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the_hdk said:
Oof...the graphics of each pop are hard to read. they are too small in the text and maybe its my old 30years old eyes but I cannot distinguish them.
Yeah, you are right. They are definitely a bit hard to read when presented in the context of tooltips.
Make Victoria 3 said:
How will the "age" mechanic work exactly? Is there some age pyramid or will individual pop ages be tracked (which sounds like a performance nightmare) or just x% will die per year so in the case of literacy if you do not educate at least x% as well it will go down?
The latter. There is a slight bias to choose the illiterate members of the Pop when deaths are resolved, which could either represent the fact that the older members of your population
tends to be more likely to be illiterate, or that they couldn't read the warning labels on the factory floor, take your pick. But if a Pop's education access decreases below their current Literacy level it doesn't matter how large that bias is, net literacy rate will still go down.
spots611 said:
Are the discrimination impacts on qualifications a replacement to the Vic II ban on industry in colonial states? I've been wondering how colonies will work and this seems like a far more elegant mechanic.
It's related to this, yes. During development we also experimented with having hard requirements for certain Professions, so the culturally discriminated could
never turn into Aristocrats, for example. But this led to huge problems in recently conquered colonial territories where the newly discriminated would be robbed of their land holdings with the result that conquered farms and plantations became completely non-operational until accepted pops had the time and will to move in to take over operation. This sounds like a fun little side effect but was actually anything but in practice. What happens under this system is that the cowed and discriminated Aristocrats gradually lose their qualifications to
be Aristocrats under these new laws, and will over time be replaced by other Pops deemed to be more suitable for the job.
Mattwae said:
I assume that buildings that reduce wages in order to return into the black won't run into the issue of:
- Reduced wages makes pops seek employment elsewhere.
- Reduced workers reduces production
- Reduced production reduces income
- Reduced income places the building in the red
- The building reduces wages in order to maintain profits.
Both because this is expensive computationally, and because it might cause a building to employ no one and produce nothing.
Although it would be rather realistic.
Click to expand...
Reduced wages could result in Pops seeking employment elsewhere, which reduces production. But this actually tends to result in a net
gain for the remaining Pops in the building, since it now pays fewer workers to make fewer goods, resulting in lower supply but retained demand, which means each unit produced and sold yields marginally more profit. So chronically unprofitable industries tend to find an equilibrium point where they can retain their current wage rate at the expense of not being able to achieve full employment.
LucasG21 said:
Will pops have any bias in demotion? For example, is it more likely for an aristocrat to demote to a farmer pop than to a machinist, given the similarities?
"Demotion" as such doesn't happen in this system. What happens is that an underpaid Aristocrat will take any job they qualify for as long as it pays better. So it's more likely that an Aristocrat will take a Machinist job at a very profitable factory than become a Farmer on a pretty humdrum Wheat Farm, and vice versa.
Kaspar Osraige said:
Some of these mechanics seem to represent only a capitalistic, free wage market. Will cooperative or command economies be treated any differently, especially with the competition part and how they employ people?
Great question! Currently there's no direct impact from the Command Economy Law on Qualifications or how Pops are preferentially sorted when hiring them. Qualifications is best thought of as a mishmash of "could this Pop literally carry out this particular Profession, given their current attributes" and "would other Pops in the country actually hire this Pop for this Profession, given their current attributes". The first part of that equation doesn't really change under Command Economy or cooperative forms of economic organization - you absolutely need a certain level of education to become an Academic or Engineer, and the greater the number of people who know how to read and write the greater the chance one of them will have the talents and tendencies to perform those jobs well. As for the second part... I'm not sure it'd make a difference, either! People tend to be, well, people, regardless of economic system, and people have biases about who they think would be a credible farmboy or clerk or military officer. So it's entirely possible Laws like those will end up making a difference to Qualification calculations before Victoria 3 is released, these numbers and factors aren't final, but even if so it probably won't make a huge impact.
