Home Trending Latest threads New posts Developer diaries
Jump to latest Follow Reply
  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Victoria 3 9047 Bug Reports 5237 User Mods 385 Multiplayer 44 Suggestions 2284 Tech Support 532 After Action Reports (AARs)
Previous dev diary Next dev diary
Show only dev responses

Dev Diary #36 – Construction

16_9.jpg


Hello and welcome to another Victoria 3 development diary! Today we’ll be returning to more mechanics-oriented dev diaries, starting out with a very important mechanic for the economic development of your 19th century nation - the construction of new Buildings.

Construction in Strategy games tends to follow a pretty typical formula: you save up money, order a construction and pay a lump-sum cost, wait some time, and the new building pops into existence. As mentioned in Dev Diary 12, however, the vast majority of expenses in Victoria 3 are not lump-sum costs but applied over time as part of your national budget. So how does it work instead? To answer that, there’s a few concepts we need to cover, namely Construction Capacity, the Construction Sector and the Construction Queue.

Let’s start then with Construction Capacity - which is actually just named Construction in-game, but we’re calling it Construction Capacity here to differentiate it from the overall concept of building things. This is a country-wide value of your nation’s overall ability to make progress on new buildings in a single week. For example, if your country produces a total of 100 Construction and a new Textile Mill costs 300 Construction, you’d expect to be able to build that Textile Mill in a total of 3 weeks. However, it’s a little more complicated than that, as we’ll see below when we explain the Construction Queue.


With Construction Sectors present in Lower Egypt, Matruh, Sinah and Palestine, the Egypt in this screenshot generates a respectable amount of Construction for the early game, though their finances may struggle a bit to fund it all.
DD36 01.png

So, how do you produce Construction? This is where the Construction Sector comes in. All countries get a tiny amount of ‘free’ Construction Capacity to ensure that you never get stuck in a situation where you need Construction Capacity to expand your Construction Sector but need a Construction Sector to get Construction Capacity. This amount is woefully small though, and wholly insufficient even for a small nation, so if you’re not planning to run a subsistence economy long-term you will definitely need to invest in a proper Construction Sector by building more Construction Sector buildings in your states.

Mechanically speaking, the Construction Sector is a type of government building which employs people and uses goods to output Construction Capacity with a variety of different Production Methods, ranging from simple Wooden Buildings to modern arc-welded Steel and Glass structures. It does work a little bit differently though, in that the amount of Goods used by the Construction Sector each week depends on the actual need for Construction Capacity - if your Country is producing a total of 500 Construction Capacity, but will only need 250 for ongoing projects that week, the total usage of Goods in the Construction Sector is cut by half - though you still have to pay the wages of all the Pops employed there.


More advanced methods of construction are expensive and require complex goods - but you will find it difficult to build up a true industrialized economy without them.
DD36 02.png

Ultimately, what this means is that how fast you can build things depends entirely on how much money, goods and research you’re willing to throw into your Construction Sector - having only a handful of Construction Sector buildings using only Wood and Fabric will certainly be cheaper and easier than building up a sprawling Construction Sector using Steel-Frame Buildings, but will naturally limit your ability to industrialize your nation.

So then, how does Construction Capacity actually turn into finished buildings? This is where the Construction Queue comes in. Each country has a nation-wide Construction Queue, with each project in the Queue corresponding to building a single level of a Building in a specific State. For example, a Construction Queue in Sweden might look like this (all numbers are examples):


  1. Expand Government Administration in Svealand (250/300 Construction Capacity remaining)
  2. Expand Fishing Wharves in Norrland (155/180 Construction Capacity remaining)
  3. Expand Fishing Wharves in Norrland (180/180 Construction Capacity remaining)
  4. Expand Rye Farms in Svealand (180/180 Construction Capacity remaining)
  5. Expand Port in Götaland (240/240 Construction Capacity remaining)

Each week, your produced Construction Capacity is allocated to projects in the Queue in order of priority, with a maximum speed at which projects can proceed (so it’s never possible to, say, build the Panama Canal in a single week). Using the above construction queue as an example, let’s say the maximum progress that can be made each week is 50, and Sweden is producing 112 Construction Capacity.

This would mean that projects 1 and 2 would both be allocated 50 Construction Capacity, while project 3 would get the left-over 12 and projects 4 and 5 would not progress at all in that week. It would take 5 weeks for entry 1 to finish at that pace, but after only 3 weeks, project 2 will be down to only 5 progress needed, and so most of the Construction Capacity allocated to it will be freed up for other projects. This also means that project 2 will actually finish before project 1, which is perfectly normal, as different buildings require different amounts of Construction Capacity to complete - it’s easier to build a Rye Farm than a Shipyard.


With just above 40 construction output and the help of some local Construction Efficiency bonuses, this country is able to make rapid progress on the Wheat Farms and Iron Mines at the top of the queue and even get a bit of weekly extra progress on the Logging Camps.
DD36 03.png

If all this seems confusing, don’t worry! All you really need to understand is that the more Construction Capacity you have, the faster things go - but a large Construction Sector will need to be kept busy with multiple projects at once if you want to use its entire output.

There is one more important factor to Construction, which is a modifier called State Construction Efficiency that governs how effective each point of Construction Capacity you put into building Buildings in a State is. For example, a state with a +50% bonus to State Construction Efficiency means that every Construction Capacity allocated to projects in that State actually results in 1.5 progress on said projects, while a malus of -50% would reduce it to 0.5 actual progress.

A few factors that will increase or decrease State Construction Efficiency are:
  • Terrain-based State Traits, such as mountains or jungle, tends to reduce State Construction Efficiency
  • Building a Construction Sector in a State increases the local State Construction Efficiency
  • Low Market Access reduces State Construction Efficiency

Industrializing the Amazon Rainforest is neither easy nor cheap.
DD36 04.png

That’s it for today! Join us again next week as we continue talking mechanics, on the topic of Market Expansion!
 

Attachments

  • 16_9.jpg
    16_9.jpg
    906 KB · Views: 0
  • DD36 01.png
    DD36 01.png
    486,3 KB · Views: 0
  • DD36 02.png
    DD36 02.png
    2 MB · Views: 0
  • DD36 03.png
    DD36 03.png
    548,1 KB · Views: 0
  • DD36 04.png
    DD36 04.png
    133 KB · Views: 0
  • 198Like
  • 44Love
  • 13
  • 13
  • 13
Reactions:
Sort by date Sort by reaction score
This looks like the Stellaris building system crossed with Civilization's. If that's the case, and this system is also used to build units, I can see it becoming a problem. In Stellaris you can queue up a ton of units and shuffle them around so they're all *almost* done. This lets you build hundreds of units almost instantly, blindsiding your enemies and bypassing paying unit maintenance costs until right when the start starts. This isn't a minor strategy -- it absolutely dominates multiplayer. It's a cancerous micro nightmare.

To prevent this I'd suggest removing the ability to shuffle the construction queue. In Stellaris that feature is only ever used for exploits like this.
 
Last edited:
  • 10
  • 5
Reactions:
lachek said:
Finding a way to make the construction industry private is an aspiration we have, actually! Like many of you have pointed out, it does sound really cool and more realistic.

As it turns out though, after quite a bit of experimentation, this is harder than you might expect at first blush. For example, would you really want a gameplay dynamic where the fewer buildings you construct at once, the cheaper it is to construct those buildings, making it optimal (but very inconvenient) to only construct one thing at a time? What about if you do build a large number of buildings at once, creating a need for a large number of construction workers, who then get fired as soon as the construction completes because there's no construction anymore? If construction industry is all very local in nature, how do you build ports to connect your overseas markets when local access to construction materials is non-existent? Do you have to set (and potentially constantly adjust) a construction budget that determines how much resources the construction industry has to operate with?

All these quite tricky questions, each of which add a number of gameplay concerns that need solutions, fade away when you treat Construction not as a variable-cost good bought and sold on the open market but as a capacity, with the player's job being to appropriately size that capacity while minimizing its cost. While I'd love to continue experimenting with Construction Sectors in the future to see if we can find a model where they can operate privately without damaging gameplay, I find it provides just the right level of player decision-making at the moment, while still being quite a bit more involved and interconnected with our socioeconomic simulation than construction usually is in strategy games.
Click to expand...

Would there at least be some way to have the investment pool pay for it's construction for the duration of the construction? Like adding money to the state budget for the duration of the construction? So you don't have the capitalists freeriding on th governments money? Actually, I think I saw something like that when you showed the budget screen come think of it.
 
  • 2Like
Reactions:
Meanmanturbo said:
No, I am fine with the investment pool and have been since the begining. What I have a problem with is that buildings built by the investment pool have the construction paid by the state and not the investment pools money. The owners are freeriding on the govenment.

I also now fear that ports and trade convoys will work the same way, that the capitalists that own buildings will have free trasnportation for exporing and importing goods for industries and have the transportation paid for by state coffers.
Click to expand...
If you don't want capitalists to freeload their profits off the backs of the workers and the state, then... don't be capitalist.
 
  • 6
  • 5
  • 2Love
  • 1Haha
Reactions:
lachek said:
Finding a way to make the construction industry private is an aspiration we have, actually! Like many of you have pointed out, it does sound really cool and more realistic.
Click to expand...

And more consistent with the stated objectives of the game.

lachek said:
As it turns out though, after quite a bit of experimentation, this is harder than you might expect at first blush. For example, would you really want a gameplay dynamic where the fewer buildings you construct at once, the cheaper it is to construct those buildings, making it optimal (but very inconvenient) to only construct one thing at a time? What about if you do build a large number of buildings at once, creating a need for a large number of construction workers, who then get fired as soon as the construction completes because there's no projects left to work on? If construction industry is all very local in nature, how do you build ports to connect your overseas markets when local access to construction materials is non-existent? Do you have to set (and potentially constantly adjust) a construction budget that determines how much resources the construction industry has to operate with?
Click to expand...

Construction is very local in nature, and always has been, and likely always will be. The closest to long-distance construction is standardized off-side modular construction of the sort that has become practical well outside of the game's time frame. That said, simply allow some long-distance bootstrapping of ports and related infrastructure to coastal areas, as long as you have the requisite infrastructure already.

As for what to do with excess capacity, have some additional 'sink' for excess construction capacity to be applied to, when not building large scale projects of the sort that the player might order. This sink could represent, for example, the continual growth of housing and services within a state.

lachek said:
All these quite tricky questions, each of which add a number of gameplay concerns that need solutions, fade away when you treat Construction not as a variable-cost good bought and sold on the open market but as a capacity, with the player's job being to appropriately size that capacity while minimizing its cost. While I'd love to continue experimenting with Construction Sectors in the future to see if we can find a model where they can operate privately without damaging gameplay, I find it provides just the right level of player decision-making at the moment, while still being quite a bit more involved and interconnected with our socioeconomic simulation than construction usually is in strategy games.
Click to expand...

It seems that you can still treat it as a capacity (or, rather, multiple local capacities) without the other abstractions described in the diary.
 
  • 9
  • 5Like
  • 1
Reactions:
lachek said:
What about if you do build a large number of buildings at once, creating a need for a large number of construction workers, who then get fired as soon as the construction completes because there's no projects left to work on?
Click to expand...

Well, construction can be both a capital good (building industries, infrastructure) and a consumer good (building housing).
If you have a baseline of housing construction which tends to be fairly stable (based on pop growth), then changes in industrial construction would be less impactful.

As a result, constructing a lot of buildings would just make private housing more expensive and constructing fewer buildings less expensive, rather than leading to undesired employment swings.
 
  • 1Like
  • 1
Reactions:
The investment pool can be used to cover the costs of all allowed constructions, so how much you can draw from it each week depends on where your construction allocation is going, ie whether you are currently building things that can be funded by it.
 
  • 32Like
  • 12
  • 2
  • 1
Reactions:
On the topic of always paying wages, we used to have the construction sector fire its employees when not building things but this created a variety of weird gameplay flows and honestly just didn’t feel very good. I would for sure like to revisit this in the future and tie the construction sector even more into the market, perhaps with a housing mechanic as well.
 
  • 56Like
  • 25Love
  • 8
  • 6
Reactions:
Revolution 11 said:
It would be nice if there were at least some benefit to unused capacity. Also perhaps put an alert if the queue is empty.
Click to expand...
You get an alert for unused capacity. I will think about whether we can add some benefit for unused capacity, I agree it would be good!
 
  • 52Like
  • 7
  • 5
  • 4Love
  • 2
Reactions:
Is the building order queue changing by the arrows only? Or we can drag ? Like HOI4 construction etc? Overall this seems nice, this is a construction sector not just click and build.
 
  • 3Like
  • 1
Reactions:
Wizzington said:
The investment pool can be used to cover the costs of all allowed constructions, so how much you can draw from it each week depends on where your construction allocation is going, ie whether you are currently building things that can be funded by it.
Click to expand...

Will it also cover wages for that period and ammount o construction?
 
  • 3Like
Reactions:
One of the reasons to not make construction local industry/private AI
Wizzington said:
On the topic of always paying wages, we used to have the construction sector fire its employees when not building things but this created a variety of weird gameplay flows and honestly just didn’t feel very good. I would for sure like to revisit this in the future and tie the construction sector even more into the market, perhaps with a housing mechanic as well.
Click to expand...
Housing mechanic or even just a simple pops demanding a "construction" good seems a good way to stabilize or provide baseline demand for the industry.

Construction being local is more intuitive then Russia or the US using industrial centers to build new buildings in Alaska or Siberia.
 
  • 7Like
  • 2
Reactions:
What about current buildings and infrastructure using construction capacity? This would be to simulate maintenance, repairs and renovations. That way if you have nothing in the building queue the construction workers aren’t just sat there doing nothing. I feel this would help with immersion and maybe help with making it private, as there would be need for construction capacity even when not building anything.
 
  • 2
  • 1
Reactions:
lachek said:
Finding a way to make the construction industry private is an aspiration we have, actually! Like many of you have pointed out, it does sound really cool and more realistic.

As it turns out though, after quite a bit of experimentation, this is harder than you might expect at first blush. For example, would you really want a gameplay dynamic where the fewer buildings you construct at once, the cheaper it is to construct those buildings, making it optimal (but very inconvenient) to only construct one thing at a time? What about if you do build a large number of buildings at once, creating a need for a large number of construction workers, who then get fired as soon as the construction completes because there's no projects left to work on? If construction industry is all very local in nature, how do you build ports to connect your overseas markets when local access to construction materials is non-existent? Do you have to set (and potentially constantly adjust) a construction budget that determines how much resources the construction industry has to operate with?

All these quite tricky questions, each of which add a number of gameplay concerns that need solutions, fade away when you treat Construction not as a variable-cost good bought and sold on the open market but as a capacity, with the player's job being to appropriately size that capacity while minimizing its cost. While I'd love to continue experimenting with Construction Sectors in the future to see if we can find a model where they can operate privately without damaging gameplay, I find it provides just the right level of player decision-making at the moment, while still being quite a bit more involved and interconnected with our socioeconomic simulation than construction usually is in strategy games.
Click to expand...
This all makes a good amount of sense, but I worry that, combined with the migration and trade mechanics we've seen, that it'll make countries and the world feel too "same-y" and interconnected, especially at the start of the game. What's there to distinguish states from one another other than their natural resources if you can just build things there based off construction industraies half a continent away and have people migrate in to automatically fill out some new globalized industry from thin air?
 
  • 5
  • 1Like
  • 1
Reactions:
maxirage said:
If that's the case, and this system is also used to build units, I can see it becoming a problem.
Click to expand...
My understanding is that standing-army units (as distinct from conscription in times of need) are "built" by filling the jobs of the military building the unit is attached to, so I don't expect the particular problem you're concerned with to exist.
 
  • 15
Reactions:
Wizzington said:
The investment pool can be used to cover the costs of all allowed constructions, so how much you can draw from it each week depends on where your construction allocation is going, ie whether you are currently building things that can be funded by it.
Click to expand...
So, if you use the investment pool, does it cover all costs associated with construction, including wages and purchased goods? Also, does construction cost anything besides the necessary wages and goods?
 
  • 2
Reactions:
RedTangent said:
Devastation recovery, maybe?
Click to expand...
This sounds like a fantastic idea. You recover (slightly to moderately) faster for devastation by sacrificing future construction. Wars still have a real hard cost in lost future economic growth but the player also gets more agency in deciding how to recover from wars by voluntarily pausing construction in other sectors or regions, or by having excess construction capacity via overbuilding the construction industry.
 
Last edited:
  • 6
  • 1Like
Reactions:
Wizzington said:
You get an alert for unused capacity. I will think about whether we can add some benefit for unused capacity, I agree it would be good!
Click to expand...

Perhaps unused capacity could be used to boost infrastructure? Makes sense for them to provide road maintenance and aid in recruitment speed when you're mobilizing for example.
 
  • 3
Reactions:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back