hobbesmaster posted:

What is the official next paradox game to make fun of for not coming out? East vs West?

ThatBasqueGuy posted:

having a prewritten op as a dev is cheating, mods??

VaultAggie posted:

Reading all this makes me very interested in this era. Are there any good book recommendations for the politics of the Victorian era about economics/politics?

Raskolnikov38 posted:

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

,

Wiz posted:

Not my fault you guys aren't asking the important questions

Fuligin posted:

in my hours of daydream-designing about a future Vicky 3, one thing i've always though would be neat is some way of competing for prestige by means of exploration/archaeological pillaging; so, say, you could sponsor expeditions to climb the highest mountains, reach the poles, explore 'darkest' Africa and the interior of the Amazon, exploit and steal the cultural memory of other nations to stock your museums. This would be more likely to be DLC fodder than base game stuff, but im curious if anything like that is intended for the release candidate

ilitarist posted:

We true connoisseurs have ready started circlejerking about the glory of past days that the new game can never reproduce, and just to be sure we went as far as Victoria 1. All hail manual POP promotion and more importantly POP divide! Hard-coded Opium Wars! Britain refusing Machine Parts export halting humanity industrial development for a decade! All of this is true hardcore V2 newfags can't fathom.

fuf posted:

You can save yourself a lot of time and awkwardness by just watching OPB's summaries:

Crazycryodude posted:

What is Paradox trying to hide in Australia, every promo screenshot of the map just so happens to be frames so you can't see it

really queer Christmas posted:

Wiz how does it feel to be a meme

BigglesSWE posted:

Did Vicky 2 model any pandemic events? Cholera became a real headache for the western world starting at 1820ish.

Raenir Salazar posted:

This makes a good case for having something like a spectrum of bondage status for pops, similar to stellaris's slavery mechanics. Because it sounds like serfs are functionally similar to slaves but with extra steps. That they can be bought/rented in addition to not being free is I think what groups them with chattel slavery.

With a spectrum we can also represent the gulags and political prisoners for Proletarian Dictatorships.

Eiba posted:

e.g.

Vasukhani posted:

lame >:|

Gaius Marius posted:

Where?

Takanago posted:

anyway Wiz if you're reading this, it's clear that the people yearn for a force to challenge them and add chaos to what would normally be an orderly game. please add The Populists from Crete into Vicky 3 it will make the game better I promise you. it's what the people need

quote:

Hello once again and welcome back to yet another Victoria 3 dev diary. Where previous dev diaries have been focusing on the economy, we’re now going to switch gears to another core pillar of the Victoria series - internal politics! More specifically, we’re going to be talking about Interest Groups, which form the nucleus of Victoria 3’s political gameplay.

What then, are Interest Groups? Fundamentally, an Interest Group is a collection of pops that espouse certain political views and want to change the country to be more in line with those views. Interest Groups are drawn from a number of different templates, but will vary in their exact views from country to country, based on factors such as the local religion, which social movements have appeared in the country or the personal views of their leader.

As mentioned, Interest Groups are fundamentally made up of Pops - all individuals in all Pops are either members of an Interest Group or Politically Inactive, with the ratio in each based on factors such as Profession, Wealth, Literacy etc. Individuals inside Pops contribute Political Strength to their Interest Group of choice, with the amount they contribute again dependent on multiple factors, the main ones being their material Wealth and the status (and/or votes!) they are offered under the nation’s power structure.

For example, a single wealthy Aristocrat in an Oligarchy will provide hundreds or even thousands times the political strength of a poor laborer. The total Political Strength of all Pops in an Interest Group is what gives it its level of Clout - the amount of political weight it can assert on the country and the government. It’s important to note though that Pops are not unified in which Interest Groups they support - individuals within Pops are the ones who decide their Interest Group, and a single Pop can potentially have individuals supporting every Interest Group in the game (in different numbers).

Some Pops have no political strength at all, usually due to being disenfranchised under the nation’s laws (such as people of a religion or culture that is discriminated against, or women in countries that haven’t instituted women’s suffrage). These Pops are ‘outside the system’ so to speak, unable to demand reform through the regular political system of Interest Groups, and instead having to rely on other methods to put pressure on the government, but we won’t focus on those today.

As mentioned above, Interest Groups have a number of ideologies which determine their views on which laws the country should or should not enact. Different Interest Groups will have different ideologies (the Landowners are significantly more conservative than the Trade Unions, for example - shocking, I know!) but these are not entirely set in stone - they can change over the course of the game and will also vary based on the current leader of the Interest Group, who comes with his or her own personal ideology and view of the world. Additionally, some Interest Groups in certain countries have unique ideologies colored by their religion and culture, such as the Confucian Scholars Interest Group in Qing China who (unsurprisingly) espouse a Confucian ideology.

