Right. Set up a couple of basic industries to produce essential intermediate goods (cement, cloth, lumber, glass, steel), and a couple of industries for products which are in demand that actually use those intermediate goods (clothing, liquor, furniture, machine tools, and then Luxury clothes and furniture), prioritizing provinces where the raw materials are produced and the labor pool is decent. The economy grows exponentially, and I expand the factories as they near full employment.....then the liberals win an election. The capitalists build EIGHT new ammunition factories (there's 1 already), and all 9 fail and close within 2 years because of the massive overproduction and consequent price collapse. The world economy suffers a minor hiccup as things readjust, and my cloth factory closes, followed by my regular clothes and luxury clothes factories as a result of the shortage of cloth due to the cloth factory failure. Now I've suddenly got tens of thousands of unemployed Craftsmen, and the capitalists build more ammunition factories (soon to fail and close) in the regions which don't have one already. If I could have subsidized that cloth factory for the 2-3 months of the crisis, it all would have been fine. Instead, I've got massive unemployment and angry workers demanding free press, as if that makes sense.
Granted, if you're subsidizing industries in the long term, you're either doing something very wrong, or else propping up some specific vital weak link in the production chain for the sake of a host of other factories.
As said by other posters, in the first half of the campaign, you practically have to switch to Intervention or state capitalism every couple of decades to fix the mess, but after you reach some "critical mass", you can turn it over to L-F and it will weather almost all of those occasional dips.
What I'm seeing for V3 looks a lot more promising.
Well, there were obvious flaws in V2 economy, that should be adjusted, in particular the build only one level of factory, at once system, and probably some other weak links, but I can`t see what is your problem, since IRL economy suffers crisis every 10 or so years, so kinda working as expected.
Then, I`m fine with
occasionally having to intervene, as that is
also pretty historical, and those interventions
had a cost. You had to elect or appoint a necessary party (a great argument for keeping those pesky monarchs in place, or in some mods, not granting compete reforms, even if it pisses off population), paying militancy cost or manipulating needed party into power, and then having to suffer some minority pops getting militancy, because most state capitalist parties have less then liberal other policy positions.
Also LF more or less required you to research "suboptimal" techs, such as taxation, and factory efficiency, which, you might wanted to skip, in favor of something, which, is fine, as long as you can get in party that will at least allow you high taxes and subsidies, which, again,
had a cost.
You could also research socialists and get that party in power.
V3 could have implemented various ways for LF governments to encourage industries, as a default, but kept capitlists in charge, in LF.
Victoria 3, however just wants to
give your government power of economical intervention,
for free, at
no consequences, as opposed to player having to manipulate national elections or keep government that allows party switching, eating up dissent penalty, if needed.
As for reforms, yes, the way they were laid out in V2 made little sense, as little sense did initial set of party policies made sense, so why not improve them?
