One thing the devs have been super-quite about is the military aspect of the game, except to say that’s it’s not an intended focus of the player’s time. This contrasts with setting up the map to have as many provinces as HoI4. If they go with a combat model anything like Vic2, this will be supremely ungainly. Hopefully they have something fairly abstract and tidy in mind.
First discussion of Goods and how they’re categorized. Not a lot of details yet but more to come when they cover pop needs.
The important thing is that next week is Production Methods which is something they’ve shown in lots of screenshots but have yet to explain. Based on those screenshots I’m incredibly intrigued by this.
Yeah, I’m looking forward to that one!
The dev responses in the thread are a bit more illuminating that the main DD content. For instance, some nice details on how they model pops:
Are pops considered one unit? Or do individuals move and join different pops and/or create a new pop for their type?
Yes, individuals inside a Pop merge with suitable Pops in their destination, and bring their “share” of their properties along with them. So if a part of a poor but literate unemployed Laborer splits off to move to another state, and finds another Laborer Pop of their own culture and religion there that they can merge with (and there’s an open spot available for Laborers in the target Pop’s workplace) then they will merge with them. The Literacy and Wealth they bring with them (among other properties, like Radicals or Qualifications) will then modify the target Pop proportionally.
It’s all pretty technical and most of the time near-invisible on an individual Pop level, but by being judicious in simulating this stuff we get some very interesting emergent effects like brain drain, itinerant oppressed demographics, geographic wealth shifts, and so on.
This is a real meaty diary.
People often joke about Paradox games being like playing a spreadhseet.
They are taking it to heart. I love it.
Indeed.
My second job out of college was the junior software engineer developing a new spreadsheet, for Visicorp, the company that invented the first spreadsheet VisiCalc. It looks like my life has come full circle, I used to get paid to make spreadsheets for work, and now I’m going pay others to use a spreadsheet for fun.
I really love this and all of the potential consequences of pushing new technology to a society that isn’t ready to adopt it.
I really like the overall mod potential with this production method model.
I don’t know how you guys can read these developer diaries, the wait is too much. I will hold off at least until we get a release date and then binge these things over one glorious weekend.
Yeah, I can’t do it myself, builds too much expectations into it thru prolonged anticipation that it would then have a hard time living up to. This thread getting bumped and me reading comments is the extent of my monitoring. ;)
Partly, because I didn’t love Victoria II, but I’m excited for III. The one that’s driving me nuts it the Not One Step back DLC for HOI IV.
I think it can make the actual game a letdown for sure. However, I think my actual favourite past time is not playing games but thinking and talking about how to model interesting things in games.
If I skipped the armchair designer part I’d be leaving a lot of fun on the table. For instance, the transport and infrastructure model in Vic3 will probably be very simple, but the discussion about how you might code up more complex models and what the tradeoffs would be was a lot of fun.
And yet the transport and infrastructure model seems like it’ll be more in depth than Vicky 2. That’s the thing that excites me most at this point, they are really leaning into the cool simulation elements that made Vicky unique without dumbing it down. Everything seems to tie back to the pop and resource system even more than the previous versions.
To be clear, I still think the game could be a let down, of course, but everything they’ve shown so far makes me think that’s probably going to be unlikely. At the very least, the underlying game design seems incredibly solid, but that could mean little if the game ends up rushed out the door in a broken state.
For sure, the whole logistics aspect is much more developed and I love how much they are leaning into the simulation. That particular discussion was more about how far it could go in theory, and we still don’t know for sure if it works the way I think.
I love that you can have a real discussion about different equilibrium wage rates based on industry structure in a state.
Following the game has inspired me to read more about the economic and political history of the 19th century.
I thought this thread was an extended April fools joke.
Ah man, we finally got you! I was about to give up. Of course there’s no Victoria 3.
Dude, we had him going for at least another month. But of course, you were doing all the work creating those developer diaries, and Kevin spoofed the Paradox forum address. Impressive teamwork by the forum.
Been following One Proud Bavarian and a couple of others on this, and the game looks so, so promising.
But when was the last time I was glad I bought a Paradox game? :)