We start off the Anniversary Week with a video going through the cool stuff added in free updates since release!

Stay tuned this week for other posts in this compendium post: Here[pdxint.at]

Hello and welcome to another dev diary! I’m Alex and today I bring you famine, starvation, ruin and disast– I mean, happy Thursday!

Back in dev diary #126 we mentioned how for 1.8 we’re looking at how the availability of food affects the people in your country. Up until now, if food prices were high, that would lead to Pops dropping in Wealth. As a consequence of that, Pops would become unhappy and have their birth and mortality rates change. In extreme cases they would drop below Standard of Living 5, which would mark them as Starving and make their mortality rate be higher than the birthrate, resulting in the Pop’s population decreasing over time.

This is fine, but it created some problems we wanted to tackle. For one, Pop Needs don’t have shortages, so when the price caps out at +75%, that’s it. Food is always available, it just gets expensive. Another issue is that the starving status is directly tied to what Standard of Living the Pop has, meaning that regardless of why Standard of Living drops below 5, the pop is marked as Starving. Even if food is essentially free and the actual issue is that clothes are expensive. Lastly, the effects of starvation don’t scale as much as they probably should, so even at SoL 1, Pops can live on quite a while.

With all that in mind, there’s three main features we’ve added to flesh out this aspect of the game:

• Starvation
  
• Famines
  
• Harvest Conditions

Below we’ll go into each of them in detail. Everything mentioned in this dev diary will be made available for free when update 1.8 arrives later this year.

As mentioned, up until now starvation has been a fixed status tied to specific SoL levels. In 1.8, all pops will have a metric for Food Security instead, which measures to what degree that Pop has access to sufficient and nutritious food. If a Pop’s Food Security gets too low, it will first be considered to be in a state of Mild Starvation. Here, Pops will start getting some penalties to their birth rate and mortality. If Food Security drops even lower, this status will change to Severe Starvation, where the Pops’ population starts decreasing fast. To be clear, both Mild and Severe Starvation penalties get progressively worse as Food Security drops, so it’s not a hard threshold where suddenly the full effects are applied.

You can now at a glance tell how much you are forgetting to feed your population while building another workshop. The map mode shows for each state if there are a lot of Pops starving there (proportional to total state population) as well as if they are mostly suffering from mild or severe starvation
Now you must be wondering: “Okay, but what actually is Food Security? How is it measured?” We’ll get there, don’t worry, first I need to talk about Pop Needs though.

If you’ve spent some time with the game, you know that the way Pop Consumption works is that at different Wealth levels Pops need to satisfy certain Needs. These Needs can be things like Basic Food or Simple Clothing for poorer Pops or Luxury Food and Drinks for richer Pops. Each of these needs can be satisfied through a set of different goods. In the case of Basic Food, it can be satisfied by consuming different amounts of Grain, Fish, Meat, Fruit or Groceries.

As mentioned, shortages currently only affect buildings while Pops are completely unaffected. In fact, we even only mark goods as having shortages at all if they are consumed by buildings.

In 1.8 that is changing somewhat: we’re introducing shortages for goods in the Basic Food Pop Need category. The calculation for if a good is in shortage is the same as before: if the number of buy orders exceeds the number of sell orders by too much it’s considered a shortage, so no surprises there.

What is somewhat different is that we’re also adding a shortage value to the Basic Food Pop Need itself. This is calculated essentially as the average shortage value for the goods in the Pop Need weighted over how much Pops are actually consuming each good. In other words, if 90% of your Pops’ food consumption is Grain and 10% is Fish, a Grain shortage will have a much stronger impact than a Fish shortage.

Nothing has really changed here, but I needed to break up the wall of text and wanted to remind you that this tooltip is in the game
I’m sure some of you will be wondering if this means other Pop Needs will also be getting shortages - and the answer is no (for now at least). Contrary to building shortages where we can just add throughput penalties if goods are in shortage, for Pop Needs we need to consider what role the goods play to be able to determine what penalties a shortage in those Needs would entail. For now, we’re only doing this for Basic Food (with the penalty being Starvation, more details below), but having a defined way of dealing with and calculating shortages for pop consumption definitely opens the door for other Needs having shortages in the future (maybe heating or clothing, for instance?).

To help you keep track of the starvation levels in your country, we’re introducing a new panel which quickly shows you how many people in your country are starving and if you have any famines or shortages active. Additionally it also gives you information about active harvest conditions that might be affecting your states and what proportion of total basic food pop consumption each good has.
With the background of how Basic Food Shortages are set up, we can finally go into the details on how Food Security works. As mentioned above, this is the metric we use to determine whether a pop is starving and how strong the effects are. Food Security is a value between 0 and 100%, where at 0% the pop is in a state of severe starvation and at 100% the pop has full and easy access to all the food it requires.

What determines a Pop’s food security is mainly a combination of two factors:

• How much the Basic Food Pop Need is in shortage in the state in question
  
• How much money the pop is spending on Basic Food compared to their whole buy package at base price

We’ve already covered the shortage part, so let me explain the second factor some more: At different wealth levels, pops need to buy different amounts of goods from a number of Needs. What we’re doing here is taking the total price for all those needs while considering only unmodified base prices and then comparing it to how much the Pop is actually spending on Basic Food.

