I'm definitely no expert on the economic side, but what effect would setting a minimum to the army maintenance slider (suggested earlier in this thread) have on the military supply elasticity problem?
So if every country in the world has a forced minimum of e.g. 25-75% army supply (depending on government war policy or whatever), would that not mean that the worldwide baseline demand for these goods would be much higher, and the industrial world's production of these goods would increase proportionally? So when there was a big war between powers, that would still represent a significantly smaller percentage increase in demand, and the system could handle it better? I just loaded up a couple of saves and it seems that the AI sets its peacetime army supply to 30% anyway - so letting the player run it at 5% in peace is also a little bit cheaty anyway.
The idea appeals to me for unrelated gameplay reasons, because it does feel a bit gamey to me to be running an army on 5% supply most of the time, and it also would mean less slider micromanagement when fighting rebels. The greater peacetime cost would also make decisions about whether to increase standing army to the max more difficult (even if you were only ever likely to fight quick, cheap wars), and perhaps make artillery more of a luxury. And it might make the choice between government war policies a bit bigger factor in government choice.
And what about perhaps adding some demand for canned food as an everyday/luxury item for craftsmen? I have the feeling that workers in the cities probably were the biggest consumers of canned goods in reality anyway? Presumably the iron requirement per unit of canned food would have to be dramatically reduced as well...
As a simpler, cruder approximation, what about when a country fully mobilises, it increases throughput of military goods factories (e.g. double) but decreases throughput of consumer goods factories (by e.g. 33%)? I guess it would have to be agnostic on middle-man goods like machine parts and fertiliser...
I suggest the reduction in consumer good throughput both to prevent players using mobilisation for cheesy production increases, but also because this would presumably also have the effect of automatically reducing civilian-factory demand for raw materials in the mobilised country? So that therefore coal at least might be less of a bottleneck...
And what's the point of having a slider in the first place then if the minimum is always 25%? As I have been telling, the slider doesn't have anything to do with the five fold increase in demand. That's being caused majorly by the auto-doubling of consumption and afterwards, mobilization which easily triples what's being fielded. Slider isn't the culprit here and what's not broken, isn't meant to be fixed.
Throughput or output also isn't the issue, but input is. The game is willing to try and shift the production but it hits a resource hard cap pretty much right away. Since you cannot shift RGO production in the same way, it means not much ultimately. A real solution could have been tremendous amount of unemployed migration to high price material provinces. I have millions of unemployed communists sitting on agriculture provinces while iron & sulfur provinces sit half-empty.
The impact upon efficiency is, it is an abstraction. WE is also supposed to represent declining efficiency as your factors of production are damaged i.e. as the PPF retreats and becomes slightly smaller.
Please take the time to actually read my posts. The problem lies with a lack of elasticity in production, not in consumption. Consumption has to increase in Great Wars in order to accurately represent the role industrial capacity played in the First World War. Industrial mobilisation is the only way this can be modelled, and what you are proposing is a simpler, less challenging, historical and interesting game.
I would wager it also has massive distorting effects on the rest of the world economy, for those reasons.
Possibly, although you're right in that it is simple, probably too simple. The bottlenecks don't really result from there not being enough coal etc. on the world market (this of course happened IRL as well, which is why claims of "There's a bottleneck, I should be able to produce as manyh units as I want!" are misguided), but that the relationship between supply and demand for military goods has been very badly implemented. It's very hard to increase supply to meet the level demanded in a Great War, or in other words the approximation of the level actually achieved in real life.
Factors of production damaged? I'm not really seeing why Congo iron production should be damaged where there isn't a soldier or gun around for thousands of miles. It's not the era of strategic bombing after all. This abstraction you call it wasn't around before and the game was much better without it in any case. I'm not convinced that the game needed it when production is already nerfed beyond recognition.
I have been, maybe you should as well? The game, for this or that matter, cannot handle raw material production near anywhere enough. It causes a very big problem. And you're not really bringing forth any realistic course of action to solve it, while only opposing any attempt at searching a simple solution. Industrial production isn't the bottleneck here and you refuse to acknowledge it. What's your own experience with the matter anyway? Could you fight a great in which the big four could train new troops or build new ships? Is the game okay with failing to to portray a great war where you can train tank brigades? Is that the priority here, or the economic strain it brings?
And I'm saying "I COULD NOT TRAIN
ONE UNIT OR BUILD ONE SHIP", not "AS MANY AS I WANT". Are you even reading what I wrote before you demand the same from me?
