Roadie posted:

Forcing through Multiculturalism at the game start date has almost zero impact on your gameplay beyond boosting immigration, so why would I assume that other laws actually do things?

Roadie posted:

Forcing through Multiculturalism at the game start date has almost zero impact on your gameplay beyond boosting immigration, so why would I assume that other laws actually do things?

Gaius Marius posted:

You're playing Vicky and don't know what a workers coop is? C'mon

Eiba posted:

If a law changes a production method you should probably check that production method. That's how abolishing serfdom and enforcing secular administration works too.

You didn't know that, and now you know. It's fine. No reason to get defensive, and no reason for other people to call you out.

Roadie posted:

This entire line of conversation started with how stupid it is that all this stuff is buried in nested tooltips and relies on you already understanding how upper class jobs work (including stuff like the investment pool contributions, which aren't even mentioned in the Aristocrat/Capitalist tooltips) just to have a rough idea of what's going to happen when you pass that law, instead of, say, having even a single paragraph that summarizes the high-level effects.

Eiba posted:

If a law changes a production method you should probably check that production method. That's how abolishing serfdom and enforcing secular administration works too.

You didn't know that, and now you know. It's fine. No reason to get defensive, and no reason for other people to call you out.

Arrath posted:

Yeah, it's very strange to make a trip through my roster of generals and find they're all 85+ boomers and despised by the public/their IG members. Then they die as soon as they get the sack.

Eiba posted:

Well there's no contradiction between feminism and imperialism.

Eiba posted:

I'm not saying imperial utopias are cool and good. But I don't understand why it's important for the game to prevent them in this case.

The Cheshire Cat posted:

Actually related to this, what does abolishing serfdom do? By the production method it seems like the only change it makes is that peasants get slightly higher SOL because of the one extra point of subsistence output. I mean obviously the big thing about the law is the massive boost it gives to the landholder IG, but as far as I can tell there's no penalty to social mobility for peasants with serfdom enabled, they can still gain qualifications and become factory workers or whatever as fast as your education system will allow. Unless having a SOL of 4 is a big break point of some kind for gaining qualifications? Which is possible but I'm not sure how I'd find that out.

Stux posted:

if u cant possibly concieve of what a workers co-op being forced in every single building in your country might do without looking it up, you may i n fact be too stupid for the game.

Roadie posted:

This entire line of conversation started with how stupid it is that all this stuff is buried in nested tooltips and relies on you already understanding how upper class jobs work (including stuff like the investment pool contributions, which aren't even mentioned in the Aristocrat/Capitalist tooltips) just to have a rough idea of what's going to happen when you pass that law, instead of, say, having even a single paragraph that summarizes the high-level effects.

This part isn't even mentioned anywhere at all, as far as I can tell.

Fray posted:

Serfdom actually does totally block qualifications growth for a lot of professions by peasant pops.

Tomn posted:

Unrelated, one weird thing about the game, I think? Opium. This age is famous for the Opium Wars, where Britain fought a war to convince China that they should be allowed to sell them opium. Except why on earth would you do that Britain, you dummy, you stupid? Why would you sell anybody else your precious, precious opium when you need all the opium you can possibly shove in your pipe to supply your field hospitals and combat medics? Hell, if you want China as a market you can just open up a treaty port and then drop all furniture you can produce into their laps or whatever, it's fine, it's great even. But opium? That's a critical strategic resource and there's no good reason to let anyone else have it, so why sell it?

Tomn posted:

Unrelated, one weird thing about the game, I think? Opium. This age is famous for the Opium Wars, where Britain fought a war to convince China that they should be allowed to sell them opium. Except why on earth would you do that Britain, you dummy, you stupid? Why would you sell anybody else your precious, precious opium when you need all the opium you can possibly shove in your pipe to supply your field hospitals and combat medics? Hell, if you want China as a market you can just open up a treaty port and then drop all furniture you can produce into their laps or whatever, it's fine, it's great even. But opium? That's a critical strategic resource and there's no good reason to let anyone else have it, so why sell it?

The Cheshire Cat posted:

Hmm, I was definitely still getting people moving from peasants to labourers/farmers/other lower strata jobs pretty quickly even with serfdom. Although I did notice that it took a long time to get people for my naval bases.

Tomn posted:

With regards to the dividends there's no one-stop-shop for that information - instead, you need to read up the tooltips about dividends, then ownership shares, then notice that ownership laws are all about swapping out who actually owns the building (and realize that the icons on the buttons are what denotes who owns the buildings since the tooltip doesn't explicitly say), then notice how various economic laws provide an investment pool bonus for various pop types and then realize that such pop types ONLY contribute what the economic laws say they do to dividends and not a penny more, and then finally put all the pieces together to understand that communists don't have investment pools but DO spread the wealth.

