Weak factory input demand (the little brother of d!=d).

[gamer42_au]

The extremely high efficiency techs are there to keep factories (somewhat) profitable when trashing large proportions of their output (and possibly significant proportions of their inputs as well). Which is something of a chicken and egg situation, since the high proportion of trashing is due to over-production by factories.

I don't think there is a shortfall in demand for RGO outputs (at least not ones that are factory inputs), because the number of factories increases so much. Also, the proportion of pops in various jobs depends a lot on whether China industrialises. But in any case, the proportion of buying power does shift away from RGO's as well.

Ultimately, money is always increasing in the game (due to gold creation from mines) and so is population. Part of the late game economic problem is that unequal income distribution relative to demand can easily result in money ending up effectively sterilised in bank accounts. Unless a government starts running a large deficit to borrow and recirculate this money, it reduces the effective money supply. Hence pops lack actual income to realise their demand for goods and the market exhibits high prices (due to high desired demand) and low sold volumes (due to low effective demand). High prices help keep prices down (and pop poor) and encourage over-production; while low sold volumes keep factories trashing large volumes of product.

A system that worked properly would need:
1) factory production levels that respond to effective demand (not phantom demand), so avoiding trashing output and creating massive overproduction
2) prices that relate to effective demand, not phantom demand, but also respond to excess production capacity (lower prices when much more could have been produced)
3) pops to buy life needs and possibly everyday needs ahead of factories, though perhaps not luxury needs (allocation to pops would need to reflect effective demand in all categories)
4) base profitablility of RGOs and factories adjusted so that outcome reasonably balanced
5) factories capturing market share from artisans by pushing down output prices (and potentially also expanding demand).

 

[Naselus]

Agreed on most of those points; however, I'd stress that switching the majority of output increases to throughput increases works wonders on solving some of the major issues. Factories SHOULD be limited by RGO production; it ought to be competition for raw material that decides what dies, rather than competition for who can survive trashing the most output. This solution furthermore increases the profit from RGOs from day 1, which means that more POPs are buying outputs immediately, and there's not this ludicrous initial 50 years of unimaginable RGO surplus, followed by 50 years of unimaginable manufactured goods surplus. The two sides of the economy should feed off one another, in a positive feedback loop which is a direct inversion of the present downward spiral.

Artisans should also be stressed - and yes, I know I always go on about the artisans. At game start, ALL artisans should be viable. How is it that on December 31st 1835, all these artisans were doing fine, only for 20% of them to go bankrupt a month later? Currently, Artisans 'get out the way' and factories fill the vacuum, in precisely the opposite manner for how they ought to work.

So what I'd look for, and actually implemented, is the following:

1) Artisans intitially compete completely fairly with factories, only to fall behind as factory output tech improves.
2) Factory output bonuses to reduce from 500% to about 50% tops.
3) Factory throughput bonuses to be enormously increased to cover for the output techs being reduced.
4) RGO supply/demand parity at game start, with technology unlocking surpluses in a sensible fashion - not '80% more everything from mechanical production and then no further improvements' but rather '20% increase from numerous inventions spread across the whole tree'.

These are moddable solutions, which still leave us with the 'phantom demand' thing (generally known as d=!d), but at least leave the economy in a passable and vaguely realistic state - no more landfill-chicken between factories, no more mass-starvation of Artisans in the initial year. Overproduction is a dual burden - it destroys demand in the early phase, as RGO profits plummet and so Artisans cannot sell, and then destroys factories in the end phase, and as the game devolves into the absurdity of landfill-chicken and craftsmen cease to earn enough to buy their own produce, in a bizarre inverse Fordism.

 

[TheArchMede]

I don't disagree with you. It feels very much like the original Victoria to me, which took a player mod to get the economy half fixed. It couldn't be completely fixed by players because there were code bugs causing order of magnitude sized bugs in the economic calculations, but a mod that worked around them was eventually cobbled together. This is a common problem in PI games. They use percentages and fractions in ill disciplined ways and then somewhere in the code a variable that was coded by one programmer to be a percentage, so its stores 10% as "10", is used in an equation coded by another programmer that works in fractions, without converting it to 0.1. Then someone else tweaks the parameters so that the bug doesn't completely destroy the game, rather than realising that the imbalances are due to bugs in the coding and fixing them. The initial release of EU3 had the effect of buildings on demand too high by a factor of 100, and the effect of colonising new provinces on supply too low by a factor of 100 and it was never fixed until one of the expansions. The same things happen with percent/per mille or year/month occasionally too. The trashing of materials by factories is supposed to happen, but I am not convinced that there are not some things being created or destroyed due to bugs in the code. The d!=d type of bug/design flaw is sadly typical of PI, they just don't seem to realise that bad things happen in game balance as well as real life when the sums in the code don't add up. I can't easily see enough information on the economy to check whether material flows are balancing properly, but there are glaring inconsistencies in the tooltips on population changes which suggest that there may be bugs creating or destroying people in the population flows. The sums in the game are not as badly wrong as the sums in the tooltips, but since the tooltips don't add up properly, I lack confidence that the population formulas in the game are adding up properly too.

