Victoria 3 update will make the Civil War harder to avoid

Paradox’s latest grand strategy game, Victoria 3, is out in the wild now, and while it’s ambitious, detailed, and beautiful to look at, it does have some problems. One of those is that the American Civil War, in which the southern slave states seceded in order to preserve their rights to own slaves, is fairly easy to avoid – you don’t really have to fight it at all. Paradox says this issue is one of several that it’s working on for its upcoming Victoria 3 patch.

In a post to the Paradox forums titled Known Bugs, the Victoria 3 team lists 19 currently tracked issues and provides temporary workarounds for them and/or a pledge to get them fixed.

“American Civil War can be easily avoided, and if it triggers, the Union may contain slave states and vice versa,” the list reads. “While civil wars and state selection for revolutionary countries are dynamically determined based on political support and radicalism, and may take different forms in different playthroughs, this particular outcome is not intended and will be addressed,” Paradox explains.

The developer says that in certain user configurations, the Paradox Launcher fails to parse the settings file, which results in language and other settings being impossible to change in the launcher. If this is happening in your setup, Paradox recommends using Windows’ Add or Remove Programs app to uninstall all instances of the Paradox launcher and then running the game again.

An issue mentioned in our Victoria 3 review is that the line on the budget balance chart, which appears when you hover the mouse over the budget figure in the top menu bar, will frequently be drawn well beyond the borders of the chart, sometimes spiking off screen. Paradox says it’s looking into this issue as well, but that in the meantime the line will gradually correct itself over in-game days.

“To sum up, these known issues are in progress and we are constantly scouting our communities for issues you raise,” the developer says. “We are doing our best to fix them in the shortest amount of time so you can enjoy your playthroughs without any concerns.”

Check out our guide to Victoria 3 cheats and console commands if you’re interested in making your campaign more unstable instead of less.