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Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #13 - Standard of Living

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Hello again and welcome to yet another walkthrough of some interrelated systems fundamental to Victoria 3’s economic model: Standard of Living, Wealth, Pop Needs, and Consumption.

All Pops in Victoria 3 have a Standard of Living score between 1 and 99, which represents - by a perfectly scientific and objective metric, don’t @ me - precisely how great their life is. Pops with levels 1-4 are labeled Starving, levels 5-9 are Struggling, and so on through Impoverished, Middling, Secure, Prosperous, Affluent, Wealthy, Lavish, and at levels 60+, Opulent. We don’t really expect a lot of Pops to reach levels 60+ but - knowing you folks - we’ve left plenty of headroom to accommodate your mad economic experiments.

Standard of Living affects two major aspects of the game: birth- and death rate, and Pop loyalty.

Birth rate is simply the percentage of children born to Pops each year, while death rate is the percentage of Pops who die. Both values start out high and decline with increasing Standard of Living, but birth rate declines slower than death rate, leading to a net increase in population growth with increasing Standard of Living. This system models that increasing Standard of Living tends to lead to longer life expectancy but declining natality. Each parameter can be modified independently by a variety of effects.

Scratch your priesthood’s back and they’ll scratch yours. Note that Interest Group Traits can vary between Interest Group variants, so a different religion might provide a different benefit.
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There are side effects to emancipation! But while reduced population growth here initially appears to be a penalty, increasing the proportion of industrial workforce at the same time tends to lead to increasing Standard of Living, which provides a net increase in population growth.
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Pop loyalty is altered whenever their Standard of Living increases or declines from its current value. Martin will get into much more detail on this in next week’s Development Diary on Political Movements.

A Pop’s Wealth attribute forms the foundation for its Standard of Living. Pops can also gain more intangible boosts or penalties to their Standard of Living from any number of sources.

Pops accumulate Wealth over time while their weekly income exceeds their weekly expenses. Conversely, if a Pop’s expenses exceed its income, Wealth will decline. How large their expenses are depends on what and how much they consume, which is also dependent on their Wealth. What this means is that as long as a Pop’s income remains the same, and the cost of the goods and services in their state and market remains the same, that Pop’s Wealth will over time drift towards exactly the level of consumption they can afford to sustain. Of course, as Wealth changes the consumption also changes, which affects the prices of the goods in the market, which might in turn affect their wages, dividends, etcetera.

This weekly shortfall of funds will eventually lead to a reduction in Wealth and thereby consumption, but since the shortfall is only a small fraction of its income it will take several months to have an impact on the Wealth score and thereby the Standard of Living.
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Wealth has a number of functions in addition to forming the basis for Standard of Living. A Pop’s raw Political Strength (excluding any such power conferred by the country’s Voting Franchise, which is treated separately) is dependent on their Wealth. Some privately operated Institutions provide benefits to Pops only in relation to their Wealth. Many Professional Qualifications also require Pops to have a certain amount of Wealth.

Each Wealth level is defined by a set of Needs and an amount of “value” that needs to be spent on goods to fulfill that Need. This “value” is defined in goods base prices, such that the Need for Standard Clothing for a Pop of size 10,000 with Wealth level 14 might be fulfilled by buying £87 worth of Clothes, assuming perfectly balanced supply and demand. If the actual price of Clothes where the Pop lives is over-demanded, their cost to fulfill this need will also be higher. As a result, cheaper goods means wealthier, happier Pops.

This Peasant Pop’s Wealth is low (6), so it consumes only the basic necessities.
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Many Needs can be satisfied by a variety of different goods. For example, the Need for Heating requires Wood, Fabric, Coal, Oil, and/or Electricity. These can be purchased in any combination assuming the total base prices add up to the required value. When given this option Pops will attempt to make a rational purchase decision based on which goods are the most available, satisfying their Need with some mix of these goods or even only one, if that’s the only one available. In this way an inland, isolated state might not consume any Fish at all as long as it has sufficient Grain, Fruit, Meat, or even packaged Groceries to satisfy their Need for food.

