# Victoria 3 Victoria 3 – Dev Diary #172 – Seasons greetings & Hotfix 1.12.2

- Product: Victoria 3 (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/victoria-3)
- Vendor: Paradox Development Studio
- Date: 2025-12-18
- Original notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/529340/view/497215345380033140
- Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/victoria-3/releases/2025-12-18-victoria-3-dev-diary-172-seasons-greetings-hotfix

What's New is an index, not a publisher: every entry below links to the vendor's own release notes, which are the authoritative source. Entries are labelled where they are hand-curated sample data, pre-releases, or drawn from a secondary source such as a developer blog.

Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'.

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- **changed** — Increased the culling of agitators in the exile pool to prevent accumulation of over 300 agitators in mid-game, scaling off character popularity and targeting non-historical agitators first
- **changed** — Elections now display the actual number of voters and voter turnout in addition to political strength shares from votes
- **fixed** — Removed the Filipino Mestizo Standard of Living requirement from the Advancements in the Archipelago Journal Entry
- **fixed** — Allow Regulars to move home and temporary AI formations to merge if they are not involved in a significant war to prevent armies from getting stuck in far away possessions
- **changed** — Changed how the AI tags armies to ensure at least one army is tagged as garrison in a HQ to prevent late game global empires from eroding all garrison armies
- **added** — Added a simplistic version of army movement for peace time to move armies back home
- **changed** — The Carlists will now fully focus their attacks on capturing Madrid upon the start of the Royal Expedition
- **fixed** — Fixed an issue that made the construction AI sometimes unable to correctly detect goods shortages
- **changed** — The AI will no longer incorporate states when they already have a bureaucracy deficit
- **added** — Added a small debug tooltip for armies which is available in debug mode
- **changed** — Reduced the base Sugar output from Sugar Plantations from 50 to 25
- **changed** — Reduced the Sugar output from the Automatic Irrigation production method from 80 to 50
- **changed** — Reduced the Sugar output from the Vacuum Pans production method from 20 to 5 and the Coal input from 3 to 1
- **changed** — Reduced the Sugar output from the Steam-Powered Mills production method from 40 to 15 and the Coal input from 5 to 2
- **changed** — Reduced the Sugar output from the Centrifugal Machines production method from 70 to 30, the Engines input from 2 to 1 and the Coal input from 10 to 4
- **changed** — Reduced the Sugar output from the Violent Treatment production method from 50 to 40

Seasons greetings Victorians! (And Happy Thursday for those that celebrate)

As we head into the winter period, with ice and snow sprinkling across the Swedish shores, we’ll take a moment after the release of _Iberian Twilight_ to do a small look through the response to the immersion pack, a look through what we’ve dubbed ‘the autumn and winter of side quests’, hotfix 1.12.2 itself and plans for post release support for 1.12!

Following on from our short contents list, let us begin with a sunny contrast to this cold weather, and take a stroll through _Iberian Twilight_!

As I write this, and looking through the many comments about the negotiations, flavor and other areas added both in Update 1.12 and_ Iberian Twilight_, we can safely say thank you for the extremely positive reception you have given this last update and Immersion Pack of 2025.

The feedback we received from betas early on in the process of crafting this content, has truly helped make this update and immersion pack the best it could be. So thank you specially to them.

##### **The Autumn and Winter of Side Quests**

In our “What's next after X?” Dev Diaries we usually outline what our main quests are that we want to handle through free updates, which we normally release after a larger update. Most recently we published an overview in (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/victoria-3-dev-diary-152-whats-next-after-1-9.1825850/) after Update 1.9 alongside _Charters of Commerce_.

After tackling trade and markets in that update, which was a huge undertaking, we decided to not do as big changes in the next updates for the year - as we said to the community - and focus instead on polish, bug fixing and background prep for future updates. Just like when you’re playing an RPG, you’ve just finished a chunk of the main quest, and you head back to your home base and restock, recuperate and plan for what's next. Maybe do a little crafting and cooking, organize your loot.

But then you see that (!) over someone’s head, you think to yourself ‘just one little side quest’ and… yeah, you know how that goes. For us this was first Culture/Discrimination in _National Awakening_ and now Negotiations/Amendments in _Iberian Twilight_, both of which weren't part of our main quests so to speak. We also picked up some other minor side quests along the way, such as the changes to elections. Oh, and all the modding upgrades and global journal entries, and…

Well. This wasn’t something we had planned to do, but is a result of the passion, creative spark and drive from individual team members, combined with some smart planning on our end that allowed us to get these things done within our normal production schedule. All in all, we’re quite happy with the result and judging from how well these features were received, you seem to be too!

This rambling and metaphorical way of explaining things is really a way to explain why we haven't approached other areas in the “What's next” diary content and why we aren't updating it this time - we simply would not be able to check anything off, and our goals remain the same as they were in (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/victoria-3-dev-diary-152-whats-next-after-1-9.1825850/). The next major update (1.13), will be different though, and will mark a definitive return to the main quest.

So what is next, then? Well, as you might have surmised from the abundance of loud foghorns over the last few months, next year will see some major updates to the naval side of the game. There will be a Dev Diary outlining the contents of Volume 3, coming in Q1 where we will tell you more.

And so, on to the hotfix proper, releasing at the same time as this Dev Diary!

##### **Hotfix 1.12.2 **

Checksum `5b56`

##### **Improvements**

- Increased the culling of agitators in the exile pool as it was easily possible to have +300 agitators at any given time sitting around in a café in Switzerland by the mid-game. This scales off character p

_[Truncated at 4000 characters — full notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/529340/view/497215345380033140]_