Economy always dead?

Well, this is true, if you're talking about AHD. It seems that demand (real one) is always lower than actual supply, while fake demand is way higher than supply, that's why AI always thinks that there's not enough goods on WM now.
Basically, every good is overproduced. The real challenge in AHD is not "supply all necessary goods", but "fight unemployment/minimize subsidies".
If you're playing small or medium industry, like Sweden or Belgium you're unlikely to overproduce all WM, but if you're great industrial power, like France, Germany, USA, this means that just by keeping craftsmen employed you'll need huge number of factories which results in overproduction of every possible trade good.

What can be done to solve this?

1. Keep taxes as low as possible, which will mean that more people will be able to buy things. Especially this applies to capitalists, because it's mostly them who buys luxury things, electronics & other cool stuff.
2. Fight throughput modifiers, because it's evil when in comes to overproduction. Example: factory produces 100 X-good from 50 Y-good and only 60/100 of X-good is sold. Now, increasing throughput by 5% will mean, that this factory will produce 105X from 52.5Y, but still only 60X will be sold, while they bought 52.5Y instead of only 50Y, thus factory become less profitable.
Again, fight throughput only if you're huge industry, which overproduces every good on the WM. But of course you need to build RRs, 'cos you don't want other countries to outrun your industry.
3. Input and Output modifiers are always good.
4. Promote capitalists, not craftsmen. Craftsmen POP will always increase due to promotion from farmers/labourers, because RGO goods become overproduced even earlier. More capitalists = more input bonus, which is good. Also keep an eye on non-industrial regions, even if region has only 1 factory, there need to be some capis to get paycheck and spend money on luxury things.
5. Don't neglect "8-hour workday", because this type of reform decreases throughput. Also look at reforms, which increase factory maintenance (machine parts, cement), this will increase constant demand to MPs and cement.
6. Expand your SoI, adding new consumers to your common market, not WM.

7. Play PDM/APD . It improves industry by adding many new stuff thus making new demand. Also, in PDM economy policy bonuses are applied to throughput, which makes State Capitalism, and later, Planned Economy best policies for huge industries. Just to warn you, PDM doesn't suddenly make economy ideal, but improves.

5. Don't neglect "8-hour workday", because this type of reform decreases throughput. Also look at reforms, which increase factory maintenance (machine parts, cement), this will increase constant demand to MPs and cement.

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Most of the social reforms are destroying world market, becouse they lower population needs. So when big populous country ,or you enact reform -> your industry collapse.

My sollution for this is
1) edit units txt files, and add luxury clothes, luxury furniture and canned food upkeep to navy vessels.
2) add 10 mln farmer population to Haiti and add them a modifier "cheeats" -> -9 to mil, -9 to con, education eff -900%, everyday needs ->-200%, life need -> -200% and luxury needs +500%
Also change goods to precious metal -> so they can afford to buy all things.

obsidian_razor said:

Do you know if there is a patch in the works to fix all of this?

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PDM
Not "all of this", but something. And it's not that AHD needs some fixing, AHD is just more real, it simulates reality more exactly than vanilla V2.
Of course, we can argue whether we need so much reality, when "playing AHD" now basically mean "concentrate on industry". PDM just tweaks AHD.

Thanik said:

Most of the social reforms are destroying world market, becouse they lower population needs. So when big populous country ,or you enact reform -> your industry collapse.

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Not exactly.

"Max. Workhours" reform decreases Luxury needs for Poor and Middle strata, but it's not really a huge hit on your industry, since most of poor and middle strata can't satisfy luxury needs anyway (reform even makes them more happier), so it's a fair trade-off.

"Safety regulations" reform decreases everyday needs for all POPs, which is sad, but increases factory maintenance a lot.

I'm not saying that these two reforms are really good, but they're not that bad either. Plus first of them helps with throughput.
Other social reforms don't affect POP needs at all.
Anyway, these reforms will not be your first priority, when you can enact Health care and School reforms.

I think what's really wrong with economy in AHD is just the way how farmers and labourers are poor and can't afford things. They promote to craftsmen and overproduce things, which their former fellows can't afford. Also, it's stupid that goods not sold on WM disappear. They should be sold with discount/given to somebody/stockpiled.

Economy is indeed a mess.

In Ricky, you had a world market acting as a soak - it bought everything thus ensuring that if you have right techs, clerks/craftsmen ratio and general efficiancy your factories were always profitable (on a side note, in that kind of system buying in order of prestige made some sense, unlike in V2). It was an "unelegant" solution and made industrializing a no brainer. Just build factories and when you're done, build some more and so on. This isn't something we want for V2.

