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When you think about building in most strategy games – even the big strategy games – it’s usually pretty straightforward. You pay the cost, wait for a predetermined time, and then your new building appears. No wonder that Victoria 3 works a little differently, and construction will be linked in important ways to the rest of your country’s economy.
Because Victoria 3 covers a period when much of the world was experiencing rapid industrialization, it needed a way to model the differences in how construction happens at different scales. As explained in the new dev diary, your nation will have a certain building capacity level that determines how much construction can be completed and how quickly it can be completed.
It seems like a pretty elegant system that matches how the game manages many of its other systems, such as military development and industry. You will start with a government building called the construction sector, which will recruit population and consume resources. The output of the construction sector is simply called “construction” and is a measure of your country’s potential for construction.
The higher this number – and it depends on how much you have spent building sectors in your country – the more new construction you will be able to build. But it also means you’ll be paying wages to more people in the construction sector, so you need to be careful about how fast you expand. Your construction sector will be a permanent item of expenditure for your state budget.
You will be able to gradually upgrade your construction sector from wood buildings to iron frame buildings, eventually moving to steel frame buildings and arc welding when these technologies become available.
The building capacity generated by your building sectors will be distributed weekly to the various projects you are working on, with higher priority building jobs given more than lower priority projects. The amount of construction required for each project will depend on the type and complexity of the building in question – for example, a rye farm does not require as much construction as a seaport.
Luckily, Victoria 3 uses Paradox’s extremely useful nested tooltip system, first introduced in Crusader Kings 3, so you don’t have to keep all of that in mind.
