to refuse them, and manipulating said aspirations, is the key to making a successful nation: not attending their demands can lead to revolts, or simply the refusal to cooperate with your government, which eventually also leads to revolts. You can also manipulate those through national focus, an ability that increases the likelihood of pops promoting to specific careers or of specific actions happening in a state.
Victoria 2 is an economy and roleplay focused game. Everything, from sphering nations to how you conquer enemies, to why populations revolt and what political views they carry, depends on the conditions of your administration. This is an interesting system, in which you always need to manage and look for the dozens of (always changing) graphs the game presents (like product prices and demands). High taxes might mean larger armies and better state programs, but it will lead to pops starving and therefore being angry, which subsequently make them vote for different parties, or even cause revolution. It also decreases consumption which hurts the production chain the economy.
Speaking of the political system, it is ingenious if yet underdeveloped and mechanically flawed. Pops have three systems which affect ballots and the senate: an ideology one, a voting one and an issue one. So while a pop might be of the liberal ideology, they might also be part of the conservative electorate, either because those have been propagated through lobbying/propaganda or because the conservatives possess an issue which the pops mostly agree with. The idea is for you to try to manipulate the electorate into voting for your desired parties by:
-Limiting who can vote (poor people tend to vote more for socialist and liberal parties, while the rich vote for more conservative parties).
-Using national focus for election campaigns (a representation of lobbying and propaganda)
-Choosing to increase certain pops, needs and issues through events (and therefore the likelihood of them voting to your desired party).
-Answering population demands and making them content, disincentivizing the will for changes in the status quo. The opposite is also true.
Those options are very intuitive, but in practice they don’t work as expected, at least in the vanilla version. For starters, the “influence party popularity national focus” ability has a null effect, only working in mod packs (and it becomes quite powerful). Trying to do it in vanilla is a complete waste of time. Another problem lies in the massive popularity that liberals and socialists tend to gain no matter what the player does, which is exacerbated in the late game. You see, pops tend to become more and more part of these two groups because they answer their democratic and socio-economic needs (minimum wage, voting rights), adding to the fact that they don’t tend to naturally become more conservative or reactionary, which can only happen through events that are very limited and rarely have enough changes to be relevant. Now, of course that in the attempt to emulate the 19 century, people would start demanding more rights and becoming less conservative, but because of how exaggerated the game is, Many of it’s mechanics don’t work. This disappointed me with otherwise interesting concepts, as you are kind of doomed in an open democracy to eventually fall prey to liberals (even when all reforms are met, liberals keep getting more popular…for some reason).
Another feature: rebels. They are exactly what you would expect: they spawn and break your country when you don’t attend to their needs, having the possibility to change your government type when they successfully siege your capital (in the case of minority nationalists, they win and secede from your country if they siege their cultural capital). Rebels used to be a nightmare in vanilla, but patches and mods had them nerfed. Still, as many other things, they feel too simple and underdeveloped and something more interesting could perhaps be done with it (you can’t really know when they will spawn, as they do so even with all reforms met!).
One last thing regarding ruling parties: monarchies can actually appoint governments independent of election results, making it the strongest political system (except if you are a new world nation, where republics benefit from more immigrant attraction). The tradeoff is that pops get angry when such a decision is made, which is a small problem in vanilla. In mods though, this choice can lead to loss of prestige and revolt.
The economy of Victoria is a blessing and a curse, being a pretty complex system, almost like a prototype of a simplified world market. In order to succeed, players need to be constantly comparing prices and stockpiles, checking if any major war or event will halt supply and demand (world wars tend to be quite lucrative to weapon industries but destroy demand and entire industrial parks) and always decreasing taxes as much as possible to increase consumption. Overall, different approaches for different moments (subsidizing when there are crises while letting laissez faire economic policies when the industrial base is strong) allow for interesting planning: letting liberals win might make the economy better now, but the player will lack flexibility in case the house of cards which is the market falls. Again, the underdeveloped electoral system ends up affecting and making the planning more rigid and with less options (that’s why monarchies are so strong).
As stated before, the economy is a two sided blade, because while having a market that reacts to different situations is it’s most engaging mechanic, it truly lacks the options that real world trades have. Some 90% of all money in the world is concentrated in national banks and governments, pops savings can’t be used for long term investments (because money in national savings and banks …disappears), the AI has a bad tendency of subsidizing useless factories, all of which tends to generate a liquidity crisis (too many products, too little consumption) and the whole world economy goes down the barrel, with factories closing, states asking for bankruptcy, pops going unemployed and communist revolutions exacerbating everything. The player can alleviate it but not much.
Capitalists are also a burden. In theory those special pops are supposed to build factories, gather material, and administrate said buildings, unfortunately they don’t work as intended because of the following factors:
1- Some factories simply don’t manage keep alive as they are 90% of the time unprofitable.
2- Capitalists don’t build factories in good places (in Vic2, there is a special bonus if production is placed on top of a needed resource, so a textile mill will be more efficient in a cotton state). Capitalists don’t assume this calculation.
3- Capitalists don’t calculate long-term profit opportunity, so they just build whatever is pumping in the market. If a war has emerged they are going to build 50 artillery sectors just to close them when it is over.
This is problematic because it means that choosing between economic policies is only one path: State capitalism is straight up the best system to feed you population with the proper jobs and resources, while laissez faire is only good in ultra late game with a huge economic base (and you are still going to miss some crucial military factories) with interventionism being a safer if yet less efficient version of the latter. Again this is why having flexibility in choosing parties is so important, and why republic runs offer the most of a challenge, as letting a liberal party win can crumble your whole empire (again, role playing). This could be somewhat fixed if factories were not hemorrhaging cash, but instead managed to at least stay open with small profits. This of course depends on demand which is often low, being much worse for special products (the most lucrative options are exactly the stuff that poor people can buy, while cars and luxury furniture cannot be obtained by the average Joe, not even the middle class in most cases). I actually modded myself a property in the game known as factory owner cost (how much it’s needed for factories to be maintained) and pop income (how much money pops acquire), therefore increasing both consumption and stability in cost income balance: the results were more open factories and less unemployment even with laissez faire parties.
Trade also has some problems: Pops will always buy first products from their nations, meaning that the protectionism mechanic/strategy is pretty useless. A waste, as competition and a calculus of balance between cheaper products/competing factories could be new strategy options leading to a more diversified gameplay. Instead, tariffs are only a tax that hurts your economy, as your capital acquires needed resources for more expensive prices.
Continuing in the theme of trade: commerce between nations are impossible to stop. While real life was filled with blockades, and difficulty in accessing raw materials, Victoria ignores both the economics and terrain burdens of international 19th century exchange: Bolivia can casually import everything from everyone while having no coast, and a warmongering Germany can actually buy artillery from its own enemies while at war and having all their coasts blockaded by the Royal Navy. This might be harder to program, and is fairly understandable that the Paradox team opted not to do it, but the experience could be greatly improved if empires could monopolize and stop the inflow of products as a way of asserting its influence. So an African nation could, for example, buy all coal (as it does have a coast line) and sell it to its waterless neighbors by a high price, making its own personal market and imperialist source of income.
An interesting feature that is a little buggy, but can still be fun, is the sphere and rank system. Basically, the 8 most powerful nations can add countries, through limited diplomatic points, into their influence: nations under this effect will become allies with the leader, assist in wars and most importantly the leader gets access to zero-tariff products and consumer markets, which is essential for making you economy jumpstart. There are a couple of problems with it (apparently there is a bug where you sell more than you produce ) but the greatest one is that the way you manage your influence (as to avoid other nations from doing the same) is manual and tiresome: you need to be always looking at the sphere scores and pressing the ‘’Ban embassy button’’ whenever someone gets too close to catching up with you…That is a constant struggle. The process could very well have been automated to avoid player boredom, having some other mechanics to make the fishing for minor countries more engaging. There are already events which can be scaled to war, but the best one is how international economic investment affects your influence (you can go to war with nations that decide to nationalize your capitalists industry).
All paradox games seem to suffer from what I call gameplay without gameplay. In summary, there are times in Victoria 2 (and in other franchises such as Hearts Of Iron) where the player does… Nothing! It just presses the timer button at max speed, waiting for a technology to complete, or an event to appear. This isn’t so bad in Victoria 2 (you can check prices and factory profitability pretty much every day), but during my time with the RTS, it was apparent to me that if the game was actually based upon turns instead of real time it could have dealt with this somewhat better. The title already feels like a turn based, with most pros constantly pausing it and reverting decisions one day before they actually happen (the AI is incapable of retreating a day prior to a battle, so this allows some exploits).
This is where I get to mods and how they fixed (in rather simple ways) some of those problems. Many Paradox games are in a way incomplete and are recommended to be played with fan-made modifications (Hearts of Iron 4 when launched was monstrously simple and felt like a demo). Today the company has a bad reputation of selling 500 expansions on what should have been in the original product, which does not happen in Victoria 2 (there are only two), but it still feels in many ways as a game that could have been more. Everything is interesting but incomplete: commerce makes planning important, but the inexistence of physical trade routes and blockades hurts what could be an amazing multiplayer feature. Spheres are nice mechanics but can often be too bureaucratic to pass through while conceptually too simple. Pops working outside of player interference and having their own ideals and desires is offset by tools of coercion that in some cases hardly work. Not to mention rebels, that were a nightmarish experience before patches.
Mods did various changes in each version, some better than others: Blood and Iron increased pop income to increase consumption and therefore factory profitability. Historical flavour mod did the exact opposite, decreasing factory production, decreasing supply and increasing prices. All of the main mods made lobbying much more powerful. Those are small changes yes, but they did make Victoria 2 a more refined experience.
To this day there are people discovering new things about the game intrincated data, even with some discussions on economics forums commenting on why the game does/does not work. Victoria 2 is a good experience and it is severely improved with mods. If the developers see the potential, Vic 3 could easily be one of the best strategy games ever made.