Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #10 - Infrastructure

[Lorehead]

I mean, if they're privately owned then presumably the Capitalist pops will be the ones funding the construction of it

Oh you sweet summer child.

 

[Zymes]

Will tunnels and bridges be a thing?

 

[MTGian]

I am not sure what to make of this DD. It is not what I expected.

I expected something really complicated, while this is quite simple.

The system that I imagined was something with regional hubs.

I will explain. So, as I am imagining things with the described system, every good starts at a state, then travels to the national market center, then back out to the state for delivery. That is why infrastructure is measured to the national market center.

The system that I was envisioning would start at a state, then goods would travel to a regional hub, then some goods would head back out to states near the regional hub, while others traveled on to the national market center. From the national market center, the goods would travel to the regional hubs, then be distributed out to the states. So, there would be an intermediary step. One more step in the chain.

I don't know if that intermediary step is necessary. I don't know if it brings anything to the table. I was thinking you would need it to model places like Chicago, but maybe not.

One way that I thought you might be able to implement an intermediary step system would be to have "sub" markets within a national market. The national market would be broken up into a bunch of smaller sub-markets. There would still be a sub-market that contains the national market center, which would be an especially important sub-market. Trade within the sub-market would happen the way that the general system has been described. On top of that, the sub-markets would trade with the national center sub-market in a variation of how international markets trade with each other. At least, that is what was in my imagination when I was trying to think of how it could be done. Some type of fractal structure.

That would take care of cases like a rail from Seattle to Los Angeles before a transcontinental railway. That makes Chicago and Dallas into important regional trade hubs. If you are playing as the U.K. and you conquer Portugal, then Lisbon would naturally transition from a national market center to a regional trade hub.

As far as presenting information to players, states that are not trade hubs would have an infrastructure value to the regional hub. States that are regional hubs would have an infrastructure value back to the national market center.

Anyway, I was envisioning something like that. I can't tell whether that level of complexity is necessary, but this seems really...simple. I am not sure what to make of it.

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Completely unrelated to those thoughts: How will shipping costs work with this? Will shipping costs also be from state to national market center, then back to state?

 

[Zalthor]

While waiting the Developers answers on the exact role of intermediate states and how important they thoose are.
(ie if %market access is important [M.Capital, 100%, 80%, 10%])
(ie if HOI4 changed inspired M.Capital [need 400=100local+300incoming], prov2 [need 300=100local+200 for incoming], prov 3 100)

In both cases, this could mean you could run in a situation where intermediate railway has to have a certain employement to fulfill the push/periphery provinces needs, but as it hasn't any local needs, it would run in a deficit. In the long run reducing employement thoose infrastructure level and reducing the push/periphery market access.
Imagine having market capital province in "Netherland" province, an intermediate "Low Rhine" Province with no industry even thought lots of railways, and a very developped "high Rhine" province whitch has to connect to Netherlands throught Low Rhine.

Or am I reading this wrong and that is partially what tickets prices are there for ?

Even in Free Trade, one is able to subsidize infrastructure.

 

[Festikus]

In last DD there was a lot words about Minsk. Can we release Belarus or another country and play for it from begining like in Vic 2?

 

[Demetae]

One way that I thought you might be able to implement an intermediary step system would be to have "sub" markets within a national market. The national market would be broken up into a bunch of smaller sub-markets. There would still be a sub-market that contains the national market center, which would be an especially important sub-market. Trade within the sub-market would happen the way that the general system has been described. On top of that, the sub-markets would trade with the national center sub-market in a variation of how international markets trade with each other. At least, that is what was in my imagination when I was trying to think of how it could be done. Some type of fractal structure.

Wiz addressed something similar to this in the national markets dev diary.

In earlier versions of the internal build we actually had countries split into multiple markets, trying out a variety of design solutions for this, but none of them resulted in satisfying gameplay as keeping track of all your markets and managing goods flow between them felt more like a chore than anything else and made it very difficult to understand the overall economic situation in your country. Moving to a single national market basically just made for a better game as it allows the player to focus their efforts and have a far better understanding of the consequences of the actions they're taking in that market. That said, we haven't completely ruled out having special cases like separate colonial markets if we can get that working in a way that doesn't create the problems I mentioned above.

I personally am curious as to how they will model other trade hubs within a nation as well. Hope they can find/have a satisfying answer.

 

[Poppis]

Will terrain affect the cost/maintenance/construction speed of railroads? In other words, is it as easy to build a railroad in the amazon rain forest, as in European plains?

