Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #7 - Laws

[Wizzington]

It sounds like every law change will have to be initiated by the player. Wouldn't this lead to bizarre situations like being able to play the whole game with the liberals in the government without passing a single liberal law?

You initiate passing laws, but that doesn't mean IGs/pops won't demand certain laws and get angry if you do nothing. More on this system later.

 

[Wizzington]

Just a heads up that we may not answer questions as much or as quickly due to vacations. I'll try to get at least a few answered later!

 

[lachek]

Since the process of enacting laws has been drawn out, do you know beforehand roughly how long it would take to get it passed? Other than knowing how much support or opposition there is for it does the game also tell you an estimated date for when it should be fully enacted and in force? Want to know if it's just a guessing game for the player or if we have a more precise idea of how long the process might take.

While the two parameters "Time to next check" and "Success chance" should gives you a pretty reasonable idea how long the process might take if nothing changes, events arising from the "Advance", "Debate", and "Stall" outcomes could very well upset this. This feature is being worked on at the moment, but our intention is that if the law doesn't pass, there should be an opportunity for a trade-off or consequence. Perhaps a neutral Interest Group would be willing to support this law in exchange for a promise to pass their pet law next, for example. So since the parameters will change relatively drastically, a prediction of what would happen if nothing changed would be misleading information.

 

[lachek]

Here's a few questions I've gathered while reading the DD:
1. After the the reform has passed for say, the public schools - what happens next? Do private/religious schools momentarily get nationalized or is there an adaptation period?
2. In DD it is stated that one of the reasons for enacting bureaucracy reforms is to disempower the intelligentsia. How does that happen?

Once the new law has passed, the change to the Institution happens instantly. The time to enact the law is waiting time enough, if we had an additional "implementation" delay before you could reap the fruits of your labor wouldn't feel great. With respect to Institutions though, there is often a period right after it's been created where you have to expand it for full effect, which does take time. I'll get into more details on that next week.

A side effect of the Bureaucracy laws is to empower one group over another as members of that group are given the responsibility to run the country's day-to-day operations. Appointed Bureaucrats disproportionately empower the Intelligentsia, so enacting another kind of Bureaucracy would remove their bonus (and maybe apply it to another group instead.)

 

[lachek]

How flexible will laws be for modding? I'm assuming very, but i figured it would be best to ask!

Extremely. Laws can unlock or modify a great number of things in the game, much like Production Methods and Technology.

 

[lachek]

You say that process of passing laws depends on what interest groups you have in government, and how many. But in the diary about interest groups there was no info about what determines, which interest groups are part of government. Can player control it or influence it? To what extent?

We'll talk about government composition more in the future, but the player basically decides - within considerable constraints - which Interest Groups are permitted to run the country and which are left on the outside as pressure groups. At game start there will be a certain set of Interest Groups in government, but as the game progresses the player might want to include or exclude different groups depending on how powerful they are and how well they align with their own ideas of governance. If the people are given the vote the player's ability to choose freely who should govern will be greatly reduced.

 

[lachek]

Now here's a question I really need answered: In Victoria II, Liberals were interested in changing political laws but not economic laws, while Socialists were interested in changing economic laws but not political laws, which led to weird situations like Socialists being a-okay with Slavery and letting rich people vote, but not poor people. Has this been changed to at least make more sense? Will Socialists be pushing for universal vote and the abolition of slavery?

Every Interest Group start with 2-3 "core" Ideologies and can gain 1-2 more, sometimes temporarily depending on which politician / faction are currently leading them. For example, the Intelligentsia will care about somewhat different things if there's a socialist revolutionary leading them than if the academies are dominated by a conservative aristocratic mindset. Each Ideology has stances on 1-4 different law groups. Moralists, for example, have ideas about Governance Principles, Free Speech, Citizenship, and the Health System, and as such cross all three categories of Laws.

 

[lachek]

Would certain laws be locked behind techs making it so time needs to progress to pass some reforms?

Yes, the Society tech tree unlocks many of the Laws in the game. Unless you're playing a country that's very far behind in that tree they'll all be pretty much unlocked by mid-game though.

 

[lachek]

Are all the laws (more or less) a sliding scale? Or is it possible to still have serfs, whilst still having accident protection (both under labor laws)?

It varies, but we've tried to minimize the number of law groups where the laws just move the needle from one side of a spectrum to another in favor of ones where each has some unique tradeoff. In the case of Serfdom it's in the Labor Rights group within the Human Rights category, so while the effects between the different laws are very different gameplay-wise it pretty much requires that laborers have the basic human right of free movement and free employment if you intend to also grant them the luxury of government oversight of how their employers are treating them.

 

[lachek]

I love the dev diary.
There's only one thing that's been bugging me in a lot of the dev diaries. A lot of the screens seem to be really really big and can be more compact, with the same information on them. There's people who already did that for some tooltips.
For example, at the moment, the law screens seem to be one screen each. Not sure if they actually will be, but they don't have to be. And they can be more compact. Excuse my use of paint, I'm not a graphic designer. But here's an idea about how they can be changed to show the same information, all on one screen, or at least a smaller screen if they already were on a single one.

(snipped out the actual graphics)

These are actually three columns on the same screen, I just hacked it to pieces for the dev diary.
In many cases we've tried to stay away from full-screen interfaces though, since we want to ensure the map is also visible and to relate as much as possible in the panels to the map. In the case of laws, there's no map information to display and players will often want to consider all their laws side by side rather than one category at a time, so there we've used a full-screen interface.

 

[lachek]

Dear @lachek thank you for the awesome DD. Can you please answer these questions:

1. How much do Internal Security (Power Structure) and Policing (Economy) overlap?

2. if a country has 100% literacy, would there be any practical difference between census suffrage and universal suffrage??

3. If proposed laws fails, how soon would a second try be possible?

1. Internal Security is mainly about preventing revolutions and other uprisings, while Policing is about keeping unrest down and minimizing its effects on your economy and living standards. The two are somewhat interrelated but help in two different contexts: your National Guard isn't going to help with petty theft, and your police force isn't going to be useful in preventing a coup.

2. In that case, there'd be no difference between the two laws in practice.

3. If the law doesn't get passed a new enactment cycle will start immediately, hopefully with a bonus to your next attempt. It's up to you when you decide it's too hard to pass it and stop trying.

 

[Wizzington]

Why do you lose legitimacy for including more interest groups in your government? This literally makes no sense, if anything having more interest groups in your government should increase your legitimacy since you're representing a larger part of your country. There already is a drawback for having too many interest groups in your country from making it harder to pass laws.

It's meant to represent the difficulties of ruling with too broad a coalition - constant squabbling between all the different interests undermine the government's legitimacy.

 

[Wizzington]

Something I am wondering is how you will have persecution that isn't strictly in law. For example the US has separation between church and state, but there was also at the same time a strong current of anti-Catholic sentiment in the country. So I am curious how this will be repersented.

We mainly simulate legal discrimination right now, though of course there's a whole grey zone beyond legal discrimination that we intend to at least represent through content, possibly some mechanics but we don't currently have anything nailed down for release there (informal discrimination is a thing that varies massively depending on time and place so it's not so straightforward to make good mechanics for).

 

[Wizzington]

Would we be able, then, to peacefully transition from a republic to a monarchy if we get the right IGs on our side?

Yes, though changing government principles is generally more difficult than many other laws in terms of time, danger etc