Protip - Don't use Command Economy

[LarsStok]

Just don't, the authority and tax capacity boost are not worth it. If you want a stable economy with workers' protections and old age pensions, use PropTax and Interventionism and subsidize the "worst offenders" (railways and power plants). If you want a socialist utopia, use workers coops. Going for a command economy with a minimum wage due to worker protections means you'll eventually go in the red due to every business having the same wage and the state needing to make up for the deficit. Even with a 35% tax rate I was unable to finance the subsidies which were at 20 million at the end. This was in spite of me reducing the minimum wage to 60% of the normal wage, so there's probably a bug there - the wage was 25 per week regardless of where I checked. It seems like the game is unable to calculate taxes beyond a certain point because there was a discrepancy between the 23 mill I was supposed to get from income taxes and the 20 million I was actually raking in. I suppose if you go autocracy or ethnostate you could have enough consumption taxes to make up for the deficit but... even then it's a hard sell. It's probably also possible to use command econ if you only use the labor law that gives less hazardous worker conditions, because then the subsidies will be less devastating owing to the wages being lower in the unprofitable businesses.

Graduated taxation combined with cooperatives is also pretty bad, seeing as even without mandated subsidies worker coops have very little in the way of dividend meaning the majority of taxes will come from income tax which is capped at 20%. This means the state can't afford anything but the bare minimum in expenses unless you're using more regressive laws to get authority for consumption tax.

EDIT: you can probably manage a command econ if you have no minimum wage. this locks you out of the last journal entry for the councilist path though, and once you've passed workers protections (the law that gives minwage) you're not getting rid of it as the IGs that will have support at that point won't support a repeal. I still say the cons outweigh the pros - I understand the point of mandatory subsidies is to brute-force get rid of normal market mechanisms making the player even more responsible for good econ planning but for now it's busted.

 

[MfgLuckbot]

I think you have to specifically prepare your economy for command economy. You can not overbuild buildings, oversupplying anything is your demise. If necessary you have to tear buildings down when they get bigger than your economy requires, but before that you should agressively trade stuff away that you have too much of.

I think that's kinda realistic. Command economy always has the issue that the government has to carefully plan what is produced when they bypass the regular control mechanisms of a free market.

 

[LarsStok]

I did all of this (taking down buildings that had "oversupply" (the output good was in fact in deficit and were still not making a profit, this seems to be a problem especially with power plants that have no way of reducing labor needs) + building more profitable buildings like textile mills which were some of the only that paid dividend) and I still entered a death spiral. At some point it comes down to there being no way to reduce the artificially high wages. Also the income tax may be borked... I had complete taxation capacity everywhere and still the tax was not at 35% as it should be. My point is, the wage subsidies is the problem. I exported large amounts of excess goods and there was still a huge issue. Maybe with free trade I could have made things better... protectionism seems to hit a bottleneck in terms of export ability.

 

[LarsStok]

Labor cost should indeed be a major factor in the late game and some laws should have a payoff with labor being made even more expensive but I do not believe that a COMMAND ECONOMY could not find a way to reduce wages to a more acceptable level. This is a problem with game design, where I think the minimum wage is pegged at the most profitable building in your entire society/empire/whathaveyou. Even when you factor in labor disputes (which there are few and far between in the game, another issue) it should be the prerogative of the state to lower wages when it is about to enter sovereign deficit.

 

[LarsStok]

If the reason why you can't lower wages in the game is militant trade unions, then make that be an event which gives you crippling throughput penalties when you attempt to lower wages. Don't just give the player no way of handling the issue. The fact that reducing the "workers protections" level had no effect on the demanded subsidies makes me think there's a bug there, not to mention there should be an event that fires when you try to lower it, much like the event that already exists regarding policing (where you either have to eat more radicals or lower the institution level by one level)

 

[Voigt]

When I went command economy as France for achivement I checked what was the worst offender for subvention cost. Most cost were shared between 2 things. One thing was a sector I recently build up and overbuild for the future, so I could fix that.
The other maim problem was city centers. Normally they are just 20% filled and already pretty much at the minimum service price, but with command eco they were at 100% staffed and I had to pay so much money just for that.
Maybe I could change to the most primitive PM, but even it probably cost lots of money.

 

[Sbrubbles]

Just don't, the authority and tax capacity boost are not worth it. If you want a stable economy with workers' protections and old age pensions, use PropTax and Interventionism and subsidize the "worst offenders" (railways and power plants). If you want a socialist utopia, use workers coops. Going for a command economy with a minimum wage due to worker protections means you'll eventually go in the red due to every business having the same wage and the state needing to make up for the deficit. Even with a 35% tax rate I was unable to finance the subsidies which were at 20 million at the end. This was in spite of me reducing the minimum wage to 60% of the normal wage, so there's probably a bug there - the wage was 25 per week regardless of where I checked. It seems like the game is unable to calculate taxes beyond a certain point because there was a discrepancy between the 23 mill I was supposed to get from income taxes and the 20 million I was actually raking in. I suppose if you go autocracy or ethnostate you could have enough consumption taxes to make up for the deficit but... even then it's a hard sell. It's probably also possible to use command econ if you only use the labor law that gives less hazardous worker conditions, because then the subsidies will be less devastating owing to the wages being lower in the unprofitable businesses.

Graduated taxation combined with cooperatives is also pretty bad, seeing as even without mandated subsidies worker coops have very little in the way of dividend meaning the majority of taxes will come from income tax which is capped at 20%. This means the state can't afford anything but the bare minimum in expenses unless you're using more regressive laws to get authority for consumption tax.

So, what average SoL and GDP/capita were you able to achieve with those tips?

 

[LarsStok]

The GDP per capita and SOL was immense but it wasn't sustainable. In the end I had to default and after that the econ recovered, although my sol dropped from 30 to 25 and obviously I was swamped with radicals and endless secession movements. All of which fail, but that's beside the point. I got to 1912 before I gave up. After the crash I had a GDP per capita of 20 with 271 million inhabitants (the GDP was 5.4 billion) while the SoL had recovered slightly to 25.8. Regardless the massive turmoil and general lag because of lategame pop fragmentation makes it not that appealing to keep playing.

 

[LarsStok]

When I went command economy as France for achivement I checked what was the worst offender for subvention cost. Most cost were shared between 2 things. One thing was a sector I recently build up and overbuild for the future, so I could fix that.
The other maim problem was city centers. Normally they are just 20% filled and already pretty much at the minimum service price, but with command eco they were at 100% staffed and I had to pay so much money just for that.
Maybe I could change to the most primitive PM, but even it probably cost lots of money.

The city centres were also a huge burden on my econ with massive subsidies (3.5 million pounds) being required even with max labor saving tech (public motor carriages).

 

[MinhowMinhow]

The main problem with government owned, is because the building dividends goes to bureaucrats, not for the national treasure.

So, you have to tax the bureaucrats and they don't have an investment pool, making it one of the less unprofitable ownerships.

Mandated subsidies is awful too, but the problem of subsidies for this ownership, is because how bureaucrats get the profits.

Infrastructure is awful for subsidize too, even when the market region is at 0%, it needs a massive subside to bring back to 100%. I don't know if is a bug or intended, but is the most awful thing about infrastructure and subsides.

On current patch, the best economic law is laissez faire, with private ownership for factories and public for farms. Command economy is terrible.

 

[TheHostName]

When I went command economy as France for achivement I checked what was the worst offender for subvention cost. Most cost were shared between 2 things. One thing was a sector I recently build up and overbuild for the future, so I could fix that.
The other maim problem was city centers. Normally they are just 20% filled and already pretty much at the minimum service price, but with command eco they were at 100% staffed and I had to pay so much money just for that.
Maybe I could change to the most primitive PM, but even it probably cost lots of money.

Yep this would probably be OPs issue.

Command eco can only ever work if the balance of the eco of the game is there. But thats simply not the case.
Urban centers are currently the worst offender when it comes to overproduction of goods compared to demand. You cant also get rid of them since they are automaticly build, unless you want to delete your eco....

Command eco cannot work when employed like the game wants it to. Maybe if you could actually tax 100% of the dividends, but it would still fall far below what worker coops achieve.

 

[LarsStok]

The main problem with government owned, is because the building dividends goes to bureaucrats, not for the national treasure.

So, you have to tax the bureaucrats and they don't have an investment pool, making it one of the less unprofitable ownerships.

Mandated subsidies is awful too, but the problem of subsidies for this ownership, is because how bureaucrats get the profits.

Infrastructure is awful for subsidize too, even when the market region is at 0%, it needs a massive subside to bring back to 100%. I don't know if is a bug or intended, but is the most awful thing about infrastructure and subsides.

On current patch, the best economic law is laissez faire, with private ownership for factories and public for farms. Command economy is terrible.

