Is Clergy Promotion Broken? Or do I not understand something?

[unmerged(26764)]

So, I'm new to VicII. Played Vic I to death. I bought AHD to try it out. I read up on how things are supposed to work. Something seems wrong.

I tried out as a first game Columbia -- nice out of the way civilized power. I played for about 20 years. I understand I need to get my literacy up. So, I put my one NF on my biggest province to increase clergy. I fully funded education. I researched the education techs. I don't tax my middle class at all, and have negative tarriffs.

Yet most of my provinces have about 10 clergy, if that. My people are actually getting stupider in most of the country.

In the one province with the NF, in 20 years I went from 1 percent of the province clergy to 3 percent.

Everywhere else, no one is promoting to clergy. If you check each tooltip of each farmer or larborer pop, they tell you they have a 4-6 percent change to upgrade to clergy. Except it never happens. And the clergy I have there devolve back into farmers or promote to aristocrats. They've got all their needs met, by the way. As do the farmers.

The farmers do promote into soldiers often. So I turned down military maintaince. It didn't fix the problem.

So, after 20 years, Columbia went from 11 percent literacy to 14 percent. Most of the provinces are getting dumber. The tooptips say this shouldn't be happening, but it is.

Is something broken? Or am I missing something?

 

[heliostellar]

What version are you playing? The pop promotions are vastly different between the different patches and in the exp.

 

[unmerged(26764)]

A House Divided.

I've run countless experiments now, tinkering with this tax rate and that setting, watching what happens. No one promotes to clergy. Farmers getting all their luxury goods, doesn't matter. You can promote officers and then devolve them to clergy, but that's pretty backwards.

If this is all working as intended, and I'm not missing something big, this is just really poorly designed. It's just not fun screwing with a million counter-intuitive levers, all with very unhelpful tooltips, to try to make the game do basic things you want it to do.

I love paradox games. But is this one actually fun? Or just a pile of frustration I don't need.

 

[kingsword]

If they earn too much, they promote to other classes. If they don't get paid much, nobody promotes to them.

All of this combined sliders for military, education and bureaucracy in which you have no direct control on who are supposedly government officers is by far the BIGGEST fault of the game, was warned against many months before the game launched and still not fixed in an expansion.

Love Vicky series and Paradox but those three sliders are a complete blunder.

 

[unmerged(26764)]

1. So, even when I set middle class taxes at 0%, put the max negative tarriff I can, and pay my clergy in fully they still devolve. So do my artisans. I have no idea why -- I'm paying them the max, not taxing them at all, and paying for their food. They mostly become farmers. Why? How do I fix this?

2. Looking at a farmer pop, there are percentages for other pop types they can turn into. These seem to have no relationship to what really happens. What does it mean to say clergy at 6%? How many can I expect to change into clergy and when?

3. If you depend on farmers to become clergy, how do you make that happen? Farmers are poor. When would they ever promote?

 

[s1234567890m]

what do there promotion and demotion tooltips say

 

[unmerged(26764)]

what do there promotion and demotion tooltips say

What do you mean?

-- The tooltip on the pop says its demoting to farmer.

-- The tooltip on the pop screen says it has a 6 percent chance of promoting to clergy (and some lesser number for other things).

What information are you looking for.

 

[matt12th]

Anecdotally, in my first game I was Ott Emp, I wasn't having this problem. Could your problem be taxing too cheap, upping your aristos? In my game the education tax is SOOO expensive that I cannot fully fund it, but my NF zones are going a great job getting clergy. It seems like the NFs get better over time too. But I don't know only played like 4 hours today.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

If you want to get more clergymen, you have to set their wages and taxes to high.
If they have too much or too few money, they will promote to other pop types.

In addition, setting low taxes for poor pops will make them more likely to convert into mid strata.

Another problem can be good shortage due to low prestige. Your pops might have money, but they actually can't buy what they need because demand in prestigious nations is so high.
That is a common problem during the mid game when pop numbers in GP start to rise and when new goods are unlocked during the late game.

 

[unmerged(26764)]

My problem isn't that the clergy are promoting to something else. It's that they're all devolving into farmers, even though I'm paying them max and not taxing them at all.

I think I located the problem. They're not getting 90% of their everyday goods. Because they can't get tea on the market. Because there's not enough of it, and I'm a south american country with no prestige. So they're devolving.

Is this serious? Is there anything that can be done about this? Or because there's one out of the multitude of good on the market I can't get, because the game is designed not the produce enough, I can't have any clergy or artisans? And thus no economy. And there's nothing to be done about it? Does the game really work like this?

Also, the tooltips make absolutely no sense. It says there's a 30.00% chance to devolve. Yet only one box is active, and that's the less than 90% of everyday needs which should add only .3% So how are we getting to 30%? There's another box that should reduce by .5% for having consciousness over 0, which they have. But that one isn't marked -- who knows why?

The tooltip for promotion also makes no sense. It says 8% chance to promote, although no one is scheduled to promote. But the factors only add up to .6%. What in the world is going on? Are these the most unhelpful tooltips in the world, or is something not working right?

