Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #8 - Institutions

[Lorehead]

Even in that assumption the same flaws exist. Wouldn't it feel weird to some that the prisoners are in California and prison guards are in New York? And you could also say that chemical engineers and mechanical engineers should be a separate jobs.

Respectfully, you misunderstand what I said on both counts. I proposed moving the jobs to the local urban centers, making the schools and hospitals something like an automatically-selected production method. Also, I did not propose adding new pop types, at least not here.

I mentioned academics as a possible pop type for physicians only because that was what one of the Devs said.

 

[alexti]

And I totally agree about that also being weird, which is why I'm in support of institution adding some jobs to city centers.

For more modern doctors, I think academic is the best fit out of the professions we've seen so far. Just because they don't write their own research doesn't mean they can't easily read and understand it, or be capable of writing their own if they were so willing. You are completely correct that what sorts of jobs are created by healthcare would change, likely by the type of healthcare you have, how big the institution is, and how advanced your technology is. So early on it might be mostly clergymen or shopkeepers, but even then I imagine there would be some academics (depending on the type of healthcare). But ultimately the exact type of profession is less important than the fact there should be some matching profession appearing locally, through whatever means.

I think that the academic is mostly added to feed into various political movements and IGs. Otherwise, you could just group those occupations with engineers or something. It is logical to put researchers (whether in medicine, theoretical physics, chemistry etc) into academic profession, but for the simulation it has little effect. There aren't enough of them to make difference at the economic level and would their political leanings be any different from their practicing counterparts (like doctors or engineers)? I think it's more important for academics in disciplines like economics, philosophy and so on...

I don't see the need to go into extra details. From what we've seen so far (but regional markets diary is yet to come), geographical location of those jobs wouldn't have any practical impact. So unless there is some mechanics that would tie their effects to a specific location, what's the point in adding more details?

 

[alexti]

Respectfully, you misunderstand what I said on both counts. I proposed moving the jobs to the local urban centers, making the schools and hospitals something like an automatically-selected production method. Also, I did not propose adding new pop types, at least not here.

You have literally wrote "doctor, nurse, police or teacher pops" in the post I've replied to, so I have assumed that's what you meant If you meant auto-creating the jobs rather than pops I wouldn't particularly object though my view is to rather avoid details unless they improve the gameplay.

 

[Lorehead]

You have literally wrote "doctor, nurse, police or teacher pops" in the post I've replied to, so I have assumed that's what you meant If you meant auto-creating the jobs rather than pops I wouldn't particularly object though my view is to rather avoid details unless they improve the gameplay.

My very next words were, “or the closest equivalent.” Yes, I was suggesting they auto-create the job slots in each state, not the pops themselves.

 

[Paul93]

Wow this seems a really thoughtful way to reduce micromanagement while maintaining depth and variety! I like it a lot and I am wondering if it could in principle be ported to other PDX games, like stellaris (or a future version of stellaris)...

 

[wilcoxchar]

The more I read this the more I'm thinking that adding the jobs to urban centers makes the most sense (which admittedly might be confirmation bias, since I'm already partial to the idea).

The problem with it being jobs created in the urban center is then the player would have zero direct control over the creation of government administration jobs, which for a player whose role is partially as the government, would be extremely weird and immersion breaking. But letting the player directly build urban centers would be too broad a power to give the player direct control over, since they also want factories and other aspects of the game to influence where urban centers are located and how big they get. So the solution is to then have something that creates government administration jobs that lets the player directly control creating them, while still being indirectly tied to urban centers so there's still some indirect influence there. Hence, the government administration building that provides bureaucrat and clerk POP jobs as a catchall for civil service and administrative positions like the healthcare, education, and legal industries, and national institutions which lets the player directly influence what those social service systems specifically look like and what impact they provide.

 

[Lapoleon]

The problem with it being jobs created in the urban center is then the player would have zero direct control over the creation of government administration jobs, which for a player whose role is partially as the government, would be extremely weird and immersion breaking.

But you do have control. By passing laws you create the institution and then you can change its level creation more or less jobs. The only thing this would prevent is creating parts of your country without education etc. on purpose.

 

[MTGian]

Let me start off by saying thank you for your detailed response. I enjoy these debates as long as everyone is nice, so I appreciate the effort and time that was put into what you wrote. I felt that you made a compelling argument.

This data is pretty misleading for the argument that public servants are needed to be local. For starters, this is just public sector employment, i.e. anyone employed by the government, not just the industries that bureaucrats and clerks would be representing. It includes people like forest service and park rangers (not really applicable to the Victoria time period) and members of the military (servicemen and officers), which is why the three states with the most highest percentage of public service workforce - Wyoming, Alaska, and New Mexico - are all low population, rural states with a lot of military bases and national or state parks, forests, or wilderness areas.

I tried to determine whether forest service/park rangers/military personnel were significant portions of employment in Wyoming and failed. I used this: (https://www.bls.gov/oes/2020/may/oes_wy.htm). Maybe I am doing it wrong, but it looks like forest related employment was about 730 out of 261,690 (0.27%). I couldn't find a military/armed forces category (maybe it is under something else?). In fairness, after struggling with Wyoming, I didn't look at the other two states.

Do you have data that supports the implication above that low population rural states have high percentage of public sector employment because of forest service/park rangers/military personnel? Because that was not the conclusion of the article. The conclusion of the article for why low population rural states have a high percentage of public sector employment was that: "the primary reason for this is that government services, particularly local government jobs, exist even in small towns. Such government services provide jobs even if there are no major sources of private sector jobs."

But even if we do look at the kind of professions that government administration would represent, it's still pretty misleading. Let's look at, for example, the Education Instruction and Library Operations employment category since teachers have been brought up a lot. Now, according to the BLS, in total there are 6,274,820 people employed in the United States in that category. Of that, there are just 19,130 people in that employment category in Wyoming. And that is one of biggest employment categories in Wyoming. That means, if we wanted to completely accurately represent the geographic distribution of teachers today in Victoria 3, just 0.3% of total teachers would need to be in Wyoming. Compare that to, say, the New York City metro area. Not New York state, but just the New York City metropolitan area. Within the NYC metro area, there are 652,260 people employed in the Education Instruction and Library Operation category. That's over 10% of the total employed nationwide in the category, and over 34 times the amount employed in all of Wyoming. (Because of how the New York metro area spreads out into New Jersey and Connecticut and how dominant NYC is in New York state, the number employed in the NYC metro is actually about the same as the number in New York state, but the city comparison makes it much clearer)

Then, think back to the idea of factories representing entire industries. The point of that is to not have factories and other buildings being built everywhere, and to make the specific industries stand out in the places where they're built. Even though you had plenty of industries that had factories all over the place in an industrializing society, you want to make it noticeable for the industries to stand out in the places where they're well known. You want the auto industry being built in Michigan to stand out, or the shipbuilding industry in Virginia, or the fuel refinery in Texas. So you abstract it, both to make them stand out as actually important and to keep numbers of factory levels at least somewhat low, so those factories are the only ones that show up with any significance in the game. Even if it's not a perfect representation of everywhere the industry existed in real life since you might not have a fuel refinery in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Colorado, and California even though they also had gas and fuel industries in the time period, it's a good enough representation of the areas where the industries actually became well known and a recognizable hallmark of the area.

Now, consider that buildings like factories and government administration buildings are on a statewide scale. They're not representing individual schools or factories. That would be far too small in scope for Victoria. So factories and other buildings are representing an entire localized industry, which means it needs to be greater than the typical distribution of the industry in that state to actually stand out enough to be able to be represented. But again, let's assume we want to combined that statewide measure into a building to represent the local industry. Since Wyoming is a state, we'll use it as a baseline. So if we're trying to represent this completely accurately down to every last person in every industry, we'll give Wyoming with its less than 20,000 employed as a teacher or librarian an Education building of level 1. That means New York, with its 669,080 people employed in that category would need an Education building of level 34 to create an equivalency with Wyoming. California, with its 1,025,580 people employed in the category would need a level 53 building to do so.

I just want to interrupt here to say that the building part of this is not something that I was proposing. My proposal is just that you would tack on the education jobs on the bureaucracy building (as compared to Lorehead's proposal that you would tack on the jobs to the Urban Center building), so it wouldn't matter whether it is a small amount or a large amount.

Continuing...

And then we start looking at overall numbers. California has 1,025,580 people employed in the Education/Library category. New York has 669,080. Texas has 740,670. Florida has 424,600. That's a combined total of 2,859,930 people, and you're already getting close to half of the total employed in just four states. Which... also happen to be the four largest state by population, because of course the states with the most people are going to have the most people employed in the education industry.

