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

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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.

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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.
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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.

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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.
 
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This is very nice, an I am glad that the game immediately gets the post release treatement, it certainly needs it! This game has a huge potential.

An important thing to improve on: MULTIPLAYER STABILITY!

Facilitating connection to games, fixing hotjoins (9/10 people who hotjoin crash instantly), stabilize MP in general so that there is less ooses etc...
A game's replayebility relies heavily on the MP in my opinion, so if the MP is stable (which currently isn't it really) and enjoyable that will guarantee a stable player base.


Another important addition in my opinion would be a STOCKPILE SYSTEM!

I think it is a crucial element to any game that has goods involved (like hoi4 and stellaris and vic2 all have it).
Otherwise, keep the changes coming, warfare is fine, but certainly needs more details, (could start by adding a sound effect when we are getting a diplo play initiated on us lol)

Otherwise, appreciate the work Keep it up!
 
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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.
A part of the problem is that France actually need to be nerfed tho, their population needs to not grow nearly as much as all other European countries around them
 
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does the building overpaying workers bug fix come in 1.0.6 or 1.1?
it isn't really that noticeable when you don't know it exists but extremely frustrating when you know what is happening
 
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Another important addition in my opinion would be a STOCKPILE SYSTEM!
We have one.

Stockpiles are represented by two facets of the in-game economy:

A small excess of buy orders (demand) raises prices, and will ultimately cause "demand destruction" by e.g. depleting pop wealth so their SoL drops, but doesn't directly cause penalties.

A large excess of buy orders directly causes penalties, but those penalties take time to build up.

A "realistic" (i.e. concrete rather than abstract) stockpile system that works even as well as (never mind better than) what we already have would require an extensive rework of the economy and would make it significantly harder for the devs, the players, and mod authors to understand and adjust.
 
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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.
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
 
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A "realistic" (i.e. concrete rather than abstract) stockpile system that works even as well as (never mind better than) what we already have would require an extensive rework of the economy and would make it significantly harder for the devs, the players, and mod authors to understand and adjust.
Seconded, and this general pattern is something that happens a lot in vic3. Like dependent/workforce ratio, for example. We don't have a system that models explicitly how many "dependents" are extra children, how many are housewives, how many housewives choose to work versus not work when you pass Women in the Workforce, how many are elderly, how many are war wounded, etc. But all of those get affected by "workforce ratio", and I have difficulty believing a more "realistic" system would produce different results than the current system. And if you're not getting anything actually different happening, why make a "more realistic" system that costs programmer time, slows the game running speed, and introduces who-knows-how-many bugs?

Same for stockpiles, really. Shortages don't happen immediately, they scale up their effects to eventually reach the shortage number. This is what would happen if we had a stockpile system, when something actually becomes "short" we'd start depleting the stockpile, and only later once the stockpile was depleted would we actually see penalties to output. Given that we're getting the same result already, why make an explicit stockpile system?
 
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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
Without the demographic transition in France (which is not well understood), France would be more populated than Japan today. With population growth similar to UK or Germany, modern France would have somewhere between 125M and 150M inhabitants today, possibly more. I think it is really hard to get this right because it is not clear what exactly happened historically (there has been many discussion on this forum about it and many academic papers discussing this topic). The dev have decided to not put an arbitrary malus on France, but it is obviously leading to their population growing more than they did (+ probably some issue with the immigration system not helping).
 
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I think it is really hard to get this right because it is not clear what exactly happened historically
My layman's working hypothesis is "each of the professional and semiprofessional hypotheses have some tiny fragments of truth that they have overinflated in a quest for One Big Explanation".
 
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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.
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.
 
Am I understanding the pop needs UI/UX correctly that I will need to go to each pop group to see consumption? As in, I will not be able to see it at a strata level?

If this is the case, it's going to make is so much worse from an information standpoint. Sure it's nice to know, but I'll literally need to check all my super tiny pop groups instead of an aggregate unless I go into the thrice nested tooltip?

Why not a roll-up by strata that I can drill into pop groups as needed?

Is there going to be a concerted effort to condense all the UI?

At what point will it just be accepted that the amount of information needed at a macro level almost necessitates a ledger?

