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Hello Victorians,
Im Lino, Game Design Lead on Victoria 3 and I welcome you all to another Dev Diary and wish you a happy Thursday!
Today were looking at some Military changes that are arriving with the free 1.9 Update, coming to you on June 17, the same day our Mechanics Pack Charters of Commerce releases.
Before we begin: As always, any values, texts, designs, graphics etc. are work in progress and are subject to change!
So, obviously warfare has some issues, which we want to address. To repeat what we have stated before: The ambition for 1.9 is not to majorly expand on warfare, but rather to fix the most egregious persistent issues.
The main areas we had identified before embarking on this quest to improve warfare were:
[olist]
Good day Victorians! After all the reveals today with Expansion Pass 2, we have one last thing... Victoria 3 and selected content is on sale starting today, with discounts of up to 70% off! Check out the discount's below! Build a Grand Tomorrow in Victoria 3 https://store.steampowered.com/app/529340/Victoria_3/ Expand your Sphere of Influence https://store.steampowered.com/app/2411231/Victoria_3_Sphere_of_Influence/ Try to keep the princely states in check as the East India Company! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3174360/Victoria_3_Pivot_of_Empire/ Or, complete your collection with the Ultimate Bundle! https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/51430/Victoria_3_Ultimate_Bundle/ With more content also on sale, so check out the full Victoria 3 catalog!
Happy Monday Victorians!
The time has come! Last week we announced Expansion Pass 2 (well, showed you the logo and a blurry square), thank you for the huge amount of responses, discussion, hype and speculation about what is in the Pass!
Speaking of speculation, we saw a lot of it for different countries based on the logos in the Expansion Pass, for example: Albania, Spain, Russia, Austria and everywhere across the globe! Some people thought the barrel was for brewing, the flag for flag customization and many, many more interesting ideas. Thank you for them all, we had a lot of fun following your discussions!
But today, we shall give you a quick tour of the Expansion Pass: first of all a proper visit to our first upcoming release and the barrel in the Expansion Pass 2 logo! Ladies and gentlemen, we are proud to announce Charters of Commerce!
Happy Thursday and welcome back! After an extended hiatus, we are now returning to regularly scheduled development diaries, the first of which you are reading right at this moment. Todays development diary is going to be a pretty hefty one, focusing on the complete overhaul of trade that is coming in the 1.9 free update. Before we start, I want to remind you of the usual caveat that this is a feature in development, so expect some rough-looking interfaces and for all implementation details and balancing to not yet be fully figured out.
We have mentioned on a number of occasions that we are not happy with the way trade works in Victoria 3. It is unreliable, overly fiddly, and inherently inefficient since the introduction of Local Prices and Market Access Price Impact in 1.5. Establishing any kind of long-term trade relationship with another country is almost impossible due to the constantly shifting market conditions, and on top of all this the system exists in a confusing limbo where all trade routes are established and paid for by the government (via convoys) while the profits usually go into the pockets of private owners. Many of these issues are inherent to the way trade routes work, and as such arent easily fixable within the confines of the current system - there really isnt a way to create a reliably profitable trade route with another market when you have no control of the price of the traded good in the other market.
For this reason, we have decided to start over from scratch. The old system is completely gone, and in its place we will have not one but two new systems - one which simulates private, autonomous, profit-driven trade, and another which handles strategic trade deals between nations. Today were going to talk only about the former, so while reading all of this, bear in mind that youre only seeing one half of the coin. Direct trade deals between governments will very much still exist in 1.9, they just wont be tied into Trade Centers and private profits. But enough with the caveats, lets get to the point.
Hey! We have some good news to share with you! As we are preparing everything for Victoria 3: Expansion Pass 2 (yes, youve read this right!), its about time to do some Spring clean-up and reorganize the Victoria 3 portfolio to make it truly evergreen. In this way we want to lower the entry threshold for new players, while rewarding the seasoned veterans by making it easier for them to complete their collection. Here are the new packages we are going to introduce:
Happy Thursday and welcome back to a brand new year! I hope youve all had a nice holiday and a good start to 2025. As I mentioned in the last dev diary, this one is going to be a brief retrospective on the year thats passed and the updates and DLC that we released in that year. Ill share my thoughts on what I think we did well, and where we want to improve going forward. I will go over each of the major releases in turn, followed by a summary of my overall thoughts for the whole year.
Our first release of 2024 was Update 1.6 back in March, and I consider it our low point of the year. While the update itself contained a lot of nice improvements, it was released in a pretty rough shape and also (contrary to our expectations at the time) had worse overall performance for a majority of users. This felt, in all honesty, more than a little embarrassing to me since I had stated improved performance to be one of our goals with the update.
The reason this happened is simply that, even though we had made a plethora of performance improvements, other changes (principally AI improvements and changes to migration) degraded performance more than these improvements could make up for. What this made us realize is that our internal tools for monitoring performance were simply inadequate to the task, and our Tech Lead spent a considerable amount of time expanding and improving on something we call The Performance Dashboard, which now monitors not just overall performance but also provides a plethora of useful breakdowns.
As an example of new functionality added to the dashboard, the new tools contain a heatmap of the most performance-intensive parts of the game (such as updating pop growth and adjusting trade volumes) with a 2-week history that lets us immediately spot if a change to a particular part of the game causes it to become slower so that we can take immediate action. All of this, alongside some extra allocation of programming resources, allowed us to release both updates 1.7 and 1.8 (as always, on average - individual hardware variation unfortunately means performance improvements are never going to be universal) with significant performance improvements despite all the new features those updates introduced.
In addition to general performance monitoring, the Performance Dashboard also tracks more specific data such as the slowest events, which lets us quickly spot when suboptimally written triggers start to impact overall performance. Its worth noting that something being yellow or red here isnt inherently bad - its okay for a complex event to use up more computing power so long as it all adds up to a reasonable level.
However, Im getting a little bit ahead of myself now. Returning to update 1.6, it of course wasnt all bad. On the good side, the update ended up being dubbed The UX Update as it contained a lot of UX improvements, ranging from simple quality of life changes to more significant changes such as formation map marker consolidation and the addition of a proper migration map mode. The most significant and well received new UX feature was probably the Pop Census Panel, which allows you to truly dig down into the nitty-gritty details of your population. The Trains Bonus Pack free DLC we released alongside 1.6 of course also merits a mention, as honestly, who doesnt like free trains?
If 1.6 was our low point of 2024, then Update 1.7 and Sphere of Influence, released in June, was definitely the high point! Both the expansion and the update itself performed extremely well, and were very positively received by the community. In particular I want to mention the Building Ownership Rework, a massive months-long effort to create more complex relationships between Buildings, Pops and Countries. There was some internal debate about whether we should really spend so much of our available development time overhauling the economic core of the game for a diplomacy-oriented expansion, but doing so is what allowed us to implement Foreign Investment as a natural extension of the building construction and autonomous investment systems instead of making it a tacked-on mechanic, and I consider it well worth the time spent.
Power Blocs is another interesting 1.7/Sphere of Influence addition to mention in relation to its community reception. During their initial conception, Power Blocs were intended to be a broader feature that could capture a variety of transnational agreements, but in actual implementation it suffered from this approach of trying to do a little bit of everything and ended up quite underwhelming. Following feedback from QA and beta testers, we refocused the feature into one focusing almost entirely on imperialist projects. This decision is something that we received some criticism and pushback about in the Power Bloc dev diaries, as some in the community felt the feature was now too narrowly focused (though I know at least a few people who came around to it after the update was released). Ultimately I believe we made the right call, as Id rather we add a feature which does a few things but does them well rather than one which stretches itself thin and just ends up underwhelming.
Something that was more on the mixed side of things was the Great Game Objective. While the objective itself seemed pretty well received, and we saw a very noticeable increase in the number of playthroughs of the countries involved with it, there was (and still is) a perception that playing without the objective locks you out of the content added for those countries. I can only attribute this to poor communication on our part, and that we need to more clearly indicate exactly how objectives change the experience, and the fact that they do not lock away country-specific flavor JEs when not enabled.
The last thing I want to mention for 1.7 is the AI, as its an area of the game that was significantly improved in the update, especially on the diplomatic side. The catalyst system and the way it explicitly informs you when and why an AI changes their diplomatic stance towards you is something I am personally very happy with, and is a model for how I want to continue to improve the Victoria 3 AI going forward. I want the AI of Victoria 3 to be both an interesting opponent and an interesting ally, self-interested but largely rational, and for players to be able to understand why it makes the decisions it makes even if its not the decisions the player themselves would make. This is an approach which necessitates the kind of transparency offered by the catalyst system as opposed to the opaque black box of hidden dice rolls which preceded it. We of course still have a lot of work to do here, and improving the AI isnt something that is ever really going to be finished, so the main takeaway here is really that we dont just want to make the AI smarter or better at challenging the player, we also want to make it make more sense.
Finally then, we have reached Update 1.8 and Pivot of Empire, the final release for 2024. As I recently posted a dev diary on my thoughts for that specific update, I wont go too much into detail, but I do want to mention that we have taken a further look at the balance of the India content (particularly the Unstable Raj JE, where we have looked at telemetry for completion rates across the playerbase and found them significantly lower than intended) and concluded that some further balancing is needed from us in 1.9. Specifically, we want to adjust its difficulty level while also improving rewards for completing it successfully, but also look into making failing the JE less of a game-ruining state.
I also want to reiterate that one of the major learnings we have made from 1.8/Pivot of Empire is that we need to focus more on the why of Journal Entries when designing them in the future. That is, why do you want to pursue and complete a Journal Entry - what player fantasy is it fulfilling, what playstyle is it supporting, what rewards does it offer - and to communicate those whys to the player. The reaction of the player to completing a complex and challenging Journal Entry should never be huh, thats it? when presented with the conclusion and rewards.
On a more positive note, something we expected to be positively received but which turned out to be extremely well liked was state/hub renaming. We were already planning to continuously add more renaming functionality to the game, and the massive amount of positive feedback weve gotten has only strengthened that ambition.
Lastly in regards to 1.8/Pivot of Empire I want to mention which came as something of a surprise to us was the strong negative reaction to the lack of an Expansion Pass for Pivot of Empire. Again this is something weve already talked about, but I do want to mention that there will absolutely be more expansion passes going forward. The reason we didnt do so already is that weve found that Expansion Passes work best for us (in terms of being able to plan and deliver high quality releases) when they start off with a major expansion, rather than ending with one, so that is what well be doing going forward.
To conclude this dev diary, I want to share an internal phrase thats been going around: 2024 is the year that Victoria 3 hit its stride. Its no secret that the game had its issues at launch and that we made some mistakes in the initial post-release period, but from update 1.5 onwards, and particularly after 1.7/Sphere of Influence, weve seen excellent playerbase growth and greatly improved community sentiment. In summary, 2024 was a very good year for Victoria 3, and Im very excited to continue building on these successes to add depth, flavor, and excessively in-depth socioeconomic simulation mechanics to this very special game series that is quite unlike anything else I have ever worked on.
Thats all for today! With update 1.9 some time away, were now going to take a bit of an extended break to focus solely on the development end of things. Expect us to return sometime early spring with details on the Trade Rework, Frontline Improvements and so much more. See you then!
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Double Happy Thursday! As is customary after each major update, today well be returning to the future update plans, which we last went over in Dev Diary #124. Just like the previous times, well be going over what changes and improvements we have planned for the game in future free updates such as 1.9, 1.10 and beyond.
Once again we will be talking about the same key four improvement areas of Military, Historical Immersion, Diplomacy, Internal Politics as well as Other for anything that falls outside those four categories.
Just as before, Ill also be aiming to give you an updated overview of where we stand and where were heading by going through each of these four categories and marking on each one with one of the below statuses:
Good Day Victorians! Hotfix 1.8.6, is now live, this hotfix was previously called 1.8.5 when talked about however we also released an opt in beta patch addressing the assimilation and occupation issues - that has been rolled in to this patch somewhat alongside other fixes, balancing and improvements! Check out the full patchnotes below! Checksum is `9358`. We wait for the next funny checksum with bated breath. As always please report any bugs on our bug reporting forums! We have also updated the Known Issues post for 1.8 with fixed issues and more known issues! The following changes have been made to the game compared to 1.8.4: [hr][/hr]
Happy Thursday everyone, its time for another Victoria 3 development diary. Today Ill be talking about my thoughts on the release of 1.8 and Pivot of Empire, the feedback weve received, and also a bit of whats in store next for Victoria 3.
As some of you might remember, 1.8 was actually meant to be two updates - a smaller 1.8 with bug fixes & polish, and a larger 1.9 with Pivot of Empire and the larger free features such as the Political Movement Rework and the Discrimination Rework. We ended up combining these into a single update because the release windows between the two were just too tight, and as a result 1.8 became a chonker of an update, with a lot of potential to cause bugs and balance issues.
On the whole, the feedback around the update (and in particular the Discrimination Rework) has been positive, and you seem to be enjoying the additional dimensions that the update adds to the economic and political sides of Victoria 3. However, there are a few issues and bits of feedback on the not-so-positive-side that I specifically want to address:
Salutations Victorians! Hotfix 1.8.4, is now live! Featuring improvements for Companies, fixes for Russia and Britain being too protective of Mexico, removal of the assimilation restriction in homelands and much more!! Check out the full patchnotes below! Checksum is `1a3e`. Alas, no amusing checksum this time. As always please report any bugs on our bug reporting forums! We have also updated the Known Issues post for 1.8 with fixed issues and more known issues! The following changes have been made to the game compared to 1.8.3: [hr][/hr]
Happy Thursday everyone and welcome back to yet another Victoria 3 development diary. With update 1.8 and Pivot of Empire having released in the previous week, wed normally be doing a post-release thoughts dev diary. However, this time around we released a bit later in the week than we usually do, and so weve been wrapped up working on the larger 1.8.3 hotfix. For this reason, were going to hold off on our post-release thoughts until next week. Instead, were going to focus on what we have already fixed in 1.8.3 as well as what else is currently on our radar to address in the coming weeks. So to begin with, here are the full patch notes for 1.8.3, which should already have reached you by the time youre reading this:
Good Day Victorians! Hotfix 1.8.3, is now live! Featuring a range of fixes to migration, Journal Entries, Secessions and BIC balancing! With much more in the patchnotes below! Checksum is `b4be`. As always please report any bugs on our bug reporting forums! We have also updated the Known Issues post for 1.8 with fixed issues and more known issues! The following changes have been made to the game compared to 1.8.2: [hr][/hr]
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Upon the Autumn day, does Victoria 3 come in the Steam Autumn sale! With savings of up to 50% off, including Sphere of Influence on sale for 20% off! So, why not indulge your Victorian dreams of economic empires, societal change or just to look at trains go by? An admirable endeavour, indeed! https://store.steampowered.com/app/529340/Victoria_3/ As part of the Paradox Steam Autumn sale, you can get great deals on other Paradox titles with savings of up to 90% off!! [previewyoutube=ADoT0Bxi4s0;full][/previewyoutube] Check it out here: https://pdxint.at/PDXAutumn2024 That is not all, we have just launched the Gold & Glory bundle with Europa Universalis 4 for the base games of both game at a reduced price!
Good Day Victorians! Another quick hotfix for 1.8, targeted at the crash affecting some players, which should be compatible with 1.8 save games! Checksum is 1fc5. As always, this post is not for bug reports, please instead post them in the bug reporting forum (including a save and steps to recreate is always useful). The following changes have been made to the game compared to 1.8.1:
Salutations Victorians! From today, until November 25th, Victoria 3 is free to play on Steam. Grab a friend and try out the range of changes in the new 1.8 Update now! Look through the changelog here!
Hello Victorians! A quick and small hotfix for 1.8, which should be compatible with 1.8 save games! There is an crash for some players that we are looking into, but currently has a possible workaround of launching Steam through Administrator mode. Checksum for the hotfix is, 'affa'. As always, this post is not for bug reports, please instead post them in the bug reporting forum (including a save and steps to recreate is always useful). The following changes have been made to the game compared to 1.8.0:
Good day Victorians!
Im happy to say Pivot of Empire and the free Update 1.8, fittingly named Masala Chai, have been released! The specific checksum is 98cc.
The Pivot of Empire Immersion Pack focuses on India and its path through the Victorian age. Many countries in the region have received new Journal Entries and Events that provide a more immersive experience to you.
The free Update 1.8, on the other hand, is adding reworks of central mechanics like Political Movements and Discrimination, additions like Harvest Conditions and Food Security, as well as Improvements for Companies and Military quality of life and many many other things.
In other news: As some of you may know, we recently hired Tunay, better known as Doodlez in the community, as a Systems Designer. Before joining us, he used to work on a mod called VTM (Victoria Tweaks Mod), together with One Proud Bavarian.
We have now integrated a range of improvements from that mod into the base game and might continue to do so in the future. You will find the respective entries marked with VTM at the front.
A big thank you to OPB and every other modder that continues to make Victoria 3 better, more interesting or completely different with their mods!
As always, you can find a list of Known Issues following the link. Most of these should get addressed in subsequent hotfixes in the coming days and weeks. Keep in mind that save games from 1.7.7 are not going to be compatible with the 1.8 Update, but any hotfixes released after will not break save games from 1.8 onwards.
Now lets take a look at the full changelog or start playing right away!
Hello Victorians! Hope everyone is having a wonderful Thursday!
This is the second part of the Art of Pivot of Empire showcasing the 3D art made for the Immersion Pack. If you are interested in having a look at the 2D art aspects of the DLC, Id highly recommend having a look at Dev Diary #135!
In this Dev Diary well be covering a bunch of the Characters and related assets, Table and Table assets, Indian Building Set and Harvest Conditions Map Effects.
Hello. This is Victoria, Narrative Design Lead of Victoria 3, and today I will be covering the narrative content that will be coming in Pivot of Empire. I will also be covering some important free features which I ran out of space to write about in diary #134.
Pivot of Empire is centred around British India, its progression from the East India Company to the British Raj, and the Indian struggle for independence. It also includes a selection of narrative content for the Sikh Empire, Princely States, and the Mughal Emperor in Delhi. Owners of Pivot of Empire will be able to experience a myriad of historical and alt-historical courses, from a revived Mughal Empire to an all-encompassing Company run according to the principles of Utilitarianism.
Greetings Victorians and Happy Thursday!
This will be the first part of the Art of Pivot of Empire showcasing the 2D art made for the Immersion Pack, while part two, focusing on the 3D art, will be released in a couple of weeks. Like the previous Immersion Pack, a brand new interface skin and paper map have been lovingly crafted with a decidedly Indian flavor. Along with the new skins, we have 8 brand new event illustrations and many more icons to support the new features coming in Pivot of Empire. For both the UI reskin and the paper map, the artists have drawn inspiration from traditional Indian architecture, classical Indian paintings, and commonly used colors such as turquoise and saffron. Without further ado, lets jump straight into the first topic - the new interface skin!
Hello Victorians, sorry for the...sanguine on the images today. Don't know what could be happening there. We have a small additon today bringing a new game rule, as shown below.
Happy Friday, and welcome to our third and final Dev Diary for the Anniversary week! Before we get into the meat of the diary, we have an infographic showing the progress of free updates since release, visually shown in the look back at free updates video at the start of this week:
That entre is followed up with a delightful smattering of statistics from the game, can you see the difference in how many yellow Prussias there have been since last time?
That is all from me, Community Manager Pelly, I hope you enjoy the Dev Diary proper from Hansi and Victoria!
[hr][/hr]
Hello and happy Thursday! Welcome to the first narrative design dev diary! Today we will be going through the British Indian Caste System and Social Hierarchies, hosted by Em. But first a word from Shubham!
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Hey Everyone, my name is Shubham. I am a narrative designer and history nerd from India, and I had the pleasure of working on the upcoming Pivot of Empire immersion pack! There are a lot of cool new systems, Journal Entries, events, and art coming your way, and honestly, I am very excited by all of them. But as dev diaries cant be book-length, I will try to focus on some of the really big points.
The first and foremost is the Caste System, which is accompanied by the discrimination rework and also introduces social hierarchies. Em will get into this later, but Ill focus on the history of the subject and what we tried to capture with its implementation.
You will see that the Caste System is labeled the British Indian Caste System in the game. This is because the modern understanding of Caste, within and without India, is very much a colonial creation.
Before the Indian subcontinent was consolidated under British Colonial rule, the Hindu identity was fragmented. So, while casteism was very much practiced then, it had greater variance and malleability. It was also not legally enforced to the same extent across the nation. Partly because there was no singular power that could enforce it but partly because different places had different beliefs around its relevance. However, after colonization, in an effort to streamline administration, the British conducted a census that tried to give a fixed value to caste. As this process happened, caste became codified and simplified. It became based solely on the Varna system and no longer allowed for any change in status. The Varna system recognizes only four castes and a fifth outcaste. It also gives social roles to each tier.
The Brahmins are meant to be teachers and priests. The Kshatriyas are warriors and leaders. The Vaishyas are merchants and traders. The Shudras are peasants. The outcastes are offered no name and are simply considered untouchable. The Portuguese later used the term Dalit to describe them, and that became their caste name.
However, as understood by the British, this Varna system ignored Jati, which is also a part of caste. Jati ranges in the hundreds, if not thousands. This resulted in a rigid system that deepened social divides and made social mobility nearly impossible. A lot of effort was made to capture this complex reality in-game.
We also considered using different labels for the tiers in the caste system. As Dalits are the most oppressed by this system, we thought to make it a two-tier system consisting of Savarna and Avarna (those belonging to Varna Castes and those outside it). However, this erased the oppression faced by Shudras by other higher castes. Not to mention the role every tier of caste played in oppressing those immediately beneath them.
We wanted to capture some of the nuance and complexity of the Hindu identities in that time period, as well as the oppressive, contradictory, and self-cannibalizing nature of the caste system.
The other topic that I want to discuss is the Indian independence movement. The Indian Independence movement had many leaders and many different factions. Furthermore, nearly all of them didnt initially demand independence.
At first, as the exploitation of resources and people continued under British Raj, discontent pushed those with the privilege (money, land, education) to demand better laws and governance. Many leaders at this time were happy to let the British Empire rule so long as they were allowed to govern themselves with more dignity. It was only when these efforts repeatedly failed that the people were radicalized into starting a revolution. The game captures this through the journal entries around Home Rule and the Indian Independence.
But as you will see, many factions affect your ability to complete either Journal Entry. This is because they were not always aligned, even when various leaders agreed that independence was the only way forward. Indeed, the divisions sowed by the British and resultant from the complex history of the subcontinent made it so that factions were fighting each other just as much as they were fighting the British.
Three figures really capture this tension: Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League and the founding father of Pakistan; Mohandas Gandhi, key leader of the Indian National Congress and the founding father of India; and Periyar, founder of the self-respect movement and leader of the Dravidian movement.
Gandhi initially believed that to be truly free, India needed to return to its Hindu roots and reject all British imposition. This scared Jinnah, who thought that this line of thinking would be terrible for Indias Muslim minority. Despite being quite secular himself, Jinnah would often find himself campaigning for the needs of Muslims lest Gandhi and the rest of the INC forget about them. This often put the two parties and the two leaders at loggerheads, a matter that would eventually result in the partition.
If returning to Hindu roots upset Jinnah, it also worried people like Periyar. He had initially been part of the INC. As a low-caste man, he feared the INC leading India as most of the leadership was high-caste and often callous towards the needs of the lower-caste people. Thus, Periyar and Jinnah usually tried to negotiate, argue, and even cooperate with the British even if it weakened Gandhi and the INCs stance. To Jinnah and Periyar, it was an opportunity to be heard.
Historically, Gandhi did become more cognizant of the needs of the lower caste and Muslim people. But as he and the INC also had to earn the support of the staunch conservative Hindus, such as the Hindu Mahasabha, it was always a compromised position. If you try to build an independent India in the game, you will hopefully feel how the game pushes and pulls at you.
Okay, lastly, I want to talk about the Sikh Empire. The Sikh Empire was in a precarious position in 1836. They have the Afghans on one side and the British to the south. Their leader, Ranjit Singh, established the first Sikh Empire but with one too many heirs. When he passes away, a series of successions occur that are violent and sometimes comical. Integrating the narrative of the Sikh Empire was a lot of fun as often it felt like writing a season of Game of Thrones. I hope you have a good time going through these events, as they are as ridiculous as they are compelling.
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Hello! Im Em, one of the game designers on Victoria 3 that specializes in narrative. This is my first dev diary and Im excited to share a bit more about what to expect with 1.8 and Pivot of Empire! Today I'll primarily be walking you through a couple things weve been working on, namely Social Hierarchies, the British Indian Caste System, and a new law group associated with the Caste System.
The British Indian Caste System has been designed alongside the Cultural and Religious Acceptance Rework that Lino spoke about a few weeks back. To represent this, we're introducing mechanics for Social Hierarchies and Social Classes to the game. The British Indian Caste System is a Social Hierarchy that makes use of Social Classes in order to represent its effects.
screenshot of Social Hierarchy concept
screenshot of Social Class concept
Previously, Pops were distributed by Profession into the Lower, Middle, and Upper Strata. This was fairly rigid, and meant that the previous system couldn't enable culture or country-specific Strata. Academics could only ever be in the Middle Strata. Clerks could only ever be in the Lower Strata. Social Hierarchies are being introduced to address some of that previous one-dimensionality where the social ranking of Professions might differ in different parts of the world and allow for the implementation of the British Indian Caste System.
To understand a little better, lets take a look at what this has looked like. Here is how the distribution of Pops by Profession across Lower, Middle, and Upper Strata has appeared previously:
screenshot of overview tab in Population panel where you can see the Lower, Middle, and Upper Strata
Clerks, Laborers, Machinists, Peasants, Servicemen, and Slaves are Lower Strata. Academics, Bureaucrats, Clergymen, Engineers, Farmers, Officers, and Shopkeepers are Middle Strata. Aristocrats and Capitalists are Upper Strata.
Pops are still distributed as they have been by Profession above. But now, in the Base Hierarchy they will be distributed into the Lower, Middle, and Upper Classes:
screenshot of Classes tab in Society panel where you can see Lower Class, Middle Class, Upper Class are Social Classes and are part of a Social Hierarchy called the Base Hierarchy
Pops part of the Base Hierarchy are assigned a Social Class based on their Professions as they had been before. Every Pop has a Social Class, and that Social Class belongs to a Strata. Social Classes can be defined based on a combination of pop type, primary culture, and/or religion. Social Class information will appear in the Society panel. Social Hierarchies are intended to affect all kinds of Pops, with moddability in mind, and can be linked to a law group.
This brings us to the British Indian Caste System. Since Shubhams given a bit of the historical and cultural context, I'll dive in with what this looks like in the game!
screenshot of Classes tab in Society panel for a country that has the British Indian Caste System where Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras, and Dalits are Social Classes
The British Indian Caste System recategorizes a Pops Strata differently from the Base Hierarchy. The British Indian Caste System specifically encompasses all Pops that are Hindu and have the South Asian Heritage cultural trait. Other Pops that are not Hindu and do not have the South Asian Heritage cultural trait will default to the existing Lower, Middle, and Upper Social Classes of the Base Hierarchy.
So where is the British Indian Caste System found? How is it set? The Caste System will be set from game start on the British East India Company and the Princely States.
Otherwise, it will appear with the following criteria:
Hello Victorians, happy Tuesday! It feels odd having a happy Tuesday instead of Thursday, but we have a good reason to release two Dev Diaries this week!
This week is our Anniversary and yesterday we talked about what came in free updates since launch. As a follow up, today we have a special treat for you: the announcement and the release date of a new immersion pack, Pivot of Empire, which will come alongside Update 1.8.
Some of you may know the name of this pack from a famous quote:
India is the pivot of our Empire... If the Empire loses any other part of its Dominion we can survive, but if we lose India, the sun of our Empire will have set - Victor Bruce, Viceroy of India during the Indian Uprising.
This sets the scene for the immersion pack. Pivot of Empire is set in the Indian Subcontinent, focused on the events following the years of discrimination and suppression by the East India Company. The Indian Uprising events take us through the eventual downfall of the East India Company and rise of the British Raj.
[previewyoutube=esXmztDsGkA;full][/previewyoutube]
Within this Immersion pack you will get to experience narrative content for the East India Company, but also the other Indian Nations, Great Britain imposing its will upon such a wealthy land, and the nearby Sikh Empire trying to assert itself with such an avaricious neighbor. Regardless if you already played in this region or not, Pivot of Empire will bring a lot of unique and fresh flavor to the game
And for your easy reference of the content we have this handy dandy infographic (you can enlarge it by clicking on it!):
Now, if you have forgotten what is coming with the free Update 1.8, we also have another quick reference overview graphic too!
As you might have noticed, the Caste System Laws and updated Indian Uprising events are part of the free Update available to all players, while narrative content related to them will be added in Pivot of Empire, along with additional content related to religious tensions in the region, Indian national movements and local initiatives for independence (among other things).
We hope you enjoy our foray into the Indian Subcontinent and the surrounding interactions caused by discrimination and movements for liberation! Of course this is just the tip of an iceberg, as we are going to delve more into the details in the upcoming Dev Diaries.
Both Pivot of Empire and free Update 1.8 will be released on the 21st of November, Pivot of Empire will cost 9.99 . Check out the Steam store page for screenshots, and don't forget to wishlist this immersion pack!
Now, with that all said and the release date coming up in just about a month, we have quite a few Dev Diaries delving into the meat of Pivot of Empire. Starting this week already, with Emperatriz leading the charge on the 24th, where we look at a selection of the narrative content!
Hello and welcome to another dev diary! Im Alex and today I bring you famine, starvation, ruin and disast I mean, happy Thursday!
Back in dev diary #126 we mentioned how for 1.8 were looking at how the availability of food affects the people in your country. Up until now, if food prices were high, that would lead to Pops dropping in Wealth. As a consequence of that, Pops would become unhappy and have their birth and mortality rates change. In extreme cases they would drop below Standard of Living 5, which would mark them as Starving and make their mortality rate be higher than the birthrate, resulting in the Pops population decreasing over time.
This is fine, but it created some problems we wanted to tackle. For one, Pop Needs dont have shortages, so when the price caps out at +75%, thats it. Food is always available, it just gets expensive. Another issue is that the starving status is directly tied to what Standard of Living the Pop has, meaning that regardless of why Standard of Living drops below 5, the pop is marked as Starving. Even if food is essentially free and the actual issue is that clothes are expensive. Lastly, the effects of starvation dont scale as much as they probably should, so even at SoL 1, Pops can live on quite a while.
With all that in mind, theres three main features weve added to flesh out this aspect of the game:
Happy Thursday and welcome back to yet another Victoria 3 development diary. A few weeks ago I went over the changes were making to Political Movements in update 1.8, and promised a followup going more into how this impacts Civil Wars and particularly Secessions. As you might have guessed by the title, this is precisely what well be discussing today, along with a bit more detail on Political Movement Radicalism, where it comes from, and how it ties into Civil Wars.
As I went over in the aforementioned Dev Diary, Political Movements have a Radicalism value going from 0-100%. More specifically, this is two values: The current value and the target value, with the current value drifting towards the target value over time. The target value is calculated from a number of factors, including:
Happy Thursday Victorians!
Its me, Lino and in todays Dev Diary Im going to walk you through the upcoming changes to one of the games central society features, namely the discrimination system.
Until now, discrimination was always binary in Victoria 3. A Pop either was discriminated against or they were not. This has led to a fairly one-dimensional feature where theres not a lot of variety in what Pops can be experiencing. It also has made it hard for us to add harsh consequences to discriminated against Pops since it would have affected so many Pops around the world.
So we are taking some steps to make that more interesting. First of all, were saying goodbye to talking about discrimination. Instead, we are introducing the opposite, Acceptance.
Each Pop will have an Acceptance value between 0 and 100. This value is determined by the Pops countrys laws, in particular the Citizenship and Church & State groups which play the biggest role here. There are other laws that will have an impact, but we are going to talk about those in a later Dev Diary.
Primary cultures are clearly the points of authority when it comes to Acceptance values
As you can see, the old rules of cultural similarity still apply in the new system. Now though, instead of being immediately accepted if the culture shares a heritage trait, they will gain a high acceptance value bonus for example. This allows a broader range of acceptance, from the cultures that are facing violent hostility to the primary cultures who will always have the highest acceptance value.
The religious impact is changed to provide a bonus if a religion shares a trait with the state religion.
This brings us one step closer to the full picture, but were not quite there yet. The Acceptance value actually determines which Acceptance Status a Pop has. There are five possible Statuses, ranging from Full Acceptance to Violent Hostility, which will be used in order to apply consequences to the Pops in question.
Figure.09: WIP list of effects. This is definitely going to change - were looking at solutions to make it more readable for release.
You can see that we are not only reworking the system to fit the new vision, but are also expanding on it with new effects, besides the Acceptance value itself. From simple statistical changes like the tax burden per acceptance status to rules for who can work in government buildings or serve in your military, we have added a decent amount of new things to the laws.
Another factor that determines a Pops Acceptance value is the age of the Pops cultural community in their state. An immigrant Pop that is "fresh off the boat" will not be as accepted as that of another culture which has been there for 30 years already. No matter what your laws say, your Pops will need some time to get used to the new faces in their neighborhoodbut, eventually, the new arrivals will reach the Acceptance value which the laws have determined for them.
Have you seen the looks they gave us? By myself, I couldnt stay here, but with you by my side I know I will make it.
Of course you can still improve your Pops situation by enacting more progressive laws. These provide higher acceptance bonuses to cultures. For example Ethnostate doesnt grant any bonus to cultures that share a non-heritage cultural trait with your primary culture, but National Supremacy grants +25 acceptance if they do.
Alright, so you passed Multiculturalism, but you didnt think your Pops would immediately hug and welcome the people they were despising yesterday, did you?
Law enactments that increase a Pops Acceptance value will suffer from a penalty much the same as the newly established cultural communities, which will decay over time. This shows the establishment of these new laws quite well and delays the full effectiveness of the more progressive laws.
Another thing we are changing is conversion and assimilation (so that your Pops can escape from the undesirable lower statuses of Acceptance).
When 1.8 comes out later this year, Pops will be able to assimilate and convert to any culture or religion that would provide them with a higher acceptance value, even if it is not the primary culture or state religion. There is a minimum assimilation value difference that needs to be crossed in order for them to be eligible. For example if their current Acceptance is at 25 and the minimum assimilation value difference from the Citizenship law is defined at 50, their targets culture Acceptance would need to be 75 or higher in order for them to assimilate.
This still looks at cultures that are present in the same state, so if none of them have a value of 75 or higher, the assimilation could not happen. The assimilation process may also still be forbidden by laws, e.g. under all laws it is currently not allowed for members of the lowest status to assimilate at all. Similarly, Pops of the highest status also do not assimilate in the current setup, as they already possess enough rights and privileges to enjoy a good life.
All of these changes require a fairly substantial rework of our interface. A lot is currently still in development and is coming in pieces, so you will have to discover it on your own, but I still wanted to provide you with a faint idea of whats coming.
The Cultures panel has been renamed to Society, which fits better since it also includes Statuses and Religion. The acceptance statuses are listed in a new tab, providing an overview of what percentage of Pops falls under which status and who exactly that is.
WIP interface showing the breakdown of acceptance statuses in your country
In the end, we hope this feature rework will enhance your experience with regards to managing your Pops and that it will show much more variety in the Pops lives. Especially on the lower end of the spectrum, you should see a lot more consequences, as sad as that is.
This rework is an important step for us, since we can make better use of this system in future narrative content too, and we also have some ideas for future mechanical changes that require this rework as a foundation.
Thats all for today. Next week, on October 3, Im handing it back to Martin again, who will provide some more information on what were doing with civil wars. That should be an interesting one, be sure to check it out!
Happy Thursday and welcome back to another Victoria 3 development diary. This week Ill be talking about the Political Movement Rework I mentioned back in Dev Diary #126 and which will be coming to you with update 1.8, slated to release later in the year. Before I start, I want to reiterate that this feature is still very much under active development, and any screenshots or numbers shown are very much not indicative of what will be in the actual release, and the UX in particular will be in a very rough state, so dont read too much into it!
Right then. As I stated previously, the principal goal of this rework is to change Political Movements from temporary demands into long-term ideological forces that can shape the political landscape of your country. So what does that mean, in practice? Well, one of the most significant differences is that movements are no longer formed around the enactment or preservation of a single law. Instead, there is a wide variety of movement types, each with its own unique agenda and conditions for forming, but which can be broadly broken down into three categories:
Ideological Movements: These are movements that exist to push a particular ideological agenda and try to win support for that agenda among your Pops and Interest Groups. Examples include both more narrowly focused movements such as Abolitionists and Suffragettes, and broader ones such as Communists and National Liberals.
Cultural Movements: These are movements that exist to agitate for the rights and privileges of a particular culture in a country. Their specific agenda will vary based on whether the culture is a primary culture or minority culture, as well as the legal status of that culture in the country. For example, a cultural minority movement of South Italians in North Italy would oppose the enactment of Ethnostate since it would strip them of their rights, but that doesnt necessarily mean theyre willing to extend those rights to other, less accepted cultures in the country.
Religious Movements: Similar to the cultural movements, but for religions instead
The Pro-Slavery Movement in the United States is largely composed of Dixie pops and has wide-reaching influence in multiple Interest Groups
As before, Movements have Support and Radicalism. Previously, both of these numbers could be a little fuzzy in exactly what they represented, so we have changed them into straight percentages between 0 and 100%, where 50% Support now actually means that about half of your country stands behind the movement.
Support is currently calculated from two parts of roughly equal importance: Popular Support and Military Support. The former is a straightforward calculation of the number of individuals in your country that are part of the movement, so in a country of 1 million people, a movement backed by 100k individuals would have a Popular Support of 10%. Military Support is a little more complex, and is currently calculated by the fraction of Soldier and Officer Political Strength that are part of the movement, representing the fact that officers tend to have a greater sway on military side-taking than mere enlisted men. We are also looking into ways to tie generals directly into movements and have this impact their Military Support. All of this plays an important role if a movement escalates into a Civil War, but more on that later.
So, how do movements gain the support of Pops? Very much like Interest Groups, they now have an attraction weight, which depends completely on the type of nature of the movement. The Abolitionist movement, for instance, might have an outsized attraction on literate pops of certain professions, but also would tend to attract more pops from religions whose scripture and traditions take an anti-slavery stance than from ones which tacitly or overtly approve of it.
This attraction weight competes with the attraction weight of all other movements in your country, as individuals can only be part of a single movement at a time. To ensure that this doesnt mean you end up with 20 tiny and fragmented movements, we are planning to have a system of initial enthusiasm, where new movements start with a boost to their attraction which fades over time, and are eventually supplanted entirely by the next shiny new thing. Its worth noting that we may end up only applying this to Ideological Movements, as it doesnt necessarily make sense that your Pops would stop caring about their right to worship freely just because the Positivist movement is taking off.
Before we move on, its also worth noting that just like with Interest Groups, Pop support for Movements isnt something that instantly changes overnight: Even if a movement is created with a massive attraction weight, it will take some time for it to pick up supporters from other movements.
The pro-Turkish cultural movement in the Ottoman Empire seeks to ensure that Turks remain at the top of Ottoman society, and has a fairly strong base of support in the military.
As mentioned above, movements will champion one or several ideologies, and have a few different ways in which they will push those ideologies. The first and most straightforward one is through direct action. Movements have a level of Radicalism, which will go up or down over time based on how much they perceive the current status quo and governments actions to match their overarching goals. Depending on their level of Radicalism, Movements will be in one of four levels of activity:
Passive: Movements with very low Radicalism are Passive, have no direct effects and will only indirectly influence Interest Groups (more on that below)
Agitating: The next step up from Passive, Agitating movements will influence the enactment chances of laws that they support or oppose
Protesting: Protesting movements have a greater impact on the enactment chances of their supported and opposed laws compared to Agitating movements, but also steadily turn their supporters into Radicals over time
Rioting: The highest level of Radicalism, Rioting movements will rapidly radicalize their supporters and may take their level of activity one step further by igniting a Civil War
What all this means is that Movement Radicalism is no longer purely a negative thing, at least not when a Movements goals align with yours - if you work too hard at keeping everyone happy, you may find it difficult to push through any radical changes that arent backed by your dominant Interest Groups.
The other, less direct way in which Movements affect country politics is the influence they hold over Interest Groups. An Interest Group is considered to be influenced by a Movement if at least a certain % of the Interest Groups total political strength are members of that Movement, and an Interest Group can be influenced by multiple movements. The most significant effect of this is how it impacts IG Leader Ideologies.
Previously, when an Interest Group got a new leader, that leader would pick their ideology from a weighted list of all the ideologies in the game (minus ones that were scripted to be unavailable or have a weight of zero for that leader), but this has now been reduced to a much shorter list: Leader ideologies can now only be picked from either a set of basic ideologies inherent to the Interest Group itself, or from one of the movements that is influencing the Interest Group, with Movement ideologies tending to have stronger weights than the basic ones. This also means that the ideology selection can now actually be predicted and displayed, so that you can make an educated guess about the way the political winds are blowing in your IGs.
This effectively means that the influencing movements serve as factions inside the Interest Group, competing to install a leader and take control of the IG for as long as that leader remains in power. We are also considering allowing Movements to have more permanent effects on the ideologies of Interest Groups, but this is tricky to pull off in a way that doesnt end up with an IG changing its core identity every 10 years or so, so I dont want to promise that itll be part of the 1.8 update just yet.
Torn between the Pro and Anti-Slavery movements, the next leader of Evangelicals may come down on either side of the issue - or be a compromise candidate who sidesteps it altogether.
The final changes I want to go over in this DD is Agitators, which of course have had to go through some changes to fit into this new system. For the most part, Agitators work exactly as before: They appear and start or join movements, can be exiled and invited, and so on. A relatively minor change is that instead of directly adding Support to a movement, they now increase its Pop Attraction by an amount partially scaling to their Popularity, so having Friedrich Engels penning columns singing the praise of your Socialist movement will attract more Socialists over time.
The more significant change is that we have flipped the script on what an Agitators Interest Group membership means for their political leanings. Previously, an Agitator would (much like an IG leader) look to their ideology first and interest group ideologies second when determining which laws they support, meaning that you would sometimes get some pretty strange bedfellows and a bunch of Rural Folk Agitators of varying ideologies trying to implement National Militia all over the place for rather unclear reasons. Instead of anchoring Agitators fully to the ideologies of their IG, we have decided that their own ideology, traits and other such circumstances should be what determines which Movement they want to support.
In other words, Agitators are now much more fixated on specific ideas, and if there isnt sufficient support for those ideas in your country to get a Movement they would actually care to support going, they may not even be available to invite. On the other hand, we are looking into loosening the rules somewhat around which Agitators you can invite based on discrimination status, but we havent fully worked out the details there, so more on that another time.
It would of course not be possible to make all these changes without also making major changes to Civil Wars (particularly Secessions and how they tie into cultural/religious movements), but well cover all of that separately in a later dev diary, along with more detailed information on how Movement Radicalism works.
For now Ill wish you adieu and encourage you to check in again next week, when Lino will tell you all about discrimination and the ways its changing in 1.8. See you then!
Hello Victorians,
wake up, grab a brush and put on a little make-up - were talking about Bulk Nationalization today! Also, I will be bringing you more details on the next step in the evolution of the Companies feature: Ownership of building levels. Lets get started, shall we?
Happy Thursday and welcome back to another Victoria 3 development diary. This week were going to take a birds eye view of the headline features of update 1.8, which is of course the next free update for the game, planned to be released sometime later this year. However, before we start on the dev diary proper I should tell you about a slight change of plans in our release schedule. Back in Dev Diary #124 I told you that update 1.8 would be a smaller update, focused almost entirely on bug fixing and general polish.
This was indeed the plan, with update 1.9 intended as a larger update following relatively closely on the heels of 1.8, but when we sat down to work out the details we realized that our intended timeline simply didnt work out, as we would either have to work on the two updates in too close proximity (creating major challenges for 1.8 post-release support among other things), or delay update 1.9 all the way to next year, which we didnt want to do. So we decided to combine the two updates, with the result that 1.8 is now going to be a single update with the combined scope of both 1.8 and 1.9, meaning it will contain not just bug fixes and polish but also some juicy new free features.
But enough about update planning, lets get into those headline features I just mentioned! As I said, this is just an overview dev diary, so were not going to go into any great detail today, but we have plenty more dev diaries planned in the upcoming weeks where we will fill in the blanks. One final thing before I start: All of the features mentioned are still in early stages of development, so any screenshots, numbers and art shown are going to be very, very, very (very) work in progress.
Hello Victorians! The hotfix today has a number of fixes mentioned in Dev Diary 125, and should be compatible with savegames! We mentioned in the dev diary we would be making changes to the abdicate/resign interaction, this has been delayed to a future update due to technical reasons. Checksum for the hotfix is, 4b8b. As always, this post is not for bug reports, please instead post them in the bug reporting forum (including a save and steps to recreate is always useful). The following changes have been made to the game compared to 1.7.5:
Happy Thursday and welcome back to our first of many development diaries before the end of the year! After a terrific launch and reception of Sphere of Influence in June, followed by several hotfixes with improvements and bugfixes, many devs on the team took a well-deserved vacation during July. We have now reassembled and can't wait to tell you what we've been working on over the summer, and what is coming in the latter half of 2024! First up I want to talk about hotfix 1.7.6 which should reach you in a few weeks and consists of a few high-impact fixes and improvements we've been working on during the summer (alongside work on update 1.8) that I think you'll enjoy.
First, improvements to the Abdicate/Resign character interactions. These interactions have been exploited in the past to cycle through rulers, in decidedly un-fun ways. To address this while retaining their overall intent, the conditions for a ruler to abdicate or resign are now much more narrow but can still be performed when a revolution to enact or restore a law is heating up. You'll be alerted when these conditions are valid, and abdicating or resigning during such a situation will decrease the Radicalism of the movement, giving you a bit more headroom to try to come to a peaceful resolution.
The Force Nationalization wargoal currently only transfers buildings owned by another country directly to you, but with the 1.7.6 hotfix it will also affect buildings owned by pops (Manor Houses or Financial Districts) in the targeted country, letting you cut a country out of your economy completely in one fell swoop.
Army position on a moving frontline will be made more persistent, ensuring that armies do not reposition themselves by traveling to a different position on the front after the line moves if they are still valid where they currently are. This should prevent fronts from suddenly becoming poorly defended after a successful state invasion and make the military system generally feel more stable to interact with. And speaking of military issues, the bug where defeated Admirals won't be restored back into action when they have recovered sufficient manpower will also be addressed.
Several crashes have been fixed, including a crash relating to transferring building ownership and issues with rendering GUI widgets on Mac.
Hotfix 1.7.6 will also include a few minor bugfixes, and tweaks to AI behavior and Leverage Resistance, and last but not least some UI system performance improvements that should make the game run a bit smoother. Some more extensive performance improvements we have made will be coming with update 1.8 due to the risk and incompatibility issues involved in pushing them out with a hotfix.
We are currently testing a possible solution to the issue of government employees that are heavily bound by Qualifications (such as Officers in certain countries) being a bottleneck for operation of government buildings (such as Barracks). With any luck this behavior should also be improved for 1.7.6.
Additionally, we are improving the visibility of an existing improvement we implemented in 1.7.5 to let you more rapidly nationalize buildings. We are also working on a greatly improved quality-of-life tool to facilitate nationalization efforts across multiple buildings for 1.8, which you will hear more about in subsequent dev diaries.
With 1.7.5 we added support to hold Ctrl when clicking the plus or minus button, which sets the number of levels to the minimum or maximum. Now were also going to display this message so that it will be more obvious to more players. Happy nationalizing!
Hotfix 1.7.6 should be arriving in late August or early September, and as usual with hotfixes will be compatible with current save games. Of course we are concurrently hard at work for the next chapter in Victoria 3's chronicle, update 1.8, which you will hear much more about from Martin (Wiz) in 2 weeks from now and in several subsequent diaries. Until then!
Salutations Victorians, we have a small hotfix today targeting some key fixes to improve gameplay experience, Checksum for the hotfix is, 6fe3. As always, this post is not for bug reports, please instead post them in the bug reporting forum (including a save and steps to recreate is always useful). The following changes have been made to the game compared to 1.7.4:
Hello Victorians, we have a larger hotfix today featuring a range of balance changes, AI improvements, bug fixes and more! Most of the team will be on vacation now, but part of the team (Including Martin) will be around, so that we maintain the capacity to release fixes as needed! Checksum for the hotfix is, 5775. As always, this post is not for bug reports, please instead post them in the bug reporting forum (including a save and steps to recreate is always useful). The following changes have been made to the game compared to 1.7.3:
Double Happy Thursday! As promised last week, today well be returning to the future update plans, which we last touched on in Dev Diary #102. Just like the previous times, well be going over what changes and improvements we have planned for the game in future free updates such as 1.8, 1.9 and beyond.
Once again we will be talking about the same key four improvement areas of Military, Historical Immersion, Diplomacy, Internal Politics as well as Other for anything that falls outside those four categories.
Just as before, Ill also be aiming to give you an updated overview of where we stand and where were heading by going through each of these four categories and marking on each one with one of the below statuses:
Hello Victorians, we have a small hotfix today, fixing threekey issues before a larger hotfix next week, what we have been saying is in 1.7.3 for a number of fixes/changes will now be in 1.7.4! Checksum for the hotfix is, 8769. As always, this post is not for bug reports, please instead post them in the bug reporting forum (including a save and steps to recreate is always useful). The following changes have been made to the game compared to 1.7.2:
Good day valiant Victorians! We have just released a hotfix for 1.7, Checksum 0942, containing a wide variety of fixes, improvements, balance changes and more! As always, this post is not for bug reports, please instead post them in the bug reporting forum (including a save and steps to recreate is always useful) . The following changes have been made to the game compared to 1.7.1:
Salutations fine Victorians!
[previewyoutube=4hqxPNkQEAY;full][/previewyoutube]
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Hello and welcome to another Victoria 3 Dev Diary, coming hot on the heels of Update 1.7 and the Sphere of Influence expansion. Todays Dev Diary will be a pretty short one, focusing on our thoughts around the release and our plans for the immediate aftermath. We will be following this up with a proper roadmap update next week.
As far as thoughts on the release go, I can definitely say that we consider this release to be a very successful one, and are very happy to see how much you, the players, seem to be enjoying the changes and additions weve made to the game. The Building Ownership Revision in particular is something we have spent a massive amount of time and effort to first implement and then tweak and polish, and its very satisfying to get to read all the feedback and discussions around it, now that you get to try it out for yourselves.
When we announced the delay of 1.7/SoI, we did so because we wanted to use the extra time to focus on the quality of the release, and this is precisely what we did. We were able to use the extra time to polish and balance the new features, improve the AI, improve performance and of course fix a lot of bugs. In hindsight I can absolutely say that this was the correct decision and that I am very proud of what the team managed to accomplish in the extra time we were given.
The 1.7 performance improvements in particular is an area where I know a bunch of you have expressed surprise that we didnt really talk about it much before release. The reason we didnt is that the real impact of such improvements are actually really tricky to measure until they make contact with the playerbase, so to speak. Weve had internal metrics which showed us that 1.7 was substantially faster than 1.6, but those metrics were collected on a limited number of hardware setups, and we wouldnt really know how it would shake out on the thousands upon thousands of different hardware configurations that are out there until you actually got to try it.
Fortunately, as far we can tell, the overwhelming majority of players are in fact experiencing considerably improved performance in 1.7, which honestly is near the very top of things that I am personally most happy about regarding this release. Getting there was by no means a straightforward process, as 1.7 introduced numerous new performance challenges, not the least was the addition of AI construction calculations for foreign investment. So how did we do it? Well, the modifier rework we mentioned in Dev Diary #120 was probably the single biggest individual contributor, but it was actually the result of dozens upon dozens of improvements coming from across the team. A few examples, in no particular order:
Hello Victorians! We have just released a hotfix for 1.7, Checksum b087, which has a number of improvements, bugfixes and balance changes based on feedback/bug reports from players. As always, this post is not for bug reports, please instead post them in the bug reporting forum (including a save and steps to recreate is always useful) . The following changes have been made to the game compared to 1.7.0:
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Good day Victorians! Welcome to Update 1.7 Kahwah and Sphere of Influence, Checksum 5ebb. Featuring improvements, bugfixes, map changes, foreign investment, Power Blocs, performance improvements and much more! For Update 1.7 Known Issues please look at this post! [previewyoutube=Rz3l4bY0A-4;full][/previewyoutube] Now on to some of the patchnotes!
Master the challenges of the modern world, from the Steam Age to the Nuclear Age with this pack, including two of Paradox Interactives most complex grand strategy games. Available for a limited time, the Wealth and War bundle includes Victoria 3 and Hearts of Iron IV, two games whose content is not just chronologically adjacent, but thematically linked. Each game challenges you to make choices based on the ideological nature of your nation, its resource base and the diplomatic and military opportunities open to you. World events may bring a harsh punishment on whichever power falls behind in the military-industrial arms race that will decide the fate, and ideology, of millions. The Wealth and War bundle includes the base game versions of: Victoria 3: The dramatic transformations of the years 1836-1936 are yours to explore in Paradox Interactives elaborate societal simulation. Detailed national populations have divided interests and needs - as they compete for political power at home, while trying to increase national influence on the world stage. Move from horsepower to steam power and then to the combustion engine. Unlock new technologies, but also new ways of seeing the world, as modern ideas threaten to change traditional societies forever. Build a colonial empire, a trading giant or a military colossus in one of humankinds most energetic centuries. Hearts of Iron IV: Paradox Interactives best-selling grand strategy wargame has been a favorite of aspiring generals for many years. Take command of any nation in the world in the years before, during and after the outbreak of World War II. Build an industrial base for the production of arms, tanks, planes and warships. Guide research and doctrinal development to make them more effective in a war that you will direct. Choose objectives, army structure and military doctrine. Pick your political and diplomatic paths with care, because it is a dangerous world out there. Pick up the bundle here: https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/42554/
Check out Part 1 for the rest of the changelog!
Happy Thursday! Today I'm very pleased to announce the changelog for Update 1.7, appropriately codenamed "Kahwah" after the delicious saffron, cinnamon, and cardamom infused tea from Central Asia. In addition to the changelog you will get a rundown of the major features of the Sphere of Influence expansion most of these features were developed for, but for full details you should read the previous dev diaries on that subject.
Before we get into the changelog I want to also draw your attention to the Known Issues list for Update 1.7. Most of these bugs will be addressed in upcoming hotfixes releasing shortly after the update. As usual, save games made on any 1.7.x version will be compatible with subsequent hotfixes, but save games from 1.6 or before will not be compatible with 1.7 due to the large number of changes.
Update 1.7 "Kahwah", as well as Sphere of Influence, will be released on Monday June 24th around 18:00 CEST. Those of you who own either the Grand Edition of Victoria 3 or our first Expansion Pass will just have to update the game to get your hands on Sphere of Influence and start extending your tentacles around the globe. If you do not yet own it, it can be pre-ordered either standalone or as part of the Expansion Pass.
Let's get into it!
Greetings fellow map-starers! I am Lufthansi, one of the narrative designers on Victoria 3, and Im here to talk about the upcoming map and pop setup changes for Sphere of Influence. Since theres quite a few of them, lets just jump straight into it.
Hello. This is Victoria, and today I will be covering the new script features coming in 1.7.
Our scripting language is the basis of all of the ingame content in Victoria 3. This means that every script functionality that we use in making game content is also usable by modders. As well as triggers and effects which interface with new features such as power blocs and building ownership, 1.7 and Sphere of Influence add several novel functionalities for modders. These include our new scripted progress bar system for journal entries.
Hello fellow Victorians, and happy Thursday!
Alex here and its my turn to bring you another exciting update on whats coming with 1.7. This time Ive been tasked with showing you a selection of certified Cool things were doing that didnt really fit in other Dev Diaries. This will be a lot like the proverbial box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get next!
Hello and happy Thursday!
Its Lino, back from the depths of development, to talk about more details on Power Blocs, one of the central new systems coming to you with Sphere of Influence on June 24.
If you dont know anything about Power Blocs yet, I recommend you to give my first Dev Diary on them a good look because we will be referencing a lot of the terminology today.
Small disclaimer for todays Dev Diary:
You will see a lot of WIP values, for modifiers and bonuses, for special powers and so on. Take them all with a grain of salt please, as were in the process of touching a number of these right now. If you have feedback on them, were happy to read it though! We have plans to adjust some values before release.
Hi, Aron here. Im one of the User Experience (UX) designers on Vicky 3 and I would like to give you an overview of our UX focus we have had in the Sphere of Influence expansion and the accompanying free update. I will start with the UX focus for our new features followed by the more general improvements.
Good day Victorians!
Victoria 3 is on sale!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/529340/Victoria_3/
The Endless Replayability Fest is on until the 23rd of May, with Victoria 3 participating. Alongside other Paradox games also taking part!
You can find selected items up to:
Hello. This is Victoria, and today I will be covering the remainder of the Great Game-themed narrative content which is coming in Sphere of Influence and its accompanying update.
To avoid any confusion, I would like to clarify that none of the narrative content shown in this diary, nor the last diary, is gated behind the Great Game objective. The Great Game objective provides objective subgoals which grant points for certain journal entries and a score tracker which interfaces with much of this content for a more focused experienceit is not required to experience this content. All content within this diary, unless specified otherwise, is available both in sandbox mode or during the course of any objective.
Hello. This is Victoria, and today I will be covering much of the Great Game-themed narrative content which is coming in Sphere of Influence. This will be the first dev diary covering narrative content, with the second covering minor nations in the Great Game and other related content.
Hello and welcome to another Victoria 3 Dev Diary! As we already mentioned, theres been some changes in the Dev Diary schedule due the release date to Sphere of Influence/Update 1.7 being delayed, so today well be talking about Diplomatic Catalysts instead of the previously planned Great Game dev diary. Well be posting a new Dev Diary schedule as soon as its finalized, most likely next week.
Right then, lets get to the topic at hand. Diplomatic Catalysts is a new system added in update 1.7, the role they play in creating Political Lobbies, and the impact they will have on how the diplomatic AI acts towards other countries.
So, what is a Diplomatic Catalyst? Put simply, a Diplomatic Catalyst is a type of diplomatic occurrence, positive or negative, between two countries. There are many different types of Catalysts, here is a small list of examples:
Hello Victorians, this is Martin here with an update on the release date of the Sphere of Influence expansion.
A few weeks ago we announced we were planning to release the expansion and its accompanying update on May 6th. Since that time weve unfortunately come to the conclusion that both the update and the expansion are in need of more time for bug fixing and polish. Both update 1.7 and Sphere of Influence contain several fundamental changes to how the game functions, particularly in the form of the Building Ownership Revision and Power Blocs, which has resulted in bugs, as well as balance and technical stability issues.
While we are happy with the features on offer in 1.7/Sphere of Influence, we simply do not believe that sticking to the original release date will allow us to deliver those features in a polished and balanced state, and we frankly do not want your enjoyment of them to be marred by excessive bugginess, crashes or general lack of polish. We believe that a delay will allow us to release the update and expansion in a state that both we as the developers and you as the players will be much more happy with.
The new release date will be Monday the 24th of June. We will continue releasing weekly dev diaries up to that point, as there is still quite a lot to cover with both the DLC and the update. We know many of you are eagerly anticipating the expansion and apologize for the extended waiting that this will create, but we really want Sphere of Influence to meet your expectations and for this release to be one that we can be proud of as a development team!
Hello and welcome to another Victoria 3 Dev Diary! Todays topic will be Political Lobbies, which is a new feature added in the Sphere of Influence expansion with some elements made available for free in the 1.7 update.
So, what is a Political Lobby? Put simply, a Political Lobby is a collection of Interest Groups pushing for the implementation of a specific foreign policy agenda in their country. Superficially, this may appear quite similar to Political Parties, but there a couple key differences in how they function:
Political Lobbies always form for a specific reason, often due to a Diplomatic Catalyst (more on those and the precise conditions for how they can create lobbies in next weeks dev diary) and pursue a specific long-term agenda that does not change over time
Interest Groups can be members of multiple Lobbies, so long as those Lobbies do not have directly contradictory goals
The agenda of a Political Lobby is always in relation to a specific foreign power, and there are four types of Political Lobbies being added in 1.7/Sphere of Influence:
Happy Thursday, it's time for more Sphere of Influence / Update 1.7 news!
One of the many benefits of being a Victorian-era Great Power is that you might get to lord over not just your own people, but other nations as well. Whether acquired through brutal conquest, colonial machinations, or willing subserviency, countries subjugated under your leadership can benefit your empire in a number of ways:
Hello and welcome to another Victoria 3 Dev Diary!
After last weeks look at Power Blocs, we are going to take a look at another major set of changes that are going to arrive with Sphere of Influence and the free 1.7 update.
Namely, a revision of the Building Ownership system and what it allows us to do: Foreign Investment, a much requested feature which makes its debut in 1.7.
You will see that the changes we are making impact your visibility of ownership and the affected Pops throughout the game.
To understand all the mechanics we will be looking at an example country in the heart of Europe.
Hello and welcome to another Victoria 3 Dev Diary!
Im Lino, a Game Design Lead on the project and today I will take you through one of the big features of the Sphere of Influence expansion: Power Blocs.
As Martin wrote last week, Power Blocs are multinational associations that are led by a Great or Major Power. They can take many different shapes, some of which I will showcase today. With your skills playing Victoria 3 (or rather: your skills picking Great Britain), you too should be able to lead one in no time, Im sure!
Display of the most powerful members of a Power Bloc under Great Britains rule
But lets get into the details, starting with some general aspects.
Salutations Victorians!
The Paradox Spring Sale starts today!
Pick up the Victoria 3 base game for 50% and select downloadable content for up to 50% off! With other Paradox titles also available for up to 75% off!
Steam Sale here: https://pdxint.at/3TAByHw
Hello and welcome to the first Development Diary for the 1.7 update and Sphere of Influence expansion for Victoria 3. This Dev Diary is meant to give you a broad overview of the major Expansion and update features, which well naturally go over in much greater detail in the next few weeks. As mentioned previously, all of this is scheduled to release on May 6th and you can pre-order Sphere of Influence right now.
Hello Victorians! We have a hotfix today, with a number of bugfixes and in particular fixing the internal migration issue reported by players. Not for problem reports, but rather file any bug reports in the bug reporting forum, thank you!
Hello to the last Dev Diary on 1.6! A little of a mash up between 1.6, Sphere of Influence and the Train Pack!
It is I, Pelly, here to be the voice of Victoria! (Read in the voice of the mysterons voice, old 1960s references are always relevant)
We released a hotfix (1.6.1) this morning addressing the Mac crash related to sea nodes, one of the issues mentioned in the 1.6 Known Issues post.
Otherwise for 1.6, we are looking to address a number of issues in upcoming patches including, but not limited to:
Hello Victorians! Today we have a small hotfix targeting one of the known issues, namely the Mac SeaNode Crash! We are currently looking into other reported issues and will look into providing updates to them as soon as we can. Not for problem reports, but rather file any bug reports in the bug reporting forum, thank you! Patchnotes: BugFixes - Fixed Early game crash on Mac related to SeaNodes, blocking gameplay after a few years at the game start.
Hello Victorians! Today is not only free Update Blackcurrant 1.6! We also have an update about the Expansion Pack, Sphere of Influence, and a surprise free pack for all players! First up, the free Trains Bonus Pack! Choo Choo! The power and potential of steam transportation is brought to new life for Victoria 3 in Trains Bonus Pack. [previewyoutube=gYogd9Ye0HA;full][/previewyoutube] In this bonus pack, free for download for all Victoria 3 owners, players will see new models of classic train engines from the dawn of rail transport to the years of the iron horse, when the expansion of railways across continents signaled a new age and a smaller world. This free pack includes a total of ten new 3D models of train engines traveling across the game map. Five Experimental Trains:
Good day Victorians!
