clipper convoy

Yellowjacket said:

Is it so expensive to ship stuff to Alaska?

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Basically, yes. As far as I know, the clipper convoy represents shipping, so if you're shipping a lot of stuff to far flung provinces, it's going to cost you. It's the same reason that when a nation goes to war overseas, its military costs are going to soar, because it's having to pay for the same stuff its always had to (food, ammunition, etc.), but then it has to ship them across the ocean.

If its eating up a lot of your budget, I'd suggest lowering your national stockpile slider, just make sure to bump it all the way back up if you plan on going to war.

You don't need to lower your overall stockpile purchase fund below 100%. Go to trade page, select clipper convoys, disable ai control, manually set your purchase amount equal to your oversea maintenance demand. Now voila, your ships can safely rot in ports while your budget floats and all other sections get good funding. There is no point to supply your ships except when they are about to sail into battle, anyways. In the same sense, you can manually shut down purchase of artilleries, small arms and canned foods if you don't plan to use your army in near future.

The problem of shutting down all war material purchase is that it will lead your factory producing those goods to bankruptcy. Sudsing them can get even more costly than keeping them running to buy the goods. Personally, I think having a national armament industry during war time is very important. Even if some goods are available on the world market, you might not be able to get them as fast as needed to make your troops able to fight properly. You can still rely on artisans but it's a very risky bet. Personally I prefer to let my artisans work on unprofitable goods for factory like fertilizer, ammunition or explosives. Russia have a big army witch enable you to get a few small arm factory witch are very profitable. The case of clipper convoy is tricky since this good is only profitable for the first 10 years then it become useless. Shutting down purchase for this one is fine but I would certainly not stop purchasing small arm, artillery or Steamer.