[MOD] Imperatrix: Victoria

[Sobisonator]

I think its time to get some more life into this thread.

Do the dev team have any ideas as of yet on how to handle the changing role and circumstances of cavalry in 19th century warfare? There's alot of newer material written on this subject to challenge old dogma and thus I am very interested, being a cavalry enthusiast myself, for how this will be handled in the mod.

Military design has been worked on, but on the back burner since around September 2022 while we focused all work on overhauling the fundamental systems of the game. I have to stress we have really torn the guts out of Imperator and not left much of the vanilla experience unchanged, at all, so it's a lot of groundwork to lay in creating scripts for all-new gameplay. We'll have a dev diary soon showcasing our progress, which is significant. We're talking more and more about "Alpha" in the Discord now.

That said, we would live to get your input. Do you have some suggestions for how cavalry could work?

 

[Gurkhal]

Military design has been worked on, but on the back burner since around September 2022 while we focused all work on overhauling the fundamental systems of the game. I have to stress we have really torn the guts out of Imperator and not left much of the vanilla experience unchanged, at all, so it's a lot of groundwork to lay in creating scripts for all-new gameplay. We'll have a dev diary soon showcasing our progress, which is significant. We're talking more and more about "Alpha" in the Discord now.

That said, we would live to get your input. Do you have some suggestions for how cavalry could work?

Sure, I wrote a post about this as a suggestion for Victoria 3 before that game had been announced. And I'll repost it, with some tidying up the grammer and spelling, here rather than write the same thing again. I realize that its for Victoria 2 combat system but I hope that most of the general ideas here can be translated into this mod, if you find them useful.

***

All of this is primarily aimed for Western or Westernized armies in the European style. Hence for example Native Americans, feudal Japanese or even the United States cavalry may need some modifications to what I write here in order to portray their traditions with cavalry as this is primarily cavalry drawn from the Napoleonic tradition in Europe which is probably to be considered what is "mainstream" in this period of history.

Also note I am still doing my reading so if some stuff here is off, I am not surprised but please let me know anyway. And naturally this is not meant to be only a historical simulation but also a bit gamey to make it an interesting part of the game.

Forms of cavalry

The first is that there could be five different cavalry units as standard, and some special ones possible if the right circumstances are there for their creation.

Cuirassiers (shock specialists and potentially the best anti-cavalry battle force owing to that fact that cavalry-on-cavalry action tended to be melee and that the cuirassiers wore armour as their name implies)

Lancers (shock specialists and the cavalry that is best with attacking enemy infantry - from the fact that their lances tend to outreach the infantry's bayonets

Dragoons (cavalry capable of conducting dismounted action which means that they do not at all have the same penalties for fighting entrenched infantry that other types of cavalry have)

Hussars (recon specialists and perhaps the cavalry with the best morale in the basic stats)

Carbiniers (mix between cuirassiers and dragoons, they get some but not the full bonus that the cuirassiers and dragoons get respectively).

Special cavalry type examples

Chasseurs á Cheval (France) - special in that they can take the position of other friendly units in battle and essentially "push" the line to fill the gaps. For example if A is a unit of Chasseurs á Cheval and they take the position of D, then B moves into A's old position, C to B's old position and D moves to C's old position and A is now in the old position of D. I am not 100% sure that this is historically correct but I understood them to be used for rapid action. But this is just a potentially uninformed concept so I'll leave it at that.

Yeomanry Cavalry (UK and England, if the UK would be broken up and there's enough Conservative or Reactionary rural POPs) and Cossack Cavalry (any state possessing both Cossack culture POPs and laws for the Cossack to exist as a specific military state) - both can be used as cavalry byt also have a special "police" mode they can be set on which allows them drastically reduce the unrest in territory where they are moved.

Use of cavalry

My suggestion, at this stage is that cavalry, when troops enter into combat, forms two parts; reconnaissance and battle.

When two armies are in the same province and will fight each other the reconnaissance forces of both sides form a screen and a scouting force. The screen is defensive to protect one's side from the enemy's reconnaissance while the scouting force moves out to find the enemy and conduct the actual reconnaissance.

There will be both encounters throughout the battle between the scouting forces, the number of these are determined on a die roll along with potential skirmishes between scouting forces and infantry and combat cavalry units if the screen has been broken, and between the opposing sides screens and scouting parties.

