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King

Part Time Game Designer
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Dec 7, 2001
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  • Crusader Kings II
  • Deus Vult
  • Europa Universalis III
  • Europa Universalis: Rome
  • Sengoku
  • Victoria 2
  • 500k Club
  • Crusader Kings II: Holy Knight (pre-order)
  • Europa Universalis III: Collection
  • Hearts of Iron II: Beta
  • Victoria 2 Beta
If you were to select the most important things in the Victorian era they were social and economic changes. So we have two major game play tracks here. The evolution of your country socially and economically. The thing that bridges the two are the POPs. These little guys, and you have got to love their work, drive the economic and political systems of the game. So one of the first decisions we made when it came to the Victoria 2 design was POPs had to stay.

However the POP system was not without its flaws. There are a number of things that POPs did, which we felt could be improved on and will be covered in future developer diaries. These are migration and issue and ideology selection, these are coming up soon. Today’s diary revolves around the promotion mechanic.

First up is that essentially POP promotion can be become a real drag on your game play, I mean scrolling through your states to see if a POP is big enough to split, splitting promoting, making sure you have enough goods to promote the POP in question. This is a highly repetitive task that in itself does not add much to the game experience.

Secondly, to be quite honest here, I do not believe that manual promotion really felt right in the vast majority of cases. The Kaiser did not round up 40,000 farmers, give them some stuff and send them off to work in a factory. The whole manual promotion mechanic just did not give historical immersion.

Now the thing is, the POP promotion mechanic did add one key thing to the Victoria experience. It gave you the feeling that you were shaping your country’s destiny. So we had to think about this aspect of game play. We want you to steer and build up your country without having go through and tediously upgrade each POP in turn.

So our first goal was we dropped the promotion logic into the POP files, partly for modding but, mainly for development purposes. We could easily tweak the promotion logic when it wasn't warking properly. We then set up context sensitive triggers that defined who a POP would choose to become and why they would choose to change job. Thus the conditions you set up in your country then alter the POP promotion logic.

For example setting up high military spending makes the soldiers seem more attractive to farmers. Literacy values influence promotion into jobs like the bureaucracy and clergy. High cash reserves help a POP to promote to higher income tier positions.

So far so good, how you tax your POPs and how you spend your state money influence what your people become. However we felt there was more to POP promotion than this. Just think what Oklahoma Land Run of 1889 where the government didn’t just alter taxation and spending but got people to move somewhere and become farmers. We have recylced the national focus idea from Heir to the Throne and added a few extra tweaks to it. This will get a developer diary of it’s own, but I thought I should mention it now.

To sum up our Population design. We are comitted to giving you cool levers to alter your population that will shape your country, without turning it into micromanagement hell.

Here is a screenshot of an early screenshot of the POP screen just to give you a little flavour of what we are aiming for. Keep an eye out for further improvements.

Moderator's note : the Buddhist POP in the screenshot is actually a Jewish pop in New Orleans. The symbol is merely a placeholder for the religion from EU3 as there was no Jewish religion symbol in EU3. The screenshot is an alpha shot, there will be a separate icon for Jewish faith POPs in the final version of the game. Hopefully posting this note here will avoid the continued confusion (even after several people have stated below that it was simply a placeholder) some readers of this DD are having. OHGamer.
 

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The state-by-state population interface screen seems like a great idea, as does the USA having an accurate population in 1836.

What religion are the 50 non-Christian Dixie artisans though...?

The POP files are as accurate as we can make them, a lot of time and effort was put into these. OHgamer was hired by us to do the POP files and he could draw upon all the research the VIP team had put in.

Those non-Christians are Jewish.
 
POPs having more than one definite ideology? Interesting... Also, will we still have 25 and 50 strong POPs next to 25000 strong? Anything on size and output?

Size effects output directly. 25 POPs produce half the number of goods that 50 POPs do.
 
The news are great, as always (and now we know who we should blame for the "obvious" wrong pops in *insert your home country here*).

I'm curious, though, about the "U" column - it seems to have a continuous indicator for something, but I don't know what.

And, the 50 non-Christian artisans look like to be Buddhists - the symbol is the Darma Wheel, the same one from EUIII, IIRC.

The U is Unemployment.
 
Aww so you wont be able to see the population of your country anymore only some pop numbers :(

Its written clearly on the screen twice.
 
So will Pop splitting still be in (hope not), or did I miss something?

No POP splitting, there is no need. Productivity is directly linked to POP size, so splitting a POP down will not give you any extra output. Secondly there is a trickle effect on promotion so only a small number of farmers will decide to become something else at any given time, so again no need to split for promotion purposes either.
 
Also, what is the "outlawed" issue that 28% of the population are concerned about? All the others are familiar, but that seems to be new...

That'll be slavery, oddly enough a large percentage of slaves are not in favour of slavery. :)
 
Half the dev diary is about what's wrong with vic1, it would be nice with some info on what's in vic2. ;)

Nice to hear about the "trickle effect", so that we won't have big pops changing all at once.

How does unemployment work? It's a percentage. If a part of a pop can be unemployed, does that mean that parts of a pop can work in different factories? No need to assign workers anymore?

Yes a single POP can work in different factories.
 
oddly enougth only 28,0% are against slavery, while you got 28,1% slaves.

Still: is atheism a religion or an issue in Victoria II?

Atheism is an issue.

Well some slaves think full citizenship is important, while those conservative slaves....
 
Will factories still require the same space for employing either 5 pops that are 500,000 people and 5 pops that are 20,000 people?

Well factories employ people not POPs, so if a factory has space for 500,000 people then it has space for 500,000 people regardless of how many POPs this is.
 
That spreadsheet looks wonderful. A drop down menu that shows national, state and province population at a glance and composition chart of each level (I presume). Heaven for a statistics nuts like me.

I presume getting the balance right of auto promotion is going to be work of trial and error? A good idea and reassuring to make promotion logic moddable.

Modability is there for two reasons. Partly for easy of balancing during development but also because what ever we do we won't please everyone, so peole can play around with these to thier heart's content.
 
So the numbers of atheist will skyrocket and drop according to the ruling party again. bummer.



Ok, you got me there king :rolleyes:

When it comes to issue selection we are in the process of giving POPs basic logic for the selection of thier issues. Athiesm is currently not a heavily weighted issue, we feel that religion was not as key an issue as it was during EU3 say. Secondly it is more driven by the religious status of the POP, religious minorities see the virtues of an athiest state much more than those of the state religion. However these things will be tweaked as we go on.
 
good thing that the taxation is not the only way to influence pops. question though..will the other way be more direct? don't have to be specific if u want.

Yeh, if you selection for national focus is give me farmers in state X, then that is what it does.
 
As King said, splitting POPs would be pointless because production is now directly proportional to the size of a POP. They also no longer promote (or become unemployed, change ideology etc) in entirity. It would seem that POPs are now more like container units of populations of the same nationality, religion and occuption within a single province.

In that sense, am I correct to assume POPs will no longer have a maximum size?

They do, but it is quite a lot. I think it is 1M but don't quote me on that.
 
Very nice! My only complaint is about the buttons "Su" "Ev" "LU" "CH" seems to me a small symbol (with a tooltip) would do a better work than these 2 letter combinations.

But that's nothing (especially as this is an alpha screenshot), I really like what I'm hearing/seeing (apart from the engine things it's also nice to know that pops have been thoroughly researched to avoid the depopulated Poland from vicky 1 and similar).
 
King - question (I don't know if this was already discussed in other dev diaries): will there be any system of imposing the laws (acts, bills etc. thus kind of political system) which will also influence POP's? IMO, despite financial way of influencing POP's (taxes, tariffs) the important way of influencing people life was passing the laws of course in different manner depending on the political system; if you have parliamentary system you have to pass the law through parliament, if you are authocratic you simply announce decree :) The example could be land enclosures in England (however I think it's not this century what Vic is about in this case :)).

No