Reactionaries Strike Back: Victoria 3's Latest Dev Diary

Victoria 3, in my opinion, has succeeded in bringing a vision of the industrial revolution and its human dimension to life. By modernizing the gameplay elements of the previous games in the series, and taking several radical steps to make mechanics match the vision, they have created a robust and unique foundation to build upon. Unfortunately, these changes inevitably made some people very upset and angry. A few were entirely unwilling to understand the creative vision behind the overhaul of mechanics such as warfare, and insisted that nothing less than a simple graphically updated version of Victoria 2 will satisfy them. Nevertheless, the development team were brave enough to hold strong (while taking into consideration constructive feedback) and ultimately delivered an innovative experience that was thematically and mechanically cohesive.

This is why I was so disappointed when I woke up to see the most recent Dev Diary, which covers the issue of autonomous construction. In Victoria 2, market systems worked differently from Victoria 3's. Rather than providing different levels of contribution into investment pools that players can spend on buildings (the type of building depends on the economic law), Victoria 2's system could have market types  block players from construction or improving factories. For instance, while a planned economy allowed for governments to build and improve factories, interventionism only allowed them to improve and subsidize them; laissez-faire entirely removes player-control over buildings. In policies that disallow players from interacting with factory construction, capitalists take on this role. The capitalist pops contribute investment into building factories that they decide would be the most profitable. In practice though, the choices felt entirely random, and laissez-faire economies largely pinballed between being massively profitable and being in the red. The only real use of the laissez-faire economy was making construction less of a pain to manage (due to the bad UI and the number of clicks needed) in massive economies.

Victoria 3's development team realized that this was neither fun nor accurately represented those economic policies. For their next iterations, they created a rather elegant solution: economic systems. These laws did not restrict players' actions directly, but rather guided them through the investment pool. Different economic laws would allow for different pops to contribute differing amounts to a central pool of money that would subsidize the construction of factories and buildings. For instance, an agrarian economy did not allow for capitalist contribution to the investment pool, but boosted aristocrat contribution by 25%; furthermore, the pool could only be used to construct agricultural buildings such as farms, plantations, and ranches. This meant players are enticed into investing into this sector, but still have the option to build factories and industrialize, albeit without the support of the aristocracy. Laissez-faire, on the other hand, boosts capitalist investment by a whopping 50% to represent the benefits that a less-regulated economy had on the wealth and investment of the capitalist class. This was not a perfect mechanic, but it was elegant and innovative.

 The latest Dev Diary, which as mentioned covered a mechanic called autonomous construction, is a step backwards. Autonomous construction would remove player control over the investment pool, with pops choosing buildings and contributing money to them without player direction. It is a rough manhandling of Victoria 2's construction mechanics into Victoria 3, with little consideration of its gameplay effects. With warfare abstracted, the players' time is mostly spent on managing the construction queue in Victoria 3 - removing player agency in this area would make the game less interactive. Furthermore, taking away control does not make the game more realistic. In Victoria, the player isn't the government, but is rather the spirit of the nation, therefore a players' construction decisions could be understood as an extension of the investors' own decisions. There was no need to bring back the unwieldy and antiquated system.

The Dev Diary itself made clear that players were split on this issue too, with the concession being that a game rule could be toggled to change between the player-controlled and AI-controlled investment pool. This is a terrible decision both in terms of design and maintenance. First, it is a retreat from the brave and innovative decisions that the team has previously made; the investment pool system could be instead be refined by tinkering with ideas such as having all pops being able to invest while economic systems modified the effectiveness of this investment. There was no need to bring back Victoria's clunky mechanics. Second, maintaining both systems is an unnecessary strain on the team. As we can see from how difficult it is to ensure both the vanilla and DLC-versions of games such as EUIV remain playable, maintaining two systems in parallel while making sure neither break from new updates will take up resources from the team that could be put to much better use. In the same way that having multiple start dates drained development resources while hardly ever being used by the players (i.e. EUIV and CKII), most people would simply use the default game rules even though the team has to devote resource to both systems. 

Even now, as I write, there are comments flooding into the forum. Can the player delete AI-constructed buildings? How would the UI be implemented to distinguish the two types of buildings in a comprehensible way? Perhaps the answers to these would allay some of my fears, but the core uncertainty remains; which path will Victoria 3 take? Liberalization or conservatism?

A ray of hope lies in the teaser for next week's Dev Diary, which will cover government shares in buildings. If this system is expanded entirely such that shares and ownership is realistically represented, perhaps I will be proven wrong. I will hope against hope, because Victoria 3's team have proven their skill and brilliance in the base game. 

One thing that hasn't changed is that Victoria 3 remains at the forefront of grand strategy - it is forging a new path that we have to closely watch.