Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #10 - Infrastructure

[BeauNiddle]

I have a few questions for anyone who can answer them.

1. What's the difference between tickets and infrastructure usage? If the cost to transport goods is modeled via infrastructure usage, then do buildings have to buy tickets to transport their goods (either in or out)? Do pops consume tickets, and if so, what do they need them for? vacationing? migration? business trips?

2. I'm worried about the way modelling rivers as straight infrastructure bonuses will work. Let's say state A has a river that makes up its western border and it borders a state B on its east. State B has a ton of railroads built and is directly connected to the capital (more than enough infrastructure to handle state B's needs). But there's no built infrastructure in state A, just the bonus from that river. But since that river doesn't actually connect to state B, conceptually, the infrastructure granted by that river shouldn't give state A any market access. To use the river to connect to the market, there should have to be some sort of railroad or canal system built in the state to transfer goods from that river across the state to state B's railroads. I'm worried right now that we're effectively pretending that that river will connect up to the railroads even though the river is on the complete opposite side of the state.

3. I certainly understand how having multiple markets per country wouldn't make good gameplay, but I think it'd be good for a few instances, particularly colonies and psuedo-colonial areas of a country. For example, California for the US, BC for Canada, the Far East for Russia, India for Britain, etc. I'd think that it should only be a thing for particularly massive countries and for colonial nations. Not for like Austria-Hungary. I also think they probably shouldn't be "optional," like when Californian settlement starts, a market should appear there, and it should automatically disappear when the transcontinental rail network gets robust enough.

4. Who gets to choose where the market capital moves if there are multiple countries in a single market? This would be especially sticky if there's not a particularly dominant member of what is effectively a customs union.

5. Can mines and farms produce any good in any state? I've heard it won't be one good per state like with RGOs, but will states have a set of resources that can be produced (based on climate for crops and mineral deposits for those goods)? Or will it be like an "all mines in this state produce copper" or "copper mines can be built in any state" system?

1) tickets are an input good for specific production methods. If you connect your steel factory to the rail system (alter the production method in the building) then you need fewer labourers to transport goods but you have to buy tickets. It's a way of representing the cost for improved productivity.

Infrastructure is just for calculating if the finished goods can make it to the national market or not.

2) Yes you will get the infrastructure bonus even tho the river is no where near the railway. The transportation capacity of infrastructure is a (very fast) abstraction that is easy for computers to calculate. It is NOT a simulation of goods moving around. This is why rivers that don't connect to railways give bonuses and why 6 100 infra states feeding into 1 100 infra state on the way to the market center still work at full speed without needing to up the infra in that 1 state to 700 (to handle it's own requirements + that of the 6 other)

It is not an accurate simulation - it is a reasonable abstraction to cover the complexities of transportation, and an improvement on Vic2.

3) I agree - I really want to know how colonies work. I've been assuming that India, etc would be different markets for UK to have access to. Hopefully they tell us more when they cover naval shipping.

4) I think the intent is there will always be a dominant member. This is Victorian period (first amongst equals), not the modern EU (lets pretend everybody has a say)

5) States have a limited number of resources available (but more than one. Not sure if it's one per province or just a list somewhere). You then use buildings to extract what you want. So if a state only has copper available you can only build copper mines. If the state has iron & copper available you decide which buildings to place/upgrade. If the state doesn't have copper at all you can't mine it.

Farms have climate affinities so you can build rice farms in some places, wheat farms in others, barley elsewhere. For easy of use I think all 3 of those farms then produce the "Grain" good but at differing productivity rates and with differing upgrades available.

 

[Balesir]

2. I'm worried about the way modelling rivers as straight infrastructure bonuses will work. Let's say state A has a river that makes up its western border and it borders a state B on its east. State B has a ton of railroads built and is directly connected to the capital (more than enough infrastructure to handle state B's needs). But there's no built infrastructure in state A, just the bonus from that river. But since that river doesn't actually connect to state B, conceptually, the infrastructure granted by that river shouldn't give state A any market access. To use the river to connect to the market, there should have to be some sort of railroad or canal system built in the state to transfer goods from that river across the state to state B's railroads. I'm worried right now that we're effectively pretending that that river will connect up to the railroads even though the river is on the complete opposite side of the state.

I'm not worried about it at all. It's already been said that the system is something of an abstraction, but besides that I think it does effectively model a number of influences:

1) If a really large river runs along a state border, the larger settlements will tend to be built on or near that river. This has happened since time immemorial because rivers are so effective for transportation, and (some) people think about what they are doing before they do it.