Update 1.6 Blackcurrant is now live! Featuring a variety of quality of life changes, balancing, bugfixes and a number of new features! For Known Issues please look at this post!
Please do not use this thread to report any new issues you discover - but rather file any bug reports in the bug reporting forum, thank you!
Hello Victorians! Today's dev diary will be a rundown of all the changes you can expect in free Update 1.6, codenamed "Blackcurrant".
As we mentioned in our first teaser for Update 1.6, this update focuses almost entirely on polish - bug fixes, performance work, UX and AI improvements - rather than major new features. Our aim here is simply to make the game feel better to play. Nevertheless, we're sure there will be many lines in the sections below that are cause for excitement!
As we mentioned last week, Update 1.6 is due to be released sometime next Wednesday, March 6th. Make sure to keep an eye out on our forums, Discord, or social media channels on that day!
Hello! Im Alex, one of the system designers on Victoria 3 and Im here to tell you a bit about what changes we have been planning for Migration in 1.6. I have also [strike]conscripted[/strike] volunteered one of our programmers, Konrad, down from the code mines to give us some of the nitty gritty details about whats going on.
Hello and welcome to this Dev Diary that will mainly focus on the Quality of Life improvements we will add to the game with 1.6. The improvements for this update are mainly focused on three areas: Diplomacy, the Outliner and the Census Data panel, with some additional bug fixes and improvements sprinkled on top.
Hello Victorians! Today we have released a hotfix targeted at a few key crashes in the game, whilst we previously had said in the last Dev diary that we were unlikely to have more hotfixes. It was deemed important to fix these key crashes in a separate hotfix prior to update 1.6 releasing. Not for problem reports, but rather file any bug reports in the bug reporting forum, thank you!
Hello everyone, happy new year and welcome back to another Victoria 3 development diary, the first of many for 2024. Today is just going to be a very short dev diary with a first look at free update 1.6, which as we mentioned in Dev Diary #102, will be a standalone update (meaning not accompanied by a paid DLC) that is next up on our release schedule.
1.6 is going to be a smaller update that focuses almost entirely on game polish (meaning bug fixes, performance work, UX and AI improvements) and not on adding features to the game, since after the massive slew of changes to the game that was 1.5 we now want to instead focus on smoothing out some of the rougher edges of the game. While we could of course just continue to release hotfixes for 1.5, focusing our efforts into a proper update instead is going to allow us to tackle some things (particularly on the performance and military pathfinding side) that would be too risky to include in a hotfix.
While all this means that you shouldnt expect much to change on the post-release plans roadmap from 1.6 alone, you can expect some nice new QoL changes, such as the Pop Browser, a new interface inspired by Victoria 2s Pop Interface, which gives you a comprehensive overview of your countrys population that allows you to more easily identify problems or opportunities, such as pinpointing where exactly those 1 million radicals that keep stirring up trouble are coming from.
The Pop Browser comes with an extensive list of filters to make the selection of Pops you want to look at as broad or narrow as suits your needs
The Pop Browser is one of a few other UX improvements coming in the update, but we will elaborate more on the other changes in our next dev diary (in two weeks) - going through the specifics of UI/UX changes in 1.6. See you then!
Victorians, wintery tidings bring news of a sale starting in the snowy lands of Steam! Explore the grand tomorrow, from the comfort of your room*! *Coal fire and smoking jacket, optional. 50% off Victoria 3 for the Winter Sale! New players can find information, our wiki, links to guides and more here! https://store.steampowered.com/app/529340/Victoria_3/ As well as the rest of the Paradox Interactive portfolio being up to 75% off!
Small hotfix today, fixing a number of OOS's! Please do not use this thread to report any new issues you discover - but rather file any bug reports in the bug reporting forum, thank you! Known bugs in 1.5.11/1.5.12 are present in this thread.
Hello Victorians!
Today we have released a hotfix for 1.5, which contains a variety of gameplay issues and is aimed to enhance your gameplay stability and experience. As mentioned in Dev Diary 102 it also includes convoy raiding balance, whilst also fixing other prominent issues such as some AI navies conscripting land units to swim around with them and conscript only armies not functioning as intended.
Please do not use this thread to report any new issues you discover - but rather file any bug reports in the bug reporting forum, thank you! Known bugs in 1.5.11 are present in this thread.
Hello and welcome to our Post-Release Plans update dev diary for 1.5. Once again, just as in Dev Diary #79 and Dev Diary #89, well be going over what changes and improvements we have planned for the game in future free updates such as 1.6, 1.7 and beyond.
Before we get started, a quick note that we are planning to release hotfix 1.5.11 next week. This hotfix addresses a few dozen remaining issues in the 1.5 release, including some rare crashes and out-of-syncs, graphics polish, some military-related modifiers not working as they should, and convoy raiding balance.
Today we will continue talking about the same key four improvement areas as in previous dev diaries, namely Military, Historical Immersion, Diplomacy, Internal Politics and Other for anything that falls outside those four categories.
Just as before, Ill also be aiming to give you an updated overview of where we stand and where were heading by going through each of these four categories and marking on each one with one of the below statuses:
Hello Victorians!
Today we have released a hotfix, that we internally started calling the Hotfix++ for how big it is! It includes a number of improvements alongside bugfixes and other changes.
Please do not use this thread to report any new issues you discover - but rather file any bug reports in the bug reporting forum, thank you!
Hello Victorians! The Autumn Steam Sale has started, for example the Paradox catalog is on sale now! Alongside picking up glamorous games for phenomenal prices, the Steam Award nominations have also started today! So, start voting today!
Hello Victorians! Today we have released a small hotfix addressing a crash, hotfix is numerated 1.5.9. The patch described in Dev diary 101 will now be 1.5.10 unless otherwise changed in the future! Please do not use this thread to report any new issues you discover - but rather file any bug reports in the bug reporting forum, thank you! Bugfixes:
Hello New Victorians joining us for the Free to Play weekend! Below, we have some new player advice, video tutorials on how to play the game, alongside some common terms used by the community!
[previewyoutube=NeR_wDxxhCE;full][/previewyoutube] https://store.steampowered.com/app/529340/Victoria_3/ New to Victoria 3? Join our Discord Server and ask our Helpers for help, or look at our wiki and resources!
Hotfix 1.5.8 is now live! Please do not use this thread to report any new issues you discover - but rather file any bug reports in the bug reporting forum, thank you! Bugfixes:
Hello Victorians! It has been a few days since the release of 1.5 and the Colossus of the South region pack.
First of all, we would like to thank you all for the response to both 1.5 and Colossus of the South. The appreciation for the art, narrative content, UX changes, mechanics and more have been very much received.
We're also, as always, very appreciative for the feedback you've provided since release! Today we're releasing hotfix 1.5.8, which contains a few fixes and improvements including:
Bugfixes:
Enjoy the changes spread across warfare, politics, economy and more! As well as experiencing Brazil during a key era in history!
Read the Patchnotes: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/victoria-3-update-1-5-and-colossus-of-the-south-region-pack-now-available.1609767/
Hello Victorians and welcome to our centennial dev diary, which appropriately will be for the biggest free update Victoria 3 has ever received, with particular emphasis on the military mechanics! Alongside this update we will also make our new Region Pack Colossus of the South available for purchase, or for free to Grand Edition or Expansion Pass holders. You can read more about Colossus of the South in our previous dev diary.
Update 1.5 "Chimarro" will be available on November 14, which also - not entirely by coincidence, I must admit - marks the 20th anniversary of the Victoria series!
Victoria: An Empire Under the Sun was released on November 14, 2003 and marked the beginning of an era of economy-focused, population-simulating Grand Strategy games. All of us in the Vicky dev team are humbled and honored to be able to carry on and elevate its legacy two decades later, proving our fantastic player community continues to demand deep, complex, immersive society simulators and (alt-)history gameplay. We hope you will love what we have transformed Victoria 3 into for its Anniversary Update, and here's to two more decades!
A very quick overview of the main features of Update 1.5 "Chimarro" above - if you want a lot more details, read on!
First let's cover the adventures you can expect in Colossus of the South.
Hello. This is Victoria, and today I have two very important reveals to share with you.
First off, the long-awaited Update 1.5 Chimarro, which has been in Open Beta since September, will be released on November 14.
Second, it is my pleasure to announce our new Region Pack Colossus of the South, focusing on the Amazonas region of South America. Colossus will be released alongside Update 1.5, and will be free to all Grand Edition or Expansion Pass owners. The price of the standalone pack will be $5.99.
[previewyoutube=2P2kG1a73R0;full][/previewyoutube]
Region Packs are a new type of product for Victoria, and will contain detailed content regarding a certain region or political sphere. They differ from Immersion Packs through a heavier focus on narrative content, and a lighter focus on art and mechanical systems. Whilst Region Packs do include some 3D and 2D art assets, such as clothing and event images, they do not include features such as new UI skins or building sets.
Hello Victorians!
This hotfix resolves the issue of AI using a lot of 0-sized Armies and Fleets on 1.5.4.
For those unaware, the issue was:
[quote]The AI wants to create a new formation but does it in the wrong HQ, thus it goes 'oh I need a new formation in Poland' (makes one in Prussia). Next tick: 'oh I need a new formation in Poland' and so on, creating the towering 1 unit formation stacks.[/quote]
As always, please provide feedback and bug reports for the Open Beta on our Discord server! I shall see you there!
Hello everyone! Today we will cover the upcoming hotfix coming to the Open Beta plus a further set of improvements coming in the free Update 1.5 release (tentative release date: sometime in November).
With the latest release of the Open Beta (Update 2) we introduced a few new mechanics which, it turned out, weren't quite ready for release. Being a beta build that is perhaps understandable (and you've all been very understanding!) but nevertheless we feel the issues are too game-breaking to leave in their current state. As a result we will be releasing a hotfix imminently (if it hasn't been released already, as I'm writing this in the past) that will contain fixes for the following issues:
Cannot change language in the Settings menu unless game was started in English
This could be worked around by setting the language in the Launcher before starting the game, but should nevertheless be fixed now.
Occupying a state may remove fronts from the war
Winning the last bit of a state, causing fronts to move, may remove that front from the war temporarily. In most cases the front re-emerges again after some time, but this causes you to have to redeploy formations to the front again. This should no longer happen.
Crash to desktop in some cases when a front is destroyed, or when reloading the game
Seemingly random crash related to repositioning of armies when their current front is no longer valid and they are forced to travel elsewhere, or sometimes when recalculating cached data upon reloading a game. The game should no longer crash under these conditions.
Trade Route Caravans not visible
This applies to all "caravans" traveling the network except for armies and fleets - horse buggies, trains, zeppelins, trading vessels, etc. They are now visible again, alongside armies and fleets.
Occupation texture not visible on the paper map
Sometimes partial occupation won in a state would be shown correctly and sometimes it would not, leading to some confusion over who won certain battles. Partial occupation should now always be properly displayed again.
AI <3 Infantry
The AI refuses to build any unit type other than Infantry or Light Ships. This issue has now been patched up - the AI is still not the greatest at evaluating which unit types to build for different purposes, but at least it's open for a bit of experimentation now.
This job sucks
A balance issue in the new Job Satisfaction + Migration system caused especially rich strata pops to be incredibly hard to hire and retain. In practice this looked like these job openings were just incredibly hard to fill or pops were "bouncing around", but the reason for this turned out to be as follows:
Hello Victorians!
Today we have released a hotfix for the 1.5 Open Beta, which includes fixes for:
Welcome Victorians, to the next update to the Open Beta! Featuring changes, improvements and new features highlighted in Dev Diary 97!
Alongside this, we have also updated the known issues post - please make sure to read it before reporting bugs or submitting feedback. Finally, remember to join our Discord server to submit feedback!
Key Features include from Dev Diary 97:
1.5-beta - 1.5 Open Beta
[/olist]
Hello Victorians! Victoria 3 is now on sale from today until the 13th of October! So, grab your conductors hat and whistle your way along the Victorian era! (The expansion pass will also be affected due to it dynamically changing with price/items owned) https://store.steampowered.com/app/529340/Victoria_3/ https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/32180/Victoria_3_Expansion_Pass/
Good Day Victorians!
The Remastered Victoria 2 soundtrack, previously a pre-order bonus for Victoria 3 at release, has now been given away to all owners of the game for free!
You can access the soundtrack both in-game via the music player or through the files: \Steam\steamapps\common\Victoria 3\game\dlc\dlc001_preorder\Victoria 2 Remastered Soundtrack
Today's Dev Diary will be looking at the changes and improvements coming in the second update to the 1.5 Open Beta!
Due to the sheer size of this Dev Diary we couldn't post it here natively! Please visit our forums to read and see all the improvements coming to Open Beta 1.5 here: https://pdxint.at/3F7EqUl
Happy Thursday! It's time for an update on how things are moving along with the 1.5 Open Beta. Today we will take a look at a few major improvements we've made since last time, both to the new military-related mechanics but also a number of other aspects of the game.
As a reminder, adapted from dev diary #93:
Update 1 will tentatively launch early next week. By this time the new features should feel a lot more mature, with bugs and missing information / graphics filled in, additional mechanical details closing exploits and providing new optimization challenges, and in general more bells and whistles available to you. While beta testing this update, in addition to feedbacking on what tweaks would make for more fun gameplay, focus especially on balance and UX improvements.
We don't expect 1.5 to go live until sometime in November, so keep that in mind when assessing and feedbacking. We have planned two more 3-week sprints after this update for making additional improvements, fixing bugs and balance issues, and hooking up all the additional graphics our Artisans team is hard at work at.
With that out of the way, let's get into the changes!
Due to just how large this Dev Dairy is we are unable to share it on steam, please follow the link to our forums to read it in it's entirety!
>Dev Dairy #96 - Open Beta 1.5 Update 1<
Hello, hello Victorians! We have released a hotfix for 1.4.2 today which includes a few fixes and changes to the game. Please do not use this thread to report any new issues you discover - but rather file any bug reports in the bug reporting forum, thank you! Fixes include:
The day is finally here! Hot on the heels of Dawn of Wonder and the 1.4 update, we have now launched a very early look at version 1.5 in Open Beta. This update is of course opt-in, and you can access it by switching to Steam beta branch 1.5-beta. During the Open Beta we will of course listen to and discuss your feedback directly on the Open Beta section of the Victoria 3 Discord server.
If you haven't already, I would urge you to go back and read Dev Diaries #92 and #93 as well as this one, since they cover the Companies and Military Improvements in more detail than we do in the changelog here. If you elect to participate in the Open Beta it is especially important you read the first part of #93 since it goes deeper into what to expect from each beta release.
There are also a number of known issues with the initial release, some of them which might heavily impact your game, which you should be aware of. I will echo it here for your convenience, but remember to always consult the living document since that will reflect the most major issues of the Open Beta build as we find more of them.
[hr][/hr]
Dear Victorians!
It is time for some feedback for our Open Beta. But before we would like to introduce some known issues in our 1.5 Open Beta.
If you encounter any issues in 1.5 Open Beta not listed below, please report it!
First some notes about hurdles and exploits you might encounter during warfare:
Good Day Victorians! Today we have released a hotfix for a few issues present in Update 1.4! As normal, please do not use this thread to report any new issues you discover - but rather file any bug reports in the bug reporting forum, thank you! These fixes include:
From the glory of the sunrise to the glow of the gas lamp, this Art Pack takes the theme of light and shadow to add new life to the visual experience. [previewyoutube=asXn-FBPmw4;full][/previewyoutube] This new pack for Victoria 3 includes:
Ahoy Victorians!
Today we released Dawn of Wonder, accompanied by a free update for all owners of Victoria 3.
Please do not use this thread to report any new issues you discover - but rather file any bug reports in the bug reporting forum, thank you!
We can not give any guarantees that save files from 1.3.x will be working in 1.4 without issues which is why we recommend that you roll back your game to the previous version and finish any ongoing games you want to finish before updating to 1.3. More information on rolling back your game version can be found here! (TL;DR is go to properties in Steam -> Betas -> select the version in the dropdown list). This is especially the case due to map changes, such as Vancouver Island.
[previewyoutube=5zVdtTpPvDI;full][/previewyoutube]
Good Day Victorians! As said in the last dev diary, the Open Beta has been delayed from releasing today to ensure we release the best initial version we can. However, it will be released on Thursday the 31st at 16:00 CEST! The Open Beta will launch alongside a changelog for the first version of the Beta and a list of known issues, these will be available on our forums and Discord server. We look forward to seeing you play it and giving us feedback soon!
See Part 1 for the rest this Dev Dairy!
Happy Thursday to you all! This is a particularly exciting dev diary for me to write, because I finally get to reveal details on what we've been working on since before the summer months - and strap in, because it's a lot!
I want to start out by talking a bit about the Open Beta and expectation setting. As we discussed in Dev Diary #91, we will be running an extended Open Beta from Aug 28th (alongside the launch of the 1.4 update) until our final release of 1.5 in late autumn. During this time we anticipate releasing at least 2 additional updates to the Open Beta branch, coinciding with our 3-week sprint schedule.
Expectations for the first update
Launch date: Aug 28. In the initial release, new features will be in a rudimentary state, with plenty of placeholder interfaces, graphics, and missing mechanical details. Many features will be exploitable and buggy, and absolutely not balanced. Some features will be unused or underused by the AI. Core components of the game that we have not touched should continue to work, so playing a game focused on economy and politics should not be heavily affected by these changes, but be aware that military campaigns may feel unsatisfying or cumbersome. If you wish to partake in testing this update, focus on feedbacking on what additions or balance changes would make the new features fun, not on whether they feel great right now.
Expectations for the second update
Tentative launch: mid September. By this time the new features should feel a lot more mature, with bugs and missing information / graphics filled in, additional mechanical details closing exploits and providing new optimization challenges, and in general more bells and whistles available to you. While beta testing this update, in addition to the aforementioned considerations, focus on balance and UX improvements.
Expectations for the third update
Tentative launch: mid October. If all goes as planned, at this point we should be fully feature-complete for the 1.5 release. This doesn't mean everything is wrapped up and ready to go! We will spend the time between this update and the final release fixing bugs, doing balance updates, and reacting to your feedback. While testing this update you should be able to focus on how fun the game is to play with the new features.
But first a short message from our Community Manager Pelly on how the Open Beta will be run!
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Hello! For those that dont recognise me, I am the Community Manager for Victoria 3 and helped run the Open Beta for 1.2 last time.
Open Betas are a very involved process, not just from the developers, but also on the community team end too!
When the Open Beta for 1.5 starts, the old 1.2 channels will be reopened for usage by the community! Any user can access these, to make it as easy as possible to provide feedback and chat about the Beta update!
As soon as the Open Beta is live, you can access the Beta Steam branch by following these instructions:
Hello and welcome back to a new round of Victoria 3 dev diaries! Today were going to be talking about Companies, a new free feature being added in the 1.5 update, which will be available to test and feedback on in the first version of the 1.5 open beta.
As we have previously mentioned, one of our major focuses for the 1.5 update is to improve the replayability and challenge in the core economic gameplay loop, and the main purpose of the Companies feature is to do just that by encouraging countries to specialize in certain industries and develop competitive advantages against other nations. Companies are also intended to add more flavor and differences in gameplay between different nations, as well as giving players more of a reason to care about prestige and their position in global national rankings.
Before I go into the nitty-gritty, I should mention that this dev diary is going to be focused mainly on the Companies feature in the form that will be available in the first open beta release, with a fairly narrow focus on achieving the above design goals for economic specialization, flavor and prestige. However, Companies is a feature that we consider to have near limitless potential for expanding on and hooking into more parts of the game, so Ill wrap up the dev diary by mentioning some of the ideas we have for building on this feature in the future. Also, please note that this is very much a feature under development, so expect placeholder/WIP art, names, numbers and interfaces!
But enough preamble, lets get into the details. Companies are national-level entities that are established by a country, with each country being able to support a certain number of companies based on factors such as technology and laws. The vast majority of countries will not start with the ability to support any companies, but will need to reach a certain level of society tech before their first company becomes available.
Each Company is associated with a certain set of building types, for example a Company specializing in metal mines might be associated with Iron Mines and Lead Mines, while a more agriculturally inclined company might instead be associated with certain types of plantations and/or farms.
To establish a company, you need to have the technology and resource potential to construct at least one of their associated building types - its currently possible to establish companies without having any of their associated buildings built, though this is something we will be actively looking for feedback from the open beta on how it feels, as its something of an immersion versus gameplay question. Flavored companies (more on those below) have other more specific requirements to be established in addition to these basic requirements.
A selection of potential candidates for Swedens first company: Combine of Fisheries and the United Forestry Conglomerate are immediately available, while the buildings of Wine & Fruit Inc are not so suitable to the Swedish climate and hence will only be available if Sweden acquires some warmer lands with potential for those resources.
Once established, a Company will have effects on all buildings of their associated building type in their parent country. These effects are twofold: They increase the throughput of the buildings, as well as the construction efficiency when constructing new levels of the associated building types. The degree by which companies boost their associated buildings is partially scaled based on the Prestige ranking of their parent nation, with the 3rd-ranked nation gaining a larger boost than the 4th-ranked nation and so on. While somewhat abstracted, this is meant to represent competitive benefits the company enjoys from the international status of their home country. The purpose of this effect as a game mechanic is to give players a direct economic reason to care about their overall prestige ranking versus other nations.
Its also worth noting that in conjunction with this change, we have increased the base construction cost of all buildings and, through the change to local pricing, somewhat lowered the base economic efficiency of most buildings. The overall intent is that the baseline economy should be less efficient, with companies allowing countries to make up the difference in select areas, providing the incentive for specialization and competitive advantages mentioned above. However, one exception to this is that base construction production was increased from 5 to 10 to ensure the baseline slowdown of construction did not make small nations entirely unviable to play.
While the majority of the construction efficiency increase from companies does not depend on your prestige ranking, Swedens relatively high placement on the global scoreboard does give its companies an additional edge.
Established Companies also have Productivity and Prosperity ratings. Productivity is simply the average Productivity (yearly average earnings per employee) of all its associated building levels. This is compared against the global average Productivity of all companies in the world, with companies that are doing better than average gaining Prosperity over time, and companies below a certain threshold (which is lower than the threshold for gaining Prosperity) losing it instead.
If a Company reaches 100 Prosperity, its Prosperity modifier will activate, granting a company-specific bonus to its parent nation. This is intended to add an additional dimension to the selection of companies - do you simply want to focus on whatever resources are going to be most profitable for your nation, or aim to build up a specific industry for the bonuses it can give you? As an example, a player that is planning to play a particularly aggressive campaign may want to focus on building up an arms-industry related Company for the military advantages it can grant.
The Agricultural Development Society is doing well enough compared to other companies that its Prosperity is increasing, which will please the Rural Folk once Prosperity hits 100.
As we hinted at earlier in the dev diary, Companies come in two varieties: Standard and Flavored. Standard Companies are ones that are available to all nations unless replaced by a Flavored Company, while Flavored Companies tend to be restricted to a certain culture and/or geographical region. For example, a North German nation that owns certain parts of the Rhineland will have certain historical German companies available to them.
Flavored companies are mostly historical (but not always, as sometimes we have to go a bit alt-history), with a set of building types based around their real-life historical business focuses, and tend to have stronger or more interesting prosperity bonuses than the standard companies. Flavored companies may sometimes replace very similar Standard companies, but this is the exception rather than the rule, most Flavored companies do not replace Standard companies.
Alright, thats the general gist of what Companies will look like when you first get your hands on it in the 1.5 open beta. As I mentioned at the beginning though, there is a lot of places we envision taking this feature in the future, so here are a few examples of that, though you definitely shouldnt expect all of this be in scope for the 1.5 update:
Hello and welcome to the last update before our traditional July break! Today I will drop a little more concrete information of what will be coming in future updates 1.4 (Q3) and 1.5 (Q4). First, a few words about the 1.3.5 patch that we released Monday June 26. We are very happy to see the positive response to the changes made, both to the Voice of the People content and the free update. As we mentioned previously, these are not all the planned improvements to Voice of the People and we plan to give more love to France in 1.5, with further updates to the Paris Commune and more. Also, while the reception of the feature to selectively demobilize Generals has been overall positive, there is a remaining high-priority concern that you still cannot tell conscripts raised to stand down for as long as you remain at war. This functionality was not implemented for 1.3.5 since we're planning to address the matter more comprehensively in a different way in the near future. We'll touch on that below, in the section about Update 1.5. We're planning on putting out one more hotfix (1.3.6) in the 1.3 series before we go on summer vacation. With any luck that should be available to you already, if not it will arrive within a few days of this diary publication date. Among other things this fix addresses the bug where overlords helping out their subjects get their claimed states as wargoals if they win. Now, on to the future!
Good day Victorians!
Today we have a hotfix that will resolve a number of issues in 1.3.5! Please do not use this thread to report any new issues you discover - but rather file any bug reports in the bug reporting forum!
Good day Victorians! Patch 1.3.5 is now released! Please do not use this thread to report any new issues you discover - but rather file any bug reports in the bug reporting forum, thank you! Changes from 1.3.4 to 1.3.5: - Fixes to a few localization issues in French and Korean - Toasts about claims are no longer displayed to more countries than intended - Commanders that are in active battle can no longer be retired Link to 1.3.5 Changelog If you wish to play with mods not updated to this version you may roll back the game version via: [olist]
Happy Thursday! Today we will reveal the final list of changes in the 1.3.5 update which is due to roll out on Monday June 26th (but more on that at the end!)
As we mentioned a few weeks ago, Update 1.3.5 is bigger than one of our usual post-release patches, since we wanted to take this opportunity not just to fix some of the bugs you've identified but also to make some much-needed improvements to the content in Voice of the People. For those who don't own Voice of the People, there are some new high impact improvements to the base game as well.
This does mean that there may be issues with existing saves, though. Your save games should load up fine, but especially if you're playing with Voice of the People as France, some of the reworks may cause your progress in existing saves to break in hard-to-predict ways. As always you will be able to roll back to version 1.3.3 on Steam to wrap up your games in progress.
With that said, on to the updates! First up, improvements made to Voice of the People. Here we have focused our efforts on improving the content in line with the feedback we have received, as described in Dev Diary #88. As an example, here is the revised Divided Monarchy Journal Entry:
As you can see, the Journal Entry is now a proper race between three dynasties rather than a timer to install the candidate of your choosing. You will still select your preferred candidate, which gives you the option to Sway characters to support that dynasty, but that does not necessarily mean it is that dynasty who will be enthroned once the Journal Entry completes.
So what determines the rate of progress for each dynasty? Let's take a look:
The popularity of characters is one factor. This is not limited to just Interest Group leaders - the ruler, heir, generals, admirals, and agitators can all impact the rate. Furthermore, all of these can be Swayed to your cause, and the cooldown for the Sway interaction has been reduced to 2 years (from 5) to give you more opportunities to do so. Since Agitators tend to have a lot of Popularity, finding one you can invite and bribe into agitating for your candidate can help your cause a lot - or send one of those Bonapartist Generals into war to win battles for you in order to help the Bonapartist cause.
Another major factor is the Clout of Interest Groups led by people of the appropriate Ideology. This is multiplied if you can somehow maneuver the Interest Group into government.
Building levels of a particular type is a major aspect. Bonapartist gain progress from military buildings, Orleanists from industrial buildings, and Legitimists from agricultural buildings. If you feel forced to increase France's military readiness, this will favor the Bonapartist cause. I found out the hard way that this includes Conscription Centers - once your conscripts are fully raised, and for as long as the war is raging, the Bonapartists will hold a lot of sway in France.
Your government Legitimacy will also affect the dynastic dominance. For the house currently enthroned, positive Legitimacy (over 50) will increase the rate of progress while it will decrease it (to a lesser extent) for the other dynasties. This doesn't only apply to the house of Orlans necessarily, because if France were to abolish the monarchy and re-establish it, a different house may sit the throne and the Divided Monarchy Journal Entry may re-emerge.
Of course, your decisions during the events associated with the Journal Entry will also matter, which may lead to other effects on the rate of dynastic progress.
There's one very good reason to try to resolve this Journal Entry as soon as possible:
While the Divided Monarchists Journal Entry is active, a Republican Unrest modifier applies to all of France. This makes it very difficult to get Loyalists from just having a high Legitimacy, but very easy to gain Radicals from a low Legitimacy. It also makes it harder to maintain a legitimate government with an ideologically incoherent government; if your Resistance Party contains Interest Groups of several different dynasties, it's likely your Legitimacy will be hard to maintain due to infighting. Finally, the Radicalism of any Political Movements that may emerge will be higher than usual, making it more likely that political demands will result in taking up arms.
Finally, let's take a look at the failure conditions:
It is not implausible that the Divided Monarchy Journal Entry will devolve into chaos and republicanism. This will happen if there's an Interest Group in France that supports a Presidential Republic, if Turmoil in the capital is quite high, and if one of the following is true:
Ahoy Victorians! Please do not use this thread to report any new issues you discover - but rather file any bug reports in the bug reporting forum, thank you! This hotfix is numbered 1.3.3, but we are still planning to do a larger patch on the 26th of June, just called 1.3.4 now! - Fixed a crash caused by dead or foreign agitators supporting political movements that then break out into a revolution. If you wish to play with mods not updated to this version you may roll back the game version via: [olist]
Hello and welcome to our Post-Release Plans update dev diary for 1.3. Just as we did in Dev Diary #79, in this dev diary well be going over what changes and improvements we have planned for the game in future free updates such as 1.4, 1.5 and beyond. In the previous Post-Release Plans Dev Diaries we outlined four key areas of improvement for the game, which well be sticking to for this one: Military, Historical Immersion, Diplomacy, and Internal Politics. The Other section is also still there for anything that doesnt fall neatly into one of the four categories.
Just as last time, Ill be aiming to give you an overview of where we stand and where were heading by going through each of these four categories and marking on each one with one of the below statuses:
Good day Victorians!
We will be hosting a Giveaway for 20 Displate and 5 Vinyl Soundtracks on our Discord from today until the 6th of June at 16:00! React to the message in #Discord-Giveaway to enter!
Victoria 3 has released 30+ Displates of our art, including events, loading screens and more! Immerse yourself in the Victorian age with the artwork and decorate the rooms of your room, while contemplating in your smoking jacket next to a coal fire...if one were so inclined.
Check out there Store here!
Remember! We also have the delightful sounds of our soundtrack available on Vinyl! Both the Victoria 3 Soundtrack, and the Melodies for the Masses music pack! A limited edition of 1836 for the Victoria 3 Vinyl and 999 for the Melodies for the Masses Vinyl!
Check out the Vinyl Store here!
Hello Victorians! We have deferred discussing our post-release plans until next week, as we felt there was another, more pressing topic to cover.
You were not satisfied with the narrative content included in Voice of the People, and neither are we. In particular, we see the following weak points in some of the Journal Entries included in the DLC:
Good Day Victorians! We just released a small patch, to address some issues in the current build of Victoria 3. Please do not use this thread to report any new issues you discover - but rather file any bug reports in the bug reporting forum, thank you! - Fixed an issue where Divided Monarchists events could keep firing even after reaching 100 progress - Fixed an issue where events could give you a second Napoleon III after already having one Napoleon III - Reduced the impact of Agitator Popularity on Political Movement Support - Safeguards added to hopefully prevent an issue where some mods could cause buildings to get duplicated in split states - The Shut the Door Behind You achievement no longer requires Voice of the People to unlock - Fixed the Anarchist ideology having duplicated stances on Economic System laws - Fixed a texture streaming issue that caused the border between the paper map and the table to look blurry when zoomed out - The Vox Populi achievement should now work properly - Fixed an issue where Agitators would sometimes not join the correct Political Movement - Fixed an issue where agitator supported political movements could repeatedly form and disband - Agitator support tooltip is now shown correctly for Agitators with 0 popularity - Radicalism of revolutionary political movements is now shown correctly in the outliner - Fixed a bug where civil wars could break the Divided Monarchists Journal Entry due to incorrectly setting a variable - The Paris Commune now inherits the Journal Entries and variables of France if it ends up victorious and annexes France - Fixed NULL_OBJ being shown in event Pbrine Outbreak - Fixed a typo in the event When You Have a Hammer - Fixed incorrectly formatted text in the event Devout Call For Intervention - Fixed an issue where the German Unification chain of Journal Entries did not work correctly for Lbeck - Fixed an issue where the Schleswig-Holstein Question Journal Entry would incorrectly resolve without taking Holstein - Fixed an issue where the German National Identity Journal Entry could complete before the Schleswig--- Holstein Question Journal Entry, potentially breaking the whole German Unification chain - Fixed an issue where Max Stirner could end up spawning multiple times - Fixed an issue where NULL_STATE entries could appear in the Construction Queue due to revolutions/secessions splitting states - The AI now correctly understands how to resolve the Government Petition Journal Entry - Fixed a localization issue with numerous triggers relating to unification where the name of the unification would not be shown - Fixed an issue where some sound effects for free features such as Exile Agitator were incorrectly DLC locked - Fixed an issue where exiling an Agitator would not remove their support from the Political Movement they were a part of - Fixed a crash to desktop issue in the virtual file system - It is no longer possible to colonize inland states that you do not border just because the state region they are a part of is coastal - Fixed an issue where saving the game was blocked in certain languages when playing as a revolution due to country name formatting
Hello! It's going to be a short and sweet development diary today as we're all very busy working on well, the stuff I'm going to be talking about today!
As you all know, Update 1.3 and Voice of the People launched a few days ago. It's a big update, particularly to the political subsystems in the game, and it hasn't been without some bugs and balance issues. We have already rolled out a fix for the bug that omitted newlines in Chinese localization (1.3.1). We have another set of bug fixes (1.3.2) in the pipe, scheduled for next Tuesday if all tests clear.This update should fix a number of issues on the list.
We are also working on cataloging and incorporating your feedback on the new Journal Entries and events into a future update. For example, we're planning on increasing both the interactivity and challenge of the Divided Monarchy Journal Entry. Stay tuned for more on when this update will be released!
Victoria 3's Immersion Packs are meant to enhance the depth of a particular aspect of the game. For Voice of the People, that aspect is political agitation and revolutions. France is a great country to showcase these mechanics with, and we also used French aesthetics for the wealth of new art also included in Voice of the People, but the intent is not to make it a "country pack". The new map, UI skin, and command room table are available even if you don't play as France, and with the theme selector we are rolling out with Dawn of Wonder (the Art pack coming in Q3 - more on this below) you will be able to customize which theme combinations you want. Historical Agitators appear across the world, and several of the new character interactions relating to Agitators as well as coups apply regardless which country you play. Rest assured we will be rolling out country-specific content in other expansion products and updates in addition to Immersion Packs.
After the release, we received feedback suggesting that Update 1.3 - released alongside Voice of the People - has had a greater impact than the DLC itself. This is partially because we needed to introduce a significant number of new events to support the new Agitators and revamp the revolution progression system. However, the main reason for this perception is our approach to DLC development, where we don't want to lock essential mechanics behind paywalls. Mechanics spread out over multiple DLC tends to fragment the community, makes mod management harder, complicates building new features on top of old ones, and can cause features to become unbalanced over time. As an example of this approach, based on your feedback, we elected to include the Exiles mechanic in the free update rather than the DLC to address concerns about future game balance. While there is a risk this reduces the perceived value of the DLC, it ensures that the core gameplay experience remains intact and allows for future expansion without limitations.
The Voice of the People DLC still offers a range of unique content such as new events, stunning artwork, and exclusive mechanics for owners. While we understand that the number of features and improvements in the free update can lead to a lower perception of value for the DLC, we do not believe that the answer here is to simply paywall more features. Instead, we will strive to learn and improve from the criticisms of the content in Voice of the People without compromising our principal focus, which will remain on the core gameplay experience.
On the topic of lessons learnt, in case you missed it, what was originally a pre-order bonus for Voice of the People - the Agitators Jules Brunet, Georges Clemenceau, and Alexis de Tocqueville - were made available to everyone who owns Voice of the People the day after release. We didn't realize quite how valuable these characters would be to you, so thank you for making it known how you felt about this and we hope these brilliant gentlemen will help improve your great nations!
Finally, a note about the more distant future. Many of you noticed that with the availability of an Expansion Pass to upgrade from the base game to the Grand Edition, two additional products for Victoria 3 were soft-announced: the aforementioned Dawn of Wonder Art pack, and Sphere of Influence, our first major expansion. We can't get into a lot of detail on these on the Steam pages yet and as a result I've seen a lot of speculation around them. There are a few things I'd like to clarify prior to the official announcement.
First off, yes, Dawn of Wonder will include a Day/Night cycle. It is super customizable (naturally you can turn it on and off, but you can also for example scale it to in-game time so a full cycle could take 1 day or 1 year depending on your preferences - or even sync it to your computer clock for cozy nighttime play) and looks terrific in action.
Side-by-side example of a landscape at midnight and noon respectively. There is of course a gradual transition period between these as well. On-map text gradients also change with the daylight cycle, to ensure sharp text contrast even during nighttime. All map objects have been updated to provide their own light sources, where appropriate - buildings, vehicles, and more.
It doesn't have any effect on the paper map view, of course, but if you enjoy watching and listening to your little towns while playing, it really makes the world come alive. The Day/Night Cycle isn't everything in the Art pack, there will also be a hefty assortment of the kinds of things we also included in the Voice of the People Immersion Pack (thus why a theme selector will also be included).
Secondly, regarding Sphere of Influence. As mentioned in the description, among several other features this major expansion will add Power Blocs, which lets you spread your influence across the world via soft power. I have spotted a few concerns that a Sphere of Influence mechanic that served this same purpose was already included in the Victoria II base game, so I wanted to clarify what this expansion actually contains.
Victoria 3's base game already has features to model the Sphere of Influence mechanic from Victoria II: subjects, and customs unions (in fact, it's not uncommon to hear players refer to forcing nations into customs unions or subject relationships as 'sphering'). Members in a customs union share a unified market but have no other diplomatic ties, while subject nations are also forced to participate in their overlord's market but have a number of diplomatic restrictions placed on them as well. The ability to influence, cajole, or dominate other countries to force them into your market / sphere is already something you can do in Victoria 3 using a mix of diplomatic and military tools.
The idea behind Power Blocs is to make a shared market merely one of numerous ways in which countries can cooperate with (or exploit) one another. The most fundamental of these, and the core mechanic itself, will be part of the free update delivered alongside the expansion. Much like with Voice of the People, we don't want to fall into the trap of making the base game on its own obsolete over time by locking key mechanics behind paid expansions. The various ways in which players can customize Power Blocs should help make different Great Powers more distinct, enhance interaction and dependencies between nations, make Influence and Prestige feel more meaningful, and so on. While some of these options will be in the free update, others will be in the paid expansion.
So then I hear you wonder, why call the expansion Sphere of Influence? Simple answer: it's a terrific term to describe what sorts of features it contains! It may evoke the memory of one beloved mechanic from Victoria II, but the expansion itself is intended to be a broad enhancement to diplomatic gameplay with a variety of features. And as always, the fundamentals will not be paywalled.
On that note, the Sphere of Influence expansion blurb also says that investing into foreign economies will be a feature, and there have been concerns that this means we're going back on our earlier promise of making foreign expansion available in a free update. To be clear, we are always going to allow for foreign expansion in your subject nations, with or without the Sphere of Influence expansion. The expansion will add a great deal more options to Power Blocs, foreign expansion, interference in other countries' politics, and much more - but the core systems will be in the free update, since that's how we keep them current and fresh and can build on them in the future.
The release dates for Dawn of Wonder and Sphere of Influence listed on Steam are placeholder dates until their respective announcements, but do roughly reflect reality. Sphere of Influence is scheduled for early 2024, to allow sufficient time to implement new features of considerable complexity, but that's not how long you have to wait for another major update! We are also planning for another major free update - with an open beta - before 2023 is over, similar in scope to our 1.2 release. Some of the improvements to the diplomatic gameplay we're currently developing for the update alongside Sphere of Influence is targeting this release rather than the one in Q1 2024. You will hear a bit more about that next week when we return to give you an update to our post-release plans!
I hope this has cleared up a few of your questions and concerns! In closing, we are very happy to see the big uptick in player numbers since Update 1.3 and Voice of the People, and we hope you are all enjoying your time with it!
Greetings Victorians! - Fixed an issue with new lines not working properly in the Chinese localization
Lose yourself in the dramatic political maneuvering of the 19th century as famous figures from history lobby for their preferred policies in Voice of the People, a new immersion pack for Victoria 3, available today. With dozens of new historical characters, you can write an intriguing new history of the Victorian age, where nihilist authors and liberal reformers challenge established authorities. Victoria 3 is Paradox Interactives grand strategy simulation of society in the century from Andrew Jackson to World War I. Players guide the industrial, political and social development of a historic nation, moving with the tides of time as new ideologies and shifting political alliances challenge your grand plans. In Voice of the People, more historical flavor is added with new characters integrated into the new Agitator mechanic, as well as a deeper simulation of French politics of the century, with new events, missions, and more. [previewyoutube=wZyeIhtblvA;full][/previewyoutube] Features of Victoria 3: Voice of the People include:
Greetings Victorians!
Today we released Voice of the People as well as the new Victoria 3 Expansion Pass - and as usual these new releases are accompanied by a free update for all owners of Victoria 3.
Please do not use this thread to report any new issues you discover - but rather file any bugreports in the bug reporting forum, thank you! (We will not be able to collect bug reports from Steam)
We can not give any guarantees that save files from 1.2.x will be working in 1.3 without issues which is why we recommend that you roll back your game to the previous version and finish any ongoing games you want to finish before updating to 1.3. More information on rolling back your game version can be found here! (TL;DR is go to properties in Steam -> Betas -> select the version in the dropdown list).
We hope that you will enjoy these updates for Victoria 3!
[previewyoutube=1klbemc_xp8;full][/previewyoutube]
Hello and welcome to our final development diary before the release of Voice of the People and Update 1.3 on May 22! Today I have the pleasure of announcing the full list of changes made for both the Immersion Pack and the free update.
But first, let's talk about new Achievements! We have 15 new challenges for you, 12 of which are exclusive to Voice of the People and 3 that are also valid for the base game.
Hello! With the 1.3 update and the Voice of the People pack were adding a bunch of new visual features and components. While adding new agitator characters across the world, a lot of care and attention has been put into making France its very own visual culture.
This includes both generated and historical agitators, visual effects, maps, UI and table assets! To see these assets and further explanations please visit our forums here: https://pdxint.at/3pAk0io
Next week we will have the changelog for 1.3 and Voice of the People!
Hello Victorians! Last week we covered Agitators and Exiles, the central mechanical feature of the 1.3 Update. Today, well be covering the new paid content that will be included in the Voice of the People Immersion Pack, along with some updated free content coming in the 1.3 Update. First, Ill be covering Coups, one of the most popularly anticipated features of the Immersion Pack, before moving on to the Natural Borders of France - and then moving on to Victoria and Hansi to cover the other included features, from French Algeria to the Paris Commune.
Hello again! Last week we announced that the Voice of the People Immersion Pack will be released alongside the 1.3 Update on May 22nd and included in the Grand Edition of Victoria 3. Following on from that, today well be going into depth on Agitators and Exiles, the central mechanical features of the update.
As I teased in the previous dev diary, Agitators are populist firebrands who lead Political Movements to support their ideological goals in your country. They might be the only avenue towards moving your country in a direction opposed by your political elite, allowing you to leverage their support to enact laws that would otherwise find no support. Alternatively they might be dangerous dissidents who oppose the very foundations of your rule, leading the people to revolt against the state. Agitators are a free feature included in the 1.3 Update but various bells and whistles, primarily the historical Agitator characters, will be exclusive to the Voice of the People Immersion Pack.
Lenin is one of the historical Agitators that can appear in your game. Depending on conditions in Russia when he becomes politically active, he might either remain there and immediately agitate for a communist revolution or first spend some time in Exile.
Voice of the People will include over 60 historical Agitators that can appear throughout the world in your game, but regardless of whether you own the Immersion Pack you will also see unscripted Agitators emerge. There are three ways that an Agitator can appear your country:
Good afternoon Victorians! It is with great pleasure that I can finally reveal to you our first Immersion Pack: Voice of the People. Voice of the People is the Immersion Pack promised by and included in the Grand Edition of Victoria 3, and will be released alongside the free 1.3 Update on May 22nd. Todays dev diary will give you a feature overview for Voice of the People, as well as some words on our design philosophy for Immersion Packs and an update on our team structure.
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Proudhon is one of many historical Agitators in Voice of the People, alongside other noteworthies such as Leon Trotsky, Sun Yat Sen, and Susan B Anthony.
Without giving too much away - well be going more in depth on this next week - Voice of the People is named for its headliner feature: Agitators. Agitators are a new kind of character that rally your pops to support Political Movements that align with their Ideology. Agitators will shake up your internal politics, acting independently of their Interest Groups. Amplifying power from below, Agitators serve an opposite function to Interest Group Petitions which reflect the demands of the political elite. Depending on how your goals align with theirs, Agitators might be a painful thorn in your side or a valuable ally to your political agenda.
Mr Marx, having been unceremoniously booted out of his home country, is looking for a loving home.
Are you sick and tired of that one Agrarian Party leader with inexplicably high Popularity stealing votes from your cherished Liberals? Is there a Radical Agitator spreading dangerous ideas in your bastion of political reaction? Well Ive got a solution for you: Exile. Inconvenient characters can now be expelled from your nation and driven into political exile, up for grabs for whatever nation wants to harbor your unpatriotic dissidents. On the other side of things, perhaps you feel like your nation needs a shakeup, and that Danish Anarchist Exile would be just the man for the job - you can peruse the list of available Exiles and invite them to your country as an Agitator.
Napoleon III went on to restore the French Empire in our timeline, but what would France look like under the House of Orleans or the Legitimists?
Vive la rvolution! Vive la France! Voice of the Peoples content and visual focus is themed around France, one of the greatest powers of the era and one of the most, in my humble opinion, in need of a healthy dose of content. In an upcoming dev diary well be going into detail about what we have planned for France, but right now I can tell you that well be tackling such weighty topics as the Paris Commune, the Dreyfus Affair, and the dynastic struggle for the French throne - including of course the return of the Bonapartes. Well also be covering the nations quest for territorial expansion both within Europe and beyond. With ample new Journal Entries and Events, playing as France will offer a much more immersive experience.
The map of the world has become some sort of Carte du Monde.
I think by now youve probably noticed that something is different in these screenshots. Voice of the People will add not only a beautiful baroque blue UI skin, but also a totally new French-themed paper map of the world - featuring my personal favorite art in the game, the Pacific Bread Centaur. On the character art side, weve added many new historical Agitators who will have their own unique appearance including outfits and props. And as if that werent enough, theres even more to come in the dev diary on visual features in a few weeks' time.
This is the Bread Centaur. I will not elaborate.
I think I can state with confidence that devs and players alike share a love of staring at maps. We also really enjoy nitpicking and complaining about maps. While our content designers were busy making French content they noticed that there was room for improvement for the state region and city hub setup in the country. These arent the only changes to the map coming in 1.3 - most notably weve made major changes to Algeria which well also talk about in a future dev diary.
Can you spot what else is different about France besides the borders?
Id like to talk a bit about what an Immersion Pack entails for Victoria 3 and how weve decided which parts of the 1.3 Update will be free to all players and which will be exclusive to the Immersion Pack.
So far, everything weve talked about in the previous 1.3 Dev Diaries is part of the free update - the Revolution Clock, the changes to Law Enactment, and the new Laws for instance. These are reworks of existing systems and additions to them, exactly the kinds of changes that Paradox veterans might expect in a free update.
Immersion Packs are envisioned as content-driven and art-heavy, with mechanical features that support this content and make the world come to life. As the title implies, Immersion Packs are about immersion. You can expect them to contain plenty of narrative content like Events and Journal Entries, major visual updates, and light but impactful new mechanical features and systems reworks. Immersion Packs will be themed around one country or region of the world, and this is where the bulk of narrative content and art will be focused and take inspiration from. These new mechanical features and systems reworks will be mostly contained in the free update that will be released alongside the Immersion Pack - everyone gets the feature, but Immersion Pack owners will also get all the bells and whistles. In the case of Voice of the People, Agitators will be a free feature while certain interactions (such as Exiling characters) will be included in the Immersion Pack.
Time for a team update! Since around the games release, the Victoria 3 team has transitioned from being a project aimed at delivering a single product - Victoria 3 1.0 - to a team that can work on multiple updates simultaneously. Weve divided ourselves into three sub-teams with different focuses, sizes, and fields of expertise. For instance the Machinists team was responsible for bringing you the 1.2 Update, and is defined by a focus on systems design and code-heavy tasks. Voice of the People and 1.3 is primarily the work of the Academics and Artisans teams, which focus on narrative design/scripted content and art respectively.
The teams tie in to our major post-release goals that weve talked about before: 1.3 and Voice of the People are focused on Internal Politics and Historical Immersion, which (very deliberately) lines up perfectly with the expertise of the Academics and Artisans teams. While the Academics and Artisans work on 1.3, the Machinists team is cooking up the next systems-focused update, which will include some long-awaited free updates related to our other post-release pillars. Were far from ready to start talking about this now, but I can assure you it is exciting stuff.
Im sure youre excited to read more about Voice of the People, but that will have to be all for this week. Join me for next weeks dev diary, where Ill be going into depth on the mechanical features: Agitators and Exiles - as well as unveiling a new (super moddable) way to interact with characters.
Voice of the People will release on May 22nd alongside Patch 1.3. Pre-orders available now with limited-time bonus content, also included in the Grand Edition!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2282100
Hello. This is Victoria, also known as Pacifica, and today we will be going over the new laws added in 1.3.
By and large, these laws exist to grant an experience that allows for more modern forms of states, to represent the changing ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to represent some of the most contentious and important issues of the period - land reform, anti-clericalism, and more modernised systems of governance.
Happy Thursday and welcome to the first of several diaries about improvements and changes in Update 1.3! Today we will cover changes made to the process of enacting laws, political machinations by your ruling Interest Groups, and the build-up to revolution.
First off, why are we making changes here? Well, while the core mechanics of law enactment and political movements agitating for legislative change and/or revolution work well and in accordance with the design vision, there are a number of issues that has bothered us and many in the community since release:
Hello and welcome to the first Victoria 3 dev diary after the release of update 1.2! With this update now out, we feel that its a good time to return to the Post-Release Plans we outlined in Dev Diary #64, check whats already been done and go over what further changes and improvements we have planned for the game in future free updates such as 1.3, 1.4 and beyond. In the Post-Release Plans Dev Diary we outlined three key areas of improvement for the game: Military, Historical Immersion and Diplomacy and these are very much still our main targets, but are now being joined by an Internal Politics section. The Other section is also still there for anything that doesnt fall neatly into one of the four categories.
For this dev diary, Ill be aiming to give you an overview of where we stand and where were heading by going through each of these four categories and marking on each one with one of the below statuses:
Top of the morning to you Victorians! We just released patch 1.2.7 to address some issues in the current build of Victoria 3. Please do not use this thread to report any new issues you discover - but rather file any bugreports in the bug reporting forum, thank you! - Fixed buildings getting blocked from hiring if the first hired Pop is a Capitalist/Aristocrat. - Fixed the war panel not opening when clicking the pending peace deal alert. - Fixed heirs being bald. - Fixed paused constructions showing a wildly incorrect estimated weeks to completion. - Fixed a bug where bankroll could be autocancelled without removing expenses. - Fixed AI countries sometimes repeatedly adding and removing the same IG from government. - Fixed a bug that was causing Germany to always have the black-yellow-red flag when formed from the North German Confederation. - Fixed battles where a very small armies could hold off a much larger opposing force for weeks. - Fixed a CTD in CConstructionQueue::CalcNumUnderConstruction.
Hello everyone! It is finally time to release Update 1.2 Hot Cinnamon Spice to the masses! Following a period of Open Beta testing where the invaluable help from you guys we now feel that it is ready for delivery. A huge thank you to everyone that's been participating in the open beta, providing us with feedback and bug reporting! Please do not use this thread to report any new issues you discover - but rather file any bugreports in the bug reporting forum, thank you! We can not give any guarantees that save files from 1.1.x will be working in 1.2 without issues which is why we recommend that you roll back your game to the previous version and finish any ongoing games you want to finish before updating to 1.2. More information on rolling back your game version can be found here! (TL;DR is go to properties in Steam -> Betas -> select the version in the dropdown list). Unfortunately the full changelog is too large to fit into one Steam announcement. Please refer to our recent development diary for the full changelog: Part 1 Part 2 You can also read the full changelog on our official forum! Today we also released the music pack: Melodies for the Masses (included in the Grand Edition)! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2348450/Victoria_3_Melodies_for_the_Masses_Music_Pack/
Part 2 of Dev Diary 78
Hello and welcome! Today I will be going through, or perhaps more accurately infodumping, everything that has happened for Update 1.2. Many of you will have already experienced 1.2 in our Open Beta and will recognize many of these new features, improvements, and bug fixes, but there's a substantial number of things in here that were not in any of the three beta releases (or which were too niche for most to notice), so I expect that even beta players will find a few gems in here!
The planned release date for the update is Monday March 13th, at 10:00 Central European Time. Our testing shows a promising amount of compatibility with savegames created on 1.1.2, but as usual we cannot guarantee flawless compatibility between versions, so for safety we recommend you start a new campaign on the new build. We will of course backup the old 1.1.2 version as a Steam beta branch which you can rollback to if needed (e.g. for mod compatibility).
It is worth noting that this changelog reflects only the changes between 1.1.2 and 1.2.3 (which will be the release version of 1.2), and interim changes between beta releases are omitted to avoid confusion. In practice this means that if you experienced a bug or balance problem in a feature new to the beta build, this document won't explain whether it's been fixed or not.
If you're looking for more detail on the biggest changes coming to 1.2, take a look at our previous dev diaries.
Now, without further ado
Hello and welcome to this week's Victoria 3 dev diary. This time we will be talking a bit about performance and how the game works under the hood. It will get somewhat detailed along the way and if you are mostly interested in what has improved in 1.2 then you can find that towards the end.
For those of you who dont know me, my name is Emil and Ive been at Paradox since 2018. I joined the Victoria 3 team as Tech Lead back in 2020 having previously been working in the same role on other projects.
Hello everyone! We have opened up an open beta for Victoria 3 Update 1.2, which after careful consideration by the entire team has been named Hot Cinnamon Spice! Weve been working on this update for a while now and we hope that it will provide a significant improvement to your experience with Victoria 3. Before we unleash it fully wed like for you all to give it a go and provide us with feedback so that it can be the best it can be. The final release date of the full update will be revealed later. How to opt-in to the Open Beta: First of all we'd like to recommend everyone to start a fresh game and not use existing 1.1 save files. To opt-in you right click Victoria 3 in Steam, go to properties, click on the tab that says BETAS and in the dropdown list there you should be able to select the 1.2-beta. Let the game update and you should be ready to go. If you wish to opt-out from the beta you repeat the above process but pick none in the dropdown list. Step by Step Guide 1. Right click Victoria 3 in your Steam library 2. Go to Properties 3. Click "BETAS" on the menu to the left 4. Pick 1.2-beta in the dropdown list 5. Allow for your game to update 6. Start Victoria 3 as you normally would How to report bugs and give feedback: Our primary channel for communications will be the Victoria 3 Discord Server in the OPEN BETA section where you can post feedback and report bugs! You can also file bug reports in the bug report forum (make sure you specify the bug is found in the 1.2 Beta build). PLEASE NOTE THAT WE WILL NOT BE COLLECTING BUG REPORTS ON STEAM - ONLY ON DISCORD AND OUR OFFICIAL FORUM Updates to the build: Well be updating the open beta build on a regular basis and any updates will be communicated on Discord. Please note that updates may render your save file incompatible. THREAD ABOUT KNOWN ISSUES CAN BE FOUND HERE!
Hello and welcome to another Victoria 3 Dev Diary about Update 1.2! By now the Open Beta is of course in full swing, and everything in this post will either already be available to try out or be part of one of the upcoming updates to the Open Beta in the following weeks. However, we still want to take the time to properly outline the changes were making to the game in 1.2 for those who either dont want to opt into the Open Beta or are just interested in more detail and context. Todays Dev Diary will be focusing on changes on the Diplomatic side of the game, both in terms of new functionality and AI.
The first improvement were going to go over today is Colonial Claims, which is a change to Colonization that is intended to prevent some of the more ahistorical nonsense we have going on in colonization at the moment, such as countries rushing for Hokkaido before Japan can get it or the United States setting up shop in Tierra del Fuego. Quite simply, what it means is that some countries now start with claims on states owned by Decentralized Nations, and any country which *doesnt* have a claim on that state is blocked from colonizing it so long as the claiming state maintains an Interest there.
As an example, the Hudson Bay Company starts with a claim on Alberta in 1.2, while the United States of America does not, which means that the USA cannot start just colonizing into Canada without first forcing the HBC to revoke their claim through the use of a Revoke Claim war goal. Similarly, Chile and Argentina have overlapping claims on some parts of Patagonia and thus are able to race each other for it, but wont have it sniped away from them by a Belgium with grandiose Latin American ambitions.
While were on the topic of colonization, I should also mention that something else weve changed to improve how it plays 1.2 is how the Native Uprising diplomatic play works. In 1.1.2, a colonizer that defeats a Native Uprising would annex the entire native Decentralized Nation, which led to some weird pacing and balance issues. This has been changed to instead give the colonizer a special Colonial Rights diplomatic pact with the defeated natives, which lasts for the duration of the truce. During this period, colonization speed is doubled and no further uprisings can occur from that particular Decentralized Nation.
It is no longer possible to simply snipe Hokkaido away from the Japanese Shogunate, as they start with a claim on the Ainu-controlled parts of the island
Next up is a change to Diplomatic Plays that allows countries to expand their Primary Demands in a play. An issue that has been repeatedly identified by players since release is that once they grow strong enough, the AI has a tendency to back down against them in plays, ceding one war goal at a time and setting in place a five-year truce before the next demand can be made. While this does fit with the design principle that there should be a reason to want to back down, the end result could end up unduly frustrating and wasnt just an issue for the player, either, as the AI of the USA struggled to reach the West Coast when it could only take one state off Mexico at a time.
To address this in a way that directly tackles the problem while still ensuring that it still isnt simply best to always take your chances with a war, weve changed the concept of Primary Demand (ie the first war goal added, which gets enforced when backing down) to Primary Demands, which will all be enforced when the enemy backs down, and Secondary Demands, which will only be relevant if the play escalates to war. Just as it works right now, the first war goal added on each side is always a Primary Demand, but there are now ways to add more Primary Demands beyond the first.
Firstly, any war goal targeting the main opponent (or any of their subjects) that is added by Swaying another country to your side will now automatically be a Primary Demand. In other words, if youre launching a play against France and theyre being supported by Spain, any country you sway to your side with a war goal targeting France will have that war goal added as a Primary Demand, while war goals targeting Spain are Secondary Demands. The AI understands this and will place higher value on Primary Demands, since they are much more likely to actually receive whats promised by the war goal in the end.
Secondly, any war goals you yourself add can be made into Primary Demands if they target the main opponent (or any of their subjects). However, doing so is considered less justified than adding Primary war goals through swaying, and so will cost an amount of maneuvers and generate an amount of infamy proportional to the cost of adding the war goal in the first place. This means that while adding more Primary Demands for yourself ensures that you receive them if you end up making them back down, it isnt free, and is done at the expense of adding additional war goals or swaying more countries to your side. The AI is also going to receive some tweaks here to make them less likely to back down if you keep piling on Primary Demands, as at a certain point the unreasonableness of the demands just becomes too much to take without making a fight of it.
The cost of expanding your Primary Demands is entirely relative to the cost of the wargoal, so in the case of taking the small and depopulated state of Utah, its quite low
On the topic of AI, we move on to the final topic for todays dev diary: Peace AI and War Exhaustion mechanics. Both of these have received a bunch of improvements in 1.2, though most of these improvements have not yet made it into the Open Beta. War Exhaustion, of course, is the rate at which a countrys War Support drops towards -100, at which point they are forced to capitulate. In the 1.1.2 version of the game, the main driver of War Exhaustion is occupation of territory, particularly wargoals and the capital, leading to the much-maligned just naval invade Berlin meta.
In 1.2, you still get War Exhaustion from occupation, but the amount gained from occupied wargoals/capital is less, and War Exhaustion from occupation of other territory now scales non-linearly, with severity increasing rapidly as the country approaches full occupation: a fully enemy-controlled Modena will still capitulate quickly, while a Russia that has lost control of a few states in the Caucasus is barely going to be affected. Instead, the primary driver of War Exhaustion is now casualties and battles lost. War Exhaustion from Casualties now scale against the total available manpower for the country instead of its Population, so a country with an army of 10,000 is going to be much more affected by 5000 casualties than a country with an army of 100,000, even if the two countries have the same overall population. For available manpower, all regular battalions are counted (whether mobilized or not), but conscripts are only counted once theyre actually called in - so calling up more conscripts can be a way to directly affect your War Exhaustion rate.
Furthermore, War Exhaustion from Casualties now scales against the % of battles (proportional to battle size, so a battle of 100 battalions vs 100 battalions counts more than one of 5 vs 1) that your side of the war has lost. What this means is that a country which keeps winning battles can absorb far more losses than one which keeps losing them, and allows for battlefield victory to play much more directly into achieving overall victory in the war.
Even though the amount of casualties relative to army size are fairly similar owing to the massive Qing army, the British are losing war support at a much slower rate due to their string of battlefield victories
The AI for making peace has also received some upgrades. In addition to now just being better at constructing equitable peace deals through a rewrite of the core logic behind AI-made peace deals, the AI has also been made to consider more angles when deciding whether or not a peace deal is acceptable. Firstly, a new factor has been added called achievable wargoal, where the AI looks at whether a war goal is likely to be gained by the side that holds it through the capitulation of the target if a peace deal is not signed. Such wargoals, if held by the AI, will make them far more reluctant to sign peace unless those wargoals are part of the peace, while they are simultaneously more likely to accept the enemy pressing wargoals against them that theyd just lose anyway if the war continued. Secondly, the AI now looks at more additional factors for peace (such as the relative military strength of the two sides) and other factors have been tweaked, for example the size of AI Gold Reserves now has less importance than it used to.
Even though the Qing are offering considerable concessions, the British AI will refuse this peace deal because they believe they can get everything they want anyway once Qing is forced to capitulate
Thats it for today! This is of course not an exhaustive list of everything thats been improved diplomacy-wise in 1.2, and there are a number of improvements still planned for future Open Beta updates, particularly on making the diplomatic AI behave in a more plausible way and be better at sticking by important allies, but details on that will have to wait for another day. Next week, we continue talking about the 1.2 Update as our tech lead Emil will tell you all about the improvements weve made to Performance. See you then!
Hello, my name is Henrik, and I am one of the UX Designers on Victoria 3. For 1.2 I have been fully focused on improving the user experience of the game. Before we go into the details of what has been worked on for this update, I want to give a special thanks to the community, all the modders, and anyone who posted feedback here on the forum, Discord, Reddit, Youtube, or any of our other communication channels. Your feedback, ideas, and discussions have all been instrumental in helping the team prioritize our time and efforts for this update.
Hello and welcome! Today we'll be covering several topics relating to Update 1.2:
Ahoy Victorians!
Next week we will be having a Discord QnA with the Developers, February 7th at 14:00 CET!
Make sure to join our Discord and we will see you then!
https://discord.com/invite/victoriagamepdx
Hello and welcome to the second Victoria 3 dev diary for 2023! Today were going to continue talking about patch 1.2 for Victoria 3 (release date to be announced), on a topic that is closely related to last weeks dev diary, namely Economic Laws and how they have changed in 1.2. As we mentioned in Dev Diary #64, one of our post-release ambitions is to increase the differences in gameplay between different economic systems. What I mean by that is that there should be deeper mechanical differences between for example Laissez-Faire and Command Economy in terms of how they impact your country and the economic decisions you make. All of the existing Economic Laws have received changes in 1.2 and weve also added a new one, so Im simply going to go through them one by one and explain how they work now.