Here’s an example: a pop at Wealth 9 needs to consume goods to cover for their Simple Clothing, Crude Items, Basic Food, Heating and Intoxicants needs. The total value of what they need at base price is 314. After considering market availability and all of that, food is actually very expensive though, meaning the pop is spending 220 on Basic Food. We then simply compare their real food expenses with their total base price expenses: 220 / 314 = 70%. That is a lot of money going towards food!

You might be rich enough to consume a country’s worth of Fine Art output, but you’ll be quickly reminded you can’t eat statues when food runs out
Food Security then is a value that starts at 100% and is reduced by the two values above. If in addition to the 70% Basic Food Expense Share, food is also in a 20% shortage, the food security for the pop in question will be 100% - 70% - 20% = 10%, putting them firmly into severe starvation.

The reasons we went for this set of calculations in particular are primarily the following:

• It means that as pops increase in Wealth, they’ll be less affected by increasing prices (due to food becoming a smaller part of the pop’s total buy package)
  
• It means that the effects of starvation can become increasingly worse even after the price caps out and shortages become more severe
  
• It means that there being literally no food in a state will affect rich pops as well even if they have a bunch of money, because you can’t eat money. (rich pops don’t consume basic food, but the shortage factor still affects them)

All of this leads to starvation being something that primarily affects poorer pops, but in the right (or wrong, I guess) circumstances it could also affect rich pops, or it could even affect no one. Have enough food and prices will be so low that food won’t be the primary concern even for the poorest in society. This is of course easier said than done, as getting your grain prices down to -75% price should be very hard for any reasonably large country. Still, it’s not mechanically impossible.

As part of decoupling starvation from Standard of Living we also had to update the Standard of Living icons and names for some of the levels
If Starvation is what happens to your pops when they don’t have enough food, Famines are simply a political classification that comes up when enough pops are suffering from starvation. Specifically, we look at two metrics:

• How many people in total are starving in the state in question?
  
• How many people are specifically suffering from severe starvation in the state in question?

The goal here is that a famine should feel serious and encompassing. It should both affect a significant portion of the population in the state, but also be severe enough. In fact, this kind of classification is loosely modeled after real world classifications today (albeit with different values as the 19th Century had a different standard for such things).

As a primarily political classification, famines don’t have any direct effects on your pops. A bunch of Stockholm bureaucrats finally noticing that people in the Dominion of Norway are starving and calling it a famine doesn’t on its own make any difference for the poor Norwegians. Instead, a famine being declared is more of a political event. It can act as a starting point for narrative content surrounding famines and how to deal with them for instance.

Famines also act as a warning signal for the player. They tell you how long they’ve lasted, how many people are affected as well as estimations for how many deaths and unrealized births the famine has led to so you can feel extra bad for neglecting them.

When a famine is declared you can see it front and center in the new Food Security panel
On top of the revised mechanics for starvation and famines, we also wanted to add some more volatility and unpredictability to the game with Harvest Conditions. These conditions are occurrences (often tied to weather, but not necessarily) that can happen to your states and primarily affect your agricultural sector. Here’s a breakdown of different aspects of harvest conditions:

An example of what a harvest condition can look like. The Effects described are further multiplied by the intensity in each specific affected state
While a lot of the effects will be tied to increasing or decreasing agricultural throughput, the effects are not strictly limited to agriculture. Floods and Wildfires might have drastic effects on your infrastructure for instance. Additionally, conditions are not necessarily negative: a pollinator surge could increase your fruit production or optimal sun conditions could lead to a particularly good harvest.

For Floods and Droughts we added some effects to the 3D map itself, so you can be more immersed while thinking about how you failed your country and let your people starve
Harvest conditions happen on a state region level, but are often limited to certain parts of the world (Locust Swarms won’t happen in Northern Europe and Frosts won’t happen in Egypt for instance).

Harvest conditions have variable durations, range and intensity. One drought might be milder and limited to just a couple of states, while another affects a large area for a long time. Intensity acts as a multiplier to the base effects conditions have.

If you’re curious about what harvest conditions are active around the globe you can look it up on your Victorian era weather app of choice
It wouldn’t make much sense if a drought suddenly happened in a region affected by torrential rains, so most harvest conditions have a set of other conditions they’re not compatible with. A drought will never happen in a state affected by a flood, nor will a flood happen in a state with a drought. A heatwave could lead to an increased chance of a drought happening and subsequently even a wildfire. In such a case the drought would replace the heatwave and later get replaced by the wildfire.

We’ve also made changes to some existing content so it meshes with the new Harvest Conditions and Starvation. Numbers are still WIP, but should give you an idea of where we’re taking it
That’s it for me! Hope you enjoyed learning more about how we’re dealing with famines and other aspects of human suffering. Join us two weeks from now for the anniversary week marking two years since we launched Victoria 3! (Two years already!? Who turned on Speed 5?)

