Grand Strategy Victoria 3

[Sranchammer]

I wonder if Fascism is also included...

Of course! See the CSA event chain!

 

[Space Satan]

Some laws template

 

[Space Satan]

Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #7 - Laws

• Thread starterlachek
• Start dateToday at 18:00

dd7.png
lachek · Jul 22, 2021 at 18:00

" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-block; max-width: 100%; cursor: pointer;">

After a couple weeks vacation, we’ve now returned to our usual weekly dev diary schedule! Today we will be diving deeper into Victoria’s politics to talk about Laws. Legal reform in your country creates different political, economic, and social conditions for your Pops, which over time changes the fabric of your society. This change can be slow and incremental, or fast and revolutionary - sometimes literally.

There are three major categories of Laws with seven sub-categories in each, which themselves contain up to half a dozen specific Law options. As always everything here is being heavily iterated upon, including these sub-categories, so the laws you see at release will not exactly match what we’re telling you here!

Power Structure
These Laws determine who is in control of different aspects of your country. It includes fundamental Governance Principles such as Monarchy and Parliamentary Republic, which determine who your Head of State is and what kind of powers they wield. Distribution of Power ranges from Autocracy and Oligarchy through various extensions of the voting franchise all the way to Universal Suffrage. Citizenship and Church and State Laws govern which Pops suffer legal discrimination in your country due to their culture or religion. The principles on which your Bureaucracy is run - such as hereditary or elected positions for bureaucrats - determine how expensive it is to keep track of each citizen and how much Institutions cost to run, but also directly benefit some groups over others. Conscription lets you raise a part of your civilian workforce as soldiers in times of war, and Internal Security governs how the Home Affairs anti-insurgent Institution works.

The Power Structure Laws of a typical European nation after having made a few strides towards liberalization. The numbers in green refers to the number of alternative Laws currently available to be enacted. This indicator is used throughout the UI to reveal how many options a sub-menu has without having to open it.

Economy
This set of Laws define where your treasury’s money comes from and how it can be spent. Your Economic System is crucial - this governs whether your country operates on principles of Mercantilism, Isolationism, or Free Trade, among others. Income Tax determines which Pops should be taxed and what range of tax burden is appropriate. No Income Tax at all is of course an option, and legislation to such effect will make some Pops both rich and happy! Poll Taxation, or levying a fixed tax per head, is another option primarily used in less industrialized societies. (There are other avenues of taxation as well, but these are the ones driven by legislation.) Finally, you can choose what form the Institutions of Colonization, Policing, Education System, and Health System will take in your country. For example, you can keep government spending under control by instituting Charity Hospitals, which have limited effect and boost the power of the clergy, or you could pass a Public Health Insurance Law which is costlier but can have a greater impact on the health of the masses.

Payroll Taxes require reasonable lower-class wages and a centralized population to pay off, but if so can form the economic basis for a budding welfare system as seen here. A tax system based on Levying might be more lucrative in countries with huge Peasant populations.

Human Rights
Enshrining the rights of the individual was a hallmark of the era. These Laws define how your Pops are treated and what manner of control you can enforce over their lives. Free Speech determines the degree of control you can enforce over your Interest Groups but restrictive rights throttle the spread of innovation. The Labor Rights Laws include outlawing serfdom, but extends all the way to establishing a Workplace Safety Institution to reduce the number of people literally crushed in the jaws of industry. Children’s Rights and the Rights of Women have a number of effects such as shifting the Workforce/Dependent demographics, affecting Dependent income, and extending the franchise. Welfare ensures the poor and disabled in your society are taken care of. Migration Laws can be used to influence Pop migration. Slavery Laws determine the legal status of owning people in your country. More details on that subject in a future dev diary.

Not a lot of concessions have been made here, but at least children may congregate freely after the factory whistle signals the end of their grueling workday.

Laws are almost always completely independent from one another. You can create a Constitutional Monarchy with hereditary succession but Universal Suffrage, or an Autocratic Presidential Republic with a strongman leader at the top of the food chain. You can have a Secret Police and still permit fully Protected Speech.

Our aim is to set all countries up with the best fitting Laws compared to what they actually had in 1836. This will vary wildly between countries, and will greatly influence what sorts of conditions and strategies are available to you at the start of the game. For example, the USA starts with Total Separation of Church and State, ensuring no Pops suffer legal discrimination on account of their religion, while Sardinia-Piedmont doesn’t take kindly to non-Catholic Pops. This will affect Pops who live in the country currently, but will also limit which Pops might migrate there - few Pops would make it their preference to move to a country where they’re mistreated by law.

As a result of these starting Laws Sardinia-Piedmont might have to look towards colonization or conquest if they start to run out of their native workforce, while North America is likely to get regular migration waves to help expand the frontier. By connecting these effects to starting Laws, many historically appropriate and recognizable aspects and behaviors of Victorian-era nations - such as their attractiveness to immigrants - are connected to a tangible property (e.g. poor or oppressed Pops emigrating to the USA both because of its demand for workforce and also its liberal Laws) rather than being arbitrarily encoded into the very fabric of the nation itself, the approach previous Victoria games took to encourage history in the a familiar direction.

