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Victoria 2 17560 After Action Reports (AAR)
HeilLoki

HeilLoki

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Nov 30, 2010
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Ok guys! I just don't get it: Why does my Canned Food Factory shut down (early 1850s) even if Canned Food is in high demand and I have everything but 1 or 2 "incredients" for canned food? Why?

What do I produce early in the game? What's the best strategy? I know, there is an economy thread somewhere, but I'd like to kindly ask you for some basic advice. Can someone plz tell me a base strategy for economy?

I play as Argentinia, annexed Paraguay, Uruguay, everything but the capital of Chile and Bolivia. I'm not a noob, but still don't really get how the economy works!
 
Well, I'm no expert on it, but to be competitive, you generally need three things: good input/output tech, high literacy (I'm not sure how it actually affects the economy, but i know it has to do with craftsmen promotion rate) and markets i.e. a SOI. Other things you can try are playing with tariffs, and tax rates on poor citizens (less taxed citizens will buy more).

Hope that helps, at least a little. It usually works for me, but as far as I can tell, nothing is foolproof, short of microing everything.
 
Don't think literacy has anything to do with it, but the market is probably the issue. The problem you will have most often is the lack of buyers for your products (you can check what your exact problem is by hovering over the benefit/deficit of your factories). You will have priority for sales in your own country and in your SOI, but when it comes to the world market, it's actually your rank that determines the pecking order. So #1 gets to buy first and sell first, then #2 etc. Of course, the further down the ranks you are, the less access you have to the market. Given your military successes, I assume you're at least a secondary power; see if you can't bump that up to Great Power with some prestige techs or colonial wars. Factory efficiency techs help too, as I don't believe you start with those in South America.

Early industry in weaker countries tend to have a lot of trouble unfortunately, hitting the subsidies button to artificially keep it going might be a good idea until you're tough enough to face the competition. While that's the very definition of a bubble, it's useful to get your general capitalist infrastructure set up and, you know, making sure your pops get to eat.
 
canned food is both stable and unstable (then again what good isn't?) because demand for it is altered drastically by militaries and pops going spontaneously broke.

It's worth subsidizing IMO, not worth losing a staple industry because your artisans decided to be morons one month.
 
HeilLoki said:
Ok guys! I just don't get it: Why does my Canned Food Factory shut down (early 1850s) even if Canned Food is in high demand and I have everything but 1 or 2 "incredients" for canned food? Why?

What do I produce early in the game? What's the best strategy? I know, there is an economy thread somewhere, but I'd like to kindly ask you for some basic advice. Can someone plz tell me a base strategy for economy?

I play as Argentinia, annexed Paraguay, Uruguay, everything but the capital of Chile and Bolivia. I'm not a noob, but still don't really get how the economy works!
Click to expand...

you can't save your industries per se without subsidicing them, you can however make sure that your internal market is somewhat safe from those kinds of fluctuations by increasing the tarifs to 50%+ so that your local produce is bought locally... you can if you invest a lot at the beginning and keep a high tarifs reduce your taxes to 0 and just keep your economy running on tarifs, but this approach requires that you have a stable basic resource base to enable you to supply your production facilities.

another approach is to set the chance that artisans change their production from 5% to 0% (monthly) to ensure some stability on the world market (in defines.lua GOODS_FOCUS_SWAP_CHANCE = 0, -- Percent increased chance that artisan wants to change goods independantly of how well he is doing presently)
 
Xenophon13 said:
Well, I'm no expert on it, but to be competitive, you generally need three things: good input/output tech, high literacy (I'm not sure how it actually affects the economy, but i know it has to do with craftsmen promotion rate) and markets i.e. a SOI. Other things you can try are playing with tariffs, and tax rates on poor citizens (less taxed citizens will buy more).

Hope that helps, at least a little. It usually works for me, but as far as I can tell, nothing is foolproof, short of microing everything.
Click to expand...

