The Victoria 3 1.2 update is now available, and even after keeping up with the game's ongoing development diary, it's already feeling like a surprising transformative patch. All menus, tooltips, and other interface features keep you updated on what's happening in the interesting world of the 19th century.
Patch 1.2 addresses several of the issues I identified in our Victoria 3 analysis, such as clarity on pop needs, radicalization, and trade route usage. Players also have full control over the alert notifications that appear in the bottom-right corner of the screen, which may quickly become overwhelming after a playthrough.
The trade routes panel now allows you to see a list of all the trade routes in a particular market, and you can filter this to only show trade routes you own. This list may also be sorted by country or by goods, as it works in vanilla.
Update 1.2 makes it even easier to see at a glance what your pops want, which items they're most fond of, and what's pinning them toward the loyalist or radical side of the political spectrum. The new population screen shows how much they're paying in income, dividends, and consumption, and makes it easy to see which goods they purchase are above or below the average price.
The Victoria 3 construction panel has a lot more information available at a glance, and a clever redesign has allowed tooltips to be placed less obtrusively. There's also a new interface that allows you to reset all of your production methods to the baseline, which UX designer Henrik Hansson says is particularly useful when you absorb new states.
In patch 1.2, Hansson adds indicators for the inputs and outputs for each production method, which the Victoria 3 team loved so much they're making a recreation of it for the base game.
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.
If you need help getting started with Paradox's latest historical strategy game, check out our Victoria 3 beginner's guide.