I have experience with all of the PDX grand strategy games, and despite their monetization policy, I’ve enjoyed my time in all of them.
I’ve been playing Victoria 3 and I’m really enjoying it. I do still prefer Victoria 2, but I’m sure with more content eventually 3 will overtake 2 for me. I love looking at spreadsheets in general, so the sheer amount of information presented in Victoria 3 is fun to poke through. I find it very fun and satisfying to try to make my country as rich as possible and become my region’s economy capital.
But that’s the thing, capitalism as a concept literally only makes sense in video games. If there were no stakes in real life, it would be fun to compete against my friends to see who could make the most money. Almost like a high score on a leaderboard.
For the bourgeoisie, capitalism in real life is a game. There are no stakes for them, just like there aren’t any for anyone in Victoria 3. The proletariat are not players in the game, the proletariat are the pieces with which the game is played through the exploitation of their labor.
I know this isn’t a new concept, but I just found it funny to recognize how much I enjoy the competitive aspect of capitalism as a Marxist and wanted to share.
I have a challenge for you: next V3 game you play, try using your standard of living as your score. The game becomes DRASTICALLY different once you do that. Do you stick to laissez-faire, which is generating stupid numbers of free buildings while leaving everyone but the capitalists in the dirt, or do you rip the scaffolding off and see if your economy has grown enough to support everyone?
Playing this way is less a line-goes-up simulator, and becomes more of a game about timing and plate-balancing.
I did exactly that the first time i played in Vic 3, since i remember how stupid the laissez faire was in Vic2. It turned out surprisingly fine and fun.
Vic 3 is so much superior comparing to Vic 2 as no PDX game ever was compared to its predecessor.
I’ve played like that in the past, and unfortunately Victoria 3’s radicalization system needs a complete rework to fully commit to maximizing SoL. If you have the highest standard of living in the world, when it decreases slightly you gain +6% radicals by base. When you bring it back up, you only gain +4% loyalists by base.
My SoL is fluctuating up and down slightly throughout the entire game. Even if it positively trends over the course of the entire game, radicalization will continue to increase, leading to annoying turmoil debuffs that never go away.
Have you tried passing Guaranteed Liberties as your Home Affairs law? That completely flips the script at higher levels and makes SoL radicalism drop like a rock from fluctuations like that.
Home Affairs and Police are always the first laws I try to push through and I always keep both institutions at their highest level. They mitigate some of the debuffs but they don’t seem to actually reduce the number of radicals overall.
Weird. I’ve never had that kind of issue after passing GL. I’m assuming atm you don’t have discriminated pops, those are of course hotbeds of radicalism.
Only thing I can think of is high unemployment with no welfare? Once you have a multicultural multireligious society, every discriminated pop floods your country, which can be very hard to handle to keep them all employed without a strong economy to back it up.
Ah, definitely could be it. I usually turn welfare up to level 1 or 2. On my next run, I’ll turn it up a lot higher and see if that helps with reducing the number of radicals.