Another week means another batch of details about upcoming strategy game Victoria 3, and dev diary 16 focuses on States, their importance, and some features we’ll need to look out for when interacting with them.
States are the main political-geographical unit in Victoria 3 and different from State Regions. Where the former is controlled by a single country and has dynamic borders that shift over the course of a game, the latter can contain one or more States but also have static borders.
“For example, the State Region of Rhineland is a predetermined set of provinces on the border of France that in 1836 contains two States: Prussian Rhineland (actually just called Rhineland because it contains more than half the land in the region) and Bavarian Rhineland (called Bavarian Rhineland to distinguish it from the Prussian parts), a concept that we call a Split State,” dev diary 16 reads.
“Over the course of the game, which exact provinces make up the State Region of Rhineland will never change, but the States might. If France was to conquer the Prussian Rhineland, there would of course no longer be a Prussian Rhineland but a French Rhineland, and if Prussia were to conquer the Bavarian Rhineland, the entire State Region would be unified into a single Prussian State.”
States also have an Incorporation Status that affects the population living in them and their economy. An Incorporated State is a “fully integrated political unit” that “incurs full bureaucracy costs, pays all forms of taxes required by the government, and gets the benefit of all national Institutions.”
Their Unincorporated counterparts do not have to worry about bureaucracy costs and only pay some taxes but also do not get benefits from national Institutions and have reduced Infrastructure. Lastly, Colonial States work in a similar fashion to Unincorporated ones but deal with increased immigration and even lower Infrastructure.
Victoria 3’s resource limits are determined at a State Region level and “dynamically allocated to the States in the region based on how large of a share the State holds.” In addition, State Regions will also feature discoverable resources such as oil, gold, or rubber, which cannot be initially accessed or exploited. That, however, changes over the course of the game.
“Certain technologies will affect both which resources can be discovered and the actual chance of said resource being discovered. All of this functions in a weighted random fashion, so while the chance of there being a Klondike gold rush at some point during the game is high, it probably won’t happen exactly at the same date it did historically.”
Previous developer diaries have touched upon interest groups, infrastructure, and national markets.
Victoria 3 is headed to PC and does not currently have a release date.
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