Preview by: Troy Goodfellow

When Paradox announced it was working on Victoria II, the CEO bet his hair that it would not see a profit. Who can blame him? As deep and interesting as the original Victoria was, it was more a collection of systems only roughly integrated with each other. The world market was less a market than a clearing house, colonial conflict made little sense and the micromanagement of a nation’s population seemed divorced from the larger streams of history.

Chris King, the lead developer of Victoria 2, thinks there’s life in the old girl yet. By dialing back on the micromanagement and making the economic system a flow of money and not magic coins, he hopes to make the game’s complexity more intelligible and more accurately reflect the “long nineteenth century” from the accession of the young queen of England to the era of total war.

The interface is considerably improved. There are still a lot of menus to dig through, but the information you need is more immediately accessible than it was. The expansion of the tooltips and links between menus means that experienced players should be able to move through their nation more smoothly. Though still a maze of data, the trends are clearer and this is the important thing.

The political system has been reorganized to prevent players from advancing their society too quickly and ahistorically. A nation’s “upper house” will block social or political reforms not in line with their political ideology, but a restive population demanding change can force these changes upon a government that would prefer not to have a revolution. This is one way that Paradox is trying to capture the political tension of the period, an era of great liberalization but also of conservative resistance to growing fears of socialism or mob rule. Growing consciousness and liberalism will also be tied to pan-national movements.

The military and technology systems are, for the most part, untouched, but the great power status of your nation is even more significant. To reflect the benefits of prestige, the eight greatest powers will have more diplomatic options and responsibilities available to them. You now have a reason to strive for great power status and, more importantly, to fight to preserve it. Major powers should be more interesting than minor powers, they argue, but this also gives you something to aspire to.