Victoria 3
SHAPE A GRAND TOMORROW
Paradox Development Studio invites you to build your ideal society in the tumult of the exciting and transformative 19th century. Balance the competing interests in your society and earn your place in the sun in Victoria 3, one of the most anticipated games in Paradox’s history.
THE ULTIMATE SOCIETY SIMULATOR
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Lead dozens of world nations from 1836-1936. Agrarian or Industrial, Traditional or Radical, Peaceful or Expansionist… the choice is yours.
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Detailed population groups with their own economic needs and political desires.
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Reform your government and constitution to take advantage of new social innovations, or preserve the stability of your nation by holding fast to tradition in the face of revolutionaries.
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Research transformative new technology or ideas to improve your national situation.
DEEP ECONOMIC SYSTEM
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Expand your industry to take advantage of lucrative goods, taxing the profits to improve national prosperity.
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Import cheap raw materials to cover your basic needs while finding new markets for your finished goods.
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Secure vital goods to fuel your advanced economy and control the fate of empires.
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Balance employing available labor force with the needs for new types of workers.
PLAY ON A GRAND STAGE
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Use your diplomatic wiles to weave a tangled global web of pacts, relations, alliances, and rivalries to secure your diplomatic position on the world stage.
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Employ threats, military prowess and bluffs to persuade enemies to back down in conflicts.
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Increase your economic and military strength at the expense of rivals.
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Accumulate prestige and the respect of your rivals as you build an industrial giant at home or an empire abroad.
Read More: Best Economy Historical Games.
Europa Universalis IV
I’m a divorced woman of color. Recently, my ex got our son Larry a video game called Europa Universalis for his 14th birthday. It seemed good for him, because it takes place in the distant past and he’s always been interested in history, so it seemed like a nice enough game, no graphic violence or anything, at least until I sat down and watched him play at it. I don’t know what sorts of racists made this game, but it’s basically a colonialism and genocide justification simulator. If you want to survive, you need to have access to money and soldiers, and the most (only) reliable way to ensure you have enough is to attack and conquer your weaker neighbors. If you don’t, you can be sure someone else will eventually come attack and conquer you.
– Real player with 4558.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Economy Historical Games.
So EU4 was a good game. Then they released the 450+ ‘bug fixes’. The entire game outside Europe has now been put back behind a new paywall unless you have the paradise DLC as it is now impossible to develop your provinces to spawn institutions as army tradition gives you impossibly high dev costs. I played one game and when I needed to dev an institution from a 1/1/1 grasslands province and starting cost is 120. That is only with 33 army tradition giving a 150% penalty. This was a custom nation and I had -20% dev cost. Good job paradox forcing everyone to buy your shittiest dlc in order to use any of the other DLC’s you have paid for. The game is now broken outside of Europe without the paradise dlc. You make me sick Paradox!
– Real player with 1819.5 hrs in game
ELECTRONIC STOCK TRADING SYSTEM
FINALLY a stock trading game that actually works. I have tried a dozen of these types of games and this is the only one that works correctly. That is why I had post here. I have been playing it for over a month now and I have had no problems with it. Most like real world game so far. A great learning tool. I did have an issue when I tried to start the game for the first time, but support got it working for me pretty quick and easy. The instructions to resolve the issue were integrated into the game! Top notch game and customer support.
– Real player with 64.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Economy Capitalism Games.
Thumbs up for fast and extremely helpful support. If the game starts with an error they will give you a quick fix.
The game is relatively simple. You choose your start amount, look through some stocks conveniently named in similar fashion to real companies and read the scrolling news as you “end your turn” and continue to buy and sell accordingly. No tutorial so navigating the beginning portions may take a 5-10 minutes to look through all the options. With only 20 mins played I haven’t gotten into the subtleties just yet. However I was very impressed by the customer service!
– Real player with 0.3 hrs in game
Hexonomy
Hexonomy is a game of strategy and economics. Choose from hundreds of different businesses to build and use the resources at your disposal to create the largest economic empire before time runs out. Be sure to keep your eyes open for any weaknesses in your opponents business strategy, placing the right business, at the right time, in the right place, could mean the end of it all for your opponent.
GAMEPLAY
Start with a blank slate. You begin by creating Resource nodes on the map. These will set the basis of the game. Where you place your first resources could affect the outcome of the entire game. All businesses derive from a resources in some shape or form.
From there, you advance into Tiers. Each Tier requires a business from the Tier below it. For example, a Tier 12 business requires a Tier 1 supplier. A Tier 6 supplier requires a Tier 5 supplier. And Tier 1 suppliers always require Resources. The higher the Tier, the bigger the risk, and the bigger the reward. Higher tiers will requires a wider variety of supplies from multiple businesses, so you have to be sure that all the suppliers are met. For each supplier on the map that supplies your business, you get a boost to efficiency, which results in more money for you.
If you own the supplier to your business, you get a HUGE discount on supplies. Meaning, chaining the suppliers and business makes great economical sense when possible. But that may not always be the case.
