

Generals are recruited from Strategic Regions, and gain command of as many locally available troops in that region that their Command Limit allows. Every country will start the game with one or a few Generals - many of them straight out of the history books - and can recruit more as needed. Generals are characters who command Servicemen and Officers into battle on Fronts. Much like with the economic interface of Buildings or the political interface of Interest Groups, from this Front view you can drill down through your Generals all the way to the individual Pops that actually do the fighting if you want to. Using the Front system we can account for every individual Serviceman and Officer in meticulous detail while giving the player a high-level strategic interface to monitor and manipulate.

For warfare, the scale ranges from a small border skirmish between minor nations in single-player to a massive multiplayer world war involving every Great Power. Our aim is to make the game playable and well-paced, without requiring frequent pausing, on every scale while retaining the detail and integrity of the Pop simulation. The design philosophy here is the same as with the economic Pop model. The number of active Fronts, however, is likely to be much more manageable. In a large end-game conflict you might have hundreds of thousands - possibly even millions - of soldiers in active service, which is a lot to keep track of. Are your soldiers there demoralized and dying in droves from attrition? Double-plus ungood. Have you advanced it far into enemy territory? Great. Do you have more troops on the Front than your enemy does? That’s pretty good. The health and status of your Fronts is a primary indicator of how well the war is going for you. As such it is not to be taken as representative of what you will see in the final product. Everything you are seeing today is only to give you a better idea of the mechanics, but is in heavy revision as we speak and will look different on release. As mentioned at the top, these visuals - and all other images in this diary - are far from complete! We have many parameters left to expose, more UI layout to do, and more visual effects to add before release. Let’s take a look at a screenshot from the current build of the game: Therefore a Front always has one country on either side, but it is possible for Generals from several countries to be assigned to the same Front. All combat takes place on these Fronts, where a victorious outcome consists of moving the Front into your enemy’s territory while preventing incursions into your own.įronts are created automatically as soon as two countries begin to oppose each other in a Diplomatic Play, and consist of all provinces along the border of control between those two countries. In Victoria 3, rather than manually moving armies around the map, you assign troops (via Generals, as we will see later) to the border provinces where two combatants clash.
#DEV DIARY VICTORIA 3 UPDATE#
Once we are closer to release we’ll make sure to update you on any revisions, and release more finalized in-game screenshots!įirst I want to present the concept of Fronts. Furthermore, being a drastic divergence from how warfare works in all other Paradox games, these systems have required a lot of time in the oven to feel as fully baked as the others. War is a very important supporting system to all those three which tie them together, but we needed to make sure those three aspects were mature enough before we put the final touches on the military system. The reason for this is simply because, as we have stressed previously in these dev diaries, Victoria 3 is a game about economics, politics, and diplomacy first and foremost. In some cases images will be artistic mockups and visual targets, and in other cases very rough in-game screenshots that will be revised before release. While development diary screenshots should never be taken as fully representative of the final product, this is especially true in this case. But let’s take a moment first to recall the pillars of warfare in Victoria 3 from last week’s diary, which should be considered prerequisite reading to this one.īefore we get started I want to point out that a few of the mechanics I will be mentioning below are currently still under implementation in the current build.

Hello and welcome! Today we will dig into the core mechanics of land warfare, including Fronts, Generals, Battalions, Mobilization, and more.