Before I start however, I should mention a change that has happened since last week based on feedback we received on the Autonomous Investment dev diary. Several people pointed out that with a weighting system in place, there wasnt really a need for hard restrictions on what the Investment Pool could fund under Autonomous Investment, and we agree! Thus, Autonomous Investment no longer has any restrictions on what profit-generating buildings can be built, just weighting based on who is investing and what they would want to invest in (as mentioned last week, if youre running Agrarianism, expect a lot of farms). The restrictions still apply under Directly Controlled Investment however (and the tooltips will reflect this based on which setting you are using).
Traditionalism: Traditionalism in 1.2 is largely the same as before: A very backwards system that you should generally be trying to get out of. The main difference from 1.1 is that the Investment Pool isnt disabled for Traditionalism, though you take a hefty penalty to investment efficiency (further reduced if you also have Serfdom) and the building types you can construct with the Investment Pool are highly curtailed if you are playing with Directly Controlled Investment.
Interventionism: The golden middle way of economic laws, Interventionism also isnt extensively changed in 1.2: It provides no particular bonuses or penalties, but gives you the freedom to subsidize any and all building types as well as extensive options for the Investment Pool under Directly Controlled Investment, while providing a balanced allocation between Private and Government Construction Allocation under Autonomous Investment.
Agrarianism: Agrarianism has received a fairly substantial boost in 1.2, with both the addition of Farmers as an investing Pop Type and a hefty bonus to the efficiency of all rural investments. Capitalists are now also not locked out of investing under Agrarianism, though they do so at a penalty and their building selection is quite limited if youre playing with Directly Controlled Investment.
Laissez-Faire: The invisible hand of the Free Market made manifest, Laissez-Faire in 1.2 is meant to be the go-to law for the player that wants to get the absolute most out of their Investment Pool when it comes to industrializing. It does come with some significant drawbacks though, as it is no longer possible to downsize non-government buildings under Laissez-Faire.
Cooperative Ownership: A new Economic Law introduced in 1.2, Cooperative Ownership is now a fully fledged economic system instead of just being unlocked by becoming a Council Republic. Under Cooperative Ownership, all Pops working in a building receive an equal number of shares and Aristocrat/Capitalist jobs are eliminated. While this should lead to higher Standard of Living among the workforce, it also means far less money in the Investment Pool, as Farmers and Shopkeepers invest far less than their wealthier counterparts under other systems.
Command Economy: Command Economy is the law that has received the largest (and most needed) overhaul under 1.2. Instead of being a frankly weird system where the Bureaucrats own the profits but you are required to subsidize them, Command Economy now makes use of a new system called Government Shares, which is used by the Government Run ownership production method. Just like how Pop Shares entitle Pops to a portion of a buildings dividends, Government Shares ensure that buildings pay some or all of their profits directly into the treasury - though in large economies this is subject to an efficiency modifier, with some of the money being wasted due to the inefficiencies inherent to large, heavily centralized systems. While this is not something we currently have a setup for in the base game, Government Shares can also freely be mixed with Pop Shares, so were looking forward to seeing what modders make with this!
Another change you might have noticed when looking at the screenshots in this dev diary is that we have tied some economic laws more closely to a countrys Distribution of Power and Government Principles. For one, seizing the means of production is no longer a one-step reform into Council Republic, but rather a multi-step reform that involves first implementing a Council Republic, then Cooperative Ownership, and finally allows you to branch off into Anarchism if you so desire. Command Economy now also requires Autocracy or Oligarchy, as its difficult to pull off a fully centralized economy without the corresponding amount of centralized powers (and with the new Government Shares mechanic should provide more reasons to want to keep a grip on power in the late game).
So the question on everyone's mind is, when will you be able to play with these changes and all the other updates and fixes coming in 1.2? Some of these changes are pretty big and we don't want to rush this patch out too early, but at the same time we know you're anxious to get your hands on it. To find the right balance between these we've decided to launch patch 1.2 in open beta, which we will talk more about in next week's dev diary! In there we will also focus a bit more generally on patch 1.2, giving you more of a birds-eye view of what the patch will look like, along with giving you an expected release date.
Hello and welcome to another Victoria 3 dev diary! Todays diary marks the start of dev diaries about Patch 1.2, which is the next major upcoming patch for Victoria 3 (release date to be announced). As with 1.1, 1.2 will contain a slate of bug fixes, UX improvements, AI improvements and so on, but also some more significant changes to game mechanics, which were going to go over in these dev diaries.
The particular changes well be talking about today, as alluded to by the title, is Autonomous Investment, which is something we said we were going to look into for our post-release plans back in Dev Diary #64. What we said back then is that while we are never going to take construction out of the hands of the player entirely, we were open to the idea of non-government entities constructing buildings in a way not directly controlled by the country, and what we came up with is a system where the Investment Pool will be used by private entities to construct different types of buildings depending on your economic laws.
Before going over how all this works, I first want to mention that we recognize that the community is somewhat split on the issue of autonomous construction, and as such, weve opted to create a new Game Rule for Autonomous Investment. By default, Autonomous Investment is enabled, which puts the Investment Pool out of the hands of the player, but you can choose to disable it, which puts the Investment Pool back in the players hands and makes it work exactly as it does in the current 1.1.2 version of the game.
The Investment Pool Game Rule allows you to enable or disable autonomous construction with Investment Pool funds, depending on your personal preference
Regardless of whether Autonomous Investment is enabled, the Investment Pool works pretty much the same as it did before: Certain Pop Types with ownership shares in buildings pay part of their dividends into the Investment Pool, the funds in which can then be drawn on for construction. There are, however, a few key differences in 1.2 compared to 1.1.
Firstly, the types of Pops that invest have been expanded from just Aristocrats and Capitalists to also include Farmers and Shopkeepers. Capitalists invest the highest percentage of their dividends (20%), followed by Aristocrats at 10%, with Farmers and Shopkeepers investing only 5% each. The rationale here is that it wasnt only the wealthiest in society who invested in new businesses, and this also allows a small degree of investment under laws which strip ownership away from the Capitalists and Aristocrats (but more on that next week).
Secondly, the proportion of dividends that are paid into the Investment Pool varies in 1.1 based on your laws, which can have some pretty bizarre effects, such as switching to Laissez-Faire suddenly creating a bunch of Capitalist Radicals because they are now investing more money and thus end with a drop in their Wealth. The proportion of funds that are invested is now a fixed percentage based on pop type, which is then subjected to an efficiency bonus: Capitalists always invest 20% of their dividends, for example, but under Laissez-Faire, this investment is more efficient and ends up contributing more money to the Investment Pool.
There is also a general investment efficiency bonus for payments into the Investment Pool in small and mid-sized economies, and a penalty in very large ones, to ensure the Investment Pool is also relevant for mid-sized countries while not growing to such absurd proportions that it cannot possibly be spent in a 10 billion GDP country. These efficiency bonuses are meant to abstract a system of foreign investment, which is something weve also mentioned is on our radar in Dev Diary #64 but is a bigger rework that we are not tackling yet in patch 1.2.
Agrarianism gives a hefty bonus to the investments of your Farmers and Aristocrats, but reduces investments from Capitalists and greatly limits the types of buildings they can put their money into.
So how then, does the Investment Pool funds get turned into buildings when Autonomous Investment is enabled? Well, autonomously, of course! With Autonomous Investment, the Construction Queue is split into Private and Government Constructions, with Government Constructions being anything (regardless of whether its a Government building or not) ordered to be built or auto-expanded by the player or country-level AI, while a Private Construction is anything the Pops themselves are building. The Construction capacity of the country will be split between the Private and Government queues in a proportion based on your economic law, though if there isnt enough constructions queued of one type to use its full allocation, the excess can be used by the other queue instead.
In the construction screen, youll be able to see what the next planned Private Construction will be, along with its current funding level. The funding level is a calculated value based on both the total funds available in the Investment Pool as well as the weekly funds coming into it, and can fluctuate based on the Market price of Goods used in construction. Once a project is funded and ready, itll be added to the private Construction Queue the next tick. Private Constructions, unlike Government ones, cannot be reprioritized or canceled - they will always be built in the order they are queued up by the Pops.
Though the Government is currently building nothing in France, there are several private constructions in progress, and plans for the expansion of the Alsace-Lorraine iron mines. Note that this UI is highly WIP!
Pop-ordered constructions use a variant of the standard construction AI which doesnt take into account the country-level AIs strategic objectives and prioritizes the creation of profitable buildings which will create lucrative jobs for the investing Pop types, but they will also take some more strategic factors into account, such as building railroads in low-infrastructure states. Just as with the country-level AI, they also have access to the system of Spending Variables described in Dev Diary #59, which means that they do not operate on a snapshot of the current Market but understand factors such as the impact that already queued buildings (private and government-ordered both) will have on prices once completed and staffed.
Since Autonomous Investment does not only affect player countries, you might be wondering how well this system works together with the AI? The answer is that it actually works quite well! Together with a bunch of AI improvements and fixes in 1.2, this has resulted in more stable economic growth for AI countries and especially seems to have given Great Britain a boost, as the private sector doing its own thing means that the economy is usually growing even if the countrys treasury is having issues, at least as long as the Pops investing into private-sector growth are making healthy profits. Theres still some issues, particularly when AI runs out of available workforce late game, that we are hoping to tackle before 1.2 releases to further improve the AIs economic growth.
Screenshot from a hands-off game taken in 1908. While theres certainly still room for improvement and some countries like France and Prussia have underperformed due to wars and turmoil (and Austria continues to overperform compared to history), its definitely looking better than in 1.1.2.
Thats it for today! Join us again next week as we go over more changes to the economy in 1.2, with a particular focus on Economic Laws and the introduction of Government Shares in buildings.
Victorians, thank you for nominating us for the Steam Awards for the Best Game You Suck At! Remember to vote for us in-between making the line go up!
The Steam Winter Sale starts today too, where you can get Victoria 3 for 10% off!
Almost 2 months after the release of Victoria 3, the game has been picked up by over half a million players worldwide. We hope that you enjoyed the beginning of your journey as much as these people did! [previewyoutube=UC-VSRIrca0;full][/previewyoutube]
Welcome to the final Victoria 3 dev diary for 2022! Last week we took a look at some experimental features and prototypes our team worked on during our recent Game Jam. For the background and purpose of this initiative please refer to last week's diary.
Something that may not have been clear in that diary is that a regular allotment of Personal Development Time (PDT) is an integrated part of game dev culture at Paradox. Team members may use this time as they wish as long as it is something that hones their craft and makes them grow as developers.
The Game Jam initiative is a way of funneling that energy into prototypes for Victoria 3 features, and even if not everything will make it into the game (sorry lizardfolk fans!), pushing against the limits of what we know we can do with the game is important to increase quality and developer skills in the long run. In other words, the Game Jam hasn't taken any scheduled time away from bug fixing, UX and feature improvements, and balance changes. These are and remain our top priority, with patch 1.2 now fully in the works. As always, we are reading your comments and feedback carefully and incorporating many community suggestions in the next free update.
That said, let's jump into it, because there's a lot of fun stuff to cover! First up, team Map Graphics Enchantment:
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Hi, my name is Ilya and I am a gameplay programmer on Victoria 3, you might have seen me in the past on Stellaris and HOI4 streams. Ive been mostly focused on implementing gameplay graphics for the last two years on the project and wanted to use the time during game jam to push the immersive living map experience even further.
So I gathered a team of three other people (two amazing artists Daniel and Paul and one amazing programmer Viacheslav) who were as excited about enhancing map graphics as me. Here are our results!
Pavement upgrades to dirt roads when player researches Paved Roads
Items along the roads, railroads and sea lanes that could be reflective of time
Building highlighting on the map, so players feel the connection between buildings growing in the UI and on the map
Our team actually won the game jam, which I am incredibly proud of :) I wish you all Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the map graphics enchantment team!
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Adding more contextual detail to the map, making you feel like your country is changing and evolving with the times, is something we'd love to improve! While it's not top of our priority list at the moment, you can fully expect to see such visual details bringing historical, immersive flavor to the game eventually.
We're absolutely ecstatic about the building highlighting functionality since it gives you a much closer conceptual connection between the UI and the map. A bit more work is needed here but we are definitely going to try to get this in the game sometime in 2023.
Next up, something yours truly (Mikael) worked on. Technically I didn't participate in the Game Jam, but everyone being busy with their own secret skunkworks projects meant I had some time to hunker down and make something I've been thinking about for a while but never had the chance to try out: Government Quick-Select Options for the Reform Government panel.
With the Legitimacy calculations becoming a bit more complex with patches 1.1.x, it can be pretty hard to predict which combinations of Interest Groups are good together since it depends on the groups that are already there. Victoria 3 isn't really supposed to be a puzzle game, so I figured let's just make the computer do the heavy lifting here. Whenever you click the Reform Government button now, the game runs through every single valid government combination and sorts them by Legitimacy. The top three options are available to you to quick-select at the press of a button. You can even select an option that's almost right and then make tweaks to it before confirming, reducing a lot of the puzzling you previously had to do.
This functionality, along with tweaked Ideological Incoherence, Legitimacy balance overhaul, and changes to government composition rules to prevent Legitimacy death spirals, should already be in your hands with patch 1.1.2 when you read this!
Next we have a team that worked on a prototype for something very Victorian: [strike]graverobbing[/strike] museums!
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We are team The Mummy Returns, composed of Daniel, Iris, Henrik, Konrad, and Vicka. We spent our game jam week developing a new feature: Museums! Our goal was to represent the 19th and early 20th Century obsession with plundering the world for other peoples priceless cultural treasures as a game mechanic. In your Museum, you can exhibit Artifacts for prestige and propaganda.
This is Britains Museum - each country can only have one Museum, buildable only in the capital state. Museums have a limited number of Artifact Slots, determined by the Museums Production Methods which are unlocked by society techs - including the new Archaeology tech which also acts as a gateway to archeological expeditions. You can recover Artifacts from expeditions and other gameplay content; they can be anything from priceless treasures from centuries past, to works of art, to modern ideological propaganda.
In addition to the Museum and Artifact mechanics, we also experimented with a new type of archeological expedition. Unlike exploratory expeditions, you wont need to worry about Peril as the excavation proceeds. Instead, you must strike a careful balance between progress and Recklessness; Recklessness will speed up your progress, which will allow you to complete the expedition before funding is cut off, but build up too much and you risk damaging the site and being unable to receive the best possible rewards. Here's Vicka to present the outline of that expedition:
Hello. My name is Victoria, also known as Vicka. Some of you may know me as AcresOfAsteraceae, or as Pacifica from my work on the TNO mod for HOI4. I am a new content designer on the Victoria 3 team, and the designer of the Valley of the Kings expedition, here to present more details regarding the specifics of the expedition itself.
This expedition was designed to follow the rough outline of the historical expedition to excavate the tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun, carried out by Howard Carter. Upon researching the new technology for archaeological sciences, and securing ones relationship with Egypt, one can dispatch an expedition to the Valley of the Kings in order to search for valuable historical knowledge - and, of course, staggeringly valuable loot. The imperative to secure other peoples priceless historical treasures is a powerful one - and it is one that the Great Powers of Victoria 3 shall pursue to the fullest in their search for both power and prestige.
On the site in the Valley, the expedition team will be faced with numerous challenges and decisions. The practical difficulty of excavating a long-forgotten site in a remote area will quickly become apparent - and the dichotomy between getting the expedition done quickly, and getting it done properly will rear its head.
If one takes too long to complete it, the powers that be in your home nation will pull its funding - but if one rushes ahead too much, catastrophe may well strike, tearing down sections of the tomb and limiting the rewards one may collect.
Finally, if both fortune and practice align in a manner favorable to your archaeologist, the expedition will return home bearing a treasure trove of artifacts. Well, of course, either that, or the few meager scraps that they could pull out of the rubble that they left behind.
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This team's explorations into new types of game content here is really interesting and may be something we delve deeper into in the future!
Finally, we have team Incredible Experience, who spent their time on making some lovely enhancements to the tech tree:
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Hi! Im Aron, one of two UX Designers on the Victoria 3 team. During the Game Jam, I teamed up with one of our Programmers (Can), our 2D Art Lead (Kenneth) and our Producer (Daniel), to rework and improve the User Experience of the tech tree in our game, and oh man did we have fun doing so!
The tech tree is a beast, both visually and as a code-base, and is a perfect candidate for a face lift. Currently, there is no way of queueing up tech research and no way to see at a glance what a tech unlocks. However, the biggest issue is the readability at the furthest zoom level. The text is way too small to read, but if you are not that far zoomed out you cant really get a good overview of the tree.
We tried to tackle all these issues all at once, aiming for the highest cloud.
This resulted in a barrage of fixes, big and small. Lets start with the small but impactful changes:
Ahoy Victorians!
Today we released a minor patch to correct some issues!
Please report any issues in our bug report forum or submit a support ticket. Thank you!
- Adds quick-select options for the three most Legitimate valid government combinations on the Reform Government panel
- It is no longer possible to reliably max out Legitimacy by throwing every Interest Group in government together; Legitimacy penalty from conflicting Government ideologies is now calculated by determining, for each law group, the law (unlocked by tech) with the strongest compound feelings for or against it across all Interest Groups in government (even within the same party) ensuring every additional Interest Group potentially increases the total ideological incoherence
- Legitimacy penalty from size of government has been reintroduced, but in the form of a number of allowed Interest Groups or Parties in government with no penalty and a flat penalty for each entity in addition to that
- Legitimacy balance changes across Laws
- Angry Interest Groups can now be invited to the government, and will not leave the government voluntarily unless Insurrectionary
- Angry Interest Groups in government can now join Political Movements
- Insurrectionary Interest Groups in a government party will now leave the government and party, unless it is the last Interest Group in government
- Number of provinces won in smaller theaters with large numbers of defending mobilized Battalions is now reduced, ensuring they will take more battles to wipe out entirely
- Fixed bug that prevented the AI from sending their mobilized Generals to fronts under certain conditions
- Improved AI's ability to make smart investments in its port infrastructure in the mid- and late game
- Improved AI's ability to manage their total number of ports across a market region
- Increased AI priority for building ports in market areas that lack a port connection
- Ensured that overseas Generals will not travel to their home HQ if their front is resolved or invalidated. Generals whose front has been resolved or become invalid should now always travel to the closest active front to continue their campaign, even if this front is overseas. If no valid fronts exist, the General should remain on Stand By in the overseas HQ unless manually recalled home.
- Fixed a case of Generals skipping travel time and "teleporting" home if their source front's position is unknown
- Fixed issue where high Legitimacy Level would increase Radicals instead of Loyalists due to an outdated cache
- Fixed out-of-sync related to shipping lanes
- Fixed crash when running certain console commands, such as starting events through the console
- Fixed issue with flickering map names in culture panel
- Fixed missing market interaction texture
- Fixed two broken concept tooltips in Japanese localization and one in Polish localization
Hello again and happy Thursday! Today I'm going to tell you about a new dev team initiative we ran last week, after we had locked down the final 1.1 build - the Vicky 3 Feature Game Jam!
We know from experience that some of the best features and aspects of our games come from passionate developers acting on their own initiative to build what they want to see in the game. Sometimes this is a high-impact tweak to some UI element, other times new game content like new events or building types, or even some under-the-hood improvement to the game engine. For the Game Jam, we challenged devs to join up into cross-disciplinary teams and make the coolest feature they could think of in a week's time, with prizes for the team that could make the highest impact on the game. Here are some of the things they came up with!
Please note: only a few of these features will be included in 1.2, and there are no guarantees any of them will ever make it into the game or its future expansions. Some are cool prototypes that would take too much work to implement, while others may need a lot more supporting code or content to work as a standalone feature. Consider this a peek behind the curtain of what our team is experimenting with and what type of things might come in the future.
First up, we have team War Never Changes, with a set of experimental enhancements to the military system!
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Hi, Im Guilherme, one of the programmers! During this game jam, Nik - one of the designers - and I decided to team up to explore potential improvements for our military system. Because of that, we havent implemented many new things, but we did dig up things that could be potentially improved. For example:
Hello Victorians!
Today we released a minor patch to correct some issues, and we're planning to follow it up with 1.1.2 next week for some additional adjustments.
Please report any issues in our bug report forum or submit a support ticket. Thank you!
- Fixed a bug where AI breaks off pacts to save Influence even when they're not the ones paying
- Fixed a few unlocalized Russian custom loc strings (RU_CL...)
- Fixed a bug where the Capitalists, Shopkeepers and Bureaucrats had no default Interest Group attraction value, causing them to be Politically Inactive unless they worked in a Trade Center
- Fixed a bug that caused regressive political movements to be much more common than progressive ones
- Fixed a bug that caused Morale Loss to scale negatively with the number of troops in battle
- Fixed random crash on startup when reading in game data
Greetings Everyone!
The time has come for us to release the first major update for Victoria 3, named "Earl Grey"! As far as we know there shouldn't be any compatibility issues between old saves, with emphasis on shouldn't. This is nothing we can guarantee, so if you want to be safe you can roll back to 1.0.6 and finish off any ongoing saves before updating.
- Reworked Morale to inflict a base loss for every round of battle, modified by the difference in casualties inflicted between the sides as well as various other modifiers
- Reworked Legitimacy to provide bonuses and penalties to countries at different Legitimacy levels
- Added a new Legitimacy modifier based on Votes in Government
- Replaced Legitimacy Penalty from Government Size with a Legitimacy Penalty from Ideological incoherence
- Treaty Ports will no longer function if the owner's Power Rank isn't greater than the market owner's, ensuring Great Powers cannot use them to get access to the markets of other Great Powers
- Rebalanced Legitimacy across all Laws
- Added Authority bonus to High and Very High Government Wages
- Added Morale Recovery and Power Projection bonus to High and Very High Military Wages
- Added Power Projection penalty to Low and Very Low Military Wages
- Lowered Training Rate penalty for Very Low Military Wages
- Lowered the positive and negative approval from Government/Military Wages
- Buildings will now only raise wages if they are either competing for wages or are below their minimum wage target; the target is based on employees' Expected Standard of Living to prevent too much active radicalization
- Building wage targets are lowered in unincorporated states (e.g. colonies) and for discriminated pops
- Laws that restrict cultural / religious tolerance now give a decrease to radicals and increase to loyalists from accepted cultures / religions - the more restrictive the law, the higher the effect
- Pops in Unincorporated States now have their voting power reduced according to current Incorporation level
- Mass migration now only targets incorporated states, to avoid colonies being the main target of mass migration rather than e.g. the New World
- Unincorporated states now have a lower expected standard of living than incorporated states
- Rebalanced potential Oil and Rubber deposits around the world
- Rebalanced Power Plant production method
- Reduced the impact of Artillery Commander traits
- Rebalanced Port production methods to (generally) increase Convoy production
- Rebalanced technology unlocks for potential Port levels to increase sizes over time
- Replaced Cape Colony with Persia as a recommendation for the Learn the Game objective
- USA no longer immediately starts losing its Interest in the Great Plains on game start
- Additional production Rubber Irrigation PM added
- Revolutions will now always lose some amount of war support, even when they're out of troops, so they cannot go on forever
- AI will not begin unifying Canada or Australia until Pan-Nationalism is researched
- Australian and Canadian confederation no longer forces the annexation of a player
- AI acceptance for white peace now increases over time the longer a war goes on
- AI is now less inclined to pursue annexation of subjects with whom they have good relations
- AI is now more willing to settle wars that are going nowhere with a white peace
- AI now also takes into account bankruptcy when considering peace desire, neutrality and confidence, not just debt level
- AI will now properly stop enacting a law to avoid revolution if it calculates this to be in its best interest
- AI will now properly use its investment pool when it can cover the entire construction cost, despite being in deficit
- Fixed native uprisings not mobilizing due to not being able to calculate their conscripts' power projection
- Improve the AI's understanding of when it should produce more military goods of a certain type
- Make the AI more interested in switching to more productive PMs, and less interested in switching to less productive ones unless there is a very good reason to do so
- Great Powers are much more likely to declare an interest in Arabia while the Ottomans are trying to reclaim Syria
- Liberia now begins independent, to discourage US colonization of Africa and to better reflect Liberia's de facto situation
- Changed incorrect check in Powerful Protectors that compared army size to country rank instead of army size
- Fixed some cases where the AI would use the wrong define for computing heuristics
- Improves the Pop Details Panel with tabs and Consumed Goods
- Added a Good's current Trade Routes to the Goods Panel's Market tab
- Added a delay to opening map tooltips. The amount of delay is controlled by a new setting.
- Added pop consumption goods needs display to Economy and Consumption pop tabs
- Added "show more" button to the Population panel to display all categories, inspired by the "Complete Pop List" mod by Ron Swanson
- Make the Construction Queue building list items say their State as well as making the list items smaller, inspired by the "Construction Queue with States" mod by Seppiya
- Multiple changes to which notification types display as Toasts (middle of the screen) versus Feed (bottom right)
- Show usable manpower involved on each side of a battle in addition to the number of battalions
- The volume for Music Stingers and Background Music can now be adjusted independently in the Audio Settings screen
- Inactive Treaty Ports are now displayed as such, with a tooltip explaining why
- Active Production Methods are now non-clickable and more distinguishable from the rest
- Game rules are now visible even before you select a Player Objective in the New Game Interface
- Moved the Timed Modifiers higher up in the change Production Method tooltip
- The amount of unrealized taxes are now displayed in the country budget tooltip
- Transfer of Power information is now displayed better
- The outliner now shows the number of currently active unpinned Player Objective challenges and Journal Entries
- Update to the construction queues page buttons visuals
- Establish Trade Route Map List Panel can now sort markets alphabetically by name
- Updated text for convoy raiding order to better represent information to the player
- Right-align the Consumption tax cost in the add Consumption tax menu for better readability
- Removes decimals from Legitimacy modifier types
- Added decision to cancel surveys of Panama/Suez
- Added event greatly weakening the Shogunate if Japan is forced to open its market
- Skyscraper now has a Trade Nexus base PM as an option for Bureaucratic Nexus
- Changed the requirement for completing the Reading Campaign to only require 95% literacy.
- Made several repeating events fire less often
- Fixed various issues in 1848 content
- Expanded the name lists for North German, South German, North Italian, South Italian, and Thai cultures
- Added some variant unifier flags for Germany and Italy
- Germany's default flag is now the Black-Red-Gold tricolor
- Italy's default flag is now the Green-White-Red tricolor without the House of Savoy's coat of arms
- Conservative IGs such as the Landowners, Devout and Rural Folk now tend to be significantly stronger at the start of the game in most countries
- Fixed the large starting unemployment in several Decentralized Countries
- Reduced Hokkaido's population to historical levels
- Made events that strengthen abolitionism rarer in the USA
- Manifest Destiny decision now requires an Interest in the Pacific Coast
- Manifest Destiny now provide claims on the colonized split states of Mexico
- Alaska Purchase decision now has significantly easier requirements
- American West Expedition is now significantly easier to complete
- "The Dream" event for gold rushes no longer has one unequivocally better option
- Sub-Saharan African states now have more cultural homelands assigned to them
- Amended Great Qing flavor text to better fit its historical situation
- Reduced the urban center requirements for the Underground Railway Journal Entry from 30 to 20, and made the completion goal valid for cases where the country's capital and the country's market capital are in different states
- People's Springtime is now correctly triggered by a powerful Radical IG, not only through insurrection
- tanzimat_events.10 now requires Napoleonic Warfare
- migration_laws.6 now displays pop names correctly
- "A Tale of Hope" event no longer targets a null state
- "An Economic Prison" event no longer applies trade route effects to isolationist countries
- "Devout Scandal" no longer has a sentence starting with a lowercase letter
- "Elevating Our Situation" journal entry has been made less convoluted
- "Expand the East Indies Administration" is now visible whenever the Dutch East Indies exists
- "Mutually Beneficial" event now applies the correct popularity modifiers.
- "The Rogue Imperialist" event can no longer cause a diplomatic incident with yourself
- Austrian-formed Germany no longer has the Matter of Hungary Journal Entry
- Fixed many issues in cultural_homelands_events
- China now re-incorporates the states of the Heavenly Kingdom upon defeating the rebellion.
- Commanders can no longer cheat with their own spouses
- Defeat in the Opium Wars will now remove opium bans and opium ban Authority cost
- Countries with the Free Trade law can now remove trade bans but not add them
- Doctrine of Lapse decision for the British East India Company now has a proper cooldown of two years
- Elitist ideology now has a stance on theocracy
- Ethiopia now requires at least two fully controlled states to form
- Poland now requires only 5 Polish states to form rather than 7
- Event "Campaign Financing" now requires active parties to fire
- Expand Productive Building tutorial challenge now tests if the player can actually expand the target building an additional level before selecting it as a target building
- Italian nations classified as minor powers may now participate in Risoregimento
- Efficient Home Affairs modifier is now actually efficient
- Made the "Good Word of the Revolution" event less spammy
- Mustard Gas no longer permanently applies modifiers to states
- North German Federation, South German Federation, and Italy are now formable if all completion requirements are achieved before Nationalism is researched
- Numerous law enaction events will now fire properly, and not auto-cancel
- Paying for school supplies now costs bureaucracy instead of benefiting it
- Philip Sheridan's birth date is now correct
- Presidents in Republics now die less frequently
- Railway research bonus in the Atmospheric Engine tech event now requires all railway prereqs to be unlocked
- Resolved edge case where native_resettlement.4 has no options
- Resolved issue with error spam when China was annexed
- The Free States of America's name now shows up in its secession event
- The Ripper can no longer be a child or toddler
- Tooltip for "How to Reform your Government" tutorial will no longer flood the error log
- West America expedition now removes event tracking variables properly
- Bureaucracy tech no longer uses the same localization key as bureaucracy concept
- Cleaned up defines to remove unused ones
- Renamed some defines to be more precise about what they do
- Exposed several parameters of character life expectancy calculation as defines
- Fixed font atlas not notifying the map system when textures where recycled, leading to garbled map names especially frequent in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages
- Enabled new logging system that prevents log files from growing too large
- Fixed overflows in politics related math that could lead to weird values for political strength of pops, or amount of votes in elections, and other such things
- Fixed an issue that led to most characters having a natural lifespan in excess of 90 years
- Fixed computation error that made it possible to have two highly profitable routes trading the same good back and forth between two markets
- Fixed an issue that made the "force open market" and "ban slavery" wargoals forbid the affected country from changing policy for 60 years instead of 60 months
- Fixed an overflow in gold reserves limit
- Fixed a bug that would cause garrison units to not recover morale
- Ensures that angry IGs always leave the government if able to do so, even when in a party
- Fixed an issue where tariffs would incorrectly be paid out to market owner from tariff-exempt trade routes
- Revolutionary and seceding countries can no longer engage in colonization until the civil war is over
- Discriminated Pops now have their Political Strength reduced by 90% as intended
- Pops in Unincorporated States now get a 50% penalty to Political Strength as intended
- Battalions are now assigned to battles in order of descending usable manpower (including Morale)
- Countries can no longer make progress on colonies in regions without maintaining an active Interest there
- Subjects no longer have to ratify a peace deal if their overlord does, even if they have diplomatic autonomy
- Expedition leaders are now always properly returned to service upon expedition conclusion
- Expeditions no longer automatically fail after turning back on the Niger River
- Expedition modifier for expedition taxes now removed upon expedition end
- Fixed general travel exploit that would allow to teleport generals by alternating orders towards the same destination
- Fixed a general travel duration exploit that was possible when giving several orders targeting different destinations, causing GENERAL_TRAVEL_OVERSEAS_SCALE to sometimes not be applied
- Fixed a bug where making a general return to a previous location during travel would sometimes apply GENERAL_TRAVEL_OVERSEAS_SCALE
- Military buildings are now unable to provide more Battalions or Flotillas than their level can support
- Fixed the bug when Cut Down To Size wargoal would liberate conquered states regardless of when they were acquired
- Fixed a bug that would cause only one admiral to be able to defend against naval invasions
- Fixed a bug that allowed an admiral to be able to naval invade a state that has no passable coastal provinces controlled by the enemy
- Fixed an issue that caused secessionist countries to not being able to be targeted by diplomatic plays even after they win the secession war
- Fixed a bug where Treaty Ports could give you access to markets in states outside the same state region
- Fixed bug where market access was not updated in states split due to ceding a Treaty Port or gaining independence
- Fixed the bug when status of convoy raiding wasn't displayed on the map nodes
- Combat unit allocation between commanders is now recomputed if a commander loses their role
- Failed or timed out Journal Entries won't be triggered by an Objective again unless marked as repeatable
- Fixed an error that caused the building tooltip to display incorrectly and produce error log spam when the building was built in a state with an apostrophe in its name
- Fixed commonly occuring crash caused by offscreen GUI VFX not being cleaned up properly
- Fixed crash when running out of cloud storage space for save files
- Fixed OOS for Elections when hot-joining
- Fixed a crash that would happen when the same peace deal is accepted at the same time in multiple wars
- Fixed crash when listing saves
- Fixed crash arising from cultural_homeland_events.1
- Fixed crash during commander generation
- Rebellions/uprisings and civil war countries no longer have rebellions
- Fixed issue with displaying country names for civil war countries
- Ensures the correct number of Battalions are reported for both Regulars and Conscripts on various panels and tooltips
- Death notifications no longer fire upon the retirement of a politician
- Fixed an issue in prediction tooltips where Peasant goods consumption was incorrectly calculated, causing price predictions to be wrong for certain goods
- Fixed an issue where price predictions for pop-consumed goods would get increasingly inaccurate the longer the game went on due to old data not being properly cleared
- Fixed flickering map mode in the culture panel
- Fixed front map markers not showing up correctly in Observer Mode
- Fixed overlapping text of the options in the Sway Country Panel
- Fixed overlapping text on the Nation Formation panel to not overlap
- Fixed text overlapping and alignment issues on the War Panel
- Fixed the Diplomatic Play title text to not overlap the flags when very long
- Fixed 'You' label being visible for other players in the War Panel in a Multiplayer game
- Fixed invalid diplomatic relations expandable tooltip
- Fixed wrong scope provided to on_sway_offer_rejected
- Added missing localization for is_direct_subject_of
- Fixed a missing texture that would appear in the war tooltip when the initiator of a diplomatic play had obtained all of their declared war goals
- Fixed an issue that made it possible to change government or military wage rates when the country wasn't actually paying any government / military wages
- Fixed incorrect text that would appear in the war tooltip when either side of a diplomatic play had obtained all of their declared wargoals
- Fixed notifications accidentally appearing twice when closed
- Fixed typo in Pop Properties tutorial lesson
- Fixed missing text for Annex Subject Diplomatic Play Tooltip
- Korean officers now wear clothes
- Male Academics and Capitalist pops no longer carry parasols
- Dinka slave pops are now properly naked
- The final fallback for character clothing is now peasant's clothes instead of a birthday suit
- The Confederate States of America should now always be called such during the American Civil War
- Taiping Rebellion war name is now properly localized
- Corrected spelling issues with Australian hubs and Theodore Roosevelt
- Commanders-in-Chief now use the correct Character background on their Character Panel
- Fixed unlocalized string in the load game button in the multiplayer game over screen
- Resolved several typos in the country flavor text for Parma, Modena, and Krakow
- Fixed spelling of "Van Diemen's Land", "Concepcin", and "Legazpi"
- Return State Goal now utilizes correct infamy define[/spoiler]
* A known issue with loading 1.0.6 save games into 1.1 is that the Bureaucracy tech will be "forgotten" and has to be re-researched. If you don't want to do this in-game, you can fix it by running your game with the debug console enabled in the launcher, loading up your save game, opening the console, and typing 'research tech_bureaucracy'.
Hello and welcome to the final dev diary on the subject of patch 1.1! The release date for this patch is Monday December 5th, at 10:00 Central European Time. Your existing save games should be compatible* with 1.1, but as usual we will backup the old 1.0.6 version as a Steam beta branch you can rollback to if needed (e.g. for mod compatibility).
This is a chonky update so I'm not going to go over the entries in detail, but to get a more in-depth look at a few of the major things that have been added or changed to 1.1, you can take a look at our previous dev diaries.
Let's dig into it!
- Reworked Morale to inflict a base loss for every round of battle, modified by the difference in casualties inflicted between the sides as well as various other modifiers
- Reworked Legitimacy to provide bonuses and penalties to countries at different Legitimacy levels
- Added a new Legitimacy modifier based on Votes in Government
- Replaced Legitimacy Penalty from Government Size with a Legitimacy Penalty from Ideological incoherence
- Treaty Ports will no longer function if the owner's Power Rank isn't greater than the market owner's, ensuring Great Powers cannot use them to get access to the markets of other Great Powers
- Rebalanced Legitimacy across all Laws
- Added Authority bonus to High and Very High Government Wages
- Added Morale Recovery and Power Projection bonus to High and Very High Military Wages
- Added Power Projection penalty to Low and Very Low Military Wages
- Lowered Training Rate penalty for Very Low Military Wages
- Lowered the positive and negative approval from Government/Military Wages
- Buildings will now only raise wages if they are either competing for wages or are below their minimum wage target; the target is based on employees' Expected Standard of Living to prevent too much active radicalization
- Building wage targets are lowered in unincorporated states (e.g. colonies) and for discriminated pops
- Laws that restrict cultural / religious tolerance now give a decrease to radicals and increase to loyalists from accepted cultures / religions - the more restrictive the law, the higher the effect
- Pops in Unincorporated States now have their voting power reduced according to current Incorporation level
- Mass migration now only targets incorporated states, to avoid colonies being the main target of mass migration rather than e.g. the New World
- Unincorporated states now have a lower expected standard of living than incorporated states
- Rebalanced potential Oil and Rubber deposits around the world
- Rebalanced Power Plant production method
- Reduced the impact of Artillery Commander traits
- Rebalanced Port production methods to (generally) increase Convoy production
- Rebalanced technology unlocks for potential Port levels to increase sizes over time
- Replaced Cape Colony with Persia as a recommendation for the Learn the Game objective
- USA no longer immediately starts losing its Interest in the Great Plains on game start
- AI will not begin unifying Canada or Australia until Pan-Nationalism is researched
- Australian and Canadian confederation no longer forces the annexation of a player
- AI acceptance for white peace now increases over time the longer a war goes on
- AI is now less inclined to pursue annexation of subjects with whom they have good relations
- AI is now more willing to settle wars that are going nowhere with a white peace
- AI now also takes into account bankruptcy when considering peace desire, neutrality and confidence, not just debt level
- AI will now properly stop enacting a law to avoid revolution if it calculates this to be in its best interest
- AI will now properly use its investment pool when it can cover the entire construction cost, despite being in deficit
- Fixed native uprisings not mobilizing due to not being able to calculate their conscripts' power projection
- Improve the AI's understanding of when it should produce more military goods of a certain type
- Make the AI more interested in switching to more productive PMs, and less interested in switching to less productive ones unless there is a very good reason to do so
- Great Powers are much more likely to declare an interest in Arabia while the Ottomans are trying to reclaim Syria
- Liberia now begins independent, to discourage US colonization of Africa and to better reflect Liberia's de facto situation
- Changed incorrect check in Powerful Protectors that compared army size to country rank instead of army size
- Fixed some cases where the AI would use the wrong define for computing heuristics
- Improves the Pop Details Panel with tabs and Consumed Goods
- Added a Good's current Trade Routes to the Goods Panel's Market tab
- Added a delay to opening map tooltips. The amount of delay is controlled by a new setting.
- Added pop consumption goods needs display to Economy and Consumption pop tabs
- Added "show more" button to the Population panel to display all categories, inspired by the "Complete Pop List" mod by Ron Swanson
- Make the Construction Queue building list items say their State as well as making the list items smaller, inspired by the "Construction Queue with States" mod by Seppiya
- Multiple changes to which notification types display as Toasts (middle of the screen) versus Feed (bottom right)
- Show usable manpower involved on each side of a battle in addition to the number of battalions
- The volume for Music Stingers and Background Music can now be adjusted independently in the Audio Settings screen
- Inactive Treaty Ports are now displayed as such, with a tooltip explaining why
- Active Production Methods are now non-clickable and more distinguishable from the rest
- Game rules are now visible even before you select a Player Objective in the New Game Interface
- Moved the Timed Modifiers higher up in the change Production Method tooltip
- The amount of unrealized taxes are now displayed in the country budget tooltip
- Transfer of Power information is now displayed better
- The outliner now shows the number of currently active unpinned Player Objective challenges and Journal Entries
- Update to the construction queues page buttons visuals
- Establish Trade Route Map List Panel can now sort markets alphabetically by name
- Updated text for convoy raiding order to better represent information to the player
- Right-align the Consumption tax cost in the add Consumption tax menu for better readability
- Removes decimals from Legitimacy modifier types
- Added decision to cancel surveys of Panama/Suez
- Added event greatly weakening the Shogunate if Japan is forced to open its market
- Skyscraper now has a Trade Nexus base PM as an option for Bureaucratic Nexus
- Changed the requirement for completing the Reading Campaign to only require 95% literacy.
- Made several repeating events fire less often
- Fixed various issues in 1848 content
- Expanded the name lists for North German, South German, North Italian, South Italian, and Thai cultures
- Added some variant unifier flags for Germany and Italy
- Germany's default flag is now the Black-Red-Gold tricolor
- Italy's default flag is now the Green-White-Red tricolor without the House of Savoy's coat of arms
- Conservative IGs such as the Landowners, Devout and Rural Folk now tend to be significantly stronger at the start of the game in most countries
- Fixed the large starting unemployment in several Decentralized Countries
- Reduced Hokkaido's population to historical levels
- Made events that strengthen abolitionism rarer in the USA
- Manifest Destiny decision now requires an Interest in the Pacific Coast
- Manifest Destiny now provide claims on the colonized split states of Mexico
- Alaska Purchase decision now has significantly easier requirements
- American West Expedition is now significantly easier to complete
- "The Dream" event for gold rushes no longer has one unequivocally better option
- Sub-Saharan African states now have more cultural homelands assigned to them
- Amended Great Qing flavor text to better fit its historical situation
- Reduced the urban center requirements for the Underground Railway Journal Entry from 30 to 20, and made the completion goal valid for cases where the country's capital and the country's market capital are in different states
- People's Springtime is now correctly triggered by a powerful Radical IG, not only through insurrection
- tanzimat_events.10 now requires Napoleonic Warfare
- migration_laws.6 now displays pop names correctly
- "A Tale of Hope" event no longer targets a null state
- "An Economic Prison" event no longer applies trade route effects to isolationist countries
- "Devout Scandal" no longer has a sentence starting with a lowercase letter
- "Elevating Our Situation" journal entry has been made less convoluted
- "Expand the East Indies Administration" is now visible whenever the Dutch East Indies exists
- "Mutually Beneficial" event now applies the correct popularity modifiers.
- "The Rogue Imperialist" event can no longer cause a diplomatic incident with yourself
- Austrian-formed Germany no longer has the Matter of Hungary Journal Entry
- Fixed many issues in cultural_homelands_events
- China now re-incorporates the states of the Heavenly Kingdom upon defeating the rebellion.
- Commanders can no longer cheat with their own spouses
- Defeat in the Opium Wars will now remove opium bans and opium ban Authority cost
- Countries with the Free Trade law can now remove trade bans but not add them
- Doctrine of Lapse decision for the British East India Company now has a proper cooldown of two years
- Elitist ideology now has a stance on theocracy
- Ethiopia now requires at least two fully controlled states to form
- Poland now requires only 5 Polish states to form rather than 7
- Event "Campaign Financing" now requires active parties to fire
- Expand Productive Building tutorial challenge now tests if the player can actually expand the target building an additional level before selecting it as a target building
- Italian nations classified as minor powers may now participate in Risoregimento
- Efficient Home Affairs modifier is now actually efficient
- Made the "Good Word of the Revolution" event less spammy
- Mustard Gas no longer permanently applies modifiers to states
- North German Federation, South German Federation, and Italy are now formable if all completion requirements are achieved before Nationalism is researched
- Numerous law enaction events will now fire properly, and not auto-cancel
- Paying for school supplies now costs bureaucracy instead of benefiting it
- Philip Sheridan's birth date is now correct
- Presidents in Republics now die less frequently
- Railway research bonus in the Atmospheric Engine tech event now requires all railway prereqs to be unlocked
- Resolved edge case where native_resettlement.4 has no options
- Resolved issue with error spam when China was annexed
- The Free States of America's name now shows up in its secession event
- The Ripper can no longer be a child or toddler
- Tooltip for "How to Reform your Government" tutorial will no longer flood the error log
- West America expedition now removes event tracking variables properly
- Bureaucracy tech no longer uses the same localization key as bureaucracy concept
- Cleaned up defines to remove unused ones
- Renamed some defines to be more precise about what they do
- Exposed several parameters of character life expectancy calculation as defines
- Fixed font atlas not notifying the map system when textures where recycled, leading to garbled map names especially frequent in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages
- Enabled new logging system that prevents log files from growing too large
- Fixed overflows in politics related math that could lead to weird values for political strength of pops, or amount of votes in elections, and other such things
- Fixed an issue that led to most characters having a natural lifespan in excess of 90 years
- Fixed computation error that made it possible to have two highly profitable routes trading the same good back and forth between two markets
- Fixed an issue that made the "force open market" and "ban slavery" wargoals forbid the affected country from changing policy for 60 years instead of 60 months
- Fixed an overflow in gold reserves limit
- Fixed a bug that would cause garrison units to not recover morale
- Ensures that angry IGs always leave the government if able to do so, even when in a party
- Fixed an issue where tariffs would incorrectly be paid out to market owner from tariff-exempt trade routes
- Revolutionary and seceding countries can no longer engage in colonization until the civil war is over
- Discriminated Pops now have their Political Strength reduced by 90% as intended
- Pops in Unincorporated States now get a 50% penalty to Political Strength as intended
- Battalions are now assigned to battles in order of descending usable manpower (including Morale)
- Countries can no longer make progress on colonies in regions without maintaining an active Interest there
- Subjects no longer have to ratify a peace deal if their overlord does, even if they have diplomatic autonomy
- Expedition leaders are now always properly returned to service upon expedition conclusion
- Expeditions no longer automatically fail after turning back on the Niger River
- Expedition modifier for expedition taxes now removed upon expedition end
- Fixed general travel exploit that would allow to teleport generals by alternating orders towards the same destination
- Fixed a general travel duration exploit that was possible when giving several orders targeting different destinations, causing GENERAL_TRAVEL_OVERSEAS_SCALE to sometimes not be applied
- Fixed a bug where making a general return to a previous location during travel would sometimes apply GENERAL_TRAVEL_OVERSEAS_SCALE
- Military buildings are now unable to provide more Battalions or Flotillas than their level can support
- Fixed the bug when Cut Down To Size wargoal would liberate conquered states regardless of when they were acquired
- Fixed a bug that would cause only one admiral to be able to defend against naval invasions
- Fixed a bug that allowed an admiral to be able to naval invade a state that has no passable coastal provinces controlled by the enemy
- Fixed an issue that caused secessionist countries to not being able to be targeted by diplomatic plays even after they win the secession war
- Fixed a bug where Treaty Ports could give you access to markets in states outside the same state region
- Fixed bug where market access was not updated in states split due to ceding a Treaty Port or gaining independence
- Fixed the bug when status of convoy raiding wasn't displayed on the map nodes
- Combat unit allocation between commanders is now recomputed if a commander loses their role
- Failed or timed out Journal Entries won't be triggered by an Objective again unless marked as repeatable
- Fixed an error that caused the building tooltip to display incorrectly and produce error log spam when the building was built in a state with an apostrophe in its name
- Fixed commonly occuring crash caused by offscreen GUI VFX not being cleaned up properly
- Fixed crash when running out of cloud storage space for save files
- Fixed OOS for Elections when hot-joining
- Fixed a crash that would happen when the same peace deal is accepted at the same time in multiple wars
- Fixed crash when listing saves
- Fixed crash arising from cultural_homeland_events.1
- Fixed crash during commander generation
- Fixed issue with displaying country names for civil war countries
- Ensures the correct number of Battalions are reported for both Regulars and Conscripts on various panels and tooltips
- Death notifications no longer fire upon the retirement of a politician
- Fixed an issue in prediction tooltips where Peasant goods consumption was incorrectly calculated, causing price predictions to be wrong for certain goods
- Fixed an issue where price predictions for pop-consumed goods would get increasingly inaccurate the longer the game went on due to old data not being properly cleared
- Fixed flickering map mode in the culture panel
- Fixed front map markers not showing up correctly in Observer Mode
- Fixed overlapping text of the options in the Sway Country Panel
- Fixed overlapping text on the Nation Formation panel to not overlap
- Fixed text overlapping and alignment issues on the War Panel
- Fixed the Diplomatic Play title text to not overlap the flags when very long
- Fixed 'You' label being visible for other players in the War Panel in a Multiplayer game
- Fixed invalid diplomatic relations expandable tooltip
- Fixed wrong scope provided to on_sway_offer_rejected
- Added missing localization for is_direct_subject_of
- Fixed a missing texture that would appear in the war tooltip when the initiator of a diplomatic play had obtained all of their declared war goals
- Fixed an issue that made it possible to change government or military wage rates when the country wasn't actually paying any government / military wages
- Fixed incorrect text that would appear in the war tooltip when either side of a diplomatic play had obtained all of their declared wargoals
- Fixed notifications accidentally appearing twice when closed
- Fixed typo in Pop Properties tutorial lesson
- Fixed missing text for Annex Subject Diplomatic Play Tooltip
- Korean officers now wear clothes
- Male Academics and Capitalist pops no longer carry parasols
- Dinka slave pops are now properly naked
- The final fallback for character clothing is now peasant's clothes instead of a birthday suit
- The Confederate States of America should now always be called such during the American Civil War
- Taiping Rebellion war name is now properly localized
- Corrected spelling issues with Australian hubs and Theodore Roosevelt
- Commanders-in-Chief now use the correct Character background on their Character Panel
- Fixed unlocalized string in the load game button in the multiplayer game over screen
- Resolved several typos in the country flavor text for Parma, Modena, and Krakow
- Fixed spelling of "Van Diemen's Land", "Concepcin", and "Legazpi"
* A known issue with loading 1.0.6 save games into 1.1 is that the Bureaucracy tech will be "forgotten" and has to be re-researched. If you don't want to do this in-game, you can fix it by running your game with the debug console enabled in the launcher, loading up your save game, opening the console, and typing 'research tech_bureaucracy'.
We hope you enjoy this update! Please continue to provide your feedback and make sure to let us know if you run into any other bugs so we can continue to improve the game for the next free patch 1.2. We will return to discuss our next plans for the future next Thursday!
Hello Everyone!
We would like to start off by thanking everyone for the support and passion you've all shown for the game. It's truly humbling to have such a dedicated and passionate community, thank you!
Victoria 3 has now sold over 500k games since the release a little over a month ago, which makes it one of the most successful launches in Paradox history, and it's all thanks to you, our players.
To top it all off, Victoria 3 has also been nominated in the "Best Sim / Strategy" category in The Game Awards!
We're looking forward to the Victorian journey we are embarking on together with you all. And the first stop would be the release of the 1.1 Update coming in early December - bringing forth a multitude of improvements and fixes that has been requested by the community. The changelog will be shared with you all in tomorrow's Dev Diary.
We'd also like to celebrate this occassion by sharing some fascinating stats with you from this first month:
Happy Thursday! Today we'll talk about some more changes we've introduced in patch 1.1, including how Morale works.
For starters, why rework morale? One piece of feedback we heard a lot of post-release was that it was frustrating to watch long, drawn-out battles that tied up the front while your battalions that weren't in that combat perished from attrition. Our goal with these changes is primarily to make battles snappier, ensuring that battles that are all but decided can come to a rapid conclusion so the front can start moving again. Some nice side effects are that your supply, morale recovery rates, and having reinforcements and reserves start to play a greater role than they used to.
In the new system, instead of the losers typically being the only side to take morale damage, units on both sides will take a certain amount of morale damage for each round of combat. That morale damage can be modified by various factors, such as technologies and production methods. In addition, the side that has taken the most casualties will suffer an additional multiplier to their loss of morale, ensuring that combat superiority is still what ultimately wins battles.
The basis for how much morale units lose each day is determined by the organization or ship class production method groups in Barracks / Conscription Centers and Naval Bases respectively. The more modern the method of warfare, the lower the loss of morale. Also, conscripts now differ from regular Battalions in that they suffer more morale damage.
These Ohioan conscripts have a relatively high base morale loss of 15 men per day, but this is reduced due to National Militia. Their morale losses increase somewhat from currently being in a battle where more casualties have been inflicted on them than they have on the enemy. When all remaining men in the unit have been lost to casualties or morale loss, the battalion will detach from the battle. Once fighting has concluded, their commanding General's Experienced Diplomat trait will increase the speed by which their morale recovers. Morale will also recover along with fresh reinforcements from the Conscription Center supporting them.
Modifiers can affect how much morale your own troops lose, such as good modifiers from First Aid and Field Hospitals, or bad modifiers from battle conditions such as Broken Supply Lines or commander traits like Reckless. But the morale damage you take can also be modified by the enemy's forces, for example via production methods like Siege Artillery or Chemical Weapon Specialists, or character traits like Wrathful.
When battles start, units are now deprioritized to enter combat if they are injured or demoralized. What this means is that even if you end up with fewer than your full complement of battalions in a particular fight, the rest of them will make use of this short respite to recover for the next one.
Speaking of recovery, we have also made a few changes to the way Wage levels work. Higher military wages than usual now affect how quickly units recover morale when not in combat, letting flush governments push frontlines by gradually overcoming the enemy's fighting spirit - at least as long as you're able and willing to rack up an enormous body count in the process.
Recovering Morale faster than the enemy does could be well worth the expense in the long run. It will also give your Officers and Servicemen a better Standard of Living, building Loyalists in your Armed Forces over time. Their increased Wealth will provide them with more Clout to throw around in internal politics as well, of course, so take that into account.
This isn't the extent of the changes to government and military wages in 1.1. These settings used to be a highly efficient way of directly and immediately altering your Interest Groups' Approval scores, which we have toned down a bit in 1.1 by making the Approval changes limited to -2 / -1 / 0 / +1 / +2 for the five different levels. Of course, the act of raising or lowering wages still has the usual knock-on effects on Approval by increasing or decreasing the purchasing power of the pops that tend to make up those groups, leading to changes in Standard of Living and therefore Radicals and Loyalists.
High or low military wages also affect your armed forces' Power Projection, leading to a Prestige impact also during peacetime. Low military wages also affect your buildings' training rate, i.e. how rapidly they can reinforce battalions and flotillas that have become underpowered due to casualties. To round it out, low government wages provide a direct impact on Prestige while higher levels now provide additional Authority.
As a final note, an update from our first Patch 1.1 update on Legitimacy levels. One oft-repeated concern with how Legitimacy works currently is that under most democratic systems, having two parties in a coalition government does not provide much of a penalty, even if those parties are vehemently opposed to each other. From one perspective this was working as intended, as it represents a trade-off between Legitimacy (in this case, popular representation) and ability to actually enact any new Laws (since the incoherence between the ideologies in government would make debate and stall outcomes very common). But on the other hand it felt wrong to have the two completely incompatible parties working together in a highly functional government - as long as they didn't try to make any changes, that is.
In response, we have changed the Legitimacy penalty from government size to one that actually represents ideological incoherence. Adding a party or Interest Group to government will now cause any conflicting ideologies (as measured by their stances on Laws) outside party boundaries to inflict a Legitimacy penalty. This encourages formation of government groups that are both strong and effective together. We're very interested in hearing how this change feels to you all, once patch 1.1 drops!
Despite representing the majority of Clout and Votes in Great Britain, an unholy alliance between Tories and Whigs is just too incoherent to form government together. You could still confirm such a government, but the penalties for doing so would be enormous and no legislation could be passed while Legitimacy is that poor.
The changes we have discussed in this and the previous two dev diaries represent just a fraction of the changes you will see in the new update. These ones are maybe the most visible, but a number of under-the-hood improvements and bugfixes have been made as well. Next week we will go through the full changelog! Until then!
Greetings my fellow Victorians, Paul here to talk about some of the things I have been doing for Patch 1.1.
As was said in previous dev diaries, this patch (1.1) is going to primarily focus on game polish: bug fixing, balancing, AI improvements and UI/UX work, while the next major free patch (1.2) is going to be more focused towards making progress on the plans weve outlined in our Post-Release Plans DD by iterating on systems like warfare and diplomacy. Hotfix (1.0.6) should be out for you all with performance improvements and some bug fixes in the meantime.
So what have I been doing? Balance work, alongside bug fixing, and assisting with some UI work and bettering of the player experience. Im new to the design team and during my onboarding I've been able to utilize one of my special talents: I love spreadsheets and data - so Ive been working on building profitability, production methods, and resource availability. In Patch 1.1 two large changes I have made are to Oil and Rubber and Ive got some cool resource maps to show you the changes.
And before you take a look at the images showcasing what changes I have done, a big shoutout to @Licarious who made the tool that I am utilizing here today. This tool is open for you all on the forum in this thread. I have found the tool to be particularly lovely, helping me make quick visualizations of the changes I am considering in the game. It's one thing to balance a spreadsheet but another to take a look at the changes proposed on the map itself.
The Worlds discoverable Oil Supply as of 1.0.6
In the version of the game you are all currently playing, these are the oil reserves that are discoverable in game. They are mostly the historical oil fields that were cultivated over the current knowledge of where Oil is and has been accessible (even if we did not find out about it until later than 1936). As youve no doubt noticed in your later games, Oil is a scarce resource and limits the progress of later game industrialization. While we want Oil to be an important late-game resource, its current bottleneck as an available resource is a little too harsh to the players experience so weve expanded the discoverable oil fields in game.
I spent a few days going through various feedback threads on the Discord and forums, alongside as many natural resource distribution maps as I could to give a better estimate of the worlds oil supply and help make the game representative of that. As of now weve doubled the worlds potential oil fields to give rise to a more plentiful supply in the world by both player and AI actions.
The Worlds discoverable Oil Supply as of 1.1.0
I know some of you might be asking, why did we not just increase the production of oil methods and leave the historical oil fields in place? Why have you included [specific] oil fields that were not tapped until ~1950! etc.Those fields represent a usage of either Oil Sands, or some various substrate that would have not been accessible at the time.
These are all some valid questions and I will no doubt go into more detail in the thread about choices made, but some quick answers.
- Reduced the number of monthly radicals from political movements to enact and restore
- Reduced the number of pops in the mid- to late-game by merging very small pops back into the general population
- Reduced the number of pops in the mid- to late-game by forcing unemployed pops to switch profession when sufficiently poor
- Improved performance of updating trends for political movements
- Improved performance of enumerating Liberation war goals
- Increased AI tendency to stick by its allies and subjects in conflicts
- Fixed AI acceptance for 'powerful protectors' factor to appear in virtually any alliance/customs union
- Fixed AI confidence and peace desire from gold reserves not being capped to 100% reserves
- Fixed AI incorrectly calculating how much an ongoing war or diplomatic play should add to their neutrality, making them abandon allies due to involvement in small conflicts
- Fixed AI involvement in a diplomatic play shown as an empty string in their neutrality calculation
- Fixed settings (such as in-game language) not being saved correctly when path contains non-latin characters
- Properly fixed flotillas not recovering morale
- Fixes "Pass a Law that enables an Institution" tutorial challenge being impossible to complete or writing to the error log under certain circumstances
- Fixed issue where a placated Political Movement might still trigger a revolution
- Fixed issue with American Territory Achievement using an incorrect trigger
- Fixed issue with not being able to get Berlin Conference Achievement.
- Star Swarmed Banner no longer requires exactly 100 states exactly to get the achievement, but rather 100 or more
- Fixed issue with placeholder image being used for flamethrower event modifiers
- Fixed CTD in CPdxTerrain::CreateEffect
- Fixed CTD in CWarGoal::IsAdjacent
- Fixed CTD in CBuildingType destructor
Hello and welcome to the second post-release dev diary for Victoria 3. Today well be talking about the first major post-release patch, which were aiming to get to you before the end of the year. This patch (1.1) is going to primarily focus on game polish: bug fixing, balancing, AI improvements and UI/UX work, while the next major free patch (1.2) is going to be more focused towards making progress on the plans weve outlined in our Post-Release Plans DD by iterating on systems like warfare and diplomacy. With that said, theres a few more significant changes coming in 1.1 as well, which were going to go over in this and next weeks dev diary.
The first of these changes is a rework of the interface for individual Pops, with a particular emphasis on improving the visualization of Pop Needs. In addition to the general overview, there are now separate tabs for Economy and Consumption, with Economy showing a more detailed breakdown of the Pops income and expenditure, as well as their top 5 Goods expenditures, and the Consumption tab showing a detailed breakdown of all their Goods expenditures, along with pricing information for the State and Market. We also plan to iterate on Pop Needs further in the future to give you a better idea of what your population needs are country-wide.
The next significant change in 1.1 is a rework of Legitimacy: some frequent criticisms we have received about the political system in Victoria 3 is that Legitimacy doesnt matter enough and isnt clear enough about its effects, as well as that elections dont have enough of an impact. This rework aims to resolve all those problems by making several changes: First, legitimacy, while still a number from 0 to 100, is now divided into five categories with differing effects, some of which will increase or decrease based on the actual number and not just the threshold:
- Changed so that Trade Centers cost 1 infrastructure per 10 levels instead of 1 infrastructure per level
Hello and welcome to the first of many post-release Victoria 3 dev diaries! The game may now be out at last (weird, isnt it?) but for us that just means a different phase of work has begun, the work of post-release support. Weve been quite busy collecting feedback, fixing bugs and making balance changes, and are now working on the free patches that will be following the release, the first of which is a hotfix that should already be with you at the time you read this.
Our plans are naturally not limited to just hotfixes though, and so the topic of this dev diary is to outline what you can expect us to be focusing on in the first few larger free patches. We will not be focusing on our long-term ambitions for the game today; we certainly have no shortage of cool ideas for where we could take Victoria 3 in the years to come, but right now our focus is post-release support and patches, not expansion plans.
However, before I start, I want to share my own personal thoughts on the release. Overall, I consider the release a great success, and have been blown away by the sheer amount of people that have bought and are now playing Victoria 3. Ive had a hand in this project since its earliest design inception, and have been Game Director of Victoria 3 since I left Stellaris in late 2018, and while it certainly hasnt been the easiest game to work on at times, it is by far the most interesting and fulfilling project Ive ever directed. The overarching vision of the game - a society builder that puts internal development, economy and politics in the driving seat - may not have changed much since then, but the mechanics and systems have gone through innumerable iterations (a prominent internal joke in the team is just one more Market Rework, please?) to arrive where we are today, at what I consider to be a great game, one that lives up to our vision - but one that could do with improvement in a few key areas.
