Victoria 2: Materialism, Failure, & Social History

[@otomegrandma7472]

I really appreciate seeing this kind of content being made about strategy games. There are so many political assumptions that are made to make these games work that I almost never seen discussed.

[@comeintotheforest]

Absolutely true!!! As someone interested in both theology and sociology, I would add that there’s a massive overlap between religious assumptions and the broader social imaginary of a people group, and the governing preferences and choices they make. There’s a reason for example that there’s a 1:1 overlap between social Democratic nations and nations which have had a Lutheran state church. I think this is one of the biggest failures of historical strategy, fiction, and alt history; that they simply ignore this documented historical reality. Even if you’re a strict materialist, the effect of religious values informs everybody’s daily life and decisions through all history, and it’s far more significant than any “+3% conversion rate” or “+2 to agricultural throughout” could ever hope to recreate.

[@charmyzard]

We're in tacit agreement not to talk about it since drawing too much attention will get the games and studio "canceled" or wokeified through coercion. "Please, not our funny map games!" so to say.

[@notNajimi]

@@charmyzardwho’s the we here?

[@askoldir4538]

15:22 Funnily enough this is one of the giant shortcomings of EU4’s MEIOU & Taxes 3.0. They revamped the economy so much they needed to make an AI to manage it for players, but it’s so good and the economy so complex that most players just find themselves not touching the economic gameplay, taking a very complex mods and making it actually simpler to play than past versions, despite a massive revamp

[@brettmcclain9289]

That is a pretty accurate description of the real economy too.

[@durianjaykin3576]

So basically vicky 2 lol?

[@kuman0110]

@@durianjaykin3576 vicky 2 if capitalists were smart

[@left9096]

Why is this necessarily a shortcoming?

[@aelianaevergreen8955]

​@@left9096I wouldn't say it's necessarily a bad thing it's a matter of perspective. It's easy to ask why it's necessary to have a mechanic that's so complicated that it can't be effectively used.

[@user-pu4lv6pr5v]

So what you are saying is Dwarf Fortress is the closest representation we will get of social history in video games. My fort fell because the majority of my people were Nobles while the peasants slowly lost their mind and went on a tantrum spiral, after the peasants were put down my nobles would be discontent and also have a tantrum. It would spiral out of control causing the elves to declare war on us, starting a race war between the Dwarves and the Elves.

[@TPrice919]

This actually makes me want to get into Dwarf Fortress again.

[@wickedAberration]

Ayn Rand's utopia?

[@TheHalf123]

Looks like Rimworld also

[@hedgehog3180]

@@TheHalf123 Well Rimworld was basically the only successful game from the wave of games that tried to be Dwarf Fortress but less obtruce.

[@infernocop1009]

yeah, rimworld even tells you what your colonists are talking to each other about, you still play from the top down, but the "bottom up" stuff is well communicated because it's the focus of the game.

[@calebr7199]

Yes! finally, someone said it! These games basically all have the same government type, a single ruler player autocracy! I've been thinking about this for a while and I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who this thought has occurred to. I would love to see a game balance player control with the control of "the people" in game.

[@hedgehog3180]

It's such a difficult issue to tackle especially because AIs are usually just stupid so giving up control in all strategy games is inherently a limit to your power.

[@Mike-ukr]

@@hedgehog3180 alternatively whenever AIs are good enough, players just never bother with those aspects of the game

[@morpheus9522]

I always liked Crusader Kings because even if the player dictates a lot about the country, you're still "just" the ruler. If the council doesn't like you, they'll make a move. There's plots, people who don't like you, who disagree or have a different culture. Of course, Crusader Kings has a lot of "roleplay" in gameplay, but I would love if they try the "you're ONLY the ruler" thing in Vic and EU

[@Dramon8888]

The only game I can think of that approach what you say at the, about a game navigating both internal politics and facing an external world, is Dwarf Fortress. Now, Dwarf Fortress, depending which mode you play, is either a really cool colony manager that every other colony manager has copied, or a really bland CRPG with a ton of cool systems that ultimately don't matter, but that's the nature of a game perpetually in development. There has been talks about adding a Kingdom mode to the game for years, but it's probably at least a decade away. Anyway, in what is often considered the 'main' mode, you build your dwarven fortress, having to take care of your little guys, and sometimes things from outside your fortress attack. Sometimes other civilizations come to trade. Other times the Mountainhomes decide your fortress has developed enough to acquire official recognition as the governing body of the region, and it's proclaimed a barony, which can eventually advance to a county, a duchy, and ultimately the dwarven king may decide to move the capital there (it continues being a duchy, and the duke is with all probability another person than the king, which could be interesting but currently doesn't really matter). In one of the last updates they added the ability to send armies to attack other sites. You don't control the army apart from sending it, but they bring back the loot and might conquer the site for your kingdom. So right now you can play as the leaders of a fortress, building a settlement for your kingdom, eventually being able to send armies to wage war, then hop into adventure mode and play as a citizen of the fortress, maybe go to see a conquered town, and NPCs will comment on all that. Then you can gather a party of followers and travel the world, maybe settling somewhere else eventually (adventurers can make a 'site' and build stuff, but currently you can't switch to playing that site as you'll do in Fortress mode). I'm not sure if it represents social history well, in the end you are always playing as 'great men', either an adventurer or the leaders of a fortress, but your citizens aren't quite mindless robots, they will start fighting if you don't take care of them, which can make others unhappy and you end up with pure anarchy.

