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Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #73 - Open Beta and Update 1.2 overview

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Hello and welcome! Today we'll be covering several topics relating to Update 1.2:

  • Open 1.2 Beta
  • Feature Overview
  • Anticipated 1.2 Release Date

As mentioned in our last dev diary, 1.2 is a big update with some far-reaching changes, and we don't want to push it out before we feel it's ready for primetime. We're happy overall with the reception of Update 1.1, but those of you who were with us during its initial release will remember - perhaps fondly, perhaps not - how the Legitimacy mechanics seemed to change from day to day for a while there. While we finally managed to iron out most of the kinks in 1.1.2 (more on that later) this is the kind of scenario we'd like to avoid going forward. With a game as highly interconnected and complex as Victoria 3, the only way to do that is to give the patch enough time in the oven, letting our playtesters really give everything a solid rundown.

At the same time, Update 1.2 brings some substantial improvements in several areas that we know are important to you, and we don't want to keep those away from you longer than we absolutely have to. Disentangling specific improvements and bug fixes from the rest of the changes that have already been done to the branch is itself laborious and error-prone. Our assessment is that releasing those in hotfixes would be risky.

So how do we marry these two things together - giving you access to upcoming content as soon as possible, while ensuring high quality of the upcoming update? By launching our first Open Beta, of course! In this way you will have a chance to experience all the juicy parts of Update 1.2, but also share your feedback with us in advance, allowing us to improve what we are currently working on.

Our planned beta launch date is February 8th at 10:00 CET. At that point a new Steam beta branch 1.2-beta will become available to anyone who owns Victoria 3. A new forum post will be made with step-by-step instructions for how to enable it. Once you've started playing the beta, you can always switch back to the live branch in the same way. As always, your existing save games might not be fully compatible with this new version, and you should definitely not expect saves made in 1.2 to be backwards compatible with 1.1.2.

We will also launch a new beta section on our Victoria 3 Discord server where you can discuss the update with other players and report any bugs or balance issues you find. Our moderators will be active on this channel, and so will developers and QA team members as time permits. If you prefer not to use Discord you can also file bugs using our forum bug report tool, even for the beta version.

After the initial beta release, we plan on releasing two additional updates on the beta branch on a weekly basis, containing additional bug fixes, performance improvements, etc and also adjustments we've made according to your feedback. The exact release dates and times of these updates are to be confirmed, but we will keep you posted on the Discord channel.

To set expectations at the right level, playing the beta build will not be a buttery-smooth experience! Some aspects of the game will be greatly improved, but other things will be in a rougher state, and there will be bugs (if not, we'd just launch it without a beta phase!)

Also, some features will be in a less mature state at the beginning of beta than they will be at release. For example, Strategic Objectives will be limited to one per country during the beta, but the intent is to expand this to allow for designating multiple Strategic Objectives. This slimmed-down version is included in the beta to allow you to try it out and feedback on how it feels in general while we continue to work on the full implementation.

So do keep in mind that while you'll get a sneak peek at the latest features and will see many improvements, you should expect some speed bumps along the way. And when you do, we want to hear about it!

Below you can find a short list of some of the new features and improvements made in 1.2. As always, just because something is not on this list doesn't mean we're not aware of it, and may even have addressed it already! The full changelog will be published closer to the release date.

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New Features
  • Autonomous Investment system
  • Strategic Objectives for planning military campaigns
  • Customizable notification settings
  • In-game music player
  • Key rebinding

Improvements and bug fixes
  • Performance optimization
  • Improved AI handling of economy and military, including port management
  • Greater differences in economic systems
  • More realistic modeling of trade route profits and GDP
  • Worldwide Arable Land revision and migration balancing
  • Mega-parties limited by tweaks to party formation logic and ideology

Interface
  • Trade panel overhaul for easier route management
  • More clarity on Pop Needs, Convoys, Radicals and Loyalists
  • Visual upgrades to mapmodes and lenses, such as showing Infrastructure and employable Pops when expanding buildings
  • Outliner enhanced with pinnable market goods and characters
  • Reduced notification spam


We are going to cover most of these things in dev diaries leading up to the release of 1.2, so details on what exactly these entail may be sparse until then. However, all of these will be in the beta build when we release it (although to reiterate, perhaps not in their final form) so come February 8th you can explore them for yourself!

After the third and final beta release, but before the live release of Update 1.2, you can expect the beta build and the beta section on Discord to become unavailable, as we will be channeling all our resources into the release. We will keep you updated on the expected beta shutdown date on Discord as well, of course.

Our preliminary release date for Update 1.2, assuming all goes according to plan, is March 13th. For those of you who opt to continue playing 1.1.2 until then you can follow the new features in upcoming dev diaries. For the rest of you, I'll see you on Discord on Feb 8!

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Yeah it's an unfortunate bug in the forum software! We prep the DDs in advance, and the system doesn't always update to the correct time after we publish them. :)
 
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This all looks great! Love the idea of an open beta, and can't wait to get my hands on it. Also wanted to say this is great communication from the team, and much appreciated!
 
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A few things to improve the game:
  • Enable production of a single goods for all goods (Dynamite, wine etc.)
  • Introduce a diplomatic option to lower infamy or move infamy to a "by country" attitude adjuster. If you open the "conquest door" it never closes unless you clear it with a revolution switching sides - which is super gamey and silly... and it clears your statistics graphs, which is suuuuper annoying.
  • Weaponry should be unique to each country and default to non-tradeable. It should be tradeable, but not by default. I've had enemies import guns from me - again silly.
  • Weaponry should have some kind of quality besides production methods. It should encourage trade for the best guns. Or poor weapons because you need quantity over quality.
  • Luxury goods should also have a quality stamp. I want wine from Europe, cars from the US and porcelain from China. Or settle for some poor cars from Russia. It would add a lot more interesting trade dynamics.
  • Railroads should be required to form a continuous route back to your capital or where ever it is consumed. As it is now, goods teleport all over as long as you have railroads in the region that you produce a lot. Consumption isn't at all factored in.
I have no idea what to do with combat, but I feel like a complete overhaul might be required.
 
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Gort11 said:
That doesn't seem right to me. If I have ten times the troops on the front, I should usually find myself outnumbering them in the battles. Instead, the defender pretty much always outnumbers the attacker, even when outnumbered vastly.

It makes large enemy militaries very unthreatening when you can just sit back and be confident of a numbers advantage as long as you just defend.
Click to expand...

Except you can't, because they only have to pin you down once, or they can grind down your manpower reserve.

Yes, it can be frustrating, it was frustrating for the British when they landed 180,000 troops in South Africa and couldn't actually draw the much smaller Boer forces into a pitched battle where they annihilated them (not that we can represent this perfectly yet, since they'd surrender too quickly when you took their capitals, and there's no "let's put their families in concentration camps because we can't beat them in the field" option).

But this is literally the only system Paradox has ever done where outnumbered and outgunned enemies can't just be run over by a big army, and can even achieve local victories on the defence, which happened all the time in real life. You're still going to win every time if you are willing and able to commit to keeping your larger force grinding them down, but at least you sometimes have to work for it.

But what people don't get is that generally, if you were outnumbered, you didn't go out and have a fair pitched battle and lose. You used guerilla warfare and ambushes and your better knowledge of the terrain and local connections to achieve local superiority. And then you still USUALLY lost because this was the era where Europe had the most disproportionate superiority in warmaking to the rest of the world... but not always.
 
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I am rather concerned that features are being added to military before the very big issues are being fixed rather than after (revolutions occupying all your enemy’s land when you can’t Dow them, allies taking control of your front with highly inferior / fewer soldiers, naval invasions send all the troops home after your general decides to send 2 guys against the enemy’s 30, so on). I think that the number of issues in warfare are kind of overwhelming and more features might just create even more problems at this point in time, especially done in pieces rather than in an overhaul.

That being said I’m really excited for many of these changes in general and I think it’s a great direction.
 
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Gui10 said:
Does this only mean an increase of it in the Americas or also a decrease in India and East Asia? If so, how are subsistance farms handled now?

If it will all be explained in another developer diary, I am fine waiting :p.
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It means both, we've made a special rice paddies subsistence farm that can take twice as many employees which has allowed us to drastically reduce the amount of arable land in China.
 
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I am pleased there's going to be an Open Beta; it's definitely the best way for PDX to release fixes for the reasons clearly laid out in the dev diary.

But having tried it for another game project, I can tell you that Discord is a terrible way to report bugs on a multi-person project. It's not designed for large chunks of text or for structured text (like making sure people include checksums in their report). If you're not online at the time of the report, it's easy to miss it. Plus you're totally dependent on Discord continuing to provide the service free of charge to you and your users. I am an enthusiastic Discord user (it works well for things like AMAs and of course for its original purpose of chatting in multiplayer games) and "we'll try anything once" is a reasonable principle. But best of luck to the mods and/or QA devs trying to use it for bug reporting this time because I suspect it will make your life harder, unfortunately.
 
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Will peasants have normal buy orders? Or at least half of other pop buy orders
Currently if you have nothing but subsistence farms, then all those goods are very cheap.

That is good prices should be on Expensive side if you have nothing but subsistence farms.
You don't need to make any grain farms early currently.
 
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Wizzington said:
It means both, we've made a special rice paddies subsistence farm that can take twice as many employees which has allowed us to drastically reduce the amount of arable land in China.
Click to expand...
Are these special rice paddles subsistence farms just for China or are they for any state where there is rice farms instead of Wheat,Millet,Maize or Rye farms?
 
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Exciting times! A while back, the possibility of a "reverse sway" mechanic -- basically, here's what you could offer for me to join your war -- was mentioned. Did that idea ever pan out? Of all the features that have been brainstormed in these DDs, that one sticks with me as one that could be a massive improvement to the diplomacy experience.
 
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Regarding migration, have you considered making it so that cultural migration only causes emigration in homelands of that culture? It's very odd when, for example, an Afro-American migration caused by turmoil in the USA results in Afro-American pops living in Canada migrating to Haiti.
 
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Kyoumen said:
Except you can't, because they only have to pin you down once, or they can grind down your manpower reserve.

Yes, it can be frustrating, it was frustrating for the British when they landed 180,000 troops in South Africa and couldn't actually draw the much smaller Boer forces into a pitched battle where they annihilated them (not that we can represent this perfectly yet, since they'd surrender too quickly when you took their capitals, and there's no "let's put their families in concentration camps because we can't beat them in the field" option).

But this is literally the only system Paradox has ever done where outnumbered and outgunned enemies can't just be run over by a big army, and can even achieve local victories on the defence, which happened all the time in real life. You're still going to win every time if you are willing and able to commit to keeping your larger force grinding them down, but at least you sometimes have to work for it.

But what people don't get is that generally, if you were outnumbered, you didn't go out and have a fair pitched battle and lose. You used guerilla warfare and ambushes and your better knowledge of the terrain and local connections to achieve local superiority. And then you still USUALLY lost because this was the era where Europe had the most disproportionate superiority in warmaking to the rest of the world... but not always.
Click to expand...
In the current state you can outnumber the enemy 10 to 1, have them completely encircled in a small area with flat terrain, and still be outnumbered in the ensuing battle. I think being outnumbered in these situations should be modifiers, not the status quo. If Germany is invading Luxembourg, what is a valid reason that they should outnumber Germany in any given battle? There are tons of situations where this doesn't make sense, even if it does make sense in a large guerilla war you're fighting in Africa
 
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CollectorOfBolts said:
Out of curiosity, is the infrastructure for the message settings part of the engine or specific to Vic3? In other words, how easy/difficult would it be to port the system over to CK3?
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I am really pleased to see Message Settings introduced into V3, as shown on Twitter yesterday. I don't know how customizable they will be, but anything is a step in the right direction.

And yes, I really hope that CK3 will be following this lead. The Customizable News Feed mod makes CK3 much more enjoyable, but for the sake of console players and newbies I'd really like to see message settings in vanilla.
lilcritt said:
Speaking of...
View attachment 944019
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Yes, it's really strange that voting is not present in the V3 subforum when it is for other games' Suggestions. But search works fine for me on desktop.

Improved AI handling of economy and military, including port management
Click to expand...
Also pleased to see AI improvements. Not as shiny as new features but so, so important to having a replayable game.
 
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