The first of these areas is military: The military system, being very different from the military systems of previous Grand Strategy Games, is one of those systems that has gone through a lot of iterations. While I believe that we have landed on a very solid core of how we want military gameplay in Victoria 3 to function and we have no intention of moving back towards a more tactical system, it is a system that suffers from some interface woes and which could do with selective deepening and increasing player control in specific areas. A few of the things were looking into improving and expanding on for the military system follow here, in no particular order:
################### # Game Balance ################### # Economy - Petit-Bourgeoisie now also care about government wages - Slashing government wages will now reduce prestige - Slashing military wages will now reduce training rate - Debt slavery can now enslave pops up to wealth level 9, in reduced numbers for each point of wealth - Reduce the max number of pops enslaved each week by debt slavery from 5% to 0.5% of state population - Debt slavery will no longer enslave additional pops when slaves is 20% or more of the state population - Tweak subsistence production in decentralized nations so African pops don't start at starvation levels # Politics - Increased the chance of progressive political movements appearing over the course of the game - Movements to Preserve now have a larger effect on the chance for a law to stall, making it harder to pass laws opposed by powerful groups - Political Movements for or against changes in Slavery and Government principles laws will now be more radical - Reduced base effect of Propagandists Intelligentsia trait from 50% to 25% - Reduced effect of guaranteed liberties on loyalists and radicals growth # Colonization - Native Uprisings now get a significant bonus to their combat capabilities, mainly on the defensive - Reduced the chance of Native Uprisings occuring when provinces are colonized ################### # AI ################### # Diplomacy - AI is now a bit less likely to back down in diplomatic plays - AI is now a bit more likely to get involved in diplomatic plays - Make the AI more keen on swaying countries to its side if outmatched in a diplomatic play # War - AI is now a lot more focused on taking land-adjacent states and conquering contiguous land areas in general - Increase AI aggression against Unrecognized countries after unlocking Civilizing Mission # Colonization - Increased AI tendency to get involved in Native Uprisings slightly ################### # Interface ################### # Tooltips - Improve revenue predictions when constructing buildings to show more accurate and useful data ################### # Bugfixes ################### - Flotillas now regain Morale as intended after naval battles - Fixed a bug where capitulating in one war could cause your generals in another war to standby - Added additional check to prevent monuments from being targeted in tutorial - Added a check to the Declare Interest Tutorial that was miscounting the maximum amount of Declared Interests possible. - Fix issue where Investment Pool could be used for disallowed building types - Fix issue where predicted price for goods after goods substitution would sometimes show the wrong value - Political movements can now start organizing a revolution at 50 radicalism rather than 100 (100 is needed for the revolution to actually begin though) - Fixed typos in several defines - Fix pop attraction reasons tooltip CTD in Asian languages - Fixed a CTD caused by trying to create a shipping lane between two market areas with at least one of them being only nominally coastal due to the entire coast being impassable - Fixed a CTD that could be triggered when clicking on the "mobilize all" button" - Fixed late game CTD when transferring troops - Fix CTD when hovering sell orders after having country join your market (__chkstk (chkstk.asm: 109)) - Fix CTD in NPdxParticle2Internal::SParticlePool ::GetActive - Fix CTD in CJominiSplineNetworkGraphics::GetStripLengthInternal
Greetings Victorians!
This post has been created to gather useful information for players. Tutorials, Links, and various other resources that both new and old players can use to make their experience easier and more enjoyable.
Read it here!
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/player-resources.1549501/
Good Day Victorians!
With the release of Victoria 3, you have been listening to the soundtracks of Victoria 3 and Victoria 2 Remastered in-game!
You may be excited to learn that you can access the soundtracks of Victoria 3 and Victoria 2 (if you pre-ordered) in the game files to listen to as you like outside the game! You can find the files by following the paths below:
Path to Victoria 3 Soundtrack MP3/FLAC:
"\game\soundtrack\original_game_soundtrack"
Path to Victoria 2 Remastered Soundtrack MP3/FLAC:
"\game\dlc\dlc001_preorder\Victoria 2 Remastered Soundtrack"
[previewyoutube=eOI-RJGHJxc;full][/previewyoutube] Lead your nation through social, political and industrial change. The Victorians promised a Grand Tomorrow, you can play it today! Get Victoria 3 here! https://pdxint.at/3FahyVv
Leading your country into the world stage can be daunting, so relax and let the orchestra revolutionise your industrialising experience. [previewyoutube=hkbyzbKkrxc;full][/previewyoutube] Tracklist: 00:00 A Prospering Country 03:07 Rule The World 08:44 Adagio For Four Strings 13:02 At The Country Manor 15:19 Benedicte 19:30 England 1850 23:50 Moonlight Waltz 27:08 Our New Residence 30:15 Over the Calm Ocean 33:37 Quite Noble Festivities 35:39 Remembering Prince Albert 40:04 Sunrise Over London 44:56 Sunset Over Windsor Castle. 50:00 Tea Time 52:50 The Queen Is Actually Amused 53:53 To Build A Factory 56:51 Asset Gathering 01: 02:04 British Soil 01: 08:12 Death March 01: 13:09 Glory to the Queen
We talk about Warfare today! Learn how it works, how to affect it and how to make peace: [previewyoutube=MLNtCGbSiFo;full][/previewyoutube]
Diplomacy is the action of conversing with and influencing other nations, watch to see how your plays and actions change the world! [previewyoutube=5QQ2w2gVxs4;full][/previewyoutube]
Politics are the governing principles of the nation. Through laws and how you use them, you affect your nations path. [previewyoutube=NtHoeZdNxCM;full][/previewyoutube]
Todays subject is Interest Groups; what they are, what they do and how to affect them. Watch it here: [previewyoutube=lwfXCNqRiFw;full][/previewyoutube]
Every pop has needs, what they are and how you fulfil them can be seen today in this How to Play! [previewyoutube=mX8e5Fy6skE;full][/previewyoutube]
Income, vital to keeping the nation running. What shall we learn about it today? [previewyoutube=sFboIELDmq0;full][/previewyoutube]
Trade & Markets, how will you fare in this mercantile tutorial?: [previewyoutube=zi311ZiyhQc;full][/previewyoutube]
A tutorial a day shows us how Buildings play! [previewyoutube=5-NHuVrx9Ag;full][/previewyoutube]
Victorians! Learn about the game in our series of tutorial videos! Today we look into resources: [previewyoutube=7sZNeu-ALWA;full]https://youtu.be/7sZNeu-ALWA[/previewyoutube]
Why not sit back, relax and let Paul talk about the economy of Victoria 3: [previewyoutube=eDFHJx4XWGU;full][/previewyoutube]
Prepare for the release of Victoria 3 by dreaming of a better tomorrow while listening to the game's Official Soundtrack. Let the songs of an era of transformation and revolution be the background music of your everyday life, and imagine yourself the builder of a mighty mercantile empire. The Victoria 3 Official Soundtrack will be available on most music platforms.
Find a link to your favorite in the list below.:
Spotify
Youtube Music
Deezer
Anghami
Amazon
7 digital
Apple Music
Hello all, today we are going to talk about some of the data visualization in Victoria 3, how we on the team have iterated on it since our UX dev diary and what we think through when talking about such iterations.
Aron is very busy doing what last bits of polish can be done before we lock down the game for release certification, so I have been asked to write this dev diary for you in their stead. Im not officially a UX Designer but I do have my qualifications in user experience as QA and I also am quite opinionated about pie charts and other forms of data visualization as many of you in the community are no doubt aware of. I regularly get to be Aron and Henriks rubber duck as we talk through solutions to problems on the UX side and it's part of my job that I thoroughly enjoy.
(In fact the first draft of this diary was a full thesis on why pie charts are bad, but I was encouraged to tone down the rhetoric a little, so I will conclude they are aesthetically pretty but are horrible for conveying data.)
Just how angry is Paul? Even with the visualization you would still be guessing
Now most of the time when we talk about Data Visualization in games, especially Paradox Games, the first thing that comes to mind is either line graphs or charts of some kind - giving a visual representation of data instead of just a pure numerical representation on the screen. This is not wrong, but data visualization is not solely about making some form of visual representation of abstract data. It is also about increasing the inherent cognitive understanding of the player by using known trends and patterns that are well established.
An easy example is the capacities, they are color-coded. When things are positive: it's green, when it's bad: it's red. We have a human tendency to impact meaning to color and thus it's a general rule of UX to never use Green and Red unless you are representing Good and Bad.
A quick glance at the capacities bar tells you all you need to know for the moment by color alone, and when you get its tooltip it continues such color coded summarization:
Have any of you whove seen streams or images noticed that this dynamic changes in regards to income? When your nation is in a deficit the balance can show either as white (neutral) or red (bad) in the capacity summary and there is an inherent reason for that?
We do not show a negative income balance as red until it reflects an unhealthy economy, but what do we mean by this? Nations run deficits all the time, but not all deficits are bad, especially those which are investments into the country such as construction. Construction is classified as a temporary national expenditure as opposed to a fixed one, meaning that we calculate your fixed revenue vs expenditure to be positive once the construction is finished, and we keep the income balance showing a neutral tone because of it.
This is to reflect that your money is going down, but the fundamentals are fine. What this allows you to notice is when this fundamental changes and turns red, signaling a larger issue of your economic fundamentals being out of balance that could cause future problems.
We may be losing money now but the fundamentals of the economy are okay if we ever stop building new factories
This is a lot of what we have been trying to iterate on in Victoria 3 at this point in its development: we dont want to just show you the static image of whats going on just that moment but we want you to know the dynamic trends of where the data is going.
What do I mean by this? Well let me give you an example: see our buildings list (to make it clearer about what I am talking about I have gone with the minimized mode - didnt know there was a minimized mode? Now you do!)
Behold the glorious minimized building menu and color-coded gold reserve bars.
(Bars are color coded on regular view as well)
Before cash reserves were only golden, and you would have to physically watch the bar tick along and hopefully notice the trend of your reserves. The data was still informative but you were only able to easily glance if your business had cash reserves (meaning it could afford a price disruption or could help supplement the investment pool). Now we use the historical data we would normally use to fill out a line graph to color the bar and add trend markers to show if the cash reserves is going up or down, coloring it green or red respectively.
Now at a quick glance you not only see how your economy is doing, but where it is going and you would be amazed at how significant such a small change can be. This is combined with our usage of red, white, and green to symbolize whether productivity is good or bad - to give you further depth of information: sugar industries in this picture are not failing but soon will be if you do not do something about it. Meanwhile the arms industry has stalled outright.
A lot of these data visualization changes, you might never see or notice, because when they work well their understanding becomes second nature, but heres another one I want to call out: we recoloured the market summary tab:
Behold the new Market Panel, with corrected colors and balance bars to show the magnitude of the effect.
The older Market Panel, serviceable but flawed with its data presentation.
Okay we changed like 3 things, I hear you say - but why is that so damn important? Im glad you asked that community strawman heres why.
We removed the Red/Green visualization of the balance and by doing that we helped make our understanding of the market system clearer to the player. Remember, this is Victoria 3, imbalances are not inherently bad. Sometimes maintaining a shortage of a good can be done intentionally to prop up an industry or ensure the wealth of specific pops. (I went into the logic of why for this in my talk at PDXCON and if we are lucky at some point in the future I will get a copy of that up on the forums as well). We found that when we colored the items green/red we were inherently having players react in ways that they themselves found was not always good or what they wanted. In this case, this mostly meant players reacting to red numbers being bad and trying to make the number go green.
We also added balance bars, to help show you the magnitude of what those numbers mean in the scope of its total buy/sell volume and price scale. Can you tell from the old version above what the relative difference to your economy the liquor and sugar shortages are?). By giving more perspective on these offsets from equilibrium we help you better understand the cause and effect of your actions or most importantly; opportunity cost. If merely looking at high prices you might find yourself focusing on furniture or paper, but technically getting food prices lower is shown to have a larger impact on your economy, which is illustrated by the bars below the Balance values. The more blue or gold that bar is, the higher impact that Goods imbalance has on your market. This impact may differ greatly per Good if it is good or bad, but thats up to you to determine.
Thats just a few examples in the game of where we are iterating on data visualization. Mostly because these are the ones I can easily remember and chat about. We are by no means done, Henrik, Aron and myself will continue in the trenches experimenting and iterating on such workflows throughout the game. We look forward to reading your feedback on release and use that to help us prioritize our backlog of ideas.
If you thought this dev diary was a sight to behold, just wait till you hear about the next one, which is the Audio of Victoria 3 which will be written by Franco Freda, our Head of Audio.
Hi folks! I'm Mike, one of the Game Designers who specializes in content for V3, and today we're going to talk about the delights of modding.
Modding is a whole world of things in Paradox games. Some mods are total overhauls, some are just simple little tweaks. I've seen sweet little mods that just add a person's pet as a graphic, or even one that I spotted on Hearts of Iron's workshop page as I wrote this that added in a dearly-departed office cat as a replacement for Joseph Stalin. There's all sorts of mods out there! And, hopefully, by the time you've finished reading this dev diary, you'll know how to create the start of your own mod for Victoria 3, too.
Mark your calendars for the 29th of September! We will be having a developer Q&A session, so get your questions ready!
Join our Discord server here: https://discord.com/invite/victoriagamePDX
Hello and welcome to the 59th Victoria 3 development diary! With the release of the game just a little more than a month away (which honestly feels surreal), one of the last remaining things for us to do alongside bug fixing is to put the final polishing touches on the AI for release. As such, this feels like a good time to talk about the AI of Victoria 3 - how its designed, how it operates, and what tools modders have available to tweak it. However, I wont really be talking about which exact amount of difficulty the AI provides or which level skill it plays at. Firstly, because perception of AI performance is highly subjective and what is a good AI means something different to just about every player, and second because theres still a few issues to be ironed out before release, one example being AI-controlled countries too frequently experiencing revolutions (something that should hopefully be greatly improved now, but which has yet to be verified by QA).
So then, how does the AI in Victoria 3 work? Well, just as in our other Grand Strategy Games, the AI plays the same game you do. It uses all the same features, faces all the same restrictions, and does not receive the advantage of any cheats (with some exceptions if you use certain Game Rules, but more on that later in this dev diary). In addition to this, there are four design principles that guides how the AI should act in Victoria 3:
[olist]
Hello and welcome to yet another Victoria 3 development diary. Today is going to be a fairly brief dev diary discussing some design changes in diplomacy that happened as a result of internal playtesting and feedback, specifically to the mechanics of Interests and their significance in the game.
Interests, as you may recall from Dev Diary #19, are essentially a country having a diplomatic presence in a particular Strategic Region, either as a result of owning territory there, having a subject that owns territory there, or through a Declared Interest. Back then, Interests merely limited where you start Diplomatic Plays and Establish Colonies, and acted as a guide for the AI in terms of which countries it needed to care about
With so many Great Powers maintaining Interests there, Europe is a perilous place to start a Diplomatic Play in
So, what has changed between then and now? Well, basically, playtesting revealed two principal issues with Interests in the game. The first was that they simply didnt feel significant enough, because they only tied directly into colonization and diplomatic plays. The second was that the number of declared Interests a country had available to them was based solely on rank, which meant that Austria with its miniscule navy was able to maintain almost as global a presence as the British with their, well, definitely not so miniscule navy.
To solve the first problem, we decided to do a little experiment - what if instead of just limiting colonization and diplomatic plays, Interests were required for all forms of diplomacy, up to and including trade? This was an idea wed kicked around previously, but the concern was that itd simply be too limiting, particularly where trade was concerned, because as mentioned, the only way to get more Interests was to increase your country rank, and once you were a Great Power, well that was it. No more trade partners, at least not of your own choosing.
The solution to the second problem, then, turned out to also be the key to the first one: tying the navy directly into declared Interests. The number of declared Interests from rank were reduced, and instead, Naval Bases now produce declared Interests, with one declared Interest provided per 10 flotillas that a country has. In other words, while Austria can now maintain a handful of declared Interests around Europe to look out for its national interests (pun intended), the size of Britains fleet allows it to poke its nose into the business of just about any corner of the world that it wants to.
Spains navy may not be what it once was, but its still large enough to allow the Spanish a greater diplomatic reach than their Major Power rank would otherwise allow
With this change made, our experiment truly came together, and allowed us to greatly expand the scope of the Interest mechanic. Instead of just being a requirement for taking over land, Interests now signify a formal diplomatic presence in a region without which you simply do not have the ability to interact with that region at all - no French diplomats in Southeast Asia means no French diplomacy in Southeast Asia.
In no particular order, here are all the mechanics that now tie into Interests:
Hello all! Now that we know the Victoria 3 release date and have seen a bit of actual, live gameplay, I thought it would be a good idea to recap what the game is and tell you a bit about how we got here. Today I'm going to focus less on abstract principles and pillars and more on concrete game mechanics, the play experience and the process by which we arrived at the current version of the game.
It took us a while, but we built a world!
Let's start with simply: What is Victoria 3? We call it a society builder grand strategy game, where the focus is to mold and shape your chosen country's population, economy, and laws to navigate the power struggles, revolutions, and devastating wars of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In practice this means you will be making many difficult decisions about how to construct your economy, which political factions to empower, and which other countries to befriend and rival.
Everything in Victoria begins and ends with Pops, a.k.a. your population. Pops and their living conditions determine what sorts of economies you are able to run. An agrarian economy may be great at feeding itself and could sustain itself for a long time, but lacks access to manufactured goods to increase living standards. Manufacturing-based industry is more centralized, creating urban centers with wider wealth gaps, but the resulting increase in domestic demand can provide a stable economic foundation for your market. Laissez-faire could make sense for countries whose population demands a wide variety of products while specializing in highly effective production of specific goods, while a command economy may be desirable to counteract foreign influence and steer your population with more precision.
Your people, the bedrock of the simulation and the enduring feature of Victoria games.
Your economy is based around a web of industries (a.k.a. "buildings") that produce and/or consume goods, and the consumption demands of the Pops themselves. Buildings do nothing on their own but must be staffed by Pops, who in return are (hopefully!) provided with wages sufficient to purchase goods and services to improve their living conditions. Privately owned buildings have owner Pops who collect the profits, which they may reinvest or conspicuously spend on lavish luxuries, driving up demand for exotic imports like Fruit or new inventions like Automobiles. As the spirit of your nation, you decide which buildings to construct, where they should be situated, and whether they should be state-subsidized or not. Each such decision will have long-term implications for your country's future.
Buildings are your main tool for nation building, as you determine what your population should be occupying their time with and how. During development, more and more gameplay features were implemented using buildings and their production methods.
Pops are "real people", they don't suddenly appear just because there's work to be done. This begs the question, what would Pops be doing before suitable workplaces have been constructed for them? In Victoria 2, Pops not employed in factories or in special roles like Capitalists contributed towards "Resource Gathering Operations" (RGOs) which created all raw resources in the game. In V3, we wanted resource industries to be among the viable, active choices you could focus your efforts on, but we also didn't want the majority of the population to work on high-yield modern farms at game start. The solution we came up with was subsistence farming, where all unused arable land in a state could be used by Pops of the Peasant Profession to sustain themselves and produce a very small amount of excess goods for the market. These subsistence farms will gradually disappear as modern, industrialized farms and organized plantations are constructed in their place. As there is no guarantee that proper resource industries will pay lower-class Pops a better wage than the living standard Peasants could achieve by simply working the land, depending on when and how this transition is done it may lead to increased wealth disparity even while it's certainly better for your market economy.
Each Pop has an amount of Political Strength derived primarily from their size and wealth, modified by the country's laws. This influence is distributed across the various Interest Groups the Pop supports, empowering them to steer the country's political direction. For example, a wealthy plantation-owning Aristocrat might put most of their gravitas behind the Landowners, espousing a kind of patronizing conservatism. A nation of Farmers might champion the Rural Folk and their simple, honest, and non-expansionist way of life. Meanwhile, a group of coal mining Machinists might join the Trade Unions to push for both workplace safety regulations and more egalitarian expansion of the voting franchise. Over time you will start to recognize the patterns in how your economy has developed over the decades, and how this results in altered power distributions and the emergence of different political movements demanding change.
Interest Groups are new to Victoria 3 and act as the people's voice in their interactions with you. Just like everything else in the game they ultimately only function due to the Pops that lend them support, so impacting the Pops directly will also affect the Interest Groups.
In the earliest playable iteration of Victoria 3, Interest Groups were very dynamic and always organized into parties or factions. Interest Groups could suddenly appear in a country or change their beliefs based on triggered conditions. They had opinions on everything from reforms to what buildings should be constructed to which wars should be waged. This turned out to be extremely confusing, as players never really got a handle on what their country was all about or the outside limits of what might happen if they performed an action. To combat this we created eight Interest Group "templates" which were the same for all countries, with individual variations on those templates for different countries. Rather than popping into existence or fading away as there were causes to champion, we split off a new type of organization - Political Movements - from Interest Groups, so the latter would always have their own identity and ideology while the former could be used to push issues. Rather than changing Interest Groups' opinions based on triggered conditions, we introduced Interest Group Leaders which could modify an Interest Group's ideologies. Finally, we removed the Party/Faction layer altogether, only to reintroduce Parties much later in development as a more comprehensible political layer active only in democracies that still puts Interest Groups front and center.
The set of laws available for a player to try to change has evolved during development, with different tax laws merging into a single category, trade policy being split from the economic system, and the various army model laws being introduced.
The laws themselves, and the institutions they sometimes enable, tie back into the economy through the Pops. Changes to your taxation system might require you to course-correct your economy to both keep your people fed and your treasury in the black. Different army models might permit you to maintain a well-trained, professional army, or require you to rely on raising part of your population as conscripts during times of war which could disrupt your industry. Universal pensions will raise your overall standard of living and decrease poverty rates and turmoil, but can be costly to maintain. And without an education system, you will have a hard time developing the qualifications your Pops need to take advanced professions in cutting-edge factories, academic, and financial institutions.
Our initial model for how Interest Groups should support one Laws over another was based on a kind of 3D political compass, or maybe something akin to Stellaris' Ethics system. But it did not take long for us to realize just how inadequate this method was for describing all the different political positions people in the 19th century could take. For example, is "colonization" a progressive or conservative policy? The answer is that it entirely depends on the context, culture, and whatever intellectual arguments had been voiced by one philosopher or another within the prior decade. So rather than trying to create a brand new theory of Political Science, we abandoned this matrix-model for a much more bespoke system of many dozens of ideologies that each have their own set of stances on specific laws.
An enduring question during early development was, how much should government employees be paid? A fixed amount seemed particularly wrong, but so did a fully configurable amount. We settled on a continually updating national Normal Wage value - a weighted average of wages paid by private industry across incorporated states - and letting the player set wages in steps around this norm, with bonuses or penalties applying for paying more or less.
If you want to run a competitive nation, you cannot rely exclusively on private industry - the bureaucratic machine has to function, taxes must be collected, trains and ships have to depart on time, and the army and navy has to be fully staffed and on alert. These government functions are also represented via buildings, with the Pops who work there paid directly by the treasury. Every individual in your country is represented by Pops, who perform all the functions that make your nation what it is.
Originally Institutions was just another type of Law that you could invest Bureaucracy into. Splitting them out into their own entities whose nature can be changed by Laws made them come alive in a totally new way, and lets you more clearly see how your country's becoming more capable and complex over time.
One design challenge we had to tackle early on in development was how we would represent institutions: as concrete buildings on a local level, or more abstractly on a national level? We really wanted Pops to be responsible for staffing the public sector, so as to not pretend that things like healthcare, education, and policing just happen from legislating their existence. But on the other hand we didn't want to have to saddle the player with having to micromanage constructing the exact right number of hospitals, jailhouses, employment offices, tax collectors, etc etc in every state. In a fit of insanity we briefly flirted with the idea of non-local buildings, where Pops would live in one place but work in an indeterminate "cloud-based" workplace that provides benefits to the entire population, but this started looking like the kind of weird hacky solution that would come back to haunt us later in development and we thankfully abandoned it quite quickly. After consulting a programmer with much fresher eyes on this issue than the design team at this point, we decided to make a building that creates a currency (Bureaucracy) that institutions would consume, just to see how that felt. This proved an excellent trade-off, letting players customize which parts of their country their administration was centered in while ensuring that legislated promises of access to services were distributed correctly across the country in different proportions without excessive micromanagement.
With a well-oiled market supported by appropriate laws you can turn your eye to the economies abroad. Not all goods your people demand can be acquired locally, so which countries do you want to trade with? Importing another country's products could be exactly the kickstart your economy needs, but will also enrich the exporting nation and make you dependent on their economy. Exporting consumer goods will benefit those of your Pops who own the factories the most, while it will come to the detriment of Pops consuming those goods. Each decision made will impact different segments of your population, both economically and politically.
In the original trade system, the amount of goods your routes moved was quite open-ended and required trade center management on both ends. It was micromanagement heavy, complex to understand, and easy for both player and AI to abuse.
Trade has gone through a number of iterations, as it works very differently from both Victoria 2 and most other strategy games. We knew very early on that we wanted market-to-market trade of specific goods, and our supply-and-demand system works well out of the box for creating incentives to trade. The first trade system was serviceable - you would earn trade routes from building Trade Centers and would spend them to move a certain number of goods between two markets. It made sense and was simple to understand, but turned out quite micro-intensive as you had to babysit routes to move just the right amount. It was also much too easy to destroy foreign economies by simply stealing all their supply of a crucial good or oversaturating a market, which was nominally fun to do to the AI but less fun when the AI did it to you.
In the new system, only the country establishing the route gets a trade center to manage it, and the quantity of goods is dependent on what is actually profitable to trade. You can still fine-tune who your trading partners are and how large the routes can grow by using tariffs and embargoes, but the level of interactivity is much more even.
The trade system currently in the game instead creates and expands Trade Centers to manage trade as needed, earning money for the Pops who work it based on the marginal price difference between the two markets. This way you simply establish a route between two markets, and if that good is in high demand in one and in high supply in the other, it will grow until there's no money in trading a larger quantity. That also meant we could implement a tariff system where a player can both earn money off trade and deter other players (or the AI) from importing or exporting particular goods. Crucially though, we needed to see the first, simpler system in action before figuring out what the problems with it would be.
Your nation's prestigiousness, determined by the size and power of its economy, military, culture, and other aspects, sets its position on the global power ranking ladder. Are you but a Minor Power, barely involved in local affairs involving your neighbors? Or a Major Power, a regional powerhouse or up-and-coming global player? Or one of the few Great Powers, whose tendrils reach all over the world, constantly trying to one-up each other so none get too far ahead?
This ranking sets the amount of Influence you receive, which can be used to establish and maintain Diplomatic Pacts with other nations. Trade Agreements simplify trade between your countries, Alliances permit you to come to one another's aid, Customs Unions merge several markets, and numerous types of Subject relationships can be either demanded or requested - by either party, since enjoying the protection of a Great Power may be worth the loss of freedom it entails. Pacts can only be established if countries have overlapping strategic interests, a limited resource forcing you to pick and choose between the parts of the world that matters to you. Interests have always been core to the design principles of Victoria 3 but have gone through a number of revisions as well, some of which will be covered by Martin next week!
Rather than fabricating claims or war justifications, in Victoria 3 you can be as bold and brash with your demands as you wish - for as long as you can afford the Infamy and don't endanger the wrong Great Powers. Finding a balance between the ability to strategically pre-plan your Plays and still having to navigate uncertain outcomes is key to making Diplomatic Plays feel satisfying, and a lot of iteration on both mechanics and AI has gone into finding it.
Demands between nations can also be asserted as Diplomatic Plays, where every country with a stated interest in a region may weigh in on the issue by supporting one of the sides. With enough military strength supporting your claims, even a territorial dispute may be resolved without a single shot being fired. But this is much less a negotiation and more a game of chicken, where in a best-case scenario at most one side walks away with what they want. If that would be you, are you prepared to press this issue even to the point of war, knowing the tremendous loss of money and lives that would bring? Or should you make a concession now and start planning your revenge?
Diplomatic Plays is in many ways an evolution of the Crisis system from Victoria 2: Heart of Darkness, where a "flashpoint" somewhere on the globe could spark an international crisis involving several Great Powers picking sides. The mechanic works well to emphasize the importance of international "policing" of world conflict in the era. Instead of it arising from a flashpoint, issuing a Diplomatic Play in Victoria 3 causes an incident which adversely affects the country initiating it. It can also involve a lot more countries than just Great Powers, as regional or local players might also become involved or recruited.
The point of going to war is to press your war goals and sign a peace deal as soon as possible. Nothing is worse for the economy than a forever-war (unless the foundation of your economy is arms manufacturing, that is)
Should war become inevitable, you have many further choices to make. What proportion of your population do you conscript into service, and which parts of the country do you leave to keep the economy running? Which of your generals do you mobilize, and which do you retain in reserve? Which troops do you send where? Do you keep your navy back to defend your shorelines, send them out to protect your trade routes, or try to sabotage enemy trade and supply lines? As generals and admirals have different ranks, skill traits, and force allocations from supporting barracks and naval bases, which resource you utilize where can make a big difference in the outcome of the war. Since generals and admirals also support their own Interest Groups, their performance against the enemy can also cause political shifts that persist even after the war.
After having allocated your resources and issued orders, your generals and admirals perform their duties to their best abilities, letting you focus on managing the home front - expanding or subsidizing industries necessary for the war effort, establishing trade routes, managing your taxes, and dealing with dissidents and radicals that use the chaos of war to further their own causes. The outcome of the war is to a large extent determined by if you can keep your population's spirits high - even if your frontlines are gaining ground, it won't help a people demoralized from lack of bread (or furniture, or coffee, or). Such a population may insist you sign a peace deal as quickly and favorably as possible, whatever your long-term plans were.
As you might imagine, the warfare mechanics have gone through extensive iteration to hit the design goals. Moving stacks of variable-sized armies between small provinces and having fights break out when they overlap is a tried and true mechanic that works great in many strategy games, not just Paradox GSGs. But for Victoria 3 it didn't feel right - the pacing felt off compared to the management/society building gameplay, handling multiple simultaneous wars (or multiple fronts) as a global Great Power was a pain, and the element of "tactics cheese" where a human could use trickery to devastate an AI with a superior army actively harmed the dynamics of Diplomatic Plays where armies are measured against each other by statistics.
Of course, new systems come with new sets of challenges. If you are forced to manage 20 generals and their orders, it's no less work than managing 5 stacks and their locations. Giving the player a sense of presence and an overview of their forces when you can't give a precise location for an army or fleet is a challenge, especially when they're moving to or from something. And most of all, even though we want to reward foresight and strategic thinking, having the outcome of a war virtually predetermined the moment someone starts a Play against you is no fun at all. We're happy with the way it works now, but it has required a lot of experimentation, testing, compromises, and particularly UX work and visual polish.
The true enemy of Victoria 3 is often found inside your borders.
Fail to keep your population content and you may have a revolution or even a cultural secession on your hands. As a populace grows more literate they become class-conscious and politically active, starting or supporting movements to change the nation's laws or demand autonomy. Such situations can be dealt with in several different ways, ranging from the classic bread-and-circus approach of ensuring everyone is so materially satisfied they have no reason to complain, through granting other popular concessions such as welfare programs or a somewhat expanded voting franchise, to suppressing the rowdy Interest Groups and cracking down on protesters with a national guard or secret police. Managing such uprisings before they break out is important even if you have a strong military, since other countries may take advantage of your internal strife and support the revolutionaries in exchange for making you a future puppet state.
One system we thought we'd knocked out of the park on the first attempt was the algorithm for determining which states would rise up against you in case of a revolution. The number would be largely based on the total Political Strength share of the revolting Interest Groups, so if 25% of the Political Strength was against you and your country had eight states, two of them would revolt. Furthermore they would tend to revolt in a cluster, so you wouldn't be fighting on a number of fronts against individual states but as a unified force. The state with the highest proportion of revolutionary Political Strength would be selected as the epicenter, with states neighboring the epicenter likely to follow them.
That worked quite well for large, terrestrial countries like for example France, USA, Brazil, and Russia. But for some reason, every progressive reform in Sweden would result in Gotland - a small sheep-farming island between Sweden and the Baltic states - rising up in lone protest. Can you guess why? The very small population of Gotland consists of only politically apathetic Peasants, and those few Aristocrats who own the land. Therefore, the conservative Landowners held the most dominant position there - relatively speaking - by far. And, in order to be guaranteed more than 1 rebellious state out of Sweden's 5, the Landowners would need to hold 40%+ of the Political Strength. The current algorithm is substantially less elegant but a lot more nuanced, producing results that don't require launching naval invasions against angry shepherds with every social reform you make!
This is of course just scratching the surface of all the systems and dynamics that emerge within Victoria 3's simulation of the modern era. I didn't even get into technology, colonization, infrastructure, slavery, literacy and qualifications, enactment of laws, population growth and migration, national unifications, and all the journal entries and events that shake the game up and keep it eventful throughout the century-long campaign. You can look back at previous dev diaries to get more details on all of these, or wait a mere 8 weeks to see for yourself!
As mentioned, next week Martin will return to discuss the revisions we have made to the Interests mechanics. Tomorrow the team will head out to PDXCON to see several hundreds of you play the game for the very first time, help moderate a massive Victoria megagame, and run panels about the game and its development. We'll be back to continue polishing the brass and tweaking the knobs on Monday, getting everything just right for when you get your hands on the game on October 25th!
Victoria 3 is now available for pre-order: https://pdxint.at/3KlLWgf
The Grand Edition includes the whole Expansion Pass package... on top of the remastered Victoria 2 soundtrack awarded to everyone pre-ordering the game!
Available here: https://pdxint.at/3KlLWgf
[previewyoutube=ZZhUadmaP8M;full][/previewyoutube] Claim your place in the sun in Victoria 3! The Victorians promised a grand tomorrow based on science and industry. Now you get to build it. Watch the trailer: https://pdxint.at/3wD0QZD Pre-order now and get Victoria 2 remastered soundtrack as a bonus: https://pdxint.at/3KlLWgf
Hello there! My name is Alex and Im part of the QA team working on Victoria 3! Im a relatively recent addition to the team, having only joined around March this year. Despite that, it has already been an incredible ride to see the game progress since then! Enough of that though, because today the topic at hand is something you likely have heard a lot about in previous dev diaries but that still deserves its own introduction: Cultures and Religions.
As you probably already know from one of our very first dev diaries, pops have a series of aspects that define and group them. These include where the pops live, what profession they have and what building they work in. On top of that, pops are also defined by their cultural and religious background.
When hovering a culture you get all kinds of data you might find useful, like in this example of the Japanese Pop culture (not to be confused with Japanese pop culture which would much later take the world by storm) tooltip
Cultures and religions in Victoria 3 are closely related and a central concept of what makes the game work. At their core, both of them work by having a set of traits that define how closely-related different cultures and religions are. These traits are what determine if a culture or religion will be accepted or discriminated against based on the different laws you might have in your country. As an example, both Catholicism and Protestantism have the Christian trait, meaning that they accept each other under the Freedom of Conscience law which requires a shared trait between the religions - but not under the State Religion law a law under which only pops of the state religion are accepted. The last alternative is of course the Total Separation law which accepts all religions no matter what traits they have..
The world has many cultures and traditions to get to know and learn more about.
Cultures work slightly differently. For one, you have descriptive traits such as which language a culture generally speaks, i.e. lusophone or hispanophone. You also have a special kind of trait called heritage which generally describes very broadly where a certain culture originated from geographically. Some laws specifically require cultures to share a heritage with the primary cultures for them to be accepted, such as National Supremacy and Racial Segregation. Theres also Cultural Exclusion which requires at least a single trait to be shared for the culture to be accepted. Finally, Multiculturalism accepts all cultures regardless of traits.
Maybe your ideal run is to achieve prosperity as an independent Greenland where the Inuit culture gets to decide its own destiny.
Closely tied to cultures and religions are the concepts of taboos and obsessions. Both of these affect, either negatively or positively, how much Pops are willing to pay for and consume certain goods. As such, both taboos and obsessions only apply to consumer goods as opposed to military or industrial goods (so no tank obsessions, sorry). Obsessions are tied to cultures, for instance the French culture being obsessed with wine or the Nepali with tea. As you might have guessed, taboos on the other hand are tied to religions. Importantly though, they still manifest themselves culturally. Every culture has a religion tied to it and inherits the taboos from that religion. This means that a catholic turkish pop will still have a taboo against wine and liquor for instance.
The Nepali know Tea is the superior hot drink and not that bitter bean juice people call coffee.
Another difference between obsessions and taboos is that while taboos dont change throughout the game, obsessions are more fleeting and can emerge organically or be removed in case something significant happens, like the Opium Crisis for instance. If a certain good is abundantly available in a market, the Pops in that market have a small chance of becoming obsessed with it.
A prominent leader of the Comanche, Puhihwitsikwasu, or Iron Jacket for the uncultured Europeans, gets some impressive culturally defined clothes and headdress.
Cultures and religions touch on most of the games mechanics in one way or another as can be seen from previous dev diaries. From mechanics related to secessions, migrations and unifications all the way to discrimination, political strength and conversion/assimilation. Cultures are also tied to visual changes such as the appearance of characters. When playing Victoria 3, you will often be thinking about cultures in one way or another.
On top of all that, it might interest some of you that cultures and religions are very easily moddable to do what you want. Below you can find a quick Blorg culture mod I made with some details like localization files omitted. All in all a very simple process!
Im fully expecting someone to make a Blorg invasion from Outer Space total conversion alt history mod now.
As you can see, the modding itself is very simple, even though I glossed over a few details like localization files and properly defining cultural traits as well as actually creating a Pop with the Blorg culture, but all of that is very straight forward.
Thats all for me folks! Exciting times are ahead of us and Im looking forward to having you all play the game when its finally time. Until then maybe Ill see you at our first upcoming stream next week or maybe even at PDXCON? Either way, next time Mikael will tell you a bit more about The Journey so Far!
Hello and welcome to yet another Victoria 3 development diary. Today were going to be talking about Achievements, and since I think absolutely everyone reading this already knows what an Achievement is, Im not going to do the usual what-is-this-feature preface. But before I get to listing all the achievements that Victoria 3 will be releasing with, we do have something to announce in regards to achievements which will differ in Victoria 3 compared to earlier Paradox Grand Strategy Games, namely that Ironman and an unmodified checksum will no longer be required to unlock achievements.
That is to say, no matter what mods you have installed and whether youre playing ironman or not, all of these achievements will be unlockable. There are a few game rules that disallow achievements, but since you could simply mod away that requirement if you wanted, not even this is a particularly hard rule. The reason for this change is simply that after quite a bit of discussion among the designers, weve decided that for Victoria 3 we want to emphasize access to achievements for everyone, even if that may end devaluing the achievements in the eyes of some players.
Now then, with that out of the way and without further ado, I will get to listing, in no particular order, the 50 achievements that will be available in the release version of Victoria 3!
Peccavi: Starting as the British India Company, fully own the states of Sindh and Punjab.
Perkeletankki: Starting as Finland, produce at least 100 units of tanks every week.
Luxurious Luxemburg: Starting as Luxembourg, be the leading producer of Luxury Clothes, Luxury Furniture, and Porcelain.
Anarchy in the UK: Starting as Great Britain, have an Anarchist form of government.
Mohammed Alis Ambition: Starting as Egypt, form Arabia and own Thrace.
An Empire Under the Pun: Starting as the Sikh Empire, subjugate Great Britain.
I didnt vote for Pedro: Starting as Brazil, change government to Republic and implement Universal Suffrage.
Go West, Young Man: Starting as the USA, own California, Oregon and Washington with 250k or more population in each.
The Western Protectorate: Starting as Great Qing, have a treaty port in France, Germany, the British Isles, Iberia and Italy.
The Paris Commune: Starting as France, become a Council Republic and have a Command Economy.
Barbarys Back: Starting as Algeria, retake Algiers and become a Major Power.
Miners and Minors: Starting as Lanfang, incorporate all states in Borneo and have the 'Compulsory Primary School' law.
Healthy Man of Europe: Starting as the Ottomans, be the Greatest Power while having max level Public Health Insurance.
Habsburg Resurgence: Starting as Austria, own Silesia and Prussia must be Minor Power or lower rank.
The Great Game: Starting as Russia, own the entire Central Asia region.
Bourbon for Everyone: Starting as Spain, have an average standard of living of at least 20 while remaining a monarchy.
Manifest Mexico: Starting as Mexico, own the Pacific Coast & Great Plains, and have a higher Power Rank than the USA.
American Territory: Starting as the Indian Territory, have the USA as a subject with no more than three states.
Broken Promises: As Italy, join a diplomatic play against 2 or more of your allies.
The Berlin Conference: Starting as Prussia, form Germany and fully own at least 10 states in Africa.
Star-Swarmed Banner: As the United States, have 100 incorporated states represented on your flag.
Belle poque: Starting as France, have the highest GDP per capita and Innovation generation in the world.
Deeds, Not Words: Pass the Women's Suffrage law.
First Flight: Be the first nation in the world to fly aeroplanes.
Victorian Century: Play a full campaign from 1836 to 1936.
Poor, Huddled Masses: Have a cultural migration target in one of your states.
Billionaire: Have a national GDP of at least 1 billion.
Serfs Up: Starting as a nation with Serfdom, enact Workers Protections Labour Rights Law.
Risorgimento: Form the nation of Italy.
Three Hurrahs: Form the nation of Germany.
Solomons Quest: Form the nation of Ethiopia.
I am a Scandinavian: Form the nation of Scandinavia.
Enlightened Despot: Have electrical street lights in all states while being an Autocracy.
Mightier than the Sword: Have the other side back down in a diplomatic play.
Revolutionary: Switch sides to the revolutionaries in a civil war and win the ensuing conflict.
Reading Campaign: Starting as a nation with less than 20% literacy, get to 100% literacy.
We Are Not Amused: Starting as Great Britain, Expel Diplomats of a Great Power with Cordial or better relations.
Institutional: Have an institution at maximum investment level.
Poppydock: Have at least a level 8 port and export at least 2500 units of Opium to foreign markets.
Grander Colombia: Form Grand Colombia and own all land in the Gran Colombia, Andes, and La Plata strategic regions.
Inventive: Research all technologies across all three categories.
Educated: Complete the 'Learn the Game' objective.
Tycoon: Complete the 'Economic Dominance' objective.
Hegemon: Complete the 'Hegemon' objective.
Caretaker: Complete the 'Egalitarian Society' objective.
Thats all of them, and thats all for today! Join us again next week as Alex goes into more depth about Cultures and Religions!
Good day Victorians!
Join our discord server to vote for the country played in the stream on the 30th!
The poll will be up from 17:00 CEST today until 17:00 CEST on the 23rd of August!
Discord Server:
https://discord.com/invite/victoriagamePDX
Hello and welcome to another Victoria 3 development diary. Today is going to be a slightly different diary, as instead of bringing up a system we havent previously covered well be talking about a whole bunch of changes that have happened to Trade, which was previously talked about in Dev Diary #38.
As is fairly common knowledge, we are constantly iterating on our systems, and even when something has been written about in a dev diary that doesnt mean were a hundred percent happy with it or arent looking to tweak it in some way. For Trade specifically, there were two main issues that were brought up repeatedly from internal testing and feedback, but which we hadnt had figured out the solution for yet by the time the Trade dev diary was written.
These issues were that first, managing the precise level of your trade routes was far too micro-intensive, and second, that Tariffs didnt function as an effective trade barrier. These werent the *only* issues mind, but they were the two big ones that we needed to design some sort of solution for. Well, design and implement a solution we did, so here I am to tell you all about it.
So then, what has changed about trade? Well first of all, lets go over what hasnt changed. Namely, that trade routes are still established by a nation, from their market to another market, and can be either an import route (which creates buy orders in the foreign market and sell orders in your own market) or an export route (which does the opposite). Trade Routes also still require Convoys to transport goods along sea routes, and still create Trade Centers whose employees manage and profit from those routes.
Trade Routes are created from the Trade Lens, where you will get both a map and list overview of the most suitable markets to trade with
As to what has changed, probably the single most important difference is that you no longer directly manage the level of your trade routes. Instead, all newly established trade routes start at level 1, and will grow (or shrink) on a weekly basis based on market conditions. So if youre playing as Britain and looking to import Wood from Brazil, instead of setting the exact level of Wood imports that makes sense for your needs right away, you simply establish the route and it will grow towards those needs over time. Its also worth noting in this context that we have removed the national limit on the number of trade routes you can have, and replaced it with a fixed bureaucracy cost per route (which does not increase with route level) instead, to encourage countries to have fewer, more impactful trade routes.
So what are the market conditions that affect whether trade routes grow, shrink, or stay unchanged? Well, the single most important factor is profitability. A trade route makes money by buying goods that are cheap in the exporting market and selling them at a higher price in the importing market, but it isnt as simple as just looking at the current market price. Instead, each trade route has a purchase price and sale price which are calculated based on the difference between the pre-trade and post-trade price of the goods in the two markets.
To maintain naval trade routes, you will need convoys. If your supply network is under strain due to lack of convoy production or attacks on your shipping lanes, your trade routes will start shrinking over time.
Confused yet? To try and explain, Ill use the Wood import route to Britain from Brazil as an example. To get the purchase price in the exporting (Brazilian) market, we first calculate what the price of Wood would be in that market if it had no trade routes exporting or importing wood, i.e. if it was set only from local supply and demand. Lets make up a number and say that the pre-trade price of Wood in Brazil is 10 (quite a low price) and the post-trade price of Wood in Brazil is 20 (a very average price). To get the purchase price, we simply calculate the midpoint between these two prices, aka 15. This means that we assume that our trade route is paying, on average, 15 for each unit of Wood they are exporting. The same calculation is then done in the British market to get the sale price, which Im just going to arbitrarily set at 25. From here on, the math should be simple enough - each unit of Wood imported to Britain from Brazil generates 10 in profits for the Trade Center.
Theres a lot of factors that go into whether or a trade route will grow or shrink, but fortunately you dont have to know them all by heart, since the level prediction tooltip will break them down for you!
Well, it would be that simple if it werent for Tariffs. Tariffs are collected on both ends of the trade route, with the exporting market collecting Export tariffs and the importing market collecting Import tariffs. Under the new system, Tariffs can be a highly effective trade barrier because they are calculated against the base price of the goods rather than the market price. What this means is that if the Import tariff on Wood is 25%, that Import tariff is always going to be 5.
If you have a degree in economics or youre just surprisingly good at following along with my overcomplicated explanations, you may already have picked up on the reason that setting against the base price makes Tariffs a more effective trade barrier. Namely, that it disproportionately affects high-volume, low-revenue-per-unit routes. For our example Wood route above, a tariff of 5 means a full 50% reduction in profits, and as the route grows and the difference between the purchase and sale price shrinks, tariffs will take away more and more of that profit until its simply more profitable for the Pops in the Trade Center to stop growing the trade route level, and indeed may end up reducing the level in order to make more money for themselves.
Its worth noting that Trade Routes can never shrink below level 1, and so will always trade a small number of goods even if doing so at a loss, so that for instance you can always import a small quantity of weapons or ships needed to kickstart your military or merchant marine - assuming that youre willing to subsidize the Trade Center if it doesnt have other, more profitable routes to make up for the losses.
So then, is creating trade routes and letting them do their own thing the only way you interact with trade now? Well, no. Since weve taken away the need to adjust routes manually, this means that we can now put emphasis on other, more indirect ways to manipulate the flow of goods between markets. These include strengthening Trade Agreements (which now remove both bureaucracy cost and tariffs from all trade routes between the two countries) and adding the ability to place Embargoes on countries you want to keep out of your market.
Mexico decides that it has had enough of American meddling in their market - its Embargo time!
However, probably the single most important tool weve added for controlling trade is Market Good Policies. There are 3 such policies, which you can set separately for each individual good in your market:
Welcome back! With the traditional Swedish summer vacations over, the Victoria 3 team is back to work and that means the resumption of dev diaries. Today were going to take a look at Characters and their various facets, including Leader Ideologies, Traits, Popularity, and more.
His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty, By the Grace of God Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary and Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomeria and Illyria; King of Jerusalem, etc.; Archduke of Austria; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Cracow; Duke of Lorraine, Salzburg, Styria, Carintia, Carniola and Bukovina; Grand Prince of Transylvania, Margrave of Moravia; Duke of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, of Auschwitz and Zator, of Teschen, Friaul, Ragusa and Zara; Princely Count of Habsburg and Tyrol, of Kyburg, Gorizia and Gradisca; Prince of Trento and Brixen; Margrave of Upper and Lower Lusatia and in Istria; Count of Hohenems, Feldkirch, Bregenz, Sonnenberg etc.;
Lord of Trieste, of Cattaro and on the Windic March; Grand Voivode of the Voivodeship of Serbia etc., etc.
Interest Group Ideologies, such as Liberal for the Intelligentsia and Jingoist for the Armed Forces, are for the most part set in stone outside of some special instances. Interest Groups represent broad class interests rather than the prevailing political zeitgeist, so weve taken care to ensure that their Ideologies align with those interests. The Rural Folks Particularist Ideology, for instance, opposes Serfdom, Debt Slavery, and Peasant Levies - and its difficult to imagine them changing their stance on such matters.
Market Liberals can appear after researching Stock Exchange, and may well decide that they want to shake up your tightly controlled or agrarian economy.
The Ideologies of your Interest Group Leaders, however, do represent the prevailing political zeitgeist within their own section of society. Every character comes with their own personal Ideology, determined by a wide variety of factors reflecting the material and political conditions of your nation. Ill list a few examples of these factors:
Victorians! PDXCON returns to Stockholm this September! Meet the developers, join a massive board game session, attend Paradox games orchestra & play our games!
Victoria 3 will be the guest of honour this year, including; Q&A sessions with the developers, a talk about the economy in Victoria 3, live gameplay sessions, a live demo introduced by the team and for a lucky select few, the unique opportunity to participate in workshops with the design team about the future of the game!
Get the tickets while supplies last! https://paradoxinteractive.com/pdxcon
Within this monthly update, we shall enthrall you with a tale weaving through: the Graphics of Victoria 3, our Living Map, the Tutorial and Player Objectives & Agency! 00:00 - Intro 00:25 - Graphics Overview 04:17 - Living Map 08:14 - Tutorial 11:44 - Player Objectives & Agency [previewyoutube=jrLMQTDpuaA;full][/previewyoutube]
Hello everyone, and welcome to Victoria 3s 52nd Dev Diary. My name is Nik or Paradoxical Nikname and I am here to tell you about Player Objectives in the game.
Objectives screen
You might have already seen this screen from the last Dev Diary, but I will go through it again quickly. Here we give you the player a choice on what you would like to do in your game. You have the tutorial, three different objectives and the Sandbox. If you missed the last Dev Diary and would like to know more about the Tutorial (click here). Then you have the three Objectives to choose from, well go into those in a bit. Finally, we have a sandbox for those of you who want a completely unguided campaign.
What are Objectives
There are multiple goals we are trying to achieve with objectives. First and foremost we wanted to present the player with some suggested accomplishments to try and achieve before the end of the game. How the player chooses to complete the tasks in the end is up to them.
Another one of our goals is to make an extra challenge for players who have dipped their toes into the tutorial and now want to try and take that knowledge and see if they can carry themselves without the extra help from the tutorial.
Also we see it as a way of giving the player an idea of what to play. Say that you are in that, I wanna play (insert Paradox Title) mood, but you don't know what you want to do or who to play as. Now we have a mission for you to complete either as a specific nation or a random one.
One thing I would like to make clear to you is, these are not an extra set of tutorials. These are their own challenges available as an additional option. There are no How and Why tutorial lessons that guide you towards completing the tasks. It is entirely up to you to solve and complete the task at hand.
Player Agency and Direction
Much like the Journal system walks a tightrope between historical accuracy and the player's ability to create their own alt-history, the Objectives system has to balance agency and direction. Too much direction and you feel railroaded or puppeteered, too little direction and the goal just becomes noise competing for your attention instead of something to strive towards.
In early playtests we found that many players were intrigued by all the systems and how they fit together but didn't know why to perform certain actions in the game, because nobody was pushing them in a particular direction. This was particularly true for strategy players new to Victoria, while those with prior experience could more easily formulate goals for their campaigns before they started: "I want to liberalize Tsarist Russia" or "I want to form Poland as Krakow" or "I want to make Qing the globally dominant economic force".
The Objectives system helps with this in two ways:
[olist]
Hi, Im Aron, UX Designer on Victoria 3. I'm here to tell you all about our latest attempt to teach you how to play a Paradox game (God help me).
Hello again everyone! This week, as promised, Ill be showing you a lot more of the visual elements of the map and how it evolves over the course of time and through your influence.
The Living Map has many different elements to it that adds both a bit of flavor and life in the world of Victoria 3, Ill be going over some of the main elements in their current state to give you all some insight.
Hub Expansion
The most important and noticeable aspect that the world is progressing are your Hubs, as you reach certain thresholds of buildings (both production, government and residential ones) your cities will expand with the corresponding buildings. When it comes to the residential buildings they all have three different tiers of wealth within each culture set, the higher tiers are automatically activated upon reaching a higher Standard Of Living for the Pops of that Hub. To further amplify this change of SOL and to provide some more motion around hubs we have an effect that indicates either an increase or decrease with a construction hammer and anvil that either hardens or breaks.
Small Hubs
Large Hubs
Decrease in SOL
Increase in SOL
Vehicles
Traversing the roads, seas and even skies of the game we have made quite a few vehicles that breathe life into the world. These are unlocked by research, adjusting your Production Methods and building specific buildings. The most fundamental one being a horse carriage that traverses the dirt roads of connected Hubs, with specific research you can instead have cars putter along the roads! If regular roads are too simple for you there are also a bunch of different trains for when youve researched railroads, old locomotives can turn into electric ones and steel railway cars can also be applied.
Well get there, eventually
Traveling in style
Old locomotive
Electric trains
But land is not the only place where vehicles make an appearance, in the seas and along the shipping lanes youll be able to see cargo ships traveling! These range from simple clippers to steamships, depending on what youve researched and what sort of Production Methods youre utilizing.
Trade ships
Last but not least we look to the skies where youll be able to see Zeppelins soaring through the air when skyscrapers have been built and act as anchoring points for the massive airships.
Soaring through the skies
Military and War
When conflict inevitably brews and wars break out there are lots of ways we show those effects on your Hubs and surrounding terrain. When gearing up for war your troops will be determined by what youve researched and the Production Methods of your Barracks. You can look at what troops you have in your Garrison at any time, but upon entering a battle they (the most advanced unit) will be visible on the map where battle takes place, facing off against the opponents troops. Depending on what weapons youve equipped your units with, different effects will show, so even a Mobile Artillery unit has different kinds of shots.
Beautiful illustrations for your troops
Bunker fire
Flamethrowers!
Let's play battleship!
When a region has been ravaged by war and a lot of battles you will start to see the effect of that on the region where it has happened through Devastation. The dynamic Devastation affects a variety of parameters for the region, its trade, Pops and Hubs. It also visually shows, not just by tearing up the surrounding terrain but also muddles rivers and burns buildings, the extent of this increases the more battles are fought in the same region.
Devastation (sped up)
Devastation at a Hub
Also, if you really need additional troops you can activate your conscription centers (if youve got access to them) which forces a lot of people to sign up. We make sure to show this as well, through an effect on your Hubs where conscripts are being drafted.
Production and Pops
In addition to expanding your city Hubs, youll also be able to affect the world with mining, farming and forestry Hubs. Trees will be cut down in close proximity to your forestry Hubs, farms will cultivate the earth and ground will be excavated close to your mines, leaving visible impact on the terrain.
Forestry Hubs and their effect
Farm Hubs and their growth
Mining Hubs effect on the world
With increased production and industrialization within your country and Hubs we are also giving you a purely visual reminder that the world will be affected by that as well. The visual Pollution will see more smokestacks rising from your hubs as well as the surrounding terrain becoming tarnished. All for the sake of progress right?
Smokestacks coming from a Hub
Pollution affecting a larger area
However, if your people don't like the way things are progressing they will show their displeasure through turmoil, and if you dont correctly address their concerns you might find yourself with a revolution on your hands. Turmoil will just be a bit of anger brewing in the form of puffs of displeasure while revolution will have flags of opposition being raised in your hubs.
Let the flags of revolution rise!
Buildings
As previously mentioned, youll get zeppelins traversing the skies upon building skyscrapers, and while these behemoths of buildings will tower over the rest in your city Hubs there are still Monuments like the Eiffel Tower that will be even stronger indicators that your cities are growing beyond the point of the regular buildings.
The different skyscrapers for each culture set
They also blink!
That should give you all a glimpse into the life of the world map! There are things we would love to explore more in the future but I feel weve got a great foundation going that wed love to hear ideas on how to take further.
Join us next week, where Aron will be covering the tutorial!
A new video for Victoria 3! Today, we will learn about internal politics, assimilation and unification! 00:00 - Intro 00:24 - Elections 02:19 - Parties 03:39 - Conversion and Assimilation 06:46 - Unification [previewyoutube=V2M2q7ijU3Q;full][/previewyoutube]
Victorians! We are excited to share our gameplay trailer, with the game coming in 2022! [previewyoutube=5ftmdd1g4hE;full][/previewyoutube]
Hey everyone! Im Max, Art Director of Victoria 3, here to go over the different visual elements of the game and give you some insight into our process. The games visual pillars center around Elegance, Hopefulness and some of the older visual elements of the Victorian era, this will be present within each visual category and discipline.
To start off, a lot of things have happened visually over the last year, even in these last few weeks a lot of tweaks and improvements have been made thanks to the team! To go over some of these improvements Ill be giving a brief overview, starting with:
Interface
The lead of the 2D art team, Kenneth Lim, talked a lot about our interface visuals in Dev Diary #30 so make sure to check that out! The components of the interface have not changed drastically since then, but have rather been refined and more illustrations have been incorporated into menus that are very text heavy or where a bit more flavor helps. In general the interface direction wants to provide visuals that are elegant and ornate but not too heavy, with a palette that compliments the visuals of the map and illustrations, making icons and button interactions pop out from it. Working closely with the UX designers we aim to put the visual emphasis and focus where your important decisions can be made, ensuring that interactable objectives and buttons are clear and have an order of importance.
Interface for the politics, showing various different elements
Buildings and lots of icons
Outliner for the market UI
Illustrations
As illustrations are being incorporated more frequently in the game we want to ensure they have a consistent style, a style that is something of a mix between modern digital art and some older 19th century style and technique with clear brush strokes. We also try to ensure that they all have a hopeful (though some quite grim) feel to them that gives flavor to your decisions and the Events that do occur while still not discouraging you. The illustrations for Events are quite vast, and with so many different possible events occurring one thing we have tried to ensure is that all different cultures of the game are represented within Events. The downside of this decision is that some of our events will look pretty specific to a culture while applicable to almost everyone, this is something we will look to improve in the future!
Event Illustration within the interface
Character background illustrations
Illustrations for the different Institutions
Map
The map of the world is something weve put a lot of effort into making sure looks both very interesting yet soothing enough not to compete in complexity with the interface and the actions you take, steering clear of too much clutter and maintaining the visual pillars that gives the player satisfaction of seeing their course of the world progress. We also try to ensure a visual hierarchy of what is important to look at by balancing the complexity of assets as well as their scale. During next weeks DD Ill be talking more about the elements that help make the map feel alive and how we visually change the world as the game progresses. But aside from that the papermap, the zoomed out version of the 3d map, also has a lot of visual detail put into it, lots of small illustrations and details that make it more interesting to look at alongside the scene with the table and objects surrounding it to contextualize that this is you overlooking the world as a whole. Other elements present on the map are the buildings of different cultures that make up the Hubs that range from small farms to huge monuments, in addition theres also a vast assortment of military 3d units that appear when battles take place.
Trade in the Dardanelles Strait
Rome and the Vatican
Asian building set
Papermap and the surrounding scene
Characters
The characters of Victoria 3 aim to be visually representative not only of the stratas they inhabit but also of their profession and its characteristics. Butchers sporting cleavers, farmers have pitchforks and servicemen have rifles, all this in combination with various different appearances for different cultures, a large age spectrum as well as a plethora of different outfits ranging from farmer rags to exquisite dresses gives a really varied appearance of the game's characters. While our visual pillars still stand even for the characters, ensuring that their appearance is a bit softer and filled with a bit of hope, they also show when they are not doing well, giving starving Pops altered idle animations where they look displeased and hunched forward. We are still finding new ways of increasing the personalities of characters and their overall visuals and look forward to giving them even more life in the future!
Farmers in Burma
French heir
Now thats a fancy outfit
Aristocrats in Harar
Growing old
VFX
The visual effects that we have in game range from emphasizing certain button presses to atmospheric weather effects like rain, sand and snowstorms but where its most prevalent is through wars and battles where units fire devastating cannon shots or even flamethrowers, really emphasizing the situation! The games VFX also helps provide a sense of whats happening on the map, visualizing things like buildings being built and completed, turmoil, revolutions and celebrations among many.
It does snow a lot between Sweden and Norway
Sandstorms can be daunting
Fire!
Technical Solutions
For a lot of the neat details and dynamic elements of the game we have Technical Art providing smart solutions to things like waves around shorelines, the clouds that provide depth and fog of war to the map as well as how country borders and occupied territories look.
Smart shader work makes waves not take up too much performance
Clouds and Contested Territories
That should give you some insight into how we work on the visual side of Victoria 3! As mentioned before, next week will have another Developer Diary from yours truly with a more in-depth look at the Living Map and how things change through the course of the game. We are still making a lot of nifty changes to things and cant wait for you all to experience Victoria 3 in all its glory!
Hello and welcome to yet another Dev Diary for Victoria 3! Todays topic will be Unification, aka the process of turning one nation into another, greater nation, such as the historical example of the Kingdom of Prussia turning into the German Empire in 1871.
When talking about Unification, theres two distinct types of Unifications - regular Unifications and Major Unifications, the latter of which have some special mechanics associated with them. Well go over the former first.
The Unifications youre able to form range from small one-region nations like Baluchistan to vast ones like India.
A Regular Unification is, plain and simple, a particular country that can be formed by other countries. These may be countries that have existed in the past (such as Poland), came into being after 1836 (such as Italy), are alt-history countries that we have deemed plausible or interesting enough to include (such as Arabia) or may even be countries that already exist on the map in 1836 but can be re-formed if they were to break up or be conquered (such as the United Provinces of Central America).
In order for one country to become another, theres a few conditions that must be met:
Happy Thursday! Today our topic returns to Pop mechanics, with a discussion around some of the finer details on how Pops may change their religion and culture over time depending on your nations legal system. The mechanics themselves are quite straightforward, but as always in Victoria 3, the applications of them can have quite different outcomes in different situations.
Lets begin by reviewing the mechanics around Discrimination, since this will be important later in the discussion. Weve already talked about most of this in other dev diaries but some details here may be new.
Discriminated Pops have barely any Political Strength and cannot vote. This means the only way they can impact your countrys politics is by agitating for change through Political Movements, or by starting a civil war for self-rule through a Cultural Secession. In addition to being hamstrung politically, they also get paid substantially less than their non-discriminated counterparts, have a harder time developing Qualifications for certain Professions, and their presence in your country is a potential source of radicalism and Turmoil.
Whether a Pop is discriminated against or accepted depends on who they are, the national identity of the country they live in, and the laws of that country. Both culture and religion are potential reasons for discrimination, and these are controlled by different laws. Your Citizenship laws determine which Pops are discriminated against on the basis of their culture, while your Church and State laws determine which forms of worship are considered acceptable in your country. To be considered non-discriminated by these laws, Pops must pass a more or less stringent selection criteria based on how much they differ from the primary culture(s) and state religion in the country.
For example, under the Racial Segregation Citizenship law, only Pops whose cultures heritage trait matches that of their primary cultures heritage trait will be accepted. The heritage trait indicates which region of the world the culture originates from (e.g. European, African, Indigenous American), and under this law that is the only thing that matters - whether the Pops speak the same language, or are both transplants in the New World, is unimportant in determining their status. By contrast, under Cultural Exclusion, any similarity between a Pops culture and one of the primary ones qualifies them as equal under the law.
The total set of options are:
Ethnostate: only Pops of primary cultures are accepted
National Supremacy: Pops whose cultures share both heritage and another trait are accepted
Racial Segregation: Pops of the same heritage are accepted
Cultural Exclusion: Pops whose cultures share any similarities are accepted
Multiculturalism: no cultures are discriminated against
State Religion: only Pops who adhere to the state religion are accepted
Freedom of Conscience: Pops who adhere to a religion in the same family as the state religion are accepted (e.g. any branch of Christianity, any form of Buddhist)
Total Separation: no religions are discriminated against
The practical impact of these laws therefore depends on what the state religion and primary cultures of your country are, as well as who actually lives in your country. An Ethnostate operates no differently in practice than a Multicultural state if only Pops of primary cultures live there. Since Pops are unlikely to mass migrate to your country if theyd be oppressed there once they arrived, until you expand your borders and populace by force you may not see a practical difference (except for a curious lack of immigrants). But if you were to form a Customs Union with a poorer neighbor, resulting in a lot of economic migration within the market to your country, you might have to deal with substantial political strife until you take steps to loosen up your Citizenship laws. If the option exists for you, as an alternative you might consider attempting to unify your nations instead (which well learn more about next week) in order to accept both cultures as primary.
