Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #132 - Pivot of Empire

[PerhapsItsChondoLal]

So what tea blend is the patch going to be called?

Darjeeling, obviously.

 

[Notme1]

Since caste system is a law like any other, then its effects would disappear or appear from/in state X instantly, if India loses or gains it.
I guess its not that different from other laws like slavery, or cultural/religious laws.

 

[Jakuga]

Thinking about it, a new expansion pass might be one of the things announced in the next two days...

 

[PerhapsItsChondoLal]

Er why is tripura decentralized

 

[vyshan]

Darjeeling, obviously.

Not Masala Chai? though Darjeeling is a good choice.

 

[Namelessgod95]

Thinking about it, a new expansion pass might be one of the things announced in the next two days...

Highly likely considering they aren’t taking preorders yet. When is paradox ever not taken preorders!!!

 

[Almas]

Will the new DLC be part of an Expansion Pass or Chapter 2 or something like that? Would it be more economical to buy it with a possible expansion pass to get a discount and increase my personal Standard of Living?

 

[MohawkWolfo98]

I’m looking forward to see how this would affect the UK! There will be events and mechanics for it in the immersion pack will there?

 

[le cur]

Exciting news! I'd suspected this might be in the works given the caste system mechanics, and it's great to see. I'll echo what others have asked about Sikh Empire interactions with its neighbours to the west.

How will the East India Company Company work? That is, the flavour Company in the game called the East India Company, which you can have as the East India Company. In general I feel that chartered companies could do with their own Governance Principles law, one which encourages heavy dependence on an overlord, perhaps by ensuring their Legitimacy will take blows unless they can hit increasingly unfeasible economic targets. Now Companies can own buildings, it might make sense to have the EIC be a Company headquartered in the Home Counties, which requires the EIC as a subject to maintain. In exchange for dealing with the unreliability of CC rule, the overlord gets an additional Company slot; if you go the route of making CC into a GP law, that might extend to the Hudson Bay Company and perhaps even to the CC subjects in Africa.

Finally, in DD 130 I asked about Austria. Knowing that you're focusing on India this time round, I assume there won't be much content there, but I do think that with Discrimination and Secessions both getting reworked this update, you do need to give them a bit of a touch-up. Spoilered is my last post on the matter.

Spoiler

As a general note, I'd like to ask about the Matter of Hungary content. I touched on this last DD, but will the possible outcomes remain the same? At the moment, Austria-Hungary is the same thing regardless of how it comes about: if you manage to raise Hungarians to the second-highest acceptance, you're rewarded with them becoming a primary culture, and if you fail and they're on the verge of secession, you can opt out by making them a primary culture. Sure, it upsets the aristocracy, but who cares? You've still got yourself a new primary culture, and your state's still as strong as ever.

I'm sure you're already coming up with ideas for an Austria rework, along with so many other countries, but I do think at the moment it's more ahistorical than you can justify. Austria-Hungary wasn't a real state. The flag used in-game was strictly for merchant shipping. In daily affairs, the two realms had their own flags, with their own armies, because they were their own countries held together by an increasingly tenuous personal union. The Ausgleich you get in game is nothing like that: it's equality for the Hungarians, with zero concrete penalties to your state's functionality.

If you're reworking civil wars and secessions anyway, you absolutely need to make Hungarian nationalism into a threat, because at present it's if anything much less scary than any other nationalism. The easiest fix would be that upon failing the Journal Entry you get to choose between the current Austrian Hegemonist option and a new option which, rather than just accepting Hungarian as a culture, instead releases all secessionist states into a Personal Union (as a monarchy) or Dominion (as any other type). I'd also like another success option which lets you remain as Austria in exchange for, say, more pro-Multiculturalism characters.

Now for the harder, but in my view very worthwhile, possibility: expanding this idea to other secessionist movements. The obvious case that comes to mind is the creation of the Irish Free State. At the moment the AI has very little incentive to release puppet states, especially because the predefined state borders usually don't actually match the secession support. In my view, secessionists (at least the less ideological ones) should give you some sort of prompt where you can release them, perhaps in exchange for their loyalty as a puppet state. The more radical a movement is, the more autonomy they'll demand, or else the new puppet might fall into immediate civil war.

