Not a full AAR, but you all might get a laugh out of it! I’ve been enjoying the game and this amused me so much, I had to share. Been trying to figure out the right place to put this since I’m a light-weight lurker who doesn’t really do much posting.
Enjoy!
TL;DR at the bottom if you just want to see the punch-line.
I am playing as Prussia > Groß Deutschland (Germany+Austria Hungary) via German Unification mechanics. I recently discovered that AI Austria had built nothing but 1 single wheat farm and 15 barracks in South Tyrol, a state which starts with ~200k people in 1836, about 60k of which are able-bodied adult males able to participate in the labor force.
Fast-forward ~40 years to 1872. I have owned the state for 20 years now, but never looked at it because it is quite insignificant in my country of 100M people with the largest and one of the most developed economies in the world. I have just finished a series of 3 wars with France, Russia and various other European powers in the space of 5 years (truces don’t really do that much in this game), and I am wondering why my troops on the Spanish front in the last war weren’t replenishing the way I expected them to. So, I take a look at my Italian holdings (where the battalions in question were mustered from) and see that the issue seems to be coming from South Tyrol. Odd, I think to myself, I would not have expected there to be a lot of barracks in a state that small; but I take a look.
Turns out those 15 barracks the AI had built and I knew nothing about had been aggressively recruiting random country peasants and laborers from the 1 organized farm in the state (the only other employer) by the thousands to fill gaps left by killed and wounded in the battalions at the front to the point that they had gone through EVERY ADULT MALE IN THE STATE.
By the time I realized, there were only 2,735 able-bodied individuals left of the original over 60,000; and the overall population had declined 30% to only 135k. The vast majority of families have now lost their provider(s) or had them return from the front crippled and unable to work. People are fleeing the state in droves. The Italian minority population of ~10,000 have been reduced to a family of 3, with no one able-bodied enough to find work. Since my nation has no welfare system, all I can do is destroy the barracks in the hopes that this will cause the few remaining workers to seek less dangerous employment at the local farm or as peasants subsisting in the countryside. I then marvel at the potential for storytelling in this game, share the story with my wife, and once again turn to more important matters.
Fast-forward again 1 year of game time and one replaced shower head later, and it is now 1873.
I hear an event notification pop up. I click on it, and am shocked to see that I have gotten a great famine event! This is an Irish-potato-famine level event that spreads across your entire country like a ck3 plague and kills in droves. Already has a rep for destroying games for people playing poor minor nations. But I am playing a massive, highly developed economy, and absolutely should not be getting this event.
I go into troubleshooting mode, frantically trying to find what is triggering it and praying that it isn’t a game-ending bug. I look in my newly conquered holdings in South America, and they aren’t good, but nothing that would trigger the famine event. I look in my African colonies, nothing. Many of them are even wealthier than parts of Europe.
Then it hits me. South Tyrol. The place I had written off as fixed with the population no longer being endlessly shipped off to die or be crippled in my wars and promptly forgotten all about.
I take a look, and sure enough, things have gotten so much worse. The population is now 120k. 15,000 people have either died or migrated elsewhere. The farm has begun to employ some of the now 3,000 able-bodied former soldiers or newly adolescent males (child labor is still a thing), but there aren’t enough skilled overseers to fully utilize the farm, so only 756 have jobs. The rest have returned to being country peasants, but with so much damage to the local economy and so few able to actually work, few families have any income. Thanks to the lack of any welfare system, the people who haven’t been able to leave have run out of savings and begun to starve.
Now for the ironic bit:
It is this—admittedly tragic, but nonetheless isolated and frankly insignificant to the nation at large—state of affairs which has—in part—caused the great famine event to fire. The OTHER part of the trigger is that within a state where the average citizen is starving, a farm building must be at least 10% employed and losing money each week, a condition which our little South Tyrolian farm is satisfying because its 756 employees are having difficulty competing with the economies of scale which the other, larger farms enjoy.
TL;DR:
So, I now find myself in a situation such that the only way to avoid a railroaded, event-driven, nation spanning famine wreaking havoc on my wonderful, highly-developed Super-Germany; is for me to destroy the only farm in the one, single state which is actually starving.
I hope you all enjoyed!
Enjoy!
TL;DR at the bottom if you just want to see the punch-line.
I am playing as Prussia > Groß Deutschland (Germany+Austria Hungary) via German Unification mechanics. I recently discovered that AI Austria had built nothing but 1 single wheat farm and 15 barracks in South Tyrol, a state which starts with ~200k people in 1836, about 60k of which are able-bodied adult males able to participate in the labor force.
Fast-forward ~40 years to 1872. I have owned the state for 20 years now, but never looked at it because it is quite insignificant in my country of 100M people with the largest and one of the most developed economies in the world. I have just finished a series of 3 wars with France, Russia and various other European powers in the space of 5 years (truces don’t really do that much in this game), and I am wondering why my troops on the Spanish front in the last war weren’t replenishing the way I expected them to. So, I take a look at my Italian holdings (where the battalions in question were mustered from) and see that the issue seems to be coming from South Tyrol. Odd, I think to myself, I would not have expected there to be a lot of barracks in a state that small; but I take a look.
Turns out those 15 barracks the AI had built and I knew nothing about had been aggressively recruiting random country peasants and laborers from the 1 organized farm in the state (the only other employer) by the thousands to fill gaps left by killed and wounded in the battalions at the front to the point that they had gone through EVERY ADULT MALE IN THE STATE.
By the time I realized, there were only 2,735 able-bodied individuals left of the original over 60,000; and the overall population had declined 30% to only 135k. The vast majority of families have now lost their provider(s) or had them return from the front crippled and unable to work. People are fleeing the state in droves. The Italian minority population of ~10,000 have been reduced to a family of 3, with no one able-bodied enough to find work. Since my nation has no welfare system, all I can do is destroy the barracks in the hopes that this will cause the few remaining workers to seek less dangerous employment at the local farm or as peasants subsisting in the countryside. I then marvel at the potential for storytelling in this game, share the story with my wife, and once again turn to more important matters.
Fast-forward again 1 year of game time and one replaced shower head later, and it is now 1873.
I hear an event notification pop up. I click on it, and am shocked to see that I have gotten a great famine event! This is an Irish-potato-famine level event that spreads across your entire country like a ck3 plague and kills in droves. Already has a rep for destroying games for people playing poor minor nations. But I am playing a massive, highly developed economy, and absolutely should not be getting this event.
I go into troubleshooting mode, frantically trying to find what is triggering it and praying that it isn’t a game-ending bug. I look in my newly conquered holdings in South America, and they aren’t good, but nothing that would trigger the famine event. I look in my African colonies, nothing. Many of them are even wealthier than parts of Europe.
Then it hits me. South Tyrol. The place I had written off as fixed with the population no longer being endlessly shipped off to die or be crippled in my wars and promptly forgotten all about.
I take a look, and sure enough, things have gotten so much worse. The population is now 120k. 15,000 people have either died or migrated elsewhere. The farm has begun to employ some of the now 3,000 able-bodied former soldiers or newly adolescent males (child labor is still a thing), but there aren’t enough skilled overseers to fully utilize the farm, so only 756 have jobs. The rest have returned to being country peasants, but with so much damage to the local economy and so few able to actually work, few families have any income. Thanks to the lack of any welfare system, the people who haven’t been able to leave have run out of savings and begun to starve.
Now for the ironic bit:
It is this—admittedly tragic, but nonetheless isolated and frankly insignificant to the nation at large—state of affairs which has—in part—caused the great famine event to fire. The OTHER part of the trigger is that within a state where the average citizen is starving, a farm building must be at least 10% employed and losing money each week, a condition which our little South Tyrolian farm is satisfying because its 756 employees are having difficulty competing with the economies of scale which the other, larger farms enjoy.
TL;DR:
So, I now find myself in a situation such that the only way to avoid a railroaded, event-driven, nation spanning famine wreaking havoc on my wonderful, highly-developed Super-Germany; is for me to destroy the only farm in the one, single state which is actually starving.
I hope you all enjoyed!
- 6
