Development Diary #20 - National Focus

[Johan]

We've talked a bit about national focus before in previous developer diaries. Here is the developer diary we devote to this subject. National focus is something that began life in Heir to the Throne .It was something you could place in a province and would give benefit to that province and its neighbours and also allow access to special decisions. It could be moved fairly infrequently and was thus an important choice on where to place it. In Victoria 2, however, it has been developed a bit further.

It started off life as one those design discussions we had. When we thought about the kind of game we wanted Victoria 2 to be, we felt that we should move away from the direct control you saw in Victoria. It was both highly repetitive and ahistoric, a lot of things were determined by people themselves. Now I have read on the forum, but what about authoritarian states like Stalinist Russia? Well the author Orlando Figes was in Stockholm, not too long ago, on a speaking tour to promote his book The Whisperers. He was talking about how people in Stalinist Russia would fake their backgrounds to get round the effects of purges and rise up to positions that they should not have allowed them to enjoy. My own personal conclusion is that even in an authoritarian state like the Soviet Union, state power was not absolute enough to give you the control that Victoria gave you.

So as you have seen in previous developer diaries we have done a lot to try and make state control more indirect and thus more historic, and at the same time remove the micromanagement. However, we hit the horns of a dilemma, what the micromanagement gave you was a way to shape your country. This shaping of the country was half of the fun of Victoria and to remove that would make Victoria 2 some soulless clone of Victoria. So how do we give the player this ability to shape their country in a way that was both historic and did not inject in micromanagement? The answer is National Focus.

We have made changes to national focus, instead of being a single province you can now have several and they cover a whole state. Each state can have only one national focus marker. The total number of national focus points depends on the number of national POPs you have and your technology level, each country always has a minimum of one national focus point. Thus no matter which country you play you will always have options. In addition we also set up a trend in the game of increasing state power, which we feel captures an aspect of that period in history.

As we mentioned in a previous developer diary it is a tool to shape your population. National focus can be used to 'encourage' your POPs to move somewhere and become something. The exact form this encouragement takes depends on your own personal suspension of disbelief. It allows all sorts of historical events to be modelled; a USA player can use national focus to encourage the settlement of the interior of the US. A Dutch player could set national focus in the Netherlands East Indies and encourage bureaucrats to move out there and man the colonial bureaucracy. However, national focus is not just about POPs.

National focus can be set in a state to encourage railways or goods production. Even the most hands off government appreciated the strategic potential that railways offered and did much to encourage the development of railways in areas that they felt were important. The production of goods types covers both artisans and capitalists. Setting a marker in a state for a good will encourage artisans to make it and capitalists to build/expand factories of that type. Thus if you are in a war and need more guns, you can use your powers of persuasion to convince business to do more for the war effort.

The last thing that National focus is used for is colonisation. You can set a national focus marker in an uncolonised state and start to claim it. The control amount slowly ticks up by a random amount, so just because you are first in a state doesn't mean that someone else might get lucky and beat you. If you want to increase your chances of claiming a state you can send in troops, the presence of troops in a state will increase the amount your claim ticks up by. This might just give you the edge to beat some who already has a placed a claim in front of you. What happens if they too send troops? In this situation countries who are both claiming a colony can fight each other inside the state. This allows Fashoda style skirmishes without needing the whole messy colonial war mechanic. Now you can skirmish with allies and friends for colonies without having to burn all your bridges and go fight a war.

National focus gives you the tool kit to shape you country in a way that fits the period and also sets up choices. Do you want to join in the scramble for Africa or do you feel that developing the home land is number one priority?

 

[Johan]

Do we get any answers this time from you Johan?

King is apparently not available at the moment...

King is not around for this week. I'm crappy at answering things compared to him

 

[Johan]

A question: is the 1/2 in the top bar under the population tab your amount of focus points?

Yes.

 

[Trin Tragula]

This DD was more or less how I expected it to be from previous hints but it's looking good nonetheless

Yes, that's far too long for the time period. Somewhere between 5-10 years sounds good.

Or if the armies are too big?
Though attrition and popular support should take care to limit the army sizes as well (and in fact I'm going to assume that any colonial skirmishes also increase jingoism and sentiment vs the other country back home)...

 

[King]

Does "national focus" on railway mean we will be unable to buid railroads directly??? Even in planned economy???

No, a planned economy still build railways themselves. What it means is that more liberal governments can encourage railway construction in certain places. If you take the example of the USA, where the government offered up insentives to encourage the construction of a transcontinental railway.

 

[King]

Mucho Awesome

I just have one question: can these colonial skimishes escalate into full blown war (without the player necessarely planning/wanting war) ?

If the bad guys get so annoyed that they decalre war on you.

 

[King]

How often can these foci be changed / moved? It's not every 25 years again is it? But I do like the idea, encourage the steel industry in Pennsylvania, the Fabric / clothes in another place, timber / furniture elsewhere.

Can we place more than one focus in a state, such as adding both clerks and craftsmen in a state with factories?

Do we still have life sustainability and range from a port for colonization? I like the mechanic that you have to choose between the home front and colonization.

I'd have to see how immigration in handled to comment on promote immigration, but I hope it doesn't all go to just one place. I'd also have to see how the railroad build logic is handled to guesstimate how useful "build railroads here" will be. In Vicky I never had any problems covering the US with railroads. I'm guessing it will impact invention spread as well as actual construction.

It won't be 25 years. At the moment they can be changed at any time. However, since the effects are long range it means that constantly flipping national focus won't be too benficial. Still the exact time will be determined by balance testing.

 

[King]

Are their nation specific national focus, ie the US manifest destiny or are all such options available to every state?

There are no country speicfic national focus. The USA wanting people to move to the interior of the country is to us the same as a colonial power enoucraging settlement in one of their colonies.

 

[King]

These colonial skirmishes - is there some sort of cap on their scale? If I as France am confident there is no major war on the horizon, what (beyond attrition) stops me loading fifty divisions up and parking them in the Sudan?

Awesome diary, btw.

Attrition. plus what if you are wrong about the major war guess?

 

[King]

Then I hope Great Britain will not be a permanently overstretched country that must always decide if it neglects colonization or issues at home. In reality they were good in developing both.

Since it works on National POPs not total POPs, the UK has fewer potential national focuses than say a France or a Germany.

 

[King]

Is it directly proportionate to national POP numbers, or the relative amount of national POPs vs non-national?

In other words- say you have Austria with S German and Hungarian as national POPs but then Hungary breaks off and forms its own nation. Will the number of national focus points remain the same as total POP numbers didn't change much or increase because relative numbers of non-nationals might have decreased for the now smaller Austria?

This also matters for population growth if points increase over time or as conquests are added.

Would be nice to see some national focus on developing cultural identity to speed assimilation or an improve literacy focus.

Yes it will remain the same if Austria has exactly the same number of national POPs. Essentially small densly populated countries will have an advatage over larger more sparsely populated countries. We feel the the ability for the State to influence the smaller country will be easier due to the lower distances involved.

 

[King]

May I suggest national foci for assimilation and integration?

Definately not. This is the era of national awakings, where nationalities yearned for a country of their own. Not the era of assimilation and integration.

 

[King]

I hope you are going to answer my question. What reason is there for players to encourage immigration to North American interior? I hope immigration to other states mechanic won't be too powerful and encourages more even population distribution in provinces than the mechanic you had in vicky 1. It wasn't too uncommon in vicky 1 to see players emptying southern USA to high growth northern states or most of the European part of UK to greater London state which had London with insane growth rate.

Well you can't turn them into states for a start. Without bureaucrats there, crime will run rampant and you won't get any taxation from them. There is also a cap on the number of POPs that can work in a RGO. So encouraging immigration to some states will only give you angry unemployed farmers.

 

[King]

So, if you put Immigration as a national focus in a certain state (if i understood correctly) can you also control which area those people come from, if you want it to be national immigration? For example setting emigration as national focus in another of your states?

No, build it and they will come, but it isn't up to you where they come from. The POPs themselves will decide.

 

[King]

I do not get the part with more state control? Paradox claim is that increasing state power captures an aspect of that period. One pharagraph further you mention the Netherlands, now of course i can not decide on every country in the world, but in the Netherlands the nineteen century was a nation of centralisation and less state control. Will this specific national development be a part of the game?

Well first we must go back to the original Victoria. Where you went through each POP in turn and decided what job he would do, at the same time you had absolutely no say and where POPs went. Now we have national focus which you can use to influence both promotion and migration. Thus we are changing how we represent state control in our game, from a direct to an indirect more hands off form. At the start of the game your total maximum national focus is very low. As the game advances and your technology increases the ammount of national focus you can place increases in tandem. Thus states do gain increasing power and influence as the game continues, but the form it takes is different.

 

[King]

If your able to encourage POPs to move to certain places, and they do so on great numbers, wouldn't that be a form of assimilation? The user would be requesting massive migration and colonial expansion of their national culture in other places. Eventually they could become a majority and could reduce the native culture in size and importance.

Assilimation and migration we will talk about in greater detail in a future developer diary. However there is no direct way for a government to encourage people to assimilate.

 

[King]

In regards to the colonial skirmishes you said earlier that attrition would decimate huge stacks of hundreds of thousands of troops to prevent the ridiculous numbers from Vicky 1 in Africa etc...Does this mean life rating or some other game mechanic will create much larger attrition then in say London or Paris? Even if these provinces are owned by your empire?

Unowned provinces, which are the provinces you are claiming of course have higher attrition than owned ones. Plus it doesn't matter how many troops you actually stack in the state. The only requirement is that you have at least one unit in one of the provinces of the state.

 

[King]

Following on from this, can you tell us whether exactly migration/immigration will be solely dependent upon having national focus set to migration/immigration?

Therefore, what I am trying to ask you is whether pops will go to Province X because national focus is set to Y?

Will this be what influences them most? Will other factors have an influence? Eg. the money they do/don't have? Money they hope to earn? Available jobs?

Lots of other factors influence which job a POP will select and where they will go. Thus national focus cannot get your Poor POPs promoting to bureaucrats if you are taxing them to death. All it can do is supply another nudge to promotion. Thus if you set your country up right, then national focus is a means to get you there faster.

 

[King]

Does this mean that the "you can turn colonies into states if they are on the same continent" is gone? As the US you could turn most everything in North America into a state as soon as you grabbed it. This sounds like you need to set your national focus to encourage immigration and wait for a while until you have sufficient POPs to grant statehood.

And will encourage immigration result in more overall immigration than otherwise, or will total immigration remain the same and much of it go where you want it too?

I take it you can no longer expand RGOs then?

The who reason why had the ability to turn colonies into states if they were on the same continent was becuase no one migrated into the interior of the USA. Now if they ain't migrating there it is because you did not give them enough encouragement.

No you cannot expand RGOs anymore, if all the land is beign farmed, then all the land is beign farmed.

 

[King]

This is an excellent idea. At last, a way for the USA to fill the Midwest! It'll also really nicely simulate the way colonies generally weren't profitable until a colonial bureaucracy was established, which means colonialism won't be a no-brainer anymore: if you're wanting chunks of Africa, you'll need to divert your National Focus from elsewhere to make it economically worthwhile.

One thing King - have you worked out a formula for how much colonial skirmishes will damage relations? Fashoda, for example, could have led to a war between France and Britain very, very quickly without good diplomacy on both sides.

Actually, come to think of it, is it best to have colonial troops fighting if they are in the same province? I'm hard pressed to think of two European powers actually fighting eachother over African colonies, even where there were conflicting claims. Maybe some sort of stand off situation would be better if two national armies sit in an unclaimed province, with a monthly penalty on relations for the duration of the standoff?

There is no formula for damaging relations at this point in time. That will be a question for testing and balance.

You are absolutely 100% correct that there were no shooting wars over colonies during the period. However Victoria had a mechanic for it and that means that Victoria 2 must also have one too. After all we don't want you feeling short changed.