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Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #65 - Patch 1.1 (part 1)

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Hello and welcome to the second post-release dev diary for Victoria 3. Today we’ll be talking about the first major post-release patch, which we’re aiming to get to you before the end of the year. This patch (1.1) is going to primarily focus on game polish: bug fixing, balancing, AI improvements and UI/UX work, while the next major free patch (1.2) is going to be more focused towards making progress on the plans we’ve outlined in our Post-Release Plans DD by iterating on systems like warfare and diplomacy. With that said, there’s a few more significant changes coming in 1.1 as well, which we’re going to go over in this and next week’s dev diary.

The first of these changes is a rework of the interface for individual Pops, with a particular emphasis on improving the visualization of Pop Needs. In addition to the general overview, there are now separate tabs for Economy and Consumption, with Economy showing a more detailed breakdown of the Pop’s income and expenditure, as well as their top 5 Goods expenditures, and the Consumption tab showing a detailed breakdown of all their Goods expenditures, along with pricing information for the State and Market. We also plan to iterate on Pop Needs further in the future to give you a better idea of what your population needs are country-wide.

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The next significant change in 1.1 is a rework of Legitimacy: some frequent criticisms we have received about the political system in Victoria 3 is that Legitimacy doesn’t matter enough and isn’t clear enough about its effects, as well as that elections don’t have enough of an impact. This rework aims to resolve all those problems by making several changes: First, legitimacy, while still a number from 0 to 100, is now divided into five categories with differing effects, some of which will increase or decrease based on the actual number and not just the threshold:
  • 0-24: Illegitimate Government: This government is considered blatantly illegitimate by most everyone in the country. This legitimacy level reduces the approval of all opposition IGs, makes it impossible to enact laws, and generates a steady stream of radicals in increased numbers the lower Legitimacy is.
  • 25-49: Unacceptable Government: This government is generally not considered acceptable to the people of the country. Laws can be enacted, but opposition IGs will disapprove and radicals will be created over time, though in amounts less than in an Illegitimate Government.
  • 50-74: Contested Government: This government is considered to have somewhat shaky foundations. Opposition IGs will disapprove slightly but otherwise there are no ill or good effects.
  • 75-89: Legitimate Government: This government is considered proper and legitimate. Over time a small number of Loyalists will be generated, with increased numbers the higher Legitimacy is.
  • 90-100: Righteous Government: This government’s legitimacy is considered to be unassailable. In addition to generating Loyalists over time, enactment time for new laws is cut in half.

The way you gain legitimacy has also been altered in democracies, with the share of votes (rather than just clout) represented in Government now having a direct effect on Legitimacy, the degree to which depends on the laws - under more restrictive voting systems, Clout can still be more important than votes, but as more of the population becomes enfranchised votes grow in importance and under Universal Suffrage it should be virtually impossible for a government that doesn’t have the voters behind it to be considered legitimate.

Despite being the largest party in terms of Clout, the Whigs alone are not considered Legitimate due to only commanding 47% of the votes in the last election.
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Lastly for today, we’ve also made a balancing change to the Church and State and Citizenship laws - previously, the only balancing consideration for these laws was that less tolerance gave more Authority, which we felt was neither particularly balanced nor really a complete representation of the reasons that a country might want to discriminate against part of their population. To try and address this, we’ve made it so that by default, slightly more radicals are created by Standard of Living decreases than Loyalists from Standard of Living increases, but offset this with modifiers on the more restrictive laws that increase Loyalist and reduce Radical gain among the accepted parts of the population - the more restrictive your cultural/religious tolerance, the greater the effect on the part of the population that actually falls within it.

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That’s it for today! Next week we’re going to continue talking about Patch 1.1, which as I said at the beginning of the dev diary is planned to be released before the end of the year. We’re also still working on another hotfix (1.0.6) which should hopefully include some late-game performance improvements and other fixes and which we are aiming to release sometime next week.
 
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This comment is reserved by the Community Team for gathering Dev Responses in, for ease of reading.


Ruck said:


The changes are nice, but i personally can wait for them even longer, those are not important things for now. What we really need as fast as possible is a performance patch or maybe even more than just one. Many can not play longer than 1870-1880 cause of the incredible slow down.

You should prioritize performance for now over absolutely everything else.
That's the fun thing, we can work on both at the same time. The Artists, Designers, UX Designers are not the one's dealing with performance issues.
The performance issue is known to us, we delayed putting it into the hotfix because it wasn't yet vetted. You will get it in 1.0.6 sometime next week.
And after that there will continue to be a developer working on performance.

But trust me when we show you UX work and maybe some of the stuff I might tease next week, you don't want me working on performance instead - I will actively make it worse since I don't know what I am doing on that front.


LucasG21 said:


This looks good, although I do hope you might add "Electoral Laws" or "Anti-Corruption" categories in the future to represent the ability for non-majority governments will be able to enforce their will with sufficiently authoritarian policies.

Also, will you be making another pass over IG ideologies? It's really weird that the Roman Curia is a key supporter of secularizing the Papacy because they prefer Monarchy to Theocracy, especially when the Roman Landowners have a special ideology to make them prefer Theocratic governments.
Not too much comment on when its getting a pass but trust me this is something thats on our list of continual areas of improvment. I think Tolman has been working on it but I am not sure when its going to be vetted for a branch. The reason I am ignorant on this is because I've got my nose in economic balancing but more on that in the future. If you have specific suggestions, discord and forums is a great place to put it. Community and QA are regularly rounding up the feedback for us.


DogTheBoss said:


Will the UI improvements be taken or inspired by current popular mods?
So, we try to not outright copy mods but we do take alot of inspiration from them. We are regularly keeping eyes on those things which are the top because that signals areas for us that could use improvement. Sometimes we do take them, make a few tweaks to make them meet our standards and implement them in a future patch.

Its a fun balancing act but if there's a cool mod, we see it.


Shake Appeal said:


All sounds good to me, especially getting another hotfix before 1.1.

Do the devs have a recorded stance on France's dominance and (relatedly) the extreme effectiveness of Treaty Ports?
A few short term solutions came to mind, I'm not sure which one we insitutied for 1.1
And yes I am away of France's current dominance. The trick is not nerfing France into oblivion but lifting the others to be able to challenge them. I am on it.


gkbba said:


can we expect some trade UI changes, its the most obnoxious part for me to navigate.
Planned for the future, but reworking an entire screen needs both myself and Aron to have time to stop assisting on other things.
UX Resources is as always at Paradox, a bottleneck. Don't be disheartened that you don't hear anything, we don't want to show it to you until its done and ready for feedback.


milliontonnez said:


Also, please make disasters like cyclone relief scale with province GDP and not the entire country's GDP.
Its ridiculous that a state with 58K pop needs a disaster relief of 4M just cuz its my late game Germany
I've got a code support request out for this, its in the queue but also folks want their perforance and crash fixes so its not the hightest priority relatively but my eyes are on it. I balanced the events down for 1.1 a bit until I get that support.


ryan404000 said:


Wonderful, besides my constant want for Warfare to be entirely overhauled, can we please get some sort of unemployment map mode? It's so frustrating trying to find where my unemployment is
Until I am able to get to this, open up the production lense and zoom in, the map will have a popup of unemployment and the maplist will assist.
 
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Is it safe to assume the overflow bugs (Gdp, loyalists, clout,, and so forth) will be vanquished in 1.0.6? My trade unions are so happy they've collapsed into a hate-singularity, and so powerful they don't exist.
 
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This looks good, although I do hope you might add "Electoral Laws" or "Anti-Corruption" categories in the future to represent the ability for non-majority governments will be able to enforce their will with sufficiently authoritarian policies.

Also, will you be making another pass over IG ideologies? It's really weird that the Roman Curia is a key supporter of secularizing the Papacy because they prefer Monarchy to Theocracy, especially when the Roman Landowners have a special ideology to make them prefer Theocratic governments.
 
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Not the biggest fan of low-legitimacy governments being totally barred from passing laws.

Maybe passing a law with an illegitimate government should produce a large number of radicals, but fully gatekeeping it doesn't make sense to me.

Other than that — love the direction you're moving in! Victoria 3 is a great game, just needs some polishing.
 
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The changes to legitimacy are certainly welcome but radicalism seems like a much better route than just disabling law enforcement for illegitimate government. The proposed change removes some player agency since we'll presumably never put in place a very low legitimacy government.
 
