Victoria 3 offers an exciting, complex vision of grand strategy game economics

We’re over a month out now since the announcement of the highly anticipated grand strategy game Victoria 3, which has been a meme for so long. It’s finally on its way, although we don’t know the release date just yet.

Since then, the development team at Paradox Development Studio has been releasing weekly development diaries, laying out the vision and plans for various aspects of the game. While you can read each one in full if you haven’t yet, the team has also recently put out a video that summarises the key points of everything shared so far. Lead game designer Mikael Andersson, as well as members from the programming and content design teams, give an overview of some of the economic systems.

There are a few exciting things going on here – pops, for example, are far more intricate than they were in Victoria II. Buildings now don’t really do anything on their own, instead they are a vessel where you plug in a workforce, define production methods, and then generate an output. This allows for a lot more customisation and flexibility over your economy. Even capacities, which is a form of currency that doesn’t accumulate, sounds like good solution to the ‘mana’ criticisms of pre-2.0 Imperator and EU4.

Here’s the month one recap video in full:

Victoria 3 is looking to offer a very deep economic simulation, with an intricate web of dependencies and relationships that will offer players of a lot to interact with, although given the nature of private ownership you will have very little direct control. These systems will be further enhanced by the relationship between domestic economies and international trade.

Like most of Paradox’s Swedish workforce, large swathes of the Victoria 3 team are currently on holiday. The most recent dev diary was at the start of July and touched on politics in the game by looking at ‘interest groups’.

These aren’t strictly speaking political parties, although in response to player feedback following the announcement game director Martin Anward has mentioned that the team is looking into some kind of mechanic to reflect political parties, which would be based on the existing interest group systems.

Related: The best simulation games on PC

Developer diaries are due to resume as normal next week on July 22. There is currently no release date for Victoria 3.

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