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Honestly the Alaska purchase should be more dynamic for sure. Have a way for a Canadian state or a resurgent Mexico to buy it too.
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Apr 1, 2023 07:41
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I've never actually gotten it despite playing as the US a bunch; either Russia didn't like me or they were never in debt.
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Apr 1, 2023 07:47
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I've never once seen a non-russian alaska in any game.
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Apr 1, 2023 08:28
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I've seen them buy it twice, and they also launched a conquest play against me as Russia when I was already at war, so I gave it to them.
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Apr 1, 2023 08:43
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Yeah, i've played 6+ full USA games, and despite parking a diplomat/watching their debt all game, Russia never meets the requirements.
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Apr 1, 2023 09:00
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For my part I asked because I was able to nab Alaska the instant that the Northwest was handed over to me. Even though they'd fought on Mexico's side to keep California out of my hands.
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Apr 1, 2023 09:21
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Fun thing about revolutions: the AI will delete all of its government buildings because it doesn't have any money. This seems probably not intended, it makes sense for a revolution to be damaging to infrastructure but it shouldn't be goodbye level 30 university and level 30 gov admin building because of a few months of fighting On a related note: next time I won't take that "let's just murder the king" event even if it was super narratively satisfying. Unfortunately the PB got really strong in this playthrough, I'm not sure why. I passed elected bureaucrats but even so they went from irrelevant to regularly being at 20%+ clout. Possibly because I made the aristocracy and church weak pretty quickly this game all of the regressive pops went to the same IG?
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Apr 1, 2023 13:21
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It would probably make sense for the ongoing revolution to have extra low wages, but keeping most of the jobs. This way you'll get a lot of poor miserable angry people when you end the revolution, not just a ruined infrastructure.
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Apr 1, 2023 13:36
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Quick question: when do you all slack off high taxes? I almost always start with maximum taxes and consumer goods I can afford (with a few Promote Social Mobility in choice states to start ramping up literacy). What's everyone's stopping point when they think it's time to give back a bit? First signs of turmoil? After opening borders and reducing discrimination for immigration?
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Apr 1, 2023 17:58
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I only go up to high taxes if I suddenly get expenses I wasn't planning for (conquered a bunch of construction sectors, suddenly hit by an event that makes me pay things, have to go to an expensive war).
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Apr 1, 2023 18:12
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Same. To me tax changes only look worth it in extreme situations.
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Apr 1, 2023 18:36
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Man, forming socialist Russia is hard. Can't seem to get enough people into trade unions at all
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Apr 1, 2023 18:48
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Are temporary throughput bonuses from events or decrees worth it? I always avoided them because I figured they’d inevitably just cause a bunch of radicalism once the effects wear off and revenues drop.
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Apr 1, 2023 19:03
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Dayton Sports Bar posted:Are temporary throughput bonuses from events or decrees worth it? I always avoided them because I figured they’d inevitably just cause a bunch of radicalism once the effects wear off and revenues drop.
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Apr 1, 2023 19:58
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dead gay comedy forums posted:Man, forming socialist Russia is hard. Can't seem to get enough people into trade unions at all I didn’t seem to have too much trouble but mine was an intelligentsia and armed forces coalition. AKA the Bolsheviks, whereas my trade unions stuck with the Mensheviks. I then pivoted hard into anarchism when given the choice and ended the game by splitting the empire up into several socialist, anarchist and communist countries mostly under my thumb (Ukraine being the main exception becoming the free states and refusing any subjugation but willing to be bribed with debt clearing offers) just before the clock ticked to the end. Surprisingly funny and accurate that it ended up this way with random rebellions out east for nationalist reasons and a civil war I had to contend with early in. If you are aiming for democratic socialism I imagine it’s harder to get the trade union more powerful than the military or intelligentsia combined.
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Apr 1, 2023 20:13
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Dayton Sports Bar posted:Are temporary throughput bonuses from events or decrees worth it? I always avoided them because I figured they’d inevitably just cause a bunch of radicalism once the effects wear off and revenues drop. The smaller your country, the better decrees are. I'm usually running manufacturing, agriculture and 1-2 resource decrees and only drop out of them when authority becomes scarce. If it's a bonus from an event, I always pick the research option over the temporary boost.
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Apr 1, 2023 20:14
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ilitarist posted:Same. To me tax changes only look worth it in extreme situations. Why? The bonus industrialisation speed you get from being able to crank two to three times the amount of construction sectors without going in a debt spiral is huge. Is there any reason to want to go slower? Honestly asking in case I missed a big obvious mechanic.
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Apr 1, 2023 22:06
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Popoto posted:Why? Once you start hitting resource/population bottlenecks, construction speed is less important than the legitimacy/SoL boost from lower taxes. Then they're just something you increase in case of a long war. Early game it's more of a balancing act, but unless your nation is pretty homogenous going max taxes might still be suboptimal.
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Apr 1, 2023 22:21
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The wealth of your pops drives consumption which ultimately determines how much demand you have inside your market for everything except military goods and direct government consumption (universities, construction, etc). You actually want your pops to keep as much of their money as possible so that they can spend it on things, but you need do money to build things to produce supply as well. Also I like to keep my economy ticking over in such a way that if I need to suddenly raise conscripts and build up the military quickly for some reason I'm not already too far in debt to make it viable to pivot
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Apr 1, 2023 22:31
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RabidWeasel posted:The wealth of your pops drives consumption which ultimately determines how much demand you have inside your market for everything except military goods and direct government consumption (universities, construction, etc). You actually want your pops to keep as much of their money as possible so that they can spend it on things, but you need do money to build things to produce supply as well. I understand that well, but at the beginning you have no consumer industry anyway they can take advantage of. Until that is built properly, it stands to reason to jack taxes to the max for a decade or two while you set your industry up and research the production methods that will enable everyone to have access to cheaper goods, no? That’s why I was wondering when exactly people feel it’s a proper time to lower taxes and allow your pops to start taking advantage of the industry you’ve built for them.
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Apr 1, 2023 22:49
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eh depends. You can not jack prices up and just do consumption taxes before switching over to more rational methods of taxation. I personally skip over entirely to the second-to-last tax law whenever my industry is at a good place and has capitalists.
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Apr 2, 2023 00:21
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Definitely add some consumption taxes and crank up the taxes to at least high in the early game so you can get the snowball rolling earlier. I usually lower taxes again when I get a better tax law.Dayton Sports Bar posted:Are temporary throughput bonuses from events or decrees worth it? I always avoided them because I figured they’d inevitably just cause a bunch of radicalism once the effects wear off and revenues drop. Throughput bonuses are great and should be taken advantage of, especially early in the game. If you only have one main resource-producing state, then using the resource decree there makes too much sense not to do. The atmospheric engine journal entry bonus can be great too, though getting a water-boiler research boost is also worth it if your mines are already productive enough. Radicalism is a total non-issue here either way.
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Apr 2, 2023 00:38
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Tankbuster posted:eh depends. You can not jack prices up and just do consumption taxes before switching over to more rational methods of taxation. I personally skip over entirely to the second-to-last tax law whenever my industry is at a good place and has capitalists. Yeah, this is what I do, in the early game I tend to use the high / low tax options as just "oh poo poo I need more money temporarily" or "I am 5 points away from having a more legitimate government".
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Apr 2, 2023 10:46
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Popoto posted:Why? It’s better to have happy people and spending through your gold surplus than it is to have angry people and making money, in one part because turmoil will hurt your production, also because debt is good for growing your GDP.
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Apr 2, 2023 12:21
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:debt is good for growing your GDP. Note that this distinctly is not true if you're unrecognised, unrecognised powers have a huge interest pentalty Edit: The AI is definitely getting better, Russia invaded Sicily in a recent game of mine specifically to get sulphur, I was inside the Russian market and it went from consistently having shortages to being an exporter RabidWeasel fucked around with this message at 15:44 on Apr 2, 2023 |
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Apr 2, 2023 15:28
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Been doing a laboratory run: I've been jacking up taxes in the game to have more radicals to try to force movements and issues, but doesn't seem to have a massive effect like landowners going ballistic. Maybe more consumption taxes?
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Apr 2, 2023 18:16
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:It’s better to have happy people and spending through your gold surplus than it is to have angry people and making money, in one part because turmoil will hurt your production, also because debt is good for growing your GDP. oh yeah debt good. when i said debt spiral i meant spending more than you're gaining in GDP
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Apr 2, 2023 18:47
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dead gay comedy forums posted:Been doing a laboratory run: I've been jacking up taxes in the game to have more radicals to try to force movements and issues, but doesn't seem to have a massive effect like landowners going ballistic. Maybe more consumption taxes? In order to do that you'd have to get them under their expected SOL, which is very very hard to do with taxes in my experience. TBH I don't know how one would go about deliberately increasing Radicalism, I've wanted to do that to Landowners in quite a few games in EIC where I knew Big Daddy GB would help me put them in the ground for their insolence, but they keep just stopping my laws politely!
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Apr 2, 2023 19:00
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Raising taxes on the upper class will slow the rate at which they become loyalists, but probably won't increase radicalism directly. You'll just get the more poor people angry. If you want to piss off the rich try passing a law that they hate, that usually gets them radicalized in my experience. If you have high taxes and pass laws they hate then they'll turn radical because they won't be raising their SoL to counteract the radicalism from the angry IG.
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Apr 2, 2023 19:07
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Jamsque posted:The lack of stockpiles (especially for strategic goods) is the biggest hole in the economic simulation of the game imo. I hope they get to it sooner rather than later, although I assume it will end up as a feature in a paid DLC rather than just a patch. The way stockpiling is handled is much more in line with how it actually works. Eventually you hit the dregs and start using lower and lower quality stuff. I mean it's still way too generous for military stuff which should be "It's been six months, each soldier is issued six bullets" if you fully mobilize, but you know, it beats viccy2 where you didn't have any supply issues.
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Apr 4, 2023 02:52
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So I went for Spicier Chile this time around and was very happy with the result: eating Argentina, Peru, and Bolivia while subjugating the rest of the continent apart from the Euro holdouts during endgame when I was running the clock to 1936. That said, I managed to beat both the USA and GB through the power of war crimes and tanks, taking the land they seem to always colonize to my southeast. Love to have a 400 brigade military fighting drat near every Great Power (lotta infamy for subjugating Brazil) and mostly winning thanks to sheer tech advantage. Stuff I did differently or noticed: 1) Staying in my own market was actually pretty nice, not having my income subject to fluctuations or the market owner/volunteer joinees going "gently caress this, you're/I'm out" was good for keeping track of what to build. It helps that South America is pretty self-sustaining; the only thing you don't have access to is opium. This also meant going to war with the Europeans meant I didn't get hosed by supply issues since I had an autarky going on. 2) On that note, do not switch to the level three military medical thingy without your own opium sources. Had to reload when I realized I had it on when going to war with GB; clearly I didn't have the navy to protect my convoys shipping in opium from SEA and China, and I ended up getting rolled when my brigades were fighting at half-effectiveness. 3) Is it me or does going Council Republic guarantee an inevitable civil war when every other non-leftist IG starts poo poo? I actually had a very strong socialist-democratic presidency that had as much progressive laws as possible while the elections were always the leftist bloc (Trade Unions, Intelligentsia, and Rural Folk teaming up without issue, a true leftist fantasy :v) stomping the gently caress out of the Conservatives and Nationalists, and while I went CR when presented with the journal quest to do so, I wonder if I could've just kept it going indefinitely and spared myself the civil war. Especially annoying when you can't consolidate all your brigades into the capital state for various reasons. 4) As much as I like consolidating industries into one state for the economies of scale bonus, as Chile I found this eventually impractical for a bunch of reasons: either I run out of labor and getting people to come in means authority I can't spare, or I own other states where labor is migrating to en masse regardless of what I do (unincorporated, plenty of arable land, etc.) that I am better off just building it there to address supply issues ASAP instead of trying to min-max like crazy. 5) On a related note, I had a brutal confluence of bad poo poo when I conquered Peru-Bolivia and took La Paz with it's 1M inhabitants. The issue: La Paz has both the Andes and the Amazon Rainforest state traits, slowing down construction by 50%. Getting poo poo built there even with steel-frames, road infrastructure decree, and around 250 construction points took a lot of time. 6) When I went to war with America to kick them out of South America, we were basically in this insane loving back and forth hellwar that brought my state to 100 devastation because despite my raw tech advantage, they just had so many troops to throw into the meatgrinder that it took me researching chemical weapons to finally smoke them out for good. Very annoying, the worst part being how brigades seem to hang on until the very last man, taking days to kill off a hundred guys or whatever. 7) Turns out Dominions don't give you military access and you can somehow still violate their sovereignty and get them to go to war against you :v 8) Is it even possible to have a competitive naval force against Britain if you're not already one of the big boys from the jump? I didn't even bother, I just massed troops and made them as good as possible since AFAIK if there's a front active enemies can always deploy their dudes directly to it. But yeah, fun game, will try another nation now. I was thinking trying Belgium on recommendation from a friend but TBH I'm not a fan of colonizing outside of the continent because I get overwhelmed and Belgium doesn't have the natural resources to run a semi-autarky. Maybe when they add the ability to invest in other countries so getting them into your market and fighting to keep them there is more valuable. ADD: Also, drat, this game really needs to revamp its UI; I want to be able to tell how many people are employed in a building relative to available labor (and eligibility) at a glance, and how many goods am I expected to get per building level at a glance, not after I hover over the thing or a nested tooltip. Just QoL poo poo, you know? toasterwarrior fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Apr 4, 2023 |
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Apr 4, 2023 02:58
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toasterwarrior posted:3) Is it me or does going Council Republic guarantee an inevitable civil war when every other non-leftist IG starts poo poo? I actually had a very strong socialist-democratic presidency that had as much progressive laws as possible while the elections were always the leftist bloc (Trade Unions, Intelligentsia, and Rural Folk teaming up without issue, a true leftist fantasy :v) stomping the gently caress out of the Conservatives and Nationalists, and while I went CR when presented with the journal quest to do so, I wonder if I could've just kept it going indefinitely and spared myself the civil war. Especially annoying when you can't consolidate all your brigades into the capital state for various reasons. Council Republic, well, c'est la lutte finale.  It essentially removes every IG except unions/army/intellectuals/peasantry from the game by locking out the PMs that employ workers who lean elsewhere or pay enough to give them outsized clout, the petite bourgeoisie can occasionally pip up to like 5% influence but every building that they work at comes with ten times as many laborers earning nearly as much. You can usually find a window where the rest have just fallen out of unrest about something else and won't sign on to new unrest, or are pleased by an event, but they should be pissed because a normal population pane a month or two after passing it locates ten upper-strata citizens in your entire country clinging to a 7.5 SoL. Navy you can definitely catch up on, though. The AI's a lot better about microing them to useful places than I find appealing, kind of shades of HoI4 air zones, but the thing about a cap per state is that even if they try to match you ship-for-ship, something I haven't really seen, the British eventually run out of populated states to build in compared to other historical naval powers.
