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Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #16 - States

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It’s Thursday again and that means it’s time for another Victoria 3 dev diary! Today’s dev diary is going to be a little bit different in that it will mostly be about collecting and further explaining the various mechanics that tie into States. There might not be a whole lot of new information here for people who have been closely following the development, but we feel it’s important to put all this information in the same place and clarify a few points.

So then, onto the topic of States. States, as we have previously touched on, are the main political-geographical unit of Victoria 3, where pops live and buildings are built. Before we proceed it will be useful to understand the difference between States and State Regions. A State is always controlled by a single country and its borders are dynamic (can change over the course of the game, including being created and destroyed), while State Regions can contain 1 or several States and have static borders (unchanging throughout the game). If a single country owns all provinces within a State Region, there is no practical difference between these concepts. But if more than one country owns provinces within a single State Region, they will each control individual States within it.

For example, the State Region of Rhineland is a predetermined set of provinces on the border of France that in 1836 contains two States: Prussian Rhineland (actually just called Rhineland because it contains more than half the land in the region) and Bavarian Rhineland (called Bavarian Rhineland to distinguish it from the Prussian parts), a concept that we call a Split State. Over the course of the game, which exact provinces make up the State Region of Rhineland will never change, but the States might. If France was to conquer the Prussian Rhineland, there would of course no longer be a Prussian Rhineland but a French Rhineland, and if Prussia were to conquer the Bavarian Rhineland, the entire State Region would be unified into a single Prussian State.

Political control of the State Region of Rajputana is split between numerous Indian Princes, none of which control enough of the region for their part to be considered Rajputana proper.
2021_08_31_1.png

In addition to political ownership, there are a number of conditions that can apply to a State that affects the local population and economy. First of all, there is something called Incorporation Status, representing a State’s political status within the country that owns it. The different Incorporation States are as follows:
  • Incorporated State: A state that is a fully integrated political unit in the country. This state incurs full bureaucracy costs, pays all forms of taxes required by the government, and gets the benefit of all national Institutions.
  • Unincorporated State: A state that is owned but only very lightly administered by the country, such as frontier states. Unincorporated states do not incur any bureaucracy costs but only pay certain taxes (such as Consumption Taxes), get no benefits from national Institutions and have reduced Infrastructure.
  • Colonial State: A state that is considered to be an overseas colony. Works similarly to an Unincorporated State, but also gets increased immigration at the expense of even lower Infrastructure.

It is possible to Incorporate any Unincorporated/Colonial State as long as you have the Bureaucracy that would be needed to properly administer it, but this can be a rocky process - while the increased costs kick in immediately, the benefits (taxes, institutions and so on) are only gradually phased in over time. The time it takes depends on how easy it is for your country to integrate the local population - it would be a lot more difficult for Britain to incorporate an Indian state than it would be for them to incorporate the Falklands, for example.

Other conditions that can apply to a State include (not an exhaustive list):
  • Capital State: The political capital of a country. All Pops living in the Capital State have increased political power.
  • Market Capital: The economic capital of a country. Has increased Infrastructure and Migration Attraction.
  • Turmoil: A State that has too many political radicals (as a percentage of population) will experience Turmoil. A State with Turmoil suffers penalties in the form of increased Tax Waste and reduced Migration Attraction. These penalties can be reduced by investing into the Police institution.

Pennsylvania is an Incorporated State, contributing both taxes and a star on the flag to the United States of America.
2021_08_31_3.png

States can also inherit certain conditions from their State Regions, including:
  • State Traits: As explained in the Infrastructure dev diary, these represent a wide variety of geographical features that have an impact on the economy, infrastructure and/or population of the entire State Region.
  • Claims: A State Region can be claimed by a country that does not currently own it but are broadly considered to have a legitimate reason to think that maybe they should. We’ll come back to this when talking about diplomacy and war.
  • Homelands: Every Culture has one or more State Regions that most people in that Culture consider to be their natural homeland. This does not consider the views of anyone else outside that Culture (ie, the Swedes don’t get any say in which State Regions the Russians consider to be their homelands and vice versa), and has certain effects that we will go over in later dev diaries.

Guano was a central pillar of the Peruvian economy in the mid-19th century, and a war was even fought over control of the Chincha Islands between Spain and Peru (the icon for this particular State Trait is a placeholder)
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As mentioned all the way back in the dev diary about Buildings, States are limited in which Resource Industry Building Types they can support and how large these can get. For example, the degree of Iron deposits in a state limits how many levels of Iron Mine you can build there. These resource limits are actually a property of State Regions, which is dynamically allocated to the States in the region based on how large of a share the State holds.

It’s worth noting that this proportion isn’t just based on the raw number of provinces owned. As an example, potential for Fisheries are distributed according to the amount of coastline a State has in the State Region, while Arable Land land can be heavily weighted by the amount of Prime Land is in each State. While not applicable everywhere, Prime Land is something we use in states where there is a clear division between fertile and non-fertile land - control of the Nile should matter a lot more to a State in Upper Egypt’s Arable Land than control of the surrounding desert, for example.

It’s also possible for a State Region to contain Discoverable Resources. These are resources such as Oil, Gold or Rubber that are either not known about or not considered exploitable at the start of the game, but may be discovered and exploited at a later point. Certain technologies will affect both which resources can be discovered and the actual chance of said resource being discovered. All of this functions in a weighted random fashion, so while the chance of there being a Klondike gold rush at some point during the game is high, it probably won’t happen exactly at the same date it did historically.

There may or may not be gold in them hills!
2021_08_31_2.png

Alright then, that’s all for today! Next week we’ll be continuing on the topic of Politics as I explain how Migration works.
 
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galkowskit said:
So just to be clear. State Regions are divided into States and the number of those States is constant? If France conquers half of "Prussian Rhineland" there won't be a possibility of Rhineland splitting into three instead of two States?
There are some ways in which States can be partitioned, the main one we have in game right now is Treaty Ports but we're also considering the possibility of partitions along cultural lines.

Al-Khalidi said:
I absolutely love the thing with claims and homelands! How is claim different from a core in vic2? Would, say, Ottomans have claims on Cairo while not considering it homeland? (I imagine claims are static and can't be fabricated)
Also, can we make an incorporated state into an unincorporated one like in eu4, thus freeing beaurocracy for incorporating another one?
Claims and Homelands are quite separate mechanics. A Claim is essentially a country having a rightful cause to take land, and you get a Claim if a fully incorporated state is conquered from you. Homelands is more about where a culture feels their natural homelands lie, and while there's some interaction with diplomacy/war there, it isn't as simple as Anhalt having just cause to take over Prussia because it's North German Homelands.

CorneliusBottomly said:
Will it be possible to mod a way for state region borders to change over the course of the game?
At the moment this is not possible, though it's something I would like to make possible, perhaps after release.

Make Victoria 3 said:
Will the province level still matter when it comes to building factories. So for example if a part of the state are mountain provinces will the whole state get an infrastructure penalty even if the large cities are in plains and therefore the mountains would not matter when it comes to railroadconstruction? And in the case of mines, will the provinces that historically would contain them also get the construction potential if you split the state/conquer only that part with the mine? instead of for example every province gets 1/10 of the max mine capacity regardless of where it actually is.
We don't have province mechanics on this level - nothing is built on the province level. The state does know if a Pop is in say, the city or the countryside, and we can potentially do things like splitting off the entire urban population into one state in a partition if that state contains the entire city, but we haven't really gone deeply into partition mechanics as of yet.

Al-Khalidi said:
I see, but are there situations when you have a claim other than when it's conquered from you? Would prussia have a claim on Alsace, and so on?
There are events and the like that can add Claims, and some Claims are defined historically. I don't see Prussia starting with a Claim on Alsace but they could possibly get one during the leadup to forming Germany (I don't think this is a thing in the current build though).


Ruck said:
Why exactly would it be more difficult for Britain to incorporate an Indian state, compared to the Falklands ? What will be calculated for that ? I guess population size and something like culture groups ?
It's based on the local cultures, and how much they diverge from your national culture(s) in traits.

Spartakusbund said:
What is an Isolated State Region?
A State Region that is isolated from its Market and can only buy and sell locally.

Vefe123 said:
So,a bigger state have more capacity to produce iron than a small one?
like minas gerais and rhineland?
Size of state isn't what's relevant here, rather how sizable the local iron ore deposits are in this case.

Grave461 said:


Does this mean the number of stars on the US flag can change during the course of the game?
Yes.

CorneliusBottomly said:
Why are the states not called "Bikaner Rajputana" and similar? Is it because this is the only state region these countries are part of?
If a split state in its entirely makes up a country, we name that split state after the country for the sake of brevity. So the split state of Luxemburg is called Luxemburg instead of Luxemburgian Wallonia.

Victor Cortez said:
A word on how this affects markets? Would the Rhineland "states" belong one to the Prussian market and the other to Bavarian market? Or do they both belong to Prussia as Prussia has the biggest state in the state region?
Right now, all states in the same State Region share a market but we're looking at moving this to the State level (The reason it's on the State Region level is because it made sense in earlier versions of the Market system).

Voigt said:
Is it possible to remove foreign claims on your lands? Always disliked that the French Core on Elsass was permament on Victoria 2.
Sure it nudged the game into a historical rivalry between the German Empire and France, but an option to recouncil either after decades of Status Quo, or after winning a war cementing the status of Elsass without taking any further territories would be nice.
Hopefully this will be a thing when talked about diplomacy.
In Victoria 2 I modded the save a removed the cores after I won a Great War against France for example.
It's possible to force countries to relinquish Claims.

Heatth said:
That is very good to hear but how would that work if the game doesn't known where cultures live within the state?
We know what Pops are in which Buildings, we know where the different city hubs are in the state, and we can reasonably compute which province a given number of levels of a building might be in. What this means is that we can determine as-needed which Pop "might" be in which province. This is then used to determine which Pops, building levels, etc go where in case of a split.

This saves us from tracking the mostly-useless information of which Pop is in which province at any given time, which would bloat the game a lot, but still lets us approximate it as needed. Otherwise we'd have to, for example, split a single Peasant Pop of 1 million people into 50 Pops of 20,000 people each if those Peasants are equally spread across the state's 50 provinces, even though by our game rules they could all pack up and take another job in the same state tomorrow.
 
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So just to be clear. State Regions are divided into States and the number of those States is constant? If France conquers half of "Prussian Rhineland" there won't be a possibility of Rhineland splitting into three instead of two States?
 
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Pennsylvania is an Incorporated State, contributing both taxes and a star on the flag to the United States of America.
Wait, does it mean USA's flag is dynamic and will have as many stars as incorporated states?
 
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I absolutely love the thing with claims and homelands! How is claim different from a core in vic2? Would, say, Ottomans have claims on Cairo while not considering it homeland? (I imagine claims are static and can't be fabricated)
Also, can we make an incorporated state into an unincorporated one like in eu4, thus freeing beaurocracy for incorporating another one?
 
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So just to be clear. State Regions are divided into States and the number of those States is constant? If France conquers half of "Prussian Rhineland" there won't be a possibility of Rhineland splitting into three instead of two States?
There are some ways in which States can be partitioned, the main one we have in game right now is Treaty Ports but we're also considering the possibility of partitions along cultural lines.
 
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Pennsylvania is an Incorporated State, contributing both taxes and a star on the flag to the United States of America.

I'm assuming I'm crazy for hoping this means there's a dynamic flag system available for certain countries?
 
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Political control of the State Region of Rajputana is split between numerous Indian Princes, none of which control enough of the region for their part to be considered Rajputana proper.
View attachment 758588
Why are the states not called "Bikaner Rajputana" and similar? Is it because this is the only state region these countries are part of?
 
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I absolutely love the thing with claims and homelands! How is claim different from a core in vic2? Would, say, Ottomans have claims on Cairo while not considering it homeland? (I imagine claims are static and can't be fabricated)
Also, can we make an incorporated state into an unincorporated one like in eu4, thus freeing beaurocracy for incorporating another one?
Claims and Homelands are quite separate mechanics. A Claim is essentially a country having a rightful cause to take land, and you get a Claim if a fully incorporated state is conquered from you. Homelands is more about where a culture feels their natural homelands lie, and while there's some interaction with diplomacy/war there, it isn't as simple as Anhalt having just cause to take over Prussia because it's North German Homelands.
 
