Nearly 11 years after the launch of Victoria 2, Paradox has at last surrendered to the noble soldiers relentlessly asking about, predicting and demanding Victoria 3. Paradox announced the sequel during PDXCon, easily the biggest reveal of the show, but we don't know when we'll have it in our hands.
If you haven't delved that far back into Paradox's library, the Victoria series puts you in charge of a nation in the 19th century and gives you 100 years to make your mark on the world. It's a grand strategy affair, but with a greater emphasis on populations, politics and economics than the studio's other games.
At the domestic level, you'll be managing people with a lot of competing interests and beliefs, trying to get them on your side so you can push through reforms and improve the country, which is shaped by its political and economic systems. Liberal democracies, for instance, will likely have capitalists and industrialists making money and exploiting those lower down the economic ladder, but if the working class is educated and agitated it can rise up and set up a new order, which you can also run.
There's also a big world to meddle with outside your borders, so you can get stuck into the global economy, carve up the world from the negotiating table, watch as foreign ideas spread to your people—unless you go wild with the censorship—and march to war.
I saw a hands-off demo earlier in the month, so take a gander at my Victoria 3 preview (opens in new tab) for more details.
