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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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Do subsistence farms produce Grain for sale in the market? Or are their profits abstracted as direct money generation?
They produce a small surplus which is sold in the market, but most of their labor is simply self-sustaining.
 
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You imply I "do not necessarily need" tea? Sir, it is the most staple of goods that is essential to my everyday survival.
 
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Something that our UX designers have put a lot of time into is showing contextual information, in this case by allowing you to see heatmaps of production, consumption and potential production while viewing a particular good (which is extremely useful as it tells you things like where you can get coal).
there should be a "salivating" reply emoji
 
Hypothetically, if the price of a luxury good dropped low enough, would poorer pops start consuming it as though it were a stable good of the same sort?
If so, would they still be considered a luxury good? Or conversely, if a staple good got rare enough (and the price high enough compared to other goods with the same broad function), could a staple good become a luxury?
 
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Will housing/construction "industry" be modeled, and construction goods and building services be present?

Will there be something along the line of home ownership/destruction during wars/slums? Housing shortage and handling it was extremely important for "early" years of Soviet Union (akka till 1970s)

Will we have to actually produce and maintain our urban centers with goods?
 
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I was thinking about attacking it by making tanks cheaper, but making cloth more expensive sounds more fun. Probably not good for your pops though :cool:
"This just in, the Invisible Hand of the Market strikes again! Fabric is now more expensive for you to buy than highly advanced, mechanical war machines. People are finding it easier to purchase a tank and hide their bodies in it than they are to clothe themselves leading to demands that the government improve road infrastructure immediately. A new political action group has been formed towards this goal."
 
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"This just in, the Invisible Hand of the Market strikes again! Fabric is now more expensive for you to buy than highly advanced, mechanical war machines. People are finding it easier to purchase a tank and hide their bodies in it than they are to clothe themselves leading to demands that the government improve road infrastructure immediately. A new political action group has been formed towards this goal."
like I always say an armed society is a polite society
 
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Very impressed again. The separation of goods into categories and the addition of more types of goods should hopefully help cut down on the kind of "bottleneck" situations (looking at you Machine Parts) that could really wreck the game in previous versions.
 
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View attachment 732592
Anybody want to guess what these are? I thought vegetables for a second but they seem too expensive relative to other goods.
I was assuming axle and gears... then zoomed in to 300% and saw hashish, a cigar and two bulbs of opium poppy. So harmful addiction goods. Tho why alchohol is separate is a bit weird. Or for that matter antisocial media.. oh wait not invented yet.