Victoria 3

[The Brain]

I hope they find a better way for influencing minors and adding them to your sphere of influence. The constant whack-a-mole against other nations was just tedious.

OK Grallon.

[garbon]

[jimmy olsen]

1836-1936 is a crap time frame.

You're basically obligated to have WWI, so you have to stretch it out to 1920, but even that is going too far for any engine that simulates the 19th century well.

Starting date should at least be pushed back to 1815. It would be better if there were a few different revolutionary start dates, the first being 1792.

[FunkMonk]

Looking forward to a Haitian world conquest by 1936 run.

[Razgovory]

1836-1936 is a crap time frame.

You're basically obligated to have WWI, so you have to stretch it out to 1920, but even that is going too far for any engine that simulates the 19th century well.

Starting date should at least be pushed back to 1815. It would be better if there were a few different revolutionary start dates, the first being 1792.

Generally you don't want to have a world-shaking event at the beginning or you have outcome of that hanging over the rest of the game.  It is particularly annoying if the world-shaking event always gives an ahistorical outcome.  After the Congress of Vienna is good start.

I do wonder if you would be able to extend the game up the Modern day.  This is about the Industrial Revolution something that is arguably ongoing.  The game that has the latest start date in HOI, but it's not really that good at doing anything other than war.

[Syt]

There's Cold War and Modern Day mods for V2. Not sure how good they are, though.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/victoria-2-cold-war-enhancement-mod

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/modern-age-mod.807447/

I thought Vic2 would make a better basis for a Cold War game than HoI (the attempt of that was gladly aborted) with its more indirect gameplay, less war focus, crisis system, spheres of influence system etc.

[Zanza]

Lots of details from a Reddit thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria3/comments/nhzt1w/victoria_3_everything_we_know_so_far/?sort=confidence

For a broad overview of Vicky 3, check out my announcement coverage on IGN: https://www.ign.com/articles/paradox-reveals-victoria-3-a-long-awaited-sequel-to-a-grand-strategy-series

For everything else...

CAVEAT: Everything I saw was very work-in-progress. Anything could change, especially specific numbers.

KEY: This is a simulation. It's not a map painter. Military conquest is not the main focus. Victoria 3 is more about diplomatic maneuvering, shaping your society and laws, building and industrializing your economy, and "tending the garden" of your nation.

• 1836 - 1936.

• 4 ticks per day, so the number of ticks per campaign is similar to EU4.

• The map is divided into States and Provinces. There are about 730 States at game start, which are the smallest unit you will interact with for purposes of politics and economics.

• It's possible to split existing states, such as when you demand a Treaty Port in a war or Diplomatic Play. This creates a new State that is only one Province in size. Even at game start there are some cases of having more than one State, gameplay-wise, within a single "State Area."

• Provinces are subdivisions that you usually only interact with for maneuvering armies and when colonizing (which is done one Province at a time as you add more Provinces to your Colonial State), and there are roughly the same number of individual Provinces as in HoI4. (According to Google, that's around 13,000 - roughly 18 Provinces per State on average.)

• Visually, urbanization will spread across individual Provinces within a State.

• The pre-alpha map we saw looks better than HoI4 but worse than CK3/Imperator. They did say specifically that it isn't done yet. You can definitely zoom in further than HoI4, so I'd say the map overall feels bigger than the HoI4 map. Zoomed all the way out it looks very similar to the Vicky 2 paper map. Zoomed in you can see realistic clouds and stuff drifting over the landscape. Railroads are visible.

• Well over 100 playable countries, but not all countries are playable. Most of Africa, parts of inner South America, and a few surviving native tribes in North America (including the Lakota, Dakota, and Cree) were not playable. These are "Decentralized Countries." Post-launch, they want to make them playable eventually. But they want to do them right because the gameplay experience should be significantly different. All the Decentralized Countries have names and governments. There are no "uncolonized" provinces, but you can colonize on top of a Decentralized Country without declaring war.

• Full POPs like Victoria 2. Over a billion people are modeled individually, which will roughly double by game end, including Dependents. These represent non-working children and homemakers. Your laws, i.e. Child Labor laws, determine how much economic output your Dependents create and if they collect wages. So like, kids will still be counted as Dependents, but your wages from Dependents might go up (along with mortality rate.)

• Example POP types I saw (not exhaustive): Capitalists, Laborers, Machinists, Farmers, Shopkeepers, Engineers, Aristocrats, Clergymen, Officers, Bureaucrats, Academics, Servicemen, Clerks

• Standard of Living is mostly based on a POP's Wealth, which is determined by your sources of revenue minus your expenses. This can be a salary from your job, stipends and wages from dependents in countries where women and children can work (or if they're receiving welfare payments), and dividends from buildings you own. Increasing wages, lowering taxes, and increasing the supply of goods (thus lowering the prices and therefore the lifestyle expenses) will all generally raise Standard of Living. Standard of Living affects POP Loyalty and Population Growth.

• Your GDP measures how much you produce and affects your Great Power ranking, but it doesn't necessarily reflect how much money you, as a player, have to spend. The Ottomans, for example, start with a very inefficient tax system, so they have a small state budget compared to their GDP.

• Capitalists work completely differently from Vicky 2. Capitalism isn't "Let The AI Do It Mode." Instead, Capitalists (and sometimes Aristocrats depending on your laws) invest profits from buildings they own into a new resource pool separate from state funds called the Investment Pool, which you can only spend on certain things based on your laws and economic system. So you are still personally directing the expansion of industry in a capitalist economy, with some restrictions.

• Every nation has a primary culture and state religion, with varying levels of acceptance for other religions and cultures based on your laws. Non-accepted POPs are paid lower wages (so have a lower Standard of Living) and are more likely to radicalize.

• In places like the US, discrimination is on a racial basis. This is based on your country's laws and can be changed. There are no culture groups, but cultures have traits like Heritage traits and Linguistic traits, and your laws will look at how alike or different those are to your main culture. So someone from England will be less discriminated against in American society. Someone from a different part of Europe will face some more discrimination than the Englishman but not too much. Someone from Africa or Asia will face a lot of discrimination.

• Every State has a proportion of Arable Land, which represents how much agricultural industry it can support. Arable Land you have not directly built any buildings on will automatically generate Subsistence Farms, which employ Peasants. Peasants represent the vast majority of the world's population at game start, and they don't produce very many taxes or sellable goods since they're just focused on their own survival. So you'll generally want to start moving them to work in other industries if you want to grow your GDP and your tax base.

• Spheres have been replaced with Markets. There are many local markets instead of a single world market. Expanding your market is going to be a new playstyle aside from conquest - "painting the map economically". You can bring other countries into your market diplomatically or through war. Trade between markets is done by setting up one-way Import and Export trade deals for specific goods, of which you can only have a limited number at a time per market, based on a number of factors.

• An example given was that Mecklenburg starts out in the Prussian market (modelling the historical Zollverein Customs Union), which may allow them to build luxury furniture to meet the demands of the wealthy Prussian elite. But if they leave that market to form their own, their own elites may not have enough money to afford those luxury goods, and their economy will suffer unless they can set up trade deals to find buyers abroad or join a different, larger market.

• The number of countries that can be in your market at a time is based on the market leader's diplomatic Influence, which is one of the main capacity types. Capacities are different from power/mana in that it's not a pool of points you build up and spend. It's more like having enough electricity to run a lot of devices. Influence is also used for things like alliances, etc. You get Influence primarily from having rivalries, your Power Ranking (Great Powers get a ton), and a few other things that add percentage modifiers.

• Prices of goods are based on Supply and Demand. It's not event-based with arbitrary starting prices like EU4. Full market simulation. POPs and Industries will place Buy orders while Industries will also place Sell orders for finished goods. There's a screen that lets you see what are currently the five most under-produced and the five most overproduced goods in your market, so you can set up trade deals or expand industries to meet demand better.

• The other factor that affects this is Infrastructure. Having insufficient infrastructure will make it harder to get goods from a given State to your wider market efficiently.

• Around 50 trade goods divided into Staples - Consumed by all POPs for daily needs, Industrial Goods - Consumed by industries to make other finished goods, Luxury Goods - consumed by POPs with higher Standard of Living, and Military Goods - Used to create military units including infantry, artillery, ships, and later tanks and planes.

• Trade Goods (incomplete list, mostly guessing based on icons): Tools, Glass, Wood, Coal, Luxury Furniture, Porcelain, Silk, Iron, Chemicals, Meat, Cannons, Ammunition, Fish, Sulfur, Basic Furniture, Clipper Ships, Ironclads, Luxury Clothing, Paper, Artillery Shells, Fruit, Tea, Tobacco, Baked Goods, Coffee, Wine, Steel, Standard Clothing, Guns, Grain, Automobiles, Alcohol, Cotton

• Production buildings have resource inputs and outputs, Throughput rating, and pay wages to all employed POPs. If their output can sell for more than their inputs, they will generate dividends that are paid to the owners and increase their Wealth. Otherwise, they will need to be subsidized or else they will fail. Each also has a personal cash reserve, presumably so it can run at a loss for a bit without subsidies.

