Recent reviews by Lidhuin

It's a fun game. It's a difficult game.

But it's also incredibly repetitive - partly due to its difficulty. And that does take a lot away from the fun.

I got a shrine that reduced the forests hostility.

I got a cornerstone that meant the queen didn't care if my villagers died

I got a cornerstone that replaced any villages killed by corruption.

I slaughtered my villagers and the forest loved me for it.

10/10 would play this puzzle game again.

It's a nice puzzle game.

This is a mixed recommend. Yes, based on most of the gameplay (some of which still needs polishing - "Oh, you want to declare independence from your overlord while they're involved in two wars? Sorry, you have to wait"), but no based on the failure of the devs to implement some of the central (non-gameplay) tenants of Victoria 2.

Since the gameplay might change for the better, I'll focus on some key design choices that are lacking in 3:

1) Warfare in Victoria 2 had a historical element to it - in the start of the game, combat widths were narrow, so you utilized Napoleonic tactics with line infantry at the front, cavalry at the sides, and cannons in the back. Maneuverability is key. As combat widths increase, you end up with WWI trench warfare tactics. Artillery for offense and infantry for defense, resulting in catastrophic casualties during warfare and endless stalemates among huge armies. Seems like Napoleonic tactics are right out the window and it's been a little too abstracted away. Naval combat likewise needs polishing, but it wasn't especially good in Victoria 2 either (still, this was the era gunboat diplomacy for a reason)

Secondly, Victoria 2 had many small incremental bonuses to industry. This made industrialization slow and to remain competitive you had to continuously improve your factories (not throughput, but efficiency), because you could outproduce your rivals, but there was a good chance of prices plummeting. If you couldn't keep up in efficiency, you'd be left behind. Victoria 3 could have kept some of that design choice and made it better, but instead it's these massive increases and typically only in throughput. There's no real way to increase the efficiency of an industry, so no matter how much you specialize in e.g. fine art, it'll never be worthwhile.

And finally, a lack of understanding of gold standard vs fiat currency. Victoria 2 wasn't perfect by any means, but it was quite intentional that the currency eventually accumulated with all the capitalists (who promptly hoard it), leaving nothing for the commoners. It was a driving force behind the social reforms at the time, because the government also ends up with a bunch of money, and if the commoners don't see any of that, then they become radicalized and revolt. Thus, social programs, shorter work weeks, etc... weren't just desired by workers, but necessary in order to keep currency flowing at a time when you couldn't just print currency. Victoria 3 ignores that and just prints currency, allowing value to appear out of thin air and disappear into thin air.

Thank god I got this in a bundle, because the story actually manages to be worse than the other modern XCOM.

As far as the game goes, it's a nice little puzzle with neat graphics. Way too much focus on the graphics though - I really don't care about yet another action shot after I've already seen it thirty times. It gets tedious.

It's okay

This isn't your average every-day darkness. This is... advanced darkness.

UI could use some work, but the gameplay is top notch. And honestly? I'm not sure how the UI could really be improved, just that it could.

To get more in-depth with it, the AI is pleasing. It's not some brilliant, human-like AI, but for this game it's about as good as it gets.

Essentially, each ruler and hero has a ton of actions they can take throughout the map. They decide which action they'll take depending on their skills (I think), personalities (loves, likes, dislikes and hatred), world factors (such as panic), their awareness, which family they belong to, how much shadow they are under, and other special factors.

Due to the large amount of actions available to heroes/rulers, interactions between them, and your own agents and powers, it really feels like a living breathing world. Not every single hero is going to oppose you. Many have their own fears and motivations, that you can use to drive a wedge through humanity. For example, a mutual dislike between a holy order and a ruling family may lead to several heroes conducting relatively harmless raids on each other. But these build up menace and can cause growing dislike, unrest and resentment among both the heroes and the rulers, as well as unrelated heroes and rulers.

Eventually, that resentment can boil over and lead to one hero killing another. And that's how you get wars and blood feuds started. All this before you've lifted a finger to influence them, mind you. And that's what I like about the AI.

That being said, if you do nothing, there's way more heroes who will be taking actions to prevent you from consuming the world, so you absolutely need to play a part, and that's the other part this game does well: There's so many things you can do that all drive you towards victory. To list a few that are available to all Elder Gods:

You could influence an existing religion and corrupt it to spread its shadow for you, perhaps even spreading madness, or vampirism. Or you can find the witches, corrupt them, and have them spread your religion for you.

You can make your agents experts in magic and summon forth ghasts, possess heroes to do your dirty work for you (and likely getting them killed in the process), or something forth volcanoes killing millions

You can seek out the Deep Ones and help them avoid being decimated by enemy heroes while growing their strength.

You can corrupt a king and his kingdom, and turn it into a Dark Empire - hopefully you're also wise enough to avoid getting the notice of the (almost inevitable) Alliance

You can beat down the orcs, steal their banner, and then subjugate them under your rule.

You can spread plague through sewers.

Will any one thing work on its own? Sometimes, if you're good at it. But a lot of the above also synergizes. If you spread a lot of plague very efficiently, a ton of heroes will be very busy curing that plague. This gives you plenty of time to spread shadow - or the heroes can try to stop your shadow, but then your plague will spread.

And trying to do one thing can be challenging: Put everything into making the orcs strong enough to beat the humans also makes them a menace, and they'll scarcely withstand a full assault from every human nation at once. However, that means every human nation is now assaulting the orcs.

What are you going to do to those poor human nations who are too busy wrecking the orcs, while your Dark Empire's forces remain unmolested?

While interesting, this game is extraordinarily repetitive.

This game seemed awesome, and it has almost everything it needs in order to be awesome.

Unfortunately, the logistics behind this game is awful. I have never played any kind of economic simulator where "prioritizing" a building (and nothing else) doesn't - at a minimum - make at least one worker focus on accomplishing that task.

Yet after disaster had struck (fair), I realized I needed to get my worker factory up and running again, which meant getting my parts factory up and running, which in turn required a solar panel. I knew everything in my base was connected and I still had five workers and plenty of stockpiled resources - more than enough to continuously supply the parts factory (the bottleneck) in order to produce new workers so I could take care of everything else, right?

Wrong!

My five workers literally did everything else but bother supplying either the parts or worker factory with anything they needed. I could see them transporting steel towards my parts factory and I thought "great!" except they'd promptly move right past it and not only bring the steel elsewhere, but literally just bring it to a building in order to stockpile the steel. Not to use it to build something or produce anything, no, just to... store it... really far away... from where it was needed... ???

As there was no way to manually tell any of the workers that "Hey, you can mess around and do whatever with everything else, but these two priorities are mission critical" the inevitable consequence was that, despite everything being available to get the parts & worker factory back up and running to get more workers, the remaining workers inevitably broke down resulting in the loss of the colony.

Because the AI in this game is too dumb to know what "priority" means.

Meh, it's basically a remake of an old WWII saboteur game that I forgot the name of, but as I recall, the old one was better (or maybe I'm just being nostalgic)