Happy Thursday everyone, it’s time for another Victoria 3 development diary. Today I’ll be talking about my thoughts on the release of 1.8 and Pivot of Empire, the feedback we’ve received, and also a bit of what’s in store next for Victoria 3.
As some of you might remember, 1.8 was actually meant to be two updates - a smaller 1.8 with bug fixes & polish, and a larger 1.9 with Pivot of Empire and the larger free features such as the Political Movement Rework and the Discrimination Rework. We ended up combining these into a single update because the release windows between the two were just too tight, and as a result 1.8 became a chonker of an update, with a lot of potential to cause bugs and balance issues.
On the whole, the feedback around the update (and in particular the Discrimination Rework) has been positive, and you seem to be enjoying the additional dimensions that the update adds to the economic and political sides of Victoria 3. However, there are a few issues and bits of feedback on the not-so-positive-side that I specifically want to address:
- On release, we had a very nasty issue introduced by a backend change in the launcher, which caused users with a non-unicode character to crash when launching the game, which unfortunately slipped past our testing due to the fact that all of our work email addresses use only unicode characters. This one actually had us pulling our hairs a bit trying to find the cause, but with help from the engine team we were finally able to narrow it down and get a fix out just before the weekend (we don’t usually make a habit of patching at 17:45 on Fridays, but in this particular case it was warranted)
- We’ve gotten a fair amount of feedback that the rework of companies to own and affect specific buildings has made them somewhat underwhelming compared to the way they worked in 1.7, and we agree that this is an issue. We have made some changes in the hotfixes since, and are continuing to read your feedback and make adjustments as needed. You can always @ Pelly directly on our social platforms for key feedback in this regard, especially on Discord, the Forums and Reddit!
- Migration ended up far too non-restrictive and Assimilation ended up too restrictive as a result of the changes made to Discrimination. Both of these issues should now have been resolved in hotfixes.
I also want to take a moment to talk about the release and reception of Pivot of Empire. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback about the flavor it adds to India and how much more interesting playing in the region has become, which of course we’re very happy to hear! With that said, there’s also some things that didn’t work out quite as we wanted, which has resulted in some learnings for the Victoria 3 team going forward:
- Most significantly, it’s clear that we need to spend more time testing and iterating on the balance of complex Journal Entries like The Unstable Raj before releasing them into the wild, to ensure the difficulty level and overall impact on game outcomes are where we want them to be.
- We need to rethink how we set rewards for Journal Entries so that they feel appropriate to the challenge of completing them. We also need to get better about telling the player what those rewards are going to be so they don’t have to make a guess or check the wiki when deciding whether or not to try and complete a JE.
- We need to ensure the AI can handle the content we add, particularly for complex/difficult Journal Entries.
Finally, I want to touch briefly on what’s coming next. I won’t spend too long on this, as next week’s dev diary is going to be the customary ‘what’s next after update 1.8’ which will be all about this topic, but I feel I would be ignoring the elephant in the room if I didn’t address the fact that a significant amount of the feedback we’ve gotten about 1.8 isn’t so much about what is in 1.8, but rather what wasn’t: namely, as a number of you would put it: ‘fixing the military system’.
There is of course a broad range of opinions on what exactly this phrase entails, but from my perspective, these are most significant issues we see with the Victoria 3 military system as it stands:
- Front splitting causing wars to become unmanageable or frustrating
- Units suddenly teleporting away when their front disappears
- Supply isn’t impactful enough and armies win battles they should really lose when facing critical equipment shortages
- Lack of a proper military access system, i.e. Prussia having to naval invade to reach Denmark
- Troop allocation to offensive vs defensive battles causing unexpected outcomes (for example, a general using all local troops to defend against one naval invasion causing another naval invasion to just walk in unopposed)
For the next update (1.9), our ambition is to take a crack at all of these issues and in particular try to find a proper solution for the front splitting and troop teleportation woes once and for all. Finding good solutions for these issues is going to be a fairly major undertaking, so you might have to wait a while for 1.9, but I promise we’ll try to make it worth the wait!
With that said, we’re done for today. Join us again next week as I continue to talk about what’s next in updates 1.9, 1.10 and beyond. See you then!