As Designed Migration controls currently prevent almost all mass migrations under Racial Segregation since 1.8

[ScaleZenzi]

Integrity​

I have verified my game files (on Steam)​

Yes

I have disabled all mods​

Yes

Required​

Summary​

Migration controls currently prevent almost all mass migrations under Racial Segregation since 1.8

Description​

I've actually made a few posts about it detailing the problem and potential solutions, both on the forum and on reddit. Originally I thought it was a (poorly) thought out intentional decision, but it seems more like it was actually a bug/oversight the whole time. Here's a link to my previous posts for more detail:

https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria3/comments/1lexrcb/migration_controls_have_been_broken_since_18

Migration controls need tweaking - A possible solution to both it and Ahistorical migration

This seems to have slipped under the radar, but the cultural acceptance changes have actually transformed migration controls into one of the worst laws you can have. Obviously you'd get more immigration with open borders that you're missing out...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Migration controls changes - Suggestion

The current implementation of Migration Controls doesn't work. The recent acceptance changes have changed migration controls to require 60 acceptance to be eligible to both immigrate and mass immigrate. However, this acceptance doesn't seem to...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

To summarize:
- Migration controls currently have a restrictiveness of 60
- Migration controls currently don't seem to factor in religious acceptance, and thus only the base cultural acceptance from citizenship laws is factored in
- Racial Segregation has a language acceptance of 30, a Heritage acceptance of 50, and a combined acceptance of 70.
The end result is that under Racial Segregation, the only migration that is allowed is any that shares both a Language and a Heritage (ie America can only get Anglo immigration, SA countries can only get Spanish/Portuguese immigration, etc). Obviously this is unintentional, as it leads to the Americas being insanely underpopulated - Particularly South America, where every country starts with Migration controls and thus can only get it from Iberia.

Enacting Cultural Exclusion technically fixes this, but it's ahistorical for many countries throughout this period so it'd be better to just bump down the restrictiveness number for now.

As an aside, the Canadian and Australian states really need to start with Migration controls too, otherwise they get massive amounts of ahistorical Indian immigration every single game. Just giving them migration controls would be a sufficient stopgap fix until migration could be reworked to something more historical

Steps to reproduce​

Play as any South American nation, put migration controls on all your states, and AFK. You'll see how you don't get any migration aside from other South Americans or Iberia, and neither will any of your neighbors. Canada, Australia, and the US will still get them though since they start without migration controls

Game Version​

1.9.2

OS​

Windows

Additional​

Bug Type​

Other

Save Game​

Attachments​

Player Pain​

7

 

[lilcritt]

Can this be fixed with a mod?

 

[Ispil]

Can this be fixed with a mod?

Yes. Just change the law values in question.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Hello!

I talked to design and this was deemed WAS. Resolving as such.

 

[ScaleZenzi]

Hello!

I talked to design and this was deemed WAS. Resolving as such.

Are you sure they understood the issue properly? This was NOT how mass migrations worked pre-1.8 with migration controls, it used to allow for same heritage migration. This is a massive change that severely nerfs South America & any country that starts with migration controls.

I'd get it being WAD if mass migrations factor in religious acceptance, but they currently don't, which is the primary issue. There's tons of anecdotal evidence on the forum and sub about this. Here's one i found from a quick search:

https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria3/comments/1lizouf/if_im_on_migration_controls_will_a_culture_thats

It honestly seems like just an oversight in the same vein as the African American JE for the US being impossible to complete w/o multiculturalism. If religious acceptance got factored in I don't think there would be any problem

 

[NATOaster]

Yeah this really doesn't seem like it's working as designed

 

[lilcritt]

Hello!

I talked to design and this was deemed WAS. Resolving as such.

In that case can this be a suggestion for a change to that design

It honestly seems like just an oversight in the same vein as the African American JE for the US being impossible to complete w/o multiculturalism. If religious acceptance got factored in I don't think there would be any problem

Is that still a thing?

 

[GAGA Extrem]

I double checked, and yes it is WAD.

 

[ScaleZenzi]

I double checked, and yes it is WAD.

