Home Trending Latest threads New posts Developer diaries
Jump to latest Follow Reply
  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Victoria 3 12163 Bug Reports 8034 User Mods 552 Multiplayer 65 Suggestions 3293 Tech Support 952 After Action Reports (AARs)
Previous dev diary Next dev diary
Show only dev responses

Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #58 - Interest Revisions

16_9.jpg

​
Hello and welcome to yet another Victoria 3 development diary. Today is going to be a fairly brief dev diary discussing some design changes in diplomacy that happened as a result of internal playtesting and feedback, specifically to the mechanics of Interests and their significance in the game.

Interests, as you may recall from Dev Diary #19, are essentially a country having a diplomatic presence in a particular Strategic Region, either as a result of owning territory there, having a subject that owns territory there, or through a Declared Interest. Back then, Interests merely limited where you start Diplomatic Plays and Establish Colonies, and acted as a guide for the AI in terms of which countries it needed to care about

With so many Great Powers maintaining Interests there, Europe is a perilous place to start a Diplomatic Play in
DD58_1.jpg

​
So, what has changed between then and now? Well, basically, playtesting revealed two principal issues with Interests in the game. The first was that they simply didn’t feel significant enough, because they only tied directly into colonization and diplomatic plays. The second was that the number of declared Interests a country had available to them was based solely on rank, which meant that Austria with its miniscule navy was able to maintain almost as global a presence as the British with their, well, definitely not so miniscule navy.

To solve the first problem, we decided to do a little experiment - what if instead of just limiting colonization and diplomatic plays, Interests were required for all forms of diplomacy, up to and including trade? This was an idea we’d kicked around previously, but the concern was that it’d simply be too limiting, particularly where trade was concerned, because as mentioned, the only way to get more Interests was to increase your country rank, and once you were a Great Power, well that was it. No more trade partners, at least not of your own choosing.

The solution to the second problem, then, turned out to also be the key to the first one: tying the navy directly into declared Interests. The number of declared Interests from rank were reduced, and instead, Naval Bases now produce declared Interests, with one declared Interest provided per 10 flotillas that a country has. In other words, while Austria can now maintain a handful of declared Interests around Europe to look out for its national interests (pun intended), the size of Britain’s fleet allows it to poke its nose into the business of just about any corner of the world that it wants to.

Spain’s navy may not be what it once was, but it’s still large enough to allow the Spanish a greater diplomatic reach than their Major Power rank would otherwise allow
DD58_2.jpg

​
With this change made, our experiment truly came together, and allowed us to greatly expand the scope of the Interest mechanic. Instead of just being a requirement for taking over land, Interests now signify a formal diplomatic presence in a region without which you simply do not have the ability to interact with that region at all - no French diplomats in Southeast Asia means no French diplomacy in Southeast Asia.

In no particular order, here are all the mechanics that now tie into Interests:
  • Diplomatic Plays & Colonization: As before, a country must have an Interest in a region to start a Diplomatic Play or begin colonizing there.
  • Diplomatic Actions: To conduct diplomacy with a country, you must now have at least one overlapping Interest - meaning they must have an Interest in any strategic region where you also have an Interest. For example, Texas can conduct diplomacy with Britain if Britain maintains an Interest in the Dixie Region, even if Texas has no Interests outside the Dixie region.
  • Trade: To establish a trade route between two markets, one of the two market owners has to have an Interest in any region where the other market is present. For example, if the USA maintains an Interest in La Plata where the Argentine market is present, then Argentina and the USA can trade with each other, even if Argentina doesn’t have an Interest anywhere in North America.
  • Notifications: You will only be informed about diplomatic going-ons between countries with which you have an overlapping Interest, and in states where you have an Interest in the region.

As much as the Sikh Empire might desire European allies against Britain, their landlocked position limits their options - without a coast they will have to wait for one of those powers to take an interest in North India
DD58_3.jpg

​
Ultimately, the result of these changes were threefold: It made Interests a far more central mechanic to the game, it increased the need for maintaining a large fleet-in-being for empires with global ambitions, and it increased immersion by having who you could and could not deal with simply make more sense. An isolated Bhutan in the Himalayas now truly feels isolated, rather than inexplicably being able to send embassies to Paraguay at a whim.

That’s it for today! I’ll be back next week with another Dev Diary on a hotly anticipated topic: The AI of Victoria 3.
 
  • 257Like
  • 88Love
  • 29
  • 22
  • 5
Reactions:
Sort by date Sort by reaction score
InvisibleBison said:
I don't like this. One of the things I enjoy about Paradox games is watching the world develop beyond my immediate influence, and receiving notifications about things that I'm not involved in makes it much easier to do that.

In other words, message settings are an important part of grand strategy games, and getting rid of them was a mistake.
Click to expand...
Absolutely agreed, we should be able to decide where we want notifications from, its a big part of immersion for me to get dispatches from all over the world on whats going on.
 
  • 6
  • 1Like
Reactions:
22pedro22 said:
Absolutely agreed, we should be able to decide where we want notifications from, its a big part of immersion for me to get dispatches from all over the world on whats going on.
Click to expand...
I honestly really liked the newspapers back in vic2.

Did i read it often? No. But it's important to know that it's there!
 
Last edited:
  • 2Like
  • 1
Reactions:
It sounds great. Thanks for the update.
 
