Overall:
Victoria 2 is a clear improvement on its predecessor in many ways and is a joy to play, but the game balance and strategic level AI leaves much to be desired.
The good:
I personally wished for all POPs to die a miserable death after beta testing the
first Victoria. My position then was that I really liked the idea but found the execution, the pop-splitting, and the POP micromanagement unbearable, and that I never wanted to see it again. Well, in Victoria 2 POPs are back with a vengeance and they can be as frustrating as ever they were in Victoria 1,
but I don't need to baby-sit them since POP promotion is automatically handled and the factors affecting it almost excruciatingly detailed in in-game tooltips. In fact, if I run my realm well, I can to a large degree ignore the individual POPs on the strategic level so long as I check the total numbers for each
class of people within a state.
That doesn't mean you can't babysit POPs and indeed if you are faced with a problem you don't know the cause of checking with the POPs involved and seeing what their stats are can be important for devising a solution but, in general, once you know how to play the game the top level statistical view of the province, state, and nation tells you everything you need to know well enough.
The interface is clean and probably overall the best in a Paradox game yet. The alerts are great and have helpful tooltips. My favourite alerts are the ones for factory construction and unemployed workers. Always a focus of Paradox games, the tooltips have in general gotten even better. Most of the tooltips give useful breakdown of numbers for those of us who love that sort of thing or explain game mechanics in clear terms. Want to know again which sort of reforms the socialists will support and under which conditions? Need to refresh your mind on which factors affect craftsmen POPs desires for 14h workdays? Want to know why all your clergy is turning liberal or why your bureaucracy is growing beyond all previous known limits? The answer is there in a tooltip if you know where to look.
In addition, the game runs well in a window, something that I find very useful.
Spheres of Interest are fun. Not side-splitting fun, but good for low-level entertainment. It is a rough system that could use a lot of love, but you have to start somewhere. The way they change my focus from "conquer everything" to at least considering whether protecting an AI nation is worth the hassle by bringing it into my SOI and getting its production into my common market is considerable. To be honest, conquest remains my default behaviour for anything really valuable in the vicinity, but I find myself willing to spend the considerable time on playing the SOI mini-game more often than not and there
is a certain joy to be had in bringing the most valuable nearby nations into my SOI. It also gives players a way to truly piss off each other in multiplayer without open warfare, which is all to the good (though warfare can very well be the result of a truly pissed off player.
)
The unit system works well and the combat system does so too, but as is usual with Paradox games, they work best with armies. The EU3 like combat display works nicely and the popups at the end of battle are wonderfully informative, but let's face it - the joy is had when two armies of normally fairly limited size face eachother, a factor that is even further encouraged with the brilliant combat width system, not when two long (and in multiplayer potentially very, very, long) lists of ship names take turns shortening the other list.
The strategic level army AI draws on the accumulated experiences from the last many games and it shows. Like all its predecessors it is utterly incapable of challenging a competent player in anything approximating an even fight, but that is too much to ask for in the first place. What it can do is give the lesser player, or the one without defensive depth, a run for the money without needing to massively outnumber him, and cause the competent player to at least consider the level of casualties he is taking in even fights, since casualties in battle do damage to the soldier POPs.
Even with full military spending and a technology focus on getting population growth and army hospitals maximized I have managed to deplete a 5-brigade soldier POP to the level that it was no longer large enough to fully support one brigade... Admittedly that was an exceptionally bloody testgame and probably not something that people will encounter on a regular basis but the potential is there.
Fighting your external enemies can be fun, but in Victoria 1 no enemies are as bad as your own people. Everything from scattered small-scale rebellions to large scale organised risings,
potentially from within your own army turning soldiers against each other, is experienced in Victoria 2. It is definitely an area in need of more balancing but I like it as it is. Once you FINALLY get the liberals to behave (whether from giving in to their reform demands or from a more ruthless approach) you are probably far enough along that the socialists or communists will give you troubles and late-game the fascists join the merry hell. Throw in unhappy minorities, the anarcho-liberals who are
never happy, and the reactionaries who hate all the bloody changes that happen as you cope with the troublemakers and one has a recipe for a never-ending bloodbath.
Except for one thing. Every single rebel in the game is tied to the POP it spawned from, you can kill them, and killing them reduces the militancy of that particular pop, thus giving you time before the survivors will rise again.
If you want to count on the military rather than reforms to keep your population in check for the full length of the game the population growth techs are of primary importance as many people will end up killed in revolts and more will emigrate, but you can do it and so long as your soldier POPs stay loyal you can do so succesfully. If the rot sets in there - which it has an unfortunate tendency to in the late game amongst highly literate primary culture troops - well, I hope you have some loyal low-literacy troops from the colonies to restore order or the inclination to set up your armies such that they are a mix of adherents of different ideologies such that any rebellion within an army by e.g. the communists will be crushed by the liberal or nationalist adherents and vice versa.
The bad:
In singleplayer navies remain things to ferry troops around and actually confronting an enemy fleet is to a large degree a matter of choice. The ocean is just too bloody big and the AI not good enough at interdicting the navy of a competent player who is paying attention. For those players wanting a real fleet (perhaps for the purpose of large-scale blockades) rather than having the pleasure of occasionally rebuilding a sunken transport fleet, the naval AI is also too slow to react to the player splitting up or rejoining his fleets, which means it is often possible to inflict a defeat in detail on a superior naval nation. On the other hand, the AI is very competent at blockading.
Naval invasions range from the ridiculous to the terrifying and there's often no way to know in advance. They are
usually ridiculous but the few times they are not, such as when an AI lands 20 or 30 brigades in your home islands while you are watching another front or begins picking off your small island outposts one by one they cannot be ignored and may drag out the war.
Event popups have aged poorly and many of the standard problems with them remains. For Victoria 2, the obvious case is that while an event may be triggered by issues with a specific POP (or group of POPs), the event popup has no way to really show you which POP it was or to link you to it. As an example, if you really want to know the size of a POP you are about to make a decision about, you will often know the state it comes from (occasionally province) and what job it had or you might know location and culture - but you will still have to hunt down the POP in the province view or population view manually. Most cases are mild, but the absolutely worst example I have seen yet was when I was given an event with two very drastic outcomes; One affecting my entire nation, one affecting the entire population of a province. The latter was to kill 50% of any POP in that named province that had a militancy of 4 or higher. When you get such an event you just want to be able to click somewhere on the popup and be taken to the POP breakdown for the province without
any hazzle... or to be told just how many people out of how many are going to be affected by your click.
The game's economy needs more work. The system itself is fine and works considerably better than Victoria 1s but more balancing is needed.
Victoria 2 does not have difficulty levels. I consider this a considerable lack as the challenge level is low for an experienced player of Paradox games and I have always been in favour of hamfisted and draconian difficulty level modifiers for those who want more of a challenge. On the positive side the game is easier to balance when everybody has results that come from the same base and there are other ways to artificially increase the challenge rating but, well, it is something I miss. A lot! Not enough to make me stop playing Victoria 2, though.
The ugly:
Two entire main tech areas out of the five (culture and commerce) are for all except niche strategies of very little value compared to army and industry. With one glaring exception within culture (the Ideology line which increases national focuses, plurality, and has many other interesting side effects) you just aren't going to be investing heavily in culture or commerce in most cases. Compunding this is that most of the culture and commerce techs are boring in their in-game effects with few having inventions with unique effects. The balance here is definitely off. (On the flip side, I love making choices in the the Industry and Army techs - so many
different effects)
The previous issue is compounded by the AI being bad at picking techs, which means that the already considerable advantage any player gets merely from having a brain tends to be magnified the further the game progresses. Currently the best wars are to be had in the early game since by the middle game the player is likely to be far ahead in picking up certain key techs even with an inferior research base (assuming an even half-way competent player at any rate).
On the positive side, this is fully moddable in the poptypes files by anybody willing to rebalance the economy to cope with smarter nations (significant economic rebalancing would have to be done) and something that I expect will be addressed in upcoming patches.
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