2) Large rivers also have smaller rivers feeding into them. They may not be shown on the map, but the presence of smaller rivers and ancient canals is strongly implied by the proximity of a big river.

Further musing on (minor) canals: By the game start date, canal building was really slowing up in northern Europe, at least, so rivers as a proxy for canals might work fairly well; if you don't have any rivers, after all, you won't get any useful canals (exception: the coast, but I sincerely hope that this counts as a "really big river" or something equivalent for infrastructure purposes). Hopefully, too, there will be technologies that relate to river transport that increase the infrastructure from rivers - minor canal building could be factored in here, for places that don't start after the "canal age".

 

[hazard151]

Market Capital is usually the political capital at start but can be moved. The US is an exception, starting with New York as their market capital instead of Washington DC.

And the Netherlands? The political capital would be in Den Haag and the market capital in Amsterdam (and the actual capital is Amsterdam too, the Netherlands are a bit weird in this because it's not where the government is). I would guess that the game won't go down to that level though.

It really depends on how heavily you want to industrialize compared to how much you want to spend on maintaining infrastructure. A better alternative to just having the same level of railroad everywhere could for sure be to create pockets of heavy infrastructure and industrialization with weaker rail lines to the countryside where a focus on rural buildings means you don't need as much logistical support.

Also historically accurate, plenty of large nations with vast tracks of (otherwise potentially not useful) land concentrated their industrialization in relatively confined and often already well settled areas and let the more rural areas of the nation supply raw materials.

It's not that I exactly don't want minor canals in the game, it's just that if we're to have them I don't want them to fill the exact same role as railroads. They should either be a precursor in an earlier start date, or to for instance be a cheaper alternative that is only available in certain places. We'll likely not have them for release though.

Or another, potentially radical, option. We already have subsistence farms and the like as the '0th level' development for certain natural resources. If you turn 'major waterways' into a similar natural resource that can be exploited in a relatively inefficient manner and canals into efficient, managed waterways you can definitely get that effect.

I mean, it's not as if canals were an unknown, the Canal Midi in France has been operating since the 17th century, and early railways often hired canal diggers to cut the paths they needed due to limitations of early steam engines. They weren't exactly cheap to build but neither were railways, and they could move large cargoes, if not at tremendous speed then with relatively limited technical expertise required. Canal boats were often pulled along by horses, after all, rather than rowed or sailed. All you need is fodder, fresh horses and peasants to take care of them.

 

[BrotherJonathan]

I must say, I am interested to see how the devs integrate canals into the infrastructure system, if at all.

 

[zipaks]

Hi there, amazing DDs so far! I'm anxious to play Vicky 3!
I have a question and a few suggestions if you'd like.

Will terrain affect infrastructure? and if so will it be possible to build a railway on a mountainous province with low tech or will it be kinda like vicky 2?

There should be a bonus if a log industry is located in a wood producing town, it'd be weird to have no synergy whatsoever.

It would be nice to have a special building in the likes of a rail port channeling goods from an area, it could work almost like "splitting" market zones in order to make industrial hubs. I imagine this as having a rail port in the middle of Siberia resulting in a province or state with a huge potential for becoming a industrial hub sending goods back to Moscow -provided with enough infrastructure that would simulate the supply/demand between this one state or province in Siberia itself and Moscow - without the need to improve the infrastructure from entire nearby states to feed the entire market so that Siberia can be well fed. Dry ports could work around the same aspect.

My thinking of this comes from the idea that the goods will have to travel all the way to the market capital zone so that they can be traded with nearby provinces, i.e. Vladivostok is close to and has a great infrastructure connecting it to Kamchatka but it wouldn't matter since its connection to the capital is very poor, so local prices will depend only on how well connected is the local infrastructure with the capital. If Kamchatka could itself supply Vladivostok's demands and vice-versa, they should have their own prices of goods, it makes no sense they have to travel all the way back to the capital market in order to go back again to the other province. Is that correct or am I missing something?

 

[hazard151]

There should be a bonus if a log industry is located in a wood producing town, it'd be weird to have no synergy whatsoever.

There is, States can have modifiers that impact how well it produces certain goods. The Minsk region, for example, has the Russian Forests modifier which increases the efficiency of logging industries.

There is not currently a synergy to also having an industry that processes wood, like a paper mill or furniture factory, in that same region though. They're looking into it.