• Production Methods affect how buildings operate. For instance, a workshop can be Privately Owned, belong to a Merchant Guild, Publicly Traded, Government Run, or a Worker Cooperative. This affects what kind of POPs are employed here, what wages they are paid, and who collects the dividends/profits. i.e. Privately Owned workshops will employ Capitalists who get most of the wealth generated with the workers getting only wages, whereas in a Worker Cooperative, the people doing the work own the workshop and split the Wealth it generates evenly.

• Government Run industries have mandatory subsidies, meaning any losses they incur will come directly out of your national treasury rather than letting them go out of business. But you can also pocket any profits.

• You can have a Statist, command economy without being Communist. Communism itself, while it often goes hand-in-hand with a command economy, is now more directly related to distribution of wealth and political power. Communism is not when the government does things. The government doing more things doesn't make it more communister.

• POPs can promote/demote and some types are more likely than others. Engineers and Shopkeepers are more likely to become Capitalists, for instance.

• Command Economies do not allow Capitalists or Aristocrats to be employed in your nation, so they will have to find a new job or leave. They also get fewer foreign Trade Routes to work with, but can enact Encourage Consumption, Discourage Consumption, and Consumption Taxes more cheaply. They can embargo all goods and they can (must) subsidize everything.

• You need to have a Command Economy to switch Production Method to Government Control.

• Free Trade gives you more import/export routes, reduces loan interest rates, allows you to subsidize only Service Industries and Infrastructure, and increases the amount of wealth Capitalists contribute to the Investment Pool.

• Isolation cuts off all foreign trade (so you can only operate within your Market/Customs Union), you can embargo all goods, you can subsidize all buildings, and both Capitalists and Aristocrats will contribute to the Investment Pool.

• Traditionalism (used mostly by Unrecognized countries and represents pre-industrial economies): Fewer trade routes, can subsidize only Services and Infrastructure.

• Agrarianism gives you more export routes, lets you subsidize agriculture, infrastructure, and services, Aristocrats contribute to the Investment Pool, and you can embargo Luxury Goods

• Different economic systems dictate what you can or cannot spend Investment Pool money on.

• Services are a non-tradeable good, so they cannot leave your home market. Access to services is based on Infrastructure. So for example, you might have lots of services being produced in New York, but if you don't build railroads out to California, the people in California will have very little or no access to those services (and goods from California won't be able to get to market efficiently) even though both states are in the US market. Until you have better infrastructure, you'll have to rely on producing most things locally.

• Services come from buildings called Urban Centers, which can't be directly built but are generated automatically based on the Urbanization of your States. All buildings you build produce a little bit of Urbanization in the target State, but some provide a lot more than others. If you focus more on expanding agriculture, you won't have as many Urban Centers. If you build lots of Factories and government buildings, you will generate much more Urbanization. The Service sector will employ POPs as well.

• Classes: Lower, Middle, and Upper strata. Determined by POP type. It mainly determines their wage level and taxation under uneven tax laws. Standard of Living goes all the way up to 100, which would be "Jeff Bezos level", but you generally won't see anything above 50 unless you're trying to break the game.

• If you have a system like worker-owned factories, you can get to a point where even the lower strata POPs in your country are richer by the late game than the capitalists were at the beginning.

• Each POP is represented by a 3D character model, looks like the same basic models from CK3, including regional and class-appropriate dress.

• National leaders have 3D, CK3-style portraits and character traits (up to 3 in the build we saw). Monarchies have heirs who also get a portrait.

• POPs can belong to Interest Groups, and these are the main forces that you must contend with to make changes to your society. Not all POPs of a specific type belong to the same Interest Group. i.e. Capitalists are likely to join the Industrialists interest group, but some of them might instead belong to the Devout.

• There are a handful of "Templates" for interest groups that will be used in just about every country, but they can have different traits and desires. For example, Industrialists in Prussia are very pro-Monarchy, whereas in the U.S. that is very much not the case.

• Example Interest Groups we got to see: Industrialists, Landowners (called Junkers in Prussia, Landed Gentry in Britain, Plantation Owners in the US, and Scholar-Officials in Qing), Intelligentsia (called Literati in Qing), Devout (called Anglican Church in Britain and Confucian Schools in Qing) - they said this one specifically will change A LOT in ideology depending on the dominant religion of your country, Armed Forces, Rural Folk, Petite Bourgeoisie, Trade Unions

• Interest Groups have a set of Ideologies, as well as Traits that can be active or inactive at any given time.

