• 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 - Dev Diary #65 - Patch 1.1 (part 1)

16_9.jpg

Hello and welcome to the second post-release dev diary for Victoria 3. Today we’ll be talking about the first major post-release patch, which we’re aiming to get to you before the end of the year. This patch (1.1) is going to primarily focus on game polish: bug fixing, balancing, AI improvements and UI/UX work, while the next major free patch (1.2) is going to be more focused towards making progress on the plans we’ve outlined in our Post-Release Plans DD by iterating on systems like warfare and diplomacy. With that said, there’s a few more significant changes coming in 1.1 as well, which we’re going to go over in this and next week’s dev diary.

The first of these changes is a rework of the interface for individual Pops, with a particular emphasis on improving the visualization of Pop Needs. In addition to the general overview, there are now separate tabs for Economy and Consumption, with Economy showing a more detailed breakdown of the Pop’s income and expenditure, as well as their top 5 Goods expenditures, and the Consumption tab showing a detailed breakdown of all their Goods expenditures, along with pricing information for the State and Market. We also plan to iterate on Pop Needs further in the future to give you a better idea of what your population needs are country-wide.

DD65_1.png


DD65_2.png

The next significant change in 1.1 is a rework of Legitimacy: some frequent criticisms we have received about the political system in Victoria 3 is that Legitimacy doesn’t matter enough and isn’t clear enough about its effects, as well as that elections don’t have enough of an impact. This rework aims to resolve all those problems by making several changes: First, legitimacy, while still a number from 0 to 100, is now divided into five categories with differing effects, some of which will increase or decrease based on the actual number and not just the threshold:
  • 0-24: Illegitimate Government: This government is considered blatantly illegitimate by most everyone in the country. This legitimacy level reduces the approval of all opposition IGs, makes it impossible to enact laws, and generates a steady stream of radicals in increased numbers the lower Legitimacy is.
  • 25-49: Unacceptable Government: This government is generally not considered acceptable to the people of the country. Laws can be enacted, but opposition IGs will disapprove and radicals will be created over time, though in amounts less than in an Illegitimate Government.
  • 50-74: Contested Government: This government is considered to have somewhat shaky foundations. Opposition IGs will disapprove slightly but otherwise there are no ill or good effects.
  • 75-89: Legitimate Government: This government is considered proper and legitimate. Over time a small number of Loyalists will be generated, with increased numbers the higher Legitimacy is.
  • 90-100: Righteous Government: This government’s legitimacy is considered to be unassailable. In addition to generating Loyalists over time, enactment time for new laws is cut in half.

The way you gain legitimacy has also been altered in democracies, with the share of votes (rather than just clout) represented in Government now having a direct effect on Legitimacy, the degree to which depends on the laws - under more restrictive voting systems, Clout can still be more important than votes, but as more of the population becomes enfranchised votes grow in importance and under Universal Suffrage it should be virtually impossible for a government that doesn’t have the voters behind it to be considered legitimate.

Despite being the largest party in terms of Clout, the Whigs alone are not considered Legitimate due to only commanding 47% of the votes in the last election.
DD65_3.png

Lastly for today, we’ve also made a balancing change to the Church and State and Citizenship laws - previously, the only balancing consideration for these laws was that less tolerance gave more Authority, which we felt was neither particularly balanced nor really a complete representation of the reasons that a country might want to discriminate against part of their population. To try and address this, we’ve made it so that by default, slightly more radicals are created by Standard of Living decreases than Loyalists from Standard of Living increases, but offset this with modifiers on the more restrictive laws that increase Loyalist and reduce Radical gain among the accepted parts of the population - the more restrictive your cultural/religious tolerance, the greater the effect on the part of the population that actually falls within it.

DD65_4.png

That’s it for today! Next week we’re going to continue talking about Patch 1.1, which as I said at the beginning of the dev diary is planned to be released before the end of the year. We’re also still working on another hotfix (1.0.6) which should hopefully include some late-game performance improvements and other fixes and which we are aiming to release sometime next week.
 
  • 272Like
  • 70Love
  • 16
  • 11
  • 5
  • 4Haha
Reactions:
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.
 
  • 26Like
  • 6
  • 2Love
  • 1
Reactions:

No, it is not. The stall chance is the same whether the IG is in government or not, so having an opposing party in governement while trying to pass something has no effect on the chance to stall. So only the enacment time will drop meaning you can try to get it passed faster.