Happy Thursday and welcome back to yet another Victoria 3 development diary. A few weeks ago I went over the changes we’re making to Political Movements in update 1.8, and promised a followup going more into how this impacts Civil Wars and particularly Secessions. As you might have guessed by the title, this is precisely what we’ll be discussing today, along with a bit more detail on Political Movement Radicalism, where it comes from, and how it ties into Civil Wars.

As I went over in the aforementioned Dev Diary, Political Movements have a Radicalism value going from 0-100%. More specifically, this is two values: The current value and the target value, with the current value drifting towards the target value over time. The target value is calculated from a number of factors, including:

• Which laws you have enacted or are in the process of enacting (if the movement’s core ideology has a stance on them)
  
• How many radicals and loyalists are members of the movement
  
• Other factors specific to a particular movement type. For example, a Cultural Majority movement might be upset if the ruler of the country isn’t of one of your primary cultures, or a Pro-Slavery movement might be upset if they perceive that Slave States are not receiving their fair share of government building construction, particularly for the army.

A side note is that we’re currently thinking of renaming ‘Political Movement Radicalism’ to ‘Political Movement Activism’ as we feel this better describes how the system works now, but this isn’t done yet so I will continue to refer to it as Radicalism for the moment.

The Abolitionist Movement in the USA is currently ‘Passive’, but drifting towards ‘Agitating’ due to the Legacy Slavery law, the fraction of Slave States versus Free States in the country, and a smattering of Radicals among the movement supporters
I already went over the different Radicalism thresholds and their effects, so I won’t repeat myself there, but instead focus on the highest radicalism threshold (currently called ‘Rioting’, but we’re probably going to rename it) where Civil Wars become possible. While this isn’t technically all that different from before, what is different is that all civil wars are now started by Radical movements, including Secessions.

What this means is that the previous system we had for Secessions, where they just randomly start when a culture has high turmoil, is completely and utterly gone from the game. Instead, Movements can ignite a Civil War that is either a Revolution or a Secession. Whether a radical movement starts a Revolution or a Secession depends on the Movement Type and the specific circumstances in your country, so I’ll list a few examples of how we currently envision this to work (the exact details may change before release though):

• Cultural Minority movements will generally always try to Secede if they can
  
• Royalist Movements will generally always launch a Revolution if they can, but might Secede under very specific circumstances (see below)
  
• Pro-Slavery/Anti-Slavery Movements will usually launch Revolutions, but under Legacy Slavery (ie the American Civil War situation) will tend to secede instead
  
• Religious Minority movement might launch a Revolution to change the State Religion if they have broad enough support, but otherwise would Secede

Whether a Movement is able to start a Civil War doesn’t solely depend on their level of Radicalism. For one, in order for a Revolution to start, there must be at least one Interest Group willing to side with the Political Movement. The precise conditions for when an Interest Group sides with a Revolution are still being tweaked, but right now we’re thinking along these lines:

• The Interest Group must be influenced by the Movement (ie be able to get character ideologies from it)
  
• The Interest Group must be Angry
  
• The Interest Group must be at least somewhat ideologically aligned with the Movement (ie, Landowners led by a Slaver wouldn’t join an Abolitionist uprising)

Secessions, on the other hand, never pull in Interest Groups directly, and so one of the conditions under which a Secession could happen is when a Movement is extremely radical but unable to garner any Interest Group support and decide to instead break off and make their own country with their own Interest Groups. As an example, the Royalist movement in a Republic flight find the overall support for restoring the monarchy is so weak that they try to create a breakaway Kingdom in whatever region they are still able to garner support in. This may of course not make sense for all movement types, so we’ll have to decide on a case by case basis for each.

The American Pro-Slavery Movement is rising up, taking the Slave States with them in their attempt to secede from the union. Note that the tooltip/UI here is very WIP!
Another part of Civil Wars that has changed considerably is state assignment, ie which precise states rise up against you. Previously, state assignment worked according to a few basic rules:

• For Revolutions, a fraction of states would rise up based on Movement Support (frequently this would be ‘everything but the capital’ if the movement was strong enough)
  
• For Secessions, a fraction of cultural homelands would rise up based on level of turmoil (usually, all of them)
  
• For Revolutions, only Incorporated states could rise up
  
• The Capital could never rise up

All of these rules, including capital immunity, have been tossed out the window. Instead, the precise configuration of states depends heavily on the type and support of the movement, and where its support comes from. For example, a movement with high Military Support will tend to get more of the states with Barracks/Naval Bases, while a movement backed by a large portion of the population would gain a greater share of states overall. In other words, if you stack all the barracks in your capital, and then proceed to anger the military, then well… that capital is likely going to be on the other side of the war in the coming scuffle. Unincorporated States are now also able to take sides, so that Revolutions aren’t just a concern in the metropol anymore.

Overall, just like the Political Movement Rework overall, the new system relies a whole lot less on blunt same-for-everyone rules and much more on precise scripting and rule-setting (all of which is of course fully moddable) for the different movement types, allowing us to create much more interesting and immersive mechanics for the different movements, what they want to achieve, and what they are willing to pick up a rifle to fight for. We are also aiming, overall, to have less inconsequential civil wars going on, but to try and increase the danger and unpredictability for even large countries when they do happen.

The Royalist Movement, giving up on Britain as a whole, are instead trying to create a breakaway monarchy in the north (note that dynamic secessions are also still WIP, so don’t read too much into the name and other details here)
Alright then, that’s all for today, but do join us again next week, when Alex will tell you all about Famines and Harvest Conditions. See you then!

Happy Thursday Victorians!
It’s me, Lino and in today’s Dev Diary I’m going to walk you through the upcoming changes to one of the game’s central society features, namely the discrimination system.

Until now, discrimination was always binary in Victoria 3. A Pop either was discriminated against or they were not. This has led to a fairly one-dimensional feature where there’s not a lot of variety in what Pops can be experiencing. It also has made it hard for us to add harsh consequences to discriminated against Pops since it would have affected so many Pops around the world.

So we are taking some steps to make that more interesting. First of all, we’re saying goodbye to talking about discrimination. Instead, we are introducing the opposite, Acceptance.
Each Pop will have an Acceptance value between 0 and 100. This value is determined by the Pop’s country’s laws, in particular the Citizenship and Church & State groups which play the biggest role here. There are other laws that will have an impact, but we are going to talk about those in a later Dev Diary.

Primary cultures are clearly the points of authority when it comes to Acceptance values
As you can see, the old rules of cultural similarity still apply in the new system. Now though, instead of being immediately accepted if the culture shares a heritage trait, they will gain a high acceptance value bonus for example. This allows a broader range of acceptance, from the cultures that are facing violent hostility to the primary cultures who will always have the highest acceptance value.
The religious impact is changed to provide a bonus if a religion shares a trait with the state religion.

This brings us one step closer to the full picture, but we’re not quite there yet. The Acceptance value actually determines which Acceptance Status a Pop has. There are five possible Statuses, ranging from Full Acceptance to Violent Hostility, which will be used in order to apply consequences to the Pops in question.

Figure.09: WIP list of effects. This is definitely going to change - we’re looking at solutions to make it more readable for release.
You can see that we are not only reworking the system to fit the new vision, but are also expanding on it with new effects, besides the Acceptance value itself. From simple statistical changes like the tax burden per acceptance status to rules for who can work in government buildings or serve in your military, we have added a decent amount of new things to the laws.
Another factor that determines a Pop’s Acceptance value is the age of the Pop’s cultural community in their state. An immigrant Pop that is "fresh off the boat" will not be as accepted as that of another culture which has been there for 30 years already. No matter what your laws say, your Pops will need some time to get used to the new faces in their neighborhood–but, eventually, the new arrivals will reach the Acceptance value which the laws have determined for them.

“Have you seen the looks they gave us? By myself, I couldn’t stay here, but with you by my side I know I will make it.”
Of course you can still improve your Pops’ situation by enacting more progressive laws. These provide higher acceptance bonuses to cultures. For example Ethnostate doesn’t grant any bonus to cultures that share a non-heritage cultural trait with your primary culture, but National Supremacy grants +25 acceptance if they do.

Alright, so you passed Multiculturalism, but you didn’t think your Pops would immediately hug and welcome the people they were despising yesterday, did you?
Law enactments that increase a Pop’s Acceptance value will suffer from a penalty much the same as the newly established cultural communities, which will decay over time. This shows the establishment of these new laws quite well and delays the full effectiveness of the more progressive laws.

Another thing we are changing is conversion and assimilation (so that your Pops can escape from the undesirable lower statuses of Acceptance).
When 1.8 comes out later this year, Pops will be able to assimilate and convert to any culture or religion that would provide them with a higher acceptance value, even if it is not the primary culture or state religion. There is a minimum assimilation value difference that needs to be crossed in order for them to be eligible. For example if their current Acceptance is at 25 and the minimum assimilation value difference from the Citizenship law is defined at 50, their target’s culture Acceptance would need to be 75 or higher in order for them to assimilate.
This still looks at cultures that are present in the same state, so if none of them have a value of 75 or higher, the assimilation could not happen. The assimilation process may also still be forbidden by laws, e.g. under all laws it is currently not allowed for members of the lowest status to assimilate at all. Similarly, Pops of the highest status also do not assimilate in the current setup, as they already possess enough rights and privileges to enjoy a good life.

All of these changes require a fairly substantial rework of our interface. A lot is currently still in development and is coming in pieces, so you will have to discover it on your own, but I still wanted to provide you with a faint idea of what’s coming.
The Cultures panel has been renamed to Society, which fits better since it also includes Statuses and Religion. The acceptance statuses are listed in a new tab, providing an overview of what percentage of Pops falls under which status and who exactly that is.

WIP interface showing the breakdown of acceptance statuses in your country
In the end, we hope this feature rework will enhance your experience with regards to managing your Pops and that it will show much more variety in the Pops’ lives. Especially on the lower end of the spectrum, you should see a lot more consequences, as sad as that is.
This rework is an important step for us, since we can make better use of this system in future narrative content too, and we also have some ideas for future mechanical changes that require this rework as a foundation.

That’s all for today. Next week, on October 3, I’m handing it back to Martin again, who will provide some more information on what we’re doing with civil wars. That should be an interesting one, be sure to check it out!

Happy Thursday and welcome back to another Victoria 3 development diary. This week I’ll be talking about the Political Movement Rework I mentioned back in Dev Diary #126[forum.paradoxplaza.com] and which will be coming to you with update 1.8, slated to release later in the year. Before I start, I want to reiterate that this feature is still very much under active development, and any screenshots or numbers shown are very much not indicative of what will be in the actual release, and the UX in particular will be in a very rough state, so don’t read too much into it!

Right then. As I stated previously, the principal goal of this rework is to change Political Movements from temporary demands into long-term ideological forces that can shape the political landscape of your country. So what does that mean, in practice? Well, one of the most significant differences is that movements are no longer formed around the enactment or preservation of a single law. Instead, there is a wide variety of movement types, each with its own unique agenda and conditions for forming, but which can be broadly broken down into three categories:

Ideological Movements: These are movements that exist to push a particular ideological agenda and try to win support for that agenda among your Pops and Interest Groups. Examples include both more narrowly focused movements such as Abolitionists and Suffragettes, and broader ones such as Communists and National Liberals.

Cultural Movements: These are movements that exist to agitate for the rights and privileges of a particular culture in a country. Their specific agenda will vary based on whether the culture is a primary culture or minority culture, as well as the legal status of that culture in the country. For example, a cultural minority movement of South Italians in North Italy would oppose the enactment of Ethnostate since it would strip them of their rights, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re willing to extend those rights to other, less accepted cultures in the country.

Religious Movements: Similar to the cultural movements, but for religions instead

The Pro-Slavery Movement in the United States is largely composed of Dixie pops and has wide-reaching influence in multiple Interest Groups
As before, Movements have Support and Radicalism. Previously, both of these numbers could be a little fuzzy in exactly what they represented, so we have changed them into straight percentages between 0 and 100%, where 50% Support now actually means that about half of your country stands behind the movement.

Support is currently calculated from two parts of roughly equal importance: Popular Support and Military Support. The former is a straightforward calculation of the number of individuals in your country that are part of the movement, so in a country of 1 million people, a movement backed by 100k individuals would have a Popular Support of 10%. Military Support is a little more complex, and is currently calculated by the fraction of Soldier and Officer Political Strength that are part of the movement, representing the fact that officers tend to have a greater sway on military side-taking than mere enlisted men. We are also looking into ways to tie generals directly into movements and have this impact their Military Support. All of this plays an important role if a movement escalates into a Civil War, but more on that later.

So, how do movements gain the support of Pops? Very much like Interest Groups, they now have an attraction weight, which depends completely on the type of nature of the movement. The Abolitionist movement, for instance, might have an outsized attraction on literate pops of certain professions, but also would tend to attract more pops from religions whose scripture and traditions take an anti-slavery stance than from ones which tacitly or overtly approve of it.

This attraction weight competes with the attraction weight of all other movements in your country, as individuals can only be part of a single movement at a time. To ensure that this doesn’t mean you end up with 20 tiny and fragmented movements, we are planning to have a system of ‘initial enthusiasm’, where new movements start with a boost to their attraction which fades over time, and are eventually supplanted entirely by the next shiny new thing. It’s worth noting that we may end up only applying this to Ideological Movements, as it doesn’t necessarily make sense that your Pops would stop caring about their right to worship freely just because the Positivist movement is taking off.

Before we move on, it’s also worth noting that just like with Interest Groups, Pop support for Movements isn’t something that instantly changes overnight: Even if a movement is created with a massive attraction weight, it will take some time for it to pick up supporters from other movements.

The pro-Turkish cultural movement in the Ottoman Empire seeks to ensure that Turks remain at the top of Ottoman society, and has a fairly strong base of support in the military.
As mentioned above, movements will champion one or several ideologies, and have a few different ways in which they will push those ideologies. The first and most straightforward one is through direct action. Movements have a level of Radicalism, which will go up or down over time based on how much they perceive the current status quo and government’s actions to match their overarching goals. Depending on their level of Radicalism, Movements will be in one of four ‘levels’ of activity:

Passive: Movements with very low Radicalism are Passive, have no direct effects and will only indirectly influence Interest Groups (more on that below)
Agitating: The next step up from Passive, Agitating movements will influence the enactment chances of laws that they support or oppose
Protesting: Protesting movements have a greater impact on the enactment chances of their supported and opposed laws compared to Agitating movements, but also steadily turn their supporters into Radicals over time
Rioting: The highest level of Radicalism, Rioting movements will rapidly radicalize their supporters and may take their level of activity one step further by igniting a Civil War

What all this means is that Movement Radicalism is no longer purely a negative thing, at least not when a Movement’s goals align with yours - if you work too hard at keeping everyone happy, you may find it difficult to push through any radical changes that aren’t backed by your dominant Interest Groups.

The other, less direct way in which Movements affect country politics is the influence they hold over Interest Groups. An Interest Group is considered to be influenced by a Movement if at least a certain % of the Interest Group’s total political strength are members of that Movement, and an Interest Group can be influenced by multiple movements. The most significant effect of this is how it impacts IG Leader Ideologies.

