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How to get capitalists started and how do you tell what factories to build?

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gamer42_au

gamer42_au

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Playing with state capitalism, you can build a "starter" factory to earn money for the capitalists in that state.
I thought that factories with high excess demand would be good picks, but when I built luxury furniture and luxury clothing in mid-game (about 1870) only a small proportion of production sold, despite the trade screen showing a strong excess of demand over supply. Presumably, this represents excess demand that is not acted on due to inability to afford the goods.
Next time I think I will stick with steel, cement and machine parts (as available) as solid all-round performers for starter factories.

But with Interventionism or Liberalism, you can't build new factories.
This means capitalists earn no money, which means they can't build anything, which means they earn no money. They then get mad and start to become anarcho-liberals wanting to destroy the entire country (and the craftsmen and clerks in that state also get mad, or leave). Kind of funny, but it is not clear what is the way out. Any suggestions?

IRL a capitalist with no money isn't a capitalist for very long. In game, perhaps there should be an ability for them to access national bank funds (run negative savings balances) in order to build factories (especially the first factory in a state).
 
Lower taxes ... in theory that should let your POPs earn enough to put in the national bank, which in turn should allow your capis to lend money for projects.

Since you can't decide what they should build, all you can do is put a NF suggesting which industry they should concentrate on. That is by no means a guarantee that they will build anything you need.

Demand in the trade screen only shows potential demand, but often the pops who demand these products can't afford them.

So f.x. if Rich POPs demand 7 luxury clothes, but luxury clothes costs too much, then real demand mind only be 0,5. But the trade screen would still show a demand for 7.
 
I ran into this problem as the Netherlands. After several tries I found out that your best bet is to set your middle class taxes very low(say, 10%), and do not under any circumstance set your national focus on Capi's until you've actually got some profitable factories. If you do it like that, your bureaucrats will promote to capi's - and bring their cash reserves. They put this into projects, and then they die out because of a lack of cash and life needs(when the cash reserves ran out). This wouldn't happen if you would have a focus on capi's, because then the capitalists will grow into huge hordes of angry hobo's that will stay poor yet still rise in size.

Anyway, I tried this with several games as the Netherlands and everytime it worked out great. Just be sure to keep subsidizing your factories because even those running debts seem to give your capitalists a bit of a salary. At the beginning groups of 5 to 12 capitalists will come, spend some money on a project(the money gets "saved" in the project, so the next batch of capi's will add some more), and shortly afterwards die out again. This repeats itself until you've finished enough profitable factories for the capitalists to naturally sustain themselves, without the help of a national focus.
 
Nice thinking De Spinoza - a rotating pool of temporary capitalists is a neat solution.

I would prefer that the game allowed them to borrow money from the excess funds in the national bank, but that probably had severe balance problems.

TempestDK - that certainly seems to be how the trade interface works.
Continuing your example:
potential demand 7 units
actual production 1
excess (potential) demand results in trade screen showing product as in high demand
This seems to trigger price being high
High price means that less is actually bought than potential, say only 0.5

The key elements of this that seem flawed to me are:
1) price being based on potential demand and not actual purchased demand. I acknowledge the trickiness of the circularity for programming purposes - but this could be addressed by basing price on yesterday's purchase volume and today's (or even yesterday's) production volume, except that if purchases were 100% of production when potential demand could be used to keep prices above baseline price
2) trade screen showing only potential demand and not actual consumption or proportion of production sold. You can see the proportion of production sold if you own such a factory, but not otherwise. IMO having the trade screen also show % of production sold would be useful
 
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