The only limit here is that if the law proposal makes the IG angry (-10 or worse) they will refuse to participate and kick themselves out of the government possibly tanking your ligitimacy and thus your enacment time, but again the stall chance is unaffected.
thats definitely wrong. stall just depends on IGs in goverment.

pass chance = clout of endorsingIGs in gov (base chance) + changes through the enactment process (events, decisions, debate etc)
stall chance = clout of oppsing IGs in gov
advance = (base chance of passing - 2*stall chance)*some constant that seems to be 0.98 sometimes for some reason
debate = 100-pass chance-stall chance-advance
 
  • 3
Reactions:
Countries with both proportional representation and an ability for the legislature to call a vote of no confidence expect exactly that the governing party/coalition has 50% or more of the popular vote (because a governing bloc that doesn't have that, gets ejected by Parliament).
Not necessarily, here in Finland we used to have quite many minority governments (less than 50% of the vote in the parliament) back in the day. The point with the no confidence votes is that the governments could get some in the opposition to support them on any single issue due to compromises and promises, and the opposition parties knew that they couldn't get a functioning majority government together either, so instead of just breaking the whole system so nobody could play, they supported the government on single issues so that at least something got done.

Having majority governments is still a relatively recent thing over here.

But that all changes when you start talking about first past the post electoral systems that direct the whole system towards a strict two party system, where of course the minority is not going to be able to hold a government as the opposition is a single unified block that has the majority. But in multiparty systems you can actually have situations where a minority government is able to function quite well and not fall to the next no-confidence vote, since those are usually held on single issues (at least here in Finland they are, there isn't a general "no confidence", they need to point to a single issue where there is no confidence) as someone in the opposition might well support them on that particular issue as they have needed to make a compromise with them to get their law proposals to pass in the parliament.
 
  • 2Like
Reactions:
thats definitely wrong. stall just depends on IGs in goverment.

pass chance = clout of endorsingIGs in gov (base chance) + changes through the enactment process (events, decisions, debate etc)
stall chance = clout of oppsing IGs in gov
advance = (base chance of passing - 2*stall chance)*some constant that seems to be 0.98 sometimes for some reason
debate = 100-pass chance-stall chance-advance
Nope, at least not in the version of the game that I'm playing it's not. I've checked in my version (1.0.5 with no mods that affect reforms) and the stall chance is caused by the clout of opposing IGs regardless of whether they are part of the government or not. As Japan I would have loved to create a minority government to pass abolishment of serfdom on the first go without the shogunate stalling things, but unfortunately that is not possible.

Other than that your math checks out, and the constant you are wondering about is the "debate is over" modifier that modifies both advance and debate when the pass and stall chances are so high it would cause the total percentage to go over 100%.

EDIT: Ok, I tested this once I got back to my home computer where I could boot the game, and apparently I am wrong in this. I could have sworn the stall chance was caused by all clout.

I'll just go and create a personal mod that does that, since it would make the system much better. There's no point in the whole thing if you can just make an extremely illegitimate government and run through reforms where majority of the political clout opposes the issue.
 
Last edited:
  • 1
  • 1Like
  • 1
Reactions:
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.
 
  • 22Like
  • 4
  • 2Love
  • 2
Reactions:
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.
 
  • 19Like
  • 3
  • 2Love
  • 1
Reactions:
Any plans on tweaking leader lifespans/ active years? It does feel somewhat annoying being unable to impliment a law for 20 years just because the Trade Unions haven't gotten around to picking a new IG leader after you unlocked socialism. Not to mention the rather common example of Nicolas I living until 1890, leaving Alexander II with no window to actually do his reforms.
 
  • 1Like
Reactions:
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.
 
  • 20Like
  • 2
  • 2
  • 1Love
Reactions:
Are there any UI changes planned on the battle front manager? For me, there is just a lot of crucial information not displayed.

1) Possible combat width (for both attacker and defender)
2) Required naval vessels for invation (to avoid penalty)
3) adjust the evaluation number to be less misleading

EDIT:
4) make combat effectiveness reduction due to missing materials more obvious by displaying it directly on the combat screen (not two layers into the details).
 
  • 1Like
  • 1
Reactions:
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.
 
  • 20
  • 8Like
  • 2
  • 1Love
Reactions:
Let me help y'all out a bit.



Try this:



More info upfront with fewer clicks. Add some headers and pretty it up from my paint cut and paste if you want.
They added character models only for the sake of adding them and now they refuse to make more readable interface because of this. And similar thing goes for every part of UI...
 
  • 5
  • 4Like
  • 3
Reactions:
Currently there is a problem where the party that wins an election cannot become part of the government if they are angry.

For example, say the USA radicalizes the Southern Planters by abolishing slavery, and then the Democrats win the next election. It is not possible to put them into the government, the game forces me to continue playing with an illegitimate losing party.

Who are Interest Groups loyal to, happy with, angry with, etc? Is it the disembodied "spirit of the nation" or is it the government in power? Is John Calhoun mad at Henry Clay and the Whigs, or is he mad at me? Who am I playing as? This design philosophy does not seem to be consistent.

One modest suggestion regarding this could be that if you put an angry party in to government, they will become happy and they will automatically try and force through one of the laws that they like and the player is not allowed to cancel it for some predetermined amount of time, so that it has a chance of passing. This sounds like reasonable behaviour for a party that is unhappy with the current state of affairs. Alternatively, instead of it being a random law, the player could negotiate with the party instead, say we will try and enact this law that you want.
 
  • 2Like
Reactions:
Real world politics in a nutshell. A coalition of two parties with 30% is stronger as the other party with 40% of the vote. This is absolute fine if you are having a system with more than two parties.
Yes and no. In reality if a party can command a majority without a fringe group they would tell them to like it or lump it, but they wouldn't allow the fringe group to hold the whole party hostage.
I admit that it might be difficult to decide who or what is fringe in this example.
What would be nice would be an option to break a party in that case, for the price of some sort of loss of legitimacy. Then it would come down to the question what's more harmful. A government not supported by the largest party or a party that shed one of their supporting interest groups
 
Game is already generating millions of radicals that keep everywhere in turmoil and cause constant revolutions for AI and Paradox' first patch is about making even more radicals.

Solve the oscillating fire/hire loop from generating radicals before you do anything else.
Agree. Here's how my game constantly looked since 80's

1668168658717.png
Uyb81KT.png

Yi1nA5z.png


Even my country on those screenshots constantly has 30% radicals. I just can't do anything about them, at some point they always make a huge portion of your population and you can't overshadow them with loyalists, and even as a monarchy there's too little Authority (which unlike Bureaucracy doesn't scale with more buildings which I think is stupid) . However since I simply invested in Secret Police I never had a revolt, meanwhile AI just can't handle this at all
 
Last edited:
  • 4
  • 2Like
  • 2
Reactions:
Would it technically be possible to add a map mode of open work slots in a state? Basically all unfilled slots in a state, maybe split up by education level. In addition to the already mentioned unemployment map mode, it would be useful to have this, because sometimes there is a flight out of a state and you need to see that there are a lot of open work spaces that have accumulated and take action, either with migration, toning down existing buildings or starting subsidies to get things back on track.

This could be a general employment map mode that highlights provinces in a certain shade of color for free employees and another one for free work spaces.
 
  • 4Like
Reactions:
Lastly for today, we’ve also made a balancing change to the Church and State and Citizenship laws - previously, the only balancing consideration for these laws was that less tolerance gave more Authority, which we felt was neither particularly balanced nor really a complete representation of the reasons that a country might want to discriminate against part of their population. To try and address this, we’ve made it so that by default, slightly more radicals are created by Standard of Living decreases than Loyalists from Standard of Living increases, but offset this with modifiers on the more restrictive laws that increase Loyalist and reduce Radical gain among the accepted parts of the population - the more restrictive your cultural/religious tolerance, the greater the effect on the part of the population that actually falls within it.
This is nice, but have you thought about increasing the Authority bonuses from these laws? +50 isn’t enough to do literally anything. Decrees cost 100, consumption taxes cost at least 100, and bolstering/suppressing IGs costs a whopping 200 (and I end up never using this feature).
 
  • 3Like
  • 1
Reactions:
This is nice, but have you thought about increasing the Authority bonuses from these laws? +50 isn’t enough to do literally anything. Decrees cost 100, consumption taxes cost at least 100, and bolstering/suppressing IGs costs a whopping 200 (and I end up never using this feature).
Part of the Problem is, that the cost of decrees doesn't scale by the amount of state you have.

As a OSM (one-state minor) the Authority is really strong and you can enact quite a few strong decrees, but in larger states the decree feature is largely useless.
 
  • 3
Reactions:
Part of the Problem is, that the cost of decrees doesn't scale by the amount of state you have.

As a OSM (one-state minor) the Authority is really strong and you can enact quite a few strong decrees, but in larger states the decree feature is largely useless.
Yes, I really don't understand why they made 3 mana pools, all of which are used more the more you expand, but only Bureaucracy is possible to stack, meanwhile Authority almost always goes down to 0 the more you liberalize, so you would always have none as big countries, even monarchies
 
  • 7
Reactions: