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Dev Diary #36 – Construction

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Hello and welcome to another Victoria 3 development diary! Today we’ll be returning to more mechanics-oriented dev diaries, starting out with a very important mechanic for the economic development of your 19th century nation - the construction of new Buildings.

Construction in Strategy games tends to follow a pretty typical formula: you save up money, order a construction and pay a lump-sum cost, wait some time, and the new building pops into existence. As mentioned in Dev Diary 12, however, the vast majority of expenses in Victoria 3 are not lump-sum costs but applied over time as part of your national budget. So how does it work instead? To answer that, there’s a few concepts we need to cover, namely Construction Capacity, the Construction Sector and the Construction Queue.

Let’s start then with Construction Capacity - which is actually just named Construction in-game, but we’re calling it Construction Capacity here to differentiate it from the overall concept of building things. This is a country-wide value of your nation’s overall ability to make progress on new buildings in a single week. For example, if your country produces a total of 100 Construction and a new Textile Mill costs 300 Construction, you’d expect to be able to build that Textile Mill in a total of 3 weeks. However, it’s a little more complicated than that, as we’ll see below when we explain the Construction Queue.


With Construction Sectors present in Lower Egypt, Matruh, Sinah and Palestine, the Egypt in this screenshot generates a respectable amount of Construction for the early game, though their finances may struggle a bit to fund it all.
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So, how do you produce Construction? This is where the Construction Sector comes in. All countries get a tiny amount of ‘free’ Construction Capacity to ensure that you never get stuck in a situation where you need Construction Capacity to expand your Construction Sector but need a Construction Sector to get Construction Capacity. This amount is woefully small though, and wholly insufficient even for a small nation, so if you’re not planning to run a subsistence economy long-term you will definitely need to invest in a proper Construction Sector by building more Construction Sector buildings in your states.

Mechanically speaking, the Construction Sector is a type of government building which employs people and uses goods to output Construction Capacity with a variety of different Production Methods, ranging from simple Wooden Buildings to modern arc-welded Steel and Glass structures. It does work a little bit differently though, in that the amount of Goods used by the Construction Sector each week depends on the actual need for Construction Capacity - if your Country is producing a total of 500 Construction Capacity, but will only need 250 for ongoing projects that week, the total usage of Goods in the Construction Sector is cut by half - though you still have to pay the wages of all the Pops employed there.


More advanced methods of construction are expensive and require complex goods - but you will find it difficult to build up a true industrialized economy without them.
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Ultimately, what this means is that how fast you can build things depends entirely on how much money, goods and research you’re willing to throw into your Construction Sector - having only a handful of Construction Sector buildings using only Wood and Fabric will certainly be cheaper and easier than building up a sprawling Construction Sector using Steel-Frame Buildings, but will naturally limit your ability to industrialize your nation.

So then, how does Construction Capacity actually turn into finished buildings? This is where the Construction Queue comes in. Each country has a nation-wide Construction Queue, with each project in the Queue corresponding to building a single level of a Building in a specific State. For example, a Construction Queue in Sweden might look like this (all numbers are examples):


  1. Expand Government Administration in Svealand (250/300 Construction Capacity remaining)
  2. Expand Fishing Wharves in Norrland (155/180 Construction Capacity remaining)
  3. Expand Fishing Wharves in Norrland (180/180 Construction Capacity remaining)
  4. Expand Rye Farms in Svealand (180/180 Construction Capacity remaining)
  5. Expand Port in Götaland (240/240 Construction Capacity remaining)

Each week, your produced Construction Capacity is allocated to projects in the Queue in order of priority, with a maximum speed at which projects can proceed (so it’s never possible to, say, build the Panama Canal in a single week). Using the above construction queue as an example, let’s say the maximum progress that can be made each week is 50, and Sweden is producing 112 Construction Capacity.

This would mean that projects 1 and 2 would both be allocated 50 Construction Capacity, while project 3 would get the left-over 12 and projects 4 and 5 would not progress at all in that week. It would take 5 weeks for entry 1 to finish at that pace, but after only 3 weeks, project 2 will be down to only 5 progress needed, and so most of the Construction Capacity allocated to it will be freed up for other projects. This also means that project 2 will actually finish before project 1, which is perfectly normal, as different buildings require different amounts of Construction Capacity to complete - it’s easier to build a Rye Farm than a Shipyard.


