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WhitemageofDOOM
Sep 13, 2010

... It's magic. I ain't gotta explain shit.

Nitrousoxide posted:

1880's China: Passed most of the liberal reforms except for getting out of monarchy because the clergy/landlords would rise in revolt if I try. Out of nowhere, despite ~40% of my 3 billion GDP economy being craftsmen now, the rural folk win a landside election with 80% of the votes and halt all further progress. Neat.

I guess that's what happens when I enact universe sufferage huh?

Universal sufferage is a "hand all power to the trade unions or ruralists" button yeah.
And even super industrialized qing with your 100m people beijing, it's still 90% peasants.

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trapped mouse
May 25, 2008

by Azathoth
So I was looking at my Steam Replay (which is apparently a thing now) and was surprised to discover that this game took up nearly 25% of my total Steam gaming time this year, impressive considering it came out in late October.

Also it seems like the "Reading Campaign" achievement is bugged. I accidentally got it while trying to do a separate achievement as France, which is a country that starts with well over 20% literacy. So if you want another easy cheevo, get it before it's fixed again.

Tankbuster
Oct 1, 2021

WhitemageofDOOM posted:

Universal sufferage is a "hand all power to the trade unions or ruralists" button yeah.
And even super industrialized qing with your 100m people beijing, it's still 90% peasants.

the trick of course is to industrialize the places in china where the bulk of the population is. So between the yangtze and yellow rivers.

AAAAA! Real Muenster
Jul 12, 2008

My QB is also named Bort

Agean90 posted:

early Japan fells like the purest experience this game has. no trade no ais just number go up
This post got me to try a game as Japan. I, uh, I've got my tool industry and iron mines set up, some groceries, a university in every province, and everything on my market is either a negative percentage market price or really drat close. I'm having bad luck getting my laws updated so I'm stuck without the ability to export anything. I'm not sure what to do next. Militarize and start a war? Drive all my market prices into the ground? I've never been in this position before.

Dr. Video Games 0031
Jul 17, 2004

WhitemageofDOOM posted:

Universal sufferage is a "hand all power to the trade unions or ruralists" button yeah.
And even super industrialized qing with your 100m people beijing, it's still 90% peasants.

I hit the 35% peasant mark as Qing by around 1890. It took building up to around 2.5k construction on iron frame buildings and then around 5k on steel frame. Basically, try to get off your traditionalist economy and onto laissez-faire or interventionism as quickly as possible and then just loving go. The investment fund as china is genuinely an infinite money printer once your economy gets even a little industrialized.

Though the rural folk will still dominate politics because you'll need to build a shitload of farms and plantations. Maybe I should've built fewer dye plantations and more synthetics plants (especially since I'm oversupplied on fertilizer)

edit: in the earlier of my two qing campaigns, i went agrarian before LF. It helps a little if only to get away from traditionalism's awful taxation penalty, but you really need to switch to either interventionism or LF quickly to get those money printers going.

Dr. Video Games 0031 fucked around with this message at 06:08 on Jan 2, 2023

Mandoric
Mar 15, 2003

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

This post got me to try a game as Japan. I, uh, I've got my tool industry and iron mines set up, some groceries, a university in every province, and everything on my market is either a negative percentage market price or really drat close. I'm having bad luck getting my laws updated so I'm stuck without the ability to export anything. I'm not sure what to do next. Militarize and start a war? Drive all my market prices into the ground? I've never been in this position before.

Get moderately rich and pick a war with whoever grabbed Hokkaido, and they're almost sure to demand you open your markets. Then lose it (or back down to be historical) and you can start to escape the shogunate's death grip on politics.

AG3
Feb 4, 2004

Ask me about spending hundreds of dollars on Mass Effect 2 emoticons and Avatars.

Oven Wrangler

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

This post got me to try a game as Japan. I, uh, I've got my tool industry and iron mines set up, some groceries, a university in every province, and everything on my market is either a negative percentage market price or really drat close. I'm having bad luck getting my laws updated so I'm stuck without the ability to export anything. I'm not sure what to do next. Militarize and start a war? Drive all my market prices into the ground? I've never been in this position before.