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Apr 4, 2023 04:23
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I haven't found navy that hard to catch up in if you already have the prerequisite techs and economic base (and portage, obv). Can take a bit of leadup with long training times but AI isn't good at pressing its advantage in those sort of races anyhow
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Apr 4, 2023 05:43
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I thought I was on track for the “grander columbia” achievement. And then I remembered the Falkland Islands ☹️ And I guess I need to do something about Peru-Bolivia being a French dominion. This sucks!
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Apr 4, 2023 06:22
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Is there any way to determine what’s causing a drop in “shipping lane effectiveness”? My poor economy =(
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Apr 4, 2023 06:50
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Gato The Elder posted:Is there any way to determine what’s causing a drop in “shipping lane effectiveness”? My poor economy =( Do you have enough convoys? Shipping lane effectiveness goes down once you go into the negatives on convoys. Build more ports and upgrade them to make sure you have enough. You can also lose a lot of convoys by having your shipping lanes raided during war, so make sure you defend your shipping lanes.
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Apr 4, 2023 06:54
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Gato The Elder posted:Is there any way to determine what’s causing a drop in “shipping lane effectiveness”? My poor economy =( Lack of convoys or hostile power in a war harassing convoys. For the former, build more ports (make sure to also build more shipyards if this causes a clipper/steamer shortage as well). For the latter, especially if you have a lot of trade routes, using your navy to intercept convoy harassing fleets is kind of a waste of time, just try to bring the war to a quick conclusion.
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Apr 4, 2023 06:55
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:It’s better to have happy people and spending through your gold surplus than it is to have angry people and making money, in one part because turmoil will hurt your production, also because debt is good for growing your GDP. Yeah, the thing about money in this game is that, perhaps counter-intuitively, you shouldn't think of it as a currency you stockpile and then spend. It is, in fact, what it says it is in game: a budget. With that mindset, the primary goal in managing your budget isn't "making the most money" it's simply "don't go bankrupt" which is an easier goal to accomplish than it sounds. If you have a massive stockpile of money that isn't being earmarked for something in the near future (an expensive long war for example) then something went wrong because every pound you make is a pound that should be spent on making your economy better. Broadly speaking, population, or more specifically, happy population is the asset stockpile you should be using to benchmark your progress, as that drives every other system in this game.
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Apr 4, 2023 07:26
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I'm weary of going into debt too much because I notice I quickly reach a point where the interest payments are larger than my deficit, meaning I would not be in the red if I didn't have debt, and I could spend more money
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Apr 4, 2023 07:34
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| # ? May 28, 2024 09:31 |
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It's still true though that running high taxes in the early stages of the game to kickstart your economy can lead to a faster snowballing. The goal of raising taxes isn't to accrue more money, it's to give you a bigger budget to spend on construction. As another goon already pointed out, demand for consumer goods is low in the beginning anyway, and the main thing you're building towards is a solid foundation for your heavy industries. You can make your people happy with lower taxes later, but in the early game that money is better spent on more construction than unnecessary poo poo like "clothes" or "food." Your country's populace will thank you later, I swear. This is how I approach almost all of my campaigns, and I've never run out of demand in the early game, nor do I ever run into serious turmoil issues. And even if a few states do get turmoil, you counteract that by being able to support way more construction sectors at once.
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Apr 4, 2023 07:35
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