Chapter 6: Look out, world, here we come!
So, those elephant lovers beat us. They wouldn't have done it without their British friends, and you can take that to the bank! There's only one thing to do -- show the world we are not to be trifled with!
January 1, 1861: Our naval base in Miyazaki is finished. Now we have colonial range, a place to fix our ships, and a place to build ships more quickly. Good stuff!
April 25, 1862: Let's reform our economy!
Wait a minute... that puts us at 70% for our progress. If only there were a reform that gave us 30% in one go...
Well, look at that!
It'll take a bit before we can pull it off, but the end is in sight.
September 11, 1862: Our new found wealth lets me cut taxes on the poor to 75%. There are distinct elements of green and blue in the pies now; yes, Japan is coming up in the world. We also build another 7 brigade army. In case you're wondering, I usually prefer small armies to large ones, so I have more flexibility. We can always merge them if we need to later.
April 13, 1863: The Americans really like us now!
Do I have the patience to wait until we get into their sphere? Wait and see!
September 19, 1864: Those sneaky Johoreans (?) overthrow their rulers and break all ties with all other countries, making them the perfect target!
... For somebody who doesn't already have 15.77 infamy.
October 23, 1864: We cut taxes a bit more, to 65%.
May 13, 1865: That was embarrassing. A revolt in Kyoto actually takes out one of my armies!
June 13, 1865: And the revolt is over now. Eat that, rebels!
July 19, 1866: I cut education a bit more, to 50%.
January 15, 1867: In preparation for our imminent westernization, I change ruling parties.
The old party had Planned Economy; State Capitalism is much better.
September 12, 1868:
[video=youtube_share;t4Oh7U_L6hs]http://youtu.be/t4Oh7U_L6hs[/video]
As of this moment, Japan is a civilized nation! Fear us, everybody else!
Here's our new politics screen:
It's time to introduce the concept of reforms and how the upper house works.
Reforms
There are two reform tracks for Civilized Nations; Political and Social Reforms. Each step down in Political Reforms provides more political freedom, which increases your attractiveness to immigrants. For Social Reforms, you make the lives of your citizens better (at a price). All positive reforms (i.e., down on the chart) also reduce MIL. We won't go into Reforms in any detail until we can actually do them, but I do want to explain the upper house.
There are seven ideologies in AHD: Fascist, Reactionary, Conservative, Socialist, Communist, Liberal and Anarcho-Liberal. Each one treats reforms differently, which is all that matters for the upper house.
Fascist: If they are the ruling party, they will back any reform or retract any reform. If they aren't in power, they won't allow anything.
Reactionary: Will always roll back reforms, but never implement them.
Conservatives: Will never roll back reforms. Normally oppose reforms, however, for every +1 in MIL, 10% of them will support reforms. (This applies to movements, too, although we don't have any yet. More on those later.)
Socialists: Will never roll back reforms. Always support Social Reform. Support political reforms only under MIL (see conservatives). Note: The old 50/50 split from vanilla is gone (half of all Socialists support political reform and half of all liberals support social reform); you won't miss it with movements.
Communists: Always support rolling back political reforms and adding social reforms.
Liberals: Always support political reforms. Support social reforms by MIL.
Anarcho-Liberals: Never add reforms. Support rolling back social reforms, but not political reforms.
More than 50% of the upper house must approve a reform.
So, why aren't we screaming for reform right now? Our MIL is 8.83! That should mean 80% of conservatives would support reform. Let's do the math, shall we?
All liberals support political reform. = 8.6%
80% of Conservatives support political reform. = 56.88%
That's over 50%! Ah, but there's one more wrinkle -- only one reform every 30 days. We'll almost certainly be able to reform in October.
Enough politics for now. Let's start living like a king, like all civilized Europeans! We'll start with techs. The next few screens are purely informational.
Once we westernized, we got a percentage of the techs of the lowest GP. If I'd been more patient, I could have gotten a percentage of the USA's techs. This is based on your relative ratio of military to economic reforms; you'll notice that, since I had more powerful economic reforms, I did better with commerce and industry than army and navy.
How do we get new technologies? I'm glad you asked!
Research
Much like our reforms earlier, Clergy generate a number of RPs a day for new technologies. Now, if you're a Vicky 2 vet, you'll be rubbing your hands with glee, stockpiling your RPs until the last possible moment. Right? Wrong. There's a cap of one year's RPs; after that, they vanish. Sorry. However, AHD does include some pretty cool new research features. Here's the first tech we'll research.
In vanilla, only one thing affected the base price of techs: your academic school. (We'll get into that later.) In AHD, the farther you are from the activation date, the less you spend to research a tech! That's a big advantage for countries like us. We should be able to catch up pretty quickly. Why did I choose this tech? Easy -- it's a flat improvement to every single RGO in Japan. We have to worry about debt now, so a strong economy is key.
With our wonderful new technologies, I get more NFs; I put these into encouraging Craftsmen, who will soon start filling my factories.
Factories, you say? Why yes!
Industrialization
Once you can industrialize, a few things happen. First, three new POPs introduce themselves into your economy, slowly but surely.
Craftsmen: Factory workers. Like Farmers or Laborers, but they work in factories. Poor.
Clerks: Perhaps the most sought after POP in Vicky 2. They improve efficiency AND generate RPs. They do crowd out Craftsmen, so they're not universally good, but they can make factories into a powerhouse. Middle.
Capitalists: Provide factory budgets. Also, they can build stuff on their own (depending on your economic policy). Very handy in Laissez-Faire and Interventionist governments.
More importantly, you can build factories! Every state (
not province) can have up to eight factories. This matters if you and another country (or two) are splitting a state; you'll have to share those eight slots, which can be might inconvenient. Our first factory was technically already started -- the Cement factory in Edo -- but here's the first one we'll build from scratch.
Every factory has a base daily input and base daily inputs. For this factory, a Liquor Distillery, the output is Liquor (duh) with inputs of Glass and Grain. In Vicky 2, factories essentially live to turn inputs into outputs.
To build a factory, you need to meet a few requirements. First, for some factories, a resource must be present in the state. See how Steel Factory and Lumber Mill are grayed out? That's because Nagoya doesn't have Iron or Timber. That isn't true for most factories, though. The next thing you need is cash. You can see that in the bottom right, under "base price." Third, you need resources to physically make the factory. Most factories require Iron, Cement, and Machine Parts. More advanced ones require things like Electric Gear and Steel. Since we don't have any goods in our stockpile (if you're clever, you can save a lot of money by buying up these goods at a cheaper price), we'll pay cash for that too. Finally, you need workers. We will have Craftsmen by the time the factory is done (which will take 730 days, or two years), so that's no concern. It'll cost us £8322.77 pounds to build this, in all -- as you can see, we've got plenty of cash. All we do now is click "Build" and wait for the money to roll in!
We'll talk more about how factories actually work a bit later; the last thing I want to mention is a commonly asked question: what kinds of factories should I build?
A lot depends on what goods you have access to. Japan has most of the best goods for industrializing, but you won't always be that lucky. I almost always build three factories early on:
1. Cement. Since every factory in the game needs cement, you'll always have a market for it. It won't always be super profitable, but they're cheap.
2. Glass factory. I build one right after the Liquor Distillery, but you ideally want one first. Now, glass by itself isn't a big deal, but it does lead to...
3. Liquor Distillery/Winery. Depends on your access to Grain or Fruit. Every POP in the world needs liquor as an everyday need and wine as a luxury good. You can't build Cavalry without Wine or Guards (a very powerful unit) without Liquor. Get a few wars and you'll see your treasury skyrocket.
This is a solid base for industry. If you have the inputs, Luxury goods are very profitable (Luxury Clothes and Luxury Furniture), but the market is really volatile. You want a solid foundation, and the factories I listed above will give you that.
(For those concerned about such things, the capitalist AI is a lot smarter; no more flooding the market with
bullsh*t Fertilizer.)
Here's our army and navy -- the biggest change (that's immediately obvious) is Tactics, which is now at 100%. That means we'll take less casualties in combat.
Here's our new budget.
Why do we have a shortfall in cash? We do have to pay for those goods for our shiny new factories; we should recover quickly.
That'll close this update. Now, for the first time, I haven't played ahead. That'll give all of you a chance to make suggestions on what I do next, militarily. Here's a map of SE Asia.
Almost everybody is in somebody's sphere right now, which makes going after them difficult. If they aren't in a sphere, they're allied to China, which is almost as bad.
For something a little more daring, Arabia.
I'm going to outtech and outnumber virtually everybody here. The downside is how long it'll take me to get there.
There's also the prospect of sweet revenge on the Zulu. Stupid Zulu.
Here's the world in 1868!
