Home Trending Latest threads New posts Developer diaries
Jump to latest Follow Reply
  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Victoria 3 12187 Bug Reports 8065 User Mods 552 Multiplayer 65 Suggestions 3301 Tech Support 958 After Action Reports (AARs)
Previous dev diary Next dev diary
Show only dev responses

Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #72 - Economic Law Changes in 1.2

16_9.jpg

​
Hello and welcome to the second Victoria 3 dev diary for 2023! Today we’re going to continue talking about patch 1.2 for Victoria 3 (release date to be announced), on a topic that is closely related to last week’s dev diary, namely Economic Laws and how they have changed in 1.2. As we mentioned in Dev Diary #64, one of our post-release ambitions is to increase the differences in gameplay between different economic systems. What I mean by that is that there should be deeper mechanical differences between for example Laissez-Faire and Command Economy in terms of how they impact your country and the economic decisions you make. All of the existing Economic Laws have received changes in 1.2 and we’ve also added a new one, so I’m simply going to go through them one by one and explain how they work now.

Before I start however, I should mention a change that has happened since last week based on feedback we received on the Autonomous Investment dev diary. Several people pointed out that with a weighting system in place, there wasn’t really a need for hard restrictions on what the Investment Pool could fund under Autonomous Investment, and we agree! Thus, Autonomous Investment no longer has any restrictions on what profit-generating buildings can be built, just weighting based on who is investing and what they would want to invest in (as mentioned last week, if you’re running Agrarianism, expect a lot of farms). The restrictions still apply under Directly Controlled Investment however (and the tooltips will reflect this based on which setting you are using).

Traditionalism: Traditionalism in 1.2 is largely the same as before: A very backwards system that you should generally be trying to get out of. The main difference from 1.1 is that the Investment Pool isn’t disabled for Traditionalism, though you take a hefty penalty to investment efficiency (further reduced if you also have Serfdom) and the building types you can construct with the Investment Pool are highly curtailed if you are playing with Directly Controlled Investment.

DD72_1.png

​
Interventionism: The ‘golden middle way’ of economic laws, Interventionism also isn’t extensively changed in 1.2: It provides no particular bonuses or penalties, but gives you the freedom to subsidize any and all building types as well as extensive options for the Investment Pool under Directly Controlled Investment, while providing a balanced allocation between Private and Government Construction Allocation under Autonomous Investment.

DD72_2.png

​
Agrarianism: Agrarianism has received a fairly substantial boost in 1.2, with both the addition of Farmers as an investing Pop Type and a hefty bonus to the efficiency of all rural investments. Capitalists are now also not locked out of investing under Agrarianism, though they do so at a penalty and their building selection is quite limited if you’re playing with Directly Controlled Investment.

DD72_3.png

​
Laissez-Faire: The invisible hand of the Free Market made manifest, Laissez-Faire in 1.2 is meant to be the go-to law for the player that wants to get the absolute most out of their Investment Pool when it comes to industrializing. It does come with some significant drawbacks though, as it is no longer possible to downsize non-government buildings under Laissez-Faire.

DD72_4.png

​
Cooperative Ownership: A new Economic Law introduced in 1.2, Cooperative Ownership is now a fully fledged economic system instead of just being unlocked by becoming a Council Republic. Under Cooperative Ownership, all Pops working in a building receive an equal number of shares and Aristocrat/Capitalist jobs are eliminated. While this should lead to higher Standard of Living among the workforce, it also means far less money in the Investment Pool, as Farmers and Shopkeepers invest far less than their wealthier counterparts under other systems.

DD72_5.png

​
Command Economy: Command Economy is the law that has received the largest (and most needed) overhaul under 1.2. Instead of being a frankly weird system where the Bureaucrats own the profits but you are required to subsidize them, Command Economy now makes use of a new system called Government Shares, which is used by the Government Run ownership production method. Just like how Pop Shares entitle Pops to a portion of a building’s dividends, Government Shares ensure that buildings pay some or all of their profits directly into the treasury - though in large economies this is subject to an efficiency modifier, with some of the money being wasted due to the inefficiencies inherent to large, heavily centralized systems. While this is not something we currently have a setup for in the base game, Government Shares can also freely be mixed with Pop Shares, so we’re looking forward to seeing what modders make with this!