[@Rosencreutzzz]

An interesting comparison and it’s possibly a testament to the difficulty of making a game that depicts social history that it would have to be compared to something as monumentally ambitious as Dwarf fortress. I hadn’t even considered the comparison, though I did for all of ten seconds consider bringing up rimworld in a tangent, but dwarf fortress would have been a bit better (though they both fall outside the genre, they do offer a template of sorts)

[@mrgopnik5964]

mind you, Victoria 2 is the only paradox game, where you legit just don´t need an observer nation to make timelapses. You just pick some indian puppet, disable fow and events and watch the world burn. Everything else just solves itself

[@elilawrence7166]

This idea of swapping between top-down and ground-level experience is what I really wanted City Skylines VR to be….

[@Rosencreutzzz]

I still remember being blown away by some knock off Roller Coaster Tycoon game on the PS2 that I played as a kid where you could like, fix your camera to one of the wandering park goers and experience the rides.

[@meanmanturbo]

@@Rosencreutzzz A new game like the old Streets of Sim City or SimCopter where you could import your own SimCity 2000 cities as maps for a racing game/rescue helicopter mission game. I was long ago thinking about being able to import your Crusder Kings save file into a Mount and Blade style game (not just the combat).

[@nightlight0x07cc]

​@@Rosencreutzzzyou might be thinking of ThrillVille, which I love. You play from first person as the "Inheritor of the Theme Park". You get to build the park using a sort of design mode, but during the periods where you'd be waiting to collect funds or meet goals in a normal management game you instead play as a teenager and you can chat with park goers, date girls, play in the arcades and ride the coasters you made ^-^

[@nightlight0x07cc]

I think the Guild II is the coolest for its gameplay where you only play as a single character at a time, but you build businesses, create a dynasty, and can have real influence by joining politics. If they made it first person like how GTA V does character swapping, I think it would be super cool.

[@novitrix9671]

At first I found the tone and tenor to be intensely lacking to the point I was convinced clicking off the video was for the best. My patience was rewarded at around 14 minutes when the commentary substance overpowered the detracting delivery. You had my attention on the ropes and won it back with solid ideas and concepts, good job!

[@jovaniibb]

Try to be more patronising, would you?Nobody needs your approval.

[@novitrix9671]

@@jovaniibb There is a hefty amount of conflict in your comment there, am I supposed to continue on, or stop since apparently nobody needs my approval? Pick one not both since giving opinions on the video itself is one of the main points of comments not loosing focus with salty flailing. Seems like I did a fair go at that so will continue regardless of your 'approval' :)

[@nawade]

talking about player autocracy made me think of Civ I, as a republic or democracy, you can't just go to war. You have to get authorization from congress or whatever. A little text box comes up and challenges your absolute authority. I remember just hating that text box. Like how dare my governments duly elected officials dare to intervene in my blatant power grab. This is clearly a peacekeeping exercise/premptive defense of eminent attack/etc. My only game of Vicky 2, i played as Brazil and mostly just let things happen. I did notice in the early game that some of my artisans had massive cash reserves that they were making available to me as government debt. So, I took out Massive loans and just held it. As i encouraged them to become capitalists, they would start a project to build whatever and if I liked what they proposed, i would pay back my gov't debt, freeing up their cash to build a railroad or whatever. I found it actually really satisfying as this way of using the economic system to provide some kind of check on my capitalists investment choices. It didn't work for long

[@Rosencreutzzz]

Lol yeah there's not a lot one can do when the system for choosing what to build is arbitrary or deeply short sighted and just does trial and error with factories, a really brute force "survival of the fittest" to massive industrial endeavors with no input from like, actually demand projections. That all said, I do like to do passive "see what happens with the economy" runs sometimes. It's a game that can be super chill if you let it. For that kind of gameplay, if you use only one single vaguely exploit-y thing, I suggest Mexico too. You can push a ton of reforms quick and rival the US as an immigration destination and keep what would historically be the Mexican American war concessions, as well as Texas. All you have to do is let texas burn you down enough at the start that they add a wargoal, and then the US can't get involved in the war and you can beat them back and annex them no problem. It's a tiny bit tricky to grasp but rather consistent as openers go. Bonus points for all the militancy you rack up from being seiged up and how that can push rapid reforms.

[@efulmer8675]

I did find that the "survival of the fittest" approach actually works fairly well if you scale down the size of any individual factory. I wrote a mod (tangentially this came from my own experiments following a reddit thread about finding and solving the root, systemic cause of Vicky 2's Late Game Economic Meltdown) that made the factory level limit 255 (the max it could possibly be), the size of any factory level 1/3 of normal, and in a bit of a trauma reaction to playing China once, made any factory level finish constructing in 1/4 the normal time. The result was that the entire world's economy was much more stable and the AI going with Laissez-faire was absolutely terrifying: never had I ever seen an AI country reach an industrial score of 20,000 let alone all 6 European great powers simultaneously, and three of them were on Laissez-faire, two on Interventionism, and one on State Capitalism.

[@nawade]

@@efulmer8675 Kinda sounds a little bit like how they ended up making Vicky 3 work.