In my case I was running a command econ parallell with coops as to avoid the bureaucrat class sapping my coffers seeing as they demand higher wages without any real benefit. There were only bureaucrats in the government admins and other buildings that have them regardless of ownership. I had PropTax so there was no point in increasing dividends either, as they'd be taxed at 20% and the extra dividend would mostly come from my treasury. My income tax was good but not enough to outpace the losses accrued from subsidizing every business.

I agree about the railways costing a lot, the only exception might be if you've got a massive transportation deficit and plentyful electricity and coal but if that's the case then all of the businesses, farms and mines that use transportation start bleeding money, not to mention the power plants and coal mines that'll be needing subsidies.

 

[Meneye]

The main problem with government owned, is because the building dividends goes to bureaucrats, not for the national treasure.

So, you have to tax the bureaucrats and they don't have an investment pool, making it one of the less unprofitable ownerships.

Mandated subsidies is awful too, but the problem of subsidies for this ownership, is because how bureaucrats get the profits.

Infrastructure is awful for subsidize too, even when the market region is at 0%, it needs a massive subside to bring back to 100%. I don't know if is a bug or intended, but is the most awful thing about infrastructure and subsides.

On current patch, the best economic law is laissez faire, with private ownership for factories and public for farms. Command economy is terrible.

Yes, but isn't it supposed to be like this? If you play laissez faire and privately/publicly owned, you have business that have no restrictions and no other purpose than to grow themselves and enrich their owners, so of course it's going to be easier with them to raise the GDP and reduce government spending. That's the whole point.

Worker coops aren't meant to be more efficient than laissez faire, they're meant to have the economy benefit the people more, which in game they very much do.

Government run brings the worst of both worlds, which also makes sense since that's pretty much what happened in real life. The problem there is that almost none of the profits go into the government like it probably should, but even if they fix that, I don't think that it should match up with either of the above laws.


I did find a video by OPB that helps people manage the command economy better, if anyone wants it.

 

[Meneye]

This was in spite of me reducing the minimum wage to 60% of the normal wage, so there's probably a bug there - the wage was 25 per week regardless of where I checked.

Yeah, there's a really big problem with minimum wages. Minimum wages with mandated subsidies create a nasty feedback loop. When minimum wages are raised, they hurt profits which is fine. But, if the employers have any trouble hiring, they raise wages, which are, in my experience, almost always paid for by subsidies.

When that happens, however, it raises the average wealth of a state and thus their normal wage rise as well. Since the minimum wage is tied to normal wages, it's increased as well. So the wages increase, which means that the industries have to further increase their wages to compete with other industries, which *BREATHES IN FOR AIR* causes the normal wage to increase, which causes the minimum wage to increase, and so on.

 

[LarsStok]

I also wanna do a little rebuttal to "the best law is laissez faire", in some cases this is correct but the issue with the investment pool is it necessitates construction. It's not available for other spending needs, and it can also sap dividend taxes creating a situation where you get half the amount from capitalists that you would get if you were on agrarianism, and 33% less than if on interventionism. AFAIK dividend tax is applied after investment pool money is sapped off, leading to a curious economic situation where if on laissez faire and with graduated taxation you can get a real budget crunch. Playing as Russia I was wondering why I was having money problems and then I checked my investment pool. It was at roughly 500 million. this was at a point where I felt like the economy was "fully developed" (ofc it wasn't but even so the problem is obvious, laissez faire demands constant investment into the econ in order for it to "work")


In addition to this, under a cooperatized economy interventionism is hands down better than laissez faire as it allows subsidizing every building and not just infra, meaning you can save power plants (unless they count as infra under the current patch which I don't think they do). Cheap electricity is a boon for the econ even if it means the state needs to bear the cost. You aren't getting anything into the investment pool anyway seeing as the capitalists no longer own the businesses. The only benefit to laissez faire over interventionism is the -25% interest rate which is negligible anyway unless you're a unrecognized power.

 

[LarsStok]

Yes, but isn't it supposed to be like this? If you play laissez faire and privately/publicly owned, you have business that have no restrictions and no other purpose than to grow themselves and enrich their owners, so of course it's going to be easier with them to raise the GDP and reduce government spending. That's the whole point.

Worker coops aren't meant to be more efficient than laissez faire, they're meant to have the economy benefit the people more, which in game they very much do.

Government run brings the worst of both worlds, which also makes sense since that's pretty much what happened in real life. The problem there is that almost none of the profits go into the government like it probably should, but even if they fix that, I don't think that it should match up with either of the above laws.


I did find a video by OPB that helps people manage the command economy better, if anyone wants it.

