Victoria 3 1.2 open beta makes some excellent UI updates

The open beta for the Victoria 3 1.2 update is now available, and even after keeping up with the grand strategy game’s ongoing series of dev diaries, it’s already feeling like a surprisingly transformational patch. The latest update covers the changes the dev team is making to the user experience, which includes all the menus, tooltips, and other interface features that keep you abreast of what’s going on in the complex world of the 19th century.

Patch 1.2 targets several of the issues I raised in our Victoria 3 review. It includes clarity around pop needs, radicalisation, trade route usage, and clarity about radicalisation. The screen’s bottom-right corner displays alert messages, which can quickly become overwhelming when a playthrough gets more intense.

You can now view a list all trade routes within a market. This panel also allows you to filter it so that you only see routes you own. You can sort the list by country, or by goods. This is similar to vanilla.

Update 1.2 is also making it much easier to see at a glance what your pops want, which goods they’re spending the most money on, and what’s pushing them toward either the loyalist or radical side of the political spectrum. The new population screen shows how much they’re paying in taxes on income, dividends, and consumption, and makes it easy to see which of the goods they buy are above or below the average price.

There’s more information available at a glance in the Victoria 3 construction panel as well, and some clever rearrangement has made it so that tooltips can be placed less obtrusively. There’s also a new interaction that lets you reset all your production methods to the baseline, which UX designer Henrik Hansson explains is particularly helpful when you absorb new states.

Indicators for the inputs and outputs of each production method are another great addition to the Victoria 3 UX patch 1.2. Hansson says this was inspired by the Visual Methods mod by FUN, which the Victoria 3 team liked so much that they’re adapting a version of it into the base game.

You can opt into the 1.2 beta now by right-clicking Victoria 3 in your Steam library, clicking ‘Properties’, and selecting the “1.2-beta – Open Beta for 1.2” branch in the drop-down menu under Betas.

Check out our Victoria 3 beginner’s guide if you need a bit of help getting started with Paradox’s latest historical strategy game.