Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #124 - What’s next after 1.7

[TheActiveGamer]

I absolutely love the game and the direction it’s going and especially the fact that developers actively listen to feedback but I have a small gripe about bug reporting. It seems like sometimes my bug reports are seen and documented and other times I never get any tag. Is it that they have been checked and are not bugs or are they still under review ? I also understand that there might be a lot of bugs for the QA team to go through but also as a player it is a bit frustrating to never see if your report has been taken into account or not.

 

[Aloraand]

Are there any plans to expand on the existing logistics systems? Trains don't feel as important as they were historically, especially for countries with low population density, and the game could benefit from another obstacle to growth.

 

[le cur]

is there any example of a country running out of port space within a state? the Russians wanted better ports not more of them because they hit the arbitrary limit

I don't think this is exactly what the port level represents. It's not just space, but the maximum possible throughput a port can achieve. In a sense, they did hit the arbitrary limit on their existing ports, because those harbours couldn't achieve a higher throughput due to ice. That said, there are examples of ports which began running out of space - Bristol started to decline in the 19th century because the Avon Gorge meant the city's port couldn't accommodate the progressively larger cargo ships. London and many other ports suffered the same fate shortly after the end of the game's period thanks to containerisation.

examples that are impossible under the current system:

1. Under the PLA, London's annual trade had grown to 60 million tons (38% of UK trade) by 1939
2. On the eve of the First World War Le Havre was the primary European port for coffee,[19] it imported some 250,000 tonnes of cotton and 100,000 tons of oil.
3. Hamburg experienced its fastest growth during the second half of the 19th century, when its population more than quadrupled to 800,000 as the growth of the city's Atlantic trade helped make it Europe's third-largest port

also, look at the biggest ports of the world today and how big some individual ports are massive and extremely important to trade

I can see the value in raising the overall level cap, particularly as technology evolves, but I think having a cap is still a fundamentally good idea. There are problems with it at the moment, but it's clearly designed to allow one to replicate this sort of setup. For instance, if you look at this map you'll see one of Europe's largest ports is Piraeus; in-game, this is represented by Attica having a trait that increases the max port level by 3. The real issue with the traits as they stand is that they only grant a flat increase to level cap, which means they're progressively less relevant as time goes on, whereas in reality technological development has seen the consolidation of seaports. I think fixing this would require a couple of changes:

• Most harbour trait bonii should provide a percentage increase to the max port level, not a flat increase. As you go through the tech tree, the max port level rises from 5 to 25; Attica initially has a 60% advantage over other states' ports, but that drops to a mere 12% by the end of the game. If instead Attica had a 60% bonus, it would go from a cap of 8 at the start of the game to 40 by the end, and ports like London would enjoy an even bigger buff.
• However, in order to actually incentivise this development, ports should enjoy an economy of scale bonus. At present, there's no difference between having one port in each of Greece's starting states and three ports in Attica. That ought to change, either with the other economy of scale techs or with the techs that allow you to increase port level.

I also think they should consider looking at how both ports and railways work with relation to MAPI. It's always felt slightly odd that ports can't provide transportation, and that infrastructure can't make any profit. Freight transportation is profitable! Under the current MAPI system, the cost of transporting from one area of the market to another disappears. I think it should go to either a Trade Centre or to any buildings in the state providing infrastructure. Ideally, I think ports should be able to make profits in the same manner as railways - the Port of London Authority is self-financing, for instance!

 

[lilcritt]

Does Germany still go after an italian tyrol?

 

[Nikolai II]

examples that are impossible under the current system:

1. Under the PLA, London's annual trade had grown to 60 million tons (38% of UK trade) by 1939
2. On the eve of the First World War Le Havre was the primary European port for coffee,[19] it imported some 250,000 tonnes of cotton and 100,000 tons of oil.
3. Hamburg experienced its fastest growth during the second half of the 19th century, when its population more than quadrupled to 800,000 as the growth of the city's Atlantic trade helped make it Europe's third-largest port

also, look at the biggest ports of the world today and how big some individual ports are massive and extremely important to trade
View attachment 1158225

also the shiplane flow shows that few ports control the world trade
View attachment 1158226

Yea, the "convoy" capacity should be detached from the "port space" capacity. Port space should be "how many trades can be accepted / MAPI" and "convoy" should just be a cost in money or ships (money buying ship capacity from the nation you trade with) for longer trades. (A cost which would depend on calculated distance - which could then be used to also calculate how many ships use the Suez or Panama canals and hand trading money to those)

While at it, convoy raiding shouldn't sink ships (that only happened on a large scale once WW1 hit - and it became a huuge deal) - and they shouldn't just manage to randomly find ships wherever. The timeframe used "blockades" a lot more than they used "raiding". (And ships were taken as prizes, not sunk, meaning they didn't just disappear and might feasibly be sold back after the war)

 

[CivMasters]

Any plans on improving the trade system? The biggest problem with trade right now is that you are limited by the number of ports which affects the number of convoys produced. It's virtually impossible to play as a small trading country like Singapore since your convoys will easily used up. So to increase convoys you literally have to conquer coastal states in order to get more ports which is ridiculous and unhistorical. You are forced to play wide because of this. All it does is penalize small countries.

People will usually recommend you to join custom union/power bloc market from a great power if you're a small nation, but that kinda defeat the whole purpose of trade since you already have full access for the market goods in a power bloc market.

Also, there is a soft cap on the number of trade routes, due to the incurred lag for each

 

[CivMasters]

I hope 1.7 represents a paradigm shift on how patches and expansions are developed for Vic3. No more rushed releases. A delayed optimized release is way better.

I appreciate the changes and the aforementioned topics for improvement.

Under the reworking of the discrimination, I call for special attention to be given to religious discrimination. During the 19th and early 20th century the world started to see significant religious migration within the catholic world due to bad economic conditions on Europe, but also the rise of the British Mandate of Palestine and Jewish migrations due to high discrimination and economic conditions.

Accruing large discriminated populations - especially religious minorities - should be politically represented ingame. The current abstraction through IG cannot account for the many difficulties in these discriminatory situations.

The IG system also creates some nonsensical situations, in which the death of a single politician makes thousands of politically engaged people drastically change their stance on a particular law - such as when your Market Liberal from Corn Law dies and the Landowners now suddenly radically oppose the law you are trying to pass.

 

[Jjjace55]

View attachment 1157705
​

Double Happy Thursday! As promised last week, today we’ll be returning to the future update plans, which we last touched on in Dev Diary #102. Just like the previous times, we’ll be going over what changes and improvements we have planned for the game in future free updates such as 1.8, 1.9 and beyond.

Once again we will be talking about the same key four improvement areas of Military, Historical Immersion, Diplomacy, Internal Politics as well as Other for anything that falls outside those four categories.

Just as before, I’ll also be aiming to give you an updated overview of where we stand and where we’re heading by going through each of these four categories and marking on each one with one of the below statuses:

• Done: This is a part of the game that we now consider to be in good shape. Something being Done of course doesn’t mean we’re never going to expand or improve on it in the future, just that it’s no longer a high priority for us. Any points that were already marked as Done in previous updates will be removed from the list, to avoid it growing unmanageably long, but you can look at the older dev diaries (#79, #89 and #102) if you’re interested in what was done previously.
• Updated: This is a part of the game where we have made some of the improvements and changes that we want to make, but aren’t yet satisfied with where it stands and plan to make further improvements to it in future updates such as 1.8, 1.9 and so on. Note that this section will mainly focus on updates made in 1.6 and 1.7.
• Not Updated: This is a part of the game where we haven’t yet released any of our planned changes/improvements in any currently released updates but still plan to do so for future updates.
• New: This is a planned change or improvement that is newly added, i.e. wasn’t present on the list in Dev Diary #102.
• Reconsidered: This is a previously planned change or improvement that we have reconsidered our approach to how to tackle from previous updates. For these points we will explain what our new plans are, and change the list appropriately in future updates.

For the final bit of repetition: Just as before we will still only be talking about improvements, changes and new features that are part of planned free updates in this dev diary. I will also remind you that this is not an exhaustive list of the things we are going to do, and that something being ‘Done’ doesn’t mean we’re not going to bugfix, balance or make UX improvements to it afterwards. Alright then, onto the dev diary proper.

View attachment 1157707​

Military​

New:

• Making navies more important for projecting global power and securing control of coasts.
• Adding a proper system of military access and finding solutions for the other remaining rough edges in the frontline system.

Not Updated:

• Turning individual ships into proper pieces of military hardware that can be built, sunk and repaired rather than just being manpower packages.
• Adding a system for limited wars to reduce the number of early-game global wars between Great Powers

Historical Immersion​

Done:

• Ensuring unifications such as Italy, Germany and Canada don’t constantly happen decades ahead of the historical schedule, and increasing the challenge of unifying Italy and Germany in particular
  • Asides from the AI challenges when it comes to forming Germany/Italy, we are now relatively happy with the state of the unifications. There are certainly ways we want to improve unifications in the future, particularly in tying them much closer to the political systems, but that falls outside the scope of this particular point.
• General AI tweaks to have AI countries play in a more believable, immersive way
  • With the introduction of Diplomatic Catalysts and various AI improvements in 1.7 we now consider this to be ‘done’, though in reality this is the sort of point that is never going to stop seeing improvements from our end.

Updated:

• Tweaking content such as the Meiji Restoration, Alaska purchase and so on in a way that they can more frequently be successfully performed by the AI, through a mix of AI improvements and content tweaks
  • After the release of 1.7.2 we now consider this to be ‘almost there’ but still in need of a bit more work.
• Going through the base game Journal Entries and events and making improvements and additions to ensure that they feel meaningful and impactful for players to interact with
  • We’ve made a number of changes and improvements to older journal entries in 1.6/1.7 such as the addition of scripted progress bars, but we still have more work to do here.
• Adding more country, state and region-specific content to enhance historical flavor of different countries
  • As before, this is something we’re simply going to keep adding to every single update and is never really going to be ‘Done’. For now I am leaving this entry here to mark that this is still one of our top priorities

Diplomacy​

Done:

• Improving and expanding on interactions with and from subjects, such as being able to grant and ask for more autonomy through a diplomatic action
• Have Interest Groups weigh in on diplomacy, for example having the Armed Forces disapprove of an alliance with a country that recently took land from you due to revanchism (Lobbies)
• Foreign investment and some form of construction in other countries, at least if they’re part of your market

Not Updated:

• Make declaring and holding onto diplomatic Interests a more rewarding and challenging aspect of global empire-building
• Allowing peace deals to be negotiated during a Diplomatic Play instead of only having the option to give in

Internal Politics​

Updated:

• Adding laws that expand on diversity of countries and introduce new ways to play the game
  • Similar to the point for region-specific flavor, this is something that will never really be ‘Done’ but remains here to highlight that we consider it an important priority

Not Updated:

• Turn legitimacy into a more interesting mechanic, where the strength of a government depends on their successes and failures, and highly legitimate governments can’t simply be ousted at a whim but have to be undermined first.
• Introduce a concept of national pride which can increase or decrease depending on a country’s actions and which ties directly into legitimacy.
• Have discrimination not be a purely binary status and reflect forms of discrimination aside from what’s written in the law, as well as making assimilation into a more meaningful mechanic in the process.

New:

• Find a better solution for the ways ideologies appear, attract followers and create support for reforms than the current RNG-heavy leader ideology system.

Other​

Not Updated:

• Improve on Companies by turning them into actual actors in your country that can own/expand buildings and interact with characters/politics.
• Find a way to deal with the excessive fiddliness of the trade system in large economies, possibly by allowing for autonomous trade based on your laws in a similar way to the autonomous investment system.

As always, I cannot make any specific promises about when these things will be coming. However, I can tell you that the next update (1.8) will be a standalone free update that should knock a point or two off this list, but will mainly be focused on bug fixing, general polish and more AI improvements. Before then we also have at least one more hotfix (1.7.4) planned to address the remaining high priority issues from the 1.7 release (tentatively planned for next week) and part of the team will continue working for a few more weeks like I mentioned in last week’s dev diary.

Right then, that’s all for this time, and all for this side of the summer! Dev diaries will return on August 15th but until then, I can but wish you many a Happy Thursday in the sun (or possibly snow, if you happen to live in the south hemisphere). Regardless, I hope you have a great July!

Can you guys maybe change the trade state system so that it’s able to occur if countries are in diplomatic plays, I kept trying to trade with Russia and they were constantly in a diplomatic play, maybe by not allowing it when a state is a subject of a play or if there’s a front there to avoid cheesing; also maybe make deals more acceptable, I was giving Russia a much more economically developed state they had a claim on yet they refused to give me an unincorporated state that was significantly less developed (like 3 million gdp to 400k), maybe also add a benefit for unifying states when you’re asking for a state and unifying it rather than it only being if the state the player is giving will unify. Other than state trading my experience with 1.7 has been great and I’ve been finally able to fully reach the end date and had much more fun in the late game.

 

[Abd121]

Underwhelming... At least you could say the title and theme of the next big expansion.

They literally just told you the next major feature 2 patches will be free so without an expansion. it'd be way too early to talk about more DLC.

 

[Loco_HUN]

Can't wait the military updates. What about a stockpile system for military goods?

 

[HoratiusGm]

Hi!
I wonder whether in changes regarding cultures in the country and the rights that apply to them, it would be possible to mark another foreign culture, more different from country's culture, as acceptable in some cases (without using the law of multiculturalism). It would be great if you would do that feature

 

[TheBlahJ]

Can you consider adding a World War system like vic 2?

 

[lemonsquid]

The state of New Jersey should have a bonus to manufacturing to reflect the importance of Patterson Falls as an industrial center in the 1800s. Productions of note include textiles, locamotives, the Colt Gun Mill and the first submarine to sink an adversary! First noted as a place of importance by Alexander Hamilton. Yours truly, a New Jerseyian!

 

[ScottyWired]

I played Vicky 3 at release, I uninstalled the game because it was bad.

Now I've played 1.7, I uninstalled the game again because I was scared of how much I enjoyed it.

 

[Vellsi]

Let me just start saying that there are a lots of good points on that list I'm positively excited about. As everyone else is praising l'll instead play advocatus diaboli here and point out a few concerns I have:


There was mention of a legitimacy and national pride system. I presume this would have to replace the current interactions supported by the loyalty/radical system, which we use to buy ourselves political wiggling room through risking radicals. It allows players to pass laws that are difficult to get approval for, wage lenghty and lossy wars to get that final wargoal in, make economic decisions or mistakes that are rough on the population or simply buy us economic throughput in the form of higher taxation.

The current loyalist/radical system is by no means perfect but it has many advantages:
- It's highly flexible. It can (and mostly does) interconnect with all other features and gameplay systems, as it's just a number associated with a certain Pop type in- or decreasing.
- It builds up over time and therefore automatically provides time averaged returns (and safety) with only the occasional larger jumps (which makes it fare more forgiving to experiment, as it also prevents a wrong decision from ruining the game in an instant). It also incentivizes good long-term planning and behavior.
- It is highly granular. It's not a on/off mechanic, it's about a decimal value ratio of loyalists to neutrals to radicals for each interest group and social strata. Values can be gained once, repeatedly, tied to certain input or lack thereof. Doesn't get more fine grained than that.

Meanwhile the current legitimacy system can cause both loyalists and radicals over time, as do taxes, military losses, events, employment, standard of living and so on. It's all connected but with a great way of arbitraging between those systems, which at times have other valves to arbitrage through other game systems. One can save up for a rainy day and make tradeoffs down the road in many, many ways. It's a really smart pressure valve.

However, decoupling the legitimacy system partially from arbitrage with other game systems, to allow political entrenchment and its management, will create a mini-game one has to juggle exclusively for legitimacy reasons. I worry it would come with a loss in flexibility, forcing the player down a specific path with less free gameplay agenda. One has to remember here that laws need to be changed to increase performance and power of the nation, else one falls ever more behind.
Right now it's possible to create a wonderful nation with lots of happy loyalists or neutral pops one harvests when the economy is doing well. One can outright buy them by slowing progress and lowering taxes to increase standard of living. At some point later one could implement drastical measures when it comes to taxation, force political change, pick unpopular choices during events or conduct overly aggressive diplomacy - all of which would not cause the country to go down in flames, as long as one has enough of a buffer in the loyalists/radicals system. There's a way of offset negative impact in one area with good actions from entirely different play areas. It's a very powerful and underappreciated mechanism and one of the smartest game systems, despite it's relative simplicity.

It connects with everything. The huge advantage is that it lets one freely assign and interchange increases and decreases to loyalists and racials through choices in so many different areas and to different extent.

Creating a specific legitimacy system, one that is supposed to entrench itself, takes away flexibility and hunkers the game down into specific political pathways that already exist in a shape or form anyway. Currently having a lot of farms leads to a lot of landowners, who also might get their political strength increased by various laws. This is a layered system with multiple approaches on how to tackle it. For instance, one can remove the amount of landowners relative to other types of politically active pops by just nationalizing or building up certain economy. It's also possible to specifically suppress landowners with decisions and other mechanics or even take a massive radical hit and confront them in a rebellion. One could also change laws over time to weaken their grasp or empower a different faction, both of which avoids radicals. Commonly its a combination of all of it but one can freely and highly granularly choose to pursue one more than the other and it lets one weather the storm agianst all external diplomatic, political and economic factors.

Any legitimacy entrenchment system needs to untangle this layered and highly granular system and replace it with a new system that probably won't be allowed to interact with all those things, else we'd just keep the current highly interconnected implementation after all. There's also the challenge to make sure the player can't ignore the entrenchment by just doing loyalist/radical arbitrage and running a less popular government as we do right now, which would make an overhaul pointless.
This very thought concerns me.

The reason I worry is because I also read of plans for a national pride system and ask myself if this is actually just removing the flexibilty of loyalist/radical arbitrage in favor of a more binary and rigid version. If one has to take specific steps and decisions to create and keep up national pride, to accure it in the long run, as it supposedly also comes with ties to legitimacy, the concern arises that one will be stuck going through a series of repeating events with very little wiggling room, like some of the political events we get right now, where a certain choice is always the right one and the other would lead away from it.
Most political events we got from past DLC were somewhat limiting. The only currencies to make a political choice have an interesting tradeoff are changes to clout, approval of IGs, loyalist/radicals, relations to other nations or money. Since political entrenchment already exists, reputation to other nations is already affected by differences in the political system itself, we can already select choices to increase/decrease clout (or could suppress/bolster IGs) and since we can already manage income/expenses, there are only radicals/loyalists or approval remaining. Given how common approval change already is and how inflexible it can be, I doubt it'll be that, so I can only assume loyalists/radicals would have to go.

So please, if that is the consideration, do make sure whatever you choose instead is as flexible. Promoting or preserving interesting playstyles and giving a long-term arbitrage in elastic systems, such as the loyalist/racidal system, leads to wonderful choices and unique pathways through nation development in a run. I'd argue it makes a better player experience than clicking through narrative events to solve a political puzzle again and again. Time arbitrage from loyalty works with every nation, every region, every political system. It's very hard to find and similarly flexible tool as replacement - even though I get that there's a desire to make it more immersive and less abstract.


There's also a second concern I have:

The next point on the list, the criticism of RNG of leadership and reform, seems equally dangerous. The randomness right now acts as a card one is being dealt and that one has to play out to the best of one's ability. It gives rise to a certain amount of variety, as it makes long-term political planning non-deterministic (to some extent), so one can not perfectly time progression through political reform. For that reason no playthrough ever feels the same. As the game is an adaptive complex system it needs some form of noise. Politics and laws have such a huge impact on economy, population count and diplomacy that I'd hate to this turn into a min-max system to gain optimal results, instead of needing to manage a lack of opportunity and taking a different route.

To illustrate this simply: On some runs one is lucky and gets a great party leader for a party one could actually get into the government (or to start a civil war so one can abdicate) - on other runs that is not the case and the opposition becomes a pain to deal with. This forces one to work through this phase of the game by resorting to other means or keeping busy until the time has come. Not only does it provide variety and a flexible challenge but it also has plenty of friction points with other game mechanics.

I'd like to contrast this to a primary staple of Victora 3's design: While technically most of the game's economy is deterministic, the sheer size and complexity, combined with the granularity and connections to other game systems, makes it so very difficult to think in, that one mostly deals with seemingly random factors of market entropy and political shifts. Juggling this is rather enjoyable. One tries to bring order to the chaos to carve out a structure of one's own making. Why wouldn't it be the same for the chaos of politics and leadership one only gets to influence in limited ways? For all it's worth we do have various strong methods of forcing someone into leadership positions, as there are events to promote a general (or agitator), have someone assassinated or we can force a revolutionary movement and have the leader step down to get the demands instated instantly. The randomness has plenty of breaker switches we could pull every now and then in case bad RNG truly makes it tough to progress.

