What would an economist call this situation?

[MatthewP]

But since I'm not an economist, I saw this weird situation and didn't even have a vocabulary to discuss it.

It seems like you do though:

That's a whole other discussion to have on another day. I actually plan to do that at some point with a better save that takes infrastructure down to the absolute minimum required to have 100% market access in all states and talk about the disconnect between infra and transport costs.

Basically, I never have profitable railways past 200 million GDP. And that's with all railway using PMs in use, cargo prioritization, and any other trick I can think of to drive up transportation demand.

You're spending literally 1/3 of your income on railroad subsidies. You can call this a construction bubble or whatever I guess. But what it really seems like is that your railroads and national budget are broken by low transportation prices. Which I agree is partly because transportation is effectively being spent (on infrastructure) but not bought as a good.

 

[Secret Master]

still haven't reached arc welding, so it may be that steel construction is simply cheaper per point at the moment?

So I poked around in the save swapping PMs around and building construction sectors.

Swapping back to just steel buildings cuts CPs in half, so I doubled construction sectors (I almost ran out of states) to get back to roughly where I was at, and this was the result:

Compare to using arc welding for roughly the same CPs:

You're trading an additional 63k steel and 51k glass for 51k electricity. The steel construction sectors employ a ton of extra people, too. (Twice as many sectors.) But I probably shouldn't be using twice as many sectors since adding more sectors results in more than the 24000 CPs I had under arc welding. (There is also some disjointed friction in labor markets because states getting new construction sectors don't all have available labor. I have unemployment, but it's not spread evenly throughout the German Empire.)

It is more expensive to use steel buildings than arc welding for my situation. It does employ significantly more people. Increasing demand for steel and glass has both positive and negative effects. I'm using arc welding for steel production, so I should be able to make up the lost electricity by expanding steel production to meet new demand.

But that's not the funny part.

The funny part is this:

Building the requisite steel plants to cover the new demand for steel is profitable even though the new demand for iron has finally induced the Malthusian apocalypse we all knew was coming.

Electricity is now so cheap (thanks to no electricity for construction sectors) that the arc welding steel plants can increase production while the economy starves for iron.

At this point, I could downshift to Bessemer or Blister process for steel, but with current resource ratios, it won't help. I'd just have to build more steel plants to meet my needs and still run out of iron. I'd just need a ton of extra labor to do it. Which would meet my goal of employing more people, but it's going to be a ton of laborer jobs with crappier SOL than current jobs.

That's really it. Once your resources peak it's all downhill from there. Only solution past that is the conquest of more resources in areas with lower pop density per resource than your own country.

Try as I might, I can't get around this. It's really Malthus all the way down at the point I'm at. The rest are just optimization and shell games to try and get around the fact that I can't mine any more iron.

I guess I need to create a heat map of relevant resource buildings to starting POP density. Some countries need the labor. Others need just the buildings but don't want tons of labor to go with it.

 

[Gui10]

Looking at the save, I think you're not in as much trouble as you think. Yes, you have 7.5M unemployed pops... But that's just 1.8% of your population. And those unemployed pops are doing pretty well - on Welfare Payment alone they reach SoL 18, and it costs your budget just 880k per week. I think you can afford to significantly reduce the construction capacity, though it's definitely better to that gradually.

Even if you want to avoid unemployment on principle, you can still afford to reduce the construction capacity a bit - assuming every building level costs 450 construction points and 4k employees per level, you catch up to the population growth at ~19.5k Construction Points per week.

Oh, and downsizing Healthcare and Worker Protection institutions would reduce the population growth rate (not by much, but with exponential growth every bit counts).

May I ask a question? I am unable to load the save game due to it using the American buildings pack (I think that was the name). I researched it and found that it comes as a free dlc with the Grand Edition, so it can't be acquired separately even if I wanted (and I wanted to, I really wanted to open those saves >< ).

I think I read that the inability to load saves with different visual elements would be solved, but it doesn't seem to be the case yet. Is it going to be fixed? Or will there be another way for players without the Grand Edition to load saves from the Grand Edition?

 

[Fawr]

SOL boosting pops is the key for a healthy mid-to-late game economy.

