I bought the original game back in 2004 (I think) and I still play it every once and a while. I am preordering and getting the game as soon as I come out.
It takes place from 1836-1936 and you can play any country in the world. There’s a ranking system but you pretty much set your own goals. Make the U.S. a world power? Mexico hold its own? Form Germany? It’s all up to you.
You have control over nearly every aspect of a country, from its economy to diplomacy to warfare.
Very easy game to learn but takes a lot of thinking to master.
I am still playng Europa Universalis 3, which is the base Vicki 2 will run on, and it’s fantastic. The only real issue is that the graphics are poor, even by strategy game standards. Be ready for lots of bland visuals and tables - but the gameplay is out of this world. I just wish they’d sprinkle some art into the actual game.
I’m looking forward to Victoria 2. They say they’ve really beaten down the micromanagement (you can let the AI control much more) and improved the economy (fewer monetary sources and sinks–cash actually circulates). Those were the two things that made the original less fun.
This time period covered is close enough to modern that the world is mostly familiar, and the rapid changes in political climate and technology means that one can try many plausible counterfactual situations. My first several games will be things like:
Play the US favoring the South, release the Confederacy and then play them.
Mexico is always fun. Try to keep Texas and the northern territories. Try to expand into central america.
Try to form Germany with one of the smaller German states instead of Prussia or Austria. Or more likely, simply try to survive as an independent German state.
Modernize Korea and try to form Korean-centric sphere of influence to eclipse the historical Japanese one.
I wish development would go back to turn based gameplay for these types of grand-strategy games. Real-time is great for tactical level games. But with these you either get 120 seconds for all of 1846. Or you get a pause and wait style where you end up watching large portions of the game doing nothing. Then hop into pause, and issue commands then go back to watching the game. Just not a fun style of gameplay for me.
I guess I still have Civ and Total War to play. But I won’t be getting Victoria II. Which is too bad, I would love to play a game like this… I miss old titles like Imperialism.
This is very much a bad title to try and turn into turn-based. Unless you fancy games with tens of thousands of turns. Although, in thurth is is turn-based, because the actions of each nation, body of trooops, and event on each and every day is resolved independantly.
I haven’t played any of the expansions, but EU3 went too far in revamping the event system of EU2. While EU2 arguably had too much event-driven predetermination, EU3 didn’t have any, something that made a lot of the countries feel the same when you played them.
Have you played EU3 with the expansions? You’ll find Eu3:Complete (that is, with Napoleon’s Ambition and In Nomine pre-installed) with 3.2 applied, or better still with the current expansion Heir to the Throne installed, a very different game. User feedback is virtually universally positive, FWIW.
Well, AGEOD is working on a turnbased 1850-1920 grand strategy game. It was called Vainglory of Nations but Paradox renamed it Pride of Nations. Their wargames are pretty good so I’m definitely watching this one.
However long it takes the mod community to do a proper adjustment.
Based on other Paradox games, I expect it to be runnable, but with some gameplay mechanic broken badly at release. The first patch will usually fix that. By the second patch, enough fine adjustments are to make it more or less good. Paradox seems to always release buggy games, but they are very good for putting out patches, both to fix bugs and also to add features. Their patch cycle is partly development of their next game.
Wait three months if you have a low tolerance for bugs.
I think they’re using the Kreigspiel engine from HOI3, rather than EU3. Certainly it looks better.
On the playability front, following the HOI3 trainwreck Paradox have gone for professional beta-testers this time, so it should at least be stable. OTOH, it’s pretty much a given that at least one gameplay element will be broken badly. The rule of thumb for Paradox games is not to buy before the first patch.
If you want to see what it looks like and get an idea of what it involves, there’s an intro AAR on the Paradox site here.
I downloaded it this morning. I tried jumping straight in but I realized quickly I was way in over my head. I’m still going through the tutorial, but I’m uber stoked.
I think the game looks gorgeous. My only regret is that I have to go back to school in a week and I won’t have much time to devout.
Well, I’ve been playing the game pretty much all day and I’d suggest waiting. It’s a lot better than the first one, very pretty, I like most everything about it, but…
damn rebels are everyone. Militancy raises throughout the game and it’s very hard to enact reforms to counteract such. Every few years, as the U.S., I’d get ~1 million rebels across the country. They’re very easy to defeat, but it’s a pain the the ass.
That’s apparently the game-breaking bug for this release. Paradox is so predictable.
But I still love them. If you’re so inclined you can find threads in their forums for tweaking the game to something more playable. Almost everything important to the game is in text files, so it’s fairly easy to mod. Or wait a month for the official fix.
I’m one of the people bitching on the forums about the rebels (nemph99). I’d go in a alter the tex files but chances are I’ll fuck it up and then have to do a complete uninstall. I’m waiting for the patch as well.
Luckily a book I’ve been looking forward to comes out tomorrow and Mafia II comes out next week.
If you have the harddrive space, simply copy the game folder to another location. Make your changes in the copy, run from the copy. Paradox really does make it easy to mod their games.
You can also make mods within a mod subfolder without changing any of the original files. When you start the game, choose the mod you want to run with. Unfortunately they have a bug in their mod code so it currently isn’t possible. :smack:
Glad to know that somethings never change. Since I’ll be getting this one and Civ5 it may just come down to which one is more stable initially and I’ll throw the other one on the Christmas wish list.
