Countries are complex beasts in Victoria 3 and the people under your rule will spare no thought before making their voices heard when it comes to the direction in which you’re taking them. One of the elements you’ll often deal with is Interest Groups, which happen to also be the topic of today’s dev diary 6.
“Fundamentally, an Interest Group is a collection of pops that espouse certain political views and want to change the country to be more in line with those views. Interest Groups are drawn from a number of different templates, but will vary in their exact views from country to country, based on factors such as the local religion, which social movements have appeared in the country or the personal views of their leader,” the developer explains.
The individuals that make up Victoria 3’s different Pops are either members of an Interest Group or politically inactive. Factors like their profession, the amount of wealth they’ve amassed, or their level of literacy all have a say when determining the number of individuals in both categories.
The higher an individual’s wealth and status, the more Political Power they contribute to their Interest Group of choice.
“It’s important to note though that Pops are not unified in which Interest Groups they support - individuals within Pops are the ones who decide their Interest Group, and a single Pop can potentially have individuals supporting every Interest Group in the game (in different numbers),” the developer explains.
Your country’s laws can also render certain Pops without any political strength whatsoever, which will see them turning to other methods to sway things in their preferred direction.
The views of Victoria 3’s Interest Groups are determined by their ideologies, defining which laws they’d rather see you enact and which laws they’d rather not have to deal with.
Landowners, largely comprised of members of the Aristocracy, will have a tendency towards conservatism, but ideologies “are not entirely set in stone.” Not only can they change during a game but the Interest Group’s active leader also influences them, based on their own beliefs.
Clout is based on the political strength of the Pops that make up an Interest Group and “is calculated by comparing their Political Strength to that of the other Interest Groups in the country - if all the Interest Groups in Belgium put together have 100k Political Strength and the Landowners have 30k, they correspondingly get 30% of the Clout in Belgium.”
Depending on their Clout level, Victoria 3’s Interest Group can be classified as either Powerful, Influential or Marginalized.
“Interest Groups also have a level of Approval, which is based on factors such as how much they approve of the country’s laws, whether they are in government or in opposition, and how many of their individual members are Loyalists or Radicals,” Victoria 3’s dev diary 6 explains.
“There are numerous other factors that can affect Approval as well, such as how you react to certain events or decisions that you take.”
Clout and Approval both determine an Interest Group’s active traits as well as their effectiveness.
“There are different traits, positive and negative, with positive traits being activated when an Interest Group is happy and negative ones when they are… not so happy. If an Interest Group is Powerful, the effects of any traits they have active (good or bad) are stronger, while an Interest Group that is Marginalized cannot activate traits at all, as they are too weak to exert an effect on the whole country.”
Victoria 3’s dev diary 6 concludes with the developer admitting that the absence of political parties has been often brought up by the community while offering a sliver of hope for those players who really want to see them in the game.
“What I can tell you for now is that we are currently looking into a solution where parties can form in certain countries as constellations of Interest Groups holding a shared political platform. This is something that’s by no means fully nailed down at this point though, so don’t take this as a 100% firm commitment to how they would function. What I can tell you for sure is that we will come back to this particular topic later!”
Victoria 3 is slated to launch on PC but does not currently have a release date. Previous dev diaries have delved into production methods, categories of goods, and buildings.
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