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

[Naex]

So something that might be possible for 1.1 would be a diplomatic option similar to a trade agreement: agree to purchase. In most games I need to conquer Fars because it's the only way to reliably get opium. Likewise if I want silk my best options are to conquer.

It would be great if you could enter some kind of agreement like "I will buy x or x% of a certain resource from you" to encourage the AI to build it. Persia is better off just building their own textile manufacturing - the incentive to trade the raw product is low.

Often times I'll invade African countries because I need resources that I'd be happy to trade from them but they want to sell me 5 luxury cloths rather than a few hundred sugar.

 

[Aurelius789]

I mean, wouldn't these changes make late game recourses overabundant? Some balancing is sure needed, but the main problem with oil/rubber scarcity is that AI doesn't want to develop them under most circumstances.

Definitely not.

In 1900+ industrialized USA with 1B+ GDP does not currently have enough oil even for itself.

If all other large countries without much oil also industrialize (god bless Anbeeld's AI mod) there is severe deficit of oil in the world.

 

[milliontonnez]

Could we have goods added - some of the most important ones like spices, salt, precious stones ( with maybe flavour like Getting the gems for Queens crown)

Also, for the pop issues when trying to get resources - can there be some historic state forced migration events? ( A very tragic thing that played important role in populating resource rich places for exploitation for colonial powers - moving pops from Africa/India - apart from slave trade)

Specifically - if a colonising power owns a historic src and tgt state - get event, to move forcefully, a fraction of starving pop in src to tgt state(for a decaying 1% malus to convoys used) OR gain dec in radicals in src state or something.
That should help with rubber/whaling in Oceania/oil states late game.

 

[Svenska Super]

What tech was it actually you need for oil drilling? What resources the process consumes tools only? Maybe good time to introduce mechanical parts?

 

[milliontonnez]

Or allow overlord to build in subject territory! That way the overlord AI can get access to these resources ..
This used to there in Vic2 ( FDI) as well as pretty historically accurate!!!

 

[SupremTurtle]

Its unlikely to make it into 1.1 but its certainly something I can look into for the future. Any documentation you can send my way to expedite my searches would be appreciated. I've not looked at anything other than Oil and Rubber at the moment, I know there are a hundred of "but this state made X" comments - I will hopefully get to them all in time, sources help me stack them in a pile for my todo's in the future since its hard to look at a map and notice what's missing if I didn't know it was supposed to be there.

Source for lead and other minerals:
Mineral Facilities of Asia and the Pacific - Map
Mineral Facilities of Asia and the Pacific - Spreadsheet
These are modern mines and facilities, but many of the mines were definitely possible during the Victorian era. For oil specifically, the oil rig 566 (Oil field at Liaohe) is on the 1.1 map, but oil rig 565 (Oil fields at Daqing) is not. If only one of the two should be in Vic3, it should be the Daqing since it produced much more oil and is more well known. (Both of these are established post 1936)

More on oil: China's Worldwide Quest for Energy Security
This map is originally from a report made by the IEA, showing Chinese oil reserves. The notable ones that are currently not in 1.0.6 is Daqing in Heilongjiang, Shengli in Shandong, and the Tarim basin. The rest are either not that big or requires later tech.

Source for Rubber:
Expansion of Rubber in Southern Yunnan, China
Rubber plantations initially failed due to environmental factors, but with enough investments they became successful.

I hope that these sources can help make the resource distribution more acurate.

 

[STABBY5]

Its unlikely to make it into 1.1 but its certainly something I can look into for the future. Any documentation you can send my way to expedite my searches would be appreciated. I've not looked at anything other than Oil and Rubber at the moment, I know there are a hundred of "but this state made X" comments - I will hopefully get to them all in time, sources help me stack them in a pile for my todo's in the future since its hard to look at a map and notice what's missing if I didn't know it was supposed to be there.

I've got at least two. Silk was grown in Virginia since the 1600s trying to compete with France. It was a decent sized industry until 1844 when a blight killed most of the mulberry trees and had a hard time recovering when faced with competition from cheap silk in China. That could easily be an event to debuff through put of silk plantations.

Opium was also grown in the new world. I'm unsure of which regions other than California. The California poppy is the state flower even.

 

[Senza32]

There's also the third option of increasing the number of slots in existing oil fields. Just doubling still doesn't feel like enough oil. In my US game at 1900, I had reverted all my railroads to electric, all my power plants to coal, and the entire potential output of North America still wasn't sufficient. Hitting peak oil in the late 1800s feels incredibly ahistorical.

