Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #39 - Shipping Lanes

[lachek]

"Convoys" are not to be thought of as goods as such and cannot be traded; they represent the ability to move things overseas, including the ship, crew, dockworkers, etc. Ports consume ships (Clippers or Steamers) and turn them into convoys. You can trade Clippers and Steamers with other markets, but you have to turn them into convoys through ports yourself - you cannot outsource your shipping lanes to another country (that would be best thought of as waiting for another country to export their goods to / import your goods from your market).

Regarding ports being government owned with no option to privatize them like railways, we agree that's a bit suboptimal - having Port-based trading companies make big bucks selling goods transport to Trade Centers who make clever decisions whether it's cheap enough to buy them given the profit of the routes they manage etc sounds really neat, but also one step too far in complexity at the moment. Your supply network is crucial for your ability to operate an intercontinental empire, and seeing your overseas expeditionary forces go undersupplied because some Pops on the other side of the world decided to switch to coffee instead of tea, bringing the profit of trade centers and thereby ports down below the point where they can offer competitive wages with your Steel Mills... well, it sounds cool, but is not a UX challenge we want to try to tackle at this time.

 

[KaiserJohan]

1. What are the options to reduce convey usage? Are there different techs or Production Methods that reduce the required number of Conveys per any set amount of traded goods on a route, aside from Canals?

2. What happens economically to the isolated enclaves that lose all access to the home market/market capital? How is mass starvation avoided?

3. Does the number of conveys scale purely on distance and amount of goods traded? Or does the type of good also affect how many conveys are needed? An example would be that more conveys are needed to trade something bulky like 1000 units of Steel vs 1000 units of Silk.

1. Currently, new Production Methods will increase the amount of convoys rather than reduce the number used. Generals can have traits which lowers their convoy usage.

2. They have to rely on locally produced goods and prices, which can be quite disastrious indeed.

3. The goods type can change convoy cost, yes.

I'm ever so slightly confused. The summary above the picture of trade routes doesn't seem to have anything to do with the picture?

The picture was taken after the DD was written and unfortunately missed the England -> India port connection; but the point was to show how hugely expensive India is to maintain compared to everything else

 

[KaiserJohan]

Hi. Nice DD. Could you clarify if its the player who sets the shipping lanes/routes or are they fixed since the game start? Thank you

It's a result of the players actions (sending a general overseas, setting up a trade route or building ports in overseas territory). The actual shipping lane path is the shortest/lowest cost possible.

Looks great! Really a big improvement over vic2's logistic system... one that doesn't even exist

Based on the dev diary I have two questions because two things are not entirely clear to me:

• What happens what a country in a customs union (partially) loses its connection to the market capital? Lets take Canada as an example. What happens if the connection to London is severed? Does 'forming an enclave' mean that every state becomes isolated or that Canada functionally leaves the British market to form its own market? What happens if the connection only is partially disrupted?
• Do all subjects have to share convoys with the senior member of the market, or only if they're overseas? If the first is the case, wouldn't Prussia have an overflow of convoys, while Britain would be at a relative disadvantage?

Other than that, great dev diary. Really cool stuff and completely clear to me.

If the connection is severed Canada is isolated from the British market and must rely on local goods and prices. Likewise the rest of the British market cannot access Canadian goods. No new market is automatically created but Canada can of course leave the British market and form their own should they wish.

A partially disrupted connection lowers Market Access. For example at 50% market access then the price of Wheat is based on 50% off the british market and 50% of the local price.

Can you mod a production method to reduce amounts of convoys required for a specific good or in the case of batallions for war,or it is not possible?
Thanks for any replies about this.

It's something we've discussed but not yet had time to implement

 

[KaiserJohan]

Can you elaborate a bit how overland trade works? Am I right to assume that’s it essentially free in terms of transportation and doesn’t tax your infrastructure in any way? Is it the same for overland supply routes?
Also, it seems a bit counterintuitive that building processing industries in colonies would add to the strain of your shipping. Like, if UK builds textile mills in India to serve local demand instead of bringing cotton all the way to England and then bringing back the fabric, I’d expect their convoy usage goes down, not up

If two market capitals have a direct land connection then it will trade overland, for example Berlin and Vienna but not Berlin and Paris. Land connections dosn't cost anything at the moment no.

