Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #69 - Feature Game Jam (part 1)

[Wizzington]

On warfare: having 2 battles on the same front could be fun, but given that generals teleport back home after conquering provinces these days, I suspect this could introduce new bugs.

On logging: we already have a global shortage in hardwood in late games. Would deforestation make it worse?

Resource depletion would of course have huge balance implications that would need to be sorted out alongside implementation, if and when that prototype actually becomes part of the game.

 

[Ofaloaf]

Disappointed at the lack of trains there, Mike.

I want dinosaurs, too! I experimented with seeing the limits of CK3/V3 genes and models by attempting to import Elder Kings 2's Argonian models into V3, and... you can see what happened there. Then I tried using 2D portraits, and that's not nearly as terrible as trying to get new genetics scripting to work. All in all, it was an excellent exercise in mucking about with character portraits and mapping, and I've got to give kudos to the Elder Kings 2 mod for CK3 and the Total Conversion Sandbox for V3 for giving me a springboard to build off of so I didn't need to do everything from scratch.

 

[Wizzington]

One thing that might be good to know but wasn't in the dev diary is that all of this was done during PDT (personal development time), which is time allocated to all Paradox devs to work on whatever they want to grow their skills or do something they're passionate about. We gave everyone the option to participate in the Game Jam if they wanted to do so for their PDT, but this was not taken out of time that would otherwise have gone to patching etc (and was done after 1.1 was already locked down).

 

[lachek]

So does this mean the front system won't be significantly changing in 1.2, just tweaked? Is there ANY chance we can at least get custom fronts?

You should not expect the core mechanics of fronts to change in 1.2, but we are hard at work trying to resolve some of the edge cases and bugs that make it difficult to manage at times. Most of the reports we've received relate to naval invasions and/or multiple small fronts in tiny areas. It's very common that these reports misattribute the behavior to intentional mechanics or missing systems when they're actually logic errors, so we're treating these as bugs and limiting improvements to UX rather than changes to the core design (which tend to cause far more problems than they solve), such as custom-drawn fronts.

 

[lachek]

The Resource Depletion System seems excellent. Will it become more moddable? For example, different PMs have different depletion chances.

We definitely won't be implementing any new building-related features without making them moddable!

 

[lachek]

Can you please make the penalty for switching methods for military scaled from the base of the old method?

Innovations in warfare pretty much only happened during war time. That's the main time when new innovations were implemented. But trying to upgrade units while at war is suicide.

I'm fine with it taking a year for the new method to come online but upgrading to skirmishing infantry from line infantry shouldn't make your army worse than irregulars. You should start at line infantry stats and it should take you a year to get to skirmishing infantry stats.

Revisions to this system is on our radar, yeah. Decaying flat debuffs for any changes made serves its purpose to discourage funding your military only during wartime, but is not very immersive, I agree.