The case against Rubber

[Mithel]

First we must start with what an IC is. In HoI IC (Industrial Capacity) produces consumer goods, supplies (mostly food and ammo?), funds research and creates military units (divisions, naval vessels, aircraft). Each IC requires raw materials (2 Coal, 1 Steel, ½ Rubber). However agriculture (food) is completely ignored. Many of the economies (specifically smaller nations) were largely agrarian.

It’s reasonable to state that a large portion of some economies were funded by agriculture. Money raised by selling food could be used to purchase raw materials or to purchase the end products. Just because a country may not have any rubber (and can’t obtain it on the poorly functioning world market) doesn’t mean that it’s economy would completely collapse.

And certainly producing consumer goods and “supplies” would be largely a reflection of the agricultural industry of a nation.

Due to the simple and fixed amounts of Coal, Steel and Rubber per IC, to replicate an accurate economy in WWII requires fudging the actual amounts of these resources. So at best they can be considered as primarily representing their namesake. Coal really should be “all fuel sources - coal, hydroelectric, wood, petroleum, etc”; Steel really should be all metallic ores and rubber, well that’s the subject of this thread.

Steel (iron) is certainly a key ingredient for industry and there are no serious problems with it in HoI. However I do feel it’s more appropriate to consider “steel” as all metals.

In HoI oil can be substituted for rubber and coal substituted for oil via conversion. This can be considered as either synthetics or using less efficient alternatives. A simple and on the surface apparently good system. However this leaves coal as essential (which it more or less was). And that’s ok, except when a country runs out of rubber, converts all it’s oil to rubber, thus running out of oil and converts all or most of it’s coal to oil. The economy of that nation then “melts down”, leading to bizarre behavior of players like “upgrading” all provinces just to reduce the resource drain of their industry (this leads to absurdly fortified countries) or in the case of the AI a potentially non-functional nation.

Lack of essential raw resources can certainly hamper an economy if acceptable substitutes can’t be found. But in HoI this is taken to the extreme. And in my opinion this is largely due to not representing agriculture and reasonable international trade.

Hence we find the solution to avoiding “meltdown” is to prevent conversion of coal ultimately to rubber. (Coal to Oil is acceptable as an excellent and critical portion of the German synthetic fuel economy)

How best can we prevent coal from being converted in large quantities to rubber? Well, we could alter the conversion rates (and give extra coal to countries), but this would potentially screw up the synthetic oil system. Or we can give all countries (specifically minor nations) a reasonable amount of rubber to represent their agrarian economies.

How does Paradox deal with this issue? Primarily by giving minor countries absurdly large stockpiles of raw materials (which can be captured). A very poor, temporary and non-historic/realistic solution.

Should Germany get rubber? Probably not. Germany was a food importer and their economy could not be considered as agrarian. Nor should any of the major powers (which represent roughly 80% of the world’s industry), although the USA has always been a major food producer (but as I understand it the USA actually DID have a rubber shortage in WWII).

Won’t giving minor countries rubber totally mess up the economic system? No, on the contrary it should “fix” the HoI economic system. By giving each minor country just barely what they need for rubber to supply their starting ICs we give them stable economies. And if a major country should conquer them it will basically represent gaining their agricultural output and should not dramatically alter the economy of the major nation. Giving minor nations rubber, has the side benefit of no longer needing to give them grossly disproportionate amounts of coal (which a major nation with good conversion tech could make into oil or rubber). This allows us to more accurately model the petroleum situation of WWII.

- Mithel

 

[unmerged(9145)]

This is an interesting idea, in no small part because it's on my 'to do' list. ;-) I've never liked the rubber requirements in HOI and the problems caused by rubber shortages with AI economies are well-documented. The only reason I haven't gotten around to modifying province.csv is primarily because of the amount of work it would take to compare and contrast the provinces a country owns with food production and total economic power.

There's also the historical research, which I'm not at all interested in doing. But a simple game fix could be simply to multiply the starting IC of a country by 1/2, then add some 'padding' to keep the AI from upgrading itself into a shortage, followed by distributing the 'rubber' to various provinces.

