Who's in charge determines what laws you can pass. People gather into broad interest groups that you have to appease, cajole, or even incorporate into your government. Those populations, or pops, fall into broad categories like lower, middle, and upper, then drill down by occupation and education. That's true in economics and in wars, which are fairly abstract, but which still take real people that could be working in the fields or factories out of your economy. If it's not someone else's, well, it's probably your own population footing the bill. Your strong economy always comes at someone's expense. Victoria 3 doesn't make you colonize, or engage in colonialism, but it sure does give you an understanding of why it developed. So raw materials don't always come cheap… and that's when you start looking overseas, or at less-developed neighbors. Paradox's developers were clear that the AI was very unpolished at the nuances, so that's something to want improvements in before release. It also didn't always understand when it should back down from a fight. The AI, however, has its own goals that range from obvious and clever diplomatic alliances to quixotic and seemingly random economic choices. So you go to your neighbors, or international allies, and set up a trade route that also generates profit for your government via tariffs-or doesn't, if you have a trade agreement. Those mills might have a lucrative side-business in luxury clothing that you'd like to export, but your economy doesn't produce enough fabric to support the extra input.

A shortage of clothing on the market might drive you to invest money in more textile mills. It's complex, sure, but made approachable by clear, obvious screens that give you a summary of how your market works… or doesn't work. Abundance makes the price go down, need makes it go up-that snowballs into profits, how much the people working there are getting paid… which affects how much they can buy. It's all simple supply and demand principles based around a base price for each item compared to what it's actually being sold for. All those goods have to be produced somewhere, and contribute to overall quality of life for a population. Everyone on earth needs food, clothing, warmth, and more. It's first and foremost an open-ended historical sandbox, and the core is how it simulates population person by person. It's first and foremost an open-ended historical sandbox.

To address that you engage with a deep and interesting economic simulation that's simultaneously less complex and more believable than others like it.

Everything else stems from there, and is much more abstract than the manipulation you do around who does what, when, and how well they eat while they're doing it. It's broadly built around two backbones: Society and economy. No, I was looking at numbers like jobs created, hammers manufactured, universities built, literacy rates, laws passed, political party approval, loyal citizens, and immigration stats. That is the real strength I found in Victoria 3: It wasn't just army sizes and damage stats when you were looking for numbers to improve.

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