My pov: I've never played a previous victoria game and the only other pdx game that i've really gotten into is Stellaris, with which i have almost 2000 hours in.

With this in mind, I really like this game. I've owned a copy of this game for like 4 days at this point when im writing this review. Big number go up energy. It's an economy sim after all. I feel like most of the negative reviews are from people comparing it to its previous iterations and how it is worse than them. I have no input there as i haven't played the other iterations of the victoria franchise. I do recall on release there were reviews saying that the military combat like basically plays itself.

While i do get that the combat automation is there i don't feel like its a bad thing in my opinion, since i personally don't like games with excessive micromanagement required to play anywhere remotely optimally. For comparison I look to stellaris as another pdx game with worse automation than Victoria 3. If you play too wide in stellaris, especially in older versions of the game before they updated the automated sector management, you would have to play excruciatingly slow or pause the game every 2 minutes to resolve an issue or to play optimally.

I personally only ran into a few annoyances with vic III so here is where i will list them.

1. The menu clutter and the UI. There are tons of menus and its so bad i ended the first game as the north german federation instead of germany because i didn't know where the Unification war-goal was located in the menus. (Its in the cultures menu for some reason instead of an option on a country that you need to unify)

2. The expedition "system." its kinda unclear how much peril you have as that's not a separate bar, but a descriptor instead and its kinda mediocre of a system. This could i guess be under the UI issues but it is what it is.

3. not really anything too bad but i noticed a significant FPS slowdown in the colonization mapmode, just putting this here so if a dev reads this they can fix it lol.

thats basically all my issues with the game as a newer player. I really enjoyed my time with the game thus far and will continue to do so lol. i really like the setting and the 4x gameplay in the industrial revolution setting. just fix the above issues and its an EZ PDX W

My pov: I've never played a previous victoria game and the only other pdx game that i've really gotten into is Stellaris, with which i have almost 2000 hours in. With this in mind, I really like this game. I've owned a copy of this game for like 4 days at this point when im writing this review. Big number go up energy. It's an economy sim after all. I feel like most of the negative reviews are from people comparing it to its previous iterations and how it is worse than them. I have no input there as i haven't played the other iterations of the victoria franchise. I do recall on release there were reviews saying that the military combat like basically plays itself. While i do get that the combat automation is there i don't feel like its a bad thing in my opinion, since i personally don't like games with excessive micromanagement required to play anywhere remotely optimally. For comparison I look to stellaris as another pdx game with worse automation than Victoria 3. If you play too wide in stellaris, especially in older versions of the game before they updated the automated sector management, you would have to play excruciatingly slow or pause the game every 2 minutes to resolve an issue or to play optimally. I personally only ran into a few annoyances with vic III so here is where i will list them. 1. The menu clutter and the UI. There are tons of menus and its so bad i ended the first game as the north german federation instead of germany because i didn't know where the Unification war-goal was located in the menus. (Its in the cultures menu for some reason instead of an option on a country that you need to unify) 2. The expedition "system." its kinda unclear how much peril you have as that's not a separate bar, but a descriptor instead and its kinda mediocre of a system. This could i guess be under the UI issues but it is what it is. 3. not really anything too bad but i noticed a significant FPS slowdown in the colonization mapmode, just putting this here so if a dev reads this they can fix it lol. thats basically all my issues with the game as a newer player. I really enjoyed my time with the game thus far and will continue to do so lol. i really like the setting and the 4x gameplay in the industrial revolution setting. just fix the above issues and its an EZ PDX W