Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #91 - Post-Summer Plans

[Wizzington]

Good afternoon,a great dd and all of theses changes are very good.However,i have a question:
1)Will goods substitutions revisions include another way to manage the buy package files,mainly for easier mod compatibility?
Thanks for any replies about this.

There's no revision to the overall structure, just to how the values are set. What kind of file management are you asking for?

 

[Wizzington]

View attachment 1000987
Amazing! didn't know you could do that without breaking the engine. This led countries specialization before they got access to any global goods chain. Will you review the initial resources for each nation to balance this? or the initial setup is already good to go?

Very nice addition for competitive advantage to appear in the game. I only hope that trade between nations can become more prominent in the game. If you do the autonomous trade that was mentioned in the other DD thay may help, the player should not always try to produce everything himself.

We will be reviewing and tweaking the setup to account for these changes.

 

[Wizzington]

Are you doing any internal experiments with making it harder for pops to gain qualifications required for doing the higher wage jobs? Right now this mechanic seems to have almost no impact (if there is workforce in a state it will almost always fill all the empty positions in the current economy).

Nothing ongoing right now but we have some ideas of how we want to improve this mechanic in the future. One of the ideas I've been toying around with is to have universities be qualifications factories (Student pops!).

 

[PDX_Pelly]

The most important feature ever finally added:

SEPARATE VINEYARDS

All great stuff and looking forward to it!

We couldn't stop the French people's obsession any longer!

 

[PDX_Pelly]

Great changes all around, with update 1.5 lining up with the Spheres of Influence DLC this could completely shift gameplay to a much better direction, especially if developers do touch qualifications in following patches.

Update 1.5 is coming this year and is not the expansion update.

1.5 is a big free update to the base game (similar to 1.2), which plans to improve several areas of the game, most notably Diplomacy, Warfare and replayability/challenge of the core economic loop in major ways.

 

[lachek]

You want to make it "easier" to balance the economy? My goodness, how much easier does it have to become? We need more in there to make economic management more difficult and especially more interesting! It's as seamless and frictionless as a plastic sheet.

EDIT: I see from a couple of negative reactions that I may have not made myself clear. I do not mean that a better system of good substitution and differentiated production systems are not good things to propose. They are. But overall it is far too easy to grow the economy to stratospheric heights in this game, and there is very little of interest in making it do so. So "ease" of managing the economy is not what's called for, in my opinion.

To be clear, when I say "balance" I mean "balance", not making the game less challenging. As it stands at the moment, several buildings are configured such that it's extremely fiddly or even impossible to produce enough of one good without making an excess of another. This is not the kind of challenge we want the game to present.

Increasing the challenge level of economic gameplay is one of our main goals with Update 1.5, but the building split and PM rebalance is not related to "difficulty" in the way you mean it.

 

[lachek]

I think you should prioritize improving the speed of vic3. The update slightly improved the performance of the game, however it is still far from its best when the game launched. Wish you great summer!

We have programmers permanently assigned to performance and it's being worked on continuously. We will mention most such improvements in changelogs, but you likely won't hear of upcoming improvements in advance unless it's due to a change in design.

 

[lachek]

How will this work on non-tradeable "goods" (services, transportation and electricity)?

Now that we have a more robust system around local prices we can trial making these goods truly local-only, but we'll have to provide more details on this at a later point.

 

[lachek]

I love the announced changes. I'm looking forward to version 1.5.
Speaking of war changes, I wanted to report an exploit that hopefully could be changed. It is about the possibility of changing the types of troops of the insurgent states prior to a civil war. While the game prevents you from reducing barracks, it still allows you to change production methods, hurting the AI because of the gear reset penalty.

This exploit will become irrelevant after the changes with Formations, for reasons I will be happy to get into more in 6 weeks or so

 

[lachek]

How is the possible performance impact of local prices so far during tests? This is my biggest worry.
If we can achieve this with minimum issues it would be amazing.

There's actually no difference, since we already had local price computations due to the way Market Access works. This applies the same factors in a different way and adds more gameplay around it to achieve the effect of local variation.

 

[lachek]

Agreed, this is probably the single best addition to the game yet honestly.

Havent read through the whole thread yet so sorry if this has been addressed, but will adding new buildings negatively impact performance? I am very pro-granularity and distinct wineries are a very welcome addition, ideally I'd like to see more of that kind of thing, but not at the expense of actually being able to play the game (I am well above rec specs before anyone asks)

New building types _can_ impact performance if it leads to construction of more buildings overall, yes. So we're careful about how many types we're adding and have to balance such that we're incentivizing constructing tall rather than wide. It's absolutely possible to increase the number of building types without increasing the total number of buildings in the game, but it needs design- and AI work to get there.

 

[lachek]

Question about autonomus investment and local synergies.
Will the "AI" build to maximise the synergies or will it as it does today, just build all over the place?

The AI understands local pricing and acts accordingly.
Furthermore, with 1.3.5 the AI should be considerably less random in how it builds.

 

[lachek]

Hmm isn't multiple battles taking into account army size? Because as I read the DD, with the change, it will be better to have 3 generals with 20 regiments each rather than one general with 60 regiments, as the former will be capable of initiating 3 simultaneous battles on a front and win 3 times faster.

This can quickly lead into general microing and for the lategame that can easily be hundreds of clicks...

Why not add an auto battle size setting per army, or a divider based on the size of the front? Perhaps base it off the generals rank or on the total nuber of regiments?

Multiple battles will have limiting factors applied to it to accommodate for the issues you're referring to. The exact details aren't determined yet and we'll discuss this more after the summer.

 

[lachek]

that wouldn't be (as big of) a problem if buildings didn't generate tons of pops each, would it?

Buildings still have modifier nodes that need updating which is pretty heavy, but yeah, it would be less of a problem if each building didn't also generate several additional pops. The number of pops per building is not that high on average though. Unemployment has a tendency to create a lot of additional pops as well.