Victoria II’s artwork reflects its narrower focus on the European state system, making this one of the few instances where the official game artwork looks outside of that system. And here, unfortunately, Victoria II makes its fair share of missteps. But this week we’re going to mostly look outside of the major players of the European state system towards the subjugated, colonized and enslaved. So far we have stayed mostly focused on the game as it is played by the various western ‘Great Powers’ (mostly the European powers, but also the United States and the Ottomans).
#VICTORIA 3 FORUM SERIES#
But of course you all knew this series couldn’t be all positive things. Having that theory of history come together as an emergent, interactive part of gameplay (as far as I can tell, quite unintended by the developers) is I think the singular triumph of Victoria II as a historical game.
While for most of human history the best way for a community or a society to become wealthy, power and secure was to seek out aggressive, expansionist war, the industrial revolution marked a turning point where war no longer ‘paid’ and the best strategy for state power and wealth (as well as for the well being of the citizens of that state) was to avoid war whenever possible, since even a victorious war was unlikely to be worth the cost. Last time, we looked at how the game’s models for the industrial revolution and warfare interacted: by simulating (even in a fairly limited and abstract way) both the tremendous increases in productivity of the industrial revolution and the tremendously increased destructiveness of warfare brought about by the weapons of the industrial revolution the game reproduced one of the key historical developments in warfare in the period. This is the third and final part of a three part series ( I, II) examining the historical assumptions of Paradox Interactive’s 19th and early 20th century grand strategy game, Victoria II.
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