One thing you don't want to do is set up a nation for a rubber shortage, as this would lead to the absurd idea of converting oil to food. The easiest solution I can see is to go through province.csv and add a rubber resource value equal to the IC value x 1.5; this would almost certainly resort in a surplus no matter how much the AI upgrades. Completely ahistoric, but it certainly fixes the AI and prevents 'oil to food' conversions. In effect, it removes the resource of rubber from game considerations entirely - which is a good thing, I think.

Max

 

[unmerged(13914)]

An alternative view

Mithel, I think I agree with your two major premises, and your main recommendation, but not your way of explaining it.

I agree with you that food needs to be represented in some way in the game, and without it, the game lacks realism.

I also agree that because of low successive coal-to-oil and oil-to-rubber conversion efficiencies, rubber shortages turn into coal shortages and economies grind to a halt.

I even agree that part of the solution is to give nations that did not actually produce rubber a supply of that HOI resource.

But here's the thing: I don't think the 1/2 point of rubber included with each IC should be viewed as food. In my economic rewrite/interpretive framework for HOI, I divide up the resources this way:

coal -- broad category that represents all primary sources of energy and process chemicals, including coal, bunker fuel oil, hydroelectricity, natural gas, wood, animal forage, animal mechanical power generation, sulphur compounds and nitrites (for sulphuric acid and fertilizers) and food.

steel -- broad category that represents all primary sources of structural materials, including iron & steel, aluminum, cement, wood & pulp, stone, sand, glass, fiberglass, plastic.

oil -- fairly narrow category of portable fuels and lubricants used by transport, including gasoline, diesel, kerosene, and coal for coal-burning ships.

rubber -- broadest category of the four, including all specialized materials needed for industrial production and finished goods: rubber, silk, nickel, copper, beryllium, tungsten, uranium, plutonium, silicon, diamond, bakelite, mercury, platinum, tin, cotton, nylon . . . and so on.

Now if you look at the resources this way, you'll see a consistent logic. The most common item in total tonnage in each category gives the category its name -- I believe food runs a close second to coal in annual tonnage. The other items in the coal and steel categories are all substitutes for the primary material: an economy that has a lot of hydro power or a lot of rural households that heat their homes with wood, will consume less coal and have more available for industrial use. If your economy produces a lot of fertilizer, this decreases the labor required to produce food and indirectly increases the supply of energy for other purposes.

The items in the specialized category can not be used as substitutes, but they are the most portable of the resources, with the highest value per unit weight and generally excellent exchange value. The precise proportion of different materials needed by each country is less important because if they have X, they can generally swap it for Y.

I find this framework easier to use in thinking about national economies than your approach. And it does lead to some differences in recommendations. Instead of giving each country enough "rubber" to meet its peacetime IC value, I would give minors perhaps 1/3 to 1/2 the rubber, and leave in the fairly weak coal-to-oil and oil-to-rubber conversion techs. I would give the majors 1/2 to 2/3rds the rubber they need. I would also rethink the tonnage of coal and steel minors get, in light of their domestic food, cement, wood, aluminum, and so on.

Reasoning: A minor country will generally be deficient in a lot of specialized materials and so be more dependent on foreign "rubber". A major country will have enough synthetic alternatives (nylon v. silk) and enough trading strength that it will stay closer to full capacity. By setting the value below full peacetime production, and letting either the weak exchange rate or trade take care of the rest, we simulate the decline in production that actually did occur in most neutral countries and the need for rationing that took hold in the major powers. The supply of strategic materials really did dry up in WW II -- anything with military value became difficult to obtain.

On the other hand, the minor countries did have things like food to export, and where they could find a wartime trading partner, they continued to get specialized materials back as needed (e.g. Canada shipped enormous amounts of timber to the UK to use as pit props for coal mines). So I would raise the available amount of coal rather than give too much free rubber.

Hope this is clear. There are lots of ways that my interpretive framework could be tweaked, and I'm not emotionally attached to having exactly these lists.

My main objective is to try to work within the implications of the existing system -- because of the exchange ratios and the relative costs of transportation, coal should represent the most abundant, low-value items, that we simply burn in vast quantities, and rubber represents the least abundant, high-value ones. Making rubber represent food goes against this.

 

[Mithel]

Excellent concepts Mathguy, the reason that I don't agree with you is the German production of synthetic fuel.

The importance of oil has been stated in several books as the only real strategic resource battle. (not 100% true but it's the best we'll do in HoI)

If we allow Germany and/or Japan to convert "food" into oil and they conquer enough agrarian economies then the fuel situation would be totally messed up. And that's the most important raw material limitation.

