Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #104 - Quality of Life improvements in 1.6

[CaesarVincens]

Is there a way to only see unemployment instead of jobseeker? Reducing unemployment is far bigger priority vs make employed ptomoted.

It is already possible to filter only peasants or only unemployed by using the "Settings" dropdown at the top of the state selection for construction.

 

[adil3tr]

Please show attitudes towards both nations on the diplomatic play UI, show us the ideologies of generals in the outliner, let us change imports/exports tariffs on the list of goods, and tell us if there's unused capacity in factories/mines when a production method change says it'll raise prices for a good.. Thank you for the construction UI overhaul.

 

[Tricontinental]

WHATTT

I've read a lot of dev diaries in all my 10 years of Paradox gaming and this has to be one of the juiciest ones I've seen! Keep up the great work, Vic3 team! Can't wait to see how it plays out!!

 

[Don_Quigleone]

There is one more thing that is not mentioned in the DevDiary, as it was added at the last minute - topbar now shows how much Infamy your country has.

View attachment 1079180

For the infamy indicator, I think it should be colour coded, depending on the AI thresholds. White for <25, yellow for <50, and red above 50, or something like that.

 

[Metz]

Would the tech tree look better if instead of having the strings connecting the techs, the techs were connected by semi-steam punk angular pipes/tubes?

Or even more elaborate, a collage of Victorian era items/goods/machines and each tech picture is surrounded by objects related to that tech (ex. Lathe tech is surrounded by a lathe and dynamite is surrounded by a pile of dynamite).

 

[Metz]

Not for 1.6, but definitely for a future update.

Instead of having urban and rural tabs, could the tabs be Resources, Agriculture, and Manufacturing? It would make the lists less long since there would be 3 groups. The naming conventions would also match the decrees. There are 23 agriculture buildings (5 grain types, 10 plantations, 1 livestock, 1 vineyard, 1 whaling and 5 subsistence farms). 9 resources (5 mining , 1 gold field, wood, oil rig, electricity ), and 18 manufacturing buildings.

 

[Taylor_]

love it

 

[Cagallo]

The qualifications tooltip rework is gold, especially if one plays with mods that increase "difficulty" by making qualifications more scarce and difficult. Thanks!

 

[anbeck]

I know that for patch 1.6 there will only be very few changes made to the systems "under the hood" (looking forward to the exception: migration, yeah!).
And I know that going from 1.x to 2.x is said to require major changes to the game's major system(s).

But I think these UX changes will make the game feel like we are getting Victoria 3 patch 2.0. I know that previously, most of the information could be found somewhere. But now it is there. There! Where we need it! Many complaints by people who did not learn the wiki by heart will taken care of (especially in diplo plays, pacts and buildings not hiring), meaning that these changs will make Victoria 3 much more accessible to new players, and much more "comprehensible" for all players.

For me, this is much more than a UX polish. It is about taking all the lessons learned form 1+ years of people playing and complaining (eh, I mean, giving constructive feedback!) about certain things they found puzzling or obscure. If these changes work the way I think they'll work, it will make the game feel like a different game more so than the military or MAPI changes we had in the past.

I know that patch will be patch 1.6. But 30 or so years down the line, I might be telling my grandchildren: "You know, for some of us, patch 1.6 was actually patch 2.0."

 

[hapster]

Will there be an open beta for 1.6?

 

[IsaacCAT]

 

[Leoreth]

During one of our Personal Development Time days we finally made a working prototype for what has internally been referred to as the Holy Grail of Tooltips UX: Tables in Tooltips.​

I don't want to be too negative on an overall good list of UX improvements, but the dev team really needs to get over the mindset that every UI problem can be and should be best solved with a tooltip and if some information can only be communicated in a certain way (e.g. tables) that thing should also be crammed into a tooltip. It has become evident to anyone playing this game that Vic3 is trying to address way too many interface problems by having huge triply nested tooltips that are not a good experience to interact with and not the ideal solution to the problem. To see that anything tooltip related is still considered the "holy grail of UX" in the team is quite depressing, because I had hoped that this realisation had worked its way to the devs despite its initial infatuation with tooltips as the one tool to solve every UX problem.

I do not think it's a good idea to put tables into tooltips. Why? Because the good thing about tables is that you can sort, filter, and select its rows and columns. Are we supposed to do that in the tooltip as well? This game already has a problem with many tables and table-like UI elements giving the player no control over how they are sorted or filtered.

