Potential Worldeconomy. A test of what the world can produce.

[TheHostName]

Hello everyone.

After the lengthy discussions that were had in Secret Masters thread about resource lack and how the Ai doesnt devolop it, i set myself a goal to find out what can actually be produced in Version 1.1.*.

Setup:

-Ive used the console command annex_all to annex everything into the British Empire (1.03B People)
-Ive changed the laws to accept everyone and increase healthcare voting rights all the other fancy laws we want to have in our games, just so that i wont get killed by radicals while also maximasing the wealth of my pops. Thats why I became a council republic aswell.
-I also changed qualifications gain in the defines so that i wont have to wait 50 years to fill a level 50 steel mill.
-I console researched all techs
-I incorperated all states within 5 weeks (defines change)
-I build with the console command fastbuild to get all the industry in place so that i dont have to wait through the construction quee.
-I also tried some stuff with migration and popgrowth to fill all mines and so on.

The Result:
I reached 19.1B in GDP. This is however not the cap you can reach in V3. I simply capitulated after 5 crashes and extremly low weekly progress.
Ive done a new test. The result can be found here.

TLDR: Double what you can see here

My Market meanwhile is looking like it wants to expand further.

The Staple goods are in excess. If i need more farms I can build more. If i need more paper/groceries i can build more. Only thing that is actually capped is Fish. If there is one thing that V3 doesnt lack then its farmable resources. China and India have simply that much.
I will talk about chairs and cloths later.

When it comes to industrial goods its a bit different but not to a huge degree. I cannot expand mines more then i allready have. They are allready at their max.

The prices however are currently low. I would guess that i could keep factories profitable if their need would increase by 50% but not more.
If push come sto shove i could increase mineproduction through oil, but there is simply not enough of it. The oil iam currently using is for Glass and some automation. But its not enough even for that.

As we can see here aswell. There is no lack of farmable luxeries. There is however a limit for luxery cloths and chairs. The hardwood supply is capped at 78k through eco of scales.
If the population keeps on getting wealthier and wealthier (as they are doing in this save. I ended before they reached their cap), then the amount of these luxeries that would have been demanded would outpace the hardwood supply. If we were to assume that we needed to double these luxeries, then we would also need more wood for tools and the luxeries aswell. In total i would guess that the hardwood supply would run out first, followed by rubber, wood and then Iron (for the steel).

Oberservations:

-There are enough resources to give 1B people a SoL of 20 or higher.
-There are also enough resources to get a World GDP of over 20B. My guess would be that 25-30B would be the cap, because of the lack of hardwood.
-There seems to be a demand spiral for luxery goods. Because of the way SoL increases changes demand, can there be points where nations cannot keep up with luxury demands. Chairs and cloths simply become worthless and make those factories more unprofitable.
-There seems to be a heavy imbalance in what oil is needed for when you want to automate production. Food industry and Tetile Mills dont need Oil for their automation. Furniture and glassworks need it though. This patern applies to many other industries aswell and creates a heavy imbalance between those in terms of profitability, since you cant spent oil on them all.

Conclusions:

-There is no lack of resources, but a lack of spread out resources (which is correct and good). If the AI builds them and you buy them then you will be fine (unless you become a huge economy)
-Countries can keep their luxury factories profitable if they can find markets to sell those goods to. Those factories are essentially profitable aslong as x% of their non luxery products can be exported. If this ratio of export to selfconsumption goes to low, then you will see factories become to unprofitable. This is a definitiv reason why everyone needs to play with AI mods. There is no way to keep this ratio in a healthy position if one tries to export into vanilla AI markets. Those simply have a lack of demand.

Suggestion for the devs:

-Create another good. "Machine tools" made out of tools and steel (oil? instead of oil in automation?) This good would be used in automation pms and could replace oil and tools. The reasoning i see behind this is the extreme amount of tools we need. This also results in a extreme demand of wood. As a result one could increase the share of hardwood to wood.
-There was synthethic coal in V2. Bringing this one back could help with all the complaining about Oil. This is simply better then more Oil wells. Those create money/wages for Zero cost and only increase demand in their market. Having synthetic oil would need goods which would lower profitability and therefore potential wages and newly created demand.

And now for a bigger addition to the game/solution to rubber and fertilizer. The second Industrial Revolution: Chemistry.

The game allready nicely portraits the first industrial revolution and the importance of iron and steam really well. But fails to create a deeper production chain for chemical resources. I would therefore suggest the creation of a new good called: "chemical products"

-It could be produced in the chemical plant (later pm could include oil)
-Would be used for dye and silk in the synthetic plant
-Could be used in either a fertilizer plant (that still produces explosives) or in a split explosives and fertilizer plant.
-Could be used with some oil to produce synthetic rubber in a synthetic rubber plant.
-Maybe even change Plastics to need chemical products.