A breakdown of how the Peasants in Ceylon spent their heating budget this week.
heating-for-peasants-in-ceylon.png

Goods can also appear in several different Needs categories. Groceries, Meat, and Fruit can fulfil the need for both Basic Food and Luxury Food, but Grain or Fish can only fulfil the need for Basic Food. As a result, maintaining only Millet Farms and Fishing Wharfs to meet your food needs will mostly satisfy your poor Pops, while focusing on Livestock Ranches and Banana Plantations will cause wealthy Pops to inflate the price of the available food supply and further impoverish the poor. Operating productive Food Industries that can turn Grain and Fish into Groceries is good for everyone in your country, and frees up any available supply of Meat and Fruit to be consumed by those with a Need for Luxury Food.

A breakdown of who requires Basic Food and how it can be fulfilled.
basic-food-substitution.png

Lower Wealth levels have only a handful of Needs, such as Simple Clothing, Heating, Basic Food, and Intoxicants. The middle levels introduce more refined Needs like Household Items, Services, Luxury Drinks, and Free Movement. Really wealthy Pops consume increasingly vast quantities of Luxury Goods to impress and outdo their peers. In some cases Needs disappear entirely in favor of more diverse Needs. The Need for Simple Clothing which can be satisfied by both Fabric and Clothes will, as a Pop is raised from abject poverty, be gradually phased out by the Need for Standard Clothing which include only professionally sewn items.

Compared to the Wealth 6 Peasants, these Wealth 17 Bureaucrats are more diverse in their requirements.
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Introducing new goods into your market will help you diversify your economy and alleviate the demand on crucial industrial goods. Importing Oil - either petroleum from newly discovered deposits or whale oil from the few places in the world that produce it - will cause your Pops to buy some quantity of it for heating instead of Coal or Electricity, which lowers the price of those goods and help make your industries more profitable. Introducing Opium into your market will decrease Pop demand for Liquor and Tobacco... for good or ill.

Some goods are favored over others by default if available. Once Electricity is available to them, due to its convenience Pops will prefer to buy it over Wood or Coal, even if they’re the same price. Some goods can be replaced by other goods entirely, while others will always be required to some bare minimum. Train travel can completely replace the need for having your own Automobile to drive around in, but having an Automobile doesn’t ever completely remove the need for an occasional train ride to see your cousin who lives all the way in Paris.

In addition to these factors cultures can develop Obsessions for certain goods, and some even have Taboos they must abide by. A country can also encourage or discourage the consumption of certain goods using Authority, perhaps in an effort to avoid enriching a hated enemy or entice Pops to buy something that’s heavily taxed over something that is not. This impacts the purchase habits of Pops affected despite this being irrational from a strictly financial perspective.

What if the Bengali were obsessed with the status afforded to them by Luxury Furniture? This could happen due to events, or organically because Luxury Furniture is a really prevalent luxury good in markets where a lot of Bengali Pops live. But even if this habit is developed around their homelands, Bengali Pops that migrate abroad - to the USA or Australia or Japan - will continue preferring Luxury Furniture to other luxury goods, and will suffer financially if the same level of access is not available there.
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Let’s close out by considering the difference between this and the consumption model from previous games. In Victoria 2, Pops have different Life, Everyday, and Luxury Needs based on their Type (what we call Profession in Victoria 3), both in types of goods and quantities. Pops in Victoria 2 always strive to get promoted into Types which require more advanced, luxurious goods in larger quantities, but will fail to do so if they cannot afford it. Since certain advanced Types of Pops in Victoria 2 perform their duties objectively better than their less advanced counterparts (e.g. Craftsmen, Clerks) it becomes important to retain access to advanced goods in order to ensure that your workforce is internationally competitive.

In Victoria 3 this formula is turned on its head. An Engineer is not intrinsically better than a Machinist who is not intrinsically better than a Laborer, and there’s no ideal national proportions between them you need to maintain in order to maximize your competitiveness. Different Professions do fulfil different functions, but it’s the Production Methods of the Buildings they work in that determine what function they serve. By choosing what Buildings to construct and which Production Methods to activate, you create the opportunities for these Professions which in turn impose changes to the population. What types of goods you need to ensure access to in order to keep your population satisfied is not driven directly by what professional opportunities you have created, but rather by what Wealth development and Wealth distribution these changes have resulted in.