Japan was a pretty tricky start for me, and a really slow game too. No mines or tool factories at start, no trade possible, nearly non-existant internal market since everyone is so dirt poor, you can't subsidize anything (except ports I think). On top of that you lack tech (though events later on help you catch up) and have a huge shortage of tax capacity, though there isn't much to tax in the first place. I'm not sure there's a way to play Japan that doesn't involve "take it slowly", if there is I'd love to know. You can war early on, but with so little income you risk bankruptcy. On the other hand, you have a massive population and all the resources you need locally for industrialization.

What I ended up doing was just taking it slowly and chipping away at the landowners/shogunate, throwing my lot in with the clergy and samurai early on since they aren't opposed to most laws that take away shogunate power. You need them gone as soon as possible in order to get any meaningful development done. I guess you could go invade Korea, but you'd only get yet more undeveloped land and poor peasantry so it wouldn't give you anything you don't have already. You'd probably also go bankrupt. You can defeat China just by throwing enough peasants at them so long as you have at least a small military tech advantage, but early on it just doesn't help you achieve the goals of industrializing.

So at least in my experience, just get the shogunate/landowners out of office as soon as possible so the Meiji restoration event can start, then once you are able to trade you can industrialize much faster and snowball from there.

Mandoric posted:

Get moderately rich and pick a war with whoever grabbed Hokkaido, and they're almost sure to demand you open your markets. Then lose it (or back down to be historical) and you can start to escape the shogunate's death grip on politics.

Or you can do it this way to speed things up, though it is the dishonorable way of doing it.

TorakFade
Oct 3, 2006

I strongly disapprove


Finishing a game as Persia now, it was very fun. Their landholders are very hard to get rid of, but they have tons of resources (for a change, almost enough oil to fuel every pm and modern industry!) and easy neighbors to beat up, plus easy imperialism in south east Asia.

The game is good, but I don't like how samey nations feel after you get over the initial hurdles and empower industrialists/trade unions and start reforming to good laws, I wish there were more reasons to remain "backwards" in some areas (the only real advantage I cn see is some extra authority, which while a powerful currency it's almost never worth it later on)

More flavor would be really welcomed too. The journal system of giving special missions for some countries isn't great imo and I hope they tinker with it, plus we need more local flavor and journal entries. Have they ever said/hinted at what the first non-cosmetic dlc will be?

AAAAA! Real Muenster
Jul 12, 2008

My QB is also named Bort

edit: please dont get me wrong, I am not complaining, just describing the situation because I am trying to learn how to get out of it/handle it better.

Mandoric posted:

Get moderately rich and pick a war with whoever grabbed Hokkaido, and they're almost sure to demand you open your markets. Then lose it (or back down to be historical) and you can start to escape the shogunate's death grip on politics.
I grabbed Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and now I'm colonizing the pacific islands :v:
Next I might colonize Kenya then attack Oman for Zanzibar so I can monopolize east Africa (and maybe conquer Makran and Kalat so I have access to Opium).


AG3 posted:

Japan was a pretty tricky start for me, and a really slow game too. No mines or tool factories at start, no trade possible, nearly non-existant internal market since everyone is so dirt poor, you can't subsidize anything (except ports I think). On top of that you lack tech (though events later on help you catch up) and have a huge shortage of tax capacity, though there isn't much to tax in the first place. I'm not sure there's a way to play Japan that doesn't involve "take it slowly", if there is I'd love to know. You can war early on, but with so little income you risk bankruptcy. On the other hand, you have a massive population and all the resources you need locally for industrialization.

What I ended up doing was just taking it slowly and chipping away at the landowners/shogunate, throwing my lot in with the clergy and samurai early on since they aren't opposed to most laws that take away shogunate power. You need them gone as soon as possible in order to get any meaningful development done. I guess you could go invade Korea, but you'd only get yet more undeveloped land and poor peasantry so it wouldn't give you anything you don't have already. You'd probably also go bankrupt. You can defeat China just by throwing enough peasants at them so long as you have at least a small military tech advantage, but early on it just doesn't help you achieve the goals of industrializing.