The Shipyard produces steamships or clippers, the Port consumes steamships or clippers. depending on production method. A Port consuming steamships will produce more convoys per level/employee

Correct!

Do I read it correctly, that the shipping lanes alyways take the shortest route?
Like shipping from the West to the UK always ends in the West Country and From the East in East Anglia?

We have played with a few different alternatives but currently thats how it works yes

 

[KaiserJohan]

Great dev diary, although I can't wait to see how it works in combination with other aspects of gameplay (mostly naval warfare....).

Two questions:

1. You said that you can't send troops by sea to landlocked fronts. But say GB needs to send your army to quell a colonial rebellion in Niger, and Nigeria has a "friendly port". The frontline will be landlocked, but how can British troop even reach it if not by sea?
2. How do ports work to establish market access between places that are also connected by land? Say that my sulfur from Sicily needs reach Naples where the explosive factory is located. Appennines in Sicily and Calabria make it hard to develop "land" infrastructure (I am here positing that the Messina Strait is considered as a "land" connection) - but sending them by sea would make much more sense, at least until the railway infrastructure is developed enough*. How would road, railway and port infrastructure combine in determining the market access?

* spoiler alert - it is still not very developed even as of today

1. If British troops can reach the Niger front from the friendly port in Nigeria then it's fine.
2. Unsure how a mixed scenario would work, perhaps @lachek can explain this one

Will there be a system to simulate piracy? And for fleets to protect sea-lanes for everybody else?
It would be a good way to simulate the pax britannica and an incentive for small nations to get a navy protecting their coasts

Convoy raiding exists but there is no separate piracy mechanic right now other than perhaps via events.

In regards to:


Would you say more about "goods-specific modifiers," please? Could we have a few examples? What are these intending to model?

It seems pretty clear that distance (# of sea nodes) and bulkiness (quantity) would play a part in how costly in convoys any trade route would be.

For example one unit of Automobiles consumes more convoys than one unit of Wheat. These are scriptable for each goods.

 

[KaiserJohan]

If the US' market capital is in New york, wouldn't this make trade between Japan and the US establish a lane all the way around South America instead of more logically using a port in California?

No, not if there exists a land route from New York to California

Previously convoy cost was calculated based purely on the number of nodes in the route. Does this mean that convoy cost has been adjusted to be proportional to goods in general now as well as have the good-specific modifiers? So a route trading 100 grain will take more convoys than one with 50?

Yes. Are you refering to an old build?

 

[KaiserJohan]

Yes. A comment by lachek in the Navies and Admirals DD said that at the time convoys was determined purely by the number of nodes but changing it to the current system was planned.

Yeah, this is the new system

Well, how many does a unit of electricity use? How about clippers?

Batteries?

 

[KaiserJohan]

If I don't have enough convoys, can I prioritize certain routes to lower or remove penalties on that route, at the cost of raising the penalties on others? For example, if I have two trade routes that each want 100 convoys, but I only have 150 convoys, that would mean that each route would only get 75 convoys from their desired 100. What I am curious about is if I can steal convoys from one route for the other, so that one route has 100/100 convoys, while the other only has 50/100. I could see wanting to do this while at war, for example, to prioritize the supply line, or if one trade route is bringing the materials I need to build more convoys, I definitely would not want to not get everything I could from that route.



Could it be possible to trade "through" other countries if your country is landlocked, with the country the goods are passing through getting tariffs or transportation fees or something?

You can't prioritize one shipping lane over another at the moment but it's a great idea.

Some more questions:

1. Will the sealanes (their locations, throughput, speed of delivery) be affected by weather / primary sea winds and currents? IRL until steamships took over completely shipping routes were dictated by winds and currents. Sailing ships went with the wind, not along a shortest direct lines between two points. See Brouwer route or Clipper route for more info.

2. Will the sealanes and ports and trade routes in general be affected by season and weather? For example Saint-Petersburg port freezes in winter and until arrival of reliable icebreakers commerce stopped for cold months. In connection with previous questions - some trade winds are seasonal.

