Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #140 - 1.8 post-release thoughts

[PDX_Pelly]

SNIP I would MUCH rather have the promised Naval changes in 1.9 and a couple of the smaller Army fixes in 1.9 and let the front-splitting and teleportation rework wait for 1.10, then.

SNIP

I'm going to focus on this one part, we talked about wishing to do a navy rework and our ideas for it in the video discussion/ the what's next dev diary it was based on.

One thing seems to have been lost from people talking about it past that, which is we did not say when this would happen. It was for next updates not the next update. I can see how people may have thought that from there being more talked about it, but that is more "we are very interested in how we could do it rather than us having a fully worked out design". We also try to give ourselves the best possibility to move around when we do things based on feedback, for example with military as with in this dev diary.

This is definitely not to say we are putting looking at navy into the furthest recesses of our mind or plans.

 

[Silens]

It's good that the military system gets some work. Again. This time around, I really hope you'll change the current system fundamentally, and not double down on a flawed concept that has never worked properly.

Worst case scenario we're headed straight into sunk-cost-fallacy territory. I'm aware that you already sunk major resources into the current system and it's a centerpiece of the original design intention, it is someone's beloved brain child and letting go hurts. But at some point you have to cut your losses and move on.

You know, I can get behind you and express my admiration that you bravely tried something new. Imho not many devs are willing to take such risks, so kudos to you.

It's just that after two years of the current warfare system, and with lots of experience ranging from Imperator to Stellaris, I have to say that Vic3 takes the cake with the most unenjoyable and fun-draining and frustrating warfare/naval system (which in combination with the changes to war goals and warscore makes it worse).

Here's hoping that 1.9 isn't just a superficial nose job and window dressing, but a complete redesign.

 

[guiskj]

I'm going to focus on this one part, we talked about wishing to do a navy rework and our ideas for it in the video discussion/ the what's next dev diary it was based on.

One thing seems to have been lost from people talking about it past that, which is we did not say when this would happen. It was for next updates not the next update. I can see how people may have thought that from there being more talked about it, but that is more "we are very interested in how we could do it rather than us having a fully worked out design". We also try to give ourselves the best possibility to move around when we do things based on feedback, for example with military as with in this dev diary.

This is definitely not to say we are putting looking at navy into the furthest recesses of our mind or plans.

Thank you for the reply, but it is really frustrating to learn that major changes to naval gameplay are not close to release.

 

[marmot01]

• Most significantly, it’s clear that we need to spend more time testing and iterating on the balance of complex Journal Entries like The Unstable Raj before releasing them into the wild, to ensure the difficulty level and overall impact on game outcomes are where we want them to be.

As it stands, improving EIC's SoL by 1.5 (8.5->10) within the initial 13 years (676 weeks' worth of construction) requires very narrowly scheduling the construction queue, some luck with abolishing slavery, and minmaxing what is being built - no rice fields or you waste construction time.

I understand that the Unstable Raj is alt-history and should be harder. But having to minmax so tightly is immersion-breaking, which isn't what you would want from an immersion pack.

I'll try a run today where I'll pass only one institution (Public Health) so as to conserve construction bandwidth which in my last run went for administration buildings. I suspect this wasted construction time I would have used better for manufacturing industry and iron, to try to keep a lid on my construction expenses.

 

[Dr BAMF]

We're taking a look at some of the values involved.
Can't say more at this point as we need to investigate further before committing to anything.

I'd like to humbly suggest that values are not the core problem here. I understand why cross-heritage was blocked, as it's very strange and immersion breaking to see pops change facial features and even skin colors when they adopt new cultural practices, but I also understand why it was removed. I think both off and on are extremes here, and a new solution is needed.

I think the game's performance has gotten good enough now that you could afford to consider the idea of dynamic hybrid cultures that unite an entire heritage as a new culture linked to the new country. South-East-Asian-English, Middle-Eastern-French, Euro-Chinese or what have you. It would need to have significant requirements, say, a minimum 10% of the country's population being from that heritage, the country itself being at least a major, and having had a cultural community there for at least some years to even start, say 10-20 or so. Ultimately though, I don't think it would need to cost much performance to have a new culture for each heritage in each of the major countries, it may actually cost nothing or even increase performance by allowing pop groups to combine in these new hybrids.

Please consider it. I know that it might take some significant changes to allow cultures to assimilate into a culture that isn't a primary, and I'm honestly not sure what to do with colonial nations like the EIC, where presumably some Indians would combine into Indo-English people, and then not know what to do with themselves after independence, but I think solving these problems would be worth it. It would add some more depth to the new acceptance mechanics (as presumably hybrid cultures would be at least a little more accepted), and it would also add immersion, as well as making the existing culture mechanics work better in the end.

 

[alexgmcm]

I feel one issue with the system as it stands is that once a front has been established (or already exists, perhaps via allies) your troops can move there regardless of whether the enemy has naval superiority on the oceans in the way or if there is a path over land to that front through countries with military access etc.

This severely nerfs the usefulness of the navy as I can't use the navy to stop other countries sending their troops over. The naval supply system somewhat addresses this but as mentioned in the main post, the supply system isn't really impactful enough.

I'm not sure what can be done for land-based wars, but for the overseas ones massively scaling up the impact of the naval supply system (i.e. convoys) on armies seems like it could be a 'quick fix' to improve it somewhat.

 

[marmot01]

Thank you for the reply, but it is really frustrating to learn that major changes to naval gameplay are not close to release.

I am still waiting for the Carlist wars for Spain. They caused some major upheaval throughout European diplomatic circles, but in the game, there is no mention of them.

 

[SinisterPig]

Receiving an update concerning the military would be quite beneficial for the current state of Victoria 3, while I agree that the naval system could use a lot of love too (they could probably make some minor improvements as part of the larger military update), acknowledging the fact that most major conflicts throughout history have been decided by land armies and working the military into something that is enjoyable and rewards strong economies, should be the top priority. It would be nice if we could see infrastructure and railways having more of an impact on mobilization and attrition, rather than just being a toggle-able army effect. So, while the navy is an important component of warfare that cannot be dismissed, wars are mainly won and lost on the ground, rather than the sea.

(Also do you know if the dev team could look into reworking the current state of the electricity good? It is very annoying having it be a local good, what I think could happen is that electricity could become a good that transcends states, and is able to be used in states that are connected by a power grid (the power grid being extended to states that have at least one power plant). This way, it would be much less tedious to manage electricity in the late game, and it will feel much more rewarding to get an electricity grid for your country up and running).

 

[SpiritRiven]

Does this mean you guys are working on introducing mechanics for limited warfare instead of every war being a total war?

 

[guiskj]

Receiving an update concerning the military would be quite beneficial for the current state of Victoria 3, while I agree that the naval system could use a lot of love too (they could probably make some minor improvements as part of the larger military update), acknowledging the fact that most major conflicts throughout history have been decided by land armies and working the military into something that is enjoyable and rewards strong economies, should be the top priority. It would be nice if we could see infrastructure and railways having more of an impact on mobilization and attrition, rather than just being a toggle-able army effect. So, while the navy is an important component of warfare that cannot be dismissed, wars are mainly won and lost on the ground, rather than the sea.

(Also do you know if the dev team could look into reworking the current state of the electricity good? It is very annoying having it be a local good, what I think could happen is that electricity could become a good that transcends states, and is able to be used in states that are connected by a power grid (the power grid being extended to states that have at least one power plant). This way, it would be much less tedious to manage electricity in the late game, and it will feel much more rewarding to get an electricity grid for your country up and running).

To me it is not at all about historical relevance of navy vs land battles, though one could argue that this was THE period where naval superiority defined conflicts.

But regardless of any of that, I just want the navy gameplay to be fun. Or barring the feasibility of that, reduce how incredibly annoying it currently is.

To me, one of the big incentives to make my country's economy big and powerful is to then throw the whole world in chaos in the 1900s with big wars. But after only a few runs, I've given up on that because the navy game is just crazy annoying to deal with.

I shelved the game, then in 1.7 did a Brazil pacifist run just to see the content and then shelved it again.

There is no point for me to play Vic3 anymore. I know how to make most non-meme countries into great powers, but there is nothing to do once you get there. No crisis, no challenge to prepare for.

Maybe that's the Stellaris player in me talking, but what the hell is the point of late game in Vic 3?

 

[sr_lobo92]

In my humble opinion, the game needs a 2.0, not a 1.9, to fix the military situation. I think the game works very nice on the political and economic side but, just when I am having fun with my playthrough, a war comes around and everything breaks down. The most important thing is to introduce a supply map similar to HOI4, and a proper land-sea interaction.
For instance, in a Japan vs China war, China is able to move all of its troops to counteract the Taiwan invasion, which it is just insane, removing the key aspect of strategically controlling the sea.
In another example, Russia is able to move its whole army to Afghanistan. The whole point of the Great Game is that since the two powers were not able to commit large number of troops to the theater due to logistics and terrain, they had to rely on diplomacy, soft power and espionage, or risk an uncertain war (i.e., afghan wars). If you can just move any number of troops to the region, then everything else is pointless.

 

[Wizzington]

I think you hotfixed this one a little too hard.

Agreed. We will need to make some adjustments.

 

[Álvaro Núñez de Lara]

You don't find it tedious clicking around to add every single battalion to a specific state, making sure you count out exactly 50 infantry and 50 artillery? What about if you need to get a proper size naval invasion fleet of your big army? You don't mind clicking into a panel and typing or sliding exactly 25 inf- 25 arty to get a new army?

True that is annoying. But as annoying as having to create a big army in EU4 or other PDX games. It would be nice to get a template. But these are QoL stuff for me, not a deal breaker.

 

[Álvaro Núñez de Lara]

I'm going to focus on this one part, we talked about wishing to do a navy rework and our ideas for it in the video discussion/ the what's next dev diary it was based on.

One thing seems to have been lost from people talking about it past that, which is we did not say when this would happen. It was for next updates not the next update. I can see how people may have thought that from there being more talked about it, but that is more "we are very interested in how we could do it rather than us having a fully worked out design". We also try to give ourselves the best possibility to move around when we do things based on feedback, for example with military as with in this dev diary.

This is definitely not to say we are putting looking at navy into the furthest recesses of our mind or plans.

This team has always been great at pushing to the next patch the most urgent and most requested stuff by the community. It is no wonder that people would expect this to apply to naval as it is one if not the most requested thing. But I dont think anyone took it for granted it would be for 1.9. It just disappointing that it isn't, but it's fine, as long as it is coming

 

[Ancillary]

Yeah, the impact of supply on armies feels like it's actually regressed from launch. For all the other issues with the original war system, it was always a good time to bait the AI into sending 300K troops overseas then cutting their lines with convoy raiders and watching them take horrific casualties. I don't know why the increased daily attrition from supply shortages was removed in the last big military rework.

 

[Xodion413]

Thank you for addressing some of these warfare things. As other parts of the game are getting better and better, the issues there have become more glaring, and chief among them are the front splitting bugs, units teleporting home, and un-assigning from fronts when a state is taken. Fixing those would surely go a long way towards improving the experience.

Knowing that warfare is going to be patched it’s also tempting to ask for a whole wishlist of other fixes or reworks at the same time, many of which obviously the team wouldn’t be able to address in this patch due to time, or because they wouldn’t actually work.

That said, and though I am very much speaking from an armchair perspective, I would urge the devs to also look at a few other things:

• Having battles result in devastation again, instead of occupations. And making artillery cause devastation at very high rates. It creates a nice risk/reward dilemma of whether to use artillery which are effective at winning battles but reduce the winner’s reward, or to use cavalry which are less effective but don’t generate devastation and capture land more quickly.
• To go along with that, separating captured states’ market isolation from devastation. Occupied states definitely should be restricted to 0% market access, but that penalty should be its own thing if devastation comes from battles.
• Giving all generals a “terrain preference” trait of some sort, so players can have some idea of what path they might take to the wargoal. (As others have said, a terrain mapmode would also help in this regard.)

(And my personal wish would be the ability to set a Strategic Objective for each Army, but I understand that one is probably the least likely.)

 

[47pik]

Also, I don’t think I was clear before but I really believe in the vision of military being presented in Vic 3 at present. It’s flawed in implementation, yes, but the goal and big picture design and the overall approach are fantastic and I want to see more doubling down and commitment to that vision and I hope you don’t let the toy soldier types stop you from improving the current vision and making something truly unique and special.

As flawed as military is right now, the overall approach to military as an mere extension of politics and economics is what makes me the most excited about this game, in a way strategy games never have been able to before.

 

[Dr BAMF]

It's good that the military system gets some work. Again. This time around, I really hope you'll change the current system fundamentally, and not double down on a flawed concept that has never worked properly.

They aren't going to get rid of the front line system, and I really don't see a need for it if they fix front collapsing. I like that it's mostly economic and logistics based rather than focusing of the minutia of combat. I don't need another wargame, I already have dozens, including HOI4, and the goofy plastic-men-on-a-map model has it's problems too.

The lack of naval mechanics and blockades, front collapse, and a lack of serious impact to supply shortages that the player and AI can induce are the biggest problems with it. The diplo-play and wargoals system is significantly more broken than war itself is.

I'd like some more depth with it, sure. I'd like it if generals could level up with experience and learn to do map-affecting tactics like encirclements (I don't want to tell them to do it, I want them to just do it), and I'd like it if cavalry had some relevance. But the frontline system itself is good, it just needs fixing and expansion.

 

[AceGHQST]

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Happy Thursday everyone, it’s time for another Victoria 3 development diary. Today I’ll be talking about my thoughts on the release of 1.8 and Pivot of Empire, the feedback we’ve received, and also a bit of what’s in store next for Victoria 3.

As some of you might remember, 1.8 was actually meant to be two updates - a smaller 1.8 with bug fixes & polish, and a larger 1.9 with Pivot of Empire and the larger free features such as the Political Movement Rework and the Discrimination Rework. We ended up combining these into a single update because the release windows between the two were just too tight, and as a result 1.8 became a chonker of an update, with a lot of potential to cause bugs and balance issues.

