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I try to modulate my construction sector expansion because for one thing, each level is another 5k people employed, but also construction goods are very, very expensive and absolutely brutalize your resource stocks. There's definitely an inflection point where population growth starts kicking your construction sector's rear end and it's around when you start getting progressive cultural and migration policies passed; last game I got prompted to take Multiculturalism and I swear to God I had like 5 mass migration events pop right after another and they just kept coming in. After that, it just felt impossible to catch up and my peasant to employed ratio went to hell again. For that matter, another bunch of things I realized: 1) Arable land attracts migrants, so if I got it right, I want few to no farms on where I want my industrial centers to be to keep people coming in. 2) For provinces with important resources (iron, coal, etc.), you also want few to no farms to keep immigration flowing in. 3) Likewise, you probably don't want your industries in these provinces because they'll be competing with the same labor pool, with fluctuations in prices causing labor to shift back and forth between consumer and producer, which may cause a rippling effect. 4) Sometimes labor just dries up thanks to migration and your state is no longer a good place to keep building a specific industry, economies of scale be damned 
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Apr 4, 2023 07:39
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toasterwarrior posted:I try to modulate my construction sector expansion because for one thing, each level is another 5k people employed, but also construction goods are very, very expensive and absolutely brutalize your resource stocks. There's definitely an inflection point where population growth starts kicking your construction sector's rear end and it's around when you start getting progressive cultural and migration policies passed; last game I got prompted to take Multiculturalism and I swear to God I had like 5 mass migration events pop right after another and they just kept coming in. After that, it just felt impossible to catch up and my peasant to employed ratio went to hell again. Also, you want your arms and munitions industries in your capital, as well as most of your barracks. Additionally, it's good if your capital has ports.
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Apr 4, 2023 07:58
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I had a fun but somewhat futile run as Krakow recently, got through about the first 30 years before I got sick of the political situation being so static. I just want a nice European war so I can break free from Austria! I wasn't focusing my economy on anything in particular and I was producing a lot of coal which was probably a mistake as I guess it was just letting Austria use my raw resources to build up. Next time I'll focus entirely on manufactured goods. I continue to be frustrated by the way the tech system works, I don't get any benefit from being highly literate and liberal unless I build 30+ universities. I guess I should just be building as many university levels as I can afford and maybe things will work out? Unfortunately Austria doesn't seem to like to develop its sulphur supply so it's hard to get a good paper industry going. p.s. Has anyone else noticed that Austria and Prussia fight over German leadership really early now every game and Prussia almost always loses? RabidWeasel fucked around with this message at 08:23 on Apr 4, 2023 |
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Apr 4, 2023 08:20
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Hadn't noticed until the other day, that the UI sound for clicking on trade routes from one end to the other isn't going through the central speaker, neat.
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Apr 4, 2023 08:34
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RabidWeasel posted:I continue to be frustrated by the way the tech system works, I don't get any benefit from being highly literate and liberal unless I build 30+ universities. I guess I should just be building as many university levels as I can afford and maybe things will work out? It's a difficult concept. On the one hand, 30 universities in a huge country like Russia should probably have less effect on the tech level of the country than 30 universities in a tiny country like Malta. On the other hand, you don't want tiny countries to automatically lead the world in technology because they scraped together the money for one university and half their total population works there. Maybe tech spread should be faster if your population is small, meaning literate, liberal small countries will often keep up with the tech curve, but won't be developing cutting edge technology like the Manhattan Project any time soon.
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Apr 4, 2023 09:20
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Gort posted:It's a difficult concept. On the one hand, 30 universities in a huge country like Russia should probably have less effect on the tech level of the country than 30 universities in a tiny country like Malta. Yeah, you want bigger countries to have an advantage overall as they should be technological "drivers", but it's also weird that very small countries have backwards tech purely by virtue of not being able to afford a huge university
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Apr 4, 2023 09:33
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Gort posted:Maybe tech spread should be faster if your population is small, meaning literate, liberal small countries will often keep up with the tech curve, but won't be developing cutting edge technology like the Manhattan Project any time soon. I really liked the concept of tech spreading by territory in Crusader Kings 2 and Victoria 2. It is much harder to justify it in Victorian age where trains and even air travel. Victoria 2 had provincial improvements like explosives in the mines and tractors in the fields appear naturally in places. Perhaps something like this could happen in Victoria 3, but we already have production methods. I guess they could add inertia to adopting new production methods mitigated by universities and communications, but they already kinda do this by requiring qualifications. Perhaps balancing the speed of POPs getting qualifications can make a university network a more interesting choice. It would probably also require additional migration law between no internal travel and allowing POPs to emigrate. I suspect slow learning POPs didn't feel good in playtests? You switch to new fancy engines, but now you suddenly need engineers, and you wait for years for them to come and when you try to speed it up by building universities you wait for a year till you get them built and find enough academics. ilitarist fucked around with this message at 09:44 on Apr 4, 2023 |
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Apr 4, 2023 09:42
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ilitarist posted:I really liked the concept of tech spreading by territory in Crusader Kings 2 and Victoria 2. It is much harder to justify it in Victorian age where trains and even air travel. Victoria 2 had provincial improvements like explosives in the mines and tractors in the fields appear naturally in places. Perhaps something like this could happen in Victoria 3, but we already have production methods. I guess they could add inertia to adopting new production methods mitigated by universities and communications, but they already kinda do this by requiring qualifications. Perhaps balancing the speed of POPs getting qualifications can make a university network a more interesting choice. It would probably also require additional migration law between no internal travel and allowing POPs to emigrate. I suspect slow learning POPs didn't feel good in playtests? You switch to new fancy engines, but now you suddenly need engineers, and you wait for years for them to come and when you try to speed it up by building universities you wait for a year till you get them built and find enough academics. Yeah, perhaps instead of the process being "pick tech to research -> wait years for the research to complete -> implement tech everywhere instantly and simultaneously" it should be "pick tech to research -> implement tech gradually over years as it spreads province-by-province across your country".
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Apr 4, 2023 10:00
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I think tech spread in the age of capitalism is very natural, actually. In this era (and our own), the main component of tech level is simply the amount of capital invested. More capital invested advances the cutting edge, but most tech spread is about being the rest of the world up to standard. I think representing techs as beginning in the capital or at a university center and spreading throughout your states at a rate proportional to overall literacy and education investment. And with spread to other countries in a similar way, perhaps modified by the amount of trade between the origin country and the destination country. You could also have events about investing in scientific conferences/exhibitions and a World’s Fair which all promote tech spread. This touches on another part of the game I feel deserves expansion, which industrialization in the provinces. It should be really hard to build a factory in the middle of nowhere. You should have to invest in infrastructure like railroads and ports before it is even possible. Your construction sector needs to be either limited by distance where it can build, or perhaps you can’t build factories until you have some level of urbanization or infrastructure or a combination. It just feels ahistorical to start building factories in freshly colonized frontier provinces.
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Apr 4, 2023 10:41
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The issue with those ideas is that they will probably be hard to represent and understand by the player. The game already has a lot happening under the hood. I can see some additional value on a provincial level that spreads due to the economic influence, but I struggle to even think of a proper name for it. Modernization? Innovativeness? That's why I think bringing it back to POPs would be cooler. Right now I feel the population is a little bit in the background, cause there are layers of abstraction hiding the population from you. Worrying about a lack of educated people is a legitimate concern at the time, and literacy or qualifications in Victoria 3 do not reflect this. It would also allow you to better feel the way your country changes, you've raised those engineers and academicians yourself, now deal with disgruntled people with money who want representation and silly things like work safety and pensions.
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Apr 4, 2023 10:57
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ilitarist posted:The issue with those ideas is that they will probably be hard to represent and understand by the player. The game already has a lot happening under the hood. I can see some additional value on a provincial level that spreads due to the economic influence, but I struggle to even think of a proper name for it. Modernization? Innovativeness? That's why I think bringing it back to POPs would be cooler. Right now I feel the population is a little bit in the background, cause there are layers of abstraction hiding the population from you. Worrying about a lack of educated people is a legitimate concern at the time, and literacy or qualifications in Victoria 3 do not reflect this. It would also allow you to better feel the way your country changes, you've raised those engineers and academicians yourself, now deal with disgruntled people with money who want representation and silly things like work safety and pensions. If your concern is lack of player understanding, tying a mechanic to a zillion pops is gonna be much harder to track than a mechanic that ties to a couple of dozen provinces. At least the provinces don't move.
