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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 in previous Victoria games, the manufacturing of Goods (by Pops in Buildings) is how the vast majority of the wealth in Victoria 3 is created.

Fundamentally, a unit of Goods represent a quantity of a certain type of natural resource, manufactured good or intangible service and come attached with a price tag. This price varies both in base (a single unit of Tanks is pricier than a single unit of Fabric) and in actual market value, as the prices of Goods change depending on supply and demand.

A selection of goods that are bought and sold in the British Market.

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There are four broad categories of Goods: Staple Goods, Luxury Goods, Industrial Goods and Military Goods. Of these, Staple/Luxury Goods are mainly consumed by Pops, and Industrial/Military Goods are mainly consumed by buildings, but there are no hard rules here - you will find Buildings using Luxury Goods and Pops purchasing Industrial Goods when and where it makes sense for them to do so.

Staple Goods are everyday goods that Pops need to live, such as food to eat, wood to heat their homes, and clothes to wear. Staple Goods tend to be purchased in vast quantities by poor and middle class pops, with richer pops generally eschewing them for luxury variants.

Grain - possibly the most Staple of all Staple Goods!
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Luxury Goods are the things that Pops do not necessarily need but definitely want, such as fine foods, luxury drinks like Tea and Coffee, or fine clothes made from chinese silk. Luxuries tend to be more profitable to produce than Staple Goods, but depend on having a customer base with money - a poor factory worker isn’t going to be buying a whole lot of mahogany cabinets.

You can never have too many painted Ming vases, I always say.
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Industrial Goods are goods such as Iron, Coal, Rubber and Lead whose main purpose is often to be converted into other, more profitable goods. Securing a steady supply of vital Industrial Goods is crucial to Industrialization and growing the GDP of your country.

Tools are essential to the operation of many industries.
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Military Goods are goods such as Small Arms, Ammunition and Warships that are used by military buildings to arm and supply the armies and navies of the 19th century nations. The more technologically advanced the army or navy, the more complex (and expensive!) Military Goods they will need.

I’m told that soldiers tend to perform better if they’re given ammunition for their guns.
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We’ll be returning to the topic of Goods in later dev diaries when discussing related mechanics such as Markets, Pop Needs, Goods Substitution and Cultural Obsessions... but for now, I bid you adieu for a while, as next week Mikael will provide you with a dev diary about something we’ve been teasing for some time now - Production Methods!
 
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Thank you for the dev diary! Everything in this one seems really well thought out and implemented. Especially the different map layers we can now apply. The idea of different production methods is incredibly intriguing to me and I think is going to be one of the greatest shifts from vicky2 to 3 now I just have to wait a week :D
 
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Will there be a way to subsidize certain goods so it will be easier for your pops to buy them?
There are a number of ways you can interact with goods (more on that later) but at the moment we don't have an ability to direct subsidize one particular good. There are other ways to lower the price of a good though, such as subsidizing buildings producing it or importing it in greater quantities.
 
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I'm glad to see the game has prices based on supply and demand. Very important for the "economic simulation" feeling.

A small suggestion: instead of having just a "liquor" or whatever specific alcohol good, can we have something like a more generic "alcohol drink" good? That way it can be represented in all cultures and countries. I'm asking this because I guess there won't be multiple types of alcohol drinks.
 
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What I really liked is the option to show on the map the potential, production and consumption on the map. Hopefully Vic 3 will have more map modes than recent paradox games. One thing I would like to improve is that the market price graph was more detailed in relation to values.
 
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The coins tell you how expensive the good is in relation to base price in the particular context (market, state region etc). This way you can for instance see quickly at a glance that your steel factory is having trouble because the Steel it's producing has a very low price.
Is "base price" a thing like in Vic2? Vic2 seemed to have a thing where if the price went too far from "base price" it would stop rising. Are the price mechanisms gonna be presented in a future developer diary?
 
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I very much hope that in combination with free trade agreements or joining the market of a GP industrial power with a smaller nation with a comparative advantage in producing certain goods such as much of south America in agricultural goods in this time period will have a viable choice between attempting to industrialize and achieve autarky at a comparative disadvantage to many established industrial powers due to poor geography (ie Brazil's mountains and rainforest), lack of capital etcetera meaning they would be self-sufficient but poorer or choosing to forego some of their independence and tying themselves to a GP and focusing on the export of a few products via a trade agreement or common market which would make the nation wealthier but make it reliant on the goodwill of industrial powers.

A really good example of this was the South American Dreadnought race in which Brazil, Chile and Argentina were able to afford dreadnoughts, ships which were really reserved for Great Powers due to their booming agricultural markets but then also faced the consequences of their lack of self reliance when WW1 broke out and their export markets were partially cutoff and their dreadnoughts were seized in the docks of the belligerent powers.

I really hope there are multiple viable ways to build your economy rather than in vic 2 where pretty much everyone focused military goods and everyone had the capital to carpet their entire country in factories and railroads 10 years in.
 
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What i'd like to see related to this is how product of "raw materials"/RGO that in previous game were always fixed in a state, can switch. During this period of time in the territory of the Argentine Confederation/Argentine Republic there was a general switch of an economy based in wool and leather (sheep and cows) to grain (once the large plains were "ruralized/developed" and beef meat (once refrigeration and processing plants allowed meat to be exported raw or prepared), at the point that sheep went from being one of the main cattle to a marginal one.

I'd be interesting to see if Vic 3 can recreate a kind of economical switch like that.
 
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What I really liked is the option to show on the map the potential, production and consumption on the map. Hopefully Vic 3 will have more map modes than recent paradox games. One thing I would like to improve is that the market price graph was more detailed in relation to values.
Something that our UX designers have put a lot of time into is showing contextual information, in this case by allowing you to see heatmaps of production, consumption and potential production while viewing a particular good (which is extremely useful as it tells you things like where you can get coal).
 
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