Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #125 - Hot Bug Summer

[lachek]

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 we’re 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!

 

[PDX_Pelly]

This comment is saved for developer responses, and welcome back to dev diaries everyone!

Are there any plans to make buildings about to auto-downsize more visible in the UI? I would like to have an alert that warns me when this is about to happen, so can do something about it maybe.

The challenge is that the assessment whether the building should downsize or not is currently done at the exact same time as it transpires, so we'd have to build in some sort of delay there which may adversely affect the simulation and/or performance. So no promises, but I'll see if we can squeeze something onto the 1.8 roadmap to facilitate this.

Thats great to hear, but can we assume that will also fix a problem where armies change frontlines entirely for no reason which reverts my progress back to zero?
I also don't like how my army in defensive stances is forced into an offensive battle because of a subject with 1 battalion on offensive stance, can we also get a choice weither or not we loan armies to allies in battle or not?

That all depends on the reason they're leaving the frontline. After this change, they should only detach from the frontline if you explicitly order them to, or if their current position is invalid for some reason. In the latter case they may decide to change to a different frontline if their previous one is not viable for some reason, but it should not happen.

Regarding lending troops to other formations on the frontline, for 1.8 we are adding an additional checkbox to the current setting that allow you to permit or disallow lending troops from specific formations, where you can now distinguish between lending to only your own country or also to allies.

No info about the performance issues from trade routes? Or is that one of the things being addressed in 1.8?

Not for 1.7.6 at least, but the UI performance improvements in that hotfix is showing good signs so I hope you will find performance overall to be less of an issue after that patch. Performance improvements for 1.8 are prioritized according to impact, so if trade routes is a major culprit it will be looked into.

Thank you! These look amazing!

Can we get the ability to set privatisation/subsidies/etc flags on a building to be set before it's built? It's a small QoL change that would remove the need to micro waiting for the building (level) to be created before we can click those

I would absolutely love this personally and will be looking into this for 1.8 for sure!

May I know the big categories of 1.8 patches? War? Diplomacy? Economy? Or regional flavor?

Next week!

Is this a typo or will we actually get more news next week outside of the DD? Please let it be the second one.

Very sorry to disappoint, my internal clock is off. Since we're on an every other week schedule now, you will indeed have to wait two weeks.

Thank you for the response.

As far as I know, there is already a 12 month grace period before a building downsizes, including an icon in the building view (AUTO_DOWNSIZE_BUILDING_MONTHS_TO_WAIT in defines). The problem is that because it is hidden away in the building view, I will never ever see it in time. If this were an alert instead, I *would* see it in time, which would make the game much less frustrating for me.

Apologies, I must have misread the code! That would indeed make it much more feasible to implement an alert for it for 1.8, we'll keep you posted if the timeline allows for it!

 

[lachek]

Are there any plans to make buildings about to auto-downsize more visible in the UI? I would like to have an alert that warns me when this is about to happen, so can do something about it maybe.

The challenge is that the assessment whether the building should downsize or not is currently done at the exact same time as it transpires, so we'd have to build in some sort of delay there which may adversely affect the simulation and/or performance. So no promises, but I'll see if we can squeeze something onto the 1.8 roadmap to facilitate this.

 

[lachek]

Thats great to hear, but can we assume that will also fix a problem where armies change frontlines entirely for no reason which reverts my progress back to zero?
I also don't like how my army in defensive stances is forced into an offensive battle because of a subject with 1 battalion on offensive stance, can we also get a choice weither or not we loan armies to allies in battle or not?

That all depends on the reason they're leaving the frontline. After this change, they should only detach from the frontline if you explicitly order them to, or if their current position is invalid for some reason. In the latter case they may decide to change to a different frontline if their previous one is not viable for some reason, but it should not happen.

Regarding lending troops to other formations on the frontline, for 1.8 we are adding an additional checkbox to the current setting that allow you to permit or disallow lending troops from specific formations, where you can now distinguish between lending to only your own country or also to allies.

 

[lachek]

No info about the performance issues from trade routes? Or is that one of the things being addressed in 1.8?

Not for 1.7.6 at least, but the UI performance improvements in that hotfix is showing good signs so I hope you will find performance overall to be less of an issue after that patch. Performance improvements for 1.8 are prioritized according to impact, so if trade routes is a major culprit it will be looked into.

 

[lachek]

Thank you! These look amazing!

Can we get the ability to set privatisation/subsidies/etc flags on a building to be set before it's built? It's a small QoL change that would remove the need to micro waiting for the building (level) to be created before we can click those

I would absolutely love this personally and will be looking into this for 1.8 for sure!

 

[lachek]

May I know the big categories of 1.8 patches? War? Diplomacy? Economy? Or regional flavor?

Next week!

 

[lachek]

Is this a typo or will we actually get more news next week outside of the DD? Please let it be the second one.

Very sorry to disappoint, my internal clock is off. Since we're on an every other week schedule now, you will indeed have to wait two weeks.

 

[lachek]

Thank you for the response.

As far as I know, there is already a 12 month grace period before a building downsizes, including an icon in the building view (AUTO_DOWNSIZE_BUILDING_MONTHS_TO_WAIT in defines). The problem is that because it is hidden away in the building view, I will never ever see it in time. If this were an alert instead, I *would* see it in time, which would make the game much less frustrating for me.

Apologies, I must have misread the code! That would indeed make it much more feasible to implement an alert for it for 1.8, we'll keep you posted if the timeline allows for it!

 

[PDX_Pelly]

Is there some sort of roadmap apart from 1.8 releasing at some point in the future? Like more DLC, next expansion and stuff?

We have what is next for Victoria dev diary (124) which covers what free updates will look at in the future. Aside from this we will let people know what plans we have when we want to! For example through Dev Diaries.