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Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #71 - Autonomous Investment in 1.2

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Hello and welcome to another Victoria 3 dev diary! Today’s diary marks the start of dev diaries about Patch 1.2, which is the next major upcoming patch for Victoria 3 (release date to be announced). As with 1.1, 1.2 will contain a slate of bug fixes, UX improvements, AI improvements and so on, but also some more significant changes to game mechanics, which we’re going to go over in these dev diaries.

The particular changes we’ll be talking about today, as alluded to by the title, is Autonomous Investment, which is something we said we were going to look into for our post-release plans back in Dev Diary #64. What we said back then is that while we are never going to take construction out of the hands of the player entirely, we were open to the idea of non-government entities constructing buildings in a way not directly controlled by the country, and what we came up with is a system where the Investment Pool will be used by private entities to construct different types of buildings depending on your economic laws.

Before going over how all this works, I first want to mention that we recognize that the community is somewhat split on the issue of autonomous construction, and as such, we’ve opted to create a new Game Rule for Autonomous Investment. By default, Autonomous Investment is enabled, which puts the Investment Pool out of the hands of the player, but you can choose to disable it, which puts the Investment Pool back in the player’s hands and makes it work exactly as it does in the current 1.1.2 version of the game.

The Investment Pool Game Rule allows you to enable or disable autonomous construction with Investment Pool funds, depending on your personal preference
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Regardless of whether Autonomous Investment is enabled, the Investment Pool works pretty much the same as it did before: Certain Pop Types with ownership shares in buildings pay part of their dividends into the Investment Pool, the funds in which can then be drawn on for construction. There are, however, a few key differences in 1.2 compared to 1.1.

Firstly, the types of Pops that invest have been expanded from just Aristocrats and Capitalists to also include Farmers and Shopkeepers. Capitalists invest the highest percentage of their dividends (20%), followed by Aristocrats at 10%, with Farmers and Shopkeepers investing only 5% each. The rationale here is that it wasn’t only the wealthiest in society who invested in new businesses, and this also allows a small degree of investment under laws which strip ownership away from the Capitalists and Aristocrats (but more on that next week).

Secondly, the proportion of dividends that are paid into the Investment Pool varies in 1.1 based on your laws, which can have some pretty bizarre effects, such as switching to Laissez-Faire suddenly creating a bunch of Capitalist Radicals because they are now investing more money and thus end with a drop in their Wealth. The proportion of funds that are invested is now a fixed percentage based on pop type, which is then subjected to an efficiency bonus: Capitalists always invest 20% of their dividends, for example, but under Laissez-Faire, this investment is more efficient and ends up contributing more money to the Investment Pool.

There is also a general investment efficiency bonus for payments into the Investment Pool in small and mid-sized economies, and a penalty in very large ones, to ensure the Investment Pool is also relevant for mid-sized countries while not growing to such absurd proportions that it cannot possibly be spent in a 10 billion GDP country. These efficiency bonuses are meant to abstract a system of foreign investment, which is something we’ve also mentioned is on our radar in Dev Diary #64 but is a bigger rework that we are not tackling yet in patch 1.2.

Agrarianism gives a hefty bonus to the investments of your Farmers and Aristocrats, but reduces investments from Capitalists and greatly limits the types of buildings they can put their money into.
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So how then, does the Investment Pool funds get turned into buildings when Autonomous Investment is enabled? Well, autonomously, of course! With Autonomous Investment, the Construction Queue is split into Private and Government Constructions, with Government Constructions being anything (regardless of whether it’s a Government building or not) ordered to be built or auto-expanded by the player or country-level AI, while a Private Construction is anything the Pops themselves are building. The Construction capacity of the country will be split between the Private and Government queues in a proportion based on your economic law, though if there isn’t enough constructions queued of one type to use its full allocation, the excess can be used by the other queue instead.

