Victoria 3 News

Happy Thursday and welcome to the first of several diaries about improvements and changes in Update 1.3! Today we will cover changes made to the process of enacting laws, political machinations by your ruling Interest Groups, and the build-up to revolution.

First off, why are we making changes here? Well, while the core mechanics of law enactment and political movements agitating for legislative change and/or revolution work well and in accordance with the design vision, there are a number of issues that has bothered us and many in the community since release:

• The feeling of excessive randomness in law enactment mechanics, where you might have only a 5% success chance but could hope for a "critical hit" that wasn't particularly rare, or repeatedly failing and getting stuck when at 80% success chance
  
• The risk of getting stuck with "bad rolls" early on in an enactment process leading to repeated frustration until you cancel enactment and start over
  
• Exploits related to repeatedly starting/canceling law enactment to prevent revolutions from ever getting off the ground
  
• The ability to disarm a revolution by inviting a supporting Interest Group to the government, only to then ignore their desires
  
• Interest Groups in government actually having less political agency than those in opposition
  
• Revolution buildup not feeling particularly flavorful or engaging as a simple progress bar
  
• Several confusing user experiences and tooltips relating to law enactment and revolution
  

We've tackled these issues with two larger and several smaller features or tweaks.


Laws now need to progress through three phases in order to pass, instead of simply having a percentage chance to be enacted once the clock fills up. What is not changing here are the underlying mechanics of Success, Advance, Debate, and Stall chances, which are based on the relative endorsement and opposition of the law from the Interest Groups in your government. However, when the result is a Success, you will progress to the next phase instead of immediately enacting the law. If you then achieve success in the third phase, the law will pass.

To compensate for the additional time requirement, we've increased the pace of the enactment clock - which also means more twists and turns during each law enactment. Previously it was not uncommon that if you had 40% endorsement of a law you want to pass, you might succeed on the very first checkpoint, which makes the whole thing mostly a waiting experience. By requiring a number of successes, we can compensate for the random factor and create more interesting challenges.



While this is, in the words of Alex in QA (who originally conceived of this feature), "just three EU4 sieges in a trenchcoat", it solves the problem of excessive randomness and feels a lot better: giving you a clearer sense of progress and increases the stakes of each decision made. Choosing to get a +5% Enactment Chance out of an early event now doesn't just give you a +5% bonus to a single roll, but effectively a +5% bonus to each of the three phases, which is a much bigger deal. You're also much more likely to experience a variety of events before the enactment is concluded.

Events spawned by the enactment process are now categorized in association with the UI element that tracks your progress, and identifies the outcome that spawned it to give you more context. They will also time out automatically (selecting the default option) when the clock fills up, so there's always only one enactment event pending - no more delaying taking action on negative events until the next cycle to try to improve your better outcome!

One issue with the current (1.2.x) build is that after dealing with a few negative events you could end up with a net negative enactment chance, a hole you'd have to try to dig your way out of in order to even have a chance to progress. But of course, the lower the enactment chance the lower the chance of getting a positive event, so this often turns into a self-perpetuating cycle of digging a deeper and deeper hole. The "correct" action at this point is to cancel enactment and try again after a cooldown period, but this feels very bad.

To address this, in 1.3 we have introduced a concept of setbacks which can be taken to recover from a situation like this. Each enactment process can take up to three setbacks, but when it has taken its third it will automatically and irrevocably fail. For as long as you have taken less than that, events will permit you to reset your current enactment progress if you've taken too large of a hit, or in some cases trade a setback to turn an negative outcome into a marginally positive one.

When enactment chance drops below zero, the Legislative Failures event will automatically spawn and let you reset back to a clean slate at the cost of a Setback.

Many law enactment events have been backfilled with new options that let you take a setback in return for avoiding a more negative repercussion, letting you gamble a bit to try to get your bill passed.

However, Stall outcomes can also sometimes generate Setbacks without your input, so be wary of pushing your luck too much!

Even with the extra agency provided by the Setback mechanic, you may find that enacting a certain law is so difficult it's just not worth it. When you cancel enactment in 1.3, you will find that the cooldown has increased to 2 years instead of 1 (and is applied even if you have not yet reached the first checkpoint), but also an entirely new effect: if there is a Political Movement currently agitating for this law to pass, and you cease trying to enact it, the movement's Radicalism will shoot up considerably, in many cases all but guaranteeing they will revolt as a result.

Cancellation confirmation box explaining the impact of your decision. Laws redacted to not spoil the fun for next week's dev diary, but feel free to speculate in the comments!

This closes the door on two (unfun) identified exploits: starting to enact a law a movement demands, but canceling it before it succeeds, keeping the movement teetering just on the edge of revolution without giving in to it; and canceling enactment just before the first enactment cycle is up, thus avoiding cooldown and penalties altogether.

But what about the exploit where a revolutionary Interest Group is invited into government, thus removing them from their Political Movement? In one sense, this is working-as-designed; inviting a populist faction to try to execute their politics in a more respectable fashion is a not-infrequently utilized tool for declawing a revolutionary movement. The problem with this in Victoria 3 is that a human player will be in full control of which laws are being enacted, so inviting a group into government doesn't actually give them more power to make change - it only takes away their ability to threaten consequences.

Enter Government Petitions.

Petition events commonly appear a few months after a new government has been formed. They can be issued by any of the Interest Groups in government and for any of the law changes they endorse the most.

The event produces a Journal Entry that you may pursue if you wish, or ignore at your peril. Passing the desired law will of course have the effect of improving the Interest Group's Approval as usual, but it will also improve your Legitimacy for a long time, as you're showing responsive governance. On the other hand, if you don't pass the law on time, or by some other means disenfranchise the petitioning Interest Group, they will become very disappointed with you.

In effect, this creates a kind of "government agenda" that the player is rewarded for pursuing and penalized for ignoring, further incentivizing building a government constellation of groups whose politics you actually want.

For the modders out there, Government Petitions are implemented entirely in script, and can serve as a good example and pattern for Journal Entries that can be more dynamic and responsive to circumstances.

Finally, what happens when things go sideways and your population demands something you can't (or won't) give them? In the current live build, a Political Movement with high Radicalism will become Revolutionary, triggering a countdown until they rise up against you, taking one or several of your states with them. In 1.3, these fundamentals remain but the countdown has changed drastically.


When a Political Movement becomes Revolutionary, a clock will start ticking. Similar to the enactment clock, every time it fills up the Revolution meter will (usually) increase, with a revolution event triggering alongside it. The event frequently provides some options for how to deal with the revolution. All in all there are 40 such new events in 1.3, many of them contextually triggered based on who is supporting the revolution, what law is currently being enacted, and so on.



With the support of the Rural Folk and a Political Movement led by the Intelligentsia and Trade Unions (all of them individually weak) we're attempting to ban slavery in early game Afghanistan. The reaction from the Landowners was quite severe. Not only did they leave the government in protest (causing Legitimacy to drop to a level where we cannot make progress on the law enactment), but they also started their own movement to preserve Debt Slavery and, on account of their considerable strength, went straight into plotting a revolution against their former Rural Folk co-rulers.

On the new Political Movement panel, we can get a good overview of where the support is actually coming from and why they are as strong and radical as they are.

On the Supporting Pops tab in the same panel, you can find out exactly who is providing the most support and radicalism to the Movement. Perhaps you could temper some of these strong feelings by increasing dividends in their industries or providing some targeted reduction in prices of certain luxury goods?

The Revolution Clock events usually adjust the revolutionary progression up or down, but can also apply other conditions, some which may upset your country's political balance for quite some time. This can of course also impact revolutionary progression indirectly, as Clout heavily impacts the conditions of the movement.

Revolutionary movements have also been given their own animated map marker, to make it clearer where the revolution is brewing and what territory is likely to go along with it when it erupts. And yes, once again I've had to redact part of the UI to not spoil some surprises we have in store for you!

That's all for today! As you can see we're putting a lot of focus on making internal politics more dynamic and fun to play with in Update 1.3, and there's much more to come in subsequent dev diaries. Next week Victoria will present new laws we have introduced in the mix, to fill some late-game gaps and enable new early- and mid-game conflicts between your political factions!

Hello and welcome to the first Victoria 3 dev diary after the release of update 1.2! With this update now out, we feel that it’s a good time to return to the Post-Release Plans we outlined in Dev Diary #64, check what’s already been done and go over what further changes and improvements we have planned for the game in future free updates such as 1.3, 1.4 and beyond. In the Post-Release Plans Dev Diary we outlined three key areas of improvement for the game: Military, Historical Immersion and Diplomacy and these are very much still our main targets, but are now being joined by an Internal Politics section. The Other section is also still there for anything that doesn’t fall neatly into one of the four categories.

For this dev diary, I’ll be aiming to give you an overview of where we stand and where we’re heading by going through each of these four categories and marking on each one with one of the below statuses:

• Done: This is a part of the game that we now consider to be in good shape. Something being Done of course doesn’t mean we’re never going to expand or improve on it in the future, just that it’s no longer a high priority for us.
  
• Updated: This is a part of the game where we have made some of the improvements and changes that we want to make, but aren’t yet satisfied with where it stands and plan to make further improvements to it in future updates such as 1.3, 1.4 and so on.
  
• Not Updated: This is a part of the game where we haven’t yet released any of our planned changes/improvements in either 1.1 or 1.2 but still plan to do so for future updates.
  
• New: This is a planned change or improvement that is newly added, ie wasn’t present on the list in Dev Diary #64.
  

Just like in the original Post-Release Plans dev diary, we will only be talking about improvements, changes and new features that are part of planned free updates in this dev diary. So then, let’s get to the categories and see where we stand! For each point in each category that isn’t new to this update there will be a sub-point detailing our progress on the point so far.



Done:

• Adding the ability for countries to set strategic objectives for their generals
  
• The ability to designate Strategic Objectives were added to the game in update 1.2
  
• Addressing some of the rough edges in how generals function at the moment, such as improving unit selection for battles and balancing the overall progression along fronts
  
• While there are still rough edges in the military system and we undoubtedly will continue to tweak the precise balancing here, we consider the specific issues with front progression and unit selection for battles largely resolved in update 1.2
  

Updated:

• Improving the ability of players to get an overview of their military situation and exposing more data, like the underlying numbers behind battle sizes
  
• We have made a number of improvements to army visualization in 1.2 and added breakdowns for factors such as battle sizes, but we have more work to do when it comes to giving players a good overview of wars and making multi-front wars easier to manage
  
• Increasing the visibility of navies and making admirals easier to work with
  
• Some improvements have been made here, such as removing the restriction on naval invasions using Generals from different HQs, but we still consider navies an area of the game in need of improvement from a visibility and usability standpoint
  
• Finding solutions for the issue where theaters can split into multiple (sometimes even dozens) of tiny fronts as pockets are created
  
• We have mitigated this issue in update 1.2 by auto-closing small pockets and improving battle province selection but the issue still persists (particularly in wars with a large number of small countries) so further improvements are needed here
  

Not Updated:

• Experimenting with controlled front-splitting for longer fronts
  
• Some internal design work has been done on this, but it’s very tricky to get right without worsening the front splitting issues - it’s still very much a high priority for us nonetheless!
  

New:

• Adding a system for limited wars to reduce the number of early-game total wars between Great Powers
  
• Solving the issue of armies going home after Generals die during a war by adding a system for field promotion
  

Done:

• Ensuring the American Civil War has a decent chance to happen, happens in a way that makes sense (slave states rising up to defend slavery, etc), and isn’t easily avoidable by the player.
  
• The ACW is now more difficult to avoid, and when sparked over the issue of slavery, should now create a historically plausible CSA (note that there may still be unintended cases of a ‘fake CSA’ appearing due to a non slavery related landowner revolt, which isn’t covered by the above fixes)
  
• Working to expose and improve content such as expeditions and journal entries that is currently too difficult for players to find or complete
  
• The Journal Entries that we wanted to make easier to complete and/or more visible have been tweaked in the intended way (though we will undoubtedly continue to make minor balance adjustments to them)
  

Updated:

• Tweaking content such as the Meiji Restoration, Alaska purchase and so on in a way that they can more frequently be successfully performed by the AI, through a mix of AI improvements and content tweaks
  
• Significant improvements have been made to the AI’s ability to complete Journal Entries such as Tanzimat, Manifest Destiny and so on, though it still struggles with others like the Meiji Restoration and so further work is needed.
  
• Ensuring unifications such as Italy, Germany and Canada doesn’t constantly happen decades ahead of the historical schedule, and increasing the challenge of unifying Italy and Germany in particular
  
• The Unifications now occur in a way that is more ‘on schedule’, but we still want to change them so that they mechanically behave in a more historically plausible way
  
• General AI tweaks to have AI countries play in a more believable, immersive way
  
• Significant changes have been made to the diplomatic AI in both 1.1 and 1.2 but this is an area that is going to continue receiving attention from us for some time, particularly when it comes to making the AI less opaque in its reasoning (for example, explaining why they sided against you in a diplomatic play despite good relations)
  

New:

• Adding more country, state and region-specific content to enhance historical flavor of different countries
  

Done:

• The ability to expand your primary demands in a diplomatic play beyond just one wargoal (though this has to be done in such a way that there’s still a reason for countries to actually back down)
  
• Adding additional primary demands was added to the game in update 1.2
  

Not Updated:

• ‘Reverse-swaying’, ie the ability to offer to join a side in a play in exchange for something
  
• More things to offer in diplomatic plays, like giving away your own land for support
  
• Trading (or at least giving away) states
  
• Foreign investment and some form of construction in other countries, at least if they’re part of your market
  
• Improving and expanding on interactions with and from subjects, such as being able to grant and ask for more autonomy through a diplomatic action
  

New:

• Allowing peace deals to be negotiated during a Diplomatic Play instead of only having the option to give in
  

Updated:

• (Moved from ‘Other’) Making it more interesting and ‘competitive’ but also more challenging to play in a more conservative and autocratic style
  
• We have made some changes here, such as locking laws behind regressive distributions of power and changing GDP to not unfairly favor manufacturing economies but this is still an area where we want to do more
  

New:

• Improving the mechanics of law enactment and revolutions to be more engaging for the player to interact with
  
• Adding more mechanics for characters and giving the player more reason to care about individual characters in your country:
  
• Adding laws that expand on diversity of countries and introduce new ways to play the game
  

Done:

• Making it easier to get an overview of your Pops and Pop factors such as Needs, Standard of Living and Radicals/Loyalists
  
• Update 1.2 added new overviews for Pop Needs and better explanations for the reasons behind radicals and loyalists
  
• Experimenting with autonomous private-sector construction and increasing the differences in gameplay between different economic systems (though as I’ve said many times, we are never going to take construction entirely out of the hands of the player)
  
• Autonomous private-sector construction was added to the game in update 1.2
  
• Ironing out some of the kinks with the late-game economy and the AI’s ability to develop key resources such as oil and rubbe
  
• While the economic AI is definitely going to continue to receive improvements, the specific issue of the AI never developing these key resources should be fixed
  

New:

• Improving Alerts and the Current Situation widget to provide more useful and actionable information.
  

Just as last time we shared these plans, the above is not an exhaustive list of everything we want to do, and I can’t give an exact timeline for any of the individual points or which precise future update they will be a part of. This list also still only covers changes and additions that will be part of free updates! We are planning to continue releasing dev diaries like this updating you on our progress after each major update to the game.

That’s all for today’s update, I hope you found it informative! Next week we’ll dive right back into regular dev diaries as we start going over the details of what we have in the works for Update 1.3, though I’ll note that we won’t be ready to talk about the release date for that update. See you then!

Top of the morning to you Victorians!

We just released patch 1.2.7 to address some issues in the current build of Victoria 3. Please do not use this thread to report any new issues you discover - but rather file any bugreports in the bug reporting forum, thank you!

- Fixed buildings getting blocked from hiring if the first hired Pop is a Capitalist/Aristocrat.
- Fixed the war panel not opening when clicking the pending peace deal alert.
- Fixed heirs being bald.
- Fixed paused constructions showing a wildly incorrect estimated weeks to completion.
- Fixed a bug where bankroll could be autocancelled without removing expenses.
- Fixed AI countries sometimes repeatedly adding and removing the same IG from government.
- Fixed a bug that was causing Germany to always have the black-yellow-red flag when formed from the North German Confederation.
- Fixed battles where a very small armies could hold off a much larger opposing force for weeks.
- Fixed a CTD in CConstructionQueue::CalcNumUnderConstruction.

Hello everyone!

It is finally time to release Update 1.2 Hot Cinnamon Spice to the masses! Following a period of Open Beta testing where the invaluable help from you guys we now feel that it is ready for delivery. A huge thank you to everyone that's been participating in the open beta, providing us with feedback and bug reporting!

Please do not use this thread to report any new issues you discover - but rather file any bugreports in the bug reporting forum, thank you!

We can not give any guarantees that save files from 1.1.x will be working in 1.2 without issues which is why we recommend that you roll back your game to the previous version and finish any ongoing games you want to finish before updating to 1.2. More information on rolling back your game version can be found here! (TL;DR is go to properties in Steam -> Betas -> select the version in the dropdown list).

Unfortunately the full changelog is too large to fit into one Steam announcement. Please refer to our recent development diary for the full changelog:

Part 1 Part 2

You can also read the full changelog on our official forum!

Today we also released the music pack: Melodies for the Masses (included in the Grand Edition)!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2348450/Victoria_3_Melodies_for_the_Masses_Music_Pack/

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