Victoria 3 News

Hello Victorians,

and a Happy Thursday! Lino, Game Design Lead here, and talking to you today about Prestige Goods. Keep in mind that today is a public holiday in Sweden, so while I’ll be around to answer some burning questions, more answers will have to wait until we’re officially back at work on Monday.

Prestige Goods are going to be part of Charters of Commerce, our upcoming Mechanics Pack which releases on June 17 alongside the free 1.9 Update.

Before we begin: As always, any values, texts, designs, graphics etc. are work in progress and are subject to change.

Well then, let’s take a look at Prestige Goods.

[h2]Prestige Goods[/h2]
Prestige Goods are a feature we have wanted to do for a while. In my internal pitch for Companies I had brought up a different variant of the feature already - at this point almost two years ago. So we are happy to be able to bring them to you now of course.

From this, you can tell already that there is a strong connection between Prestige Goods and Companies. In fact, Prestige Goods can only be produced by Companies. In some cases, they represent particular brands or products these Companies produced, in other cases they are more of a quality label for a type of product. At the end of this Dev Diary I am showcasing a couple of examples if you are curious.

Something worth noting is they are variants of existing goods, not new goods. For example Champagne is a Prestige Good variant of regular Wine. This has a couple of advantages, most importantly the performance is not nearly as affected by this as it would be if we introduced this large number of new goods. They are part of the same buy packages, serve as the same inputs and outputs as regular goods etc., with some differences which I’ll go over later.
Additionally, there can be multiple Prestige Good variants of any given good, for example we are introducing three different Prestige silk versions.

So how are Prestige Goods produced?

[h2]Production[/h2]
Companies can only ever produce one Prestige Good type. A company that is prosperous will be able to produce their assigned Prestige Good.
You might be wondering: what makes certain Prestige Goods truly unique? Well, we made sure to include about 50 historical examples of goods and companies that were iconic for the era - keeping both immersion and replayability in mind.
For example the Manufacture d'armes de Saint-Étienne Company in France will start producing the Prestige Good Saint-Etienne Rifles instead of regular small arms as soon as they hit the prosperity threshold. All company-owned building levels get the new blueprints and get to work on them, while all other weapon manufacturers in the country continue producing boring standard rifles. So while other companies around the world might be able to produce a generic Prestige Small Arms, there can be only one true producer of Saint-Etienne Rifles(TM)!
It doesn't necessarily mean that France has an exclusive right to that good - as country borders can always change.

Unique icon showcasing the production of the new rifles has begun

Once you have at least one Prestige Good variant of a good in the market, we need to show that somehow of course. For that, we can expand the entry of a good and show all Prestige Good variants of this good that are part of the market and can see how high their share is.

Here’s an example for how this entry looks on the World Market, there’s a filter to disable the fold-out entries too

While we wanted to make Prestige Goods somewhat special, we didn’t want to exclude all companies that lacked a good historical example. So, for all other companies that lack a historical Prestige Good, players will get a Journal Entry with the additional requirement of becoming one of the top three producers of the according good to start production of a “generic” kind of Prestige Good, e.g. Prestige Cloth or Prestige Iron rather than a special name and look.

It may not be Haute Couture, but Spanish fashion could still become a thing

Now let’s look at the effects that Prestige Goods have when they are being produced and introduced into your market.

[h2]Effects[/h2]
The effects of Prestige Goods are manifold. In general one can say that they are more desired and of higher quality than their regular good counterparts and the higher the percentage of Prestige Goods, the better it is generally.

For one, of course Prestige Goods increase the prestige of the country where the producing company is located. This behaves like the top-producer Prestige gain for a regular good, but with a significantly higher bonus. So if you are the number one Prestige Wood producer, you can collect a nice Prestige bonus for example.

“The French produce the best wine, clearly! And guns too.”

On the World Market, Prestige Goods provide a trade advantage bonus based on the percentage of goods of that type that are Prestige Goods. This calculation is market area based, so for example if 50% of all iron in France is a form of Prestige Good iron, they receive 50 Trade advantage on exports from France for that particular Prestige Good. But if in one of their colonies the share of Prestige Good iron is only 25%, exports from that colony would only receive a 25% trade advantage bonus, without affecting the exports from France mainland itself.

Note the +85.9 trade advantage from 85.9% of all Small Arms production being a Prestige Good

Buildings consume Prestige Goods as input goods too. Based on the share of Prestige Goods, they are profiting from increased throughput.

Prestigious Swedish Oregrounds Iron helps to increase the throughput of this Tooling Workshop

Now what would be the point of producing prestigious Saint-Étienne Rifles if you couldn’t show them off on the battlefield too?

Prestige Goods also increase Offense, Defense and Morale recovery.

They shoot extra accurate

Pops also heard about the new shiny Prestige Goods - and they want them. As you may know, goods that are consumed by Pops are organized in a couple of need categories, e.g. basic food or luxury drinks.
Within a category, Pops will consume more of a particular good depending how much of it is a Prestige Good. For example if you have a lot of Champagne, say 80% of all wine, but none of the other goods in the luxury drinks category has any Prestige Good, Pops will shift some of their spending from tea and coffee towards wine. If all goods were Prestige Goods, nothing would change about their spending.
Additionally, we also increase the chance of Pops getting obsessed with a particular good, increasing with the percentage of Prestige Goods variants of that good.

[h2]Closing thoughts[/h2]
Alright, that’s our walkthrough for the new Prestige Goods mechanic. I’d like to end today by showcasing some of the fantastic work that our 2D artists have done to make these new Prestige Goods shine.

Some historical ones + all “generic” Prestige Goods made by Ingela

More historical ones made by Kenneth, don’t you want to bite into that River Plate Beef?

That’s it for today. Next week already, Tunay (aka Doodlez) will be writing about some other changes that we made for the 1.9 Update. What exactly that entails, you will have to check out yourself.
Until then, have a happy Thursday and goodbye!

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Hello Victorians,

Happy Thursday! It’s Lino, Game Design Lead on Victoria 3 and I welcome you back to another Dev Diary!
Today we’re looking at (almost) everything to do with Companies. Most of what I will talk about today is part of Charters of Commerce, which releases on June 17, but we will also talk about some additions and changes for Companies that are coming with the free 1.9 Update alongside the DLC.

Before we begin: As always, any values, texts, designs, graphics etc. are work in progress and are subject to change.

So, one big ambition we had for Companies with this update was to not only expand interactions with them and add functionality to them, but also to make observing them grow a bit easier and more enticing. For that we overhauled the Company interface panel and added a bit of functionality to it. I will be going through these changes later in this Dev Diary, but before then we will talk about all the individual parts that make the whole.

Alright, let’s get into it, starting with Company Charters (of Commerce).

[h2]Company Charters[/h2]
Company Charters are a new way for you to enable your companies to expand their wealth and reach. They all provide new, different sets of rights to the company in question. What those rights are, I will talk about in detail further down. Hand them out to a company you want to see grow and then watch and observe as their line go up!

Hmm… What could these icons stand for? Continue reading to find out!

Every country gets a number of free charters which you will be able to hand out across all your Companies. You can go over the limit, but then each charter will cost you additional authority. For example, if you have five free charters to spend, you can put all of them onto one company, increasing their opportunities by a lot but be left with no charters for your other companies, or you can spread them equally, specializing all companies only a bit in order to see them succeed. The choice is yours!
The number of free charters can come from different sources, e.g. economic system laws, certain technologies and also the rank of a country will increase the limit.
As this free charter functionality is a very late addition in our process, we are not making full use of this yet, but we see potential in adding it as an effect to the completion of certain Journal Entries, events or Power Bloc Principles for example and are also happy to take your feedback for where you believe this could be added. Similarly, modders are also able to use this where they see fit since it is a regular modifier.

Without further ado, here’s the first Charter which we are introducing with Charters of Commerce.

[h2]Colonization Charter[/h2]
While the era of the big company-states started to end in our timeframe, there certainly were ambitions by some to continue the trend.
When you hand out a Colonization Charter to one of your companies, you select the target state to be colonized. Then, a colony will be created which will be supported by your company.
The colony receives a bonus to its colonization speed and upon fully colonizing one state region, this will actually turn the colony into a new country, led by the company you gave the charter to.

“I know a good name - Fordlandia!”

The new country is a charter company type subject of your country and behaves like any other regular country pretty much.
The new country has a connection to your company though of course and receives a bonus to construction of new buildings and throughput. The country gets the same bonuses the company receives for industries that are in the company’s supported building types and a fraction of them for any other buildings. On the other hand, a company country cannot have companies on their own. Of course if they go fully independent they will be able to do so like any other country.
Now you may wonder what that means for the chartered company countries that we have at game start and I will talk about that later in this Dev Diary.

Connected to the company, the new country benefits from the expertise

[h2]Trade Charter[/h2]
The Trade Charter is quite straightforward. It allows the company in question to build, buy and run trade centers.
Once you’ve granted your company a Trade Charter, trade centers are added to the company’s building types, making company-owned Trade Centers profit from the same bonuses the other industries do.
Trade Centers run by a Company additionally have a Trade Advantage bonus for goods that are produced by their building types.

Companies exporting goods they produced

[h2]Industry Charter[/h2]
Similarly to the Trade Charter, the Industry Charter allows your company to expand into a new type of business.
Depending on scripted options, using this charter will allow you to grant your company the rights to expand into a different industry entirely.
When we scripted these options, we looked at historic expansions that the companies have done or have added vertical integration industries that were the most fitting. For example a furniture company likely received logging camps as an additional option if there was no other historic precedent.
Just like with the Trade Charter, the Industry Charter adds the selected option to the building type list of the company, making any company-owned levels benefit from throughput bonus and boosting construction. You can only assign one Industry Charter per company

What to do? Some companies have more than one choice

[h2]Investment Charter[/h2]
You can grant an Investment Charter to companies to bolster their investments in foreign countries. How that works is that companies can establish a Regional Headquarter in any country where they have at least 5 owned levels and you have foreign investment rights.
The Regional HQ, similar to the main Company Headquarter, serves as the place to display ownership of local investments and simultaneously as the place to collect the income of those buildings. It sends the profits to your home country’s investment pool so that capitalists in your country can use that to build even more wealth.
But here’s the catch - the presence of a Regional HQ allows the company to use the foreign country’s investment pool to construct or buy additional building levels, bringing more options of aggressive foreign acquisitions to the table.

“They're turning profits in the name of prophets”

As a side note: Although foreign investment works in subjects etc. without having any DLC, we felt it was best that we also unlocked the full foreign investment pact when owning Charters of Commerce since the Investment Charter becomes a lot more fun when you have access to that. So both DLCs, Sphere of Influence and Charters of Commerce will now unlock foreign investment rights.

[h2]Monopoly Charter[/h2]
Monopoly Charters allow you to choose an industry (or more) of a company to grant them exclusive building rights of that industry. This industry list does include any industry the company has gotten access to via another Charter though, so for example you can use the Industry Charter to unlock logging camps for a company and then subsequently grant the same company a monopoly for logging camps.

Do not pass go. Do not collect $200

So what does the monopoly actually do?
Well, like a proper monopoly should, it increases prices of the produced goods. We modify the selling price in building levels affected by a monopoly. The company’s potential profits are increased by this since they’re selling goods at a higher price. This will in turn of course increase the market price too, according to how much of a good is produced under a company monopoly. An active monopoly will also make it so that companies can purchase buildings of the fitting type for a big discount from other owners. Which other owners? I will talk about that further down this Dev Diary.

Additionally, we have a nice tie-in with the Treaty system that Alex presented last time. As part of a treaty, you will be able to request a country to give monopoly rights to one of your companies, further increasing their profits from ownership in foreign lands.

This brings us to the end of the Charters part, but as I mentioned before we have a couple of things that we will roll out for everybody with the free 1.9 Update that releases alongside Charters of Commerce.

[h2]Free 1.9 Update additions[/h2]
Since the inception of the companies feature, we’d been thinking about a potential expansion of the system, namely characters leading them. With 1.9, we’re laying the groundwork for future work in that regard.

[h2]Executives[/h2]
Introducing Executives, a new role that characters can have. They serve as the head of a company, not only running it, but also being the face of the company towards the outside world.
Executives will come with some new character traits that we are adding which will boost certain aspects of companies, e.g. a free charter to spend or a bonus to throughput in the company’s owned levels. These traits are not done yet, so I cannot show them at this point.
Executives will boost the political power of their affiliated Interest Group, similar to how generals do it at the moment. The amount is dependent on how well the company they are leading is doing. Like other characters, Executives can end up as heads of Interest Groups as well if circumstances line up accordingly.
If a company forms a new country via the Colonization Charter, it is also the Executive who will be head of state of the new country. At least at the start, depending on the country’s laws of course they might have elections that change the ruler for example.
We have a number of historical Executives that can show up in the game to lead your historical companies, fully equipped with custom DNA. For all other Executives we generate a random character as we usually do.

Don’t you want this young Alfred Krupp to give you company?

We hope to expand on this in the future to make Executives have more impact on your political life so that Companies feel even more like an actor within your country, maybe even to the point where granting them too many privileges will actually turn them into a potential danger. But that will require more work in the future.

[h2]Interface[/h2]
Now that I have shown all the individual bits, we can finally take a look at the interface changes we have done. First, here’s a look at the list of companies which remains accessible via the Companies button on the left navigation bar.



You can see, all relevant information is still available, though the positioning may have changed due to the addition of Executives and other information. We can see Prosperity now has a dedicated icon, but apart from that it’s more or less the same.
We do see a second tab in the panel though, which is a global display of Companies, in which you can compare all established companies. You can sort the list by country, names of the companies or the profit they make and can also see how many of their building types they own.



Now, if we look at a specific company’s interface, we will see a lot of changes.



In the first tab we get an overview of the company, the bonuses they provide, their building types, Executive and so on. On the bottom you can see the buttons to assign Company Charters. They can be found there in all tabs of the company interface, so that you don’t have to go back to the Overview tab each time you want to assign one. Depending on which ones are active, we see additional industry types added to the company’s list or an additional widget informing you about which monopolies the company holds.
If you scroll down a bit, you will also find a summary of Regional HQs and colonies that are attached to this company. But for a detailed view we should look at the second tab, Assets.



Here we can see all building levels owned by the Company’s HQ and also attached countries, colonies and Regional HQs and their assets (if they have any).
If you want to see more data on how your company has developed, you should look into the third tab, Statistics.



As the name suggests, this tab features multiple graphs that show you the development of the Company with information about productivity, profit, prosperity, number of building levels and levels of each type, making it the perfect place to see how your assignment of Company Charters affects your Company for example.
I for one really enjoy seeing the numbers grow and we hope you do too.

Next up, we have a couple more changes unrelated to the interface that I’d like to bring to you.

[h2]Various changes[/h2]
People with a keen eye may have seen in my screenshots that the Hudson Bay Company is listed as a British company.
That is because we are making it so that all three historical establishments of company countries (HBC, EIC, Russian-American Company) will start as former colonies with respective ties to their original companies. So the Hudson Bay Company will be a country tied to the Company HQ of the Hudson Bay Company in London for example.
This change included some minor adjustments to owned building levels and sadly the removal of the Great Western Railway from the game start so that Great Britain has space to have the EIC and HBC as historical starting companies. Of course the Great Western Railway is still available if you want to form it at a later stage.

For 1.9, we are also changing the way Prosperity is gained. We are making it so Prosperity has a target value that it is drifting towards instead of a constant upward or downward movement.
The target value is influenced by the current productivity of the company and also the number of staffed building levels the company owns. Additionally the popularity of the Executive leading it can impact the target value too. With a high popularity it increases, low popularity decreases it of course.
Similarly, the speed at which Prosperity drifts towards its target value is affected mostly by the size of the company and a base value.



As the way companies work has changed quite drastically over the years, in particular with 1.8 and 1.9, we are also conducting a small pass over the forming conditions of companies. We are now making it so that forming a company can be done with privately owned buildings that you pay for and also we are generally making the establishment slightly easier by reducing the number of required building levels. This won’t affect all companies and not all affected ones to the same degree, but should make more companies’ establishments viable.

Furthermore, we are of course introducing a new set of historical companies, some of which are going to be free, most of which are going to be part of Charters of Commerce.

I have one last thing that I’d like to talk about today, which is that with 1.9, companies will be able to buy building levels owned by financial districts and manor houses. This is a big change that we had wanted to do for a while and should smooth out some of the behaviour where companies and other private owners are playing a cat and mouse game to profit from throughput bonuses and generally makes companies more competitive.
This does not mean that other private owners can do the same. We will evaluate in the future if we want to add that functionality, but for now we are already happy that we could bring this improvement to you.

Alright, that’s it for today. In two weeks we will be back with our next Dev Diary where I will talk about and walk you through how Prestige Goods work.
Until then, have a nice day!

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