Victoria 3 News

Victorians!

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Hello Victorians,

My name is Alex, I’m a multiclass programmer and designer on Victoria 3 and today it’s finally time for another Dev Diary on this very happy Thursday!
Today we will be taking a look at Diplomatic Treaties, one of the features arriving with the free 1.9 update on June 17 together with our Mechanics Pack “Charters of Commerce”.

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

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

But now, without further ado, enter Treaties:



[h2]Diplomatic Treaties[/h2]
As part of the changes to the World Market we described in Dev Diary #143 and with Trade Routes as you know them going away, we wanted to introduce a new mechanic that let you actively establish pointed strategic ways of elevating your industries or exploiting other countries through trade. We wanted more ways for you to peacefully (but aggressively) compete against your rivals (and allies) and establish your dominance across the globe.

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

And well, that’s what we did.

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

Pedro had some aggressive negotiation tactics

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

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

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

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

[h2]Articles[/h2]
This is the core part of treaties that actually defines what they do. Articles have a few different classifications. On a fundamental level, articles can be either Mutual or Directional. This mostly just indicates whether the article is something that affects both sides equally or not. A prime example of a mutual article is an Alliance: both sides are involved equally. On the other hand, Transfer Goods is an example of a Directional article: one side (the source) is sending the goods and the other (the target) is receiving them.

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

Supporting Texas with some good ol’ ammo

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

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

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

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

We’ve taken the opportunity to rework Treaty Ports by turning them into an article instead of a consequence of geography. No Treaty, no Treaty Port! (Historical treaties aren’t setup yet, so ignore the date and binding time details)

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

Who’s gonna play Switzerland as their first run when 1.9 drops?

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

[h2]Ending a Treaty[/h2]
A Treaty ends when either side withdraws from the treaty. Easy. Of course, if you gave away Angola in exchange for Spain transferring you a certain amount of money every week, you want to make sure they actually follow through and you don’t get scammed. This is where binding periods come in.

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

We’re still looking at a few alternatives for how to pick the binding period. This is one, but it could also maybe be a slider?

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

[h2](Re)Negotiation[/h2]
If you made some poor choices and a Treaty is really not good for you, you can attempt to renegotiate the treaty instead of just withdrawing from it. To do so, you select what treaty you want to renegotiate and simply click on the button. This will bring you to a flow similar to the original drafting panel, but instead of having a blank slate, the existing articles will be the baseline. From there you can add or remove articles, change inputs or even change the binding period. When you’re happy, you send the proposal as usual and the other side has the opportunity to respond. If they agree, great, the old treaty is replaced with this new one. If they reject your offer though, the old treaty remains in force as it was.

New Granada is starting to feel like maybe this wasn’t such a good deal after all

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

[h2]Non-fulfillment Consequences[/h2]
Say you are playing as Belgium and you need paper, but don’t feel like actually making it yourself. You could set up a treaty where you give the Netherlands some of your Sulfur and in exchange they give you some of the Paper they produce. They agree to this, but then for whatever reason, say a foreign power annexed their only paper mills, they are not able to produce the Paper they should deliver to you. This would likely lead to a shortage of Paper in the Dutch Market which would mean they are not able to deliver the Paper to you.

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

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

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

[h2]Obligations[/h2]
As usual, you can call in obligations to make countries more likely to accept a treaty you propose. When it comes to how you get those obligations we’re making some changes though. Broadly speaking, you will be able to say you consider a certain treaty as essentially a favor to the other side. This will reduce their acceptance of the treaty, but in turn, if the binding period of the treaty lapses and everyone fulfills their parts it will grant you an obligation you can then use as usual.

Signed treaties will take on different names depending on different circumstances. There will also be some historical treaties scripted in with their historical names. Additionally, you will also be able to give your treaties a custom name if you so wish. (shout out to Default Window Line Two)

[h2]Modding[/h2]
As always we have made an active effort to keep this feature as moddable as possible. Many times when thinking about how to solve a certain problem we could see an easy solution which would just work within the assumptions of what we have planned to do with the feature and a more complicated solution where making things work on a more abstract level meant more combinations were possible for modders and as much as possible we chose the latter. As such, I’d like to take a little bit of time to talk about what you can do with this system, primarily centered around modding articles.
A lot of article modding is similar to diplomatic action modding: you can set AI weights, modifiers, effects, costs and so on. What is a bit different here with how articles work, is that you are also able to set if an article should be mutual or directional, but more importantly, you can have the article take any combination of the following inputs (although only one of each):

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

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

A little example of how flags and inputs are set in script on articles

There are of course some significant parts of articles that are hard coded, but we tried to make them flexible in that. For instance, most vanilla articles work by setting behavior flags. So Transfer Goods has an is_transfer_goods flag. This then tells the code what behavior it should call and makes it take in the expected inputs that is_transfer_goods requires. There’s also say is_investment_rights, or is_alliance. And the cool thing here is that you can actually to some degree combine these. So if you want to make an article that grants both military access and transit rights at the same time, you can do that. The main limitation here is if you have two flags that look at the same input type, they will have to use the same input. So combining transfer goods with no tariffs would necessarily both target the same input.
Another cool thing you can do is mod the non-fulfillment conditions. You could for instance have a version of Transfer Goods that is only active while the countries are at peace or something and then if that is broken maybe you’d want the treaty to auto-break or maybe you want it to freeze instead. Up to you.

[h2]Charters of Commerce[/h2]
While everything I have described so far will be part of the free 1.9 update, the Mechanics Pack Charters of Commerce will also include a number of new articles exclusive to it:

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

Portugal would really like to be left alone with their colonies

[hr][/hr]

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

[h2]Just one more thing[/h2]
There’s one more thing I’d like to show before we end this though. In addition to the flow I’ve already explained above, there’s another way Treaties can be used: Diplomatic Plays.

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

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

Now you’ll have more ways in which you can make the Prussians pay

[hr][/hr]

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

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

Hello Victorians,

I’m Lino, Game Design Lead on Victoria 3 and I welcome you all to another Dev Diary and wish you a happy Thursday!
Today we’re looking at some Military changes that are arriving with the free 1.9 Update, coming to you on June 17, the same day our Mechanics Pack “Charters of Commerce” releases.

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

So, obviously warfare has some issues, which we want to address. To repeat what we have stated before: The ambition for 1.9 is not to majorly expand on warfare, but rather to fix the most egregious persistent issues.
The main areas we had identified before embarking on this quest to improve warfare were:

1. Too many front splits, which results in having to micro too much
   
2. Shuffling of units along a front (usually when two fronts merge), leading to them not being defended while the units were travelling
   
3. Formations teleporting home when they don’t have a valid route to get there
   

There are of course other issues, e.g. our user experience and interface could certainly be improved in some areas, supply should matter more etc., but these three are the cause of most of the warfare feedback posts we see on our forums, discord and other social platforms.
We have read through all your posts and decided on addressing the three points above (and more), based on your extensive feedback. First up is addressing frontlines and their splitting.

[h2]Frontline generation[/h2]

Faced with the problem of having to micro after front-splitting, we sat down to talk about some requirements and possible options.
We knew that it’s impossible to fully avoid front-splitting from happening in general. But that’s okay, that was never our goal. We cared about addressing the resulting issues.
One use-case we really wanted to improve was India. Well, fronts in India. Once the princely states decide they’ve had enough and declare war, we get an insane amount of frontlines generated all across the subcontinent.
This is due to the algorithm of how frontlines are created. It looks at continuous pieces of land that are connected to another continuous piece of land that is owned by your enemy and then spawns a frontline between the two basically.

Well, in the case of India, this will often lead to having 10-15 fronts because the princely states aren’t always located next to each other.

But what if we had a different algorithm? One that resulted in fewer fronts.
Let me introduce our patented “Why not jump?” front generation algorithm:
Instead of requiring fronts to be along a continuous piece of land, we are now telling it to jump for some distance if it would reach another front which it can merge with.
In the current version we have internally, we are looking at covering one state region of a gap. We will be experimenting with a version that instead looks at a specified distance in pixels to cover some of the weirder edge-cases where a state is either very small or very large.

We are quite happy with the results when you apply it to actual use-cases, for example the case of the Indian revolt that I mentioned earlier.

No longer will we have to endure 13 fronts

Now it’s just two instead

This is the biggest visible improvement we have done for this Warfare improvement cycle, but we have a lot more to cover. Next up is the shuffling of army positions.

[h2]Front camps[/h2]

So, we’ve probably all seen armies march to the other end of a front they were assigned to, seemingly just because they felt like it.

Well, in reality this is because armies are assigned to front camps, specific positions along a front to spread them out.

When two fronts merged or a front split, we would re-evaluate the front camps and the armies in them were assigned a new valid front camp. That could mean their new camp was on the other end of the front, meaning they’d pack up their things and start marching.

So we have taken a look at this algorithm as well and made some seemingly small changes which should result in a much smoother gameplay experience though.

We now make it so that as long as an army is positioned in a front camp, which is still valid after a front change, they stay there. The armies were spread out evenly before, so the same distribution should make sense after a split/merge too. This can still lead to armies starting to move, e.g. because it was their front camp that was invalidated (because it’s no longer part of the front for example), but that is a logical reason to move.

It’s hard to showcase this behaviour change in images, but internal test results have been positive about this and we hope you’ll feel the same. There’s much less unintentional shuffling of armies along a front which was the main point of this change.

Next up is another big frustration point.

[h2]Teleporting Armies[/h2]

“Beam me up Scotty!” General Wolseley exclaimed when he found himself unable to attach to a front in India. And sure enough, two minutes later he was drinking tea with the Queen in Buckingham Palace.
At least that is how it sometimes worked out in our game. Until now!

The issue of teleporting armies comes to be when there’s no valid front available for a formation to go to. This can happen for example when a formation is isolated by neutral territory or the front they were moving towards being pushed into unavailable space.
We’ve always had some fallbacks for missing spline connections for example, which allowed armies to simply march through terrain though there wasn’t really a path defined.
And teleportation was our fallback solution for the worse cases.
But now we are refining this particular one into more of an actual feature, which should make it possible for armies to not teleport home again. What we’re doing is to take a lesson from our other titles and implement an exiled army status.
Once an army finds itself in a situation where they would have previously beamed home, now they’ll enter exiled status and have to walk (or ship) home.

Exiled armies have a few special rules:

• They can march through neutral and enemy territory
  
• They are not able to attach themselves to a front, they need to regroup in a friendly HQ first. They will automatically target the nearest HQ (ignoring landlocked HQs unless it’s their home HQ) and go there.
  
• They suffer from attrition as if they were present at a front (more attrition in enemy territory than in neutral)
  
• Their organization value will drift towards 0 over time
  

Once an exiled army reaches their target HQ, they lose the exiled status and act like a regular formation again.

As this feature is still in development, I can’t show you too much yet, but here’s a teaser for the icon which will be used across all interface screens to visualize the exiled state

That’s the big three out of the way, but I have more to show today.
Since I just mentioned the army organization value, I think this would be a good time to briefly mention some changes on that front (ha!) before coming back to juicier additions.

[h2]Organization, Supply and Morale[/h2]

Right now, organization is a value whose limit is determined by the commanders in the formation and used by your units. If there are sufficient commanders, it always is at the maximum value and if there suddenly isn’t (because an unfortunate accident happened), well then the organization will drop immediately to the new target value, leaving the army shattered.

What we’re doing now instead is making organization a drifting value, meaning that when an important commander dies, the target is set to say 40 but it will take a while to go down from 100. Enough time for you to hire or promote a new general in their place.

[h2]Organization drifting from 100 towards 0 at a rate of 5 per day because the army is exiled (and has too many special units)[/h2]


Negative effects from low organization also scale a bit differently now. When you have full organization, you suffer no consequences of course. If you go down to 0 you’ll suffer 100% of the penalties. Previously this was set to 25, but it’s working better with 0 and the drifting value.
Another small change we’re doing alongside this is that we’re adding a base command limit of 10. That means that small formations (max 10 units) do not require a commander to have full organization anymore.

Lean, mean killer machine

With regards to supply, we are making some small, but impactful changes too.
Previously supply impacted morale, instead it now affects it via organization. It does so by multiplying the organization target. So if the organization target of a formation is currently 100, but the formation’s supply is only at 50%, the organization target will be set to 50 instead.
This gives supply a lot more teeth than the previously rather harmless effects.

Here we can see the impact of a small supply penalty

Alright, so much for our little tour around these values.

Let’s get back to some meaty stuff again that I’m sure will excite many people.

[h2]Military Access[/h2]

Military Access has been on our wishlist for a long time. It has proven tricky in our military system to define what exactly it actually means and how we can make it work in a way that makes sense for us.

I don’t think I need to explain that much why having a military access system in the game is a good idea, but let’s just say it should allow a lot more countries to conduct war without a naval invasion.

The way this is set up is via a diplomatic pact that two countries establish. It’s one-sided, so for example Belgium could grant military access to Prussia without being granted the same. Additionally, having an alliance with another country will inherently also provide military access.
Note that the example of Prussia marching through Belgium is incidental and not a reference to any particular historical conflict which involved German soldiers marching through Belgium.

Small relevant spoiler for our next Dev Diary :o

What I should explain though is how Prussia can actually make use of the military access rights they just secured.
Let’s imagine we play as Prussia and find ourselves at war with France (silly example I know). Now we’d like to open a second front with them using a route through neutral Belgium’s territory into Champage to get to Paris.
Well, with the press of a few buttons, we’re able to do so.

Incorrectly found in the Navy tab currently. This will be adjusted before release.

Once you press the plan invasion button, you’ll see an interface you may know from Naval Invasions already, which shows all potential invasion targets, via the sea, but also via land.

Note the extra options for states Champagne and Lorraine which are accessible through the military access to Belgium.



When we select Champagne, we see the panel where you select your armies. Once selected, they’ll prepare for a while.

While the 2. Armee defends, the 1. Armee shall advance through Belgium!

These invasions via land will work almost like naval invasions, minus the boats. While preparations are ongoing, a new front is already spawned at the point of invasion so that the defender also has the time to react and send forces to defend. Once prepared, the Prussian attackers will be able to start advancing the new front.

Again, the invasion icon will be fixed before release

France on the other hand will only be able to defend this front and cannot push into Belgium. The conditions to see this front disappear are the same as for naval invasions, so after 3 failed attempts, the front disappears and the attackers return to their HQ.

But what if France wants to fight back and take the fight into Prussia? Well, they can also open a second front via Belgium. When any country uses their military access via a neutral country to invade another country, their enemies will also gain military access to the neutral country.
So keep that in mind when you go around securing these rights.

Next up, some interface improvements we’re doing.

[h2]UI Improvements[/h2]

We have done a number of changes to the UI surrounding military and warfare which I’d like to present to you in this section.

First up, we now use the more compact Mobilization window layout for formations by default. Previously the long list was very ineffective for how much space it was using and required a lot of scrolling.

Lots of small buttons, making better use of the space

We have updated the formation tooltip. It now shows which units are in said formation. Additionally we now expose Offense and Defense stats of units in fitting places.

Updated formation tooltip, including its units and offense/defense value in them

Default unit selection

Also, the cost of war needed to be highlighted a bit more as it’s a pretty important number.
So in the Military tab, you’ll find a summary of your Military expenses now.

“4.56K for Iron bars?! Who approved this?”

Another change we’re doing is to stack all allied/enemy formation markers that are on the same front. This drastically reduces the amount of clutter you see on screen when you’re at war. Your own formations are not affected by this. Hovering over the stack allows you to still see the individual groups that are summed up in it.

Before: Chaos!

After: So fresh, so clean

Showing what’s in a stack

Alright, I have one last feature outlook I want to mention today.
This feature is still very actively in development, but we want to let you know that we are currently working on implementing the possibility to edit mobilization options for your formations in bulk.
This will work by multi selecting any formations you want this to apply to and then have a central editing process which will apply the mobilization options to all selected formations.

Here’s a little outlook (all very much WIP), you can see 3 armies selected, the blue and yellow lines indicating that at least one army has selected the option

[h2]Closing thoughts[/h2]

We are very happy with this set of improvements which ended up a bit bigger than originally expected and we look forward to hearing your feedback once you get your hands on it.
I can’t stress enough that this is not marking the end of military improvements. We will continue addressing issues that aren’t up to par in free updates as we have always done.
We also would like to come back to the naval improvements we have previously teased, but these changes are much larger in scope so we can’t tell you exactly when they are coming at this point.

Also, before I leave you, here's an outlook of further Dev Diaries up until release of the 1.9 Update and Charters of Commerce, which releases on June 17th:

• May 1st: Diplomatic Treaties
  
• May 15th: Company Charters
  
• May 29th: Prestige Goods
  
• June 5th: Other changes
  
• June 12th: Changelog
  

We will be back with Alex who will walk you through the very exciting Diplomatic Treaties feature in the next Dev Diary on the 1st of May.

Have a good day and see you in the comment section!