Victoria II and Economic accuracy

[Naselus]

so i guess you're limited to events, decisions and the gold mines then.

Yup, and there's precious few useful triggers for the events and decisions. And I think we've covered the reasons why goldmines are useless. Basically, there's no mechanisms in place to accurately measure the international economy's size at all, so it's effectively certain that the money supply will deviate from the sweet spot eventually.

I generally measure how good a V2 economy is based on it's mean time to crisis; a bad economy can only manage a few years before the money supply and industrial output become completely out of sync. A good economy is one that can average 75 years+ (this is about where the HoD economy stands; after 75 years, you have about a 50% chance of the world running out of cash). Hitting 100 is fiendishly tricky; going beyond is almost entirely a matter of luck rather than skill, because the number of possible industrial output levels by then is enormous. I've seen maybe 4 economies out of all versions of all of the mods for V2 which can claim to regularly beat 100 years, and most of those are for AHD.

You need to try to hit a small window with about 10% leeway to either side of exactly enough money for total world GNP. Price fluctuations allow for the game to correct a slight money shortage or oversupply, but beyond this buying order begins to cause other problems - too much money and the top nations begin to starve all the others by consuming all the goods, too little and the entire economy collapses.

The one way which would be fairly certain to avoid the money supply issue is something like VRRP's Jan Mayen aristocrats; they were pretty much infinitely wealthy and so acted as a source of income (in fact, they were effectively just a re-implementation of the V1 WM). It's rather ironic, really; Konrad didn't even know the money problem existed when he implemented the idea. Of course, even though it eliminated the money supply issue, their presence caused all sorts of other problems which made the economy unstable in other ways; Konrad's endless hours simming everything in spreadsheets were largely wasted because there were many variables at play we simply didn't know about back then. More than once we both had to re-write from scratch based on a newly-discovered link between different factors.

 

[Secret Master]

Money producing factories behave rather oddly, and are best avoided. I experimented with them waaaaaay back in 2011, and they always seemed to produce a fixed amount of cash regardless of the number of workers or whether they could acquire goods etc. RGO value is only one component of the multi-faceted gold production equation, and it doesn't work well with the factory scripting.

Question for ya:

Ricky had a precious metal good instead of just producing raw cash from precious metal mines. Is there vestigial code in Vic2 that would let you create something like that and make it a luxury good in super high demand for capitalists and aristocrats to help "spread the wealth" as a way to at least slow down the pooling of money in the national banks?

Or use it as a "capital investment" good of some kind that is produced by "bank" factories?

 

[Naselus]

Question for ya:

Ricky had a precious metal good instead of just producing raw cash from precious metal mines. Is there vestigial code in Vic2 that would let you create something like that and make it a luxury good in super high demand for capitalists and aristocrats to help "spread the wealth" as a way to at least slow down the pooling of money in the national banks?

Or use it as a "capital investment" good of some kind that is produced by "bank" factories?

That's perfectly doable, yes.

 

[General WVPM]

some thoughts on the earlier mentioned stuff about governments stockpiling cash and RGOs not being filled.
I made techs reduce RGO size for farms in my mod and focus more on soldier pops, no longer should 5% be your target, but more like 10% as I massively increased mobilization to scale up wars to the millions. The reduction of RGO size and the minimal military spending the pro military and jingoism policies have could solve those 2 problems right?
RGOs become less dependent on the amount of workers, but more on the tech, while the pro-war policies force governments to spend more cash instead of stockpiling it.
I also plan to increase the admin spending needed for the right % of bureaucrats as you can now do it with 10% spending, pretty damn low....

 

[Secret Master]

That's perfectly doable, yes.

There's no way to force a factory to only employ clerks is there?

I'd hate to create a banking sector that "sells" financial instruments, only to have it employ lots of unskilled labor that were coal mining two weeks ago with a literacy of 10%. It would unbalance Russia and recently civilized states.

 

[General WVPM]

There's no way to force a factory to only employ clerks is there?