The extra transportation demand contains the Railway subsidies cost increase and induces demand for other goods, boosting the entire industry. Once you reach a point where you have more or less full employment within your resource capacity you cut taxes as much as possible. This will also boost private investment, to a point where you can actually just rely on private construction to compensate for population growth if you have done proper growth control during the mid game.

That's really it. Once your resources peak it's all downhill from there. Only solution past that is the conquest of more resources in areas with lower pop density per resource than your own country.

The nerf to private investment (x0.3) means this won't work when your GDP gets too big anymore.

Looking at the save, I think you're not in as much trouble as you think. Yes, you have 7.5M unemployed pops... But that's just 1.8% of your population. And those unemployed pops are doing pretty well - on Welfare Payment alone they reach SoL 18, and it costs your budget just 880k per week. I think you can afford to significantly reduce the construction capacity, though it's definitely better to that gradually.

Even if you want to avoid unemployment on principle, you can still afford to reduce the construction capacity a bit - assuming every building level costs 450 construction points and 4k employees per level, you catch up to the population growth at ~19.5k Construction Points per week.

Oh, and downsizing Healthcare and Worker Protection institutions would reduce the population growth rate (not by much, but with exponential growth every bit counts).

Think about 30M extra pops on welfare (if he runs 2/3rds of his construction pool, doesn't have a deficit and goes forward a decade). The cost of that starts eating significantly into his construction budget.

Healthcare and buildings without automation will certainly help. But getting to the late game and running buildings without automation and turning off healthcare because you got too rich seems like a very perverse outcome. The expected outcome from getting too rich is more like a 1950s or 1960s economy, not one going back in time!

 

[FindFloppies]

May I ask a question? I am unable to load the save game due to it using the American buildings pack (I think that was the name). I researched it and found that it comes as a free dlc with the Grand Edition, so it can't be acquired separately even if I wanted (and I wanted to, I really wanted to open those saves >< ).

I think I read that the inability to load saves with different visual elements would be solved, but it doesn't seem to be the case yet. Is it going to be fixed? Or will there be another way for players without the Grand Edition to load saves from the Grand Edition?

I bought the cheapest edition, and I'm able to load that save just fine. You do realize that's a 1.2 (open beta) save, right? Regardless, I do not have the Grand Edition, and I can load that save. So that's not the issue, it seems.

 

[Secret Master]

Healthcare and buildings without automation will certainly help.

This was part of the original plan for this save: to test the limits of labor saving PMs if I had enough coal to actually run them.

For context:

The previous game to this one was a run as the US with no conquests other than Manifest Destiny stuff. Not even Hawaii or Alaska. Thanks to a huge amount of oil and coal, I was able to maintain most automation PMs across the board for basically the entire game while I had #2 population. By the end of 1935, I was getting priced out of some things, but one of the big issues I faced was that I could either pass Free Trade, use oil to power my ports, or sit there with potential untapped trade due to convoy limitations. (Limited coastline for ports and Congress being stubborn and not passing Free Trade) So I wanted to run another game where I knew I would have plenty of coastline and coal after some imperialism. Hence Greater Germany with an African colonial empire.

But Austrian oil plus African oil doesn't equal US oil. And it's not close enough to pull off the same PMs. This meant my US run had a better standard of living and fewer radicals:

The only time I've ever had fewer radicals was in this same game when it dipped to around 11k. I'm sure someone has done better, but that's not bad.

 

[Gui10]

I bought the cheapest edition, and I'm able to load that save just fine. You do realize that's a 1.2 (open beta) save, right? Regardless, I do not have the Grand Edition, and I can load that save. So that's not the issue, it seems.

I am playing on the 1.2.2 (Beta) version. I checked again to see if I had left any mods on, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Do you have any idea what I could do? I will be attaching two screenshots to show the problem.
Edit: I also checked the integrity of the files, but that doesn't seem to be the problem either.

 

[FindFloppies]

I am playing on the 1.2.2 (Beta) version. I checked again to see if I had left any mods on, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Do you have any idea what I could do? I will be attaching two screenshots to show the problem.
Edit: I also checked the integrity of the files, but that doesn't seem to be the problem either.

That's very interesting. Maybe something was included in the US Steam version that I bought, if that's not how you got yours?

