Starting Moves | Victoria 3 v1.9 | No DLC Required
Victoria 3 is a complex game. It has a lot of systems that interact with each other in ways that aren’t immediately clear, and the learning curve can make it difficult to get started at all. If you are like me, the process of learning and experimenting in a strategy game is a big reason they are so fun to play. But once you were loaded into a game with no idea where to start, it can be like you hit a wall and your enthusiasm dampens. In this video, I’ll go through what to look at and what to do after you load in as a country to actually get to the unpause button. Hopefully this helps out some people who have attempted to learn the game but failed to actually play it. I’m not going to go into what is meta or optimal, but instead show how a typical casual or role-play friendly start goes. I prefer my games not to be entirely solved, so I intentionally avoid looking up what is technically optimal. I’ve chosen to use Spain as the example start. It’s a great beginnerfriendly country in my opinion and just a really fun country in general to play. This is because you face no immediate military threats and have all of the early to midame industrial resources available to you from the start. My name is Dustin and let’s get right into it. Before we decide what changes to aim for and what buildings to queue up for construction, we need to briefly analyze the starting situation of our country. Even if you aren’t interested in sitting around looking at population statistics for an extended time to come up with the perfect plan, there are a few basic things you need to look at. Let’s start with interest groups. Our powerful interest groups will determine which laws we can easily pass early on. The most important one to understand the position of will be the land owners. Generally in Victoria 3, you will want to reduce the power of the landowners as much as possible, even if you want to stay as authoritarian or monarchy. They support too many laws that hinder economic progress by default. As Spain, our land owners start as the second largest interest group. As you can see in the landowner tool tip, their support primarily comes from the agricultureowning aristocrats in our country who work in manor houses. Moving over to the government screen, we can see that our queen is part of the intelligencia interest group. This makes reforming our laws of Spain much easier. You normally need your leader interest group in government to achieve acceptable legitimacy levels. Because the queen is intelligencia, it isn’t necessary for the landowners to be in government. And we are essentially guaranteed that the intelligencia can be in government. To pass laws, you normally need an interest group in government that supports them. And the intelligencia typically supports many good laws. You will want to briefly check the ideology of your interest group leaders as they can change their party’s stance on certain laws. As Spain, we have several traditionalists and interestingly a radical petite bourgeoisi. If we want to reform into a republic, they would support us. Now let’s take a look at the most important laws. As we start with the first four economy laws are important to make note of here. Economic system determines how much of our construction is used by the private sector and how much money our pops contribute to the investment pool that funds both private construction and helps fund government construction. Most importantly, if this is on traditionalism, you want to make it a priority to switch to something else. Traditionalism is one of the worst laws in the game. having the investment pool, lowering taxation capacity, which affects highly populated states, and lowering market access price impact, which makes goods more expensive for any of your pops living in a state that doesn’t produce those goods locally. This will affect all of your pops negatively in some way. As Spain, we have interventionism, which is the standard law in the early to mid game and is perfectly acceptable for now. In trade policy, Spain starts with mercantalism. All of these are fine to have except for isolationism. Isolationism means that you are not allowed to build trade centers to trade with the world market which severely handicaps your economic options. I would make it a priority to get rid of isolationism unless you want to roleplay a fully contained ottery. Next up is taxation. We start on landbased taxation which means almost all of our money is collected from our peasants. As you industrialize and employ peasants in other buildings, your income from land-based taxation will go down. We want to move to per capita or proportional taxation when possible to instead tax the non- peasant working class and the rich capitalists and aristocrats. We can see by hovering over per capita that Spain would already benefit from switching to per capita in terms of tax income. Every tax law allows consumption taxes to be put in place. The consumption-based taxation law only allows consumption taxes and is best avoided for anyone early game as you won’t be able to raise enough taxes to properly fund your economy. There may be some late game situations where enough goods are consumed in your economy to make consumption-based taxation viable as a role-play option for land reform. Surfom both boosts landowner political strength and makes peasants produce slightly less goods than other land reform laws. So you will want to move off of surfom when possible if you have it. As Spain, we start with tenant farmers, which is pretty standard for the early game and not the highest priority thing to change. In the power structure category, we want to make a quick note of the first two laws. As Spain, we start as a monarchy with oligarchic distribution. If you are playing in the Americas, citizenship, church, and migration laws are important for increasing cultural acceptance to enable migrations to your country from more places. Now, let’s take a quick look at our cultures in the society tab. The majority of our population is Spanish culture, and the other significant cultures we have are 60 or above in acceptance. We don’t need to worry about culture-based independence movements for now, and acceptance doesn’t need to be a priority for us. I’ll quickly check the food security screen to see if anyone on our market is actively starving. As Spain, we start with a lower population than any of the other great powers. I would prefer that the population we do have is growing and not starving. We have two states with famine issues, which we will come back to later. Moving on to institutions. Spain starts with the education and health institutions already in place. These crucially provide education access, which is how you raise your literacy over time. and lower mortality, which increases our pop growth. These two are the most important institutions in my opinion, but they are all useful. Spain also starts with a level in law enforcement, which reduces the penalties from any turmoil caused by radicals. Now, let’s look at our starting military. Spain begins with line infantry, cannon artillery, and cursors. Line infantry is a step behind the other Western European powers, most of whom start with skirmish infantry. This rules out any early wars in Europe. We can see what troop types countries we might want to fight have by clicking on one of their populated states and going to the barracks building. We have a much smaller army than most of the European powers, but a big enough one to take some overseas possessions if we desire. Our navy, however, is a hindrance to this. We need our navy to be roughly the same size as the army we naval invade with to prevent landing penalties. One of the most important screens in the game. Let’s look at our market goods situation. As Spain, all of our staple goods are in shortage. These are the goods that all of our pops need to buy to satisfy their needs. We don’t import or export a significant amount of staple goods, looking at the bars underneath the order numbers. For industrial goods, the numbers are very low for all but tools, as our economy is not very industrialized yet, but we don’t have any significant shortages. In luxury goods, we have an excess of several cash crops and a small shortage of a few other goods. Most luxury goods are consumed by our richer pops, except for intoxicants, which are consumed by and affect all of our pops. In the nested tool tips, you can see that liquor, tobacco, opium, and wine can be used as intoxicants. The different types of luxury foods can also be used as basic food substitutes for all pops if they’re abundant. Of these, we have a shortage of meat. Finally, for military goods, we have a shortage of cannons, although we don’t use many overall. Onto our national budget, I would remove any consumption taxes you start with until we decide what to do with our authority later on. As Spain, we have a landbased taxation, so we exclusively taxing the peasants. You can see this when you go to the population tab and expand taxes. Our revenue is mostly peasant tax and minting from GDP size. We also make a small amount of money from the two subjects we have. Because we are still online infantry, our military expenses are mostly in wages. The good costs will rise as our military progresses technologically later on. A quarter of our expenses are from government building wages and another quarter is paper for our government buildings. We won’t be able to fully understand our budget situation till we queue up a building and our construction sectors start working. So, we’ll come back to the budget later. Now, let’s look at our power status. Are we a recognized country? Spain starts recognized. An unrecognized country has much higher interest rates and isn’t able to become a great power until they are recognized through the associated journal entry. We start as a major power and are well poised to become a great power. What about subjects? We saw in the budget tab that Spain has at least two subjects. In the diplomacy screen, we can see that we have two colony type subjects. We’ll want to keep an eye on their liberty desire going forward. Now, let’s find out what attitudes the great powers and other relevant countries have towards us. In this case, all of the great powers are cautious or cooperative except for the United States. This could limit our expansion options in the Americas. In Africa, the most important great powers to befriend are normally Britain and France. To get an idea yourself of what countries are most relevant to your interests, open up the strategic regions map mode and look at your home regions as well as any you are interested in expanding to. As Spain, I want to pay especially close attention to what France and Britain think of me as they both have land borders with me as well. Next, let’s see if we start with any existing treaties. We have an 8-year defensive alliance with Portugal, France, and Britain. So, we are not under imminent threat of being invaded. Are there any active journal entries that I need to pay attention to? Spain doesn’t start with any, but if you do start with some, you should take a look at their effects and requirements. Now, finally, I want