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

[MrKinich]

Will there be ways to set employment or wage targets for state-owned industries in the coming patch?
IIRC, one of the current issues with Command Economy is that you, the state, can’t actually influence how many pops are employed at the buildings you supposedly own, nor can you influence the wages they are paid.

 

[Meanmanturbo]

These changes are nice. What is also needed to make game more enjoyable is making the world more alive and plausible, countries played by AI stronger. You already made some steps in this direction. Can we expect that this patch will have some more changes connected to world balance, AI, historical plausibility?

Might get blasted for this, but I am more in favor of making it harder for the player to snowball ahead of the AIs to much. Without different rules for the player of course.

 

[Meanmanturbo]

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.

Having buildings built with tax money be government owned would be nice.

 

[Leoreth]

Have you considered an even tighter coupling between who invests and what can be invested into?

It seems to be already the case that for autonomous investment, the decisionmaking will be based on the proportion that a profession contributes to the investment pool. My understanding is that if you have a lot of aristocrats contributing, the AI will use the funds to build a lot of plantations.

I think it's worth thinking about to not just limit this connection to the AI. For example in addition to the "contribution efficiency" there could be an "investment efficiency" based on building types. Let's say Aristocrats want to build farms and mines and Capitalists want to build factories and mines. Then if 100% of your investment pool comes from Aristocrats you get a 100% investment efficiency on farms and mines but 0% on factories (i.e. they would need to be fully funded by the state). But if 50% of your investment pool comes from Aristocrats and 50% comes from Capitalists then you'd get 50% investment efficiency on farms and factories, but 100% investment efficiency on mines.

Even better, with such a system in place each law no longer needs to define which buildings can be funded by private investment at all. Instead some building types would become naturally more or less supported by the investment pool depending on the contributors, and the law already has an impact on who is a significant contributor and who isn't.

Even EVEN better, the desires of professions to invest in particular buildings should be based on the ownership production method. So you could get Capitalists to become interested in investing in farms once farms are switched to Publicly Traded. To keep Shopkeeper investment you cannot abandon Privately Owned for buildings where this includes Shopkeeper ownership etc. Of course, for that to make sense it should be harder for the player to switch to a different ownership PM after the fact than it currently is.

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.

How about a "political power from shares" modifier? That would make Autocracy and Oligarchy much more responsive to who actually holds power in the economy. In most political systems that would boost capitalists and aristocrats like before, but they'd lose it if cooperatives or command economy get implemented.

Bureaucrats could get political power from government shares, even though they don't actually own them.

 

[SilentReflection]

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.

On the subject of Bureaucrats, could we please do something about their interest group attraction? Currently, Bureaucrats are more likely to join the intelligentsia, but Bureaucrats are only ever used in Government Run production or in Government Administration buildings. Shouldn't they therefore be more likely to support whatever interest group has a stronger presence in the government?

Also, this is likely to get weird with the new patch and Command Economies:
Command Economy requires Autocracy/Oligarchy -> Command Economy requires Government Run production -> Government Run production requires Bureaucrats -> Bureaucrats are likely to join Intelligentsia -> Intelligentsia dislike Autocracy/Oligarchy

Do we see the problem?

 

[ZacmanTheDamned]

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).​

I'm a bit confused as to how this will interact with Cooperative Ownership - Cooperative Ownership is supposed to be the workers sharing the means of production, but if I'm interpereting this right, won't CO just end up being "Agrarianism Lite" since the only ones deciding what gets to be built are the Farmers and Shopkeepers? And by extension, wouldn't this lead to runaway clout gain for the Rural Folk and Petite Bourgeoise unless the player constantly intervenes?

 

[Coouragee]

Great to see these changes, they're definitely needed to add more flavour (even if I think they're a little flawed).

A general change I'd like to see is the "Allowed" and "Disallowed", under the "Requires one of the following section", being shaded green and red respectively so that it's clearer what laws must not be enacted when you're looking quickly, but idk how feasible that is.

 

[Bshepp]

Will the new update include an update to religion policy?
We need at least one (if not more) policies in between freedom of conscience and total separation.

 

[King of Men]

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

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

Strong agree with this, but maybe "Non-Government" should read "Commercial" or "Private"? Every negation makes the sentence harder to parse.

 

[MrNoobomnenie]

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.

A good solution would be to add another Distribution of Power law specifically for Council Republics, which would fill the niche of Landed Voting and Wealth Voting in other governments: something more "authoritharian" than Universal Suffrage and Census Suffrage, but still with elections and political parties. For an example, there's a Marxist-Leninist concept of People's Democracy, which allows multi-party system as long all parties are committed to Socialism

 

[SilentReflection]

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.

Hypothetically, would it be possible to introduce a universal investment tied to the Standard of Living. For example, pops start with small investments if they're Prosperous, slightly more if they're Affluent, etc, etc, etc, and as much as Shopkeepers if they're Opulent.

 

[Aozora Kasuga]

Maybe I have some misunderstanding on wage manchanism. It seems that the wage of pop will be decreased when building is deficit. However, command economy law makes me have to subsidize all buildings. Is that mean that the wage will never decrease?

 

[Notme1]

Hypothetically, would it be possible to introduce a universal investment tied to the Standard of Living. For example, pops start with small investments if they're Prosperous, slightly more if they're Affluent, etc, etc, etc, and as much as Shopkeepers if they're Opulent.

At this point it would be Fine Art (and luxury items) tax, that goes to investment pool

By the way will all pops in trade center and urban center get shares in council ownership?

 

[Tvarog]

A good solution would be to add another Distribution of Power law specifically for Council Republics, which would fill the niche of Landed Voting and Wealth Voting in other governments: something more "authoritharian" than Universal Suffrage and Census Suffrage, but still with elections and political parties. For an example, there's a Marxist-Leninist concept of People's Democracy, which allows multi-party system as long all parties are committed to Socialism

Also I think there should be "party member" or "party official" class in People Democracy and Command Economy. They could be just renamed aristocrats actually. It's strange that in game upper class disappear in command economy when in history they just changed name and made disparities even larger in long run.

 

[auzewasright]

I'd go a step further and add a question mark at the end of these "rule modifiers": Yes Can Subsidize Infrastructure?

If this change is made, I would think it may just be more aesthetically pleasing to put the Yes and No after the modifier, like Vic2:

Personal Opinion of course.

 

[DominusNovus]

I'd like to offer some constructive feedback, rather than just my usual criticism. Before doing so, I would like to say that this is an improvement over the current systems and does look like it will go some ways into making different systems play differently.

However, I do think that you're going down the wrong path in tweaking how the different economic systems play, and adding a new one. given how important the economic simulation is to this game, I think the system should be much more granular. Rather than having 6 systems that basically represent an overall ethos around your nation's economic policy, there should be a variety of laws within each category.

For example:
- A series of laws on what you can subsidize
- A series of laws on your taxation capacity
- A series of laws on your investment pool efficiency
- A series of laws on what your investment pool can be used to build

This would allow the player to guide their society in a more granular fashion, while also letting players tweak the laws to more precisely fit their playstyle. Further, it would also give the pops in your nation more room in which to navigate your policies. For example, rather than the Industrialists just supporting Laissez Faire while Landowners oppose it, you could have a bit more give and take between them, giving each IG a smaller piece of what they want, so that they put up with the laws that you don't want.

I appreciate that, overall, this is basically what the Law system is at the moment, a series of graduated changes, but I do think that the economic systems are so broad reaching that they should be broken up more. Perhaps it could be similar to the taxation policy, where you have both the actual taxation policy, and then additional tweaking allowed by your tax rate. Or perhaps it would just make sense to break up the economic systems into multiple categories (in this case, rather than your nation having 7 economic laws, it might have, say, 9, with a subsidy law, an investment pool law, and private construction law replacing the overall 'economic system' law).

 

[SilentReflection]

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.

I've had this problem too, its happened more than once where IGs gain the radical ideology through events, they all join the Radical Party, the Radical Party wins the elections by a landslide, and even if it is the only Political Party in Government, legitimacy is non-existent because the one party is too diverse. Also, because they get all the votes, the legitimacy of any other party (though admittedly higher) is still terrible.

 

[Splorghley]

I'd go a step further and add a question mark at the end of these "rule modifiers": Yes Can Subsidize Infrastructure?

I'd go further still, and suggest making them into actual sentences:

You can subsidise infrastructure.
You cannot downsize non-governmental buildings.
The investment pool is disabled.

 

[FranklyJustNess]

Okay, I don't get the Command Economy. How I imagined it working, was dividends going directly into the government, but all government employed bureaucrats being on government wage. Here it says it just takes investment pool money into treasury. So like pops are still owners, still have their normal dividends income, that they would invest a percentage of into new buildings, but instead it goes into treasury?

Co-op ownership's investment is also quite weird, with it being allowed to go into manufacturing buildings, but it's just shopkeepers, that would do that, and they essentially don't exist as owners. I think the only place that employees them, that isn't urban center, in late game is furniture/clothes factories on luxury production. Either the workers should invest a bit of money or just keep it farmer only. Honestly I preferred the version where it just didn't have any investment pool.

And LF seems under-powered. It blocks downsizing buildings, it blocks subsidies, it blocks agrarian investment, and in exchange we get 25% more allocation and 25% more capitalist efficiency. Unless the real problem is, that with 50% allocation the capitalists can't invest all this money they are making, then it seems like a modest and not very useful mode.

 

[Tvarog]

For example:
- A series of laws on what you can subsidize
- A series of laws on your taxation capacity
- A series of laws on your investment pool efficiency
- A series of laws on what your investment pool can be used to build

Imagine trying to balance that.

Probably making AI somehow competent would also be nightmare.