Why are all the social reforms except unemployment subsidies and pensions free?

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Wminus

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I was shocked to discover that if you manage to get a high militancy by purposefully losing wars then you can easily pass a dozen or so social reforms, giving bonuses like 10% extra education efficiency, immigration bonuses, higher population growth-rate etc. free of charge.

This really needs a fix. Ie these social reforms like healthcare and education should cost money, not be totally free.
 
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I was shocked to discover that if you manage to get a high militancy by purposefully losing wars then you can easily pass a dozen or so social reforms, giving bonuses like 10% extra education efficiency, immigration bonuses, higher population growth-rate etc. free of charge.

This really needs a fix. Ie these social reforms like healthcare and education should cost money, not be totally free.

The safety and max hours cost factory efficiency.

And I think HC requires more bureaucrats.
 
If I get it correctly, the reforms that you call not free, actually raise the amount of bureaucrats a country needs. So until you get that new percentage you have less administrative effiency which makes some things more expensive (like army maintenance). The increased need for bureaucrats also means less POPs become farmers, clerks, craftsmen, etc. because the. So you have less people for your RGOs and factories. So they do cost you.
 
If I get it correctly, the reforms that you call not free, actually raise the amount of bureaucrats a country needs. So until you get that new percentage you have less administrative effiency which makes some things more expensive (like army maintenance). The increased need for bureaucrats also means less POPs become farmers, clerks, craftsmen, etc. because the. So you have less people for your RGOs and factories. So they do cost you.

Yep. And if you are playing AHD, you don't have rivers of money to finance everything, so reduced admin efficiency really hurts, especially in the late game. We're talking thousands of pounds a day in stockpile costs if you have a big military, not counting all the other effects of admin efficiency on the game.
 
Yes, it's usually better to take the social reforms which are charged to social spending, since that can be kept low without damaging crimefighting and administrative efficiency. Increasing your required number of Crats means everything is more expensive, crime becomes more prevalent (and that can be really painful in AHD), and you need to divert more potentially useful middle-class POPs to your bureaucracy, which can become very expensive if you have a lot of reforms.
 
Yep. And if you are playing AHD, you don't have rivers of money to finance everything, so reduced admin efficiency really hurts, especially in the late game. We're talking thousands of pounds a day in stockpile costs if you have a big military, not counting all the other effects of admin efficiency on the game.

Bureaucrat numbers adjust so fast in the AHD beta and their wages are so low, that reforms which just use bureaucrats are essentially free. (as are all the others) The only reason I have yet to pass a social reform in AHD is that I have yet to have the UH votes.

Cheating on wars hurts late game, because its 10% off your prestige per failed wargoal but you can do it at the beginning of the game without much penalty. Militancy loss from reform passing is pretty trivial, so you don't actually need to keep driving it up with a new set of failed wars after each reform.
 
Crats cost the exact same amount as clergy do, one for one. Once you have reforms that double or treble their required number, your administration can become more expensive than education. Plus there's the human cost; having to use twice or three times as many potential clerks to run your social programs hurts your private sector - if I need 4% of my population working for the government, then it's that much harder to get the clerks I need to run my factories at peak efficiency.

And if you're already running an overstaffed Bureaucracy, then the reforms aren't 'in reality free' - it just means you're paying too much too begin with :p It's like a free gift you get when you buy something for twice it's actual price. Besides, you could equally say that if I set my stockpile slider to zero, then my army is free, and if I set education spending to 0, my clergy are free.
 
Crats cost the exact same amount as clergy do, one for one. Once you have reforms that double or treble their required number, your administration can become more expensive than education. Plus there's the human cost; having to use twice or three times as many potential clerks to run your social programs hurts your private sector - if I need 4% of my population working for the government, then it's that much harder to get the clerks I need to run my factories at peak efficiency.

And if you're already running an overstaffed Bureaucracy, then the reforms aren't 'in reality free' - it just means you're paying too much too begin with :p It's like a free gift you get when you buy something for twice it's actual price. Besides, you could equally say that if I set my stockpile slider to zero, then my army is free, and if I set education spending to 0, my clergy are free.

Actually it makes it easier to get clerks with 4% bureaucrats because of the extra people available to demote. You get a much bigger throughflow on a route with a 4% pop than a route with a 1% pop in it.

Put the crat percentage up enough and I will grant that it eventually becomes a cost, but 0.2% per reform step is trivial to pay for and the benefits of higher demand easier outweigh the costs of lower production. I suspect with the 2.2 changes to promotion I am going to be suffering because I can't boost my bureaucrats over the required percentage in order to get a better balance between supply and demand.
 
Actually it makes it easier to get clerks with 4% bureaucrats because of the extra people available to demote. You get a much bigger throughflow on a route with a 4% pop than a route with a 1% pop in it.

Yes and no; in 2.2, middle class POPs tend to be 'sticky' when they get good everyday needs. Combined with lit maluses, this makes it hard to get rid of crats when funding them at 70% or over on the slider - and if you're funding them less than that, their numbers will start to fall, taking us straight back to inefficient crime fighting, less efficient promotion, and rising spending costs.

Put the crat percentage up enough and I will grant that it eventually becomes a cost, but 0.2% per reform step is trivial to pay for and the benefits of higher demand easier outweigh the costs of lower production. I suspect with the 2.2 changes to promotion I am going to be suffering because I can't boost my bureaucrats over the required percentage in order to get a better balance between supply and demand.

Sure, the advantages of reforms are worth more than the 0.2% extra crats required - tho they're kinda meant to be, since reforms aren't meant to be a disadvantage. but since you basically double your admin cost by taking health care reform to level 5, it's disingenuous to say that they're free.

Oh, and incidently, you can still get over the required % of crats in 2.2, as they gain a small boost from literacy. It's just harder, and so avoids producing the 25% crat AI nation.

I personally favour the idea of making reforms be entirely movement-based, so that militancy is always a bad thing. That'd close up the war-for-mil reform exploit nicely, if nothing else, and would also force the player to reform what the people want, rather than whatever you want for yourself (safe in the knowledge that the movement militancy boost can be used for yet more reforms).
 
Crats cost the exact same amount as clergy do, one for one. Once you have reforms that double or treble their required number, your administration can become more expensive than education. Plus there's the human cost; having to use twice or three times as many potential clerks to run your social programs hurts your private sector - if I need 4% of my population working for the government, then it's that much harder to get the clerks I need to run my factories at peak efficiency.

And if you're already running an overstaffed Bureaucracy, then the reforms aren't 'in reality free' - it just means you're paying too much too begin with :p It's like a free gift you get when you buy something for twice it's actual price. Besides, you could equally say that if I set my stockpile slider to zero, then my army is free, and if I set education spending to 0, my clergy are free.
The only way to stop the late-game bureaucrat-flood is reducing administration spending to 0-10%..
 
My assumption is that the beta patch still needs work, anyway, so I'm assuming that some of the beta-problems with crats will be taken care of. I would be very surprised if Paradox thinks flooding crats in the late game is a good idea.

I agree with Naselus. They do have a cost; it's just that the benefits 99% of the time outweigh the cost when it comes to reforms that require crats.

Now, a different question might be whether reforms that lower POP needs are beneficial in the long term or not. I've been thinking that there are situations where the reduced demand is worse than the benefits of passing the reform when world demand is mostly satisfied.
 
I personally favour the idea of making reforms be entirely movement-based, so that militancy is always a bad thing. That'd close up the war-for-mil reform exploit nicely, if nothing else, and would also force the player to reform what the people want, rather than whatever you want for yourself (safe in the knowledge that the movement militancy boost can be used for yet more reforms).

Um, then what would a sufficiently Liberal or Socialist Upper House do? What is the point of the UH at all if it can't pass reforms?
 
Um, then what would a sufficiently Liberal or Socialist Upper House do? What is the point of the UH at all if it can't pass reforms?
A sufficiently socialist upper house could just pass social reforms without regard for movements, since socialists always support social reform. A liberal upper house would have to wait for movements.
 
The only way to stop the late-game bureaucrat-flood is reducing administration spending to 0-10%..

I can think of a million ways to prevent late-game crat flooding, in code terms.

Um, then what would a sufficiently Liberal or Socialist Upper House do? What is the point of the UH at all if it can't pass reforms?
A sufficiently socialist upper house could just pass social reforms without regard for movements, since socialists always support social reform. A liberal upper house would have to wait for movements.

This. I'm not in favour of preventing the UH passing reforms at all; I'm in favour of only letting it pass reforms when there's a movement in support or 50% in favour, rather than when there's a militancy level.
 
This. I'm not in favour of preventing the UH passing reforms at all; I'm in favour of only letting it pass reforms when there's a movement in support or 50% in favour, rather than when there's a militancy level.

If you go that route, then I want A-Ls in the UH to support political reform, but support rolling back social reforms, just like Communists want to roll back political reform and grant social reforms.

Hell, I want them to do that anyway. :)
 
the last beta patch i stick crat spending on 100% and it sits at 100% the hole game (this was as a wealthy austria) and crats never go over 1.0 unless i pass social reforms