Thank you for double checking, though I genuinely do think this is a horrible change - especially when prior to the culture rework, racial segregation + migration controls allowed for same heritage migration just fine. I'm just going to make a suggestion thread instead, since I did have an idea for a more dynamic migration controls setup either way that'd be more historical.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

So.
Please bear with me until the end before coming to conclusions.

Yes, it's intentional as was reported back to you. Yes, we do understand the problem correctly. Yes, some things in this system are bugged, namely the missing impact of religion. BUT, even if we fixed the religion impact, we'd likely tweak the values so that the result stayed the same and you'd still not get other mass migrations than before with this set of laws.
The reason is quite simple: Because it would break the system in unwanted ways elsewhere on the globe.
Maybe some of you recall millions of Indians migrating to London in 1838 in one of the 1.8 patches? That was a very similar thing that happened there where the laws were not restrictive enough, causing a very strange behaviour.
It is very tricky, arguably impossible (as seen by this situation) to get the current system to feel right for all countries, for all culture combinations.
The religious acceptance playing a role was of course intended originally, but as we started implementation it was proving a lot more tricky than expected to get it in there, which is why we rely on the base value in most situations. But as mentioned before, the values have been adjusted accordingly to reach the intended behaviour.

I want to give some more context around this because I think it is important to get on the same page so that feedback becomes effective:
Just because it worked differently before 1.8, doesn't mean that it's wrong now. Our intention with the cultural rework was of course to deepen the room we have to play with. Instead of making it binary, we now have the scale on which acceptance lies.
60 is the value chosen because it corresponds with the threshold to the second highest bracket. The second highest bracket is also (not a coincidence) what we considered "Accepted" before. When all the narrative content was adjusted with 1.8, the initial pass was a mass replace to replace "accepted" with "second bracket/60 or higher" pretty much. And it has largely stayed this way.
So what I'm trying to explain is that the 60 isn't just a made up value, but it was chosen to reflect a similar behaviour. Under Racial Segregation with Migration Controls, you need to accepted basically. It doesn't always line up perfectly as shown here, but there's thought behind it.

All of this to say is that we'll probably not change this now as it would cause imbalance elsewhere, but that we are aware of the problem.
We have another opportunity to look at this with the release of National Awakening for reasons that I can't talk about, but it would likely still require a very much custom solution, e.g. with one of the new law variants which were not a thing before 1.9
And since that is the case, I also can't promise that we'll do it since it takes valuable time from elsewhere (as is always the case).

Hope that clears up some things around this topic.
Have a nice weekend, I'll check back in on this next week.

 

[CaesarVincens]

So.
Please bear with me until the end before coming to conclusions.

Yes, it's intentional as was reported back to you. Yes, we do understand the problem correctly. Yes, some things in this system are bugged, namely the missing impact of religion. BUT, even if we fixed the religion impact, we'd likely tweak the values so that the result stayed the same and you'd still not get other mass migrations than before with this set of laws.
The reason is quite simple: Because it would break the system in unwanted ways elsewhere on the globe.
Maybe some of you recall millions of Indians migrating to London in 1838 in one of the 1.8 patches? That was a very similar thing that happened there where the laws were not restrictive enough, causing a very strange behaviour.
It is very tricky, arguably impossible (as seen by this situation) to get the current system to feel right for all countries, for all culture combinations.
The religious acceptance playing a role was of course intended originally, but as we started implementation it was proving a lot more tricky than expected to get it in there, which is why we rely on the base value in most situations. But as mentioned before, the values have been adjusted accordingly to reach the intended behaviour.

I want to give some more context around this because I think it is important to get on the same page so that feedback becomes effective:
Just because it worked differently before 1.8, doesn't mean that it's wrong now. Our intention with the cultural rework was of course to deepen the room we have to play with. Instead of making it binary, we now have the scale on which acceptance lies.
60 is the value chosen because it corresponds with the threshold to the second highest bracket. The second highest bracket is also (not a coincidence) what we considered "Accepted" before. When all the narrative content was adjusted with 1.8, the initial pass was a mass replace to replace "accepted" with "second bracket/60 or higher" pretty much. And it has largely stayed this way.
So what I'm trying to explain is that the 60 isn't just a made up value, but it was chosen to reflect a similar behaviour. Under Racial Segregation with Migration Controls, you need to accepted basically. It doesn't always line up perfectly as shown here, but there's thought behind it.

