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Barron of Gondor

First Lieutenant
66 Badges
Mar 23, 2018
276
1.135
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So I almost never build a fine arts industry in any significant number. But I’ve seen streams where it becomes essentially a NFT going to da moon. So what causes that to happen?
 
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Fine Art is only needed by pops with 30 or more SoL, so you either need very rich capitalists, a rich middle class, or Council Republic lower class (especially post-1.1 when wages are going to be reduced) to create sufficient demand for it.
 
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If you don't build any fine arts academies, that need will be met by services just fine. The real advantage of fine arts academies is that they use very little labor. Thus, especially after you research Realism, they're quite lucrative in terms of per-capita productivity. Spamming fine arts academies buffs your urbanization, which means you also get more services. City-dwellers are also pretty well-to-do, due to a having relatively high proportion of middle strata professions, and receiving dividend shares.

It's a decent way to make your population richer, especially when you have a limited labor pool. It's a good thing to do once you have construction sorted. The big drawback is the low total productivity and high construction time. Infrastructure needs to be abundant, as it uses more of that per capita.
 
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Since fine art can only be demanded by pops with wealth 30+, in the early game it's mostly only found in places like the French market.

Like all goods, places where it could be profitable are misleading, because pops only develop a taste for goods when they exist in a market in the first place. So most of the time when you build an Art Academy, it's immediately a failure, even if it would eventually succeed.

The trick to Art in particular is to make simulated demand in the form of forced exports.
  1. Build the Academy
  2. Subsidize it until it produces its first unit of art
  3. Pause the game and export that art to anybody.
    1. This causes trade buy orders to appear in your market, making art price skyrocket
    2. This causes trade sell orders to appear in the target market, tanking their price (but you don't really care what happens in their market)
Now that your Art Academy has demand, it will function and provide art to both markets. This will cause pops to notice art and start buying it when they meet requirements, and probably art prices will eventually stabilize. When that happens, you just make another export route, and then another.

The volumes provided by art academies are incredibly low compared to the base volumes of a level 1 unprofitable trade, so you're abusing the buy-sell mechanic and basically forcing your traders to pony up the cost of buying art and throwing it into the sea. And that's fine as long as they have a variety of other reasonably profitable trades, they won't notice. Meanwhile you quickly become the world's largest art producer. Enjoy your 60 prestige and very profitable industry!
 
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so you're abusing the buy-sell mechanic and basically forcing your traders to pony up the cost of buying art and throwing it into the sea. And that's fine as long as they have a variety of other reasonably profitable trades, they won't notice. Meanwhile you quickly become the world's largest art producer. Enjoy your 60 prestige and very profitable industry!
Uhh… That’s a bubble
I kinda want to see PDX embrace that, and just add actual recession mechanics.
 
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Uhh… That’s a bubble
I kinda want to see PDX embrace that, and just add actual recession mechanics.
It's the downside of modeling an economy where you can put your grubby fingers into everything. There's no reason a trader would do this on their own.

Subsidizing art long enough to get stable prices in your own market costs the government money and makes way more sense by contrast - and indeed does eventually work if your market is big enough. It's just not nearly as profitable or immediate :cool:
 
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I'll share my recent experience in a Qing game where I focused on driving GDP and SOL as high as possible. With 800 million pop, a GDP of over 7 billion, and a large chunk of my workers at over 30 SOL, I had just under 700 buy orders for fine art while most goods had tens of thousands.

Fine art academies are nice for the prestige boost and the chance to add Academics pops, maybe for roleplay purposes. But from an economic perspective there's just no tole for them.
 
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I'll share my recent experience in a Qing game where I focused on driving GDP and SOL as high as possible. With 800 million pop, a GDP of over 7 billion, and a large chunk of my workers at over 30 SOL, I had just under 700 buy orders for fine art while most goods had tens of thousands.

Fine art academies are nice for the prestige boost and the chance to add Academics pops, maybe for roleplay purposes. But from an economic perspective there's just no tole for them.

One thing I've used them for is to soak up some labor producing something in high demand later in the game. The inputs required for fine art aren't usually in short supply, and when you have a ton of wealthy POPs, the demand for fine art can be pretty high even if you have services covered. (obsessions can play a role here) I'll soak up some labor making fine art when I'm running out of demand and input goods for other things.

And since fine art can benefit from throughput bonuses just like any other industry, in the later game, I'll essentially create Hollywood and mass produce fine art with a couple of massive fine arts academies using photography and film PMs.

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And since fine art can benefit from throughput bonuses just like any other industry, in the later game, I'll essentially create Hollywood and mass produce fine art with a couple of massive fine arts academies using photography and film PMs.
Personally I'm a fan of turning a random island state into the art capitol of the world. Why have Hollywood when you can turn Bermuda into the center of the art world?
 
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One thing I've used them for is to soak up some labor producing something in high demand later in the game. The inputs required for fine art aren't usually in short supply, and when you have a ton of wealthy POPs, the demand for fine art can be pretty high even if you have services covered. (obsessions can play a role here) I'll soak up some labor making fine art when I'm running out of demand and input goods for other things.

And since fine art can benefit from throughput bonuses just like any other industry, in the later game, I'll essentially create Hollywood and mass produce fine art with a couple of massive fine arts academies using photography and film PMs.

View attachment 922441
I've used buildings to soak up labour before, but never art academies (I tend to go for things like farms for grain). The building points needed per employed person in art buildings seem very low?
 
Whilst getting the Star Swarmed Banner achievement I wanted to build something in Oregon to employ the local pops and didn't have any arts elsewhere, but after I'd put 5 levels in the demand started to grow dramatically and IIRC it ended up over level 50 - with autobuild on.
 
Uhh… That’s a bubble
I kinda want to see PDX embrace that, and just add actual recession mechanics.
It is. The moment major trading partners are lost, art prices drop. So, after being the most profitable industry, it loses a lot of money.
I had several economic crises because of it but could eventually recover, by using deficit spending. In my first campaign this brought me close to bankruptcy.
 
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I've used buildings to soak up labour before, but never art academies (I tend to go for things like farms for grain). The building points needed per employed person in art buildings seem very low?

At the point where I’m facing certain resource shortages and have started to sate demand for certain products and I have 12,000 construction points to spend, suddenly any source of employment that makes profit will be put on the build list.
 
Art Academies also take your prestige to da moon, because the AI doesn't prioritize it at all meaning you can easily pocket the something like +60 flat prestige for being the leading producer. All that for just 2-3 academies. It's a godsend for minor nations, and has the benefit of employing academics too so that your Intelligentsia gets more clout.
 
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