Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #25 - The Cost of War

[Wizzington]

"First and foremost, when the Conscription Center appears, recruited Pops will leave their regular places of work en masse which could cause major temporary disruptions to your nation’s economy. If the conscripts in a certain state happen to primarily originate from the lower strata of its underpaying Lead Mines, this will reduce output and thereby affect the Glasswork and Munitions Plants that consume the lead produced in your market, which in turn will impact all its Urban Centers as well as your very military machinery. If you have enough Pops in search of labor this situation will correct itself over time as the Lead Mines rehire their lost workers, but in the long run this simple action of initiating conscription in a single state will still mean a shift in Wealth distribution, political allegiances, population distribution, industrial profitability, and so on. Even after a successfully prosecuted war those men returning home alive may need to look for new opportunities to regain their old Standard of Living. Everything has consequences."

...And that's why during wartimes exemption for people working in strategic sectors existed.

One thing we have discussed is having subsidized buildings be exempt from conscription, as that's a good way of flagging an industry as essential.

 

[lachek]

1st. Thank you for giving us the visuals of a devastated landscape. Warfare should impact everything on the map.
2nd Can I limit or expand the pops that are eligable for military service aka conscription?
I'd love to give my female population a greater stake in my country by allowing them to vote AND to die for the Fatherland.

The number of conscripted Battalions you can raise is determined by your conscription rate, which is (predominantly, at least) based on your Army Model. This is a fraction of the Workforce in your country that can be conscripted, which means that as you expand the rights of women, in the process you get access to more conscripts as well. This may be because you permit women to do military service, or because women in the workplace permits more men to go off to war.

 

[lachek]

I love every sentence of this diary. You did a great job.

A question:
Are our Pop's going to get mad about casualties in war? This was absolutely the case historically, like British society being angry about crimean war losses

Next week!

 

[lachek]

It looks amazing especially the big cost of war and devastation! Will the civillian casualties be directly included in this system? Will we get numbers of casualties from battles on frontline?

We're currently collecting statistics on the military casualties associated with specific wars. We're not currently keeping track of civilian casualties due to devastation, maybe in the future!

 

[lachek]

Can I as an industrializing country, logically have a mixed army of say men with Firearms and with lower tier equipment? Perhaps as a Polish Rebellion I lack infantry equipment so I get my population to make basic Melee weapons so I at least have a weapon for everyone while keeping some more elite gun equipped regiments?

Every military building can have as unique of a setup as you like, so you could create differently equipped Battalions in every Barracks in 4 different states, and differently equipped conscripts in each state too for that matter. Battalions from the same military buildings will be split up between as few Generals as possible (in most cases only 1) so you can decide exactly what equipment the troops that belong to a certain General should be using.

 

[lachek]

You said in a previous DD armies could get very large as time goes by, since there are so many production methods and so many barracks will there be a way to ease all the micromanagement required? Thank you

As they are buildings they follow the same principles, meaning you can customize each one individually or switch what production methods are in use all across your country at once if you like. You can also adjust production methods for groups of Battalions on the Generals they are assigned to.

 

[lachek]

Will casualties be shown by just lost of battalions in clean amounts of 1000, or will they be more granular?

Each Battalion of 1000 take damage individually, so you could have one Battalion with 823 men, another with 618, another with 936 of which 133 are demoralized, etcetera. They will receive reinforcements automatically and gradually based on the activities of the building that supports them.

 

[lachek]

Will losing a large part of your male population in a war hurt population growth?

In the Soviet Union, for example, the loss of up to 80% of the men born in the 1920's during WW2 led to huge numbers of women going childless, and the USSR's population being tens of millions short of where it otherwise would've been. Similar in places like Serbia and Paraguay.

Since we don't actually distinguish Pops by sex but rather by Workforce and Dependents, we can't infer an effect like this directly. However, as the Workforce part of the Pop dies off, the Dependent part of the Pop will have a much harder time financially and as Standard of Living declines, so does population growth.

 

[lachek]

We don't yet know how trade is modeled in game, but the fact that tariffs are apply to exports instead of imports is wrong on so many levels. Is this a wording mistake or are indeed tariffs applied to exports of your country ?

Tariffs are applied to both imports and exports. Most of the time you would indeed use them on imports, i.e. goods being exported to you. This is one of the rare use cases where you might want to discourage other countries from exporting your weapons, i.e. importing from you. Note that you can choose which exact goods to tariff, it's not across the board for all imports/exports.

More on this when we talk about Trade.

 

[lachek]

Will PTSD / Shellshock be a part of the game?

It's a Condition trait your Generals may acquire in the field, yes.

 

[lachek]

One thing I still confused is how useful that is. Like, is piracy a thing? Is it important I keep patrolling trade routes even in peace time?

Piracy is not a thing - wrong era for that to be a major aspect of the game - but we're currently looking into peacetime benefits for patrolling / escorting convoys.

 

[lachek]

If war is more expensive that will apply for the ai too. So what stops you staying in a victorious war to raze their economy into the ground?