Alright, now that weve cleared up how countries can adapt to the Pops, we will consider how Pops might adapt to their country.
First lets tackle Religious Conversion. Pops who are discriminated against on the basis of their religion will always be in the process of converting to an accepted religion. The religion they convert to is not necessarily the state religion, though - it could be any accepted religion that is dominant in the state where they live. An Indigenous American following an Animist religion in a United States with Freedom of Conscience instead of Total Separation is eventually going to convert to some form of Christianity to avoid religious persecution, but if they live in a Nebraska that has been settled by predominantly Catholic rather than Protestant Pops, they would convert to Catholicism even though Protestantism is the dominant religion in the nation as a whole.
Pops convert at a percentage-based rate, currently set to a base of 0.2% / month (as usual, numbers such as these are subject to balancing and change before release, and are always moddable). A percentage-based conversion rate naturally means a diminishing number of actual converts over time, so at this rate it would take almost 30 years for of your discriminated population to convert. If you find this rate too ponderous for your strategic goals, you have two primary tools at your disposal to speed it up.
The Religious School System law + institution combination increases this rate by +20% per investment level, up to a potential maximum of +100% (i.e. twice the speed). It also increases the Education Access of Pops overall and increases the Clout of the Devout Interest Group.
The other method is the Promote National Values decree. Like all decrees, it is issued in a certain state and costs Authority for each state it is issued in, so in a larger country you will have to focus your efforts. Promote National Values doubles the rate of both conversion and assimilation.
Using a combination of both methods, you could speed up religious conversion such that of a minority population can be converted to an accepted religion within the span of a 10 years. Of course, your school system only extends to incorporated states, so if youre trying to mass convert Pops in conquered land or colonies you will have to do so by decree - or embark on the often lengthy and painstaking process of incorporating a part of the world thats culturally alien to your country.
This leads us to cultural assimilation. The conditions for assimilation are a little more complex than conversion, and in some ways operate by the reverse logic. In order to start assimilating, a Pop must already be culturally accepted. After all, if they cant get citizenship, cant vote, cant participate in politics, cant get paid a fair wage on the basis of who they are, there simply is no way for them to assimilate - by which we mean, integrate themselves into a primary culture such that they are both accepted as such by others and genuinely consider themselves part of that culture. Renouncing ones religious beliefs and practices can be a very practical and concrete choice, but adopting and being adopted by a different culture is not a utilitarian decision.
In addition, Pops will never change culture if they live in a state they consider their Homeland. A Franco-Canadian in Ontario might over time adopt the ways and tongue of their Anglo-Canadian neighbors, but a Franco-Canadian who resides in Quebec?! Plutt mourir!
(And of course, if a confederated Canada has been created with both Anglo- and Franco-Canadian as primary cultures, none of those types of Pops would be changing cultures in the first place.)
If a Pop should be assimilating, the culture they will be assimilating into will always be a primary culture. This is because, again, this is not a practical decision thats just up to the Pop in question, but a two-way-street of assimilation into the dominant national identity. In the case of countries with multiple primary cultures, the one selected will be the Homeland of the state the Pop lives in, or in case none or several apply, the dominant one among Pops who already live there. A Czech Pop living in a unified Germany (North + South German) in the state of Silesia (North German and Polish Homelands) will assimilate into the North German culture; if they lived in Bavaria they would be assimilating into the South German culture; and if they lived in Bohemia they would not assimilate at all, since Bohemia is a not only a South German but also a Czech Homeland. If this Pop instead lived in Transylvania (with both Hungarian and Romanian primary cultures and Homelands), they would be assimilating into whichever of those cultures is more dominant in the part of Transylvania where they live.
The rate of assimilation is the same as for religion, 0.2% per month. As mentioned, the Promote National Values decree can be used to double this rate on a per-state basis. In addition, a Public School System will provide an increased assimilation rate of +12.5% per investment level, representing perhaps a less overt approach to indoctrination than their religious counterparts. With maximum effort, this means you can assimilate half of a minority population in about 18 years.
Ill end on a small design note. While our primary motivation while developing these mechanics was to provide a logical and believable simulation, a nice side effect of the asymmetry between conversion and assimilation is that theres no way to benefit from both without an asymmetry in your laws as well. An inclusive, accepting, discrimination-free society wont also become religiously homogeneous over time, nor will an oppressive, xenophobic country be able to assimilate their cultural minorities just by waiting them out while throwing resources at integrating them. Culture-wise, Pops need to be either accepted or harshly dealt with, now or in the future. Being accepting of all faiths today means there will be problems if you backtrack in the future. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for dealing with heterogeneous populations.
There are of course a few good examples of countries that already start out with asymmetrical Citizenship and Church and State laws. The Ottoman Empire, home to a lot of cultural and religious minorities, has fairly lenient Citizenship Laws but zero separation of Church and State. As a result they will initially have a lot of both assimilation and conversion, and increasing the rate of those further might be one way for them to try to minimize Turmoil due to discrimination long-term. Meanwhile, the United States has total separation of Church and State (zero religious conversion, but no religious discrimination either) but Racial Segregation laws that cause considerable population segments to be discriminated against, particularly Indigenous- and African-American. Since none of these populations will ever be assimilating unless the Citizenship policy changes, this problem will not just go away on its own. Either the United States changes course legally, or they will have to continue dealing with trouble caused by the oppression of these minorities for the following century.
Thats all for this week! Like I hinted above, next week Martin will get into how Unifications work in Victoria 3, which I for one am very excited about!
Good evening! Today we are finally ready to talk in detail about Political Parties. This has been a much-requested feature for Victoria 3, and indeed the political world would feel a little empty without the Whigs and Tories going at each others throats. Weve listened, and some months ago we revealed that we were indeed working on implementing this feature. Today we are ready to talk about how Parties will factor into the political landscape of the game.
In Victoria 3, a Political Party is an alliance between Interest Groups. They appear in countries that have Elections, and are absent in countries without them, differentiating the experience and mechanics of democracies from autocracies. Interest Groups must be added or removed from government as a single bloc, which means that youll need to make strategic decisions about the makeup of your government and deal with the consequences. The Liberal Party may for instance contain both the Intelligentsia and the Industrialists, who will both back your plans to move toward a free market economy but diverge on the issue of child labor. Sometimes an opposition Interest Group might decide that it wants to join a Party currently in government (or vice versa) - in this circumstance, the Interest Group will leave their old Party and be marked as wanting to join their new party. This wont force any Interest Group into or out of government, but if you decide to reform your government under these circumstances you must treat that Interest Group as being a member of the new Party, bringing them into or out of government as a single bloc.
The Republican Party in the USA is made up of an alliance between the Industrialists and the Intelligentsia, primarily opposing the ruling Democratic Party which is constituted by the Southern Planters and Petite Bourgeoisie.
Just as Parties ally together when you form your government, they also share their Momentum in Elections, which determines their votes. If for instance the fascist leader of the Petite Bourgeoisie joins the Conservative Party and is caught up in a political scandal, the whole Party suffers the electoral consequences. On the other hand, as the Landowners begin to lose their political relevance in an increasingly industrialized economy they might cling to relevance by attaching themselves to the rising Fascist Party, who may bring them Political Power from the votes the whole Party gains in the Election.
The Whig Party, consisting of a large number of opposition IGs, has landed themselves in a corruption scandal. Rowland Hill, leader of the Armed Forces and prominent Reformer, may have seriously harmed the entire blocs election campaign.
During the Election Campaign period (which as youll recall lasts 6 months before the final votes are cast), youre likely to get events relating to the various Partys campaign efforts that can have a major impact on Momentum. These events are inspired by the campaigns and scandals of the period, such as Gladstones Midlothian campaign and the whistle-stop tours that became popular in the USA.
There are 11 potential Political Parties that your Interest Groups can join. At any given time, any combination of these parties might exist or not exist. Parties emerge and disband dynamically, so the political landscape can be very different between countries and playthroughs. The following Parties can emerge throughout the course of the game:
Welcome to another video for Victoria 3! This time we will talk about countries in a state of internal turmoil.
Topics covered, in order by timestamp:
Good evening and welcome once again to a Victoria 3 Development Diary! Todays topic is elections. Well be covering the various laws that enable and affect voting, as well as the progression of Election Campaigns and how they affect political power in your country. We'll briefly be mentioning Political Parties in this dev diary, but theyre not the focus of this week - more on that next time! For now, Ill just say that Political Parties in Victoria 3 exist in democracies and are made up of alliances of Interest Groups.
A country has Elections if it has any of the Distribution of Power laws that enable voting:
Ave and welcome to another Dev Diary! Today I will be talking about how Battles work and what their consequences are. If you haven't already, I suggest you first read through the dev diary on Fronts and get acquainted with the concepts explained there.
Let's start off with a somewhat updated version of the Front panel. Do note that this is all still very much WIP and not all values are hooked in, balanced or polished. For example at the moment there are a lot more deaths in battles than there should be.
Who couldve seen this war coming?
In order for a battle to happen one side must have at least one General with an Advance order. Once this happens an advancement meter will slowly start to fill up and once its full a new battle will be launched. Various factors can increase or decrease the time it takes.
When the battle is created a sequence of actions unfolds before the fighting begins. All of these are in script and can be tweaked by mods as desired.
Hello folks, welcome to another dev diary for Victoria 3! This week we're going to talk about the American Civil War, a dark period in the history of the United States.
Turmoil had been building under the surface of the United States for decades prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, with tension growing increasingly violent particularly in the 1850s. In 1861, several states voted to secede from the Union, and established the Confederate States of America. The Union and the Confederacy fought for four years, to 1865. After the surrender of the CSA, the Union reincorporated the states of the former Confederacy and initiated an era generally known as Reconstruction, a period of ambition, domestic unrest, and, ultimately, a failure to complete some of the most significant social reforms instigated in the wake of the CSA's defeat. The efforts and failures of Reconstruction resulted in Jim Crow laws and the promise of racial equality becoming a generations-long struggle that has carried on well past the end of the Victorian era.
Let's get something established first before we dive into the game: Slavery is central to the Civil War. The authors of secession did not dance around this point. The institution of slavery was singled out time and time again by the people seceding from the Union in their reasons for secession, during their debates over secession, and then throughout the Civil War itself. After the war, rhetoric shifted as the Lost Cause myth developed, but before and during the war slavery was declared as a central element in the rebellion time and time again.
This interpretation of history is built on solid foundations with ample evidence. Victoria 3 uses this approach as its basis for the American Civil War.
Antebellum America's unrest is centered around slavery.
The United States of America begins the game with a Journal Entry already underway. In the first years of the game, and historically, the 1830s were already rife with national debate over the issue of slavery, although violence was only just beginning to escalate. At this point on the national level, all the United States can try to do is balance the pressures of abolitionists and pro-slavery advocates, and either limit escalation or come down firmly on the side of one camp or another.
Even a policy of appeasement and reconciliation will not stop rising tensions entirely. Some events will ratchet up tensions regardless of whatever option is chosen; the main difference in choices is determining who will become more mad and who will be more mollified by ensuing government actions.
Iowa has become the front line in the fight over slavery, and will be struck with unrest regardless of the choice picked.
As tensions rise, violence will rise, and events will become more and more polarizing. Early events may talk about a single senator's words, or a single death in a city, but as the issue festers, things will just get worse and worse until something gives way. Newspaper debates will turn into arguments on the floor of the Senate, then those arguments will turn into canings, and people will stop campaigning with pamphlets and start campaigning with paramilitaries.
Attempts to ban slavery are more likely to create a reactionary movement in the United States.
The most straightforward way to end the debate over slavery may be to just end it, but this carries enormous risks - political movements may emerge in reaction to the potential passage of these laws. Of course, not banning slavery may also lead to a movement emerging explicitly agitating for the abolition of slavery, and that has its own set of challenges.
Triggering the Civil War early caused a slightly different set of states to secede. Florida simply didn't have enough pro-slavery supporters here to join the pre-war movement that formed the basis of the CSA.
This is where we've decided to engage with our own revolution mechanics in order to create a more dynamic American Civil War. If the Slavery Debate Journal Entry is active when a revolution over slavery erupts, the revolutionary government will turn into a secessionist government. Secession is determined by what states join the radicalized movements for preserving slavery or banning slavery, which means the strength of the secessionist government will vary depending on which IGs align themselves with the radicalized movement prior to the outbreak of revolution. If pro-slavery Interest Groups had been empowered again and again prior to their radicalization and revolution, then secessionists will control a large number of states, but if those same Interest Groups had been suppressed and their influence limited time and time again, then their government will be far smaller when war breaks out.
Of course there's a train-centered event.
The war itself has its own incidents that can complicate the pursuit of victory or give some unique opportunities. Raiders will jump back and forth across the border, causing chaos, while Unionist sympathizers in secessionist-held areas and secessionist sympathizers in Union-held areas will challenge the authority of local governments as long as the war still burns. If the secessionists are pro-slavery but the Union has not finished enacting abolition yet, the country will have a special change to radically hasten the change in law through a certain proclamation.
The war itself plays out the same way
If the secessionists win, then the secessionists win, and a new country is established in North America. A Union victory, however, will lead to Reconstruction.
Reconstruction varies depending on how the Civil War went.
Reconstruction is a long and varied process. Depending on who fought, what laws were passed, and the general shape of the United States at war's end, different journal entries will spawn. Establishing the Freedmen's Bureau and pursuing the cause of equality only makes sense if you fought against slavery. Reconciling the South only makes sense if the South was the part of the country that rebelled. Conversely, it's possible to end up with multiple goals for Reconstruction that end up conflicting.
Escalating violence is still a threat, even after the Civil War comes and goes.
Reconstruction will be ugly. Historically, it wasn't a clean and smooth process, and in the game it's not a clean and smooth process. There was a struggle to balance the ambitions of Reconstruction against the resistance of a reactionary coalition that sought to restore their antebellum political power and impose a vision of racial supremacy upon society. Pursuing egalitarian measures will alienate these people and related groups, which may make governance more difficult and more expensive, while currying favor with them will undercut the foundations of Reconstruction and create another alienated population that will have to be contended with for the rest of the game. Every step is fraught with challenges to the government and to the welfare of the people; Reconstruction will be rough.
Frontier justice is a tricky thing.
Not all postwar turmoil will be right where the fighting happened. Knock-on effects of the Civil War will be felt across the nation, from the very center of government to the furthest tendrils of the frontier. It's up to you, the player, to decide how the country will face all these myriad challenges. What kind of America do you want to create?
How's that for something to stew on for a week? Next time, we're going to talk more about how you can fight battles, both in the American Civil War and with wars in general, with the one and only KaiserJohan!
Welcome back to another chapter in this rundown of features that might tear your lovely nation apart! Last week we discussed Revolutions, which is where politically engaged members of your society rise up to change your country in favor of a certain Law. Today we will discuss another type of Civil War: Cultural Secessions, which is where Pops in your nation of a certain culture demand their right to self-determination and carve out their own country from yours. These types of Civil Wars have some similarity in mechanics but ultimately serve two very different purposes.
Just like revolutions can be seen as a failure to balance the economic and political needs of different classes against each other, secessions can be seen as a failure to see to the needs of Pops of certain cultures within your borders. Often this can come about as the result of aggressive expansion or systematic oppression of Pops of certain cultures (or indeed, the religions commonly associated with those cultures). Just like revolutions there are several paths to go down in order to deal with the problems secessionists might cause.
Back in the Migration dev diary we briefly mentioned a mechanic called Turmoil. Turmoil is the effect of having too many Radicals in your country, and has effects both on the state level and on entire cultures worldwide. To understand cultural secessions we have to understand Turmoil a bit better first.
Turmoil measures social friction and conflicts between Pops. This can include crime, violence, angry protests, and more. When a substantial part of a states total population are made up of Radicals, Turmoil is created and negative effects start to be applied: theres a certain amount of Tax Waste, modeling all the different costs of the types of unrest Turmoil represents; and the states migration attraction decreases substantially, because nobody wants to move to an area where trouble is brewing.
Louisiana appears to be going through some difficulties. Could that be a slave revolt brewing?
As you might recall from the Political Movements dev diary, Radicals can originate from a number of sources, including drops in material wealth, being below the minimum expected Standard of Living, or supporting a movement thats not being listened to. But one additional major cause of radicalism tends to be Discrimination - particular discrimination of literate Pops.
Which begs the question, if discrimination creates radicals, and radicals lead to turmoil, and turmoil hurts your economy - why would any country discriminate against parts of their population in the first place?
First, discrimination is governed by Laws, and most countries start out with Laws that would cause certain cultures or religions to be discriminated against - even if such Pops arent even present in the country at game starts. You dont pick and choose which cultures or religions to discriminate against, its all based on your Laws and how similar other cultures and religions are to your countrys primary culture(s) and religion. These Laws are supported by Interest Groups, so while you can try to put an end to your discriminatory practices by changing your Citizenship and Church & State Laws, certain groups might not be pleased with you if you do.
Second, discriminated Pops get paid less than their non-discriminated peers. This in turn makes ownership shareholders - and potentially all non-discriminated Pops in states where discriminated Pops live - richer, as they get a larger piece of the productivity pie. Therefore, putting an end to discrimination would hurt their personal finances, which causes them to Radicalize - and they have more Political Strength to hurt you with than the discriminated Pops do.
Third, discriminated Pops have considerably less Political Strength than their peers. If youre worried about potential uprisings, getting rid of discriminatory practices could certainly help you in the long-term, but in the short-term it will empower the formerly discriminated to make stronger demands. It might be tempting to retain the status quo unless youre prepared to take the fight with both the conservative elements of your society and the newly equal citizens who might want to see a few changes.
But since discrimination occurs on a cultural basis (and if not cultural then often religious, which often maps back to a certain cultures anyway), this means that even if Pops of a certain culture represents a small proportion of the population in your country, the proportion of Pops within that culture that are Radical could be very large indeed. So in addition to measuring Turmoil on the state level, we also measure it on a culture level, and on a culture-in-country level.
The Maghrebi culture might not have very high Turmoil overall because most of them live in Tunis and Morocco where they arent discriminated against, but within France the Turmoil among Maghrebi Pops could reach higher levels.
As we know from the Migration diary, if a whole culture has high Turmoil, this can result in the emergence of Mass Migration targets - states across the globe that temporarily gain the ability for Pops of those cultures to mass migrate there. This is the peaceful resolution to Discrimination - eventually, Pops who suffer systematic discrimination and see no improvement to their material conditions to compensate will simply pack up and move to someplace where theyre accepted.
But if Pops in a country suffer high Turmoil and live on one of their Cultural Homelands, they may instead start a Secession Movement. This could be the case for the Maghrebi population of Algiers, for example: theyre not only being oppressed, but theyre being oppressed on land they feel is theirs by right, and the obvious solution is to kick the French out of there. However, an Algerian that moves to Nice after their homeland was colonized and introduced to the French market will not try to start a secession movement for a Maghrebian sovereign state in southern France.
A Secession Movement functions a lot like a Revolutionary movement. It will gradually escalate in intensity until it reaches a threshold, after which point one or several states will break off from the country to form their own, then launch a Diplomatic Play. Much like Revolutionary and Political movements, you can deal with these by trying to fix the underlying issues - whether the discrimination or the lack of material comforts - or by suppressing the troublemakers using decrees or the Home Affairs institution. If you can get the situation back under control you can dodge the secession for this time, but the movement might of course return if conditions worsen.
You can also deal with it more permanently by simply ceding the land to secessionists. In this case you would release a nation, including all Homelands of that culture in your possession. One benefit of this approach is that you can release the nation as a Subject, permitting you to still meddle in their affairs and exploit their economy even while you grant them at least some degree of self-determination. With no Homelands now left in your possession, the secessionist movement will vanish immediately.
Another option when releasing a nation is to play as them, which immediately puts you in charge of that country instead!
But if you do not do any of these things, the secession will take place. This launches a Diplomatic Play where the country seceded from automatically gains the Crush the Uprising war goal, which if enforced will return the seceded states to their possession. The secessionists on the other hand only need to defend themselves! Unlike with Revolutions, a secession can (sort of by definition) result in a white peace where the seceding country is simply left to exist.
Just like in Revolutionary Plays, other countries with Interests or certain Pacts are able to intervene on behalf of either country. Most importantly, if the culture seceding is already a Primary Culture in another country - for Maghrebi, that would be Tunis - that country is automatically invited to join the Play on the defenders side. Should they succeed to beat France, the seceding states would then become part of Tunis.
In addition, as soon as such a Secession Play has commenced, there is a chance that secessionist movements for this culture will break out in other countries, even if they dont meet the Turmoil threshold! The classic example for this is Poland. Polish Pops live on Homelands across Prussia, Austria, and Russia. If any one of these countries mistreat the Poles to the point where they break away and form Poland, Polish pan-nationalist movements might break out in the other two countries as well. This potentially means having to fight all three countries for their independence!
Will the three Great Powers unite in crushing the Polish nationalist movement? Or perhaps one will graciously give up their parcel of land to Poland and start bankrolling them instead, hoping to weaken their rivals and maybe gain a new puppet state in the process?
Cultural Secession and Turmoil is a pretty classic take on anti-blobbing mechanics - if you aggressively expand too quickly your new subjects will get angry, will become more of a liability than an asset to you, and may even try to take their land back. But with Victorias thematic focus on nation-states and pan-nationalism, these interact with the core mechanics of Pops, Cultures, Homelands, Radicals, Turmoil, and Diplomatic Plays to give you more tools to influence the situation than just pacing your conquests. Perhaps you will be a benevolent imperialist conqueror, who abhors Discrimination and Incorporates every new state to extend the benefit of your Institutions to them, convincing the newly conquered that theyre better off under your rule? Or perhaps you will exploit their natural resources but release them as a Subject nation integrated into your market as soon as they get rowdy? Or you build good relations with a neighboring power who's also oppressing this population so you have a natural ally in case you need to put down a rebellion together? Or you stay in your own lane while putting Interests all around you, so you can get involved in these conflicts when they happen to others in order to create buffer states aligned with you?
Thats all for me for a little while! Next week Ofaloaf will give us a peek at how we handle a very special butterfly of a civil war thats not really a revolution, not really a cultural secession, but that includes elements from both: the American Civil War.
Another month, another update video, Victorians! In this video, the team talks about the building blocks of society: trade, overseas shipping, markets, and more.
Topics covered, in order by timestamp:
A glorious Thursday to you! Today we will finally get into details of what fate befalls the state that fails to deliver what its people demand - revolution!
Revolutions in Victoria 3 can be seen as a result of failure in the games economic and political core loops. When this happens it means you have failed to balance the material and ideological desires of the different segments of your population, resulting in one or several groups deciding to take matters in their own hands. The result is a tremendous upheaval which could go very wrong for you - but play your cards right, and theres a chance you might bounce back from this crisis even stronger than before.
A design goal we have kept front and center is that outright armed uprisings should be rare but still feel threatening. There is a lot of foreshadowing and opportunity to course-correct or compensate if you want to avoid a revolution. Not all movements will actually be powerful or angry enough to pose a real threat to you, and if they arent, they wont drag you into a pointless war with an obvious outcome but bide their time until they become relevant.
A revolution always starts with a Political Movement demanding some kind of change to the countrys Laws. The demand might be to enact something novel (perhaps Universal Suffrage or Workplace Safety), preserve something youre about to change (maybe the Monarchy youve been trying to abolish), or restore something you used to have (Free Markets? Outlawed Dissent?). Any of these could end in a violent uprising if the movement is radical enough and you fail to meet its demands.
Political Movements have two major attributes to keep an eye on: their Support and their Radicalism. A movements Support affects how much help they would lend to enacting their desired change if you choose to go along with them, or how much resistance they put up in case of a movement to preserve a law youre trying to change. It also determines how powerful a revolution they can muster, should it come down to that.
Meanwhile, Radicalism measures how likely they are to revolt if they dont get their way. A movement with strong Support and high Radicalism is of course very dangerous. A movement with strong Support but low Radicalism can be a nuisance but is relatively harmless: theyll work within the system, maybe raise a placard or two, but wont take up arms. Finally, a movement with low Support but high Radicalism might not stand much of a chance to overthrow the government on their own, but the instability caused by their ideological fervor could be damaging to your country in the short-term and might even create geopolitical opportunities for your neighbors.
The movement to restore the Republic is not the most powerful one, but those who do support it care a great deal - and may even be willing to lay down their lives for it. It is supported by both the Armed Forces and the Intelligentsia - not the most likely of bedfellows typically, but united in this case for this particular cause.
A movements Radicalism originates from two sources: the number of Radicals among the Pops that support the movement, and the Clout of supporting Interest Groups with Approval low enough to be Angry. Since an Interest Groups Approval originates both from the Laws of your country and also how Loyal vs Radical its supporters are, Radical Pops can potentially double their impact on a movements Radicalism. The major difference between these two factors is that when Pops act through their Interest Groups their impact is through Clout (the national share of their Political Strength) while direct Pop support makes a difference through sheer numbers. This means populist uprisings are possible even though the affected Pops dont have any real representation in the halls of power, assuming theyre angry enough about their living conditions.
While a movements demands remain unmet, any Pops that belong to them will gradually gain Radicals. Once the Radicalism of a movement has exceeded a certain threshold it will begin organizing an armed uprising. You can monitor this progression in your outliner to see both how rapidly youre moving along the road to revolution and how far you have already gone, both determined by Radicalism.
This means you can have a direct impact on revolutionary progression. Of course you can cave to the movements demands, which will placate them and eventually cause them to disband. But you can also address the problem by identifying the troublemakers and deal with them directly: either deradicalize them by improving their living conditions, or suppressing their contrarian ways by other means.
The ability to deal with insurgents by issuing Decrees to suppress Radicals can be a helpful tool in more authoritarian countries with concentrated populations, or where the insurgency is very localized. This is much more difficult in case of broadly supported populist movements in a large country.
If you manage to get the movements Radicalism under control, you can make the revolution fizzle out on its own without giving an inch.
Another way of keeping revolutions in check is by establishing a Home Affairs Institution. By sinking Bureaucracy into Home Affairs you can more easily keep your troublesome elements in check, giving you more room to maneuver politically. As usual such an Institution can take several forms depending on what Law establishes it. A National Guard can require you to take more overt, proactive steps to keep law and order, while a Secret Police is able to operate more effectively in the background.
A minimal Home Affairs Institution under the Secret Police Law.
When radical movements are met with obstacles to their revolution for a long time, theres an increasing chance that its revolutionary fervor burns out and the movement disbands.
But lets say you dont manage to placate or obstruct the political movement and the revolutionary progression boils over a required threshold. In this case an armed uprising will take a number of your states, proportional to the strength of the movement and localized roughly where its supporters are, to form a new revolutionary country. This country has the same technology as you but with some differences in laws, to reflect the ideological desires of the political movements leadership. Furthermore, the Interest Groups in this new country will become marginalized if they do not support the revolution, while the opposite is true in the loyalist part of the country.
Obviously, characters supporting revolutionary Interest Groups will join the revolution. This includes not only Interest Group leaders, but also those Generals and Admirals you may have carefully nurtured over many military campaigns and who may by now be in charge of most of your forces. Even if you win against them, they wont be making it back to your country - alive, at least.
All other properties of this new country are dependent on the states they won over. If the revolution takes all your Barracks and Arms Industries, you might be in big trouble; if the revolutionary states consist mostly of Paper Mills and Art Academies, maybe youre not so worried (until your Government Administrations start grinding to a halt and your aristocracy get mad about the lack of culture workers to patronize, that is). And of course, the loyalist part of the country retains all their hard-won diplomatic pacts and treaties, while the pretender has to start from scratch.
What follows is a Revolutionary [Diplomatic] Play where the stakes are very simple: the loyalist part of the country tries to crush the rebellion, while the revolutionary country tries to swarm the loyalists. Other countries with an Interest in the region can participate in this Play as usual. It is not uncommon for countries with good relations to the country before the revolution to support the loyalists in restoring order. It is also possible for a country whose government supports the ideals of the revolutionaries to back their side. As such, a revolution might not only result in you having to fight and kill your own people, but your nation might even become the ideological battleground of Great Powers.
A revolution in South Germany might prove a perfect opportunity for some old rivals to weaken each other and perhaps woo a potential Subject nation without having to take on any Infamy of their own.
If the prospect of winning against the revolutionaries doesnt look good, like in all Diplomatic Plays you have the option of giving up. But rather than simply backing down and letting the revolutionaries have their way (which, to be frank, you could and should have done a long time ago if that was your intention), in Revolutionary Plays you only have an option to switch sides and take over the revolutionary part of the country in its fight against the loyalists. A daring player might decide to manufacture a powerful revolution on purpose in order to push some highly contentious laws through, though this strategy definitely straddles the line between brilliance and madness.
Its important to note that there is no potential for a white peace in a revolution. Either side can capitulate, of course, but a peace cannot be signed without one party pressing their war goal and annexing the other side. By the end of the revolution, only one country will be left standing.
Needless to say, while all wars are expensive, civil wars are doubly so. A quick and decisive victory with minimal casualties is the best you can hope for - a long, drawn-out war amassing casualties and devastation on both sides might result in a country so broken it will take decades to rebuild. But once the war is over, the Interest Groups that lost the power struggle are defeated, for a time. Perhaps during this golden age you will have the opportunity to effect some much-needed political change and rise from the ashes?
Losing a revolutionary war means your country loses all its territory and Pops, in other words Game Over. This is something weve gone back and forth on during development, because while we do want you to be able to drastically transform your country through revolution, we dont want to encourage you to just give up if things are looking bleak because resisting means a prolonged conflict leading to a more war-torn country in the end. So pick your side, but do it carefully! Should you end up losing after all, just like in any Game Over situation you can choose to continue playing as a different country, including the political faction that just took over yours. But to be clear, we still havent fully made our mind up on this and might well change our mind again! What do you think? Feel free to let us know in the comments!
Next week Ill return with part two of civil wars: cultural secessions. Until then!
Good evening, and welcome to this weeks instalment of the Victoria 3 Dev Diaries! To cap off this months theme of trade, Ill be talking about the Opium Wars and introducing the concepts of Cultural Obsessions and Religious Taboos.
In the 1830s China was ravaged by opium addiction. The impact was severe and broad in its effects, with myriad social, economic and even military consequences. Despite attempts by the Qing government to restrict imports, British merchants continued to illegally flood the market. The situation came to a head when Qing officials ordered the seizure and destruction of opium in Canton, to which the British responded with force - the First Opium War resulted in crushing defeats for the Qing government and began an era of unfavourable and humiliating treaties with the Western powers.
In Victoria 3 we represent the Opium Wars through Journal Entries and Events. Qing China begins in the midst of this crisis, but it is also possible for other unrecognised countries to experience this content if the in-game conditions are appropriate.
The Opium Crisis event applies harsh negative modifiers to Standard of Living throughout your country, to your Mortality Rate, and to the effectiveness of your military forces.
This is a good time to talk a little more about Cultural Obsessions. A culture can become obsessed with a specific Good - Pops of that Culture, regardless of where they are in the world, will spend significantly more on Goods they are obsessed with compared to other goods in the same Pop Needs category. So in the case of Opium in China, Han pops will spend a lot more of their wealth buying Opium than they do on Liquor or Tobacco. This naturally drives up demand for Opium, and therefore makes it more expensive within the Chinese market. The foreign powers selling Opium to China are making a killing exploiting this demand and feeding the addiction. Cultures can develop new Obsessions over time, and youll need to react to changes in pop demands as a result.
On a mechanically related note (though unrelated to the Opium Wars), Religions have Taboos against certain goods. For instance Muslim faiths have a Taboo against the consumption of Liquor and Wine. This has the opposite effect from a Cultural Obsession - pops following these religions will spend much less on purchasing that Good compared to other Goods in that category. So Muslims will typically buy Tobacco and Opium instead of Liquor, and they will buy Tea or Coffee instead of Wine. Just as in real life, not everybody completely adheres to the tenets of their faith, and so these act as powerful modifiers on purchasing decisions rather than total bans on consumption. Unlike Obsessions, Taboos are static throughout the game.
Beijing is one of the most populated States in the world in 1836. Besides its 19 million people, it is also home to the Forbidden City Monument, a massive Government Administration sector, as well as a large section of the now defunct Great Wall.
Back to the Opium Wars!
If China (or whichever country is the target, but well keep things simple and refer to China from here on out) chooses to confront the issue head on, the Opium Crisis Journal Entry will describe the conditions for successfully resolving the issue, as well as the conditions that will cause immediate failure. China must avoid at all costs enacting the Free Trade law as well as resist the attempts of the Great Powers to establish a Treaty Port - both of these are potential war goals which the AI will strongly prioritize when starting Diplomatic Plays against China. While resisting the Western powers, China must maintain a total ban on the Opium trade.
Playing as Great Britain (or any major opium exporter), you'll have the opportunity to thwart the opium ban through all the usual diplomatic and coercive means at your disposal. It could even be an opportunity to make inroads into China.
Chinas attempts to halt the flow of opium will not go unchallenged. All Great and Major powers exporting Opium to China will receive an event prompting them to decide their stance on the matter - though there is some chance that they will let the issue slide, it is much more likely that they will take an opposing stance. This will add the Opium Wars Journal Entry to that country, in which their success conditions match the failure conditions for China. Opium-trading countries must either force China to adopt the Free Trade law, or else acquire a Treaty Port in that nation that allows them to bypass goods bans. Rather than immediately creating a Diplomatic Play with predefined war goals, the AI (and indeed the player!) is strongly encouraged to start a Play with wargoals that would complete the Journal Entry.
Free from the ravages of opium addiction and the interference of froeign powers, the strengthened Qing dynasty might avoid or avert the crises that would historically bring them to ruin.
If China succeeds in suppressing the flow of opium while withstanding the onslaught of the Great Powers, the course of history is altered and the addiction crisis will be resolved. All its primary cultures will lose their Opium Obsession, and the negative modifiers representing the effects of widespread addiction will be removed. With foreign powers repulsed, China has not been forced into the unequal treaties that would lead to further conflict and turmoil.
Fragile Unity is the broadest Journal Entry in Victoria 3, encompassing content that can emerge at all stages of the game - for instance while the stage is already set for the Opium Wars in 1836, the Boxer Rebellion will not happen until later in the game when a stronger sense of Han nationalism has appeared.
Failure, however, may have dire consequences. The government will lose Legitimacy, Radicals will rise across the nation, and Turmoil will engulf your states. But that is not the worst of it; failing the Opium Wars Journal Entry increases your fragmentation, tracked by the Fragile Unity Journal Entry. If your fragmentation rises to 100%, it will herald the end of a unified China, with the nation breaking up into a dozen warlord states. Failing the Opium Wars Journal Entry will indirectly lead to an influx of missionaries into China which may spark radical uprisings on a scale never seen before. And if exploitative foreign presence in China continues into the era of Han nationalism, the peoples demands for sovereignty will shake the foundations of the state and threaten the survival of the Qing Dynasty. One great failure can lead to a chain reaction of disaster.
Thats all for today! Next week well be moving on from trade to a month of focus on the theme of strife. Join us next week where Mikael Andersson will introduce Victoria 3s Revolutions.
Ave and welcome to another Dev Diary! I am Johan (No, the other Johan) a tech lead on Victoria 3 and today I will be talking about Shipping Lanes. It is an interesting addition to maritime empires in that there is now a cost to overseas possessions and sending a military expedition halfway across the globe is no longer as straightforward as in some older Paradox titles.
But first we have to talk about Convoys which are an essential part in maintaining shipping lanes. They are produced from Ports, a government building which requires Clippers (or their era-equivalents) and possibly other goods.
Each country has a set number of required convoys and not having enough will incur penalties on all shipping lanes. This may for example occur due to an overstretched colonial empire or hostile convoy raiders.
Ports also fulfill an important role in connecting your overseas territories but more on that later.
Aha! I told you the Clipper factory was a good investment!
Shipping Lanes represents port-to-port connections and are established for three different reasons:
If money is the sinews of war, then trade is the lifeblood of nations and in no period is this truer than the Victorian Era. Victoria 3 takes place in a period of time where the nations of the world pushed this concept further than before, through a period of industrialization and growing interconnectivity of first homelands and colonies and then among nation-states themselves. The trade routes on the map connecting our nations became the fabric that underpins many of the understandings of our modern world today.
But what is trade? It may seem obvious to some but to better understand the systems we need to make sure we understand the foundations they are built upon. Thus, trade is understood to be the movement of goods between two markets as a means of commercial transaction so that the other party is effectively paid for their services. Trade is not conducted between businesses and/or nations but is instead conducted through their national markets and by proxy their trade centers. While this may not seem a meaningful distinction, the market and economy of a nation is not synonymous with its national government; while that government may attempt to influence the economy it does not always have an absolute degree of control over it. Thus the trade that goes on in your market is something that you can influence and encourage (or discourage if you like) but never fully control (unless you are the only nation in existence I guess?).
While trade takes place between national markets at the behest of players and AI, it is conducted in the trade centers of those respective countries. Trade centers function similarly to urban centers, talked about in a previous dev diary. These are not buildings that are constructed manually but develop as a result of their engaging in trade routes as they are representative of the many gray areas of industry that necessitate the collection and movement of goods.
If you were to create an import route of goods for your industries, a resulting level of trade centers would develop within your nation. While urban centers tend to develop where you have placed many industrial buildings, trade centers develop in the market capitals and the ports of your nation. While you cannot paint the placement of trace centers outright, you can influence their development by creating ports in states that are naturally suited to such, where infrastructure and pops are readily available to staff them.
Where there is a port and people, there is likely to be trade, and hopefully profit!
Yes, trade centers must be staffed. Goods do not just appear in one nation from the next but require the maintenance of bureaucrats, laborers, clerks, and the like to offload and onload cargo, take account of it, tax it, and move it forward. These are for the most part privately owned enterprises that normally have capitalists in charge, instead of government run services. Without pops staffing your trade centers you will find yourself unable to conduct trade in accordance with your aspirations but that shouldnt be too hard to manage as trade centers have also been historically known to be centers of migration, the first stop of migrants both domestic and international seeking a better life and sometimes finding it.
All the goods moving to and from New York means it's easier for Pops to hitch a ride.
Trade centers collect revenue on both sides of the routes they manage, in relation to how many goods are moved and how much the routes affect the prices in their respective markets. This revenue is allocated to the employees and taxed by the same logic as any industry, so who makes money off your trade is related to your domestic policies in the same way as the rest of your economy.
While trade is something every nation can take a part of, how they affect trade in relation to conducting it efficiently, preventing it when it hurts them, or profiting off of it when they can is dependent upon its trade policies, which are in turn dictate how a nation can set its policies of embargoes and tariffs. Yes thats right, I said tariffs, cue historical excitement of the fanbase.
Where at first there was one law category, now there are two!
Weve done a little restructuring of the economic laws in Victoria 3 since we wrote the Law dev diary, where originally your economic system affected both your domestic and international situations. It has been broken into economic systems which now cover the domestic economy, and trade policy which covers your international endeavors. As such trade policy governs how you interact with a customs union, your ability to set embargoes and tariffs, as well as the general efficiency of your conducted trade.
The Trade Policy laws are broken down into the four categories of ideology relative to the time period which interact with each of the economic systems you can put into place domestically.
Embargos represent the ability of a national government to extend its influence in protecting its national market and subsequent interests. Most, if not all nations can engage in embargoing a good but their effectiveness of doing such is dependent upon the trade policy the national government is centered around. A government centered around the ideas of protectionism has an easier time implementing a more efficient embargo on goods vs those that are committed to a more mercantilism or free trade policy. Notice I said influence, not authority there? While it costs authority to enact taxes domestically it costs influence to place embargos as whether or not they are able to be enforced is dependent upon your ability to influence other nations to respect them. Refusing to make fair trade deals will strain your diplomatic corp.
Protectionism means that not only are embargoes easier to maintain, they are also more efficient.
And now for the potentially more controversial statement, embargoes are not absolute. Sure you may embargo trade of a specific good into your country but thats not going to stop it outright, only hinder the ease of its trade. Another nation might try and continue to push goods into your country but it will certainly require more of an effort to facilitate such, it all depends. In history theres certainly something we can agree upon, embargoing something, making it illegal, or hindering its trade reduces the flow of the good but does not stop it outright if there is a vested interest by another nation and a profit to be made.
Tariffs are the means where a national government extends its influence as an intermediary in the trade between national markets, if not for the means of protecting its national interests, to at the very least ensure it gets its fair share of the profits that such entails. Tariffs are set on both exports and imports leaving the national economy because yes the government is interested in its fair share and if it cannot get the revenue by means of a consumption tax it will find other means. The ratio of this tariff level is dependent on the trade policy set. A more mercantilist trade policy would seek to ensure exports exceed imports so tariffs on imports will undoubtedly be lower. Protectionism is equal in its ratio as it seeks to shelter the domestic economy from booming or busting on either side of the equation. Free Trade, well free trade cares not for tariffs and seeks to profit through other means.
While the laws set the tariff ratio of import/exports these can be customized further in the budget screen by setting their tax levels. Tax levels dont just bring in revenues but offer incentives to your economic actors, your pops. Lower tariffs encourage trade while higher tariffs will hinder their efficiency because well if the nation is getting a bigger cut, how motivated can you expect the pop to be in engaging in such trade?
A higher tariff means minimizing the profit to be had by business and disincentivizing trade.
So how do treaty ports play into these systems, as they certainly existed during the time period? Treaty ports are a means to ensure that you have access to a national market despite such embargoes and tariffs. They are a wedge in the barriers to trade another nation may put up so the goods may be funneled out of the market. Treaty ports have the special function that they permit the bypassing of embargoes and tariffs set in land adjacent markets through trading. They are a more permanent means of opening the market to your access but in the same vein also require a more permanent investment. Since treaty ports are first and foremost ports they will certainly become trade centers and will require the infrastructure and staffing to function. As you invest in this profitable endeavor, be aware that you will need to protect such from the eyes of other imperialist nations who might seek to take it away from you.
At game start Portugal finds itself holding the Treaty Port of Macao, a very profitable trade endeavor, but will such profits attract the attention of greater powers?
How do Customs unions come into play here? If you recall from the previous developer diary, customs unions are an agreement between one or more nations where one nation agrees to subject itself to another's national market. By agreeing to subject your national market to another nation you are agreeing to take on the structure set into place by their economic system and policies. While you are still able to enact trade between that national market and another you lose the ability to set embargoes on specific goods and tariff policies across the market, though you do receive your contributing share of the profit of such tariffs. Sometimes this development can be beneficial, sometimes it can majorly hurt your national sources of income, as the previous dev diary goes to great length to summarize it depends.
And that's a bit about trade, tariffs, and more! I may not have succeeded in delivering a concise explanation this time but it's certainly a shorter one. Next week is going to be the Kaiser himself (Johan Jons) to talk about Shipping Lanes. Ill let the fanbase craft their own conspiracy theories about whether or not we are being literal with that one.
We have a new Monthly Update for you, Victorians! In this video, the team talks about discovering the world and building marvelous monuments.
Topics covered, in order by time stamp:
Hi Im Paul PDJR_Alastorn Depre - member of the QA team on Victoria 3. Ive been asked to write about market expansion in Victoria 3 and how that can be done through the mechanics of a customs union. Apparently my credentials speak for themselves:
Have you ever had that day where multiple coworkers message you simultaneously to let you know youve become a meme by way of the Victoria 3 fanbase?[Twitter Link to greater Meme]
So as you have no doubt seen in screenshots, dev diaries, after action reports, and the like, in Victoria 3 we have introduced the concept of a customs union but weve yet to truly go into detail about what they actually entail as a means of market expansion. [See Previous Dev Diaries]. Thats why I am here today, in no small part because I find the customs union one of the more interesting mechanics of Victoria 3 compared to its previous iterations such as Spheres of Influence, which after saying that I hope it doesnt set your expectations too high but I guess it's on me to try and explain why I feel that way. Alright, no pressure then.
So, what exactly is a customs union and how does it relate to market expansion? Before I explain it mechanically, I would like to define the concept both conceptually and historically so we are all starting with a similar frame of reference. Promise me you will continue reading till the mechanical explanation before you make assumptions based on obscure historical examples? Good, then let's go forth.
A customs union, and I am literally pulling the definition from Wikipedia here folks, is generally understood to be a trade bloc or arrangement among nations. It is most commonly known as a free trade area with a common external tariff, or common external tariff policy. The bonds of a custom union are at the very least economical, they exist for the purposes of increasing trade, economic co-dependence, and mutual benefit that comes from such and can lead to closer political and cultural ties between countries. They do not necessitate a political union though they are certainly seen through history as the stepping stones towards such.
One of the more well known, at least to the Vicky fanbase, is the Zollverein which helped further facilitate the unification of Germany but by no means was the sole deciding factor of that movement. The European Union, it can be argued, started off as merely the European Coal and Steel Community, which was a more restricted definition of a customs union but certainly counts in my eyes. Whether or not the North American Free Trade Agreement counts as a customs union is up for debate. While trade agreements regularly cover similar topics of tariff and economic co-dependence they are usually of a smaller scope and scale. Ultimately the economics of it is tricky, because it involves politics and what defines a union vs an agreement is not always a coherent 1:1 and before I get into explaining all the counterarguments of historical note, let's actually talk about the game some now, shall we?
The Zollverein represented at game start.
Within the scope of Victoria 3, a customs union is a bilateral agreement between two nations where one nation agrees to subject its national market to another and to be absorbed into an economic union. This means that its a diplomatic action, a.k.a. something another nation has to agree to as a customs union alone is not something that is normally able to be forced upon another nation. A customs union is not limited to only two partners, other nations may make themselves subject to the senior partner alongside other participant junior nations but a customs union can have only one senior member in control of the union.
A peaceful endeavor of France to assist Sardinia-Piedmont, not at all the beginnings of Hegemony in Italy.
Slight variance to the above statement is possible, custom unions can be forced through by utilizing obligations by the previously owed country. This will only allow the diplomatic action to take place despite the nations disposition to say no, it should not be able to supersede any other limitations possible in the game. Thus it's entirely possible as a larger power to go, you want me to pay off your debt? Sure, Ill do it for a favor and then force the unsuspecting debtor country into its market. Always be aware of the small text written into your diplomatic dealings!
Customs unions themselves cannot be forced through war but they can be forced as a result of other diplomatic entanglements. Certain subject relationships come with the implicit expectations of joining the shared market of their overlord but they also come with other strings attached. [See Subjects Dev Diary]
What allows a customs union to exist? That is dependent upon the trade policy of the participant nations, not all domestic laws allow for a nation to partake in a customs union (though most will alongside various other trade changes). Trade will be coming with a future dev diary so I will not be going into detail about that here, apologies.
But assuming that two nations both have trade policies that would allow them to do so, thats all thats needed to form a customs union? Well no, economic unions of such are not simple agreements to be engaged in and reneged upon on a whim with anyone in particular. They have some more base level requirements.
The two nations (or more specifically the junior partner in question and the senior partner overseeing the market) must have neutral or positive relations to conduct this action. A nation who sees you in an antagonistic light as you are attempting to wipe them off the map isnt going to give you access to its market willingly. Two nations that are trying to wipe each other off the map can both be junior partners in the same customs union led by another nation, just expect all the market disruption that would come with such chaotic developments if it's your frustration to handle as the overseeing power.
A senior member of a customs union must not be a subject of the junior partner or be a junior partner in another customs union. I'm not sure how the more lowly powers might feel about the matter, but the national prestige of this great power will not be subject to any Bavarian market. They must bow to Lubeck or there is no deal! AI considerations such as the requirements of port connection to facilitate market access, comparative GDP, rank, infamy and other diplomatic considerations are taken into account when accepting or proposing this relationship.
You are given the breakdown as to why the AI may not be so willing to join your Customs Union. And you can seek to overcome these differences peacefully.
As well, this relationship is not a one and done, it must be maintained and this is seen both in an influence upkeep by the senior partner per junior member (as they hold the prestige of it being their market and policies which take priority) but a relations upkeep by all partners and the senior member lest they be booted from the union.
When a Customs Union can no longer be maintained (due to a variety of reasons) you will get a notification update that you can click for more information.
In the end what does subjecting themselves to the senior partners market mean? For all intents and purposes it means that the national market of the junior partner no longer exists - they are part of the senior partners market, so all goods produced, bought and sold are done so within the confines of that new national market. This can mean many things and depending on the relative disparities of your previously independent markets, prices can shift towards a new equilibrium as supply and demand internally change to reflect this. Businesses will revisit their input costs and subsequently adjust their labor cost if necessary. You may see some industries boom and others start running on their reserves, hoping for trends to change before they shut their doors entirely, unable to compete with those industrialists in the far off city.
Any trade routes you might have had as a junior partner may be disrupted, you are not barred from trading outright as a junior member of the union but since it's no longer your national market you will have to engage in a few extra steps to take part in such.This is something we will go into more detail with in a future dev diary so it will be simple statements at the moment, apologies again.
For internal trade, market access will now be calculated based on infrastructure usage in the recipient state and whether it has a connection to the market capital of the senior member. If you cannot connect the routes by land then ports will need to be staffed and supplied to provide such connections. If you are the senior partner and youve found with the addition of new members they are struggling to connect to your market capital, you can always consider shifting the center of your market elsewhere to better accommodate all members.
Lower Canada has difficulty connecting to the British Market due to the shipping requirements for such connections to the Market Capital back in London.
Domestically you will still be able to tax and encourage specific goods and services and their consumption, but your ability to embargo or take tariffs on goods coming into the market will depend on your relationship within the customs union but I am getting ahead of myself - more on that in a future development diary so please be patient on that front.
So what are the benefits of expanding your market by customs union? Why not just gobble up the territory by forcing someone to be your vassal or taking them under your direct authority?
If you were to take the territory, well you might have to do so militarily if the nation is unwilling to come along willingly. If that is the case then it's going to be a national expenditure to mobilize and supply your armed forces, youre certainly going to take some infamy on the world stage, you might even lose the conflict depending on who gets involved. What if you need to concede part of the market to another nation to assist you - what if it's the resources you really wanted yourself. Even in the winning scenario you end up with a bunch of pops in a devastated landscape, radicalizing and potentially discriminated against in your larger empire - all you wanted was some coal, was that cost worth it? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isnt.
All of these factors affecting the state are related to each other. Devastation of a war means not only turmoil for the pops but that infrastructure is getting damaged which means goods are not flowing to and from the market efficiently and standard of living is suffering as a result.
The benefits of the customs union are many but they can also be a double edged sword - it's not guaranteed to be beneficial and it's much more in the lines of choosing which problems you wish to face as is much of the way with Victoria 3.
A benefit of a customs union is that it decreases relative transportation costs compared to sticking to trading more manually among markets. You may not need to keep trade routes active though you may still need to utilize convoys for market connections. Instead of moving a more limited amount of goods between two markets you have the sum total of to markets buy orders and sell orders interacting. This may be very welcoming to some as it means less intensive micromanagement of their national economy and allows them to more natural growth of their industries. This also means the potential degradation if not dismissal of your transportation industry that fuels the trade sector of your economy, which also has implications. Which one is more beneficial to you ultimately depends on what you are trying to do, the size of your nation, and what you can afford.
A customs union means both increased goods accessibility and sales accessibility - for example you can trade with Prussia for your much needed coal as Lubeck (as youve seen me do in previous AARs) but trade is fickle, subject to changing winds of national priority, diplomatic scuffles, and possibly embargoes. Embedding yourself into the national economy of another gives you more concrete access to those goods and sales potential, but it also means they have access to your national economy with relatively less barriers. In the Lubeck AAR we turned the competitive advantage of our national industry focused on tools and shipping to further turn a profit in the larger Prussian market at the cost of less productive industries. Because we were able to keep the standard of living high and a Prussia devastated by revolt did not look as appealing (as it's never one single factor that determines these things) we profited further both monetarily and through migration.
Shipyard profits which were flagging within Lubeck see growth (and hopefully future profit) when being sold on the greater Prussian Market.
As Greece (the most recent AAR) we joined the British Market with neither a stable standard of living nor a competitive advantage in any particular industry to carve our niche, thus our prices fell drastically and wages inflated as pops moved elsewhere to greener lands in the far British Empire. Could we have been successful as Greece? Certainly, the problems there are not guaranteed but we clearly moved into that market too soon with no clear plan to take advantage of it and thus we were the ones being taken advantage of.
Greece, after joining the British Market sees its pops migrate to sunnier shores, well at least more economically thriving shores.
The price and standard of living differences across customs unions can have an effect on your (and other partners) populations and whether or not they choose to migrate. There is a clear advantage here if you are a relatively prosperous nation either with a good standard of living or just the law of large numbers on your side that you will see a population growth due expanding a market with a customs union. More pops is usually good, but let me make the argument that in some cases having migration away from your country can also be good in the case of a customs union.
Let's say you are a multiethnic empire, and some of your pops are a little uppity with the ideas of nationalism and their own independence, thoughts that dont really sit well with your own as they jeopardize the stability of the empire as a whole. You can discriminate, repress, put in police and security forces to try and keep things under control - but thats expensive. It's even harder to maintain when there is the homeland state these pops yearn to join on their border. What What if you brought that neighboring country (through agreement or force) into your customs union? Sure your hinterlands may have a population migration to their homeland but you no longer have an insurrectionary problem to deal with. As opposed to them just mass migrating away to another country and/or market, you can have them stay within your economic borders if not exactly your national borders, thus keeping all the production and consumption benefits of the pops with relatively less insurrectionary costs.
Now that is a very cherry-picked example, but ultimately not all migration seen through a customs union is bad - even as a small nation willingly allowing migration of your poorer population within can allow you to refocus your economy (economic policies willing) and potentially attract them back post reform. A custom union allows such plays to be ones where you dont have an immediate zero-sum loss and can pull such pops or new ones back to your nation.
And before I digress into every other mechanics I would like to cover the most important why would I allow myself to be subjected as a minor nation within a customs union, when it's clearly not advantageous to me scenario. Well it certainly beats the alternative of getting wiped off the map or subjected further doesnt it? Thinking in a realpolitik sense, if you are a small or middling state and you don't want to have your domestic resources gobbled up by a larger power, but you dont have a way to protect yourself without submitting to another power, the only way to succeed is to submit partially. Now you could take the diplomatic route and step under the larger power as a suzerain in some way, some of these may necessitate a customs union regardless. They also can necessitate a loss of your diplomatic potential as an independent entity, that might not be a prefered option on your end. Submitting to a customs union willingly might not be the most advantageous of your choices, but tying your economy to theirs might be a way to maintain some distance from an inevitable political union. Potentially you could turn this to your advantage and maintain a separate diplomatic policy because of such integration. In the AAR as Lubeck we submitted to the Prussian customs union because it was a way to guarantee the AI would not easily turn towards us as a means of expansion and hopefully if we tied our economies close enough together they would not seek to interfere in our affairs, lest we bring the institutions to a halt.
And in closing, thats a smattering of the potential that market expansion through a customs union can have. I could probably no doubt talk on this point further, until release potentially but I sadly have some forum limit or another about how long this post can be. I look forward to hearing your ideas and feedback on this topic in the various channels. Even more, I look forward to seeing how you all take this feature and play with it in the future when the game releases.
And with that I would like to take a moment to address the elephant economics degree in the room. Never did I think that uttering those words before my introduction would come to be the meme it is today, but regardless of that, I would like to all correct you that the phrase did you know Paul Depre the QA Lead on Victoria 3 has a degree in economics? is no longer technically correct and has not been for some time as I have taken over the role of QA Manager on PDS Red. I am still heavily involved with Victoria 3, assisting in the onboarding of the new QA lead, giving input and the such. Just now I am making sure that not only does the game have a good level of quality, but that the QA team has what it needs to ensure that for release and onwards.
The team celebrated this news in the best way they knew how - the loading text was updated almost immediately to be more correct so I could not ask for it to be removed as a bug.
And next week is it me again with Trade Routes and Tariffs? Crap I better start writing.
Wish me luck in trying to nail a concise explanation the second time around.
Hello and welcome to another Victoria 3 development diary! Today well be returning to more mechanics-oriented dev diaries, starting out with a very important mechanic for the economic development of your 19th century nation - the construction of new Buildings.
Construction in Strategy games tends to follow a pretty typical formula: you save up money, order a construction and pay a lump-sum cost, wait some time, and the new building pops into existence. As mentioned in Dev Diary 12, however, the vast majority of expenses in Victoria 3 are not lump-sum costs but applied over time as part of your national budget. So how does it work instead? To answer that, theres a few concepts we need to cover, namely Construction Capacity, the Construction Sector and the Construction Queue.
Lets start then with Construction Capacity - which is actually just named Construction in-game, but were calling it Construction Capacity here to differentiate it from the overall concept of building things. This is a country-wide value of your nations overall ability to make progress on new buildings in a single week. For example, if your country produces a total of 100 Construction and a new Textile Mill costs 300 Construction, youd expect to be able to build that Textile Mill in a total of 3 weeks. However, its a little more complicated than that, as well see below when we explain the Construction Queue.
With Construction Sectors present in Lower Egypt, Matruh, Sinah and Palestine, the Egypt in this screenshot generates a respectable amount of Construction for the early game, though their finances may struggle a bit to fund it all.
So, how do you produce Construction? This is where the Construction Sector comes in. All countries get a tiny amount of free Construction Capacity to ensure that you never get stuck in a situation where you need Construction Capacity to expand your Construction Sector but need a Construction Sector to get Construction Capacity. This amount is woefully small though, and wholly insufficient even for a small nation, so if youre not planning to run a subsistence economy long-term you will definitely need to invest in a proper Construction Sector by building more Construction Sector buildings in your states.
Mechanically speaking, the Construction Sector is a type of government building which employs people and uses goods to output Construction Capacity with a variety of different Production Methods, ranging from simple Wooden Buildings to modern arc-welded Steel and Glass structures. It does work a little bit differently though, in that the amount of Goods used by the Construction Sector each week depends on the actual need for Construction Capacity - if your Country is producing a total of 500 Construction Capacity, but will only need 250 for ongoing projects that week, the total usage of Goods in the Construction Sector is cut by half - though you still have to pay the wages of all the Pops employed there.
More advanced methods of construction are expensive and require complex goods - but you will find it difficult to build up a true industrialized economy without them.
Ultimately, what this means is that how fast you can build things depends entirely on how much money, goods and research youre willing to throw into your Construction Sector - having only a handful of Construction Sector buildings using only Wood and Fabric will certainly be cheaper and easier than building up a sprawling Construction Sector using Steel-Frame Buildings, but will naturally limit your ability to industrialize your nation.
So then, how does Construction Capacity actually turn into finished buildings? This is where the Construction Queue comes in. Each country has a nation-wide Construction Queue, with each project in the Queue corresponding to building a single level of a Building in a specific State. For example, a Construction Queue in Sweden might look like this (all numbers are examples):
[olist]
Good evening and welcome back to another Victoria 3 development diary! Today we will talk about two topics that are intrinsically connected: Expeditions and Decisions.
The Victorian age was also the age of exploration. Campaigns were sent to explore the farther territories of the world and discover their hidden mysteries. Scholars turned their attention to uncharted territories and promises of glory and fortune; numerous papers and conferences were produced on behalf of science and this era set the foundations for modern studies.
But these expeditions were not without peril - many failed, and not all of them returned. This, we also wanted to represent.
In Victoria 3, you will be able to take a Decision to go on an Expedition if you fulfill the requisites for it: namely having an interest in the region and, sometimes, a special technology. For instance, exploring the African rivers without protection against malaria may not be the greatest idea. Apart from that, any country can decide to embark on this adventurous enterprise.
Dr. Livingstone, I presume?
But what is a Decision? A Decision is a specific option that you can take when you meet the requirements, thus triggering an important or special event. They don't require any completion conditions because you'll only be able to take them when you already meet those. Some Decisions will allow you to go on an Expedition, like in this case, but many others trigger historical events, like the Grand Exhibition or the Decision to build the Canals that we saw last week.
Some, but not all, Decisions will also add a Journal Entry so you can track how the event is going, like the surveillance of the canals. Others just fire an immediate event because it's not an ongoing circumstance, so you get to see the immediate results.
The decision to trigger the Grand Exhibition will give you a Journal Entry and a countdown to make it as great as you can. You can do so by special exhibition events, going on expeditions to retrieve important artifacts or by researching new technologies that you can showcase to the world. Of course, we also take into consideration everything you've achieved up to that point, so you can still trigger the exhibition after having completed all expeditions and your findings will be taken into account and displayed.
Once you take an Expedition Decision, a starting event will trigger setting up the preparations for the journey. If you decide to go on with it, you'll be asked to choose a leader and a budget, then a Journal Entry will be added to your game with a progress bar that indicates, well, the progress of the expedition. Also, bear in mind that the leader's skills and traits may also play a part in the success of the group and how they face the events they encounter. A drunkard leader may delay your expedition while entering a nervous breakdown because they miss their addiction - or they could even lose their vice.
The expedition Journal Entry will keep track of your advances with a progress bar, and will trigger different ending events depending on your results. A high progress means a successful expedition, while getting a high peril before reaching the end means a more grim completion event, regardless of your progress.
Expeditions use two main variables: progress and peril. When you reach a high enough progress the expedition will complete successfully; however, a high peril will mean that the expedition may be lost or even die. You'll be able to control how these variables progress through your decisions during the expedition events: every month you'll receive an update on how your expedition is doing where you'll act as their leader and choose how they should proceed. Sometimes, however, the expedition will go on peacefully and you'll receive a progress event instead that increases both your progress and peril by one point. You'll also get an updated map location on where your expedition is at the moment, so you can see them advance (or not).
If an expedition fails you can repeat it as many times as needed, and you may even encounter a lost leader or find out about the fate of the last group. However, once you complete one, you cannot go on the same expedition again.
Will you choose the safer option and risk staying behind or will you venture into the white fog and accept its perils?
Some expeditions have special mechanics. For example, in the Antarctica Expedition you'll want to reach the Pole before your competitors, so you may feel inclined to take riskier options to ensure that you get there soon. You may also find traces of previous lost expeditions, and you can always take advantage of the resources left behind.
There's also the possibility of finding a previous expedition that you had already sent and that failed to come back - not only in Antarctica. However, the state in which you find them may vary.
There's a limited amount of available expeditions that we have added to the game, all of them inspired by the most famous campaigns of the Victorian age: the African rivers, the North American Trails and Antarctica.
Surviving always has a high price, especially in the most dangerous latitudes.
And here we have an example of a special event that gives you something for your exhibition, at the cost of delaying your expedition, since the first option gives you no progress:
During your travels, you may find animals you've never seen before and, with the adequate technology, you'll be able to photograph or even film them.
Of course, completing a successful expedition will give your nation a prestigious reputation, and will definitely help its leader's popularity - but, as you can see here, there are many other benefits of going around and exploring the world, like getting brand new material for your exhibitions.
So remember to choose carefully your expedition and its leader, and keep an eye out for peril while trying to not get left behind!
And that was all for today! We'll see you again next week with another Development Diary, this time on Construction, by our GD Martin Anward :)
Good evening and welcome to this weeks Victoria 3 development diary! Todays topic is Canals & Monuments, unique buildings with special inputs, outputs, and effects.
The Vatican City is the seat of the Catholic Church and a great asset to the Papal States in Victoria 3. As Europe developed and industrialized, the power of religious authority in national politics declined steeply but never lost its relevance. Can you change the course of history and renew the temporal power of the Pope?
Monuments are unique buildings only available in specific states, each with its own 3D model on the map. They make use of some of the more interesting aspects of the production methods system; just as buildings can output Goods, they can also output both national and local modifiers, Capacities, and effects on the pops working there. The Vatican City for instance outputs the Influence capacity as well as greatly increasing the political strength of the Devout Interest Group. Meanwhile the White House adds a multiplier to your national Bureaucracy output as well as increasing the amount of political strength Pops gain from votes. Not all Monuments are present at the start date. Some, like the Eiffel Tower, must be constructed, and Monuments are significantly more costly and time-consuming to construct than standard buildings. Monuments are subsidized by government funding, so if you decide that a Monument is unaffordable or that you arent interested in its effects (for instance if you as communist Italy no longer want to Church to wield so much power) you can simply defund them. On release we intend to have eleven different Monuments in total.
