Hello and welcome to yet another monthly update video for Victoria 3.
My name is Maciej, I'm a part of the community team here at Paradox,
and today we'll talk about politics.
First off: elections.
In democracies, elections determine the political strength
of the parties and interest groups in your nation.
Your distribution of the power laws determine who can vote
and which votes carry the most weight.
For example, under landed voting,
aristocrats will have a great deal of voting power
while under universal suffrage,
the distribution of power is much more even.
These distributions of power laws
are compatible with any kind of government principles.
For example, your council republic might have wealth voting,
while your theocracy may have universal suffrage.
There are three factors that will prevent a pop from voting entirely.
People who are culturally or religiously discriminated against in your country
will not be able to vote.
Additionally, only pops that live in an incorporated state
are able to participate in elections.
Finally, politically inactive pops will not be voting in elections either.
But that isn't all.
There are many factors that go into determining the voting power of each pop.
Passing the women's suffrage law will greatly increase the voting power
of dependent populations.
In this case, a journal entry will track the growth and activities
of the women's suffrage movement.
Elections occur every four years in countries that have voting laws.
An election campaign begins six months prior to the election date.
At the beginning of an election campaign,
each political party is assigned a momentum value.
Momentum is a measure of the strength of a political party's election campaign.
Momentum for each party will fluctuate throughout the election campaign.
This is affected by election events,
by the popularity of interest group leaders
and finally by random chance.
When the results are in, interest groups receive additional political strength
from their party's voting power.
This will have a huge impact on the legitimacy of your government,
and therefore its effectiveness.
That said, the actual makeup of your government is still up to you.
You can defy the results of the election and form a minority government,
but you must deal with the consequences of doing that.
Elections are the voice of your people. Ignore them at your own peril.
Elections allow citizens to shape their country.
But who represents them exactly?
Let's talk about political parties.
Political parties are alliances between interest groups.
Political parties tend to align around a certain ideology.
Many parties are aligned around the core ideologies of particular interest groups.
For example, the Liberal Party is very much aligned with the intelligentsia.
Other parties are associated with leader ideologies
that emerge throughout the game.
For example, the Communist Party or the Radical Party.
Each of these parties has a wide variety of dynamic names
based on cultural, national and religious factors.
For example, in Great Britain the Liberal and Conservative Parties
are named the Whigs and Tories.
A wide variety of factors determine which party an interest group will join.
For example, an interest group led by a Social Democrat
may fall in line behind a stronger Communist Party.
Interest groups in a political party will share their momentum
in an election campaign.
Interest groups in parties
must also be added or removed from government together as a block.
For example, if you want to remove the petty bourgeoisie from government,
you may have to also remove the industrialists.
Political parties are a vital factor to consider
when constructing your government.
When you choose which parties to include in your government,
you may find yourself making unlikely alliances.
During the Victorian era,
only a very few countries were unified in terms of culture and religion.
How is that represented in the game?
Let's talk about conversion and assimilation.
So in Victoria, your country runs on pops,
but not all pops in your country are treated equal.
All pops have a culture and a religion
and either one of those can be a source of discrimination of that pop.
To determine whether or not your country discriminates against a particular pop,
we have to look at your laws.
Your citizenship law is what determines
whether a pop is discriminated against on a cultural basis,
whereas the church and state law
is what determines how a pop is treated based on their religion.
All countries have one or several primary cultures
and one state religion.
Based on the primary cultures and the state religion,
a certain pop will be considered discriminated against
if they fail certain conditions imposed by the citizenship
or church and state laws.
To explain what that means in practice,
the cultural exclusion citizenship law says that a pop that doesn't have
any cultural traits in common with the cultural traits of the primary cultures
will be discriminated against on a cultural basis.
The church and state law freedom of conscience means that
any pop with a religion of the same branch as the state religion
is considered accepted.
So one way of being more or less inclusive of the pops that live in your country
is to change your laws.
So you can choose to be more or less inclusive
of the pops that live in your country by changing your laws.
However, under certain conditions,
the pops themselves will adapt to your country.
Pops who are discriminated against on a religious basis
will eventually convert to a majority religion
that is accepted in the state that they live.
How quickly that conversion goes depends on, for example,
the institutions in your country
and any decrees you may have issued in the state.
However, in order to culturally assimilate into your country,
the pop's culture must already be accepted.
If that is the case, and the pop does not live in a state
that they consider to be their cultural homeland,
the pop will start assimilating gradually into one of the primary cultures.
Again, how fast this cultural assimilation is
depends on your institutions and your decrees.
In Victoria 3, conversion and assimilation is something that happens to pops
who live in a certain country that's more or less compatible with them.
It's not a process that you initiate as a player,
but it is something that you can control the rate of to a certain extent.
Will you take the path to encourage your pops to adapt to your country,
or will you change your country to adapt to them?
The rise of new ideologies had a profound impact
on the political landscape of the era.
As a result, divided states become unified nations.
Let's take a look at unification mechanics in Victoria 3.
Unification is the process of turning one nation
into another more prestigious nation.
There are two distinct kinds of unifications:
regular unifications and major unifications.
Most unifications fall into the category of regular unifications.
All the mechanics of regular unifications also apply to major unifications.
An example of a unification would be Poland,
a country that has existed in the past but isn't on the map in 1846.
but could be formed, for instance, by the Free City of Krakow.
In order to meet the conditions for forming a country,
you need to share at least one primary culture with that country.
For instance, in the case of the Poland, you will need to have the Polish culture.
Your country also needs to be of a lower tier
than the country you are trying to form,
like, for instance, if your country is a mere duchy,
then you can form a kingdom,
but it isn't plausible to go from a kingdom to a duchy.
Most importantly, you need to control enough land to plausibly be able to say
that you now are that country.
In the case of Poland, you need to control enough of the Polish homelands
that everyone else would recognize you as actually being Poland.
Major unifications, as mentioned, have all of these mechanics,
but also work in a pretty special way.
A major unification is a country that had a strong nationalist movement
that agitated for the unification of that country during the era,
for example, Germany and Italy.
Once any country that is able to form a major unification
researches the Nationalism technology,
then they will have the potential to become a unification candidate.
A unification candidate is a country that is essentially claiming
the ambition of unifying, for instance, Germany.
The historical example here being the Kingdom of Prussia
and their eventual transition into the German Empire.
In order to become a unification candidate,
a country needs to have a certain power ranking.
Usually you just need to be a major power.
But if there's another candidate who is a great power,
then you also need to be a great power
or your claim of candidacy won't be taken very seriously.
Over time, as power rankings change, these candidates may also change.
The most crucial part of unification candidates
is that they can be supported by other non-candidate countries
that share a primary culture with the major unification.
These supporters come into play for two different purposes.
First, any land held by supporters of a candidate gets to be counted
toward their attempt to form that country, just as if they themselves owned it.
Secondly, there are two special diplomatic plays
that the unification candidates can use,
which makes it easier for them to achieve their aims.
The first of these plays is called the leadership
and comes into play when there are two or more unification candidates
vying to form the same country.
In the leadership play, the two candidates are arrayed against each other
with their supporters backing them up.
Once there's only one candidate left,
either because they were the only candidate to begin with
or because they have defeated all of their rivals in leadership plays,
the unification play is unlocked.
In the unification play, the remaining candidate targets all countries
of a relevant culture in order to attempt to seize all the land they need
to proclaim their new country.
The exception is their supporters, who will actually be on their side,
as these supporters are effectively saying that they want to be absorbed
into the greater nation.
For example, if Prussia is launching a unification, trying to become Germany,
then any German minors that support them will be fighting on their side,
while all other lesser German countries will be their targets.
If Prussia, in this case, wins the play or the ensuing war,
they will annex all of these minor German countries,
their supporters included,
effectively guaranteeing that they will be able to form the German Empire.
Whether it is a regular unification or a major unification,
the way you actually form the nation is simple,
once you have done all of the hard work of qualifying to do it.
We'll be back next month with more information,
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