Victoria 3

“The peasants are revolting,” cries The Management, but really it’s just Jonathan Bolding serving up their afternoon tea and biscuits.

-  Jonathan Bolding

It’s 1836 and the Industrial Revolution’s machines are in high gear. The coming century will change the face of the human world with a population explosion, a second industrial revolution and more. In Victoria 3, you take control of a society attempting to ride this wave of explosive change to its end in 1936. What you do along the way, and how much fun you have, is up to you.

Victoria 3 tasks you with building a nation by shaping its laws, economy, people and institutions. Developer Paradox calls it a “society-builder”. It wants you to care about the minutiae of political movements, distribution of power, population trends, economic organisation, factory output or global trade, and then start manipulating them.

That might be hard. Victoria 3 boasts some of the most intricate game mechanics we’ve seen in a strategy game. They can be overwhelming. You can micromanage trade routes, chart paths for societal reform, tweak your nation’s build queue, or examine production methods. Even a small nation is constantly given options to fiddle with, and progress in large nations can slow to a crawl as you scramble between trade crises and multi-front wars.

Managing this is made easier by one of Paradox’s better interfaces. It’s not quite as friendly as Crusader Kings 3, but it does have significantly more complex systems to work through. The bottom bar in particular is useful, with shortcuts to all kinds of national actions, from building and diplomacy to mustering troops. The map, meanwhile, is striking and impressively detailed.

I am the law