DD72_6.png

​
Another change you might have noticed when looking at the screenshots in this dev diary is that we have tied some economic laws more closely to a country’s Distribution of Power and Government Principles. For one, seizing the means of production is no longer a one-step reform into Council Republic, but rather a multi-step reform that involves first implementing a Council Republic, then Cooperative Ownership, and finally allows you to branch off into Anarchism if you so desire. Command Economy now also requires Autocracy or Oligarchy, as it’s difficult to pull off a fully centralized economy without the corresponding amount of centralized powers (and with the new Government Shares mechanic should provide more reasons to want to keep a grip on power in the late game).

So the question on everyone's mind is, when will you be able to play with these changes and all the other updates and fixes coming in 1.2? Some of these changes are pretty big and we don't want to rush this patch out too early, but at the same time we know you're anxious to get your hands on it. To find the right balance between these we've decided to launch patch 1.2 in open beta, which we will talk more about in next week's dev diary! In there we will also focus a bit more generally on patch 1.2, giving you more of a birds-eye view of what the patch will look like, along with giving you an expected release date.
 
  • 153Like
  • 82Love
  • 10
  • 6
  • 4
Reactions:
Sort by date Sort by reaction score
I love the direction that changes are heading in with the Victoria 3 economic system as a whole, but I would like to see some system level changes in the future (not necessarily a priority right now) that address the fact that the economic system is created for Great Britain only. my main point of concern is that smaller nations are effectively unplayable in many cases without exploiting the game (which, don't get me wrong, I've done plenty of).
It is possible to play as smaller nations and win a hegemony victory, but the most consistent way I have found to do so is diplomacy (which I think kinda sucks). If you get great powers to join your side in wars, you can take a lot of land, but getting an economy online from such a weak position takes a lot of plantations. The diplomacy system needs an overhaul (namely being able to see who will join your side before committing to a diplo play, with the attitude numbers for sways), because the current system feels really bad when a great power decides to just end your playthrough with no available recourse.

I hope you can add a way to utilize population in a non Euro-industrial way, because it doesn't make much sense to me that a nation state like the Zulu who beat the British in battle historically, doesn't have gameplay mechanics that allow them to survive currently. I advocate for wars lasting about 5-8x as long, so that Britain is fighting on anywhere from 2 to 15 fronts around the world at any given time. This would allow small nations to have a chance against large maritime empires, and coupled with some changes to how non industrialized populations can be used (maybe adding a government type that resembles a military dictatorship or allowing more authoritarian governments greater direct control over their resources while decreasing SoL to allow for "weaker" nations to compete), smaller nations would feel better to play as and against as conquest would feel much more meaningful and realistic.

There also has to be a construction overhaul. I know we're getting private construction, but we should look into building-upgrade style construction so that smaller countries can still have buildings, but larger countries with more construction can still have better and more buildings. Maybe natural resources are naturally worked (inefficiently) by peasants up to 20% of state capacity, and construction can build more extraction buildings AND upgrade existing natural peasant extraction to industrial buildings. Currently construction is the biggest thing holding small nations back as V3 construction is a logarithmic function that needs to start high to end high. I've play tested a lot of smaller nations and it's really frustrating that high population nations can't use their population without industrializing. Maybe adding a centralization mechanic or something similarly beauraucratic in nature rather than population as a factor of purely economy.

I've tried to make some mods to fix these issues, but I don't have the skills to do more than balance changes. I am, however, super excited to try command economy playthroughs on smaller nations coming up and seeing which strategies can find success in the cutthroat world of Victoria 3 on patch 1.2!

Best of luck working on the Best of games
 
  • 1
  • 1
Reactions:
Maxwell Tornado said:
Yeah, it's kind of bizarre that in your comunist/fascist oligarchy, the aristocrats and capitalists have more political power, but I think that's a broader issue with the distribution of power laws. Vanguardists already want an autocracy, which boosts aristocrat political power... Because logic. This isn't even a difficult fix, just change autocracy from aristocrats to the head of state's IG, and oligarchy from aristocrats and capitalists to IGs in government. And the voting models shouldn't have these kinds of boosts at all, because they already have voting, and all the modifiers that come with that.
Click to expand...
This is what i was trying to say. Autocracy and oligarchy are clearly not done for communist governments. It's like say interventionism is the same as command economy
 
  • 2
  • 1
Reactions:
Comrade_Winter said:
This is what i was trying to say. Autocracy and oligarchy are clearly not done for communist governments. It's like say interventionism is the same as command economy
Click to expand...
Honestly we might end up needing a separate special government type for communist states.
 
  • 3Like
  • 2
Reactions:
Sighfer said:
I think the problem with foreign investment is obvious with current mechanics - ownership shares. A building automatically employs people who own it. So how would it work if the people who "own it" are in a different state? Whose capital would be used? Whose construction capacity? Would the game keep track of foreign owned buildings separately? Would the host country be allowed to demolish them? Is it an ant colony worth of bugs? A pig devouring the processor calculations? Both?
Click to expand...
True, but if there was some way to simulate it, it could solve a lot of problems. Instead of having to invade states for resources there should be an option to build a factory or a mine or a plantation in a puppet or a country in your market in order to get the resource you need, or maybe if the ownership shares causes a problem, then a large share of the profits goes to the imperialist country while a smaller share goes to the victim in the form of diplomatic pacts similar to being a puppet or reparations it may work. I don't think my suggestion is a good fix, but hopefully down the line they can find away to add it in, they had it in Vic2, though it was very unstable.
 
  • 3
  • 1Like
Reactions:
TheLand said:
All sounds great stuff!

At present Oligarchy is quite Capitalist-favourable (I think it gives Aristos and Capis extra clout or something?) - which doesn't fit very well with this particular change. Will Oligarchy be getting some tweaks?
Click to expand...
I may be wrong about the Council republic concept in Vicky3. Are we talking about the dictatorship of the proletariat or a single party democracy? I was presuming the latter because in game we still have universal suffrage, which means that it is an elected democratic government. The Soviet Union and the current China would require autocracy or oligarchy and I don’t know if you could actually have workers co-ops in those regimes because they would be a command economy. The government is the corporation, which is state capitalism and the oligarchy are the exclusive shareholders. The oligarchy’s hands are on the levers of the economy, and greed and personal profit are the primary motivations.
In the game, the only way to represent the Soviet revolution is to have a way of combining in one swoop Command economy, autocracy (no Capitalists), and Presidential Republic is the closest fit. To make it right, the game would have to include a new form of governance principle, a variance of monarchy, where the authority is very high, but there would be no political strength to the landowners. Perhaps Junta would be a legitimate new governance principle with a +25% political strength to the armed forces, +200 authority, +20 government ideological penalty and +20 legitimacy, including the head of state.
Of course, that is the only one anybody would ever play, because authority is extremely useful and who wouldn’t want their military to be fighting at +30% !? Perhaps a base infamy of 50% would be a resonable nerf, but I would still go for that. I run notorious for the first half of the game anyway, and then infamy doesn’t even matter because you can beat everybody!
 
  • 3Like
Reactions:
unmerged(38409) said:
I may be wrong about the Council republic concept in Vicky3. Are we talking about the dictatorship of the proletariat or a single party democracy? I was presuming the latter because in game we still have universal suffrage, which means that it is an elected democratic government. The Soviet Union and the current China would require autocracy or oligarchy and I don’t know if you could actually have workers co-ops in those regimes because they would be a command economy. The government is the corporation, which is state capitalism and the oligarchy are the exclusive shareholders. The oligarchy’s hands are on the levers of the economy, and greed and personal profit are the primary motivations.
In the game, the only way to represent the Soviet revolution is to have a way of combining in one swoop Command economy, autocracy (no Capitalists), and Presidential Republic is the closest fit. To make it right, the game would have to include a new form of governance principle, a variance of monarchy, where the authority is very high, but there would be no political strength to the landowners. Perhaps Junta would be a legitimate new governance principle with a +25% political strength to the armed forces, +200 authority, +20 government ideological penalty and +20 legitimacy, including the head of state.
Of course, that is the only one anybody would ever play, because authority is extremely useful and who wouldn’t want their military to be fighting at +30% !? Perhaps a base infamy of 50% would be a resonable nerf, but I would still go for that. I run notorious for the first half of the game anyway, and then infamy doesn’t even matter because you can beat everybody!
Click to expand...
I think I said this earlier, but I feel like the devs might end up needing to make a special government type for communist states.
 
  • 1
Reactions:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back