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Sarys

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Apr 18, 2012
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Hello! Where can I found good Vic1 tutorial (Vic was harder than I thought)
 
The wiki has a good one about playing a beginner's game as Brazil. It can be found overhere: http://www.paradoxian.org/vickywiki/index.php/Main_Page

But it seems that was written before the Revolutions add on, so I'll paraphrase it and give a general summary here:

1. Start a game as Brazil. This will give you a large country with a lot of good resources that will probably not experience war (unless you're playing VIP) and the potential to become a Great Power.
2. First thing is to choose a technology to research. Since Brazil is isolated, it can ignore Army/Navy techs for a while without worrying about being overrun. Look at the cultural techs. Does the cultural tech available to research say it gives a prestige bonus? If so, research it. If not, research the economics tech, or maybe the industrial one.
3. Check the world market. Make sure you're selling all of the resources Brazil makes and not selling anything it needs. Be very aware of the world market and check it frequently, because forgetting you're selling something or buying something can lead to economical problems. Do not put anything on auto-trade. (The AI isn't trustworthy.)
4. Look at your budget. Set Tariffs as high as they will go. Set lower-class taxes to between 40-60%, as much as you need. Most of your population at the start of the game is lower class, so you will make the most taxing them. Middle class and upper class taxes should not exceed 50% ever (it results in over-taxation which demotes them from upper/middle to lower, like your aristocrats will become farmers or laborers. This can be useful in playing certain nations, but we want to avoid that at the moment.) Upper class taxes should be set as low as possible, why will be apparent in a moment.
5. Set education budget as high as it will go. Crime fighting and defense budget should also be raised eventually, but it's not as critical. Army maintenance is rather important, so keep that high.
6. Let the game time advance. Pretty soon there will be a scripted uprising of one rebel in a province in the middle of the country. Move your army out to defeat it. Make sure it has maximum manpower (through clicking on the fist in the upper-right when the unit is selected) and assign it a general assuming you have the leadership. If it captures any provinces, you will need to put your armies there to take them back.
7. When you have the money, go to the Rio de Janeiro province. This province has the highest population in your country. Bring up the population and pick some laborers. Check the "convert to clerks" button. Buy whatever you need to buy from the world market to convert them to clerks. (This population should be decent, but not too high. In the 10,000-20,000 range is plenty.) Convert them to clerks, then notice there's a "convert to capitalists" button. Buy the items you need to convert them to capitalists from the world market and then activate it. Note that you may not use as much money as it says it will take because it takes less money the lower population amount the POP is. (Though I don't have the formula right in front of me.) You now have capitalists!
8. Here's the fun part: since we're interventionist government, we can't build factories by ourselves. So upper-class taxes should be set as low as possible. Look up the capitalist POP details. You should see the number that represents the money they're saving start to climb. When it reaches a certain level, they will start to build a factory or railroad. (Assuming you have the tech to do it.)
9. You should be getting prestige from your cultural techs. This will give you more diplomatic points, through which you can improve your relations with other nations. Peru is the other South American nation most likely to declare war on you, so spend your points to build its relations to +200 with you, then offer them an alliance. (Your choice if regular or defensive. I suggest defensive because they will go to war with other countries sometimes.) Having an alliance prevents them from attacking you and gives you allies if you are attacked. Consider doing this with other nations nearby as well.
10. Eventually your first factory will be built in Rio. Pick a laborer or farmer POP in the same state (not necessarily same province) and convert it to craftsmen. Make three total craftsmen groups, and two clerks. (Make sure they're a good size!) Then bring up the factory screen and add the workers you created to work at the factory. Turn the game time on and watch what resources it makes and what resource it creates. Sometimes you will make factories that use resources you have to import. In which case, you'll either need to buy those resources from the world market, or just let your factories sit there... But importing too many resources can devastate your economy. So be careful.
11. Eventually you will get more and more factories and have money to promote more capitalists in other states. Always make sure there's a high enough population in these states to work the factories.
12. Your literacy will eventually give you excess research points, or a lucky event will do so. When this happens, begin raising your diplomacy with a super-power, like the UK or France or Germany or the USA. When it's high enough, offer to buy their technology in exchange for money. This requires a lot of money (like 40,000 per tech) but it's the only way to catch up, and is great for advancing in those army or naval techs you've been ignoring.
13. If you ever need a military, make sure you have the right amounts of liquor, small arms, and canned food, at least. For this reason it's good to have a stockpile of these goods bought from the World Market. (Or to stockpile them yourself if you were lucky enough to get a factory that makes them.

