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Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #39 - Shipping Lanes

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Ave and welcome to another Dev Diary! I am Johan (No, the other Johan) a tech lead on Victoria 3 and today I will be talking about Shipping Lanes. It is an interesting addition to maritime empires in that there is now a cost to overseas possessions and sending a military expedition halfway across the globe is no longer as straightforward as in some older Paradox titles.

But first we have to talk about Convoys which are an essential part in maintaining shipping lanes. They are produced from Ports, a government building which requires Clippers (or their era-equivalents) and possibly other goods.

Each country has a set number of required convoys and not having enough will incur penalties on all shipping lanes. This may for example occur due to an overstretched colonial empire or hostile convoy raiders.

Ports also fulfill an important role in connecting your overseas territories but more on that later.

“Aha! I told you the Clipper factory was a good investment!”
DD39 01.png

Shipping Lanes represents port-to-port connections and are established for three different reasons:
  • Trade Routes to an overseas market
  • Supply Routes for an overseas General
  • Port Connections to link states in a market

Each shipping lane must have its own origin and destination port. Once established it will span across a number of sea nodes and have its own individual cost in convoys which adds up to the country’s total convoy requirement.

It also tracks its own Effectiveness score which is based on the overall Supply Network strength (more on that later) and may be reduced by any local convoy damage done along the route.

While India provides Great Britain numerous benefits such as raw materials and population it is clear that the Crown Jewel of the British Empire is by no means cheap. A massive civilian and military naval industry is required to maintain it and keep it safe and thus it is by no means obvious whether such overseas possessions are always worth it.
Note that UI and values are very much WIP.

DD39 02.png

Trade Routes between two markets which do not share a common land border must be done overseas and will necessitate a shipping lane. Land adjacency is determined from where the two market capitals are located.

The convoy cost is influenced by the number of sea nodes, quantity of goods and any goods-specific modifier (if any). The effectiveness affects the trade route competitiveness and by extension the quantity of goods shipped.
It will use the two closest ports in the respective market capitals region. If either country lacks ports no overseas trade routes can be established.

Supply Routes are required when a general is sent to a front that is not reachable by land. It will use a friendly port connected by land to the generals headquarters and trace to the closest friendly port reachable from the front.
The convoy cost is based on the number of sea nodes, battalions supplied and any general traits. Low effectiveness reduces supply status of the general and his troops. If a front is landlocked no generals can be sent there.

Supplying troops over great distances is quite an enterprise. Rather than sending an expeditionary force from England all the way around the Cape to reach India perhaps Britain should consider building a standing army using either colonial settlers or locals?
DD39 03 v2.png

Lastly, Port Connections are a bit more complicated. In order for a state to access the goods within the market it needs to be able to trace a path back to the market capital. If this path requires it to go via the sea (meaning it is overseas) a shipping lane must be established to the market capital.
This must be done for every state within the market including foreign ones. Rather than a single state having its own shipping lane a group of adjacent overseas states can form a cluster with a single exit port to the market capital - such as Bombay in the case of British India.

This assumes such a port exists however. If the connection is severed from either end then the overseas states cannot access the market and thus forms its own isolated enclave. Likewise if the shipping lane effectiveness is strained it will lower the accessibility of goods to and from the overseas states. Reflect back on previous dev diaries and consider the cascading consequences that were to occur if a maritime empire reliant on its overseas possessions were to suddenly lose control of its shipping lanes.

It is the market owner which must establish and pay for the port connections to all overseas market states. To somewhat compensate for this its subjects must share a portion of their convoys with their overlord. Subjects are still required to pay for their own trade and supply routes however.

The convoy cost of a port connection is influenced by the number of sea nodes and the overseas infrastructure usage. By extracting your raw materials from overseas colonial plantations and mines, while the high-Infrastructure manufacturing industries producing finished goods are located near the market capital, you can keep your Port Connection cost down - though at the expense of the development and wealth of your colonies.