So at least in my experience, just get the shogunate/landowners out of office as soon as possible so the Meiji restoration event can start, then once you are able to trade you can industrialize much faster and snowball from there.

Or you can do it this way to speed things up, though it is the dishonorable way of doing it.
Yeah I have found it tricky so far. I did the usual Tools => Iron Mine virtuous cycle to get to the point of having enough Tools and Iron to be running 4 Construction Sectors set to Iron Frame construction at a slight deficit. I built some grocery industries because it was something I could do to use my massive amounts of grain and sugar, then built a bunch of universities and a few other things to balance the cost of certain things that were expensive on my market. Now I'm not sure what to build - more Universities would get too expensive (they each cost about 700/week to maintain so I dont want too many), I dont need more of any of the basic resources, and the prices of things like glass, paper, tools, clothes, furniture, ect are all around +5% so building more of those buildings would drive the price negative and thus to the point of being unprofitable to manufacture.

tl,dr; I have all this construction capacity and no idea what to do with it because I cant figure out how to increase my peoples' spending power to increase demand of goods to expand any industries so people have even more spending power and so on

I havent had any luck getting away from Peasant Levy, Landed Voting, or Serfdom so I'm pretty stuck in that regard, too. I can try to go from Peasant Levy to Professional Army but its a 5% chance and a bad event always fires nullifying that tiny chance. Same if I try to go with Wealth voting.

Dr. Video Games 0031
Jul 17, 2004

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

edit: please dont get me wrong, I am not complaining, just describing the situation because I am trying to learn how to get out of it/handle it better.

I grabbed Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and now I'm colonizing the pacific islands :v:
Next I might colonize Kenya then attack Oman for Zanzibar so I can monopolize east Africa (and maybe conquer Makran and Kalat so I have access to Opium).

Yeah I have found it tricky so far. I did the usual Tools => Iron Mine virtuous cycle to get to the point of having enough Tools and Iron to be running 4 Construction Sectors set to Iron Frame construction at a slight deficit. I built some grocery industries because it was something I could do to use my massive amounts of grain and sugar, then built a bunch of universities and a few other things to balance the cost of certain things that were expensive on my market. Now I'm not sure what to build - more Universities would get too expensive (they each cost about 700/week to maintain so I dont want too many), I dont need more of any of the basic resources, and the prices of things like glass, paper, tools, clothes, furniture, ect are all around +5% so building more of those buildings would drive the price negative and thus to the point of being unprofitable to manufacture.

tl,dr; I have all this construction capacity and no idea what to do with it because I cant figure out how to increase my peoples' spending power to increase demand of goods to expand any industries so people have even more spending power and so on

I havent had any luck getting away from Peasant Levy, Landed Voting, or Serfdom so I'm pretty stuck in that regard, too. I can try to go from Peasant Levy to Professional Army but its a 5% chance and a bad event always fires nullifying that tiny chance. Same if I try to go with Wealth voting.

Build more iron frame construction sectors. Try to get to around 40 - 60 construction. You may have to downgrade a few construction sectors periodically if you go up to 60 in order to prevent yourself from going into too much debt. Japan needs lumber at the start too so build more of those. Upgrade them to sawmills so you can have more demand for tools which will drive more demand for iron. My research priorities was colonialism first (so I wouldn't have to compete with russia for hokkaido) and then cotton gin -> lathe -> atmospheric engine -> academia -> intensive ag -> mechanical tools -> railroad. This is not an optimized research order, but it is the list of stuff I'd want early. Academia should probably be brought forward in that queue and intensive ag pushed back. Lathes and atmospheric engines will give you more demand for tools and coal. You can also generate demand for coal by switching a couple cities to gas streetlamps. Do not be afraid to overproduce your core resources. You can also generate additional demand by upgrading your urban centers if you can't find anything else to do between techs. That can give you more demand for glass, which can be met by switching glass factories to leaded glass, which opens up demand for lead (not much of it, granted). Once you get mechanical tools and railroad, the steel and rail industries are opened up to you. By this point you should be trying to get on interventionism. If you manage to pull that off (as I did by around 1852 I think?), you can expand your construction sector to 100 and beyond and really start taking off.