In general a valuable basic resource which could become the second iron of the economy.

 

[ShoGuL]

Porcelain can substitute for luxury chairs and clothes, no? You don't mention it anywhere.

 

[Yosiu]

Great test idea, well done.
It definitely proves that (maybe beside oil) it's not simple resource deficit.
I recently started to use "Ultra Historical Research & Education" mod which reduces literacy and qualification increase and slows tech progression and I recommend to try it.
Economical growth is much slower and reduces strain on resources.

I think in vanilla game it's too easy to industrialize because qualifications are too abundant. And when westernized countries race with GDP (assuming Anbeeld Ai mod, vanilla AI economies aren't racing anywhere) third world countries stays too poor and outproduced by highly industrialised nation even in raw resources.

 

[TheHostName]

Porcelain can substitute for luxury chairs and clothes, no? You don't mention it anywhere.

Yep it can. Its also why i usually go hard with glassworks (and no plastics pm). In this test however i could not reach the point where you would try to solve your luxury chair problem with glassworks. I would assume that you would run out of lead. Expecially since its not that spread out over the world.

Something i failed to add to the post is that i obvs dont have a construction sector. This would increase the demand of some goods like glass and steel/iron by atleast 50%. Atleast if i go by the numbers i usually have in my games.

 

[Fawr]

Yep it can. Its also why i usually go hard with glassworks (and no plastics pm). In this test however i could not reach the point where you would try to solve your luxury chair problem with glassworks. I would assume that you would run out of lead. Expecially since its not that spread out over the world.

Something i failed to add to the post is that i obvs dont have a construction sector. This would increase the demand of some goods like glass and steel/iron by atleast 50%. Atleast if i go by the numbers i usually have in my games.

You mentioned you were using your oil for glass and automation. I think if you built less glass by not using any oil there and switched to produce more iron, lead, sulfur, etc it would let you expand your industry further as well as getting more porcelain.

But overall this was a very interesting read. The world looks like it has an in-built surplus of services. Are there vacant jobs in the cities?

Also how many peasants/unemployed did you have left at the end? Did you get those to zero so that all your pops had "real" demands for goods (and no free lumber production)?

Did you have any infrastructure problems? I'm surprised that your transportation goods demand was so high. I find it hard to keep the price of transportation high in my games and I'd assumed it was locked into a similar problem to services. Did you build many ports for infrastructure?

 

[ShoGuL]

You mentioned you were using your oil for glass and automation. I think if you built less glass by not using any oil there and switched to produce more iron, lead, sulfur, etc it would let you expand your industry further as well as getting more porcelain.

But overall this was a very interesting read. The world looks like it has an in-built surplus of services. Are there vacant jobs in the cities?

Also how many peasants/unemployed did you have left at the end? Did you get those to zero so that all your pops had "real" demands for goods (and no free lumber production)?

Did you have any infrastructure problems? I'm surprised that your transportation goods demand was so high. I find it hard to keep the price of transportation high in my games and I'd assumed it was locked into a similar problem to services. Did you build many ports for infrastructure?

Don't forget that with proper play, the population would easily triple.. looks like they only played a few years. Having the world built out with only 1.15B pops isn't super realistic.. I've seen no conquest China games with more people by the end game.

 

[TheHostName]

You mentioned you were using your oil for glass and automation. I think if you built less glass by not using any oil there and switched to produce more iron, lead, sulfur, etc it would let you expand your industry further as well as getting more porcelain.

Yes. I changed it and this is the result: (Glassworks actually were only 60k usage) (also there is more then enough Oil to use it for mines)

New Coal production is 1.2M and 650k Iron.
So you can expand your eco further. But like i said: My game cant handle it.

The world looks like it has an in-built surplus of services. Are there vacant jobs in the cities?

Yep this surplass exists.You will also not get rid of it, since services doesnt rise that much with SoL. Building cars and art would even reduce service demand. There are also 13k city centers. If the wages would be low enough, they would actually employ soooo much more. i guess next to the fertilizer imbalance the second thing everybody has plenty of.

Also how many peasants/unemployed did you have left at the end? Did you get those to zero so that all your pops had "real" demands for goods (and no free lumber production)?

So if i didnt increase popgrowth to fill all the mines(they all emigrated to india and china where i build the industry) then it would be full employment. Currently there are 70Mio that still can find work. But as i said. I cant be asked to build more. The time it takes to fill these factories.... Might redo this test with everypop beeing of the same culture. Though i have the feeling that will not fix performence issues.

