Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #68 - Patch 1.1 Changelog (part 4)

[commissar roach]

This comment is reserved by the Community Team for gathering Dev Responses in, for ease of reading.

Amtoj said:


Will the American AI still colonize that tendril of land going into Canada?

Yes, for now. We considered addressing it in the short-term by changing the way some decentralized nations were laid out at the start of the game, but it would be ahistorical and not a sustainable / generic solution. Instead we have been working on an improved colonization mechanic that takes Claims into account to address this, which will be coming in a later patch.

veryalien said:


I can't tell exactly from the changelog but is the AI building better now in 1.1? I know there's an arable land rebalance coming but that not withstanding is it better now?

There are some changes that improve the AI in this area:

- AI will now properly use its investment pool when it can cover the entire construction cost, despite being in deficit
- Improve the AI's understanding of when it should produce more military goods of a certain type
- Make the AI more interested in switching to more productive PMs, and less interested in switching to less productive ones unless there is a very good reason to do so
- Fixed some cases where the AI would use the wrong define for computing heuristics

and some other bugfixes and tweaks that, taken together, will improve it further.

Prpht said:


Oh, so the trade fix is scheduled for 1.2, not 1.1? I get it, it has considerable balance implications. But still - I would (personally) prefer to give it a much higher priority. It is the number one enjoyment breaker for me right now.,

Addressing the issue with the pricing algorithm traders use to determine traded volume is a major change that will require substantial testing and experimentation, so we were unable to address this for 1.1.

However, the issue that enabled massive circular trading was fixed in 1.1.

Cymsdale said:


Shouldn't the point to be to have to pass minimal wage laws in order to avoid this radicalization, not just have the factories pay it out of the goodness of their hearts?

Too much radicalization also disrupts the industries, and note that they will only do this if they are quite profitable. Using only minimum wages for this would mean that wages would not rise at all as the economy grows, which would be neither a desirable nor particularly realistic outcome.

monksimus said:


You weren't kidding that this is a long changelog. It looks like good work and it is coming sooner than I expected for a nice surprise.

I know you are always working on it, but any progress on improving late game performance or the AI building priorities?

Performance work is ongoing and I know some improvements have been made for 1.1 in this area, even though they haven't made it into the changelog (since they're entirely under-the-hood).
AI construction logic has been improved somewhat as well.

Republic of Mercury said:


Does this patch fix the issue where small countries would get locked in endless civil wars, either not having enough battalions to fight, or the two sides just not being able to reach other? (Oman was a repeat offender for that one).

(But even if it doesn't I'm still really really looking forward to Monday now.)

I did some digging and I think we just missed this in the patch notes
Revolutions will now always lose some amount of war support, even when they're out of troops, so they cannot go on forever.

benis1996 said:


How did you fix the circular trading issue?

I am also quite disappointed no discussion here about fixing GDP calculation. It barely affects balance and isn't that complicated of a change (just adjusting the formula for a statistic)

Circular trading was caused by one of the computations not taking the post-trade price of the goods into account, thinking it would always be possible to trade even though they were also being traded with. So it was a bugfix, not a design change.

Regarding the GDP calculation, if you're referring to changing it to represent only value-added GDP (i.e. subtracting the cost of input goods used in production), that change has been made and is being tested out on branch 1.2 right now. It has the potential of causing a lot of balance issues so we wanted more time with it, even though it's a simple change.

kamik said:


Hi, great work, but what do you mean by "Cleaned up defines to remove unused ones" Do not remove defines pls. How can You know that certain define are not used???

They were removed if they were not referenced anywhere in code or script. No functionality was removed, only misleading entries in the defines file that suggested something worked a certain way when it didn't.

costevie said:


I dunno anything about code for games or the like but I’m curious what the problem ended up being that led to the 100 year old rulers bug? Was it just a misplaced 0 or something??

I'd rather not say

Andarnio said:


Massive patch, i like. Im cautiously optimistic about it since a good bunch of my problems with the game are being fixed or worked on, but i still feel like there should some changes made to qualifications, or at least the visible impact of them, as well as tech being way too fast and universities redundant

It's on the list. Our design team can only make and get changes vetted so fast. I couldn't squeeze tech changes in for 1.1 soon enough.

Due to the complexity of how game mechanics tie together we rarely get the approval of late changes in a patch to systems that touch everything.

I got to choose between Oil and Rubber or tech, both would have caused me to be hung by my own QA team.

Once I get arable land ready for a QA pass I intend to look at tech alongside a few other things.

TempestM said:


Can we expect an actual fix to this problem, so Gibraltar and Pondicherry wouldn't count as treaty ports in any circumstances (like rank change), or this is how it will be working forever?

Uhm, I guess this means it IS intended and Gibraltar intended to be a treaty port forever?

Click to expand...

You mistake my respectfully disagree, its with your tone. Bold screaming of an actual fix, without giving any context of what you mean by that is a wonderful way to convince others of your argument. In my personal opinion this fix is good enough for now and I don't think the split state solution that is being proposed (or I have to assume here because you've not actually proposed something, just really screamed "is that it?") here is of any actual value in relation to the other issues that need tackling.

deldonut1 said:


So France won't be so OP now? As far I know, France becoming more strong than UK is because of its port in Indian market.

France is still powering ahead a bit, but no longer able to access the British Market and fuel it as crazily as it did before.
There are some changes in 1.2 which will help bring them into a reasonable equation, as well as other things planned but those are spoilers.

PedroLuiz said:


Why Monday and not today?

Good question! We always need to time releases carefully to make sure staff are on hand if something unforeseen happens. Even patch release dates are usually set several weeks in advance and rarely moved.

Alien-47 said:


Will AI start building their own ironclads in the mid-late game?

Yes!

Weyird said:


As someone from South Africa who was super excited that more people would be aware of our country's history because it was highlighted as a suggested nation, this makes me sad.

I feel you, and I'm sorry! It turns out, after repeated playtesting, that running the tutorial as a subject in the British market really messes up the pacing and can introduce a number of bugs in the flow. Several parts of the early tutorial is centered around making noticeable changes to the profitability of buildings or the prices of goods, and it turns out this is much harder to do as a small nation in a giant market than what's suitable for a tutorial. We'll try to make it up to South Africa in the future!

ToraktheNord said:


Will scripted GUI be possible again in the next patch?

Sadly no. This has to do with how we separate presentation layer and logic layer in V3, which lets us do some cool things to enhance performance and responsivity but disconnects the game logic scripting facilities from the GUI scripting. We're going to take a shot at it for future patches though, since it's highly requested modder functionality. Stay tuned!



Regarding the discussion around building wage settings: my takeaway is that you guys really love to see abject poverty, huh. Good to know, we'll see what we can do about that for the future.

Bhangbhangduc said:


This is probably down the line in terms of importance, but is there an idea to fix the US colonizing Canada? It's a holdover bug from Vicky 2, which makes me wonder if there was a reason why the US-Canada border was set up in Vicky 3 the same way. If the Montana-Alberta border is that important to the game, perhaps it could be normalized with the Oregon treaty?

We've got a solution that will potentially work for 1.2 - it needs vetting.
It should also help solve problems like Russian Hokkaido

Fantasy295 said:


In addition to political strength and gold reserves, population and subsidies can also overflow. I saw such posts in my own country's community. are developers going decide to consider fixing more overflows?

Reported overflows get the highest priority (after hard crashes), but they can also sometimes be tricky to solve technically, since numbers can get really big in V3. It is possible that some root issues have been fixed in these patches that cause the other overflows to no longer happen either, but if you do encounter any other overflow errors in 1.1 once it drops, please do file bug reports.

Cymsdale said:


It's more like "why should I care about passing welfare laws when my coal miners are dressing in silk and enjoying fancy cheese."

Which isn’t really something you'll see with wages pegged to minimum acceptable. That caps out at 15 for poor strata with era 5 social tech and 100% literacy.

Splorghley said:


Market rework time!

.... I have nightmares of this in ways you cannot comprehend.

Aeschyli said:


Since its not written i would like to ask. Will there be a change infamy cost for return states in this patch?

I am not complaining actually i like the patch notes. I just want to know because i really like to play ottomans, japan and for both of them return state is really matters.

So this one required me to do some digging in the jira database.
It was fixed, but was fixed by a tangentially related task which is why it didn't show in the changelog and patchnotes because that is made off of the git commits and not the Jira database resolutions.

Serensius said:


Agreed that it’s annoying to never see the AI colonize there, but I’d be a little concerned about AI Australia colonizing lots of stuff in Indonesia if this change were made.

I’ve been wondering if there should be another colonization law, which only allows colonization of bordering states. Would be nice in this case, as well as for the US, Canada, Russia, Japan, and a few other places as well.

EDIT: Just wanted to add that all of these changes are awesome, really happy to see this patch come out before holiday season starts.

1.2 will have a whole slew of changes here, with mechanics for claims on colonies, more countries starting with colonial institutions, etc.

Bread said:


I still don't really understand the rationale for this, there are in-game mechanics for poor people being unhappy with their low wages and forcing higher wages through legislative change - radicalization -> movements; why completely sidestep this mechanic by having wages raise automatically to an acceptable level?
It just feels wrong for a period which birthed the trade union movement for what I can only assume to be a simulation of collective bargaining to be handled in the background completely separately from the politics system.

The issue is that if buildings only ever raised wages when there was a labor shortage for the jobs they're hiring for, you would see wage rates sit just above subsistence level until you put every single one of your peasants to work in the factories, and then suddenly all buildings in the state would start to compete with each other for workers until their wages matched their productivity and no profit is gained at all. It's not a good experience for the player and feels very wrong (believe me, it is how it used to work earlier in development).

With the system tuned such that very profitable buildings will raise wages at least up to some threshold - we've chosen the radicalization threshold, the point where pops feel like they'd rather fight and die than accept their situation - there's a more gradual increase in wages as the productive workforce increases, which makes more sense when you see it in action. You will still see radicalization in the buildings whose margins are more pressed, or even failing, and there are many other sources of radicalism to create the effect you're after.

Lukevan16 said:


I like the Dev diary, and am excited to try it out.
A small suggestion if you’re already changing some town names. “Da Aar” in Cape Colony should actually be “De Aar.”

Also, is there anyway you could add some event that moves post-Confederation Canada’s capital to Bytown, which is then renamed “Ottawa?” It’s weird to keep seeing a Canadian state centred in Ft Douglas.

I fixed De Aar, or I'm like 95% sure I did.
I went the loc files with a spellcheck, and a really good podcast because someone had to.

Shevvek said:


Personally it doesn't bother me if the US doesn't fully expand but seeing the random bit of Mexico surrounded by the US every game is painful IMO.

- Manifest Destiny now provide claims on the colonized split states of Mexico

Bread said:


Couldn't this be alleviated through changing/expanding the qualifications system though? So that the pools for certain jobs are smaller, allowing more granularity in wage changes? Non-game designer spitballing I admit.
Though I could be getting too hung-up on not having a good enough head-canon of what's going on with these wage increases, it is just really taking me out of it (as well as probably more importantly preventing the simulation of historically very profitable but also very exploitative industries)

Not a bad suggestion, but this would require us to have floating wage levels for every profession type in a building. At the moment, buildings only keep track of one "wage rate", which is the wage it would pay a (non-discriminated) Laborer, and other professions get paid some multiple of that. Under a system that relied more on Qualifications to determine labor competition than is the case currently, we would need for buildings to be able to pay e.g. Engineers a lot more than Machinists due to the increased pressure on that pool of workers. That is something I would like to explore in the future, but it adds a fair amount of complexity.

deldonut1 said:


The fact that POPs don't seem to tolerate a slight decrease in SoL levels. Going from 19.5 to 19.3 seems to already be enough to make some POPs become radical, which shouldn't be like that.

The average SoL metric you see in the top bar is great as a general overview of how things are going for you as a nation, but actually terribly misleading on its own when trying to determine where Radicals are coming from and how to address it. The reason for this is that Wealth changes between pops, especially across class boundaries a lot more than it changes on average, generally speaking. To take one example, Britain starts to import Grain from you, raising Grain prices across the nation. This massively benefits the Aristocrats that own the land the farms are built on, because they rake in the profits - but the pops who work the farm and has to buy that Grain are not getting paid any more than they used to (unless their Standard of Living drops below the minimum they'd accept, as per the parallel conversation in the comments). As a result, Britain importing Grain from you might cause average SoL to increase because overall your buildings' effective Productivity has increased, putting more wealth into circulation, but simultaneously this could have drastically increased the wealth gap in your nation, leading to more Loyalists among some pops but also more Radicals in other parts of the population.

Visualizing this better by breaking down SoL trends in different parts of the population is something we're investigating at present, but for the moment I can say that this system works exactly as intended: even minor drops in SoL will cause a one-time increase of Radicals and vice versa.

Nikolai said:


It's late, so perhaps I missed it. But is the issue of rebellions getting rebellions that becomes independent when first rebellion is crushed, fixed?

Fractal rebellions and uprisings should also be fixed, yes! Countries created due to civil wars should no longer be able to have their own civil wars.

durbal said:


I see the trade changes and it looks like you 'fixed' circular trades while leaving the ability to raid someone else's market by buying high and selling low (i.e. the price inversion problem). Now we have no workaround to re-import goods being effectively stolen from our markets when fixing price inversions would've killed both birds with one stone.

There have been many discussions around how trader price determinations affect trade volume and whether that is strictly correct or if it actually upsets the economic system as a whole, with good points made on both sides. The reason we opted for the system of average pre/post-trade prices we did was because we figured trade is strictly a transfer of value between two agents where the optimal volume both depends on and affects those prices, whereas in the rest of the economic system, demand and supply are not actually directly price-dependent as such. By applying the full burden of the transactions on the price prior to resolving all those transactions, we figured we would artificially decrease the optimal trade volume. However, the argument could also be made that trade creates Buy and Sell Orders which affect prices, and by using a different price algorithm for traders than production buildings and consumers we're in effect letting traders (and tariffing nations) extract value off trade to the detriment of domestic industry. That case is sufficient reason for us to experiment with it, to ensure we're not destroying the trade system's dynamics or the market balance in the process. But we aren't sufficiently convinced that we're just going to change the algorithm, give it a quick go to make sure it doesn't crash, and push it into a patch without a lot of playtesting and balancing. That is especially true since we did find an actual bug when investigating and fixing circular trading, which might also impact the player experience of regular trade as the volume calculation has now been fixed.

So no, I don't agree that putting our efforts towards experimenting with the trade algorithms while under extreme time pressure rather than fixing obvious bugs would have been time better spent. We can agree to disagree on that point, even while we can both agree we're looking forward to more intuitive and well-balanced trade in the future.

Sotek said:


Does the OOS fix only cover exactly the hotjoin fix, or is it possible other OOSes are fixed?

It is possible, since OOSes are often the result of bugs or dangerous use of threading, which could have been resolved in the course of other fixes. OOS issues are very highly prioritized so where we haven't fixed them explicitly, it's usually due to them being very rare or that we're no longer able to replicate them on the latest builds.

durbal said:


I understand those points, but the fundamental problem is that the math you're using is incorrect. Using the arithmetic mean to get the mean value of the pricing function is incorrect since that only works when the function is linear while the pricing function is not. The correct mean value needs to be calculated through integration or a better approximation method as @Tempscire explains here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...oncerns-about-trade-gdp.1558055/post-28653780. This incorrect mean causes the price inversions. If you guys are still not sure there's more information in that thread or I'm sure many people participating in that thread can explain further.

The pricing function is linear, ranging from 0.25 to 1.75 of base price and reaching those bounds when sell / buy is 2:1 and 1:2 vice versa and progressing linearly based on the ratio between buy and sell orders in between. Not sure where the claim to a concave pricing function is coming from, this is pretty well outlined in both tooltips and the defines file (the PRICE_RANGE and BUY_SELL_DIFF_AT_MAX_FACTOR defines in particular).

The price inversions are rather originating from traders optimizing their volume based on an average of pre- and post-trade prices, but then applying the full brunt of this volume as Sell and Buy orders in the respective markets. This essentially lets them execute a number of profitable transactions "before" the final market prices are actually set, leading domestic market agents to have to buy or sell at (probably) unfair prices by comparison, particularly when one market is much bigger than the other. We'll try to address it like I said, but please understand that even if a different algorithm was to work better and look more sane at large volumes, there's no guarantee this will magically solve all problems without causing new ones.

tahlaskerssen said:


Maybe giving ways of counteracting this behavior or limiting it could be a solution without needing to change the whole system. Usually it's better to cure than to treat the symptoms, but maybe not in this case. If players had more ways of limiting exports per good or setting tariffs on exports per good could help to fight it.

I hear you on that ultimately it does come down to the player experience of the system, but if we do have a fundamental balance issue in the economy system - which is not unlikely to be the case - doing a proper fix early in the game's lifecycle is definitely preferable to a smoke-and-mirrors solution. We also want to take care to not give countries full control of every nuance of their trade policies without pushback, since it's completely contrary to both modeling the international market forces that lead to economic imperialism and the political interests of your pops. I have no doubt we'll find a solution to the balance issues we currently have with trade, we just need a bit more time.

 

[UmbrellaWork]

good

 

[Anbeeld]

Hooray, time for

has_technology_researched = bureaucracy

to work instead of thinking it got numerical value!

 

[veryalien]

I can't tell exactly from the changelog but is the AI building better now in 1.1? I know there's an arable land rebalance coming but that not withstanding is it better now?

 

[Amtoj]

Will the American AI still colonize that tendril of land going into Canada?

 

[DJMR666]

For the next patch, could y'all fix the bug I reported on Nov 15 where the landowners of the Confederacy lose both elitist and Pro-Slavery ideologies the moment they start the American Civil War?

 

[lachek]

Will the American AI still colonize that tendril of land going into Canada?

Yes, for now. We considered addressing it in the short-term by changing the way some decentralized nations were laid out at the start of the game, but it would be ahistorical and not a sustainable / generic solution. Instead we have been working on an improved colonization mechanic that takes Claims into account to address this, which will be coming in a later patch.

 

[turokhalo]

Good stuff and nice that you give the modder some credit.
But I think it may be a good idea to have the patch notes in the future closer to the release date of the patch, to prevent unnecessary radicals from spawning. But I understand that you don´t want to release major patches on thursdays or fridays.

 

[monksimus]

You weren't kidding that this is a long changelog. It looks like good work and it is coming sooner than I expected for a nice surprise.

I know you are always working on it, but any progress on improving late game performance or the AI building priorities?

 

[Prpht]

Oh, so the trade fix is scheduled for 1.2, not 1.1? I get it, it has considerable balance implications. But still - I would (personally) prefer to give it a much higher priority. It is the number one enjoyment breaker for me right now.,

 

[Fallofthepurple]

- Added some variant unifier flags for Germany and Italy
- Germany's default flag is now the Black-Red-Gold tricolor
- Italy's default flag is now the Green-White-Red tricolor without the House of Savoy's coat of arms

We love to see it
Even if it makes my mod a bit redundant. Curious to see how its implemented here, maybe i can steal something!

Also happy to see fixes to expeditions and overflow bugs.

Unfortunately doesnt seem like Religious Taxation was fixed :C

 

[lachek]

I can't tell exactly from the changelog but is the AI building better now in 1.1? I know there's an arable land rebalance coming but that not withstanding is it better now?

There are some changes that improve the AI in this area:

- AI will now properly use its investment pool when it can cover the entire construction cost, despite being in deficit
- Improve the AI's understanding of when it should produce more military goods of a certain type
- Make the AI more interested in switching to more productive PMs, and less interested in switching to less productive ones unless there is a very good reason to do so
- Fixed some cases where the AI would use the wrong define for computing heuristics

and some other bugfixes and tweaks that, taken together, will improve it further.

 

[Republic of Mercury]

Does this patch fix the issue where small countries would get locked in endless civil wars, either not having enough battalions to fight, or the two sides just not being able to reach other? (Oman was a repeat offender for that one).

(But even if it doesn't I'm still really really looking forward to Monday now.)

 

[t.et7.8.637.77]

no more access over Treaty Ports to great powers?!! is that true. That is a hole game changer for me!!

 

[Sovetskysoyuz]

Fixed general travel exploit that would allow to teleport generals by alternating orders towards the same destination bill

Are there any fixes for battalions teleporting to their home HQ when their general dies, or a general on a naval invasion returning to his home HQ rather than joining the front after the invasion, or naval invasions creating two fronts and the attacker being unable to deploy a general to the second front before the defender pushes the beachhead back into the sea? The alternating-orders teleport bug was the only workaround for all of these and some parts of warfare will be a lot more frustrating if it’s been fixed but these other issues haven’t.

 

[lachek]

Oh, so the trade fix is scheduled for 1.2, not 1.1? I get it, it has considerable balance implications. But still - I would (personally) prefer to give it a much higher priority. It is the number one enjoyment breaker for me right now.,

Addressing the issue with the pricing algorithm traders use to determine traded volume is a major change that will require substantial testing and experimentation, so we were unable to address this for 1.1.

However, the issue that enabled massive circular trading was fixed in 1.1.

 

[Cymsdale]

- Buildings will now only raise wages if they are either competing for wages or are below their minimum wage target; the target is based on employees' Expected Standard of Living to prevent too much active radicalization

Shouldn't the point to be to have to pass minimal wage laws in order to avoid this radicalization, not just have the factories pay it out of the goodness of their hearts?

 

[Nnorm]

​

- Fixed general travel exploit that would allow to teleport generals by alternating orders towards the same destination

Didn't see any bugfixes for frontlines gore. In 1.03 as soon as front collapse, general teleports back to HQ. If this has not been fixed yet, i don't know why this workaround was fixed first.

 

[Aeschyli]

I was hoping to see return state infamy cost fixed.