• 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:
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
To be fair, Great Powers get various buffs to the diplomacy pool, in this sense it also grows. Authority is really the odd one out.

However, consumtion taxes do scale, as does bolstering IG groups. In other words, it's not even the Authority mana that the problem, but decrees.

The best solution imo would be have decrees have cost only the fraction of the population that is present in the state. (e.g. If 12% of you pops life in a state, a decree would cost 12 authority instead of 100).


In addition: Monarchies should NOT recieve special treatment, until they (finally) introduce a figurehead monarchy type. I would even abolish the current effect of a monarchy that the IG of the HoS recieves a legitimacy buff. This should be moved to Autocray instead.
 
  • 2Like
  • 1
  • 1
Reactions:
To be fair, Great Powers get various buffs to the diplomacy pool, in this sense it also grows. Authority is really the odd one out.

However, consumtion taxes do scale, as does bolstering IG groups. In other words, it's not even the Authority mana that the problem, but decrees.

The best solution imo would be have decrees have cost only the fraction of the population that is present in the state. (e.g. If 12% of you pops life in a state, a decree would cost 12 authority instead of 100).
They get buffs for declaring Rivals, but if you expand and vassalize those rivals, no one will give you enough Influence to cover the costs, especially if you want to use bonus pool for quicker infamy reduction, so technically it does goes down the more you use it. If you don't use it and use Bureaucracy instead then yes you will have a lot of it doing nothing. But I agree, decrees are the biggest problem, using anything as India was impossible because I could only do one suppression, or one immigrating, or one relief, etc
 
They get buffs for declaring Rivals
And also more base diplo
but if you expand and vassalize those rivals, no one will give you enough Influence to cover the costs, especially if you want to use bonus pool for quicker infamy reduction
Very true. It still needs rebalancing. It should partially scale with e.g. Prestige.
 
  • 1Like
Reactions:
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.

Please start by getting rid of those portraits. They bring absolutely nothing into the game and take up HALF of the space that you could use for information.
 
  • 12
  • 9Like
Reactions:
Please start by getting rid of those portraits. They bring absolutely nothing into the game and take up HALF of the space that you could use for information.
I love the portraits! Please keep them! I want to see actual people in my population, not just a load of boxes and numbers.
 
  • 9
  • 7
  • 2Like
  • 1
Reactions:
I love the portraits! Please keep them! I want to see actual people in my population, not just a load of boxes and numbers.
I have no objection to the portraits, but they serve no gameplay function and in the current layout they reduce the utility of the pop viewer by reducing the amount of gameplay-relevant information visible.
 
  • 7Like
  • 1
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
I retested at home and you are correct, I made edits to my previous comments. I don't know from where I got my wrong understanding of the system, but I could have sworn it was caused by clout regardless of whether it was in government or not.
 
  • 1Like
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.
I believe the point of the whole system is to make it possible to level the playing field a bit for minor countries as they can get more done. This also limits the effect of land blobbing as you can run less decrees than as a minor. In my opinion it is a good system as it is. The decrees reflect your rulers attention to a single state, which is much more limited the larger your state is as you need to divide your attention.
 
Please start by getting rid of those portraits. They bring absolutely nothing into the game and take up HALF of the space that you could use for information.
In the Building menu, there's a handy button to collapse the Big icons into little icons. Adding a button to collapse portraits to get a larger list would be nice. Portrait View/Detail/List View.

My oddest thing about the game I noticed is the game is really, really quiet. Sure, if you zoom out you can hear the ambiance of the room. or if you zoom in you can hear the trains chug about. But most of the game is played at a more middle zoom. But I do remember Vicky 2 being noisier during war and when a bunch of industrial projects finished. Anyone could hear an audio file from Vicky 2 and instantly know what was happening. Vicky 3 is super quiet. Like if you have an event waiting to be answered to, I almost don't hear it. If I am playing the game while listening to something else. The sound design could be expanded upon. If I don't like a sound I can always turn it down.
 
