Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Developer: Paradox Development Studio
System requirements: Windows XP/Vista/Win 7, 2.4 GHz Pentium IV/AMD 3500+ or better CPU, 2 GB RAM, GeForce 8800/Radeon X1900 or better graphics card, 2 GB hard-drive space, DirectX-compatible sound device, DirectX 9, Victoria II (base game) and A House Divided expansion pack
Genre: RTS
ESRB rating: Teen
Release date: Available now

Victoria has always been a franchise I’ve loved, and it’s one that has always been built on complexity. When your game is built around an economy that tracks the purchases of every single person, business and government in the world, you’re not catering to those with poor attention spans. The catch, though, is that no matter how complex Victoria II gets, there’s always something more I want from the game. It’s been a year since the last Victoria II expansion was released, and Paradox has decided that there are enough people like me who want even more from Victoria II to justify another expansion. Heart of Darkness focuses on four main areas of gameplay: colonies, navies, armies and diplomacy. Any fan of the franchise, while happy with improvements to warfare, will no doubt be intrigued more by the possibilities offered by diplomacy and colonization. And I’m happy to report that, aside from a few warts, HoD delivers the goods.

Since colonization is tied to naval overhauls, we should first talk about ruling the waves. In prior versions of the game, capital ships were meant to be spammed. While the historical Royal Navy, the most powerful in the period, fielded 29 dreadnoughts in 1914, it was not uncommon for multiple Great Powers to deploy 200 or more at a time during the game. This is no longer possible, as navies have been completely rebalanced. Now, instead of making ships more expensive, the soft cap on shipbuilding comes from existing naval bases. Each country can build and upgrade a single base in each state, and these contribute to naval supply. A navy can have any combination of ships that doesn’t exceed the naval supply rating; if you go over the limit, then your entire military is hit with a supply throughput penalty that cuts the received supply of every unit. You might be purchasing all of the ammunition needs for your military, but being over the limit might mean only 70 percent or less is reaching your units. Added to this is a complete redesign of naval combat. Dreadnoughts and battleships cost horrendous amounts of naval supply, but they have enough firepower and firing range to kill just about anything. But cruisers and commerce raiders now have torpedoes they can use in combat; if even one gets through to a dreadnought or battleship, those big expensive ships are in trouble. Thus, balanced fleets with plenty of screens and capital ships are now required to win sea battles. And thanks to the limitations of the new system, you have to be the world’s most awesome naval power to even hope to employ 40 dreadnoughts, never mind 400, making naval combat reasonable and historical.

Colonization is affected by all these naval changes, so things just get better. To colonize, you must still meet technological requirements and be a Great Power or secondary power. But now, instead of just planting your national foci on the states you want to colonize, you have to invest colonial points. These are generated by your naval bases and actual ships in your navy. When you are in range of a place to colonize, you spend your points to begin the process. You can’t colonize more places than you have points, and you’re still restricted by the range of your naval bases. If no one opposes your colonization, then you gain a protectorate, which is a low-end colony. It generates a little tax income, gives you access to goods, and costs colonial points to maintain. You can upgrade to a colonial state, which costs even more colonial points, but makes the colony generate more revenue for you. If you can manage enough assimilation in your colony, you can still upgrade to a full state. This costs a substantial number of colonial points unless it’s on your own continent (Russia and the USA benefit the most from this). Also, conquering uncivilized countries further eats into your available colonial points because they count as colonies, just like areas you colonize outright. All of this means spamming colonies is no longer possible, because even the British don’t have infinite colonial points. If two countries try to colonize the same place, they must both keep investing colonial points until either one side stops investing points, someone voluntarily withdraws, or a crisis decides who gets the colony. This can cost a lot of colonial points, and leads to the other change in the system. Dominions can be created out of colonies; you get a semi-permanent ally, and you gain your colonial points back to invest somewhere else. Every place where colonies can be built can be turned into a dominion, so everyone can follow the British model if they so choose. Hard choices must be made when colonizing now, because a single colonial race can easily consume 10 to 20 times as many colonial points as just investing somewhere else where there is no competition. Just how badly do you want to colonize the heart of darkness?

The crisis system for HoD is my most anticipated feature. It’s also something that worried me. The AI isn’t really known for doing well with brinksmanship, which is more or less the entire point of having crises in the first place. I’m pleased to say that the system works rather well. There are about a dozen ways in which a crisis can occur, ranging from colonial competition to the ever-popular competing claims between minor powers in the Balkans. When a crisis develops, the minor powers ask Great Powers for help in resolving the issue. If a Great Power backs both sides, the crisis develops and all Great Powers on the relevant continent are asked if they want to participate. Declining results in loss of prestige. Participating takes it to the next stage. The Great Powers involved decide who to back in the crisis; in some cases, to get the cooperation of other powers, the leaders of the crisis might even offer diplomatic concessions to sweeten the deal. Russia might offer France Alsace-Lorraine if Prussia is involved on the other side of the crisis, or perhaps France will offer to humiliate Germany to entice Russia to her side. As the negotiations continue, the temperature of the crisis increases. Random events can increase the temperature further, as can a preemptive mobilization of reserves (the WWI effect). If a peaceful solution is not found to the crisis before it boils over, then a war breaks out. Otherwise, prestige is gained and lost by the participants. Note that once a crisis develops, the minor powers involved get no say in anything anymore. Greece might create a crisis about Macedonia and get the UK to back them, but after that, the UK gets to decide how to resolve the crisis and Greece must accept the outcome. The system also ignores currently existing alliances. Russia and Prussia might be allies, but if they take opposite sides in a crisis and a war breaks out, then the alliance is over and they’re now at war. This means there’s no such thing as late-game complacency anymore. You could have the best allies in the world, but if no one can agree on how to deal with Hungarian nationalists rising up in Austria, then half the world can be plunged into a war that no one expected. The good news is that the system allows for peaceful resolution to territorial disputes. Sure, you might lose some prestige for letting Greece gain Macedonia from the Ottomans, but do you really want to plunge Europe into a five-year war and kill thousands of people just because you don’t want to lose some prestige? It’s these kinds of tough choices that keep things fresh and fun.

Land combat has also been revamped. Now all different kinds of cavalry serve a purpose, so there are no more useless units. Also, reconnaissance and province fortresses have been reworked. Now armies have a recon percentage that dictates their effective occupation rate, along with siege effectiveness that reduces the effects of fortresses. Combined with changes to engineers so that they play a useful role in combat, and changes to guards and infantry that make guard spam pointless now, land warfare is much more interesting and rewards smart army construction. Uncivilized nations have also had a revamp to their militaries. The differences in the tactics technologies are now smaller, and uncivilized countries have access to basic cavalry, making them a bit harder to conquer by western powers.

By and large I was impressed by this expansion, but it suffers from two minor annoyances. The first is the colonial race between two powers. If you’re in a colonization race with another power, you have to continue to manually send expeditions to the state in question. There’s a cooldown timer involved, but the problem is that you might need to send 20 or more expeditions to win the race. So, every time the cooldown expires, you have to go into the province interface and manually send an expedition. During a war, this is mind-numbingly tedious and distracting, not to mention that you can lose the race just because you forget to do it. Instead, the game should have a check box that just keeps sending expeditions until you run out of colonial points or win the race to automate this process. The second problem relates to the AI and creating dominions. The good news is that the AI creates dominions to recoup the colonial points so it can colonize elsewhere. The bad news is that the AI does this in situations that don’t make any sense. Take the United Kingdom as an example. In 1836, Australia is not finished being colonized, but the AI on Day 2 of the game creates Australia as a dominion. This might be fine, except that it then continues to colonize the interior of Australia, creating a “donut” Australia with British colonies in the middle. Also, secondary powers cannot have spheres of influence, yet Portugal creates dominions out of its African colonies in the first year of the game. It loses the income from them and gains no benefit because there really isn’t anywhere else to colonize at that point. The AI really needs a rewrite in these cases to make better decisions, not because the map looks funny, but because these blatantly poor decisions hamper it in the long run.

These minor problems only somewhat detract from an enjoyable experience. In many ways, this expansion is the one I’ve been waiting to play. The congress system from the 19th century is now in place, navies are really important, and colonies aren’t just a spam issue. In fact, while I’ve enjoyed all iterations of this franchise, Heart of Darkness gives the game a truly 19th-century flavor that distinguishes it from other strategy games, doing a better job than even Pride of Nations. Victoria II will never be for all strategy gamers; its indirect mechanics and emphasis on economics and diplomacy make it a niche product. Yet, at the end of the day, I feel more like Otto von Bismark after playing a game of HoD than any other game on the market right now. If that’s not an indication of success, then I don’t know what is.

Our Score:
Our Recommendation: