Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Cease to Hope
Dec 12, 2011

Raenir Salazar posted:

I don't think there's any disagreement there, and that their example happened to use stellaris

I don't think Stellaris does a very good job of recreating those pressures, though. It isn't an example of what I was talking about.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

trapped mouse
May 25, 2008

by Azathoth
I don't claim to be an expert historian on the Victorian era (or really any time period), but from what I understand mobilizing a country's military was a very important part of the preparation for a large scale war. One of the problems with V2 was the fact that mobilization was not only damaging to the country, but also handled in such an inconvenient way that, unless you were prepared to do large scale micro, it wasn't even worth the effort. And it was really only necessary in multiplayer, it was easy enough to win against the AI with your standing army, and MP is where large scale micro is nearly unfeasible.

One of my items on the wishlist for Victoria 3 would be making mobilization something that could be organized much more efficiently, so that the damage it does to your country could be put off by the large advantage in numbers that mobilization brings. Something like preset division templates set to gather in specific cities, which would of course take some time but once finished you would have thousands of amateur soldiers ready to run towards enemy bayonets.

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice

Cease to Hope posted:

I don't think Stellaris does a very good job of recreating those pressures, though. It isn't an example of what I was talking about.

He was using it as an example for a different set of pressures, not those specific pressures. It's less about responding to a specific point you said but more about responding to a general abstract idea; which was "games can convey interesting ideas to the player through their mechanics and game design." This is applicable to Victoria because that's what we're discussing; how can we represent a certain kind of historical set of socioeconomic and geopolitical pressures and make the player immersed in them? The Stellaris example was clearly more general.

trapped mouse posted:

I don't claim to be an expert historian on the Victorian era (or really any time period), but from what I understand mobilizing a country's military was a very important part of the preparation for a large scale war. One of the problems with V2 was the fact that mobilization was not only damaging to the country, but also handled in such an inconvenient way that, unless you were prepared to do large scale micro, it wasn't even worth the effort. And it was really only necessary in multiplayer, it was easy enough to win against the AI with your standing army, and MP is where large scale micro is nearly unfeasible.

One of my items on the wishlist for Victoria 3 would be making mobilization something that could be organized much more efficiently, so that the damage it does to your country could be put off by the large advantage in numbers that mobilization brings. Something like preset division templates set to gather in specific cities, which would of course take some time but once finished you would have thousands of amateur soldiers ready to run towards enemy bayonets.


Ideally the mechanics for mobilization should slowly morph over time as railroads come online and things like a central General Staff becomes more common, leading to the drafting of preplanned mobilization schedules where any divergence to them causes chaos and moral/organization damage so once you press the button you're committed (by the late game). Because he who mobilizes and gets to the field first wins.

But earlier in the game it can be more like EU4/CK where you have mustering points and raise regiments as normal and the technological and political developments slowly change how the mechanics work until its something closer to Hoi4 by the end.

Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 18:48 on May 30, 2021

HerpicleOmnicron5
May 31, 2013

How did this smug dummkopf ever make general?


I want to unlock HoI 4 style planning.

BigglesSWE
Dec 2, 2014

How 'bout them hawks news huh!
I am very intrigued about the way they’ll make warfare work. I can’t really wrap my head around how one can mesh the warfare of 1836 to the realities of 1936 but I guess that’s why I’m not developing Vicky 3.

Nonsense
Jan 26, 2007

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Friendly reminder that lol, the actual current habsburg pretender gets in twitter slapfights about monarchism and inbreeding

That guy is not very cool, Napoleon's pretender looks like him, and works in New York City

Pocky In My Pocket
Jan 27, 2005

Giant robots shouldn't fight!






I never played V1 or V2, so I don't really know what to expect. But this looks like a fun spreadsheet game to EU4's fun map game

PerniciousKnid
Sep 13, 2006

BigglesSWE posted:

I am very intrigued about the way they’ll make warfare work. I can’t really wrap my head around how one can mesh the warfare of 1836 to the realities of 1936 but I guess that’s why I’m not developing Vicky 3.

You just make it work like warfare in 1886 with a few tech differences adding modifiers on either end.

Popoto
Oct 21, 2012

miaow
Whelp, reinstalled vic2. What’s the current good mod for it? Last time I played was with the beta patch and things seemed fine, but I’ve seen people play on streams from time to time with loads of decisions to take and such.

wisconsingreg
Jan 13, 2019

Popoto posted:

Whelp, reinstalled vic2. What’s the current good mod for it? Last time I played was with the beta patch and things seemed fine, but I’ve seen people play on streams from time to time with loads of decisions to take and such.

HPM is the best imo, the only eughghh thing is the changing of clergy to "intellectuals" although I guess it doesnt make sense to have 4% clergy in your communist mali

https://www.moddb.com/mods/historical-project-mod

Charlz Guybon
Nov 16, 2010

Vasukhani posted:

HPM is the best imo, the only eughghh thing is the changing of clergy to "intellectuals" although I guess it doesnt make sense to have 4% clergy in your communist mali

https://www.moddb.com/mods/historical-project-mod

The Neo-Summerian Empire was a theocratic socialist command economy. :colbert:

wisconsingreg
Jan 13, 2019

Charlz Guybon posted:

The Neo-Summerian Empire was a theocratic socialist command economy. :colbert:

always worth posting

https://imgur.com/gallery/kIUrq

The Narrator
Aug 11, 2011

bernie would have won

God drat this is the poo poo I live for

Edit: "Communist East India Company" is why you play Vicky

The Narrator fucked around with this message at 11:22 on May 31, 2021

Jazerus
May 24, 2011


Popoto posted:

Whelp, reinstalled vic2. What’s the current good mod for it? Last time I played was with the beta patch and things seemed fine, but I’ve seen people play on streams from time to time with loads of decisions to take and such.

greater flavour mod. it's a fork of HPM that has continued development until the present day whereas HPM was finished a few years ago

Vasukhani posted:

HPM is the best imo, the only eughghh thing is the changing of clergy to "intellectuals" although I guess it doesnt make sense to have 4% clergy in your communist mali

i never thought it made sense to have clergy as the only instrument for raising literacy anyway. a more general intellectual class was decidedly missing from the game

Randarkman
Jul 18, 2011

Jazerus posted:

greater flavour mod. it's a fork of HPM that has continued development until the present day whereas HPM was finished a few years ago
i never thought it made sense to have clergy as the only instrument for raising literacy anyway. a more general intellectual class was decidedly missing from the game

For most of the game's duration clergy very often doubled as teachers, particularly in rural areas, not to mention how religion often was an integral part of school curriculum (and that many primary school programs, the kind that worked to raise general literacy had sort of developed on top of earlier specifically religious education initatives or they were part of that same current).

I'm not necessarily saying that perhaps a generalized "educator" pop wouldn't perhaps be useful (and I think the game should distinguish between academics who should mainly be for generating innovation points or whatever they called them, and educators who raise general literacy), but clergy played a dominant role in many societies, in Europe and otherwise, in fulfilling that role.

There is even a some political stuff to work in there in having policies dedicated to general education, something states did as they became increasingly powerful towards the end of the 19th century, was disseminate nationalist and other ideological propaganda through schools, and there could be some interesting stuff regarding to what extent schools work towards assimilating children towards the majority language, culture and religion and the guiding ideology of the state.

Star
Jul 15, 2005

Guerilla war struggle is a new entertainment.
Fallen Rib

Jazerus posted:

greater flavour mod. it's a fork of HPM that has continued development until the present day whereas HPM was finished a few years ago
You know it's a good mod when it's over 1 GB in size.

Jazerus
May 24, 2011


Star posted:

You know it's a good mod when it's over 1 GB in size.

every single bit of the bloat is flags

Precambrian Video Games
Aug 19, 2002



OctaviusBeaver posted:

I never managed to figure out what I was supposed to meaningfully interact with in V2.

The point of Vicky 2 is to acquire enough machine parts to transform your nation into an industrial powerhouse that generates unimaginable wealth by selling electrical goods and internal combustion engine-powered vehicles before chronic rubber shortages cripple the global economy.

Lawman 0
Aug 17, 2010

Honestly if Wiz wanted to be spicy he should include pollution that makes your pops miserable and that you can't ever fully clean up even if you go for stuff like the Garden City concept in the late game and set aside land for parks.
Also the great stink should be an event.

Kraftwerk
Aug 13, 2011
i do not have 10,000 bircoins, please stop asking

How does the economy work in this game?

Like in Victoria II I was never really sure how exactly you built wealth. My goal was always to try and build domestic production of all goods and I found what I got was a bunch of unproductive factories and a lot of sunk costs.

I couldn't "visualize" the global market and how the goods physically moved between the different countries nor how many of those goods were available in total for import/export.

So basically I build furniture factories in wood producing regions, glass factories where I had coal and so on. I had no idea whether I was consuming more raw materials than I produced and only assumed that goods would neatly flow from the raw material sites to the production sites at minimal cost.

How are you actually supposed to plan these things?

Staltran
Jan 3, 2013

Fallen Rib
Literally no-one understands how the Vicky 2 economy works, even the people with access to the source code. As for Vicky 3, I don't think we know much details yet.

Pakled
Aug 6, 2011

WE ARE SMART

Kraftwerk posted:

How does the economy work in this game?

Like in Victoria II I was never really sure how exactly you built wealth. My goal was always to try and build domestic production of all goods and I found what I got was a bunch of unproductive factories and a lot of sunk costs.

I couldn't "visualize" the global market and how the goods physically moved between the different countries nor how many of those goods were available in total for import/export.

So basically I build furniture factories in wood producing regions, glass factories where I had coal and so on. I had no idea whether I was consuming more raw materials than I produced and only assumed that goods would neatly flow from the raw material sites to the production sites at minimal cost.

How are you actually supposed to plan these things?

We don't know enough details to know exactly how it'll work in V3 with any kind of detail yet.

But in V2, there's a trade screen that, among other things, shows the sum of the resource needs for your factories, pops, and military, and you can mouse over the trade goods to see the sources of production and demand in your country. You can use that to identify what resources you should prioritize. I believe there's also something you can mouse over for individual factories on the factories screen to see their daily inputs/outputs, and factors affecting production. The economy in V2 is a very complicated beast and there are tons of factors that affect the price of goods and wages.

Gaius Marius
Oct 9, 2012

Kraftwerk posted:

How does the economy work in this game?

Like in Victoria II I was never really sure how exactly you built wealth. My goal was always to try and build domestic production of all goods and I found what I got was a bunch of unproductive factories and a lot of sunk costs.

I couldn't "visualize" the global market and how the goods physically moved between the different countries nor how many of those goods were available in total for import/export.

So basically I build furniture factories in wood producing regions, glass factories where I had coal and so on. I had no idea whether I was consuming more raw materials than I produced and only assumed that goods would neatly flow from the raw material sites to the production sites at minimal cost.

How are you actually supposed to plan these things?

So first off Raise all your taxes to max, at game start your Admin Eff. is so poo poo that it won't matter that you have 100% tax, because they're just gonna hide most of it in their mattress.

Second you do get a bonus for keeping your factories in the same province as it's input so that's good. Your missing piece is how you acquire resources on the World Market. Their is no transport or anything like that. Countries must sell any resources that their Sphere master wants to them first, then they go on the world market and are offered first to the number one Great Power, than if any is left to the Second and so on down the line.

So if you seem to be lacking resources, say you need wood for a furniture factory you can either conquer a Wood producing province, Sphere a country that makes a lot of wood, or hope to god the rest of the world above you in rank doesn't want wood as much as you do.

Dr. Video Games 0031
Jul 17, 2004

Adding countries to your sphere is good, unless it's China. Never, ever sphere China.

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice

Kraftwerk posted:

How does the economy work in this game?

Like in Victoria II I was never really sure how exactly you built wealth. My goal was always to try and build domestic production of all goods and I found what I got was a bunch of unproductive factories and a lot of sunk costs.

I couldn't "visualize" the global market and how the goods physically moved between the different countries nor how many of those goods were available in total for import/export.

So basically I build furniture factories in wood producing regions, glass factories where I had coal and so on. I had no idea whether I was consuming more raw materials than I produced and only assumed that goods would neatly flow from the raw material sites to the production sites at minimal cost.

How are you actually supposed to plan these things?

As I mentioned a bit back, a big issue with the V2 economy is that there is a very inelastic supply-demand. Prices could go up, but unless you either took the RGOs for yourself and practice autarky or researched techs at the right time; there was basically no way for supply to organically meet demand. In theory RGOs should hire more people to meet demand but they are bottlenecked by the number of people who live in the province and immigration and hiring speed are all slow enough that a massive spike in prices doesn't really result in the sort of speculation and hiring that would normally occur to take advantage of that "gold rush" so to speak. Supply tends to spike up whenever new techs are researched by the nations who already happen to be the largest producers; and not because RGOs/capitalists/aristos decided to invest money to make their operations more efficient or expanded to take advantage of the price spike/speculation/trends.

There are goods usually from RGOs which get bought off of the world market; access to those goods is gatekeep'ed by the Great Power ranking of the country in question; first place gets first dibs; and if first place buys all of it; you're out of luck, even if its from your own mines someone else can get first dibs on the stuff produced by your own rgos and factories starving you're own country of it (which has a certain historical irony; i.e the USSR/PRC selling grain to western nations first before their own people).

If demand is higher than supply the price starts to crank upwards by a tiny amount each I wanna say day? Maybe month? Factories and Artisans have a certain amount of budget to buy goods and turn them into new goods and then sell them onto the world market; if they are operating on a loss, its usually because the cost of the inputs was too high and the price of the final product too low to sustain it (note, that prices of all goods are determined by their supply and demand; never is it the case that a factories can make prices higher in an attempt to recoup losses, or keep goods in storage (if non-perishable) until the price gets high enough to be worth selling.

The global price is the only price to boot, different costs to manufacture the goods in different regions, and transportation costs, don't factor in (they should).

In my megacampaign the last couple of times we finally attempted solutions to some of the economic problems (which got 100x worse when everyone are massive blob superstates with 200 million pops at game start and everyone just spends the entire game spamming factory clicker) by instituting Ersatz Factories that produce often Bottlenecked RGO goods, but this has many of the same pitfalls as above; if the inputs are too expensive then these factories will never be profitable; and if designed to operate at a loss, just produce a massive blackhole that drags your economy and national budgets into bankruptcy.

There can also be weird issues where pops can sometimes hit a death spiral of being too poor to buy goods and rgos too expensive to run so all the labourers and farmers get fired from the rgos which makes them poorer and less able to buy rgo goods so rgos fire more people; etc. IIRC this was because there was a lack of precious metal rgo's for aristocrats.

Sometimes factories can be temporarily very profitable because the finished product is always in high demand and the input goods are cheap and plentiful enough to access; but the main issue is probably due to Great Power ranking, exists an ahistorical artificial scarcity that prevents most factories from buying the goods they need and the market has no inbuilt mechanism other than player intervention to resolve this.

What I'd really like is a combination of:

-the Great Power first come first served to be more of a weighted-privilege, enough for first crack most of the time but you/your wholesalers can still be outbid by someone more desperate for the good; or only first dibs at say, 50% of the goods while the other 50% is by highest bidder.

-transportation/distance to be factories in according to the type of transportation (ships can more easily do bulk shipments, trains are about half as good; wagons are inefficient for bulk but are closer).

-modeling comparative advantage where some nations have a lower cost of living/cost to manufacturing various goods and these places are where wholesalers go to buy stuff from first; and then once that is exhausted go to the next cheapest available supplier etc; this is where tariffs existing to protect domestic industries would make sense instead of just making things more expensive and providing you revenue but does basically nothing else.

-RGOs/factories invest profits into self-improvements by some small ticking percentage, maybe something like the Stellaris "siege" mechanics used for excavations/first contact that has a chance for a small efficiency boost to the factory/rgo and a chance for it to go down if there's a lack of competition etc. Something so that even if you don't have the tech to take advantage of high prices, your economy can still respond.

Jazerus
May 24, 2011


Kraftwerk posted:

How does the economy work in this game?

Like in Victoria II I was never really sure how exactly you built wealth. My goal was always to try and build domestic production of all goods and I found what I got was a bunch of unproductive factories and a lot of sunk costs.

I couldn't "visualize" the global market and how the goods physically moved between the different countries nor how many of those goods were available in total for import/export.

So basically I build furniture factories in wood producing regions, glass factories where I had coal and so on. I had no idea whether I was consuming more raw materials than I produced and only assumed that goods would neatly flow from the raw material sites to the production sites at minimal cost.

How are you actually supposed to plan these things?

you were basically doing the right thing, you want as many factories as possible to receive the bonuses from having raw resources or other factories present in the state. you can roughly discern your balance of import/export/consumption/production with the trade panel on the top bar - not the trade window itself, which is an incomprehensible mass of price statistics that are mostly not very informative, but the panel. it shows your top 3 imports and top 3 exports, so you know what you need and what you're selling. if you're selling lots of raw materials, you could probably benefit by making factories that use those materials so that your top exports are finished goods instead. conversely, your top imports are a guide for which nations you should conquer or sphere so as to get their goods cheaply.

many factories will be unprofitable at first until you get input/output efficiency bonuses and that is okay. they are still serving a role by providing goods to your pops that they might not be able to afford to import, or producing military goods that you might otherwise never be able to buy in a timely fashion.

as far as getting money into your own hands to spend on stuff, heavy taxation can be a burden to pops early on that prevents them from promoting, but once you have your specialist pops like clergy and bureaucrats at decent levels, you can turn the taxes up and never look back. things which increase the amount of wealth that pops get will also boost your treasury, like minimum wage reforms.

as far as "visualizing" the market and how things are moving...well, don't. there's nothing to visualize; nations consume goods that they produce, and any excess goods are simply placed in a pool on the world market to be sold to nations that need more of the good. nations buy from the world market in order of their rank, so the UK will basically always be able to get their hands on anything, while outside of the top 10 or so you'll face shortages pretty often. a sphered nation is effectively part of its sphere leader's market both for buying and selling.

Jazerus fucked around with this message at 19:43 on May 31, 2021

Weyd
Nov 26, 2009

Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:

Adding countries to your sphere is good, unless it's China. Never, ever sphere China.

You got me curious, what happens if you sphere China? As far as I understand the Vicky 2 mechanics, wouldn't it only negatively affect the countries that are of lower rank than China?

Friend Commuter
Nov 3, 2009
SO CLEVER I WANT TO FUCK MY OWN BRAIN.
Smellrose

Weyd posted:

You got me curious, what happens if you sphere China? As far as I understand the Vicky 2 mechanics, wouldn't it only negatively affect the countries that are of lower rank than China?

Early game, a lot of your income comes from tariffs. Your pops and factories buy from spherelings before the world market, and you can't charge tariffs on goods from spherelings. China produces such vast amounts of basically everything that your country won't buy anything from the world market. Put all that together, and sphering China fucks your budget up real nice.

reignonyourparade
Nov 15, 2012

Weyd posted:

You got me curious, what happens if you sphere China? As far as I understand the Vicky 2 mechanics, wouldn't it only negatively affect the countries that are of lower rank than China?


Friend Commuter posted:

Early game, a lot of your income comes from tariffs. Your pops and factories buy from spherelings before the world market, and you can't charge tariffs on goods from spherelings. China produces such vast amounts of basically everything that your country won't buy anything from the world market. Put all that together, and sphering China fucks your budget up real nice.

