I had a quick squiz through Google off my own bat, but I was burning daylight. It's not reasonable of me to expect the devs to provide a two hour video essay explaining things I don't know about economics. For all that Victoria 3 could tell me how Victoria 3 itself operates, the problem (if it is one) is that its simulation of global politics is complex enough that it's also contending with a theoretical new player's general knowledge. I stalled on this goal for about four hours, which is quite a long time when you only have a hundred years to play with, and I realised it was because I don't know how GDP works in real life.
It was going fine until the game set me the target of increasing Sweden's GDP by 1.5 million.
#MAN CARRY HERMES VICTORIA III HOW TO#
I did play the tutorial, which explained all the basic elements of running a whole country (in this case Sweden), and it got me through the different parts of an economy and how to tinker with them: checking the output of your different rural and urban industries, not importing too much more than you export, and so on. The map in Victoria 3 is very educational vis. The Swedish market includes Norway because they used to be a Kingdom together, and then were in a personal union. There's a lot of stuff to look at, but the trick seems to be in figuring out which bits you can ignore most of the time. You're also given a steer, if you need one, by a journal tracking some significant short-term goals (short-term here sometimes meaning "over the next three years").
It's an impressive system, with a lot of tabs and levers to press and pull, but the UI is really readable and easy to use, even despite nesting tooltips being a thing. As you put in railways you can see it change the landscape, towns in regions with unrest start to raise literal red flags to signal support for revolution. Even further and you can see the roads, trees, cities and towns. You can zoom in from a flat map, where every country is an outline painted a different colour, and suddenly see the mountains and the clouds, migratory birds scudding across the sky. There are farmers, labourers, machinists, shopkeepers, clerks, academics - a bunch of 'em, all falling into different classes and pressure groups, divided by political belief, religion, culture, and many other things. Victoria 3 claims to be an impressive simulation of basically the entire population of Earth in its Pops system, keeping track of where people are and what they're angry about all the time. "That one runs on Pops, doesn't it?" he said. I asked Nate Crowley (RPS in peace) for some tips for playing, and he went "Victoria 3? Ooh, that's probably a bit much for me," and since he likes Dwarf Fortress you can imagine how concerning I found that. Victoria 3 simulates running a nation for a century, starting in 1836 (a tumultuous century, taking you up to just before the Second World War). Luckily, the AI in Victoria 3 is so advanced it's better at playing the game than I am. In a presentation before I and others were let loose on the better part of a week with the game, it was claimed that Victoria 3 is the best yet for onboarding newcomers, with a deep and detailed tutorial system. The problem is that previewing Victoria 3 is quite an advanced level to dive in, the Paradox GSG equivalent of being a live translator for a UN summit when you're only just about able to read the French version of The Famous Five. I'm trying to learn new languages, though, so it's not an unwelcome challenge. A game like Victoria 3, where the whole point is making decisions that have country-wide effects and outcomes years in the future, is essentially operating in a different language to any I understand. I'm a fundamentally un-grand person I spend most days dressed like a 14-year-old fan of Tony Hawk, I do not like olives or scallops, and I'm unable to predict the consequences of actions if they exist outside of, say, a 12 month timeframe. I play strategy, sure, but grand strategy has always been a bit beyond me. I'm going to level with you: I'm not a GSG player.
0 kommentar(er)
