Quick Look: Pride of Nations

I admit to always being a big scared of the video game that AGEOD has been creating and to always abandoning them rather quickly, after playing around with them for at most a few days, mainly because of the game system they use, one that seems impossible to grasp and has a tough learning curve. Now the company is part of Paradox Interactive and they have recently launched a new game called Pride of Nations: Vainglory of Empires, a strategy game that maps the period between 1850 and 1920, allowing the player to get into a Grand Campaign using a number of the more important nations of the epoch or to try out a more localized scenario built around an important event.

Superficially, the game shares a lot with Victoria II, but playing just a few hours of it shows a very different beast, one that is more concerned with armies, placement, supply, troop balance and the various effects of commanders than with diplomacy, research and nation development.

I took Austria for a spin for my first game, hoping that the central position in Europe means that I have quite a few chances to expand and that I will not have to deal with the colonization elements of Pride of Nations.

To me, the biggest problem of the AGEOD (now Paradox France) is that it's simply not intuitive, but after a few minutes it's rather easy to understand what the various modes on the right hand of the screen do and how to read the information linked to units, buildings and resources.

Another issue is the huge number of views for the map that can be enabled from buttons near the mini map and the relative paucity of information linked to turn events and messages.

The concept behind Pride of Nations is interesting and I plan to spend some more time with the game in the next few weeks, aiming to grok the system and see what it can do.

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