Also one of the biggest factors in Vic2 is whether your country is in the top 5 immigrant destinations or not. Countries outside the top 5 most attractive immigrant destinations get 0 or almost 0 immigrants.
Will the authority mechanic railroad players into playing despotism?
- Thread starter Sir Boots
- Start date
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Again... The french revolution did neither require elections nor trade unions. And while your aristocrats will of course not like change that will mean they earn less money in the future, while the poor people earn more (i mean come on they are called poor for a reason...), they will definitely prefer one or two reforms over risking to meet a good old choping block...
- 1
If Victoria II is anything to go by, some little form of edge in some field for authorian regimes would probably be needed if these are going to stand a chance in the late game.
Anyways, imagine not spending every game LARPing as an anarchic commune.
- 2
- 1
My friend, I feel like you need to re-read the "Game Vision" dev diary. I don't think this is the game series for you.
- 4
The french revolution was the exact example o the nobility pushing things to the limit and then meeting Mr guillotine as a result.
The nobility and clergy famously didn't want to make concessions in the general estates, which lead to the third estate creating the national assembly.
Then, when a constitutional monarchy was going to be established, they still didn't want to make concessions and the king attempted to leave to gather outside support and crush the revolution, which was the last straw to begin the whole guilotinnin' business.
You seriously underestimate what the people in power will do to keep that power.
If the elites would simply roll over reforms whenever the people started getting a bit restless, we would've never seen any strikes, revolts or revolutions after 1815, which has clearly not been the case.
Even somewhat progressive monarchists like Bismark were under an electoral system, Prussia (and then Germany) wasn't an absolute monarchy after 1848.
And more illiberal monarchies like Russia and Austria had to make concessions for elected bodies after situations of widespread unrest as well.
But anyway, that part you quoted was meant to address game mechanics, not strictly history, it has already been stated that elections will significantly boost an IG's influence.
The poster I was responding to had argued for the player including trade unions in the government to pass reforms, and I'm arguing that, while you may indeed be able to do it, without elections unions will have far too low influence, and IGs with higher influence would be very unhappy as the result, becoming a serious thorn on your side because of it.
Perhaps not rebellion or revolutions if you pass "one or two reforms", but if this becomes a constant, it might very well escalate.
Last edited:
- 1
Because slaves don’t buy things, and so can’t provide a market for the goods the factory is producing. This is a huge part of the reason why the South didn’t industrialize. Whether it would have tried to use free or enslaved workers, there wasn’t enough demand for products in the Southern economy to make a factory system viable.
- 3
Because regardless of how well fed they are, some of your pops will act on their political beliefs. If you believe that your country should be ruled by its people, you'll still be pissed off at the government because it's illegitimate. The fact that your neighbors have it worse won't stop you from "doing it right this time". Just ask every communist out there. They will do it right in their country, of course.
- 1
But why they didn't industrialized using the raw goods from slavery? Slaves could produce free cotton, but the southern industries, with free labor, could produce fabric and clothes. They could sell these products in internal market and the excess to external markets. With advantages, as they would control all production, instead of selling cheap cotton to Britain, that exported more expensive fabric.
- 1
Slaves were used! In textile mills, sawmills, tobacco plants (factories?), you name it! Slavery, however, is incompatible with Fordism or global consumerism. The reason why wage slaves succeed today is that me and you consume more than enough to make up for them.
- 2
- 1
They lacked an internal market. Slaves had no purchasing power and most free whites had very little. Only the plantation elite had disposable income, and that’s not enough to build a market on. Plus, they preferred buying European imports most of the time anyway.
- 2
- 2
Don't forget that the Devs said that foreign ideas will slowly spread across your country. We don't have much information about how this will work but I guess that being an autocratic power surrounded by other liberal nations won't be an easy task without concessions.
- 2
- 1
- 1
Slavery and industrialization would only work in export focused countries, hell it is still the case today, countries were sweat shops are widespread are mainly export focused countries and mainly in Asia. So it would be a fight between if you would want a quick buck by maintaining cash crops or sweat shops to export to markets abroad or develop a market at home and expand a consumer base in which case you will prefer to pay your workers enough to buy the goods you produce. Each are different models and you can begiin as an export focus country with slave wages and transition to more home market focus with better pay and living standards, in essence this is what happened in China the last 30 years so it would be nice to model that in the game.
