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Victoria 3 patch 1.1 will fix one of its most annoying issues

The latest dev diary explains how Victoria 3 patch 1.1 will update three key problem areas before the end of the year, including the way it handles pop info

Victoria 3 patch 1.1 - A man in a brown three-piece suit attempts to calm down a crowd of gallery patrons who appear to be angry about a depiction of the horrors of war showing two skeletal soldiers in a trench

Grand strategy game Victoria 3 has been out for a couple of weeks now, and while running a nation through the turbulent 19th century is a lot of fun, players have run into some rough edges and bugs. Game director Martin Anward has published a new dev diary that goes through some changes coming with update 1.1, which he says the team aims to have out before the end of the year, and it addresses one of my chief annoyances with the game.

As I noted in our Victoria 3 review, the pops who power everything that happens in Victoria 3 are interesting entities that each have their own sets of traits and needs. They have a job they go to, an income, religious and ethnic backgrounds, and expectations of their government. Fail to meet their needs or provide them with good-paying jobs, and they’ll radicalise, making it harder for you to get things done and potentially even starting a revolution against you.

The trouble is, it can be difficult or impossible to determine what these needs are for individual pops. Fortunately, Anward says Paradox is adding new tabs to the pop information screen that provide breakdowns of each pop’s economic situation and goods consumption. You’ll be able to click on a pop, then look at the exact prices they’re paying for the goods they need – brilliant.

Anward also explains that work is going into making government legitimacy matter more than it does at present. Patch 1.1 introduces a five-tier system for legitimacy, with each tier adding bonuses or maluses to the rate at which loyalists and radicals are generated in your country.

Paradox is also adjusting the way Church and State laws and Citizenship laws impact your population. The way it currently stands in Victoria, it’s a relatively simple and abstract trade-off between tolerance and authority. With update 1.1, you’ll see that more restrictive laws result in increased loyalist gain and reduced radical gain within the segment of the population that’s ‘accepted’ within your society.

Anward says he’ll have more to share about update 1.1 next week, and that another hotfix, version 1.0.6, should be due out sometime next week, too. Check out our guide to Victoria 3 buildings if you’re just getting started with this meaty game.