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Apr 4, 2023 11:14
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I think the system mostly works well the way it is right now. Being able to research a tech and then immediately be able to take advantage of it is very gratifying from a gameplay point of view. It feels great to get atmospheric engines and then watch as your mining output goes up massively across the board. It's also very easy to engage with. The issue of small countries being more technologically backwards could be resolved with a boost to spread as Gort suggested. I think having technology slowly spread through your country would make it harder to plan around and it would make gaining new technologies less fun. I'm also not convinced that it would be more realistic than the current system—did new technologies really gradually spread province-by-province like that in this era? Maybe that works for Crusader Kings, but I dunno about Victoria. Dr. Video Games 0031 fucked around with this message at 11:26 on Apr 4, 2023 |
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Apr 4, 2023 11:23
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:I think having technology slowly spread through your country would make it harder to plan around and it would make gaining new technologies less fun. I'm also not convinced that it would be more realistic than the current system—did new technologies really gradually spread province-by-province like that in this era? Maybe that works for Crusader Kings, but I dunno about Victoria. Yeah, you're probably right. Maybe a throughput penalty for switching factory production methods would be more representative, in the same way switching production methods on barracks makes your soldiers suck for a while.
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Apr 4, 2023 11:28
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RabidWeasel posted:p.s. Has anyone else noticed that Austria and Prussia fight over German leadership really early now every game and Prussia almost always loses? I actually saw Prussia winning so hard that they also took Moravia, completely marginalized Austria and ate it later during the unification.
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Apr 4, 2023 11:48
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Unless I've missed something, small literate countries do get a ton of tech spread already. You need universities to direct your research, but the research points you don't end up utilizing in your universities already contribute to tech spread with the current mechanics. Are people actually seeing small, literate countries, with liberal laws stagnating? I haven't noticed it. A small illiterate country would have trouble (as would a large illiterate country), and a small literate country with repressive free speech laws is going to get a big penalty. So maybe there are a number of cases where a small country falls behind. But in those cases they probably should fall behind. I haven't looked too carefully at how the numbers end up sorting out, but if it's got unsatisfying results, the number to tweak is the 'innovation spillover' or whatever it is that boosts passive tech spread, not how effective universities are. As a player, being a smaller country with a necessarily smaller university system should actually mean you can't direct your research as effectively as a large country, but all your literacy should mean you'll more or less keep up with passive tech spread.
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Apr 4, 2023 22:26
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I'm so close to finishing the Grander Columbia achievement. I liberated Peru-Bolivia from French dominion by pouncing when France was pulled into one of the many turn-of-the-century world wars. I tossed French Guyana onto my war goals, got Brazil to join me, and then blew up convoys until the (otherwise overwhelming) European armies were reduced to chumps. Fast forward 5 Years and Peru-Bolivia is a puppet, and the only thing standing between me and Simon Bolivar's Second Dream is the crown colony in the Falkland Islands. I think I can abuse the AI's poor understanding of the naval system to convoy raid + naval invasion but idk; might also need to pull in the Americans or one of the European naval powers.
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Apr 4, 2023 22:30
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taking the Maldives is really easy, there will never be any substantial garrison on it and I'm not even certain the AI knows how to counter naval invade relevant wargoals yet, they'll prolly just suicide run somewhere close to your capitol until you ticker them out
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Apr 4, 2023 22:49
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Will switching to a council republic / anarchy tank my economy? I've been going for the economic domination run as Britain but, uh, some poo poo happened and now the monarchy is gone and everyone is radical. Also the drat achievement for expelling the French ambassadors won't pop, despite me having +50 approval with them when I do it.
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Apr 4, 2023 23:30
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:taking the Maldives is really easy, there will never be any substantial garrison on it and I'm not even certain the AI knows how to counter naval invade relevant wargoals yet, they'll prolly just suicide run somewhere close to your capitol until you ticker them out Also, only slightly related, but while we're on the topic of abusing naval invasions- I was able to take Sindh off the same really powerful France in a similar way. I couldn't push through their massive defensive armies, but I had good enough troops to defend more often than not, so I just kept invading the coast over, and over, and over again. Each time I'd land in a single province and occupy that province, and the French couldn't dislodge me. Each naval invasion gave me another province even though I couldn't get any with my land offensives. Eventually I had the whole coast and the French army starved. I never had anything close to naval supremacy- just like 20 ships to send over a tiny army over and over. If you're ever in a stalemate with a great power who's fighting overseas it's worth considering- just take the whole coastline by spamming tiny naval invasions. Albino Squirrel posted:Will switching to a council republic / anarchy tank my economy? I've been going for the economic domination run as Britain but, uh, some poo poo happened and now the monarchy is gone and everyone is radical. Otherwise it shouldn't fundamentally ruin whatever you've got going on. Your demands might shift wildly as the consumption of your capitalists is no longer driving your civilian economy, but your newly rich proletariat will have their own needs to drive your industry going forward.
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Apr 4, 2023 23:40
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Your demands should stay pretty even, really. Pop needs are a function of their SoL, and the non-universals are: - At SoL 20+, luxury foods--any three of meat/fruit/sugar/groceries--are demanded. (Sugar is unused before this, but the other three are also part of the basic foods basket.) - At SoL 30+, basic foods are no longer demanded, and grain and fish become solely useful as grocery inputs. - Below SoL 5, no durable goods are consumed. Between 5 and 9, only wood and furniture are consumed in the crude items subcategory. Between 10 and 14, crude items continues and household goods (furniture, paper, glass) begins. At 15, crude items turns off and luxury goods (lux clothes/furniture, porcelain, radios) turns on. At 45+, household goods turns off. - Luxury drinks turn on at 15. - Services turn on at 10. - Transportation (services, transportation, automobiles) turns on at 15. - Communication (services, transportation, telephones) turns on at 20. - Art (services, fine art) turns on at 30. Empirically, the industrialization needed to get unions strong enough usually results in around 15/25/40, and the implementation of co-ops pulls you to 25/35/nonexistent--so you'll have a bit more reason to PM higher-end foods maybe (though I find meat to previously be a questionably-useful product of fertilizer production), demand for wood will drop a bit, demand for paper and glass will rise especially if you were a bit below 15 for lower strata, as will demand for tea/coffee/wine, and your population will step in to subsidize radios just as you begin to want them as a military good/demand porcelain just as it becomes easily available as a glass byproduct and you're able to produce synthetic dye for it. The last few are just solved by modernizing urban center and railway PMs if they're not already.
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Apr 5, 2023 01:07
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Council republic itself will do nothing to your economy. It's either Command Economy or Cooperative Ownership that will change everything. One thing I noticed when going CE as Russia (full USSR) is that my population landed at around 25 SoL, and demand for services absolutely plummeted. This meant that if I didn't downgrade my urban centers, then their subsidization became my biggest expense. But if I did downgrade them, demand for steel, glass, and coal/electricity dropped. I ended up just subsidizing them for an ungodly amount of money because having -75% services is good for SoL and I could afford it (the amount of revenue generated by government shares was insane). That said, I think my SoL topped out at around 27. I had a few resource bottlenecks that were really hard to clear up, such as coffee and sulfur. (russians were obsessed with coffee, which made things trickier)
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Apr 5, 2023 02:13
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The demand curve is definitely off for a number of goods and it’s most glaring with services. Urban centres just don’t work very well imo; the market square production method line is a trap that craters service price, electrifying lights increases labour requirements for some reason, and swapping to cars uses transport as an input despite the fact that transport is exclusively provided by trains.
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Apr 5, 2023 02:32
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Lowering service price is often a good thing as long as it doesn't go below -50% or so. Past that, urban centers become unprofitable and expensive to subsidize. At around -30% to -40% seems to be a good spot for them where they can provide very cheap services for a good SoL boost while still being profitable, so I always try to upgrade urban centers to around that level. The sudden drop in demand when going CE did take me by surprise though.
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Apr 5, 2023 02:36
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service economy go brrr
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Apr 5, 2023 03:51
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I'm glad I managed to sneak one full playthrough under the wire before tommorrows dev diary that will render me incapable of playing until the next update.
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Apr 5, 2023 19:10
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Looks like law enactment is finally changing, I hope they make it different enacting a law between sieging down Parliament to an Autocrat declaring a law. https://twitter.com/PDXVictoria/status/1643614467530317827
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Apr 5, 2023 19:42
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I did it At game end, Grander Columbia had the 2nd highest standard of living and the 3rd highest GDP per capita. I spent the entire game as a protectorate of the united states (highly recommended since otherwise you have one of the worst starting positions in the game) and was *this* close to having the force projection to get independence peacefully. Alas the game ended
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Apr 5, 2023 20:16
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Working on Healthy Man of Europe atm and then taking another shot at Empire Under The Pun. I've tried the latter once, but abandoned the game when the British Raj formed before I could get any of the juice bits from the EIC.
