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Author Topic: Let's Play Victoria II: The Second Brothers' War (1861-1869)  (Read 7899 times)

Tawa

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Let's Play Victoria II: The Second Brothers' War (1861-1869)
« on: March 02, 2018, 05:35:35 pm »


Victoria 2 is Paradox Interactive's 2010 successor to 2003's Victoria: An Empire Under the Sun. It's a grand strategy game wherein you control a country from 1836 to 1936. The game has an elaborate economy engine that, despite a few hiccups and being rather inscrutable, is reasonably accurate and allows for some interesting gameplay (as well as giving you things to do other than slaughter people, cough cough EU4.) It features an elaborate political system, as well, modeling conservatism, liberalism, and socialism and the effects of various social and political reforms like expanding the franchise and providing old age pensions. It is also probably the only video game ever made wherein you can play as a fascist Democratic People's Republic of Jan Mayen and conquer Europe. There are two expansions, A House Divided and Heart of Darkness; I have both.

The most defining feature of Victoria II is its population system. Every person in the world is modeled, by using manageable chunks called "POPs" based on location, profession, and cultural and religious identity. POPs have needs that determine their happiness, political ideologies that determine how they vote, literacy values that contribute to political consciousness and plurality, and militancy that determines if they'll revolt.

The core of the game is built around the Great Power system. The eight "Great Powers" are the countries with the highest Prestige, Industry, and Military scores combined. A Great Power has access to things lesser countries do not, chief among them putting other countries into its "sphere of influence", which makes it easy to form an alliance and adds the lesser country's market to the Great Power's national market (in effect, giving the people of both countries easy access to the other's goods.) Great Powers, along with the Secondary Powers (the eight next strongest countries) are also able to colonize territory.

Spoiler: Abridged Backstory (click to show/hide)

In this game, we'll be playing as the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Established as an absolute monarchy during the Congress of Vienna, the Kingdom of the Netherlands is ruled by William I of Orange. In 1830, the southern provinces revolted. Though the Great Powers have secured Belgian neutrality, the Netherlands maintains a claim to Belgium and does not recognize it as a sovereign state.

This will be a narrative Let's Play. We'll tell a story of a country and how it changes over the course of a century. I'm writing the updates from various first-person points of view; government officials, soldiers, average people, and civil rights activists are all fair game.

I will periodically leave things open to the readers--in fact, I already have such a moment lined up at the end of the third update. I strongly encourage reader participation! I should note that I prefer to not blob in Victoria 2--for example, in a war with Russia, I'd much prefer to make them release Finland or Poland as sovereign states than conquer Finland or Poland for myself. At most, I take territory I already have cores on, need to have to form a bigger country (like Arabia or Germany,) or transfer colonial territory. My primary goals for this game are to retake Belgium, become a top 4 great power, and build a new Dutch colonial empire by reclaiming old territories (e.g. bits of South Africa and India) and taking new ones. Whether we become an oppressive dictatorship or a democratic, civil-rights, social-programs utopia remains to be seen.

I've made a few small adjustments to the game at game start, via console commands. I gave the province of Kelowna to Great Britain, to prevent the U.S. from colonizing Canada. I also made Sweden release Norway as a satellite state, as this is how the game models other personal unions like Luxembourg and Hanover. Finally, I will be giving Liberia its inland cores during the Scramble for Africa, because otherwise that land never gets colonized and the blank patch looks weird.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Apologies in advance to our Belgian forumites!

Fair warning: since I'm doing this from various first-person perspectives, sometimes from the points of view of people like reactionaries, social Darwinists, and fascists, I occasionally include bits that would not fly in the modern world, and for good reason (e.g., referring to Africans as "savages", calling Muslims "Mohammedians", and the like.) I, of course, don't believe these things are OK, I'm writing them simply because they fit the point-of-view characters' worldviews and help develop them and the setting, and I'm not going to start, say, throwing the N-word or other slurs about, but I understand that some of this stuff could seem uncomfortable.

Updates
Prologue: The Divided Kingdom of the Netherlands (1836)
Chapter 1: The Belgian War & East Indies Offensive (1836-1839)
Chapter 2: The Old Order and the Revolutions of 1842 (1839-1842)
Chapter 3: The Lecture at Amsterdam (1842-1851)
Chapter 4: The Titans of Industry (1851-1861)
Chapter 5: The Second Brothers' War (1861-1869)
« Last Edit: May 13, 2018, 11:40:32 pm by Tawa »
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Tawa

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Re: Let's Play Victoria 2: The Divided Kingdom of the Netherlands (1836)
« Reply #1 on: March 02, 2018, 05:42:22 pm »



Ah, the good Junker! Welkom, welkom. Your travel from Berlin must have been hard! But don't worry, you are in good hands. We take care of our guests properly here in Amsterdam.
« Last Edit: March 02, 2018, 11:12:13 pm by Tawa »
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Tawa

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Do you remember the Belgian War? I do.

« Last Edit: March 02, 2018, 11:12:00 pm by Tawa »
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Zazmio

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Re: Let's Play Victoria 2: The Divided Kingdom of the Netherlands (1836)
« Reply #3 on: March 02, 2018, 06:55:16 pm »

I was going to say that world conquest as Jan Mayen would be impossible in this game.  Then I looked at the Victoria 2 Wiki and saw that there is a decision that allows you to embrace polar bears as your overlords, gaining Greenland and Iceland.  How about that.

