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:

• The AI spending system was rewritten to be much smarter about which data was updated and when those updates were actually needed
• The design team made numerous changes to events and other parts of the script which were running slowly
• Improvements were made to market updates to avoid unnecessarily frequent updates of pricing data
• Employment was made much more performant by eliminating rounding errors in the hiring logic that resulted in numerous insignificant employment changes
• The programmers expanded the use of smart caching and multithreading pretty much across the entire game. Military graphics and other map graphics were also heavily optimized.

• Substantial improvements (through AI improvements and balance tweaks) to the AIs ability to execute on historical and historically plausible outcomes, particularly in nation-forming and ability to pursue Journal Entries such as the Meiji Restoration and Tanzimat Reforms
• Setup improvements to relations and AI attitudes to more closely match history
• More aggressive colonial AI, particularly for late-game land grabbing in Africa
• Making it harder to get reparations by occupying insignificant colonies
• Fix for poor building browser performance when using scrollbar
• Improved leverage UX
• Allowing Unrecognized Major Powers to form Power Blocs
• Balancing the Great Game to be less biased towards Britain

SHAPE A GRAND TOMORROW

THE ULTIMATE SOCIETY SIMULATOR

• Lead dozens of world nations from 1836-1936. Agrarian or Industrial, Traditional or Radical, Peaceful or Expansionist... the choice is yours.
  
• Detailed population groups with their own economic needs and political desires.
  
• Reform your government and constitution to take advantage of new social innovations, or preserve the stability of your nation by holding fast to tradition in the face of revolutionaries.
  
• Research transformative new technology or ideas to improve your national situation.

DEEP ECONOMIC SYSTEM

• Expand your industry to take advantage of lucrative goods, taxing the profits to improve national prosperity.
  
• Import cheap raw materials to cover your basic needs while finding new markets for your finished goods.
  
• Secure vital goods to fuel your advanced economy and control the fate of empires.
  
• Balance employing available labor force with the needs for new types of workers.

PLAY ON A GRAND STAGE

• Use your diplomatic wiles to weave a tangled global web of pacts, relations, alliances, and rivalries to secure your diplomatic position on the world stage.
  
• Employ threats, military prowess and bluffs to persuade enemies to back down in conflicts.
  
• Increase your economic and military strength at the expense of rivals.
  
• Accumulate prestige and the respect of your rivals as you build an industrial giant at home or an empire abroad.

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• OS: TBC
• Processor: TBC
• Graphics: TBCSound Card: TBC