Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #65 - Patch 1.1 (part 1)

[PDJR_Alastorn]

The changes are nice, but i personally can wait for them even longer, those are not important things for now. What we really need as fast as possible is a performance patch or maybe even more than just one. Many can not play longer than 1870-1880 cause of the incredible slow down.

You should prioritize performance for now over absolutely everything else.

That's the fun thing, we can work on both at the same time. The Artists, Designers, UX Designers are not the one's dealing with performance issues.
The performance issue is known to us, we delayed putting it into the hotfix because it wasn't yet vetted. You will get it in 1.0.6 sometime next week.
And after that there will continue to be a developer working on performance.

But trust me when we show you UX work and maybe some of the stuff I might tease next week, you don't want me working on performance instead - I will actively make it worse since I don't know what I am doing on that front.

 

[PDJR_Alastorn]

This looks good, although I do hope you might add "Electoral Laws" or "Anti-Corruption" categories in the future to represent the ability for non-majority governments will be able to enforce their will with sufficiently authoritarian policies.

Also, will you be making another pass over IG ideologies? It's really weird that the Roman Curia is a key supporter of secularizing the Papacy because they prefer Monarchy to Theocracy, especially when the Roman Landowners have a special ideology to make them prefer Theocratic governments.

Not too much comment on when its getting a pass but trust me this is something thats on our list of continual areas of improvment. I think Tolman has been working on it but I am not sure when its going to be vetted for a branch. The reason I am ignorant on this is because I've got my nose in economic balancing but more on that in the future. If you have specific suggestions, discord and forums is a great place to put it. Community and QA are regularly rounding up the feedback for us.

 

[PDJR_Alastorn]

Will the UI improvements be taken or inspired by current popular mods?

So, we try to not outright copy mods but we do take alot of inspiration from them. We are regularly keeping eyes on those things which are the top because that signals areas for us that could use improvement. Sometimes we do take them, make a few tweaks to make them meet our standards and implement them in a future patch.

Its a fun balancing act but if there's a cool mod, we see it.

 

[PDJR_Alastorn]

All sounds good to me, especially getting another hotfix before 1.1.

Do the devs have a recorded stance on France's dominance and (relatedly) the extreme effectiveness of Treaty Ports?

A few short term solutions came to mind, I'm not sure which one we instituited for 1.1
And yes I am away of France's current dominance. The trick is not nerfing France into oblivion but lifting the others to be able to challenge them. I am on it.

 

[PDJR_Alastorn]

can we expect some trade UI changes, its the most obnoxious part for me to navigate.

Planned for the future, but reworking an entire screen needs both myself and Aron to have time to stop assisting on other things.
UX Resources is as always at Paradox, a bottleneck. Don't be disheartened that you don't hear anything, we don't want to show it to you until its done and ready for feedback.

 

[PDJR_Alastorn]

Also, please make disasters like cyclone relief scale with province GDP and not the entire country's GDP.
Its ridiculous that a state with 58K pop needs a disaster relief of 4M just cuz its my late game Germany

I've got a code support request out for this, its in the queue but also folks want their perforance and crash fixes so its not the highest priority relatively but my eyes are on it. I balanced the events down for 1.1 a bit until I get that support.

 

[PDJR_Alastorn]

Wonderful, besides my constant want for Warfare to be entirely overhauled, can we please get some sort of unemployment map mode? It's so frustrating trying to find where my unemployment is

Until I am able to get to this, open up the production lense and zoom in, the map will have a popup of unemployment and the maplist will assist.

 

[PDJR_Alastorn]

France does need to be nerfed, their growth rate is ridiculously high, and they usually are super stable politically for most of the game, with highest SoL in the world, which obviously should not be the case

If France gets 80 million population by 1900, I don't think a right solution is to make other countries also achieve their historical numbers doubled. The solution is to nerf France

Which will be handled by general balancing of other systems and methods which will result in nerfing France.
The trick is to not just nerf France but make the systems behave where they are disadvantaged and others see their value possibilities grow.

Everyone says to nerf France, I say I won't just "nerf france" and make them have a modifier that adds a negative and hampers them. I will get the systems to work better and with other nations being able to put up a challenge that will hamper them.

 

[PDJR_Alastorn]

I realize you're trying to make a buck here and only have so much to spend, but if something is always a bottleneck, maybe you need a bottle with a wider opening.

Adding more UX Designers is like increasing the highways between two cities, increasing supply also increases demand. Its never not going to be a bottleneck and hiring more UX Designers does little to alleviates the bottleneck only after they are onboarded and before the team fully adapts to tacking advantage of their access.

 

[PDJR_Alastorn]

I am not quite certain the analogy works here. Having a UI where people can easily find the relevant information (e.g., the vote share of each party) would lead to people wanting a good UI? and that's ... like ... a bad thing? Also, "we cannot hire people because that won't solve the problem instantly"... well, yes, and?

I am not sure what's the point here.

You're coming in on the end of the conversation, I stated earlier in the thread that the attention of a UX designer on X is usually a bottleneck so progress on some fronts is delayed until when they are not busy assisting other matters.

Someone decided to be a bit smarmy as if we should just hire more UX designers and boom, problems solved. And I like a fool decided to be smarmy back.

No one is saying that UI is not important, but our UX Designers are heavily outnumbered by the rest of the development team which is why sometimes you see more progress in bugfixing and polishing of X instead of Y. And folks on the forums tend to make the assumption because we aren't throwing a fix of Y at you immediately, we don't agree its a problem, which is untrue.