Factories Upgrading Themselves

[baky123]

What we've seen today in the Dev diary for buildings honestly has me really excited, but slightly worried about the micromanagement side of things. Something that I think would greatly alleviate this is if profitable factories, once they've accumulated enough capital, can upgrade themselves. This is very similar to the Vic2 system where capitalists would upgrade factories once they have the money, and means that you can get that feeling of naturally growing your industry without having to remember to come back and press a button to upgrade every few years.

This has the extra advantage that profitable economic sectors will naturally expand as they make more money, meaning that they can expand to meet market demand. Meanwhile, less profitable factories will not expand, meaning that your population will naturally end up employed in more profitable economic sectors unless you deliberately intervene. Effectively, you get most of the good parts of having capitalists build and upgrade factories from Vic2, without having to worry about the AI building useless clipper shipyards everywhere.

 

[mikhail321]

I was typing a very similar post and didn’t notice this thread. I like the idea very much. I don’t know how to merge threads so just copy my post here:
First of all I believe giving player a better control over construction projects is good as it creates engagement and safeguards against erroneous ai behavior. One of the most frustrating experiences of Vic2 was watching capis build some random small arms factory in Middle Siberia, have it occupied by 20 craftsmen, go bust immediately for some obscure reason and be replaced immediately with some other random project.
I don’t think it’s unrealistic either as even under liberal economic regimes governments had a multitude of tools to influence investment decisions through tax cuts, direct and indirect subsidies, licensing, public land distribution, informal links with business circles and so on.
However giving player full control over investment decisions detracts from the feeling of having a living economic system and has a risk to explode micromanagement.
For me the best option would be to allow player exclusive right to give directions for new buildings in a region, while letting the pops do expansion/upgrades on their own if economic laws permit private investment. This is how I mostly used to run Vic 2 economy.
This way you retain general control of the economic buildup of the regions, but allow some room for autonomy both to reduce micromanagement and to simulate less than absolute control over pops.
The way it could work is to have two investment pools: one on a state or national level under player’s control, another one on building level (can be depicted as an extra level of existing cash reserve). The buildings with expansion room available and close to 100% employment will start filling its investment pool with a certain split with dividend payouts (just like real life businesses do not distribute all the profits). when enough funds are accumulated they will be invested in an expansion project. The player can always top up this pool from general investment pool to stimulate some industries over others. The top up decisions can also be automated on state level, to let ai top up pools closest to completion (or in particular industries) to reduce micromanagement.
This way business will need to be successful to be expanded, so ai craziness will be very limited, the player will have very granular control, but there will still be some independent investment activity to simulate investment cycles and such. It will also make it more expensive for player to kick-start new industries vs. developing existing ones, which I think is very realistic.