Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #147 - Everything Companies

[PDX_H4n1baL]

Has the limits on the number of companies been changed? With Britain now starting with two companies (HBC and EIC) replacing the railway, that is 1 additional company. That now does make it more difficult to acquire some other good companies that Britain has, such as the Bolckow, Vaughan & Co. (Coal-Steel-Iron company) or any of the other unique companies Britain has.

We've not changed the limit (for now).
In the case of GB, we've actually given them an additional starting tech so they can have two.

Also, another question. What happens if Britain were to disband the HBC or Russia were to disband the Russian-American Company?

They can't. As long as there's a country attached to a company (and they aren't fully independent), you can't disband it.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

ok so question regarding colonial charters, do they work on per state basis (e.i they colonise and expand in the state alone) or are they region based (e.i after colonisisng their current state they will colonise the rest of the region, similar to how the current colonial countries we can build)

You give a company a mandate for one state. But once that state is colonized, it turns into the company country, from which point onwards, the new country can colonize further on their own. But at that point it's not up to you anymore.

 

[Loco_HUN]

Very nice,

Now we can fiddle around with companies, and enjoy the game, before it comes to situations like enforcing the company's rights in another country, shooting the company's way into that country, or a market, to obtain the resources needed, having some of that gunboat diplomacy or colonialist war, and here you have to interact with the war system, which will ruin everything, and so this i where the fun will end.

Or, you finally have the wealth and power from your companies, and you could use that for expansion, and again, have to interact with that elephant in the room.

Please adress that elephant in the room, everyone will stumble upon it sooner or later at any point of the game, which will surely ruin the whole experience, as it does with every other mechanic.

"Wow, cool industry i built, and my arms industry is strong aswell, now i can go to war and... never mind, armies can actually run with 0 arms input goods and stilll perfectly able to fight (have the stats), just gotta pay a higher price, but with no suply system, they are perfectly able to fight with 0 guns, so I guess me buildiung up that industry has a minimal impact."

"Wow, I just greately shifted my society, passed some key laws, finally expanded upon an aspect of the society which suddenly opened up new conquest opportunities, oooh nooo, that means i have to intract with this broken system again, naval invasions, bugging fronts, randomized battle conditions where my bigger army for some reason starts the battle with just a fraction of my troops and i have to watch all of this nonsense...."

Wow, I finally built up a good navy, now I am at war as France agaisnt Britain and i have to move troops to my indochina, but UK obviously has naval supremacy and it wants to stop me, so now it is ime to time to use that navy and see it shine..... OH, never mind, I can justt move the army to indochina, and it CANNOT BE INTERCEPTED ON SEA if its just a simple friendly to friendly territiry troop movement. They cannot be touched during their sea voyage even if enemy fleet is present where they are moving trough... I guess i built this navy up for nothing, should have known that i could justt cheese everything.... "

"Did I fiddle around with my society and economy to now suffer in this messy and buggy war? god I wish it would just be over and I would get this *insert consession*".

And then you get it and feel empty because the journey to it wasn't fulfilling, because the culmination of ur buildup (that is the role of the war) was unsatysfying.


I stop here before i go too far, I think you got the point. If it would be a peacefull game about company expansion in the 19th century, this would be a 10/10 angle, but that elephant always will the 50% of any points from any mechanic in this game.

Elephant tax.

"Chartres of commerce is really nice, unfortunately it got elephant taxed as the other mechanics and expansions".

Conclusion: cool expansion, fix war pls.

Thank you.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

Will we get more charters in the future? While I like the idea, stuff like tax brakes or specific subsidies would also be nice. Alos Lobbys would be awesome, like the groups we get for foreing nations but isntead its companies making these but I guess taht was partially implid with the fact you laid the groundwork.

It's certainly not out of the question to expand with other charters in the future. No concrete plans at this point, but it's a new toy in our toolbox that we can consider for future additions and expansions.

 

[iagocor]

How does monopoly charter work with trade centers? (they get more subventions¿¿??), is there any profit to it, besides making them buy cheaper? Also, is there any benefit in giving the trade charter to panama or suez companies, that already have trade centers as a building type? A colony from a company can still have charters to give?