The Panama Canal links the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Finally completed in 1914 after decades of planning and construction, ships no longer had to take the long and treacherous route around South America to travel between the East and West. Yes, we can see the trees and houses in the Canal - well fix it!
Like Monuments, Canals are unique buildings with a special set of inputs and outputs. But the true allure of constructing a Canal is that it allows you to create new connections between sea nodes, allowing ships to travel through the isthmuses of Panama and Suez. This significantly reduces the Convoy costs for trading and supplying armies across vast ocean distances, as well as your vulnerability to unscrupulous rivals trying to disrupt your supply lines.
We use the Journal Entry system to track the progress of your canal survey. Behind the scenes a variable is increased every month until the goal is reached, which triggers the completion event. The Journal Entry also acts as a reminder that you are spending a lot of Bureaucracy on this project, and that it will eventually be made available again once the survey is complete.
Constructing a Canal is far from trivial. Before any work can begin, an extensive survey of the region needs to be conducted, costing a hefty chunk of Bureaucracy for the surveyor for around 3 years. Either the owner of the state or a Great Power with an Interest in the region can conduct a survey. Any number of countries can potentially conduct their own surveys and compete to build the Canal themselves.
Weve made the conscious decision to avoid starting wars or Diplomatic Plays through scripted content wherever possible, instead offering incentives for the player to start their own Plays and encouraging the AI to pursue Journal Entry goals. In this case, the player has the option to either gain a Claim on Sinai or to improve relations with the owner country, helping you along your chosen path but not locking you into a particular course of action.
Once youve completed your survey, the path diverges depending on whether you own the appropriate land. If you already own either a Treaty Port or the whole state region you can simply begin constructing the canal, but if not youll need to find a way to acquire it, either through monetary or coercive means. A Decision becomes available allowing you to purchase a Treaty Port in the appropriate State Region in exchange for a series of very large weekly payments, assuming you can convince the local rulers to part with the port. You might however decide that youd rather keep your money and start a Diplomatic Play for a Treaty Port or the entire State Region (the former will cost you a lot less Infamy), which might lead either to a peaceful concession to your demands or to war.
And thats all for today! Next week Ill be handing you over to one of our Content Designers to talk about Expeditions and Decisions.
Its time for another Monthly Update, Victorians! In this video, we take a moment to get an overview of the look and feel of the game.
Topics covered, in order by time stamp:
Hello folks, I'm Ofaloaf, one of the content designers on Victoria 3, and I'm here today to talk about decentralized nations. What are they? Why are they there?
To start with, let's talk about what came before - let's take a quick look at what Victoria (well, Victoria: Revolutions) and Victoria II did when it came to regions outside of traditional imperial homelands.
Africa in Victoria: Revolutions
Above is Africa as it was represented in Victoria: Revolutions. Most of the continent is open territory for any Great Power to colonize. There's people living there, but they don't do anything. Outside of a few limited cases, like Sokoto, they're represented by nothing. They do not do anything on their own, and when added to a colonizing power, they just immediately become pawns in the imperial game and don't really care for independence or their own homeland.
Africa in Victoria 2: Heart of Darkness
The same is broadly true in Victoria II. Regions historically colonized by imperial powers, such as most of Africa and parts of the Americas, are represented as unclaimed swathes of land just waiting for an empire to come by and colonize them. The people who live there do not care who marches in, and will just be members of one empire or another forevermore after they are colonized. It's a model that could use some improvement. It didn't do justice to the people who historically lived there, and, frankly, it made colonial gameplay kind of boring.
Africa as it currently stands in Victoria 3
In Victoria 3, decentralized nations exist to address both the issues of gameplay and better representation of indigenous peoples. No matter where an empire tries to colonize, someone already lives there. They're organized, although they don't have the same level of international recognition and administrative organization as, say, Congress of Vienna attendees.
No formal declaration of war needs to be made in order to make an incursion into the territories of decentralized nations and start colonizing, although the deeper you colonize into a decentralized nation's lands, the more likely it is a diplomatic play will kick off where the decentralized nation starts a real war of resistance against you. Even if a colony is successfully established, the people living there aren't just pawns - they'll remember that they weren't always colonized subjects, and just like any other part of an empire they'll agitate for independence if conditions are right.
Mapping these nations has been a challenge. We essentially started with the Victoria II map as a base to build off of, which meant we had a lot of work to do just gathering information for peoples across the globe. Records of who lived where, and how many people lived there, have been difficult to obtain for some regions. Gameplay considerations have also driven some design choices - let's look at North America for an example of that process.
Behold the snippet of a beautiful draft image used when presenting the original proposal.
This is part of one drafted proposal for the implementation of decentralized nations in North America. There's already some compromises in this version - peoples have been consolidated into some larger polities, and some state borders have been followed largely because having just one or two provinces on the other side of a state line can create regions too small to provide anything or anybody - 400 pops living in State X aren't able to provide enough men to contribute a single battalion to a native uprising, among other things. This design isnt just for the decentralized nations - it is something we also do elsewhere in the world when trying to balance historical accuracy with gameplay, although we of course try to avoid steering too far away from actual history.
North America after the revised proposal was implemented.
Even with these considerations, we still ended up pursuing a modified version of that proposal that did more to preserve the borders of larger imperial borders - we didn't want too many avenues for the United States to colonize its way into historical Canadian territories, or for Mexico to colonize its way into Minnesota. I do miss the Council of Three Fires and hope I can get it back in, but that depends on getting a design hammered out that works with the considerations and limitations we just went over above.
Other regions have had design considerations made in their implementation, too.
(from Wikipedia)
I'm gonna be real with you, there was no way we were going to accurately and sufficiently map out all the peoples of New Guinea. That's one region where I think we've probably done the most consolidation, but I think it was necessary in order to provide anything like the combined strength needed in order to give the indigenous peoples of New Guinea a decent punch in case of a native uprising.
West Africa in Victoria 3.
West Africa had many design decisions made since it was first mapped out for V3; as mentioned above, the original map built off of was Victoria 2's, so the first thing done was just getting some entity everywhere on the map. This early draft has been revised and revised and revised again, and probably will still be subject to further revisions. Countries that were first marked as decentralized have been centralized, such as the Ashanti Empire, and tag additions and renamings are a thing that's happened already and will happen again, as we continue to invest time in research and listen to feedback from our fans.
Decentralized nations give life to regions that have been treated as blank slates up 'til now. Mapping them out, getting them right, and balancing the challenges of precision and gameplay are a constant struggle, one which we are constantly tackling and working through. The result of all this, though, is a world that feels much more alive, one that I hope you'll be happily exploring at Victoria 3's release.
I'm terrible at transitions so let me just say that next week is Daniel Tolman's dev diary, and we're going to ship some monumental information there! And by that I mean it's on canals and monuments.
Good evening and welcome to this weeks dev diary! Todays topic is colonization, which in Victoria 3 terms means the process of establishing and expanding colonial states in regions owned by Decentralized nations.
The pith helmet became popular among British forces following the Anglo-Sikh wars, being widely adopted in tropical regions. The helmet has become synonymous with 19th and 20th Century colonial conquests and expeditions.
To establish colonies, you must have researched the Colonization technology, a tier 1 technology common to many recognized powers at game start. This unlocks Colonization laws as well as the Colonial Affairs Institution, which affects how quickly your colonies will grow.
In 1884 the Berlin Conference initiated the Scramble for Africa. Hungry for new resources and global dominance, the great powers divided the continent between themselves and began a relentless campaign of conquest and colonization, establishing colonial governments to oversee their new domains.
You can establish colonies in strategic regions where you have declared an Interest, and within those strategic regions you can colonize a state region in which at least one state is controlled by a Decentralized nation. Once youve selected a location, one of the provinces in that state region will be the starting point for your colony. Having a colony in a state region does not give you a monopoly on it; other colonial powers can create competing colonies, resulting in split states and messy borders that are sure to generate diplomatic tensions in the future.
Colonial States are a special kind of state that is created by establishing a colony in a Decentralized nation or conquering territory from an Unrecognized power. A Colonial State that borders a non-colonial state belonging to the same country will lose its colonial status and become a regular unincorporated state. Colonial States have a bonus to migration attraction and are affected by certain modifiers from colonial laws and the Colonial Affairs institution. Since Colonial States cannot be incorporated, your institutions do not apply there, and pops living in these states cannot be taxed and will have very little political power to contribute to Interest Groups.
Now, why would you want a colony? Primarily, youd want colonies to gain access to more natural resources that you may be lacking at home, especially goods required for more advanced manufacturing Production Methods like rubber and dye. Once your colony expands enough that its the largest State in its State Region, it will become part of your National Market, giving you direct access to the goods it produces assuming that you ensure market access. Many European powers have little opportunity for aggressive expansion in their homelands, as wars there could become very unpredictable and destructive. And of course, any territory you dont colonize yourself may fall into the hands of your rivals!
A handy progress bar lets you know how soon your colony will expand, with the corresponding tooltip and nested tooltip breaking down in increasing detail exactly why it is growing (or not growing!) at the current rate.
The rate of Colonial Growth is determined by your incorporated population, and modified by your Colony Growth Generation Speed (primarily affected by your investment in Colonial Affairs) as well as by local conditions in the State Region.The more colonies you have growing at once, the less quickly each colony will develop, though you can selectively pause and resume Colonial Growth in a state. Once a colony grows, it will expand into neighboring provinces owned by a Decentralized nation within its state region.
Early in the game, the colonization of most regions will be a very long and painful process due to the prevalence of malaria and other hostile conditions. The technology of the time did not allow the European colonial powers to penetrate far into Africa, but with the development of quinine and malaria prevention techniques this would cease to be the obstacle it once was. In Victoria 3, you will need to develop your medical technology and invest in your institutions to overcome harsh penalties to colonial growth in the most inhospitable regions.
Now of course you cant expect to claim and exploit vast swathes of land without some resistance from the people who live there. While a colony is growing, it has a chance to generate Tension with neighbouring Decentralized nations. If Tension rises too high, the Decentralized nation will begin a Native Uprising - a kind of Diplomatic Play - against you to retake their homeland and expel the invaders. Tension will slowly decay, but on average you can expect the factors advancing Tension to eventually outweigh its decay rate. Though it is very likely that the native inhabitants will be technologically outmatched by a colonial power, there are some factors that give them a fighting chance. Firstly, the colonial power needs to manage the logistics of transporting an army to the region while the Decentralized nation has the home advantage. Secondly, other nations with an Interest in the region can join the Diplomatic Play on either side. If France, for instance, has their own designs for dominance over West Africa they might decide to support Kaabu in their struggle against British encroachment.
Colonial laws are typically supported by the Armed Forces due to their Jingoist ideology, which causes them to advocate for an aggressive and expansionist foreign policy. The Industrialists, ever seeking new sources of profit, especially favor Colonial Exploitation, while the Rural Folk fear for their livelihoods if their agricultural jobs are replaced by cheap colonial labor.
One of the most important factors affecting Tension decay is your colonial policy. Colonial powers can choose between Colonial Resettlement, which encourages migration to colonies, and Colonial Exploitation, which improves building throughput in colonial states at the expense of reduced Tension decay and Standard of Living for pops in those states.
Lets sum this up: once you have the appropriate technology and laws, you can start a colony in a Decentralized nation and it will slowly expand over time. The rate of growth is determined largely by your level of investment in Colonial Affairs and the population of your incorporated states. As your colonies grow, they generate Tension with nearby Decentralized nations which can eventually lead to a Native Uprising.
Next week Ill be handing you over to Ofaloaf of Monthly Update video fame, who will talk in more detail about the Decentralized nations of Victoria 3s world map.
Hello and welcome to this weeks Victoria 3 development diary! My name is Daniel and Im the Content Design Lead for the project. Today well be taking a first look at Journal Entries.
Upon the death of King William IV, the personal union between Great Britain and Hanover ended due to different laws of succession. Queen Victoria ascended the British throne, while Hanover was ruled by Williams brother Ernest Augustus. This Journal Entry highlights the imminent end of the union.
Compared to Victoria 2 weve shifted the focus of scripted content away from random event popups and towards the Journal system. Journal Entries fulfill a variety of narrative and mechanical purposes in Victoria 3 - they can be optional goals the player can pursue, imminent disasters, anchors for ongoing situations, and much more. You can think of the Journal as items on the governments agenda, situations that you can engage with (or not) to whatever extent best fits your goals and situation.
In 1836 Canada was administered by several colonial governments, including Upper Canada (modern Ontario), Lower Canada (modern Quebec), and the Hudsons Bay Company. By the end of our period they were consolidated into a single Canadian nation.
Here we can see some potential entries in the British Journal. Inactive Journal Entries serve to announce potential goals you might want to pursue or disasters you might want to avoid, depending on what youre aiming to do with your country. Many Journal Entries have an effect upon activation, usually an event presenting the situation to the player both narratively and mechanically, and sometimes offering different approaches to the issue. The Confederate Canada Journal Entry leads you as a colonial overlord down the path of consolidating your Canadian subjects into a single nation. To begin this process youll need to research Nationalism, but there are also hidden triggers that determine whether this should appear in your Journal as a possibility at all. In this case the Journal Entry is potentially available for any country that has Canadian subjects; this means that this content is not exclusive to Great Britain, but available to any country that fits the bill.
This is reflective of our goals for historical content in Victoria 3. We want to avoid arbitrary historical events that occur for specific countries even when they dont make sense in relation to whats happening in the game. We also want to avoid writing content that only happens for particular state actors under hyper-specific conditions, making it all but invisible. So historical content should be both emergent and visible to the greatest extent possible.
The Ottoman Empire was in a period of steep decline by 1836. Despite attempts to modernize the country, it was not able to retain its dominance and fell to the wayside of history, eventually collapsing to nationalist movements and the machinations of the great powers. In Victoria 3, you have the opportunity to steer history in a different direction. How would an Ottoman resurgence affect the world?
Though we certainly do have nation-specific content. Above we can see that the Ottomans are dealing with The Sick Man of Europe Journal Entry series. There are quite a few features a Journal Entry can have. Progress bars can track completion (or failure!) of Journal Entries based on specific variables. Journal Entries can also have a timeout, which might have an effect when it expires, in this case a very negative consequence for failing to reform the country. In other Journal Entries we use timeouts to create limited-time opportunities you can take advantage of if youre willing to commit to a goal. Additionally, there are pulses that can be added to Journal Entries that have effects on a monthly/weekly/yearly basis, and we can use these to, for example, measure that a set of objectives has been true for a certain amount of time. All of this is entirely written in our scripting language and is therefore extremely moddable.
Following the end of the Sakoku era and Shogunate rule, Japan modernized rapidly. A major transformation of society and the economy proceeded, and the great powers watched with interest. Will you be able to guide Japan towards a prosperous future, striking the balance between modernization and sovereignty?
While a Journal Entry is active, various events might occur in your nation. Here for instance a modernizing Japan considers an offer of American military consultancy. Active Journal Entries might also unlock Decisions - one-time actions a country can opt to take - or have a multitude of effects and modifiers while they remain in play.
The Great Molasses Flood of 1919 saw the city of Boston inundated with treacle due to a burst storage tank. Investing in the safety of your industries is important if you wish to avoid such accidents
becoming commonplace.
On the topic of events, there are now extremely few pop-up events that immediately demand the players attention. Events now appear both in the outliner and on the map itself, and can be opened and minimized at your convenience.
Journal Entries are a dynamic and versatile system used to represent a wide variety of era-inspired situations and historical content, and to make the game world feel narratively alive. The possibilities for this system are practically limitless and I expect well continue to innovate with it for a long time to come - and with its incredible degree of moddability I look forward to seeing the communitys own creations as well.
That is all for today! Next month well be donning our pith helmets and centering our development diaries on the theme of colonization and exploration.
Hello all! My name is Kenneth and I am the 2D Art Lead on Victoria 3. Working on the games user interface (UI in short) with my team is a big part of what I do on the game. From here on, whenever the word UI is mentioned, it refers to an overview of these 3 categories (Panels, Buttons and Icons) which make up the UI of the game! The majority of the information and the decisions a player makes happens in the UI.
There is a huge opportunity to engage and immerse the player into the world of Victoria 3 through the UI. As mentioned in the previous Dev Diary, the UX teams focus is to make this massive amount of information approachable and accessible. Us, in the UI team, work extremely closely with them, to display all that information in a visually appealing way.
Welcome to a brand new year with Victoria 3! Our first video for 2022 looks to the future, towards peace and progress.
Topics covered, in order by time stamp:
Hello, my name is Henrik and I am a UX Designer on PDS. I have been a part of the Victoria 3 team for almost the entirety of the project, and since I am about to take a few months of parental leave I wanted to leave you with a brief summary and overview of the thoughts and ideas that form the foundation of the User Experience (UX) design in our game. Also, say hello to Aron whom I have written this dev diary in cooperation with. Aron has been my UX padawan for the past year and will be shouldering the UX while I am gone.
First and foremost, why do we do what we do? Basically, our end goal is to make the game more approachable and accessible, so that we can make it even deeper and more complex. Complexity should not come from not knowing where to find something and why something happened, but from the deep simulation and game mechanics at the core of our game. The more accessible the information and interactions can be, the more complex we can make that information and those interactions.
In order to get there, we have three UX Pillars
[olist]
Earlier this month we held an exclusive Q&A session on the Official Victoria Discord for our newsletter subscribers. We have now gathered some of our top questions and answers in this article, for your reading pleasure! Enjoy.
Winged: Will some cultures have areas they specialise in? For example Nepali could be better soldiers while Norwegians could be better fishermen
Michael "Ofaloaf" Kundak-Cowall: The main problem I have with that is the unfortunate implications of saying people are just innately better at one thing or another- a Norwegian who moves to central Iowa isn't going to be a terribly good fisherman, and a Nepali who has never experienced war in his or her lifetime isn't going to have much experience at combat.
General_WCJ: what is the most common degree held by team members working on v3, history, game development, game design, computer science or something else
Paul Depre: If I had to guess its most likely some form of computer science and or game development for those who were able to go to school for such. We also have quite a few individuals who have the non-standard degrees in various forms of sciences, history, language, and me - the token economist. Never done a survey among the studio though, might be an interesting thing to do. The results will not be in a pie chart, that I can assure you.
SenatorSnowBear: Will we see models of trains move around the railways on the map? Will they go 'choo choo' if we zoom in close enough? The latter question is very important to me.
Michael "Ofaloaf" Kundak-Cowall: The trains do indeed travel around on the map and go choo choo! In fact, the trains even go chugga chugga.
Gimokes: How does the government form affect how laws pass?
Does an Absolute Monarchy like Prussia have a easier way to pass unpopular laws by many interest groups than a Constitutional Monarchy like Great Britain?
Daniel Tolman: More authoritarian laws will help you pass laws faster; so an autocratic monarchy that suppresses opposition interest groups can pass laws quickly and with less resistance than a democracy with a strong opposition. Of course, that has its own downsides.
Dr. Njitram: Are there any mechanics youre not fully fleshing out, awaiting feedback from the larger player base/QA?
Paul Depre: There are plenty of things not solid - all to various levels. That's part of the reason we do dev diaries and feedback sessions, hold UR tests, and let QA tinker on the regular. Some more structural mechanics are locked in, but we are always looking to and reacting to your feedback. If we do not act upon it right away its usually because doing such is risk based on the timeline and then we look for when we can address it in the future. In future dev diaries you may in fact see such changes detailed.
Kings: Can democracies influence what interest groups are in their governments?
Aron Nisbel: Yes! As a Democracy you will be able to Reform your Government by adding and removing Parties and Interest Groups. However, Government constellations will vary on how Legitimate they are.
KaiserPiplup: What is the feature you are most excited about personally and to see what players will do with?
Martin Anward: Definitely Diplomatic Plays! I want to see what kind of crazy upsets players manage to pull through clever diplomacy, and also what unintended consequences they end up with. Not to mention the multiplayer shenanigans...
EnzoF: What is the most interesting aspect/consequence of something you've already talked about that you were not able to place onto a dev diary?
Mikael Andersson: I don't actually recall if we've discussed Urbanization in detail yet, but one aspect I find fascinating is how building up your industrial states automatically create a parallel service industry which booms if the Pops' Wealth increases but fails if it doesn't, so creating an exploitative, extractive industrial sector will decrease the price of the industrial output goods in the market but not benefit any sector of Pops in that state.
al-Khalidi: Will it be possible for Austria to unify Germany?
Daniel Tolman: yes, but only if they don't become Austria-Hungary!
Katakras: Can interest groups be banned in authoritarian countries?
Paul Depre: More authoritarian countries have an easier time influencing their IGs to irrelevance. That being said its not as easy as simple to "ban" an IG - if they have the clout they will attempt to fight back instead of heading off meekly into irrelevance.
Softload3r: Will there be a tutorial like in CK3? Vic 3 will be the first game in the Vic Series I'm playing, so a tutorial like in CK3 would be a huge help and much appreciated!
Aron Nisbel: Yes! We're working hard on the Tutorial and the format will have similarities to CK3, but we're of course aiming to improve on it and have made many of our own changes to fit it more to our game and take it further. One change we've been aiming for is that you will be able to play the tutorial as any country, but we're not going into any specific details on that yet! As a UX designer, the Tutorial is close to my UX heart since it is one of the most important features especially for a new player's experience. Hopefully, our Tutorial will make the game very enjoyable even for anyone without an economics degree.
Grovar: Are we going to have game rules we can change before we start a new campaign like we have in other pdx titles?
Martin Anward: Yes, game rules are going to be in! For example, there will be a game rule to decide whether you want 'silly' nations like Byzantium and Jan Mayen to be able to appear or not.
Jboy2000000: How will the blimp reward from sighing up to the newsletter be implemented in game?
Mikael Andersson: Airships are one of the many things in the game that makes the map more alive. The one you get for signing up for the newsletter will be making an appearance in place of the standard model from time to time.
SolarCola: Is colourblindness considered in the design of the UI?
Paul Depre: Yes! I can say we have been working towards addressing some color-blindness issues with our game particularly because it is more numbers heavy than others. We've been working on a dynamic setting that should allow for us to expand its coverage and hopefully (don't confirm quote me here) allow for modding as well to help cover all the various possibilities. Maybe we can do a dev diary on it in the future.
Simply John?: What are some of the biggest quality of life changes that are planned or that have been made?
Martin Anward: There's a lot, but just to take one example we have implemented prediction functions when you change a production method or expand a building for how profitable the method/building will be. This in itself isn't new, but what is new about it is that the prediction takes into account factors such as how prices are going to change not just from that particular building/method but also from every other building currently in your construction queue, pop goods substitution (so you can see if there is potential for a good to be consumed even if it's not currently consumed) and so on. These predictions are actually also used by the AI to be able to far more accurately plan out its economic decisions than in our other games.
Goodluck: Will there be reasons to keep the upper class happy on the cost of the lower and middle class, even though the upper class is just a fraction of your nations population?
Daniel Tolman: Absolutely. Firstly, if you're deliberately playing as an autocratic reactionary country, you of course want to favor the old guard power groups. But also, remember that wealth and certain laws boost the political power of pops - and if you try to pass laws that favor the poor, the rich will push back.
Golden: although events arent going to be railroaded, will we still see history play out roughly as we would expect? (As long as the player doesnt interfere, that is )
Mikael Andersson: That depends on your expectations! We are not taking the approach that there is one "Platonic" way that history played out and if you don't poke at it, it will repeat itself. Rather, historical progression is the emergent consequence of millions of interacting events based on material conditions. What this means in practice is that while a lot of things will progress roughly as you might expect - countries are more likely to fight over shared Homelands, technologically advanced countries are more likely to do well financially, a country with a lot of colonies are likely to dominate the seas and vice versa - there will also be plenty of "butterfly effects" where e.g. a mass migration from China to Argentina will change the power dynamics in South America which might cause the US to reconsider their Interests there, etc. Our aim here is that some events should be recognizable while the remainder should be justifiable, and as few events as possible should feel inconceivable.
SL128: Which types of countries tend to be the most beginner friendly or hostile?
Daniel Tolman: Personally I think Japan is very beginner friendly. But to a great extent how "difficult" a country is largely depends on what your goals are.
An_Oxygen_Consumer: can we play as rebels in some events?
Martin Anward: Yes, there's a variety of both events and mechanics where you can choose to be the rebels and fight against 'your own' country. To give one example, if the Sepoy Rebellion happens it's possible to switch and fight for Indian freedom.
RatherHolistic: are there any alt-history formables?
Daniel Tolman: We certainly have some, and we'd like to add more before release. Scandinavia and Gran Colombia are some examples.
Happy Doggu: When do big nations like France, Prussia, and Austria actually get in on diplomatic plays? How does the game determine that?
Martin Anward: I'm assuming this is about when the AI decides to join a play rather than when it's possible for them to do so. The gist of it is that to join a side, an AI has to either want strongly either to back a side, or be tempted with something that it wants enough (what it wants depends on which AI strategies is governing it at the moment) to overcome both their desire to support the opposing side and their desire to stay neutral. I'll go more into this in AI dev diaries in the future.
Mr.Erik: how will taxes affect purchasing power and so standard of living? I want to know if i can build a small government for less militancy for less returns(money/soldiers)
Paul Depre: Without going into extravagant detail about the various disagreements among the economic schools of the relative effectiveness of taxes on consumption, etc. Im on a character limit and I cannot digress.
In short any money taken by taxes will reduce the purchasing power of the pop and make where their consumption basket is relatively more expensive (out of their remaining income) thus they will have to reprioritize and might possibly consume less. More wealth in their pocket would mean a gradual want of the more quality goods, a nicer standard of living, even something extravagant.
But depending on how those taxes are spent - maybe by building industries that stimulate domestic production of the consumed goods you've been importing (thus keeping the relative wealth within your domestic economy) this loss in purchasing power from one strata of society can be overcome by subsidizing the welfare of another.
I said I wouldn't go into extravagant detail and here I am with the answer of "it depends"
michael III: Will there be an observer mode(if you want to just watch the AI)?
Aron Nisbel: Yes!
Goodluck: Is it possible to stay competetive as an agricultural focused nation, or will you have to industralize if you want to keep up with the great powers?
Paul Depre: What determines staying competitive here may differ from player to player: you can stay as a primarily agricultural based economy and meet the relevant standard of livings for your pops. Of course to expand that past your domestic restrictions without industrializing would require finding markets for such goods, etc. Its a challenge to meet the needs of your pops if they start asking for goods you choose to not produce. Nothing in the economic situation and focus is inherently impossible, it just presents a different set of challenges to you to maintain.
Goodluck: Is there advantages to both tall and wide play; like will it be advantages to focus on one big city or building up many different Urban areas?
Paul Depre: In short: yes. Playing tall has its advantages and disadvantages as does wide - its more a question of which problems you want to confront. Playing tall can allow for the benefits and throughput of industrialization to be seen faster. Wider means more accessible resources domestically across your economy but multiple urban centres will require an infrastructure network to maintain a connection between them and the movement of goods but a single industrial capital might become dirty overtime and see an increase in mortality.
Aquos: What are you most excited for in terms of new modding capabilities?
Mikael Andersson: I've seen some absolutely next-level overhauls just focused on replacing buildings, production methods, and goods made by members of the team on their "free project" time, and I think this is where we will see the most amount of modding. Having said that we aim to make nearly everything we put in the game moddable, so undoubtedly we will see new laws, institutions, tech trees, diplomatic actions, subject types, military behaviors, and even AI mods. There's also another major feature we use to support the event system which we'll cover in a dev diary in January, that I am also positive will see some really amazing mods written for it.
Theo: Will we be able to zoom out fully and see the whole world?
Aron Nisbel: Yes, and we put a keyboard shortcut in for you to instantly zoom out and then you can click the map + release the shortcut to instantly zoom in there.
Jagriel: Can we expect more pie charts and graphs in the release state of the game?
Mikael Andersson: We'll have more charts and graphs than you can shake a stick at. We recently rewrote our trends backend system to be able to support a ridiculous amount of data sampling, just so we can give you more charts.
Cilantro: Will we be able to outfit arctic expeditions like the Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage?
Michael Ofaloaf Kundaw-Cowall: There are expeditions- hang tight and we'll go into detail about them in the future!
Eze agha: will their be flavor events to spice up gameplay inbetween diplomatic plays?
Michael Ofaloaf Kundaw-Cowall: Yes! They even let me write some of them, somehow.
uzo70: Will the "Tooltips in Tooltips" system from CK3, make its way into Vicky 3?
Aron Nisbel: Yes!
And there we have it, a short roundup of the newsletter subscriber exclusive Discord Q&A. To to stay in the know on all things Victoria 3, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter and well keep you updated!
Hi folks, welcome to another dev diary, and get hyped for what I know you're longing for: flags. I'm Ofaloaf, one of the designers on the game, and somehow they let me write a dev diary. Let's go!
Let's start at the beginning. What is a flag?
A flag is a thing of beauty.
A flag is a decorative design on a bit of fabric, often used to communicate something, such as a message or identity, to the viewer. In Victoria 3, all flags are flags associated with countries. They're neat designs that serve as visual shorthand for a state, and they just look pretty too, most of the time.
In the Victorian era, what counts as the flag of a country was a bit vague, depending on who you were asking. Some countries, like the United States and France, very clearly had a single flag that served as the national flag that everybody knew them by, but others weren't so clear.
Look - here's some period examples of what people considered Russia's flag to be:
Selection from 'The maritime flags of all nations', 1832, as seen on Wikimedia Commons
Selection from 'Pavillons et cocardes des principales puissances du globe d'apres des documens officials', 1850, as seen in the David Rumsey Map Collection.
First thing that's noticeable is that it's not just one flag. The tricolor that is used as the Russian Federation's flag now was just one of several in use in the 19th century up through to the 1850s, as a merchant flag or civil ensign used to identify civilian ships in foreign ports. The Romanov dynasty's emblem is also used as a Russian flag, and then there's two naval jacks - the flags with the blue saltires or diagonal crosses stretching across them- which are also widely recognized. Eventually, the Russian government started trying to consolidate everything and issued a decree on June 23rd, 1858, proclaiming a single "state flag", a black-gold-white tricolor. In 1883, the white-blue-red "merchant" flag was officially accepted as a national flag to be used on special occasions, and in 1896 it wholly replaced the black-gold-white tricolor as Russia's state flag.
Man, ain't that a doozy of flags to pick from! How are we supposed to pick which one to use in Victoria 3? Well, good news there - we can use more than one flag! We got dynamic flags triggered by script!
Any trigger which is valid for a country, like checking if a specific state is owned by the player or if a war is happening, can be used to trigger a different flag in the game. We've used that to spice up flag varieties in different situations - for example, a united Scandinavian monarchy has a different flag depending on whether the Danes are in charge or not:
Spicy! And that's on top of just using the usual checks like governments, the number of states in a country, and so forth - right, yes, you probably want to see the stars in the American flag, don't you? I know I do. They do change based on the number of states in the Union.
I can taste the freedom.
There's even some unique flags for when one country becomes the puppet of another. In some cases, a generic "oh no I am a puppet now" design is used for the puppeted country's flag with the "master" country's flag inserted as a canton in the upper-left corner of the puppeted country's flag, while in other cases a wholly unique flag is made for a particular combination of puppeteer and puppet.
There's also a sort of fallback system, to provide flags for every polity even if we can't really settle on one particular design, or if they're feisty dynamic rebels, or what-have-you. Flags can be randomly generated, with particular triggers set so some flag elements only appear if a tag is of a particular culture, religion, or ideology, among other things.
And, for the modders out there, it shouldn't be difficult for you folks to put together more flags if you want (and of course you want to make more flags, right?) - we use a system similar to the one Crusader King 3 uses for its coats of arms. France's default flag is a simple example of how the system works:
FRA = {
pattern = "pattern_solid.tga"
color1 = "blue"
colored_emblem = {
texture = "ce_tricolor_vertical.dds"
color1 = "white"
color2 = "red"
}
}
All that's going on there is that a plain blue field is set as the background, and then a single graphical element with the central third and right third of the tricolor as colorable sections is slapped on top, with white and red respectively added in there to make a nice and tidy blue-white-red tricolore. Magnifique!
And to plug that bad boy into the game, all you need is a little scripting in another file that goes a little something like this:
[noparse] FRA = { # France
flag_definition = {
coa = FRA
subject_canton = FRA
allow_overlord_canton = yes
coa_with_overlord_canton = FRA_subject
priority = 1
}
flag_definition = {
coa = FRA
subject_canton = FRA
allow_overlord_canton = yes
overlord_canton_scale = { 0.337 0.337 }
priority = 10
trigger = {
coa_def_republic_flag_trigger = yes
}
}
[And so forth. Find more flags by playing the game!]
}
[/noparse]
You can create as many flag definitions as you like, and you can plug the same flag design into multiple definitions or make a unique one for every definition if you want to go insane scripting it all up. Triggers are straightforward to plug in (and you can script generic triggers if you don't want to write the same combination of checks over and over again). If you want to mod flags, there's a delightful amount of flexibility with this system.
So there you have it! We got flags. We got lots of flags! We got randomized combinations of flags that go on for days! You could script more flags if you really want to poke at the game's innards! Flags.
Now, as we march towards the Holiday season, the dev diaries are taking a bit of a break. We will be back in January with a brand new topic in our first dev diary for 2022. Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!
Stand at Ease Victorians! Welcome to another Monthly Update video from the Victoria 3 team! In this months video, we are Inspecting the Warfare systems in the game.
Topics covered, in order by time stamps:
Welcome back to another Victoria 3 development diary! Today we will talk about something weve already had to touch on in numerous previous dev diaries, as it is a topic crucial to every part of the game: Technology.
The Victorian era saw revolutionary progress in three major areas: industry, military, and politics. The rise of automation and free enterprise brought about the promise of immense material wealth for anyone willing and able to put in the work. Military technology - on land, at sea, and eventually even in the air - progressed so rapidly it could render a nations centuries-old doctrines obsolete overnight. And along with these material changes came a fundamental reorganisation of the societies themselves - sometimes by redistributing power from the ancient noble regimes to benefit the common people, and at other times by reigning such democracies in through entirely novel power structures made up of bureaucrats, business magnates, or populist autocratic strongmen.
These three revolutions are represented in Victoria 3 through three distinct tech trees: Production, Military, and Society. Within each tree, the many technologies your country will discover through each game are organised such that each tech both requires one or several others and leads to one or several others. Modders might be interested to know that each tree automatically rebuilds and reorganises itself whenever changes are made, to make it pain-free to add, remove, or change the tech trees without having to tinker with tree layout or static image files.
To research Shaft Mining, which permits the construction of mining industries, you need both Enclosure (which permits private ownership of land) and Manufactories (which lets you establish basic industries that make finished products). Shaft Mining itself leads to Prospecting (which increases your chance of discovering new resources), Steelworking (which lets you build Steel Mills), and the Atmospheric Engine, a building-sized early steam engine employed to pump water out of mine shafts. Industrialised countries start the game with most or all of these technologies.
Production technologies are all about increasing your economic capacity in various ways. These tend to be very concrete inventions, such as Cotton Gin which increases the output of Cotton Plantations and Dynamite which can be employed for increased yields in all kinds of Mines. On some occasions they are more abstract, such as Enclosure which is a prerequisite for construction of modern, privately owned farms and ranches or Shift Work which more effectively utilises labor in your manufacturing industries. Production technologies also include advances to Railways, and some even unlock Goods unknown at the start of the game such as Rubber, Electricity, and Automobiles.
Military technologies improve your army and navy. These consist of a mix of new weapon technologies, doctrines, and ways of organising your Servicemen and Officers. Rifling lets you switch Production Methods from Muskets to Rifles in your Arms Industries, increasing their Small Arms production. Trench Infantry, once employed in your Barracks, organises your Battalions for trench warfare, which requires greater access to Small Arms but establishes a more reliable supply of manpower and causes fewer provinces to be lost when territory must be yielded to the enemy. The naval part of the tree is mostly dedicated to the invention of new ship types, but also includes a few new naval strategies that unlock or improve the effectiveness of certain naval Orders as well as upgrades to civilian Ports to improve your Supply Network and trade capacity.
Society technologies are all about new ideas for organising society. These include ideas pertaining to politics, finance, and diplomacy to name a few. Democracy permits the enactment of various voting franchise Laws as well as Republican principles of governing. Pan-Nationalism is a requirement for forming certain larger countries, and leads to Political Agitation which both makes your population more politically active and also gives you more Authority to deal with them. Several political ideas in this tree also unlocks specific Ideologies which may appear from that point on alongside new Interest Group Leaders and shake up the political landscape you had so carefully tuned, such as Feminism and Anarchism. Just as techs in the Production tree often unlock Production Methods, Society techs often unlock Laws - or Ideologies that can lend support for Laws previously thought utterly absurd by the political establishment.
In addition, Society technologies include improvements to your countrys financial system, such as Central Banking which increases your capacity for minting new currency and unlocks the Diplomatic Actions to Bankroll a country or Take on their Debt, as well as new forms of Institutions like Central Archives that unlock the Secret Police Law / Institution and leads to Identification Documents.
We are aiming for roundabout 175 of these technologies in the game on release, split up across the three trees. Many countries will start with 20-30 of these technologies already researched, as their starting economies, legal systems, militaries, and diplomatic relations rely on them. On average, leading edge countries will discover perhaps one new technology per year, though this pace can vary greatly from country to country.
An early part of the Society tech tree that deals mostly with finance and diplomacy. While a pre-industrial country might want to prioritise crucial Production technologies, missing out on elementary Society ideas that let you adjust Relations or perform effective International Trade is inadvisable. A rapidly developing country without allies could easily fall under the influence of an ambitious Great Power.
Embarking on the research of a new technology is a simple matter of clicking on the tech in the tree youd like to focus on, and time will take care of the rest. But time is perhaps your most precious resource in Victoria 3, since falling behind your neighbours could be a death sentence - or at least might force you to cede your right to self-determination. The pace at which your research progresses is therefore of the utmost importance.
The rate by which countries develop new technologies is measured by Innovation. All countries start with a small amount of Innovation capacity. Those countries who can afford to do so can construct and fund University buildings, which employ Academics and Clerks to boost Innovation and thereby speed up the pace at which a country discovers new things.
Another way to improve research speed is to ensure the Industrialists, Armed Forces, or Intelligentsia are satisfied with the state of the country, as this will cause the effective cost of Production, Military, and Society techs respectively to drop. If only one of these groups are pleased with the society youve built, this will incentivize focusing your research on that tree since its relatively advantageous. As a result, a country with a large army and Laws favouring Patriotic, Loyalist, and Jingoist Ideologies would also progress faster in their Military technologies, though they may fall behind on Production and Society.
The amount of Innovation you can use to actively research your chosen technology is capped by your countrys Literacy. Even if your Universities are top-notch, your countrys ability to effectively incorporate new learnings will be hampered by a poorly educated population. Those countries who aim to be the guiding light of global progress must maintain a solid primary school system in addition to Universities that carry out their research.
Mexico is evidently on the fast-track of becoming the innovative powerhouse in the Americas, but its current Literacy rate doesnt quite support making full directed use of the Universities theyve built - for now.
Literacy is a product of a Pops Education Access. If a given Pop has 30% Education Access, over time 30% of individuals in that Pop will become Literate. The pace by which this value changes is dependent on the birth- and death rate of the Pop, since this sort of learning happens mostly in the early years.
A Pops Wealth provides it with a base level of Education Access, and Wealth often varies substantially depending on Profession, making higher-paid Professions have greater Education Access. However, Literacy is often a limiting factor to a Pops ability to Qualify for those jobs in the first place, so relying solely on Wealth for Education Access could severely limit your countrys social mobility and opportunity for economic growth. This is where your school system comes in.
The main source of Education Access comes from the Education Institution, which must be established by a Law and can be run by either the religious authorities, the private sector, or by a public administration depending on your school system Law. Each of these systems have their advantages: a religious school system keeps your priesthood strong and helps ensure unity of faith; a private school system works just peachy for Pops with high Wealth levels and ensures the working class dont get strange ideas; and a public school system lets you enact mandatory schooling for children and encourages cultural assimilation.
A countrys Literacy is simply the percentage of their Pops in Incorporated states that know how to read and write at any given point. This means that if the most educated people in your society decide theyve had enough and move abroad, your average Literacy will drop, to the benefit of the other country. If a war utterly devastates the backwaters of your nation and slaughters the hundreds of thousands you conscripted to defend it, your average Literacy might increase.
After the Texan Revolutionary War, these Clerks found themselves once again subjects of Mexico. While they currently all know how to read and write, their offspring are unlikely to enjoy the same benefits. Mexico has no formal school system in place and their Wealth doesnt buy much of an education. To add insult to injury the Catholic Church Interest Group in Mexico is currently spreading Pious Fiction to ensure the children arent led astray by heretical ideas. The next generation of Clerks are unlikely to qualify to follow in their parents footsteps.
All technology is organised into Eras, which are rough estimates of progress through the games timespan. Anything in Era I is considered pre-1836 technology, going back as far as the very idea of Rationalism to the invention of Steelworking. Era II ranges from the start of the game to around the 1860s - Railways and Percussion Cap ammunition both belong here (though some countries did have railways a little earlier than 1836; this is not an exact science). Era III runs from the early 1860s to the end of the 1880s, and includes Civilizing Mission as a justification for colonisation and Pumpjacks, heralding the rise of the oil industry. Era IV from late 1880 to the early 20th century includes both War Propaganda and Film, both which might make it easier to justify the horrors which are to come in Era V - including Battleships, Chemical Warfare, and Stormtroopers. Era V also sees truly modern civilian inventions such as the Oil Turbine to make Electricity from Oil and Paved Roads to improve your national infrastructure.
The Eras act as an indicator of roughly where you are at in a given tree, but also serves a role in ensuring that rushing a certain late-game technology is difficult. Not only do technologies in later Eras take more innovative effort to research, but each technology you have not yet researched in that tree from previous Eras makes it harder and harder to make progress. This means techs arent unlocked on specific years in Victoria 3, and there is never a hard block preventing you from making your Universities develop technologies earlier than they were historically invented. But keep in mind that its a less efficient use of time and resources, so ensure that acquiring that technology ahead of everyone else is actually crucial for your strategy, as it will not come easily.
Trying to take a shortcut from the Atmospheric Engine (Era I) through Water-tube Boiler (II) and Rotary Valve Engine (IIII) straight to Combustion Engine (IV) so youre able to manufacture Automobiles in the mid-1800s is certainly possible given enough money and grit, but would be far from the best use of your resources. Even skipping a few Era III Production techs before going for the Combustion Engine could easily yield this 30% time penalty, the difference which might buy you a whole Era III tech. Besides, you might want to research Rubber Mastication and set up a few Rubber Plantations before you start building Automobiles, unless you want your factories to be wholly dependent on foreign rubber for the tires...
The final yet crucial point about technological development is that government funding and steering of national research is not the dominant way most countries are exposed to new ideas. For each of the three categories of technology (Production, Military, and Society) there is always one technology that is spreading in your country. Which exact tech that spreads to you in each category is out of your hands, but it will always be something in your current technological Era which has already been invented elsewhere.
The speed by which technology spreads to you is highly dependent on your populations Literacy. In addition, any Innovation you generate in excess of the Literacy cap is funnelled into improving tech spread rate. In other words, oversizing your Universities compared to your school system can assist in catching up to the rest of the world but can never be used to get ahead of the others.
Technology spread is also affected by your Freedom of Speech Laws. Stricter censorship provides you with more Authority but hinders the assimilation of new knowledge throughout your country. This is often to your detriment but could also very well be exactly what you intended! The downside of having a well-educated population is that they get exposed to foreign ideas more easily, and some of those ideas might not be what you had in mind. A bit more state control over what people are allowed to talk about can help keep your population focused on the ideas you want them to know about.
The technology system in Victoria 3 is meant to shape and change the game as your campaign evolves. While a few techs apply straight bonuses to various attributes of your country, the primary function of most techs is to unlock new actions, options, and even challenges. Very often, discovering a new technology doesnt have any immediate effect on your country but gives you new ways to run your country and new tools in your toolbox. The introduction of new inventions and ideas can also act as a catalyst for emerging situations in your country, with certain parts of your populace demanding these new developments be adopted - or shunned. Much of this is driven by the Journal system which we will talk more about in a few weeks, but before that we will cover another feature of crucial importance to grand strategy games - Flags! See you next week!
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Hello and welcome back to another Victoria 3 development diary! Last week we wrapped up our dev diaries on War, and now well be bringing both Diplomacy and War to a close (for the being, that is) by talking about (appropriately enough) how to negotiate an end to one of your wars. Were of course not done talking about warfare and will return to the topic at a later point, but for now, lets talk peace.
So, lets say you launched that diplomatic play to get the Dutch colony youve been eyeing for years thinking that youd have it in the bag, all the way up until the French decided to back them up and you found yourself dragged into a bloody and costly conflict that you now want nothing more than to get out of. What do you do?
Theres actually two different ways of making peace in Victoria 3: Capitulating and Negotiating Peace. However, before we explain how these work, we first need to explain a crucial mechanic to all forms of peace-making: War Support.
War Support is a measure of the political will in your country to continue fighting in a particular war, and goes from -100 to +100. Each country will start a war with a high degree of War Support (currently always 100, though were considering having it start on different levels based on how politically unified your country is), which declines over time. The factors that govern how quickly War Support drops include:
Today marks the final entry in our 4-part overview of the warfare mechanics of Victoria 3. If youre just tuning in now, we have previously covered The Concept of War, Fronts and Generals, and Navies and Admirals which introduces many of the core concepts fleshed out in this diary.
That war costs substantial money and resources is hardly a novel concept. Most strategy games impose a cost for creating military units, some have upkeep costs, and even in Pop-less Paradox GSGs a metric such as a Manpower pool often has to be regenerated in order to replenish damaged units. A few games even encourage you to peace-out of wars that are so costly your treasury cant bear the expense for as long as it takes to win, even if you still have armies left standing.
In Victoria 3 we aim to take this to the next level by modelling the truly astronomical, often lasting expenses of war in the economic system. This includes letting players and Pops profit off of wars; employ economic tools such as trade disruptions to gain military leverage; encourage upgrading not only your military but also industrial output to match; reform your Laws to fit your military to your economy; ensure your Infrastructure is sufficient to maintain your country while at war; and invest in medical corps and medicine to treat your population traumatized by the frontlines.
The intention here is not only to give the player a lot of economic levers to pull to prepare their country for war, although that is certainly part of it. A big reason for making wars approach the real-life cost is to encourage the player to think hard about the opportunity cost of war - that is, what youre missing out on by spending your resources on war instead of something else - and incentivize solving your diplomatic conflicts before war breaks out. If war was a cost-effective way both of increasing your power and decreasing your enemys power, diplomacy would be relegated to nothing but faux formalities before fighting begins. But if neither party truly desires a war, no matter the power discrepancy between them, thats when the Diplomatic Play intimidation game to see who blinks first can become real and tense.
It also means that its a skill to know when to stop. If war was an all-or-nothing affair this would not be an issue, but in Victoria 3 wars rarely result in one side getting everything they asked for (as we will learn more about next week, when we cover the Peace Deals system). Once you have hurt your enemy enough you might accept a consolation prize and sign a truce, knowing you will recover better over the next five years than they will.
With that said, lets dig into the details.
Your ability to sustain your war machine is of crucial importance in peace as well as war. At the start of the game many countries can get away with maintaining an army of self-supporting Irregular Infantry to keep the costs of arms down, but this wont be possible for long. And while wages might be affordable when your country is underdeveloped, increased productivity and labor competition will eventually raise expectations.
Your countrys Army Model is a type of Law that governs who makes up your military and how they are organized. We currently have four Army Models planned:
Under a Peasant Levy model, a permanent military force supported by Barracks is non-existent or minimal in size. Instead the country may raise large numbers of conscripted levies of irregulars during wartime, led by Officers originating from the aristocracy. This model is cheap to maintain during peacetime but can get very expensive (particularly in lives) during war. Conscripted Battalions can also take a long time to organize, and provide no Power Projection that affects the countrys Prestige.
The National Militia model limits your standing army and Power Projection in much the same way as Peasant Levies, but permits you to conscript a large part of your population into a well-rounded national defense force if needed. Its the model of choice for countries who want to focus on homeland defense, or countries desiring to democratize the military and limit the power of the Armed Forces.
Mass Conscription becomes available once you have unlocked the Society tech Nationalism. It lets you enlist the same large number of conscripts as National Militia but does not limit the size of your standing army. However, these conscripts are limited to infantry troops only. This is the correct choice for countries fighting no-holds-barred existential conflicts where sending regular waves of fresh meat to the frontlines is imperative.
A Regular Army model lets a country maintain an army of any size even in peacetime. While it also permits for conscription of a smaller number of civilians as needed, its standing army is the pride of the nation and confers considerable Prestige onto it. This model has the greatest flexibility in terms of military Production Methods, letting countries configure their armies without restrictions. Technologically advanced countries relying on more expensive crack troops rather than sheer numbers favor this Law.
Like all Laws, changing your Army Model will be popular with some Interest Groups and not with others, and in most cases you need to have at least a semi-legitimate government that favors the Law in order to have a chance to pass it without major complications. The icons you see for these Laws are not yet finalized.
Conscripting the civilian population into military service is an option available to all countries, but only during wartime or when the country is at threat of war (i.e. when it is actively participating in a Diplomatic Play). Conscripted Battalions do not Project Power and therefore do not impart Prestige, and under some Army Models they do not have access to certain advanced Production Methods that require specialized training.
Conscripts can be activated state by state or all across your country at once. Activating conscripts creates a Conscription Center in the state where civilians are recruited into temporary military service, and the cost of these conscripts are only incurred as they become active. This means relying on conscripting civilians as needed can be a compelling strategy to keep the military budget down, but it does not come without its own costs.
First and foremost, when the Conscription Center appears, recruited Pops will leave their regular places of work en masse which could cause major temporary disruptions to your nations economy. If the conscripts in a certain state happen to primarily originate from the lower strata of its underpaying Lead Mines, this will reduce output and thereby affect the Glasswork and Munitions Plants that consume the lead produced in your market, which in turn will impact all its Urban Centers as well as your very military machinery. If you have enough Pops in search of labor this situation will correct itself over time as the Lead Mines rehire their lost workers, but in the long run this simple action of initiating conscription in a single state will still mean a shift in Wealth distribution, political allegiances, population distribution, industrial profitability, and so on. Even after a successfully prosecuted war those men returning home alive may need to look for new opportunities to regain their old Standard of Living. Everything has consequences.
Second, conscripted Battalions are always created from scratch which can take a lot of time. This means they lose any experience gained in the last armed conflict as they stand down, while your standing army units will get more and more impressive over time. Soldier for soldier, conscripts give you less bang for your buck.
Third, conscripted Battalions are distributed among your Generals by their normal Rank-based proportions and arent automatically mobilized as soon as they emerge. So first the conscript Battalions need to be recruited and created from scratch, and then any conscript Battalions assigned to mobilized Generals must also mobilize in order to be able to leave for the front. As we explored in the Front and Generals diary, when such a large number of Battalions are raised all at once it is Infrastructure that governs how quickly they will be able to get ready, so this needs to be taken into account when choosing where to recruit your conscripts.
While all of the above happens automatically with the press of a button, the impact can be complex and will be experienced over time. Choosing to activate conscripts in the populous but rural vineyard valleys of Rhone will have a very different effect on France than activating conscripts in industrialized, well-connected Paris.
Mass Mobilization may provide access to vast numbers of fighting men, but redirecting up to 25 percent of your capable workforce to the war effort (in this case 60 Battalions, or the equivalent workforce required to staff about 12 levels of farms, mines, or manufacturing industries) could play a real number on your economy. These visuals are a work in progress, but demonstrates how the player functionally interacts with the map through the lens system either through clicking directly on regions of the map or by selecting options from a list.
A very tangible cost is of course the actual money you are spending on military goods for mobilized troops in the field. While Barracks consume military goods at all times in proportion to the number of Battalions it supports, units that are mobilized consume twice the normal maintenance level of goods. Not only does this double the quantity you need to buy, it also puts a lot of additional demand on the goods, raising the price-per-unit as well. As long as they can keep their production levels steady, your domestic Arms Industries, Munition Plants, and War Machine Industries will see profits skyrocket off of this increased consumption of your mobilized troops.
This also means other nations - allies or neutral parties - will see the sudden benefit of exporting arms to you. If you normally export military goods to others you may wish to cancel these routes to keep prices down, while if neutral parties import arms from you this may be a good time to Embargo (or at least Tariff) these goods. Every little bit helps your treasury and ultimately your frontline troops.
Trade routes criss-crossing the ocean are susceptible to your enemys Convoy Raiding fleets. Until a patrol discovers them and sends them to home base for repairs, such a fleet can do considerable damage both to your supply network as a whole (affecting all Trade Routes as well as the supply of overseas Generals) and to some shipping lanes in particular, possibly crippling your countrys access to strategic goods like Small Arms or hard-to-find imports such as Radios. Compromising a countrys access to industrial, luxury, or even staple goods can also be devastating to their ability to stay in the war, as we will learn more about next week!
Convoy Raiding fleets can also damage connections to overseas markets, for example by compromising the East India Companys connection to London. This could potentially devastate the economies of clusters of dozens of states who may have come to rely on such a connection to survive, particularly if their economies arent locally well-balanced but relying on cash crops or specialized manufacturing.
Many countries rely on foreign trade to supply them not only with the additional arms they require during wartime, but also the consumer goods required to keep morale up on the home front in this difficult time. Ending up on the opposite side of your trading partners during Diplomatic Plays could be catastrophic for the war effort. On this screenshot we can see the British used to supply the Ottomans with 100 units of Artillery each week, but with Great Britain now siding with Russia they will have to try to find a new trading partner as soon as possible - or try to hold the Russians off despite an Artillery shortage. Another potential crisis the Ottomans have to deal with is the imminent stoppage of a smaller amount of Liquor and enormous quantities of Luxury Clothes, at least the latter of which is prone to make many wealthy Pops feel this war might carry too high a price.
(On this screenshot we can also see some suspiciously round numbers of Available vs Required Convoys - these are currently placeholder values, which will be replaced with values properly scaled to the number of units traded across the number of nodes)
The goods, technologies, and in some cases Laws you have access to practically limit which military Production Methods you have available to you. These determine the composition of your army and navy and include both upgrades and options. As always, this list is not finalized but represents what is in the current build of the game only.
Your Infantry Organization Production Methods govern the organization and doctrines of your armys core fighting force. They consume mostly Small Arms and Ammunition and include Irregular, Line, Skirmish, Trench, and Squad Infantry. Offense, Defense, and Training Rate are the most commonly affected attributes.
Artillery Support Production Methods consume expensive Artillery and Ammunition to boost the Offense, Morale Damage, Kill Rate, and Devastation attributes of the Battalions. Cannons, Mobile, Shrapnel, and Siege Artillery are represented.
Your Battalions Mobility options affect their ability to get around and scout the terrain, impacting their ability to do damage during an Offense and capture larger amounts of territory at the conclusion of a won battle. Cavalry forces are the default, which can eventually be supplemented with Bicycle Messengers, and after the turn of the century Aerial Reconnaissance or even an Armored Division supplied by late-game War Machines Industries producing Aeroplanes and Tanks.
Your standing army can unlock various Specialist Companies for Barracks to focus on. These include Machine Gunners, Infiltrators, Flamethrower Companies, and Chemical Weapon Specialists. These specialists consume various goods to inflict quite specific effects.
Medical Aid determines what sort of battlefield medicine your troops have access to, from the default of Wound Dressing, through First Aid, to fully fledged Field Hospitals. These consume Fabric and Opium to treat the sick and wounded to minimize the casualties inflicted by attrition and combat alike.
Access to Opium permits you to care for your injured population during wartime, but while the country is at peace the excess Opium floating around your market may result in Pops developing an unhealthy Obsession with the drug. This is less of a problem if you are the producer than if youre relying on imports for your supply, of course.
Similarly, Naval Bases also consume goods to produce Flotillas with different attributes. These are due for a design pass so I wont go into details which are prone to change anyway. But in broad strokes, the fundamental Production Method determines the class of the central vessel that defines each Flotilla: is this a Man-o-War, Ironclad, Monitor, Dreadnought, or Battleship? In addition to the class of your central vessel, do you have Submarines or even Aeroplane Carriers accompanying your fleet? All these have pros and cons for different types of missions, letting you specialize your fleet for protecting or attacking trade routes, performing naval invasions, or blockading ports.
If youve paid especially close attention you might now ask: we know you must mobilize your army and Generals to see effective use of them in wartime, but what about mobilizing your navy and Admirals? In fact, navies are considered to always be ready and in active service and do not need mobilization. You also cannot recruit conscripts to start manning your warships just as a war breaks out, for obvious reasons. This means expanding and upgrading your navy is both a long-term process and a long-term investment. Navies are excellent at Projecting Power however, so while an impressive navy might not be particularly useful outside of armed conflict it will at least grant you considerable Prestige even as it burns its way through your treasury.
Since navies do not cost any more during war than in peace you may as well use them! You can set up most Orders for your Admirals any time, even while at peace. Once they spot ships flying hostile flags they will take action automatically.
A less direct cost of war which nonetheless can have severe consequences is Devastation. This reflects direct damage to an entire state and its infrastructure caused by battles transpiring in that state. Particularly large degrees of Devastation is inflicted by battles involving heavy and sustained artillery barrages. Devastation directly impacts Infrastructure and thereby Market Access, making the state economically unsustainable. It also tends to cause migration away from the state, an increase in Pop mortality, and other very detrimental effects. After the war this damage will be gradually reversed, but this rebuilding effort can take a long time and cause a lot of economic upheaval in the process.
The Greater Caucasus region before and after substantial Devastation has been inflicted. Numbers are, as always, not final.
Finally, of course, there is the human cost of war. Some wars end with only a few hundred casualties on both sides; some wars claim millions of lives with no peace deal in sight. In Victoria 3 it is your actual population who fight and die for your causes - the same population that harvest your fields and work at your assembly lines, who vote for their preferred party or rebel against your enlightened rule, who learn to read and write or pack up and move in search of greener pastures.
Many men fall in battle of course, but more commonly they perish on the way to the battle, or after the battle, whether from disease, starvation, infections, or exposure. Simply mobilizing your forces to the front will increase their risk of dying or suffering lifelong disability. To counteract this you can research and invest in good frontline medical care, or favor Generals with proven ability to reduce such needless casualties.
Those casualties who do not recover from their injuries and return to the frontline will either return home as Dependents or die outright. As a result of both of these effects, after a major war your Pops are likely to consist of an outsized proportion of Dependents to Workforce. While this will self-adjust over time (especially if birth rate is high) there may well be a post-war period where youre forced to deal with a large portion of your population not being economically productive. Its in cases like these youll be glad youve enacted a good Pension System to ease this impact during the recovery period.
In closing and to reiterate, Victoria 3 emphasizes the cost of war for several reasons, including:
Happy Thursday and welcome back to our series of development diaries on warfare in Victoria 3! Today we talk about navies, and how we intend to make them as strategically important to winning wars as they were in history. This diary builds on the warfare vision presented in The Concept of War and many of the core mechanics presented in Fronts and Generals, so ensure those are fresh in your mind before reading on!
Your ability to sustain an empire depends, to a large extent, on how well you can compete on the high seas. This is the era of truly global trade, which also meant countries were highly susceptible to disruption of that trade - and the higher they climb, the harder they may fall. In Victoria 3, maintaining a powerful blue-water navy is a large but necessary expense if you wish to ensure the integrity of your markets, overseas colonies, and trade routes during war. And even while at peace, a magnificent fleet can provide your nation with substantial Prestige!
Our design intent for naval gameplay in Victoria 3 is that it should serve as a strategic precision instrument in conflicts between seafaring nations. The sea is not another front in a war. The province-based moving Front system works well to represent conflicts over territory but would be nonsensical at sea, where no nation can be said to meaningfully control an enormous stretch of ocean. Instead, Admirals and their Flotillas are deployed to meet specific strategic objectives to disrupt the enemys military operations or economy, or defend against such attempts by the enemy. A powerful navy can never win you the war on its own, but if deployed correctly under the right circumstances it can be the ace in the hole that lets you outsmart even a foe thats superior on paper.
A clipper departing Luanda in the Portuguese colonial state of North Angola, representing the colonys connection to the Market Capital in Lisbon.
As with land warfare and Generals, you control your navy through your Admirals. Generals and Admirals share many similarities. Both are provided with military resources originating from buildings in the Strategic Region they call home. The amount of resources they get depend on their Rank, which you can grant via promotions to reward your favorite commanders. Their Rank also lends Political Strength / Clout to the characters favored Interest Group. Furthermore, both Generals and Admirals get Traits that affect both themselves and those Officers and Servicemen serving underneath them.
Most importantly, just like Generals are your interface to command your armies, Admirals are the interface to your navies. Admirals are given Orders, which they attempt to carry out to the best of their ability using the Flotillas they have been assigned. These Orders consist of:
Intercept any hostile navies around a certain Strategic Regions friendly coastlines while keeping your fleets stationed close to shore
Patrol any shipping lanes between the Admirals home region and a remote region, intercepting any hostile navies encountered
Convoy Raid at a particular point at sea to damage enemy shipping lanes
Naval Invasion to establish a beachhead and a frontline on enemy soil, by escorting and protecting a Generals land forces in a joint operation
While it has not yet made its way into the game, we also want to add a fifth Order - Blockade - to disable enemy ports and prevent hostile forces from crossing straits.
An artistic mockup of an Admiral in the Navy panel. Admiral Ruiz and his 10 Flotillas are currently on Interception duty in the Iberia HQ, ensuring no Naval Invasions or Blockades endanger the Spanish home front.
Convoy Raid and Naval Invasion are aggressive orders intended to hurt the enemy in different ways, while Intercept and Patrol are defensive orders that counter the other two. But to really understand how these work we have to start by talking about Shipping Lanes and the Supply Network.
Shipping Lanes are facilitated by vessels called Convoys, which are an output of Port buildings. These are created automatically whenever its necessary to move goods and/or people overseas. The three main reasons this happens are due to naval Trade Routes between non-adjacent markets, remote States connecting to their Market through a Port, and Battalions sent to frontlines that can only be supplied by ship. When a player is about to take an action that establishes such a shipping lane they are warned of how many new Convoys would be required for this action, which is based on the size of the route or the army supplied.
Shipping Lanes are always established via the shortest possible path, as defined by the number of nodes in the naval network it passes through.
A zoomed-out view of the North Angolan shoreline above, showing the main route ships travel off the coast of southeast Africa. The yellow pin indicates this path is part of Portugals Supply Network.
The sum total of a countrys Shipping Lanes determine the extent of its Supply Network, and the total cost in Convoys of that network compared to the Convoy output by Ports determine the overall strength of that network. That is to say, if the total Shipping Lane cost is 500 Convoys but Ports provide only 400, the Supply Network as a whole will operate at only 80% efficiency. This impacts all Shipping Lanes, causing less trade to flow between the markets than would be optimal and impacting the supply and morale of overseas troops.
Admirals assigned to Convoy Raid a given sea node will surreptitiously try to sink any enemy transports that pass through. In effect this will do damage over time to the affected Shipping Lanes, causing both an overall drop in efficiency of the affected countries Supply Networks but also a larger, local drop in efficiency of the damaged Shipping Lanes. As a result, by parking your fleet in a highly trafficked part of the ocean you could do a lot of damage to your enemys trade or even directly impact the amount of military supplies theyre able to send to their frontlines.
A very visually un-polished view of part of Portugals supply network, stretching from the Azores around the African continent all the way to Portuguese Bombay. In the lower-right corner we see an additional tendril going east, which is a trade route importing Porcelain from China.