With just above 40 construction output and the help of some local Construction Efficiency bonuses, this country is able to make rapid progress on the Wheat Farms and Iron Mines at the top of the queue and even get a bit of weekly extra progress on the Logging Camps.
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If all this seems confusing, don’t worry! All you really need to understand is that the more Construction Capacity you have, the faster things go - but a large Construction Sector will need to be kept busy with multiple projects at once if you want to use its entire output.

There is one more important factor to Construction, which is a modifier called State Construction Efficiency that governs how effective each point of Construction Capacity you put into building Buildings in a State is. For example, a state with a +50% bonus to State Construction Efficiency means that every Construction Capacity allocated to projects in that State actually results in 1.5 progress on said projects, while a malus of -50% would reduce it to 0.5 actual progress.

A few factors that will increase or decrease State Construction Efficiency are:
  • Terrain-based State Traits, such as mountains or jungle, tends to reduce State Construction Efficiency
  • Building a Construction Sector in a State increases the local State Construction Efficiency
  • Low Market Access reduces State Construction Efficiency

Industrializing the Amazon Rainforest is neither easy nor cheap.
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That’s it for today! Join us again next week as we continue talking mechanics, on the topic of Market Expansion!
 

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Anna_Gein said:
Is it a game where "buildings" are more large scale abstraction as it was explain in earlier diaries are "buildings" truly individual buildings (a necessity when you have monument and large scale infrastructure like canals) ?
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I don't see how White House or Panama Canal can't be seen as representing whole industries. (Unless White House really happens to be magical building with magical effects).
Anna_Gein said:
Some characters like generals and admirals have a basic level of autonomous conscience and are capable to lead wars on their own as well as form "groups of interest" to push laws and policies which may run counter to the player's wish, thus leading to internal crisis. But other characters like capitalists appears to be near empty shell with no capacity to act on their own. Even as by definition, they were irl mostly independent from the government while military leaders were, again by definition, both integral part the government and active mostly according to the government wish.
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True, Pops (such as Capitalists and Officers) don't have personality (or even character). But their political Interest Groups do have character through their leading characters.
Anna_Gein said:
Who or what exactly is the player ? According to this answer, what dictates where the player can act directly and where he can only act indirectly ? Is he the nation he choose at the start date ? But then can the player still play if/when your nation loose its statehood ? Or is the player a political party ? But then what happens if your party loose the elections ? Can my nations be led by a liberal party while simultaneously allowing me to micro manage and plan all aspect of my economy ? Or is there some constrain to the player free will depending on what happens in-game in internal politic ?
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Pretty much all strategy games share the trait that the question "what exactly is player?" is pretty much unanswerable in satisfying way. This is mostly because the following question "why can('t) player do X then?" doesn't really have satisfying answer outside of "because of intended gameplay".

I see as economy and industrialization being the main gameplay mechanic in Victoria 3. And it also seems to be main lever of gameplay too, as it is main thing how player effects the world. Mechanics where player has lesser control (politics, population, military and such) are manipulated mainly through economy. And that would be why player has full control over economy but not over other things.

Interestingly enough HoI4 gives player full control over economy (but on high abstraction) while having non-total control over military (but at finer detail). The likely reason why this is so is likely because It makes for more interesting gameplay according to the developers.
Anna_Gein said:
Does Victoria 3 not risk to end up as a disjointed, counter-intuitive and confusing experience ? Sometimes you can only act directly with a lot of micro. But sometimes you are stuck to extremely indirect gameplay.

[...]

But what is Victoria 3 ? I do not know. And the more dev diaries I read, the less I can answer this question. Despite the wealth of gameplay mechanics details I learn with each new diary. Imho this is something worrisome period.
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I feel like this is something all Paradox's games share, as what player actually is and what does that imply can't really be explained in satisfying way (or least Paradox haven't tried this far).
Xeiki said:
What's lost if the player doesn't control all construction directly? The ability to directly control and steer every single construction (obviously). Mind you that nobody is arguing that there should be no player driven construction at all, so this isn't a complete loss and doesn't cut out the player from engaging with industrialization directly through construction, either. State Railroads, State Mines, State Buildings are all still there, unless there's such a thing as anarcho-capitalism or straight up anarchy in the game - the player is still able to influence things very directly, just not all of them!
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All this revolves back to the question:

"What is the main gameplay lever player has?" If economy is made more autonomous some other lever must be implemented for levels of gameplay interaction to stay same. Presumably this lever could be politics but that would change the focus of game rather much.

So game taking the lever away (such as player's country being led by anarcho-capitalists) makes player viewer of the situation. The main thing they would normally use to steer the situation is not there any more. If player is given more direct control over politics player could fix the situation that way. But as developers decided to have player use economy to change politics this doesn't exactly work.
 
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Absolutely agree that there has to be a lever for the player to change things in a meaningful (and comprehensible) way. That's where I think Vicky 2 lacked first and foremost.
Player building everything is fine imho, under all political systems. After all the player is not meant to be "the state" or "the king" but some kind of spirit leading the nation. So there are ways I think (I hope), to make your own construction not feel like state decree, but rather a ghost whispering into the capitalist's ear. Making the investment-pool meaningful would help, having a private building sector would help aswell.
On the flipside you could also argue that automated building is justified in a communist dictatorship. After all it's not the dictator who orders every single factory to be build, but rather a vast bureaucracy.
In any case, making it so that you either have or have not access to a fundamental game mechanic depending on your political system is pretty weird. People who hate micro will always go laissez-faire, people who like to min-max everything will always go communist, no matter what nation they play or what what they try to roleplay. Maybe you like command when your nation is small, then go laissez-fair when it grows bigger. Anyway it's the wrong incentives (and probably impossible to balance, too).
 
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Anna_Gein said:
No autonomous AI entrepreneurs/capitalists building stuff on their own in a Victoria game. Quite the disappointment. As someone said, the time frame represent the apex of economical laissez-faire, ie free capitalism. On the top of that it was an integral part of the broader 19th century liberalism movement.

At this point, the more dev diaries are released, the less I understand the vision for this game. It seems to be lacking period.
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At this point, the more dev diaries are released, the less I understand the people who don't understand the vision for this game. Something is definitely lacking, that's for sure! :rolleyes:

Edit = Bolded for emphasis. "Understand" does not mean "agree"
 
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Bearmarshal said:
This is such a minor nitpick that I feel bad about bringing it up, but the cut red ribbon in the artwork is way too long. Based on the height and distance between the two poles, it should barely reach the ground on either side if it was stretched before they cut it. Instead, the gap between the cut ends is really small, and the ribbon has crumpled up a bit, meaning the distance between the poles would have to be twice as wide. The only explanation would be that the ribbon was arranged after they cut it to make it look better on camera, but that feels a bit far-fetched.

Also, it doesn't look like it was cut in the middle, and there's no scissor in the picture (as far as we can see, but it seems to continue off-screen to the left).

As I said, really minor, but since I assume this is going to become one of the loading screens and thus will annoy me for all eternity, I wanted to mention it.
(To the people who hadn't noticed it before but will be as unable to unsee it as me, I'm sorry.)
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Why did you do this? Now I can't let this go either :p
 
I really enjoy the presente mechanics. The more dev diaries I catch up on, the more I like it.

A reflection on unused construction capacities:
- Could having unused construction capacity give a (minor) bonus to the other similar type jobs in the state while never equaling them to represent the fact that the construction workers are laid off when they are not needed?
- Or have their weekly cost tick down and have to tick back up when the capacity is required elsewhere (with possibly the ticking back to full capacity going much faster than the ticking down)?
 
One thing that Vic 2 UI lacked was the fact that neither production nor factory tab UI didn't show RGO and bonuses before building a factory. So make sure that in Vic 3 this will be resolved and all necessary info for decision making will be shown in building menu.
 
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