 

[TheChronoMaster]

Get more prestige.

Invade some minor, humiliate someone, do something.

Alternatively, secure a source of tea, somewhere.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Funny sidenote: I had the same problem when playing the VRRP mod a few days ago. Tea shortage led to unfullfilled needs.

The only way to solve this as a minor nation is probably incerasing prestige by techs. As a GP, try investing in countries that produce tea.

 

[unmerged(26764)]

Get more prestige.

Invade some minor, humiliate someone, do something.

Alternatively, secure a source of tea, somewhere.

I've got to say, while it's a workaround, that's really not a reasonable solution. Is this game really designed so that if you're not in the top half of prestige, all your clergy and artisans are wiped out in 15 years? Because that's what happened.

I don't know whether the tooltips are wrong but 30 percent devolution I think is supposed to be either 3% or .3% depending on what the other tooltips says. I think it's malfunctioning way too high. But I can't be sure what's intended because the tooltips are so uninformative. Maybe its a display bug. Maybe its working as intended. Maybe its broken.

Also, how are you supposed to get capitalists? Neither of Columbia's two parties are state capitalist. The reactionaries are, but they're hard to get into power. It seems to promote to capitalists you have to already have a factory in a province. Really? So you start with no factories, and you can't build any without capitalists, which you can't get until you have a factory. So the only way to build factories ever is to somehow maneuver the radicals into power? Is that really right? I've got to be missing something. You wouldn't intentionally design the game that way, would you?

 

[TheChronoMaster]

You're misunderstanding what state capitalism is, first up.

State capitalism allows you to directly interfere in building and expanding factories, and also allows Capitalists (the pop) to build them -- laissez faire and interventionism also allow Capitalists to build factories, and allow you varying levels of control.

National focus capitalists somewhere if you want them building for you, and cut your tariffs into the negative if you want to help them out.

Note, you can only do this as a civilized state.

Also, that is not a workaround, that is the Victorian era -- grab a source of tea from someone, anyone. Steal it away. Find it, and come up with an excuse to take it.

But really...there should be enough. Did you cut your national stockpile spending, or increase your tariffs? Both of those prevent necessary goods from entering your country...

 

[GAGA Extrem]

(1) Aquire some cash (20-30k)
(2) Set "encourage capitalists" focus in one of your regions.
(3) Set mid and rich taxes to 0.
(4) Capis receive some money after being converted, so they should start a project soon.
(5) Invest into their project to build the first factory.

 

[tarpoon]

If your clergy demotes because they don't get enough tea you could try to increase your relations with Great Britain and hope that they add you to their sphere. There should be plenty of tea in their SOI.
You could increase your chances of being added by the AI by conquering a state which has a land border with one of their colonies. Venezuela, Brazil or Guatemala would be candidates for that.

Also researching a prestige tech early (and getting the prestige inventions while they are still worth something) helps your pops and factories a lot in buying the stuff they need from the world market.

And you should avoid conciousness like the pest while you are building up your clergy.

 

[TheChronoMaster]

That's the other thing -- great powers lock down their spheres of influence pretty tight. Worm your way into one, or become a power yourself, to get better priority on their sphered goods.

 

[Commandante]

A thought sprung to mind: Isn't POP promotion and demotion affected by administration efficiency? If so, getting more bureaucrats could help you get (or keep) your clergy.

 

[SlyEcho]

I was able to get literacy up yesterday in my Estonia game. Started from 10% in 1861 to 40% in 1910. I used the promote clergy NF a lot. If I didn't have the NF set they would demote, so I had to keep checking my clergy percentage on the research points tooltip.

 

[unmerged(26764)]

I can't keep bureacrats either, or artisans. Every middle class pop is getting killed because I don't have 100% everyday needs.

The beginning set up is 2000 tea produced and 3000 demanded. So unless you can get up into the upper tier of prestige, you're not getting any. And with just tea missing from everyday needs, every middle class pop is on permanent devolution. 30% Within about 15 years there's none left, except where you use a NF.

This has to be wrong. First, it's insane that you have to get every single everyday need to stop this from happening. A single one missing starts a middle class massacre. And the initial set up makes tea difficult to get if you're not at least a secondary power.

Second, it's not reasonable to expect a normal country to just go get tea. There's very little that's not owned by the UK, the Netherlands, or China. A little in Indonesia and Siam. It's not reasonable to expect a little south american country to go attacking in asia just to have a working middle class. Nor is it reasonable to bank on getting sphered by the UK, because that's mostly outside your control.

This is either a bug or an awful design decision. I really can't believe that the threshold for devolution is set at 90%! Not for basic needs, but everyday needs. So any single one missing sets it off. How can this possibly be right?

I'm guessing most people haven't noticed this because they play major powers who have enough prestige to avoid it. Or they don't really pay that close attention to this sort of thing. But if this is intended, it's just terrible design. I'd bank on a bug. Either the threshold isn't supposed to be set for 90%, or the impact is supposed to be a lot smaller than 30% -- like 3%, or .3%.