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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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Thomas Mertzen said:
I don't find that the terrain State Traits should impact the construction effeciency as the buildings are State localized and not in a single province. States seems to be so big there is always a place to build something without having the rainforest or the mountains penalizing you.
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Bear in mind that "buildings" are not really individual buildings, but are instead entire industrial sectors. So you're not just building one building in one specific place, you're building all the necessities to support that sector of the industry. Which can very much end up being statewide and be affected by the terrain of an entire region.
 
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lachek said:
Finding a way to make the construction industry private is an aspiration we have, actually! Like many of you have pointed out, it does sound really cool and more realistic.

As it turns out though, after quite a bit of experimentation, this is harder than you might expect at first blush. For example, would you really want a gameplay dynamic where the fewer buildings you construct at once, the cheaper it is to construct those buildings, making it optimal (but very inconvenient) to only construct one thing at a time? What about if you do build a large number of buildings at once, creating a need for a large number of construction workers, who then get fired as soon as the construction completes because there's no projects left to work on? If construction industry is all very local in nature, how do you build ports to connect your overseas markets when local access to construction materials is non-existent? Do you have to set (and potentially constantly adjust) a construction budget that determines how much resources the construction industry has to operate with?

All these quite tricky questions, each of which add a number of gameplay concerns that need solutions, fade away when you treat Construction not as a variable-cost good bought and sold on the open market but as a capacity, with the player's job being to appropriately size that capacity while minimizing its cost. While I'd love to continue experimenting with Construction Sectors in the future to see if we can find a model where they can operate privately without damaging gameplay, I find it provides just the right level of player decision-making at the moment, while still being quite a bit more involved and interconnected with our socioeconomic simulation than construction usually is in strategy games.
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Thanks for the clarification. Overall a great DD and I very much appreciate you directly addressing the critique.

I have two questions however, mainly wether or not you tried this already or if I misinterpreted this.
1. Do I understand correctly that the player builds all buildings? If that is the case I don't see why that's the case. I understand the argument againgst a private construction sector, but couldn't pops with enough wealth add things to the building list? If they add something it gets priority based not on the individual building but industry type (maybe via administration cap like supporting heavy industry, which reduces the cost the pops need to cover). That would also enable a law how much the industry sector is owned by the government, via what incentives/subsides for building the state can pay out, how much it needs to pay workers that don't actively work, let's the private sector make the decisions and makes it more taxing for the state to grow the industry or less taxing depending on the strength and power of the private sector and the laws in place.

If I misunderstood in my first question I would appreciate a correction as it would rather bug me if only the player can decide what gets build.

2. Couldn't the pay of the construction workers depend on wether there is a project for them or not? My meaning is when the capacity is unused why not make it so that the pops in question earn less money during that time, reducing their living Standart, but also allows the state to "build roads to nowhere" aka the palmer could just put up the salary for them when they don't work making their livingstandarts more secure. It would also allow the simulation of work projects, were the stage hires people to build useless infrastructure at worst, it also would allow the state to essentially startup their own economy by giving the poorest person's a better wage making them able to buy more and thus getting the state out of a recession or depression.
 
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lachek said:
Finding a way to make the construction industry private is an aspiration we have, actually! Like many of you have pointed out, it does sound really cool and more realistic.

As it turns out though, after quite a bit of experimentation, this is harder than you might expect at first blush. For example, would you really want a gameplay dynamic where the fewer buildings you construct at once, the cheaper it is to construct those buildings, making it optimal (but very inconvenient) to only construct one thing at a time? What about if you do build a large number of buildings at once, creating a need for a large number of construction workers, who then get fired as soon as the construction completes because there's no projects left to work on? If construction industry is all very local in nature, how do you build ports to connect your overseas markets when local access to construction materials is non-existent? Do you have to set (and potentially constantly adjust) a construction budget that determines how much resources the construction industry has to operate with?

