Happy Thursday! It's time for an update on how things are moving along with the 1.5 Open Beta. Today we will take a look at a few major improvements we've made since last time, both to the new military-related mechanics but also a number of other aspects of the game.
As a reminder, adapted from dev diary #93:
Update 1 will tentatively launch early next week. By this time the new features should feel a lot more mature, with bugs and missing information / graphics filled in, additional mechanical details closing exploits and providing new optimization challenges, and in general more bells and whistles available to you. While beta testing this update, in addition to feedbacking on what tweaks would make for more fun gameplay, focus especially on balance and UX improvements.
We don't expect 1.5 to go live until sometime in November, so keep that in mind when assessing and feedbacking. We have planned two more 3-week sprints after this update for making additional improvements, fixing bugs and balance issues, and hooking up all the additional graphics our Artisans team is hard at work at.
With that out of the way, let's get into the changes!
Formation Pathfinding
Your formations will no longer travel in straight lines, but along roads and sea lanes to reach their destination, and you can visibly track their progress as they do. They will take military access into account when determining which path to take, and will always aim for the route that will take the least amount of time.One detail to note for when you're playing the beta is that the checks to determine if the formation can reach the destination is not yet using the pathfinder but rather operate according to existing logic (e.g. whether you can reach a front or not is dependent on the relationship of the formation's current and target theaters, not whether an uninterrupted travel path can be created). This could potentially lead to bugs (visual or gameplay) and we will update the logic checks to use the pathfinder in future updates. If you encounter any such bugs, please report them on Discord as always.
The travel network, visualized in debug mode across North America, with spline color representing the type of spline; yellow are roads or potential roads, red are roads that could be upgraded to railway, blue are sea lanes in between sea nodes, cyan are coastal sea lanes that connect to sea nodes.
By contrast, here is the travel network at game start, before a lot of roads have been established and prior to any railway upgrades. The travel system will evolve as buildings are created to establish new city hubs and railways, determining the route that formations take and how long it takes them to get to their destinations. Different types of paths will affect the speed by which formations travel, and in future updates formation speed itself will be determined by factors such as unit composition, mobilization options, and commander traits.
In many cases, a formation won't be able to reach a particular point using the travel network alone. In those cases we infer the additional pathing required by drawing a straight line from its source location or target destination to the closest travel node (e.g. city hub). Here we see a path taken by an army walking from the Brazil HQ in Rio de Janeiro to its main position on the Grão-Pará frontline. Traveling "off-road", either due to no path having been established yet or because the position is outside the travel network, will result in slower travel speeds. Armies that need to travel overseas will incur an additional "docking" speed penalty when embarking or disembarking, stalling their movement for some time while in port. This ensures an army doesn't "hop onto land" unnecessarily in the middle of their move. Armies also move slower over sea lanes than fleets do.
At the moment we have a simple horse cart model representing the traveling army. This will be changed in the future to display a proper formation, sized according to its number of units and the commanders leading it, in uniform (approximately) appropriate for their home country.
By contrast, here is the travel network at game start, before a lot of roads have been established and prior to any railway upgrades. The travel system will evolve as buildings are created to establish new city hubs and railways, determining the route that formations take and how long it takes them to get to their destinations. Different types of paths will affect the speed by which formations travel, and in future updates formation speed itself will be determined by factors such as unit composition, mobilization options, and commander traits.
In many cases, a formation won't be able to reach a particular point using the travel network alone. In those cases we infer the additional pathing required by drawing a straight line from its source location or target destination to the closest travel node (e.g. city hub). Here we see a path taken by an army walking from the Brazil HQ in Rio de Janeiro to its main position on the Grão-Pará frontline. Traveling "off-road", either due to no path having been established yet or because the position is outside the travel network, will result in slower travel speeds. Armies that need to travel overseas will incur an additional "docking" speed penalty when embarking or disembarking, stalling their movement for some time while in port. This ensures an army doesn't "hop onto land" unnecessarily in the middle of their move. Armies also move slower over sea lanes than fleets do.
At the moment we have a simple horse cart model representing the traveling army. This will be changed in the future to display a proper formation, sized according to its number of units and the commanders leading it, in uniform (approximately) appropriate for their home country.
We still have a bunch of work to do here! Up to this point the spline network representing roads between hubs has been purely decorative, which has made it quite forgiving to work with. With it now having a direct impact on game rules, we have found some cases where we need to make improvements and adjustments. So in addition to the planned improvements mentioned above, we also need to ensure the travel network doesn't have any improperly broken connections, expose more details about the travel time to the player, deal with formations that split while en route, ensure straits are included as a possible pathing option (with appropriate delays) etc. Should you encounter any problems severe enough that they block your playthrough, you can temporarily change the USE_TRAVEL_NETWORK define (inside a text file in the 'common/defines' folder) to "no" instead of "yes" to re-enable straight-line movements.
Formation Command Limit, Organization, Supply, and Morale
A number of tweaks have been made to Military Formations, to let you customize and optimize them in more realistic ways. These are all related, so read them in order!Command Limit
This one is pretty simple. Commanders don't have their own personal military force anymore, but they still provide a Command Limit according to their Rank (a single value, no longer split up by regulars and conscripts). The Command Limit of all Commanders in your Formation is summed up to provide a Command Limit for the whole Formation. If the number of units in your Formation exceeds its Command Limit, the Formation will regain Organization slower, and the excess will impose a cap to the amount of Organization a Formation can regain. Keep the number of units in the Formation below the Command Limit and you will suffer no Organization penalty. If you do end up with an excess, you can:- Promote existing Commanders
- Recruit new Commanders, if you don't have 4 in the Formation already
- Transfer some excess units out of the Formation into one that has room for them
Organization
When a Formation is first created it has an Organization of zero. Organization will build up over time up to the cap, which is informed by Command Limit (with 25% Organization as the minimum cap; so you can have a Formation with no Commanders / Command Limit at all, though it's definitely not recommended if you care about your population).If Organization is below 100%, the formation and all its units will be penalized depending on how much Organization is missing. Currently these penalties range up to:
- An Offense reduction of up to 25%
- A Defense reduction of up to 10%
- A Morale Recovery reduction of up to 100%
- A Recovery Rate reduction (i.e. how many casualties are recovered as Wounded vs Kills after a battle, and how much manpower dies when subject to attrition) of 50%
One of the purposes of Organization is to encourage having sufficient Command Limit to effectively command all the units in your Formations. Another is that this means that in future updates, we can let you toggle certain Mobilization Options even while the army is mobilized, at a cost in e.g. Organization or Morale. In practice this means that if you research a new tech during active warfare, and you want to equip your troops with this new discovery, you can do so even while they're at the frontline - but you will have to be smart about timing it to ensure the new equipment doesn't cause disarray and unnecessary casualties until your army can be reorganized.
Supply
At the moment Supply for Formations works very similar to how it does for commanders in the live version of Victoria 3. It is always 100% if the Formation is a fleet, or an army that is fighting on the same continent as its HQ. If it is an overseas army supported by a shipping lane, its Supply is equal to the shipping lane efficiency, which is affected by your Convoy capacity and any convoy raiding damage applied to it. If an army is cut off from its HQ and cannot establish a shipping lane to it, its Supply will be zero.In future updates we also intend to impose a penalty from any Input Goods Shortages suffered by the buildings supporting units in the formation, and possibly some sort of Fleet Support capacity based on the size of fleets stationed in an HQ.
Insufficient Supply has no direct impact on its own, but has a strong influence on unit Morale. Available materials are assumed to be distributed across units to be able to fight in the next battle, and when supplies are unavailable it will reduce the manpower that can effectively contribute.
Morale
In the live version of Victoria 3, Morale tracks towards the Supply value, such that units that belong to commanders with sub-par Supply will gradually reduce their Morale to match. They will also of course lose Morale in combat.In the new update to the 1.5 Open Beta, Morale is instead always regained when a unit is not in combat, but if Morale is currently above the Supply value it will be regained much slower. Each combat unit tracks its Morale based on a comparison of demoralized manpower and total manpower, so a unit with 60% Morale and 800 manpower will only have 480 manpower available to fight with. When all manpower in a unit is demoralized, it will detach from a battle. When all units have detached, the battle is lost.
Implications
These four attributes work together to make it so you can always create the formation compositions you like, and the first battle in a war tends to always be fought at full efficiency. But if your Organization or Supply is lacking (due to not having sufficient Command Limit, compromised shipping lanes, or (in the future) an inefficient economy to support the composition), your Morale will not be regained fast enough for you to handle repeat losses. Your line will break and your front will be overrun. Keeping your armed forces set up with the right commanders in charge of the right troops, the right mobilization options applied (well ahead of time, if possible), and ensuring your economy and infrastructure doesn't collapse under the strain of mobilization will be important factors to consider to successfully prosecute your wars.Military Panels
To help with this fine-tuning (and give you something pretty to look at in the process) we have revamped many new and existing military-related panels. Right now there are still some placeholders here, and we will continue to iterate on these throughout the Open Beta, but they should be mostly functional in Update 1.
Naval Invasions
One feature that was reworked in the initial Open Beta release but launched in very rough shape was Naval Invasions. We have continued working on this feature during the current sprint, but still have some more work to do.The way naval invasions will work in Update 1 is as follows:
- Plan a Naval Invasion by either:
- Selecting Plan Naval Invasion from the Military - Navy lens
- Selecting Naval Invasion from an Army or Fleet
- Select the state to invade
- Select the formations you want to be involved in the Naval Invasion (the army no longer has to be demobilized)
- Confirm the Naval Invasion
- Both fleet and army will now travel towards the sea node off the shore of the invaded coastal state, and a pin will be used to indicate the naval invasion in the Military lens
- Once both formations have arrived, landing battles will commence
- "Garrisoned" (unmobilized) armies will be defending the state, and the landing battles will capture occupation in the state according to the normal rules if they win
- Once the whole state has been captured, a front will be created and the army will be assigned to it
Remember that the invading army needs to have at least one General with an Advance order for landing battles to occur.
Future planned improvements to Naval Invasions
For Update 2 we're working on a number of enhancements, including:- A Naval Invasion panel for both attacker and defender to gauge the progress and chance to succeed
- The ability to assign more than 1 formation of each type to the naval invasion, as well as defending formations (no longer requiring demobilized armies in the HQ to defend)
- Alerts and improved UX
- Making fleets defending the coastline prevent landing battles until defeated (at the moment defending fleets won't prevent landing battles)
- Reimplementing and rebalancing the Landing Battle penalty (right now there is no penalty)
Orders
When playing Update 1, you will note that two Orders have been removed: Stand By and Naval Invasion. Stand By is now irrelevant because it (by definition) performs no function, and Naval Invasion is handled in a different way as outlined above. Aside from that, for Update 1 you won't notice much of a difference in terms of how Orders work, but a lot of work has happened under the hood to prepare them for our future plans.In time for Update 2, we will have added new Orders to commanders which can affect the outcome of battles. Orders will continue to have a basic "behavior" outside of battle, such as advancing a front or raiding convoys, but will have different advantages and disadvantages on top of that. Additional Orders can be unlocked by things like tech or specific character traits. As one hypothetical example, an order like Vicious Assault might act like a regular Advance, but could inflict more casualties and devastation at the cost of increased Morale loss on your own side. Such an Order might be available only to Generals with a certain Personality trait, or might be unavailable to kinder, gentler commanders.
The intent for these additional Orders is to provide more "tactical" options, especially for when you're in a situation where you have to try to hold a front for longer or inch out an advantage over an equally-sized opponent. We have avoided adding such orders in the past since orders used to imply both a "stance" and a "location", and when all you want to do is move a guy somewhere (maybe in a hurry) the last thing you want to do is look through a list of a dozen options for what they're supposed to do when they get there. Since Orders now only define behavior, and there's usually a couple of orders you'd want to consider for every commander in a formation to line up with their specialities (for example, "this is my defensive guy, his job is to stall an enemy advance even at his own forces' expense" or "this is my raiding fleet, I want them to be as fast and hard-to-find as possible") there's a lot more opportunity to provide additional meaningful choices without introducing "twitch" mechanics that rely on reaction time. Usually there's plenty of opportunity to set these before a war and rarely change them, but even on an active front you will have an opportunity to switch individual orders around without too much time pressure.
Population Growth
One issue we see frequently in the mid- to late-game, especially in highly effective player countries, is problems with mass unemployment and overpopulation. While these often create interesting challenges, it's a bit overtuned at the moment. One of our designers has taken a deep look at it and recently made a series of changes we're very excited about.The old Pop Growth curves vs the new ones. These are baseline curves which do not include modifiers, such as starvation at very low Wealth levels or implications from high or low population compared to Arable Land. The main takeaways here are:
- Higher overall birth rate and mortality but lower difference between them, which will lead to a faster "generational shift" - Loyalists and Radicals will decay faster and Literacy will adjust towards Education Access faster as well
- No annoying and immersion-damaging "local minimum" mortality at Standard of Living level 20, both birth rate and mortality now drops as expected with each SoL level while population growth peaks at around SoL 25 (up from 20)
- Population replacement (equal birth rate and mortality) levels are now achieved at SoL 50, reflecting how most rich nations' increased population come from immigration and not natural growth in the native population
Annual population growth for different segments of population by standard of living. Do note these are unweighted averages, meaning they don’t really correspond to the actual growth in these segments when playing. That being said, you can see how the SoL 6-25 segments have quite a bit lower base pop growth.
Here we compare population growth from the old curves to the new ones based on a few different situations. (this does however not include mortality modifiers that apply to specific pop types which commonly affect lower SoL pops more)
- Base (No modifiers)
- Progressive scenario (Women in the Workplace + Level 3 Public Health Insurance)
- Conservative scenario (Legal Guardianship + Level 3 Private Health Insurance)
Finally, we have made the number of Urban Centers produced by Urbanization increasable by tech, providing more employment opportunities for highly urbanized states by the mid- to late-game. Sure, these are likely to be low-paying service jobs (especially with Services being hyperlocal goods in 1.5) so if you want your pops to really benefit from them you still need to provide other well-paying jobs and goods access to raise the Standard of Living levels to improve the lives of service workers. Fail to do this and you risk ghettoization of your overpopulated states, but still, a job is a job, right? The intent here is to make Urban Centers act as an alternative "subsistence farm" type of building once you've expanded away all your Arable Land, providing more elasticity to the labor pool even in the mid- to late game.
Some preliminary implications of the changes, in 1903. The control column here is without the changes. We can see a drastic drop in the unemployed population, almost 50%. Of course we're also seeing a slight decline in GDP (due to decreased consumption by the relative lack of unemployed pops, most likely) but not at all to the point of declining SoL overall - in fact, the change has resulted in an overall increase to SoL, especially in the lower strata. Most excitingly, for many of you, this change has resulted in 10% fewer pop objects, which translates directly into performance!
We will be monitoring the effects of these changes over the course of the beta to determine if we need to do more, meaning we're very interested in hearing feedback on how all of this impacts your nations over the Victorian century!
Interest Group Traits
Many Interest Groups across various countries are now customized to have Traits with different mechanical effects, providing subtle but sometimes quite impactful changes to playstyles of different countries.This is very noticeable across the various Devout (religious) groups. The Confucian Scholars no longer have a (highly inappropriate) Be Fruitful And Multiply trait to increase birth rate, but rather an Asceticism trait to keep the population in check when their Standard of Living drops.
Empower the Petite Bourgeoisie of France (perhaps using the new and improved Urban Centers) and you get cheaper loans instead of more Bureaucracy, letting you more easily deficit-spend to race past the other Great Powers.
The already-powerful Petite Bourgeoisie of Sweden enjoy special political representation in mining communities, and improve efficiency there accordingly as long as you can keep them satisfied.
There are many many more traits to discover, and we suggest you take a good look through the Interest Groups of your country at the start of a new playthrough!
Empower the Petite Bourgeoisie of France (perhaps using the new and improved Urban Centers) and you get cheaper loans instead of more Bureaucracy, letting you more easily deficit-spend to race past the other Great Powers.
The already-powerful Petite Bourgeoisie of Sweden enjoy special political representation in mining communities, and improve efficiency there accordingly as long as you can keep them satisfied.
Companies
Over 100 new historic Companies have been added, many of them with unique unlock conditions. We're also working on improved UIs relating to Companies, as well as other improvements to make them operate more as you'd expect them to under various circumstances, such as under different economic systems.We have big plans for Companies going forward! There's a number of behaviors we'd like them to exhibit in the long-run that we can't implement for 1.5, but which are slated for the free update accompanying Sphere of Influence in 2024. The reason we have to defer some of that is due to mechanics we're adding in Sphere of Influence that affect how building finances work, required to support the foreign investment mechanics we're adding in that update. Those mechanics aren't going to be ready in time for 1.5 release, but we still wanted to introduce Companies as early as possible to give you a chance to specialize your country's economies and counteract the current meta of making every country you play an autarky.
We've received a great deal of feedback on the Companies mechanic already but we're always interested in more! We're translating all your ideas into improvements both for 1.5 (where possible) as well as for future updates.
Most generic companies (available to everyone) now have new logos and dynamic naming conventions. By 1.5 launch all companies will have their own unique logos.
The Company panel is accessible through the briefcase button on the left hand side. It will be integrated with the other icons in a future update.
The Company panel is accessible through the briefcase button on the left hand side. It will be integrated with the other icons in a future update.
Impose Laws on your subjects
This feature was originally intended for the Sphere of Influence expansion, but we decided to launch an experimental version of it for the Open Beta. You can now force your subjects to start enacting certain laws. To do this, go to their Country panel and the Politics tab. You will find that their current laws are now enabled for you as buttons, and you can click them to select a different one. This will force them to start enacting that law if they would normally be able to, using the normal process, and block them from canceling enactment for some time.Free farmers? In my Personal Union?! This is a call to action!
Currently this is an alpha quality-level feature for testing only, and there's a number of things we hope to improve on for the final release:
- Instead of immediately starting to enact the law, the country should be provided with an event on how to respond to the (hrm) strong suggestion from their overlord. Options might include to commence enacting it immediately; promise to enact it within a certain period of time (similar to petitions); or refusing to enact it outright, which should come with a high cost / penalty
- UX improvements, to more clearly show you what your "menu" of options are and why, display the current status of the law enactment you've enforced, and properly explain why they can't enact something you want them to
- Distinctions between which subject types you can enforce laws onto and which you cannot
- Some sort of "overlord boost" to make it easier for them to enact the law you want, similar to how Political Movements make it easier to enact laws
Building Employment
We have made some changes to how and when buildings hire employees in 1.5.1 to tackle some problems present in the logic there, which became particularly evident when states ‘ran out’ of workforce. The first and most significant change is that buildings no longer always try to hire as long as they’re not losing money. Instead, each building will make a prediction of how profitable it would be if it was able to add one week’s worth of hires to its workforce, and avoid hiring if the prediction shows that they wouldn’t be able to maintain a minimum profit threshold. It’s worth noting that buildings do not stop hiring just because adding more employees would lower their income per employee (as this is virtually always the case and would stop all hiring), but what this change does mean is that buildings won’t hire themselves into unprofitability only to then immediately wage dump or fire employees, but can reach a stable equilibrium at partial employment if there simply isn’t enough demand for their goods to justify full employment.As there simply isn’t enough demand in Argentina for fully employed Tooling Workshops, the building has instead stopped hiring and continues to make a decent profit at only one-third employment.
The second change to building employment logic is in how buildings hire employees from each other. In the current version of the game, buildings that aren’t fully employed and who can’t find anyone willing to work at their current wages will hike their wages to try and hire (or ‘snipe’ as we call it internally) from other buildings in the state. This works fine when the building that is hiking the wages is more productive than the one that it’s hiring from, but can produce some quite strange results when you end up with the low-productivity farm sniping workers from the high-productivity factory, only for the factory to then raise its wages to snipe the employees back, with a back-and-forth that continues until the farm has tanked its profits without actually gaining anything (besides wealthier workers, but I digress) in the process.
To prevent this destructive back-and-forth, non-subsidized/non-government buildings in 1.5.1 will now only consider hiring from another building if their productivity is not only higher than the target building, but would also stay higher after the hiring building gains one week’s worth of hires, and the target building loses one week’s worth of hires - so that after the transfer of employees happens, we don’t end up with the other building hiring the same people right back. Additionally, buildings will only consider hiking wages to hire more employees if doing so wouldn’t reduce their profitability too much, similar to how the above logic for when to stop hiring works.
Overall, these changes should result in buildings whose hiring behavior is a lot more rational, and prevent the chaotic situations you can get when states run out of workforce and all the buildings are constantly having swings in wages and workforce that ultimately don’t benefit any of them.
Future Focus
Aside from what has already been mentioned above, the following is a (non-exhaustive) list of what to expect in future 1.5 updates:Naval warfare
As you know, naval warfare is not functional in the beta build. This is in part due to the number of changes we're doing to Orders, but also because with the greater focus on locality in the new warfare system (being able to see where everyone is with concrete locations at any given time), a lot of things need to be reworked regarding naval warfare in particular. For Update 2 we aim to have a new set of Orders and improved visibility of your fleets, but also a clearer Fog of War-style mechanic so you don't always know where enemy fleets are. Our aim here is to not lose the aspect of strategic positioning of your fleets - we don't want you having to chase enemy fleets across the seven seas, but rather deploy your fleets in strategic locations to both defend against and compromise your enemy. More information to follow in the next dev diary.Conscription
Conscription is also not functional on the beta build at the moment. Recruiting units for army formations as conscripts, raising them army by army, and lowering them alongside an army's demobilization will be coming in Update 2.Battle Conditions
At the moment Battle Conditions can feel pretty random and non-immersive. We're going to rebalance and adjust them a bit, so they trigger in more logical situations and feel less unpredictable. In the process we will add the promised Retreat / Pursuit battle conditions, to wrap up battles that have basically been won already, and investigate ways we can have commander skill traits and adverse battle conditions interact in a more fun way.Upgrading units
By Update 2 you should be able to upgrade your units (or sidegrade, in some cases) between appropriate types, when conditions allow.Balancing
Balancing all these new mechanics is going to be a priority for Update 2 as well as the final release. In particular we're very curious to hear more about occupation cost, victory score, organization penalties, mobilization options, and pop growth. The impact from local prices and companies on the economy are also elements we would love more input on. We don't want any single "metas" to emerge, either in the economic or military gameplay, so let us know which combos and strategies you feel are too strong - or what approaches ought to work well but which you feel are currently too weak.AI
The AI uses the new features in a rudimentary manner at best, and we have a bit more work to do in order to get it to a competent level. This is unlikely to be complete before release of 1.5, so enjoy this opportunity to "take candy from babies" in the Open Beta.Tutorial
Similar to AI, don't expect any changes to the tutorial before 1.5 release. Which means, don't even try to play the tutorial in the Open Beta - it will not work, because it still references a lot of components relating to the 1.4 military system. We will update the necessary lessons for the final release, though.Performance
We have some tentative design changes we're investigating - particularly in how migration and employment works - which on paper should help a lot with excessive pop numbers and late-game lag. The 10% reduction in pop numbers from the pop growth adjustments should prove a big boost already, since the number of pop objects in the game has a quadratic relationship with tick speed, but we think we can squeeze out even more. More on this in later dev diaries.We're still working on implementing frontline graphics, to let you see the units that are fighting and visualize occupation gained on the map. We have made some partial progress here, but be warned that you will frequently see test gfx like airplanes, tanks, and other anachronistic unit types long before they're invented!
Other Improvements and Bugfixes
Due to time constraints the full changelog for Update 1 will be available a few days after release. A partial list follows below, which in combination with the above should give you enough of an idea of what has changed to navigate the update.
Improvements:
- Frontline diorama graphics
- Added some one hundred historical companies to the game
- Added 41 historical company and most generic company icons to the game
- Regime change now changes all laws in Governance Principles to match the wargoal holder's law, assuming the two laws differ too much ideologically and that the law change is not blocked by technology or other laws that are not being changed
- Added events, journal entries, and decisions centered around Romanian unification
- There are now explicit Demands/Plays/Wargoals for increasing or reducing the autonomy of a subject. The autonomy scale for subjects goes Protectorate -> Dominion -> Puppet, Tributary -> Vassal, while a Personal Union can be turned into a Puppet/Vassal/Protectorate/Tributary if autonomy is increased/decreased
- Diplomatic Play/Demand/Wargoal Make Puppet was changed into Make Protectorate
- Diplomatic Play/Demand/Wargoal Make Vassal was changed into Make Tributary
- Diplomatic Play/Demand/Wargoal Make Dominion was removed
- It is now only possible to demand annexation of a Puppet or Vassal
- Diplomatic Demands/Plays that do not involve taking territory (such as changing autonomy or law changes) now generally are not blocked by high relations
- Buildings now evaluate wages more frequently when they're unprofitable
- Buildings will no longer raise their wages to try and hire additional employees unless they can maintain a decent profitability after accounting for the increased employment
- Buildings will no longer 'snipe' employees from other buildings unless they have a high enough productivity compared to the target building to ensure this doesn't result in an endless back-and-forth wage race between the two buildings
- Buildings will no longer hire employees if doing so would result in them becoming unprofitable after accounting for wage and production changes
- A new building's wage rate is now initialized to whatever the average needed wage would be to sustain wealth levels in the state
- Fixed an issue where Productivity was sometimes being calculated based on max employee count instead of current employee count, resulting in misleading information being displayed in the interface
- Japanese characters and pops will transition to more European fashions after the Meiji Restoration is completed
- Government Run Production Method for Plantations now give Government Shares
- Fertilizer from Ranches is now produced as a byproduct of Sheep Ranch PMs rather than meat-producing PMs, and require Intensive Agriculture for Ranch fertilizer production to be possible
- Countries now have a certain number of 'free' trade routes before additional routes start costing bureaucracy to maintain. Trade Routes that are free due to Trade Agreements do not count towards this cap.
- Bougie, Algeria now starts under French control
- The Trail of Tears now has a more direct impact on affected pops
- When a state is annexed, building levels under construction are now only transferred to the new owner if those levels have made some progress
- Puerto Rico now has the 'Natural Harbors' state trait
- Korea now starts with Sulfur deposits in Yangho and Gwanbuk
- Persia now starts with Traditionalism rather than Interventionism as their economic law
- Adds formation modifier support for units
- Adds battle side unit modifier support for units
- Mobilization and Conscription notifications are now only sent to countries that are committed participants in a play
- Liberate Country now gives the releasing country claims on any incorporated states that are lost
- Liberate Country now has the liberated country start with a friendly AI strategic desire towards the releaser, and an antagonistic one towards their former oppressor
- Formation pathfinding honors fleets only traversing water
- Formation pathfinding has different connection-costs for armies & fleets
- Formation pathfinding has customizable 'docking' cost for fleets/armies
- Formation pathfinding honors military access for Armies
- Formation pathfinding honors canal access
- Characters now provide their modifiers to all units in combat
Balance:
- Urban Center services rebalanced
- Soldiers pops are more likely to support the Armed Forces if their wages are high, vice versa if low
- Non-discriminated pops in unincorporated states are more likely to support the Armed Forces
- The Professional Army law now increases Soldiers' pop attraction to Armed Forces, and decreases non-military pop attraction
- The Peasant Levies law now increases Aristocrats' pop attraction to Armed Forces
- Officers are now slightly more attracted to Armed Forces
- Adjusted impact of pop loyalists/radicals on interest groups to ensure they don't spawn support from nowhere
- Clergymen are now slightly more attracted to Devout
- State Religion, Religious Schools, and Freedom of Conscience now increase pop attraction to the Devout
- Capitalists are now slightly more attracted to Industrialists
- Capitalists, Engineers, and Shopkeepers will be slightly more attracted to Industrialists as their wealth increases
- Limited pops that can join Intelligentsia to Academics, Aristocrats, Bureaucrats, Capitalists, Clergymen, Clerks, and Engineers
- Academics and Bureaucrats are now slightly more attracted to Intelligentsia.
- Clerks are now slightly less attracted to Intelligentsia
- Aristocrats are now slightly less attracted to Intelligentsia by default, with Hereditary Bureaucrats slightly increasing their attraction
- Increased Intelligentsia attraction for Aristocrat/Capitalist/Clergymen pops in Urban Centers, government administrations, universities, and arts academies
- Farmers will now be more attracted to Landowners as their wealth increases
- Slave States will now increase Farmers attraction to Landowners and decrease attraction to Petty Bourgeoisie
- Decreased base attraction of non-urban pops to Petty Bourgeoisie
- Shopkeepers are now slightly more attracted to Petty Bourgeoisie
- Clerks are now slightly more attracted to Petty Bourgeoisie
- Poor pops in agricultural buildings can now be attracted to Trade Unions under Commercialised or Collectivised Agriculture
- Decreased middle-strata pops' attraction to Trade Unions
- The Homesteading law now increases the political participation of Farmers
- Increased the political participation of pops in trade buildings
AI:
- AI now takes more factors into account when deciding how many construction sectors to aim for. Countries with large investment pool incomes in particular will focus more on expanding their construction potential.
- Fixed a bug where randomization functions in the history database were not working correctly, primarily impacting starting AI strategies
- AI should now be less inclined to overspend on construction sectors when it has more advanced construction technology
- AI is now less inclined to jump into diplomatic plays to gain new subjects unless they are domineering towards those potential new subjects
- AI is now less willing to give away its subjects for support in a play
- Fixed an issue that made it so AI starting strategic desires from history DB were sometimes not correctly set
- Increase starting relations between Britain and Lower/Upper Canada to avoid Britain immediately trying to annex them
- AIs are now less inclined to gain sympathy for a side in a diplomatic play just because they are facing overwhelming odds unless those overwhelming odds also come with harsh demands
- AI now takes the infamy of the starting wargoal more into account when determining whether to be sympathetic towards the target of a play
- AIs are now less inclined to back a country in a diplomatic play just because it's facing a country with relatively high infamy (that isn't a Pariah)
- AI is now very reluctant to remove declared interests that are supporting growing colonies
Interface:
- Alert message setting interface added to the message setting panel
- Military lens shows formation/hq markers at all zoom levels now
- The capitulation desire tooltip no longer displays an unnecessary line about annexation
- Political movements now has a tooltip breakdown for population support
- Two new Important Action types signal when Organization is negatively impacted
- Mirrored and rotated all pie charts to start from the top, being filled clockwise with the largest piece first
- Added Occupation pie chart to the State panel
- Added Occupation breakdown chart to the State Panel
- Multiple minor changes to the End of Battle Panel that should make the numbers add up more clearly
- Improved the Occupation Won tooltip to give clearer information
- Tweaked the "Ended Battles" item to more clearly signal the outcome of the Battle
- Added collapsible sections for Active Fronts and Ended Battles on the War Panel
- Added sorting to the the Active Fronts list on the War Panel
- Removed state details in market panel if accessed through state
- Added a smaller version of Formation Map Markers, shown when zoomed out
- Made number of Battalions transparent on the Formation Map Markers and Outliner item if you are at War or involved in a Diplomatic Play
- Hooked in the Military Formation fancy tooltip where we show the Formation name
- Added a go-to-details button at the top right corner of more tooltips.
- Added a Fancy tooltip for Military Formations.
- Made the demobilization button less pronounced, but more convenient to use.
- Added Create Army/Fleet to the Military Lens
- Properly center aligned the buttons in the Lenses
- The Create Formation interface now closes after creating a new Formation and floating text on the Map was added to provide better feedback that a Formation was created
- Re-enabled several Map Interaction texts
- Exposed which HQ a Military Building belongs to in the Building details panel, the Expand Building tooltip and the Map Interaction list.
- In the Create Formation Map Mode, we now show Strategic Region names instead of Country names
- Implemented companies icon to the sidebar button
- Added new breakdown tooltips for Military Units on all military related panels
- The game will now ask for confirmation when transferring the entirety of a formation into a different formation
- Added a tab for Interesting Countries in the Message Settings
- Made the Attrition tooltip on Military Formations more readable
- Improved tooltips for Morale and Supply
Modding:
- Added an on action for country formation.
- Added an effect to mark a country as immune to revolutions (set_immune_to_revolutions) along with a matching trigger to check this mark (is_immune_to_revolutions).
- Add add_occupation console command.
- organization and max_organization compare triggers now exist on military formation scopes
- add_organization effect can now be run in military formation scope
- scope_general and scope_admiral scriptlists can now be used in military formation scope
- New military_formation scriptlist
- Added a new effect to copy all the laws of a country (copy_laws).
- Removed allows_advance and protects_convoys_from_damage property from commander order types (these behaviors will be inferred due to modifier presence instead)
Bugfixes:
- Ensured all combat unit types have Morale Loss modifiers, and Kill Rate modifiers where relevant
- Ensured combat units lose Morale in combat, so battles don't drag on forever
- Fixed a bug where removing a unit did not remove its barracks
- Government petitions no longer fire for countries that cannot enact laws
- Labour Negotiations event can no longer fire without options
- Resolved issue where French Algerian states would be raided by null countries
- "The Party Favourites" will now correctly choose interest groups
- Resolved issue of missing loc for the North and South Philippines Sea
- The Indochinese Union event will no longer present options with no effects
- Resolved errors in the German Confederation event
- Devout interest group leaders will no longer be Atheist if spawned in a State Atheist country
- Atheist pops can no longer join the Devout
- Fixed some event localization where the supporting and opposing agitators got mixed up
- Cavalry and Mechanized Infantry is now correctly called what they should be
- Literacy concept now correctly refers to Pops in incorporated states, rather than unincorporated ones
- Brazilian Portuguese: Expiring Obligations will now show the number of days until it expires
- Fixed "Breaking the strike" event option b applying its modifier to the wrong IG
- Fixed Paris Commune subjects' flags not showing the Paris Commune overlord canton
- Fixed multiple typos in different languages
- Music system updated so that ALL tracks now have a “relaxed” mode (affects V2 remastered soundtrack in particular)
- Fixed a bug where the starting tooltip for unification plays would show a nonsensical wargoal
- combat_unit scriptlist now work correctly again
- paris_commune.2 event can now fire properly again
- Show the Military graphics around the Lens toolbar if you are at War or involved in a Diplomatic Play
- Fixed a localization issue in the new formation notification
- Fixed an Out of Sync caused by the new formation notification
- Fix a bug where capitulation and peace agreement notifications would sometimes be blank instead of showing which wargoals were enforced
- Fixed crash in CConstructionQueue caused by a race condition
- Fixed a bug where players would sometimes get notified about trade routes they themselves created
- Fix a bug where the AI would start and then immediately cancel bankrolling
- Fixed an Out of Sync in the MilitaryFormations category
- Fixed an Out of Sync caused by incorrectly ordering unordered data
- Fixed a bug where swaying with wargoals did not actually add the wargoal on the swaying side
- It is no longer possible to rename other countries' armies
- Fixed HQ markers not showing for observed countries
- Fixed an Out of Sync caused by updating gamestate data at an inopportune time
- Fixed that the flags in the save game menu would be scrambled when there are too many flags
- It is no longer possible to click the confirm button to transfer a formation into another if the source formation is itself being tracked. Previously, it was possible to click this button without any effect.
- Wargoals to turn a country into a subject are now converted into Transfer Subject wargoal if the target becomes the subject of another country (for instance by offering it as a sway) instead of being invalidated
- Fixed an issue where caches not being updated resulted in earnings prediction breakdown for expanding buildings being inaccurate
- Fixed an issue where earnings prediction tooltips were not taking all produced/consumed goods into account, resulting in incorrect earnings estimates
- When a revolution is defeated, the original country no longer inherits Journal Entries and variables from them, as this could cause some Journal Entries to break. Victorious revolutions still inherit from the original country.
- Fixed an issue where starting Diplomatic Plays targeting a whole country through the right-click menu sometimes would be incorrectly blocked by not having an Interest in a non-capital region of the target country
- Fixed a bug when conscription VFX over cities could spawn indefinitely
- Fixed an issue where some breakdowns of buy/sell orders in market panel were incorrectly applying Market Access Price Impact to the actual number of buy/sell orders, resulting in incorrect numbers
That is all for this week! We hope you will have fun with Open Beta Update 1 and look forward to hearing what you have to say about it on Discord! We will return in three weeks with more details on Update 2. Until then!
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