Connecting India to the British market means it has to go all the way around the Cape to reach the British Isles which significantly impacts costs. But what if Britain somehow managed to discover a shortcut?
DD39 04.png

And lastly when combining all the shipping lanes of a country we get its overall Supply Network. As outlined early on we derive its Strength score from the costs of all individual shipping lanes compared to the country's total supply.

That is all for today! Hope you enjoyed this dev diary and in the words of Admiral John Fischer you may sleep easy in your beds. In next week's Dev Diary, Daniel will be back to tell us about how the Opium Wars are represented in the game.
 
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Would it be possible for a country to "sell" or lease their Convoys to another country? A large chunk of 19th century Norway's economic growth came from shipping goods on behalf of other countries, notably the United Kingdom who had implemented liberal trade policies which allowed foreign vessels to transport British goods not just in-and-out of the British market, but also within it.

In this era, individual coastal communities around Norway started collectively producing wooden ships, which were owned by the locals involved (the term for this was "partrederi"). This meant that the Norwegian merchant fleet was very decentralized and spread the wealth around fairly evenly. This could probably be modeled in-game with the rise of (using the already-available in-game options) "worker-owned" clipper factories. So Norway would produce an abnormal amount of Convoys specifically to sell them, particularly to the British.

This would tie really neatly into the way technology is being implemented to be more potentially troublesome, because this whole industry came to an end due to the rise of metal ships, which require a ton more starting capital than what these local communities could scrounge up. Metal ships means capitalists or state actors, and big centralized shipyards. It also means the end of the livelihoods of thousands and community disruption across the country. Not a graceful transition.

Looking at it, much of this seems like it could work within the current framework of the game, provided convoys could be used in this way.
 
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Yes. A comment by lachek in the Navies and Admirals DD said that at the time convoys was determined purely by the number of nodes but changing it to the current system was planned.
Yeah, this is the new system :)

Well, how many does a unit of electricity use? How about clippers?
Batteries? :cool:
 
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If I don't have enough convoys, can I prioritize certain routes to lower or remove penalties on that route, at the cost of raising the penalties on others? For example, if I have two trade routes that each want 100 convoys, but I only have 150 convoys, that would mean that each route would only get 75 convoys from their desired 100. What I am curious about is if I can steal convoys from one route for the other, so that one route has 100/100 convoys, while the other only has 50/100. I could see wanting to do this while at war, for example, to prioritize the supply line, or if one trade route is bringing the materials I need to build more convoys, I definitely would not want to not get everything I could from that route.



Could it be possible to trade "through" other countries if your country is landlocked, with the country the goods are passing through getting tariffs or transportation fees or something?
You can't prioritize one shipping lane over another at the moment but it's a great idea.

Some more questions:

1. Will the sealanes (their locations, throughput, speed of delivery) be affected by weather / primary sea winds and currents? IRL until steamships took over completely shipping routes were dictated by winds and currents. Sailing ships went with the wind, not along a shortest direct lines between two points. See Brouwer route or Clipper route for more info.

2. Will the sealanes and ports and trade routes in general be affected by season and weather? For example Saint-Petersburg port freezes in winter and until arrival of reliable icebreakers commerce stopped for cold months. In connection with previous questions - some trade winds are seasonal.

3. Will ports be logistical hubs only? Will there be separate buildings for fishing / seafood gathering / whaling / corals gathering / pearls gathering and other maritime pursuits?

4. Will ports provide revenue per visiting ships to represent harbour fees and other multitude of services provided in ports to ships (repair, fuelling, provisioning, R&R for the crews)?
1) and 2): Weather & Seasons is beyond the scope of release I am afraid
3) Yes
4) Nothing planned at the moment
 
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Trade Routes between two markets which do not share a common land border must be done overseas and will necessitate a shipping lane. Land adjacency is determined from where the two market capitals are located.
Does it mean that landlocked markets are not allowed to trade with markets other than those they already share a border with?

