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.

  • suggsjackal@lemmygrad.mlOP
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Barbarian
      2·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • suggsjackal@lemmygrad.mlOP
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.