Victoria 3

[garbon]

The V3 province map: https://i.redd.it/eccslaknxlx91.png

Ok one more bit of history nerd rage: Saint Pierre and Miquelon are on the map. They are right there off the coast of Newfoundland...yet they are not part of France but part of the UK? What? Why have them even on the map then? Just leave them off if they are not important enough to be given to the correct country. I am all for just pretending they don't exist if you want to do that, but come on. They are  important enough to exist but not important enough to exist accurately?

Especially as this is an economic game and they were part of France for fishing interests, economics. Seems like something Victoria 3 would care about.

Because they aren't large enough to be a state?

[crazy canuck]

The V3 province map: https://i.redd.it/eccslaknxlx91.png

Ok one more bit of history nerd rage: Saint Pierre and Miquelon are on the map. They are right there off the coast of Newfoundland...yet they are not part of France but part of the UK? What? Why have them even on the map then? Just leave them off if they are not important enough to be given to the correct country. I am all for just pretending they don't exist if you want to do that, but come on. They are  important enough to exist but not important enough to exist accurately?

Especially as this is an economic game and they were part of France for fishing interests, economics. Seems like something Victoria 3 would care about.

Because they aren't large enough to be a state?

They should start as an unincorporated state of France.  They were actually of more economic importance than a lot of the other unincorporated states on the rest of the map.

[Syt]

Dev Diary:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/victoria-3-dev-diary-64-post-release-plans.1553970/

Hello and welcome to the first of many post-release Victoria 3 dev diaries! The game may now be out at last (weird, isn't it?) but for us that just means a different phase of work has begun, the work of post-release support. We've been quite busy collecting feedback, fixing bugs and making balance changes, and are now working on the free patches that will be following the release, the first of which is a hotfix that should already be with you at the time you read this.

Our plans are naturally not limited to just hotfixes though, and so the topic of this dev diary is to outline what you can expect us to be focusing on in the first few larger free patches. We will not be focusing on our long-term ambitions for the game today; we certainly have no shortage of cool ideas for where we could take Victoria 3 in the years to come, but right now our focus is post-release support and patches, not expansion plans.

However, before I start, I want to share my own personal thoughts on the release. Overall, I consider the release a great success, and have been blown away by the sheer amount of people that have bought and are now playing Victoria 3. I've had a hand in this project since its earliest design inception, and have been Game Director of Victoria 3 since I left Stellaris in late 2018, and while it certainly hasn't been the easiest game to work on at times, it is by far the most interesting and fulfilling project I've ever directed. The overarching vision of the game - a 'society builder' that puts internal development, economy and politics in the driving seat - may not have changed much since then, but the mechanics and systems have gone through innumerable iterations (a prominent internal joke in the team is 'just one more Market Rework, please?') to arrive where we are today, at what I consider to be a great game, one that lives up to our vision - but one that could do with improvement in a few key areas.



The first of these areas is military: The military system, being very different from the military systems of previous Grand Strategy Games, is one of those systems that has gone through a lot of iterations. While I believe that we have landed on a very solid core of how we want military gameplay in Victoria 3 to function and we have no intention of moving back towards a more tactical system, it is a system that suffers from some interface woes and which could do with selective deepening and increasing player control in specific areas. A few of the things we're looking into improving and expanding on for the military system follow here, in no particular order:

- Addressing some of the rough edges in how generals function at the moment, such as improving unit selection for battles and balancing the overall progression along fronts

- Adding the ability for countries to set strategic objectives for their generals

- Increasing the visibility of navies and making admirals easier to work with

- Improving the ability of players to get an overview of their military situation and exposing more data, like the underlying numbers behind battle sizes

- Finding solutions for the issue where theaters can split into multiple (sometimes even dozens) of tiny fronts as pockets are created

- Experimenting with controlled front-splitting for longer fronts

The second area is historical immersion: While we have always been upfront with the fact that Victoria 3 is a historical sandbox rather than a strictly historical game, we still want players to feel as though the events unfolding forms a plausible alt-history, and right now there are some expected historical outcomes that are either not happening often enough, or happening in such a way that they become immersion-breaking. Again, in no particular order, some areas targeted for improvement in the short term:

- Ensuring the American Civil War has a decent chance to happen, happens in a way that makes sense (slave states rising up to defend slavery, etc), and isn't easily avoidable by the player.

- Tweaking content such as the Meiji Restoration, Alaska purchase and so on in a way that they can more frequently be successfully performed by the AI, through a mix of AI improvements and content tweaks

- Working to expose and improve content such as expeditions and journal entries that is currently too difficult for players to find or complete

- Ensuring unifications such as Italy, Germany and Canada doesn't constantly happen decades ahead of the historical schedule, and increasing the challenge of unifying Italy and Germany in particular

- General AI tweaks to have AI countries play in a more believable, immersive way

We're balancing cultural/religious tolerance laws by having more restrictive laws increase the loyalty of accepted pops, so there is an actual trade-off involved.



The third area is diplomacy. While I think what we do have here is quite good and not in need of any significant redesign, this is an area that could do with even more deepening and there's some options we want to add to diplomacy and diplomatic plays:

- Making it easier to get an overview of your Pops and Pop factors such as Needs, Standard of Living and Radicals/Loyalists

- Experimenting with autonomous private-sector construction and increasing the differences in gameplay between different economic systems (though as I've said many times, we are never going to take construction entirely out of the hands of the player)

- Ironing out some of the kinks with the late-game economy and the AI's ability to develop key resources such as oil and rubber

- Making it more interesting and 'competitive' but also more challenging to play in a more conservative and autocratic style

One of the first mechanics we're tweaking is Legitimacy, increasing its impact and making it so the share of votes in government matters far more, especially with more democratic laws.



The above is of course not even close to being an exhaustive list of everything we want to do, and I can't promise that everything on the list is going to make it into the first few patches, or that our priorities won't change as we continue to read and take in your feedback, only that as it stands these are our plans for the near future. I will also remind once again that everything mentioned above is something we want for our free post-release patches. At some point we will start talking about our plans for expansions, but that is definitely not anytime soon!

What I can promise you though, is that we're going to strive to keep you informed and do our best to give you insight into the post-release development process with dev diaries, videos and streams, just like we did before the game was released. I'll return next week as we start covering the details of the work we're doing for our first post-release patch. See you then!

[Zanza]

Apparently they accidentally made trade centers eat inordinate amounts of infrastructure per trade route in the patch, effectively breaking the game, although a few people seem to like the severe cap on trading.

Ah, that must have happened in my game. All of a sudden I had to build lots of ports and railroads in some of my core provinces. I had wondered why.

[Zanza]

The topics from the Dev Diary sound very good to me. I am looking forward to the patches then.

[Barrister]

The V3 province map: https://i.redd.it/eccslaknxlx91.png

Ok one more bit of history nerd rage: Saint Pierre and Miquelon are on the map. They are right there off the coast of Newfoundland...yet they are not part of France but part of the UK? What? Why have them even on the map then? Just leave them off if they are not important enough to be given to the correct country. I am all for just pretending they don't exist if you want to do that, but come on. They are  important enough to exist but not important enough to exist accurately?

Especially as this is an economic game and they were part of France for fishing interests, economics. Seems like something Victoria 3 would care about.

My piece of history nerd rage: the Canadian arctic.

First of all, nobody would use the term "Nunavut" in the 19th century.  That term was coined at the end of the 20th century from the Inuit term "Our land".  The best possible term for it at the time would be Keewatin, which was the name for that region when part of the Northwest territories.  Heck the entire idea of Nunavut being a separate province is silly since that didn't happen until 1999.

But while there would have been some very scare fur trading in the southernmost parts, the bulk of the area would have been "terra incognita" in 1836.  Most of Nunavut wasn't meaningfully incorporated into Canadian society until the 1950s.

[Sheilbh]

Tremendous work having a Canadian history hijack in a game that literally includes the American Civil War.

[Valmy]

Tremendous work having a Canadian history hijack in a game that literally includes the American Civil War.

I have given up on having Victoria model the American Civil War in a fun or accurate way since Victoria I. All wars in all Victoria games have been pretty lame IMO.

I am interested in if the new system makes them feel like actual 19th century wars.

[Zanza]

The V3 province map: https://i.redd.it/eccslaknxlx91.png

You have to wonder why they bothered. Virtually all game mechanics are on the state level with the exception of warfare. But as they cut the tactical warfare from the game, so many provinces serve little purpose. It allows border gore from colonization and representing non-unified countries like Germany or Italy. But I feel that for both purposes much fewer provinces would have been sufficient.

[Sheilbh]

You have to wonder why they bothered. Virtually all game mechanics are on the state level with the exception of warfare. But as they cut the tactical warfare from the game, so many provinces serve little purpose. It allows border gore from colonization and representing non-unified countries like Germany or Italy. But I feel that for both purposes much fewer provinces would have been sufficient.

Possibly to create flashpoints or splits of states during colonisation?

Edit: But I'm not sure they're particularly developed yet, which is a shame.

[Syt]

Yeah, split states is the main reason, I feel (check the Malay peninsula, I think some states there are split into three or four). And it makes frontlines/colonization look more organical on the map, i.e. more fluid progression instead of a whole state just flipping at some point.

[Zanza]

In Germany e.g. Hesse and Saxony are split into five countries at the start. But  this split is only for game start and as far as I know there is no mechanism to have a split state later, right? Other than colonization.

Neither exist for most of the map...

[HVC]

Apparently they accidentally made trade centers eat inordinate amounts of infrastructure per trade route in the patch, effectively breaking the game, although a few people seem to like the severe cap on trading.

Ah, that must have happened in my game. All of a sudden I had to build lots of ports and railroads in some of my core provinces. I had wondered why.

Any timeline for a fix?

[Tamas]

Apparently they accidentally made trade centers eat inordinate amounts of infrastructure per trade route in the patch, effectively breaking the game, although a few people seem to like the severe cap on trading.

Ah, that must have happened in my game. All of a sudden I had to build lots of ports and railroads in some of my core provinces. I had wondered why.

Any timeline for a fix?

It's an easy edit in one text file, here is the mod to have it done, but patch is probably coming tomorrow:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2883457763

[HVC]

Thanks!