3. Will ports be logistical hubs only? Will there be separate buildings for fishing / seafood gathering / whaling / corals gathering / pearls gathering and other maritime pursuits?

4. Will ports provide revenue per visiting ships to represent harbour fees and other multitude of services provided in ports to ships (repair, fuelling, provisioning, R&R for the crews)?

1) and 2): Weather & Seasons is beyond the scope of release I am afraid
3) Yes
4) Nothing planned at the moment

 

[KaiserJohan]

Does it mean that landlocked markets are not allowed to trade with markets other than those they already share a border with?

Correct.

Any way to prevent my routes going through certain locations?
Like if I'm Britain that has an abundance of convoys and heavily fortified Suez end Gibraltar, so it's much safer for me to just go around the Cape instead of challenging Regia Marina?

No but you raise a good point. An easy solution might be flagging specific sea nodes as "no-go" zones for the pathfinding alghorithm.

Beware of my incredibly effective (trade-wise) Great Lisboa-Vladivostok Worm that would border everyone.

Is this @Dnote alt account?

 

[lachek]

Thanks for the response,so to clarify,is there a delay to produce convoys?If it's the case,this means that if you can't have enough clippers or Steamers,you can have an unavoidable shortage of convoys if you don't plan on long term.I really hope so.It would be great.Can you confirm it's the case?
Thanks for any replies about this.

If there's a Shortage of Clippers or Steamers, the output of your Ports will suffer as well - so not only will it be more expensive to run them but the number of convoys produced as a result will also be decreased. Remember though that there are no stockpiles, so there's no "delay" as such - as soon as your Convoy demand increases above your output your shipping lanes will start suffering penalties, and as soon as your demand for Clippers or Steamers outstrips the supply by such a degree there's a shortage you will start to see compounding output penalties.

 

[lachek]

Can't you at least make the private sector pay for the convoys through the investment pool or something? It makes no sense that the state is paying for the transportation of goods.

The logical purchaser of convoy services for Trade Routes would be Trade Centers, not the investment pool - otherwise you might end up in a weird situation where all the trade being done is imports of Clothes while the people paying for these routes are Aristocrats running Grain Farms not involved in international trade at all. But there are two other types of Shipping Lanes as well, and those are best considered purchased by the government (supplying troops overseas and connecting overseas states into the market).

But the source of the money is not the problem, it's about exposing the causality chain to the player and giving them the tools to deal with it. As @KaiserJohan has discussed elsewhere in these comments, the ability to prioritize shipping lanes would help address some of that. But this would also introduce a horrendous degree of micro to execute strategies that in 90% of cases are obvious (prioritize port connections and military supplies) and in 9% of cases are incredibly obtuse for little payoff (where in the priority ladder should Porcelain imports be compared to Coal exports?). Very few cases would end up actually being Interesting Choices, as opposed to busywork to fix the simulation manually. Since it'd require an extensive amount of work on both gameplay logic and new UIs to give the player these tools we've decided to just make Ports government owned for the moment, since it creates the gameplay dynamic we want (=maintaining trade and an overseas presence can be very lucrative but also necessitates extensive infrastructure and tall production chains, which can leave you vulnerable to instability). As we've mentioned elsewhere in the past, our long-term aim is to make as many buildings privately owned as possible without hurting gameplay.

 

[lachek]

Yes, but trade relations implying two partners, who "pays" for the convoy cost necessary to upkeep a trade route?

The initiator of the route pays for shipping the goods, no matter which direction the goods move in. The "partners" in this case are not the countries but the Pops in the Trade Centers on both sides. The work done by the "recipient" Trade Center does help maintain the route's efficiency but does not impact its convoy cost, since they're not the ones sending ships out. In return those Pops get a share of the route's profit.

Not to get ahead of dev diary schedule here, but as an example, consider the East India Company exporting Opium to China. China is not a "partner" in this trade by any means and is doing everything it can to curtail the trade. But there are still people working on the other end to receive and distribute the Opium that does land in China, and they make some money off this trade even though they're not in any way contributing to the convoy cost of the route.

 

[lachek]

1. What is the argument for making ports government owned? For construction companies it was employment level, which is easily fixable via subventions.

2. What is the arguement for making it free? Construction had expenses covered.

If I mod ports to be a private owned building, what will go wrong?

if I mod ports to to be government owned but selling their service, what will go wrong?

1. Employment level and supply chain complexity. Employment level can be fixed with subsidies, yes, the main question is when would you ever turn them off? There are extremely few cases where you'd ever be OK with not having full Port employment. Since that means you have to cover any shortfall anyway, that means the only mechanical advantage to you (the player) to have Ports operate independently is that if they're making enough from Trade Centers buying their services, you don't have to pay their operating costs.

However, this means these cost will be borne by Trade Centers instead, meaning you have to babysit your trade routes more to ensure they remain profitable - otherwise the interplay between Trade Centers and Ports could turn into an extremely hard to troubleshoot death spiral, where there aren't enough Convoys to do efficient Trade and Trade isn't profitable enough to buy Convoys. If in practice these problems are so difficult to manage that you just turn on the "subsidize" buttons on every building type involved in the trade supply chain and then just poke at them to try to bring your total marginal cost down a bit, there's no real advantage to it compared to making only the terminus of the supply chain (Ports) government owned and the other buildings private.

In addition, since Shipping Lanes created for reasons other than Trade Routes (military supply and port connections) should actually be state expenses, having all Convoys bought by Trade Centers is also non-immersive. To fix that you'd need some way of having the state buy goods from the market directly, which likely means the player should be able to determine what price they're willing to pay for those goods, as this would be what calibrates the economy of the privately owned building supplying it. Since choosing the amount you're paying a building for its services freely in order to ensure it's profitable enough to not fail to provide you with those services is essentially a roundabout way of subsidizing it (something I've discussed at length elsewhere on the forum) this would be a whole new system to replicate the functionality of an existing one, only in the service of making the mechanic feel a tad more true-to-life.

2. Not sure what you mean by "free" here. Ports cost both materials and labor to operate, just like every other building. That cost is just borne by the treasury directly rather than by other buildings or Pops.

3. If you mod ports to be a privately owned building, it's going to need a source of revenue to operate. This means you have to add a (non-tradeable) market good for it to sell, preferably to Trade Centers. You may be able to turn Convoys into this kind of market good directly even though it also acts as a capacity with other mechanics associated with it, but it'd probably be easier for balancing to make it a separate good. You'd then have to rebalance Trade Centers to ensure they remain profitable enough after buying this new product that they can pay competitive wages. All this is perfectly doable, but like I said in #1 above, I'm pretty sure you'll find that you're going to want to subsidize all buildings involved by default as a result, leading to slightly less compelling gameplay with more complexity. But YMMV!

4. In the current build this would do nothing other than reduce the cost of the goods the building sold - it wouldn't actually improve your treasury balance or even the building's internal economy, since wages are fixed and it's assumed that government buildings do not provide revenue to offset its costs. Having government-owned buildings at least be able to offset its operating expenses by providing goods & services for sale sounds like cool modding functionality though, it's very likely something we'll support in the future.

 

[lachek]

How do ports work to establish market access between places that are also connected by land? Say that my sulfur from Sicily needs reach Naples where the explosive factory is located. Appennines in Sicily and Calabria make it hard to develop "land" infrastructure (I am here positing that the Messina Strait is considered as a "land" connection) - but sending them by sea would make much more sense, at least until the railway infrastructure is developed enough*. How would road, railway and port infrastructure combine in determining the market access?

Ports provide some Infrastructure to the state it's built in, increasing its overall connection to the market. But we don't model the transportation of Sulfur from Sicily to the Chemical Industry in Naples directly, and intra-market trade does not cost Convoys unless it's connecting two state clusters. Sicily is connected via a strait so there's no port-to-market Shipping Lane connection required.

 

[KaiserJohan]

I really think we need some clarification about #Canadagate from @KaiserJohan or @Iachek. If a cluster of states interconnected by land (say, Canada) gets temporarily separated from their market capital (say, London), will they form a local market capital, or will they have to rely on each state's internal market (since interstate trade would have to pass from the market capital from what we know)

The latter