I wouldn't be surprised, since the AI screws up just about everything it does (unless it's UK, then they're crash proof).
Laissez-Faire = Industrial Collapse?
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I wouldn't be surprised, since the AI screws up just about everything it does (unless it's UK, then they're crash proof).
So what other I need to have more Craftsmen in my factories? In some of my regions, there are only 10 Craftsmen in a factory. I have put 80% taxes for Middle, but I see they are still able to buy Luxury needs, so I have put 100%, but over 50% of them can still buy Luxury.
What to do?
What to do?
Tariffs are a key to making LF work for you. NEGATIVE tariffs. They make a big difference to how much money your capis have available to invest, as well as affecting the profitability of factories that import inputs.
Also become a great power and acquire a sphere to exploit. If you are in someone else's SOI, it can completely shred your industry because they can grab all of one of the inputs your factory needs. Factories which have an input good disappear will go completely broke very fast whatever the policy. If your spheremaster is taking all the timber in a sphere (often happens from mid game onwards), everything that needs timber will stop. It doesn't matter what policy you have, only becoming a great power will allow you access to timber again. Other disruptions may be temporary. Maybe rebels are occupying all your spheremasters iron provinces, so all your iron is being taken for their factories and every factory you have that has an iron input will be broke until iron production resumes in the occupied provinces.
You probably need to demote poor strata not middle ones. Put up poor taxes to get your farmers to head for the factories. If you do have a big middle class that you want to demote, cut education and administration spending.
Also become a great power and acquire a sphere to exploit. If you are in someone else's SOI, it can completely shred your industry because they can grab all of one of the inputs your factory needs. Factories which have an input good disappear will go completely broke very fast whatever the policy. If your spheremaster is taking all the timber in a sphere (often happens from mid game onwards), everything that needs timber will stop. It doesn't matter what policy you have, only becoming a great power will allow you access to timber again. Other disruptions may be temporary. Maybe rebels are occupying all your spheremasters iron provinces, so all your iron is being taken for their factories and every factory you have that has an iron input will be broke until iron production resumes in the occupied provinces.
You probably need to demote poor strata not middle ones. Put up poor taxes to get your farmers to head for the factories. If you do have a big middle class that you want to demote, cut education and administration spending.
I've read this in several threads, but I've yet to see this actually make a difference. In my current game I'm bouncing back and forth between LF and interventionism, with tariffs at 25% and 33% respectively, and my industry is growing as fast as possible (instantly upgrading new factories once the previous upgrade is done, the entire country covered in railroad construction once the new tech is researched, etc). Additionally, when I was struggling earlier in the same game, I tried setting tariffs negative to encourage my capitalists to acquire building materials faster, but it didn't make a noticeable difference.
EDIT: Of course, the new patch tweaks with capitalist AI, so maybe this is all moot.
That's not the case if you make those inputs domestically or they're made somewhere in your SoI.
Which is sort of the point of tariffs -- you're encouraging the purchase of domestic goods over foreign goods.
I realize that this is heresey to the Orthodox Free Trade adherents, who consider the Invisible Hand something of a diety or force of nature, as opposed to the simple and limited metaphor that it is.
Which is already built into the game.
Also, The domestic Market includes the SoI, but does it include Sattelites?
Indeed, it is.
I wasn't arguing that it wasn't, I was responding to a statement that seemed to be saying that all tariffs make all factories less profitable, which is incorrect.
I don't rag on tarrifs because I think they are generally a bad idea IRL. I rag on them because they are far, far worse for your economy in the game then IRL.
Does this depend on which country you're playing, and the breadth of its internal production?
Hi! Welcome to the discussion way to late. If you continued reading momentarily, you'd notice that I've already addressed this at length because soup_alex pointed it out. Please think of the linked post as directed at you instead of soup_alex.
I will however make some a comment for you: you have made a totally unwarranted assumption that my comments regarding a game economy reflect my views on complex economic matters in the real world.
Aye aye. I treat my pops like a ruthless bastard, but irl I'm actually a really nice person!
To capstone this thread, I started a new Chile game last night and did a couple of things differently:
1. Negative tariffs: 1-3%
2. Industries could buy from my stockpile
3. After first two weeks, no industry was subsidized
Result: GREAT SUCCESS.