All of this to say is that we'll probably not change this now as it would cause imbalance elsewhere, but that we are aware of the problem.
We have another opportunity to look at this with the release of National Awakening for reasons that I can't talk about, but it would likely still require a very much custom solution, e.g. with one of the new law variants which were not a thing before 1.9
And since that is the case, I also can't promise that we'll do it since it takes valuable time from elsewhere (as is always the case).

Hope that clears up some things around this topic.
Have a nice weekend, I'll check back in on this next week.

Thank you for taking the time to provide such a detailed explanation.

I believe one thing that would have helped when 1.8 released would have been to state at least some of these factors more explicitly, that consideration of "accepted" and related mechanics had changed. I think most players (at least those that frequent the forum) understood that 60 represented the new "accepted" value, but as other mechanics had changed, which pops reached that threshold changed without explicit explanation, especially as this affected migration so strongly (also USA Reconstruction).

 

[GARGEAN]

We have another opportunity to look at this with the release of National Awakening for reasons that I can't talk about

Okay, now THAT is just teasing.

 

[ScaleZenzi]

Yes, it's intentional as was reported back to you. Yes, we do understand the problem correctly. Yes, some things in this system are bugged, namely the missing impact of religion. BUT, even if we fixed the religion impact, we'd likely tweak the values so that the result stayed the same and you'd still not get other mass migrations than before with this set of laws.
The reason is quite simple: Because it would break the system in unwanted ways elsewhere on the globe.
Maybe some of you recall millions of Indians migrating to London in 1838 in one of the 1.8 patches? That was a very similar thing that happened there where the laws were not restrictive enough, causing a very strange behaviour.
It is very tricky, arguably impossible (as seen by this situation) to get the current system to feel right for all countries, for all culture combinations.
The religious acceptance playing a role was of course intended originally, but as we started implementation it was proving a lot more tricky than expected to get it in there, which is why we rely on the base value in most situations. But as mentioned before, the values have been adjusted accordingly to reach the intended behaviour.

Thank you for the transparency. I definitely agree that it's impossible to truly perfectly balance migrations, especially under the current implementation (even if the acceptance aspect of it was perfected, abberations like New England becoming depopulated while the great plains become population strongholds would remain). I'm still not sure I agree with the current route chosen though - in my view, the significant underpopulation of the Americas is honestly even worse than the strange discriminated migrations that'd happen during that beta, since it makes those countries significantly more unplayable if done historically due to missing millions of people.

Additionally, the strange discriminated migrations you mentioned still actually occur with the current restrictive implementation - I'm sure everyone else has also noticed how every game has Canada and Australia end up populated with millions of Indians every single time anyway, because:
1. All the Canadian & Australian tags start without any form of migration controls
2. While the Indian tags do have migration controls, only the EIC actually has a European primary culture, so they're still allowed to migrate out of all the indian tags anyway.

Additionally, discriminated migration is still allowed in all states that are directly owned anyway, even under migration controls. This means that if Britain ever annexes any Indian minors or large chunks of China (a not uncommon occurrence in many games), then the British isles still get flooded with this discriminated immigration you mentioned.

I guess what it boils down to is that solely using Cultural acceptance as the baseline for acceptance means you're missing a large chunk of where acceptance comes from, which is religion. Just as an example, under total separation religion is giving every culture an additional +15 to acceptance. 10 additional acceptance from any source is the main thing that'd drag a pop over the acceptance line to be allowed to migrate (Freedom of Conscience is the same argument & numbers, but with only co-religionists, as with State Religion/Atheism, etc). The fact that this is ignored is the main thing causing these countries to not be getting the immigration that happened historically. Additionally, I'm pretty sure religious acceptance is still factored in when it comes to intramarket migration, so this is really just specifically neutering mass migrations. If Argentina was to become Britain's puppet for example, then they'd still be flooded with European immigration like they should be, even with migration controls.

