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 12151 Bug Reports 8019 User Mods 551 Multiplayer 65 Suggestions 3292 Tech Support 952 After Action Reports (AARs)
Previous dev diary Next dev diary
Show only dev responses

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

16_9.jpg

​
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.

DD79_01.jpg

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!
 
  • 162Like
  • 37Love
  • 25
  • 11
  • 2Haha
  • 1
Reactions:
Sort by date Sort by reaction score
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.
Click to expand...
The problem isn't the battle size setup script. The problem is the lack of in game information about what is going on combined with the lack of tools to do something about it. Without a UI which clearly tells the player what is going on, the ability to somewhat control the size of the frontline and without full control over how many troops to send (i.e. not sending every man assigned to a general) the system will never become good or interesting.
 
  • 8
  • 1
Reactions:
Allowing for Foreign investments will really enhance game play! :) Please have the cash reserves of a foreign owned factory count as part of the owners reserves. This would add the mechanism for dominating indirectly through investment (the way the US to a large extent did, in contrast to direct colonial control).
 
This development timeline is helpful, but it's also proof that you should have released this game into Early Access. Instead, you baited the community into paying full price for a purportedly full release. If you needed to develop and flesh out core gameplay elements while realizing revenue, utilize Early Access.

As a long time player of Paradox games, I do not appreciate the gaslighting that Victoria 3 Patch 1.0 could actually be called a Victoria game. I think it's a little disingenuous that Paradox did not acknowledge the plain fact that the game is far from complete on launch.

EDIT: For example, politics is completely unfinished except for the law enactment RNG mini-game and this roadmap acknowledges that only Autocracies--the simplest play type--are "complete"; autonomous investment was introduced to this series in October 2006 in Victoria Revolutions and here we are in early 2023 celebrating its semi-return; and I still cannot see why a particular population is experiencing Turmoil--there is no tooltip and the general advice is simply to raise their standard of living (??). Once upon a time, you could cool turmoil significantly by passing reforms but again, politics is broken. Foreign investment was in the base game of Victoria 2 and was a way to generate influence with that country. I suppose that I should not be surprised that is also missing.
 
Last edited:
  • 5
  • 3
  • 1Haha
Reactions:
Ranamar said:
One thing I've noticed is that it's extremely hard to get a handle on how different powers see each other diplomatically. The information is there, in one of the map lenses, but it's a lot of work to find and integrate. With that said, I also don't know how I would represent it, either. I'm not sure two dimensions can effectively contain "Here's what everyone thinks of either of the two primary belligerents," although maybe a table of likely initial intervention opinions would do it? That's the part that is definitely not visible until the play starts, but that might also be too much exposure.
Click to expand...

Need like a "matrix" or one of those Force Atlas 2 graphs of interconnected countries.

I also really miss the defined Spheres of Influence system from Vicky 2. Unless Im missing something. The idea was good, if a little slow to move.

I also think that Diplomacy is an EXCELLENT way to use characters better and get some really cool emergent storylines. Think Alexander Burns who led the British Delegation in Afghanistan. When the Akhbar Kahn's revolution sparked off Burns was slaughtered by the Afghanis. Put a person, or better, select a team of your characters as delegates to a nation. Say its to a minor nation from your GP nation. You send 1,2,3 dudes to lead the delegation, each might have a bonus or malus based on personality, stats, religion, traits. ASsign some gifts too while you are at it. These dudes taken off the board for travel time, like the EU4 envoys. Then at the destination, hopefully will speed up the goal - boost/damage relations - meanwhile, different event can fire, possibly getting more dangerous in hostile areas the longer they stay. As we can see that Espionage is centered in the diplomacy realm - EU4 more than HOI

In a similar vein, you could assing a delegation to a "White Peace conference" that would (if this was old fashioned paradox wars anyway), provide a boost to your warscore...maybe take certain things off the table, again on stats, personality, political party goals (masterful inaction school might boost your warscore by 10 but strictly limit annexation possibilities). And cherry on top, the possibility could exist of a double cross. It's happened enough IRL! Again, Afghanistan, the Elfinstone-Kahn peace conference was a trap that led to the retreat from Kabul.

Just an aside, I really hope every dev/designer on the game read The Great War by Peter Hopkirk and then through the Flashman series, and maybe Taipan by Clavell. Those books alone will provide all the inspiration anyone could need for building an Victorian age sandbox with real RP possibilities. The Victorian era was all about big - big monuments, big buildings, world fairs, big expeditions, and larger than life personalities doing crazy stuff.

Frederick Burnarby, a 6'something monster of a man and British soldier decides for his vacation hes just going to go and visit Khiva, an overland thousand mile route over unmapped rugged terrain filled with murderous tribes. Not exactly glamping. (PS Another great book on the period.) Or how many dudes were just like yeah ill roll down into the dark continent through, again murderous tribes, marlaria, frkn panthers....just for the mad props of finding the source of the Nile. Ewing Young, on expedition through the rockies and his right hand the famous Kit Carson. Larger than life. And bonus, unlike earlier larger than life European characters, these dudes often didnt engage in a little casual genocide on the side. Look at you Cortez.
 
  • 2
Reactions:
Great DD! Keep up with the good work!

