The Game
Victoria 3 is a grand strategy video game by Paradox, the same company that does Hearts of Iron and Europa Universalis. It begins in 1836 and runs the next 100 years, charting economic and sociopolitical evolution of numerous countries. The player is supposed to guide their country through events both specific and non-specific to that country.
Some of the stats that matter: taxation, income, reserves, outflow, per capita income, population, education, legitimacy, prestige, shortages, surplusses, diplomacy.
You can probably figure out what they do, but there are a lot more.
There are modes that offer different scenarios, but I tend to prefer the sandbox mode, which throws you into the world and says "good luck, fucker!"
Victoria 3 does not skip on wars, for example, but that is not regarded as the primary purpose of the game. The warfare system is acceptable and has gotten better over time, but is not on the level of, say, Hearts of Iron. There are armies and navies. There are plenty of different units and weapon types. It's not really missing much in that regard, but it's not the main thing. Diplomacy in general is much more important.
It is very easy to over-explain the game, because there's so much going on, so I will instead over-explain the idea behind this experiment and how I went about it, plus results.
The Idea
It is entirely possible for someone to know a whole lot about Victoria 3 on paper and still be very, very bad at it. I definitely knew a whole lot about it before I became good enough at it. So there is huge asymmetry involved. Paradox players will be very familiar with this dynamic.
In my own campaigns, I have managed to win as numerous countries without perfoming any of the many exploits out there. (This is not special, but it has to be said.)
Based on my experiences and the experiences of others with the game, I believed it would be interesting to see this as a test of judgment. It's one thing to know, it's another thing entirely to have a plan and execute it without really fucking up.
I would therefore ask the robot which nation it wanted to play as, have it formulate a basic plan of action, and then allow it to implement policy and actions as it sees fit.
The Problem
This is a lot harder than it sounds.
For one thing, there are not turns as such, and the information is therefore constantly evolving in many different directions.
For two, I am not rich and to give ChatGPT all of the data it would need would be pretty expensive.
It is entirely possible to take actions in game which would theoretically improve GDP of your country but then have the actions of another country nullify that to such an extent that your average living standard decreases.
It is also possible for this to happen without foreign involvement, as in the case of famine or a volcanic eruption.
It is also possible to improve the GDP of your country but not of your citizenry.
High immigration may also significantly outpace your realistic build capacity, and high out-migration may decrease GDP by way declining labor productivity.
There are more potential tripwires for economic and social ruination than you can imagine, and without knowing how all of these systems interact, it is very easy to hit them one-by-one on the way down.
I knew, in other words, I would need an easy way to get all of the information to the robot.
The Plan
In order to make this work on a perilously limited budget, I was going to have to take a multi-track approach.
First, if an event is pressing enough, I can send a screenshot or a text description of the event and let the robot choose the response.
(This would apply to things like a volcano eruption, where the answer I would prefer may or may not be in line with the robot's preference.)
Second, if an event is of the kind where I know what answer it would choose anyway, I can be the one to answer.
(This would apply to things like elections, where the robot favors one party and you know the best options for boosting that party.)
Third, if an event is pressing enough and the robot's choice is questionable due to a lack of complete information, I may act as a temporary advisor and hint that I do not think the choice is wise, without saying anything too specific. I thought this was a reasonable median between giving it too much information and too little information during key moments.
(There is an example of this in the USA scenario below.)
Finally, for everything else, the information can be drawn directly from the autosave at checkpoints or sent directly from menus as needed.
(Whether this works all depends on whether the robot knows what to ask for at different times, and I found that it was surprisingly good at knowing that most of the time.)
The Cabinet
Without a lot of spend, we had to agree on when I should summon the robot to respond to ongoing tasks related to maintaining a nation. It seemed simple enough but turned out to be... quite difficult.
As noted in the last section, the cleanest option for this was to meet at checkpoints. As a starting strategy for these first few tests, the checkpoints would be whenever the production queue was cleared or whenever a specific technology we were researching finished.
Upon summoning the Cabinet (the robot), I have to take its course of action outside of very exceptional circumstances.
Thankfully, we only ran into one very exceptional circumstance between two runs.
Otherwise, Cabinet meetings were arranged as discussed in the section above.
Test I: Japan scenario
The first nation the Cabinet wanted to try was Japan.
I found this a somewhat curious choice due to the fact that Japan has a lot going on in the 1800s.
Its political situation is what you might call complicated.
There are a lot of competing interests inside of Japan that really hate each other and if you don't keep a good enough balance, you can very easily end up with revolutionary situations. This is bad.
Despite not having many neighbors, the ones that it does have are either hostile or chaotic. In either case, it doesn't take a whole lot for them to attempt something on you.
More distant European powers with a lot of naval projection ability (France, United Kingdom) can also become very hostile very quick.
