Why does AI insist on running import tariffs on stuff it doesn't produce but direly needs?

[kingsword]

I have countless examples but putting just the recent one in how absurd it is. Ottomans aren't producing ammunition. I try to sell them without tarrifs on my side. They put on import tariffs so it's stuck at level 1 which means they don't make any tariff money while they're paying massive sums on ammunition. I witness such examples constantly like how they put tariffs on engines they don't produce and then run their into the ground, tank their infrastructure and their economy etc.

Dare I say, is it stupid? Or is there some genius at work I can't fathom?

 

[Life is Comedy]

Whoo wants tò give Power tò the merchants. Thoose useless mules having the audacity tò sell stuff we dont produce.

Just tò be clear: when you tag switch to thoose countries, you see them having put the import Slider tò the max, while NOT having any industry of that good themselves, correct ?

Mmh... Might Need tweaking Indeed. İ can Imagine coding self destructive behaviour on isolationist. As well as coding that if I have my own industries I want to protect them. But not been isolationist, using the goods, and not having the industry, should probably not put max tariffs.

 

[kingsword]

I don't need to switch since when I check their market, the game shows the tariff setting they're applying on their market. I also check the level of trade which explains that it won't grow because the trade revenues will drop too low so it's not lack of convoys etc.

Ammunition, engines etc all the same. AI sets itself for bankruptcy and I very much hope that this will get revised for 1.9. Otherwise world trade won't amount to anything because 95% of the countries stick mercantilism and they wanna sell stuff they won't produce.

Mind you, this is nothing like China setting tariffs on opium or something like that. This is stuff that's actively destroying its own coffers and economy. And its own investors won't say "let me build this up since it's expensive". They'll keep building wineries instead.

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

I don't need to switch since when I check their market, the game shows the tariff setting they're applying on their market. I also check the level of trade which explains that it won't grow because the trade revenues will drop too low so it's not lack of convoys etc.

Ammunition, engines etc all the same. AI sets itself for bankruptcy and I very much hope that this will get revised for 1.9. Otherwise world trade won't amount to anything because 95% of the countries stick mercantilism and they wanna sell stuff they won't produce.

Mind you, this is nothing like China setting tariffs on opium or something like that. This is stuff that's actively destroying its own coffers and economy. And its own investors won't say "let me build this up since it's expensive". They'll keep building wineries instead.

Fullily enough sometimes you can make a profit on levying an import tariff on a minimally traded item.

Though art tends to be the only profitable one at start. The minimal trade of art is always 2 pieces valued at a nominal 200£, meaning that a 45% import tariff levied upon such a single trade will yield 180£ in tariffs. Providing you can bring your bureaucracy down to 10£ or less per point of bureaucracy then thats profitable even if it might never grow.

 

[exi123]

This all does not need to be rocket science.... Good available my market? No - Set import tariff to low or none. If Yes, keep it neutral. If good is to cheap, set to no export tariff. If base price is to high, set it to no import tariff, if in shortage set it to import subvention.

99% percent of cases covered with a very simple logic, only needs to be checked like once per month or so.

 

[Manchura]

the AI is incredibly autarkic, the reason it tariffs such goods is to make it's own private sector willing to build those industries after being exposed to the good

this is why trade is so piss poor at the moment, the AI uses your trade to make it's own industries viable to build due to mapi making it impossible to dominate their market after import tariffs are applied to your goods

 

[Timewalker102]

Wait till you find out about real life human leaders...

 

[kingsword]

the AI is incredibly autarkic, the reason it tariffs such goods is to make it's own private sector willing to build those industries after being exposed to the good

this is why trade is so piss poor at the moment, the AI uses your trade to make it's own industries viable to build due to mapi making it impossible to dominate their market after import tariffs are applied to your goods

The thing is that the only sulphur mine and fertilizer factory built in the OE was by me, AI should realize the situation it's in. For example Austria kept buying ammo from me even though I had ammo factories in it but not enough to cheapen it. So this is not always but sometimes. That sometimes is bankrupting it though so it should never happen.

Wait till you find out about real life human leaders...

I mean TBH it's more like North Korea setting tariffs on imports rather than USA which can produce most everything today. Sure it's gonna hit the consumers bad but it'll also stimulate local production because they have the industrial and investment base to achieve it. Autarky is good if you're preparing for a world war...

Moreover something like ammo is paid by the government, not POPs. I could understand if they put tariffs on consumer goods if it didn't care about SoL.

