Victoria 3 Tips
Economic tips:
- If you are poor, do not build any construction sectors. You always have the base 10 construction points for free. If you build a construction sector, it will add 2 points, cost £2000+/week, and start spending half of the points on the private queue. If you are a poor nation, you get far less benefit from private buildings than government-owned buildings, and it is better to be able to fully direct what to build anyway. Stick with the free 10 points until you have at least £4000/week to spare.
- If you are rich, you want to build as many construction sectors as necessary to get the private queue to break even. The capitalists are trying to give you free buildings and therefore a larger GDP and tax base, so you want to take advantage of that. This is doubly true if you get Laissez-Faire. The biggest economic mistake nations make is not enabling the capitalists to build enough. Almost every dollar profit they make goes back to building more buildings without the government overhead. You get full quadratic growth and should completely eclipse the rest of the world economically on this tip alone.
- Migration is fantastic with almost no downsides. Rushing multiculturalism and decreeing Greener Grass Campaigns gives you tons of free extra labor.
- Always subsidize railroads. Usually subsidize power plants and motor industries. Consider subsidizing steel, arms, and coal. You often have to force people to advance.
Diplomacy tips:
- Ideological differences has nothing to do with laws. It is purely based on what interest groups are in government in each. Capitalist monarchies and communist anarchies will see eye-to-eye on ideology if both put the [Rural Folk] in government. So if you want a Great Power to be your ally, you can just put the same interest groups in government as them, call them in, and then switch them out for your own after the alliance is formed.
- If you really need prestige, you can usually build a few fine arts buildings, subsidize them until you get to be the #2 producer, and then stop subsidizing them for a year.
Conquest tips:
- Protectorating and then puppeting and then annexing gives you less infamy than conquering does.
- A bit cheesy, but revolutions essentially form a new country. So if you rack up a bunch of infamy, you can try to force through an unpopular law, switch sides to the revolutionaries if they are strong enough to win, and then win the war to get a new country with no infamy.
- Infamy gains are based on population, homelands, modifiers, and the rank of countries. So getting a Cautious or Reckless leader helps a lot, as well as reducing both your own and your target’s prestige. One minor power conquering another only costs 71% as much prestige as between two major powers.
- Adding war goals will often cause third parties to join the war for your enemy. To avoid this, wait until right before the end of Diplomatic Maneuvering to add the war goal. The third party will probably have already declared its neutrality by then, or else won’t be swayed in such a short time frame.