Victoria 3: Everything we know so far

A very long (6,300 words) review of what Victoria 3 plans to offer. Apparently the person who made this post also wrote a review on IGN. If this all comes to fruition, I think it could be high on best games of the 2020s, a massive rebound from what happened to Imperator and Eu4 and a big jump in grand strategy.

1836 - 1936.

4 ticks per day, so the number of ticks per campaign is similar to EU4.

The map is divided into States and Provinces. There are about 730 States at game start, which are the smallest unit you will interact with for purposes of politics and economics.

It's possible to split existing states, such as when you demand a Treaty Port in a war or Diplomatic Play. This creates a new State that is only one Province in size. Even at game start there are some cases of having more than one State, gameplay-wise, within a single "State Area."

Provinces are subdivisions that you usually only interact with for maneuvering armies and when colonizing (which is done one Province at a time as you add more Provinces to your Colonial State), and there are roughly the same number of individual Provinces as in HoI4. (According to Google, that's around 13,000 - roughly 18 Provinces per State on average.)

Well over 100 playable countries, but not all countries are playable. Most of Africa, parts of inner South America, and a few surviving native tribes in North America (including the Lakota, Dakota, and Cree) were not playable. These are "Decentralized Countries." Post-launch, they want to make them playable eventually. But they want to do them right because the gameplay experience should be significantly different. All the Decentralized Countries have names and governments. There are no "uncolonized" provinces, but you can colonize on top of a Decentralized Country without declaring war.

Full POPs like Victoria 2. Over a billion people are modeled individually, which will roughly double by game end, including Dependents. These represent non-working children and homemakers. Your laws, i.e. Child Labor laws, determine how much economic output your Dependents create and if they collect wages. So like, kids will still be counted as Dependents, but your wages from Dependents might go up (along with mortality rate.)

If a revolution happens, you can side with the rebels. So you can be super duper capitalist on purpose, make life hell for all the workers, then switch sides when the socialists rise up. Neighboring conservative countries will be likely to step in and try to stop a socialist revolution.

Historical events (Taiping Rebellion, US Civil War) can happen, but only if the correct conditions exist. If the US player plays the interest group game really well and manages to abolish slavery peacefully in the 1850s, there won't be a hardcoded Civil War event chain that fires.