Suffice it to say, you do not have enough influence to handle them all diplomatically if they start going after you. But that usually doesn't happen for me.
The Cabinet decided we should pursue a path of industrialization and modernization, attempting to build an economic superpower in the region.
Unfortunately, the Cabinet also kneecapped its own plan by becoming hyperfixated on solving employment in a single coal mine we placed in Kyūshū.
The coal mine was not employing many pops and was very stubborn about that.
The Cabinet tried to solve this problem by increasing education in the region, and then encouraging social mobility, and even putting other industries there as pathways.
None of this made a dent in the numbers and as our standing fell, the Russians made a diplomatic play to gain access to our markets.
The Cabinet chose to agree, thinking it would serve our purposes, resulting in a lot of very immediate political chaos.
Eventually, the Russians said "fuck it" and declared war, taking advantage of the crisis.
I thought they probably wouldn't be able to actually do anything (this happens sometimes), but instead they completely flattened us.
Test II: USA scenario
I suggested the USA simply because I am from the USA originally (Portugal today) and know the most about it.
The USA is isolated enough and strong enough to be good for new players and I am familiar with its diplomacy and crises as the result of doing probably a couple dozen runs with it.
The Cabinet agreed and we began.
Our goal was to achieve a highly developed and multicultural liberal democracy.
At first, the Cabinet did a great job: the first five years saw us build up our economy pretty quickly and pretty equitably with a series of strategic construction queues.
We made it through several of these and built up relations with the UK and France at the same time, ultimately aiming to ally with Britain for reasons unknown. (I normally do this as well, but I can't say for sure why the Cabinet chose this course of action.)
The Democrats (pro-slavery) maintained control with large majorities throughout this early period, where there is one election in your first year (1836) and another four years later (1840), but the longterm goal was to increase support for the Whigs (abolitionist).
By 1844, our modernization program had gone so well that the Democrats were rapidly losing support, going from about 70% of the vote in 1840 to 53% that year. Because they were losing support, we were able to increase legitimacy by switching the government to the Whigs in 1846.
(Presidents remain of the party they were elected with, so the switch is analogous to a Congressional majority change during a midterm.)
In short, we were doing surprisingly good.
But then the Cabinet became, I suppose we could say, overconfident.
It decided to try and pass a slavery ban in 1846, when the odds of it passing were 39% with 14% in favor, 43% against and 43% undecided.
I gently suggested this may not be the right choice at this junction:
we might end up with a civil war lmao
But the Cabinet was confident we could steamroll the south if it came to that, so we pressed ahead anyway.
Spain immediately declared us a rival and began damaging relations.
The south started to secede from the union.
Our most powerful Navy Admiral started a coup.
We successfully beat the coup by taking the Admiral's ships and sending him out to the Pacific.
Spain did not do anything else and we began improving relations with them.
But the south seceded and the Civil War began.
Contrary to the Cabinet's expectations, the south rocked our shit.
So that didn't go very well.
The Analysis
As a test of judgment, the results were a bit mixed.
Initial moves in Japan were pretty promising, but the overall strategy was ruined by the hyperfixation on a single coal mine and misjudging the amount of chaos that would come from accepting Russian market demands.
These are all easy mistakes to make and, indeed, I did make them myself the first time I played as Japan despite having read up on it a bit beforehand.
Compared to a complete beginner, the robot did better in the very early steps, but probably about as bad after that.
In the USA scenario, the robot did markedly better for the first 10 years to the point where I was very satisfied with its performance. I would put it at about low intermediate.
The point that utterly crippled us was the far too early attempt to ban slavery.
It is not impossible to win the Civil War in 1846, as I've done it earlier than that without using any exploits, but the robot utterly ignored the infrastructure that would make it possible.
Indeed, we were on track to ban slavery without a Civil War by probably 1860!
The real kicker is that the robot totally blew off my hint that it was a bad idea, showing that it has at least developed the arrogance of the average Paradox gamer.
I think a part of this is that I simply could not get it all of the information that it needed to make really informed decisions. I could not collect literally everything, even with custom programs doing work in the background.
But I also think it could have done better even with the information it had because it seems to be learning the flow of the game as it plays more.
Conclusion
If I had more money to throw, I suspect the robot would be at least as good as a higher level beginner or a lower level intermediate player.
Its judgment was likely hobbled by a lack of some crucial information, but this is realistic enough as it is simply not possible to always have the information you need. Something will always slip through the cracks.
I will very likely try to improve on information capture and conveyance and see if that helps, or if playing more rounds alone will improve on its judgment.
This experiment has been very fascinating and if anybody out there would like to run it properly, I would be thrilled to help.
I would also be thrilled to have suggestions for what could be improved in the flow.
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed.