On the whole, the feedback around the update (and in particular the Discrimination Rework) has been positive, and you seem to be enjoying the additional dimensions that the update adds to the economic and political sides of Victoria 3. However, there are a few issues and bits of feedback on the not-so-positive-side that I specifically want to address:

• On release, we had a very nasty issue introduced by a backend change in the launcher, which caused users with a non-unicode character to crash when launching the game, which unfortunately slipped past our testing due to the fact that all of our work email addresses use only unicode characters. This one actually had us pulling our hairs a bit trying to find the cause, but with help from the engine team we were finally able to narrow it down and get a fix out just before the weekend (we don’t usually make a habit of patching at 17:45 on Fridays, but in this particular case it was warranted)
• We’ve gotten a fair amount of feedback that the rework of companies to own and affect specific buildings has made them somewhat underwhelming compared to the way they worked in 1.7, and we agree that this is an issue. We have made some changes in the hotfixes since, and are continuing to read your feedback and make adjustments as needed. You can always @ Pelly directly on our social platforms for key feedback in this regard, especially on Discord, the Forums and Reddit!
• Migration ended up far too non-restrictive and Assimilation ended up too restrictive as a result of the changes made to Discrimination. Both of these issues should now have been resolved in hotfixes.

I also want to take a moment to talk about the release and reception of Pivot of Empire. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback about the flavor it adds to India and how much more interesting playing in the region has become, which of course we’re very happy to hear! With that said, there’s also some things that didn’t work out quite as we wanted, which has resulted in some learnings for the Victoria 3 team going forward:

• Most significantly, it’s clear that we need to spend more time testing and iterating on the balance of complex Journal Entries like The Unstable Raj before releasing them into the wild, to ensure the difficulty level and overall impact on game outcomes are where we want them to be.
• We need to rethink how we set rewards for Journal Entries so that they feel appropriate to the challenge of completing them. We also need to get better about telling the player what those rewards are going to be so they don’t have to make a guess or check the wiki when deciding whether or not to try and complete a JE.
• We need to ensure the AI can handle the content we add, particularly for complex/difficult Journal Entries.

Finally, I want to touch briefly on what’s coming next. I won’t spend too long on this, as next week’s dev diary is going to be the customary ‘what’s next after update 1.8’ which will be all about this topic, but I feel I would be ignoring the elephant in the room if I didn’t address the fact that a significant amount of the feedback we’ve gotten about 1.8 isn’t so much about what is in 1.8, but rather what wasn’t: namely, as a number of you would put it: ‘fixing the military system’.

There is of course a broad range of opinions on what exactly this phrase entails, but from my perspective, these are most significant issues we see with the Victoria 3 military system as it stands:

• Front splitting causing wars to become unmanageable or frustrating
• Units suddenly teleporting away when their front disappears
• Supply isn’t impactful enough and armies win battles they should really lose when facing critical equipment shortages
• Lack of a proper military access system, i.e. Prussia having to naval invade to reach Denmark
• Troop allocation to offensive vs defensive battles causing unexpected outcomes (for example, a general using all local troops to defend against one naval invasion causing another naval invasion to just walk in unopposed)

For the next update (1.9), our ambition is to take a crack at all of these issues and in particular try to find a proper solution for the front splitting and troop teleportation woes once and for all. Finding good solutions for these issues is going to be a fairly major undertaking, so you might have to wait a while for 1.9, but I promise we’ll try to make it worth the wait!

With that said, we’re done for today. Join us again next week as I continue to talk about what’s next in updates 1.9, 1.10 and beyond. See you then!

I was expecting that we would be able to have a chance to lead a proper princely states campaign into rebellion with this update. It was all in vain as the update teased at it only to make it unfeasible all together (especially with the 1.8.3 patch which fixed much but ruined any chance for said type of run). Will this be addressed in any way?

 

[ingenieux]

Also, I don’t think I was clear before but I really believe in the vision of military being presented in Vic 3 at present. It’s flawed in implementation, yes, but the goal and big picture design and the overall approach are fantastic and I want to see more doubling down and commitment to that vision and I hope you don’t let the toy soldier types stop you from improving the current vision and making something truly unique and special.

As flawed as military is right now, the overall approach to military as an mere extension of politics and economics is what makes me the most excited about this game, in a way strategy games never have been able to before.

Yes, i hope the army stays mostl out of hand of the player and get some agency, after all it's the period of admiral replacing powder with sawdust, of autonomous conquest in manchuria, of military creeping over civilian government during WW1, and of military backed communist revolution.

But before that, yeah, fronts and logistics.