So im playing vic3 with one of my girlfriends and she kicks serious ass. I don’t want to be a drag and have fun with her, so im looking for ways to better play. Im russia she’s china. Just general tips would be nice. I want to do the usual and reform quickly and expand my economy.
Russia and China have the same fundamental problem. Pre-industrialisation, both have all their power and wealth concentrated in the landowners. You need to rush industry so that wealth is broken up between capitalists/petit bourgeoisie/trade unions. Playing Russia I immediately shift my capital to Perm so it’s invasion-proof without 1m casualties. Then I start building up construction, wood, and iron in Perm. I max it out there, Urals, and Moscow. Then I build up Trans-Baikal, Luhansk, and the Caucuses. I upgrade to iron construction methods and my whole mission until about 1850 is getting it up to about 300 capacity. The industrialisation that brings will drop the landowners down to like 20-30% power and make the reforms easy with a power base for them.
Damn was this game designed by Marxists?
It basically is a Marxism simulator to the point that they had to nerf socialism because it was like a cheat code for raising your citizens’ quality of life and governmental budget. It’s pure historical materialism with any great man subject to dying at age 35.
ok im sold. How do the libs cope?
/r/victoria3 was big mad about it and every thread was lovely. Marxists walking people through the most basic theory that they become naively aware of but think is a gameplay bug.
Get Victoria 3. It’s so good.
Love it. Do you know if it works on Linux?
In your opinion, is the game a good piece of propaganda for teaching materialist concepts or do most libs figure out the mechanics without internalizing their relevance to geopolitics?
it officially supports Linux
I don’t know how its linux performance is. The game gives a good representation of base and superstructure, but only in an abstract sense. You see the transition from the remnants of feudalism to early and middle stage capitalism, all tied to the material conditions of your citizens and how their ideology ontologically impacts their response to things. It makes you viscerally hate groups like landowners by juxtaposing their desire to hoard money with your need for tax revenue/legislation benefiting 90% of society. You get a good sense of what separates the petit bourgeoisie from the Ancien régime of the larger bourgeois factions, what separates the proletariat from the peasant, and how your relationship to the means of production shapes you.
Do you think the dlc are worth it? Been looking at this game on and off since I join Hexbear because it seems like a lot of folks here like it. Just put it on my wishlist.
It’s still very early in its DLC cycle. There’s Voice of the People which is good for the political metagame, adding agitators who help push legislative agendas, and a Brazilian content pack that I haven’t bought yet because South America is so painfully slow to industrialise. You’d be fine to just get the base game and maybe buy Voice of the People on sale.
I think I will grab it when it’s on sale. I’ve tried a few x4 and grand strategy games and have had some fun. Learning curve of Crusader Kings can fuck itself. But a few have grabbed me for at least enough hours that it was worth the cost of entry imo.
You sold me on it being a game that favors socialism. I didn’t know there was seething lib drama about that lol.
Compared to Crusader Kings, it’s more intuitive and improves on the map-level elements like trade/diplomacy/development. War is a bit more simple and it’s hard to be an expansionist. Grand strategy is my big genre and Victoria is the jewel of it to me. You’ll probably get hundreds of hours from the base game alone.
Agitators are not DLC exclusive, but you get more of them, some real ones from france I think. Also the first to research Socialism gets a 95% chance to get Karl Marx in their Labour Union.
ah yeah, its socialism time
thank you so much!
I’d mostly agree with this, with the exception of the capital, you want it in Moscow for that sweet MAPI bonus. Also, be aware that, as a country with serfdom, low literacy and little unemployment, you actually might have trouble getting people into factories. The main culprit is Serfdom, but you can also mitigate it by building in areas that already have large non-peasant populations and by increasing literacy.
You can also get a little bit of iron construction up right away, thanks to the 16 iron mines you start off with.
There’s also an exploit you can use if you have Voice of the People. Have the Tsar abdicate, have the new guy become a general, fire all over Landowner generals, then exile your Landowner head. You’ll get your new Tsar as the landowner leader, and he’s a Market Liberal, so it’s trivial to switch to Homesteading/Laissez Faire/Free Trade.
What’s the MAPI bonus?
Market Access Price Impact (MAPI)