AI and War Support Rework Open Beta Update 3 is now LIVE!

Happy Wednesday Victorians!

Update 3 of the 1.14 Open Beta is here! This update focuses on Naval Power Projection and Combat Reworks, AI Naval Improvements, Early Troopships and the addition of AI Regional Objectives!

To those of you who are just finding out about the beta or need a refresher on how to join, you can opt into the Beta by following these instructions:

• Navigate to your Steam Library.
• Right-click Victoria 3 and select “Properties”.
• In the newly created window, select “Game Versions & Betas”.
• Now find the “1.14-openbeta” option and select it.
• If you wish to opt out and return to the live version of the game, you can scroll back up to the top of the same list and select “Default Public Version”

The Open Beta is only available in English, other languages will be supported when changes make it to the public version of the game.

Changes in 1.14 Open Beta Update 3

Everything in this section will be available to test in the 3rd Open Beta update, which was released shortly before this post went live. To see the changes brought by the previous updates of the Open Beta, check out the following links.

• Update 0
• Update 1
• Update 2

Naval Power Projection Rework

• What is it: Naval power projection now requires much smaller fleets but has a lower involvement cap, the intent is that power projection should be done with small light ship squadrons, not your main battle fleet, and that you cannot gain high level interests from fleets alone.
• What to test/feedback: Whether the balance feels right, whether it feels too easy to project power everywhere now, whether the AI has adapted correctly to the new intent

Naval Combat Rework

• What is it: Major changes to naval combat balance and ship classes so that all-capital ship fleets should no longer just be better. In particular, screening was reworked so that unscreened ships take extra damage relative to their vulnerability. A bug was also fixed that could prevent ships from retreating, so naval combat should be less lethal now.
• What to test/feedback: How naval combat balance feels now, whether all ship classes now occupy a meaningful niche, whether the AI builds properly mixed fleets with sufficient screening for their main battle fleets, whether ship retreating feels balanced.

Early Troopships

• What is it: New Early Troopships are now available from the very beginning and countries with significant naval forces start with some early troopships in their fleets
• What to test/feedback: Whether moving troops around in the early game feels less cumbersome now, whether this trivializes sending troops overseas

AI Naval Improvements

• What is it: Major improvements to AI fleet organization, the AI now maintains larger and better composed battle fleets that should pose more of a threat to players, as well as smaller power projection/raiding fleets for secondary missions
• What to test/feedback: Whether the AI is a more challenging opponent at sea, whether more centralized transportation capacity makes the AI better at naval invasions and overseas troop management

AI Regional Objectives

• What is it: An addition to AI Region Stances, the AI will now also set an objective on regions where it has a stance, further informing how it aims to expand its influence there. A country may wish to make a new subject in a region where it has a “Conquer” stance for example. This will be listed in the stance tooltip.
• What to test/feedback: Is the feature communicated properly? Does the AI feel responsive according to its objective? Does this make the AI behave more rationally overall?
• KNOWN ISSUE: Objectives are not rolled on start up and take a couple days to initialize, fixed in next update.

There were of course also numerous bugfixes and smaller balance changes, in particular for bugs relating to the new war goal flipping and war support systems. Many of those are direct consequences of your provided feedback and reports, thank you!

A major issue still outstanding is AI capitulation, both in terms of being willing to capitulate against unachievable wargoals and being unwilling to capitulate at all. Civil wars in particular will be looked at for the next open beta update.

Infamy is still largely untouched from last week but will receive a proper balancing pass for the last open beta update coming next week, based on the feedback received.

Planned changes in future 1.14 Open Betas

AI Government Spending Improvements

• Make the AI better at balancing its budget and not overspending on certain government building types, make it better at understanding how many armies it actually needs to mobilize for a particular war.

AI Strait Handling

• Improve AI understanding of straits: both in how to use them and how to diplomatically react to player strait closures.

AI Trade & Production

• Give the AI better tools for evaluating trade capabilities in its market and which goods it should encourage importing as opposed to domestically producing. Make AI understand which goods it can overproduce to fill key needs in the world market.

That’s all from us today but we’ll see you tomorrow for our next Dev Diary!