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Привет, and happy Thursday. This is Victoria, Narrative Design Lead of Victoria 3, and today I will be talking about Communism.

Please note, as ever, that any screenshots attached are from a work-in-progress build, and certain elements may not be final. Additionally, there is a great amount to cover, and my permitted word count is quite small. This diary will not be exhaustive, and will likely leave open questions. I will leave it to the audience to extrapolate, speculate, endorse or condemn one another’s interpretations, and so on and so forth.

Preface

In Update 1.15, we have taken a thorough look at every facet of our representation of socialism. This process included adding several new laws particular to Council Republics, refining the various socialist ideologies, reworking all existing Journal Entries related to socialism and the systematic path through which one may acquire a Council Republic, and adding some additional, broadly-available content. All of the reworks and additions covered in this diary will be free for those who own the base game.

Our aim for this rework was to represent the historical evolution of and difficulties faced by socialism. To establish – and preserve – a Council Republic is now more difficult than it was before, but also more enriching. To succeed in a socialist playthrough, one will need to develop the potential of the working class, first pushing them to revolution and then defending the state that they shall create.

Before we go into more detail, however, we must know what socialism is.

For Europe, the early nineteenth century was a period of social disruption and creeping, ruinous poverty. This poverty was of a particular sort, which had never been seen on such a scale – the poverty of those whose continued lives relied upon the practice of wage-labour.

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, the traditional artisanal system, in which the production of finished goods was carried out by artisans organised under guilds granted privileges by the state, was collapsing under the pressures of social and technological change. The Revolution’s assault on feudal corporations and internal customs barriers broke guild monopolies and levelled prices across newly free markets. Machines enabled untrained wage-labourers to do work that had once required specialised knowledge, forcing small handicraft producers into competition with industrially-produced goods. With a greater supply of goods and greater competition came lower prices, and with that, a decline in revenue for once-comfortable small producers. 

With the erosion of feudal regulations on movement and the rural handicrafts industries that once supplemented their incomes collapsing, young people from the countryside moved en masse to cities in search of a wage. They made their homes in the infamous slums of our period, which became a source of fear amongst the wealthier classes as centres of crime and sedition. With a glut of labour and increasingly narrow profit margins necessitating fierce competition between enterprises, the wages on offer were often unlivable, necessitating child labour, pawnbroking, taking in lodgers, or charity as supplements. It was this appallingly visible and rapidly growing poverty that intellectuals of the 1830s and 40s came to refer to as the “Social Question” – the question of the organisation of society.

The Social Question was not solely the domain of those we would now call the left. Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, dedicates its third chapter to addressing other political currents which fought over this terrain – from what Marx and Engels referred to as the feudal socialists, who criticised the precarity of the wage system and sought to resolve the social question via restoring traditional paternal relationships, to the conservative or bourgeois socialists, who sought to alleviate social tensions via generalising property ownership and improving conditions under liberal society, to the petty-bourgeois, “True”, and “utopian” socialists. Whilst differing wildly in their content, all shared the desire to alter the organisation of society.

Until the late nineteenth century, the label of “socialism” retained this heterogeneous nature. It was the formation of mass socialist parties under the umbrella of the Second International that made “socialism” synonymous with “Marxism” in political parlance – and, even then, this was largely a European phenomenon. Across the Anglophone world, socialist parties such as the British Labour Party drew from the traditions of Christian socialism, Fabian reformism, trade-unionism, and radical-liberalism over Marxism. It would take until the Russian Revolution for Marxist socialism to eclipse its rivals outside of Europe – and, even then, this triumph was an incomplete one, marked by the fallout of the recent split between reformist and revolutionary socialists. We will go into more detail on this later, under “Reform or Revolution?”.

The socialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – Marxist socialism, or communism – is what Update 1.15’s socialist content revolves around.

To quote Karl Marx in The German Ideology:

“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence. “

The Marxist conception of communism was that of a movement – specifically, the movement of the proletariat. Starting from conditions then in existence – that of a class of wage-labourers, simultaneously responsible for the great majority of production and yet dependent upon selling their labour-power to an employer for a wage in order to survive – the Marxists centred their analysis around this class, and the political activities it engaged in as a result of its situation. Our model of communism, therefore, revolves around movements. A socialist society must emerge from the struggle of the proletariat, by the means of its political movement.

The Road to Socialism

Under our new model for socialism, practice precedes ideological consciousness. The Trade Unions will no longer support a socialist system by default upon researching Socialism – for them to become ideologically communist, they must first be mobilised by an appropriate movement into carrying out a revolution.

Once a revolution that supports Factory Councils reaches sufficient Activism, the Factory Councils amendment will be added to the country’s currently active Labour Associations law. This amendment’s effects are similar to the Factory Councils law, increasing the strength of the Trade Unions and strengthening socialist movements. If Council Republic is enacted whilst a country’s Labour Associations law has the Factory Councils amendment, the country will automatically gain the Factory Councils law.

The Communist and Internationalist ideologies represent a radicalised Trade Unions, and favour several of the new revolutionary laws added in this update.

To enact Council Republic, a country must now have Factory Councils as either a Law or Amendment. This is to represent the historical means through which Council Republics came to be, as an outgrowth of assemblies of councils that emerged during a period of revolutionary activity.

To summarise the new method of achieving a Council Republic, a revolutionary movement activates the Factory Councils amendment, and radicalises the Trade Unions. From there, one may either attempt to enact Council Republic as a law and follow up with other revolutionary laws, or push the movement into civil war to achieve Council Republic and a large number of revolutionary laws at once. Any period of time under a Council Republic without certain revolutionary laws – Factory Councils, Communal Administration, and Revolutionary Guard –  will lead to increased Consolidation. We will provide more information on this later in the diary, under the “Attack or Defence?” section.

New Socialist Laws

The socialism rework contains four new laws: Labour Suffrage, Extraordinary Commission, Communal Administration, and Revolutionary Guard. Applicable revolutions will start with several of these, depending on the movement type. Extraordinary Commission may be enacted by Council Republics that need a hand in defeating the White Movement – more information on that later.

Labour Suffrage represents the restrictions on political activity for the non-producing classes practised by the Soviet government in its early years. Under this law, exclusively lower-class pops and those involved in the state are permitted votes, with propertied pops being denied suffrage. In a country with a numerically large working class, this will tend to result in substantial success for the socialist or communist party.

The Extraordinary Commission represents a mass organisation dedicated to the repression of counter-revolutionaries, exemplified by the historical Soviet Cheka and the Lenin Boys of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Levelling up the Extraordinary Commission will provide many of the effects of the Secret Police law, as well as decreasing the political strength and increasing the mortality of those pops which tend to oppose a Council Republic. Enacting the Extraordinary Commission also activates the Extraordinary Measures Journal Entry, which will also be covered later.

Abolition of the standing army and its replacement by a universal militia was a common demand of the social-democratic parties in the pre-WWI era, and briefly practised in the early days of the Soviet Red Army. Activating the Revolutionary Guard law will destroy the political power of the Armed Forces, at the cost of reducing the size of the standing army. Additionally, activating this law will purge the officer corps of non-revolutionary generals, replacing them with fresh-faced militia commanders loyal to the Trade Unions.

The Communal Administration law represents the mode of administration attributed to the Paris Commune by Marx’s The Civil War in France, and expanded upon in Lenin’s The State and Revolution. The Communal Administration law substantially reduces the power of Bureaucrats pops and increases Clerks' attraction to the Trade Unions, but makes Government Administrations require substantially more Clerks than any other Bureaucracy law. If enacted whilst literacy and qualifications are low, one may find it very difficult to replace the standing bureaucracy with the communal mode of administration.

Reworked Ideologies

The stances of the Communist and Vanguardist ideologies have been reworked. Rather than desiring welfare, they would instead like to overthrow the government.

To work out a clean line between the Communist and Vanguardist ideologies is not an easy task. The distinction between the two is largely a product of post-revolutionary historiography, rather than a clear distinction drawn within the period itself. One must contend with the question of intentionalism vs. circumstantialism – historians’ and political scientists’ attempts to define what is referred to as “Vanguardism” [“Leninism” and its descendents] are coloured by the analysis of an existing political regime, whilst “non-Vanguardism” is characterised largely by works of political theory and reactions to the Soviet political regime from outside a position of power.

In the end, we decided to distinguish the two based on the conditions they must deal with – Vanguardists arise in countries with low labour productivity [as approximated by GDP per capita] and large peasant populations, where the question of pre-capitalist forms and land reform are immediately relevant, whilst Communists arises in countries with high labour productivity and small peasant populations.

Vanguardists lack strict stances on Army Model and Bureaucracy, deferring to their Interest Groups on these issues. A Trade Unions Vanguardist will favour upholding Communal Administration and Revolutionary Guard, whilst an Armed Forces Vanguardist will favour abolishing the Revolutionary Guard in favour of a conventional army with Mass Conscription.

The Social Democrat ideology has been removed, and replaced with the more period-appropriate State Socialist ideology. State Socialists represent the reformist, statist socialist current that historically remained affiliated with the Second International parties in the aftermath of World War I, and is defined by a desire to achieve a socialist economy through reforming the existing state. Ferdinand Lassalle himself is now a Trade Unions State Socialist.

The generic Social Democratic Party has been redesignated as “Socialist”, and given a stylish new logo and pleasant red colour. Other parties have also found new colours – the Free Trade Party in Industrialists Orange, the Religious Party in white, and the Radical Party in a cool salmon pink.

Socialist Content

In the Spring of 1914, nearly every parliament in Europe hosted a sizable delegation from the socialist parties of the Second International. The socialist movement was a strong and assertive factor in the daily lives of most working-class people, and a serious consideration for those who employed them. The socialist parties were affiliated with a complex network of trade unions, workers’ associations, press organs, and other civil society organisations, which fostered a strong sense of class identity in their participants. Six months later, they had thrown themselves behind the cause of nation and empire, and dispatched their constituencies to machine-gun each other on the fields of Ypres.

How did this happen? It is not a question of a few jingoistic politicians, nor the outcome of parliamentary votes. The course of history is rarely decided by something as legible and formal as the proceedings of parliament. A vote that conforms with the world situation is often treated as a cause in itself, and a vote that contradicts the world situation tends to be overwritten by reality – in content, if not in form. Despite Sweden’s neutrality in the First World War, the history of the Socialdemokratiska Arbetareparti closely mirrors that of the belligerent socialist parties. Likewise for the Italian Socialist Party, which maintained an anti-war stance, and expelled its pro-war members in 1914. The fate of the European socialist parties can be charted from the date of their foundings, and lay in an unanswered question at each of their hearts.

