Victoria 3 Hotfix 1.13.1 Patch Notes

Two days after 1.13 launched, Paradox is already patching. Hotfix 1.13.1 is live now, and it's a focused pass on the most disruptive problems players hit immediately: AI misbehaviour, performance hits, and a handful of balance swings that clearly weren't landing.

The AI fixes are the headline here. Tiny fleets clogging up naval gameplay, armies refusing to disband empty formations, ships being built without the crew to man them, all addressed. On the balance side, literacy growth has been slashed from 0.5% per week to 0.1%, because apparently Victoria 3 was briefly on track to educate the entire 19th century in a matter of months. The Land Reform changes that added minimum subsistence employment have also been reverted entirely, with Paradox acknowledging the UI and mechanics aren't ready to support them yet.

Lead designer Martin also stepped in to push back on the wave of criticism directed at QA following the rougher-than-usual 1.13 launch, taking personal responsibility for late build changes that left testers without enough time to catch everything. I respect the transparency, more studios should own their release decisions that directly rather than letting the blame land elsewhere. More hotfixes are already in the works.

Full patch notes below.

Good day Victorians.

We have a focused hotfix today addressing critical AI issues, performance, bugfixes and balance changes. We are also working on more hotfixes with more issues being addressed.

This hotfix should improve how the AI interacts with the new systems, a building employment issue and performance should be improved compared to 1.13.0, though we are still investigating improvements in performance and AI.

Note from Martin:

We have also seen an uptick in comments blaming QA for the issues in 1.13. There is a very common misconception that if a release has bugs, it’s QA’s fault for not catching them, but this is almost always just that - a misconception.

We've made a lot of very large system changes in 1.13, with a lot of knock on effects, and they've had to constantly play catch up with our tinkering. Many of the issues that made it into the release were the result of late changes to the build that they simply didn’t have time to catch. In short, if you really want to place blame anywhere, place it on me, as I am ultimately responsible for the quality of each release.

I will be talking more about this in next week’s dev diary, but for now the focus is on finding and squashing bugs and balance issues.

As always, please report any bugs on our bug reporting forums! We have also updated the Known Issues post for 1.13 with any fixed issues.

Otherwise, check out the full patch notes below. Checksum is `ccf2`.

The following changes have been made to the game compared to 1.13.0:

AI

Fixed an issue where the AI would create a lot of tiny fleets. Also improved the behaviour for armies so AI should have less tiny armies
Fixed a bug where the AI would not disband empty formations it did not have a use for
Improved AI handling of obsolete ships, including cancelling obsolete ship constructions and more aggressive decommissioning of useless ships
Fixed a bug where the AI would generate way more templates than it needed and did a general improvement pass on how the AI designs ships to produce more sensible templates
Countries no longer start naval invasions using marines without a general
Fixed a bug where the AI was constructing new ships they did not have the necessary crew for
Added triggers for the AI to get rid of Merchant Navy if they have sufficiently high tech unlocked

Balance

Reduced Literacy growth from 0.5% per week to 0.1% per week, as it was way too fast previously
Reverted the change to several Land Reform law such as Tenant Farmers that added minimum subsistence employment. We will experiment with bringing this back when the UI and mechanics support it properly.
Reduced the armor values of late game Capital Ships, moderately increased the damage of late game Cruisers, as damage was far too outclassed by armor from Modern Ironclads onwards
The fraction of Coup Strength formerly calculated off of the number of units commanded by a General or Admiral is now calculated off of that commander's rank divided by the sum of the ranks of all commanders of that type
Added two textile mills to Ile de France at game start, to discourage French uprisings on account of their threadbare clothes they can’t afford to replace
Reduced movement radicalism gain from the Geheime Staatskonferenz for Austria
Reduced movement radicalism gain from the Divided Monarchists Journal Entry for France
Increased the threshold for the Hungry Forties Journal Entry to fire

Art

More historical Japanese characters have had their specific character DNA for their appearances added
Fixed an issue where pre-restoration Officers pops could wear peasant clothing pre-Restoration if the player had no DLCs
Fixed blockade graphics not being shown on the map

Interface

Made the Strait map marker show up less frequently in the Default map mode
Removed the broken commander buttons from the Naval Invasion planner, we are planning to improve the general functionality of this feature in future hotfixes
Improved the missing crew alert by adding info that ships need to go to port to get new crew. This new part will be displayed in English only, until next week or so.

Performance

Significantly increased AI performance for handling diplomatic plays
Improved AI performance for handling armies

Bugfixes

Fixed the stranding of armies due to fleets forgetting they were transporting them because they got merged with another fleet. As a backup and to fix saves, we teleport any currently stranded armies at sea to their supply hub.
Fixed an issue that allowed countries to start or join diplomatic plays in a region even if they didn’t have the necessary interest tier level.
Stopped drowning marines when you merge two fleets. Instead allowed them to be attached to the other fleet as it was intended.
Fixed a bug where unraised irregular infantry could not gain any supplies
Fixed a bug where fleets could return to their home HQ when stationed in other HQs or states
Fixed ‘Abandon Piracy’ treaty not preventing ‘Piracy’ missions from still occurring
Fixed an issue where buildings which only employed very small pops would ignore them and dump their wages making them unable to hire anyone
Potentially fixed an issue that caused a rare bug which would cancel the construction of naval administration buildings
Fixed an issue that could print errors when hovering characters in the "Honorable Restoration" Journal Entry
Fixed Sweden owning Livestock Ranches in Kyoto
Removed deprecated Man-o-War good from the USA-Texas starting treaty
Removed the Armstrong Ironclad Prestige Good as it can no longer be produced
Fixed a number of localization issues