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

I think canal companies should be a separate entity and not count towards the normal company limit.

I don't hate that idea.
We could increase company limit by 1 when they unlock the prosperity bonus maybe. I'll bring it up with the team, no guarantee. Thanks for the idea in any case!

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

Maybe in addition to the free charters granted by laws, governing principles, like corporatism, could give a discount to authority cost to make up for their relatively reduced authority bonus.

Certainly something I'll have a think about. Thanks for the idea! Unlikely to make it for release version, but could be something for the first patch after or so.

 

[Anonim97]

I might have a stupid question.

In this Dev Diary we were shown different charters, what do they do etc. But why should we give charters to these companies in a first place? Industry Charter is quite easy to guess, but why Trade Charter or even Monopoly Charter?

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

So capitalist pops in the home country don't get dividends from their company's Regional HQs? Regional HQs send dividends only to the home country investment pool?
I would expect the Company HQ building to own the Regional HQ.

We would have liked to do that, in fact this was how I pitched the idea. But during development it unfortunately turned out to be very complex to have the three layer ownership system this would require. Company HQ - Regional HQ - Buildings owned by Regional HQ
So this is an abstraction that we settled on which should still provide an interesting impact that goes around this issue. If we ever get around to it in the future (unlikely, because very big change for quite small impact), we'd clean this up alongside.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

Looks quite interesting so far, and I'm especially interested in imposing monopolies on other countries. I have a few questions though:

1. If country A imposes, e.g., a steel monopoly on country B, what what happens if country C comes and then also wants to impose a steel monopoly in country B?

I'd need to check to be 100% sure, but I believe country C can't ask for it if there's already an external monopoly.

2. Can you only create colonisation charters on uncolonised land, i.e., Africa? What if British control in India falters and I decide I want to take chunk for setting up my own Greek East India company, for example?

Only uncolonizes land.

3. Can colonisation charters be turned into normal (colonial) subjects if you wanted to?

Depends on how you mean exactly. So what's possible is to reduce their autonomy via subject interaction and turn them into a regular colony, yes. If you mean a decision button or so to change their status - then no.

 

[lemonzrus]

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Hello Victorians,

Happy Thursday! It’s Lino, Game Design Lead on Victoria 3 and I welcome you back to another Dev Diary!
Today we’re looking at (almost) everything to do with Companies. Most of what I will talk about today is part of Charters of Commerce, which releases on June 17, but we will also talk about some additions and changes for Companies that are coming with the free 1.9 Update alongside the DLC.

Before we begin: As always, any values, texts, designs, graphics etc. are work in progress and are subject to change.

So, one big ambition we had for Companies with this update was to not only expand interactions with them and add functionality to them, but also to make observing them grow a bit easier and more enticing. For that we overhauled the Company interface panel and added a bit of functionality to it. I will be going through these changes later in this Dev Diary, but before then we will talk about all the individual parts that make the whole.

Alright, let’s get into it, starting with Company Charters (of Commerce).

Company Charters​

Company Charters are a new way for you to enable your companies to expand their wealth and reach. They all provide new, different sets of rights to the company in question. What those rights are, I will talk about in detail further down. Hand them out to a company you want to see grow and then watch and observe as their line go up!

Hmm… What could these icons stand for? Continue reading to find out!
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Every country gets a number of free charters which you will be able to hand out across all your Companies. You can go over the limit, but then each charter will cost you additional authority. For example, if you have five free charters to spend, you can put all of them onto one company, increasing their opportunities by a lot but be left with no charters for your other companies, or you can spread them equally, specializing all companies only a bit in order to see them succeed. The choice is yours!
The number of free charters can come from different sources, e.g. economic system laws, certain technologies and also the rank of a country will increase the limit.
As this free charter functionality is a very late addition in our process, we are not making full use of this yet, but we see potential in adding it as an effect to the completion of certain Journal Entries, events or Power Bloc Principles for example and are also happy to take your feedback for where you believe this could be added. Similarly, modders are also able to use this where they see fit since it is a regular modifier.

