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:

Patchnotes

Improvements

• Added an event for Persia or Afghanistan winning the Great Game
• Britain and France no longer start with a rivalry, as this doesn't really accurately reflect their relations in 1836
• Austria, Prussia and Russia now start the game with friendly attitudes towards each other, to represent the historical Holy Alliance
• Added a rivalry between Brazil and Argentina at the game start
• Added a rivalry between Britain and Russia at the game start
• The initial Meiji Restoration Journal Entry is now a lot easier to complete and simply requires keeping the Shogunate out of power while maintaining at least middling legitimacy for 10 years, but is failed if the Shogunate gets back into government
• The Impose State Religion bloc action now also converts 2% of the population in non-capital states
• Advanced Research, Colonial Offices and Police Coordination principles now allow bloc leader to impose their law in the education system, colonization and policing law groups respectively
• Advanced Research, Colonial Offices and Police Coordination principles now disallow members from having the base laws in their respective groups (no schools, etc)
• Added dynamic boolean modifiers for disallowing specific laws
• Advanced Research, Colonial Offices and Police Coordination now all reduce their respective institution costs by -10/25/50% and increase speed for changing institution levels by 25/40/50%
• Advanced Research 1 now has +5% Tech spread as a Schools institution modifier instead of the flat value
• Advanced Research 3 now has -5% Ahead of Time Research Penalty as a Schools institution modifier instead of the flat value
• Advanced Research 3 now has an increase of 15 to the weekly innovation cap as a Schools institution modifier instead of the flat value
• Police Coordination 2 now reduces political movement radicalism on the police institution instead of giving authority
• Colonial Offices 3 now adds a decrease of 7% to infamy generation against unrecognized countries to the colonization institution
• Choosing to leave a Power Bloc now results in a relations hit and negative catalyst with the other members
• Liberty desire levels now display what war goals they unlock.
• Unrecognized Major Powers can now form Power Blocs, but will suffer a greater Relations hit with Recognized Power Bloc leaders when doing so, and will only gain Leverage over Recognized countries at 10% the normal rate
• Added a check for establishing Trade Agreement Pacts that their market can actually be reached by your country. This will also prevent Lobbies from requesting the signature of a Trade Agreement which you could not fulfill.
• Added a port to Shaozhou so that Hong Kong starts with a port when taken as a Treaty Port
• Changed Hokkaido to have subsistence pastures instead of rice farms, to more accurately reflect its initial Ainu majority
• Added missing localisation for power bloc identity requirements for production methods
• Restored Asceticism as one of the Chinese Devout IG Traits
• Added the concept_unrecognized_major_power in all languages

AI

• Added and tweaked many starting attitudes and relations of AI countries to better reflect the diplomatic situation in 1836 and/or encourage more historically plausible outcomes
• Increased AI tendency to build gold mines.
• AI recognized powers are now more aggressive against unrecognized powers when they have the Civilizing Mission technology and/or Colonial Officers principle
• Unrecognized powers are now generally more aggressive against each other, particularly in Africa
• Ethiopian princes and Chinese warlord states now make more concerted efforts to unify
• Greece now more aggressively pursues the Greek Nationalism JE where it has claims
• East India Company is now less gung-go about conquering Tibet, but more inclined to target its neighbors in India and Burma
• AI now has a stronger tendency to abolish slavery after Human Rights is researched
• The Great Powers now have a greater tendency to get involved in early Ottomans vs Egypt disputes
• USA and Britain now tend to seek to befriend each other when trying to resolve the Oregon Border Dispute
• France now sometimes chooses to not pursue the Natural Borders JE when given the option
• Fixed a bug where the AI was way too eager to grab treaty ports in places where they had no actual interest in a treaty port
• The US now more aggressively targets the states held by Mexico border it directly at the start, such as Colorado
• Fixed some issues with new attitude changing system that caused the AI to not open up Japan
• The AI now focuses more on befriending Great Powers when on track to complete Earning Recognition
• Added a bespoke strategy and more AI weights for Japan to try to complete the Meiji Restoration
• Fixed an issue where AIs would adopt a Domineering attitude but not actually act on it due to the strategy score calculation not resulting in them wanting any wargoals
• Made the AI more restrictive about mixing generally incompatible wargoals, such as investment rights and subjugation
• The AI no longer has an increased neutrality score in civil wars where they have a truce with the country having a civil war
• The AI is now less inclined to get involved in the German Leadership War so long as neither side starts demanding territory, in which case they will have increased support for the non-expansionist party
• The AI will now be more restrained with what additional wargoals they add in a Unification or Unification Leadership play if they are a primary participant
• Added catalysts for gaining and losing land borders with a country, used to make AI more belligerent when gaining borders with unrecognized powers
• The AI now scales its minimum mobilization level by the number of small conflicts it's involved in, so that it's better at dealing with simultaneous revolts in subjects
• Added a +50 AI acceptance bonus to investment rights proposals if the target country has recently declared bankruptcy. This also means that AI countries who had to declare bankruptcy will be more likely to offer other countries to invest in their country.
• Fixed a bug where the AI would not properly build up its military forces due to incorrect logic when validating its spending
• Subjects with a Defiant or Rebellious attitude towards their overlord now get an appropriate acceptance bonus when asked to support the independence of a fellow subject
• Fixed a bug where some larger countries such as Occitania would become independent when released as a subject
• Fixed a bug where the AI of newly released countries was not properly initialized, causing issues such as no autonomous investment happening

Performance

• Improved frame rate when scrolling in the Building Registry

Balance

• The Ottomans now get an increase to Intelligentsia approval & clout while pursuing the Tanzimat Reforms
• Reduced the required army size to complete Tanzimat Army Reforms from 150 to 100
• Reduced minting and output of gold mines by about a third
• Declining to pursue the Opium Wars now angers the British East India Company
• Literate Pops now tend to more strongly support movements to abolish slavery after Human Rights is researched
• Reduced military and war exhaustion bonuses given to Taiping as they currently tend to always defeat Qing
• Reduced the infamy generation against unrecognized reduction from Colonial Offices 3 from 50% to 25%
• Added infamy generation against unrecognized reductions to Colonization and Civilizing Mission techs
• Extended time you have to complete Tanzimat Reforms from 20 to 30 years, due to some of the JEs requiring several steps of law reform
• Tweaked army setup and military bonuses granted to Texas to give them a better chance to survive the Texan War of Independence
• Chartered Companies can no longer switch Government Principles
• Slavery laws no longer directly increase the clout of landowners, as they also do so in a very significant way indirectly
• Unification Leadership wargoal is now considered to be contested if any incorporated state is occupied by the enemy
• War Goals that previously required any state to be occupied to be contested (such as War Reparations) now requires any Incorporated state to be contested
• Increased aggression of Afghan countries towards Chitral
• Afghan minors can now request more aid from Great Powers twenty years after last receiving it
• Gave Maimana Tajik as a primary culture, enabling them to form Afghanistan.
• Non-Pashtun Afghan countries will now be more aggressive towards each other.
• Great Game passive drift now relies on the extent of a country's direct or indirect control over Central Asian and Persian states
• Declaring Bankruptcy now applies a decaying reduction in welfare payments, starting at 100%
• Declaring Bankruptcy now immediately resets all institution levels to 1
• Removed Poor Laws (and the government admins supporting it) from China, as it's no longer needed to 'balance' their budget and tends to result in chain bankruptcy
• Changed the requirements of Pacification of the Steppes to make the journal entry more feasible
• Subjects now require to have diplomatic autonomy in order to sign foreign investment rights and agreement pacts
• You now must be non-Isolationist in order to form a Power Bloc, and Power Bloc members cannot enact Isolationist trade policy
• Sovereign Empires now only half the Cohesion loss from having subjects with high Liberty Desire, and only from the Liberty Desire of the leader's own subjects, not subjects of other members
• Tweaked subsistence income and building throughput for decentralized nations so they don't end up with the highest SoL in the world in certain edge case scenarios
• Significantly reduced the Ericsson company's education access bonus.
• Reduced Leverage Resistance from Population by 50%, as it was too difficult to overcome in some cases even with a variety of leverage sources
• Having the Armed Forces or an Authoritarian leader in government is no longer sufficient to initiate the Natural Borders of France
• Reduced AI aggression from Natural Borders
• Interface
• Added a separate tooltip description for when a building loses employees due to emigration instead of just saying they were fired
• When inviting a prospective member to a Power Bloc you are now given a prediction of what that will do to your Cohesion
• There is now a confirmation box when pressing 'Leave Power Bloc'
• There is now a notification for other Power Bloc members when a non-leader country leaves the bloc
• Made the sortable column header buttons sticky at the top of the Market panel (Goods tab) when you scroll.
• Building Registry filters are now rows of buttons of icons instead of fold out menus

Modding

• Added new trigger called army_power_projection
• Building groups can now be flagged as always_self_owning, which makes them always worker-owned

Bugfixes

• Fixed an issue with foreign investment that could cause invalid elements to appear and stay around in the Construction Queue permanently, however this will only prevent the issue from appearing in new saves. We are planning to introduce a save-game validation fix for old saves in 1.7.3.
• The Pamir Delimitation JE tooltips no longer lags the game. A tooltip for the JE activation has been added for clarity.
• Tibet Expedition JE now ends when subjugation demand is refused by other countries.
• Fixed an issue that would cause Formations to sometimes travel towards a Front they cannot join.
• Fixed an issue in the code that handles the relationship between interest groups and political lobbies, which caused misleading error messages to be logged.
• Fixed a bug where using a create_country effect in global history files would lead to blocs being disbanded during initialization
• Unrecognized powers no longer get any benefit from infamy reduction against unrecognized modifier
• Fixed a bug where a number of AI countries (such as Greece) did not pursue their Journal Entries because the catalyst for Journal Entry was incorrectly firing on JE creation instead of JE activation
• Fixed a bug where Journal Entries that were created in an inactive state before the start of the game did not notify the player about their activation due to a rather bizarre (and entirely unnecessary) boolean set on creation
• Fixed column header broken loc in map list panel for inviting countries to your bloc
• Fixed a bug where half of the screen sometimes turned orange during the start of diplomatic plays.
• Fixed a crash that occurred when collecting unit distribution data
• Resolved an issue which caused null objects to occasionally appear in exiles events.
• Power bloc statues are now prevented from being transferred when states change hands to countries that shouldn't have them.
• Fixed a bug where employees would switch jobs without taking potential dividends into account
• Fixed a bug causing government owned buildings to have a hard time filling their employment
• Fixed a bug where the country religion link was referencing the country definition's religion instead of the country's state religion, resulting in the Impose State Religion bloc action being repeatable on the same country
• Remove the duplicated Overlord Actions button for Subjects that appeared when you are not a Power Bloc leader.
• Fixed a bug where cohesion for ideological unions was inexplicably trending towards 0
• Removed the placeholder Manul culture from the game.
• Fixed an issue where the relief option in the STATE Crop Failure event would apply the wrong modifiers.
• Conquering a split state now applies the 'State Liberated' rather than 'State Conquered' modifier, as the latter ended up giving tax penalties to a state you already owned, which could be devastating for tiny nations
• Amended the description for the I'm the Captain now achievement.
• Reduce the freeze during annexation caused by diplomatic catalysts
• Gold Fields are now always worker owned
• Fixed fleets being stuck in ally HQs after losing military access to them
• Fixed invalid travel destination options for formations after switching between interactions
• Fixed an issue that caused the game to try to localize the null country when showing the peace treaty popup when one of the displayed wargoals is a wargoal to conquer a split state and the winner is a country that has a different split state in the same region
• Fixed a bug where it was possible to accept a diplomatic proposal that had become invalid in the time between it was proposed and when it was accepted
• Removed Clergymen from Cotton Plantations' default Production Method and replaced them with Farmers.
• Blocs led by a major power which turns into a great power will now lose the weak bloc modifier as intended
• The Cohesion prediction when kicking a member out of your Power Bloc now takes the per-member modifier impact into account correctly
• Fixed a bug where the reinvestment fraction of Government Dividends was not correctly calculated for buildings unless they had 100% government ownership
• Persia and Afghanistan will now properly get the "Great Game, no re" achievement for winning the Great Game
• Fixed autonomous investment constructing too many levels of the same building
• Fixed a bug where the Commander Order tooltip was not showing requirements to activate orders
• Fixed a bug where the wrong production method for Power Bloc statues was shown in the UI
• Homesteading law now also affects the ranching category buildings in addition to agriculture buildings.
• Fixed a bug where the expedition cost in Tibet was still active after the journal entry ended.
• Fixed a construction queue tooltip to indicate that the constructing country is paying the cost
• Added a missing collectivization modifier to collectivized agriculture.
• Fixed a bug for Tibet Expedition Events so it doesn't result in the possibility of Tibet's diplomatic play against itself.
• Fixed a bug where sometimes Treaty Port status would get 'dropped' by markets, resulting in the Treaty Port having no effect despite showing up properly in the state
• Most hills in Japan, North China and Manchuria no longer display as jungle hills in the state panel
• Fixed an issue where Russia would start the game with three landlocked naval bases.
• Fixed a bug where the AI would not use certain actions such as grant own market due to a missing evaluation_chance value
• Fixed an issue with an unlocalized, dynamic name for Azerbaijan.
• Diplomatic Plays can no longer start if the initiator or the target country has no passable provinces
• Fixed an issue where throughput was not correctly updated during building initialization
• Academic caps and glasses are now restricted to characters with relevant traits, even within power blocs with the level III Advanced Research principle.
• Cuirasses are now restricted to characters with either a royal or military affiliation.
• Fixed a bug where it was possible to oppose the subjects of your allies in plays where it would not be possible to object the ally themselves
• Fixed the missing text for the currently enacting Law under the specific Law Group.
• Fixed an issue where the AI would sometimes not construct ports to connect isolated states to its market
• Fixed an issue in how some principle groups were displayed in the principle groups chooser window
• The indicators for what production method is selected in each category for buildings in your country no longer takes foreign buildings into account, so if all your domestic buildings use the same PM it will show that rather than the "mixed" indicator if some of your overseas buildings are using a different PM
• Fixed a rare crash when hosting in Multiplayer
• Fixed a major issue that would prevent upgrading power bloc principles under some circumstances