I think you're also being too cagey about overproduction in general. If you have +5% price on a good, that means you need more of it, full stop. Hell, I'd say the same if it's +0%. If it's unprofitable at 0%, that means you need to make the input goods cheaper by producing more of those. If you have an abundance of of wood, cloth, grain, iron, etc, then you can build more furniture, clothes, groceries, tools, etc. Moreover, buildings will ultimately balance their production on their own. If something is unprofitable, then they'll scale down production until it is profitable. You don't have to and shouldn't try to micro manage them by keeping them just above the point you think they're still profitable at. Basically, :justpost: (except "just build" instead)

edit: The political game requires a decent bit of luck. Sometimes you'll be brought to 0% success chance immediately after trying to change a law, but you should just pivot and try something else in that case and go back to that law later. Eventually, you'll get it after enough attempts. Abolishing serfdom does help to weaken the shogunate, but be aware that it will drop your grain production a decent bit. Which means you'll need to build more rice farms, which in turn strengthens the shogunate again, so it's maybe a bit less impactful than you'd think. Economic reform is a higher priority. You may need to go through a period of low-ish legitimacy in order to do so, but that's fine. Professional army is also a high priority. Try to have a few extra government buildings built when switching off of traditionalism because you'll take a small hit to your bureaucracy in the process.

Dr. Video Games 0031 fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Jan 3, 2023

Nitrousoxide
May 30, 2011

do not buy a oneplus phone



Also of note for the whole political game,

If you have pops that are going to start a revolution because you're not passing a law they want, you can just start the passage proccess and then... just not do it when they chill the gently caress out.

Art imitates life I guess there hah.

Servetus
Apr 1, 2010

Agean90 posted:

early Japan fells like the purest experience this game has. no trade no ais just number go up

Try Baganda in Central Africa. No access to a coastline, so you have to build your economy in isolation until the French and British arrive to kick your poo poo in or you colonize you way to an ocean.

Tomn
Aug 23, 2007

And the angel said unto him
"Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself."
But lo he could not. For the angel was hitting him with his own hands

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

Yeah I have found it tricky so far. I did the usual Tools => Iron Mine virtuous cycle to get to the point of having enough Tools and Iron to be running 4 Construction Sectors set to Iron Frame construction at a slight deficit. I built some grocery industries because it was something I could do to use my massive amounts of grain and sugar, then built a bunch of universities and a few other things to balance the cost of certain things that were expensive on my market. Now I'm not sure what to build - more Universities would get too expensive (they each cost about 700/week to maintain so I dont want too many), I dont need more of any of the basic resources, and the prices of things like glass, paper, tools, clothes, furniture, ect are all around +5% so building more of those buildings would drive the price negative and thus to the point of being unprofitable to manufacture.

It's been a while since I played, but it's worth noting that driving the price negative can actually be good for the overall economy even if it means an individual factory gets a bit less profitable. Remember that all pops use their income to buy up a basket of goods, and having one good become cheaper means they can now afford to buy more goods and drive up overall demand throughout the economy - including, potentially, more of the cheaper good in question if they increase wealth levels enough.

Beyond that, it's probably best to look at the actual disparity between buy and sell orders instead of the price difference anyways. For goods with large enough demand it's entirely possible to have the price hovering at +5% or something while still having hundreds of unfilled orders that can easily absorb more factories.

Popoto
Oct 21, 2012

miaow

Nitrousoxide posted:

Also of note for the whole political game,

If you have pops that are going to start a revolution because you're not passing a law they want, you can just start the passage process and then... just not do it when they chill the gently caress out.

Art imitates life I guess there hah.

Did that in my Brazil game when landlords and clergy cried for the emperor to come back. Worked wonders as they were very closed to the threshold to not be angry, and letting them chill for six months was enough to let their negative opinion reduce a bit.

