The Victoria 3 1.2 update open beta is now live, and even after following the grand strategy game’s ongoing series of dev diaries, it already looks like a surprisingly transformative patch. The latest update covers the changes the development team is making to the user experience, including all menus, tooltips, and other interface features that keep you up to date with what’s happening in the complex world. of the 19th century. .
Patch 1.2 targets several of the specific issues I pointed out in our Victoria 3 review, such as clarity of population needs, radicalization, and trade route usage. It also allows players to control the alert messages that appear in the lower right corner of the screen, which can quickly become overwhelming as the game speeds up.
The trade routes panel now allows you to see a list of all trade routes in a particular market, and you can filter this to only show the routes you own. You can also sort this list by country or by product, as it works in vanilla.
Update 1.2 also makes it much easier to see at a glance what your pops want, what goods they spend the most money on, and what pushes them towards the loyalist or radical side of the political spectrum. The new population screen shows how much they pay in income taxes, dividends and excise duties, and makes it easy to see which goods they buy are above or below the average price.
There’s also more information available at a glance in Victoria 3’s build panel, and a clever reorganization has been done so tooltips can be placed in a less distracting way. There’s also a new interaction that lets you reset all of your production methods to baseline, which UX designer Henrik Hansson says is especially useful when absorbing new states.
Another great addition to the Victoria 3 UX in patch 1.2 are the input and output indicators for each production method. Hansson says it was inspired by FUN’s Visual Methods mod, which the Victoria 3 team liked so much they’re porting a version into the base game.
You can sign up for beta 1.2 right now by right-clicking on Victoria 3 in your Steam library, clicking “Properties” and selecting the “1.2-beta – Open Beta for 1.2” branch from the drop-down menu under Betas.
Check out our beginner’s guide to Victory 3 if you need a little help getting started with Paradox’s latest historical strategy game.