Victoria 3 News

Hello Everyone!

We would like to start off by thanking everyone for the support and passion you've all shown for the game. It's truly humbling to have such a dedicated and passionate community, thank you!

Victoria 3 has now sold over 500k games since the release a little over a month ago, which makes it one of the most successful launches in Paradox history, and it's all thanks to you, our players.

To top it all off, Victoria 3 has also been nominated in the "Best Sim / Strategy" category in The Game Awards!

We're looking forward to the Victorian journey we are embarking on together with you all. And the first stop would be the release of the 1.1 Update coming in early December - bringing forth a multitude of improvements and fixes that has been requested by the community. The changelog will be shared with you all in tomorrow's Dev Diary.

We'd also like to celebrate this occassion by sharing some fascinating stats with you from this first month:

Happy Thursday! Today we'll talk about some more changes we've introduced in patch 1.1, including how Morale works.

For starters, why rework morale? One piece of feedback we heard a lot of post-release was that it was frustrating to watch long, drawn-out battles that tied up the front while your battalions that weren't in that combat perished from attrition. Our goal with these changes is primarily to make battles snappier, ensuring that battles that are all but decided can come to a rapid conclusion so the front can start moving again. Some nice side effects are that your supply, morale recovery rates, and having reinforcements and reserves start to play a greater role than they used to.

In the new system, instead of the losers typically being the only side to take morale damage, units on both sides will take a certain amount of morale damage for each round of combat. That morale damage can be modified by various factors, such as technologies and production methods. In addition, the side that has taken the most casualties will suffer an additional multiplier to their loss of morale, ensuring that combat superiority is still what ultimately wins battles.

The basis for how much morale units lose each day is determined by the organization or ship class production method groups in Barracks / Conscription Centers and Naval Bases respectively. The more modern the method of warfare, the lower the loss of morale. Also, conscripts now differ from regular Battalions in that they suffer more morale damage.

These Ohioan conscripts have a relatively high base morale loss of 15 men per day, but this is reduced due to National Militia. Their morale losses increase somewhat from currently being in a battle where more casualties have been inflicted on them than they have on the enemy. When all remaining men in the unit have been lost to casualties or morale loss, the battalion will detach from the battle. Once fighting has concluded, their commanding General's Experienced Diplomat trait will increase the speed by which their morale recovers. Morale will also recover along with fresh reinforcements from the Conscription Center supporting them.

Modifiers can affect how much morale your own troops lose, such as good modifiers from First Aid and Field Hospitals, or bad modifiers from battle conditions such as Broken Supply Lines or commander traits like Reckless. But the morale damage you take can also be modified by the enemy's forces, for example via production methods like Siege Artillery or Chemical Weapon Specialists, or character traits like Wrathful.

When battles start, units are now deprioritized to enter combat if they are injured or demoralized. What this means is that even if you end up with fewer than your full complement of battalions in a particular fight, the rest of them will make use of this short respite to recover for the next one.

Speaking of recovery, we have also made a few changes to the way Wage levels work. Higher military wages than usual now affect how quickly units recover morale when not in combat, letting flush governments push frontlines by gradually overcoming the enemy's fighting spirit - at least as long as you're able and willing to rack up an enormous body count in the process.

Recovering Morale faster than the enemy does could be well worth the expense in the long run. It will also give your Officers and Servicemen a better Standard of Living, building Loyalists in your Armed Forces over time. Their increased Wealth will provide them with more Clout to throw around in internal politics as well, of course, so take that into account.

This isn't the extent of the changes to government and military wages in 1.1. These settings used to be a highly efficient way of directly and immediately altering your Interest Groups' Approval scores, which we have toned down a bit in 1.1 by making the Approval changes limited to -2 / -1 / 0 / +1 / +2 for the five different levels. Of course, the act of raising or lowering wages still has the usual knock-on effects on Approval by increasing or decreasing the purchasing power of the pops that tend to make up those groups, leading to changes in Standard of Living and therefore Radicals and Loyalists.

High or low military wages also affect your armed forces' Power Projection, leading to a Prestige impact also during peacetime. Low military wages also affect your buildings' training rate, i.e. how rapidly they can reinforce battalions and flotillas that have become underpowered due to casualties. To round it out, low government wages provide a direct impact on Prestige while higher levels now provide additional Authority.

