This thread is a prime example of why I have to have the Victoria 3 Wiki Jargon page open at all times.
What's he on about?
What's he on about?
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Yeah, you really shouldn't need gigantic complexes employing hundreds of thousands of people just to make tools. I am pretty certain that the all-in-one Rouge River Plant Ford operated in the 1920's didn't need 250k people working there, and it was a power plant, steel mill, and automobile factory all in one.
See: that's a nice illustration of the problem. One factory complex is employing a quarter of a million people. Do you want to know how many people worked at Standard Oil in 1909 at its height? About 60k, according to Rockefeller's own admittance. Hell, in 1900 a full third of the US population still worked on farms (10 million of 29 million gainfully employed) and yet we had already exceeded the UK's steel output a decade earlier.
You need to drop the numbers down by a lot, and then as suggested elsewhere have the primary PM's also reduce overall employee count, since one machinist should be able to do the the work of several laborers.
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Yeah. I have other reasons for wanting stricter quals, but exhausting population isn't one of them.
Well...
This is a multifaceted issue for a whole list of reasons.
Historically, it makes almost no sense. Our unemployment levels in Vic3 are comically low throughout most of the game. Given how labor unrest was a driving force in the period, this means we are missing one of the hurdles we should be facing.
But...
A lot of GSGs are about the player exceeding what happened historically. Winning the Napoleonic Wars as Napoleon. Creating a colonial empire as China in 1880. Winning WW1. Conquering the world as Tibet.
In a game where economics and POP welfare is important, exceeding historical successes might include having both #1 population and having the lowest unemployment at the same time. Even if it didn't have knock on economic benefits, some players might just see that as a good thing in and of itself. And on top of that, players with an anti-capitalist outlook might even see full employment in a command economy as a fun and fitting response to laissez-faire economics.
And this adds fuel to that viewpoint, since full employment is part of the recipe for achieving that economic growth via POP demand. Those peasants aren't going to drive demand like laborers.
And let's make sure we understand something: having the best economy and a large population gives the player the resources needed to do things like conquer their enemies or fund massive social programs that won't yield a return in terms of GDP within the game's timeframe but will give you that warm fuzzy feeling of knowing infant mortality is going down.
So, if Vic3 is a game where economy is detailed and important, then what does it look like to do better than history? Defeating Temujin or Atilla? Wrong era. Preventing the formation of a unified Germany as France? Getting warmer, but again, having a great economy is key to this. Reaching full employment with a population of 200 million while women enter the workforce further increasing workforce ratio? Yeah, that would do it.
And for players of original Vicky and Vic2 (I see you in this thread, @RELee ), don't let rose colored glasses fool you. Even with weird late game economic issues, full employment was a reasonable goal for experienced players on even the biggest countries.
Side note: One thing we had to deal with in Vic2 that we don't have to deal with in Vic3 was artisan competition with factories. While it was never more than a nuisance in most cases, you could have significant problems with radicals as artisans were outcompeted by factories. While I don't know how I feel about directly copying over artisans to Vic3, I do wonder if urban centers might be retooled to create an urban counterpart to subsistence farmers (similar to the OPs suggestion) but more along the lines of "the urban center has a much higher employment capacity and always hires people like subsistence farms but offers them terrible jobs that, unlike subsistence farms, has no decrease in POP needs, resulting in a potential under-employed and underfed lower class that won't return to the countryside."
The goal is to give more "oomph" to labor problems by virtue of displaced labor being unhappy. Because at the moment, in most cases, I'm not too concerned about farms and plantations moving people off subsistence farms... since I want that labor to work in mines and workshops anyway.
EDIT: And I wanted to point out that under interventionism, I rarely build farms anyway. My government-directed build queue is usually focused on industry and resource buildings since that's where the money and long-term growth are. I'll just import grain and fish if I have to.
Players wanting to roleplay would be still be able to do that as full employment now is reached way before the end of the game
By reducing pops employment in buildings in theory (as I haven’t yet done it and I am sure devs already tested this before) you would still be able to have enough resources to conquer enemies or fund massive social programs by taxing companies or by means of tariffs as was historically the case until WWI.
Also players will experiment something that only a handful of Vic3 players know about now: the lack of demand crisis. This is not happening to most of Vic3 players as they do not build enough construction sectors or reach the end of the game in 1936 (due to PC performance). This crisis needs wits to solve, finding new markets for your goods, uplifting your POPs for more demand, etc… It is something that would be experimented earlier if less pops would be employed per building.
