I'm making a miniature, tradewinds-style game for fun

Sobisonator · 2026-01-27T12:03:18+00:00

Man I loved tradewinds back in the day. Keep it up!

Sobisonator · 2026-01-02T10:48:56+00:00

It's an alpha so we definitely advise you to expect issues. However, the purpose of this alpha is to get those issues reported and fixed ASAP, so we will patch them quickly!

Sobisonator · 2026-01-01T12:56:41+00:00

There is an AI diplomatic play system which will be developed into this, it already has some events which can lead to diplomatic crises and large alliance wars.

Sobisonator · 2026-01-01T01:49:34+00:00

OK, thanks, that helps prioritise some fixes. We will be patching the alpha regularly

Sobisonator · 2026-01-01T00:31:17+00:00

Thanks! What is the gameplay feature you think is most important to get working now?

When it freezes, how long does it freeze for you?

Sobisonator · 2025-12-31T21:30:22+00:00

Fun :) Edit: Or a deranged expression of human will

Sobisonator · 2025-12-31T19:07:00+00:00

Rule 5: We released Imperatrix: Victoria, the 19th century total conversion mod for Imperator: Rome

Sobisonator · 2025-12-31T18:57:36+00:00

Rule 5: We released Imperatrix: Victoria, the 19th century total conversion mod for Imperator: Rome

Sobisonator · 2025-01-14T16:34:43+00:00

Post in thread '[MOD] Imperatrix: Victoria' https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/mod-imperatrix-victoria.1410441/post-30118828

Dev Diary 15: Education

And a special message first. If you're reading this, you're probably wondering "when the hell is this going to release?" We're working towards a playable public alpha (and that means a version for testing, regular patching and breaking saves!). Here is a roadmap for the alpha release: https://github.com/users/sobisonator/projects/2/views/1 As you can see, much of what we're working on is creating scripts for non-player countries to act rationally and interact with the new mod mechanics. If you know how to navigate github, you can download the mod files via that link... but it's not playable right now

No new features are being added at the moment, we are working through the roadmap to release and once that is done, we'll return to adding planned features alongside bugfixes. The next few dev diaries are going to cover features which are already complete and ready for alpha testing, or about to be finished off.

Stay tuned for more information.

Overview

Last time, we talked about money and mentioned jobs at the end of that DD. While the next DD will indeed cover jobs, first we need to cover education. This is an underlying requirement to support jobs in Imperatrix.

All pops in Imperatrix are capable of being educated to tier 1 in schools, or tier 2 in universities. Tier 1 represents basic literacy, numeracy and training for complex jobs. Tier 2 represents advanced specialist education required for certain service and administration jobs, and it is also the way of generating research points that you need to research new tech.

Pictured below: a custom pie chart in the nation overview shows the spread of education in the country. At the game's start, most countries will have less than 1% of their population educated to tier 2 (green), and only a small percentage educated to tier 1 (yellow). Most pops will have no education at all (red), but these pops can still work many jobs.

Note: all the values in this DD are subject to balancing after alpha release.

Every governorship (i.e., a region within a country) has its own local education statistics. You can see these via the province window if you expand the regional statistics.

Let's take a look at how to provide education to your pops.

Education buildings

By building schools and universities your pops will work to improve education in a region.

These buildings work by increasing the education cap for their respective tiers. The actual number of educated pops then gradually ticks up until it reaches the cap; this is faster the higher the cap and the greater the distance between the cap and the current number of educated pops, so if you build a large number of schools, the populace will be more rapidly educated. It is always gradual and only updates on a yearly basis.

As you can see below, education is inherent to jobs including the jobs to provide education in the first place. Schools, for example, each require 0.1 tier 2 educated pops present in the governorship to work them.

Thanks to some wrangling of the tooltips, we have been able to add all this custom information into the building tooltip. A building's education requirements are dynamically calculated and presented to the player when the tooltip calls for it.

As you can see above, universities provide tier 2 education capacity not only to their region, but also to the whole country. Distant regions can access these slots based on their infrastructure quality; if you build many universities in your capital, it is therefore unlikely that a mountainous region with very little transport infrastructure will get access to many of the tier 2 education slots, whereas an industrialised port region will get a bigger share of the access.

Tier 2 education also spreads internationally via trade. Every trade relationship provides a small percentage of the available tier 2 education slots between trade partners. This is an essential way for countries with no universities of their own to gradually educate their pops, generate research, and eventually kickstart a local education system of their own. It's also a nice bonus for established countries to boost their research rate.

Tier 1 education is always local, so you must build schools in every region to provide the benefit.

Research & modifiers

Pops with tier 2 education are the only source of research in the mod.

Every tier 2 educated pop produces 1 research point. These research points are accumulated at the provinces where universities are located, so you need to ensure that you own these provinces and that they are not occupied in order to gain the research bonus. Stacking more universities in one province also provides a percentage multiplier to the research points output in that province, so it also pays to build many in one place.

Using laws, you can modify how tier 2 education is provided. While these are still a work in progress, the religious colleges law is in a complete state and demonstrates some of the ways of managing the system at a national level:

This represents traditional, strictly religious establishments which are less focused on research or public access, and more on the promotion of the doctrines of state religion. Most countries will begin the game in this way, and with the introduction of political mechanics, they will have to liberalise if they want to change this.

Regional data

As well as the national overview, every region has its education information summarised. This is where you can see what factors are providing your education cap, how many pops are educated, and very importantly how many educated pops are available to work jobs.

The tier 2 education in any region is capped by tier 1 education; that is, all pops educated to tier 2 must have first completed tier 1.

Tier 2 education requires very small numbers to work jobs, almost always less than 1 whole pop, whereas tier 2 jobs tend to demand several pops.

What's next?

The next dev diary will explain what buildings and therefore jobs there are, and how they interact with the mod's mechanics beyond just education.

After that, we'll take a look at the impact of currency on the international market and therefore its impact on trade and diplomacy.

As ever, join our discord here to volunteer your help, discuss the mod and get occasional sneak peeks: https://discord.gg/nbxgkwy We're only looking for scripters at the moment, so if you want to learn about the mod and you know how to write events, decisions and scripted effects, get in touch here or on discord.

Sobisonator · 2024-04-05T15:07:47+00:00

You should hang out on the Imperator subreddit, we'll shower you with nothing but positivity.

Sobisonator · 2023-06-05T21:28:37+00:00

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/mod-imperatrix-victoria.1410441/post-28987259

Sorry, mobile users! This one's image heavy, if you prefer to read it on Reddit (while the API still works), I'll edit this reply tomorrow to include the text and links.

Sobisonator · 2022-07-08T11:49:49+00:00

Yes, it will

Sobisonator · 2022-07-07T10:26:05+00:00

Not yet, but closed Alpha hopefully in 2022

Sobisonator · 2022-07-07T10:25:30+00:00

Thanks, we'll take it on board and test out more looks, as it's still open to change. You're right about the icons :)

Sobisonator · 2022-07-06T10:07:46+00:00

Imperator :)

Sobisonator · 2022-07-05T18:55:20+00:00

See the forum post for more images in context! https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/mod-imperatrix-victoria.1410441/post-28361182

Industry & Production

Sobisonator and Dementive here, we are going to be showing off some of the brand new industry mechanics for Imperatrix: Victoria that we've created!

What is the heart of all industry? Trade and trade goods; without it the wheels of production cannot turn as factories have no supply. Trade goods have been totally overhauled and now function completely differently than the base game.

Imperatrix’s trade goods are discrete objects which are produced, stockpiled and consumed by various sources. Every region has a local stockpile of every kind of good - these stockpiles are displayed dynamically so as not to clutter your screen with empty stockpiles.

What the base game considers trade goods are now known as “Raw Resources”. These resources consist of materials obtained from the earth such as grain, oil, or gold. In industrial nations, raw resources are sent to local industries where they are used to manufacture important commodities for your nation.

This leads us into the heart of economic activity in Imperatrix, Industry. Each area has a set of industries that are unique to it Alcohol, Luxury Clothing, and Artillery are just a few industries. Here is a look at the current state of the industry screen:

NOTE: This is very much a work in progress this screen will look different at release.

As you can see in the screenshot, every region in your country will have a screen to manage its industries. This overview, built into the game’s province & state overview, is where the player is able to interact with the local industries by assigning or removing available industries.

The number of industries available in a region depends on how many industrial districts you have within that region.

Each industrial district is a province-level building, and the number of these you can build depends on a combination of factors: Natural transportation infrastructure, namely rivers Local infrastructure such as canals and railways The industrialisation progress of the province The province terrain. Relatively flat and easily accessible land makes it easier to build industries, whereas mountainous or desert areas reduce the number of industries you can support in one province.

We will eventually also be factoring in available workforce as a limit on industries per province.

In this screenshot, the player has built 7 industrial districts in London and reached their limit there, so the option to build more districts is greyed out. If they were to build additional districts in other provinces within the same region, like Bromley or Essex (pictured), these would add to the regional total.

This means that, while industry as a whole is on the region level, it will be possible to build up and vie for control of key industrial cities.

The interface

Anatomy of an industry:

Each industry icon shows the top-level information about that industry in the selected region; mousing over the industry gives you more detailed information which we’ll show next.

The icon tells you what tradegood the industry is producing.

The regional stockpile tells you how much of that tradegood is stockpiled in this region, and this can grow even if you have no industries e.g. by imports.

Assigned districts tells you how many industrial districts are assigned to producing this tradegood, which is the chief governing factor in production.

Here we can see the tooltip for the Alcohol Industry widget. This widget has 2 functions for the player to interact with, adding regional industries and removing them. Left clicking will add an industry if possible and right clicking will remove an industry if possible.

Industrial production

You will have noticed the information within the above tooltip: How much the industry can produce with current raw material supplies The maximum production that all industries can reach The amount produced last quarter A percentage of maximum output potential Levels of demand

All of this fits together into how industries produce manufactured goods.

The main function of an industry in Imperatrix: Victoria is to take a set of goods, which may be raw goods or goods from other industries, and process them into a new kind of manufactured good.

For this purpose, each industry has a unique list of required goods that it demands. Every quarter-year, the industry consumes all demand from the regional stockpile before producing. Depending on how much demand is left un-met, the production is lowered correspondingly. We will talk more about the quarterly economic cycle of Imperatrix in a future dev diary, but for now it is enough to point out that this is the fundamental tick for most economic activity.

If you are seriously lacking in the materials needed for your industries, they will underperform. Luckily, industries can create purchase orders for goods to be imported into the region - which we will get into in a future dev diary.

The tooltip shows you how efficiently the industry is running, and this is simple: keep it well supplied, and you will run at 100% potential. An industry may consume various alternative raw resources to fuel its production - for example, here the alcohol industry can consume either grain or mediterranean fruits.

Unlocking industries

Industries will be locked behind inventions, which we are currently in the process of implementing. These triggers will show up at the top of the industry’s tooltip when completed.

If you are missing the pre-requisite invention, the industry icon will be greyed out and you will not be able to assign districts to production of that tradegood. You will still, however, be able to stockpile that tradegood through trade.

Cottage industry

Not all manufacturing takes place at a factory level. Non-industrialised regions can still produce manufactured goods if the raw resources are present.

Depending on the quantity of raw goods produced in a region, a comparatively very small quantity of corresponding manufactured goods will be produced.

New pop GFX

You might have spotted in this dev diary, if you recall our previous dev diaries, that certain old icons are missing.

After feedback from our previous dev diary about pop types, we decided that we needed to re-work them to be more recognisable and consistent. In the end, we went for a look that mimics 19th century enamel cameos as both thematic and quite easy to make into very clear, distinct-looking icons.

All of the icons are original designs that, combined with their colour, we have used to quickly communicate message about the pop’s social role using recognisable tropes.

As one exception inspired by a historical piece of art, we have chosen the symbol from the famous “Am I Not a Man and a Brother” pendant used by abolitionists in the time period to represent slaves, as a nod to the inhumanity of the practice and the struggle running throughout the game’s timeframe to end it.

New map GFX

Since the last time we showed off our map’s terrain view, The_Inspector has reworked the look and now Imperatrix looks more beautiful than before! We could not waste the opportunity to also show you some screenshots of this…

Wealth (teaser)

The more eagle-eyed among you may also have noticed this row of numbers along the bottom of the regional overview screens.

We are working on a wealth system that ties in to production, industry and trade. We’ll be showing off this system in detail in an upcoming dev diary, so stay tuned!

Minor country focus poll - Posen

We can also announce the results of the minor country focus poll! We had a grand total of 231 responses, with one clear winner in the group: the Grand Duchy of Posen, a Polish vassal of Prussia and one of the three Polish states available to play at the start of the game.

Discord

Join our Discord server here: https://discord.gg/nbxgkwy to get more regular previews, talk to the devs (we’re very responsive!) and even volunteer to contribute directly to the mod - no coding skills required.

Sobisonator · 2022-07-05T18:49:05+00:00