TGC 0.96 A Fair Days Pay file - The Grand Combination mod for Victoria 2: Heart of Darkness

It’s been three years since this ambitious project started, and what was first an attempt to merge the popular mods of the time, the project slowly went on to become one of Victoria II’s largest and most popular mods, with its own unique content and community.

To celebrate this special occasion, there is no better way to do so than to announce it with an update, which is why the TGC team is proud to present the second major update of 2023 and the largest one ever done so far: A Fair Day’s Pay!

A comprehensive revamp of Victoria II’s economy with tons of fixes and new additions.

To see the full changelog go >>> HERE <<<

This is probably the biggest update TGC ever had! A full Russia and Economy rework, Polish and Greek mini rework, Direct Immigration sub-mod mini rework, a full UI overhaul, scramble for China, scramble for Oregon and TONS of optimization to make the mod run even better than before.

Economy Overhaul

First things first, economic issues have plagued Victoria II for a long time, liquidity crises, good shortages, and stagnation; the economy of the late-game was known for collapsing and not working altogether. We, the TGC team, assign these issues to the theory that the problem comes down to the PoPs' salaries not increasing properly during the game, while demand and needs do, creating a situation where the PoPs want to spend more, but are unable to do so.

The modding community came up with a myriad of solutions to those economic shenanigans, some solutions being rather complex, such as Victoria Universalis' world bank system, or VRRP literally removing need increase based on tech.

But our approach is completely different: To solve this problem, we needed to go right into its root and directly increase PoP's salary in the mid to late game, making it scale properly. The easiest method to solve this issue, which is the modifier pop_income_modifier, would’ve worked fairly well, but it is completely broken (thanks Paradox). The modifier works only under very weird circumstances and is pretty much not usable.

Ultimately, after tinkering with lots of code and values, our solution was to create carefully designed events that manually inject money into the PoP’s treasuries based on technology, PoP size, and other factors, simulating the salary increase they should be getting normally:

Notice the extra salary in those random PoPs. The amount of cash PoPs receive depends on many variables, but it ultimately ensures that PoPs can afford their needs and fuel the economy.

The increased salary, which scales mostly with tech and PoP size, will ensure that pops can actually buy more goods and meet their needs as the game passes, they consume more as the game progresses, increasing demand and making the economy bloom during the mid to late-game, instead of stagnating. Goods, demands, industries, needs and everything else were also adjusted to make a better and more dynamic economy.

Look at those booming late game scores!

This approach is not perfect, and it still needs some playtesting and polishing, so we count on the community to help with that, but we feel it’s a massive step into the right direction.

These fixes gave us plenty of room to make even more adjustments to the economy, which means that we have decided to add new goods:

These four new goods, which are Pharmaceuticals, Plastics, Soap, and Rubber goods, will add to the game a more flavorful experience as you approach the late-game, giving you even more space to develop your economy in more unconventional ways while still making a profit and industrializing properly.

The late-game economy can develop significantly more now, as seen on the previous screenshots, and it’s way more worthy and satisfying to play the game for longer. Because of this, we have also decided to add five new fully fledged technologies to each tech tree branch:

These new techs provide a more fulfilling late-game experience, giving you more things to do apart from waging warfare and managing your economy.

The new technologies provide large amounts of bonuses to different fields of your nation, but they are expensive! So you must choose wisely before time runs out.

Russia Rework

But man does not live by mechanics alone! While we were working on the economy, we were also working on other stuff as well, the first being a comprehensive overhaul of the Russian Empire, including more than 200 events, about 30 new decisions, tons of flavour, new mechanics, and revamped conflicts, among which are a new Crimean War (and the million ways it can occur and develop), new Great Eastern Crisis paths, flavour for interim between the two, Russian Pacific (American) ambitions, Panslavic flavour, China and Japan rivalry, 4 Emperors with their flavor and paths

Russia’s end goal for the Pacific Ambitions path.

As the old autocracy of Europe, Russia is one of the strongest nations of the continent, and thus, it is in its duty to be the beacon of the old order and Eastern Christianity. You’ll get to see and experience how Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality becomes the fundamental pillar of Russia’s internal and external policy, and how these ideals may or may not change over time: will you try to preserve Russian authority at all costs? Or will you try to reform, and follow the path of liberalism? The history book is right in your hands, and it is none but yours to write in it.

The way you interact with internal and external politics will directly impact how the empire develops. Russia could adopt aggressively expansionist policies, leading to coalitions and becoming an international pariah, or it may as well adopt an isolationist policy, focused on protecting its borders from any external threats.

Lot’s of expansion opportunities.

But it’s a dangerous endeavor.

As the protector of Eastern Christendom, Russia may see itself get entangled in the various European struggles for power, of which Russia could see an opportunity to challenge the Sick Man of Europe, or bring down the German Eagle. Russia has plenty of paths it can take to approach European diplomacy, and if this fails, let the drums of war rumble.

One of several ways the Crimean War can happen, as Austria and Prussia can both intervene, depending on each other’s choices.

Russian Victory in Crimean War and one of several crisis that erupt in its wake

One of six Great Eastern Crisis outcomes, this one being that Russia won Crimean War and compromised with other Great Powers in GEC to dismantle the Ottomans

Scramble for Asia

We have also decided to replicate the Scramble for Africa but for China (and possibly Japan too). If either of the two countries don't reach a certain westernization level before the 1910s, the Great Powers will call for a conference to discuss the partition of East Asia.

Greek Mini rework

A good amount of old Greek content was refactored and improved upon, giving the Greeks a fairly good expansion path and some cool flavor. With decisions and customized Restore Imperial Province casus belli, the player can take Greece away from historically idealized Hellenism sponsored by the West towards the Imperial and Eastern Orthodox path.

Poland Mini Rework (HBM Port and Revamp)

Take up the mantle of Polish Cause and defeat your enemies in 1848 revolutions! With 50 new events and a dozen decisions, Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła!

Apart from this comprehensive rework, we have also taken the opportunity to overhaul the Direct Immigration submod, which is now less tedious to set up, with proper localization explaining what each option does. You can now decide to either relocate primary, accepted, or non accepted pops, or non accepted religion, as well as a new direct assimilation mechanic with the Immigrator building being able to assimilate core population in a province that otherwise you would not be able to. On top of this, several new override decisions at influencing (colonial) migration and emigration have been added, among others.

That’s all for the main and major gameplay changes, but there’s a gigantic list of other changes, fixes, and optimizations to make the mod run faster and smoother. We have compressed all the files with more efficient compression methods to free up to 150mb of ram usage and twice as much disk space! Compressed TGC from github is now sitting at a 100mb download, which is pretty impressive for a full overhaul mod like TGC.Along with this, we have also released a new ultra low ram patch that brings TGC’s ram consumption down by some 500-600mb (yes!). During our experimentation with the game we managed to use compression techniques on the flag cache in a very specific way, and this new technique will help players on low end PCs or other mods that are close to breaking the 4gb barrier (honestly, not many).

This was a massive breakthrough for the community, this means that computers with 2GB of RAM can now play the mod.

All those compressions and performance saves gave us room for plenty of cosmetic improvements, so we have totally revamped our loading screens, the main menu and UI. The UI itself has been fully remade, going for a more “Emerald/Jade” look, while of course keeping our classic TGC green.

New loading screens

Each loading screen imge depicts the main characteristics of the Victorian Period

New main menu

There are some easter eggs on this image, can you find them all?

And, to top it all off, we added a batch of new modifier icons to better showcase the more than 500 modifiers we have in TGC: