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

[funkyfreshrat]

While they weren't mentioned in the developer diary itself, I hope we see certain historical immersion improvements in regards to what is already present in-game before we see anything new added. We still have characters with incorrect traits who look nothing like their historical counterparts as well as a decent amount of tags that should be present at game start as colonies and what not but exist as non-incorporated states (Bahamas, Jamaica, Malta, Puerto Rico, etc.). There are also formable/releasable tags like West Indies which feel deeply disconnected with whatever historical reality during this period they were attempting to represent (No necessary colonies exist at start as colonies to pursue forming West Indies under GB, tag formation requirements also currently ignores states that were originally present) and likely need to be adjusted.

Adding new split state colonial tags in the Caribbean/Gran Colombia/etc. for the colonial governorships present there at game start under the relevant European powers there would, aside from improving historical accuracy, help in the long term to prevent strange situations such as absurdly costly wars between GB and France over nonsense like unnecessary treaty ports.

 

[tstockle]

Finding solutions for the issue where theaters can split into multiple (sometimes even dozens) of tiny fronts as pockets are created

I wonder if it might be better for players if, in the War overview window and the General assignment window, fronts were grouped together under whatever "theatre" they belong to, as well as allowing generals of high enough rank, say 3 or higher, to be assigned to a theatre itself. Then whenever new fronts are split off, this high level commander can divert some forces to man the gaps. The balance of troops deployed can even be influenced by traits, such as "cautious" prioritizing parity with the enemy or "bold" prioritizing supremacy in the direction of war goals/strategic objectives.

 

[thestonecow]

Some nice and much needed improvements!

But what I am desperatly missing on this list are Great Wars: Big lategame challenges that test the society the player has built, involve most of the world / Great Powers, and whose peace treaty can completly change the world (balkanising nations like Austria-Hungary or Russia; seizing the entire colonial empire like with Germany after WWI)

The current Diplomatic Incident- and Peace-system are just terribly ill equipped for something so important, that even Vicy2 with its timegated crisis system did better.
We can't join ongoing wars, like Italy, Romania or the USA did in WWI. We can demand far to little colonies and released nations in Diplomatic Plays, which only the war leaders can do, and even that only befor the war even starts.

 

[tstockle]

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.

I think what the poster was asking about is when a battle begins with 30k vs 20k and lasts for 2 months, but the last month is spent whittling away the remaining 5k men of the losing side, in some kind of protracted Alamo style situation. Surely once one side is utterly broken and surrounded, they will surrender more often than fighting to the last man.

 

[requiem48]

Seems great, i am waiting for the next updates

 

[mcgluszak]

Why is it possible to send generals to a front in a diplomatic play before a war starts, but it's not possible to plan a naval invasion the same way? Also, IMO naval and land warfare seem to be completely disconnected. It's possible to "trick" AI into sending all of its armies to some distant location and at the same time quickly invade their homeland. In some ways naval invasions are completely overpowered, in some ways they are useless, but it doesn't sum up to a balanced and sensible experience at all.

 

[CountCristo]

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.

One other thing, you talk about there being a lack of "no brainer" actions - totally fairly. I agree that the V3 team has done a good job of making most decisions *real* in that there are viable options in most situations.

What I don't really follow is your rule of thumb on alerts.
When a drop down appears in Eu4 there are 4 main options:
- Resolve the alert such that it goes away
- Leave it there to be a persistent reminder of an ongoing situation
- Dismiss it such that it comes back next time it is relevant
- Dismiss it such that it never comes back

each of these are valid, and have different use cases for different players and different alerts. It seems (from your rule of them as described) that you are considering only the first and last of these options when considering how alerts should be designed - so I'd like to speak up for the middle two.

- Leave it there to be a persistent reminder of an ongoing situation
This is useful to inform the player about a situation that either doesn't want resolving, or will take along time to resolve, that they non-the-less want to know about persistently. I personally feel almost forced to play with the situation menu open constantly because a LOT of things fall into this category, I want the information on screen at all times - and the only way to do that in game at current is through a (I'm sure we can agree) intentionally intrusive UI element.
To give just one example - a high priced government good. This is something that I clearly want to stop being the case, but that won't happen fast (at least sometimes) when my way to change it is by increasing domestic production. So what I need is an alert that persists while the situation is ongoing, and then noticeably goes away when it is resolved - something EU4 does very simply and elegantly, and V3 currently struggles with.

- Dismiss it such that it comes back next time it is relevant
Maybe I don't care right now- because I've reviewed the situation and decided it's not a problem for example - but this might not always be the case.
Pretty simple usecase for this one.

 

[Panagean]

Thanks for taking on player feedback. I'm really glad to see that "fix politics" has migrated onto the to-do list.

Excellent suggestion! Part of this was actually already in our work backlog as mechanics to prototype, but I will add the rest to the list as well with minimal adjustments.

Not at all, actually - the AI already does all these computations for their own buildings, we'd just need to do it for the player's buildings as well which is no big deal. The additional factors you mention above pure profit puts a little bit of extra strain on it, but not at all so much it'd cause the complexity of the operation to notably change.

Could I ask whether this (capitalist-controlled autonomous PM methods) is still on the to-do list?

