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Rob Zacny

Episode 217: Victoria Day

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3MA Producer Michael Hermes and GWJ editor Erik Hanson joins Rob and Tom to talk about Victoria II: Heart of Darkness. Rob is reconsidering some of his earlier, harsher views on Victoria while Tom argues that it is a towering achievement of game design that speaks to real-world politics in a way few others have ever attempted.

 

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I am not sure if I should listen to this episode or not! On the one hand I love paradox games. On the other hand, I hate Victoria especially! I suppose I'll check it out on the way to work and see what the crew has to say though! I got all excited last episode when they said this one was going to be Paradox centric, only to be disappointed it isn't about EU4 or CK2!

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This episode was definitely a concrete example of why I enjoy listening to people talk about Paradox games but don't really enjoy playing them. Tom's suggestion that players should just ride the wave is exactly what bothers me about playing Paradox games. Even after putting dozens of hours into one I still feel like that's all I'm doing. It's such a passive experience for me, and so at odds with Sid Meier's concept of strategy games as a series of interesting decisions. I guess this is what makes these games more of a simulation, and less of a strategy game.

 

One point of confusion for me: I could have sworn in the original Victoria 2 podcast there was talk about the crisis system, but it sounded as if it was new here. Maybe it simply changed radically or something, but it wasn't totally clear to me what Heart of Darkness brought to the table.

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You're spot-on about the contrast to Sid Meier's conception of a Video game, Mr. Sclpls (dude, what happened to all your vowels?).  Early in the podcast, Michael mentioned something along these lines as well, referring to it as more of a simulation than a game.  There's an argument to be made that Victoria (and Paradox's games in general) defy a lot of the conventional wisdom about what makes a good game, and you're absolutely right to invoke that Meier quote.  My problem with that quote is that "interesting decision" is a meaningless phrase.  I don't personally find the decision about whether to bank my plane right or left in that godawful little Ace Patrol boondoggle the least bit "interesting", because of the game built around it.  However, I find it terribly interesting how many spaces to move my soldiers in Xcom, because of the game built around it.  So it is with Victoria.  Once you wrap your head around what the game is doing, it's not only interesting to decide whether to grant wider voting rights, it's damn near paralyzingly difficult.

 

But mostly, I disagree that it's passive.  As you're learning the game's systems, working your way up the learning curve, you start to understand more ways you can interact with the simulation.  You make very important decisions, but you don't always know the consequences of those decisions immediately.  Which is another way that I feel Victoria is a uniquely valuable model for history and politics.

 

The crisis system is entirely new in Heart of Darkness.

 

    -Tom 

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You're absolutely right that "interesting decision" is so vague as to be essentially meaningless. I'm glad you mention Ace Patrol, which is a game I really love. I care about whether I bank left or right because that action determines what types of maneuvers I'm capable of executing on my next turn. It's critically important I'm able to outmaneuver my enemy if I'm outgunned, or at a higher difficulty levels because losing a pilot for a couple of missions while he or she recovers can be brutal. To me, these decisions are just as interesting as how I position my dudes in XCOM. How interesting a game's decisions are is going to be determined by how well I understand what is going on in the game. The lag in time between the execution of a decision, and its effect makes the Paradox games more realistic as a simulation, but also more difficult to comprehend. The Federal Reserve has a flash game on their website that has the same sort of mechanics, where you adjust interest rates to compensate for inflation/unemployment, but there is a time lag so you are never sure how much of an impact a decision has until it is too late, and disasterous consequences arrive from doing too much/too little. Basically, with Paradox games I never feel like I know enough about how to apply the right touch to a situation, so I end up watching events in fold in front of me that I'm not really able to interact with in any sort of meaningful way. Again, I'm not trying to criticize Paradox, I think their games are brilliant, but they also aren't something I'm really able to get into in any sort of satisfying way.

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I'm glad you mention Ace Patrol, which is a game I really love. I care about whether I bank left or right because that action determines what types of maneuvers I'm capable of executing on my next turn. It's critically important I'm able to outmaneuver my enemy if I'm outgunned, or at a higher difficulty levels because losing a pilot for a couple of missions while he or she recovers can be brutal.

 

Why bother?  Just buy another hospital for 99 cents. :)

 

    -Tom

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How dare you! I can't believe you would besmirch my good, vowel-less name by suggesting I would pay to cheat! The nerve! ;-)

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On the interesting decision issue, isn't the difference between (say) Civ and VicII in that sense just a question of how well you need to understand the game before you can identify what those decisions are?  Both games offer you a spectrum of decisions both interesting and uninteresting.  Civ gives you less scope for interesting outcomes in order to make identifying the interesting decisions easier.  VicII gives you a vast array of potential interesting outcomes, but the cost is learning to navigate the decision landscape and determine which parts matter.

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This was my first time listening to your podcast and it's excellent! I recently bought CK2 but don't own the other Paradox games yet, but thinking of getting EU3. I'm a little confused why you guys were talking so much about Victoria II in such grand strategy terms, when it seems to be essentially the same game as EU3 but on a smaller scale. I was having a hard time reading or watching reviews online that explained the big differences between the two games - can someone elaborate? I would consider Victoria over EU3 but the overall reviews for it seem to be so-so and EU3 is more widely known and played.

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Both games run on the same sort of Paradox engine, and both can be classified as grand strategy games. The more limited scope of Victoria allows for greater historical detail (similar to how it can be desirable to play a WWII game that focuses simply on the Eastern Front, or even a particular battle as opposed to playing out the entire scope of the war). As with all historical strategy games, you'll consider one game over another because of personal preferences in terms of particular episodes of history you find fascinating.

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Mr. Cat, I partly disagree with sclpls about the similarities between EU and Victoria coming down to personal preference for history.  That's certainly part of the difference, and a lot of why I prefer Victoria.  But the things I talked about on the podcast that make Victoria unique are, well, unique to Victoria.  The EU games are fantastic, but they're more in the vein of that familiar top-down Civilization model of strategy gaming.  

 

Victoria's population-driven gameplay model is, in my opinion, what makes it stand out.  It uses this model to express that historical period in a way that no other game has done, and I feel it's far more relevant today than other strategy game models.  Its gameplay is also different from EU in terms of its economic model, which can still throw me for a loop for how intricate it gets (What happened to all my liquor?????).  Because Victoria is based on the industrial revolution, there's a sense of consuming raw materials to manufacture goods, almost like a train tycoon game.  There's nothing quite like that in the EU series.  And the crisis system is built to set up global conflicts of the type that you'd never see in an EU game.

 

So, yes, personal preference is a lot of it, but I still feel Victoria has unique gameplay that goes above and beyond the historical theming.

 

    -Tom

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Its gameplay is also different from EU in terms of its economic model, which can still throw me for a loop for how intricate it gets (What happened to all my liquor?????).  Because Victoria is based on the industrial revolution, there's a sense of consuming raw materials to manufacture goods, almost like a train tycoon game.  There's nothing quite like that in the EU series.

 

I ran into a particularly nice instance in the game I started after listening to this episode. I was Greece, in the United Kingdom's sphere, which was a frustrating game mostly because the "Megali Idea" decision is broken, but there was a moment where the UK was at war with the rest of the Great Powers and all her satellites & protectorates went bankrupt because they couldn't trade with the enemy, which was the rest of the known world.

 

It's a fascinating system to see in action, just not always to play.

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