Are explosives that good a resources or are my capitalists stupid?

The capis can be a bit retarded really, sticking a nf focus on a particular industry you'd like to see them build is more effective. They don't seem to build factories in terms of how profitable or useful they might be. I have noticed though that they are marginally smarter under laissez fair than interventionism. They do seem prone to worship the military industrial complex, small arms, artillery, explosives and ammunitions factories gallore. Never had much success with those industries, so quite baffled by their behaviour as you observe.

If it is making money, any money at all, and not obstructing your industry, I'd leave them be. Just don't fund their mad dreams.

They don't know what they are doing. Even if they do take note of supply/demand, they are unable to evaluate whether that current daily demand is sustained in the long run. So they build way too much military industry whenever someone big is waging war. Artisans too. Whole huge artisan pops start to build the same product even if there is demand for only a few units. You also end up with factories which require inputs you have currently no chance to buy (silk, dye etc.) due to them being in spheres or bought in full by more prestigious customers.

Just let them build and don't subsidize money losers unless you want to grow craftsmen for another, profitable industry.
Encourage x industry NF gives +10% to chance that capis will build one of such factories the next time they decide to build one.
This you need to use sometimes when you can't switch briefly to something with state capitalism.

I'm not sure that they are marginally smarter with LF. They just get a bonus on efficiency vs. interventionism and factories are slightly cheaper to build for capis. That efficiency bonus doesn't seem to be worth pursuing, but LF enables you to focus on other things.

Securing access to raw materials, building your internal market size, promoting literacy up to a point and clerks afterwards is more important. Sooner or later almost everything your capis can come up with can be profitable.

Always presume incompetence in regards to your capitalists.

Personally, I only let them take over when they have a large income, and I have personally built most of the industrial base, so that they can mostly just expand the profitable factories I have built.

Capitalists are really stupid, even IRL.
They just spam so many factories of the same type until it is unprofitable. Despite that, they keep spamming them. They really need to work more on that in the next expansion WHICH I DEMAND THAT THEY MAKE!

Choose a party that doesn't allow capis to remove factories, so once there's like 4 profitable factories you built yourself and 4 crappy factories, they won't create new one(they can't actually). Sometimes they just try to reopen a fertilizer or a explosive factory, it's not a big deal. That way you can avoid too massive unemployment. And obviously don't subsidize any factory unless you're at war or want hordes of craftsmen.

zezeb said:

WHICH I DEMAND THAT THEY MAKE!

Click to expand...

Amen

bloody artillery factories

Six-Monts said:

So should i just close the new factories or simply don't subsidize until they close by themselves? Will unemployement be a problem then?

Click to expand...

Unemployment won't be a problem unless you subsidize (or run heavy negative tariffs) and then at some point have to stop doing so because it gets too expensive.
That would be a disaster. Even worse would be also NFing craftsmen, forcing them to leave RGOs for factories even if they'd be better paid doing farming/mining.

If you don't subsidize, craftsmen population won't grow much past real demand. RGOs will be manned until they become less profitable than being a craftsman.

Yes.

zezeb said:

Capitalists are really stupid, even IRL.
They just spam so many factories of the same type until it is unprofitable. Despite that, they keep spamming them. They really need to work more on that in the next expansion WHICH I DEMAND THAT THEY MAKE!

Click to expand...

As much as it annoyed me at first, I like having to use NF to encourage particular industries instead of just making them myself. It makes the game feel like I'm desperately trying to ride a tiger to where we need to go instead of the nigh-omnipotent governments of EU. But I can understand how that would grate.

CK makes psychopaths out of its fans, EU sculpts shameless imperialists, and Victoria breeds control economists like nobody's business.