• Interest Groups also have a leader with a portrait and traits.

• Ideologies can change over time (such as Trade Unions becoming more socialist). They will be stable for most of the game, but certain events, ideas, and leaders can cause them to shift. The leader of the Interest Group might be a socialist, for instance. They are still tweaking how ideologically malleable or fixed these groups should be.

• Prussian Industrialists have Monarchist (very upset if you switch to any non-Monarchy form of government), Individualist (Disapprove of most welfare/social security/government healthcare/public schools), Abolitionist (Don't like slavery), two others that we didn't get to see.

• If Ideologies are what an IG wants, Traits are what they can do for you. These traits will become active if the IG is loyal enough to your government. Kind of like how loyal Institutions provide bonuses in EU4. The one we got to see for the Industrialists was Job Creators, which increases the contribution to the Investment Pool by Capitalist POPs by 10% if their loyalty is at least 20.

• You can invite Interest Groups into your government. The ones that aren't part of your government will be in Opposition. You can never make everyone happy so you have to choose which groups to champion.

• Clout is how much influence an Interest Group has in your nation. In 1836, the main factors are Wealth, Status, and Workforce. If you liberalize your country you can offset this with Votes. When you hold elections, each Interest Group receives Votes from the enfranchised POPs that support it, which increases their Clout by a set amount per Vote until the next election. Various laws can tweak the political weight of Votes vs Wealth, or give more people Votes, though Wealth will always be a factor. So a truly egalitarian society will need to level the playing field in terms of wealth inequality in addition to democratic reforms.

• Not all POPs belong to an Interest Group at game start. Some of them are considered Politically Inactive.

• Literacy is back from Vicky 2, with your education spending determining what percentage of the country has access to education rather than just how fast it ticks up toward 100%. 100% Literacy will be very hard to achieve. Literate POPs can take certain jobs that illiterate ones cannot. It will be hard to get modern factories and government institutions up and running with low Literacy.

• Higher Literacy also affects your likelihood to join an Interest Group rather than being Politically Inactive, which sort of replaces the Consciousness system from Vicky 2. Uneducated laborers are more likely to stay out of politics. Likewise, ideas like Egalitarianism and Socialism will spread to your country faster if the lower classes are educated, which further increase political participation, expected minimum Standards of Living, and cause more attraction to groups like the Trade Unions among laborers. If the expected minimum Standard of Living goes up but the actual Standard of Living for those POPs does not, they will start to radicalize. So you can give them more beer and amenities to suppress class consciousness, is basically what it sounds like.

• You can Suppress or Promote IGs directly using your Authority, which is an administrative capacity stat. More absolutist forms of government have more Authority, and so will have more control over the IGs in their nation, whereas democracies will be less able to combat or uplift the ones they prefer.

• Legitimacy is basically a check against inviting too many Interest Groups into your government. If you try to form too large of a coalition, your Legitimacy will tank. You also get Legitimacy from having the Interest Group your leader belongs to in the government – so as Prussia, we had to have the Armed Forces in the government, because they're the king's faction, or we would take a hit to Legitimacy. And that in turn makes it harder to ever pass any laws the military doesn't like. In a Presidential Republic like the US, you might have a different interest group represented by the head of state every election cycle, which dictates what you can accomplish during that term.

• An Autocracy requires you to work with fewer Interest Groups to maintain Legitimacy, whereas a Parliamentary Republic can form larger coalitions. By the same token, Autocratic governments can commit to a more defined strategy (at the risk of annoying everyone who is not part of the government), whereas Republics will have to make more compromises and only be able to pass policies with very broad, cross-party support (while making more people feel their voices are being heard).

• Trickle Migration (Vicky 2 style) will mostly happen within cultural regions, to/from colonies, and within your market. i.e. Germanic cultured pops will be free to move around the Germanic home region, between your metropole and your colonies, or anywhere in their home country's market. POPs won't just trickle migrate wherever at all times.

• The exception to this is Migration Waves, which can be caused by poor economic conditions, political unrest, ethnic discrimination, etc. These will be major events, rather than a trickle. i.e. famine in Ireland might trigger a Migration Wave from Ireland to the US. They will try to target countries that have better standards of living and freer laws than the place they're leaving, but it's not explicitly tied to New World vs Old World like in Vicky 2. So the US and Brazil won't have any arbitrary advantage in attracting immigrants, though conditions in those nations might still make them popular destinations.

