Happy Thursday and welcome to another deep-dive into the guts of Victoria 3’s economic machinery. This week we will be talking about Pop Professions, specifically how and why Pops change Professions.
While this is an automatic process, the mechanics of it is still crucial knowledge to keep in the back of your head when building your society. Perhaps you want to ensure the population in one of your states are able to take on Machinist jobs before embarking on a rapid industrialization project there, or perhaps you want to ensure you don’t accidentally enable too much social mobility in a country already prone to uprisings against their true and lawful King.
In the Production Methods dev diary we learned that different Production Methods change the number of Profession positions available in a building. So how do Pops get assigned to these spots?
Victoria 3 Pops have Professions instead of the fundamental property Pops had in Victoria 1 and 2, where they were categorized by their type.
Professions are in some ways similar to “Pop Type”, but the ideal ratios and economic functions of those Professions differ based on the building they’re employed in and the Production Methods activated. The fundamental difference between these two approaches becomes clear when considering the Bureaucrat Pop Type/Profession in Victoria 2 and 3.
In both games, Bureaucrats increase a country’s administrative ability. But in Victoria 2 Pops promote into Bureaucrats independently in relation to the amount of administrative spending the player sets, while in Victoria 3 Pops will only become Bureaucrats if there are available Bureaucrat jobs in Government buildings, usually as a result of the player actively expanding Government Administrations.
Paradox Interactive
The latter approach gives the player more control over where these job opportunities are created and combined with Production Methods cause demographic shifts to have stronger, more localized effects that are easier to predict and understand. It’s also more flexible, permitting the same Profession to cause different effects in different Buildings given different Production Methods.
In Victoria 3 higher-paid Pops don’t, by their very nature, perform a more valuable societal function than lower-paid Pops - rather, each acts as a crucial part of a Production Method’s ‘recipe’. Each of these roles requires the others to be effective - without enough Laborers to shovel coal the engines the Machinists maintain stay dormant, and without seamstresses to work the sewing machines the Shopkeepers don’t have any clothes to sell.
