Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #4 - Goods

[lachek]

How do population affect trade good production? In V2, high pop regions produced vastly more amount of the goods that sparsely populated ones. This system couldn't represent high productive regions that weren't massively populated, for example cotton in India vs the USA.

In Victoria 3, Pops require buildings to be productive and vice versa. So for a region to be a major producer of a certain trade good, it requires a large workforce to work the buildings producing it. If a region is just highly populated but not well developed, the Pops sustain themselves off the land in Subsistence buildings, which occupy all otherwise undeveloped land by default.

 

[lachek]

Are Obsessions Nation-, State-, Pop-wide? I mean, will all of the UK be obsessed with tea or the Two Sicilies with coffee? Or can it be for example that only the wealthy pops in Paris (and not the rest of France) get obssessed with a specific good?

It's cultural. So if French people become obsessed with Wine, then all French people will demand relatively more Wine regardless of which country they live in, though this will be moderated somewhat by its availability.

 

[lachek]

And what elements do provoke cultures to become obsessed with certain goods or to consider them taboos? Availability, price? Events? Or, in other words, if I want to make a playthrough to liberate India, how can I make tea a taboo for the English to make them GTFO there?

Mechanically, availability and the nature of the goods. Luxury goods are more likely to become "fashionable" than Staples, and certain goods might have other intrinsic properties that could make Pops, shall we say, a bit overly enthusiastic about consuming them. But yes, events can also play into this.

 

[lachek]

Will the governments / private individuals be able to transfer populations? It was quite possible for an investor in 19th century to buy undeveloped land somewhere, then bring in slave workers and start up a plantation/mine/factory. Likewise in the 20th century certain governments also moved whole populations (certainly enough people to constitute an in-game POP) to work and live in various places.

Also - how will this balance of "large workforce means high production" be affected by growing efficiency of manufacturing when new technologies / machines are introduced?

Will buildings have individual levels of mechanization/efficiency (i.e. cloth factory A has invested in new looms, so they now produce more but are indebted, whereas cloth factory B has not and produces less per employee but is debt free)?

This will be covered in much more detail in other DDs on the mechanics of Migration, Production Methods, and Slavery. But for now suffice to say that yes, the population will move around within certain bounds to take new jobs, although development of low-populated areas can take some time and work to pay off.

Pops themselves can actually come in any sizes, from a single working stiff to 100,000 Workforce + 300,000 Dependents or more (for the tech nerds: yes we've repeatedly had to find workarounds for overflowing integers when doing arithmetic involving Pops, as the numbers can get astronomical) and can migrate or switch workplace in similarly variable chunks, no artificial limitations are imposed whereby a Pop is too small or large to move.

 

[KaiserJohan]

Are pops considered one unit? Or do individuals move and join different pops and/or create a new pop for their type?

They act like individuals when necessary (so you don't get the likes of a million chinese artisans swapping goods at one time)

Does this mean that all natural resources (metals, oil, coal, etc. etc.) will be in historical places? So all players will know from the start that, say, Texas, Alaska and South Africa Cape will very valuable real estate?

Could we perhaps have some game mode where natural mineral resources placement is at least partially randomized? For example if suddenly diamonds or gold is found in Iceland in 1870s - this can lead to a whole new strategic balance in North Atlantic (for example US - UK competition for control over resources). Or what if oil was found not in Ploesti but in Szeged - would this have made Austria-Hungary more competitive in early 20th century - etc., etc.

Some resources like Gold are somewhat randomized if I remember correctly. Will probably be expanded upon in a later dev diary about Resources

 

[lachek]

Are pops considered one unit? Or do individuals move and join different pops and/or create a new pop for their type?

Yes, individuals inside a Pop merge with suitable Pops in their destination, and bring their "share" of their properties along with them. So if a part of a poor but literate unemployed Laborer splits off to move to another state, and finds another Laborer Pop of their own culture and religion there that they can merge with (and there's an open spot available for Laborers in the target Pop's workplace) then they will merge with them. The Literacy and Wealth they bring with them (among other properties, like Radicals or Qualifications) will then modify the target Pop proportionally.

