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Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #66 - Patch 1.1 (part 2)

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Greetings my fellow Victorians, Paul here to talk about some of the things I have been doing for Patch 1.1.

As was said in previous dev diaries, 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. Hotfix (1.0.6) should be out for you all with performance improvements and some bug fixes in the meantime.

So what have I been doing? Balance work, alongside bug fixing, and assisting with some UI work and bettering of the player experience. I’m new to the design team and during my onboarding I've been able to utilize one of my special talents: I love spreadsheets and data - so I’ve been working on building profitability, production methods, and resource availability. In Patch 1.1 two large changes I have made are to Oil and Rubber and I’ve got some cool resource maps to show you the changes.

And before you take a look at the images showcasing what changes I have done, a big shoutout to @Licarious who made the tool that I am utilizing here today. This tool is open for you all on the forum in this thread. I have found the tool to be particularly lovely, helping me make quick visualizations of the changes I am considering in the game. It's one thing to balance a spreadsheet but another to take a look at the changes proposed on the map itself.

The World’s discoverable Oil Supply as of 1.0.6
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In the version of the game you are all currently playing, these are the oil reserves that are discoverable in game. They are mostly the historical oil fields that were cultivated over the current knowledge of where Oil is and has been accessible (even if we did not find out about it until later than 1936). As you’ve no doubt noticed in your later games, Oil is a scarce resource and limits the progress of later game industrialization. While we want Oil to be an important late-game resource, its current bottleneck as an available resource is a little too harsh to the player’s experience so we’ve expanded the discoverable oil fields in game.

I spent a few days going through various feedback threads on the Discord and forums, alongside as many natural resource distribution maps as I could to give a better estimate of the world’s oil supply and help make the game representative of that. As of now we’ve doubled the world’s potential oil fields to give rise to a more plentiful supply in the world by both player and AI actions.

The World’s discoverable Oil Supply as of 1.1.0
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I know some of you might be asking, why did we not just increase the production of oil methods and leave the historical oil fields in place? Why have you included [specific] oil fields that were not tapped until ~1950! etc.Those fields represent a usage of either Oil Sands, or some various substrate that would have not been accessible at the time.

These are all some valid questions and I will no doubt go into more detail in the thread about choices made, but some quick answers.
  • Oil production methods are already incredibly profitable and buffing them further would help but probably not fully solve the problem.
  • The gating of Oil Fields to only historically extracted areas is always tricky, if Russia and the United States collapse in game, 50%+ of the world's oil supply is locked behind their regression and the world suffers. We want to have historical credibility but also give players multiple avenues to pursue.
  • We don’t exactly leave a track record of “this field would have been accessible in 1880" etc in our history books when we discover new resources, so best guesstimates have to be used and a balance between historical and semi-balanced gameplay has to be found.

We are by no means done with Oil, this is my first step in their balancing and it's been sent off to QA to run tests and gather feedback. I’ve got plenty of possibilities to look into but I want to make iterative changes instead of altering many things at once and not seeing the full impact.

Things I am looking into for the future includes
  • Gating some oil reserve potential behind tech to make it where deposits that were not found until more modern days are harder for the player to get to, but still possible.
  • If Oil Supply is still too short - looking into adding more variation of production methods of balancing of input/output of those factories.
  • Giving the Whale Oil Industry a bit more of a kick into gear in the early stages of the game.

So keep your feedback on the forums/Discord coming! I might not read and answer them right away but I do collate them for future reference and they’ve been incredibly helpful in my efforts.

And now onto the world’s rubber supply, which I have also adjusted for Patch 1.1.

The World’s discoverable Rubber Supply as of 1.0.6
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While not as much of a bottleneck as the world oil supply, rubber is found to not be plentiful enough to meet world demand at current. And as we make the AI better at extracting and utilizing resources in game, we no doubt have to increase the rubber supply available to the world.

And so here are the changes.

The World’s discoverable Rubber Supply as of 1.1.0
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Notice the differences? Your eyes aren’t deceiving you, the two maps are the same - and this is not a mistake. The changes to Rubber have been focused on its vertical margins as opposed to the horizontal margins. While I could have upped the world supply of rubber, looking at the later game saves I found it was population issues which were preventing the resource from meeting demands, etc.

So, what I did instead was add a new PM to Rubber Plantations, giving them an automatic irrigation system (like that of the other Plantations this building shares relation to in name only) to symbolize later efforts to modernize plantations and not be fully rainfall dependent. This would help increase the productivity of buildings already in game.