Can we at least expect all of the information to be exposed so we can have total overhaul mods to fix the information presentation issues?

I want to love this game, but it's being made really difficult between performance/UI/UX/post-launch support failures. Not to mention the simple yet still unfixed bugs of overflow, years instead of months, ruler age, etc? I would much rather have an ongoing update on the known bugs and expected fixes than information on a year end patch.

Seriously, I'll defend a lot of the game design choices, like war system, and I don't expect a perfectly bug free game that's feature rich at launch, but I have to play 1.03 still because the first post launch hot fix breaks the game with revolutions. I can't play past 1900 with a well above required specs CPU because constant crashes or tediously slow progression.

This release has burned a lot of the brand trust I've had in PDX for years. I really really want to love this game. Please don't make it so hard to love.
 
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Am I understanding the pop needs UI/UX correctly that I will need to go to each pop group to see consumption? As in, I will not be able to see it at a strata level?

If this is the case, it's going to make is so much worse from an information standpoint. Sure it's nice to know, but I'll literally need to check all my super tiny pop groups instead of an aggregate unless I go into the thrice nested tooltip?

Why not a roll-up by strata that I can drill into pop groups as needed?
AIUI pop consumption is based on standard of living, and can vary very wildly within each strata. Like if your Mechanists (I'm pretty sure they're Lower Strata?) are at SoL 15-20 in profitable factories, while your Peasants are at SoL 7-9, or if your Aristocrats are at SoL 20-25 while your capitalists are at SoL 35-50, they're going to have very different consumptions, to the extent that a strata-level overview might be worse than useless in informativeness. (Both of those divergences are things that happen routinely in my games.)
 
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We have one.

Stockpiles are represented by two facets of the in-game economy:

A small excess of buy orders (demand) raises prices, and will ultimately cause "demand destruction" by e.g. depleting pop wealth so their SoL drops, but doesn't directly cause penalties.

A large excess of buy orders directly causes penalties, but those penalties take time to build up.

A "realistic" (i.e. concrete rather than abstract) stockpile system that works even as well as (never mind better than) what we already have would require an extensive rework of the economy and would make it significantly harder for the devs, the players, and mod authors to understand and adjust.
Victoria 2 had goods, shifting prices according to demands and sell orders AND a stockpile. I don't see how adding a stockpile would brake the price system. The demand and supply would jsut apply the same way.

When you are buying to the stockpile that's like u were buying it as usual, except it goes to the stockpile. Once the stockpile is full, and u continue buying for the rest of the industry, nothing changes! But if ur consumption diminishes after u have a full stockpile, then the price can diminish aswell due to less demand.

STOCKPILe is only one thing though, You didn't even adress the question of MP, I think it is really important for the game to be alive, and comes even before the stockpile. Bugfixes, Ai improvements etc.. can wait, if the MP is stable and enjoyable, playing with palyers always will be superior to the AI experience no matter what.

Right now, it is literally the question, If people will get bored of the game fatser than the devs can put out updates! It is a question of replayability, that currently is pretty low! Multiplayer is the ULTIMATE REPLAYABILITY FEATURE, that should be prioritized RN, so there is a stable consummer base. I think it is Important that the devs get this, for the sake of this game.
 
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UPVOTE if you think the following message is crucial, so more people, and the devs themselves can see it:

Right now, it is the question, If people will get bored of the game fatser than the devs can put out updates (Imperator Rome's case)! It is a question of replayability, which currently is pretty low! Multiplayer is the ULTIMATE REPLAYABILITY FEATURE, that should be prioritized right now, so there is a stable consummer base.

Stability issues (which affects Sp btw, and the fact that you basically don't get to see the lategame), game optimization, multiplayer connection issues (ooses, hotjoin problems) should be resolved asap, in order to make good MP experience possible (a 30 peoplestable vic 3 MP lobby would definetly be an experience msot will come back for over and over again for quite a while).

I think it is Important that the devs get this, for the sake of this game.
 
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You didn't even adress the question of MP
Because like a lot of Paradox GSG players, I never play Paradox GSGs in multiplayer.
 
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