Victoria 3 News

Hello and welcome to another Victoria 3 Dev Diary! As we already mentioned, there’s been some changes in the Dev Diary schedule due the release date to Sphere of Influence/Update 1.7 being delayed, so today we’ll be talking about Diplomatic Catalysts instead of the previously planned Great Game dev diary. We’ll be posting a new Dev Diary schedule as soon as it’s finalized, most likely next week.

Right then, let’s get to the topic at hand. Diplomatic Catalysts is a new system added in update 1.7, the role they play in creating Political Lobbies, and the impact they will have on how the diplomatic AI acts towards other countries.

So, what is a Diplomatic Catalyst? Put simply, a Diplomatic Catalyst is a type of diplomatic ‘occurrence’, positive or negative, between two countries. There are many different types of Catalysts, here is a small list of examples:

• Relations between two countries increases by one full ‘level’ (for instance from Cordial to Amicable)
  
• A subject has their autonomy decreased
  
• Two countries end up on the same side in a Diplomatic Play
  
• A country reforms their government and becomes significantly ideologically divergent from another country’s government
  
• A country declares another country their rival
  
• A country breaks off a mutually negotiated Diplomatic Pact with another
  

Each type of Catalyst may result in the creation of a Political Lobby in one or both of the countries, targeting the other country. The type of Lobby and chance for it to appear depends on the nature of the Catalyst (such as whether it is of a hostile nature), the diplomatic conditions between the two countries, and whether the overall conditions are suitable for the creation of a Lobby. For example, a ‘Relations Increased’ catalyst will only create pro-country lobbies, with an increasingly higher chance to do so the higher relations go. Conversely, the ‘Pact Broken’’ catalyst can create both pro and anti-country lobbies and is more likely to do so the more significance the broken pact had for the country that just had it taken away from them. Some catalysts, such as ‘Ideological Divergence’, can result in the creation of either a Pro or an Anti-Country lobby.

Of course, it isn’t as simple as just being a dice roll: the proper conditions must be in place for a Lobby to appear to begin with and there must be at least one non-marginalized Interest Group interested in joining the Lobby. Additionally, the calculation for whether an Interest Group wants to join a lobby or not can depend on the type of Catalyst: For example, if the ‘Ideological Divergence’ catalyst creates a Lobby, Interest Groups calculating their desire to join that lobby will place additional emphasis on their own ideological view of the country in question. After all, just because a country that’s going all in on Market Liberalism has ideologically diverged from your government doesn’t mean your in-opposition Industrialists aren’t over the moon about their new politics.

The signing of a Defensive Pact between Brazil and the USA has resulted in the creation of a powerful Pro-American Lobby comprised of the Industrialists and Landowners

Right then, onto the diplomatic AI. Since this is a topic we haven’t talked about in a while, I thought I’d give a little refresher on how the AI decides its behavior towards other countries, before telling you about how this decision-making process will change in 1.7.

Fundamentally, the most important factor in how an AI country behaves towards another country is their Attitude. Attitude is mainly determined by a country’s Attitude Score and Strategic Desire, which is in turn influenced by their Diplomatic Strategy and other factors such as active Journal Entries.

Confused yet? I’ll try to illustrate with an example: If you’ve ever played Mexico, you should be all too familiar with US aggression. They typically start as Antagonistic towards Mexico and progress to Belligerent after some time has passed. Though these are both hostile attitudes, they differ considerably in which particular hostile behaviors the AI will engage in.

Antagonistic AIs will tend to oppose you in diplomatic plays and use hostile diplomatic actions like rivalry and embargo, but will rarely attack you outright. Even if they do attack, they will do so using wargoals aimed at weakening you or at worst snatching away subjects they have an interest in: they want to keep you in check but they don’t have any interest in taking your land.

Belligerent AIs, on the other hand, are very much interested in taking your land. They may be after just a single state, or a handful of states, or they may in fact be seeking outright annexation. Regardless, when a Belligerent AI comes over for a visit, you’d better hope that your army and its allies are up to the task of seeing them off.

So why does the AI pick one over the other? It all comes down to the aforementioned Strategic Desire, which represents their long-term diplomatic goals towards a particular nation. The US tends to start with the ‘Antagonize’ Strategic Desire towards Mexico, and change to ‘Conquer’ once they research Nationalism and unlock the Manifest Destiny Journal Entry. If these sound like they line up directly with Antagonistic/Belligerent, it’s because they do! In some cases, a Strategic Desire will translate directly into a particular Attitude unless offset by the Attitude Score, while in others it’s more nuanced. I don’t want to go too on too much of a tangent into Attitude Score, but you can think of it as the AI’s calculation of whether it’s willing to set aside its long-term diplomatic goals for short-term reasons. I.e., ‘we do want to conquer a state from the Ottomans, but at the moment we need them to protect us against Austria’.

‘Maintain Balance of Power’ is one of the more common Diplomatic Strategies, and has the AI pursue more moderate diplomatic goals, avoiding excessive infamy and preferring weakening their rivals to expanding their borders in most cases.

When the AI is prompted to select a Strategic Desire towards another country, they look at the pool of available and achievable desires, assign them a score, and then select through a weighted random process. As mentioned above, Diplomatic Strategy plays an important role here: A country with the ‘Acquire Colonies’ strategy needs no particular reason to select the Conquest desire towards a juicy Unrecognized target, while a country with ‘Defend the Borders’ will only consider picking it to retake lost territories, and even then they’re reluctant to do so in an offensive war. Journal Entries also factor heavily, as we saw with the Manifest Destiny example above. There are of course many more factors in how the AI scores different desires: as an example, AI countries tend to pick more hostile desires towards a country going full-in on radical leftism if they themselves are not pursuing a similar path.

But enough with the long-winded explanations, let’s get to what has actually changed in 1.7. I mentioned above that the AI selects a Strategic Desire ‘when it is prompted to do so’, and here is the crux of the matter. In the current version of the game, the AI uses a system that you could call a ‘reroll progress bar’. For each country, it tracks the progress of said bar, which increases slowly over time but can also make larger jumps from certain occurrences, such as the country selecting a new Diplomatic Strategy or the two countries suddenly ending up opposed in a play, essentially a much simpler version of the very Diplomatic Catalyst system we’re going over in this DD.

Once the reroll progress bar hits 100, the AI will re-roll its strategic desire, often with an additional weight towards ‘staying the course’, particularly towards a country they have long-standing diplomatic pacts with. This may seem like a fairly sensible system, but the problem is that it’s entirely opaque to the player. You simply aren’t told that your long-standing ally just turned hostile towards you because they had a massive ideological shift in their government or picked up a new Journal Entry - at best you may get a custom notification that gives you a hint, such as the one for the French Borders Journal Entry.

This, of course, is where the Catalysts come in! As of update 1.7, the ‘re-roll bucket’ is gone, and replaced with a system of weights similar to those used for Lobby creation, which allows for the AI to adjust its long-term goals in a way that’s far less arbitrary and most importantly, which can be explained to the player. Just like different Catalysts have different weights and conditions for creating Lobbies, the way they potentially alter an AI’s diplomatic strategy is also tailored to the specific Catalyst.

To give you an example, ‘Country Bankrupt’ is a Catalyst that triggers for all of a country’s diplomatic ties when they go bankrupt. For most AI countries, this is of little significance and won’t result in any change in Strategic Desire, but if an AI thinks it’s in a position to take advantage of the bankrupt country’s momentary weakness, particularly if they are pursuing a strategy of Economic Imperialism, a recalculation may trigger in which the AI picks a new desire towards the bankrupt country, which will always be of a more hostile nature than whatever they had before. Other catalysts (for example ‘Relations Improved‘) may only ever change their Strategic Desire in a friendlier direction, while yet others (for example ‘Diplomatic Strategy Changed’) can potentially change it in any direction that makes sense at the time.

By declaring bankruptcy to deal with their crippling debt problems, Ashanti has displayed their weakness to the world and become a tempting target for Great Britain

So what does all this mean? Essentially, what it all boils down to is that the AI is now much more transparent and comprehensible in its behavior, and that the diplomatic relationship between two countries will flow much more from the actions of those two countries. Your AI ally will no longer turn on you just because some dice rolls behind the scenes told them to, they will turn on you because you broke a Trade Agreement they saw as vital, or because you pushed your Infamy too far, or because the ideologies of your governments simply became too incompatible. Similarly, befriending an AI is no longer just a matter of keeping relations high and praying for a re-roll, instead you can actively work to improve their Strategic Desire (and thus attitude) towards you by acting in a manner that benefits them: Make enemies of their enemies, support them in diplomatic plays, and so on.

Even if you missed the notification informing you of an Attitude change resulting from a new Strategic Desire, you can always tooltip the Attitude of an AI country to discover the reason that they adopted their current Strategic Desire towards you. You can even use this to discover why two AI countries are enemies or friends with each other by using the Attitude filter on the diplomatic map mode!

That’s all for today! Next week we’ll be switching topics and talking about the content side of Sphere of Influence, starting with The Great Game. See you then!

Hello Victorians, this is Martin here with an update on the release date of the Sphere of Influence expansion.

A few weeks ago we announced we were planning to release the expansion and its accompanying update on May 6th. Since that time we’ve unfortunately come to the conclusion that both the update and the expansion are in need of more time for bug fixing and polish. Both update 1.7 and Sphere of Influence contain several fundamental changes to how the game functions, particularly in the form of the Building Ownership Revision and Power Blocs, which has resulted in bugs, as well as balance and technical stability issues.

While we are happy with the features on offer in 1.7/Sphere of Influence, we simply do not believe that sticking to the original release date will allow us to deliver those features in a polished and balanced state, and we frankly do not want your enjoyment of them to be marred by excessive bugginess, crashes or general lack of polish. We believe that a delay will allow us to release the update and expansion in a state that both we as the developers and you as the players will be much more happy with.

The new release date will be Monday the 24th of June. We will continue releasing weekly dev diaries up to that point, as there is still quite a lot to cover with both the DLC and the update. We know many of you are eagerly anticipating the expansion and apologize for the extended waiting that this will create, but we really want Sphere of Influence to meet your expectations and for this release to be one that we can be proud of as a development team!

Hello and welcome to another Victoria 3 Dev Diary! Today’s topic will be Political Lobbies, which is a new feature added in the Sphere of Influence expansion with some elements made available for free in the 1.7 update.

So, what is a Political Lobby? Put simply, a Political Lobby is a collection of Interest Groups pushing for the implementation of a specific foreign policy agenda in their country. Superficially, this may appear quite similar to Political Parties, but there a couple key differences in how they function:
Political Lobbies always form for a specific reason, often due to a Diplomatic Catalyst (more on those and the precise conditions for how they can create lobbies in next week’s dev diary) and pursue a specific long-term agenda that does not change over time
Interest Groups can be members of multiple Lobbies, so long as those Lobbies do not have directly contradictory goals

The agenda of a Political Lobby is always in relation to a specific foreign power, and there are four types of Political Lobbies being added in 1.7/Sphere of Influence:

• Pro-Country Lobby: This Political Lobby seeks to promote and advance the interests of their target country, both in relation to their home country and in a more global sense
  
• Anti-Country Lobby: The opposite of the Pro-Country Lobby, this Lobby seeks to hinder the interests of their target country and ‘take it down a peg’ whenever possible
  
• Pro-Overlord Lobby: A Pro-Overlord Lobby can only form in a subject country, and will always target the overlord. It seeks to promote loyalty towards and closer integration with the overlord.
  
• Anti-Overlord Lobby: The opposite of the Pro-Overlord lobby, this lobby is also only for subject countries and wants to become less dependent on the overlord, and ideally secure independence for their home country if the opportunity arises.
  

Interest Groups can join Political Lobbies for a variety of reasons, such as ideological alignment with or opposition to the country they target, or in pursuit of an overarching goal, such as the Industrialists joining a Pro-Country Lobby for a wealthier, more advanced country in the hopes of securing foreign investment capital.

Lobbies have an Appeasement score, which goes up when you take actions that the Lobby feels aligns with their goals, and goes down when you take actions that they consider to be contrary to those goals. Appeasement acts as a modifier on the Approval of their constituent Interest Groups, which means that your foreign policy actions can now directly help or hinder your internal political goals.

For example, are those staunchly Anti-French Landowners doing the Landowner thing of blocking those voting rights you want enacted? Simple! Just declare your opposition to France in a Diplomatic Play and humiliate them, and the Landowners will be so busy celebrating their victory over the perfidious Gallics that they will graciously let you have this one little reform.

On the flipside, you might find that the very pro-British Industrialists are not at all pleased with your continued alliance to a British rival, and that your previous plan of working to strengthen them in order to enact Laissez-Faire has now backfired, as they refuse to work with you until you break said alliance, forcing you to choose which of your two goals is more important to you.

Anti-American sentiment is strong among the Armed Forces and Trade Unions of Mexico, and both have been appeased by declaring an embargo on American trade, though of course the Americans aren’t likely to be too pleased with this action…

Lobbies, of course, do not only affect Interest Group approval but have direct diplomatic benefits or drawbacks depending, once again, on whether the actions you take align with their goals. How large these effects are depends on the combined Clout of the Interest Groups that are part of the Lobby.

For example, having a Pro-Country Lobby will make it easier to conduct diplomacy with that country, both by increasing their AI acceptance for proposals and by lowering the Influence cost of any friendly pacts you maintain with them, but increasing the cost of hostile actions (such as Embargos) and lowering the Influence you gain from rivaling them. As you might expect, Anti-Country Lobbies have the opposite effect, making friendly diplomacy harder and hostile actions cheaper. Anti and Pro-Overlord Lobbies also significantly influence Liberty Desire, as mentioned in the previous dev diary.

Lobbies also have a secondary effect on AI behavior, as an AI country with a Pro-Country lobby will be more likely to adopt a friendly attitude towards the target of said lobby, with the opposite effects for an Anti-Country Lobby, with the Clout of said lobbies once again determining how likely the AI is to fall in line with them. All of these effects, as well as the actual creation of Lobbies themselves, will be available to everyone as part of the free 1.7 update.

Although Russia’s government currently has a positive attitude towards Austria and wishes to pursue closer relations, the powerful Anti-Austrian Lobby in Russia makes it more difficult for them to agree to any proposed new Diplomatic Pacts

For those with the Sphere of Influence expansion, Lobbies can also make their will known through an opportunity or a demand. Opportunities generally come in the form of some diplomatic groundwork done by the Lobby that may allow their parent country to sign a diplomatic pact that is otherwise difficult to get, or even out of reach entirely. For Pro-Country Lobbies this usually involves dealing with the target country directly, while Anti-Country Lobbies will instead work to create opportunities to cooperate with the target’s enemies and rivals. Opportunities can be declined without any penalty, and will only result in a loss of Appeasement if accepted but not followed through on. Accepting and following through on the Opportunity will of course increase their Appeasement.

Even though Great Britain is Cautious about France and thus not willing to sign a Trade Agreement under normal circumstances, the acceptance bonus granted by the opportunity created by the Pro-British Lobby should be enough to secure the deal

Demands, conversely, is when a Lobby believes that the government isn’t doing enough to pursue their agenda and well, demands action. A demand generally comes in the form of a specific action that the Lobby wishes to see taken either against the target country, or against a country relevant to them (for example, a rival or ally). A demand can be declined, but doing so will significantly decrease the Appeasement of the Lobby (though not as much as accepting the demand and then failing to follow through on it).

Feeling that the French government isn’t doing enough to foster closer ties with Britain, the pro-British Lobby demands a grand gesture of enmity with Britain’s Russian enemy

Also available for those with the Sphere of Influence expansion is the new Fund Lobbies diplomatic action. This action works in a fairly similar way to Bankroll, in that it transfers money from the treasury of the initiating country, but instead of the money going to the target country’s treasury it is paid out among the target country’s Pops instead, with who gets what share of the money dependent on the target’s political setup and how much power sharing is going on - when trying to Fund Lobbies in an Autocratic country, nobody is going to bother spreading money around to poor laborers who have no say in politics whatsoever.

The precise effects of Fund Lobbies depends on whether a Pro-Country/Pro-Overlord lobby targeting the initiator already exists in the target country. If one does not exist, the money goes towards promoting the creation of such a lobby, with a weekly chance for this to happen. If such a lobby already exists, or once one is created, the pact switches to supporting that Lobby by increasing the Pop Attraction of Interest Groups that belong to the boosted lobby, which over time will increase the combined Clout of the Lobby’s Interest Groups, which in turn translates into greater mechanical effects and impact on AI decision-making.

Seeking to tighten its grip over their junior Personal Union partner, Sweden begins to spread some money around among the politically influential Norwegian Pops

Finally, I want to wrap up this dev diary by talking a little bit about the moddability and extensibility of the Lobbies system. Besides the Pro and Anti Country Lobbies mentioned above, the system also comes with built-in support for ‘neutral’ Foreign lobbies that have a goal relating to another country which is neither directly friendly nor antagonistic, and even for Domestic lobbies that pursue an entirely internal agenda in the country they are created in. The entire system of forming, appeasing and applying mechanical effects from lobbies is completely moddable, and we definitely intend to use this system to create new and interesting types of lobbies in future updates!

That’s all for today! Since this one ended up pretty long, and we actually have a bunch of semi-related things to go over as well, we’ve decided to change the Dev Diary schedule so that next week’s dev diary will be about Diplomatic Catalysts and the Diplomatic AI. We also still want to talk more about Power Blocs, and will find a way to fit that in before release. See you then!

Happy Thursday, it's time for more Sphere of Influence / Update 1.7 news!

One of the many benefits of being a Victorian-era Great Power is that you might get to lord over not just your own people, but other nations as well. Whether acquired through brutal conquest, colonial machinations, or willing subserviency, countries subjugated under your leadership can benefit your empire in a number of ways:

• they expand your market
  
• they provide you with a share of their Prestige
  
• they may compensate you with taxes in exchange for your protection
  
• they may join your wars
  
• etc.
  

This doesn't mean subjects will always just lie back and accept you exploiting them. Overlords that see their subjects as nothing but buffer zones and cash cows could in time come to learn that patience can run thin, leading to calls for independence. And in this era of nationalism, your subject declaring their autonomy could prove the perfect pretense for your worst rival to upset the balance of power.

We're introducing a number of enhancements to gameplay around managing your subjects, or indeed managing your own status as a subjugated nation if that's more your speed. These enhancements are meant to improve interactivity and AI responsiveness, while also introducing a number of quality-of-life features and highly requested additional mechanics. Some features below are available in the Sphere of Influence expansion, while others will come to everyone as part of Update 1.7.

[h2]Liberty Desire[/h2]
The first and most obvious feature you will encounter relating to your subjects in Update 1.7 is Liberty Desire, a measure of how pressing the issue of autonomy and independence is to the people (particularly the ruling class) in the subjugated nation. At high levels, an AI subject could become rebellious and might make some terribly rude demands of their overlord; at low levels, they will be complacent and cooperative, enabling their overlord to relax and maybe squeeze them a bit more, as they please.

For AI countries, Liberty Desire will strongly influence their strategy with respect to their overlord. Four additional AI strategies have been added:

• Break Free: the AI attempts to become independent from their overlord
  
• Increased Self-Reliance: the AI attempts to increase their autonomy and become less dependent on their overlord, but will not seek outright independence
  
• Maintain Autonomy: the AI wants to maintain their autonomy and relationship with their overlord just as it is
  
• Integrate with Suzerain: the AI wants closer integration with their overlord and will loyally comply with their wishes
  

But Liberty Desire is not just for the AI, it also informs what human players can do, and the level of Liberty Desire can have a direct effect on the country and its pops as well. The current level of Liberty Desire is visualized much like Legitimacy, as a tiered meter with different effects at different levels. Unlike Legitimacy it is never static - Liberty Desire is always either increasing or decreasing, the question is at what speed and what you (as overlord or subject) will do about it.

The British East India Company, with its largely self-sufficient economy and powerful standing army, could become a problematic subject for Great Britain unless relations and lobbies are kept in check, and concessions may have to be granted to keep them loyal to the crown.

A multitude of factors play into Liberty Desire, providing you with a lot of different strategies for how to keep it under control (or perhaps increase it, if you're the subject).

• Relations: obviously, high relations will lower Liberty Desire and vice versa
  
• Relative Prestige: the greater the difference in Prestige between overlord and subject the lower the Liberty Desire. The less autonomous your subject is, the greater the Prestige difference you need to maintain to depress Liberty Desire.
  
• Economic Dependence and Lobbies: explained in greater detail below
  
• Market Isolation or supply problems: if you cannot provide your subject with effective access to your market, they will be more inclined to demand sovereignty
  
• Change Rate scaling: the higher or lower Liberty Desire gets, the slower its rate of progression, giving you more opportunities to manipulate it with Diplomatic Actions (which we'll discuss soon)
  

[h2]Economic Dependence[/h2]
Another metric introduced in Update 1.7 is Economic Dependence, which measures exactly what it sounds like: how dependent country A is on country B's economy. Economic Dependence doesn't do anything directly, but feeds into other metrics such as Liberty Desire and the Cohesion of Trade League-type Power Blocs.

A major aspect of Economic Dependence is how much of the nation's economy is owned by the other country through foreign investments, either directly or through pop investors. If you want to make your subjects dependent on you, make sure you provide all of their good jobs.



If you do not share a market with the other country, the secondary aspect of economic dependence consists of the value of trade between your two nations. But in most cases where Economic Dependence matters, you do share a market, which introduces another few factors.

First off, the difference in GDP between the countries in the market has an impact.

But much more interestingly, how much your economy provides for the other nation's pops - and how much they are able to provide for themselves - is a crucial factor. As a market leader, you're considered to be providing anything the market member does not provide for themselves, in this case luxuries like Opium, Fruit, Luxury Clothes, and Tobacco.

The more you're able to provide for yourself, the more you can offset this factor. In this case, Columbia produces most of the Grain they consume, which is their dominant demand. As a result they more than offset the luxuries provided by membership in the British market.

As a result, from the viewpoint of Great Britain, if I want to increase Columbia's economic dependence on me I should consider producing an excess of the goods they aren't able to fully provide for themselves, such as Liquor. Thinking longer-term, I could also try to take measures to make their domestic staple industries unviable, making me the dominant supplier of (for example) Grain or Clothes or Furniture throughout the empire, while my colonial subjects' economies consists of producing cash crops for the benefit of my own people or industries.

Note that this part of the calculation is currently WIP and may be altered for legibility and consistency before release, but the principles will stay the same.



[h2]Lobbies[/h2]
In the Sphere of Influence overview we mentioned Lobbies, which are also crucial to keeping Liberty Desire under control across your empire. We will go deeper into Lobbies next week, but for now I can mention that subject nations will almost always have two Lobbies relating to their overlord: one of them a proponent of closer ties with the overlord, while the other is opposed to the overlord and devoted to independence. The relative power of these Lobbies depends on which Interest Groups support them, how powerful those Interest Groups are, and whether or not they are currently in government, which directly feeds into Liberty Desire as well.

As an overlord, with the Sphere of Influence expansion you will have some indirect influence over this by sponsoring the creation and maintenance of lobbies in other countries, which we will learn more about next week. As a subject, you have more direct control: if an Interest Group supports ties with your overlord, you can try to suppress them, remove them from power, even incite them to revolution and defeat them to keep your Liberty Desire high (though beware this could rouse your overlord into supporting their side!).

[h2]Subject Actions[/h2]
So as a subject, why would you want your Liberty Desire to be high? You actually probably don't want to keep it high, since it can mean less stability in your country (as reflected by greater risk of Radical generation, as people demand their freedom). But when your Liberty Desire has reached a high enough level, you can make demands of your overlord which are hard for them to ignore.

Increase Autonomy: previously available only as a Diplomatic Demand, you can now more gently request an increase to your autonomy when your Liberty Desire is high enough. Should the overlord decline this request the subject can demand full independence, so the stakes are quite high. If the request is granted, Liberty Desire will drop to much more manageable levels.

Demand State: if your overlord controls a state that is both adjacent or a homeland to you, directly or through another subject, you can demand they give you that state under certain conditions.

Request Payment Relief: you can request that your overlord reduce your payment burden. (Sphere of Influence only)

Request Support for Regime: a pact where the overlord provides overt support for your rule, granting you Legitimacy. This is reversible, so the overlord can grant this pact on their own if they wish. (Sphere of Influence only)

Request Knowledge Sharing: a pact where the overlord provides the subject with a tech spread boost, letting them catch up to the state-of-the-art quicker than usual. This is also reversible, letting the overlord display their benevolence unprompted. (Sphere of Influence only)

For example, you might wish to demand an increased level of autonomy, or relief from excessive payments.

Once one of these demands have been accepted your Liberty Desire will decrease, reflecting the diplomatic impact of the concession your overlord agreed to.

[h2]Overlord Actions[/h2]
Most of the new options are available for overlords towards their subjects, but follow the same principle - if Liberty Desire is low enough you can demand more from your subject, although this is likely to increase Liberty Desire and maybe even cause it to increase over time. Similarly, you can grant special privileges to depress Liberty Desire.



The following actions will be coming in Update 1.7 / Sphere of Influence:

Increase and Decrease Autonomy: when Liberty Desire is particularly low, the overlord can force a decrease to their subject's autonomy without making a Diplomatic Demand for it. Full annexation is possible only for Puppets / Vassals, and still requires a Diplomatic Demand.

Grant and Take State: a much requested feature, as an overlord you can now benevolently decide to grant territory to your subject. The state you select must belong either to you or another one of your subjects, and must either be adjacent to the subject or a homeland of one of their primary cultures (and in that case, it cannot also be a homeland for another subject that is adjacent, and therefore a better fit). Granting a state will of course reduce Liberty Desire, often by a substantial amount, especially if it's a homeland. Transferring a state from another subject will of course increase the Liberty Desire of the subject you transferred it from. In the case of Puppet or Vassal subjects, you can even transfer their states to yourself if Liberty Desire is sufficiently low (not their capital though).

Exempt from Service: for subjects that are forced to join the overlord's Diplomatic Plays, this pact lets overlords exempt the subject so they stay out of the conflict.

Grant Own Market: cuts the subject off from your shared market and makes them run their own. This could be useful in cases where you want your subjects to be a trading partner rather than fully integrated with your economy, limit migration, or reserve your convoys.

Reduce or Raise Subject Payments: for Subject Types that must pay a tax to their overlord, these "add-on pacts" allow you to either decrease or increase the amount paid in exchange for a change in Liberty Desire progress. (Sphere of Influence only)

Appoint Colonial Governor: lets the overlord select a new Head of State for the subject. The options the overlord has available depends on their laws vis a vis who the subject is - under some laws you could permit a local governor to take charge, while under others only hopefuls from the empire's capital are permitted. (Sphere of Influence only)

Evangelize: spreads the overlord's state religion in the subject, increasing conversion rates. (Sphere of Influence only)

A nifty cheat sheet to remind you of the effects of different subject types and compare between them has been added to the Subjects tab UI, where you also have easy access to the Liberty Desire values of your subjects, sort functions, and a list of the Overlord actions you can issue for each subject. If the symbols aren't self-explanatory to you, they're of course tooltippable!

[h2]Support Independence[/h2]
Support Independence is a new Diplomatic Pact, which a country can establish to commit to support another country's subject if they declare independence from their overlord. Once the Diplomatic Play has been declared, any supporters will automatically join on the subject's side. As a side effect this pact also increases Liberty Desire progression in the subject, so over time supporting a subject's independence may lead to greater autonomy if not full independence.

Supporting the sovereignty of your subject's rivals is a common strategy among aspiring imperialists, and subjects looking to become independent can also cozy up to other nations and ask for their support, hypothetically speaking of course.



[h2]Improved Imposition of Laws[/h2]
We introduced the ability to impose laws on your subjects in Update 1.5, but at that time the implementation was so rudimentary it was almost like an easter egg for the few who discovered it. In Update 1.7, you can now impose laws on your subjects directly from the Subjects tab.

When you start imposing a law, the other country will get an event where they can respond to the demand. They can choose to outright refuse, which they might do if their Liberty Desire is high or their chance of passing the law is very low.

You will now also be told what their chances of passing the law is before you commit to it.

They can also choose to start enacting it right away, giving them a +10% enactment chance for the duration, or deferring it until later. If they are already passing a law at the time you send the demand, they can choose to cancel their current law at no penalty in favor of your request, or wait until the time is right. While they're committed to enacting the law, they cannot cancel it until it's complete. They can however abandon the attempt, and may do so if they've made no progress after several years, but this will hurt relations with you.

As a player, your AI overlord may make these demands of you as well, and you have the same options to deal with them.

[h2]Conclusion[/h2]
These new interactions with your subjects (or your overlord), informed by the Liberty Desire metric, Economic Dependence system, and Lobbies, is meant to add more difficulty, depth, and interactivity to your imperialist projects - or as a subject, give you the ability to plan for your eventual independence. While most of these mechanics are available in Update 1.7, several of the new interactions are a component of the Sphere of Influence expansion. Some of the mechanics, such as imposition of laws and diplomatic actions limited to countries you have special relationships with, also integrate with the Power Bloc mechanics in Sphere of Influence to give you a more unified way of interacting with countries in your sphere, whether they're subjugated to you directly or merely in the same Bloc as you.

These features also add exciting new potentials for more targeted interactions with specific countries without cluttering up the lens interface where more generic actions are shown, permitting for more custom interactions between countries to be added in the future. Modders should also be able to make good use of the new options we've added to Diplomatic Actions, such as modifier support.

As mentioned earlier, next week Wiz will be back to go into more detail on Lobbies, and what they provide for the upcoming Sphere of Influence expansion. Until then!

Overview for all upcoming Dev Diaries:

Hello and welcome to another Victoria 3 Dev Diary!

After last week’s look at Power Blocs, we are going to take a look at another major set of changes that are going to arrive with Sphere of Influence and the free 1.7 update.

Namely, a revision of the Building Ownership system and what it allows us to do: Foreign Investment, a much requested feature which makes its debut in 1.7.

You will see that the changes we are making impact your visibility of ownership and the affected Pops throughout the game.

To understand all the mechanics we will be looking at an example country in the heart of Europe.

[h2]Ownership types[/h2]
It’s 1836. In Bavaria, a proud member of the Zollverein Power Bloc, all buildings are owned by the state or the workers themselves.

Capitalists, Aristocrats, and Clergymen no longer work in these buildings, and most of the Shopkeepers no longer work in production buildings directly. In addition, the Ownership Production Methods have been removed. Instead, ownership works on a per level basis, allowing a mixed ownership structure in the same building.

A popular Logging Camp it seems. Workers, a Financial District and a Manor House own a part.

In worker-owned buildings employees work for themselves basically. So any dividends they may accumulate, they split amongst themselves. This is the default at game start for many countries (not all) and is a state which you can more or less return to at a later stage of the game with the enactment of Cooperative Ownership, which will expropriate your privately owned buildings over time.

One major exception from the ownership situation at game start are subsistence farms which are owned by a new building we are introducing: Manor Houses.

Now they lounge around in luxury, instead of slumming it with the common folks in less refined taste buildings, we wouldn't want their shoes to be dirtied on a subsistence farm!
Manor Houses are able to own levels of other buildings, in our case at game start all the levels of Subsistence Farms in their own states. They pay their wages and dividends by collecting dividends from the buildings they own and distributing them among their employees.
What type and how many employees they have is determined by a limited set of PMs.

Clergymen or Aristocrats? You can’t get rid of both of them!

So you can see there are still jobs for Clergymen. What about the Shopkeepers and Capitalists?
Well, they work in the new Financial District buildings, which behave pretty much like the Manor Houses. They too have different employment PMs, can own levels of other buildings and pay their employees by collecting dividends from owned building levels.

Both new buildings expand automatically, depending on how many levels they own. For example if a new level of a privately owned factory is created, a corresponding new level of a Financial District is also generated.

All building levels that you construct are country-owned. Under certain laws, this status can change soon after they are finished constructing. Country-owned buildings come with reduced Economy of Scale bonuses and a bureaucracy cost for each level you own. But in return they can provide additional income based on the building’s dividends which partially get transferred to your treasury.

Not all buildings can be of any ownership type of course, for example barracks or government administrations will always be country-owned.

Summing up, there are now three types of ownership for any building level:

• Worker owned
  
• Privately owned (Financial Districts and Manor Houses)
  
• Country owned
  

If all buildings in Bavaria are owned by the workers or the country itself, how do the first Financial Districts appear, you may wonder!

The main way to get that to happen is the next point on our agenda.

[h2]Privatization[/h2]
Enter Privatization, whereby you allow country-owned buildings to be sold to Pops.

If you are short on cash, Privatization might help you

This makes it possible for your Pops to acquire them. Depending on the type of building you are privatizing, they usually get bought either by Aristocrats or Capitalists, using the investment pool’s funds.
If you don’t have any capitalists in your country yet, other Pops may step up though, using the investment pool’s funds to buy a building you put up for sale and become Capitalists in the process, which in turn leads to the first Financial District appearing.

The money will be transferred from the investment pool to your country’s treasury once that happens. The cost of buying a level is determined by its construction cost and is modified by most of the Economic System laws. These laws also affect the efficiency of these transactions, meaning how much money is lost as overhead and how much is being reinvested into the investment pool or the treasury.
One particularly interesting law is Laissez-Faire which upon enactment forces all your country-owned buildings to be put up for sale and will automatically do so for every new building level you construct. Similarly, enactment of other laws like Cooperative Ownership and Command Economy doesn’t immediately change the ownership of all buildings, but rather can start a process that can convert your economy over time.

Insert witty joke about the free market here

Now let’s take a look at how the different ownership model affects investments from your Pops.

[h2]Investment[/h2]
The existing logic for how the private investment pool works remains similar to before. So, different Pop types still have different priorities and they will look at factors like estimated productivity, available workforce etc.
When a building is about to be constructed by private investment, we randomly determine who is building it, favoring already existing Financial Districts and Manor Houses over creating new ones.

In a worker-owned economy, the private investment pool will continue to function, but they will only expand their own buildings, not create new ones.

An important fact with this system is that investments do not need to be local. A Financial District or Manor House can invest in any of your country’s states, including your colonies overseas.
This system will create a flow of money from the colonies to your homelands, a stronger centralization of wealth and power and it will end the status of colonies’ Pops making more money than your Pops at home.

Of course the non-local investments also come with some challenges with regards to other countries.

It looks like Prussia has heard about that option and has started investing in your country!

“First they took our chairs, then the tables we used to eat at. What’s next? Our beds?!”

[h2]Foreign Investment[/h2]
There are a few ways to acquire Foreign Investment Rights.

First of all, overlords can always invest in their subjects. This is part of the free 1.7 update and will allow you to do Foreign Investment where it matters the most, even if you do not own Sphere of Influence.

Then there are three diplomatic pacts which you can use if you have bought the expansion:

1. Mutual Investment Rights which allows both countries to invest in each other
   
2. One-directional Investment Rights in either direction, so you either demand to be allowed to invest in their country or offer another country to invest in yours
   

The [redacted] has been [redacted]. We shall see its effects on the 11. of April.

There is also a Power Bloc Principle group that deals with Foreign Investment which on Tier 3 has the consequence of being able to invest in any member country.

No matter how you got the Investment Rights, you and also your Pops will be able to invest in the target country. Private investment does consider foreign states as potential targets for their expansions, allowing them to build profitable buildings more easily.

As nice as it is that Prussia has invested in new buildings in Bavaria, I don’t think we can let them get away with diverting the profits to Berlin instead of our own population!

[h2]Nationalization[/h2]
Nationalization allows you to take control of foreign assets in your country. You cannot nationalize other countries’ assets as long as they possess Foreign Investment rights in your country.

Once that is no longer the case, e.g. if Bavaria left the Zollverein Power Bloc, you can peacefully nationalize their building levels in your country. For that you need to pay a sum of money from your treasury. Similarly to Privatization, the sum is determined by the construction cost + modifiers from laws.

You will also be able to nationalize your own Pops’ building levels, both worker-owned and privately owned, if you’d like to take ownership. Nationalization is not seen positively by the affected Pops of course and will radicalize them.

“We should compensate them to reduce the quarrels.”

But what if the Bavarian coffers are empty yet you still want to take over that juicy productive Furniture Manufacturies that is owned by Prussia?

Well, there is always an alternative.

“Pay them? I don’t think so!”

You can demand nationalization of a country’s assets in your country. If they accept, their building levels’ ownership changes to your country. If they don’t, you can try and enforce it as a wargoal. If you are successful, you will also remove their Foreign Investment Rights for your country in addition to taking control of their buildings in your country.

[h2]Building Registry[/h2]
To visualize all these new mechanics, we are introducing the Building Registry, which allows you a customizable look at your country’s situation.

All the building data one could wish for

This is a major new UI, that similar to the Census Data window, comes with a lot of functionality to filter the available data. Only show buildings outside your country? Sure. See all buildings that are owned by Pops and which are currently not hiring but not fully employed? No problem.

Lots of filter groups to browse through

We hope you find this as useful as we do. You can access it via the button on the bottom of the Buildings panel.

Really recommend pressing that button

[h2]Implications for the Directly Controlled Investment Pool Game Rule[/h2]
As you can imagine, this new system of ownership, geographic wealth extraction, and privatization/nationalization has far-reaching implications on the economic foundations of Victoria 3. It enables a lot of interesting dynamics we haven't been able to model until this time and adds a whole new dimension to your economic laws.

It also comes with the consequence of making the Directly Controlled Investment Pool game rule that we introduced with 1.2 (as a legacy alternative to the new Autonomous Investment system) impossible to maintain. In 1.6 and prior, if this game rule was turned on, the player would be directing all construction efforts. As long as there was money in the investment pool and the construction queue was building a privately-owned building, the cost of construction goods would be coming out of the investment pool first before being carried by the state budget. With the new rules for building ownership, investment rights, and so on in 1.7 this no longer makes sense - there's now a very clear distinction between a building project initiated by a private investor and the state, a potential source of conflict innate to both foreign ownership and the privatization/nationalization mechanics, and even differences between owners in different regions that cannot be represented if all construction projects were player-initiated.

Because of this it no longer makes sense for players to be in charge of both public and private investments simultaneously, and as such the Directly Controlled Investment Pool rule has had to be removed for 1.7 and beyond. While we can't support non-default game rules to the same degree as the standard options, removing a game rule completely is not something we'd ever do without good cause. We know that a smaller fraction of you favored this setting so we want to be clear with why its removal was a necessity to move forward with these improvements to ownership and foreign expansion.

[h2]Outlook[/h2]
I would like to end today’s Dev Diary by providing a short outlook for what these changes also enable us to do in the future.

The main thing here is affecting Companies.

The way we have reworked ownership allows us to create Company headquarter buildings which can then own specific building levels of industries they care about, determining its profitability from and providing their throughput bonuses only to these. While we cannot provide a concrete timeline for that change at this point, it is something we would like to tackle for one of our next free updates.

That’s it for today. Check back next week when Mikael is going to walk you through what changes 1.7 and Sphere of Influence brings to relations and interactions between Overlords and Subjects, including how these foreign investment mechanics relate to your grip over your extended empire.

Overview for all upcoming Dev Diaries: