Congratulations to Victoria 3 players on causing 860,000,000,000,000,000 deaths by famine in a single year, enough to depopulate Earth 107,000,000 times

Every great leader knows it: you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Sometimes you have to do bad things in order to achieve good things. Sometimes you have to spill a little blood. Sometimes you have to, let's see here, kill 806 quadrillion people via famine in the space of a single year. Well okay then!

This and other vital lessons come courtesy of Victoria 3, which is celebrating its third birthday with a few statistics, as has become fashionable. Turns out players are either incredibly bad farmers or incredibly efficient murderers, because in the last 12 months they've starved enough people to death to denude real-life Earth of humans 107 million times over.

But it was all worth it, because in the same timespan our plucky players managed to create anarchist Prussia 1,476 times, which is surely deeply distressing if you're Otto von Bismarck and deeply heartening if you are Gustav Landauer. Also, if you are either of those people, welcome back.

All this was accomplished in a total of 440,377,653 hours of play, which equals out to about 1.1 billion deaths an hour if my maths is right. So well done. Well done on that. You must get up very early in the morning.

I am a little dismayed by players' most-common governments, mind you. Vicky 3 provides you ample room to get incredibly weird with your state structures, but the stats say people just can't get enough of their presidential democracies, with 61 million of them coalescing in the last 12 months of play. Treat yourself, folks: try a Soviet Republic or Bhutanese Diarchy some time.

Finally, I'm at least a little surprised by the most-played nations. I'd expected the charts to be dominated by humdrum anglophone states. Especially the UK, given it was the dominant power of the era. But no, China has been players' most popular pick with 3.4 million playthroughs happening in the Middle Kingdom over the last year. Then it's Japan, the USA, Russia, and Prussia (thus all the anarchism, you see).

Anyway, I should apologise. At least some of those famine deaths were probably down to my ill-thought-out tariff policies. I really thought it was a good idea at the time.