I've never played played as the Netherlands, but I've played as Belgium.  Seems like you would need to blob a bit in Europe in order to get the space needed to make factories.  It has been a while since I've played this game, though.
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Tawa

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I've done Netherlands once or twice before, though never through to the end. We'll probably be fine; between the Netherlands and Belgium, there's five states, so there's room for 40 factories. A lot of Dutch revenue comes from colonial cash crops anyway, and we're fine on that front as long as we're never on the losing end of a Great War or the like.

By the way, there's not a lot of maps in this one--I had transparency issues with the map overlay when I converted from BMP to PNG, so I tried to keep map exposure to a minimum, but I realized about halfway through that converting to JPG would fix that due to JPG's lack of transparency.

Friends! Enemies! Ministers and MPs! I speak to you not only in my capacity as Prime Minister, but as a Dutchman!
« Last Edit: March 02, 2018, 11:12:47 pm by Tawa »
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Zazmio

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An example must be made.  In order to protect the morals of misguided Dutch youth, we must slaughter them all!  Let the streets of Amsterdam and Rotterdam run red!
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George_Chickens

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What's your economic strategy right now? As smaller nations, I like to centralize with state capitalism, build what I know will succeed and what I need (food, rifles, ammo, etc), then eventually loosen restrictions and go interventionist or even LF.
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Tawa

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Should add that I ran up to 1851 or so earlier today, will probably update tomorrow. Spoilers: the revolt is a massacre.

My usual strategy--in Europe, anyway--is pretty similar to yours. Usually, I appoint the reactionaries as ruling party in 1836 and use state capitalism to get the ball rolling for a few years. Once the initial uproars have calmed down--that is, when the 1848 revolutions have ended and any early-game wars I want to run have finished--I switch over to trying to get the liberal party in power. I let lassiez-faire run for a couple decades and usually extend political liberties. Then, once the socialists get big in the 1880s/1890s, I put them in power. I use their state capitalist policies to start up promising factories that closed down, demolish underperforming factories and closed failures, and generally just streamline things, ideally passing some social reforms along the way. After that, I mostly just let whoever is convenient take office and check up on the factories every now and then.

Democratic economic politics are a bit trickier. Getting the reactionaries in power is generally a necessity so you can build industry and avoid wallowing in obscurity, but since you can't appoint them, you have to get people to vote for them via national foci and guiding their hand with election events.
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Zazmio

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That's pretty much how I used to play.  State capitalism at first, then laissez faire for a while, then back to state capitalism to fix things the crazy capitalists fuck up.  I would never go planned economy, because there used to be a malus involved; apparently they got rid of that and instead gave planned economy a 5% throughput bonus.  This makes me want to fire this game up again and give planned economy a try.
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George_Chickens

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Planned economy is wonderful. All profits go to you, wages and safety laws cease to have effect outside of popularity, and you can safely tax your upper class by 100% and smile as they slowly drop to nothing. It's not without its downsides, however. You will never make as much money as a functional LF or interventionist economy, and you can neither invest nor be invested in. Being sphered as a planned economy, for reasons I am uncertain of, is extremely dangerous, as you seem to run out of cash and straight into economic collapse much faster than the other economic policies, assuming they are implemented functionally.
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Fishbreath

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I love a good Victoria II game. I'll be keeping an eye on this.

Tawa

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Re: Let's Play Victoria II: The Great Lecture at Amsterdam (1842-1851)
« Reply #11 on: March 06, 2018, 11:33:45 pm »

Students, colleagues, friends and faculty.



I hope you are as deeply concerned about our government as I am;



they are certainly not quite so concerned about us.


Members of the Liberale Coalitie, and our Conservatieven allies. The time is upon us to extend Dutch political liberties. We have five choices before us, as I've outlined on the sheet before you.

Weighted Wealth Voting: If we pass this law, the voting franchise will be extended to the middle class. Clergymen, clerks, bureaucrats, officers, and artisans will be allowed to vote, but they will have half votes relative to the wealthy.
Jefferson Method Voting: This method will change the voting method to allocate parliament seats differently. I'm not actually sure how it works, but I'm told it keeps people in line with a few parties without making it a 2-vs-2 race like FPTP and without the absurd granularity of proportional.
Proportional Representation: This method will allocate upper house seats based exactly on how the voters vote. It will give an upper house that very closely matches the population's views.
State Controlled Labor Unions: This will make our population want social reforms more, which is useless until the 1860s because there are no socialist parties until then.
Harassment: This will lower the amount by which the vote is skewed toward the party currently in power, and will also mean I don't have to keep writing around the fact that "Ruling Party Only" and "Only Underground [Opposition Parties]" are on different law trees.
« Last Edit: March 07, 2018, 02:07:49 am by Tawa »
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George_Chickens

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Re: Let's Play Victoria II: The Great Lecture at Amsterdam (1842-1851)
« Reply #12 on: March 07, 2018, 02:23:34 am »

I suggest switching to harassment. Absolute monarchy will drag you down to hell by the midgame, with risks of political deadlock and oh my god so many rebels. It's best to rid the shackles of it ASAP and accept limited constitutionalism as to allow political pluralism to blossom.
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Sheb

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Re: Let's Play Victoria II: The Great Lecture at Amsterdam (1842-1851)
« Reply #13 on: March 08, 2018, 02:54:09 am »

I second harassment.
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A Thing

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Re: Let's Play Victoria II: The Great Lecture at Amsterdam (1842-1851)
« Reply #14 on: March 09, 2018, 07:54:35 pm »

Harassment for me also. (I bet all of these votes will end up in OOCQT.)
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