Here are some help before starting the game.
Picking your Home Nation[]
Which nation you choose to call home in Victory Belles has 5 effects on your player experience:
- A limited roster of belles you can choose from to pick your starter Belle
- A discount on vesture costs for rescuing Belles that are from your home nation's navy
- Access to your nation's specific quests
- Potential limitations on which alliances you can fight for during Wars
- Final selection of which nation you fight for during Wars
#1 is probably the least important factor from a player experience perspective. Every nation’s roster of starter belles are some of the easiest belles to get vestures for in the game. The kickstarter Belles can also be selected for your starter, which I do not recommend. Those can’t be grinded in game, but they are always given to the players who backed VB on kickstarter regardless of which nation they choose. You do not have to be Italian to get Pola if you backed the appropriate Kickstarter tier, and if you don’t choose one of the default starters you are basically giving up a free belle.
#2 is almost certainly the easiest to understand the implications of. We don’t know how big the discount is exactly (10% is thrown around in playtesting circles), but even if it was just 5% that is going to make a big difference in regarding how quickly a player can get the more powerful classes of belles (think capital ships like battleships and aircraft carriers) as those classes can demand hundreds of vestures to summon.
#3 is a bit harder to understand. The game gives you daily and weekly quests that you can complete to get rewards. These will largely be in-game resources (including a small amount of prestige), but you can also get diplomatic points, vestures, and even pieces of equipment. The kinds of diplomatic points, vestures, and equipment you receive will be themed based on the source of the quest. Every player receives quests from the League of Nations, the alliance they fight for during that month, and their home nation. Therefore your nation of choice will increase your chance of receiving your home nation’s vestures, diplomatic points, and equipment as quest rewards
#4 and #5 are related concepts. As players play the game and complete quests, they generate war score for both the nation they chose as their home nation and the alliance they are fighting for that month. This contributes to the total war score of the nation and alliance respectively, with there being a ranking at the end of each month for the leading nation and alliance. There is also a leaderboard within each alliance and nation that ranks players based on their war score, along with one for the entire League of Nations. At the end of each month, rewards are distributed to players based on their final war placement on those leaderboards. Like with #3, these rewards are themed to the alliance and nation respectively. We know for sure that the leaderboard rewards do scale with how high of a leaderboard placement you get. Therefore your nation choice may impact which nation/alliance leaderboard rewards you get as well as how easy it is to get to the top of the leaderboard. Update: According to the launch Q&A, players will be able to change the fate of the various nations by choosing between war plans. The combined score of your nation compared to the others will have an additional impact on those war plan decisions. Therefore, it also makes sense to pick a nation you want to do well or influence in the VB world.
Side Note: The 3 Alliances in the game are the Axis, Allies, and Comintern. The UK, France, Poland, Germany, Spain, and the USSR all start in an alliance but the captains from neutral nations can choose their preferred alliance for each month of war progress.
Final Recommendation: Player Preference
Points #3-5 have been in serious flux over the course of the beta, but your nation choice will probably have a negligible impact on your play experience in these areas. Point #2 is the most tangible bonus, but the devs haven't really given us a firm set of guidelines on what future belles are going to be based on. For example, we don't know how the French are going to be handled past 1940 considering their warship production seriously fell off after their historical surrender. So I recommend picking whichever nation you want to RP as being a member of, the one that has your favorite ww2 ship in it, the country you want to do the best in VB, or the country you think is the least popular to make war leaderboard placement easier.
Remember that you can make a guest account to play around before you make a final choice!
In-game tutorial[]
YouTube video from BCS showing the entirety of the in-game tutorial
FAQ[]
A list of Frenquently Asked Questions is available here.