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80% 40 Reviews Tomatometer 85% 250+ Ratings Audience Score This eight-part drama features an all-star cast including Jenna Coleman as a young Queen Victoria and Tom Hughes as Prince Albert. The...
- 6. The Queen's Husband
Reviews Albert finds a noble cause; Victoria gets her way at...
- 4. The Clockwork Prince
Reviews Albert faces royal disdain when he makes a visit...
- 1. Doll 123
Reviews On the death of her uncle King William IV in 1837,...
- 3. Brocket Hall
Reviews While Victoria ponders marriage, her friendship with...
- 7. Engine of Change
Link to Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes First Reviews: A...
- 2. Ladies in Waiting
Reviews Tomatometer Lord Melbourne's resignation as Prime...
- 5. An Ordinary Woman
Reviews Victoria and Albert contemplate matrimony; whether...
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- 6. The Queen's Husband
- A remarkable, if a bit janky, nation-builder with ocean-deep political and economic systems that suck you in and don't let go.
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By Leana Hafer
Updated: Oct 29, 2022 3:02 am
Posted: Oct 24, 2022 6:05 pm
Paradox Interactive’s grand strategy games are known for their uncompromising scope and depth in recreating entire eras of history, but never before have they attempted something quite so dizzyingly complex as Victoria 3. Modeling every single human alive in the world-changing century from 1836 to 1936, their hopes and desires, their joy and wrath, and how they feel about the price of new deck chairs, the simulated world before you is a marvel to behold. And what's even more incredible is that it's not merely a curiosity or a tech demo. Aside from a moderate helping of launch-day jank, it mostly works, and serves as the basis for a deeply engrossing sociopolitical strategy game.
It's only fair to give a warning straight off that Victoria 3 is dense, detailed, and by its nature, full of mechanics that require you to do some proactive detective work to understand them. I love that stuff, personally. But for the uninitiated, finding your way around its quirks and pitfalls during the first couple campaigns is likely to be daunting. Even as someone with a combined 4,000 hours, give or take, across Paradox's other franchises, I struggled at first.
There is a dynamic tutorial scenario in which you can play as any country, and that will give you a grasp of the basics but not necessarily set you up for mastery. The best teaching resources Victoria 3 offers are a nested tooltip system, and the ability to select "Tell Me How" and "Tell Me Why" on important game concepts. This is something I'd love to see in more strategy games, since simply explaining what all the buttons do – Tell Me How – usually doesn't give you a working idea of when to press them – Tell Me Why. Even with all of that, though, I would still rank Victoria 3 as one of the hardest Paradox games to learn – more in line with Hearts of Iron than Crusader Kings.
However, you'll also be creating barons of the new world: factory owners and captains of industry who want low taxes and no child labor laws. Since wealth will always confer political power, even in a democracy where everyone gets a vote, truly putting power in the hands of the people requires economic reforms just as much as political ones – a bit of realism I rarely see replicated in these types of games.
Beneath all of this is a rich economic simulation in which every person – organized into groups called "pops" based on their culture, religion, profession, and place of residence – has a list of needs that they wish to fulfill. The richer and more educated someone is, the more things they want, so an illiterate peasant in the 1840s will be happier with less than his great-great-grandkids who are part of the burgeoning, urban middle class in the 1900s.
Supply and demand are modeled by a clever system of buy orders, which represent people wanting things, and sell orders, which represent industries making things, from grain and clothing all the way up to cars and electricity. Lower prices mean people can afford more things, but also that those industries are less profitable and the people making the things don't get paid as much, so there are a lot of interesting trade-offs to navigate. There is a lot of give at the margins to this economic model, like the fact that high and low prices are capped at a certain point and having more buy orders than sell orders doesn't limit the strict availability of basic goods – it just maxes out their price.
Whatever fudging is going on behind the scenes creates a much more robust and authentic simulation than Victoria 2.
“
But trust me when I say whatever fudging is going on behind the scenes creates a much more robust and authentic simulation than Victoria 2, which tried to be a bit more "realistic" and inadvertently created a lot of problems for itself. It doesn't really matter that they've "cheated" in some places, because what we got is a system that behaves, in practice, so much more like a real economy, which is awesome.
Yes, I jump in on day one, bugs be damned
No, I wait for some patches to smooth them out first
The way conflicts begin is fairly interesting. Launching a Diplomatic Play allows you to make demands, like taking land or forcing someone into a common market, after which both sides can bid to try and bring other countries in on their side. This can be a fun little game of chicken, as ultimately choosing when to mobilize your troops can give you an edge but also increase tensions, while either side has the option to back down for smaller concessions before it turns into a full-blown war. The bigger problem is that wars themselves aren't that great.
I respect Victoria 3's decision not to focus on war, especially when it excels at most of the things it does focus on. But that doesn't change the fact that armed conflicts can be very fiddly and confusing. Generals are permanently attached to headquarters in specific regions, which limits where they can actually fight, and you can't reassign them. They also have to be assigned to specific fronts, and it's possible through the mostly hands-off warfare system that annoying, smaller fronts can open up in the middle of a war and completely throw off your strategy. Your influence once a war has begun is largely relegated to making sure your armies are well-supplied, as you can't even order them to prioritize taking certain targets. I try to avoid war altogether as often as I can, which is also generally the right choice where the wellbeing of my people is concerned.
I respect Victoria 3's decision not to focus on war.
“
Victoria 3 is the kind of game that sucks me in and doesn't let me go, whether I'm trying to turn Hawaii into an anarcho-communist utopia or make Afghanistan the centerpiece of the global economy by monopolizing the opium trade. The scope and depth of its simulation is remarkable. I would need to double the length of this review just to explain the...
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With Jenna Coleman, Adrian Schiller, Tommy Knight, Jordan Waller. The early life of Queen Victoria, from her ascension to the throne at the tender age of 18 to her courtship and marriage to Prince Albert.
- (30K)
- 2017-01-17
- Biography, Drama, History
- 60
Jan 15, 2017 · Victoria TV Review | Common Sense Media. Parents' Guide to. Victoria. By Joyce Slaton, Common Sense Media Reviewer. age 13+. Beautiful but stuffy period drama is no Downton Abbey. TV PBS Drama 2017. Rate TV show. Parents Say: age 13+ 9 reviews. Any Iffy Content? Read more. Talk with Your Kids About… Read more. A Lot or a Little?
- Jenna Coleman, Rufus Sewell, Tom Hughes
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Jan 12, 2018 · By Mike Hale. Jan. 12, 2018. Vicky or Liz? “Victoria” or “The Crown”? The simultaneous existence of lavish, successful television series dramatizing the lives of the current British queen,...
Aug 29, 2016 · TV review Television. This article is more than 7 years old. Victoria review – Jenna Coleman goes back in time to become a future queen. Coleman swaps Tardis travel for court machinations as...
Jan 13, 2017 · Victoria launched in the U.K. in August last year, receiving a number of positive reviews. The Daily Mail called it a “proper costume drama” that follows the Downton Abbey template “with rapid...