 

[Lord Baela]

What about river regulation? At the beginning of the 19th century, one third of the territory of Hungary was regularly under water. Then, in the middle of the century, swamps were drained, dams were erected, and winding river sections were cut off. This allowed boat traffic on rivers and drained areas without having to get stuck in mud anymore, the development of the railway network made it possible for Hungarian agriculture to join the international market. Nevertheless, the structure of the economy has completely changed. Before regulation strippers, potters and fishermen worked on the bog. Almost the entire peasant population supplemented their diet with mushrooms, fruits, roots and herbs collected in forests and reeds, but for many people in the waters of the wetlands their main occupation - or at least a source of livelihood equal to farming - was the aquatic world. Floodplain management also included gathering, grazing, and fishing. There was little work to be done. But the wetland could provide a livelihood for few people ( kind of advanced subsistence farms ) As a result of large water systems, quicksand became a fruitful orchard or vineyard, and vast steppe pastures became wheat-producing fields. So for Hungary (Austro-Hungarian Empire) it was the most significant step towards industrialization.

 

[edowie]

Beautiful Art!

Yeah I like this one a lot! Any chance we can get a high res version? Maybe 2560 x 1440 ?

 

[Earmuffs]

So is it safe to assume that water-way trade is going to operate in a similar fashion to trains? Except with ships obviously.
I know you said we'd find out at a later date but go on, give us a sneak peak, treat yourself Wiz you deserve it.

 

[Faeelin]

This looks amazing, but are you concerned about how hard it will be to manage, say, the USA or Russia? I worry there's a lot of micromanagement.

 

[Leoreth]

Market Capital is usually the political capital at start but can be moved. The US is an exception, starting with New York as their market capital instead of Washington DC.

Is the US the only exception? I think it's worth thinking through major markets where a different market capital makes sense, Moscow and Milan have already been mentioned. Is Beijing really the market capital of China? etc.

It's not that I exactly don't want minor canals in the game, it's just that if we're to have them I don't want them to fill the exact same role as railroads. They should either be a precursor in an earlier start date, or to for instance be a cheaper alternative that is only available in certain places. We'll likely not have them for release though.

I don't want to push for them and think it's fine to exclude them from release, but the difference between them should be that canals are much more expensive and labour intensive to build but less resource and labour intensive to operate. To this day canals (and rivers) are preferred over any land based transportation because of how cheap it is. The idea that canals are a low tech solution that were used until the railroad showed up is definitely not accurate, the railroad was used because it allowed to establish infrastructure over long distances without the insurmountable amount of labour required to do the same with canals. There is no trans-siberian canal for obvious reasons but if there was it would be much much preferable to the railway. Nations were building new canals all through the time period of the game while they were also building new railroads.

I think they would make sense as a building just like railroads, whose effectiveness is tied to the river transportation modifier present in their state region (i.e. the better the river, the better the canal), costs a lot more money to build, and requires a lot less labour and resources to operate.

Neat little trade-off, easy to understand, not universally available.

Moving your market capital doesn't cost anything per se, but it does create some temporary penalties in the market due to the resulting upheaval.

I wonder if there are any other social implications to your market capital. Do your capitalists prefer to live there? Do they get mad if you move it?

This is the kind of micromanagement that can be done by the pops themselves in a government with laissez faire-laissez passer. Even Shadow Empire is doing it now.

Yeah, but Shadow Empire is a grognardian mess that Victoria shouldn't seek to replicate.

 

[Leoreth]

I am also very curious about how infrastructure interacts with the military. Does it act as a movement modifier? I hope it's more than that, and you need it both for supply and mobilisation.

Can't forget the recent Revolutions episode about how the Russian government's prioritisation of getting soldiers and materiel to the front led to shortages and economic crises throughout the empire in World War 1.

 

[Alpha2518]

So it is good to see rivers provide an infrastructure bonus. But how will you handle something that happened a lot during this time period...canalizing. For example, In U.S. History there is the Erie canal which links the great lakes to the Hudson river and there's a couple other of these in the northern U.S states. The Erie Canal was completed in 1825 and it should be obvious what a economic advantage it is to have a canal connecting the great lakes to the Hudson River. Are you all going to model these existing canals of rivers or the new ones that are build during this time?

 

[MTGian]

Wiz addressed something similar to this in the national markets dev diary.


I personally am curious as to how they will model other trade hubs within a nation as well. Hope they can find/have a satisfying answer.

Yeah, I read that as they considered splitting up large countries into multiple national markets, which is not quite what I imagined. While I think that five sub-markets (one in the northeast, one in the midwest, one in the west, one in the south, and one in the southeast) would make sense for the USA, I would not have suggested breaking up the USA into five national markets.

As far as management, I wouldn't imagine that there would be much more to managing the system than picking where you would put the regional hubs. You would build regional rail networks rather than having everything stretch to the national market center, but that doesn't seem like a big hardship.

Without playing it, it is hard to tell whether any of that is necessary or how immersion breaking it will be to ship everything back to the national market center before delivery. We will see.

