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

[Ispil]

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

If I had to guess the reason why is because the naval work is going to be a lot more involved/changing of backend systems compared to the military changes. Which makes sense, given that the issues with the naval system are fundamental to the core of the system.

 

[le cur]

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.

For my part, I'd say your focus should be less about general buffs, which tend to feel quite mediocre, and more about specific boosts and especially ideological changes that make it rewarding to play in a certain direction. So far the most exciting narrative content to me has been the stuff that deals with custom ideologies; to date my favourite country is Paraguay under Francia, because the Intelligentsia adopt such a fascinating role, both enhancing and blocking progress in unique ways. I have never once bothered to try the Armed Forces path because I couldn't care less about getting an Army Offense boost; conquest is easy enough in the game as it is, and all those boosts do is make it slightly easier to play as what is otherwise a slightly harder version of the generic Latin American junta start.

As a general rule, I think the game is too Whiggish at the moment: it treats historical development as basically a uniform progression across countries at which you can either succeed or fail. If you're a nation like Brazil or Punjab, with fantastic agrarian potential, your incentive is currently not to utilise that potential, but to try and ignore it while you make a beeline for Laissez-Faire - indeed, you're incentivised to kneecap your farms, because then you can get the all-important Corn Laws. Until you've solved this basic problem, you just won't have many interesting narrative tools at your disposal. I can understand not wanting many new laws, but imo you do need a good number of new ideologies, like an Agrarian Liberal who wants free trade but still tries to maintain the power of the landed elite.

Otherwise: in general you need to rebalance the laws so that the player has to fight much harder to go down the route of an industrial superpower. I'd say Cooperative Ownership's 35% Government Construction allocation is a good baseline for Interventionism, and maybe 10-15% for Laissez Faire. LF should also not give such automatic favour to industrial investment: if the market conditions favour agriculture, why would an ultra free market not invest in agriculture? With additions like this, it becomes much harder for an underdeveloped nation to overtake the great industrial powers of Europe - and because it's much harder by default, it means your narrative content for those nations can be much more significant, because it can offer a boost over those hurdles rather than just a generic buff.

 

[Silens]

I don't need another wargame

And what makes you think that this is what I want? All I want is a warfare system that isn't as frustrating to use as the current one, the devs will obviously have to answer the 'how'.

Why not come up with something new? The devs shouldn't be afraid to part ways with something that doesn't work. Stellaris does that all the time, discarding stuff that works poorly. Vic3 devs (some of which did work on Stellaris) shouldn't be afraid to do the same.

Ironically, the severe lack of player agency leads to a frustrating micro-hell, worse than HoI4 even. What was meant to reduce frustration, now causes the exact opposite. You may be fine with it, but I am not.

All I want is to get it fixed properly, to offer options to those who want them, and automate it for everyone who doesn't like to deal with it. It's a sandbox, let the player decide what they want.

If they have to invent a new system to get there, yeah, go for it, I'm not attached to any system in particular, and I have no love or hate for the frontlines. Whatever the solution, I only expect it to work properly.

The diplo-play and wargoals system is significantly more broken than war itself is.

I agree with that view, but not with the conclusion. Just because there are worse problems than warfare, doesn't mean it shouldn't be solved regardless.

As it stands, we have several layers of unsatisfying systems on top of each other. You go from diplomatic plays to wargoals and then warfare (land as well as naval), and each system reinforces the weaknesses of the other two. I say they ought to fix all three, and not wait for years to do it.

The game is already two years old and old problems persist. I just don't want them to have to revisit the warfare debate every other year on repeat, to try and save a system that so far has brought little else but problems. I say they should take their time, come up with a proper solution, and then do it once and for all. A fundamental solution, now that they have more than two years worth of feedback.

I don't want to have the same discussion a year or two down the line. I'm tired of the warfare debate, and I want it solved. Is that really so unreasonable?

 

[Mosaic]

Are we doing to get at least some logistics for the military system so Russia couldn't fight America supporting Mexico and so the player would have more leverage changing the war's outcome.

Since the launching of the game it felt like the simplification of the entire military system was going to be balanced by something like that and it's really the only area where the player have no meaningful choices whatsoever.

From my personal perspective, building railways so it would be easy to defend/invade would finally make the preparation and supporting the war enjoyable for me. I find no fun in EU4 military system but Vic3 system still still shallow to me.

 

[TeddyTheBear]

I know you guys are going to be slammed with everyone wanting a huge overhaul of the land warfare system, and people have great points to that.

