Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #13 - Standard of Living

[lachek]

Is there some technical limitation to tooltips that does not allow proper formatting like this?
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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!

 

[lachek]

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.

 

[lachek]

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!

 

[lachek]

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.

 

[lachek]

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.

 

[lachek]

Why does producing more meat increase the price of food?

Rather, focusing your food production on Meat means that this one food type will be used to satisfy both Basic and Luxury Food needs, and since rich Pops have higher purchasing power than poor Pops this will drive the price up for the Basic Food Need as well. Whereas if your food production was focused on Grain, it would be easier for Pops of all kinds to satisfy their Basic Food needs while rich Pops would be forced to pay a premium for their Luxury Foods, which doesn't include Grain as a substitution option.