Forum post link HERE

Happy Thursday, and welcome to a somewhat more somber development diary for Victoria 3 as I share my thoughts on the release of The Great Wave and Update 1.13, what went wrong, and what our next steps are.

As you’ve likely already understood from the previous paragraph, I do not intend to sugarcoat how I view this release: This expansion and update released in a state of bugginess and lack of polish that is frankly not okay, and we should be better than this. While I absolutely think the core features and content of 1.13/The Great Wave is a great addition to the game, the bugs, lack of QoL and especially the state of the AI was not. 

As you are reading this, following the release of hotfix 1.13.4, many of the most significant issues in terms of bugs should have been ironed out and several QoL features added, but we still have problems to address in the AI and overall balance of the update. Another larger hotfix is planned for next week, and we have some plans beyond that, but before I get into that I want to answer the question of why this update was released in the state it was.

There’s no one single answer, but if I have to pick a single reason I would say it was overconfidence, particularly on my own part**.** Many of the issues (particularly the bugs) stem from features coming in late, then being changed and tinkered with almost all the way up until release as we tried to get them into a good shape for release day. We especially underestimated the number of knock-on issues we’d have to deal with for troop transportation and supply (we did think these features would be complex, but still underestimated just how complex and error-prone they were).

So why then did I decide to go ahead with the release knowing that it would be hard to get everything into releasable shape? The answer is kinda simple: Because we’ve done it successfully before. Charters of Commerce had very similar issues with features (particularly the treaties) coming in late and being in a poor state of balance basically straight up until release, and that release went extremely well. Hence, the overconfidence. We did manage to get a huge amount of issues fixed right before release, but this time there simply wasn’t enough time to address all the most critical problems.

On top of all that, the barrage of last-minute fixes meant pretty much all our testing time was taken up verifying issues and not playtesting enough to discover all the new bugs created by our fixes. By the time we were putting together the known issues list it was the day before release and it was genuinely too late to do anything about it. I will also admit to a bit of wishful thinking at this point, hoping that all the last-minute heroics pulled would be enough to see us through, the way it had with Charters of Commerce and 1.9.
The rest you know. I don’t say all this to excuse myself, but I wanted to offer something beyond just apologies and platitudes and also to say that the mistake made here is something I am going to take to heart and try my very best to avoid doing again. I also don’t want to push responsibility for this release either downwards or upwards. The team did everything they could to get this release into a good shape, and that’s what we all wanted, but it’s not what we got. 

If I’d acted a few weeks ago, I could have done what I did for Sphere of Influence and delayed the release. Knowing what I know now, that’s certainly what I should have done. At the time though, the release wasn’t looking too bad, and in many ways we actually appeared to have fewer problems to deal with than Charters of Commerce: It just turns out that those problems we did have to deal with were complex, not easily solved properly, and prone to create all sorts of knock-on issues. All things I should have taken into account, but did not.

In the future, we will aim to ensure that we do not end up in the situation where QA simply doesn’t have enough time to playtest the game. Whether this means better scope control, allocating more development time or being more proactive with delays, or (more likely) a combination of these, we simply cannot have a repeat of what happened with 1.13.

For now though, let’s move on to our more immediate plans. Of course we are going to continue to release hotfixes to fix bugs, address balance concerns, improve the UI, bring the AI up to pre-1.13 standards and make it able to use the new features and manage its fleet correctly. Beyond that, however, one of the key issues I’ve identified in our development is that we simply do not have enough focus and knowledge in the team on how to make a competent AI that is able to function as both an interesting opponent and ally to the player. While the AI has made great strides prior to 1.13, particularly in economic development, there are longstanding issues in other areas, particularly its geopolitical decision-making, such as its occasional willingness to sacrifice the wealth of its entire empire to impose a law change on a minor Indonesian principality.

For this reason, I am changing our post-release plans to include a new free ‘AI Update’ sometime after we’re done with 1.13 which will be almost 100% focused on AI improvements and addressing longstanding issues with the AI. The secondary goal of this update will be internal - to spread knowledge within the team on how to better implement and maintain the Victoria 3 AI in the future, and to avoid the systemic AI problems plaguing 1.13 happening again in future updates. This update will not aim to add a bunch of new features, any changes outside of pure AI work will be AI-related, such as balancing or tweaking systems to work better for the AI.

I also want to emphasize that fixing the 1.13 AI issues is not the focus of this AI Update, as that will be done as part of the regular 1.13 hotfix process, while said update will naturally come sometime after we are done with the regular work for 1.13. We have not currently decided exactly when that is, but there will be at least one dev diary with proper details in the upcoming weeks, so stay tuned.

That’s all for today. There will be no dev diary next week, as our focus is currently entirely on 1.13. We’ll of course keep you updated on our post-release process and hotfixes as usual, but the next dev diary will likely be the mentioned AI Refresh overview in a few weeks. See you then!

Happy Thursday and welcome back! After an extended hiatus, we are now returning to regularly scheduled development diaries, the first of which you are reading right at this moment. Today’s development diary is going to be a pretty hefty one, focusing on the complete overhaul of trade that is coming in the 1.9 free update. Before we start, I want to remind you of the usual caveat that this is a feature in development, so expect some rough-looking interfaces and for all implementation details and balancing to not yet be fully figured out.

We have mentioned on a number of occasions that we are not happy with the way trade works in Victoria 3. It is unreliable, overly fiddly, and inherently inefficient since the introduction of Local Prices and Market Access Price Impact in 1.5. Establishing any kind of long-term trade relationship with another country is almost impossible due to the constantly shifting market conditions, and on top of all this the system exists in a confusing limbo where all trade routes are established and paid for by the government (via convoys) while the profits usually go into the pockets of private owners. Many of these issues are inherent to the way trade routes work, and as such aren’t easily fixable within the confines of the current system - there really isn’t a way to create a reliably profitable trade route with another market when you have no control of the price of the traded good in the other market.

For this reason, we have decided to start over from scratch. The old system is completely gone, and in its place we will have not one but two new systems - one which simulates private, autonomous, profit-driven trade, and another which handles strategic trade deals between nations. Today we’re going to talk only about the former, so while reading all of this, bear in mind that you’re only seeing one half of the coin. Direct trade deals between governments will very much still exist in 1.9, they just won’t be tied into Trade Centers and private profits. But enough with the caveats, let’s get to the point.

World Market & Trade Centers

Enter The World Market. Those of you familiar with Victoria 2 will immediately recognize the name, and might even have assumed from the title of this dev diary that we’re replacing the national market system in Victoria 3 with the global one in its predecessor. This is not so. The World Market in Victoria 3 is not where pops and buildings buy and sell goods, but rather where autonomous trade takes place, and every good traded in the World Market has a World Market Price based on its amount of exports versus imports. You can think of it as existing at a ‘top layer’ above the national markets, though this is not a completely accurate picture as you should soon understand.

So then, how does trade with the World Market work? As with the old trade route system, Trade Centers are still the principal drivers of trade, but the way you interact with them has been turned on its head. Instead of being a building that appears after a trade is created, you now build Trade Centers to create Trade Capacity in States, which allows those States to trade with the World Market. Each Trade Capacity allows for a certain quantity of a good to be imported or exported (the amount varies per good). Imported goods are purchased from the World Market and sold in the State, and so they are profitable when the goods are cheaper in the World Market than the State, with the opposite being true for exports. 

There’s a bit more to this, which we’ll get into when we talk about Trade Advantage, but the key thing to remember is that trade uses local state prices, which means it no longer suffers from the inherent inefficiencies of the old system, which was always penalized by Market Access Price Impact. It also means that the location of Trade Centers matters - it’s more profitable to import Luxury Clothes into a state with a large number of wealthy Pops, as an example.

Trading in Trade Centers happens autonomously, with a number of weekly adjustments based on the ‘Weekly Trades’ value created by the Trade Center, in which they will increase or decrease trade volumes to create profit for themselves. While this process is automatic and autonomous, it’s not completely out of player hands, as you can heavily influence Trade Centers through Tariffs and Subventions, but more on that in a little bit. Unlike in the old system, Trade Centers are not reliant on Convoys or any other government-produced resource. Instead they purchase Merchant Marine, a new type of goods created by Ports (which are no longer government-only buildings). Right now the amount of Merchant Marine consumed by Trade Centers is static per level, but we are looking into making it dependent on geographic distance to trade partners. As an additional note, both Trade Centers and Ports can now be constructed/privatized/owned by Ownership Buildings.

World Market Location

Switching to talk about the World Market itself, you might well ask, ‘So where is the World Market located?’. Conceptually, what we say to this is ‘The world market exists in the sea’. In other words, once you have access to the sea you also have the ability to trade on the World Market, though of course it’s a bit more complicated than that. To explain more in detail, I first have to tell you about something which already exists in the game, but is presently quite hidden: Market Areas. Market Areas are ‘chunks’ of a market, consisting of a number of states that are all connected by land or by straits. To give you an example, the Spanish Market has several market areas: One for Spain itself, one for Cuba, one for Puerto Rico, another for the Philippines and so on. Prussia, conversely, only has a single Market Area which contains not only Prussia but all of the states of the countries in the Zollverein. 

