Johan said:Revolutionary Colonisation Features
When we came to design Victoria Revolutions we looked at each area of the game and thought about how we could improve it. The first feature to get a face lift was colonisation. Although the basic ideas were sound, it didn’t seem to work quite right in practice. There were three areas that we felt we could improve on. Colonies were being built just too fast, countries were building in strange places and you ended up with these horrendous colonial dead locks.
The biggest change you’ll probably already noticed is the concept of range. No longer can you just build colonies anywhere, you need the province to within range of a naval base. As your naval tech advances you can build bigger naval bases and extend your range. By the end of the game you can virtually colonise anywhere in the globe, if there are any slots left.
Again from the screen shots you’ve probably seen the fact that your ability to colonise is linked to the province life rating. As you discover more tech you can colonise provinces with yet lower life ratings. We set it so you needed a spectrum of techs from various areas in order to colonise. However this is an event command and for those of you who enjoy modding the game then you can use whichever techs you like.
In addition we reduced the size of the huge colonial provinces down to no more than 4 provinces in the state. This has a couple of very nice effects. Firstly you see far fewer colonial dead locks. More Importantly you see Africa Divided amongst more countries.
There is one last final change, historically each country focused its colonisation on single regions and tended to no welcome other countries in their area (unless the other country was bigger and more powerful). Well now you can only colonise a certain number of states at a time, and if someone else is colonising a state you can only colonise it if you have more prestige than them.
Finally a screenshot, here is France at the start of the 1881 scenario:
So let’s run through the colours
Blue: Already owned by someone
Green, I can colonise
Grey: I cannot colonise because either the life rating is too low, the province is out of range, or I cannot reach the province.
There is an additional colour (Red), advises you if someone is already colonising the province. The new map view does make those colonial decisions so much simpler.
When we came to look at the economy we had four goals. These were to make the economic system more realistic, to make the economic policy of your government more relevant, make the game more fun to play and to see if we could shut off some of the exploits in the current system.
From the initial screen shots most of you probably spotted that it is now not always possible to build a factory, so let’s start by telling you all what has replaced it. The system now works around Capitalists, they accumulate money and then (depending on the economic policy) they’ll build factories and railways. The up shot of this is two things. Firstly if you promote a large amount of Capitalists, what will happen is that none of them will accumulate enough money to build anything and your industrial growth will stall. Secondly tariffs are no longer free money. The higher your tariffs are the less money your Capitalists will accumulate each day, therefore it will take them longer to build factories and railways with. Thus the slower your industrial growth will be (now before you go up in arms about this and point out how many countries industrialised behind a high tariff wall, you’ll see a bit later why this is still true).
Now let’s look at the effects of economic policy on Capitalists. If you are Planned Economy your Capitalists will never build anything. On each other policy your Capitalists will build railways and Factories. As you move from State Capitalism, through Interventionism to Laissez-Faire your Capitalists require steadily less money to build something, thus build quicker. Also if you are Laissez-Faire you cannot build any economic improvements. Under Interventionism you can expand factories and build railways. Under the other two economic policies you have full control. The economic policy of your government can really swing how you’ll play the game. Elections can make a huge difference to your game plan.
As a consequence of this, Laissez-Faire together with Free Trade can lead to some pretty impressive industrial development. In fact if you have some spare cash and want use import subsidies, your Capitalists can really start building. Under Interventionism the dreaded monopoly structure suddenly becomes very tempting (I prefer it myself).
Now back to the tariff question, low tariffs are not always useful. Remember Capitalists earn money from the export of goods, if you have a low industrial base your Capitalists will accumulate money very slowly. Comparing Austria and Prussia is a very good example of this fact in action. Looking at the two countries at the start of the 1836 scenario, Prussian Capitalists will build much more than Austrian Capitalists over any set period (if both countries have the same economic policy). For Austria it could actually be better to go for State Capitalism, use high tariffs to finance the building a few factories yourself, before letting your capitalists take over. Otherwise Prussia is going to own you on the economic front.
So now for the 64 thousand dollar question, what do capitalist build? We spent a lot of time thinking about this, and coming up with a system that works. Capitalists will build virtually any factory that your tech allows them to. However they prefer to build consumer goods factories, (i.e. factories that produce products that your pops will buy). Here is an example of what they build:
Despite being interventionist for most of the game I have not done anything to the factories in Westphalia. So this gives you a flavour of what Capitalists like to build.
Now I know what you are thinking, what happens if I want to build a huge industrial base, to conquer the world with. Well if you to avoid things like the British shell crisis of 1915 your going to have to intervene in your economy.
One thing worth mentioning, if you don’t like the factory you’re Capitalists are building, well delete it and sooner or later they’ll build another. It’s not like it’s costing you any money.
We had two goals with the political system to make monarchies more powerful in the beginning and to make politics in general more relevant to the player. Rather than election being something that just happens we wanted to make it an important event, and make the banning and choosing of parties a real option that a player would consider. However rather than going for a massive overhaul we decided to do a series of small improvements. When taken together though we feel that this achieves the goals we set ourselves.
Now for those of you who follow our weekly sneak preview will know that the economic policy of the government has some major impact on the game. As a little spoiler I’ll mention that military policy has some minor effects too. However in order to keep some suspense and mystery about the game I’ll not discuss that at the moment.
The first change was to add a new ideology, fascism. It covers various right wing ultra nationalist groups; it becomes active in 1905 and is the favourite ideology of soldiers and officers. However if you are suffering from revanchism or high militancy then more pops tend towards fascism. So nice stable countries tend to not go fascist, angry and bitter ones do.
So here is my Germany in 1905. As you can see I’ve got all my cores and my people are happy. The Fascists are a very small party, and should stay that way unless I do something stupid.
We’ve also made sure that each country always has one party from each ideology from the year the ideology becomes active. This prevents rather interesting things like a liberal revolution in Japan putting the conservatives in power. In addition if a country allows parties then we’ve tweaked the set up in the Grand Campaign so you’ll have a choice of parties. This gives those countries that start as a monarchy a real advantage, you’ve got the power to steer your government in whatever direction you choose.
Now we’ve also made one slightly ahistorical change to the starting party set ups. Each Country will have at least one state capitalist party, usually the reactionary one. Still for those of you who like to control the economy totally, the option is there. All you have to do is pay the price.
So here is Austria at the start of the GC, as you can see you have a nice choice of parties there that allow you to set your own destiny. You’ll also notice those little icons below the ideology of the party. These tell you if your party is a major party, a third party or a party that only takes votes from a certain culture. With the importance of voting in the game we felt that this was a very useful addition to help you judge the chances of victory for your favourite party.
Another change we have done is how democracies function. If you have low plurality then your people don’t understand how democracy works and will get upset if their party did not win the election. This again makes monarchy a more useful form of government early in the game.
Now we’ve also made a few changes to pop promotion, you can no longer automatically promote and demote every pop as right, for certain pops it depends on the policy of the government. The biggest change is that if you do not have full citizenship then you cannot promote non state cultured pops. Having a pacifist government, will severly restrict your military capabilities.
No doubt there are a few other changes I have forgotten to mention, but this gives you a run down of the major changes.
This is no peace. This is an armistice for 20 years
The Converter to Doomsday was in some ways the easiest and in some ways the hardest thing to do. When you think about it, it sounds pretty easy. When the players select the export button the game creates a Doomsday saved game starting in January 1936, however life is never that simple.
So let’s start with the biggest problem of all, provinces. There are 2862 provinces in Victoria and 2608 and Doomsday. Already you have to figure out where those extra 250 provinces need to go. Throw in the fact that Victoria’s provinces are concentrated in different parts of the world, for example Victoria has a lot more provinces in Africa and Western Europe, while Doomsday picks up extra provinces in places Manchuria and Western Russia. You have a problem that in the end there is no exact solution. However this is not the end of the world.
This is a screenshot is a conversion from the start of the 1881 scenario. As you can see the conversion is starting to look pretty good.
Another problem that makes it a real headache to do the converter are the province shapes. While Victoria provinces are designed to give nice smooth frontiers during the Victoria era, Doomsday’s are not. What this means is that things do not always look quite right. So this is why we are proud of the next screenshot, Europe in 1914. Despite all the problems we had, it is still looking recognisable.
Having bored you to tears about provinces, let’s move onto to some of the other features with the converter. One of the first things we did was overhaul the 1914 scenario. Early in the process we realised that starting from 1835 the chances of Europe looking the way in did in 1935 were pretty slim. So instead we turned our attention to the 1914 scenario. We’ve done a lot of work on the set up to get it all ready to play and balanced. Next the scenario specific event file has been expanded and the existing events improved to make the game flow more historically. Some the new tags that we’ve added to Revolutions have been pressed into service to be used as countries that existed in the interwar era. I have to put in a quick mention to our Beta team here for all the hard work they’ve done on the scenario. The 1914 scenario should give you a good game and covert very nicely to Doomsday (for those of you who want to see this new scenario in action, you'll just have to wait a while longer.). In addition the 1914 scenario is now a sort of Victoria light, there is no colonisation, your economy is fully developed (at least if you are a civilized country) and all you have is one minor war to fight, ideal for those of you who have struggled to play Victoria in the past and want to break yourself in gently.
Now let’s talk about a few other things, if you have been paying close attention to the screen shots you’ll have noticed that the IC values are different from Doomsday. Your IC in Doomsday is now based upon your final industrial score. The calculation in essence takes the total IC at the start of Doomsday and allocates it to each country according to its industrial score. Now there are a few modifications to take into account things like debit (which maps to dissent) but that is the essence of it. Starting resources remain unchanged.
We’ve also done a lot of work converting the politics from Victoria to Doomsday. Again it is not precise, but the political reforms you have in place in Victoria determine how the sliders are set up in Doomsday. The more Voting rights you have the more democratic you’ll be, things like press rights and public meeting make your society more open.
Then there are the tech teams, rather than each country picking up its default tech teams, they are now randomised depending on how you ended Revolutions. Every choice you make influences your tech teams, however as a hard and fast rule on average you’ll get better tech teams if you are a great power. However let me give you a flavour on how it works. For example everyone gets a tank tech team. It is fairly average and will have a few components. However if you tank factories, car factories and Machine parts factories this will push up the average skill of the tech team. Similarly if you have good inventions it will increase the chances of getting those additional useful components that will turn it into a great tech team. Then there is a second tank tech team, this has a higher average skill and will get more components automatically. Having good industry will push up the skill level and inventions will increase the chances of additional components. If you are a great power you will get this second tech team automatically. If you were playing a minor power which has good tank techs and a tank industry then you will also see yourself getting this tech team as well.
At the moment the tech teams just get random names and pictures that fit the tech team, but we are working on each country getting proper names for their tech teams, so a German rocket tech team gets called Wernher von Braun etc.. So let me show you where we are at the moment.
Between now and release I think we’ll have the new tech teams looking pretty damn good.
For this weeks update we’re going to give you a little bit more information about the changes we’ve made to the military system. We’re also going to talk a little bit about the nice new technologies you can find in revolutions. First let’s start with the military. From the other updates we’ve done you’re probably aware that we have made several changes to the military system. So let’s go into a bit more detail about these before we move on to some new features.
Firstly the rules on POP promotion, as has already been mentioned you cannot promote POPs form non state cultures unless you have a full citizenship party and you cannot promote POPs in colonies at all. In tandem with the change we’ve made a few other changes to make this truly effective. Firstly when you annex a province the soldier POPs do not automatically convert to Farmers/Labourers. This means that as you expand your colonial empire your pool of colonial manpower expands with it. Then if you factor in population growth by the end of the game you can have a reasonable amount of colonial manpower. We’ve also scattered more soldiers across Africa. Again a reasonable sized colonial empire will initially yield a few divisions for defence; then with population growth you can get a not bad little army out of it.
Next let’s talk about the Mobilisation pool. Currently you can have 0 divisions of a standing army and have 200 divisions ready to be mobilised when war broke out, well no longer. Now the size of the mobilisation pool is tied to the size of your army. We did this in part to close the little loophole I described above, but also because in the Victoria Era the majority of the great powers operated a system were soldiers were drafted into the regular army for a few years and then served several years in the reserves, the link between the mobilisation pool and size of the army reflects this. We also added in the size of mobilisation pool being tied to your military policy, the more militaristic you are the longer you can keep your troops serving as reserves and thus the larger your mobilisation pool can be.
Moving along on the military front we’ve added a whole new level of military technology, 5 army and 5 navy, reflecting the inter war period. New ships have been added such as carriers, battle cruisers and more models of battleships have been added, to make the late game Navy more flexible and powerful. On the land front, as some of you may have already guessed, we’ve added aircraft, but we’ve also added inventions to improve your army across the board. Making the late game army more mobile and harder hitting. Here is a screen shot from the last day of the game showing you the chance to build nice new ships
Now onto technology we’ve also added technology to all the other areas as well. In the field of culture we’ve added new inventions, which start to push your pops toward extreme ideologies, (not so much that everyone goes extreme by the end of the game, just enough to help those that are heading that way anyway). We’ve also added a series of random event tied to these political inventions. These help late game dictatorships stay dictatorships. No longer do you have to worry about the rising militancy of your pops, a propaganda triumph or a party rally can be just the thing you need to bring the masses over to your side. Just to illustrate here is Austria from the same game, notice that the useful political events have helped lower Austria’s plurality making its people more willing to enjoy the joys of an absolute monarchy.
The industrial commerce technologies also add something to the late game. New factories, including radios and synthetic oil, increased productivity as modern management techniques come into play and an additional level of railway to help your factories along. Although personally I like that your government ideology also influences your late game economic development. Communist states get five year plans that allow cheaper factories, socialists get cheaper social reforms, liberal governments get reduced loan repayments etc.. Giving each ideology its own unique stamp on the late game.
Things are coming along quite nicely for revolutions, I hope you’re all looking forward to it.
