Features you'd like to see in Vicky 2 Megathread

[Moltke]

Can countries possibly have their own stockpile of goods instead of everything flowing into the "world market" for distribution? It would be cool to be able to seize a nation's production when you invade them.

Also, can locomotives be a commodity? They were pretty important as nations industrialized and I seem to remember them being "paid" or demanded in reparations at times.

[Rodrico Stak]

Prestige decay. I hated how prestige was a static number that just went up, and up, and up, with maybe the occasional -3 prestige event totally failing to stop it. To me, it makes much more sense for prestige to be expressed as a percentage, as in EU3.

[Skyman]

My biggest thing would be POPs that are not separate, arbitrary units requiring a lot of micromanagement. See the second post in the POPs thread.

Right after that would be a deeper political system that includes actual monarchs/PMs/presidents/dictators.

[Pietbont]

Remove those useless events where you lose a couple of units of a good. Most of the time it was a small amount where you lost a tiny amount of money which almost wouldn't affect you anyway. Replace them with a ''-50% production efficiency for x good for x days/months'' or something like that maybe?

[greendevil]

• No more uber stacks of death (i mean, 200 divisions alone in only a province)
• Deal with the railroad expansion (poor zones shoudn't have them)
• Make exportation of goods more monitorable (example, do not allow exports to one specific country, to enemies, favour it for allies and so on)
• The ability to auto reinforce divisions and corps
• The ability to select or advantage the production of a certain resource in a regione (as being said in another thread)
• Modify greatly the economic, the political and the industrial system depending on wich type of government you have (i mean completely different way of managing your country if you are a liberal country, a dictatorship/regency or a proletariat dictatorship)
• Introduce peace conferences (again, as already being said)
• Find a way to have a more "homogeneous" immigration between different zones

That's all what comes in my mind right now.

[jafloresl]

Sorry if it was posted before but here are some suggestions:
- Have names for the country's head of state (King, emperor, president, etc.), like the EUIII advisors or HoI3 cabinet.
- Have advisors or cabinet members.
- Spys (functions similar as in EUIII and HOI3)
- Trade agredments like HOI3.
- Historical Generals not to have fixed skills, but something that depends on leadership, like EUIII.
- Missions and National Ideas (like EUIII).


Thanks.

[aitosalamies]

I'd like to depict influence and cultural superiority of great nations with modified alignment system. The nations should converge towards their betters, especially if those better nations have similar mixture of national ideas/laws.

This reflects the ideological and cultural competition for prestige brought forwards by installment of great commerce, libraries, poets, literature, scientific achievements and raw power my nation can boast to show off its natural superiority over others.

Naturally this shift is tempered by nationalism of both lesser countries and my great nation. After all, the lesser nations do not enjoy being constantly told how naturally superior I am in everything.

This creates a game where progress has rewards on its own but nationalism and its power to strengthen national unity (and allowing me to wage war longer) also shoots itself into foot when striving to impress others.

[MarcFloyd]

My biggest thing would be POPs that are not separate, arbitrary units requiring a lot of micromanagement. See the second post in the POPs thread.

.

You must be joking, the pop system is an essence of Vic to me.

[Nikolai]

POPs are good, but it should be modified. As it is now, it's not good enough.

[Skyman]

You must be joking, the pop system is an essence of Vic to me.

No. No I'm not. I think it's great that we can see different groups of people, their professions/ideologies, etc. I just think the current implementation makes things much harder than it should be. What does 'pop splitting' have to do with reality, and what does it add to gameplay that being able to set population policies for a province or country wouldn't?

[Fire_Unionist]

Prestige decay. I hated how prestige was a static number that just went up, and up, and up, with maybe the occasional -3 prestige event totally failing to stop it. To me, it makes much more sense for prestige to be expressed as a percentage, as in EU3.

It doesn't really matter, because other nations are also taking in prestige.

