Happy Thursday everyone and welcome back to yet another Victoria 3 development diary. With update 1.8 and Pivot of Empire having released in the previous week, we’d normally be doing a post-release thoughts dev diary. However, this time around we released a bit later in the week than we usually do, and so we’ve been wrapped up working on the larger 1.8.3 hotfix. For this reason, we’re going to hold off on our post-release thoughts until next week.
Instead, we’re going to focus on what we have already fixed in 1.8.3 as well as what else is currently on our radar to address in the coming weeks. So to begin with, here are the full patch notes for 1.8.3, which should already have reached you by the time you’re reading this:
Hotfix 1.8.3 Patchnotes
The following changes have been made to the game compared to 1.8.2:
Improvements
- Cultures will now seek to mass migrate somewhere where their acceptance is improved somewhat. This isn't a hard requirement, if the potential migration target has high enough migration attraction, that can offset the sought acceptance, meaning cultures might move somewhere they are less accepted as long as the target migration attraction is sufficiently higher than the origin one.
- The ratio between acceptance at the origin and at the target will now scale how many pops actually move in a mass migration per week. If the target acceptance is lower than the origin one, less pops will move. If it's higher, more pops will move.
- Presidency Stability game concept now explains conditions that affect the Unstable Raj Journal Entry progress bars
- Updated tooltips to explain conditions that affect the Sikh Sovereignty Journal Entry's 'Empire Stability' and 'Court Intrigue' progress bars
- Imperialism of Promise Journal Entry will no longer fail from civil wars, except secessions
- Power Blocs can now invite Revolutionary nations
- When recruiting a new commander, historical characters will now be displayed more often
AI
- The AI East India Company should now be more cautious with regards to events that decrease its stability
- Slightly decreased the AIs desire to construct Power Bloc Statues
- The aggression of colonial empires towards Unrecognized Nations now starts off slightly lower and ramps up more significantly as the game progresses
- Britain will no longer ignore the Boer states because they happen to be Recognized Nations when the time to clean up Africa has come
Balance
- Britain is now a part of the Indian Uprising diplomatic plays by default
- Reduced the income transfer of Chartered Company subjects to their overlords from 40% to 30%
- Rebalanced Indian Presidency stability from a scale of 100 to a scale of 300
- Gave the East India Company claims on much of its historical western frontier from game start
- Reduced the flat liberty desire growth in subjects from annexing low-prestige subjects
- Added 5 years of Memento Mori immunity to all starting leaders and agitators
- Reduced the impact from high/very high taxes on Expected Standard of Living, as the values were a bit overtuned
- Made the British East India Company start with high military wages
- Fixed Portugals conquer weights, it should now correctly prioritize annexing Gaza once the time comes
- Bumped Portugal's starting colonial affairs level from 1 to 2
Art
- The optimal sunlight positive harvest condition effect is now less intense, appearing colder at nighttime to illustrate moon light rather than sunlight.
- Reduced the effect and strength of wind effects
- Added disease outbreak particle effects
- Adjusted moderate rainfall vfx
- Resolved an issue where the parasol held by pops sometimes clips out in the portrait view
Content
- The "The Conquest of Algeria" Journal Entry now also grants France a claim on Western Sahara
Interface
- Political Movements are now sorted by type, and alphabetically within the same type
- The Harvest Condition map marker is now clickable and opens the Food Security tab on the Market panel
- Made the Harvest Condition map marker show up in the default and diplo play map modes on the nearest zoom
- Made the list of movements impacted by enacting or cancelling a law into a paged list so it doesn't take as much screen space in situations where there are a lot of movements
- Made it so when enacting or cancelling a law, movements where nothing is happening to their activism won't be listed
- Added the Acceptance Status icon in front of the status name in modifiers based on player feedback.
- Fixed a bug where localization did not have proper values for decaying civil war progress
- Added a go-to button for the active Movement on an Agitator's Character panel
Modding
- Added trigger can_pressure_interest_group to political movements, this must evaluate true for an IG to be able to be pressured by a movement, in addition to the already existing supporting clout requirements (Requested by Better Politics Mod for their 1.8 compatch)
- add_loyalists and add_radicals effects now support negative numbers (ie, add_radicals with a value of -0.5 will remove 50% of radicals)
- Scripted progress bars can be marked as inverted so that progress is defined as making progress values smaller
Bugfixes
- Fixed a bug where civil wars (particularly secessions) could be created without any viable states, resulting in the civil war continually starting and then being cancelled
- For a new insurrectionary movement to 'overtake' the currently active civil war, it now needs to have at least 10% higher activism, fixing an issue where you could have 'ping-ponging' between two civil wars with very similar activism levels
- Likely finally fixed the long-standing bug where battles do not end because the last few soldiers refuse to die or get demoralized
- Fixed an issue that would incorrectly clear occupations of a country that was occupying states belonging to a country that got annexed by losing an insurrection diplomatic play
- Fixed an issue where princely states were unable to be annexed by independent India, citing available Doctrine of Lapse
- Cultures will now require at least 30 general cultural acceptance to mass migrate somewhere. This general acceptance can then be reduced when the pops actually migrate due to things like Cultural Community Acceptance, but as a baseline there shouldn't be cultures moving somewhere they will for sure be Violently Oppressed.