[@Alex-zq3nw]

Excuse me, where is the 200k subs But for real this is a really cool and neat channel.

[@GabrielMonette]

I recently sent an abstract to publish a paper on game design and strategy games mobilising an idea that is similar to yours. Your video is great and deep. I might build on some of your ideas. In the final paper, I might reference this video. Well done!

[@huyhuy3837]

Excellent video and you explained perfectly why I love Vicky 2, CK2, and Imperator more than the other PDX titles. The pop/ internal-agencies-beyond-my-own system is so satisfying to nudge and manipulate just right. Also on the zoom-in thing, I love that in Tropico. While you explicitly play as a dictator in that game, there's lot of incentives to care for your ppl well-being, win elections legitimately while somehow fattening your Swiss acc.

[@flameoguy]

I always thought that instead of anarcho-liberals, extremist liberals should be radical Jacobins. The Jacobin rebel types already exist in the game so they could easily give them their own faction of head-chopping bourgeois.

[@robertblume2951]

They are

[@ajjeehh]

What if you played as a political party? There's enough cohesion and direction that it makes sense that theres a party line that is being followed that equates to your player autocracy. It might miss the intricacies of internal party politicking and factions but you could model that in a similar way to Vicky - and have outcomes like the Bolshevik Menshevik split for example. It seems like a good balance between having the ultra-micro view of society and the completely top down autocrat that you play in Paradox games. You'd have a much more internal/domestic view as well while still being quite in tune with the global situation.

[@Rosencreutzzz]

I think one of the best innovations Vicky 3 is bringing in (from Imperator of all places) is that revolutions are a run killer, if I understand correctly. In Imperator the civil wars were rare but if they happened it had a unique territorial expansion system more like HoI where you don’t need a treaty to own the land you just get it as you take it- rather than like… it remaining the opponent map color with diagonal stripes across it. And if you lost those rare civil wars (usually only occurring if you tried to declare yourself a dictatorship, for example) you lost the game. In Imperator this was…mixed, in that it was very unclear who the player embodied between the State, Actors, and Parties. I don’t think the game itself knew the answer. So I’m hoping Victoria’s handling of who the player is is clearer but at the least having the End of the State be a run killer is something I find very interesting.

[@denpadolt9242]

The idea of your party being potentially out of power sells this idea for me. It implements a risk/reward system in what you do with government structure; lightening your grip on power or making concessions to your population makes ruling easier, but less efficient. And if you want to turn your country into a one-party state, you'll gain immense influence but at the cost of building the political mechanisms for your rivals to prevent you from ever returning should you be ousted.

[@GameyRaccoon]

If your party is out of power, you should get to form a shadow cabinet and opposition government (like in real life)@@denpadolt9242

[@alexturnbackthearmy1907]

@@denpadolt9242 Also compromiss~! Almost no party (not in US or similar 2-3 party system) in democratic country is alone, they are in coalition with similar-minded parties, trading control for ability to be in power.

[@theggfloupin4084]

this is actually why i really like games like frostpunk you can give orders to people, jobs, but if they are sick they wont show up. same if they are rioting, protesting or doing something else, like buyring a body. If people die they loose hope and if you push them to hard they become discontent. to a point where they will overthow you

[@Lucas-dg4zn]

There is one indie game currently in development that somehow might fit very well your definition of a "social history based game". It's called Songs of the Eons, try searching it up. It's basically a fantasy world simulator which aims to simulate human (and non human) history in all of it's aspects, from neolithic hunter gatherers, pastoral nomads, early agriculturalists, bronze age empires, medieval feudal states, enormous bureaucratic states and so on. So, instead of giving you a top-down "government leader" position, you just (are intended to, when it's playable, which on it's first early agriculturalists stage might take just a few more months) play as one of many agents in the world (including maybe a leader), each simulating a person and the way they interact with each others, their cultural and religious traits, their specific function in society, and etc, having the same model apply to a governor, a general, a bureaucrat, a king or a small village peasent. That way, there's no need to be part of or lead a state, instead aiming to simulate non-state actors first and foremost

[@pitaden5620]

The developers also worked on eu4's MEOIU! SOTE is also being made with mod support in mind, and the developers are very active and communicative

[@Cecilia-ky3uw]

I find myself appreciating eu4's player autocracy

[@riverman6462]

Microsoft paint simulator

[@ZoomReverseFlash]

Auto-Resolve in Total War is another can of worms. In Medieval 2 it granted victories to peasant troops that are woefully inefficient in manual use.

[@jaketepsa6523]

The hoi4 mod TNO has interesting event chains which show how your actions as the nation effect people and vice versa.

[@mixis1931]

Yeah, I remember doing a Taboritsky run and seeing refugees fleeing TO Reichkomissariat Muscowien, the fucking Nazi puppet state, was heartbreaking

[@GlidusFlowers]

Commenting to give the videos some more engagement

[@quartzmech5661]

Your mention of being able to click on individual people and seeing their thoughts, as well as of materialism made me think you should take a look at Songs of Syx. Its about running a fantasy city state, and I think it does something somewhat interesting there. Everything comes down to being about managing the happiness of your citizens, be it by providing food surpluses, law, consumer goods, or even through internal politics like opposition to immigration. It represents something things in ways I haven't seen in another game, such as technology being something that has to be maintained through libraries and by teaching it to your people, or otherwise lost if you stop maintaining your research. Or the way that the push towards an ever larger city eventually incentivizes the player to push out and conquer a breadbasket so their people can focus more on industry.