  • 2
Reactions:
But I do remember Vicky 2 being noisier during war and when a bunch of industrial projects finished.
I recall bulk railroad completion redlining my speakers.
 
  • 1
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.
Yeah. Really hoping this gets fixed as part of the patch. Seems like the unhappy people would want to join the government and start changing laws. As-is, it makes role play unfun since if you pass too many laws that the current government wants, you can't easily just swap to a different set of things when the winds change since the opposition will refuse to govern.

Also, it seems like if you have a political party that has 3 IGs and 2 of them are massive and extremely happy, they aren't going to pass on governing just because some IG with 2% clout is upset about a law. Especially if that tiny IG wasn't crucial to winning an election and is upset about a law that the other IGs in that party are happy with.

In reality, they'd probably just kick such a a small faction out and only pay attention to them if they needed them to get a majority and hold power.
 
  • 1
  • 1Like
Reactions:
A few short term solutions came to mind, I'm not sure which one we insituited 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.

To clarify does this mean that there won’t be any changes to how treaty ports work?
 
  • 1
Reactions:
Are you considering add workers committee preference for trade unions? Communism leader not often appears in trade unions and makes the legislation change to trade union difficult. Also please change the event that turn a leader’s traits. These events appear so frequently.
 
I retested at home and you are correct, I made edits to my previous comments. I don't know from where I got my wrong understanding of the system, but I could have sworn it was caused by clout regardless of whether it was in government or not.
Base stall chance is equal to clout of opposing IGs in government plus support of the Movement to Preserve, if one exists. In the current patch it seems like always that the opposed IGs out of government will start a Movement to Preserve, so effectively it's total clout opposed regardless of whether in or out of government, unless you're lucky enough that the opposed IGs out of government are either happy (+5 opinion or greater, meaning they can't join movements), or distracted by some other movement. In the release patch it was total clout opposed in government plus half the support of the Movement to Preserve, which made a meaningful difference between whether the IGs were in or out.

And regarding the Meiji Restoration, it seems like everyone saying "yes you can get decent legitimacy during the 10-year wait" is doing it with a voting system. So, for those of us trying to do an autocratic Restoration, is it impossible to keep above 25% legitimacy? With the changes to legitimacy's effects, will it be impossible to last 10 years at that legitimacy without a civil war over something?
 
  • 1
  • 1Like
Reactions:
The pop needs GUI was really needed and missing.

Can you also fix the bug in war where generals send your low morale/low manpower troops in every battle instead of the other 50 sitting in line, so I can play the game again? I shelved the game until this is fixed.
 
  • 4
Reactions:
again dat mobile theme

at least glad u understand country view is needed, maybe good moment to say mobile theme goodby and fill up screen

(really dont like current micro intensive trade system)
 
  • 5
  • 2
Reactions:
I feel things are going in the right direction with what's been laid out in the Dev Diary. More transparency is very much needed, and always a good hing. More global statistics as the ones you mentioned are also a very welcome addition. I'd love to have more ledger functionality in general. E.g., a list of states where pops of a certain culture live, a list of states by radicalism, stuff like that to help with deciding where to place edicts or build stuff.
 
  • 1
Reactions:
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.

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.

That is two times you said "trust me" there. Should we really trust you? ;P Hehehe!

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.

Well, I am not sure if I will be publishing any mods for Victoria 3, at least not any time soon, but when and if I do, consider this to be my permission to even outright copy any of my mods if your studio find anything worthy for adding to the game. :) To be honest, I don't really care if anyone copy my mods and make it better or even integrate them into the game. :p After all, sharing is caring. ;) :p
 
  • 3Love
  • 2Haha
  • 1Like
Reactions:
Next time please fix AI countries' revolution problem. Like every one of them got wrecked by rebels and this kind of breaks immersion & upset balance of power.

And I am also confused why an AI country with friendly attitude would support an uprising against me? And I have no way to negotiate them out of the conflict?
 
  • 2Like
Reactions: