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gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

Minenfeld! posted:

I'd call Workers & Resources more of a nation-builder than strictly a city-builder. It's more like...good Tropico, maybe?

while the scope/scale of W&R is comparable to a small Eastern European nation (and indeed that is the premise), it's not exactly a nation-builder in the sense that politics are mostly omitted, as compared to even something like Tropico.

that said, it would be pretty funny if it did introduce things like a top-down demand to set-up a steel industry within x years, or you were condemned for being revisionist as you use your internal industries to run a car export industry to the West.

my dad posted:

Well that's a game I haven't heard of since forever. Is it still being actively developed, or did it reach a stable state?

it hit 1.0 a while back, but is still getting regular updates. On April 5th the dev added "forced vassalization" as a selectable wargoal.

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Mandoric
Mar 15, 2003
Yeah, in terms of the actual gameplay while W&R isn't precisely a citybuilder it's more citybuilder+Factorio (that is, both conceptually and physically optimizing production chains and their supporting logistics) than anything else.Your domestic policy choices beyond which buildings you plop and which you don't are a few flat +healths or so on in the research tree, and your foreign policy is limited to managing import/export deals, that is, juggling two trade currencies such that you can always afford to buy from the better option if you need to buy.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy
This does make me want to go back to Tropico [1] and see if learned concepts still apply: I think it would be important to load up on lots of construction and teamster capacity, and then really try to move up the value chain to take advantage of more valuable goods.

Parakeet vs. Phone
Nov 6, 2009

gradenko_2000 posted:

This does make me want to go back to Tropico [1] and see if learned concepts still apply: I think it would be important to load up on lots of construction and teamster capacity, and then really try to move up the value chain to take advantage of more valuable goods.

Not sure about the 1st one, since I think it has problems with dealing with scale. I mostly remember stuff taking forever in the 1st one from people have to walk everywhere. Or maybe I just sucked at the game as a kid. Each teamster and construction office holds a lot of people so you usually don't need to bulk up on them too much, since you'd rather your limited population be doing valuable work. Not having to build roads or basic shacks (people build their own shanty towns) really cuts down on construction busy work. But running low on teamsters is an easy way to gridlock an economy since you want the docks as full as possible at all times. General rule is still true though unless you're doing a gimmick. Take advantage of mining natural resources or farming cash crops for early game cash. Get a high school set up so that you can have enough factory workers and stop having to pay for experts to immigrate, then use factories to get crazy value add and make the big bucks.

I think the later games added imports in to even let you become a specialized producer who just buys the raw materials and provides the labor.

Tropico still strikes me as kind of an odd duck. It's agent focused in a really interesting way. All the people have factions and skill levels and problem faction people exist on the actual map to be tracked, arrested, killed, etc. The population is also so low that it's even reasonable to mentally keep track of some of your population. They live in specific houses and you can theoretically target neighborhoods with buildings and effects to influence people and make them change factions. But there's almost never a reason to get that granular with the game. You just treat it like a typical city builder unless you're bored and loving around or doing one of the challenges that the sequels introduced. And the skill system doesn't matter half of the time because people switch jobs way too easily.

John Charity Spring
Nov 4, 2009

SCREEEEE
Just going to throw in an anti-recommendation for Suzerain. I found it really badly written. Its worldbuilding is facile (oh this neighbouring Asiatic country is called Yekrut, I see! how novel) and it loves to throw in cringy memes as an attempt at humour. The characters are very flat and the prose alternates between over-written and very basic.

On top of that it pretty much ends when it feels like it's finally getting going, which I understand is part of the point of it but I didn't get on with it at all. Even though 'visual novel with management trappings about Cold War politics' should be extremely my poo poo.

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3
Nov 15, 2003
if nothing else Suzerain teaches you that the ministries of education and health are where leftists go to get crushed

Bro Dad
Mar 26, 2010


Typo posted:


new DLC came out where you play as the king of Not-1960s Iran

it's really more of a united gulf monarchy that leased out kuwait to iraq and is extremely mad about qatar

also the writing is good actually

Minenfeld!
Aug 21, 2012



gradenko_2000 posted:

while the scope/scale of W&R is comparable to a small Eastern European nation (and indeed that is the premise), it's not exactly a nation-builder in the sense that politics are mostly omitted, as compared to even something like Tropico.

that said, it would be pretty funny if it did introduce things like a top-down demand to set-up a steel industry within x years, or you were condemned for being revisionist as you use your internal industries to run a car export industry to the West.

This is true, I wasn't even thinking in terms of managing the political aspects of a nation. It's a very large scale city/economy/logistics sim I suppose. I just really like it because it gives you reasonable and organic reasons for why you build things and where. The way other city builders just let you start from scratch with no sense of geographic and spatial reasoning always bugged me even before I could even articulate it. Since becoming a transportation planner, all these aspects of our built environment have taken on new meaning and I very much appreciate having these challenges to address in a game.

And it gives me further insight into socialist planning, too, as a bonus.

FrancisFukyomama
Feb 4, 2019

they should make a futuristic cybersyn expansion where you can make automated supply chains and poo poo

Danann
Aug 4, 2013

I have a feeling that the W&R devs will just lazily reuse state department declarations and Falun gong news about the PRC though.

BearsBearsBears
Aug 4, 2022

Danann posted:

I have a feeling that the W&R devs will just lazily reuse state department declarations and Falun gong news about the PRC though.

What makes you say that? I would have assumed their politics to be good.

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3
Nov 15, 2003
They have a Ukraine DLC that raises money for Ukraine.

Mandoric
Mar 15, 2003
The vibe I get is that whether they're doing ostalgie or ironic ostalgie isn't a settled question among the dev team, and that probably contributes to why the explicit political sim is limited to flavor text and having secret police but their sole job is to assign credit scores.

BearsBearsBears
Aug 4, 2022

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:

They have a Ukraine DLC that raises money for Ukraine.

Looks like the DLC is for the Ukrainian Red Cross so that's not too bad. I do see the normal lib-brain thing.

quote:

The developers of this game are against any war. We never wanted to present our political views and we are tolerant of any political opinions. But when bombs start exploding, politics is over. We are strictly against the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Wow, it would have been nice if you spoke out when Ukraine was bombing Ukrainians.


Mandoric posted:

The vibe I get is that whether they're doing ostalgie or ironic ostalgie isn't a settled question among the dev team, and that probably contributes to why the explicit political sim is limited to flavor text and having secret police but their sole job is to assign credit scores.

That makes a lot of sense. What do the credit scores even do for the citizens?

Mandoric
Mar 15, 2003

BearsBearsBears posted:

That makes a lot of sense. What do the credit scores even do for the citizens?

Basically, every citizen has a "loyalty" score that's a near-final near-multiplier on a lot of activities--highly loyal citizens are Stakhanovites, loyal radio broadcasters multiply the positive effect of broadcasts on listeners' loyalty, loyal or disloyal teachers straight-up pull their students to their level, when a want goes unsatisfied for long enough to trigger rolling to save vs. deciding to emigrate it heavily modifies the result of the roll.

This value trends down over time, as the only things which raise it are education by a loyal teacher, broadcast by a loyal anchor, and a small tick when walking past monuments, while any need or want going ignored lowers it. There's probably also a background decay. Overall average loyalty is available from the beginning, as are warning popups that individual residential buildings are exceptionally disloyal, but individuals cannot be viewed nor does automated filtering of them (ie, if you want only loyal teachers so every schoolkid pops out at 50% or 60%) function ("unknown" is considered to ==100%.)

Enter the secret police, who are flavored such that you have to build something suspiciously Lubyanka-looking for as their headquarters to drive around town placing bugs in each apartment and replacing them when discovered. That's the ironic half.

The unironic half is that the net produce of their actions is just pinning the loyalty score, as a kind of vibes check or social credit score, to a citizen's sheet and letting builtin employment/apartment-moving filters work on them. You're not hauling the 10%s off to the basement of the secret police building, just not hiring them to teach elementary school, moving them into the flats by the aircraft plant that are most likely to path there for work, or in the very lategame putting them at the front of the list for a new Lada; the gameplay implementation is very much, in my impression, East Germany as it actually existed as a functioning society that's notably chiller on the surveillance-and-binning that we are in 2020s America, rather than as it existed in Hollywood and political emigré rants.

So yeah, that's the tension and why I think there's a split.

Arven
Sep 23, 2007
If W&R ever releases the expansion pack they announced a while back where you can play a nation in different geographic areas (South Asia, Middle East, Siberia) I imagine the framework will exist for different systems an buildings to be tied to a map type. If that's the case, we'll probably see all kinds of neat things from the modding community like moon bases.

Mister Bates
Aug 4, 2010
The crime and justice system is also depicted in a surprisingly idealistic way, in that crime is mostly a social problem and you can do a lot to mitigate it by meeting everyone's needs and keeping them happy and loyal - and the prisons themselves can also easily be made ridiculously pleasant rehabilitation-focused facilities if you so choose, with a lot of fine control over exactly how the prison is managed. You can use prisoners for forced labor if you so choose, but to be honest there's very little reason to.

my dad
Oct 17, 2012

this shall be humorous
I don't think I'll ever get used to the Dominions devs replying to things by editing their answer into your posts.

my dad
Oct 17, 2012

this shall be humorous

Mister Bates posted:

The crime and justice system is also depicted in a surprisingly idealistic way, in that crime is mostly a social problem and you can do a lot to mitigate it by meeting everyone's needs and keeping them happy and loyal - and the prisons themselves can also easily be made ridiculously pleasant rehabilitation-focused facilities if you so choose, with a lot of fine control over exactly how the prison is managed. You can use prisoners for forced labor if you so choose, but to be honest there's very little reason to.

The way the leatherworks factory used to work in my hometown is that it had a lot of jobs reserved for ex convicts. It's a tough, stinking job, but it was also the best paid blue collar work in town. You weren't forced to stick to that job, but it was a guaranteed well paid job for you, with all the associated benefits of socialist self-management, as long as you didn't go back to whatever landed you in prison in the first place. And having that job in your work history without any major issues helped overcome the stigma of your prison time when you applied to get another job.
As far as I'm aware, it legitimately contribued to a continuation of rehabilitation.

my dad has issued a correction as of 15:09 on Apr 16, 2024

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

my dad posted:

I don't think I'll ever get used to the Dominions devs replying to things by editing their answer into your posts.

omg lol imagine if that's how mods here operated

disgusting

Lostconfused
Oct 1, 2008






Tankbuster
Oct 1, 2021

my dad posted:

The way the leatherworks factory used to work in my hometown is that it had a lot of jobs reserved for ex convicts. It's a tough, stinking job, but it was also the best paid blue collar work in town. You weren't forced to stick to that job, but it was a guaranteed well paid job for you, with all the associated benefits of socialist self-management, as long as you didn't go back to whatever landed you in prison in the first place. And having that job in your work history without any major issues helped overcome the stigma of your prison time when you applied to get another job.
As far as I'm aware, it legitimately contribued to a continuation of rehabilitation.

One of my uncles who went to jail for murder became a nurse in prison and was declared rehabilitated/pardoned during covid. He kinda wants to go back now. :lol: :lmao:

sullat
Jan 9, 2012

gradenko_2000 posted:

This does make me want to go back to Tropico [1] and see if learned concepts still apply: I think it would be important to load up on lots of construction and teamster capacity, and then really try to move up the value chain to take advantage of more valuable goods.

Be sure to pay your teamsters and dockworkers $2-4 more than other jobs otherwise you'll have a bunch of dockworkers quit and leave $200,000 worth of goods on the quay to go and become strippers or something.

For construction, basically keep bulldozing & rebuilding the construction shops closer to where you're developing since time spent walking from the office to the jobsite counts as working time (so does time spent walking from home to the office in the first place but you're less able to control for that).

I usually rushed getting the trade mission to the USSR ASAP since it cuts the price of housing in half which is a really great deal, the USA's mission (half price airports and powerplants) is more of a late game thing and really only benefits the capitalists and tourists anyway.

It is funny how catering to the capitalists usually results in having to cheat in elections, oppress the people and often results in having to flee the island in a leaky boat with a suitcase of cash regardless while catering to the communists results in an easy victory.

Parakeet vs. Phone
Nov 6, 2009

sullat posted:

Be sure to pay your teamsters and dockworkers $2-4 more than other jobs otherwise you'll have a bunch of dockworkers quit and leave $200,000 worth of goods on the quay to go and become strippers or something.

For construction, basically keep bulldozing & rebuilding the construction shops closer to where you're developing since time spent walking from the office to the jobsite counts as working time (so does time spent walking from home to the office in the first place but you're less able to control for that).

I usually rushed getting the trade mission to the USSR ASAP since it cuts the price of housing in half which is a really great deal, the USA's mission (half price airports and powerplants) is more of a late game thing and really only benefits the capitalists and tourists anyway.

It is funny how catering to the capitalists usually results in having to cheat in elections, oppress the people and often results in having to flee the island in a leaky boat with a suitcase of cash regardless while catering to the communists results in an easy victory.

Yeah, Teamsters and Dockworkers are the heart of the island. One of the other reasons capitalism plays suck is that I think you're supposed to pay basic labor less than college educated people to keep the capitalist faction happy, and man, I'm sorry for the doctors but it's way more important that that load of tinned fish makes it to the dock.

Part of the issue is that the 1st game struggles really hard with the split between capitalism and communism. Which is partly a problem because you're always going to be some form of communist since you're doing top-down central planning in the economy unless you basically become a small business tyrant at an island scale. So "capitalism" is just arbitrarily introducing income inequality and leaning into tourism and a general sense of creating and nurturing a rich class over top of a poor class...which, fair enough. But the benefits of capitalism compared to communism in 1 are really lopsided unless you're just doing it as a challenge. Just giving everybody homes with no rent/rent=maintencance and jobs while profiting off of your industry is much easier.

The later games did a little better job of modeling the differences by making the capitalism path more a question of whether you're struggling and reaping the benefits or letting foreign money come in and put you under boot in return for money in hand. Although from memory the foreign investment systems were still kind of rough.

Funny that I remember my young teen or pre-teen self reading the original Tropico manual which carefully laid out all the political and faction definitions and asking my parents why exactly communism was so bad. And that it seemed to make a lot of sense in developing the island :).

For an older game series with some kind of questionable bits to it, it is funny that it is so right about the feel of it. Communism means boring but fine tenement buildings and eventually nice apartment buildings once you can afford it and some reasonable entertainment options with strong social services and steady development of industry. You basically just have to lie, cheat and steal to keep everybody barely in line and then it gets easier once things start to fall in. Capitalism is selling yourself out to tourists or crushing workers, relying on a bunch of soldiers or the US army base to keep your rear end safe and having shanty towns and bunkers tucked away somewhere while you build artisanal houses and mansions for the top 20% or so. Neat.

Typo
Aug 19, 2009

Chernigov Military Aviation Lyceum
The Fighting Slowpokes

gradenko_2000 posted:

This does make me want to go back to Tropico [1] and see if learned concepts still apply: I think it would be important to load up on lots of construction and teamster capacity, and then really try to move up the value chain to take advantage of more valuable goods.

the way you win tropico 1 is to build 1 rum factory and several sugar plantations as your source of income. The sugar can be sold directly as cash crop until your factory is up and running. You can pay to import high-school educated workers for said factory to get it up and running asap w/o building ur own school to train workers

then it doesn't matter which economic model you are running because the rum factory produces so much $$$ you can do w/e you want

Typo has issued a correction as of 21:28 on Apr 17, 2024

BearsBearsBears
Aug 4, 2022
Playing as Wallachia in Victoria 3. I was interested because it's the only country in Europe that gets the unique Sericulture technology (+25% silk). Honestly still not sure what the deal with that is. I've had zero success with trying to conquer Serbia or Moldavia. Every time I check if I can annex them or make them a protectorate they've got somebody else that would crush me. Things have gotten even stranger because I'm now in a personal union with Moldavia and with myself as the junior partner. I have no idea if I can leverage this to my benefit.

Industrialization on the other hand has been going pretty well. I've got a wide variety of factories and I'm slowly getting my Standard of Living up. I got kicked out of the Ottoman's market and joined Russia's.

I'm seeing all the things that have been added since release. Companies are neat but I'm concerned that they herald Paradox's modifier-stacking style of gameplay that they love so much. There are now different types of military units and I had to look up how to build barracks. I've dismantled most of my military since I can't do much with it. There's also pollution and local prices, neither of which I've really taken a look at. Local prices probably shouldn't affect me much as I'm still stuck with a single province.

BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 21:52 on Apr 17, 2024

StashAugustine
Mar 24, 2013

Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

Pollution is mostly ignorable afaict, it's basically a soft pop growth cap turned into an actual game mechanic

DJJIB-DJDCT
Feb 1, 2024

BearsBearsBears posted:

Playing as Wallachia in Victoria 3. I was interested because it's the only country in Europe that gets the unique Sericulture technology (+25% silk). Honestly still not sure what the deal with that is.

It was known for its silk textiles during the period, to the point of there being folk ballads about silk.

FirstnameLastname
Jul 10, 2022


got me 50 ounces out a bird in this bitch
if you cap the frame rate to 30 and disable vsync vicky 3 runs about 2x faster at 5x speed if not more justa fyi

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

quote:

Tinto Talks #8 - 17th of April 2024

Hello, and welcome to the eighth iteration of Tinto Talks where we talk about what we are doing in our very secret future game, with the code name Project Caesar.

...

This week we’ll continue talking about the economical part of the game. Last week we talked about the different items in the monthly budget, and now we’ll continue with explaining some of the core concepts of the economy. Please be aware that all images here are tooltips or parts of tooltips, and some are very much Work in Progress!

Loans and Bankruptcy

Let's start with Loans, which will work a fair bit differently than any other previous Paradox GSG. At first glance, it is kind of similar to previous games, where you can take a loan, you get money, and you pay interest on it for a set period of time. However, in Project Caesar, there are some new changes. Take a look at this WiP tooltip for taking a loan:



Yeah, 10% interest is perfectly fair…

In this game, you are not borrowing money from an abstract national bank, but instead, your internal loans are taken from what the estates have made available. The estates invest money they have, not only in immediate gains for their own power, or other ways that benefit the country, or other [REDACTED], but they also invest in having money available for the country, where they will benefit from the interests.

If there is no money to borrow from the estates available and you have no ducats left, you will go bankrupt, which is a little bit more severe than in, let's say EU4...

There is also another way to get gold, you can send a diplomat to one of the banking countries, like Peruzzi and Bardi, if there is one that you know of within diplomatic range, to request a loan. Make sure you don’t forget to pay them on time, or default on the loans, or you may never be able to loan from them again.

Core Concepts

So let’s continue, by taking a look at the tooltip for a location, so we can quickly have a reference to some important aspects in the rest of this development diary.



Enjoy the nice placeholder icons, sadly the forum does not allow for nested tooltips, like the game does…

Food

If you notice the line of food above, you see that Kalmar is not self-sufficient in food, and needs to rely on the rest of Östra Småland for food, unless they buy it from the local market.



Even the small town of Kalmar needs food from nearby locations…

Primarily, there are a lot of burghers here that consume a lot of food. There are also a lot of modifiers that impact how much food the location produces as well.