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Not the biggest fan of low-legitimacy governments being totally barred from passing laws.

Maybe passing a law with an illegitimate government should produce a large number of radicals, but fully gatekeeping it doesn't make sense to me.

Other than that — love the direction you're moving in! Victoria 3 is a great game, just needs some polishing.
Eventually the radicals make opposing interest groups start a civil war. Winning that zaps their clout, so the groups in power have a larger relative share of the clout, so your legitimacy goes up.
 
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The way you gain legitimacy has also been altered in democracies, with the share of votes (rather than just clout) represented in Government now having a direct effect on Legitimacy, the degree to which depends on the laws - under more restrictive voting systems, Clout can still be more important than votes, but as more of the population becomes enfranchised votes grow in importance and under Universal Suffrage it should be virtually impossible for a government that doesn’t have the voters behind it to be considered legitimate.
Please show us the amount of votes in the goverment screens after an ellection as well. Currently I don't know where you'd be able to find it. It should be a second percentage number next to their cloud.
 
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In my game I started as US last night, I immediately moved to ban slavery. An event fired about someone trying to assassinate Andrew Jackson, leading to his gaining the abolitionist trait, and I had slavery outlawed by Oct 1836, at which point I immediately went for multiculturalism. The Southern Landowners didn’t oppose it (were neutral) and it passed first try. When I logged out it was 1842 and I had just elected a Black President….

It’s a game, meant to be fun, so I understand greasing the wheels a bit so things pass quicker than historically, but to achieve this much this quickly with no effort or sacrifice is definitely something that needs work.

You should be finishing the major political reforms closer to 1900 than to 1850. Something to slow down the chances of passing a reform for x number of years after each successfully law change would really help with spacing out reforms and saving immersion.
 
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The next significant change in 1.1 is a rework of Legitimacy: some frequent criticisms we have received about the political system in Victoria 3 is that Legitimacy doesn’t matter enough and isn’t clear enough about its effects, as well as that elections don’t have enough of an impact. This rework aims to resolve all those problems by making several changes: First, legitimacy, while still a number from 0 to 100, is now divided into five categories with differing effects, some of which will increase or decrease based on the actual number and not just the threshold:
  • 0-24: Illegitimate Government: This government is considered blatantly illegitimate by most everyone in the country. This legitimacy level reduces the approval of all opposition IGs, makes it impossible to enact laws, and generates a steady stream of radicals in increased numbers the lower Legitimacy is.
  • 25-49: Unacceptable Government: This government is generally not considered acceptable to the people of the country. Laws can be enacted, but opposition IGs will disapprove and radicals will be created over time, though in amounts less than in an Illegitimate Government.
  • 50-74: Contested Government: This government is considered to have somewhat shaky foundations. Opposition IGs will disapprove slightly but otherwise there are no ill or good effects.
  • 75-89: Legitimate Government: This government is considered proper and legitimate. Over time a small number of Loyalists will be generated, with increased numbers the higher Legitimacy is.
  • 90-100: Righteous Government: This government’s legitimacy is considered to be unassailable. In addition to generating Loyalists over time, enactment time for new laws is cut in half.

The way you gain legitimacy has also been altered in democracies, with the share of votes (rather than just clout) represented in Government now having a direct effect on Legitimacy, the degree to which depends on the laws - under more restrictive voting systems, Clout can still be more important than votes, but as more of the population becomes enfranchised votes grow in importance and under Universal Suffrage it should be virtually impossible for a government that doesn’t have the voters behind it to be considered legitimate.

One question about this. When new parties are generated during an election I have seen my legitimacy tank thanks to IGs suddenly wanting to join the newly created parties. Only time I have seen 0 legitimacy. But before that the legitimacy was in the 70-80 range. Will feel unfair to have to have 6 months of massive radical generation just because of that. With how it works now, 6 mothe of 0 legitimacy is not that big of a deal, but after this change it would be much worse. How will you handle that?
 
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Does the UI show better the percentage of votes an IG is holding?

Can we get a popup for election results?

Generally, can we get pop ups when something we should care about happens?
 
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These changes are nice and all that but the game is currently unplayable with the mid to late game lag.

When people said the hardest achievement was reaching 1936 they meant it as a joke.

it really needs a fix asap.
 
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