Forum post link HERE

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Happy Thursday everyone! We’re now properly back from the time of vacations and ready to share more about what’s coming next for Victoria 3, starting of course with the much anticipated 1.14 “AI Update”. This update was first mentioned in Dev Diary #183 and then expanded on a little in Dev Diary #184, and now it’s time to finally properly lay it out for you in terms of what changes you can expect and when you can expect them.

So, what’s going to be in the AI update then? For the broad goals, I’m going to simply refresh you on what I wrote in DD#184, since this vision hasn’t changed:

• Deepen AI strategic region stances and use them to give the AI a much better understanding of how it should view and act against other countries in a particular region
• Give the AI a proper understanding of where it should and should not be interested in territory - improve border gore and prevent nonsensical aggression such as the US puppeting Italian states
• Fix the persistent issues with war starting/ending - make the AI properly understand when wars are worth going into and getting out of
• Improve the AI’s economic development by fixing some systemic issues that are holding it back, particularly when it comes to understanding how to plan its economy around the availability of goods and the world market
• Make the AI more transparent in its reasoning and behavior across the board

Something that’s worth pointing out though, is that meeting these goals isn’t always about changing the actual, literal behavior of the AI. Often, problems with the AI’s ability to use a feature comes down to the way the feature itself is designed. For this reason, the AI update isn’t strictly limited in scope to the game AI itself, but will also involve tweaks, touch-ups and reworks to some such features. To add a bit more meat to this dev diary, I’m now going to show off some of those touch-ups and reworks that are currently in development and will be coming with the AI update.

War Support Rework

For the very reason I just mentioned, one of the larger features in the AI update will be a rework of the war support/war exhaustion system, which has long been a source of poor AI performance. The AI has numerous issues with the system, but by far the most visible problem is the limitation on war support not being able to drop below 0 unless all wargoals against a country are contested. This causes the AI to get stuck in stalemated wars and expend huge amounts of resources and lives to no gain, and can also frustrate players to no end when their AI ally adds an inconsequential war goal that turns an otherwise winnable war unwinnable.

So how will it work going forward? Quite a bit differently! First of all, war support has received a major overhaul. There are no longer two separate concepts of war support and war exhaustion, just a single “war support”, which goes from 0-100% (rather than -100 to +100) and which can both go up and down during wars. The reason for the change to 0-100% is that “negative war support” never really made too much sense - zero war support should indeed mean, zero support for the war.

Many factors which were previously part of the rather nebulous “peace desire” system have now been rolled into war support directly, and several new factors added outright.
Here is a list of some of the factors that can now cause war support to increase or decrease:

• Occupying the enemy and being occupied
• Controlling war goals
• ‘Flipping’ war goals (more on this below)
• Suffering casualties
• Devastation
• Financial situation
• Winning/losing battles (scaled by battle size)
• Being at war with rivals
• Lobbies
• Length of war

War Support also had a natural drift towards 50%, though this is designed to eventually be overpowered by ‘length of war’ to ensure wars don’t remain deadlocked forever.

The US is feeling great about the war and sees no reason not to press on to full victory. Mexico, meanwhile, is rapidly losing war support after a series of battlefield defeats. Please note that all values are highly WIP and subject to an upcoming balancing pass.

https://preview.redd.it/idyzva3w4jkh1.png?width=557&format=png&auto=webp&s=7b5ae3834a14202fc1a3f62da0683ef259e23abe

https://preview.redd.it/w2n2c1ww4jkh1.png?width=579&format=png&auto=webp&s=46412b35d290e7a0942faf0691c3da5cadba8e4b

Another important change is the removal of the aforementioned “war support can’t drop below X” mechanic, along with the removal of auto-capitulation. To replace auto-capitulation, there are now instead political and military consequences to continuing to fight while at low war support, with increasing radicalization of the population as war support ticks down, and (at very low levels) an additional escalating impact on military effectiveness as the common soldiers stop being willing to die for your grand ambitions.

The way the AI decides when it wants to make peace, and what peace it wants to make, has also been redesigned. Previously it would take into account a combination of their own war support and ‘peace desire’, which factored a number of things such as length of war that are now part of war support instead. The country’s war support is still the baseline, but instead of peace desire the AI now considers the difference between the average (weighted by country importance) war support of the two sides to decide how equitable a peace should be reached.