Or to put this all in a far more simple context: Some nations have gotten events that add layers of political entrenchment and more engaging interactions centered around legitimacy. I'd personally not consider France or Brazil to be more interesting to play than countries who do not have these mechanics. That mostly comes down to the fact that a sandboxy approach to building up a nation, and the freedom it provides, lets one find an own adventure.


As said in the beginning, reading all of this seemed somewhat negative, as it seems dismissive, but that was far from the intention, so I'd like to close with one affirming point that was on the list. Just to quicky say why I find it is most important:

Combat in Victoria 3 is mandatory, frequent and nearly unavoidable. Right now the army management UI is janky, making it a chore to create, build, split and especially merge armies. For large nations those actions are mandatory, frequent and conquest makes it necessary to repeatedly merge or delete tiny new armies that come with states. The actual army movement (especially when fronts are splitting) can be very infuriating, as it leads to nonsensical pathing away from fronts one had successfully pushed a second ago. Cases in which an army gets teleported home are equally unsatisfying. Were it down to me I'd love to see the army system rework be a priority. It's an existing feature that one uses multiple times in every game and every time one has to be hyperattentive to immediately pause when something goes wrong and the player has to scramble through layers of windows to find the right army, assign new generals (in case of death), stance dance between defense/offense or assign armies to fronts again.

The naval rework seems equally exciting, as there's a lot of untapped potential here and it's an empty canvas full of potential for improvement and quirky layers.
I'm not sure if ship managemnet needs to be made more deep, as we already have solid archetypes to make fleets with. I somewhat fear ship building might go down the same route as the unit editors in Hearts of Iron 4, where one just slaps in the meta approved template and has no gain from ineracting with it after the first time to read al lthe tooltips, but I'll gladly finally shut up here and look forward to whatever the future brings.
Sphere of Influence was a huge step in the right direction and I for one can't wait to see what other great things will come our way.

 

[SaltyYuyuko]

I lean towards more simulationist elements and the changes in 1.7 were a step in the right direction in my opinion.
I think that some very important points are:

1. Implement automatic trade
This would be such a massive change and would make the game feel more alive! You would actually feel you are interacting with a society and playing a management game.

2. Transforming companies into actors
Same reasons as the above. This would tie in nicely with automatic trade actually. You could actually roleplay as a govt. either fighting against elements with power in your inside or joining hands with them.

3. More optimization
Even after numerous updates, the game still runs very slowly. This also limits the number of states that we can have on the map. Having more states to interact with would be nice. Seeing how the small regions of your country change under your leadership is very fun.
I always felt that Vic3 has a big problem with oversized states which breaks immersion.

While the rest of the content in the roadmap is definitely interesting, many of the things outlined can actually be modded in. And there's plenty of mods that focus on exactly that. However, the big 3 changes that I mentioned are hardcoded and require you at PDX to consider them.

 

[kinderschlager]

"building wine isnt an auto win"

"sorry, the entire economic system dies if we dont have wine or opium function as an auto-win guys, see you in the next patch"

when are y'all gonna admit that the economy and standard of living have to be completely decoupled from eachother? the AI you have built means it is impossible to sperate cheap SoL buildings from the games economic system. stop delaying it and just admit that the players have the ability to break 1800's capitalism with 21st knowledge. you cant pigeon hole your way out of this without scraping the entire system!

 

[yurcick]

I really like what I see. There has been significant progress, and the plans are good too.
Slightly disappointed in what I don't see.
1) there needs to be an economy pillar, economic topics shouldn't cover behind the label "other"
2) there are many things that I would add to this pillar, but the most important one is creating a realistic (expected ROI-based) investment behaviour for investment pool acquisition. I would also love to be able to steer private investment, affect IP priorities somewhat with tax cuts promises and similar stuff, but first there need to be rational priorities. Right now, as I understand (this is super unclear in the UI, but I read it somewhere in the patch notes, I think) IP privatises something or goes for foreign investment not because it's better than building domestically, but because "it hasn't done it for some time, why not have some change". This can not stand, as it distorts rewards for better conditions (i.e. lower labour costs and dividend taxes but enough skill workers) completely

 

[Metz]

Are there any plans to expand on the existing logistics systems? Trains don't feel as important as they were historically, especially for countries with low population density, and the game could benefit from another obstacle to growth.

