Better control a nation that has a good steel industry. Othen than that you could also make some money by selling regular furniture. It seems that selling luxury items (lux furniture and/or lux clothes) will make your capitalists lose money, although i find this absurd (probably it has to do with the command for those items being set to "sell" which disables any purchace on your side, thus making the capitalists lose money since they have to buy them theirselves).
However the game is tiresome. Belgium looks like a nice little nation, with enough steel to be financially secure, but then it is landlocked between France and Germany. I am utilising an event for the ottoman empire which forces them to hand over Constantinople if it is captured, although i changed it since originally it had the unrealistic hand-over of the entire balcans (provided that you already controlled a part of them) whereas now it only causes them to hand over eastern Thrace. I am not keen on having the ottoman empire collapse entirely, since then there is only one nation that takes over the border, and that is Russia, which in Victoria means that you have no chance of getting it to back down from a war unless you can field massive armies.
I still am of the view that Victoria is very far away from being as good as Imperialism1, or Imperialism2. The Imperialism series were a lot more balanced, although ultimately their scope was smaller. Moreover although in theory all nations are playable in Victoria, it still is suicide to control uncivilised nations (minus Japan of course, but it becomes independent through an event). So that leaves only a handfull of nations apart from the european ones, and even less if one takes into account the german and italian unifications. In Europe the only playable nations are Greece, Prussia, Austria, Two sicilies, Piemonte-Sardinia, Spain, Portugal, France, Denmark, Sweden, Russia (well, it must be boring), Britain (boring as well i trust), Ottoman Empire and Netherlands. Possibly Bavaria too, although im not sure if it can stay out of war with Prussia, and finally i am not sure if the Papal states have any chance of unifying Italy.
Apart from them there are some latin-american nations, and then the Usa and Japan. That is not that great a number of playable nations afterall
I could also add Serbia and the Hegemonies (Wallachia and Moldavia) but they start as Ottoman vassals and most probably will remain such for eternity; even waiting until the ottomans are at war with Russia can take ages.
Also i was quite surprised that Bulgaria has as its core provinces those it got to control in the end of the first balcan war. If it was so then Greece should also have Vlore as a core province, since it controlled it for a short while, but was forced to give it away due to Austrian/Italian pressure, which resulted in the creation of Albania. Overall the twenty-five provinces of the Greek core could have been a bit more; Izmir (Smyrna) and some other ones in coastal anatolia could be added, and also Varna and Burgaz could have formed Eastern Rumelia, which had been briefly a protectorate nation, before it was annexed by Bulgaria.
In the edited ottoman collapse event the ottomans are forced (if Constantinople is under greek control) to give Konstantinye, Edirne and Vlore, with the two other albanian provinces forming Albania as an independant nation, and Greece getting claims in Izmir and some other surrounding provinces.
I think that i will try the byzantine mod for Victoria, since there you have a real shot at making a huge nation in the region, although effectively it still is pretty much the same as the ottomans. However at least it allows for more interesting wars with Persia, and another block of alliance (with Russia).
Of course, I got a leader some months after I had annexed them...
) later on i realised just how boring it is to go to war with nations that have endless numbers of provinces... In that respect probably Eu1 and Eu2 were better; there was a reasonable number of provinces and not this hyberbole of Victoria (Germany/Prussia has some 50 provinces i think!).