One thing I think may be nice to add is the political compromise between reform and status quo. I know there's the "Opposition members put forth demands" event but that's too much on the favor of the reform side, with the demanding opposition getting nothing but a more angry reforming IG (and doesn't usually even matter as -3 is almost nothing). What I'm talking about is if there's a very powerful and/or radical political movement supporting/resisting a very huge change (e.g. a change from Autocracy to Universal Suffrage), and the reform has been going on for quite a while but nowhere near the end, maybe there could be a compromise solution where a sort of half-leaf reform is implemented (e.g. instead of going from Autocracy all the way to Universal Suffrage, the reform stops somewhere between Landed Voting to Census Suffrage depending on the power/radicalness of political movements). Of course, that wouldn't work for all reforms, but I have the feeling that this could actually work on quite a lot of Vicky 3 political reforms. I mean, the essence of politics is compromise, right?
 
  • 2Like
  • 1
Reactions:
Wizzington said:
  • 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
Click to expand...
iirc my first 1.2 game had Italy unite in 1838, so I think there might still be some tuning needed there :)

lachek said:
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.
Click to expand...
When thinking of strategic games, I'd think of chess much sooner than poker, but the current diplomacy system feels like it has much more in common with the latter.
We're basically unable to see the perspective other nations have of a situation and thus cannot even begin to reason about what their future moves might be.
In effect we're playing blind, relying only on obscure "tells", until the figurative cards are already on the table, at which point there's no more decisions to be made.
 
  • 3
  • 1Haha
Reactions:
heliostellar said:
Early Access.
Click to expand...
I get where you're coming from, but, well.

When you say Early Access to me, the first thing that springs to mind is not "high quality unfinished product from a large, well-established, financially secure publisher".

It's "low quality indie dreck that gets abandoned when the dev gets evicted / gets bored / gets hospitalized / gets busted / gets a boyfriend/girlfriend / gets put on academic probation / realizes they'd make a better hourly rate flipping burgers".
 
  • 4
  • 2Haha
  • 1Like
Reactions:
grommile said:
I get where you're coming from, but, well.

When you say Early Access to me, the first thing that springs to mind is not "high quality unfinished product from a large, well-established, financially secure publisher".

It's "low quality indie dreck that gets abandoned when the dev gets evicted / gets bored / gets hospitalized / gets busted / gets a boyfriend/girlfriend / gets put on academic probation / realizes they'd make a better hourly rate flipping burgers".
Click to expand...
Well, I was trying to think of a constructive way to criticize them dumping out a rough skeleton of a game that can barely emulate Autocracy at full price.
 
  • 2
  • 1Like
Reactions:
I just want to add something I believe many others have said before me:

Diplomacy:
- Ability to grant individual states to your puppets if they have a claim on it
- Ability to claim individual states from your puppets if you have a claim on it
- Ability to set a "conquer state" wargoal in the name of your puppets (with or without claim)
 
  • 2Like
  • 2
Reactions:
I'm not sure the ACW is "fixed". My recent run throughs show that its not working well. I rarely occurs and then if it does, the whole reconstructive path seems very broken.
 
Yang Lianzhou(Yoshimoto) said:
I do want to empower the province markets rather than letting them rot as external powers-no matter national or international buyers-suck honey from the province. Maybe let the local buyers' demands be fulfilled first?
Click to expand...
This is a topic over which many lances were broken. Devs said they acknowledge that the current model leads to misrepresentation of IRL regional specialization. However, there are no good solutions mechanically. I believe the latest thing they named as a possible solution is capping market access on a level less than 100%, to make prices different between resource-rich and resource-poor regions without properly simulating logistic costs. I don't know if this is still the main approach, but I definitely like this, as the outcomes sound promising.

I do think the idea should be elaborated and expanded though, with different market caps for different goods (food, especially meat and fish, should be much harder to transport, than furniture, and it -- than art) and the ability to improve the cap with tech (so for developed countries it should go from, say, 60% in 1836 to 90% in 1936).
 
  • 1Like
  • 1
Reactions:
yurcick said:
This is a topic over which many lances were broken. Devs said they acknowledge that the current model leads to misrepresentation of IRL regional specialization. However, there are no good solutions mechanically. I believe the latest thing they named as a possible solution is capping market access on a level less than 100%, to make prices different between resource-rich and resource-poor regions without properly simulating logistic costs. I don't know if this is still the main approach, but I definitely like this, as the outcomes sound promising.

I do think the idea should be elaborated and expanded though, with different market caps for different goods (food, especially meat and fish, should be much harder to transport, than furniture, and it -- than art) and the ability to improve the cap with tech (so for developed countries it should go from, say, 60% in 1836 to 90% in 1936).
Click to expand...
I thought the biggest problem is to minimize the factors provincially so that they wont cause significant lags? Then nothing would be able to help, otherwise i would suggest setting a basic internal-external ratio and to spread the goods determined external to its neighbor states by the square of their Urbanization values' ratio. If state Shanxi have 100 Coal and Peking 10 level city, Hebei 5 Level, then 4:1 it would be. A base number is set to be 10 to spread to the provinces with little to no citys. All the goods spread 1 state each fortnight(maybe 2 or 3 if the state is bigger than 30 or 60 provinces).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back