Netherlands strategy

[TheFlemishDuck]

But instead of staying on wood construction, if I take that same game in 1843 and instead build 5 iron mines in Vrystaat or Transvaal, and slot in the mineral company: my iron mines get a huge throughput bonus, but more importantly, the company gets a massive iron mine construction bonus (+62%).

Companies are strong there is no denying that a company will make any industry you focus on stronger. But at the same time its kinda some strong card you expend, the choice for any company must be considered against the potential of any alternative. Several aleternativs come to mind, you argued that the wood company of the Netherlands is weaker than the Belgian one and would rather wait for the latter but the cost of even establishing it for a temporary period would not be high however it could be established earlier and aid you both in cheaper wood and providing more infrastructure. Given how you argue in a chief consideration of infrastructure constraints that seems something logical to point to. Furthermore, when considered in a philosophy of not aiming so much for self reliance but high reward specialty production a argument could be made for a company that buffs certain consumer goods that the Netherlands might find more of a market for and hence produce in far higher volume so that the company has more of an impact/size.

That construction bonus is absolutely huge and I can almost force my private queue to spam iron mines by manipulating the iron price temporarily through production method swapping on the construction sectors. I can be sitting at ~110 construction very quickly after founding that company, while on wood I'd still be at 50. That will let me build universities literally twice as fast than if I had stayed on wood construction.

it's weird in a circular way if you build this logic on infrastructure constraints. You would not build more construction sectors because your infrastructure constrained, but then there is relatively few reason to up the construction points for the purpose of economic growth in part trough private spending if no free infrastructure is available to use those 100 construction points. Your right that it will build those unis faster, but then adding more wood construction sectors to the tune of 100 construction points could do that too, and its really left to question here if that couldnt be done if its purely in function of building unis and/or if a different company would not have enabled the construction of 100 construction points worth of wood construction sector. Admittingly construction sectors use a fair amount of infrastructure so in absolute terms 25 more wood construction sectors can produce a fair infrastructure and labor requirement on a country as relative small as the Netherlands.

The opportunity cost is those 5 initial iron mines

As you may have noticed and get i have a very "accounting way" at looking at this. The accounting i'm going to do now might seem pedantic but in accounting one has to count all of it into the details. When you build 5 iron mines using atmo you atleast need 1 coal mine to feed the coal that it will use and 1 tool factory to feed the tools it consumes. A company would amplify this, in that while a company increases total output it also increases input needs, so 5 iron mines subject to 100 throughput would need 2 coal mines and 2 tool factories to be fed inputs. 2 Tool factory's being the equivelant construction cost of 3 mines, you have the equiveland of 5 extra mines to build (when considering coal to) to feed said 5 mines if they are subject to such a degree of throughput. Granted its not like the company might not be able to live with some shortage, coal on the market will be sparse but maybe you can get enough by then. Just on a general point, if you count the cost of building out industry's you ought to include the costs of building the industries that will supply those industries with raw resources otherwise the cost picture isnt really complete, lest however that you would get those good by trade.

On a practical note, 5 iron mines isnt much in in your particular case, atleast considering the infrastructure constrains you have (or find yourself in) it's a cheap way to up your construction points at this stage in the game. So sure, an autartic aproach has a degree atleast by which it works or is functional but the very outlook of your economy and perhaps how much infrastructure it would have and would need could be fairly different with another playstyle. there was never doubt or aobjection that an autartic strategy wouldnt have merrit, but the discussion is far more complex if the argument would be made that thiis is nessecarily optimal.

Sure Transvaal is a lucrative area to capture, but it's typically not for the iron mines. People usually take it for the gold. Since its Dutch culture it does make a strong argument why you would want to have it as the Netherlands, given that its manpower poor early on it begs the question though if you want much infrastructure spend in the regionon iron and coal production if that might impact your ability to sustain the gold mines optimally. it is of some consideration atleast that gold mines would yield more with mining tech so atmo as tech is not bad if your going to have a prolific early gold industry providing a substantial addition to government income, which it can. Afcourse that would still be an investment, but with a fair ROI. However, while gold is arguably the best money maker from a money making perspective in production, it has to be noted that the ROI for goods succesfully sold over a high export tariff will yield far higher income for construction points invested than gold would. On the matter of colonial priority's and considering what you'd do in a trade oriented nation it could probably be argued that taking a region that would be great for bulk production of export goods could be more lucrative even that taking South Africa and by a fair margin. It's mostly afcourse because tariffs yield very high sums when you can sell succesfully at the highest export tariff, its calculated as a large percentage on its base price so its a quite large net amount on the worth of the good itself and what it took to build the industry.

Even taking company's and then colonial conquest targets in mind, if you conquer Transvaal early it tends to quickly make the case for a gold company there and then following it up with taking more gold elsewhere. The troughput modifier of gold production also affects minting. A mine that through 100 troughput produces twice as much gold also produces twice as much minting. So yeah gold is nice, but gold at such high throughput is its own crazy and has a significant impact afcourse on the ROI of building that industry. One could argue that if you would have taken a gold company, that you could have a industry that proportionally provides a very high income to the state for relativly limited infrastructure used, far more so that much of the random industry that your 100 construction points would build out. If your gold mine has a budget contribution per construction point and infrastructure point used that is say 4 times higher than your average industry (which it likely would) then you really wouldnt have needed a lot of different industry and the infrastructure it eats up so as to provide you with the income you require. A good country to really get a feel on some of this is Bolivia, it's massivly infrastructure constraint due to the bad infra modifiers of the Andes so its very limited in how much industry it can even afford to build but it has a tonload of goldmines which might however take up most of its available infrastrucutre and manpower for a long while if you build that industry out. But the thing as Peru is that if you go so monofocussed on gold in combination with a company that you functionally get an economy that produces very little for pop needs but can produce a disproportionate income per infrastructure point or 1000 labor used. The point with a country like bolivia-peru is that the infrastructure limitation will be so obvious and impacting on you from a long time that there isnt really a good point to push for as much construction points as possible so the AI would build a lot of random things that would eat into infrastructure and would make Peru a poor country once they quickly filled up all capacity. Indeed, rather than having so much infrastructure provided by autartic production, we might avoid the infrastructure use for pop needs here by potentially importing said goods The general wisdom in Vicky is that you should always have more construction points for the growth, but when you hit infrastructure/tech constraints early due to limited capacity to build an industry then it creates an argument to plan ahead around those constraints so that you can quickly lift then and then fully unleach growth. One of the big considerations there imho is considering the sheer proportion to contribution to the budget a industry has in relation to the amount of infrastructure and labor it uses, and then afcourse companies are the crucial element in such a consideration but then there are plenty of options. Thus i have to wonder "what is eating up so much infrastructure in your country", and "is that nessecarily worth it"? Given that much of your argument is based on being infrastructure constrained as to build out a bigger wood construction sector, it begs to question if you couldnt functionally loose much of the low yield industry in your country where it provides consumer goods and also eats into infra, in favor of simply importing those consumer goods and not spending infra for that industry in your country.