[@Owlr4ider]

From what you've said on multiple videos I think you really need to check out the Majesty games, published by Paradox btw. It's a purely fantasy title but the whole premise of it is that you as the player don't actually have direct control over your kingdom. If you want to attack something you set up a bounty with a cash amount and than hope your soldiers will actually go and attack what you want them to. It's a fun twist of the genre. I have to warn you though that due to those gaming conventions you keep mentioning, it can also lead to many frustrating moments where your troops don't actually do what you want them to do and of course your extremely limited ability to use actual tactics in the game(you have some very limited capacity to do magic, some of which can have an effect on the battlefield similar to what tactics would have).

[@ZahrDalsk]

The problem with Laissez-Faire in V2 is not capitalists making bad decisions. It's that when a factory goes bankrupt, all levels of it except 1 vanish into the ether. Size 50 steel mill goes bankrupt? It becomes size 1. 98% of the physical steel mills (if you take it as a representation of "all steel mills in the state") vanish. The machinery, the walls, the foundation, gone. They disappear. There's no option for someone else to buy and reopen them, or to buy them, retool them, and reopen them, or to buy them and reuse some of the components to build something else. This means that when you go from an inefficient State Capitalist or Interventionist economy reliant on subsidies, or when a really bad economic shock hits your country, a lot of your physical industrial base disappears. I'd call it a logic error, but it's more like bad design, but it does break the simulation, a lot, so maybe "design error" is a better term. If factories going bankrupt kept them at their current size or only took off a relatively small percent, and then had some extra costs (say, some multiple of their base construction goods) to represent repair/retooling following the period of disuse, Laissez-Faire would work a lot better. As it is, the magical disappearing infrastructure design error is the main problem. This error is compounded by the fact that per-industry upgrades are serial rather than parallel. Factories can only upgrade one level at a time, even if there's enough of the goods and money to upgrade several levels at once. It means that there are long periods of constricted industrial base while the capitalists build the profitable factories up to use the craftsman manpower that the unprofitable bankrupt ones had been using. If factories could upgrade in "parallel" / in larger size multiples based on local labour availability, then the magical disappearing infrastructure design error wouldn't be as big of a problem, and players wouldn't have such a negative view towards economic policies that allow bankruptcy.

[@SlimeJime]

well the other part of the hate is that laissez-faire as a generic minor slows down the game for no reason

[@zardoz_the_great]

I'd love to hear your thoughts on how successfully dwarf fortress manages to accomplish what you lay out here. It's the only game I can think of where the agents in your system will put their own needs before that of the player and will sometimes just ignore your commands. I always imagined that the player in dwarf fortress is playing the "collective drive" of an anarchist community and not an authoritarian state, an example being that rulers and nobles place direct demands on the player rather than the other way around. Also your stuff is great, your videos are super underrated!

[@Mike-ukr]

Rimworld and Oxygen Not Included too, though to a lesser degree

[@TheJayman213]

Meanwhile Idle Civilization: World History turns historical materialism into an idle game.

[@jakesmith5101]

You know I love a good stream!

[@comradeotaku]

one thing i was always confused about in vicky2 was why socialists didn't support political reforms (and also why anarcho liberals, who were often referred to as "radicals", i.e. radical liberals, didn't support them either). i tend to be that kind of person who wants to make the little people in my computer happy so i would always try to both democratise and implement social reforms in vicky2, so it was annoying that it was extremely difficult to democratise if you hadn't done so before socialism spawned and took over the entire working class lol

[@x999uuu1]

Iirc, it was a deliberate choice made to make the electoral factions more "distinct"

[@comradeotaku]

@@x999uuu1 i mean socialism would still be distinct if it supported both political and social reforms since no other ideology does that

[@Fernybun]

@@comradeotaku Fascism technically can do both political and social reforms if they're in power

[@comradeotaku]

@@Fernybun fascists also support rolling them back if in power. socialists always supporting both regardless of whether they have power would still make them unique.

[@user-df8wi6xv4i]

Socialists support political reforms with high militancy, just like conservatives and liberals with social reforms.

[@connerblank5069]

Obvious solution to player autocracy's conflict with social history: make players run a state in co-op mode. Bonus points if each player has to answer to a specific political base as well as each other.

[@podemosurss8316]

14:08 Who hasn't wanted to open a distillery in the middle of the desert?

[@LibertyMonk]

Rip Imperator, honestly. It's really good at modeling Rome, and a true shame that they never had the chance to model any of their contemporaries beyond a fancy CB.

[@stijndhondt9611]

"When Madonna said "the boy with the cold-heart cash is always mister right", she is engaging in what we call Dialectical Materialism." Very based, comrade.

[@Shannon_Lynch]

when are youtube sending you your 100 subscriber plaque?

[@BrunoCarvalhoPaula]

How hyped are ya for Vic3?

[@deotemp886]

I'm not sure you read comments from videos so old but if you do, what do you think about a system like Hoi 4s TNO mod where you have top down state like control but stories of every day life are given to you to give your actions context about how your actions actually work in said society and the effects they have on every day people?

