• Victoria An Empire Under The Sun Revolutions Patch 2

Real-time strategy game that concerns itself specifically with the events that occurred between 1836 and 1920. Four successive campaigns let you play as one of many Great Powers on the world stage, but you can also take the helm of other nations, like Beroda, Annam, Kutch, or the Ionian Islands. It's certainly possible with a little personal help to move the likes of Argentina or Japan closer to the center of the 19th century world stage.

Victoria is played on a 2D world map, with four zooming levels. If you feel the need to jump to an unseen portion of the globe, you can always use the handy mini-map. Victoria allows you to combine a mix of locally harvested resources such as grain, lumber, or coal, with others you can purchase from an entity known as the World Market. In addition to three economic classes, there are also 10 population types that represent your civil and military forces to consider. Victoria: An Empire Under the Sun Review By Shawn Oaks June 05, 2012There was a time, kiddies, when games were released in perfect condition, and never required patches. Stop laughing, and pick yourself up from the floor. It's all true, every last word of it.

Sit quietly and Grandpappy Brenesal will tell you exactly what he means, in his typically dazed fashion, while you drink your rum baba.You see, in those pre-Windows, DOS days, developers didn't have to worry about compatibility with four different chipsets or eight video cards; and when games were still relatively small affairs that could be encompassed on a few floppies, it was easier to tie up all the loose ends before releasing final code. Programmers could afford to take their own sweet time doing so, because they didn't have to worry about owing their souls to publishers, hiring publicity firms, or paying exorbitant fees to monopolistic distribution chains. That's not to say all titles were perfect during the horse-and-buggy era of computer games. They were blatant exceptions like Microprose's Darklands, arguably one of the finest RPGs ever made, but only playable after eight patches. Still, that's just the point: Darklands was an exception, and everybody was aghast when it occurred. Many games of the same period and earlier required no patching at all, and others received the courtesy of a general tweaking patch before fading into fond memories and private collections.Contrast all this with the past year.

I have seen, played, and occasionally reviewed a host of games that were released in a partially disabled state. Warlords IV didn't have fog of war. KotoR won't run on my PC, thanks to my Radeon 9600 card.

Deus Ex: Invisible War has also frame rates and some of the worst texturing I've seen outside of Donald Rumsfeld's face. Lionheart looked like its first city had been completed before the team rushed to throw in hundreds of cloned battles to make up for the missing rest.

Temple of Elemental Evil had so many bugs that a list compiled by some of its irate players and distributed on the Troika forums ran to more than four pages. Releasing hobbled code to a public for beta-testing never used to be SOP; at least, not if you weren't the latest, greatest Windows release. Something has changed, and it isn't for the better.These and similar uncharitable thoughts stalked through my mind this past week as I played the latest strategy game from Paradox Entertainment. You probably know this development company better as those delightful Swedish folks who gave us the superb Europa Universalis series, Hearts of Iron, and the amazingly underwhelming Valhalla Chronicles.

Fortunately, Victoria used the EU2 engine, so I fully expected it to live up to PE's standards for that game. You can guess the rest.Mind, I'm not saying Victoria was a frumpy dud, whatever the game's namesake may have looked and acted like in her old age. In fact, it is a rich title, combining many of the best features of EU2 with a whole new level of economic and political challenge added to the mix. But the game balance needs a lot of tweaking, even with a first official patch already out of the way, the manual is all but useless, and the interface is pretty counter-intuitive and unattractive.Now give me the rest of your drink, and go make another one for yourself. We've got a long road ahead of us.The BasicsAs you might know if you'd attended school instead of working from the age of five in the wheat fields, the final blaze of British imperialism covered a period lasting from the defeat of Napoleon through the end of WWI. True, Britain kept several important colonies long after that, such as India, Nigeria, and Wales.

But effectively, the British Empire began unraveling shortly after the birth in the last century of the late, great comic, Spike Milligan. There's probably a lesson in that.Victoria concerns itself specifically with that time frame of nearly ninety years, between 1836 and 1920.

While each of the four successive campaigns ostensibly lets you strut your stuff as one of many Great Powers on the world stage, you can right-click any of them and select from a lengthy list of other nations, instead. In this fashion you can take the helm of Beroda, Annam, Kutch, or the Ionian Islands. Admittedly this kind of all-inclusiveness is a bit silly, since you can't achieve anything save a waste of time as the leader of the Ionians.

(Actually, you could, but only if you predated Homer, and your name happened to be Odysseus.) Opting for a secondary power, though, has its attractions. It's certainly possible with a little personal help to move the likes of Argentina or Japan closer to the center of the 19th century world stage.The game world functions in real time. Pausing is not only an option: it's a necessity. There's simply too much data to track in this strategy title, and AI-driven opponents are relatively competent at assessing their resources, deriving objectives, and following through to completion. Victoria is played on a 2D world map, with four zooming levels. If you feel the need to jump to an unseen portion of the globe, you can always use the handy mini-map.

The graphics are adequate but often ugly. Paradox would seem to hold the opinion of one celebrated game designer I've known for years, who believes that people wanting attractive visuals in any game are best fit to serve the ecosystem as digestible biomass.Victoria supplies five basic means by which any budding leader can interact with its world: economics, national politics, international diplomacy, technology and the military. Let's take a look at each.EconomicsThis is one of the two major areas where Victoria has significantly increased the depth of EU2 gameplay.

Where individual provinces of a nation each produced a single resource for export in that earlier title, Victoria allows you to combine a mix of locally harvested resources such as grain, lumber, or coal, with others you can purchase from an entity known as the World Market. (Note that nations with a higher prestige factor gain earlier access to the World Market. This makes a good deal of sense.) You can transform your farmers and laborers into 'craftsmen,' a very handsome euphemism for the social dregs of the Industrial Age who worked city factories back then and had a life expectancy in the high twenties. No factories?

No problem: you just need money in your national treasury, and the appropriate resources to start up one of fourteen types of factories. A luxury furniture factory, for example, requires regular furniture and hardwood, while an ammunitions factory requires iron, sulfur and coal. When playing game press F12, type any of these cheats below and confirm with Enter: PasswordEffectTRANSPORTSGet transportsPRESTIGEGet prestigeMONEYGet loads of moneyLEADERSHIPGet leadersMANPOWERGet menDIFRULESPlay like a GodNOWARNo warNOREVOLTSDefeat allNOLIMITNo troops limitsNOFOGNo fogHANDSOFFHands off allSHOWIDGet province IDsFULLCONTROLTotal controlnevilleThe AI will now accept any of your peace proposals. Resource CheatsPress f12 to bring up the cheat prompt.

Victoria An Empire Under The Sun Revolutions Patch 2

Then type in code and press enter. Pressing up after hitting enter re-enters the last code entered.