I mentioned previously that Interest Groups have a level of Clout based on the total Political Strength of their constituent Pops. Clout is calculated by comparing their Political Strength to that of the other Interest Groups in the country - if all the Interest Groups in Belgium put together have 100k Political Strength and the Landowners have 30k, they correspondingly get 30% of the Clout in Belgium. The Interest Group’s Clout will determine their classification - Powerful, Influential or Marginalized.

Interest Groups also have a level of Approval, which is based on factors such as how much they approve of the country’s laws, whether they are in government or in opposition, and how many of their individual members are Loyalists or Radicals (more on those in a later dev diary). There are numerous other factors that can affect Approval as well, such as how you react to certain events or decisions that you take.

Together, the classification and Approval of an Interest Group determines which Traits are active for an Interest Group at any given time, and how impactful they are. There are different traits, positive and negative, with positive traits being activated when an Interest Group is happy and negative ones when they are… not so happy. If an Interest Group is Powerful, the effects of any traits they have active (good or bad) are stronger, while an Interest Group that is Marginalized cannot activate traits at all, as they are too weak to exert an effect on the whole country.

Traits are, of course, not the only way that Interest Groups can affect a country, and it’s even possible for one (or several!) angry Interest Groups to start a civil war, potentially bringing in foreign countries to support them.

Now, something that’s been a hotly debated topic in the community in regards to Interest Groups is Political Parties and whether they will be a part of Victoria 3 so I want to briefly touch on this. What I can tell you for now is that we are currently looking into a solution where parties can form in certain countries as constellations of Interest Groups holding a shared political platform. This is something that’s by no means fully nailed down at this point though, so don’t take this as a 100% firm commitment to how they would function. What I can tell you for sure is that we will come back to this particular topic later!

That’s all for today, though we’ll certainly be coming back to the subject of Interest Groups and looking at the different types you will encounter in later dev diaries. With July and summer vacations coming up, we’re going to take a short break from Development Diaries, but we’ll be back on July 22nd as Mikael returns to continue talking about politics in Victoria 3, on the subject of Laws.

Poil posted:

Are the pie charts disabled during famine?

creamcorn posted:

unrelated, but if you want a good laugh go in wiz's twitter replies and look at all the people smugly going "It's Austria-Hungary" in response to that post lol.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

A Royale with Chairs

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Lmao now a US world conquest is mandatory. You thought our flag was ugly now?

Mantis42 posted:

when you manifest your destiny a little too hard

Baronjutter posted:

I can't believe paradox nerfed slavery.

Gort posted:

You wouldn't call a railroad or a canal a "building" either, though. You build them, but they're not buildings, because English.

Maybe "construction" or "improvement" would be a better catch-all term for everything including factories, barracks, canals, dockyards and railroads.

VostokProgram posted:

How is time an abstract concept not connected to anything in reality, change over time is literally the bedrock of physics

Jazerus posted:

imagine four balls at the edge of a cliff

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Voting for a party that bans voting, then getting massacred in a revolt for voting rights is a Vicky staple.

Fray posted:

Yeah, I’m not actually concerned about any loss of tactical decision-making, because there was almost none to begin with. Paradox doesn’t make wargames, they make narrative engines that have some trappings of wargames. That’s why combat is always the worst part of their titles: it’s an appendix rather than an actual part of the core gameplay loop.

What’s causing consternation is that they’re dropping a lot of the pretense for the first time. People who oppose the fronts design talk a lot about preserving tactical gameplay, but I don’t think that’s really what worries them, because that’s never been what paradox games are about. I think they’re really concerned about their narration being compromised. Fronts and doomstacks both come down to a soup of stats and dice rolls in the end, but the latter looks like more happened than actually did.

So despite any debates about tactics, I think what people really want is narrative power, and that largely comes down to presentation. Things like splitting the front up among different generals could help sell a narrative even if it’s just a visual thing with no mathematical significance. If the brain can create a story, it’ll convince itself that meaningful decisions were made to bring that story about. In the end you get a design that’s cleaner, less burdensome, and (I expect) much more playable by an AI, and the player isn’t actually making fewer meaningful choices. Maybe more meaningful choices, since they seem keen to integrate war more closely with the social-political-economic mechanics that comprise the real gameplay loop.

Mantis42 posted:

"There are currently no political parties in the game."
[Booing]
"OK, fine, look we put the Tories in."
[Booing intensifies]

Takanago posted:

Agean90 posted:

https://twitter.com/PDXVictoria/status/1481279802208358404

Wiz posted:

I'd love to use a better term but honestly I just haven't been able to think of one for 'countries that the Great Powers are racist against' since I don't want to actually use racist terminology. Feel free to come with suggestions.

guidoanselmi posted:

What’s the etiquette for leaked beta chat?