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

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Hello and welcome to the first Victoria 3 dev diary after the release of update 1.2! With this update now out, we feel that it’s a good time to return to the Post-Release Plans we outlined in Dev Diary #64, check what’s already been done and go over what further changes and improvements we have planned for the game in future free updates such as 1.3, 1.4 and beyond. In the Post-Release Plans Dev Diary we outlined three key areas of improvement for the game: Military, Historical Immersion and Diplomacy and these are very much still our main targets, but are now being joined by an Internal Politics section. The Other section is also still there for anything that doesn’t fall neatly into one of the four categories.

For this dev diary, I’ll be aiming to give you an overview of where we stand and where we’re heading by going through each of these four categories and marking on each one with one of the below statuses:
  • Done: This is a part of the game that we now consider to be in good shape. Something being Done of course doesn’t mean we’re never going to expand or improve on it in the future, just that it’s no longer a high priority for us.
  • Updated: This is a part of the game where we have made some of the improvements and changes that we want to make, but aren’t yet satisfied with where it stands and plan to make further improvements to it in future updates such as 1.3, 1.4 and so on.
  • Not Updated: This is a part of the game where we haven’t yet released any of our planned changes/improvements in either 1.1 or 1.2 but still plan to do so for future updates.
  • New: This is a planned change or improvement that is newly added, ie wasn’t present on the list in Dev Diary #64.

Just like in the original Post-Release Plans dev diary, we will only be talking about improvements, changes and new features that are part of planned free updates in this dev diary. So then, let’s get to the categories and see where we stand! For each point in each category that isn’t new to this update there will be a sub-point detailing our progress on the point so far.

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Military​

Done:
  • Adding the ability for countries to set strategic objectives for their generals
  • The ability to designate Strategic Objectives were added to the game in update 1.2
  • Addressing some of the rough edges in how generals function at the moment, such as improving unit selection for battles and balancing the overall progression along fronts
    • While there are still rough edges in the military system and we undoubtedly will continue to tweak the precise balancing here, we consider the specific issues with front progression and unit selection for battles largely resolved in update 1.2
Updated:
  • Improving the ability of players to get an overview of their military situation and exposing more data, like the underlying numbers behind battle sizes
    • We have made a number of improvements to army visualization in 1.2 and added breakdowns for factors such as battle sizes, but we have more work to do when it comes to giving players a good overview of wars and making multi-front wars easier to manage
  • Increasing the visibility of navies and making admirals easier to work with
    • Some improvements have been made here, such as removing the restriction on naval invasions using Generals from different HQs, but we still consider navies an area of the game in need of improvement from a visibility and usability standpoint
  • Finding solutions for the issue where theaters can split into multiple (sometimes even dozens) of tiny fronts as pockets are created
    • We have mitigated this issue in update 1.2 by auto-closing small pockets and improving battle province selection but the issue still persists (particularly in wars with a large number of small countries) so further improvements are needed here
Not Updated:
  • Experimenting with controlled front-splitting for longer fronts
    • Some internal design work has been done on this, but it’s very tricky to get right without worsening the front splitting issues - it’s still very much a high priority for us nonetheless!
New:
  • Adding a system for limited wars to reduce the number of early-game total wars between Great Powers
  • Solving the issue of armies going home after Generals die during a war by adding a system for field promotion

Historical Immersion​

Done:
  • Ensuring the American Civil War has a decent chance to happen, happens in a way that makes sense (slave states rising up to defend slavery, etc), and isn’t easily avoidable by the player.
    • The ACW is now more difficult to avoid, and when sparked over the issue of slavery, should now create a historically plausible CSA (note that there may still be unintended cases of a ‘fake CSA’ appearing due to a non slavery related landowner revolt, which isn’t covered by the above fixes)
  • Working to expose and improve content such as expeditions and journal entries that is currently too difficult for players to find or complete
    • The Journal Entries that we wanted to make easier to complete and/or more visible have been tweaked in the intended way (though we will undoubtedly continue to make minor balance adjustments to them)
Updated:
  • Tweaking content such as the Meiji Restoration, Alaska purchase and so on in a way that they can more frequently be successfully performed by the AI, through a mix of AI improvements and content tweaks
    • Significant improvements have been made to the AI’s ability to complete Journal Entries such as Tanzimat, Manifest Destiny and so on, though it still struggles with others like the Meiji Restoration and so further work is needed.
  • Ensuring unifications such as Italy, Germany and Canada doesn’t constantly happen decades ahead of the historical schedule, and increasing the challenge of unifying Italy and Germany in particular
    • The Unifications now occur in a way that is more ‘on schedule’, but we still want to change them so that they mechanically behave in a more historically plausible way
  • General AI tweaks to have AI countries play in a more believable, immersive way
    • Significant changes have been made to the diplomatic AI in both 1.1 and 1.2 but this is an area that is going to continue receiving attention from us for some time, particularly when it comes to making the AI less opaque in its reasoning (for example, explaining why they sided against you in a diplomatic play despite good relations)
New:
  • Adding more country, state and region-specific content to enhance historical flavor of different countries

