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Hmm is it just me or does the UK have less provinces?

And no big ben at capital :(

Clio ended with Great Britain gaining +1 or +2 provinces, so not less than V1 unless there has been some tweaking by Paradox from the base map, which I don't see anything different.
 
Clio ended with Great Britain gaining +1 or +2 provinces, so not less than V1 unless there has been some tweaking by Paradox from the base map, which I don't see anything different.

Aha ok :) Then it's just my eye :)
 
Sometimes you can’t find the words to describe it so you steal someone else’s

Wait - King ISN'T Midge Ure? But the signs were all there . . .

I was starting to think that the fact that the province number was only 10-20% bigger than Vicky 1 was going to mean relatively few provinces in the UK (only one Welsh province in Vicky 1 if memory serves) but there seem to be a good number there, hope the same is true of likely war-zones which in Vicky 1 were relatively sparse like China and the US.

So the economy can spot what the world is lacking eh? Hopefully this will put an end to capitalists building dozens of factorys producing gear for which there is no market.
 
Ok I'll give you this for free, the world market interface was the thing that told us there wasn't enough fish to feed the world.

Ooh... I haven't played revolutions in years, but that sounds promising. I wonder how you will fix it? More fishermen POPs or more productive fishing RGOs?

In the meantime I shall plot to colonize as many small Pacific fishery islands as I can as the US, once I liberate Texas and California from Mexico. To Hawaii for Fish!
 
Well, I do not know wether I should be disappointed or happy.

On the one hand, it is great to hear that Victorias model will be reworked to provide a more logical simulation of the period. On the other hand, it sounds like the world-market still exists as a whole entity, which is a point I hugely dislike (amongst others).

Until the early 20th century there was no thing as a world market. Only with the extension of traffic and transportation-systems could the world grow into one market. Before the breakthrough of railways even within one country there was no such thing as a regular price for a good.
It was not possible in 1836 to ship huge amounts of heavy goods around half the world without giant costs. Even in 1912, where the world-market can be considered much more developed than 1836, the prices where different for different regions, depending on their infrastructural connection and the availability of goods.
The higher price for coal due to the scarcity of this ressource was a major reason for Frances late industrialisation, by the way!
In my opinion, a blunt world-market does destroy historically important details that decide about rise or stagnation of certain countries in this period and that is why it is dangerous to stay with this unrealistic and in my opinion obsolete model.

Another issue that needs correction is the already mentioned fact that the State buys ressources, sells the produced goods and equally distributes money amongst the citizens.
No further comments on this, except one: This needs to be fixed.

And a third major point of criticism:
"The law of diminishing return" - it doesn´t exist. Seems like this one was pointed out before (Iron-production in Wallonia for the entire world). The more you invest, the less EXTRA will you gain out of your investment. This needs to be reflected in the game! (Maybe even exhaustion of ressources from over-use... try how many wood you can chop before the region is deforestated)

Regarding this, I hope that "similar" means that the major issues are corrected - one way, or the other. If you have a much better approach, I will be pleased with this as well.
 
Honestly, I liked the economic model from Ricky so seeing the basics kept is kind of good news

I suppose fish isn't the only ressource that needs a retouch, I suppose balance is a big issue right now

My question: With everything you have to do in terms of game development, will you still have time to overpower Sweden And, if yes, can we get a DD on that? ;)
 
I loved the depth of the economy system in Vicky 1, I just hope it can be streamlined in the sequel. It could be bloody hard to set up your country in any half-decent manner even after the experience of a dozen games.
 
Nice short DD.
I like how you are approaching the development of this game. It's important that the game is working when you release it, I don't mind paying for expansions that add stuff later.

Can you say anything about how old these screen shots are?
I would suspect somewhat old since the menu interface seems very unfinished, (judging by the menu text not being aligned).

Also how will ports look like and will all provinces have them?
 
Nice short DD.
I like how you are approaching the development of this game. It's important that the game is working when you release it, I don't mind paying for expansions that add stuff later.

Can you say anything about how old these screen shots are?
I would suspect somewhat old since the menu interface seems very unfinished, (judging by the menu text not being aligned).

Also how will ports look like and will all provinces have them?

The screenshot was yesterday
 
The economic model of Victoria is sound insofar as you have decribed it. From an economists point of view, two missing pieces are the economics of property and a representation of the service industries. These two things should represent the bulk of economic activity.

Service industry should be possible to model in the game. After all, this is reallly what POPs interface with to meet their needs. Thus, in addition to it's economic importance is a significant political role. This could be prvince level - call it the "social infrastructure" for example. It would be automated, but could be incentivized. A key component here is that this is a breeding ground for your nascent capitalists.

As to property, this can be abstracted on the one hand with laws. I'm not sure if there is a better way, since property in this era was highly local and the primary struggle was capitalist vs aristocrat.
 
Its great that you are already spotting economic malfunctions... which means that the game is further along than I thought...
 
sounds good.

Yeah the early releases of Vicky were rough because you had to take extreme measure just to get your economy balanced- things like ramp up your tariffs to ridiculous heights and cut just about all your spending. It just didn't make sense.