What
does change the equations quite a bit is more egalitarian access to the factors that produce Qualifications. In a liberal and non-discriminatory society, with a public school system and low wealth disparity, Pops will accumulate Qualifications a lot more equally on account of having more similar properties than in a discriminatory and stratified society.
joe9594 said:
Obviously you are the ones who have a feel for how this is balanced but I am shocked that the numbers seen there are so weighted to consider current employment over everything else. I mean for aristocrats wealth is contributing 0.1 per point, literacy is 0.01 per point and being officers is giving 9.71. So pops with wealth of 80 (insanely high) and literacy of 100% would between those things have as much contribution as just the factor from being an officer. And it is even moreconcerning for other job types which need actual skills.
Seems like it will make getting a population with the qualifications you need mainly just dependant on having the more basic pops of that same type (machinists to engineers, officers to aristocrats, shopkeepers to capitalists etc).
That seems unfortunate, a population with poor education (even if it is 20%) but lots of basic factory workers should only produce a tiny fraction of the engineers that one with high education can, same for shopkeepers to capitalists. The skills are not that transferable and they represent very different kinds of work and economic systems.
Good catch! Factors and values are very work-in-progress, and the impact from current Profession is indeed inflated at the moment compared to where it should be.
Having said that, it's not necessarily the case that having Wealth 20 means that every point of Wealth provides 0.1 to the algorithm. In the case of Aristocrats, the algorithm currently looks like this:
- requires Wealth > 10 to be positive at all, otherwise reduce by -2
- add ( Wealth - 10 ) / 5
- add literacy rate
- if Officers or Bureaucrats, multiply the current tally by 5 (this is the part that will be nerfed, likely to 2 or 3)
- if not culturally accepted, reduce by 90%
So a well-to-do, culturally accepted Clerk with Wealth 40 and Literacy 80% would gain a base factor of +6.8 to their Aristocrat Qualifications, which is a very respectable figure without already being one of the two preferred types.
And yeah, this algorithm is really hard to parse and we don't really expect players to keep these figures in their head - this breakdown is more for auditing purposes than gameplay purposes. If the player wants to ensure they gain more Qualifications for Aristocrats in their population, they should look at the Aristocrat description which will explain the factors in more comprehensible terms, like "Potential rises with Wealth and to a lesser degree by Literacy".
jaredstanko said:
I see that the steel mills are promoting machinists and engineers from qualified pops, but losing engineers to the war industry too quickly
So if the steel mills are gaining machinists but losing engineers that will make their production method 'recipe' stop working as well. So then they'll raise wages for engineers eventually? Do buildings raise wages for different jobs at different rates?
I hope you'll be able to prevent the systems from locking up, for example having a factory lose all its engineers and then have their budget deep in the red on account of inefficient machinists still drawing wages.
Buildings have a general "wage rate" and Professions have a wage weight that determines how large of a multiple of that rate they should get. So wages paid out are always proportional based on those weights. A building that needs more Engineers and finds it can't attract them based on their low wage rate will raise the wage rate generally, not only for Engineers. The latter would be cool but there's so many moving parts already - floating wages for each individual Profession in each building is the stuff of designer nightmares. Maybe one day!
With respect to the latter question, buildings will always aim for proportionality between Professions - if a factory loses all its Engineers and can't promote Machinists or other Professions to take over, it will start letting go of other employees until it returns to proportionality and profitability, and can start competing again to get some of those Engineers back.
OllyOllyOxenFree said:
Ok, if the pops now have professions and not types then does that mean:
1) Pops who don't have the correct type for a profession have maluses?
2) Does that mean that education facilities promote pop types before they enter the workforce if you have it?
3) Is there a cap as with Victoria 2? (5% for soldiers, 2% for officers, 4% for clergy etc.)
4) Does urbanization mechanic encourage pops to move into these factories from the rural countryside?
5) Do national focuses work the same way they did in Vic 2?
Thanks
Click to expand...
We'll get more into this in a couple of weeks but real quick:
1, 2) Pops who don't have the Qualifications for a Profession cannot get hired for that Profession. All Profession changes occur at point of hire, driven by market forces.