Diplomacy​

Done:
  • The ability to expand your primary demands in a diplomatic play beyond just one wargoal (though this has to be done in such a way that there’s still a reason for countries to actually back down)
  • Adding additional primary demands was added to the game in update 1.2
Not Updated:
  • ‘Reverse-swaying’, ie the ability to offer to join a side in a play in exchange for something
  • More things to offer in diplomatic plays, like giving away your own land for support
  • Trading (or at least giving away) states
  • Foreign investment and some form of construction in other countries, at least if they’re part of your market
  • Improving and expanding on interactions with and from subjects, such as being able to grant and ask for more autonomy through a diplomatic action
New:
  • Allowing peace deals to be negotiated during a Diplomatic Play instead of only having the option to give in

Internal Politics​

Updated:
  • (Moved from ‘Other’) Making it more interesting and ‘competitive’ but also more challenging to play in a more conservative and autocratic style
  • We have made some changes here, such as locking laws behind regressive distributions of power and changing GDP to not unfairly favor manufacturing economies but this is still an area where we want to do more
New:
  • Improving the mechanics of law enactment and revolutions to be more engaging for the player to interact with
  • Adding more mechanics for characters and giving the player more reason to care about individual characters in your country:
  • Adding laws that expand on diversity of countries and introduce new ways to play the game

Other​

Done:
  • Making it easier to get an overview of your Pops and Pop factors such as Needs, Standard of Living and Radicals/Loyalists
    • Update 1.2 added new overviews for Pop Needs and better explanations for the reasons behind radicals and loyalists
  • Experimenting with autonomous private-sector construction and increasing the differences in gameplay between different economic systems (though as I’ve said many times, we are never going to take construction entirely out of the hands of the player)
    • Autonomous private-sector construction was added to the game in update 1.2
  • Ironing out some of the kinks with the late-game economy and the AI’s ability to develop key resources such as oil and rubber
    • While the economic AI is definitely going to continue to receive improvements, the specific issue of the AI never developing these key resources should be fixed
New:
  • Improving Alerts and the Current Situation widget to provide more useful and actionable information.

Just as last time we shared these plans, the above is not an exhaustive list of everything we want to do, and I can’t give an exact timeline for any of the individual points or which precise future update they will be a part of. This list also still only covers changes and additions that will be part of free updates! We are planning to continue releasing dev diaries like this updating you on our progress after each major update to the game.

That’s all for today’s update, I hope you found it informative! Next week we’ll dive right back into regular dev diaries as we start going over the details of what we have in the works for Update 1.3, though I’ll note that we won’t be ready to talk about the release date for that update. See you then!
 
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lachek said:
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.
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This makes a lot of sense. Maybe there is something that could be done, like attaching some colored tassels to the icon or something along those line that could give the player a hint as to what sort of issues are currently inside the the alert? Even it it's somewhat arbitrary, any sort of additional feedback would be useful.

Something like a red ribbon indicates expensive goods, green ribbon represents available decisions, blue ribbon is a taxation issue, etc.
 
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Everything looks great, appreciate the info.

Regarding the intervention and non intervention of the AI in diplo plays, I feel like their are a number of issues combining to confuse us players.

We want to strategise but find it hard to predict what will happen in a diplo play.
Some issues are:
1. AI relations, AI attitude and AI strategy - it isn't easy to understand what affect these will have in a diplo play. For example, genial attitude countries joining against you makes no sense based on the information the player sees.
2. The UI can be difficult to work with, ideally you would be able to see on the screen before the Diplo play a little bit more detail about the three above items.
3. Perhaps more granularity is needed with attitudes and relations - instead of just cautious or genial, maybe the AI could see the player as 'expansionist' which would help us realise that they may try to contain us.

I find it all very frustrating while playing to be honest, although I enjoy the game and appreciate the work you guys are putting in.
 
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Thank you for the update. I'm really pleased that investment in, and interactions with, subjects are high on your priority list. That's the thing I find most frustrating at the moment (partly of course because 1.2 removed a lot of annoying things).
anbeck said:
I think it could be nice if the game allowed for a pool of characters not associated with any IG, just to represent important people in your country (some of which may never become members or lead IGs). With some historical characters, such as Sigmund Freud, it doesn't feel right that they'd be leading an IG. So these could hang around in a pool separate of IGs and intervene in the political process episodically, for example by publicly taking sides in a law debate.

As you say, IGs could be expanded to give 1-3 positions to "secondary" associates of IGs in addition to the leader. The characters from the pool could then upgrade to become associates or supporters of IGs. This line of secondary IG characters could also be the pool from which the net IG leader will be recruited - this would make the at times immersion-breaking recruitment of generals to IG leaders less frequent (sure, it makes sense that the Armed Forces recruit their leaders from generals, and it is plausible for some other IGs as well. But I'm pretty sure I've seen generals become the leader of the Devout as well).
Furthermore, the game could provide tools for the player to influence who will become the next leader by making the secondary characters appear in a more or less attractive light, either through events or by giving us a mini-version of suppress/bolster interactions just for these secondary IG characters.

This character rework would pave the way for an eventual IG rework, which would allow for factions within IGs.
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I echo the desire in this and other comments to see a wider range of characters. This would improve our ability to tell stories about our nations. It could also create more interesting political dynamics. For example, I would like to have to choose between a prime minister with more competence and one who can bring their ethnic group to support the government.

However, I'm a little bit nervous about characters not linked to IGs. I think what makes *Victoria* unique is the pops and the way that you must consider them, so that you are 'gardening' the nation as a whole, not a collection of characters. So characters should always be linked to pops, whether through IGs or some other mechanism. But IGs seem the core link for the time being.
 
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I would really like to see an "Hemicycle view". It would be way more immersive to visualise your Assembly with colors representing parties.
 
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Karzender said:
Along these lines, it would be nice if, when an IG leader retires, to have an additional notification (ideally in the same alert) telling me who the new person in charge is. Every time leadership of an IG changes, I want to know who the new person in charge is, but to do so I have to look at the retired/dead person and navigate to their IG and from there to their leader.

So, something like "X has retired from political life. The new leader of the Rural Folk is Y."
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I am exactly the same and it seems like this would be a quick win.
 
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lachek said:
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.
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I think he was talking about when a battle starts with 100k vs 100k, but ends up with 3k vs 2k because everyone else is a casualty and somehow it takes forever for those few remaining soldiers to die.
 
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SeekTruthFromFx said:
However, I'm a little bit nervous about characters not linked to IGs. I think what makes *Victoria* unique is the pops and the way that you must consider them, so that you are 'gardening' the nation as a whole, not a collection of characters. So characters should always be linked to pops, whether through IGs or some other mechanism. But IGs seem the core link for the time being.
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You are of course correct.

I got carried away by my frustration of seeing Sigmund Freud as Chancellor and of everybody recruiting generals all the time. Something needs to be done about the latter, and I am sure there's a good way to do this without the game becoming Victoria Kings 3.

EDIT: I think I can revise this post: having a pool of "independent" characters would not result in a Great Man theory of the era. It could be done by having these characters as organic intellectuals in the Gramscian sense: they only gain political and historical efficacy by becoming the mouthpiece/organiser of a social group. As individuals in the pool of independent characters, their influence is highly restricted.
 
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I do hope that the increased focus on characters includes generals, because I think combined with other changes to warfare, we'd be closer to a situation where the player has to carefully chose who to put in command where (split fronts are a part of this) and may be forced into suboptimal choices due to internal politics (or may have to sacrifice some internal unity and risk worse happening in order to put the general you want in charge).

