Specialty production with tariffs vs autartic production

[TheFlemishDuck]

First 2 pictures of what will seem some unassuming factories, bear with me

2 shipyards, working at high throughput employing 16.000 people in between them in a environment of high labor competition. What is more peculiar about these factories is that the sole fashion upon which the state takes income or gain from those factories is trough tariffs. We dont have income tax or any other form of tax in our nation, just tariffs. And the thing here is that the ships are pretty much all produced for export, and sold at a 15% export tariff, but in fact the input resources they use and which as you might have noticed are rather expensive are also pretty much all imported and this over a 45% import tariff.

As a result, we can make a breakdown o what these 2 factories bring in for us, the state, trough tariffs:

Not only do we need to consider the export tariffs on the ships, which can all be traced back to these factories as they are pretty much the sole ship producers in my country, but also the tariff levied on the imports, it breaks down as folows:
1400£ for the sales of man-o-wars
1730£ for the sales of Clippers
450£ for the import of engines, fully utilized by these factories
800£ roughly for the hardwood, as these factories consume 95% of the imports
700£ roughly for the imports of fabrics, these factories consume 20% of the volume imported
100£ each on wood and iron, since we actually also produce some ourselves and they dont use much of that

Which brings us to a grand total of 5180£ of tariffs, levied on products with a total market revenue of 20.800£.

Thats a lot of money for the state, a LOT.

Lets say per comparison that the state would want to earn money on those factories trough state dividends, then given that these 2 factories have a rather fine 3000£ of dividend spread between them that the state could perhaps get about 1000£ in dividend at a 30% divident rate ... it doesnt compare, and take in mind that state ownership would clash with the throughput delivered by the company.

If we look at it from the perspective of tax, then it's also fairly easy to calculate. My pops here have triple the wages as say a shipyard in London, and yet their total wages spread among two factories constitutes a total of about 2300£. the mid level of Per capita tax levies a 15% inccome tax, so the income tax taken from such wages would yield 345£

So if you were just taxing this and taking a dividend in a autartic system were all imputs are produced by the nation ann all outputs consumed for the nations use, 1345£ is a rough ballpark of what you might get as the state for having 16k of your laborpool employed. Compare this to the 5180£ we earn here, well 5180£ is four times that kind of money that the state earns per worker employed. Especially handy then for country's of more diminutive size that have limited manpower to work with.

Now take in mind that the ones who pay most in this system are kinda the factory owners, as they in part pay for the overpriced import goods yet their business is profitable enough to bear that burden so ... it works. They are still getting fairly rich from this operation, and the workers are payed well. The workers afcourse neither pay taxes, which drives their consumption rates higher.

Further conclusions can be derived from looking at how high input prices affect tariffs. They dont. On the of the 21K revenue the factorys make selling between them at average market price, 14000+1730£ is a fairly logical income for its output, it constitutes roughly 15 % as the export tariff suggests of that revenue minus the ships i consume myself. It's the same for the input of cloth which is about as 1670£ and on which i gain at 45% a rough 700£ in tariffs. But i dont make the 45% on the costs made on engines by these factories, not by far, and thats because they are overpriced. The tariffs are thus levied at normal market price, all the extra of a high priced good goes, kinda logically, to the actual seller. The utility of having those goods cheaper then is for the purpose of making the factory more competitive. But take in mind that therefore the inverse is also true. If i am selling coffee as the state to a country at -75% market price, then the 15% tariff levied on the product is calculated on the normal price not this reduced market price. So if you have significant competitive advantages as an agricultural producer that however require you to really push the price down to be competitive then know that nevertheless the size of that 15% export tariff gotten will be pretty neato given its calculated at normal price, in this case the buyer gets the advantage of a cheaper good but not a cheaper tariff.

One can understand that in this sort of system, what we really want to produce is foremost things that pop dont consume and require industrial resources at it. We want to import as much as we can, as we can slap a high tariff to it, but preferably on consumption goods ofcourse, and then on input resources too. So what we rather prefer is really highly effecient non consumer good producing factories, and a sufficient trade network to both get the materials from and sell the output. Not much if anything in terms of mines or farms or whatever, a limited sellection of highly effecient company supported industires.
General arms industry (providing you also focus a bit on mil tech) is kinda perfect, even though the market is somewhat limited, especially for small country's that relative limited market can be big enough for them and provide huge income at it. This is because the price and volume of their output good constitutes a lot of money on a per worker basis. But certain bulk agricultural goods like dyes that have an industrial nature can be fine too, if you can drop of thousands on markets from really cheap producing high throughput farms for example.

For small country's, i have experimented on this with negative bureaucracy. But it doesnt have to be nessecary on negative buraucracy. The thing is that even for large country's that suffer from large tax waste, there is a certain way into this. I call it "labor intensive administration", there is a peculiarity in buraucracy's in that extra buraucracy gained from utilizing paper scales up far slower than extra tax capacity gain. That means that buraucracys that are purposedly held "paper less" and are overbuild to get more buraucracy and tax effeciency trough sheer throughput are actually more effecient at generating sheer volumes of buraucracy but not tax capacity. If it were for the sheer tax capacity, large natiosn with lots of tax waste like China would need more advanced paper using buraucracies, if however China would opt to produce sheer administration out of its administrations and then use it to set up huge trade neworks to make huge gains on tariffs then it could do that while keeping buraucracy positive and then thus also take in a lot more tax too. given that buraucracies are cheap nowadays sonce latest patches, paperless buraucracies have become an option for such nations to combine ineffecient tax capacity with a big chunk of added tariff income.

there are a number of things i still have to experiment here. As a power block, one can get an institution like internal trade level 3 where 20% tariffs are levied from outside the power block both on imports and exports. the questin i have is how this combiens with free trade and trade agreements. it would perhaps be the sweet spot that you would have this and then free trade and free trade agreements and your still levying 20% tariffs. Also, treaty ports rock, i didnt play much with treaty ports before but i can call for some re-apreciation of them. treaty ports are also rebellion free, quite nice, but afcourse the main use is to circumvent the tariffs levied by the one you trade to, after which maintaining a 20% tariff in combination with free trade should make it easy to compete on their market i reckon.

 

[IsaacCAT]

Tariffs are applied to base prices not market prices as far as I am aware.

Tariffs make sense at the start of the game for government revenues or if you are limited on workforce because demand is not a problem. However, later in the game if you lack demand, tariffs are detrimental if your objective is not only to grow government revenues but to grow your economy.

This is also important on comparative advantage or opportunity costs to produce one good or import it. That should be analyzed in your game to see what is the cost of each unit produced compared to other nations. Sadly, you cannot import everything other nations can produce more efficiently than you because the convoy number limit, making autarky the only way to grow and limiting your tariffs income.

