Happy Thursday and welcome back to another Victoria 3 development diary. This week I’ll be talking about the Political Movement Rework I mentioned back in Dev Diary #126 and which will be coming to you with update 1.8, slated to release later in the year. Before I start, I want to reiterate that this feature is still very much under active development, and any screenshots or numbers shown are very much not indicative of what will be in the actual release, and the UX in particular will be in a very rough state, so don’t read too much into it!
Right then. As I stated previously, the principal goal of this rework is to change Political Movements from temporary demands into long-term ideological forces that can shape the political landscape of your country. So what does that mean, in practice? Well, one of the most significant differences is that movements are no longer formed around the enactment or preservation of a single law. Instead, there is a wide variety of movement types, each with its own unique agenda and conditions for forming, but which can be broadly broken down into three categories:
Ideological Movements: These are movements that exist to push a particular ideological agenda and try to win support for that agenda among your Pops and Interest Groups. Examples include both more narrowly focused movements such as Abolitionists and Suffragettes, and broader ones such as Communists and National Liberals.
Cultural Movements: These are movements that exist to agitate for the rights and privileges of a particular culture in a country. Their specific agenda will vary based on whether the culture is a primary culture or minority culture, as well as the legal status of that culture in the country. For example, a cultural minority movement of South Italians in North Italy would oppose the enactment of Ethnostate since it would strip them of their rights, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re willing to extend those rights to other, less accepted cultures in the country.
Religious Movements: Similar to the cultural movements, but for religions instead
The Pro-Slavery Movement in the United States is largely composed of Dixie pops and has wide-reaching influence in multiple Interest Groups
As before, Movements have Support and Radicalism. Previously, both of these numbers could be a little fuzzy in exactly what they represented, so we have changed them into straight percentages between 0 and 100%, where 50% Support now actually means that about half of your country stands behind the movement.
Support is currently calculated from two parts of roughly equal importance: Popular Support and Military Support. The former is a straightforward calculation of the number of individuals in your country that are part of the movement, so in a country of 1 million people, a movement backed by 100k individuals would have a Popular Support of 10%. Military Support is a little more complex, and is currently calculated by the fraction of Soldier and Officer Political Strength that are part of the movement, representing the fact that officers tend to have a greater sway on military side-taking than mere enlisted men. We are also looking into ways to tie generals directly into movements and have this impact their Military Support. All of this plays an important role if a movement escalates into a Civil War, but more on that later.
So, how do movements gain the support of Pops? Very much like Interest Groups, they now have an attraction weight, which depends completely on the type of nature of the movement. The Abolitionist movement, for instance, might have an outsized attraction on literate pops of certain professions, but also would tend to attract more pops from religions whose scripture and traditions take an anti-slavery stance than from ones which tacitly or overtly approve of it.
This attraction weight competes with the attraction weight of all other movements in your country, as individuals can only be part of a single movement at a time. To ensure that this doesn’t mean you end up with 20 tiny and fragmented movements, we are planning to have a system of ‘initial enthusiasm’, where new movements start with a boost to their attraction which fades over time, and are eventually supplanted entirely by the next shiny new thing. It’s worth noting that we may end up only applying this to Ideological Movements, as it doesn’t necessarily make sense that your Pops would stop caring about their right to worship freely just because the Positivist movement is taking off.
Before we move on, it’s also worth noting that just like with Interest Groups, Pop support for Movements isn’t something that instantly changes overnight: Even if a movement is created with a massive attraction weight, it will take some time for it to pick up supporters from other movements.
The pro-Turkish cultural movement in the Ottoman Empire seeks to ensure that Turks remain at the top of Ottoman society, and has a fairly strong base of support in the military.
As mentioned above, movements will champion one or several ideologies, and have a few different ways in which they will push those ideologies. The first and most straightforward one is through direct action. Movements have a level of Radicalism, which will go up or down over time based on how much they perceive the current status quo and government’s actions to match their overarching goals. Depending on their level of Radicalism, Movements will be in one of four ‘levels’ of activity:
Passive: Movements with very low Radicalism are Passive, have no direct effects and will only indirectly influence Interest Groups (more on that below)
Agitating: The next step up from Passive, Agitating movements will influence the enactment chances of laws that they support or oppose
Protesting: Protesting movements have a greater impact on the enactment chances of their supported and opposed laws compared to Agitating movements, but also steadily turn their supporters into Radicals over time
Rioting: The highest level of Radicalism, Rioting movements will rapidly radicalize their supporters and may take their level of activity one step further by igniting a Civil War
What all this means is that Movement Radicalism is no longer purely a negative thing, at least not when a Movement’s goals align with yours - if you work too hard at keeping everyone happy, you may find it difficult to push through any radical changes that aren’t backed by your dominant Interest Groups.
The other, less direct way in which Movements affect country politics is the influence they hold over Interest Groups. An Interest Group is considered to be influenced by a Movement if at least a certain % of the Interest Group’s total political strength are members of that Movement, and an Interest Group can be influenced by multiple movements. The most significant effect of this is how it impacts IG Leader Ideologies.
Previously, when an Interest Group got a new leader, that leader would pick their ideology from a weighted list of all the ideologies in the game (minus ones that were scripted to be unavailable or have a weight of zero for that leader), but this has now been reduced to a much shorter list: Leader ideologies can now only be picked from either a set of basic ideologies inherent to the Interest Group itself, or from one of the movements that is influencing the Interest Group, with Movement ideologies tending to have stronger weights than the basic ones. This also means that the ideology selection can now actually be predicted and displayed, so that you can make an educated guess about the way the political winds are blowing in your IGs.
This effectively means that the influencing movements serve as ‘factions’ inside the Interest Group, competing to install a leader and take control of the IG for as long as that leader remains in power. We are also considering allowing Movements to have more permanent effects on the ideologies of Interest Groups, but this is tricky to pull off in a way that doesn’t end up with an IG changing its core identity every 10 years or so, so I don’t want to promise that it’ll be part of the 1.8 update just yet.
Torn between the Pro and Anti-Slavery movements, the next leader of Evangelicals may come down on either side of the issue - or be a compromise candidate who sidesteps it altogether.
The final changes I want to go over in this DD is Agitators, which of course have had to go through some changes to fit into this new system. For the most part, Agitators work exactly as before: They appear and start or join movements, can be exiled and invited, and so on. A relatively minor change is that instead of directly adding Support to a movement, they now increase its Pop Attraction by an amount partially scaling to their Popularity, so having Friedrich Engels penning columns singing the praise of your Socialist movement will attract more Socialists over time.
The more significant change is that we have flipped the script on what an Agitator’s Interest Group membership means for their political leanings. Previously, an Agitator would (much like an IG leader) look to their ideology first and interest group ideologies second when determining which laws they support, meaning that you would sometimes get some pretty strange bedfellows and a bunch of Rural Folk Agitators of varying ideologies trying to implement National Militia all over the place for rather unclear reasons. Instead of anchoring Agitators fully to the ideologies of their IG, we have decided that their own ideology, traits and other such circumstances should be what determines which Movement they want to support.
In other words, Agitators are now much more fixated on specific ideas, and if there isn’t sufficient support for those ideas in your country to get a Movement they would actually care to support going, they may not even be available to invite. On the other hand, we are looking into loosening the rules somewhat around which Agitators you can invite based on discrimination status, but we haven’t fully worked out the details there, so more on that another time.
It would of course not be possible to make all these changes without also making major changes to Civil Wars (particularly Secessions and how they tie into cultural/religious movements), but we’ll cover all of that separately in a later dev diary, along with more detailed information on how Movement Radicalism works.
For now I’ll wish you adieu and encourage you to check in again next week, when Lino will tell you all about discrimination and the ways it’s changing in 1.8. See you then!