It would be nice to have a special building in the likes of a rail port channeling goods from an area, it could work almost like "splitting" market zones in order to make industrial hubs. I imagine this as having a rail port in the middle of Siberia resulting in a province or state with a huge potential for becoming a industrial hub sending goods back to Moscow -provided with enough infrastructure that would simulate the supply/demand between this one state or province in Siberia itself and Moscow - without the need to improve the infrastructure from entire nearby states to feed the entire market so that Siberia can be well fed. Dry ports could work around the same aspect.

My thinking of this comes from the idea that the goods will have to travel all the way to the market capital zone so that they can be traded with nearby provinces, i.e. Vladivostok is close to and has a great infrastructure connecting it to Kamchatka but it wouldn't matter since its connection to the capital is very poor, so local prices will depend only on how well connected is the local infrastructure with the capital. If Kamchatka could itself supply Vladivostok's demands and vice-versa, they should have their own prices of goods, it makes no sense they have to travel all the way back to the capital market in order to go back again to the other province. Is that correct or am I missing something?

You are missing something. A State needs to be able to trace a line back to the trade capital where the lowest infrastructure in any state along that line cannot be lower than the total used infrastructure in the originating state to achieve full access. If Kamchatka needs 10 Infrastructure and has it, and Vladivostok needs 50 but has 40 and both can draw a line back to Moscow with 30 Infrastructure at the lowest point Kamchatka has 100% Market Access and Vladivostok 60%.

At least if I'm reading the Dev Diary and Q&A post correctly.

 

[Darsara]

So railways are build over the whole state at the same time, yes? On one hand, it does keep it simpler and quicker; on the other hand, it does negatively effect a few edge cases, like the fact that the early trans-continental railways in North America and Russia will no longer a single course of tracks cutting across the land, and will instead be empty, barely used tracks looping over great distances around a main transit corridor, wasting a lot of extra resources for what's actually needed (just enough to cover the throughput, not local demand) and making the visuals very odd.

 

[Spartakusbund]

So railways are build over the whole state at the same time, yes?

I don't know if we know enough yet to conclude that.

 

[Axe99]

Further musing on (minor) canals: By the game start date, canal building was really slowing up in northern Europe, at least, so rivers as a proxy for canals might work fairly well; if you don't have any rivers, after all, you won't get any useful canals (exception: the coast, but I sincerely hope that this counts as a "really big river" or something equivalent for infrastructure purposes). Hopefully, too, there will be technologies that relate to river transport that increase the infrastructure from rivers - minor canal building could be factored in here, for places that don't start after the "canal age".

It's important to bear in mind the 'canal age' hasn't finished yet - between the 1960s and the 1990s, tonnage of goods transferred by canal in Europe increased substantially - it's still the case that bulk, non-time-critical goods are significantly cheaper to transport by water than land. The UK dropped out of the canal game because their narrow canals were never upgraded when rail came along, but canals are still being used and maintained/built to this day in China and Europe, at the very least. From a very quick-and-dirty Google, form the "Canals" page of Wikipedia, about France:

"In France, a steady linking of all the river systems – Rhine, Rhône, Saône and Seine – and the North Sea was boosted in 1879 by the establishment of the Freycinet gauge, which specified the minimum size of locks. Canal traffic doubled in the first decades of the 20th century."

I'm not 'worried' per se by the current approach (it's a big step up on Vicky 2 - improvement is always good ), but I do think it's a bit of a missed opportunity, and Paradox showing their partial-blindness to all things waterborne again. The directional nature of rivers had a huge influence on how countries developed, but here they're just a static modifier, so it doesn't really matter in which direction the river runs. I also doubt there are any river-based ports enabling market access to the coast for goods dropped off by railroad at that river-based port, for example. It changes the geographical influences on development - and a large part of Vicky is about a nation's economic development. It seems Vicky 3's take on canals is based entirely on the British experience (which, to be fair, dominates most of the English-language information on the internet), and neglects their continued use elsewhere.

It feels a doubly-missed opportunity because there is a mechanic for the directional nature of railroads (hence the comment on sea-blindness earlier - for whatever reason the more expensive and often lower-capacity railroad traffic gets extra love, while the cheaper and often larger-capacity waterborne traffic is a static state modifier). I get that railroads developed in a more 'tangible' way in this era (laying of railroad tracks is an emotive and 'exciting' thing, while rivers were already there, and canals were never as geographically extensive as railroad tracks), but there were huge improvements in the way goods were shipped over water in the Vicky timeframe, and arguably the advances in waterborne trade went at least as hand-in-hand with the industrial revolution than the railroad, even if it's the railroad that captured the popular imagination (possibly because ships already existed, so they weren't 'new and shiny', per se).

I'd also note we haven't heard anything about coastlines providing infrastructure at all - despite it being raised a few times now - given the history of PDS on things maritime, I'd argue this means it's far more likely to have been overlooked than "it's been added in and they just left it out of the Dev Diary specifically on infrastructure."

 

[Darsara]

I don't know if we know enough yet to conclude that.

Strictly speaking we do not; I'm asking that question, since what we've been shown suggests it's running at State level like almost everything we've been shown is, and based on a statewide level. I mean, other than (presumably) movement and a rare land transfers, has anything been confirmed to work at province level in Vic3?

 

[hazard151]

So railways are build over the whole state at the same time, yes? On one hand, it does keep it simpler and quicker; on the other hand, it does negatively effect a few edge cases, like the fact that the early trans-continental railways in North America and Russia will no longer a single course of tracks cutting across the land, and will instead be empty, barely used tracks looping over great distances around a main transit corridor, wasting a lot of extra resources for what's actually needed (just enough to cover the throughput, not local demand) and making the visuals very odd.

You forget that it is very common for such tracks to become the focal transit corridor, with local, state wide transportation shifting as much in the way of goods towards the most efficient/effective transportation system as possible. Cowboys used to drive cattle hundreds if not thousands of miles from the ranches to the slaughterhouses and processing plants of the Wild West, but as the West became less wild and more settled with more railway tracks those journeys became a lot shorter.

Those tracks might still be single track over great distances, because 10 Infrastructure is nice but on the scale of things not exactly Earth shattering or representative of how much a heavily developed area would need. But for what would in fact be marginally productive and demanding areas in the backwaters of a vast nation, that one, singular stretch of track hundreds if not thousands of kilometers in length and serving an area hundreds of kilometers wide is generally speaking, enough.

I mean, looking at the Infrastructure Usage list and the text blurb about it, it only records stuff that are actually on average impacting it. Subsistence farms aren't counted, because near enough all their product is used locally and doesn't even leave the farm, let alone the state, and urban centers aren't counted because while they do create a level of infrastructure (and at high enough levels would in the abstract need rail or tramways of some sort), they have a net zero impact because all the infrastructure they create is also used up by them to facilitate their existence.

I'd also note we haven't heard anything about coastlines providing infrastructure at all - despite it being raised a few times now - given the history of PDS on things maritime, I'd argue this means it's far more likely to have been overlooked than "it's been added in and they just left it out of the Dev Diary specifically on infrastructure."

You forget that multiple times the Dev Diaries have now said 'but how sea transportation and stuff works is a subject for a different DevDiary'. Hell, they did it in this DevDiary. I'm also disappointed that rivers are a flat modifier rather than something you can interact more directly with for the same reason, mind you. But it is also not wrong to note that during the time of the game, canals and river traffic were massively impacted by the existence of railways and diminished in importance.

 

[Axe99]

You forget that multiple times the Dev Diaries have now said 'but how sea transportation and stuff works is a subject for a different DevDiary'. Hell, they did it in this DevDiary. I'm also disappointed that rivers are a flat modifier rather than something you can interact more directly with for the same reason, mind you. But it is also not wrong to note that during the time of the game, canals and river traffic were massively impacted by the existence of railways and diminished in importance.

I haven't forgotten at all - however, it's not clear at all that this refers to anything other than international (or at least overseas) trade. It might include coastal traffic, in which case it's all good, the devs can chuckle at how I've missed the point, and watch me eat humble pie when that dev diary comes out. But given the relative blindness to the importance of waterborne traffic seen so far, it's not an irrational concern that it won't be included.

As for railroads diminishing the relative importance of waterborne transport, there's no question that's the case (it's logically impossible for it to be anything but the case, given railroads are more-or-less new, and waterborne transport isn't) - but that's not an argument for ignoring it entirely. What would be very useful would be period-relevant figures on tonnages of goods shifted by train alone, train and water, and water alone, from 1836 through to 1935.

I can't find any historical numbers, but for modern figures (2011) it's clear that inland water transport (barges) is still relevant (and modern figures are likely to significantly undercount the importance of both rail and water due to the rise of road-based freight) - from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_freight_transport:

Within the U.S. railroads carry 39.9% of freight by ton-mile, followed by trucks (33.4%), oil pipelines (14.3%), barges (12%) and air (0.3%)
Railways carried 17.1% of EU freight in terms of tonne-km,[33] compared to road transport (76.4%) and inland waterways (6.5%).

