Next step for flavour is balance

[Aloraand]

I'm towards an end of a Morocco playthrough. I mostly roleplay and grow my economy. With the ai now doing somewhat better economically, I was expecting to be on my toes with France and Spain on my border and to have difficulties industrialising because of the new trade mechanics.

But the game went differently and now I'm preparing to declare on GB to clean up borders and looking for countries for my overly abundant capital. This is how most of my playthroughs go. Sure, I might pick a different company(a fairly non-interactive feature after choosing it), but I'm almost sure I'll end up too strong for the ai to 1v1 with most nations.

The issue is two-fold, there is too much potential growth and the ai is incapable of realising it. I really really hope that this gets addressed, because I like the game, but if I can ignore most new features and still roll-over the game with the same mindless strategy as anything that isn't tedious or requires abusing ai plomacy, then there's no point in buying any dlcs as those features either don't matter or are actually actively making the problem worse by giving the player even more tools to grow outside of reasonable bounds.

 

[Helmut von Dandy]

With the new trade system I’d like to see resources and arable land distribution be made even less balanced. Since economies don’t need to be as autarkic anymore, making resource distribution less even could really mix up the possible strategies for smaller countries, without the cost of flavoured content.

I know that performance is one of the main reasons that the number of goods is what it is, another reason is balance. When countries needed to be more self-sufficient to be playable it didn’t really make sense to have goods that were very rare or highly localised, but now that they can be more easily traded I think it could be interesting if there were rare goods that countries had to compete economically and diplomatically to import.

 

[Desseabar]

With the trade update, industrialization still feels too easy.

Right now the balance still tilts WAY too heavily towards MAPI instead of economies of scale, so you end up with a lot of inefficient cottage industries everywhere, rather than large-scale industry dominated by Britain. E.g., Austria never seriously has to worry about protecting their local textile industry from at-scale British manufacturing.

That's exacerbated by the fact that industry snowballs 1-way: since there's no ongoing maintenance/financing cost, it's nearly impossible for buildings to generate an actual loss, and there's no way to downsize them in a recession. So you can build a factory and the worst-case scenario is that you mothball it for free until there's demand later in the game.

Taking real-world Austria as an example: during Napoleon's continental system, the local textile industry boomed because it was insulated from cheap British clothing. However, once the blockade ended, these same textile mills faced real hardship as they struggled to compete with the enormous British industry: you see the same with Indian artisans.

Overall, I think 1.9 has a lot of great stuff, but it does feel like it's balanced to be too easy: there's way too much minting, loyalists are too easy to get, and the wide-but-not-tall industry investment makes it too easy to create an upstart, competitive industry.

 

[Aloraand]

Right now the balance still tilts WAY too heavily towards MAPI instead of economies of scale, so you end up with a lot of inefficient cottage industries everywhere, rather than large-scale industry dominated by Britain. E.g., Austria never seriously has to worry about protecting their local textile industry from at-scale British manufacturing.

I think the issue is that higher pms just aren't efficient enough and don't cost anything. E.g. the water frame(1765 technology) was 96 times more efficient and required less skilled labour than cottage industry. However, it also needed to be built and bought(some capital needed to be fixed into the machine) and operated in an expensive factory with a mill(again, some capital needs to be fixed there). Vic3 pms aren't nearly as strong and cost nothing but research(so no fixed capital), which then makes it very easy to do import substitution and industrialise as anyone, because you are just building cheap factories that are always profitable.

 

[Helmut von Dandy]

I think the issue is that higher pms just aren't efficient enough and don't cost anything. E.g. the water frame(1765 technology) was 96 times more efficient and required less skilled labour than cottage industry. However, it also needed to be built and bought(some capital needed to be fixed into the machine) and operated in an expensive factory with a mill(again, some capital needs to be fixed there). Vic3 pms aren't nearly as strong and cost nothing but research(so no fixed capital), which then makes it very easy to do import substitution and industrialise as anyone, because you are just building cheap factories that are always profitable.

The trouble with PMs as a system is that changing it in this way would require pretty huge changes to the rest of the games’ systems. At the moment switching PMs is a tool the player can use to quickly respond to market changes and war, so if they couldn’t be changed quickly a lot would need to be rebalanced to make the game playable.

Also, if there was some sort of conversion cost to upgrading PMs then it would make sense if buildings could have mixed PMs across building levels as some were upgraded. The problem with that is pop fragmentation, as now a single building could have every possible kind of employee.

I think the idea is that this is all smoothed out in the abstraction. So the act of building or expanding motor industries in some way also represents the investment in upgrading other industries to potentially use engines. I think it’s a mistake to think of buildings as actual individual buildings.

 

[Desseabar]

I think the issue is that higher pms just aren't efficient enough and don't cost anything. E.g. the water frame(1765 technology) was 96 times more efficient and required less skilled labour than cottage industry. However, it also needed to be built and bought(some capital needed to be fixed into the machine) and operated in an expensive factory with a mill(again, some capital needs to be fixed there). Vic3 pms aren't nearly as strong and cost nothing but research(so no fixed capital), which then makes it very easy to do import substitution and industrialise as anyone, because you are just building cheap factories that are always profitable.

Yeah, agree on all points.

However, I'd put the emphasis on economies of scale rather than just PMs. Tech-wise, no GP or major is more than ~1 PM behind at any given time, and the passive tech spread + need to invest in all tech simultaneously means there's no real distinction via PMs.

~70% of the world's ship-tonnage was made in Britain in 1900; this wasn't because of tech (British shipbuilding was notoriously cheap about capital investments), but rather because of an enormous, skilled workforce and supply base. Italy, France, Japan and Germany all heavily subsidized their own local competitors but struggled to establish a strong domestic industry.

Emphasizing economies of scale has lots of really positive externalities throughout the game: it improves performance by reducing building/pops fragmentation, it makes states more legible (eg you know that Belfast is your shipbuilding state), and ties in neatly with the emphasis on companies.