Economy

The most important changes in Revolutions come with how the economy is handled. You, as the player, are no longer expected to micromanage every single province in your state. No longer are you going to click the “upgrade” button to improve your infrastructure every time a new railroad technology becomes available. You don’t even have to build factories yourself – the capitalists will do it for you. To industrialize quickly, the player can lower high-income taxes to zero and set or try to get elected a party with laissez-faire economics, which makes factories cost the capitalists very little.

However, laissez-faire really does mean “hands off” on the economy. Your ability to tax your populace is limited, and you cannot even forcibly expand a factory, never mind build one of your own. This can lead to some interesting situations, as capitalists build profitable luxury factories in the early 20th century, while you need tanks, planes, and artillery! This isn’t quite without historical precedent, as the robust economy and heavy industry of Great Britain was unable to provide for the massive armament and munitions that the rapidly growing British Army needed. However, the inability of the player to force a solution even in a time of war, like Britain did historically, is extremely frustrating. It is almost as bad as being stuck with a Pacifist party during an epic conflict.

Overall, the game is much more believable, but still exploitable and retains some issues. During war, partisans who pop up are classified as regular infantry units, rather than irregulars or even conscripts, which – during a prolonged conflict – can mean you’ll end up dying more to the partisans than to your enemy. It’s a silly and needless issue. Many of the new inventions that pop up from technologies give the player a choice, as to whether he’d like to go the Clausewitzian Theory route or go with Jominian Attitude, but neither of these is explained in any detail in the pop-up. It’s disturbing how many inventions don’t have proper descriptions for the choices they provide. There are far fewer bugs in the expansion than the Victoria release and early patches, but the game still has a tendency to crash in the late 19th and early 20th centuries at high speed modes, especially during wars.

The AI is quite good, all things considering, but it does make some key mistakes that it repeats from game to game. For example, it calculates military prowess solely on your military score. However, you can easily inflate your military score by building lots of low-quality ships, and even if you’re a land-based power, this will deter the AI from attacking despite a bigger army it might have. Britain is better about keeping its navy up-to-date than it was in Victoria, but because it doesn’t always build the factories it should, you’ll often find that mighty empire of the waves relying on Pre-Dreadnought battleships at a time when you have much more modern craft ruling the waves, and the navy is one area where small changes in technology make a decisive difference in combat.


Finally, since the game continues until 1936, coincidentally the same year that Hearts of Iron II starts, Paradox was kind enough to include a converter. You can continue your game from Victoria: Revolutions in Hearts of Iron II. This means that Germany isn’t necessarily a Nazi state, Russia didn’t become the Soviet Union and the Confederates may have, however unlikely, survived the American Civil War. What doesn’t get translated, however, are resources. So the Spain, which under my rule humbled France, conquered Italy, drove Austria out of the Adriatic, had one of the most powerful economies in the world, while producing half the world’s oil and most of its iron and steel, is still a chump in Hearts of Iron II. The industrial capacity gets translated roughly correctly, but little else does. Provinces with huge oil output in Victoria, Dubai and certain Persian and Arabian provinces, as well as Brunei, are reduced to their minimal values in Hearts of Iron II. Thus, in HOI2 my tank-powered Spanish-Italian war machine has tremendous industrial capacity behind it, but no resources to feed that industry, even though in Victoria: Revolutions I was exporting over 100 units of oil, 100 coal, and 50 steel. Of course, the converter isn’t a key feature of the game, but it is somewhat disappointing regardless.