Making warfare interesting on the strategic level means situations like the North in the ACW are possible: you have trouble with your generals, who can't seem to fight effectively or follow your strategic goals (I'd again like to push the idea of more detailed stances than we have now, with the interactions between the two sides leading to different styles of conflict). Maybe as a player you find a better solution than Lincoln did earlier and survive the political fallout or maybe you end up imploding the country due to forcing out politically powerful and popular generals.
 
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Have you found the problem for the increased number of IG causing performance issues? Do you plan to add more IG to the games at some point, maybe taking inspiration from the Better Politics Mod?
 
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lachek said:
"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.
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It is a game about economics! And I think a lot of Vic1 players are rather interested in the concepts involved, since it caused interesting failure states for the global economy in that game's simulation.
 
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Karzender said:
Along these lines, it would be nice if, when an IG leader retires, to have an additional notification (ideally in the same alert) telling me who the new person in charge is. Every time leadership of an IG changes, I want to know who the new person in charge is, but to do so I have to look at the retired/dead person and navigate to their IG and from there to their leader.

So, something like "X has retired from political life. The new leader of the Rural Folk is Y."
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I wholeheartedly agree.

A workaround right now is the following: set up the retirement message as a toast. Then hover over the IG name in the message, and the tool tip will show the leader ideology of the retired person's successor.
 
Looking good!
I am really looking forward to the Diplomacy improvements. However what seems to be really needed is a trade off mechanic to make it all go better!

Trading colonial provinces/interests as happened in the Crisis of Marocco.
 
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are there no plans to add some late game mechanics like great wars and/or dismantle empire CB. these were the only reason for me to play late game in vic2 (and usually pretty fun :))

as of now, beside new technologies, new production methods etc, what is different from 1836 and 1905 for instance?
 
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one more thing, when it comes to german unification - i have seen austria to often form gross germany, and i feel i should be less often (and harder to achieve/maintain).

ideally the way unification for germany should change somehow,
 
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Internal politics
  • Adding laws that expand on diversity of countries and introduce new ways to play the game
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i hope this means that we will be able to have an economic law that allows mixing of ownership production methods - like coop, govt owned, private owned etc
 
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I'd like to leave 2 suggestions.

First, private construction AI needs to be SERIOUSLY improved! I was playing with the UK and the AI was making huuuuuge investments in manufacturing and urban buildings in my colonies. I ended up with multiple levels of Steel Mills in the Falkland Islands, Arts Academies in Ghana and Furniture Factories in Guyana! Doesn't make any sense! I needed those investments INSIDE the UK!

My suggestion is to change how the AI does private investments by differentiating between Incorporated States and Unincorporated States. For example, a rule that the AI would make investments mostly, but not exclusively, in the Manufacturing and Urban sector in Incorporated States, while in Unincorporated States it would direct the vast majority of it's money into the Resource and Agricultural sectors.

My other suggestion relates to Mass Migrations. This concerns mostly the USA but it can apply to Canada, Australia, etc as well. Everytime I play with the USA I always end up with the states of the Midwest, Northwest and Great Plains with MASSIVE populations! I'm talking the Dakota's and Montana and Wyoming with 5, 6 million people while New York has like 3.5 , Massachusetts 2 and New Jersey 700K! Because those are always the targets of Mass Migrations, they end up with these huge populations.

My suggestion is to make only coastal states the targets of Mass Migrations. This way you can replicate what actually happened in history where the coastal states absorved most immigrants and then they spread out through the territories through Internal Migration, while the coastal states still experienced huge population growth.
 
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Wizzington is there any chance we might see laws regarding:
(a) centralization vs decentralization (unitary states, federations and confederacies) which could help reduce turmoil costs or increase authority
(b) the length of the working day (8 hour workday, 10 hour workday, unregulated workday) which could improve SoL and reduce unemployment at the price of more workers needed to run a factory
(c) agrarian land ownership models (enclosure acts, homesteading, rural land reform etc) as distinct from the current economy laws

I think these are the 3 law categories that are most historically relevant for the time period
 
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lachek said:
"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.
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That makes sense. I feel like something like that would be good content to include as part of a DLC since it would be interesting it to some people but not essential to the game, so paywalling it wouldn't cause any major issues.
 
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