  • 1
Reactions:
Wizzington said:
Would be more realistic but also very annoying to have to redeclare interests anytime you have a naval battle, so we chose gameplay over realism here.
Click to expand...
I understand where you are coming from but isn't there a way to make it acceptable gameplay-wise yet still make it so that by disabling a significant enough portion of a countries navy, you can drastically reduce their ability to project power and thus declare interests?
 
  • 6
Reactions:
I also don't really want the return of notification settings. I always found them fiddly, confusing, and annoying, especially since you had to reset them after every update.
 
  • 9
  • 3
Reactions:
Wizzington said:
Sharing a land border always lets you interact with and receive notifications about a country.
Click to expand...
So is it possible to start a diplomatic play against a country you share a land border with which is based in a strategic region you don't have declared interest in?
 
  • 2
Reactions:
dbruser said:
If the base has enough shortages and operates at a loss for long enough, they can shut down which would have an effect.
Click to expand...
I don’t think so. You can mantain your naval bases even if you don’t have enough input goods for them. You can subsidize then.

So basically even if your naval bases are useless and can’t produce any ships because they don’t have the required materials for it, they will give you the same interest power as ig they were fully functional :(
 
  • 1
Reactions:
MrMcQue said:
I understand where you are coming from but isn't there a way to make it acceptable gameplay-wise yet still make it so that by disabling a significant enough portion of a countries navy, you can drastically reduce their ability to project power and thus declare interests?
Click to expand...
It the following quote from DD#19 is still true, then convoy raiding will reduce where an interest can be declared. If you have reduced their navy it should be easier to reduce their convoys through raiding.

Wizzington said:
A country can Declare an Interest in any region that is either adjacent to a region where they already have an Interest, or which they can reach through the support of their naval supply network (more on that later!).
Click to expand...
 
  • 1
  • 1
Reactions:
A minor and pedantic point - but looking at the map of regions someone posted earlier, is "North Sea" really the right name for a region covering Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, and Greenland? Of those, only Scotland actually has a coast on the North Sea, and only on one side at that!
 
  • 1
  • 1Like
Reactions:
dbruser said:
If the base has enough shortages and operates at a loss for long enough
Click to expand...
Naval bases are government buildings, they don't produce a marketable product and they don't operate at a profit or loss.

However, if you ruin your rival's economy hard enough, their naval bases will get so ruinously expensive that it's downsize or go bankrupt.
 
  • 3
  • 2
Reactions:
MrRazza said:
A minor and pedantic point - but looking at the map of regions someone posted earlier, is "North Sea" really the right name for a region covering Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, and Greenland? Of those, only Scotland actually has a coast on the North Sea, and only on one side at that!
Click to expand...
Probably North Atlantic would be better.

I still think it would be more interesting if it included Newfoundland and Labrador as well.
 
  • 3
Reactions:
Wizzington said:
Naval Bases now produce declared Interests, with one declared Interest provided per 10 flotillas that a country has.
Click to expand...

Wizzington said:
Right now it's just 1 per 10 but that might change before release.
Click to expand...

Wizzington said:
You don't lose declared interests from ships being sunk, only from downsizing naval bases.
Click to expand...

Wizzington said:
Would be more realistic but also very annoying to have to redeclare interests anytime you have a naval battle, so we chose gameplay over realism here.
Click to expand...

Your wording have been unusually unclear and inconsistent in this thread. Is it correct that it is your fleet capacity/limit that gives interests? And in the base game the only way to increase that capacity/limit is to build/improve naval bases?
 
  • 1
  • 1
Reactions:
Wizzington said:
You do get notifications about countries that are relevant because of overlapping interests, to be clear. So US would get notified if say, a trading partner ended up at war.
Click to expand...
Why not just let us decide ourselves which countries we consider relevant without having to juggle some boring made up limited resource? Part of what made Paradox games great was the fact that they let players decide themselves how to play the game. Restricting that is not an improvement on any level, and will reduce the replayability of the game.
 
Last edited:
  • 3
  • 3
Reactions:
Brynjar said:
Your wording have been unusually unclear and inconsistent in this thread. Is it correct that it is your fleet capacity/limit that gives interests? And in the base game the only way to increase that capacity/limit is to build/improve naval bases?
Click to expand...
If you look at the screenshot, declared interests are a product of the naval base, not derived from the fleet capacity or current size. The amount is equivalent to 1 per 10 flotillas but they aren't actually connected.

Which interestingly means mods should be able to yield declared interests from whatever buildings they want.
 
Jamaican Castle said:
If you look at the screenshot, declared interests are a product of the naval base, not derived from the fleet capacity or current size. The amount is equivalent to 1 per 10 flotillas but they aren't actually connected.

Which interestingly means mods should be able to yield declared interests from whatever buildings they want.
Click to expand...

Jus a side note: does anyone else feel that interest, as a "power projection" of sorts, should stem from ships rather than naval bases?
 
  • 2
Reactions:
DanielPrates said:
Jus a side note: does anyone else feel that interest, as a "power projection" of sorts, should stem from ships rather than naval bases?
Click to expand...
I think having interests decrease after naval losses would be cumbersome and ultimately not make a lot of sense. ("The navy was defeated in the North Atlantic, better withdraw our ambassador to Japan.") The mechanical implications would also be a pain - would losing an interest automatically suspend agreements or trade routes? What if you're at war with someone in that Interest region? How do you even determine which interests are lost - is it by age? Do you put some "over interest cap" penalty on the player until they remove one (what if they don't do it)?
 
  • 8
  • 1Like
Reactions:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back