I do think this is definitely a fine starting point for a system. A good first run at a transportation infrastructure system. However, shipping everything back to the market center is one of the more abstracted systems that they have presented, so it also feels like an area ripe for expansion in a DLC or an overhaul for a Victoria 4.

Cheers for the DD Wizzington, and the extra info from you and KaiserJohan . It’s great to see infrastructure’s implementation improve substantially in Vicky 3 relative to Vicky 2 – however, there’s still substantial evidence of Paradox’s “sea-blindness” (here more river, coast and canal-blindness, but the term is generally used to indicate a lack of understanding of the importance of waterborne economic and military activity).

While infrastructure was important for the movement of goods over land, one of the key features of the period was the explosion in maritime trade, increased use of canals, and so on. It’s great to see rivers are represented in the game, but it is a little sad to see them ‘tacked on’ as modifiers to individual states, whereas representing them similar to railways (ie, the rivers should need to connect back to the market capital, or to a port that connects to the market capital – noting that the port may be on the river rather than on a coastline). The rise of the steam engine, for example, also facilitated greater/more efficient riverine trade, but this doesn’t look to be covered off mechanically.

But as well as rivers (which, even if they seem somewhat ‘tacked on’, are at least in the game), there’s also no mention of coastlines. A big question is do the upcoming “sea transport” mechanics adequately cover off the importance of coastal traffic – which was hugely important in pretty much anywhere with a coast even through the Second World War period (on the eve of WW2, the value of Australian coastal traffic was a dash more than its international trade). To-date, Paradox seems to have missed the importance of coastal traffic on trade, economies and logistics, and while it’s not critical to most games, for the Vicky and HoI4 periods, where greater trade and logistics chains become far more important, omitting them warps the way the world works relative to its historical patterns, making the game less intuitive. For example, will the UK, Japan and Italy (amongst many others) benefit from being able to make use of their long coastlines to cheaply and efficiently ship goods around the country?

The big benefits of riverine and coastal trade is that it was much, much cheaper (it still is) than moving non-time critical goods by rail and road (although in the early Vicky period it's also one of, if not in many situations, the quickest way to move things too). The downside is that it's limited geographically. I haven't looked into it, but I'd be very surprised if the rivers, canals, coasts, roads and rails formed complimentary networks, with bulk goods transported by water to road/rail hubs, and then transported on to their final destination (and, in the other direction). By just focussing on rail, it looks as if the Vicky "infrastructure/economics model" is missing a significant (for the start of the game, and for many regions at the end of the game, by far the largest) part of the picture. Note that I'm not an expert here - I'd need to read a whole lot more to have more insight - but I've seen enough to know that Vicky 3 is currently a bit 'dry' when it comes to its infrastructure modelling.

I appreciate that these things move forward iteratively – compared with Vicky 2, Vicky 3 is a huge step forward. This post is intended as encouragement to continue breaking down Paradox’s remaining partial “sea-blindness” (not just a thing for Paradox, but for most people in modern, industrialised economies - and PDS is much, much better than it was back in the day) and improve the quality of the underlying mechanics of the game ).



This comment seems to show a certain degree of blindness to canals as a form of important economic infrastructure in the period. For sure, the Suez, Panama and Kiel canal were important, but they were largely important for international economics (Kiel a little less so), rather than for domestic transportation of goods. The canal and river systems, however, were domestic infrastructure built to transport goods within, rather than between markets. Both canals and rivers continued to be important until after the end of the Vicky timeframe (indeed, there are still new canals being proposed, and existing canals used, for substantial transportation of goods in Europe - for example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seine–Nord_Europe_Canal ).


It wasn’t just “big rivers” though – it was any river that connected to other markets that could support rafts or boats. Some of the rivers in the era that were important to their regions’ trade weren’t even navigable year-round. And, of course, just having a “state modifier” without any directional impact of the river could lead to some relatively unintuitive results (for example, a state with part of a river that doesn’t connect to anywhere else in its state gets a big bonus to domestic market access, even though the river is far more likely to be facilitating international trade). I'm also not sure of the ability of a static state modifier to reflect the relative change in the importance of rivers (from very high at the start of the game, to much less at the end).



Infrastructure was arguably more important for international trade than domestic – domestic trade may have to travel between regions – international trade starts outside every region within a market. Ports, and the degree to which they were connected by rail, river, canal or road to the rest of the country were the lifeblood for overseas trade. You may well have this all covered off, but just piping up, in case useful.



I’m a long way from an expert on warfare in the period, but I’d expect logistics to increase in importance as the period increases, such that the “infrastructure chain” it travels along by the end of the game is vital to an effective campaign (but, at the start, far less important).