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Apr 5, 2023 20:24
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I really hope they release more nation-specific achievements in future expansions/updates. The most fun I've had w/ the game is trying to solve the puzzles of the hard/v.hard achievements.
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Apr 5, 2023 20:33
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Gato The Elder posted:I really hope they release more nation-specific achievements in future expansions/updates. The most fun I've had w/ the game is trying to solve the puzzles of the hard/v.hard achievements. Funny, I always prefer the ones Paradox do, that can be done with any nation. Lets me set my own extra set of difficulty. E: Like the new set for EU4 looks abysmal to me.
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Apr 5, 2023 20:34
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The invention of telephones should allow you to import and export services.
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Apr 6, 2023 00:23
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whats even the point of services. Seems like they should be consumed more as a counterpoint to bureaucracy.
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Apr 6, 2023 01:47
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Probably dumb question but I assume cooperative ownership is a great way to increase SoL since your worker pops then start receiving dividends from their employment?
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Apr 6, 2023 04:07
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toasterwarrior posted:Probably dumb question but I assume cooperative ownership is a great way to increase SoL since your worker pops then start receiving dividends from their employment? i regret to inform you communism is op and must be nerfed
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Apr 6, 2023 04:17
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Legit forgot to enable it last game. I want to see just how much of a jump I get
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Apr 6, 2023 04:21
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toasterwarrior posted:Probably dumb question but I assume cooperative ownership is a great way to increase SoL since your worker pops then start receiving dividends from their employment? Yes, you're exactly correct. Cooperative Ownership is rocket fuel for SoL. To my knowledge Command Economy is still a trap, did that change significantly post 1.2?
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Apr 6, 2023 04:26
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DJ_Mindboggler posted:Yes, you're exactly correct. Cooperative Ownership is rocket fuel for SoL. To my knowledge Command Economy is still a trap, did that change significantly post 1.2? 1.2 changed CE significantly, yes. CE also boosts SoL now, but I hit a ceiling at 27 for my national average in my Russia campaign, largely due to some resource bottlenecks that limited my ability to overproduce some consumer goods. I can tell you that my income shot up dramatically when I flipped the Command Economy switch. Government shares means you now get all profits from all of your buildings. you will also lose revenue for any building losses, and your services demand will drop like a rock because apparently a large part of services demand comes from the upper classes (I assume this happens with cooperative ownership too). This means you'll have to subsidize all of your cities or downgrade them, with that second option reducing demand for some industrial goods. I was able to spend like 2 million subsidizing all of my cities and still earn over a million a week in surplus. With very low taxes, no consumption taxes, and max government and military spending. So yeah, from a pure income point of view, it's actually kind of bonkers. One other issue with CE though is that you can't really set wages for most buildings. I earned way more money than I could spend, and what I really wanted was to be able to just lift wages to boost everyone's SoL at the expense of my revenue, but that wasn't possible. I had max welfare, max minimum wages, max government/mil wages, but wages were still kinda low. Overall though, CE is definitely viable, and there may be ways around the factors limiting SoL that I failed to find in my campaign.
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Apr 6, 2023 05:44
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One interesting thing I've noticed in a recent game which I assumed wouldn't be possible due to how Paradox games tend to work: it's currently possible for a country to join a diplomatic play against a country that they're already at war with. Specifically I was playing Serbia; Wallachia started a play to declare independence from the OE with Russian support. I waited for war to break out and for the Ottoman balkans to get partially occupied, then started my own play for independence. Surprisingly, I was able to sway the Russians to aid me in exchange for Ottoman humiliation, which let me add an extra war goal in my favour and the OE gave in without a fight. I'm not sure what would have happened if they had pushed it to a war as it would have resulted in Russia being in two separate wars against the same target, which isn't typically something that can happen in a Paradox game.
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Apr 6, 2023 09:55
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https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/victoria-3-dev-diary-80-law-enactment-and-revolution-clock-in-1-3.1577105/ Looks like they're greatly expanding law changes and Revolutions, and implementing OPB's subsistence law changes. That should make an India/Russia/China playthrough better, what with their bottomless subsistence farms. I'm glad they realize the current situation is EU4's siege mechanics in a trenchcoat, and they're addressing a lot of legislative cheese that currently happens.
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Apr 6, 2023 15:11
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That is honestly one of the best dev diaries since release. Better law enacting, governing parties making demands of the player, more laws, revolutions being more unpredictable are all great changes.
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Apr 6, 2023 15:17
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