Paradox Interactive has just released its new grand strategy game and it’s Victoria 3, a long-awaited sequel to the amazing Victoria 2 game. For years the player base and fans of the Victoria series have been making memes out of the fabled Victory 3 game, and now it’s actually real. The game itself may look like it’s a fancier version of Victoria 2, but there’s actually major differences from the previous games. Some of these changes can confuse even the veteran players so in this Victoria 3 complete beginner’s guide we’ll show you some beginner’s tips and tricks on how to play this game.
Complete Beginner’s Guide | Victoria 3
There’s a lot of new stuff in Victoria 3, some of them can be quite a handful to find and learn. Mechanics from the previous games have been streamlined, changed, simplified and so on. That’s why it’s good to know what changed and what to keep an eye on. These are some things that you need to know about Victoria 3.
The Market
If you thought the Victoria 2 market will just be ported into the new game then you’ll be wrong. The sequel has a heavier focus on the market, and you can see it in the market screen. One look and you can see which goods are being produced, which are producing surplus, which needs more and so on.
In Victoria 3, managing your market is a whole other game you need to keep an eye on. You need to know which goods you need, and build the appropriate building to make them, or import them from another country. The market is a zero-sum game, it’s better to have market equilibrium usually instead of having huge amounts of surplus.
Buildings
To make goods for the market you’ll need to have buildings, and these buildings has a bunch of information on them. When selecting a building you can see how much they produce, how much they consume, how many are employed and how big it is. Here you can also set the different production methods, with higher tier ones usually being better at production but at the cost of more materials or new materials. For example, a logging camp can use engines to increase production of wood, but then it will require more tools and now coal.
To make buildings faster you’ll need to construct more Construction Sectors. The more of these sectors you have the faster the construction is since it’ll give construction power, just remember that each building being built caps at 20 construction power and the rest will go to the next building in queue.
Also remember that these Construction Sectors are expensive to maintain and usually drain your money when constructing, which isn’t usually a bad thing since…
Budget and Gold Reserves
On the top left of the screen, you can find your country’s income and gold reserves as the bar below it. You might think having negative income is bad, but it’s actually the opposite. You often need to use up money to make more money and having negative income isn’t that bad as long as you keep on building your economy. If you do it right, sooner or later that negative income will become positive again, and that’s where you make new stuff to make it negative again.
Remember that you can keep having negative income until you run out of gold reserves, after that then you can still go beyond until near bankruptcy, just don’t go completely broke.
Population & Standard of Living
Population is literally the life blood of a nation and it’s generally good to keep the population growing. This is the time of industrialization and at that time there was massive increase in population despite all the wars going on. As your economy gets better the standard of living also gets better and that’s good for the economy and for the pops to grow more. It’s usually not something you directly change but something you influence through economic growth.
Politics
The Victoria era isn’t just the Industrial revolution, but also political revolutions. From the great unification of Germany, to the desolation of the Qing Empire, the Meiji Restoration of Japan and America manifesting their destiny. Politics plays a major role in the game and there’s different political parties and groups that you can focus on.
This really depends on what your plan is for a country so for example if you’re playing as Japan you want to increase the influence of Intellectuals and Industrialists to slowly take out the Shogunate. You don’t have to be historical though and can even try to turn Germany into a military ethnostate a few years earlier with laws and backing certain government groups.
Diplomacy and War
To even begin further diplomatic moves besides increasing relations you’ll need to declare interest to the area first. After that you can then do a number of different diplomatic plays in that region. For example, you can force people to be your vassal or puppet, make them open their markets and so on.
Once a diplomatic play is done, you’ll then see a new window pop up. This is basically a peer-pressure minigame for countries, where different countries show their goals and other countries can back up either side. There are 3 phases, the Opening moves is usually where you don’t do anything. The Diplomatic Play phase is where you either add new war goals, or sway other countries to join your side.
If one country backs down, you get your war goal. If not, then a war breaks out between both sides.
Congratulations you now know the basics of Victoria 3, it’s a complex game we know but that’s why a lot of people play it. Learning the game is part of the fun and hopefully, you’ll find it fun as well. Many thanks to Montu Plays for showing everyone some of these tips, if you need more information on the subject then go check their video out here: Victoria 3 Beginners Guide In Only 20 Minutes – YouTube
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