After much heartache and heavy cost, the brave warriors of the Union of Social Democratic Tribes of Oceania have bought their freedom from the Perfidious English, liberated their comrades in Polynesia and Australia, and created a land where everyone from Freed American slaves to Flemish Refugees to Chinese Socialists can join together. Soon the Parliament will be dissolved in favour of a Council Republic.

Two problems remain

  1. Taking most of Australia somewhat suddenly means that now I have tanked my economy and standard of living having to provide Public Healthcare and Education to a few million starving semi-literate anglos.

  2. The Fucking French! HAAATTTTTEE!

  • Eris235 [undecided]
    ·
    2 years ago

    To add to what others are saying, one thing I thought was interesting as a first time Victoria player was the way changing the government works. Your government always has the 'groups of interest' that support it, and oppose it. You can only pass laws that at least some of the current government members support, and the decisions may radicalize some groups. Groups being stuff like landowners, Catholics, Rural folk, intellegencia, etc.

    But those groups are just floating ideas, they're actual people, with your groups of 'pops' beloning to one or more groups (so, your iron workers might be Trade Union and Catholic for example).

    To actually manage to change the laws in your country in ways the populace disprove of, you need to actual get the populace at least somewhat behind your ideas. So like, building more factories will eventually result in more Trade Union Members, or alternatively, you can use propaganda to increase/decrease attractions to groups, so overtime you can bleed support away from the Catholics. But even then, you're not going to be able to 'get rid' of the Landowner faction unless you actually lower the amount of landowners.

    It actually feels pretty damn materialistic, even if the core gameplay idea of a guiding 'spirit of a nation' definitely is not, and some of the execution is lacking at times.

      • Eris235 [undecided]
        ·
        2 years ago

        FWIW, I can see how its broken down

        Your buildings give how much of each type 'worker' you have

        Each type 'worker' has a pool of Groups of Interest they could be interested in (though the game only ever has one or two 'active' for each individual, based on weightings, so like factory works could be Trade Union, or Industrialist, or Catholics, or maybe some others) But the overall spread of who supports what is all based on percentages.

        You program the starting Worker->GoI weighting, but the 'drift' mechanics can change (within set bounds) what percentage of each type of worker supports which GoI.

        That gives you your number of GoI, that show up on your government screen.

        Each GoI has preprogrammed what they think about each law

        From there, its trivial (for a computer) to calculate overall populace approval, and if you do something to 'radicalize' catholics (like implementing seperation of church and state) its trivial to backtrack specifically which worker are now radicals.

        Each lil step there is pretty easy to program and relatively simple on its own, the trickier part of actually balancing it, cause it is a system with a LOT of 'moving parts', lots of weightings and balances, not to mention a pretty decent amount of stuff to do 'by hand'. There's a couple hundred laws, and I have to image they just went though each possible GoI and law by hand to set the approval. Similarly, a lot of type of 'workers' to weight for what GoI they start allied with, and what bounds they have to work in.

        There even more complexity I'm skipping over, like each set of populace also has an amount of political enfranchisement, so (accurately) at the start, the landowners and other aristocracy are heavily 'over-represented' in political sway, in terms of GoI power and populace approval. So you need to appease them to get anything done... Or figure out another way to get fewer landowners :owl-wink:. But, as the lower classes get more educated and better living conditions, and as you change voting laws or protest laws, they gain enfranchisement.

        Probably other shit I missed too, I'm not that deep in the game yet. But overall, I can definitely feel out how the game is just a towering pile of little systems all interwoven. So, I'm not really impressed with the programming complexity, but the balancing complexity.