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Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #127 - Bulk Nationalization and Companies Building Ownership

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Hello Victorians,
wake up, grab a brush and put on a little make-up - we’re talking about Bulk Nationalization today! Also, I will be bringing you more details on the next step in the evolution of the Companies feature: Ownership of building levels. Let’s get started, shall we?

Bulk Nationalization

Since the release of the 1.7 update and the Nationalization feature, the biggest wish from the community (and ourselves) in regards to it was to have a tool that allows you to nationalize more buildings at once and to let you choose more concretely which levels you want to nationalize.
So that’s what we did!

In order to access this new tool, you will have to go into the Building Registry, which you can find on the bottom of the Buildings panel.

Big button. Big window. Big nice.
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In here you will see a new button which says “Nationalize Filtered Buildings”.

The Bulk Nationalization waits behind this new button in the Building Registry
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As you may be able to tell from its name already, for assembling the list of buildings to be nationalized with the tool, we take into account all the filters you have set up inside the Building Registry.
So if for example you’ve filtered your list down to a list of buildings that are owned by other countries or pops in other countries, well then these are the only buildings that are considered when opening the Bulk Nationalization window. Alternatively you could have filtered the list for buildings that are located in West Bengal, that have a goods shortage and that are currently not hiring. The more you filter, the more control you have over which buildings to nationalize.

Now let’s see what happens when you press that button.

Example: List of all British Pop-owned Ranches, Furniture Manufacturies and Steel Mills that I have filtered for in the Building Registry and that I can nationalize in one go
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You can see a list of all affected buildings on top and the main sliders underneath to determine how many levels you’d like to nationalize as you know it from the existing tool. If other owner groups were present, there’d be a separate slider for them.
Additionally, to the left of it, we’ve added a shortcut to filter by a specific ownership type in order to allow you to only select Manor House owned properties for example (because who needs these Landowners, really).

Quick filter for specific ownership type
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On the right side of the window, you see the summed up consequences, costs and the option to disable payment (if your laws allow it).
All that’s left to do is press the button and take control.

This Bulk Nationalization feature should prove a powerful tool in everybody’s toolbox when it comes to claiming national ownership and we can’t wait to see you use it.

Companies Building Ownership

As we wrote in the past when we talked about Companies, we have always had a bunch of ideas on how to expand the feature to integrate it more in the simulation.
One of these ideas was giving established Companies actual ownership over building levels in the country which they would positively affect, rather than applying it to all buildings in your country.
So now that we have shipped the 1.7 update which contained the Building Ownership Rework that actually allows other buildings to take control of levels, it felt only natural to take this next step for Companies too.

The way we do this is by giving each established Company a Headquarter (HQ) building. This building will act much like a Financial District or Manor House. They are going to have Pops working in them, have an ownership portfolio overview etc.
So you still decide which Companies to establish in order to specialize your country, but how that plays out will be different.
The establishment of a Company HQ may require you to give away some of your own building levels or provide the necessary funds. Details on this still need to be evaluated and implemented as we are approaching 1.8, but the conditions will likely be dependent on your economic laws.

When you decide to establish a Company, we determine in which state its HQ will spawn based on where in your country the relevant industries are the most prominent. So if you establish Friedrich Krupp for example, a company that cares about Steel, Guns and Artillery, it looks through your country and finds the state with the highest number of building levels of these types and will settle there.

Friedrich Krupp being established in Westphalia, the major steel producing state in Prussia
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Once established, Companies can invest into new building levels like Financial Districts or Manor Houses. They make use of the Investment Pool for this. Depending on how much they or the Pops in them have contributed to it, there will be more or less investments from Companies into new levels.
Like the other ownership buildings, the Company HQ level will increase with each level they build or buy.
A goal that we have with their investment logic is that Companies should start investing much more locally, e.g. in their own state, before expanding to your country. But of course if you have foreign investment rights in place, Companies will also be able to make use of that and start building new Steel Mills on the other side of the world!
But keep in mind that Companies will only ever invest in buildings of their assigned types, so Friedrich Krupp will never build a Ranch for example.

A look inside Friedrich Krupp and their Property Portfolio
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Another major change that we’re doing with this update is of course to change the throughput and construction bonuses. Companies will only affect the buildings that are actually belonging to them, rather than every single building of fitting type in your country. To compensate for this, we increase the bonus that Companies are providing. The same is true for the construction bonus, which is applied only to buildings that are funded by the Company.