[Arilou]

I'd love some way of modelling demand, supply and unemployment. In Vicky, your pops never really go unemployed (unless you're playing China where they pop up faster than you can upgrade RGO's ) and that needs to change somehow.

[Irioth]

The things that really would improve Vicky playing experience as far as I'm regarded:

A) Provide an effective AI POP management option for those players that don't enjoy being POP micromanagers. As far as I'm concerned, I enjoy building factories, RGOs, and railways, but the micromanagement of POP splitting and conversion in large states like Greater Germany, USA, Russia, or China could absolutely get one nuts.

B) For Heaven's sake, just kill demobilized POP degradation. A POP that is mobilized as a clerk should be demobilized as a clerk. The alternative was annoying enough that I never used mobilized troops. It's a royal pain in the butt, aggravating the annoyance of POP micromanagement for totally irrealistic reasons (that kind of social displacement may surface if one stays a soldier for a decade in the Vicky timeframe, not a war lasting an year or two; job skills were much more static back then).

C) Please provide more and more flexible ahistorical national unification/annexation paths. E.g. I would very much like to have Grossdeutchsland paths with the Conservative Empire and Three Hurrahs paths, available for Austria and Prussia both, a path to unify Italy in 1848, an All of Mexico annexation if the USA win the Mexican-American War, and a path for the USA to annex Canada if they win a war with UK. Oh, and when a national unification/annexation path triggers, do make it provide the appropriate cores and national cultures.

[Hansag]

Economics modled after university textbooks (or at least, modable so that they could become)

Also, the ability to have "Organizations" in the game.

i.e. "Capitalist" creates an "Organization" (companies) that manages a factory or two. Another "Capitalist" creates another "Organization", and so they compeat.
Or another Capitalist creates an organization that offers investment capital for other Capitalist in exchange for rent...

Intra-industry competition etc.

But also the ability for the player to create "Organizations" (public companies etc.) that you can task to do things (improve infrastructure, offer venture capital for capitalists etc.)


A lower class "Capitalist" called "Entrepreneur", who can "upgrade" to "Capitalist".

[Kehrichtbesen]

I would love to see Multiplayer Coop mode included in Victoria 2..enjoyed this game mode with my friend a lot in EU and Hoi!

[MadImmortalMan]

You must be joking, the pop system is an essence of Vic to me.

I'm sorry.

[MadImmortalMan]

Economics modled after university textbooks (or at least, modable so that they could become)

Also, the ability to have "Organizations" in the game.

i.e. "Capitalist" creates an "Organization" (companies) that manages a factory or two. Another "Capitalist" creates another "Organization", and so they compeat.
Or another Capitalist creates an organization that offers investment capital for other Capitalist in exchange for rent...

Intra-industry competition etc.

But also the ability for the player to create "Organizations" (public companies etc.) that you can task to do things (improve infrastructure, offer venture capital for capitalists etc.)


A lower class "Capitalist" called "Entrepreneur", who can "upgrade" to "Capitalist".

Hmmm not bad. And the organizations or companies can get huge and powerful like the East India Company or Standard Oil and you have to do some trustbustin' to get them back in line. Or you can grant them evil mercantilist monopolies and let them basically run Canada for you as a puppet.

[rudel.dietrich]

Naval power should be greated enhanced and deepened. I would love to have control over ship design to some degree. This was a period where naval development was rapid and at the cutting edge of all technology. It was also where militaries were focusing most of their efforts.
I would also love to see naval management take the form of branching paths. Like for instance focusing on brown water navies instead of blue water navies. Focusing on armour over firepower and speed. Having better fire control over heavier broadsides. I would also like to see instead of cookie cutter ships, the more ships you build of any one type slight upgrades to each ship you build. Also you could choose to spend a little bit of money or a lot of money on each ship and that determines it quality.l
So for instance if you are a smaller nation like say the Netherlands and you had a smaller budget you could build a battleship 'on the cheap' and have it be lower quality than the battleships of the UK, Germany and America.