• Falling Standard of Living can generate Radical pops (replacing Vicky 2's Militancy system), while rising Standard of Living can convert Radicals to neutrals, or neutrals to Loyalists. Having more Radicals in a state generates Turmoil, which can affect the economy and lead to uprisings. Having more Radicals in an Interest Group will lower that group's Approval score toward the current government (and Loyalists in an interest group will do the opposite), which can lead to a civil war or revolution. Cultural discrimination can also generate Radicals.

• Higher wealth POPs have a lower threshold to radicalize because they expect a higher standard of living. "They can only afford 100 Ming vases instead of 150, and this is absolutely unacceptable."

• Loyalist POPs (and Radicals) can die off, which causes intergenerational conflict. If you had an era of prosperity that generated a lot of Loyalists, and then they die, the younger generation with worse economic opportunities might suddenly be not so happy and change the loyalty and attitude of your Interest Groups.

• You can fund Police Institutions to reduce the local effects of Radicals. They don't go away, but they won't be able to cause as much trouble. You can also bring up the standard of living or change discriminating laws to deradicalize them. Or you can discriminate even harder and hope they decide to go live somewhere else.

• Enslaved POPs will be modeled. This is a historical simulation. They don't want to stray away from the parts of history that are horrific and pretend they didn't exist. They also don't want to pretend that it was a good idea. As an example, slavery is not a flat boon for your country, but it is very profitable for plantation owners, and those Interest Groups will fight against abolition because it's in their economic interest – they want to keep those unpaid wages for themselves and spend them on luxuries. You as the player will have to decide how to deal with those groups.

• At the same time, not every nation needs to be on a set trajectory toward liberalism. If you want to keep Russia an absolutist feudal serf state until the endgame, you can do that assuming you can deal with any radicals who want to change it. There is no assumed best path.

• Example needs for higher wealth pops: Free Movement (Transportation or Automobiles), Luxury Items, Luxury Drinks, Intoxicants, Communication, Heating - Needs are different from goods, and many of them can be filled by multiple different types of goods.

• Example Laws (Not a complete list, just the ones I saw) -

POWER STRUCTURE

• Governance Principles: Monarchy, Chiefdom, Presidential Republic, Parliamentary Republic, Council Republic

• Distribution of Power: Autocracy, Oligarchy, Elder Council, Landed Voting, Wealth Voting, Census Suffrage, Universal Suffrage, Anarchy

• Citizenship: National Supremacy

• Church and State: Freedom of Conscience

• Bureaucracy: Appointed Bureaucrats

• Conscription: Conscription

• Internal Security: No Home Affairs

ECONOMY

• Economic System: Mercantilism, Free Trade, Traditionalism, Isolationism, Agrarianism, Command Economy

• Income Tax: No Income Tax, Payroll Tax (more burden on the poor), Proportional Tax (everyone pays a flat percentage), Graduated Tax (more burden on the wealthy)

• Poll Tax: No Poll Tax

• Colonization: No Colonial Affairs

• Policing: Local Police Force

• Education: Public Schools, Religious Schools, No Schools, Private Schools

• Health System: No Health System, Charity Hospitals, Private Health Insurance, Public Health Insurance

HUMAN RIGHTS

• Free Speech: Censorship

• Labor Rights: Serfdom Abolished

• Children's Rights: Child Labor Allowed

• Rights of Women: Propertied Women, Legal Guardianship

• Welfare: Poor Laws, Wage Controls, No Social Security, Pensions

• Migration: No Migration Controls

• Slavery: Slavery Banned

• Passing laws an interest group doesn't like will lower their approval. If they get upset enough, they can start a civil war. You can only pass laws if at least one interest group that is part of your government approves of it, and many of them require specific inventions as a prerequisite (ie: Graduated Income Tax requires Socialism.) The more Interest Groups that are part of your government approve of a law, the faster you can implement it.

• Institutions are like the organs of your government. Some Institutions are unlocked by specific laws. They have five levels each, with increasing bonuses but also increasing Bureaucracy cost. Bureaucracy is the third capacity, along with Authority and Influence, that is generated by building government buildings in your states and having Bureaucrat and Clerk pops working in them (which also requires literacy). Going over your Bureaucratic capacity will give you a tax penalty due to governmental inefficiency, but there's also a hard cap on the number of Institution levels you can have, which can be raised over time.