The year is 1880, Chile is a Great Power due entirely to its industry, which is the 7th largest in the world. In a high-altitude mountain war with Bolivia, Chilean Potosi was reclaimed. 25% of my population are immigrants, mostly from Germany and northern Italy (mountains wtf?). The government has hopped several times between radical liberals (full citizenship!) and liberal-looking "conservatives" (Parti Conservador). Brazil, Argentina, and Peru are in my SOI. I'm weaning my industries off their tariff-subsidies... a few are crashing, but my Capis keep building so unemployment is low. Target: 0% tariffs.
Lesson learned? Vic 2 factories /= Vic 1 factories. They're dynamic, rising, living, and dying, like the chinchilla gerbils my mountainous nation is so famous for.
1. Negative tariffs: 1-3%
2. Industries could buy from my stockpile
3. After first two weeks, no industry was subsidized
Result: GREAT SUCCESS.
The year is 1880, Chile is a Great Power due entirely to its industry, which is the 7th largest in the world. In a high-altitude mountain war with Bolivia, Chilean Potosi was reclaimed. 25% of my population are immigrants, mostly from Germany and northern Italy (mountains wtf?). The government has hopped several times between radical liberals (full citizenship!) and liberal-looking "conservatives" (Parti Conservador). Brazil, Argentina, and Peru are in my SOI. I'm weaning my industries off their tariff-subsidies... a few are crashing, but my Capis keep building so unemployment is low. Target: 0% tariffs.
Lesson learned? Vic 2 factories /= Vic 1 factories. They're dynamic, rising, living, and dying, like the chinchilla gerbils my mountainous nation is so famous for.
Regarding your second paragraph: actually, you have made the totally unwarranted assumption that a general comment was directed at you, when it was not worded as such.
Regarding your first paragraph: in your reply to soup_alex, you state (parphrasing) that POPs buy internally until their needs exceed the internal supply from your own country. Does this also apply to factories? (Factories being the subject of the post I was replying to, that is, the claim that tarriffs make factories unprofittable.)
Vainglory said:
Your wording there also makes it unclear as to whether you are refering to tariffs in V2, or tariffs in the real world.
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It is my experience that the economy tends to be in far worse shape during large multi-player games than it does during single-player games.
Yes, factories buy from your internal market. No, I didn't state it explicitly but it was implicit.
You put a general statement after a specific one. I am entirely justified in interpreting the succeeding statement as referring to me even if it doesn't explicitly state so, because the preceding one was explicitly directed at me. Ironically this is the principle by which you say it's unclear whether I'm referring to in-game tariffs or not, because the previous paragraph was specifically real world but the succeeding one was ambiguous.
Now as I have already acknowledged, and then linked it for you, my statement was uncharacteristically imprecise. If we want to talk about being imprecise:
How informative! How do you define worse shape - more volatile? More overproduction? Or is it shaped like a tetrahedron and you've an aversion to that shape.
Hamza said:
That is a great experiment, excellent work! Too bad you didn't make regular saves for Innocent Beard's economy evaluations.
I was considering trying a similar thing since I got an understanding of V2s mechanics. I suspected that V2 would reward negative-tariffs because they'd make factories more profitable at the other end. Obviously V2s goal is to win by maxing your score, so even if your country was spending more money on negative-tariffs than it was getting in extra profits from the factories, you'd still be better off because your Ind score would be higher. Ind score is factory-levels * production value, so even if the production is being sea-dumped your score's higher. And of course high taxes in V2 don't have real world effects so you aren't kneecapping yourself by having higher taxes to sustain negative-tariff. Furthermore if you have high enough Ind score to make you a GP then you can form an SoI to boost your economy which probably makes the negative-tariffs worthwhile in pure profit/loss terms anyway.
As I said, great work.
So, if tariffs and your stockpile are what regulates how efficient your factories are, how do you see and ensure that they get all the inputs they need? My factories are all bloody useless and state-subsidized.
I'm kinda new to the game though.
I'm kinda new to the game though.
The point of tariffs is to promote industry. The only reason you would want tariffs on raw materials is if you were not industrialized and a nation was competeting with your outputs in raw materials.
The point is in the game, tariffs do not encourage the purchase of home goods. They just discourage foreign goods. I know that sounds funny but you only import if your nation does not produce enough to meet pops and factories needs. Therefore, in the game there is no competition between foreign and domestic goods. The world market just picks up the demand your home market does not meet. So tariffs > 0 in the game, do absolutely nothing to promote home industry.
