Paradox diffuse une bande-annonce pour Victoria 2 – An empire under the sun. On verra dans ce court trailer essentiellement quelques jolies illustrations et un très rapide survol de la carte. Cette vidéo est suivie par une interview de Johann Andersson, entretien réalisé durant la récente convention Paradox et dans lequel le producteur du jeu vient ici présenter les grandes lignes de cette suite de Victoria.
Par ailleurs, voici un nouveau chapitre du carnet de développement. Cette neuvième partie (disponible ici dans le forum officiel) est consacrée à la diplomatie et introduit la notion de « war goals », soit un ou plusieurs objectifs fixés lors de la déclaration d’une guerre, et durant son déroulement, objectifs qui permettront de mieux négocier avec l’IA les conditions de la paix une fois que vous voudrez cesser les hostilités. Au passage, on apprend aussi que les grandes puissances disposeront de capacités diplomatiques spéciales et que les guerres coloniales seront remplacées par un nouveau système, ce qui sera expliqué plus amplement dans de prochains chapitre.
L’image ci-jointe est un screenshot bonus publié il y a quelques semaines. Vous le trouverez en plus haute résolution de ce coté du forums officiel.
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Dev diary #9
Well the Paradox Convention is over so it is back to a more regular working schedule and where would be without a weekly developer diary? So this week let’s touch on diplomacy.
When thinking a bit about diplomacy it is probably the game system that has changed the least from the days of EU1. Part of the reason is that it is a very solid and adaptable diplomatic system. So for inter-country relations at a base level you are going to see a system that bares a remarkable resemblance to what you have seen before.
For those of you who are not to familiar with the system it works something like this. Between each country is a relation value of –200 to +200 which represents how much they like each other. Diplomatic and in game actions shift this relationship around and then this will feed into AI calculations of what it will do. To put it in a nut shell diplomacy is from one country to another.
Which to a certain extend does capture part of what diplomacy is, however we felt we could do more with diplomacy so we added two additional features, one I will talk about in a bit more detail and one I will talk a little about because it will be important for a later developer diary.
First up is War and Peace, not the epic book by Tolstoy (which I am yet to finish) but instead how we make peace after war. The two problems we have is the AI offering you peace deals you don’t want and secondly trying to figure out what the AI wants. Peace negotiation is less fun than it could be. Enter Heir to the Throne and the war goal system. Now this is interesting, when you declare war you announce your goal, I can see some potential with this system.
So we start with the war goals system but we are going to make some changes. Firstly your war goal is your peace option, if you go to war to protect Turkey then this what you can ask for at the peace table, no more than this. Secondly though you can add more war goals as the war progresses, although this does affect your POPs. Thirdly failure to achieve a war goal will increase POP militancy so just adding more goals to increase peace options is not a no brainer. Thus when it comes to the peace resolutions you will know what your opponent wants and your opponent will know what you want. Then it is up to you to decide if you are going to give in or pursue victory.
However this also creates two kinds of wars, those wars were countries pursue very limited goals because they do not wish to upset the home front and total wars were they county gambles all and knows that failure to win could lead to revolution. Which we feel captures warfare in the period very well. While I go on about warfare I would just like to add that colonial wars are out. They never worked well anyway to be honest and did not fit the period. We have a new system to simulate colonial skirmishes that I will talk about in a later developer diary.
The next part I will touch briefly on, because it forms part of another subject for a later developer diary. We are going to talk later on about why you want to be a Great Power and why you should be willing to fight to remain one. One of the reasons is that Great Powers get special diplomatic options not available to other countries. Now I am not going to go into to much depth here, but they do depart a little from our current system and that I do want to mention. Great Powers do not just influence how a country sees them; they have the added ability to use their influence on other countries to change their perception of other Great Powers. The struggle for influence that the Great Power wage around the world is not a simple bilateral basis but also with each other inside countries, giving an added dimension to diplomacy which was not present before.
So that’s the basics of diplomacy, we are back on a regular schedule so there will be another next week.