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Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #74 - UX Improvements

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Hello, my name is Henrik, and I am one of the UX Designers on Victoria 3. For 1.2 I have been fully focused on improving the user experience of the game. Before we go into the details of what has been worked on for this update, I want to give a special thanks to the community, all the modders, and anyone who posted feedback here on the forum, Discord, Reddit, Youtube, or any of our other communication channels. Your feedback, ideas, and discussions have all been instrumental in helping the team prioritize our time and efforts for this update.

Trade Routes​

One of the first things we started with immediately after 1.1.2 was improving the usability of the Trade Routes panel. In addition to the current view of grouping Trade Routes by Goods, you can now get a sortable list of all Trade Routes in the Market, or get a view where they are grouped by Country. All of these lists can also be filtered to exclude any Routes not owned by you. The Country grouping is especially useful when setting up Embargos or Trade Agreements.

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Message Settings​

Our new Message Settings window lets you decide how you want a specific Notification to be displayed, and if you want the game to automatically pause when it gets triggered. In future updates, we are planning on expanding this to cover more functionality, like the Current Situation panel, Alerts etc.

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Parallel to adding Message Settings, we also made a pass on making sure that the Notifications we post to the player are informative and have a reasonable default setting for how to present them. Among the tweaks we have done are:

  • Make the “Interest Activated/Deactivated” Notification into a “You can now conduct Diplomacy with X” Notification that only triggers if the activated/deactivated Interest is the first/last one that overlaps with any of your Interests
  • Moving the Price Report to the Market Panel (turned off by default, can be turned on in the Message Settings panel)
  • Splitting up Trade Routes Notifications into significant and less significant versions (Significant is turned on by default, less significant is not)
  • Only show “Mobilization” and “Declare Neutrality” Notifications if you are committed to the Diplomatic Play in question
  • Only show resource related Notifications if they happen in your Market (previously Strategic Regions in which you have an Interest in)

All of these changes should, according to our benchmarks, reduce the number of Notifications by roughly 50% for most Countries. In addition to this, we have also tweaked the animations for the Notification feed, so the overall user experience of the entire system should be much improved.

Rebindable Keys​

Our shortcut system has been replaced by a new system that can leverage rebindable keys. When adding this new system also made a pass and added a few more shortcuts, as well as hooked in a few existing ones in more places.

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Pop Needs​

Another fully reworked panel is the Population overview, which now gives you more information about who your Pops are, how many they are, how much money they make, what they spend it on, and how much that goes to increasing/decreasing their Standard of Living (the last one not included in the screenshot, but visible without scrolling when the Taxes and Needs sections are collapsed).

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In addition to creating this new panel, we have exposed more information in the Pop Lists used throughout the game, and improved a few of the Pop Need tooltips. They should now surface more of the relevant information higher up in the information hierarchy. We also exposed the top five Goods a Pop spends money on in this list, inspired by the Visible Pop Needs mod by Apprehensive-Tank213

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Economy​

Martin has already discussed some of the changes regarding Construction in DD #71, and in addition to these changes we have improved the user experience of the gameplay loop by providing better contextual information in several places. For example, we have added Infrastructure, Available Labor, and Qualifications to the Map List that is shown when expanding Buildings. In the screenshot below you can also see that we have restructured the layout of the Map Interaction panel to make it possible to navigate directly to another panel, which in the case of the Construction Interaction is the Building details panel for the specific Building. This layout also allows for more reasonable tooltip positioning, making it easier to navigate into a nested tooltip without accidentally opening another tooltip when moving the cursor towards the tooltip you wanted to dig into the details of.

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The most recent improvement that made it into the game is the Reset Production Methods Map Interaction, a PDT project by our Lead Designer Mikael and myself. It should make it much more efficient to streamline the production in your Country, which is especially useful if you have just acquired a few new States. This is currently somewhat of a work in progress, and we are hoping to expand this to work on Buildings and Building Types in the future.

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One of the most popular mods for the game is currently Visual Methods by FUN, a mod that we liked so much that we decided to make our own, slightly tweaked, version of.

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The Investment Pool is now being more prominently displayed in the Buildings panel.

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The tooltips for Market Access have also been improved to give more detail as to why a State is not fully connected to the National Market.

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Radicals and Loyalists​

We have improved the presentation of why your Pops turn Radical or Loyal, who they are and which Interest Groups they belong to. Information regarding this has been exposed in several tooltips and panels, like the Interest Group panel.

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Convoys​

Your current Convoy balance has been added to the Top Bar, making it much easier to keep track of and access when needed. This item will be hidden for landlocked Countries and unlocked as soon as you gain access to a coastline.

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Map Modes​

We have added three new Map Modes (Literacy, Population and Infamy), and given the transition between two Map Modes a configurable fade in/out to make it smoother. One of the first mods I personally subscribed to at release was Practical Heatmaps by Ronin Szaky, and an ever-so-slightly tweaked version made its way into the base game in 1.2.

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Diplomacy​

For Diplomacy, we have improved how we show AI Acceptance and signal more clearly if offering or using an Obligation would convince them to accept.

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We have also exposed all types of Diplomatic Plays on the Country details panel, not only the ones you can currently start, making it easier to figure out what is blocking you from starting a particular Play.

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Military​

When it comes to the Military system, the focus for the UX improvements in 1.2 has revolved around making it clearer how the Battle systems work. We approached this by exposing more data related to Battles, as well as, improving some of the tooltips presenting breakdowns of the calculations involved. Some effort has also been made to decrease the amount of visual noise from multiple Front Markers.

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Work in Progress tooltip for the breakdown of the initial number of troops each General was able to bring to the Battle.

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We have also surfaced the information regarding which HQ a Commander considers their Home HQ and made some improvements to the information presented in the Naval Invasion user flow.

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Outliner​

The Outliner has gotten some polish, with pinnable Goods and non-Military Characters being the biggest additions. Interest Groups are now showing their Approval value, and States show their Available Labor and Qualifications.

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Tech Tree improvements​

The Tech Tree Improvements discussed in DD #70 also made it for 1.2.

Closing words​

In addition to all of these changes listed above, we have also made over 100 smaller UX tweaks and bug fixes, which you will either have to wait for the full patch notes to explore, or experience for yourself during the Open Beta. Once again, thanks for all the feedback, it really helps us make the game as great as it deserves to be!

Next week, Martin will be showing us diplomacy improvements coming in 1.2!
 
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Okay this is a very silly dynamic aesthetic idea, but what if the symbol for currency in the game changed depending on who the greatest economic power is instead of it always being the Pound? Like if Russia, America, or Germany do well enough it could end up changing to the Ruble, USD, or Reichsmark symbols.

As for my concern with the music player mentioned above, I realize now that the ambient music that plays DOES follow the triggers scripted by the modder or developer adding the music, but when you press the "next song" button in the music player it does not follow the triggers, and just plays any random old song it likes. Luckily this sounds like a very easy fix that could most certainly be updated to the finished version of 1.2.
 
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Partiya_Lenina said:
Okay this is a very silly dynamic aesthetic idea, but what if the symbol for currency in the game changed depending on who the greatest economic power is instead of it always being the Pound? Like if Russia, America, or Germany do well enough it could end up changing to the Ruble, USD, or Reichsmark symbols.
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That would be cool but probably too tricky to implement.
 
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It shouldn't be too hard to implement; they give every nation a currency symbol, then check once a month if the #1 country matches the current symbol (and, if not, whether they're sufficiently far ahead to change).

Then the only issue is what happens when a small currency (think of 2023's yen) becomes the current symbol.
 
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It shouldn't be too hard to implement; they give every nation a currency symbol, then check once a month if the #1 country matches the current symbol, (and, if not, whether they're sufficiently far ahead to change).
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Well, it's still some effort to create 100 icons.
DragonAtma said:
Then the only issue is what happens when a small currency (think of 2023's yen) becomes the current symbol.
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You mean it would also recalculate the shown number to fit to the relative strenth of currencies at the time?
 
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Mannio5 said:
Well, it's still some effort to create 100 icons.

You mean it would also recalculate the shown number to fit to the relative strenth of currencies at the time?
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No, I mean they would change the symbol but not the number, so something that costs 100 pounds would suddenly cost 100 yen due to the symbol change -- and as of 2023, 100 pounds is a lot more than 100 yen.

Of course, we can assume that the yen (or lira or ZWD or whatever the top economy uses) is a lot more valuable than it is IRL.
 
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DragonAtma said:
No, I mean they would change the symbol but not the number, so something that costs 100 pounds would suddenly cost 100 yen due to the symbol change -- and as of 2023, 100 pounds is a lot more than 100 yen.

Of course, we can assume that the yen (or lira or ZWD or whatever the top economy uses) is a lot more valuable than it is IRL.
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I don't think the real life worth of different currencies should be included, this would complicate Trade and Economy too much. But I'm also unsure if I would make the currency of the economical leading country a "world currency". If every or at least some countries get their own currency, they should have them regardless of which country the strongest economy has. Of course, the currencies should all have the same worth. But I don't know if Paradox would want to include something that is rather a cosmetical change.
 
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Port.Sacral said:
I don't think the real life worth of different currencies should be included, this would complicate Trade and Economy too much.
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I would like to see it, down the road. Maybe each nation gets a currency and each GP (and major power?) can use its own currency when leading its own market and there are currency exchanges to complicate trade and rewarding having a dynamic internal market and a whole thing about how you issue money and yada yada yada. Each currency could be different strengths based on your market conditions.

But that's all not urgent, there are obviously bigger things needed for now.
 
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DragonAtma said:
It shouldn't be too hard to implement; they give every nation a currency symbol, then check once a month if the #1 country matches the current symbol (and, if not, whether they're sufficiently far ahead to change).

Then the only issue is what happens when a small currency (think of 2023's yen) becomes the current symbol.
Click to expand...
You still have to implement a hook that swaps the symbol in all strings etc. I dont think something like this is there yet. Maybe the character system (name of character = currency symbol) can be used/adjusted)
It should be possible in the current engine, but it is not that simple. (esp. as you would not want to switch so often as every month id wager that would be quite confusing/irritating when two countries are close together GDP wise)
 
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I'm trying the beta and while I'm glad there's more information than the previous base game, when I turned off my mods I'm seeing a lot less essential info and scattered controls. I want to be able to order goods by price and change the tariff policy for them in one screen, I want my armies to not be massive chunky UI elements for no reason, I want to see the employment and reserves of buildings in the building screen so I can easily add a couple more power plants or railways where I can see they're needed, I want to see the unemployment situation there so I know I should probably remove the barracks in the low employment area and build them somewhere else, etc.
 
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This UI rework will be a godsend! I'm very much enjoying the game so far but the UI was one of the things that irked me the most, glad to see you have tackled a lot of the issues present atm.

I have just one comment about the "Reset Production Methods" tab: "Reset" is a bad choice in my opinion: it took me a bit to understand that it was about standardization of the production methods, I tought it was about resetting them to the initial values (eg. Gas Streetlights -> Unlit Streets) and I was very confused by the usefulness of it.

I think that a better wording could be "Standardize Production Methods" or "Update Production Methods"'.

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One thing I have been wanting since the game launched is a way to more clearly see which states have traits that benefit the different buildings. It would be awesome if say I clicked to build Logging Camps, the list of states would clearly mark the ones that have a forest for increased production throughput, or at least show the icons over the states on the map so you could quickly and easily make sure you are building in the best states.
 
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Nice work!

It would be great, when adding a liberate country war goal, to see the borders of the country you are going to liberate.

The profit calculation when changing productive method is calculated at full staff, isn't it? If so, it would be awesome to have it calculated at current employment level
 
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Tuned out of following Vic3 news for the last couple of weeks, so this is a delight to come back to. Mostly commenting to say that I would have clicked the "love" emoji reaction more than once for each of these items. Thank you for listening to player feedback.

Only complaint I have is with the population screen. It's definitely an improvement over the current state and a welcome change. But I would love if the same design approach that has been used for trade routes was applied here as well. Currently the screen still makes too many choices for us when it comes to how pops are grouped and aggregated and what they are sorted by. Having a selection of how the population is grouped (by strata, by profession, by culture, by religion) and then displaying a table of multiple sortable columns containing things like radicalization, needs expenditures (with detailed breakdown in the tooltip), whether needs are met, aggregate SOL and so on would help a lot.

I would also appreciate a more explicit communication regarding the question "which good supply do I need to increase to help this aggregation of pops most". Currently, we are being shown two numbers: good A is X% of expenditures and is Y% relative to base price. But it's not easy to tell if e.g. a good that makes 30% of expenditures being 20% above base is worse than a good that makes 10% of expenditures being 60% above base.

But like I said, I really love the direction, and I hope the UI keeps being iterated on.
 
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I just wanted to log on here and give thanks for the new autopause options in the new 1.2 UI! I have been nagging about this on other forums for a while, I just want to let you know how appreciated this is!
 
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