Professions that are part of the Middle Strata in this state are considerably better off than those in the Lower Strata, and not far off from the Upper Strata. It’s very likely this state hasn’t started industrializing yet, since Shopkeepers - who run the pre-industrial economy - are Middle Strata, and Upper Strata Aristocrats aren’t always particularly wealthy if their income originates from exploiting the Peasantry on Subsistence Farms. Since the Middle Strata is already wealthy enough to demand Transportation, construction of Railways in this state is likely to be both profitable and beneficial for population growth and general happiness.
sol-breakdown.PNG

As a result, Pops in Victoria 3 won’t always strive to ascend to a higher social strata, nor will an Aristocrat always have a higher income or goods consumption Needs compared to a Clerk. All of this is driven by market forces - a qualifying Clerk would gladly become an Aristocrat on available land if that comes with a higher income than remaining a Clerk, and this increased income will gradually result in an increase in their Wealth and consumption demand. Conversely, Aristocrats don’t demote to Laborers because they can't acquire enough goods to sustain their lifestyle - they would only turn to such desperate measures if they become landless (unemployed) and are trying to avoid starvation, or if by some miracle taking on a relatively well-paid Laborer job in a particularly profitable factory would actually yield a greater paycheck than their failing farm provides them with.

In practice this means that it's important in both games to secure your populations’ basic needs to prevent starvation and dissent, followed by appeasing their desire for ever more advanced or exotic goods in larger and larger quantities to increase the size of your economy and power on the world stage. But while reaching this commonly pursued end goal in Victoria 2 often meant pursuing a certain optimal population distribution no matter what else happened throughout the game, the Professions of the Pops you end up with could be vastly different between games in Victoria 3! If you build a colonial plantation economy, your Aristocrats might remain as dominant by endgame as they were at start. If you're a manufacturing powerhouse on the cutting edge of technological progress, your middle strata Pops might come to rival the Capitalist class in wealth and power. If your high taxes are reinvested in vast Institutions your power base might be dominated by Bureaucrats and Academics. If your workers own the means of production, your Laborers might even be wealthier - and consume more luxuries - than your neighbor's Aristocrats.

These possibilities for diverse Pop distributions also result in very different political tendencies in your population, which lead to demand for different kinds of Laws. While in Victoria 2 it’s primarily the rising Consciousness of a greater ratio of more advanced and literate types of Pops that drives a desire for reform in a liberal direction, Victoria 3’s more open-ended consumption model and the diversity of Professions it can create could result in your population having very different political desires by endgame depending on the path you’ve taken. This requires your political machinery to be working in tandem with your economic engine, both to create the right conditions for your Pops and to satisfy their changing desires.

Next week, we will learn more about these desires as Martin introduces us to Political Movements, which themselves are strongly connected to Standard of Living. Until then!
 
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This comment is reserved by the Community Team for gathering Dev Responses in, for ease of reading.

Xuanzue said:
Sri Lanka with +30ºC has heating needs?
Heating also represents fuel for cooking, etc

Make Victoria 3 said:
So how will taboos affect for example the total spent money for intoxication? For example muslims that are not allowed to drink alcohol, will they instead use more opium than an european pop that has alcohol available, but overall they spend about the same amount for intoxication if their wealth is similar?
That's exactly right! Which means that taboos and obsessions concentrate demand in certain goods but not others, increasing their prices and making things overall more expensive for Pops depending on them.

8816boo said:
Is starving just a flavor name for lowest income bracket or do you actually loose population? Is standard of living related to famines at all?
At those levels of living standard the base mortality will be higher than the base fertility, so if no additional factors apply the net population growth will be negative.

Note that this is only the systemic way that e.g. famines are represented economically. Particularly severe famine "event chains" may also arise during the game. We'll talk more about our approach to events in a later diary!

papapyro said:
I am no expert on this, but didn't the increase of women in the workforce mainly come about due to the two World Wars, rather than 'feminism'?
Feminism unlocks the possibility of passing these laws, in that there will now be people agitating for more rights, while what happened during the World Wars would be actually passing those laws.

Al-Khalidi said:
Should really birth rate ALWAYS decrease due to increasing standard of living? I thinknin many cases more money means better chances to start a family! Please reconsider, I think there should be situations where increasing standard of living, along with better infrastructure, will lead to huge population boom, especially in less developed nations that modernize
I believe that in the lower end of SoL, increasing SoL also increases birth rate (you have more kids if you're not starving and such).

baky123 said:
Given that heating requirements are simulated, will these vary with climate and season? If we could wind up with situations like coal shortages in winter because demand increases would be amazing.
Unfortunately seasonal shifts in goods supply and demand cannot be easily simulated in our model, as we assume rational stockpiling happens behind the scene. As for climate, the production of goods varying by climate is simulated to some degree by permitting some buildings to be built in some states but not others - for example, some regions can grow Coffee and others cannot, some regions have Rice Farms and others have Wheat Farms - but the consumption of different goods cannot be made to depend on climate, time of year, or the combination of the two. However, the goods substitution system does permit for distinctions in consumption based on availability, so Pops don't smoke opium in markets where it's not present, and can subsist only on Fruit if that's the only food that's available.

Miganto said:
On the back of that, does climate affect needs, ie heating?
Not at the moment, it's something I've thought about but we probably will not have for release at least.

jumbi said:
Do taboos affect pops views on working to produce a certain good? Say if my pops have taboos against alcohol, would producing it give me a guaranteed export good or will my people dislike having to produce something they abhor?
Pops don't have an aversion to working in industries producing a taboo right now. It's an interesting idea though, maybe it's something we can explore at a later point.

MinhowMinhow said:
Shouldn't tropical places have a lesser demand of heating goods? While cooking would be represented, home heaters wouldn't be that of an issue.
Realistically? Absolutely. Would I like this to be in the game? For sure. However, this is also the kind of mechanical addition that I'm alright with not having in release and add in a at a later point, because it's more of a nice detail than a crucial mechanic (Heating is not a very significant part of expenses). I would also want a system like this to be used in other cases where it makes sense and I wouldn't just want to make it as simple as 'Pops in hot regions enjoy a higher average standard of living due to reduced heating expenses while Pops in cold regions are poorer'.

SignedName said:
How broadly does the "women in the workplace" law apply? Women were in the "workplace" since the beginning of human civilization, whether it be in cottage industries or in farming or even in factory settings- the Industrial Revolution was kicked off by women working power looms after all, and this was before the development of feminist thought. I think there ought to be women in low-strata jobs from the get-go, and feminist-inspired workplace involvement should apply specifically to middle and upper strata professions. I hope different professions can have different worker gender ratios- it should be easier to get more women into industrial or clerical work than it would be to have an gender-integrated military with an balanced gender distribution. At the extreme end of this, gendered industries like aforementioned textiles industry could have "inverted" gender distributions.
Professions can actually have different Dependent ratios, but we're not quite sure to what extent we will distinguish them yet as too drastic differences between them can lead to some counterintuitive game dynamics.

However, this is one of the major reasons why we've chosen to go with the term "Workforce" and "Dependents" instead of Men and Women - it's not intended to be the case that at a 1/4 ratio, everyone in the Workforce is a man and every Dependent is a woman. Rather, it's that when Women in the Workplace become the norm, more Dependents join the Workforce.

Metz said:
Why not just adjust the values from 1-9? There are 9 conditions for pops. This means that opulent will be in the 80-89 range. You can always add destitute as a condition above starving which would mean that opulent can range from 90-99.
We want there to be plenty of room upwards in the system instead of pop incomes simply being wasted if they hit the highest level. SoL 99 is meant to be more or less impossible to reach.

Portius said:
Can we use authority to ban goods entirely, or is it just a push towards using alternatives? Mostly wondering if some combination of that, substitutions, and maybe tariffs would make it possible to make an entirely vegetarian country, or functionally ban opium, and so on.
You can discourage consumption of a good and embargo imports of it, but if there's a local supply you can never eliminate consumption of it entirely, as that isn't a feat even modern day states can achieve.

Meanmanturbo said:
Does this mean we can actually get Giffen goods?

Like the classic rising price of grain makes poor people less able to buy meat so they start to buy even more grain.
Sort of, I think, yes! Though if I understand the effect correctly, we've tried to compensate for it by both making staples quite substitutable and by gradually shifting Needs from certain staple goods to other goods as Wealth levels increase, so Pops don't get "stuck" in Wealth ranges where they're paying more for high-demand staple goods than they would if they had the option to switch to lower-demand luxury goods. While cool, this kind of Catch-22 could make a for a pretty annoying puzzle for players to have to solve, particularly since securing staple goods tends to be an early-game problem.

Should certainly be something a modder could simulate by undoing our compensations, though. :p

Vohen said:
I don't know if I got it quite right, but wouldn't this wealth-consumption relation lead to a seesaw in demands and SoL, in turn leading overall to economic and political instability?

So wealth increases as income exceeds expenses, but once the pop reaches a certain level of wealth, it'll have more refined needs, leading to higher expenses which, if not accompanied with a higher income, will lead this pop to lose wealth.
From that it is apparent that every pop will be going through alternating cycles with more and less refined needs, as wealth increases and then decreases, this will make industries/IG loyalty also alternate between expansion/loyalty and contraction/radicalism.
Correct if I wrong anywhere here.
Metz said:
Why not just adjust the values from 1-9? There are 9 conditions for pops. This means that opulent will be in the 80-89 range. You can always add destitute as a condition above starving which would mean that opulent can range from 90-99.
To address both these birds with one stone, we need the granularity of 100 levels instead of 10 to ensure that Pop needs don't flip-flop like that but remain at relatively stable Wealth due to market forces. Otherwise the sudden shift from Wealth 4 (40) to Wealth 5 (50) in a large Pop could cause demand to increase so much it devastates their ability to pay for it next week, causing them to drop back down to 4, etc. So the answer to why we don't see see-sawing and instability is because of careful tuning like that.

Wizzington said:
We want there to be plenty of room upwards in the system instead of pop incomes simply being wasted if they hit the highest level. SoL 99 is meant to be more or less impossible to reach.
Also that.

Spartakusbund said:
Does the act of discouraging a good drive up its price? Or will the price fall because POPs don’t put out as many buy orders for it?

I ask because Prohibition lead to decreasing consumption and higher prices. Though, alcohol is a pretty inelastic good.
Decreases consumption over time, meaning increased prices if supply remains the same.

Avald said:
This is a lie. We know that from the 60s on (around the time the largest push towards women going into the workforce happened) natality has been on the decline ever since.
In the game it's not natality that increases from increased Standard of Living, it's net population growth. So by enacting Women in the Workplace, natality immediately declines by 5% but will cause Dependents to gradually turn into Workforce, a process which can take many years to maximize. Assuming this leads to increased Standard of Living for most Pops over time, natality will decrease further, but mortality will decrease more, potentially leading to net population growth despite the two-pronged decreases to natality.

Between 1836 and 1936 the world's population doubled, largely due to industrialization and the increased Standard of Living it brought. Women's Suffrage and emancipation were also major aspects of the era in many countries that also experienced explosive population booms. We're attempting to model both these phenomena independently. How it turns out in your game might be different.

Spartakusbund said:
Do you mean “decreased prices” or am I very confused?
Yes, I meant to write decreased prices!

Spartakusbund said:
Have you guys considered adding some kind of black market mechanic to capture the difficulties of trying to stamp out consumption through a punitive, legal approach?

And are organized crime syndicates in the game at all? They were present if a bit shallow in Vicky 2, though I imagine Turmoil might have filled that gap in Vicky 3. Might be good grist for DLC if it’s not in the base game.
I think organized crime, black markets and so on would be a really interesting thing to add to the game, but we don't have any plans to explicitly simulate them for release (I know I keep saying that in this thread, but there are so many things I want to add to the game but where we need to prioritize the core features that we do have and ensure they're as good as they can be on release).

mikhail321 said:
Is there a numerical value of money a pop needs to save to advance to the next level of wealth? Is it a fixed sum per level, or a geometric progression or something else? Can you also give examples of other factors beyond wealth that can affect standard of living?
At the moment Wealth levels are balanced such that 10k Workforce at Wealth 1 require a total weekly net income of £150, and each level is worth roughly 10% more than the level before it, so it's a quite gradual exponential increase that nevertheless gets astronomically high by levels 60+. Of course this is at base pricing, so specific market prices can impact how much money Pops need to have to achieve a certain Wealth level a lot. And even if the goods your population needs to buy are quite expensive, if many of them are made domestically they might have the wages to match on account of their industries producing high-value goods.