Without further ado, here’s the first Charter which we are introducing with Charters of Commerce.

Colonization Charter​

While the era of the big company-states started to end in our timeframe, there certainly were ambitions by some to continue the trend.
When you hand out a Colonization Charter to one of your companies, you select the target state to be colonized. Then, a colony will be created which will be supported by your company.
The colony receives a bonus to its colonization speed and upon fully colonizing one state region, this will actually turn the colony into a new country, led by the company you gave the charter to.

“I know a good name - Fordlandia!”
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The new country is a charter company type subject of your country and behaves like any other regular country pretty much.
The new country has a connection to your company though of course and receives a bonus to construction of new buildings and throughput. The country gets the same bonuses the company receives for industries that are in the company’s supported building types and a fraction of them for any other buildings. On the other hand, a company country cannot have companies on their own. Of course if they go fully independent they will be able to do so like any other country.
Now you may wonder what that means for the chartered company countries that we have at game start and I will talk about that later in this Dev Diary.

Connected to the company, the new country benefits from the expertise
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Trade Charter​

The Trade Charter is quite straightforward. It allows the company in question to build, buy and run trade centers.
Once you’ve granted your company a Trade Charter, trade centers are added to the company’s building types, making company-owned Trade Centers profit from the same bonuses the other industries do.
Trade Centers run by a Company additionally have a Trade Advantage bonus for goods that are produced by their building types.

Companies exporting goods they produced
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Industry Charter​

Similarly to the Trade Charter, the Industry Charter allows your company to expand into a new type of business.
Depending on scripted options, using this charter will allow you to grant your company the rights to expand into a different industry entirely.
When we scripted these options, we looked at historic expansions that the companies have done or have added vertical integration industries that were the most fitting. For example a furniture company likely received logging camps as an additional option if there was no other historic precedent.
Just like with the Trade Charter, the Industry Charter adds the selected option to the building type list of the company, making any company-owned levels benefit from throughput bonus and boosting construction. You can only assign one Industry Charter per company

What to do? Some companies have more than one choice
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Investment Charter​

You can grant an Investment Charter to companies to bolster their investments in foreign countries. How that works is that companies can establish a Regional Headquarter in any country where they have at least 5 owned levels and you have foreign investment rights.
The Regional HQ, similar to the main Company Headquarter, serves as the place to display ownership of local investments and simultaneously as the place to collect the income of those buildings. It sends the profits to your home country’s investment pool so that capitalists in your country can use that to build even more wealth.
But here’s the catch - the presence of a Regional HQ allows the company to use the foreign country’s investment pool to construct or buy additional building levels, bringing more options of aggressive foreign acquisitions to the table.

“They're turning profits in the name of prophets”
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As a side note: Although foreign investment works in subjects etc. without having any DLC, we felt it was best that we also unlocked the full foreign investment pact when owning Charters of Commerce since the Investment Charter becomes a lot more fun when you have access to that. So both DLCs, Sphere of Influence and Charters of Commerce will now unlock foreign investment rights.

Monopoly Charter​

Monopoly Charters allow you to choose an industry (or more) of a company to grant them exclusive building rights of that industry. This industry list does include any industry the company has gotten access to via another Charter though, so for example you can use the Industry Charter to unlock logging camps for a company and then subsequently grant the same company a monopoly for logging camps.

Do not pass go. Do not collect $200
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So what does the monopoly actually do?
Well, like a proper monopoly should, it increases prices of the produced goods. We modify the selling price in building levels affected by a monopoly. The company’s potential profits are increased by this since they’re selling goods at a higher price. This will in turn of course increase the market price too, according to how much of a good is produced under a company monopoly. An active monopoly will also make it so that companies can purchase buildings of the fitting type for a big discount from other owners. Which other owners? I will talk about that further down this Dev Diary.

Additionally, we have a nice tie-in with the Treaty system that Alex presented last time. As part of a treaty, you will be able to request a country to give monopoly rights to one of your companies, further increasing their profits from ownership in foreign lands.

This brings us to the end of the Charters part, but as I mentioned before we have a couple of things that we will roll out for everybody with the free 1.9 Update that releases alongside Charters of Commerce.