I think double construction output for 20 years is worth far more than a temporary 5 university for 1 year head start. The increased construction would catch up to innovation output to those 5 universities very quickly.

Sure thats a correct assertion, but the question can be asked if A) you really couldnt have played more effeciently or differently directed so to not have the infrastructure constraints so to not be able to build wood construction so to provide 100 construction points, b) if you couldnt have started universities earlier c) if that equasion you make is entirely correct if you havnt reasearched dialects yet and and the other person has.

is it really so interresting to build up construction points fast to spam economic growth if the industry that is being build is relativly low yield. Any trade/specialized oriented focus would likely try to do "more with less", when you consider specialty production in clothes with company's you have a industry for which you potentially dont need to produce the raw resources yourself for but has very high yield in relation to how much infrastructure it uses. If such can sustain the cost of building universities, then its really just a matter to using company's in a fashion that you can quickly get a fairly significant industry in size that really has high output and budget contribution so to allow concentrating on other priorities quick.

And as I mentioned before, there's the whole Belgium issue. You're going to want to both use the Belgian resources once you take them and be able to slot in John Cockerill ASAP, and you need atmo to do that, which means you have to research it by 1850. If you get lucky and get it by nat spread, great. If not, you're going to have to research it manually either way before steel construction.

joph cockerill is a great if not OP company it cant be denied. One can consider annexing Belgium logical though im not sure if all players go that route or if its a must, the argument can certainly be made that it is a rewarding endeavour but it brings the netherlands to a somewht different path. Incidently the whole matter were discussing here also kinda plays in Why Belgium broke free, king Welhelm of the Netherlands wanted to focus on a trade oriented economy rather than a production based one centered around Wallonia as major supplier. From a hindsight perspectve that seems to have been a bad idea heh. Again there is nothing to argue that this would not be a legit strategy, whereas it is nessecary in the strategy one uses is another question, a trade nation might expand elsewhere and might take other colonies and choose other companies so as a means to get income and growth in another fashion.

Netherlads has some good compnies of its own, strongly advised atleast to take some prepperation to slot Siemens in at a timely moment as innovation improving companies are great and i'm jealous that Spain gets such an effing OP one.

 

[OnceSetCannotBeChanged]

This thread is why I <3 forums. May they never die.

 

[RedRalphWiggum]

This thread is why I <3 forums. May they never die.

Makes me feel like it’s ~2006 again

 

[Black_Shade]

Companies are strong there is no denying that a company will make any industry you focus on stronger. But at the same time its kinda some strong card you expend, the choice for any company must be considered against the potential of any alternative. Several aleternativs come to mind, you argued that the wood company of the Netherlands is weaker than the Belgian one and would rather wait for the latter but the cost of even establishing it for a temporary period would not be high however it could be established earlier and aid you both in cheaper wood and providing more infrastructure. Given how you argue in a chief consideration of infrastructure constraints that seems something logical to point to. Furthermore, when considered in a philosophy of not aiming so much for self reliance but high reward specialty production a argument could be made for a company that buffs certain consumer goods that the Netherlands might find more of a market for and hence produce in far higher volume so that the company has more of an impact/size.



it's weird in a circular way if you build this logic on infrastructure constraints. You would not build more construction sectors because your infrastructure constrained, but then there is relatively few reason to up the construction points for the purpose of economic growth in part trough private spending if no free infrastructure is available to use those 100 construction points. Your right that it will build those unis faster, but then adding more wood construction sectors to the tune of 100 construction points could do that too, and its really left to question here if that couldnt be done if its purely in function of building unis and/or if a different company would not have enabled the construction of 100 construction points worth of wood construction sector. Admittingly construction sectors use a fair amount of infrastructure so in absolute terms 25 more wood construction sectors can produce a fair infrastructure and labor requirement on a country as relative small as the Netherlands.

You don't have the infastructure to push to 100 construction from wood, and at that point I think you would run into budget constraints. In this particular run, wood from the world market is +25% cost over base, and you have to subvent it to import. Because of this, I actually did build all of the chop chops in the netherlands proper, along with 2 tool workshops in Holland. This did eat up quite a bit of infastructure, but there was little option because there isn't as much wood on the market as you would hope (note the +25% cost AND having to subvent on top of this). Had I not done this, the construction cap would have been about 30, because the wood would have been expensive and I'd have 100k fewer tax payers (the 100k i turned from substinance farmers into laborers). The toolworkshops also ended up jump starting DEI to switch over, and my private queue built 8 more tool workshops in Holland for me in the first 7 years which was a nice bonus.

