You can play as any of over 100 countries, from the heavy hitters like Great Britain and the Qing Dynasty of China, to local and regional powers like Siam or Switzerland. Most grand strategy games tend to focus on warfare and conquering as much territory as possible – "map painting," as we call it in the biz – but Victoria 3 wants to make you pay more attention to economics, internal politics, and international diplomacy. Using a system of POPs – Parts of Population – it represents all one billion people who lived on Earth in 1836, from a subsistence farmer in rural China to a loyal soldier in Prussia to a wealthy captain of industry in Pennsylvania. And from what I've seen so far, it looks more than worth the wait.While a lot of Paradox's other strategy games have come to resemble something more like a board game (Europa Universalis IV) or an RPG ( Crusader Kings 3), Victoria 3 is billing itself as a deep, less abstracted historical simulation. The franchise sits between Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron, simulating the technological leaps, ideological movements, and political shifts that shaped the modern world from the Industrial Revolution right up to the eve of World War II. Victoria 3 has become a meme and an urban legend in the strategy community over the last few years, as speculation has run rampant about when we'd get a proper sequel to 2011's Victoria 2.