Tomn posted:

As an aside, for anyone who's ever legally changed from a monarchy to any other government type - are there any events when doing so denoting the gravity of what's happening? Reading up on things like the Risorgimento or the Springtime of Nations, efforts to swap out the monarchy were almost always tense, involved a lot of stand-offs, frequently had flaring bits of violence even if things didn't quite break out to a full-scale civil war, and usually involved a very great deal of reluctance on the part of the monarch. Do any of the debates that pop up when trying to swap out of a monarchy capture that sense of barely contained chaos? It feels like that kind of thing should be a much bigger deal than, say, changing from per capita taxation to proportional taxation even though the mechanics for doing so are entirely the same. Swapping to a Council Republic or Theocracy should be a pretty big deal as well really.

Roadie posted:

Wow, what a convenient gameplay loop, pausing to read Wikipedia first so you can find out how the hidden mechanics work

Forcing through Multiculturalism at the game start date has almost zero impact on your gameplay beyond boosting immigration, so why would I assume that other laws actually do things?

Jedi Knight Luigi posted:

Yeah I think I’ve figured it out now:
1. game is too easy to recognize the effects of my own decisions.
2. you’re a pretty huge rear end in a top hat.

Ck is easy too, but it’s definitely more interesting at this point.

Gaius Marius posted:

You're playing Vicky and don't know what a workers coop is? C'mon

Jazerus posted:

have you noticed how much opium can actually be produced if you're smarter than the AI and actually develop it? gujarat alone has over 400 arable land that can be devoted to opium. you could get the entire world hooked on heroin from the output of two states

The Cheshire Cat posted:

I think opium currently suffers from the same "the AI underdevelops its territory" problem as a lot of other resources. Because unlike oil, there is a lot of potential opium on the map. Like it does use arable land so it has to share with other farms, but you're still looking at like potentially tens of thousands of units from a single state if you go all in. So it's supposed to be a cash crop, but it ends up being way, way rarer than it should be because the AI builds like 5 opium plantations and goes "actually I'm good now".

Stux posted:

gonna cry?

Tomn posted:

...though thinking about it, perhaps I'm overfocusing on your specific use of words and we're actually talking about the same actual concept?...

Tomn posted:

With regards to colonies specifically, it does seem to be true that relying on the lower starting wage granted by colonial exploitation can allow some wild wage differences between plantations, but then the question becomes "What are you using your colonies for?" Using them for profitable factories is something of a waste since being unincorporated, you can't actually get any taxes out of them and you only loosely benefit from their dividends and consumer demand. Much more likely that your colonies primarily exist to service your vast need for raw materials, and in that case fiddling over the individual profitability of a given building isn't as important as just building every last oil rig and opium plantation as you can. Overall, trying to control buildings based on manipulating wages as you describe seems to me to likely not be really worth the effort compared to just slamming down what you need, as you need it, at least in the mid-to-late game - you may be on to something regarding how to manage the early game.

Tomn posted:

Again, your explanation of how factories choose to decide wages and how individual workers make the decision to move from one factory to another seems to make sense - but I would argue that wealth isn't really the deciding factor here, raw wages and needs are (though thinking about it, perhaps I'm overfocusing on your specific use of words and we're actually talking about the same actual concept?) The question is always going to be how much money can the pops actually make, and how easily they can fill their basket of needs with that income - wealth is just a way of keeping score, as it were. I do note, however, that if your model is correct it is MUCH easier to reduce wages than it is to raise them - all you need to reduce wages is to crash the profitability of a given building, which isn't that hard to do if you fiddle with supply of the input goods, while conversely to raise wages you specifically need to create a labor shortage in the state - much more difficult to set up and sustain, though possible if you have massive migration and truly spectacular building practices. I'm not sure if I'd call that a problem in the simulation or accurate and working as designed, to be honest.

Tomn posted:

Yeah that's true, the game is honestly more difficult in a number of ways because the AI just isn't that good at it. It'd be fascinating to go full free trade if the AI actually made competitive economies.

Cast_No_Shadow posted:

To be fair, you can totally understand what a worker co-op is and how a communist economy works and not get it because the investment/dividend pool and how that works is a complete invention just for this game to give the player agency over how their countries industries and economy develops.

The Cheshire Cat posted:

I feel like the fundamental issue is that the AI doesn't really do much speculative development. And I can understand Paradox wanting to be conservative with AI construction to avoid the whole "capitalists won't stop building clipper factories my country is dying" problem from V2, but there are a lot of goods where the demand doesn't materialize until the supply exists, unless you're the player and will recognize "I'm going to need oil soon so I should start building a lot of pumps". Opium particularly is an odd one because as a consumer good, it can be substituted for other goods, so there is literally zero demand in countries that don't have access to opium, but do have liquor/wine/tobacco - until you start shipping them some and then it will end up competing against those other goods and enter into the pop need equation. I think the AI isn't currently set up to think about trade that way and instead only looks for routes that will be profitable from the moment they're created, and if it can't find any it just doesn't bother developing the resource beyond its own domestic needs.

Stairmaster posted:

Paradox should have play tested this game a bit

Stux posted:

the words "worker co-operative" by themselves should explain whats going to happen even if youve never heard of it before somehow

Schnitzler posted:

Yeah I think this is it, I should have been clearer. This "basic wage to sustain level" value is really only used as a starting point for calculating wages. So that tooltip is only accurate directly after the factory is first built. From that moment on, the value that tooltip shows should be called "basic wages we currently want/are able to pay here in this factory". As you correctly showed, from the moment the factory exists the wage decouples from the wealth present in the state. I never meant to claim otherwise, again, should have been more clear there. The point I was trying to make is that massive differences in wages paid by different factories can be traced back to this initial wage, in cases where the the labor market was rather calm so factories did not have to adjust the wages paid to remain competitive.

Now the calculation of this initial basic wage, here is my theory. Standard of living (=average wealth) in a state is set for each of the three income stratas. When the factory is built, it needs to calculate and set a basic wage that, after multiplying it with the worker type factor, attracts enough workers from each strata. So lets say we are in a state where capitalists currently make an average wage of 600. Then our newly built factory needs to offer at least a basic wage of 100 so capitalists can be paid 100x6=600. If machinists get paid on average 390, than the basic wage would need to be 130 so 130x3 = 390. Finally, if laborers in the same state get paid an average wage of 150, then the basic wage would need to be 150. I believe what happens now is that these three values are averaged, so (100+130+150)/3 =~ 126 initial basic wage (to sustain current wealth level).

Now using this starting point, the factory starts hiring, and immediately the connection to the calculated starting basic wage starts to fade. Should the set basic wage not be enough to attract workers from every strata, it will be adjusted upwards until every strata can be hired. This is where wealth comes in again. If our factory wants to hire laborers at a basic wage of 100, but all unemployed laborers available in the state have enough wealth that they need a basic wage of 120 to sustain their level, they will not take the job until either the wage offered is raised or their wealth level drops down to the point where 100 is enough to not drop further. However, workers in other factories with a lower wage level will readily switch over. On the other hand, if the factory runs into trouble, it will lower wages/fire current employees and try to hire at the new, lower wage level. This means that the workers hired initially at the higher level either get fired outright or get a cut in wages, and their wealth starts to deteriorate. If they do not have the option to switch to another, better paying job in the state, they are stuck. I think workers never quit by themselves, they either get fired or switch to better paying jobs. So they keep working their job while getting poorer, which is what happens in your example.

I just think it's a fun thing you can do, and a possible way to get some use out of colonial exploitation. Putting down a massively profitable industry in a unincorporated territory does not give you taxes, but it does give you investment fund contribution, which I can see being helpful when you are growing. Another application would be something like steel industry in territories. The low wages would allow them to stay profitable and productive at a much lower price point for steel. This then lowers input costs for your steel using industries, as well as your construction sector. But again, that's just fun min maxing/tinkering opportunities.

One more thing about wealth, as I understand it wealth determines which needs a pop actually has. So it goes a bit beyond a way of keeping score, it determines what is in the pop's basket of goods. That's also what drives it's relation to wages. As the wealth level goes up, the amount and type of goods the pop wants to buy goes up as well, which is why it's wage demand goes up. As for actually using this knowledge in game, again, it's mostly for fine tuning/min maxing certain decisions. Like say you want to increase your income tax revenue, so you decide to build a new textile mill to employ more people. Now, in order to get the most income tax revenue, you want to put that new mill in a state where the standard of living (=wealth) is already high, since that determines the initial amount of wages paid, and therefore the initial amount of taxes gathered. On the other hand, if you want to have a very profitable textile mill, for investment fund money or to boost industrialist influence so they eclipse other IGs or something like that, then you want to put that mill in a poor state instead.

Cast_No_Shadow posted:

To be fair, you can totally understand what a worker co-op is and how a communist economy works and not get it because the investment/dividend pool and how that works is a complete invention just for this game to give the player agency over how their countries industries and economy develops.

stumblebum posted:

Waifu Radia posted:

has someone curated a list of best mods so far before my next campaign

Roadie posted:

So far it's basically just all the "make the UI less lovely" ones plus Anbeeld's Revision of AI.

Realistic Population Growth & Resources may also be promising to try and make population numbers and resource availability better reflect real life.

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

The mediterranean architecture mod is the most important one. It will break your savegames

Stux posted:

maybe theyll enable a historical mode like hoi4. or maybe itll be left like eu4 to be vaguely historical sometimes but 80% of the time u look over at europe after looking at africa/asia for 250 years and wonder what happened.

Gamerofthegame posted:

drat




maybe you should play multiplayer*

*a forty person game mostly works if you slap that rehost every hour