Admirals assigned to Patrol a certain stretch of their Supply Network will eventually be able to detect and engage the raiding navy, causing a naval battle to ensue which will not only sink ships but also send the losing side back to base for repairs for some time. Admirals assigned to Intercept all nodes along a coastline are able to do the same to any raiders along the coast. Convoy Raiding right outside a major entry/exit port, such as in the English Channel, therefore has the chance to seriously disrupt a large number of shipping lanes but also put you at greater risk of detection and interception than if youre raiding transatlantic shipping lanes on the deep seas. The composition of your navy can also greatly impact how this plays out: a fleet with an accompaniment of Submarines can deal more damage before being intercepted, while a fleet of Monitors has an easier time intercepting raiders but may be more easily sunk if faced down by a more powerful navy.
Because the distance Admirals must patrol plays a difference, there is an inherent asymmetry to Convoy Raiding and Patrol orders. Since a chain is only as strong as its weakest link the damage done to a shipping lane by raiders is the same whether it stretches across 1 node or 10, whereas 10x as many Flotillas are needed to protect the longer route as effectively as the shorter.
Extremely unfinished breakdown of what is currently happening in the Macaronesian Sea. Look at all those juicy raiding targets!
Naval Invasion is an Order you give to provide naval support for a Generals landing on an enemy coastline. The size of the fleet determines two things: one, how great is the chance that youll be able to defeat an opponents intercepting fleet, and two, how many Battalions will you be able to successfully land. Even if the enemy has no defensive fleet at all, a naval invasion with a very small fleet might land too weak of an initial force to withstand the enemys counter-offense before the rest of the army can arrive. Since Naval Invasion is a one-time Order, once it has been completed it automatically turns into a Patrol Order to protect the shipping lane supplying the new Front.
Concept art of early Ship-of-the-Line and late-game Dreadnought class vessels
Navies are made up of Flotillas, which are constructed and maintained by Naval Bases. Naturally these can only be built on coastlines, where they consume military vessels such as Man-o-Wars or Ironclads constructed in Shipyards. Like Barracks they also employ Servicemen and Officers Pop, and depending on your navy configuration may need to consume other military goods as well (such as Ammunition and Radios) in order to keep in fighting condition. Flotillas differ from Battalions in how long it takes to create and upgrade them; constructing a competitive navy is not something you can begin considering when your rival has already started saber-rattling.
Another difference between Battalions and Flotillas is that your countrys navy is always considered to be in fully active service. In peacetime Generals can keep their troops on low alert, limiting their consumption and expenses. Once war breaks out, Generals can be selectively mobilized to only deploy the troops necessary. Admirals on the other hand have exorbitant needs and expenses even while at peace, so sizing and teching your navy appropriately is an important consideration for imperialists on a tight budget.
On the other hand, navies provide you with considerable Power Projection which confers substantial Prestige onto your country. Having a world-class navy is not strictly a requirement to be a Great Power, particularly if youre a large self-sustaining terrestrial empire, but it definitely helps you both gain and hold onto the title.
Artistic mockup of the Navy panel with Flotillas expanded. Admiral Alvarez de Toledo commands 20 Flotillas of Man-o-Wars on a Patrol mission to secure an important Spanish shipping lane.
Before we wrap up for this week, I want to say a few words about the lack of an order to just seek out and destroy enemy forces. In Victoria 3, your commanders - Generals as well as Admirals - are given strategic objectives which they use their manpower and resources to carry out as best they can. If in the process they get into conflict with the enemys forces (as they almost certainly will at some point) a battle will ensue. The outcome of that battle determines which direction the war proceeds in. The intent of this is to remove the need to babysit your commanders.
To illustrate this, assume we did have an order to seek and destroy. The optimal choice would then be to assign this order only to the strongest commander, fight the eventual battle, then revoke this order and give it to another commander while the first one recuperates, and so on.
With an order like advance front instead, the Generals intention is simply to capture territory as efficiently as possible, ideally while avoiding enemy interference. If its impossible to avoid the enemy, the imperative is to try to be intercepted by as weak of an enemy force as possible. Meanwhile the intent behind defend front is the opposite: prevent enemy incursions by defending it in the places where the enemy might advance, bringing to bear as powerful a force as possible. Similarly at sea, convoy raiding is about maximizing shipping lane damage while avoiding detection, while patrol is about minimizing damage to convoys by seeking out and destroying those enemy ships attacking them - not to sink ships for its own sake.
Depending on how the war is developing your priorities or overall strategy might certainly shift, causing you to change the orders youve assigned or make changes in your ranks to distribute resources differently. But our design intent is that this should only be necessary because your strategy is evolving, not to counter enemy movements or try to minmax your way to victory.
This is an especially important consideration for the naval part of the warfare mechanics. Naval (and aerial) warfare in strategy games commonly face the design challenge of extreme mobility options due to the lack of obstacles to movement. Usually some form of Fog of War and interception-radius mechanics is employed to counteract turtling behavior. The AI also often has to be forced to make mistakes to not become too good at dodging or intercepting the player in this environment. Even with Victoria 3s more strategic-level decision making, the freedom of movement the sea provides would make a system where being in/avoiding being in the same location as the enemy so as to start/not start a battle extremely micro-heavy, annoying, and highly unfair to either human or AI players depending on implementation.
So instead, in Victoria 3, you tell your Admirals what their overall priorities should be for the war and then they try to do that, using the resources theyve been allocated, only coming into conflict when they become aware of an enemy Admiral with an order that clashes with their own.
I hope that gives you a good idea of what to expect from the naval mechanics in Victoria 3. Next week we will wrap up this first batch of diaries on the military system by going through the many economic impacts of warfare in Victoria 3. Until then!
Salutations, Victorians, and welcome to another Monthly Update video from the Victoria 3 team! In this months video, we are delving deep into Diplomacy.
Topics covered, in order by time stamps:
Hello and welcome! Today we will dig into the core mechanics of land warfare, including Fronts, Generals, Battalions, Mobilization, and more. But lets take a moment first to recall the pillars of warfare in Victoria 3 from last weeks diary, which should be considered prerequisite reading to this one.
Before we get started I want to point out that a few of the mechanics I will be mentioning below are currently still under implementation in the current build. While development diary screenshots should never be taken as fully representative of the final product, this is especially true in this case. In some cases images will be artistic mockups and visual targets, and in other cases very rough in-game screenshots that will be revised before release. The reason for this is simply because, as we have stressed previously in these dev diaries, Victoria 3 is a game about economics, politics, and diplomacy first and foremost. War is a very important supporting system to all those three which tie them together, but we needed to make sure those three aspects were mature enough before we put the final touches on the military system. Furthermore, being a drastic divergence from how warfare works in all other Paradox games, these systems have required a lot of time in the oven to feel as fully baked as the others. Once we are closer to release well make sure to update you on any revisions, and release more finalized in-game screenshots!
First I want to present the concept of Fronts. In Victoria 3, rather than manually moving armies around the map, you assign troops (via Generals, as we will see later) to the border provinces where two combatants clash. All combat takes place on these Fronts, where a victorious outcome consists of moving the Front into your enemys territory while preventing incursions into your own.
Fronts are created automatically as soon as two countries begin to oppose each other in a Diplomatic Play, and consist of all provinces along the border of control between those two countries. Therefore a Front always has one country on either side, but it is possible for Generals from several countries to be assigned to the same Front.
Lets take a look at a screenshot from the current build of the game:
An early draft view of the Texas Utah Front. This Front belongs to the Texan Revolutionary War of 1835, which is in full swing on the games start date. Two Texan Generals are assigned to this Front, Samuel Houston with an Advance Order and William Travis with a Defense Order. On Mexicos side, Jos de Romay is advancing with 10 Battalions. The four stars on either side indicates relative average fighting skill compared to the worlds best - here Mexico and Texas are tied with 40 Offense and 35 Defense each. From Mexicos perspective this Front has a slight advantage at the moment and indeed one battle on this Front has already been won by them.
As mentioned at the top, these visuals - and all other images in this diary - are far from complete! We have many parameters left to expose, more UI layout to do, and more visual effects to add before release. Everything you are seeing today is only to give you a better idea of the mechanics, but is in heavy revision as we speak and will look different on release. As such it is not to be taken as representative of what you will see in the final product.
The health and status of your Fronts is a primary indicator of how well the war is going for you. Do you have more troops on the Front than your enemy does? Thats pretty good. Have you advanced it far into enemy territory? Great. Are your soldiers there demoralized and dying in droves from attrition? Double-plus ungood.
In a large end-game conflict you might have hundreds of thousands - possibly even millions - of soldiers in active service, which is a lot to keep track of. The number of active Fronts, however, is likely to be much more manageable. The design philosophy here is the same as with the economic Pop model. Our aim is to make the game playable and well-paced, without requiring frequent pausing, on every scale while retaining the detail and integrity of the Pop simulation. For warfare, the scale ranges from a small border skirmish between minor nations in single-player to a massive multiplayer world war involving every Great Power. Using the Front system we can account for every individual Serviceman and Officer in meticulous detail while giving the player a high-level strategic interface to monitor and manipulate. Much like with the economic interface of Buildings or the political interface of Interest Groups, from this Front view you can drill down through your Generals all the way to the individual Pops that actually do the fighting if you want to.
After a particularly punishing battle the Texan Barracks are desperately trying to recruit replacements to send to the front.
Generals are characters who command Servicemen and Officers into battle on Fronts. Every country will start the game with one or a few Generals - many of them straight out of the history books - and can recruit more as needed.
Generals are recruited from Strategic Regions, and gain command of as many locally available troops in that region that their Command Limit allows. Command Limit is determined by their Rank, which ranges from 1-star to 5-star. If several Generals are headquartered in the same Strategic Region, the troops are split up between them proportional to their Command Limit as well. Military operations can be complex to manage, and to model this every General costs a certain amount of Bureaucracy to maintain. You can promote Generals freely, but while higher-ranking Generals can effectively command more troops they also cost more Bureaucracy.
Like other characters, such as Heads of States and Interest Group Leaders, Generals have a set of Traits that determine their abilities and weaknesses. Admirals, their naval counterparts, work the same way. These Traits determine everything about how the characters function and what bonuses and penalties they confer onto their troops, their Front, and the battles they participate in.
All characters have a Personality Trait, with different effects depending on what role they fill. For example, a Cruel General might cause more deaths among enemy casualties, leaving fewer enemy Pops to recover through battlefield medicine or return home as Dependents, while a Charismatic General might keep their troops Morale high even when supplies run short.
Characters can also gain Skill Traits which are unique to their role. Generals may develop skills like Woodland Terrain Expert that increases their troops efficiency when fighting in Forest or Jungle, or Engineer that increases their troops Defense. Freshly recruited Generals start with one of these but can gain more as they age and gain experience. Many Skill traits have several tiers as well, so Generals that remain active across many campaigns may deepen their abilities over time.
Characters may also gain Conditions due to events or simply the passage of time. These often affect the characters health, but might also influence their popularity or ability to carry out their basic duties. Shellshocked is a classic example of a Condition your General might gain.
Like all characters, Generals and Admirals are also aligned with an Interest Group - which is often, but not always, the Armed Forces. For Heads of States and Interest Group Leaders the impact of this political allegiance is obvious, but why (you may ask) would this matter for Generals and Admirals?
In addition to industrialization and revolutions, the 19th Century was also known for its revolving door between military and political office. Often given assignments far from the capital with very limited communications, Generals and Admirals were given access to enormous man- and firepower and sent off with little possibility of oversight to see to the nations best interests. This autonomy not only granted them considerable geopolitical power while in the field, but also made them extremely popular figures once returning home from a successful campaign. As such, in Victoria 3 your decisions on who to recruit, promote, and retire - which should ideally be based on meritocratic concerns - sometimes have to be tempered also by concerns for internal power balance and stability due to the impact Generals can have on the countrys Interest Groups.
First off, the character contributes directly to their Interest Groups Political Strength, which as we know determines their Clout. The amount provided is dependent on their rank, so granting a promotion to a promising young General will also increase the influence their Interest Group wields.
This fellow (whose full name I refuse to write out) has a Direct personality, prefers to command troops in Open Terrain, and is an expert Surveyor of the battlefield. Hes also become Wounded, probably as a result of some recent skirmish. He supports the Industrialists, and as a Rank III General, his allegiance is quite important to them.
Second, if a General is becoming a little too big for their boots - or perhaps crippled by adverse Conditions, like that 79-year old fossil who just wont leave active service despite senility and various ailments - and you want to force them into retirement so someone else can take command of their troops, their Interest Groups Approval will be impacted. Understandably so, since you just robbed them of some political power!
Third, and most important, if an Interest Group becomes revolutionary - which will be the subject of another dev diary - their Generals and Admirals will take up against you. If youve put all your eggs in the basket of some farmers boy who turned out to be a strategic genius and you suffer an agrarian uprising, you may end up fighting a rebellion against that same brilliant commander using fresh recruits still wet behind the ears.
Commanders can also be the focal points of special events, caused either of their own volition or by a situation you have put them in. Your decisions in these events may end up affecting your country in any number of ways.
Both Generals and Admirals can be given Orders which they are obliged to try to carry out. We will go over Admiral Orders next week. The Orders you can give Generals are quite straightforward:
Stand By: the General returns home from their current Front, dispersing their troops into their home regions Garrison forces to slow down any enemy incursions
Advance Front: the General gathers their troops, moves to the target Front, and tries to advance it by launching attacks at the enemy
Defend Front: like Advance Front except the General never advances, instead focusing only on intercepting and repelling enemy forces
These orders may end up executed in different ways depending on the Generals Traits, resulting in different troop compositions and battle conditions during the operations. For example, a Reckless General may provide his Battalions with increased Offense during advances, but fewer of his casualties taken will recover after the battle. Further, his recklessness may lead to making a Risky Maneuver during a battle, which could prove a brilliant or catastrophic move. If you want to play it safer you could assign a Cautious but well-supplied General to a frontline, even though that may be less prestigious.
Generals charged with advancing a Front will favor marching towards and conquering states marked as war goals, but their route there may be more or less circuitous depending on how the war is progressing and possibly other factors such as the local terrain. Other such designated priority targets, which the player could set themselves to alter the flow of battle, is a feature were looking into adding to represent strategies and events such as General Shermans march to the sea. This is not currently in the game but is something we think would add an interesting dimension to the strategic gameplay, so something like this is likely to make its way in sooner or later!
Fronts targeted to Advance or Defend can also be a Front belonging to a co-belligerent, as long as you can reach it by land or sea. For example, if Prussia supports Finland in a war of independence against Russia, they could send one or two Generals to advance their own Front against Russia and another to help defend the Finnish-Russian Front, ensuring Finland can stay in the war for as long as possible while simultaneously striking at Russias own war support. To do so it needs to send its troops helping Finland across the Baltic, which require naval support we will learn more about next week.
Generals cannot be given Orders unless they are Mobilizing. In peacetime, all Generals will be demobilized, doing whatever it is 19th Century Generals do in peacetime (probably drink copious amounts of wine, have sordid affairs, and plot against their governments) while their troops are on standby doing occasional drills to keep readiness up. As soon as a Diplomatic Play starts, and for as long as the country is at war after that, players have the option to Mobilize any and all of their Generals, which will increase the consumption of military buildings (guns, ammo, artillery, etc) and start the process of getting that Generals troops ready for frontline action. The speed by which troops are readied is dependent on the Infrastructure in their local state, so high-infrastructure states can mobilize many more troops quickly while low-infrastructure, rural states might take much longer to gather and organize a lot of manpower.
This means when you choose to start mobilizing, and how many Generals and Battalions you choose to mobilize, will matter a lot to your initial success in the war - and as everyone knows, the first few battles could well prove decisive if the other party is taken by surprise. The magnitude of mobilization becomes immediately visible to the other participants in a Diplomatic Play as soon as the decision is taken. Choosing to mobilize big and early in a Diplomatic Play tells the other participants two things: one, youre serious, and two, youre hedging your bets that this wont end peacefully. This in turn can trigger a cascade of mobilizations, and before you know it, a peaceful solution is no longer on the table. Choosing to hold off on mobilization until late means you save precious money and lives until its needed, but may cost you the war if thats what it comes down to.
Mobilized Generals cannot be demobilized until the war is over. Once youve committed your troops to the war, they expect to be in the field and well-supplied until a peace is signed. If getting what you want out of a war takes a long time, your expenses may eventually begin to exceed the value of the potential prize.
In-progress artistic mockup of an Army overview, listing all your Generals with shortcut actions. In this case only General Long-Name has been mobilized (activated), preparing his men to go to the front at the expense of increased goods consumption and attrition.
Your land army is composed of Battalions, which are groups of 1000 Workforce with Servicemen or Officer Professions. Like all other Pops these work in Buildings, in this case either Barracks or Conscription Centers. The difference between these are that Barracks are constructed manually and house the countrys standing army, which are considered permanent troops, while Conscription Centers are activated as-needed during a Diplomatic Play or War and recruit civilians into temporary military service. In addition Barracks have a wider selection of Production Methods to choose from, particularly high-tech late-game Production Methods. How your army is divided between professional and conscripted soldiers depends on your Army Model Law, which we will cover in more detail in a few weeks.
The Production Methods in these two buildings work like other Production Methods do: they employ Pops of certain Professions, and consume goods to provide a set of effects. In this case they employ Servicemen and Officers in proportions depending on your organization style, consume a number of military goods, and in return provide Battalions with different combat statistics such as Offense (indicating how useful they are during an advance) and Defense (indicating how useful they are when defending against an advance).
Since military buildings work according to the same logic as other buildings, such as factories and plantations, all core mechanics such as Market Access, Goods Shortages, Qualifications, etcetera apply to them in exactly the same way. If one of your Barracks Battalions are supported by Armored Divisions but you cannot supply it with enough Tanks, recruitment will slow down to painful levels and both Offense and Defense will suffer. If you dont have enough qualifying Officers the number of Battalions the building can actually create will be throttled. Just because you have researched a new type of artillery piece or a more efficient way of organizing your army doesnt mean youll be ready to modernize straight away, and if your local infrastructure suffers the acquisition cost for the requisite goods could reach astronomical levels.
Upgrades to Production Methods in military buildings take considerable time to take effect. While any goods consumption changes happen immediately, improvements to combat effectiveness takes some time to realize. Keeping military spending low during peacetime by reverting your military to pre-Napoleonic warfare doctrines might be pleasant for your treasury but less great for both your war readiness and Prestige, the latter which is directly impacted both by how large and how advanced your army is.
In-progress artistic mockup of a Battalion/Garrison-focused list. Illustrations are selected for a collection of similar Battalions based on dominant Battalion culture (defined by the Pops in the military building) and tech level (defined by the Production Methods in use in the military building). Collections can be expanded to display the full list. From there the player can click through from a given Battalion to the military building supporting it.
All this leads us to Battles. Advancing Generals will eventually gather enough troops to launch an attack into one of the enemy-controlled provinces along the Front, which will be intercepted by defending troops and possibly an enemy General. In short, a battle then takes place over some number of days until one force has taken enough casualties and morale damage to retreat. We will go over in more detail how battles play out in a future diary, but suffice to say for now that a bunch of Battalions go in along with a number of different combat-related stats and conditions, some of them related to the General and their troops, others due to conditions like province terrain and chance. If the advancing side wins, they capture a number of provinces depending on how large their win was, what sort of technology they use, how dispersed or concentrated the enemy forces are across the region, and so on. If the defending side wins, they repel the advancers and will likely be able to launch their counter-attack at a nice advantage.
An item of note here is that just because one General might command 100 Battalions while the other sides General might only command 20 does not mean every battle outcome on this Front is predetermined. A single Front can cover a large stretch of land and just because a General with 100 Battalions is on a Front does not mean they travel with 100,000 individuals in their encampment; those Battalions are considered to be spread out, simultaneously planning their next advance while intercepting enemy advances, and as such the force size each side in the battle can bring to bear may vary. Furthermore, Battalions under the command of other friendly Generals on the same Front may be temporarily borrowed for a certain battle, and even Battalions without mobilized Generals (considered part of the regions Garrison) can be used to defend against incursions. However, Battalions not under the direct command of the General in charge of the battle do not gain the benefit of his Traits.
This variable sizing of battles, particularly when combined with mobilization costs, counteracts the otherwise dominant strategy of doomstacking and make wars feel more like a tug-of-war than a race. Each side can choose to either try to gain marginal advantage over the other on the cheap, or spare no expense to increase their chances for an expedient victory, with any position on this spectrum being a valid option in different situations.
Well get deeper into some of the combat statistics that go into resolving a battle in a few weeks when we explore military buildings in more detail, and we will talk more about how Battles play out and look on the map in a diary a little further down the line. Were anxious to show them to you, but need to give these visuals a little more attention first!
Thats land warfare in a nutshell. In the two upcoming dev diaries we will go over the major role that navies play in this system as well as the economic and human costs of war, which are closely interrelated. For now I want to close by saying that we appreciate your patience in waiting for details on warfare mechanics! The reasons for why weve chosen to diverge so far from the classic GSG military formula would be hard to grasp until youve seen how the different economic, political, and diplomatic systems function.
Next week we will talk more about warfare mechanics as we get into how your navy plays into all this. Until then!
Hello and welcome to another Victoria 3 development diary! Todays dev diary has been a hotly anticipated one, as were finally ready to start talking about war and combat and how they will work in Victoria 3.
So then, how does war and combat work? The answer is that weve taken a pretty different approach to warfare and combat in Victoria 3 compared to other Paradox Grand Strategy Games, and in this dev diary Ill be going over the overall vision that governs our design for warfare, with the actual nitty-gritty on the mechanics coming over the next few weeks. Just as Victoria 3 itself has a set of design pillars that all game mechanics follow (as outlined in the very first diary), Warfare in Victoria 3 has its own design pillars, which we will now explain in turn.
The first pillar is one that is shared with the vision of the game as a whole: War is a Continuation of Diplomacy - anything you can gain through war should also be possible to gain through diplomacy. As weve already talked about this multiple times in the past, and last weeks dev diary told you all about Diplomatic Plays, we dont feel the need to go into this again, but its still important to keep in mind to understand our approach to warfare.
The second pillar, War is Strategic, is exactly what it sounds like. In Victoria 3, all decisions you make regarding warfare are on the strategic level, not the tactical. What this means is that you do not move units directly on the map, or make decisions about which exact units should be initiating battle where. Instead of being unit-in-province-based, warfare in Victoria 3 is focused on supplying and allocating troops to frontlines between you and your enemies. The decisions you make during war are about matters such as what front you send your generals to and what overall strategy they should be following there. If this sounds like a radical departure from the norm in Paradox GSGs, thats because it is, and Ill be talking more about the rationale at the end of this dev diary.
The third pillar, War is Costly, is all about the cost of war - political, economic and humanitarian. There is no such thing as a bloodless war in Victoria 3, as just the act of mobilizing your army will immediately start accruing casualties from accident and disease (as these were and remain the biggest killers of men during war, not battles) in addition to being an immense financial burden for your country. The soldiers and conscripts who die during war leave behind children and widows, and may even become dependents themselves as a result of injuries sustained during your quest for national glory.
The fourth pillar, Preparation is Key, ties heavily into the second and third pillars. Much of the strategic decision making in Victoria 3 that will let you win wars are all about how well prepared you are. For example: Have you promoted the most competent generals, or were you forced to promote an incompetent wastrel for political expedience? Have you invested in the best (but very costly) rifles for your soldiers, or are you forced to fight at a technological disadvantage? During the Diplomatic Play preceding the war, did you mobilize all your armies in time and eat the costs in men and materiel, or did you hold off hoping on a peaceful resolution, or at least for the conflict to end up as a limited war? Did you choose to build and subsidize an arms industry large enough to cover your wartime needs, or is your army reliant on import of weapons that may be vulnerable to enemy shipping disruptions? These are the sort of questions that can decide who has the true advantage when going into an armed conflict in Victoria 3.
The fifth pillar, Navies Matter, is an ambition of ours that for many countries, navies should feel just as important (and in some cases more important) as armies. In addition to supporting or hindering overseas expeditions (by, for example, cutting off enemy supply lines), navies play a crucial role in waging economic warfare, as a country whose economy (or even worse, military goods supply) depends on trade will be vulnerable to the actions of hostile navies.
The sixth and final pillar, War Changes, is all about the technological advances of the 19th century and the way that warfare changed from the maneuvering of post-napoleonic armies to the meat grinder that was World War One. Our ambition is for these changes to be felt in the gameplay of Victoria 3, as technologies such as the machine gun makes warfare an ever bloodier and costlier affair while advancements in naval technology makes it easier for countries with advanced navies to project global power.
Before I end this dev diary, I want to talk briefly about our most radical departure from other Paradox GSGs - the absence of units you move on the map, and why we chose to go in this direction. The main reason is simply that Victoria 3 is a game primarily focused on Economy, Diplomacy and Politics and we felt a more strategic approach to warfare mechanics fits the game better than micro-intensive tactical maneuvering.
Its important to note that how this works differs completely from having AI-controlled units in our other GSGs, since in Victoria 3 armies you assign armies to fronts rather than provinces (navies of course work differently, but more on that later). Well be getting into the exact details of the mechanics for both armies and navies in the coming weeks.
We of course still want Victoria 3 to have interesting and meaningful warfare mechanics, but we want the player to be engaging on a higher level of decision-making, making decisions about the overall war strategy and just how much theyre willing to sacrifice to achieve their goals rather than deciding which exact battalions should be battling it out in which exact province next.
This also ties into the general costliness of wars and the fact that you can achieve your ends through diplomacy - we want the ways in which an outmatched Victoria 3 player triumphs over their enemies to be clever diplomacy, well-planned logistics and rational strategic thinking rather than brilliant generalship. Ultimately, weve taken this approach to warfare for the same reason we take any game design decision: because we believe that it will make Victoria 3 a better game.
With that said, were done for today! Well of course be talking much more about warfare in the future, starting with next weeks dev diary on the topic of Fronts and Generals.
Its Thursday again and you know what that means - another Diplomacy dev diary! Todays dev diary is one Ive been looking forward to writing for some time, as it covers Diplomatic Plays, which we consider to be more or less the signature feature for Diplomacy in Victoria 3.
So what are Diplomatic Plays? Well, to answer that question, Im going to reach all the way back to Dev Diary #0 and one of the four game design pillars, namely Diplomatic Eminence. That pillar reads as follows: War is a continuation of diplomacy, and everything that is achievable by war should also be achievable through diplomacy (even if that diplomacy sometimes comes at the point of a gun).
Well, diplomacy at the point of a gun is exactly what Diplomatic Plays are, as they allow you to try to achieve any objective normally achievable by war by diplomatically maneuvering to force the other side to give it to you without a fight. To fully explain what I mean by that, well go over the mechanics of Diplomatic Plays in sequence - how they start, how they play out, and finally how they are resolved.
The way Diplomatic Plays start is the way you would normally start a war in another Paradox Grand Strategy Game - by demanding something from another country, for example that they cede a particular state to you. In fact, unlike other GSGs, Victoria 3 has no declare war button to get what you demand - instead you start a Diplomatic Play, and wars are always preceded by Diplomatic Plays.
The fourteen opening moves currently available as Diplomatic Plays, each corresponding with a war goal. As usual, the number in green indicates the number of possible valid targets that exist for that Play.
Once a Diplomatic Play is started, theres a number of things that happen immediately. First, the country that is being targeted is of course notified, along with any countries that are considered Potential Participants in the play. Who is considered a potential participant depends on the exact nature of the play, but usually it includes any country with an Interest in the Strategic Region where the Play is taking place as well as countries that have a strong diplomatic reason to get involved (such as allies or the overlord of the defender). At this point its important to note that only the Initiator (the country starting the play) and Target (the country targeted) are active participants, all others just have the potential to take part.
Next, the primary active participants on each side (the Initiator and the Target initially, though this can change if the overlord of either side steps into the play) are given a number of Maneuvers. This is a currency that primarily depends on Rank, with higher Rank countries having more maneuvers, and determines how many actions such as Swaying and adding Demands (more on these below) that said primary participant can take during the course of the play to try and gain the advantage over their enemy.
There are three distinct phases over which a Diplomatic Play plays, based on the level of Escalation, which is a value that increases each day after the play is started. The first of these is Opening Moves, during which participating countries take stock of the situation, set their initial stances (more on that below) and the Target has time to set their Main Demand (the Main Demand of the Initiator has already been set, as it depends on what type of Play was started). During the Opening Moves phase, it isnt possible for other countries to fully commit to one side or another, with the sole exception of overlords of the primary participants. It also isnt possible for either side to back down.
Cape Colonys bid for independence and open British markets turned out to be a step too far. Britain demands nothing less than total annexation of the colonial upstarts, whose only hope now is either suffering partial annexation for its insolence, or having to get in real close with France and hope for the best.
Once Escalation reaches a certain point, the Opening Moves phase ends and the Diplomatic Maneuvering phase starts. If by this point the Target has not set their Main Demand, they are automatically given one (usually War Reparations). This is the main phase of the Diplomatic Play, which occupies the majority of the escalation scale and during which most of the action takes place.
During this phase, potential participants can now set any stance towards each side, from full support without requiring anything in return (something most AIs wont be keen to do as theyre not big on having their troops die for charity, at least not in an offensive war), to leaning towards a particular side (which will signal to that side that theyre likely willing to be swayed), to simply being on the fence with no particular preference for either side. Its also possible for countries that have not committed to one side or the other to simply Declare Neutrality and exit the play altogether, though this might have diplomatic consequences depending on the circumstances.
With only a fraction of the military strength of Great Qing, Kokands future independence looks highly questionable. But this Play still has the potential to become pretty complex if Kokand can convince the Sikh and Russian empires to support their case against Qing. Perhaps gaining another subject is not worth the risk of a protracted war that might well cost upwards of half a million lives.
The Diplomatic Maneuvering phase is also when the primary participants are expected to use up their available Maneuvers on adding Demands and Swaying potential participants to their side. It is also possible to spend your Maneuvers during the Opening Moves phase on adding Demands for yourself, burning through most of them early might leave you at a significant disadvantage late.
Demands are essentially Wargoals (and will turn into such if the Play escalates into war, but more on that later) and includes a wide variety of requests-under-duress such as ceding land, giving up claims or becoming a subject. Only the primary participants can add Demands, but in addition to demanding things on their own behalf they can also demand things on behalf of other countries backing them, if said country agrees that the Demand is something they want.
While this may make it sound like its a good idea to spend your maneuvers piling on as many Demands for yourself as possible, theres a couple reasons not to. First, adding certain aggressive Demands (such as demanding land) always results in a Diplomatic Incident, which will immediately give you Infamy and may degrade relations with countries you need to support you in the Play. Second, being seen as greedy and unreasonable in your Demands will in itself make it harder to get countries to back you up, and may in fact make it so undecided participants side against you just to put a stop to your mad dreams of conquest. Its worth noting though, that the Infamy from any Demands or Wargoals that end up not being pressed (for any reason) is partially or fully refunded, though their negative impact on relations remain.
Swaying, on the other hand, is the main way in which the primary participants get undecided participants over to their side, by making them a promise. This promise may be in the form of owing them an Obligation (more on this in a later dev diary) or promising them a Wargoal if the Play escalates into war. Theres a few more such types of promises planned for release (promising to become their Protectorate or giving them a piece of land or a subject of yours, for example) but these are not yet implemented. If the country agrees, they will be set as backing the Swaying side in the Diplomatic Play, and will fight on their side if war breaks out, just as if they voluntarily set their stance to backing that side.
Offering Prussia the Austrian states of West Galicia, Moravia, or Bohemia would be most appreciated, as they are populous border states. States which do not already border Prussian land are less attractive to them as they would be much harder to manage.
However, if you think the Play is over just because France threw their weight behind the Initiator and there isnt anyone strong enough to oppose them, youd be wrong! Its possible for countries that have promised to back a side to betray that promise and go back to being undecided, or even switch sides entirely, perhaps because the other side made an even juicier offer. Doing this of course makes them lose out on anything that was promised to them and negatively impacts on relations with the betrayed side, but otherwise there is no limit to how many times a single country can switch sides in a Diplomatic Play (the AI will be rather reluctant to offer something to a country that has already forsaken them once unless they desperately need their support, though).
This also means that trying to play it smart by burning through your maneuvers immediately to sway all the countries you think you need early in the Play can backfire, as the other side is then free to try and bid over on your supporters while youre unable to do anything. Furthermore, it can also make it risky to not be upfront about your own territorial demands - doing the swaying first and then saying oh, and by the way, I want London might result in your side of the Play looking very empty all of a sudden as your former supporters scramble to distance themselves from you. Swaying and adding Demands during Diplomatic Maneuvering will also both pause Escalation for some time when carried out, to make it possible for the other side to react even if those actions are taken right at the end of the phase.
[Bolivia will remember this]
The final phase of the Diplomatic Play is Countdown to War, which is exactly what it says on the tin. During Countdown to War, both sides are locked down and its no longer possible for countries to declare or abandon support for either side, nor is it possible to add new Demands or do any Swaying. In fact, the only thing that is possible during this phase is Backing Down, and this is usually the phase when you will see one of the sides give in (though it is also possible to back down during Diplomatic Maneuvering).
Backing Down is, quite simply, one side deciding that the odds arent looking in their favor and deciding to concede the Main Demand of the other side to cut their losses. Its important to note that only the Main Demand is ever conceded in this way, so any additional Demands that are either added or promised to supporters of the winning side are simply lost (with accrued Infamy fully refunded), along with of course all the Demands on the losing side. This means that there is actually in some cases a reason to want the Play to escalate into war (and hence, to not stack the odds in such a way that the other side sees no path to victory), as it is the only way in which you can simultaneously press multiple Demands/Wargoals, assuming youre willing (or at least think youre willing) to bear the heavy cost of the war. Its possible to back down all the way up until the Escalation meter hits 100, at which point the Diplomatic Play is over and War breaks out.
Once all the cards are on the table you have to carefully weigh if this is really something youre able to win, and what cost youre willing to pay for the opportunity to try. Perhaps its better to cut your losses, gain a Truce, let the other side accrue some Infamy, score a Claim on the lost territory (if the Play was about land), and start making a plan to recover what you lost - and then some.
Whew, that was a lot of text, and Im sure Ive still missed some detail or another. As those of you who are familiar with Victoria 2 has noticed, Diplomatic Plays draws a lot of inspiration from the Crisis feature in Victoria 2: Heart of Darkness, a feature Ive personally worked on and always thought was one of the most interesting things weve done in any expansion for a Paradox GSG. But with that said, our dev diaries on Diplomacy are drawing to a close (for now, well certainly return to the subject later) as next week were going to talk about something youve been (rightfully) curious about since the announcement War!
Hello and welcome to yet another Victoria 3 dev diary! Today well be continuing to talk about Diplomacy, specifically on the topic of Diplomatic Actions, which are the means by which countries in Victoria 3 conduct diplomacy, build (or tear down) relations, and sign various kinds of agreements with each other.
Diplomatic Actions and how they work should be pretty familiar to anyone whos played pretty much any other Paradox Grand Strategy game. In short, a Diplomatic Action is a type of interaction that is carried out by one country towards another, and which sometimes (but not always) requires the agreement of the other party.
As the exact requirements and effects of a Diplomatic Action are unique to each type of action, this Dev Diary will mostly just be going over which actions currently exist in the game, but before I get into that I want to briefly explain about the three distinct categories that all actions fall into and how they differ:
[previewyoutube=_U5FltMuWDo;full][/previewyoutube] Time for another splendid Monthly Update Video from the Victoria 3 team! In this video, we are covering topics that relate to internal politics. Topics covered:
Hello and welcome to another Victoria 3 dev diary! This one is going to be a little bit broad, as we want to go through the fundamental mechanics of Diplomacy before moving on to more specific topics. Today, the mechanics well be going over are Relations, Infamy and Interests, so lets get to them one at a time, shall we?
Starting out with Relations, this is a value on a scale between -100 and +100 that determines the overall diplomatic standing between two countries, similar to relations/opinion in games such as Europa Universalis and Stellaris. The key difference between Relations here and in those games is that in Victoria 3 relations are bilateral, meaning that while in Europa Universalis France can have a relations of -100 with Prussia while Prussia has a relations of +100 with France, in Victoria 3 these two countries will always have the same Relations score towards each other.
Theres a few reasons for this change, such as making it more clear exactly where two countries stand with each other, but the most important is that we want Relations to be a mechanic with significance and mechanical effects not just for AI countries but also for the player, and even in multiplayer. Your relation number will translate into a relations level, and the different relations levels are as follows (from highest to lowest): Warm (80-100), Amiable (50-79), Cordial (20-49), Neutral (-19 to 19), Poor (-20 to -49), Cold (-50 to -79), Hostile (-80 to -100).
Your relationship with the Great Powers will be especially important, as they are the ones with the global reach to potentially affect you no matter where your country is located
All of these have an impact on the AIs decision-making in terms of which diplomatic proposals it will accept, which side it will want to join in diplomatic plays, and so on, but besides that there are also limitations on what actions you can take against another country based on your mutual Relations. For example, a relations level of Cordial or above acts as a non-aggression pact: It isnt possible to start most Diplomatic Plays against a country with which you have that relation level without first acting to reduce said relations. On the flip side, signing and maintaining a Customs Union with a country requires you to be at or above Cordial relations, and there are other actions that cannot be taken unless relations are at other certain negative or positive thresholds.
So, how do you raise and lower relations? The primary way is through the Improve Relations and Damage Relations ongoing diplomatic actions (more on those next week), but theres many other ways in which relations can be increased or decreased, including various events, Diplomatic Incidents (see the section on Infamy below) and the Expel Diplomats diplomatic action (which well also go over in detail next week), which is a way in which one country can act to prevent another from cozying up to them relations-wise, though at the cost of gaining Infamy.
Here, France finds itself with few friends in Europe - the only other Great Power they have decent relations with is Austria, and it seems like it may not stay that way...
That covers Relations, so lets move on to Infamy. This is a system we have previously talked about a little under the name of Threat, implying that it works similarly to Aggressive Expansion in Europa Universalis, but is actually something we have since redesigned following tester feedback, as the very localized effects of Threat/Aggressive Expansion did not feel appropriate to the far more globalized Victorian era. The result is something that could be described as a hybrid between older Infamy (or Badboy as those of you who have been around Paradox GSGs for a long time might recall) systems and the newer, more localized systems.
In Victoria 3, a country has an Infamy value that starts at 0 and can increase to well, anything, as theres no upper cap on it. As a countrys Infamy increases, other countries will become more wary, resulting in various diplomatic penalties for the infamous country.If Infamy exceeds the Pariah threshold (which is currently set to 100) the country becomes a potential target for a special Contain Threat diplomatic play where the Great Powers step in to restore order. Infamy decays slowly over time, and its rate of decay can be increased if the country has a large amount of unallocated Influence capacity, representing that capacity being put to use trying to salvage the countrys global reputation instead.
After making some aggressive moves against its neighbors, Bolivias infamy has increased to the point where they will start feeling some diplomatic effects - though its not yet too bad
So far this should probably sound very familiar to anyone who has played Victoria 2, but the key difference between Victoria 3 and its predecessor here is the Diplomatic Incident mechanic tied to Infamy. In the vast majority of cases, any action a country takes (for example demanding land in a Diplomatic Play or violating a neutral countrys sovereignty during war) that increases Infamy will also create a Diplomatic Incident localized at a particular Strategic Region (more on that below) on the map.
For example, starting a Diplomatic Play to demand a colony in West Africa will result in a Diplomatic Incident occurring there. Whenever a Diplomatic Incident happens, the country that caused it immediately suffers a penalty to their relations with all countries that have an Interest in the region, with the amount of Relations lost based on the amount of Infamy attached to the Incident in question.
Infamy in itself should be understood as a measure of how concerned the Great Powers are about a country, and as such, country Rank has an effect on how much Infamy a country gets when it commits a diplomatic transgression against another. Generally speaking, the lower the rank of the two countries involved, the less Infamy will be generated, as the Great Powers care a lot more about actions taken by and against other Great Powers than they do over two Minor Powers being engaged in a local squabble.
The Sikh Empires ambitions on India are not going to go unnoticed by countries with an Interest there
Ultimately, what this means is that Infamy doesnt just have a global effect, and where youre accruing it matters. If you keep taking actions that destabilize a particular Strategic Region, you can expect to quickly become very unpopular with both the locals and any outside powers that have taken an Interest in it.
By now, Ive said the word Interest a whole bunch of times, so its probably time to finally explain what they are. To do that though, I first have to explain the concept of Strategic Regions. A Strategic Region is a large predetermined geographic area consisting of a number of State Regions, with the 715 State Regions of the current internal build divided into a total of 49 Strategic Regions.
A look at the Strategic Regions of Europe - do note that as with all parts of the map, this may not be how it looks on release!
Interests is, put simply, a mechanic that determines whether or not a country has a stake in a particular Strategic Region and plays into numerous different mechanics such as Diplomatic Plays, Colonization and the aforementioned Diplomatic Incidents. A country can gain an Interest in a region in one of two ways: either automatically by having a geographical presence there (owning land or controlling subject nations in the region) or by using a Declared Interest.
A Declared Interest is a country quite simply saying that, regardless of their lack of a geographic presence, a Strategic Region is still of importance to them, perhaps because they plan to colonize it, or because they want to prevent a hated rival from expanding into it. A country can Declare an Interest in any region that is either adjacent to a region where they already have an Interest, or which they can reach through the support of their naval supply network (more on that later!). The number of Declared Interests that is available to a country depends on their Rank - a Great Power can choose to have its fingers in a great many pies, while an Insignificant Power is limited to acting only in regions where they already have land.
You might want to declare an Interest in Persia for numerous reasons, such as checking Russian or British aggression in the region or as a precursor to seizing colonies there for yourself
Interests do not provide any inherent benefit to a country besides the ability to throw their weight around in a Strategic Region, and can actually be a bit of a double-edged sword in that a country with Interests all over the world may get dragged into a lot of local conflicts. Ultimately, Interests are our attempt to simulate such historical occurrences as why certain parts of the world simply got a lot more attention from the Great Powers than others at particular points during the century that Victoria 3 covers, and to make nations act and care about things in a way that makes sense according to their national self-interest.
Right then, thats all for today! Join me again next week as I continue to write lots of words about diplomatic things, this time on the topic of Diplomatic Actions!
Happy Thursday and welcome to a brand new dev diary for Victoria 3! Today were finally switching away from talking about economy and politics and starting on a string of Diplomacy-oriented dev diaries, of which the first is this one, where well be covering Rank and Prestige, two interconnected mechanics that play a very central role in how diplomatic matters play out in the game.
Rank is a mechanic that also existed in both previous Victoria games, and is a measure of how glorious and influential a country is in the eyes of the rest of the world. What Rank a country has - be it a mighty Great Power or a largely irrelevant Unrecognized Power - is determined by two factors: Prestige (which well be explaining below) and Recognition.
When talking about Recognition, its important to note that we are not talking about Recognition in the more commonly used term when applying to nations, that is, whether other countries recognize the nations independence and existence in the first place. Rather, it is a measure of whether the reigning (probably mostly European) Great Powers, as a whole, see the country as a potential equal, i.e. whether the country could potentially be included as a decision-maker in said system if they grew strong enough.
Were not going to go too deep into this specific topic today (as well return to it in a later dev diary), but the gist of it is that countries start the game either Unrecognized or Recognized, and Unrecognized countries have to gain or force recognition in order to properly climb the Rank ladder. The Unrecognized/Recognized system replaces the Civilized/Uncivilized system of Victoria 1 and 2, and a difference from those games is that being an Unrecognized country is purely a Diplomatic status with Diplomatic penalties - a country does not become inherently worse at constructing factories or fighting wars by virtue of being scorned by Metternich and his friends, though many countries with Unrecognized status do also start out on the lower end of the technological scale.
Though it has among the highest Prestige ratings in the world, Great Qings status as an Unrecognized Country severely limits its potential rank among the nations of the world
All in all, there are six different ranks that a country can occupy in Victoria 3, as well as a special seventh rank that only applies to Decentralized (non-playable) nations and so isnt of any real interest to talk about today (please note that the names of some of these may be subject to change):
Great Power: These are the most powerful and glorious of nations and often have a global reach, getting involved in far-off conflicts. The most obvious example of a Great Power at the start of the game is Great Britain.
Hello and welcome to yet another Victoria 3 dev diary. Todays topic is Migration (meaning the movement of Pops between states), what role it plays in Victoria 3, and how it functions mechanically. There are two types of Migration in Victoria 3: Intra-Market Migration and Mass Migration, and well be explaining both of these starting with Intra-Market Migration.
Intra-Market Migration is the movement of Pops between two States that are part of the same Market. Barring certain exceptions (such as slaves not being able to migrate, as covered in the previous dev diary), Pops are generally always able to move between States in the Market, though the number of individuals that are able to change their homes on a weekly basis varies based on factors such as the local Infrastructure and Market Access in the two States.
Which Pops migrate from and to what States depends on the Migration Attraction of each State. Migration Attraction is a value that is based on the average Standard of Living in the state, and modified by various factors such as over/underpopulation, unemployment/available jobs and so on. It is possible for a country to directly encourage Migration to a specific state through the Greener Grass Campaign Decree, at the cost of some Authority. In general, Pops will move from States with a low standard of living and a lack of employment opportunities to states with a high standard of living and jobs to offer. States with a low population compared to the amount of available land are especially attractive to economic immigrants.
Kansas, already an attractive state for American settlers due to its sparse population, has been further prioritized for migration through the use of a Greener Grass Campaign decree
Discrimination, too, plays a role in migration. Pops that are being discriminated against in a particular State, and have the opportunity to migrate to another State in that market where they would not be discriminated against (perhaps because of multiple countries sharing the same Market, and one of those countries having more liberal citizenship or religious laws) will take that opportunity in greater numbers, provided of course that there is an underlying economic reason for them to want to move there in the first place. After all, while enjoying voting rights is certainly nice, putting food on the table is higher on the agenda for most Pops.
Discrimination can also have the opposite effect: Pops that are already enjoying full citizen rights are generally going to need to be in pretty dire economic straits to consider moving somewhere where those rights are going to be taken away, and in the case of a Pop that is going to be discriminated against no matter where they go in the Market, they tend to stick to their cultural Homelands.
French colonial settlement policies means that their colony of Algiers receives a steady trickle of immigrants from mainland France every week
So, what then of Mass Migration? Mass Migration is a mechanic introduced to try and model the migration of large amounts of people to places such as the US, Brazil and Australia in the 19th century. Mass Migration can happen when a particular culture experiences Turmoil, which is a product of having a large number of radicalized pops. A culture that has enough Turmoil to meet the threshold has a chance to create a Migration Target somewhere in the world, which is a flag set on a particular State that attracts huge numbers of migrants from that culture over the course of a limited timespan to that State and any States neighboring it.
Migration Targets are more likely to be created if the Pops in the culture have a low Standard of Living and high Literacy, and particularly likely to be created if there is widespread starvation among the Pops of that culture.
The selection of States for Migration Targets is based on a number of factors, including the states Migration Attraction, whether or not the culture is legally discriminated against in the country, and if there is a logical path that Pops of the migrating culture would be able to follow from their Homelands to the target (such as trade routes). There is no inherent advantage in certain country tags for who gets migrants - the US tends to get migrations because of availability of jobs and land combined with liberal citizenship laws, not because they have a built-in migration attraction bonus.
Fed up with economic hardship and political oppression in their homelands, a large group of Polish people have decided to try their luck at a new life in France
There is one more aspect of migration that were only going to briefly touch on: Migration Policy. This is a group of Laws which lets you set the stance of your country on migration. For example, whether you want to promote the movement of people from your core lands to your colonies, attract skilled workers from other countries for your manufacturing economy, or even just minimize all migration (external and internal) as a way of maintaining your iron grip over the population. The reason we wont be going into this today is because its currently in the process of being redesigned to this end (from a previous, much simpler set of laws). Well try to return to it at a later time!
With that said, weve reached the end of this dev diary, and in fact, the end of the current string of politics dev diaries, as next well be changing our focus from inwards to outwards and talking about Diplomacy, on the topic of Prestige and Rank!
Its Thursday again and that means its time for another Victoria 3 dev diary! Todays dev diary is going to be a little bit different in that it will mostly be about collecting and further explaining the various mechanics that tie into States. There might not be a whole lot of new information here for people who have been closely following the development, but we feel its important to put all this information in the same place and clarify a few points.
So then, onto the topic of States. States, as we have previously touched on, are the main political-geographical unit of Victoria 3, where pops live and buildings are built. Before we proceed it will be useful to understand the difference between States and State Regions. A State is always controlled by a single country and its borders are dynamic (can change over the course of the game, including being created and destroyed), while State Regions can contain 1 or several States and have static borders (unchanging throughout the game). If a single country owns all provinces within a State Region, there is no practical difference between these concepts. But if more than one country owns provinces within a single State Region, they will each control individual States within it.
For example, the State Region of Rhineland is a predetermined set of provinces on the border of France that in 1836 contains two States: Prussian Rhineland (actually just called Rhineland because it contains more than half the land in the region) and Bavarian Rhineland (called Bavarian Rhineland to distinguish it from the Prussian parts), a concept that we call a Split State. Over the course of the game, which exact provinces make up the State Region of Rhineland will never change, but the States might. If France was to conquer the Prussian Rhineland, there would of course no longer be a Prussian Rhineland but a French Rhineland, and if Prussia were to conquer the Bavarian Rhineland, the entire State Region would be unified into a single Prussian State.
Political control of the State Region of Rajputana is split between numerous Indian Princes, none of which control enough of the region for their part to be considered Rajputana proper.
In addition to political ownership, there are a number of conditions that can apply to a State that affects the local population and economy. First of all, there is something called Incorporation Status, representing a States political status within the country that owns it. The different Incorporation States are as follows:
Its Thursday again, which means its time for another Victoria 3 development diary. Todays subject of slavery is a rather heavy one, being both one of the most significant political issues of the Victorian era as well a story of untold suffering on a human level. For this reason, before I start getting into the mechanics of slavery I want to briefly explain our philosophy behind its representation in Victoria 3.
Slavery is, obviously, a horrific crime against humanity and precisely for this reason, many games that have a slavery-related setting or mechanics will either leave it out of the game or abstract it into something thats less on the nose (for example by simply applying some form of economic bonus at the expense of decreased stability). For Victoria 3, we dont think these options work for us for two main reasons.
The first reason is that as I mentioned before, it was an important political issue of the day and was a major catalyst for several significant conflicts, most notably the American Civil War which would be bizarrely contextless if slavery did not play a significant role in the game. The other, and most important reason, is that through our Pop system we are trying to represent every individual human on the planet from 1836, so what statement would we be making if we simply wrote all enslaved individuals out of history, or reduced them into an abstract set of modifiers?
Instead, our aim is to try and represent the institution, systems and causes of slavery, as well as the people who lived under and fought against it, as close to history as we can get it. We simply believe this to be the most respectful way for us to handle this topic, as well as the way thats most true to the game Victoria 3 aspires to be. With that said, lets get into the actual mechanics of how slavery and slave pops function in Victoria 3.
As was mentioned in the Employment and Qualifications dev diary, slaves are what Victoria 2 would have called a Pop Type and Victoria 3 calls a Profession, but function in a significantly different way from other Pops. For one, slaves do not get hired with the enticement of a wage and do not have the freedom to choose the place they work. Slaves also arent just able to stop being slaves by switching their Profession to one that does offer a wage and freedom of movement.
These Slaves are given the bare minimum of goods not to starve, resulting in a very slight population increase over time but a generally miserable existence for the people that make up the Pop
Buildings that employ slaves also do so in a way that differs from the way they employ other Professions. The gist of how this works is that in a state that has slaves, certain buildings (for example plantations) that employ laborers or peasants can fill each available position for those Professions with either a laborer/peasant or a slave. As an example, a Cotton Plantation in a slave state that has the capacity to employ 4000 laborers could fill that capacity with 2240 slaves and 1760 laborers, 4000 laborers and 0 slaves, or any other combination of the two less or equal to 4000. Generally buildings will prefer acquiring slaves over hiring free laborers whenever possible for the economic benefits it brings.
So what are those economic benefits? Well, first, it should be understood that said economic benefits are mostly for the owners of the building, meaning a bunch of wealthy aristocrats in the case of Cotton Plantations. Instead of paying wages, each building decides a standard of living based on factors such as laws and profitability and purchases the necessary goods for that target standard of living. This target SoL may not always be at the level of outright starvation but is never going to be anything but a very basic existence.
The cost to purchase said goods is simply added as a building expense and is virtually always going to be cheaper than employing paid labor, which translates into lower costs, higher profits and increased dividends for the building owners. Slaves also do not pay taxes in any form, so if the government wants to convert those profits into revenue, they have to do so through the various forms of wealth-based taxes that are always going to be deeply unpopular with the powerful elite.
These Tobacco plantations on Cuba have fully replaced the usual Laborer workforce with Slaves instead, leading to greater wealth for the Aristocrats
However, there is one economic advantage to slavery that goes a little beyond just enriching aristocrats: Slave pops have a higher ratio of workforce to dependents than other pops, meaning that a population of 100k slaves can supply the labor needs of a greater number of buildings than a population of 100k laborers. The key thing here is of course that not all buildings can utilize slaves, so this isnt going to be doing any good for an industrialized manufacturing economy, but a country that aims to keep its economy agriculture/plantation-focused and suffers from a labor shortage may find the brutal economics of slavery to work in its favor, if theyre willing to stomach the human cost and stamp down on any resistance.
So what of that resistance? Well, given that slavery is founded entirely on human misery, slaves are naturally not going to be content with their lot in life, and will attempt to resist by whatever means are available to them. Mechanically this translates into a steady stream of radicalized slaves and the threat of turmoil and slave uprisings. This threat to a slave society can usually be averted with sufficiently repressive measures, but fear and violence is not a good foundation for a completely stable country.
Of course, resistance to slavery doesnt just come from the slaves themselves, but also from Abolitionists, both internally in your country (in the form of characters and Interest Groups with the Abolitionist ideology) and externally in the form of Abolitionist-led countries that may hinder or put pressure on slave regimes that arent strong enough to resist them. The most notable historical example here being Britain and its naval efforts to stamp out the trans-atlantic slave trade in the 19th century.
With the explanation out of the way, lets talk about slavery laws. These are what govern who (if anyone) is enslaved or emancipated and where (if anywhere) slavery can exist in your country. They are as follows:
Slavery Abolished: The law that most countries with advanced economies start with. Under this law, slavery is completely illegal and on its passage any slave pops in the country are immediately emancipated and converted into laborers. If a country with this law comes into possession of land where slaves are living, said slaves are also immediately emancipated as above.
Debt Slavery: This law is meant to represent traditional systems of generally debt-based slavery, present in a number of economically less advanced and/or decentralized countries. Under Debt Slavery, Pops of low Wealth levels will gradually create a trickle of new slaves (with poorer pops converting into slaves at a higher rate), as individuals sell themselves or others into slavery for economic reasons such as debt repayment. However, under this system, children born to slaves are born free, so slave populations will not grow by themselves.
Slave Trade: This law is meant to represent the kind of widespread chattel slavery practised in places such as Brazil and Cuba. Under Slave Trade, the children of slaves are born as slaves and new slaves can also be imported from abroad. Well not go over exactly how slave import works today, but the gist of it is that slaves can be imported from decentralized countries that practice slavery if the importer has an established Interest in the region (more on Interests at a later point).
Legacy Slavery: This law is meant to represent countries that have made slave trade illegal but not abolished it altogether, most notably the United States of America. Under Legacy Slavery, the country is divided into Free States and Slave States. In Free States, slavery is illegal and everything functions exactly as if the country had the Slavery Abolished law, while Slave States function as though they had the Slave Trade law with the notable exception that new slaves cannot be imported from abroad. Under this law, slaves also tend to have a slightly higher standard of living for the simple reason that a starving slave population isnt demographically sustainable. This law also plays an important role in how the American Civil War functions in the game, but thats a topic for a later dev diary.
The United States starts the game with the Legacy Slavery law. Surely, nothing will go wrong if they start trying to abolish it right away?
Since slavery laws function just like any other laws, it is possible for them to change in different ways: a country with Slave Trade may follow the US example and change to Legacy Slavery as a compromise alternative to abolishing it altogether, and a country that has fully abolished slavery can even try to bring it back. Given that no country in history actually re-legalized chattel slavery after abolishing it, this is very difficult to do (once abolished there will generally be a strong anti-slavery bastion in a country that arent going to look kindly on such proposals). Of course, trying to abolish slavery isnt likely to happen without resistance either - those wealthy aristocrats who benefit from it have a vested interest in defending it, after all.
Lyman Beecher, leader of the Devout Interest Group in the United States, is an ardent opponent of slavery
On that note, weve reached the end of this dev diary, though well return a bit to this topic in the future when we talk about diplomacy (which isnt that far away now!). Next week were going to go over the system of States and their related mechanics such as State Regions, Split States and Turmoil.
[previewyoutube=JLLUqruFzvg;full][/previewyoutube] Welcome to the September Update Video for Victoria 3! For this Dev Diary roundup, we're delving deeper into markets and infrastructure! Topics covered, more specifically:
Its Thursday again and that means were going to continue talking about politics in games! Specifically, well be talking about Political Movements in Victoria 3. I touched a little bit on this feature back in Dev Diary #6 by saying that there are ways for politically disenfranchised Pops to push for reform, though that isnt the entirety of the role that Political Movements fill in the game.
What then are Political Movements? Put simply, a Political Movement is a way for your Pops to make a direct demand of the government, either because they desire change or because they dont desire the change you are currently pushing through. A Political Movement is always aimed at one particular law, and can take three different forms:
Movement to Preserve: This is a political movement that can form when there is sufficient opposition to the passing of a particular law. For example, if Great Britain starts replacing the Monarchy with a Republic, its very likely that this will result in a Movement to Preserve the Monarchy.
Movement to Enact: This is a political movement that can form when there is a popular demand for the enactment of a particular law. For example, if you have a politically active and literate but very poor underclass of laborers, these laborers might form a movement to create a minimum wage.
Movement to Restore: This is a political movement that works exactly like a Movement to Enact, but aims specifically to bring back a law that was previously in effect in the country - for example a Movement to restore the Monarchy in a Britain that successfully transitioned into a Republic. The main difference between a Movement to Restore and a Movement to Enact is that the former will tend to get some extra support from being able to harken back to the golden era of the past instead of having to champion new ideas.
Political Movements have a singular goal and will exist only so long as this goal remains unfulfilled. Their impact on the country in pushing for said goal is determined by their Support score. A Political Movement can have support from both Interest Groups (which represents a part of the political establishment backing the movement) and individual Pops (which represents individuals championing the movement in the streets).
Political Movements are not always progressive - while the Industrialists and Intelligentsia want to expand the franchise in Prussia, a coalition of more conservative Interest Groups are simultaneously pushing for more censorship
Interest Groups will provide Support for the Movement based on their Clout, while Pops provide Support based on raw numbers (compared to population as a whole), meaning that a single discriminated Laborer backing a Movement provides just as much Support as a fully enfranchised Aristocrat when taking action outside their Interest Group.
In other words, while Political Strength still plays an important role in Political Movements (in the form of Interest Groups throwing their Clout behind movements championing laws they like), it is entirely possible for a Political Movement to form with no Interest Group backing at all - even if nobody is willing to champion workers rights in the halls of power, enough angry workers in the streets may just be enough to affect change anyway.
Which Interest Groups will or will not back a Political Movement depends on whether they would approve of a change to the new law (in case of Enact/Restore) or disapprove of the current change in progress (in case of Preserve). Interest Groups that have high approval or who are part of the Government will not support Political Movements, though Government IGs may put pressure on you in other ways if theyre not pleased with your actions.
Pops are more complex, as they can back a Political Movement either because it aligns with their political movement (ie their preferred Interest Group is in favor of the movement) or because they have something to gain directly from it (for example a discriminated Pop backing a movement that would give them more rights).
This Political Movement to abolish the regressive Poll Tax is currently only backed by the Trade Unions and Pops sympathetic to them.
The Support score of a Political Movement has two direct effects on legislation: Firstly, it affects the chance of successfully passing a law (making it easier to pass the law the movement wants in the case of a Movement to Enact/Restore, and more difficult to replace in the case of a Movement to Preserve). Having a Movement to Enact/Restore also allows a country to attempt to pass the law the movement wants, even if said law has no backing among the Interest Groups in government.
But what then, if you dont intend to bow to the wishes of a movement in your country? This is where the Radicalism of a Political Movement comes in. Radicalism is based on the number of Radical pops and Clout of Angry Interest Groups supporting the Movement. A movement with low Radicalism is one that is intent on getting its wishes heard through peaceful means, while a movement with high Radicalism is willing to use more extreme methods, up to and including sparking a Revolution (though that particular topic is something well cover in a later dev diary).
Replacing the Monarchy with a Republic is *not* a popular idea in Sweden in 1836 - the opposition is both strong and highly radicalized - a civil war is all but guaranteed unless the government reverses course.
It is by no means a sure thing that every peaceful movement will become radical, and movements may very well fizzle out without accomplishing their goal, but ignoring the wishes of a significant part of your population and/or political establishment does come with some associated risks.
When talking about Political Movement Radicalism, I mentioned Radical Pops, and since they play an important role in creating and radicalizing Political Movements I thought Id take a little time to explain how Radical Pops and their Loyalist counterparts function in Victoria 3. The first thing that should be understood about Radicals and Loyalists is that just like with Interest Group membership, Radicals and Loyalists are not whole Pops but rather individuals within Pops.
Starting a game as France by hiking the taxes up as high as possible and slashing government/military salaries is a sure-fire way to watch the number of Radicals quickly climb
Radicals are individuals who have become disillusioned with the government and political apparatus of the country and want to seek change through any means necessary, while Loyalists are patriots who are generally willing to put their political views and goals aside for the sake of the nation. There is a large variety of ways that Pops can become Radicals or Loyalists, heres a few of the more common reasons listed below:
Hello again and welcome to yet another walkthrough of some interrelated systems fundamental to Victoria 3s economic model: Standard of Living, Wealth, Pop Needs, and Consumption.
All Pops in Victoria 3 have a Standard of Living score between 1 and 99, which represents - by a perfectly scientific and objective metric, dont @ me - precisely how great their life is. Pops with levels 1-4 are labeled Starving, levels 5-9 are Struggling, and so on through Impoverished, Middling, Secure, Prosperous, Affluent, Wealthy, Lavish, and at levels 60+, Opulent. We dont really expect a lot of Pops to reach levels 60+ but - knowing you folks - weve left plenty of headroom to accommodate your mad economic experiments.
Standard of Living affects two major aspects of the game: birth- and death rate, and Pop loyalty.
Birth rate is simply the percentage of children born to Pops each year, while death rate is the percentage of Pops who die. Both values start out high and decline with increasing Standard of Living, but birth rate declines slower than death rate, leading to a net increase in population growth with increasing Standard of Living. This system models that increasing Standard of Living tends to lead to longer life expectancy but declining natality. Each parameter can be modified independently by a variety of effects.
Scratch your priesthoods back and theyll scratch yours. Note that Interest Group Traits can vary between Interest Group variants, so a different religion might provide a different benefit.
There are side effects to emancipation! But while reduced population growth here initially appears to be a penalty, increasing the proportion of industrial workforce at the same time tends to lead to increasing Standard of Living, which provides a net increase in population growth.
Pop loyalty is altered whenever their Standard of Living increases or declines from its current value. Martin will get into much more detail on this in next weeks Development Diary on Political Movements.
A Pops Wealth attribute forms the foundation for its Standard of Living. Pops can also gain more intangible boosts or penalties to their Standard of Living from any number of sources.
Pops accumulate Wealth over time while their weekly income exceeds their weekly expenses. Conversely, if a Pops expenses exceed its income, Wealth will decline. How large their expenses are depends on what and how much they consume, which is also dependent on their Wealth. What this means is that as long as a Pops income remains the same, and the cost of the goods and services in their state and market remains the same, that Pops Wealth will over time drift towards exactly the level of consumption they can afford to sustain. Of course, as Wealth changes the consumption also changes, which affects the prices of the goods in the market, which might in turn affect their wages, dividends, etcetera.
This weekly shortfall of funds will eventually lead to a reduction in Wealth and thereby consumption, but since the shortfall is only a small fraction of its income it will take several months to have an impact on the Wealth score and thereby the Standard of Living.
Wealth has a number of functions in addition to forming the basis for Standard of Living. A Pops raw Political Strength (excluding any such power conferred by the countrys Voting Franchise, which is treated separately) is dependent on their Wealth. Some privately operated Institutions provide benefits to Pops only in relation to their Wealth. Many Professional Qualifications also require Pops to have a certain amount of Wealth.
Each Wealth level is defined by a set of Needs and an amount of value that needs to be spent on goods to fulfill that Need. This value is defined in goods base prices, such that the Need for Standard Clothing for a Pop of size 10,000 with Wealth level 14 might be fulfilled by buying 87 worth of Clothes, assuming perfectly balanced supply and demand. If the actual price of Clothes where the Pop lives is over-demanded, their cost to fulfill this need will also be higher. As a result, cheaper goods means wealthier, happier Pops.
This Peasant Pops Wealth is low (6), so it consumes only the basic necessities.
Many Needs can be satisfied by a variety of different goods. For example, the Need for Heating requires Wood, Fabric, Coal, Oil, and/or Electricity. These can be purchased in any combination assuming the total base prices add up to the required value. When given this option Pops will attempt to make a rational purchase decision based on which goods are the most available, satisfying their Need with some mix of these goods or even only one, if thats the only one available. In this way an inland, isolated state might not consume any Fish at all as long as it has sufficient Grain, Fruit, Meat, or even packaged Groceries to satisfy their Need for food.
A breakdown of how the Peasants in Ceylon spent their heating budget this week.
Goods can also appear in several different Needs categories. Groceries, Meat, and Fruit can fulfil the need for both Basic Food and Luxury Food, but Grain or Fish can only fulfil the need for Basic Food. As a result, maintaining only Millet Farms and Fishing Wharfs to meet your food needs will mostly satisfy your poor Pops, while focusing on Livestock Ranches and Banana Plantations will cause wealthy Pops to inflate the price of the available food supply and further impoverish the poor. Operating productive Food Industries that can turn Grain and Fish into Groceries is good for everyone in your country, and frees up any available supply of Meat and Fruit to be consumed by those with a Need for Luxury Food.
A breakdown of who requires Basic Food and how it can be fulfilled.
Lower Wealth levels have only a handful of Needs, such as Simple Clothing, Heating, Basic Food, and Intoxicants. The middle levels introduce more refined Needs like Household Items, Services, Luxury Drinks, and Free Movement. Really wealthy Pops consume increasingly vast quantities of Luxury Goods to impress and outdo their peers. In some cases Needs disappear entirely in favor of more diverse Needs. The Need for Simple Clothing which can be satisfied by both Fabric and Clothes will, as a Pop is raised from abject poverty, be gradually phased out by the Need for Standard Clothing which include only professionally sewn items.
Compared to the Wealth 6 Peasants, these Wealth 17 Bureaucrats are more diverse in their requirements.
Introducing new goods into your market will help you diversify your economy and alleviate the demand on crucial industrial goods. Importing Oil - either petroleum from newly discovered deposits or whale oil from the few places in the world that produce it - will cause your Pops to buy some quantity of it for heating instead of Coal or Electricity, which lowers the price of those goods and help make your industries more profitable. Introducing Opium into your market will decrease Pop demand for Liquor and Tobacco... for good or ill.
Some goods are favored over others by default if available. Once Electricity is available to them, due to its convenience Pops will prefer to buy it over Wood or Coal, even if theyre the same price. Some goods can be replaced by other goods entirely, while others will always be required to some bare minimum. Train travel can completely replace the need for having your own Automobile to drive around in, but having an Automobile doesnt ever completely remove the need for an occasional train ride to see your cousin who lives all the way in Paris.
In addition to these factors cultures can develop Obsessions for certain goods, and some even have Taboos they must abide by. A country can also encourage or discourage the consumption of certain goods using Authority, perhaps in an effort to avoid enriching a hated enemy or entice Pops to buy something thats heavily taxed over something that is not. This impacts the purchase habits of Pops affected despite this being irrational from a strictly financial perspective.
What if the Bengali were obsessed with the status afforded to them by Luxury Furniture? This could happen due to events, or organically because Luxury Furniture is a really prevalent luxury good in markets where a lot of Bengali Pops live. But even if this habit is developed around their homelands, Bengali Pops that migrate abroad - to the USA or Australia or Japan - will continue preferring Luxury Furniture to other luxury goods, and will suffer financially if the same level of access is not available there.
Lets close out by considering the difference between this and the consumption model from previous games. In Victoria 2, Pops have different Life, Everyday, and Luxury Needs based on their Type (what we call Profession in Victoria 3), both in types of goods and quantities. Pops in Victoria 2 always strive to get promoted into Types which require more advanced, luxurious goods in larger quantities, but will fail to do so if they cannot afford it. Since certain advanced Types of Pops in Victoria 2 perform their duties objectively better than their less advanced counterparts (e.g. Craftsmen, Clerks) it becomes important to retain access to advanced goods in order to ensure that your workforce is internationally competitive.
In Victoria 3 this formula is turned on its head. An Engineer is not intrinsically better than a Machinist who is not intrinsically better than a Laborer, and theres no ideal national proportions between them you need to maintain in order to maximize your competitiveness. Different Professions do fulfil different functions, but its the Production Methods of the Buildings they work in that determine what function they serve. By choosing what Buildings to construct and which Production Methods to activate, you create the opportunities for these Professions which in turn impose changes to the population. What types of goods you need to ensure access to in order to keep your population satisfied is not driven directly by what professional opportunities you have created, but rather by what Wealth development and Wealth distribution these changes have resulted in.
Professions that are part of the Middle Strata in this state are considerably better off than those in the Lower Strata, and not far off from the Upper Strata. Its very likely this state hasnt started industrializing yet, since Shopkeepers - who run the pre-industrial economy - are Middle Strata, and Upper Strata Aristocrats arent always particularly wealthy if their income originates from exploiting the Peasantry on Subsistence Farms. Since the Middle Strata is already wealthy enough to demand Transportation, construction of Railways in this state is likely to be both profitable and beneficial for population growth and general happiness.
As a result, Pops in Victoria 3 wont always strive to ascend to a higher social strata, nor will an Aristocrat always have a higher income or goods consumption Needs compared to a Clerk. All of this is driven by market forces - a qualifying Clerk would gladly become an Aristocrat on available land if that comes with a higher income than remaining a Clerk, and this increased income will gradually result in an increase in their Wealth and consumption demand. Conversely, Aristocrats dont demote to Laborers because they can't acquire enough goods to sustain their lifestyle - they would only turn to such desperate measures if they become landless (unemployed) and are trying to avoid starvation, or if by some miracle taking on a relatively well-paid Laborer job in a particularly profitable factory would actually yield a greater paycheck than their failing farm provides them with.
In practice this means that it's important in both games to secure your populations basic needs to prevent starvation and dissent, followed by appeasing their desire for ever more advanced or exotic goods in larger and larger quantities to increase the size of your economy and power on the world stage. But while reaching this commonly pursued end goal in Victoria 2 often meant pursuing a certain optimal population distribution no matter what else happened throughout the game, the Professions of the Pops you end up with could be vastly different between games in Victoria 3! If you build a colonial plantation economy, your Aristocrats might remain as dominant by endgame as they were at start. If you're a manufacturing powerhouse on the cutting edge of technological progress, your middle strata Pops might come to rival the Capitalist class in wealth and power. If your high taxes are reinvested in vast Institutions your power base might be dominated by Bureaucrats and Academics. If your workers own the means of production, your Laborers might even be wealthier - and consume more luxuries - than your neighbor's Aristocrats.
These possibilities for diverse Pop distributions also result in very different political tendencies in your population, which lead to demand for different kinds of Laws. While in Victoria 2 its primarily the rising Consciousness of a greater ratio of more advanced and literate types of Pops that drives a desire for reform in a liberal direction, Victoria 3s more open-ended consumption model and the diversity of Professions it can create could result in your population having very different political desires by endgame depending on the path youve taken. This requires your political machinery to be working in tandem with your economic engine, both to create the right conditions for your Pops and to satisfy their changing desires.
Next week, we will learn more about these desires as Martin introduces us to Political Movements, which themselves are strongly connected to Standard of Living. Until then!
Hello and welcome to another development diary for Victoria 3! Today well be covering a topic that tends to be very much in the mind of governments of all eras: Money! Specifically, were going to be talking about income, expenses and debt, and how they function on the national level.
As was mentioned all the way back in Dev Diary #2, Money is one of the principal resources you have to manage in Victoria 3. This in itself is of course nothing new (money of some form playing a role in almost every Grand Strategy game weve ever released), but the way money works is a little bit different than what you might be used to.
In most games, money tends to be a resource you accumulate for a specific goal, until you have enough of it to achieve that specific goal. For example, you might want to build a building that costs 100 money, and your monthly income is 10 money. That means in order to build said building, you have to wait for 10 months to accumulate the 100 money needed for the lump sum cost to order the construction of said building.
Now, you might be asking, why am I explaining such a simple and obvious mechanic that undoubtedly every single reader of this dev diary is completely familiar with? The reason for this is because in Victoria 3, there is no such thing as a lump sum cost - instead, its all about your weekly balance. At the end of every in-game week, your countrys income and expenses are tallied up and the result is then applied to your Gold Reserve or National Debt. This also means that all forms of expenses, such as construction, also work on a weekly basis - you do not need any cash on hand to start construction of a dozen buildings at once, but if you dont have the revenue to support it you may find yourself quickly going into debt.
Americas lack of an income tax in 1836 sharply limits its potential for government spending
The Gold Reserve is your countrys national stockpile of cash. If you are free of debt, any money that is left over in the weekly budget after expenses are subtracted is used to increase the Gold Reserve. Conversely, if your expenses exceed your income, this money is taken out of the Gold Reserve to balance the books.
Though its certainly never bad in itself to have a sizable Gold Reserve, it isnt necessarily the best idea to continually run a large budget surplus - each country has a Gold Reserve Limit, which is a soft-cap over which each surplus pound has diminishing returns on the Gold Reserve - if you have an enormous stockpile of gold, a surplus of 10k may only increase your stockpile by as little as 2k, meaning that youve simply wasted the rest of your money. Hence, a country that finds its gold reserves filling up may want to consider finding a way to reinvest some of that money to avoid such wastage.
The Spanish Gold Reserve has grown to the point where further stockpiling is becoming very inefficient, and they should really try to find better uses for some of that money
So what if youre running a deficit and your Gold Reserve has all been tapped? Well, this is when debt comes into play. Beyond that point, each pound spent in excess of your income will result in automatically taking on debt. While this may sound like something that you should avoid at all costs, that isnt necessarily true.
While you do have to pay interest on your loans, interest rates in Victoria 3 are relatively low, and so long as you avoid hitting your Debt Ceiling, growing your economy through deficit spending can actually be a very valid strategy. This is because the increase in revenues from minting and taxation may very well end up exceeding the interest payments, not to mention the benefits constructing new industries can have for your population.
The Debt Ceiling, unlike the Gold Reserve, is not a soft cap - once you hit it, your country will be in default, which is a terrible state to be in and can only be recovered from if you manage to slash your expenses enough to put your weekly expenses back in the black (or if another country steps in and takes on your debt, which can have its own undesirable outcomes for you but more on that later). Its also possible to simply declare bankruptcy, but because the money you are borrowing against is actually the cash reserves of your countrys buildings (which is actually what determines the size of your Debt Ceiling), this will have immensely negative consequences for your domestic industry.
Even though Britain has taken on several million pounds of debt, this isnt too much of an issue - their advanced economy allows them a high debt ceiling, and the interest payments is only a small fraction of their spending
To wrap up this Dev Diary, Im going to briefly touch on the main forms of income and expenditures, though this is by no means an exhaustive list! Some forms of income and expenses (taxes and salaries, specifically) also have a level setting, where you can for example squeeze more taxes out of your population at the cost of reduced legitimacy and increased radicalization.
A massive hike of the tax level to the highest level is a sure-fire way to both raise money and create political radicals
Main Types of Income (not an exhaustive list):
Minting: All countries can generate some cash flow by printing or casting new currency in relation to their GDP. Minting provides all countries with some income - particularly those who have domestic Gold Fields - but is in itself insufficient for funding anything but the most minimalist of governments.
Income Taxes: A form of taxation collected on income, where a certain % of the wages paid to workers in buildings is paid to the government.
Poll Taxes: A form of per-capita taxation where a fixed sum of money is collected on each member of the workforce. Poll Taxes are very regressive since they collect the same amount regardless of income.
Land Taxes: A special type of Poll Taxes that are only collected on certain types of Pops, such as Peasants.
Consumption Taxes: A tax that is levied directly on a specific good that is consumed by Pops. Levying Consumption Taxes costs Authority.
Dividend Taxes: A tax that is applied to dividends paid to Pops with an ownership stake in a Building. Tends to be a very progressive form of taxation, as usually only well-to-do Pops have ownership of buildings.
Tariffs: Tariffs are something that we plan to have in the game as a way to profit from goods being exported from your market, but were not ready to talk about exactly how this will work yet.
Main Types of Expenses (not an exhaustive list):
Government Wages: The salary cost of employing Pops in your Government Buildings such as Government Administrations and Ports.
Government Goods: The material costs for your Government Buildings, for example the Paper needed by Government Administrations.
Military Wages: The salary costs of Pops serving in your army and navy.
Military Goods: The various goods needed by your army and navy, such as Small Arms for Barracks.
Subsidies: The cost of subsidizing specific buildings to ensure they remain competitive.
Interest: The cost of making interest payments on your loans, if you have any.
Construction: The cost of constructing new buildings, both in goods required for the method of construction and wages paid to Pops working in the construction industry.
Well then, thats all for today. Next week were going to be talking about a topic that touches on both economics and politics - Standard of Living. See you then!
Happy Thursday and welcome to another deep-dive into the guts of Victoria 3s economic machinery. This week we will be talking about Pop Professions, specifically how and why Pops change Profession. While this is an automatic process, the mechanics of it is still crucial knowledge to keep in the back of your head when building your society. Perhaps you want to ensure the population in one of your states are able to take on Machinist jobs before embarking on a rapid industrialization project there, or perhaps you want to ensure you dont accidentally enable too much social mobility in a country already prone to uprisings against their true and lawful King.
First, a quick recap. In the Pops dev diary we learned that all Pops have a Profession, which determines their social strata and influences a number of things like wages, political strength, and Interest Group affiliations. In the Buildings dev diary we learned that buildings need Pops of specific Professions to work there in order for them to produce their intended effects on the economy and society. Finally, in the Production Methods dev diary we learned that different Production Methods change the number of Profession positions available in a building. So how do Pops get assigned to these spots?
Our approach here differs a bit from previous games. Victoria 1 and 2 has the concept of a Pop Type, a fundamental property of Pops in those games that defines most aspects of their existence - what function they perform in society, what goods they need to survive vs. what goods they desire, what ideologies they espouse, etcetera. Pops in Victoria 2 autonomously change into other types over time depending on their finances and the various needs and aspects of the country. Providing access to luxury goods in your country permits Pops to promote more easily. Generally speaking, higher-tier Pops will provide better bonuses for your country as different Pop Types perform different functions. By manufacturing or importing special goods and educating your population you would turn your simple, backwards Pops into advanced, progressive types in ideal ratios, which maximizes these bonuses to increase your competitive advantage.
Pop Types from Victoria 2: Aristocrats, Artisans, Bureaucrats, Capitalists, Clergymen, Clerks, Craftsmen, Farmers, Laborers, Officers, Slaves, and Soldiers.
Victoria 3 Pops instead have Professions. These are in some ways similar to Pop Type, but the ideal ratios and economic functions of those Professions differ based on the building theyre employed in and the Production Methods activated. The fundamental difference between these two approaches become clear when considering the Bureaucrat Pop Type/Profession in Victoria 2 and 3. In both games, Bureaucrats increase a countrys administrative ability. But in Victoria 2 Pops promote into Bureaucrats independently in relation to the amount of administrative spending the player sets, while in Victoria 3 Pops will only become Bureaucrats if there are available Bureaucrat jobs in Government buildings, usually as a result of the player actively expanding Government Administrations.
Professions in Victoria 3: Academics, Aristocrats, Bureaucrats, Capitalists, Clergymen (temporary icon; will be changed to be more universally applicable), Clerks, Engineers, Farmers, Laborers, Machinists, Officers, Peasants, Servicemen, Shopkeepers, and Slaves.
The latter approach gives the player more control over where these job opportunities are created, and combined with Production Methods cause demographic shifts to have stronger, more localized effects that are easier to predict and understand. Its also more flexible, permitting the same Profession to cause different effects in different Buildings given different Production Methods. So in Victoria 3 higher-paid Pops dont by their very nature perform a more valuable societal function than lower-paid Pops - rather, each acts as a crucial part of a Production Methods recipe. Each of these roles require the others to be effective - without enough Laborers to shovel coal the engines the Machinists maintain stay dormant, and without seamstresses to work the sewing machines the Shopkeepers dont have any clothes to sell.
Buildings adjust their wages over time in order to achieve full employment with minimal wage costs. As employment increases, so does the Throughput - the degree by which the building consumes input goods and produces output goods. By the laws of supply and demand, this makes a building less profitable per capita the closer to full employment it gets, so at first blush it might appear irrational for a building to pay more wages just to reduce their margins. But since a building does not represent a single factory but rather a whole industrial sector across a large area, and we assume the individual businesses in that sector compete with each other rather than engage in cartel behavior to extort consumers, this adjustment of wages to maximize employment makes sense. However, buildings wont increase wages due to labor competition if this would cause them to go into deficit, so theres little point to expanding industries beyond the point where theyre profitable.
Employees are hired into available jobs from the pool of Pops that already exist in the state, but unless theyre unemployed these Pops will already have a job somewhere doing something else. Pops can be hired under two conditions: first, they must be offered a measurably higher wage than the wage theyre currently getting from their current employment. Second, unless they already work as the required Profession in another building, they must also meet the Qualifications of that Profession to change into it.
These Steel Mills dont pay as well as the Arms Industries, but they do seem to offer better terms than the Textile Mills and resource industries in the same state - with the notable exception of Fishing Wharves, who also need Machinists to service their trawlers.
Wages are set by individual buildings in response to market conditions. A building that is losing money will decrease wages until its back in the black. A building that has open jobs it cant seem to fill will raise wages until it either fills the necessary positions or runs out of excess profits. As a result, different buildings in the same state will compete for the available workforce. What this means in practice is that a large population with the necessary Qualifications to perform all the jobs being created in the state will keep wages depressed and profits high. Only when industries are large or advanced enough that they need to compete with each other for a limited pool of qualified workers are wages forced to rise. This rise in wages also comes with increased consumption, which increases demand for goods and services that some of the same buildings may profit from in the end.
A Pops Qualifications measure how many of its workforce qualify for certain Professions, and updates monthly depending on how well their current properties match up to the expectations of the Profession in question. For example, at least a basic education level is required to become a Machinist while a much higher one is required to become an Engineer. Conversely, the ability to become an Aristocrat is less about education and more about social class and wealth. Buildings wont hire Pops who dont meet the Qualifications for the Profession in question.
These 981 Machinists qualify to become Engineers at a rate of 4.08 per month. Their Literacy is nothing to write home about but they at least meet the cut-off of 20%, arent starving to death, and benefit substantially from already working in an adjacent field. All factors and numbers are work-in-progress.
If some Paper Mills required more Engineers and this Pop was being considered, only the amount of qualified Engineers theyve accumulated so far could be hired. Currently that is only 85 (not shown). If those 85 were all hired, this Pop would then end up with only 896 members left in the workforce of which 0 now qualify to become Engineers. Since all recently hired Engineers used to be Machinists, all 85 retain their Machinist Qualifications. Furthermore, if 512 members of this Pop qualified to be Farmers before the hire (52%), of the 85 of them who were newly promoted to Engineers, 44 of these new Engineers are also qualified to become Farmers.
To be considered for a job as Aristocrat a Pop must have at least moderate Wealth, and the more Wealth they have the faster they will develop this potential. Unlike many other jobs Literacy is not a requirement for being accepted into the aristocracy, but an education does make it easier. Bureaucrats and Officers have an easier time becoming Aristocrats than other members of society, while Pops who suffer discrimination on account of their culture have a much harder time. Finally, if a Pop does not meet the minimum Wealth requirement, they actually devolve any prior potential for becoming Aristocrats. This means that down-and-out former nobles robbed of their land and forced to go unemployed or (perish the thought) become a wage laborer will - over time - lose their ability to return to their former social class. All factors and numbers are work-in-progress.
Like all Pop attributes, Qualifications follow the Pops as they split, merge, move between buildings, migrate, and die. If you had previously developed a lot of potential Bureaucrats in your country but ran into budgetary problems and had to shut down your schools, over time those Pops who have already developed the Qualifications to become Bureaucrats will die off and not be replaced by newly educated ones. If your Capitalists in a given state had been underpaying their local discriminated employees to the degree that nobody gained the Qualifications to take over for them, and then some of those Capitalists move away to operate a newly opened Iron Mine in the next state over, rather than promoting some of the local discriminated Laborers to the newly opened jobs they will simply leave the spots open (and the mines underproducing) until some qualified Capitalists move in from elsewhere to take over.
Qualifications are entirely moddable by simply providing the computational factors that should go into determining how the value develops each month. If you want to make a mod to split up the Clergymen Profession into individual variants for each Religion in the game, you could make the Imam Profession dependent on the Pop being Sunni or Shiite. If you wanted Aristocrat Qualification development to be highly dependent on the amount of unproductive Arable Land in the state the Pop lives in, you could do that. An event option or Decision that makes it faster and easier to educate Engineers but harder to educate Officers for the next 10 years? Absolutely.
A breakdown of all Pops in Lower Egypt that qualify to become Engineers. Of course, any openings will be offered to existing Engineers first, and not all of the remaining qualified Pops would actually be interested in the job - though if it was lucrative enough, perhaps some Aristocrats on a failing Subsistence Farm would consider a career change.
The intent of Qualifications is to signal to a player what capacity for employment they have available among any subset of their population. They cannot, for example, conquer a state filled with under-educated people they also legally discriminate against and expect to immediately build up a cutting-edge manufacturing- and trade center there. These efforts will be throttled by their inability to employ the locals into highly qualified positions, meaning they have to wait for members of their already qualified workforce to migrate there from the old country to take on any high-status positions created for them. But by building out their education system, paying Bureaucracy to extend their administrative reach to the new state through incorporation, and changing their Laws to extend citizenship to these new residents, they can start to build this capacity also in the locals.
In summary, Qualifications is the mechanism by which access to education and your stance on discrimination - in addition to many other factors - impact your ability to expand different parts of your society. It is also the mechanism that sorts Pops logically into the economic (and thereby political) niches you carve out as you expand, ensuring your laws and economic conditions inform the social mobility of Pops based on who they are. Its quite subtle, and you might not even notice its there - until you run into the challenges caused by rapid industrialization, mass migration, conquests, colonization, and other drastic population shifts.
That is all for this week! Next Thursday we will finally get into how all this economic activity translates into revenue streams for you, when Martin presents the mechanics governing the Treasury and national debt.
Hello again and happy Thursday! Today were going to follow up on last weeks dev diary about Markets, which touched on Infrastructure but did not explain how it works. Infrastructure is an important mechanic for the economic simulation of the game, simulating the cost of moving goods over land and creating the necessary, well, infrastructure to support wide-scale industrialization.
So what is Infrastructure then? Infrastructure is represented by two distinct values that each State has: Infrastructure and Infrastructure Usage, which together determine its Market Access. So long as the Infrastructure in the State is greater than or equal to the Infrastructure Usage, everything is fine and the State maintains a Market Access of 100%, but if usage starts exceeding the available Infrastructure, Market Access will be reduced by an amount proportional to how much of the usage is not being serviced.
For example, if a state has an Infrastructure of 45 with a usage of 90, its Market Access will only be 50%. Market Access and its effects is something weve already covered in the previous development diary, but to briefly go over it again, a low Market Access means that a State is unable to fully integrate its local market into the National Market, which can lead to adverse price conditions from local over- or undersupply of goods.
Minsk has somewhat overextended their local Infrastructure, but with a large population and mostly staple production both their industries and consumers will probably be fine until the railway arrives
This imbalance goes in both directions. If you have one bread basket state and one iron mining state, and they both have perfect Market Access, the price of iron and grain will be the same in both. If the iron mining states Market Access is reduced, the markets price of iron goes up while the local price of iron in the mining state goes down. But in addition to this the iron mining state will be unable to source as much grain, raising the local price there but reducing its price somewhat across the rest of the market.
If your consumption matches your local production, as is often the case in rural states where the production consists of staple goods your people require, this isnt such a big problem! You could perhaps even build some simple Textile Mills and Livestock Ranches in the same underdeveloped state to provide cheap wool clothing if the local population is large enough to demand it in sufficient quantity. But if youre looking to manufacture more complex goods (or use more demanding Production Methods) you need goods you might only be able to source from another state in your market, or which you can only import from a foreign nation. These goods in turn might be lucrative but only if there are buyers for them - buyers who can actually afford them. Your schemes to get rich off Luxury Clothes and Porcelain wont work if you cant reach all the far-flung wealthy Pops of your empire.
The Infrastructure Usage of a State is determined by which types of Buildings exist in a State and which level they are. Generally, the more urban and specialized the building, the more Infrastructure it uses per level, so Chemical Industries (a heavy industry building) will use several times more Infrastructure than a Rye Farms building of the same level.
Minsks urban buildings - the Furniture Manufacturies, Textile Mills, even the Government Administrations - account for 2/3rds of its Infrastructure usage despite employing the same number of people as the Logging Camps and Rye Farms. Subsistence Farms and Urban Centers do not use Infrastructure, the former because its production is nearly all for domestic use and the latter because the Infrastructure it provides cancel out the Infrastructure it requires.
Infrastructure is provided and modified by numerous sources. Just about all States in the game have at least a little bit of Infrastructure based on the technology level of the country that owns it and its state of incorporation (colonies have lower infrastructure than incorporated states, for example). However, over the course of the game, the most crucial aspect of your Infrastructure is the size of your Railway network. As weve previously mentioned, Railways is a Building that produces Transportation, an intangible good sold to Pops, but they are also your main source of Infrastructure.
This means that if you want to industrialize a State, it isnt enough to simply build those industries there and have the Pops available to work in them, you also need to ensure that said industries have enough infrastructure to support them. This of course has a variety of costs involved in that infrastructure-providing Railways need both Pops to work them and access to goods like Coal and Engines. There are alternatives that can be used in the short-term, such as using your Authority on a Road Maintenance decree to ensure the populace dont allow the roads to fall into disrepair or become unsafe, but such options will never be sufficient in themselves for large-scale industrialization. Of course, Railways also grow more efficient over the course of the game with such inventions as Diesel trains and Electricity, requiring less levels of rail to support a certain number of Buildings.
This early Railway has rapidly become one of Minsks best employers, at least for Pops with the qualifications to become Machinists. Unfortunately few people do, so the Infrastructure production is not currently as high as it might be if the railway was fully staffed. Ticket prices, however, are sky high.
Our intention for railways is that they must be able to find their way back to the market capital, or an exit port destined for the market capital, in order to be useful. In effect this means that any railway can only provide infrastructure up to the amount of infrastructure provided by the best adjacent railway that connects it to the market capital. If you want good access to the Sulfur Mines in Aginskoye for your Munition Plants in St. Petersburg, you best get started on that Trans-Siberian Railway sooner rather than later, because it will take a good long while to build.
Geography, of course, also plays a significant role in other ways when it comes to Infrastructure, and this is represented in Victoria 3 through State Traits. State Traits are bonuses and/or maluses given to a particular State representing particular geographical features, climate and so on. State Traits have a variety of effects, but the most common ones are to either affect the production of a particular resource (for example, if a State contains high quality coal this may be represented through a State Trait that makes coal mines in the state more efficient) or, more significantly for the topic on hand, to provide or modify Infrastructure.
The high-yield Russian Forests are of great benefit to the Logging Industry in Minsk, as long as theres enough infrastructure available to ship the wood off to all the Russian factories and construction sites that demand it.
States with significant rivers get a large boost to Infrastructure, making them excellent candidates for early industrialization
Before we finish up for today, I also just want to mention that Infrastructure does tie into a number of mechanics besides Market Access, such as military logistics and migration, and that Infrastructure is only meant to simulate the cost of transporting goods on land - where the sea is concerned, there are other systems at play but all of those are topics for another day, so for now I bid farewell and encourage you all to tune back in next week as Mikael returns with another economy-related dev diary about Employment and Qualifications.
Welcome to the first Monthly Update video for Victoria 3. In this video, we take a look at what has been going on in the first batch of Dev Diaries, and more! [previewyoutube=sM57wXqlK1E;full][/previewyoutube]
Hello again! Today we will dig into Victoria 3s National Market system. Markets are what drives the games dynamic economy by determining a rational price based on supply and demand for all trade goods in every state throughout the world. Expanding your national market to encompass more territory means more raw resources for your furnaces and more customers for your manufacturing industries. As your industrial base grows, so does your demand for infrastructure to bring goods to market.
The French market is swimming in cheap Luxury Furniture, Porcelain, Fruit, and Meat. Luxury Clothes and Wine are well-balanced. But as far as luxuries go, Sugar in particular has a sizable deficit and securing a reliable source of that would likely result in improved supply of domestic distilled Liquor as well.
By default every country is in control of its own market which is typically (but not always) centered on their capital state. Every state connected to this market capital - overland or by sea through ports - is also part of the market. These states all have a variable degree of Market Access representing how well-connected they are to every other state in the market. Market Access is based on Infrastructure, which we will talk more about in next weeks development diary!
All local consumption and production in states contribute to the markets Buy Orders and Sell Orders. Think of these as orders on a commodity market: higher consumption of Grain will cause traders to submit more Grain Buy Orders while higher production of Silk will result in more Sell Orders for Silk.
Furniture is a popular commodity with the growing urban lower middle-class, and its not likely its price in the French Market will drop anytime soon. Assuming the appropriate raw materials remain in good supply, upsizing this markets Furniture industry is a safe bet.
As we discussed in the Goods development diary, all goods have a base price. This is the price it would fetch given ideal market conditions: all demand is fulfilled perfectly with available supply, with zero goods produced in excess of demand. If buildings produce more than is being demanded each unit produced will be sold at a depressed price. This benefits consumers at the detriment of producers. Conversely, if demand is higher than supply, the economy of buildings producing those goods will be booming while Pops and buildings that rely on that goods to continue operating will be overpaying.
When determining prices for goods across a markets many states we start by determining a market price. This is based on the balance between a markets Buy and Sell Orders, with the base price as a baseline. The more Buy Orders than Sell Orders the higher the price will be and vice versa. Buy and Sell Orders submitted to the market are scaled by the amount of Market Access the state has. This means a state with underdeveloped infrastructure will trade less with the market and rely more on locally available goods.
States with full Market Access will use the market price for all its goods. Otherwise only part of the market price can be used, with the remainder of the local price made up by the local consumption and production of the goods. All actual transactions are done in local prices, with market prices acting to moderate local imbalances proportional to Market Access.
Glass is overproduced in Orsha. Coupled with a suffering Market Access in Orsha this means the Glassworks there cant sell at the somewhat high market norm for their goods. This works out fine for local Pops and Urban Centers who consume it as they get to pay less than market price. But continuing to expand the Glassworks in Orsha will only lead to worsening Market Access for all local industries, and wont lead to a better price of Glass anywhere else since fewer and fewer of Orshas Glass Sell Order ends up reaching the market. We can see this development on the market price chart: the market price used to be high due to low supply, we started expanding the Glassworks in Orsha which lowered the market price, until the point Orshas expanding industry became a bottleneck and prices started to rise again. The last few expansions have done nothing to lower the market price even as the local price has been steadily dropping.
If an oversupply becomes large enough, the selling price will be so low producers will be unable to keep wages and thereby production volume up unless theyre receiving government subsidies. But oversupply is not remotely as bad as when goods are grossly undersupplied, which causes a shortage. Goods being in shortage leads to terrible effects for those in your market who rely on it; for example, drastically decreased production efficiency of buildings that rely on it as an input. Shortages demand immediate action, whether that be fast-tracking expanding your own domestic production, importing it from other markets, or expanding your market to include prominent producers of the goods.
Lacking access to a sufficient quantity of Dyes, this poor Textile Mill can only manufacture 42 units of Clothes this week instead of 126, which is entirely insufficient to make ends meet. Unless something changes, its wages will be cut to compensate and eventually Cash Reserves will run dry, rendering the building inoperable as its workers abandon it.
If importing Dyes, growing them on Plantations, or manufacturing them in high-tech Chemical Plants to fix the shortage is not an option, returning the Textile Mills to pre-industrial, low-yield handicraft will remove the need for Dyes and restore the Textile Mills to marginal profitability.
Astute observers familiar with previous Victorias will note there are no goods stockpiles involved in this system. In the predecessor game a single unit of a goods would be produced, sold, traded, perhaps refined, stored, and ultimately consumed, with global price development determined by how many units are inserted into or removed from the worlds total supply. In Victoria 3, a single unit of goods is produced and immediately sold at a price determined by how many consumers are willing to buy it at the moment of production. When this happens prices shift right away along with actual supply and demand, and trade between markets is modelled using Buy and Sell Orders. This more open economic model is both more responsive to sudden economic shifts and less prone to mysterious systemic failures where all the worlds cement might end up locked inside a warehouse in Missouri. Any stockpiling in the system is represented as cash (for example through a buildings Cash Reserves or a countrys Treasury) or as Pop Wealth, which forms the basis for Standard of Living and determines their level of consumption.
As the econ nerds (you know who you are) will by now have intuited, this lack of goods stockpiling in turn implies that in Victoria 3 we have moved away from the fixed global money supply introduced in Victoria 2. The main reason for this is simply due to how many limitations such a system places on what we can do with the economy in the game. With Victoria 2s extremely restrictive and technically challenging closed market and world market buying order, it simply wouldnt have been possible to do things such as Goods Substitution, Trade Routes, dynamic National Markets, transportation costs for Goods and so on in the ways we have, either due to incompatibilities in the design, or simply because it couldnt possibly be made performant. We believe that the complexity, responsive simulation, and interesting gameplay added by this approach more than make up for what we lose.
Finally, a small teaser of something we will be talking more about once we get around to presenting the diplomatic gameplay. As you may have gleaned from the top screenshot, it is possible for several countries to participate in a single market. Sometimes this is the result of a Customs Union Pact led by the more powerful nation but more often its because of a subject relationship with a puppet or semi-independent colonies. In certain cases countries can even own a small plot of land inside someone elses market, such as a Treaty Port. The route to expanding your countrys economic power is not only through increasing domestic production and consumption, but also through diplomatic and/or military means.
The Zollverein, or German Customs Union, is a broad unified market of German states controlled by Prussia. Without such a union many smaller German countries would find their economies too inefficient and trade opportunities severely hampered by geography and lack of access to naval trade.
Thats the fundamentals of Victoria 3s pricing and domestic-trade system! As mentioned, next week well take a look at an aspect of the game thats closely related to markets and pricing: Infrastructure.
Lets talk about Government Institutions! These are the services your government provides to its Pops - and I use scare quotes here because while that does certainly include things like schools and workplace safety controls, it also means conscription offices, militarized police, and poorhouses.
While Laws are political hot buttons with your Interest Groups, Institutions are a side effect of those Laws, and its not as politically fraught to expand your pre-existing health care system as it is to establish or dismantle it. But the Laws that bring an Institution into existence also govern what side effects they have, and Interest Groups will care a lot about those.
As we all know, Institutions run on Bureaucracy like gamers run on caffeine (I would have said cars run on gas, but that isnt universally true anymore, is it?). Bureaucracy comes from Government Administration buildings, which employ Clerks and Bureaucrats that consume Paper (and later on other goods, like Telephones) in the process. The more Government Administration buildings you have, the more and larger Institutions you can operate at once.
Running a positive Bureaucracy balance is great for remaining responsive to your peoples evolving needs. In the meantime, any excess Bureaucracy will be used to marginally improve construction efforts around your country.
The cost of Institutions, or the cost of one level of an Institution, is dependent on the size of the population across your Incorporated states. An important aspect of Institutions is that the effects and benefits they apply only affect Incorporated parts of your country - if you have any colonial frontiers, contested territory, or recently annexed land you havent Incorporated yet, these do not pay taxes to you nor do they cost you Bureaucracy, but they also cant access your awesome hospitals.
Ways of decreasing the cost of providing Institutions to your people include:
Currently planned Institutions are:
After a couple weeks vacation, weve now returned to our usual weekly dev diary schedule! Today we will be diving deeper into Victorias politics to talk about Laws. Legal reform in your country creates different political, economic, and social conditions for your Pops, which over time changes the fabric of your society. This change can be slow and incremental, or fast and revolutionary - sometimes literally.
There are three major categories of Laws with seven sub-categories in each, which themselves contain up to half a dozen specific Law options. As always everything here is being heavily iterated upon, including these sub-categories, so the laws you see at release will not exactly match what were telling you here!
Welcome to the first Monthly Update video for Victoria 3. In this video, we take a look at what has been going on in the first batch of Dev Diaries, and more! [previewyoutube=K3dJb4TZNQE;full][/previewyoutube]
Hello once again and welcome back to yet another Victoria 3 dev diary. Where previous dev diaries have been focusing on the economy, were now going to switch gears to another core pillar of the Victoria series - internal politics! More specifically, were going to be talking about Interest Groups, which form the nucleus of Victoria 3s political gameplay.
What then, are Interest Groups? Fundamentally, an Interest Group is a collection of pops that espouse certain political views and want to change the country to be more in line with those views. Interest Groups are drawn from a number of different templates, but will vary in their exact views from country to country, based on factors such as the local religion, which social movements have appeared in the country or the personal views of their leader.
The Landowners is an Interest Group dominated by the Aristocracy and tends to be firmly in the conservative side of politics
As mentioned, Interest Groups are fundamentally made up of Pops - all individuals in all Pops are either members of an Interest Group or Politically Inactive, with the ratio in each based on factors such as Profession, Wealth, Literacy etc. Individuals inside Pops contribute Political Strength to their Interest Group of choice, with the amount they contribute again dependent on multiple factors, the main ones being their material Wealth and the status (and/or votes!) they are offered under the nations power structure.
For example, a single wealthy Aristocrat in an Oligarchy will provide hundreds or even thousands times the political strength of a poor laborer. The total Political Strength of all Pops in an Interest Group is what gives it its level of Clout - the amount of political weight it can assert on the country and the government. Its important to note though that Pops are not unified in which Interest Groups they support - individuals within Pops are the ones who decide their Interest Group, and a single Pop can potentially have individuals supporting every Interest Group in the game (in different numbers).
Some Pops have no political strength at all, usually due to being disenfranchised under the nations laws (such as people of a religion or culture that is discriminated against, or women in countries that havent instituted womens suffrage). These Pops are outside the system so to speak, unable to demand reform through the regular political system of Interest Groups, and instead having to rely on other methods to put pressure on the government, but we wont focus on those today.
Individual members of a Pop can support different Interest Groups - or stay out of politics altogether!
As mentioned above, Interest Groups have a number of ideologies which determine their views on which laws the country should or should not enact. Different Interest Groups will have different ideologies (the Landowners are significantly more conservative than the Trade Unions, for example - shocking, I know!) but these are not entirely set in stone - they can change over the course of the game and will also vary based on the current leader of the Interest Group, who comes with his or her own personal ideology and view of the world. Additionally, some Interest Groups in certain countries have unique ideologies colored by their religion and culture, such as the Confucian Scholars Interest Group in Qing China who (unsurprisingly) espouse a Confucian ideology.
Interest Groups will generally favor laws that benefit them in some way
I mentioned previously that Interest Groups have a level of Clout based on the total Political Strength of their constituent Pops. Clout is calculated by comparing their Political Strength to that of the other Interest Groups in the country - if all the Interest Groups in Belgium put together have 100k Political Strength and the Landowners have 30k, they correspondingly get 30% of the Clout in Belgium. The Interest Groups Clout will determine their classification - Powerful, Influential or Marginalized.
Interest Groups also have a level of Approval, which is based on factors such as how much they approve of the countrys laws, whether they are in government or in opposition, and how many of their individual members are Loyalists or Radicals (more on those in a later dev diary). There are numerous other factors that can affect Approval as well, such as how you react to certain events or decisions that you take.
Together, the classification and Approval of an Interest Group determines which Traits are active for an Interest Group at any given time, and how impactful they are. There are different traits, positive and negative, with positive traits being activated when an Interest Group is happy and negative ones when they are not so happy. If an Interest Group is Powerful, the effects of any traits they have active (good or bad) are stronger, while an Interest Group that is Marginalized cannot activate traits at all, as they are too weak to exert an effect on the whole country.
Traits are, of course, not the only way that Interest Groups can affect a country, and its even possible for one (or several!) angry Interest Groups to start a civil war, potentially bringing in foreign countries to support them.
Keep the aristocracy happy, and theyll be more willing to reinvest their hard-earned money into the country
Now, something thats been a hotly debated topic in the community in regards to Interest Groups is Political Parties and whether they will be a part of Victoria 3 so I want to briefly touch on this. What I can tell you for now is that we are currently looking into a solution where parties can form in certain countries as constellations of Interest Groups holding a shared political platform. This is something thats by no means fully nailed down at this point though, so dont take this as a 100% firm commitment to how they would function. What I can tell you for sure is that we will come back to this particular topic later!
Thats all for today, though well certainly be coming back to the subject of Interest Groups and looking at the different types you will encounter in later dev diaries. With July and summer vacations coming up, were going to take a short break from Development Diaries, but well be back on July 22nd as Mikael returns to continue talking about politics in Victoria 3, on the subject of Laws.
Hello again and happy Thursday! Today we will be taking a deeper look inside Buildings to explore Production Methods. These determine the functions of the building, its inputs and outputs, and what employee types it requires to operate.
Many management games let you upgrade a building to increase its efficiency or expand its functionality. In these games, after the upgrade investment has been paid the impact is permanent and nearly always superior in every way to the building's previous functionality. But in Victoria 3 there are no actions without reactions, and novel innovations don't just make buildings better with no side effects. Improving industrial processes over time is to be expected, but in some cases those improvements might require goods as input that the country has scant access to, while others permit the output of a new type of end product at the expense of the old one. As a result, buildings in Victoria 3 require more flexible upgrade paths than what's afforded by permanent, linear, no-brainer improvements.
All buildings have several categories of Production Methods, usually between 2 and 5. Only one is active at any given time in each category. Most categories fall into one of these types:
Base: governs the general "tech level" and efficiency of the building, produces goods typical for the building type
Refining: reduces output of typical goods in favor of output of specialized or luxury goods, sometimes adding a special input
Automation: adds industrial goods as input to reduce the building's unskilled workforce requirement
Ownership: determines who owns shares in the building; typically governed by Laws
With the right technologies Food Industries can make Groceries from both Grain (Bakeries) and Fish (Canneries). They can also refine Grain and Sugar into Liquor (Distilleries). With advanced technologies Food Industries can be partially automated, drastically reducing the need for unskilled labor. Simple Food Industries are operated by Merchant Guilds (Shopkeepers), while more advanced and profitable Food Industries are owned by Capitalists who reinvest some of their dividends.
As one example, an Iron Mine's base Production Method determines if miners use only picks and shovels or if they also use some sort of engine-driven pumping mechanism. There are several different pumping technologies which also determine what fuel is used. The more advanced the pumping mechanism the more deposits can be accessed and the faster Iron can be mined, but the more Coal or Oil is used in the process. With higher tech pumps comes a requirement for more Engineers and Machinists to be on-site to control and oversee its operation. This creates more demand for qualified workers and also opens up a number of better paid positions to those Pops who meet the qualifications.
The revolution in chemical sciences of the era also enabled the use of explosives in mining, which is a secondary Production Method category used only in mines. Once Nitroglycerin is invented, it can be used in mines to generate even more minerals, at the expense of Explosives produced by the Chemical Industry but also with a higher rate of workplace accidents. By researching less volatile Dynamite, even more minerals are extracted at the expense of even more Explosives, with the additional benefit that far fewer workers will blow themselves up on the job.
Once invented, portable Steam Donkey engines can be deployed at mining sites to drastically reduce the amount of manual labor required just for hauling. This costs the building some money in the form of Coal and Engines, but reduces the amount of money they have to pay in wages. Perhaps more importantly it frees those Laborers up to do other work in other buildings if the state is running low on workers. But if wages are already very depressed it might not be a great idea to purchase expensive industrial goods just to increase the unqualified labor pool further, so this might not be a no-brainer decision for a player to make.
In most countries, simple mines are owned and operated by Merchant Guilds at game start. These are small-time purveyors of the goods produced represented by Shopkeepers. Once mines start to industrialize, Capitalists step in to take over ownership. In most cases these Capitalists will come from Shopkeepers promoted to these newly created positions, but some might come from other Pops in the state, even other Capitalists in buildings not quite as lucrative as these new mines. There are fewer Capitalists than Shopkeepers but they draw a higher wage, and more importantly they will reinvest some of their earnings into the country's expanding industry depending on how much profit their workplace is generating for them. As new ideas spread across your society you might be able to make the mining industry publicly traded instead of privately held, and later on in the game perhaps even nationalize them to be run by government bureaucrats or turn them into cooperatives where profit is split between workers.
Production Methods aren't limited to consuming and producing goods. Government Administrations employ Bureaucrats and Clerks who use Paper to produce Bureaucracy, one of the game's Capacities that let you govern more people and extend more state services to them. Railways consume Engines and a fuel such as Coal to produce both Transportation and Infrastructure, the former which is sold on the market and the latter which allows the state to support more buildings without loss of Market Access. Universities employ Academics that let the state guide research and development of new technologies and ideas. Virtually any kind of currency, modifier, or effect can be produced by Production Methods in buildings and can be applied in a variety of ways to the country, state, or even the building itself.
A basic Government Administration consumes 10 Paper and produces 50 Bureaucracy per fully-staffed level, but each additional level beyond the first adds a +2% Throughput bonus due to economy of scale. This increases both consumption of Paper and output of Bureaucracy, yielding more productivity from each of the Pops that work the building.
This of course adds a tremendous capacity for modding in new Buildings and Production Methods! Embassies that increase your Influence, but which can also be configured to consume Wine and Meat at state expense to increase the speed at which you Improve Relations? Shantytown Temples that can only be built on coastlines, that consume Fish and create jobs for pops qualifying for the Deep Ones profession, increasing state mortality but also the weekly rate of the global cthulhu_rising counter? We can't wait to see what madness you unleash!
If tweaking multiple Production Methods across several categories on every single building in the game sounds a bit complex compared to linear building upgrades - you're right! Thankfully we've built a number of tools to help with this process. Foremost among these are the Buildings panel, where you can get an overview of all buildings in your country organized by major and minor type. For example you could get an overview of all Rural buildings, or all Furniture Manufactories, or all Ports. If you have buildings of the same type in several different states, you can break it down further to view the individual building. On each level you can see how profitable the building is and adjust its Production Methods. You can even set all Production Methods for a certain building type to a specific setting all across your country with one click.
From the Buildings panel you can get a birds-eye view of all industries in your country and see at a glance how theyre doing financially. You can change Production Methods on an individual building or on all of them at once. You can even expand buildings directly from this screen if you so choose, or click on one to get an in-depth view of its balance sheet and workforce.
To minimize the requirement for mental math we have also created prediction tools that give you a breakdown of what to expect from choosing a certain Production Method, based on profitability predictions taking adjusted production and consumption into account, and summarizing which new job positions will be created and which will disappear. While it may on the surface seem obvious to just enable the Production Methods that make the buildings more profitable, keep in mind the societal effects as well - are there enough Pops in the state that qualify for the more advanced jobs this new process requires? Will the wage for these new jobs be sufficient to entice those Pops to switch professions? Will you inadvertently create a whole new class of well-to-do Machinists that may have pro-labor union sentiments? Or will the increased profits not lead to higher wages in the building because they're already competitive and fully employed, and will simply result in more dividends for the shareholders which will be funneled into increased luxury consumption? Which you choose might depend on your populations social mobility, what politics you favor in your country (a socialist uprising may not be in your plans!) and whether you're able to supply luxuries yourself without benefiting your rival. More profitable domestic industries are never bad, but should be far from the only consideration when building your society.
Predictive tooltips will explain the anticipated impact on the buildings Balance as a result of changes in production, consumption, and wage requirements, as well as the changes in employment that could also impact the countrys politics over time. You will also be forewarned if there arent enough qualifying Pops to take on any new professions created, as this could limit your industrys effectiveness.
That is all for this week. We will return to discussing more economic intricacies later, but for the next little while we'll be exploring domestic politics - starting next week when Martin will be presenting Interest Groups!
Happy Thursday and welcome back to yet another Victoria 3 dev diary, this time on the subject of Goods! Goods are a core economic feature of Victoria 3, just as they were in previous Victoria games, and come in a wide variety of types. Also, as in previous Victoria games, the manufacturing of Goods (by Pops in Buildings) is how the vast majority of the wealth in Victoria 3 is created.
Fundamentally, a unit of Goods represent a quantity of a certain type of natural resource, manufactured good or intangible service and come attached with a price tag. This price varies both in base (a single unit of Tanks is pricier than a single unit of Fabric) and in actual market value, as the prices of Goods change depending on supply and demand.
A selection of goods that are bought and sold in the British Market.
There are four broad categories of Goods: Staple Goods, Luxury Goods, Industrial Goods and Military Goods. Of these, Staple/Luxury Goods are mainly consumed by Pops, and Industrial/Military Goods are mainly consumed by buildings, but there are no hard rules here - you will find Buildings using Luxury Goods and Pops purchasing Industrial Goods when and where it makes sense for them to do so.
Staple Goods are everyday goods that Pops need to live, such as food to eat, wood to heat their homes, and clothes to wear. Staple Goods tend to be purchased in vast quantities by poor and middle class pops, with richer pops generally eschewing them for luxury variants.
Grain - possibly the most Staple of all Staple Goods!
Luxury Goods are the things that Pops do not necessarily need but definitely want, such as fine foods, luxury drinks like Tea and Coffee, or fine clothes made from chinese silk. Luxuries tend to be more profitable to produce than Staple Goods, but depend on having a customer base with money - a poor factory worker isnt going to be buying a whole lot of mahogany cabinets.
You can never have too many painted Ming vases, I always say.
Industrial Goods are goods such as Iron, Coal, Rubber and Lead whose main purpose is often to be converted into other, more profitable goods. Securing a steady supply of vital Industrial Goods is crucial to Industrialization and growing the GDP of your country.
Tools are essential to the operation of many industries.
Military Goods are goods such as Small Arms, Ammunition and Warships that are used by military buildings to arm and supply the armies and navies of the 19th century nations. The more technologically advanced the army or navy, the more complex (and expensive!) Military Goods they will need.
Im told that soldiers tend to perform better if theyre given ammunition for their guns.
Well be returning to the topic of Goods in later dev diaries when discussing related mechanics such as Markets, Pop Needs, Goods Substitution and Cultural Obsessions... but for now, I bid you adieu for a while, as next week Mikael will provide you with a dev diary about something weve been teasing for some time now - Production Methods!
Hello again everyone! Its Thursday again, and that means that its time to talk about Buildings. Buildings are a core mechanic of Victoria 3, as it is where the Pops work to produce resources such as Goods. Buildings represent a wide range of industries, businesses and government functions, from humble subsistence farms to complex motor industries and sprawling financial districts. In this dev diary, were going to broadly cover the main types of buildings and their function in Victoria 3.
To talk about buildings though, I first have to mention states! States are a concept that should be generally familiar to anyone whos played some of our other games such as Victoria II or Hearts of Iron IV - a geographic unit of varying size in which much of Victoria 3s gameplay takes place. States are where Pops live and (more importantly for our subject matter) where Buildings are located and built.
The State of Gtaland in Sweden
We will return to states more in later dev diaries, but for now lets keep talking about Buildings!
Before we start on Buildings, something thats important to note is that Buildings are just places where Pops can work and generally do not represent a single building - a single level of Government Administration, for example, represents the necessary buildings and infrastructure to support a certain number of Bureaucrats. Buildings always need qualified pops to work in them to yield any benefit, and an empty building is just that - empty and completely useless. This holds true even for buildings like Railroads and Ports that did not need Pops to work in them in Victoria 2.
Most buildings are directly constructed, but some (like the Subsistence Buildings below) will appear automatically based on certain conditions. When Buildings are constructed, the construction uses Pop labor and goods, and the costs involved will be subject to market forces.
But onto the different building types! First out, we have Subsistence Buildings. These are a special type of highly inefficient Buildings that cannot manually be built or destroyed, but rather will appear anywhere in the world where there is Arable Land that isnt being used for another type of building. The vast majority of the worlds population starts the game working in subsistence buildings as Peasants, and much of the games industrialization process is about finding more productive employment for your Peasants.
Peasants eke out a meager living in these Subsistence Farms, contributing little to GDP and taxes per capita
Another special type of building is Urban Centers. Like Subsistence Buildings, these are automatically created rather than built, with the level of Urban Center in a State being tied to the amount of Urbanization generated by its other buildings. Urban Centers primarily employ Shopkeepers and provide a number of important local functions that we will get into at a later point.
The Urban Center is where youll find most of your middle-class Shopkeepers
Next up we have Government Buildings. These are buildings that are fully funded by the state (ie, you!) and provide crucial civil services required for the smooth running of a Victorian nation. Examples include Government Administrations where Bureaucrats produce Bureaucracy for the administration of incorporated states and funding of Institutions, and Universities where Academics produce Innovation for technological progression.
Bureaucrats work in Government Administrations to provide Bureaucracy - the lifeblood of the government
The counterpart to Government Buildings is Private Industries. The vast majority of Buildings in Victoria 3 fall under this category, which includes a broad range of industries such as (non-subsistence!) farms, plantations, mines and factories. Unlike Government Buildings, Private Industries are not owned by the state but rather by Pops such as Capitalists and Aristocrats, who reap the profits they bring in and pay wages to the other Pops working there (usually at least - under certain economic systems the ownership of buildings may be radically different!).
Many of these buildings are limited by locally available resources such as Arable Land for agriculture and simply how much iron is available in the state for Iron Mines. Urban Buildings such as Factories however, are only limited by how many people you can cram into the state, simulating the more densely populated nature of cities. In short, there is no system of building slots or anything like that, as we want limitations on buildings to function in a sensible and realistic way.
Several different types of Private Industries are shown below
Finally there are Development Buildings. These are often (but not always!) government buildings that distinguish themselves by providing vital state-level functions. A couple examples are Barracks that recruit and train soldiers from the local population and Railways that provide the Infrastructure other buildings need to bring their goods to the Market.
From left to right: Barracks, Port, Naval Bases and Railway
To finish up this dev diary I just want to mention that building up your country is meant to be more of a hands-on experience in Victoria 3, as this is absolutely core to the society-building aspect of the game and forms a major part of the games core loop. This naturally also means that we need to give the player the necessary tools to manage their buildings in a large empire, which will likely involve some form of autonomous building construction, though we havent yet nailed down exactly what form that will take (and whether it will involve more direct decision making on the part of the investor class). Ultimately though, we want the player, not the AI to be the one primarily in charge of the development of their own country.
Well, there you have it. There is of course a lot in here (such as Production Methods) that will receive further explanation in the many more dev diaries we have planned, so be sure to tune in next week as I talk about Goods. See you then!
Hello and welcome back to another Victoria 3 dev diary! Today we will be talking about three of the four of the main currencies of the game - namely Capacities (the last being Money, which well of course come back to later).
We mentioned in the very first dev diary that there is no mana in Victoria 3, and since this dev diary is about the games currencies, I want to be clear on what I mean by that. When we say there is no mana we mean that the resources in Victoria 3 arise and are spent in clearly defined ways that are parts of the simulation, not from an overly abstract concept or vague idea. There is, of course, some degree of abstraction involved (all games are abstractions after all), but we want all the games currencies to be strongly rooted in the mechanics and not feel arbitrary.
But enough about that and onto Capacities. What exactly are they?
Well, for starters, calling them currencies is actually not accurate. Capacities are not a pooled resource and are not accumulated or spent, but instead, have a constant generation and a constant usage (similar to for example Administrative Capacity in Stellaris), and you generally want to keep your usage from exceeding your generation. Each capacity represents one specific area of your nations ability to govern and is used solely for matters relating to that area.
As mentioned, Capacities are not accumulated, so excess generation is not pooled, but instead there is an effect for each Capacity which is positive if generation exceeds usage and quite negative if usage exceeds generation - a country that incorporates territories left and right without expanding its bureaucratic corps may quickly find itself mired in debt as tax collection collapses under the strain!
Bureaucracy represents a nations ability to govern, invest in and collect taxes from its incorporated territory. It is produced by the Government Administration building, where many of a nations Bureaucrats will be employed. All of a nations Incorporated States use a base amount of Bureaucracy which increases with the size of their population, and further increased by each Institution (such as Education or Police - more on those later!) that a country has invested in. Overall, the purpose of Bureaucracy is to ensure that there is a cost to ruling over, taxing and providing for your population - administrating China should not be cheap!
The Swedish Bureaucracy is currently a bit overworked and the country could certainly benefit from another Government Administration building or two.
Authority represents the Head of States personal power and ability to enact change in the country through decree. It is generated from your Laws - generally, the more repressive and authoritarian the country, the more Authority it will generate - and is used by a variety of actions such as enacting decrees in specific states, interacting with Interest Groups and promoting or banning certain types of Goods. Overall, the purpose of Authority is to create an interesting trade-off between more and less authoritarian societies - by shifting the distribution of power away from the Pops into the hands of the ruler, your ability to rule by decree is increased, and vice versa.
The Swedish King has more Authority at his disposal than he is currently using, slightly speeding up the rate at which laws can be passed.
Influence represents a countrys ability to conduct diplomacy and its reach on the global stage. It is generated primarily from your Rank (Great Powers have more Influence than Major Powers and so on) and is used to support ongoing diplomatic actions and pacts, such as Improving Relations, Alliances, Trade Deals, Subjects and so on. Overall, the purpose of Influence is to force players to make interesting choices about which foreign countries they want to build strong diplomatic relationships with.
Sweden has plenty of unused Influence and could certainly afford to support another diplomatic pact or two!
Thats all for today! Join us again next week as I cover something yet another topic thats fundamental to Victoria 3: Buildings. See you then!
Population management, Society Building, Conflicts and Diplomacy: a grand tomorrow begins with a grand vision. In this video, Game Director Martin Anward and Lead Game Designer Mikael Andersson tell us about the Game Vision for Victoria 3. [previewyoutube=1_NBtwY9y6s;full][/previewyoutube]
Hello everyone! Im Mikael, Victoria 3s lead game designer - and oh boy does it feel good to finally be able to say that out loud! Today I have the pleasure to reveal some details about that one feature everyone thinks about when they hear Victoria - the Pops.
Pops were introduced in the very first Victoria game to represent your countrys population. Pop mechanics have since snuck into other Paradox titles like Stellaris and Imperator. But this in-depth population simulation is what Victoria is about, and were going to bring you a system with more depth than ever before!
In Victoria 3, Pops are the countrys engine - they work the industries, they pay the taxes, they operate the government institutions, and they fight the wars. Theyre born, they die, they change occupation, they migrate. And they organize, get angry, and start revolutions.
Every Pop is visualized so you can see which demographic sports the best moustache. Note that Pop portraits are very much a work in progress!
You, the player, might be in charge of the country, but youre not in charge of the Pops and cant manipulate them directly. Yet everything you do to the country affects them, and they in turn will react in what they perceive to be their own best interests. A large part of your game will consist of trying to sate your populations appetites for material goods or political reform. But most actions you will take arent to the benefit of every Pop in your nation, and by making life better for one part of the population you may inadvertently upset another demographic.
The most important aspect of Pops are their Professions, which reflects the types of jobs it carries out in the building where they work. A Pops profession determines its social class and can affect its wages, political strength, what other professions it might qualify for, and particularly which political Interest Groups its prone to supporting (which you will hear lots more about in future Dev Diaries.) Some of the Pop professions you will encounter in Victoria 3 are Aristocrats, Capitalists, Bureaucrats, Officers, Shopkeepers, Machinists, Laborers, and Peasants. Investing in industries that provide job opportunities for the kinds of professions you want to encourage in your country is key to the society building gameplay of Victoria 3.
Every variation of Profession, Culture, Religion, and Workplace in the world gets its own unique Pop. At any given time this results in many tens of thousands of Pops in the world working, migrating, procreating, and agitating.
The people that make up a Pop are distinguished into Workforce and Dependents. Members of the Workforce keep the buildings in the game operational and collect a wage from them in return. Those who cannot or arent permitted to be officially employed are considered Dependents. They collect only a small income from odd jobs and government programs.
Laws affect who is included in each category. At game start most countries do not accept women working and collecting a wage outside the home but by reforming laws governing the rights of women more Dependent Pops will enter the Workforce over time. By abolishing child labor, the amount of income Dependents bring home will decrease but will make it easier to educate your populace, increasing their overall Literacy. After a bloody war many Dependents of soldiers may be left without sufficient income, and you may decide to institute pensions to help your population recover.
In short: nothing in your country runs without Pops, and everything about your country affects those Pops, who in turn provide new opportunities and challenges during your tumultuous journey through the Victorian era and beyond.
I have oh so much more to say, but that is all for this week! You will hear much more from me in future Dev Diaries. Next week Martin will return to explain something quite central to the game - Capacities!
Hello everyone!
Yes, youre seeing this right. No, this isnt a belated April Fools joke. After all these years, and all these memes, Victoria 3 really is confirmed at last. Im Martin Wiz Anward, the Game Director of Victoria 3, and its my absolute pleasure to finally be able to reveal what I have been working on since 2018 (around the time I stepped down as Game Director of Stellaris).
So what, then, is Victoria 3? I can start by telling you that its most definitely a proper Victoria game - namely a game with a core focus on Economy, Politics and Internal Country Management and with the iconic Victoria Pop system not just included as a core mechanic but made even deeper than in either of its predecessors.
Though Victoria 3 is its own game and not an iteration on Victoria 2, our ambition is to create a worthy successor that stays true to the core values of the Victoria series while using what have learned over the last decade in terms of making games more accessible - so that we can use that accessibility to build an even deeper game for old and new players alike!
Our vision for Victoria 3 is to create what we call a Society Sim - a game that is first and foremost about the internal workings of the 19th-century country that you are playing and how its society is shaped over the course of the game. Politics, Economy and Diplomacy are the three most important parts of the game - Wars are of course a part of the game (just as they were a part of the Victorian age), but Victoria 3 is *not* a wargame or a game about map painting.
Loading screen from Victoria 3 - The Crystal Palace
Oh, and before you start speculating crazily about what is and is not in the game: No, there is no mana!
Now, there is going to be a lot of dev diaries going forward to dig into the mechanics of the game, but to wrap up this dev diary I want to briefly touch on the four game design pillars that we have been following when designing and building Victoria 3:
Welcome to PDXCON, and to Victoria 3! We have several activities listed up in the PDXCON schedule for all of our Victorians - both new and old - to enjoy.
Announcing the newest Grand Strategy Game from Paradox Interactive, Victoria 3! Guide your nation in the ultimate society simulation from the Industrial Revolution through the Great War.
Wishlist now: https://pdxint.at/3yygRzA
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