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grommile

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Jun 4, 2011
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So an obvious way for someone like me to play the USA is to go all-in from day one on breaking the Slave Power.

Knock down all military facilities and arms industries in Dixie, build nothing of any kind in Dixie, etc.

Is there anything to make that hard?
 
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So an obvious way for someone like me to play the USA is to go all-in from day one on breaking the Slave Power.

Knock down all military facilities and arms industries in Dixie, build nothing of any kind in Dixie, etc.

Is there anything to make that hard?
I don't think igs actually have regional affiliations or interact with buildings so probably not

EDIT: but I think you're better of building factories to lessen the plantations importance, and so probably make the plantation owner ig weaker and less likely to go to war
 
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So an obvious way for someone like me to play the USA is to go all-in from day one on breaking the Slave Power.

Knock down all military facilities and arms industries in Dixie, build nothing of any kind in Dixie, etc.

Is there anything to make that hard?
probably won't be anything to prevent it because it's just cheating the game, a regular player won't do that
 
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but I think you're better of building factories to lessen the plantations importance,
Factories can use slaves.
probably won't be anything to prevent it because it's just cheating the game, a regular player won't do that
That would be very disappointing.

Like, blatant defiance of historical circumstance should be faced with actual challenges.

There needs to be an at least somewhat compelling reason why de-Dixiefying the armed forces is, if not outright a bad idea for the USA, at least one that causes actual complications.
 
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That sounds about right. POPs are deeply dependent on outcomes in their States, since they don't interact with any other States. If you have multiple States to choose from, you can discriminate between favoured and unfavoured ones. Indeed, this has been a tactic of governments through history. However, in the game, it's likely that landowners will have a strong sway over your government, e.g. through your head of state, and they will probably push for policies to mitigate these problems.
 
"he key thing here is of course that not all buildings can utilize slaves, so this isn’t going to be doing any good for an industrialized manufacturing economy,"
 
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Factories can use slaves.
They can use some slaves, for Laborers, but they need a core of educated Machinists and Engineers that will be very difficult to muster from an agrarian society.

There needs to be an at least somewhat compelling reason why de-Dixiefying the armed forces is, if not outright a bad idea for the USA, at least one that causes actual complications.
Complication #1 is that if you take away all their jobs, the Southern pops will turn super-radical, which could kickstart the war before you're ready.

Complication #2 is that the Landowner IG is probably pretty important to your government and it will hate your guts for dismantling plantations. If you don't marginalize them, they'll slow down all your lawmaking (possibly by beating up their opponents on the Senate floor); if you do, they'll rise up. Plus, if you empower someone (maybe the Trade Unions?) in their place, you'll have to deal with the long-term fallout of your new government.

Complication #3 is that they're probably also important to your army. The army in 1836 relied heavily on aristocratic Southern officers, making their IGs stronger and carrying the risk that their troops will switch sides.

In short, if you drop in at the start of the game and start a full-court press to undercut the South, they'll notice. You could end up kicking off the war 20 years early, when your odds of victory are nowhere near as good. Or you could accidentally cripple your economy, government, and/or military and get invaded by unscrupulous Canadians, idk.
 
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There wasn't much arms industry of note in the South to drive down. The Tradegar Iron Works in Richmond basically, but even it was (compared to what was available in the North) a minor and technically backwards supplier. And it didn't even exist in 1.1.1836. An interesting related question is how hard it would be for a CSA oriented player to actually build arms industry in the Dixie before the war (hopefully very). The South was in practice reliant on trade and looting to keep army on the field.

What did benefit the South a lot was the Southern officer corps (the enlisted of the pre-war army went overwhelmingly to Union) and the stockpiles of weapons in southern armories. In US the officers were chiefly being manufactured in West Point a location into which the officer candidates migrated from all over the country and from where they then emanated across the country to take posts in service. In that sense it would be realistic if military buildings did not recruit officers from the local state with any sort of priority. So if the player built barracks in Iowa he might end up with it filled with primarily Dixie officer corps who "migrated" into the state. And once the Civil War starts they migrate back to the South, ready to take posts they have existing qualification for in barracks the CSA player scurries to set up.

Not sure what to make of armory stockpiles since 1) they don't exist and 2) none of the proposed army models from the Dev Diary seems to match Civil War era USA. There wasn't really any kind of formal existing reserve, the forces both sides fielded were functionally built from scratch at the start of the war.
 
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So an obvious way for someone like me to play the USA is to go all-in from day one on breaking the Slave Power.

Knock down all military facilities and arms industries in Dixie, build nothing of any kind in Dixie, etc.

Is there anything to make that hard?

I would presume removing military facilities in Dixie would mean that you will lose prestige, GDP, as well as taxable income. This would also with a significant drop in SoL for your pops which might still trigger a war, and that war has nothing to do with slavery. You have fought a war against Southerners that is not Slavery related, so to end slavery you will have to fight another war. Does not seem optimal but does seem doable.