Previously, when an Interest Group got a new leader, that leader would pick their ideology from a weighted list of all the ideologies in the game (minus ones that were scripted to be unavailable or have a weight of zero for that leader), but this has now been reduced to a much shorter list: Leader ideologies can now only be picked from either a set of basic ideologies inherent to the Interest Group itself, or from one of the movements that is influencing the Interest Group, with Movement ideologies tending to have stronger weights than the basic ones. This also means that the ideology selection can now actually be predicted and displayed, so that you can make an educated guess about the way the political winds are blowing in your IGs.

This effectively means that the influencing movements serve as ‘factions’ inside the Interest Group, competing to install a leader and take control of the IG for as long as that leader remains in power. We are also considering allowing Movements to have more permanent effects on the ideologies of Interest Groups, but this is tricky to pull off in a way that doesn’t end up with an IG changing its core identity every 10 years or so, so I don’t want to promise that it’ll be part of the 1.8 update just yet.

Torn between the Pro and Anti-Slavery movements, the next leader of Evangelicals may come down on either side of the issue - or be a compromise candidate who sidesteps it altogether.
The final changes I want to go over in this DD is Agitators, which of course have had to go through some changes to fit into this new system. For the most part, Agitators work exactly as before: They appear and start or join movements, can be exiled and invited, and so on. A relatively minor change is that instead of directly adding Support to a movement, they now increase its Pop Attraction by an amount partially scaling to their Popularity, so having Friedrich Engels penning columns singing the praise of your Socialist movement will attract more Socialists over time.

The more significant change is that we have flipped the script on what an Agitator’s Interest Group membership means for their political leanings. Previously, an Agitator would (much like an IG leader) look to their ideology first and interest group ideologies second when determining which laws they support, meaning that you would sometimes get some pretty strange bedfellows and a bunch of Rural Folk Agitators of varying ideologies trying to implement National Militia all over the place for rather unclear reasons. Instead of anchoring Agitators fully to the ideologies of their IG, we have decided that their own ideology, traits and other such circumstances should be what determines which Movement they want to support.

In other words, Agitators are now much more fixated on specific ideas, and if there isn’t sufficient support for those ideas in your country to get a Movement they would actually care to support going, they may not even be available to invite. On the other hand, we are looking into loosening the rules somewhat around which Agitators you can invite based on discrimination status, but we haven’t fully worked out the details there, so more on that another time.

It would of course not be possible to make all these changes without also making major changes to Civil Wars (particularly Secessions and how they tie into cultural/religious movements), but we’ll cover all of that separately in a later dev diary, along with more detailed information on how Movement Radicalism works.

For now I’ll wish you adieu and encourage you to check in again next week, when Lino will tell you all about discrimination and the ways it’s changing in 1.8. See you then!

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Remember your fellow Victorians can help you out on our forums, discord server and Reddit! So chug on down the track and join them all!

Hello Victorians,
wake up, grab a brush and put on a little make-up - we’re talking about Bulk Nationalization today! Also, I will be bringing you more details on the next step in the evolution of the Companies feature: Ownership of building levels. Let’s get started, shall we?

Since the release of the 1.7 update and the Nationalization feature, the biggest wish from the community (and ourselves) in regards to it was to have a tool that allows you to nationalize more buildings at once and to let you choose more concretely which levels you want to nationalize.
So that’s what we did!

In order to access this new tool, you will have to go into the Building Registry, which you can find on the bottom of the Buildings panel.

Big button. Big window. Big nice.
In here you will see a new button which says “Nationalize Filtered Buildings”.

The Bulk Nationalization waits behind this new button in the Building Registry
As you may be able to tell from its name already, for assembling the list of buildings to be nationalized with the tool, we take into account all the filters you have set up inside the Building Registry.
So if for example you’ve filtered your list down to a list of buildings that are owned by other countries or pops in other countries, well then these are the only buildings that are considered when opening the Bulk Nationalization window. Alternatively you could have filtered the list for buildings that are located in West Bengal, that have a goods shortage and that are currently not hiring. The more you filter, the more control you have over which buildings to nationalize.

Now let’s see what happens when you press that button.

Example: List of all British Pop-owned Ranches, Furniture Manufacturies and Steel Mills that I have filtered for in the Building Registry and that I can nationalize in one go
You can see a list of all affected buildings on top and the main sliders underneath to determine how many levels you’d like to nationalize as you know it from the existing tool. If other owner groups were present, there’d be a separate slider for them.
Additionally, to the left of it, we’ve added a shortcut to filter by a specific ownership type in order to allow you to only select Manor House owned properties for example (because who needs these Landowners, really).

Quick filter for specific ownership type
On the right side of the window, you see the summed up consequences, costs and the option to disable payment (if your laws allow it).
All that’s left to do is press the button and take control.

This Bulk Nationalization feature should prove a powerful tool in everybody’s toolbox when it comes to claiming national ownership and we can’t wait to see you use it.

