Home Trending Latest threads New posts Developer diaries
Jump to latest Follow Reply
  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Victoria 3 12221 Bug Reports 8098 User Mods 555 Multiplayer 65 Suggestions 3312 Tech Support 963 After Action Reports (AARs)
Previous dev diary Next dev diary
Show only dev responses

Dev Diary #36 – Construction

16_9.jpg


Hello and welcome to another Victoria 3 development diary! Today we’ll 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, there’s a few concepts we need to cover, namely Construction Capacity, the Construction Sector and the Construction Queue.

Let’s start then with Construction Capacity - which is actually just named Construction in-game, but we’re calling it Construction Capacity here to differentiate it from the overall concept of building things. This is a country-wide value of your nation’s 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, you’d expect to be able to build that Textile Mill in a total of 3 weeks. However, it’s a little more complicated than that, as we’ll 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.
DD36 01.png

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 you’re 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.
DD36 02.png

Ultimately, what this means is that how fast you can build things depends entirely on how much money, goods and research you’re 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):


  1. Expand Government Administration in Svealand (250/300 Construction Capacity remaining)
  2. Expand Fishing Wharves in Norrland (155/180 Construction Capacity remaining)
  3. Expand Fishing Wharves in Norrland (180/180 Construction Capacity remaining)
  4. Expand Rye Farms in Svealand (180/180 Construction Capacity remaining)
  5. Expand Port in Götaland (240/240 Construction Capacity remaining)

Each week, your produced Construction Capacity is allocated to projects in the Queue in order of priority, with a maximum speed at which projects can proceed (so it’s never possible to, say, build the Panama Canal in a single week). Using the above construction queue as an example, let’s say the maximum progress that can be made each week is 50, and Sweden is producing 112 Construction Capacity.

This would mean that projects 1 and 2 would both be allocated 50 Construction Capacity, while project 3 would get the left-over 12 and projects 4 and 5 would not progress at all in that week. It would take 5 weeks for entry 1 to finish at that pace, but after only 3 weeks, project 2 will be down to only 5 progress needed, and so most of the Construction Capacity allocated to it will be freed up for other projects. This also means that project 2 will actually finish before project 1, which is perfectly normal, as different buildings require different amounts of Construction Capacity to complete - it’s easier to build a Rye Farm than a Shipyard.


With just above 40 construction output and the help of some local Construction Efficiency bonuses, this country is able to make rapid progress on the Wheat Farms and Iron Mines at the top of the queue and even get a bit of weekly extra progress on the Logging Camps.
DD36 03.png

If all this seems confusing, don’t worry! All you really need to understand is that the more Construction Capacity you have, the faster things go - but a large Construction Sector will need to be kept busy with multiple projects at once if you want to use its entire output.

There is one more important factor to Construction, which is a modifier called State Construction Efficiency that governs how effective each point of Construction Capacity you put into building Buildings in a State is. For example, a state with a +50% bonus to State Construction Efficiency means that every Construction Capacity allocated to projects in that State actually results in 1.5 progress on said projects, while a malus of -50% would reduce it to 0.5 actual progress.

A few factors that will increase or decrease State Construction Efficiency are:
  • Terrain-based State Traits, such as mountains or jungle, tends to reduce State Construction Efficiency
  • Building a Construction Sector in a State increases the local State Construction Efficiency
  • Low Market Access reduces State Construction Efficiency

Industrializing the Amazon Rainforest is neither easy nor cheap.
DD36 04.png

That’s it for today! Join us again next week as we continue talking mechanics, on the topic of Market Expansion!
 

Attachments

  • 16_9.jpg
    16_9.jpg
    906 KB · Views: 0
  • DD36 01.png
    DD36 01.png
    486,3 KB · Views: 0
  • DD36 02.png
    DD36 02.png
    2 MB · Views: 0
  • DD36 03.png
    DD36 03.png
    548,1 KB · Views: 0
  • DD36 04.png
    DD36 04.png
    133 KB · Views: 0
  • 198Like
  • 44Love
  • 13
  • 13
  • 13
Reactions:
Sort by date Sort by reaction score
I would prefer to construct is a building like others with owners, profits, dividends, etc. And there should be a housing industry that has a demand for it.

Can we mod it?
 
Last edited:
  • 3
Reactions:
So if you build a construction sector in, say, Tokyo, then Tokyo builds things faster because of the efficiency gain, but it doesn't penalize you for trying to build in Nagasaki (assume for my question that the only construction sector in Japan is in Tokyo). The queue is national?

I guess before I question this, did workers historically get shipped around to where the projects are or would they just be hired on-site? How would a construction sector in Tokyo actually help Nagasaki historically? I assumed the latter, and that they'd be largely unrelated, but idk. Or maybe the dev response is "it's inaccurate and we're just abstracting it" which I'm fine with if that's the answer, but I found this noteworthy.
 
  • 2Like
Reactions:
"Construction mana" is a sensible approach to avoid the "how do you build construction camps when you don't have construction camps" problem without making them not buildings (which would cause other, more fundamental issues). The benefits of having a local construction building mean you'll want to spread them across your country, without the tricky edge cases that requiring them to be local would have.

And I think people are reading too much into construction buildings being designated "government buildings". All that really means is that they don't produce a Good subject to supply and demand, so they'll try to orient themselves for full staffing where possible. That's an important distinction from a gameplay perspective but it doesn't really mean much flavor-wise.

Druplesnubb said:
Why wasn't construction capacity mentioned together with bureaucracy capacity, authority capacity and influence capacity back in dev diary 2?
Click to expand...
Probably because it was still being iterated and developed on, and hadn't settled into its final form. Keep in mind, DD2 was nine months ago.

Gilbert95 said:
Thinking about some of the comments in this thread having to do with the private sector, one thought I had is to make pops consume construction capacity. This would represent the need for things such as housing, places of worship, entertainment buildings Etc. As pops standard of living goes up their need for this would also go up.
This should hopefully create an interesting choice for players to decide between using their construction capacity to expand their economy versus satisfying their pops Sol requirements.
Click to expand...
It's an interesting thought, but that wouldn't actually create a choice for players. You don't decide where a Good goes, it gets consumed automatically by pops and buildings that want it. If there was a Construction Good that was consumed by both building buildings and by wealthy pops, the pops would always claim their share whether you like it or not.

Now, if there was an interesting Goods Substitution option (maybe wealthy pops can displace some of their housing/Construction demand into Services, or poorer pops might be satisfied with raw building materials?) that would open up a bit more flexibility for the player.
 
  • 14
  • 2Like
  • 1
  • 1
Reactions:
All of this makes it sound like the player will have to micro-manage their own economy. Will there be any mechanics like in Victoria 2 where capitalists can invest to build and upgrade buildings, factories, railroads, etc.
 
  • 12
  • 1
Reactions:
wilcoxchar said:
Because it appears that it isn't a formal Capacity in game terminology like bureaucracy, authority, or influence.

"Let’s start then with Construction Capacity - which is actually just named Construction in-game, but we’re calling it Construction Capacity here to differentiate it from the overall concept of building things."
Click to expand...
Why isn't it counted as a capacity like the others when it works the exact same way?
 
  • 1
Reactions:
Avernite said:
Will unused construction capacity give any benefits at all?

I imagine many players being distracted by a tense diplomatic play only to find their building queue ran out halfway through it.
Click to expand...
An idea I thought up of from the top of my head is for operational costs for urban buildings to be lowered/efficiency increased, as the "idle" construction workers do maintenance on buildings before they require major repairs, saving money in the end. Base it off a ratio between unused construction points and urbanization, and you have an actual job for construction workers to do while they aren't erecting new buildings.
 
  • 3
  • 1Like
Reactions:
God, under which rock did all these guys sit, who are accidentally surprised with the fact that player controls the economy entirely manually?
Not that I support this, but this is a topic on which countless lances were broken, and extensive arguments for and against have already been made. I'd highly recommend everyone interested to check the forum search with the query "laissez-faire" instead.
 
  • 21
  • 6Haha
  • 3Like
  • 2
Reactions:
A suggestion to address both the fear of what happens when there is unused construction capacity and the government builds everything critique:

Put unused construction capacity into an investment pool. When the pool reaches X size, it adds a new construction to the queue. Pops may also contribute to the pool, proportional to their wealth and type (capitalists would contribute the most but aristocrats, and others may contribute as well). The type of pops contributing helps determine what kind of building is added to the queue, more capitalists will build more factories, more aristocrats will build more farms. The cost of that building is paid from the investment pool instead of the monthly budget. This creates an automated baseline construction system that will run in the background even if you do not pay attention to the queue. If you do pay attention, you can of course still put your preferred projects at the top of the queue and override the automated choices, but you never lose out by not making a choice.
 
  • 3
  • 3
  • 1Like
Reactions:
So how long does it take to build a level 700 farm in a state in China?
 
Wow lower egypt has some impressive builders, -100% goods input, literally constructing the buildings from thin air. Will the finished game have limits on modifiers like this to avoid the players achieving downright silly levels of efficiency (I know you probably did this with some kind of cheat but in general will modifiers cap)?
 
  • 7
Reactions:
joe9594 said:
Wow lower egypt has some impressive builders, -100% goods input, literally constructing the buildings from thin air. Will the finished game have limits on modifiers like this to avoid the players achieving downright silly levels of efficiency (I know you probably did this with some kind of cheat but in general will modifiers cap)?
Click to expand...
"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."

It's not that they're building buildings out of thin air, it's that there are no buildings being built currently so no goods are needed.
 
  • 10
  • 5
Reactions:
joe9594 said:
Wow lower egypt has some impressive builders, -100% goods input, literally constructing the buildings from thin air. Will the finished game have limits on modifiers like this to avoid the players achieving downright silly levels of efficiency (I know you probably did this with some kind of cheat but in general will modifiers cap)?
Click to expand...
You only need to pay for input goods when there are buildings under construction.
 
  • 4
  • 1
Reactions:
Jamaican Castle said:
"Construction mana" is a sensible approach to avoid the "how do you build construction camps when you don't have construction camps" problem without making them not buildings (which would cause other, more fundamental issues). The benefits of having a local construction building mean you'll want to spread them across your country, without the tricky edge cases that requiring them to be local would have.
Click to expand...
Counter proposal: every state provides a pittance of construction capacity within its own state, allowing you to build within that state initially, similar to how, at the moment, there is a base value for your entire nation. In addition, allow any state to use construction capacity from adjacent states, when needed/available. This representation should both allow for areas that already have extensive infrastructure to continue to maintain their edge as highly developed urban centers, while also allowing a gradual expansion across the vast, lightly settled, stretches of your nation.

Unless, of course, we think that having a megalopolis in St. Petersburg should help you in developing out eastern Siberia, or London helping develop out British Columbia and the Cape Colony.
 
  • 3Like
  • 1
Reactions:
Finding a way to make the construction industry private is an aspiration we have, actually! Like many of you have pointed out, it does sound really cool and more realistic.

As it turns out though, after quite a bit of experimentation, this is harder than you might expect at first blush. For example, would you really want a gameplay dynamic where the fewer buildings you construct at once, the cheaper it is to construct those buildings, making it optimal (but very inconvenient) to only construct one thing at a time? What about if you do build a large number of buildings at once, creating a need for a large number of construction workers, who then get fired as soon as the construction completes because there's no projects left to work on? If construction industry is all very local in nature, how do you build ports to connect your overseas markets when local access to construction materials is non-existent? Do you have to set (and potentially constantly adjust) a construction budget that determines how much resources the construction industry has to operate with?

All these quite tricky questions, each of which add a number of gameplay concerns that need solutions, fade away when you treat Construction not as a variable-cost good bought and sold on the open market but as a capacity, with the player's job being to appropriately size that capacity while minimizing its cost. While I'd love to continue experimenting with Construction Sectors in the future to see if we can find a model where they can operate privately without damaging gameplay, I find it provides just the right level of player decision-making at the moment, while still being quite a bit more involved and interconnected with our socioeconomic simulation than construction usually is in strategy games.
 
  • 63
  • 50
  • 30Like
  • 9
  • 1Love
Reactions:
yurcick said:
God, under which rock did all these guys sit, who are accidentally surprised with the fact that player controls the economy entirely manually?
Not that I support this, but this is a topic on which countless lances were broken, and extensive arguments for and against have already been made. I'd highly recommend everyone interested to check the forum search with the query "laissez-faire" instead.
Click to expand...

No, I am fine with the investment pool and have been since the begining. What I have a problem with is that buildings built by the investment pool have the construction paid by the state and not the investment pools money. The owners are freeriding on the govenment.

I also now fear that ports and trade convoys will work the same way, that the capitalists that own buildings will have free trasnportation for exporing and importing goods for industries and have the transportation paid for by state coffers.
 
  • 3
  • 1Like
  • 1
Reactions:
joe9594 said:
Wow lower egypt has some impressive builders, -100% goods input, literally constructing the buildings from thin air. Will the finished game have limits on modifiers like this to avoid the players achieving downright silly levels of efficiency (I know you probably did this with some kind of cheat but in general will modifiers cap)?
Click to expand...
Nothing is in the queue (as shown at the bottom of the tab) so no goods are being used. Wages are still being paid.
 
  • 3
Reactions:
magriboy0750 said:
Good evening,great dd and a very innovative and interesting mechanic,as always with Victoria 3 so far.However,i have a few questions:
Can the maximum progress of a construction be modded by either modifers,in defines,or both?
Can the construction capacity be modded as a state,country,building or production methods modifiers?
Thanks for any replies about this.
Click to expand...
All these parameters and more can be modded, yes!
 
  • 19Like
  • 7
  • 2
Reactions:
Meanmanturbo said:
The owners are freeriding on the govenment.
Click to expand...
Ah! I see, that makes sense.
Hope we see some explanation of how exactly does investment pool work soon, if the workers and resources for construction are government-paid anyways.
 
  • 2Like
Reactions:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back