- 4
I agree that it should be possible to shift your country from one extreme focus to another, but I wonder how feasible that change would be. I can't say how effective a concentrated effort to transform an economy to home market would be during the Victorian age, but it's hard to picture it being a smooth ride. Unless you get stupid rich and start mass-building / heavily subsidizing factories for the home market that the recently-freed ex-slaves can then work in, shifting the production focus sounds like an easy way to get economically screwed, after which a revolution is almost certain.
One of the primary conditions for industrialization is when your local wages are higher than the competition's.
Innovation and mechanization are expensive and risky endeavors, they need to compensate their costs to be viable, so if you can get free labor, you have essentially no motive to industrialize.
That is what happened to Britain, for example, where they needed to compete with Indian production despite having shorter supply of workforce (and thus, higher wages), so industrialization became a necessity to remain competitive.
Industrialization wasn't a deterministic process, it only arises the way it did due to necessity.
In the US, the north industrialized exactly due to the lack of slaves, it wouldn't have had any need to do so otherwise.
From then on, on a macro scale, they see this huge untapped market that currently is dormant as slaves, and they of course want to take a share of it for themselves, so they start advocating for abolition.
It's also the reason why the UK started pressing for abolition in Latin America as a whole as well, it wasn't for the goodness of their hearts, it was to expand their own export markets.
This really.
In Vic2, as annoying and unreasonable as it may have been, it at least felt like dealing with people (which are often unreasonable and annoying themselves) with their own desires, instead of simply looking at a spreadsheet of numbers.
Are you talking about per capita production or rough plantation-wide production? Because, as you said, it can be in the end far more productive in absolute because you have more people working a same patch of land for more time with longer shifts and a almost industrial organization of labour, but as someone who lives on a country where latifundia to this day dominates i can assure you that much productive capacity is wasted because neither the plantation owners nor the workers have much incentive to make complete use of their lands, since the slaves won't gain anything from it and the plantation owners don't need absolute efficiency. I'm sure the crack of the whipe can drive someone to work harder, but small-scale sabotage and lack of willingness to work where also constants of slave economies all throughout the world.
On the issue of taxation, you don't use it only to pay for infraestructure and education, you also need to pay the army and your bureaucracy, vital functions of any State since its inception, and most rulers in history wanted to expand their power, wich implies the expansion of these tools of state, wich implies more need for taxes. After all, the raising of taxes that led to american and french revolutions surely wasn't made to pay teachers or roadbuilding.
- 1
I don't know if I agree with this. Anti-slavery feeling (including but not limited to abolitionism) came from two big sources:
1) Moralism, influenced by the Second Great Awakening in particular. This was mostly mostly a middle and upper class phenomenon and was more associated with abolitionism.
2) Fear that the expansion of slavery would cut off the frontier in the west. This was more of a lower class phenomenon and tended to lead to support for Free Soil (ie no further expansion of slavery)
These are not necessarily discrete motivations and do overlap; however, I don't think tapping blacks as consumers for Northern products was a big concern. If anything, Northern industrialists had a strong incentive to maintain the plantation system, since it was feeding the textile industry its raw materials.
A good test of this comes in Reconstruction. If Northern industrialists and liberals had been more concerned about getting more consumers for the American industrial economy, they would have pushed for free land and cheap credit in the South. If they were more concerned about maintaining supplies of cotton, they would have opposed breaking up the plantations and pursued hard money policy to force black and white laborers into share cropping.
Reconstruction, even during its Radical phase, pursued the latter strategy. There were other factors, but securing high cotton production was a big part of why it did.
- 2
Looks like they needed a Share Our Wealth plan with Slaving Charactaristics!
Yes, there will always be people like this, but they should be the minority, not the majority. Many revolutions are spearheaded by the most radical; most people, typically, are along for the ride.
Last edited:
- 1