I feel it's important to model the German need to capture the oil from Russia or the Mideast. While at the same time modeling Germany's unique advantage of being able to create synthetic fuels. This would be totally messed up by increasing available "coal".

- Mithel

 

[unmerged(14078)]

An interesting and important topic.

The main advantage of giving the minors rubber to substain their economies is that it's more valuable to the minor than for mayors which can afford conversion techs.

For most minors, 1 rubber is worth 16 coal, if we look at the conversion rates. Mayor countries can easily research better conversion techs and get a much lower value for rubber, with the first two improvements it's 1 rubber for 4 coal.

This is also the reason why Germany can keep it's industry at 100% without conquering any resource rich areas by just conquering the coal mines of the minors.

Regards/
Klaus

 

[unmerged(9145)]

After thinking about this a bit more I decided, for my own game, not to think of rubber as food but rather as 'consumer goods'. Food supplies were rarely a problem in WW2 with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Vichy France); abstracting them right out of the game was a good choice on Paradox's part, I think.

More important, I think, are the goods which were useful to the war effort but which aren't modeled within the game as is. We have metals, we have static fuel sources, we have mobile fuel sources, we have wartime supplies/ammunition - what we don't have are all the other items of production which drove the economy - 'consumer goods', production which were indirectly critical to the war machine. The consumer good production on the slider bar is, I think, more aptly the production which didn't have military applications and was used mainly to keep the populace happy.

As a test I went through province.csv and made the rubber value of a province equal to twice the IC value. This essentially takes rubber out of the game as a limited resource altogether. The point wasn't to turn rubber into a different kind of resource but simply to see what would happen to the game if economies stopped crashing and burning due to rubber shortages. I then ran one (just one so far) hands-off test. The results:

- no nation ran short of rubber; no nation crashed due to rubber shortages.

- rather than the interminable trade wars over oil and rubber, these wars now revolved around oil and steel in the early game, and steel more than anything else in the later game. The fight over steel remained vicious right up until 1945, when I ended the test.

- now that oil is no longer converted to rubber most smaller nations accumulated an excess of it, then turned to trying to accumulate steel. Larger nations (except the U.S.) kept their oil stocks up to feed their machines, especially Germany, Italy, Japan, and Britain (the last three because of their navies).

- Italy didn't suffer economic collapse like they do in just about every other game. However, the Brits appeared to do much better and completely forced them out of Africa just one year after the Italians joined the war.

- for reason beyond mortal ken, the Nationalist Chinese became a superpower that the Japanese were simply unable to defeat. When the Japs joined the Axis and started fighting with the Russians the Nationalist Chinese counterattacked and completely drove them out of Asia.

I'm going to go run another test now to see how things vary. I should note that I changed all national .inc files as well, giving each nation 90 days of production in all of their resources except oil, which was equal to:

- 45 x IC if they had no oil production
- 45 x (IC + Oil production), if they did produce oil

Max

 

[Mithel]

max, I very much disagree that food supplies were not a problem. There are many references to the lack of food. By mid war (1942) (not even talking the devastation of the end of the war) Germans were eating roughly 66% of what they were in 1939.

Italy's agricultural production dropped by 15% from 1938 to 1942 (and caloric intake dropped by virtually the same amount).

I've read accounts of Switzerland stating that the Swiss had to manufacture armaments and sell them to the Germans in order to avoid starving. The Swiss turned virtually every open space into a garden.

What is the point of giving every province double it's ICs in Rubber? Each IC only needs 1/2 a rubber. In v1.05b there is an excess of rubber worldwide that would support 25% growth in industry! The only problem with "rubber" is the way it's allocated between the countries (trying to model actual rubber).

- Mithel

 

[unmerged(13914)]

The value of 1 rubber point

Hmmm, German synthetic fuel. Okay, that is a problem, but maybe there's a better way here.

I believe Germany produced from 2 million to 4 million tons per year at peak. Let's say for simplicity it was 3.6 million, so 10,000 tons per day, that's 100 oil points per day. Certainly with panzer divisions using 2.3 points each per day, Germany needed all 100 points as fuel.

Now to get those 100 points using the conversion techs available to Germany in 1941 (crisis year of the war, Barbarossa was when Germany actually had to limit expenditure for the first time), Germany needs to use 400 points of coal per day (0.25 ratio).

Meanwhile they need 2 points of oil to make 1 point of rubber, and they need at least 200-250 points of rubber to run their economy, so they need 400-500 points of oil, and that requires 1,600-2,000 points of coal.

I concede that there's a staggering disproportion here, with the Germans needing so much coal for the coal->oil->rubber path that they can't possibly hope to also maintain supplies of oil as fuel. But I think the solution is to adjust the ratios.

First, as I've argued elsewhere, we should set 1 point of oil = about 100 tons. That is the number suggested by the convoy point capacities and the daily unit consumption values. But 1 point of rubber does NOT = 100 tons of rubber. Not even remotely. The total world production of rubber in 1940 was about 1.4 million tons per year, plus 43,000 tons of synthetic rubber. By 1945, the U.S. was making 1.2 million tons of synthetic rubber per year. Compare this with somewhere between 1 and 2 BILLION tons of coal produced per year -- the numerical ratio for an IC is 4 coal points to rubber point, but the tonnage ratio is more like 1,000 to 1.

So as Germany, I do not have to sacrifice 2 points of oil to get 1 point of rubber -- a very conservative ratio might be 1 point of oil = 10 points of rubber.

When you consider that rubber also includes other specialized materials, you don't want to go completely crazy on the oil-to-rubber ratio. 1 point of rubber could be a 10-ton mixture of nickel, tungsten, rubber, silk, whatever. But in any case, an oil-to-rubber ratio high enough to eliminate the economic-collapse issue isn't hard to achieve or justify.

 

[Azkor]

Mathyguy your assestment that "rubber" has to be all the various high value rare materials is spot on I think. Rubber as the natural material has been placed at to high a value in HOI.

I have been looking at increasing the capacity of the USSR of holding out against germany. What I have found is consistantly the soviet economy crashes due to bad conversion of coal : oil : rubber which sends them into a downwards spiral of defict spending of resources. Everyone who has played knows what happens next. Once coal=zero until daily returns come in the economy oscilates back and forth from some value usually about 25% to 50% total IC. This of course means they cant meet the daily supply requirements which leads to them getting hammered like a ten penny nail.

One bit of information regarding polymers that I recall from my textbook for my polymers class was that hydrocarbon based polymer production takes up some 4% of global crude-oil production.

If we just look at changing the conversion rates of oil:rubber then the change needs to be in the nature of 1:1 for synthetic rubber plants, 1:5 for improved synthetic rubber plants and 1:10 for advanced synthetic rubber plants. However, if these changes where made then the IC cost of the research and time should be at least tripled to represent the construction of the plants.

A better solution to the synthetic resources issue would be if we could change the territory value as a technology is researched. For example, upon researching improved synthetic oil plants, at an increase IC and time cost, an event fires that adds oil to provinces of the nation that researched it.

Since thats not possible what resources could be used to represent "rubber"? Also how would this be modeled? Would provinces that say produce uranium have rubber added to represent this?

edit: fixed smilies

 

[unmerged(13914)]

Good arguments Azkor! I think we're narrowing down the numbers quite nicely.

Myself I like 1:1.5 for the baseline plant, 1:2 and then 1:2.5.

That way, the maximum damage that will be done is when you're at the initial 0.25 coal-to-oil ratio, when you'll need:

4 coal = 1 oil = 1.5 rubber
6 coal + 3 steel + 1.5 rubber = 3 IC

Once you have the advanced coal-to-oil technology and the advanced oil-to-rubber technology, you're converting at 0.75 to 1, so now it's:

4 coal = 3 oil = 7.5 rubber
30 coal + 15 steel + 7.5 rubber = 15 IC

The effect is to impose a surcharge of about 1.333 coal per IC, if you have the worst possible conversion technology, and about 0.267 coal per IC, if you have very good conversion technology. (Bear in mind this scheme also assumes you're giving small amounts of rubber directly to many economies, to represent their own sources of specialized materials.)

