POP Merging Crisis

[tony luke]

:wacko: Greetings,
I have been playing Victoria for two weeks now and find the POP merging issue to be disastrous to building a nation/economy. I know it is under review and merely bring up the following issues for consideration in fixing the problem. Example: Prussia starts GC with 93 POPs in Rheinland State. By 1844 this has become 51 POPs. The greatest problem is that with the merging/disappearing POPs I went from 15 POPS of Clerks to 4, AND 2 of these 4 are at strength 0!!!!. How can you run an economy like this? There is now only 2 POPs of clerks for 4 factories! There is now also only one goup of officers in the whole country and NO clergy at all. Also, my POP went up from 14,095,000 to 15,478,000 over this period but the POPs do not remotely equal this figure when added up?
Immigration; I really am puzzled why so many happy Nth German Protestant craftsmen would decide to immigrate to guatemala??? Tied to this issue is that of immigration to a colony if you raise one. I tried this once and found that 50,000 plus craftsmen left thier jobs in germany for the Congo, which did not even have any industry!!!!!

This game has so much potential but at the moment I will shelve it as unplayable and await the next patches, alternately I suppose that I could mod the GC file and create every POP to be at least 50,000 strong to start with?? (my tax would be an outrageous cheat but at least the economy/society may balance and grow as I think the game intended!).

For your consideration.

Tony Luke

 

[JohnMK]

Naturally you do bring up great points. I believe these will be looked at and resolved in future patches. A real game breaker at the moment IMO is the pop-merging, and I think it warrants a beta patch until 1.03 comes out.

 

[Darkrenown]

There is now also only one goup of officers in the whole country

That doesn't matter, it's the number in the pops rather than the number of pops that count for soldiers and officers.

I'd say pop merging was more annoying than game breaking, but Johan has said he is looking at making only pops under 10k merge in the next patch.

 

[unmerged(22409)]

That doesn't matter, it's the number in the pops rather than the number of pops that count for soldiers and officers.

I'd say pop merging was more annoying than game breaking, but Johan has said he is looking at making only pops under 10k merge in the next patch.

Even merging under 10k pops can be a bit disasterous. I would rather a "select 2 pops click merge button" solution, or only merge if there are more than 10 (figure pulled out of hat) similar pop groups.

As I once pointed out, when playing the zulu's I turned 80% of my pop into soldiers during a war, when they merged, I was stuffed because from then on I could not disband part of my army and send people back to their place of origin while still retaining a small force of peace time troops.

 

[Stonewall]

I think it makes sense to have the pops merge, but the 10k limit is a good thing. I'd personally prefer to see only 5k and under merge, with the rest mergable by the player, but any change is a welcome improvement. What I think would be an even better solution is to treat pops like the game treats soldiers, i.e. one point in a factory requires 5,000 in pops, whether they come from 5 different groups, or 1 large one.

 

[unmerged(13384)]

It would also be nice if you could divide pops of over X number (say 50,000) into half or fifths. I hate when all of my craftmen immigrate into Berlin and I end up with one pop at 150,000 instead of many reasonable sized pops.

 

[Darkrenown]

It would also be nice if you could divide pops of over X number (say 50,000) into half or fifths. I hate when all of my craftmen immigrate into Berlin and I end up with one pop at 150,000 instead of many reasonable sized pops.

Pops can only reach 100k, then they split into two 50k pops.

Pop merging only under 10k would be fine for me, especially if production is made more linier rather than 2 10k pops outproducing a 20k pop. If it relied more on the number of people in a pop then you wouldn't want the small pops anyway.

 

[unmerged(24157)]

There's some real weird stuff with migration too. I was playing Belgium last night and I grabbed Melanesia as a colonoy (really easy to do in a series of colonial war using just one division and one transport to seize other's TPs).

I was super-liberty, super liberal and was even running with negative tariffs. All this hoping to draw migrants to work in my high-tech factories. And it did, alright. I was getting Solider POPs from all over Europe setting in New Ireland and Bouganville. One of them was a 30,000-ish POP of North Germans. I demobilized them and put them to work in the mahogany plantations, of course. But that was weird. Pity North German isn't a Belgian culture: I would have liked to make the place a State so I could build more factories. Sure couldn't get my own folks to leave for the colonies.

In another game as France, at one point I noticed that about 180,000 clerks were living in Draa: the least hospitable colony in the Empire.

Sorta funny.

 

[Tex]

The pop merging item is the weakest part of 1.02 (IMnsHO). I was playing recently as Texas, and watched after conquering a mexican provence w/ 5 pops in it (1 soldier and 4 laborers). I converted the soldier back to a laborer and guess what happened...
I had a single pop in that provence after that, albeit a rather large pop, but only one. my production was cut by way more than half.
The way in which pop development (except educating pops to higher levels) are taken completely out of the hand of the player weakens my options as a player.

