Chapter 6: 1911 - 1936
Welcome back to another chapter in the Swiss Experiment. The experiment concludes in this chapter, with a surprising (and muddled) set of results. In this post I'll mainly focus on what happened, and some 'small learnings', and then throw things open to group discussion
- this experiment has indeed changed how I will approach Vic2.
Enough muttering and mumbling, on with our show....
The Swiss Wave
When we left Switzerland, it was
1911, and Switzerland is somehow in 5th place, and has just finished getting Austria to enter its SOI (and ally with it).
Things start on a sour note, as almost immediately Austria regains GP status (leaving my SOI), and then breaks its Alliance with me. I guess the Austrians really didn't appreciate being 'protected' by me
. Ahh well, it matters little as it turns out, as they don't attack me, which is what I really cared about.
And then, a phenomenon I am calling "The Wave" hits. Swiss growth goes from Exponential to hyper-Exponential. This happened suddenly, as well - just as some "bit" flips in the program that causes your craftsmen supply to take off from 0, just as some "bit" flips that causes your capis to decide they'll start building factories, some "bit" somewhere flipped that caused my craftsmen supply to skyrocket hugely. A main cause of this (though perhaps not the only one) is that pop growth skyrocketed - from around 1-2K/month (this in a country of under 2M) to 10-20K/month. Now, was this
cause, or
effect of the wave, I don't know. (Almost none of this was immigration, by the way - though I did get waves of it, it was roughly balanced by emigration - this was almost all due to natural pop growth).
But at any rate, as I catch and ride the Wave, my score starts climbing. I move past the NGF into 4th place, and by
January 1913 am very close to 3rd, behind France!
The 'Wave' is in full roar, and I find throughout almost all of this session that I have to have
all of my factories expanding constantly - literally the day that a factory finishes expanding, I order it to expand again - and that's
still not enough!
At this point, I'm wondering if I have somehow stumbled across the mystic secret of Vic2 success, tapped into the 'mother lode' of progress, when things change....
World Events
First, let me sketch what happens in the world this session, to set the stage.
I make a mistake, and take my eye off the German unification ball for just a minute, just long enough for Germany to take Wurttemberg out of my SOI (there are 3 german minors left - Baden, Bavaria, and Wurttemberg). We are both now ''Friendly', and yet I find to my amazement that the NGF is advancing influence at over double the rate I am, even though I have it at priority 3. Before you know it, in
1914 Germany forms. Interestingly, their score doesn't really change much.
Then there are a bunch of major-power wars, still no Great War though (I've never seen one in 4 games, though others have):
Germany attacks France, and wins, taking a French core province (Franche-Comte).
The USA finally wakes up and gets mighty angry with Mexico, ripping off large chunks.
The UK attacks China twice, winning twice, ripping off more chunks of China - by the end of this game, they'll own roughly half of China.
The UK attacks the USA twice, and France once, and white-peaces every time! Odd, given their Godzilla status, I don't know what happened here, oh well.
I mention all this to set the stage for the next set of events....
Swiss wave good, French wave better
Starting about 1920, while it is losing a war and a core province to Germany, France gets its own much larger wave - it goes from just barely ahead of me in 1920 to almost triple my score by 1936.
Swiss wave good, German wave better
Starting about 1930, well after it won its war with France, Germany gets its own wave - it's much smaller than the French wave, but it goes from well behind me in 1920 (and even 1930) to, sorry to spoil the ending here
, but to just surpassing me in 1936.
Swiss wave good, USA wave better
Starting about 1925, while it's thrashing Mexico, the US catches its own wave - it's smaller than the French wave, but bigger than mine, and it goes from way behind me in 1920 (I had outscored it 3:2), to way ahead (outscoring
me 3:2) in 1936.
Swiss wave good, Chinese wave good
Starting about 1930, while it's losing two wars and two core provinces to the UK, China catches its own wave - it's actually smaller than the Swiss wave, but enough to move China into 7th place by the end of the game.
Oh, by the way, I had China in my SOI most of this session - it's quite the money-maker!
So even though Switzerland kept its throttle to the max its whole time (as we'll see, I wound up with large pools of unemployed craftsmen - even "all expansion, all the time" wasn't enough), other nations, with bigger boats riding bigger waves eventually outstrip me - here's the final tally:
I finish in 6th place, narrowly losing to Germany. Congrats to
Timmie0307 and
Selzro, who both predicted a 5th place finish - double-congrats to Timmie, who predicted it way back at the halfway point. Sal-ute!
Before post-game analysis
, let's do the end-of-game stats:
The World
(1) The USA wound up pounding Mexico
(2) 'lucky Brazil' did nothing the last half of the game, wound up in 13th place
(3) Germany forms, takes Alsace-Lorraine, and Franche-Comte
(4) best I've seen Russia do - they annexed Persia, then colonized a bunch of Africa
(5) UK took almost half of China
(1) This was my first game with the 'Age of Colonialism' mod, which is supposed to weaken Britain in reasonable ways, and yet they wound up with 4X the score of #2
(2) Note how IND score, for everyone in the top 10 but China, dominates everything else - it's the economy, stupid. (especially when you consider that the Army part of MIL is heavily influenced by economy and RP).
Here are the scores that the final 8 had in 1911, and then 1936 - note how much of the final score comes in this last quarter, and mainly, I think from the 'Wave' (too bad I can't stick in HTML tables here, sorry
). Numbers don't always quite add up, due to rounding:
Power ...
Score(Prestige/IND/Mil) in 1911 ...
Score(Prestige/IND/Mil in 1936) ... % in last 25:
UK ...
43487(2859/39794/1835) ...
76725(2024/72693/2008) ... 43%
France .... 2863(348/1137/1378) ... 18516(1654/13266/1604) ... 85%
USA ... 1556(507/302/747) ... 10121(1115/7950/1056) ... 85%
Russia ... 4929(201/4119/609) ... 7842(772/6145/925) ... 37%
Germany ... 2342(535/1495/402) ... 7189(2379/4296/914) ... 67%
Switzerland ... 2325(130/1130/1065) ... 6780(438/4993/1349) ... 66%
China ... 609(527/0/82) ... 2569(1559/840/169) ... 76%
Austria ... 798[/B(247/280/271) ... 2352(609/1428/315) ... 66%
Switzerland overall
Taking a stroll through the top strip:
(1) I wound up 5th in industry - not too shabby, but not quite enough. I'm actually more surprised by the 9th place in MIL, this shows how powerfully MIL score is affected by your economy (better economy means better RP, means more people, means more soldier POPs).
(2) I wound up running a large deficit at the end, more on this later
(3) I stayed a research super-power, the last 10 years I researched stuff that didn't help me just to see how far I could get.
(4) I had a reactionary ruling party almost the entire game
(5) Only two states mean you can only use 2 NF
(6) soldier POPs and reserves grew nicely
The Economy
(1) I stopped the ceaseless expansion when there was less than a year left, but notice how full-to-the-brim the factories are. Here's my unemployment situation at the end of the game:
That's right, over 100K idle hands in East Switzerland alone.
Learning - two states isn't enough
What's the difference between 5 level 2 factories, and 10 level 1 factories? They both employ the same number of workers, and produce the same output, after all - the difference is, you can build the latter twice as fast as the former - more parallelism. This hurt me mightily. I don't think you'd need that many more states, though - even just 4 states probably would have been enough.
(2) Note how many of the factories are now losing money.
Learning - the World Market shrinks
Why did the factories become such money losers? It's hard to say for sure (the game could easily give me this info, but doesn't ) but I think much of this was due to idle time due to factories not being able to get their needed inputs. I could see this by watching the little symbols twinkle on the production screen, but you can't stay on there permanently as you don't see the outliner when there
My hypothesis going into this game was that the World Market would suffice for Switzerland's inputs, as with a nice high prestige it would always be near the front of the line. This indeed was the case for about 3/4 of the game, when two things happen:
(1) As mentioned above, as more and more countries hyper-industrialize, industrial demand begins to far outstrip supply. In particular, as France and the UK hyper-industrialize, they probably begin to consume everything on the WM before it can trickle down to Switzerland.
(2) As the game continues, more and more countries enter SOIs - I think I tend to over-focus on conquests, as they show up on the map, but there's this "hidden layer" of conquests, namely SOIs - by the end of the game, roughly 3/4 of the countries were in SOIs. Sure, those countries still put their goods on the WM, but only with the 'leavings' their overlords don't want.
This also implies a strategy of aggressively trying to monopolize the market on certain crucial mid- to late- game goods (oil, rubber, iron) could be very powerful.
The Population
(1) Faskinatin' - I wind up with 13% Frenchies. Yet despite this steady exodus to Switzerland from France, France far outstripped me in production. Perhaps it was so much bigger that this was 'in the noise' for them? The 'Breifaren' are Chinese immigrants.
(2) wound up with almost 40% craftsmen, and 8% clerks, by far the largest I've ever had.
(3) 2.8% Jewish? I wonder where that immigration came from.
(4) While the population stayed solidly Socialist in plurality, they never got a second Socialist party with a wiser party platform, and the Socialists never came close to taking power - see in the pie chart below that they only had 14% electoral support.
Oh, and just to show that the pop growth wasn't due to immigration, here's the last month:
Note how emigration can be to non new-world countries, they might get a bonus (and only they can make it a NF), but I've had lots of immigration to Switzerland in this game, and here we see emigration to Austria.
Politics and Diplomacy
All the ones with 100 influence are in my SOI, as is the OE. I lost both Austria and China from my SOI late when they became GPs . In hindsight I probably should have been more aggressive here on smaller countries that could provide more goods, and less on Austria/OE.
Technology
Army:
Commerce:
got 'em all
Culture:
The untaken ones here raise educational efficiency (which was already at 100%), and colonial migration (didn't have any), I could have left this entire column untouched....
Industry:
Learning: tech tree size
One of my goals in this AAR was to see just how far you could get in the research tree - I think Switzerland here did about as much researching as is possible, and it got roughly 4/5 of the way through (I never did anything in Navy).
RGO Production
Factory Production
As discussed before, I think many of the factories were starved for inputs at the end.
Class Discussion
I'd now like to throw things open for general discussion
Join in, won't you? Some of the topics under discussion:
(-) How is that France could lose to Germany, including losing home provinces, yet far defeat it in score, after being fairly close in 1920?
(-) Same question, with France and Spain. Spain was a big colonizer, was at peace the whole time, had 1/2 the score of France in 1920 - and wound up with 1/7th the final score. What happened to France that didn't happen to Spain?
(-) Why did the 'wave' hit some countries big (France, USA), some medium (Austria, Germany), and some not at all (Russia, Spain)? Is it all about tech level? Is it about social reforms? If so, then why did it hit Switzerland 20 years after the last social reform passed?
(-) If so much of the ending score is racked up in the last 25 years, and so much of that is from IND, then should we all be spending more effort on SOI-ing and colonizing and less on conquering?
Until then, awaiting your inputs, I remain your experimenting colleague: