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Future proposal for the War Machine Industries: Have one extra alternative mode where instead of producing Tanks, you're producing Motorcycles. It should still be the same old Automobiles trade good that they'd produce, only now they'd be consuming Tools, Rubber and Oil to make it. Best historical example for this would be companies like BMW who went from producing aeroplane engines to producing Motorcycles as they needed to make their swords to plowshares.
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Nov 27, 2022 18:48
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| # ? May 22, 2024 19:29 |
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God help you if you accidentally hit the switch sides button during an Ironman run. In 1929, I accidentally hit it, causing me to leave India behind and become Communist Philippines. Some thoughts, but probably nothing others haven't experienced or noted... - The late game has a ton of techs and interesting military variety (different kinds of scouts, different kinds of support units like flamethrowers or gas) but very little actual time remaining to make use of them. - Overall, the end game techs and manufactory types become diverse but in a way that is hard to leverage (phones, radios, planes) and I notice most of the other states aren't developed enough to even start electricity. I never built radios, planes, or automobiles. I did build phones for the bureaucracy upgrade. - After you industrialize, you're constructing 6 or 7 pages of buildings and it gets really hard to keep track of what's going on. The early game systems for managing construction don't scale well to 2 orders of magnitude more productivity. Terra Invicta had similar problems where the game wants to start small in scope and really ramp up, but the UI doesn't help you make the transition. - War stops working well once you're large enough to pose a serious threat to your neighbors, they always back down yielding only a single province so you can't expand very quickly. Maybe this provides a needed brake on expansion, but it feels forced. Why wouldn't I attack anyway? - It's weird you can't peacefully annex highly loyal puppets. - I couldn't figure out how to spread my religion to states that didn't have at least one pop of that religion already. Once your religion is there, Promote State Values causes a massive amount of conversion, but getting a single seed pop in place wasn't clear. - At some point I stopped caring about what was built where and just start spamming out whatever I needed. The feel of carefully planning and managing the economy in the early game dissolved. The late game felt more like a button smashing arcade game, where my only goal was to keep my GDP rising and making war on any neighbor without a truce. - The AI can't seem to manage late game revolutions. Every great power was ripped in two by revolts and sometimes those revolts had revolts. At one point the Confederate States of America were at war with the Fascist Confederate States of America! Yes, it can get worse. This meant that 1) I couldn't attack a bunch of great powers because they were locked in revolution and 2) they couldn't stand up to me when I could attack because revolutions had massacred their economies. - Naval landings are super OP. I consistently used them to quickly capture warscore and the AI would doomstack the front lines and leave parts of their shore unguarded. You can wreck Qing this way as they might have 10 regiments guarding the shore and 1000 on the front lines. - Treaty Ports are abusive. You can let your enemy have one then pin their ground forces in there while you land marines on their homeland... - Frequently the AI would just collapse their ability to maintain regiments. Probably related to revolts or something, but I noticed that around 1880 the countries that had 300 regiments suddenly only had 80. - The investment pool goes completely exponential. I had a 1B investment pool that was going up despite my constructing 1000s of buildings all at once. Maybe this isn't likely to happen in less populated states, but India has so much grist for the mill you aren't likely to run out of people to work. - There doesn't seem to be any point in liberalizing. Secret Police are fantastic. Once I had secret police I pumped up my policing and that lowered radicalism enough I was able to trust non-capital provinces with military. It allowed me to run an absolutely huge million man army because revolts just never happened. I had a ton of fun, despite the crazy stuff and wild game design. GreenMarine fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Nov 27, 2022 |
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Nov 27, 2022 19:34
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guaranteed liberties is even better than secret police because it generates loyalism in addition to reducing radicalism
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Nov 27, 2022 22:07
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Jazerus posted:guaranteed liberties is even better than secret police because it generates loyalism in addition to reducing radicalism However the -50% political movement radicalism from secret police lets you avoid a lot of revolutions.
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Nov 27, 2022 23:18
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GreenMarine posted:
theres mods for these https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2891293616
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Nov 27, 2022 23:51
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I feel like it would make sense if, when someone backs down to you in a diplomatic play, you can declare war anyways but eat much more infamy for it. Incidentally that's arguably how WW1 kicked off, when Serbia gave in to almost every Austrian demand and the Austrians went to war anyways.
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Nov 28, 2022 02:20
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Having it be something like a peace deal would probably work, "They're willing to back down and give you X, do you accept?" Either say yes, hold out for a better offer or go to war for it all.
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Nov 28, 2022 02:33
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3rd game in a row where I kinda break the game early on because I am strong enough to puppet Persia on day 1. Diplomacy, truces, backing down, peaceful expansion all these things are pretty broken and will need fixing.
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Nov 28, 2022 08:35
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this is a good writeup but:Mandoric posted:Above SoL 30, only luxury foods are purchased, and people will literally starve before baking a loaf or bread or letting an unfileted whole fish look at them with its googly eyes. they won't starve, they just won't promote or will demote SOL down to where they'll eat bread and fish again
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Nov 28, 2022 09:12
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Tahirovic posted:3rd game in a row where I kinda break the game early on because I am strong enough to puppet Persia on day 1. Day 1 puppeting Mexico as USA by conscripting Massachusetts etc is also a fun play.
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Nov 28, 2022 17:27
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Played through the 'Learn the Game' objective as Sweden, as well as got a bit into games as both Britain and France for the money/egalitarian games respectively. Game is janky but engaging enough that I've sunk a fair bit of time into it. Honestly more of an effort catching up with this thread. I think I'm starting to grok a bit how the economic gameplay loop works, but for some reason I cannot understand my Swedish pops were perpetually in turmoil. The UI doesn't do a great job of explaining why people are radicalized in each individual province. I went through the list of pops and tried figure out why any were struggling and decrease the price of their basic needs, but that didn't seem to do anything. I also noticed that my peasants were perpetually struggling so I decided to enclose the land to make the peasants... not exist anymore. This, oddly, did not make their lives any better, but I now have an enormous amount of rye and leather to sell you! It might have something to do with a smaller market because I'm not noticing the same things with the British or French. Or maybe I'm just better at avoiding radicalism through events and through not pissing people off through laws. As France, I've managed to eat most of Borneo through diplomatic plays; I'm scary enough that people just back down and surrender. I do wish there was a notification if you win a diplomatic play through the opponent backing down; like, I looked away for a minute to go build some poo poo in Provence and then the diplomatic play disappeared and I didn't know why until I looked closed and figured out that I now own Brunei. Next up is trying to eat the VOC territories in Borneo, and making sure I can do that without dragging in another great power to defend the Dutch. War is a counterintuitive slog. I have no idea how to make naval combat work and somehow have not got in a single naval battle with the goddamn Royal Navy. I think I'll wait for an update or two before trying to instill Prussian hegemony.
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Nov 28, 2022 18:11
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Albino Squirrel posted:I think I'm starting to grok a bit how the economic gameplay loop works, but for some reason I cannot understand my Swedish pops were perpetually in turmoil. The UI doesn't do a great job of explaining why people are radicalized in each individual province. I went through the list of pops and tried figure out why any were struggling and decrease the price of their basic needs, but that didn't seem to do anything. I also noticed that my peasants were perpetually struggling so I decided to enclose the land to make the peasants... not exist anymore. This, oddly, did not make their lives any better, but I now have an enormous amount of rye and leather to sell you! I'm also constantly in turmoil because my SOL will drop no matter what I do. I had it drop 4 points after I lowered taxes and increased government and military wages so I'm not completely sure on how it actually works. But the general gist is that the more goods your pops can buy (either from having more money or from things being cheaper) the happier they are. And there's a tooltip nested inside a tooltip nested inside a tooltip that tells you exactly what goods the pops want and how expensive they are.  Now if anyone can tell me how to make sure my pops are actually getting those goods (so I don't have so many pops not meeting the minimum expected standard while the average for their wealth group is far past it) I'd appreciate it.
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Nov 28, 2022 18:25
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TTBF posted:I'm also constantly in turmoil because my SOL will drop no matter what I do. I had it drop 4 points after I lowered taxes and increased government and military wages so I'm not completely sure on how it actually works. But the general gist is that the more goods your pops can buy (either from having more money or from things being cheaper) the happier they are. And there's a tooltip nested inside a tooltip nested inside a tooltip that tells you exactly what goods the pops want and how expensive they are.
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Nov 28, 2022 18:36
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the 2 issues afaik are that you need to make the lower strata pops richer and just build way more of the good than you think you need idk what your peasant status is like but build poo poo in states with a lot of peasants to get them more money to buy poo poo with. For the latter I noticed the issue when trying to lower food prices. Lowering the cost of a good means more pops buy it which means the cost goes back up. So in your case you'd need to bring in way more luxury clothes so a bunch of those pops can actually afford the clothes.
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Nov 28, 2022 18:50
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Tomn posted:I feel like it would make sense if, when someone backs down to you in a diplomatic play, you can declare war anyways but eat much more infamy for it. Iirc there is a mod for this.
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Nov 28, 2022 19:13
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Agean90 posted:the 2 issues afaik are that you need to make the lower strata pops richer and just build way more of the good than you think you need Ah, thank you that makes sense. I'm done with that save (got 100+ states in America!) but I was wondering why some things' prices weren't changing when I made a ton of them.
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Nov 28, 2022 19:24
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TTBF posted:Ah, thank you that makes sense. I'm done with that save (got 100+ states in America!) but I was wondering why some things' prices weren't changing when I made a ton of them. It's helpful to keep in mind that economic demand isn't a measure of what people want, it's how much they're willing to buy in a given situation. Ingame demand does a fair job of behaving like economic demand, and most consumer goods strongly exhibit induced demand. Your market will always hunger for more shirts, chairs, and paper for the same reason that highways will always fill up with traffic. (Unless something drastic happens to suddenly spike relevant prices, like a a blockade or embargo.)
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Nov 28, 2022 20:09
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TTBF posted:I'm also constantly in turmoil because my SOL will drop no matter what I do. I had it drop 4 points after I lowered taxes and increased government and military wages so I'm not completely sure on how it actually works. But the general gist is that the more goods your pops can buy (either from having more money or from things being cheaper) the happier they are. And there's a tooltip nested inside a tooltip nested inside a tooltip that tells you exactly what goods the pops want and how expensive they are. There's also another tooltip on the same initial bar - if you hover over your radicals number it shows you why the radicals are increasing over the past year. Most of the time for me it was because of decreases in standards of living (despite my efforts to make products more affordable) or from people who got fired. The latter I have no idea why, because it was like that even if I hadn't upgraded production methods anywhere recently. Like, you didn't get laid off, Dave, maybe you just suck at your job at the dye factory.
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Nov 28, 2022 20:12
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I'm looking forward to the new patch and seeing what happens to Portugal's markets once Qing gets recognition and rockets above them in rank. It'll also be nice to take Johore and the EIC without giving GB or France unfettered access to your markets.
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Nov 28, 2022 20:20
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TTBF posted:I'm also constantly in turmoil because my SOL will drop no matter what I do. I had it drop 4 points after I lowered taxes and increased government and military wages so I'm not completely sure on how it actually works. But the general gist is that the more goods your pops can buy (either from having more money or from things being cheaper) the happier they are. And there's a tooltip nested inside a tooltip nested inside a tooltip that tells you exactly what goods the pops want and how expensive they are. When you cut taxes, your middle-class pops bought more goods and drove the prices up for your poor pops. You have lots of radicals because 'lower strata' isn't defined by wages, but by job types. Laborers in a highly profitable factory are being paid more than laborers on a wheat farm, and it's the farmers who are broke. There isn't much you can do about it other than passing welfare laws, but that might drive your economy into a death spiral trying to subsidize 50 million people.
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Nov 28, 2022 20:20
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Albino Squirrel posted:Yeah, I'd found that tooltip and was using it to try to figure out what I needed to build. I think it's just that I wasn't able to build anything very rapidly in Sweden; you can afford much larger construction industries in, like, France, so you can upgrade your furniture factories in 2 weeks instead of 12. Takes forever to build an Ikea these days... Probably means you have surplus capacity to produce a good. When factories don't make enough money they lay people off until production declines raise prices to be profitable. This is kinda helpful but also kinda a pain in the rear end because it means I can expand my tool factory whenever the steel mills are understaffed and I know that steel prices will return to a normal value after the mills hire more people to match the new demand but it's also hard to track without specifically knowing what youve overbuilt on for it. Check the states with a lot of radicals and see if any of the builds have done layoff and then either see if you need to make input goods cheaper or increase consumption of their product to keep profits stable
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Nov 28, 2022 20:21
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fuckloads of people get fired all the time at trade centers as trade routes adjust size with supply and demand
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Nov 28, 2022 20:23
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The hire/fire thing will drive up radicalism in any state that it's happening in and can create a loop where a factory is just profitable enough to hire, but as soon as it does it becomes unprofitable and fires people. This can result in a spiraling radicalism that you can't do anything about unless you subsidize the industry until you can stabilize profits or close the building. This hosed up Scania pretty hard for me in my Sweden game because the arm industries there overproduce small arms.
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Nov 28, 2022 20:35
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My ally doesn't support a peace deal in which all of our demands are conceded and none on us: It seems like that Pressed Demands value should be a + and not a - My opponent's War Support is floored at 0 because I haven't occupied their subject, who isn't in the war and can't be occupied:  Maybe a subject that's the target of a demand should be called into the war?
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Nov 28, 2022 21:05
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Normally, Liberia would have been called into the war. It might already have capitulated and been ceded to you. It's either that or the Ashanti treaty port that's an issue. I've heard that maybe hitting the 'set terms to white peace' option will reset it so you can propose the peace deal properly?
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Nov 28, 2022 21:16
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I've been doing a lot of imperialisms in my current run (fun discovery: eventually the mapdrawing logic will just decide that entire continents don't need to be labeled) and I've definitely, repeatedly, run into "target of a transfer subject goal doesn't enter the war but is counted as an unoccupied goal". Just been cheesing it by opening a ton of fronts and then naval invading the capital, but it's there. And yeah, a LOT of peace terms that were acceptable but needed the table cleared and then reproposition. If one party capitulates, the "demands enforced on ally" malus seems to be hanging around as a ghost.
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Nov 28, 2022 21:28
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Hellioning posted:Normally, Liberia would have been called into the war. It might already have capitulated and been ceded to you. Nope they were never in the war. I don't think protectorates are called into their overlord's wars and I think they're a protectorate? But I'm suggesting maybe they should be if they become a target of one of the demands; either that or remove the requirement that I occupy them. And I know about the trick with setting terms to white peace and then setting the deal up again, but that didn't work in this case.
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Nov 28, 2022 21:46
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Family Values posted:Nope they were never in the war. I don't think protectorates are called into their overlord's wars and I think they're a protectorate? But I'm suggesting maybe they should be if they become a target of one of the demands; either that or remove the requirement that I occupy them. And I know about the trick with setting terms to white peace and then setting the deal up again, but that didn't work in this case. Hmm, maybe because the 'transfer subject' play only came up as a secondary demand and not the primary, then. Annoying.
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Nov 28, 2022 22:00
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Yeah I've had issues with the whole "can't occupy a subject because the war was declared on the overlord and the subject never actually joined" thing, I think it's just a bug (or just an edge case they missed in the design). Can you violate Liberia's sovereignty? It might not let you since I think you have to border a nation to do it, but if it does, it's a way to force them into the war.
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Nov 28, 2022 23:37
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Albino Squirrel posted:I do wish there was a notification if you win a diplomatic play through the opponent backing down; like, I looked away for a minute to go build some poo poo in Provence and then the diplomatic play disappeared and I didn't know why until I looked closed and figured out that I now own Brunei. Me too. Luckily it wasn't hard to fix, so I'm going to take this chance to shamelessly self-promote: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2886548041
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Nov 28, 2022 23:37
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The other option is to occupy the enemy capital. Thankfully, they're frequently coastal, and the AI is lax about actually keeping a defending force around. It's a nice quick way to force their exhaustion to tick below 0 and let you actually make gains.
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Nov 28, 2022 23:39
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Albino Squirrel posted:Yeah, I'd found that tooltip and was using it to try to figure out what I needed to build. I think it's just that I wasn't able to build anything very rapidly in Sweden; you can afford much larger construction industries in, like, France, so you can upgrade your furniture factories in 2 weeks instead of 12. Takes forever to build an Ikea these days... Have you considered that you're making goods too cheap? I don't know how many people you've got working in your wheat farms for example, but they're probably making trash wages because of how cheap wheat is in your market. Edited with better example
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Nov 29, 2022 02:29
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Nicodemus Dumps posted:Have you considered that you're making goods too cheap? I don't know how many people you've got working in your wheat farms for example, but they're probably making trash wages because of how cheap wheat is in your market.
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Nov 29, 2022 03:37
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Isnt this the eternal struggle? Produce too little and people complain that its too expensive. Produce too much and people complain they dont get paid enough. Time to overthrow the capitalists and seize the means of production to pay the dividends to ourselves.
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Nov 29, 2022 03:39
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Isnt this the eternal struggle? Produce too little and people complain that its too expensive. Produce too much and people complain they dont get paid enough. This is why some of later production methods are kind of a scam because they don't actually increase output relative to costs and you end up making a good more expensive to produce.
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Nov 29, 2022 03:54
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Ithle01 posted:This is why some of later production methods are kind of a scam because they don't actually increase output relative to costs and you end up making a good more expensive to produce. It's usually more labor-efficient, which can be good if you're playing a country with a relatively low population. The biggest problem is the current behavior where wages are automatically increased no matter what so long as the factory is mildly profitable. If it weren't for that, the factories would usually be making enough money that a somewhat less profitable PM would be worth it, since it'd mean cheaper goods for other industries and pops without requiring more labor. But because factories increase wages until the margins are really slim, there's no way to avoid some of the PMs causing huge losses because they replace laborers with an equal number of engineers who earn 3 times their wage, but without a production boost to match. So you end up in a situation where using the new PM in your old factory is a huge loss, but making a new factory in a different state using the new PM may be worth it because it starts without the same wage inflation, and even though the new factory will also steadily increase wages it will stop while it's still in the green. Even accounting for that though, some of the PMs do need tweaking because they currently make little sense. AG3 fucked around with this message at 12:28 on Nov 29, 2022 |
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Nov 29, 2022 12:25
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AG3 posted:The biggest problem is the current behavior where wages are automatically increased no matter what so long as the factory is mildly profitable. So, basically "what if trickle down economics worked", and the final result is "economy does not work". That says something.
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Nov 29, 2022 15:13
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Well, yes and no. It increases worker wages which makes it easier for them to afford things, which in turn sharply increases SoL and thus demand for more goods. However it makes the businesses incredibly vulnerable to market fluctuations because the margins are so small, and any efficiency gains you manage by reducing input costs or increasing throughput gets eaten up by wage increases, which is a problem since a lot of these gains are temporary in the first place. I don't have access to the defines at the moment, but I believe they increase wages a little bit every ~21 weeks whenever the profits exceed 20% or so (which is apparently getting removed next patch). I've tinkered with upping the 20% limit to 80% to see how that affects things, which does slow down wage raises somewhat, but they still increase a little bit as SoL in a state does. On the flip side this makes the capitalists and aristocrats even more disgustingly wealthy, and it also gives you way more money in the investment pool, possibly more than you'll ever be able to spend. AG3 fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Nov 29, 2022 |
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Nov 29, 2022 15:43
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Maybe I’m just cynical, but I feel like the only time they should increase wages is if they’re profitable, but not fully staffed because there aren’t enough people willing to take the wages they currently offer.
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Nov 29, 2022 17:09
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| # ? May 22, 2024 19:29 |
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Puppets should automatically allow my troops to pass through them. More than once have I had to end a war because it was impossible to advance after the country I share a border with capitulates and their former allies "behind" them that I don't share a border with are now impossible to reach with my army.
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Nov 29, 2022 17:12
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