Developer Diary 10 – PoPs and the End to Manual Promotion

[King]

If pops are no longer a fixed size what is the deal with different ideologies/issues within each pop?

Wouldn't it be less confusing to split dissidents into a separate pop with different ideology/issue?

Or perhaps the opposite. Why don't you merge all catholic dixies into one pop and just change the ideologies/issues composition?

The screenshot is of all the POPs in a state not province.

 

[King]

Really love what you are doing with the POPs and the fact that OHgamer helps is great news.

My questsions:
1. Will we have some filters to short the POPs so we can get more information about what is going on in every state?
2. What are the "Su" "Ev" and "Lu" columns?
3. The literacy of the cleric POPs is 10%. Since they are now a kind of teacher POP shouldn't they have 100% literacy? it's a little strange to have illiterate teachers.
4. Is there a way to get information of what the POPs are changing to and how fast in this screen?

You can filter by POP types, by state, by province, there are tool tips for the rest and thesetups are not complete.

 

[King]

this is looking to be one of the best interface King.

Interface is soemthing we are putting a lot of effort into. To be frank here if Victroia 2 was simply Victoria but with a reworked interface I believe we would have a better game straight away. If we want you to run your country and take advantage of everything the game offers, you need to know what is going on. Anything we add after that, well that's a bonus.

 

[King]

I presume unemployment adds to Consciousness and feeds somehow into Militancy...

Not having money to buy stuff makes people sad.

 

[King]

Won't it have side effect of having huge POPs changing from one class to another all the sudden when conditions "tick"?

Somehow I imagined that POP promotion in case of huge POPs will spawn new, smaller POP of new class (people that left their previous occupation to start new work), with old POP getting a bit smaller.

I assume it's not the case and in late game big POPs will change their type as a whole, not partially?

Also, I assume demotion of POPs (like cappies and others losing their status and such) is still possible via the policies?

no POPs promote through a drip effect. So the promotion is through a gradual process. It is more like migration in the old victoria.

 

[King]

Awesome.

Same with culture change (like becoming Yankee, German or Russian), I assume?

Yes

 

[Trin Tragula]

and/or provincial decisions.

Let's hope they're atleast regional decisions rather than provincial ones in Victoria2...

Also the main feature of the national focus, atleast in eu3 seems to be the associated decisions. I'm guessing this might still be the case in victoria

 

[King]

Hey, I've noticed something odd. There are both labourers and farmers in the same province, does that mean that labourers jobs have been changed? IIRC, labourers in provinces with a food RGO turned to farmers as soon as the game starts processing info, so maybe in Vicky II they are gonna have a different role? Or maybe farmers, that will produce food regardless of the RGO in a province?

No it's just an Alpha.

 

[King]

I have a question about unemployment. I don't think that a whole pop is unemployed, rather some share of the pop is unemployed, but the U-Column in the screenshot indicates a Yes/No logic?

Can you tell me how it really is?

EDIT: Sorry, after a second look on the screenshot, I've seen, that in the last row the red Bar is not completely filled. I think these means that roughly 1/3 of the Pop is unemployed. The other rows are 100% or 0%.

The game isn't finished yet so there are glitches. However Unemployment is a percentage value.

 

[King]

Unless they live in a utopian communist paradise?

Well I hear unemployment benefits do help unemployed people buy things.

 

[King]

So... if manual promotion is ended, how does V2 handle the promotion of cultural minorities? Same as in V1, except coded into the algorithms to say "if cultural minority, and if non-full citizenship policy, don't promote"?

At the moment we have not done anything, but our idea is discriminatory policies against minorities reduce the chances of them promoting up the ladder.

 

[King]

I find it odd no one have brought this up yet, perhaps because it is not so much related to the graphs at hand.

But what keeps bugging me about that screenshot is that it is clearly the United States in 1836, yet somehow North Dakota (among other examples) are states, and there are simply too many stars on the flag for this time.

I assume the obvious answer here is; 'it's alpha, it'll be historical accurate once we get around to do that'. But it still leaves me hanging with a question; will the American flag increase correctly in star amount as it historically did? Or will I have to wait for a flag modifications for that to happen?

And related to the topic; these graphs are simplifying an overly complicated part of the gameplay. Nice...

Colonial territory appears in the list too.

 

[King]

just a quick question on the mechanics side, does literacy play a part in pop promotions and does it affect the overall litteracy of the pops?

eg. a 'farmer' pop starts to trickle to clerks or capies would litteracy be a factor? would the litterate farmers be chosen over the illiterate or would it just be random?

literacy is one of the factors we have to play with, but the actual promotion logic is not done.

 

[Darkrenown]

A souped up national focus sounds interesting, but what might be even better would be a "national priority". Something like "promote industry", or even a more specific "promote steel production"/"recruitment drive"/"encourage literacy" etc. to give your nation a little nudge in the direction you want it to go. Then again, perhaps you can already do this through your spending policys etc.

 

[King]

King, you clearly aren't giving too much away on this (possibly because it isn't yet decided), but what sort of factors would turns, say, a craftsman into a clerk?

Not at the moment, we have a general idea which I put in the developer diary and then a lot of nice tirggers to play around with, but the exact form still needs to be nailed down.

 

[King]

King, are we still looking at a total of 25-odd DDs? Cause if we are, either the game is coming out in Q2 or there's going to be a huge gap between the last DD and release...

Yeh we are still looking at about 25 odd DDs at the moment. Once the game gets more complete we may hit upon game features that are actually much cooler than they seemed and they get a developer diary of thier own. If not there are always things that we can do to keep you guys interested. Perhaps we'll run an inhouse MP game to test things and do an AAR about it.