In other words, if one is tired and demoralized while the other is fresh and ready to fight on, then the natural outcome would be a peace deal favoring the side that’s going ‘put me in coach’, while a white peace or minor swap of war goals might happen in a case where both sides have exhausted themselves. Of course if both sides are ready to fight on, then there’d be no peace deal at all and the war continues until one side’s had enough.

War Goal Flipping

So that’s all well and good, but the war support rework is only one half of this rework, and arguably the less important one in terms of how it’ll change the dynamics of war. Enter war goal flipping.

For all the frustration and player pain it caused, the old “don’t let war support drop below 0” system did serve a purpose - it prevented you from being able to conquer territories you had no way to reach, and to impose war goals that you had no real way to contest. It also (at least in theory) rewarded setting more limited aims for your war and made it possible to snatch away distant territories from powerful empires without having to launch a full-scale invasion of their metropol. These are all valid concerns, and to address them, we’ve introduced “war goal flipping”, or the ability to enforce war goals while still at war.

The vast majority of war goals (there are a handful of exceptions such as Cut Down to Size) now have their own independent enforcement bar, which starts ticking as soon as the war goal is captured. For example, let’s say you’re the US and you want to take Cuba away from Spain, so you start a war with a ‘Transfer Subject’ war goal against Cuba. You send a fleet with some marines, occupy Havana, and take control of your war goal. An enforcement bar now starts filling towards 100%, and unless Spain can regain control over Cuba or reach a peace settlement before that bar fills, the war goal gets automatically and fully enforced while at war.

Okay, so the war goal is enforced, Cuba is now a US subject - does that mean Spain has now effectively lost the war? Not quite. When a war goal is enforced during war, something we call a “mirror war goal” is created, meaning that Spain now gets an (infamy-free) Transfer Subject war goal against Cuba. Effectively, the situation is now reversed, with the US controlling Cuba and Spain aiming to take it back. If Spain then proceeds to get the upper hand and hold Cuba they can then enforce their war goal, regain their suzerainty, and hand the “Transfer Subject” war goal back to the USA - hence the term “war goal flipping”.

War Goal Flipping in action - the USA occupies New Mexico long enough to annex it, whereupon a “Return New Mexico” war goal is created for Mexico even as the war rages on.

https://preview.redd.it/trrt15e25jkh1.png?width=954&format=png&auto=webp&s=69771ce18ece4d39d0c9b1450b1403bb93a0f066

Any gains from wargoals enforced during a war are by default kept at the end of the war, unless the peace agreement says otherwise. A white peace thus becomes purely “status quo” rather than “status quo ante bellum”. To take the US-Spain example above, if Spain improves its position enough in the overall war, it could theoretically press its “mirror” war goal in the peace deal and regain Cuba, but any peace which does not explicitly hand Cuba back to Spain is one in which the US has a brand new colony liberated subject territory.

All of this should hopefully serve to make wars more dynamic, less frustrating, and lead to far fewer pointless but oh-so-bloody AI-AI conflicts.

AI Territorial Ambitions

Moving on from AI-adjacent things to actual fully-AI things, the next thing I want to show off is the work we’ve been doing on the listed goal of “give the AI a proper understanding of where it should and should not be interested in territory”. There is a system for this right now in AI strategies, called “state value”, but it’s a bit of a mess to work with and poorly visualized in-game, so we decided to start by actually tackling the visualization problem by introducing a new map mode for AI territorial ambitions. In this map mode, you can see which states an AI is interested in, how much they are interested in them, and why they are interested in them.

The new mapmode gives you both an overview of which states the AI values (blue = territory it owns, green = territory it wants), and how much they value it. You can also tooltip the states and numbers for a proper breakdown.

https://preview.redd.it/0wpigjb75jkh1.png?width=873&format=png&auto=webp&s=5be4d8df2d2901f7c928f486f5f34c6505754685

Aided by this map mode, we plan to extensively tune, tweak and introduce more factors to AI state values to inject some proper sense in the AI’s territorial ambitions and stop the US from subdividing Mexico into a collection of disjointed exclaves every single campaign. In general, we’re also looking at breaking up some of the logic in the AI strategy file to make it easier to work with - both for our own sake, and for the sake of modders.

Hiring & Wage Tooltips

While only tangentially related to AI, I also wanted to show off some UI improvements we’ve made to the building hiring and wage tooltips. Previously, buildings would frequently communicate the wrong information entirely about why they were or were not hiring, and wouldn’t really tell you anything at all about their plans for wages. As with the AI territorial ambitions, exposing this is as much about giving ourselves better debugging information as it is about improving the user experience. This is where the AI tangent comes in, as better debugging information will be helpful to us when we’re working to improve the AI’s economic performance. As an added bonus, this has already resulted in a number of old hidden bugs in the wage setting system being fixed.

You can now see exactly which pops in the state are eligible and ineligible to be hired by a building and where they are working or why they are ineligible. You can also see whether a building wants to hire or fire employees, why it wants to do so, and whether and why it’s looking to raise or lower wages.

Open Beta

Last but not least, when talking about the AI update in DD#184 I mentioned I would be looking into the possibility of doing an open beta for it, and I’m happy to tell you that we will indeed be doing just that! The open beta will take the form of a staged rollout, with an initial more limited set of changes, and new changes/improvements dropped every week based on both existing plans and incoming feedback.

The Initial Open Beta Branch will be available 1st September, with weekly updates for the open beta.

• Open Beta Update 1, 8th September
• Open Beta Update 2, 15th September 
• Open Beta Update 3, 22nd September

 

More information on how to opt in to the beta and where to put feedback will be shared 31st August.

Well then, that’s all for today, but we’ll be back next week with a look at the more explicitly AI-oriented changes that will be part of the initial 1.14 rollout, and the week after that you’ll have the chance to try it out for yourself. See you soon!

Forum post link HERE

https://pdxint.at/4aWw3Lr

Happy Thursday everyone and welcome back, it’s been a little while. As I mentioned in the previous dev diary, we decided after the release of 1.13 and The Great Wave that we needed to put all our focus on the post-release hotfixes, and so we haven’t really been doing the usual ‘what’s next’ kind of updates. Until now, that is.

But before I jump into that future, I should update you on said post-release hotfixes. As promised, we have one more big hotfix (1.13.9) currently planned to release next week. 1.13.9 is the last hotfix planned for 1.13, though we will of course adjust those plans if anything critical enough pops up. We were originally planning to release it this week, but decided to delay it to get some more fixes in and ensure we leave the game in a good place before the traditional July summer break. 

1.13.9 contains a lot of fixes and improvements, but to name a few: 

• All movement types will now have substantially reduced Activism following their defeat in a Civil War. Movement defeat status is stored per identity, and persists through movements being disbanded and refunded.
• Fixed a bug where fleets whose supply ships were under attack would be considered 'in battle', preventing them from functioning normally
• Fixed slaves being freed when fired from their jobs

As also mentioned in Dev Diary #183, the next major update (1.14) will be a free update with no accompanying DLC that we’ve dubbed “The AI Update”, and which will focus almost exclusively on improving the AI’s ability to play the game and function as an interesting ally and adversary for the player.

The major goals for the AI update are as follows:

• Deepen AI strategic region stances and use them to give the AI a much better understanding of how it should view and act against other countries in a particular region
• Give the AI a proper understanding of where it should and should not be interested in territory - improve border gore and prevent nonsensical aggression such as the US puppeting Italian states
• Fix the persistent issues with war starting/ending - make the AI properly understand when wars are worth going into and getting out of
• Improve the AI’s economic development by fixing some systemic issues that are holding it back, particularly when it comes to understanding how to plan its economy around the availability of goods and the world market
• Make the AI more transparent in its reasoning and behavior across the board

https://preview.redd.it/zdjpyeubc18h1.jpg?width=3840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=449fc515f780c954aefabff51810c7cb55577754

This is of course not everything, there’s lots of tiny fixes planned alongside the big ones, but if there’s a particular theme for this update it is definitely to elevate the AI’s overall understanding of geopolitics and to make the AI behave more like proper 19th century imperialist governments and less like they were operating on a combination of the Cocaine Addict, Reckless and Senile character traits.

A secondary, internal goal for the update is to spread knowledge about AI design and implementation inside the team. Currently, this knowledge is largely concentrated to only a few people and this was a factor that contributed to the AI being in such a rough shape when 1.13 released.

Another major improvement which we’re hoping to get done for 1.14 is a complete rewrite of pathfinding to eliminate the many, many bugs with supply, army pathfinding, trade routing and so on caused by our present overengineered and overencumbered pathfinding system. If this doesn’t make it for 1.14, it will come in 1.15 instead.

