Greetings Victorians,

And a delightful Thursday to you!

It’s Admiral Lino, speaking to you from the dockyards. Today I will go over the central mechanical feature of The Great Wave, the Ship Designer. Also we’ll talk about Flagships, a smaller feature, but cool nonetheless. And last but not least, I’ll walk you through Ship Purchase Treaties.

To be clear, all of which I describe today is part of The Great Wave expansion, which is releasing alongside Update 1.13 on April 28.

Let’s jump right into the water.

I’ve mentioned this previously, but will repeat here that our ambition for the Navy and the Ship Designer in particular was always to make it matter for your strategic ambitions, and not to get lost in the details with tactics for individual battles.

So when we sat down for the design of it, we knew we wouldn’t want to replicate a Ship Designer as players might know it from Hearts of Iron 4 for example. So if that was your fear, I think it’s safe to say that that is not what we’re going with.

Instead, we are focussing on a more Victoria-appropriate design, where you make the big picture decisions instead of deciding how many flak guns you’d like to have on your cruiser.

And while doing so, we still wanted to improve upon historical accuracy a bit, add flavor wherever we can and—even accounting for abstractions—come up with something that is historically plausible.

In order to try and achieve that, we had a long running consultation over multiple sessions with Drachinifel, who runs a YouTube channel and a podcast almost entirely dedicated to naval topics, much of it taking place in the 19th century.

He has been instrumental in providing us with a lot of necessary information on all things to do with the ships themselves, from finalizing the list of different ship types with us, to providing good references for what ships to model ours after, to what different ship modification levels could look like given our constraints, and even the soundscape one would expect to hear.

We are really happy to have had him on board with us (ha!), and he has done a tremendous job working with us.

Well then, shall we get started on the Ship Designer? It all starts with Ship Modifications.

Ship Modifications modify key stats of ships, and are the tool you use to build a fleet that serves your strategic purpose. The attributes that are modified directly are: Armor, Damage, Speed and Supply Capacity.

Armor, of course, determines how robust your ship is. Here, we want to make it very impactful compared to the past when steel hull ships are introduced. Historically, they made wooden ships pretty much obsolete immediately. We represent this by adding armor values to them that are high enough to block most attacks of the wooden ships, completely changing the progression of ships’ power in the game.

Damage is Armor’s counterpart, and is (as you may have guessed) simply deducted by Armor values of the opponent’s ship.

Speed determines the travelling speed on the world map.

Supply Capacity is used to determine how much Supplies a ship can carry, allowing it to stay disconnected from the supply network for longer if necessary. It’s also closely related to the Supply Efficiency value which determines how much Supply is consumed per week.

To modify these stats in the Ship Designer window, you can simply choose individually between three levels for each stat: high, medium and low. Depending on the ship type those can mean different things though of course, which we display as flavor text underneath the category.

This is where a lot of Drachinifel and our dear designer Hansi’s work come in

Upon changing a Ship Modification level, the 3D preview window will show the change accordingly, showing for example more or different types of guns on the ship.

See the three images below for a demonstration of the progression.

Visual changes exemplified by the beautiful Light Cruiser in this case

Of course these visual changes do not only apply in the preview window. They will be visible wherever this ship is going on the 3D map, including battles.

In general, we have put in a pretty good amount of effort into better representing your fleet in the world.

When you zoom in closer on a fleet, the ship representing your fleet will “unfold” and display more ships. These ships are proportionally showing your fleet composition. If you have a large percentage of dreadnoughts, your fleet will also be composed of those for example. We’ll likely show that off in the Art Dev Diary as well.

But let’s come back to the Ship Modifications. Changing one of these stats can also implicitly affect another stat. For example, improving the propulsion of a ship will also improve their detection capabilities, which allows them to engage enemies more easily.

But this can also incur negative effects. If you set the armor value of your Frigate to high, it will come at the expense of Speed for example. You can counter it by setting speed to high too, but this will further increase the production cost of the Frigate.

Because generally true across all ship types is: Increasing a value will also increase production (and maintenance) cost of the ship, whereas lowering it will make it cheaper.

Therefore, the main balance to pick between will be dependent on your country’s situation, and will be between Armor/Damage vs Speed/Supply, and generally effectiveness vs total cost.

But we wanted to add something else that reflects the increased design complexity when trying to fit all this thick armor and big guns and supplies and propulsion onto the same ship.

The costs to build a ship (and therefore also its maintenance costs) is scaled non-linearly with the levels of the Ship Modifications.

For that, we count how many Ship Modification levels are applied to the ship in total, low representing 1, medium 2, high 3. Each wildcard slot (which I’ll get to) also counts as 1.

Then those values are multiplied with the base cost of the Modifications with some exponential growth bits sprinkled on top.

With the current values this results in “all medium” ships being roughly twice as expensive as “all light” ones of the same type and “all high” being again twice as expensive as an “all medium” ship configuration. These values are placeholders, as always, but I wanted to give you an impression of where the journey is roughly going to go.

Since this is a very important aspect of constructing your fleet, we have this graph displayed in the Ship Designer to showcase this exponential cost increase. Also sporting a new icon for Ship Construction Point costs that caused some confusion on Steam previously.

For this, we also added a new piece of tech to highlight a node on a graph, causing it to display a tooltip. We’ll likely make use of this in the future in other graphs across the game. For now though, only this one.

But how do you actually get these changed values to your ships?

In order to make any Ship Designer effective, you need to be able to construct both cheap frigates focussing on efficient supply consumption as well as heavily armored frigates with high firepower. That is what templates are used for - to save your own setups and construct different versions of the same ship type.

A template is determined by a ship type and all selected Ship Modifications for it.

To create a new template, you press the according button in the list of templates when choosing what ship to construct. Alternatively, you can go to the Navy tab in the Military panel, where you will find the “Create Ship Template” button that will also take you to the Ship Designer panel.

Many ways to enter the Ship Designer. Editing a template also gets you there!

All ship types have a default template set up from the start of the game, featuring the medium level Ship Modifications in all four groups.

This, in turn, is also the list of templates that you will have available to you if you don’t own The Great Wave. But it also serves the side benefit, that if you really don’t want to engage with customizing your fleet, you can simply stick to the default templates.

A template has a name—which you can change, of course—to make it easily identifiable. This name will also be repeated in all other relevant places in the interface that are referring to the template that a given ship is based on.

4 Ship of the Line of the Base Template, and 14 Super Duper Ships of the new template you created

But of course creating a new template is not the only way to navigate ship designs. You can just as well edit existing templates if you want your Frigates to get big guns, for example.

Once you edit the template of a ship that has been constructed already, all ships of that template will be marked as being outdated.

To apply a change in an existing template, a ship or group of ships has to be given a specific command to return to port and get it installed via a shipyard. The costs for this action depend on the modification, e.g. if the armor needs to be improved, the construction cost in terms of goods, time and Ship Construction Points depends on the specific cost of the armor, rather than the whole ship. Starting an upgrade/refitting process creates an entry in the ship construction queue like regular ship construction would.

Once completed, the ships in question will return to the fleet.

The arrows are not only indicating a possible change in the ship’s template, but also act as the button to send an individual ship to be retrofit

Last but not least, I want to quickly mention the Wildcard Modifications.

Depending on the ship type, you can install a few Wildcard options into your ships. These can be used to provide a particular specialization to a ship template in order to shape their role further.

Wildcards range from something like patrol boats which increase the ship’s blockade strength, to medical stations which reduce the crew damage suffered in combat, to fire suppression which reduces the damage of critical hits it suffered.

Many of these only become relevant for the more modern ship types, and generally the bigger the ship, the more wildcard slots it will have.

Each wildcard option you use of course also increases the construction cost for the ship as outlined before.

Alright, that’s it on the Ship Designer I think! From the flagship feature to another feature, Flagships.

Flagships are a special status which symbolizes the pride of your fleet. Your entire Navy can only have one Flagship at a time!

Designating one of your ships as your Flagship is easy. You can choose any of your existing ships, be her the most modern and badass ship (cough HMS Claudius cough) or the oldest ship that serves more of a nostalgic purpose - it’s up to you.

To do so, you open the individual ship panel of the ship you’d like to assign this special status.

On the bottom you will find the “Assign as Flagship” button, which is all you need.

Go on, you know you want to press that shiny button. As last time, the textures are of course not final. In the Art Dev Diary, we will show off more final looks of the ships.

Congratulations, you now have a flagship!

In the same ship panel, you now get some options to customize the figurehead of your flagship. Sadly I can’t present the options yet, since the 3D models for them are still in development by our Art team.

“They lead only as the carved wooden figurehead leads the ship”

In comments surrounding the last few Dev Diaries, I also saw some interesting suggestions for additional customization, which we will consider for after the release of the Update.

But what about the actual effects of Flagships?

