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Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #4 - Goods

Happy Thursday and welcome back to yet another Victoria 3 dev diary, this time on the subject of Goods! Goods are a core economic feature of Victoria 3, just as they were in previous Victoria games, and come in a wide variety of types. Also, as in previous Victoria games, the manufacturing of Goods (by Pops in Buildings) is how the vast majority of the wealth in Victoria 3 is created.

Fundamentally, a unit of Goods represent a quantity of a certain type of natural resource, manufactured good or intangible service and come attached with a price tag. This price varies both in base (a single unit of Tanks is pricier than a single unit of Fabric) and in actual market value, as the prices of Goods change depending on supply and demand.

A selection of goods that are bought and sold in the British Market.

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There are four broad categories of Goods: Staple Goods, Luxury Goods, Industrial Goods and Military Goods. Of these, Staple/Luxury Goods are mainly consumed by Pops, and Industrial/Military Goods are mainly consumed by buildings, but there are no hard rules here - you will find Buildings using Luxury Goods and Pops purchasing Industrial Goods when and where it makes sense for them to do so.

Staple Goods are everyday goods that Pops need to live, such as food to eat, wood to heat their homes, and clothes to wear. Staple Goods tend to be purchased in vast quantities by poor and middle class pops, with richer pops generally eschewing them for luxury variants.

Grain - possibly the most Staple of all Staple Goods!
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Luxury Goods are the things that Pops do not necessarily need but definitely want, such as fine foods, luxury drinks like Tea and Coffee, or fine clothes made from chinese silk. Luxuries tend to be more profitable to produce than Staple Goods, but depend on having a customer base with money - a poor factory worker isn’t going to be buying a whole lot of mahogany cabinets.

You can never have too many painted Ming vases, I always say.
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Industrial Goods are goods such as Iron, Coal, Rubber and Lead whose main purpose is often to be converted into other, more profitable goods. Securing a steady supply of vital Industrial Goods is crucial to Industrialization and growing the GDP of your country.

Tools are essential to the operation of many industries.
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Military Goods are goods such as Small Arms, Ammunition and Warships that are used by military buildings to arm and supply the armies and navies of the 19th century nations. The more technologically advanced the army or navy, the more complex (and expensive!) Military Goods they will need.

I’m told that soldiers tend to perform better if they’re given ammunition for their guns.
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We’ll be returning to the topic of Goods in later dev diaries when discussing related mechanics such as Markets, Pop Needs, Goods Substitution and Cultural Obsessions... but for now, I bid you adieu for a while, as next week Mikael will provide you with a dev diary about something we’ve been teasing for some time now - Production Methods!
 
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What I really liked is the option to show on the map the potential, production and consumption on the map. Hopefully Vic 3 will have more map modes than recent paradox games. One thing I would like to improve is that the market price graph was more detailed in relation to values.
Something that our UX designers have put a lot of time into is showing contextual information, in this case by allowing you to see heatmaps of production, consumption and potential production while viewing a particular good (which is extremely useful as it tells you things like where you can get coal).
 
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Any chance we'd have some pops in some areas buying military goods, like small arms and ammunition in countries where firearms are not banned?
 
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Saw on the twitter teaser from yesterday that powerplants existed as building needing coal. So makes it look like electrification is in the game. Now that sound like something maybe more for production methods but I had one sort of goods question. Could hydro power resource spots be something you discover sort like oil and rubber after certain technology or year?
 
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Wooooo!!

Question: How moddable are goods? I'm assuming one can add or subtract goods as needed, but what are some examples of what else can be done with this system?
 
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Luxury Goods are the things that Pops do not necessarily need but definitely want, such as
Such as.. what with precious metals from Vicky2? Are these gonna be split into gold, silver, gems and pearls and available to POPs, or similar to previous game they are going to be just a bland and uninteresting source of magical income?
 
Wooooo!!

Question: How moddable are goods? I'm assuming one can add or subtract goods as needed, but what are some examples of what else can be done with this system?
To give an example, we have a variety of different farms (rice, grain, millet etc) which all produce the 'grain' good (but might vary in efficiency and have different secondary production methods, more on this next week). It wouldn't be hard at all for a modder to actually break these up into different goods which can all be used to fulfill pop food needs according to what's locally available in a market.
 
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I'm curious, will services be considered Goods that require a pop to be produced? (like for example, in the first picture I tought that the "tools" Good was more like workforce, or something akin to that, so what I mean is that you could have serveces that are considered luxury services, like entertainment etc.)
 
Wondering if there are tractors in the game, as vic 2 simulated them with a production bonus when the invention and research was finished... if there are tractors as goods instead of bonuses could we have a Soviet Union shifting massive amounts of resources to building tractors to improve agriculture and thus making farmers more productive. Does this also apply to specific tools in general needing to be consumed by farming pops or mining pops to be more productive... idk if it would be done by slowly over time a pop wants more machinery by getting used to it, for example British ppl getting used to drinking tea as the game progresses... or is it through a different mechanic like inventions that give bonuses to production.

Thank you its looking good so far, I want to know more about in depth economics and how pops react to a players decisions
 
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The base price under which market price could never fall has been demonstrated to be one of the main contributors to Vic2 late-game economy crisis. Was this feedback taken into account in the design of Vic3 and what mecanisms will be in place to prevent the same problem from appearing again?
 
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There are a number of ways you can interact with goods (more on that later) but at the moment we don't have an ability to direct subsidize one particular good. There are other ways to lower the price of a good though, such as subsidizing buildings producing it or importing it in greater quantities.
Well, I was hoping to subsidize my bread so that nobody would go hungry. Or have to eat cake.
 
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I'm curious, will services be considered Goods that require a pop to be produced? (like for example, in the first picture I tought that the "tools" Good was more like workforce, or something akin to that, so what I mean is that you could have serveces that are considered luxury services, like entertainment etc.)
At the moment, Services is a single good that is non-tradable (meaning it can only be bought and sold locally) but it would be easy to split it up into different kinds of intangible goods if we wanted to.
 
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I can see that the internal logistics of a country is going to be more complex than I imagined
 
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Very nice,it seems there is far more goods than they were in Vicky 2.And i really like the offer and demand based system.It's a massive improvement compared to Vicky 2.
Question:Will the type of goods be fully moddable,such as creating new or modifying the already existing ones?
Thanks for any replies about this.
 
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Well, I was hoping to subsidize my bread so that nobody would go hungry. Or have to eat cake.
You can do this by importing cheap foreign grain or subsidizing your agriculture, we did discuss having a direct way to subsidize goods but we felt the mechanics we have did the same thing in more interesting ways.
 
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Looks like POPs consume non-tradable goods/services, unlike in Vicky 2 where their entire consumption was tradable. Love it.

Do Tools include industrial machines (like Vicky 2's Machine Tools)? Kinda odd that the icon is a hammer, but this is all WIP so I won't make much of it.
 
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