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Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #4 - Goods

Happy Thursday and welcome back to yet another Victoria 3 dev diary, this time on the subject of Goods! Goods are a core economic feature of Victoria 3, just as they were in previous Victoria games, and come in a wide variety of types. Also, as in previous Victoria games, the manufacturing of Goods (by Pops in Buildings) is how the vast majority of the wealth in Victoria 3 is created.

Fundamentally, a unit of Goods represent a quantity of a certain type of natural resource, manufactured good or intangible service and come attached with a price tag. This price varies both in base (a single unit of Tanks is pricier than a single unit of Fabric) and in actual market value, as the prices of Goods change depending on supply and demand.

A selection of goods that are bought and sold in the British Market.

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There are four broad categories of Goods: Staple Goods, Luxury Goods, Industrial Goods and Military Goods. Of these, Staple/Luxury Goods are mainly consumed by Pops, and Industrial/Military Goods are mainly consumed by buildings, but there are no hard rules here - you will find Buildings using Luxury Goods and Pops purchasing Industrial Goods when and where it makes sense for them to do so.

Staple Goods are everyday goods that Pops need to live, such as food to eat, wood to heat their homes, and clothes to wear. Staple Goods tend to be purchased in vast quantities by poor and middle class pops, with richer pops generally eschewing them for luxury variants.

Grain - possibly the most Staple of all Staple Goods!
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Luxury Goods are the things that Pops do not necessarily need but definitely want, such as fine foods, luxury drinks like Tea and Coffee, or fine clothes made from chinese silk. Luxuries tend to be more profitable to produce than Staple Goods, but depend on having a customer base with money - a poor factory worker isn’t going to be buying a whole lot of mahogany cabinets.

You can never have too many painted Ming vases, I always say.
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Industrial Goods are goods such as Iron, Coal, Rubber and Lead whose main purpose is often to be converted into other, more profitable goods. Securing a steady supply of vital Industrial Goods is crucial to Industrialization and growing the GDP of your country.

Tools are essential to the operation of many industries.
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Military Goods are goods such as Small Arms, Ammunition and Warships that are used by military buildings to arm and supply the armies and navies of the 19th century nations. The more technologically advanced the army or navy, the more complex (and expensive!) Military Goods they will need.

I’m told that soldiers tend to perform better if they’re given ammunition for their guns.
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We’ll be returning to the topic of Goods in later dev diaries when discussing related mechanics such as Markets, Pop Needs, Goods Substitution and Cultural Obsessions... but for now, I bid you adieu for a while, as next week Mikael will provide you with a dev diary about something we’ve been teasing for some time now - Production Methods!
 
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This is an interesting idea. One major issue that resource companies have is accessibility to infrastructure. There are enormous gold deposits up in Alaska/British Columbia that are still so remote that they have not been developed yet (NovaGold Resources is a classic example). If infrastructure is expensive enough, then you could find gold, but it would not be worth developing it, which is exactly what happens in real life. Whether that would be fun or not for a game, I do not know.
Please keep in mind that this is true only for modern liberal democracies.
Under many regimes in the past the issue would have been solved by using up labourers.
 
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Are you going to take notions of economics from the different paradox games like EU4 (transport of goods, embargoes) and HO4 (blockade) or is it too much to ask in terms of work and calculation to maintain a balance in the games?


thank you very much for your work for victoria 3 :)
 
It's really sad how so many people's "solutions" to everything is either "make it a game option" or "don't let the player play the game and just watch instead" instead of actually putting thought into game design and mechanics.

I mean when the problem is "people want different things", then "have multiple different options" is 100% a solution.
 
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What about slaves? Are they considered as pops or goods or both in the game?
The US had already abolished the foreign slave trade in 1807. Russia (which, bizarrely, was portrayed as not having slavery in Vicky 2) also wasn’t importing or exporting slaves. I would guess that internally displacing enslaved people would probably be modeled as a form of migration?

The Devs’ example of farms being able to hire a few engineers to replace many of its workers with tractors makes me suspect that plantations will also be able to hire either free farmers or slaves, and emancipation would convert slaves to sharecroppers. From our perspective, there isn’t much reason slaves couldn’t grow wheat or work in factories, but in the time period it was common for Americans to say that would never happen.
 
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I mean when the problem is "people want different things", then "have multiple different options" is 100% a solution.
It's really not. When people disagree a thousand different ways on a thousand different things, or when they disagree on underlying game philosophy for example, it is very much not an solution. Especially when those people disagreeing have such little knowledge of what's actually been going on in the development and design of the game thus far and don't really know the full impact of what they're disagreeing on or want to make an option.
 
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It's really not. When people disagree a thousand different ways on a thousand different things, or when they disagree on underlying game philosophy for example, it is very much not an solution. Especially when those people disagreeing have such little knowledge of what's actually been going on in the development and design of the game thus far and don't really know the full impact of what they're disagreeing on or want to make an option.

Most people are disagreeing two ways on this (historical mineral deposits / historically plausible random deposits). Maybe three if you want to throw in a more random option.

Regarding not knowing as much as the devs, I think that applies to everyone here? Including you? (Unless you know something we don't : P)
Obviously you can see why people would still be willing to talk about their opinions on the stuff the devs have shown and told us so far, otherwise you wouldn't have posted either : P
 
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Most people are disagreeing two ways on this (historical mineral deposits / historically plausible random deposits). Maybe three if you want to throw in a more random option.