If two market capitals have a direct land connection then it will trade overland, for example Berlin and Vienna but not Berlin and Paris.
If, say, Germany and France are allies in war, and the friendly mainland is safe while the Baltic and North Seas are really pestered by British and Swedish convoy raiders, then they won't be able to conduct safe trade over land at all?
 
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The actual shipping lane path is the shortest/lowest cost possible
Any way to prevent my routes going through certain locations?
Like if I'm Britain that has an abundance of convoys and heavily fortified Suez end Gibraltar, so it's much safer for me to just go around the Cape instead of challenging Regia Marina?
 
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Land connections dosn't cost anything at the moment no.
Beware of my incredibly effective (trade-wise) Great Lisboa-Vladivostok Worm that would border everyone.
 
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Does it mean that landlocked markets are not allowed to trade with markets other than those they already share a border with?
Correct.

Any way to prevent my routes going through certain locations?
Like if I'm Britain that has an abundance of convoys and heavily fortified Suez end Gibraltar, so it's much safer for me to just go around the Cape instead of challenging Regia Marina?
No but you raise a good point. An easy solution might be flagging specific sea nodes as "no-go" zones for the pathfinding alghorithm.

Beware of my incredibly effective (trade-wise) Great Lisboa-Vladivostok Worm that would border everyone.
Is this @Dnote alt account? :eek:
 
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I like this diary! Much more fact-based than the previous one.

"Convoys" are not to be thought of as goods as such and cannot be traded; they represent the ability to move things overseas, including the ship, crew, dockworkers, etc. Ports consume ships (Clippers or Steamers) and turn them into convoys. You can trade Clippers and Steamers with other markets, but you have to turn them into convoys through ports yourself - you cannot outsource your shipping lanes to another country (that would be best thought of as waiting for another country to export their goods to / import your goods from your market).

Regarding ports being government owned with no option to privatize them like railways, we agree that's a bit suboptimal - having Port-based trading companies make big bucks selling goods transport to Trade Centers who make clever decisions whether it's cheap enough to buy them given the profit of the routes they manage etc sounds really neat, but also one step too far in complexity at the moment.
I think this is mixing up things. Just because you want to buy furniture from China, you are not going to buy container ships and enter the cargo shipping business!

Why not do it like industry/infrastructure capacity?
Ports provide a service called 'convoys', and then trade centers have to buy 'convoys' in order to operate trade routes (instead of making big bucks with free government-provided convoys). The government is also buying convoys to supply armies and portions of the market that have no land connection.
Trade centers automatically launch/expand new trade routes when they seem profitable and stop/downscale those that are loosing money (for instance, if there is a convoy shortage). They are both exploiting and solving market imbalances.

The government is always collecting profit taxes from domestic trade centers.
With protectionism they also collect tariffs on the total value of goods imported/exported, regardless of who is owning the shipping lane. Most trade routes will be unprofitable, unless there is a real price gap between the markets.
With mercantilism, tariffs are higher for shipping lanes owned by foreign trade centers (you seek to promote not just your own products, but also your own trade centers).
 
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Will having your own trading port in macau be beneficial in convoy cost for trading with china or will it be the same if i just transport goods using some random china port all the way to lisbon?
 
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Don't tell me they aren't trying to stretch by making small dev diaries about small topics just so that we can reach a September release.
Shipping lanes are not a small topic! At least not for those of us interested in the naval side. Without lines of communication, you cannot have anything resembling real naval warfare. So this was a fascinating DD!

Though a great shame that convoys always have to be provided by route owner. Pretty much kills any idea of carrying trade (which was important part of national economies for many countries) and such important part of colonial and international politics as limitations and regulations on whose ships can enter whose ports. IRL a lot of income disparity between colonies and metropolitan countries was caused by laws that prohibited colonies from having their own merchant marines and having direct trade with each other. Likewise the whole great stories of "opening Japan" and of competition for trade with China fall by the side.
Hope this can be re-done before release or in updates thereafter.
I agree that this is an unfortunate compromise. Britain's control of maritime trade was central to its 19th century economic dominance of Asia and as others have said, the merchant marine was equally important to the national histories of Greece and Norway in the 20th century. I realize this probably can't be fixed before launch, but I really hope that the devs come back to this in a later patch. If V2 could have factories owned by foreign powers, I don't see why V3 couldn't have trade routes/shipping lanes owned by foreign capitalists.

