What would an economist call this situation?

[Froonk]

We have to dismiss the idea that economic crises happening means the game system is faulty, economic crises except stagnation not happening at all would be a faulty system in itself. Reasons for why the economic crisis happened is what is important, in some cases (like a bubble) the crisis could be an indication the system is working well. Malthusian limits should exist in some ways and population surplus is definitely a wall that can be hit, we can't account for just results.

Should a country really have infinitely available jobs for absurd amount of population and GDP growth? I don't think so. Labor scarcity was a thing in this era, and industrialization works best in an environment where there are labor limitations. We have to look at population growth numbers. Another point is should we be able to infinitely grow our construction sector, then say we should have no unemployment if this massive construction sector is not working? What is the issue here exactly?

Sure we are better administrators in a game than the bureaucrats in past managing real life economies might be in real life, but I don't think we should make people breed like rabbits just because they have better living standards, it seems to be opposite in general. Game needs to have realistic population pyramids to put a limit to this exponential population growth.

My view is that the economic growth in the game is a bit too much as well, the money is created like a fiat system, while the era had gold standard. This is an issue. In real life too the gold standard started causing problems, inflation and unemployment towards 70s which is when gold standard was abandoned altogether.

I don't know how limitations of liquidity could be represented however but it definitely should to put a stop to infinite credit and wage expansion.

 

[Fawr]

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.)

I don't mind some techs doing that. It's just a simplification to avoid tracking the expenditure of every bit of military gear.

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.

Conscription does seem out of whack. My understanding is that conscripts often have to do months of training (just in case), which would need some labour and equipment. You also need to have all the equipment (guns, tanks, artillery) for their deployment already constructed and ready to go, so why isn't that a ticking cost just like having the same equipment ready for your standing army to use?

It also seems weird that if you want your standing army to start using something new then they start off really inefficient. However conscripts can be using looms or plows one week and the same new military gear the next week without any of those issues.

Maybe they should slow down the rate at which conscripts assemble so that you need a standing force in case of defensive war (particularly early game)? The penalties could be overcome on a state by state basis with railways until it just takes a few weeks (WW1 German timeframes).

We have to dismiss the idea that economic crises happening means the game system is faulty, economic crises except stagnation not happening at all would be a faulty system in itself. Reasons for why the economic crisis happened is what is important, in some cases (like a bubble) the crisis could be an indication the system is working well. Malthusian limits should exist in some ways and population surplus is definitely a wall that can be hit, we can't account for just results.

I don't mind having limits or crises, but the type of limits the game has are just silly. The idea that a successful country will need to return to tech from half a century ago rather than work out a new way past their resource constraints still blows my mind.

 

[Froonk]

I don't mind having limits or crises, but the type of limits the game has are just silly. The idea that a successful country will need to return to tech from half a century ago rather than work out a new way past their resource constraints still blows my mind.

I agree with this issue, I also don't like idea of using very old production methods and honestly at one point that should actually not be cheaper to run, perhaps there needs to be an associate cost of changing production methods to make switching back and forth an actual investment. However without going to tangent, I think player needs some other ways of downsizing or overemploying.

 

[marxwasright]

If you were an economist, what would you call this situation?

Probably an 'externality' which in no way invalidates the models I make up in order to be accepted as a serious economist.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

[...] Conscription does seem out of whack. My understanding is that conscripts often have to do months of training (just in case), which would need some labour and equipment. You also need to have all the equipment (guns, tanks, artillery) for their deployment already constructed and ready to go, so why isn't that a ticking cost just like having the same equipment ready for your standing army to use?

It also seems weird that if you want your standing army to start using something new then they start off really inefficient. However conscripts can be using looms or plows one week and the same new military gear the next week without any of those issues. [...]

Tbh, I really wish V3 had gone for a HOI4-esque approach when it comes to military equipment - forgo the economic stockpiles, but keep them for the military.

So you just researched this brand new thing called Steel Artillery. Now you need to spend a decade actually producing sufficient numbers to slowly replace the old guns you have in service. What do you do with those? Well, maybe sell them to China, who is currently bogged down in a war with Russia, and you probably wouldn't mind to keep them busy a bit longer so that they won't interfere with your expansion into Persia.

It would add an economic & political dimension to tech, past the "research, swap out PM, wait 6-ish months" thing we have now.

 

[TitaniumMan91]

Tbh, I really wish V3 had gone for a HOI4-esque approach when it comes to military equipment - forgo the economic stockpiles, but keep them for the military.

So you just researched this brand new thing called Steel Artillery. Now you need to spend a decade actually producing sufficient numbers to slowly replace the old guns you have in service. What do you do with those? Well, maybe sell them to China, who is currently bogged down in a war with Russia, and you probably wouldn't mind to keep them busy a bit longer so that they won't interfere with your expansion into Persia.

It would add an economic & political dimension to tech, past the "research, swap out PM, wait 6-ish months" thing we have now.

Then you run into the HoI4 problem of untold millions of unused old guns floating around. I get both sides of this debate, but with where they want the focus and with the tools the player currently has, I think the current system is the best option. The inevitable war focused DLC rework will hopefully add depth and variety, but I would prefer they only do one true rework of the system because it get old relearning basic parts of the game, going back to Stellaris years later took me way to long to understand.

 

[Secret Master]

Tbh, I really wish V3 had gone for a HOI4-esque approach when it comes to military equipment - forgo the economic stockpiles, but keep them for the military.

The system has its advantages, certainly.

I suspect that for it to work really well, you'd want to encourage gameplay where all major powers are slowly but constantly expanding both standing armies and conscription depots for conscripts so that as both pools of battalions grow, you need both new guns and have a use for old guns to cover needs.

Perhaps a "spoilage" mechanic so that over time, guns not in production will attrition away.

Then you run into the HoI4 problem of untold millions of unused old guns floating around.

Infantry kits in HOI4 are in a weird place in a lot of games.

On the one hand, you need tons of guns to expand your army. That means putting X MIC on guns. And you probably want better infantry kits than what you started with. So, that means the MIC is swapped to a new production line near the outbreak of the war and loses efficiency (or between France and Soviets). Which means you need more guns at an inconvenient time. You put more MIC on it. 18 months later, you are swimming in infantry kits or you have raised a ton of new infantry divisions or you hare burned 100,000 kits in a year going on the offensive with infantry divisions. In two of those cases, you are overproducing simply because its time to swap over to something different.

It's really hard to get the number of MIC on kits "right." The last time I played the Soviets, I ran out of infantry kits. Like, I just straight up didn't have enough rifles for everyone... as I rolled into Berlin. I had 1000 heavy tanks with 1943 chassis in stockpile that because my tank divisions were simply not losing that many tanks, an air force with so many 1940 and 1944 planes that I couldn't fuel it all, and enough AA and ART to have bankrolled the British Raj for independence while still winning the war against Germany. But the humble PPsh-41? Yeah, there were troops suppressing partisans in Danzig who were doing their best Enemy At the Gates cosplay. And yet, in the game prior to this infantry kit starvation, I was sitting on 300,000 extra kits before Germany capitulated. I had managed to upgrade the entire Red Army to tier 2. :shrugs:

But what's interesting in this discussion is that in MP games, we sometimes face the opposite problem. Not enough infantry kits for occupying powers. In our group, we had to mod in some rules and traits for certain nations to cut down on "justify and annex Tibet just to get its infantry kits to help occupy China" kinds of strategies. (It was even more hilariously effective when someone in our group rewrote the production AI for minors and suddenly AI controlled minors had twice as many kits as unmodded AI minors in vanilla HOI4.)

This is all a long winded way of saying that the "unused guns problem" of HOI4 is a symptom of issues specific to that game and how people play it. A simple spoilage mechanic for unused small arms, ammo, and artillery (if such were included in stockpiles) would solve this issue.

Also, the Springfield 1861 should have atrocious stats compared to the Steyr 1912 Mauser, so hoarding Springfields should carry little benefit.

 

[LiberiusX]

Then you run into the HoI4 problem of untold millions of unused old guns floating around. I get both sides of this debate, but with where they want the focus and with the tools the player currently has, I think the current system is the best option. The inevitable war focused DLC rework will hopefully add depth and variety, but I would prefer they only do one true rework of the system because it get old relearning basic parts of the game, going back to Stellaris years later took me way to long to understand.

I don’t necessarily disagree, but I’ve actually enjoyed relearning Stellaris as the changes were needed to make the game more fun. In other words, I don’t mind fundamental changes if they enhance gameplay/depth

 

[MatthewP]

I know it's popular, but I think adding stockpiles for military goods would be a lateral move with a high dev cost, at best. You don't end up with much different outcomes in most cases:

-You need to spend on military goods in peacetime, like now.
-You generally can't use new types of weapons immediately, like now.
-Fighting more and deploying more troops leads to needing more military goods, like now.
-You get weird things that don't make sense, like now, just slightly different ones - "thank goodness we stored all these muskets in 1840, otherwise we'd really be having trouble here in WW1."

And some fixes that are proposed, like adding a spoilage mechanic, just functionally move the stockpile system closer to the abstracted version we have now where the optimal approach is constant production. At the end of the day the goal of stockpiling is to spread out the cost of wartime expenditure across peacetime, and the game already accomplishes it.

There are some things that are missing with the current system. It is cool to see a real economic effect as tech increases, or a real advantage going to a power with a more developed modern military-industrial complex that allows them to quickly adopt new technologies even in wartime. But these things don't require stockpiles or even work better with stockpiles. IMO the way to get this stuff is to:

1) Make advanced military PMs more expensive
2) Greatly reduce the duration of the equipment change modifier, or eliminate it.
3) Add extra costs (a multiplier to input goods) for switching to more advanced PMs which slowly decrease - this becomes the new disincentive to sit at lower tech levels. The cost increase and duration should be proportional to how big the tech change is.

