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

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Hello and welcome to the second Victoria 3 dev diary for 2023! Today we’re going to continue talking about patch 1.2 for Victoria 3 (release date to be announced), on a topic that is closely related to last week’s dev diary, namely Economic Laws and how they have changed in 1.2. As we mentioned in Dev Diary #64, one of our post-release ambitions is to increase the differences in gameplay between different economic systems. What I mean by that is that there should be deeper mechanical differences between for example Laissez-Faire and Command Economy in terms of how they impact your country and the economic decisions you make. All of the existing Economic Laws have received changes in 1.2 and we’ve also added a new one, so I’m simply going to go through them one by one and explain how they work now.

Before I start however, I should mention a change that has happened since last week based on feedback we received on the Autonomous Investment dev diary. Several people pointed out that with a weighting system in place, there wasn’t really a need for hard restrictions on what the Investment Pool could fund under Autonomous Investment, and we agree! Thus, Autonomous Investment no longer has any restrictions on what profit-generating buildings can be built, just weighting based on who is investing and what they would want to invest in (as mentioned last week, if you’re running Agrarianism, expect a lot of farms). The restrictions still apply under Directly Controlled Investment however (and the tooltips will reflect this based on which setting you are using).

Traditionalism: Traditionalism in 1.2 is largely the same as before: A very backwards system that you should generally be trying to get out of. The main difference from 1.1 is that the Investment Pool isn’t disabled for Traditionalism, though you take a hefty penalty to investment efficiency (further reduced if you also have Serfdom) and the building types you can construct with the Investment Pool are highly curtailed if you are playing with Directly Controlled Investment.

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Interventionism: The ‘golden middle way’ of economic laws, Interventionism also isn’t extensively changed in 1.2: It provides no particular bonuses or penalties, but gives you the freedom to subsidize any and all building types as well as extensive options for the Investment Pool under Directly Controlled Investment, while providing a balanced allocation between Private and Government Construction Allocation under Autonomous Investment.

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Agrarianism: Agrarianism has received a fairly substantial boost in 1.2, with both the addition of Farmers as an investing Pop Type and a hefty bonus to the efficiency of all rural investments. Capitalists are now also not locked out of investing under Agrarianism, though they do so at a penalty and their building selection is quite limited if you’re playing with Directly Controlled Investment.

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Laissez-Faire: The invisible hand of the Free Market made manifest, Laissez-Faire in 1.2 is meant to be the go-to law for the player that wants to get the absolute most out of their Investment Pool when it comes to industrializing. It does come with some significant drawbacks though, as it is no longer possible to downsize non-government buildings under Laissez-Faire.

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Cooperative Ownership: A new Economic Law introduced in 1.2, Cooperative Ownership is now a fully fledged economic system instead of just being unlocked by becoming a Council Republic. Under Cooperative Ownership, all Pops working in a building receive an equal number of shares and Aristocrat/Capitalist jobs are eliminated. While this should lead to higher Standard of Living among the workforce, it also means far less money in the Investment Pool, as Farmers and Shopkeepers invest far less than their wealthier counterparts under other systems.

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Command Economy: Command Economy is the law that has received the largest (and most needed) overhaul under 1.2. Instead of being a frankly weird system where the Bureaucrats own the profits but you are required to subsidize them, Command Economy now makes use of a new system called Government Shares, which is used by the Government Run ownership production method. Just like how Pop Shares entitle Pops to a portion of a building’s dividends, Government Shares ensure that buildings pay some or all of their profits directly into the treasury - though in large economies this is subject to an efficiency modifier, with some of the money being wasted due to the inefficiencies inherent to large, heavily centralized systems. While this is not something we currently have a setup for in the base game, Government Shares can also freely be mixed with Pop Shares, so we’re looking forward to seeing what modders make with this!

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Another change you might have noticed when looking at the screenshots in this dev diary is that we have tied some economic laws more closely to a country’s Distribution of Power and Government Principles. For one, seizing the means of production is no longer a one-step reform into Council Republic, but rather a multi-step reform that involves first implementing a Council Republic, then Cooperative Ownership, and finally allows you to branch off into Anarchism if you so desire. Command Economy now also requires Autocracy or Oligarchy, as it’s difficult to pull off a fully centralized economy without the corresponding amount of centralized powers (and with the new Government Shares mechanic should provide more reasons to want to keep a grip on power in the late game).

So the question on everyone's mind is, when will you be able to play with these changes and all the other updates and fixes coming in 1.2? Some of these changes are pretty big and we don't want to rush this patch out too early, but at the same time we know you're anxious to get your hands on it. To find the right balance between these we've decided to launch patch 1.2 in open beta, which we will talk more about in next week's dev diary! In there we will also focus a bit more generally on patch 1.2, giving you more of a birds-eye view of what the patch will look like, along with giving you an expected release date.
 