to look at my states. You can easily see state modifiers when the production lens is open. Spain gets a state with bonus coal throughput and one with bonus iron throughput. You can easily cycle through your states by adding them to the outliner and then clicking one and pressing the Z key to go to it. We can see that Puerto Rico also gets a natural harbor bonus. I also recommend briefly clicking on each state to see what resources you have available to you. This can give you an idea if you want to specialize in a particular industry for exporting to the world market or if you will need to import a lot of something. As Spain, we have many states with deposits of iron, coal, sulfur, and lead. This means we have all of the raw resources needed to industrialize without needing to heavily trade with the world market for them if we desire. I would say that 30 potential mines in a state is a decent amount and 60 and above is a large deposit. Some countries are set up to do particularly well specializing into a few types of goods. As a South American country, for example, you will notice many of your states have a high capacity for cash crop agriculture. If we go to the market tab, click on Brazil and click on coffee, we can change the map mode to potential goods. Here we can see that the industrializing European countries who will have a lot of goods demand cannot grow coffee in most of their land. Several types of agriculture buildings can only be built in certain parts of the world. So I encourage you to check the ones you have and consider making use of them to overproduce and sell associated goods to the world market. Especially if you lack the resource deposits to fully industrialize yourself. You will want to determine what goods you can base your early economy on exporting so that you have the money to import the industrial goods. Now that we’ve looked into our starting position, what are our long-term and our midterm goals? What do we aim to accomplish with this campaign? Maybe you chose this country so that you could go for an achievement, which is always a great goal. Or maybe you just want to take your home country as high on the leaderboard as you can. You have a lot of options for what you want to aim for in Victoria 3. high GDP, standard of living, prestige, population, territory, cornering specific parts of the world market, gaining independence, the list goes on. A great goal for Spain is the achievement bourbon for everyone, requiring a standard of living of 20 while still being a monarchy. For this demonstration, let’s make this achievement and recovering lost Spanish colonies the long-term goals of our example. All right, we know who we are playing, but what do we actually need to do to get going? Well, let’s start by going to our government tab and reforming the government. We want to be over 50 legitimacies so we can actually pass laws. And ideally, we want to get interest groups in government to support laws we want to pass. Our economic laws are not pressing. One of the goals I have is reconquering South American countries that were historically Spanish colonies. So, I’ll need a decent military, but I start with professional army already, and I don’t need to change it. I would like to further reduce the power of the landowners to make sure they don’t bounce back. So, I’ll look at changing off of oligarchy, local police force, and legacy slavery. All three of these boost landowner political power. Slavery banned is only endorsed by the intelligencia, but there is a lot of support to move away from oligarchy. Let’s see if we can get the petite boogeoisi in government, and we can. Now, with our new government, I noticed that we also have the option to switch to per capita taxation with a good amount of support. We would make an estimated 18,000 extra in taxes from this. So, I’m going to go for enacting this one first while we have the opportunity. I see two obvious routes for early expansion that we could take. Morocco or South America. If I go to demand protectorate with Morocco, I can see that no one is guaranteed to join in the prediction column. But do not trust the prediction. It doesn’t take everything into account. Morocco could offer France a Spanish state to get them to join. I would consider minus30 on the border if they could join. Around minus30 and closer to zero, it isn’t guaranteed that a great power will join, but you need to account for it being possible. It doesn’t affect us in this case, but keep in mind that it also doesn’t account for if your infamy is going to cross the 25 or 50 threshold. Countries will be more likely to join against you when you cross these. Taking a look at other countries attitude towards Morocco, France considers them a potential friend, which isn’t great. But I would be more concerned if they viewed them as in need of protection. Britain does view them as in need of protection, but they aren’t close enough to joining the diplomatic play for it to concern me. Now, let’s look at South America. I’ll have to declare an interest there to see the diplomatic play, but I can see which major powers are interested in the area in the meantime. The US, France, Britain, Brazil, and Netherlands are who I need to worry about if I want to invade the Grand Colombia region. I can see that Britain views Venezuela as in need of protection. While New Granada has several countries that are cooperative, I’m going to improve relations with France and Britain while I prepare for war and then decide who to invade. We don’t quite have enough influence to do this, so I need to rival someone to gain more. Looking at our rivalry