It's all pretty technical and most of the time near-invisible on an individual Pop level, but by being judicious in simulating this stuff we get some very interesting emergent effects like brain drain, itinerant oppressed demographics, geographic wealth shifts, and so on.

 

[lachek]

Victoria 2 also has this sort of mechanic which ended up allowing otherwise impossible assimilation (e.g. if some colonial state has native farmer pop, sufficiently small number of primary culture farmers moving there would just end up being merged into that non-primary culture pop). Does Victoria 3 handle that sort of situations more gracefully?

Pops of different cultures and religions cannot merge in Victoria 3. Assimilation / Conversion splits off part of the Pop, changes the culture/religion, and only merges it if it can find a suitable Pop to merge with.

 

[KaiserJohan]

Is any developer able to or allowed to answer my two questilns from eaelier which sadly were overlooked?

Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #4 - Goods

Happy Thursday and welcome back to yet another Victoria 3 dev diary, this time on the subject of Goods! Goods are a core economic feature of Victoria 3, just as they were in previous Victoria games, and come in a wide variety of types. Also, as...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #4 - Goods

Happy Thursday and welcome back to yet another Victoria 3 dev diary, this time on the subject of Goods! Goods are a core economic feature of Victoria 3, just as they were in previous Victoria games, and come in a wide variety of types. Also, as...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Currently Tractors have a pre-requisite tech and allows farms to consume Engines & Coal/Oil goods to vastly change the employment structure by employing a few Machinists at the expense of many Laborers and Farmers. So not directly a "Tractor goods" but abstracted into Engines&Coal/Oil. There are a ton of goods as it is so we have to draw the line somewhere.
It would of course be trivial to mod a Tractor Factory and Tractor goods yourself

As for buy/sell orders I would refer to the Markets dev diary!

 

[lachek]

You're the dev here, but I always wondered why don't Paradox's games just simulate a month or two of gameplay (obviously, without war declarations and such) before game start. You usually have to sit idle for some time waiting for all the values to properly initialize anyway, so why not do it behind the scene? Maybe it's what is happening in Vic 3 already though.

Vicky 2 did actually do this to some extent, and it was the approach we used in early Vicky 3 development as well. It has the downside that since everything is interrelated with the economy, anything you change in history scripts would be out-of-date as the game starts - for example, if I tell the game to make some Wealth 12 Clerks in Missouri at game start, but then the economy runs a few months in the interim, those Clerks might end up Wealth 10 with half of them turning into Farmers before the game starts.

So at this point in development it's preferable to us to ensure the scripted setup is adhered to at game start, even if that makes for an economically unstable early game. At release we will likely do some limited behind-the-scene iterative pre-ticking (instead of trying to compute an economic equilibrium between this many agents which would be, well I don't want to say impossible, but probably a bit overkill for a video game) but we need to limit what can happen as a result of that - for example we wouldn't want Pops to engage in economic migration prior to game start.

 

[lachek]

With regards to discoverable resources such as Gold and Oil, they are not totally randomized but rather distributed throughout the world in potential quantities based on our research of actual deposits discovered today. Discovery chances are based on technologies, so it's also influenced by who controls what part of the world.

From a design perspective we don't actually care if a player wants to pre-emptively capture a part of the world before they would realistically know that part of the world will contain a valuable late-game resource. You wouldn't realistically be able to know in 1836 what technologies would eventually lead you to the capacity to develop Automobiles by the turn of the century either, but we're not hiding or randomizing technology progression for realism's sake.

That does not mean all regions with potential for Gold or Oil will be guaranteed to manifest that potential by end-game, even if they did so in actual history. If you want to try to pre-empt historical development you do so at your own risk. Personally I think it's more fun to see and react to the economic, political, and diplomatic shake-up of one of these discoveries than to use my knowledge of history strategically to win more, but for those who feel differently it's very easy to mod the removal of potentials from regions that didn't manifest it before 1936 - even impose historical discovery dates if you so wish.