not enough of everythin

[Linusz]

Hi All,

I finally made my way into Vicky 3 and am doing a first run with Greater Germany. The most annoying thing I am experiencing (despite the obvious unpolished features and bugs, looking at you, warfare), is, that there is barely enough ressources to fuel a late game economy and the pace of laws / technology progress.

It is around 1905 and I have researched almost every technology. I have enacted all laws and unlocked all institutions to their highest level (in a sense of liberalism and freedom). Taxes are set to lowest and wages to highest. So nothing to do on these fronts. What keeps to be done? Increasing the SoL of my people (which keep migrating into my states - I have to lack of workers at all). So I keep spamming industries like no more - I am only thinking in increasing in 100s and sit on ~ 4.000 cp (could easily increase it, but for what??).

But now the horrid part comes:
There is no hardwood anymore. There is no fish anymore. There is not enough oil. There is no lead left. I cannot build any more coffee / tea / sugar / opium plantanations anymore, despite having expanded into China to get "farming space". I do not have enough luxury products despite having the production of basic goods reverted to old production methods so I can spam more factories to get the luxeries out. But factories start to become unprofitable due to basic goods being too cheap. (this all being 1.1.1, with increased cap on rubber / oil).

To me it seems, that resource / production balancing is not desined to go with the economies of scale that you are able to achieve in late game with a large nation. Or as a player based nation at all cause you can do so much optimising. To reflect better on this age of abundance Paradox really needs to raise the ceiling of what is possible economy wise.

 

[xsmilingbanditx]

I don't get that one Part: If your basic resources are too cheap, you haven't built enough goods producing industry. You could also start with setting up trade routes.
In the end, I'd say you just snowballed out of control and hereby proved why endless, exponential growth isn't possible in a closed system

 

[Life is Comedy]

Lesson 1 in economics :
How do we allocate finite ressources with infinite desires ?

Edit : or just go full imperialism mode

 

[Bearjuden]

In the end, I'd say you just snowballed out of control and hereby proved why endless, exponential growth isn't possible in a closed system

So, literally speaking this is true, but it should also not be possible though to get anywhere close to that kind of resource usage in a game that's claiming to represent history. Nobody in history got anywhere close to the ridiculous development that's downright trivial to achieve in-game; the biggest winners irl, like the USA, played like chumps to be as relatively poor as they were at game's end.

This would be greatly alleviated if RGOs were more productive so there was a lot more raw goods on the market (without just adding more deposits/increasing relative employment) and construction was much slower (it being way too fast causes too many buildings to create way too much urban demand).

 

[Richard Dolder]

Every victoria has had a very real problem with incredibly scarce basic resources late game, which is weird, as you should have incredibly abundant basic resources to the point it is unprofitable to make them basically.

 

[TheHostName]

Lets be real. Vic 3 Eco isnt balanced late game for simple reasons:

Its hard to balance a potential snoball mechanic.
Most balancing goes in to the timeframe thats played by most players --> The beginning of the game. The more time passes the less it has been played by players and testers. Just look at Eu4: Not many play longer then 1650-1700. Partly because they "won" the game at that point or because the last 150 years are unbalanced.

Also do you think the game should be balanced in a way, that having 100Mio people be as wealthy as a Victorian era capitalist should be sustainable?

 

[hamburgertrain]

Couldn't the caps be fixed by simply increasing theamount of available wood? There's more than enough agricultural land for everything, but not nearly enough wood. If say historic large wood producing states like Quebec had 100 or even 200 wood slots instead of the current 25 or so wouldnt that solve the issues?

I don't know why more capacity wouldn't be made available. As far as I know most places in Canada for example wouldn't reach peak wood until well after the games timeframe such as the 1970s.

Curious why the decision was taken to have limited wood everywhere. It seems almost impossible to over produce wood after mid game

 

[thedarkendstar]

Lesson 1 in economics :
How do we allocate finite ressources with infinite desires ?

Edit : or just go full imperialism mode

Except Malthusian economics did not exist and to this day dont exist for iron wood and coal.

 

[FluffayOne]

Curious why the decision was taken to have limited wood everywhere. It seems almost impossible to over produce wood after mid game

It wouldn't solve the issue to be fair, it'd just kick the can down the road for another 2, maybe 3 years, when all the construction is done again. Because at this point it's less of an issue with the resources themselves, I feel, and just how easy it is to make line go brrr at a ridiculous pace and create infinite demand for finite resources. I'm against adding more resources because I like scarcity as a gameplay mechanic to force methods of play in both SP and MP, which would be rendered obsolete if everything just got bumped up by a large degree to account for meta-play late-game. So the options are to either redo construction and migration so the whole meta we have at the moment dies, or people just hold back from doing the meta, the later of which I understand not everybody wants to do.

 

[Bearjuden]

I like scarcity as a gameplay mechanic to force methods of play in both SP and MP

The problem with is that it wasn't so much of a mechanic in real life, which the game is (supposedly) trying to capture some of. If there was ever one single era in which it seemed like there was an absolutely unending bounty of resources to harvest to make human lives better, it was this one. The only resources that people grew seriously concerned about within this time were wild living ones: forests, whales, and fish. Nobody ran out of coal, the very idea of it was silly.

 

[hamburgertrain]

It wouldn't solve the issue to be fair, it'd just kick the can down the road for another 2, maybe 3 years, when all the construction is done again. Because at this point it's less of an issue with the resources themselves, I feel, and just how easy it is to make line go brrr at a ridiculous pace and create infinite demand for finite resources. I'm against adding more resources because I like scarcity as a gameplay mechanic to force methods of play in both SP and MP, which would be rendered obsolete if everything just got bumped up by a large degree to account for meta-play late-game. So the options are to either redo construction and migration so the whole meta we have at the moment dies, or people just hold back from doing the meta, the later of which I understand not everybody wants to do.

