If you were to select the most important things in the Victorian era they were social and economic changes. So we have two major game play tracks here. The evolution of your country socially and economically. The thing that bridges the two are the POPs. These little guys, and you have got to love their work, drive the economic and political systems of the game. So one of the first decisions we made when it came to the Victoria 2 design was POPs had to stay.



However the POP system was not without its flaws. There are a number of things that POPs did, which we felt could be improved on and will be covered in future developer diaries. These are migration and issue and ideology selection, these are coming up soon. Today’s diary revolves around the promotion mechanic.



First up is that essentially POP promotion can be become a real drag on your game play, I mean scrolling through your states to see if a POP is big enough to split, splitting promoting, making sure you have enough goods to promote the POP in question. This is a highly repetitive task that in itself does not add much to the game experience.



Secondly, to be quite honest here, I do not believe that manual promotion really felt right in the vast majority of cases. The Kaiser did not round up 40,000 farmers, give them some stuff and send them off to work in a factory. The whole manual promotion mechanic just did not give historical immersion.



Now the thing is, the POP promotion mechanic did add one key thing to the Victoria experience. It gave you the feeling that you were shaping your country’s destiny. So we had to think about this aspect of game play. We want you to steer and build up your country without having go through and tediously upgrade each POP in turn.



So our first goal was we dropped the promotion logic into the POP files, partly for modding but, mainly for development purposes. We could easily tweak the promotion logic when it wasn't warking properly. We then set up context sensitive triggers that defined who a POP would choose to become and why they would choose to change job. Thus the conditions you set up in your country then alter the POP promotion logic.



For example setting up high military spending makes the soldiers seem more attractive to farmers. Literacy values influence promotion into jobs like the bureaucracy and clergy. High cash reserves help a POP to promote to higher income tier positions.



So far so good, how you tax your POPs and how you spend your state money influence what your people become. However we felt there was more to POP promotion than this. Just think what Oklahoma Land Run of 1889 where the government didn’t just alter taxation and spending but got people to move somewhere and become farmers. We have recylced the national focus idea from Heir to the Throne and added a few extra tweaks to it. This will get a developer diary of it’s own, but I thought I should mention it now.



To sum up our Population design. We are comitted to giving you cool levers to alter your population that will shape your country, without turning it into micromanagement hell.



Here is a screenshot of an early screenshot of the POP screen just to give you a little flavour of what we are aiming for. Keep an eye out for further improvements.



Moderator's note : the Buddhist POP in the screenshot is actually a Jewish pop in New Orleans. The symbol is merely a placeholder for the religion from EU3 as there was no Jewish religion symbol in EU3. The screenshot is an alpha shot, there will be a separate icon for Jewish faith POPs in the final version of the game. Hopefully posting this note here will avoid the continued confusion (even after several people have stated below that it was simply a placeholder) some readers of this DD are having. OHGamer.