options in the diplomatic lens, Sweden is an option who I don’t plan to interact with, so I’ll rival them. Before I forget, I’ll make sure I have declared my available interests. Having a declared interest in the same region another power also has an interest in is what determines who you are allowed to do diplomacy with. You can see who has interest in the strategic regions map mode, of course, and a consistently good region for all the European powers is Italy. I’ll keep my interest in Italy, but I don’t think I’ll be needing the interest in Scandinavia. I’m going to want an interest in Grand Colombia and Central America to keep my options open on who I can invade. Indo-China is another good region for potential expansion and will ensure I have contact with China for treaties. To expand, I’m going to need to triple my navy. I’m not planning on fighting a great power directly anytime soon, so I can save upkeep costs by building only frig, which require 1/3 of the mana wars and upkeep. I’ll queue up 21 ships for now to bring the total to 30, which can support a 30siz army for naval invasions. Now, let’s organize my armies so that I have a 30siz army with good offense values. I’ll send my artillery and cavalry to the Eherito del Centro and make that my invasion army. I want to switch the draons to curissers and make sure at least half of the army is still infantry. My other two armies can be combined into one and I’ll send that one in after a naval landing has been successful. Might as well top that one up with one unit to make it 30 as well. Moving on to construction sectors. I start with wood activated and iron construction already researched. Switching construction methods is one of the big progress points in the game, and when to move to the next one is a big decision. As a general rule, I like to switch to iron frame buildings once I have atmospheric engines unlocked and several iron mines already built. Spain doesn’t start with atmospheric engines, but I could unlock them soon to switch to iron, and I think I will. We start with three iron mines built and two tooling workshops already, which are the materials added by the iron construction method. In combination with the ability to temporarily import materials from the world market if we need to, I think it is worth immediately starting on iron construction instead of bothering with building up my wood construction industry just to switch soon. Anyway, iron construction requires less wood and fabric, which will also alleviate my market shortages a small amount to help out my low strata pops. After we get our budget sorted, we can come back to construction and adjust the number of construction sectors we can support. For technology, we have several options. I’ve already pointed out that getting atmospheric engines would be beneficial, but we could push for skirmish infantry military tech or K9 and society techs if we wanted to push for colonization of Africa. Stock Exchange is another important tech for the 10% market access price impact. I will however go for atmospheric engine at the start to kickstart my industrialization. It is important to keep in mind that researching techs in one tier makes the next tier cheaper within a tech category. I have all of the tier one production techs except for lathe. If I skip lathe and directly research atmospheric engine, it will cost 12.5,000 research points. If I were instead to finish tier 1 by researching lathe first, the cost of atmospheric engine would drop to 10,000. I already start a little ways behind the other Western Europeans, so I’m going to finish Lathe first to avoid wasting research points. Now, how are we going to pay for our increasing military expenditure and new iron construction? Well, we have landbased taxation, so raising taxation level has the benefit of not lowering the standard of living of our non-pasant pops and allowing us to pay for more construction. However, it will lower the legitimacy of our government, which keep in mind, we want to keep above 50 normally. It will raise the standard of living that all of our pops expects to have, even those not being taxed. And it will increase the amount of radicals we get from political movements. The expected standard of living being higher will also likely raise the number of radicals we have. The more radicals we have in our country, the more likely we are to have a rebellion and the less construction efficiency we have in states, making construction much slower and defeating the purpose of having more money in the first place. It’s also important to keep in mind that since our current tax law is taxing the peasants heavily who are the majority of our country right now, 1.8 million peasants versus 1.1 million working population, we would be lowering our pop growth. Putting very high taxes on the peasants is going to lower my annual pop growth from around 1.2% to 0.9% for context of how big the effect is. In patch 1.9, you hit the maximum pop growth around standard of living 15, after which it trends back down a bit. We already start with low population relative to the other parts of Europe. So I am inclined not to raise taxes until we have a better tax law. There are situations where you would intentionally want to create radicals and cause a rebellion. If you start in a country that has overwhelming landowner control, you have a choice between forcing a rebellion and siding with the more progressive side or slowly whittling down landowner support by industrializing and selectively passing laws. As Spain, we already have fairly low landowner support. So peaceful reform is the clear choice. Instead