Victoria 2: A House Divided review by lady frogbeastegg

[Voigtkampf]

In case you wondered about the expansion to critically acclaimed Victoria 2, A House Divided, you can read a review about it here (http://www.voigtkampf.com/2012/03/13/victoria-ii-house-divided/), done by our very own favorite amphibian ruler, lady frogbeastegg. Feel free to comment!

[Vladimir]

Another excellent review. :bow:

[Monk]

Neat review, thanks for the post Voigtkampf, and great work froggy :bow:

Vickie 2 had the misfortune of being released completely bugged. I remember that at launch, the economy just broke after a certain date leading to certain nations dominating and others being left out in the cold. I shelved it while i waited for a patch, and have since been completely side-tracked by other games. And now Crusader Kings II! Maybe if I can pry myself away from that masterpiece, I should give Vickie 2 another go.

I'm sure the worst oddities are long since ironed out. :yes:

[Vladimir]

Swedish games: Brilliant concepts, poor execution. Why can't they be more like their cousins?

[Voigtkampf]

Swedish games: Brilliant concepts, poor execution. Why can't they be more like their cousins?

If I were to judge by me, it is probably those beautiful Swedish blondes that are distracting them...

[HopAlongBunny]

The review really caught my attention; thank you for the post Voigt and for the interesting review Lady Frog

d/l'd the demo and raring to see what its all about :)

[frogbeastegg]

Phew! I've been meaning to start a topic on this since I started to play AHD. Never quite got chance. It's hard to discuss gameplay experiences in a review.

I enjoyed vanilla Victoria 1 in all of its micromanagement hell, and never quite liked with the micro-reducing Revolutions expansion. Vicky 2 I found distinctly lacking. At release it was a bit of a mess, and patches failed to fix some of the more serious issues. Consequentially I was rather wary of AHD; I intended to wait until it was on deep sale, and then I was offered the opportunity to review it. I'm happy to say that, whilst it's clearly not perfect, Vicky 2 with AHD recaptures a lot of what I liked about Vicky 1. It's an essential duo, the game without AHD is simply inferior. The only downside is that it raises the entry price for new players.

AHD is strangely addictive. In a real-time version of "one more turn" syndrome, I found myself playing until I finished this one tech, then seen a particular new factory constructed, then I'm near another tech, and then there's railway upgrades going on - and before I knew it, it was half an hour after I'd intended to quit. I think the key in this is progress: I can see my nation get that little bit better with each step. My railways are up, now look at my good production and income soar. I've researched new rifles, my troops just got stronger and my military score went up by 22 points. I just got an event which gave me prestige, now I'm up three places in the world ranking and my increased buying ability has kicked my economy up a notch.

Vanilla Vicky 2 had problems with the global economy crashing. In nearly every game, around 1870 the bottom would fall out of the world market and the entire globe would go bankrupt. It took decades to recover, and destroyed gameplay IMO. I haven't seen that happen in AHD. I know that it can still happen - I've seen reports - but that's fine by me. It should be a possibility, something which happens maybe once out of every 5 games. There are a few economy related bugs, and it's pretty harsh at the moment unless you are near the top of the leaderboard. I didn't find it too difficult to buy the goods I needed, industrialise and shoot up the rankings as Japan, but I did find it harder when I tried smaller, already westernised nations like Belgium. There's a patch in the works to tweak the balance a little, and it should make life a bit easier for those not at the top.

I think my favourite game so far would be the one I played as Japan, in the 100 year long grand campaign. It was slow-going at first. As an uncivilised nation there was not much for me to do aside from balance my economy as best I could, pre-emptively work on my supporting bureaucracy, and wait to gather enough research points to afford reforms. There were lengthy periods where I sat there with the game on full speed, waiting for something to occur. Once I had a few reforms in place the game began to pick up pace. I went with the economic, administrative and educational reforms first. That got me more money, a more efficient country, and a slightly faster increase in population literacy (which impacts research point income). In the end I managed to achieve the required total of 10 reforms, and Westernised. Boom! Thanks to my hard work, my research point income shot up, and I started to fly through the technology trees. Once a tech is discovered, every nation which has not yet discovered it gets a minor research cost reduction. Since the Westernised world had been researching at full speed for around 20 years, I had loads of techs where I could get 20%-50% off. At first I focused on techs which granted prestige; I intended to play a peaceful game and knew I'd need prestige to shoot up the rankings. This soon showed effects, and by the time my fuirst capitalists were ready to invest in factories, I was placed sufficiently highly that they didn't have difficulty buying the goods needed to construct and supply them. From there, it was one rapid climb to being an industrial powerhouse, and as my economy rose I could expand my educational and administrative efforts for greater efficiency and tech rates.

Once I'd grabbed all of the easy prestige techs, I went after the foundational industry, commerce, and economy techs. That shot my industrial power up even further, and before I knew it I was making more money than I could hope to spend. Within a decade of Westernising, I was a secondary power. Within 15 years I entered the great powers as 8th most important nation in the world. At this point, with access to spheres of influence, I modernised my army via more cheap techs, and watched my military rating climb. I began pulling nations which the AI had ignored into my sphere, meaning that I got first access to the goods they sold on the world market.

By this point, I was rising up the great power status list, and was stupendously wealthy. I hosted the Olympic games almost every time that they were held, went in search of (and discovered) both the North and South poles, and obtained exclusive access rights to Tutankhamen's tomb when it was discovered. Result: lots and lots of prestige.

By the end of that game I was in second place overall, behind the ludicrously powerful USA. The Civil War had left them with insanely high military and industrial scores, and in point total they had over double my score. Meanwhile, I was several hundred points ahead of 3rd place, which was Great Britain. I'd researched nearly everything, had billions in the bank, and had only fought two wars in the entire 100 years, both of which were (disappointingly) triggered by random events. I won both easily, since they were against isolated, uncivilised sphere countries. The game had decided that angry locals had placed my embassy under siege, and my only choice was to go to war unless I wanted to lose a chunk of prestige. I didn't even need to fight in the second war - my sphere pets all sent armies in, and pulped the troublesome neighbour for me.

At the moment I'm waiting for the patch. I don't know how much longer it will be, and since I have the steam version of the game I don't want to be forced into updating midway through a campaign. Based on the preliminary changelogs, I expect it will make old savegames go a bit screwy. I intend to try a larger, more industrialised nation next. Probably one which has great power status at the start. That should be a good change from the smaller nations I've played so far, and will give me more chance to mess around with colonisation and warfare.


d/l'd the demo and raring to see what its all about :)
It is a very steep learning cliff, and you need to be willing to lose games, to be confused, to experiment, and to read the forums. The manual for Vicky 2 is now outdated and so not much help. The manual for AHD is closer to an advertising pamphlet than real documentation, and many of the tutorial episodes are currently broken. If you can make it past all of that, there's no game like it aside from Vicky 1.

I should be able to help if you get stuck, although I won't be able to answer everything. Even after 1 completed game and 2 partial campaigns (around 45 hours played), there's still a lot left for me to learn.

[Graphic]

Swedish games: Brilliant concepts, poor execution. Why can't they be more like their cousins?

I like World in Conflict more than any German games (if that's what you meant). :-D