Wasting my time?

[PeterCorless]

I keep trying to play Victoria 3 and trying to like it, but I keep running into a wall hard.

Just when I get a semi-functional economy things go non-linear and I am suddenly -£50 (or worse) in the hole with no way back. The game keeps telling me I have no access to my own market (83% or 92% or whatever), even though I keep building railroad after railroad.

Even though I have 14 railroads in West Switzerland, it's telling me there's a transportation shortage. (Why?)

It keeps telling me that my 53.9% and 57.9% of my population is living below their expected standard even though I am the top #10 economy in the world. What do I do to fix that?

Then two years go by and I am suddenly at #22. Okay. So... I suck?

And I just don't understand how to troubleshoot any of these issues. "Okay. So I am hosed. What do I do about it?"

The game invariably becomes progressively non-linear and non-predictive. I keep playing it over and over again and get to a point where the economy collapses. I wish I understand before I built something what effect it would have on the economy. And after I built something, that I actually see that it had the effect that I thought it was going to have.

I don't feel like the game is giving clear enough metrics or clues as to what to do next. It's a plate spinning exercise, but you're blindfolded. You can only react when you hear a crash of a plate.

Yes, I am "only" 40 hours into playing the game, but I am left with the same impression I had when I was 10 hours into it when it first released.

 

[Hansatron]

There’s several different things here. One of them is that you should contemplate playing a nation that isn’t Switzerland (read:landlocked) and see if the experience is better.

What I would ask is this: are your railroads actually being staffed? They probably are not, which is why they aren’t creating enough infrastructure (hence market access is dropping) nor transportation (hence you’re seeing a shortage of that.) What’s probably happening is you’re developing your economy and suddenly it hits a point where factories start pulling workers away from your railroads, creating an unstable spiral.

Some advice: Subsidize your railroads so they always employ up and thus always give infrastructure. Be judicious about turning on production methods that consume transportation so you don’t accidentally over consume it. Your urban centers can also provide some.

I recognize you may not know what to tell us so we can pinpoint the problem immediately, but based on what you’ve written, this seems like that situation.

 

[PeterCorless]

I think the thing is that there's not a whole lot of room or time to understand exactly what sends a plate crashing to the ground.

Like, if I didn't have staff for a railroad, why didn't the game tell me that?

I know I can just simply play as another country, but I really want to beat my head against the wall with Switzerland to really narrow the scope of what's going on. I don't want to play with a fleet yet. I just want to learn armies and economy.

As it is, I find both systems utterly baffling. Inexplicably Germany comes to the defense of Baden, even though the game did not warn me of that when I was planning to declare war. "Okay. Game over. Let's just restart."

Again, the thing about it is that there's a TON of information to keep a nation just simply afloat, and I feel like the game doesn't really provide sufficient <edit>organization of the{<edit> data to understand what is happening, why, and present options on what you can do about it.

 

[Life is Comedy]

So the game is not too easy afer all ???

Jokes aside. I am partially confused on what the complains are. I think that you are expecting to have "banners" or "alerts" drop down telling what issues are encombing like in EUIV etc ?
While V3 is a game with sometimes weird mechanics, all the issues you are writing here are almost 1 o 1 real life common sense:

from easier to more complicated:

> Then two years go by and I am suddenly at #22. Okay. So... I suck?
You are switzerland. You can pounch above your weight of course, but your are still a small country with small population and limited ressources. Without actively working for it (not necesserly min maxing) you cant expect to have a greater economy then most big countries.

> Just when I get a semi-functional economy things go non-linear and I am suddenly -£50 (or worse) in the hole with no way back.
Looking at expenses, you started to build again ? Just stop building if you dont need what you are building ? The başance number is white. Wich means that if you stop building it will be in the positive again. Deficit is good, but not when you spend it on stuff you dont need. Your private sector can also build on its own. 136 big sector might just be to big for your true capacities.

> The game keeps telling me I have no access to my own market (83% or 92% or whatever), even though I keep building railroad after railroad.
> Even though I have 14 railroads in West Switzerland, it's telling me there's a transportation shortage. (Why?)
A little more hidden at first, but as long as one keeps in mind that this game has workers (buildings needs population, dont produce ex nihilo) that should be again a sign to check emplyment level first ? If you are expecting to be able to play as a big state that doesnt need to care about the TWO STATES they are composed of, again, dont play switzerland.
@Hansatron is correct though, in saying that railroads have a tendency to provide poor wages. hence people tend to quit. DONT OVERBUİLD railroads.

> It keeps telling me that my 53.9% and 57.9% of my population is living below their expected standard even though I am the top #10 economy in the world. What do I do to fix that?
Welcome to the whoole point of the game (there are also other but this is one of the end goals). You cant. Or at least this is something you want to be working on your whoole game. A game mechanic that is less obvious (because one might not thing it exist) is that wages change over time, increasing if possiblei when the buildings have a worker shortage. Keep everyone employed and the issue will slowly solve itself. Albeit, you need more advances Production methods / technologies to really bring everyone out of misery.
A more advanced tipp, is that Education (which is very high in your case) increases expected Standard of Living.

> And I just don't understand how to troubleshoot any of these issues. "Okay. So I am hosed. What do I do about it?"
read the tooltips, and explore the different UIs you have at your disposal. I remember my first 2-3 games, I played 3-4h. Noticed I had missed some pretty obvious things, I kept playing for another hour just to explore the new mechanic, then restarted the next day.



On how to solve ? Your main underlying issue is that you lack workforce (and later ressources). You need to attract immigrants. How do you attract immigrants ? Check the immigration attraction UI. What will it say ? Provide good jobs, low discrimination, ideally be in the same market.

As a final note: Switzerland IS NOT a beginner friendly country. Mainly because access to the sea (read trade) is really important.
Sweeden, Vietnam are.
Even the ottomans if one takes its first journal entry just as guideline and doesnt care if he actually fails it at first.

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

I know I can just simply play as another country, but I really want to beat my head against the wall with Switzerland to really narrow the scope of what's going on. I don't want to play with a fleet yet. I just want to learn armies and economy.

And thats fair enough, Switzerland isnt even such a bad country for it though i would typically suggest belgium as a first nation to play with as its existing economy (with access to varried resources) and tech level combined with its small size allows the new player to make a lot of errors and not nessecarily be punished for it a lot.

Switzerland is a bit a different beast, i have some experience with it, like my 30 SOL foreign investment oriented Switzerland. First thing of note: you lack sulpher and lead, thats a fair issue for a starting player to have to deal with, you wont be getting enough sulpher from the market early on to run and improved paper industry and the many universities you need, Switzerland doesnt even have much active poppulation to start with.

Furthermore those Alpine mountains are a pain on infrastructure given their negative infrastructure modifiers. And afaik those mountains might give a negative construction modifier too, its not to be underestimated what a pain those mountains are and what a extra challenge they pose to a new player. You dont really have an option there than to have the railroads and notably you will also have to subsidize them because they will be ineffecient. The thing i presume you have here is that while you have many railroad levels that they also might not bee fully employed, it seems fair to assume from your cost structure that you are not subsidizing them, which you should be in this case.

if the wiki is up to date on it this is the alpine modifier:

And yes, thats a pain. -15% infrastructure, -15% construction efficiency thats "ouch". Other country's like Austria and Sardinia-Piedmont who have this modifier can atleast focus to invest in other provinces, your stuck with it to have it as a quasi national modifier. Granted its not as much as a individual state pain as it is to have low pop amazon rainforeest provinces especially if those go into turmoil too which is not nessecarily easy to prevent. Just goes to show what particular challenges you can face according to the nation.

As to your living standards, the thing is that high literacy pushes the minimum desired SOL up, but thats only one thing to consider as it might also be a product of say having very expensive food, and otoh if you constantly lack market access then consumer goods can also be more pricy as a result if they are not produced locally. And then we do have to wonder, do you even produce all the consumer goods/articles that pops will need?

And I just don't understand how to troubleshoot any of these issues. "Okay. So I am hosed. What do I do about it?"

The game invariably becomes progressively non-linear and non-predictive. I keep playing it over and over again and get to a point where the economy collapses. I wish I understand before I built something what effect it would have on the economy. And after I built something, that I actually see that it had the effect that I thought it was going to have.

Keep at it, and keep asking people here for advice, there are plenty who will be keen to share their wisdom. It's a game with a high learning curve. I do advise you to platy Belgium first though instead of Switzerland for the purpose of your "learning game" as Switzerlands infrastructure and its lack of sulpher and lead is a tricky matter to deal with.

Like, if I didn't have staff for a railroad, why didn't the game tell me that?

I know I can just simply play as another country, but I really want to beat my head against the wall with Switzerland to really narrow the scope of what's going on. I don't want to play with a fleet yet. I just want to learn armies and economy.

it kinda does as you see but there are a lot of different tooltips and warnings and "that railroads specifically often need subsidies" is more like something you lean from experience, because subsidies can be applied to about everything but most players will subsidize things like railroads and perhaps power plants. Well perhaps thats another one that is good to mention then, you might need to subsidize your power plants at some point too, although prefferably you avoid that by keeping input prices at a reasonable price.

Its not like you would NEED to expand with Belgium, or even build a fleet. Belgium has pretty much all the resources it needs in a tight package and its blessed to start the game with no border controls so whenever you need more manpower it will tend to trickle to you soon enough. I can certainly appreciate my country be its own little OP thing in a paradox game though admittingly Ai belgium tends to be more populous by game end as Belgium is in real life hah. Even for expansion you could do this very chill via some colonies where you can grab some rubber and oil perhaps. Not all colonies need an army and navy to take it, empty land can be "grabbed" and if their is some insurrection your army does not need a warfleet to get there either.

Again, the thing about it is that there's a TON of information to keep a nation just simply afloat, and I feel like the game doesn't really provide sufficient <edit>organization of the{<edit> data to understand what is happening, why, and present options on what you can do about it.

Be sure to consult the Vicky 3 wiki often, and learn game by game starting with easy nations, you'll get there, pretty much all veteran players here have gone trough that fase too.

What you could also do is to let us "guide you" in a game, just play a game post an update every 10 years wwith some screenshot where we can analyse youre situation and then give advice as to what you should change or prioritise towards. I'm sure there will be plenty willing to give you tips. For the moment though, its very hard for us to derive much information and conclusions from your single screenshot even though certain issues seem obvious here.

 

[ThePastfinder]

Of all the mapgame series (serieses?), Vicky is queen of the spreadsheets. There's been a valiant effort to dress it up more this time, which mostly means you have to learn to love tooltips.

Besides the UI aspect, the unintuitiveness of subsidizing infrastructure is part of a broader problem...guess I'll save that for the suggestion forum.

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

Besides the UI aspect, the unintuitiveness of subsidizing infrastructure is part of a broader problem...guess I'll save that for the suggestion forum.

What is the game supposed to say, you should specifically subsidise this and that and such? Its not like its impossible to run railroads or power plants or anything withought having to subsidize them, but if your a country like Switzerland that has no railroad company afaik to fall back on and additionally hase infrastructure debuffs to deal with yeah that kinda does increase the likelyhood that you will need subsidies in this particular industry.

My Switzerland that was foreign investment based managed to replace most of the infrastructure need by railways in late game through pop car usage. Its not like its impossible to do but it takes a bit more experience i'd say, that was a Switzerland that was at 30 Sol indeed thats kinda a point where car demand will replace transport demand pretty fully and i wasnt using much in mining anymore as that industry had run empty when i could buy massive volumes from abroad, rather than subsidizing rail or power plants i was subsidizing food factory's (of all things) because my pops had huge demand that outstripped the limited of land trade with all the nations around me.

Point is, there are plenty of advanced strategies that invalidate the suggestion that you absolutely must subsidize your rail, its just that for a new player this will be the advise you give as they will learn the more particular situations later with more experience. And the game offers a lot of flexibility in that, so that there is hardly "1 way" to play it in.

 

[Cymsdale]

There is only so much information you can get from one screenshot but it doesn't even seem like you are doing particularly poorly. A small landlocked nation is going to have challenges because your ability to trade is going to be highly dependent on your neighbor's economy, and that can get very swingy if they fall in or out of other markets.

You have a fairly large investment pool, is it being used? If you are not at Laissez faire you probably should be so the private sector can take on more of the building expenses.

If you have a transportation shortage (I assume you mean that and not an infrastructure shortage, they are different things) I don't think you want to go too hard on railroads necessarily, you might simply be able to turn off a few PMs that are using a heavy amount of it to bring the demand down to a reasonable level. That might work better than subsidizing more railroads you can't afford.

 

[ThePastfinder]

What is the game supposed to say, you should specifically subsidise this and that and such? Its not like its impossible to run railroads or power plants or anything withought having to subsidize them, but if your a country like Switzerland that has no railroad company afaik to fall back on and additionally hase infrastructure debuffs to deal with yeah that kinda does increase the likelyhood that you will need subsidies in this particular industry.

My Switzerland that was foreign investment based managed to replace most of the infrastructure need by railways in late game through pop car usage. Its not like its impossible to do but it takes a bit more experience i'd say, that was a Switzerland that was at 30 Sol indeed thats kinda a point where car demand will replace transport demand pretty fully and i wasnt using much in mining anymore as that industry had run empty when i could buy massive volumes from abroad, rather than subsidizing rail or power plants i was subsidizing food factory's (of all things) because my pops had huge demand that outstripped the limited of land trade with all the nations around me.

Point is, there are plenty of advanced strategies that invalidate the suggestion that you absolutely must subsidize your rail, its just that for a new player this will be the advise you give as they will learn the more particular situations later with more experience. And the game offers a lot of flexibility in that, so that there is hardly "1 way" to play it in.

To clarify, I was just getting at the fact that manually turning subsidies on & off is a huge pain. Auto-subsidizing just enough workers to cover infrastructure (not fill the building) might as well be the default. Besides removing a nasty source of player micro-optimization, it'd also save the AI from the worst way it goes immersion-breakingly stupid: turning entire small nations into ant mills of starving rail workers. Ending a famine via invasion and getting infamy for it like I'm 1979 Vietnam is only fun the first few times.

It could also prevent goods shortages or unwanted downsizing, as military industries especially need. Every half-year I have to go through the buildings tab, find the buildings I need that are about to shrink, turn on subs, run a week, then switch them all off. It sucks but so does wasting all that previous construction, right on the margin of "let's make a house rule to paper over this design flaw" and "oh I need to do whatever I can to get far as Karagwe".

Oh crap I said I was going to save it...Well apparently this has been suggested at least twice so far. Seems like it'd be such an obvious benefit that I have to wonder if there's some intractable edge case I'm missing.

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

Oh crap I said I was going to save it...Well apparently this has been suggested at least twice so far. Seems like it'd be such an obvious benefit that I have to wonder if there's some intractable edge case I'm missing.

I can understand that as a quality of life addition. i play mostly smaller nations so that saves me a lot of clicking when doing micro anyway, it doesn't feel like much of a hassle on that size or say the size of Switzerland but i'm less inclined to play nations like China or Russia where success will translate in managing huge build queu's where you have to add like a 100 buildings for each week that passes lol. It gets a bit crazy with those big nations coming from a small one when your suddenly dropping down industry in stacks of 50 and lets hope there wont be too much devolution but i cant be bothered to make my queu more varied in a fashion where i would need to add buildings one by one of different type. If you want to micro China to the finest points ... youll be playing that game for a month??

That said, one would typically just go into the building ledger and click the subsidize all railways button there? Or are we talking about situations where you want to subsidize some but not all?

 

[ThePastfinder]

I guess those linked posts weren't suggesting exactly the same thing, so again: "just enough workers to cover infrastructure (not fill the building)". A subsidy setting, not another macromanagement tool. This is much more important for small nations & states, where money and labor are scarce. Hence the AI frequently bankrupting & starving itself (like the Arab and Yemeni states in every game).

Even for macromanagement, unless I've missed something this whole time, there's no way to filter buildings for "about to downsize" or "has a local or national shortage". And even then I don't want them fully manned, especially if the state has only 15k workers or private construction made a dozen railroads for some reason.

 

[Manchura]

so, you created a resonance cascade without truly meaning to... that is fine, we all do it the first few games and thankfully it can be looked at step by step to see how this happened:

1. you did not have enough transportation usage, transportation is profitable for railroads at the first tier of PMs at around +50% price if all other prices are base, generally speaking you want transportation to be +60ish% from base price so it remains profitable even if the odd engine issue arises

2. without subsidies this caused the railroads to become poor places to work, so everyone moved out and with it the infrastructure this was providing is lost

3. with the loss of infrastructure this led to a MAPI collapse, as market access falls this means local price is closer to what is being payed, so if a state has no engines and that means there is a shortage well... bye bye transportation since the railroad shuts down

4. with everyone's access to the market cut off they rapidly lose the goods they were using to improve their SoL like luxury goods and out of state foodstuff leading to grain costing 4 times as much and making them starve dropping your SoL

5. this is the point you notice something is wrong, you reacted like any government would and tried to spend your way out of the perceived problem you were being notified of which was, in fact, not a problem (the transportation shortage) and rapidly spent years building railroads across random mountains that nobody would use

6. since the problem is not fixed and the economy crashes as a result, your placement drops due to the massive loss in goods production placement

bonus step: since you are still land locked into europe in 1881 this means your pops usually want a SoL that ends up demanding a ton of overseas products like dye based luxury clothing, oil based heating/leisure, and sugar foods like groceries which aren't possible to acquire in large quantities given your reliance on austria, prussia, italy, and france who generally dont get much of those goods normally making pops who can get that SoL somewhere else emigrate away from you

steps 1 and 2 are where you can actually stop this chain of events, 3-6 are just the consequences of failure to do so and many new players prove why governments in reality often collapse their economy after taxing everyone to hell to try and fix it

 

[Komodo445]

I think the thing is that there's not a whole lot of room or time to understand exactly what sends a plate crashing to the ground.

Like, if I didn't have staff for a railroad, why didn't the game tell me that?

I know I can just simply play as another country, but I really want to beat my head against the wall with Switzerland to really narrow the scope of what's going on. I don't want to play with a fleet yet. I just want to learn armies and economy.

As it is, I find both systems utterly baffling. Inexplicably Germany comes to the defense of Baden, even though the game did not warn me of that when I was planning to declare war. "Okay. Game over. Let's just restart."

Again, the thing about it is that there's a TON of information to keep a nation just simply afloat, and I feel like the game doesn't really provide sufficient <edit>organization of the{<edit> data to understand what is happening, why, and present options on what you can do about it.

you can pause the game with the space bar if you need more time

 

[Troyen]

Like, if I didn't have staff for a railroad, why didn't the game tell me that?

If you click on the buildings tab of one of your states (pick the one complaining about market access) there's a little red person icon next to a building's name when it can't hire enough workers, or white person icon if hiring more workers would make the building lose money. At least on the compact list view of buildings, not sure about the default grid view. The tooltips for those icons go into more detail like "can't hire workers because not enough are qualified" or more likely "workers don't want to work here because their current job pays more". Subsidies are a quick fix for the latter. There's no drop-down alert for this because it's common late-game to run out of workers to staff everything even with automation and you have to start choosing what industries you care more about.

The shortages can however be turned into a stand-alone alert circle at the top as can the "not 100% market access". I don't think they are by default, but go into the notification settings and change them both to "Alert". They're important enough to always be aware of. (Note: if you're part of a market spanning over the ocean and get into a war that sinks your convoys, the market access alert can also get rather spammy.) The reason for the shortage may not always be immediately clear, but it should be a hint to check out your railroad building and maybe you'll notice it's not fully staffed and see that red person icon with the tooltip explaining what's going on - at least for this type of shortage.

 

[PeterCorless]

Well, I finally got it done.

Never expanded. Didn't even pass the laws to form a larger army until 1930+. Increased pop from 2 to 4.5 million. And yes, subsidizing the railroads was the key to success.

 

[PedroLuiz]

Well, I finally got it done.

View attachment 1283218

Never expanded. Didn't even pass the laws to form a larger army until 1930+. Increased pop from 2 to 4.5 million. And yes, subsidizing the railroads was the key to success.

Did you have fun?

 

[PeterCorless]

Sort of? I mean, it wasn't an Ulm world conquest, but I got the hang of it.

 

[47pik]

It’s good you were able to finish the campaign and all, but I would caution you that going forth you might want to explore the UI more. Not being notified of your railroads failing to employ makes a lot of sense - buildings failing to employ resulting in notifications would be a miserable experience for the player, but as a consequence you need to know how to pay attention to certain things that matter to you.

This is to say, this category of problem is not going to go away as you keep playing other countries; there will be lots of times something goes wrong and you’ll need to figure out what it is. To put it bluntly, figuring out this puzzle is part of the game and if you don’t enjoy, say, trying to investigate a debt spiral, this game might not be for you, because it’s not going to tell you the exact cause for why your economy is collapsing.

 

[Nats]

Good advice above that has helped me too.

But I do agree with the OPs issues about lack of feedback. There should definitely be, at the very least, some events arising that give you hints as to why your country is failing, rather than just letting you fail and not know why.

This is a game after all that is meant to be pleasant entertainment, not a form of torture.

 

[stern]

You are playing the wrong way.
Victoria 3 is a tools-iron-coal and civil war simulation.
You allow civil wars to happen so you can remove groups entirely from politics to pass min maxing laws, and you just keep producing more tools to produce more coal to produce more iron to produce more tools.
Don't forget to import wood.