The release date for the AI Update is not yet set in stone, but we’re aiming for sometime around late August/early September. That may feel like a long wait, but some of the issues we’re aiming to tackle are not exactly simple and straightforward, and trying to rush something out the door sooner would have taken resources away from 1.13 post-release fixes and honestly likely wouldn’t have achieved the stated goals. This is a long-term investment in replayability and we want to do it right. We are also looking into the possibility of doing an open beta for this update, but since doing so would end up pushing it further into September, we have to make sure our schedules can work out.

There will of course be dev diaries for the AI update, which will both update you on the work being done and also take you on a bit of a deep dive into how the Vicky AI functions behind the scenes.

That’s all for now. You'll see us in the patch notes for 1.13.9 next week. Then we will have a break for Dev Diaries over July, starting back up again in August.

Forum post link HERE

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Happy Thursday Victorians!

The issue mentioned in the patch notes yesterday has now been addressed related to Naval invasions, across multiple cases.

Our next scheduled Hotfix is a larger one in a few weeks for June, that should contain more fixes, balance changes and other improvements.

Please report any bugs on our bug reporting forums, it is very helpful in identifying issues especially with a save! We will also update the Known Issues post for 1.13 with any fixed issues, if relevant.

1.13.8’s checksum is `ce22`, and you can check out the full patch notes below.

The following changes have been made to the game compared to 1.13.7:

Interface​

• Made it so fleets are not always shown as "too weak to fight” during naval invasions
• Fixed the pink placeholder face being shown as a mapmode icon in a building details screen

Bugfixes​

• Fixed a bug where naval battles did not spawn during naval invasions unless there was an explicit interception mission
• Fixed a bug where a fleet would drop an army in the sea and go back to port during naval invasion
• Fixed a bug where a naval invasion would get cancelled if an enemy fleet was blocking the sea node
• Fixed a bug where the AI could be blocked from conducting naval invasions related to the issues above

Previous Patchnotes
1.13.0 | 1.13.1 | 1.13.2 | 1.13.3 | 1.13.4 | 1.13.5 | 1.13.6 | 1.13.7

Forum post link HERE

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Ahoy Victorians!

Hotfix 1.13.5 has just released, featuring some key fixes and improvements to the experience of 1.13, including making the AI less gung-ho about supply ships and ruining their economy in the process, fixing MAPI not changing with tech, state or law changes, added ship crew experience and reduced base literacy even further. Read the full patchnotes below for more information on all the changes.

As always, please report any bugs on our bug reporting forums! We have also updated the Known Issues post for 1.13 with any fixed issues.

1.13.5’s checksum is `547c`, and you can check out the full patchnotes below.

The following changes have been made to the game compared to 1.13.4:

Features​

• Added Ship Crew Experience. Ships will now gain experience while out on a mission, while participating in battles and when sinking ships. Experience will decay over time if a fleet is sitting idle in port. By accruing enough experience ships will increase their Veterancy Rank, which provides a positive modifier to accuracy, critical hit chance and readiness gain, with higher ranks providing larger advantages. The baseline accuracy bonus and critical hit chance for all ship types has been adjusted downward to compensate.
• The "Jeune Ecole" and "Capital Fleet" Navy Model Laws now also provide a starting experience bonus to ships

Improvements​

• The supply ship allocation percentage is now a hard cap on how much ship construction is allowed to be allocated to supply ships
• Certain treaties now allow joining diplomatic plays again regardless of interest tier: alliance and support independence as well as guarantee independence and defensive pact when trying to join on the defense
• Added 'station in state' to right-click menu for military formations, also supports overseas stationing

AI​

• The AI is now less gung-ho on supply ships and will not drive their economies to ruin endlessly building them
• Made a substantial pass on AI ship construction logic to make them more proactive about replacing obsolete ships gradually, instead of all at once
• Added better logic for AI navy composition, governed in the AI strategies database files
• Fixed a bug where the AI would select far too small fleets to transport their armies, resulting in the army being split into a myriad tiny stacks
• Fixed an issue where the AI was unable to ever pass Jeune Ecole
• Made the AI less willing to select event options that would increase Movement Activism if it is threatened by a revolution
• Made the AI more inclined to expel agitators with traits that increase Movement Activism
• Fixed a bug where the AI could get stuck on very low authority while unable to reduce authority spending