Finally I would also love to see implented some nations being able to arm lesser nations.
Lets say I am playing Japan and it is around 1890-1900 and I have recently civilized myself and became industrialized. I do not yet have the technology of shipyards to build a navy. But I am choose to order a PDN from the UK or Germany.
This is how Japan and the South American nations initialy armed themselves.

You could extend this further to allow say Germany to send money, arms and training to other nations in an attempt to stave off being colonized and to make trouble for your European competitors.
Lets say I wanted to use Morocco as a weapon against France. France has an active interest in making Morocco a colony. As Germany I can send Morocco money to use on its army, give Krupp a contract to produce weapons and coastal artillery, use my shipyards to produce gunboats and small cruisers and finally send some of my officers to train the Moroccian army.
Kind of like the client state idea.

Anyways I hope that was coherent. I am estactic over the idea of a new Victoria title.

[Vargas]

I wan't the proffits to go to the Capitalists. I want the land rent to go to its owners, weather they are capitalists or aristocrats. The salary to industrial workers. Military spends to the military people...

Make the capitalist actually build factories or other infrastructures, buy bonds from the government or even loan to foreign capitalists or governments. Make shure they get the return for this invetments into their own pockets! These are dreams I have since the first release of Victoria. I dont think its impossible to do.

These ideas opens a lot of possible features to the game. Think for example what should you do if some minor nation that had received lots of investments in railways and loans from your capitalist try to default them? War, sanctions or blocking ports?

Also, make real supply and demand curves for each product, taking into consideration to where the factory is located! The first capitalists to produce a manufactory product should collect the bonus of monopoly, and so on! Its simple microeconomics.

The location of the production is also relevant. How could grain planted at patagonia be sold to buenos aires or Nepal for the same price? Each region should have a productivity value. The higher the value, the lower the cost to produce each unity.

People in the world would buy those products they can reach for the lowest price. The price would be changed buy supply and demand equilibrium, freight cost, tax, technology, productivity change... like it heappens in real life!

I don't know how difficult this is to do, but thats what Victoria is to me, an economic simulation game. That's why we used to spend most time building railways and factories. And thats what we shouldn't be doing now. We should change the minds of our people. Introduce innovations to their minds and jobs. Invest in education, political stability, new laws! Arrange wars to gain markets, or even to conquer lands. Fight aristocracy and eliminate slavery. Open or close your market to the world, and face the consequence of it. Build your nave, secure your ports and merchantmen troughout the world!

Two more things!

I hate pops! Why couldn't each province simply have a number of people for each class?? People would migrate between classes according to current structures of the nation and the province. For example, land enclosure would increase the unemployment inside the peasant class. These unemployed peasants woud eventually look for a city to live or maybe another farm in any other province to work.

Also, provinces shouldn't produce only one type of primary product (like coal, grain, fruit or gold), but all those they were good at.

Well, guys, thats it.

[SamouraiSteven]

Like so many people, I can’t help but open my own thread to try and give a consistent vision of how, in my humble opinion, the economic model should be revisited. I know there are threads dedicated, but I think that they do not make the complete link between markets, industry and population.

First, what are the objectives? Most of all, we want fun, so we need a model which gives the player control of the situation, even in a liberal economy. But we also want a model that gives us a feeling of reality, and with a historical flavour. Then, probably the developers don’t want to stray too far away from known game designs (that is Victoria 1 and to a lesser extent EU / HOI).

So, what were the most pressing economic issues in the 19th Century, those a history-minded player wants to cope with? Here is my own list, feel free to add something I might have forgotten:
- industrial development, based on technological breakthroughs and capitalistic accumulation;
- inflation and deflation;
- unemployment, labour shortages, immigration, rural migrations, urbanization;
- thirst for colonial markets, led by capitalists and merchants;
- the first ‘globalisation’ led by the United Kingdom, with a huge development of international trade in all kinds of goods;
- the economic shock of European and American superior industry and goods in other parts of the world, from Africa to Japan, and its dramatic consequences for these countries;
- the fight between old and new economic models, such as of course capitalism vs communism but also liberalism vs interventionism, and free trade vs protectionism.

Industrial development: Vicky Revolution’s system is already quite good at it. Building up industries and giving capitalists a say in a liberal economy was working rather well.

Inflation and deflation: Currencies were mostly linked until WWI, through the gold exchange parity, but WWI saw the explosion of European countries’ debts and the massive devaluations of their currency. Anyway, I think we should give up on this to keep the game simple. Unless someone has a better idea.

Unemployment and immigration: here, I’d say V1 and VR were very far from it. Immigration was more or less broken, and unemployment was not really an issue. And, should I say that the POP system was a micromanagement nightmare? As most of you will probably agree on, there’s no reason why 40k + 26k people should produce much more than 66k people.

Colonial markets: there was no point in conquering and colonising markets, as you would always find the goods on the World Market.

Globalisation: same point; the World Market was there from January 1st, 1836, as if container ships and air cargo already existed (but they didn’t, trust me).

Western shock: none of this.

The fight between economic models: this part was modelled with quite some detail, but the fact is that liberalism was annoying in that it deprived the player of much control over his country. It could fit some players, but not the majority.

Now, here are my proposals and ideas:

MARKETS

1/ Create Centers of Trade like those in EUIII. Big industrial countries should automatically get one (UK, USA, France…), as well as the biggest non-western countries (China, Japan, Persia…), and other countries should be people to build one for a certain amount of money / resources.
2/ For each Region (and not for each province), the buying price of resources not produced locally depends on the price of the goods in the Center of Trade plus a malus (representing the cost of transportation). This malus will decrease according to infrastructure.
The selling price depends on the price of the goods in the CoT less a malus (same logic, you need to transport your goods to the CoT).
3/ For each CoT, the evolution of the price of goods depends on the balance between demand and supply. Prices will not drop or increase suddenly, but in a more or less gradual way (grain increases quickly, luxury clothes increases slowly). This is called price elasticity, AFAIK.
4/ CoT Demand is calculated by summing up the demand of the population, factories, and States depending on this CoT (from all regions), plus some demand from linked CoTs where the price is higher (as buyers from this CoT are eager to find cheaper goods). Supply is calculated in the same way, with some supply coming from linked CoTs.
5/ Links between CoTs depend on political factors: being part of the same nation, being neighbours (having common borders), one CoT being a colony of the CoT’s metropolis, and trade agreements between countries (which gives a strong incentive to gunboat diplomacy). It also depends on infrastructure and technology (railroad, merchant navy, trading counters and coaling stations). The link level between two CoTs can stretch from 0 (no link) to 100% (at which point they might merge, to simplify things).
During the game’s lifetime, we’ll see links growing between many CoTs, simulating the development of trade through different means.

INDUSTRY

6/ Industry in a given CoT will get some profit from added value (to simplify, selling price – raw materials). Part of this profit is redistributed to the workers, and part is redistributed to the capitalists. This splitting might depend on factors such as unemployment, but basically, there should be some balance around 50% / 50% (to be finetuned, I suppose).
7/ Now, this is becoming tricky. We want production to depend on the global number of workers. We don’t want the POP splitting nightmare. So, a factory or a RGO will get part of the workforce of the Region (not the province, to minimize processing). Gradually, this factory or RGO will lose or gain part of the workforce, depending on the salaries (aka part of the profits distributed to the workers). But we don’t want to find ourselves with unemployment jumping at 50% or factories with 0 workforce. So we need flexibility. And the answer is… the law of decreasing returns! (is that how you call it in English?). Your first employee brings maximum productivity. Your second slightly lower. Your third even lower, etc, until your last employee brings 0 productivity. How can we simulate that? We won’t calculate productivity for each employee, so we need a bloody mathematical formula. For instance, we could use a formula like this: P being Production, W being Workforce, we could have P = a W – b W². W is limited to this level where the curve starts to go down.