Free 1.9 Update additions​

Since the inception of the companies feature, we’d been thinking about a potential expansion of the system, namely characters leading them. With 1.9, we’re laying the groundwork for future work in that regard.

Executives​

Introducing Executives, a new role that characters can have. They serve as the head of a company, not only running it, but also being the face of the company towards the outside world.
Executives will come with some new character traits that we are adding which will boost certain aspects of companies, e.g. a free charter to spend or a bonus to throughput in the company’s owned levels. These traits are not done yet, so I cannot show them at this point.
Executives will boost the political power of their affiliated Interest Group, similar to how generals do it at the moment. The amount is dependent on how well the company they are leading is doing. Like other characters, Executives can end up as heads of Interest Groups as well if circumstances line up accordingly.
If a company forms a new country via the Colonization Charter, it is also the Executive who will be head of state of the new country. At least at the start, depending on the country’s laws of course they might have elections that change the ruler for example.
We have a number of historical Executives that can show up in the game to lead your historical companies, fully equipped with custom DNA. For all other Executives we generate a random character as we usually do.

Don’t you want this young Alfred Krupp to give you company?
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We hope to expand on this in the future to make Executives have more impact on your political life so that Companies feel even more like an actor within your country, maybe even to the point where granting them too many privileges will actually turn them into a potential danger. But that will require more work in the future.

Interface​

Now that I have shown all the individual bits, we can finally take a look at the interface changes we have done. First, here’s a look at the list of companies which remains accessible via the Companies button on the left navigation bar.

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You can see, all relevant information is still available, though the positioning may have changed due to the addition of Executives and other information. We can see Prosperity now has a dedicated icon, but apart from that it’s more or less the same.
We do see a second tab in the panel though, which is a global display of Companies, in which you can compare all established companies. You can sort the list by country, names of the companies or the profit they make and can also see how many of their building types they own.

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Now, if we look at a specific company’s interface, we will see a lot of changes.

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In the first tab we get an overview of the company, the bonuses they provide, their building types, Executive and so on. On the bottom you can see the buttons to assign Company Charters. They can be found there in all tabs of the company interface, so that you don’t have to go back to the Overview tab each time you want to assign one. Depending on which ones are active, we see additional industry types added to the company’s list or an additional widget informing you about which monopolies the company holds.
If you scroll down a bit, you will also find a summary of Regional HQs and colonies that are attached to this company. But for a detailed view we should look at the second tab, Assets.

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Here we can see all building levels owned by the Company’s HQ and also attached countries, colonies and Regional HQs and their assets (if they have any).
If you want to see more data on how your company has developed, you should look into the third tab, Statistics.

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As the name suggests, this tab features multiple graphs that show you the development of the Company with information about productivity, profit, prosperity, number of building levels and levels of each type, making it the perfect place to see how your assignment of Company Charters affects your Company for example.
I for one really enjoy seeing the numbers grow and we hope you do too.

Next up, we have a couple more changes unrelated to the interface that I’d like to bring to you.

Various changes​

People with a keen eye may have seen in my screenshots that the Hudson Bay Company is listed as a British company.
That is because we are making it so that all three historical establishments of company countries (HBC, EIC, Russian-American Company) will start as former colonies with respective ties to their original companies. So the Hudson Bay Company will be a country tied to the Company HQ of the Hudson Bay Company in London for example.
This change included some minor adjustments to owned building levels and sadly the removal of the Great Western Railway from the game start so that Great Britain has space to have the EIC and HBC as historical starting companies. Of course the Great Western Railway is still available if you want to form it at a later stage.

For 1.9, we are also changing the way Prosperity is gained. We are making it so Prosperity has a target value that it is drifting towards instead of a constant upward or downward movement.
The target value is influenced by the current productivity of the company and also the number of staffed building levels the company owns. Additionally the popularity of the Executive leading it can impact the target value too. With a high popularity it increases, low popularity decreases it of course.
Similarly, the speed at which Prosperity drifts towards its target value is affected mostly by the size of the company and a base value.

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As the way companies work has changed quite drastically over the years, in particular with 1.8 and 1.9, we are also conducting a small pass over the forming conditions of companies. We are now making it so that forming a company can be done with privately owned buildings that you pay for and also we are generally making the establishment slightly easier by reducing the number of required building levels. This won’t affect all companies and not all affected ones to the same degree, but should make more companies’ establishments viable.

Furthermore, we are of course introducing a new set of historical companies, some of which are going to be free, most of which are going to be part of Charters of Commerce.

I have one last thing that I’d like to talk about today, which is that with 1.9, companies will be able to buy building levels owned by financial districts and manor houses. This is a big change that we had wanted to do for a while and should smooth out some of the behaviour where companies and other private owners are playing a cat and mouse game to profit from throughput bonuses and generally makes companies more competitive.
This does not mean that other private owners can do the same. We will evaluate in the future if we want to add that functionality, but for now we are already happy that we could bring this improvement to you.

Alright, that’s it for today. In two weeks we will be back with our next Dev Diary where I will talk about and walk you through how Prestige Goods work.
Until then, have a nice day!

View attachment 1299541

Will railroads be profitable finnaly?

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

I'm liking what I'm seeing. I have a few questions:

1. What happens to your company HQ owned buildings if the company becomes independent? EG I'm Britain, and I lose control of EIC. What happens to all the plantations the EIC headquarters in London owned, both in and outside of India?

They take control of all building levels inside their own country.

2. Following on, what happens to the EIC company when it becomes the British Raj and likewise the HBC when it joins Canada.

The company remains but will likely be severely weakened. At that point you can dissolve it. You can't while they have a country attached to them that's not independent from the mother country.

3. Has any thought been given to switching the Laissez Faire Company slot bonus to a free charter bonus? One of the annoyances with the Laissez Faire Company bonus is that it makes it more annoying to switch economic systems throughout the game, which I don't think is optimal from a gameplay perspective (and from a gameplay perspective, companies are now supposed to be more permanent).

We're going to evaluate LF in general once the update is out and you players have gotten your hands on it. And then we're very open for all kinds of changes if necessary.

4, Will there be a way to "Gift" buildings to a company? The lack of this can make it very difficult to scale up companies.

Not at this point.

5. Will there be some new alternative ownership structure for companies introduced for Command Economy/Coop Ownership countries? It would be good for Command Economies to be able to have companies as "State owned enterprises" EG Gazprom, with the ownership pops being bureaucrats instead of capitalists.

We're making some changes to them in fact. Company HQs don't employ Capitalists under Coop and CE anymore.

6. Has any thought been given to give Corporations some free money bonus when buying state owned buildings, to match their construction bonus? It's annoying that the optimal way to use corporations now is to NOT build their associated industries at all.

If they have a monopoly, they get a huge discount as described in the Dev Diary. I don't think we want to apply that in general since state ownership should still be possible and valid. If it really isn't, then we should adjust the system but probably with other levers.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

if so could this be incorporated into the dlcs treaty features ( e.g you enforce a treaty on someone that lets your companies monopolise their opium or something ) ?

That's written in the Dev Diary

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

Question about the investment charter, because I don't really understand if this is an opportunity for both countries, or a bad thing that is imposed upon one by the other :

The investment charter create another headquarter in another country, that "centralize" the ownership and gains from the owned buildings
So, if I understand correctly, for a country A having an investment charter in country B :
- This is "better" for country B than a classic A company investing and bringing the money back to A, because the headquarter is actually in country B, so the capitalists are taxed by country B, and only the investment still go to A. So B lose less money.

Correct.

- The bonuses and executive is the same than the "mother company" ?

Correct.

- Will the executive have a political influence on IG of country B ?

No, only in their home country since there's no "Regional Executive" or so.

- Are all new building build by the original company automatically owned by the second headquarter ?

In the "target" country - yes, correct.

- Is this still working IF I cancel the foreign investment rights ?

What's there is there when you cancel, but it prevents further construction and buying of levels of course.

- Are the nationalization still possible even with the investment rights ?

Nationalization of foreign assets is still not possible while you have active investment rights.

Thank you !

Thank you!

