Pride of Nations

[b]I strongly do not recommend this game[/b] - you'll lose both your time and nerves, no matter how much you would like the concept of potential of the game. This game had huge potential. But it is botched in so many ways, that it is just not worth it. Maybe only if you plan to develop similar game, go check it out. I have several pages of things that I dislike about Pride of Nations, here are few most important of them: - wait time between turns - on my i5-6600K running at 4.7 GHz, this game capable running on just 1 core is taking 3-6 minutes to calculate 1 single turn in the early game (was about a minute in the very beginning, year 1850). In 50+ hours in this game I've been able to progress from year 1850 to 1856. Campaign ends in 1920. Okay, I was doing other stuff about half the time, as you are not able to do anything in the game during the wait time. But even if you can accept that you play a turn, then do other stuff in your real or virtual life, the game is still not worth it because the list only begins: - crashes - game crashed to desktop many times without apparent reason - clunky UI - mouse movement is delayed, map scrolling with mouse is a nightmare, drag & drop system is very inconsistent especially with moving and merging units and there are UI elements which were not implemented in the game - like message importance or loans + many other issues with the UI - dis-balanced overcomplexity with incomplete manual or tooltips - I've read the whole manual of the game, all the guides and I still did not understood why some options are missing to me, or why I cannot do. Or issues like militancy being described as a huge issue, when I have it at max level in all my national regions, without a real way to lower it and without any negative effects from that.. etc. etc. - missing any ledgers or easy ways to view known/important information about the world, other countries etc. - historical/geographical non-senses despite the game aiming to be very historically accurate - like region Slowakei without any Slovak population, or region with Troppau (Opava) without any Czech population.. and many other.. - messy messages - there are way too many messages each turn to read all, with no priority levels, and no filter on which are relevant to your nation. So sorry to say that, but this game was my biggest dissapointment, also because of high hopes and some really enthusiastic reviews I've seen on the web. And because I love games on world maps, especially grand strategies. And because it has so many great mechanics and so much potential... [strike]And it might not take too much to fix it in my eyes.. [/strike] no sorry, it is unfixable without great effort.. I was just typing out list of easy fixes, but many of them are not easy, and yes there are many of them and just the code optimization is not feasible to make it at least 10x faster to be playable. And even 10x shorter waiting times are still too long, so... I would love to see someone take concept of this game and maybe mix it with Victoria 2, let multiple historical start dates be available and ideally make it possible to play until modern era of 21st century. That would be a fantastic game to play.

I recommend this game if you are fascinated with the era, with one caveat, the turn times. Pride of Nations is brilliant, and far and away the best video game adaptation of the Victoria era I have ever seen. It also has obscene turn times. You’ll be tricked, turns start out a minute or so long, and it isn’t so bad, then the next thing you know, they’re 20 minutes. I have a pretty decent computer, but it doesn’t matter. Trying to multitask at my computer while playing has led to crashes as well. This game has an in-depth colonization system, a wonderful system of region development, and of course, that fantastic Ageod strategic military layer that can’t be beat. But the turn times… There are turns where you may be doing absolutely nothing for the round as well, which makes the game a complete slog due to the turn times. If you can get over that one awful wart, you will find an incredible experience here that has never been duplicated. I would never play Victoria II again if this game ran better. I love Field of Glory: Empires and every night before bed I beg the universe to create a Victorian era game with that engine, but it hasn’t happened yet. This game is a 9/10 that runs like a 3/10. Ageod hear us! Strike while the iron is hot and steal the hearts of disappointed Victoria III and bored Victoria II players. We’re out here. EDIT: August 20 2024 I have recently started running this game in Windowed mode using these instructions https://steamcommunity.com/app/73190/discussions/0/616198900641205757/ Not only can I multitask while playing now, but I have had SIGNIFICANT performance improvement. Give it a try and enjoy this classic!

My NASA supercomputer can barely handle this 10+ year old game. A few hundred turns in, the AI needs about 20 minutes to resolve a turn. I'm afraid my power consumption has nearly outpaced bitcoin mining. It's that's bad and only getting worst and I'm only in 1860. Other than that, this game is excellent and truly makes you feel like a 19th century monarch. My mission to prepare France for its historical clash with Prussia took some meticulous planning: Ten years of industrial buildup and near constant wars against Spain, Belgium and Austria got me on pace. I can field about 650k well led and experienced soldiers, though that's barely on par with what Prussia has. War is coming. Give the game a try if you are patient and won't mind doing something on the side while it runs. The management and strategy aspects are much fun, albeit tedious, but maybe that's why its so satisfying in the end.

Truly a great game that needs a second edition and maybe a earlier start date and end date... honestly one of a kind and for its time was very impressive. Yes slow turns but ultimately a deep and complex strategy game that needs to go deeper and more complex to be a viable successor(if they do PoN2).

Half-baked. The game only gives you half the information you ever need to get a good idea of what's going on in any given point of the game. It is meticulous and repetitive. You manage every sector of your country with no automation. Every turn is rather boring. This is nothing new for games of this genre, but imagine if every turn you had to manually manage every lousy thing most games of the sort allow you some rough automation for while you waited for something interesting to happen. Even then the turns where interesting things ARE happening are weighed down by those same repetitive and meticulous tasks that you NEED to do to keep your country up and running. It's not hard to do any of this, mind you. It's just boring.

2021 short review: This is a good game, the UI is not so bad and the flavor of the day is there! Even the somewhat lenghty turns are not so long on a good machine (per '21 standards), however it started crashing repeatdely around 20h in and upon loading another save to see if that can help "unjam" the savegame, it just wiped out clean my 20h savegame...so yeah a thumbs down as technical limits we can deal with but not with technical showstoppers. Too bad cuz it's a gem...

Great game. Way better than Victoria 2 and Victoria 3. Unfortunately the game utilises an old and archaic engine so turn processing is really really long. Its basically its only major flaw.

There are some interesting mechanics, but the interface is horrible, the turns are very slow, AI assist is almost non existent, and generally the game does a bad job at conveying what important things you should be working towards at a given time. In a world where we have both Victoria 2 and Victoria 3, this is comfortably skip-able.

Huge game. Favours the patient player. In multiplayer, you need your colleagues to stay within the spirit of the era - accept small wars that exchange provinces rather than playing total war.

I own the game, and all dlcs, it's just utter bad, bad systems, very bad turn time, very bad replayability, there is just nothing good at all about it, except that i only paid like 3e? for the whole pack back in the day, and yeah it never got performance fixed, AI is utterly braindead, it's 0 fun, a typical slitherine publishing game, over priced and low quality and absolutely horrible graphics, without any AI worth a darn