Hmm, after a bit more poking around, the version I bought *does* have that American Buildings Pack. I was not really aware, as I just bought the lowest priced version on Steam. My apologies. I guess it *is* still an issue. Here's the thing, though, if they fixed that issue in 1.1.2 after they forked the 1.2 beta off, that might explain it.

EDIT: the two screenshots you have would make a good bug report...

 

[GAGA Extrem]

[...]
Try as I might, I can't get around this. It's really Malthus all the way down at the point I'm at. The rest are just optimization and shell games to try and get around the fact that I can't mine any more iron.

I guess I need to create a heat map of relevant resource buildings to starting POP density. Some countries need the labor. Others need just the buildings but don't want tons of labor to go with it.

The easier way is to simply accept that there are two mutually exclusive late game goals: Highest SOL OR having as many pops as possible, and that your economy will peak around 1900 (for most nations).

Or, well, you can just mod in a few decisions that keep adding new resource deposits for hard cash via prospecting decisions or the like.

 

[Fawr]

The easier way is to simply accept that there are two mutually exclusive late game goals: Highest SOL OR having as many pops as possible, and that your economy will peak around 1900 (for most nations).

Or, well, you can just mod in a few decisions that keep adding new resource deposits for hard cash via prospecting decisions or the like.

That seems to be accepting a very ahistorical outcome from the game doesn't it?

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Yes.
Because I was strictly speaking from a current game balance perspective.

 

[Haresus]

It seems inevitable that coal, iron, and wood will eventually be given some sort of "discoverable resource" mechanic, where you unlock additional (less efficient) sources after "using up" the initial resources. Or perhaps an option to permanently trade the economy of scale bonus for more mines (-10% throughput for x% more mines, repeatable a couple times).

That should at least partially solve the Malthusian disaster.

Also, railways and transportation seems to need some improvements.

 

[Notme1]

Yes.
Because I was strictly speaking from a current game balance perspective.

Yeah resources could be boosted 2x - 5x - some resources having bigger limit, while others would be placed in new states.

 

[Kriegsspieler]

It seems inevitable that coal, iron, and wood will eventually be given some sort of "discoverable resource" mechanic, where you unlock additional (less efficient) sources after "using up" the initial resources. Or perhaps an option to permanently trade the economy of scale bonus for more mines (-10% throughput for x% more mines, repeatable a couple times).

That should at least partially solve the Malthusian disaster.

Also, railways and transportation seems to need some improvements.

Or maybe the rates of economic growth in the game should be significantly reduced? All of Secret Master's examples in these interesting threads he posts depend upon rates of economic growth that are kind of crazy.
Also, about population growth. That too is pretty high. Historically, population in the UK increased a little over 10%/decade in the 19th c. I think the game permits that number to go a lot higher, and that's just taking births into the equation.

 

[Secret Master]

Or maybe the rates of economic growth in the game should be significantly reduced?

I am of two minds about this.

On the one hand: Economic growth was nerfed in the beta patch in terms of minting income and turmoil reducing construction speed. Was it nerfed enough? Maybe not. But I can still get to the same sort of late game economic malaise problems that I did in the previous patch. So, you're right, economic growth is still off the charts, and maybe its for deeper reasons than just "there's too much money floating around to put into construction sectors."

On the other hand: What should be the limiting factor of economic growth in the first place? Lack of capital? Lack of resources? Lack of labor? Something else? Depending on how you answer that question will dictate how you answer my next question: Am I really growing the economy too fast, or am I just growing the economy as fast as it could have grown in the period if incompetence hadn't caused various economic contractions.

Put another way: Am I simply doing a better job at running the economy than, say, Chinese officials who were banning opium when they could have equaled British production domestically (which happened by the beginning of the 20th century anyway) or officials in the Raj/EIC who, despite an official policy prohibiting slavery at a certain point in the 19th century, really just turned a blind eye to practices that were effectively slavery that kept people in poverty rather than creating a vibrant economy? Or am I doing a better job of managing the economy than, say, officials in the Russian Empire that technically ended serfdom in 1861, but since land distribution wasn't really changed, you ended up with a bunch of peasants barely scraping by despite no longer being serfs, resulting in poor agriculture and food distribution that contributed to a completely avoidable famine in the 1890s?

You and I both know that the future isn't subsistence farming or slaves running laborer jobs in plantations. You and I both know that cotton simply can't be king in the way the southern planters thought it would be regardless of abolition. And you and I both know that technological advances in the period will result in huge shifts on productivity across the board. Our counterparts did not, and some even resisted these changes.

So, is the economy really growing too fast, or is it just the ideal economic growth that could have been achieved if those in charge of investments were more competent. I don't know. Since it's a game, you need to have room for player competence to matter. :shrugs:

EDIT: Maybe I should make a video on this topic and go into more detail. Because it's a game design issue, but it's also an issue related to a bunch of things that we see in other historical games like HOI and even non-Paradox titles like Field of Glory: Empires.

 

[Kriegsspieler]

Ok, there are several replies one could make here, beginning with your last point. I agree completely with you. There's something odd about the way these strategic economic simulators are designed so that as the game progresses the economies just snowball in size. In the real world, lots of things get in the way of the sustained and overheated growth that we see in Vicky -- wars, pandemics, economic depressions, and so forth. In this game, there are no economic cycles (yet, hopefully!) and wars do not seem to cost as much as they ought to cost.

Aside from that, there's just not enough drag on economic growth of the kind that we should expect to see. My favorite example from the game -- although only one among many -- is the "Modern Sewerage" social tech. It's a good one for players to go for, because the benefits it confers in terms of reducing the population effect on bureaucrats and others things is considerable. But the crazy thing is, it doesn't cost anything! In the real world, the costs of installing sewer systems in large cities like London were enormous, so much so that the British Parliament actually delayed coughing up the funds when it first had the chance to do so, until another cholera epidemic had finally shown the idiocy of not making better provision for managing the water supply. A famous book in German history (Death in Hamburg) was written on the same topic describing how the greedy patricians of Hamburg in Germany mishandled the same problem.

For another example, the expansion of institutions (education, social security, colonies, etc) doesn't cost nearly enough. I think bureaucrats are a poor way of representing their costs. Yes, of course more schools and more social welfare ought to also result in more bureaucrats. But they also should be represented as costs that directly come out of a government budget.

Another factor that could help level out growth somewhat is to look at how consumption changes over time. As the wealthiest classes become more accustomed to having the finer things, they tend to behave less like capitalists and more like super-consumers. Therefore in a mature economy a "capitalist" POP would conceivably have lower rates of private reinvestment than the same POP two generations before. Instead, they just fritter away their hoard buying fancy stuff.

Finally, are you a better manager of the economy than your average 19th-century mid-level bureaucrat? Of course you are! You're playing a game! Even I am better than those guys were, and I never mini-max my approach to a game like Victoria. But even I, dullard that I am, manage to figure out the most efficient way to grow my economy within the framework of how the game is designed. There's no getting around that.

 

[Secret Master]

Instead, they just fritter away their hoard buying fancy stuff.

You take that back! Elon Musk doesn't just fritter away his hoard; he invests in important things like Twitter! That's totally an example of investment, and not frittering away money to buy something fancy for self-aggrandizement.

(Unrelated picture of Hugh Laurie from Blackadder for some reason.)

On a completely unrelated note, as SOL creeps up, those art academies become solid earners as demand for fine art shoots up. And while it's not a mobious strip demand, I have been able to build art academies that employ people at SOL 30, which is the threshold for demanding fine art.

Yes, of course more schools and more social welfare ought to also result in more bureaucrats. But they also should be represented as costs that directly come out of a government budget.

I've noticed that early in the game, the institution cost for those things is fairly stiff. But once you get certain techs in place, running a ton of institutions at the highest level is practically just a side effect of the required bureaucrats to collect the taxes.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

I think the biggest issue is that there is simply too much surplus money around for the player throughout all the stages of the game. The sewer example above is actually a good remark about how many things are abstracted, and primarily in a way that's benefitial for the player rather than a double-edged sword with an attached money sink. PM changes should probably take a ton of money (and time) as well, but I get that an instant flip avoids lots of edge cases and is in general much easier to process.

