Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #79 - What’s next after 1.2?

[lachek]

Is there a reason why you want to continue working on the Current Situation system rather than having a row of banners/alerts on top a la EU4/Stellaris?

While I appreciate most of CK3's UI changes from CK2, the decision to hide away hugely important notifications in a button that's very easy to miss has always baffled me.

Still, thanks for continuing to work on polishing the game before releasing new paid content: I hope this will smooth the path to a steady release for Victoria 3's first DLC!

As a sandbox game where most actions have a reaction elsewhere in the system, there are very few instances in Victoria 3 where you have "no-brainer" types of actions to take. Our rule of thumb is that alerts, that prominently signal a call to action and stick around until you've resolved them, should be irrefutably bad for you and something the player is usually easily able to resolve with a few clicks. For example, an undefended front will cause you to lose territory very quickly, and a severe goods shortage is very likely to hamstring your industry without a net benefit to anyone. Both situations can usually be resolved by sending a General to the front (even if you have to hire a new one) or importing goods / reducing consumption by downsizing, so these qualify as Alerts.

Other types of "alerts" are a lot less severe, might require long-term planning to resolve without knock-on issues, or might even be a desired (though unbalanced) state - say you're paying a lot of money for Man-o-Wars but your Capitalists that run the Shipyards need to be kept in check, you might not want to reduce their earning potential by importing from your neighbors. Exposing this situation under a menu you can access on demand when you have time, and even dismiss items if they don't apply to you, makes more sense than shoving them in your face and demanding you deal with them by some prescribed method.

What we're going to look into here is improving what information shows up where and in what form, and ideally giving more control to customize this as well. I don't have any more details to share quite yet though.

 

[lachek]

Do you think that the willingness of the AI to go to war over diplomatic plays is in a good spot right now?
In my runs so far, the AI seems a bit stubborn and either just doesn't give in even if it is an unrecognized power facing off against a GP or just calls in like half the other GPs, both is very annoying, especially if I see Britain sitting over there initiating diplomatic plays one after another and no one opposing them whilst if I try then they all jump at the opportunity. Might just be me though, monkey brain is weird sometimes

Monkey brain is indeed weird! I have frequent conversations regarding both situations, AI getting involved when it feels weird that they do, and AI not getting involved when they'd be expected to. What this tells me is that we need to do more work visualizing how the AI makes decisions; better predictive tools relating to diplomacy; and more AI balancing based on such displayed information, to get expectations and reality to match up better and contextualize why the AI is making unexpected decisions in the situations where it does. And we do want some unpredictability, I think - if we had a perfectly predictable AI, diplomacy would turn into more of a puzzle game than a strategy game.

 

[lachek]

Could you please consider adding "resource mining rights" as a mechanic?
You mine the resources of a foreign country, and the output goods are put to your market instead of them.
Like in Hearts of Iron, Great Britain controls the Middle East's oil outputs.

This sounds easy but has a very very large number of design gotchas. But rest assured we're aware of the demand for a foreign investment mechanic and are invested in finding a solution. It will not be in the very near future though, due to the complexity.

 

[lachek]

Are there any plans to somehow change the dynamics of the battles? I'm talking about a situation where half the time of the battle is fought by a few percent of the starting number of troops.

When the battle is fought by a few percent of the starting number of troops, you're either trying to man a very long front or you might be advancing into very undeveloped terrain. In such situations you are actually better off on average to mobilize a smaller number of troops, so you suffer less attrition and lower materiel cost while trying to wage your campaign. That's intentional, a total war with full mobilization over a small African colony is meant to be a bad move.

That's not to say we won't continue tweaking the battle size setup script where we see a reason to do so, of course.

 

[lachek]

Do you have plans to add representations of money supply and inflation/deflation at some point?

"At some point", yes. "Soon", no. It's extremely compelling to me and others in the team, but mostly for econ-nerd reasons rather than it being a feature the game is sorely lacking at this point.