AAAAA! Real Muenster
Jul 12, 2008

My QB is also named Bort

Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:

Build more iron frame construction sectors. Try to get to around 40 - 60 construction. You may have to downgrade a few construction sectors periodically if you go up to 60 in order to prevent yourself from going into too much debt. Japan needs lumber at the start too so build more of those. Upgrade them to sawmills so you can have more demand for tools which will drive more demand for iron. My research priorities was colonialism first (so I wouldn't have to compete with russia for hokkaido) and then cotton gin -> lathe -> atmospheric engine -> academia -> intensive ag -> mechanical tools -> railroad. This is not an optimized research order, but it is the list of stuff I'd want early. Academia should probably be brought forward in that queue and intensive ag pushed back. Lathes and atmospheric engines will give you more demand for tools and coal. You can also generate demand for coal by switching a couple cities to gas streetlamps. Do not be afraid to overproduce your core resources. You can also generate additional demand by upgrading your urban centers if you can't find anything else to do between techs. That can give you more demand for glass, which can be met by switching glass factories to leaded glass, which opens up demand for lead (not much of it, granted). Once you get mechanical tools and railroad, the steel and rail industries are opened up to you. By this point you should be trying to get on interventionism. If you manage to pull that off (as I did by around 1852 I think?), you can expand your construction sector to 100 and beyond and really start taking off.

I think you're also being too cagey about overproduction in general. If you have +5% price on a good, that means you need more of it, full stop. Hell, I'd say the same if it's +0%. If it's unprofitable at 0%, that means you need to make the input goods cheaper by producing more of those. If you have an abundance of of wood, cloth, grain, iron, etc, then you can build more furniture, clothes, groceries, tools, etc. Moreover, buildings will ultimately balance their production on their own. If something is unprofitable, then they'll scale down production until it is profitable. You don't have to and shouldn't try to micro manage them by keeping them just above the point you think they're still profitable at. Basically, :justpost: (except "just build" instead)

edit: The political game requires a decent bit of luck. Sometimes you'll be brought to 0% success chance immediately after trying to change a law, but you should just pivot and try something else in that case and go back to that law later. Eventually, you'll get it after enough attempts. Abolishing serfdom does help to weaken the shogunate, but be aware that it will drop your grain production a decent bit. Which means you'll need to build more rice farms, which in turn strengthens the shogunate again, so it's maybe a bit less impactful than you'd think. Economic reform is a higher priority. You may need to go through a period of low-ish legitimacy in order to do so, but that's fine. Professional army is also a high priority. Try to have a few extra government buildings built when switching off of traditionalism because you'll take a small hit to your bureaucracy in the process.
Thanks for the writeup! I had the economy going alright and your post helped me improve it, but my luck for laws was supremely bad. I kept bouncing between things like Professional Army, Abolish Serfdom, and removing Hereditary Bureaucrats (not a complete list) all with sub-10% chances; when one got a bad event I dropped it and switched back to the other. Abolishing Serfdom climbed all the way up to 80% to pass then plummeted down to 5% then back up to like 40% before it finally passed. After colonizing the pacific I got Quinine, colonized Kenya, and conquered Zanzibar and now I'm colonizing into central Africa. I finally have Ironclad tech and a positive cashflow so I'm working on building out a navy so I can start conquering Borneo or something. I need somewhere that has Opium and will have Oil so I'm debating my options - Sumatra & Java are looking juicy since DEI got free.


Tomn posted:

It's been a while since I played, but it's worth noting that driving the price negative can actually be good for the overall economy even if it means an individual factory gets a bit less profitable. Remember that all pops use their income to buy up a basket of goods, and having one good become cheaper means they can now afford to buy more goods and drive up overall demand throughout the economy - including, potentially, more of the cheaper good in question if they increase wealth levels enough.

