War is, obviously, still going to be an important factor in Victoria 3, but it’s not what Paradox really want you to consider the first or only option to getting what you want – in fact, it’s not being shown at this point in time.

You have to build up your institutions over time, but might find that, if you find yourself in the middle of a war, you have to deprioritise education in favour of boosting your military through a Conscription Office. How you can build up the institutions of your country, whether you can prioritise education which will eventually start to introduce newer social ideas to a wider portion of the populace, fuelling the social change, and more. The people in power, the IGs that have the most support and their opinions help to define some of what you can do with your country. The Industrialists led by August von der Heydt, for example, support the monarchy in Prussia thanks to his personal opinion, as opposed to an Industrialists’ traditional desire for more control of their own and a different government type that suits that desire. Each IG will have a stance on the state’s Welfare system, Health system and Education, though each one also has a leader whose personal opinions feed into the things they support. The Junkers, for example, will look out for a country’s landowners, the Devout for the country’s religion, the Rural Folk IG for the farmers and workers in the countryside, and so on. Multiple IGs might, in reality, be combined to create Social Democrats, but here you have certain IGs in power and the others able to exert their influence, the ones that appear being relevant to the demographics of your nation. Intriguingly, these aren’t the actual political parties that would have been found in the era, but something broader and transferrable across the hundreds of countries you can play as, adaptable to the many different countries of the world. People of different backgrounds support different Interest Groups (IGs), which would make up the political groups of your country. How well an industry is doing affects how well they pay their workers, which in turn affects how much tax you collect, which feed the rolling economy of your country.ĭig into those Pops and you discover more about the people of your country and how they can impact the political machinations available to you. You can determine your own needs in this way, but you can also join or create common markets that align multiple nations together and (for the Great Powers of the era), allows you to exert influence over lesser nations.ĭiving down into the economy, you find the buildings that make up the various industries in your country – tooling workshops, for example – and how they employ your country’s pops (a Part of Population that has been a building block of the series’ mechanics). Where Victoria 2 had a single global marketplace for the trade of materials and goods – everything from furniture and fabrics, to meat, sulphur and beyond –Victoria 3 splits that down to a national level. You play as a country, just as in Europa Universalis and many other historical grand strategy game, guiding the nation’s political and economic machinations. Immediately there’s some significant changes to the pillars on which Victoria 3 is built. That’s a lot to try and represent in a game, but Vicky 3 is going to try.

Victoria 3 map