 

[Darsara]

You forget that it is very common for such tracks to become the focal transit corridor, with local, state wide transportation shifting as much in the way of goods towards the most efficient/effective transportation system as possible. Cowboys used to drive cattle hundreds if not thousands of miles from the ranches to the slaughterhouses and processing plants of the Wild West, but as the West became less wild and more settled with more railway tracks those journeys became a lot shorter.

Those tracks might still be single track over great distances, because 10 Infrastructure is nice but on the scale of things not exactly Earth shattering or representative of how much a heavily developed area would need. But for what would in fact be marginally productive and demanding areas in the backwaters of a vast nation, that one, singular stretch of track hundreds if not thousands of kilometers in length and serving an area hundreds of kilometers wide is generally speaking, enough.

I mean, looking at the Infrastructure Usage list and the text blurb about it, it only records stuff that are actually on average impacting it. Subsistence farms aren't counted, because near enough all their product is used locally and doesn't even leave the farm, let alone the state, and urban centers aren't counted because while they do create a level of infrastructure (and at high enough levels would in the abstract need rail or tramways of some sort), they have a net zero impact because all the infrastructure they create is also used up by them to facilitate their existence.

I'm not forgetting that they become corridors; there was vast amounts of land speculation here in Canada based about where a railway might be built, with vast amounts of money changing hands as people tried to by up land to either sell to railway companies, or hold onto to become the landlords of whole town that would form along them. The politics about where a station would be build/maintained was (and is) life or death for many towns in Prairies, and other parts of Canada. There is there's also a difference between, say, building a rail corridor across Saskatchewan to aid trans-continental shipping verses building links to small farming/mining communities in quality and the effort you put into it.

Part of question, though, is based on shear Space, though; if the styling used for States and provinces are roughly the same as in Victoria 2, then ensuring that there good railways in Toronto or the St Lawrence Valley means that there IS extensive railways in in the Hudson Bay coast, literally 1,000km's and more away and sparsely developed and populated even today. Unless, of course, we assume that area is shown on the map, but not actually 'there', because if I was to build lots of mines and logging sites in Ontario, I would assume that lots of it up north, and if those are benefiting from the infrastructure quality, we'd need to assume that either it is there. Or if I built a port of there, would it instantly benefit from infrastructure connections? Which is one thing to decide it's worthwhile to expand the forestry and mines, and build a port complex up there, but to just assume that anyone trying to develop the Golden Horseshoe is also going to keep an equal level of development in the far north is, as a Northern Ontarian, honestly laughable. We can't even get funding to restore the main passenger railway of improve road maintenance.

And one small area of tracks isn't going to cut it for transporting lumber or iron ore if you need to transport it by wagon over 300km of Canadian Shield just to reach it.

And no, none of this is vital or even truly important; it's just the sort of thing I notice and think about. I mean, we don't even know infrastructure costs scale with the actual size of the state, and for the sake of simplicity it probably won't, and it takes the same amount of money and manpower to maintain the railroads of Quebec (1,542,056 km2) as they do New Jersey (22,591.38 km) and I don't need to wonder why my people are wasting resources maintaining good service nobody is using so much.

 

[Shneemaster]

I'm not forgetting that they become corridors; there was vast amounts of land speculation here in Canada based about where a railway might be built, with vast amounts of money changing hands as people tried to by up land to either sell to railway companies, or hold onto to become the landlords of whole town that would form along them. The politics about where a station would be build/maintained was (and is) life or death for many towns in Prairies, and other parts of Canada. There is there's also a difference between, say, building a rail corridor across Saskatchewan to aid trans-continental shipping verses building links to small farming/mining communities in quality and the effort you put into it.

Part of question, though, is based on shear Space, though; if the styling used for States and provinces are roughly the same as in Victoria 2, then ensuring that there good railways in Toronto or the St Lawrence Valley means that there IS extensive railways in in the Hudson Bay coast, literally 1,000km's and more away and sparsely developed and populated even today. Unless, of course, we assume that area is shown on the map, but not actually 'there', because if I was to build lots of mines and logging sites in Ontario, I would assume that lots of it up north, and if those are benefiting from the infrastructure quality, we'd need to assume that either it is there. Or if I built a port of there, would it instantly benefit from infrastructure connections? Which is one thing to decide it's worthwhile to expand the forestry and mines, and build a port complex up there, but to just assume that anyone trying to develop the Golden Horseshoe is also going to keep an equal level of development in the far north is, as a Northern Ontarian, honestly laughable. We can't even get funding to restore the main passenger railway of improve road maintenance.