Well, first of all, the presence of a Flagship in a Fleet increases the Involvement that is being generated by this fleet.

Involvement, as a reminder, is the value that you will need to increase to reach higher levels of Interest in a Strategic Region, as outlined in our Dev Diary[forum.paradoxplaza.com].

Furthermore, the presence of the Flagship in naval battles plays a role. Specifically, the outcome of the battle. If your Flagship is present during a successful naval battle, you’ll earn some deserved Prestige for your country.

But the opposite is also true. If your Flagship is participating in a lost battle, your country is going to be made fun of at the expense of some Prestige.

And beware of your Flagship being sunk in battle. The shame of suffering such loss is a painful one.

The flagship status or presence in a fleet is presented in relevant places with this cute crown icon. You made the right choice with the ship, she won’t disappoint you

Now, moving on to the next topic.

I would like to start with a note on ship commissioning, where you order a ship to be built by another country before it actually exists: We would of course have liked to do that, but it was simply not feasible. The added complexity for this is many many times more time consuming. Apart from needing to add foreign entries into your own ship construction queue (which is to this day a source of bugs in foreign investment), one would have to come up with custom code solutions for all of these questions and more around its edgecases:

• What happens if the shipyards in the commissioned country get destroyed or occupied?

• Can you deprioritize an entry you got from another country? Is that breaking the treaty? If so, what happens in that case?

• What do you do with a half-finished ship entry if the treaty is nullified? Do you switch it to the building country's ownership?

• Do you have to crew the ship to ferry it to its target destination?

I hope you can see that, unfortunately, it’s a bit more complicated than simply granting another country their ship construction points. Therefore this was out of reach for us.

To compensate for this lack of ordering, we’re making it so the AI will try to produce a small extra percentage of ships compared to how big they’d like their fleet to be, so that there should be enough options for ship purchasing.

So, let’s talk about what we are actually offering instead since some people in the comments of previous Dev Diaries have asked what you will do with your outdated ships, for example your wooden ones when steel ships are being established.

While you can always decommission them, a maybe better answer will be to sell them to other countries. These might still be interested due to their own technology or those of their rivals lagging behind, or simply because they are desperate.

Of course you can also sell your most modern ships, either because you don’t fear this coming to haunt you, you want to support a trusted ally, or simply because the other country is having particularly deep pockets.

In all cases, you will make use of the new “Ship Transfer” Treaty article that you use like any other. For this, we have made it possible to target ships as tradeable objects. Previously this was limited to goods and states.

When you select it, it opens a list of all ships you or the other country owns. You can use filters to shorten that list which may be useful if you’re dealing with Great Powers.

Oh you wouldn’t really give away the HMS Claudius, now would you?!

This way, you can add as many or few ships as you would like. Just like any other treaty, it can be composed of different articles as well, for example to get some money or investment rights in the target country.

Really not sure that’s a good trade for them…

And that is how you can trade ships with other countries!

Alright folks, that’s all for today. We hope you enjoyed this look at the Ship Designer and other features.

Next Thursday, Cabin Boy Tunay will be back with a look at how Naval Combat changes in the 1.13 Update and also how Gunboat Diplomacy in The Great Wave will play out when it releases on April 28.

Until then, have a Happy Capitalized Thursday!

Schedule of our upcoming Dev Diaries:

• April 02 - Naval Combat & Gunboat Diplomacy

• April 09 - Narrative Content of The Great Wave

• April 16 - Art & Music of The Great Wave

• April 23 - Changelog & Achievements

• April 28 - Release of The Great Wave and Update 1.13

Happy Monday everyone, and welcome to a bonus dev diary for Victoria 3! In our last dev diary[forum.paradoxplaza.com], Lino made a valiant effort on covering the entirety of free Update 1.13, but with so much to cover, he found that to do so would be simply going overboard. Well, any port in a storm, so in today’s bonus dev diary we will be covering some additional changes and additions, mostly character-related, that will also be launching with 1.13.

Characters have always been a bit of an underutilized feature in Victoria 3, and I’ve never felt that we’ve managed to settle on a single cohesive vision for the feature. In some roles, characters can be incredibly impactful, and getting the right historical character can have massive implications for your political system, but in other cases you’re simply recruiting commander #94 to be able to start one more simultaneous battle on a front and couldn’t be less bothered about the particulars of their personality, skills, political leanings or personal hobbies.

This is something I’ve long wanted to change, and have made it my own personal pet project to take the first significant steps towards doing so in Update 1.13. Going forward, the way we approach the character system will be guided by the following design principles:

• Characters are player-facing avatars of specific ideological forces, social classes or other groupings within your country. They exist to highlight and/or champion a force or cause greater than themselves.

• Characters should be ‘surfaced’ to the player in proportion to their importance. It is fine for unimportant characters to exist, but they should not be held up by the game as worthy of the player’s notice unless specifically sought out.

• Characters are not solely defined by their job. Important/interesting characters should be able to change their role and influence multiple parts of your nation. For example, a forcibly retired commander might step into politics and become an even bigger headache for the player than they were before. 

That last point is more key than it might seem, as a major current design limitation of characters is that they are intimately tied to their job and will in fact be scheduled for immediate execution the moment they no longer have a specific task to carry out in their country (don’t let those notifications about retirement trick you, they’re just a nice way to dress up the mass murder of former Interest Group leaders). Pelly Note: They go to a farm upstate, please don’t believe anything else.

As such, the first and probably most important change we’ve made to characters in 1.13 is the addition of the National Cast. The National Cast, or ‘Character Pool’ as it’s also informally called, is simply a place where all the characters in your country are kept and shown, but more significantly where characters without a job go to hang out and wait for better days.

Look at all these unemployed, lazy politicians! Never done an honest day’s work in their lives, I’m certain.

This may not seem like a very significant change, but it actually has some significant benefits for both existing character-related systems and in enabling us to do a lot more with characters going forward. One immediate benefit is that Historical Characters no longer need to be forced into a job to appear. In other words, Bismarck does not need to spring out fully formed as the entrenched leader of the Junkers, he can simply appear as another conservative politician and potential future leader candidate, adding both greater historicity and flexibility to our character system.

This, in turn, has allowed us to update the Interest Group (IG) leader/ideology selection into something far more comprehensible and logical than the old system of “50% chance of Bismarck, otherwise 50% chance of Commander A, otherwise we randomly select one of these ideologies”. Leader ideology selection is now a single weighted pool, where each ideology can potentially be represented by an appropriate character of that ideology that exists in the pool. 

If no character of the chosen ideology and Interest Group exists, a new one is randomly generated to step into that role. Characters of any role can be chosen as the next Interest Group leader, so long as they meet the requisite Prominence threshold (currently set at 10, more on Prominence below), but some Interest Groups are more likely to look outside of the Politician class than others - the Armed Forces, for instance, are fond of selecting present or former commanders as leaders, while the Industrialists are always and forever making heart-eyes at the Executives of powerful companies. 

When their current leader retires, there are six ideologies that the next leader of the Armed Forces may espouse. Reformer/Moderate are championed by a pair of commanders, Bonapartist/Republican have politicians backing them, and Orleanist/Liberal would result in a new leader being randomly generated.

So then, let’s talk about the new character stat Prominence and how it differs from Popularity. Prominence serves two purposes: the first being to more easily surface to the player which characters in their country hold important positions of power, and the second being to add a bit more nuance to the way characters gain and hold onto power. 

Previously, Popularity served as a kind of all-in-one stat, representing both how popular a character is with the general public and also their level of influence within their Interest Group; but, I think, if history has taught us anything, it’s that just because someone is a cruel, imperious alcoholic that is deeply unpopular with the general public doesn’t mean their political party don’t think they’re just the best possible option for Prime Minister or President there ever was. As such, we’ve now split these two, so that Popularity now only represents the character’s popularity with the masses, while Prominence represents how deeply entrenched they are in the political machine of their Interest Group. Popularity still influences Prominence to a lesser degree, but is now more of a secondary stat for most roles, though it is still of prime importance for Agitators.

Prominence is gained from a number of different sources, the most significant being the character’s Role. We’ve actually added several new character roles with this update, so for the sake of clarity I’m going to enumerate all the character roles we now have, what they represent, and how they impact prominence.

• Ruler: The ruler of a country. Rulers will virtually always have the maximum amount of prominence (100).

• Heir: The heir-apparent in a monarchy, gets a large boost to Prominence (though less so if they are not yet an adult).

• Leader: The leader of an Interest Group, gets a significant boost to their Prominence. Always held concurrently with another role.

• General/Admiral: The commander of an army or a fleet, gets a boost to Prominence based on their rank.

• Executive: The CEO of a Company. Gets a boost to Prominence based on the size of the Company.

• Politician: The champion of a particular ideology within their Interest Group. Gets a small boost to Prominence. Politicians are randomly generated into the pool for non-marginalized Interest Groups to champion appropriate ideologies within that Interest Group.