• Example Institutions- These modifiers can change based on your laws

• Conscription Office: +2% Conscription Rate and increases the number of Battalions you can mobilize per level (with Conscription)

• Education: +15% Education access per level (with Public education), +2% Wealth-based Education Access (this scales with Wealth so it works out to much higher than 2% at very high Wealth levels) and +20% Intelligentsia Political Strength (with Private Schools), +10% education Access, +20% religious Conversion rate, +20% Devout Political Strength per level (with Religious Schools)

• Law Enforcement: +10 Landowners Political Strength and -20% State Penalties from Turmoil per level (with Local Policing), -5% Radicals from Standard of Living decreases and -15% State penalties from Turmoil with ???

• Colonial Affairs: +20% Colony Growth per level

• Social Security: +10% Industrialists political strength and +2 Minimum Wealth per level

• Workplace Safety Offices: -2% Mortality of Laborers, Machinists, and Engineers employed in Mines and -20% to Dangerous Working Conditions per level

• National Security Agency - No modifiers shown

• Institutions only apply their benefits to Incorporated parts of your country. You can also have Unincorporated areas. The Bureaucratic cost per investment level is based on the total population in all of your Incorporated states, so the more people benefitting from services will result in needing more bureaucrats to maintain.

• Institutions also have a financial cost since you're paying the wages of the Bureaucrat POPs out of the state treasury. There will always be some bureaucrats, even if you're not funding a bunch of government institutions, just from enacting your laws in Incorporated states.

• States like the Qing will begin with massive, sprawling bureaucracies that have a significant impact on their playstyle. They have a huge population in their Incorporated States day one, which is a colossal bureaucratic sink before you even start adding Institutions on top. You probably can't bring 100% education access to everyone in China because it would take an absurd amount of bureaucratic investment, while smaller nations will have a much easier time doing this.

• It's a valid playstyle to run a "lean state" with very few bureaucrats and very few or no public services, freeing people up to do other jobs and relying on the Investment Pool instead of state revenue to expand infrastructure and industry. Minting can allow some countries to replace taxation.

• Diplomatic actions are your standard Paradox stuff. New ones include Trade Agreements, Invite to Customs Union (making them part of your Market), Violate Sovereignty, Start Bankrolling - I didn't get to ask what those last two do but Bankroll is probably just monthly subsidies.

• Diplomatic Plays: Basically an evolution of the crisis system from Vicky 2. This is now the default way you try to get things from other countries who do not want to give them to you! I described it as almost like "Diplomatic Combat."

• Types of plays:

• Conquer State, Liberate Subject, Make Puppet, Open Market, Take Treaty Port, Transfer Subject, Annex Subject, Cut Down to Size, Declare Independence, Ban Slavery, Make Territory, Make Vassal, Return State, Take Colony, Unify Region (in the example we saw it was called "Unify Germany").

• You put your starting demands on the table. Enemy puts their starting demands on the table. It then enters a maneuvering phase where either side can add wargoals, other countries can become involved (mostly if they actually want something from either side - rivals will be very likely to join just to stop you from getting what you want.)

• Ultimately you can back down (the side that didn't blink gets their original wargoal, but not any extra wargoals that were added later by themselves or other nations that became involved), or let the timer expire and go to war (everyone who placed a demand on the table gets called in and all demands on both sides are up for grabs).

• It's possible to Sway nations during the maneuver phase, offering them spoils of war to join your side. This isn't just useful for securing their alliance if it does go to war. Tipping the balance of power more and more in your favor also makes it more likely that the other side will Back Down.

• The more demands you add to your side of the table, the more POTENTIAL threat you will generate and the more likely it is that other nations will pledge their support to your enemy. Particularly if you are a Great Power, other Great Powers will try to head off any massive wars of conquest before they even start by pledging their support to the target and trying to get you to Back Down, to maintain the balance of power. So it's generally safer to eat your neighbors one bite at a time unless you think you can take on everyone at once.

• Allies will generally side with you or stay out of your way. Countries with friendly relations or who don't see you as a threat are also generally unlikely to get involved, so maintaining a strong diplomatic position with other Great Powers will enable faster conquests with less meddling.

• At any point during this process, before war is declared, you can Mobilize your armies to have a head start, which might cause your opponent to back down. If you wait until the war has already started to mobilize, you will be on the back foot compared to countries that mobilized before the timer ran out.

• They don't want this system to make every single conquest into a World War and it's being balanced accordingly. It's always a possibility though if you as a player try to overreach too much.