And one small area of tracks isn't going to cut it for transporting lumber or iron ore if you need to transport it by wagon over 300km of Canadian Shield just to reach it.

And no, none of this is vital or even truly important; it's just the sort of thing I notice and think about. I mean, we don't even know infrastructure costs scale with the actual size of the state, and for the sake of simplicity it probably won't, and it takes the same amount of money and manpower to maintain the railroads of Quebec (1,542,056 km2) as they do New Jersey (22,591.38 km) and I don't need to wonder why my people are wasting resources maintaining good service nobody is using so much.

I doubt all of Ontario and Quebec are going to be a single states.

 

[WIL0504]

I can't wait to desperately fail at maintaining the Trans-Andean Rail Line as any South American state.

 

[hazard151]

I haven't forgotten at all - however, it's not clear at all that this refers to anything other than international (or at least overseas) trade. It might include coastal traffic, in which case it's all good, the devs can chuckle at how I've missed the point, and watch me eat humble pie when that dev diary comes out. But given the relative blindness to the importance of waterborne traffic seen so far, it's not an irrational concern that it won't be included.

As for railroads diminishing the relative importance of waterborne transport, there's no question that's the case (it's logically impossible for it to be anything but the case, given railroads are more-or-less new, and waterborne transport isn't) - but that's not an argument for ignoring it entirely. What would be very useful would be period-relevant figures on tonnages of goods shifted by train alone, train and water, and water alone, from 1836 through to 1935.

I can't find any historical numbers, but for modern figures (2011) it's clear that inland water transport (barges) is still relevant (and modern figures are likely to significantly undercount the importance of both rail and water due to the rise of road-based freight) - from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_freight_transport:

Within the U.S. railroads carry 39.9% of freight by ton-mile, followed by trucks (33.4%), oil pipelines (14.3%), barges (12%) and air (0.3%)
Railways carried 17.1% of EU freight in terms of tonne-km,[33] compared to road transport (76.4%) and inland waterways (6.5%).

Wel,, I've got one example from the wikipedia article for the Canal du Midi, which noted a high during the 19th century of 110 million ton-kilometers in 1858, when it was already facing competition by rail, after which it got handed over to the stewardship of a rail company in 1858, which tried very hard to make their rail line running the same course much, much more attractive. In 1859 it registered 59 million ton-kilometers, or about half the peak of 3 years previous, and by 1896, the end of said rail line's control it had dropped down to 28 million ton-kilometers, or about 25% of the peak during the 19th century.

Interestingly, these figures rapidly recovered after the government took the canal back from the rail company and removed the tolls, having more than doubled from the 1896 figure by 1900 to 66 million ton-kilometers.

 

[Axe99]

Wel,, I've got one example from the wikipedia article for the Canal du Midi, which noted a high during the 19th century of 110 million ton-kilometers in 1858, when it was already facing competition by rail, after which it got handed over to the stewardship of a rail company in 1858, which tried very hard to make their rail line running the same course much, much more attractive. In 1859 it registered 59 million ton-kilometers, or about half the peak of 3 years previous, and by 1896, the end of said rail line's control it had dropped down to 28 million ton-kilometers, or about 25% of the peak during the 19th century.

Interestingly, these figures rapidly recovered after the government took the canal back from the rail company and removed the tolls, having more than doubled from the 1896 figure by 1900 to 66 million ton-kilometers.

Cheers, that's interesting info It'd probably be quite the case study to see how much of the decline in canals was anti-competitive behaviour from the rail companies as opposed to actual comparative disadvantage. And will we be able to see it happen in Vicky 3 as well?!

 

[Iggy]

How can you simulate local patches of industrialization with the requirement of infrastructure to the capital?
There are plenty of examples of areas that were heavy industrialized, rich and had strong local infrastructure but with poor connections to the capital.

 

[grommile]

How can you simulate local patches of industrialization with the requirement of infrastructure to the capital?
There are plenty of examples of areas that were heavy industrialized, rich and had strong local infrastructure but with poor connections to the capital.

I'm sure there were; please cite a few to make the point clearer

 

[NilsFabian]

What will happen to my infrastructure in Siberia in 1908?
I'd hate to build up infrastructure and industry there just to see it smashed