Pride of Nations

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.

This game is essentially the ancestor of Paradox's Victoria series. Imagine playing those games, but turn-based and far more limited. Compared to modern games, it leaves much to be desired, especially due to the thing only using one out of your multi-core CPUs. But if you enjoy a slower pace and don’t mind waiting between turns, this is definitely the game for you. Personally, it’s nostalgic for me. This was my first real “PC gaming” experience, and it practically inspired the career path I’m pursuing in international relations. So yes, I recommend it, especially if you’re really interested in that time period. Oh, and if you are into modifying the game files, you can adjust them so that recruitment and building times are faster by editing the number of days required in their respective files