I find with worker coops PropTax is the better tax law because dividends scarcely exist, which makes sense given the fact that there's little to no differentiation between owners and workers.
Government run isn't terrible but in the current state of the game it is worse than worker coops because bureaucrats demand higher wages with no other benefit than them being "politically expedient". I'd still say that in a vacuum it's not much worse than private ownership (arguably better depending on your ideal political system, landowners and capitalists aren't exactly aching for egalitarianism), if not for the fact that it doesn't exist in a vacuum and you, the state, are forced to subsidize their higher wage demand.

 

[LarsStok]

Yeah, there's a really big problem with minimum wages. Minimum wages with mandated subsidies create a nasty feedback loop. When minimum wages are raised, they hurt profits which is fine. But, if the employers have any trouble hiring, they raise wages, which are, in my experience, almost always paid for by subsidies.

When that happens, however, it raises the average wealth of a state and thus their normal wage rise as well. Since the minimum wage is tied to normal wages, it's increased as well. So the wages increase, which means that the industries have to further increase their wages to compete with other industries, which *BREATHES IN FOR AIR* causes the normal wage to increase, which causes the minimum wage to increase, and so on.

I'm going to do a Qing run where I do coops with interventionism and I'm crossing my fingers that I'll be able to have a minimum wage without a infinite wage feedback loop. Praying to Smith, Marx, Keynes and whatever other dead economist that'll listen. I also suspect government wages in construction centers and government admins play some role, though it's probably not the main issue.

 

[BPZ1941]

Command eco cannot work when employed like the game wants it to. Maybe if you could actually tax 100% of the dividends, but it would still fall far below what worker coops achieve.

I modded my own Command Economy game to have fixed 95% dividends taxes. Totally works.

On current patch, the best economic law is laissez faire, with private ownership for factories and public for farms. Command economy is terrible.

Laissez-Faire doesn't pay for investment into mines, farms and plantations. That might seem fine at face value but it starts to become problematic if you're reliant on the investment pool and colonize a lot.

AFAIK dividend tax is applied after investment pool money is sapped off, leading to a curious economic situation where if on laissez faire and with graduated taxation you can get a real budget crunch.

You're right. Investment pool money is deducted before taxes, so it's mostly bad for Graduated Taxation to have those. I've found best results with Graduated while running co-ops, otherwise it tends to be much worse than Proportional.

I find with worker coops PropTax is the better tax law because dividends scarcely exist, which makes sense given the fact that there's little to no differentiation between owners and workers.

Dividends under worker co-ops are paid to every employee. If the dividends tax % is the same, the tax you get will be the same. Consider it a 'profit tax' not an 'exploitation tax'. That makes it great for SoL, because it doesn't cut as much into wages.

 

[LarsStok]

Dividends under worker co-ops are paid to every employee. If the dividends tax % is the same, the tax you get will be the same. Consider it a 'profit tax' not an 'exploitation tax'. That makes it great for SoL, because it doesn't cut as much into wages.

While this is true, I think results may vary. It's possible that gradtax can work if you don't have mandated subsidies, but I've found proptax to be a more secure source of income (probably because dividend taxes are entirely dependent on your businesses actually making a profit, and income taxes aren't) - I had a budget crunch with gradtax and coops even without Command Econ when playing as the brits (admittedly I was trying to integrate all of India which caused welfare payments to balloon). Cooperatization + welfare does away with most of the issues regarding inequity anyway, so the need to tax the "upper class" is less pressing if the goal is to create an egalitarian society.

 

[Notme1]

I find with worker coops PropTax is the better tax law because dividends scarcely exist, which makes sense given the fact that there's little to no differentiation between owners and workers.
Government run isn't terrible but in the current state of the game it is worse than worker coops because bureaucrats demand higher wages with no other benefit than them being "politically expedient". I'd still say that in a vacuum it's not much worse than private ownership (arguably better depending on your ideal political system, landowners and capitalists aren't exactly aching for egalitarianism), if not for the fact that it doesn't exist in a vacuum and you, the state, are forced to subsidize their higher wage demand.

For now I prefer government run over worker coops, because coops don't pay dividends to engineers and potentially other professions.
I heard it will be changed for 1.2 tho.

I just use worker coop on subsistence farms to remove clergy and aristocrats - those two in subsistence farms count as gainfully employed BTW.

If you use subsidies everywhere then you don't use minimum wage at all.
Also welfare isn't really needed too, if you have worker coops in subsistence farm + spare capacity in them.

You want high taxes + strategically picked consumption taxes too.