- What I find the most efficienct way to get industrialisation going is to use NF to promote capitalists, especially in an area with high concentration of people.
- You can kickstart your economy by taking loans and invest in alot of infrastructure, just to let your factories, rgo's and artisans get money etc. Kind of like the real world.
- If you don't have any factories at all, getting a cement factory first is rather vital, as it increase the stability of your industry dramatically.
I don't find any of these helping with industrializing Prussia/NGF/Germany.
First, Capitalists seem to make exceptionally bad choices (that is, choosing to build factories for goods for which there already is an oversupply, e.g building the 4th machine parts factory when the whole current worldwide demand is below what a single single, non-extended factory can produce or choosing to build factories for which there is a huge undersupply of input goods, e.g regular clothes factories when the worldwide demand for fabric already exceeds supply by a factor of 2, and no, there isn't enough supply of fabric on the common market either so they will have to buy from the world market).
Also, the Capitalists seems to be totally cash starved (no wonder, there aren't any high profit factories around to get them a good inflow of cash) and they don't seem to be borrowing money from the national bank (which is overflowing with money from aristocrats).
So even if they finally get of their asses and build some factories, they go bankrupt within days of being opened. (Except when heavily subsidized, IF you have a party in charge that allows that).
Then there is a MAJOR problem in Prussia/NGF/Germany to get any craftsman into factories. Even with the use of NF to promote craftsman, farmers/labourers are extremely reluctant to change to craftsman.
They are making good money from the RGO and the population is still way below the point where the RGO is full, so there is no unemployment. Even with all industrial/cultural/commercial techs (I edited the savegame to try it out) fully researched and all inventions they enable active (to reduce RGO size), population in Germany is still insufficient to saturate the RGO's.
If I don't tax the poor heavily, they actually make so much money that they mostly promote to aristocrats (and some bureaucrats/clergy if sufficiently literate). Ending up in 1860 with 800k aristocrats and 80000 craftsmen in all of Germany.
If I do tax them heavily enough to stem the flow towards aristocrats, then the craftsman are constantly under the existence minimum (because of the stupid decisions the capitalists made when building their factories) and emigrate out of the country, or go back to being farmers/labourers in droves.
Depending on their product, artisans are either rich and promote to aristocrat (or some bureaucrats) or they are poor and demote preferably to farmer/labourer (RGO not full, good money) instead of craftsmen (bad money).
Overall, I find it almost impossible to industrialize Germany.
It's better with most other countries where the population is large enough to fill the RGOs and create sufficient unemployment to drive conversion to craftsmen, but even for them, many of the factories, even when well filled with craftsmen are only surviving because of subsidies as they either produce something for which there is a significant oversupply on the world market or try to produce something for which there is a significant undersupply of input goods on the world market.
I find that in multiple games I tried, If I check the other GPs with high industrial score around 1865 or later the only way they achieve that is by throwing between 25 and 60% of their total budget into subsidies as the large majority of factories either produce something which is hugely oversupplied, or try to produce something for which they simply cannot get the input goods at any price, because they are hugely undersupplied on the world market.
The economic model clearly needs more tweaking.
