Kudos to Paradox for their will to experiment in their designs. Making a living out of games is complicated and other developers who stick to perceived winning formulas are starting to get into my nerves. Whether Victoria 2 achieves the heights of popularity of the previous Victoria or not, Paradox is being proactive pushing itself towards the high ground and I'm ecstatic that they don't strand themselves into design stagnation. So, please fellows, I will accept your kind donations of save-games of different countries at different game dates. Alas, the only possibility is to start your games at 1836. with a decent order of battle and not the mess of armies I end up building. Even when I like the sandbox, non-deterministic approach or all other Paradox games, I'm craving to fight the Austro-Prussian War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Crimean War, the Balkans War, the Triple Alliance War, the Russo-Japanese War. If increasing the historical flavor of the game engine was an issue, Paradox could have introduced historical scenarios where you start at a certain date with a world already tuned to what history books say. The question of why and when important events and wars happen in the real world is fascinating and I don't posses the intellectual stature to point fingers at Paradox, but this new design results in a perplexing game experience. A great example of this is the American Civil War: you can delay it, but you can't avoid it. Sorta like "scattered clouds but it hadn't rain in a while, so let it pour now" instead of "it's humid, hot and cloudy, it's gonna rain". This new middle ground of game design works great for certain in-game timeframes and countries but feels deterministic for others. In Victoria 2, Paradox introduced back some historical events but now they are triggered according to what's going on in the virtual world. The second obstacle is not exclusive to Victoria 2 and has been the cause of many grand-strategy veterans to steer clear from anything Paradox after Europa Universalis III: a sandbox game design with no date-triggered historical events dumped into a virtual world that may have strayed more or less dramatically from real history. We can safely say that the first obstacle has been passed.
#Victoria 2 to hoi3 manual#
The tutorials are outstanding, almost to the point where you can skip reading the manual (just kidding, this game is deep, read as much as you can). Also, this is the best presented game from Paradox in a long time. Victoria 2 runs smoother, loads faster and has far less crashes than that first version of the other game. The first obstacle in the climb is the widespread "look and wait" stance that many gamers have after the serious performance and interface issues of Paradox's Hearts of Iron III upon release. Ask Tiger Woods! Victoria 2 has a steep hill to climb before reaching the heights of popularity of its predecessor (Victoria: An Empire Under the Sun). When you have achived so much, it's hard to best yourself. Instead, I will take a stab at a few Victoria 2 features that at least for me were crucial to keep the game in my hard drive. I won't even try to comprehensively cover all features of this game. I could play this game for a year and still be learning something new. Reviewing a game like Victoria 2 is like reviewing the Internet.
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