I'd hate to create a banking sector that "sells" financial instruments, only to have it employ lots of unskilled labor that were coal mining two weeks ago with a literacy of 10%. It would unbalance Russia and recently civilized states.

ofcourse there is, you can run a factory by any pop_type, its all in the ../common/production_types.txt

 

[Naselus]

some thoughts on the earlier mentioned stuff about governments stockpiling cash and RGOs not being filled.
I made techs reduce RGO size for farms in my mod and focus more on soldier pops, no longer should 5% be your target, but more like 10% as I massively increased mobilization to scale up wars to the millions. The reduction of RGO size and the minimal military spending the pro military and jingoism policies have could solve those 2 problems right?
RGOs become less dependent on the amount of workers, but more on the tech, while the pro-war policies force governments to spend more cash instead of stockpiling it.
I also plan to increase the admin spending needed for the right % of bureaucrats as you can now do it with 10% spending, pretty damn low....

Increasing government spending costs does help to redistribute cash, but the budget AI doesn't do very well with it usually since it's programmed to spend rather freely and keep taxes fairly low where possible (precisely to avoid dead cash sitting in banks and the national purse). It's also worth bearing in mind that the total amount of money the government has at any given time is not in use to circulate goods - so in the course of the actual 'turn' you're reducing the amount of money in circulation by the sum total that all governments tax and spend - so higher spending means more money that is 'busy' being used to pay soldiers rather than being used in a transaction. Creating conditions which are too expensive can force the AI to pull too much money out of circulation early on. You ideally want government spending to be enough to keep national banks low, but not empty; if there's no credit available in the economy you'll get sudden, random bankruptcies of absurdly wealthy nations (even ones which actually have cash in their purse) due to the game's decidedly poor bankruptcy mechanics.

Reducing farm size is equally double-edged, since it'll tend to concentrate cash in small farmer POPs (some of whom can be very wealthy by mid-to-late game), who may begin dumping it in the national bank (particularly further down the buying order, where they might find themselves unable to find all the goods they can afford).

 

[Naselus]

There's no way to force a factory to only employ clerks is there?

I'd hate to create a banking sector that "sells" financial instruments, only to have it employ lots of unskilled labor that were coal mining two weeks ago with a literacy of 10%. It would unbalance Russia and recently civilized states.

PDM's had clerk-only factories since about 2011.

 

[Secret Master]

PDM's had clerk-only factories since about 2011.

Really? Well, that might breathe some life into the idea.

 

[Nashetovich]

a bad economy can only manage a few years before the money supply and industrial output become completely out of sync

How do you determine this? Unbalanced supply/demand?

 

[Naselus]

How do you determine this? Unbalanced supply/demand?

Depends on which direction the out-of-sync is - if it's a money shortage, lots of Actual Bought =! Demand problems will be the first noticeable sign, followed by a protracted recession that comes from nowhere. The entire world then sinks into the familiar economic malaise you see at the end of vanilla games, where industrial expansion becomes trapped at the rate of monetary expansion, and mass factory closure becomes fairly normal.

If there's too much money, you'll start noticing widespread famine in the lowest-ranking countries (China in particular) because the higher ranked nations buy all the goods on the WM. This one is considerably harder to spot; and might not even be considered a problem in some mods - heavily MP-focused ones in particular may even aim for this, because famine in Bhutan is unlikely to matter in competitive play. You'll also find large armies becoming rarer, and again concentrated in GPs, as they begin buying up all the military goods.

Basically, with too little money high-ranking nations start showing problems as they typically have far larger domestic circulation, which will be choked by the lack of cash. With too much, low ranking nations will suffer first because they usually have to wait for industrial production to increase before they can access goods they demand. However, a too-much money economy is much harder to produce than a too-little, since monetary expansion is basically always linear (it's not exactly, due to techs, goods changes and population movement, but is close enough for our purposes here) while factory expansion tends to be exponential whenever liquidity permits it. Eventually, given enough time, all economic models in V2 become cash-shortage economies, as gold-increasing techs and events run out and factories continue to be built and expanded.

 

[Secret Master]

The entire world then sinks into the familiar economic malaise you see at the end of vanilla games, where industrial expansion becomes trapped at the rate of monetary expansion, and mass factory closure becomes fairly normal.

Or, as the AI likes to call it, "Let's subsidize 4000 IND with taxes/tariffs from our RGOs. Those paper mills are going to pay off any day now, I tell ya!" Which creates even weirder economic conditions, as any country without a large colonial empire is more or less screwed, as they don't have the RGOs to pull this off.

So, Germany starves, while the UK artificially supports its industrial sector. And I'm busy fueling the world market with as much coal as I can from across my colonial empire just to keep the the whole system running, since all that artificial industry requires coal.

 

[Orlov Kruskayev]

So, Germany starves, while the UK artificially supports its industrial sector. And I'm busy fueling the world market with as much coal as I can from across my colonial empire just to keep the the whole system running, since all that artificial industry requires coal.

Well, that does sound pretty accurate.

 

[Secret Master]

Well, that does sound pretty accurate.

Germany had a vibrant industrial economy for decades without owning a huge colonial empire. Assuming Germany does not lose a Great War, there is no reason that Germany should face economic ruin just because it lacks a colonial empire.

There is a huge difference between "The UK has an awesome economy, because of the integration of her industry with her colonies, while Germany is only slightly behind since she must import some stuff" and "The UK artificially buoys up her economy even during the best of times by using a tax policy to shift wealth from RGOs in the colonies to factories in the homeland, while Germany's economy starves to death for lack of currency."

There's a reason I do my best to conquer as much of the uncivilized world as possible in Vic2, and it's got nothing to do with vanity or pride.

 

[General WVPM]

are we still talking about the same game?
any unified germany instantly gets #1 and has massive income and absolutely no economic trouble whatsoever in any V2 playthrough i had

 

[Secret Master]

any unified germany instantly gets #1 and has massive income and absolutely no economic trouble whatsoever in any V2 playthrough i had

Then you haven't seen my games. I've seen Germany get the #1 slot and still face substantial economic problems (mainly because its AI is trying to subsidize factories too, except it doesn't have a huge colonial empire to shift the tax burden on to).

Tag switching to AI Germany reveals some serious economic problems even when she is #1, although if you want to see Germany really face economic hardship, let her stay #1 for awhile, then drop to #2. The inability to access certain materials from the WM makes life even harder.

 

[Naselus]

are we still talking about the same game?
any unified germany instantly gets #1 and has massive income and absolutely no economic trouble whatsoever in any V2 playthrough i had

I think SM is talking post-1900, when the economy is already shaking itself apart. The usual pattern is Germany unifies, dominates the next 30 years while things are still reasonably functional, and then begins to suffer serious internal issues as the wider economy begins to cap out. While it's still usually sat in the #1 or #2 spot, if you tag switch and take a look there's dozens of closed factories piling up, and high craftsman unemployment. Growth is essentially stagnant - it's like the 1970s, not the 1900s.

Compared to where it should be, end-game Germany (in fact, most end-game GPs) are seriously underpowered - just look at the kind of industry scores that are it can achieve in an economy which is non-disfunctional. Industry scores can easily be 4-5 times higher then they usually are in 1930; back in AHD, I recall some consternation in a post-your-empire thread when someone posted a PDM end-game Germany with an IND score of nearly 30,000. The typical vanilla GP IND scores at the time capped out around 6k. If the economy can be kept on track for the full game, then individual GPs have the potential to produce as much as all the GPs combined in vanilla; we basically lose 30 years of what ought to be the highest growth rates because of the cash crunch.

 

[General WVPM]

if AI subsides for factories leads to big problems, could it be worth it to disable that for the AI only?

 

[Naselus]

if AI subsides for factories leads to big problems, could it be worth it to disable that for the AI only?

Possibly, though you may find it hard to support the military industries without AI subsidies (they're anemic at the best of times). The military industries are really another area which doesn't work very well - the market isn't great for dealing with spikes in demand, and small arms etc are locked in constant spikes. This should really be changed in V3 so that support costs are the only cost for units, and they kick in immediately on queuing the unit. That way you get a series of discrete plateaus rather than abrupt jumps and troughs.

 

[sgt.stickybomb]

Possibly, though you may find it hard to support the military industries without AI subsidies (they're anemic at the best of times). The military industries are really another area which doesn't work very well - the market isn't great for dealing with spikes in demand, and small arms etc are locked in constant spikes. This should really be changed in V3 so that support costs are the only cost for units, and they kick in immediately on queuing the unit. That way you get a series of discrete plateaus rather than abrupt jumps and troughs.

But what about mobilizations and large troop depletion during battles? You will get spikes there regardless.