[@uvbe]

21:20 You can do it in Trópico, though it's not the same haha

[@blikizz9355]

You need more sub

[@chrisca]

I... wouldn't say that Liberalism is frowned upon in Victoria 2 because of giving up control (kinda is, yes) but rather that it is most times actively harmful to the player, regardless of strategy, and i'll compare to the de-centralization of Crusader Kings II. In Crusader Kings, you're not the only state actor managing the interests, poise and policy of a political entity. Depending on what, when and where you play, there may be a plethora of people working on the shadows, behind each Lord, and generally your vassals, family members, etc, work either for you or with you (as in, your interests of having a powerful state, more solidity, advance your religion, culture or influence... are aligned). If you give a vassal in southern Iberia a cohesive land patch and protect them against the most dangerous threats, they themselves will begin to try and expand southwards to Africa (essentially free land for you) and develop economically and influentially. Some actors are directly harmful to you and your interests (conspirers, etc) but the game gives you the tools to deal with them, or curve their power if you have other pylars upon which you can rest (its unlikely to have your ruler killed unless you neglect several game mechanics). On the other hand, in Victoria II, liberals are the antithesis of what any player or actor would desire, and there aren't that many options to keep them from rising to power, even if you can secure goods for your people early on. Liberals: 1. Disallow you to manage the economy completely, even closing down factories that are bankrupt, improving those you wish to use, etc 2. Liberals generally allow for less if any tariffs (its the main source of income of any country) 3. Depeding on the party and your focus, they may have other undesirable traits, like pacifism, curtailing soldier salaries (and therefore your ability to raise troops) 4. Unlike the player, the AI does not take into consideration the existing resources in a region in order to make use of the production buffs due to horizontal planning (example: building an artillery factory along explosives, munitions, etc in a single state that produces iron or sulphur) or closes down critical factories (due to loss of subsidies or overextension) and opens those of the same type in less desireable places. 5. Often sends craftsmen and clerks into unemployment due to lack of subsidies or resources (not that they can't buy it, but rather that there are no more of them), driving your militancy and making your socialist pool grow (and they are the ultimate killer of states) 6. Even though you have national focuses that "influence" the creation of certain industry, it is not that much effective and you lose on the power NF have (more pops, political parties, colonizing or apeasing colonial provinces...) 7 and last, most events that grant you more cores or chances to expand, are usually tied to jingo, reactionary or less democratic governments In Victoria, going from a protectionist interventionist directly to liberal will usually deplete your coffers and create much more trouble than they are worth, with the desirable transition to liberalist parties taking several years or even decades (buildup, supply a market, slowly open up and cut subsidies, and then hope for the best and see few industries falling under). With all of this in mind, it is logical that players actively seek to keep liberals in a second place (to help push reforms) or avoid them outright, as it is a mostly harmful AI that plays against you, unlike socialists, which can be a huge burden for states like Imperial Russia, Colonial Britain or France, but are generally more advantageous to the player on the economic side of things

[@1Maklak]

You might like Millenia. It's like Civilisation, but new or conquered cities start as puppets and do their own thing.

[@ZoomReverseFlash]

IIRC, in the base game there is an "Anarcho-Liberal" Party in Austria that is Pro-Military, and I never let the people to vote on the upper chamber, so whenever the Liberal Coalition would have win, I would switch the ruling party from the normal Liberal to Anarcho-Liberals that supported military. Not sure why an IRL monarch would do so, but it worked. So with Austria it usually went "Go Reactionary to build roads and factories yourself -> Go AnLib to keep the military strong despite liberals winning elections". And in late game, when you don't need focuses to support education or laborer supply, you can support parties you like in the most populated regions via national foci and get them in power that way (also a good way to lessen the influence of Communist and Fascist rebels).

[@ZoomReverseFlash]

The problem with Liberal parties is that not only they stop the player from building factories, but they often have anti-Military policies, making your armies worse in comparison to the neighbors.

[@left9096]

This is a wonderful video. But now I have to ask: have you ever played the meiou and taxes mod for eu4? I am really, really curious to hear your take on it.

[@crizzlesizzle6088]

Nice video 👍

[@InterUse]

In Superpower 2 you as a player rule a contry as a representetive of a specific political party (even in dictatorships), lost of popularity can lead to you loosing control. Don't remember if it is game over, or you just need to wait, or rely on help from others to put you back in power.

[@RobsRedHotSpot]

Have you played Songs of Syx? I'd be curious to see your take on it!

[@swedichboy1000]

Whats your thoughts on Meiou and Taxes 3.0?

[@JakeBassCZ]

Your essay is really good, but it focuses on the premise that social history is the history "from bottom up", i.e. the history of the common people, like how E. P. Thompson presented it in his excellent The Making of the English Working Class. But that is not the only approach to social history. Bielefeld school, as I understand it, views social history a history of social structures. Victoria 2 is a game that does really good job at simulating the social structure with a robust representation of economy to boot.

[@DJ-1Q84]

In Rome 2 TW you absolutely can get better auto-resolve results than player fought battles. Rorarii spam for the win.

