It doesn’t have to be a smooth transition, either – it sure wasn’t in real life! The example of such varied games as Rule the Waves 2 and Anno 1800 shows that such transformations can make for compelling gameplay. The game’s Europa Universalis-style combat system must somehow be transitioned into something approaching Hearts of Iron’s. You know something is wrong when one side having “gas attack”, and the other not having “gas defence”, is a decisive factor in battles. Victoria II’s system isn’t fit for purpose. The game’s combat must transition from Europa Universalis to Hearts of Ironįirstly, Victoria 3 needs to embrace that war will change over the course of a game. So how could Victoria 3’s combat system take advantage of its fundamental premise? Victoria II portrays an era of immense change, with the world of 1936 being almost unrecognisable to the one of 1836, and does it well, but war is left out. Modern war: How warfare works in Hearts of Iron 4 The less said about the naval side of things – Paradox’s traditional problem child – the better. This isn’t wrong, at first.īut, as wars expand, and armies take up entire fronts, like in Hearts of Iron (and real life), the transition to that kind of war is awkward. Having created superb social and economic systems that complement each other, the design of Victoria II’s warfare runs crying home to Europa Universalis. War, as a worse alternative to diplomacy, needs to be properly represented and imbued with gravity in-game, otherwise the diplomacy intended to prevent a war will mean little.īut what about when war begins? Victoria’s record is mixed. To begin with, Anward’s emphasis upon diplomacy offering the same results as war is heartening, and represents the era well.īut – without getting into a debate that is now more than one hundred years old – diplomacy also created the catastrophe of the First World War.īack to the Front: These are the best WW1 strategy games To demonstrate this, I want to show in this article how Paradox could take advantage of Victoria 3’s fundamentals in portraying war, and still maintain the design pillars that were outlined with the game’s announcement. Giving war its due does not mean you have to promote it. You only have to portray it in a different way. It is reasonable to want to avoid that, of course – but don’t use it as an excuse to just brush over war entirely. Giving war its due does not mean you have to promote it That is why war should matter to Victoria 3. War is the final chapter of the story, the ultimate test for the society you build, and, if designed well, can complement everything you set out to do while still avoiding the trap of promoting constant war.
War does not undermine the society building game you wish to make. For my money, many of Paradox’s games should follow their example.īut I beg, I implore, the developers at Paradox, don’t leave war behind. Emphasising economics and society is exactly how a Victoria game should be – and that is precisely what Game Director Martin Anward and co. It’s a meme no longer: Victoria 3 is coming, and Paradox is doing it right. The horror of World War One was not simply the death and destruction, but that that slaughter had been created by the self-same advances of an age where everything, it seemed, had combined to make life faster, safer, and better.įast forward to now. All the progress of the past hundred years – all the science, industry and technology of the age – united to create a war where human life was just one more commodity fed into the machine. When Europe went to war in 1914, they expected Napoleon.