Also the sheer number of chinese artisans means that anything your pops do buy has a significant chance of being from a chinese artisan instead of your own factories, destroying your own attempted industrialization.

feller
Jul 5, 2006


I think the market in vicky 2 was described wrong. There are two markets for a country to care about: their common market (the stuff they produce, plus a percentage from countries in their sphere) and the world market. Prestige affects the world market but not the common market. I believe that stuff only goes to the world market if it isn't sold on the common market.

The big problem with sphering china specifically is that they have a billions artisans that drive down the price of goods and make your factories/own artisans extremely unprofitable.

feller fucked around with this message at 21:48 on May 31, 2021

Precambrian Video Games
Aug 19, 2002



Friend Commuter posted:

...you can't charge tariffs on goods from spherelings.

Wow, I did not know that. That doesn't seem to make much sense for gameplay or even historically.

I hope the RGO system is reworked significantly. Having just one per province never made sense, nor did scaling output more or less linearly by the number of workers. Techs instantly boosting production by 100% or more never made sense either. It would be neat to have capitalists invest in RGO upgrades and have allotments of arable land/forests/resource deposits so that land use can change slowly too.

Precambrian Video Games fucked around with this message at 22:19 on May 31, 2021

Mantis42
Jul 26, 2010

There's also the fact that spheres duplicate commodities, which exacerbates the issue.

Gort
Aug 18, 2003

Good day what ho cup of tea
With all those downsides, why sphere anyone?

Pakled
Aug 6, 2011

WE ARE SMART

Gort posted:

With all those downsides, why sphere anyone?

Spherelings will always (or almost always) accept alliances with you, and a large sphere means potentially a lot of military power.

If your territory is lacking in certain important resources like coal and iron and the UK is buying up all the stuff that makes it to the world market like the assholes they are, you can sphere a country that produces the resources you're missing to get it.

AnoHito
May 8, 2014

Mantis42 posted:

There's also the fact that spheres duplicate commodities, which exacerbates the issue.

This is the main issue, iirc. It floods the world with every good, thereby crashing the price of everything and making it impossible to make any money off of production and trade.

Koramei
Nov 11, 2011

I have three regrets
The first is to be born in Joseon.

Pakled posted:

Spherelings

I’m gonna object here to you sneakily trying to slip this one past us

Jazerus
May 24, 2011


Gort posted:

With all those downsides, why sphere anyone?

you want your pops to fulfill their needs so they can promote to higher class pops. the difference in promotion rate is exponentially better if they have easy access to stuff, and factories also run more cheaply (and thus profitably) with internal market goods. pops that spend less on externally-produced goods also have more wealth to tax. in general i think going nuts with sphering is more beneficial for LF than other economic types, because LF parties are going to limit your tariff income anyway and factories that can't run with a consistent profit will shut down. that being said, you can get a "Free Trade" policy even on socialist parties which limits your tariff income. ultimately you have to move past tariffs and into income taxation as a primary source of your state revenue, which means keeping prices high for your exports, not your imports; early-game is all about tariffs, but unless you start as a GP you won't have to worry about sphering for a while.

e: and yeah, there are certain countries you should never sphere, that you should just leave the gently caress alone and hope the AI doesn't touch them either so that goods remain scarce enough. mostly china but if india were to somehow bust out of the UK's hands i would be hesitant about that too.

Jazerus fucked around with this message at 23:21 on May 31, 2021

KOGAHAZAN!!
Apr 29, 2013

a miserable failure as a person

an incredible success as a magical murder spider

Koramei posted:

I’m gonna object here to you sneakily trying to slip this one past us

That's just the word everyone uses for them. Sorry!

Pakled
Aug 6, 2011

WE ARE SMART
Yeah generally, sphering small and medium sized countries with little industry is good, what you don't want to do is sphere industrialized countries who'll compete with your domestic production, and what you REALLY don't want to do is sphere China or a Russia or USA that's somehow dropped out of GP status while remaining mostly-teritorially-intact because that will completely gently caress the world economy.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

karmicknight
Aug 21, 2011
Also, accruing wealth in Victoria 2 was a trap and a joke. You only need to make enough money to keep your country running, anything more is only useful insofar as you have stuff to spend it on.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply