As a reminder, adapted from dev diary #93:
Update 2 will tentatively launch next week. At this point we should be fully feature-complete for the 1.5 release*. This doesn't mean everything is wrapped up and ready to go! We will spend the time between this update and the final release fixing bugs, doing balance updates, and reacting to your feedback. While testing this update you should be able to focus on how fun the game is to play with the new features.
*We're close! Not quite there yet, especially with the new naval mechanics, but we still have a few more scheduled days of feature development left before we switch fully into bug fixing and balancing mode.
After this update we will be working towards the final release of version 1.5, sometime in November. You will get a few more dev diaries prior to that release with more details.
Multiple Battles
Generals now advance independently of their frontlines, and will repeatedly attack the same state until it's been conquered. The state each General chooses to attack is dependent on how troops are distributed on the front, with higher-ranking Generals commanding the most troops. Troop distribution and General assignment is an automated affair, so you don't have to worry about it beyond assigning Strategic Objectives on those states you're most interested in conquering or defending.This does mean that having more Generals than your opponent on a long front can lead to an advantage, since your opponent won't be able to properly command their defensive troops. It shouldn't result in "run-arounds" where the enemy can't properly raise forces against you at all though. We're very curious to know how you feel about this feature! We think it makes wars feel much better paced, particularly on long fronts, but we also want to make sure it feels balanced and fun.
Onwards to Madrid!
Naval Battles
In Open Beta Update 2, we will see the return of naval warfare after we disabled it in the previous iterations of the beta. As mentioned previously, all fleets will now be patrolling specific sea nodes so you can see where all your forces are at any given time. Battles will be fought whenever one Admiral has an Order that allows them to intercept hostile fleets, and such a hostile fleet is in their same sea node.When an Admiral loses a battle, they will be marked as Defeated and can no longer carry out their order. They will have to return to port before they can be effective again, and if all Admirals in a fleet are Defeated the fleet will automatically return to their home HQ to facilitate this.
Note that Convoy Raiding (including protection of Convoys) is unlikely to be functional until the final release, and as such there's currently little reason to engage in naval warfare beyond protecting your coastlines from invasion. We're still looking into how to deepen the naval warfare experience further, and appreciate all the input we have received to date. While we won't be able to fully execute on the aspirations we have for naval warfare for 1.5, our aim here is to improve the experience enough that it will feel like a clear upgrade from the old system while laying the groundwork for further improvements post-1.5.
Conscription
Speaking of features that will make a return in Update 2, conscription will finally be enabled again. Rather than configuring your Conscription Centers for the kind of conscript battalions you want and then clicking on states in wartime to activate them, conscript battalions will be created and assigned to armies in exactly the same way as your standing army is, up to the limit available in each state. Like in the past, conscript battalions will not be available in peacetime but will be raised once you activate them during war - however, rather than activating specific states you will be activating them for a specific army, which will enable only those conscripts assigned to it. This means if you demobilize the army, the conscripts will be lowered and the pops that created them will return to their civilian lives, even during wartime. It's also only a single click to raise them, and assuming your army setup is well-prepared it should be a breeze to maintain and balance your conscripted forces.Work-in-progress panel for assigning conscripts. Here you can see we have maxed out the number of conscripts we can recruit from Lancashire, based on the total population there and our conscription rate in Great Britain.
Not all unit types can be recruited as Conscripts under all Army Model Laws. Those who can will have individual controls for Standing vs Conscript types, as you can see here.
Not all unit types can be recruited as Conscripts under all Army Model Laws. Those who can will have individual controls for Standing vs Conscript types, as you can see here.
Unit Experience and Upgrades
Your battalions and flotillas will now start accumulating experience and gain veterancy levels. Veterancy will of course affect Offense and Defense, but higher levels can also yield other benefits such as improved Morale and Recovery Rate, resulting in hardier soldiers and fewer lost battles. Getting them to very high veterancy levels will take time, of course - and while getting them into armed conflict could help gain them more experience, casualties they take will count against them as new recruits will naturally decrease experience accumulated. Veterancy levels also take longer to reach the better they are.For example, to reach the next level of Veterancy the 82nd need to reach 100 experience to become Seasoned.
Upgrading units will also be possible in Open Beta Update 2. Units of specific types can be toggled for upgrading on a formation by formation level, which will result in them upgrading to the default type for their unit type group over time - if they can, that is.
An example might be in order. Say I have an army with Irregular Infantry and Line Infantry, and I just researched a tech that allows me to recruit Skirmish Infantry. Both these types are upgradeable to Skirmish Infantry, and both are listed in the Military Formation panel for my army. I set my new Default Infantry type to Skirmish Infantry, which enables upgrade buttons next to each entry in the panel. I can choose to toggle one, both, or neither. Let's say I choose to upgrade my Irregular Infantry first. Each week, a percentage of my total forces (currently 10%, subject to balancing) in that army will change their type to Skirmish Infantry, in order of experience. If they have gained any Veterancy levels they will decrease it by 1 in the process, reflecting how outdated militaries need time to adapt to new ways of fighting. If they are currently mobilized, they will demobilize and remobilize, reflecting the upgrade time required before they become available again.
I can toggle both at the same time if I so choose, and eventually they will all become Skirmish Infantry. I can also toggle the button off when the group is halfway done, if I notice the cost is becoming prohibitive, and upgrade the rest at a later point.
As we can see here, Skirmish Infantry are upgrading to Trench Infantry over time now!
Retreat and Pursuit
Three battle conditions have been added in order to further improve the pacing of warfare, even beyond multiple battles. These come into effect whenever conditions are met, and don't have to wait for the old condition to "time out".Pursuit: When one side has considerably more men than the other, forces on that side will stop taking morale damage and surround their foe, allowing them to use considerably more manpower in each attack. The impact is that they will deal more damage in the same amount of time. The cut-off point for switching to this condition decreases if the enemy is already in Retreat.
Panicked Retreat: When a side has lost a large amount of their starting manpower, and their Commander is not particularly skilled, they will enter into Panicked Retreat. This increases their Morale Loss and while reducing their Recovery Rate, leading to losing the battle faster but with more killed soldiers.
Re-Home Formation
In addition to Stationing a Formation at an HQ you will also be able to change its home HQ. Currently there are few distinctions between the HQ you are stationed at and which is considered your home, except that the home is the one you return to. We're looking to add a few additional distinctions here, for the final release and in the future, since the home HQ is the one your formation is considered to be supplied from which is important for shipping lanes, mobilization speed, and other aspects.Food, Pollution, and Population Growth
Grain has generally been in pretty high supply throughout the game and hasn't really proved the important staple goods it's meant to be. We have made a number of balance tweaks here to make securing a stable supply of Grain in particular take a bit more effort than it used to.This of course ties into population growth, particularly among the lower strata. Population Growth is, as you probably know if you've read previous dev diaries, something we've been paying a lot of attention to for 1.5, and we're still making tweaks to it. Our intention here is to make population growth from Standard of Living something to strive for in the early game, as it effectively limits your access to labor to operate your infernal machines, while limiting overpopulation problems in the late game. In addition to rebalancing tweaks, which we continue to make, we have previously talked about additional factors we have added here such as a negative impact on birth rate from unemployment and increasing sizes of Urban Centers as you make progress in the tech tree. We are now adding gameplay effects to a feature that has been in the game for a long time, but only as a visual feature: pollution.
Pollution is generated by your buildings' Production Methods, to various degrees. Higher-tech Production Methods often increase Pollution, but not always - for example, Electric Railways have a much lower impact than Steam Engines (though that electricity has to come from somewhere, and Power Plants do output quite a bit of Pollution).
Pollution generated is moderated by the state's Arable Land, so one-province states with huge industries will be much more polluted than those with a vast countryside where the industry can be more spread out. Pollution can have an impact on populations, including increasing mortality and decreasing Standard of Living, but can also have an impact on the state itself, such as Migration Attraction.
The list for a whole state can grow pretty long by late-game…
Population impact is then scaled by technologies as well as your Healthcare Institutions, so you can manage some Pollution in your incorporated territories by investing heavily into healthcare. Of course, you could always outsource your most polluting industries to states on the margins of your empire and derive the benefits from them for your pleasant core states, but if these states are unincorporated they will bear the full brunt of the Pollution impact your industries produce.
This has also resulted in a bit of a rebalancing of the effects of the different Healthcare Laws. Private Health Insurance and Charity Hospitals provide a bit less Pollution Effect Reduction impact than Public Health Insurance does, but with different impacts on individual pops depending on their Wealth.
Of course Pollution has a really sexy map mode, too!
As a game mechanic, the intent of Pollution is to provide an additional reduction to pop growth in the mid- to late-game, when overpopulation is more likely to occur due to increasing Standard of Living. However, since Pollution is a factor with quite a bit of player control in both directions, it's also a lever of your society with tradeoffs that you can pull in either direction depending on your conditions.
Local Prices and Companies
UIs and tooltips related to Local Prices have received a facelift to assist with readability and understanding. The AI is now also better at handling centralization vs decentralization of industrial sectors to account for local price distinctions between states.Special Companies are no longer limited to specific countries but have other unique conditions to establish them instead, such as cultures. We have also added more unique illustrations for Companies, replacing a number of placeholders, and improved the UI around them considerably.
Companies can now be pinned to the Outliner so you can keep track of their financial health
Narrative Content
For this one I'm taking a quick break so our narrative designer Victoria can go over additions and changes to narrative content in Update 2:Hello. This is Victoria, and today we will be going over some of the new, free content that is to be added in Patch 1.5.
Colonial Administrations
The 1.5 free update expands the Scramble for Africa with new, specialized colonial administrations that may be formed in several African regions. Using the new Expand Colonial Administration journal entry, unlocked along with the Scramble for Africa, colonizing powers may assign control of their African colonies to a new subject state.
These administrations make use of the new dynamic tags feature, which allows for the creation of new, extremely configurable nations in script. Rather than relying on existing tags for your mod’s warlord period or seven-sided civil war, the create_dynamic_country function allows for rapidly defining several new nations at once, configurable with whatever laws, cultures, religions, or names that one wishes to assign them.
The result of some colonial administrations may be seen below, with Belgium handing control of the Congo off to a colonial administration, and France splitting its territories in West Africa in twain between its Guinea and Outer Hausaland administrations.
Pictured: This is absolutely not the result of me forgetting I wasn’t playing HOI4 anymore.
Colonial Trading
However, as any Victoria 3 player knows, these nice borders do not typically emerge from the colonization of Africa. For example, what if this happens?
Pictured: People who play past 1890 will understand.
Fortunately, with the new Trade States functionality, there is a solution. Whilst the Scramble for Africa is ongoing, the AI will use the Trade States function to smooth out colonial borders, resolving claims and attempting to minimize the number of split states in Africa.
Newly acquired states may be transferred to colonial administrations by button, ensuring that Africa will not turn into a pockmarked mess of identically coloured tags.
Formables and Unifications
Ever since we released Victoria 3 version 1.0, a common request has been for additional formable nations and content for national unifications. Update 1.5 aims to add additional flavor for unification, including events fired by unifying countries, and formable nations voted upon by the players. The new formables we have added as a result of the community poll includes the Benelux, the Confederation of the Rhine, the Holy Roman Empire, and Rio de la Plata.
Pictured: the four new formable nations included in patch 1.5.
Italy
The Risorgimento journal entry for the Italian states has been entirely reworked based on your feedback, with an arsenal of new tools that can be used to stir nationalist dissent across Italian regions into the foundation of a unified Italy.
…or make use of pro-unification sentiment on the peninsula itself to overthrow reactionary governments at the hands of the pan-Italian movement.
In addition to the buttons provided by the journal entry, the new “Stir National Agitation” character interaction for agitators allows agitators who are friendly to the current government to induce radicalism in states of your national culture which are under the control of another nation. This action is available for all nations once the Nationalism technology is unlocked - perfect for revanchist nations that wish to reclaim their territories from their neighbors.
Poland, as well, has been given content oriented towards unification, with the new Christ of Nations journal entry for Krakow, and other Polish states that may come into existence over the course of the game.
Once a Polish nation has successfully broken free from its former overlord, it will be able to unify with other Polish nations via raising relations to a sufficient level, paving the way for a political union.
If, after reclaiming its homelands, Poland seeks to form the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a new journal entry will appear, granting Poland-Lithuania the option to expand further into the East, and reclaim its historical borders.
Formable nations from Indonesia to Yemen have been given unique formation events. These events appear upon national unification, granting nations additional prestige, claims on homeland territories they do not yet own, or other bonuses unique to the formed nation.
Bonus: But what if a Republic attempts to form the HRE?
Interest Group Tweaks
The base of politics in Victoria 3 is the pops - and we are ever striving to make politics more interesting and varied, both in terms of national flavour and the shifting nature of politics as your nation modernises.
Interest Group Makeup
The 1.5 patch contains a battery of changes to interest group makeup, designed to make the political structure of a nation more dependent on laws, with pops aligning towards different interest groups depending on the social structure that the player has crafted for their nation.
The goal of these changes is to make interest groups more dynamic over the course of the game, with certain laws able to influence the power of groups in society in a way far more organic than a flat bonus to interest group clout. For example, in 1.5, there have been some changes to the Homesteading law.
Pictured: Just imagine an ominous scare chord when you see “Petit-Bourgeoisie” show up here.
Under Homesteading, farmers are much more free to claim land on the frontier for themselves and hire farmhands, thus making them members of the Petit-Bourgeois class. This, however, is not uniform across the country. Whereas in the North, where yeoman farmers predominate, there are enough middle farmers to form a sizable rural petit-bourgeoisie, the Southern slave states have an altogether different class dynamic. In the South, the presence of slavery stratifies the farmers into either extremely wealthy or extremely poor, sharply increasing their attraction to the Landowners, and weakening their attraction to the Petit-Bourgeoisie.
Pictured: Rather than simply being a catch-all for all highly literate pops, the Intelligentsia is now a more specific group - of bureaucrats and upper- and middle-class intellectuals. Rather than just having the ability to read, you now must have both time and money.
To compensate for removing the ability of poor people to be part of the Intelligentsia, pops in certain buildings will now gravitate towards the Intelligentsia at a much higher frequency.
Pictured: The distinguished gentlemen in the public service of Saint Petersburg are much more likely to gravitate towards the Intelligentsia, due to their station as public administrators in the urban government administration.
In addition to their workplaces, laws also have a role in the inclinations of the aristocracy to support the intellectual class. The Hereditary Bureaucrats law has many downsides, but comes paired with its bonus to Aristocrats’ attraction towards the Intelligentsia, providing developing nations a much needed boost towards modernisation in the early game.
As opposed to the current situation, where increasing pop literacy tends to make the Intelligentsia’s strength unintentionally grow out of control in the late game, 1.5’s changes are oriented towards making it a smaller, more elite group throughout the game, progressive but limited in the mass power it can ever truly wield. Rather than always being enormously more relevant than the equally middle-class petit-bourgeoisie, the Intelligentsia will now compete for middle-class pops with them.
Another problem has been the problem of the death of the Devout in the late game. With the additions to interest group attraction, religiously-oriented laws will not only increase the clout of the Devout, but also increase the willingness of certain pops to join the Devout rather than any other interest group. Through going all-in on laws like State Religion and Religious Schools, any non-atheist pop’s chance of joining the Devout can be greatly increased, making these laws present a very real double-edged sword. Instituting the reforms the Devout support will increase literacy, yes - but they will also increase the strength of the church far more than previously.
These are just a few of the changes made to the pop IG selection logic - and you can expect even greater dynamism from here on out.
Interest Group Traits
In addition to making the makeups of interest groups more dynamic, Patch 1.5 also adds new interest group traits to various interest groups across the world, representing the unique historical character of groups in different countries.
Pictured: A selection of new interest group traits, counterclockwise: British Petit-Bourgeoisie, Qing Armed Forces, Japanese Industrialists, and Ottoman Devout.
Different interest groups, reflecting their different historical backgrounds, may provide different bonuses or maluses to their nations when favoured or disfavoured. For example, the Japanese industrialists, representing the vast Zaibatsu conglomerates of post-restoration Japan, deeply vertically integrated and intertwined with the state, provide bonuses to manufacturing taxes when happy, or a lack of capitalist investment into the economy when upset. The British petit-bourgeoisie, meanwhile, historically intertwined deeply into finance and the bureaucracy, grant bonuses to interest rates, bureaucracy, and authority when sufficiently catered to - but are utterly uncompassionate towards those less fortunate than themselves when crossed.
Even those updates to narrative content is not quite all though - the art team has also been super busy making both 2D illustrations and icons, as well as 3D models and animations. While not all of these are visible in-game yet, many of them are, and the rest will be hooked up to follow in the final release. For the moment I will just share some work-in-progress images:Military Graphics
Assortment of unit illustrations for different culture groups
I like boats, a.k.a. the trains of the sea
Dramatic fainting
Dramatic fainting cannons
Fire in the hole!
Firearms maintenance
Long-range rifles are cool and all, but that guy in the top center really needs to be more careful
Early in-game battle side diorama
I like boats, a.k.a. the trains of the sea
Dramatic fainting
Dramatic fainting cannons
Fire in the hole!
Firearms maintenance
Long-range rifles are cool and all, but that guy in the top center really needs to be more careful
Early in-game battle side diorama
Performance
Last but not least, we are continuing to work on performance, especially mid- to late-game performance. In addition to the usual low-level improvements of eking out a few more CPU cycles here and there, we're also tackling this with some design changes.Job Satisfaction
Pops now have a Job Satisfaction parameter, visible in the UI and computed based on factors such as their wage compared to the normal wage, or the average wage for their profession, in the country and state; how many Qualifications they have for higher-paying jobs; whether they're unemployed; and so on. If their Job Satisfaction is high enough they won't bother looking for other jobs. This helps performance by letting us exclude these pops as prospective candidates when we evaluate employment or process migration, and also improves UX by giving us more precise numbers of pops that are "Job Seekers" in a particular state.Some of these factors might need some balancing, but in this case it sort of works out!
Migration and Cultural Communities
The performance impact of migration is actually not in making sure it happens, but in the large amount of pop fragmentation it can create. This is because in the past, each pop has considered where it could move to, and then split itself off into multiple smaller fragments to move to all those viable places, in numbers depending on the relative migration attraction between the source and target state. We have now changed this such that pops will only consider moving to a state that already has a Cultural Community of the same type. Over several weeks they will build up a small migration wave, and when they finally move, many pops might move all at once to a specific state.In this way, Cultural Communities work similar to Mass Migration Targets, and indeed the latter also act as the former. But there are far more Cultural Communities than Mass Migration Targets. The presence of any pop in a state automatically creates a Cultural Community there to match its culture. If there are no pops of the right culture, there's still a chance that one might be created if the migration attractiveness of the state is high enough. This chance is scriptable (for the modders out there) and can support any number of different parameters, such as a specific country's laws, available jobs in the state, etc.
Once a wave has arrived, of course this will impact the migration attractiveness of the state - the newly arrived migrants will tend to have lower Standard of Living when they arrive, but as they take on available jobs they will affect both their own finances and those of other pops in the state over time. Subsequent migration waves are therefore likely to target another prosperous state the next time, and so on.
The intent here is to make even intra-market migration feel more tangible and meaningful, with less of a trickle of every-kind-of-pop constantly moving between states in the same market. This will also naturally lead to less pop fragmentation and ultimately increased performance, particularly by the late game. Job Satisfaction also plays into this, by ensuring only dissatisfied pops care about moving elsewhere which cuts down on the computation needed.
It bears mentioning that by the time Update 2 launches, this feature will probably be pretty unbalanced - migration waves might be too strong or not strong enough, Cultural Communities might spawn too easily or in insufficient numbers, the cut-off points for when someone chooses to move or how rapidly the migration wave builds might be wrong, etc. We're hoping for lots of feedback on this so we can get the numbers tuned to values that make sense and feel good for the game.
Changelog, or lack thereof
Unfortunately we have not been able to produce a full changelog for you in this dev diary, but one should be forthcoming alongside the Update 2 beta release.As mentioned, we hope to get Update 2 out sometime next week! Be sure to keep an ear out on Discord for the announcement, and provide your feedback there as you play! This dev diary marks the end of our three-week dev diary update schedule and you'll be hearing from us again in two weeks, and then once per week after that for a little while. Until then!
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