Monkspider's Top 25 Countdown: #23 Victoria (PC)

The top ten countdown returns! Sorry for the delay dear readers, but last week i was bedridden with a particularly nasty Las Plagas infection. As promised, today's entry is a somewhat obscure PC title that I doubt any of you have heard of, Victoria: An Empire Under the Sun.

Released in 2003 with perhaps the most absolute lack of fanfare of any game ever. Victoria allows you to control any country in the world from 1836 to 1920 (and later 1933 with the eventual expansion pack), giving you the chance to lead your country through the industrial revolution, the American Civil War, the Colonial rush, and the World War I era.

Many have called it the most hardcore videogame ever made. Personally, I know better, but there is no doubt that for the beginning player it is intimidating almost beyond belief. You control the creation of armies, the research of technologies, the acquisition of resources, your diplomatic relations with other counries, the expansion of industry, the laying of railroads, and i am sure i am just scratching the surface of everything this game covered.



One of the best parts of the game is that at various points "events" occur that give you potentially far-reaching possibilities. These events usually pop up and give you several choices and you are forced with the task of deciding which one best meets your long-term goals. For example, playing as Japan in 1836, you are still a backwards country living under the Tokugawa shogunate that has closed the nation to all trade with foreigners. An event occurs early in the game where you have a choice to allow trade with the Dutch. If you do so, it negatively impacts some of the events later in the game regarding the Meiji restoration which saw Japan quickly undergo a period of rapid industrialization only matched by Modern China. But if you play your cards right, the free technologies the Dutch give you could allow you to gain a bigger advantage than waiting for the Meiji restoration to take place. So the events are interesting and add a lot of historical flavor to the game.

One of the game's greatest accomplishment is a fully functioning market that has prices that increase and decrease based on supply and demand. Every province has farms that create certain natural resources and each of your factories will create industrial goods. So say there is a lot of demand for steel because France and England are trying to build a ton of railroads (which require certain amounts of steel, lumber, and other resources), you build some steel factories to satisfy that need and make money hand over foot, but later on maybe the price for steel will drop and your factories actually start to lose money because the resources to make steel (iron and coal, as I recall) but be more expensive than steel itself. It is an interesting dynamic which rewarded the prudent player and later on you can build a lot of factories for cool stuff like automobiles, telephones, and "aeroplanes". Just be careful, all of your population develop different political beliefs based on various conditions in the game and the more factories you have, the more rabble rousing communists and socialists will pop up demanding absurd things like safe working conditions and health care that will cut into your bottom line!



The best part of the game though for someone who enjoys history like me is the "stories" that the game creates. The points of divergence from history that leaves the amateur historian such as myself to dream about all the implications of what real history would have been like if things unfolded like they did in your game. You can try to rebuild the Ottoman Empire to greatness, lead Prussia or Bavaria through German unification, you can try to colonize the world as England, or give the Confederate States of America a chance at independence. The game allowed for several interesting fantasy scenarios like a communist "Manhattan Commune" that would declare it's independence from the USA if the New York province falls to commie revolutionaries.

My favorite game of all time I think was playing as the Republic of Texas. First of all, winning the war against Mexico at the beginning is tough as balls and accurately represents the historical fluke that was Texas' existence. But once I finally did that, I freed the slaves, passed political reforms toward universal healthcare, covered the country with railroads, massively industrialized (i seemed to favor the canned food industry based on the natural resources Texas had at the beginning) and built Texas into and up and coming power. Several events popped up at the time that Texas historically joined the union, but this time I declined and remained independent.

When the civil war broke out (ahistorically early in this game I think, around 1854), an event fired where the the CSA offered for me to join them as a state, ally with them or stay out of the war. I chose to join the war as their ally but remain independent. Mexico and I were good buddies at this point so they joined the war too. In this version of history, Texas, Mexico and the CSA fought in an alliance against the Union. It was a tough war, but thanks to the support of crack Texas ranger cavalry troops, the CSA won their independence!

Over the course of the game, my liberal reforms and economic opportunity attracted lots of immigrants, so when i looked at my demographic screen it was like 75% Texan, 10% Mexican, 0.5% Chinese, 0.5% Irish, 0.5% Hungarian and so forth. My population, military size and industrial size couldn't rival the USA, but it actually did rival the much larger CSA.

By the dawn of the 20th century, i was considered one of the world's "great powers" and had the third largest economy in the world. I was one of the foremost producers of the newfangled aeroplanes as well as tanks (to reflect the ahistorical nature of the game, they were actually called "barrels" instead of tanks, which i thought was hilarious). The mighty Texan navy struck fear into the hearts of the European powers, with massive dreadnaught-class battleships and I had even established several small colonies in eastern Africa (I believe around the Congo area). Texas was ascendant, a colonial and industrial power, and at this point I believe nothing could stop me.

That is, until another war between the states broke out! The USA declared war on my allies, the CSA. Texan infantry powered by the latest in rifling technology and a complement of barrels to break through enemy lines assisted my besieged CSA ally. This time the USA proved too much, with seemingly hundreds of divisions who didn't hesitate to use gas attacks on us. The USA took the Confederate capital of Richmond but the war devolved by this point into a World War I style stalemate. Texan barrels made some small scale victories, but by the the time an armistice was signed, the Confederates had to surrender some territory back to the union. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, i put a lot of money into cultivating relations with the Union so when another war broke out, i turned on my former ally and added a lot of land to Texas' borders including Oklahoma and chunk of the southwest USA.



The only real flaw with the game as I saw it is that it divides the world into "civilized" and "uncivilized" nations and the uncivilized nations received absolutely absurd penalties against them that made the game completely unfun. The offensiveness of dismissing a civilization with as rich a culture as China as uncivilized aside, it was a horrible gameplay mechanism. It's only reason for being in the game in the first place was just to handcuff China who tended to become an unstoppable monster in the game if it ever got it's shit together. But relatively advanced nations like Korea and Siam that could have theoretically pulled off Japan style transformations are lumped in the category as the most backwards parts of Africa and the middle east and pretty much have zero chance of having any kind of an interesting game. Modders eventually fixed this problem but it was really dumb for it to exist in the first place.

Oh, and one other thing, the expansion pack had an awesome cover featuring a manaical, possibly zombiefied British soldier.


So yeah, i had invested many hours in this game, and experienced some of my most memorable gaming experiences. It has a ridiculously steep learning curve, and it's definitely not a game for the faint of heart, but if you put in the time to learn it, it is incredibly rewarding. It gives me hope for the future of gaming as an intellectual medium. For that reason, it is number 23 on this list.