There was a post about this a few months ago but I think the issue needs to be raised again: the criteria for speed running this game are neither interesting nor indicative of a players skill. The westernize category is essentially a waiting game, and the "reach the end screen" category doesnt even mean you "beat" the game. It means that players just play a country at war and annex themselves or, as the meta has shifted recently, just quit the game.

Honestly I love Victoria 2 for its sandboxy quality; there is a high skill cap, there are so many cool things to do and no real set way to win. One idea that presented in the last thread was the unify germany category. This would be a superb addition, any person whose played the game for a bit can unify germany but it would be really cool to see people do it really efficiently. Other cool runs for vanilla could be form poland-lithuania from kracow or form india. Non nation formations could include reach 10,000 industry or 5000 prestige.

Also, If you follow the victoria 2 community at all, vanilla is not exactly hot. People are overwhelmingly playing the historical flavor mod, and there could be special categories for this mod as well.

(I dont know how difficult it is to add categories as a mod but id be happy to do so if i were a mod)

I would def support HFM categories. Other potential categories could be "conquer all of africa" or "own london as nation besides the UK" or. I think this has the potential to be a game of many, many categories, which could make for some fun strats!

If we stick to the base game, I do think that a World Conquest % would be theoretically possible, if possibly taking hundreds of hours to complete. I think so far people have pulled of WC as Greece and the UK.

the own london one sounds really cool like the player would probably have to go for the release nation casus belli a bunch of times to remove britains colonies until the dismantle nation casus belli comes up which would take the down to a few remaining states and you could conquer SE england. Thats a really rad idea kudos dude.

I think a world conquest would be really tricky to get enough jingoism to even make wargoal justifications unless you played without heart of darkness and ahd.

Yeah I agree, we do need more categories. Form Germany (or other nation) seems like a good one.

I know this was like 2 months ago at this point but there does need to be more categories. Adding categories isn't really that difficult tbh, it would just be a matter of actually doing it, especially if we work our way up to having more categories with starting with a unify germany one. If we become desperate we could create a pseudo-leader board in the forums until something else happens haha.

And about changing from time to in game date like the other paradox games? Or would be too much trouble at this point?

I'm not sold on IGT, honestly. It's a grand strategy game, so yes, you should be able to pause and plan things out perfectly. On the other, it's been much more challenging for me to form Germany as fast as physically possible than going by IGT. Even still, RTA in its current form does seem to favor players with faster computers rather than those who play well. No offense meant here Rat, your Western% run was solid - just making an overall observation since I've seem to benefited from this myself. IGT could definitely be its own category but RTA should be maintained. If I were to impose anything new I'd say RTA should be limited to ingame speed 4 (since 5 is as fast as your machine can handle and 4 is still limited by the game). No clue what to do about the existing runs - speaking for myself, I'd be happy to redo mine on speed 4.

No ofence at all! My name is rat for that exact reason! Kkk

I agree whit your acessament. RTA stays to test the ability under pressure and if the player slows down the speed will do it at the cost of the RTA. And a new category for the IGT.

Hello! I just found this page and considered attempting a speedrun of my own. However I must concur with fruitjuiceman that any RTA run should be limited to speed 4, and in fact I don't see any way that RTA runs can be in any way fair as long as speed 5 is allowed. Since speed 5 is as fast as your computer can run, it will always give a ridiculously unfair advantage to those with more powerful computers, to the extent that I suspect that computer power will be the single most deciding factor in runs once they get more optimized.

With speed 4 you at least have a hard cap for how much computer power is going to benefit you. Slower computers might still have a disadvantage in longer runs since the amount of lag tends to increase the longer into a game you play, but at least it won't be quite as extreme as with speed 5.

I would go so far as to say that RTA runs are rather pointless in a competitive setting as long as speed 5 is allowed. IGT runs would of course be unaffected by this so I would definitely support introducing such a category.