Currently POPs are having disafection by SOL levels. By reducing the number of POPs employed the SOL levels will not increase as much as now and less loyal POPs will exist. I find myself almost always with a surplus of loyal POPs, negating the political movements that otherwise would be a struggle for the player.
IMHO, less POPs employed per building should be a difficulty level that Victoria 3 base game should offer to experienced players.
That's not one factory complex. That's one sector of industry.
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I have thought for a while that simply reducing the number of workers per building has got to be the best place to start with fixing this problem. Probably quite drastically, like to 10 or 20% of the current amount.
The issue with running out of population is most drastically obvious in parts of the world which are lightly populated - Sumatra and Borneo are good examples. You can run out of population quite easily within a decade or so as some of these countries.
The issue with running out of population is most drastically obvious in parts of the world which are lightly populated - Sumatra and Borneo are good examples. You can run out of population quite easily within a decade or so as some of these countries.
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I very much agree with the ideas here, it's interesting how this is a multifaceted problem with many possible ways to tackle it.
So I'll add another point where the simulation is lacking: population growth.
I'll quote my own reply to another thread with mkre specific data:
That's not just "more peasants", as urban populations growing actively creates unemployed pops.
I actually did put this to the test, modding a +15% baseline pop growth, which not only got the numbers to a near historical level, but also left some unemployed people/peasants out there as a result.
Of course, this was the AI, a player would have performed much better, and some countries did find their way to full employment anyway, but it was an improvement.
(Sadly, I couldn't play a full game myself with the mod at the time, and now I want to wait for the trade rework, so... yeah)
Any green number will give the player a good feeling, and a red number a bad one.
So have the unemployment number on a neutral color and slap a percentage on the side of it, with it being green if <5% and red if >15%.
I'm much more concerned about the devs willingness to implement a nerf to players in the game really.
So I'll add another point where the simulation is lacking: population growth.
I'll quote my own reply to another thread with mkre specific data:
But the gist of it is how pop numbers lags behind historical numbers by some 20-30% by the endgame, which has a huge impact on employment numbers.
That's not just "more peasants", as urban populations growing actively creates unemployed pops.
I actually did put this to the test, modding a +15% baseline pop growth, which not only got the numbers to a near historical level, but also left some unemployed people/peasants out there as a result.
Of course, this was the AI, a player would have performed much better, and some countries did find their way to full employment anyway, but it was an improvement.
(Sadly, I couldn't play a full game myself with the mod at the time, and now I want to wait for the trade rework, so... yeah)
It's all an UX issue to me.
Any green number will give the player a good feeling, and a red number a bad one.
So have the unemployment number on a neutral color and slap a percentage on the side of it, with it being green if <5% and red if >15%.
I'm much more concerned about the devs willingness to implement a nerf to players in the game really.
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Yes, and IRL actual employment numbers never, ever got that close for a single industrial sector. In 1920, all of Michigan state had a population of 3.6 million, and just under a million of them lived and worked in Detroit, the Motor City. I'm pretty sure you'd need to employ the whole damn historical population of the city in motor industries alone to get close to its historical output in Vic 3.
Don't forget that a side effect of reducing factory employment is less competition for workers with urban sectors, giving them an indirect boost. Of course, that still doesn't solve the transportation/infrastructure issue between them and railways, and in fact makes it worse, but sadly this whole game is filled with systemic issues like that.
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I wholeheartedly agree that there's too much economic growth compared to artificially decreased pop growth. However
your understanding of the rural economy seems wrong.
I doubt that peasants went willingly to become unemployed and even if they went for a job and didn't find one, farming is better than starving, if there's available land and you know how to farm, you'd rather do that than starve (hence e.g. migrations to the US). Also, subsistence farmers didn't have it nearly as bad as you make it out. Yes, they were poor, but the urban poor weren't comparatively better off, ditto not the unemployed ones. E.g. in Scotland, the lords paid their tenants to get them off the land.
On the contrary, peasants were often enclosed and driven off the land by the landlords to either sell the land to settle personal debt or to start a farm producing for the market.
Subsistence farm by definition cannot go bankrupt, but it can stop sustaining people who work it through severe weather, soil exhaustion, or overpopulation. Rents/ taxes also play a role, but they can be either in kind (portion of harvest), in labour(3 days of work on the lords land) or in money. Only the last one offloads the monetary risk of bad harvests onto the tenant possibly causing something like bankruptcy, but not for the farm, but rather for the tenant. So no, subsistence farms would not go bankrupt.
To get your rural peasant to urban unemployed pipeline, i think we could do with something like
a) higher population growth -> population outgrowing what subsistence farming can produce
b) higher demand for food and lower initial productivity of farms + farms employing less people than a subsistence farm -> constant push to enclose land and enclosing pushing people off the land.
c) severe natural disasters causing famines for peasants -> makes life unsustainable on a subsistence farm -> emigration or workhouse(if you have poor laws)
your understanding of the rural economy seems wrong.
I doubt that peasants went willingly to become unemployed and even if they went for a job and didn't find one, farming is better than starving, if there's available land and you know how to farm, you'd rather do that than starve (hence e.g. migrations to the US). Also, subsistence farmers didn't have it nearly as bad as you make it out. Yes, they were poor, but the urban poor weren't comparatively better off, ditto not the unemployed ones. E.g. in Scotland, the lords paid their tenants to get them off the land.
On the contrary, peasants were often enclosed and driven off the land by the landlords to either sell the land to settle personal debt or to start a farm producing for the market.
Subsistence farm by definition cannot go bankrupt, but it can stop sustaining people who work it through severe weather, soil exhaustion, or overpopulation. Rents/ taxes also play a role, but they can be either in kind (portion of harvest), in labour(3 days of work on the lords land) or in money. Only the last one offloads the monetary risk of bad harvests onto the tenant possibly causing something like bankruptcy, but not for the farm, but rather for the tenant. So no, subsistence farms would not go bankrupt.
To get your rural peasant to urban unemployed pipeline, i think we could do with something like
a) higher population growth -> population outgrowing what subsistence farming can produce
b) higher demand for food and lower initial productivity of farms + farms employing less people than a subsistence farm -> constant push to enclose land and enclosing pushing people off the land.
c) severe natural disasters causing famines for peasants -> makes life unsustainable on a subsistence farm -> emigration or workhouse(if you have poor laws)
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/thread
Agree with the premise, nationwide labour shortages should not be a norm (although perhaps OP is overdoing it a bit when he says they can't happen, but generally I agree).
On your specific points:
> 1) Balance the game to be MUCH more aggressive in deleting unprofitable buildings.
I don't really see how that would help, unless there are huge periodical profitability swing. In my impression, there isn't, so the only thing that would be achieved is reducing infra burden. As unprofitable buildings likely wouldn't be profitable in reasonable time and wouldn't employ a significant number of workers anyway.
You say that the systems should be reworked to allow for such cycles, and for me, this should be a primary part of the argument. And I don't see any specific propositions on this front.
I also don't find this downsizing mechanics elegant, how it's made at the moment. It's quite untransparent on a national level (to be honest, tracking your citizens' assets numerically is absolutely terrible, and it shouldn't be this way, we should have clear asset dynamics, broken down to factors such as new construction, ownership change and downsizing). So now I wouldn't want it to be more prevalent.
> 1.1) Just make construction less potent.
I generally agree, although I can't say I have a ready idea on how to better realise "the landowners backlash against industrialising at their expense" and such. Although I think both state revenue as a share of GDP and effective state construction share should be reduced (regardless of whether it actually should be an explicitly stated "state share").
For some reason, you include the construction-as-input here, and not as a separate point. I think it's much more important than everything else, and I support you in this fully.
As a side note: "growing your debt ceiling faster than you accumulate debt" is in no way an abuse of mechanics, it's literally how the world works.
> 2) Make efficiency PMs also be labor-saving PMs.
Idk. Maybe. An issue of fine balancing.
> 3) Create a 'migration pull'-like mechanic for peasants to willingly become unemployed urban residents.
You mean migration push from the countryside? That'd be nice, but that more or less is there in form of immigration pool where there's arable land (and lack of such pool where there isn't). I would want demographics pyramid actually implemented (to give these "second sons" a tangible face and to make wars much more devastating), and would want an explicit ownership of subsistence farms (so that there would still be friction to send the second sons even to existing arable lands), but I can't say I find this all too important.
Rather, a profession-level immigration attraction would be really great, but I'm afraid it has too heavy computational drawbacks, worse than the demo pyramid.
> 4) Make repeasanting incredibly unlikely.
Very true.
I'd rather tie this to the aforementioned "subsistence farm and land property" thing. If someone can buy into peasantry, they should have. But this shouldn't happen often anyway (as if one has some money, he's probably gainfully employed, and wouldn't want to be a peasant), and any means would do.
> 4.1) Kill off subsistence farms in mid-game by getting them outcompeted with organized agriculture.
I generally agree that we should have a significant long-term price dynamics, especially on high-tech stuff. But I'm not sure that a subsistence farm, mostly separated from the market, should really be able to get "outcompeted". People live of their gardens even now, if they don't want much.
Agree with the premise, nationwide labour shortages should not be a norm (although perhaps OP is overdoing it a bit when he says they can't happen, but generally I agree).
On your specific points:
> 1) Balance the game to be MUCH more aggressive in deleting unprofitable buildings.
I don't really see how that would help, unless there are huge periodical profitability swing. In my impression, there isn't, so the only thing that would be achieved is reducing infra burden. As unprofitable buildings likely wouldn't be profitable in reasonable time and wouldn't employ a significant number of workers anyway.
You say that the systems should be reworked to allow for such cycles, and for me, this should be a primary part of the argument. And I don't see any specific propositions on this front.
I also don't find this downsizing mechanics elegant, how it's made at the moment. It's quite untransparent on a national level (to be honest, tracking your citizens' assets numerically is absolutely terrible, and it shouldn't be this way, we should have clear asset dynamics, broken down to factors such as new construction, ownership change and downsizing). So now I wouldn't want it to be more prevalent.
> 1.1) Just make construction less potent.
I generally agree, although I can't say I have a ready idea on how to better realise "the landowners backlash against industrialising at their expense" and such. Although I think both state revenue as a share of GDP and effective state construction share should be reduced (regardless of whether it actually should be an explicitly stated "state share").
For some reason, you include the construction-as-input here, and not as a separate point. I think it's much more important than everything else, and I support you in this fully.
As a side note: "growing your debt ceiling faster than you accumulate debt" is in no way an abuse of mechanics, it's literally how the world works.
> 2) Make efficiency PMs also be labor-saving PMs.
Idk. Maybe. An issue of fine balancing.
> 3) Create a 'migration pull'-like mechanic for peasants to willingly become unemployed urban residents.
You mean migration push from the countryside? That'd be nice, but that more or less is there in form of immigration pool where there's arable land (and lack of such pool where there isn't). I would want demographics pyramid actually implemented (to give these "second sons" a tangible face and to make wars much more devastating), and would want an explicit ownership of subsistence farms (so that there would still be friction to send the second sons even to existing arable lands), but I can't say I find this all too important.
Rather, a profession-level immigration attraction would be really great, but I'm afraid it has too heavy computational drawbacks, worse than the demo pyramid.
> 4) Make repeasanting incredibly unlikely.
Very true.
I'd rather tie this to the aforementioned "subsistence farm and land property" thing. If someone can buy into peasantry, they should have. But this shouldn't happen often anyway (as if one has some money, he's probably gainfully employed, and wouldn't want to be a peasant), and any means would do.
> 4.1) Kill off subsistence farms in mid-game by getting them outcompeted with organized agriculture.
I generally agree that we should have a significant long-term price dynamics, especially on high-tech stuff. But I'm not sure that a subsistence farm, mostly separated from the market, should really be able to get "outcompeted". People live of their gardens even now, if they don't want much.
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I agree with your criticism, but that's not exactly what I meant. The idea is to simulate some information asymmetry which causes irrational decisions by peasants to migrate.
Consider that they didn't have services like LinkedIn back in the day, and the countryside and the urban areas were quite remote from each other. The news about new vacancies would have to travel by word of mouth - for instance, when a wealthier farmer sells their produce in a city, they may hear rumors that some factory is now recruiting, then pass it along when they return to the village. As a poor farmer who is potentially interested, you wouldn't really have a better source of information, so you'd have to travel to this factory to find out yourself. I think this is a fair assumption that urban life would be quite appealing, and more people would travel to cities than laborers are needed.
Of course, one can then return if they fail to employ, but a) for a particularly poor farm, being absent even for a handful of days may be critical for collection of harvest and etc., and it might even be necessary to sell their few possessions to pay for transportation to the city (either of which definitionally makes it a one-way ticket), b) in a context of rapidly industrializing economy, where factories are opened frequently, they might deliberately choose to stay to wait for new job openings.
At any rate, this is just a simulation of small-scale frictional unemployment. I don't think that this should be a particularly large phenomenon. Though I'll admit this is not my area of expertise at all, and if someone can find some data-based assessment of how prevalent this phenomenon was (if it was), I'm open.
And, subsistence peasants are of course better off when they're free farmers, the US is a good example here (when a 'peasant' means someone with their own plot of land, their own house, and tools for agricultural work which they bought with their own money). But there were places like Russia which didn't ban serfdom until 1860s and even then the peasant reform (switching to 'tenant farmers' in Vic3 terms) placed a massive debt on peasants to 'compensate' the nobles for their liberation (edit: so there was no government compensation in Russia; - in contrast with Britain, where, after the ban on slavery, the government paid off the slavers for their 'losses' - see the comment below by @TitaniumMan91). This was so bad that their next emperor had to nullify these debts in 1880s as many peasants had actually gotten worse off from this reform. And the original peasant reform was only so half-baked in the first place to prevent a noble coup.