May I humbly suggest that adding a simple army template creator, would go a heck of a long way. Allow me to select a certain strategic region, pick my number of troops/conscripts/units, assign those same numbers to barracks in states, and build your soldiers up. Then find a reasonable way to copy/paste that same template to different states or strategic regions.

Just something to allow me to build armies quickly instead of a thousand clicks. Thanks for all you do!

 

[VonHuerde]

In my opinion the army system is also missing the "spring"-like characteristics of army offensives where one has to first gather strength by planning and preparing supplies and then releases that potential in an offensive until supply lines are stretched and/or supplies exhausted.

 

[CivMasters]

"Fixing the military" is kind of a meme. There are improvements to be made to the unfun spaghetti mechanics, to the terrible "troops unassigned and teleported to the shadow realm/HQ" etc.

Also, Diplomatic plays are still the biggest problem with the game, making it feel quite unfun at times and not at all dynamic. Once declared, there is no room for the play to increase, decrease, or change. Being able or unable to tick below zero is a bizarre concept.

I reckon the main problem is that you've been adding more half baked systems. The climate added in 1.8 is so bad. Not at all balanced, zero interactivity, as deeply complex as a saucer.

 

[ENFP]

Can we expect to see some sort of war escalation system in the vein of the Victoria 2 crisis system? You mentioned in one of the roadmap posts that you want to reduce the number of great power wars early in the game, could these work in tandem with each other?

 

[Troyen]

Maybe we'll see more details next week, but there's also some army management items that are frustrating as well:

• Phantom troops being assigned to my armies. I'm talking about the mysterious +1 you get when you colonize/conquer territory with no way to trace back to which barracks is trying to supply the outdated unit. Sometimes you can even get +1 units despite all barracks being at full employment and those units you didn't create never filling. (Probably some bug here because if I try to reduce a barracks level it deletes one of my trained units, it doesn't remove that +1 unit).
• I know why we have the "50+% of your troops must be infantry" requirement, but this actually adds a lot of micro because now you have to ensure you appropriately spread out which states give you infantry. If you mess this up and your army gets decimated, your artillery might reinforce battalions faster than infantry, which leaves you with the organization penalty until the infantry states can catch up. It's quite micro-intensive to fix this because it requires a lot of drilling down into which exact states each barracks level is in, when really I just want my army to have a balance of troops.
• There's a mechanic for losing less exhaustion if you use discriminated pops, but it's not integrated well into the army management system. You seem to have to use non-upgraded conscription centers to achieve this, but good luck figuring that out from the in-game system.
• Conscription center assignment requires clicking on every state multiple times throughout the campaign, for every conscript you want (and if you're using conscripts, chances are you want a lot of them).
• The setting for whether or not to share units from my specific army seems to get reset after every war.
• I can't queue up orders for a decimated unit to return home if some units were pulled into a battle. Let the battle finish, but I'd like to say "return to X HQ after you're done". I can tell them to change fronts and they'll move while the battle finishes, so why can't I tell them to come home?
• When picking mobilization options, can the game tell me the expected cost of adding e.g. 1 sugar output to the soldiers in my army? The upkeep number changes when I click the button, but I either have to click the button or do a lot of manual math (unfeasible in MP) to guess whether sugar or liquor or tobacco is cheaper for my troops. (The nested tooltip for the good also doesn't show the current good price, it's the less helpful version of the good tooltip.).
• How many convoys do my troops need for overseas engagement? Is there a way to know so I can plan sufficient capacity in advance, rather than finding out consumption in the middle of the war?
• Make it easier to see what types of troops countries have. It's important to know if your opponent in a diplo play has skirmish infantry vs irregular infantry, but right now this requires checking a tooltip nested three layers down, one battalion at a time. I think if I'm not playing a country, I never actually need to know how a country divides its troops into battalions, but I do need to know their composition. Something like CK3 where it lists all the Man At Arms available.

You only specifically mentioned army adjustments, but there's some naval annoyances too:

• The naval unit upgrade system is incredibly arbitrary and has been the source of a lot of complaints since its introduction. It seems like a trap to upgrade too early (which locks you out of further upgrades) rather than holding onto wooden ships until you have later tech.
• It's unclear whether I should focus on offense or defense for a particular navy because unlike with fronts, I don't know whether my navy is going to be the attacker or defender.
• All of the special naval orders seem underwhelming, or they aren't explained very well. Why would I ever do escort convoys when regular interception lets my navy engage quicker, with no penalties, so I can blow up the navy attacking my convoys sooner? Why would I ever pick the +casualties taken or -offense modifiers? (I guess maybe if I could reliably predict I'll always be the defender, but as noted above, I have no idea which side my navy will be on).