Effectively this gives you the same choice as adding stockpiles: spend in peacetime to make sure you're ready for war, or don't and have to quickly ramp up a lot of production (and deal with short/medium term shortages) when war breaks out and you update your PMs. Also you can change to new techs during war, but only if you have the industry to support the changeover costs.

 

[FindFloppies]

This is all a long winded way of saying that the "unused guns problem" of HOI4 is a symptom of issues specific to that game and how people play it. A simple spoilage mechanic for unused small arms, ammo, and artillery (if such were included in stockpiles) would solve this issue.

And many of those issues are related to the fact that usually a 'long' HOI4 game covers 10 years. Usually less. So, a WWI rifle from storage still works in 1945, and, it isn't really a 'different' weapon. Improved weapon, yes, but it's still a 'rifle'.

On the other hand, if you have even the crappiest rifles, you probably don't want to use muskets. I've seen the mechanism, (I think in Civ, but I might be confused), where equipment A or idea B can be obsoleted by later tech D. i.e. *for you* if you have X grade of rifle, your stockpile of muskets is worthless, or you melt them down, or, something. They're not in your stockpile anymore.

 

[Secret Master]

And many of those issues are related to the fact that usually a 'long' HOI4 game covers 10 years. Usually less. So, a WWI rifle from storage still works in 1945, and, it isn't really a 'different' weapon. Improved weapon, yes, but it's still a 'rifle'.

Yeah.

A ton of game design choices in HOI4 stem from the 10 year time frame it covers, both in length and in it being those specific years.

It's one reason the "meme" focus trees are so, well, memey. If the US goes Communist starting in 1936, that's silly. If you had 30 years to get the US to become communist, that might be more believable.

 

[thedarkendstar]

The issue with economic cycles are they happen for a reason the economy expands and when a recession happens all the industries that were inefficient die but the game doesn't work this way the player wont even build a bubble if they know what there are doing they have perfect information how can the economic cycle occur when the whole countries economy is acting according to the players will?

 

[GAGA Extrem]

[...] On the one hand, you need tons of guns to expand your army. That means putting X MIC on guns. And you probably want better infantry kits than what you started with. So, that means the MIC is swapped to a new production line near the outbreak of the war and loses efficiency (or between France and Soviets). Which means you need more guns at an inconvenient time. You put more MIC on it. 18 months later, you are swimming in infantry kits or you have raised a ton of new infantry divisions or you hare burned 100,000 kits in a year going on the offensive with infantry divisions. In two of those cases, you are overproducing simply because its time to swap over to something different. [...]

The main problem I have with HOI4 in that regard is that there is simply no supply upkeep (in the form of a default attrition) for anything.

I recall playing as SOV in HOI2 and funnelling about 1/3 of my IC into producing supplies - which had the nice side effect that it also slowed down my army expansion, because I had less and less IC available to build new units.

Meanwhile in HOI4 the only thing that will limit your army expansion is manpower, time and potential combat losses. It doesn't matter if your Soviet Army is 200 or 2000 divisions, as long as you are at peace or don't lose any man in combat (e.g. by just standing behind the rivers in fortified provinces) all your industry needs to do is produce that bottomless bag of ammo & food alongside the rest of their infantry kit and they will be fine forever.

 

[Secret Master]

The main problem I have with HOI4 in that regard is that there is simply no supply upkeep (in the form of a default attrition) for anything.

You're not wrong.

And what you describe doesn't even take into account things like my "training cadre" method of creating new divisions or captured equipment from MAINT companies.

I will say this, though. It's a lot better than it was thanks to some changes that have been made over the years.

You lose planes when training air wings. And air wings start with terrible stats until they get some training. And attrition for just trying to move and fight in certain weather conditions really hurts land units. The mud and blizzard conditions on the eastern front matter now (though not quite as much as I would like). And while the AI isn't great at capitalizing on player logistics problems, motorizing supply and keeping a proper number of trucks and trains in action even when partisans and enemy planes are shooting them is a real priority now.

Also, low reliability has more impact than it did when the tank designer was new.

 

[TitaniumMan91]

I don’t necessarily disagree, but I’ve actually enjoyed relearning Stellaris as the changes were needed to make the game more fun. In other words, I don’t mind fundamental changes if they enhance gameplay/depth

The game is absolutely better for the changes, but it's still not fun to pick up a game I spent hundreds or thousands of hours in and realizing I have no idea how to even play anymore.

Guns could spoil, sure, but I think you'll still have absurd numbers of guns in weird places because AI gonna AI. Like you said, the strategy in MP is conquering minors for their stockpiles, and given the number of tags who don't fight unless the player drags them in I'm sure it would see a comeback.

I think the mistake was giving the arms factory a PM centered around the type of gun so you could be making musket small arms in the bolt action era, except you aren't actually doing that you're just making small arms. They should have gone with artisan/mass produced/stamped to reflect the changing manufacturing process

 

[TheHostName]

Tbh, I really wish V3 had gone for a HOI4-esque approach when it comes to military equipment - forgo the economic stockpiles, but keep them for the military.

Its technically already in the game for one thing: man of wars and ironclads. Wish it was the case for arty and Guns aswell...