Rubber Plantations can now double their effective output in the later game, by replacing some employees with machines.
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Items I am looking into for the future include:
  • Adding more Rubber potential to the world if this PM is not enough
  • Potential synthetic rubber in the late game?
  • State traits for the specific areas of the world best suited to its cultivation to help throughput

These two resource changes have been put into 1.1 among other things and are currently being vetted for balance and functionality by the QA team. I look forward to hearing your thoughts as well but remember that all numbers are currently WIP. If you have thoughts and opinions and can find me a source backing up your claims, please feel free to put them in the thread or on Discord/forums where then can continue to be collated for me.

What am I doing while this is being vetted? Why I am breaking ground into future balance changes in 1.2! As stated elsewhere on these forums, I am looking into the arable land balance of the game making changes to them. Since these changes have the potential to upend the world economy, I’m getting this branch settled early so we have as much time on our end to iterate on its balance. I will also take feedback from players upon 1.1s upcoming release, then look into tweaking other resources’ balance and such. There are always a few things to tweak!

And that’s it for this dev diary, with this little peek behind the curtain of work being done I am now going to return to it and read through the QA feedback. Then do some further balancing as needed and my work for Patch 1.2.

Patch 1.1 is planned to release before the end of the year and it's already November so it's not that far away in the grand scheme of things. Next week we will talk about some more of the changes in that patch.
 
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I can already tell you that doubling the oil supply isn't going to be enough. In my last game as Germany, I wasn't even using all of the PMs utilizing oil, and with the US in my customs union and them actually building Oil Rigs, plus owning Borneo and Iraq, I still didn't have enough to fuel one economy. And that's with the current AI which builds only very meager economies - I had a GDP of 4 billion in 1910, while the runner up (France, I think) had ~250 Million, so there wasn't even any competition going on.

If the AI gets better at building, oil (and rubber, too) will still be heavily, heavily bottlenecked. Same goes for multiplayer games where multiple human players will push GDPs in the billions. There are other shortages happening, too: lead especially is pretty scarce. From looking at the map, Germany already has a pretty huge supply of it (could be wrong about that) and I maxed out my lead in 1900, and now the prices just keep rising. Even if the AI gets better at building stuff, it will also consume more, so supply needs to be increased. I think all reasource availability will need an overhaul eventually.

Also, please don't make whaling more productive regarding oil - it's already hugely overproductive comparatively. If anything, the Whaling Industry should fill a different niche than crude oil, given that Whale Oil was only partially used for the same things. Only lighting, really - the rest of the industry (and the thing which kept whaling profitable even when crude oil dwarfed it in raw output) was focused on luxury products like perfume, etc.

Regarding synthetic rubber: yes, that's a great idea, at least for the very late game, since it would allow more diverse playstyles of not having to conquer half the world just to fuel your economy. Maybe just a quarter ;)
 
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I don't see that it's unique to micromanagement of industry or such like - EU has the same issue with the location and form of the New World, for example, and CK with the possibility of supernatural events. The only way you can get away from it altogether is to have every country, including the players', acting on a set historical script - which would be little fun as a game at all.

The player has far more hands-on control over colonization in EU4 than they should, not to mention that growth rates are too fast, and success is all but guaranteed. It isn’t that the player knows where to colonize. Its the player knows to park a full regiment on each developing colony *and* can easily garrison them until they’re secure.
 
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Its the player knows to park a full regiment on each developing colony *and* can easily garrison them until they’re secure.
EU4 has a button that turns off native uprisings. (The AI always pushes it.)
 
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Can we have this screen again? It was really excellent and ahead of its time, only missing a couple things. It's so much harder to get useful info about pops now with the small UI that basically makes you look at just one demo in one province at a time or get almost no aggregate information for a whole culture.
 
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It would be nice to add a screen with all needs generated by pops. For example, take Luxury drinks. It is better to see all needs in basic units, then distribution/breakdown of goods in the market (substitutes such as wine, tea, coffee). With that the player could understand what he can produce more. RIght now you see, for example, that there is some small demand for wine and you would not increase production without uderstanding that having wine cheaper some pops interchange tea for wine.
The same with other needs like heating, clothing, etc.
 
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EU4 has a button that turns off native uprisings. (The AI always pushes it.)

Exactly my point. You can have risk-free colonization, its just a question of whether you spend colony growth speed or military force to attain it.
 
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Maybe the correct path for the whole "late game" oil driven economy for combustion engines and piston ignition engines is not focusing on Oil, but alternatives.

