Hello and welcome to another Victoria 3 Dev Diary!
After last week’s look at Power Blocs, we are going to take a look at another major set of changes that are going to arrive with Sphere of Influence and the free 1.7 update.
Namely, a revision of the Building Ownership system and what it allows us to do: Foreign Investment, a much requested feature which makes its debut in 1.7.
You will see that the changes we are making impact your visibility of ownership and the affected Pops throughout the game.
To understand all the mechanics we will be looking at an example country in the heart of Europe.
Ownership types
It’s 1836. In Bavaria, a proud member of the Zollverein Power Bloc, all buildings are owned by the state or the workers themselves.
Capitalists, Aristocrats, and Clergymen no longer work in these buildings, and most of the Shopkeepers no longer work in production buildings directly. In addition, the Ownership Production Methods have been removed. Instead, ownership works on a per level basis, allowing a mixed ownership structure in the same building.
A popular Logging Camp it seems. Workers, a Financial District and a Manor House own a part.
In worker-owned buildings employees work for themselves basically. So any dividends they may accumulate, they split amongst themselves. This is the default at game start for many countries (not all) and is a state which you can more or less return to at a later stage of the game with the enactment of Cooperative Ownership, which will expropriate your privately owned buildings over time.
One major exception from the ownership situation at game start are subsistence farms which are owned by a new building we are introducing: Manor Houses.
Now they lounge around in luxury, instead of slumming it with the common folks in less refined taste buildings, we wouldn't want their shoes to be dirtied on a subsistence farm!
Manor Houses are able to own levels of other buildings, in our case at game start all the levels of Subsistence Farms in their own states. They pay their wages and dividends by collecting dividends from the buildings they own and distributing them among their employees.
What type and how many employees they have is determined by a limited set of PMs.
Clergymen or Aristocrats? You can’t get rid of both of them!
So you can see there are still jobs for Clergymen. What about the Shopkeepers and Capitalists?
Well, they work in the new Financial District buildings, which behave pretty much like the Manor Houses. They too have different employment PMs, can own levels of other buildings and pay their employees by collecting dividends from owned building levels.
Both new buildings expand automatically, depending on how many levels they own. For example if a new level of a privately owned factory is created, a corresponding new level of a Financial District is also generated.
All building levels that you construct are country-owned. Under certain laws, this status can change soon after they are finished constructing. Country-owned buildings come with reduced Economy of Scale bonuses and a bureaucracy cost for each level you own. But in return they can provide additional income based on the building’s dividends which partially get transferred to your treasury.
Not all buildings can be of any ownership type of course, for example barracks or government administrations will always be country-owned.
Summing up, there are now three types of ownership for any building level:
- Worker owned
- Privately owned (Financial Districts and Manor Houses)
- Country owned
If all buildings in Bavaria are owned by the workers or the country itself, how do the first Financial Districts appear, you may wonder!
The main way to get that to happen is the next point on our agenda.
Privatization
Enter Privatization, whereby you allow country-owned buildings to be sold to Pops.
If you are short on cash, Privatization might help you
This makes it possible for your Pops to acquire them. Depending on the type of building you are privatizing, they usually get bought either by Aristocrats or Capitalists, using the investment pool’s funds.
If you don’t have any capitalists in your country yet, other Pops may step up though, using the investment pool’s funds to buy a building you put up for sale and become Capitalists in the process, which in turn leads to the first Financial District appearing.
The money will be transferred from the investment pool to your country’s treasury once that happens. The cost of buying a level is determined by its construction cost and is modified by most of the Economic System laws. These laws also affect the efficiency of these transactions, meaning how much money is lost as overhead and how much is being reinvested into the investment pool or the treasury.
One particularly interesting law is Laissez-Faire which upon enactment forces all your country-owned buildings to be put up for sale and will automatically do so for every new building level you construct. Similarly, enactment of other laws like Cooperative Ownership and Command Economy doesn’t immediately change the ownership of all buildings, but rather can start a process that can convert your economy over time.
Insert witty joke about the free market here
Now let’s take a look at how the different ownership model affects investments from your Pops.
Investment
The existing logic for how the private investment pool works remains similar to before. So, different Pop types still have different priorities and they will look at factors like estimated productivity, available workforce etc.
When a building is about to be constructed by private investment, we randomly determine who is building it, favoring already existing Financial Districts and Manor Houses over creating new ones.
In a worker-owned economy, the private investment pool will continue to function, but they will only expand their own buildings, not create new ones.
An important fact with this system is that investments do not need to be local. A Financial District or Manor House can invest in any of your country’s states, including your colonies overseas.
This system will create a flow of money from the colonies to your homelands, a stronger centralization of wealth and power and it will end the status of colonies’ Pops making more money than your Pops at home.
Of course the non-local investments also come with some challenges with regards to other countries.
It looks like Prussia has heard about that option and has started investing in your country!
“First they took our chairs, then the tables we used to eat at. What’s next? Our beds?!”
Foreign Investment
There are a few ways to acquire Foreign Investment Rights.
First of all, overlords can always invest in their subjects. This is part of the free 1.7 update and will allow you to do Foreign Investment where it matters the most, even if you do not own Sphere of Influence.
Then there are three diplomatic pacts which you can use if you have bought the expansion:
[olist]
The [redacted] has been [redacted]. We shall see its effects on the 11. of April.
There is also a Power Bloc Principle group that deals with Foreign Investment which on Tier 3 has the consequence of being able to invest in any member country.
No matter how you got the Investment Rights, you and also your Pops will be able to invest in the target country. Private investment does consider foreign states as potential targets for their expansions, allowing them to build profitable buildings more easily.
As nice as it is that Prussia has invested in new buildings in Bavaria, I don’t think we can let them get away with diverting the profits to Berlin instead of our own population!
Nationalization
Nationalization allows you to take control of foreign assets in your country. You cannot nationalize other countries’ assets as long as they possess Foreign Investment rights in your country.
Once that is no longer the case, e.g. if Bavaria left the Zollverein Power Bloc, you can peacefully nationalize their building levels in your country. For that you need to pay a sum of money from your treasury. Similarly to Privatization, the sum is determined by the construction cost + modifiers from laws.
You will also be able to nationalize your own Pops’ building levels, both worker-owned and privately owned, if you’d like to take ownership. Nationalization is not seen positively by the affected Pops of course and will radicalize them.
“We should compensate them to reduce the quarrels.”
But what if the Bavarian coffers are empty yet you still want to take over that juicy productive Furniture Manufacturies that is owned by Prussia?
Well, there is always an alternative.
“Pay them? I don’t think so!”
You can demand nationalization of a country’s assets in your country. If they accept, their building levels’ ownership changes to your country. If they don’t, you can try and enforce it as a wargoal. If you are successful, you will also remove their Foreign Investment Rights for your country in addition to taking control of their buildings in your country.
Building Registry
To visualize all these new mechanics, we are introducing the Building Registry, which allows you a customizable look at your country’s situation.
All the building data one could wish for
This is a major new UI, that similar to the Census Data window, comes with a lot of functionality to filter the available data. Only show buildings outside your country? Sure. See all buildings that are owned by Pops and which are currently not hiring but not fully employed? No problem.
Lots of filter groups to browse through
We hope you find this as useful as we do. You can access it via the button on the bottom of the Buildings panel.
Really recommend pressing that button
Implications for the Directly Controlled Investment Pool Game Rule
As you can imagine, this new system of ownership, geographic wealth extraction, and privatization/nationalization has far-reaching implications on the economic foundations of Victoria 3. It enables a lot of interesting dynamics we haven't been able to model until this time and adds a whole new dimension to your economic laws.
It also comes with the consequence of making the Directly Controlled Investment Pool game rule that we introduced with 1.2 (as a legacy alternative to the new Autonomous Investment system) impossible to maintain. In 1.6 and prior, if this game rule was turned on, the player would be directing all construction efforts. As long as there was money in the investment pool and the construction queue was building a privately-owned building, the cost of construction goods would be coming out of the investment pool first before being carried by the state budget. With the new rules for building ownership, investment rights, and so on in 1.7 this no longer makes sense - there's now a very clear distinction between a building project initiated by a private investor and the state, a potential source of conflict innate to both foreign ownership and the privatization/nationalization mechanics, and even differences between owners in different regions that cannot be represented if all construction projects were player-initiated.
Because of this it no longer makes sense for players to be in charge of both public and private investments simultaneously, and as such the Directly Controlled Investment Pool rule has had to be removed for 1.7 and beyond. While we can't support non-default game rules to the same degree as the standard options, removing a game rule completely is not something we'd ever do without good cause. We know that a smaller fraction of you favored this setting so we want to be clear with why its removal was a necessity to move forward with these improvements to ownership and foreign expansion.
Outlook
I would like to end today’s Dev Diary by providing a short outlook for what these changes also enable us to do in the future.
The main thing here is affecting Companies.
The way we have reworked ownership allows us to create Company headquarter buildings which can then own specific building levels of industries they care about, determining its profitability from and providing their throughput bonuses only to these. While we cannot provide a concrete timeline for that change at this point, it is something we would like to tackle for one of our next free updates.
That’s it for today. Check back next week when Mikael is going to walk you through what changes 1.7 and Sphere of Influence brings to relations and interactions between Overlords and Subjects, including how these foreign investment mechanics relate to your grip over your extended empire.
Overview for all upcoming Dev Diaries:
| Date | Topic | [/tr]
|---|---|
| 4th April | Subject Interactions | [/tr]
| 11th April | Lobbies and More on Power Blocs | [/tr]
| 18th April | The Great Game | [/tr]
| 25th April | The Art of Sphere of Influence | [/tr]
| 2nd May | Changelog 1.7 | [/tr]