Every few years (or months) you should get random events asking you to make selections. Some of them are easy (do you want to support education? Of course,) others not so much. (Especially things like Jominian vs. Clausewitz attitudes.) These are more nuanced events you're best off reading the more in-depth guides for.

Someday you might want to start playing the colonial game. This will take several technologies to grab land that is not yet claimed, so it's better to steal colonial claims by other countries. This can easily be done by declaring a colonial war, but consider the consequences. First it takes prestige, then it's likely that the other country will never offer or accept peace. On the plus side, a colonial war means your homeland will not be invaded...

But with this strategy, you will have an easily managed game where your prestige will be sky-high (enough to get you to be a Great Power by itself) but your war score and military score will probably be far behind the other Great Powers. There's not much you can do about that, though.

Also note that this guide completely ignores Plurality, Militancy, and Consciousness. Here's a brief summary:
1. Consciousness indicates how much a POP is aware of his situation in society and what he/she can do about it. It causes them to vote more in line with their ideology (conservative, liberal, etc.). Whether you want a POP of high consciousness or not depends on what type of government you want to put in power. When playing Brazil, since you have so many Clergymen, there's not much you can do to affect them because Clergymen automatically raise the consciousness of your upper class POPs, and decrease it of the lower-class POPs. Later if you get a government that doesn't have "Moralism" as a value, you can convert Clergymen to other POP types. (And depending on the situation, I suggest you do.)
2. Militancy is a score that indicates how likely the POP of a province is to rise up against you in revolt. You ALWAYS want this number to be as low as possible. 0-4 is generally okay. 5+ is not. You can decrease it by lowering taxes, granting better social programs (and funding them!), and leaving a military unit in the province.
3. Plurality represents how accustomed your country is to democracy and accepting new ideas. (...sorta.) With Brazil being a constitutional monarchy, this is neither good nor bad. However, higher plurality means better education, less militancy when a POP doesn't get the government it wants elected, and it attracts immigrants from other countries. (Which Brazil can really benefit from.) It'll take a while, but having a good plurality score will help out, generally. (When you play a nation like Prussia or Russia with an absolute monarchy, however, plurality can be a very bad thing.)

So, having played Brazil, what other countries are good to learn with? I suggest Japan, because it starts with a few factories, is also isolated and protected from war (even more so), and you'll also get the unique experience of starting as an Uncivilized Country. It's very hard to lose as Japan, and given its greater capacity for industry and military, it can easily get in the top five (or at least top eight) by the end game.

Good luck!
 
So after that I should have the knowledge to play with any country I want?
 
Yeah I never played Vic that much either because it the hardest Paradox Interactive game.
 
You'll have the basics down pretty well. A lot of the European Great Powers are heavily driven by events that can only be familiarized with playing them, and they take more micro-management, quicker colonization to beat their rivals, more complicated research plans than just spamming the cultural techs, etc.

Here's a list of countries:
1. The UK and Russia are probably the most powerful nations at the start of the game.
2. France, Prussia, and maybe Sardinia-Piedmont are second-third tier at the start, but they have the potential to become #1 if they can defeat each other. (Prussia and Sardinia-Piedmont will both need to unite into Germany and Italy to achieve this.
3. The USA and Japan are probably the most powerful non-European countries. Japan has a good population and the time to become an industrial and military powerhouse (its only really dangerous enemy is Russia, which will generally ignore Japan unless you try to invade through Siberia), and the USA starts with a democracy and a high plurality and will attract a lot of immigrants. (Its major concern is uniting the historical country and winning the civil war. Then it's free.)
4. Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire, and Mexico are all countries which look pretty strong on the outset, but will be divided by external or internal problems in most game.
5. China has the potential to become a strong nation if it can achieve Civilized status, but that can be very difficult.
6. Other than that, you have strong regional powers like Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands where you should consider it a victory to make them Great Powers.

Also playing a nation like say, Hawaii, will be difficult no matter what you do.

On the whole, all things being equal, a united Germany usually takes the #1 spot by the end of the game.

But do check that wiki. The guides on there are very helpful. (And eventually give VIP a try.)
 
You'll have the basics down pretty well. A lot of the European Great Powers are heavily driven by events that can only be familiarized with playing them, and they take more micro-management, quicker colonization to beat their rivals, more complicated research plans than just spamming the cultural techs, etc.