I am worried that these tooltip tables will start out without any player interaction (beyond probably, and worryingly, the ability to hover over its contents to be served another tooltip...) and even if they were present or later added, now I have to manipulate a complex format of information inside a tiny tooltip that may go away if I move or click the mouse the wrong way.

Please just give us proper menus/tabs/ledgers that contain the information that you are trying to cram into tooltips, where we can actually use the full screen real estate to look at and manipulate them. The integration with other UI elements and tooltips should work in such a way that the tooltip links to the right table with the appropriate filtering and sorting already applied.

So to use your example, there should not be a special party breakdown table in the party tooltip. There should be a dedicated ledger page / table dedicated to interest groups that I am able to sort and filter in all sorts of ways. One of the breakdown options should be "by party": if I select the Resistance Party, it should show the breakdown of IGs just in that party, instead of the default where it shows the breakdown of IGs nationwide. The only thing the Resistance Party tooltip should do is send me to this table and automatically select the "by party: Resistance Party" breakdown.

I am worried about the announcement that we will see more tables crammed into more tooltips.

 

[GoguRomania]

As someone who has played a bit around advanced software programming, you can just use <table></table> to add tables to tooltips. There's a lot of useful information here: https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_tables.asp

 

[ruhrbaron]

I love all of these changes, wish we could also set mobilization options globally tho. Excited for 1.6 either way!
These changes will reduce quite dramatically the number of UI mods I'll have to use, very nice!

 

[amocpower]

Love you guys! Amazing things are coming!

There is one wish from me : you can´t move a slider by click on bars. e.g. In option/Audio menu, i want to put Volume from 100% to around 50%. I can´t click on middle of bar the move slider. I need to catch the slider then move to position. Same with Army Trasfermenu...actually anywhere in the game.

Its maybe its a small thing, but i would very happy if you change this. (and i hope i could explain what i mean)

 

[Dsingis]

There are already filters for jobseekers, peasants, and unemployed.

Also while not particularly common there are instances where you would prioritize one industry over any other and not have the unemployed or peasant workforce available. In which case knowing that there are pops willing to leave their current job is useful information.

This is a dev diary about quality of life improvements for the UI. Tell me how it is a quality of life improvement to have to constantly switch between two separate filters for unemployed and pesants just to know where people are that could take up a job in a building I want to build. Tell me how it is quality of life to have a useless number that includes already employed people, when I am looking for people to work in a building? Tell me how it is quality of life, that I see 2 million ""jobseekers"", decide to waste my country's ressources on building 40 steel mills in a state only to see that there aren't even enough people to fill the 20 steel mills that already existed there? Tell me how it is quality of life, that the AI keeps building their buildings in states with no unemployed people, just because the number of jobseekers is high?

That number is useless, if it includes employed people. "Prioritize industry over another", use subsidies, or downsize unneeded buildings. How does knowing the amount of people who want to switch their job but already have one benefit you in the least bit? I want to prioritize steel building in a state, okay there are 2 million ""jobseekers"", I build 40 steel mills and... nobody goes there. whop-di-freaking-do, I have to subsidize it anyways, or remove other buildings.

 

[Metz]

Can there be more transparency or straightforwardness to knowing why trade won’t increase with other countries? The UI does mention that an increase in volume would result in less profit but if the UI was more explicit by breaking down the components, it would be more understandable.

Also can you add a way to see what country contributes what to a market? That way if you want to leave or change a market, you know what shortages/surpluses you have to work with.

 

[v0lta1c_]

I love these changes! Everything ranging from the better diplomatic plays screen to the upgrade all units button is just awesome. Excited for the 1.6 update now! Also love the detailed pop list!

Also, since this diary is considering the ui changes in 1.6, can we have a slider in options which we can use to adjust how long you need to hover over an underlined text to open the tooltip? It's usually not a problem but i tend to check my prestige very often and it gets a bit anooying to be waiting hovering over the prestige number and then again hovering over the leading goods producer number.

 

[RELee]

There's a guaranteed RELee trigger.

 

[Ninking]

I'd love to be able to see a Census Data tab for the whole global population, including uncivs Seeing it change and grow over the span of a game would be a lot of fun, and it might help identify bugs and imbalances related to assimilation & migration.