Manufactory, Post Offices, Custom Houses, Supply and Demand

[ywhtptgtfo]

The predominant strategy of making a rich empire is to spam post offices and custom houses whilst owning a few CoT's. I've read somewhere else that there is an approach that involves spamming conscription centers and manufactories. Supposedly, the influence on demand by these buildings will make trade income for metals exceedingly high. Since the way how supply and demand works in this game is rather obscure, is there any merit to this strategy?

I'd imagine that the global supply for a resource is proportional to the sum of all relevant buildings in the world (i.e. market places etc for tobacco), but the tooltips for trade in this game are so bad.

 

[Pewt]

You'll be richer by spamming post offices, but conscription centres are actually useful for something other than sitting on a golden throne.

 

[alexti]

In SP conscription centres are mostly useless, since you are not likely to have problems with forcelimits or manpower if you can spam anything. On another hand spamming trade building is not very useful either, unless you intend to land on Mars before the end of the game. I don't think there's any building that it's worth building solely for the purpose of increasing demand. However building an (single) artillery unit is definitely worthwhile - who would've thought that maintaining it could cause such a spike in world's demand on copper?

 

[ywhtptgtfo]

Speaking of MP. How are those games like? Is it an all-out arms-race + minting-like-crazy?

Also, do you guys play at a fixed speed or can you pause?

 

[alexti]

Speaking of MP. How are those games like? Is it an all-out arms-race + minting-like-crazy?

Also, do you guys play at a fixed speed or can you pause?

The game style very much depends on the group.

I'm not a fun of the process. I used to play Dominions (there everyone gives orders and then they're resolved on the server) and in comparison EU3 MP suffers too much from too-much-to-do and nothing-to-do periods. I don't think simultaneous real-time works well in grand strategy games.

 

[Ryuujin95]

I think idea behind conscription centers + manufactories is that the cost increase for manufactories is tied to your manpower, thus by spamming manpower buildings you can build far more inexpensive manufactories without the cost moving beyond the cost/benefit point. Not sure to what degree the manufactories will influence prices to generate value above and beyond their own income. Another thing to consider in pursuing such a strategy is that Consciptions Centers are level 6 buildings while Post Offices are level 5, but you can build manufactories much earlier and use other methods (NI, HRE, sliders) to boost your manpower.

 

[unmerged(104812)]

Wars in EU 3 as far as I can tell (I've limited experience) can turn into slugging matches if both sides are evenly matched and no one gains immediate advantage. Thats when investing in manpower can pay off because whoever can keep their armies up to full strength might win just off that. And sometimes of course you just get wars that are just crazy unfair such as 4vs1. Also minting too much is a bad thing, I try to keep my inflation below 4. While most people do try and make sure they keep up or get ahead in terms of military tech I wouldnt say there's arms races. Plenty of diplomacy and alliances depending on what they want or who's the biggest threat.

So far in the game I'm in (newbies colosseum, I did say limited experience) the usual speed is set at 3 and drops to 2 for player vs player wars. Pausing is a big no because no matter what the problem is there's about 11 other people playing and they don't want to wait five mins for you to get done with whatever. Of course other people might have different rules.

 

[alexti]

I think idea behind conscription centers + manufactories is that the cost increase for manufactories is tied to your manpower, thus by spamming manpower buildings you can build far more inexpensive manufactories without the cost moving beyond the cost/benefit point. Not sure to what degree the manufactories will influence prices to generate value above and beyond their own income. Another thing to consider in pursuing such a strategy is that Consciptions Centers are level 6 buildings while Post Offices are level 5, but you can build manufactories much earlier and use other methods (NI, HRE, sliders) to boost your manpower.

Even at the base cost Post Office is better (and cheaper, and quicker to build) than a manufactory for a reasonably-sized country, so manufactories looks more like a stop-gap to build until you research post offices

 

[unmerged(80402)]

I think about pause there could be rule like - you got a limited number of pauses in mp game - and when pause time end game is resumed. It think the pause timer in game was made just for that. IE it is 30 sec timer.

But it all depend on who play, and ingame rules.

EDIT: And about such strategy - i think it is quite nice one, but of course depend on what you intend to do. Whatever i think that keeping manpower high is good idea always - apspecialy if you got very big armies, that go much over limit. If you got 2MLN armies, and 1MLN manpower, it give quite big chance that you will loose due to atrition, as you will have no manpower to replenish such big hordes of men. So if you build manpower buildings in every province, you gain like 10k per province (6k of number and additional from percentage bonuses - 3k from national conscription...). For 100 provinces it is 1MLN manpower which is quite a number.