I agree, and I think oil usage amounts need to be looked at as well, not just increasing the amount of oil in the world. It seems strange to me that most upgrades in production methods just result in "input more of x to get even more of y", you don't really see increases in efficiency when it comes to usage of resource inputs, mainly in labor. Vic 2 modelled increasing efficiency with reductions in input goods needed as tech progressed, why doesn't Vic 3? I find it incredibly difficult to supply two main things in late game: oil and electricity, to the point I almost wish we could research nuclear plants since it feels like that's the only thing that could sate my incredibly power-hungry industries. While this makes sense to an extent, since obviously in real life, Siberia wasn't heavily industrialized in 1920 for example, I think some sacrifices in realism could be made for gameplay in this area. I would really like to see the ability to mix production methods on certain buildings like power plants and railways, and overall I feel like mines and motor industries use more oil than they probably should, admittedly this is just my feeling, not really backed up by anything.

Edit: Now that I think about it, the lack of oil refineries feels strange as well, perhaps this could be another way to increase world oil supply without having to worry as much about adding potentially ahistorical oil fields?

 

[Secret Master]

Line must go up at any cost. All hail the line!

 

[Amorenkaire]

While whaling produces oil it is useless early game and just starts to get relevant when the fossil fuel techs are researched. In reality whaling was important prior and started to decline after the discovery of fossil fuels.

There should probably be a use for oil early that makes whaling very profitable. Like be able to light urban centers with oil. Using it for lighting was one of its main purposes. Another one was for chemical industries to create nitroglycerin and explosives. So maybe a production method for chemical plants that turns oil into explosives.

Currently the historical relevance for whaling isn't really there.

City lights and coal gas should be a thing to help support it as well. Although I thought the whaling industry was mostly for the meat and oil wad a cheap side product they sold?

Russia being able to produce more than double what the USA can seems a bit overkill considering that the USA was by far the largest oil producer during the era. Would personally like to see some special flavor regarding Texas considering their history of insane oil production.

California I think still lead production for a while, although not certain when Texas overtook it. Oil was pretty widespread throughout the US though. I don't have the stats off hand but I recall a video someone made of USA by state oil production vs Germany during world war 1, where every US state with more oil would clip to the video of a German kid raging out at his computer. And a lot of states came ahead of Germany.

The deciding factor shouldn't be how much someone produced at some point, but how big the oil fields are. And Russia's fields are just bigger.

Except not all oil fields are equivalent, some require technological investment to either extract or discover, especially to do so profitably. And obviously the 1.1 map doesn't do that either since Alaska is lacking it's oil reserves too.

And unless the game can model all the things that went into why oil was discovered and exploited in x region over just money, historical exploitation data makes a pretty decent goal post.

Being several orders of magnitude outside the goal post is going to irk people.

 

[Balesir]

Fair questions - one, adjusting inputs as raw mats requires a bit more calculation and balancing because it can have knock on effects of other industries and its not a change I felt comfortable doing at that period of time. So instead I made the changes to adding an automatic irrigation PM. This is not to be confused as a cultivator addition, this is not the tractor or tool PMs that are on fields or plantations. This is the addition of engines as pumps to ensure irrigation of the nursery when rainfall is not sufficient.

I would also note that just as cotton plantations do not directly produce 'fabric', rubber plantations do not directly produce 'rubber' - the game (presumably) includes the initial processing in the 'plantation' building (which is absolutely fine, since it is generally fairly local to the plantation relative to the scale of states, etc.). In the case of rubber the plantation produces latex and local processing takes the form of 'mastication' and additive mixing; these parts of the process could definitely be automated with a consequent reduction in required labour.

 

[Owen123]

Russia being able to produce more than double what the USA can seems a bit overkill considering that the USA was by far the largest oil producer during the era. Would personally like to see some special flavor regarding Texas considering their history of insane oil production.

For most of the games time period Russia was the largest supplier of oil

 

[Silens]

Except not all oil fields are equivalent, some require technological investment to either extract or discover, especially to do so profitably. And obviously the 1.1 map doesn't do that either since Alaska is lacking it's oil reserves too.

And unless the game can model all the things that went into why oil was discovered and exploited in x region over just money, historical exploitation data makes a pretty decent goal post.

Being several orders of magnitude outside the goal post is going to irk people.

You're wrong. From its beginning in the 1860's to the mid 2010's, the US produced ~38,550,000,000 bbl and the estimated remaining oil at that time was at 35,230,000,000. So at gamestart, going by historic data, we're looking at ~74B bbl total oil in what is today the territory of the USA.

Russia's oil reserves at the same time were estimated at ~80B bbl, so the remaining oil in the mid 2010's was already more than what the USA had left plus what they ever produced.