As per everything else in this post, rivers and coasts were very important parts of these logistics chains - with railroads becoming increasingly important as they expanded, with their role being hugely important to the mobilisations at the start of WW1 and WW2.



They shouldn't necessarily be discrete (ie canals then railroads) - as per this map, at least at some stages in the period, canals and railways were part of an integrated system: https://www.nationalgeographic.org/photo/early-transportation/

For example, Britain should start the game with an established system of canals that is soon to go into decline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_British_canal_system#Railway_competition_and_decline

Without those canals in place, it's going to be difficult to effectively model the capacity in the UK to move products around before the railway networks are built up - and the only way to do it is by giving undue importance to other means of transport, or by arbitrarily reducing the integration (and size/effectiveness) of the UK economy. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_British_canal_system

Further while in Britain canals largely declined in the face of the railroad and no longer provide much economic use, greater investment in canals in Europe means they still have an important economic role to this day - see: britannica.com/technology/canal-waterway/Economic-significance

In case useful, there's a particularly good site on French canals here (the individual canal pages at least sometimes have a history section): https://www.french-waterways.com/waterways/canals-rivers-france/

For an on-theme naval(-ish) pic, here are some gunboats on the Loire, from the Franco-Prussian war:


View attachment 747664

Nice post! I do hope river trade gets some love. There should be a building for river trade (at least for major rivers) similar to the railroad building complete with employment and production of various type of river craft (similar to how you build various types of trains). My guess is that is probably already in there, but if not, DLC.

 

[Colon]

I don't really see any mechanism right now. I think there is a mild indirect effect in that the way railways work you will probably want to locate heavy industry close the economic capital at first, just to minimise the amount of railways you'd need in connecting provinces.

That's not really what is was referring to. Where various manufacturing industries have been located has always been strongly infuenced by the relative transportation costs of their inputs and outputs. You find factories close to suppliers in industries where transporting inputs is more expensive than outputs, and you find them close to customers when vice versa. Emulating this wouldn't necessarily require any mechanism. I think that reworking the bonuses factories received in Vic2 (for having inputs goods produced in the same state) and making the AI consider these would already go a long way to stop factories' location being random. I explained these things in more detail in the thread I linked to.

 

[sabasNL]

Market Capital is usually the political capital at start but can be moved. The US is an exception, starting with New York as their market capital instead of Washington DC.

In the case of the Netherlands, the national capital is Amsterdam, but the political capital has always been The Hague and during Victoria's timeframe the economic capital arguably became Rotterdam instead of Amsterdam due to industrialisation and a shift in maritime trade. In the brief period before Belgian independence, both The Hague and Brussels were the political capital of the Kingdom.

Could you shed some light on this particular case? Will Vic III feature Amsterdam as both the 'political capital' (which is without a doubt The Hague) and the 'economic capital' (which it ended up losing to Rotterdam), just like in Vic II?

A similar officially recognised split in what is the 'capital' can be seen in South Africa as well. And informal splits like that of the USA can be seen elsewhere too, such as China, Australia and unified Germany.

 

[Lapoleon]

Will terrain affect the cost/maintenance/construction speed of railroads? In other words, is it as easy to build a railroad in the amazon rain forest, as in European plains?

For one thing: we know that railroad buildings need workers. I don't think that trained engineers are in abundance in the middle of the Amazon.

 

[Mr. Sometimes]

Is it possible to subsidise trains in any way to keep ticket prices low for the pops?

 

[Kotau]

Little off top

Im still thinking about political parties. One of the best experiences of V2 was to see the historical parties, how they changed, die out and being created. The thing that was lacking was the possibility to create your own pet party (unless you do some modding that was also fun ). It was great to see your parliament painted in parites colours.

My Idea on how parties should work in V3 (regarding the dev's desire to keep intrest groups and not replace it with political parties):
1. Parties should be entities simmilar to intrest groups, with their (historical) leaders, colours based on ideology (those in V2 were perfect), and they should form the parliament and govermnents.
2. Parties should have programs/manifestos. They should have stance on every possible issiues. (Having historical parties with their program is so exciting, but you can keep option to tailor player's pet party with its program).
3. Support for the parties should be based od interest groups, simmilar way the support of interest groups is based on pops. So % of intrest group should go to support this party that represents their prefered issues. But also some interest groups should prefere certain ideologies. Landowners and religious should be more likely to support conservative parties, industrialists and petit bourgeoisie should be more in favour of liberal parties and of course proletariat should be more in favour of socialists.


About religion
I really hope that atheist/non-religious form of "religious" affiliation will be included. For example the communist Soviet Russia had the state atheism program to "convert" people to atheist. Schools in countires like this should enocurage population to atheist "conversion".

Hope my ideas can be helpfull to someone reading it.