Hello Victorians,
Happy Thursday! It’s Lino, Game Design Lead on Victoria 3 and I welcome you back to another Dev Diary!
Today we’re looking at (almost) everything to do with Companies. Most of what I will talk about today is part of Charters of Commerce, which releases on June 17, but we will also talk about some additions and changes for Companies that are coming with the free 1.9 Update alongside the DLC.
Before we begin: As always, any values, texts, designs, graphics etc. are work in progress and are subject to change.
So, one big ambition we had for Companies with this update was to not only expand interactions with them and add functionality to them, but also to make observing them grow a bit easier and more enticing. For that we overhauled the Company interface panel and added a bit of functionality to it. I will be going through these changes later in this Dev Diary, but before then we will talk about all the individual parts that make the whole.
Alright, let’s get into it, starting with Company Charters (of Commerce).
Company Charters
Company Charters are a new way for you to enable your companies to expand their wealth and reach. They all provide new, different sets of rights to the company in question. What those rights are, I will talk about in detail further down. Hand them out to a company you want to see grow and then watch and observe as their line go up!
Hmm… What could these icons stand for? Continue reading to find out!
Every country gets a number of free charters which you will be able to hand out across all your Companies. You can go over the limit, but then each charter will cost you additional authority. For example, if you have five free charters to spend, you can put all of them onto one company, increasing their opportunities by a lot but be left with no charters for your other companies, or you can spread them equally, specializing all companies only a bit in order to see them succeed. The choice is yours!
The number of free charters can come from different sources, e.g. economic system laws, certain technologies and also the rank of a country will increase the limit.
As this free charter functionality is a very late addition in our process, we are not making full use of this yet, but we see potential in adding it as an effect to the completion of certain Journal Entries, events or Power Bloc Principles for example and are also happy to take your feedback for where you believe this could be added. Similarly, modders are also able to use this where they see fit since it is a regular modifier.
Without further ado, here’s the first Charter which we are introducing with Charters of Commerce.
Colonization Charter
While the era of the big company-states started to end in our timeframe, there certainly were ambitions by some to continue the trend.
When you hand out a Colonization Charter to one of your companies, you select the target state to be colonized. Then, a colony will be created which will be supported by your company.
The colony receives a bonus to its colonization speed and upon fully colonizing one state region, this will actually turn the colony into a new country, led by the company you gave the charter to.
“I know a good name - Fordlandia!”
The new country is a charter company type subject of your country and behaves like any other regular country pretty much.
The new country has a connection to your company though of course and receives a bonus to construction of new buildings and throughput. The country gets the same bonuses the company receives for industries that are in the company’s supported building types and a fraction of them for any other buildings. On the other hand, a company country cannot have companies on their own. Of course if they go fully independent they will be able to do so like any other country.
Now you may wonder what that means for the chartered company countries that we have at game start and I will talk about that later in this Dev Diary.
Connected to the company, the new country benefits from the expertise
Trade Charter
The Trade Charter is quite straightforward. It allows the company in question to build, buy and run trade centers.
Once you’ve granted your company a Trade Charter, trade centers are added to the company’s building types, making company-owned Trade Centers profit from the same bonuses the other industries do.
Trade Centers run by a Company additionally have a Trade Advantage bonus for goods that are produced by their building types.
Companies exporting goods they produced
Industry Charter
Similarly to the Trade Charter, the Industry Charter allows your company to expand into a new type of business.
Depending on scripted options, using this charter will allow you to grant your company the rights to expand into a different industry entirely.
When we scripted these options, we looked at historic expansions that the companies have done or have added vertical integration industries that were the most fitting. For example a furniture company likely received logging camps as an additional option if there was no other historic precedent.
Just like with the Trade Charter, the Industry Charter adds the selected option to the building type list of the company, making any company-owned levels benefit from throughput bonus and boosting construction. You can only assign one Industry Charter per company
What to do? Some companies have more than one choice
Investment Charter
You can grant an Investment Charter to companies to bolster their investments in foreign countries. How that works is that companies can establish a Regional Headquarter in any country where they have at least 5 owned levels and you have foreign investment rights.
The Regional HQ, similar to the main Company Headquarter, serves as the place to display ownership of local investments and simultaneously as the place to collect the income of those buildings. It sends the profits to your home country’s investment pool so that capitalists in your country can use that to build even more wealth.
But here’s the catch - the presence of a Regional HQ allows the company to use the foreign country’s investment pool to construct or buy additional building levels, bringing more options of aggressive foreign acquisitions to the table.
“They're turning profits in the name of prophets”
As a side note: Although foreign investment works in subjects etc. without having any DLC, we felt it was best that we also unlocked the full foreign investment pact when owning Charters of Commerce since the Investment Charter becomes a lot more fun when you have access to that. So both DLCs, Sphere of Influence and Charters of Commerce will now unlock foreign investment rights.
Monopoly Charter
Monopoly Charters allow you to choose an industry (or more) of a company to grant them exclusive building rights of that industry. This industry list does include any industry the company has gotten access to via another Charter though, so for example you can use the Industry Charter to unlock logging camps for a company and then subsequently grant the same company a monopoly for logging camps.
Do not pass go. Do not collect $200
So what does the monopoly actually do?
Well, like a proper monopoly should, it increases prices of the produced goods. We modify the selling price in building levels affected by a monopoly. The company’s potential profits are increased by this since they’re selling goods at a higher price. This will in turn of course increase the market price too, according to how much of a good is produced under a company monopoly. An active monopoly will also make it so that companies can purchase buildings of the fitting type for a big discount from other owners. Which other owners? I will talk about that further down this Dev Diary.
Additionally, we have a nice tie-in with the Treaty system that Alex presented last time. As part of a treaty, you will be able to request a country to give monopoly rights to one of your companies, further increasing their profits from ownership in foreign lands.
This brings us to the end of the Charters part, but as I mentioned before we have a couple of things that we will roll out for everybody with the free 1.9 Update that releases alongside Charters of Commerce.
Free 1.9 Update additions
Since the inception of the companies feature, we’d been thinking about a potential expansion of the system, namely characters leading them. With 1.9, we’re laying the groundwork for future work in that regard.
Executives
Introducing Executives, a new role that characters can have. They serve as the head of a company, not only running it, but also being the face of the company towards the outside world.
Executives will come with some new character traits that we are adding which will boost certain aspects of companies, e.g. a free charter to spend or a bonus to throughput in the company’s owned levels. These traits are not done yet, so I cannot show them at this point.
Executives will boost the political power of their affiliated Interest Group, similar to how generals do it at the moment. The amount is dependent on how well the company they are leading is doing. Like other characters, Executives can end up as heads of Interest Groups as well if circumstances line up accordingly.
If a company forms a new country via the Colonization Charter, it is also the Executive who will be head of state of the new country. At least at the start, depending on the country’s laws of course they might have elections that change the ruler for example.
We have a number of historical Executives that can show up in the game to lead your historical companies, fully equipped with custom DNA. For all other Executives we generate a random character as we usually do.
Don’t you want this young Alfred Krupp to give you company?
We hope to expand on this in the future to make Executives have more impact on your political life so that Companies feel even more like an actor within your country, maybe even to the point where granting them too many privileges will actually turn them into a potential danger. But that will require more work in the future.
Interface
Now that I have shown all the individual bits, we can finally take a look at the interface changes we have done. First, here’s a look at the list of companies which remains accessible via the Companies button on the left navigation bar.
You can see, all relevant information is still available, though the positioning may have changed due to the addition of Executives and other information. We can see Prosperity now has a dedicated icon, but apart from that it’s more or less the same.
We do see a second tab in the panel though, which is a global display of Companies, in which you can compare all established companies. You can sort the list by country, names of the companies or the profit they make and can also see how many of their building types they own.
Now, if we look at a specific company’s interface, we will see a lot of changes.
In the first tab we get an overview of the company, the bonuses they provide, their building types, Executive and so on. On the bottom you can see the buttons to assign Company Charters. They can be found there in all tabs of the company interface, so that you don’t have to go back to the Overview tab each time you want to assign one. Depending on which ones are active, we see additional industry types added to the company’s list or an additional widget informing you about which monopolies the company holds.
If you scroll down a bit, you will also find a summary of Regional HQs and colonies that are attached to this company. But for a detailed view we should look at the second tab, Assets.
Here we can see all building levels owned by the Company’s HQ and also attached countries, colonies and Regional HQs and their assets (if they have any).
If you want to see more data on how your company has developed, you should look into the third tab, Statistics.
As the name suggests, this tab features multiple graphs that show you the development of the Company with information about productivity, profit, prosperity, number of building levels and levels of each type, making it the perfect place to see how your assignment of Company Charters affects your Company for example.
I for one really enjoy seeing the numbers grow and we hope you do too.
Next up, we have a couple more changes unrelated to the interface that I’d like to bring to you.
Various changes
People with a keen eye may have seen in my screenshots that the Hudson Bay Company is listed as a British company.
That is because we are making it so that all three historical establishments of company countries (HBC, EIC, Russian-American Company) will start as former colonies with respective ties to their original companies. So the Hudson Bay Company will be a country tied to the Company HQ of the Hudson Bay Company in London for example.
This change included some minor adjustments to owned building levels and sadly the removal of the Great Western Railway from the game start so that Great Britain has space to have the EIC and HBC as historical starting companies. Of course the Great Western Railway is still available if you want to form it at a later stage.
For 1.9, we are also changing the way Prosperity is gained. We are making it so Prosperity has a target value that it is drifting towards instead of a constant upward or downward movement.
The target value is influenced by the current productivity of the company and also the number of staffed building levels the company owns. Additionally the popularity of the Executive leading it can impact the target value too. With a high popularity it increases, low popularity decreases it of course.
Similarly, the speed at which Prosperity drifts towards its target value is affected mostly by the size of the company and a base value.
As the way companies work has changed quite drastically over the years, in particular with 1.8 and 1.9, we are also conducting a small pass over the forming conditions of companies. We are now making it so that forming a company can be done with privately owned buildings that you pay for and also we are generally making the establishment slightly easier by reducing the number of required building levels. This won’t affect all companies and not all affected ones to the same degree, but should make more companies’ establishments viable.
Furthermore, we are of course introducing a new set of historical companies, some of which are going to be free, most of which are going to be part of Charters of Commerce.
I have one last thing that I’d like to talk about today, which is that with 1.9, companies will be able to buy building levels owned by financial districts and manor houses. This is a big change that we had wanted to do for a while and should smooth out some of the behaviour where companies and other private owners are playing a cat and mouse game to profit from throughput bonuses and generally makes companies more competitive.
This does not mean that other private owners can do the same. We will evaluate in the future if we want to add that functionality, but for now we are already happy that we could bring this improvement to you.
Alright, that’s it for today. In two weeks we will be back with our next Dev Diary where I will talk about and walk you through how Prestige Goods work.
Until then, have a nice day!