Arguably the 0.75 to 1 conversion ratio for coal to oil is a bit high as well. One figure I find very compelling is an estimate that a warship burning oil used 60 % of the fuel tonnage that a warship burning coal did. I also read that synthetic oil cost at least 40 % more than natural oil even when the production volumes were in the millions. So I'd like to see the ratio top out at 0.6 to 1, which gives us:

5 coal = 3 oil = 7.5 rubber
30 coal + 15 steel + 7.5 rubber = 15 IC

Bear in mind this means that 66.7 tonnes of coal, or 40 tonnes of oil, are needed for each rubber point. In your scheme, with maximum technology we'd have:

4 coal = 3 oil = 30 rubber
120 coal + 60 steel + 30 rubber = 60 IC

For a surcharge of just 13.3 tonnes of coal or 10 tonnes of oil per rubber point.

My conservative reasoning also comes partly from the fact that immediately after the war, synthetic rubber production declined dramatically and natural rubber was used to meet requirements. So clearly synthetic rubber production was NOT good enough, even in 1950 or 1955, to beat out natural sources in terms of cost.

We don't have access to any direct pricing mechanism, but we do have one indirect one that seems relevant. If I can convert coal at 7.5 rubber for 1 coal, I don't think I care much about having access to natural rubber. I can ship 1 point of coal to a destination and get a huge amount of rubber out of it. But if the best I can do is convert coal to rubber at 1.67 rubber for 1 coal, and then I need 0.5 rubber per IC, well, I can import sufficient natural rubber using a smaller convoy than it would take to bring over the additional coal for each IC. So I'd be inclined to use natural rubber rather than make my own. Make sense?

I also checked: the USSR, the UK, the USA, even minors like Canada and Hungary all have tech #4303, the Improved Synthetic Rubber plant, in 1939. But almost no one has the Improved Synthetic Oil plant. So they're all going to be operating at the 2:1 oil-to-rubber ratio, and their surcharge per IC will therefore be:

8 coal = 2 oil = 1 rubber (under 1.05b standard rules)
4 coal + 2 steel + 1 rubber = 2 IC, surcharge of 4 coal per IC (!)

8 coal = 2 oil = 4 rubber (under this revision)
16 coal + 8 steel + 4 rubber = 8 IC, surcharge of 1 coal per IC

So instead of tripling their coal consumption per IC, they'll have a 50 % jump -- and it would be even less if each country got its own rubber. A decline of 33 % in production is survivable, and it won't be as high as 33 % with the map changes.

 

[unmerged(9145)]

I don't think it matters what you call it - rubber, consumer goods, food, whatever. What matters is the effect it has on the game, which is simple: shortages force all but major nations, and often even major nations, into economic crashes that the player can easily avoid. This cripples an already weak ai.

The primary goal should be to make sure this doesn't occur, assuming, of course, that you want a game that's at least somewhat challenging. By removing rubber from the equation you do this.

However, the economic portion of the game shows its flaws in spades at this point. If rubber is no longer a factor the remaining two construction resources receive the focus, and both of these are generally abundant. And then why bother having steel at all? Coal is still useful for making oil, and oil is still very necessary to supply ships, planes, and mech units. But steel itself is pretty much a non-issue. And as we can't alter the characteristics of the resources themselves (e.g., make it possible to convert rubber into supplies) there's no alternative to the current situation.

I don't really have a problem with this. Remove rubber and the nations I'm fighting are more capable, therefore provide a greater challenge. Steel is an issue for some nations, not much of one for most - works for me. Coal and oil are key, but lacking access to oil supplies one can either capture large amounts of coal or work on conversion technologies. This is also acceptable. Sure, it reduces an already simplistic system even more *but you can't alter the current system anyway so the point is moot*.

There is, however, something you can do at this point that you can't do so long as you keep rubber and rubber shortages: make oil as important as it was in the actual war. Right now units don't use a great deal of oil, and as discussed in another thread the consumption rates are both out of whack and significantly lower than they should be. Now, without the need to convert oil to rubber, you can raise the consumption rates of units and make oil (and coal, with conversion techs) critical to the war effort - *without crippling ai economies*.

This, I think, has some real possibilities. Players usually build oil-hungry units because, as players, they can always keep themselves in supply. A German player will build oil-expensive supertanks, and why not? It's not like he's going to need to ration his oil, like the Germans actually had to during the war. But now you can force the player short on oil supplies to make hard choices just like his historical counterparts; perhaps now a Japanese player will actually feel the pressure to attack the Dutch East Indies because he's running out of oil and can't trade or convert enough to keep his fleet functional.

