Age of Colonialism

[Rizzmond]

I have to admit is that trying to understand how a game mechanic works is one of the unique experiences that paradox games offer. I remember reading a huge thread dedicated to experiments on what role each modifier played in sea battles in HoI2.

And it is not a fun experience. Our lives would be a lot easier if the devs were more transparent about game mechanics.

Rizz, you could help this a lot by removing lumber from POP's needs, since POPs seem to get priority over countries when purchasing goods - there's some experiments done recently which suggest that countries can only buy from the World Market, while POPs and factories can get their goods from the internal one. I've found we get less of these unpleasant supply shortfalls early on by making POP needs into 'finished' consumer goods and keeping them out of fabric, lumber, steel, cement and other 'component' goods; also, less variety cuts the number of small transactions and so reduces the money influx.

If your theory is correct about the small transactions causing the money influx then I agree this is a logical choice. Now that 1.4 is out though the question is if they fixed whatever is causing the money influx... my gut tells me no though.

[Naselus]

The 1.4 beta certainly does nothing to fix the cash influx, and tbh I suspect it is now enshrined as WAD. The stockpile internal market blindness, I strongly suspect WILL be changed. However, the level of solid demand we see now means that there's really no good reason to have POPs demanding raw steel and lumber anymore; these items are no longer suffering demand shortfalls. And frankly, it also makes more sense from a 'realism' point of view, too - when was the last time you nipped out to buy your daily half-ton of steel girders?

You can get round the money influx thing through need changes - concentrating them on a larger amount of a smaller variety of goods will reduce the relative % of money being pumped in per purchase, and bring it to a more controlled level. This is actually another argument in favour of the canned-goods-for-life-needs solution, too: rather than 1/100,000 of 0.25 grain bought at £0.9 per unit (amounting to £0.0000021 per member of a POP, or in other words requiring 47 people to equal the smallest money unit in the game) and then similarly tiny quantities of other goods, you can handle all the life needs in a single transaction, hugely reducing the size and income of POPs required to make the amount up to the £0.0001 minimum cash value the engine can recognize.

So I advise you drop anything 'unfinished' and just let industry eat that, while the POPs buy clothes, liquor, food, paper and other end-product stuff only. I've brought the cash influx under control through doing more or less exactly that. I should probably draw up a list of the major glitches and niggles in 1.3/1.4 so we can check that everyone's aware of them - waiting for the finished patches saves you from all the ridiculous back-and-forth I had to do with the economic changes, but it means you've missed on some research.

Just for starters, are you aware of this Literacy issue:
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/...3-Con_Literacy

It was added in 1.3 - prior to that, the function worked properly. Paradox appear to have reacted to the issue by sweeping it under the carpet and pretending the feature never existed.

[Rizzmond]

I wasn't aware of the con->lit problem, but that is a minor niggle compared to this money supply issue.

So with your strategy have you managed to make goods not chronically under supplied whilst keeping factory profits at such a level that craftsmen/clerks/capis don't fulfill all their needs?

[egslim]

It's 1850 in my game.
Industrial score is 523 for France, 417 for UK, 387 for Russia, 210 for Austria, 178 for Prussia, 166 for the US. The Ottoman Empire has 13, followed by the rest of the world.

As UK I have 330K Craftsmen and 30k Clerks at work, France has 260K and 9k respectively. The UK outproduces France in all industrial goods except wine and fertilizer. So why does France have a 20% higher industrial score?

It looks like Russia is industrially overpowered, while countries like Belgium are underpowered.

[Rizzmond]

It's 1850 in my game.
Industrial score is 523 for France, 417 for UK, 387 for Russia, 210 for Austria, 178 for Prussia, 166 for the US. The Ottoman Empire has 13, followed by the rest of the world.

As UK I have 330K Craftsmen and 30k Clerks at work, France has 260K and 9k respectively. The UK outproduces France in all industrial goods except wine and fertilizer. So why does France have a 20% higher industrial score?

It looks like Russia is industrially overpowered, while countries like Belgium are underpowered.

This is due to the way industrial scores are calculated in 1.3. They've supposedly fixed that for 1.4 so the issue should disappear.

[egslim]

This is due to the way industrial scores are calculated in 1.3. They've supposedly fixed that for 1.4 so the issue should disappear.

My bad, I thought AoC fixed that in 3.0.

[Naselus]

I wasn't aware of the con->lit problem, but that is a minor niggle compared to this money supply issue.

So with your strategy have you managed to make goods not chronically under supplied whilst keeping factory profits at such a level that craftsmen/clerks/capis don't fulfill all their needs?

The secret is to increase the finished goods demand by the same £ amount you lower raw material by. If the craftsman needs a ton of Furniture, rather than a half-ton of lumber and a hlaf ton of furniture; well, furniture isn't used for much else... same with clothes, tho be careful not to choke recruitment. Having all the spare factory-made consumer goods in PDM really helped with that, tho I suspect you can get the same thing with the RGO based ones from vanilla anyway. After all, if you remove 5 lumber requirement from a capitalist, and then give him 5 lumber worth of Lux furniture in exchange, you're not increasing his need fulfillment but you're preventing him competing with countries, construction and industry for the raw goods.

Meanwhile, the fact that your 93 man craftsman POP is now spending 0.00008 on luxury furniture, which is rounded to 0.0001, rather than 0.00004 (rounded to 0.0001) on lumber and 0.00004 (rounded to 0.0001) on furniture means you've halved the uncontrolled money influx from 0.00012 to 0.00002 from that POP - a reduction of 88%, which REALLY mounts up on a world-wide scale. You're both reducing the cash to create demand, while simultaneously moving demand 'up the chain' to the finished product.

After 1.2, we're so conditioned to having to support industrial production with POP demand to prevent them collapsing that we're afraid of changing tack. I spent three Betas wasting time with goldmines and cash support. When I finally returned to it, I cut goldmine output by 96%. And then I cut most POP demands by abour 60%. The cash overflow in PDM is now contained, and most POPs get somewhere within the everyday category.

Forcing the cash through the entire industrial process before it reachs the end-user not only spreads the wealth around as much as possible, it also ensures that the cash inflow is reduced and that player actions can be supplied... it's really the only sensible option. You cn achieve the whole thing from demand adjustment, too, so it's also probably the easiest solution (you can definitely get the same result from prices or production, but external factors work on those while needs remain a constant).

[Rizzmond]

It sounds like all the extra goods in PDM would actually be counter-productive to your strategy then if you are trying to focus needs around a few goods rather than multiple so that there are no rounding errors.

Anyways, I've taken your advice and concentrated demand on a few goods, deleted the gold mines, and made the aristocrats into a money sink too and now I am finally not seeing shortages on the WM so it looks like I've hit the right balance.

[Naselus]

The new goods mostly act as furthering the existing consumer RGO goods, or as alternate inputs to consumers (sugar-based liquor, for example), so it's not that bad; plus, the economic magnification makes the rounding much less pronounced anyway, but yes, extra goods are now actually harmful to the economy for precisely the same reasons they were good for it in 1.2. It's effectively a mirror image effect, which is another thing to suggest the rounding solution is the reason for the money inflation, just as it was the reason for the deflation in 1.2. I essentially got round it by taking the other solution - prices and production rather than demand. Nothing in PDM is cheap enough or demanded in small enough quantities to cause the inflation problem.

Good to hear that you've balanced it - which again further supports the theory. I think we've got enough circumstantial evidence to say that the problem is solved.



We should probably move the theorycraft in this thread over to the Wiki, as it's a fairly significant piece of the economic mechanics of V2.


Inciddently, the LIT/CON thing is actually much harder for us to get round than this economy thing - I've had to throw in a quick and dirty static effect on average LIT, which is far from satisfactory. I hope Paradox fix the define value for 1.4, as it worked fine in 1.2.

[Jawa]

Just a thought:
If there's a money influx from rounded up pop spendings, why don't you guys just multiply everything by a thousand (or a million or ten or whatever is needed)? Wouldn't that prevent values so small that rounding up is ever needed thus making the economy and money influx from precious metal working as designed?

[Naselus]

Just a thought:
If there's a money influx from rounded up pop spendings, why don't you guys just multiply everything by a thousand (or a million or ten or whatever is needed)? Wouldn't that prevent values so small that rounding up is ever needed thus making the economy and money influx from precious metal working as designed?

PDM takes that approach. However, there's some values that can't be modified - most notably, the stockpiles, which means the more we multiply, the less countries can stockpile. There's also a stack limit for money which means once you get over a few billion £ the value inverts to negative, giving us an upper ceiling for multiplication of around 100x. If we can balance without using magnification, then it's probably preferable to do so.

[ZomgK3tchup]

I hope you don't remove Gold mines entirely. Removing features from a game is a major turn-off for a mod, no matter how beneficial it is.

[Van Diemen]

I hope you don't remove Gold mines entirely. Removing features from a game is a major turn-off for a mod, no matter how beneficial it is.

I understand your concern, but our primary task is to get everything working as planned and if that means no gold mines, then it needs to be sacrified. However as we are still working on this (and PI is working on the patch) hopefully a better solution will be possible in the near future. Besides PI also turns off features when they are unachievable (think gunboat diplomacy and military presence for colonies).

To be honest, I would rather play a game without goldmines than play a broken game with goldmines, but I agree that the message might be difficult to convey for the casual Victoria II player. No matter what, I'm sure you will like next version even more once you play it.

[Rizzmond]

I hope you don't remove Gold mines entirely. Removing features from a game is a major turn-off for a mod, no matter how beneficial it is.

No worries, i figured out a way to balance the economy with some gold mines and a large diversification of pop needs.

AoC 3.1 already works directly on top of 1.4 if anybody would like to use it, however we are going to roll out a new version for both 1.3 and 1.4 soon.

[Rizzmond]

I need some opinions from the AoC playerbase. We are drastically cutting down the number of gold mines, but not removing them all together. What provinces do you consider most important for historical reasons to have a gold mine?

[ZomgK3tchup]

I need some opinions from the AoC playerbase. We are drastically cutting down the number of gold mines, but not removing them all together. What provinces do you consider most important for historical reasons to have a gold mine?

The California Gold Rush was big so a province around there.

I imagine gold mines on the Gold Coast would be important; in fact, gold in Africa and uncivs should be emphasized to serve as an incentive for players to colonize Africa and Asia.

[ODaly]

The California Gold Rush was big so a province around there.

I imagine gold mines on the Gold Coast would be important; in fact, gold in Africa and uncivs should be emphasized to serve as an incentive for players to colonize Africa and Asia.

This. I'd say the first ones to cut would be the ones in metropolitan Europe (however many there are). Everybody there already has enough money and enough reason to go to war. Maybe Johore could lose one or two, since they have four or five, I think.

[Rizzmond]

Naselus, I can't seem to get the AI chances to work for the colony->state slave event, do you see anything wrong with this?

#$STATE$ Joins $COUNTRY$
country_event = {
	id = 70000
	title = "EVTNAME70000"
	desc = "EVTDESC70000"
	picture = "Slaves"
	trigger = {
		country = {
			slavery = yes_slavery
			capital_scope = {
				NOT = { continent = europe }
			}
		}
	}
	is_triggered_only = yes
	option = {
		name = "EVTOPTA70000"
		is_slave = yes
		any_state = {
			limit = {
				is_slave = no
			}
			any_pop = { militancy = 2 }
		}
		ai_chance = {
			factor = 0.5
			modifier = {
				factor = 0
				tag = USA
				not = {
					any_owned = {
						any_neighbor_province = {
							state_scope = { is_slave = yes }
						}
					}
				}
			}
		}
	}
	option = {
		name = "EVTOPTB70000"
		is_slave = no
		any_state = {
			limit = {
				is_slave = yes
			}
			any_pop = { militancy = 2 }
		}
		ai_chance = {
			factor = 0.5
			modifier = {
				factor = 0
				tag = USA
				not = {
					any_owned = {
						any_neighbor_province = {
							state_scope = { is_slave = no }
						}
					}
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

I tried both with and without the any_owned scope change to no avail

[Athalcor]

Do you realize that the chances in the second option checks even the provs inside the questioned state?

E: Plus with using the country_event scheme it IMO won't work at all.

[Rizzmond]

Do you realize that the chances in the second option checks even the provs inside the questioned state?

E: Plus with using the country_event scheme it IMO won't work at all.

this is not a country_event, this is a state scope event. This is a special kind of event and the country_event at the top is misleading, it is like the election events.

it goes state scope -> any province owned by state scope -> any neighbor province scope

which should be correct