Victoria 3

Journal system seems like a decent evolution of the various triggered missions/decision-type things used in other Paradox games. The added visibility should make complex chains way more viable than just stumbling into hidden event triggers.

It is very important to have things like a journal, that’s more than just a dump of news.
I’m really looking forward to this game.

Nothing too exciting as far as colonization. It is interesting that it requires a technology to do colonization. Was that true in Vicky 2? I don’t remember it.

Oh, yes.

Summary

A nation begins the game with a minimum life rating of 35. Though there are a few areas that can be colonized so early, most potential colonies are not so hospitable.

Three inventions can decrease a nation’s minimum life rating. They are:

Prophylaxis against Malaria has a 2% chance of being discovered by a nation that has learned Medicine, and reduces the minimum life rating by 5.

Mission to Civilize and Colonial Negotiations are more complicated inventions: they have no base discovery chance on their own, but gain a 10% discovery rate both when a great power or a neighbor invent them, and 25% discovery rates when the nation discovers technologies from later decades. Specifically, Mission to Civilize requires techs from 1850:

And Colonial Negotiations requires techs from 1870:

The bonus from discovering any one of the later-era technologies outweighs the combined bonus from a great power and a neighboring power already having the technology.

Generally, if the player is the first to get Colonial Negotiations, and thus able to colonize, the rest of the major powers will quickly (if not immediately) follow suit due to the neighbor bonus. This causes a rush of colonization in the 1870s, especially in Africa where most empty provinces have life rating 10 or 15. (Historically, the Scramble for Africa began in 1881.) Any country who hasn’t researched Breech-Loaded Rifles by 1880 will probably miss the boat and find all of Africa already colonized.

Wow, I had completely forgotten about all that stuff.

It is not clear how much Vicky 3 will keep.

This was one of the main complaints ACOUP had about the V2 model. Now there is a nation everywhere - though they aren’t all treated the same. I don’t envy the work they went through trying to figure out borders, populations, names all around the world and also adjudicating compromises for gameplay.

I wonder if there can be conflicts between decentralized nations?

I expect them to be passive and maybe generate some events for bordering nations.

I don’t believe they’ll act externally at all while they are decentralized. I’m curious if they have a path to centralizing outside of interference from imperial powers.

From the dev responses on the dev diary:

No, part of what makes a decentralized nation functionally different from a centralized one is the lack of an active foreign policy, or much of any organized and directed policies. The Nyamwezi of East Africa do not exchange ambassadors with Oman, and the Pawnee are not centralized enough for any protectorate to stick. If you go through the records of treaties arranged between the US and various native nations, many of them have notes like “Part of the tribe refused to be governed by this act and it had to be repealed later”, because there isn’t a central authority that can make these things stick .

Decentralized nations will not be centralizing on their own at release.

Interesting, thanks. I wasn’t expecting declarations of war, but maybe some border provinces shifting hands here and there. I guess that would be problematic with the state region system. Anyway, they have bigger fish to fry.

This is a great change. It sounds like it won’t affect gameplay a ton, since deep incursions into these regions will rubber band against the player, but it makes the globe a lot more interesting and educational. Appreciate the quantity of work involved.

And it’s a good jumping off point if they choose to expand mechanics in that area in the future.

I guess I skipped a few. Anyway, construction is it’s own industry, with workers, inputs, etc.

I know I did, for the sake of sanity. I want to know when the game is coming out!

Around when they announced, I held out hope it would be Victoria’s birthday (May 24th). That doesn’t seem to be in the cards anymore, but Victoria day 2023 seems too long, so fall I guess?

I thought about posting some of them but they just haven’t been covering anything all that interesting or really new. The decentralized nations stuff is interesting in how their approach has changed over the years but there wasn’t really much new info in the dev diary vs what we already knew about it.

Still hoping they are going to announce a release date soon, I wonder if whatever date they had in mind internally got pushed after they started dev diaries and that’s why it seems like they’ve had to stretch out the topics.

I’ve been faithfully reading them, but I’ve already hit the top of Chickparabola on my interest level and I’m heading down. This is a real pity, cause it should be building up before the game is launched.

I’ve read them all and caught One Proud Bavarian’s reaction to each. Everything sounds great, but Paradox games always sound great. And then I find they just aren’t for me. Really, really hoping this is the one to end that streak, and I will certainly buy the game, it seems to address a lot of the stuff I haven’t liked in the past, but time will tell. :)

Get yourself a big cup of tea before you sit down with this lengthy dev diary on customs unions:

The most recent 3MA is basically three people thirsting for Vicky 3 (and producing the same desire in the listener.)