I’ve always had a soft spot for Paradox’s Victoria series. Over the last decade I’ve sunk an embarrassing number of hours into turning minor powers into industrial giants, lifting those tiny (and now nicely animated) people into better lives, rushing for Johore because of course you rush for Johore, and generally seeing how far I could bend the XIXth century. As you probably guessed, those games are a major inspiration for Uncharted Sectors.

What Victoria does exceptionally well is make the economy feel alive. You build things that actually feed other things, pops respond to what you produce, standards of living climb, and you get that very satisfying “the graph is going up because I made good choices” moment. It’s a great loop because the parts of society depend on one another, and the game actually shows you that.

But there’s a built-in limitation to that formula. In most runs you gravitate toward the same path: secure iron, coal, wood, gold, rubber, oil; pump out steel and tools; grab the good states; get more people; research the obvious techs; and eventually let the AI do the heavy industrial lifting because pops can do it faster than you. Whether you start as a European power or something smaller, you end up playing variations of the same industrialization story.

That big limitation is, in my opinion, unavoidable. It’s baked into the pitch itself. You’re playing an industrializing nation during the industrialization era in a historical game. The whole game engine revolves around that, as it should. There is no way to make “the march of progress” not railroaded (pun very much intended). You can get to automobiles first, you can be richer than the others, you can optimize better, but you’re still playing off the same screenplay.

A science-fiction setting breaks those constraints. We can keep the part that’s fun (inputs becoming outputs, populations reacting, standards of living changing) but we’re not required to have only one “correct” way to power cities, feed people, move goods, or entertain a growing population. Who’s to say that, in your sector, people will prefer canned food over homegrown vegetables? You can build your economy as you like it; you can influence your people to live the way you’d like.

And that’s one of the key directions for Uncharted Sectors' economic system: keep the Victoria feeling of a society that actually breathes when you touch the economy, but put it in a place where progress isn’t one staircase everybody climbs at the same speed. The graph will still go up, but now you get to decide what the graph is about.