Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #143 - Trade Rework: The World Market

[spooq]

Will the new port system do anything to resolve the "Australia problem", where goods that are made in the same market on the other side of the earth are as cheap to access as ones made round the corner?

 

[Uber_Barleyman]

Monopolies always produce less and at a lower quality. If productivity is the goal the player should be pushing to eliminate monopolies and prevent them from forming. You would only create monopolies for controlling the population and securing power.

If you create a monopoly it could be tied to certain pops or interest groups, and give you leverage over their politics and the ability to suppress or prevent their radicalism.

The last thing a monopoly should do is improve efficiency. Monopolies do the opposite of that, categorically.

 

[DWeird]

I like it! I haven't read all replies so apologies if this has already been asked, but I feel like there's a strange little niggle now.

Since imported goods are sold at local prices and... autarky-produced goods are sold at national market prices, there is now a weird implication that different states in the same country can sell and buy the same good to the World Market with both a markup and a discount.

For example, if Middle Egypt is making Cotton and Lower Egypt is making Clothes, they both would gain by selling to and buying from the World Market respectively.

Does this happen? How does the World Market interact with National Markets versus Local Markets?

Perhaps less importantly, Market Access seems like it's going to control a lot of how profitable trade is, which in turn counterintuitively means that less politically advanced societies are going to naturally have higher volumes of trade, which both feels off and might have unexpected political consequences, right?

...and getting really into the weeds here, but what about stuff like intentionally crashing your infrastructure score so as to live off trade with the world market entirely?


To summarize, there seems to now be a strong incentive to avoid goods ever hitting National Markets at all. That's good in that encourages trade, but feels like would produce a number of strange second-order effects as well. Am I missing anything important in my understanding of how things will work?

 

[Bisonmask]

That's on you. Those terms are nowhere near as obscure.

In my defense I was 14, either way the point is that learning a new word isn't very burdensome

 

[Mayra Silva]

Does anything in the new implementation help fix the superiority of land trade? Historically, maritime trade was more efficient due to the speed and simplicity of moving goods via boat, compared with the difficulties moving goods by land (roads, railway routes, geography, infrastructure, etc.), but in Vic 3 it is currently the opposite - due to the convoy system, land routes are cheaper and better.

 

[AntonVisby]

So exited for the international market, and so exited to finally have the trade centers paying for shipping costs. Great improvment!

I see one possible issue here. In the case of colonies with bad MAPI there could be scenarios where the colony would make more profit by shipping its goods to the global market. If I was playing as Denmark and concured Benin to get my hands on some coal, MAPI makes the coal cheap in the state, and a trade center there could snatch it all before it ever makes it to Copenhagen.

I think MAPI is a bad mechanic, as it removes money from the economy, instead of giving money to transport workers. Is it possible to make the national markets function like the international market? Imagine if every state had its own market, and every state has a trade center from game start, and it could have PM's for both national and international trade. The PM's for international trade having higher requirements and locked behind laws and tech. The merchants would have to buy transportation and make the profits on the price difference between the prices in the states. However trading in the national market would be a lot more effecient than the international market. This could remove MAPI and we could have a much more interresting simulation.

 

[Notme1]

Can we tariff specific countries in reworked trade?
I wonder if you could cause worldwide recession when you are strongest economy and you decide to be funny.
This would require a lot of trade in first place.

 

[TalTal]

Can we tariff specific countries in reworked trade?
I wonder if you could cause worldwide recession when you are strongest economy and you decide to be funny.
This would require a lot of trade in first place.

First, we will need a list of countries that have imposed tariffs against us and the size of these tariffs, which are ruining our economy)

 

[Julian Torres]

I may be missing it, but has there been any mention if there will be simulation of the effects of imbalances in countries' trade? (Ie current account deficits/balance of payments issues?)

 

[M Sohl]

Have to agree, I’m a native English speaker and I’ve never heard the word subvention.

Perhaps the choice of using subvention instead of subsidy is due to someone in Paradox being used to Swedish and accidently choosing a word less commonly used. In Swedish subvention is a common and natural choice of word, while it may be somewhat less used in english.

 

[The Mr Z]

I suspect you're thinking of this in terms of the old trade routes, 'completely new trades' is just a Trade Center increasing trade volume on something it hasn't traded before. There is also some logic to ensure that 'new goods' like Automobiles get traded on the World Market. The rest is a bit too nitty-gritty to get into in a DD.

How will it handle goods where the Trade Centre's region currently has 0 supply and demand for a good, but it can be consumed by pops when available at a reasonable price. Thinking of things like Fine Arts currently - a lot of countries have no production at the start of the game or when they spawn, and this currently seems to result in their prices being calculated as max and 0 pop demand. Currently if I try to establish a trade route to export to those countries, the price immediately falls to minimum as they now have some supply but 0 demand, and the route is unprofitable until the pops respond to the lower price by consuming more. The AI never creates these routes because it sees them as unprofitable.