 

[Diskianterezh]

We would have liked to do that, in fact this was how I pitched the idea. But during development it unfortunately turned out to be very complex to have the three layer ownership system this would require. Company HQ - Regional HQ - Buildings owned by Regional HQ
So this is an abstraction that we settled on which should still provide an interesting impact that goes around this issue. If we ever get around to it in the future (unlikely, because very big change for quite small impact), we'd clean this up alongside.

Regional headquarter paying dividends to local pops feels a bit more balanced.
Regular foreign investment permit you to asphyxiate an economy, by exporting the profits out. If a regional headquarter could export the profit AND use the local construction point, it would incredibly lack positive points for the receiving country.

 

[Don_Quigleone]

If they have a monopoly, they get a huge discount as described in the Dev Diary. I don't think we want to apply that in general since state ownership should still be possible and valid. If it really isn't, then we should adjust the system but probably with other levers.

Thanks for the comprehensive reply.

What I mean here is that if you have a textile company, the optimal play pattern becomes to no longer ever build textile mills and leave it entirely to the private queue.

This has always felt unsatisfying to me as companies are supposed to be the industries you're focused on building up and pouring resources into.

It means that if you want to avail of that nice construction bonus you have to intentionally under build and pray to RNG to build the industry buildings, and in the locations you want.

If the construction efficiency bonus also applied to (perhaps to a lesser degree) to purchasing buildings eg £100 of IP money becomes £140 when purchasing a government built building, it would go some way to change that dynamic.

I'm aware of the monopoly bonus you detailed, but that actually causes the state to get less money per building built (making it an even worse bargain to build company buildings and sell them to the company).

What I'm proposing is that if a building costs 7500 for a financial district to buy, it should cost a company hq some lower amount (proportional to the companies construction bonus) with the difference magiced from thin air and given to the player.

This way, it would become advantageous for players to use state budgets to build industries they have companies for again, rather than suboptimal as it is now.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

What happens if a communist rebellion in a chartered company country takes over?

Or any other type of revolt for that matter?

They behave like any other subject in that regard.

What are the limits to what a company country can become in terms of laws?

None, after it's a country it can theoretically develop into anything if gaining independence.

 

[kamik]

Is it possible to gain monopoly from another country in exchange for investments in this country?

 

[Emperor8428]

I see that you've responded to the idea of separating company investments into their own pools a few times now, and I'll make a longer suggestion post later, but I really hope you guys pursue this. Ensuring that companies each have their own pool which allows them to buy a building in the private queue of any country they have access to opens up a huge opportunity. The dream system for me would be that instead of having a specific number of companies that the player establishes, the player instead has to "garden" a variety of companies, that each gain competitive advantage over one another by investing into "R&D", which produce minor throughput, input substitution, and output variety bonuses that compound over time. Different companies would have different strategies to maximize profit - perhaps based on their executive - such as focusing on increasing breadth and marketshare at razor-thin margins or only investing in the most profitable buildings to save for R&D investment. And companies could go bankrupt; if their investment pool goes negative, they need to sell buildings until they are forced to disband and all buildings get turned over to all other private/public actors for a discounted rate. The player can then influence this by favoring companies that pursue their preferred strategies through the granting of various charter rights, or they can pursue trust-busting and intentionally weaken large companies in order to lower prices (but at the expense of losing R&D investment due to lower margins for the newly created companies!). And of course to ensure that companies just don't sit on tons of money and everything integrates well with the game as is, companies that grow a large investment pool just automatically start paying back into the national pool of the country that owns them.

Also just an aside - but on the issue of money disappearing when a company buys the building, couldn't it make sense in the future to have a "subsistence" building for capitalists that just accumulates money on the sale of buildings and pays it out to its owners, so the pops just temporarily sit there with the same SOL while waiting to be employed by a new ownership building

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

Can't find any answer to this, so I'm trying here.

How is the trade agreement article going to work in 1.9? How does it benefit?

It provides trade advantage, depending on how much of the trade the other side of the agreement can actually cover, e.g. if you're selling 5000 iron and your trade agreement partner can buy 2500 of it you're getting less than if they can buy all.