So then, it makes sense to tie the education and other government administration buildings to where the population is since that's naturally going to be where the jobs and the workers end up and where the industry is most recognizable. So you link government administration buildings to urban centers, with, as has been shown so far, government administration buildings contributing to the urbanization of an area and thus the growth of the urban center. It doesn't prevent people from building government administration buildings in a small, rural area just like it doesn't prevent people from building a factory somewhere that geographically doesn't fit the resources it's near. But it does encourage players to build their government administration industries in the places where they want to create urban clusters, which fits how the industry is distributed in real life. It's not perfect, but nothing will be when you're working on a global scale and it's a good enough fit for the purposes of the game and it fits with the same scope and abstraction that the rest of the buildings are on.

oh no I was just looking up numbers why did this become an essay aaaaaa

Okay. I see your point We aren't representing small scale manufacturing, so why would we represent small scale administrative services/bureaucracy? Large scale administrative services/bureaucracy is a population center thing like automobiles is a Detroit thing. It isn't a bad point. Maybe that is what the developers are thinking. For me, your writeup was the best argument in support of the proposed model that I have seen. So, thank you/props for that.

That said, I have a couple of responses.

1) Small scale administrative services/bureaucracy is proportionally really important to rural areas. It doesn't matter if New York City has 1,000,000 times as many public sector employees as Wyoming, if public sector employees in Wyoming are 25% of the workforce*. Ignoring 25% of the workforce is a huge deal. Yes, the same could be true for small scale manufacturing, which brings me to my second point...

2) There is a difference between representing small scale manufacturing and small scale administrative services/bureaucracy. We can represent small scale administrative services/bureaucracy. Easily. As Lorehead and I have proposed, just tack on the jobs onto an already existing building. Done. If it were that easy to do the same for small scale manufacturing, then I think it would actually be cool to have smaller scale manufacturing in places. A small automobile factory in a small city could be pretty important for employment in that city. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to do this.

* - of course, other people have pointed out that the public sector was probably not 25% of the workforce in Wyoming during the time period, but that was not wilcoxchar's issue/point.

 

[General WVPM]

...
An important aspect of Institutions is that the effects and benefits they apply only affect Incorporated parts of your country - if you have any colonial frontiers, contested territory, or recently annexed land you haven’t Incorporated yet, these do not pay taxes to you nor do they cost you Bureaucracy, but they also can’t access your awesome hospitals.
...

Why would these lands be tax exempt?

 

[Tamwin5]

I think that the academic is mostly added to feed into various political movements and IGs. Otherwise, you could just group those occupations with engineers or something. It is logical to put researchers (whether in medicine, theoretical physics, chemistry etc) into academic profession, but for the simulation it has little effect. There aren't enough of them to make difference at the economic level and would their political leanings be any different from their practicing counterparts (like doctors or engineers)? I think it's more important for academics in disciplines like economics, philosophy and so on...

I don't see the need to go into extra details. From what we've seen so far (but regional markets diary is yet to come), geographical location of those jobs wouldn't have any practical impact. So unless there is some mechanics that would tie their effects to a specific location, what's the point in adding more details?

I think the exact understanding of what the Academic profession represents will have to wait until we get detailed profession descriptions (so possibly launch), but my understanding is that it more refers to being highly educated and intellectually focused than being specifically "researchers". Being engineers instead feels silly, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is another profession which works, and ultimately it's less of a concern. But having a large and well developed healthcare system effect the size/influence of various interest groups seems like it would make perfect sense. This would probably have a bigger impact with faith hospitals creating clergy though. And while a, say, 1% increase in jobs doesn't seem like much at the macro level, for an interest group only making up 5% of your country that's a 20% increase. It would mainly just make it harder to sideline whatever profession/interest group is associated with the institutions you are developing, which makes sense.

I don't know anywhere near enough to make claims about how adding a few jobs will effect the economics of your country. I suspect the only times it will cause issues will be edge cases: Needing to get some academics (or whatever profession doctors are) to move out into Siberia to run your hospitals there, or needing to import a resource used by your high level institution you haven't begun producing yourself (or can't produce) for whatever reason. The main reason to incorporate these extra jobs is simply immersion. It feels real that increasing your schooling would see some jobs pop up at the city center, that you need literate pops to run your conscription drive in Africa, that supporting a high level healthcare institution means supplying the chemicals, silk, and tools they need. And considering that these changes wouldn't force any extra micro on the player, I don't see a reason not to add them.

 

[Lorehead]

The problem with it being jobs created in the urban center is then the player would have zero direct control over the creation of government administration jobs,

I made that suggestion because a Dev said they didn’t want any micromanagement. However, if this is a concern, public services could be production methods. Then, you could set a national default of public schools, but change that to private schools in one state and religious schools in another. Production methods can already change what type of pops a building employs.

 

[blobmaneatsme]

Why would these lands be tax exempt?

