First of all, a long overdue, and quite appropriate
mea culpa and
please excuse me to
lawkeeper; I have reread what and how I posted and neither the words nor the tone were appropos. I must have been REALLY tired or mad at someone else.
I've looked into this further. I have the answer.
The Financial Summary window has some limitations, most importantly the fact that the summary of income portion is woefully inadequate to report all the types of income you receive in a month. There are eight different income categories reported in the ledger; squeezing that down into three or four line items in the Summary is very difficult.
To accomplish this, the line item "Tax Income" includes Ledger entries for "Taxation," "Tolls," and "Trade Tarriffs," as well as, if you have them, "Vassals." "Tolls" you might recall are reported as "Trade Taxes" in the tooltip that appears when you hover over Province Income in a province information window. The line item "Trading Income" reflects what it should, that is, income from your traders. "Gold Mines" show you the production income you receive from your gold mines, provinces for which no true "production income" is received.
"Goods Production" is another issue entirely. This line in the Financial Summary reports two Ledger entries: "Production" and "Manufactory." This comes with two
caveats: 1. It incorrectly
truncates monthly manufactory income to a whole number only (instead of rounding to the nearest tenth), and 2. It will not report manufactory income for the month of January.
To test out this situation, I loaded and played as Russia in the Napoleon's Ambition scenario. During the first two years, Russia is reported in the Financial Summary screen as having monthly production income of 33.1 ducats, except in the screen appearing during February, which reports January's income and expenditures. That one month reports production income of 31.1 ducats. It also reports a total income 2.5 ducats lower (roughly) than the months to either side.
I saved the game each month on the first of the month during 1796. This way I could check the actual figures for the Treasury, the reported ledger entries, and the reported "lastmonthincome" and "lastmonthexpense." Not surprisingly, given the Financial Summary screen, the "lastmonthincome" for the save on Feb 1 showed 118.813 ducats; for the save on Mar 1 the "lastmonthincome" was 121.313 ducats. BUT, the Treasury figure saved for Feb. 1 was consistent with income of 121.313 ducats. "Aha!" I said to myself. That is the same as the reported manufactory monthly income!
I looked at the save from Jan. 1. THAT save listed no manufactory income in the ledger for the current year (which had just started) or the current month. But the save files for Feb. 1 and Mar. 1 both showed not only manufactory income for the proper number of month prior to the save (2.5 for Feb, 5.0 for Mar), but also manufactory income
already recorded for the "current month." In other words, The manufactory income is granted at the very beginning of the month, before I could manually stop the computer and save in all cases except January, where the income doesn't appear until the very end of the month.
Thus, it isn't clear exactly why the game runs this way, but "Goods Production" in the Financial Summary reports a combination of Production and Manufactory incomes every month
except for February (January's results), when it doesn't report your manufactory income from January. Fortunately, the game includes that income in the total income for the month that it uses to calculate investment income and Treasury income/expenditure.
As to the truncation issue, I tested this by manually altering the save file for March 1 to add a fourth manufactory in a "wrong" province, then adding two more, then subtracting one. In all cases, the result was predictable. "Goods Production" went up by one full ducat after adding one manufactory, went up another full ducat adding two more, but lost a full ducat when removing one (for a total of five). Instead of adding 3.5 ducats to "Goods Production," it only added 3, just as it was only adding 2 at the start of the game when it should have been adding 2.5 to the display.
Interestingly enough, when you restart the game, the Financial Summary the first month after you restart doesn't reflect the increased income from the added in manufactories, although the income IS added to the Ledger and the Treasury. Obviously, the game uses something other than the actual addition of manufactory income to calculate that income for the Summary; most likely basing it on the truncated income reported for the previous month.
In summary: there are two display bugs. One improperly truncates the monthly income from manufactories when adding that income to Production income to create the line item entry "Goods Production" in the Financial Summary screen. The other improperly fails to add the manufactory income to the summary of January income/expenditure, thus seeming to underreport "Goods Production" for that month. Neither bug affects the actual calculations the game uses to determine what you have invested in research or what you have added to/spent from your Treasury.
I'm guessing for
lawkeeper that can add up to quite an underreport by the mid-16th century, with all those FA's in existence!!
