Fully agreed with Complex => Good for Victoria! We still want to build tools to make the feature accessible and manageable though. You should be spending your time making informed, meaningful choices, not have to crunch dozens of numbers in your head or press 37 buttons to execute on your intentions. In the words of our Product Manager, "complexity is not the same as complicated"
At the moment we're erring on the side of restricting ownership quite strictly, not by government form specifically, but rather by your country's various economic laws. We want the economic laws to feel very distinct and have big impacts on the population, and if we were to permit most of them under all systems this impact wouldn't be felt as strongly. Of course these are balancing decisions and may change before release.
Yes, assuming the main production cost you have are wages, China's relatively large population will help keep that part of the manufacturing expense down. But if you don't have easy, cheap access to the input goods you need you might not be able to sustain manufacturing the goods cheaply enough to compete with countries that use more technologically advanced, less labor-intensive methods. And then of course there's the additional cost to moving product out of your market, which we'll talk about another time.
Yes, assuming as you say that the industry has large enough capacity to absorb all those other workers, it could put other industries out of business as a result. Of course, since this means the supply of the goods those industries produced will decrease while demand will remain high (or even get higher as the mega-industry pays such high wages that Pop wealth and thereby demand increases overall) this should eventually approach an equilibrium where all industries are utilized to some extent.
Yes.
We'll cover that in a future Dev Diary focused on Trade, but there are ways to protect yourself from predatory trade practices.
We're playing around with some things surrounding civilian factories contributing to the war effort. We'll see.
Don't know the answer to the first questions but yes steel eventually replaces many iron inputs and electricity is used by factories later on
A single state region (e.g. Piedmont) has access to a number of resources (arable land, mining potential, etc) that represents how much it can be exploited and in what ways. A subsection of that state region (e.g. French Piedmont) only gets access to some of those resources, limiting how many jobs can be created there and thereby how large and wealthy the state can get.
Depending on the resources transferred in the split different types of buildings would also be transferred, along with the Pops attached to that building.
Not going to get deep into details about this yet, but while low infrastructure is not a limit on how well Bureaucracy is utilized, it does impact the ability for remote Government Administrations to buy Paper from the market at a good price. In effect, without an incentive to centralize, the optimal play strategy would be to construct fully self-sufficient local economies by constructing a variety of building types in every state. This would mean lacking Infrastructure wouldn't matter.
State size varies since they're intended to mostly follow historical cultural/legal/administrative boundaries rather than be based on geography or target size. Territorial changes where a state changes hands can very well be big and sudden, yes. That is fully intentional, since the game is not about slow and steady expansion of territory but rather slow and steady growth inside your borders and major upheaval as one potential outcome of conquest. Of course the Pops in the states always change over time, though.