of raising all taxes, we can use our authority to raise consumption taxes targeted at our richer pops. The trade-off with using authority for this is that you can’t use it for state decrees. Opening up the political lens, these decrees are especially powerful in countries with only a few states or a few highly populated states. The promote social mobility decree is a great way to increase literacy when you don’t have access to an education institution yet. Enlistment efforts can also be crucial to quickly raise an army for early wars. Our population is split up across many states, and we already have an education law, so we might be better off using our authority on something else. Taking a look at potential consumption taxes, we can’t actually make a ton of money on consumption taxes yet, but we’ll have a better taxation law soon, so I’m not too concerned about being overbudget temporarily. I’ll place taxes on luxury clothes, luxury furniture, coffee, and wine. We still have some authority left over. So, let’s take a look at our current political movements. The absolutist movement is pushing for many laws that I do not want. And the movement does have some support. So, I’ll suppress it for now to make sure it doesn’t become a problem. Although, I’m not suspecting a large increase in radicals. So, it would probably be fine without this extra step. You can instead put authority into a few decrees. I’m also going to suppress the pro-slavery movement because I want to try passing slavery banned sometime soon and I would prefer if the movement didn’t become a problem. If a movement stays around zero support, it will eventually disappear. I’ll suppress these until at least one of them disappears. Then I’ll use the freed up authority to place a few decrees down. Back to budget. One of our major expenses is paper. This is consumed by our government administration buildings that contribute bureaucracy. As Spain, we start with 500 extra bureaucracy, which means we can consider downsizing our government admin to help our budget. Taking a look at our states with government admin, Toledo has plenty of tax capacity and the highest upkeep of our admin buildings. On current production method, each admin building gives 50 bureaucracy. I noticed while looking through our states that four of them are unincorporated. We don’t collect taxes from unincorporated states, but we also don’t pay the bureaucracy cost or give them the benefits of institutions. They also get worse prices on goods in our market that aren’t produced locally, and construction is 33% slower in unincorporated states. I would like to pay the bureaucracy cost to incorporate them. So, I’ll only downsize by six buildings to leave a buffer of 230 bureaucracy. If you recall during our exploration of our starting position, there were a couple of states with starving pops, the Canary Islands and Puerto Rico. Upon investigation, this appears to be because these states start with unemployed pops. To help prevent them from starving to death, I’ll queue up some fishing warves to give them jobs. Their subsistence farms appear to be full, which means building agriculture would kick peasants off of the farms and create even more unemployment. Before moving on to construction, let’s look at our country’s building production methods in the buildings tab. We are already on filing cabinets, which is good. Our ports are subsidized, which is fine to make sure they output infrastructure, but not all of them are on cargo port. If we want to build more infrastructure somewhere in the future, we will need to check the port production method before building more ports. Trade center is fine. Many of our farms are set to produce fruit and sugar. If you recall from our analysis of the market, we had an abundance of sugar that no one was buying and a shortage of food. To alleviate our food shortage for now without needing more farms, I’ll switch the farms to exclusively grain production. harvesting process is fine with no tools as we still have peasants and don’t need to cut down on the number of employees in each building. We can move to using tools in our ranches to help with our meat shortage. It will make tools more expensive, but that is a building we will likely expand soon as it’s very important for industrializing. Loging camps can also be swapped to using tools to double their production and we do have a wood shortage. We don’t have a large demand for hardwood, so we can leave the hardwood method split so that only one state makes it. Swapping our fishing warves to use clippers would cause a shortage, but it still estimates increased production, and we can build a new shipyard if it becomes a problem. We will both need more rich pops and need to construct more silk farms before we can switch textile mills to making more luxury clothing. There also isn’t much demand for luxury furniture right now, and we have a large shortage of standard furniture, so we should probably build some more factories before adding the luxury furniture method. Our tools are already on iron. We’ve raised the demand for iron significantly by switching to iron construction. So, we’ll want to acquire more iron for our market as soon as possible. I want to delay building more iron mines until we have atmospheric engines and a coal mine. So, I’m going to build a few trade centers in the states that need iron. My construction sectors are located in Castile, Western Andalusia, and Catalonia. My tooling workshops are in Navara. The price for iron on the iron prices map mode is high in all four of these states. Three of these states already have trade centers