I spent a good chunk of Saturday playing a game I’d meant to get to for a while now: Europa Universalis III. I took the easy way out and played as Britain, which can largely keep to itself and avoid the conflict in Europe. First priority was to sell off the provinces near France, then I conquered Scotland, and then absorbed Ireland into the empire.

From that point on it was mainly a matter of economics, trying to get as much money and research as I could. Around the 1460s I finally got the Quest For The New World national idea and started colonizing North America, beginning around the Newfoundland and Nova Scotia territories. It’s slow going from that point on though due to colonial range restrictions and slow colony growth.

At that point I started a new game and flipped things around out of curiosity, playing as the Huron instead, with a goal of just seeing how long I could survive as soon as the Europeans arrived and what the state of Europe was at that point. It was tougher than expected though, since they start off next to the Iroquois, and it wasn’t long before we found ourselves at war.

Beating the Iroquois militarily wasn’t that tough, but what makes combat among native tribes annoying is that they can take over territories instantly, turning it into a game of whack-a-mole as they take over a couple provinces, you beat them and take one back, they retreat to another province and take it over, repeat… And then even once you’ve beaten them, the revolt risk in the captured territories remains high, and the instant any rebels appear they reset the revoltrisk-raising nationalism flag on that territory. It took a lot of luck and reloads before they finally settled down and I’d fully assimilated them into the Huron nation.

It was calm from that point on, and once I hit around 1530, I finally noticed the border of another new nation nearby, though it’s still an unknown territory and they haven’t yet revealed themselves.

Both games are still in progress though, as there’s still a long ways to go until 1820…

I was only in WoW tonight long enough to do my dailies and make the titansteel shield I mentioned before. Instead, I spent most of my time playing Victoria: Revolutions.

I picked up a bunch of the Paradox strategy games in a sale a while back, but this is the first time I’ve really taken a good stab at one. Following the guide to Chile here, my first attempt didn’t go so well as I flubbed up the timing of purchasing some essentials and it was taking forever to get industrialized. I took another stab at it tonight and had a much easier time of it, especially thanks to getting the Gold Rush event almost right away.

Although the scope of the game is pretty broad, I’m still new at it and just wanted to focus on keeping the economy afloat and growing for now. I soon had enough gold to promote some capitalists, and they soon started building factories and railroads sooner than anyone else in South America. From that point on it was mainly a matter of making sure factories had the right population types to work in them, trading for the right resources to keep them supplied, balancing the budget, picking research options, and sucking up to the neighbours so they wouldn’t attack me.

(There’s a lot of time spent waiting for stuff to finish and watching some interesting developments going on in the rest of the world. Texas got clobbered by Mexico very early on; the US managed to delay the civil war until 1869; the German Empire formed without Bavaria or Lippe, leaving a little dot right in the middle of Germany; Russia got gangbanged when it decided to take on Germany just before the Crimean War was about to break out, and when the dust cleared the UK wound up owning half of Denmark somehow. And around the same time that the US civil war kicked off, Mexico was suddenly invaded by the UK, France, and…Canada? It was so cute watching their just-barely-formed single little division running around amid all the big UK stacks. “We’re helping!”)