Victoria 3 News

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

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

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

Big button. Big window. Big nice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quick filter for specific ownership type

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A look inside Friedrich Krupp and their Property Portfolio

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

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

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



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

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

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

Happy Thursday and welcome back to another Victoria 3 development diary. This week we’re going to take a bird’s eye view of the headline features of update 1.8, which is of course the next free update for the game, planned to be released sometime later this year. However, before we start on the dev diary proper I should tell you about a slight change of plans in our release schedule. Back in Dev Diary #124 I told you that update 1.8 would be a smaller update, focused almost entirely on bug fixing and general polish.

This was indeed the plan, with update 1.9 intended as a larger update following relatively closely on the heels of 1.8, but when we sat down to work out the details we realized that our intended timeline simply didn’t work out, as we would either have to work on the two updates in too close proximity (creating major challenges for 1.8 post-release support among other things), or delay update 1.9 all the way to next year, which we didn’t want to do. So we decided to combine the two updates, with the result that 1.8 is now going to be a single update with the combined scope of both 1.8 and 1.9, meaning it will contain not just bug fixes and polish but also some juicy new free features.

But enough about update planning, let’s get into those headline features I just mentioned! As I said, this is just an overview dev diary, so we’re not going to go into any great detail today, but we have plenty more dev diaries planned in the upcoming weeks where we will fill in the blanks. One final thing before I start: All of the features mentioned are still in early stages of development, so any screenshots, numbers and art shown are going to be very, very, very (very) work in progress.


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

A frequent complaint about Victoria 3’s political system is the highly random nature of leader and character ideologies. The way in which you build up support for certain laws among your Interest Groups can be frustratingly opaque and reliant on using certain pieces of content (Corn Laws, anyone?) in a way that is neither immersive nor feels particularly rewarding.

In update 1.8, we are taking aim at this problem, alongside a number of other issues with a feature that we have dubbed ‘Ideological Forces’, but which can be more accurately called ‘Political Movement Rework’. The plan is to transform Political Movements from spontaneous and temporary demands for a single legal reform into longer-term ideological movements with a broader political agenda. For example, instead of a movement popping up to abolish slavery, you will have an actual Abolitionist movement with a long-term legal agenda, which will attract supporters from your Pops and influence the politics of the Interest Groups that those Pops are backing. Political Movements will also include religious and cultural minority (and majority!) movements, with some corresponding changes to civil war and secession mechanics.

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

[h2]Discrimination Rework[/h2]

Another issue straight off the future update plans that we’re tackling in 1.8 is the way pop discrimination works. Ever since release, we’ve said multiple times that the overly simplistic nature of discrimination is something we want to improve on in the future, and now that future is finally here! This feature is still in the ‘figuring it out’ stage, so I’ll eschew the details, but our principal goals with are as follows:

• To introduce multiple ‘levels’ to discrimination instead of it just being a binary state
  
• To have the level of discrimination faced by a Pop be determined by factors other than just what the law says
  
• To turn assimilation into a properly useful feature that isn’t only available to fully accepted pops
  

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

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

In update 1.8, we’re also planning to expand on the gameplay around agriculture and food availability, which of course was an issue of great importance to governments at the time. After all, the 19th century saw events such as the Irish Potato Famine, the repeated famines in British-controlled India and the world-wide famines in the wake of the Krakatoa explosion.

To do this, we are going to introduce the concept of food availability for Pops, which is a factor that is separate from, but intrinsically linked to a Pop’s standard of living. Currently, we’re thinking that food availability for a Pop will be determined by how much of their buy package goes towards feeding themselves, how expensive the food goods they’re purchasing is, and whether there are any shortages among those goods. Low food availability will increase pop mortality and radicalism and may trigger a state-wide famine if it’s widespread enough.

Food production at the time was highly dependent on the weather and climate, and many peasant families were only one or two bad harvests away from the brink of ruin. To simulate this unpredictability, we’re also adding something called ‘Harvest Incidents’, which can increase or decrease agricultural output in different regions over a longer timeframe.

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

These are the ‘big ones’ for update 1.8, but of course it is by no means all we’re planning to do in this update. A few honorable mentions of other changes and improvements you can expect in 1.8, all of which we’ll explain in detail over in the upcoming weeks:

• Companies owning and investing in buildings
  
• Bulk Nationalization tool
  
• Multi-select and right-click orders for formations
  
• Adding wargoals on behalf of subjects
  

Along with, of course, many bug fixes, balance changes and other miscellaneous improvements.

That’s all for today! More details on all of these features will of course follow, starting with Bulk Nationalization and Companies Owning Buildings, which Lino will tell you all about next week. See you then!

Hello Victorians! The hotfix today has a number of fixes mentioned in Dev Diary 125, and should be compatible with savegames! We mentioned in the dev diary we would be making changes to the abdicate/resign interaction, this has been delayed to a future update due to technical reasons.

Checksum for the hotfix is, 4b8b. As always, this post is not for bug reports, please instead post them in the bug reporting forum (including a save and steps to recreate is always useful).

The following changes have been made to the game compared to 1.7.5:

[h2]Improvements[/h2]

• Protectionism now has a +25% leverage resistance effect
  

[h2]AI[/h2]

• The AI will now prefer to first cancel constructions of government buildings over demolishing existing ones when trying to save money
  
• Reduced AI naval spending targets from having a large overseas empire, to prevent excessive British overspending on the navy
  

[h2]Interface[/h2]

• Added the prompt saying "CTRL + click to set the levels to a minimum/maximum" directly to the Nationalization popup for better visibility.
  

[h2]Bugfixes[/h2]

• Fixed the bug when guarantee independence wouldn't join if the diplomatic play that was started outside of the current interests
  
• Fixed a bug where it was possible to Enforce Military Access on a subject who is opposing their overlord in a play or a war
  
• Fixed a bug where the AI would sometimes not merge back temporary formations into their parent formations, resulting in a large number of armies with few or no battalions in each
  
• Fixed a bug where the AI would not evaluate Investment Rights and Join Power Bloc wargoals correctly when calculating its desire to dominate another country, resulting in adopting a less aggressive attitude than intended
  
• Fixed CTD related to front distribution cache
  
• Fixed a bug where the AI would use 'Grant own Market' on subjects in cases where it did not make sense to do so, such as Austria granting Krakow their own market due to low supply network strength
  
• Fixed bug where Force Nationalization Wargoal would only take state-owned buildings from the target, ignoring private-owned ones
  
• Fixed the bug when government buildings couldn't promote employees
  
• (Mac CTD fix) Fix/potential stack overflow in cpdxguitextdata
  
• Fixed the bug when fleets in non-home HQs wouldn't recover from being defeated
  
• Fixed a bug where Military Formations could establish a new basecamp somewhere else when they already had a valid one.
  
• Fixed a crash to desktop that could happen upon enacting cooperative ownership
  
• Now subjects subjugated through power bloc action will properly update ports and markets
  

Happy Thursday and welcome back to our first of many development diaries before the end of the year! After a terrific launch and reception of Sphere of Influence in June, followed by several hotfixes with improvements and bugfixes, many devs on the team took a well-deserved vacation during July. We have now reassembled and can't wait to tell you what we've been working on over the summer, and what is coming in the latter half of 2024! First up I want to talk about hotfix 1.7.6 which should reach you in a few weeks and consists of a few high-impact fixes and improvements we've been working on during the summer (alongside work on update 1.8) that I think you'll enjoy.

First, improvements to the Abdicate/Resign character interactions. These interactions have been exploited in the past to cycle through rulers, in decidedly un-fun ways. To address this while retaining their overall intent, the conditions for a ruler to abdicate or resign are now much more narrow but can still be performed when a revolution to enact or restore a law is heating up. You'll be alerted when these conditions are valid, and abdicating or resigning during such a situation will decrease the Radicalism of the movement, giving you a bit more headroom to try to come to a peaceful resolution.

The Force Nationalization wargoal currently only transfers buildings owned by another country directly to you, but with the 1.7.6 hotfix it will also affect buildings owned by pops (Manor Houses or Financial Districts) in the targeted country, letting you cut a country out of your economy completely in one fell swoop.

Army position on a moving frontline will be made more persistent, ensuring that armies do not reposition themselves by traveling to a different position on the front after the line moves if they are still valid where they currently are. This should prevent fronts from suddenly becoming poorly defended after a successful state invasion and make the military system generally feel more stable to interact with. And speaking of military issues, the bug where defeated Admirals won't be restored back into action when they have recovered sufficient manpower will also be addressed.

Several crashes have been fixed, including a crash relating to transferring building ownership and issues with rendering GUI widgets on Mac.

Hotfix 1.7.6 will also include a few minor bugfixes, and tweaks to AI behavior and Leverage Resistance, and last but not least some UI system performance improvements that should make the game run a bit smoother. Some more extensive performance improvements we have made will be coming with update 1.8 due to the risk and incompatibility issues involved in pushing them out with a hotfix.

We are currently testing a possible solution to the issue of government employees that are heavily bound by Qualifications (such as Officers in certain countries) being a bottleneck for operation of government buildings (such as Barracks). With any luck this behavior should also be improved for 1.7.6.

Additionally, we are improving the visibility of an existing improvement we implemented in 1.7.5 to let you more rapidly nationalize buildings. We are also working on a greatly improved quality-of-life tool to facilitate nationalization efforts across multiple buildings for 1.8, which you will hear more about in subsequent dev diaries.

With 1.7.5 we added support to hold Ctrl when clicking the plus or minus button, which sets the number of levels to the minimum or maximum. Now we’re also going to display this message so that it will be more obvious to more players. Happy nationalizing!

Hotfix 1.7.6 should be arriving in late August or early September, and as usual with hotfixes will be compatible with current save games. Of course we are concurrently hard at work for the next chapter in Victoria 3's chronicle, update 1.8, which you will hear much more about from Martin (Wiz) in 2 weeks from now and in several subsequent diaries. Until then!

Salutations Victorians, we have a small hotfix today targeting some key fixes to improve gameplay experience,

Checksum for the hotfix is, 6fe3. As always, this post is not for bug reports, please instead post them in the bug reporting forum (including a save and steps to recreate is always useful).

The following changes have been made to the game compared to 1.7.4:


[h2]Balance[/h2]

• Reduced starting radicals for countries with historical radicals, such as Argentina and Central America
  
• Reduce the Infamy gained by Tibet's overlord if they refuse Tibet's subjugation in Tibet Expedition
  

[h2]AI[/h2]

• Fixed incomplete logic for AI evaluation of granting states to unrecognized and autonomous subjects, allowing USA to grant states to Indian Territory when it shouldn't
  

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]

• Fixed Private Investment Pool behaviour under cooperative ownership
  
• Aristocrats no longer starve due to Subsistence farms suddenly raising wages for peasants
  
• Infamy cost reduction for rebelling subjects is now properly applied to rebellious subjects not loyal subjects
  

Previous Patchnotes
1.7, 1.7.1, 1.7.2, 1.7.3, 1.7.4