[Beta Mini-AAR] Next Stop: Greater Germany

[podcat]

I love the way foreign investment is being used to increase influence.

yeah, it makes it a lot more interesting and easier to hold onto your sphere

 

[Darkrenown]

So RR still get spammed because they are still too cheap?

You really need to stretch to find something negative here, but good effort. Going by his income shown it'll take him ~3 weeks to afford each province's railway assuming he builds nothing else...

 

[podcat]

Heading to the pub, I would hope

why head out. I have a bottle of Highland Park on my work desk donated by a victoria 2 fan (bribery works) that we will be uncorking after release

maybe cigars if weather permits!

as for next project, all I can say is that it will be something cool

 

[Darkrenown]

Not in 1836. Prussia in 1836 should be thinking, "once we have finished researching level 1 railroads we are going to need a lot more steel manufacturing capacity because the current world supply will only run to building them in 5 provinces a year and the UK isn't going to let us buy any we don't make ourselves." It isn't until the 1850s that Germany actually gets a connected network and its the 1860s before the historical maps look like something that is reasonably represented by railroad in every province and real spam is 1870s.

...

Having an easy button for spam is good for the player, and just what's needed if the player is in the situation of needing to manually build on researching level 5, but Prussia using it to build level 1 says to me that the economic changes have been overhyped.

No one ever said we'd be drastically limiting the world's steel supply or anything of the sort. We said we'd make them more expensive, and we did. You are imagining a totally different game.

 

[podcat]

Paradox! Explain foreign investment for laissez fair countries?

Are their capitalists able to invest abroad and not the government, or can they just not invest abroad at all?

we've been tweaking back and from a lot. currently they cant. in the patch on release day they will most likely be able to like anyone else because its hard to compete with influence otherwise as it turns out. its one of the places where realism has to take a step back from gameplay

 

[Darkrenown]

There's also the problem of even if your capis could invest and you rationalise that, they still won't invest where you want them too, which leads to frustration.

 

[Darkrenown]

Would it really be too much (programming-wise) to let profits from a factory go to the capis of the country that built it? I presume each factory is flagged according to which country built it anyway.

You presume incorrectly, only the cash spent is tracked. It'd be a reasonably large task.

 

[podcat]

Oh, okay then. So foreign investment is really a way to convert money into influence, with industrial development in the target country being a (from the point of view of the investor) incidental consequence?

not exactly. since when they are in your sphere their products are pretty much your products to be exploited it makes a lot of sense for this reason as well.

 

[Darkrenown]

A) You build RRs and they get more RGO output for you to buy.
B) You build factories and can gain access to the goods they produce.
C) You don't get access to their entire market unless you own 100% of their industry.

 

[Darkrenown]

E) Crush them all and make them your puppet with the CB that gave you

 

[podcat]

You get a puppet CB if a country nationalized your factories? That's interesting.

indeed :ninja:

 

[Darkrenown]

So the reason to build shoe factories in Iraq is to get more oil, not to profit from cheaper labour? Seriously?

If you just wanted RGO output it would be cheaper and more sensible just to build Railways, but if you want to be picky you can view building factories as investment to gain a "most favoured nation" type trade deal.

 

[Darkrenown]

I'm not sure what you mean. I have told you how it works, I'm not keeping anything secret.

 

[Darkrenown]

You keep in secret why it works like it works, not how ~most would expect it to work, that capitalists would actually get some monetary profit from investing in foreign factories.

Capitalists don't though, the state does. It works like this because it was the simplest and most effective way to do what we wanted: Build infrastructure in other nations in exchange for influence and increased market share.

 

[Darkrenown]

Yes? He was talking about foreign investment, and if you build factories abroad the capis in that state get the income from them too.