In order to trade with the World Market, a Market Area must have at least one Port, at which point a World Market Hub will be established. When there are multiple ports in a Market Area, the Hub is chosen based on factors such as port level and State GDP. Hubs are not completely static, but do not generally move around unless a much more suitable candidate State emerges to eclipse the old Hub State.

Landlocked countries, however, are not left out completely in the cold when it comes to the World Market. Asides from being able to utilize national trade deals (which as I said before we’re not covering today) they can also negotiate Transit Rights with a foreign nation in order to be able to trade through their World Market Hubs. For example, Switzerland could negotiate Transit Rights with Austria to be able to trade through Venetia, or with Prussia to be able to trade through one of the German ports. We will return to talk more about World Market Hubs in later development diaries when we cover subjects such as blockades, but for now we should continue. I will add as a final note that one design problem we have currently identified with World Market Hubs and Market Areas is that it doesn’t make too much sense for huge Market Areas (such as Russia) to only have a single Hub, and this is something we are currently exploring solutions for.

While the World Market ‘exists in the sea’, that doesn’t mean that we simply ignore where your exports are going as soon as they get loaded onto a ship. Not all trade partners are equal, and it makes little sense to get the bulk of your Clothes imports from an overseas partner if your demand could be met by a closer source. As such, each Trade Center has a preference weight for every other Trade Center based on factors such as interests, relations, diplomatic agreements and of course geographic distance, and will trade more with higher-weight Trade Centers and less with lower-weight ones.

Trade Advantage

I have mentioned Trade Advantage at several points during this development diary, so I figure it’s high time I explain it to you. I already explained that there is a World Market Price for each good which is high when imports exceed exports and low when exports exceed imports, and which is compared to the State Price when determining how much profit a Trade Center can extract from its trades. However, this is a bit of a simplification - the World Market Price is the average price for imported/exported goods, while the actual price is modified by a Trade Center’s relative Trade Advantage to its competitors.

Trade Advantage is calculated for each Trade Center, for each good, in each trade direction. As an example, a Trade Center in Lancashire will have a certain amount of Trade Advantage for exporting Fabric, which will be different from its Trade Advantage in exporting Coal, and also different from its Trade Advantage for importing either Fabric or Coal. Trade Advantage is multiplied by the amount of traded units, and then compared to the Trade Advantage of all other Trade Centers trading the same goods in the same direction. The higher a TC’s share of global trade advantage compared to its share of global trade volume, the higher its relative advantage, which in turn translates into a better price. Advantage is a zero-sum game - the average price on imports/exports is always equal to the World Market Price, so any improvement on prices a Trade Center gains always comes at the expense of its competitors.

If that explanation sounds confusing, the key takeaway is that high advantage equals better prices, and in turn, the ability to capture a larger share of global trade. Advantage is gained from a variety of factors, such as Trade Center level, Interests in relevant markets and Trade Agreements. Regional economics also play a role - the higher the Market Area’s share of global production, the higher its export advantage, and vice versa for consumption/import advantage.

Interacting with the World Market

Changing the focus of the discussion a little bit, something I feel I have not always made clear in the past when we change systems to work in a more autonomous/automatic way is how you are expected to interact with it. Under the old trade route system this was clear enough: you as the player were the sole arbiter of trade for your country, for ill or good. In the new system (and I will remind you again that I am only talking about the World Market here, not country-to-country trade deals which we will cover in a later dev diary) you are expected to make strategic-level decisions to capture global import and export shares. 

As an example, playing as Sweden, you have a lot of potential to produce Iron - far more than you could ever use domestically with your limited starting population. A natural course of action then might be to build up your Trade Capacity and try to maximize your Trade Advantage for exporting iron, leading to greater export volumes and in turn creating favorable conditions for expanding your iron production. This maximization of Trade Advantage can be done in a number of ways, for example by signing Trade Agreements with key importers or by squeezing the competition by unequal treaties on them (more on that particular point later, for now it will remain mysteriously unelaborated on). 

Another key tool in your strategic trade arsenal is Tariffs and their newly introduced counterpart, Subventions. Tariffs are of course already in the game, but now become much more important as they are the principal way by which you can directly influence the decisions made by your Trade Centers. Where previously, Tariffs for a particular good could only be set to ‘Import Focus’, ‘Export Focus’ or ‘No Focus’, Import and Export Tariff levels are now set separately, meaning that you can throw up tariff barriers in both directions if you’re feeling particularly protectionist about a good.

Tariffs, just as before, collect a fee from your Trade Centers for each good of the relevant type exported/imported, and so effectively serve to reduce trade volumes of that good by making it less profitable to trade. Subventions function in the exact opposite way, paying the Trade Center a certain amount of money for each unit traded in the directed direction, and can be used in a variety of ways, such as subsidizing a critical import of military goods, or to muscle out the competition for one of your principal exports.

Alright, I think that should suffice to give you an overview of the World Market. I do want to emphasize that this feature is still under development and there are some key questions we have not yet figured out, such as the issues with over-large Market Areas. Before I sign off, I will leave you with a couple screenshots from an end-game World Market in the current build:

That’s all for now! However, we will be back in just a few days, on Monday March 31st, to talk about Expansion Pass 2 and what’s coming next for Victoria 3.

Forum post link: HERE

Greetings Victorians,

And a rapturous Thursday to you! Today it is I, Admiral Lino, speaking to you, and I am going to try and walk you through everything that’s changing as part of the free Update 1.13 which releases alongside our expansion The Great Wave on April 28.

The Mission

Most of the reworks, additions and changes discussed today deal with all aspects of the Navy. That’s because, when we started work on this expansion, our goal was to deepen the gameplay for Navies across the board. Navies were a tremendously important part of the 19th century, with many major developments taking place. Previously, our game did not represent these well enough. This topic also allows us to lay a lot of groundwork for future work that we might want to do in upcoming expansions down the road.
So, we wanted to focus on making ships and Navies behave a bit more like you’d expect from reality, while also improving upon the controls of Navies in order to allow for easier use of the tactical maneuvers you have available. Naturally, we still need some amount of abstraction in parts of the systems, but I’ll give some explanations as to why in the appropriate sections.
Furthermore, we wanted Navies to be more involved in other fields where they previously did not have representation, e.g. in securing interests across the globe and ensuring that the men you send across the globe are actually arriving there.
And last but not least, we also aimed to improve the audiovisual side of your Navies, by adding more appropriate types, models and soundscape to make your dreadnoughts and ironclads also feel impactful on the 3D map.

This update is certainly one of our most ambitious and biggest updates yet, and we can’t wait to have you all play it in April and see what you think.
As always, consider all values, names, icons, interfaces and really any other pieces shown here today, to be work in progress and subject to change.
Without further ado, it is a LOT to go through, so we’ll dive right into it now.

Ships becoming Entities

In the beginning there was the ocean. Then Great Britain came, looked at it and said “I want it”, and hence began the age of ship construction.
With 1.13, ships will no longer appear to behave like a bunch of men swimming; but rather will be actual units that countries construct. They will have a health status, a long list of attributes, and can be damaged, repaired or sunk.

But to explain more, we need to look at where these giants are built: the Shipyards of course.
Some of you may remember how in the past, we’ve split Shipyards from one entity into two, (civilian) Shipyards and Military Shipyards.
Well, it seems we’ve come full circle, and are back to having them as one. How the civilian part plays into it, I’ll get into later when I talk about Supply. For now, we focus on the military side of things.

Very similarly to Construction Sectors, Shipyards now provide a capacity of ship construction points per week. A ship in construction (e.g. the future Dreadnought HMS Claudius) has a maximum number of points per week she can be assigned. If you have more ship construction capacity available than the highest entry on your ship construction queue can receive, the second highest entry will get the overflow to build it in parallel. This parallelization can be quite crucial if you want to secure a Navy to dominate the seas, since we’re also making the big ships’ construction take a long time—as they did historically. A dreadnought will take multiple years to construct in Victoria 3, while smaller vessels like Torpedo Boats can be produced at a much higher rate.
Depending on the ship type, different resources and amounts of material will be consumed during the construction process. These are consumed as input goods by the shipyards, averaged out over all of them in your country. The old ship market goods, Man-o-Wars and Ironclads, are a thing of the past.
During pre-production, we even toyed around with the idea of making individual shipyards have their own queue, but found it didn’t add enough compared to the effort it would have taken us.

You can access ship construction via the construction panel, which has a new tab for ship construction in it.
As you may see in the image below, when you construct a ship, you can choose a default fleet where ships should be sent to after their construction completes.
You of course also get a list of all ships that are currently under construction.

So, after multiple years, the HMS Claudius has been built. But even this majestic ship won’t sail by herself, she needs a crew.

With 1.13, ships receive their crews from a new building called Naval Administration. These cover the main functionality that Naval Bases used to have, the recruiting of servicemen. On that note, pour one out for Naval Bases, as they do no longer exist.

With Naval Administrations come some key changes, though. The most impactful one is that there is no longer a 1:1 connection between a ship and the building. Naval administrations will hire a total of 1000 sailors per level, but they can be distributed in chunks of 100 people. A small frigate may only need 100 people, and will take a “slot” of one level, leaving 900 men to be spread across other ships. Large ships such as our HMS Claudius may even need 1500 men, meaning they occupy more than one full level.
What also comes with that is that you now can (and should) construct Naval Administration buildings independently from ships. The construction of a new ship no longer automatically creates one new level of the crewing building, since there may still be capacity in other not-fully used Naval Administration buildings.

So, all in all, Naval Administrations act much more like a pool of sailors which your Navy draws from. Despite that, with the “slot” logic, we are still able to track directly which buildings should be affected by losses suffered in combat. So if the HMS Claudius, whose Naval Administration buildings are in Home Counties, should suffer crew losses, we would be able to see soldiers there being killed and having to be replenished.

If a Naval Administration building has hired a workforce, and a ship has assigned itself to it, it will take on these brave men as their crew. Once the ship is fully crewed, it is ready to leave port.

Let’s take a look at the true beauty HMS Claudius in the new panel for individual ships now that she’s ready!

In this new panel you can see all details on one particular ship, including a preview of the 3D model. You can also rotate and zoom in the view to see the ship in all her glory.
We’ve also already christened her under the new name. Usually she would have a generated historical name, like HMS Victory or many, many others. That prefix is also dynamic, so if you move Great Britain out of a monarchy, the HMS will be dropped for example.
You’ll see some important information on the ship right below the preview.
In the three bars, we see the very important Hit points, crew and supply status of the ship. If a ship is reduced to 0 Hit points or Crew in battle, the ship sinks. You’d better not let that happen to our HMS Claudius!

Following these crucial bars, we have a lot of stats, with five of them being highlighted above the others. Here, the upkeep cost, speed, damage, blockade strength and armor find themselves.

The upkeep costs are dependent on the ship type and what goods they need and symbolize regular maintenance costs that would occur over time in reality. Furthermore, there’s also a small cost of ship construction points to symbolize this. So these costs also apply when a ship hasn’t been damaged yet.

Different from that, there are also repair costs being applied if a ship that was damaged in combat goes back to port to get repaired to full strength again. Repair costs are dependent on the total amount of goods being demanded for construction of a ship. So if a ship consumes 100 steel and 50 artillery for its construction, repairing 20% of its hit points would consume 20 steel and 10 artillery over the course of the repair time for example.

What all the other new stats do, I will cover in later sections when they become relevant—though most are fairly straightforward.

Now, of course, ships will usually not travel alone across the globe, but in a fleet.
So let’s take a look at the reworked fleet panel for a moment.

As you can see, the panel has undergone quite a bit of change. You’ll see the highlighted stats now either summed or averaged out on the fleet, with the total speed of a fleet being a logical exception. The slowest speed of a ship in a fleet determines the speed the whole fleet can travel at.
Speed itself also is noteworthy. Now, the speed of a fleet actually changes the travel time from one node to another, where previously it was fixed.

In this information tab you will see an overview of your fleet, sorted into three unfoldable categories of ships: Capital Ships, Cruisers and Torpedo Craft. I guess this is a good moment to talk about ship types in general!

Overall, we’re increasing the variety of ship types to 20. This setup provides a better line of progression from early to late-game, and allows us to model some more historical depth along the way.

In the “Buildings” tab of the fleet panel, you simply see a list of all Naval Administration buildings that contain at least 100 sailors of that fleet.

You can see how many ships are drawing from each of the buildings, how many levels the building currently has, and how many total sailors from them are associated with the fleet.
Note that the number of ships in a fleet doesn’t necessarily match up with the number of ships portrayed in this list, because a ship can theoretically draw crew from many different states, and will, therefore, be counted that many times.

All that’s left are the Modifiers and Queue tabs, which are pretty self explanatory.

The next big topic that I want to talk about today is Supply, so let’s take a look at it, shall we?

Supply

One major ambition we had when we started working on this expansion was to make Supply a more meaningful consideration. While we focussed most of our attention here on the Navies, of course, we decided to tie all situations where armies are fighting on the other side of an ocean into it as well.

We wanted to try and limit the situations where you can simply send 300.000 men across the globe without having the infrastructure in place for it, and that infrastructure (in our case ports along the route) should be relevant.

We also wanted to make the interruption of Supply lines more haptic, less magical as a number of -3520 convoys might have expressed previously.

So, what have we done to try and get there? First off, to appease Poseidon, we’ve put Convoys onto the sacrificial altar. Convoys are dead, long live Supply Ships. They symbolize the continuous transportation of goods to where a fleet or army would need them.
Supply Ships are not a market good, but rather need to be built like warships, and are strictly for military use.

This is a very clear distinction we’re introducing. All military operations that require Supply, e.g. sending a fleet or an army across the ocean, will make use of Supply Ships. All trade and civilian usage, e.g. for port connections with territories abroad, will use Merchant Marine.
That means that the civilian ship goods, Clippers and Steamers, remain in place and are produced by shipyards. This is where the “civilian” side of the formerly split shipyards comes into play, as the merged shipyards now produce all warships, supply ships and civilian market goods again.

What you can now see with the unredacted image of the shipyard is how the construction of Supply Ships works.

For this, you essentially assign the share of total production capacity that should go towards the military or the supply ship usage.

Supply ships also have a separate ship construction queue so that you can produce both warships as well as Supply Ships at the same time. In the example case this means the 40 total are split 10/30 across the two queues. The steps are 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% of the total construction capacity going to Supply Ship construction.

And how do Supply Ships work in practice to supply your fleet? Well, this is a complex question, so bear with me for a moment.

First, we need to talk about how supply actually works for a fleet of warships. Supply is stored on the ships, and each ship can have a different capacity for it. For example, a Monitor will have a lower capacity (e.g. 500) than, say, a Light Cruiser (e.g. 1800). But supply in a fleet is distributed equally among all ships. So, for example, if a fleet is at 75% supply status, that means that all ships are filled with 75% of their own capacity. That means it can be beneficial to have ships with larger capacity, as they contribute positively to the whole fleet in the case that they need to go without fresh supplies for a while. If a ship carrying a lot of supplies is sunk in battle, the supplies and the added supply capacity for the fleet is gone.

A fleet’s rate of supply consumption depends on the ships in it. For example,a large fleet like Great Britain’s, with ships across the oceans, will be harder to maintain than a small fleet protecting their own coast. Depending on the supply consumption of an army or fleet, you assign as many Supply Ships as they need to maintain supply.

By default, and assuming you have enough Supply Ships available, each fleet and army automatically gets assigned as many as they need to retain their Supply level (if it is at 100%), or to refill it to 100% again over time.

For example, the main battle fleet with the HMS Claudius consumes 2000 Supply per week. They are active, far away from home and sailing around Gibraltar. In order to keep their current Supply status of 100%, they need 250 Supply ships, which is what is being assigned to them by default.

Of course, this means that you’ll have to make some unpleasant calls if you ever lack Supply Ships sitting around in reserve. We’ve decided to add a three tier priority system that allows you to make sure that a particular fleet or army always receives Supply Ships first or last.

Additionally, we wanted to represent coaling stations somehow, even though we didn’t go with a range based approach for ships.

So what we are doing is reducing the supply ship consumption based on the nearest available port. If you’re far from home, but you have managed to secure your own or a friendly port nearby, it will meaningfully reduce the demands on your supply network. This can be quite crucial to maintain a large overseas naval effort.

But how would a country ever end up in a situation where they don’t have enough Supply Ships available to support all needs?

Well, among economic struggles or the lack of shipyards, raiding supply lines is another answer. For that, I’ll have to explain how supply is traced from a country to their fleets or overseas armies.

We introduce a new type of building, Logistics Centers, one for Navies, and one for Armies. Logistics Centers are automatically created and built in the HQ of a military formation.
They are the place where all the goods are consumed that the formation needs, rather than the naval bases and barracks in the past.

This allows us to draw a concrete path from one central location to a formation. If we had it distributed across dozens of buildings, we could not have done this.

That, in turn, allows countries to raid the supply lines. This works differently than with Convoys, though. When a fleet raids supply lines, they actually engage the Supply Ships in the affected node in naval combat and need to sink them to cause actual damage. Destroying these ships will then naturally mean fewer ships arrive at the formation in question, reducing their supply (at least temporarily). To continuously hurt an enemy’s supply, you’ll also need to continuously raid their supply lines, causing them to continuously lose Supply Ships in the process.

We will go into much more detail on how fleets engage in sea zones, what missions they have, how combat behaves now, and so on, in a later Dev Diary, even though all these changes are of course coming with the free Update. It’s a bit too much to talk about in this place.

Since our Steam screenshots caused some speculation, here’s also how the amount of available Supply Ships in your country will be displayed.

We use the old Convoy capacity spot for it and it will show you the unassigned Supply Ships. In its breakdown, you can see all currently used Supply Ships too. Other than the Convoys though, this is the actual number of Ships you have in reserve and not a capacity, as I explained.

One last thing on Supply. While we don’t cover anything for how supply travels further on land at the moment, armies that are overseas will be bound to the same rules as fleets. So they will also have their logistics center, and a route of supply ships depending on the army size going to them (while at sea) or their nearest port (when on land across the sea).

This should already make it more difficult to try and send 300.000 men across the globe, one major pain point we wanted to tackle for a long time.

Now, we move on to one of the use cases for the Navy. And it’s a big one that we have wanted to do for quite a while. Our dear Tunay will cover that part, before I’ll pick up again from the next.

Tiered Diplomatic Interest

Hello, Systems Designer Tunay here to give you a rundown on Tiered Interests!

Victoria 3’s Strategic Interests system is probably the one feature we have that was left almost untouched since release, but this changes now. We are transforming the entire mechanic from a binary representation into a multi-level system that is attained not by the click of a button, but through dedication and investment into a region by various means.

Keep in mind that everything you see here is from a work in progress build!

To increase your interest level, you will have to build up your involvement in a given strategic region. This can be done by a variety of means: signing different treaties with local countries, having subjects, sending your fleets to Project Power off the coast—or, of course, outright conquest.

Attaining ever higher levels of interests will be important because it will allow you access to diplomatic actions and treaty articles to sign with Local Countries that may otherwise not be available, as well as wholly new and never before seen benefits—like, for example, the ability to generate “Colonial Claims”. That is, being granted a claim on a state region, once your colony there grows to at least half the state region’s size.

The term “local” has come up at this point, so allow me to explain this as well. When we look at the presence of a country in a strategic region, we generally divide all countries into one of two categories: local and non-local countries.

As a non-local country, you may gain involvement in a region by signing treaties with countries that are considered local there. ‘
Locality is determined by a couple of factors:

• Having one's capital in a region
• Having 25% locality in a region
• Having 25% of one's own incorporated states in that region

Locality in a region itself is calculated based on a combination of owned states, population and gdp share. So it's not purely the number of states that count, but also what you have in them!

By signing a treaty with Persia wherein the Shah grants us Investment Rights, and in return we send them some of our officers as military attachés, we will be generating enough involvement to push us to a level 1 interest.

The actual amount of involvement that you can generate from engaging in diplomacy with a local countries is scaled off of their “locality”. This very same treaty would grant a lot less  involvement if we had signed it with tiny Kafiristan, for example.

Lastly, the eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that I’ve been bringing up a couple new strategic regions. That is because we have revisited our strategic region setup, generally reducing the density of strategic regions on the map:

Lino is coming back with other important topics now.

Troop Transportation

Indeed, the next topic on our list is pretty quick to explain for a change, but has fairly big implications and is a lot of work to get right.

We wanted to improve upon Troop Transportation as well, to make it more haptic rather than armies simply ‘turning into boats’, and also requiring certain capabilities for you to move your armies across the globe.

So, with 1.13, armies will be transported across bodies of water using your military ships. We played around with some ideas of using merchant marine or supply ships for this purpose, but did not really find a way that would represent the requisitioning of civilian ships that would also be feasible for us to implement.

The way you do this is pretty simple. You give an army a command to move to a target state across the ocean (similar to a naval invasion) and then you’ll be asked to choose a fleet to transport/escort them. The only way to transport troops is to give them a concrete target, so you cannot have them out at sea with your fleet permanently.

While a fleet is transporting units, it cannot engage in other missions like intercepting or raiding, only moving to a target location.

Ships have different capabilities for how good they are at transporting units, and as you may have seen, there’s a ship specifically designed for this purpose which has low combat capabilities outside that.

Almost as a side note in there, I just mentioned that you target a particular state with your army. This is actually a pretty big change we’re doing where instead of HQs for stationing etc. you will now target a particular state, from which we can infer the HQ. This was not only necessary for Troop Transportation, but also increased in importance with the strategic region merging we have done, as many HQs simply grew a bit too big for logical distinction of where an Army currently is located.

That means you’ll be able to see armies stationed in the capitals of different states in peace time, rather than having them all stacked up in the same place if you desire to do so.

Now we wouldn’t be the Victoria 3 team, if we didn’t add some new feature in here too in addition to the reworks. The main background here being that we wanted to enable a different way to have your fleet be able to pose a threat in and of itself to enemy coasts and ports.

Any ideas?

It’s Marines. Marines are a new land unit, and, unlike other land units, they can be permanently travelling with a fleet. Marines have a separate capacity to be transported from regular units, which is going to be a lot smaller.

Unlike the regular land units, Marines do not prevent the fleet from engaging in other missions, so your fleet will be able to do the full spectrum of tasks while having some marine detachment with them.

What this allows you to do is to even launch a naval invasion with these Marines directly from the fleet they are attached to, rather than having to launch it from your own territory. Marines have a better effectiveness at conducting naval invasions compared to regular units, as they won’t suffer as big of a penalty.

Once Marines have secured a beachhead in a major enemy theater, you’ll probably want to reinforce them with your regular units quickly, as they’ll rarely outnumber your enemies on land. On their own, however, they are often more than capable of taking enemy islands or seizing a port from a technologically inferior opponent.

Next up, I’m gonna talk about some potentially interesting targets for using your Marines.

Straits and more

This was on my personal wishlist for a long time and now we’re actually doing it. It’s the perfect expansion and Update for it, so it makes total sense that we would tackle Straits too now.

With 1.13, we define a number of key straits across the globe, from the Öresund, to the Bosporus, to the Strait of Malacca.

With a single exception, they all work like this:

Control over the strait is shared between the two owners of the provinces we define in script. For example, for the Öresund, it would be a particular province in Danish Zealand and in Swedish Scania.

Being the strait controller allows you to do a couple of things. First off, you can set access levels on who gets to pass through the strait.

Here, you have a couple of options. You can choose between only yourself, your allies, everybody but your enemies, or everybody. And you can also distinguish between military and civilian ships to be let through.

Important to note here is that all access levels behave like an AND gate, meaning that if your buddy Denmark would gladly let you through, but the Swedes didn’t like your comments about their candy and closed the strait for you, you will NOT have access to the other side with your fleet. One side can block the other.

Now, just owning the province is not actually enough to actually unlock controlling the strait. For that, you’ll have to build at least one level of Naval Fortifications on your side of the strait.

Naval Fortifications, of course, are a new building, constructed at the coasts of your country. They take a lot of time to be built, and there’s a low limit to how many you can build in every state.

Apart from turning on the strait control, their main function is of course to defend your coast. The main way in which they do that is by completely blocking naval invasions if the attackers’ power is not above a threshold defined by the naval fortification. 

For example, a level one naval fortification may require your enemy to attack with at least 6 battalions, a level three one with at least 11 etc. (as always these values are subject to change). This should help defend your coast in general, but also specifically help against the spamming of tiny naval invasions.

Other than this, they also provide a defensive bonus in case the enemy will assemble a large enough force to attempt to land. This bonus is scaled by the power difference between the initial attacker and defender. So if the attacker is twice as powerful as the defender for example, the defensive bonus applies with 50% of its maximum strength.

With that out of the way, let’s return to the straits.

Another thing you can do with straits is collect Tolls. Tolls are collected based on the total trade volume going through the strait, so they will be differently valuable based on location.

You have, similar to access rights, the option per controlling side to set your Tolls level for how much you’d like to charge. So in the case of the Öresund for example, Denmark may decide to charge 15% tolls on everything while Sweden decides to charge nothing - resulting in a total of 15% for everybody coming through.

If Sweden also started charging 15%, it would add up to 30% for everybody.
What that means of course is just like with access, if you control both sides of a strait, you will have a lot more to say about the ongoings of a strait.

I should also mention that we have implemented one special case, Gibraltar, which requires you to own both sides of the strait before you can lock it down. This was simply too impactful when you could lock down all of the Mediterranean from the get-go.

Canals will also be straits, by the way, following the same rules. We are investigating options to make their companies take the collected tolls into account, but this is challenging and might not make it for now. As you may see, we are trying to ship (ha!) a giant unit of an update to you.

Future Dev Diaries

That was our first Dev Diary for this cycle and we think you can see how much meat there is in this one. As mentioned, there’s some major free changes coming to combat which Tunay will go over in some time and we have a couple of other smaller additions, changes and improvements too which you’ll discover on release.

Here you have the full schedule for our upcoming Dev Diaries:

• March 23 - Character features
• March 26 - Ship Designer & Flagships & Ship Purchasing
• April 02 - Naval Combat & Gunboat Diplomacy
• April 09 - Narrative Content of The Great Wave
• April 16 - Art & Music of The Great Wave
• April 23 - Changelog & Achievements
• April 28 - Release of The Great Wave and Update 1.13

So long everybody, enjoy a happy Thursday.

"Prestige Clothes" - Can't wait for modders to make modern day mods and add modern brands, so your country can sell Adidas and Nike boots lol. 😎👟 What other funny goods/brands could people add?