I hope the idea with at least colonial territory is that you will have a sort of puppet colonial government that is subservient to it's mother country but all of the tax's raised in the colony go to that colonial government first. sort of like hoi4's British empire with India and the like.

it would be an elegant way of allowing different colonies to have different governing methods and development levels

 

[alexti]

My very next words were, “or the closest equivalent.” Yes, I was suggesting they auto-create the job slots in each state, not the pops themselves.

I see the source of misunderstanding then. I took it as "the closest equivalent of listed pop types", not as jobs being a closest equivalent of pops.

 

[Lorehead]

I see the source of misunderstanding then. I took it as "the closest equivalent of listed pop types", not as jobs being a closest equivalent of pops.

Unfortunately, we seem to be talking past each other a bit. I did mean the existing pop type that’s most appropriate to represent the professions I listed. Contrary to the opinion of one person here, that’s not always clerk or bureaucrat. However, I don’t think it’s worth the complexity to make a huge number of new Pop types.

If that’s clear, we can probably move on now.

 

[alexti]

I think the exact understanding of what the Academic profession represents will have to wait until we get detailed profession descriptions (so possibly launch), but my understanding is that it more refers to being highly educated and intellectually focused than being specifically "researchers". Being engineers instead feels silly, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is another profession which works, and ultimately it's less of a concern.

At this point it's a bit of a guesswork about details of professions. At that period there wasn't much of a clear separation as it is now. Many important inventions and breakthroughs were made by people without any high education and generally the science and technology was much less advanced which also meant that innovations could be done without needing extensive background knowledge. Definition of "engineer" has also shifted over the time, so it's not such a big stretch. The game has to make them all the time unless they want to add thousands of different professions.

But having a large and well developed healthcare system effect the size/influence of various interest groups seems like it would make perfect sense. This would probably have a bigger impact with faith hospitals creating clergy though. And while a, say, 1% increase in jobs doesn't seem like much at the macro level, for an interest group only making up 5% of your country that's a 20% increase. It would mainly just make it harder to sideline whatever profession/interest group is associated with the institutions you are developing, which makes sense.

In a plausible world you shouldn't be able to create a large and well developed healthcare system. At the fundamental level, the societies at that time didn't have economic capacity to maintain it. Production of food and basic needs items still required the bulk of the labor pool and to free up the labor would require significantly faster technological progress in many disciplines. Then besides the economic capacity, simply throwing resources at the healthcare isn't going to achieve much. The medical knowledge at the start of the period was very low though gradually improving, but it also relied on technology in many other areas. For example, most of that expensive medical equipment that was created in 20th century wouldn't be possible without transistors which weren't invented until well after Victoria period.

I am curious about faith hospitals - would they actually create clergy jobs? I would expect that the doctors working there wouldn't be very different from the doctors in secular hospitals, but I don't really know anything about this subject.

I don't know anywhere near enough to make claims about how adding a few jobs will effect the economics of your country. I suspect the only times it will cause issues will be edge cases: Needing to get some academics (or whatever profession doctors are) to move out into Siberia to run your hospitals there, or needing to import a resource used by your high level institution you haven't begun producing yourself (or can't produce) for whatever reason. The main reason to incorporate these extra jobs is simply immersion. It feels real that increasing your schooling would see some jobs pop up at the city center, that you need literate pops to run your conscription drive in Africa, that supporting a high level healthcare institution means supplying the chemicals, silk, and tools they need. And considering that these changes wouldn't force any extra micro on the player, I don't see a reason not to add them.

Historically, it usually wasn't the case of bringing hospitals into remote area, but rather bringing people to the hospitals in large population centers. So someone living in Siberia would have to travel to a large city to be treated in the hospital (if one could afford that). The most one were able to get in a medium-sized town would probably be a generalist doctor.

Regarding creating demand on some products (in small quantities), it would really open can of worms, because practically every industry requires many different products to operate, so for example, furniture industry would also require glue, nails, brackets and so on... It feels like modelling all such details is outside of the scope of the game.

 

[Tamwin5]

In a plausible world you shouldn't be able to create a large and well developed healthcare system. At the fundamental level, the societies at that time didn't have economic capacity to maintain it. Production of food and basic needs items still required the bulk of the labor pool and to free up the labor would require significantly faster technological progress in many disciplines. Then besides the economic capacity, simply throwing resources at the healthcare isn't going to achieve much. The medical knowledge at the start of the period was very low though gradually improving, but it also relied on technology in many other areas. For example, most of that expensive medical equipment that was created in 20th century wouldn't be possible without transistors which weren't invented until well after Victoria period.

So you are saying that having a very high level of healthcare institution should create a large demand for jobs and goods? I could easily see a level 5 healthcare institution being so expensive that you effectively couldn't afford it until endgame, if you didn't want to cripple the other aspects of your country. I kept my suggestion to adding small amounts of jobs as to minimize the amount of changes from the current system (which currently adds none), but I could easily see it creating much more if that's what the devs wanted to go for. We don't know how technology works at all yet, but I could easily see technology both providing bonuses to how healthcare is and locking out the higher levels until you've researched it.

I am curious about faith hospitals - would they actually create clergy jobs? I would expect that the doctors working there wouldn't be very different from the doctors in secular hospitals, but I don't really know anything about this subject.

Admittedly I don't know very much either, but it sounds like roughly the right level of knowledge and mindset for early healthcare. Early private healthcare would probably have some shopkeepers. As you get later in years and technology and have higher level institutions, I suspect that things would begin to converge in similarity though.

Historically, it usually wasn't the case of bringing hospitals into remote area, but rather bringing people to the hospitals in large population centers. So someone living in Siberia would have to travel to a large city to be treated in the hospital (if one could afford that). The most one were able to get in a medium-sized town would probably be a generalist doctor.

If it wasn't clear, the jobs would still only appear in city centers. And in a place like Siberia they would likely be small and very few, but even those could run into the issue of not getting the required professionals out there.

Regarding creating demand on some products (in small quantities), it would really open can of worms, because practically every industry requires many different products to operate, so for example, furniture industry would also require glue, nails, brackets and so on... It feels like modelling all such details is outside of the scope of the game.

Adding NEW goods opens a can of worms, adding small amounts of EXISTING goods is fine. So rather than buying books and bandages, they'd purchase paper and cloth. The main reason to not have furniture require small amounts of iron for furniture would be that they already have a primary input good in lumber (and even then it might still be present, depending on production process). But it's better (imo) to require small amounts of SOME input good than no input at all.

 

[alexti]

So you are saying that having a very high level of healthcare institution should create a large demand for jobs and goods? I could easily see a level 5 healthcare institution being so expensive that you effectively couldn't afford it until endgame, if you didn't want to cripple the other aspects of your country.

Yeah, although you won't be able to produce necessary goods unless the game allows to achieve much faster technological progress in comparison to real history. So that level might be similar to living standards of 99 for pops.

Adding NEW goods opens a can of worms, adding small amounts of EXISTING goods is fine. So rather than buying books and bandages, they'd purchase paper and cloth. The main reason to not have furniture require small amounts of iron for furniture would be that they already have a primary input good in lumber (and even then it might still be present, depending on production process). But it's better (imo) to require small amounts of SOME input good than no input at all.

I don't agree with this. Amount of details and micromanagement is proportional to the number of supply chains (or more accurately total number of links in the supply chains) and adding small amounts of input goods increases that number whether the required good is an existing good or a new one. Increase in number of supply chains will only require player to make the same decisions more times rather than adding some new interesting decisions. In my view it's better to add requirement of some new "high-tech" good (that would require some advanced research) for high-level healthcare and require no inputs for low-level healthcare. This way going for high-level healthcare will be a distinct decision requiring to focus research in specific area at the expense of other areas.

 

[Lamartine]

Bureaucracy usually represents an impediment to getting things done and growing the economy, I would much have preferred a more realistic approach rather than shoehorning in power points, although I am sure many disagree or believe this will lead to a better game.

If you want to role play a libertarian government then Vicky3 will let you do that.

To the extent that bureaucracy can be an impediment to progress remember that bureaucrats will typically belong to the Intelligentsia interest group who, according to your playstyle, will represent a curmudgeonly obstacle or an empowering supporter.

 

[ianbora]

Oh yes!!!

 

[aGamingMonkey]

The final major reason is the large amounts of frankly boring micro this would require many countries to engage in. Chances are very good that once you have a Health System you're going to want to extend its function to at least most of your states. Spamming Hospitals in every state and then keeping up on what level they are in order to ensure they provide the right amount of health care to all the people who live there sounds awesome on paper, is a terrible game experience for larger countries, and frankly isn't a very interesting choice. Now multiply this experience with all the different Institutions you'd rather have as Buildings.

The player doesn't necessary has to build every type of institution service. There already is a system for automatic building in the game. An institution level should enable the level of building like urbanisation enables levels of urban centres. When changing the level of an institution you get an overview of how much building the new buildings will cost. Then the output of each building only is applicable to the state (like services) and they can have modifiers if there are differences between states. This also shouldn't be the case for every type of institution. Only the ones where actual services are provided locally, like healthcare, police, education. They should however still have some base bureaucracy cost. For more national level type institutions such as colonial office and work safety they can still operate using only administrative centres and bureaucrats.