Protip - Don't use Command Economy

[LarsStok]

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.

It's true that you can probably use command econ if you don't have workers protection, because then there's no minimum wage. But even then I'd say command econ is inferior to plain old interventionism for me personally, because I DO want a minimum wage, and the current game version doesn't allow me to do so while running a command econ at the same time. Also one of the journal entries demands you to use it at level five along with a bunch of other important social programs (universal health care and schooling + pensions) so the devs are leading you into an economic disaster which I find amusing and annoying at the same time. btw subsistence farms have VERY poor outputs so you really don't want to have those. I've checked their output and the only benefit they have to others is that they don't have input needs. Still terrible.

 

[Notme1]

I completed Anarchist patch with Wage Subsidies (no minimum wage) and Regulatory Bodies (no reduction to workforce ratio).
I guess its Communist/Vanguard path that needs minimum wage.

Also I know that subsistence farms are inefficient, and should be removed, its just that worker coops make them peasant only.

 

[LarsStok]

I completed Anarchist patch with Wage Subsidies (no minimum wage) and Regulatory Bodies (no reduction to workforce ratio).
I guess its Communist/Vanguard path that needs minimum wage.

Also I know that subsistence farms are inefficient, and should be removed, its just that worker coops make them peasant only.

I think only the communist path has the mission "our revolution", which demands both command econ and minimum wage. The anarchy law seems to be pretty meh atm with both legitimacy issues and no authority. It's fine for roleplay but politics wise council rep + autocracy, oligarchy or universal suffrage seem to work better (unless you get a borked party with vanguardists, anarchist and communists all in one party, which has happened to me at least once). The vanguard path requires you to purge non-far left interest groups.

 

[Vernichtere]

Is also simply because the game system is designed for the market economy. The state-owned companies continue to buy their raw materials on the market. The same applies to labor and finished goods.

The factories controlled by the workers do better because the subsidies are not mandatory and the high purchasing power, to use Keynes' terms, stimulates demand.

You would have to rebuild the economic system quite a bit in order to simulate the planned economy and its problems here.

 

[BPZ1941]

Is also simply because the game system is designed for the market economy. The state-owned companies continue to buy their raw materials on the market. The same applies to labor and finished goods.

The distinction seems kind of pointless aside from centrally setting wages - the Soviet Union could set 'prices' to whatever they wanted, but a finite amount of it was still in the system. Thus creating perpetual shortages when production wasn't adequately expanded, even if in theory everyone should've afforded it.

You would have to rebuild the economic system quite a bit in order to simulate the planned economy and its problems here.

Why?

Mandatory subsidies forces factories to produce at maximum capacity and employ at maximum capacity regardless of whether it could be more profitable to just produce less or employ those people elsewhere. Thus, chronic goods shortages and excesses compared to a market economy.

For the wage situation, being able to set the wages is the obvious solution - you can allocate as much money as you'd like for people to buy cars, but there are still only as many as are produced.

And most/all factory profits should also go straight back into the government budget to use for any other economic activity. I fail to see how this would not be good enough, the player would be in control of both demand and supply while having to deal with some inefficiencies due to the rigidity of the system.

The big problem with economic planning and any game, is that the Soviet Gosplan nor any other real person in the world would ever have perfectly accurate data to plan production and consumption for any given moment. But in Victoria 3 (and 2) the player is nearly omniscient and can fix it all - no erroneous reports, no needing to check if quotas are fulfilled, no black market possibly obscuring activity.

And frankly, it's doubtful if the game would even improve as a result of obscuring that information.

 

[FranklyJustNess]

A major problem of Command Economy is a basically useless ownership method. You just replace capitalists, that actually contribute nicely to the economy through investment pool, into bureaucrats that are just like shopkeepers of early production methods. On top of that, they support intelligentsia, which is hardly useful in later game, as you either already passed all liberal laws or didn't want them, and the bonuses themselves are pretty insignificant.

When combined with Council Republic it can be decent, just cuz you get the authority bonus of Command Economy, but still can use Co-op ownership methods, while all other economic laws don't help (there's no upper class to pay into Investment Pool in Council Republic).

The way Planned Economy works really needs to be changed. Whenever I see any post about it, it's just how to enact it and not die, never why you would ever want to do it.

 

[Vernichtere]

The distinction seems kind of pointless aside from centrally setting wages - the Soviet Union could set 'prices' to whatever they wanted, but a finite amount of it was still in the system. Thus creating perpetual shortages when production wasn't adequately expanded, even if in theory everyone should've afforded it.

Why?

Mandatory subsidies forces factories to produce at maximum capacity and employ at maximum capacity regardless of whether it could be more profitable to just produce less or employ those people elsewhere. Thus, chronic goods shortages and excesses compared to a market economy.

