Hello Victorians and Happy Thursday!

My name is Tunay (aka Doodlez) and I'm a Game Designer and Rural Folk member on Victoria 3 and I've been tasked with bringing you this Dev Diary.

Today we will be going through some of the changes and additions that didn't fit into the other Dev Diaries as well as some follow-up on some topics we have tackled already.

Let's jump right in with some of the latter in fact.

Bulk Formation Actions

As mentioned by Lino in Dev Diary #145 we were actively working on the ability to change Military Formation Mobilization Options in bulk and not only has this been implemented but the scope has also somewhat escalated and now also includes some other much sought after functionality like the ability to mass merge Formations or set Commander Orders across all Generals.

The blue numbers signalize how many Commanders are set to a specific Order or how many Formations have a specific Mobilization Option activated, very handy!

Blockades

A Blockade is a new type of Commander Order for Admirals that allows them to cut off World Market Access and Supply Lines from being created in Ports adjacent to their designated Sea Node.

Pictured here; the Royal Navy blockading Guangdong Bay

Blockades differ from conventional Convoy Raiding in that they require overwhelming naval supremacy but can inflict massive damage to the target country.
The defending nation does not have to helplessly watch this unfold of course, they can always choose to send their own fleet to engage your navy and try to break the blockade!

Whether you wish to deploy one or the other will depend on your situation, means and of course the make-up of your Fleet in comparison to your enemy! Capital Ships in particular will be able to instill fear and whiplash into anyone contemplating sailing that day on account of being so large and, as I have been told, having lots of guns.

While Capital Ships are great for blockading Ports you may wish to rely on smaller vessels for your raiding business instead

Now, this is all that I have for you on the Navy side of things for today but before we continue I'd like to reaffirm that we will be actively looking into further naval improvements and additions going forwards.

Strategic Objectives

Strategic Objectives are a feature that we introduced way back in Update 1.2 that allowed you to designate a State as a target to advance towards on top of any war goals you may also have. This was however before we introduced Military Formations and has never really meshed well with it and other subsequent changes and additions to warfare to the point that it essentially only worked on one general at a time.

To that end we have decided to not only fix how Strategic Objectives work under the hood to make them feel more responsive but instead took the time to make them into something more. Therefore we have moved them from being something that exists per Front to instead be something that is attached to individual Formations. This felt particularly necessary as Fronts are no longer guaranteed to be contiguous objects either.

This change will give players significantly more control over the behaviour of the Formations in wars where it matters if they want that, while being something that can be safely ignored in rather one-sided affairs or if you simply do not wish to meddle with your Generals advances at all.

You can mix and match Strategic Objectives across several Formations as you please, allowing you to either concentrate their efforts on specific targets or to spread them out across the front

When choosing where to assign a Strategic Objective you will also be shown your wargoals as well as those of your enemy!

The rebel scum is advancing towards Maranhão but we wont let them!

Lastly to accompany this change, Strategic Objectives can now be placed via a new button in the Formation panel or alternatively through a new right-click interaction on the State you wish to target.

Wargoal Tooltips

At times it has felt confusing as to how and why a war goal counts as contested or not, an issue that's only exacerbated by the fact that war goals can have all sorts of conditions between them. To alleviate this problem the war goal tooltips have been updated to now clearly state how a war goal can be pressed.

For now Hedjaz is out of reach but this will change once our invasion force arrives

This will be all things military for this Dev Diary, as always we are looking forward to your feedback!

Company Prosperity

In Dev Diary #147 we mentioned that Company Prosperity is now a target value that a Company drifts towards as well as some smaller changes and additions, like the popularity of our newly added Executives.

The formula has since received another small but noticeable change. Where in the past the base Prosperity was based on the productivity of the Company compared to other Companies, it is now instead based on the Productivity of the Company compared to the global productivity of the types of buildings owned by said Company. In other words, if a Company owns Logging Camps and Rye Farms, its Prosperity from Productivity will be based on how well it compares to the average productivity of all Logging Camps and Rye Farms in the world.

Country Monopolies

As you may recall we added the ability to grant Companies Monopolies on specific building types via our new Company Charters feature, but what if you wanted to be the one doing the monopolizing? Well now you can thanks to our new Country Monopolies feature:

In the name of his majesty the King, I have decided to put the production of all Cheese and Sausage in Prussia under the exclusive domain of the government!

Each Country Monopoly comes with a cost in Authority and in turn blocks Private Investors from constructing new buildings of this type.

It's important to note that a Country Monopoly does not affect the ownership makeup of pre-existing buildings; you will still have to claw those back the old fashioned way by nationalizing them.

Custom RNG Seed

Making its way into update 1.9 is a new game rule:

When activated it allows you to set a custom seed that the random rolls in your game will be based on which should be particularly useful for the modders amongst you or if you simply didn't like the Ideology your Japanese Landowners IG leader spawned with.

I bring all the…

Quality of Life Changes

Next up here are a couple more Quality of Life and UX changes and additions coming with Update 1.9. You will have to wait for the full changelog next week for all of the details but there are a couple that I'd like to highlight today!

Private Investment Log

When hovering over the upcoming Private Construction plan you will now be greeted with a new tooltip that lists some of the most recent investments conducted by your pops including Constructions and Privatizations.

Apparently there is a fortune to be made in the colonies

Colonization

When colonizing a new overseas state you will now also be granted a Port in that state, for a price of course, since otherwise colonization will be halted until you do so. To cut down on busy work we decided to just merge this step into the interaction itself.

A worthwhile investment if you ask me, and now with less clicks than ever before!

Movements

Additionally, in the never ending quest to surface more important information to the highest levels Movements have received a bit of a facelift with the generic Movement Type icons being replaced with the Core Movement Ideology of each movement or a fitting Flag if there is one.
On top of that the tooltip now also clearly lists the Laws that the movement supports or opposes without having to dig further.

The Liberal Movements advocacy for personal freedoms does not seem to apply to enslaved people, as such they are currently very passive

These types of changes are almost always spawned either by our own gameplay experiences or your feedback so please keep it coming! With every update we try to optimize as many tooltips, concepts and other bits of information as possible to deliver you the data you want more directly.

Mapmodes

Something we had been testing in Update 1.8 was assigning a list of contextually relevant map modes to the Budget Panel and for Update 1.9 we have decided to expand this into pretty much all other relevant panels! To this end our wonderful artists have also created icons for every single map mode in the game.

We felt that both of these steps were necessary as we are looking into improving map modes further and as the number of our map modes has increased quite substantially since release and will probably continue to do so in the future.

Clicking the small map mode button to the right will create a list of map modes relevant to the panel at hand, all of them with the new icons created by Ingela

Modding

It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to end my Dev Diary without mentioning at least some of the changes and new tools for modders coming with this update!

Law Variants

You can now assign your new Law a parent based on the other laws in the same category, your new Law will then inherit all ideological stances of its parent law allowing you to easily create variations of existing laws for more flexibility or to cover situations in different countries or regions in a more detailed manner without having to setup completely new Ideologies every time.

We are introducing one such Law Variant in Update 1.9 in the form of the “Canton System” a version of Isolationism that exists in China at game start. Implemented by the Qing dynasty, it greatly reduces the amount of outside trade by forcing it to go through a single port without banning it outright however, unlike regular Isolationism!

The Canton System — while not as extreme — does not come with perks as strong as that of Isolationism either

Creating a new variation is as simple as defining a new “parent” key in the respective law type:

Trade Setup

Those of you creating total conversion mods would probably like to know how to set up historical trade routes now that the old trading system has been replaced, thankfully it's a rather simple affair.

Within your common/history/trade folder you should create a new file allowing you to define imports and exports in each state via the new add_exports and add_imports effects, just make sure you also give the states sufficient Trade Centers when you do so! Note that the numbers in these effects is not the number of goods exported, but rather the amount of Trade Capacity that will be used, so add_exports = 20 on iron will actually result in an exported quantity of 100.

To top things off I have created a handpicked list of some of the most exciting additions coming with this update that I haven't already mentioned:

• Added new text formatting tags ":" and ";" which are used like the "+" and "-" tags, but colors numbers gold/blue instead of green/red.
• Added new on actions “on_game_started” and “on_game_started_after_lobby” both of these will fire once the game has begun, the latter will fire after players have chosen their countries which is perfect for when you need access to players specifically.
• Added "cooldown" for "scripted buttons" (used by Journal Entries) which can be used to specify how often the button can be used. For example: cooldown = { days = 10 }
• The create_building effect now allows script values to be passed into the “level” property meaning you can finally prune all those if-statements. (I see you)
• Scripted Buttons and Decisions now use script values to calculate ai_chance instead of scripted modifiers, allowing easier scripting of more advanced AI logic.
• The max_manpower property from Combat Unit Groups has been moved to Combat Unit Types meaning you can now define different unit sizes for individual unit types if you like!
• Added optional custom_completion_header, custom_failure_header, custom_on_completion_header, and custom_on_failure_header properties to journal entries to allow customized flavor for completion and failure states.
• Added event_outcome_completed_desc, event_outcome_failed_desc, event_outcome_timeout_desc properties to journal entries allowing you to show the effects of an event that would fire as a result of a journal entry.
• Added script lists for decentralized countries like any_decentralized_country, random_decentralized_country, every_decentralized_country etc.
• Added executive_usage and company_trigger triggers for character templates, allowing you to add new company executives throughout the game
• save_temporary_scope_as will now properly work in script values, including being passed into localization.

That will be all from me for today. We will be back next week with the Changelog for Update 1.9 and Charters of Commerce!

Until then, Happy Thursday and have a nice day!