Also, it's not enough to just be able to afford Wealth 2 (at £165 base pricing) to advance to it - rather, the Pop's income is compared to its expenses, and it progresses in one direction or another until it switches to the new level. So assuming perfectly balanced supply and demand, a Pop of Wealth 1 that has a net income of £180 would gain 180/150 = 20% progress towards Wealth 2 per week.

Hammrtime said:
I see there is a National Standard of Living number. How is that calculated verses the different stratas? Also what impact does it have on the game?
The national value as well as the state-specific strata values are not separate values, but are all examples of where we have aggregated individual Pops' Standard of Living along with a breakdown of what the most prominent factors are that affects them. The idea here is to give the player some approximate ideas of major trends and factors on different levels of granularity, to make it easier to play both large and small countries. If you're playing, say, USA it's not really feasible to try to parse the details of thousands of Pops individually to figure out how to best address their varied needs, but if you want to make things better for all Middle Strata Pops in Pennsylvania you'll easily be able to see that the best way to do that is e.g. increase access to Transportation or Furniture, or cut Consumption Taxes on Tea.

WARenie said:
Is there some technical limitation to tooltips that does not allow proper formatting like this?
View attachment 752864
Other than time and resources, I don't think there are any technical limitations anymore! It used to be the case that our tooltip system only supported formatted text (the graphics you see in there are actually icons converted into text to embed it inline), but full layout in templated tooltips is now a possibility in the engine. But creating text-only tooltips is still about 10x faster, so particularly during this stage in development when things are still a bit fluid it's not top of the list.

All this feedback is appreciated and will be taken into consideration for the final product, though!

Frostcreep said:
I really hope we get a ledger for Victoria 3, as the massive amount of information that we are shown to have access to in these dev diaries scream be organized in some form of easily accessible overview. I don't want to have to click on provinces frantically trying to find out which is in the worst economic state, or which one is producing the most oil, which enemy state province would be the most valuable to grab, etc. I want pie charts, graphs, plots!! Please bring them back in some form!
Our approach here is to actually try to figure out what information is relevant to a player in which contexts and provide that, rather than a ledger filled with raw numbers. The latter would be much easier (text-based infodumps are dead simple) but
a) it's overwhelming to a player who doesn't already understand how everything in the game works, which works against our philosophy on accessibility
b) as soon as we start to make information available in a ledger format we reduce the pressure on ourselves to make it available in a more useful context

So we do have pie charts, graphs, and plots, but we show them alongside the items they pertain to, not in a separate information system. You should absolutely not have to click through a bunch of states to figure out what's going on with them - we have summaries for that in a number of places, often using the map and sortable lists to visualize that kind of information.

That's certainly not to rule out the idea of a raw infodump function in the future! We can't intelligently pre-parse all information for all use cases and besides, a lot of the data is just really fun to drown in absorb. But it's not our go-to solution for solving the kinds of use cases you're describing, since we have a lot of other methods at our disposal to expose that kind of data.

Lord Canterbury said:
I wonder if it would be possible to provide a 'blank' ledger for modders to easily add pages from raw datasets? That would achieve all of the goal set out here... and most likely generate a whole host of ledger page mods to keep all the old grognards happy.
This is almost certainly doable already to some degree through UI modding! But the takeaway here is that we're not in any way anti-ledger, we're just against putting something like that in as a primary solution to the kinds of gameplay problems listed (like "where can I find oil" or "which of my states are costing me the most money") since that would relieve us from the responsibility of connecting the actionable information with the actions. There's an utterly ridiculous amount of raw data in the game already and where we think it makes sense and/or is just plain fun to gather and summarize it, we absolutely will!

Vasya999 said:
Does this not mean that £10 of fabric at base price would be just as effective for satisfying the need for heating as £10 of coal at base price?
Yes exactly, but since Fabric and Coal might have different base prices per unit, this can work out to different numbers of units for different goods required to satisfy a particular Need. This idea that a Need is not a certain number of units of goods but a certain amount of objective "value" you are satisfying by acquiring goods that sum up to that value is crucial to the inner workings of the goods substitution system.

