Infrastructure changes

[Bearjuden]

All right boys, girls, and all other peoples, put on your hard hats because I wanna' talk about infrastructure. V3 has the potential imo to model infrastructure really well, better than any Paradox game to date and in particular to accomplish some things which Paradox games have always struggled with showing. But right now infrastructure in the game is kind of terribly depicted unless you are specifically looking at a developed industrial state, and only patched over in some cases.

Disclaimer: I've used some ideas from @Amorenkaire in a separate discussion on arable land as the basis for some of this, though I think I suitably expanded on it. But some credit should go their way.

First, let me illustrate how it's not working right now. So at present, base infrastructure is provided from the population in a state plus modifiers. There is an extremely basic logic to this: people make roads where they live, so there should be infrastructure, right? And I get that the devs have a lot on their plate and so you can throw this basic model in and it doesn't make a lot of issues so nobody looks twice at it while they focus on balancing an entire global economy. This is double true when the player's primary method of interacting with infrastructure - railways - actually works pretty well. But the answer to that question is that it falls apart if you look outside that case. See, infrastructure doesn't model all roads. It specifically models roads that provide market access; the kinds of roads that can be trafficked not just by poor peasants but by large movements of goods. This is why lacking infrastructure penalizes market access. Those basic roads mentioned above are exactly what is created by the peasantry when those more proper roads don't exist; they are a direct consequence of poor market access, not a means to having good market access. Consider the following two states in-game, at game start in 1836. I have specifically picked these because they are geographically identical, in game terms: they are inland states with a major river state modifier.

• Brandenburg
  • Population: 1.63m people
  • Infrastructure: 51/73
• Sichuan
  • Population: 14.0m people
  • Infrastructure: 40/73

What does this tell us? Well, both states are fully integrated into their respective markets and thus the global convoy network. But it also tells us that Sichuan is even better able to accomodate further growth than Brandenburg is. Sichuan's roads are on the order of ten times better than Brandenburg's, because they are fully integrating ~9 times as many people into the market with the same effort as well as allow for 11 points more development before they require upgrading.

This is obviously and blatantly ahistorical. The Chinese interior should have among the worst market access in the entire game. This infrastructure-from-population model works okay to cripple infrastructure among low-pop states and well enough in developed states, with some patching by state modifiers to reduce the amounts you'd get otherwise in some places. But it completely breaks down in these rural megastates. Right now, if rural China has a famine, it can just import grain from the rest of the world and send it inland, but if this happened in real life (spoiler: it did), you would never be able to send enough grain to feed millions of people in the interior, hundreds of miles away, using only the existing roads. It's just not possible.

So infrastructure I think needs some retooling to focus on what it actually models, which is inter-state and trade access. Here is my proposal:

1. First off, population needs to stop automatically providing infrastructure. Having a lot of people use your roads only means very little is available for trade, especially if your roads are bad. Instead, I would suggest that urban centers have a new PM for roads. At their most basic level, these are only dirt, which use a few laborers to keep them clear but otherwise provide pretty poor infrastructure. These might provide marginal market access in low population environments but in any kind of populated environment they will rapidly become insufficient and must be upgraded (for which means are limited) or augmented (with other buildings, eg railways). This will in practice mean there is no more need for Siberia to specifically penalize infrastructure to have only very marginal access; it occurs naturally due to being extremely rural and unpopulated. Likewise, rural China will have incredibly poor market access, which is historical.
2. The second thing is that ports need to provide a lot of infrastructure directly as well as significantly more urbanization. Right now, ports do provide some of both but I don't think it's enough, especially the urbanization. This means ports build infrastructure in two ways, both by directly adding to it but also by increasing the size of your urban centers dramatically, which lets your roads do more. Ultimately this is a balancing thing but it needs to feel way easier to develop a port state than an inland one.
3. The third thing, and this is the big ticket item I was referring to when I talked about some things which Paradox games have always struggled with showing, is to rename ports to seaports, and then use state modifiers that represent major inland waterways to add in riverports. Riverports should work similarly to seaports in that they consume boats to output convoys, urbanization, and infrastructure, though at different rates of effectiveness (a full seaport is just better at all this than a riverport). The maximum level to which these can be developed is influenced by the size of the river modifier, as not all rivers are built equal. This accounts for situations like the Rhineland, which is inland but supported by the titular river to become one of the most developed regions in the world, or Chicago, which grew to prominence specifically by being very easy to ship to and so reduce the amount of rail needed to access the midwest. Right now these modifiers just provide flat infrastructure but it feels wrong to me that this is just given to you; it's an opportunity, but one you should have to develop into a real advantage. Ideally these states should also be able to have shipyards, restricted only to civilian ships and hopefully in size as well, so that purely inland states with this river access don't have to import all of their ships to make convoys.
4. The fourth thing is that pops above a certain SoL should impose costs on infrastructure. I impose this SoL limit because the burden on infrastructure here mostly represents large-scale inter-state travel. So a small number of people should not cause a huge issue, especially if they are only moving within the state, but large population movements should depend on infrastructure. This can be expanded on with population migrations, which should impose temporary infrastructure penalties on the places they move to (eg, New York).

What does all of this do on net? It means that places with access to waterways will naturally have a surplus of urbanization, which they can use to trade, urbanize, and industrialize. Which is accurate! Trade happens when goods move; goods have always and continue even today to move best on waterways, and so that is where most development happened. This naturally creates a focus on industrializing places with spare infrastructure which happen to be on ports and rivers. More isolated areas can be industrialized but will have to make up specifically for their isolation with auxiliary infrastructure, especially in mountainous areas which should have railway throughput maluses. Otherwise, the minor increase in urbanization from building a lumber mill is outweighed by its local use of infrastructure. Building a lumber mill in Qinghai (just north of Tibet) might help the peasants there heat their homes, but despite its 5/36 infrastructure usage in game* currently you should not be able to run a furniture factory in Beijing with it unless you put a lot of work into the Chinese infrastructure network. Situations like the Taiping rebellion can now happen organically; if the Yellow River floods (I would suggest this is the part that should be random) and switches course, not only can you apply local temporary modifiers to agricultural throughput but you also lose your riverports providing crucial access to these areas. This causes a famine, which raises radicalism dramatically, and before you know it you've got a rebellion. Unless, of course, you built rail networks that provide alternate large-scale access to the interior, in which case all you have to do really is make sure you buy enough grain to feed them.

As part of this, there are two other things I think should be touched up:

1. Low market access should penalize construction efficiency. A construction sector in Beijing cannot build where there is poor market access. How is it sending the construction materials in? The exception to this should be for infrastructure buildings in states that are adjacent to a state that has full market access. If you're building the railways in, it makes sense you can use what you just built to send yourself more materials, after all.
2. Low market access should explicitly prioritize luxury goods for movement and keep other goods more local. Or I guess there should be a hierarchy, but luxury goods should be atop the pile. Things like furs, gold, silk, and tea were what the distant emperors in places like China cared about and they were happy to leave the less valuable goods, like grain, more local. This feeds into the Taiping Rebellion as mentioned above; part of the problem was that China was getting what it cared about out of the land and then when it needed to send in grain it was not able to.

And that's it. That's my suggestion right now. Thank you for your time, I know it's a bit of a read. But I think there's a lot of potential to do some neat stuff in V3, and I'm curious to hear what y'all thnk.

*population of 1.4 million, for comparison with the first two states. It's also totally out of whack. Similar population to Brandenburg, one tenth the infrastructure usage, albeit with much less in total at least...

 

[Amorenkaire]

Happy to have helped partially inspire an idea of yours. Coincidentally, I was putting my own list of thoughts together for suggestions at the same time, many of which involve a more detailed infrastructure system including the road idea. Power, services, and transportation being local goods only, arable land being changed to potential and add some involvement with deforestation and land reclamation via construction, etc.

I'll disagree with pops not causing infrastructure consumption, however. Even local subsistence farmers need some sort of transportation, and if their local roads are full of carts and oxes, those small rural roads aren't going to be providing much good for large scale trade. Especially as market access is entirely for goods flowing in and out of that state. Its conceivable to have a state in game surrounded by 1-50% infrastructure states with 100% market access unless I'm wrong, which I like the idea of starving bandits glaring angrily at a train chugging along fuel of valuables skipping by their local region entirely (hey, isn't that a trope of the Wild West...). To think of it another way, as we discovered in the Shipping Crisis recently, it doesn't matter how good your infrastructure for getting goods to an area is, if the warehouses and ports are full because its taking to long to get the goods from there to where they're needed. Especially as the market access would also reflect how difficult it would be for this large mass of peasants to travel to the urban center itself to pick up their goods.

River Ports are a neat idea, but I don't think they should be the only way Infrastructure from rivers works. After all, small scale shipping of goods along rivers happens sometimes without a boat like what happened in history with logging. Certain areas though I can definitely agree, there were major trade parts along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers irrc, Chicago should definitely have a great lake port if it doesn't already, and so on.

I'm not sold on them giving Convoys, as well Most of the time these river trade ships probably wouldn't be fit for an ocean voyage. Likewise with ship construction, ships for rivers just were not fit for the open ocean. Monitors and other small military ships specialized for rivers and coastal use would be fun from a strategy perspective, but I don't think the game's exactly in a place to worry about needing special anti-river flotillas.

Edit: The idea of Rulers deciding to prioritize luxury goods, rather than needs like grain, in a market access crisis and famine screams of an event or journal decision to me, personally. Its effects could be modified by adding a modifier that removes the tea and infrastructure from the province and adds it as goods produced at the market capital to make it work. Having the option to do the 'moral' thing of supplying grain but reducing their infrastructure, and further damaging their luxury goods export and economy, would be a flip side, too. ;3

 

[Bearjuden]

Even local subsistence farmers need some sort of transportation, and if their local roads are full of carts and oxes, those small rural roads aren't going to be providing much good for large scale trade.

This is fair enough. I already wavered between a few different ideas on how to do this so I could be talked into different permutations.

River Ports are a neat idea, but I don't think they should be the only way Infrastructure from rivers works. After all, small scale shipping of goods along rivers happens sometimes without a boat like what happened in history with logging. Certain areas though I can definitely agree, there were major trade parts along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers irrc, Chicago should definitely have a great lake port if it doesn't already, and so on.

Perhaps then it could retain a small base infrastructure bonus but the big gains come from the development, then? I definitely think that having the ability to build up ports on inland waterways is worth depicting. There's a reason big cities naturally develop on rivers. If riverports provide urbanization, then it makes that process much more natural.

I'm not sold on them giving Convoys, as well Most of the time these river trade ships probably wouldn't be fit for an ocean voyage. Likewise with ship construction, ships for rivers just were not fit for the open ocean. Monitors and other small military ships specialized for rivers and coastal use would be fun from a strategy perspective, but I don't think the game's exactly in a place to worry about needing special anti-river flotillas.

So, there's two elements to this:

• I was not trying to get into river warfare. This is why I wanted to restrict them only to civilian ship PMs. River warfare seemed too much for just an infrastructure change and also it's not even clear to me it's worth getting into, I don't think it played a major role in the majority of wars in this period?
• My thinking with the convoys is that, for example, it facilitates downriver trade (eg, Baden to Netherlands, if we pretend Baden isn't in the Prussian market at game start). But having booted up the game just now only to check, I am not sure there are any cases where to nations share a river but not a strategic region so the issue would be moot because in that case you can always trade with the people along the river with you.

Also, if this is the case then also the shipyard thing is unnecessary since the secret hidden core of that is, it would feel pretty bad to have a port that outputs convoys but no way to making ships. So if that all is irrelevant then I guess skip the convoy thing and leave it at riverports providing urbanization and infrastructure.