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echopapa

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I'm a longtime EU2 player who's just started playing Vicky. I'm playing as Switzerland so I can get the hang of economics. That said, what is the best order to carry out money-making improvements? Start with railroads, then upgrade craftsmen to clerks? Expand resource-gathering? Upgrade factories?

I've got a steady money-maker in a steel factory, and I've just finished with a machine parts factory that I think will get me rolling in cash, but I'm afraid I may have wasted a lot of it along the way.
 
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I usually start with railroads, since they help your industry, military, and I think they help your RGOs as well.
 

unmerged(32689)

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yeah, usually railroads are top priority for me, they multiplay your income and RGO/Factory productivity. swiss have good RGO's spots so try expend and not convert people in iron, coal regoins, couse they are vital to your economy. money is not a real problem espesually if you have interest rates 5% and know how to invest the money. if you have a wine or other small income factories i would suggest to close them and build something like and artillery factory. (sometimes its better to close, then keep it open)
 

King

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Railways are definatly the way forward here. I would build them rather than factories. I had a paper factory that was not making a profit, if I had expanded it I would still probably not make a profit. However I built some railways and all of a sudden I started to make cash from the factory. However a disclaimer here no point building railways if you do have the raw materials to build them, so it can be worth while to build the factories to supply the railway raw materials first.
 

Grosshaus

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I normally start building railroads in smaller states with factories first so I can cover the whole state cheaper to get the full factory benefits and earn more faster to further enlarge the railroads. But that might not mean much for Switzerland if it has just one state.
 

HarkovAdm

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AFAIK railroads are not too important early game, compared to their expense. Just build a railroad in your province with the factory for now. In my experience, in the early game, the best factories to have are steel glass and lumber, possibly paper, with cement not quite as profitable but sometimes necessary to have. The thing about your RGOs is that you want to steadily convert the workers in them to factory workers until in the late game you only have people working on important resources like iron, sulphur, coal, precious metal... The game is about the transition from agrarian to industrial society and it simulates it well; factories are a LOT more profitable than farms are in victoria :)

Unfortunately as switzerland you have only limited potential and your economy will be very weak in the beginning. With no colonization potential, I guess you'll just have to creep along making railroads as the money is made available, researching to get machine parts so that you can finally make some more profitable factories like clothing, luxury clothing, machine parts, and eventually steamers.

Finally, you will want to convert some POPs to capitalists. This comes later in the game as it's expensive and in any case you don't have access to the luxury furniture required for a while. I always choose "meritocracy" in "meritocracy vs aristocracy" and I BELIEVE that is what sets it to 333K capitalist people to give you a 50% industrial bonus per state. So in other words, promote about 300K capitalists, most preferably your largest pops (hopefully you will have some extra population, I am not specifically familiar with switzerland but they seem to have a decent-sized state and not broken down into multiple states thus requiring more capitalists)... anyways those are just some things I wish I knew when I started playing this game so hopefully at least something I said helps :)
 

unmerged(7509)

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HarkovAdm said:
Finally, you will want to convert some POPs to capitalists. This comes later in the game as it's expensive and in any case you don't have access to the luxury furniture required for a while. I always choose "meritocracy" in "meritocracy vs aristocracy" and I BELIEVE that is what sets it to 333K capitalist people to give you a 50% industrial bonus per state. So in other words, promote about 300K capitalists, most preferably your largest pops (hopefully you will have some extra population, I am not specifically familiar with switzerland but they seem to have a decent-sized state and not broken down into multiple states thus requiring more capitalists)... anyways those are just some things I wish I knew when I started playing this game so hopefully at least something I said helps :)
Does it matter whether the capitalists are national pops or not? If not I would of course rather use the national ones for clerks.
 

tyrel68

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rasmus40 said:
Does it matter whether the capitalists are national pops or not? If not I would of course rather use the national ones for clerks.
No, it does not matter if capitalists of national or not.
 

Sleepyhead

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As Switzerland your goal should be to buy a few provinces from Austria or try to conquer Sardinia or Baden/Würtemburg then convert their pops to craftsmen and let them migrate to Switzerland. Make sure to convert them to laboures in your coal and iron mines to get more raw material.
And make sure you use as many Swiss pops as clerks as possible.

Focus on building glass, steel and remeber that liquor greatly helpes your tairiffs.
 

unmerged(32689)

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well i dont know about you guys but ive notices that national Capitalist give more bonuses.
 

Sleepyhead

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it has been tested and they come up with that it doesn't matter which culture the capitalist has.
 

Lord Boreal

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Clerks sizes and nationality however are. A clerk of your national culture adds to your rate of RP gain, any other clerk adds to factory output and IS, larger clersk are better than smaller ones which is why most players tend to make larger POPs clerks and smaller ones craftsmen. Large craftsmen POPs are good too but I would still promote them to Clerks instead.