#Victoria 2 bourgeois dictatorship series#

One of the notable quirks of Paradox games is that rather than having just a few вЂplayableвЂ™ countries, effort has gone in to putting nearly every historical state in the period on the map and they are all playable, so while the designers clearly expect many players to stick to the most common states (the United States, France, Prussia, Austria, and of course Britain, inter alia), if a player wants to play as less economically or militarily powerful developed powers, they can (note that weвЂ™ll mostly deal with those countries in the third post in this series as they have quite a different experience in the game). In it, players take control of a single state and guide that stateвЂ™s policy decisions, including military and diplomatic strategy, economics and politics from 1836 (the gameвЂ™s start date) to 1936. Victoria II (the sequel to Victoria: Revolutions) is a grand strategy game made by Paradox Interactive. Introducing VictoriaД«efore we dive in, we should set some of the basics of the game.

Subscribe! One of Victoria IIвЂ™s loading screens, showing its namesake being crowned in 1837. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter ( for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings. If you really want to throw me laurels, you can support me on Patreon. But I think that the announcement of the next game in the series makes this look at VickyII more valuable, to get a sense of the ways that it succeeded and failed as a historical exercise, in the hope that the best parts of it will be preserved into the next version.Д«ut seriously, if you want to give me accolades, please share my writing.

I humbly accept all of your accolades for my heroic service. Moreover, the very presentation of ParadoxвЂ™s games as historical simulations as much as games both encourages players to think about them as exercises in history and also lends their theory of history tremendous persuasive power.ДЇinally, I should note that, when I began this series with EU4, I noted that we would do VickyII next as, вЂњI want to bully Paradox into green-lighting Victoria III.вЂќ Paradox almost immediately announced Victoria III so I want to note right away that I gracious accept ParadoxвЂ™s surrender on this point and will happily take credit for ending the long drought of Victoria content. Paradox games, by and large, arrive at their subject matter with a theory of the history behind them and that theory is then expressed in interesting ways through the game mechanics. This week, weвЂ™re going to be looking in particular at how Victoria II treats what is arguably its central game system: economics and the industrial revolution.ДЄs before, the reason I chose ParadoxвЂ™s series of titles is not to subject them to withering critique, but because I think they are a particularly rich area to discuss precisely because they are somewhat more historically aware than many similar games. Readers will find a number of references here to our previous discussion of one of ParadoxвЂ™s other games, Europa Universalis IV, but I think this discussion will be mostly readable without having to rush back and read (or reread) the previous posts that said much of what we discuss here will, I suspect, be more interesting if one has read the previous entries. This is the first post in a three-part series that will be examining the historical assumption of Paradox InteractiveвЂ™s grand strategy computer game set in the 19th and early 20th century, Victoria II.