For the wage situation, being able to set the wages is the obvious solution - you can allocate as much money as you'd like for people to buy cars, but there are still only as many as are produced.

And most/all factory profits should also go straight back into the government budget to use for any other economic activity. I fail to see how this would not be good enough, the player would be in control of both demand and supply while having to deal with some inefficiencies due to the rigidity of the system.

The big problem with economic planning and any game, is that the Soviet Gosplan nor any other real person in the world would ever have perfectly accurate data to plan production and consumption for any given moment. But in Victoria 3 (and 2) the player is nearly omniscient and can fix it all - no erroneous reports, no needing to check if quotas are fulfilled, no black market possibly obscuring activity.

And frankly, it's doubtful if the game would even improve as a result of obscuring that information.

Within the Soviet planned economy, most companies did not trade with each other. The prices only applied to foreign countries and consumers.

Please do not now mention the partially still existing private sector.

Yes, the system had its problems and it hasn't stayed the same for over seventy years. It's more that it aimed to get away from the commodity character. However, this cannot be simulated within the game, since the individual companies still have to trade their goods on the market.


P.S: please don't bring in politics now. It's all about the logic the system was trying to use.

Edith:
In order to more or less simulate the Soviet planned economy, there must be the following things:

- Profitability as such gone.
- Access of the companies to the required raw materials for free. The state decides which companies get what and how much.
- Consumer access to goods either directly or through wages. Again, the state decides how much and at what price.
- Possibility to limit mobility.
- Possibility of forced labor.
- No unemployment, since indirect work pressure was mandatory.

What cannot be simulated, what otherwise does not work:
- differences in the quality of the goods
- Transport losses
-Planning error
- Information leaks/fraud/competing interests.


Practically for something like this, the in-game planning economy would be the best system. The player would have full access to everything without any disadvantages.

 

[BPZ1941]

Within the Soviet planned economy, most companies did not trade with each other. The prices only applied to foreign countries and consumers.

However, this cannot be simulated within the game, since the individual companies still have to trade their goods on the market.

But goods still exist, have a demand and a supply. That also means they have a relative price, regardless of whether it's officially acknowledged as such or not. Granted, consumers and companies are not the ones paying but the underlying dynamic is the same.

If there isn't enough steel to make 100 guns and 100 tractors, you'll need to reduce either or both. Naturally, you'd reduce the inputs for what you (/the planning committee) think is most important, which still means there's a relative value of both inputs and outputs. Which means that however you want to define that relative value, that is still representable as a price.

Yes, the system had its problems and it hasn't stayed the same for over seventy years. It's more that it aimed to get away from the commodity character
P.S: please don't bring in politics now. It's all about the logic the system was trying to use

The system of centralized economic planning was in place in the USSR between 1928 and 1936 in game terms, and is quite explicitly what Command Economy refers to. The Soviet emblem is literally the icon of the ideology advocating for it to be enacted! Furthermore, the Soviet economy is the only example of it I know from before 1936.

Whatever ideological rationalizations were made for that system, I don't care. I'm specifically and only interested in a game implementation that is reasonably accurate and interesting from a gameplay perspective.

 

[Achab]

I ran CE as PRC (CR) from 1895 till the enddate without any serious issues. Just on the start I get loads of radicals from downsizing all the bloated newly ineffective buildings because of subsidies, but that quickly fixed itself. Also that could be prevented by not overbloating them at the 1st time. Had WP with WSO lvl 3 enacted for the whole time as a minimum. With the Workers Cooperative PM and Graduated Taxation it seems to be an easy ride.

 

[TheHostName]

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

Except that you will end up with the money and not your pops. You would need to lower your taxes. But even after doing that my worker coop pops would be richer then your goverment run ones. This means i can employ more people then you can which in return means i wont get into the spiraling wellfare deathtrap as easily as you will.

Though i guess its nice to hear that the state budget can withstand command eco this way.

End of day: Graduated worker coops is simply the best like you said.

 

[LarsStok]

I ran CE as PRC (CR) from 1895 till the enddate without any serious issues. Just on the start I get loads of radicals from downsizing all the bloated newly ineffective buildings because of subsidies, but that quickly fixed itself. Also that could be prevented by not overbloating them at the 1st time. Had WP with WSO lvl 3 enacted for the whole time as a minimum. With the Workers Cooperative PM and Graduated Taxation it seems to be an easy ride.

I did attempt to downsize inefficient buildings but it didn't seem to help. I was on Command Econ for quite some time with only cooperatives for quite some time before the crisis hit but when it did there was no averting it. Declaring bankruptcy "solved" the problem by decreasing pop wealth and forcibly lowering wages but obviously this caused enormous amounts of turmoil. It seems to me like it's just not worth the hassle when I could easily run an interventionist cooperative economy without risking economic catastrophe.

 

[BPZ1941]

Except that you will end up with the money and not your pops

That was kind of what I was going for

 

[FranklyJustNess]

I now had a game where I passed command economy without worker coops or minimum wage and tried to see how it's gonna work. Ended up on an about 1.4 bln GDP and had a constant 2 mln spent on subsidies. Some of the paid money was pretty fair, but no matter how much I tried, I just couldn't get my buildings into "green" and stop paying them. For example a large expense of my people were groceries and I was a massive exporter of them, but none of the food industries were actually turning profit without subsidies. Every factory I built was adding into a constant flow of money into making sure those buildings were kept afloat.

I had a bug where some buildings were not subsidized (until I triggered it, then it would lock into having to) and built 20 levels of food industries in a state, that really wasn't much different to the state next door, and before I knew it, it was fully employed and making a nice profit. I click that I want to enable subsidies on it and apparently it now needs 10k or it's not gonna be able to pay the workers. So I am really not sure if there isn't some error in calculations there.

 

[GrounchoVilla]

I think it would be reasonable to replace the bonus to tax capacity with some kind of flat dividend tax bonus on state-owned factories. This would also make more incentive to have state-owned over worker coop, as workers coops are unambiguously better than government run. This would allow the player to chose which factories are state run or worker's coop with a more clear trade-off between higher SoL for the workers and more revenue for the state, which is sort of akin to the real choices which command economies faced irl.

Also, the % authority bonus is a bit odd since it clearly incentivizes one to have a command economy that is an ethnostate or has some other regressive law which is clearly at odds with the actual politics of economic revolutionaries. Imagine Lenin keeping the Orthodox Church's monopoly on religion so the USSR could pass more decrees ...

 

[FranklyJustNess]

Also, the % authority bonus is a bit odd since it clearly incentivizes one to have a command economy that is an ethnostate or has some other regressive law which is clearly at odds with the actual politics of economic revolutionaries. Imagine Lenin keeping the Orthodox Church's monopoly on religion so the USSR could pass more decrees ...

Well to be fair it had a state "religion" and not a total separation in the understanding of each citizen is free to believe in whatever they wish, it's just it was state atheism and not Orthodox Christianity.

Personally I think it's a cool bonus, that gives nice flavor to vanguardist socialism and sets it apart from communism and anarchism. Tax capacity bonus however, yeah it sucks and should be replaced with something more useful.

 

[LarsStok]

I think it would be reasonable to replace the bonus to tax capacity with some kind of flat dividend tax bonus on state-owned factories. This would also make more incentive to have state-owned over worker coop, as workers coops are unambiguously better than government run. This would allow the player to chose which factories are state run or worker's coop with a more clear trade-off between higher SoL for the workers and more revenue for the state, which is sort of akin to the real choices which command economies faced irl.

Also, the % authority bonus is a bit odd since it clearly incentivizes one to have a command economy that is an ethnostate or has some other regressive law which is clearly at odds with the actual politics of economic revolutionaries. Imagine Lenin keeping the Orthodox Church's monopoly on religion so the USSR could pass more decrees ...

I think the authority bonus is supposed to mainly benefit vanguardist regimes that enact autocracy and outlawed dissent, which make up 400 authority iirc. That nets an extra 100 authority from those laws. Outlawed dissent also synergizes with the goal of marginalizing all non far left groups, which is the prime target of the "state and rev" journal entry vanguardists get, since you need to suppress "bourgeois" interest groups. I do agree with the increased dividend angle on state-owned factories, that might make it more viable, but I still think it'll struggle when paired with minimum wages due to worker wages reducing profits.

 

[imperial.]

I mean command economy is one of the struggles that comes with communism, having to micromanage. That being said it's worth doing a playthrough or two of every political system the game has to offer, just role playing different scenarios & nations.

 

[GrounchoVilla]

Well to be fair it had a state "religion" and not a total separation in the understanding of each citizen is free to believe in whatever they wish, it's just it was state atheism and not Orthodox Christianity.

Personally I think it's a cool bonus, that gives nice flavor to vanguardist socialism and sets it apart from communism and anarchism. Tax capacity bonus however, yeah it sucks and should be replaced with something more useful.

there should be a lacite and a state atheism law which go beyond the "total seperation"

 

[Richard Dolder]

there should be a lacite and a state atheism law which go beyond the "total seperation"

So the same as state church except empowering the intellegisia?

 

[GrounchoVilla]

So the same as state church except empowering the intellegisia?

empowering the intelligentsia would probably come with it. Religion doesnt have much of a role to play yet though so perhaps it would be better once DLC or a major patch has fleshed out religion a bit more