The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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10:35am on Monday, 10th July, 2023:
Outburst
I really liked the game Victoria 2. It was marred by some incredibly irritating micromanagement you had to do to keep minor states swinging your way, but other than that it was great. Broken economic system? HA! Who cares about broken economic systems if the resulting game is fun?
I was therefore pleased to hear that Victoria 3 was coming out. The more that I read of the dev diaries, though, the lower my enthusiasm became. As is often the case with games that have numbers at the end of their names, it's been "streamlined". Combat has been abstracted away so much that there are no units on the map and there's very little control over wars. Trading is tiresome unless you join a customs union, which (you find out later) means you can't get to be a major power unless you subsequently leave it and send your whole economy down a sinkhole as a result (so like Brexit, then). Building is either tortuously slow or hideously expensive (although you do get the choice - yay!).
Worst, though, is the civil war revolutionary system.
I've just played a game as Belgium. I was doing very well, until a faction in Wallonia wanted me to switch from a monarchy to a presidental system. If I didn't, they revolted and beat the troops I had in Flanders; if I did, the monarchists (also in Wallonia) revolted and also beat the troops I had in Flanders. It didn't matter what I tried, one of the two groups took the whole of Wallonia with it and its invisible armies defeated the ones on Flanders. That doesn't make a lot of sense: if the pro-president group and the anti-president group are at odds, why can either one of them defeat the rest of the entire country? I could have asked for help from another country by signing my soul away to them, but that's not the point.
I managed to do respectably well with my first two games (Sweden and Chile), except for the tedious trading aspect. The revolutions were easy to put down because they were only ever in one province and I had more than one province. Belgium only has two provinces, though, and if the bigger one revolts, you're stuffed.
I started another game as Belgium yesterday and instead of capturing Luxembourg (which becomes part of Wallonia) I captured Holland instead. This gave me three states instead of two. I'm now hoping that this will be enough to see off any of these "we're going to revolt and we don't care for what cause" revolutions I get.
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Copyright © 2023 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).