I have heard so many contributors argue back and forth about the benifits of 1.02 ( and I do beleive that it is a considerable step above 1.01 in balance of game play), but I dislike the fact that given the shrinking pop numbers and non-linear production of the factories (for the most part... ok... a pop of 100K is 5 time more productive than a pop of 1000... but that's still asinine).

For what its worth, I think that there should either be 1) control over the size of your pops or linear production. I wouldn't mind having 5 pops merge into one if the production would remain the same.

 

[unmerged(24157)]

I was astonished to learn that the size of the pop has no influence on production. It really makes no sense at all. It would seem so easy to include the pop size (as a percentage of 100,000 or 50,000) in the Efficiency calculation for the factory.

I still only half beleive its true, despite all the evidence.

 

[unmerged(12858)]

I was astonished to learn that the size of the pop has no influence on production. It really makes no sense at all. It would seem so easy to include the pop size (as a percentage of 100,000 or 50,000) in the Efficiency calculation for the factory.

I still only half beleive its true, despite all the evidence.

If i remember right there is a benefit for size of the pop but its in steps and not liner.. And not that a 50K pop produce dubble that of a 25K
It might seams idiotic BUT if you consider the fact that a factory employing 5*100 K is as cheap to build/uppgrade as one who employ 5* 1 K its start to make some sence.. I guess the game calculation vill be to comlicated (to MANY calculations) if a total liner system was made (both cost of factories adn out put depending of size of pops



I actually start to like the pop mergin a LITTLE bit.. The problem is that it should be able to split a pop (say of craftman) and educate them to clerks or soldier etc..


Just my thoughts...

 

[unmerged(24157)]

I suppose its reasonable for it to be non-linear. Its not like every single person living in a place is actually involved in the principle economic activity. There's gotta be someone collecting garbage and pouring beer at the tavern, etc.

But you're saying that a 30,000 Craftsman POP will produce more than a 1500 Craftsman POP?

I was watching the details window for some factory while playing a US game. I watched production jump up as those little Craftsmen pops came in from Europe. Then it would drop again when they merged into the big Yankee POP also working there. I watched it for a while, and expected that eventually, the post-merge production would be bigger but it never was.

Production was 0.1 with one pop, 0.2 with two pops for as long as I watched it, even though the one pop was about 20,000 and the second was maybe 300 or so. Maybe the differences are down in the 0.00 and smaller places and they just arn't showing up when the number if formatted with one decimal place.

 

[Traveler]

originally posted by Stonewall
What I think would be an even better solution is to treat pops like the game treats soldiers, i.e. one point in a factory requires 5,000 in pops, whether they come from 5 different groups, or 1 large one.

This is a fantastic idea. PoP merging wouldn't be such a problem if this were the case. You could better determine the efficiency of a factory based on the applied "points".

As it is now you look at the factory under the factory screen or ledger and see that there are 5 working in it, at level one(from here it looks maxed out). But that could be 2 clerk pops of 500 and 1000 and 3 craftsmen of 10k and 5k and 45k (not very efficient).

Obviously, if I wanted to increase production, at the sample factory listed above, I would have to manually remove a clerk or craftsman PoP demote them to farmers/laborers or stick them off to the side with no employment hoping they grow up some day. I then could promote another PoP with higher numbers, then move them into the factory. Seems very tedious and quite expensive givin the costs to promote farmers/laborers to craftsmen/clerks.

Maybe we should flesh out Stonewall's idea, could work perfectly with Victorias RGO/Factory mechanics and alleviate the pain of merging PoPs as these are the areas where it hurts the most.

Traveler

 

[unmerged(12858)]

But you're saying that a 30,000 Craftsman POP will produce more than a 1500 Craftsman POP?

I was watching the details window for some factory while playing a US game. I watched production jump up as those little Craftsmen pops came in from Europe. Then it would drop again when they merged into the big Yankee POP also working there. I watched it for a while, and expected that eventually, the post-merge production would be bigger but it never was.

Production was 0.1 with one pop, 0.2 with two pops for as long as I watched it, even though the one pop was about 20,000 and the second was maybe 300 or so. Maybe the differences are down in the 0.00 and smaller places and they just arn't showing up when the number if formatted with one decimal place.

It was stated that there was step. And juste a few ones (say 1K, 20K. 60K, i really dont remember the numbers!!!) This was during the "beginning"=1.01, if changes in 1.02 i dont know. There is an economic treads somewhere which explaine some off the stuff.. (and use tariffs early on in the game!)

Sorry for not being able to give u an exact answear...