If the US' market capital is in New york, wouldn't this make trade between Japan and the US establish a lane all the way around South America instead of more logically using a port in California?
While this particular example is probably historical, I suspect that automated port placement is going to need some iterations after launch. HoI4 still has trade routes between Japan and the USSR going through the Baltic or Black Seas, which is really not optimal for either gameplay or immersion.

If, say, Germany and France are allies in war, and the friendly mainland is safe while the Baltic and North Seas are really pestered by British and Swedish convoy raiders, then they won't be able to conduct safe trade over land at all?
You are assuming that Berlin and Paris are the capitals of Germany and France. Possibly OP was thinking that Berlin was the capital of Prussia and therefore doesn't share a land border with France in 1836? Then his point would make more sense.

(Actually, Prussia did have a land border with France in 1836. but it was the land-locked Rhine Province. The Zollverein brought them into a single National Market with a land connection in 1834, just in time for the start of V3. But maybe OP overlooked that?)
Will there be a system to simulate piracy? And for fleets to protect sea-lanes for everybody else?
It would be a good way to simulate the pax britannica and an incentive for small nations to get a navy protecting their coasts
IMHO this sounds like great patch/DLC material and Victoria 3: Pax Britannica sounds like a great DLC title.
 
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If the US' market capital is in New york, wouldn't this make trade between Japan and the US establish a lane all the way around South America instead of more logically using a port in California?
It also doesn't make sense, the largest port in the Netherlands is Rotterdam, in a united (North) Germany it's Hamburg. But in this setup you'd have trade going to Amsterdam for the Netherlands, which is for gameplay not different but still weird, and for Germany around Denmark to somewhere closer to Berlin the way I read it.
 

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It also doesn't make sense, the largest port in the Netherlands is Rotterdam, in a united (North) Germany it's Hamburg. But in this setup you'd have trade going to Amsterdam for the Netherlands, which is for gameplay not different but still weird, and for Germany around Denmark to somewhere closer to Berlin the way I read it.
I think Market Capital and political capital are different things, so it doesn't have to be Amsterdam for the Netherlands when Rotterdam is the best for trade.
 
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Kacper1234PL

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Will smaller ports in various provinces have a reason to exist (i.e. will they be actually used, and there will be merchant ship traffic between them?), or will only a single major port + good road network be mandatory to distribute all of the goods, with small ports being completely useless and redundant?
 

shoebird

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Maybe it has been already asked, but one question about convoy cost. Let's say I create a trade route to export iron from Spain to the UK and I create another route to import coal from the UK into Spain. Do I have to pay the convoys for the two routes independently, or the ships that I send with iron bring the coal on its way back, thus lowering the amount of convoys needed? This is a historical example, the basque steel mills manage to import coal from Britain at a lower cost by using the ships sent to export iron on its way back.
 
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$ilent_$trider

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Will smaller ports in various provinces have a reason to exist (i.e. will they be actually used, and there will be merchant ship traffic between them?), or will only a single major port + good road network be mandatory to distribute all of the goods, with small ports being completely useless and redundant?
Ports produce convoys, so many might be necessary, even if only one is actually used to link your country to your overseas empire.
 
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Bearjuden

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> Reflect back on previous dev diaries and consider the cascading consequences that were to occur if a maritime empire reliant on its overseas possessions were to suddenly lose control of its shipping lanes.

(idk why the actual quote function hasn't been working for me at least but this is from the actual DD)

Will AI nations reliant on maritime control be good about fighting rising maritime powers not reliant on this to keep control? For example, if a newly united Germany is expanding its fleets with the industry it now has available, how diligently will the an AI UK try to keep Germany from having a fleet that can contest theirs with or without provocation? Will an AI nation that depends on its fleet be able to recognize that fact?
 
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