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!