Did you have any infrastructure problems? I'm surprised that your transportation goods demand was so high. I find it hard to keep the price of transportation high in my games and I'd assumed it was locked into a similar problem to services. Did you build many ports for infrastructure?

Price was extremly low over the entire span of this. Was on full automation for it. Save says 250k usage by Pops. But essentially all centers are empty. I guess price adjusted and its to unprofitable to lower the price. Iam btw not perfectly efficent with trains and infrastucture. Too much to micro. Iam also running electric trains and wood wagons. Too much transportation otherwise. Really wish you would get eco of scales for trains and also use of transportion in non rural industries.

Don't forget that with proper play, the population would easily triple.. looks like they only played a few years. Having the world built out with only 1.15B pops isn't super realistic.. I've seen no conquest China games with more people by the end game.

Indeed. Which means that if there wasnt still peasants in Ai countries and so on you would drown in Pops.

 

[TheHostName]

Something else i just came up with. Could it be that the game calculates all weekly relevant updates on a per nation basis and then switches to the next country?

My thinking essentially is: The game calls up all relevant data it needs to calculate something like needs for one nation. Does the calculatation and then saves it somewhere. Then it does the next operation, until it is done with one nation and moves on to the next. This way each process is short and doesnt have a huge amount of data.
However if you become a large nation each individual collection and calculation gets longer and longer. Now could it be that there is a problem like we can see with the construction quee? The entire job to calculate and store the relevant data for just one task might simply become to large?

it would also explain why ive seen information and numbers ingame get updated mid week and on everytick. The game literally lagging behind in updating that information. One example i saw was the literacy increasing by multiple % points mid week/day. Note though that it was not a jump but incremental update. Stuff like this isnt supposed to be updated mid week though.

 

[Xeiki]

Don't forget that with proper play, the population would easily triple.. looks like they only played a few years. Having the world built out with only 1.15B pops isn't super realistic.. I've seen no conquest China games with more people by the end game.

This is a very important point and makes me question the conclusion of the OP that there's no resource shortage. That goes against my experience playing the game, and against the numbers presented here. Limited or at least strategic resources like Oil and Rubber make sense, but afaik, there was no lead or iron shortage in the Victorian Era; even Whaling reached its peak after the end date, IIRC.

 

[TheHostName]

This is a very important point and makes me question the conclusion of the OP that there's no resource shortage. That goes against my experience playing the game, and against the numbers presented here. Limited or at least strategic resources like Oil and Rubber make sense, but afaik, there was no lead or iron shortage in the Victorian Era; even Whaling reached its peak after the end date, IIRC.

There is a resource shortage if you have limited resources as the name suggest. The question is at what SoL level and GDP you would consider it fair for the game to have shortages. My level is when you can have 20B in GDP in production and still have room to increase it further, then that is enough. Also actuall population isnt that relevant. Their demand however is. In this case it was 1B with a SoL of 24.
I simply have no problem with the games eco supporting "only" 1B people at a wealth level of 24. Heck it could be even way higher. Just looking at the demand of goods you can see that theres still plenty of space for more SoL increases. Wouldnt be suprised to learn that it could support a SoL of 30.

Iam going to be honest. I dont want to see V3 be balanced in a way that you can support the world population of 2B (1927) at a stupidly high SoL.

Also what is this argument with "the was no iron or lead shortages in the Victorian Era"? There was never enough demand to have shortages. You can create such extreme amounts of resource demands in this game. Stuff like that would have crippled the world back then. Just imagine what would happen nowadays if the 8B people in 2022 would have the same consumption as a European or American has? The world would die in resource shortages and ecological destruction would kill our children.

 

[Cry_Havok]

There is a resource shortage if you have limited resources as the name suggest. The question is at what SoL level and GDP you would consider it fair for the game to have shortages. My level is when you can have 20B in GDP in production and still have room to increase it further, then that is enough. Also actuall population isnt that relevant. Their demand however is. In this case it was 1B with a SoL of 24.
I simply have no problem with the games eco supporting "only" 1B people at a wealth level of 24. Heck it could be even way higher. Just looking at the demand of goods you can see that theres still plenty of space for more SoL increases. Wouldnt be suprised to learn that it could support a SoL of 30.

Iam going to be honest. I dont want to see V3 be balanced in a way that you can support the world population of 2B (1927) at a stupidly high SoL.

Also what is this argument with "the was no iron or lead shortages in the Victorian Era"? There was never enough demand to have shortages. You can create such extreme amounts of resource demands in this game. Stuff like that would have crippled the world back then. Just imagine what would happen nowadays if the 8B people in 2022 would have the same consumption as a European or American has? The world would die in resource shortages and ecological destruction would kill our children.

So, ultimately what you have proven is there is enough resources with enough finegaling, with total WC, and if construction didn't exist. How does this really help figure out balance though?

 

[TheHostName]

So, ultimately what you have proven is there is enough resources with enough finegaling, with total WC, and if construction didn't exist. How does this really help figure out balance though?

It depends on what type of balance you want to achieve. The tests purpose was not only to find out what the potential world economy could even be. But also to find out what role trade and AI build up has to do with resource shortages.

Ultimativly it does show that better AI exploitation of resources could lead to a reduction of shortages. That in itselfs sounds like an obvious statement, but it was one of the points that was argued about in Secret Masters thread.
My conclusion is that its a problem with demand in most cases. 4B GDP nations should not experiance shortages if the World can easily sustain 20B. Even 10B Economies should get enough resources if the AI builds up.

The other things this test showed was the extreme abundance of transportation and expecially services. Also that large high SoL countries can enter a phase where they only survive on their export of luxery items, aswell as basic consumer goods. The AI would otherwise use their own hardwood to build stuff, which you need for your own consumption.

And if you wanna know something that i would immediatly suggest for balancing? Halve construction sector output. The world eco grows to fricking fast.

 

[Sovieticozasz]

I would disagree that the world does not lack resources. You are on 1838 with 1.15B pops (the world pop at that time). I have just loaded a game i had on 1878 and Annexed_all, the world pop was 1.31B roughly a 0.3% increase in yearly pop. Even if we assume the pop growth in my game was high for some reason and we accept a 0.2% yearly world pop increase from 1838 to 1910 the world pop will be 1.15*1.002^72 = 1.37B, there is no way the coal and wood that exist in the save you have posted
could sufice for 20% more population. And that is assuming a very meager pop growth increase, if the AI was better at playing it will increase the SoL of its pops more and it will pass better laws, probably increasing the pop growth even more.

 

[slackerpants]

Nice test. Who were the biggest consumers among the pop? Upper, middle or lower class? I can imagine an extremely wealthy upper class in this kind of test.

 

[Xeiki]

Also what is this argument with "the was no iron or lead shortages in the Victorian Era"? There was never enough demand to have shortages. You can create such extreme amounts of resource demands in this game. Stuff like that would have crippled the world back then. Just imagine what would happen nowadays if the 8B people in 2022 would have the same consumption as a European or American has? The world would die in resource shortages and ecological destruction would kill our children.

Uh ... the game simulates Victorian Era production and production methods, and most of the stuff you produce is normal everyday goods everybody would have had access to. So yeah, I'd expect that the demand generated by the pops in game is appropriate for the time period. I'll admit that I overlooked the high SoL; but I'd also like to know what a SoL of 24 corresponds to in real life terms. Even then, you simply shouldn't run out of iron, since we currently produce a multitude of iron & steel compared to what was produced in the Victorian era, so higher demands could have been met. It would have been an issue of labour, not of resource availability. Same goes for lead, etc.

Edit: Just take a look at this graph, for example: Global steel production 1900-now

 

[thedarkendstar]

I firmly do not think the global should be able to reach peak iron and coal individual countries maybe but these resources should probably have a shortage only every virtually every other one like coal and iron should be the last possible resource that we could bottle neck there is jsut that much of it.

 

[TheLand]

Don't forget that with proper play, the population would easily triple.. looks like they only played a few years. Having the world built out with only 1.15B pops isn't super realistic.. I've seen no conquest China games with more people by the end game.

Another reason why fertility rates need to be looked at as well as qualifications!

 

[Gawquon3]

One thing to think about is the growth of demand, which is one of the reasons I think that people don't feel the abundance of a 10+ Billion GDP economy. Someone made a very good spreadsheet for this closer to release that sadly I can not find, so we'll have to make to with game file snippets. This is from common/buy_packages/00_buy_packages.txt

Spoiler: Excerpts

wealth_9 = {
    political_strength = 0.6
    goods = {
        popneed_simple_clothing = 43
        popneed_crude_items = 48
        popneed_basic_food = 132
        popneed_heating = 29
        popneed_intoxicants = 62
    }
}
wealth_10 = {
    political_strength = 0.75
    goods = {
        popneed_simple_clothing = 50
        popneed_crude_items = 43
        popneed_basic_food = 133
        popneed_heating = 26
        popneed_household_items = 7
        popneed_standard_clothing = 10
        popneed_services = 23
        popneed_intoxicants = 63
    }
}
wealth_20 = {
    political_strength = 18
    goods = {
        popneed_basic_food = 194
        popneed_heating = 26
        popneed_household_items = 134
        popneed_standard_clothing = 126
        popneed_services = 121
        popneed_intoxicants = 84
        popneed_luxury_drinks = 84
        popneed_free_movement = 42
        popneed_communication = 17
        popneed_luxury_food = 8
        popneed_luxury_items = 101
    }
}
wealth_30 = {
    political_strength = 65
    goods = {
        popneed_heating = 26
        popneed_household_items = 207
        popneed_standard_clothing = 161
        popneed_services = 352
        popneed_intoxicants = 216
        popneed_luxury_drinks = 269
        popneed_free_movement = 207
        popneed_communication = 62
        popneed_luxury_food = 269
        popneed_luxury_items = 642
        popneed_art = 21
    }
}
wealth_43 = {
    political_strength = 160
    goods = {
        popneed_heating = 26
        popneed_household_items = 238
        popneed_services = 1112
        popneed_intoxicants = 216
        popneed_luxury_drinks = 889
        popneed_free_movement = 741
        popneed_communication = 741
        popneed_luxury_food = 963
        popneed_luxury_items = 2964
        popneed_art = 371
    }
}
wealth_50 = {
    political_strength = 275
    goods = {
        popneed_heating = 26
        popneed_services = 2254
        popneed_intoxicants = 216
        popneed_luxury_drinks = 1503
        popneed_free_movement = 1503
        popneed_communication = 1503
        popneed_luxury_food = 1954
        popneed_luxury_items = 6012
        popneed_art = 1052
    }
}

As you grow into abundance goods get cheap -> pop SoL increases -> demand increases -> you make more goods and more complex goods that eat other resources. Demand growth isn't slow, this is fine but permanent runaway economic growth creates permanent runaway demand growth. Every citizen a Robber Baron and quail be going extinct real fast.

Personally I'd consider a soft cap of what's reasonable for swathes of your high society to reach is that ~43 wealth level. Some small groups here and there might poke up towards that 60 Opulence. If you start raising SoL for all of your pops as high as it will go, eventually your consumption will meet your production.

tl;dr ridiculous levels of development don't feel as ridiculous as they should because visually all your pops do is get a new hat

 

[TheHostName]

You are on 1838 with 1.15B pops (the world pop at that time). I have just loaded a game i had on 1878 and Annexed_all, the world pop was 1.31B roughly a 0.3% increase in yearly pop. Even if we assume the pop growth in my game was high for some reason and we accept a 0.2% yearly world pop increase from 1838 to 1910 the world pop will be 1.15*1.002^72 = 1.37B

I cheated in the defines file. I changed pop growth since many places like Perm and so on was depopulated from 2 years of migration. So i need more migration and pop growth. World population should have only increased by 1.7% per year from 1.03B to 1.06B. I was also using max education and private healthcare. (maxed out)

there is no way the coal and wood that exist in the save you have posted
could sufice for 20% more population. And that is assuming a very meager pop growth increase, if the AI was better at playing it will increase the SoL of its pops more and it will pass better laws, probably increasing the pop growth even more.

Another commentator suggested to use oil in the mines instead of elsewhere. That increased Coal supply to 1.3B. Current Coal demand dropped to 650Mio in this save. There is enough Coal to double world population to 2B at the same SoL.
Now about wood: Doubling world population doesnt mean double all resource needs. Out of 500k wood demand 300k is tooling. So if we look at Tools we see that out of 700k demand only 250k comes from industries we would need to double. Stuff like ranches, food industry, furniture ect. The rest of the demand is stuff like iron mines and so on. Those are allready at max. So just going by that we can expand all of that. Only thing that wouldnt work is Hardwood. But ive stated in my post that hardwood will run out first. Then Rubber.

If the world population goes above 2B (which can happen in V3 quit easily) then i guess it becomes more problematic. Maybe conquoring china is not something people should do. For the sake of the games eco aswell as their pc

 

[TheHostName]

Nice test. Who were the biggest consumers among the pop? Upper, middle or lower class? I can imagine an extremely wealthy upper class in this kind of test.

There is no upper class. I went council republic to increase lower pop wealth faster and generally higher. I also dont think the upper class would be less wealthy then in normal games. This here was ineffecient. Ive overbuild quit some food factories and other things. In General many factories are not at max capacity of workers. Demand is to low right now. But that would change with time.