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Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #74 - UX Improvements

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Hello, my name is Henrik, and I am one of the UX Designers on Victoria 3. For 1.2 I have been fully focused on improving the user experience of the game. Before we go into the details of what has been worked on for this update, I want to give a special thanks to the community, all the modders, and anyone who posted feedback here on the forum, Discord, Reddit, Youtube, or any of our other communication channels. Your feedback, ideas, and discussions have all been instrumental in helping the team prioritize our time and efforts for this update.

Trade Routes​

One of the first things we started with immediately after 1.1.2 was improving the usability of the Trade Routes panel. In addition to the current view of grouping Trade Routes by Goods, you can now get a sortable list of all Trade Routes in the Market, or get a view where they are grouped by Country. All of these lists can also be filtered to exclude any Routes not owned by you. The Country grouping is especially useful when setting up Embargos or Trade Agreements.

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Message Settings​

Our new Message Settings window lets you decide how you want a specific Notification to be displayed, and if you want the game to automatically pause when it gets triggered. In future updates, we are planning on expanding this to cover more functionality, like the Current Situation panel, Alerts etc.

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Parallel to adding Message Settings, we also made a pass on making sure that the Notifications we post to the player are informative and have a reasonable default setting for how to present them. Among the tweaks we have done are:

  • Make the “Interest Activated/Deactivated” Notification into a “You can now conduct Diplomacy with X” Notification that only triggers if the activated/deactivated Interest is the first/last one that overlaps with any of your Interests
  • Moving the Price Report to the Market Panel (turned off by default, can be turned on in the Message Settings panel)
  • Splitting up Trade Routes Notifications into significant and less significant versions (Significant is turned on by default, less significant is not)
  • Only show “Mobilization” and “Declare Neutrality” Notifications if you are committed to the Diplomatic Play in question
  • Only show resource related Notifications if they happen in your Market (previously Strategic Regions in which you have an Interest in)

All of these changes should, according to our benchmarks, reduce the number of Notifications by roughly 50% for most Countries. In addition to this, we have also tweaked the animations for the Notification feed, so the overall user experience of the entire system should be much improved.

Rebindable Keys​

Our shortcut system has been replaced by a new system that can leverage rebindable keys. When adding this new system also made a pass and added a few more shortcuts, as well as hooked in a few existing ones in more places.

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Pop Needs​

Another fully reworked panel is the Population overview, which now gives you more information about who your Pops are, how many they are, how much money they make, what they spend it on, and how much that goes to increasing/decreasing their Standard of Living (the last one not included in the screenshot, but visible without scrolling when the Taxes and Needs sections are collapsed).

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In addition to creating this new panel, we have exposed more information in the Pop Lists used throughout the game, and improved a few of the Pop Need tooltips. They should now surface more of the relevant information higher up in the information hierarchy. We also exposed the top five Goods a Pop spends money on in this list, inspired by the Visible Pop Needs mod by Apprehensive-Tank213

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Economy​

Martin has already discussed some of the changes regarding Construction in DD #71, and in addition to these changes we have improved the user experience of the gameplay loop by providing better contextual information in several places. For example, we have added Infrastructure, Available Labor, and Qualifications to the Map List that is shown when expanding Buildings. In the screenshot below you can also see that we have restructured the layout of the Map Interaction panel to make it possible to navigate directly to another panel, which in the case of the Construction Interaction is the Building details panel for the specific Building. This layout also allows for more reasonable tooltip positioning, making it easier to navigate into a nested tooltip without accidentally opening another tooltip when moving the cursor towards the tooltip you wanted to dig into the details of.

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The most recent improvement that made it into the game is the Reset Production Methods Map Interaction, a PDT project by our Lead Designer Mikael and myself. It should make it much more efficient to streamline the production in your Country, which is especially useful if you have just acquired a few new States. This is currently somewhat of a work in progress, and we are hoping to expand this to work on Buildings and Building Types in the future.

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One of the most popular mods for the game is currently Visual Methods by FUN, a mod that we liked so much that we decided to make our own, slightly tweaked, version of.

