Victoria is the best game Paradox ever made.

[Slaikkiz]

Vic 1 and Revolutions was such an icredible game. Never have I seen a game like that. Goes in my top 3.

I got high hopes that Vic 3 will be great

 

[Revshawn]

Yeah I’ve been trying to play Victoria revolutions because it looks like a fun game. The dated ui and game mechanics is tough to figure out though.

 

[OllyOllyOxenFree]

Yea I totally agree with you. In fact the mods are probably the greatest ever developed in all Paradox games since and especially for Victoria 3.

The economics make me want to cream my pants with all the pie charts and stonks charts I'm seeing everywhere. The increasing budget deficit and high % interest rates don't seem to work properly.

The war aspect is a bit on the dry side though it's endlessly entertaining to watch fighters and bombers screw with the enemy and might be considered OP as of patch 1.0.2.

 

[DerGrößteRitter]

I would say that 2 was better than the first.

 

[Victor1234]

I would say that 2 was better than the first.

It depends on how you view the tradeoff. Having played both (with mods), I actually like 1 better.

Modded Victoria 1 (VIP)
The good: It produces randomized semi-historical results until ~1890 (when WW1 usually breaks out) very faithfully, with minimum player intervention. The economy, even late game, works and the AI can outbuild you. My favorite game ever was as Napoleon III France, focused on stealing UK's empire and getting west bank of the Rhine, only to find AI Austria had randomly elected liberals in 1848, which got it's many non-accepted pop groups as accepted via event and kept electing liberals with the unintended consequence of becoming the #1 industrial power by ~1880.

The bad: The cost of these semi-historical results is the very definition of railroading. UK tag will always get first dibs on colonizing Nigeria because they are tag UK, although if they refuse, or if they take it and you show up later, you can still take it too.

The ugly: You manually promote every pop. It sounds worse than it is, unless you're playing Russia or China, but then those countries weren't designed to have you create promotion goods via cheat console to turn every single pop into clerks or craftsmen in ideal ratios. If you wait until you can afford to buy or create those goods and promote as you get them, it's not an insane number of clicks because you definitely can't afford to make everyone in China a clerk.

Despite common misconceptions, the capitalist AI in Vic 1 did build railroads and factories automatically too, so only manual promotion and splitting of your own pops (the AI did it's own) was needed.

Modded Victoria 2 (PDM mod)
The good: Much more indirect influence, colonization probably handled better as a mechanism (although who can colonize what is probably worse...) and more diplomatic interactions (spheres and crisis system, even if badly implemented is better than RNG AI declaration of war).

The bad: Pretend you're on planet Fantasia, because even with some tag specific decisions and events, crazy stuff still happens. Your world will likely not even resemble our world by 1870 at the latest, and the longer it goes on the worse it gets. Victoria 2 was designed unfortunately with the EU3 phase of Paradox design philosophy in mind, as in, EU1/Victoria was too deterministic and railroaded, so let's free it up and make it almost entirely random! Yay Chinese Mexico! Yay Bavarian Venezuela! While EU3 had the mechanisms to let mods guide a semi-coherent direction for most countries, Victoria 2 is just bonkers and even mods can't make things make sense.

The ugly: The economy is broken, period. No matter what you do, there's a late game economic crash where it just stops working and there's nothing you can do. The mod softens the vanilla blow as much as possible but still. The military system is more micro intensive than V1 and probably broken, because since you can't manually promote pops, if you ever use your military at all, your brigades will eventually turn red icon and not be able to reinforce anymore since the soldier pop in that specific province promoted or demoted or died in battle. In Victoria 1, you can always promote more soldier pops of that same culture and keep your units, you just need X South Italian sized pops from any non-colony because they go into a national pool, and not necessarily only from Napoli.


My end result is that I've played dozens of (modded) Victoria 1 campaigns to the end in 1936, while I've never reached 1900 in Victoria 2, and it's not for lack of trying. It just keeps generating very silly results every single time I've tried.

 

[DerGrößteRitter]

It depends on how you view the tradeoff. Having played both (with mods), I actually like 1 better.

Modded Victoria 1 (VIP)
The good: It produces randomized semi-historical results until ~1890 (when WW1 usually breaks out) very faithfully, with minimum player intervention. The economy, even late game, works and the AI can outbuild you. My favorite game ever was as Napoleon III France, focused on stealing UK's empire and getting west bank of the Rhine, only to find AI Austria had randomly elected liberals in 1848, which got it's many non-accepted pop groups as accepted via event and kept electing liberals with the unintended consequence of becoming the #1 industrial power by ~1880.

The bad: The cost of these semi-historical results is the very definition of railroading. UK tag will always get first dibs on colonizing Nigeria because they are tag UK, although if they refuse, or if they take it and you show up later, you can still take it too.

The ugly: You manually promote every pop. It sounds worse than it is, unless you're playing Russia or China, but then those countries weren't designed to have you create promotion goods via cheat console to turn every single pop into clerks or craftsmen in ideal ratios. If you wait until you can afford to buy or create those goods and promote as you get them, it's not an insane number of clicks because you definitely can't afford to make everyone in China a clerk.

Despite common misconceptions, the capitalist AI in Vic 1 did build railroads and factories automatically too, so only manual promotion and splitting of your own pops (the AI did it's own) was needed.

Modded Victoria 2 (PDM mod)
The good: Much more indirect influence, colonization probably handled better as a mechanism (although who can colonize what is probably worse...) and more diplomatic interactions (spheres and crisis system, even if badly implemented is better than RNG AI declaration of war).

The bad: Pretend you're on planet Fantasia, because even with some tag specific decisions and events, crazy stuff still happens. Your world will likely not even resemble our world by 1870 at the latest, and the longer it goes on the worse it gets. Victoria 2 was designed unfortunately with the EU3 phase of Paradox design philosophy in mind, as in, EU1/Victoria was too deterministic and railroaded, so let's free it up and make it almost entirely random! Yay Chinese Mexico! Yay Bavarian Venezuela! While EU3 had the mechanisms to let mods guide a semi-coherent direction for most countries, Victoria 2 is just bonkers and even mods can't make things make sense.

The ugly: The economy is broken, period. No matter what you do, there's a late game economic crash where it just stops working and there's nothing you can do. The mod softens the vanilla blow as much as possible but still. The military system is more micro intensive than V1 and probably broken, because since you can't manually promote pops, if you ever use your military at all, your brigades will eventually turn red icon and not be able to reinforce anymore since the soldier pop in that specific province promoted or demoted or died in battle. In Victoria 1, you can always promote more soldier pops of that same culture and keep your units, you just need X South Italian sized pops from any non-colony because they go into a national pool, and not necessarily only from Napoli.


My end result is that I've played dozens of (modded) Victoria 1 campaigns to the end in 1936, while I've never reached 1900 in Victoria 2, and it's not for lack of trying. It just keeps generating very silly results every single time I've tried.

Have you tried other Vic 2 mods?

 

[Pope Thrax]

I think people forget how unplayable V2 was at launch. Massive Jacobin rebellions ring a bell to anyone? The game didn't hit its stride until the first expansion.

 

[Meanmanturbo]

It depends on how you view the tradeoff. Having played both (with mods), I actually like 1 better.

Modded Victoria 1 (VIP)
The good: It produces randomized semi-historical results until ~1890 (when WW1 usually breaks out) very faithfully, with minimum player intervention. The economy, even late game, works and the AI can outbuild you. My favorite game ever was as Napoleon III France, focused on stealing UK's empire and getting west bank of the Rhine, only to find AI Austria had randomly elected liberals in 1848, which got it's many non-accepted pop groups as accepted via event and kept electing liberals with the unintended consequence of becoming the #1 industrial power by ~1880.

The bad: The cost of these semi-historical results is the very definition of railroading. UK tag will always get first dibs on colonizing Nigeria because they are tag UK, although if they refuse, or if they take it and you show up later, you can still take it too.

The ugly: You manually promote every pop. It sounds worse than it is, unless you're playing Russia or China, but then those countries weren't designed to have you create promotion goods via cheat console to turn every single pop into clerks or craftsmen in ideal ratios. If you wait until you can afford to buy or create those goods and promote as you get them, it's not an insane number of clicks because you definitely can't afford to make everyone in China a clerk.

Despite common misconceptions, the capitalist AI in Vic 1 did build railroads and factories automatically too, so only manual promotion and splitting of your own pops (the AI did it's own) was needed.

Modded Victoria 2 (PDM mod)
The good: Much more indirect influence, colonization probably handled better as a mechanism (although who can colonize what is probably worse...) and more diplomatic interactions (spheres and crisis system, even if badly implemented is better than RNG AI declaration of war).

The bad: Pretend you're on planet Fantasia, because even with some tag specific decisions and events, crazy stuff still happens. Your world will likely not even resemble our world by 1870 at the latest, and the longer it goes on the worse it gets. Victoria 2 was designed unfortunately with the EU3 phase of Paradox design philosophy in mind, as in, EU1/Victoria was too deterministic and railroaded, so let's free it up and make it almost entirely random! Yay Chinese Mexico! Yay Bavarian Venezuela! While EU3 had the mechanisms to let mods guide a semi-coherent direction for most countries, Victoria 2 is just bonkers and even mods can't make things make sense.

The ugly: The economy is broken, period. No matter what you do, there's a late game economic crash where it just stops working and there's nothing you can do. The mod softens the vanilla blow as much as possible but still. The military system is more micro intensive than V1 and probably broken, because since you can't manually promote pops, if you ever use your military at all, your brigades will eventually turn red icon and not be able to reinforce anymore since the soldier pop in that specific province promoted or demoted or died in battle. In Victoria 1, you can always promote more soldier pops of that same culture and keep your units, you just need X South Italian sized pops from any non-colony because they go into a national pool, and not necessarily only from Napoli.


My end result is that I've played dozens of (modded) Victoria 1 campaigns to the end in 1936, while I've never reached 1900 in Victoria 2, and it's not for lack of trying. It just keeps generating very silly results every single time I've tried.

Capitalist AI building stuff was the main feature of the Revolutions expansion. Together with a timeline extention from 1920 to 1936 coupled with the hoi2 converter and a bunch of late game units for said converter.

So in Victoria without revolutions capitalists are about as usefull as aristocrats.

 

[harold lorre]

Victoria2 was never a great simulation game it was full of historical errors and had all the flaws of the Paradox games as well as the problem of all the strategic ones a poor ai.

 

[Sarmatian]

One giant problem Victoria 1 had was that market bought up all the goods produced. So, basically, the only limiting factor was primary culture pops.

 

[harold lorre]

One giant problem Victoria 1 had was that market bought up all the goods produced. So, basically, the only limiting factor was primary culture pops.

the provinces, the borders, the claim to be able to simulate all the states in the world, even the smallest ones! the lack of a system of economics: banks, industries, railways, stock exchanges, economic conglomerates, finished and raw products. the paradox is not improving anything in my opinion only improving a few things

 

[Sarmatian]

the provinces, the borders, the claim to be able to simulate all the states in the world, even the smallest ones! the lack of a system of economics: banks, industries, railways, stock exchanges, economic conglomerates, finished and raw products. the paradox is not improving anything in my opinion only improving a few things

I honestly don't understand what you're trying to say.

 

[harold lorre]

I honestly don't understand what you're trying to say.

All the flaws of the game. Victory and Paradox in particular

 

[DerGrößteRitter]

All the flaws of the game. Victory and Paradox in particular

Sure, but no other game even comes close

 

[Morrowind3]

Any reason to play Vicky 1 when you've already played Vicky 2? Always figured Vicky 1 would just be more basic than 2 and not worth the trouble

 

[grommile]

I honestly don't understand what you're trying to say.

What he's been trying to say in every post on this forum, as far as I can tell, is that he wants:

• a perfect simulation of the 19th century in every sphere
• with complete disregard for any practical concern, including budget, performance, schedule, and profit, if it means compromising accuracy

 

[Neva115]

It depends on how you view the tradeoff. Having played both (with mods), I actually like 1 better.

Modded Victoria 1 (VIP)
The good: It produces randomized semi-historical results until ~1890 (when WW1 usually breaks out) very faithfully, with minimum player intervention. The economy, even late game, works and the AI can outbuild you. My favorite game ever was as Napoleon III France, focused on stealing UK's empire and getting west bank of the Rhine, only to find AI Austria had randomly elected liberals in 1848, which got it's many non-accepted pop groups as accepted via event and kept electing liberals with the unintended consequence of becoming the #1 industrial power by ~1880.

The bad: The cost of these semi-historical results is the very definition of railroading. UK tag will always get first dibs on colonizing Nigeria because they are tag UK, although if they refuse, or if they take it and you show up later, you can still take it too.

