Victoria 3 News

Welcome to the final Victoria 3 dev diary for 2022! Last week we took a look at some experimental features and prototypes our team worked on during our recent Game Jam. For the background and purpose of this initiative please refer to last week's diary.

Something that may not have been clear in that diary is that a regular allotment of Personal Development Time (PDT) is an integrated part of game dev culture at Paradox. Team members may use this time as they wish as long as it is something that hones their craft and makes them grow as developers.

The Game Jam initiative is a way of funneling that energy into prototypes for Victoria 3 features, and even if not everything will make it into the game (sorry lizardfolk fans!), pushing against the limits of what we know we can do with the game is important to increase quality and developer skills in the long run. In other words, the Game Jam hasn't taken any scheduled time away from bug fixing, UX and feature improvements, and balance changes. These are and remain our top priority, with patch 1.2 now fully in the works. As always, we are reading your comments and feedback carefully and incorporating many community suggestions in the next free update.

That said, let's jump into it, because there's a lot of fun stuff to cover! First up, team Map Graphics Enchantment: ___________________________________________________________________

Hi, my name is Ilya and I am a gameplay programmer on Victoria 3, you might have seen me in the past on Stellaris and HOI4 streams. I’ve been mostly focused on implementing gameplay graphics for the last two years on the project and wanted to use the time during game jam to push the immersive living map experience even further.

So I gathered a team of three other people (two amazing artists Daniel and Paul and one amazing programmer Viacheslav) who were as excited about enhancing map graphics as me. Here are our results!

Pavement upgrades to dirt roads when player researches Paved Roads

Items along the roads, railroads and sea lanes that could be reflective of time



Building highlighting on the map, so players feel the connection between buildings growing in the UI and on the map

Our team actually won the game jam, which I am incredibly proud of :) I wish you all Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the map graphics enchantment team!
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Adding more contextual detail to the map, making you feel like your country is changing and evolving with the times, is something we'd love to improve! While it's not top of our priority list at the moment, you can fully expect to see such visual details bringing historical, immersive flavor to the game eventually.

We're absolutely ecstatic about the building highlighting functionality since it gives you a much closer conceptual connection between the UI and the map. A bit more work is needed here but we are definitely going to try to get this in the game sometime in 2023.

Next up, something yours truly (Mikael) worked on. Technically I didn't participate in the Game Jam, but everyone being busy with their own secret skunkworks projects meant I had some time to hunker down and make something I've been thinking about for a while but never had the chance to try out: Government Quick-Select Options for the Reform Government panel.



With the Legitimacy calculations becoming a bit more complex with patches 1.1.x, it can be pretty hard to predict which combinations of Interest Groups are good together since it depends on the groups that are already there. Victoria 3 isn't really supposed to be a puzzle game, so I figured let's just make the computer do the heavy lifting here. Whenever you click the Reform Government button now, the game runs through every single valid government combination and sorts them by Legitimacy. The top three options are available to you to quick-select at the press of a button. You can even select an option that's almost right and then make tweaks to it before confirming, reducing a lot of the puzzling you previously had to do.

This functionality, along with tweaked Ideological Incoherence, Legitimacy balance overhaul, and changes to government composition rules to prevent Legitimacy death spirals, should already be in your hands with patch 1.1.2 when you read this!

Next we have a team that worked on a prototype for something very Victorian: graverobbing museums!
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We are team The Mummy Returns, composed of Daniel, Iris, Henrik, Konrad, and Vicka. We spent our game jam week developing a new feature: Museums! Our goal was to represent the 19th and early 20th Century obsession with plundering the world for other people’s priceless cultural treasures as a game mechanic. In your Museum, you can exhibit Artifacts for prestige and propaganda.



This is Britain’s Museum - each country can only have one Museum, buildable only in the capital state. Museums have a limited number of Artifact Slots, determined by the Museum’s Production Methods which are unlocked by society techs - including the new Archaeology tech which also acts as a gateway to archeological expeditions. You can recover Artifacts from expeditions and other gameplay content; they can be anything from priceless treasures from centuries past, to works of art, to modern ideological propaganda.

In addition to the Museum and Artifact mechanics, we also experimented with a new type of archeological expedition. Unlike exploratory expeditions, you won’t need to worry about Peril as the excavation proceeds. Instead, you must strike a careful balance between progress and Recklessness; Recklessness will speed up your progress, which will allow you to complete the expedition before funding is cut off, but build up too much and you risk damaging the site and being unable to receive the best possible rewards. Here's Vicka to present the outline of that expedition:

Hello. My name is Victoria, also known as Vicka. Some of you may know me as AcresOfAsteraceae, or as Pacifica from my work on the TNO mod for HOI4. I am a new content designer on the Victoria 3 team, and the designer of the Valley of the Kings expedition, here to present more details regarding the specifics of the expedition itself.



This expedition was designed to follow the rough outline of the historical expedition to excavate the tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun, carried out by Howard Carter. Upon researching the new technology for archaeological sciences, and securing one’s relationship with Egypt, one can dispatch an expedition to the Valley of the Kings in order to search for valuable historical knowledge - and, of course, staggeringly valuable loot. The imperative to secure other people’s priceless historical treasures is a powerful one - and it is one that the Great Powers of Victoria 3 shall pursue to the fullest in their search for both power and prestige.



On the site in the Valley, the expedition team will be faced with numerous challenges and decisions. The practical difficulty of excavating a long-forgotten site in a remote area will quickly become apparent - and the dichotomy between getting the expedition done quickly, and getting it done properly will rear its head.



If one takes too long to complete it, the powers that be in your home nation will pull its funding - but if one rushes ahead too much, catastrophe may well strike, tearing down sections of the tomb and limiting the rewards one may collect.





Finally, if both fortune and practice align in a manner favorable to your archaeologist, the expedition will return home bearing a treasure trove of artifacts. Well, of course, either that, or the few meager scraps that they could pull out of the rubble that they left behind.





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This team's explorations into new types of game content here is really interesting and may be something we delve deeper into in the future!

Finally, we have team Incredible Experience, who spent their time on making some lovely enhancements to the tech tree:

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Hi! I’m Aron, one of two UX Designers on the Victoria 3 team. During the Game Jam, I teamed up with one of our Programmers (Can), our 2D Art Lead (Kenneth) and our Producer (Daniel), to rework and improve the User Experience of the tech tree in our game, and oh man did we have fun doing so!

The tech tree is a beast, both visually and as a code-base, and is a perfect candidate for a face lift. Currently, there is no way of queueing up tech research and no way to see at a glance what a tech unlocks. However, the biggest issue is the readability at the furthest zoom level. The text is way too small to read, but if you are not that far zoomed out you can’t really get a good overview of the tree.

We tried to tackle all these issues all at once, aiming for the highest cloud.

This resulted in a barrage of fixes, big and small. Let’s start with the small but impactful changes:

• Increased text size on all zoom levels.
  
• Default camera view set to the furthest zoom and at a better position.
  
• Color-coded tabs.
  
• New icon representing a group of modifiers.
  

Now to the bigger changes.

We show all the unlocks of a tech directly on the tech in the tree, not only in the tooltip. They are now grouped by icon and type, and have their own group tooltip






We made splines highlightable so they can change color depending on context + clearer highlighting of the techs themselves to be able to see at a glance what has been researched and what is currently researching. The splines and the techs share the same color scheme for the 4 different states:

• Already researched tech has a paper brown look.
  
• Researchable techs are green. (not the splines though as it did bloat the screen and mess with the visual hierarchy a bit too much)
  
• Currently researching techs are blue.
  
• Not researchable techs are dark grey/black.
  

Finally, the technology queue. I am still amazed we managed to pull this off in less than a week and even managed to iterate quite a few times on the UX Design for this feature. The core thing here is the ability to queue up which technology will be researched after the current research is completed. We set a few goals ranging from must-have to nice-to-have.

1. The player should be able to queue the next research.
   
2. Queue unlocked research.
   
3. Queue several techs.
   
4. Queue locked research.
   
5. A universal way of clicking on the tech in the tree to queue it up.
   
6. A visual representation of the queue somewhere on the tech tree screen.
   
7. Clear visual feedback and distinction between putting a tech in the queue and start researching it.
   
8. Present the queued up tech’s time left to finish researching in all essential places. (tooltips and in the visualization of the queue)
   
9. Remove techs from the queue.
   
10. Clicking on a tech will clear the queue and start to research that tech instead.
    
11. Shift + clicking on a tech will put it in the queue.
    
12. Directly click on a locked tech and automatically queue up the prerequisites in front of this tech in the queue. This will clear the queue first.
    
13. Shift + click the locked tech and automatically put this tech + prerequisites in the back of the queue. This will not clear the queue first.
    
14. Alt + click a tech to add it to the top of the queue.
    
15. Rearrange the order of the queue.
    

Believe it or not, but we managed to get to point 9 in this list. Let me show you how it looks. In the below image I have just clicked directly on Flamethrowers far down in the Military tech tree (because Flamethrowers!). This queues up all needed techs for me to get to Flamethrowers in the end. Notice the numbers that display the position in the queue for each tech and the splines highlighting the way. If I were to shift + click Stormtroppers here, it would put that tech + any needed prerequisites at the back of the queue.
At the top of the screen you can see the queue nicely queued in the correct order with a max cap of 5 shown tech icons. It is capped at 5 since this screen needs to be responsive for any players that play on 1600x900 or with a higher UI-scaling, which we of course want to support for accessibility reasons. Any additional techs queued above the 5 first can be found under the +X numbered button to the right of the queue.

I can remove any specific queued tech by clicking the X-button visible on each queued tech at the top.





We worked hard on displaying the information correctly to the player in each and every context. As an example of that, you can see in the tooltip in the image below, we added a prompt in the tech tooltip with our normal green formatting for prompts that tells the player to either click this researchable tech (Field Works) to start to research it immediately, or shift + click to queue it up. For any players that will have trouble finding this prompt, we also added a plus button at the top left of each tech to queue up the tech without having to shift + click (not all players read tooltips, believe it or not).



I can’t wait til we actually get this into the game and the actual regular pipeline, and we get to spend some more time polishing it up and in the end get it out to you guys.

If you want to read up on the cool dynamic algorithm we use to generate our tech tree, here are a few links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layered_graph_drawing
https://paginas.fe.up.pt/~ei05067/documentos/bibliografia/Layout.pdf
http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:882369/FULLTEXT01.pdf
http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/~shhong/fab.pdf

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The tech tree improvements drastically increase usability and are in most respects a finished set of features, so these changes will be coming to version 1.2!

In conclusion, this was an incredibly successful Game Jam week for us in the Victoria 3 development team: several finished features were developed that will be coming in the next major patch, we pushed the boundaries of what is possible within the game, and produced a bunch of experimental working prototypes that we can build on for the future. We hope you enjoyed the sneak peek!

We will be back with more dev diaries after the winter holidays (sometime mid- to late-January) with more details about what the future for Victoria 3 will hold, particularly for the free 1.2 patch. We hope you have a lot of fun with the game until then. I know we will!

Ahoy Victorians!

Today we released a minor patch to correct some issues!

Please report any issues in our bug report forum or submit a support ticket. Thank you!




- Adds quick-select options for the three most Legitimate valid government combinations on the Reform Government panel




- It is no longer possible to reliably max out Legitimacy by throwing every Interest Group in government together; Legitimacy penalty from conflicting Government ideologies is now calculated by determining, for each law group, the law (unlocked by tech) with the strongest compound feelings for or against it across all Interest Groups in government (even within the same party) ensuring every additional Interest Group potentially increases the total ideological incoherence
- Legitimacy penalty from size of government has been reintroduced, but in the form of a number of allowed Interest Groups or Parties in government with no penalty and a flat penalty for each entity in addition to that
- Legitimacy balance changes across Laws
- Angry Interest Groups can now be invited to the government, and will not leave the government voluntarily unless Insurrectionary
- Angry Interest Groups in government can now join Political Movements
- Insurrectionary Interest Groups in a government party will now leave the government and party, unless it is the last Interest Group in government
- Number of provinces won in smaller theaters with large numbers of defending mobilized Battalions is now reduced, ensuring they will take more battles to wipe out entirely




- Fixed bug that prevented the AI from sending their mobilized Generals to fronts under certain conditions
- Improved AI's ability to make smart investments in its port infrastructure in the mid- and late game
- Improved AI's ability to manage their total number of ports across a market region
- Increased AI priority for building ports in market areas that lack a port connection




- Ensured that overseas Generals will not travel to their home HQ if their front is resolved or invalidated. Generals whose front has been resolved or become invalid should now always travel to the closest active front to continue their campaign, even if this front is overseas. If no valid fronts exist, the General should remain on Stand By in the overseas HQ unless manually recalled home.
- Fixed a case of Generals skipping travel time and "teleporting" home if their source front's position is unknown
- Fixed issue where high Legitimacy Level would increase Radicals instead of Loyalists due to an outdated cache
- Fixed out-of-sync related to shipping lanes
- Fixed crash when running certain console commands, such as starting events through the console
- Fixed issue with flickering map names in culture panel
- Fixed missing market interaction texture
- Fixed two broken concept tooltips in Japanese localization and one in Polish localization

Hello again and happy Thursday! Today I'm going to tell you about a new dev team initiative we ran last week, after we had locked down the final 1.1 build - the Vicky 3 Feature Game Jam!

We know from experience that some of the best features and aspects of our games come from passionate developers acting on their own initiative to build what they want to see in the game. Sometimes this is a high-impact tweak to some UI element, other times new game content like new events or building types, or even some under-the-hood improvement to the game engine. For the Game Jam, we challenged devs to join up into cross-disciplinary teams and make the coolest feature they could think of in a week's time, with prizes for the team that could make the highest impact on the game. Here are some of the things they came up with!

Please note: only a few of these features will be included in 1.2, and there are no guarantees any of them will ever make it into the game or its future expansions. Some are cool prototypes that would take too much work to implement, while others may need a lot more supporting code or content to work as a standalone feature. Consider this a peek behind the curtain of what our team is experimenting with and what type of things might come in the future.

First up, we have team War Never Changes, with a set of experimental enhancements to the military system!

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Hi, I’m Guilherme, one of the programmers! During this game jam, Nik - one of the designers - and I decided to team up to explore potential improvements for our military system. Because of that, we haven’t implemented many new things, but we did dig up things that could be potentially improved. For example:

• Combat units on a front each have a 20% chance of suffering 5% - 15% casualties from attrition each week, an average of 2% casualties per week from attrition alone. This sounds like too much.
  
• Generals are currently selected for battles mainly based on their total number of battalions. We should probably check their manpower and morale instead, and/or maybe their traits.
  

On the actual implementation side of things, we did a few things we thought would be fun to try out. Such as having simultaneous battles in a front:



As a game jam hack, I just made it so when battle advancement progress reaches 100% we spawn up to 2 battles in different states, as long as you have at least 2 advancing generals. This is funny and a bit chaotic, but turns out this might introduce other issues as it affects the rhythm of war and also gives the advancing side some advantage: if they win one of those battles they capture a bunch of provinces; if the defending side wins one of those, welp, they just won’t lose a bunch of provinces.

We also added the ability of locking province captures to the same state as the battle province, which again, is fun as it looks more like a well planned military invasion, but currently has the effect of capturing whole states most of the time.



All in all, I really appreciate how this game jam gave us the opportunity to explore all sorts of potential improvements for Vicky 3. We certainly can improve many things, but we need to be very careful as our systems are interconnected and small changes in one system can have a big impact in other parts.

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Hello, my name is Nik and I am the second half of this Game Jam experiment. As stated above I am a designer on the team. My goal going into this Game Jam was to see what quality of life could be added/explored for the game without needing to rework many systems. Primary goals I had going into this week were:

• Communicate information to the player more readily
  
• Reduce some of the pain points that frustrate myself and other player
  
• War Exhaustion ticking
  
• Attrition
  
• Equipment Modifiers
  
• Generals and Troops selected for Battles
  

As stated above by Guilherme, one of the primary goals of this was to experiment with the idea of multiple battles. I personally wanted to experiment with the idea that the length of the front would determine the amount of battles taking place across it and that battles should be spread out and only take place one per state to attempt to avoid player frustration of battles potentially canceling each other out.

Another goal was to attempt to increase the information that the player could easily see. First goal was to include the advancement bar of the opposing side to the Front tab so it can be seen there as well.



Additionally, I wanted the player to have more information on the battle screen. For this we added a demoralized count for units. We noticed it might be confusing for the player to see that they started a battle with 15k troops only to see that they have lost the battle, but only showed that 3k died and 6k were wounded, but at the end of the battle it shows that you have 0 troops remaining.



I wanted to look at the ticking of war exhaustion as I felt like losing one province could sometimes have a massive impact on the effect of the war exhaustion. There is a lot I would like to do with this system in the future, but for now I focused mainly on lowering the values of these numbers while increasing the impact the loss of men has on a country's war exhaustion.

The equipment Adjustment Modifier can be irritating at times, and added to prevent people from just turning their army on and off again, without penalties. I have now made it so the penalty is worse for the primary PM, but all other PMs will now have a smaller one, that will affect you as a whole but should not inflict as much pain as before when switching.

Another area I wanted to improve was which generals and troops were selected for certain battles. Often inferior allied troops and their generals would take the battle and tie the front down. There are now additional checks to increase the chances of a General being picked based on his traits, as well as the PMs of the troops under his command.

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The changes this team made to various aspects of warfare will be made available in 1.2, but (likely) with multiple battles limited to single states turned off by default. If you'd like to experiment with multiple battles and/or state-limited battles you'll easily be able to change some defines in the script files to do so, or download a mod that does it for you. In the interim we will use this team's work to test and attempt to balance multiple battles per front to see if we can make it a viable feature for the future, without accidentally introducing game-destroying metas like "whoever has the most generals win".

Next up, team Cookie Clicker, consisting of our VFX artist, Sean. His addition adds visual effects when you interact with certain parts of the terrain:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Improving the interactivity of our map is something we're interested in exploring further, and we will use this as a prototype for future exploration in this area!

Next up was some prototype work on more advanced resource potentials:

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Hello everyone, Paul here to talk about the project I was working on for the Vicky 3 Feature Game Jam. This project was titled “Breaking Ground” because it's both related to resources and is an exploratory prototype of what could be done in the future. I took the discoverable/depletable resource system that we utilize for resources like Oil/Rubber/Gold and attempted to apply them to Logging/Mining/Fishing and other normally “capped resources” in game.

Forestry is by far the most fleshed out of the prototypes I built this week, so we will talk about that one. The intention is that forests of the world are all accessible at game start (there is no hidden undiscovered resource) but can suffer from depletion, in this case deforestation.

Deforestation is dependent upon a few things, the higher techs you utilize for base production increase the chance of the resource to be depleted. If it is depleted the logging camp is replaced with a “clear cut" building which can still produce lumber but at a heavily reduced rate. There is also the intent of adding where this mechanic can be utilized to better represent natural and man-made disasters which have affected resource procurement.

Deforestation is shown by clearcut camps which produce resources at a greatly reduced rate

Now why a separate building instead of a modifier? Well it's a prototype and the system lends itself well to that, since it's what we do with gold fields to gold mines. A different building is also a clearer indication to the player of these events (as opposed to a modifier on the building itself), it also makes it where production methods are available, and the profit calculations are different so that you more easily see the employment changes. Lumber Camps will also have new production methods to manage their extraction, decreasing depletion chances at the cost of throughput, while depleted camps have the ability to enable conservation efforts to try and mitigate the loss of resources that have already occurred.

An example of resource management a player can enact to prevent deforestation, or embrace it for much needed throughput bonuses

On a personal level, I think it adds to the mindset of the time. What do I care about 2 levels of deforestation and their inability to produce? I have 40+ levels of lumber left, this is the price of progress! Seeing the rate of balance between the two buildings shows the cost of advancement or progress of industrialization as you wish to see it. Also it allows us to easily measure deforestation and tie that into events and Interest Group reactions.

There’s plenty of places we can go with this, the Conservation Movement of the 18th and 19th centuries, tying industrialization with actual ecological effects that will upset IGs and affect pops. This is not meant to be a complete feature unto itself but a means of making a more realistic narrative to the game. Early industrializers might run afoul of deforestation and poor resource management, and will seek other markets to alleviate this effect, much like we have done historically. Can you keep the balance of man vs nature in effect, or is that even truly your concern when you are facing extreme radicalization and you need to meet the needs of your pops at any cost?

An example of the resource management a player can enact on clearings, Do you let nature take its course, get involved, or just keep exploiting what you can?

What about Whaling/Fishing and Mineral Resources? Here I look to follow the Forestry model where resources are available but can be depleted due to overutilization - as the fisheries of the world were very much subject to the tragedy of the commons.

The difference is as tech scales, the effect of fishing scales not only in depletion but in range. I am experimenting with having the actions of a neighboring nation affect the resource potential of its neighbors. Overfishing in Great Britain can cause knock-on effects to the eventual depletion of the Fisheries of Iceland and Canada/US. The scale of these effects are still very much in a prototype stage. This applies to both fish and whaling industries.

Where Fishing Industries differ is the potential to maybe do aquaculture back at home. My research is showing that it's slightly out of our historical timescale but it's technically a possibility. The world started ramping up aquaculture in the 1950’s to 1960’s but that was in response to the decrease in fish population, who’s to say if an ahistorical Victorian era that goes hard on world fish supplies might need to invest in these technologies a few decades early?

Mineral Resources are primarily focused around discovery over the potential of being depleted. At the start of the game a fair chunk of resources will be available for exploitation, but most will be hidden and require discovery and exploitation to be started. Mines will have the chance to discover new resources as they start excavation down below. These efforts can be expedited by resource exploration PMs, increasing the educated labor force requirement and likely a more modernized set of inputs. In this way, mineral deposits are still greatly important but there is an investment potential in them, the longer you hold and develop a resource - the more you may get to access. For example, you cannot gain all levels of coal in Wales with just hands and picks, some of that is going to require modernization.

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Finally, Mike surprised us all by not doing anything at all with trains this time. We're not exactly sure what he's up to, but whatever it is I think it emphasizes the point in the beginning that there are absolutely no guarantees any of this will make it into the game as-is, now or in the future! If any of you have theories of what this might be all about, please give the rest of us a clue in the comments below.







Next week we will look at the remainder of the Game Jam entries, and that will be the last dev diary of 2022 as most of the team heads out for winter holidays, returning mid-January. Until then!

Hello Victorians!

Today we released a minor patch to correct some issues, and we're planning to follow it up with 1.1.2 next week for some additional adjustments.

Please report any issues in our bug report forum or submit a support ticket. Thank you!


- Fixed a bug where AI breaks off pacts to save Influence even when they're not the ones paying


- Fixed a few unlocalized Russian custom loc strings (RU_CL...)


- Fixed a bug where the Capitalists, Shopkeepers and Bureaucrats had no default Interest Group attraction value, causing them to be Politically Inactive unless they worked in a Trade Center
- Fixed a bug that caused regressive political movements to be much more common than progressive ones
- Fixed a bug that caused Morale Loss to scale negatively with the number of troops in battle
- Fixed random crash on startup when reading in game data