Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #144 - Charters of Commerce & Expansion Pass 2

[RaccoonCity]

No navy rework is coming with 1.9, otherwise we'd have mentioned it.
We want to tackle it eventually of course, but we will need the necessary time to do it.

Can't you at least tweak it a bit? Like navies not recovering so fast after being defeated?

 

[Commander Flazgar]

Prestige products I can guess

Champagne
Persian carpets (fabric)
Germans cars
Swiss furniture
Russian luxury clothes (representing furs)

Honestly furs should just be added in as their own good, both as an alternate material for luxury clothing and to fill in the Simple Clothing need (stitched-up rawhide in place of properly made clothing). Not to mention giving the Hudson Bay company its original purpose in a dlc featuring company states.

 

[Metz]

I assume Chapter 3 will be US related same for HoI4 next year. For some reason, themes in different game's dlcs tend to overlap. The more autonomous and reworked company designs may allow for adventurers like William Walker.

 

[Splorghley]

Austria has desperately needed a sui generis narrative content pack since day 1 and I am very chuffed to see one.

I really hope that it isn't all just focussed on Hungary and Austria's interaction with the Balkans though. German nationalism was an important force within the entire empire, and garnered a strong, defensive counter-nationalism from other nations. In turn, Hungarian nationalism and centralism instigated exactly the same response from the many nations within historic Hungary. The Czechs played a key role in Austrian domestic politics, especially in pushing for a plurinational union, and came to feel fatally betrayed following the dual compromise with Hungary. Other groups had their own agendas - Romanians, Poles, Slovenes, Italians, etc. - many of which had an external dimension (Italian reunification, Polish independence movements in Congress Poland, etc) - and all of which played their part in destabilizing the country and ultimately leading to its dissolution.

There's an absolute wealth of narrative content - and interesting gameplay choices and trade-offs - that Austrian internal politics could provide. I'd really hate to see the situation in Austria streamlined into some singular 'recognize Hungary' binary that resolves all internal nationalist tension. I'm cautiously optimistic, but I'll wait to hear more about this pack before I buy.

 

[Celestial0]

1) Will companies with their own state count towards the company limit? When they acquire their "statehood" by owning territory, will the production buildings in my country become the property of foreign capital? Will this somehow be the number of properties of my capitalists? 2) Will companies specializing in a given sector somehow support the development of specific technologies? if you are thinking about something like this then I beg you to do it, I really miss something like this, private capital investment in technology, companies are perfect for this.
greetings and I'm looking forward to these new changes

 

[kingsword]

While these are all good, I can't stress enough that AI should be able to play the game more competently as it's completely at the mercy of a player. I don't want just another way of snowballing to walk all over AI. It need to produce and enrichen POPs so that trade makes sense. Right now it's all autarky since AI can neither provide raw materials nor buy finished goods by itself.

German, Italian reunifications and Tanzimat should also be railroaded for the AI. Spain and Austria content is good but none of them as important the previous three. The map ends as it was in 1836 except North America and Africa. These patches should fix these along so there's actually a living and evolving world alongside what we're doing instead of just being our sandbox to destroy or build as we please.

 

[IrishBandit]

Amazing announcement!

Interesting, but I find it a bit incomplete. While governments did grant monopolies to certain industries (like the British East India Company, Dutch VOC, or various state-sanctioned utility monopolies), history also shows many powerful monopolies forming naturally through market dominance.
Standard Oil, American Tobacco, and U.S. Steel achieved near-complete market control without government assistance. In fact, governments eventually had to create antitrust legislation specifically to break up these monopolies, (eg: Sherman Antitrust Act, well within the timeperiod of the game) and subsequent trust-busting efforts.

This seems to only represent government-granted monopolies while missing the other side of the historical relationship between monopolies and governments. A more nuanced approach might include both the ability to secure government monopoly rights AND the government antitrust actions against too-dominant companies.
Imho it would be amazing to see the game exploring the tension between business power and governmental regulations.

I just hope that "form monopoly" is a scriptable effect so that flavorful specific monopolies can be implemented (by dlc or mods).

 

[guiskj]

Could we get a comment from the Devs on whether navies having actual ships is still (or ever) planned for 2025?

I'm a big fan of splitting big expansions into a mechanic and story DLCs, as the price for the big expansions were getting ridiculous. Many full AA games don't cost as much.

 

[Bisonmask]

Russian luxury clothes (representing furs)

Furs and spices are two of the biggest missing goods I's rather see them added properly than be implemented as prestige goods, especially not bound to just Russia

 

[47pik]

While these are all good, I can't stress enough that AI should be able to play the game more competently as it's completely at the mercy of a player. I don't want just another way of snowballing to walk all over AI. It need to produce and enrichen POPs so that trade makes sense. Right now it's all autarky since AI can neither provide raw materials nor buy finished goods by itself.

German, Italian reunifications and Tanzimat should also be railroaded for the AI. Spain and Austria content is good but none of them as important the previous three. The map ends as it was in 1836 except North America and Africa. These patches should fix these along so there's actually a living and evolving world alongside what we're doing instead of just being our sandbox to destroy or build as we please.

Railroading sucks, no. I want to see the organically develop.

 

[Sofyan Rghiwi]

All looks really promising, I have already got this second season pass, as I wholeheartedly love this game and would like to see it continue to grow.
My single remark is that I'd be immensely disappointed if nationalism is going to be simulated via Journal Entries and not have its own unique mechanics.

 

[MakSenpai]

I hope there will be a new form of Trade wars where we can economically destroy a nation with high taxes (sanctions), high taxes on exports of specific products (inflation on the product in the target nation) and etc.

 

[Teutonic_Knight_2000]

No one is talking about the fact that we can expect two major map updates this year - Balkans (or broadly understood Central Europe) and Iberia!

 

[kingsword]

Railroading sucks, no. I want to see the organically develop.

At this stage I have lost hope for that but if the choice is between what we have after 2,5 years and anything else, anything else is better. Current AI is at stage where I was in 2003 on the day when I first installed Vic 1. It's way behind the me after reading tooltips for 2 days though.

But yeah sure, if they'll make it so it can organically develop, go for it.

 

[Will Treaty]

I *Very* rarely use this account to talk on the forums or reply to dev diaries, but I just wanted to post my comment here from the OPB video to make sure the devs hear my thoughts and hopefully take them into consideration:

while none of the content presented I think is bad I do have to say I'm very disappointed and underwhelmed, again especially with the mechanics change I think they're good and I really look forward to the company colonial mechanics, to start I really dislike the dlc model they're using, they shouldn't be trying to adhere to this 'plan' where they release one big mechanic expansion and then immersion/flavor dlc that might have some mechanical changes along with it but not the focus and I really really think this is the wrong way to approach things, right now they need to focus almost solely on revising, overhauling, and changing mechanics and core gameplay features because that's currently the biggest thing dragging the game down especially in terms of warfare and diplomacy and it's really disappointing to see them instead focus effort on making an iberian flavor pack??? who asked for that??? I can guarantee anyone who would be interested in that (which I absolutely would) would far prefer a complete naval and army overhaul, and that goes into my second issue that being these mechanical changes while looking great simply should not be the priority at the moment, as OPB said by focusing on trade without a naval overhaul inherently limits the effectiveness of these changes, or say the whole carlist question will be incredibly limited by the lack of a real comprehensive internal political system, these dlc should be like phase 2 level stuff they start working on after they overhaul more of the fundamental systems that people have problems with/are still lacking, and its even more disappointing when mods have already added some incredible mechanics much faster on things paradox should really be working into the core gameplay (cabinets, parliaments, parties etc come to mind), it just really feels like they don't seem to have their priorities in order and are focusing on the wrong things and with the incredibly slow place of bigger mechanic focused updates and fixes it just really makes the game feel somewhat hollow and while improving just not fast enough and not in big enough ways to really feel substantial

 

[47pik]

I *Very* rarely use this account to talk on the forums or reply to dev diaries, but I just wanted to post my comment here from the OPB video to make sure the devs hear my thoughts and hopefully take them into consideration:

while none of the content presented I think is bad I do have to say I'm very disappointed and underwhelmed, again especially with the mechanics change I think they're good and I really look forward to the company colonial mechanics, to start I really dislike the dlc model they're using, they shouldn't be trying to adhere to this 'plan' where they release one big mechanic expansion and then immersion/flavor dlc that might have some mechanical changes along with it but not the focus and I really really think this is the wrong way to approach things, right now they need to focus almost solely on revising, overhauling, and changing mechanics and core gameplay features because that's currently the biggest thing dragging the game down especially in terms of warfare and diplomacy and it's really disappointing to see them instead focus effort on making an iberian flavor pack??? who asked for that??? I can guarantee anyone who would be interested in that (which I absolutely would) would far prefer a complete naval and army overhaul, and that goes into my second issue that being these mechanical changes while looking great simply should not be the priority at the moment, as OPB said by focusing on trade without a naval overhaul inherently limits the effectiveness of these changes, or say the whole carlist question will be incredibly limited by the lack of a real comprehensive internal political system, these dlc should be like phase 2 level stuff they start working on after they overhaul more of the fundamental systems that people have problems with/are still lacking, and its even more disappointing when mods have already added some incredible mechanics much faster on things paradox should really be working into the core gameplay (cabinets, parliaments, parties etc come to mind), it just really feels like they don't seem to have their priorities in order and are focusing on the wrong things and with the incredibly slow place of bigger mechanic focused updates and fixes it just really makes the game feel somewhat hollow and while improving just not fast enough and not in big enough ways to really feel substantial

I mean, it’s this or a subscription model.

You shouldn’t sell the critical stuff, that leads to bad, fractured game design. But they have to sell something, that means they have to sell other stuff instead, which requires dev resources.

 

[Kevin1472583690]

Can I form Personal Union as Austria and Spain to revive the Habsburg Empire?
Also, will there be adjustments to the German and Italian Unification mechanics since Austria was heavily involved in these two processes? How will these two Regions interact with the new Austrian/Balkan immersion pack?

 

[DurianKing]

lol I know a lot of very vocal people on this forum will be happy to see the Carlists in here. Excited to not see “how can you expect this history game to be historically accurate about [non-European region], they don’t even have detailed mechanics related to the Carlist wars!” comments anymore.

 

[BrotherJonathan]

I'm a little confused by the "Colonial Charters". I though the era of private colonization was basically over by the Victorian age?

 

[Orinsul]

1. Finally Carlist Wars! and spanish dlc, Thank you!
2. NEW ZEALAND COMPANY mechanics! That's amazing