A Trade Centre would presumably see the same situation - there's no demand or supply in it's state for fine art, so it won't import it because if it imports 1 unit the price will fall to minimum and it'll make a loss, and so it'll cancel the import the next week before the pop demand can pick up. If it stuck with it, the demand price might recover if there are enough wealthy pops after a few weeks or months, but it might not if there just aren't enough pops in the upper strata. Will there be anything to encourage trade centres to stick with unprofitable imports for a bit to see if the market demand will increase. Fine arts in particular are there at the start of the game, so will never be classed as "new", but the conditions for a state to be able to sustain an import of them might only occur after a few decades of play.

 

[The Mr Z]

Treaty Ports will be part of the market they're targeting (so Macau will be part of the Chinese Market) and can import and export directly in that market, bypassing tariffs etc.

Does that mean that France can export Opium to China through Macau, even though it's a Portuguese treaty port? Is there any advantage to being the country that owns the treaty port in this case? Yes your merchants working in the trade centre make a bit of margin on the difference between Chinese prices and world market prices, but that seems much less beneficial than the current exclusivity on exporting into the Chinese market.

 

[Desseabar]

Not sure if the "breaking up giant market areas" has been resolved already, but can the harvest condition logic be used here?

Basically, let market areas spread a max range of maybe 10 states from the epicenter (i.e., market hub) without overlapping.
Spread could be determined by:
1) river modifiers: all states with the same river modifier should be in the same state (e.g., all states with Mississippi River are part of the same market, all states along the Volga are one market, all states along the Rhone, etc).
2) infrastructure, where states prefer to join a state with a similar infrastructure level.

And you could determine the market area based on sea nodes, and the max spread based on tech – that way eg central Siberia might be isolated until Russia develops sufficient railway tech to connect to it.

 

[marmot01]

Switching to talk about the World Market itself, you might well ask, ‘So where is the World Market located?’. Conceptually, what we say to this is ‘The world market exists in the sea’. In other words, once you have access to the sea you also have the ability to trade on the World Market, though of course it’s a bit more complicated than that. To explain more in detail, I first have to tell you about something which already exists in the game, but is presently quite hidden: Market Areas. Market Areas are ‘chunks’ of a market, consisting of a number of states that are all connected by land or by straits.

Will the new trade system allow for interrupting a country's trade routes by blocking a strait that these routes pass through?

A major consideration for Russia for example was that most of its exports were going through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, and it was ever under the threat of having its trade shut down by a sea power larger than its own Black Sea flotilla blockading the straits. This threat partly drove the whole school of thought within the Russian establishment, that Russia ought to conquer Istanbul for itself. Of course there was the whole "restoring Byzantium" thing too.

 

[exi123]

While playing the last runs in 1.9 these days I was asking myself if it is possible to have electricity and transportation back as full inner market goods. As soon as states within the market have railroads and power plants and link to each other, they should be able to trade these goods. It can come along with large MAPI penalties but would make it much easier to handle these goods withing markets.

 

[NSArtem]

Am I understanding correctly that land trade will be completely removed from the game, and that two bordering countries won’t be able to trade goods unless both negotiate access to the world market via coastal countries?

If that’s the case, isn’t that a bit ahistorical and illogical? Historically, for example, the Russian Empire conducted land trade with Qing China in the 19th century. According to a quick search, the volume of this land trade was around 10 million silver rubles which is significantly lower than, say, maritime trade with the UK, which reached around 50 million rubles, but still a substantial amount.

 

[Bisonmask]

Am I understanding correctly that land trade will be completely removed from the game, and that two bordering countries won’t be able to trade goods unless both negotiate access to the world market via coastal countries?

If that’s the case, isn’t that a bit ahistorical and illogical? Historically, for example, the Russian Empire conducted land trade with Qing China in the 19th century. According to a quick search, the volume of this land trade was around 10 million silver rubles which is significantly lower than, say, maritime trade with the UK, which reached around 50 million rubles, but still a substantial amount.

Said trade would be conducted by the government and could feasibly represent 20% of the trade you effectively do with the UK. It's that or there's no way to avoid doing a million individual bilateral trades

 

[Durcurugul]

Could we be able to mod more than one world market?

Some states connected to an Indian Ocean Martket, others to a Mediterranean Market, for example.

 

[Tq96v]

Monopolies always produce less and at a lower quality. If productivity is the goal the player should be pushing to eliminate monopolies and prevent them from forming. You would only create monopolies for controlling the population and securing power.

If you create a monopoly it could be tied to certain pops or interest groups, and give you leverage over their politics and the ability to suppress or prevent their radicalism.

The last thing a monopoly should do is improve efficiency. Monopolies do the opposite of that, categorically.

Devs should keep this in mind for when companies are more firmly integrated into the game and features to make them more dangerous to the player (instead of purely being a benefit) are added in.