The line is flat despite demand being higher than supply. So there is an obvious cap here.
If the economic model can not handle free prices, it will mean that the model has a bad design.
You realize Vic2 had basically the exact same system, right? There was a base price and a min and a max. Please stop the hyperbole.
And that was really bad.
Disbanding floor was done in some Vic 2 mods. I do prefer free prices, as well, as that increases substitution pressure.
Nahhhhhh, sorry for being invalidating, but you're over-dramatizing big time. The base mechanics are far more important price bounds can be removed in mods. I do think that the shortage-system will partially emulate prices which would cause bankruptcy.
It should be, famines were a massive issue at the time, especially because the decline of subsistence farming in favor of cash crops and (un)employment on privately owned farms tied hundreds of millions of people previously able to feed themselves into dependence on international agricultural markets. This led to several famines, some with tens of millions of death, everywhere from Brazil to India. These famines were also heavily utilized (both indirectly and more directly) for colonial expansion of great powers, big examples being Italy in Ethiopia, Britain in Egypt, and the Dutch in Indonesia. In many cases the famines of the late 19th century were the biggest (though not isolated) factors in securing european imperial control of much of the world, and especially in the globalization of agricultural markets.
Base allows for better balancing, if the additional time is spent on core mechanics, then it's worth it.
Once again people seem to forget that Victoria 3 is a game and not an academic model. The behavior of the mechanics and system models should be facilitating the desired design choices of the developers and the core gameplay loop above all else. If the model is not doing that - for instance, if a economic model without price caps is causing price fluctuations that make economic management unfun or have consequences on other systems that make them not act as the developers want in terms of game behavior and the gameplay loop - then it is a bad model and the model needs to be changed to better suit the desired behavior of the systems.
A 50% price cap will cause massive balance issues. Like you can produce only refined goods while only producing a trickle amount of raw goods to avoid the 0 supply penalty.
It's very understandable that you can't imagine how this helps gameplay, because you like me are not a developer who has been iterating and testing the game for years and haven't seen the underlying mechanics of how the game functions yet.
Your raw goods will have to be more than a trickle to avoid the supply penalty.