Going back to your point. RGO efficiency improves too and sizes change (and the RGO size calculation is another one that doesn't add up. Size increases seem to be calculated properly, but techs that decrease RGO size are not.), but I agree that the Vic2 model needs its economic parameters set in a way that is calculated like this. You cant expect this sort of model to converge somewhere sensible, unless you start it off somewhere sensible.

 

[Naselus]

the RGO decrease thing is because RGOs may never decrease below size 1 (40k workers). Everything is worked out on fractions of the whole numbers, and do work properly - a size 4 RGO with a 10% size reduction will appropriately decrease to 144k workers - but a size 1 RGO with a 10% reduction will be completely uneffected.

The thing that really gets me is that I can be producing literally enough grain to feed the entire world, and then receive a potatoe famine event... This does not make sense. Food shortages should never happen amongst POPs who are throwing away more grain than they would even want to eat. Moreover, there was not, to my knowledge, a period of history around the beginning of the 19th century where the amount of grain, cattle, fruit, mutton and fish outstripped world demand for them by 2:1...

Industry should not be playing catch-up with the raw material ouputs. Raw material outputs should not be so high that the price collapses, resulting in the 50% or so goods the farmers are selling clearing at half the price they could be.

I think that a major part of the problems we see is down to the economy derailing on day 1, and taking 40 years to actually get on track in the first place. Farmers don't make enough to buy from Artisans; Artisans go bankrupt, RGO demand falls further, farmers lose more money, Artisan demand stops completely. Meanwhile, the dependence of farmers and labourers upon so many RGO goods means any fall in their wealth levels causes a runaway feedback loop, dropping their demand still further and thus hurting their own sales.

By the time the eonomy stabilizes after the initial recession, the economy appears to have shrunk roughly 20% by my estimate. How much of this is down to starvation, and how much is due to mass artisan retraining as clergy and crats is hard to say, but what is clear is that the economy is set up at game start to immediately fail, and seeks equilibrium at a much, much lower level of production with a heavy reliance upon government intervention. If that's the case, then why not START like that? Just run the game for 4 years and then use the POP distributions by that point as the starting template.

Either that, or set up the economy right at the starting level - which is much preferable, but also much more work.

 

[TheArchMede]

If that's the case, then why not START like that? Just run the game for 4 years and then use the POP distributions by that point as the starting template.

I have thought they ought to set the initial conditions for their games this way for a long time. CK was a game that badly needed a generation's worth of random relatives to flesh out the families of the famous ones. The game should start with you taking over a going concern.

 

[unmerged(133356)]

Lots of intelligent analysis in this thread -- I really hope the devs are following the discussion.

 

[zmantle]

So with all of this is there any real upside to industry? It seems like the AI just ends up giving the goods for you at or below the cost.

 

[NoClass]

The thing that really gets me is that I can be producing literally enough grain to feed the entire world, and then receive a potatoe famine event... This does not make sense. Food shortages should never happen amongst POPs who are throwing away more grain than they would even want to eat. Moreover, there was not, to my knowledge, a period of history around the beginning of the 19th century where the amount of grain, cattle, fruit, mutton and fish outstripped world demand for them by 2:1...

If Victoria 2 were perfect, some economic weaknesses caused by the model should be by design. Economic tension between the old ruling classes, entrepreneurs, the working poor, and the growing middle classes created a great deal of the conflict around which the game is based. It's not so irrational that a poor uneducated worker in a morally backwards nation would not be able buy the goods he produces.

That being said, many of the economic weaknesses caused by Vic 2 aren't by design. It has to work ideally on some level before it can be purposely set out of balance. If only every bug or imbalance was as fixable as RGO overproduction.