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The Investment Pool is now being more prominently displayed in the Buildings panel.

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The tooltips for Market Access have also been improved to give more detail as to why a State is not fully connected to the National Market.

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Radicals and Loyalists​

We have improved the presentation of why your Pops turn Radical or Loyal, who they are and which Interest Groups they belong to. Information regarding this has been exposed in several tooltips and panels, like the Interest Group panel.

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Convoys​

Your current Convoy balance has been added to the Top Bar, making it much easier to keep track of and access when needed. This item will be hidden for landlocked Countries and unlocked as soon as you gain access to a coastline.

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Map Modes​

We have added three new Map Modes (Literacy, Population and Infamy), and given the transition between two Map Modes a configurable fade in/out to make it smoother. One of the first mods I personally subscribed to at release was Practical Heatmaps by Ronin Szaky, and an ever-so-slightly tweaked version made its way into the base game in 1.2.

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Diplomacy​

For Diplomacy, we have improved how we show AI Acceptance and signal more clearly if offering or using an Obligation would convince them to accept.

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We have also exposed all types of Diplomatic Plays on the Country details panel, not only the ones you can currently start, making it easier to figure out what is blocking you from starting a particular Play.

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Military​

When it comes to the Military system, the focus for the UX improvements in 1.2 has revolved around making it clearer how the Battle systems work. We approached this by exposing more data related to Battles, as well as, improving some of the tooltips presenting breakdowns of the calculations involved. Some effort has also been made to decrease the amount of visual noise from multiple Front Markers.

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Work in Progress tooltip for the breakdown of the initial number of troops each General was able to bring to the Battle.

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We have also surfaced the information regarding which HQ a Commander considers their Home HQ and made some improvements to the information presented in the Naval Invasion user flow.

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Outliner​

The Outliner has gotten some polish, with pinnable Goods and non-Military Characters being the biggest additions. Interest Groups are now showing their Approval value, and States show their Available Labor and Qualifications.

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Tech Tree improvements​

The Tech Tree Improvements discussed in DD #70 also made it for 1.2.

Closing words​

In addition to all of these changes listed above, we have also made over 100 smaller UX tweaks and bug fixes, which you will either have to wait for the full patch notes to explore, or experience for yourself during the Open Beta. Once again, thanks for all the feedback, it really helps us make the game as great as it deserves to be!

Next week, Martin will be showing us diplomacy improvements coming in 1.2!
 
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CassCD said:
I have been losing my god-damn mind trying to understand what the hell "toast" is supposed to mean in the context of message settings. Why is NOBODY talking about this anywhere? Does this terminology actually make sense to someone? The only toast I recognize is the kind I EAT.
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Haha, sorry about that! Tooltips with explanations are coming for this!
 
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CassCD said:
I have been losing my god-damn mind trying to understand what the hell "toast" is supposed to mean in the context of message settings. Why is NOBODY talking about this anywhere? Does this terminology actually make sense to someone? The only toast I recognize is the kind I EAT.
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It's from CK3, the logic being that you make a toast (you know, raise your cup of beer or whatever) to celebrate some big news.
 
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Troyen said:
Assuming it means the banner at the top of the screen (complete with sound effects) rather than a silent notification in the corner. "Toast" is a common term for those popups in modern OSes and phones.
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Yonomin said:
Toasts are those message panels that appear in the top section of your screen
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First, I appreciate the two of you for informing about this.

Secondly, I'm GONNA start ranting: There is NO SHOT that this is a common term. I have never ever heard of this even ONCE in my 30+ years of living with this cursed English language. There has GOT to be a better term for this that actually adequately describes the meaning of this word. You wanna talk UX improvements, "toast" is NOT it. That is not an intuitive term at all.
 
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I feel that Pop needs also needs to be broken up by what need it is fulfilling. And if a substitution is trending*, what way is it moving.
*It is my understanding that substitutions have some hysteresis or inertia.

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Can we pin other markets? If so, how; if not, is there a need for the "British Market" level?
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One change I’ll beg on my knees for you to add, is to show the Infrastructure, unemployed and peasant numbers in a state at the bottom of the building view screen.
I usually add buildings through this rather than the macro builder, and had been playing with a UI mod that amongst other things, showed these numbers. I didn’t even realise this was part of the mod by the time the beta dropped, as it’s ended up feeling so essential that I can’t imagine playing without it now. It takes an extra click away and click back to see these numbers now.
Another thing I’ll pray for is adding a bar to show employment of a building in this screen too. I can try finding the mod and screenshots when I get back on my PC if this helps.
Loving the other changes, especially visual methods, but I desperately hope the devs see this, it would mean a lot.
 
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I know it is not mentioned here but group by country is currently implemented as group by originating country. Is there a reason for this? Would it not make more sense if it was all trade including said country? If I am checking my trade with Peru I would not want to have to check both the USA section and the Peru section.
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Oglesby said:
Can we pin other markets? If so, how; if not, is there a need for the "British Market" level?
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The plan was definitely a "Yes, you should be able to pin Goods in other Markets", but recently we discovered a bug, or rather a limitation of how the data for the Outliner is structured, so for 1.2, it is very much a Maybe.
 
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Oglesby said:
I know it is not mentioned here but group by country is currently implemented as group by originating country. Is there a reason for this? Would it not make more sense if it was all trade including said country? If I am checking my trade with Peru I would not want to have to check both the USA section and the Peru section.
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Oh, that very much sounds like a bug! Thanks for pointing it out!
 
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I absolutely adore the UX work that's been done in this beta, props to all of you magnificent bastards. One of the things I'd say could still use some work is displaying information about combat width and troops being pulled into a battle, as it feels arbitrarily hidden right now. I feel it's something that'd work best as a prominent feature of the battle UI instead of tucked away behind initial troop numbers. Maybe display a combat width number underneath terrain in the middle of the screen and slap all the info within it?
 
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Oglesby said:
I feel that Pop needs also needs to be broken up by what need it is fulfilling. And if a substitution is trending*, what way is it moving.
*It is my understanding that substitutions have some hysteresis or inertia.
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I used to have this mod:
Pop Needs UI Panel

It's since become outdated, so I try to maintain a small personal mod where I just bolt the Needs under one of the new elements.
I like seeing the ration for the substitution and find it helps to decide about introducing new goods or closing trade routes.

The impact on the economy might be minor, but this game is very much about the pops for me and I love seeing the French prefer their wine in a substitution table.

And walking the mouse pointer through 3 popup stabilizations from pop expenses is quite annoying.
 
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Really great changes. May I ask, though, why the battle screen still uses most of its displayable real estate (before scrolling) to showing the generals? There is so much good screen space wasted on this. One could argue that it is there for flavour, but it is half of the screen! Please reconsider this, don't make me scroll just because of avatars that, imo, don't even look good.
 
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I don't know if this relates exactly with UX, but one problem that I've always had with the UI is that because most buttons are in the edge of the screen, I accidentally touch the edge, causing the map to pan. Is there a fix to that problem? Should I create a bug report?
 
hagerhink said:

Closing words​

In addition to all of these changes listed above, we have also made over 100 smaller UX tweaks and bug fixes, which you will either have to wait for the full patch notes to explore, or experience for yourself during the Open Beta. Once again, thanks for all the feedback, it really helps us make the game as great as it deserves to be!
Click to expand...

Would it be possible to see a screenshot of the new music player UI?
 
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The update is epic.but just a problem ,
don't make a button for the building.
I need to move my mouse for click that
button
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for the old one i can click every place i like
but in the new one i can only click the button if i want to build something
 
Your current Convoy balance has been added to the Top Bar, making it much easier to keep track of and access when needed. This item will be hidden for landlocked Countries and unlocked as soon as you gain access to a coastline.
Click to expand...

According to the tooltips explaining land routes, you use convoys for your land route when you go over your maximum. So shouldn't the Convoys bar be left on even for landlocked countries? Also, I'd love to hear a little bit more about how land routes works as I don't think it's been mentioned by any devs.
 
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