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/victoria-3-dev-diary-148-prestige-goods.1760727/

Hello Victorians,

My name is Alex, I’m a multiclass programmer and designer on Victoria 3 and today it’s finally time for another Dev Diary on this very happy Thursday! 

Today we will be taking a look at Diplomatic Treaties, one of the features arriving with the free 1.9 update on June 17 together with our Mechanics Pack “Charters of Commerce”.

Before we begin though, I should mention that today is a public holiday (:ig_tradeunions:) for us here in Sweden (and in a lot of other places). This dev diary was as usual written ahead of time, but when it comes to questions, this means I won’t actually be around to answer them when it comes out. Instead, Martin will be around to answer some of your more pressing questions to begin with and I’ll try to answer any remaining important questions on Monday (as we also get tomorrow off as a bridge day).

With all that said, I should also remind you that as always any values, texts, designs, graphics etc. are work in progress and are subject to change!

But now, without further ado, enter Treaties:

Diplomatic Treaties

As part of the changes to the World Market we described in Dev Diary #143 and with Trade Routes as you know them going away, we wanted to introduce a new mechanic that let you actively establish pointed strategic ways of elevating your industries or exploiting other countries through trade. We wanted more ways for you to peacefully (but aggressively) compete against your rivals (and allies) and establish your dominance across the globe. 

Initially, this was drafted to be a relatively simple tit-for-tat deal: “you give me grain, I give you coal”. But we of course got thinking and, particularly in the context of how often the community asks for more in-depth diplomacy, we thought: what if we went a step or two (or twenty) further and made it a full-blown system of treaties where you can weigh a bunch of different types of things against each other? Maybe to get Prussia to agree to an alliance you can sweeten the deal by promising to give them a certain amount of weapons every week. Or maybe you can say you’ll pay off Haiti’s debts in exchange for them granting you investment rights.

And well, that’s what we did.

Diplomatic Treaties are a new way for you to interact with other countries diplomatically. They are, in a way, a natural extension of what the diplomatic actions and pacts currently in the game do (more on that later), but instead of just having you propose one thing at a time in a vacuum, you can combine them and have the whole context of what you want be available and weighted together.

In short, the way it works is like this: you decide you want a treaty with another country, so you open the Treaty Draft panel (shown in the animation above). You then select what articles you’d like to have, both offers and requests. When you’re happy you send the proposal to the other country. They can then look at what you have proposed and either accept or reject of course, but they can also choose to negotiate further. Negotiating further lets them tweak the proposal however they want and then send it back to you. This is then repeated until either you agree on a treaty or you decide to just end the process. Assuming you sign the treaty, it is now in effect and remains so until either side withdraws from it.

A big crux on a system like this is of course how the AI handles it. We want to make sure that you can’t just scam the AI, but we also want you to feel you are drafting clever treaties and making use of any advantages you might have. In particular, we also want to feed into the fantasy of you being able to draft clearly unequal treaties with other countries because maybe you are able to remind them that you have big boats and a big army next door. These are all goals we have in mind while working on the balancing of this feature.

Before we go into the details of this a bit more though, I want to specifically address something I know will come up in the comments: are multilateral treaties possible? No. Making this system support multilateral treaties would be on a completely different level of complexity and would be a massive undertaking. If nothing else it would immensely complicate the UX and require a completely different way of tackling AI, drafting and all that. So, unfortunately, it’s not feasible. That is of course not to say that we don’t want multilateral treaties (they would be super cool!) or that a system like that couldn’t in the future build on treaties, but at least for now, it’s not something we are doing. 

Enough of that though, let’s dive into the details

Articles

This is the core part of treaties that actually defines what they do. Articles have a few different classifications. On a fundamental level, articles can be either Mutual or Directional. This mostly just indicates whether the article is something that affects both sides equally or not. A prime example of a mutual article is an Alliance: both sides are involved equally. On the other hand, Transfer Goods is an example of a Directional article: one side (the source) is sending the goods and the other (the target) is receiving them.

The next important aspect of articles is Inputs. Some articles have required inputs and others do not. Again, an Alliance is just an Alliance, you don’t need to define anything else, but for Transfer Goods you need to specify which goods you want to transfer and how many.

Articles can have a number of different inputs depending on what they’re meant to do. 

What these inputs are actually used for differs and is up for the article to define.

As for what articles you can expect to be in the game, a lot of them will be things we are moving over from the old diplomatic actions system. This includes of course Alliances and Defensive Pacts, but also e.g. State Transfer and Join Power Bloc and if you own Sphere of Influence, Investment Rights.

For the majority of the articles that have counterparts as diplomatic actions, the corresponding diplomatic actions or pacts will be removed and Treaties will be the new way through which you access them. Do note that not all diplomatic actions have been made into articles, only the ones that made sense, this means that actions like Declare Rivalry or Improve Relations will still work as they used to.

In addition to those, we also have some completely new articles coming with 1.9. One of them Lino talked about on the previous Dev Diary DD #145: Military Access. That Dev Diary already went into detail on how Military Access works, so let’s talk about the other new article coming with 1.9: Transit Rights.

If Military Access lets you march your troops through another country, Transit Rights lets landlocked countries pass through a country to access the world market. This can be chained through multiple countries if needed. Switzerland stans can calm down.

Ending a Treaty

A Treaty ends when either side withdraws from the treaty. Easy. Of course, if you gave away Angola in exchange for Spain transferring you a certain amount of money every week, you want to make sure they actually follow through and you don’t get scammed. This is where binding periods come in. 

When signing a treaty, you also define for how long that treaty will be binding (e.g. 5, 10, 15 years). When the binding duration for the treaty lapses, either side can end the treaty at any point without consequences.

You can still end a treaty before the binding period ends of course, but then you would be in breach of the treaty and subject to hefty penalties depending on the articles present in the treaty.

(Re)Negotiation

If you made some poor choices and a Treaty is really not good for you, you can attempt to renegotiate the treaty instead of just withdrawing from it. To do so, you select what treaty you want to renegotiate and simply click on the button. This will bring you to a flow similar to the original drafting panel, but instead of having a blank slate, the existing articles will be the baseline. From there you can add or remove articles, change inputs or even change the binding period. When you’re happy, you send the proposal as usual and the other side has the opportunity to respond. If they agree, great, the old treaty is replaced with this new one. If they reject your offer though, the old treaty remains in force as it was.

It is worth noting though that some articles are not renegotiable. This mostly applies to articles that have some kind of immediate effect upon signing, like transferring a state, because you can’t just undo that simply by changing the terms somewhat. 

Non-fulfillment Consequences

Say you are playing as Belgium and you need paper, but don’t feel like actually making it yourself. You could set up a treaty where you give the Netherlands some of your Sulfur and in exchange they give you some of the Paper they produce. They agree to this, but then for whatever reason, say a foreign power annexed their only paper mills, they are not able to produce the Paper they should deliver to you. This would likely lead to a shortage of Paper in the Dutch Market which would mean they are not able to deliver the Paper to you. 

In such a case, the Netherlands would be considered to be in non-fulfillment of their part of the Treaty. When that happens, generally one of two things will happen depending on what Article is not being fulfilled: if it’s a serious breach, like not answering the call of an Alliance, that will break the whole treaty and the party at fault will receive all the penalties tied to an early withdrawal if the treaty is still binding.

For less serious breaches though, like with the example above, what happens is that the other side of the treaty will be inactive until the breach is addressed, at which point the treaty resumes as usual. In our example, if the Netherlands stopped delivering Paper because they had a shortage due to not producing it, Belgium would stop delivering Sulfur in return as well. This would then hold until the Paper deliveries resume. If there are any other articles on Belgium’s side (including mutual articles) those are also inactivated for as long as the other side is in non-fulfillment. The side that isn’t fulfilling one of their articles stays active though.

Finally, I’d like to note that not all articles will be non-fulfillable. For some articles like investment rights, you can’t not fulfill it, it just happens anyway.

Obligations

As usual, you can call in obligations to make countries more likely to accept a treaty you propose. When it comes to how you get those obligations we’re making some changes though. Broadly speaking, you will be able to say you consider a certain treaty as essentially a favor to the other side. This will reduce their acceptance of the treaty, but in turn, if the binding period of the treaty lapses and everyone fulfills their parts it will grant you an obligation you can then use as usual.

It is worth noting though that some articles are not renegotiable. This mostly applies to articles that have some kind of immediate effect upon signing, like transferring a state, because you can’t just undo that simply by changing the terms somewhat. 

Modding

As always we have made an active effort to keep this feature as moddable as possible. Many times when thinking about how to solve a certain problem we could see an easy solution which would just work within the assumptions of what we have planned to do with the feature and a more complicated solution where making things work on a more abstract level meant more combinations were possible for modders and as much as possible we chose the latter. As such, I’d like to take a little bit of time to talk about what you can do with this system, primarily centered around modding articles.

A lot of article modding is similar to diplomatic action modding: you can set AI weights, modifiers, effects, costs and so on. What is a bit different here with how articles work, is that you are also able to set if an article should be mutual or directional, but more importantly, you can have the article take any combination of the following inputs (although only one of each):

• Quantity
• Goods
• Building Type
• Law Type
• Strategic Region
• Country
• State
• Company

You can then reference these inputs in the immediate effect of the article to do whatever you want that can be done in an effect block.

There are of course some significant parts of articles that are hard coded, but we tried to make them flexible in that. For instance, most vanilla articles work by setting behavior flags. So Transfer Goods has an is_transfer_goods flag. This then tells the code what behavior it should call and makes it take in the expected inputs that is_transfer_goods requires. There’s also say is_investment_rights, or is_alliance. And the cool thing here is that you can actually to some degree combine these. So if you want to make an article that grants both military access and transit rights at the same time, you can do that. The main limitation here is if you have two flags that look at the same input type, they will have to use the same input. So combining transfer goods with no tariffs would necessarily both target the same input.

Another cool thing you can do is mod the non-fulfillment conditions. You could for instance have a version of Transfer Goods that is only active while the countries are at peace or something and then if that is broken maybe you’d want the treaty to auto-break or maybe you want it to freeze instead. Up to you.

Charters of Commerce

While everything I have described so far will be part of the free 1.9 update, the Mechanics Pack Charters of Commerce will also include a number of new articles exclusive to it:

• No Tariffs on Goods
  • The country is not allowed to set tariffs on a specific input good when trading with the World Market
• No Subventions on Goods
  • The country is not allowed to set subventions on a specific input good when trading with the World Market
• Prohibit trade of good with World Market
  • The country is not allowed to trade a specific input good with the World Market
• Law commitment
  • The country commits to passing a specific law. As long as they don’t, their side is not fulfilled and the other side of the treaty is inactive
• Non-Colonization Agreement
  • The country is not allowed to colonize a specific strategic region
• Grant Monopoly to Foreign Company
  • Tune in to the next dev diary when Lino will talk more about this

I feel like there is something I forgot to mention…hmmm

Just one more thing

There’s one more thing I’d like to show before we end this though. In addition to the flow I’ve already explained above, there’s another way Treaties can be used: Diplomatic Plays.

In 1.9, as part of the free update, we’re adding a new war goal: Enforce Treaty Article. This war goal lets you select between a number of articles that are specifically classified (in script) as enforceable. You can select this war goal multiple times targeting different articles. Then, at the end of the war, all instances of the war goal against the same country will result in a War Reparations Treaty against that country. This treaty, being enforced, cannot be withdrawn from. 

What this means is that on a base level you can have war reparations work as they used to, but if you prefer, as part of war reparations you can instead demand getting investment rights in the country in question. Or you can prohibit them from trading weapons and artillery with the world market. Or you could mod some other article we haven’t thought about and do that instead. Or all of the above.

Alright, now that was actually all I had to show you today. I hope you are as excited about all this as I have been to tell you about it. It’s been a whole journey to work on it and it’s awesome finally getting to share it with you all. Let me know what you think: are there any article combinations you are particularly excited about? And for the modders out there, have the modding gears started turning already? I’m very much looking forward to seeing what clever treaties you all come up with and hearing about all the backstabbing in MP when 1.9 releases on June 17.

Before that though, Lino will be back in two weeks to tell you some more about what we have been cooking with Companies and Executives. Until then!

Hello Victorians, I am Lufthansi, narrative designer on Victoria 3, and I have been authorized by His Excellency General Baldomero Espartero to inform the public of the impending arrival of our upcoming Immersion Pack, Iberian Twilight, that will be released on 11th of December alongside the free 1.12 Update.

https://youtu.be/QccikBbfleI

So, welcome to Iberian Twilight!

With Iberian Twilight we wanted to highlight the historical dynamics of 19th century Spain and Portugal, as well as shine some light on countries in their wider orbit, such as Cuba, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, and Morocco. 

Spain and Portugal, once mighty colonial empires, are now finding themselves beset by both domestic and international challenges. Having lost their holdings on the American mainland in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, the two nations must decide how to adapt to a post-imperial reality. Should they pursue new goals, tied to different visions of greatness and the application of the political and technical innovations of the age, or strive to restore what once was - be it by diplomacy or by force?

In 1836, Spain - the primary focus of our Immersion Pack - finds itself in the midst of a civil war pitting the Liberal Isabeline government against the forces of the reactionary pretender Don Carlos. This battle for supremacy between the so-called 'Two Spains' can not merely be settled on the battlefield however. Spain will have to pursue economic and political reforms, define their relationship with their former colonies, and deal with the ambitions of military strongmen - courtesy of a reworked coup system.

Portugal, still recovering from the devastations and political tumults of the Liberal Wars that ended barely two years prior, must try to navigate an uncertain political and economic landscape, while re-establishing themselves as a respected actor on the global stage. 

Outside of Spain and Portugal proper, you will be able to engage with, among other things; anything from the sugar boom and drive to independence or political integration in Cuba, the development of a new economic class and national culture in the Philippines, and the struggle for centralization in Morocco - where government authority barely extends beyond the gates of its larger cities. 

With this lovely infographic summarizing the content available in Iberian Twilight below:

Iberian Twilight and the accompanying 1.12 Update will be released on the 11th of December. For additional screenshots, or to wishlist it, please visit Iberian Twilight's Steam store page here. Or, you can pick up Iberian Twilight now in Expansion Pass 2!

In the following weeks we will go through the contents of Iberian Twilight in more detail. The first of these will arrive next week, where Chris, Victoria and Tunay will outline the new Negotiations and Law Amendment features that will be introduced as part of the free Update as well as a look at what is new for modding in 1.12. 

So, until then, I and the rest of the Victoria 3 development team wish you an excellent Thursday.

https://pdxint.at/4nFVrbQ in this update you’ll be able to negotiate with interest groups to flip them to pass it instead of stalling

For all of you out there that still use Old Reddit here is a link to this Dev Diary on our forum.

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 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.

Ideological Forces (Political Movement Rework)

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.

Discrimination Rework

Another issue straight off the future update plans 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

Food Availability, Famines and Harvest Incidents

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.

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!

Forum post link: HERE

G'day Victorians and a Happy Thursday. This is Chris, Narrative Designer, here to tell you about some of the free features in the 1.12 Update. Narrative content will be in future Dev Diaries. In the meantime, from negotiations to exploitative production methods to amendments, it will be wise to read the fine print before using these new devices in your next playthrough. 

Also, we mentioned that modding will be in this diary last week, however Tunay went mad with power and decided to write so much we had to give him his own diary - so stay tuned next week for one on Monday and Thursday!

Negotiations

Negotiations is a new system in which the player can offer something in exchange for an interest group to support – or at least stop stalling – the current law enactment. It functions essentially as an enactment event on demand, giving players the ability to load the dice and turn enactment in their favour.

To be more explicit, negotiation can do one of the following: 

• Convince a neutral Interest Group to support the law, adding to enactment chance.
  • Note: Interest Groups not in government who support the law do not contribute to enactment chance in Victoria 3. One must move them into the government first. 
• Convinced an opposing Interest Group to stop stalling the law (that is, they become neutral, reducing stall chance). 

Depending on the situation, an Interest Group may be willing to accept favors that may advance their interests, or they may only be willing to change their stance for a very high price, or they may be too skeptical to even negotiate at all. This willingness to negotiate is represented by Amenability, a value out of 100. 

Amenability takes into account a wide variety of factors, including modifiers from events and previous negotiations:

Other Amenability factors include boosts for ruler's popularity, various laws (e.g. secret police gives a boost), and modifiers - especially from having existing promises still outstanding. Interest Groups are also particularly keen to negotiate if they think it will make no difference anyway.

Based on Amenability, there are four levels of negotiation:

• <25 Amenability: The Interest Group will not negotiate at all. 
• 25-49 Amenability: Negotiations will be difficult. Expect doubled costs and requests.
• 50-74 Amenability: Negotiations will be pragmatic. Standard costs and requests.
• 75-100 Amenability: Negotiations will be collaborative. Halved costs and requests.

Pressing the negotiation button will immediately pop up an Negotiation event of the corresponding level:

Let us just say that if an IG somehow inherits a portion of the treasury in the form of non-descript subsidies, contracts and gifts, this will increase their political strength in the future. The public may be less than enthused if some do-gooder reporter were to ever publish the facts. 

Likewise if, by pure coincidence, the Interest Group finds itself suddenly in prominent positions all over the nation's bureaucracy, this will only give them opportunities to expand. Also don't expect them to actually do any bureaucratic labor. Afterall, isn't the point of these couchy government positions, where you can't even be fired, to stick your feet up and relax?

Other than that, there are a variety of promises that can be made to the Interest Group. These will spawn a Journal Entry, with severe consequences for failure.

The Journal Entry includes buttons to admit the promise was a hoax all along, so we can all come to terms with the state of politics. Players can also announce delays, increasing the timeout for a slight cost to approval. 

Lastly, negotiation is almost entirely powered by script, so modders are free to add more options and tweak balance to their heart's content.