What’s the point of this ridiculous formula? Gradually, factories will either hire or shed workers; but even if factories are turning at full capacity, they will be able to hire a bit more if unemployment is very high, and the economy will continue growing, at an albeit slower pace, if labour is scarce.

8/ I know this idea is already floating around, but I write it again to support it. One province should actually be able to produce more than one raw material: grain and coal, for instance, or grain and fruit, or grain and silk…

STANDARD OF LIVING

9/ For each Region, a Standard income is calculated for each category of POP, based on their share of the profits and their consumption needs. This is quite similar to Vicky 1. But there’s a big difference on spending and saving. Each POP spends all it needs to satisfy its survival needs (some basic food and maybe clothes / coal / things like that). If they don’t earn enough, they can spend their savings as well. Then, gradually, they will start saving more and more money, once they satisfy basic needs, standard needs and luxury needs. This money will be part of the private capital of each region. Capitalist POPs will have the biggest share of this capital from the beginning, but other POPs can accumulate capital as well – and earn interest. Interest is calculated by dividing a Region’s industrial profits by its private-owned capital.

10/ Emigration (whether national or international) is determined by two factors: economic and political. Purely economic emigration will first head towards new regions of the same country (regions with low unemployment will get part of this internal migrations), then if unemployment is high towards other countries. Political emigration will head directly towards other countries.

For these would-be emigrants, the destination is always a CoT. This way, we make sure migrants arrive in New York, London or Paris.The factors of choice will be unemployment, relative standard of living of the similar class (for instance, workers wealth), political freedom, cultural similarities (language, religion…) and maybe prestige (only when linked to economic, scientific or cultural achievements).

11/ Competitive shock.
When the Europeans open the markets of Asian or African countries, they will be able to sell their efficiently produced, cheaper goods. It means that prices will decrease for manufactured goods, and standard for living will decrease for the population. This should stir heavy social trouble, simulating all the problems that for instance China suffered at that time, with all its political consequences.

ECONOMIC POLICY

The player should have some control of the economy even in a liberal system, but each system should have its own advantages / drawbacks. This part needs some fine-tuning; in particular, I think the Leadership system from HOI3 should be re-used and adapted.
12/ Liberalism.
The State has a limited margin for action (building railroads, merchant navy, factories), that reflects its ability to subsidize some activities or to use its relations with the capitalists. Private initiative is strong, like VR, depending on which industries are the most profitable.
Technological innovation works in a same way, with a Liberal society being able to research more fields at the same time, with the State directing only a limited number of research projects.
To summarise in a HOI3 fashion, the liberals get more leadership, but can control a small part of it.
13/ Interventionism and State economy.
Depending on interventionism level, the effects of liberalism will gradually phase out. There is less private initiative, less private research, more public research. Public intervention in some fields is cheaper (building railroads and factories, for instance).
In HOI3 words: with increasing interventionism, you control more of your leadership but with lower total leadership.
14/ Communism.
There is no private initiative and the player controls everything, but the number of research projects is more limited, as well as the number of factories / railroads that can be built at the same time. The State gets all private savings from the Capitalists, and gets all profit from Industry.
15/ Free trade and protectionism.
This one is obvious. Free trade allows to increase the links between your CoT and those of your trading partners. If both countries are free traders, the link should be very strong, giving you access to a wider array of products and helping you selling your goods. On the other hand, protectionism allows you to limit the impact of competition if foreign goods are cheaper (since, as we said, a decreasing Standard of Living is a source of social trouble).

For the purpose of these humble ideas, I assumed that like V1 and HOI3, there will be regions containing many provinces. I think it’s a safe bet.

So, to the (very few) people who might have had the courage to read my awfully long post to the end, many thanks! And again, good luck to Johan and the team!