Beyond that, it's probably best to look at the actual disparity between buy and sell orders instead of the price difference anyways. For goods with large enough demand it's entirely possible to have the price hovering at +5% or something while still having hundreds of unfilled orders that can easily absorb more factories.
I'm going to have to try this. As I've gotten better at keeping up with things and colonizing quickly I've tried to do a better job outsourcing food & raw resource production to the colonies so I think I'll try to lean into that a bit more to keep wood and food costs down.

edit: lol

AAAAA! Real Muenster fucked around with this message at 03:27 on Jan 3, 2023

Dr. Video Games 0031
Jul 17, 2004

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

Thanks for the writeup! I had the economy going alright and your post helped me improve it, but my luck for laws was supremely bad. I kept bouncing between things like Professional Army, Abolish Serfdom, and removing Hereditary Bureaucrats (not a complete list) all with sub-10% chances; when one got a bad event I dropped it and switched back to the other. Abolishing Serfdom climbed all the way up to 80% to pass then plummeted down to 5% then back up to like 40% before it finally passed. After colonizing the pacific I got Quinine, colonized Kenya, and conquered Zanzibar and now I'm colonizing into central Africa. I finally have Ironclad tech and a positive cashflow so I'm working on building out a navy so I can start conquering Borneo or something. I need somewhere that has Opium and will have Oil so I'm debating my options - Sumatra & Java are looking juicy since DEI got free.

You gotta get on interventionism or LF if you haven't already. Force the industrialists into your government even if it means taking a hit to legitimacy. If you switched to landed voting before you did this then you might just want to restart the run, because this will be very hard if they've formed a party with the intelligentsia and armed forces. In that scenario, getting that party in government while maintaining 25%+ legitimacy so you can pass laws is impossible until you either industrialize enough or get really lucky with election events.

Here's an example of what I was talking about with overproducing core resources:


Coal is -17% price, tools is actually +12% price, and it's still pulling in a nice profit. Trying to maintain +0% or above pricing wouldn't make sense here. Lower core resource prices will help your more important industries produce cheap goods for consumers/your government. And your industries can support lower prices than you might think. But really, the prices won't ever drop as much as you think you will. As long as you keep building stuff in a balanced manner, the prices should stay fairly stable and your economy will continue to grow. So, build aggressively but evenly.

I think my run is a bit scuffed though. I also made the landed voting mistake, and I can't get the shogunate out of power anymore because they keep winning every election. If this were still an autocracy, their clout would be under 20% by now and I'd be able to form a stable government able to pass laws without them, getting me the restoration event. But their clout is stuck at around 24% now, and I can't actually repeal landed voting anymore. I also probably should have built even more aggressively, considering my treasury is almost full. I just realized that I have the option of getting free trade though thanks to the intelligentsia. Would taking that, importing a bunch of agricultural goods, and then deleting a bunch of farms/plantations weaken the shogunate enough?

Gort
Aug 18, 2003

Good day what ho cup of tea
Are other people spreading out or concentrating their universities?

I could see spreading them out for the qualifications, but I never seem to lack for those so I always just have one mega-university that provides all my Innovation.

ilitarist
Apr 26, 2016

illiterate and militarist
I don't really feel the local effect of University. It's supposed to speed up people switching to more complex professions, right? If so then the default speed should probably be modified and the effect has to be global in addition to local, both for the sake of immersion (even in medieval times most of the students came from other towns) and gameplay (you don't want a worker to see an opening for a mechanist, actually migrate to a province with university and then migrate back to fill the vacancy).

Triple A
Jul 14, 2010

Your sword, sahib.

ilitarist posted:

I don't really feel the local effect of University. It's supposed to speed up people switching to more complex professions, right? If so then the default speed should probably be modified and the effect has to be global in addition to local, both for the sake of immersion (even in medieval times most of the students came from other towns) and gameplay (you don't want a worker to see an opening for a mechanist, actually migrate to a province with university and then migrate back to fill the vacancy).

IMO it should be changed so it applies to states adjacent to it as well. That way, there's always a good reason to place your universities in locations that are fairly central to your lands while encouraging a degree of dispersal on constructing them.

ilitarist
Apr 26, 2016

illiterate and militarist
This might be too much. The game design weighs heavily on the concept of communities living in a specific region being somehow united and this already is a huge stretch. AFAIK no other mechanic in the game cares about adjacency it would make stuff a lot weirder. Some university can probably "cover" all of Scandinavia or Britain while the one in Japan is just servicing a minor isle.

Dr. Video Games 0031
Jul 17, 2004

i've only run into qualifications problems exactly once, and that was when i was trying to rapidly build something like 100 fully upgraded mines per province in a newly conquered korea. It doesn't seem to happen very commonly when you are gradually building up your industry.

Gort
Aug 18, 2003

Good day what ho cup of tea
I think there was a mod that made each level of university give a 10% bonus to education access in the state it's in, that might be an avenue worth theorycrafting down.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

Gort posted:

I think there was a mod that made each level of university give a 10% bonus to education access in the state it's in, that might be an avenue worth theorycrafting down.

Just for grins, I modded them to add 0.1%/0.133%/0.2% education access globally. You'd need 1000/752/500 universities to give 100% education access on their own. I think you start with a base 25% though?

Either way, it makes it less important to conquer Mali and build the Mosque of Djenne for the free 20% education access globally.

ilitarist
Apr 26, 2016

illiterate and militarist

Dirk the Average posted:

Either way, it makes it less important to conquer Mali and build the Mosque of Djenne for the free 20% education access globally.

This sounds so wrong.

Star
Jul 15, 2005

Guerilla war struggle is a new entertainment.
Fallen Rib

Star posted:

Anyone tried out The Great Rework mod? It seems to have some good ideas but I’m afraid it’s the classic modding case of “cramming in everything you can think of”

My hunch was kind of right. There are some stuff in it that adds flavor, like notifications about books released by contemporary authors. There are also included sub-mods that make it easier to navigate your country. Among my favorites are additions to the outliner so that you can see what goods you have a surplus and a lack of in the market section, and the opinion of each IGnin the IG section. But there is also some bloat. Do we really need a journalists pop? You can build fortresses but they don’t seem to do much. And the game’s performance appears worse (not a big surprise really).

I’ll probably play out this session to try it out more but overall i think it’s better to go with smaller mods than this giant package.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Star posted:

But there is also some bloat. Do we really need a journalists pop?
The overlap between "thinks journalists are important enough as a class to need a new pop type" and "enjoys Victoria" has to be minuscule.

If I was gonna suggest adding a pop type, the most obvious one I can think of would be cops and other state security agents. The establishment of modern police forces was a major development that was happening during this period, and they're essentially a reactionary group of enforcers of upper class rule. The latter would mean relying on the police to keep your population in check would also build up a large reactionary force within your state, that wouldn't just disappear if you had say a revolution. Resulting in a revolution within a reactionary state being more likely to also become repressive in some fashion, even if that was not the initial goal.

In a less dramatic fashion, a weak state or dropping living standards for cops could also make the police turn rogue and start supplementing their wages through corruption or participating in criminal enterprises directly, resulting in an interest group that was directly opposed to trying to right the ship of state.

ThatBasqueGuy
Feb 14, 2013

someone introduce jojo to lazyb


Outer Heaven but its just the world news bulletin

Nitrousoxide
May 30, 2011

do not buy a oneplus phone



Well I completed the egalitarian questline as China. The last 15 years or so I pretty much let the game run in the background to wrap up the "reach the end date" quest as the country very slowly imploded from ballooning welfare payments. Due to a constantly increasing population base but completely exhausted the world's supply of some basic materials (lead, hardwood, fish) even after I got all the major suppliers of these goods in my market (Russia/ Most of South America including Brazil) there was essentially no more growth possible.

By the end of the game I had 14 billion GDP but it'd plataued a few years before and welfare payments made up 75% of my expenses.

Nitrousoxide fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Jan 3, 2023

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

ilitarist posted:

This sounds so wrong.

Yeah, monuments are, uh, interesting.

Fuligin
Oct 27, 2010

wait what the fuck??

they feel out of sync with the rest of the game's pseudo-sim design

Chatrapati
Nov 6, 2012
I'm in my first game of this, and I want to form Yemen as the Qasimids. I have a brilliant economy based off glass, but don't produce much else of note because I don't have access to many resources other than lead. I'd like to have more land in Arabia, but all of my neighbours are backed by either Britain or Egypt, who I just don't stand a chance against. What am I supposed to do?