A 'tenant farmer' like this would be absolutely ecstatic at a prospect of working 16 hours for a token wage and live in barracks.
Meanwhile a serf wouldn't even be able to travel freely, their reemployment at a factory would need permission from their landlord, and presumably some financial compensation as well.
I know we're getting into microeconomics territory (which Vic3 doesn't simulate) but some generalizations can be made with small-scale mechanics and modifiers.
Actually, this is also achievable with a simulation of imperfect information for market actors. If a certain industry is very profitable at this time, capitalists might be tempted to overinvest in it, which dilutes everybody's profits in this industry and causes a correction (bankruptcies, closedowns, layoffs, and capital outflows to other sectors). This can even sorta-kinda-happen in Vic3 right now: I often observe how the late-game investment pool orders things in bulk, for example, 20 or 30 levels of a building simultaneously, which if fully staffed will produce way more than the market needs.
The problem here is that productivity and profits are evaluated by every building in real time and the price feedback to supply quantity changes is also immediate and perfectly known to everyone. Hence if a particular industry is 'overbuilt' it just stops hiring right before it gets unprofitable, and is never mechanically allowed to make the bad decision to overcommit to a hyped up market segment.
So to enable cyclical crises we just need to come up with a system where buildings don't always act with perfect rationality.
To be honest, though, I'm not sure how this can be achieved within existing mechanics, or simulated without murdering performance; the only point I can think of is to make price swings way harsher so that overproduction is punished more. (I remember a few cases where I'd have +50k of grain on the market (production of 130k with consumption of 80k) and yet the farms are among the most productive businesses with excellent laborer wages too.) But even then the market will correct itself quite fast and we won't get the problem of the economy working in a 'wrong' mode for months and years that are needed for a crisis to develop.
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While abolition in the British colonies did not impose a debt on the manumitted slaves, their former owners were still compensated, with a grand total of £20 million being paid out from the public purse under the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 – five million in tax revenue and fifteen in public borrowing.
(Meanwhile, it had been held by the courts since the 16th century that in the Kingdom of England proper, as opposed to overseas colonies, slavery could not exist because there was no statute enabling it and no basis for it under the common law.)
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Maybe not 250k, but it did employ "more than 100k people" at it's peak in the 1930s per the Ford website.
I agree with what others have said RE artisan production and when discussions of artisans have come up in the past, I was of the opinion that they should come from urban centers, which should create small numbers of more "advanced" goods. Subsistence farms produce basic clothing/furniture/food, urban centers should produce small amounts of luxury clothing/luxury furniture/groceries.
Yeah, that's what I meant, just worded poorly (now reading my original sentence, it is confusing where I mean Britain and where Russia). I'll fix it now.
Maintenance cost could do wonders. It's a pretty basic approach in many other games to make exponential growth less exponential. I especially like the idea of having pms to affect it, specificly having zero maintenance for tier 1 pms, so that undeveloped economies are not nerfed too hard.
While this is not a core issue in the game, it does seem a bit weird that an incoming urbanite just starts farming from zero. I suppose this would not be too hard to implement either. Just add qualification requirements for peasants. Then again, I wouldn't know what weird side effects this would have.
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While the issue at hand is correctly identified, I don't see it as a real problem because it only concerns the player. AI is unable to even employ the unemployed that is out of arable land currently. So whatever is done to once again push back on the player building up, it'll once again massively mess up AI progress. At this stage I don't even want them to do anything that hampers AI even further. So while the unemployed going back to being peasants or the peasants magically needing much less are both problems, any solution must be made foolproof that AI performance isn't disproportionately impacted by it. MAPI was introduced and it whopped the AI while being a speed bump for the player. Something to boost post-industrial unemployment sounds definitely like another candidate to be an annoyance for the player while throwing another layer of unemployed on AI that's already massively unemployed at endgame.
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In what world is running out of peasants not realistic? What country do you live in that has a lot of peasants? The economic development of every country on earth has involved the population moving out of subsistence agriculture. I'm honestly fascinated what you have read for you to make such a statement.
I see people constantly posting as if running out of peasants is a problem, when it is exactly how you develop your country into an industrial economy. I think people need to look up the 'lump of labour' fallacy before posting this non-issue.
I see people constantly posting as if running out of peasants is a problem, when it is exactly how you develop your country into an industrial economy. I think people need to look up the 'lump of labour' fallacy before posting this non-issue.