3) It's all based on the requirements of the Buildings as defined by their active Production Methods.
4) Only if those factories are more profitable (as they tend to be) and therefore capable of paying higher wages, AND the rural population qualify.
5) No. We have
Decrees, and there is a decree to promote social mobility which helps build Qualifications in a state generally. But there's no "Encourage Profession X" type national focus, as this is driven by the needs of the Buildings.
cb30001 said:
What's the difference between farmers and peasants?
Peasants are employed on Subsistence Farms only and satisfy most of their needs off the land, outside of the economy proper.
Agamidae said:
No, I can see that. In this tooltip in particular, engineers are almost invisible. Farmers are hard to see. Machinists and laborers to a point too.
View attachment 749389
It is much better in the next tooltip. So they need to figure out the backgrounds or make the icons much brighter. Maybe add more color to differentiate them?
View attachment 749388
Will ping our UX experts on this, thanks for the feedback! These smaller "text-icons" for Professions are pretty new and not fully polished yet, so hopefully we can address this.
Edit to add: but of course, they're already
on the case 
Irbynx said:
How will subsidies play into that? Will the factories still dynamically shift wages in command economies/under subsidies, or you'd be able to manually handle that?
Factories will still dynamically shift the wage rate
they pay out while subsidized, so it still orients itself properly in the dynamic economy. The government is then required to top up that wage to pay the workers at least a "fair" wage, if needed, and to cover any shortfall if materiel costs exceed revenue from sales of produced goods. In return the building maintains as full employment and throughput as Qualifications allow.
Leoreth said:
A couple of questions:
- While this isn't directly related to qualifications, you mention that buildings adjust their wages depending on their economic conditions, and that pops will try to take jobs depending on those wages if there is a significant enough difference, including promoting based on their qualifications. Beyond the monthly qualification update, how much inertia is there in this system? Price shocks are possible, but the labour market is much less flexible than the commodity market, due to contracts, the need to move, and general human tendency to avoid change. This inertia has historically both prevented economies from reorienting efficiently to changing market conditions, but also sometimes buffered economic shocks. How will that look in the game? If it's checked too often and everyone can switch their employment I expect things to be quite swingy.
- Is there any distinction in the aristocrat and capitalist profession from other professions? Does a building/production method "need" those professions to operate? How does that correlate with the (not yet completely explained) mechanic that these pops provide the investment pool to build these buildings in the first place. I would assume that those pops are the "owners" of the buildings they financed. Obviously there is a level of abstraction going on here, but it seems strange to me that e.g. more people qualified to be capitalists are "promoted" because a factory "needs" more owners. If that's the case, what does the "need" for capitalists in a factory represent? Intuitively I would say a factory runs just as well if it is owned by fewer than more people.
- Does the fact that a pop is qualified to promote to a more socially prestigious profession but lacks the economic conditions to do so play a role in other sections of the game? For example, imagine there are a lot of machinists who are qualified to promote to engineer but the country currently does not have any additional jobs for engineers. Does the game consider promoting from machinist to engineer something that is socially desirable in itself, and would that fact lead to unhappiness / political opposition / emigration? Or is all of that a function of the wage difference between machinists and engineers?
Click to expand...
1. Deciding on the degree of inertia is a recurring design problem in the development of Victoria 3! On the one hand we want stability, both the
sense of stability so your country feels like a real breathing nation full of willful people, and the
impact of stability on a dynamic economic simulation to ensure one part of it doesn't overreact to another and bring the whole thing crashing down. On the other hand too much inertia makes the system feel unresponsive and removes the sense of cause and effect. To answer your specific question, productive buildings have a buffer called a Cash Reserve into which it will deposit any excess profits in fair weather and use as a buffer to avoid drastic crashes when the wind goes the other way. Buildings with an empty Cash Reserve will act much more drastically than ones with a full reserve, but all buildings that lose money will take some cautious steps to try to fix the problem before they lose too much. This means we get both some inertia where the economy doesn't go belly-up overnight because some Machinists decided to relocate, and the cause and effect of seeing buildings start to lose money, wages starting to lower, and Pops starting to change careers.
