The game Victoria should've been the first time around.
Not every game appeals to every audience. Sometimes this is due to major structural flaws that turn off a large segment of the potential audience, but most of the time a game gets itself relegated to niche status because the game the developers explicitly intended to create is one that only a limited audience would find appealing.
Enter Paradox Interactive, the Stockholm-based developer of grand strategy games going back to their original Europa Universalis in 2000. The idea behind this sort of game is rather than model every battle of every war in explicit and excruciating detail, the player is instead tasked with overseeing a much broader scale of development, developing his chosen nation's economy, infrastructure, diplomacy and yes, military, then turning to the AI to resolve the nitty-gritty details in a manner not radically dissimilar to the throwing of dice in a game of Risk. Paradox has in its history covered every time frame of human history from ancient Rome to World War II, and its effort in the nineteenth-century Age of Imperialism is 2003's Victoria: An Empire Under the Sun and its expansion, Victoria: Revolutions.
You'll notice that my title would seem to imply that this review is about the expansion solely; this is not the case. Simply put, Revolutions is what makes Victoria playable. As there is near-universal consensus among the users of Paradox's forums that Revolutions is an essential part of the gameplay, and furthermore since I belong to that consensus, I cannot in good conscience recommend the core game by itself when a far superior gameplay experience is only one more download on GamersGate.com away. Now then...
After loading up Revolutions for the first time, one is presented with the very daunting task of deciding which country to play, a task made more daunting by the fact that you can play any nation extant in the world in 1836 and take them through a Grand Campaign encompassing a hundred years. While there is virtually no point to playing as a nation like Hawaii since they're just going to get gobbled up by some colonial power no matter what you do, playing as a civilized country - even a small one like Uruguay - provides a much greater range of what this game can accomplish, since it is open-ended. While a winner is calculated based on prestige, industrial development, and military force, the player is entirely free to ignore those goals and set goals of his own.
The gameplay itself is, in a word, daunting. Each country is divided into states, which are groups of provinces in which factories are built and the labor force is pooled, and provinces, which form constituent parts of states; as an example the US state of Nevada contains provinces centered around Carson City, Elko, and Las Vegas. Every province contains an RGO (Resource Gathering Operation) which produces the raw materials required to supply the factories at the state level.
All of that production is how revenue is generated; the state sells its produce and goods, the export revenue is then distributed to the POPs, who form the worker base of your nation, and the POPs are then taxed to determine how much money is available to the nation to spend on improvements. Setting a budget for education allows your POPs to become more literate, which not only makes them more productive but also accelerates research into new technologies. Crime fighting prevents "corruption buildings", which raise revolt risk, reduce production efficiency, and have a few other effects, all of them bad. Defense spending, army maintenance, social reforms...all must be properly funded without taxing your POPs into such poverty that they begin to see emigration as their only viable option.
Of course, resource gathering and industrialization themselves are merely a means to a greater end, namely colonization and conquest. Once your society is sufficiently advanced you can begin to penetrate into Africa and the Pacific, bringing civilization to the savages and racing to acquire the resources contained on the Dark Continent and in the South Seas. Not only does this make life vastly easier for your industries as more raw materials become available, but it also sets the powder keg for warfare. Imperialism, after all, is dirty business, and there is no Berlin Conference here to set clear lines of demarcation; this must be done by force.
Warfare itself appears simple; build an army, a navy, some transport ships, and project force as in any other grand-strategy wargame. That simplicity is where Victoria runs into its most critical flaw in many gamers' minds, namely that combat truly is that simple. This isn't Total War, where grand strategy yields to meat-and-potatoes tactics every time two armies clash. The game autoresolves all combat, and while the player can withdraw if things turn against his forces, the AI behaves so predictably that this is rarely a problem. Build a strong enough infrastructure as a Great Power nation like the UK, Prussia, or France and soon enough you'll reach a tipping point where your army is so large that no matter how much "badboy" (the game's term for nasty reputation that causes AI war declarations to increase) you accumulate, no country or even coalition can hope to stand against you. This isn't a problem with smaller countries, and it can be eminently satisfying to conquer Brazil as Paraguay because you'll actually have to fight with the odds against you, but the aggressive player, assuming he can wrap his mind around the non-war aspects of the game, shouldn't face too much difficulty---the Paradox forums are full of tales about world conquests as countries like Haiti and Venezuela.
Still, there is a very deep, very satisfying game here, especially if you're more interested in peaceful development and setting goals like bringing a 90% literacy rate to Paraguay or making Haiti into a colonial nation with colonies in West Africa than you are in smash-and-grab wargames. It's not for everyone, but if you've got an interest in a game that offers the Age of Imperialism in a box (or on a download, since Revolutions is available exclusively from Paradox's GamersGate service), Victoria: Revolutions may be for you. In point of fact, even with the scope of this review I haven't covered 5% of what the player can do.
Bottom Line: Victoria is a game that will break your brain and is certainly not for everyone, but if you like extreme levels of depth you'll love it.