There actually hurt home industry because input prices rise but domestic demand does not get any bigger. Prices for home goods do not rise so there is no mechanism to have a tariff promote domestic industry. In the end, it hurts it because input prices rise and your pops can't buy as many goods on the world market, so if demand is working correctly world demand drops which might lower final good prices. You just shoot yourself in the foot in game by having tariffs. The only benefit is tax income.
That being said a negative tariff can actually BUILD your industry. By subsidizing imports your pops meet demands more easily and capitalist have more money to spend so they invest more.
This has nothing to do with tariffs vs. free trade. It is pointing out the tariff system works EXACTLY OPPOSITE of what you describe that is tariffs helping home industry. They do not they hurt it in several ways whereas negative tariffs promote industry! By subsidizing goods for POPs you are actually subsidizing investment because lower the cost of meeting luxury demands increases the cash capitalist have to save and invest! The opposite happens when you impose a positive tariff, capitalist cash decreases from several causes and you get less investment not more! Tariffs are simply broken under the current system. Again this has nothing to do with theory it is the way the game is working.
Tariffs work exactly opposite in the game of the way that people at the time and now believed the way they work. Subsidizing imports actually grows your domestic economy rather than choking it out. Taxing imports actually hurts your domestic economy and makes you import more rather produce more. That is how the game is working. The problem is simply because there is never direct competition between imports and domestic goods. Cost advantage only indirectly affects output in that your factories can flood the market and make foreign factories close but they can't directly replace domestic production because a pop will never buy from the world market unless there is no domestic output left.
Note all of this is about how tariffs work in the game and has no analysis of how real tariffs work other than the assumption that tariffs should help promote home industry at a cost to consumers.
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Erm, well efficiency refers to the ratio of output to input. So if efficiency is higher then you'll make more goods for the same inputs.
I have never fiddled with national stockpile to any avail. I've tried buying up timber and releasing it to capitalists but they never took it. I just ignore stockpile and never have any problems. If you can buy the item your POPs/capitalists need, they've got access to it as well, so they hardly need you to serve as a middleman unless supply is intermittent. At least that's been my experience.
Basically the game works on:
POPs buy first, then nation, then factories/capitalists (AFAIK, but definitely POPs first).
If demand can't be met on your internal market (your country, plus sphere of influence) they look on the world market.
On the world market the country with the highest prestige buys first, so it works its way down. It works the same within a sphere of influence.
If the internal market doesn't buy all the day's production of an item it goes on the world market. If it isn't all bought there it is "dumped in the sea"/disappears unsold.
So to ensure your factories get inputs, well ideally it's within your country. If it isn't, try to put it in your sphere, eg if you need dye try sphering a country that produces dye. If it's not in your country or your sphere then you buy it off the world market, assuming there's enough supply to fill your factories' demand by the time your turn comes. If it isn't available on the world market you've no easy options. You'll need more prestige to move up the food chain, or else have to conquer territory with the item, or else pry off a sphereling that has the item from someone else's sphere of influence. If you can't do any of that then build new factories with less exotic inputs!
Certain factories are good money spinners: cement is always good. Glass is good usually. Steel's often a tidy earner. Others are awful: most people revile canneries for their money losing abilities. Military goods often don't turn profits. Steamers and clippers are borderline.
Tech affects this. I've said it somewhere, I think it was the economy evaluation thread. Basically the most advanced nations will be flooding the market with way more supply than there is demand through tech benefits + volume. Prices plummet. If you're behind on tech then you'll have a hard time turning a profit even if you can sell your output because the flooding by the advanced nations has driven the price low (and yet arguably, not low enough).
Well, you're certainly living up to your forum handle, I'll give you that.
Anyway, in the context of the question asked, it was a perfectly valid answer -- Patton wanted to know if the ecomomy worked differently in large MP, with the implication that issues were arrising from the AI's lack of competence. In that context, the fact that the economy is in worse shape during a large MP would indicate that the AI is not, by itself, to blame.
If you want the specifics, the difference I've seen between SP and large MP is that the same tax, tariff, spending, etc, settings for the same country will produce significant government surplus in the former, and significant government deficit in latter. That is, in order to run "in the black" (or in the green, in the case of V2), taxes and/or tarrifs must be higher, and/or spending must be lower, and significantly so, in large MP.
I will try to find examples, but I could swear I had seen multiple people claim that factories have absolute priority over POPs, etc, in buying good for inputs.