Goods not purchased despite demand

[Claudius]

Disclaimer: I'm running PDM Pops of Darkness with V2 3.04, but asking here first since I believe the issue to be inherent to the base game rather than PDM.

In a game as Cuba I've run into a curious situation where I have a(n until now) profitable rum distillery producing liquor. It's my largest factory and is still going strong into the 1880s, when all of a sudden anywhere from 15-150 of my 300 units produced daily aren't being sold anymore despite there being a demand for 4100 and only 2700(!) are being supplied worldwide. So even though people want to buy my rum, it's getting thrown overboard for some odd reason, and drunk fish don't pay their bar tabs.

I always just assumed "amount sold" would always be 100% so long as demand exceeded supply, but apparently I'm mistaken. Now I could just build a few new factories, diversify like I might should have done from the start, and then let the distillery shut down to save my economy before it gets wrecked by subsidies, but I'd still like to know what causes this.

Does "demand" include pops who might want to buy something but can't afford it, and thus my export market has been hit by someone else's depression? Maybe those irritating women from the temperance events meddling? Something else I'm not thinking of? Or just an annoying bug?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Searry]

Probably something changed somewhere and now the pops don't have money to buy your rum even though they would probably want to.

 

[Denkt]

Given that the demand is higher than the supply I think the problem is that the pops can not afford the product.

Pops will always first try to purchase their life needs, then their everyday needs and last their luxury needs. They will always purchase from the internal market (your country and spheres) before the world market. How many goods they want increase with their consciousness.

Check your own pop and see what they are able to purchase and how much money they have. Poor pops should be moved into more profitiable enterprises and very rich pops should be made more consciousness so they rather spend their money instead of saving it.

The problem is that most of the world population may be poor farmers trying to make a living by producing stuff that are already overproduced and thus have very low income and can barely afford even their life needs. You can help these pops by increasing the demand of their goods by starting factories but there are a limit to how well that can work because your factories need to be profitable as well.

So here are some solutions:

• Increase your internal market so that more pops will choose your goods before others.
• Increase your populations income by for example industrialize your country (factory workers tend to be richer than farmers).
• Increase your populations consciousness so that they spend their money on goods instead of saving it.

 

[Claudius]

How many goods they want increase with their consciousness.

Check your own pop and see what they are able to purchase and how much money they have. Poor pops should be moved into more profitiable enterprises and very rich pops should be made more consciousness so they rather spend their money instead of saving it.

That's interesting about consciousness increasing willingness to spend. Here I was thinking I knew so much about V2's pop system and something as big as this slips under my radar. I find it somewhat odd that being more politically conscious makes a pop less willing to save money for a rainy day, but I guess if it means "more conscious of Keynesian economic theory..."

The problem is that most of the world population may be poor farmers trying to make a living by producing stuff that are already overproduced and thus have very low income and can barely afford even their life needs. You can help these pops by increasing the demand of their goods by starting factories but there are a limit to how well that can work because your factories need to be profitable as well.

Hm, altering my economy to try to give people in poor areas of the world a helping hand so that they can afford to buy my other goods. How intriguingly modern a thought.

• Increase your internal market so that more pops will choose your goods before others.

Ahh, that's a very good point I hadn't thought of. It didn't occur to me that the internal market would play a role because demand is higher than supply, but if important, populous countries with rich RGO workers were sphered, that leaves me selling only to poorer countries that can't afford such everyday needs as liquor. I've been concentrating on sphering for strategic, not economic reasons (Mexico/Canada as a buffer against US aggression, Colombia for the canal), but I'll try breaking some spheres in countries with high-value RGOs to open those markets and see if that makes a difference.

Good tips, thanks!

 

[Denkt]

Plurality also increase the amount of goods people want.

Different pops demand different amount of goods and different goods as well. Capitalist is the far most demanding pop so if you want to increase your demand you should get more capitalists. Aristocrats are the second most demanding pop and still far behind capitalist in their demand of goods. Middle class demand alot more goods than the lower class so that is something to keep in mind. For example artisans demand more goods than craftsmen do.

Another way to help you pop is to develop technology who make them more productive. There are alot of very powerful boost to farming and mining so developing these will help those pops. Giving them low taxes help them as well and building railroads is great for everyone.

Productive pops with low taxes will be able to purchase more goods.

 

[Claudius]

Plurality also increase the amount of goods people want.

Different pops demand different amount of goods and different goods as well. Capitalist is the far most demanding pop so if you want to increase your demand you should get more capitalists. Aristocrats are the second most demanding pop and still far behind capitalist in their demand of goods. Middle class demand alot more goods than the lower class so that is something to keep in mind. For example artisans demand more goods than craftsmen do.

Another way to help you pop is to develop technology who make them more productive. There are alot of very powerful boost to farming and mining so developing these will help those pops. Giving them low taxes help them as well and building railroads is great for everyone.

Productive pops with low taxes will be able to purchase more goods.

Interesting, all good things to know. I tend to keep taxes and tariffs high so as not to have to lower any spending sliders and still have income in the green (kinda like a modern gov't, except for the positive income part ), especially taxes on the poor since the amount it brings in is so high compared to the others. I'll have to try the more capitalists with lower rich/middle taxes approach. Is there a "sweet spot" you'd recommend in terms of a percentage for capitalists and aristocrats?

 

[KevinG]

Demand doesn't take into account whether or not POPs can afford to buy the goods. One experiment you can do to show this is by tag switching to every big population country and switching to laissez faire free trade governments. You will immediately see an increase in the amount of goods sold when taxes are lowered across the world.

 

[Denkt]

Here are some more

Learn how every pop type earn their money:

Factories use roughly 25% of their profit as salaries. Of that salary half goes to the capitalists and half goes to the factory workers (craftsmen and clerks) with each craftman and clerk getting an equal pay. Capitalists also recive the rest of the profit the factory make.

So capitalist earn roughly 87.5% of the factory profit while the workers have to be content with only 12.5% of the factory profit. The number of capitalist and workers don't matter for this diversion of money. A single capitalist with 100k workers will still get 87.5% of the factory profit.

RGO are alot more fair to the workers. Each aristocrat take twice the salary of a worker but aristocrat take their share from all RGO in their state while the workers only take their share from the RGO they work. Slaves receive no pay so their share go to the free workers.

Artistans work like factories. They pay for their resources and they keep their profit which they then use to purchase goods.

The other pops earn their money from the state.

The more money the pops have the more goods they can purchase and they always pick their own country's goods before others so rich pops will benifit their own country's industry.

So the question becomes how to make the pops rich?

First off is that low taxes will help as taxes take money directly from pops.

For factories and artistans:

• Avoid factories with low profitability, generally the low tech stuff is worse than the high tech goods because low tech goods can be produced by everyone while high tech goods are generally limited to a few countries and thus much less common and thuse more valuable on the market.
• Increase output efficiency by recruiting clerks. Output efficiency basically create extra goods for free and thus pure profit. Factories with alot of clerks tend to do much better than those without.
• Increase input efficiency by recruiting capitalists. More capitalist also mean more consumption of most goods because capitalist have by far the most demands of any pop.
• Build railroads and research technologies who help factories in different ways as well as unlocking new factory types.
• Tariff can hurt factory and artistans profitability because they may depend on world market products while subsidy can great help factories and artistans.

For RGO:

• Laborers are much better than farmers as they work in more profitable RGO
• Research technology which help RGO. RGO rather fire workers than overproducing but the workers left will be able to get a bigger share as they are more productive and the fired workers quickly find work in the factories or as soldiers.

For state workers:

• Well simply pay them as much as possible.

One of the harder things then it comes to industry is to get clerks and clerks make a huge differens for your industry. One of the quickest way to get alot of clerks is by using bureaucrats as they can be promoted from farmers and laborers who are the most common pops while clerks can not. Bureaucrats in turn can both promote and demote to clerks (demotion is far quicker). To get them to demote to clerks simply set their pay to zero while using a national focus on clerks. Bureaucrats are also capable of being promoted to capitalist so you can use them for that purpose as well. The bureaucrat road is the quickest way to both clerks and capitalist, much quicker than the slow craftsmen to clerks. One other nice thing about bureaucrats are that you can recruit them as a primitive country and after you are able to industrialize you can quickly turn them into capitalist and clerks to jumpstart your industry.

To get alot of craftsmen you want your farmers and laborers not to have any other class they can promote to. By paying the clergy, bureaucrats and soldiers around 35% of their maximum should make it impossible to promoting to these and thus all farmers and laborers who promote and demote become craftsmen.

 

[Searry]

Well detailed post and I agree completely. My findings are purely empirical but I have the same conclusions as you do.
If you have some details about how the POPs save money and spend money from the bank account you could try to explain that as well.
I think that's an area of the game that goes to the paranormal, black magic and the devil.

 

[KevinG]

AFAIK POPs only put money into the bank when they have a surplus after buying l their life/everyday/luxury needs. Working class POPs generally never have enough money to put into the bank. Aristrocrats and capis put the most money into the bank, and in the lategame capis income usually dwarfs aristocrats income if you industrialized well.

Since a capitalist size doesn't matter when distributing factory profits, smaller capitalist POPs will earn so much money and have so little expedintures (needs are based on the size of the POP) that they are able to stash millions into the national bank. This is actually bad because that money is basically removed from the game. Some of it is loaned out to countries in debt, but even if the debt is repaid it goes back to the bank and not to you or your POPs. That money becomes unusuable unless you yourself go into debt and take loans from your own bank. Even if you do this, you still end up making interest payments that takes more money out of circulation. Interest doesn't get paid to anyone, it just vanishes from the game.


So ideally you actually don't want to accumulate a large national bank reserve. Unless its early game and you have laissez faire government and are a democracy, you should always keep rich taxes at 100%. When promoting capitalists, make sure that each state has more than just a handful of capitalists. The bigger the capitalist POP, the more money it spends on goods, the more money gets re-circulated into the world economy.