We'll explain this next week.

 

[lachek]

Will there be a toggle for "ignore global settings?" I can already see a situation where players might want to have regular units and a few specialized units, but changing the regulars would take a lot of clicking unless you do global, but doing it global would affect your specialized garrisons!

We're looking into a quality-of-life feature very similar to that, yeah.

 

[lachek]

Great DD. Like the previous one about naval aspects, this one sheds more light about the second land warfare DD. It is becoming increasingly more clear that the 'lack of control' we were all talking about is not so lacking after all, as initially thought; Merely being able to decide on battalion types, production methods, mobility types, and all the resulting sub-types of units, already gives a decent layer of interaction as you may not be deciding minutelly what your general is doing, but what he has at hand is decidedly the fruit of your playing strategy.

Hey @lachek I didn't quite understand if when you decide to mobilize your untrainded population, you lay down only one conscription center in a defined place in the map to draw conscripts towards that place, or if you drop down as many as you want as to decide where from the conscripts are being taken from.

Conscript activation is done state by state, or if you prefer, all across your country at once. As you choose to activate conscripts in, say, North Carolina, a Conscription Center local to North Carolina appears and recruits Pops who live in North Carolina only, up to the maximum number of conscripts the population in North Carolina can support.

 

[lachek]

Does that mean that Countries with National Militia can only defend their Fronts?

They can have a small standing army as well which give you a few more options, but the main use of a National Militia model is for turtling / homeland defense, yes.

 

[lachek]

1. You said conscripts do not give power projection prestige. But does potential conscripts battalions matter for ai calculating strength for diplomatic play reasons?

Yes, you can always see how large a country's standing army is and how many conscripts they could potentially activate, and this is used by the AI to determine how to act in a Diplomatic Play.

2. Does the artillery support and mobility production methods mean those are separate battalions, or production methods that strengthen your infantry battalions?

The latter.

 

[lachek]

If I understand it correctly, the army model laws seem to be based on conscription, while others aim to create a standing army. Are these mutually exclusive laws, or could I have all of these ennacted at the same time? How would conscription work if I only have 'regular army' enacted?

All models permit you to raise some conscripts and maintain some amount of a standing army. The proportions vary a lot, as does what production methods are available to you in military buildings, how your population feels about it, and a few other factors.

 

[lachek]

I very much like the focus on the costs of war, I think this is really something that makes Vicky series stand out from other GSGs!
Some questions to the DD:
1 can you explain how much control you have over the proportion of different unit categories? Like, is it only one type of units per building, or each building supplies a mix of infantry/artillery/cavalry/specials? If it is the second, do you influence the mix somehow, or you just set the unit types within each category?
2. Can you give a bit more details on impact of military goods shortages on your armed forces? Do they have any effects in peacetime, or you should only care in wartime?
3. Not a question, but a suggestion - please consider linking your conscription capacity to the size of the standing army in some way. Standing armies were very important to train the reserves to be conscripted in times of war.
4. Do you plan to distinguish between volunteer and drafted military force (both for regulars and conscripts)? Like if you can’t afford to pay high wages to your military, you can force draft them, but with some political consequence.

1. The production methods represent what components go into the Battalions. So there are no "Artillery Battalions", nor any kind of proportion of artillery-to-infantry. If you want your Battalions to focus more on Artillery you'd invest in the latest and greatest techs and production methods, and perhaps save some money on your Infantry or Specialist Corps.
2. In wartime shortages of course affects their Offense and Defense, but in peacetime it also affects their Power Projection, lowering your effective Prestige as your army may be large but also undersupplied.
3. Thanks for the suggestion!
4. All military forces can be considered "drafted", we don't have a volunteer model planned at the moment - maybe in the future. Paying low wages to your military has both explicit political effects and the implicit negative effects of making your servicemen and officers poor and potentially radical.

 

[lachek]

How does the game determine which POPs get drafted? Is it more slanted towards poorer POPs? Can we do things to affect this? In the US Civil War, you could buy your way out of conscription, which lead to a lot of anger and resentment (see the Draft Riots).

At the moment we prioritize drafting Pops that a) qualify and b) make just below average amount of money, and then we keep going further and further down the wage ladder until none more qualify, then we start from the middle and go up. This probably sounds incredibly convoluted but basically amounts to favoring the average Joe who wants the job before "scraping the barrel", and then moving on to people who'd rather not take the job in order of least to most resistance.

 

[lachek]

This is one of my favourite Dev diaries do far! Amazing work.

The only thing I dislike is that, apparently, navies don't have much to do during peacetime. They should have stuff to do! They should be hunting pirates or taking down slavers on the high seas. They should be protecting trade routes and helping colonials maintain in contact with the mainland. And they should be sailing up the rivers of the defenseless to impose the wills of their Imperial master! Gunboat diplomacy is such a huge part of the 19th century and it would be a shame if it weren't implemented outside of active warfare.

We agree, and are investigating options on this front.