In the interface, we will represent Company ownership with their icon wherever a level is owned by them. We are also thinking about adding a new color to distinguish their ownership type further, but will need to investigate this more.
What we also do to visualize company ownership is take it into the third dimension. We will show on the world map that a building has an association to a company in the form of billboards.
If there’s at least one level being owned by a Company, we place an according billboard showing the Company’s logo on the building.

Our Art team has come up with multiple designs for billboards, very pretty (but still WIP)
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For the future, we can see potential to expand this kind of visualization to other areas, e.g. ships and trucks, but that’s out of scope for 1.8 at least.

While this ownership change is a major step forward for Companies, it’s not the end of our plans for them. We cannot provide you a timeline for further improvements yet, but we do see potential to expand on them with features like political impact (e.g. influencing IGs or enactment of certain laws) and company leading characters among other things.
But that’s for another time.

The next Dev Diary is coming to you in two weeks on the 19. of September, where Martin will walk you through the changes we are making to Political Movements.
With that, I’m leaving you for today and wish you a happy Thursday! ;)
 
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I was just wondering if this update will include a way to turn off in the pm screen the owned foriegn industry. So like when chanigng production methods for me its alway like oh some things are differnt and its some random farm in india i built or otherwise. Will there be a way to make it only in country that you can change in this update? or is it already a thing and i havent noticed?
 
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1) Can companies buy out financial district/manor houses' levels?

2) Any news on more metrics such as:
- Net immigration/emigration (currently you can only see it on a state per state basis)
- How many pops become X profession, Y interest group, or Z religion last month
- Gini Coefficient
- If building average wages have increased, decreased, or stagnated since the previous month
 
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I was just wondering if this update will include a way to turn off in the pm screen the owned foriegn industry. So like when chanigng production methods for me its alway like oh some things are differnt and its some random farm in india i built or otherwise. Will there be a way to make it only in country that you can change in this update? or is it already a thing and i havent noticed?

Patch notes for 1.7.2 mention

The indicators for what production method is selected in each category for buildings in your country no longer takes foreign buildings into account, so if all your domestic buildings use the same PM it will show that rather than the "mixed" indicator if some of your overseas buildings are using a different PM

Is that what you mean?
 
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Could be possible so the Investment Pool would also cover for the wages of Construction Sector employees in the amount ratio appropriate to government - private CP split?
 
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The investment pool has never been a good abstraction, and with 1.7 it's decidedly very harmful, as you can cheese out certain owners with repeated nationalization.

I get that you couldn't make companies have their own IPs for 1.8, but I very much hope that one day the IP concept is abolished altogether in favour of just using buildings' cash reserves (be it company HQs or regular fin districts) to invest in stuff. The IP is good as a metric (accumulated investment-ready cash reserves), about the same way as debt limit is a metric. It isn't good as a dedicated, unreasonably meritocratic purse that takes everyone's money and then distributes them.
 
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I'm not sure about the company changes. The impact of companies will probably be significantly reduced, with only the few owned buildings getting the bonus. From a realism perspective, it seems reasonable, but gameplay wise I really liked the strategic decision around companies. You really had to balance which industries to boost and the companies felt like an impactful decision.
 
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I'm not sure about the company changes. The impact of companies will probably be significantly reduced, with only the few owned buildings getting the bonus. From a realism perspective, it seems reasonable, but gameplay wise I really liked the strategic decision around companies. You really had to balance which industries to boost and the companies felt like an impactful decision.
But strategic decisions will become even more important how much focus govenment focus you will give to the company. S the choices will be more impatful, not less....

What will be the relationship between Company HQ and Financial Districts/Manor Houses?
 
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The way we do this is by giving each established Company a Headquarter (HQ) building. This building will act much like a Financial District or Manor House. They are going to have Pops working in them, have an ownership portfolio overview etc.
I see you've mentioned that a Company HQ might have Capitalists employed, albeit fewer than a Financial District. To be clear: those capitalists will invest their money as normal, and the company's investment funds come from elsewhere? I've been eager to have more tools for bootstrapping financial centres in initially poor states, so that'd be great. I wonder if there'll be a new meta of establishing Companies for early-game resource expansion (e.g. construction goods firms) with the intent of breaking them up so as to privatise those goods later on.

Somewhat.
Due to the architecture of ownership buildings, companies will always have to be private owners, even under Cooperative Ownership and so on (for which they'll get an exception). So there's that.
But what changes is the establishing conditions. E.g. you'll usually need to provide 5 levels to establish a company, but under LF you can't nationalize, so instead you'll be required to have enough money to buy 5 levels, which will then get transferred to the Company as it's being established.

We will do things like who benefits the most based on economic laws though, so for example under Command Economy most of the profits will go to the state coffers instead of the Capitalists working in the buildings (under LF for example).
Curious. What do you mean by "exception" for Cooperative Ownership? Do you mean that it'll work like a normal capitalist enterprise despite the rest of the system, or that there'll be a different ownership PM? If it's the former, can they privatise new state-owned buildings, or do they just have to get by with whatever buildings they fund themselves? And if it's the latter, do CO companies return some of their dividends to their workers? If a company owns some, but not all, of a given building type in a state, do they equally share out the dividends with the workers there? And likewise, if the other half are cooperatively owned directly, do they equally share out their half of the dividends? I presume any socialist ownership PM would replace capitalists with bureaucrats or something.

Ah, exciting stuff! Perhaps I'll get to make the Comintern into a mutual investment partnership, so each of The People's Socialist Revolutionary Proletarian Megacorporations can do socialist construction in their comrade nations. To get rich is glorious!
 
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  1. Are company HQs limited to one state or can they spread out across your country like financial districts? i.e. will I have 100 levels of HQ lumped in one state of 50 in one, 20 in two others and 10 in a last one?
  2. Since it sounds like Companies cannot buyout Financial Districts and Manor Houses the only way to have them get existing building levels is to nationalize the level (getting radicals) and then privatizing the levels and cross my fingers hoping that it will be the Companies that buy them and not the Financial Districts and Manor Houses? (Provided I am allowed to Nationalize and Privatize otherwise I am just screwed?)
 
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I feel like this game is so bland and disconnected from the history of the era its based in that it needs some significant, foundational changes to actually be an immersive, enjoyable game. The economy system/GDP simulator is really the only thing I would commend the game on doing an excellent job of.

I've given up on Vicky 3 and I'm hoping PDX has learned its lessons from this mediocre game and doesn't repeat the same mistakes. Looking forward to Vicky 4 ...
 
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Do you guys think you will add unique visual art for the military models on the ground according to what nation they are a part like British, French, and Russian?
 
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What? If anything this is a nerf for companies. They were extremely useful since they were added to the game.
I think the line of reasoning is "they were massively cheesy and nothing more". And now they are also something else.
 
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I hope in this update, that Victoria 3 will give to the Dutch back the ABC islands in the Caribbean. The ABC islands are the physical group of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, the three westernmost islands of the Leeward Antilles in the Caribbean Sea. These have a shared political history and a status of Dutch underlying ownership, since the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814 ceded them back to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, as Curaçao and Dependencies from 1815. They are a short distance north of the Falcón State, Venezuela.

in the game The ABC islands are part of Venezuela,
 
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It might be interesting to be able to bankroll or straight up just grant money to the companies.

If they can't keep up with the economy it may be difficult to make use of their construction bonus. But if I can just grant them 1 million pounds that they will convert that would be great.
 
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It might be interesting to be able to bankroll or straight up just grant money to the companies.

If they can't keep up with the economy it may be difficult to make use of their construction bonus. But if I can just grant them 1 million pounds that they will convert that would be great.
Subsidize their buildings and you are good to go
 
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Probably wouldn’t hurt to let companies form organically, like in real life, from financial districts and manor houses. Any companies formed by the player would be state-owned, provided the requisite economy law is enacted. (Flavored companies should be organic for sure—unless it’s a flavored company that was, historically, state-owned.)

Suez & Panama Canal Companies should form organically if player cannot form them due to economic law constraints. Nor should they contribute to company limit if they are formed by the player.

Also, removing the limits on the number of organically-formed companies a country can have would also make a lot of sense. Especially if their HQ could be conquered and fall under the ownership of another country.

Perhaps just limit the number of state-owned companies that can be formed? (But if the HQ of a state-owned company is conquered, said company shouldn’t be simply disbanded—HQ should move to another location within owner-country, or conquering nation should have a chance to overtake the company.)
 
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