Victoria II

[Salamander8]

If you're a fan of Paradox game's various grand-strategic games, you'll like this one. I'm still trying to get to grip with the taxation problems I've been having, but it has a lot of potential. I never played the original Victoria, but I do love the Hearts of Iron and Europa Universallis series. This game covers the time period of 1836-1936 and currently only has the one grand campaign, but the modders are already at work, and I'm sure Paradox will make expansions for it. My one real gripe with Paradox is their spotty QC. As an example: when they first released the Semper Fi pack for HoI3, there was a bug where you could never or so close to never that it may as will be never, catch enemy submarines that were performing commerce raiding even with extra research focus on it, and sending out several patrols of destroyers. It's been patched to hopefully fix this, but my friend in CA. that plays these games with me online has been having patching issues and so we've been playing EU3 instead as our normal online game group is having "MMO-issues" and it's just us two right now.

 

The premise is simple; take any selectable nation, and this covers pretty much any nation in the world at the time of the game, and lead them to glory all while balancing the budget, researching technologies, and trying to keep the populace working and happy enough to not rise in armed revolt. I have been avoiding playing any of the 8 great powers (Prussia, Austria, Great Britain, Russia, Ottoman Empire, Spain, France, USA) so far as I want something in the middle to learn with, so have so far tried Bavaria and Switzerland, as my Sokoto and Haiti games didn't go well and those two nations low literacy hurt my research. Japan looks interesting as you can try to research the proper technologies to implement the Meiji Restoration, so will have to try it in future games. The USA has to contend with it's slavery issues and could spark the civil war, many of the smaller Germanic states get Pan-German nationalists that want to unify into the German nation, and etc. It looks to have a lot of replay value and certainly has strategic depth.

[Salamander8]

They've already patched to 1.2 and I'm trying Japan out as I grind my way to industrialization. I found to my chagrin that trying to build too many Men-O-War and Frigates with no indigenous supply of artillery not only costs a lot (which I knew), but it also slows production as my demand for the artillery was too high for world supply! Something to watch for in the future. I've added a couple of screenshots to possibly pique people's interest. I'm actually playing this game more than Civ5 as while I don't actually dislike Civ5, I find it a bit simpler than I'm used to and Victoria II is definitely in the other direction. I did not want to flood the forums with pictures of every single separate game screen, but wanted to share some of the game's features in some detail.

 

 

Here's the Main UI. each of the buttons on the top Left displays some info and you click on them for more detailed info. The lower right has various messages and you can click on the flags on the far lower right to get details of things like who did what to who and who passed certain laws and who went bankrupt. By my small flag/symbol in the upper left just below the buttons you'll see my status as a nation in the global community. The star is my prestige, the factory is my industrialization, and the crossed swords my military power. The left number for each of these is the value of the attribute and the right one is my nation's spot in the worldwide hierarchy for that attribute. These 3 are then compared to give me nation's rank overall and that is displayed in the circle on the lower right of my flag. You can see that I'm ranked as the 48th nation overall, I started at 68th or 64th, so some progress there. The military unit's number is the thousands of troops in that unit and the color green means full strength, organization, and supply. It turns yellow and then red as this worsens.

http://i870.photobucket.com/albums/ab268/Salamander8888/Japan1.jpg

 

 

The trade screen is this one. It lists all the goods that are made throughout the world and how much you import/export and the costs. If you hover over on of the goods in the upper portion it will give you more details.

http://i870.photobucket.com/albums/ab268/Salamander8888/Japan2.jpg

 

 

The Politics screen! You can see that Japan is an absolute monarchy at this time and that the conservative "Court Faction" is in charge. You actually start with the reactionaries in charge, but while I want state control of industry (although I can't build factories yet), I don't like how tight the reigns are on the country with the reactionaries in charge. At the lower right are the various decisions you have and you can see that the Meiji Restoration button is greyed out. I don't meet the requirements yet, but I'm working on it! Hovering over the question mark associated with the decision will list the requirements. This is also where you can ascertain what the people think on various issues and where you can enact reforms.

http://i870.photobucket.com/albums/ab268/Salamander8888/Japan3.jpg

 

It's a great game, but also extremely detailed. In this new game above, Prussia annexed several northern Germanic states and formed the Northern German Federation, and Denmark, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the Ottoman Empire are all fighting over the 'bottom' 2 spots of the great powers so a lot messages of them discrediting each other and the flip/flop of gaining/losing great power status are flooding my diplomacy messages UI!

[katashy]

I was thinking of buying this. How well does it run on low-end machines? My laptop can't handle too much.

 

Anyway, how complicated is it? It looks quite overwhelming.

[Salamander8]

It is quite complicated but it comes with several tutorials to help. If you can play Star Fleet Battles or Federation and Empire you should be good here. It's more detailed than Space Empires 4 gold (my favorite 4x game ever), but if you can play SE4 well, you should be ok..

 

As for specs, the box says: XP/Vista/7 OS, Pentium IV 2.4 Ghz or AMD3500+ CPU, 2.0 Gigs of RAM, Geforce 8800 or ATI Radeon X1900 or above. I have XP with 3 gigs of RAM, a 3 Ghz Intel E8400, and an Nvidia GTX 470 and it runs fine for me. It sounds like it might be too much for your laptop, but you can turn some of the effects down to help.