• Agitator: A demagogue stirring up the masses to achieve specific political ends. Agitators have reduced Prominence, representing the disdain of the elite for their populist ways.

• Magnate: A wealthy landowner or businessman using their money to influence politics. This is a new role that I’ll explain more in detail below.

Honoré Charles Reille wears many hats, all of them fancy

Prominence can also be gained from a variety of secondary factors, such as traits, Popularity, events and so on. Prominence is the principal stat affecting which character and ideology is likely to be selected for the next leader of an Interest Group: Higher-Prominence characters are both more likely to be picked as the next leader if there are multiple characters of the same ideology competing for the job, and also directly increase the chance of their ideology being picked over other ideologies. 

This means that, for example, if a character from the Landowners happens to espouse a more liberal ideology that would make the Interest Group less of a pain in the rear to your reformist ambitions, you can attempt to put your thumb on the scale for that character by looking for ways to boost their Prominence - for example, by giving them a promotion (if they’re a commander) or striving to increase the revenue of their holdings (if they’re a Magnate, more on this below). 

There is one additional thing Prominence does for characters which meet a certain threshold (currently set at 25): They directly increase the Clout of their Interest Group. This replaces the old (and sometimes very silly) ways in which characters impacted Clout, such as every single commander giving a Clout boost no matter how utterly pointless their command was to the country as a whole. There’s a bit more nuance to how commanders and politically-aimed promotions work now, but I’ll cover that in part 2 of this Dev Diary.

Onto Magnates, then. Magnates are a new role that have an important part to play in new Japanese scripted content coming in The Great Wave (more on that in a later Dev Diary), but aren’t exclusively limited to Japan. Magnates can be generated as historical characters, but will also be randomly generated up to a limit set by the rank of your country. As I mentioned above, Magnates are wealthy landowners and businessmen who have decided that because they are wealthy, they obviously know what’s best for their country, and have decided to put their money to use furthering their chosen political agenda.

Magnates have a Home State (in fact, all characters now do, though it has no real impact outside the Magnate role for now) and a Holding, which is either the Financial Districts or Manor Houses in their Home State. Which of these two it is primarily depends on their Interest Group - Landowner Magnates naturally tend to come from, you know, landowners, while Industrialist Magnates are more into the whole captain of industry thing. You can think of the Magnate as representing one of the Capitalist or Aristocrat Pops within their Holding, though obviously they are far wealthier and more powerful than most.

Baron Veit von Göriz uses the revenue from his Tyrol estates to try and make the Austrian Aristocracy even more reactionary - really fighting the good fight there, Veit. If you’re wondering about the poverty look, it’s WIP - we haven’t set up proper clothing script for the role yet.

Magnates gain Prominence from the revenue (note that it’s revenue, and not profit) of their Holdings, scaled against the GDP of the country. If you paid attention to how Prominence works, you’ve probably already figured out what this means: The larger and wealthier their Holding, the more the Magnate will boost their Interest Group, their Ideology within the Interest Group, and their own chance of being selected as the next leader of said Interest Group. Magnates are thus fairly similar to Executives (who derive Prominence from the size of their Company), but tend to be a bit more diverse in which Interest Groups they come from and Ideologies they champion, at least so long as your country isn’t still operating on an economic system more suited to the era of Crusader Kings.

We’ve now gone over the big changes to characters, but there’s a couple minor bits to cover before we move on to the next topic. The first is Loyalty, which is a secondary stat for characters which is now used instead of Interest Group Approval in some content (mainly Coups), and which is a bit more nuanced, incorporating the approval of their IG, how well their individual Ideology matches the current crop of laws, and modifiers from events. This is a very limited mechanic for the time being, but is something we plan to make more use of in the future.

Mathieu is not the biggest fan of the July Monarchy, all in all

Finally, we’ve also ended the era of politically radicalized toddlers. When generated, child characters will no longer have an Ideology, Interest Group or fully formed personality, but instead have hearts full of neutrality. For historical child characters or characters generated via a scripted effect with specific characteristics, those characteristics will be saved and applied to the character once they turn 16 and become an adult. 

Isabella now starts the game politically unaligned. Upon turning 16, she is scripted to join the Petit-Bourgeoisie and become a Moderate, thus changing… not all that much, really.

Any characteristics not pre-saved or set by content before they become an adult will be randomly determined on their 16th birthday, which also means that heirs will select their ideology based on the political conditions when they are a teenager, rather than coming into the world having already been convinced of the inevitable triumph of socialism while in the womb.

One of our stated goals for Update 1.13 reads as follows: “Make generals/admirals into more meaningful and noticeable actors in countries and reduce the micromanagement of large numbers of commanders.” This is precisely what we are doing, and this section of the Dev Diary is all about that particular change, namely to reduce the number of commanders in countries while simultaneously increasing the importance of each particular commander.

This is actually something that’s effectively made possible by the National Cast and the ability to have characters without explicit jobs hanging around. If you’ve been with us for a while, you might be raising your hand and saying “But wait, Mr. Martin, didn’t we have one commander per formation back before 1.5?” and I would then tell you that “Ha-ha! There were in fact no military formations before 1.5”.

But is there actually a difference between one commander now and one commander back then? Absolutely. I don’t want to spend too much time talking about the past, but suffice it to say that the old, release-era single-commander system allowed for very little control over the size and composition of your armies and navies. They were extremely transient objects, changing size of their own accord and stealing units left and right when commanders were recruited or dismissed. The end result was messy and made it hard to care about any one commander even with less of them hanging around overall.

Under the new system, we maintain armies and fleets as the semi-permanent objects they are, only they now have a maximum of a single commander instead of a maximum of four. Additionally, commanders are no longer permanently married to their military formation: They can be unassigned and reassigned at will, and you can have unassigned commanders hanging around in the Character Pool waiting for the day when they are needed, though there is a limit on how many unassigned commanders you can have, and once you reach this limit you are no longer able to recruit new commanders, unassign existing commanders, or disband formations with a commander until you retire some of your excess brass.

“You can’t replace Santa Anna, Santa Anna is irreplaceable!” Quote attributed to Antonio López de Santa Anna.

Besides making the individual commanders more important in your country and making commander management much more user-friendly, this also increases their mechanical significance: The traits of a skilled commander now apply to their entire formation, and so do any special orders they unlock, making the “special orders from traits” system one you might actually care about when selecting who gets to lead your desperate defense against British imperialism.

“1er Corps d’Armée - pillage at will!”

To represent the fact that commanders do not have access to teleporters, a newly assigned commander now has to travel from their current position to the position of their new formation. While travelling, they contribute command limit to the formation but the troops under their command gain no benefit from their orders or skill traits. The amount of time spent travelling depends on the distance, so reassigning a commander from South France to North France goes a lot faster than if Jean-Pierre had to catch a ship to Micronesia to take command of the 1st Pacific Rifles.

Those of you familiar with the military system will likely have several objections raised at this point, such as “Does this mean we can only push in a single state per front?” or “Doesn’t this make commander political cheese even worse since you can just unassign commanders you don’t like?”, or “Does this mean command limits have been rebalanced?”. These are indeed real issues that we’ve attempted to tackle alongside this change, so I’ll try to address them one at a time.

Firstly, as a more general balm to political cheese, Rank is now more important than size of assignment. A Field Marshal is still a highly influential figure in the military even if you’ve decided that his particular skills are best suited for a desk job back at HQ, and will be able to get a significant amount of backing from more junior officers if he attempts a coup. 

Additionally, there is now a penalty for ‘unnecessary promotions’, which is a promotion done when the collective command limit of your commanders is already more than enough for the needs of your armies + keeping some benchwarmers at the ready in case of a sudden battlefield death. Such a promotion, presumably carried out for purely political reasons, will always anger the Armed Forces (even if they’re the ones benefitting, they don’t like frivolous promotions that undermine the chain of command), as well as any non-benefitting Interest Groups that have active commanders who feel snubbed.

Antonio López de Santa Anna is outraged at the lack of understanding for the necessity in promoting Mexico’s most capable general, Antonio López de Santa Anna.

As far as battles go, generals can now be engaged in multiple battles simultaneously, being able to participate in an unlimited number of defensive battles and a limited number of offensive ones (the cap for offensive battles is based on their rank), so long as there are troops under their command available to fight. While this may seem a little odd, you can think of the general as being in overall command at the front, with unnamed junior commanders in place carrying out their orders at the actual battles.

Command Limit has also been rebalanced to reflect the growing size of formations over the course of the game. At the start of the game, it’s the same as now, but increases with army & navy tech, so that at the end of the game a single Field Marshal can take command of nearly half a million men.

The impact of tech on Command Limit is split so that naval techs increase the effectiveness of your admirals, while army techs impact generals

You might also be wondering what happens when a commander dies in action: Does this spell immediate doom for their formation as the organization of the commander-less formation craters? This is a legitimate concern, and to address it we’ve added a grace period: When a formation enters a state of being ‘below command limit’, its Organization target won’t go down for 30 days, giving you time to assign or recruit a new commander. We’re also looking into an auto-replacement feature, but are currently not sure if this is something we’ll have time to do for 1.13. 

Oh no! Antonio López de Santa Anna has succumbed to an infection after pricking himself on his new medal valiantly fallen in battle, and a replacement must be found! Fortunately we have a whole month to grieve before a decision must be made.

There is one last small thing of note here, which is that commanders that embark on expeditions will now automatically be unassigned from their formations and are not available for reassignment until they return from their adventures.

Hello everyone! Cabin boy Tunay here with a couple of modding related additions included in the upcoming Update. 

Note that while, of course, we will also have a bunch of navy and ship related script additions, I will not be diving into those today!

After reading through all of the above mentioned changes to characters you probably won't be surprised to hear that some of our script additions have to do with characters as well, the biggest one in question is the addition of the character role database.
I know that this has been a much requested feature for a long time and I'm happy that we have finally managed to get around to implementing this! 

Going forward anyone can define and implement new character roles as they please.

To do this you will have to create a new entry in common/character_roles with your role in question. This does not only add script support to be able to apply this role to your characters but it also comes with some additional functionality hooked straight into the code like determining if and how characters are generated by the game. You will also be able to assign custom titles to characters, more on that in a moment.

[c]character_role_example = {[/c]

[c]    type = politician       # Archetype for this role, valid archetypes are politician/general/admiral/executive/agitator/ruler/heir/magnate. Roles do not need to have archetypes if they are fully controlled by script.[/c]

[c]    priority = 1            # Used to select the primary title for a character, higher priority gets selected over lower[/c]

[c][/c]

[c]    auto_assigned = yes/no      # If this is set to yes, then all characters of this role's archetype will receive this role when created[/c]

[c]   [/c]

[c]    should_use_title_in_name = yes/no   # If set to yes, characters with this role as primary will have its title in their titled name ('General Cupcakes Muffin III')[/c]

[c]    title_format = from_name            # Determines how titles are formatted, from_name/ruler/heir/custom, defaults to from_name. If set to custom, a customizable localization with the format key_custom_loc (example: character_role_politician_custom_loc) must be added to the customizable loc database.[/c]

[c]    title_preposition = "PREP_IN"       # Determines the preposition when title is shown in country context (ie, 'Ruler in France'), uses define (english default: 'in') if not set[/c]

[c]   [/c]

[c]    spawn_characters_to_pool = yes/no   # If set to yes, characters with this role will be spawned into the pool from templates and potentially also randomly depending on spawn target values below[/c]

[c]   [/c]

[c]    # The below values are used to control when new characters of a role should be randomly generated into the character pool[/c]

[c]    # The target value is the number of characters of a specific role and IG we want to hang around in the pool at different levels of IG influence[/c]

[c]    # Current IG leader is counted, as are other characters that are potentially valid for IG leadership[/c]

[c]    # If the number of characters of this role hanging around in the pool is below the target, we will try to create a new character.[/c]

[c]    # Politicians generated randomly will get an ideology currently unrepresented in their IG, other characters use normal ideology selection[/c]

[c]    # Characters generated from templates count towards but are not prevented from spawning by these values[/c]

[c]    # Each of these is a script value, root = interest group[/c]

[c]    # WARNING: Using complex script values here is likely to degrade performance![/c]

[c]    pool_spawn_target_powerful = 3      # Target if the character's IG is powerful[/c]

[c]    pool_spawn_target_influential = 2   # Target if the character's IG is influential[/c]

[c]    pool_spawn_target_marginal = 0      # Target if the character's IG is marginal[/c]

[c]   [/c]

[c]    # Alternative spawn control number, incompatible with IG spawn values above[/c]

[c]    # Script value, target for number of characters from this role that should be spawned into the pool across a country. Created characters will be assigned IGs based via the normal IG selection logic from role etc.[/c]

[c]    # Root = country[/c]

[c]    pool_spawn_target_country_wide = {[/c]

[c]        value = 0[/c]

[c]    }[/c]

[c]   [/c]

[c]    # Applied to characters holding this role[/c]

[c]    character_modifier = {[/c]

[c]        character_prominence_add = 10[/c]

[c]    }[/c]

[c]}[/c]

Characters of a given role may be granted a custom title, we do this for Rulers and Heirs of course and it's usually dependent on the country or type of government or both, but you will now be able to create custom titles for other roles as well, including of course your own ones.

To do so, you would first have to specify in your character role database that this role uses custom titles, in the basegame this is true for Magnates for example:

[c]character_role_magnate = {[/c]

[c]\[...][/c]

[c]title_format = custom[/c]

[c]\[...][/c]

[c]}[/c]

Now we can create a new entry in common/customizable_localization. Please keep in mind that it's very important that your key follows this strict syntax: character_role_\[character_role_key]_custom_loc

[c]character_role_magnate_custom_loc = {[/c]

[c]type = character[/c]

[c]random_valid = yes[/c]

[c]text = {[/c]

[c]trigger = {[/c]

[c]is_female = no[/c]

[c]is_noble = yes[/c]

[c]}[/c]

[c]localization_key = character_title_lord[/c]

[c]}[/c]

[c]text = {[/c]

[c]trigger = {[/c]

[c]is_female = no[/c]

[c]is_noble = yes[/c]

[c]}[/c]

[c]localization_key = character_title_baron[/c]

[c]}[/c]

[c]text = {[/c]

[c]trigger = {[/c]

[c]is_female = no[/c]

[c]is_noble = yes[/c]

[c]}[/c]

[c]localization_key = character_title_count[/c]

[c]}[/c]

[c]text = {[/c]

[c]trigger = {[/c]

[c]is_female = no[/c]

[c]is_noble = yes[/c]

[c]}[/c]

[c]localization_key = character_title_marquis[/c]

[c]}[/c]

[c]text = {[/c]

[c]trigger = {[/c]

[c]is_female = no[/c]

[c]is_noble = no[/c]

[c]}[/c]

[c]localization_key = character_title_gentleman[/c]

[c]}[/c]

[c]}[/c]

As always, there are a bunch of miscellaneous and smaller additions in terms of effects and triggers, and I have chosen to highlight some of them here today. But first, some housekeeping!

The has_role trigger has been split into has_role and has_role_of_type, all of your current has_role instances should be replaced with has_role_of_type.

Moving on, we have added the ability to change an already existing character's name via a new effect, well two really!

To do so you can scope to a character and use the set_first_name or set_last_name effects, either of which will require you to provide a predefined loc key.

Philippe Égalité, I can do you one better.

Additionally you can use the new set_home_state effect to change a character's home state. Note, that when creating a character template, you will also be able to insert a new home_region parameter directly.

We have also provided you with a new trigger called is_noble to check whether a character belongs to the nobility (if there is such a thing in your country). This distinction had always existed but it was not really something you could check for in script and now you can! 

Taboos can now be applied to and removed from cultures directly instead of just being a strictly religion based feature. To do so you can simply use the add_cultural_taboo and remove_cultural_taboo effects in culture scope with the target being a goods key!

It’s something of a patriotic duty

Another long requested feature is finally making its way into the game: we have added the ability to add and modify resource potentials in script on run time! To do so you can use the new add_resource_potential, remove_resource_potential and change_resource_potential (for capped resources) effects.

[c]s:STATE_GREENLAND = {[/c]

[c]add_resource_potential = building_vineyard[/c]

[c]change_resource_potential = {[/c]

[c]type = building_iron_mine[/c]

[c]amount = 5[/c]

[c]  }[/c]

[c]}[/c]

What will you tell your grandchildren when they ask you why you didn’t invest in Greenlandic Vineyards?

Lastly, if you have made it this far, I would also like to let you know that we are working on implementing variable maps into the game which were first introduced in the most recent EU5 Rossbach update[forum.paradoxplaza.com]. I highly recommend checking out the associated Tinto Talks for more details, but in essence, variable maps allow you to insert a key:value pairing whereas the variable lists only accept a key or value respectively.

This is our Get Along Shirt

This will be it for me for today! Now if you will excuse me, I got a ship deck to scrub…

Next time in Dev Diaries, we return to Admiral Lino and will go down to the dockyard to look at the Ship Designer, Flagships and Ship Purchasing, this Thursday!

Schedule of our upcoming dev diaries:

• March 26 - Ship Designer & Flagships & Ship Purchasing

• April 02 - Naval Combat & Gunboat Diplomacy

• April 09 - Narrative Content of The Great Wave

• April 16 - Art & Music of The Great Wave

• April 23 - Changelog & Achievements

• April 28 - Release of The Great Wave and Update 1.13