It'd be cool if they do an Africa expansion. I really wanted to do an Ashanti game, but in the game as it is, there's no way you'd be able to fight the British as they did historically. I want to be able to raid forts to dissuade colonial powers from paying to maintain them, or make their maintenance politically unviable- then take over the coast! In the game now, you'd have to declare a formal war, possibly involving other powers, and face off against the full might of the British army, rather than just 100 sweaty, hungry and uncomfortable men who would much rather go home.

RabidWeasel
Aug 4, 2007

Cultures thrive on their myths and legends...and snuggles!

Fuligin posted:

they feel out of sync with the rest of the game's pseudo-sim design

There's a reason why they have their own game rule setting, I always set them to prestige only

Fuligin
Oct 27, 2010

wait what the fuck??

RabidWeasel posted:

There's a reason why they have their own game rule setting, I always set them to prestige only

ahh havent noticed that

ilitarist
Apr 26, 2016

illiterate and militarist

Fuligin posted:

they feel out of sync with the rest of the game's pseudo-sim design

Not even that. In, say, Civ series you can argue that building a wonder represents not just some specific monument but the desire of your people to concentrate on a specific cultural thing. If someone conquers The Great Library then these other people are now committed to be the biggest readers. Not quite a simulation but it makes some sense. EU4 monuments are usually limited by culture or religion. So you have less of absurd situations when it's optimal for Britain to conquer some African state to improve its university system.

Star
Jul 15, 2005

Guerilla war struggle is a new entertainment.
Fallen Rib

A Buttery Pastry posted:

The overlap between "thinks journalists are important enough as a class to need a new pop type" and "enjoys Victoria" has to be minuscule.
There’s even more than that. The mod adds a newspaper building that produces broadsheets and other goods that pops consumes. There are also various events where the newspapers print articles critical of the government and you need to decide whether to censure them or not. Like, I can understand what they are going for but there are so many other things that should have a higher priority.

Tomn
Aug 23, 2007

And the angel said unto him
"Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself."
But lo he could not. For the angel was hitting him with his own hands

Star posted:

Like, I can understand what they are going for but there are so many other things that should have a higher priority.

To be honest I feel like half the point of mods is to satisfy people with weird priorities. The kind of thing that would normally have a low priority for the actual devs but which someone is absolutely convinced is the most important thing in the world for whatever reason. Sometimes that means the modder thinks Paradox isn't fixing how warfare works fast enough, sometimes the modder thinks what the game truly needs is a full-fledged currency system, sometimes it means that the modder really thinks Queen Victoria needs a 3D anime model.

Agean90
Jun 28, 2008


this game has like 2 kinds of mods: UI/Bug fixes and incredibly niche poo poo only the modder cares about made with no real regard to how it gels with current systems.

is there a reason for the journalism building to need its own special pop type instead of just using clerks? No, but gently caress it why not more =betters I say as my computer chokes and catches fire in 1870.

Dr. Video Games 0031
Jul 17, 2004

just another day at the journalism factory with 40,000 of my fellow journalists

Demon_Corsair
Mar 22, 2004

Goodbye stealing souls, hello stealing booty.
How does one make any loving sense of the loving war system in this game?

I'm trying an Ethiopia run which involves a bunch of conquering, and it just seems completely random. Some attempts my 2x poo poo troops vs their poo poo troops just steam rolls them, and then I'll have to restart and the next game they just steam roll me.

Last time I was able to fight of 3 of my neighbors in one war, and this game one of those neighbors just rolled over me like I didn't even have an army.

How the gently caress do you manage any of this? Do you just hope and pray or have overwhelming tech?

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Agean90
Jun 28, 2008


The system the game uses to determine how many divisions each side gets is super fucky imo. Without a screenshot what's probably happened is that they had a series of battles where they had more troops, and so bigger attack/defense numbers than you and the one where you steamrolled them you were probably closer to parity.

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