In the battle between screen and scouting party, if the scouting party can win they penetrate the screen. Those scouting forces will win back reconnaissance bonuses which transforms into bonuses to all units on their side. While such bonuses will be denied, or reduce for, the enemy if the screen holds well enough. If the won bonuses will be applied straight on or if they would cancel each other and what's left is what is applied, is something that is up for discussion as far as I am concerned. And I can also see special actions in battle, like: flanking, attacking an isolated enemy segment, supply raid and so on will only be possible to carry out if the scouting party will be able to conduct enough successful reconnaissance against the enemy's screen to gather information for these kinds of tactical cavalry operations.

After this comes combat cavalry which is the cavalry that engages with the enemy in order to defeat him in battle. I would say that they would work roughly as they already do but there would be a few possible extra things the cavalry can do. For one thing it can mount a pursuit of fleeing enemies, potentially causing massive losses, do tactical raids which can potentially cause large scale organization harm and get at supply lines and artillery formations, flank the enemy, attack an isolated troop before it can make contact with friendly troops as well as the standard shock tactics. And when on the defensive, it can engage enemy forces to slow them down with skirmishes and so reduce the possibility to do a flank attack or such where a rapid movement is required.

As I believe Napoleon showed, unless you've got sufficient cavalry to mount a pursuit, a fight between infantry and artillery will likely be strategically inconclusive, or at least relatively inconclusive, but with enough cavalry to get at the retreating enemy and deny him the chance to regroup in peace that inconclusive and attritional infantry fight can become the day of doom for the enemy as his retreating formations are torn up by pursuing cavalry.

More stuff regarding cavalry

On the question of horse artillery, which is artillery that can keep up with moving cavalry, I leave it as an open question if they should be added as a unit in themselves or if they would be added as some kind of attachment or improvement or something else to cavalry units. But one things is clear, they should be part of the game.

And finally, pure cavalry forces should have the oppertunity to conduct strategic raids. That means that they'll not be moving under the same rules as otherwise but that they can enter a territory, and similtaneously engage the enemy forces there while sabotaging the local infrastructure in regards to railways and sap the local enemy supplies before potentially moving on into enemy territory. This would require some careful balancing and mechanics but when, for example looking at the great cavalry raids in the American Civil War, that should somehow be possible to re-create for more strategic options for the combatants. I envision it somewhat similar to the "looting" in Ck2 which can be turned on and off under the right circumstances and when starting in friendly territory.

 

[Hugger3000]

So bad the map is terrible

 

[SAS]

I think it looks nice.

 

[Sobisonator]

So bad the map is terrible

Feedback is welcome, if you have any suggestions.

 

[za3tarani]

when do you guys think we can see the next dev diary/dev update?

 

[Sobisonator]

Dev Diary 12: Trade part 2

Greetings, dear reader! We're back, having been working hard at the Imperatrix stock exchange to bring you nothing but the cheapest deals and finest quality goods from distant exotic lands.

It's been a while, but we have been hard at work all this time, designing and debugging the huge trade overhaul that sits at the core of Imperatrix's economy. This has been the single largest piece of work for the mod and I think we will be able to share things a little more regularly now that the system is working as intended.

In our first dev diary about trade, we spoke about quite a few things:

1. Demand
2. Payments
3. Categories of goods
4. Internal trade
5. Customs unions
6. Infrastructure and trade capacity
7. Production
8. Prices of goods

This time around we are going to elaborate on detail on some of the above topics, as well as introducing some new topics:

1. Trade zones
2. How a purchase order works: tendering for best value and partial fulfilment
3. Dynamic local prices
4. Dynamic supply and demand
5. Internal trade & customs unions: more detail
6. International trade
7. Shipping lanes

Trade zones​

The world of Imperatrix is split up into Trade Zones: These are geographical super-regions that follow natural routes and boundaries to trade around the world.

Below is a screenshot taken in-game of the custom trade zone mapmode, which we have made possible with mapmode modding spearheaded by the Imperator modding community:

Tradezones give locality to trade. They determine the following factors:

• The local price of a tradegood - prices of goods are affected by the supply and demand within a tradezone, so there is no worldwide base price.
• The distance that must be traversed to complete a trade - shipping in tradegoods from distant tradezones requires more shipping and is more expensive.

