Victoria 3 News

Happy Thursday Victorians!
It’s me, Lino and in today’s Dev Diary I’m going to walk you through the upcoming changes to one of the game’s central society features, namely the discrimination system.

Until now, discrimination was always binary in Victoria 3. A Pop either was discriminated against or they were not. This has led to a fairly one-dimensional feature where there’s not a lot of variety in what Pops can be experiencing. It also has made it hard for us to add harsh consequences to discriminated against Pops since it would have affected so many Pops around the world.

So we are taking some steps to make that more interesting. First of all, we’re saying goodbye to talking about discrimination. Instead, we are introducing the opposite, Acceptance.
Each Pop will have an Acceptance value between 0 and 100. This value is determined by the Pop’s country’s laws, in particular the Citizenship and Church & State groups which play the biggest role here. There are other laws that will have an impact, but we are going to talk about those in a later Dev Diary.

Primary cultures are clearly the points of authority when it comes to Acceptance values

As you can see, the old rules of cultural similarity still apply in the new system. Now though, instead of being immediately accepted if the culture shares a heritage trait, they will gain a high acceptance value bonus for example. This allows a broader range of acceptance, from the cultures that are facing violent hostility to the primary cultures who will always have the highest acceptance value.
The religious impact is changed to provide a bonus if a religion shares a trait with the state religion.

This brings us one step closer to the full picture, but we’re not quite there yet. The Acceptance value actually determines which Acceptance Status a Pop has. There are five possible Statuses, ranging from Full Acceptance to Violent Hostility, which will be used in order to apply consequences to the Pops in question.

Figure.09: WIP list of effects. This is definitely going to change - we’re looking at solutions to make it more readable for release.

You can see that we are not only reworking the system to fit the new vision, but are also expanding on it with new effects, besides the Acceptance value itself. From simple statistical changes like the tax burden per acceptance status to rules for who can work in government buildings or serve in your military, we have added a decent amount of new things to the laws.
Another factor that determines a Pop’s Acceptance value is the age of the Pop’s cultural community in their state. An immigrant Pop that is "fresh off the boat" will not be as accepted as that of another culture which has been there for 30 years already. No matter what your laws say, your Pops will need some time to get used to the new faces in their neighborhood–but, eventually, the new arrivals will reach the Acceptance value which the laws have determined for them.

“Have you seen the looks they gave us? By myself, I couldn’t stay here, but with you by my side I know I will make it.”

Of course you can still improve your Pops’ situation by enacting more progressive laws. These provide higher acceptance bonuses to cultures. For example Ethnostate doesn’t grant any bonus to cultures that share a non-heritage cultural trait with your primary culture, but National Supremacy grants +25 acceptance if they do.

Alright, so you passed Multiculturalism, but you didn’t think your Pops would immediately hug and welcome the people they were despising yesterday, did you?
Law enactments that increase a Pop’s Acceptance value will suffer from a penalty much the same as the newly established cultural communities, which will decay over time. This shows the establishment of these new laws quite well and delays the full effectiveness of the more progressive laws.

Another thing we are changing is conversion and assimilation (so that your Pops can escape from the undesirable lower statuses of Acceptance).
When 1.8 comes out later this year, Pops will be able to assimilate and convert to any culture or religion that would provide them with a higher acceptance value, even if it is not the primary culture or state religion. There is a minimum assimilation value difference that needs to be crossed in order for them to be eligible. For example if their current Acceptance is at 25 and the minimum assimilation value difference from the Citizenship law is defined at 50, their target’s culture Acceptance would need to be 75 or higher in order for them to assimilate.
This still looks at cultures that are present in the same state, so if none of them have a value of 75 or higher, the assimilation could not happen. The assimilation process may also still be forbidden by laws, e.g. under all laws it is currently not allowed for members of the lowest status to assimilate at all. Similarly, Pops of the highest status also do not assimilate in the current setup, as they already possess enough rights and privileges to enjoy a good life.

All of these changes require a fairly substantial rework of our interface. A lot is currently still in development and is coming in pieces, so you will have to discover it on your own, but I still wanted to provide you with a faint idea of what’s coming.
The Cultures panel has been renamed to Society, which fits better since it also includes Statuses and Religion. The acceptance statuses are listed in a new tab, providing an overview of what percentage of Pops falls under which status and who exactly that is.

WIP interface showing the breakdown of acceptance statuses in your country

In the end, we hope this feature rework will enhance your experience with regards to managing your Pops and that it will show much more variety in the Pops’ lives. Especially on the lower end of the spectrum, you should see a lot more consequences, as sad as that is.
This rework is an important step for us, since we can make better use of this system in future narrative content too, and we also have some ideas for future mechanical changes that require this rework as a foundation.

That’s all for today. Next week, on October 3, I’m handing it back to Martin again, who will provide some more information on what we’re doing with civil wars. That should be an interesting one, be sure to check it out!

Happy Thursday and welcome back to another Victoria 3 development diary. This week I’ll be talking about the Political Movement Rework I mentioned back in Dev Diary #126 and which will be coming to you with update 1.8, slated to release later in the year. Before I start, I want to reiterate that this feature is still very much under active development, and any screenshots or numbers shown are very much not indicative of what will be in the actual release, and the UX in particular will be in a very rough state, so don’t read too much into it!

Right then. As I stated previously, the principal goal of this rework is to change Political Movements from temporary demands into long-term ideological forces that can shape the political landscape of your country. So what does that mean, in practice? Well, one of the most significant differences is that movements are no longer formed around the enactment or preservation of a single law. Instead, there is a wide variety of movement types, each with its own unique agenda and conditions for forming, but which can be broadly broken down into three categories:

Ideological Movements: These are movements that exist to push a particular ideological agenda and try to win support for that agenda among your Pops and Interest Groups. Examples include both more narrowly focused movements such as Abolitionists and Suffragettes, and broader ones such as Communists and National Liberals.

Cultural Movements: These are movements that exist to agitate for the rights and privileges of a particular culture in a country. Their specific agenda will vary based on whether the culture is a primary culture or minority culture, as well as the legal status of that culture in the country. For example, a cultural minority movement of South Italians in North Italy would oppose the enactment of Ethnostate since it would strip them of their rights, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re willing to extend those rights to other, less accepted cultures in the country.

Religious Movements: Similar to the cultural movements, but for religions instead

The Pro-Slavery Movement in the United States is largely composed of Dixie pops and has wide-reaching influence in multiple Interest Groups

As before, Movements have Support and Radicalism. Previously, both of these numbers could be a little fuzzy in exactly what they represented, so we have changed them into straight percentages between 0 and 100%, where 50% Support now actually means that about half of your country stands behind the movement.

Support is currently calculated from two parts of roughly equal importance: Popular Support and Military Support. The former is a straightforward calculation of the number of individuals in your country that are part of the movement, so in a country of 1 million people, a movement backed by 100k individuals would have a Popular Support of 10%. Military Support is a little more complex, and is currently calculated by the fraction of Soldier and Officer Political Strength that are part of the movement, representing the fact that officers tend to have a greater sway on military side-taking than mere enlisted men. We are also looking into ways to tie generals directly into movements and have this impact their Military Support. All of this plays an important role if a movement escalates into a Civil War, but more on that later.

So, how do movements gain the support of Pops? Very much like Interest Groups, they now have an attraction weight, which depends completely on the type of nature of the movement. The Abolitionist movement, for instance, might have an outsized attraction on literate pops of certain professions, but also would tend to attract more pops from religions whose scripture and traditions take an anti-slavery stance than from ones which tacitly or overtly approve of it.

This attraction weight competes with the attraction weight of all other movements in your country, as individuals can only be part of a single movement at a time. To ensure that this doesn’t mean you end up with 20 tiny and fragmented movements, we are planning to have a system of ‘initial enthusiasm’, where new movements start with a boost to their attraction which fades over time, and are eventually supplanted entirely by the next shiny new thing. It’s worth noting that we may end up only applying this to Ideological Movements, as it doesn’t necessarily make sense that your Pops would stop caring about their right to worship freely just because the Positivist movement is taking off.

Before we move on, it’s also worth noting that just like with Interest Groups, Pop support for Movements isn’t something that instantly changes overnight: Even if a movement is created with a massive attraction weight, it will take some time for it to pick up supporters from other movements.

The pro-Turkish cultural movement in the Ottoman Empire seeks to ensure that Turks remain at the top of Ottoman society, and has a fairly strong base of support in the military.

As mentioned above, movements will champion one or several ideologies, and have a few different ways in which they will push those ideologies. The first and most straightforward one is through direct action. Movements have a level of Radicalism, which will go up or down over time based on how much they perceive the current status quo and government’s actions to match their overarching goals. Depending on their level of Radicalism, Movements will be in one of four ‘levels’ of activity:

Passive: Movements with very low Radicalism are Passive, have no direct effects and will only indirectly influence Interest Groups (more on that below)
Agitating: The next step up from Passive, Agitating movements will influence the enactment chances of laws that they support or oppose
Protesting: Protesting movements have a greater impact on the enactment chances of their supported and opposed laws compared to Agitating movements, but also steadily turn their supporters into Radicals over time
Rioting: The highest level of Radicalism, Rioting movements will rapidly radicalize their supporters and may take their level of activity one step further by igniting a Civil War

What all this means is that Movement Radicalism is no longer purely a negative thing, at least not when a Movement’s goals align with yours - if you work too hard at keeping everyone happy, you may find it difficult to push through any radical changes that aren’t backed by your dominant Interest Groups.

The other, less direct way in which Movements affect country politics is the influence they hold over Interest Groups. An Interest Group is considered to be influenced by a Movement if at least a certain % of the Interest Group’s total political strength are members of that Movement, and an Interest Group can be influenced by multiple movements. The most significant effect of this is how it impacts IG Leader Ideologies.

Previously, when an Interest Group got a new leader, that leader would pick their ideology from a weighted list of all the ideologies in the game (minus ones that were scripted to be unavailable or have a weight of zero for that leader), but this has now been reduced to a much shorter list: Leader ideologies can now only be picked from either a set of basic ideologies inherent to the Interest Group itself, or from one of the movements that is influencing the Interest Group, with Movement ideologies tending to have stronger weights than the basic ones. This also means that the ideology selection can now actually be predicted and displayed, so that you can make an educated guess about the way the political winds are blowing in your IGs.

This effectively means that the influencing movements serve as ‘factions’ inside the Interest Group, competing to install a leader and take control of the IG for as long as that leader remains in power. We are also considering allowing Movements to have more permanent effects on the ideologies of Interest Groups, but this is tricky to pull off in a way that doesn’t end up with an IG changing its core identity every 10 years or so, so I don’t want to promise that it’ll be part of the 1.8 update just yet.

Torn between the Pro and Anti-Slavery movements, the next leader of Evangelicals may come down on either side of the issue - or be a compromise candidate who sidesteps it altogether.

The final changes I want to go over in this DD is Agitators, which of course have had to go through some changes to fit into this new system. For the most part, Agitators work exactly as before: They appear and start or join movements, can be exiled and invited, and so on. A relatively minor change is that instead of directly adding Support to a movement, they now increase its Pop Attraction by an amount partially scaling to their Popularity, so having Friedrich Engels penning columns singing the praise of your Socialist movement will attract more Socialists over time.

The more significant change is that we have flipped the script on what an Agitator’s Interest Group membership means for their political leanings. Previously, an Agitator would (much like an IG leader) look to their ideology first and interest group ideologies second when determining which laws they support, meaning that you would sometimes get some pretty strange bedfellows and a bunch of Rural Folk Agitators of varying ideologies trying to implement National Militia all over the place for rather unclear reasons. Instead of anchoring Agitators fully to the ideologies of their IG, we have decided that their own ideology, traits and other such circumstances should be what determines which Movement they want to support.

In other words, Agitators are now much more fixated on specific ideas, and if there isn’t sufficient support for those ideas in your country to get a Movement they would actually care to support going, they may not even be available to invite. On the other hand, we are looking into loosening the rules somewhat around which Agitators you can invite based on discrimination status, but we haven’t fully worked out the details there, so more on that another time.

It would of course not be possible to make all these changes without also making major changes to Civil Wars (particularly Secessions and how they tie into cultural/religious movements), but we’ll cover all of that separately in a later dev diary, along with more detailed information on how Movement Radicalism works.

For now I’ll wish you adieu and encourage you to check in again next week, when Lino will tell you all about discrimination and the ways it’s changing in 1.8. See you then!

[h2]Good Day Victorians![/h2]

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Remember your fellow Victorians can help you out on our forums, discord server and Reddit! So chug on down the track and join them all!

Hello Victorians,
wake up, grab a brush and put on a little make-up - we’re talking about Bulk Nationalization today! Also, I will be bringing you more details on the next step in the evolution of the Companies feature: Ownership of building levels. Let’s get started, shall we?

[h2]Bulk Nationalization[/h2]
Since the release of the 1.7 update and the Nationalization feature, the biggest wish from the community (and ourselves) in regards to it was to have a tool that allows you to nationalize more buildings at once and to let you choose more concretely which levels you want to nationalize.
So that’s what we did!

In order to access this new tool, you will have to go into the Building Registry, which you can find on the bottom of the Buildings panel.

Big button. Big window. Big nice.

In here you will see a new button which says “Nationalize Filtered Buildings”.

The Bulk Nationalization waits behind this new button in the Building Registry

As you may be able to tell from its name already, for assembling the list of buildings to be nationalized with the tool, we take into account all the filters you have set up inside the Building Registry.
So if for example you’ve filtered your list down to a list of buildings that are owned by other countries or pops in other countries, well then these are the only buildings that are considered when opening the Bulk Nationalization window. Alternatively you could have filtered the list for buildings that are located in West Bengal, that have a goods shortage and that are currently not hiring. The more you filter, the more control you have over which buildings to nationalize.

Now let’s see what happens when you press that button.

Example: List of all British Pop-owned Ranches, Furniture Manufacturies and Steel Mills that I have filtered for in the Building Registry and that I can nationalize in one go

You can see a list of all affected buildings on top and the main sliders underneath to determine how many levels you’d like to nationalize as you know it from the existing tool. If other owner groups were present, there’d be a separate slider for them.
Additionally, to the left of it, we’ve added a shortcut to filter by a specific ownership type in order to allow you to only select Manor House owned properties for example (because who needs these Landowners, really).

Quick filter for specific ownership type

On the right side of the window, you see the summed up consequences, costs and the option to disable payment (if your laws allow it).
All that’s left to do is press the button and take control.

This Bulk Nationalization feature should prove a powerful tool in everybody’s toolbox when it comes to claiming national ownership and we can’t wait to see you use it.

[h2]Companies Building Ownership[/h2]
As we wrote in the past when we talked about Companies, we have always had a bunch of ideas on how to expand the feature to integrate it more in the simulation.
One of these ideas was giving established Companies actual ownership over building levels in the country which they would positively affect, rather than applying it to all buildings in your country.
So now that we have shipped the 1.7 update which contained the Building Ownership Rework that actually allows other buildings to take control of levels, it felt only natural to take this next step for Companies too.

The way we do this is by giving each established Company a Headquarter (HQ) building. This building will act much like a Financial District or Manor House. They are going to have Pops working in them, have an ownership portfolio overview etc.
So you still decide which Companies to establish in order to specialize your country, but how that plays out will be different.
The establishment of a Company HQ may require you to give away some of your own building levels or provide the necessary funds. Details on this still need to be evaluated and implemented as we are approaching 1.8, but the conditions will likely be dependent on your economic laws.

When you decide to establish a Company, we determine in which state its HQ will spawn based on where in your country the relevant industries are the most prominent. So if you establish Friedrich Krupp for example, a company that cares about Steel, Guns and Artillery, it looks through your country and finds the state with the highest number of building levels of these types and will settle there.

Friedrich Krupp being established in Westphalia, the major steel producing state in Prussia

Once established, Companies can invest into new building levels like Financial Districts or Manor Houses. They make use of the Investment Pool for this. Depending on how much they or the Pops in them have contributed to it, there will be more or less investments from Companies into new levels.
Like the other ownership buildings, the Company HQ level will increase with each level they build or buy.
A goal that we have with their investment logic is that Companies should start investing much more locally, e.g. in their own state, before expanding to your country. But of course if you have foreign investment rights in place, Companies will also be able to make use of that and start building new Steel Mills on the other side of the world!
But keep in mind that Companies will only ever invest in buildings of their assigned types, so Friedrich Krupp will never build a Ranch for example.

A look inside Friedrich Krupp and their Property Portfolio

Another major change that we’re doing with this update is of course to change the throughput and construction bonuses. Companies will only affect the buildings that are actually belonging to them, rather than every single building of fitting type in your country. To compensate for this, we increase the bonus that Companies are providing. The same is true for the construction bonus, which is applied only to buildings that are funded by the Company.

In the interface, we will represent Company ownership with their icon wherever a level is owned by them. We are also thinking about adding a new color to distinguish their ownership type further, but will need to investigate this more.
What we also do to visualize company ownership is take it into the third dimension. We will show on the world map that a building has an association to a company in the form of billboards.
If there’s at least one level being owned by a Company, we place an according billboard showing the Company’s logo on the building.

Our Art team has come up with multiple designs for billboards, very pretty (but still WIP)



For the future, we can see potential to expand this kind of visualization to other areas, e.g. ships and trucks, but that’s out of scope for 1.8 at least.

While this ownership change is a major step forward for Companies, it’s not the end of our plans for them. We cannot provide you a timeline for further improvements yet, but we do see potential to expand on them with features like political impact (e.g. influencing IGs or enactment of certain laws) and company leading characters among other things.
But that’s for another time.

The next Dev Diary is coming to you in two weeks on the 19. of September, where Martin will walk you through the changes we are making to Political Movements.
With that, I’m leaving you for today and wish you a happy Thursday! ;)

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.


[h2]Ideological Forces (Political Movement Rework)[/h2]

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.

One of the major aims of the Political Movement Rework is to make the mechanics around how we assign ideologies to Interest Group leaders much more transparent to the player

[h2]Discrimination Rework[/h2]

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
  

UX mockup of what discrimination/acceptance of a particular culture might look like in 1.8. Note that everything here is just placeholder/example data and not necessarily planned features (sadly there will be no ‘let them eat fish’ law).

[h2]Food Availability, Famines and Harvest Incidents[/h2]

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.

Early development mapmode showing harvest incidents. Korea is experiencing a period of bountiful harvests, while the situation is less rosy in the East African interior (ignore the colored sea zones, as that is just a bug from the feature being WIP).

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!