2. Aristocrats and Capitalists are required and they are required proportionally to the other Professions in the building. While that is arguably unrealistic - how many Aristocrats do you really need to own the land for people to work it productively, after all - but there's unfortunate side effects from not doing things this way, such as Farms full of Laborers but no Aristocrats to siphon off the profits being able to pay astronomic wages, and then when some Aristocrats move in and take over the land the building is suddenly deep in the red because the Aristocrats need to get paid their share. This then leads to metas where the factors that develop Qualifications for Aristocrats are artificially throttled to ensure simple Farms provide amazing wages without having to engage in any form of ownership reform. Disproportionality between Professions tend to throw the whole balance off, so we avoid it like the plague. Regarding Capitalist investments, it helps to think of a building as an industrial sector, not a single factory. Capitalists invest in expanding the manufacturing industry, which creates opportunities for other companies to move in and start businesses, which leads to more Capitalists.
3. In Victoria 3, Pops never change Profession unless a building offers them a job different than what they currently have. In this, Pops are perfectly rational actors and will only take jobs that pay better, regardless of perceived social status. However, with increased pay tends to come more political strength and other benefits, so that dimension isn't completely ignored either.
warsoldier said:
Concerning wages, will trade unions and strike actions be represented in some way?
The Trade Unions is an Interest Group present in every country. It tends to be weak at game start but often become very relevant in industrializing nations.
Regarding Strikes, they're present in the game and you will learn more about them later!
vyshan said:
So the rockerfellers, JP Morgan, Carnnige and other trusts and robber barons never engaged in such behavior? thats not going to be modeled?
That's not going to be modelled
systemically at least, because it's no fun as a player to lay the tracks and build the infrastructure for a new Steel Mill and have the existing Steel Mill owners decide that production won't be increased because that might lead to them becoming individually less wealthy.
Valentin the II said:
I wonder, can qualifications be tied to technology?
Like, more machinists can qualify to be engineers in London where the technology is more advanced and the concept of a steam Engine is widely known and accepted than Kairo. Not only being dependent on the literacy and integration, literate people study different things which are effected by the society they live in.
It's not included in the set of factors currently, but it's very easy to add (or mod) in. Will take it into consideration!
Vathek said:
Few questions:
1. What will an unemployed pops ‘profession’ be? Just whatever they were last employed as?
2. Why no artisan profession to simulate cottage industry as in Vicky 2? Is this modelled in another way?
3. Do buildings in the red only reduce wages or do they also lay off workers? The latter would seem to be a better simulation of individual firms represented by ‘the building’ going bust and firms downsizing to reduce costs, which happens more often in the real world than wage cuts.
1. What they were last employed as, yes. This also gives them precedence for any new jobs created of that type in the state.
2. It's modeled in another way.
3. We used to have them do both actually,
but the problem with that was that since wage rate is not set by the player but by the building, yet the building size
is controllable by the player in the sense that they can pay to expand it, if the player pays money and time to expand a building which then won't hire because with the current wage rate that'd put it into the red (due to increasing demand of input goods / increasing supply of output goods), that's a very unsatisfying experience and leads to a lot of analysis paralysis. It's a much more satisfying experience to expand a building, see building wage rate decrease somewhat, and see some of those employees move into other jobs to make room for poorer employees. With this approach we also don't get the weird downward spirals in the economy where lower supply of Tools due to layoffs leads to lower profit in other manufacturing industries, which in turn leads to layoffs, etc. It
sounds cool but it's very annoying when it happens.
Ramidel said:
Are serfs considered slaves or peasants?
Peasants. Victoria 3's definition of a Slave is a person who is wholly owned by another person and can be bought and sold as property. This excludes serfs, most indentured servants, etc who are instead represented as the Profession they're carrying out.
MTGian said:
So, let's say a country wants to restrict social mobility. If you are a farmer, then you (and your descendants) stay farmers. If you are a soldier, then you (and your descendants) stay soldiers. Could this system model that in some way? What would that look like?
If we wanted to do something like that there's a modifier that can be added to, well, anything: Laws, Institutions, Buildings, via Event options, Decisions, etc that reduces Qualification gain across the board. But typically we assume that the baseline is the lowest possible social mobility, and instead of penalties we apply bonuses to those things that provide better social mobility across the nation. Same effect but has a better feel, especially since Pops having good Qualifications is virtually never a bad thing from the player's perspective - it just gives them more options.
durbal said:
'...and 74 more items.' This is the same UI problem that CK3 has, except now even more massive. There needs to be a better way to display this information or the amount of critical data that warrants informing the player needs to be cut down.
Victoria 3 is looking more and more like a spreadsheet with a bad UI facade over the top with every new dev diary.
There is a much better way to display this information one level up, where it's aggregated.
Our philosophy is to always aggregate so the player can make good decisions on the right level, but also always provide ways to delve deeper into the raw data on demand.
MrMineHeads said:
So buildings won't engage in any layoffs, just a reduction in wage rate? So how do Pops become unemployed?
Unemployment occurs in instances where some employees leaves and proportionality cannot be easily restored (i.e. a couple of smaller businesses in the sector closed down because a bunch of Engineers went elsewhere, rendering the Machinists, Laborers, and Capitalists temporarily inconvenienced for a few weeks until they can find other employment), when there's inbound migration but insufficient jobs (and/or insufficient Qualifications among the immigrants), and when automation Production Methods are activated that makes a chunk of workforce redundant.
Jorlem said:
From a UI/Immersion perspective, this is a place where I think V2 did it better than V3 looks like it is doing. Having the POPs represented by pictures of people makes them feel more like
people, while V3's icons lose that. There's nothing in these icons that indicates that they represent people, and I think that is important to have.
The Pop icons in V2 were great for this, agreed. The reasons we didn't use this approach in V3 are threefold:
1) Static icons that look like people could not possibly even
begin to represent the diversity of people all around the world. I find V2's icons to be immersive when I play Britain, but pretty immersion-shattering when I play Bhutan.
2) On the other hand we don't want different icons for different cultures, either, since the point of an "icon" is to be instantly recognizable even between different game sessions.
3) We have the technological luxury of actually being able to display each Pop as a rendered portrait of a unique person, which reduces the need to use Profession icons to give you a sense of Pop personhood by approximately 97%.
Jamaican Castle said:
Can there be unemployment if a resource runs into such a shortage that it stops being available altogether? (As opposed to just being more expensive.)
This will make the building extremely unprofitable which will cause it to dump its wages. This will cause the lowest-paid employees to return to being Peasants on Subsistence Farms or just migrate away. It can also cause unemployment if a bunch of Laborers leave, nobody else comes in to replace them on account of the low wages offered, and Pops of other Professions are fired to restore proportionality.
toegut said:
the question was whether a pop can add new qualifications simultaneously, not whether it already carries around multiple qualifications in its pool. From the screenshots posted it's not clear whether the pop can add +4 to machinists and +2 to aristocrats this same month, or whether it fills its pool of qualified machinists first and then starts to fill aristocrats.
Qualifications for all Professions are updated for each Pop once per month. There's no queue where they have to fill up Qualifications for one Profession before moving onto another.
wisecat said:
1. How big will this cash reserve be?
2. Will its size be static or dynamic?
3. If dynamic will it change with:
3.1. Change in price of product produced by the building
3.2. Change in size of building
3.3. Change of profitability rate of building
3.4. Change of average wages in a country
4. Will this reserve disappear in command economy?
The size is static by building type but depends on the building level, so a level 3 Textile Mill has 3x the size Cash Reserve of a level 1 Textile Mill. It does not disappear under command economies, no.
wisecat said:
In RL most socialist economies subsidize full or almost full employment even if a given factory is unprofitable.
Will this be simulated in game? Can you spend your national treasury on this?
(to be honest, I don't believe that VIC3 as it is now can convincingly simulate a socialist economy, because it will require a whole new economic system to be programmed in, with such key distinctions as totally fiat money, non-convertible money, total ban on conversion of bank deposits into cash for enterprises).