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Will the province level still matter when it comes to building factories. So for example if a part of the state are mountain provinces will the whole state get an infrastructure penalty even if the large cities are in plains and therefore the mountains would not matter when it comes to railroadconstruction? And in the case of mines, will the provinces that historically would contain them also get the construction potential if you split the state/conquer only that part with the mine? instead of for example every province gets 1/10 of the max mine capacity regardless of where it actually is.
 
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Will it be possible to mod a way for state region borders to change over the course of the game?
At the moment this is not possible, though it's something I would like to make possible, perhaps after release.
 
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I'm assuming an isolated state region is one that isn't connected to the capital? Would that mean that some of Prussia's western territory at the start of the game are part of isolated state regions?
 
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it would be a lot more difficult for Britain to incorporate an Indian state than it would be for them to incorporate the Falklands, for example.

Why exactly would it be more difficult for Britain to incorporate an Indian state, compared to the Falklands ? What will be calculated for that ? I guess population size and something like culture groups ?
 
View attachment 758587

It’s Thursday again and that means it’s time for another Victoria 3 dev diary! Today’s dev diary is going to be a little bit different in that it will mostly be about collecting and further explaining the various mechanics that tie into States. There might not be a whole lot of new information here for people who have been closely following the development, but we feel it’s important to put all this information in the same place and clarify a few points.

So then, onto the topic of States. States, as we have previously touched on, are the main political-geographical unit of Victoria 3, where pops live and buildings are built. Before we proceed it will be useful to understand the difference between States and State Regions. A State is always controlled by a single country and its borders are dynamic (can change over the course of the game, including being created and destroyed), while State Regions can contain 1 or several States and have static borders (unchanging throughout the game). If a single country owns all provinces within a State Region, there is no practical difference between these concepts. But if more than one country owns provinces within a single State Region, they will each control individual States within it.

For example, the State Region of Rhineland is a predetermined set of provinces on the border of France that in 1836 contains two States: Prussian Rhineland (actually just called Rhineland because it contains more than half the land in the region) and Bavarian Rhineland (called Bavarian Rhineland to distinguish it from the Prussian parts), a concept that we call a Split State. Over the course of the game, which exact provinces make up the State Region of Rhineland will never change, but the States might. If France was to conquer the Prussian Rhineland, there would of course no longer be a Prussian Rhineland but a French Rhineland, and if Prussia were to conquer the Bavarian Rhineland, the entire State Region would be unified into a single Prussian State.

Political control of the State Region of Rajputana is split between numerous Indian Princes, none of which control enough of the region for their part to be considered Rajputana proper.
View attachment 758588

In addition to political ownership, there are a number of conditions that can apply to a State that affects the local population and economy. First of all, there is something called Incorporation Status, representing a State’s political status within the country that owns it. The different Incorporation States are as follows:
  • Incorporated State: A state that is a fully integrated political unit in the country. This state incurs full bureaucracy costs, pays all forms of taxes required by the government, and gets the benefit of all national Institutions.
  • Unincorporated State: A state that is owned but only very lightly administered by the country, such as frontier states. Unincorporated states do not incur any bureaucracy costs but only pay certain taxes (such as Consumption Taxes), get no benefits from national Institutions and have reduced Infrastructure.
  • Colonial State: A state that is considered to be an overseas colony. Works similarly to an Unincorporated State, but also gets increased immigration at the expense of even lower Infrastructure.

It is possible to Incorporate any Unincorporated/Colonial State as long as you have the Bureaucracy that would be needed to properly administer it, but this can be a rocky process - while the increased costs kick in immediately, the benefits (taxes, institutions and so on) are only gradually phased in over time. The time it takes depends on how easy it is for your country to integrate the local population - it would be a lot more difficult for Britain to incorporate an Indian state than it would be for them to incorporate the Falklands, for example.

Other conditions that can apply to a State include (not an exhaustive list):
  • Capital State: The political capital of a country. All Pops living in the Capital State have increased political power.
  • Market Capital: The economic capital of a country. Has increased Infrastructure and Migration Attraction.
  • Turmoil: A State that has too many political radicals (as a percentage of population) will experience Turmoil. A State with Turmoil suffers penalties in the form of increased Tax Waste and reduced Migration Attraction. These penalties can be reduced by investing into the Police institution.

Pennsylvania is an Incorporated State, contributing both taxes and a star on the flag to the United States of America.
View attachment 758589

States can also inherit certain conditions from their State Regions, including:
  • State Traits: As explained in the Infrastructure dev diary, these represent a wide variety of geographical features that have an impact on the economy, infrastructure and/or population of the entire State Region.
  • Claims: A State Region can be claimed by a country that does not currently own it but are broadly considered to have a legitimate reason to think that maybe they should. We’ll come back to this when talking about diplomacy and war.
  • Homelands: Every Culture has one or more State Regions that most people in that Culture consider to be their natural homeland. This does not consider the views of anyone else outside that Culture (ie, the Swedes don’t get any say in which State Regions the Russians consider to be their homelands and vice versa), and has certain effects that we will go over in later dev diaries.

Guano was a central pillar of the Peruvian economy in the mid-19th century, and a war was even fought over control of the Chincha Islands between Spain and Peru (the icon for this particular State Trait is a placeholder)
View attachment 758590

As mentioned all the way back in the dev diary about Buildings, States are limited in which Resource Industry Building Types they can support and how large these can get. For example, the degree of Iron deposits in a state limits how many levels of Iron Mine you can build there. These resource limits are actually a property of State Regions, which is dynamically allocated to the States in the region based on how large of a share the State holds.

It’s worth noting that this proportion isn’t just based on the raw number of provinces owned. As an example, potential for Fisheries are distributed according to the amount of coastline a State has in the State Region, while Arable Land land can be heavily weighted by the amount of Prime Land is in each State. While not applicable everywhere, Prime Land is something we use in states where there is a clear division between fertile and non-fertile land - control of the Nile should matter a lot more to a State in Upper Egypt’s Arable Land than control of the surrounding desert, for example.

It’s also possible for a State Region to contain Discoverable Resources. These are resources such as Oil, Gold or Rubber that are either not known about or not considered exploitable at the start of the game, but may be discovered and exploited at a later point. Certain technologies will affect both which resources can be discovered and the actual chance of said resource being discovered. All of this functions in a weighted random fashion, so while the chance of there being a Klondike gold rush at some point during the game is high, it probably won’t happen exactly at the same date it did historically.

There may or may not be gold in them hills!
View attachment 758592

Alright then, that’s all for today! Next week we’ll be continuing on the topic of Politics as I explain how Migration works.
When releasing a nation, cant I just give them a part of a state? Like, when releasing Croatia as Austria, can I keep few provinces of Dalmatia for myself?
 
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Claims and Homelands are quite separate mechanics. A Claim is essentially a country having a rightful cause to take land, and you get a Claim if a fully incorporated state is conquered from you. Homelands is more about where a culture feels their natural homelands lie, and while there's some interaction with diplomacy/war there, it isn't as simple as Anhalt having just cause to take over Prussia because it's North German Homelands.
I see, but are there situations when you have a claim other than when it's conquered from you? Would prussia have a claim on Alsace, and so on?
 
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Will the province level still matter when it comes to building factories. So for example if a part of the state are mountain provinces will the whole state get an infrastructure penalty even if the large cities are in plains and therefore the mountains would not matter when it comes to railroadconstruction? And in the case of mines, will the provinces that historically would contain them also get the construction potential if you split the state/conquer only that part with the mine? instead of for example every province gets 1/10 of the max mine capacity regardless of where it actually is.
We don't have province mechanics on this level - nothing is built on the province level. The state does know if a Pop is in say, the city or the countryside, and we can potentially do things like splitting off the entire urban population into one state in a partition if that state contains the entire city, but we haven't really gone deeply into partition mechanics as of yet.
 
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