Finally, I must reiterate how impressed I am with all that you've been doing. It's fantastic to see India getting the attention it deserves; keep up the great work!

 

[Dr BAMF]

YES, YES, YES, YES!!!!

This is the exact Victoria 3 flavor pack that I have always wanted!!!

India is such fascinating country, with incredible land and massive super-power potential if you manage to gain independence as the powerful 'India' tag. Doing this 100 years early though, while awesome, has always felt weird without any unique flavor dramatizing it. Seeing that there is now not only going to be a unique and flavory delicious independence path for native Indians, but new unique characters, ideologies, Sikh content, princely state content and an actual caste system with the new discrimination rework as its foundation -- I am officially hyped! This is ten bucks I've been wanting to spend on Victoria 3 since it was 1.0!

I have always wanted to be able to muck things up so badly as the BIC that, instead of turning Raj, they get overthrown by native Indians who establish an Indian democracy like the real one, only much earlier. Becoming the India tag, I would love the option to either seize the BIC's military and seek independence by force, or agree to compensate British investors with a big debt and remain a British Vassal with full autonomy, as a way to keep the peace while you develop. If I can do anything at all like that in this pack, if there's a good amount of unique Indian cultural events and the caste system is interesting and impactful, I'm going to love it!

Thank you, Paradox! I couldn't be happier with this choice of flavor pack! I can't wait to read the dev diaries!

 

[Desseabar]

From the screenshots, it looks like Shan has been split out as a subject of Burma. Will we be getting Burmese content now? That's great, as Southeast Asia has been in need of love for a while now.

 

[47pik]

Perfect, 10/10 choice of region, no notes

 

[Me_]

Is there going to be some sort of DLC pack, like the other Paradox games are doing?

 

[Nirual]

I didn't expect an India DLC, but it surely fits the content of the free update.

The visuals look great! And I'm looking forward to the DLC

 

[Traxium318]

I think is fairly expected to see the Season Pass 2 announced this week anyways, we cant buy the new DLC yet and still 3 more annoucements to come.

DLC looks amazing btw!

 

[Basileus2]

I’m gonna reverse colonise Britain and introduce them to good food.

 

[Anonim97]

Victoria 3 really takes the areas that were an afterthought in other GSGs (either due to lack of importance in that timeline or something else) and make them into main focus.

I love it!

 

[William-frost]

I saw this most important picture in the video introduction in the Steam store.
First of all, there are more princely states in India, and the Sikh Empire now has a color that is easier to distinguish from the East India Company. It is more historical that the Jammu Kingdom, a vassal of the Sikh Empire, is now invading Ladakh. I hope that Qing can add a truce agreement with Ladakh to show that Qing refused to support Ladakh when the war broke out in 1936. This truce relationship is used to express that Ladakh was forced to break away from Qing's vassalage. And I hope that the Kashmir region and tag will be split into Jammu and Ladakh, because they represent two different cultures and different terrains. At the same time, after China reunifies, I hope that China can be correctly given a claim to the Ladakh region, because China has never controlled the Jammu Valley, and giving a claim to the entire Kashmir region is too destructive to the immersion of the game.
Second, Myanmar is no longer a whole. But I found in the video that Shan State seems to be in a state of transition between tribe and country. I guess there was an event after the start that caused Shan State to become a vassal of Myanmar. Chin and Nagaland now need to be colonized, but this is like letting Russia colonize Alaska and the Turkmen tribes, I feel that this is too difficult for AI to do.
Third, the borders of Tibet have been adjusted. Originally, Tibet owned the entire Arunachal Pradesh region of modern India, which was obviously wrong. Now that the mistake has been corrected, I wonder if a province will be re-divided in the southern Tibet region to represent Arunachal Pradesh. And add the McMahon event to let the East India Company directly obtain here and Aksai Chin. Haha, although this is very historical, it is really sad for me as a Chinese.
Finally, Kabul seems to have been adjusted a little, I can't see what it is

 

[SilentReflection]

I'm now curious what the caste laws will do

 

[z3rO_]

Oh, do we finally get something for Himalayas? Thunder Dragon Empire? With cool flags and stuff?