Thoughts after completing a full game in the 1.9.6 beta

[Athius]

I just completed a full game in the 1.9.6 beta, playing as Krakow. The latest beta release was much more stable, allowing me to complete the game. In a previous post I made suggestions for a very large overhaul of the game itself, but recognizing that scope of changes will be much smaller for the rest of the year I am writing this post to provide some suggestions for smaller changes that fit in the reduced scope.

1. Minting seems overpowered.

Economies now grow much larger, meaning that minting income also grows. In my last game I basically played on lowest taxes and got 60% of my income from minting. Social security, max expenditure on army and admin - all of it was basically paid by minting. This removes much of the tension from the game (There is no fiscal reason to resist social reforms / laws). Reducing it 10X would help make the financial side of the game more interesting.

2. Unit upgrades are a UX hassle.

I've argued a lot against the use of discrete units, but since they are here I think a smaller fix would be removing some of the UX pain points. I reached the last tier of military units in my game (tanks). Infantry could be upgraded for all armies, with a single button, in the military menu. But both artillery --> heavy tanks and cavalry --> light tanks wasn't possible. Instead I had to remove all of my artillery / cav from my armies and rebuild it as their upgraded units. I do not really understand why it works this way. It doesn't change anything gameplay wise, it just makes it a UX hassle (one that the AI never seems to figure out - they use mech-inf but I did not see them use heavy tanks, making warfare very easy for me) As an aside: tanks replacing artillery does not really make sense. I would suggest either leaving siege artillery or adding interwar artillery as a new unit, and move all tanks to replace the cavalry. (As tanks represent the mobile component of the armies).

3. Company bonuses are overpowered.

Late game, financial centers do not stand a chance, its all companies. I think mild nerf of the company throughput bonus would make the economic game more interesting. It would give local capitalists some leeway making the AI more competitive.

 

[yurcick]

2 and 3 are nothing new.
2 was, in fact, slightly tuned down in 1.9.

But still, that's all very correct.

 

[cyberrb25]

#3 should be almost by design. If anything, it should be that the number of companies should be quite limited to force the specialization in the country.

I do agree with the ideas about moving tanks to cavalry, if not making a new unit type to not actually remove artillery from the units. And I think there needs to be messages that explain to the user about the risks of using the "Upgrade all units", as there seems to be quite an issue with making units with radios/tanks (mostly this seems to be the biggest gripe) and having no radios available on the national or world markets.

 

[yurcick]

#3 should be almost by design. If anything, it should be that the number of companies should be quite limited to force the specialization in the country.

Quite disagree.
The game has positioned itself as a simulator from its inception.
The last thing we need is forced specialisation. There are plenty of natural reasons and incentives for specialisation, and the game needs to represent them, and not become some gamey arcade of "choose your bonus for this playthrough".

 

[WTH666444]

Quite disagree.
The game has positioned itself as a simulator from its inception.
The last thing we need is forced specialisation. There are plenty of natural reasons and incentives for specialisation, and the game needs to represent them, and not become some gamey arcade of "choose your bonus for this playthrough".

Yeah, five companies are the standard value, which means some strategic choices and you should have companies in 10-20 industries (depending on charters and base industries per company and company availability and duplicate industries etc.). That‘s quite a lot.

 

[icedt729]

#1 is definitely the case for microstates, but I don't think it holds for most countries, and especially not for ones with large peasant populations. You could maybe halve minting from GDP without too much damage but reducing it by a factor of ten would make it negligible for all countries.

 

[LazyKatie]

I think reducing minting would make economies too slow, before this patch economies already felt too slow but now they actually feel like they're at a good pace bc of how much faster they are this patch

 

[cyberrb25]

Quite disagree.
The game has positioned itself as a simulator from its inception.
The last thing we need is forced specialisation. There are plenty of natural reasons and incentives for specialisation, and the game needs to represent them, and not become some gamey arcade of "choose your bonus for this playthrough".

I'm not advocating against the sandboxiness of the game, or towards railroading. What I'm saying is that when you get a lot of companies and a lot of uses, then you just are blobbing and aren't really having the specialisation – specialising in everything isn't a real decision.

