VICTORIA 3

Creating utopias and dystopias by gaslight

- Leana Hafer

NEED TO KNOW

RELEASE October 26

DEVELOPER Paradox

PUBLISHER In-house

ILL LINK paradoxinteractive.com

The year is 1881 and I've turned the state of Hawaii into an anarchist paradise that long ago disposed of the king. Our industries are modest, but they are all owned by the workers, giving us one of the highest standards of living in the world. For the most part, we did this without firing a shot.

Victoria 3 is, even more than its 2011 predecessor, a grand strategy game about shaping a society. Covering the years from 1836 to 1936 on a detailed world map, it models every single individual person alive at the time. That might sound absurd, but it's not an exaggeration. They're organized by culture, religion, and profession into groups called 'pops' that all get their own 3D portraits, but when you see that there are 4,361 Anglo-Canadian Protestant Machinists in Saskatchewan, that's not an abstracted figure. The Clausewitz engine is keeping track of all of those people, from their birth rate to literacy level to political preferences.

If characters are the core of Crusader Kings III, pops are the core of Victoria 3. Not only do you need them to plow your fields, fight your wars, and work in your textile mills, they exert their influence on the political balance of your nation. At least, the educated ones do. And as the 1800s roll on, more and more of the lower and middle classes will become politically active. You can certainly try to slow that down by passing draconian censorship laws and making schools only available to the wealthy, but as a certain Romanov learned in real life, you hold back the tide of history at your own peril.