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!