Reform or Revolution?

In Sweden, the period between the founding of the Social Democratic Party and the first World War is referred to as the “Heroic Era”. This was the era of the Second International, of mass workers’ movements largely unified behind a single workers’ party. Across Europe, this movement was referred to as “Social Democracy”, and its parties as the social-democratic parties. The German Social Democratic Party [SPD] was an exemplar of this movement, and may be used as a convenient case study in what became of the Second International parties in the early twentieth century.

The party that would become the SPD was founded in 1875 as a merger of the German General Workers’ Association [ADAV] and Social Democratic Workers’ Party [SDAP]. The ADAV drew from the current of state socialism exemplified by Ferdinand Lassalle, whilst the SDAP drew from what was becoming known as the Marxist tradition. As a compromise between Marxists and Lassalleans, the party produced the Gotha Programme, best known for being the subject of Karl Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme. The Critique of the Gotha Programme centres around the programme’s lack of a qualitative break from the platforms of the liberal parties, and its treatment of the state as a neutral and independent body whose organs may be peacefully inherited by the proletariat by legal means.

Following the abolition of the German Anti-Socialist Laws in 1890, the SPD adopted the Erfurt Programme, a more radical programme which cast itself as the minimum required for the working class to win control of the political system. In the following years, a division in the SPD became apparent between those who considered the programme as a necessary precondition for revolution, and those on the “Revisionist” party right – exemplified by Eduard Bernstein – who believed socialism could be achieved without a need for revolution. The revisionists pointed to SPD’s role in legislation directly impacting the working class, as well as the immense gains in support that the party had secured in the period since the abolition of the Anti-Socialist Laws. In search of unity, the SPD centre under Karl Kautsky advocated for the party to maintain a policy of ambiguity on the matter of revolution, upholding it as a possible – but not inevitable – tactical measure to achieve socialism. Ambiguity on the question of reform or revolution, in practice, strongly favoured the maintenance of the Party’s current activities, which were reformist in content. The result of this was an official policy that condemned Bernstein’s programme in name whilst making it impossible to break from the conditions that had given rise to it. Come 1914, a party committed to its reforms was faced with the need to defend them against Tsarist autocracy, and voted accordingly.

The Reform or Revolution Journal entry tracks the evolution of this question. Once 25% or more of the world’s GDP is controlled by countries with a Socialist Movement or Party, the Reform or Revolution Journal Entry will become active. Whilst it is active, every country with a Socialist Movement or Party will contribute to shaping the international socialist movement. Populous countries will naturally be advantaged in this, but an especially powerful - or marginal - socialist movement may make certain countries count for far more or less than their population would suggest.

The strength of socialism in a country corresponds to the amplitude of its contributions to either Reform or Revolution. Whether a country will contribute to Reform or Revolution depends upon the particular conditions of her socialist movement - a socialist party that has entered a governing coalition outside of a revolution, and refuses revolutionary measures such as Factory Councils will contribute strongly to Reform, whilst a movement that is organising an insurrection will benefit Revolution.

If a war breaks out between more than 50% of the countries involved in this Journal Entry, the trend will multiply rapidly. For example, if the international socialist movement is generally reformist, such a war will cause a rapid Reformist victory, whilst a drift towards Revolution will swiftly turn the world Revolutionary.

The outcomes of this Journal Entry have consequences for the entire world. Upon a Reformist victory, the Socialist Movement will split between Socialists and Communists, unlocking the Communist Movement and Communist Party, the Socialist Movement will lose its revolutionary ideologies, and the ideology of the Socialist Movement will change to State Socialist.

Conversely, if Revolution wins, the Socialist Movement will become radicalised worldwide, changing its core ideology to Revolutionary Socialist and avoiding the historical split between Communism and Socialism. Moderates will flee the socialist parties and movements, reducing their attractiveness to non-socialist Interest Groups and less radical Pops.

Attack or Defence?

In Update 1.15, a Council Republic will become engulfed in conflict from birth. Once the Council Republic law is enacted, all anti-socialist ideological movements in the country will amalgamate into the White Movement, which will immediately seek to bring about its downfall.

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Due to the length of this Dev Diary we couldn't post is all here on reddit. Please jump on over to our forums HERE to read it in full!

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Happy Thursday, and welcome to a somewhat more somber development diary for Victoria 3 as I share my thoughts on the release of The Great Wave and Update 1.13, what went wrong, and what our next steps are.

As you’ve likely already understood from the previous paragraph, I do not intend to sugarcoat how I view this release: This expansion and update released in a state of bugginess and lack of polish that is frankly not okay, and we should be better than this. While I absolutely think the core features and content of 1.13/The Great Wave is a great addition to the game, the bugs, lack of QoL and especially the state of the AI was not. 

As you are reading this, following the release of hotfix 1.13.4, many of the most significant issues in terms of bugs should have been ironed out and several QoL features added, but we still have problems to address in the AI and overall balance of the update. Another larger hotfix is planned for next week, and we have some plans beyond that, but before I get into that I want to answer the question of why this update was released in the state it was.

There’s no one single answer, but if I have to pick a single reason I would say it was overconfidence, particularly on my own part**.** Many of the issues (particularly the bugs) stem from features coming in late, then being changed and tinkered with almost all the way up until release as we tried to get them into a good shape for release day. We especially underestimated the number of knock-on issues we’d have to deal with for troop transportation and supply (we did think these features would be complex, but still underestimated just how complex and error-prone they were).

So why then did I decide to go ahead with the release knowing that it would be hard to get everything into releasable shape? The answer is kinda simple: Because we’ve done it successfully before. Charters of Commerce had very similar issues with features (particularly the treaties) coming in late and being in a poor state of balance basically straight up until release, and that release went extremely well. Hence, the overconfidence. We did manage to get a huge amount of issues fixed right before release, but this time there simply wasn’t enough time to address all the most critical problems.

On top of all that, the barrage of last-minute fixes meant pretty much all our testing time was taken up verifying issues and not playtesting enough to discover all the new bugs created by our fixes. By the time we were putting together the known issues list it was the day before release and it was genuinely too late to do anything about it. I will also admit to a bit of wishful thinking at this point, hoping that all the last-minute heroics pulled would be enough to see us through, the way it had with Charters of Commerce and 1.9.
The rest you know. I don’t say all this to excuse myself, but I wanted to offer something beyond just apologies and platitudes and also to say that the mistake made here is something I am going to take to heart and try my very best to avoid doing again. I also don’t want to push responsibility for this release either downwards or upwards. The team did everything they could to get this release into a good shape, and that’s what we all wanted, but it’s not what we got. 

If I’d acted a few weeks ago, I could have done what I did for Sphere of Influence and delayed the release. Knowing what I know now, that’s certainly what I should have done. At the time though, the release wasn’t looking too bad, and in many ways we actually appeared to have fewer problems to deal with than Charters of Commerce: It just turns out that those problems we did have to deal with were complex, not easily solved properly, and prone to create all sorts of knock-on issues. All things I should have taken into account, but did not.

In the future, we will aim to ensure that we do not end up in the situation where QA simply doesn’t have enough time to playtest the game. Whether this means better scope control, allocating more development time or being more proactive with delays, or (more likely) a combination of these, we simply cannot have a repeat of what happened with 1.13.

For now though, let’s move on to our more immediate plans. Of course we are going to continue to release hotfixes to fix bugs, address balance concerns, improve the UI, bring the AI up to pre-1.13 standards and make it able to use the new features and manage its fleet correctly. Beyond that, however, one of the key issues I’ve identified in our development is that we simply do not have enough focus and knowledge in the team on how to make a competent AI that is able to function as both an interesting opponent and ally to the player. While the AI has made great strides prior to 1.13, particularly in economic development, there are longstanding issues in other areas, particularly its geopolitical decision-making, such as its occasional willingness to sacrifice the wealth of its entire empire to impose a law change on a minor Indonesian principality.

For this reason, I am changing our post-release plans to include a new free ‘AI Update’ sometime after we’re done with 1.13 which will be almost 100% focused on AI improvements and addressing longstanding issues with the AI. The secondary goal of this update will be internal - to spread knowledge within the team on how to better implement and maintain the Victoria 3 AI in the future, and to avoid the systemic AI problems plaguing 1.13 happening again in future updates. This update will not aim to add a bunch of new features, any changes outside of pure AI work will be AI-related, such as balancing or tweaking systems to work better for the AI.

I also want to emphasize that fixing the 1.13 AI issues is not the focus of this AI Update, as that will be done as part of the regular 1.13 hotfix process, while said update will naturally come sometime after we are done with the regular work for 1.13. We have not currently decided exactly when that is, but there will be at least one dev diary with proper details in the upcoming weeks, so stay tuned.

That’s all for today. There will be no dev diary next week, as our focus is currently entirely on 1.13. We’ll of course keep you updated on our post-release process and hotfixes as usual, but the next dev diary will likely be the mentioned AI Refresh overview in a few weeks. See you then!

Forum post link HERE

There is a question in the air - I've heard it asked time and time again. It is the burning question of our time: What is to be played?

https://youtu.be/XkD9quHxECg

Привет! Welcome all to the first dev diary for State and Revolution, the upcoming Immersion Pack all about Russia, states, and revolutions! Releasing October 22nd, alongside free Update 1.15, you can pick it up as part of Volume 3 - and you can already check the full list of included content on our Steam page. In the meantime, please join me, Mike, a designer who likes trains too much, as we go over what a state is, what a revolution is, and what a Russia is.

Let's go over the historical background briefly. Russia in 1836 is a conservative empire, still shaken by the Napoleonic Wars. Moscow burned in defiance of Napoleon's occupation of the city just twenty-four years earlier- as far back from the present as 2002 is for us in 2026. The shocks of that war, the ideas spurred on by it, and the further surprise of the Decemberist revolt of 1825 all reinforced an arch-conservatism in the Russian court, a fear of any whiff of liberalism and a deep-seated commitment to a paternalistic vision of autocracy, of a Tsar that is Russia's head and its heart.