The ugly: You manually promote every pop. It sounds worse than it is, unless you're playing Russia or China, but then those countries weren't designed to have you create promotion goods via cheat console to turn every single pop into clerks or craftsmen in ideal ratios. If you wait until you can afford to buy or create those goods and promote as you get them, it's not an insane number of clicks because you definitely can't afford to make everyone in China a clerk.

Despite common misconceptions, the capitalist AI in Vic 1 did build railroads and factories automatically too, so only manual promotion and splitting of your own pops (the AI did it's own) was needed.

Modded Victoria 2 (PDM mod)
The good: Much more indirect influence, colonization probably handled better as a mechanism (although who can colonize what is probably worse...) and more diplomatic interactions (spheres and crisis system, even if badly implemented is better than RNG AI declaration of war).

The bad: Pretend you're on planet Fantasia, because even with some tag specific decisions and events, crazy stuff still happens. Your world will likely not even resemble our world by 1870 at the latest, and the longer it goes on the worse it gets. Victoria 2 was designed unfortunately with the EU3 phase of Paradox design philosophy in mind, as in, EU1/Victoria was too deterministic and railroaded, so let's free it up and make it almost entirely random! Yay Chinese Mexico! Yay Bavarian Venezuela! While EU3 had the mechanisms to let mods guide a semi-coherent direction for most countries, Victoria 2 is just bonkers and even mods can't make things make sense.

The ugly: The economy is broken, period. No matter what you do, there's a late game economic crash where it just stops working and there's nothing you can do. The mod softens the vanilla blow as much as possible but still. The military system is more micro intensive than V1 and probably broken, because since you can't manually promote pops, if you ever use your military at all, your brigades will eventually turn red icon and not be able to reinforce anymore since the soldier pop in that specific province promoted or demoted or died in battle. In Victoria 1, you can always promote more soldier pops of that same culture and keep your units, you just need X South Italian sized pops from any non-colony because they go into a national pool, and not necessarily only from Napoli.


My end result is that I've played dozens of (modded) Victoria 1 campaigns to the end in 1936, while I've never reached 1900 in Victoria 2, and it's not for lack of trying. It just keeps generating very silly results every single time I've tried.

wacky things like Mexican China (which I've never seen sadly) made vic 2 so interesting though. Especially because it changes the power dynamic completely. Once had Austria who conquered Egypt and it was an amazing a-historical powerhouse.

 

[harold lorre]

wacky things like Mexican China (which I've never seen sadly) made vic 2 so interesting though. Especially because it changes the power dynamic completely. Once had Austria who conquered Egypt and it was an amazing a-historical powerhouse.

All things to be eliminated: the realistic economic, They must, be game dynamics.realistic The uchrony is necessary because every possibility must be contemplated. exaggerations ex. A Chinese Mexico. In Europa universalis. And feasible. Because China could colonize Mexico. Not an Italy that conquers Europe! In 1800

 

[Sarmatian]

Any reason to play Vicky 1 when you've already played Vicky 2? Always figured Vicky 1 would just be more basic than 2 and not worth the trouble

Not really.

I hold Vicky 1 in very high regard, but it's really dated now...

 

[Victor1234]

wacky things like Mexican China (which I've never seen sadly) made vic 2 so interesting though. Especially because it changes the power dynamic completely. Once had Austria who conquered Egypt and it was an amazing a-historical powerhouse.

Different strokes for different folks I guess.

It is an interesting example because the end result was the same in both of our games (Austria becomes an amazing ahistorical powerhouse), but the journey is a big difference to me at least.

I'm very curious though, because I think this is something that was a DLC in EUIV which wasn't very well received, but would you have enjoyed Victoria 2 as much if it was a random generated world? The geography would be different and maybe the country names too, but it would use the same mechanisms as the regular game, so only the starting positions and country strengths would be different.

In Imperialism (the 'inspiration' for the Victoria series), there were historical scenarios for 1836, 1848 and 1870, but those were quite predictable (Ottomans get squashed every time, etc), but there was an amazing random scenario generator which made a random map you could reroll before starting (usually island groups of 2-3 majors and 2-3 minors, but sometimes if you rerolled enough you'd get a major on its own island with only a minor or two around).

You'd be given a summary of available resources for each country so you know what you start with before you pick one and it roughly equalized the starts (so everyone has as much coal, as much timber, etc, the same number of units, etc) but you could fiddle with difficulty to give yourself an easier start (which only really increased your starting cash and stockpiles, but it didn't generate more coal deposits in your country or anything).