THE CATCH
There can only ever be ONE of any business. Which means if you need birch wood, and your opponent owns the only tree farm, you HAVE to buy from him. You cannot decline to buy from a supplier. If the supplier is available, you have to buy from them, and you have to pay their price. Meaning, if you know your opponent needs Gold in the future for their Jewelry brokerage, it would be wise to put down a Gold mine if they haven’t already. You would profit tremendously selling to your opponent, they wouldn’t get a discount, and that means leverage by trying to hike the price up as much as possible.
However, they can do the same to you, so its wise to be careful about leaving any vulnerabilities in your supply chain. These vulnerabilities sometimes may be unavoidable, since the higher Tier business may already require resources that your opponent bought early in the game. This is where prediction and smart calculations will win you the game.
TACTICS
Businesses location and information varies as well. Certain business only do well in certain time of the year (the time of the game is calculated in a 12 month system, using economic quarters and sprints). Some businesses have higher shipping costs than others. Some require a higher amount of resources to produce their product. Other business may have to be placed next to other tiles. Some business cant be within x amount of tiles of another business.
These placement restrictions and variables make it a little harder to create good economic chains. However, they can also be used to your advantage in order to put your opponent in a tough spot. If you know what their strategy is, you can restrict certain businesses from being built by creating others that counter those businesses. Knowing the supply and demand will help you overcome this as you learn about the Hexonomy.
UPGRADES
Once you have businesses placed, you can start thinking about how to upgrade. There are many types of modifiers in the game. Ones that apply to the whole board, ones that apply to all your businesses only, some that affect an area, and some that affect a single business. You can purchase these modifiers for Capital. By doing this, it will effectively cost you Net Worth, but in the long run, may help generate significantly more income. Spend wisely.
WINNING AND LOSING
As the game goes on, you are constantly trying to increase your company’s Net Worth. The more property you own, and the more successful businesses you have, and the more Capital your businesses earned you, the higher your company’s value. The player with the highest Net Worth at the end of time is the winner.
Create the empire you want! You can choose a hundred different paths to victory, as long as you have a great strategic and economical mind!
Evil Bank Manager
An interesting and novel idea ruined by a lack of execution. There is the base of a great game here, but as is I cannot recommend it and, given the chance again, would not buy it.
The issue with EBM is that, beyond the early game, the gameplay loop becomes insanely tedious.
In the early game, you are given a small amount of money and given the oppertunity to buy a “banking license” in a country from anywhere in 14th century Europe, North Africa, or Asia. You can invest in logging camps, real estate, farms, and luxuries like furs and gemstones and will receive their produce on the next turn. You can then sell the items, craft weapons to sell out of wood or iron, or hold onto them until the price is better. You can lend money, send out guards to retrieve loans that were not paid back, and use all the profits to buy more investments.
– Real player with 40.1 hrs in game
Evil Bank Manager is clearly an attempt to remove the sometimes mundane task of moving military units around the map from a grand strategy role-playing game. In that one aspect, they succeeded; in most other aspects, they fail.
[EDIT]
I’m retracting my con about the locks on the “exchange” page. They work with the “sell all” buttons but not the manual “sell” button.
[PROS]
A few.
- The ocean water effect was an interesting optical illusion – a crazed glass image with a translucent background that slides with the continental map above a second image of blue clouds. This is a nifty trick that cuts down on draw calls. I didn’t even notice it until around hour twenty.
– Real player with 36.5 hrs in game
Scrapping Simulator
This game is in early access so, you unlock all the available features quickly. As you may have guessed, this game is about disassembling eWaste for scrap materials. You can then sell the scrap directly or spend the time to melt them down to ingots for a bigger profit. Eventually, the world will be much more open and new features are coming.
I’ve logged a lot of extra hours figuring out many of the ins and outs of different processes. I enjoy the “grindy” aspects of this game and look forward to how they’ll adapt to user input.
– Real player with 35.1 hrs in game
game is really fun and easy to get into having a good time playing this game easy and chilled to play. loving all the new stuff and animations but game has some little bugs here and there but can see they are trying to fix them. but loving the game cant wait to see what else they do to the game.
– Real player with 30.3 hrs in game
Victoria II
“Ugh… What could’ve been… Praise KEK that I at least have my videogames to live out my epic power fantasies”
– Real player with 1707.9 hrs in game
Really fun game once you get the hang of it, and If you ever get bored of the base vanilla content, there’s so much creative and fun community mods that gives the game infinite replayability
– Real player with 1442.6 hrs in game
Zenith Frontier
Zenith Frontier is an interstellar strategy simulation game. Explore and colonise hostile exoplanets and help humanity survive the struggles of 2040 and beyond.
Zenith Frontier features several novel mechanics in the context of traditional 4X and grand strategy gameplay elements. Experience visionary strategic gameplay set in an evolving procedural galaxy populated by billions ot autonomous citizens and private companies. Build a faction with a rich background and strong identity, then oversee their interstellar efforts to advance their position within the precarious New Space Age.
New Gameplay Features:
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A Shared Origin: Factions start in the same overpopulated, suffering home system and compete to expand outwards in the year 2040. This is made possible by the recent discovery of –REDACTED– which allows high-tech spacecraft to slip into subspace.
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Volatile Subspace: Exploration of this newly accessible subspace is incredibly dangerous. This chaotic region is thick with dark matter and swirling dark energy fields, but the ability to travel interstellar distances in considerably shorter timeframes may be worth the risk. Known safe routes will become critical to sustaining your remote holdings, but beware - subspace is neither static or stable and these routes may change!
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Information is Essential: Unshielded signals will be destroyed in subspace and must be carried through by comm drones. News that arrives at your capital from a distant colony will be out-of-date - the situation will have evolved and you will have to consider this when planning your response. Additionally, perhaps the illegal hijacking of another’s comm drones will glean some strategic information - and prevent it from arriving at its intended destination!
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Special Relativity: Spacecraft travelling at incredible speeds and colonies established within deep gravity wells will experience first-hand the effects of special relativity and time dilation. Time will progress more quickly for the crew of your –REDACTED– spacecraft making a long journey at high speeds than the colony they are destined for.
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Geospatial Resource Pricing: A supply and demand model for price determination within a dynamic economic system that includes taxes, import/export fees and transportation costs mean that resource prices will vary throughout the galaxy. Plan your economic developments accordingly - or invest in this interstellar network infrastructure to take a slice of your rival’s operations.
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Top Level Direction: Shape your faction from the top down by issuing orders, directives, and edicts to your military staff, governors, and private sector. These are executed autonomously, which can lead to surprising outcomes. This indirect control poses interesting strategic challenges.
Traditional Gameplay Features:
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Diplomacy and Politics
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Research and Technology
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Military Conflict
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Management and Governance
Zenith Frontier’s Design Pillars:
Zenith Frontier is being designed and developed in line with these pillars.
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Emergence - A rich, living world that generates unique emergent scenarios.
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Strategic Depth - A semantic network of interconnect systems.
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Gameplay Over Graphics - A high quality interactive system that priotises gameplay.
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Self-Directed - The player is primarily working towards self-selected goals in open gameplay.
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Top Level Decisions - The player provides direction from the top-down to autonomous agents.
Arms Race - TCWE
Arms Race - The Cold War Era is pretty promising with the way game mechanics work and the AI is good. The recommended strategy in the guide section doesn’t work reliably for me and I ended up using a different strategy. The AI is also pretty good at adapting to what you are doing. The limited 3 budget changes ends up meaning every decision has long term implications.
Most games turn out slightly differently due to the AI choosing different tactics and the randomness of global crisis events.
The game isn’t as full fleshed as say Hearts of Iron but I feel like the mechanics are well thought out and the AI provides a challenge even on easy. It does a good job of abtracting the cold war and reducing decisions to the macro level (‘meaningful decisions’) compared to HoI3/4 which features considerable micromanagement. I personally prefer macro level games (less micromanagement) but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. If you prefer to play M&T in EU4 vs base EU4 or if you prefer to play Darkest Hour/HoI2 vs HoI4 then this is the game for you.
– Real player with 17.2 hrs in game
This is a fun little game which plays a complete run in about 2-3 hours.
It runs through the whole of the cold war and includes extensive historical detail and research - history geerks will enjoy looking through the tech trees and space race just reading some of the interesting commentary.
The game itself is primarily about resource allocation - the resources being influence (generated by diplomats) spies, and military. These three resources allow you to control the board through a variety of diplomatic coups and military intervention.
– Real player with 14.9 hrs in game
Lorenzo il Magnifico
I will freely admit that Lorenzo is a favorite board game. In Pre-Covid times I would beg my game group to bring it to the table. While this implementation of the game digitally had a rocky start, it’s now settled in as an elegant rendition of a very complicated game. In particular, the AI is finally modestly competitive…but very modestly… I play this game most often after a loss on Yukata or BGA…because it soothes my ego to have a reliable victory.
But the real reason for my “yes” recommendation is that I live in hope of finding a live human being to play this with. For months, I’ve hit the lobby at various times of day in the vain hope of finding a game I can join. So ] far just crickets. I just know I can’t be the only person who bought this game. I figure if I write a review, maybe someone will tell me where you’re all hiding.
– Real player with 217.2 hrs in game
A nice digital adaptation of a great boardgame. If you’re not familiar with the actual boardgame you will have to follow the complete tutorial and then still have some trial and errors (the tutorial lacks a bit in dept concerning strategie, unless you want to read a lot of text in the glossary), but looking for great ways to score and learning to improve your game is actually something that makes this game a hidden jewel.
In a game of Lorenzo il Magnifico you will try to earn points by gaining buildings, assets, … (the parts shown in the big building on the right) and by gaining papal approvement (this is not obligated, but failing the pope gives you some kind of penalty).
– Real player with 32.5 hrs in game