A secondary problem is that right now you can rely way too much on Conscripts to carry you through a war - at leats in SP. It's usually one of the first law changes I make, and dismantling my entire military infrastructure means I save tons of money that I can pour into the early game economy to reap thos snow-balling benefits. If the player actually had to maintain a serious military infrastructure even for the purpose of a defensive war, I am quite sure that things wouldn't spiral out of control so quickly. Same if the higher tier military PMs would actually be significantly more costly instead of just a mild increase in terms of upkeep cost. The AI can easily spend a quarter of its entire income on the miltiary alone, it would only be fair if the player had to do the same.

Pop growth is the second pillar that amplifies this issue. It would probably be good to have higher mortality on most of the lower tier jobs, and again force the player to make investments to counteract that if they want to arrive at a healthy population growth.

...maybe I should get around to make a mod at some point. How does "Dive By Negative Zero" sound?

 

[Kriegsspieler]

I've noticed that early in the game, the institution cost for those things is fairly stiff. But once you get certain techs in place, running a ton of institutions at the highest level is practically just a side effect of the required bureaucrats to collect the taxes.

This in my opinion is especially regrettable, because it makes bureaucrats far more of an engine of economic growth than they ought to be. Also, GAGA Extrem is right about the effect of excess money in the game. It has the same inflationary effect that it does in real life!

In both respects we see the effect of the designers' decision to give the player the ability to make direct and large investments in the private economy. This wasn't the only possible choice. Pride of Nations was the first game that I know of that separated the private sector from the public sector in the economy. Another game that I know of that makes the same division is Matrix's Shadow Empire, which has a really interesting economic model. I don't mean to suggest that the PDX design team made the wrong call on this -- given where Vicky 2 left this issue, people would have been annoyed not to be able to choose factory builds. But now we need interventions in the design to mitigate the consequences.

 

[Secret Master]

This in my opinion is especially regrettable, because it makes bureaucrats far more of an engine of economic growth than they ought to be.

Also, GAGA Extrem is right about the effect of excess money in the game. It has the same inflationary effect that it does in real life!

Yeah. There's a huge difference between China in 1836 and Germany in 1860. For China, some states are poor enough that adding bureaucrats is a net loss in 1836 even when the tax efficiency is below 100% and there is waste. In Germany, with some techs in place and some advances in economic development, you'd be an idiot not to expand the government if tax collection wasn't 100%.

Same if the higher tier military PMs would actually be significantly more costly instead of just a mild increase in terms of upkeep cost.

This was a shock to me the first time I noticed it. And some military techs just grant free stuff to the army. Looking at you, hand cranked machineguns tech. (It must be cousins with the support weapons tech in HOI4.)

This is where some of the techs seem oddly placed. I'm thinking of repeaters and bolt action rifles. They are PMs for arms manufacturing. Okay. But the better troop types don't need exponentially more guns per battalion. So... you got more efficient at making small arms, but you aren't using 10x as many?

HOI4 gets around this problem by assigning stats to equipment. If you have tier 0 infantry kits, your infantry fight with those crappy stats. Better kits give better stats. In Vic3, I can manufacture flint lock weapons and give them to Squad-base infantry with no problem. And the infantry battalions don't need increase need for small arms, so it's not like the flint lock factories need to double up to meet demand.

Munitions are supposed to cover this sort of thing. If you look at PMs, the amount of munitions goes up as you swap to better infantry. And artillery needs go up as you swap to better artillery.

But the weirdest thing about conscription in Vic3 was something I didn't even notice until I was working on this post.

I have a save as the US with a standing army of 170. I can conscript 3800 battalions. With mechanized infantry, activating 100% of conscripts and placing them under generals and mobilizing all of those generals only results in a 6-700% increase in military goods expenditures. Part of this is because with Mass Conscription, my conscripts can't use air planes or infiltrators. But even without those things, you'd think the 22x increase in small arms, munitions, and artillery would result in more than a 700% increase in military goods expenditures. Hell, my level 60 war machine industry in Wyoming is still nowhere near profitable even with conscription centers consuming 3.24k tanks per week.

I think the game might need some kind of depot cost associated with conscription centers and a balance pass on how input goods are used.