These factors are central to how a purchase order is made: in Imperatrix, whenever a region order goods, it carries out a process to identify the best value trade available to it. This way, trade is competitive and dynamic. Let's explore how that works!

Purchase orders​

Purchase orders are the basic unit of trade in Imperatrix: Victoria. When a governorship has unmet demand for a tradegood, it begins what our script calls a "shopping list" for it. A governorship takes its shopping list and looks at all the tradezones available to it, giving priority to its customs union (which may be a single country, a federation, or a colonial empire with its protectorates and subsidiaries) and then as a second priority it goes outside of the customs union to all other countries with which it has negotiated trade deals.

Let's imagine I'm a governorship in Imperatrix and I want to procure 100 units of coal to fuel all my factories. How do I procure that?

Pictured: our custom mapmode for federal customs unions, showing the German Confederation. As you can see, Prussia and Austria's outer territories are not included even though they are members of the Confederation. You may notice a missing blob in western Germany there, too: that's Hesse-Homburg, a small landgraviate which did not join the German Confederation until 1817.

Note that the figures below are demonstrative, and will be different in-game!

1. First of all, I check my own inventory. I have 20 coal in my local stockpile already, great! So I generate an order for 80 coal... now I need to find
2. What tradezones are available to me inside my customs union? I check the list... I'm a member of the German confederation, which has a customs union with 2 tradezones within it, but doesn't include some outer territories belonging to Prussia or Austria.
3. OK, which of these tradezones has the better price for coal? The Baltic tradezone values coal at £0.021 per unit, while Central Europe values it at £0.035 per unit because of higher demand.
4. I am located in Central Europe, so it would be very cheap to import the coal whereas to import it from the Baltic I would need to pay £0.043 in shipping fees for the transfer. Still, the total cost from the Baltic is £1.723 with shipping included, whereas to order from Central Europe would be £2.800 even with no extra shipping. So the best value is from the Baltic.
5. I send my order for 80 coal to all suppliers in the Baltic tradezone, so any governorships and countries here that are also in my customs union get a cut of the sale. But, there's only 65 coal available in Eastern Europe for me to buy!
6. My order is not complete then, so I go to Central Europe, the second best deal, and try to buy 15 more coal at the higher price. Once again, they can only partially fulfil my order, and I get 10 coal from there.
7. I now need to go outside to buy the remaining 5 units, to my national trade partners. Our country has a trade deal with the United Kingdom, which has coal for sale in 2 tradezones: the Atlantic Seaboard (£0.090 per unit, shipping cost of £0.040 for a total cost £0.490) and North West America (£0.050 per unit, shipping cost of £0.80 total cost £0.330).
8. Coal from North West America is cheaper overall, despite the more expensive shipping, so I import it from there. I send the money over and get the goods, completing my order.

Let's break down some of the assumptions in this process!

Shipping
​

Shipping costs have 2 factors:

• Physical distance and barriers between tradezones, which sets the base cost.
• Man-made trade infrastructure, which diminishes the cost.

Physical distance can't be changed per se, but with our system, it is also quite simple to add modifiers to distances: temporary climate effects altering the time it takes for ships to cross oceans may change the effective distance between tradezones one year.

Trade infrastructure is the same infrastructure that determines the trade infrastructure capacity which we mentioned in our first trade dev diary, i.e. what determines how many units of goods you can import and export from any given region. Certain buildings are especially important for shipping costs (more so than for trade capacity), namely seaports and river ports, and to a lesser extent railways and canals.

That means that if you had an expensive good in a tradezone that had huge amounts of trade infrastructure, it might be more likely to get bought from there instead of form a tradezone where the goods price was lower, but there was little infrastructure. (Infrastructure also has an impact on the price in the first place, which we'll explore later in this dev diary).

The infrastructure does not need to be your own and likewise you can build trade infrastructure that improves trade in nearby regions belonging to other countries, and this is an important intentional feature. Shipping was not just carried out by the nations involved in trade, but often by middle-men who had access to ports and other such transport routes. In Imperatrix, you will be able to profit off trade passing through your tradezones by building up the trade infrastructure: this will make your whole tradezone more attractive to trade in, even when it is not your own country trading, and the more trade infrastructure you build, the more of that shipping will go through your country on its way to its final destination, earning you big profits.

Increasing trade infrastructure simulates the development of international trade through technology. More advanced civilian shipping, ports, and land-based transport makes it more feasible to transport goods over long distances. Early on, only high value goods will be worth importing over large distances, but as trade over long distance becomes more affordable, even basic goods will be traded across the world.

Higher levels of infrastructure buildings will be locked behind relevant transport and industry techs, and we may implement a system like convoys to simulate civilian sea power.

Shipping lanes & trade power​

Shipping has been generated between the Baltic and Central Europe, as well as between North West America and Central Europe.

In both cases, shipping traffic is generated in the source node and the destination node. In the case of the Baltic and Central Europe trade zones, that's it, because they are adjacent. But North West America and Central Europe are far apart, so shipping has to cross through the Atlantic Seaboard tradezone before it can get to Central Europe, creating shipping traffic in the Atlantic Seaboard as well.

If the tradegoods had needed to flow from East Asia to Europe, they would have had to go past the southern cape of Africa and round West Africa... unless, of course, the Suez Canal had been built, meaning there is a shorter route and trade would be directed past Arabia and through the Eastern Mediterranean.

It will be possible to build other such canals, the Panama Canal and Kiel Canal for instance, to create more efficient trade routes and re-route shipping through them.

But what is the impact of these shipping lanes?

As we discussed above, infrastructure is central to supplying shipping. A nation that has provinces with high trade infrastructure capacity, as well as the ports to exploit the value of that infrastructure, gets income from shipping that passes through its tradezones as the merchant vessels dock, load goods, repair, pay taxes and allow their sailors time for R&R at the shipyards. It may even be that the nation is supplying the ships to carry out trade on behalf of other nations.

Ports will create demand for shipping materials, so be prepared to pay the expenses for them if you want to maintain them (or pass on the cost to your capitalists!)

Larger ports give you trade power, and thereby a bigger cut of the shipping income in a tradezone. The income you can get is capped, so it may be that an underdeveloped tradezone doesn't have enough ports to exploit 100% of its shipping traffic; otherwise, your income is treated as a ratio of the total shipping traffic that stops off, departs from or passes through the tradezone.

It's therefore useful for a colonial empire to have major ports all over the world, so that you can benefit from the shipping. In some cases, a single city could be worth more than whole regions. This creates real in-game strategic value for historical locations such as Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Macau, Zanzibar and so on...

Additional concepts

​

There are some further concepts within this part of gameplay that are yet to be developed, but are likely to be in Imperatrix: Victoria.

Refueling
When using ships that have engines, ports may also be able to sell fuel goods as shipping passes through them. Your nation may even be able to profit by importing coal or petrochemicals and re-selling it to ships that dock at your ports on trading missions.

Naval trade protection
Much like in EU4, it is possible to simulate trade protection missions with military fleets in Imperator. We would like to extend this concept to Imperatrix, perhaps as a way for the player to gain more shipping power in a tradezone by stationing its fleet there.

Prices

Prices of goods as well as shipping in Imperatrix are local to each tradezone. They are determined by a number of factors:

• The amount of demand for the given goods in the tradezone
• The amount of that good available on the market, which acts more or less as the supply. This is indirectly affected by industrialisation and trade infrastructure, as that determines how much of a good can get from its place of production to other regions. It's all well and good producing tonnes of gold in a deep mountain mine, but if there's no railway to ship it out, then it's still very hard to sell, and therefore expensive.
• The stockpile of that good on the market, which has a minor influence on the price. If stockpiles are big, prices will be slightly lower; eat away at your stockpiles, and prices will climb somewhat.
• The actual amount sold: the more a tradegood actually sells, the more its price will inflate -and vice versa. Demand may be high and production relatively low, which without this factor would lead to high prices; however, if the price is too high, local buyers will look elsewhere for these tradegoods, and suppliers will be forced to lower their prices. This is intended to naturally factor in the supply and demand curves we see in real-world economics. While this feature is central to determining prices realistically, it has not yet been implemented as balancing needs to be done on the basics first; however, it is simple to implement once we are ready.

Struggles

It wasn't all plain sailing, of course. The trade script is very complex and has taken months of work to get right, and to optimise it. The first iterations of the script took upwards of two minutes to run... now, it takes around 5 seconds total - and we are working on bringing it down further, although we will work on that more during the Alpha and Beta as our focus will remain on core functionality so we can get the Alpha released.

Some interesting issues that plagued us during the development of the system are worth a mention...

• Trade was only taking place inside the customs union of the German Confederation while everywhere else was failing to buy or sell any goods! A poorly implemented trigger was the cause of this.
• Regions were getting profit for sales, but not paying for imports - free money for everyone! The script was failing to scope to the sellers when it was calculating the origin of expenses.
• Regional prices were only being calculated after trades were attempted, so no trades could take place since regions could not select the best value suppliers as tradegoods all had null prices! This was the hardest one to fix, because in the debug UI, the prices were showing up (the whole process happens all at once, so it looked like the prices were set).
• Regions were unable to fulfil their whole orders, because they only ever looked at the nearest tradezone. This is because the script that ranks the best value was only ever looking at the first item in the list, when Imperator's scripting language requires the maximum number to check to be explicitly stated.

Support from the Imperator modding co-op has been invaluable in working through the various bugs, quirks and mind-numbing terrors of creating the trade system. Without that wonderful community, this absolutely could not have been achieved, so my thanks go out to the modders you will know from Invictus, Improved UI, FMO, Terra Indomita and more.

What’s next?

​

I'm really hoping to bring an Alpha to the playing public as soon as possible, so some more work needs to be done to get things ready.

Trade

• Finalising tradegood placements on the map
• Balancing production from pops, buildings and industrialisation
• Balancing price calculation scripts
• Balancing demand scripts (at the moment we are using pre-scripted demand values... there will likely be a dev diary on the demand system alone, as this was something that has been written with quite a deal of care)
• Adding modifiers for provinces with natural harbours and along major shipping lanes
• Finishing the brand new trade interface which needs to display all these new values and ways to interact with them

Other features
Here's a teaser of other features that are being worked on now, or will be worked on in the near future now that trade is mostly done:

• Personal union / viceroyalties: unique titles
• War overhaul
• Diplomacy AI overhaul
• Constitutional systems
• Factory building AI
• Local business, jobs and wages for pops
• Federation laws
• Elections

It's hard to say for sure, but once these features are ready to test, we very much would like to start inviting Alpha testers to play the mod. Stay tuned.

Discord

Join our Discord server here: https://discord.gg/nbxgkwy to get more regular previews, talk to the devs (we’re very responsive!) and even volunteer to contribute directly to the mod - no coding skills required.

 

[High Speed Flying Gladius]

Woooohooo new dev diary boys!
Can't wait to play this and crash the world economy!

 

[Herennius]

The first iterations of the script took upwards of two minutes to run... now, it takes around 5 seconds total - and we are working on bringing it down further,

If you wouldn't have wrote this, I would have asked - performance was one of my first thoughts after reading about that sophisticated deal-making process you explained so vivid Glad that you already suceeded in speeding it up quite a bit. I'm overall once more amazed how far you are taking things with this project.

 

[AsdfeZxcas]

Great as always! Always good to see progress on this and excited to see the alpha as once it's ready.

 

[guiskj]

I bought Vic3 for the 1.5 patch and 50% discount.

I'm more excited for this mod that I have ever been!

IR is such a great society simulator because it nails the balance between simulation and fun. I'm almost never doing something unfun in IR in order to accomplish a higher goal. That certainly can't be said about Vic3.

 

[CdePlatter]

Is this mod still in development? It's been a while since there was any activity here and I'm starting to get worried. This mod has so much potential!

 

[High Speed Flying Gladius]

Is this mod still in development? It's been a while since there was any activity here and I'm starting to get worried. This mod has so much potential!

The discord is a bit more active, but updates are still kind of slow.

 

[Sobisonator]

New DD coming very soon! Watch this space on the 15th of March

 

[Sobisonator]

Dev Diary 13: Imperator Day 2 update

Today, on Imperator Day 2 where we celebrate our favourite Paradox game (remember to play a session this weekend!) on the Ides of March, it's about time that we in the Imperatrix team give an update on all the work we have been doing.

We are going to take a tour of the features that are in development to form our MVP (Minimum Viable Product - the core vision for the mod) that we are going to release as a public alpha. We can't share a release date yet, but everything we are doing is working towards that.

War overhaul - bilateral peace deals
​

War in Imperatrix was never going to be the same as it is in vanilla Imperator. The 19th century was a period of diplomacy, international rules and limited warfare. Great powers competed to establish a world order through interwoven treaties and alliances. There are also some things about vanilla peace deals that simply couldn't do what we needed them to, or were hardcoded.

Our first new feature is the bilateral peace deal. Building on the work pioneered by Terra Indomita - Extended Peace deal mechanic, we have made it possible to sign a peace treaty with the transfer of land between multiple participants on both the defender's and attacker's sides. We also have overhauled the warscore cost mechanic so that it is fully managed in script, giving us as the modders full control over warscore cost.


Pictured below: a war with Prussia as the lead defender and Russia as the lead attacker.
Russia is claiming territory from the Prussian state of Sachsen-Anhalt, while Prussia's ally the United Kingdom is claiming territory from the Russian state of Ryazan. Warscore cost values are work in progress.

Much like in Hearts of Iron IV, you are able to select which country you are negotiating for by clicking down the list on either side. The selected country will be highlighted, and while it is higlighted demands or offers can be attributed to it.

The territory interface is made up of dropdowns by country, then governorship, then state. A state can be right-clicked to toggle all provinces within that state for the peace deal, or provinces can be individually selected. While selected, a province is highlighted green and the flag of the country demanding it is displayed next to it.

Thanks to our control over warscore cost, we have been able to implement the following changes:

• Provinces are cheaper to claim based on the number of pops of the claiming country's primary culture that live there.
• Province warscore cost can account for the wealth in the region
• Province warscore cost is weighted for buildings, industrialisation, and pops
• Remaining enemy manpower increases the peace reluctance threshold, reflecting their willingness to fight on.

We are able to tweak this in much more detail, and will factor in things such as stability, government diplomatic policy and sentiment towards enemies, captured generals and political figures (think Santa Anna's capture). We will be able to factor in any other entirely new mechanics that the mod introduces, such as shipping capacity.

Additional peace demands will also be entirely scriptable, meaning that beyond monetary payments, we will be able to add disarmament treaties, migration treaties, compelled market access and so on.

Trade shipping
​

In our last dev diary, we made mention of shipping. This is Imperatrix's simulation of trade lanes, the physical travel of goods from one place to another around the world.

Every order generates a shipment, that travels between the tradezone of origin and the receiving tradezone. This shipping traffic passes between all the tradezones inbetween, and takes the shortest route - so if the Suez canal is opened, ships may pass through there rather than routing around the south and west of Africa.

The way shipping interacts with trade has been changed, so that a country's shipping capacity is now even more important. Shipping is the main way to move goods back and forth, and no matter your amount of production, if you're not able to ship your own goods, you'll be relying on others who will then reap the income from shipping tolls moving goods on your behalf. Imperatrix's trade deals grant you access to a tradezone's market based on the shipping power of your trade partners - for example, to purchase tea from China, you will get the most benefit from having a trade deal with the power that controls most of the shipping there, rather than the producer of tea (unless, of course, the producer of tea passes laws to prevent exports, in which case no amout of shipping is going to help!). Alternatively, you can take control of key shipping ports directly or via your colonies, as colonies grant full access to all shipping to their overlords.

We were able to add map widgets for tradezones by hijacking vanilla's pirate haven mechanic and subbing in new GUI script. It's a work in progress, but the implementation gives us a lot of freedom.

I am happy with how this mechanic actually encourages players to form a global empire and control strategic ports and shipping lanes. You should be able to project a lot of power without having to blob over sheer landmass.

Shown below: the tradezones of Europe with the shipping powers displayed in pie charts. Shipping power is gained by building ports and transportation infrastructure both on the coast and inland. Certain provinces grant a bonus to shipping if they are at key chokepoints, along major rivers, or in good natural harbours. These bonuses stack.

Every tradezone has a maximum shipping capacity (shown above in blue) and actual shipping traffic (above in yellow). If the traffic is greater than the capacity, it means that countries are not able to reap the full benefit of these ships docking in their ports (paying taxes, etc.) and it will cap the amount of regional wealth that can be earned from shipping by any of the powers there.

Only countries with shipping power in a region will be able to transport goods, so you could theoretically have very low producton but a monopoly on transport and still earn a lot of money from trade, as the middle-man for buyers and sellers.

Naturally, the trade overview for this is being altered to represent new values. Below is an early WiP screenshot displaying some statistics. The player will be able to alter tariffs and tolls on tradegoods and shipping on both a national and colony-by-colony basis.

All these changes to shipping would be silly if we didn't have a new ship model. Thanks to Pureon and MIUNO, we have a new steamer model complete with smoking chimneys, which you can expect to see sailing the seas of Imperatrix:

Factories
​

Factories now have a unique building model that dynamically appears on the map where factories have been built, further changing the landsacpe of your game over time. They come with animated smoking chimneys. (Credit due to MIUNO and Dementive)

A few areas in England, North America, Bohemia and the Rhineland start with factories already, and you can see some of them here.

In order to easily control the way that factories consume and output resources, we have written a new scripted system to define them, which takes a set of parameters (input materials, output materials and amounts) and then runs them through script that is triggered every production tick. This helps make industry types easy to design and maintain in the script, despite being a custom system.

Here is an example of the definition for the glass factory type.

MANUFACTURE_glass = {
    # Scope: Governorship
    # Function: Increase the glass stockpile according to the availability of resources in the glass recipe
    # Called: At game start, then every quarter after trade, by the master MANUFACTURE effect

    MANUFACTURE_combine_resources = {
        input_1 = coal
        input_1_amt = 1

        input_2 = inorganic_compounds
        input_2_amt = 1

        output = glass
        output_amt = 2
    }

    change_variable = {
        name = glass_stockpile
        add = var:manufactured_this_quarter_glass
    }
}

Personal unions and constitutional monarchies​

We have implemented the GUI for personal unions and constitutional monarchies now, such that a country can have a character as its head of state without being head of government, even if that character is not from the same country.

In a monarch's list of personal titles, each title will be attributed in its tooltip along with its proper name.

Some characters have lots and lots of royal titles...

Royal unions are also displayed in the diplomatic overview, with the head of state on the right hand side of the flag (and the head of government on the left). In this first picture, Portugal is being ruled by the queen from Brazil.

The same layout is used for constitutional monarchies.

What's next​

Following some internal testing, there were issues in the way the trade script functioned which meant that regions could fail to import or export goods because they were running out of options. This was a limitation of the system design rather than a bug, and is being addressed now with some script rewrites that aim to make trade simpler and more consistent.

Once that has been implemented, we will be able to finalise the MVP economic simulation with:

• Currencies​
• Employment​
• Wages​

These systems are planned out and much simpler than trade, so will be a matter of implementation rather than design - but they are all reliant on trade being completed first. Expect dev diaries on these as and when we are ready to show you.

We will then need to create some AI diplomacy scripts to take into account the new systems and make the world believable - i.e., not have the AI behave like marauding 4th century BC conquerors. This should be relatively straightforward, if rudimentary to begin with. AI behaviour is something we will very much have to rely on iterating during the public Alpha phase.

Alongside AI diplomacy scripts, the internal politics overhaul will be rolled out as part of the MVP, with political parties, factions, and public voting. These are also dependent on the economy system being ready, as economic systems will affect how the public and government interact.

Last but not least, I would like to leave you with a preview of our new menu and map graphics in their full splendour:

Discord

Join our Discord server here: https://discord.gg/nbxgkwy to get more regular previews, talk to the devs (we’re very responsive!) and even volunteer to contribute directly to the mod - no coding skills required.

 

[Lord Lambert]

That looks absolutely stunning

 

[AnInternetUser]

im super hyped for this

 

[HowPow]

Woah this is crazy! The bilateral peace deals and the shipping are next level tech! The shipping also looks like a dope mechanic to profit as a minor country - not necessarily the biggest market wins, but also the most connected nation.

 

[Snake Pliskin]

This looks just fantastic. Reinstalled I:R again because of the hype. Would be awesome if you manage to do a start date in the 13ths or 14ths for EU4/5 noobs like me and people who want to see other great powers in the late game. Man, I cant believe what you guys wrote there.... I wish u all the best, great job!

 

[trjacobin]

This looks just fantastic. Reinstalled I:R again because of the hype. Would be awesome if you manage to do a start date in the 13ths or 14ths for EU4/5 noobs like me and people who want to see other great powers in the late game. Man, I cant believe what you guys wrote there.... I wish u all the best, great job!

I think you reinstalled it way too soon.

With the speed of development on this mod going the way it has, I'm expecting an alpha version of it will be up in 2032...

And a playable version by 2049.