However, these starting Laws are far from set in stone! You might want to reform your Laws to better suit the direction your society is going - for example, you might want to transition your Bureaucracy from a system of Appointees to Elected Bureaucrats in order to more effectively provide services from Government Institutions to all your incorporated territories (or maybe just because you want to disempower the otherwise powerful Intelligentsia.) Or your country’s Agrarian economy has plateaued on account of increased reliance on imports of manufactured goods, and you want to change course to the exciting opportunities provided by a Free Trade policy.

A common effect of Laws is to modify some parameter about your country, like give you more Authority or reduce certain Pops’ Mortality. But Laws can also permit or disallow the use of certain actions, such as Public Schools which permit the Compulsory Primary School Law; permit the Decree to Promote Social Mobility in a certain state; and even alter the effects of other parts of your society, like boost the efficacy of your Education System Institution. Without some degree of separation between Church and State, this form of secular school system is not possible.

Another reason to change Laws is because your people demand it. As we touched on in the previous dev diary, Interest Groups have Ideologies that lead them to favor some Laws over others - for example, the Industrialists have the Individualist Ideology that cause them to favor privately operated Education and Healthcare systems over publicly funded ones, to ensure best access is given to those of merit and morals (or in other words, Wealth). Reforming your current Laws to work more in accordance with your powerful Interest Groups’ Ideologies is a quick way to win their Approval, permitting you more leeway to go against their wishes in the future or as a quick pick-me-up in case their Standard of Living has recently taken a hit.

The inverse is also true. Introduce a bill to abolish the Monarchy in Great Britain and see how the Landed Gentry feel about that.

Even Trade Unionists have a hard time saying no to zero income taxes, but even that won’t make up for restricting the vote!

Enacting a Law is far from an instantaneous, one-click affair. First off, any reform must be supported by at least one Interest Group in your government who can champion the change. Once the reform has begun it can be a smooth process that’s over in a matter of months, or it can take years of gruelling debate in parliament or horsetrading between Interest Groups in order to pass. The amount of time it takes depends both on your government’s Legitimacy in the eyes of the people, and also on the Clout of the Interest Groups in your government that supports and opposes the new Law relative to the one it’s replacing. While broader coalitions of Interest Groups in government give you more options of Laws to enact, it also complicates getting them passed.

Changing your laws isn’t an entirely straightforward process in Victoria 3! In this case it’s just a matter of time before the Law is enacted, but if dissenting Interest Groups had also been part of this government there would be plenty of room for Debate and Stalling tactics that could cause this reform to take more effort than it’s worth.

Let me close out here by tying all this back to the Pops. As we have touched on in past dev diaries, Pops have a Profession, collect an income, and consume goods depending on the economic preconditions you have created in your country. These material concerns in combination with a few others, such as Literacy, determine which Interest Groups they support. Other aspects, such as your country’s Laws, influence how much Political Strength the Pops provide to those Interest Groups. The Interest Groups have an Approval score and favor certain Laws over others. As a result, different groups of Pops approve more or less of the society you have built depending on their economic well-being, and their demands for change is more or less intimidating depending on how many and strong they are. You may choose to placate an angry group, or further benefit an already content group for extra benefits. But in doing so, some other group will become displeased. Have you built your society resilient enough to navigate these ebbs and flows? And most importantly, which of the many, many routes will you take to move forward?

That is all for me this week! In this dev diary I mentioned Institutions a number of times, and next Thursday I will be back with more details on this powerful society-shaping tool. Until then!

 

[Joggerino]

I like it, it all seems like an improvement over Victoria 2. I just hope all these systems work well together in the end.

 

[Malakal]

I like it, it all seems like an improvement over Victoria 2. I just hope all these systems work well together in the end.

Victoria 2 is really quite bad honestly, its all the unique mechanics (that don't rly work) that make people want to love it. So if they make the game actually work that would be a huge improvement.

 

[what am i doing]

I hope they'll model the dysgenic effects of welfare in the game, so that the more you grow your state welfare system, the more its dependants will grow in turn (rapidly breeding pops of a pop type that can't work in buildings or staff RGOs or generate units, but adds costs to your state welfare system - but they won't breed rapidly if you don't have a state welfare system; they could be called Shirkers or something like that), while raising income taxes high on your productive pops slows their growth rate. However, knowing Paradox, I doubt they'll do that and instead passing welfare reforms will be a no-brainer choice with unrealistically minimal consequences (or outright buffs), like it was in V2.

 

[Malakal]

I hope they'll model the dysgenic effects of welfare in the game, so that the more you grow your state welfare system, the more its dependants will grow in turn (rapidly breeding pops of a pop type that can't work in buildings or staff RGOs or generate units, but adds costs to your state welfare system - but they won't breed rapidly if you don't have a state welfare system; they could be called Shirkers or something like that), while raising income taxes high on your productive pops slows their growth rate. However, knowing Paradox, I doubt they'll do that and instead passing welfare reforms will be a no-brainer choice with unrealistically minimal consequences (or outright buffs), like it was in V2.

Fairly sure that wasn't an issue during this era, quite on the opposite really.

First of all the welfare was barely enough to survive or lead a meager existence, if at all.

Secondly it has corrected multiple issues. You know why worker rights were introduced in Prussia/Germany in the first place? Military noticed that the recruit from cities/factory workers was physically weaker than the village/farm worker ones. They had to improve conditions to maintain the quality of the army, the rest was a secondary afterthought really.

Also I'd like to share a story: during WW1 conscription in the USA the government realized that conscripts from the Great Lakes area had a higher than average amount of retards and debilitating health issues stemming from iodine deficiency. This is why they decided to start adding iodine to salt - everyone was using salt and this corrected that issue including birth defects and retardation. Not everything that government does (did) was stupid and bad.

 

[Space Satan]

Markets

Spoiler

Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #9 - National Markets

• Thread starterlachek
• Start dateToday at 18:00

DD9 (1).png

By default every country is in control of its own market which is typically (but not always) centered on their capital state. Every state connected to this market capital - overland or by sea through ports - is also part of the market. These states all have a variable degree of Market Access representing how well-connected they are to every other state in the market. Market Access is based on Infrastructure, which we will talk more about in next week’s development diary!

All local consumption and production in states contribute to the market’s Buy Orders and Sell Orders. Think of these as orders on a commodity market: higher consumption of Grain will cause traders to submit more Grain Buy Orders while higher production of Silk will result in more Sell Orders for Silk.

Furniture is a popular commodity with the growing urban lower middle-class, and it’s not likely its price in the French Market will drop anytime soon. Assuming the appropriate raw materials remain in good supply, upsizing this market’s Furniture industry is a safe bet.
image2.png
lachek · Aug 5, 2021 at 18:00

" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-block; max-width: 100%; cursor: pointer;">

As we discussed in the Goods development diary, all goods have a base price. This is the price it would fetch given ideal market conditions: all demand is fulfilled perfectly with available supply, with zero goods produced in excess of demand. If buildings produce more than is being demanded each unit produced will be sold at a depressed price. This benefits consumers at the detriment of producers. Conversely, if demand is higher than supply, the economy of buildings producing those goods will be booming while Pops and buildings that rely on that goods to continue operating will be overpaying.

When determining prices for goods across a market’s many states we start by determining a market price. This is based on the balance between a market’s Buy and Sell Orders, with the base price as a baseline. The more Buy Orders than Sell Orders the higher the price will be and vice versa. Buy and Sell Orders submitted to the market are scaled by the amount of Market Access the state has. This means a state with underdeveloped infrastructure will trade less with the market and rely more on locally available goods.

States with full Market Access will use the market price for all its goods. Otherwise only part of the market price can be used, with the remainder of the local price made up by the local consumption and production of the goods. All actual transactions are done in local prices, with market prices acting to moderate local imbalances proportional to Market Access.

Glass is overproduced in Orsha. Coupled with a suffering Market Access in Orsha this means the Glassworks there can’t sell at the somewhat high market norm for their goods. This works out fine for local Pops and Urban Centers who consume it as they get to pay less than market price. But continuing to expand the Glassworks in Orsha will only lead to worsening Market Access for all local industries, and won’t lead to a better price of Glass anywhere else since fewer and fewer of Orsha’s Glass Sell Order ends up reaching the market. We can see this development on the market price chart: the market price used to be high due to low supply, we started expanding the Glassworks in Orsha which lowered the market price, until the point Orsha’s expanding industry became a bottleneck and prices started to rise again. The last few expansions have done nothing to lower the market price even as the local price has been steadily dropping.

If an oversupply becomes large enough, the selling price will be so low producers will be unable to keep wages and thereby production volume up unless they’re receiving government subsidies. But oversupply is not remotely as bad as when goods are grossly undersupplied, which causes a shortage. Goods being in shortage leads to terrible effects for those in your market who rely on it; for example, drastically decreased production efficiency of buildings that rely on it as an input. Shortages demand immediate action, whether that be fast-tracking expanding your own domestic production, importing it from other markets, or expanding your market to include prominent producers of the goods.

Lacking access to a sufficient quantity of Dyes, this poor Textile Mill can only manufacture 42 units of Clothes this week instead of 126, which is entirely insufficient to make ends meet. Unless something changes, its wages will be cut to compensate and eventually Cash Reserves will run dry, rendering the building inoperable as its workers abandon it.

If importing Dyes, growing them on Plantations, or manufacturing them in high-tech Chemical Plants to fix the shortage is not an option, returning the Textile Mills to pre-industrial, low-yield handicraft will remove the need for Dyes and restore the Textile Mills to marginal profitability.

Astute observers familiar with previous Victorias will note there are no goods stockpiles involved in this system. In the predecessor game a single unit of a goods would be produced, sold, traded, perhaps refined, stored, and ultimately consumed, with global price development determined by how many units are inserted into or removed from the world’s total supply. In Victoria 3, a single unit of goods is produced and immediately sold at a price determined by how many consumers are willing to buy it at the moment of production. When this happens prices shift right away along with actual supply and demand, and trade between markets is modelled using Buy and Sell Orders. This more open economic model is both more responsive to sudden economic shifts and less prone to mysterious systemic failures where all the world’s cement might end up locked inside a warehouse in Missouri. Any stockpiling in the system is represented as cash (for example through a building’s Cash Reserves or a country’s Treasury) or as Pop Wealth, which forms the basis for Standard of Living and determines their level of consumption.

As the econ nerds (you know who you are) will by now have intuited, this lack of goods stockpiling in turn implies that in Victoria 3 we have moved away from the fixed global money supply introduced in Victoria 2. The main reason for this is simply due to how many limitations such a system places on what we can do with the economy in the game. With Victoria 2’s extremely restrictive and technically challenging closed market and world market buying order, it simply wouldn’t have been possible to do things such as Goods Substitution, Trade Routes, dynamic National Markets, transportation costs for Goods and so on in the ways we have, either due to incompatibilities in the design, or simply because it couldn’t possibly be made performant. We believe that the complexity, responsive simulation, and interesting gameplay added by this approach more than make up for what we lose.

Finally, a small teaser of something we will be talking more about once we get around to presenting the diplomatic gameplay. As you may have gleaned from the top screenshot, it is possible for several countries to participate in a single market. Sometimes this is the result of a Customs Union Pact led by the more powerful nation but more often it’s because of a subject relationship with a puppet or semi-independent colonies. In certain cases countries can even own a small plot of land inside someone else’s market, such as a Treaty Port. The route to expanding your country’s economic power is not only through increasing domestic production and consumption, but also through diplomatic and/or military means.

The Zollverein, or German Customs Union, is a broad unified market of German states controlled by Prussia. Without such a union many smaller German countries would find their economies too inefficient and trade opportunities severely hampered by geography and lack of access to naval trade.
image6.png
lachek · Aug 5, 2021 at 18:00

" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-block; max-width: 100%; cursor: pointer;">

That’s the fundamentals of Victoria 3’s pricing and domestic-trade system! As mentioned, next week we’ll take a look at an aspect of the game that’s closely related to markets and pricing: Infrastructure.

 

[Van-d-all]

I like it, it all seems like an improvement over Victoria 2. I just hope all these systems work well together in the end.

Victoria 2 is really quite bad honestly, its all the unique mechanics (that don't rly work) that make people want to love it. So if they make the game actually work that would be a huge improvement.

I'd love them to make that game work, but firstly PDX has been in creative limbo since Stellaris - they can't make the goddamn game fun despite being a 5yo vanity project of their star dev team and tearing even the core systems inside out (something virtually unseen in released games); secondly - simply put most Vic2 issues come from the fact they tried to model very complex mechanics with one-size-fits-all rules and it just keeps spiralling out of control, and with the overall trend of simplifying games I just don't see them fixing it, if anything they'll simplify everything like CK3 and the game will loose the very charm of Vic2.

 

[Harthwain]

I hope they'll model the dysgenic effects of welfare in the game, so that the more you grow your state welfare system, the more its dependants will grow in turn (rapidly breeding pops of a pop type that can't work in buildings or staff RGOs or generate units, but adds costs to your state welfare system - but they won't breed rapidly if you don't have a state welfare system; they could be called Shirkers or something like that), while raising income taxes high on your productive pops slows their growth rate. However, knowing Paradox, I doubt they'll do that and instead passing welfare reforms will be a no-brainer choice with unrealistically minimal consequences (or outright buffs), like it was in V2.

Fairly sure that wasn't an issue during this era, quite on the opposite really.

First of all the welfare was barely enough to survive or lead a meager existence, if at all.

One more point to add (in case someone doesn't know): pensions for disability and pensions for dependents of deceased officers were introduced after WW1.

 

[Joggerino]

They didn't mention anything about imports and exports unfortunately. Whatever they do it can't be worse than the vicky2 prestige based priority system.

Recently i played a nice game as Canada (ruperts land) and got an amazing industry going. So amazing in fact that I turned into a great power based on that alone. What followed is a total collapse of my industry because i couldn't import anything due to my relatively low prestige.
(becoming a great power automatically releases you from your overlord)

 

[Nutria]

pensions for disability and pensions for dependents of deceased officers were introduced after WW1

We had them in America after the Civil War. It's actually a pretty good way of learning about your ancestors because some of the documentation still exists where you've got guys writing and saying what happened to them that makes them worthy of getting a pension.

 

[Malakal]

pensions for disability and pensions for dependents of deceased officers were introduced after WW1

We had them in America after the Civil War. It's actually a pretty good way of learning about your ancestors because some of the documentation still exists where you've got guys writing and saying what happened to them that makes them worthy of getting a pension.

I actually read that last ACW pensions were phased out in the 60s due to various reasons related to covering spouses/children with them...

 

[Space Satan]

Infrastructure

Spoiler

Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #10 - Infrastructure

• Thread starterWizzington
• Start dateToday at 18:00

DD10.png
previous development diary, but to briefly go over it again, a low Market Access means that a State is unable to fully integrate its local market into the National Market, which can lead to adverse price conditions from local over-or undersupply of goods.

Minsk has somewhat overextended their local Infrastructure, but with a large population and mostly staple production both their industries and consumers will probably be fine until the railway arrives

This imbalance goes in both directions. If you have one bread basket state and one iron mining state, and they both have perfect Market Access, the price of iron and grain will be the same in both. If the iron mining state’s Market Access is reduced, the market’s price of iron goes up while the local price of iron in the mining state goes down. But in addition to this the iron mining state will be unable to source as much grain, raising the local price there but reducing its price somewhat across the rest of the market.

If your consumption matches your local production, as is often the case in rural states where the production consists of staple goods your people require, this isn’t such a big problem! You could perhaps even build some simple Textile Mills and Livestock Ranches in the same underdeveloped state to provide cheap wool clothing if the local population is large enough to demand it in sufficient quantity. But if you’re looking to manufacture more complex goods (or use more demanding Production Methods) you need goods you might only be able to source from another state in your market, or which you can only import from a foreign nation. These goods in turn might be lucrative but only if there are buyers for them - buyers who can actually afford them. Your schemes to get rich off Luxury Clothes and Porcelain won’t work if you can’t reach all the far-flung wealthy Pops of your empire.

The Infrastructure Usage of a State is determined by which types of Buildings exist in a State and which level they are. Generally, the more urban and specialized the building, the more Infrastructure it uses per level, so Chemical Industries (a heavy industry building) will use several times more Infrastructure than a Rye Farms building of the same level.

Minsk’s urban buildings - the Furniture Manufacturies, Textile Mills, even the Government Administrations - account for 2/3rds of its Infrastructure usage despite employing the same number of people as the Logging Camps and Rye Farms. Subsistence Farms and Urban Centers do not use Infrastructure, the former because its production is nearly all for domestic use and the latter because the Infrastructure it provides cancel out the Infrastructure it requires.

Infrastructure is provided and modified by numerous sources. Just about all States in the game have at least a little bit of Infrastructure based on the technology level of the country that owns it and its state of incorporation (colonies have lower infrastructure than incorporated states, for example). However, over the course of the game, the most crucial aspect of your Infrastructure is the size of your Railway network. As we’ve previously mentioned, Railways is a Building that produces Transportation, an intangible good sold to Pops, but they are also your main source of Infrastructure.

This means that if you want to industrialize a State, it isn’t enough to simply build those industries there and have the Pops available to work in them, you also need to ensure that said industries have enough infrastructure to support them. This of course has a variety of costs involved in that infrastructure-providing Railways need both Pops to work them and access to goods like Coal and Engines. There are alternatives that can be used in the short-term, such as using your Authority on a Road Maintenance decree to ensure the populace don’t allow the roads to fall into disrepair or become unsafe, but such options will never be sufficient in themselves for large-scale industrialization. Of course, Railways also grow more efficient over the course of the game with such inventions as Diesel trains and Electricity, requiring less levels of rail to support a certain number of Buildings.

This early Railway has rapidly become one of Minsk’s best employers, at least for Pops with the qualifications to become Machinists. Unfortunately few people do, so the Infrastructure production is not currently as high as it might be if the railway was fully staffed. Ticket prices, however, are sky high.

Our intention for railways is that they must be able to find their way back to the market capital, or an exit port destined for the market capital, in order to be useful. In effect this means that any railway can only provide infrastructure up to the amount of infrastructure provided by the best adjacent railway that connects it to the market capital. If you want good access to the Sulfur Mines in Aginskoye for your Munition Plants in St. Petersburg, you best get started on that Trans-Siberian Railway sooner rather than later, because it will take a good long while to build.

Geography, of course, also plays a significant role in other ways when it comes to Infrastructure, and this is represented in Victoria 3 through State Traits. State Traits are bonuses and/or maluses given to a particular State representing particular geographical features, climate and so on. State Traits have a variety of effects, but the most common ones are to either affect the production of a particular resource (for example, if a State contains high quality coal this may be represented through a State Trait that makes coal mines in the state more efficient) or, more significantly for the topic on hand, to provide or modify Infrastructure.

The high-yield Russian Forests are of great benefit to the Logging Industry in Minsk, as long as there’s enough infrastructure available to ship the wood off to all the Russian factories and construction sites that demand it.

States with significant rivers get a large boost to Infrastructure, making them excellent candidates for early industrialization

 

[Joggerino]

If i understand correctly the market capital doesn't need infrastructure to import everything it needs?

 

[8Sime8]

And so the "no mana" devs are replacing stockpiles with instantaneously printed money representing the cash-value of the newly manufactured goods?

 

[HeroMarine]

And so the "no mana" devs are replacing stockpiles with instantaneously printed money representing the cash-value of the newly manufactured goods?

QE 1800s-style

 

[Malakal]

And so the "no mana" devs are replacing stockpiles with instantaneously printed money representing the cash-value of the newly manufactured goods?

Well, realistically speaking, even today most products are sold right away. Farm products for sure, they usually are contracted before they are even grown, I assume industrial and mining goods are the same because NO ONE would just go 'lets dig out a million tonnes of coal and then see if we sell it'.

Thats not really a new thing and probably the most realistic part of the system.

 

[Hellraiser]

And so the "no mana" devs are replacing stockpiles with instantaneously printed money representing the cash-value of the newly manufactured goods?

Well, realistically speaking, even today most products are sold right away. Farm products for sure, they usually are contracted before they are even grown, I assume industrial and mining goods are the same because NO ONE would just go 'lets dig out a million tonnes of coal and then see if we sell it'.

Thats not really a new thing and probably the most realistic part of the system.

Eh whether they are sold right away in most cases I am not so sure, even with modern exchanges and communication. For a time period up to 1930 even more so, although I figure simulating this properly is plainly not worth the performance hit considering the scale of the game.

It definitely did happen IRL in the period as otherwise derivative trade would never pick up, but I doubt that on this kind of scale and I also assume the number of intermediaries between the producer to the final user of a commodity was greater. I doubt average Joe the farmer had snazzy contracts for selling all of his expected harvest yield, most likely the big players did.

The other thing to consider here is the zero-sum nature of the risk in a two way transaction, for someone to have a guaranteed sale of something produced in X months there must be another party that is willing to fork over cash months in advance for something they will get much later (probably another reason why cash/margin-settled contracts largely replaced physical settled ones). The buyer needs to be willing to accept it for whatever reason.

There are situations where accepting such a risk by the buyer makes sense (if supply is far outpaced by demand, as we currently have with a semiconductor shoratge being a bottleneck for producing cars and whatnot), but as a rule modern day businesses avoid paying in advance like the plague as it is bad from a financial liquidity point of view. Well that and if the shipping time is long (like with anything going by boat from East Asia) why should they pay before the fucking thing can be used by them?

Finally there is of course the related fact that a sale does not mean you got paid for the goods, depends what payment terms were negotiated, and the bigger the customer is relative to the producer the longer terms they are able to negotiate.

This kind of business risk is anyway natural and one of the things you have to prepare for with good enough margins and equity to burn until the revenue stabilizes when planning an investment. Everybody would also love to have a cash conversion cycle in the single digits and a sales backlog up to 3 years in the future, but the reality is you don't get paid instantly and stuff stays in the warehouse waiting for a buyer longer than companies would like.

 

[Joggerino]

And so the "no mana" devs are replacing stockpiles with instantaneously printed money representing the cash-value of the newly manufactured goods?

Well, realistically speaking, even today most products are sold right away. Farm products for sure, they usually are contracted before they are even grown, I assume industrial and mining goods are the same because NO ONE would just go 'lets dig out a million tonnes of coal and then see if we sell it'.

Thats not really a new thing and probably the most realistic part of the system.

Eh whether they are sold right away in most cases I am not so sure, even with modern exchanges and communication. For a time period up to 1930 even more so, although I figure simulating this properly is plainly not worth the performance hit considering the scale of the game.

It definitely did happen IRL in the period as otherwise derivative trade would never pick up, but I doubt that on this kind of scale and I also assume the number of intermediaries between the producer to the final user of a commodity was greater. I doubt average Joe the farmer had snazzy contracts for selling all of his expected harvest yield, most likely the big players did.

The other thing to consider here is the zero-sum nature of the risk in a two way transaction, for someone to have a guaranteed sale of something produced in X months there must be another party that is willing to fork over cash months in advance for something they will get much later (probably another reason why cash/margin-settled contracts largely replaced physical settled ones). The buyer needs to be willing to accept it for whatever reason.

There are situations where accepting such a risk by the buyer makes sense (if supply is far outpaced by demand, as we currently have with a semiconductor shoratge being a bottleneck for producing cars and whatnot), but as a rule modern day businesses avoid paying in advance like the plague as it is bad from a financial liquidity point of view. Well that and if the shipping time is long (like with anything going by boat from East Asia) why should they pay before the fucking thing can be used by them?

Finally there is of course the related fact that a sale does not mean you got paid for the goods, depends what payment terms were negotiated, and the bigger the customer is relative to the producer the longer terms they are able to negotiate.

This kind of business risk is anyway natural and one of the things you have to prepare for with good enough margins and equity to burn until the revenue stabilizes when planning an investment. Everybody would also love to have a cash conversion cycle in the single digits and a sales backlog up to 3 years in the future, but the reality is you don't get paid instantly and stuff stays in the warehouse waiting for a buyer longer than companies would like.

https://www.capitalismlab.com/

 

[what am i doing]

Tentatively, my suspicion is that the lack of stockpiles was done to make multithreading easier. Let's say you go with a goal where the perfect ideal is for every state to get its own logical core, but you will settle for divvying up the states among the available cores on the user's system (minus one or more for things like rendering and input). However, in order to make this neat and easily scalable without causing simulation differences based on number of threads (because you want multiplayer, and people will be playing on different systems with different CPUs) you treat it as though every state is on its own thread for purposes of thread safety. Meaning, for example, if a state is modifying something wholly internal to itself, it can go ahead and do that. But if a state is doing something external to itself, like reading the contents of another state, or writing to another state, then that could potentially be a problem because two states might want to write to another, or one state might want to read from another but that state might change a value before or after that read, and this could vary from machine to machine, session to session... a recipe for desyncs.

Ok, so a solution to that is double buffering, or as it's called in process control systems, active/standby. In this model, your active simulation is the "live" one, you read from this, the user gets their info from it, but you never write to it. This solves the problem of making sure that nothing is getting changed in a nondeterministic order relative to when you read it. You only ever read from the active (aka live, aka "don't fuck with it") simulation or from your own state on the standby simulation, and you never read from other states on the standby sim because those states' owning threads are writing to them at undetermined times. When a tick finishes (all threads done their work, and any cleanup tasks done) the formerly standby state is declared active, and the formerly active state is declared standby, and the next tick begins.

Here's where it gets tricky. If you have a stockpile model, and a bunch of states have pops that want a good (let's say pocket watches), how do you handle divvying out the supply of pocket watches to all the pops in a manner that will be the same every time that tick was to be run, no matter how many threads, no matter which threads are running fast or slow, etc? The most obvious way is to first establish a buying order, and then let them each briefly have a lock over the stockpile of pocket watches. Perhaps in a cleanup or preprocessing phase, you check all states and sort them by most to least prosperous. Perhaps you simply use each state's ID in a numeric order regardless of wealth. Perhaps you use their ID but it's in a pseudo-random order based on the seed for that playthrough. Whatever, you find a way to give them an order. Great, now you don't have to worry which thread is running fast at a given moment. But... now you've introduced a bunch of locks. Potentially a huge number. Because now for every stockpile of every good in every state for every other state, a lock must be set and then released, and it'll be even worse if you want multiple passes to let certain types of buyers (say, military purchases, then factories, then landowner and capitalist pops, then bureaucrat and clergy pops, etc). This could be a huge performance issue.

Remove stockpiles, and just look at how much was produced that tick, and all you really have to do is let every state look at the supply from last tick, and the price, and make a purchase and simply assume that they were able to buy whatever they wanted, if they could afford it and it wasn't out of supply. Give every state a list of spots for each other state to drop a struct of what they purchased that tick (their own struct that only they write, each state has its own, so no locking needed), and then at the end of the tick, you have a cleanup phase where each state looks at how much was bought, compares it to how much was produced, adjusts the price as needed, and if the bought total came within a certain threshold, marks that good as being in shortage of appropriate severity. Next tick, states do their purchases again, and you can apply that shortage penalty to reduce the amount that anyone gets to buy (and let each buying state decide for itself how to allocate need fulfillment), if there was a penalty. If it's a severe enough penalty then maybe nobody gets to buy anything, but next tick after that the penalty will be reduced. Or a severe enough price might mean that less are purchased and the shortage penalty, if there was one, goes down on that basis.

If you consider this second option to be a "good enough" simulation then it can potentially improve performance. I have no idea how their engine works / will work under the hood, it might be completely different to how I described. But I suspect the reason for avoiding stockpiles is something along these lines. Of course, I may have overlooked some simple solution to the problem (in which case I'd certainly like to know it).

 

[Space Satan]

Spoiler

Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #14 - Political Movements

• Thread starterWizzington
• Start dateToday at 20:00

header14.png
Dev Diary #6 by saying that there are ways for politically disenfranchised Pops to push for reform, though that isn’t the entirety of the role that Political Movements fill in the game.

What then are Political Movements? Put simply, a Political Movement is a way for your Pops to make a direct demand of the government, either because they desire change or because they don’t desire the change you are currently pushing through. A Political Movement is always aimed at one particular law, and can take three different forms:

Movement to Preserve: This is a political movement that can form when there is sufficient opposition to the passing of a particular law. For example, if Great Britain starts replacing the Monarchy with a Republic, it’s very likely that this will result in a Movement to Preserve the Monarchy.
Movement to Enact: This is a political movement that can form when there is a popular demand for the enactment of a particular law. For example, if you have a politically active and literate but very poor underclass of laborers, these laborers might form a movement to create a minimum wage.
Movement to Restore: This is a political movement that works exactly like a Movement to Enact, but aims specifically to bring back a law that was previously in effect in the country - for example a Movement to restore the Monarchy in a Britain that successfully transitioned into a Republic. The main difference between a Movement to Restore and a Movement to Enact is that the former will tend to get some extra support from being able to harken back to the ‘golden era’ of the past instead of having to champion new ideas.

Political Movements have a singular goal and will exist only so long as this goal remains unfulfilled. Their impact on the country in pushing for said goal is determined by their Support score. A Political Movement can have support from both Interest Groups (which represents a part of the political establishment backing the movement) and individual Pops (which represents individuals championing the movement in the streets).

Political Movements are not always progressive - while the Industrialists and Intelligentsia want to expand the franchise in Prussia, a coalition of more conservative Interest Groups are simultaneously pushing for more censorship

Interest Groups will provide Support for the Movement based on their Clout, while Pops provide Support based on raw numbers (compared to population as a whole), meaning that a single discriminated Laborer backing a Movement provides just as much Support as a fully enfranchised Aristocrat when taking action outside their Interest Group.