As you may have noticed and get i have a very "accounting way" at looking at this. The accounting i'm going to do now might seem pedantic but in accounting one has to count all of it into the details. When you build 5 iron mines using atmo you atleast need 1 coal mine to feed the coal that it will use and 1 tool factory to feed the tools it consumes. A company would amplify this, in that while a company increases total output it also increases input needs, so 5 iron mines subject to 100 throughput would need 2 coal mines and 2 tool factories to be fed inputs. 2 Tool factory's being the equivelant construction cost of 3 mines, you have the equiveland of 5 extra mines to build (when considering coal to) to feed said 5 mines if they are subject to such a degree of throughput. Granted its not like the company might not be able to live with some shortage, coal on the market will be sparse but maybe you can get enough by then. Just on a general point, if you count the cost of building out industry's you ought to include the costs of building the industries that will supply those industries with raw resources otherwise the cost picture isnt really complete, lest however that you would get those good by trade.

You don't need to build coal mines, the company will do it for you at +65% construction bonus (the company gets iron, coal, sulfur). As noted above, I had 9 toolworkshops already, all but 2 of those were from the private queue.

On a practical note, 5 iron mines isnt much in in your particular case, atleast considering the infrastructure constrains you have (or find yourself in) it's a cheap way to up your construction points at this stage in the game. So sure, an autartic aproach has a degree atleast by which it works or is functional but the very outlook of your economy and perhaps how much infrastructure it would have and would need could be fairly different with another playstyle. there was never doubt or aobjection that an autartic strategy wouldnt have merrit, but the discussion is far more complex if the argument would be made that thiis is nessecarily optimal.

Sure Transvaal is a lucrative area to capture, but it's typically not for the iron mines. People usually take it for the gold. Since its Dutch culture it does make a strong argument why you would want to have it as the Netherlands, given that its manpower poor early on it begs the question though if you want much infrastructure spend in the regionon iron and coal production if that might impact your ability to sustain the gold mines optimally. it is of some consideration atleast that gold mines would yield more with mining tech so atmo as tech is not bad if your going to have a prolific early gold industry providing a substantial addition to government income, which it can. Afcourse that would still be an investment, but with a fair ROI. However, while gold is arguably the best money maker from a money making perspective in production, it has to be noted that the ROI for goods succesfully sold over a high export tariff will yield far higher income for construction points invested than gold would. On the matter of colonial priority's and considering what you'd do in a trade oriented nation it could probably be argued that taking a region that would be great for bulk production of export goods could be more lucrative even that taking South Africa and by a fair margin. It's mostly afcourse because tariffs yield very high sums when you can sell succesfully at the highest export tariff, its calculated as a large percentage on its base price so its a quite large net amount on the worth of the good itself and what it took to build the industry.

There's nothing precluding you from building the gold mines once you have the spare infastructure to do so. You also despirately need the states for later game construction areas, as you'll run out even with Belgium and that will cap you at about ~2k construction if you don't state anything else outside of Europe.

Even taking company's and then colonial conquest targets in mind, if you conquer Transvaal early it tends to quickly make the case for a gold company there and then following it up with taking more gold elsewhere. The troughput modifier of gold production also affects minting. A mine that through 100 troughput produces twice as much gold also produces twice as much minting. So yeah gold is nice, but gold at such high throughput is its own crazy and has a significant impact afcourse on the ROI of building that industry. One could argue that if you would have taken a gold company, that you could have a industry that proportionally provides a very high income to the state for relativly limited infrastructure used, far more so that much of the random industry that your 100 construction points would build out.

A gold company would be good at the start, you could slot that in until you take Belgium. You get 2 companies from t2 techs, I tend to research those relatively early (i'm working on company #2 in the screenshot above), and you have to get both to get steel construction. You could do the gold and swap that one out for JC once you get Belgium, or just wait for JC for company #3. I don't really like the gold company much, TBH, because I tend to try and avoid conquering huge amounts of territory, but it would probably be good in this case especially if you can get production rights in other gold areas.

Sure thats a correct assertion, but the question can be asked if A) you really couldnt have played more effeciently or differently directed so to not have the infrastructure constraints so to not be able to build wood construction so to provide 100 construction points, b) if you couldnt have started universities earlier c) if that equasion you make is entirely correct if you havnt reasearched dialects yet and and the other person has.

In this game I researched dialects already, though, as my 3rd tech.

is it really so interresting to build up construction points fast to spam economic growth if the industry that is being build is relativly low yield. Any trade/specialized oriented focus would likely try to do "more with less", when you consider specialty production in clothes with company's you have a industry for which you potentially dont need to produce the raw resources yourself for but has very high yield in relation to how much infrastructure it uses. If such can sustain the cost of building universities, then its really just a matter to using company's in a fashion that you can quickly get a fairly significant industry in size that really has high output and budget contribution so to allow concentrating on other priorities quick.

The big problem is at the start the market just isn't great- even in this case the wood is not cheap and you have to subvent to actually import. Basic clothes is fine because fabric is the most available good on the market, though.

joph cockerill is a great if not OP company it cant be denied. One can consider annexing Belgium logical though im not sure if all players go that route or if its a must, the argument can certainly be made that it is a rewarding endeavour but it brings the netherlands to a somewht different path. Incidently the whole matter were discussing here also kinda plays in Why Belgium broke free, king Welhelm of the Netherlands wanted to focus on a trade oriented economy rather than a production based one centered around Wallonia as major supplier. From a hindsight perspectve that seems to have been a bad idea heh. Again there is nothing to argue that this would not be a legit strategy, whereas it is nessecary in the strategy one uses is another question, a trade nation might expand elsewhere and might take other colonies and choose other companies so as a means to get income and growth in another fashion.

Netherlads has some good compnies of its own, strongly advised atleast to take some prepperation to slot Siemens in at a timely moment as innovation improving companies are great and i'm jealous that Spain gets such an effing OP one.

Yes, of course. The dutch companies are just late game, though.

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

You don't have the infastructure to push to 100 construction from wood, and at that point I think you would run into budget constraints. In this particular run, wood from the world market is +25% cost over base, and you have to subvent it to import. Because of this, I actually did build all of the chop chops in the netherlands proper, along with 2 tool workshops in Holland. This did eat up quite a bit of infastructure, but there was little option because there isn't as much wood on the market as you would hope (note the +25% cost AND having to subvent on top of this).

...


The big problem is at the start the market just isn't great- even in this case the wood is not cheap and you have to subvent to actually import. Basic clothes is fine because fabric is the most available good on the market, though.

not sure if your currently exploiting the trade system as far as you could. You can trade trough diplomatic deals too ive noticed, and ive seen players even abuse that for the purpose of padding their income with sheer trough trade, aka buy in country A sell in country B with a profit. the diplomatic deals seem in relation to what you offer and then you could secure long term trades with terms like 20 years afaik. Such deals bypass the prices on the global market?

 

[exalter]

Trading for construction goods is perfectly viable. Is producing it yourself better? Yeah. But you can utilize 85 points of iron construction by at least 1839, no shortages. By 1845 I could fully utilize 150 points of iron construction, no shortages. At the time of screenshots I did not conquer any other lands or have a customs union.

You have to play it with a different mindset than normal autarky Vic 3. Gov trade is nice. Russia is more than happy to sell you their cheap wood. Take as much as they are willing to trade. Any extra gets sold on your trade center to keep it profitable. You can do the same with grain from Russia or Qing, you can get several thousand units of grain into your market from Qing and/or Russia who is more than willing to sell it to you. You don't have to do it in a cheesy way, the max you can take from them in Hollands tiny starting market is not even enough to take it above base price in their market. You aren't making them starve. This will raise your SOL pretty high early, attracting migrations early.

Place your diplo interests on the bigger countries as that gives you trade advantage. I get reciprocal trade priveliges with as many people as possible. World market prices for contruction goods will be high early game so any trade advantage you can get is good. I get free trade as soon as practical. Protectionism is probably OK. Anything but mercantilism as it gives an import debuff.

I research gantry cranes first as the extra trade quantity is very valuable. I then like to go research my first company slot, I use the paper company a lot. The paper company is probably not great or meta, but it is nice as it's inputs are not iron based and do not compete with construction goods. The AI does not seem to ever competitive with paper so it is easy to get the prestige good as well (I am playing on the open beta with generic prestige paper) to get a reasonablely profitable company. Prestige paper will be nice as it will mean less precious pops wasting time in Universities.

To be sure you can actually import enough iron you have to overbuild construction. Day one I immediately plop down 15 iron contruction sectors. You will have to thread the needle with debt for a while until you get your economy going, but it is the only way to keep it out of being in a shortage and keep your trade centers profitable. You will be the largest iron importer, and therefor get the best import advantage and best prices. You will have to pause contruction occasionally, but that's what the investment pool is for. While you are paused the capitalists and aristocrats pick up the slack. Eventually things stabilize enough you can build some local steel and tools to cover your local usage.

One of the London conference results will wipe your debt which makes it a little easier.

You can see in the screenshots that the only iron in my market is what is coming from the world market.

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

Trading for construction goods is perfectly viable. Is producing it yourself better? Yeah. But you can utilize 85 points of iron construction by at least 1839, no shortages. By 1845 I could fully utilize 150 points of iron construction, no shortages. At the time of screenshots I did not conquer any other lands or have a customs union.

That is certainly of value in this discussion, it looks like you generally leaned far more into trade even trough your tech priorities. Well the Netherlands has a lot of starting trade potential which you amplified and you succeeded in importing the required amount of iron to make it a legit strategy, something which offers a clear alternative then than having to find/take a place to go produce it yourself or to follow similar techpaths as Black_Shade to get it.

I guess one could say that both the autartic or specialized trade strats are legit for the Netherlands. it certainly has a interesting setup for exploiting trade.

I have seen players profit from trough-trade in 1.9, buying in country A and selling in country B for a profit, when you have a lot of cheap shipping capacity such can be attractive as you dont have to employ (much) people to draw earnings from it. Its all net gain. A country should be better placed to capitalize on such things if it has a lot of trade reach (many interrests, ports and preferably treaty ports even) to facilitate trades between country's that would not directly trade with eachother for example. Well i'm interested as to the feedback many players will give for the Netherlands if its potential as a trade focussed nation is more explored.

 

[Black_Shade]

not sure if your currently exploiting the trade system as far as you could. You can trade trough diplomatic deals too ive noticed, and ive seen players even abuse that for the purpose of padding their income with sheer trough trade, aka buy in country A sell in country B with a profit. the diplomatic deals seem in relation to what you offer and then you could secure long term trades with terms like 20 years afaik. Such deals bypass the prices on the global market?

Yeah Russia is probably a good target to get trade privilages or a goods transfer, assuming that their wood price is low at the start, I did not try that and was instead just tweaking the tariffs around on the exports/imports. I found that with just the global market I struggled a bit to get enough wood without subventing.

I still think building the limited wood you have in the netherlands is worthwhile just for depeasanting though, as I almost doubled my tax base by doing so which of course allowed me to increase construction/universities further. There are of course opportunity costs in doing that, but the forestry buildings in particular are super cheap and probably the best bang-for-your-construction in terms of employment you can get (aside from rice). But trying to target a few countries with surplus wood on top of that would definitely help bring down the cost- if you can avoid having to subvent the wood it would be a big help!

 

[Black_Shade]

Trading for construction goods is perfectly viable. Is producing it yourself better? Yeah. But you can utilize 85 points of iron construction by at least 1839, no shortages. By 1845 I could fully utilize 150 points of iron construction, no shortages. At the time of screenshots I did not conquer any other lands or have a customs union.

You have to play it with a different mindset than normal autarky Vic 3. Gov trade is nice. Russia is more than happy to sell you their cheap wood. Take as much as they are willing to trade. Any extra gets sold on your trade center to keep it profitable. You can do the same with grain from Russia or Qing, you can get several thousand units of grain into your market from Qing and/or Russia who is more than willing to sell it to you. You don't have to do it in a cheesy way, the max you can take from them in Hollands tiny starting market is not even enough to take it above base price in their market. You aren't making them starve. This will raise your SOL pretty high early, attracting migrations early.

Place your diplo interests on the bigger countries as that gives you trade advantage. I get reciprocal trade priveliges with as many people as possible. World market prices for contruction goods will be high early game so any trade advantage you can get is good. I get free trade as soon as practical. Protectionism is probably OK. Anything but mercantilism as it gives an import debuff.

I research gantry cranes first as the extra trade quantity is very valuable. I then like to go research my first company slot, I use the paper company a lot. The paper company is probably not great or meta, but it is nice as it's inputs are not iron based and do not compete with construction goods. The AI does not seem to ever competitive with paper so it is easy to get the prestige good as well (I am playing on the open beta with generic prestige paper) to get a reasonablely profitable company. Prestige paper will be nice as it will mean less precious pops wasting time in Universities.

To be sure you can actually import enough iron you have to overbuild construction. Day one I immediately plop down 15 iron contruction sectors. You will have to thread the needle with debt for a while until you get your economy going, but it is the only way to keep it out of being in a shortage and keep your trade centers profitable. You will be the largest iron importer, and therefor get the best import advantage and best prices. You will have to pause contruction occasionally, but that's what the investment pool is for. While you are paused the capitalists and aristocrats pick up the slack. Eventually things stabilize enough you can build some local steel and tools to cover your local usage.

One of the London conference results will wipe your debt which makes it a little easier.

You can see in the screenshots that the only iron in my market is what is coming from the world market.

That's pretty awesome.

I don't think I'd like the micro with the budget though, that requires a bit more paying attention than I like to do in my V3 runs. I'd definitely get distracted and end up bankrupt by accident looking at your 2nd screenshot!

I think the paper company is perfectly reasonable as your first choice, especially if you don't expand overseas. Paper is one of your primary expenses and also in high demand on the market at the start. So you can reduce your own cost and also have a good export. There's no requirement that you have to keep a company the whole game, you can easily swap this out to something else later on (like JC once you take Belgium).

What were you spending most of your construction on? Was playing the middle man from Qing grain funding most of your budget?

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

I still think building the limited wood you have in the netherlands is worthwhile just for depeasanting though, as I almost doubled my tax base by doing so which of course allowed me to increase construction/universities further. There are of course opportunity costs in doing that, but the forestry buildings in particular are super cheap and probably the best bang-for-your-construction in terms of employment you can get (aside from rice). But trying to target a few countries with surplus wood on top of that would definitely help bring down the cost- if you can avoid having to subvent the wood it would be a big help!

if one thinks from a perspective of being trade oriented and utilizing specialty production, then the kind of jobs you want your rather limited poppulation to be engaged in would be the ones that generate most revenue per worker. it pretty much always means that if its not a company it would be quite subpar, if your a specialty producer you should really try limiting yourself to produce what your company's can produce and have all of them apply the maximum attainable throughput modifier. Some industries generate more base revenue than others. factories produce more base profit per worker with grocery factories being in the top and thats especially so compared to farms and less so than mines. (were it also must be accounted that mines can be tech impoved a lot early on with focus, somewhat easier than factories)

I wouldnt exclude that wood would be a bad idea but then you would need to have a wood company, and it would not be to have a mere 20 forrestries it would be to have preferably 100's many foreign owned in places where wood production would be very efficient for example in Russia or potentially in the DEI.

When its really considered that The Netherlands will easisly hit infrastructure and pop constraints soon, there should be solid reason to try to generate as much revenue per worker aka focus specifically on GDP per capita for a minimal of infrastructure used too. I think such objectives would rather promote the early establishment of specialty factories that are notably provided with cheaply aquired imported resources, where opportunity makes them available. Factories will generate more revenue per worker and potentially more revenue per point of infrastructure used too.

Yeah Russia is probably a good target to get trade privilages or a goods transfer, assuming that their wood price is low at the start, I did not try that and was instead just tweaking the tariffs around on the exports/imports. I found that with just the global market I struggled a bit to get enough wood without subventing.

Russia is good for wood and for example cloth, liqour and grain and a few other things, it will get more iron and coal somewhat later but the likes of Belgium, Gerrmany and Sweden could be interresting trade partners for early iron too. china is great for many things like cheap cloth or cheap grain in bulk.

There are trends in how prices and availability of many goods will evolve trough the game. Many more advanced industrial good or mining goods will only be available first trough the more advanced country's while many larger and backward country's start to produce an abundance of cheap resources that are simple for them to aquire. So there is this dynamic where many base resources become cheaper and industrial goods more revenue efficient trough tech. When one is technologically advanced one can have the ambition to make those companies globally rather dominant too. Arguments could be made why Netherlands might ambition to end the game as a country that has a relatively high portfolio of overseas investment, obviously companies are very strategic in this.

i know, the general wisdom of maxing construction sectors is that you want to depeasant asap and give pops more gainfull employment, but when your a low pop country you might reconsider that mantra somewhat so to have "quality over quantity", aka have as much of your limited workforce engaged in truly min maxed revenue industries on a per worker basis. Its true that its faster afterall to employ your people trough farms in construction cost aspects but your economy will generate more GDP per capita if you oriented the economy more towards having practically factories only even if that takes longer to build.

 

[Black_Shade]

i know, the general wisdom of maxing construction sectors is that you want to depeasant asap and give pops more gainfull employment, but when your a low pop country you might reconsider that mantra somewhat so to have "quality over quantity", aka have as much of your limited workforce engaged in truly min maxed revenue industries on a per worker basis. Its true that its faster afterall to employ your people trough farms in construction cost aspects but your economy will generate more GDP per capita if you oriented the economy more towards having practically factories only even if that takes longer to build.

Wood in particular is still quite productive though, and also drives down construction costs. Your logging camps will have a profit of ~12-15, whereas your most profitable industry building early on will be something like a basic textile mill at ~20. Logging camps are also only 1 infastructure as opposed to something like mines, which are 2, so they aren't hitting you that hard on the infastructure front. Since you can build 3x forestry buildings for the textile mill, that will be more beneficial to your economy because the clothing mill is not 3x as productive. Most of the agricultural buildings only have a profit of ~6-8 at the start, with maybe tobacco or coffee as an exception. In that case, the textile mill is better because while it is roughly the same net productivity for your economy, it is also far more productive on a per pop basis. The other argument against agricultural buildings is you also don't want to really strengthen your rural folk at the start of the game, which the agricultural buildings will do, but the logging camps and industry buildings will not.

The lack of pops is a temporary problem that will only hit for a bit in the midgame. You have enough peasants to start that you won't run out immediatly, and you'll have the pop saving PMs coming online before you are actually out. As I noted in that game above from 1900, my pop was growing faster than I could build for it. I did this by focusing heavily on immigration and pop growth: I took the default grocery company, kept SoL at ~14 as long as I could, took freedom of movement and the food bloc powers, and managed to grab norton from the agitators to get multiculturalism pre-1870. So the period between when you get steel construction going full blast and before you get multiculturalism is when you will be hurting for pops- that's basically a 10 year window between 1855-1865.

And if you take Belgium even then I'm not sure you'll run out because they have a lot more free pop than you do at the start. In that game from 1916 Wallonia and Holland both had 40 million pops each.

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

Since you can build 3x forestry buildings for the textile mill, that will be more beneficial to your economy because the clothing mill is not 3x as productive.

Lets do some accounting on that matter, with a look at "productivity per worker" and productivity per infrastructure used.

With saw mills 3 forrestries produce 180 wood for a nominal revenue of 3600£ and consume 15 tools at a 600£ nominal cost, so a nominal gain of 3000£ before paying out wages and profit

if we take for example 1 food industry with as production methods baking powder, canned meat and patent stills (all can afaik be aquired before electricity can improve forrestries to the next pm and are easier to rush) then a single food factory can output 110 groceries and 100 liquor for a nominal market revenue of 6300£, the inputs are 60 grain for 1200£, 50 sugar for 1500£, 10 glass for 400£,10 iron for 400£ and 30 fish or 20 meat for 600£. Thats a total of 3700£ in input costs, the profit is 2600£, 400£ lower than your 3 forrestries when considered in n equal cost to infrastructure however your forrestries require 3x more labor to operate and the groceries creates thus far more GDP per capita. you need to employ 15000 people before automation to generate 3000£ net and with food industry we need 5000 workers to generate 2600£ net. When manpower constraints are a thing, there is argument as to get so much productivity per worker.

Clothing mills are less productive than food industry, that i must admit too. but then the calculation is made "at nominal prices", and here the following questions must be asked:
-How likely can you sell your wood at a higher than normal price
-How likely can we get our factory inputs at much cheaper price
-how likely can we get a high price for the groceries and liquor

"Dependant markets" can play a great factor in this. Atleast with coman markets as they were, you could force the situation easily where your vassals would provide such inputs at very low prices. Protectionism and market control is usefull in this, to force a vassal to sell to you so t becomes cheap like that. These dependant markets can also function to increase the prices at which you can sell. for example you might aquire yourself a big colony that has no domestic wood production of its own or very little like middle eastern country's often have, you could force such vassals to buy more expensive wood from you. It is however easier to get lower prices,especially as time goes on, for base resources and its equally more easy to create the environment for it trough vassals than to make them buy your output at high prices. From a trading playstyle perspective, its par for the course that you would try to create such "monopolies" to your benifit.

Thats the finer point of it afcourse, how will prices evolve in relation to these "nominal prices", forrestries at nominal rates have relatively few input needs but then that means you can neither reduce the cost that much. if you get the 15 tools you need for your 3 forrestries at half price then that saves you 300£ there and would give it a 3300£ profit, itf the same woudl happen with the food industry for all its inputs then it would save 1850£ and we'd have a profit of about 4500£ if nominal sell price is the same. So providing input prices are cheap enough, factories can actually be also more effecient on a infrastructure cost to in relation to revenue too while being far more labor efficient, just depends on how much you can lower the costs however factory costs have more room to be lowered. And looking at the output side what happens if we can sell at say +50% market price, then the 3 forrestries generate 5400£ and 4800£ profit and the food factory 9450£ and 5650£ in profit. So buying low and selling high favors the factory more. for troughput effects its actually good that the forrestries are labor intensive at that point that aids profitabillety a lot with food factory's the effect of getting your inputs cheap is even more amplified for the purpose of profitabillety.

 

[Black_Shade]

Lets do some accounting on that matter, with a look at "productivity per worker" and productivity per infrastructure used.

With saw mills 3 forrestries produce 180 wood for a nominal revenue of 3600£ and consume 15 tools at a 600£ nominal cost, so a nominal gain of 3000£ before paying out wages and profit

if we take for example 1 food industry with as production methods baking powder, canned meat and patent stills (all can afaik be aquired before electricity can improve forrestries to the next pm and are easier to rush) then a single food factory can output 110 groceries and 100 liquor for a nominal market revenue of 6300£, the inputs are 60 grain for 1200£, 50 sugar for 1500£, 10 glass for 400£,10 iron for 400£ and 30 fish or 20 meat for 600£. Thats a total of 3700£ in input costs, the profit is 2600£, 400£ lower than your 3 forrestries when considered in n equal cost to infrastructure however your forrestries require 3x more labor to operate and the groceries creates thus far more GDP per capita. you need to employ 15000 people before automation to generate 3000£ net and with food industry we need 5000 workers to generate 2600£ net. When manpower constraints are a thing, there is argument as to get so much productivity per worker.