(This is the original post - https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-of-production-methods.1555604/#post-28730500)

 

[Melange_Thief]

I don't see anything in here about map fixes. Are you going to fix the deeply immersion breaking map errors in the Pacific Northwest ever, or will I be permanently reliant on a mod to fix the complete absence of Seattle's primary waterway?

 

[$ilent_$trider]

I don't see anything in here about map fixes. Are you going to fix the deeply immersion breaking map errors in the Pacific Northwest ever, or will I be permanently reliant on a mod to fix the complete absence of Seattle's primary waterway?

The Puget Sound is a lie.

 

[TrainMachine]

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.

Oh, so the Current Situations button is meant to contain things that we're meant to think about now? Last I heard, you were using it to protect us from the great Bandersnatch of 'information overload', i.e. having to think. How lovely that you've got a single solution to completely opposite problems!

Let us not forget that the vast diversity of alerts hidden inside the Big Orange Button means that we have to click every time it lights up just to see if NEW BIG PROBLEM is important and actionable or literally nothing. I suppose you must have some reason for it, but to my way of looking at things, concatenating 'natives are mad about colonists' with 'input goods shortages', 'infrastructure shortfalls', and with several other topics including that one minor issue that blinks on and off every few in-game days, which therefore appears to be a completely new alert that I have to click the button to find out about, makes me wonder if you actually want the interface to be more frustrating than fun.

 

[399311]

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.

In other words, won't there be cross-border investment in 1.3?

 

[Standstill]

Wouldn't implementing a "lite" version of HoI4's warfare & troops management system make more sense, and solve many of the warfare problems?

 

[MastL]

Thanks for weekly free content development,it's getting better.

 

[Messy]

Please give UI some love. There are still a lot of huge icons that brings zero information.

 

[Searry]

Why not reduce build queue micro with the "blueprints" It's mind numbing gameplay.

 

[Cymsdale]

I think - if we had a perfectly predictable AI, diplomacy would turn into more of a puzzle game than a strategy game.

I don't think having it a puzzle necessarily makes it less of a strategy game. If you swing too far in the unpredictable direction any feeling of strategic decision making can go completely out the window.

Not that I am arguing for completely predictable, just from a realism standpoint.

I think more visibility is always better. The Civilization series struggled with this same kind thing when they tried to hide the AI decision making for diplomatic choices. No matter how rational the decisions may be behind the scenes, if the players have no information the decisions made by the AI can feel like they are completely random.

I'd like to see the factors that go in to the decision, and if the ultimately choice does boil down to some roll of the dice I'd like to actually see something closer to the real odds, not a vague description of "highly likely" or whatever it currently says.

 

[adil3tr]

The three most needed changes are

• Let us develop needed resources in our dominions and puppets, to change the current situation where annexing is neccesary just to produce enough opium, oil or rubber. This also might need to come with ways to spin colonies off as colonial vassals, specifically in Africa.
• Have development operate differently in different conditions. Under the current system, you can build factories in indonesia, africa, india, etc, both as homeland powers or colonial ones, way too easily. This leads to an issue where you build huge amounts of factories in any colonial territory you can grab in the later game, and there's never really a reason not to besides its unincorporated status. While that deals with some of the concerns, mainly the lack of taxation, it ends up treating a french belgium the same as it treats an american celebes in terms of what economic development you can do and how fast you can do it. In 1936 most player nations will have basically no regional specialization at all, which feels really ahistorical and not thematic at all. This also means as a minor power like Sokoto, you can just join a customs union and immediately industrialize, which removes most of the interesting gameplay and replaces it with just maximizing investment and acquiring more people. Mods that reduce qualification and literacy gain seem to help a lot with this, although they don't fix it by any means.
• Reverse swaying; right now players can make massive sacrifices in wars for basically no benefit, which encourages you to ignore diplomatic plays in favor of just declaring war on a participant in the war so you can get what you actually might want, and discourages players from ever actually caring about most diplomatic plays that aren't directly affecting them..

Also there's a mod that replaces the workmodes for ownership to shift more ownership from shopkeepers/farmers to capitalists over time, which concentrates their power but also leads to more money in the investment pool, and I think that would really useful in the main game. There's another mod that makes construction a function of urban centers, which also would be really useful for making growth rates more rational and province specific, as would requiring construction to consume some services in the province you're constructing in. That way building in rural provinces would start slow and speed up over time.

 

[adil3tr]

For me the civil war still seems largely broken. I still see most of the US become the confederacy or no war happen too often. I don't think the current system where any revolt in America with landowners involved becomes the confederacy makes sense in practice. I think the civil war should be basically scripted and only apply as a revolt from a maintain slavery political movement. Maybe the american slaveowners should be their own interest group in addition to landlords in general, with working in a building with slaves in it being what determines attraction to the institution, or it should be a workmode for farms in the US limited to the slave states.

 

[Jespoke]

Diplomacy
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

This whole section consists of features that are high on my wishlist. I especially hope the first and last point get a lot of options.

Conspicuously absent from the list is the way revolutions in a country at war completely break the existing war. That is a very common and devastating occurrence that really needs to be addressed. And it is exacerbated by the separate problem that missing even a single wargoal completely stops you from winning wars.