Victoria 3 News

Hello and welcome! Today we'll be covering several topics relating to Update 1.2:

• Open 1.2 Beta
  
• Feature Overview
  
• Anticipated 1.2 Release Date
  

As mentioned in our last dev diary, 1.2 is a big update with some far-reaching changes, and we don't want to push it out before we feel it's ready for primetime. We're happy overall with the reception of Update 1.1, but those of you who were with us during its initial release will remember - perhaps fondly, perhaps not - how the Legitimacy mechanics seemed to change from day to day for a while there. While we finally managed to iron out most of the kinks in 1.1.2 (more on that later) this is the kind of scenario we'd like to avoid going forward. With a game as highly interconnected and complex as Victoria 3, the only way to do that is to give the patch enough time in the oven, letting our playtesters really give everything a solid rundown.

At the same time, Update 1.2 brings some substantial improvements in several areas that we know are important to you, and we don't want to keep those away from you longer than we absolutely have to. Disentangling specific improvements and bug fixes from the rest of the changes that have already been done to the branch is itself laborious and error-prone. Our assessment is that releasing those in hotfixes would be risky.

So how do we marry these two things together - giving you access to upcoming content as soon as possible, while ensuring high quality of the upcoming update? By launching our first Open Beta, of course! In this way you will have a chance to experience all the juicy parts of Update 1.2, but also share your feedback with us in advance, allowing us to improve what we are currently working on.

Our planned beta launch date is February 8th at 10:00 CET. At that point a new Steam beta branch 1.2-beta will become available to anyone who owns Victoria 3. A new forum post will be made with step-by-step instructions for how to enable it. Once you've started playing the beta, you can always switch back to the live branch in the same way. As always, your existing save games might not be fully compatible with this new version, and you should definitely not expect saves made in 1.2 to be backwards compatible with 1.1.2.

We will also launch a new beta section on our Victoria 3 Discord server where you can discuss the update with other players and report any bugs or balance issues you find. Our moderators will be active on this channel, and so will developers and QA team members as time permits. If you prefer not to use Discord you can also file bugs using our forum bug report tool, even for the beta version.

After the initial beta release, we plan on releasing two additional updates on the beta branch on a weekly basis, containing additional bug fixes, performance improvements, etc and also adjustments we've made according to your feedback. The exact release dates and times of these updates are to be confirmed, but we will keep you posted on the Discord channel.

To set expectations at the right level, playing the beta build will not be a buttery-smooth experience! Some aspects of the game will be greatly improved, but other things will be in a rougher state, and there will be bugs (if not, we'd just launch it without a beta phase!)

Also, some features will be in a less mature state at the beginning of beta than they will be at release. For example, Strategic Objectives will be limited to one per country during the beta, but the intent is to expand this to allow for designating multiple Strategic Objectives. This slimmed-down version is included in the beta to allow you to try it out and feedback on how it feels in general while we continue to work on the full implementation.

So do keep in mind that while you'll get a sneak peek at the latest features and will see many improvements, you should expect some speed bumps along the way. And when you do, we want to hear about it!

Below you can find a short list of some of the new features and improvements made in 1.2. As always, just because something is not on this list doesn't mean we're not aware of it, and may even have addressed it already! The full changelog will be published closer to the release date.



New Features

• Autonomous Investment system
• Strategic Objectives for planning military campaigns
  
• Customizable notification settings
  
• In-game music player
  
• Key rebinding
  

Improvements and bug fixes

• Performance optimization
  
• Improved AI handling of economy and military, including port management
  
• Greater differences in economic systems
• More realistic modeling of trade route profits and GDP
  
• Worldwide Arable Land revision and migration balancing
  
• Mega-parties limited by tweaks to party formation logic and ideology
  

Interface

• Trade panel overhaul for easier route management
  
• More clarity on Pop Needs, Convoys, Radicals and Loyalists
  
• Visual upgrades to mapmodes and lenses, such as showing Infrastructure and employable Pops when expanding buildings
  
• Outliner enhanced with pinnable market goods and characters
  
• Reduced notification spam
  

We are going to cover most of these things in dev diaries leading up to the release of 1.2, so details on what exactly these entail may be sparse until then. However, all of these will be in the beta build when we release it (although to reiterate, perhaps not in their final form) so come February 8th you can explore them for yourself!

After the third and final beta release, but before the live release of Update 1.2, you can expect the beta build and the beta section on Discord to become unavailable, as we will be channeling all our resources into the release. We will keep you updated on the expected beta shutdown date on Discord as well, of course.

Our preliminary release date for Update 1.2, assuming all goes according to plan, is March 13th. For those of you who opt to continue playing 1.1.2 until then you can follow the new features in upcoming dev diaries. For the rest of you, I'll see you on Discord on Feb 8!

Ahoy Victorians!

Next week we will be having a Discord QnA with the Developers, February 7th at 14:00 CET!

Make sure to join our Discord and we will see you then!

https://discord.com/invite/victoriagamepdx

Hello and welcome to the second Victoria 3 dev diary for 2023! Today we’re going to continue talking about patch 1.2 for Victoria 3 (release date to be announced), on a topic that is closely related to last week’s dev diary, namely Economic Laws and how they have changed in 1.2. As we mentioned in Dev Diary #64, one of our post-release ambitions is to increase the differences in gameplay between different economic systems. What I mean by that is that there should be deeper mechanical differences between for example Laissez-Faire and Command Economy in terms of how they impact your country and the economic decisions you make. All of the existing Economic Laws have received changes in 1.2 and we’ve also added a new one, so I’m simply going to go through them one by one and explain how they work now.

Before I start however, I should mention a change that has happened since last week based on feedback we received on the Autonomous Investment dev diary. Several people pointed out that with a weighting system in place, there wasn’t really a need for hard restrictions on what the Investment Pool could fund under Autonomous Investment, and we agree! Thus, Autonomous Investment no longer has any restrictions on what profit-generating buildings can be built, just weighting based on who is investing and what they would want to invest in (as mentioned last week, if you’re running Agrarianism, expect a lot of farms). The restrictions still apply under Directly Controlled Investment however (and the tooltips will reflect this based on which setting you are using).

Traditionalism: Traditionalism in 1.2 is largely the same as before: A very backwards system that you should generally be trying to get out of. The main difference from 1.1 is that the Investment Pool isn’t disabled for Traditionalism, though you take a hefty penalty to investment efficiency (further reduced if you also have Serfdom) and the building types you can construct with the Investment Pool are highly curtailed if you are playing with Directly Controlled Investment.



Interventionism: The ‘golden middle way’ of economic laws, Interventionism also isn’t extensively changed in 1.2: It provides no particular bonuses or penalties, but gives you the freedom to subsidize any and all building types as well as extensive options for the Investment Pool under Directly Controlled Investment, while providing a balanced allocation between Private and Government Construction Allocation under Autonomous Investment.



Agrarianism: Agrarianism has received a fairly substantial boost in 1.2, with both the addition of Farmers as an investing Pop Type and a hefty bonus to the efficiency of all rural investments. Capitalists are now also not locked out of investing under Agrarianism, though they do so at a penalty and their building selection is quite limited if you’re playing with Directly Controlled Investment.



Laissez-Faire: The invisible hand of the Free Market made manifest, Laissez-Faire in 1.2 is meant to be the go-to law for the player that wants to get the absolute most out of their Investment Pool when it comes to industrializing. It does come with some significant drawbacks though, as it is no longer possible to downsize non-government buildings under Laissez-Faire.



Cooperative Ownership: A new Economic Law introduced in 1.2, Cooperative Ownership is now a fully fledged economic system instead of just being unlocked by becoming a Council Republic. Under Cooperative Ownership, all Pops working in a building receive an equal number of shares and Aristocrat/Capitalist jobs are eliminated. While this should lead to higher Standard of Living among the workforce, it also means far less money in the Investment Pool, as Farmers and Shopkeepers invest far less than their wealthier counterparts under other systems.



Command Economy: Command Economy is the law that has received the largest (and most needed) overhaul under 1.2. Instead of being a frankly weird system where the Bureaucrats own the profits but you are required to subsidize them, Command Economy now makes use of a new system called Government Shares, which is used by the Government Run ownership production method. Just like how Pop Shares entitle Pops to a portion of a building’s dividends, Government Shares ensure that buildings pay some or all of their profits directly into the treasury - though in large economies this is subject to an efficiency modifier, with some of the money being wasted due to the inefficiencies inherent to large, heavily centralized systems. While this is not something we currently have a setup for in the base game, Government Shares can also freely be mixed with Pop Shares, so we’re looking forward to seeing what modders make with this!



Another change you might have noticed when looking at the screenshots in this dev diary is that we have tied some economic laws more closely to a country’s Distribution of Power and Government Principles. For one, seizing the means of production is no longer a one-step reform into Council Republic, but rather a multi-step reform that involves first implementing a Council Republic, then Cooperative Ownership, and finally allows you to branch off into Anarchism if you so desire. Command Economy now also requires Autocracy or Oligarchy, as it’s difficult to pull off a fully centralized economy without the corresponding amount of centralized powers (and with the new Government Shares mechanic should provide more reasons to want to keep a grip on power in the late game).

So the question on everyone's mind is, when will you be able to play with these changes and all the other updates and fixes coming in 1.2? Some of these changes are pretty big and we don't want to rush this patch out too early, but at the same time we know you're anxious to get your hands on it. To find the right balance between these we've decided to launch patch 1.2 in open beta, which we will talk more about in next week's dev diary! In there we will also focus a bit more generally on patch 1.2, giving you more of a birds-eye view of what the patch will look like, along with giving you an expected release date.

Hello and welcome to another Victoria 3 dev diary! Today’s diary marks the start of dev diaries about Patch 1.2, which is the next major upcoming patch for Victoria 3 (release date to be announced). As with 1.1, 1.2 will contain a slate of bug fixes, UX improvements, AI improvements and so on, but also some more significant changes to game mechanics, which we’re going to go over in these dev diaries.

The particular changes we’ll be talking about today, as alluded to by the title, is Autonomous Investment, which is something we said we were going to look into for our post-release plans back in Dev Diary #64. What we said back then is that while we are never going to take construction out of the hands of the player entirely, we were open to the idea of non-government entities constructing buildings in a way not directly controlled by the country, and what we came up with is a system where the Investment Pool will be used by private entities to construct different types of buildings depending on your economic laws.

Before going over how all this works, I first want to mention that we recognize that the community is somewhat split on the issue of autonomous construction, and as such, we’ve opted to create a new Game Rule for Autonomous Investment. By default, Autonomous Investment is enabled, which puts the Investment Pool out of the hands of the player, but you can choose to disable it, which puts the Investment Pool back in the player’s hands and makes it work exactly as it does in the current 1.1.2 version of the game.

The Investment Pool Game Rule allows you to enable or disable autonomous construction with Investment Pool funds, depending on your personal preference

Regardless of whether Autonomous Investment is enabled, the Investment Pool works pretty much the same as it did before: Certain Pop Types with ownership shares in buildings pay part of their dividends into the Investment Pool, the funds in which can then be drawn on for construction. There are, however, a few key differences in 1.2 compared to 1.1.

Firstly, the types of Pops that invest have been expanded from just Aristocrats and Capitalists to also include Farmers and Shopkeepers. Capitalists invest the highest percentage of their dividends (20%), followed by Aristocrats at 10%, with Farmers and Shopkeepers investing only 5% each. The rationale here is that it wasn’t only the wealthiest in society who invested in new businesses, and this also allows a small degree of investment under laws which strip ownership away from the Capitalists and Aristocrats (but more on that next week).

Secondly, the proportion of dividends that are paid into the Investment Pool varies in 1.1 based on your laws, which can have some pretty bizarre effects, such as switching to Laissez-Faire suddenly creating a bunch of Capitalist Radicals because they are now investing more money and thus end with a drop in their Wealth. The proportion of funds that are invested is now a fixed percentage based on pop type, which is then subjected to an efficiency bonus: Capitalists always invest 20% of their dividends, for example, but under Laissez-Faire, this investment is more efficient and ends up contributing more money to the Investment Pool.

There is also a general investment efficiency bonus for payments into the Investment Pool in small and mid-sized economies, and a penalty in very large ones, to ensure the Investment Pool is also relevant for mid-sized countries while not growing to such absurd proportions that it cannot possibly be spent in a 10 billion GDP country. These efficiency bonuses are meant to abstract a system of foreign investment, which is something we’ve also mentioned is on our radar in Dev Diary #64 but is a bigger rework that we are not tackling yet in patch 1.2.

Agrarianism gives a hefty bonus to the investments of your Farmers and Aristocrats, but reduces investments from Capitalists and greatly limits the types of buildings they can put their money into.

So how then, does the Investment Pool funds get turned into buildings when Autonomous Investment is enabled? Well, autonomously, of course! With Autonomous Investment, the Construction Queue is split into Private and Government Constructions, with Government Constructions being anything (regardless of whether it’s a Government building or not) ordered to be built or auto-expanded by the player or country-level AI, while a Private Construction is anything the Pops themselves are building. The Construction capacity of the country will be split between the Private and Government queues in a proportion based on your economic law, though if there isn’t enough constructions queued of one type to use its full allocation, the excess can be used by the other queue instead.

In the construction screen, you’ll be able to see what the next planned Private Construction will be, along with its current funding level. The funding level is a calculated value based on both the total funds available in the Investment Pool as well as the weekly funds coming into it, and can fluctuate based on the Market price of Goods used in construction. Once a project is funded and ready, it’ll be added to the private Construction Queue the next tick. Private Constructions, unlike Government ones, cannot be reprioritized or canceled - they will always be built in the order they are queued up by the Pops.

Though the Government is currently building nothing in France, there are several private constructions in progress, and plans for the expansion of the Alsace-Lorraine iron mines. Note that this UI is highly WIP!

Pop-ordered constructions use a variant of the standard construction AI which doesn’t take into account the country-level AI’s strategic objectives and prioritizes the creation of profitable buildings which will create lucrative jobs for the investing Pop types, but they will also take some more ‘strategic’ factors into account, such as building railroads in low-infrastructure states. Just as with the country-level AI, they also have access to the system of Spending Variables described in Dev Diary #59, which means that they do not operate on a snapshot of the current Market but understand factors such as the impact that already queued buildings (private and government-ordered both) will have on prices once completed and staffed.

Since Autonomous Investment does not only affect player countries, you might be wondering how well this system works together with the AI? The answer is that it actually works quite well! Together with a bunch of AI improvements and fixes in 1.2, this has resulted in more stable economic growth for AI countries and especially seems to have given Great Britain a boost, as the private sector doing its own thing means that the economy is usually growing even if the country’s treasury is having issues, at least as long as the Pops investing into private-sector growth are making healthy profits. There’s still some issues, particularly when AI runs out of available workforce late game, that we are hoping to tackle before 1.2 releases to further improve the AI’s economic growth.

Screenshot from a hands-off game taken in 1908. While there’s certainly still room for improvement and some countries like France and Prussia have underperformed due to wars and turmoil (and Austria continues to overperform compared to history), it’s definitely looking better than in 1.1.2.

That’s it for today! Join us again next week as we go over more changes to the economy in 1.2, with a particular focus on Economic Laws and the introduction of Government Shares in buildings.