And in another release it was like RGO's were king. If you took people out of an RGO and put them in a factory to produce finished goods they made less money than from the RGO and you end up in worse economic position. That didn't make sense either.

I believe that basically you should start a game and for the most part be in the black already (i.e. not losing hundreds of dollars a day). And generally anytime you take a guy out of a farm and put him into a factory this should be beneficial. Of course exceptions may include if the farm was producing some scarce expensive good and the factory was producing cement which already flooded the WM.

As for the food problem:

Is it too late to devise a system where different POPs can have variable food requirements? In short, all POPs desire to eat as much as they their "highest" food capacity value. But not all POPs can afford or have access to as much as they desire - this is the problem of the world. But allow the game to have some POPs eat more some eat less. There could be levels where the hungriest POPs have x efficiency in their job. For each level of food they can eat their efficiency goes up.

So you can have African POPs who get barely enough food to exist who are working an RGO and have low efficiency but over in Germany you have some better off POPs who eat all they want and they work the same type of RGO at much greater efficiency so produce more. This would make the game better overall because this would be another way to keep those poor countries like Africa and China with large popualtions from becoming industrial powerhouses because they have a much harder time just feeding their population
 
Good to learn about the basics for those of us who don't know victoria much :D
Does that mean that you'll have to trade away fishes yourself to survive? and is there no other food kind (I mean africa does produce something, xmas or not no? hehe) I mean if there is not enough choices of goods it can be too unrealistic and if there are too many it becomes a micromanagement hell, how do you plan to cope with that? (most games go with reasonable amount of goods but I suppose we'll have a system ala HOI3 with turning trade AI on?)
are there alerts for "lack of fish for xmas"? *grins*
 
Good to learn about the basics for those of us who don't know victoria much :D
Does that mean that you'll have to trade away fishes yourself to survive? and is there no other food kind (I mean africa does produce something, xmas or not no? hehe) I mean if there is not enough choices of goods it can be too unrealistic and if there are too many it becomes a micromanagement hell, how do you plan to cope with that? (most games go with reasonable amount of goods but I suppose we'll have a system ala HOI3 with turning trade AI on?)
are there alerts for "lack of fish for xmas"? *grins*

I'll try and help you out.

There are a few other types of food (among them grain, livestock etc), and you ideally will have some of all, but if you don't have your own fish, you buy it on the world market. If you do have many farms, you have many farmers, but you may need them to work in factories or become soldiers, in which case you remove them from the farm, get them to work in a factory, and buy more grain off the world market. There is a good bit of micromanagement in Vicky1, but I strongly get the impression that Vicky2 will in some way automate this or simplify it while keepng the same basic model.
 
When we began to design Victoria 2 we thought back to the Victoria’s release. One of the problems was the epic cycle of bankruptcy at the start as your economy slowly crashed. Now by 1.04 this problem was pretty much solved but we drew one very important lesson from this. You need a functioning economy for the game to be fun.

They say that money makes the world go round, and when it comes to Victoria nothing is truer. To be able to enjoy the game you are going to need money, in Victoria 2 you need your POPs to have money so you can tax them and this means that you need a working economy. This factor pushed us towards a bit of economic conservatism, insert in contemporary analogy here, because after all if the game ain’t fun you won’t be playing it.

For those of you who did not really play Victoria, let’s have a quick run down of the economic system and how it functioned. At its base you have Resource Gathering Operations (referred to as RGOs). These represent things like farms and mines and produce goods without any inputs. Then you have factories that take inputs from either RGOs and/or other factories and turn them into other things. Then you have a world market that acts as a central clearing house for buying and selling goods.

So this is basically what we were doing. However there was a tragic scene in the office last week. Sometimes you can’t find the words to describe it so you steal someone else’s:

“Where nothing ever grows
No rain or rivers flow
Do they know it's Christmastime at all?”

Now if you ignore the fact that in 1836 most of Africa does not know it is Christmas time for religious reasons we had a global crisis. There wasn’t enough Fish produced to feed the world. Now we figured we could either hold a charity concert or rebalance the economic system a bit. When we decide what to do we’ll let you know but for the moment times are tough. Although on a more a serious note, this is the joy of improving interfaces, it makes it a whole lot easier to work out if things are actually working the way you intend them to. The sooner you can get the basics right the sooner you can move on to adding things.

Which comes to the second reason why we chose to keep the economic system at its base similar. If you think back to the first developer diary I mentioned that we initially starting talking about ideas for a second expansion to Victoria, well the idea was that this would focus very heavily on economics. We felt that there was still a lot mileage in improving the original Victoria’s economic system without having to reinvent the wheel. Now we have mentioned things like unemployment and artisans and these we will return to in future developer diaries but that is it for the time being.

Here is another random Screenshot that you may or may not like.

I'd just like to say this: Access to Markets As a Resource In Itself!

Please lets not have a World Market this time, but rather a series of Markets, the West Europe Market, the North America Market, the China Market, the East Africa Market and so on. Perhaps as well an ability to "merge markets" etc if you control rather EU3-esque Trade Centers...

Please, whatever you do, lets not again have just one big dumb infinite-capacity World Market....