The "industrial brake" was national pops - importance of them could not be overstated as they had a big bonus to RGO and factories production, thus ensuring that those bigger population countries (Germany, USA) will, most of the times, overcome UK and France. This needs to be put back in some way shape or form - maybe a huge malus for promotion/demotion to craftsmen and especially clerks for unaccepted cultures or something like that. In none of my games I noticed any issues cause majority of population was an unaccepted culture in a heavily industrialized state.

In my few last games I noticed a lot of RGO goods being undersupplied, like coal and iron in late game, in addition to usual suspects like oil and rubber, which, arguably, are supposed to be scarce. It is especially hurting when you have coal and iron producing provinces and have labourers to work in them, but they can't cause of 50 labourers per day limit on employment. So you can have a 50% full coal RGO province, coal shortage and unemployed labourers in that province - all at the same freakin' time. I do get that it is so that there aren't huge fluctuations in the market, like the moment coal becomes scarce, there's a 50% increase in world production, leading to prices dropping and labourers being laid off instantly. So the current system works somewhat for bigger countries, which have a lot of coal RGO's like Russia or Germany or those who have big spheres - it's the medium and small sized countries with coal RGO's that suffer. Solution -> create an Employment National Focus or something like which would allow you to employ en masse all unemployed farmers/labourers in a province. It wouldn't throw the world market of balance cause it would be used in rare occasions but it would be useful for those countries which aren't GP's. To stop abuse maybe allow it only if there's not enough production of that particular RGO good on the common market.

Another problem is that a lot of resources, especially late game, go being from in supply to out of supply in matter of days, pushing factories and entire factory chains out of production and into the red, which can be a big problem, especially for L-F economies. A solution would be to allow factories to "store" the goods they need in reserve, like they do with cash right now. A level 1 steel factory would store 50 iron and 20 coal + its maintainence goods which would allow factories to weather through those slight fluctuations in the market without the country going from +3000 to -4000 and again +3000 pounds in a matter of days in the late games.

Those are simple solutions and can be done in a patch - there are bigger problems, mostly with how demand is done. Every pop of the same buys and needs exactly the same, regardless of whether it's 1836 or 1936 and whether it's rich or poor. Since world production grows thousand times and world population only somewhat. it's a huge problem. Do away with this systems and create a system where money decides how much a pop will buy. If a craftsmen needs 1 fruit which costs 1 pound, why should he buy only one when he has 10 pounds? Keep a system of "needs" to determine if a pop is satisfied, does he want reform or gain or lose MIL but allow him to buy over his basic needs if he has the money. Why shouldn't a craftsmen with money want a car?
Of course, this needs balancing and probably would take an expansion but the current system where demand is fixed and supply grows fast is rather poor. The whole mechanic of industrialization is that basic people were able to afford various good because of their low prices and have things they never thought possible. Needs of a worker in 1836 and 1936 certainly wasn't the same.

Hmm. I also find the economic model and mechanics very unsatisfying. I don't see any tangible strategy involved in managing economics.

PDM sounds interesting. I'm going to give it a try. Without something that improves the economy, Vicky 2 just isn't worth playing.

According to the Reagan doctrine if it's dead you need to subsidize it

My economy as PRU/NGF is always dead in mid 1850s after several Asian mass-population countries are included into GP's SoI. Even if I included one or two it's useless. This time the day Japan was included into USA's sphere all my factories went red and I can do nothing.

Sarmatian said:

In my few last games I noticed a lot of RGO goods being undersupplied, like coal and iron in late game, in addition to usual suspects like oil and rubber, which, arguably, are supposed to be scarce. It is especially hurting when you have coal and iron producing provinces and have labourers to work in them, but they can't cause of 50 labourers per day limit on employment. So you can have a 50% full coal RGO province, coal shortage and unemployed labourers in that province - all at the same freakin' time.

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Yes, I like to play as Germany and also noticed this thing about coal.
Last time I went even deeper, I decided to investigate why this has happened. Actually, it was PDM, but I think it's not related to mod, since the same situation happened in clean AHD.

So it was about 1870-1880, I played as Germany in PDM, had highest industrial techs and RRs, had massive coal-consuming industry - cement, glass, machine parts, etc, etc. And despite the fact that I was top coal producing country, coal was my most imported trade good. Well, I consumed most of world's coal, so importing is not strange.
What was strange, is that labourers in Saxony and Ruhr had unemployment about 50%.... This means that while I had huge coal demand inside my country, miners were unemployed and I was buying coal from foreign mines. I decided to check other RGOs - my sugar refineries were importing fruits while we had mass unemployment in fruit RGO. Basically all RGOs in my Greater Germany (German Empire + modern day Austria) had huge unemployment (30-60%) while many of this goods were imported from abroad.

WHY ?

So I saved the game and decided to edit save file. I edited my biggest RGOs, set employment to nearly 100%, increased last_income proportionally - I'm sure I did everything right. Then I loaded the game and watched what has happened: 1st day - every RGO produced its max possible amount of good, 2nd day - less, 3rd - even lesser, etc. So in about a week everything came back to where we started.
I think what happened is - supply increased after I edited save file, but demand was the same, which meant that supply should also decrease, meaning that every RGO in the world produced a little less goods every day. After a few days, supply nearly met demand and the market was stabilized, but unemployment came back to old level.

So please tell me, why my factories pay money to foreign farmers/labourers when the same money could be paid to our citizens? And don't tell me about tariffs, I read about them, they don't work as they supposed to.
You still think that AHD economy isn't broken?

Sarmatian said:

Those are simple solutions and can be done in a patch - there are bigger problems, mostly with how demand is done. Every pop of the same buys and needs exactly the same, regardless of whether it's 1836 or 1936 and whether it's rich or poor. Since world production grows thousand times and world population only somewhat. it's a huge problem. Do away with this systems and create a system where money decides how much a pop will buy. If a craftsmen needs 1 fruit which costs 1 pound, why should he buy only one when he has 10 pounds? Keep a system of "needs" to determine if a pop is satisfied, does he want reform or gain or lose MIL but allow him to buy over his basic needs if he has the money. Why shouldn't a craftsmen with money want a car?
Of course, this needs balancing and probably would take an expansion but the current system where demand is fixed and supply grows fast is rather poor. The whole mechanic of industrialization is that basic people were able to afford various good because of their low prices and have things they never thought possible. Needs of a worker in 1836 and 1936 certainly wasn't the same.

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Um, that's not actually true. Conciousness has a big effect on demand (a CON 10 pop needs twice as much of everything as a CON 0 POP), and also inventions increase everday and luxury demand by 0.5% each.

ajax.hsp said:

So please tell me, why my factories pay money to foreign farmers/labourers when the same money could be paid to our citizens? And don't tell me about tariffs, I read about them, they don't work as they supposed to.
You still think that AHD economy isn't broken?

Click to expand...

Yes, I personally suspect hiring limits cause problems in the economy atm. If your own coal demand rises by, say, 5, then 5 more coal has to be produced. A RGO can hire 50 people a day - that's 1/800th of a size 1 RGO. This equates to 0.003 coal, before output modifiers are factored in.

This means 1666 coal RGOs would need to hire someone in a single day to meet the demand. Obviously, there's nothing like that many coal RGOs - there's like 200 - which means every RGO in the world hires 50 people per day for 8 days. After the 5 demand is filled, however, your own RGOs can't hire any more people; there's no more demand for coal, after all. So the whole world just picked up 400 more RGO workers, because of the demand you introduced.

I suspect eliminating the RGO hiring and firing limits would result in a much better economy - and one where if you consumed less coal than you produced, you wouldn't import the stuff while suffering unemployment.

Naselus said:

I suspect eliminating the RGO hiring and firing limits would result in a much better economy - and one where if you consumed less coal than you produced, you wouldn't import the stuff while suffering unemployment.

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The entire V2 economy is pretty wacky, TBH. There's no real way to be protectionist and goods from china can teleport all the way to England without any problems. That's true nowadays, but in 1836 china was very nearly a closed market.

Caewil said:

The entire V2 economy is pretty wacky, TBH. There's no real way to be protectionist and goods from china can teleport all the way to England without any problems. That's true nowadays, but in 1836 china was very nearly a closed market.

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Those are basic engine and performance limitations, tbh; you might argue that HOI has a convoy system, but there's 5 goods in HOI against 42 in V2. That's a lot of overhead to track goods movement, and is unlikely to change ever imo - and certainly not while Clauswitz is still in use. Protectionism would require some sort of price-based buying system, which simply isn't practical.

Naselus said:

Um, that's not actually true. Conciousness has a big effect on demand (a CON 10 pop needs twice as much of everything as a CON 0 POP), and also inventions increase everday and luxury demand by 0.5% each.

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Yes but it is a miniscule difference. You're not gonna have average 10 con even in 1936, so you're gonna end up with only somewhat bigger demand. The only real increase in demand comes from pop growing, which creates additional problems as they need industry to work in.

In reality, the demand increased many, many times in industrialized countries between 1836 and 1936.

Naselus said:

Yes, I personally suspect hiring limits cause problems in the economy atm. If your own coal demand rises by, say, 5, then 5 more coal has to be produced. A RGO can hire 50 people a day - that's 1/800th of a size 1 RGO. This equates to 0.003 coal, before output modifiers are factored in.

This means 1666 coal RGOs would need to hire someone in a single day to meet the demand. Obviously, there's nothing like that many coal RGOs - there's like 200 - which means every RGO in the world hires 50 people per day for 8 days. After the 5 demand is filled, however, your own RGOs can't hire any more people; there's no more demand for coal, after all. So the whole world just picked up 400 more RGO workers, because of the demand you introduced.

I suspect eliminating the RGO hiring and firing limits would result in a much better economy - and one where if you consumed less coal than you produced, you wouldn't import the stuff while suffering unemployment.

Click to expand...

I believe they did that to prevent a huge oversupply as soon as demand goes over supply - being 100 coal short world wide would trigger all 200 coal RGO's to hire immediately thousands of workers which would lead to what was a 100 unit shortage to become a 1000 unit oversupply and price dropping and RGO's firing people.

I believe factory stockpiling resources might be better solution, like maybe a months supply. Those shortages usually solve themselves in a few weeks most, unless there's a different cause, like rebels overrunning Russian coal RGO's.

Sarmatian said:

Yes but it is a miniscule difference. You're not gonna have average 10 con even in 1936, so you're gonna end up with only somewhat bigger demand. The only real increase in demand comes from pop growing, which creates additional problems as they need industry to work in.

In reality, the demand increased many, many times in industrialized countries between 1836 and 1936.

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It's really not that small - there's hundreds of inventions, and you'd be surprised how big the difference can be. Plus, I wouldn't dismiss the CON thing either; most middle and rich POPs can get to CON 10, and they have much more expensive demand than the poor. The two also multiply each other, so if you have 100 inventions and CON 10 then you have 300% demand.

Also, the majority of demand increase doesn't actually come from POP growth, but from increasing wealth (a bigger POP just has more unemployment, which means the same amount of money split wider - so higher life needs demand but lower everyday demand due to less carry-over money). A similar effect can be seen from looking at the game with the invention demand increase turned off - luxury demand actually increases, as people are spending less on everydays and so can afford to buy goods in the next tier. A similar process happens with growth, only POP growth effects life needs (unlike invention demand), so it mostly just leads to more grain being purchased and less furniture, clothes etc. POP growth actually hurts higher-tier demand, and ALL factory goods are higher-tier.

Sarmatian said:

I believe they did that to prevent a huge oversupply as soon as demand goes over supply - being 100 coal short world wide would trigger all 200 coal RGO's to hire immediately thousands of workers which would lead to what was a 100 unit shortage to become a 1000 unit oversupply and price dropping and RGO's firing people.

I believe factory stockpiling resources might be better solution, like maybe a months supply. Those shortages usually solve themselves in a few weeks most, unless there's a different cause, like rebels overrunning Russian coal RGO's.

Click to expand...

Factory stockpiling would certainly help deal with needless industrial failures, but a limitless hiring policy would work better with the RGO market. Even if every RGO in the world hired everyone, and then fired down to the level they wanted, this would protect internal production and hurt external - so your own RGOs would continue to supply your internal demand, as they buy from home first, while external RGOs would fire back down to the appropriate level. This would also help your factories, since your internal market will buy your own products first - rather than selling you coal you don't really need to import, and then plowing the money into their own grain RGOs and artisans.

In my first game of AHD, I have to say that in the 1870s, the economy crashed badly and I had a very big deficit. That deficit (playing as the Netherlands) nearly bankrupted me until I just decided to stop subsidizing most of my factories. Some of them closed down but capitalists soon opened new ones in more profitable wares and the economy got back up.

Lesson learned, if you subsidize factories, you might end up by sustaining artificial overproduction. This might be ok for 1-2 or 3 factories, but when it's more than that, you should just let these factories die. Overproduction will cease and your workers will be transferred to more profitable segments of the economy.

Niptium said:

In my first game of AHD, I have to say that in the 1870s, the economy crashed badly and I had a very big deficit. That deficit (playing as the Netherlands) nearly bankrupted me until I just decided to stop subsidizing most of my factories. Some of them closed down but capitalists soon opened new ones in more profitable wares and the economy got back up.

Lesson learned, if you subsidize factories, you might end up by sustaining artificial overproduction. This might be ok for 1-2 or 3 factories, but when it's more than that, you should just let these factories die. Overproduction will cease and your workers will be transferred to more profitable segments of the economy.

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As I keep mentioning on these forums, subsidies are bad. You can't keep subisidising forever. And the longer you keep those subsidies up, the more craftsmen will be left unemployed when you're forced to stop. They're only worth it if you plan on fixing that deficit they're paying for.

I use to play as southamerican nation like ARG (my favorite!), BRA or CHI.
What attracts my attention in all games is the lack of coal on the one side and the empty coal- or gold-RGOs on the other side.

Around 1921 I saved the game and reloaded it as France to look, how the AI acted as France. Even though France has a lot of coal-RGOs it has to import coal, because only 20 - 40% of the labourers still work in coal RGOs. In all states are factories. Labourers get new jobs as craftsmen. So the coal-RGOs dry out. The follow is there is a big industry demanding for coal and too few coal-RGOs hence France has to import coal. Clicking on the coal-labourers I got the information not all everyday-needs are fulfilled, because of lack of coal! That's crazy!

The problem is that pops become craftsmen from labourers and as well from farmers. Paradox thinks both goups are equal, but IMO they are not! Labourers are in common more important than farmers, because only labourers can produce precious things like oil, rubber, coal and gold. Why should labourers become craftsmen when there are no unemployed labourers in the state and getting a big portion of their luxury-needs? If the economy-policy is interventionism or laissez faire it's no longer you that build factories. As there is no order like "Do not build factories here" the AI builds in all of your states factories. If I have a gold-mine in Chile in the state Santiago I do not want to have factories there to avoid drying-out the gold-RGO.

IMO the solutions are some brakes needed in promoting and demoting pop-code. For example this one in labourers.txt:


The code says promote to craftsmen (+10%) if factories are in state, if luxury needs are less than 15% fulfilled and more than 5% of labourers are unemployed. (The line 'has factories = yes' is original from Paradox, the last two lines are a tested suggestion by me).

I believe the solution is in common farmers should promote to craftsmen, not labourers to supply the WM with goods and keeping the economy alive.

Granatenwerfer said:

I use to play as southamerican nation like ARG (my favorite!), BRA or CHI.
What attracts my attention in all games is the lack of coal on the one side and the empty coal- or gold-RGOs on the other side.

Around 1921 I saved the game and reloaded it as France to look, how the AI acted as France. Even though France has a lot of coal-RGOs it has to import coal, because only 20 - 40% of the labourers still work in coal RGOs. In all states are factories. Labourers get new jobs as craftsmen. So the coal-RGOs dry out. The follow is there is a big industry demanding for coal and too few coal-RGOs hence France has to import coal. Clicking on the coal-labourers I got the information not all everyday-needs are fulfilled, because of lack of coal! That's crazy!

The problem is that pops become craftsmen from labourers and as well from farmers. Paradox thinks both goups are equal, but IMO they are not! Labourers are in common more important than farmers, because only labourers can produce precious things like oil, rubber, coal and gold. Why should labourers become craftsmen when there are no unemployed labourers in the state and getting a big portion of their luxury-needs? If the economy-policy is interventionism or laissez faire it's no longer you that build factories. As there is no order like "Do not build factories here" the AI builds in all of your states factories. If I have a gold-mine in Chile in the state Santiago I do not want to have factories there to avoid drying-out the gold-RGO.

IMO the solutions are some brakes needed in promoting and demoting pop-code. For example this one in labourers.txt:

Code:

		modifier = {
			factor = 10
			state_scope = {
				has_factories = yes
			}
			NOT = {  luxury_needs = 0.15  }
			unemployment_by_type = { type = labourers  value = 0.05  }				 
		}

The code says promote to craftsmen (+10%) if factories are in state, if luxury needs are less than 15% fulfilled and more than 5% of labourers are unemployed. (The line 'has factories = yes' is original from Paradox, the last two lines are a tested suggestion by me).

I believe the solution is in common farmers should promote to craftsmen, not labourers to supply the WM with goods and keeping the economy alive.

Click to expand...

You've misunderstand how promotion works. Adding that in will just result in labourers demoting into soldiers all the time.

ajax.hsp said:

So it was about 1870-1880, I played as Germany in PDM, had highest industrial techs and RRs, had massive coal-consuming industry - cement, glass, machine parts, etc, etc. And despite the fact that I was top coal producing country, coal was my most imported trade good.....

Click to expand...

Hmm, so the economy is still problematic even in PDM? I was planning on giving it a shot, but won't bother if the economic model is still wacky.