Victoria 3 — Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #182 - The Great Wave & Update 1.13 Now LIVE!

Hoist sails Victorians!

_The Great Wave _and Update 1.13, ‘Matcha’, are now live! With checksum: 3c23.

Command the waves in a time of ambition and upheaval. Design mighty warships, guard the world’s straits, and employ gunboat diplomacy to bend lesser powers to your will.

Use the power of your navy in order to dominate local rivals and keep foreign threats at bay.

Guide Japan through the last days of the Shogunate, navigating turmoil at home and pressure from abroad as you forge a modern power ready to challenge the greatest empires of the day.

You can pick up The Great Wave right now, on (https://store.steampowered.com/app/4314650/Victoria_3_The_Great_Wave__Expansion/), on the Paradox Store or as part of Volume 3.

Enjoy the release trailer below:

And yesterday we released an overview of Update 1.13:

If you can’t get enough videos, we released a couple of videos covering the narrative and mechanics of the expansion to bring you up to speed.

Of course, if videos are not your speed this handy infographic summarizing what is in The Great Wave:

And, before we get into the patchnotes, we have another infographic giving an overview of the update:

Moving on, before you try to load up old saves from previous updates, we want to remind you of two things; non-updated mods most likely will not work & old saves will not work due to map/mechanical changes.

And so, we have the patchnotes below updated with any that we missed!

Patchnotes 1.13

The Great Wave Features

• Ship Designer:

• Added the Ship Designer, which allows you to customize the loadout of your ships. It works with templates which you can create per ship type, saving your setup for your current playthrough. The Ship Designer allows you to modify four main categories, Armor, Armament, Propulsion, and Supply Capacity. Setting values of these modifications to a higher value increases the construction cost of the ship in non-linear fashion. Additionally, most ship types can bring one or more Utility modifications which modify the ship's values in other ways, for example increasing blockade strength with Patrol Boats.

• Flagships:

• Added Flagships. Assign the unique Flagship status to a ship and adjust its figurehead ornament. You'll earn prestige from successful battles that the Flagship participates in, but also lose Prestige from defeats. The fleet that contains the Flagship also generates more Involvement in the region it's active in.

• **Ship purchase treaties: **

• Added a new Ship Transfer Treaty article. This targets a new type of object in treaties, Ships, and allows you to compose treaties with them.

• **Gunboat Diplomacy options: **

• Added gunboat diplomacy to the game. You can now threaten Naval Hostilities when signing a treaty. If the opposing side declines the treaty you can conduct any and all hostile naval activities for 180 days, meaning you can engage in naval battles, blockade, bombard and so on, blurring the lines between peace and war.

• New Naval Missions:

• Port Bombardment

• Added a new fleet action, Port Bombardment. It allows a fleet to fire at a coastal state to cause devastation and even destroy some buildings present in the state.

• Piracy

• Unrecognized nations can send their fleet to seize trade passing through sea nodes and sell it in their market, yielding money and sell orders from the pilfered goods.

Added a treaty article to enforce the abandonment of Piracy.

• Privateering

• Recognized nations also have access to a version of Piracy, that is only available while at war or during Naval Hostilities.

• Hunt Pirates

• Works much akin to Intercept or Protect Supply Lines, but your fleet will only be sent out to crush pirate fleets that are set to the “Piracy” mission.

• Added a Power Bloc Principle group related to the Navy

• Narrative content:

• Added several events for the Shogunal succession crises of the late Tokugawa, as well as the proclamation of new Shoguns

• Added the Tenpō Crisis Journal Entry to the game along with 8 associated events

• Added a Decision and Journal Entry to Japan to represent the Iwakura Mission

• Added a Journal Entry dealing with the Zaibatsu

• Added numerous events related to the Japanese royal family

• Added a new Grant Peerage character interaction, which allows a Monarchy to make characters into nobles at the cost of some Authority

• Added "Ostracize" and "Patronize" character interactions, to increase and decrease character Prominence or Popularity

• Added 5 new events 'Letters for All' 'The Unequal Calendars' 'A Year Recounted' 'The Westernization of Names' 'The Question of Kanbun'

• Added "Shinbutsu bunri" decision and Journal Entry for Japan

• Added "Elevate Buddhism" decision and Journal Entry for Japan

• Added Journal Entry and events related to the colonization of Korea

• Added the Taming the North Journal Entry to the game, dealing with the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido

• Added a Journal Entry showing the tug of war between China and Japan over the Ryukyu Kingdom

• Japan now begins the game with the Locked Country Journal Entry and Sakoku, a law variant of Isolationism

• Added 11 companies and 4 new unique prestige goods to the game

• Added several historical earthquake events for Japan

• Over 90 new historical characters were added with the help of modder Lord R.

• **Art: **

• New clothing assets for Japan, including;

• Added a Meiji court jacket model with new patterns and embroidery trims

• Added a traditional Japanese straw raincoat

• Added a traditional Japanese cone hats that commonly was made of bamboo leaves or straw or reed

• Added a traditional Japanese eboshi hat

• A Japanese building style, which reflects the architectural syncretism of Japan’s evolving urban landscape and enduring character of rural buildings

• A new 'Lacquer' User Interface skin, inspired by traditional Japanese lacquer work

• Added a new _Wakon Yosai _papermap inspired by Meiji era ukiyo-e woodblock prints, Japanese Naval history and mythological elements

• Added a new main menu illustration for The Great Wave, featuring important historical characters from the era

• New Japanese inspired table assets, featuring; a Japanese Imperial Naval Officer’s Dirk, a White Pine Bonsai Tree, Dango Skewers, Lacquered box and a Tatami mat table surface

• Music:

• Added new period appropriate music tracks to evoke Edo/Meiji era Japan, spread over 27 minutes in 8 tracks

Features

• Completely reworked how ships work. They are now individual objects that have to be constructed using Ship Construction provided by Shipyards. They have a variety of new or changed attributes. Ships can be damaged and sunk and they require a crew to man them. Crews are recruited in a new building called Naval Administration which act somewhat like a pool of sailors for your country that your ships can draw from. Ship construction times are therefore also significantly increased compared to the recruitment of 1000 sailors, and changing a ship's type is no longer possible. Ships require a small capacity of Naval Construction to be maintained and if they suffer damage, they need to return to port to repair their damage. Ship construction and repair both consume goods in shipyards, depending on the ship type. Due to these changes, the military goods Man-o-War and Ironclad have both been removed from the game as well.

• Reworked Naval Combat entirely. Ships will have an Initiative value in battle, and they can either attack or try to retreat. Attacks can deal hull or crew damage and depend on attack and armor values. Beware that this will make the technological advancement from wood to steel very impactful. We also reworked the visual representation of ongoing naval battles by adding dioramas that represent the two clashing fleets' compositions.

• Added a deeper Supply system. All formations now have a Logistics Center in their HQ, which they will trace a supply route to. A formation that is overseas consumes Supply Ships, depending on how high the supply consumption and distance to the HQ is. Supply Ships have to be built like military ships by using Ship Construction from Shipyards. You build and store up Supply Ships. To keep track of how many you have available and how many you are using, Supply Ships have taken Convoys' place in the top bar of the interface.

• Removed convoys. Merchant Marine now covers all civilian usage, including port connections, whereas the new Supply Ships cover everything military.

• Reworked how Troop Transportation works. To move troops across the sea, you now require a fleet with enough transportation capacity to move them. Your units will have to embark the fleet before then being dropped off in the target location. Keep in mind that this usually incurs higher Supply costs due to them being farther away.

• Reworked how Naval Missions are conducted. Ships can now be present in multiple nodes at once, at reduced mission efficiency. Naval battles are engaged by comparing detection and visibility of two fleets that are looking for each other. Fleets can now also be intercepted when they are travelling through a sea zone if the opposing side manages to spot it.

• Added Naval Fortifications buildings to the game. They provide a minimum strength that the attacker needs to beat before they can attempt a naval invasion. Additionally for any naval invasion that does happen, they provide a defense bonus depending on their level, scaled by the ratio of attacking and defending forces. We’ve added numerous Naval Fortifications around the world, representing strong historical forts in 1836.

• Added Straits to the game. You can control tolls and access through a strait by building one of the new Naval Fortification buildings. There are also new treaty articles to get exempt and to forbid a country to close their strait to anybody.

• Completely overhauled the ship type setup in the game. There's now 20 different ship types available in total, all based on historical models from major players during the time. These come with different visualizations when the ships take damage too.

• Adjusted a number of naval related technologies and what they unlock to make sense with our new Navy setup

• Added Marines, a special type of land unit. All-marine formations can be permanently attached to fleets and are more efficient at conducting naval invasions than regular troops.

• Completely reworked the existing naval sea zone map and sea route network

• Added a new Naval Doctrine Law group that provides bonuses to construction of different ship types etc.

• Merged civilian and military shipyards back into one building type. Shipyards now provide Ship Construction used to build military and Supply Ships. They also continue producing the civilian goods, Clippers and Steamers.

• Military Formations now only have a single commander instead of up to four. Commanders can be freely unassigned and reassigned between formations, but will take some time to travel to their new formation. While travelling, the commander's skill traits will not give any benefit to the formation and they will be unable to advance on the front but they still provide command limit. Commanders are now able to participate in multiple battles, but are limited in the number of states they can attack simultaneously by distance and rank. Orders now apply to a whole formation, including special orders available due to traits.

• Commander ranks are now more impactful and the command limit from rank increases with tech. There is now a penalty for 'unnecessary' promotions when you already have ample command limit and any issues with formations being under command limit could be solved via swapping, in the form of reduced IG approval for the Armed Forces and any non-Armed Forces IGs that have commanders and who did not benefit from the promotion.

• Reworked the Diplomatic Interest system. Instead of a binary on/off system, interests now work in a tiered fashion. Build up Involvement in a strategic region by patrolling its coasts, setting up treaties or getting a foothold. Higher tiers of Involvement unlock actions like starting diplomatic plays rather than just joining them and so on.

• Consolidated strategic regions around the world as part of the new strategic region interest update

• Added the Orchestrate Coup Diplomatic Action, a Diplomatic Action that allows for orchestrating a coup in weaker countries through a friendly Lobby

• Characters now have Prominence as an additional stat, representing their level of pull within the country's political machine (as distinct from Popularity, which represents their pull with the general public). Prominence is gained by a variety of factors such as being in command of troops or leading a prosperous company and determines the amount of Political Strength a character contributes to their Interest Group, as well as their chance of being appointed its next leader (replacing Popularity as the main factor in the latter)

• Characters will no longer automatically be purged if they do not have an active assignment, but will exist in the national character pool (also known as the National Cast). The National Cast can be viewed in the Characters panel or in the Population panel where you can get a filtered view of all characters in your country.

• The National Cast of each country will be periodically populated with politicians from non-marginalized Interest Groups, with ideologies suitable for that Interest Group. The amount of politicians that will be generated depends on how influential the Interest Group is.

• Added a new character role 'Magnate'. Magnates have a Holding building (either the Manor Houses or Financial Districts in their home state) and gain Prominence based on the revenue of that building, strengthening their IG and increasing their chances of being selected as Interest Group Leader. Rulers under hereditary systems are Magnates by default.

• Added 4 new free companies to the game

Improvements

• Added the ability to drag and drop buildings and ships in the construction queue

• Primary cultures and state religions are now always valid targets for assimilation/conversion in incorporated states and states affected by the Promote National Values decree

• Children no longer have an ideology, interest group or personality traits by default. Unless explicitly added via effects after creation, any traits/ideology/IG assigned to them are instead saved and applied when they become an adult.

• Character roles now have a default span for how long characters stay in them, which is modified by their health (unhealthy characters retire earlier) and can be further manipulated using script effects. It's tracked per-role, so a multi-role character can retire in one of their roles and continue to serve in another. The intent is that now that in the vast majority of cases only rulers & heirs should be able to die of natural causes in their office.

• Removed the strategic land adjacency requirement on military access treaties

• Characters now have a loyalty value based on the approval of their interest group and how much their personal ideology approves of current and enacted laws

• By default, randomly generated characters can now come from any culture within your country that has at least tier 4 acceptance, weighted by the political power each culture holds. They will receive an appropriate religion for their culture based on the demographics of that culture in your country.

• The chance that a leader ideology will be selected for an interest group is now increased if that ideology is represented by prominent characters in the country belonging to the interest group

• Interest group leader ideology selection is now a single weighted pool of relevant ideologies, which will either select an appropriate character from the character pool as the next leader, or generate a new character if there is no character representing that ideology

• Historical politicians with character templates will now appear as politicians in the character pool as soon as they are valid for usage and make themselves available as a potential future leader of the IG, instead of waiting until they actually become the IG leader

• Characters now have home state regions, which are either set explicitly on the template/create_character effect or selected through random weighting

• All international Journal Entries are now inherited when a revolution succeeds and transferred to the revolutionary country

• When a formation enters a state of 'low command limit' (for instance due to its commander dying), there is now a 30-day grace period before max organization is impacted so that you have time to assign a new commander

• When a commander embarks on an expedition they are now unassigned from their military formation

• Made it possible to cancel current tech research without clearing the research queue

• Added a 'make this work' button to the treaty draft panel that attempts to append articles and/or obligations to form the treaty into one the AI is guaranteed to accept

• Paved roads now increase army movement speed

• Company-type countries can now have subjects

• The Hudson Bay Company, East India Company, and Russian-American Company are now Company-type countries

• The Confederate Canada/Federate Australia Journal Entries are now available to any country with multiple Canadian/Australian subjects

• Made Authoritarian one of the default ideologies available to the Armed Forces

• Corrected Francisco Escobar 's birth date, and changed him to the Social Democrat ideology

• Revolution events are now limited to appearing once per month

• Made improvements to the functioning of legacy script related to characters

• Using the Abdicate