States could be assigned a "size value" which in turn would affect infrastructure buildings with a penalty, meaning that one railroad would be worth more transport in Luxembourg than that same railroad built in Svealand. Doesn't have to be specific in numbers, it could just range from very small (no penalty) to very large (-500%) or so. Same could go for the states in Russia getting an arctic water penalty which would reduce the amount of convoys, thus making Russia's mission for a warm water port more pressing in order to be able to participate more actively in global trade as well as exerting pressure via a navy.

 

[Federico8]

First of all, great job! The direction this game is taking is the right one, it's a shame that it took so long and that there are always DLCs to pay for, but this is Paradox's policy, and we've all accepted it a long time ago, or we wouldn't be here to play, right?

I have some suggestions that could, in my humble opinion, improve this mammoth, albeit difficult, game even more.
1) First of all, greater interaction between the player and the characters in the game. I don't just mean people, but every single actor who participates in a campaign: commercial companies, admirals, generals, politicians, foreign leaders... especially the leaders of various interest groups. The various leaders must have more immediate interests, pass me the term, they must not only want a certain law, but they should ask for more immediate things like: build x factory in y province because blah blah blah... a rural leader might want to expand the farms in a state where there are many farmers, an industrialist might want to build a factory where his interest group has many supporters... the idea is to give the players advice and ideas for continuous improvement, lightening the burden of always having to monitor everything on his own. The reality is that while playing you very often forget things to do, and the game needs to remind you, but not through nameless objectives, but through the interaction between the player and the characters.
2) Still in the same vein as before, we need to lighten the burden of the player's decisions, especially on very long-term strategies. Living Standard and education are the two grayest areas, together with GDP. How do I increase them? Is what I'm doing okay? What more can I do? The game must set objectives for the player and help him towards their achievement. Trivial example: there is a mission that says "raise the people's living standards by two points". How the hell do I do this? Think of a new player who doesn't want to read the tutorials (which aren't that useful anyway...) and doesn't know how to complete this objective. Or the reforms of the Ottomans. We need to guide the players much more in these objectives, give them explanations and advice, even missions! Missions that must be simple and immediate, explaining what effect they have and why they were given. for example: the price of wheat has increased too much in the x province, and the poor are unable to afford it. Create a new trade route that imports grain to lower the price, the poor will be able to afford it and live better. Simple things, banal things. Or: the nation has a paper deficit, build a paper mill in the x region that has enough unemployed people to fill the factory and reduce the deficit. More direct things that help the player and lighten the burden of the more immediate decisions that are often forgotten.
3) it takes more interactions with the various people in the game. Look at monarchies, what is the heir for? Practically for little or nothing, or rather, nothing at all: he can't organize a wedding, he can't interact with anyone relevant... he's a piece of meat that does absolutely nothing interesting. More space should be given to these interactions, even through small events or decisions such as: go hunting with the leader of the x faction, or create real power plans such as orchestrating the succession to a faction by ensuring that the heir takes it the command, like the military. Napoleon III can become leader of the petty bourgeoisie, and having him as leader brings enormous benefits! Everyone should be able to become faction leaders, it would help a lot!
4) The traits of leaders... please, I beg you, I implore you, no more random traits that appear without reason or without meaning. How can a leader be a bandit and be honorable at the same time? Or an expert attacker when he is a coward? Please create events where the player can choose between two or three traits for all characters, it's really annoying when a good ruler gets bad traits without you being able to intervene in any way. Please put events for the traits!
5) Leaders already start with a faction that supports them. Ok, there it is, it makes sense. But please, make this aspect editable too. I want to play with an ultra-reactionary, militaristic and xeophobic Ottoman Empire. How do I do this since my rulers are all from the Intelligentist? Let me change it! So I can do what I want without having to orchestrate a revolution. It would be wonderful!

Anyway, great work, keep up the good work!
And do polls every now and then, to find out what people want, it's useful to ask the public, us players, what we would like...