Nis Baggesen said:
I wonder how new technologies (e.g. telephones and radios) fit into the needs. Are they simply substitution (possibly efficient) goods in a broader category like "Communicaton", or can totally new needs arise? Is there any Red Queen Race, where more access to goods also simply mean that more consumption is needed to keep up with the Joneses.
At the moment they are substitutable goods within existing Needs categories, that either have a "convenience" bias that cause Pops to favor them if available or are intrinsically more effective to manufacture, causing them to become available in greater quantities which leads to greater relative consumption. For example, Telephones can substitute for Free Movement to some degree but cannot completely displace the Need for physical travel, and Radios are Luxury Items.

Introducing new, dynamic "Needs" that ups the bar along with new innovations becoming available is something that's been considered, but stretches the definition of "Need" and an objective "Standard of Living" scale a bit too far into cynicism for even my liking. The idea that my living standard would be going down as new iPhone is released because I gotta have it is interesting, but doesn't fit with our model's definitions of Needs and SoL.
 
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Does heating also cover cooling and any form of temperature control or is cooling a seperate need in hot climates?
 
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This looks really great. Maybe the most intriguing DD yet.
 
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I see I will have to rethink my future in-game choices for my pops' happiness.
chimp-thinking.jpg
 
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Would certain needs--heating, for instance--see seasonal variation? I guess what I'm asking is if pops anticipate a future need (I should stockpile wood for the coming winter) in a way that evens out price fluctuations over a year.
 
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What if the Bengali were obsessed with the status afforded to them by Luxury Furniture? This could happen due to events, or organically because Luxury Furniture is a really prevalent luxury good in markets where a lot of Bengali Pops live. But even if this habit is developed around their homelands, Bengali Pops that migrate abroad - to the USA or Australia or Japan - will continue preferring Luxury Furniture to other luxury goods, and will suffer financially if the same level of access is not available there.
View attachment 752446
East India Company is marked as a country

Are colonies' separate states like in Hoi4 that are playable with some limits imposed on them by their owner?
 
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This is a great dev diary, I really love the features. However a common feature I have noted and commented on is unfortunately the UI. I am increasingly unable to tell at first glance what is going on in each of the tool tips, in particular this one:

1630599268002.png

I feel this could be better expressed in the form of a table, with headers so I know what each number represents. Similar to how the needs tooltip in the Dev Diary could also be done as a pie chart so I can tell how much % is spent on Basic Food, or Clothing as a example.

Overall great dev diary, but the UI is making me concerned I will not enjoy the game as much. Which is a huge shame because the depth of the game is amazing, but it’s being hampered by the UI that isnt presenting the information well
 
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So how will taboos affect for example the total spent money for intoxication? For example muslims that are not allowed to drink alcohol, will they instead use more opium than an european pop that has alcohol available, but overall they spend about the same amount for intoxication if their wealth is similar?
 
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Given that heating requirements are simulated, will these vary with climate and season? If we could wind up with situations like coal shortages in winter because demand increases would be amazing.
 
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In addition to these factors cultures can develop Obsessions for certain goods, and some even have Taboos they must abide by. A country can also encourage or discourage the consumption of certain goods using Authority, perhaps in an effort to avoid enriching a hated enemy or entice Pops to buy something that’s heavily taxed over something that is not. This impacts the purchase habits of Pops affected despite this being irrational from a strictly financial perspective.

What if the Bengali were obsessed with the status afforded to them by Luxury Furniture? This could happen due to events, or organically because Luxury Furniture is a really prevalent luxury good in markets where a lot of Bengali Pops live. But even if this habit is developed around their homelands, Bengali Pops that migrate abroad - to the USA or Australia or Japan - will continue preferring Luxury Furniture to other luxury goods, and will suffer financially if the same level of access is not available there.
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I can't wait to hear more about how Cultures have been reworked. I like what I see from the screenshot. A lot.

Is a DD on culture to be expected anytime soon?

Also, the new needs system seems great and makes a lot of sense. Kudos!
 
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Is starving just a flavor name for lowest income bracket or do you actually loose population? Is standard of living related to famines at all?
 
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Sounds fantastic. Well done. The idea that you could play the same nation, but take a different economic direction and end up with different pops, different politics...a different experience. That is really good game design. Replayability ftw.
 
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