 

[Idle America]

My lord ! Giving in to the demands of the "make non-heritage assimilation possible" movement has created a movement to "make non-heritage assimilation impossible" !

"You kids don't know what you want! That's why you're still kids, because you're stupid! Just tell me what's wrong with the freaking immigrants!"

 

[BrotherJonathan]

Making JEs a little clearer is a good idea. I like complex JEs, but having to have the wiki open in another window so it can explain to me what a specific JE does and what I have to do to fulfill it is a little much.

 

[MohawkWolfo98]

I just hope that they will change the way troops are allowed before to magically pass through hostile territory to get to a landlocked front for no reason at all. Or that it allowed to magically teleport hundreds of thousands of troops across the world during diplo plays without any consequences to supply or logistics.

Or Britain able to hold over 100k troops in the Caucasus.

 

[tom5675]

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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!

"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."

I feel like this was the central issue effecting this update, the development team simply wasn't given the time they needed to do proper testing and balance for the update before release.

In future, if 'the release windows are just too tight', it means that the release needs to be delayed. Rather than making the development team shove everything into a "chonker of an update, with a lot of potential to cause bugs and balance issues."

 

[marmot01]

"Fixing the military" is kind of a meme. There are improvements to be made to the unfun spaghetti mechanics, to the terrible "troops unassigned and teleported to the shadow realm/HQ" etc.

It's totally ok that I'm sending 100 000 sepoys to fight in the Afghan mountains. Needs no addressing at all.

 

[KDEstroy]

A bit disappointing to hear the next patch is another army rework instead of the much more needed navy rework, but hey, if this is what makes more sense from a fundamentals perspective, I’m with it (I’m guessing some of this supply/logistics stuff might underpin those eventual navy changes that have been talked about). Plus maybe this will stop every topic on this forum from being crying about military.

Just kidding, most people crying about military will never stop until they get their toy soldiers. But regardless, supply and logistics will be a huge benefit to the game, as will the other things you’re talking about, and I look forward to a more complete vision of this games version of armies.

It's not just supply and logistics, one of the biggest warfare issues affects both navy and army. Military goods shortages simply don't have much of an impact. It doesn't matter if your navy lacks ironclads, or your army lacks rifles, you simply pay a 50% premium, and the war goes on. If the devs manage to fix this issue it'd go a long way towards improving both navy and army management. What's somewhat infuriating is that this feature worked very nicely on release, but sometime between 1.2 and 1.7 it was completely rebalanced to its current state. Which basically no one is happy with.

 

[Leoreth]

Lack of a proper military access system, i.e. Prussia having to naval invade to reach Denmark​

Very happy to read this. This was one of my pet issues to complain- I mean give extensive feedback about.

 

[ingenieux]

On one hand i wish the dev were talking even more about what they think about planning for the game.
With the other hand i see the flak canons from everyone that could shoot at what they say.

 

[Rudolf Nechvile II]

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.

I know the intention is to assuage any disappointment, but I can't help but feel... disappointment... I know you guys can't give specifics, but this reply honestly just makes it sound like we could be waiting upto, or more than a year and feels like this is just softening the blow.

I think it's good to announce things in advance, to collect feedback, and generate excitement. However, I personally don't like it when vague announcements of systems, that aren't fully conceptualised, are teased to be released at some unspecified point in the (far) future. Perhaps if the teasing was just a vague comment in a dev diary or developer comment, instead of a video, it wouldn't have generated as much excitement, and thus disappointment.

 

[MohawkWolfo98]

It's totally ok that I'm sending 100 000 sepoys to fight in the Afghan mountains. Needs no addressing at all.

Gee why didn’t the UK do this irl, are they stupid?

 

[Somberg]

I would like to beseech the devs to add in a "Ask to Take on Debt" diplomatic action that is sorely needed in the game especially with the changes to bankruptcy in 1.8.4 that makes it a lot harsher to do it. It's crazy that we are at the whims of other countries whether they want to take on our debt and can't just request they do it at the cost of an obligation. Especially hurts when most of your deficit ends up being interest payments and you have no way to eliminate that other than having a stroke of luck with an AI Great Power deciding to take on your debt. Would be very helpful to have this option as a way to get out of a bad situation or to buy yourself more time to fix your treasury.