As we wrote in the past when we talked about Companies, we have always had a bunch of ideas on how to expand the feature to integrate it more in the simulation.
One of these ideas was giving established Companies actual ownership over building levels in the country which they would positively affect, rather than applying it to all buildings in your country.
So now that we have shipped the 1.7 update which contained the Building Ownership Rework that actually allows other buildings to take control of levels, it felt only natural to take this next step for Companies too.

The way we do this is by giving each established Company a Headquarter (HQ) building. This building will act much like a Financial District or Manor House. They are going to have Pops working in them, have an ownership portfolio overview etc.
So you still decide which Companies to establish in order to specialize your country, but how that plays out will be different.
The establishment of a Company HQ may require you to give away some of your own building levels or provide the necessary funds. Details on this still need to be evaluated and implemented as we are approaching 1.8, but the conditions will likely be dependent on your economic laws.

When you decide to establish a Company, we determine in which state its HQ will spawn based on where in your country the relevant industries are the most prominent. So if you establish Friedrich Krupp for example, a company that cares about Steel, Guns and Artillery, it looks through your country and finds the state with the highest number of building levels of these types and will settle there.

Friedrich Krupp being established in Westphalia, the major steel producing state in Prussia
Once established, Companies can invest into new building levels like Financial Districts or Manor Houses. They make use of the Investment Pool for this. Depending on how much they or the Pops in them have contributed to it, there will be more or less investments from Companies into new levels.
Like the other ownership buildings, the Company HQ level will increase with each level they build or buy.
A goal that we have with their investment logic is that Companies should start investing much more locally, e.g. in their own state, before expanding to your country. But of course if you have foreign investment rights in place, Companies will also be able to make use of that and start building new Steel Mills on the other side of the world!
But keep in mind that Companies will only ever invest in buildings of their assigned types, so Friedrich Krupp will never build a Ranch for example.

A look inside Friedrich Krupp and their Property Portfolio
Another major change that we’re doing with this update is of course to change the throughput and construction bonuses. Companies will only affect the buildings that are actually belonging to them, rather than every single building of fitting type in your country. To compensate for this, we increase the bonus that Companies are providing. The same is true for the construction bonus, which is applied only to buildings that are funded by the Company.

In the interface, we will represent Company ownership with their icon wherever a level is owned by them. We are also thinking about adding a new color to distinguish their ownership type further, but will need to investigate this more.
What we also do to visualize company ownership is take it into the third dimension. We will show on the world map that a building has an association to a company in the form of billboards.
If there’s at least one level being owned by a Company, we place an according billboard showing the Company’s logo on the building.

Our Art team has come up with multiple designs for billboards, very pretty (but still WIP)
For the future, we can see potential to expand this kind of visualization to other areas, e.g. ships and trucks, but that’s out of scope for 1.8 at least.

While this ownership change is a major step forward for Companies, it’s not the end of our plans for them. We cannot provide you a timeline for further improvements yet, but we do see potential to expand on them with features like political impact (e.g. influencing IGs or enactment of certain laws) and company leading characters among other things.
But that’s for another time.

The next Dev Diary is coming to you in two weeks on the 19. of September, where Martin will walk you through the changes we are making to Political Movements.
With that, I’m leaving you for today and wish you a happy Thursday! ;)

Happy Thursday and welcome back to another Victoria 3 development diary. This week we’re going to take a bird’s eye view of the headline features of update 1.8, which is of course the next free update for the game, planned to be released sometime later this year. However, before we start on the dev diary proper I should tell you about a slight change of plans in our release schedule. Back in Dev Diary #124[forum.paradoxplaza.com] I told you that update 1.8 would be a smaller update, focused almost entirely on bug fixing and general polish.

This was indeed the plan, with update 1.9 intended as a larger update following relatively closely on the heels of 1.8, but when we sat down to work out the details we realized that our intended timeline simply didn’t work out, as we would either have to work on the two updates in too close proximity (creating major challenges for 1.8 post-release support among other things), or delay update 1.9 all the way to next year, which we didn’t want to do. So we decided to combine the two updates, with the result that 1.8 is now going to be a single update with the combined scope of both 1.8 and 1.9, meaning it will contain not just bug fixes and polish but also some juicy new free features.

But enough about update planning, let’s get into those headline features I just mentioned! As I said, this is just an overview dev diary, so we’re not going to go into any great detail today, but we have plenty more dev diaries planned in the upcoming weeks where we will fill in the blanks. One final thing before I start: All of the features mentioned are still in early stages of development, so any screenshots, numbers and art shown are going to be very, very, very (very) work in progress.



A frequent complaint about Victoria 3’s political system is the highly random nature of leader and character ideologies. The way in which you build up support for certain laws among your Interest Groups can be frustratingly opaque and reliant on using certain pieces of content (Corn Laws, anyone?) in a way that is neither immersive nor feels particularly rewarding.

In update 1.8, we are taking aim at this problem, alongside a number of other issues with a feature that we have dubbed ‘Ideological Forces’, but which can be more accurately called ‘Political Movement Rework’. The plan is to transform Political Movements from spontaneous and temporary demands for a single legal reform into longer-term ideological movements with a broader political agenda. For example, instead of a movement popping up to abolish slavery, you will have an actual Abolitionist movement with a long-term legal agenda, which will attract supporters from your Pops and influence the politics of the Interest Groups that those Pops are backing. Political Movements will also include religious and cultural minority (and majority!) movements, with some corresponding changes to civil war and secession mechanics.

One of the major aims of the Political Movement Rework is to make the mechanics around how we assign ideologies to Interest Group leaders much more transparent to the player

Another issue straight off the future update plans[forum.paradoxplaza.com] that we’re tackling in 1.8 is the way pop discrimination works. Ever since release, we’ve said multiple times that the overly simplistic nature of discrimination is something we want to improve on in the future, and now that future is finally here! This feature is still in the ‘figuring it out’ stage, so I’ll eschew the details, but our principal goals with are as follows:

• To introduce multiple ‘levels’ to discrimination instead of it just being a binary state
  
• To have the level of discrimination faced by a Pop be determined by factors other than just what the law says
  
• To turn assimilation into a properly useful feature that isn’t only available to fully accepted pops

UX mockup of what discrimination/acceptance of a particular culture might look like in 1.8. Note that everything here is just placeholder/example data and not necessarily planned features (sadly there will be no ‘let them eat fish’ law).

In update 1.8, we’re also planning to expand on the gameplay around agriculture and food availability, which of course was an issue of great importance to governments at the time. After all, the 19th century saw events such as the Irish Potato Famine, the repeated famines in British-controlled India and the world-wide famines in the wake of the Krakatoa explosion.

To do this, we are going to introduce the concept of food availability for Pops, which is a factor that is separate from, but intrinsically linked to a Pop’s standard of living. Currently, we’re thinking that food availability for a Pop will be determined by how much of their buy package goes towards feeding themselves, how expensive the food goods they’re purchasing is, and whether there are any shortages among those goods. Low food availability will increase pop mortality and radicalism and may trigger a state-wide famine if it’s widespread enough.

Food production at the time was highly dependent on the weather and climate, and many peasant families were only one or two bad harvests away from the brink of ruin. To simulate this unpredictability, we’re also adding something called ‘Harvest Incidents’, which can increase or decrease agricultural output in different regions over a longer timeframe.

Early development mapmode showing harvest incidents. Korea is experiencing a period of bountiful harvests, while the situation is less rosy in the East African interior (ignore the colored sea zones, as that is just a bug from the feature being WIP).
These are the ‘big ones’ for update 1.8, but of course it is by no means all we’re planning to do in this update. A few honorable mentions of other changes and improvements you can expect in 1.8, all of which we’ll explain in detail over in the upcoming weeks:

• Companies owning and investing in buildings
  
• Bulk Nationalization tool
  
• Multi-select and right-click orders for formations
  
• Adding wargoals on behalf of subjects

Along with, of course, many bug fixes, balance changes and other miscellaneous improvements.

That’s all for today! More details on all of these features will of course follow, starting with Bulk Nationalization and Companies Owning Buildings, which Lino will tell you all about next week. See you then!

Hello Victorians! The hotfix today has a number of fixes mentioned in Dev Diary 125[forum.paradoxplaza.com], and should be compatible with savegames! We mentioned in the dev diary we would be making changes to the abdicate/resign interaction, this has been delayed to a future update due to technical reasons.

Checksum for the hotfix is, 4b8b. As always, this post is not for bug reports, please instead post them in the bug reporting forum (including a save and steps to recreate is always useful).

The following changes have been made to the game compared to 1.7.5:

• Protectionism now has a +25% leverage resistance effect

• The AI will now prefer to first cancel constructions of government buildings over demolishing existing ones when trying to save money
  
• Reduced AI naval spending targets from having a large overseas empire, to prevent excessive British overspending on the navy

• Added the prompt saying "CTRL + click to set the levels to a minimum/maximum" directly to the Nationalization popup for better visibility.

• Fixed the bug when guarantee independence wouldn't join if the diplomatic play that was started outside of the current interests
  
• Fixed a bug where it was possible to Enforce Military Access on a subject who is opposing their overlord in a play or a war
  
• Fixed a bug where the AI would sometimes not merge back temporary formations into their parent formations, resulting in a large number of armies with few or no battalions in each
  
• Fixed a bug where the AI would not evaluate Investment Rights and Join Power Bloc wargoals correctly when calculating its desire to dominate another country, resulting in adopting a less aggressive attitude than intended
  
• Fixed CTD related to front distribution cache
  
• Fixed a bug where the AI would use 'Grant own Market' on subjects in cases where it did not make sense to do so, such as Austria granting Krakow their own market due to low supply network strength
  
• Fixed bug where Force Nationalization Wargoal would only take state-owned buildings from the target, ignoring private-owned ones
  
• Fixed the bug when government buildings couldn't promote employees
  
• (Mac CTD fix) Fix/potential stack overflow in cpdxguitextdata
  
• Fixed the bug when fleets in non-home HQs wouldn't recover from being defeated
  
• Fixed a bug where Military Formations could establish a new basecamp somewhere else when they already had a valid one.
  
• Fixed a crash to desktop that could happen upon enacting cooperative ownership
  
• Now subjects subjugated through power bloc action will properly update ports and markets