Hello Victorians,
and a Happy Thursday! Lino, Game Design Lead here, and talking to you today about Prestige Goods. Keep in mind that today is a public holiday in Sweden, so while I’ll be around to answer some burning questions, more answers will have to wait until we’re officially back at work on Monday.
Prestige Goods are going to be part of Charters of Commerce, our upcoming Mechanics Pack which releases on June 17 alongside the free 1.9 Update.
Before we begin: As always, any values, texts, designs, graphics etc. are work in progress and are subject to change.
Well then, let’s take a look at Prestige Goods.
Prestige Goods
Prestige Goods are a feature we have wanted to do for a while. In my internal pitch for Companies I had brought up a different variant of the feature already - at this point almost two years ago. So we are happy to be able to bring them to you now of course.
From this, you can tell already that there is a strong connection between Prestige Goods and Companies. In fact, Prestige Goods can only be produced by Companies. In some cases, they represent particular brands or products these Companies produced, in other cases they are more of a quality label for a type of product. At the end of this Dev Diary I am showcasing a couple of examples if you are curious.
Something worth noting is they are variants of existing goods, not new goods. For example Champagne is a Prestige Good variant of regular Wine. This has a couple of advantages, most importantly the performance is not nearly as affected by this as it would be if we introduced this large number of new goods. They are part of the same buy packages, serve as the same inputs and outputs as regular goods etc., with some differences which I’ll go over later.
Additionally, there can be multiple Prestige Good variants of any given good, for example we are introducing three different Prestige silk versions.
So how are Prestige Goods produced?
Production
Companies can only ever produce one Prestige Good type. A company that is prosperous will be able to produce their assigned Prestige Good.
You might be wondering: what makes certain Prestige Goods truly unique? Well, we made sure to include about 50 historical examples of goods and companies that were iconic for the era - keeping both immersion and replayability in mind.
For example the Manufacture d'armes de Saint-Étienne Company in France will start producing the Prestige Good Saint-Etienne Rifles instead of regular small arms as soon as they hit the prosperity threshold. All company-owned building levels get the new blueprints and get to work on them, while all other weapon manufacturers in the country continue producing boring standard rifles. So while other companies around the world might be able to produce a generic Prestige Small Arms, there can be only one true producer of Saint-Etienne Rifles(TM)!
It doesn't necessarily mean that France has an exclusive right to that good - as country borders can always change.
Unique icon showcasing the production of the new rifles has begun
Once you have at least one Prestige Good variant of a good in the market, we need to show that somehow of course. For that, we can expand the entry of a good and show all Prestige Good variants of this good that are part of the market and can see how high their share is.
Here’s an example for how this entry looks on the World Market, there’s a filter to disable the fold-out entries too
While we wanted to make Prestige Goods somewhat special, we didn’t want to exclude all companies that lacked a good historical example. So, for all other companies that lack a historical Prestige Good, players will get a Journal Entry with the additional requirement of becoming one of the top three producers of the according good to start production of a “generic” kind of Prestige Good, e.g. Prestige Cloth or Prestige Iron rather than a special name and look.
It may not be Haute Couture, but Spanish fashion could still become a thing
Now let’s look at the effects that Prestige Goods have when they are being produced and introduced into your market.
Effects
The effects of Prestige Goods are manifold. In general one can say that they are more desired and of higher quality than their regular good counterparts and the higher the percentage of Prestige Goods, the better it is generally.
For one, of course Prestige Goods increase the prestige of the country where the producing company is located. This behaves like the top-producer Prestige gain for a regular good, but with a significantly higher bonus. So if you are the number one Prestige Wood producer, you can collect a nice Prestige bonus for example.
“The French produce the best wine, clearly! And guns too.”
On the World Market, Prestige Goods provide a trade advantage bonus based on the percentage of goods of that type that are Prestige Goods. This calculation is market area based, so for example if 50% of all iron in France is a form of Prestige Good iron, they receive 50 Trade advantage on exports from France for that particular Prestige Good. But if in one of their colonies the share of Prestige Good iron is only 25%, exports from that colony would only receive a 25% trade advantage bonus, without affecting the exports from France mainland itself.
Note the +85.9 trade advantage from 85.9% of all Small Arms production being a Prestige Good
Buildings consume Prestige Goods as input goods too. Based on the share of Prestige Goods, they are profiting from increased throughput.
Prestigious Swedish Oregrounds Iron helps to increase the throughput of this Tooling Workshop
Now what would be the point of producing prestigious Saint-Étienne Rifles if you couldn’t show them off on the battlefield too?
Prestige Goods also increase Offense, Defense and Morale recovery.
They shoot extra accurate
Pops also heard about the new shiny Prestige Goods - and they want them. As you may know, goods that are consumed by Pops are organized in a couple of need categories, e.g. basic food or luxury drinks.
Within a category, Pops will consume more of a particular good depending how much of it is a Prestige Good. For example if you have a lot of Champagne, say 80% of all wine, but none of the other goods in the luxury drinks category has any Prestige Good, Pops will shift some of their spending from tea and coffee towards wine. If all goods were Prestige Goods, nothing would change about their spending.
Additionally, we also increase the chance of Pops getting obsessed with a particular good, increasing with the percentage of Prestige Goods variants of that good.
Closing thoughts
Alright, that’s our walkthrough for the new Prestige Goods mechanic. I’d like to end today by showcasing some of the fantastic work that our 2D artists have done to make these new Prestige Goods shine.
Some historical ones + all “generic” Prestige Goods made by Ingela
More historical ones made by Kenneth, don’t you want to bite into that River Plate Beef?
That’s it for today. Next week already, Tunay (aka Doodlez) will be writing about some other changes that we made for the 1.9 Update. What exactly that entails, you will have to check out yourself.
Until then, have a happy Thursday and goodbye!
