If you’ve been absorbed by Victoria 3’s take on grand strategy or are waiting for the game to be improved further before jumping into it, you’ll be happy to learn that the Victoria 3 Patch 1.7 Kahwah will be arriving today at 5pm BST.
After some delays, the Victoria 3: Sphere of Influence DLC and the 1.7 patch will launch together today on June 24, 2024. This was confirmed back on April 15 via Paradox’s official channels and the Steam forums. The initial plan was to launch the game’s first huge expansion and its accompanying update on May 6.
When is Victoria 3 Patch 1.7 Releasing?
The April blog post gave the following explanation for the delay: “While we are happy with the features on offer in 1.7/Sphere of Influence, we simply do not believe that sticking to the original release date will allow us to deliver those features in a polished and balanced state, and we frankly do not want your enjoyment of them to be marred by excessive bugginess, crashes or general lack of polish. We believe that a delay will allow us to release the update and expansion in a state that both we as the developers and you as the players will be much more happy with.”
Given the mixed reviews Victoria 3 has garnered since it launched in 2022, getting the post-launch content and reworks as right as possible is in Paradox’s best interest.
The Victoria 3 roadmap for 2024 goes beyond the 1.7 updates and the Sphere of Influence expansion. Still, all eyes are on those additions to the game, as they’re extremely crucial to it fully taking off or remaining a bit of disappointment for Paradox’s most diehard followers.
Here are the full patch notes for version 1.7.
Power Blocs:
- As a Great Power or a powerful Major Power, you can form your own Power Bloc centered around one of five central Identity pillars: Trade League, Sovereign Empire, Military Treaty, Ideological Union, or Religious Convocation.
- Each of these provide different opportunities and benefits to its leader with respect to its member countries, and can be developed further with up to 4 of 20 different Principle groups, resulting in over twenty thousand different combinations affecting your strategy for global domination!
- As a Power Bloc leader you can expand your global reach by extending your Leverage over other countries where you have declared an Interest. A large number of factors that can cause you to gain (or lose) Leverage over a country, such as maintaining Diplomatic Pacts, maintaining favorable Lobbies, helping them in their wars, being accepting or discriminatory against their cultures, or making them economically dependent on you through foreign expansion or trade.
- Power Blocs can be expanded peacefully through diplomatic invitation into your Bloc or, if the invite fizzles, through a Diplomatic Demand the country may or may not yield to without an armed conflict.
- The leader of a Power Bloc must maintain its Cohesion by enforcing its shared values across the bloc. Failure to properly manage Cohesion across your bloc may result in internal strife.
- All members of Power Blocs may construct expensive statues to represent its glory, providing a number of benefits to the state it’s built in. The leader of a Power Bloc can customize both the appearance of the statue, the Power Bloc emblem, and its name to better represent its ideas and visions for its bright global future.
- Available with Update 1.7: the Trade League Identity and its two Primary Principle groups, Internal and External Trade, are available even without Sphere of Influence and replaces the Customs Union diplomatic pact by enforcing a shared market across the Power Bloc.
- Available with Update 1.7: it is also possible to play as Great Britain, Russia, or the Ottoman Empire who starts with the Sovereign Empire Identity, permitting them to subjugate weaker Power Bloc members, or as Austria whose Power Bloc Identity of Ideological Union permits them to Enforce Regime Change in countries that start flirting with the concept of Republicanism and suffrage. Players without Sphere of Influence may also play a member of the Zollverein, an established Trade League at game start.
Foreign Investment:
- With the Foreign Investment Rights or Mutual Foreign Investment Pacts, countries can gain the ability to directly build up another country’s resource or manufacturing industries, or offer these rights to another country if they’re incapable of rapid industrialization on their own. This right extends to both countries and its investor class, who may use their Investment Pool to construct private industry abroad and gain access to new resources, cheap(er) labor, or both.
- With the Foreign Investment Power Bloc Principles, these rights can also be extended across an entire Power Bloc by default without the need to establish and maintain potentially fragile pacts. With Power Bloc Leverage being informed in part by economic dependence, this can become a great way to maintain control over your Power Bloc members during the extent of the long Victorian century.
- Available with Update 1.7: Ownership is represented by two new buildings, Manor Houses (housing the Aristocracy) and Financial Sectors (housing Capitalists), who can own buildings outside their own states or even their country. These buildings extract the profits produced by building levels they own, leading to much greater variance between productive states and wealthy states.
- Available with Update 1.7: In addition to private ownership through Manor Houses and Financial Sectors, Cooperative Ownership is also possible through the right economic system laws. Cooperative Ownership gives pops working their buildings the fruit of their own labor.
- Available with Update 1.7: State-owned enterprises are also possible, which yield dividends directly to state coffers (or drain them, if unprofitable). Under most economic systems, buildings constructed by the state are put up for sale when completed, making them available for acquisition by private interests (or even other countries, if Foreign Investment Rights are in play). Under others, it’s possible for the state to nationalize industries, with or without compensation to its owners - with sometimes grave repercussions, domestic or international.
- Available with Update 1.7: Overlords are always able to construct industries in their Subjects, even without Pacts or Power Blocs enabling it.
- With the Sphere of Influence expansion, it is also possible to nationalize all your country’s foreign-owned industries with a Diplomatic Demand - but be prepared to defend your economic self-determination!
Lobbies, Catalysts, and Opportunities
- A Lobby consists of one or more Interest Groups in a country that have a stance on another country in the world. This stance can either be positive, where they wish to form closer relations or imitate its laws and reforms, or negative where the emphasis lies on distancing yourself, forming rivalries, or even crushing them in armed conflict.
- Lobbies have a chance to form in response to a Diplomatic Catalyst, which can trigger for a variety of reasons such as establishing or breaking a Pact, choosing a particular event option, having a revolution, joining or being kicked out of a Power Bloc, inviting or exiling an Agitator, and so on. Whenever something happens as a result of a Catalyst, such as a lobby forming or an AI strategy changing, you will be told exactly the reason why it happened.
- Lobbies will benefit or hinder you in a number of ways, such as increasing a country’s AI Acceptance for Diplomatic Pacts due to your close ties, or increasing your War Support when fighting a hated foe. The impact your Lobby has relates directly to its Interest Group membership’s Clout, so you have a vested interest in supporting those groups that align with your own foreign policy and opposing those who support your geopolitical enemies.
- Adhering to your Lobbies’ wishes will increase their Appeasement, which is another source of Interest Group Approval and leads to political stability at home. Opposing them will of course do the opposite, so think carefully if you can afford to break that pact they like!
- With the Sphere of Influence expansion, Lobbies will occasionally grant opportunities or make demands. These are Journal Entries that incentivize you to go after specific foreign policy goals, or which you ignore at your peril!
- Also with the Sphere of Influence expansion, you have access to a new Diplomatic Action that lets you fund lobbies in other countries by bribing providing much-deserved financial support to the country’s elite, increasing the chance that lobbies favoring you (or lobbies that oppose your enemies) will emerge there. If a suitable lobby already exists, the financial support you provide will increase its power and improve the Leverage you gain there.
- Subjugated countries can also be home to two other types of Lobbies - those for or against the country’s Overlord, supporting integration or independence respectively. Nurturing or suppressing these Lobbies can provide the necessary political impact you need to nudge Liberty Desire in the direction you want and inform one of four new AI Strategies for subject countries.
You can read the full Patch Notes Part 1 and Part 2. The patch is so huge with a massive amount of changes, so Paradox needed two blog updates to fit it all in.
As far as we know, 1.7 could be one of the biggest updates Victoria 3 has received yet; it includes much-requested features such as map changes, new modding options that will help people reshape the game even further, and countless other changes.
Keep updated on the latest Gaming News by following GameWatcher on Twitter, check out our videos on YouTube, or by giving us a follow on Google News.
