Victoria Revolutions interview

Victoria was a truly unique strategy game challenging you with fields like politics, historical realism, economics, infrastructure and massive wars. The steep learning curve and incredible complexity pleased the hardcore strategy community, but put off many mainstream gamers, who were used to much simpler strategy games. With Victoria Revolutions the Swedish developer Paradox Interactive expands Victoria even further and fixes the areas where Victoria had problems such as the capitalists.

We've talked to two of the Victoria Revolutions developers, Chris King and Pontus Åberg, about the new expansion, which has been released via Paradox' Gamers Gate portal.

Boomtown: Please introduce yourself and explain your development background

- Hi, I’m Chris King I am the Q & A Manager at Paradox Interactive. For Victoria: Revolutions I was mainly involved in testing scripting, but I also turned my hand to a bit of coding and design work.
- And I am Pontus Åberg, the lead programmer of Victoria: Revolutions. I was also involved in the design of the game.

Why did you decide to create an expansion to Victoria instead of a full sequel?

In the cutthroat retail market it can be very difficult to get a game onto the shelves, Victoria didn’t have the sales numbers to get a full sequel into shops, but at the same time we have a dedicated Victoria fan base and we wanted to give them something at an affordable price (€10, -ed).

If Revolutions is successful enough sales wise, will you develop Victoria 2?

If Revolutions show that there is a demand for a good 19th Centaury grand strategy game, then of course we will take that into consideration when we look at coming games and our development cycle.

What is the main news in Revolutions?

We have four main new features:
1) A new colonial system
2) An overhauled Economic system
3) An improved Politics System
4) A better military system

What is the single feature you’re most proud of in the expansion?

Chris King: The Capitalists automatically building factories and railways. It is such a cool feature and for me it makes it so much more fun to play. I personally thought that previously, the factory and railway system was more micromanagement that it needed to be.

Pontus Åberg: I am mostly proud of the new colony system. It took what was a really good idea and made it into a great feature. Now we can see a proper scramble for Africa.

How is the new revamped elections and politics system going to work and how does it affect the game?

We had a two-part goal with politics. First, that the party in power should have a major effect on your game and second, that there is no wrong choice, however some choices might suit your style of play more. From the feedback we have received from the fans, it seems we have gotten pretty close to our goal.

The military system has been revamped as well – does this in broad terms mean that it’s more difficult to wage wars, and what is the aim of the revamped system?

It is not more difficult to wage war, all we have done is put a more historical limitation on manpower. What people used to do is conquer China, convert the entire Chinese population to soldiers and then proceed to conquer the world. This struck us as being wrong, so we have tried to make it feel more historical.

How will veteran Victoria players have to change their approach in Revolutions in order to be as successful as he used to be?
Well, in fact players don’t have to change their approach at all. If you want to play the old way -the political system will allow you to do that. What we have tried to do is to give the player a whole new set of choices, which we hope will increase their enjoyment of the game.

We seem to recall a troubled launch of Victoria (while still gathering lots of followers, there were bugs and complaints), can you explain what went wrong and how this was addressed?

The biggest problem Victoria had was that it had a very steep learning curve. We have made a lot of changes to the game help this:

- We added little alerts at the top of the screen so the player knows if there is a problem with his country, so rather than have to continually monitor their country, they can get on with playing the game and will be warned if something is happening.
- We have also changed the scenario set up in the Grand Campaign (and the 1914 scenario) so now you can just play.
- Your economy is already up and running and so no need to spend the first 20 years sorting that out.
- With the Capitalists auto building you can just leave them to get on with building your factories and railways, allowing you to focus on other areas of the game.

We hope that these changes will help a new player get into the game quicker.

Do you think Revolutions will turn Victoria into the game you had in your mind from day 1?

No, it is much better. Victoria has been out on the market place for a number of years now, and it is a game we have played a lot. So with all this accumulated experience we have taken Victoria to the next level.

What has been the most important request from the large Victoria user-base that you were able to implement in Revolutions?

Our fans really wanted the ability to split their population, so we have given them this option.

Once again you included a feature to export a save game from one game to another (like from Crusaders to Europa Universalis II), but how do you address the obvious continuity problems? For example what happens if Austria conquered Poland in Revolutions and thus can’t be attacked by Germany in 1939 in Hearts of Iron 2?

Firstly we dropped the events from Doomsday. Essentially there would be no point playing Revolutions if you always end up with the January 1936 set up. So we never ever assumed that this would happen. So we went for a twin approach. Firstly, that the converter would give you a reasonable conversion of your current game state. Secondly, we took the 1914 scenario and added a lot of post war events to make this scenario flow more historically. So if you play the 1914 scenario and have the historical outcome, your Doomsday game will look pretty reasonable. However starting from 1836 your world could look go in any direction.