Balance​

• Halved base literacy growth further, from 0.1% to 0.05%
• Abolishing the Edo Status System now requires Japan to abolish Subjecthood
• Public Schools now grant literacy growth per level of institution
• Philosophical Pragmatism, Central Planning and Analytical Philosophy technologies now grant literacy growth rate
• The Political Concessions amendment will now cost Authority proportional to its strength, and will not be available during negotiations if the country has insufficient Authority
• Bakufu is now required to enact Shinsengumi
• Made Iron-reinforced Hull consume some Iron instead of purely Hardwood
• Reduced the movement attraction impact caused by several pulse events - "The Flight of the Battleship [name]", "Antiquated Words", "Confusion and Delay", "Political Imprisonment", and "Cause Without a Rebel"
• Increased the Movement Activism effect of Political Concessions
• Ending Sakoku via the button in "The Locked Country" will now increase the Activism of the Sonnō Jōi movement equivalently to if the law was enacted normally
• Changed Itō Hirobumi's ideology from Market Liberal to Modernizer leader and interest group from Rural Folk to Intelligentsia
• Added a sufficient amount of Naval Administrations to Russia
• Reduced the immediate approval decrease from selecting the option to reconsider Sakoku in The Morrison Incident event

Art​

• Added traditional Japanese female clothing (haori) with additional patterns and color variations to the game
• Japanese characters with modernising ideologies will now adopt Western clothing prior to the Restoration
• Japanese characters without modernising ideologies will no longer adopt Western clothing if the Restoration concludes with a Bakufu victory

Content​

• Added Ansei Great Earthquakes event for Japan.
• Added events for the Taikyo Proclamation and finishing Shinbutsu Bunri and Elevate Buddhism
• Added a decision for Japan to found a modern secret police force based on the Shinsengumi
• Added a decision for Japan to abolish the Edo status system upon either concluding the Meiji Restoration or researching Human Rights
• Extended effects of and added custom tooltips for some Shinto conversion effects
• Added game concept tooltips for Japanese Religious concepts
• Made the Abolitionist ideology available to the Armed Forces
• Made the Devout ideology available to the Devout
• The Legitimist ideology is no longer available to the Petit-Bourgeoisie, and is now available to the Armed Forces
• Made the Social Democrat ideology available to the Petit-Bourgeoisie
• Added Sinosphere tradition to Ryukyuan culture
• Changed Jairam Shivji's ideology from Royalist to Moderate
• Changed Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera's ideology from Republican to Modernizer
• Changed Lúcio Mansilla's ideology from Radical to Republican
• Changed Hasan al-Alawi's ideology from Land Reformer to Moderniser
• Changed numerous Landowners character ideologies from Royalist to Moderate
• Changed Manuel Ignacio de Vivanco's ideology from Royalist to Authoritarian
• Changed José Relvas's ideology from Republican to Radical
• Changed Manuel Isidoro Belzú's interest group from Armed Forces to Rural Folk
• Changed Euclides da Cunha's ideology from Republican to Positivist, and interest group from Rural Folk to Intelligentsia
• Changed Custódio de Melo's ideology from Radical to Royalist
• Changed James Longstreet's ideology from Radical to Liberal
• Changed Arturo Fernández Vial's ideology from Social Democrat to Reformer
• Changed Flavio Alfaro's ideology from Radical to Liberal
• Changed Francisco Linares Alcántara's ideology from Radical to Liberal
• Changed Victor Bonaparte's interest group from Landowners to Petty Bourgeoisie
• Changed Gustave Cluseret's ideology from Radical to Republican
• Changed Otto von Bismarck's ideology from Royalist to Authoritarian
• Changed John French's ideology from Market Liberal to Moderate
• Changed numerous Armed Forces character ideologies from Jingoist to Moderate
• Changed Peregrine Maitland's ideology from Jingoist to Ethno-Nationalist
• Changed Teofil Lapinski's ideology from Radical to Republican
• Changed Santos Acosta's ideology from Radical to Liberal
• Changed Ricardo Gaitan's ideology from Jingoist to Liberal
• Changed Thomas Bugeaud's ideology from Orleanist to Authoritarian and his interest group from Rural Folk to Armed Forces
• Changed Felipe Salaverry's interest group from Armed Forces to Landowners
• Changed Rafaël Franco's ideology from Social Democrat to Corporatist
• Changed Jefferson Davis's interest group from Armed Forces to Landowners
• Changed Victor Hugo's ideology from Republican to Abolitionist
• Upon reforming the Daimyō into the Kazoku as Japan, new Daimyō will no longer be generated
• Changed Dayananda Saraswati's ideology from Feminist to Reformer
• Changed Heinrich Clam-Martinic's ideology from Royalist to Reformer
• French Legitimist, Bonapartist, and Orleanist revolutions will now have white, dark blue, and blue map colours respectively
• The Heavenly Kingdom will now change names if it's State Atheist or no longer a Kingdom
• Renamed "Restoration: End Sakoku" to "Restoration: Achieve Recognition", requiring Japan to become a Recognised Country

​

Interface​

• The Company panel has received an update, with added filters and an overall improved layout
• Moved the Previous Investments tooltip to be more visible under a label in the Construction panel
• Added a list of characters to the population tab of the state information panel containing the characters who call that state their home
• Matched the Army upkeep tooltip layout to the new Fleet upkeep tooltip
• Added subtabs to the Population tab on the State panel to reduce how much you have to scroll to see the Characters and Pops lists
• Added a proper Promote Commander tooltip to the promote button in the Character panel
• Grouped "Insufficient Ship Crew" alerts into one
• Added map notifications i.e. floating text messages when when ships are constructed/repaired/retrofit
• Updated flagship button tooltip to show reason why a ship cannot be designated
• Improved the tooltips of the Purveyor of Progress Journal Entry (Pivot of Empire)
• Added missing text for when an agitator would not start or join a political movement if invited
• Adjusted the tooltip of the "Everyone Disliked That" achievement to match its requirements

Performance​

• Optimized supply computation
• AI countries will recruit Commanders on-demand instead of keeping a pool of them around
• Optimized UpdatePartySupport ticktask
• Cached modifier names for re-use
• Country sea node range distance now updated in parallel
• Precomputed Ideology Law Stances
• Cached AI's willingness to prepare for war
• Cached some expensive Diplomatic Play variables for the AI
• Improved performance for AI evaluating Diplomatic Actions

Modding​

• Added new scopes to can_join_side_in_diplomatic_play and can_start_diplomatic_plays_against

Bugfixes​

• Fixed formations not receiving supply penalties from production shortages
• Fixed an issue where armies could get stuck in exile
• Fixed Market Access Price Impact (MAPI) not updating when incorporating a state, researching technology or switching from Traditionalism
• Fixed Carlist Spain missing supply centers for their armies
• Fixed a bug where the wrong character could get retired by the career end system, resulting in issues such as Metternich retiring before his JE is concluded and interest group leaders retiring shortly after assuming their new job
• Fixed an issue that prevented Chartered Company-type subjects from ever being able to be annexed or have their autonomy reduced
• Fixed armies getting stuck in some island states, including after invading certain island states
• Fixed fleets getting stuck at sea when their transport target becomes invalid
• Fixed a bug that could lead to the Iwakura Mission instantly unseating the Emperor by enacting Republic
• Fixed a bug where armies were unable to merge outside of its home countries borders
• Fixed a bug where, after the end of the war, the country could no longer track formation spam
• Fixed an issue causing the game to not tell the player why they or another country can't join a diplomatic play as a result of insufficient interest in the region
• Fixed a bug where the Japanese Daimyō could duplicate without limit upon a secession or revolution
• Fixed an issue where a coup could remain if the commander executing it ceased to exist
• Fixed a bug where Strait wargoals would invalidate when the strait province is occupied
• Fixed a bug where we allowed you to decommission ships when a revolution is brewing
• Fixed an issue where colonial countries could occasionally get the wrong primary cultures
• Fixed an issue where ship crews could still be assigned from a state after its owner had changed
• Fixed the Retire from Office interaction possibly resulting in the same character promptly being set as the new leader
• Fixed a bug where locality calculations could go over 100%
• Fixed a bug where a fleet sometimes could not deliver units to Circassia
• Fleets from Gibraltar now properly travels through Mediterranean sea, instead of phasing through land
• Fixed multiple instances of broken tooltips in the Iberian Union Journal Entry (Iberian Twilight)
• Restoring King Miguel now causes the Reign of the Devourers Journal Entry for Portugal to invalidate (Iberian Twilight)
• Federating Australia now properly includes New Zealand
• Fixed an issue where Miguelist Portugal would have a default name, and French Legitimist revolutions would purport to be Miguelist
• Fixed several issues in coups that could lead to visible null scopes
• Fixed supply routes sometimes not following spline network correctly
• Corrected the name order of several Japanese characters
• The tooltip of The Imperial Sanction will no longer possibly mislead the player as to its outcome
• Fixed an unlocalised string in the triggers for whether a country is a Crown Land or not
• Finally captured and eliminated Henry Ford's mischievous clone
• Fixed an issue where "The Voice of the Nation" could have a null scope in its flavour text

Previous Patchnotes
1.13.0 | 1.13.1 | 1.13.2 | 1.13.3 | 1.13.4

Forum post link HERE

https://pdxint.at/4uEHU8B

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!

