Currently the only way to gain influence is through declaring rivalries. Essentially, the only way to allow yourself more diplomatic actions is to make enemies. I like having this as a feature, but I also think there should be a way of expanding your influence capacity by doing things other countries actually like. Obligations are currently useful but I feel the influence and diplomacy side of the game could use some work, but I really would hate to see it become unnecessarily convoluted like so many parts of this game are.

Hey all, wanted to give a suggestion for people who want a digestible way to learn more about the Victoria 3 time-period. Revolutions by Mike Duncan covers a large variety of historical revolutions (from the English Civil War to the Russian Revolution) as well as one speculative fiction Martian revolution.

For things more directly relevant to Victoria 3's timeframe, I recommend starting at season 3, the French Revolution, and ending at 10, the Russian Revolution. The English Civil War and the American Revolution do matter to the Victorian era, but happened far enough in the past to be optional in my mind.

This came to mind as I regularly see people here confused at how strong the Revolutions of 1848/Springtime of the Peoples modifier is, particularly in how many revolts spring from it. To me, this seems like a disconnect between the historical narrative of 1848 as a failure with the actual scale of the revolts. 50 countries in Europe faced significant revolts, and nearly every major European nation experienced some kind of revolt.

In my last three games, France has remained dirt poor all the way into the very late 1800s. It barely industrializes at all. By 1880 or 1890 its often being surpassed by countries like Tunisia and Egypt and Wallachia in terms of GDP per capita.

I often use debug mode to switch over and see what's going on with other countries. France is pretty much constantly in a state of deficit and seems to stay away from building up its iron/coal/steel/tool industry. Yet it has this absolutely enormous army/navy that it clearly cannot afford without an industrial base to actually back it up. It also doesn't seem to utilize new techs very much. It had water-tube tech for mines, but for coal mines it was still using the first base tech. What the hell?

Now, I know that France did lag behind the UK and Belgium in terms of industrialization. But it very much did see quite a bit of economic growth during this era. According to the Maddison Project Database, it's estimated GDP Per Capita went from $1,980 to $4,530 from 1840 to 1890.

How can they fix france?

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A truck crashed into John Paradox and Victoria Clausewitz in the middle of a street, and they have now been sent to another world!

Map

Victoria must deal with the consequences of a never-ending war, choosing to continue the crusade or defect to the Demon Lord's side.

The demon empire. How red!

John instead chills out and plays a dating sim, aiming to win the heart of 5 different beastgirls.

A beastkin nation. Cats, rabbits, horses, foxes, dogs, and bears are all fully implemented!

Adventurers flock around taverns across the land, and colonization instead follows a new path. Your nation's "champion" leads your country to traverse the monstrous wastelands and claim new soil from the hands of the savage orcs and goblins. The stronger your champion, the faster you can stake new territory.

A valley in the Xianxia region.

A new tech tree is implemented, where each region has their own specialty. No longer do all nations feel the same. A xianxia nation will have a harder time researching automata, and an isekai nation might not cultivate to Nascent Soul until the endgame.

A totally revamped tech tree.

And of course, new goods and buildings exist.

Mid-tier alchemy unlocks Homunculi.

Airships transport homunculi to cultivate the Dao in a secluded valley, while automata run factories, turning spirit stones and herbs into battle potions to strengthen your army.

If you're bored with doing the same old start every game or even if you just want to raise some horsegirls in Victoria 3, try this mod out!!

It's on Steam Workshop (I really hope this link works) and Github (just in case the Steam link doesn't work).

Join the discussion on our Discord, and don't hesitate to apply to our team if you feel like contributing through code, writing, art or anything else really!

And a big thanks to the Realms of Exether and Anbennar teams for allowing use of their assets!

Forum post link HERE

https://pdxint.at/4qs1a8f

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!

Everyone on this sub seems to hate the current naval system and some even say the old one was better. While the new system was buggy for the first few weeks, I think it works fine now. I really like that you have to build individual ships that can be destroyed and the addition of sea regions. I think improvements could still be made (like giving more reason to use different types of ships) but I think it’s a massive improvement to the old system and it’s much more fun to play with. I think changes could also be made to make the navy feel more impactful (like a lot of the time when I blockade the enemy I don’t know if it actually does anything). But this might just be about making UI changes that make the effects of blockades more apparent to the player. Moving troops around is a little annoying but I think it’s necessary so Britain can’t send 500 divisions to Brazil in 1836. Although I think some sort of QOL improvement could be made to make moving troops overseas easier. Like assigning a fleet to an army so whenever you move that army overseas it automatically uses that fleet. You could even set it so that the fleet you use returns to a state after it moves the troops.

Anyways Im curious if other people feel the same way or if I’m in the minority on the navy.

I'm a filthy casual with just 400 hours played but I always wonder what's the best way to crush Russia?

Closet I've come is forming the HRE and a war caused a short lived revolution with a democratic enclave breaking off for a few years before autocracy reforming and eating it up.

I have never seen something akin to a Qing-splosion.

So what are you best methods military, economic or otherwise for laying Russia low?