Clothing mills are less productive than food industry, that i must admit too. but then the calculation is made "at nominal prices", and here the following questions must be asked:
-How likely can you sell your wood at a higher than normal price
-How likely can we get our factory inputs at much cheaper price
-how likely can we get a high price for the groceries and liquor

"Dependant markets" can play a great factor in this. Atleast with coman markets as they were, you could force the situation easily where your vassals would provide such inputs at very low prices. Protectionism and market control is usefull in this, to force a vassal to sell to you so t becomes cheap like that. These dependant markets can also function to increase the prices at which you can sell. for example you might aquire yourself a big colony that has no domestic wood production of its own or very little like middle eastern country's often have, you could force such vassals to buy more expensive wood from you. It is however easier to get lower prices,especially as time goes on, for base resources and its equally more easy to create the environment for it trough vassals than to make them buy your output at high prices. From a trading playstyle perspective, its par for the course that you would try to create such "monopolies" to your benifit.

Thats the finer point of it afcourse, how will prices evolve in relation to these "nominal prices", forrestries at nominal rates have relatively few input needs but then that means you can neither reduce the cost that much. if you get the 15 tools you need for your 3 forrestries at half price then that saves you 300£ there and would give it a 3300£ profit, itf the same woudl happen with the food industry for all its inputs then it would save 1850£ and we'd have a profit of about 4500£ if nominal sell price is the same. So providing input prices are cheap enough, factories can actually be also more effecient on a infrastructure cost to in relation to revenue too while being far more labor efficient, just depends on how much you can lower the costs however factory costs have more room to be lowered. And looking at the output side what happens if we can sell at say +50% market price, then the 3 forrestries generate 5400£ and 4800£ profit and the food factory 9450£ and 5650£ in profit. So buying low and selling high favors the factory more. for troughput effects its actually good that the forrestries are labor intensive at that point that aids profitabillety a lot with food factory's the effect of getting your inputs cheap is even more amplified for the purpose of profitabillety.

Mmm, but you won't have those techs for groceries until later on- if you're beelining steel construction, that will mean post 1860. The default grocer is not a particularly profitable building, which is what the netherlands will start off on. You don't have canneries, you don't have patent stills, and you don't have baking powder. You also -really- don't want to manually research those as stills and baking powder are dead end techs that unlock nothing further on the tree and only impact grocers. This is an absolutely terrible investment of RP. Canneries is more acceptable: it's not a dead end and leads to workshops which is a very good tech. So, given that you don't have any of the tech for grocers, it's not a great building. Your starting grocers have a profit of 15. Groceries are incredibly strong this patch longterm, and I almost always slot in the company for pop growth early on, but it requires quite a bit of tech investment to make it work that you don't start with. You do however start with lathes, which makes the textile mill a good building from the start. But when we're talking about what to build in the first 10-15 years of the game, the grocers are barely edge out a single timber lodge, for 3x the cp cost. I'd much rather have 3x timber lodges at 13 profit vs 1x grocer at 15 profit, which is what the math looks like at the start of the game. Grocers are great once you have the techs unlocked, but until you get your steel construction unlocked and can spend time filling in the tech tree, the timber lodges are going to be much, much better.

I also consider the more pops being employed a good thing in the early game, because that will increase your tax revenue more than having 1/3 of the employment with slightly higher SoL on those employed pops (and this is actually bad for pop growth- you want SoL to be ~14). You start out with enough peasants that you're not going to run out instantly, and if you push a max pop growth build like I did you'll grow faster than you can build even as UN with limited conquering.

 

[exalter]

That's pretty awesome.

I don't think I'd like the micro with the budget though, that requires a bit more paying attention than I like to do in my V3 runs. I'd definitely get distracted and end up bankrupt by accident looking at your 2nd screenshot!

It is not too bad. Since you juice up construction very fast this way you keep your investment pool moving and growing. You don't start with a great tax base and a bit of a ways away from proportional taxation, so government construction is a little hard to maintain. I let the private queue do as much as it can. I usually still had a positive balance once I paused government construction and could pay off debt.

I did bounce in and out of default this run, though I raked it back by letting buildings be privatized. After some sleep I also wonder about this tangent: My trade center was not using its full capacity, so I imagine the default throughput malus did not meaningfully effect it. I also don't think it affected my diplo trades with Qing or Russia. I feel like there is something cheesy or exploitable that could be done here but I cant boot up the game right now to look at it more.

I already am forgetting, but I believe I was spending most of my construction on building ports and seeding industries in Holland. I want to keep merchant marine cheap, and I want to be sure everything is in Holland due to its very strong state bonuses. I think Friesland starts the game with enough paper mills to form the company, but I build more in Holland to be sure that the company is founded there and will build there. I seeded a building or two of basically every manufacturery to be sure the private queue is convinced to build in Holland 99% of the time. Then just universities to at least the innovation cap.

Eventually world market prices lower and you can have a pretty strong manufacturing economy exporting finished goods with imported resources. I didn't in my screenshots, but eventually you do want to just start getting investment rights and form power block to get a bigger market. It helps keep prices stable and your own economy growing.

The diplo trades are very good but a little weird. The trades I signed with Qing and Russia were one sided good transfers. Russia sent me wood and I gave them nothing. Qing sent me grain and I gave them nothing. They considered the deal positive with 100% success chance. I am not sure yet how the AI evaluates diplo trades. I meant to tag switch over to them and see how much money they were making/losing on trade with me but I forgot. It may be more exploity than I think it is *if* they were losing significant amounts of money on the deal. If they're making money off the trade it's legit

I wasn't making money directly off the trades. As said the diplo trades are very good for me, but a little weird. I am the receiver of the good but I am not the "buyer". Russia creates a buy order in their market and a corresponding sell order in my market. They either make the income or pay the cost difference. For me it's just free wood in my market.

Asking for raw resources feels 100% meta for tall runs like this as it cost me no money or workers. That is my other crackhead revelation after sleeping on it. Treaty trade is the ultimate labor saving PM as it costs no labor, resources, or construction. This saves trade center capacity and workers for my exports.

The Qing grain trade mostly just gives a very early SOL boost. The increased sell orders of grain boosted my pops SOL so grain prices equalized despite the high import. It gave me very high migration attraction early and I was getting mass migrations quite early. I kept taxes low for the same reason, but the cheap grain meant I could run max taxes without much ill effect I think.