Forum post link HERE

https://pdxint.at/4ekffAO

Victorians,

We have a small hotfix with a major improvement to troop transportation and another to balancing the infamy cost for Threatening Naval Hostilities.

As always, please report any bugs on our bug reporting forums! We have also updated the Known Issues post for 1.13 with any fixed issues.

Moving on, you can check out the full patch notes below. 1.13.3’s checksum is `654a`.

The following changes have been made to the game compared to 1.13.2:

Improvements

• Ordering a fleet with insufficient capacity to transport an army will now have it make multiple trips to get the entire army to its destination. Moving any queued formations will result in them not being transported, while moving/giving a mission to the transporting fleet will cancel all further planned transportations.
  • There is a known issue: if an army is transported to a state that becomes invalid (e.g. when a state changes occupation) - the fleet will get stuck mid-ocean. Sending the fleet on any mission to any sea node fixes the issue, and the fleet can be stationed in any state afterwards to disembark the transported army.

Balance

• Cut the infamy cost of Threaten Naval Hostilities in half

Previous Patchnotes

1.13.0 | 1.13.1 | 1.13.2

Forum post link HERE

https://pdxint.at/3P8qQbT

Victorians,

We just released a hotfix targeting some more key issues experienced by players, including some AI improvements, UX improvements, bugfixes and more.

Moving forward, for the upcoming hotfixes, we will have a particular focus on improving the AI ability to interact with systems, not just for ones introduced in this Update but also overall. We will go over those plans more, as well as our post-release plans in general, in the dev diary next week (rest assured that more hotfixes are definitely coming).

As always, please report any bugs on our bug reporting forums! We have also updated the Known Issues post for 1.13 with any fixed issues.

Moving on, you can check out the full patch notes below. 1.13.2’s checksum is `45ca`.

The following changes have been made to the game compared to 1.13.1:

Improvements

• Military maintenance will now always be deducted before any other naval construction can happen, including supply ships. This avoids the issue of ships suffering maintenance penalties if you set the priority to allocate too little capacity for the category.

AI

• The AI is no longer willing to just give away states that grant control over a strait
• Fixed several more cases where the AI could get blocked from launching naval invasions
• Fixed an issue where the AI was not merging small Marine units formations that were deployed in the same land location

Balance

• Power bloc members now generate involvement the same way subjects do
• Moved Reinforced Fortification Production Method unlock for Naval Fortifications to Breech-Loading Artillery. Previously was on Concrete Fortifications.

Interface

• Restructured the layout of the action buttons for Formations and what goes in the context menu and what goes outside of it
• Hid ship modifications tech unlocks without DLC enabled
• Supply ships should no longer count as military ships of a fleet while engaged in a battle
• You can no longer set strait access restrictions when you have the strait open to everybody. Previously this would reset when you changed settings.

Bugfixes

• Fixed an issue where supply ships being raided would permanently join the raided fleet if the battle ended abnormally, inflating costs and power projection
• Fixed an issue causing the game to not tell the player why they or another country can't join a diplomatic play as a result of insufficient interest in the region
• Fixed an issue where exiling an agitator would not remove them as commander
• Getting a toll exemption treaty now only affects the target country rather than all
• Fixed a softlock in the Honourable Restoration Journal Entry caused by a non-Tokugawa shogun
• The Emperor abdicating will no longer break the Honourable Restoration Journal Entry
• Fixed an issue that prevented opium_wars.4 from ever firing
• Kameoka (Kyoto mining hub) is now properly placed, connected and localized

Previous Patchnotes
1.13.0 | 1.13.1

Forum post link: HERE

https://pdxint.at/3P6IaxU

Good day Victorians.

We have a focused hotfix today addressing critical AI issues, performance, bugfixes and balance changes. We are also working on more hotfixes with more issues being addressed. 

This hotfix should improve how the AI interacts with the new systems, a building employment issue and performance should be improved compared to 1.13.0, though we are still investigating improvements in performance and AI.

Note from Martin:

We have also seen an uptick in comments blaming QA for the issues in 1.13. There is a very common misconception that if a release has bugs, it’s QA’s fault for not catching them, but this is almost always just that - a misconception.

We've made a lot of very large system changes in 1.13, with a lot of knock on effects, and they've had to constantly play catch up with our tinkering. Many of the issues that made it into the release were the result of late changes to the build that they simply didn’t have time to catch. In short, if you really want to place blame anywhere, place it on me, as I am ultimately responsible for the quality of each release.

I will be talking more about this in next week’s dev diary, but for now the focus is on finding and squashing bugs and balance issues.
 
As always, please report any bugs on our bug reporting forums! We have also updated the Known Issues post for 1.13 with any fixed issues.

Otherwise, check out the full patch notes below. Checksum is `ccf2`.

The following changes have been made to the game compared to 1.13.0:

AI

• Fixed an issue where the AI would create a lot of tiny fleets. Also improved the behaviour for armies so AI should have less tiny armies
• Fixed a bug where the AI would not disband empty formations it did not have a use for 
• Improved AI handling of obsolete ships, including cancelling obsolete ship constructions and more aggressive decommissioning of useless ships
• Fixed a bug where the AI would generate way more templates than it needed and did a general improvement pass on how the AI designs ships to produce more sensible templates
• Countries no longer start naval invasions using marines without a general
• Fixed a bug where the AI was constructing new ships they did not have the necessary crew for
• Added triggers for the AI to get rid of Merchant Navy if they have sufficiently high tech unlocked

Balance

• Reduced Literacy growth from 0.5% per week to 0.1% per week, as it was way too fast previously
• Reverted the change to several Land Reform laws such as Tenant Farmers that added minimum subsistence employment. We will experiment with bringing this back when the UI and mechanics support it properly. 
• Reduced the armor values of late game Capital Ships, moderately increased the damage of late game Cruisers, as damage was far too outclassed by armor from Modern Ironclads onwards
• The fraction of Coup Strength formerly calculated off of the number of units commanded by a General or Admiral is now calculated off of that commander's rank divided by the sum of the ranks of all commanders of that type
• Added two textile mills to Ile de France at game start, to discourage French uprisings on account of their threadbare clothes they can’t afford to replace
• Reduced movement radicalism gain from the Geheime Staatskonferenz for Austria
• Reduced movement radicalism gain from the Divided Monarchists Journal Entry for France
• Increased the threshold for the Hungry Forties Journal Entry to fire

Art

• More historical Japanese characters have had their specific character DNA for their appearances added
• Fixed an issue where pre-restoration Officers pops could wear peasant clothing pre-Restoration if the player had no DLCs
• Fixed blockade graphics not being shown on the map

Interface

• Made the Strait map marker show up less frequently in the Default map mode
• Removed the broken commander buttons from the Naval Invasion planner, we are planning to improve the general functionality of this feature in future hotfixes
• Improved the missing crew alert by adding info that ships need to go to port to get new crew. This new part will be displayed in English only, until next week or so.

Performance

• Significantly increased AI performance for handling diplomatic plays
• Improved AI performance for handling armies

Bugfixes

• Fixed the stranding of armies due to fleets forgetting they were transporting them because they got merged with another fleet. As a backup and to fix saves, we teleport any currently stranded armies at sea to their supply hub.
• Fixed an issue that allowed countries to start or join diplomatic plays in a region even if they didn’t have the necessary interest tier level.
• Stopped drowning marines when you merge two fleets. Instead allowed them to be attached to the other fleet as it was intended.
• Fixed a bug where unraised irregular infantry could not gain any supplies
• Fixed a bug where fleets could return to their home HQ when stationed in other HQs or states
• Fixed ‘Abandon Piracy’ treaty not preventing ‘Piracy’ missions from still occurring
• Fixed an issue where buildings which only employed very small pops would ignore them and dump their wages making them unable to hire anyone
• Potentially fixed an issue that caused a rare bug which would cancel the construction of naval administration buildings
• Fixed an issue that could print errors when hovering characters in the "Honorable Restoration" Journal Entry
• Fixed Sweden owning Livestock Ranches in Kyoto
• Removed deprecated Man-o-War good from the USA-Texas starting treaty
• Removed the Armstrong Ironclad Prestige Good as it can no longer be produced
• Fixed a number of localization issues

Previous Patchnotes
1.13.0