Your farmers and labours need 40% literacy to be promoted to craftmen I believe. I also believe that the poor rarely buys any wares, it is the middle class and upper class that buys it. I read somewhere that some people max taxes the poor and none on the rich and middle class cause it does not effect your economy(Source needed, confirmation needed). Lower tarrifs means your factories can buy goods from other countries cheaper. That causes them to have more goods to produce things with.
 
zezeb said:
Your farmers and labours need 40% literacy to be promoted to craftmen I believe. I also believe that the poor rarely buys any wares, it is the middle class and upper class that buys it. I read somewhere that some people max taxes the poor and none on the rich and middle class cause it does not effect your economy(Source needed, confirmation needed). Lower tarrifs means your factories can buy goods from other countries cheaper. That causes them to have more goods to produce things with.
Click to expand...

you can easily max tax the poor, the reason being that you have low tax efficiency so that even when you tax 100% you may only be taxing 50% of the wealth that they produce, also the lower classes cannot usually devolve due to lack of money, starvation or anything of that kind...

taxing the middle and upper class is harder as they are relient on a lot of things to be working correctly, clergy/interlectuals-bureaucrats and officers are relient on sliders, Clerks and artisans are relient on what they produce and are very fragile to economic burdens and changes in the markets

aristocrats and capitalists can actually handle a medium tax burden and still be functional as their income is from all buisnesses...

Lower tarifs mean that your population and factories purchases from the market with less of an extra cost, this can easily outcompete any of your local producers and artisans in particular as the market(factories and artisans) always produce the maximum they can regardless of price or profit - factories just release workers when their profits go negative, artisans go bankrupt and then chose something else to produce
 
I "don't get it" either, and I play EUIII, HOI, and CK2. But Vicky is just leaving me non-plussed.

I did something similar:

* Started with Uruguay.

* Couldn't even afford the 9k troops they started me with; disbanded the entire army and turned military slider to 0 to save money. (Still couldn't balance the budget)

* Cranked every tax slider to 100%. Still didn't balance budget.

* Increased tariffs to 15%. Finally balanced budget.

* Can't really do anything for the longest while. Focused on imcreasing my prestige, because, stupidly, the global trade balance is determined by who wants to sell to you, and a high prestige gets offers first. Also focused on increasing research points. That works alright. I start climbing to a literacy rate of 15% over decades.

* After a decade or so, finally built a cement factory. It promptly begins losing money hand-over-fist.

* Subsidize it and focused on generating crafters. No one is selling me coal, so it continues to be idle and loses money. Even when I finally manually do a trade and score a large deposit of coal, the factory only makes money for a short time, and then it runs out of supplies and becomes a loss-leader in the budget again.

* A revolution usually hits about the 1860s - 1880s, which prevents further factories from opening up, and will shut down the only one you were able to afford to open.

* Why not do anything about the rebellion? Because your ability to create new regiments apparently is killed -- I can make 0/0 regiments. Nice.

If you wanted to create a basket-case economy, you succeeded. There's no way to have any reasonable slider settings at the game's beginning and stay afloat. The 9,000 troops are a "phantom division" that shouldn't even exist over time.

There were a few times when I was able to start to create multiple factories, but even then, it'd eventually get ruined when the revolution hit.

I also seem to be "stuck" most of the time with a Reactionary government that always pegs at 100% Reactionist. Even if I start getting Conservatives or Liberals or other parties in there, at the end of the year, it resets to 100% Reactionist.

I only had one semi-successful game, where I was able to make 8 factories. But two of them were always stuck as unprofitable. I was able to have a Liberal-led revolution, but that seemed more accidental than me doing anything.

Are we all just supposed to feel beholden to or like victims of the random event system for a game to work out?

It felt like me watching a century-long fishbowl, rather than leading a country in strategic decision-making.
 
Last edited:
PeterCorless said:
I "don't get it" either, and I play EUIII, HOI, and CK2. But Vicky is just leaving me non-plussed.

I did something similar:

* Started with Uruguay.

* Couldn't even afford the 9k troops they started me with; disbanded the entire army and turned military slider to 0 to save money. (Still couldn't balance the budget)

* Cranked every tax slider to 100%. Still didn't balance budget.

* Increased tariffs to 15%. Finally balanced budget.

* Can't really do anything for the longest while. Focused on imcreasing my prestige, because, stupidly, the global trade balance is determined by who wants to sell to you, and a high prestige gets offers first. Also focused on increasing research points. That works alright. I start climbing to a literacy rate of 15% over decades.

* After a decade or so, finally built a cement factory. It promptly begins losing money hand-over-fist.

* Subsidize it and focused on generating crafters. No one is selling me coal, so it continues to be idle and loses money. Even when I finally manually do a trade and score a large deposit of coal, the factory only makes money for a short time, and then it runs out of supplies and becomes a loss-leader in the budget again.

* A revolution usually hits about the 1860s - 1880s, which prevents further factories from opening up, and will shut down the only one you were able to afford to open.

* Why not do anything about the rebellion? Because your ability to create new regiments apparently is killed -- I can make 0/0 regiments. Nice.

If you wanted to create a basket-case economy, you succeeded. There's no way to have any reasonable slider settings at the game's beginning and stay afloat. The 9,000 troops are a "phantom division" that shouldn't even exist over time.

There were a few times when I was able to start to create multiple factories, but even then, it'd eventually get ruined when the revolution hit.

I also seem to be "stuck" most of the time with a Reactionary government that always pegs at 100% Reactionist. Even if I start getting Conservatives or Liberals or other parties in there, at the end of the year, it resets to 100% Reactionist.

I only had one semi-successful game, where I was able to make 8 factories. But two of them were always stuck as unprofitable. I was able to have a Liberal-led revolution, but that seemed more accidental than me doing anything.

Are we all just supposed to feel beholden to or like victims of the random event system for a game to work out?

It felt like me watching a century-long fishbowl, rather than leading a country in strategic decision-making.
Click to expand...

try setting your national stockpile to 0 or 1 %
boost education to 75%+ and try to get a litteracy rating over 50 asap
set your military spending to 0 but do not disband the army

do not try to increase tarifs over 10% and try to keep the taxes on middle and high income at 25-50% Uruguay only has cattle and wool as produce so any industry will be reliant on imports only and so need very low tarifs...
 
Military or "state" goods are special, as they are mostly bought by states via their stockpile. My guess is they show demand for canned foods as if the stockpile slider is at 100% or it is actually set to 100% but some countrys are in the red and it gets auto reduced. Really just makes sense to produce/subsidize those goods for your own needs.
 
Well if 'most' of the ingredients are available, isn't that a problem? I thought a factory needed to have all the inputs available to make the output. That is why i never voluntarily built canned goods factories, since there's too many inputs and it seems at least one of them is always going to be in short supply.
 
PeterCorless said:
I boosted Education to 100%. It took until after the end-of-the-game to get to a literacy of 50%.
Click to expand...

clergymen are most effective at 4% of the population, adding a national focus to further boost their numbers can help increase the litteracy rate
 
PB-DK said:
you can't save your industries per se without subsidicing them, you can however make sure that your internal market is somewhat safe from those kinds of fluctuations by increasing the tarifs to 50%+ so that your local produce is bought locally...
Click to expand...

Your POP's always buy from the common market first, regardless of tariffs. All goods have global prices. Only when there isn't enough, they buy foreign goods.

Tariffs are broken, all they do is increase the price of inputs and goods your pops buy that you don't produce in your common market and thus ruin your economy.

Avoid at all cost. They are only justifiable for uncivs who can't raise enough money from taxes because of low tax efficiency.
 
Sarmatian said:
Your POP's always buy from the common market first, regardless of tariffs. All goods have global prices. Only when there isn't enough, they buy foreign goods.

Tariffs are broken, all they do is increase the price of inputs and goods your pops buy that you don't produce in your common market and thus ruin your economy.

Avoid at all cost. They are only justifiable for uncivs who can't raise enough money from taxes because of low tax efficiency.
Click to expand...

debating this subject has become pointless, needless to say we are disagreeing, have a nice day
 
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