I really hope they don't Form Vic3 after IR, imperator is a bunch of different ideas and mechanics but not a game (yet) Victoria 2 is a game. Most of the vic2 fans want just a prettified vic2.1 as a base for a new game.
Victoria 2... certainly is a game, that can definitely be said of it. It's a game where most of its mechanics hardly even work as intended and the few that do are made to look like they don't because of mechanics that they interact with don't.
And historically one of the big complaints of Vicky 2 is how shallow the experience is and that's due to the absolutely terrible UI.
I do not
love Victoria 2, but I definitely respect it for its ambition and I definitely had fun with it.
Mourn not its flaws, celebrate its ambition.
For me a proper Vicky 3 would:
1) Make un-WAD mechanics in Vicky 2 WAD (though some features would likely be dropped; looking at you, Newspaper-Kun).
2) Clean up the UI. This is basically mandatory. Luckily Paradox would do this by default, so yey.
3) Make Vicky 3 as ambitious a game as Vicky 2 was in its era.
If we only get the first two at launch, I would be content with buying it. It would basically be Vicky 2 but minus the shit. Plus, they'd expand upon it over time anyway, so there you go.
greater promise than pure unfettered capitalism
Honestly, while I would like to avoid politics, and you probably don't mean this sort of thing at all, but I can't really let this slide...
The idea that the 19th century represented a golden age for "pure unfettered capitalism" is pretty much a myth. Governments around the world, including, yes, the United States, intervened in their countries' economies all the time during the period. Let's look at the United States, since that's considered the poster child for this line of reasoning.
During the 19th century the United States utilized tariffs to great effect to fund their government activities. This may not seem like much, but it does have an impact on the economy AND Free Trade was a core tenant of Smithian economics (and thus Free Market Capitalism). This alone is enough to end this myth, but there's more. There's also the First and Second Banks of the United States, which acted as a financial regulatory body within the United States and both were predecessors to the modern Federal Reserve. Then there was the subsidizing of the railroads (particularly in the latter half of the 19th century) which DEFINITELY represents government intervention into the economy. Then there's the Homestead Act, which I hope goes without saying.
I'm not here to cast judgement on these examples as good or bad and it certainly pales in comparison to what came in the 20th century, but these do represent definitive points where the US government intervened into their country's economy, thus the idea of 19th century America being the land of Unfettered Capitalism entirely a myth.
Though it could be argued that pure unfettered capitalism is just as impossible as Communism.