• They don't want to say One Tag World Conquest is impossible because the players will always find a way, but they described it as "implausible."

• There is no Status Quo in a Diplomatic Play. Either you go to war, or one side Backs Down and the other gets their initial wargoal. (But ONLY the initial wargoal.) So you can't use it risk-free to test the waters.

• No more "uncivilized" nations. Instead there are "Unrecognized" nations, which basically means they weren't seen as equals by the Great Powers at the time. They do NOT get any arbitrary debuffs to technology or combat just for having the "unrecognized" flag. They play by the same rules as everyone else for the most part.

• They will start out technologically behind in many cases, based on historical circumstances, and the social and economic conditions they have to deal with will generally make it harder to become an advanced, industrialized, technologically competitive nation. But that's all tied to the laws, POPs, Interest Groups, resources, and starting infrastructure, not their Unrecognized status.

• The one direct, mechanical difference is that it's cheaper and generates less threat for Recognized nations to take land from Unrecognized nations.

• You can go from Unrecognized to Recognized, for example by beating up a Great Power. The Russo-Japanese War was given as an example of an Unrecognized nation becoming Recognized.

• Colonization works in two different ways: Colonization against Decentralized Countries can be done like in EU4, where you can theoretically do it without open conflict. You establish a Colonial Institution back home and employ POPs as Colonists who will slowly build up the colony in the target province. During this time, you will generate a Tension score with the Decentralized Country you are colonizing on top of, which can result in open warfare. The natives will annex your colony if they win.

• Machine Guns no longer magically make you able to colonize new areas like in Vicky 2. They just help against uprisings if you do have to fight. Medical advances like Malaria Medication will have a major impact on where you can colonize, though.

• Colonization against Unrecognized nations, it's more like declaring a regular war. You can make them your colonial subject, or you can demand a Treaty Port, which will create a new State under your control and give you access to their market.

• Outright annexing overseas territory by either method will create a Colonial State, which is not the same as an Unincorporated State. They are affected by colonial policies, have special migration rules, and distinct mechanics.

• War/combat is unfinished. They're not ready to talk about it yet.

• Prestige is still a thing and affects your Great Power ranking. Cut Down to Size wargoal will take a bite out of your prestige.

• GDP affects your Great Power ranking directly, even if you as the state are not benefitting from that production through taxation. What matters is production, not government revenue. Factories, especially late game, will cause GDP to skyrocket, so you will need to industrialize to remain competitive as a Great Power.

• Each Power Rank has its own intended play experience.

• Minor Powers: Ideal for playing tall. Local concerns. Min-maxing your economy, encouraging immigration, building exactly the society you want, "tending your garden," becoming regionally powerful/influential.

• Major Power: Might have some colonies. Mass political movements outside your control might try to change the shape of your country (this is less of a concern for minor powers). Becoming a Great Power is a realistic goal.

• Great Powers: Global influence. Maintaining and disrupting the worldwide balance of power. Getting involved in smaller nations' affairs in lots of ways beyond just conquest. Proxy conflicts. Gunboat diplomacy. Being #1. They get more tools to change industry top-down, from a macro level, with a single click. You shouldn't be really concerned with economic micromanagement, but still have a lot of control over your economy in broader ways.

• Three different Tech Trees: Production, Military, and Society. More like a traditional, branching 4X tech tree, not like the tech columns in Vicky 2. No split between techs and inventions. Seems like no more RNG for inventions other than that Tech Spread has some RNG involved.

• About 10 "tiers" of tech. Earlier ones might only have three techs in them but later ones have up to 11.

• Production Tech represents the major civilian inventions of the era that directly affect industry. Dynamite, Railways, Cotton Gin, Telegraph.

• Military Tech is pretty self-explanatory. Hardware as well as doctrines. Ironclads, Machine Guns, Modern Nursing, Defense in Depth. Tanks and Planes are at the very bottom. Having something researched doesn't automatically implement it, so for example, just researching Defense in Depth won't give you its benefits until you decide to enact it.

• Society Tech is stuff like Romanticism, Urban Planning, Central Banking, Dialectics. Anarchism and Socialism are two separate ideologies now that function differently. Antibiotics, Malaria Prevention, and other civilian stuff unrelated to direct production of goods is also in this tree.

• Innovations (including social movements like Socialism) can spread into your country even if you choose not to research them, which can be combated by things like censorship at the cost of slowing down your Innovation rate and upsetting the Intelligentsia.

