Victoria 2

[stokeriño]

You are waaay ahead of me. Plus on this first game I'm being quite passive anyway.

My capitalists now build factories for me - once the government switched from Conservative to Liberal with their Laissez Faire policy. Annoyingly, the Vlandern region has great industry going on and the other region (forget its name) has lost all of it. Not sure why - nothing's changed since when it had a bunch of good factories before the government switch. Adding a National Focus hasn't seemed to help either.

Oh well. My military is better now so I may just have to declare war on the Netherlands for the hell of it...

[KevinStorm]

So, tlmn (clearly the only relevant person on this forum for this): have you bought this yet?

I get tempted by little things when I look at this, but suspect that there are big parts of the gameplay that I won't enjoy at all. For example:

YAY:

- personalising your nation's social and political development

- ridiculously large tech tree (so I'm told)

- colonisation

BOO:

- micro-managing absolutely anything to do with the economy (MINE COAL HERE, BUILD 2 X COTTON MILLS HERE, CHECK SUPPLY AND DEMAND GRAPHS, etc. etc.)

- all the different types of population units. Seriously, how the fuck are you supposed to keep track of all those?

The 'boo' points are partially taken from the 3 minutes I spent attempting to like Victoria 1, an endeavour which entirely failed to get off the ground.

And of course, it costs £35.

But...it looks pretty in a twee way, and there's something about a World Map which has St. Albans, of all places, on it that makes me feel all warm, middle class and Home Counties-ish.

So, yeah. I haven't bought it, but I get paid in 6 days and I suspect my will may be weak. I shall first have to find out what kind of graphics engine it uses though, since my computer couldn't run HoI3.

Another BOO point, which is my main problem with all of Paradox's games like this: the large amount of time spent sitting there staring at the screen and waiting for something to happen.

[stokeriño]

Hmm, I've hit the 1880s and have come up against the 'Rebel Spawn Overload' and 'Impossible To Kill Armies' problems that I read people on the Paradox forums bitching about.

Now I too eagerly await the version 1.2 patch.

On the plus side, there exists a 'Belgian Africa' (roughly encompassing Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, Burkina Faso and half of Mali). That was all I ever really wanted out of this first game anyway. >_> Plus, all the prestige from colonising made me a solidified Great Power at long last, yay.

Shame Britain were dicks and stole Belgian Guyana from me. And I see no earthly reason why they, Germany and the Ottomans should all be allied. It's not like the Russians are looking to tear shit up or anything. Frankly, I think they're just showing off.