I don't usually redline it quite that hard, I was just going as fast as I could to prove the points I was making in my post. I found it quite fun and want to keep optimizing this Holland run.

 

[Black_Shade]

Yeah the double MAPI bonus in Holland is super strong.

Did you by chance abandon the rivalry with Belgium and make friends with them? I had a bit of a hard time getting over 100 construction trying what you did because iron really wasn't on the market from anyone but belgium- I gave up around 1850 because my construction was in the red on iron the entire time even with double subversions. Belgium appeared to be the #1 supplier to the market and had something like 800 to sell, but they embargoed me from within 6 months of the start of the game and I couldn't buy off them. No one else was selling more than 20 iron to the market in 1850 (presumably because Belgium was flooding it?).

 

[exalter]

Did you by chance abandon the rivalry with Belgium and make friends with them?

I never actually abandoned the rivalry in any of my runs. I probably should have abandoned it since I never got around to actually taking Belgium in any of my runs so far.

The embargo was unlucky, I don't think they ever embargoed me in my runs. I think they even flipped genial with me at some point in one run likely due to my high world market trade, despite me still rivaling them.

I'm not too sure if what else other than what I've mentioned. I will look closer if I do more Holland runs. It's been mostly consistent for me so far, but there may be some luck that depends on what the AI decides to do. Do everything you can to max trade advantage. Declare interests in big markets, negotiate as many trade privileges as you can and be sure you have good trade capacity with a big trade center in Holland.

I never used import subventions, and turned off all tariffs. I only had a paper export subvention until it produced the prestige paper.

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

Mmm, but you won't have those techs for groceries until later on- if you're beelining steel construction, that will mean post 1860. The default grocer is not a particularly profitable building, which is what the netherlands will start off on. You don't have canneries, you don't have patent stills, and you don't have baking powder. You also -really- don't want to manually research those as stills and baking powder are dead end techs that unlock nothing further on the tree and only impact grocers.

These are all fair considerations, but not nessecarily related to the subpoint were discussing even when techpaths have been talked about in a perspective of more feneral strategy. You said:

Since you can build 3x forestry buildings for the textile mill, that will be more beneficial to your economy because the clothing mill is not 3x as productive.

What i dit was isolate this argument so to look at "what are the most productive industries, how do they stack up" and this in different metrics, namely:
-revenue/profit generated per construction point invested
-revenue/profit generated per point of infrastructure used
-revenue/profit generated per 1000 workers employed.

I think its important to differentiate these in relation to "expected bottlenecks" and how one manages the economy. Genneraly speaking the bottleneck people are most used to and which are the subject of most strategies and tips is a lack of construction capacity. The general wisdom is that more construction sectors/capacity is good and you should really try to maximize them but then there are 2 extremes to this where for certain nations its far more true and for others its not true at all. Extreme examples would be like comparing Russia to Uruguay, afcourse Russia is going to want to build up construction capacity fast and Uruguay just won't because Uruguay has plenty of construction point availabillety to employ all their people very fast while it will take years for Russia to depeasent. For a country like Uruguay manpower is the obvious bottleneck but it follows from these extremity's that there is graduation to this depending how manpower rich/poor a country is and what its financial abbilety is to sustain construction sectors. In that relation, since country's like Netherlands and Belgium start relatively quite advanced and rich but with relative limited poppulation its kinda easy for them to depeasent fast and hence the desire to get immigrants or more pops elsewhere arrives soon too.

One can furthermore argue within this perspective of either being relatively more construction point constrained or relatively more manpower constrained that the choice between say building farms or building factory's matter. As my examples obviously did point out, on a per worker basis factory's generate far more GDP per capita. But nominally things like forrestries would generate more GDP per construction point invested even if taking far more labor. So the point of it is that if as a country you have loads of peasents and lack in construction points for many years if not decades to employ them all then building those buildings that create a lot of revenue per construction point invested are very interesting even if they employ 3x more people which is actually really a good thing in such country's because thats more jobs and taxpayers. You can say in that case its about having more "quantity of work". Whereas if a country would not be so constrained in construction points but be more manpower constrained that it should aim to build industry that generates more wealth per employed worker irregardless if that might be more costly in construction point terms, more "quality of work".

in your playstyle you deal with a number of these matters like manpower constraints and infrastructure constraints trough expansion. It's a valid strat, but its more into "keeping oneself foremost construction point constrained" and "staying the kind of nation that has reason to have more quantity of work over quality". Its never going to be an invalid strat to get "by some means" a 100 million or even a billion poppulation as such will certainly create a lot of growth. But in a sense its all a matter of momentum where you would optimally balance quantity of work with quality of work for the situation you have at that moment, and by the late game its all about quality of work over quantity of it.

Now i agree, afcourse, that the Food industry i used as example:
-Would take a fair amount of teching to get there
-Would be one of the most optimal examples of factories generating wealth at a relatively early time

I do not agree with having those techs looked at as a waste of time, because when it comes to production tech what really matters imho is "how much of that industry do i have, what is its proportional importance in my economy". Specialty production in particular often has that advantage that it can forego many production techs others would need because it is simply not engaged in this industry. if your economy were so to say 100% food factories then you sure would feel inclined to rush these techs and not be so interested in things like steel tech.

in the end, what i think i really maters is the conceptual discussion here on "specialty production" versus autartic production". For that reason my examples showed the proportional effects low and high prices would have in various industries. Really the core of the discussion is still imho "how strong can you make the Netherlands trough the trade system" where the Netherlands seems like a nation well placed for it opposed to your playstyle. Were obviously still in a phase where we are still looking how much the trade system can be cheesed. But as i noted factory's have a proportionally larger profit margin increase under circumstances of cheap input prices or expensive sell prices than things like forresties. it would mathematically show that IF the trade system can be used or cheesed to a sufficient extend that we will be able to build factories reliant on traded inputs that are faaar more profitable in all metrics (construction points, infrastructure but especially manpower) than alternatives. It's really just a matter of getting those inputs cheap enough and or being able to sell high enough.