 

[Desseabar]

For minting, tiny countries especially benefit way too much. Balance-wise I think it would be nice to cut down on minting and force taxes so that you're getting less free stuff over the course of the game.

That said, I don't know if I would want to touch minting without some form of finance reform. I personally would love a world where you have to navigate gold/silver/bimetallism, liquidity, and capital flows, but I'm not sure how fun that would be for the median player. But at the very least, an ability to buy/sell debt internationally should be available before cutting out one of the main income options for smaller countries.

 

[cyberrb25]

For minting, tiny countries especially benefit way too much. Balance-wise I think it would be nice to cut down on minting and force taxes so that you're getting less free stuff over the course of the game.

That said, I don't know if I would want to touch minting without some form of finance reform. I personally would love a world where you have to navigate gold/silver/bimetallism, liquidity, and capital flows, but I'm not sure how fun that would be for the median player. But at the very least, an ability to buy/sell debt internationally should be available before cutting out one of the main income options for smaller countries.

There are a couple trades that would amplify the game in a way that can hardly be mapped onto regular companies, and those are the Press and the Banking services. The former, because it goes alongside influence, tech spread, relations and lobbying. The latter does work alongside the influence, lobbying, trade in general, the Investment fund and the debt (as in, it would mean redesigning financing).

I don't think decoupling the metals would make a lot, though, as Gold is the catchall for the mintable metals. And the end of the Gold standard happened ages after the end of the game (it would help for the Cold war mod, but it's not worth it for Paradox to touch that).

 

[strattonthebard]

There are a couple trades that would amplify the game in a way that can hardly be mapped onto regular companies, and those are the Press and the Banking services. The former, because it goes alongside influence, tech spread, relations and lobbying. The latter does work alongside the influence, lobbying, trade in general, the Investment fund and the debt (as in, it would mean redesigning financing).

I don't think decoupling the metals would make a lot, though, as Gold is the catchall for the mintable metals. And the end of the Gold standard happened ages after the end of the game (it would help for the Cold war mod, but it's not worth it for Paradox to touch that).

The end of the gold standard was after the time period but arguments about whether to use a gold standard or a bimetallic gold-silver standard were huge in the 1890s

 

[Desseabar]

There are a couple trades that would amplify the game in a way that can hardly be mapped onto regular companies, and those are the Press and the Banking services. The former, because it goes alongside influence, tech spread, relations and lobbying. The latter does work alongside the influence, lobbying, trade in general, the Investment fund and the debt (as in, it would mean redesigning financing).

I don't think decoupling the metals would make a lot, though, as Gold is the catchall for the mintable metals. And the end of the Gold standard happened ages after the end of the game (it would help for the Cold war mod, but it's not worth it for Paradox to touch that).

I think that the gold/silver standard can be really interesting but I just don't know how fun it actually would be in balance.

There were 3.5 standards during the game's era: gold, silver, bimetallism, and floating currency (which was basically just a wartime occurrence that allows you to pay your bills at the cost of increasing all prices in your economy and weakening your import ability). Silver standard should be good early game because it offers more liquidity, while gold standards create a risk of deflation and constrain your economy. By late game, gold discoveries in the US, Australia and South Africa should flip that on its head.

But in practice, 1873 saw the US and France kill bimetallism at basically the same time, which tanked the value of silver and caused a severe global recession. Exchange rates for gold:silver didn't really change during the era, so I just don't think there's much gameplay besides a one-click decision mid-game, so I'm fine abstracting gold and silver to just one "specie" (that is, gold).

However, all of that ties together as a world that's much more zero-sum: the only way you can 'mint' new money is by getting it from gold/silver mines or by buying back government debt. I don't know of any PDX game where you get 0 baseline income (i.e., minting), so I suspect it's a lot harder to balance than it sounds.

However, I think a view of overall market liquidity could be really valuable and help reflect the mercantilism that the gold standard brings out. Every ounce of silver you ship to China is an ounce less liquidity to cover transactions in your own market, which means there's less money to invest or to spend, and emergency decisions to shift to paper currency/remove convertibility (eg, US civil war) should immediately increase all prices in your market and generate radicals.

Banking is probably the biggest 'missing' part of the game's economy. I would love a world where British financial districts can buy up Ottoman debt like they can buy buildings, and where a bank runs can occur (eg, they loan out a lot of money in a railroad boom, those railroads can't service their debt, they cause a liquidity crunch for the bank). But realistically, that's a *huge* endeavor on par with the world market, and we already have hints that the naval rework is the 'big update' for 2026, so I don't see it coming soon.

 

[strattonthebard]

Honestly trying to model the effects of different currency standard and financial liquidity and the global silver trade sounds like a computational nightmare and in order to make it performant it would probably have to be abstracted to something not all that different from the system we have now

 

[maxirage]

The OP is talking about minting from GDP, not gold income. Minting from GDP which gives substantial amounts of free money to late-game economies which makes taxes irrelevant.

 

[strattonthebard]

The OP is talking about minting from GDP, not gold income. Minting from GDP which gives substantial amounts of free money to late-game economies which makes taxes irrelevant.

This is an abstraction to represent minting new currency from precious metals though, right? That's why gold mines increase it directly

 

[Desseabar]

The OP is talking about minting from GDP, not gold income. Minting from GDP which gives substantial amounts of free money to late-game economies which makes taxes irrelevant.

Isn't gold income technically considered part of minting? Either way, they serve the same purpose, which is a continual spigot of money generated each week. I think the topic diverged a bit to discuss what minting means during the Victorian era and how that ties in with the gold standard – especially since 'minting' is free money in an era notorious for deflation.

Right now it definitely feels like minting is too generous: I don't think I've had 'very high' taxes on even once during 1.9, so I hope the next update pulls that back a bit.

 

[WTH666444]

Isn't gold income technically considered part of minting? Either way, they serve the same purpose, which is a continual spigot of money generated each week. I think the topic diverged a bit to discuss what minting means during the Victorian era and how that ties in with the gold standard – especially since 'minting' is free money in an era notorious for deflation.

Right now it definitely feels like minting is too generous: I don't think I've had 'very high' taxes on even once during 1.9, so I hope the next update pulls that back a bit.

Minting used to be uncapped. Now it stops at 200k a week, which maxes out at 2 billion, I think.

 

[Ilyasviel]

The problem isn't really minting, the problem is the lack of costs. In a real economy, when a state gets more money, it can always find something to spend it on. In vic3, and in games in general, the costs of things, especially social programs doesn't rise enough in comparison to revenues. Go look at the budget of any state today, you'll find that healthcare and pensions are almost always about half of the entire budget, and that's why taxes much higher than what you could do in vic3. There's no feasible way in the game to spend so much. The only strategy game that I've ever played where you really feel the effect of inflation is the whole Supreme Ruler series. You can easily multiply your gdp by 10 and still end up with finances worse than when you started.

 

[cyberrb25]

The end of the gold standard was after the time period but arguments about whether to use a gold standard or a bimetallic gold-silver standard were huge in the 1890s

I think that the gold/silver standard can be really interesting but I just don't know how fun it actually would be in balance.

IIRC, the devs did talk about it precisely on my terms (or me on theirs) – that in the end, as Gold in itself is just "the mint resource" instead of a product in itself, it encompasses other mintable resources.

I mean, you could consider having a journal entry on that and change the name to the good to reflect that it is Silver instead, but in the end, there are Gold mines in places where the resource is mainly Silver because of it just being a catchall to the "Minting" mine.

 

[cyberrb25]

The problem isn't really minting, the problem is the lack of costs. In a real economy, when a state gets more money, it can always find something to spend it on. In vic3, and in games in general, the costs of things, especially social programs doesn't rise enough in comparison to revenues. Go look at the budget of any state today, you'll find that healthcare and pensions are almost always about half of the entire budget, and that's why taxes much higher than what you could do in vic3. There's no feasible way in the game to spend so much. The only strategy game that I've ever played where you really feel the effect of inflation is the whole Supreme Ruler series. You can easily multiply your gdp by 10 and still end up with finances worse than when you started.

The big issue is that, besides the fact that people don't tend to engage in social programs (Old age pensions, wage subsidies) afaik, the only cost for education/healthcare is the bureaucracy cost. And that cost is quite small in general (because of bureaucracy being a global good with Economies of Scale, population consumption is low, inputs are low and costs in general too – how does the capital distribute 1000Km away the healthcare?).