To be sure, this is why it is fun to keep up with research. Each discipline has its own half-life of facts, a time period in which new research corrects what we thought we knew on a topic.

And while it's still possible to play unfettered by notions of the day, it has a better feel to the experience when I do a dab bit of role-playing based on what I've learned.

Now to do my research for the next installment!

I recently picked up a book on the French, Velvet Empire by David Todd. I am excited to have that in my reading rotation.

Winfried Baumgart Crimean War, The: 1853-1856 (Modern Wars) 2020 edition Dennis Showalter and 1 more The Wars of German Unification (Modern Wars) 2015 edition

Ah, I do hope it enriches the game immensely!

Thank you!

All true. There needs to be aggression settings that vary by region. Euro to Euro need to be generally low, except for nation formation/revanchism. Euro to Africa and Asia need to be aggressive within claims - and there needs to be a mechanic where a player can create a claim. But if the next DLC allows for sphering, that AI aggression may be fine at low. Having it on high is to basically say there is no Concert of Europe.

​@@An_Economist_Plays The Concert of Europe could and should still exist with high AI agression, since the aggression setting is not supposed to make the AI start stupid wars. The AI still evaluates the risks of wars even with high aggression, its in the game's code. The only thing the aggression setting does is that it makes the AI start a diplo play on high aggression settings as soon as it sees what it evaluates to be a good opportunity. Low AI aggression just makes the AI react less to its surroundings and ignore opportunities. Low agression settings essentially just turns off the AI's diplomatic sense, if you want to put it in a plain way. The reason the Concert of Europe worked in real life was because countries were generally disincentivised to attack each-other because the sides were always balanced in such a way that starting a war was too risky, which could theoretically be replicated with the game's current mechanics. Metternich wanted to divide up Europe between great powers in a way that would make every country have its equally sized natural enemy. So for example Russia would be disincentivised from attacking any of its neighbours because the Ottoman Empire (Russia's perceived natural enemy) would take advantage of it in some way to win against Russia either by joining the war directly, or supporting its enemies indirectly. Of course, this system fell apart gradually since Metternich could not predict things such as how the Ottoman Empire's power would be dwarfed by Russia in the coming decades, and he did not expect Germany to unite either, and these are just two examples of how the Concert of Europe fell apart. The entire system falls apart in the game much much earlier than it should though, because of the bad AI. You can of course mitigate this by reducing aggression, but it just makes the AI numb and passive instead of making it only take opportunities that it can secure. To give you an example of how things should work; There was nothing wrong with you carving up Austria, but it makes no sense how Russia and the Ottomans didn't take the opportunity to subjugate all the small states that you just created. It also makes no sense how France didn't try to attack you in the meanwhile. What you did would have caused a continent-wide conflict in real life where you would have lost way more than you gained as Prussia. The AI just can not make reasonable diplomatic decisions in the game to disincetivise other countries from starting a war though, and the AI makes poor diplomatic evaluations even on low aggression settings, its just that it doesn't act on them. What low agression does is that it makes the AI just sit like a duck and not react to anything what so ever in its surroundings, which sort of just turns off the simulation when it comes to political decision making, as said earlier. The AI should also put as much resources on its military size as it can, since thats what states generally do (there are exceptions in the modern day with very good reasons, but this comment is already too long, so lets ignore those). Athough I've noticed that this has become better in the 1.6 update compared to before, but its still not there yet. Huge military power would help the AI not start wars against stronger countries (so generally european countries) even on higher agression settings. Thank you for reading. EDIT: To sum up what the aggression setting currently does in the game. It only increases/decreeses tha AI's likeliness to act on its evaluations, but it doesn't change the way the AI evaluates things.

@@I602I Plenty to consider here - and what would make best sense is a Europe ready to pounce on opportunities but also be aware of what pouncing might trigger. In my play with high aggression, Austria declared war on Prussia with England and Russia both leaning in favor of Prussia and France neutral. A terrible miscalculation on Austria's part. What I would want to see is a "Concert of Europe" setting where great powers, particularly European ones, look to preserve the balance of power in general, but will look to exploit and even dismember "sick man" nations. Ottomans were first to fall to this tendency - Russia proposed too early in 1853 to drive it from Europe, but the rest of Europe was ready for that a few decades later. After Austria collapsed in 1918, it got "sick man" treatment, Ottomans/Turkey got even more of it, Russia got a taste as well, but Germany only had a few parts handed to France and Poland, as it was not "sick", so to speak.

​@@An_Economist_Plays I don't know why the AI seeking to disarm "sick man" nations would make sense, since historically, all great powers sought to keep the Ottomans in power to keep a controlled threat in the region. The reason why Germany did not get the "sick man" treatment, as you call it, is because it would have been extremely hard to control territories with a sizeable german population. Keep in mind that France did try to keep control of the Rhineland up until the German state decided to remilitarize the region in 1936, and France really had a hard time enforcing its goals there. The french sought to make a profit from the Rhineland, but they ended up spending more money on having a military force there than what they gained from extorting german factories and whatnot. This is also something thats badly modeled in Victoria 3, as conquered states are a lot easier to control than they were historically. There was also a really good reason to why China was never divided up by western powers. It took the British Empire around 250 years to take control of India, and even then, some parts of India had to remain fairly autonomous, and Britain was by far the world's richest power in that time frame. Dividing a big nationalist country like Germany by force would historically have been way too expensive. Dividing germany has been tried in the cold war, and it also failed then, despite the entirety of germany's military power being wiped out by the end of WW2, germany still recovered and unified. Poland managed to keep huge parts of Germany by essentially expelling all germans in those regions by force, which was a huge and expensive task that could only be done because there was no german military left to stop them.

Victoria 2 with mods had the best historical feel of any Paradox game I've played. EU2 with a mod overhaul for events a good second. Once the mechanics in Vicky 3 are filled out, we get the events afterwards.