In the construction screen, you’ll be able to see what the next planned Private Construction will be, along with its current funding level. The funding level is a calculated value based on both the total funds available in the Investment Pool as well as the weekly funds coming into it, and can fluctuate based on the Market price of Goods used in construction. Once a project is funded and ready, it’ll be added to the private Construction Queue the next tick. Private Constructions, unlike Government ones, cannot be reprioritized or canceled - they will always be built in the order they are queued up by the Pops.

Though the Government is currently building nothing in France, there are several private constructions in progress, and plans for the expansion of the Alsace-Lorraine iron mines. Note that this UI is highly WIP!
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Pop-ordered constructions use a variant of the standard construction AI which doesn’t take into account the country-level AI’s strategic objectives and prioritizes the creation of profitable buildings which will create lucrative jobs for the investing Pop types, but they will also take some more ‘strategic’ factors into account, such as building railroads in low-infrastructure states. Just as with the country-level AI, they also have access to the system of Spending Variables described in Dev Diary #59, which means that they do not operate on a snapshot of the current Market but understand factors such as the impact that already queued buildings (private and government-ordered both) will have on prices once completed and staffed.

Since Autonomous Investment does not only affect player countries, you might be wondering how well this system works together with the AI? The answer is that it actually works quite well! Together with a bunch of AI improvements and fixes in 1.2, this has resulted in more stable economic growth for AI countries and especially seems to have given Great Britain a boost, as the private sector doing its own thing means that the economy is usually growing even if the country’s treasury is having issues, at least as long as the Pops investing into private-sector growth are making healthy profits. There’s still some issues, particularly when AI runs out of available workforce late game, that we are hoping to tackle before 1.2 releases to further improve the AI’s economic growth.

Screenshot from a hands-off game taken in 1908. While there’s certainly still room for improvement and some countries like France and Prussia have underperformed due to wars and turmoil (and Austria continues to overperform compared to history), it’s definitely looking better than in 1.1.2.
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That’s it for today! Join us again next week as we go over more changes to the economy in 1.2, with a particular focus on Economic Laws and the introduction of Government Shares in buildings.
 
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It says that you can't reorder or cancel buildings from the private construction queue, but can you just remove the building once it's constructed?
Yeah - you even could expand building, that is currently being expanded privately.
Otherwise playing as one state nation would get too annoying.

Now I wonder if private investment can expand building by multiple levels, for example add 10 levels at once to 100 levels big textile mills.
 
Yeah - you even could expand building, that is currently being expanded privately.
Otherwise playing as one state nation would get too annoying.

Now I wonder if private investment can expand building by multiple levels, for example add 10 levels at once to 100 levels big textile mills.
I just noticed one of the things in next week's dev diary is "government shares in buildings". I think this might solve this problem, where maybe if you have a level 10 textile mill with 3 of those levels having been built by the investment pool, then only 7 shares are government owned and the player can only delete those 7 levels.
 
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I like to have 100% control over my economy but i dont mind if they build few more lvls to my buildings. All depends if they will use my cash and if i can restrict where and what they can build. Like strategic regions and sectors.
 
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I would like to see different logics for interventionism(fix supply), laissez faire(max profit), and agraganarism/distributionism(feed pops).
But I understand you have to make concessions with the game law.
 
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Good DD. I'm very excited for this feature. It always weirded me out playing as a capitalist country in vic3, that pops had no agency in the private sector in a 'economy game' and I had to build everything like a communist country. This system worked well in Distant Worlds 1 and 2 with an autonomous private sector, which I wish Stellaris had. It cuts down the micro in a natural way for big economies.
 
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Ownership not being tied to employment is something I want to change eventually
I never thought this was possible without redoing the game from scratch.
But if it is, it's really important, because it allows modelling colonialism, which is essentially the main thing the period is about.
Right now when sugar plantations on Jamaica are extremely profitable, this makes many Jamaicans, instead of a few Londoners, extremely rich. This makes no sense historically and distorts the political process to the point of complete lack of realism.
Fixing that sounds marvellous.
 
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When looking at the screenshot for the new building que, I can't help but notice, that there is a button for "construction" and in the menu, a sub-button for switching between governement and private-sector buildings.
COuld it not either be simply two initial buttons, one for "Government Construction" and one for "Private Construction", this would make it easier to go to the place you want to, saving clicks, or you could make two coloumns under the same button, one for gov buildings and one for prv buildings. In terms of the size of the UI and how much space is just left free, I would assume both options would be possible.
 
I'm glad this is gated behind a game rule. However I'm very interested in how you avoid that being just a "super easy" mode (I suspect I'll want to play on high difficulty, but with player control).

I'm still very worried about the AI building selection as those numbers in your screenshot pale in comparison to what much smaller countries can do under player control. Would it have been better to focus on getting the AI smarter before putting it in control?
 
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Just as a random thought, I also see autonomous investment being used by anarchists representing a more local influence on what is built instead of central planning.
 
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What if construction queues were multiple private instead of a single private one?

What if a new character type called tycoons was in the game that were able to accumulate wealth?

These tycoons will be the true capitalists and the ‘capitalist’ jobs will be renamed or redistributed to other POPs.

Dividends of buildings will have an owner or owning family for aristocrats that will invest their pool of wealth by having their own building queue.

Ownership will be a new type of PM for buildings and the tycoons, families or companies will be able to buy/sell buildings using their investment pool.

How many of these tycoons/families/companies per nation? They should be limited as they represent only the big corporations able to invest in new buildings.

These tycoons/families/companies will also have the ability to set prices of goods beyond the rule of supply and demand. Increasing or decreasing its buildings selling price to increase dividends by selling more units than the competitors or increasing profits if they can create a monopoly of the buildings producing that good.

What if?
 
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Can you separate construction sectors to be public or private? I like having my construction queue to always be full so it would be nice to separate them and have them build using a different construction queue altogether.
 
Cool ideas, I love your vision for the directions game should take and you hearing community feedback. However showcased implementation raises a lot of concerns for me - especially this 50-50 split (lets take this). For start we would assume laws are dictated by political situation and player preference and should not be changed "because aristocrats got more money, so you should get away from agrarian economy"

TLDR - 50/50 construction split will create negative gameplay loops and a million angry reddit posts
EDIT - proposed solution: create button "government order X construction points" so player knows how much they pay for and rest goes to IP and pops to decide. As of 1.1.2 player pays for 100% possible construction points but in 1.2 it's not gonna be the case.

EXAMPLE WHY 50/50 BAD
I make 50k in budget (planned for construction)
Investment pool is 100k
How much construction sectors do I need to balance? Obviously at least to fully spend IF, otherwise those unspent money are wasted.
So I build construction sectors to consume 150k materials, queue in 30 buildings, go do other things - and behind scenes 75k worth of construction is spend on government issued buildings (so my budget is highly negative) and IP just queue in 40 buildings. The next day I decide I am poor enough, cancel my buildings out, everything goes to IP, it depletes fast as plus 100k minus 150k, I happily play game for several weeks (with hugely positive balance) until one day I notice IP has nothing in queue, 1/3rd of my construction sectors are idle, price of construction goods dropped immensely, iron mines close out and economy is having a depression

All because devs decided to split construction cash flow in a weird way, and player dont bother to add 1 building to queue for every 2 buildings IP adds so budget would be balanced out over course of a year.


I am sure workarounds could be invented, just wanted to bring your attention.
This problem already exist in game, but it sorts itself out being united cash flow: If you queue in gov administrations your budget goes super negative and IP stockpile, then you build ranches it gest super positive as stockpiled IP depletes, then it goes back to normal. And we all know humans queue in 10x buildings at once and create long construction queues when playing something relatively big like France or Italy - so they have time doing other things
 
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