Berlin Conference

Hello everyone!

Today, I'd like to introduce to you the latest update. The Great Rework is a project that aims to greatly enhance both the single & multiplayer gameplay experience of Victoria 3 by both: coding important and cool features that we believe improves the game experience, and integrating important mods that improve the game's QoL.

Today's post is about Major Update V1.4.0, Christmas Update, bringing The Scramble For Africa and The Berlin Conference to the game!

Let's start with the basics and game start effects, with this new update:

• No one will be able to colonize in Africa until Conference of Berlin is held (they will be able to establish trade posts (one province states) but other than that, no colonization).

• Added a game rule to select how you'd like to have the world centralization be. You can have all nations centralized and playable, keep vanilla settings or decentralize all African nations except for North Africa, South Africa and Ethiopia (See screenshot below!).

How does The Scramble For Africa work?

The following journal entry is a global journal entry that will be shown to everyone (just informative). As you can see, it's a countdown to the Scramble For Africa. Once the conditions mentioned below are met, the Berlin Conference will be called.

Note: I just updated the mod and removed the condition for German Unification. I'll improve this further in future updates!

Once the above journal entry completes, the Conference will be called, countries will be invited. Now this system is completely dynamic. Meaning, invited countries are all Great & Major Powers. If Britain and France became minor powers, they won't be invited. Completely dynamic! As you can see below, the first event of the Conference, it shows which countries were invited, then it fires a new journal entry which is a countdown until the end of the conference. The conference is a series of events that will last 31 months (we'll go over them in this post).

Once the conference is called and the journal entry is added, there will be an event every month. Flavor events! And basically events discussing articles of the General Act. Random countries from attending nations will be proposing the articles (i'm proud of myself to have made it that dynamic!).

Now, let's talk Belgian Congo? This mod cannot give it to Belgium regardless of the geopolitical situation.. This mod picks a random (Major Power, capital must be in Europe) nation from attendees and awards it the Congo to ensure neutrality of the region (completely historical and dynamic). The nation that will take the Congo will not be allowed to colonize in Africa, unless they choose to withdraw from the conference and incur great infamy.

Now, let's talk the good stuff, occupations and claims! So, how does that work? First of all, the article below will be presented in the Conference by the 1st Great Power. Once the article below is fired, all events and the conference will be paused for 12 months so nations can claim regions in Africa and announce their future colonization events (claim? announce future plans? we'll go over those in the post!).

Now that we got the event above, we have a 12-months break. Let's claim some regions!

We get this new decision:

"We were not awarded Congo", Congo recipient is awarded a huge benefit, and shouldn't be able to make further demands (it's already OP).

"Maximum allowed claims?" Great Powers can claim up to 3 regions, Major Powers can claim up to 2 regions.

You take the decision, you get:

So, some regions decisions are greyed out because i do not have interest in the region i want to claim in. I know it's cool, right!?

You have 12-months to make demands, you have time to declare interest then claim a region!

So as you can see above, we hover over a region, it shows a nice tooltip and informs us how many more claims we can make.

How do claims work? Why should we claim? Once the Conference is over and the treaty is signed, every country that made claims in any region, will get actual claims in every single state of said region! Also, claiming a region during the Conference has other benefits (you'll see them later in this post, keep scrolling!).

Once the 12 months are over and all nations made their demands, we will get 7 mor events (1 event every 1 month) announcing claims made by every nation. Examples:

I was playing Single Player, I also didn't teach the AI to make claims yet, but will do in a future update!

Once you get all this information and we're done with everything above, now it's time to sign the conference and read some legal stuff!

Yes, i did read all the terms and conditions, and i agree. Take me to next step now!

What a historic mod, what a historic mechanic!

Aftermath; A Lucky Major Power gets the Congo:

At the same time, Spain is not allowed to colonize anywhere in Africa, the will get a 200% colony growth debuff.

King Phillipe of France claimed Zanj in the Conference, how does that benefit him? See:

Also, If you try to act smart and colonize in Africa before the Conference, you get a minus 200% colony growth speed.

After the conference, signatory nations will be able to colonize anywhere in Africa. But if they colonize somewhere they didn't claim, they will get a 50% colony growth speed debuff.

After the conference, nations who did not attend it will still be unable to colonize until they decide to Adhere to the conference or violate it. Adhering to it reduces their infamy, violating it increases their infamy.

Map of Africa at game start (Game rules available to keep centralization vanilla default, or like the map below, or make all nations centralized):

Post-Conference available decisions:

Remaining in the Treaty will give you 50% colony growth debuff in regions you did not claim. Violating the treaty without joining it will make you colonize anywhere without any debuffs or buffs, but of course so much infamy. Adhering to the treaty will allow you to colonize anywhere in Africa but with 50% colony growth debuff in non-claimed regions. Why not just stay out of it and not take any actions? Not violating the treaty or not adhering to it will give you a 200% colony growth debuff everywhere in Africa even after the Conference. You must make a decision!

I couldn't post more screenshots due to the 20 images limit in reddit posts. Join to see more teasers and discuss the update with the community!

Do not forget to check out the mod in the !

Finally, i wanted to thank all our friends in the discord that helped me make this. Without their ideas, advice and motivation, i wouldn't have been able to make any of this, would've lost motivation and hype way too early.

Big thanks to Jameson, who helped me greatly making the mod and its mechanics!

Thoughts!?

Should there actually be a conference like Berlin conference that organizes colonialism and trade in Africa or in the world so that the colonial countries divide the cake? (Africa + the world) Africa becomes less haphazard and resembles the real world with colonial division, and powerful states take the lion's share of colonialism.

Teaching about imperialism in Africa with my 10th grade students. We were doing a reading together on the Berlin Conference and the reading stated that the meeting first occured on November 15th 1884. A student yells out "Today is November 15th". Just wanted to share this cool coincidence. The students were blown away, I never saw the students so engaged after realizing this lol. I guess it's the little things that might help kids remember.

I've always seen colonization as a weak point of Victoria 2, it looks very arcade for me, countries taking disperse swats of land on Africa based on competition and creating a horrible border gore forced me to use HFM/HPM for playing. But even with HFM/HPM, colonization and Berlin Conference turn out to be quite tasteless, with most of them using the vanilla Victoria 2 date-locked colonization system which avoided you from even colonizing the coast in reasonable dates, or based on having a naval base near the area (historically for instance, Germany never had naval bases near Africa, yet they got some colonies, even in Papua), or having to depend on events/decisions to avoid border gore and having some historical flavor simulating the Berlin Conference.

In short, I believe colonization is perhaps the worst system Victoria 2 has and i feel like Victoria 3 needs to improve in this area. We already know that there won't be "uncolonized" land on Vic3, which is good news if you like colonizing abroad, since there will be uncivs or unrecogs to try colonizing, with this sort of nations interacting with you in your colonial adventure, wheter if its fighting you to kick you out or making deals with you. I guess having these types of areas also means there will be a gradual colonization and not getting huge swats of land in a short period of time.

I also feel like we need to have a better Berlin Conference, in which every Great Power/Secondary Power (with the Great Powers having preference over the Secondary Powers) marks his claims based on the colonies it actually has, the influence in the area, determined by markets, and historical interests. Next, the game will simulate the deals between those nations, with the player being able to negotiate under some realistic margins, and the claims will be marked (not annexed), with every power being responsible to colonize the marked areas on a period of time (irl, the colonial powers of the Berlin Conference never annexed their claims straightforward, they had to colonize them, and they sometimes struggled to do so. The Berlin Conference took place in 1884, but the powers had to wait until 1914 to have most of the claims fullfilled, with Morocco and the Senussis taking until even early 1930s) You could also have a crisis system specifically designed for colonization in the Berlin Conference.

I think Victoria 3 needs an improvement of the colonization system and the simulation of the Berlin Conference. I always felt like Victoria 2 never had a good colonization mechanic.

My Question is will there be a conference where the different European powers divide Africa between themselves ? And how will the AI decide which land to claim ?

How do you think the Berlin conference will work in the game? Do you think it'll be like Vic2 where it's an event that unlocks full colonization of Africa or something more in depth where it's an in game conference where the boundaries of African colonization are agreed on between nations (be it between all members or in bilateral agreements) and the rules of colonialism are set (like the effective occupation policy), where diplomatic weight will influence how big of the slice of the African pie will each party get? Also what about the Congo?