Napoleon's Ambition

[Will9]

It's being released tomorrow morning!

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?t=318875&page=1&pp=20.

Here is the log of development diaries incase you want to know more.

[Nikolai]

After a day's play, all I can say is: WOW. Lots of small improvements everywhere and most important: The game is seriously faster! On top speed it goes around as fast as Eu2 on the same computer. It's amazing!

[Will9]

My impressions:

The new interface featers do help. There is a new ledger screen showing the size of armies from all countries. The colonist successful/unsuccessful screen is now much more detailed and gives you the option send another colonist. The battle win/loss now shows your losses for each type of troops.

The new gameplay options are neat. You can turn off infaltion or make it from gold only. You set the AI to be more or less agressive. You can make colonists and merchants free (good when playing as small country). You can also set leaders (as in generals I think), advisors, and rulers to be historical. You can also set them to event (don't know what it means).

By far the biggest improment is the speed. I may have payed the $20 dollars for the speed improvement alone.

[Eli]

A quick threadjack:

Can I import an EU2 AGCEEP game into Victoria?

[Nikolai]

It's no official converter, but an unofficial one can do vanilla EU2 at least, don't know for sure about mods.

[Eli]

Only vanilla? Meh... My beautiful Spanish Empire will not see the 20th century then.

[Nikolai]

From VickyWiki:

The converter in it's present state converts savegames from vanilla EU2 to vanilla Victoria 1.03 or above. That means that it will work with every patch released by Paradox for either EU2 or Victoria after 1.03. If converting either from or to a modded game, oddities can occur. And the "Countries.txt" and "Cultures.txt" files will probably have to be changed as new countries and cultures are created, removed or changed in some modded games.

[Eli]

Yeah. Well, I got tired of that game after 350 years anyway.

I have this question about Victoria though. What are my goals? In EU2 I start with infra research, going at it as much as I can with some land tech when I have to. Build bailiffs, and start slowly conquering. What do I do in Vicky when I start the game?

I started a game as Belgium, won the war against the Netherlands getting two provinces, set a research goal and got the liberals elected. Now what?

[Nikolai]

Your goals will vary depending on country. I think this page will be of great help for you, as will some of the AARs in the forums do.

For Belgium, you probably should strive to get a colonial empire going and go for the economical powerhouse. Your position hardly makes it viable to compete military with the great powers. BTW, do yourself a favour and try out VIP. It's the leading mod and greatly enhances the game.

rl=http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?t=305484]This AR/url] will hopefully help you understand some of the aspects, particulary the economy. I for one am hardly good at that at all, but the economy is very important in Vicky, so if you do manage to get a grasp of it, it'll greatly help you!

[Eli]

Do you recommend starting the game with VIP, without getting some experience with the vanilla version first?

[Nikolai]

It's said to be harder, but I suck just as much with both really. VIP gives more choices though.

[Eli]

Well, the VIP game crashed after two months, so I'm back to vanilla Revolutions.

I think I'm starting to get the hang of this game, although I still don't understand what long term strategies are possible and how to pursue them.

[Nikolai]

As Belgium? Get a colonial empire going. Build up your economy. Enact reforms and preferably get a liberal party in office. Take the enormous amount of immigrants you probably get by then and become a leading power in the world.

...but get a better player than me to teach you exactly how to do it.

[Dinner]

Belgium is a good starter nation. You make enough to build factories and do a bit of colonizing but you aren't so big as to be distracted by to many details.

[Eli]

Well... I took Holland (except Amsterdam) and attacked Prussia and it's allies while it was busy fighting Austria and it's allies. I annexed about 7 German minor provinces, also conquering the entire western part of Prussia (the noncontinuous one), but they refused to make peace. Then Prussia suddenly defeated Austria and started kicking my ass, so I went for a white peace. 7 provinces is good enough.

As could've been expected, Prussia turned into a monstrous Germany and continued to kick my ass in three wars until I gave up.

So now I'm playing Sweden.

I already bought Finland from Russia, found myself on the wrong side of the Crimean War, destroying ~30 British and French invading divisions with my tiny army, and still losing a lot of prestige in the peace.

Now it's a race for Africa, which I'm winning for a change.

I still didn't get the hang of this immigration thingie though, and for some reason I'm out of research options despite there still being undiscovered technologies (tried changing the research establishment, or whatever it's called. didn't help)