In any event, this is what I'm going to try. Having run three additional hands-off games I like the results I'm getting by removing rubber as a consideration. Quite simply, the game plays better and in the end that's the most important point of all.

Max

 

[Azkor]

Mathguy I like your points about the decline of synthetic rubber production after the war. From the small amount of information I have been abel to look up on this so far it was a question of cost more than anything that led to the decline. A chemical plant has certain fixed costs that a tree farm doesnt. The International Rubber Study Group has good numbers on natural and synthetic production available if you want to read more about it, yes there realy is a group with that goofy a name .

The idea of the surcharge that you have expounded upon is diffenatly headed in the right direction. I guess 1:5 or greater would only be realy applicable in a modern setting where even the bottoms off a refinery can be used to make rubber if you really wanted to. I like the idea of the coal-oil converstions being 0.25 at basic synthetic oil, 0.50 at improved synthetic oil, and 0.66 at advanced. The actual process for making fuel oil out of coal is pretty straight forward but insanely energy intensive.

The one thing that needs to happen though with the synthetic techs is that they need to be more expensive as they are far to cheap. At 16 IC for 180 days, without any computer tech help, that is only 2880 IC for comparison a basic light tank division costs 2635 IC, 1.05b vanillia. The time frame on the tech is to short, the processing plants in the US took over 2 years to get online and running at capacity. Something on the order of 25 IC for 360 days for 9000IC is about what I think would be more inline.

With your system of 1:1.5 baseline rubber conversion the minors with a bit of additional coal wont collapse and the majors who need to get to advanced conversion, Germany and the Soviets chiefly, will have to make a choice on when or if to go beyond improved synthetics as the cost could tie up far to much of the research budget.

Of course if rubber stops being the limiting reagent in IC production then what resource will be at that point? My guess is steel. As it stands now steel is more of a hassle for Germany than oil or rubber if you take the time to get to advanced synthetics. The soviets and even the US have similar problems, but then again you can always beat your neighbor down and take theirs.

What changes are you suggesting for the minors one or two coal added to each province?

If each minor got 3 coal in each province with at least 1 IC then the following would be true with your conversion:

3 coal -1.5 coal/IC = 1.5 coal surplus * 0.25 (coal-oil conversion) = 0.375 oil *1.5 (oil:rubber) = 0.5625 rubber -0.5 rubber/IC = 0.0625 rubber surplus

Every minor at that point would have room to expand their economy by 12.5% without crashing the economy, ignoring the fact that the AI would over industrialize like a madman and ignoring the limiting reagent steel.

However if every minor got 2 coal in each province with at least 1 IC then the following would hold true:

2C - 1.5C/IC = 0.5C * 0.25 C/O = 0.125O * 1.5 R/O = 0.1875R/0.5R which means they would be running at 37.5% efficiency

But, if we change the base conversion to 1.25 and each province gets 3 coal per IC base then the following is true:

3C-1.5C/IC = 1.5C * 0.25 C/O = 0.375O *1.25R = 0.46875R/0.5R = 93.75 efficiency.

I dont know if we want to hamstring the minors with a surplus or a deficit, but as sure as the sun will rise they will build industry tell they collapse the economy. The surplus is good at that point as it gives every minor a 0.57 rise in GDP that they could handle with domestic resources, ignoring again the fact that they may not have enough steel.

Im gonna look at this again in the morning when I can string together coherent thoughts.

 

[Azkor]

Ok after a little sleep on the subject here is my thoughts Mathguy.

Lets assume we take as a basis every nation in the world, excluding majors, has enough domestic resources to expand their economy by some margin during the 11 years covered by the road to war scenario. Let us also assume that we ignore steel and oil, as steel and oil now become the resources we fight over. Let us also assume we take your basis of 1:1.5 conversion of oil to rubber at basic 1:2 at improved and 1:2.5 at advanced. Let us also assume that the conversion of coal to oil is 4:1 at basic, 2:1 at improved and 1.0:0.66 at advanced.

Then every minor needs 3 coal per base IC in there economy.

Case 1. Hungary

49 IC base
70 coal

49*1.5=73.5>70

Therefore the hungarians have an economic collapse. They also have a serious steel shortage.

If hungary gets all its national claims then the following is true

87 IC base
240 coal

87*1.5=130.5
240-130.5=109.5*0.25=27.375*1.5=41.0625rubber
87*0.5=43.5rubber needed
41.0625-43.5= -2.4375 rubber produced
2.4375*2= 4.875 IC defict
87-4.875=82.125/87*100=94.4% IC base

Ok baring rounding issues, any ideas at what significant digit the game rounds? Greater Hungary cant support its own industrial base.

Case 2. Hungary adjusted to having 3x coal per IC

49IC
147 coal

49*1.5=73.5
147-73.5=73.5 coal surplus
73.5*0.25=18.375 oil
18.375*1.5=27.5625 max rubber conversion
49*0.5=24.5 rubber needed
27.5625-24.5=3.0625 rubber surplus
(3.0625/1.5)*4=8.166 coal not converted

This means hungary, baring steel which they dont have enough of, could support its own economic base with a small amount of growth as well, 51 total IC. Or 4% growth, over 11 years thats pretty bad .

I would like to see what your thoughts are on this Mathguy, but I think that in general this is probably the direction we need to go towards fixing the world economy. Even with 3x coal per IC base most countries wont be able to support there economy because of steel shortages, but that should put them at about 66% base which isnt too bad I guess.

 

[unmerged(13914)]

Hmmm. Your approach is maybe more drastic than mine.

I'm not sure it's the right answer to go through and assign a strict ratio of coal to ICs for every country, or to boost the total amount of coal in the game by very much. The design problem here is more subtle.

I did a survey of the economic values of all the nations in HOI, and found that one-third (mostly the minors) were in perfect balance, two coal for every steel. One-third are short of coal to some extent, and one-third are short of steel to some extent (the Axis powers in particular). Only a very small minority have any rubber, and the values for coal and steel are all rounded to the nearest 5 or 10. For example, there are 13 countries with exactly 40 coal and 10 steel.

I'd like to see those numbers made more individual, based on the real economic histories of each country, and I would favor giving some additional credit in terms of coal for nations that exported a lot of food, but I would not like to see every country given X amount of coal per IC.

In the prewar period, the world market should still allow everyone to get rubber as well as coal or steel, so there should be very little conversion activity. If you somehow modded the game such that two-thirds of all countries were producing synthetic rubber in 1940, that wouldn't be historically accurate, right?

Once war starts and the world market becomes inefficient or nonexistent, I think the multitude of minor countries that don't have natural rubber and have weak conversion techs probably should have their economies decline -- just not collapse! I think giving minors a small amount of domestic rubber to represent their own local specialized materials is good, but it should be done carefully, looking at actual materials that were traded during the war. For example, countries with nickel (Finland) or tungsten (Turkey) can be given "rubber" to represent those scarce and valuable commodities that the majors all were willing to trade for even during wartime. Countries that had no militarily important specialized materials to trade -- Afghanistan, say -- should get maybe only a token 1 point rubber supply to represent the ability to improvise, re-use prewar stocks, black market, and so on.

This helps prevent neutral minors from becoming regional superpowers and sustaining long military building projects when in fact many suffered severe economic disruption as world trade collapsed.

Meanwhile the majors should implement improved and advanced synthetic oil and rubber production, and become relatively self-sufficient as the total amount of synthetic rubber produced actually exceeds the supply of natural rubber -- although the cost of synthetic oil should remain fairly high as I described earlier. (By the way I used 0.6, not 0.66, as my top conversion ratio. I see you're using 0.66.)

Does this make sense? My goal here isn't necessarily to get every country to have sustained growth or the full use of all its prewar ICs, because historically that didn't happen. My goal is just to get rid of the very UN-historical tendency for countries to spend gigantic amounts of coal on producing rubber and then collapse for lack of coal.

 

[Azkor]

Mathguy I see your point.

By giving every country a ratio of coal to IC they would be able to grow at least some margin. Do you by chance have GDP numbers on some of the minors from 36 to 47? It would be interesting to see if the growth or decline could be moddeled.

If domestic "rubber" in non rubber producing nations is to be based off of rare vital resources which ones would you suggest we use? Obviously things like nickel, tungsten, silver, copper, sulphur, uranium, aluminum and silicates would be included, but what else and how do we set the amount produced.

As to the 0.66 I must have been too tired to read that correctly, whoops.

