Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #184 - The Great Wave Hotfix (18th June 2026)

Happy Thursday everyone and welcome back, it’s been a little while. As I mentioned in the previous dev diary, we decided after the release of 1.13 and The Great Wave that we needed to put all our focus on the post-release hotfixes, and so we haven’t really been doing the usual ‘what’s next’ kind of updates. Until now, that is.

But before I jump into that future, I should update you on said post-release hotfixes. As promised, we have one more big hotfix (1.13.9) currently planned to release next week. 1.13.9 is the last hotfix planned for 1.13, though we will of course adjust those plans if anything critical enough pops up. We were originally planning to release it this week, but decided to delay it to get some more fixes in and ensure we leave the game in a good place before the traditional July summer break.

1.13.9 contains a lot of fixes and improvements, but to name a few:

• All movement types will now have substantially reduced Activism following their defeat in a Civil War. Movement defeat status is stored per identity, and persists through movements being disbanded and refunded.
• Fixed a bug where fleets whose supply ships were under attack would be considered 'in battle', preventing them from functioning normally
• Fixed slaves being freed when fired from their jobs

As also mentioned in Dev Diary #183, the next major update (1.14) will be a free update with no accompanying DLC that we’ve dubbed “The AI Update”, and which will focus almost exclusively on improving the AI’s ability to play the game and function as an interesting ally and adversary for the player.

The major goals for the AI update are as follows:

• Deepen AI strategic region stances and use them to give the AI a much better understanding of how it should view and act against other countries in a particular region
• Give the AI a proper understanding of where it should and should not be interested in territory - improve border gore and prevent nonsensical aggression such as the US puppeting Italian states
• Fix the persistent issues with war starting/ending - make the AI properly understand when wars are worth going into and getting out of
• Improve the AI’s economic development by fixing some systemic issues that are holding it back, particularly when it comes to understanding how to plan its economy around the availability of goods and the world market
• Make the AI more transparent in its reasoning and behavior across the board

This is of course not everything, there’s lots of tiny fixes planned alongside the big ones, but if there’s a particular theme for this update it is definitely to elevate the AI’s overall understanding of geopolitics and to make the AI behave more like proper 19th century imperialist governments and less like they were operating on a combination of the Cocaine Addict, Reckless and Senile character traits.

A secondary, internal goal for the update is to spread knowledge about AI design and implementation inside the team. Currently, this knowledge is largely concentrated to only a few people and this was a factor that contributed to the AI being in such a rough shape when 1.13 released.

Another major improvement which we’re hoping to get done for 1.14 is a complete rewrite of pathfinding to eliminate the many, many bugs with supply, army pathfinding, trade routing and so on caused by our present overengineered and overencumbered pathfinding system. If this doesn’t make it for 1.14, it will come in 1.15 instead.

The release date for the AI Update is not yet set in stone, but we’re aiming for sometime around late August/early September. That may feel like a long wait, but some of the issues we’re aiming to tackle are not exactly simple and straightforward, and trying to rush something out the door sooner would have taken resources away from 1.13 post-release fixes and honestly likely wouldn’t have achieved the stated goals. This is a long-term investment in replayability and we want to do it right. We are also looking into the possibility of doing an open beta for this update, but since doing so would end up pushing it further into September, we have to make sure our schedules can work out.

There will of course be dev diaries for the AI update, which will both update you on the work being done and also take you on a bit of a deep dive into how the Vicky AI functions behind the scenes.

That’s all for now. You'll see us in the patch notes for 1.13.9 next week. Then we will have a break for Dev Diaries over July, starting back up again in August.