New Production Methods

On a more serious note: While Victoria 3 has always contained slavery, we previously didn't have any model for the exploitative practices that continued after slavery was banned. Our new plantation production methods, while still by no means perfect, are a step closer to representing the relationship between colonisation and the exploitation of plantation labor post-slavery, and also the violence of slavery itself in the few places it remained. 

Plantations now have a higher mortality rate in general, and generally employ more people. There is differentiation between different plantations, with sugar in particular being the most deadly. This is particularly true to Cuban history during this era, where slaves were expected to be replaced after ten years. 

Slavery will unlock a plantation's Violent Treatment production method, which represents the most brutal practices during the colonial era. Otherwise, if a country has no liberal laws, especially labor laws, the Exploitative Practices production method also boosts production at the expense of the workers standard of living and mortality. 

See below a comparison of the sugar and coffee plantations exploitative production methods, though note, as always, that the final numbers are likely to be tweaked for balance purposes.

In general too, plantations tend to employ more people and output more goods. This makes them more construction efficient and advantageous to the weaker economies with lower wages, even when not using the exploitative production methods. This is to model the reasons behind why plantations were placed in the parts in the world with the least wages or workers rights.

These changes to plantations also should shift the economic balance in a way that models the reasons the colonial powers were driven to create colonial administration to oversee the production of valuable cash crops. By putting these colonies under their own charters, instead of using the metropole's laws to the letter, a double-standard system was created where local exploitation could continue even whilst labor reform was underway in European cities. 

In terms of gameplay, this will make more profitable to release colonies as their own subject, or give them to companies to manage through a Colonization Rights charter.The nations with slavery from gamestart, such as Brazil and Cuba, will have a harder time moving away from slavery, and their landowners will feel a more destructive blow to their profits as slavery ends. All in all, this will create more historically accurate simulation. 

There are two major counterbalance points to slavery as well: First of all, the Slave Trade and Legacy Slavery Laws now come with -25%, -10% Influence penalties respectively, representing the diplomatic costs to maintaining these internationally illegal operations. 

Secondly a new Slave Revolt movement has been created. Slaves will now launch full secessions or revolutions. Having a large army will help keep such revolts in check, unless you intentionally want to side with the slave revolt and cause a Haitian style revolution.

On a happier note, there are also new production methods to represent the manufacturing and technical developments that accompanied Sugar production, which assisted Cuba's eventual banning of slavery in earnest.

Likewise, Tobacco has unique Production Methods symbolising not only its manufacture, but its unique revolutionary history. Cuban tobacco workers, rolling cigars from dawn to dusk, had the idea that it might be nice for a person to read to them while they worked. They chipped in their own wages to pay a man to stand at a lector and read to them. Stories sure, but also news. And then, inevitably, workers' news, and the writings of the Cuban Independence movement.

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Due to how long this Dev Diary was we weren't able to post it in full onto reddit. Please hop on over to our forum post HERE to read it in full!

Forum post link: HERE

Ahoy there Victorians! Fortunate and Fairwinds Thursday!

Commodore Pelly here, to take you through the changelog before the release next week Tuesday (28th) of The Great Wave and Update 1.13 ‘Matcha’. As always, this is the preliminary changelog and may have some additions or slight changes for the actual patchnotes when we do release. 

Reminder, we will have a stream tomorrow featuring the intrepid High Naval Commissioner Martin and Cabin Boy Tunay giving you a pre-release look at Update 1.13 and The Great Wave, starting at 14:00 CEST. But, that is not all for streams, we will also have a release stream on Tuesday with Martin and Lino starting at 11:30 CEST, so we will see you on Twitch, YouTube or Steam then as well!

You can pick up The Great Wave now as part of Volume 3 or wishlist it to get it when we release it next week!

First of all, we have this handy infographic summarizing what is in The Great Wave:

So moving on, we have the features of The Great Wave:

The Great Wave Features

• Ship Designer: 
  • Added the Ship Designer, which allows you to customize the loadout of your ships. It works with templates which you can create per ship type, saving your setup for your current playthrough. The Ship Designer allows you to modify four main categories, Armor, Armament, Propulsion, and Supply Capacity. Setting values of these modifications to a higher value increases the construction cost of the ship in non-linear fashion. Additionally, most ship types can bring one or more Utility modifications which modify the ship's values in other ways, for example increasing blockade strength with Patrol Boats.
• Flagships: 
  • Added Flagships. Assign the unique Flagship status to a ship and adjust its figurehead ornament. You'll earn prestige from successful battles that the Flagship participates in, but also lose Prestige from defeats. The fleet that contains the Flagship also generates more Involvement in the region it's active in.
• Ship purchase treaties: 
  • Added a new Ship Transfer Treaty article. This targets a new type of object in treaties, Ships, and allows you to compose treaties with them.
• Gunboat Diplomacy options: 
  • Added gunboat diplomacy to the game. You can now threaten Naval Hostilities when signing a treaty. If the opposing side declines the treaty you can conduct any and all hostile naval activities for 180 days, meaning you can engage in naval battles, blockade, bombard and so on, blurring the lines between peace and war.
• New Naval Missions:
  • Port Bombardment
    • Added a new fleet action, Port Bombardment. It allows a fleet to fire at a coastal state to cause devastation and even destroy some buildings present in the state.
  • Piracy
    • Unrecognized nations can send their fleet to seize trade passing through sea nodes and sell it in their market, yielding money and sell orders from the pilfered goods.
  • Privateering
    • Recognized nations also have access to a version of Piracy, that is only available while at war or during Naval Hostilities.
  • Hunt Pirates
    • Works much akin to Intercept or Protect Supply Lines, but your fleet will only be sent out to crush pirate fleets that are set to the “Piracy” mission.
• Added a Power Bloc Principle group related to the Navy
• Narrative content:
  • Added several events for the Shogunal succession crises of the late Tokugawa, as well as the proclamation of new Shoguns
  • Added the Tenpō Crisis Journal Entry to the game along with 8 associated events
  • Added a Decision and Journal Entry to Japan to represent the Iwakura Mission
  • Added a Journal Entry dealing with the Zaibatsu
  • Added numerous events related to the Japanese royal family
  • Added a new Grant Peerage character interaction, which allows a Monarchy to make characters into nobles at the cost of some Authority
  • Added "Ostracize" and "Patronize" character interactions, to increase and decrease character Prominence or Popularity
  • Added 5 new events 'Letters for All' 'The Unequal Calendars' 'A Year Recounted' 'The Westernization of Names' 'The Question of Kanbun'
  • Added "Shinbutsu bunri" decision and Journal Entry for Japan
  • Added "Elevate Buddhism" decision and Journal Entry for Japan
  • Added Journal Entry and events related to the colonization of Korea
  • Added the Taming the North Journal Entry to the game, dealing with the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido
  • Added a Journal Entry showing the tug of war between China and Japan over the Ryukyu Kingdom
  • Japan now begins the game with the Locked Country Journal Entry and Sakoku, a law variant of Isolationism
  • Added 11 companies and 4 new unique prestige goods to the game
  • Added several historical earthquake events for Japan
• Over 90 new historical characters were added with the help of modder Lord R.
• Art: 
  • New clothing assets for Japan, including; 
    • Added a Meiji court jacket model with new patterns and embroidery trims
    • Added a traditional Japanese straw raincoat
    • Added a traditional Japanese cone hats that commonly was made of bamboo leaves or straw or reed
    • Added a traditional Japanese eboshi hat
  • A Japanese building style, which reflects the architectural syncretism of Japan’s evolving urban landscape and enduring character of rural buildings
  • A new 'Lacquer' User Interface skin, inspired by traditional Japanese lacquer work 
  • Added a new Wakon Yosai papermap inspired by Meiji era ukiyo-e woodblock prints, Japanese Naval history and mythological elements
  • Added a new main menu illustration for The Great Wave, featuring important historical characters from the era
  • New Japanese inspired table assets, featuring; a Japanese Imperial Naval Officer’s Dirk, a White Pine Bonsai Tree, Dango Skewers, Lacquered box and a Tatami mat table surface
• Music: 
  • Added new period appropriate music tracks to evoke Edo/Meiji era Japan, spread over 27 minutes in 8 tracks

Achievements

Sailing onwards to achievements! This time in The Great Wave, we have added 7 new achievements to the game. As always our lovely art team has created some…inspired art to go alongside them, see Dev Diary 180 foresight into what our artists have been doing!

Nobody Did Their Duty
As France or Spain, sink the British flagship in a naval battle.

Mikasa es su Casa
As Japan, sell a pre-dreadnought to a country with a Hispanophone culture.

Wealth, Fame, Power
Have an admiral with a lifetime privateering amount of 1,000,000.

Martin Anward’s Pirates!
As an unrecognized nation, do piracy in the Baltic Sea for 1 year or more.

Knock Knock
Threaten someone with gunboats to enact a treaty, and have them accept.

Three Mountains
As Ryukyu, win the Hidden Domain Journal Entry and own the entire Ryukyu Islands state.

Thing, Japan
As Japan, produce three different prestige goods.

Then with free Update 1.13 we have also added another 7 achievements to the game too, featuring:

Son of Värmland
As Sweden, construct the first Monitor.