We'll talk more about this later but in short this
is simulated via the way subsidy mechanics works in a Command Economy.
You're correct that some of the fundamental distinctions between capitalist and communist systems of organizing the economy cannot be captured with our market mechanics, since it's completely driven by supply and demand affecting goods prices in ways that doesn't make a clear distinction between "sales price" and "value" .
Rhion said:
If a potentially qualified pop promotes to a profession requiring a higher literacy or wealth, does this lower the literacy rate of the pop they originated from?
Yes! The literacy rate shown is actually a computation, the value stored in the Pop is how many of its members are literate. These literate members are transferred in greater quantities if the Pop is hired into a job that requires greater Literacy, so it will in effect drain the source Pop's literacy rate.
kalauer said:
So if I understand this correctly, let's have a look at this example:
There are two job opportunities in a state, both competing for the same workers. Let's say, they each want 100 and there are 100 in total in the state. One is slightly more profitable than the other. Over time, if nothing else changes, we will see an equilibrium in which the more profitable workplace ("1") is filled to 100% (taking in all available workers) and the other ("2") has 0?
Now what happened is that 1 increased its wages to compete against 2 and because 1 is more profitable, it could do so longer than 2, winning the race. However, 1 still diminished its profitability because of the high wages. My question is: Will the now empty 2 keep pushing up wages for 1, until it is demolished?
Or do I have an error in my example and, e.g. the split between 1 and 2 is more continuous, like 80%/20%, depending on the profitability-advantage, because it is reduced when having higher employment rate?
And in any case, we effectively see a distribution of wealth to the limiting factor of production (in this case: labor)? If there were more wokers than jobs, we'd see the profiuts go to the jop opportunity owners? If so, are the owners' wages paid before the job opportunity balance is made or will they effectively work for free to fill their jobs (given that "being in black" is the hard cut-off)?
Click to expand...
There's a limit to how many Pops can be hired by a building each week. In week 1, workplace 1 will gain hiring precedence and will recruit the "best" workers until it's reached its limit. If there are more qualifying workers after that, workplace 2 will recruit them, up to their limit. If the building manages to hire it won't increase wages. Now, in week 2, workplace 1 has now increased their throughput and their net profit as a result has decreased somewhat, and it won't try to increase wages since it's been successful in recruiting new workers. This makes it comparatively less desirable than workplace 2, which might have increased its wages and as such might get precedence over 1 this time around.
Over time, the most productive / profitable building will be able to hire more workers than the less productive building, but they'll both get opportunities to increase their throughput and for as long as they have profit to spare and job opportunities to fill they will continue to compete on wages to steal workers from each other.
As for owner wages, they're distinct from dividends - these are the excess profits paid out to shareholders (=owners) after Cash Reserve deposits have been made. So owners take their "fixed" share of the wages alongside everyone else in the building, but then get paid a weekly bonus depending on how well the building is doing.
hazard151 said:
Probably out of scope of this dev diary, but how does this interact with pops out of State? If there's a labour shortage will it start pulling in qualified personnel from different states? If there's a labour surplus, will it start pushing the unemployed to other states?
At the moment there is no explicit "there are job opportunities over there, time to move" mechanic, since that would require us to assess the
wage paid for each of those job opportunities compared to the current wage the Pop is being offered to not get weird effects. Essentially to model it perfectly would be to assess each opportunity for each Pop
across a whole market which would be much too CPU heavy and arguably quite unrealistic given that there are huge barriers to packing up and moving even to an adjacent state in the same country.
However, the Standard of Living (which we'll learn more about in a couple of weeks) of Pops in a state does affect its migration attraction. Indirectly this means that if a state has a good amount of labor competition and therefore relatively high wages,
and reasonable access to consumer goods and government amenities that affect that measure, it will be a better state to move to. In addition, unemployed Pops are more likely than employed Pops to take the risk of moving to another state in search of greener pastures. This does create the effect you're describing, it just takes a longer route to get there.