Regarding not knowing as much as the devs, I think that applies to everyone here? Including you? (Unless you know something we don't : P)
Obviously you can see why people would still be willing to talk about their opinions on the stuff the devs have shown and told us so far, otherwise you wouldn't have posted either : P
I was speaking more generally about people's reactions on here and on the CK3 forums when that was in development. Every disagreement had people going "just make it a game option so I can have what I want" even though it ends up just creating magnitudes more balancing work for the developers and frequently creates options nobody uses, as utterly bloated mess of game options CK2's game options ended up being showed.
 
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Please keep in mind that this is true only for modern liberal democracies.
Under many regimes in the past the issue would have been solved by using up labourers.

Yes and no. Sure primitive mining can be practiced and often is. Productivity tho rarely much above subsistence and maybe keeping that warlord grand army of 2 toyotas and 15 men going. And that with essentially slavelabor that die like flies constantly requiring more. Hardly a income bringer and is best represented by "subsistence ie nondeveloped".
farming has it, and well, mining & fishing might well work in the same way while also demonstrating the potential for said resource if having manpower and so on.
 
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It would of course be trivial to mod a Tractor Factory and Tractor goods yourself
Now I'm looking forward to see some NUTS mod adding so many unnecessary detalied trade goods like different size and material nails that it'll be cool, but unplayable. :D
 
Now I'm looking forward to see some NUTS mod adding so many unnecessary detalied trade goods like different size and material nails that it'll be cool, but unplayable. :D
I just had flashbacks to college and looking through the WTO trade data list of goods and seeing like PVC piping divided by size into a dozen or so different categories.
 
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For the love of gods, please give navies and naval warfare some love and dedication that they deserve. They were in the centre of the arms race, they were a sign of prestige and power and they were one of the main means to assert one's diplomatic views.

I really hope navies are not as neglected as they were in Vic2 and this : "Military Goods are goods such as Small Arms, Ammunition and Warships that are used by military buildings to arm and supply the armies and navies " doesnt give me hope.
 
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I was speaking more generally about people's reactions on here and on the CK3 forums when that was in development. Every disagreement had people going "just make it a game option so I can have what I want" even though it ends up just creating magnitudes more balancing work for the developers and frequently creates options nobody uses, as utterly bloated mess of game options CK2's game options ended up being showed.

Right, I agree that the thing you are describing here was quite common when it came to CK3 and CK2. However, I am not really sure how this applies in this case, where there are three distinct options, all three of which would work perfectly fine with other game systems, but people have different preferences, or might want to change them from game to game.
 
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Right, I agree that the thing you are describing here was quite common when it came to CK3 and CK2. However, I am not really sure how this applies in this case, where there are three distinct options, all three of which would work perfectly fine with other game systems, but people have different preferences, or might want to change them from game to game.
You do realize my original comment was in response to someone saying the player shouldn't control foreign policy, right?
 
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For the love of gods, please give navies and naval warfare some love and dedication that they deserve. They were in the centre of the arms race, they were a sign of prestige and power and they were one of the main means to assert one's diplomatic views.
They were glorified, expensive paperweights, that, most of the time, sat in port. Paradox has never made AI that could competently handle naval warfare, or land warfare across multiple continents, and I would be perfectly fine with warfare being abstracted away completely, even to the level of Realpolitiks.
 
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All that said, if I may make a suggestion, the way to "fix" my issue is to make every type of colony interesting. I don't know if that is possible, but it is worth a thought.
-If you colonize a coastal region and there is nothing but fish, then your people still flock there to fish, which causes a bunch of fish to influx into your economy, which could have some type of effect. Maybe it means your people rely less on livestock/grain, which allows for planting of more cash crops.
This is making me like to think that maybe something like partial access to markets being a thing colonies can provide?

Just spitballing, and I'll admit I'm not super knowledgeable on the impacts that colonies had on trade in a general sense, but my feeling on the matter is a surge of new goods in the area is something that could happen (particularly non-perishable ones).
 
Yes and no. Sure primitive mining can be practiced and often is. Productivity tho rarely much above subsistence and maybe keeping that warlord grand army of 2 toyotas and 15 men going. And that with essentially slavelabor that die like flies constantly requiring more. Hardly a income bringer and is best represented by "subsistence ie nondeveloped".
farming has it, and well, mining & fishing might well work in the same way while also demonstrating the potential for said resource if having manpower and so on.

He's not talking about child slaves digging up cobalt by hand in the congo (though even that is productive enough it apparently remains more competitive than modern industrial mining of the stuff), he's talking about the zillions of labourers that were worked to death building railroads across the world in the 19th century.
 
So I know my question doesn't have anything to do with the current DD but as a modder there are two questions that weigh on my mind regarding Victoria 3:

1.
The Ticks per day. Being a lead dev on a mod that has a considerably larger timeline it would be cool to have a define that allows you to set how many ticks a day has. Being able to fine tune that would open up a lot of room for modder in my opinion.
2.
to what extent will the game support bundles of small nations. If a mod would seek to have a region that is dominated by OPMs and other small tags, how well would the game be able to handle it through it's area focused system?
 
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