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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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Just one thought here.
The increased importance of legitimacy is going to make it harder with certain governments.
I was quiet often forced to put a weaker government into power just because one IG was angrily pouting and refusing to join the government. Even though they had been the weakest part of the party and thus forcing the winner of the election to stay in opposition
 
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This looks cool, I like the concept.

One thing does concern me, though. As things are, there is no consistent way to get rid of radicals at all. As Russia in 1920, 4 points SoL ahead of everyone, double the gdp of GP 1-10 combined, old age pensions max invested, all that... I was still generating a lot of radicals by the slight SoL fluctuations that happen as people immigrate and resource demand plays around. By game's end, solidly over half my population was 'radical'. If goverment also adds consistent radicals... 100% radicals sounds just not-fun.

Are there any plans to 'lower' the amount of radicals through an action the player can do consistently? SoL just doesn't work, because a peasant will become a radical if their SoL drops from 25 to 24(despite their expected minimum being 11 or so) and will then stay a radical even if it increases after.

I'm thinking something like pensions generally reduce (de-radicalise) pops over time, or a well funded police / schooling system could do that, assuming you don't want to add separate systems for it.
 
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The most important question I have is, will US politics be fixed so Lincoln can't become president at age 28? I don't expect 100% accuracy, but getting the first election right doesn't seem too demanding.
 
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This looks cool, I like the concept.

One thing does concern me, though. As things are, there is no consistent way to get rid of radicals at all. As Russia in 1920, 4 points SoL ahead of everyone, double the gdp of GP 1-10 combined, old age pensions max invested, all that... I was still generating a lot of radicals by the slight SoL fluctuations that happen as people immigrate and resource demand plays around. By game's end, solidly over half my population was 'radical'. If goverment also adds consistent radicals... 100% radicals sounds just not-fun.

Are there any plans to 'lower' the amount of radicals through an action the player can do consistently? SoL just doesn't work, because a peasant will become a radical if their SoL drops from 25 to 24(despite their expected minimum being 11 or so) and will then stay a radical even if it increases after.

I'm thinking something like pensions generally reduce (de-radicalise) pops over time, or a well funded police / schooling system could do that, assuming you don't want to add separate systems for it.
I agree on this 100%. In my russia game I was generating radicals as I was tweaking production. I get it in abstract --- if I change my textile factories to be more automated and a bunch of people become unemployed they will become more radical, but the solution to this in game is more police? not pensions or the fact that they get hired a week later. I feel like there should be some scaling down of radicalization --- education, wealth level, pensions, etc.
 
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Very nice. but we need in next patch something for France. Europe is unplayable right now with a country with 3 times GDP capita in comparison with other powers.
 
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While the food industry and textile mills, to a greater extent, are built in places where the product will be consumed.
I can assure you, as an Englishman, that industrialized textile mills were frequently a long way away from the consumers of their outputs.
 
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Also, I have some quibbles with the proposed changes to legitimacy. First off, illegitimate should not be barred completely from passing laws. And the legitimacy in democracies should be higher than just the count of votes. Are two-party systems inherently illegitimate just because each party only gets half the vote? There needs to be some accounting for system legitimacy and not just IG/party legitimacy.
My current 2 party systems have both parties in government and I figure that that makes sense (certainly moreso than only having one of them in government)

In this context I'm thinking of "in government" as presenting that there are members of parliament/congress/whatever from both parties that are currently in the government rather than just the majority power.
 
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Still waiting for a response on what the future plans are for the mess of a notification system. This isn't a niche concern, the notification system has been consistently called out as subpar. See here for example.
 
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We really need more clear and easy to acess tooltips that shows critical information without having to hover the mouse over it and we need a option to deal with notifications, it lags the game a lot with everything that happens in the world popping up.
 
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Just one thought here.
The increased importance of legitimacy is going to make it harder with certain governments.
I was quiet often forced to put a weaker government into power just because one IG was angrily pouting and refusing to join the government. Even though they had been the weakest part of the party and thus forcing the winner of the election to stay in opposition

Real world politics in a nutshell. A coalition of two parties with 30% is stronger as the other party with 40% of the vote. This is absolute fine if you are having a system with more than two parties.
 
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Any plans for the issue of IGs simply not joining parties, and thus not running for election at all?
 
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  • 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.
Please please please don't do this. There's no reason for such a huge difference between full enactment time at 89% legitimacy and halved enactment time at 90%. It makes that cutoff far more valuable than any other marginal change in legitimacy for an entirely arbitrary reason. If you want high legitimacy to reduce enactment time, perhaps add a scaling modifier that goes from 0% at 90% legitimacy to -50% at 100% legitimacy. But the idea that there is no difference between 100% and 90% legitimacy but a huge difference between 90% and 89% is frankly just bad design.
 
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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
 
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Please please please don't do this. There's no reason for such a huge difference between full enactment time at 89% legitimacy and halved enactment time at 90%. It makes that cutoff far more valuable than any other marginal change in legitimacy for an entirely arbitrary reason. If you want high legitimacy to reduce enactment time, perhaps add a scaling modifier that goes from 0% at 90% legitimacy to -50% at 100% legitimacy. But the idea that there is no difference between 100% and 90% legitimacy but a huge difference between 90% and 89% is frankly just bad design.

To get 90% legitimacy, you're going to need pretty much every interest group in government - including those who oppose the laws you're trying to pass. The enactment time will drop, but the enactment chance will drop too.

EDIT:

The "respectfully disagrees" make me think I'm wrong about how this works. Is the above not correct from the screenshots?
 
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To get 90% legitimacy, you're going to need pretty much every interest group in government - including those who oppose the laws you're trying to pass. The enactment time will drop, but the enactment chance will drop too.
No you don't. You need like IG party wit 40% clout.

The modifier should be scaling.
 
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Is the hot fix gonna address the election bug?
View attachment 907750

I don't think this is a bug, but rather something VERY not clear. Voting power is influenced by things like wealth (simulating that being rich will amplify your ability to impact politics, particularly with differences in election types.

But yes, this is not clear and could probably be represented in a different way.
 
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