If the religious acceptance thing is still tough to implement though, then I'd again urge you to look into the slight changes I made in this mod, which I'll also list below:

Steam Workshop::Scale's Migration Tweaks

steamcommunity.com

This just bumps down the migration restrictiveness from controls to 50, while also adding a +20 base restrictiveness to no migration controls.
- The 50 restrictiveness basically makes up for religious acceptance not being factored in when it comes to migration acceptance, which would get most pops over the 60 threshold. These pops would not be discriminated against if they were magically teleported in to the country, the game is only looking at them as discriminated because it's ignoring what gets them over that line.
- The 20 restrictiveness to no controls stops the aforementioned massive Indian immigration that happens to Canada and Australia every game

I've tested these changes pretty extensively since the initial discussion, and it indeed solves every issue mentioned throughout these posts. South American nations are able to receive European mass migrations again even with controls, and the strange discriminated migrations mentioned as a concern still don't occur (unless you get cultural exclusion & have no controls, which is fair IMO). I'm not really sure if I'm missing part of your reasoning, but if the concern was that lowering the number to 50 would lead to ahistorical discriminated migrations like from that beta, then I can guarantee that isn't the case, at least with the listed above changes.

Thank you for interacting with the thread either way! My favorite aspect of pdx dev teams is that they're very interactive with the community. Although I really hope you'll take a look at my temporary solution to the issue, I'm looking forward to whatever changes to migration the team does in the future, such as with Mass Awakening. I think down the line a more comprehensive migration rework would be ideal, though I understand it's probably not anywhere near the top priority.

 

[Marczewka]

under total separation religion is giving every culture an additional +15 to acceptance

I think that total separation should have 0 to acceptance, so all the church and state laws should have acceptance decreased by 15 and the citizenship laws have acceptance increased by 15. Base cultural acceptance from citizenship laws should show how pops would be accepted under no religious discrimination.

 

[OxfordNik]

Will check out your mod when I next do a modded playthrough - thanks, @ScaleZenzi .

Looking forward to seeing what might happen with the Law Variant mechanics that @PDX_H4n1baL 's teaser mentions, down the line. The way forward is surely to introduce variations for some of the colonial nations that affect their migration acceptance thresholds (and resulting patterns) to something more historical/plausible for the areas that the OP mentions

 

[WTH666444]

Thank you for the transparency. I definitely agree that it's impossible to truly perfectly balance migrations, especially under the current implementation (even if the acceptance aspect of it was perfected, abberations like New England becoming depopulated while the great plains become population strongholds would remain). I'm still not sure I agree with the current route chosen though - in my view, the significant underpopulation of the Americas is honestly even worse than the strange discriminated migrations that'd happen during that beta, since it makes those countries significantly more unplayable if done historically due to missing millions of people.

Additionally, the strange discriminated migrations you mentioned still actually occur with the current restrictive implementation - I'm sure everyone else has also noticed how every game has Canada and Australia end up populated with millions of Indians every single time anyway, because:
1. All the Canadian & Australian tags start without any form of migration controls
2. While the Indian tags do have migration controls, only the EIC actually has a European primary culture, so they're still allowed to migrate out of all the indian tags anyway.

Additionally, discriminated migration is still allowed in all states that are directly owned anyway, even under migration controls. This means that if Britain ever annexes any Indian minors or large chunks of China (a not uncommon occurrence in many games), then the British isles still get flooded with this discriminated immigration you mentioned.

I guess what it boils down to is that solely using Cultural acceptance as the baseline for acceptance means you're missing a large chunk of where acceptance comes from, which is religion. Just as an example, under total separation religion is giving every culture an additional +15 to acceptance. 10 additional acceptance from any source is the main thing that'd drag a pop over the acceptance line to be allowed to migrate (Freedom of Conscience is the same argument & numbers, but with only co-religionists, as with State Religion/Atheism, etc). The fact that this is ignored is the main thing causing these countries to not be getting the immigration that happened historically. Additionally, I'm pretty sure religious acceptance is still factored in when it comes to intramarket migration, so this is really just specifically neutering mass migrations. If Argentina was to become Britain's puppet for example, then they'd still be flooded with European immigration like they should be, even with migration controls.

If the religious acceptance thing is still tough to implement though, then I'd again urge you to look into the slight changes I made in this mod, which I'll also list below:

Steam Workshop::Scale's Migration Tweaks

steamcommunity.com

This just bumps down the migration restrictiveness from controls to 50, while also adding a +20 base restrictiveness to no migration controls.
- The 50 restrictiveness basically makes up for religious acceptance not being factored in when it comes to migration acceptance, which would get most pops over the 60 threshold. These pops would not be discriminated against if they were magically teleported in to the country, the game is only looking at them as discriminated because it's ignoring what gets them over that line.
- The 20 restrictiveness to no controls stops the aforementioned massive Indian immigration that happens to Canada and Australia every game

I've tested these changes pretty extensively since the initial discussion, and it indeed solves every issue mentioned throughout these posts. South American nations are able to receive European mass migrations again even with controls, and the strange discriminated migrations mentioned as a concern still don't occur (unless you get cultural exclusion & have no controls, which is fair IMO). I'm not really sure if I'm missing part of your reasoning, but if the concern was that lowering the number to 50 would lead to ahistorical discriminated migrations like from that beta, then I can guarantee that isn't the case, at least with the listed above changes.

Thank you for interacting with the thread either way! My favorite aspect of pdx dev teams is that they're very interactive with the community. Although I really hope you'll take a look at my temporary solution to the issue, I'm looking forward to whatever changes to migration the team does in the future, such as with Mass Awakening. I think down the line a more comprehensive migration rework would be ideal, though I understand it's probably not anywhere near the top priority.

Wouldn't it make more sense to mod all the Canadian and Australian nations to have migration restrictions (which is what I think I'll do, probably also for the US, and maybe for Liberia and Sierra Leone), lower the threshold to 50 and keep no controls at 0?

Conceptually, at least. Maybe not gameplay-wise.

Ideally, they all start with controls, and severely underpopulated places (read Americas and Australia) maybe get IG law preferences ("Manifest Destiny) encouraging them to beeline towards cultural exclusion and make use of all the excess land? That‘d be one way to handle it.

Not sure what to do about the internal migration examples you brought up with British India and China, though.
With how homelands work, if you stopped them from migrating altogether, they‘d always be stuck as unaccepted.
But if you let discriminated pops migrate freely within a country, you get Indian Britain.
Maybe assimilation in homelands should be possible, but tied to cultural unrest and secessionist movements?

Also very encouraging to see that the system as it works now bothers other people as much as it did me. Almost felt like nobody cared for a while there.

 

[dmdelor]

Yes, it's intentional as was reported back to you. Yes, we do understand the problem correctly. Yes, some things in this system are bugged, namely the missing impact of religion. BUT, even if we fixed the religion impact, we'd likely tweak the values so that the result stayed the same and you'd still not get other mass migrations than before with this set of laws.

Could you fix the religion bug and make it a game settings option that defaults to off? That would let individual players and modders try to come up with a better set of settings, without dumping a big change you don't feel comfortable releasing on the broader player base.

Presumably fixing it wouldn't be wasted work, as you've identified it as a bug here, and it might even save you some work in coming up with a better set of values for your next DLC by crowdsourcing looking at the different permutations and finding values that produce outcomes to the modders that will try to fix this.

 

[WTH666444]

Ended up making a small mod of my own that also institutes migration controls for the US, Canada, Australia, Liberia and Sierra Leone

Steam Workshop::Migration Controls (1.9.7)

steamcommunity.com

 

[Froonk]

So.
Please bear with me until the end before coming to conclusions.

Yes, it's intentional as was reported back to you. Yes, we do understand the problem correctly. Yes, some things in this system are bugged, namely the missing impact of religion. BUT, even if we fixed the religion impact, we'd likely tweak the values so that the result stayed the same and you'd still not get other mass migrations than before with this set of laws.
The reason is quite simple: Because it would break the system in unwanted ways elsewhere on the globe.
Maybe some of you recall millions of Indians migrating to London in 1838 in one of the 1.8 patches? That was a very similar thing that happened there where the laws were not restrictive enough, causing a very strange behaviour.
It is very tricky, arguably impossible (as seen by this situation) to get the current system to feel right for all countries, for all culture combinations.
The religious acceptance playing a role was of course intended originally, but as we started implementation it was proving a lot more tricky than expected to get it in there, which is why we rely on the base value in most situations. But as mentioned before, the values have been adjusted accordingly to reach the intended behaviour.

I want to give some more context around this because I think it is important to get on the same page so that feedback becomes effective:
Just because it worked differently before 1.8, doesn't mean that it's wrong now. Our intention with the cultural rework was of course to deepen the room we have to play with. Instead of making it binary, we now have the scale on which acceptance lies.
60 is the value chosen because it corresponds with the threshold to the second highest bracket. The second highest bracket is also (not a coincidence) what we considered "Accepted" before. When all the narrative content was adjusted with 1.8, the initial pass was a mass replace to replace "accepted" with "second bracket/60 or higher" pretty much. And it has largely stayed this way.
So what I'm trying to explain is that the 60 isn't just a made up value, but it was chosen to reflect a similar behaviour. Under Racial Segregation with Migration Controls, you need to accepted basically. It doesn't always line up perfectly as shown here, but there's thought behind it.

All of this to say is that we'll probably not change this now as it would cause imbalance elsewhere, but that we are aware of the problem.
We have another opportunity to look at this with the release of National Awakening for reasons that I can't talk about, but it would likely still require a very much custom solution, e.g. with one of the new law variants which were not a thing before 1.9
And since that is the case, I also can't promise that we'll do it since it takes valuable time from elsewhere (as is always the case).

Hope that clears up some things around this topic.
Have a nice weekend, I'll check back in on this next week.

This is perfectly clear and understandable in terms of design goals. However I'd rather wish that developers consider religious acceptance into this and adjust it in another way because currently it creates ahistorical outcomes and I do believe properly integrating religious acceptance and discrimination could keep the immigration levels similar while actually bending it to correct outcomes.

For example historically speaking, a lot of Christian Arabs from Ottoman Empire migrated to South America but relatively few Muslims did, and it should be obvious why this was the case. Similarly religious minorities from former colonies which accepted mainly Christianity were more easily able to move to the mainland of their overland colonies. Similarly Ottoman Empire received a significant amount of Muslim migration from Balkans, Caucasia and Central Asia especially as those lands became controlled by foreign and different religion countries.

I would suggest here that religion could perhaps create both a pull and push factor, in that it could perhaps be a separate calculation than cultural acceptance but a delta of religious discrimination. So a Christian Arab living in Ottoman Empire would be more likely to migrate to a Christian Latin American country as opposed to a Muslim one, even though their ethnic acceptance would be same otherwise, however a Muslim Arab living in Ottoman Empire would be less likely to migrate to another Muslim country since they are not necessarily discriminated for their religion. This would also take account of the fact that Hindu Indians would less likely to mass migrate into London where the religious difference delta is greater and could present the developers with another lever to fine tune how and where immigration should happen along historical dynamics.

I do believe cultural association effect of religion is very underrepresented and the emphasis is put too much to "Heritage" as an ethnolinguistic categorization that's beyond the actual dynamics of the era. While nationalism gained more importance during this period it was a gradual process and these national lines and ethnogenesis often happened in tandem with religion. The game is a little too focused on experience of Northwestern European Protestant and Catholic divisions which culminated into national projects that reached over denominational differences but doesn't properly represent various groups such as Maronites, Druze, Catholics, Orthodox in Middle-east who are often all Arabic speakers yet could be and were often imagined as different communities, as well as distinctions such as Yazidi and Sunni Kurds and many others.

National Awakening, since it will be about Balkans, is actually a perfect time to address this since situation in Balkans where ethnic lines were often drawn alongside religious lines, which lead to understanding of heritage also as inseparable from confessional allegiances. Because obviously the national and religious lines follow each other very separately and understanding of ethnicity, such as what makes one a Turk or Greek, were often more about the religion they professed to rather than language they spoke. Similar case applies in case of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia as well as Orthodox and Muslim Bulgarians.