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That's disappointing. Yes, currently the entire system is broken because parties are too disunited. But even with two member parties the system usually collapses all choices into a simple binary. Why go through all the trouble of creating this complicated system when the outcomes are so predetermined by the system. There is little choice in how to form governments even when parties are not in the picture.

Please don't fall into the trap of rolling out a rushed feature in a minor patch and then sticking to it no matter what.

i think the party (political) system as initially presented is quite innovative and tries a simplified approach, but i would recommend improving it a bit more as it's the basis for things evolving/ deriving out of it like here this topic the laws
it would also not be embarassing for prdx if they would take more time for the patch as it probably needs time to test all new mechanics how they interact with each other.
 
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That is VERY realistic... but maybe a bit too much so for a game. :)
You are right, I did phrase it wrong, my bad.
I mean it happens to badly documented and hardly changeable amounts which both is bad for a game. Subsidies do some things but it is not clear at all to me what this is. They take wages in obviously but maybe also input prices? Output prices? I honestly think it is a mess and especially subsidizing wages has spiral effects as there is no limits so the wages can go up in gov spending if I see it right because there is no reason to keep or lower them even with high unemployment.

But subsidizes buildings should be able to be profitable for sure.
 
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On a similar note, provinces with bonuses for agriculture throughput should also apply that to agricultural plantations (probably not lumber, though, at least while replanting timber isn't really in the game).
Lumber falls under resources and not the 'Agriculture building' tag. Agriculture build are those that consume arable land. I did find it odd that plantations and ranches were not included in the state modifiers. (Montana's bonus doesn't affect ranches?) Did you know that the state modifiers also affect the subsistence farms?

This is a big trap for new players (the fertile provinces bonus uses a different definition of agriculture).
All the state modifiers that I have seen use the "All Farms" definitions like the laws. Is there one that uses a different definition from the two that I listed?

A burocrat is every type of manager and this could be anything from the tax office, gov minting, high level ministry, grocery store leader, mega corp CEO, state controlled monopolist CEO (like mail or trains often were handled) or city owned graveyard manager.
This is not how the game defines bureaucrat.
 
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The lack of foreign direct investment takes away a major experience in this time period. It reaches the point to where your puppets refuse to develop their economies and you have all this extra capital and no where to put it. It is unrealistic considering that during this period was the beginning of large colonial/imperial financiers altering the economies of weaker states. USA never build banana plantations in central America. The European powers never carve of Qing into spheres of influence and it forces the player to conquer the globe.
 
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The lack of foreign direct investment takes away a major experience in this time period. It reaches the point to where your puppets refuse to develop their economies and you have all this extra capital and no where to put it. It is unrealistic considering that during this period was the beginning of large colonial/imperial financiers altering the economies of weaker states. USA never build banana plantations in central America. The European powers never carve of Qing into spheres of influence and it forces the player to conquer the globe.
I think the devs said somewhere that they're going to add foreign investment in a future update.
 
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I think the devs said somewhere that they're going to add foreign investment in a future update.
I think the problem with foreign investment is obvious with current mechanics - ownership shares. A building automatically employs people who own it. So how would it work if the people who "own it" are in a different state? Whose capital would be used? Whose construction capacity? Would the game keep track of foreign owned buildings separately? Would the host country be allowed to demolish them? Is it an ant colony worth of bugs? A pig devouring the processor calculations? Both?
 
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I am sure it's flogging a dead horse at this point... But please do not lock command economy to autocracy and oligarchy.

There is no good reason to force capitalism and democracy going together and autocracy and command economy going together. There is no reason why an elected government can't have a planned economy. A planned economy with elected leaders. You can criticize the fairness of elections in the USSR or PRC, etc. But that's no good reason to exclude the possibility from the alternate history that the game become as soon as it is unpaused.

I honestly can't find a single good argument in favor of the restriction.
 
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Not sure about the icon for Agrarianism. The bull doesn't look like a bull due to lack of contrast. It looks more like a very weird wide cloth extension of the farmer(?).
 
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The newly-revealed Cooperative Ownership economic law's feelings must be badly hurt by all the people in this thread ignoring that it exists and proposing new laws for collective ownership, and complaining that they don't want to be forced to be "capitalist" as a democracy because they can't implement Soviet style state capitalism with voting, and must instead use the law that gives ownership to workers instead, etc etc. It's news to me that giving ownership of building to their workers is capitalism, haha.
 
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There is no good reason to force capitalism and democracy going together and autocracy and command economy going together. There is no reason why an elected government can't have a planned economy. I honestly can't find a single good argument in favor of the restriction.
It's probably just mechanical. There is no method by which parties get banned. Or declared illegal, or repressed. Only interest groups. And the Soviet Union was not an Anarchy or an Elder Council (maybe after Brezhnev, lmao).

But like it or not, 5-Year Plans are forever associated with the Soviet Union and communism, everyone else is just a pale imitation, India. The better question is - what's the benefit? The Soviet Union doubled its industrial output during the first 5-year, going directly into heavy industry, conventionally thought to be insane at the time. Does that mean, in-game, we get massive construction bonuses?
 
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I'd prefer if the Autocracy/Oligarchy boost to a group was dynamic based on other laws. So sometimes it would boost Aristocrats or Capitalists and other times - the Bureaucrats. I can see how difficult to do that well would be, though.
This is a really good idea. Or, to make it more clear: an autocracy has an autocrat. This can be a monarch or a dictator or a party / church leader (aka IG). Autocracy should give power to the group that rules. Not always the aristocrats or industrialists.

The planned economy needs high authority I think. But not an autocracy. Please just let it cost authority. So instead of an dictatorship I may also have a nationalist church state with a president or even a soviet / council. Soviet literally means council. Even though they got rid of it fast (because of lack of authority I guess).
 
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I totally blanked and missed this dev diary. Worker coops are still only for council republic, huh. Well, I guess I'm never getting my socialist kingdom without mods.
 
If you really want monarcho-socialism, you can always go for a command economy!
But I don't want to do all that micro. ;-;
Also, you can't do the socialist journal entries without flipping to council republic, so you can't actually get the IGs to always choose vanguardists, so y'know, that's another thing. But I mainly just want my non-micro-hell collectivised economy under a monarch.
 
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How that would be different from consumption tax on things that only richer pops consume? Only difference it doesn't go to separate place.
..it varies by economic law alone, not by tax law and budget? Also it gives them income based on investment in a more obvious manner (and also investment pool gets more obviously coupled to "the ability to have spare cash" and becomes less of "magic money" while also messing less with SoL)? I dunno, I just figured it was a good way to couple "dividends" with "the one who should earn dividends", and how much (from investment, meaning less need to couple them to a building - ideally a wealthy capitalist should be able remain wealthy even if unemployed, as long as the businessworld in general is doing find.
 
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But I don't want to do all that micro. ;-;
Also, you can't do the socialist journal entries without flipping to council republic, so you can't actually get the IGs to always choose vanguardists, so y'know, that's another thing. But I mainly just want my non-micro-hell collectivised economy under a monarch.
You can just empower the Trade Unions, the Proletarian Ideology has equal weight towards Interventionism and Command Economy, so as long as you're not already on Interventionism you can get them to support Command Econ. That said, your politics are probably not going to be the most stable - you'll end up liquifying your Aristocrats, and replacing them with a surge of Bureaucrats who aer going to empower the Intelligentsia and spend all their tie being mad about the monarchy.
 
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You can just empower the Trade Unions, the Proletarian Ideology has equal weight towards Interventionism and Command Economy, so as long as you're not already on Interventionism you can get them to support Command Econ. That said, your politics are probably not going to be the most stable - you'll end up liquifying your Aristocrats, and replacing them with a surge of Bureaucrats who aer going to empower the Intelligentsia and spend all their tie being mad about the monarchy.
Again, I don't want command economy. I want vanguardist IGs.
 
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.
I would argue that "centralized" and "authoritarian" aren't exactly the same thing. In a lot of today's liberal, laissez-faire democracies you still have extremely centralized governments, it's just that they're elected democratically rather than not. You could absolutely have a planned economy in a situation where the government rotates in and out, it's just that it would be a bit chaotic.

My suggestion is the following: you can have democratic command economies, but make authority a resource that's in high demand in command economies, meaning that authoritarianism makes having a command economy easier to manage.
 
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I would argue that "centralized" and "authoritarian" aren't exactly the same thing. In a lot of today's liberal, laissez-faire democracies you still have extremely centralized governments, it's just that they're elected democratically rather than not. You could absolutely have a planned economy in a situation where the government rotates in and out, it's just that it would be a bit chaotic.

My suggestion is the following: you can have democratic command economies, but make authority a resource that's in high demand in command economies, meaning that authoritarianism makes having a command economy easier to manage.
If I was the lead dev on a political simulator, I'd make literally nothing mutually exclusive, unless it's physically impossible. I have a vendetta against this kind of thing, because my high school classes on political systems unironically told us that monarchy = autocracy, and republic = democracy.

You can obviously have a command economy under a democracy, or literally any power structure, provided one exists.
 
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If I was the lead dev on a political simulator, I'd make literally nothing mutually exclusive, unless it's physically impossible. I have a vendetta against this kind of thing, because my high school classes on political systems unironically told us that monarchy = autocracy, and republic = democracy.

You can obviously have a command economy under a democracy, or literally any power structure, provided one exists.
How do you have a command economy under an anarchy? No democracy has had a command economy outside of a total war, and none did at all during the time period. While obviously reductivist analysis is bad that doesn’t mean that anything goes, there will still always be constraints.

Personally I think that there should be more graduated restrictions and more options. You shouldn’t be able to take an authoritarian monarchy into universal sufferage constitutional monarchy in just one step, or go back in one either.
 
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