Yes, Oil and Petroleum became wide-spread for their potential and versatility, but most of the world used biodiesel and ethanol way earlier in the 1800s, and to a larger extent before petroleum became the de-facto fuel of the world. Instead of breaking immersion by "inventing" oil on the map, maybe dig into technology versatility in terms of fuel usage.

Most of the engines before the 1910s were using ethanol (methanol in some cases), while most agricultural vehicles used either coal dust or coke, wood gas or ethanol. Most of the first cars produced and half the first flight motored projects also used ethanol based engines. Interestingly, almost 3% of cars were made in the early 1900-1910 also experimented with electric batteries and If the western world didn't agree "dark gold is the way to go", we could be in a whole different world now.
 
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Its been considered and is in the arsenal of "future ideas." I want to see how coal balances out with more Oil avaiability since right now its being used more than expected since economies don't make that much of an Oil Transfer.
Couldn't you make state traits dynamic so they only appear once the resource has been discovered?
 
Rubber plantation change looks good but oil field spread looks a bit too alt history
Which I don't think would be a bad thing if all the factors to explain that alt history were modeled (e.g., oil avaliability vs. technology and discoverability chance). Which aren't exactly modeled, and there's hardly a barrier to building oil so... Very alt history every game I guess.
 
Rubber plantation change looks good but oil field spread looks a bit too alt history
Which I don't think would be a bad thing if all the factors to explain that alt history were modeled (e.g., oil avaliability vs. technology and discoverability chance). Which aren't exactly modeled, and there's hardly a barrier to building oil so... Very alt history every game I guess.
The most alt history thing about oil in this game (even with the new update) is how little oil there actually is
 
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I am not really a forum type of person but this topic encompass both my favourite type of games and my job so I feel that I can bring something to the table.
My first source will be "The prize epic quest for oil money and power" of Daniel Yergin which is an incredible read on the history of oil from the 19th century to the late 80s (the book is really amazing and I recommend it to everyone), and my second source will be myself as someone who works in Oil&Gas exploration/development of oil or gas fields. Some of the information might lack precision but I threw the book when I moved out so I won't be able to exactly source them
  • The first map is the most accurate and should be the one used assuming we want any kind of historical accuracy aside from the fact that there was no significant oil field in Japan. In Russia most of the oil was produced in the Baku area.
  • Oil started to find production and wide use in the 1860s not as a combustible for electricity or cars, but as a combustible for kerosene lamps. Before that, most people used the sun and candles as a source of light and the one that could afford it used whale oil as a combustible. The Oil industry killed the whaling one and brought affordable light to millions of house hold across the world. --> In the game oil fields start appearing much later into the game.
  • For most part of the time period depicted in the game oil was used mostly for light rather than vehicles. --> It doesn't look like this is depicted in the game and imo it should, as it would give a reason for both AI and the player to develop whaling and oil industry early on.
  • Oil fields reached at that time peak production quickly and fell hard just as quickly. The reason is that in the US, at that time at least, nobody owned the underground below a certain depth. This meant that if you discovered oil somewhere, bought a plot of land and started drilling and producing, someone could come, buy the plot next to yours and start drilling the same oil reservoir as you so everybody had to produce as fast as possible to prevent others from "stealing their oil". This led to reservoir being mismanaged and quickly losing production. --> I don't recall seing an event telling me that an oil field has depleted like we have for gold ones.
  • Oil was not a major concern for most countries until the first World War for these reasons:
    • Bringing troops to the front was a nightmare logistically. France had to requisition all the horses and cars they could and at that time that meant not a lot. This led to scenes where you had Parisian taxi bringing troops to the front.
    • Logistics could rely on railways but only to a certain extent as there was no train station next to the trenches plus artillery. Vehicles had to be used to supply the front lines and vehicles needed oil.
    • The introduction on the front line of a new game changer, the tank. Countries quickly realized that tanks and vehicles were going to be key in the next confrontation and they both needed oil and a lot of it.
    • Coal powered military boat would stand no chance against diesel/Oil ones
    • Airplanes
  • Post WW1 countries that understood the value of oil but had no oil field at hand started developing technologies to make synthetic oil. Germany was a precursor in this field. As for japan If I remember well they started extracting oil from coal but the output was of mediocre quality. --> I don't recall seeing this the game.
  • The lack of natural oil of both Japan and Germany was the main friction reason between them and the US pre-WW2. Japanese-US relation went cold when the US embargoed Japan and prevented them specifically from buying oil. This is a very interesting topic as lack oil availability explains a lot of the pre-war moves or/and even the war itself ( at least on the pacific theatre).
  • Last one for the courageous ones. One of Japanese first move after Pearl harbor was to seize Dutch Indonesia to secure an oil supply. The dutch knowing this blew up and plugged wells which slowed down the Japanese a lot but also cost their lives. One if not the main reason for the defeat of the German on the Russian front was that they tried to get to Baku no matter what, both to secure an oil source and to cut the USSR from their main one. This led to overextending their supply line encirclement and eventual defeat.