PS: one thing I am being experimenting though is to increase tariffs to ‘persuade’ the autonomous queue to avoid investing in low comparative advantage buildings in my nation. However, this makes the autonomous queue to choose building abroad, this being a problem when your nation is underdeveloped. A solution to this problem is to not have investment agreements unless you have run out of peasants.

 

[yurcick]

That's very interesting.

I'm not concerned that this looks better monetarily than government dividends (they are basically broken), but that those are higher than potential taxes, well, that's a surprise for me.

My guess is that the biggest downside of it is low production leading to relatively higher prices, which
1) depresses SOL
2) leads to increased government spending on the output goods, if you need those

But I can't say I'm convinced that these downsides are sufficient, a quantitative analysis is needed.

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

Tariffs make sense at the start of the game for government revenues or if you are limited on workforce because demand is not a problem. However, later in the game if you lack demand, tariffs are detrimental if your objective is not only to grow government revenues but to grow your economy.

At the very least one has to consider "minimal trade sizes", its something im exploiting here too.

Have a look at my trades:

Now this is all trades of 3.5 clipper ships. it goes further down the list, there are 64 trades in total or basically 64 country's i trade clippers with (got to have interests all over the world and preferably land adjacency's for this) and this translates in a guaranteed minimal demand of 3.5x64 clippers aka 224 clippers. Thats enough demand for the factory above to kinda sustain itself indefinatly.

What is happening here is perhaps better explained by the wiki:

As you can see, for the bracked "traded quantity", the wiki lists 3.5 for clippers. It is basically "the minimal trade" that will happen regardless of profittabillety. At start, very few of such trades would be bureaucracy effecient safe for Art which is rediculous as n import, but with enough modifiers it can even become bureaucracy efficient to trust on sheer quantity of sales or purchases to secure a safe "niche market" as well as to secure cheap inputs even.

in my game for example engines are still expensive, but thats because there are only a few country's producing them. I have a total of 28 demand, importing a quantity of 56 would ensure that the price is at -75% for engines, that would mean i would need to find 19 sellers selling me the 4 engines, from the moment i have secured that these factories will be buying their engines at -75% price. Those trades would be very unproductive and unprofitable, and yet they would happen anyway because the minimum is the minimum for the game. (excluding some exceptions if the country cant actually supply) One might wonder then who would be paying the difference for both the 45% tariff and having the engines so cheap, and the answer is the merchants in their merchant quarter. I can force the merchants to buy minimal quantity's of whatever over the market, and then pay 45% tariffs on it, and all those trades might be unproductive but the merchants will buy atleast the listed minimums on that page. they might be running a deficit of thousands, and yet that deficit would actually come from the void. Although thats not entirely true, it's actually coming from the merchants pockets and your literally killing merchants in this fashion albeit at a slow pace as the merchants pockets are surprisingly deep and resilient. We basically "promote" a merchant to take over our very unprofitable trading business from time to time and before we know it he has exited trough the window. in rare occasions where i go full ham with importing i managed to kill of half the rich class 10 years in, but new onnes pop up and once you run those very proditable factories there is capitalist growth comming from there to balance it out.

As such, securing a guaranteed market for your expensive goods as well as your cheap resources is but a matter of having preferably a huge trade network where you can trade with 64 nations as in my case, though its easiets to work with for country's that dont mind going tariffs purely and negative buraucracy with it.

but even just on the matter of buraucracy cost per trade, one can consider art for example:

At 400£ per 1 ship its a pretty dense trade. Traders will fork out the price to buy them for you, even against a 45% tariff. So if you buy 2 pieces of art from 20 country's, thats 4000£ * 0.45 aka 1900£ earned in tariffs, for the use of 20 ships and an amount of buraucracy which is dependant on for example your tech as to how much it costs and on some other factors as to how much your buraucracy costs per say 100 bureaucracy which can be depending for example wether you have the IG happy that gives you +20% bureaucracy, as in were you want to make this trade effeciently while maintaining positive bureaucracy and thus other taxing potential. Which is to say, for a lot of country's that start the game with excess ships and bureuacracy, spending some on importing all the art you can find at a 45% tariff is a simple win usually, not like there are many providers but its notably that art brings in a lot of revenue per bureaucracy cost as compared to other trades for example.

So basicaly you can exploit these "minimal trades", to ensure the continuation of your profitable little cash cow.

With that in mind, you ought to look more to "revenue maxing". Not all factory's or farms bring out a product at quantity that makes a load of revenue so as to levy tariffs on, some make more than others. At its best production methods, which are relative close in reach, a 1 level grocery factory can produce roughly 6300£ of revenue afaik when the output goods are at nominal price. Thats a lot more than the average, some factory's will only be able to churn out 3000£ or 4500£ for example. The clipper factory for example produces at this production method a nominal 70 clippers worth that are each a nomimal 60£ worth, so 4200£ revenue per factory level. But then if you add a 1.86 multiplier as in my case that becomes 7812£ of revenue. Take note here that even if i were to sell those ships at a low price then, i still get the 15% tariff on the nomimal price, if i manage to move all those ships on the market i get 7812£ * 0.15 aka 1170 per factory level employed. If you had the same multiplier on a size 3 grocery factory for example and your selling all the liqour and groceries comming from it with such a throughput then you would be generating 3x6300*1.85*0.15 in tariffs, that boils down to 5240£ in tariffs for a size 3 companied grocery factory. Take in mind that i take the example of groceries because their best tech comes relative early in game as opposed to many others. For me producing ships on logical route i could go for example is to rush steamers and go for the fish. Once steamers come online youre fishery with steamers produces 100 fish at a nominal price of 20, which is a nominal revenue of 2000£ for a building that has far fewer construction cost than a factory, meaning 3 fisheries can produce 6000£ of revenue albeit with a lot more people involved than a factory takes. But you know i take another province that happens to have a lot of fisheries and drop a resource decree on it and maybe i get it to 50 throughput then i get 150 fish per fishery, and seeing that the minimal trading quantity for fish is 10 my network would already be able to move atleast 640 units.

But i'm looking at Norway and i'm salivating here with my little shipping industry, its ripe for taking and maybe even have a fishy company dropped there so i can flood the world market with "very well preserved" fish. I am rushing steamers for a reason. Norway has about 25 fisheries and 10 whaling statiosn which each have a nominal 2000£ output which can easily get 50% throughput trough non company modifiers (like their province modifiers) and has roughly the manpower to staff all that so i can calculate the revenue of turning Norway in my national fishing station as 35*2000*1.5*0.15 equals 15750£, providing i can move all the output. Fish at high throughput can manage i believe at -75% price so competing on the world food market shouldnt be such an issue with enough trade partners, its 3750 fish to move and i believe land trade capacity starts at 120 so about 30 overland trade partners will do and i have that, otherwise fishes arnt that ship heavy to move either. Atleast there is a huge market for food, and i know that its easy to sell those 120 pieces overland against a 15% import tariff if you can make the bussiness profitable at that market price. Thing is that cheap fish is also a great "SOL pusher", you drop a lot of cheap fish on the market food prices go down pop SOL goes up food demand goes up and you just created your own demand.

But the extra trick afcourse would be that i buy all the required coal for these fishersies from abroad, which is not few, i believe its atleast 15 per fishery and 20 per whaling station so i would consule (25*15+10*20)*1.5 equal 862 coal at a nominal market price of 30 which if i can secure it is a 25875£ trade which at 45% import tariff would yield me another 11650£ of tariff revenue, which is significant to bring up the total for Norway to 27.400£ about. The nominal coal cost for fisheries is greater than the nominal steamer cost, for tarifs that could be good but for profitabillety one usually would keep the main cost low and allow the secondary inputs which cost less in total even when expensive to be expensive.

Sorry, long post just to start adressing one point in a reply, and i will repley to all the questions asked no worry, but i had to go more in depth on this matter regarding "minimal trades" and how far you can bring it, which to a great degree reflects on what you can do with some production method tech rushing for example especially for smaller country's that can secure a market for their little high effeciency niche product. And i also had to reflect that "if you can produce to drop the price in your market to near -75% and still be profitable, country's will buy from you as long as demand for volume exist".

 

[IsaacCAT]

How did you get 86% throughput with level 2 and 3 buildings?

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

That's very interesting.

I'm not concerned that this looks better monetarily than government dividends (they are basically broken), but that those are higher than potential taxes, well, that's a surprise for me.

My guess is that the biggest downside of it is low production leading to relatively higher prices, which
1) depresses SOL
2) leads to increased government spending on the output goods, if you need those

But I can't say I'm convinced that these downsides are sufficient, a quantitative analysis is needed.

There are a number of things here to discuss, including dividends. let me illustrate it with a sort of "build aproach" that one can take. lets say i apply this to Austria, it would be a fairly easy one to do.

Immigane that you stick to this rule: thou shalt not build industry, thou shalt let the AI do it all for you. You will only build construction sectors, bureaucracys, universities, ports, armies whatever the Ai cant build. can you succesfully guide a country like that?

The way you do that, as far as i understand it, is like this: you start with overbuilding your construction sector until construction goods are sky high in price, all the while importing ll the construction materials you can at a 45% import tariff, and you then importantly "yield the construction pool to the AI". The thing this will do is that it will force the AI to take up as much of the construction sector as it's reinvestment rate allows it to take up, and pay said sky high prices. Its important to just overbuild the construction sector a tiny bit over what the reinvestment rate can afford at prices where all construction materials are near +75%, This will allow the AI o continue building and use up more once reinvestment grows. The thing here is that while construction materials might be sky high, you as the state are not paying for it in the least because your not building, hence you only pay the administrative cost of employing people in the construction sector. The high prices are though pushing trades to grow potentially against the 45% tariff bringing you more tariff income too. Now you should get a lot of income either way because the reinvestment rate is returned to you the state. This allows you to buy up resources like wood, cotton, iron and coal etc that might now be turning an absolutely fantastic dividend. Notably, doing this will increase the reinvestment rate because government owned buildings add more to reinvestment than private owned ones, this means that now your investment pool can support even more construction sectors and overpriced construction materials, and you add construction sectors as you go and nationalize any new build resource industry the Ai construction pool builds for you. And because resources prices are sky high, the AI will start to prioritize much more on expanding exactly on that resource industry, which allows you to further nationalize.

In such a scheme, you are actually profiting very handily from high resources prices. Where imports happen in volume, you get a 45% tariff which is chunky, where you collect dividends well at near +75% market price said dividends are actually getting a bit chunky too. Though its interesting to combine it with say a iron and coal company as they will add throughput to the levels you own for the levels they own and they will build said resource industry at a +66% speed. Your really ripping the investment pool of, but letting the Ai build brings in large amounts of cash that you can use to nationalize and this process actually increases the investment rate from which your taking money here.

And what you can do here is "drip building". Or thats what i call it, basically instead of queuing up a lot of buildings you build "1 per 1". Say that i have build up to 200 construction, and i add just 1 university to the construction pool, that will make me take up 20 construction, and will yield 180 construction to the AI. Now you can argue that for the state, building when resources are skyhigh at near +75% price is costly, but in this case i'm only taking 10% of the construction pool where i do pay a premium, but the other 90% of the construction pool pays a premium for the high priced goods to me that will maybe be 20% in the total goods cost trough dividends or 45% of the total goods cost if it comes trough trades. So your actually still profiting far more from high resource prices in such a case than that you are suffering.

Indeed, perhaps even more perversely, GDP is kinda determined by the volume of goods you create and the value at which you sell them. Thus, having your resources at near +75% creates far more GDP and consequent minting than were they at a low price. For a number of nations who can go quick into atmospheric engines and its follow up you can create pretty rapid GDP growth via this method. Additionally, very high industry profits push for higher wages, causing more consumption and creating a higher taxbase.

What about specialization in this case? Well if i want my steel mills to be in Bohemia as they bloody should rather than some place that doesnt have all those resources and manpower to boot then the steel mills in Bohemia WILL get the more advanced production methods but wont get the automation, and the steel mills located where i kinda dont want to be really get to produce with outdated pm's and get to pay for automation. It's one way in which you can guide this sort of economy towards regional specializations with ought actually building any industry yourself.

imports and tarrifs have similar function as to guide an economy too. Though the key factor is usually labor competition. The kind of industry that i "sabotage" might do well enough as long as their are peasants around but once labor competition comes around its the more profitable industries that win the labor market strugle. imports can help to depress prices of whole sectors that you would rather get rid of, if i'm playing a country that is relativly low on manpower then i likely might want to crush my own farming industry and so ill try to find as many places where i can buy cheap agricultural goods from which exist in spades acoording as how limited their market might be. Thats where treaty ports and isolationist country's can be cool, as you are the sole partner with who they can trade with if you get a treaty port on them and their goods will often be dirt cheap, plus while your levying 45% import tariff their is no tariff levied from their side.

Now what about Sol? Lets assume that i have replaced my whole farming industry and my pops are now all eating food imported at a 45% tariff rate, won't that impact their SOL? Well no, perversely they wont, its not the pops who pay the import tariffs afterall its the merchants . Now true, it will depend on wether such huge volumes of imports will be profitable for them or guide them trough the window to an early grave, but some merchant slaughter hardly is an issue for a nation early game. if the market demand is very high their trades will be profitable, but you can also send them trough the window at very rapid rates by making a huge amount of food imports as a small country trough minimal trades at start. The minimal trade size for fish or grain is 10, so if youre buying each from 64 nations over land you can import 1280 food as a market that has perhaps a demand for 50, which yes will keep food prices at -75% probably for much of the game until demadn really would grow. At that rate your killing merchants pretty fast and you can actually like kill of 80% of your starting rich class but it will stabilize with having profitable industry which they own. Even if you genocide them they can always come back. For the record importing 1280 as a nothing country constitutes a trade of about 25000£ on which one would thus receive 11250£ of tariffs no questions asked. The thing is that all import tariffs are simply payed out of their personal pockets, the pops meanwhile would have food at -75% price so their SOL sure will go up. Your forcing the traders to subsidize pop consumption out of their own pockets, and what you will see under such circumstances is that a % of your rich class hits 0 SOL and they die. I dont know do i have to call this "the NERO strategy" perhaps, in the end your rich class has nominally savings and a certain SOL they maintain with it and spend only with their surplus, now your forcing some of those lads to go will beyond only spending their surplus, like spend all your income and your savings and you get nothing to consume goods with, and you die, but there are plenty of you where you came from and its soooo damn lucrative i just cant help myself. As i see it that money would otherwise go unused, right? So its for the greater good, makes the country grow faster, more "trickleback" so i guess its ehthical from a utilitarian point of view. Right?

Some of you may die, but its a price i'm willing to take. It hardly even get as dramatic usually as in this Modena game , but thats what it takes if Modena is going to have 70% of its active poppulation employed in 20 universities. just a small factory that makes a lot of money, and hey now they are even at 50 SOL, the remaining ones got richer see im totally doing them a favor here. i think they are now at about 0.2% of the population, whereas the normal trend would be that the capitalist ratio grows at start to sit around 1% for most of the game in a "normal" economy.

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

How did you get 86% throughput with level 2 and 3 buildings?

Company throughput + province decree + special province bonus to ship industry in Zealand. It's just asking for it how can i refuse?

 

[Haresus]

When I look at something like this, I don't think it's a great example of the trade system working as it should:

Some of these trade routes are incredibly unprofitable and yet you're somehow able to extract tariffs from them because traders are just obedient servants of the government and the money appears out of nowhere, the rest barely make enough to feed the traders. Lots of trade routes like this are also fairly performance-intensive, or at least they used to be (I'm sure the devs are actively working on improving that).

Finally, even with tariffs these trades are most likely not even profitable for the government if you are paying for the bureaucracy. Sure, if you have excess bureaucracy you might as well do this to earn back some free money, but it would be more productive to downsize the bureaucracy and employ people elsewhere instead if possible.

I applaud the creativity in finding clever exploits like this, but I would personally not find much joy in playing like this for an extended period of time.

At that rate your killing merchants pretty fast and you can actually like kill of 80% of your starting rich class but it will stabilize with having profitable industry which they own. Even if you genocide them they can always come back.

Again, this just looks like the trade system not quite working to me. It's funny and all, but it's something I want to see patched out rather than integrated into my gameplay. How do we even start to discuss whether trade is good or not when traders are willing to sacrifice their lives for the state?

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

Again, this just looks like the trade system not quite working to me. It's funny and all, but it's something I want to see patched out rather than integrated into my gameplay. How do we even start to discuss whether trade is good or not when traders are willing to sacrifice their lives for the state?

No it's not, its an exploit and i readily agree to that. The devs will likely need to look at their concept of minimal trades at the least.

But then again, otoh the whole matter of playing tariffs in the fashion that also would make sense with the trade system actually does work, and does not even be so bureaucratic heavy. The trade system actually works better than people give it credit too, but you have to know when and where you can really find that competitive advantage and its opportune to invest in as you will find the profitable trade for a huge quantity flow of goods. Because the system as it is now allows me to exploit it a bit to "turbocharge" my economy im just using it to come to a point where i can give some impression of the potential of tariff generation per workforce used. It is not unseemingly that you could do similar things with many industries at trade profitability that make sense too and showcase where the system works, trades that grow to take a large volume withought much of a bureaucracy cost. The example of producing a boatload of cheap fish from Norway for example i think is rather valid, and its not by exploiting minimal trades that im going to move the output of 35 highly throughputed fisheries with steamships, were talking about thousands of fish, like 4000 perhaps from 25 fisheries, but with enough trade ports to do overland trade (which is also somewhat exploity, but we can also discuss what it takes to drasticly reduce convoy cost and how tariff revenues relate to that, aka it can easily ofset the costs and then the ports can also provide indrastructure) il will easily find a market i think for big overland trades that cost few bureaucracy all toghether.

What is there really "a market for", wether its the beginning or end of the game? Do we know the trends? iron certainly is a great performer early game. But the food market is one that is kinda the more flexible on the demand early on, as in you might bring in a lot new supply and trade it at cheap prices then the low class sol quickly rises a tad and they just eat up the new supply as the sol rise has made their demand package greater. point is, there is likely a underrated amount of early money to be made on fish tariffs, even if it takes 3x more employement than the factories per tariff pound collected its also 3x cheaper to pump out a fishery.

And there are way to reduce shipping costs and bureaucratic costs, yes i used exploits which i illustrated aswell to come to a point where i could illustrate something relating to the worth of tariffs, but let that exploitation usage not take away that i believe there is very big money that one can be made early game trough large volumes of profitable trades and tarrifs under a system that seems realistic and immersive to gameplay.

So look i will atone for the exploits i used and now will play a game where i do it for real, positive bureaucracy, big tariff income, preferably relativly early enough to also impress. give me some time to play that one out.

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

again, this just looks like the trade system not quite working to me.

Well i promised you a better oversight in a bureaucracy positive setting, and let me deliver just that.

I present to you the trades and tariff incomes of Portugal in 1844, 9 years into the game.

Is that enough trade in the first 10 years?

We import 595 wood from russia, they pay a 5% import tariff, its a very productive trade as all the rest, and were on positive bureaucracy right.
We import 450 cloth trough our super duper treaty port from China at a tariff of, i kid you not, a whooping 45%. My gawd...
200 or so liqour is imported at 5% import tariff, sorry Brittain no trade agreement anymore for you
We sold some coffee to austria, but they also initiated a trade, still at a 15% export tariff
We sell our excess dye to Germany and Austria, which totally speaks for itself, anyone having played those nations knows they need dyes.15% export tariff ofcourse.
Know your markets, China has cheap cloth Russia has tons of wood Germany and Austria need dyes you learn that with experience

Now, as to how our budget looks:

Tariffs, and a little bit of dividend is a neat extra to our income. Minting excluded, these 2 are half our income, taxes being the rest. Were overbuilding our construction sector somewhat, and they demand huge quantity's of wood and cloth because they operate as wood construction sectors. Soon ill relinquish the construction to the Ai, letting it build and invest trough my construction sectors at a rate that is just a bit higher than their reinvistment, to drain the current 3 million reserve they have and use it and also crucially to make the AI pay for the high construction materials cost and pay me with it and bigtime too, i will then use that money for nationalizing very profitable bussiness, which will increase the reinvestment rate, which will allow me to build more wood construction sectors, which will pull in even more demand.

Broken down, our tariffs look like this:

Oh hell yeah 4270£ alone for importing cloth from china trough my treaty port. The value of a treaty port and the little difference in profitabillety that allows you to set that rate all the way to 45% whew.
1300£ for about 200 sold dyes, 1100£ for coffee, almost 2000£ for wood even at just a 5% import tariff. How does the cost of transport break down anyway? lets have a look?

i deduce from this screen that i currently pay roughly 4.3£ per convoy
the cloth trade uses about 180 convoys, which gives it a running cost of about 800£ roughly, versus 4.27K collected tariffs
Wood uses 200, for about 860£ in running cost, bringing in a tariff revenue of 1860£
Dyes uses 260, for a 1110£ running cost, and brings in 1300£
Liquor uses 60, for a running cost of about 270£, and brings about 900£ in tariffs

Thats all pretty cost effecient, though one might argue that dyes isnt worth the added bureaucracy cost at the moment when shipping. Not that shipping prices can be drastically reduced, there are ... tricks for that. Something in the range of 1.5£ per convoy, want me to prove it can be done?

Angola is a strong asset for Portugal at its start, this might look inefficient withought tools but its not. The profits are chunky, the dividend accordingly, but more importantly the reinvestment rate is buffed, that means that the ai can build and invest and make more money flow trough the construction sector, which i give to them to consume wood and cloth imported at very profitable rates that only make me richer, and again yielding the construction to the AI gives me tonloads of money to further nationalise with, just need to buy industry that is really profitable trough colonial exploitation because of low labor prices to really supercharge that reinvestment rate, and the result is that my country can do a lot more construction and far faster growth and that as the state i get very rich from it too, its win win win.

But there is more to Angola. it has good wood, and it has cloth. Colonial exploitation gives you extra throughput on all resources and really low wages that allow either high profits or making goods dirt cheap, but they arnt so fond of more advanced production methods if you dont have them educated and there is a Mapi penalty to consider that mainly hits the import side for the province. You can manufacture locally to supply certain things, but by default a -20% throughput applies to factories. Yet when it comes to companies, oh boy thats a different story. if your company gives you +60% throughput, then it opperates in those colonies with +40% throughput which is still nice, but it works with very cheap labor and potentially very cheap minputs so that it can produce utterly dirt cheap too. That can be a clipper factory, adn a clipper factory that supplies a local port that has dirt cheap workers and dirt cheap clippers. When you can have your clippers at -75% price trough local oversupply and your labor 75% cheaper, yes then your perhaps looking at 1.5£ per convoy. The the very story of even such things as "trough trade", with the advantage of having a port network around the world, starts to look different.

Colonial exploitation + companies is a bit crazy and perhaps underrated. take some province with coal and iron and preferably also rubber and even maybe oil and have a steel, tools and engines company opperating there. How does producing steel, tools and engines at -75% the labor and input price sound to you? Kinda makes railroads potentially crazzily profitable too, especially if like the Uk you have a company that gives 75% troughput to railways, funny how those things can go. cant have a company in everything though, sadly.

So are we convinced? Is trade viable, profitable enough aswell? Did i make my point about tariffs well enough?

if not this is just a year later, i now managed to drive wood price so high that can levy a 45% import tariff on Russian wood too, yaaaay

Immagine selling that wood as Russia, at a 15% export tariff. you only get 1/3rd of that chunky 6.9K, but thats still 2.3k then. This one takes 230 ships, for portugal atleast, so about a 1000£ to run. Russia from its end only would need to drive the price low, but man does Russia have forrests for you. Selling it to the likes of Spain and the netherlands and portugal, or overland to make it even cheaper.

Its a good option for the netherlands aswell, when you got the convoys and the coast and ciminally lack building materials, wood constructions sectors plenty and import import. Work your shipping and convoy prices down, start to reply on port provided infrastructure rather than rail provided infrastructure considering "if you are going to subsidize it anyway, might aswell get a bunch of ships to try juice some tarrifs out of it at a profitable rate".

 

[Haresus]

Well i promised you a better oversight in a bureaucracy positive setting, and let me deliver just that.

I present to you the trades and tariff incomes of Portugal in 1844, 9 years into the game.

View attachment 1272069

Is that enough trade in the first 10 years?

We import 595 wood from russia, they pay a 5% import tariff, its a very productive trade as all the rest, and were on positive bureaucracy right.
We import 450 cloth trough our super duper treaty port from China at a tariff of, i kid you not, a whooping 45%. My gawd...
200 or so liqour is imported at 5% import tariff, sorry Brittain no trade agreement anymore for you
We sold some coffee to austria, but they also initiated a trade, still at a 15% export tariff
We sell our excess dye to Germany and Austria, which totally speaks for itself, anyone having played those nations knows they need dyes.15% export tariff ofcourse.
Know your markets, China has cheap cloth Russia has tons of wood Germany and Austria need dyes you learn that with experience

Now, as to how our budget looks:

View attachment 1272070

Tariffs, and a little bit of dividend is a neat extra to our income. Minting excluded, these 2 are half our income, taxes being the rest. Were overbuilding our construction sector somewhat, and they demand huge quantity's of wood and cloth because they operate as wood construction sectors. Soon ill relinquish the construction to the Ai, letting it build and invest trough my construction sectors at a rate that is just a bit higher than their reinvistment, to drain the current 3 million reserve they have and use it and also crucially to make the AI pay for the high construction materials cost and pay me with it and bigtime too, i will then use that money for nationalizing very profitable bussiness, which will increase the reinvestment rate, which will allow me to build more wood construction sectors, which will pull in even more demand.

Broken down, our tariffs look like this:

View attachment 1272081

Oh hell yeah 4270£ alone for importing cloth from china trough my treaty port. The value of a treaty port and the little difference in profitabillety that allows you to set that rate all the way to 45% whew.
1300£ for about 200 sold dyes, 1100£ for coffee, almost 2000£ for wood even at just a 5% import tariff. How does the cost of transport break down anyway? lets have a look?

View attachment 1272082

i deduce from this screen that i currently pay roughly 4.3£ per convoy
the cloth trade uses about 180 convoys, which gives it a running cost of about 800£ roughly, versus 4.27K collected tariffs
Wood uses 200, for about 860£ in running cost, bringing in a tariff revenue of 1860£
Dyes uses 260, for a 1110£ running cost, and brings in 1300£
Liquor uses 60, for a running cost of about 270£, and brings about 900£ in tariffs

Thats all pretty cost effecient, though one might argue that dyes isnt worth the added bureaucracy cost at the moment when shipping. Not that shipping prices can be drastically reduced, there are ... tricks for that. Something in the range of 1.5£ per convoy, want me to prove it can be done?

View attachment 1272086

Angola is a strong asset for Portugal at its start, this might look inefficient withought tools but its not. The profits are chunky, the dividend accordingly, but more importantly the reinvestment rate is buffed, that means that the ai can build and invest and make more money flow trough the construction sector, which i give to them to consume wood and cloth imported at very profitable rates that only make me richer, and again yielding the construction to the AI gives me tonloads of money to further nationalise with, just need to buy industry that is really profitable trough colonial exploitation because of low labor prices to really supercharge that reinvestment rate, and the result is that my country can do a lot more construction and far faster growth and that as the state i get very rich from it too, its win win win.

But there is more to Angola. it has good wood, and it has cloth. Colonial exploitation gives you extra throughput on all resources and really low wages that allow either high profits or making goods dirt cheap, but they arnt so fond of more advanced production methods if you dont have them educated and there is a Mapi penalty to consider that mainly hits the import side for the province. You can manufacture locally to supply certain things, but by default a -20% throughput applies to factories. Yet when it comes to companies, oh boy thats a different story. if your company gives you +60% throughput, then it opperates in those colonies with +40% throughput which is still nice, but it works with very cheap labor and potentially very cheap minputs so that it can produce utterly dirt cheap too. That can be a clipper factory, adn a clipper factory that supplies a local port that has dirt cheap workers and dirt cheap clippers. When you can have your clippers at -75% price trough local oversupply and your labor 75% cheaper, yes then your perhaps looking at 1.5£ per convoy. The the very story of even such things as "trough trade", with the advantage of having a port network around the world, starts to look different.

Colonial exploitation + companies is a bit crazy and perhaps underrated. take some province with coal and iron and preferably also rubber and even maybe oil and have a steel, tools and engines company opperating there. How does producing steel, tools and engines at -75% the labor and input price sound to you? Kinda makes railroads potentially crazzily profitable too, especially if like the Uk you have a company that gives 75% troughput to railways, funny how those things can go. cant have a company in everything though, sadly.

So are we convinced? Is trade viable, profitable enough aswell? Did i make my point about tariffs well enough?

if not this is just a year later, i now managed to drive wood price so high that can levy a 45% import tariff on Russian wood too, yaaaay

View attachment 1272112

Immagine selling that wood as Russia, at a 15% export tariff. you only get 1/3rd of that chunky 6.9K, but thats still 2.3k then. This one takes 230 ships, for portugal atleast, so about a 1000£ to run. Russia from its end only would need to drive the price low, but man does Russia have forrests for you. Selling it to the likes of Spain and the netherlands and portugal, or overland to make it even cheaper.

Its a good option for the netherlands aswell, when you got the convoys and the coast and ciminally lack building materials, wood constructions sectors plenty and import import. Work your shipping and convoy prices down, start to reply on port provided infrastructure rather than rail provided infrastructure considering "if you are going to subsidize it anyway, might aswell get a bunch of ships to try juice some tarrifs out of it at a profitable rate".

Very impressive! I suppose my main criticisms here are that you are intentionally staying on the less efficient wood construction PM for longer than necessary (this would depend on the cost of iron, but Portugal does have access to iron) and most of your tariff income comes from tariffs on construction goods (wood and fabric). You're effectively making money from making construction more expensive for yourself. Maybe that's still a net gain in the end, but it is a cost that you're forgetting to calculate. If construction goods can be made 20% cheaper with lower tariffs that's over 7k pounds saved weekly (minus additional convoy costs) for you and your investment pool, which could fund another construction sector.

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

You're effectively making money from making construction more expensive for yourself. Maybe that's still a net gain in the end, but it is a cost that you're forgetting to calculate. If construction goods can be made 20% cheaper with lower tariffs that's over 7k pounds saved weekly (minus additional convoy costs) for you and your investment pool, which could fund another construction sector.

Not for me and the investment pool, but just for the investment pool, under the condition that i am not building. When you are building, you pay for the administration of the construction sector + the materials for the percentage of the construction pool you use, when you stop building yourself you only pay for the labor cost of the construction sectors and the AI pays for all the construction materials. I even have some wood construction sectors running in colonial exploitive regions, ill usually just find enough qualified workers for 1 in each region and with some education invested, but they do work about 35% cheaper than a wood construction sector in Portugal itself and at that cheaper than an iron construction sector.

So effectivly, when i'm not building, i'm taxing the investment pool. Now you can say that this makes the investment pool be able to build less with its capital, but i use the capital that it yields to nationalize highly profitable industry or agriculture in colonial exploitation which has high profits due to low labor cost, and this in turn significantly increases the reinvestment rate besides giving me added dividend income. so i'm using that money to make the investment pool growth rate stronger so it can invest more ... and pay more tariffs.

Once you get to like 120 construction, you can easily do "drip building", you add 1 building at a time, you as the govenrment then only use 20 construction points at any time and pay something like 15% of the cost of the construction materials, but the tariff you levy on the remaining 85% can easily outweigh what you pay extra as the state for more expensive materials.

It's not so simple either to say that Portugal has access to Iron. it has a nice province with iron and coal and sulpher, but it has limited manpower. More crucially Portugal starts withought atmospheric engines and it will take years to get to it and is it the best priority for Portugal then? It starts with 1 mine but it has very limited production and cant support a full iron construction sector and it starts withought a tools factory. A iron construction sector uses a fair amount of iron and tools so just running one, for gaining 5 construction points, will take you the building of an additional 2 iron mines atleast + a tool shop before you can have it, you start with 12 construction points with 1 wood construction sector in your capital and with practically no locally produced wood or cotton either. So you may, for 700 construction points, start with queieing 2 mines and a tool shop, and after that you put in a construction sector for 100 construction points and you have 5 more construction points, and that alone might take you 2 and a half years to complete at 12 construction points. Or you use that 800 construction points to build 8 additional wood construction sectors from the bat and just import wood and cloth from the market and you land on 28 construction points, granted you will have to invest in a few forrestries, or perhaps mines, to kickstart the reinvestment rate of the investment pool, thats why i build 7 forrestries in Angola after i quickly accumulated some wood construction sectors their profit is very high and that amplifies the higher reinvestment rate it gives from state ownership.

From the moment you get atmospheric engines, and then especially its follow up too (which can gain a handy techboost by event) it takes relativly few expansion of iron to provide more for your iron construction sectors, but before atmospheric engines iron is very const ineffecient as an investment with low yield that does not justify using iron construction. Especially if you can use quasi slave labour in your wood construction sectors in the colonies and can have local construction goods cheaper ther due to MAPI difference.

 

[IsaacCAT]

For smaller nations is easier to play efficiently as trade goods are available in the market.

When I say efficiently I mean you do not need to produce everything yourself and you trade what other nations can produce more efficiently than you. This way you can concentrate in producing what you are best at.

However, as you have shown in this thread, the trick to produce goods at -75% base price and still being profitable is something that the AI isn't very good at. This will greatly help with your trades and tariffs as trade routes will not require your buildings to buy at very expensive prices.

For Portugal with its colonies in Africa, to import wood and fabric and export coffee and dyes make a lot of sense. What buildings are you going to expand in Portugal if you were to keep absolute advantage in mind?

Sadly, coffee does not have a manufactured sub-product and dyes eventually can be industrially manufactured. Your lands have potential on rubber, but what will be your focus in the Metropoli in Iberia? Garments? Groceries?

I am very much interested in this type of experiments.

PS: as far as I remember, your construction sector should be importing everything from abroad (iron, steel, glass, tools, wood) no way you want to produce that locally in Portugal.

 

[Don_Quigleone]

Regarding minimal trades:
This is a pretty terrible exploit that is not practical :
1. It doesn't scale. If you're trying to support more than 10 building levels this isn't going to do much.
2. That many trade routes, all with tariffs, means you're paying massive bureaucracy, 15 per route. That's absurdly expensive.
3. You're failing to take into account the cost of convoys.

More generally, I think you'll find once you try to scale into the midgame and take into account EVERY cost, you'll find this approach doesn't work.

My experience is that the only consistently reliable way to generate money from trade is selling opium to the Chinese.

 

[yurcick]

just for the investment pool, under the condition that i am not building

You keep repeating this like it’s some sort of a silver bullet, benefits with no cost (like what’s observed in your funny bureaucracy-deficit runs). It’s not. If a unit of construction is more expensive for your IP, it means that less gets constructed per pound invested by the IP, and your national capital accumulation rate suffers significantly.

The game, sadly, doesn’t provide convenient tools to track it, but the effects are still there.

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

You keep repeating this like it’s some sort of a silver bullet, benefits with no cost (like what’s observed in your funny bureaucracy-deficit runs). It’s not. If a unit of construction is more expensive for your IP, it means that less gets constructed per pound invested by the IP, and your national capital accumulation rate suffers significantly.

The game, sadly, doesn’t provide convenient tools to track it, but the effects are still there.

But you dont seem to get the reinvestment pool story and the importance of nationalization and the aquisition of funds for nationalisation.

lets look at the reinvestment rate for Portugal in 1835:

Now there isnt much that is all too profitable to buy for Portugal on januari 1836, but when i buy 3 underperforming coffee plantations in Africa who sell at very low prices but at a fair profit still due to low labor cost on day 1, then after that 300K investment my reinvestment rate looks like this

Yes thats right, nationalizing 3 plantations has DOUBLED my reinvestment rate

It's not a surprise, percentage wise state owned industry contributes a lot more to the investment pool early on than private business its like 70% of profit versus 30% at this point , so buying up business quickly keeps increasing that money generation rate. i doubled the pool of money from which i will draw tariffs from from day 1. Also, i get some dividends. Profitabillety of the bussiness matters a lot here, the more profit the more it amplifies the investment pool if you buy it up, and it has to be perceived in ROi versus construction cost, but for Portugal buying up logging camps, cotton plantations and opium plantations that the AI might build is gold, because you have the combo of high goods prices and very low wages creating very large profit margins, and this in turn increases the reinvestment rate even more. Yes you heard that right, high wood prices and cotton prices increases my investment rate.

This is what my reinvestment rate looks like 9 years in

i mean isnt it perverse? The higher the price of construction materials in your economy, the higher the profits of your construction good industry (and gdp+minting too) the higher the reinvestment rate becomes, so they have both benifit and a drawback from high material prices, which one wins out? Afcourse that quite depends on the volume of construction materials you produce yourself too, and what for example the laborcosts are there so as to determine the actual profit margin. But in order for the state to keep further nationalizing, it needs to generate wealth to buy up profitable business, and by yielding the construction pool to the AI and taking a tariff on the construction materials i can generate a lot of surpluss quick to buy up a lot of profitable business to further pump the reinvestment rate. So i'm nationalizing, and by that increasing my dividend income, and increasing the reinvestment rate, and hence the tariffs i will be earning. Do you see the cyclical nature of this all now? By buffing this reinvestment rate, and by having focused on just adding construction fast, i'm pushing the Ai to build faster so i have more buildings to nationalize. it's a cyclical process that that leads to exponential growth.

your saying "your reinvestment is spend less effeciently", i'm saying that this exactly increases the reinvestment rate pool and allows me to buff it even further. So i dont mind if there is say a 30% effeciency loss in its spending if that allows me to double or triple the reinvestment rate in a short time, right? If it requires that i get more income as the state to buff this reinvestment rate .... you get the picture?

 

[yurcick]

But you dont seem to get the reinvestment pool story and the importance of nationalization and the aquisition of funds for nationalisation.

Sorry mate, until I see that more actually gets built over the course of several years (or more CP consistently being used up), I'm skeptical.
Reinvestment in raw amount of money is important, but $1k reinvestment at -50% prices is equivalent to $3k reinvestment at +50% prices, in terms of how much gets constructed.

There are also secondary considerations like how much richer your pops get (which likely indirectly affects current and future reinvestment as well) and how many industries are downsized, but I'm pretty sure that those are less significant in numbers and that they can't make your strategy more effective.

The comparison of main factors is more important: will reinvestments+budget surplus be so much higher than under normal approach as to compensate the price difference? My bet is that it wouldn't.
I understand that for your strategy, you tend to minimise budget surplus, but for an apple to apple comparison you have to compare sums anyway.

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

Regarding minimal trades:
This is a pretty terrible exploit that is not practical :
1. It doesn't scale. If you're trying to support more than 10 building levels this isn't going to do much.
2. That many trade routes, all with tariffs, means you're paying massive bureaucracy, 15 per route. That's absurdly expensive.
3. You're failing to take into account the cost of convoys.

More generally, I think you'll find once you try to scale into the midgame and take into account EVERY cost, you'll find this approach doesn't work.

My experience is that the only consistently reliable way to generate money from trade is selling opium to the Chinese.

Minimal trades are an exploit which i readily agreed to. One typically plays it with negative bureaucracy strat, in which case as n expploit it werks pretty damn well to tubocharge a country.

But your wrong in point 3 that i fail to take into account the costs of transports. I know exactly what my cost per convoy is, i even adressed this in a previous post, and besides convoys dont even apply when one has a land border to trade over and those arnt always that hard to get either.

and your saying 15 per route, and absurdely expensive, but it also bears some discussion on what the actual bureaucracy cost then is and how that relates to some trades

this is a paper run democracy in Paris

We can deduce from this that France pays 19,63£ per bureaucracy here

This is a paperless bureaucracy in Beira Portugal

On paperless, and admittingly with -30% government cost due to the slider, but also taking in mind that we have the PB IG happy and powerfull to lend us a +20% bureaucracy modifier, we produce 343*1.2 equals 411, devide the costs by this and portugal is currently paying 10.65£ per unit of bureaucracy, almost half the rate of Paris.

The minimal trade for art is 2, and this is a good that comes at 200£ price. Hence, the minimal trade revenue for art is 400£, and at a guaranteed 45% inport tariff its tariff revenue is 180£. whereas 15x10.65£ equals 160£, so thats a 20£ profit margin. if that trade requiters shipping then the 1 convoy it needs costs usually about 5£. And Beira isnt even payed that shitty, i can drive those costs of bureaucracy down further. You can certainly be profitable with such trades even when taking the bureaucracy cost and potential shipping cost if any in mind just have to crush the numbers, it depends on the good and it depends on how sheer exploitative you can get on those bureaucracy workers and also how much troughput stacking you do. Because a bureaucracy can get +50% throughput too, and at throughput i would be more at a bureaucracy cost of about 7£ per unit in Beira, well as long as i can control labor competition. paperless bureaucracy's are often a temporary sollution but they have their use in many specialty cases and the point is that if you look at the production methods of bureaucracies that the improved PM adds far more taxation capacity per level than actual bureaucracy so that if its purely for the purpose of generating sheer cheap bureaucracy your often better of paperless. it also depends afcourse how easily you think you can get paper or how annoying it would be to have to build a paper mill early on, bureaucracy's itself are very cheap to build fast in the latest version so its often quicker to add more bureaucracy and at a more effecient rate by building paperless bureaucracy's early on rather than paper using ones, especially knowing that throughput modifiers would also affect the rate of paper use. But anyway its also very dependant on how low you can drive wages, as paperless bureacracy is in its cost structure "labor intensive", and are fun to use if you can have a lot of educated low acceptance pop working jobs in them.

But what can you do with this power bloc institution i wonder? I still have to test the one below here:

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

Sorry mate, until I see that more actually gets built over the course of several years (or more CP consistently being used up), I'm skeptical.

i can debate in concise terms with very precise numbers and cost comparisons as i did, and thats a fair bit of work to also make the points and the screenshot and such. I'm not going to engage on having the goalpost of proving my point moved to some "standard of comparative gaming over years" to which i dont even have a reference too. There are so many variables involved even with laws passed that such comparisons would be subject to debate too. Fine, maybe it cant be proven then, and our debate kinda ends with "each his oppinion"? or maybe you could be enticed to play Portugal to the point where i am in the game and show screenshots of your progress maybe having done better?

Reinvestment in raw amount of money is important, but $1k reinvestment at -50% prices is equivalent to $3k reinvestment at +50% prices, in terms of how much gets constructed.

You mean have your raw materials at significantly reduced prices? So that the mines make far less profit? So that the mines contribution to the reinvestment rate is pretty much destroyed?

There are also secondary considerations like how much richer your pops get (which likely indirectly affects current and future reinvestment as well) and how many industries are downsized, but I'm pretty sure that those are less significant in numbers and that they can't make your strategy more effective.

The comparison of main factors is more important: will reinvestments+budget surplus be so much higher than under normal approach as to compensate the price difference? My bet is that it wouldn't.

There is only so much i can prove in a clear and concise way, there is only so much data i can collect. i'm sorry but i'm not sure how i could prove a point to you here if you set the requirement for having the point proven so high. i mean not to be moral about it, but i guess thats it then for your discussion on this specific matter, and i'm pretty confident that i'm right.

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

For Portugal with its colonies in Africa, to import wood and fabric and export coffee and dyes make a lot of sense. What buildings are you going to expand in Portugal if you were to keep absolute advantage in mind?

Sadly, coffee does not have a manufactured sub-product and dyes eventually can be industrially manufactured. Your lands have potential on rubber, but what will be your focus in the Metropoli in Iberia? Garments? Groceries?

I am very much interested in this type of experiments.

The first priority after setup is hitting sindh as Portugal, for me. Afeterall we do have Macao right, other nations cant trade opium with China unless certain conditions but we can sell opium to China. Sindh with colonial exploitation and a farming decree is a starting +60% troughput on your opium (it province modifiers are pretty nice), it has room for 50+ levels of opium plantation for some added troughput aswell though i would tend to like to control it as the state but preferably the AI builds the plantations and i buy them up. there is a fair likelyhood that the Ai will build opium plantations in Sindh when i let it do its thing, it's a type of plantation that has a higher revenue output than others and crazily profitable with colonial exploitation for the purpose of dividends and juicing the reinvestment pool given its high ROI, i just need to keep the price as high i can so to entice the investment pool to take that direction more. China only starts with buying like a few thousand opium from the brits early on, and i think i can push the brits out of that juicepot from under their nose if i can get my hands on Sindh and hold it, i do have a defensive pact with them. We make say 3000 opium and sell it to China, its a trade worth 150.000£ in revenue and at a 15% export tariff you collect 22.500£, whereas the plantations have a dividend yield of about 300£ easily per farm so after 50 farms you have another15.000£ in dividend too.

Macao is a undeniable asset, the Chinese will have things we can buy at cheap prices and things we can sell at cheap prices and their market often allows fairly large volumes, and we dont pay their tariffs so were extra competitive with them. China will have a fairly logical progression of lacking more advanced industrial goods to which you can compete even just with more advanced production methods.

Alejento is a asset with its coal, iron and supher, a nice combo of minerals, but it has relativly limited poppulation which is of some concern that needs to be adressed by having labour competition there and a immigration decree to pull people from the rest of portugal faster. After that you can drop a steel company, a coal company and a engines company there, its a pretty effecient combo with the minerals laying around there. Tools with rubber PM are very rushable and can be very profitable, with engines you have that thing that you might just entice your buyer to switch his plantations to using it. Its something which can be pretty guaranteed if you annex and then release country's as vassal when you already have researched pumpjacks yourself, they have the tech then too and you can give them their own market and sell your engines and they will likely apply it to their plantations, and you can generate some more trade volume with such partners it is like if you have etheopia and release it well much of its economy is likely going to be plantation based and the agricultural goods they produce tend to come very cheap especially when you sell the engines so you buy their cheap goods and maybe sell them elsewhere.

Also nice to add a colony that happens to have coal and iron and will have rubber in time. Company's can have factory's in colonial exploitation provinces, which while colonial exploitation gives -20% throughput they make up for it with their company bonus. The advantage can be utterly dirt cheap labor and resources, both for the supplying mines as for the factories which all opperate at higher throughputs too. you can drive the cost of any factory good very low in colonial exploitation with company's and local autartic supply chains but you tend to need to stick to outdated production methods there which albeit is fine when sheer scale and size is added.