The thing I want to avoid is having half the nations of europe be totaly useless to either the axis or commies because they cant afford to feed their own troops. As germany its better to wait for the war with the soviets to kick off and cherry-pick the balkans because they cant afford to supply their own troops. The axis is better off annexing hungary, romania and bulgaria rather than adding them. I would like to see most minor nations be able to at least sustain a 60% economy after the world market collapses, ignoring again the fact that steel is the axis big problem.

 

[unmerged(13914)]

I have a bunch of prewar GDP figures, from a prewar almanac, but right now I don't have any for the war itself.

I also don't have a good, comprehensive list of strategic materials or who produced them -- just anecdotal stuff like nickel from Finland, tungsten from Turkey.

For the moment, all I'm going to be able to do is introduce the adjusted coal-to-oil and oil-to-rubber values into the Historical Statistics Pack. I think doing that will prevent the Axis minors, and minors in general, from collapsing economically in a long war.

These other issues are fairly complex, and the research needed to rewrite the entire HOI economic map, province by province, would take time I just don't have.

But I'm glad we agree in general terms on what should be done, anyway.

 

[Mithel]

Mathguy, the oil to rubber conversion rates you mentioned are basically what I'd already put into my mod. Virtually all nations in my mod start with oil to rubber converting at 1:1 and then techs allow that to improve to 1:1.5, 1:2, and finally 1:2.5.

As I'm running hands off testing I'm getting the world economy to balance better and better and I'm seeing some really nice realistic flow of the war.

I'm going a bit more radical than Mathguy in some regards (I'm modding *everything* and the key basis of my mod is the rework of the Province.csv for the entire world economy) and more conservative in others (Mathguy suggests increasing supply costs (supply to IC ratio) by 90% but I only increased them by 50%).

- Mithel

 

[unmerged(19545)]

Folks, this is all wonderfully clever and all, and I've noticed the same damn thing happening (and not just to minors - Canada too ) but it hadn't occurred to me that the problem was the conversion rate.

What I had concluded, having watched the WM in (semi)action for many virtual years, and confirmed by checking the posted resource totals, was that the nations who have a near monopoly on rubber: specifically France, Britain, Netherland and Belgium, iirc, don't lack anything else, so they don't bother to trade. As a result the historically adequate quantities of rubber in the world, don't enter the market.

That being said, I must admit that your proposed solution is a much more elegant one than the only thing I had sort-of considered: reducing the rubber producing empires to a-historical levels of some other resource, thus forcing them to put rubber into the market.

On a related note (should I be starting a new thread for this - this isn't just my first post here, it's my first post period, so my protocol is likely to poor) the world market has another serious problem, and that is that you can't trade at anything better than par, which is absurd. If I have lots of surplus rubber, while the rest of the world is hurtin' I'm sure as heck not going to let a ton of rubber go for a ton of anthracite. Probably not even for a ton of coke.

The same is true for steel. Consider how many tons of coal it takes to make the coke you need, to smelt of ton of steel. Those nations which have larger steel supplies than coal must be getting the btu's from somewhere else. And even in an arc furnace, powered hydro-electrically, you still need lots of some sort of reducing reagent to strip the oxygen off the iron in your Fe2O3, said reducing agent still being coke.

I'll shut up now and wait to be vivisected.

 

[jdrou]

Originally posted by Dog Cavalry
What I had concluded, having watched the WM in (semi)action for many virtual years, and confirmed by checking the posted resource totals, was that the nations who have a near monopoly on rubber: specifically France, Britain, Netherland and Belgium, iirc, don't lack anything else, so they don't bother to trade. As a result the historically adequate quantities of rubber in the world, don't enter the market.

I believe one of the fixes that Paradox has put in for this is that extra resources are added to the WM in addition to what is actually being offered for trade.

 

[unmerged(13914)]

Dog Cavalry wrote:
I'll shut up now and wait to be vivisected.

Actually, one of the nice things about this forum is the lack of pointless flame wars.

Especially now that school is back in session. Notice the abrupt drop in thread closures, warnings, and bannings? We were having an epidemic in August, and now it's nice and quiet again. Ahhhh.

What you said about more flexible trading ratios is true. It would also be nice to have fractional trading ratios like 3 for 2. It has been mentioned from time to time, no idea what priority it has with Paradox.