TLDR:
Oil was used as combustible for kerosene lamps for most of the span of the game. Countries only realized its importance post WW1 but while it was available in lots of quantity it was only located in specific spots across the world which led to diplomatic spat and eventually war.
 
  • 2Like
  • 1
Reactions:
I am not really a forum type of person but this topic encompass both my favourite type of games and my job so I feel that I can bring something to the table.
My first source will be "The prize epic quest for oil money and power" of Daniel Yergin which is an incredible read on the history of oil from the 19th century to the late 80s (the book is really amazing and I recommend it to everyone), and my second source will be myself as someone who works in Oil&Gas exploration/development of oil or gas fields. Some of the information might lack precision but I threw the book when I moved out so I won't be able to exactly source them
  • The first map is the most accurate and should be the one used assuming we want any kind of historical accuracy aside from the fact that there was no significant oil field in Japan. In Russia most of the oil was produced in the Baku area.
  • Oil started to find production and wide use in the 1860s not as a combustible for electricity or cars, but as a combustible for kerosene lamps. Before that, most people used the sun and candles as a source of light and the one that could afford it used whale oil as a combustible. The Oil industry killed the whaling one and brought affordable light to millions of house hold across the world. --> In the game oil fields start appearing much later into the game.
  • For most part of the time period depicted in the game oil was used mostly for light rather than vehicles. --> It doesn't look like this is depicted in the game and imo it should, as it would give a reason for both AI and the player to develop whaling and oil industry early on.
  • Oil fields reached at that time peak production quickly and fell hard just as quickly. The reason is that in the US, at that time at least, nobody owned the underground below a certain depth. This meant that if you discovered oil somewhere, bought a plot of land and started drilling and producing, someone could come, buy the plot next to yours and start drilling the same oil reservoir as you so everybody had to produce as fast as possible to prevent others from "stealing their oil". This led to reservoir being mismanaged and quickly losing production. --> I don't recall seing an event telling me that an oil field has depleted like we have for gold ones.
  • Oil was not a major concern for most countries until the first World War for these reasons:
    • Bringing troops to the front was a nightmare logistically. France had to requisition all the horses and cars they could and at that time that meant not a lot. This led to scenes where you had Parisian taxi bringing troops to the front.
    • Logistics could rely on railways but only to a certain extent as there was no train station next to the trenches plus artillery. Vehicles had to be used to supply the front lines and vehicles needed oil.
    • The introduction on the front line of a new game changer, the tank. Countries quickly realized that tanks and vehicles were going to be key in the next confrontation and they both needed oil and a lot of it.
    • Coal powered military boat would stand no chance against diesel/Oil ones
    • Airplanes
  • Post WW1 countries that understood the value of oil but had no oil field at hand started developing technologies to make synthetic oil. Germany was a precursor in this field. As for japan If I remember well they started extracting oil from coal but the output was of mediocre quality. --> I don't recall seeing this the game.
  • The lack of natural oil of both Japan and Germany was the main friction reason between them and the US pre-WW2. Japanese-US relation went cold when the US embargoed Japan and prevented them specifically from buying oil. This is a very interesting topic as lack oil availability explains a lot of the pre-war moves or/and even the war itself ( at least on the pacific theatre).
  • Last one for the courageous ones. One of Japanese first move after Pearl harbor was to seize Dutch Indonesia to secure an oil supply. The dutch knowing this blew up and plugged wells which slowed down the Japanese a lot but also cost their lives. One if not the main reason for the defeat of the German on the Russian front was that they tried to get to Baku no matter what, both to secure an oil source and to cut the USSR from their main one. This led to overextending their supply line encirclement and eventual defeat.

TLDR:
Oil was used as combustible for kerosene lamps for most of the span of the game. Countries only realized its importance post WW1 but while it was available in lots of quantity it was only located in specific spots across the world which led to diplomatic spat and eventually war.
Kerosene is somewhat represented by population buying it for heating purposes
But that's currently bugged