Build wood-iron-tools and grow construction to build more. Repeat until you run out of people. Conquer more people. Keep doing that until you can do whatever you want.

EDIT: And destroy fucking Great Britain the first chance you get.

A lot of people gave you some general purpose tips and tricks. What with the main conceit of Victoria 3 being 'you want to deficit spend slightly, borrowing from your population and raising taxes as much as they can take so that you can build the future'. What I'd like to mention are some Brazil specific things since that's who you played.

Brazil starts as a slaver country with a good amount of arable land, a small population and terrible infrastructure. As always, you want to identify the state traits that give your people and country an advantage.

Brazil has good state traits for Iron and Wood production in the North, and plantation goods along the coast. The north is dominated by the Amazon Rainforest, however, which lowers construction efficiency. What this means is that it takes longer and therefore costs more money over time to develop the north. Which you'll want to avoid doing until Rubber comes into play. That will let you change the Amazon trait into something that isn't nearly as crippling.

Brazil's North and South-eastern coast is dominated by states that are good at producing sugar but have bad infrastructure, either from legacy industries, plantations or low population. Very few Brazilian states have inherently good infrastructure from river systems, which leaves São Paulo and the Southern States as your initial frontier for development.

São Paulo is good for coffeeculture and the South is good for agriculture in general, while also having some paltry but at least existent supplies of Coal. Minas Gerais, your central state, has some Gold and Iron. Brazil is poor in mineral resources in general. As a result, the question you have to answer in the early game is: do you focus on an industrial revolution or the plantation economy? Plantations, at least to start with, don't require inputs other than labour. But on the other hand, Brazil does have flavoured companies that focus on Wood+Paper (Kablin) and Coal+Iron+Steel (Ipanema).

This question is less of a no-brainer than it seems. Agricultural and Wood development is cheap and takes a short amount of time to set up. Mines and factories are expensive due to the amount of time it takes to get them running. Brazil's relatively small population means that focusing on resource exports of Wood, Coffee and Sugar is a valid strategy.

Your early game priority is to either liberalize Citizenship Laws (attain Cultural Exclusion) and/or enact Open Borders. This is because under Migration Controls foreign pops will only move into your country if they have a (sans Religion) acceptance of 60. Cultural Exclusion gives you access to European migrants. Multiculturalism will eventually give you access to all of the world's migrants.

I won't spoil the Journal entries. Just know that if you succeed in preserving the Monarchy you'll get a ruler that has a pro-Multiculturalism ideology in the form of Empress Isabel. Just don't sweat about it. The most most important entry is about the Brazilian Nation, which turns the regional cultures into Brazilian. If you complete that but goes Republican or even Communist, then its hardly a failed run.

Do not listen to any of these cowards. Play as Indian Territories and declare independence day 1 and learn to love suffering.

If anyone has a good video for learning it, please link it here, I want to give Vic 3 a try soon too.

Also thanks for the help with Stellaris on the previous gaming thread op, I've been having a blast with the game, I'll problably post on the current thread there about my communist empire of ex-slaves jellyfish people.

Start as a simple and more neutral nation, like Spain, Portugal, Japan, Sweden, etc. Some place that lets you really sit there and focus on nation building thats strong enough to ward off the great powers and won't generally need to participate in wars unless you feel like fucking around. Learn how to build up an industrial base alongside balancing construction capacity, i.e building lumber camps, tool factories, construction camps, iron mines, balancing a transition from wood tools to iron tools, etc. without going over the national income by too much. Basically use your national treasury as a sort of storage depot to be deplete at a slow steady rate when building shit as a nation but when it's not being used or you shut off construction the bank number goes up again and the capitalist class slowly builds shit too with their own funds. Balance between building stuff as a nation and letting the capitalists build shit.

if you can work a diplomatic deal with the great powers to build shit in your own borders, get it. try to include granting monopolies to companies that build valuable commodities. (pro tip, before you negotiate a deal for granting a monopoly for a commodity, i.e clothes, nationalize - if you're able - the entire industry to be monopolized so you can let the great powers buy up your now-nationally owned factories to maximize production of valuable commodities) This will supplement your own construction industry. it also helps setting exports for over-produced goods to be non-tariffed and imports for in-demand goods to mild tariffed to try and gain a greater market share of the overproduced commodity in the world market while discouraging other nations from gaining world market dominance while you build up production centers to fill in your local demand.

research. race for rail. Rail will let your industry bloom beyond its natural limitations of the province. try to focus on building industrial hubs on large population centers and locally produced goods. example: In China, shanxi has iron, coal, sulpher if i remember, and enough wood, and a few million people. building here a few tool factories, lumber camps, and iron mines lets you build a basic base to jump from wood tools, to iron tools, to steel tools as soon as the tech comes in, to building engines when rail comes in, to becoming an industrial powerhouse due to the location having just a great amount of primary resources to exploit to build up heavy industries and support the growth of light industries. a good China play involves luck getting the british to fuck off, racing for industrialization, then utilizing Shanxi and other provinces to build an industrial base, then conqueroring the world through economic overproduction

I spent exactly HALF of all my gaming hours last year in a completely futile attempt at learning how to play Victoria 3. I wanted so badly to enjoy that game, but I never once succeeded and just cut my losses and gave up.

I hope you fare better than I did.

the best way to play paradox games is to not play them. incredible waste of time and CPU lifespan. the gamer to hater pipeline is real.

i really only learned the intricacies of the game by doing a U.S. run because it's basically impossible to crater your economy. you have every resource and such advanced laws at the start and dealing with the South seemed scary at first (i did an early civil war and they just spawned massive amounts of troops). but then I realized it was easy to keep things calm and just only build industry in the north until you are looking at a civil war that lasts 1 month.

it gives you some margins to play around. you are powerful but not unstoppable. safe from direct great power meddling but you still have to build your own military and navy up from being very tiny. but the cash flow will stay constant.

it's a bit icky to do Manifest destiny stuff but you can actually play around and just not do it. you will still be powerful even if you just go "meh" and stop expanding and colonizing and just build up a sort of free trade alliance with nations that break free of their colonial masters and the little landlocked indigenous protectorates.

also i just build up in the best resource states, like focus everything in them until they are full and rich and move onto the next. Brazil is challenging because it's in a similar situation to the U.S. but without any of the advantages

just focus on the construction related industries and let your capitalists take care of everything else. as the state, you want the Commanding Heights of the economy, so build build build mines, lumber mills, tool factories and keep that stuff cheap. and universities when you can afford it. and don't worry about running a deficit

i really want to play ahistorically. and it's very difficult to get the U.S. socialist for some reason.

also i didn't know there was a new update coming this is the first i have heard of it

At the start build construction sectors until you have a slight deficit, otherwise focus on building industry to supply the construction sector(wood, tools, iron etc), let the private sector handle pop needs. When you have built up your construction industry to the point where the supply is satisfied and you cant handle more construction sectors financially, build industries to satisfy domestic demand, check your market for that, at the start it will most likely be furniture and clothes. Literacy is very important, make sure to use the "promote social mobilty" decree, to help with increasing it. Avoid burocracy deficits, avoid stockpiling gold, dont worry about authority deficits, if you are smaller than a major power avoid debt, always try to reduce the power of landowners. For a starting nation i recommend argentina, you have all the natural resources you need and you shouldnt be in the scopes of any great powers.

I’ve had some successful games starting as Colombia. Sweden and Belgium are supposed to be good for players who are learning, but I could only stomach playing as Belgium once.