If the granaries in Östra Småland are close to full, we would sell their surplus to the local market in Riga, but only get about 56% of the profit, as we only have 56% control in Kalmar. If the entire province lacks food, we would have to buy food at 100% of the current price in that market. The price for food is different in each market, and depends entirely on how much food is sold to that market.

Taxes

We mentioned taxes in last week's Tinto Talk, and specifically mentioned Tax Base there. The tax base of an estate is based on the total of all their Tax Base in all the locations they are present in.



Quickly find the error in the text in this tooltip!

We are slowly increasing our control over Kalmar up to 58.2%, so the tax base will be slowly increasing, and if we would get it to the 100 maximum, it would be even bigger.

As you can see here, the nobility and the burghers have a fair bit of power here, and the peasants have basically none. Currently, we are able to tax more from the burghers each month, and could probably go above the 25% tax rate we have currently set on their estate.

To clarify, only the money that is in the “potential” row exists, and anything you don’t tax on that goes to the estates. So you get 0.05 ducats there (perhaps more, but Paradox rounding), and the remaining 0.37 goes to the estates.

Raw Materials

As you noticed in the tooltips above, we talk about Raw Materials and Resource Gathering Operations. Every location has one raw material possible that can be extracted, this includes things like lumber, stone, grain, amber, or copper. Of course, there are other ways to get access to the raw materials than merely owning and controlling a location.

Only peasants and slaves will work on gathering raw materials, and how many will work with it depends on how big of an infrastructure you have built up for that. Pops that are working with this will not be producing food, unless the goods are food related.

The maximum size of an infrastructure that can be built up depends on population, development, technologies, and societal values.



We mentioned buildings in one tooltip earlier, and next week we will talk about how they work in Project Caesar.

estate investment and tightly interlinked finances smacks of MEIOU & Taxes, while POPs and RGOs and actually-tracked production means they're taking pages from Victoria

needless to say I'm quite excited about this. Time to dust off your copies of Fernand Braudel's "Civilization and Capitalism"

BearsBearsBears
Aug 4, 2022

DJJIB-DJDCT posted:

It was known for its silk textiles during the period, to the point of there being folk ballads about silk.
Neat, it would be nice if there was a journal entry about this, mention Dracula while you're at it. Vicky 3 needs a lot more history stuffed into it, I've been getting jack poo poo for flavor as Wallachia. Probably going to have to rely on mods. The "Awaken thee, Romanian!" mod is outdated and the modder is planning to wait until the next DLC/patch to update it. However, I'm considering just installing it mid-game anyway and seeing what happens.

StashAugustine posted:

Pollution is mostly ignorable afaict, it's basically a soft pop growth cap turned into an actual game mechanic
Good to know, it looks like the healthcare system negates some of those penalties as well. I rather like that.

FirstnameLastname posted:

if you cap the frame rate to 30 and disable vsync vicky 3 runs about 2x faster at 5x speed if not more justa fyi
Done, I'll just have to deal with the screen-tearing and low FPS on this map game.

I've continued to play and I'm now out of peasants in the year of our Lord 1876. I haven't managed grab any more territory and I don't see that changing in the future. I've created a three step plan in order to continue my growth even without being able to do classic modern imperialism. I'm going to do the Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss playbook.

The first thing I'm going to do is make sure the Church very happy. The church is an interest group and if you keep them very happy a bonus called "Be Fruitful and Multiply" which gives you 2.5% to your birthrate. If you keep them both very happy and influential (20+% clout) then that bonus doubles to 5%. By the way, different religions get different bonuses; for example the Protestants get a bonus to Companies instead of an increased birth rate. So I'm going to keep the Church happy and make sure they stay influential.

The second part of my plan is to keep on discriminating. I'm actually not sure if this is actually necessary but I haven't been supporting any of the liberal interest groups (IGs) and so I can't easily switch to more liberal laws. The normal way to do pop-growth as a minor nation is through getting less discriminatory laws and then suck as many people off the other nations in your Customs Union as you can. I'm having trouble doing this because I haven't been preparing for it since the start of the game.

Finally, I'm taking heavy inspiration from famous Girlbosses like Hillary Rodham Clinton and Queen Victoria 3 Queen Victoria. We're going to use slavery. The way that Victoria 3 models the slave trade is that when you have the Slave Trade law, your country gets slaves from countries with Debt Slavery. This seems to only happen when you've got vacancies in buildings that slaves can work in (farms, plantations, maybe mines?) so it only really starts taking effect when you run out of peasants. The slave trade mechanic is a bit underdeveloped, as far as I can tell the slaves are just teleported to your country. I don't think landowners pay for them and nobody gets the money for the slaves, I'm not even sure if your customs union or trade routes affect the slave trade at all. I suspect that a lot of this is because Paradox is too cowardly to let you build and profit from slave trading posts.

This strategy should help me lift more people out of poverty (so I can then ship more people into poverty).

Incidentally, Victoria 3 has an ethnostate law. The only interest group that approves of it is the Petite Bourgeoisie. It also looks like Intelligentsia don't like Multi-Culturalism anymore. I always thought it ridiculous that the release version of Vicky 3 portray the Intelligentsia as being against racism during the golden age of scientific racism.

DJJIB-DJDCT
Feb 1, 2024

BearsBearsBears posted:

Finally, I'm taking heavy inspiration from famous Girlbosses like Hillary Rodham Clinton and Queen Victoria 3 Queen Victoria. We're going to use slavery.

Slavery was abolished four years before Victoria was coronated :confused:

Tankbuster
Oct 1, 2021
Not in wallachia/moldova. It starts with legacy slavery so you can just enter slave trade.

BearsBearsBears
Aug 4, 2022

DJJIB-DJDCT posted:

Slavery was abolished four years before Victoria was coronated :confused:

Incorrect! You gotta read the fine print on these laws they pass.

quote:

I 'WHEREAS divers Persons are holden in Slavery within divers of His Majesty's Colonies, and it is just and expedient that all such Persons should be manumitted and set free, and that a reasonable Compensation should be made to the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves for the Loss which they will incur by being deprived of their Right to such Services:
...
LXIV. And be it further enacted, That nothing in this Act contained doth or shall extend to any of the Territories in the Possession of the East India Company, or to the Island of Ceylon, or to the Island of Saint Helena.

I'm not going to actually look up the population numbers, but I believe the population within that the East India Company's holdings outnumbers the population within the rest of the British empire. Meaning that the British Empire was still overall a majority slaveholding empire when Victoria was coronated. (I'm not counting the princely states either way). I believe the game gets around this by making the East India Company a separate country to the UK.

DJJIB-DJDCT
Feb 1, 2024

If you're going to use India, Victoria only became Empress of India in the 1870's, so how much are we laying this on her shoulders? Company rule didn't end until the Mutiny in any case.

BearsBearsBears
Aug 4, 2022

DJJIB-DJDCT posted:

If you're going to use India, Victoria only became Empress of India in the 1870's, so how much are we laying this on her shoulders? Company rule didn't end until the Mutiny in any case.

The East India Company was formed by a royal charter and it derived its legitimacy, trade rights, and authority to wage war from that charter. Admittedly there was a lot of time (and Cromwell) between the original charter and Queen Victoria but she was still the reigning monarch so the authority of the royal charter came from her.

Either way, Queen Victoria is the representation of Great Britain itself so I would lay all the empire's sins and virtues upon her.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy
going back to Victoria 2 after familiarization with Victoria 3 is... interesting.

in V2, raw resource extraction is up to RGOs, which means anything you build in a state is immediately chalked-up to industrialization: no need to build a coal or iron mine, you can go straight to steel mills. As well, construction is effectively uncapped: as long as you can secure the resources to build the factory, all it takes is time (and the number of days to complete a factory is constant), and you can even build multiple factories in a state at the same time

the sticking point is securing the resources: because V2 does that thing where the highest-ranked countries get first crack at the world market, countries far down the list can have a problem securing enough steel or machine parts to begin construction of their factories, and then also securing enough raw materials to keep those factories fed with coal, if they can't produce it themselves

in contrast, with V3, individual units of goods are no longer tracked - everyone that tries to buy something can buy it... but consumption exceeding supply means the price can go as much as +75% over the market price, and so instead of running out of good to buy, the problem becomes being unable to afford the good

at the same time, not only do you have to build the resource extraction buildings for basic resources like wood or iron, but construction points become the new cap on industrialization. Whereas a country like Venezuela might have difficulty getting itself off the ground in V2 because it's so far down the pecking order in buying raw material, in V3, Venezuela going to spend a lot of time waiting for things to be built at the rate of 10 construction points per week, and then maybe 15 after half a decade's worth of development. A huge part of the economy revolves around this, because even just focusing on building up the material base to afford more construction sectors, or to go to the next stage of construction type, is enough to drive a country to modernization and urbanization, even if the player never tries to satiate needs like clothing or furniture or liquor or even food.

and I think that's part of where the problem lies when people talk about how the late game ends up feeling limp or unsatisfying vis-a-vis the AI: with Victoria 2, even a country that did nothing would eventually make a significant contribution to the economy, if only because of natural population growth when combined with RGOs producing raw materials with no need for further intervention. If a country discovers oil after 1870, the RGO converts to oil, and the world market starts getting oil.

In Victoria 3, even after oil is discovered in a state, the owner of the state has to build an oil rig on it, and then the oil rig has to be staffed, and then constantly expanded. If the AI isn't good enough to develop its economy in the first four decades leading up to this, then that construction might not happen, or happen too slowly, and it reverberates across the entire rest of the global economy.

this is not to say that either game is necessarily better or worse - from an agency and interactivity perspective, I would say V3 is much better, and the AI can always be improved (or the resource development cheesed), but it's interesting to think about the different ways in which the respective designs can cause themselves to get "stuck"

___

which brings us to Victoria 1. in that game, all goods were either the product of RGOs, or of factories, and the early-game bottleneck was Machine Tools, of which there was just a single factory that the UK started with. The way the game was supposed to work was that, as the player researched various industrial techs, they would get flat amounts of Machine Tools via triggered event, such that by the time they were ready to build their first factory, they should have enough Machine Tools for it, just from the events. But that was only if the player was aware that of this: if they left the trade automated, the trade AI was just as likely to sell off the Machine Tools as soon as they were discovered-and-awarded, and the player would be left high-and-dry

I bring this up because the problem rears its head in almost exactly the same way in two other games: Anno 1404 and Highrise City, both city builders, and both games where the player can screw themselves if they run themselves out of Machine Tools before they get their economy in a state where they can start producing their own

Victoria 2 solved this problem with Artisan POPs: a kind of pre-industrial craftsman that could inefficiently produce all sorts of factory-made goods, including Machine Tools, all by themselves. Anno 1404 solved this by having the player always be in contact with some kind of higher-ranked lord or king that would sell them more Machine Tools. Highrise City, as far as I've seen, stays stuck in the valley.

Megamissen
Jul 19, 2022

any post can be a kannapost
if you want it to be

DJJIB-DJDCT posted:

If you're going to use India, Victoria only became Empress of India in the 1870's, so how much are we laying this on her shoulders? Company rule didn't end until the Mutiny in any case.

the company works for the queen

BrotherJayne
Nov 28, 2019

DJJIB-DJDCT posted:

If you're going to use India, Victoria only became Empress of India in the 1870's, so how much are we laying this on her shoulders? Company rule didn't end until the Mutiny in any case.

Oh christ

I can forgive sucking off Austria-Hungary

But queeny viccy? Bro

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Tankbuster
Oct 1, 2021
the EIC was the first private sector gig you got for sweet sweet cash.

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