So, does the game punish you for that heavy removal of industry from the south? Does a war break out over drop in standard of living? Do your citizens just immigrate somewhere else due to war and/or a drop in Standard of Living? This seems like it could backfire and your country is not in a much better place even though slavery has ended.

Completely theorizing here, but I think the best way to defeat slavery is to do it by avoiding war. It seems the only way to avoid the war is likely to make Pro-Slavery IGs as weak as possible comparatively speaking.

I would figure the best way to do this is to avoid further plantations and keep further farming to a minimum. Grow the power of other IGs in the South. Factories that use automation and thus need a more educated workforce and less Labors/slaves. Build your Universities in the south. Maybe do your best to drive down the price of cotton so the Plantations owners are less wealthy and thus less powerful. Anything that boosts the power of IGs in the south while keeping the Plantations owners stagnant.
 
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I would presume removing military facilities in Dixie would mean that you will lose prestige, GDP, as well as taxable income. This would also with a significant drop in SoL for your pops which might still trigger a war, and that war has nothing to do with slavery. You have fought a war against Southerners that is not Slavery related, so to end slavery you will have to fight another war. Does not seem optimal but does seem doable.

So, does the game punish you for that heavy removal of industry from the south? Does a war break out over drop in standard of living? Do your citizens just immigrate somewhere else due to war and/or a drop in Standard of Living? This seems like it could backfire and your country is not in a much better place even though slavery has ended.

Completely theorizing here, but I think the best way to defeat slavery is to do it by avoiding war. It seems the only way to avoid the war is likely to make Pro-Slavery IGs as weak as possible comparatively speaking.

I would figure the best way to do this is to avoid further plantations and keep further farming to a minimum. Grow the power of other IGs in the South. Factories that use automation and thus need a more educated workforce and less Labors/slaves. Build your Universities in the south. Maybe do your best to drive down the price of cotton so the Plantations owners are less wealthy and thus less powerful. Anything that boosts the power of IGs in the south while keeping the Plantations owners stagnant.
War was the only way slavery could be eliminated (save waiting for Deus ex Boll Weevil, which would have broken the gang system and made sharecropping the way to shift uncertainty to labor and not just capital) as there was too much risk of banks in the north suffering a massive collapse with not enough cotton to cover the advances coming in, and war being the only catastrophe that would make such a disruption moot. As opposed as northerners were to the expansion of slavery into new lands, most of us Yankees recognized how dependent we were on it continuing where it was. That the economic consequences were not nearly as disastrous as might have been was due to a bumper crop of grain being sent abroad to cover a poor harvest in Europe.

Let us not also forget that states were the driving force behind public universities (and there were numerous private local institutions throughout the South, most of which did not survive the war) and that states had their own militia units independent of national government, which should have their own buildings to represent their independent status, at least insofar as being insta-built as part of the event chain that leads to the war.
 
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I asked about weakening powerful slavery institutions in one of the DDs and got roughly the reply that you can erode them over time by political reform; taxing the slavers and increasing democratization should chip away at their political power but might be also dangerous due to slaver IGs tending to have a lot of political power to oppose you with.

But you can start smoother. Increasing literacy and industrializing will increase the political power of the middle class and seep some from the landowners. The educated middle class tends to be liberal and abolitionist, and eventually they could drive the slave-holding class into a corner where they are simply not able to protest legislative changes anymore.

I'm on mobile now but I'll try to find the dev quote later.
 
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Or even fully embrace slavery to have more labor for factories and let slaves handle all the poorly paid resource gathering. Going all the way to slavetrader too.
Naturally all combined with the freeest society ever.. for nonslaves. Oh and colonising africa would be a good idea for the purpose of surrounding some high pop area as a eternal slavetrading source of slaves. Americas own little HEART OF DARKNESS in say kongo.

Meanwhile everyone free can enjoy middle living standards (30+?) as a minimum. Strutt about with twice the SoL of the next highest.
Now that is a real motivator to study the stem stuff for engineering, even study religion, wouldnt want to be stuck working with slaves in the mines? Even if a freemans pay would be much higher.
 
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Here's the dev quote I mentioned earlier:

If you just try to get rid of it with no preplanning, it tends to result in civil war since the law has powerful supporters, yes. The subtle way of getting rid of it is to gradually erode slavery proponents' political strength (absolute and/or proportional) through other means, like reforming your Bureaucracy, expanding the voting franchise, and creating well-paying urban jobs to promote liberalism, until their influence has waned enough that you can push through legislation without a civil war. You can also gradually dismantle it by going through Legacy Slavery first, since several smaller political shifts over time are easier to control than one quick big shift. Finally, you can wait until the stars are aligned - for example, a powerful Abolitionist Political Movement that helps push the law through, and/or an Abolitionist Interest Group Leader that can draw on the political strength of a group typically neutral to the issue of Slavery to shift the balance of power.
 
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Or even fully embrace slavery to have more labor for factories and let slaves handle all the poorly paid resource gathering. Going all the way to slavetrader too.
Naturally all combined with the freeest society ever.. for nonslaves. Oh and colonising africa would be a good idea for the purpose of surrounding some high pop area as a eternal slavetrading source of slaves. Americas own little HEART OF DARKNESS in say kongo.

Meanwhile everyone free can enjoy middle living standards (30+?) as a minimum. Strutt about with twice the SoL of the next highest.
Now that is a real motivator to study the stem stuff for engineering, even study religion, wouldnt want to be stuck working with slaves in the mines? Even if a freemans pay would be much higher.

That's not likely to work well.

For one, assuming slaves don't dramatically improve economic efficiency apart from their own meager wage (well, meaning cost-of-living since it's "paid" in board and lodging) the extra wealth to be divvied among the free population is simply not that great. They do almost-free work, don't lay golden eggs. The more slaves you have in proportion to your free population, the more wealth of them can get, but there are likely to be certain dangers associated with pronounced minority rule over an enslaved majority.

Second, this would screw over your labor sector. Untrained workers can't compete with free slavers, so they need to get educated en masse – which itself is expensive for your country to provide – and would likely suffer lower wages due to the increased competition in the trained professions available. Furthermore, the education has a nasty way of making your pops into free thinkers who will eventually make it harder to maintain slavery, though that's probably something you can offset via other means for a while at least (eg. improving standards of living, if you can manage that). Since enslaved pops use only few goods, your economy will likely feature cheaper luxuries, which will offset some of the gains to the factory owners for the costs saved by employing slaves.

To offset some of the problems caused to your free citizens for the adverse labor conditions created by the competition from essentially free slaves, you could of course try to create a progressive tax code that re-distributes the "excess wealth" created by the slaves more equitably to the populace, not just the owners of the factories and plantations, but generally the fat-cat elite who own the slaves are not particularly prone to supporting dramatic redistribution of their own wealth.

EDIT: Forgot to mention but the increasing tech as the game progresses is likely to render the gains from slavery more and more meager as work becomes more automated, less labor-heavy. A slave economy might be able to compete against manual farm labor and all that, but ultimately who needs a thousand people in a chain gang when you can buy a couple of tractors? Then you're left with the costs and political repercussions of maintaining slavery, with ever-marginalizing benefits.
 
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Complication #2 is that the Landowner IG is probably pretty important to your government and it will hate your guts for dismantling plantations.
I'm not going to dismantle the plantations.

I'm just going to knock down any military facilities in Dixie and spend the entire investment pool in the North.

(I'm also thinking of hanging Texas out to dry.)
 
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Or even fully embrace slavery to have more labor for factories and let slaves handle all the poorly paid resource gathering. Going all the way to slavetrader too.
Naturally all combined with the freeest society ever.. for nonslaves. Oh and colonising africa would be a good idea for the purpose of surrounding some high pop area as a eternal slavetrading source of slaves. Americas own little HEART OF DARKNESS in say kongo.

Meanwhile everyone free can enjoy middle living standards (30+?) as a minimum. Strutt about with twice the SoL of the next highest.
Now that is a real motivator to study the stem stuff for engineering, even study religion, wouldnt want to be stuck working with slaves in the mines? Even if a freemans pay would be much higher.
Slaves don’t buy goods. Don’t see how you’re going to have a thriving industrial economy if you’ve got no demand.
 
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Slaves don’t buy goods. Don’t see how you’re going to have a thriving industrial economy if you’ve got no demand.
I have the feeling Victoria 3 will teach many wannabe-imperialists that slavery wasn't just +10% minerals and +10% food, even from the rulers' point of view....
 
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Or even fully embrace slavery to have more labor for factories and let slaves handle all the poorly paid resource gathering. Going all the way to slavetrader too.
Naturally all combined with the freeest society ever.. for nonslaves. Oh and colonising africa would be a good idea for the purpose of surrounding some high pop area as a eternal slavetrading source of slaves. Americas own little HEART OF DARKNESS in say kongo.

Meanwhile everyone free can enjoy middle living standards (30+?) as a minimum. Strutt about with twice the SoL of the next highest.
Now that is a real motivator to study the stem stuff for engineering, even study religion, wouldnt want to be stuck working with slaves in the mines? Even if a freemans pay would be much higher.

For this to work you propably need a social welfare state as well because not the middle class will profit from slaaves but the economical and political elite. So you either go communism with the revenue of slavery goes to the state and the state invest it into the well being of the people or only tax the rich and give it to lower and middle class folks.

But if you go full slavery they will take away the jobs from workers and take away their source of income.
 
I'm not going to dismantle the plantations.

I'm just going to knock down any military facilities in Dixie and spend the entire investment pool in the North.

(I'm also thinking of hanging Texas out to dry.)

The southern Landowners IG propably also want some military facilities in their region.