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!”)