As a final note, an update from our first Patch 1.1 update on Legitimacy levels. One oft-repeated concern with how Legitimacy works currently is that under most democratic systems, having two parties in a coalition government does not provide much of a penalty, even if those parties are vehemently opposed to each other. From one perspective this was working as intended, as it represents a trade-off between Legitimacy (in this case, popular representation) and ability to actually enact any new Laws (since the incoherence between the ideologies in government would make debate and stall outcomes very common). But on the other hand it felt wrong to have the two completely incompatible parties working together in a highly functional government - as long as they didn't try to make any changes, that is.

In response, we have changed the Legitimacy penalty from government size to one that actually represents ideological incoherence. Adding a party or Interest Group to government will now cause any conflicting ideologies (as measured by their stances on Laws) outside party boundaries to inflict a Legitimacy penalty. This encourages formation of government groups that are both strong and effective together. We're very interested in hearing how this change feels to you all, once patch 1.1 drops!

Despite representing the majority of Clout and Votes in Great Britain, an unholy alliance between Tories and Whigs is just too incoherent to form government together. You could still confirm such a government, but the penalties for doing so would be enormous and no legislation could be passed while Legitimacy is that poor.

The changes we have discussed in this and the previous two dev diaries represent just a fraction of the changes you will see in the new update. These ones are maybe the most visible, but a number of under-the-hood improvements and bugfixes have been made as well. Next week we will go through the full changelog! Until then!

Greetings my fellow Victorians, Paul here to talk about some of the things I have been doing for Patch 1.1.

As was said in previous dev diaries, this patch (1.1) is going to primarily focus on game polish: bug fixing, balancing, AI improvements and UI/UX work, while the next major free patch (1.2) is going to be more focused towards making progress on the plans we’ve outlined in our Post-Release Plans DD by iterating on systems like warfare and diplomacy. Hotfix (1.0.6) should be out for you all with performance improvements and some bug fixes in the meantime.

So what have I been doing? Balance work, alongside bug fixing, and assisting with some UI work and bettering of the player experience. I’m new to the design team and during my onboarding I've been able to utilize one of my special talents: I love spreadsheets and data - so I’ve been working on building profitability, production methods, and resource availability. In Patch 1.1 two large changes I have made are to Oil and Rubber and I’ve got some cool resource maps to show you the changes.

And before you take a look at the images showcasing what changes I have done, a big shoutout to @Licarious who made the tool that I am utilizing here today. This tool is open for you all on the forum in this thread. I have found the tool to be particularly lovely, helping me make quick visualizations of the changes I am considering in the game. It's one thing to balance a spreadsheet but another to take a look at the changes proposed on the map itself.

The World’s discoverable Oil Supply as of 1.0.6

In the version of the game you are all currently playing, these are the oil reserves that are discoverable in game. They are mostly the historical oil fields that were cultivated over the current knowledge of where Oil is and has been accessible (even if we did not find out about it until later than 1936). As you’ve no doubt noticed in your later games, Oil is a scarce resource and limits the progress of later game industrialization. While we want Oil to be an important late-game resource, its current bottleneck as an available resource is a little too harsh to the player’s experience so we’ve expanded the discoverable oil fields in game.

I spent a few days going through various feedback threads on the Discord and forums, alongside as many natural resource distribution maps as I could to give a better estimate of the world’s oil supply and help make the game representative of that. As of now we’ve doubled the world’s potential oil fields to give rise to a more plentiful supply in the world by both player and AI actions.

The World’s discoverable Oil Supply as of 1.1.0

I know some of you might be asking, why did we not just increase the production of oil methods and leave the historical oil fields in place? Why have you included [specific] oil fields that were not tapped until ~1950! etc.Those fields represent a usage of either Oil Sands, or some various substrate that would have not been accessible at the time.

These are all some valid questions and I will no doubt go into more detail in the thread about choices made, but some quick answers.

• Oil production methods are already incredibly profitable and buffing them further would help but probably not fully solve the problem.
  
• The gating of Oil Fields to only historically extracted areas is always tricky, if Russia and the United States collapse in game, 50%+ of the world's oil supply is locked behind their regression and the world suffers. We want to have historical credibility but also give players multiple avenues to pursue.
  
• We don’t exactly leave a track record of “this field would have been accessible in 1880" etc in our history books when we discover new resources, so best guesstimates have to be used and a balance between historical and semi-balanced gameplay has to be found.
  

We are by no means done with Oil, this is my first step in their balancing and it's been sent off to QA to run tests and gather feedback. I’ve got plenty of possibilities to look into but I want to make iterative changes instead of altering many things at once and not seeing the full impact.

Things I am looking into for the future includes

• Gating some oil reserve potential behind tech to make it where deposits that were not found until more modern days are harder for the player to get to, but still possible.
  
• If Oil Supply is still too short - looking into adding more variation of production methods of balancing of input/output of those factories.
  
• Giving the Whale Oil Industry a bit more of a kick into gear in the early stages of the game.
  

So keep your feedback on the forums/Discord coming! I might not read and answer them right away but I do collate them for future reference and they’ve been incredibly helpful in my efforts.

And now onto the world’s rubber supply, which I have also adjusted for Patch 1.1.

The World’s discoverable Rubber Supply as of 1.0.6

While not as much of a bottleneck as the world oil supply, rubber is found to not be plentiful enough to meet world demand at current. And as we make the AI better at extracting and utilizing resources in game, we no doubt have to increase the rubber supply available to the world.

And so here are the changes.

The World’s discoverable Rubber Supply as of 1.1.0

Notice the differences? Your eyes aren’t deceiving you, the two maps are the same - and this is not a mistake. The changes to Rubber have been focused on its vertical margins as opposed to the horizontal margins. While I could have upped the world supply of rubber, looking at the later game saves I found it was population issues which were preventing the resource from meeting demands, etc.

So, what I did instead was add a new PM to Rubber Plantations, giving them an automatic irrigation system (like that of the other Plantations this building shares relation to in name only) to symbolize later efforts to modernize plantations and not be fully rainfall dependent. This would help increase the productivity of buildings already in game.


Rubber Plantations can now double their effective output in the later game, by replacing some employees with machines.

Items I am looking into for the future include:

• Adding more Rubber potential to the world if this PM is not enough
  
• Potential synthetic rubber in the late game?
  
• State traits for the specific areas of the world best suited to its cultivation to help throughput
  

These two resource changes have been put into 1.1 among other things and are currently being vetted for balance and functionality by the QA team. I look forward to hearing your thoughts as well but remember that all numbers are currently WIP. If you have thoughts and opinions and can find me a source backing up your claims, please feel free to put them in the thread or on Discord/forums where then can continue to be collated for me.

What am I doing while this is being vetted? Why I am breaking ground into future balance changes in 1.2! As stated elsewhere on these forums, I am looking into the arable land balance of the game making changes to them. Since these changes have the potential to upend the world economy, I’m getting this branch settled early so we have as much time on our end to iterate on its balance. I will also take feedback from players upon 1.1s upcoming release, then look into tweaking other resources’ balance and such. There are always a few things to tweak!

And that’s it for this dev diary, with this little peek behind the curtain of work being done I am now going to return to it and read through the QA feedback. Then do some further balancing as needed and my work for Patch 1.2.

Patch 1.1 is planned to release before the end of the year and it's already November so it's not that far away in the grand scheme of things. Next week we will talk about some more of the changes in that patch.

- Reduced the number of monthly radicals from political movements to enact and restore


- Reduced the number of pops in the mid- to late-game by merging very small pops back into the general population
- Reduced the number of pops in the mid- to late-game by forcing unemployed pops to switch profession when sufficiently poor
- Improved performance of updating trends for political movements
- Improved performance of enumerating Liberation war goals


- Increased AI tendency to stick by its allies and subjects in conflicts
- Fixed AI acceptance for 'powerful protectors' factor to appear in virtually any alliance/customs union
- Fixed AI confidence and peace desire from gold reserves not being capped to 100% reserves
- Fixed AI incorrectly calculating how much an ongoing war or diplomatic play should add to their neutrality, making them abandon allies due to involvement in small conflicts
- Fixed AI involvement in a diplomatic play shown as an empty string in their neutrality calculation


- Fixed settings (such as in-game language) not being saved correctly when path contains non-latin characters
- Properly fixed flotillas not recovering morale
- Fixes "Pass a Law that enables an Institution" tutorial challenge being impossible to complete or writing to the error log under certain circumstances
- Fixed issue where a placated Political Movement might still trigger a revolution
- Fixed issue with American Territory Achievement using an incorrect trigger
- Fixed issue with not being able to get Berlin Conference Achievement.
- Star Swarmed Banner no longer requires exactly 100 states exactly to get the achievement, but rather 100 or more
- Fixed issue with placeholder image being used for flamethrower event modifiers
- Fixed CTD in CPdxTerrain::CreateEffect
- Fixed CTD in CWarGoal::IsAdjacent
- Fixed CTD in CBuildingType destructor