- Government/Subsidized buildings are now able to override the usual hiring restrictions when hiring from ownership buildings, if the new job is equal or better to the old one (ie, government administrations can hire Aristocrats from Manor Houses to be aristocrats in government administration, but can't hire them to be clerks)
- Annexing states through events (such as Canadian Federation, Risorgimento etc) no longer generates radicals as though those states were conquered
- Fixed an issue where only passable provinces are counted towards bonuses to colonization speed. Also fixed a separate issue found with counting impassible provinces in state regions
- Fixed a bug where revolutionary or colonization AI wouldn't merge it's army formations
- Made it so that the Treaty of London Journal Entry will automatically select a response after six months
- Fixed bug where civil war progress would reset on save/load
- Fixed a bug where ideological incompatibility was applied to the countries that don't use a caste system
- Fixed a bug where the popup for agitators would not show which movement they created or joined due to the movement being created after the popup is fired
- When opening the game in debug mode, fixed the error spam related to ig_suppression
- Fixed the cooldown for the "The Contagious Diseases Acts" event so it does not fire if any of its modifiers are still in effect
- Reinvestment value is now calculated from each country's investment laws and tech instead of averaged over the building
- Total building reinvestment income now applies reinvestment efficiency
- The "Construct the Suez Canal" Journal Entry now correctly completes when building the Suez Canal
- Fixed a bug where countries created via create_country effect would get the wrong cultures
- Fixed a bug where heathen tax was applied for all of the religions, now it doesn't apply to religions with a positive acceptance effect
- Fixed a bug for The Positive Stage journal entry progress bar
- Fixed a bug where the Liberal Movement could not be created if the Radical Movement already existed, resulting in weird behaviors such as Market Liberal agitators not having a movement to join when finishing the Corn Laws
- Fixed some start up errors relating to character history
- Fixed a bug where chance of stalling during enactment was not predicted correctly in the law enactment tooltip
- Fixed scoping issue that could result from revolutions in British East India Company
- Sacred Civics II now properly lowers liberty desire for subjects with the same state religion
- Fixed a bug where Azadi Achievement sometimes became unavailable after loading a save
- Fixed a crash in harvest conditions
- Added cooldown to Italian Unification's Pan-Nationalist Radicals event
- Fixed a crash in map graphics
- Fixed a bug where after changing the land border adjacencies for the markets were not properly recalculated
- Fixed an issue where the Rani of Jhansi would not make use of her custom DNA
- Fixed a bug where nationally owned buildings built in other nation's states did not grant the part of their balance going to reinvestments to anyone
- Fixed a rare crash when resyncing a game
- Fixed cancellation trigger for "The Rise of Radicalism" event
- Added military shipyards and whaling stations to influence 3d center model in the port city
- Fixed a bug where ports in split states wouldn't show wharfs and fisheries from time to time
- The "The Scramble for Africa" Journal Entry now also accounts for states controlled by subjects
- Fixed a bug where certain Danish, British, and Portuguese Indian possessions would start as incorporated
- Historical figures now use their intended clothing assets
- Fixed very small countries having their armies stuck in their home HQ when at war
- Fixed wrong reference to Elections concept in factors attracting pops to Radical movement
- Fixed formatting for the "The Integration of the Nordestinos" event
- Fixed a bug where French Company Billboards appeared where they shouldn't appear
- Fixed a bug where the literacy tooltip would flicker
Further hotfix areas
Beyond 1.8.3, we’re planning to do at least one more hotfix, tentatively scheduled sometime next week, and we’re not ruling out the possibility of additional patches beyond that, as we want to leave the game in a good place before the Christmas holidays begin. In no particular order, these are some of the things on our radar for 1.8.4 and beyond, based on the feedback we’ve been getting from you since release:
- Continue to improve the balancing of the EIC content and revising some parts of the Unstable Raj journal entry
- Review the rewards of the Pivot of Empire Journal Entries to ensure they feel worth the effort to complete
- Look into the issue with too many frontlines being created in India due to the many small nations
- Evaluate building wages to see if the changes we made in 1.8 made building owners too stingy for their own good
- Find a more comprehensive solution for how acceptance should tie into migration
- Remove the heritage/homeland restrictions on assimilation when it makes sense for pops to assimilate regardless
- Evaluate companies and ensure they do not feel underwhelming as a result of no longer being country-wide
- Doing a balance pass on subject payments, particularly for Chartered Companies
This is of course not even close to being an exhaustive list, and we will continue to collect your feedback and make adjustments and fixes as a result. For now though, that’s all for today, so please join us again next week for the proper post-release thoughts on Pivot of Empire and update 1.8. See you then!