[1.13] Victoria Overhaul Mod v0.8.9
My humble attempt at making the game more enjoyable.
Unlikely to be compatible with most mods
So – what is Victoria Overhaul Mod? And what does it aim to be? At the end of the day this is ultimately my mod for how I personally want Victoria 3 to play and feel like, Victoria 3 – Coda’s cut. Some people aren’t going to like that or what I have to offer. That’s fine! My mod won’t be for everyone, and I acknowledge that. That said, the feedback of others is far from disregarded and I continue to welcome it.
That out of the way, I’d say the mod’s scope is the entire game but there are 3 core pillars I’ve been operating around. These are:
– The Historical/Gameplay interface
– The Economy
– Performance
Victoria 3 treads an interesting line between historical simulator and well, video game. It is my earnest opinion that swinging too hard in either direction results in a less engaging and fun game. One direction you wind up with an experience that feels very gamey, like aspects of Vanilla are and most other PDX games tend to steer towards as their lifecycles progress. Any historicity and strategy is thrown out the window for "if I conquer this state I can establish this company and hit +200% throughput on my tool factories" and it feels like you’re playing a tycoon game that just so happens to be set in the Victorian Era.
At the other end of the hall you just wind up playing a mediocre visual novel – if anyone ever played the UK in HFM or GFM for Victoria 2 they’ll know exactly what I mean. "Oh you’re trying to actually play the video game? Sorry, here’s 15 scripted events about Aden you have no warning about, no way to avert except through a massive prestige hit, and you have no autonomy in actually influencing." Frustrating in Singleplayer outside of perhaps the 1st playthrough, borderline unplayable in Multiplayer.
So then, my solution has been to consistently try and keep the two balanced. This is not and will never be perfect, I’m only human after all. But I do try.
For example, I have broken up Japan into a half dozen nations. Not 1:1 historical, but my point in doing so is that I don’t believe microstating Japan will contribute positively to gameplay. Playing as the Shogunate would be suicidally micro-intensive with 60 subjects, and playing as either the Imperial Court or a daimyo would be almost unbearable as you’d only have a pittance of pops and resources at your disposal. So, I believe the set-up I’ve opted for will provide a better gameplay experience while still allowing for historical situations to be better represented. Both the Shogunate and the Imperial Court are playable contenders, and in the case someone wants to be a bit unorthodox and try unifying Japan as one of the Daimyos, each of them are large enough for it to be feasible, if difficult.
The amount of changes I’ve made to this end of balancing things is too long to list here, but it is an eternally ongoing process, and a cornerstone of the VOM philosophy.
Of note is that for all the changes I’ve made, I have tried to keep the mod as approachable to Vanilla players as possible. New laws, market goods, etc. have only been put in where I thought absolutely necessary because the limits of tweaking their Vanilla counterparts have been hit.
The Economy is the cornerstone of Victoria 3. It is my wholehearted opinion that whatever changes are made elsewhere, they will always fall a bit flat until the economy is properly addressed. All the blabbering I’ve done for Japan will not matter much if you still run into the same Vanilla hiccups like depeasanting by the 1880s. It’ll be slightly interesting, then that same feeling of "oh, guess I go conquering again."
To that end, the economy has been the most intense subject of my work on this mod, and will continue to be throughout its lifespan. VOM was initially started as a small project to meet the simple goal of "what if the Green PMs didn’t blow ass," following a crashout after running out of pops early twice in a row on the Historical Multiplayer Series server (shoutout btw to the wonderful HMPS team). After much experimenting and thinking over it, I came to the conclusion that a much more comprehensive rework was needed than fiddling with the numbers of an odd PM here or there.
So, the economy has been rebuilt from scratch. Every single production method is original if not in name then at least in balancing, and coded entirely by me, if you exclude a handful of Trade Center PMs. So, no longer will your furniture manufacturies cap out at the beginning of Tier III, or your mines functionally at Tier II if you exclude an end-game PM most campaigns never see. New PMs, new buildings, and on occasion a new good will continue to pop up and make themselves more and more relevant as the game goes on. The later game will truly become a chemical and electricity-fueled monster which Vanilla only scratches.
In addition, the systemic issue of pops being a hard-cap on every single country’s economic growth has largely been addressed. The base workforce ratio now starts at 40% to represent significant female employment, even in "formal" industries at game start, with an additional 5 or 10% depending on child labor laws. Buildings for the most part operate around a baseline employment level of 2,000. Automation PMs produce goods and mainline PMs still see reductions in workforce. So the mid-game becomes much more centered around issues of unemployment than overemployment, and your late-game economy a testament to how well you’ve done over the past century. It is not impossible to run out of peasants and unemployed pops, but it is my goal that even small nations like Belgium or Sweden can push the 1900 mark without reaching full employment – even without any immigration (!)
New goods, new buildings, new PMs, new countries, new events. Sounds nice but this mod must run like steaming garbage, no? No, actually, if you’ll believe it. Admittedly, the first few years do run a touch slower than Vanilla, but because every country doesn’t become a labor blackhole throughout the game pop fragmentation has been massively lessened, and I have made a conscious effort to try and optimize and clean up every performance hitter that I can, while still preserving gameplay. It’s my ideal to keep the game at least at a Vanilla-level performance wise, and in practice I’ve found it to consistently exceed those expectations.
I am a modest supporter of people using Generative AI to assist them in their creative endeavors, especially if properly disclosed. On my end, however, no AI has been used in any capacity during the development of this project, even for research, and no plans exist for that to change. If a PM icon looks off or a bit of text reads somewhat awkward I’m afraid that’s just a result of me being bad at GIMP and not the world’s best creative writer. Apologies!
Two final asides. One, thank you for reading this far. Two, this mod stands on the shoulders of giants. While most of the code in the mod is wholly original, the ideas and code that I have integrated or plan on doing so have been of immeasurable assistance. I cannot understate that this mod would not exist in any capacity if it weren’t for the efforts of other modders. I owe them, and my guinea pigs, an unpayable debt of gratitude, and have attempted to capture as many names as I can, and will continue to do so as I properly integrate or glean ideas from more.
Credits – https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GlFk8jEoSzRHde0W2PoPdU8gzYPLDVo9pF4RlK4h5zs
This is still quite deep in Beta, so expect quirks. But if you have feedback, let me know! Hoping for a full release uh sometime