• Almost every tech has advantages and disadvantages. i.e. automation increases overall throughput and reduces costs, but also reduces the number of available jobs in that industry, so you have to figure out what to do with all the newly unemployed.

• Technology Spread is based on your Literacy rate. Higher literacy and a free press will cause techs that are spreading to you from outside to spread faster. This is separate from Innovation Points, which you invest directly into a single tech you are trying to research at a given moment.

• Innovation Points you can spend directly come from building universities and employing Academics. Literacy rate affects how many of those points you can directly invest into research each week. So if you have a well-funded academic elite but low general literacy, you might not be able to spend all of your Innovation Points. These "overflow" Innovation Points beyond your direct investment cap will increase Tech Spread instead. So there's a balance between increasing Literacy, which speeds the adoption of outside ideas, and building academic infrastructure, which gives you more direct control over research. (This is a complicated system and we got to see it for like 30 seconds but I'm pretty sure I was able to get the general idea. I'm sure Martin can find me and yell at me if I'm wrong.)

• Ideas like Socialism, Anarchism, Egalitarianism, will increase the minimum Expected Standard of Living for ALL POPs once present in your nation, so you will need to provide them with more stuff to keep them happy. This might also increase attraction for Interest Groups that want broader suffrage or to abolish slavery, for example.

• Having Anarchism as your organizing principle produces no Authority, so you will have a very reduced ability to make changes to your country directly once you have switched over to it.

• Anarchists can implement a Council Republic government, which gives more Political Strength to Farmers and Machinists and opens up the Worker Cooperative production method, in which workers own their factories and collect dividends from them. This is distinct from USSR-style communism, in which the state controls the industries and (theoretically...) passes the proceeds on to the workers from the top down in the form of subsidies and social programs.

• If a revolution happens, you can side with the rebels. So you can be super duper capitalist on purpose, make life hell for all the workers, then switch sides when the socialists rise up. Neighboring conservative countries will be likely to step in and try to stop a socialist revolution.

• They want it to be playable without a lot of prior experience. It's a very complex game but it should be much more approachable than Vicky 2.

• Rather than a game where you learn how to play "correctly" by following a guide, the goal is for it to be the kind of game where you do what comes naturally and are able to easily understand why your actions led to certain consequences.

• Historical events (Taiping Rebellion, US Civil War) can happen, but only if the correct conditions exist. If the US player plays the interest group game really well and manages to abolish slavery peacefully in the 1850s, there won't be a hardcoded Civil War event chain that fires.

[Syt]

Looks good, but let's see if it all comes together in the finished product and doesn't end up a broken unbalanced jumble.

[jimmy olsen]

Looks good, but let's see if it all comes together in the finished product and doesn't end up a broken unbalanced jumble.

Vicky 2 was all that and it was great!

[Tamas]

Looks good, but let's see if it all comes together in the finished product and doesn't end up a broken unbalanced jumble.

Vicky 2 was all that and it was great!

Yeah but a decade or two have passed though. We are too old to plug in the holes with our imaginations.

[Syt]

Yeah, Tim, but they're building from scratch from what I understand.

To quote Martin Anward from last year:

I've seen this rumor posted before but as far as I know (and have heard from others at the company who worked on V2) it's not true - it's more that the economy code has been refactored and optimized to the point of being nearly unreadable. There's a fairly solid understanding of how it should operate in theory, but it's an extremely complicated piece of code (written at a time when paradox played pretty fast and loose with code standards) that ends up behaving in weird and unexpected ways. For example, I'm reasonably sure that artisans making tanks out of fruit wasn't in the original design.

[Syt]

V2 peaked in terms of concurrent player count in the last 24 hours on Steam.

https://steamcharts.com/app/42960#All

(Misleading, for sure, as it was released originally before Paradox games were on Steam IIRC).

[The Brain]

Yeah, Tim, but they're building from scratch from what I understand.

To quote Martin Anward from last year:

I've seen this rumor posted before but as far as I know (and have heard from others at the company who worked on V2) it's not true - it's more that the economy code has been refactored and optimized to the point of being nearly unreadable. There's a fairly solid understanding of how it should operate in theory, but it's an extremely complicated piece of code (written at a time when paradox played pretty fast and loose with code standards) that ends up behaving in weird and unexpected ways. For example, I'm reasonably sure that artisans making tanks out of fruit wasn't in the original design.

Maybe, maybe not. Many countries in that era used sharpened mangoes as weapons.

[Razgovory]

Man that's complex.  I like ambitious games even if they don't entirely work properly.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

some things remind me of that AGEOD game that was barely playable