with available capacity in them. So they will start trading with the world market automatically if it is profitable. Castile does not. So I’ll build a new trade center in Castile. By alt clicking I can send it to the front of the construction queue. Now I’ll let the game run for about a month and we’ll see where the market settles at. All right, it’s a month later and we import some iron, but not enough to keep up with our construction sectors, which currently use 200 iron. To encourage more iron trade, let’s go into our market, open the iron page, and lower import tariffs to zero. We can also open up the world market screen, and analyze who is currently exporting the most iron. These countries are good candidates to make trade privilege treaties with. The largest iron exporters are currently Sweden and the United States, which we have rivaled and are antagonistic against us, respectively. Until someone else raises their exports, we can draft a treaty with the next biggest producer, Tuscanyany. Trade privileges raise our trade advantage with that country, which can allow us to import their goods for cheaper. Very briefly, world market trade keeps track of who is actually trading with who. And the higher trade advantage you have, you get to import at a lower price. The countries with the lowest trade advantage import at a higher price. And the average is what is shown on the actual world market. Iron is now our largest expense. But while the private sector is using half of our construction to build, we actually only lose a small amount of money each week. The budget number is white, indicating we can pause construction if we need to and have a positive income. Having a negative balance is completely normal in Victoria 3, as long as you aren’t going deep into debt. As an unrecognized country, your interest is so high that you probably want to avoid debt entirely. If we were overspending in the tens of thousands, I would delete a construction sector or two to bring it closer to the equilibrium. My priorities for buildings going forward from this point would be to ensure our military goods are not in shortage to prevent low supply and to balance making construction goods cheaper with providing cheaper goods to my pops. I don’t necessarily want to build an artillery factory immediately because it is a high construction cost building and we only need a small amount of artillery. To find an alternative, I can open up the local price map mode for artillery and see which great power has the cheapest artillery in their market. It looks like that would be Great Britain. Let’s see if we can make a treaty to transfer goods with them directly. It looks like if I give them military access and transfer coffee to their market, they will transfer artillery to mine, which solves that problem for the time being. To prepare for expanding our domestic iron production, I’ll queue up a coal mine in our state with a coal mine throughput bonus. All of the naval bases that need to be built, the coal mine will finish not long before we research atmospheric engines. To help with both my pops needs and my construction costs at the same time, I’ll also queue up a few logging camps to lower the price of wood. At this point, I’ll reassess my market situation again in a few years when my current queue is nearing completion. Finally, before I get going, let’s determine who we want to conquer first. Morocco looks even better than before, with France further away from joining. Morocco also has a land border with us, so our unbuilt navy is not required. The Netherlands looks likely to join a Venezuelan war, but their army is small enough to make the war viable. We just might need a slightly bigger navy to counter theirs. The Netherlands is also decently likely to join a new Granada war, but it isn’t set in stone. Central America appears to be a possibility, but they will soon break apart into several smaller countries, which means it is probably a waste for now. The best course of action appears to be subjugating Morocco while our navy builds up and then reassessing our potential targets. At this point, I am prepared to play out the game and adapt to the situations that arise. There are countless tool tips in the game, and I highly recommend you hover over anything you want to know more about and make use of the nested tool tips. I hope this gives an idea of what you should aim to do at the very start of the game to get going in a more casual style playthrough.
Maybe you’ve attempted the tutorial and tried to play Victoria 3 already, but are still struggling to actually start a game. This video goes through the typical starting moves I recommend to actually get you playing the game. I’ve made this with all DLC disabled, as it isn’t necessary to start and not everyone is going to have it.
This patch of Victoria 3 is a lot of fun, and I hope y’all have a good time playing!
If you enjoyed the video, please consider engaging by Liking, Commenting, or Subscribing. I greatly appreciate it, and thanks for watching!
I plan to begin streaming Victoria 3 and other strategy games on my twitch channel soon if you are interested:
https://www.twitch.tv/historydoesnotrepeat
Video created by me, Dustin.
Music Used:
Sunrise Over London – Victoria III Official Soundtrack
Sunset Over Windsor Castle – Victoria III Official Soundtrack
Asset Gathering – Victoria III Official Soundtrack
British Soil – Victoria III Official Soundtrack
Adagio For Four Strings – Victoria III Official Soundtrack
Benedicte – Victoria III Official Soundtrack
Chapters:
Intro 00:00
Analyzing Our Situation 01:05
Making Changes 12:45
Outro 28:56