Here's a list of countries:
1. The UK and Russia are probably the most powerful nations at the start of the game.
2. France, Prussia, and maybe Sardinia-Piedmont are second-third tier at the start, but they have the potential to become #1 if they can defeat each other. (Prussia and Sardinia-Piedmont will both need to unite into Germany and Italy to achieve this.
3. The USA and Japan are probably the most powerful non-European countries. Japan has a good population and the time to become an industrial and military powerhouse (its only really dangerous enemy is Russia, which will generally ignore Japan unless you try to invade through Siberia), and the USA starts with a democracy and a high plurality and will attract a lot of immigrants. (Its major concern is uniting the historical country and winning the civil war. Then it's free.)
4. Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire, and Mexico are all countries which look pretty strong on the outset, but will be divided by external or internal problems in most game.
5. China has the potential to become a strong nation if it can achieve Civilized status, but that can be very difficult.
6. Other than that, you have strong regional powers like Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands where you should consider it a victory to make them Great Powers.

Also playing a nation like say, Hawaii, will be difficult no matter what you do.

On the whole, all things being equal, a united Germany usually takes the #1 spot by the end of the game.

But do check that wiki. The guides on there are very helpful. (And eventually give VIP a try.)

Okay thank you :)
 
One last thing: when I say Japan has 'a good population', I don't mean the size of the population. What I mean is that nearly every single country has to deal with the issue of having non-National Culture POPs. Non-national culture POPs can be converted from their starting POP class to other POP classes only if your nation has Full Citizenship as an issue, and that usually means getting a Liberal (or maybe socialist/communist) party in power, which may not be the best for you economically or political stability-wise (Liberal governments usually have laissez-faire as an issue, which is great when you're starting out and need your capitalists to build factories because they'll start building with less money saved, but you can't raise tariffs or taxes very high and you can't enact social reforms, which you will start to need eventually as your plurality rises). Even then, non-National Culture POPs only give you half the productivity of other POPs in Resource Gathering Operations or Factories (solution: make the non-national culture POPs into soldiers). However, nearly 100% of Japan is Japanese or Ainu, both considered their National Culture. That means you can convert all of your POPs from the start into whatever you want and not worry about productivity penalties.
 
It's been a fair time since I played *much* Victoria (and I have played a lot more pre-Revolutions games than post-Revolutions). That being said, Cally's advice is pretty sound.

My take is that UK, Russia, USA, and Prussia are the easiest, and are so in that order, from easiest to hardest. Prussia is a little bit more difficult than the others, but not by much. It has always been relatively easy in my experience to form Germany. You just have to have a decent sized army near the border when war with France comes. You can declare war on them yourself or wait for the event. If you occupy Paris at any time after 1870 or so (I think that is the date), you automatically win that war and get to form Germany. From that point on, you can win on economic strength alone just by out-industrializing the rest of the world.

US is strong enough initially that a player can win through economic might alone. The only real obstacle is the US Civil War, but if you can navigate through that, the player can learn to industrialize and build a good economy because they US has a big economy and abundant resources.

Russia can also build a monster economy, but it has a lower literacy rate, so technology research will be slower. The Crimean War is the main thing to watch out for.

UK is so strong that won't be much of a difficulty, but new players might struggle a little with micromanagement.

Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden are good middle to minor-level European powers for purposes of observing the way Europe tends to unfold in the game. You can build your economy some, with maybe some war and colonization along the way. A new player is not likely to do extremely well with them, but they give a chance to play a European power while avoiding major events that create challenges and/or the threat of a major wars.

I would advise a few games of Victoria without Revolutions if you are able. While the expansion adds some interesting features, the original game patched to 1.03, or even 1.03c if you can find it, or 1.04 (the last patch of the original game) is a different experience. Among other things, minor powers stand a better chance to expand and achieve great power status than in Revolutions. Also, players are less constricted by the policies of their government in the pre-Rev versions, meaning that one has more power over the outcome of the game.
 
Hey I was just wondering that should I buy Vic 2? I have no Vic 1 experience (steam is banned in the place where I'm at the moment so no vic 1 for 5 moths :(
 
I haven't played it yet, but if you're quick, there's a sale at Gamersgate that is selling Victoria 2 and the expansion for $5 USD each.

Yeah I already bought Vic 2 but no I fear that I bought my Vic 1 for nothing...

EDIT: just realized that that's too much to remember. It's hard to try to play and switch to internet and back to game....
 
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