[@nightlight0x07cc]

Libertarians: "If we were in power, there would be no wars because fighting for land is stupid. We want to have mutual trade, protection for personal property, and maximum cultural freedom" The game developers: "Okay, but that doesn't work with our game design, so here's an imaginary militant version of you"

[@alfonsopalacios2725]

i like liberals. most of my vicky 2 gameplay is basically prepping my economy for a liberal free trade capitalist haven future. clipper shipyards aside, i'd argue theyre the most efficient in allocating rgos to actual economic power. basically protectionist state capitalism to liberal free market economy. anarcho liberals though... idk why paradox even placed that ideology in the first place. Its criminal that this channel has so few subscribers. even with so many hours played in the game, you dont really see the intent of the creators on why certain mechanics exist, or you just take it for granted. seeing the historical theories behind really gives you an appreciation as to why certain things in game work that way.

[@polasamierwahsh421]

Amazing work

[@hedgehog3180]

One thing I love about Victoria II is how good a job it does of immersing you in the time period, it's a game about industrialization and colonialism and you're going to end up playing like you were Bismarck himself. You are very clearly evil in this game and so often you're presented with trivially easy moral dillemas but you're gonna choose the evil option because you're a bastard imperialist. Like one of the events is something like a draught in one of your colonies and you can choose to divert some water to help, or not and just blame the native population for being lazy and you'll always choose the latter because doing the right thing means loosing a bit of prestiege and you really do value prestiege higher than the lives of colonized people, the downside is just a bit of militancy in the affected area but you really don't give a crap about that because you have the Maxim and they don't. Or gas attack but in that case you're busy murdering millions of Europeans probably.

[@jacobrosewater8811]

hidden gem right here

[@gabrielsa9751]

I feel rise to power mod on CK2 is a great idea of how it can be done Even some mount and blade warband mods with more focus on the civilian life are great with that Of course, its a very limited system with few and bad mechanics and usually is very streighfoward, but if you have a rise to power mod with a bit more content and focus on the low class and middle class roleplaying that was directly related to what is going on in the higher places, it would be great

[@teaser6089]

15:14 I mean I agree, but the Auto Resolve in Empire and Napoleon total war is so bad you can never really use it, cause the small little army of 200 men can kill 1500 of your army when you have 3k soldiers :/

[@user-gw4oz1rk3i]

Soo vicky 3 has come out now, what do you Think of it?

[@elijahguttman9289]

Heya! Watching this video a year late, but I find your thoughts it quite interesting. To preface, I've been pretty active in the Victoria 2 community over the past 3 years, heading the GFM mod, hosting multiplayer games and talking to a lot of players. Some of what I say may be inaccurate to the base version of the game because I haven't played vanilla in years, sorry if I get anything wrong due to being used to mods lol. I'd like to add my two cents concerning the ideology system in-game. At 9:47, you call the anarcho-liberals extremist centrists, meaning, by extension, that you are judging the liberals in Victoria 2 to be centrist. I don't think this is a fair assessment. An ideology in general has 3 components in Victoria 2: Stance on social reforms, stance on political reforms and party policies. Those contain everything from war policy to religious policy to degree of interventionism in the economy. So, for example, conservatives are neutral on political and social reforms whilst reactionaries want to roll back political and social reforms, liberals wish to enact political reforms and are neutral on social reforms and socialists wish to enact social reforms and are neutral on political reforms (at least in the base game). As such, in in-game reform terms, liberals are as non-centrist as socialists in that they support enacting a category of reforms. In fact, by always wishing to preserve the status quo and neither rolling back nor enact new reforms, I would argue that in-game conservatives functionally act as the centrists of the in-game system. No matter if you're a democracy, an semi-constitutional monarchy or a dictatorship, conservatives will always just want things to stay the way they are, while socialists and liberals wish to enact all possible social and political reforms respectively and reactionaries wish to undo them all. With its differentiation between social reform and political reform policy, Victoria 2 doesn't have a traditional left to right spectrum in terms of ideology. As per your characterization of liberals as centrists, I would assume that you view the in-game spectrum as communist-socialist-liberal-conservative-reactionary from left to right. You state that "Every ideology in the game needed an extreme version, so [...] they had to model together some kind of extremist centrism, so they did." By reducing the ideological spectrum to a scale where liberalism is the center, an extreme form of liberalism becomes inherently illogical. which it is not. The thing is that the in-game ideology spectrum is less of a left-to-right and more of a Y-shape, branching from undoing reforms to doing social and doing political reforms. I agree that anarcho-liberals in-game are weird, but for different reasons. Functionally, they are neutral on political reforms and want to remove political reforms. Which is just, what? This ideology makes no sense in a 19th century context, where barely any social reforms took place other than slow implementation of school systems and the eventual successes of the labor movement in the last third or so of the century. Even then, backlash to social reforms was almost entirely on the part of conservatives not wanting to enact them and reactionaries who continued to advocate for removing them (in terms of in-game ideologies). However, the modern concept of economic liberalism being against and wanting to roll back social reforms independently of political reforms is almost entirely unapplicable in the 19th century. In my mod, GFM, we remade anarcho-liberals to be "radicals" in the vein of classical radicalism (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_radicalism), they were the actual HISTORICAL extremist liberals of the period. The problem is that Paradox chose an ideology that didn't exist in the 19th century to represent extremist liberalism. Having an extremely liberal party is not inherently flawed by being "an extreme form of centrism", because it doesn't have to be, it's how paradox regrettably messed it up. Bit of a tangent, but anarcho-liberals are also unfun to play in vanilla Vicky 2 because nobody wants to larp as them and they make no historical sense. As an example, people often play democracies, absolute monarchies, proletarian or even fascist dictatorships because they enjoy constructing a hypothetical historical scenario in which they can play pretend to be managing a country in that scenario and be ironically patriotic. I see it all the time - people posting about "spreading the world revolution" when they go communist, "spreading freedom" as a democracy, "conquering lebensraum" as fascists or establishing the dominance of whatever dynasty is in charge of their country for monarchies. With anarcho-liberals, there is no historical precedent and thus no potential for larp, making them a lot less interesting or engaging. Conversely, changing them into radicals in GFM has made them a lot more popular to play, with people making connections to say jacobin france or the 1848 revolutionaries and "ridding the world of tyranny". Similar to how in vanilla, communists could turn other countries communist, radicals in GFM can declare war on monarchies to topple them and establish sister republics but other monarchies try to topple the republics and reinstitute monarchies. My point is that extreme liberalism can make for fun gameplay, it just has to be done right. Also, while in favor of free trade, radicals in GFM are state capitalist based more or less on the actual history at hand. French Radicals in 1848, for example, instituted the National Workshops system that guaranteed everyone willing to work a job. In essence, before the first prominently social revolutions happened with e.g. the Paris Commune, the first two thirds of the 19th century were largely focused on the political struggle of liberals and radicals against the power of the nobility, which is why people complain about liberal revolts so much. The thing is that the reason they get liberal revolts is that a large amount of players want to larp as an absolute monarchy that never does reforms. I'm not exaggerating, I've talked to a lot of people in the Vicky 2 community. If you do reforms when militancy goes up, massive revolutions are usually avoided. The people that complain about liberals almost all are just monarchists (or playing as monarchists) who get annoyed when they run their countries into the ground by denying reforms. One of the inherently cool things about reforms in Victoria 2 is that they are actually good for your country quite often. Instituting schools and healthcare increase your literacy and population which in turn increase your research and production. To get these juicy social reforms, you need to have socialists in the upper house that can only be elected if you liberalized the voting system, hence the benefit of the liberals. Another example is the abolition of slavery which lets slave pops eventually promote from farmers to factory workers needed to industrialize, soldiers to field in the army, etc. In my experience, most players actually want liberals - NOT as a ruling party, rather as a driver of militancy that lets them enact reforms. The major complaint about having liberals in charge is usually not the inability to build or subsidize factories, but rather the inability to raise higher tariffs due to the free trade policy limiting the tariff slider, making it hard to fund the functions of state. I got a bit carried away writing all this, I hope you end up reading it and that it makes some degree of sense. TLDR Your video is generally quite good but I think you missed some of the intricacies about the way in which anarcho liberalism is silly and liberalism is disliked, it's more that having them rule your country sucks but they're good in that they get you the reforms you want - unless you want to larp as an autocrat.