Now take into account that Russia actually produced oil from the late 1870's and was over many years one of the largest producers and exporters of oil, and then it becomes clear that Russia should have more oil in Vic3 than the USA.

The metric for the devs should be how much oil was in the ground in 1830, nothing else. The data is clear on that, regardless of what you think or wish for.

 

[exi123]

Why is rubber even a resource like coal, gold or oil? It grows on the ground, on plantations in certain regions around the equator (See your own map) like many other plants. The plant comes from Brazil, was stolen by the Brits and planted in their asian colonies in industrial scale to match the big demand they had. There is actually a very interesting story behind the cultivation of the rubber plants.

Let the game discover places where it can be grown, but just use the regular arable land if you do not have any special event or journal entry in place currently.

 

[Sigismund der Münzreiche]

yeah I got a copy of the book and couldnt find the info at page 179. Must be a different edition and I can't look through more pages to find it bc i dont speak German

I've sent the dev that asked pictures of pages 178 and 179 from my book. If you want to see it I put pictures on imgur but it probably won't be much use to you if you don't understand german and it's written in Sütterlin as well, which makes it hard to read.

 

[Melange_Thief]

Are we going to get any of the important map changes in this patch, such as turning Vancouver Island into an actual island, or giving Seattle its port back by adding Puget Sound?

 

[Blackzeros7]

This may not be a priority, but when can we expect a fix to landing? I just come from being defeat by a minor nation in Africa because once I landed, my general decided it was too much trouble and returned to HQ. I can only say that I rage quitted pretty hard.

 

[Tennou No Kamikaze]

Irrigation for rubber threes are only required outside of rainforest climates, since it rains heavily everyday in the forest. I don't think that pm is appropriate, idk...

 

[Marirosa]

It's very hard through trade. But it's not very difficult to find an Indian or Indochinese minor to invade and turn that land into a big opium producer.

Persia. In Fars you have both opium and oil in a single state.

 

[adil3tr]

There's so much that needs fixing. The trade route screen tells you the tariff revenue, which is the least important information. You never have enough market access even in dense urban areas, it's pointless. You never have enough convoys and are stopped from building enough ports. Almost every part of the UI doesn't give enough information or gives the wrong information. The AI doesn't colonize the whole map and colonies don't exploit their resources fully. There's effectively no way to do most things diplomatically, even making a protectorate which logically should be something you can do to countries you have a lot of influence over. It's not just that I want to build on colonies's land, but also the discovery chance that I have but they don't is really frustrating.

Command economy requires you to have forced subsidies on all buildings, which is nonsense; it should just make buildings operate at some capacity or pay wages, not 100% operation. And under command economy the government doesn't even get the profits! There should be a way to replace interest group leaders, even at some cost, since their personal traits (not their personal ideology, but they traits like cruel or bandit) can cause modifiers like -100% votes for the interest group in elections. A bunch of laws need to change or be reoriented, private healthcare does almost nothing even for the rich and income taxes don't have tax brackets. When you have a monarchy, puppeting often just makes a personal union that dissolves if you become a republic (not a civil war, just if you don't have a monarch anymore).

So many production methods/factories just shouldn't be combined and only feel complicated by being combined, like glass and porcelain, or clothes and fancy clothes, and the bizarre ratios of fertilizer/explosives, it just makes the game more confusing to play and adds a ton of micro. The UI elements are often self defeating. For example silver coins could mean a good is 40% above its base price, or 30% beneath it, much of the time it's just a matter of if the base price is high which makes zero sense whatsoever. They wrote in dev diaries that having a large deficit of a resource isn't a bad thing necessarily, which in the actual game isn't true at all since trade volumes are often too low and and these can bottleneck your economy very easily. The entire aspect of the game where you might have less productive methods to empower specific people doesn't make that much sense, I get that capitalist doesn't mean just industrial capitalist but it's odd to have a fully agricultural economy that's driving power to the industrialists.

The GUI of Victoria 2 was generally a nightmare but honestly in same ways it has a advantage. The pop screen, especially for large nations, was miles ahead of the one in VicIII, a full screen that made it really easy to zero in on any demographic anywhere in your nation or everywhere in your nation. The ledger was better, the diplomacy screen conveyed more info, construction wasn't one long chain that feels really cool but really unrealistic and arcadey.

Edit: I really enjoy the game but these issues become more of an issue over time as you play and the novelty is replaced by wanting to really get into the systems. I'm a little skeptical of the downvotes since while I list a lot of issues, at least half are not really arguable like the UI issues, the need for too much micro in large economies, how your entire intended playthrough can be messed up by an interest group leader who is too moderate, and how limited diplomacy is when they often said diplomacy would come before war in the lead up to release.