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Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #50 - Living Map

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Hello again everyone! This week, as promised, I’ll be showing you a lot more of the visual elements of the map and how it evolves over the course of time and through your influence.

The Living Map has many different elements to it that adds both a bit of flavor and life in the world of Victoria 3, I’ll be going over some of the main elements in their current state to give you all some insight.

Hub Expansion
The most important and noticeable aspect that the world is progressing are your Hubs, as you reach certain thresholds of buildings (both production, government and residential ones) your cities will expand with the corresponding buildings. When it comes to the residential buildings they all have three different tiers of wealth within each culture set, the higher tiers are automatically activated upon reaching a higher Standard Of Living for the Pops of that Hub. To further amplify this change of SOL and to provide some more motion around hubs we have an effect that indicates either an increase or decrease with a construction hammer and anvil that either hardens or breaks.

Small Hubs
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Large Hubs
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Decrease in SOL
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Increase in SOL
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Vehicles
Traversing the roads, seas and even skies of the game we have made quite a few vehicles that breathe life into the world. These are unlocked by research, adjusting your Production Methods and building specific buildings. The most fundamental one being a horse carriage that traverses the dirt roads of connected Hubs, with specific research you can instead have cars putter along the roads! If regular roads are too simple for you there are also a bunch of different trains for when you’ve researched railroads, old locomotives can turn into electric ones and steel railway cars can also be applied.

We’ll get there, eventually
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Traveling in style
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Old locomotive
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Electric trains
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But land is not the only place where vehicles make an appearance, in the seas and along the shipping lanes you’ll be able to see cargo ships traveling! These range from simple clippers to steamships, depending on what you’ve researched and what sort of Production Methods you’re utilizing.

Trade ships
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Last but not least we look to the skies where you’ll be able to see Zeppelins soaring through the air when skyscrapers have been built and act as anchoring points for the massive airships.

Soaring through the skies
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Military and War
When conflict inevitably brews and wars break out there are lots of ways we show those effects on your Hubs and surrounding terrain. When gearing up for war your troops will be determined by what you’ve researched and the Production Methods of your Barracks. You can look at what troops you have in your Garrison at any time, but upon entering a battle they (the most advanced unit) will be visible on the map where battle takes place, facing off against the opponents troops. Depending on what weapons you’ve equipped your units with, different effects will show, so even a Mobile Artillery unit has different kinds of shots.

Beautiful illustrations for your troops
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Bunker fire
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Flamethrowers!
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Let's play battleship!
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When a region has been ravaged by war and a lot of battles you will start to see the effect of that on the region where it has happened through Devastation. The dynamic Devastation affects a variety of parameters for the region, its trade, Pops and Hubs. It also visually shows, not just by tearing up the surrounding terrain but also muddles rivers and burns buildings, the extent of this increases the more battles are fought in the same region.

Devastation (sped up)
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Devastation at a Hub
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Also, if you really need additional troops you can activate your conscription centers (if you’ve got access to them) which forces a lot of people to sign up. We make sure to show this as well, through an effect on your Hubs where conscripts are being drafted.

Production and Pops
In addition to expanding your city Hubs, you’ll also be able to affect the world with mining, farming and forestry Hubs. Trees will be cut down in close proximity to your forestry Hubs, farms will cultivate the earth and ground will be excavated close to your mines, leaving visible impact on the terrain.

Forestry Hubs and their effect
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Farm Hubs and their growth
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Mining Hubs effect on the world
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With increased production and industrialization within your country and Hubs we are also giving you a purely visual reminder that the world will be affected by that as well. The visual Pollution will see more smokestacks rising from your hubs as well as the surrounding terrain becoming tarnished. All for the sake of progress right?

Smokestacks coming from a Hub
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Pollution affecting a larger area
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However, if your people don't like the way things are progressing they will show their displeasure through turmoil, and if you don’t correctly address their concerns you might find yourself with a revolution on your hands. Turmoil will just be a bit of anger brewing in the form of puffs of displeasure while revolution will have flags of opposition being raised in your hubs.