[@Jhon47807]

What do you think of Vic 3?

[@epsilon-11designatednineta43]

Victoria II is the PDX game I keep coming back to. It's a masterpiece, and despite its clunkiness, it is still the best economy sim or whatever you want to call it on Steam, still better than its sequel, Victoria III. If you don't understand how the economy works, look to real life. The whole focus of the game is the historical transition from a pre-industrial financial system to a modern debt-based economy with mass production and large integrated economies that trade goods through global markets. Sometimes I get frustrated when I see people complain about how money is useless and say that you should just subsidize industry and ignore the economy, but this is a complete misunderstanding and terrible gameplay strategy. Encourage capitalists and clerks in your states, don't subsidize, and your industry starts to prosper as the game progresses. The game models recessions, scarcity, and macroeconomic policy. This strategy works because the game is modelled to be a perfect simulator of supply side economics, and by flowing capital through your market, it will always grow(albeit not in a simple or stable way). Despite all of its clunkiness, Victoria II is a beautiful economy sim. Compare it to Victoria III? I can only express disappointment. No issue in Victoria III is as large as it's terrible economy system that isn't bad or boring, it is just so simple and unrealized compared to Victoria II. It's hard to say Victoria III is a sequel to the second game, bearing no similarities other than the time it takes place. So, give Victoria II a shot. I still believe it is the best economy sim PDX(or maybe any studio) has ever released and will stay that way for a long time:). TLDR for gameplay; The liberals are actually the party you should want(if you're playing a major nation)

[@SlimeJime]

vicky 2 isn't anything close to a perfect model of supply-side economics, every country in hardcoded to be an autarky. you are mistaking the innate advantages given to high-rank countries for an attempt to favour any school of economics. in actuality the economic model is just bizarre, and is based mainly around creating victorian "vibes" and holding together for the length of the timeframe.

[@podemosurss8316]

9:35 So, Javier Milei?

[@catmonarchist8920]

Liberals should've been buffed in terms of investment. Make them just have more money and make the same decisions for the sake of balance.

[@sybrandwoudstra9236]

Investments from capitalists are 3x as cheap.

[@jasonhaven7170]

2:21 What's the other game?

[@Rosencreutzzz]

Imperator Rome with it's pops. They clear the hurdle into relevance that something like Stellaris is just shy of passing, in my view, even if they are far less in-depth than Vicky.

[@jasonhaven7170]

@@Rosencreutzzz Very true, I do like how you can't always control your armies and their leaders in Imperator 2, makes it more realistic and it shows how Caesar controlled an army against what the Roman Republic's senators wanted

[@rock_gamer_stig5188]

Liberal's are only bad in Vicky 2 if you don't know what their benefits are. Early on playing vicky 2 I found that I was frustrated not being able to have full control over the economy, but with experience I realized my central planning was actually pretty terrible for the long term economy because I would quickly create resource shortages by subsidizing factories that were essentially too big to fail and eat up the entire world's iron supply in doing so. I remember a late game Russia where I got overthrown by communists and became the Soviet Union having a level 26 small arms factory in Moscow that never once turned a profit but also on it's own was producing 48% of the world's guns lol. But with all that, the most disgustingly powerful economy I ever managed to create was by being Laisse-Faire for about 80% of the game.

[@watermilon7758]

engagement

[@goldenplayar]

Your videos are so fucking good jesus christ

[@MugBubule]

I think people are downplaying liberals. It's just that as you said early, you control more a tide, than a direct control of the economy. For example, promoting capitalists early and switching to liberals can make your economy boom incredibly fast. You can also control the type of industry they will build through national focus. Sure it's perfectible, but these are things you could iterate on to provide more "indirect" point of attack on your economy. We could imagine building certain schools, or university, focusing on engineering over management studies. There are a lot of small mechanics that could exist like that to gently push your economy where you want it to be. In opposition, sometime, it happens with control economy as a player that your industry spiral out of control because of subsides. Slowly innefficient industry will become a weight until you can't pay anymore, and the whole economy collapse because cheap good provided by unprofitable industry where indirectly subziding other industries which become unprofitable themselves. Sometime as a player you can afford to let the steam off like that, loose 10 year of industrial progress to grow back on a more stable ground. It's a pitfall attentive or experienced player can avoid, but it would be nice if it was something a command economy was pushing you toward. Sure you can focus on important things, but it doesn't have the vitality of a laissez faire economy where company are created daily and die daily. Where new "innovation" in the market can lead to the next big thing (this ford guy completely changing the game with his cars when the command economy carefuly nurtured its horse industry to provide a boost to agriculture for example). Basically setting traps for the players and making its economy easy to direct and very strong to follow this direction, but once going in this direction, making steering of it (switching for cars for example) hard, because manpower is already allocated, people can't change their habits and leave their horse grooming activity to become machinists at the factory. At least, not as quickly as a laissez faire country. There was a great potential in vicky 2 for those kind of opposition in gameplay that not a lot of people have seen and could be nice to expand on.

[@miarke7496]

The easiest way to tell someone is a leftist is when they out right dismiss anarcho capitalism as having any serious followers or ideological foundations. I'm not gonna be the read Rothbard or hoppe guy but it's just a lazy assertion

[@Rosencreutzzz]

Forgive that I don’t seriously engage with a movement who counts among its thinkers Hoppe, whose main gimmick is trying to advocate for anarchism not as anarchism but as a simple reset so that communities can exist free of “leftist” beliefs like tolerance and be free to banish homosexuals.

[@miarke7496]

@@Rosencreutzzz and there it is thank you

[@miarke7496]

@@Rosencreutzzz also its not a matter of seriously engaging. You didn't just dismiss their ideas like you would do with a fascist you went as far as to essentially pretend a movement doesn't exist down to highlighting that fact in an essentially unrelated video. This is because leftists don't have even a basic capability or understanding of the arguments people like hoppe make. It is worth noting that a foundational principle of hoppeanism is that if you want to go live in some authoritarian commune he doesn't give a shit as long as you do it outside his community. Hoppe is only a threat to people who have an ideology that insists upon conquest.

[@Rosencreutzzz]

Glad you were anticipated a “gotcha” based on the incredibly obvious critique of a man and his ideological endpoints. Now what I do find worth engaging with is the incommensurability of anarchism as a collectivist ideology centered on community not as isolated pockets but as a disintegration of exclusionary groups… and Hoppe’s insistence that the whole point is to allow groups to form on their own in a “don’t bother me” way. There is nothing anarchistic about the idea of breaking down hierarchy so that it may be reconstructed. All that said, Anarcho Liberals are not, in fact, completely analogous to ancaps and anarcho liberals are not a thing. Ancaps are, and I don’t intend to deny that, so much as that they are in no sense anarchists, given their selective adherence and even desire towards hierarchy by other means. Hoppe is also a threat to people who will be born into an undercaste, into persecution, into slavery. I remain thoroughly unconvinced that anarcho capitalism is anything but an invitation, often enthusiastically, to neofeudalism and a mere reshuffling of power into different hands, be it in the realm of “decentralization” that does not bat an eye in the face of corporate consolidation, the same fate in crypto, and will be the same fate into whatever maligned reset they expect.

[@benismann]

im sorry but who tf takes ancap seriously

[@jonasastrom7422]

Most of the colonies gained from the Berlin conference didn't turn a profit, and were more demanded by the public as a national priority than anything else, anytime you try to frame history as a single struggle motivated by a single issue you always have to hide or not talk about the history that doesn't align with that view. What's worse is when you use it to justify bad economics