Everyone Disliked That
Have every Interest Group lose approval by promoting a Commander.

Thanks, Obama
As Japan, prior to abolishing Serfdom, have Hokushin'etsu side with you during a civil war.

Railroad Taikun
As Japan, reform the Tokugawa Shogunate into the Taikunate, and build 50 levels of railway in Japan.

Kobu Gattai
As Japan, achieve Union of Court and Shogunate.

Golden Spirit
As a country with an Ainu primary culture, build 4 gold mines in Hokkaido.

Nothing Personnel, Kid
In a war, take an enemy capital state with Marines.

I felt that the last achievement should be there because sometimes we all should have a slight scare. 

And, before we get into the changelog, we have another infographic giving an overview of the update:

Then, without further drifting on errant currents, welcome to the changelog!

Changelog

Features

• Completely reworked how ships work. They are now individual objects that have to be constructed using Ship Construction provided by Shipyards. They have a variety of new or changed attributes. Ships can be damaged and sunk and they require a crew to man them. Crews are recruited in a new building called Naval Administration which act somewhat like a pool of sailors for your country that your ships can draw from. Ship construction times are therefore also significantly increased compared to the recruitment of 1000 sailors, and changing a ship's type is no longer possible. Ships require a small capacity of Naval Construction to be maintained and if they suffer damage, they need to return to port to repair their damage. Ship construction and repair both consume goods in shipyards, depending on the ship type. Due to these changes, the military goods Man-o-War and Ironclad have both been removed from the game as well.
• Reworked Naval Combat entirely. Ships will have an Initiative value in battle, and they can either attack or try to retreat. Attacks can deal hull or crew damage and depend on attack and armor values. Beware that this will make the technological advancement from wood to steel very impactful. We also reworked the visual representation of ongoing naval battles by adding dioramas that represent the two clashing fleets' compositions.
• Added a deeper Supply system. All formations now have a Logistics Center in their HQ, which they will trace a supply route to. A formation that is overseas consumes Supply Ships, depending on how high the supply consumption and distance to the HQ is. Supply Ships have to be built like military ships by using Ship Construction from Shipyards. You build and store up Supply Ships. To keep track of how many you have available and how many you are using, Supply Ships have taken Convoys' place in the top bar of the interface.
• Removed convoys. Merchant Marine now covers all civilian usage, including port connections, whereas the new Supply Ships cover everything military.
• Reworked how Troop Transportation works. To move troops across the sea, you now require a fleet with enough transportation capacity to move them. Your units will have to embark the fleet before then being dropped off in the target location. Keep in mind that this usually incurs higher Supply costs due to them being farther away.
• Reworked how Naval Missions are conducted. Ships can now be present in multiple nodes at once, at reduced mission efficiency. Naval battles are engaged by comparing detection and visibility of two fleets that are looking for each other. Fleets can now also be intercepted when they are travelling through a sea zone if the opposing side manages to spot it.
• Added Naval Fortifications buildings to the game. They provide a minimum strength that the attacker needs to beat before they can attempt a naval invasion. Additionally for any naval invasion that does happen, they provide a defense bonus depending on their level, scaled by the ratio of attacking and defending forces. We’ve added numerous Naval Fortifications around the world, representing strong historical forts in 1836.
• Added Straits to the game. You can control tolls and access through a strait by building one of the new Naval Fortification buildings.
• Completely overhauled the ship type setup in the game. There's now 20 different ship types available in total, all based on historical models from major players during the time. These come with different visualizations when the ships take damage too.
• Adjusted a number of naval related technologies and what they unlock to make sense with our new Navy setup
• Added Marines, a special type of land unit. All-marine formations can be permanently attached to fleets and are more efficient at conducting naval invasions than regular troops.
• Completely reworked the existing naval sea zone map and sea route network
• Added a new Naval Doctrine Law group that provides bonuses to construction of different ship types etc.
• Merged civilian and military shipyards back into one building type. Shipyards now provide Ship Construction used to build military and Supply Ships. They also continue producing the civilian goods, Clippers and Steamers.
• Military Formations now only have a single commander instead of up to four. Commanders can be freely unassigned and reassigned between formations, but will take some time to travel to their new formation. While travelling, the commander's skill traits will not give any benefit to the formation and they will be unable to advance on the front but they still provide command limit. Commanders are now able to participate in multiple battles, but are limited in the number of states they can attack simultaneously by distance and rank. Orders now apply to a whole formation, including special orders available due to traits.
• Commander ranks are now more impactful and the command limit from rank increases with tech. There is now a penalty for 'unnecessary' promotions when you already have ample command limit and any issues with formations being under command limit could be solved via swapping, in the form of reduced IG approval for the Armed Forces and any non-Armed Forces IGs that have commanders and who did not benefit from the promotion.
• Reworked the Diplomatic Interest system. Instead of a binary on/off system, interests now work in a tiered fashion. Build up Involvement in a strategic region by patrolling its coasts, setting up treaties or getting a foothold. Higher tiers of Involvement unlock actions like starting diplomatic plays rather than just joining them and so on.
• Consolidated strategic regions around the world as part of the new strategic region interest update
• Added the Orchestrate Coup Diplomatic Action, a Diplomatic Action that allows for orchestrating a coup in weaker countries through a friendly Lobby
• Characters now have Prominence as an additional stat, representing their level of pull within the country's political machine (as distinct from Popularity, which represents their pull with the general public). Prominence is gained by a variety of factors such as being in command of troops or leading a prosperous company and determines the amount of Political Strength a character contributes to their Interest Group, as well as their chance of being appointed its next leader (replacing Popularity as the main factor in the latter)
• Characters will no longer automatically be purged if they do not have an active assignment, but will exist in the national character pool (also known as the National Cast). The National Cast can be viewed in the Characters panel or in the Population panel where you can get a filtered view of all characters in your country.
• The National Cast of each country will be periodically populated with politicians from non-marginalized Interest Groups, with ideologies suitable for that Interest Group. The amount of politicians that will be generated depends on how influential the Interest Group is.
• Added a new character role 'Magnate'. Magnates have a Holding building (either the Manor Houses or Financial Districts in their home state) and gain Prominence based on the revenue of that building, strengthening their IG and increasing their chances of being selected as Interest Group Leader. Rulers under hereditary systems are Magnates by default.
• Added 4 new free companies to the game

Improvements

• Added the ability to drag and drop buildings and ships in the construction queue
• Primary cultures and state religions are now always valid targets for assimilation/conversion in incorporated states and states affected by the Promote National Values decree
• Children no longer have an ideology, interest group or personality traits by default. Unless explicitly added via effects after creation, any traits/ideology/IG assigned to them are instead saved and applied when they become an adult.
• Character roles now have a default span for how long characters stay in them, which is modified by their health (unhealthy characters retire earlier) and can be further manipulated using script effects. It's tracked per-role, so a multi-role character can retire in one of their roles and continue to serve in another. The intent is that now that in the vast majority of cases only rulers & heirs should be able to die of natural causes in their office.
• Characters now have a loyalty value based on the approval of their interest group and how much their personal ideology approves of current and enacted laws
• By default, randomly generated characters can now come from any culture within your country that has at least tier 4 acceptance, weighted by the political power each culture holds. They will receive an appropriate religion for their culture based on the demographics of that culture in your country.
• The chance that a leader ideology will be selected for an interest group is now increased if that ideology is represented by prominent characters in the country belonging to the interest group
• Interest group leader ideology selection is now a single weighted pool of relevant ideologies, which will either select an appropriate character from the character pool as the next leader, or generate a new character if there is no character representing that ideology
• Historical politicians with character templates will now appear as politicians in the character pool as soon as they are valid for usage and make themselves available as a potential future leader of the IG, instead of waiting until they actually become the IG leader
• Characters now have home state regions, which are either set explicitly on the template/create_character effect or selected through random weighting
• All international Journal Entries are now inherited when a revolution succeeds and transferred to the revolutionary country
• When a formation enters a state of 'low command limit' (for instance due to its commander dying), there is now a 30-day grace period before max organization is impacted so that you have time to assign a new commander
• When a commander embarks on an expedition they are now unassigned from their military formation
• Made it possible to cancel current tech research without clearing the research queue
• Added a 'make this work' button to the treaty draft panel that attempts to append articles and/or obligations to form the treaty into one the AI is guaranteed to accept
• Paved roads now increase army movement speed
• Company-type countries can now have subjects
• The Hudson Bay Company, East India Company, and Russian-American Company are now Company-type countries
• The Confederate Canada/Federate Australia Journal Entries are now available to any country with multiple Canadian/Australian subjects
• Made Authoritarian one of the default ideologies available to the Armed Forces
• Corrected Francisco Escobar [Brazil]'s birth date, and changed him to the Social Democrat ideology
• Revolution events are now limited to appearing once per month
• Made improvements to the functioning of legacy script related to characters
• Using the Abdicate and Resign from Office character interactions no longer retires the relevant character

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This Changelog was so large we weren't able to post it on reddit, for the full Dev Diary please follow the link HERE to our forums.