Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #72 - Economic Law Changes in 1.2

[Wizzington]

Great to see the new law and the changes overall, looks like a great patch is coming. The only gripe I have is the Command Economy being locked behind Autocracy/Oligarchy. There are political systems where that wouldn't be the case (syndicalism comes to mind) and that would have (in theory) more decentralised power structure (parliamentary republic/council republic) even with universal suffrage, but still have an official (even elected!) government body that would do the central planning. "Ministry of Production" if you will.

I'm sure modders can fix that, but... eh. I think it was worth the mention.

There has been a bit of internal debate about this but I do honestly have a hard time seeing how a fully centralized economy with everything being directly owned by the central government would work without a whole lot more power being vested into that central government than you would get under a system where power ultimately rests with the electorate. I would argue that the Cooperative law fits Syndicalism far better than Command Economy, though perhaps we could introduce some sort of hybrid model.

 

[Wizzington]

All sounds great stuff!

At present Oligarchy is quite Capitalist-favourable (I think it gives Aristos and Capis extra clout or something?) - which doesn't fit very well with this particular change. Will Oligarchy be getting some tweaks?

It would probably make sense to boost the power of the Bureaucrats as well, at least, given Command Economy eliminates the traditional upper strata over time.

 

[Wizzington]

I am not a fan of the quasi double negative sentences. You got red "Yes" and a green "Yes" before a condition.

For example:

• Yes Can Subsidize Infrastructure
• Yes Can Subsidize Trade Center
• Yes Disallow Downsizing Non-Government Buildings

It is easier to read (in my humble opinion):

• Yes Can Subsidize Infrastructure
• Yes Can Subsidize Trade Center
• No Can Downsize Non-Government Buildings

Other than that input, you got a long way to go before the game is any fun. I hope you dont abandon it.

I agree that this is awkward, it's a limitation in how rules-type modifiers function that forces us to use 'Yes' in both cases. We're going to look into improving it.

 

[Wizzington]

Is it required to have Council Republic to enact Cooperative Ownership? I would love to try out some other government types with Cooperative Ownership. Eg Constitutional Monarchy with Cooperative Ownership would get close to GK Chesteron's Distributism (although maybe Agrarianism would be a slightly better fit).

At the moment this is required since Cooperative Ownership is such a radical economic shift that it should require multiple legal changes to implement. I do think there is room for mixing co-ops and government ownership into the regular economic laws but we'd need to do in a way that you can't just eliminate the aristocrats by changing some PMs.

 

[Wizzington]

Do the capitalists downsize them automatically? I feel like it would odd to have size 50 factories that are 50% unemployed that are just gobbling up your infrastructure that you can't downsize.

At the moment no but I'd be open to adding this if it feels like it's needed when playing with LF.

 

[Wizzington]

I agree with @galkowskit here, great system but locking command economy behind autocracy and oligarchy seems a bit strange. The reason is that Autocracy empowers the landowners (+50% Aristocrats political strength) while Oligarchy empowers both capitalists (+25% Capitalists political strength) and land owners (+50% Aristocrats political strength). Its weird needing to implement Aristocratic and Capitalist control (which they would strongly approve of ironically) in order to achieve communism. Maybe there could be a "Dictatorship of the proletariat" (potentially with a more generic name?) which would function similar to the previous, but empower Bureaucrats by +50% or even +100% to better show the power of the party in these circumstances.

This new distribution of power law could even have a huge government ideology penalty of like +75% to simulate the effect of a 1 party state. I could imagine a similar system for a military dictatorship

One Party States is something I think we could definitely add in the future in order to represent a Soviet style semi-democratic system.

 

[Wizzington]

If I'm reading this correctly, Cooperative Ownership does not allow use of subsidies. Is this just missing text since it's WIP? It doesn't seem to make much sense to me that Worker Co-ops would outlaw the use of subsidies to maintain full employment.

WIP, definitely not intended.

 

[Wizzington]

Council republic should have access to command economy. Participatory planning is possible, and locking council republics into a coop market economy is silly when a lot of the projects that would build council republics also had ambitions to abolish market based distribution.

I also agree a bureaucratic dictatorship form of authority should exist because neither autocracy nor oligarchy work well to represent a planned economy that isn't worker run considering what IG they boost.

Council Republics can be Autocracies and Oligarchies so there is nothing blocking a Council Republic Command Economy.

 

[Wizzington]

Be careful with your optimism, all they have stated is an open beta for the next patch not for all future patches.

While I'm not going to explicitly promise open beta for all future patches, I certainly don't expect this open beta will be a one-off affair. Victoria 3 is a complex game with a lot of interlocking systems and we want to avoid the sort of issues introduced with Legitimacy introduced in Patch 1.1 from ending up in officially released patches again.

 

[Wizzington]

With these much needed changes the economic systems certainly feel more flashed out and I really like the changes to having Governement Shares under Command Economy. However I am not fully seld off about locking Command Economy under Autocracy/Oligarchy, which seems too restrictive, and the lack of investment pool contribution from some professions in particular under Cooperative Ownership. Unless things have changed, under Worker Cooperative production method only Farmers, Laborers and Mechanists have Ownership Shares and according to the law only Farmers and Shopkeepers (who don't have ownership!) will increase their contribution efficiency.

Cooperative Ownership has a new type of universal ownership share for all Pops in the building. Given the positive effect Cooperative Ownership has on SoL, we don't want to just have it be also great for investment, as first of all I don't think it unreasonable that poorer Pops will prioritize improving their material standard over investing into expanding the business, and secondly it would simply just make into the 'best' law.

 

[Wizzington]

Why laborers and machinists can not invest in cooperative ownership? There are no shopkeepers in factories when council repiblic is active.

This is a fair point and I would really just repeat that we don't want Cooperative Ownership to simply be the best economic law. Might be that we can solve this by just adding a small universal investment to match the universal ownership, but I want to see how the current balance shakes out first. It also might not be the worst idea to have some shopkeepers added to factories under cooperative ownership - someone has to sell all those nice worker-owned fancy chairs, after all.

 

[Wizzington]

This might be abit of a tangent, but would legitimacy mechanics be potentially reworked again? In general, scrolling through the forum and Reddit, players often seem very confused about how parties canoften have 0 legitimacy in most circumstances, despite winning the election previously

It's not so much about reworking the mechanics as it is about preventing the formation of too disunited parties. We'll have more to say about this next week.