Victoria 3 | Player Resources

commissar roach · Oct 21, 2022

Greetings Victorians!

This post has been created to gather useful information for players. Tutorials, Links, and various other resources that both new and old players can use to make their experience easier and more enjoyable.

Victoria 3 Wiki: https://vic3.paradoxwikis.com/
Contribute to the Wiki here: https://vic3.paradoxwikis.com/Victoria_3_Wiki:Work_needed
Bug Reporting : https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/victoria-3-bug-reports.1114/

Victoria 3 Dev Diaries

#102 - What’s next after 1.5

If you have a decent surplus income you are not investing enough into your nation. The game is all about snowballing your economy, so you want to funnel every last bit of extra money into construction industries & related resource suppliers to maximize country development. Most larger nations will have plenty of pops, so Construction Points will remain the main bottleneck for development throughout the game. Academies are very expensive and provide rather low research gain, so they are not recommended until you have established your basic industry.
Idle hands are the devil's work. Pops that are not employed will not contribute to your economy, neither will they produce goods nor will they create demand, instead you will have to deal with welfare payments and/or unrest. On top of that, unemployed pops can prevent other pops from leaving buildings when their work conditions are bad, which can cause additional unrest & economic trouble. People in subsistence farms are not great either, but at least they tend to be able to support themselves enough to not cause a lot of problems. When you get the chance later you want to make sure to use up arable land to reduce the size of the subsistence economy.
It's perfectly fine to run High or Very High taxes if you tax the correct things. Avoid basic needs like grain, instead go for higher SOL needs like Clothing, Services and whatever luxury goods your country can easily produce. It will push down average SOL, which means lower demand & pop growth, but that is fine since you can't employ most of your pops early game anyway and your biggest issue is to provide enough input & consumer goods.
In terms of laws the most important early game change should be to enable the investment pool by passing Agrarianism, Interventionism or Laissez-Faire. Passing per-capita tax will also help a lot to increase your early income. Private Health Care can help to improve pop growth and is particularly important for smaller nations with a limited worker pool. Make sure you don't push any significantly large IGs below -10 approval with your law changes, since that will make them plot a revolution.
In terms of techs, the most important early game techs are: Urban Planning (to enable tier II construction, which equalizes input good needs), Atmospheric Engine + Water Tube Boiler (to boost your early game mine output, so you need to spend less construction points on enabling your mining industry & create less INFRA load), Romanticism (for low-tier nations to enable Agrarianism), Colonization (if you want to colonize), Railroads (to provide INFRA for your expanding industries) and Pharmaceuticals (to enable Private Healthcare). Electricity & its related techs are another excellent early-to-mid game choice that allows you to establish highly profitable industries and boost GDP.
Early game targets of opportunity in terms of colonization are: Oceania (lots of islands that can host ports, great way to boost trade capacity & get access to goods like coffee, sugar, and fruit), Indonesia (requires Quinine, large territory with high pop, good resources and rubber later down the line) and Hokkaido + Sakhalin (low pop count, but excellent mining capacity). East Africa is also an excellent entry point, allowing you to avoid competition with other colonizer's, since you can lock down the coast pretty quickly.
Military & Wars are very expensive, and since Construction Points are the main bottleneck during the early game, early warfare doesn't really help with country development all that much. Better used later down the line to secure additional pops & resource deposits. To cut down on military expenses you can pass the National Militia law and rely on conscripts for country defense. This allows you to get rid of all peace time upkeep costs, without seriously reducing the capability to defend your nation. Just make sure that you have a large enough Military Industry to support the conscripts (can be left idle in peacetime), and also keep in mind that you cannot demobilize conscripts during war time - so if you draft too many pops you can end up wasting a lot of money on wages & supplies.
Use your own industry & the trade system to reduce the cost of input goods needed for the Construction Industries. Doing so will reduce the effective cost for each construction point you generate. Ideally you'd want all input goods to be in high supply/low price. Large nations usually want to import limited critical input resources like Oil, Sulphur, Rubber, Coal, Iron, Lead, Dye, Silk and the like, small nations that focus on one specific production type (e.g. Clothing) can use exports to boost the profits of their main industry by exporting the luxury products.
Make sure you maintain INFRA & Market Access in your states. Lack of Market Access tends to severely damage the local economy, and it will also impact your national market because less goods from low-access states arrive. On top of that it will increase the costs for the local construction industry. This is why establishing railroads early on is very important. Make sure you have a port in every overseas holding to connect it to your National Market. Also remember that every building in a state requires INFRA, even when it is not used. If you build too many factories in a low pop state you can end up in a situation where you have so high INFRA demand that the existing pops can't produce enough INFRA in the railway, which leads to a death spiral. You can solve this issue by removing local buildings until you can meet INFRA demand again (downsize Railway accordingly if it was overbuilt as well).
Don't be afraid of unprofitable industries, and try to avoid subsidies at all costs. The only building that you usually want subsidized is the Railway, because its INFRA output is critical for economic health. All other buildings can be made profitable by lowering input good costs or raising output good costs (e.g. exports, higher SOL). Even if a building has low profitability, it can still be a net benefit for your country - the workers in the Fruit Orchard might be starving, but everyone else can now buy cheap fruit and get a higher SOL more easily. Railway subsidies can pile up during the mid game, a good way to avoid this is to establish lots of Mines & Plantations that use Transportation PMs. High SOL pops will also consume a lot of Transportation, so easing up a bit on taxes during the mid game to boost average SOL in the country can be better than running high / very high taxes forever.

We also have a set of helpers on our Discord server that can help new players out with leaning the game! You can find them in #v3-starting-out and around the server with their names colored green!

Community Video Guides

There are a wide range of community creators who have created informative Victoria 3 video guides, which are great to learn both about the game and how to play it!

Here are some examples, most up to date at the top:

Generalist Gaming - Victoria 3 Tutorials Post 1.5

PartyElite - Beginner's Guide & How to Play

JumboPixel - Tutorials & Guides

Andy's Take - ULTIMATE Guide to Victoria 3 - COMPLETE Tutorial With Timestamps

The Iron Workshop - Victoria 3 Basic Modding Lessons

Cool Community Stuff!

The community makes or starts some really cool things! Here we want to highlight them! With a short blurb from people involved! (Paradox isn't officially involved with or runs these projects )

Paradox Interactive Roleplay

Hello! My name is @magnum2016 and I am the owner of the Paradox Interactive Roleplay Server, within this server we play Paradox Interactive games the way we believe they were meant to be played. Through creating unique stories and being immersed in the world.

The Paradox Interactive Roleplay Community has been around since 2017 and we host weekly games of every Paradox Interactive title. We are excited to have the opportunity to invite you all to our Victoria III Community where we currently have four weekly games averaging twenty to thirty players each.

Whether you are embracing industrialization or promoting Agrarianism, defending old entrenched ideals on monarchy and right to rule or daring to speak up for the working class, know that there is a spot for you here in our community.

If you are interested in playing large scale Multiplayer Games with more focus on the story, careful diplomatic maneuvering and roleplaying then the PDX RP Server is the community you have been looking for!

https://discord.gg/RFpkzgw

Victoria 3 Mod Coop

Modding Coop for Victoria 3! Contains a huge amount of resources, help, modding projects and all the help you need to start modding for yourself!

https://discord.com/invite/uUbuMTQjA7

1.5 Tutorials
War is coming!

More War is Coming!

Finance & Politics

What's new?

Goods and Resources

Buildings and Infrastructure

Trade and Markets

Income and Wealth

Pop Needs

Interest Groups

Policies and Laws

Diplomacy

Warfare

Common Abbreviations

AF - Armed Forces
ATT - Attack
CTD - Crash To Desktop
DD - Developer Diary
DEF - Defense
DP - Diplomatic Play
GDP - Gross Domestic Product
GP - Great Power
IG - Interest Group
JE - Journal Entry
LF - Laissez-faire
LO - Land Owners
MAPI - Market Access Price Impact
NGF - North German Federation
OOS - Out of Sync
PB - Petite Bourgeoisie
PDS - Paradox Development Studio
PDX - Paradox Interactive
PM - Production Method
PMG - Production Method Group
POP(s) - Population in game
RF - Rural Folk
RP - Region Pack
SGF - South German Federation
SoL - Standard of Living
TU - Trade Unions
UC - Urban Center
INFRA - Infrastructure

Victoria 3 Economics with Paul Depre

Community Guides - Modding
Sav's Guide - How to create a country
Sav's Guide - How to move settlements in the map editor
JudasIsCarrying - Modding State Regions, Splines, Provinces, Cities, and Roads

Twitter: https://twitter.com/PDXVictoria
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VictoriaGamePDX
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria3
Discord: https://discord.gg/victoriagamepdx
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7B6h6nl83pgVvzIhdr2AmA

Pleonast · Oct 25, 2022

The wiki link is either broken or the wiki is down.

PDX_Maciej · Oct 26, 2022

Pleonast said:
The wiki link is either broken or the wiki is down.

It should be fixed now!

Chengesu · Oct 29, 2022

Are the diagrams from Paull's video (e.g. groups of goods/needs) available online somewhere? There's some great info in there which isn't as easy to discover in-game.

MuyuTech · Oct 29, 2022

Thanks for this thread. Some of elements really hard to understand. I'll look some tutorials in here.

backtostart · Oct 30, 2022

I just want to know when your patches to fix gold reserve caps and game crashes will be available

PlayerHOI · Nov 3, 2022

@commissar roach
Any chance you can add a link to the modding videos by the Iron Workshop in the list as well?

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt_7vUaEvaGSDWK-kkm-5AxiPtu0_U2FX

Yaafm · Nov 7, 2022

Your 10 tips for beginners....what the heck is INFRA? I have no idea.
Ive put 60 hours in the game so far and learned most things by feel, a few of those tips still make no sense to me.

Owen123 · Nov 7, 2022

Yaafm said:
Your 10 tips for beginners....what the heck is INFRA? I have no idea.
Ive put 60 hours in the game so far and learned most things by feel, a few of those tips still make no sense to me.

Infrastructure?

ero_sk · Nov 7, 2022

Yaafm said:
Your 10 tips for beginners....what the heck is INFRA? I have no idea.
Ive put 60 hours in the game so far and learned most things by feel, a few of those tips still make no sense to me.

Infrastructure. I noticed that there is quite a lot of abbreviations being used for Vicy's systems, but not a central place to list them all. Understandably, this can be confusing to many players.

Duckwing79 · May 25, 2023

Hi. On that note, what is SOL?

Herennius · May 25, 2023

Duckwing79 said:
Hi. On that note, what is SOL?

The abbreviation of "Standard Of Living" - for an indepth explanation of how the terms is used ingame I recommend the wiki article about it:

https://vic3.paradoxwikis.com/Standard_of_living

DarkSpiryt · May 31, 2023

Generalist Gaming on youtube have great guides for victoria 3.

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Victoria 3 | Player Resources

commissar roach

Sergeant

Pleonast

Second Lieutenant

PDX_Maciej

Marketing Wizard

Chengesu

Corporal

MuyuTech

Recruit

backtostart

Recruit

PlayerHOI

Colonel

Yaafm

Private

Owen123

The Third Revelation

ero_sk

Lt. General

Duckwing79

Recruit

Herennius

Optimat

DarkSpiryt

Second Lieutenant