All these quite tricky questions, each of which add a number of gameplay concerns that need solutions, fade away when you treat Construction not as a variable-cost good bought and sold on the open market but as a capacity, with the player's job being to appropriately size that capacity while minimizing its cost. While I'd love to continue experimenting with Construction Sectors in the future to see if we can find a model where they can operate privately without damaging gameplay, I find it provides just the right level of player decision-making at the moment, while still being quite a bit more involved and interconnected with our socioeconomic simulation than construction usually is in strategy games.
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Would it be possible to decouple Construction from Market Access, and have a parallel "Construction Access"? That way you could have in-state construction and labor pool primarily used for stuff in that state, and supplemented by out-of-state pools when needed. Decoupling them would allow for the difference between shipping materials from, say, New York to Hawaii, and the ability to build buildings, making Construction far more localized than goods production. Also, an "idle" construction labor pool in a state-based system could handle stuff like infrastructure and building maintenance within the state, with actual construction orders, including out of state orders, getting priority over maintenance by default. "Idle" Construction could also be used by private industry to build or upgrade infrastructure or their own buildings.

As an aside, there is some precedent in the game's timeframe for the shipping of construction. From 1908 to 1940, it was possible to buy mail-order houses from the Sears Catalog. MAIL ORDER HOUSES.
www.npr.org

Sears Is Fading, But Memories Of Its Mail-Order Homes Endure

In the early 1900s, Sears sold thousands of homes around the U.S. through its mail-order catalogs. Many of those houses are still around, and their owners are saddened by the retailer's bankruptcy.
www.npr.org www.npr.org
 
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Nikolai said:
It’s a game and sometimes realism needs to go for gameplay concerns.
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I feel the same, at least in general. Anyone who played Victoria 2 will remember that the 'invisible hand' of the market was pretty much clueless - private entrepreneurs kept building unprofitable factories in the wrong places. Unless you started with am advanced economy you could industrialize only by sheer luck or socialism.

Also, you can always say that having government-owned construction sectors in free market economies is an abstraction of subsidies, regulations, tariffs etc. meant to help it expand.

Having said this, it would feel right if a free-market economy had some mechanic of autonomous and spontaneous growth of the construction sector, as well as other buildings.
 
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Mef said:
It probably didn't exist yet. There used to be a building called "Construction Camps".
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I wonder what those were. I had assumed they were a temporary building that appeared whenever something was under construction in a province, which seems a more immersive way to do it than have construction be a nation-level modifier meaning you can build something in a state without ever needing to pay local workers.
 
Capitalists were somewhat braindead in V2 (to put it lightly...) but only having command economies in V3 feels wrong. The period the game takes place during saw the rise of liberalism and unchecked capitalism after all. Having gilded age America run top-down is bizarre.
 
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Wizzington said:
You get an alert for unused capacity. I will think about whether we can add some benefit for unused capacity, I agree it would be good!
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Honestly, I'm personally surprised that building maintainance doesn't seem to be modeled and that excess "capacity" doesn't get funneled to maintainance
I know this doesn't entirely tie in with what we know about devistation, but modeling it this way would give a better way to recover from devistation then a "default tick" or then having to manually say to "rebuild building levels or rebuild entire buildings". It'd also give a outlet for some degree of excess construction, and also might model some of the eb-flow of new construction better(no new construction means a focus on maintainance?) I guess maybe that makes it look a lot more like hoi4 with damaged buildings going on the priority pile, or a "maintainance" bucket that either just goes to everything or has to be bought as a good that get's prioritized towards buildings that can afford it? Players would then have the option of letting maintainance slide while building new buildings and hope that they can go back to maintaining buildings after they're done with a surge, or they can esque building buildings to focus on rebuilding and maintainance.

Unrelated: Literally how many times do the devs need to say "capitalist ai isn't a thing" for people to realize that capitalist ai isn't a thing. How many times do yall have to explain "the private market is modeled differently" for people to stop hyperbolicly claiming "there is no private market it's all government :mad:"
 
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Letharion said:
Perhaps the construction efficiency modifier should only be a local effect for buildings build in the same state or province. That way you can use the capacity anywhere but the most efficient way where you've got the most advanced construction sector.
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I'm pretty sure that's how it works already, actually. A construction industry gives 15 construction, as well as a 10% boost to construction efficiency in that state. The efficiency bonus applies to any construction applied there, so you could pour 100 construction into a massive upgrading spree and you'd get 110 effective (and since the resource cost was only paid for the original 100, you also end up with a ~9% discount on the cost of the construction).

DanielPrates said:
So how does range work?

1. The statement that having a construction site in a state raises efficiency, makes me imagine that one construction building serves my entire nation, but yields a local bonus, so if I want to build a second construxtion building, I might as well place it in another state to have my bonuses spread a larger area. Correc?

2. Are there range limitations? A constryction building in NY can build other buildings in Seattle? Alaska, across another nation? In Puerto Rico across a sea?
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1. I'm not sure exactly what "unscaled modifier" means, but I think that is the case. 10% doesn't get made nicely from there buildings, and in the screenshots we see three buildings giving +15 construction and +10% construction efficiency. What it might be better to do however, is to upgrade your construction to use a higher production method (which gives both more construction and a higher efficiency bonus) rather than expand out a bunch of construction sectors making wood buildings.

2. No range limitations, but there are access limitations. If you don't have good market access you get penalties to construction efficiency, meaning it takes longer and is more expensive.
 
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After thinking about it and reading the dev replies (and other comments), I wanted to expound a bit on what aspects of government run Construction Sectors concern me and which don't.

I appreciate that a truly private construction industry would be finicky and hard to balance and is thus out of scope for release. But it still feels weird to have Beaurocrats managing the construction offices in my anarcho-capitalist u/dys-topia.

What would make me happy is an essentially cosmetic reskin. When the ownership production method is set to private Beaurocrats are replaced by Capitalists (or shopkeepers at level 1 ) as management tier employees. Wage costs could come out of the Investment Pool rather than general spending as well, even if money has to be shuffled around behind the scenes to do it. Just to keep the sector off the ledger of government buildings with costs paid by the state. Wages would presumably still be set by the government wage formula in the absence of actual supply and demand.

A bit kludgy to be sure. But it would go a long way to helping my immersion.
 
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The construction department is out of my expectation. I had played a lot of strategy and simulation games, but all I know is that HOI and Tropico have construction department and the rest are magic builders

In addition, I think different buildings should have different maximum construction capacity that can be invested. For example, in Tropico, the airport can be built with a maximum of eight workers, but the grocery store can only be built with a maximum of two, because the airport is much larger than the grocery store.
 
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Will it be possible to rush construction at the price of inefficient use of construction capacity? eg, could you spend 100 capacity to increase the construction of a building max 20 capacity speed to 40 max capacity speed?
 
lachek said:
would you really want a gameplay dynamic where the fewer buildings you construct at once, the cheaper it is to construct those buildings, making it optimal (but very inconvenient) to only construct one thing at a time?
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Yes. It is what happens on reality while supply is corrected and the construction sector reduces its size. But more important is that not only player should be building things, but capitalists in other than planned economies should be also adding buildings to the queue.
lachek said:
What about if you do build a large number of buildings at once, creating a need for a large number of construction workers, who then get fired as soon as the construction completes because there's no projects left to work on?
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They are out of their jobs and you have got a nice crisis. We love our crisis, it makes the world feel alive.
lachek said:
If construction industry is all very local in nature, how do you build ports to connect your overseas markets when local access to construction materials is non-existent?
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By building ports and being able to ship those materials overseas?
lachek said:
Do you have to set (and potentially constantly adjust) a construction budget that determines how much resources the construction industry has to operate with?
Click to expand...
Isn’t this managed by the construction building as the other buildings do?
 
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will repairs/renovation/maintenance be a thing where the more buildings you have some construction points will be taken away in order to take care of the buildings you already have, making it necessary to expand the construction economy? (+ a heavy cost if it's a province that was occupied during a war)
 
TBH looks somewhat oversimplified.

Questions again:
1. Is the construction of military installations handled by the same system?

2. What about infrastructure / railroad building?

3. Does this mean that there are no goods requirements for buildings beside those consumed by Construction Sector? I remember how I had to wait for and stockpile machine tools to be able to build new factory earlier. That seemed more realistic.

4. Will there be debuffs for shuffling around your construction queue? It looks very unrealistic if there are no costs for shifting construction crews and materials from an Administrative building in Marseille to an Iron mine in Alsace.

5. How will technologies affect cost of construction? It will be more realistic if the buffs are type-of-building specific - i.e. invention of steam crane should give bigger benefits to bridge building than to farm building.

6. Can Construction Sector be split? I.e. can I mod it so that I have Construction Sector (who can build in civilian stuff incorporated states) and Colonial Construction Office (can build civilian stuff only in unincorporated states) and Military Construction Office (builds only military ports/forts).
 
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