But we never really run out of food and agricultural products within the game timespan? So I do think drastically increasing some capacity limits would change things

 

[DukeLeto42]

Ok, let's take this from the standpoint of my current game, a runaway GB in 1904 that may only miss out on WC because of minor German, African, and Indonesian states; I have >600 million pops and a market of >200 million more.

Most of those resources are out there. With the 1.1 boost to hardwood output from tech I'm consistently running more of a hardwood surplus than regular wood. There are still some fish, though that's getting close; lead is a bit tighter but I still have some options. A single Chinese province generates the whole world's silk, and a few more handle all the tea (and with an English primary culture, that's a lot of tea).

The sole current limiting factors are how close to the edge of profitability small buildings are (island fruit plantations come to mind) and oil. Other than that, the world has those resources. Now, you not being able to access them is an issue, but it is an issue the game absolutely should have. There's quite a bit of paper in academia on the impact of Prussia's sense of being late to the colonial game.

While there certainly are issues with the AI being unable to keep up

The problem with is that it wasn't so much of a mechanic in real life, which the game is (supposedly) trying to capture some of. If there was ever one single era in which it seemed like there was an absolutely unending bounty of resources to harvest to make human lives better, it was this one. The only resources that people grew seriously concerned about within this time were wild living ones: forests, whales, and fish. Nobody ran out of coal, the very idea of it was silly.

Japan's expansion of the Fushun mine because domestic coal supplies were woefully inadequate to supply an industrial economy would beg to differ.

But we never really run out of food and agricultural products within the game timespan? So I do think drastically increasing some capacity limits would change things

If we wanted to reflect the resource constraints of the period, we should instead see arable land reduced by a significant percentage in Europe and Asia (as much as 90% in parts of China). The inability to reliably produce sufficient food and ag. products was a key limiter to the growth of industrial societies, and this period's transition to synthetic fertilizers should be finally breaking food supply securely ahead of demand by making arable land finally sufficient to produce needed foodstuffs and other goods besides.

 

[thedarkendstar]

Japan's expansion of the Fushun mine because domestic coal supplies were woefully inadequate to supply an industrial economy would beg to differ.

This is sort of an Exception that proves the rule while there were specific areas of the globe that had trouble accessing coal the Idea the United states of America could be using all of its coal by 1936 is utterly insane

 

[DukeLeto42]

This is sort of an Exception that proves the rule while there were specific areas of the globe that had trouble accessing coal the Idea the United states of America could be using all of its coal by 1936 is utterly insane

That's why the game treats it as a maximum extraction rate and does not allow resource exhaustion.

 

[thedarkendstar]

That's why the game treats it as a maximum extraction rate and does not allow resource exhaustion.

I dont think the US could reach maximum extraction of coal and iron in 1936.

 

[Fawr]

Japan's expansion of the Fushun mine because domestic coal supplies were woefully inadequate to supply an industrial economy would beg to differ.

I feel historically Japan is the most extreme case of resource shortages.

In game resource shortages happen to every country, not just Japan though. Historically it was very rare for peak production in anything to happen in the late 1800s (whaling stands out). For example the wiki says that in the USA coal production doubled every decade until 1890.

In the Uk the data on coal production looks more like this (source https://www.gov.uk/government/stati...-coal-production-availability-and-consumption)

1853-1862	72
1863-1872	106
1873-1882	140
1883-1892	173
1893-1902	207
1903-1912	258
1913-1922	245
1923-1932	237
1933-1942	225

There was a small decline in UK coal production near the end of the game. However in another tab of that spreadsheet you can see that domestic consumption continued to rise until the 1950s (except for a minor dip from the great depression). Production only slowly fell because exports fell more than domestic demand increased. So the problem wasn't that there were no more coal to be mined, or that people in the UK wanted less coal. The problem was that other people started mining their own coal and didn't need to import British coal anymore.

British grain production did decrease during the middle of the time period, but that was due to imports from the USA rather than shortage of land (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression_of_British_Agriculture). In game you don't get enough convoys to do that kind of trade. I'm tempted to mod a large increase to the number of convoys per port (or decrease the number needed) to encourage more trade like that.

 

[maxirage]

Resources should be changed to use a soft-cap based on diminishing returns. e.g., a province with 25 wood could be built to 100, but each additional level above the cap is less productive. That would be more realistic than the linear increase with tiny hard caps we have now.

 

[Linusz]

I also came to the conclusion that the actual, possible growth is the problem. If opnecompare achievable grow rates from starting dates to what actually happened, the increase in GDP is just ridiculous. There is another thread on that topic, I might post it here tomorrow. But the problem seems to be very common. And I indeed experienced the same in V2 with Greater Germany sucking up all resources. Only back then, thinnest bottlenecks were oil and rubber just like in V3 (at least oil keeps being an issue since last patch). It seems a bit, they did not learn from their mistakes

 

[thedarkendstar]

I feel like oil was not a REAL bottle neck in real life assuming no one was embargoed or blockaded I cant think of a time of a true supply shortage of oil occuring IRL it was always some external factor never literally we cant produce enough globally.

 

[Amtep]

I wonder if this could be solved by extending the tech tree a bit, so that countries that do better than their historical counterparts can also unlock some advanced PMs that give more resources. Or techs that just expand the number of resource buildings you can build in a state.