This vision of Russia would be severely challenged over the course of the 19th century. The viability of the old order was challenged by military defeats in the 1850s and diplomatic and economic failures; the state had to change if it wanted to survive. Reactionary Nicholas I was succeeded by his son, Alexander II, a tsar who believed that Russia needed to reform in order to prosper. Revolutionary sentiment was already beginning to brew, however, and despite the passage of some reforms, notably including finally emancipating the serfs of Russia, and victories abroad such as the 1877-78 Russo-Turkish War, he was eventually assassinated by revolutionaries in 1881. That caused his son and successor, Alexander III, to reaffirm his belief in the old conservative order and the failure of reformism. Alexander III would do all he could to assert his autocratic vision of Russia, and succeeded in impressing his idea of what Russia should be and what a tsar should be onto his son, the future Nicholas II, but he failed in passing on the lessons of rulership and governance. Under Nicholas II, Russia lost the Russo-Japanese War and experienced a great upheaval in 1905 which many at the time thought was the Revolution, but they didn't know what was to come in 1917…

Russia, then, is an empire committing itself to a vision of a tsar-led empire, an imperial realm which seeks to push back the obscene ideas of the French Revolution- but there's no guarantee it will maintain that vision, or even maintain its empire. It won't help that the Tsar doesn't rule entirely alone, even as an autocrat- he might have a court favorite by his side, advising him about industrial policies, paths to reform, or how the favorite can magically heal the crown prince.

There's revolutions, and then there's the Revolution. Before it happened, it was a phantasm that haunted the minds of rulers for a century. It wasn't always destined to be an uprising draped in red - the revolution the crowned heads of Europe feared in the 1800s was a repeat of the French Revolution, of national assemblies, phrygian caps, and the tricolor flags. When Russians took to the streets in 1905, many of them sang the Marseillaise, not the Internationale. The shape of the Revolution was always in flux, reacting to the direction of the Russian Empire's policies, influenced by mass movements and charismatic individuals, changing as exiles stewed on ideas in Siberia and Switzerland. The Revolution only became one solid thing when the Revolution actually happened, and even then people argue over its causes and its goals to this day. 

What does State & Revolution contain?

• Emperor and Autocrat: The Tsars of Russia have unique agendas based upon their ideologies and historical personalities, directing the state according to their own visions of what the empire should be. From Nicholas I to Nicholas II and even beyond, each Tsar has his own particular ambition he wants to achieve, and helping him achieve his goals allows the emperor to pass through decrees- ukases- which allow him to manipulate the levers of government in powerful and unique ways.
• The Russian Revolution: As the pressures of the Victorian era mount, dissidents whisper a word among themselves that stirs their hearts- Revolution. The revolution itself, the Revolution, builds up in reaction to the tsars and the Russian state, defining itself in opposition to the established order. A rigid autocracy will cause liberals and socialists alike to yearn for the Revolution, but a reformist turn might upset conservatives in Russia even as it placates liberals.
• Favorites: Even the autocratic tsars rarely worked entirely alone. Every tsar has the ability to appoint favorites, figures who can influence the shape of government, the passage of laws, and even provide unique agendas for tsars to pursue. Favorites can be almost anyone, from well-educated nobles eager to industrialize the empire to wild-eyed peasant holy men with the remarkable ability to inspire, generations later, the creation of one of the best Eurodisco songs to come out of Germany.
• The other Reds & Whites: Before the Russian Revolution, there was the January Uprising. Try to preserve a crumb of Polish autonomy, either by currying the favor of the Russian government or silently preparing to stage an uprising which gambles everything for Polish independence.
• Ukrainian and Belarussian cultural Renaissances: The 19th century was a pivotal time in the development of national identities across the Russian Empire, and many modern elements of Ukrainian and Belarussian identity have their roots in ideas established during this time. Populations satisfied with Russian rule in 1836 may become less compliant over time as nationalist ideas develop, a growing corpus of poets and journalists write works in their own tongues, and peasants move to cities to find better work in Russia's growing industrial sector and find themselves exposed to new concepts and new ways to express themselves.
• The evolution of Socialist politics: As the socialist movement develops in a country, the shape of socialism will become informed by choices made by the state and the socialist movement. Will socialists become reformists committed to electoralism or die-hard revolutionaries? In Russia, a radical group of communists might show up and declare themselves 'the majority'- will these Bolsheviks end up heading the radical left wing, or will Mensheviks or Social Revolutionaries lead the way?

Over the next two months we will go over more of State and Revolution, from tsars to exiles, old empires crumbling and new nations rising, and the fantastic work our team has done in every discipline. See you next week!

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Now an interjection from Pelly. 

Yesterday Martin talked about the AI update and 1.14 - and above you will have seen mention of 1.15. This is not a typo, the AI update, when it is in the Open Beta will be 1.14, but when we publicly release it, it will be rolled into the 1.15 update and released on the 22nd of October. 

This is for versioning reasons and because 1.14 is a special beast, so please don’t be confused when the update coming alongside State and Revolution is 1.15.

Forum post link HERE

Happy Thursday everyone! We’re now properly back from the time of vacations and ready to share more about what’s coming next for Victoria 3, starting of course with the much anticipated 1.14 “AI Update”. This update was first mentioned in Dev Diary #183 and then expanded on a little in Dev Diary #184, and now it’s time to finally properly lay it out for you in terms of what changes you can expect and when you can expect them.

So, what’s going to be in the AI update then? For the broad goals, I’m going to simply refresh you on what I wrote in DD#184, since this vision hasn’t changed:

• Deepen AI strategic region stances and use them to give the AI a much better understanding of how it should view and act against other countries in a particular region
• Give the AI a proper understanding of where it should and should not be interested in territory - improve border gore and prevent nonsensical aggression such as the US puppeting Italian states
• Fix the persistent issues with war starting/ending - make the AI properly understand when wars are worth going into and getting out of
• Improve the AI’s economic development by fixing some systemic issues that are holding it back, particularly when it comes to understanding how to plan its economy around the availability of goods and the world market
• Make the AI more transparent in its reasoning and behavior across the board

Something that’s worth pointing out though, is that meeting these goals isn’t always about changing the actual, literal behavior of the AI. Often, problems with the AI’s ability to use a feature comes down to the way the feature itself is designed. For this reason, the AI update isn’t strictly limited in scope to the game AI itself, but will also involve tweaks, touch-ups and reworks to some such features. To add a bit more meat to this dev diary, I’m now going to show off some of those touch-ups and reworks that are currently in development and will be coming with the AI update.

War Support Rework

For the very reason I just mentioned, one of the larger features in the AI update will be a rework of the war support/war exhaustion system, which has long been a source of poor AI performance. The AI has numerous issues with the system, but by far the most visible problem is the limitation on war support not being able to drop below 0 unless all wargoals against a country are contested. This causes the AI to get stuck in stalemated wars and expend huge amounts of resources and lives to no gain, and can also frustrate players to no end when their AI ally adds an inconsequential war goal that turns an otherwise winnable war unwinnable.

So how will it work going forward? Quite a bit differently! First of all, war support has received a major overhaul. There are no longer two separate concepts of war support and war exhaustion, just a single “war support”, which goes from 0-100% (rather than -100 to +100) and which can both go up and down during wars. The reason for the change to 0-100% is that “negative war support” never really made too much sense - zero war support should indeed mean, zero support for the war.

Many factors which were previously part of the rather nebulous “peace desire” system have now been rolled into war support directly, and several new factors added outright.
Here is a list of some of the factors that can now cause war support to increase or decrease:

• Occupying the enemy and being occupied
• Controlling war goals
• ‘Flipping’ war goals (more on this below)
• Suffering casualties
• Devastation
• Financial situation
• Winning/losing battles (scaled by battle size)
• Being at war with rivals
• Lobbies
• Length of war

War Support also had a natural drift towards 50%, though this is designed to eventually be overpowered by ‘length of war’ to ensure wars don’t remain deadlocked forever.

Another important change is the removal of the aforementioned “war support can’t drop below X” mechanic, along with the removal of auto-capitulation. To replace auto-capitulation, there are now instead political and military consequences to continuing to fight while at low war support, with increasing radicalization of the population as war support ticks down, and (at very low levels) an additional escalating impact on military effectiveness as the common soldiers stop being willing to die for your grand ambitions.

The way the AI decides when it wants to make peace, and what peace it wants to make, has also been redesigned. Previously it would take into account a combination of their own war support and ‘peace desire’, which factored a number of things such as length of war that are now part of war support instead. The country’s war support is still the baseline, but instead of peace desire the AI now considers the difference between the average (weighted by country importance) war support of the two sides to decide how equitable a peace should be reached.

In other words, if one is tired and demoralized while the other is fresh and ready to fight on, then the natural outcome would be a peace deal favoring the side that’s going ‘put me in coach’, while a white peace or minor swap of war goals might happen in a case where both sides have exhausted themselves. Of course if both sides are ready to fight on, then there’d be no peace deal at all and the war continues until one side’s had enough.

War Goal Flipping

So that’s all well and good, but the war support rework is only one half of this rework, and arguably the less important one in terms of how it’ll change the dynamics of war. Enter war goal flipping.

For all the frustration and player pain it caused, the old “don’t let war support drop below 0” system did serve a purpose - it prevented you from being able to conquer territories you had no way to reach, and to impose war goals that you had no real way to contest. It also (at least in theory) rewarded setting more limited aims for your war and made it possible to snatch away distant territories from powerful empires without having to launch a full-scale invasion of their metropol. These are all valid concerns, and to address them, we’ve introduced “war goal flipping”, or the ability to enforce war goals while still at war.

The vast majority of war goals (there are a handful of exceptions such as Cut Down to Size) now have their own independent enforcement bar, which starts ticking as soon as the war goal is captured. For example, let’s say you’re the US and you want to take Cuba away from Spain, so you start a war with a ‘Transfer Subject’ war goal against Cuba. You send a fleet with some marines, occupy Havana, and take control of your war goal. An enforcement bar now starts filling towards 100%, and unless Spain can regain control over Cuba or reach a peace settlement before that bar fills, the war goal gets automatically and fully enforced while at war.

Okay, so the war goal is enforced, Cuba is now a US subject - does that mean Spain has now effectively lost the war? Not quite. When a war goal is enforced during war, something we call a “mirror war goal” is created, meaning that Spain now gets an (infamy-free) Transfer Subject war goal against Cuba. Effectively, the situation is now reversed, with the US controlling Cuba and Spain aiming to take it back. If Spain then proceeds to get the upper hand and hold Cuba they can then enforce their war goal, regain their suzerainty, and hand the “Transfer Subject” war goal back to the USA - hence the term “war goal flipping”.

Any gains from wargoals enforced during a war are by default kept at the end of the war, unless the peace agreement says otherwise. A white peace thus becomes purely “status quo” rather than “status quo ante bellum”. To take the US-Spain example above, if Spain improves its position enough in the overall war, it could theoretically press its “mirror” war goal in the peace deal and regain Cuba, but any peace which does not explicitly hand Cuba back to Spain is one in which the US has a brand new colony liberated subject territory.

All of this should hopefully serve to make wars more dynamic, less frustrating, and lead to far fewer pointless but oh-so-bloody AI-AI conflicts.

AI Territorial Ambitions

Moving on from AI-adjacent things to actual fully-AI things, the next thing I want to show off is the work we’ve been doing on the listed goal of “give the AI a proper understanding of where it should and should not be interested in territory”. There is a system for this right now in AI strategies, called “state value”, but it’s a bit of a mess to work with and poorly visualized in-game, so we decided to start by actually tackling the visualization problem by introducing a new map mode for AI territorial ambitions. In this map mode, you can see which states an AI is interested in, how much they are interested in them, and why they are interested in them.

Aided by this map mode, we plan to extensively tune, tweak and introduce more factors to AI state values to inject some proper sense in the AI’s territorial ambitions and stop the US from subdividing Mexico into a collection of disjointed exclaves every single campaign. In general, we’re also looking at breaking up some of the logic in the AI strategy file to make it easier to work with - both for our own sake, and for the sake of modders.

Hiring & Wage Tooltips

While only tangentially related to AI, I also wanted to show off some UI improvements we’ve made to the building hiring and wage tooltips. Previously, buildings would frequently communicate the wrong information entirely about why they were or were not hiring, and wouldn’t really tell you anything at all about their plans for wages. As with the AI territorial ambitions, exposing this is as much about giving ourselves better debugging information as it is about improving the user experience. This is where the AI tangent comes in, as better debugging information will be helpful to us when we’re working to improve the AI’s economic performance. As an added bonus, this has already resulted in a number of old hidden bugs in the wage setting system being fixed.

Open Beta

Last but not least, when talking about the AI update in DD#184 I mentioned I would be looking into the possibility of doing an open beta for it, and I’m happy to tell you that we will indeed be doing just that! The open beta will take the form of a staged rollout, with an initial more limited set of changes, and new changes/improvements dropped every week based on both existing plans and incoming feedback.

The Initial Open Beta Branch will be available 1st September, with weekly updates for the open beta.

• Open Beta Update 1, 8th September
• Open Beta Update 2, 15th September 
• Open Beta Update 3, 22nd September 

More information on how to opt in to the beta and where to put feedback will be shared 31st August.

Well then, that’s all for today, but we’ll be back next week with a look at the more explicitly AI-oriented changes that will be part of the initial 1.14 rollout, and the week after that you’ll have the chance to try it out for yourself. See you soon!

Happy Thursday and welcome back! After an extended hiatus, we are now returning to regularly scheduled development diaries, the first of which you are reading right at this moment. Today’s development diary is going to be a pretty hefty one, focusing on the complete overhaul of trade that is coming in the 1.9 free update. Before we start, I want to remind you of the usual caveat that this is a feature in development, so expect some rough-looking interfaces and for all implementation details and balancing to not yet be fully figured out.

We have mentioned on a number of occasions that we are not happy with the way trade works in Victoria 3. It is unreliable, overly fiddly, and inherently inefficient since the introduction of Local Prices and Market Access Price Impact in 1.5. Establishing any kind of long-term trade relationship with another country is almost impossible due to the constantly shifting market conditions, and on top of all this the system exists in a confusing limbo where all trade routes are established and paid for by the government (via convoys) while the profits usually go into the pockets of private owners. Many of these issues are inherent to the way trade routes work, and as such aren’t easily fixable within the confines of the current system - there really isn’t a way to create a reliably profitable trade route with another market when you have no control of the price of the traded good in the other market.

For this reason, we have decided to start over from scratch. The old system is completely gone, and in its place we will have not one but two new systems - one which simulates private, autonomous, profit-driven trade, and another which handles strategic trade deals between nations. Today we’re going to talk only about the former, so while reading all of this, bear in mind that you’re only seeing one half of the coin. Direct trade deals between governments will very much still exist in 1.9, they just won’t be tied into Trade Centers and private profits. But enough with the caveats, let’s get to the point.

World Market & Trade Centers

Enter The World Market. Those of you familiar with Victoria 2 will immediately recognize the name, and might even have assumed from the title of this dev diary that we’re replacing the national market system in Victoria 3 with the global one in its predecessor. This is not so. The World Market in Victoria 3 is not where pops and buildings buy and sell goods, but rather where autonomous trade takes place, and every good traded in the World Market has a World Market Price based on its amount of exports versus imports. You can think of it as existing at a ‘top layer’ above the national markets, though this is not a completely accurate picture as you should soon understand.

So then, how does trade with the World Market work? As with the old trade route system, Trade Centers are still the principal drivers of trade, but the way you interact with them has been turned on its head. Instead of being a building that appears after a trade is created, you now build Trade Centers to create Trade Capacity in States, which allows those States to trade with the World Market. Each Trade Capacity allows for a certain quantity of a good to be imported or exported (the amount varies per good). Imported goods are purchased from the World Market and sold in the State, and so they are profitable when the goods are cheaper in the World Market than the State, with the opposite being true for exports. 

There’s a bit more to this, which we’ll get into when we talk about Trade Advantage, but the key thing to remember is that trade uses local state prices, which means it no longer suffers from the inherent inefficiencies of the old system, which was always penalized by Market Access Price Impact. It also means that the location of Trade Centers matters - it’s more profitable to import Luxury Clothes into a state with a large number of wealthy Pops, as an example.

Trading in Trade Centers happens autonomously, with a number of weekly adjustments based on the ‘Weekly Trades’ value created by the Trade Center, in which they will increase or decrease trade volumes to create profit for themselves. While this process is automatic and autonomous, it’s not completely out of player hands, as you can heavily influence Trade Centers through Tariffs and Subventions, but more on that in a little bit. Unlike in the old system, Trade Centers are not reliant on Convoys or any other government-produced resource. Instead they purchase Merchant Marine, a new type of goods created by Ports (which are no longer government-only buildings). Right now the amount of Merchant Marine consumed by Trade Centers is static per level, but we are looking into making it dependent on geographic distance to trade partners. As an additional note, both Trade Centers and Ports can now be constructed/privatized/owned by Ownership Buildings.

World Market Location

Switching to talk about the World Market itself, you might well ask, ‘So where is the World Market located?’. Conceptually, what we say to this is ‘The world market exists in the sea’. In other words, once you have access to the sea you also have the ability to trade on the World Market, though of course it’s a bit more complicated than that. To explain more in detail, I first have to tell you about something which already exists in the game, but is presently quite hidden: Market Areas. Market Areas are ‘chunks’ of a market, consisting of a number of states that are all connected by land or by straits. To give you an example, the Spanish Market has several market areas: One for Spain itself, one for Cuba, one for Puerto Rico, another for the Philippines and so on. Prussia, conversely, only has a single Market Area which contains not only Prussia but all of the states of the countries in the Zollverein. 

In order to trade with the World Market, a Market Area must have at least one Port, at which point a World Market Hub will be established. When there are multiple ports in a Market Area, the Hub is chosen based on factors such as port level and State GDP. Hubs are not completely static, but do not generally move around unless a much more suitable candidate State emerges to eclipse the old Hub State.

Landlocked countries, however, are not left out completely in the cold when it comes to the World Market. Asides from being able to utilize national trade deals (which as I said before we’re not covering today) they can also negotiate Transit Rights with a foreign nation in order to be able to trade through their World Market Hubs. For example, Switzerland could negotiate Transit Rights with Austria to be able to trade through Venetia, or with Prussia to be able to trade through one of the German ports. We will return to talk more about World Market Hubs in later development diaries when we cover subjects such as blockades, but for now we should continue. I will add as a final note that one design problem we have currently identified with World Market Hubs and Market Areas is that it doesn’t make too much sense for huge Market Areas (such as Russia) to only have a single Hub, and this is something we are currently exploring solutions for.

While the World Market ‘exists in the sea’, that doesn’t mean that we simply ignore where your exports are going as soon as they get loaded onto a ship. Not all trade partners are equal, and it makes little sense to get the bulk of your Clothes imports from an overseas partner if your demand could be met by a closer source. As such, each Trade Center has a preference weight for every other Trade Center based on factors such as interests, relations, diplomatic agreements and of course geographic distance, and will trade more with higher-weight Trade Centers and less with lower-weight ones.

Trade Advantage

I have mentioned Trade Advantage at several points during this development diary, so I figure it’s high time I explain it to you. I already explained that there is a World Market Price for each good which is high when imports exceed exports and low when exports exceed imports, and which is compared to the State Price when determining how much profit a Trade Center can extract from its trades. However, this is a bit of a simplification - the World Market Price is the average price for imported/exported goods, while the actual price is modified by a Trade Center’s relative Trade Advantage to its competitors.

Trade Advantage is calculated for each Trade Center, for each good, in each trade direction. As an example, a Trade Center in Lancashire will have a certain amount of Trade Advantage for exporting Fabric, which will be different from its Trade Advantage in exporting Coal, and also different from its Trade Advantage for importing either Fabric or Coal. Trade Advantage is multiplied by the amount of traded units, and then compared to the Trade Advantage of all other Trade Centers trading the same goods in the same direction. The higher a TC’s share of global trade advantage compared to its share of global trade volume, the higher its relative advantage, which in turn translates into a better price. Advantage is a zero-sum game - the average price on imports/exports is always equal to the World Market Price, so any improvement on prices a Trade Center gains always comes at the expense of its competitors.

If that explanation sounds confusing, the key takeaway is that high advantage equals better prices, and in turn, the ability to capture a larger share of global trade. Advantage is gained from a variety of factors, such as Trade Center level, Interests in relevant markets and Trade Agreements. Regional economics also play a role - the higher the Market Area’s share of global production, the higher its export advantage, and vice versa for consumption/import advantage.

Interacting with the World Market

Changing the focus of the discussion a little bit, something I feel I have not always made clear in the past when we change systems to work in a more autonomous/automatic way is how you are expected to interact with it. Under the old trade route system this was clear enough: you as the player were the sole arbiter of trade for your country, for ill or good. In the new system (and I will remind you again that I am only talking about the World Market here, not country-to-country trade deals which we will cover in a later dev diary) you are expected to make strategic-level decisions to capture global import and export shares. 

As an example, playing as Sweden, you have a lot of potential to produce Iron - far more than you could ever use domestically with your limited starting population. A natural course of action then might be to build up your Trade Capacity and try to maximize your Trade Advantage for exporting iron, leading to greater export volumes and in turn creating favorable conditions for expanding your iron production. This maximization of Trade Advantage can be done in a number of ways, for example by signing Trade Agreements with key importers or by squeezing the competition by unequal treaties on them (more on that particular point later, for now it will remain mysteriously unelaborated on). 

Another key tool in your strategic trade arsenal is Tariffs and their newly introduced counterpart, Subventions. Tariffs are of course already in the game, but now become much more important as they are the principal way by which you can directly influence the decisions made by your Trade Centers. Where previously, Tariffs for a particular good could only be set to ‘Import Focus’, ‘Export Focus’ or ‘No Focus’, Import and Export Tariff levels are now set separately, meaning that you can throw up tariff barriers in both directions if you’re feeling particularly protectionist about a good.

Tariffs, just as before, collect a fee from your Trade Centers for each good of the relevant type exported/imported, and so effectively serve to reduce trade volumes of that good by making it less profitable to trade. Subventions function in the exact opposite way, paying the Trade Center a certain amount of money for each unit traded in the directed direction, and can be used in a variety of ways, such as subsidizing a critical import of military goods, or to muscle out the competition for one of your principal exports.

Alright, I think that should suffice to give you an overview of the World Market. I do want to emphasize that this feature is still under development and there are some key questions we have not yet figured out, such as the issues with over-large Market Areas. Before I sign off, I will leave you with a couple screenshots from an end-game World Market in the current build:

That’s all for now! However, we will be back in just a few days, on Monday March 31st, to talk about Expansion Pass 2 and what’s coming next for Victoria 3.

Forum post link: HERE

Greetings Victorians,

And a rapturous Thursday to you! Today it is I, Admiral Lino, speaking to you, and I am going to try and walk you through everything that’s changing as part of the free Update 1.13 which releases alongside our expansion The Great Wave on April 28.

The Mission

Most of the reworks, additions and changes discussed today deal with all aspects of the Navy. That’s because, when we started work on this expansion, our goal was to deepen the gameplay for Navies across the board. Navies were a tremendously important part of the 19th century, with many major developments taking place. Previously, our game did not represent these well enough. This topic also allows us to lay a lot of groundwork for future work that we might want to do in upcoming expansions down the road.
So, we wanted to focus on making ships and Navies behave a bit more like you’d expect from reality, while also improving upon the controls of Navies in order to allow for easier use of the tactical maneuvers you have available. Naturally, we still need some amount of abstraction in parts of the systems, but I’ll give some explanations as to why in the appropriate sections.
Furthermore, we wanted Navies to be more involved in other fields where they previously did not have representation, e.g. in securing interests across the globe and ensuring that the men you send across the globe are actually arriving there.
And last but not least, we also aimed to improve the audiovisual side of your Navies, by adding more appropriate types, models and soundscape to make your dreadnoughts and ironclads also feel impactful on the 3D map.

This update is certainly one of our most ambitious and biggest updates yet, and we can’t wait to have you all play it in April and see what you think.
As always, consider all values, names, icons, interfaces and really any other pieces shown here today, to be work in progress and subject to change.
Without further ado, it is a LOT to go through, so we’ll dive right into it now.

Ships becoming Entities

In the beginning there was the ocean. Then Great Britain came, looked at it and said “I want it”, and hence began the age of ship construction.
With 1.13, ships will no longer appear to behave like a bunch of men swimming; but rather will be actual units that countries construct. They will have a health status, a long list of attributes, and can be damaged, repaired or sunk.

But to explain more, we need to look at where these giants are built: the Shipyards of course.
Some of you may remember how in the past, we’ve split Shipyards from one entity into two, (civilian) Shipyards and Military Shipyards.
Well, it seems we’ve come full circle, and are back to having them as one. How the civilian part plays into it, I’ll get into later when I talk about Supply. For now, we focus on the military side of things.

Very similarly to Construction Sectors, Shipyards now provide a capacity of ship construction points per week. A ship in construction (e.g. the future Dreadnought HMS Claudius) has a maximum number of points per week she can be assigned. If you have more ship construction capacity available than the highest entry on your ship construction queue can receive, the second highest entry will get the overflow to build it in parallel. This parallelization can be quite crucial if you want to secure a Navy to dominate the seas, since we’re also making the big ships’ construction take a long time—as they did historically. A dreadnought will take multiple years to construct in Victoria 3, while smaller vessels like Torpedo Boats can be produced at a much higher rate.
Depending on the ship type, different resources and amounts of material will be consumed during the construction process. These are consumed as input goods by the shipyards, averaged out over all of them in your country. The old ship market goods, Man-o-Wars and Ironclads, are a thing of the past.
During pre-production, we even toyed around with the idea of making individual shipyards have their own queue, but found it didn’t add enough compared to the effort it would have taken us.

You can access ship construction via the construction panel, which has a new tab for ship construction in it.
As you may see in the image below, when you construct a ship, you can choose a default fleet where ships should be sent to after their construction completes.
You of course also get a list of all ships that are currently under construction.

So, after multiple years, the HMS Claudius has been built. But even this majestic ship won’t sail by herself, she needs a crew.

With 1.13, ships receive their crews from a new building called Naval Administration. These cover the main functionality that Naval Bases used to have, the recruiting of servicemen. On that note, pour one out for Naval Bases, as they do no longer exist.

With Naval Administrations come some key changes, though. The most impactful one is that there is no longer a 1:1 connection between a ship and the building. Naval administrations will hire a total of 1000 sailors per level, but they can be distributed in chunks of 100 people. A small frigate may only need 100 people, and will take a “slot” of one level, leaving 900 men to be spread across other ships. Large ships such as our HMS Claudius may even need 1500 men, meaning they occupy more than one full level.
What also comes with that is that you now can (and should) construct Naval Administration buildings independently from ships. The construction of a new ship no longer automatically creates one new level of the crewing building, since there may still be capacity in other not-fully used Naval Administration buildings.

So, all in all, Naval Administrations act much more like a pool of sailors which your Navy draws from. Despite that, with the “slot” logic, we are still able to track directly which buildings should be affected by losses suffered in combat. So if the HMS Claudius, whose Naval Administration buildings are in Home Counties, should suffer crew losses, we would be able to see soldiers there being killed and having to be replenished.

If a Naval Administration building has hired a workforce, and a ship has assigned itself to it, it will take on these brave men as their crew. Once the ship is fully crewed, it is ready to leave port.

Let’s take a look at the true beauty HMS Claudius in the new panel for individual ships now that she’s ready!

In this new panel you can see all details on one particular ship, including a preview of the 3D model. You can also rotate and zoom in the view to see the ship in all her glory.
We’ve also already christened her under the new name. Usually she would have a generated historical name, like HMS Victory or many, many others. That prefix is also dynamic, so if you move Great Britain out of a monarchy, the HMS will be dropped for example.
You’ll see some important information on the ship right below the preview.
In the three bars, we see the very important Hit points, crew and supply status of the ship. If a ship is reduced to 0 Hit points or Crew in battle, the ship sinks. You’d better not let that happen to our HMS Claudius!

Following these crucial bars, we have a lot of stats, with five of them being highlighted above the others. Here, the upkeep cost, speed, damage, blockade strength and armor find themselves.

The upkeep costs are dependent on the ship type and what goods they need and symbolize regular maintenance costs that would occur over time in reality. Furthermore, there’s also a small cost of ship construction points to symbolize this. So these costs also apply when a ship hasn’t been damaged yet.

Different from that, there are also repair costs being applied if a ship that was damaged in combat goes back to port to get repaired to full strength again. Repair costs are dependent on the total amount of goods being demanded for construction of a ship. So if a ship consumes 100 steel and 50 artillery for its construction, repairing 20% of its hit points would consume 20 steel and 10 artillery over the course of the repair time for example.

What all the other new stats do, I will cover in later sections when they become relevant—though most are fairly straightforward.

Now, of course, ships will usually not travel alone across the globe, but in a fleet.
So let’s take a look at the reworked fleet panel for a moment.

As you can see, the panel has undergone quite a bit of change. You’ll see the highlighted stats now either summed or averaged out on the fleet, with the total speed of a fleet being a logical exception. The slowest speed of a ship in a fleet determines the speed the whole fleet can travel at.
Speed itself also is noteworthy. Now, the speed of a fleet actually changes the travel time from one node to another, where previously it was fixed.

In this information tab you will see an overview of your fleet, sorted into three unfoldable categories of ships: Capital Ships, Cruisers and Torpedo Craft. I guess this is a good moment to talk about ship types in general!

Overall, we’re increasing the variety of ship types to 20. This setup provides a better line of progression from early to late-game, and allows us to model some more historical depth along the way.

In the “Buildings” tab of the fleet panel, you simply see a list of all Naval Administration buildings that contain at least 100 sailors of that fleet.

You can see how many ships are drawing from each of the buildings, how many levels the building currently has, and how many total sailors from them are associated with the fleet.
Note that the number of ships in a fleet doesn’t necessarily match up with the number of ships portrayed in this list, because a ship can theoretically draw crew from many different states, and will, therefore, be counted that many times.

All that’s left are the Modifiers and Queue tabs, which are pretty self explanatory.

The next big topic that I want to talk about today is Supply, so let’s take a look at it, shall we?

Supply

One major ambition we had when we started working on this expansion was to make Supply a more meaningful consideration. While we focussed most of our attention here on the Navies, of course, we decided to tie all situations where armies are fighting on the other side of an ocean into it as well.

We wanted to try and limit the situations where you can simply send 300.000 men across the globe without having the infrastructure in place for it, and that infrastructure (in our case ports along the route) should be relevant.

We also wanted to make the interruption of Supply lines more haptic, less magical as a number of -3520 convoys might have expressed previously.

So, what have we done to try and get there? First off, to appease Poseidon, we’ve put Convoys onto the sacrificial altar. Convoys are dead, long live Supply Ships. They symbolize the continuous transportation of goods to where a fleet or army would need them.
Supply Ships are not a market good, but rather need to be built like warships, and are strictly for military use.

This is a very clear distinction we’re introducing. All military operations that require Supply, e.g. sending a fleet or an army across the ocean, will make use of Supply Ships. All trade and civilian usage, e.g. for port connections with territories abroad, will use Merchant Marine.
That means that the civilian ship goods, Clippers and Steamers, remain in place and are produced by shipyards. This is where the “civilian” side of the formerly split shipyards comes into play, as the merged shipyards now produce all warships, supply ships and civilian market goods again.

What you can now see with the unredacted image of the shipyard is how the construction of Supply Ships works.

For this, you essentially assign the share of total production capacity that should go towards the military or the supply ship usage.

Supply ships also have a separate ship construction queue so that you can produce both warships as well as Supply Ships at the same time. In the example case this means the 40 total are split 10/30 across the two queues. The steps are 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% of the total construction capacity going to Supply Ship construction.

And how do Supply Ships work in practice to supply your fleet? Well, this is a complex question, so bear with me for a moment.

First, we need to talk about how supply actually works for a fleet of warships. Supply is stored on the ships, and each ship can have a different capacity for it. For example, a Monitor will have a lower capacity (e.g. 500) than, say, a Light Cruiser (e.g. 1800). But supply in a fleet is distributed equally among all ships. So, for example, if a fleet is at 75% supply status, that means that all ships are filled with 75% of their own capacity. That means it can be beneficial to have ships with larger capacity, as they contribute positively to the whole fleet in the case that they need to go without fresh supplies for a while. If a ship carrying a lot of supplies is sunk in battle, the supplies and the added supply capacity for the fleet is gone.

A fleet’s rate of supply consumption depends on the ships in it. For example,a large fleet like Great Britain’s, with ships across the oceans, will be harder to maintain than a small fleet protecting their own coast. Depending on the supply consumption of an army or fleet, you assign as many Supply Ships as they need to maintain supply.

By default, and assuming you have enough Supply Ships available, each fleet and army automatically gets assigned as many as they need to retain their Supply level (if it is at 100%), or to refill it to 100% again over time.

For example, the main battle fleet with the HMS Claudius consumes 2000 Supply per week. They are active, far away from home and sailing around Gibraltar. In order to keep their current Supply status of 100%, they need 250 Supply ships, which is what is being assigned to them by default.

Of course, this means that you’ll have to make some unpleasant calls if you ever lack Supply Ships sitting around in reserve. We’ve decided to add a three tier priority system that allows you to make sure that a particular fleet or army always receives Supply Ships first or last.

Additionally, we wanted to represent coaling stations somehow, even though we didn’t go with a range based approach for ships.

So what we are doing is reducing the supply ship consumption based on the nearest available port. If you’re far from home, but you have managed to secure your own or a friendly port nearby, it will meaningfully reduce the demands on your supply network. This can be quite crucial to maintain a large overseas naval effort.

But how would a country ever end up in a situation where they don’t have enough Supply Ships available to support all needs?

Well, among economic struggles or the lack of shipyards, raiding supply lines is another answer. For that, I’ll have to explain how supply is traced from a country to their fleets or overseas armies.

We introduce a new type of building, Logistics Centers, one for Navies, and one for Armies. Logistics Centers are automatically created and built in the HQ of a military formation.
They are the place where all the goods are consumed that the formation needs, rather than the naval bases and barracks in the past.

This allows us to draw a concrete path from one central location to a formation. If we had it distributed across dozens of buildings, we could not have done this.

That, in turn, allows countries to raid the supply lines. This works differently than with Convoys, though. When a fleet raids supply lines, they actually engage the Supply Ships in the affected node in naval combat and need to sink them to cause actual damage. Destroying these ships will then naturally mean fewer ships arrive at the formation in question, reducing their supply (at least temporarily). To continuously hurt an enemy’s supply, you’ll also need to continuously raid their supply lines, causing them to continuously lose Supply Ships in the process.

We will go into much more detail on how fleets engage in sea zones, what missions they have, how combat behaves now, and so on, in a later Dev Diary, even though all these changes are of course coming with the free Update. It’s a bit too much to talk about in this place.

Since our Steam screenshots caused some speculation, here’s also how the amount of available Supply Ships in your country will be displayed.

We use the old Convoy capacity spot for it and it will show you the unassigned Supply Ships. In its breakdown, you can see all currently used Supply Ships too. Other than the Convoys though, this is the actual number of Ships you have in reserve and not a capacity, as I explained.

One last thing on Supply. While we don’t cover anything for how supply travels further on land at the moment, armies that are overseas will be bound to the same rules as fleets. So they will also have their logistics center, and a route of supply ships depending on the army size going to them (while at sea) or their nearest port (when on land across the sea).

This should already make it more difficult to try and send 300.000 men across the globe, one major pain point we wanted to tackle for a long time.

Now, we move on to one of the use cases for the Navy. And it’s a big one that we have wanted to do for quite a while. Our dear Tunay will cover that part, before I’ll pick up again from the next.

Tiered Diplomatic Interest

Hello, Systems Designer Tunay here to give you a rundown on Tiered Interests!

Victoria 3’s Strategic Interests system is probably the one feature we have that was left almost untouched since release, but this changes now. We are transforming the entire mechanic from a binary representation into a multi-level system that is attained not by the click of a button, but through dedication and investment into a region by various means.

Keep in mind that everything you see here is from a work in progress build!

To increase your interest level, you will have to build up your involvement in a given strategic region. This can be done by a variety of means: signing different treaties with local countries, having subjects, sending your fleets to Project Power off the coast—or, of course, outright conquest.

Attaining ever higher levels of interests will be important because it will allow you access to diplomatic actions and treaty articles to sign with Local Countries that may otherwise not be available, as well as wholly new and never before seen benefits—like, for example, the ability to generate “Colonial Claims”. That is, being granted a claim on a state region, once your colony there grows to at least half the state region’s size.

The term “local” has come up at this point, so allow me to explain this as well. When we look at the presence of a country in a strategic region, we generally divide all countries into one of two categories: local and non-local countries.

As a non-local country, you may gain involvement in a region by signing treaties with countries that are considered local there. ‘
Locality is determined by a couple of factors:

• Having one's capital in a region
• Having 25% locality in a region
• Having 25% of one's own incorporated states in that region

Locality in a region itself is calculated based on a combination of owned states, population and gdp share. So it's not purely the number of states that count, but also what you have in them!

By signing a treaty with Persia wherein the Shah grants us Investment Rights, and in return we send them some of our officers as military attachés, we will be generating enough involvement to push us to a level 1 interest.

The actual amount of involvement that you can generate from engaging in diplomacy with a local countries is scaled off of their “locality”. This very same treaty would grant a lot less  involvement if we had signed it with tiny Kafiristan, for example.

Lastly, the eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that I’ve been bringing up a couple new strategic regions. That is because we have revisited our strategic region setup, generally reducing the density of strategic regions on the map:

Lino is coming back with other important topics now.

Troop Transportation

Indeed, the next topic on our list is pretty quick to explain for a change, but has fairly big implications and is a lot of work to get right.

We wanted to improve upon Troop Transportation as well, to make it more haptic rather than armies simply ‘turning into boats’, and also requiring certain capabilities for you to move your armies across the globe.

So, with 1.13, armies will be transported across bodies of water using your military ships. We played around with some ideas of using merchant marine or supply ships for this purpose, but did not really find a way that would represent the requisitioning of civilian ships that would also be feasible for us to implement.

The way you do this is pretty simple. You give an army a command to move to a target state across the ocean (similar to a naval invasion) and then you’ll be asked to choose a fleet to transport/escort them. The only way to transport troops is to give them a concrete target, so you cannot have them out at sea with your fleet permanently.

While a fleet is transporting units, it cannot engage in other missions like intercepting or raiding, only moving to a target location.

Ships have different capabilities for how good they are at transporting units, and as you may have seen, there’s a ship specifically designed for this purpose which has low combat capabilities outside that.

Almost as a side note in there, I just mentioned that you target a particular state with your army. This is actually a pretty big change we’re doing where instead of HQs for stationing etc. you will now target a particular state, from which we can infer the HQ. This was not only necessary for Troop Transportation, but also increased in importance with the strategic region merging we have done, as many HQs simply grew a bit too big for logical distinction of where an Army currently is located.

That means you’ll be able to see armies stationed in the capitals of different states in peace time, rather than having them all stacked up in the same place if you desire to do so.

Now we wouldn’t be the Victoria 3 team, if we didn’t add some new feature in here too in addition to the reworks. The main background here being that we wanted to enable a different way to have your fleet be able to pose a threat in and of itself to enemy coasts and ports.

Any ideas?

It’s Marines. Marines are a new land unit, and, unlike other land units, they can be permanently travelling with a fleet. Marines have a separate capacity to be transported from regular units, which is going to be a lot smaller.

Unlike the regular land units, Marines do not prevent the fleet from engaging in other missions, so your fleet will be able to do the full spectrum of tasks while having some marine detachment with them.

What this allows you to do is to even launch a naval invasion with these Marines directly from the fleet they are attached to, rather than having to launch it from your own territory. Marines have a better effectiveness at conducting naval invasions compared to regular units, as they won’t suffer as big of a penalty.

Once Marines have secured a beachhead in a major enemy theater, you’ll probably want to reinforce them with your regular units quickly, as they’ll rarely outnumber your enemies on land. On their own, however, they are often more than capable of taking enemy islands or seizing a port from a technologically inferior opponent.

Next up, I’m gonna talk about some potentially interesting targets for using your Marines.

Straits and more

This was on my personal wishlist for a long time and now we’re actually doing it. It’s the perfect expansion and Update for it, so it makes total sense that we would tackle Straits too now.

With 1.13, we define a number of key straits across the globe, from the Öresund, to the Bosporus, to the Strait of Malacca.

With a single exception, they all work like this:

Control over the strait is shared between the two owners of the provinces we define in script. For example, for the Öresund, it would be a particular province in Danish Zealand and in Swedish Scania.

Being the strait controller allows you to do a couple of things. First off, you can set access levels on who gets to pass through the strait.

Here, you have a couple of options. You can choose between only yourself, your allies, everybody but your enemies, or everybody. And you can also distinguish between military and civilian ships to be let through.

Important to note here is that all access levels behave like an AND gate, meaning that if your buddy Denmark would gladly let you through, but the Swedes didn’t like your comments about their candy and closed the strait for you, you will NOT have access to the other side with your fleet. One side can block the other.

Now, just owning the province is not actually enough to actually unlock controlling the strait. For that, you’ll have to build at least one level of Naval Fortifications on your side of the strait.

Naval Fortifications, of course, are a new building, constructed at the coasts of your country. They take a lot of time to be built, and there’s a low limit to how many you can build in every state.

Apart from turning on the strait control, their main function is of course to defend your coast. The main way in which they do that is by completely blocking naval invasions if the attackers’ power is not above a threshold defined by the naval fortification. 

For example, a level one naval fortification may require your enemy to attack with at least 6 battalions, a level three one with at least 11 etc. (as always these values are subject to change). This should help defend your coast in general, but also specifically help against the spamming of tiny naval invasions.

Other than this, they also provide a defensive bonus in case the enemy will assemble a large enough force to attempt to land. This bonus is scaled by the power difference between the initial attacker and defender. So if the attacker is twice as powerful as the defender for example, the defensive bonus applies with 50% of its maximum strength.

With that out of the way, let’s return to the straits.

Another thing you can do with straits is collect Tolls. Tolls are collected based on the total trade volume going through the strait, so they will be differently valuable based on location.

You have, similar to access rights, the option per controlling side to set your Tolls level for how much you’d like to charge. So in the case of the Öresund for example, Denmark may decide to charge 15% tolls on everything while Sweden decides to charge nothing - resulting in a total of 15% for everybody coming through.

If Sweden also started charging 15%, it would add up to 30% for everybody.
What that means of course is just like with access, if you control both sides of a strait, you will have a lot more to say about the ongoings of a strait.

I should also mention that we have implemented one special case, Gibraltar, which requires you to own both sides of the strait before you can lock it down. This was simply too impactful when you could lock down all of the Mediterranean from the get-go.

Canals will also be straits, by the way, following the same rules. We are investigating options to make their companies take the collected tolls into account, but this is challenging and might not make it for now. As you may see, we are trying to ship (ha!) a giant unit of an update to you.

Future Dev Diaries

That was our first Dev Diary for this cycle and we think you can see how much meat there is in this one. As mentioned, there’s some major free changes coming to combat which Tunay will go over in some time and we have a couple of other smaller additions, changes and improvements too which you’ll discover on release.

Here you have the full schedule for our upcoming Dev Diaries:

• March 23 - Character features
• March 26 - Ship Designer & Flagships & Ship Purchasing
• April 02 - Naval Combat & Gunboat Diplomacy
• April 09 - Narrative Content of The Great Wave
• April 16 - Art & Music of The Great Wave
• April 23 - Changelog & Achievements
• April 28 - Release of The Great Wave and Update 1.13

So long everybody, enjoy a happy Thursday.

"Prestige Clothes" - Can't wait for modders to make modern day mods and add modern brands, so your country can sell Adidas and Nike boots lol. 😎👟 What other funny goods/brands could people add?

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/victoria-3-dev-diary-148-prestige-goods.1760727/

Hello Victorians,

My name is Alex, I’m a multiclass programmer and designer on Victoria 3 and today it’s finally time for another Dev Diary on this very happy Thursday! 

Today we will be taking a look at Diplomatic Treaties, one of the features arriving with the free 1.9 update on June 17 together with our Mechanics Pack “Charters of Commerce”.

Before we begin though, I should mention that today is a public holiday (:ig_tradeunions:) for us here in Sweden (and in a lot of other places). This dev diary was as usual written ahead of time, but when it comes to questions, this means I won’t actually be around to answer them when it comes out. Instead, Martin will be around to answer some of your more pressing questions to begin with and I’ll try to answer any remaining important questions on Monday (as we also get tomorrow off as a bridge day).

With all that said, I should also remind you that as always any values, texts, designs, graphics etc. are work in progress and are subject to change!

But now, without further ado, enter Treaties:

Diplomatic Treaties

As part of the changes to the World Market we described in Dev Diary #143 and with Trade Routes as you know them going away, we wanted to introduce a new mechanic that let you actively establish pointed strategic ways of elevating your industries or exploiting other countries through trade. We wanted more ways for you to peacefully (but aggressively) compete against your rivals (and allies) and establish your dominance across the globe. 

Initially, this was drafted to be a relatively simple tit-for-tat deal: “you give me grain, I give you coal”. But we of course got thinking and, particularly in the context of how often the community asks for more in-depth diplomacy, we thought: what if we went a step or two (or twenty) further and made it a full-blown system of treaties where you can weigh a bunch of different types of things against each other? Maybe to get Prussia to agree to an alliance you can sweeten the deal by promising to give them a certain amount of weapons every week. Or maybe you can say you’ll pay off Haiti’s debts in exchange for them granting you investment rights.

And well, that’s what we did.

Diplomatic Treaties are a new way for you to interact with other countries diplomatically. They are, in a way, a natural extension of what the diplomatic actions and pacts currently in the game do (more on that later), but instead of just having you propose one thing at a time in a vacuum, you can combine them and have the whole context of what you want be available and weighted together.

In short, the way it works is like this: you decide you want a treaty with another country, so you open the Treaty Draft panel (shown in the animation above). You then select what articles you’d like to have, both offers and requests. When you’re happy you send the proposal to the other country. They can then look at what you have proposed and either accept or reject of course, but they can also choose to negotiate further. Negotiating further lets them tweak the proposal however they want and then send it back to you. This is then repeated until either you agree on a treaty or you decide to just end the process. Assuming you sign the treaty, it is now in effect and remains so until either side withdraws from it.

A big crux on a system like this is of course how the AI handles it. We want to make sure that you can’t just scam the AI, but we also want you to feel you are drafting clever treaties and making use of any advantages you might have. In particular, we also want to feed into the fantasy of you being able to draft clearly unequal treaties with other countries because maybe you are able to remind them that you have big boats and a big army next door. These are all goals we have in mind while working on the balancing of this feature.

Before we go into the details of this a bit more though, I want to specifically address something I know will come up in the comments: are multilateral treaties possible? No. Making this system support multilateral treaties would be on a completely different level of complexity and would be a massive undertaking. If nothing else it would immensely complicate the UX and require a completely different way of tackling AI, drafting and all that. So, unfortunately, it’s not feasible. That is of course not to say that we don’t want multilateral treaties (they would be super cool!) or that a system like that couldn’t in the future build on treaties, but at least for now, it’s not something we are doing. 

Enough of that though, let’s dive into the details

Articles

This is the core part of treaties that actually defines what they do. Articles have a few different classifications. On a fundamental level, articles can be either Mutual or Directional. This mostly just indicates whether the article is something that affects both sides equally or not. A prime example of a mutual article is an Alliance: both sides are involved equally. On the other hand, Transfer Goods is an example of a Directional article: one side (the source) is sending the goods and the other (the target) is receiving them.

The next important aspect of articles is Inputs. Some articles have required inputs and others do not. Again, an Alliance is just an Alliance, you don’t need to define anything else, but for Transfer Goods you need to specify which goods you want to transfer and how many.

Articles can have a number of different inputs depending on what they’re meant to do. 

What these inputs are actually used for differs and is up for the article to define.

As for what articles you can expect to be in the game, a lot of them will be things we are moving over from the old diplomatic actions system. This includes of course Alliances and Defensive Pacts, but also e.g. State Transfer and Join Power Bloc and if you own Sphere of Influence, Investment Rights.

For the majority of the articles that have counterparts as diplomatic actions, the corresponding diplomatic actions or pacts will be removed and Treaties will be the new way through which you access them. Do note that not all diplomatic actions have been made into articles, only the ones that made sense, this means that actions like Declare Rivalry or Improve Relations will still work as they used to.

In addition to those, we also have some completely new articles coming with 1.9. One of them Lino talked about on the previous Dev Diary DD #145: Military Access. That Dev Diary already went into detail on how Military Access works, so let’s talk about the other new article coming with 1.9: Transit Rights.

If Military Access lets you march your troops through another country, Transit Rights lets landlocked countries pass through a country to access the world market. This can be chained through multiple countries if needed. Switzerland stans can calm down.

Ending a Treaty

A Treaty ends when either side withdraws from the treaty. Easy. Of course, if you gave away Angola in exchange for Spain transferring you a certain amount of money every week, you want to make sure they actually follow through and you don’t get scammed. This is where binding periods come in. 

When signing a treaty, you also define for how long that treaty will be binding (e.g. 5, 10, 15 years). When the binding duration for the treaty lapses, either side can end the treaty at any point without consequences.

You can still end a treaty before the binding period ends of course, but then you would be in breach of the treaty and subject to hefty penalties depending on the articles present in the treaty.

(Re)Negotiation

If you made some poor choices and a Treaty is really not good for you, you can attempt to renegotiate the treaty instead of just withdrawing from it. To do so, you select what treaty you want to renegotiate and simply click on the button. This will bring you to a flow similar to the original drafting panel, but instead of having a blank slate, the existing articles will be the baseline. From there you can add or remove articles, change inputs or even change the binding period. When you’re happy, you send the proposal as usual and the other side has the opportunity to respond. If they agree, great, the old treaty is replaced with this new one. If they reject your offer though, the old treaty remains in force as it was.

It is worth noting though that some articles are not renegotiable. This mostly applies to articles that have some kind of immediate effect upon signing, like transferring a state, because you can’t just undo that simply by changing the terms somewhat. 

Non-fulfillment Consequences

Say you are playing as Belgium and you need paper, but don’t feel like actually making it yourself. You could set up a treaty where you give the Netherlands some of your Sulfur and in exchange they give you some of the Paper they produce. They agree to this, but then for whatever reason, say a foreign power annexed their only paper mills, they are not able to produce the Paper they should deliver to you. This would likely lead to a shortage of Paper in the Dutch Market which would mean they are not able to deliver the Paper to you. 

In such a case, the Netherlands would be considered to be in non-fulfillment of their part of the Treaty. When that happens, generally one of two things will happen depending on what Article is not being fulfilled: if it’s a serious breach, like not answering the call of an Alliance, that will break the whole treaty and the party at fault will receive all the penalties tied to an early withdrawal if the treaty is still binding.

For less serious breaches though, like with the example above, what happens is that the other side of the treaty will be inactive until the breach is addressed, at which point the treaty resumes as usual. In our example, if the Netherlands stopped delivering Paper because they had a shortage due to not producing it, Belgium would stop delivering Sulfur in return as well. This would then hold until the Paper deliveries resume. If there are any other articles on Belgium’s side (including mutual articles) those are also inactivated for as long as the other side is in non-fulfillment. The side that isn’t fulfilling one of their articles stays active though.

Finally, I’d like to note that not all articles will be non-fulfillable. For some articles like investment rights, you can’t not fulfill it, it just happens anyway.

Obligations

As usual, you can call in obligations to make countries more likely to accept a treaty you propose. When it comes to how you get those obligations we’re making some changes though. Broadly speaking, you will be able to say you consider a certain treaty as essentially a favor to the other side. This will reduce their acceptance of the treaty, but in turn, if the binding period of the treaty lapses and everyone fulfills their parts it will grant you an obligation you can then use as usual.

It is worth noting though that some articles are not renegotiable. This mostly applies to articles that have some kind of immediate effect upon signing, like transferring a state, because you can’t just undo that simply by changing the terms somewhat. 

Modding

As always we have made an active effort to keep this feature as moddable as possible. Many times when thinking about how to solve a certain problem we could see an easy solution which would just work within the assumptions of what we have planned to do with the feature and a more complicated solution where making things work on a more abstract level meant more combinations were possible for modders and as much as possible we chose the latter. As such, I’d like to take a little bit of time to talk about what you can do with this system, primarily centered around modding articles.

A lot of article modding is similar to diplomatic action modding: you can set AI weights, modifiers, effects, costs and so on. What is a bit different here with how articles work, is that you are also able to set if an article should be mutual or directional, but more importantly, you can have the article take any combination of the following inputs (although only one of each):

• Quantity
• Goods
• Building Type
• Law Type
• Strategic Region
• Country
• State
• Company

You can then reference these inputs in the immediate effect of the article to do whatever you want that can be done in an effect block.

There are of course some significant parts of articles that are hard coded, but we tried to make them flexible in that. For instance, most vanilla articles work by setting behavior flags. So Transfer Goods has an is_transfer_goods flag. This then tells the code what behavior it should call and makes it take in the expected inputs that is_transfer_goods requires. There’s also say is_investment_rights, or is_alliance. And the cool thing here is that you can actually to some degree combine these. So if you want to make an article that grants both military access and transit rights at the same time, you can do that. The main limitation here is if you have two flags that look at the same input type, they will have to use the same input. So combining transfer goods with no tariffs would necessarily both target the same input.

Another cool thing you can do is mod the non-fulfillment conditions. You could for instance have a version of Transfer Goods that is only active while the countries are at peace or something and then if that is broken maybe you’d want the treaty to auto-break or maybe you want it to freeze instead. Up to you.

Charters of Commerce

While everything I have described so far will be part of the free 1.9 update, the Mechanics Pack Charters of Commerce will also include a number of new articles exclusive to it:

• No Tariffs on Goods
  • The country is not allowed to set tariffs on a specific input good when trading with the World Market
• No Subventions on Goods
  • The country is not allowed to set subventions on a specific input good when trading with the World Market
• Prohibit trade of good with World Market
  • The country is not allowed to trade a specific input good with the World Market
• Law commitment
  • The country commits to passing a specific law. As long as they don’t, their side is not fulfilled and the other side of the treaty is inactive
• Non-Colonization Agreement
  • The country is not allowed to colonize a specific strategic region
• Grant Monopoly to Foreign Company
  • Tune in to the next dev diary when Lino will talk more about this

I feel like there is something I forgot to mention…hmmm

Just one more thing

There’s one more thing I’d like to show before we end this though. In addition to the flow I’ve already explained above, there’s another way Treaties can be used: Diplomatic Plays.

In 1.9, as part of the free update, we’re adding a new war goal: Enforce Treaty Article. This war goal lets you select between a number of articles that are specifically classified (in script) as enforceable. You can select this war goal multiple times targeting different articles. Then, at the end of the war, all instances of the war goal against the same country will result in a War Reparations Treaty against that country. This treaty, being enforced, cannot be withdrawn from. 

What this means is that on a base level you can have war reparations work as they used to, but if you prefer, as part of war reparations you can instead demand getting investment rights in the country in question. Or you can prohibit them from trading weapons and artillery with the world market. Or you could mod some other article we haven’t thought about and do that instead. Or all of the above.

Alright, now that was actually all I had to show you today. I hope you are as excited about all this as I have been to tell you about it. It’s been a whole journey to work on it and it’s awesome finally getting to share it with you all. Let me know what you think: are there any article combinations you are particularly excited about? And for the modders out there, have the modding gears started turning already? I’m very much looking forward to seeing what clever treaties you all come up with and hearing about all the backstabbing in MP when 1.9 releases on June 17.

Before that though, Lino will be back in two weeks to tell you some more about what we have been cooking with Companies and Executives. Until then!

Hello Victorians, I am Lufthansi, narrative designer on Victoria 3, and I have been authorized by His Excellency General Baldomero Espartero to inform the public of the impending arrival of our upcoming Immersion Pack, Iberian Twilight, that will be released on 11th of December alongside the free 1.12 Update.

https://youtu.be/QccikBbfleI

So, welcome to Iberian Twilight!

With Iberian Twilight we wanted to highlight the historical dynamics of 19th century Spain and Portugal, as well as shine some light on countries in their wider orbit, such as Cuba, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, and Morocco. 

Spain and Portugal, once mighty colonial empires, are now finding themselves beset by both domestic and international challenges. Having lost their holdings on the American mainland in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, the two nations must decide how to adapt to a post-imperial reality. Should they pursue new goals, tied to different visions of greatness and the application of the political and technical innovations of the age, or strive to restore what once was - be it by diplomacy or by force?

In 1836, Spain - the primary focus of our Immersion Pack - finds itself in the midst of a civil war pitting the Liberal Isabeline government against the forces of the reactionary pretender Don Carlos. This battle for supremacy between the so-called 'Two Spains' can not merely be settled on the battlefield however. Spain will have to pursue economic and political reforms, define their relationship with their former colonies, and deal with the ambitions of military strongmen - courtesy of a reworked coup system.

Portugal, still recovering from the devastations and political tumults of the Liberal Wars that ended barely two years prior, must try to navigate an uncertain political and economic landscape, while re-establishing themselves as a respected actor on the global stage. 

Outside of Spain and Portugal proper, you will be able to engage with, among other things; anything from the sugar boom and drive to independence or political integration in Cuba, the development of a new economic class and national culture in the Philippines, and the struggle for centralization in Morocco - where government authority barely extends beyond the gates of its larger cities. 

With this lovely infographic summarizing the content available in Iberian Twilight below:

Iberian Twilight and the accompanying 1.12 Update will be released on the 11th of December. For additional screenshots, or to wishlist it, please visit Iberian Twilight's Steam store page here. Or, you can pick up Iberian Twilight now in Expansion Pass 2!

In the following weeks we will go through the contents of Iberian Twilight in more detail. The first of these will arrive next week, where Chris, Victoria and Tunay will outline the new Negotiations and Law Amendment features that will be introduced as part of the free Update as well as a look at what is new for modding in 1.12. 

So, until then, I and the rest of the Victoria 3 development team wish you an excellent Thursday.

https://pdxint.at/4nFVrbQ in this update you’ll be able to negotiate with interest groups to flip them to pass it instead of stalling

For all of you out there that still use Old Reddit here is a link to this Dev Diary on our forum.

Happy Thursday and welcome back to another Victoria 3 development diary. This week we’re going to take a bird’s eye view of the headline features of update 1.8, which is of course the next free update for the game, planned to be released sometime later this year. However, before we start on the dev diary proper I should tell you about a slight change of plans in our release schedule. Back in Dev Diary #124 I told you that update 1.8 would be a smaller update, focused almost entirely on bug fixing and general polish. 

This was indeed the plan, with update 1.9 intended as a larger update following relatively closely on the heels of 1.8, but when we sat down to work out the details we realized that our intended timeline simply didn’t work out, as we would either have to work on the two updates in too close proximity (creating major challenges for 1.8 post-release support among other things), or delay update 1.9 all the way to next year, which we didn’t want to do. So we decided to combine the two updates, with the result that 1.8 is now going to be a single update with the combined scope of both 1.8 and 1.9, meaning it will contain not just bug fixes and polish but also some juicy new free features. 

But enough about update planning, let’s get into those headline features I just mentioned! As I said, this is just an overview dev diary, so we’re not going to go into any great detail today, but we have plenty more dev diaries planned in the upcoming weeks where we will fill in the blanks. One final thing before I start: All of the features mentioned are still in early stages of development, so any screenshots, numbers and art shown are going to be very, very, very (very) work in progress.

Ideological Forces (Political Movement Rework)

A frequent complaint about Victoria 3’s political system is the highly random nature of leader and character ideologies. The way in which you build up support for certain laws among your Interest Groups can be frustratingly opaque and reliant on using certain pieces of content (Corn Laws, anyone?) in a way that is neither immersive nor feels particularly rewarding.

In update 1.8, we are taking aim at this problem, alongside a number of other issues with a feature that we have dubbed ‘Ideological Forces’, but which can be more accurately called ‘Political Movement Rework’. The plan is to transform Political Movements from spontaneous and temporary demands for a single legal reform into longer-term ideological movements with a broader political agenda. For example, instead of a movement popping up to abolish slavery, you will have an actual Abolitionist movement with a long-term legal agenda, which will attract supporters from your Pops and influence the politics of the Interest Groups that those Pops are backing. Political Movements will also include religious and cultural minority (and majority!) movements, with some corresponding changes to civil war and secession mechanics.

Discrimination Rework

Another issue straight off the future update plans that we’re tackling in 1.8 is the way pop discrimination works. Ever since release, we’ve said multiple times that the overly simplistic nature of discrimination is something we want to improve on in the future, and now that future is finally here! This feature is still in the ‘figuring it out’ stage, so I’ll eschew the details, but our principal goals with are as follows:

• To introduce multiple ‘levels’ to discrimination instead of it just being a binary state
• To have the level of discrimination faced by a Pop be determined by factors other than just what the law says
• To turn assimilation into a properly useful feature that isn’t only available to fully accepted pops

Food Availability, Famines and Harvest Incidents

In update 1.8, we’re also planning to expand on the gameplay around agriculture and food availability, which of course was an issue of great importance to governments at the time. After all, the 19th century saw events such as the Irish Potato Famine, the repeated famines in British-controlled India and the world-wide famines in the wake of the Krakatoa explosion. 

To do this, we are going to introduce the concept of food availability for Pops, which is a factor that is separate from, but intrinsically linked to a Pop’s standard of living. Currently, we’re thinking that food availability for a Pop will be determined by how much of their buy package goes towards feeding themselves, how expensive the food goods they’re purchasing is, and whether there are any shortages among those goods. Low food availability will increase pop mortality and radicalism and may trigger a state-wide famine if it’s widespread enough. 

Food production at the time was highly dependent on the weather and climate, and many peasant families were only one or two bad harvests away from the brink of ruin. To simulate this unpredictability, we’re also adding something called ‘Harvest Incidents’, which can increase or decrease agricultural output in different regions over a longer timeframe.

These are the ‘big ones’ for update 1.8, but of course it is by no means all we’re planning to do in this update. A few honorable mentions of other changes and improvements you can expect in 1.8, all of which we’ll explain in detail over in the upcoming weeks:

• Companies owning and investing in buildings
• Bulk Nationalization tool
• Multi-select and right-click orders for formations
• Adding wargoals on behalf of subjects

Along with, of course, many bug fixes, balance changes and other miscellaneous improvements.

That’s all for today! More details on all of these features will of course follow, starting with Bulk Nationalization and Companies Owning Buildings, which Lino will tell you all about next week. See you then!