Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #67 - Patch 1.1 (part 3)

[lachek]

Please allow more than one battle at a time.

We're looking into it! The challenge with it is not technical per se, but rather an issue of what it would mean for the complexity of the frontline mechanics - for example, if your general advances with 90% of the troops on the front (woo!) but the enemy has two generals, one that's defending and one that's advancing, and now while you're fighting the big battle the other guy advances against your remaining 10% (boo!), and while that fight is going on his two allies on the same front advances and just easily marches in to occupy territory because there's nobody left to defend (nooo!), so in response you frantically hire several more generals, and before long you're saddled with dozens of boring randos leading your army instead of a handful of interesting ones, requiring dozens of clicks to manage... So this is the core issue, not enabling multiple battles per front. I can promise a thorough design investigation, and I hope we can find a good solution!

 

[lachek]

Hi! Thank you for reworking some points, but I have a question. Are you changing/reworking the Service Centre? Now these centres do not work normally in the middle and end of the game, because the consumption of services is lower than production, especially when we use high methods in service centers.

That's good feedback, thanks! It's not necessarily a given that all buildings will be more profitable at high technology tiers though, it's (as you've noticed) very much conditional on your population's demand and the supply of your input goods. Demand for services is virtually infinite, as it increases exponentially for wealthier pops, so to build your demand for services you need a large population of very wealthy people - or you could focus more on your supply of Glass, maybe by subsidizing your Glassworks.

But we'll keep your feedback in mind, maybe the balance is a bit off on the high-end Urban Center PMs!

 

[lachek]

Something doesn't feel right. If you do some sort of national union, your governement will be seen as illegitimate and radicals will appear? You risk revolution because two parties who disagree join the same governement?

I get the incentive from a gameplay perspective, but flavor-wise it doesn't sound logical.

I understand your perspective, but note that these radicals will come only from the politically active part of the population - i.e. the ones whose Interest Groups are forced to work side-by-side with hated enemies, or are kept out of government while an unholy, incoherent alliance reigns.

 

[PDJR_Alastorn]

Hi! Thank you for reworking some points, but I have a question. Are you changing/reworking the Service Centre? Now these centres do not work normally in the middle and end of the game, because the consumption of services is lower than production, especially when we use high methods in service centers.

Its on my list of things to look at, just sadly down a bit further from the things I am currently working on.

 

[lachek]

Are there any plans to rework how generals are assigned troops? Having them tied to strategic areas creates a lot of undesirable edge cases. I’d love to be able to actually build army groups from the ground up and assign generals to lead them.

Yeah, this is cool, but would conflict with the political side of the military gameplay. Currently, you promote your commanders to lead more troops, which give them more political power and makes them a bigger threat in case of uprisings. If you could just give your Field Marshal command of five conscripts with muskets to declaw him, he's not much of a potential threat to you.

Not to say there aren't solutions to this and it is one area we're looking to explore in the future, but we have to be careful that it doesn't wreck existing features.

 

[lachek]

How does ideological incoherency gets calculated? Do internal party disagreements count if the government is a coalition?

(i.e. will a PB Ints liberal party have a penalty to legitimacy because of different Home Office preferences once another party is invited to the government? Or will the penalty be ignored due to them being in the same party?)

The penalty is ignored within party boundaries. Of course, law enactment penalties (stalls, debates) still increase in frequency with such a party in government.

 

[lachek]

Alive game

Is oil never being bought for pop needs also getting fixed in 1.1?

You're the first person I've heard complain about too little demand for oil

I haven't seen this bug show up yet, so likely not for 1.1, but I'll keep an eye on it!

 

[lachek]

Are there any plans to improve migration in this patch? Right now the Colonial Resettlement law gives +100% migration attraction in unincorporated states, which is insane. I've run several test games while working on mods and I've consistently noticed the Eastern United States becoming depopulated because everyone is migrating to become peasants in unincorporated North Dakota.

Sweet, sweet tax evasion

Most migration work is being done for 1.2 alongside a big rebalancing of Arable Land.

 

[lachek]

Whatabout political strength overflow

Fixed in 1.1. Full changelog next week!

 

[lachek]

Are there any plans to "fix" the current implementation of how units are picked from battle (top of the list down), so that if a General has 30 troops, the top 10 of which are depleted from a recent battle, and they get a 12 width engagement, they do not once again just have 10 depleted armies and 2 fresh ones taken into battle, and they can actually draw from the bottom of the list as well?

Yes:

When battles start, units are now deprioritized to enter combat if they are injured or demoralized.

 

[PDJR_Alastorn]

Sounds to me more like a question about goods substitution in general working for goods where you start at zero demand. That is a known issue right?

You're the first person I've heard complain about too little demand for oil

I haven't seen this bug show up yet, so likely not for 1.1, but I'll keep an eye on it!

This one is written up and in our database at current.

 

[lachek]

Please make pocket fronts close automatically after some time if no troops are inside.

Some updates to the behavior of fronts to make them more manageable are being prioritized for patch 1.2!

 

[lachek]

Will there be any change to life expectancy of generals? I see, and gets lots of reports about cases of starting generals like Elder Moltke living to the end of the game.

Yes, the bug that caused extremely long-lived characters will also be fixed for 1.1. Full changelog next week.

 

[lachek]

Will 1.1 seek to improve the warfare UI? My biggest challenge right now as a player is simply reading the screens to determine what is going on--I know devs are aware and working on the overall display of info (which is really hard in a game this comprehensively huge!) but am curious if there are any specific tweaks that, for instance, will help players better understand up front why troop numbers alone don't determine a battle (i.e. putting the kill rate front and center on the battle screen).

Some improvements and bugfixes have been made in this area, but more enhancements to military UX are scheduled for 1.2.

 

[lachek]

At least, you could allow to reassign them to a more prestigious position. The prestige here would be determined by number of battalions, with some bonus for home countries. So you could reassign a good general from colonies to command a main front at home, and they would happily accept it. And it would be either forbidden in the other way (easy to do), or, preferably, it would be possible but with some sort of penalty (malus to opinion of general's interest group, or if the said group is already unhappy and powerful enough, chance of uprising).

Yep, something like this is likely how we would handle it. It would also permit for another requested feature, the ability to reassign commanders (permanently) to another HQ, but with some sort of impact or penalty to discourage the player from just shuffling commanders around all the time.

 

[lachek]

Is the A.I going to utilize the buffs from wages? If they don’t it will make the player even more OP.

Of course the AI will be using the wage levels.

It's important to note though - both in response to your comment and other comments here - that the positive modifiers from wages are actually not particularly powerful, and this is intended. They may provide the boost you need in certain circumstances, but they're not tuned to be a must-have in every relevant situation such that for example you feel compelling to bump your military wages as soon as you get into a conflict as a matter of course. Their biggest impact is and will remain the actual money paid out and the effect that has on the pops.

The reason not to make that the only impact is a player psychology thing. Seeing that pressing a button to raise wages will make your expenses increase will discourage you from ever pushing it proactively if there are no other effects. More importantly, seeing that pressing a button to lower wages will reduce your expenses incentivizes you to push it, but this is a trap that causes your military to become rebellious over time. By putting some pretty high-value penalties on the reduction of wages we encourage players to only reduce wages when absolutely needed, while putting some low-value bonuses on the increase of wages we give a small incentive to at least try it out from time to time.

The same rationale goes for positive and negative Capacity balances. A positive Capacity balance provide a minor bonus so you don't feel bad for having some Capacity in reserve, but it's still almost always better to spend it than save it. A negative Capacity balance provide a major malus so you try to get back in the green ASAP and don't get used to operating at a deficit and dig yourself a bigger and bigger hole.

 

[lachek]

Could You pls add some reduction of infrastructure usage if input goods are locally available. It would balance whole game and enforce gathering of industry in state where resources are mined. Thx If not, pls tell me why and is it possible (and how) to add such modifier by modder??????????????????????????? Thx a lot.

enforce gathering of industry in state where resources are mined

This is precisely why we don't do it. The notion that manufacturing industries are located in the same place as resource industries they rely on is not a universal truth, and in fact very frequently it's the exact opposite - manufacturing industries tend to cluster in population centers where both workforce and consumers are plentiful, and ensuring good infrastructure connections between those hubs and the more rural areas where the raw materials are sourced should be key to developing a successful economy.

What you will find though is that if you do cluster your manufacturing and resources economies together without expanding infrastructure, you will still be able to run profitable industries if there are local workforce and consumers, because more of the economy will be local due to the reduced market access. With raw materials in high supply your manufacturing industries will get a better deal, and as long as locals buy the finished products you can sustain this economy without infrastructure. It won't scale well to multiple supply chains, and your international trade will suffer, but this is the trade-off between local low-infrastructure operations and market-wide ones.

In the future we do plan on experimenting more with the differences between local and market prices to make this effect more noticeable and relevant to gameplay.

 

[lachek]

I agree in land battles, but in Sea battles please allow this to happen as currently invasions can just bypass navies because 1 navy in the sea province happens to be fighting in a battle.

This is a bug. Should be fixed in 1.1.