Let the flags of revolution rise!
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Buildings
As previously mentioned, you’ll get zeppelins traversing the skies upon building skyscrapers, and while these behemoths of buildings will tower over the rest in your city Hubs there are still Monuments like the Eiffel Tower that will be even stronger indicators that your cities are growing beyond the point of the regular buildings.

The different skyscrapers for each culture set
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They also blink!
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That should give you all a glimpse into the life of the world map! There are things we would love to explore more in the future but I feel we’ve got a great foundation going that we’d love to hear ideas on how to take further.

Join us next week, where Aron will be covering the tutorial!

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The map looks nice, but I have minor complaint:

Where do electric lokomotives get their power from? From thin air? ;) They need an overhead line as well.
 
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I recognize now that the living map design (and scale of vehicles) reminds me of ye olde map travel segments of classic cinema which fits nicely with the UI design pillar of prestige and optimism>>

Someone else mentioned before about how including animals in another thread (similar to EUIV?) could also help, though there's probably a resource management reason for not including them?

The animated wind through the trees is a great touch as well! :D

I may have missed this; any plans to include discovery of natural wonders &/or archaeological sites on the map (with journal entries prior to them appearing on the map)?
 
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These look gorgeous! However, I can’t help being scared of performance, especially for Mac users like myself. My CPU is very very good, and is running most paradox games very quickly, but graphics tend to not be supported, causing extreme FPS issues in some cases. How much will people with subpar/not supported GPUs be able to customize these graphics settings?
 
Trees will be cut down in close proximity to your forestry Hubs
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@Wizzington Please add a sustainable logging option to wood production methods! This is important, forestry's can grow forests and produce logging sustainably! I will begin fighting climate change before it's a problem!
 
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Spartakus said:
I second the large hubs being too big and sprawly. Paris is barely OK, but Luxembourg and the Saarland look pretty ridiculous.
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Well yeah. You're comparing Luxembourg, an urban area which today has a population of 500,000, and Saarbrucken which has 300,000, to Paris, an urban area with a population of 10 million. If the Luxembourg or Saarbrucken urban areas has as many people as Paris, yes they would be sprawling much more than they do now.
 
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Loving every DD so far. The first time I've had to actually ask a question though. Are there going to be model changes to account for the shift to Post-Dreadnought Battleships and the developments made in the last 25 years of the game's period? Also ... Aircraft Carrier's still suspiciously absent, please don't do me dirty like this Paradox.
 
Corgus said:
@Wizzington Please add a sustainable logging option to wood production methods! This is important, forestry's can grow forests and produce logging sustainably! I will begin fighting climate change before it's a problem!
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There is only one way to stop climate change: and that is to industrialise so quickly, so violently, and so exponentially that there isn't even a climate left to change! Aha! Fiendish!
 
Max_Art said:
Point taken, we will be able to make slight tweaks to them to distinguish them further. But as I've seen a lot of comments on these effect I would love to hear more concrete examples of what ideas you all have for it. To further showcase my intent with the current effect I can show the initial (old) concept I made for it:
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Quickest and dirtiest solution would be just rotating the "breakdown" gif 90 degrees (so the anvil is more like someone smashing down a wall).
 
looks really great from a visual perspective. the only thing that i would rather see different is the scaling. the hubs and various connecting networks all seem way too large for the map.
 
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Cheers for the DD Max, and the extra info from you, Max and Alastorn :) The map looks really nice, and I really like the idea of a dynamic map that helps tell the story as the game progresses. A couple of minor points (absolutely not critical) on the ships:

  • Clippers generally didn't have funnels, particularly early in the game period, but there were sailing ships sans funnels in trade routes (albeit quite rare by this time) all the way up 1939.
  • Down the track, it'd be nice to have the "classic" tramp steamer (pic below), for later in the game - both of the trade ship designs date from the first thirty or so years of the game.
  • That "battleship" is quite a peculiar design - in spite of the myriad and quite creative approaches to ship design in the latter half of the 19th century, I'm fairly sure it's not consistent with any existing design - while it doesn't need to be, it's a bit of a "turret farm" - to the point that the design itself looks somewhat implausible, and rather dangerous (I suspect from both a magazine explosion and stability perspective). With the great attention to detail on trains, cars, zeppelins, buildings and land forces, it's a bit sad to see the maritime side of things getting short shrift and the battleship be more meme than reality. Not game-breaking by any stretch, but a little inconsistent. It's particularly odd given the importance of things maritime to the economic growth, technology and power projection/prestige of the period.

Max_Art said:
Point taken, we will be able to make slight tweaks to them to distinguish them further. But as I've seen a lot of comments on these effect I would love to hear more concrete examples of what ideas you all have for it. To further showcase my intent with the current effect I can show the initial (old) concept I made for it:
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I had similar thoughts - I doubt I'd notice the difference between the positive and negative animation, and at most practical levels of zoom of the map, it's unlikely to be terribly visible in any event. Perhaps instead have a general "bustle" (lights going on and off, smoke, animations as graphics budget allows) with a bit more colour, for improved SoL, and a darker colour with no movement for dropping SoL, and something in-between for "steady as it goes"?


For a maritime pic, as promised, here's a pic of Aviemore, a steam merchant completed in 1920 - these types of ships were very common on the world's oceans in the last decades of the Vicky 3 time period:

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For a bonus maritime pic, here's the closest battleship (Lord Nelson) I could find to the rather creative construction shown in the DD - note the substantially smaller number of turrets, and substantially greater ratio of deck:turrets :)

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Wow this is awesome! I love the map coming to life. HOI IV was really the biggest step with cities and city lights at night and I loved the 3D art. But this is another level. 3D and 2D artists at PDX are extremely good. Props and kudos to them.
 
Looks very nice visually although I'm concerned about cities becoming too large/comically large. Rome 2 Total War had the problem and it looked goofy and cartoonish.
 
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Great, ANOTHER strategy game where I'll get distracted by the trains.

Also, will there be different train models depending on region/country? I would pay for a cosmetic DLC to that effect!
 
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Is fertility based solely on a fertility map or is there something like a temperature stat? Having visual pollution, smells like we should get health affection solution and maybe small scale climate change down the line?
 
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Max_Art said:
Point taken, we will be able to make slight tweaks to them to distinguish them further. But as I've seen a lot of comments on these effect I would love to hear more concrete examples of what ideas you all have for it. To further showcase my intent with the current effect I can show the initial (old) concept I made for it:
View attachment 850883
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Honestly a classic shiny green and red particle effect would be quite fine I think. Currently both icons use some very cold colors that will easily blend in with the background and make it so the 3d effect is almost never spotted.

Sudden reductions in quality of life should also get a notification warning, with a "This might be due to X" advice.
 
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commissar roach said:
Point taken, we will be able to make slight tweaks to them to distinguish them further. But as I've seen a lot of comments on these effect I would love to hear more concrete examples of what ideas you all have for it. To further showcase my intent with the current effect I can show the initial (old) concept I made for it:
Click to expand...
Perhaps you could make the colours of the upgrade different than those from the downgrade?
I imagine a red / green contrast doesn't fit the overall visual theme, but how about a coal black / pure gold contrast? Or perhaps copper / gold, the exact same contrast used to visualise the economic value of goods?
 
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Max_Art said:

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Hello again everyone! This week, as promised, I’ll be showing you a lot more of the visual elements of the map and how it evolves over the course of time and through your influence.
Click to expand...

Will we be able to switch off "live map" and stay at a political map (or another useful map type) at any zoom level? I have partial color blindness and some vision impairment and the way it was done in CK3 makes the game very hard to play for me.

I understand pretty visuals are fun but this is a strategy game after all and graphical fireworks should be optional if they hinder gameplay?

Thanks for understanding.
 
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