In other words, while Political Strength still plays an important role in Political Movements (in the form of Interest Groups throwing their Clout behind movements championing laws they like), it is entirely possible for a Political Movement to form with no Interest Group backing at all - even if nobody is willing to champion workers’ rights in the halls of power, enough angry workers in the streets may just be enough to affect change anyway.

Which Interest Groups will or will not back a Political Movement depends on whether they would approve of a change to the new law (in case of Enact/Restore) or disapprove of the current change in progress (in case of Preserve). Interest Groups that have high approval or which are part of the Government will not support Political Movements, though Government IGs may put pressure on you in other ways if they’re not pleased with your actions.

Pops are more complex, as they can back a Political Movement either because it aligns with their political movement (ie their preferred Interest Group is in favor of the movement) or because they have something to gain directly from it (for example a discriminated Pop backing a movement that would give them more rights).

This Political Movement to abolish the regressive Poll Tax is currently only backed by the Trade Unions and Pops sympathetic to them.

The Support score of a Political Movement has two direct effects on legislation: Firstly, it affects the chance of successfully passing a law (making it easier to pass the law the movement wants in the case of a Movement to Enact/Restore, and more difficult to replace in the case of a Movement to Preserve). Having a Movement to Enact/Restore also allows a country to attempt to pass the law the movement wants, even if said law has no backing among the Interest Groups in government.

But what then, if you don’t intend to bow to the wishes of a movement in your country? This is where the Radicalism of a Political Movement comes in. Radicalism is based on the number of Radical pops and Clout of Angry Interest Groups supporting the Movement. A movement with low Radicalism is one that is intent on getting its wishes heard through peaceful means, while a movement with high Radicalism is willing to use more extreme methods, up to and including sparking a Revolution (though that particular topic is something we’ll cover in a later dev diary).

Replacing the Monarchy with a Republic is *not* a popular idea in Sweden in 1836 - the opposition is both strong and highly radicalized - a civil war is all but guaranteed unless the government reverses course.

It is by no means a sure thing that every peaceful movement will become radical, and movements may very well fizzle out without accomplishing their goal, but ignoring the wishes of a significant part of your population and/or political establishment does come with some associated risks.

When talking about Political Movement Radicalism, I mentioned Radical Pops, and since they play an important role in creating and radicalizing Political Movements I thought I’d take a little time to explain how Radical Pops and their Loyalist counterparts function in Victoria 3. The first thing that should be understood about Radicals and Loyalists is that just like with Interest Group membership, Radicals and Loyalists are not whole Pops but rather individuals within Pops.

Starting a game as France by hiking the taxes up as high as possible and slashing government/military salaries is a sure-fire way to watch the number of Radicals quickly climb
2021_08_19_3.png
Wizzington · Sep 9, 2021 at 20:00

" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-block; max-width: 100%; cursor: pointer;">

Radicals are individuals who have become disillusioned with the government and political apparatus of the country and want to seek change through any means necessary, while Loyalists are ‘patriots’ who are generally willing to put their political views and goals aside for the sake of the nation. There is a large variety of ways that Pops can become Radicals or Loyalists, here’s a few of the more common reasons listed below:

• Pops that experience an increase in material living standards will become more loyal
• Pops that experience a decrease in material living standards will become more radical
• Pops whose Standard of Living is below the minimum they expect to have will radicalize over time, particularly if it’s so low that they’re actually starving
• Pops that are literate but discriminated against tend to radicalize over time
• Pops from Political Movements whose demands are ignored may radicalize over time
• Pops from Political Movements that have their demands fulfilled become more loyal

Radicals and Loyalists generally function in directly opposite ways. For example, Radicals are more likely to create and join Political Movements (as well as contributing to radicalizing said movements) while Loyalists will never join Political Movements. Loyalists make the Interest Groups they are part of happier, while Radicals make them less happy and so on. This means that one way to prevent political activism and curtail movements that oppose your agenda is to increase the Standard of Living of your Pops. Just because you at some point during the game created prosperity (and as a result a bunch of Loyalists) doesn’t mean everyone will just be onboard with your programme forever, though.

Pops will remain Radical or Loyalist until they either die or have a status change as a result of becoming more radical/loyal (for example, a Loyalist Pop might stop being Loyalist if their material standard of living suddenly takes a nosedive), but they do, in fact, die. As generations die off and are replaced by new ones, less and less people will remember all the great things you did for the country 30 years ago and will start wondering instead what you’ve done for them lately.

With that said, that’s a wrap for this dev diary. Next week we’ll continue talking about Politics on a topic that very much relates to Political Movements by being one of the most monumental political questions of the 19th century: Slavery.

 

[Infinitron]

Welcome to the September Update Video for Victoria 3! For this Dev Diary roundup, we're delving deeper into markets and infrastructure!

00:00 - introduction
00:33 - National Markets
05:10 - Infrastructure
09:05 - Employment & Qualifications
14:18 - Treasury

Featuring (in order of appearance):

Sanna Valapuro - Community Ambassador
Mikael Andersson - Lead Game Designer
Martin Anward - Game Director
Paul Depre - QA Lead

 

[Joggerino]

This was very informative

 

[HeroMarine]

Niggaz is struggling


Trigger warning: afro-caribeño slaves

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeY1KnjmjHE