 

[Tolomeidb2]

Trying really hard to not bring you real life examples given the news of today..... ^^

 

[kingsword]

I just explained that the comparison isn't relevant though. If America had to import Javelin missiles for its military and put tariffs on that, yeah it'd be an apt comparison. It's putting tariffs on consumer goods because the government doesn't care of SoL of its citizens. Now they'll have to self-produce those and pay more to buy less but the government can still order the same stuff from Lockheed Martin for the same price because it's already producing in USA. Unlike the Ottomans in the game not producing its ammo.

I'm not questioning the AI putting tariffs on opium imports or whatever but government goods like ammo and engines to run the country. It's not stimulating its own industry when there's none to start with. The real life example would be my dad telling me how Turkey couldn't even produce a single sewing needle for its manufacturing industry. Everything had to imported first to start from scratch. Then you build from the ground up when create a base. In the meanwhile you have to buy everything defense related from abroad because nobody will wait for you to build up before invading. I'm doing them a favor for selling tariff-free which is a no-brainer deal in that situation.

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

I'm not questioning the AI putting tariffs on opium imports or whatever but government goods like ammo and engines to run the country. It's not stimulating its own industry when there's none to start with.

Ive played a number of games "government buildings only mode", where i dont build industries just government buildings and the trick is to steer the AI to build certain things where and when. Tariffs do tend to play a role in that strategy. When you want to kickstart a new industry, for example engines at a moment where you have invented railways, then it can get rather tricky. Its a bit similar to sometimes stimulating that first steel mill or first tool shop. The trick is that the good needs to be expensive for the AI to be enticed to it but another critical requirement is that the demand in the nation must also be high enough to warrant a whole factory. Like you get your first tool shop to work on steel tools and import steel for it it might not take up enough demand for a factory and you might need to set up a few minimal trade steel trades and set a number of tool factory's to steel tools to really push the AI to it. That the steel is expensive is no detriment to push the Ai to build a steel factory au contraire i'd think but i can only observe what the AI does and when it comes over to that point. It's a bit annoying with engines indeed because railways dont use all that much engines and minimal trades of engines are small and especially scarce early in the game, su pushing the AI to build an engines factory if your not going to build it yourself is tricky. The Ai will build steel mills and machinery factories just fine once the first has been established and demands keep rising, but i'm pretty sure most players tend to take up the building of the country's first steel factory and engines factory for themselves in prepperation to start laying out railways for example.

Anyway, as seemed relevant to your reply, i wanted to discuss what it takes to stimulate the building of an industry where there is none to start with. Granted that ammunition is a good the government always pays and there isnt so much a point to setting tariffs when its the government who wholly will pay the price, whereas when other actors in the economy do it thats another matter afcourse. Though in another thread i did discuss the idea of importing huge volumes of construction materials and putting tariffs on that while letting the AI build and discussing the merit of that, there exist funny ways in which the government can sometimes push the cost of something down to others and take the benefit of tariffs for their own. And in Vicky we play from the role of the State, which means that while in a general way the state will prefer to have a solid economy, what at times might be more priority is the healthiness of the state budget rather than the healthiness of the economy.

Granted your original post did contain some of the more silly situations. I do think they collect tariffs even if its just a level 1 trade, the player sure does if he does things like that. But its also when such things would lead to railways not being payed and infrastructure getting tanked that we likely are dealing with a kind of bug, whereas with a number of other trades there is perhaps reason to it.

 

[Manchura]

The thing is that the only sulphur mine and fertilizer factory built in the OE was by me, AI should realize the situation it's in. For example Austria kept buying ammo from me even though I had ammo factories in it but not enough to cheapen it. So this is not always but sometimes. That sometimes is bankrupting it though so it should never happen.

ammunition is a situational good, the only time it comes into effect is when you are at war, otherwise it's price is mute

that's why the AI buys it from you even when it has a factory. unless the AI is at war ammunition is unprofitable to build compared to literally anything else even bare minimum wheat fields with -5k profitability

 

[kingsword]

Granted your original post did contain some of the more silly situations. I do think they collect tariffs even if its just a level 1 trade, the player sure does if he does things like that. But its also when such things would lead to railways not being payed and infrastructure getting tanked that we likely are dealing with a kind of bug, whereas with a number of other trades there is perhaps reason to it.

AI mostly (not all of them) stopped subsidizing railways which is already a problem. Like Britain is subsidizing but Sweden and Switzerland became ghost countries due to not doing it. The only solution is to cheapen the engines enough but when they also set tariffs on that they shoot themselves in the foot.

A lot of other silliness going in the game already but it's really breaking it. They really need to decouple market access from engine prices. AI cannot cope.

 

[kingsword]

Oh and the newest example of this non-sense:

Ottoman AI again managing to do most senseless thing possible. This time it puts export tariffs to oil so the wells I opened for them are useless while it could make a killing selling the oil to me. Foreign investment feature becomes utterly useless because the AI manages to pick the losing option out of the two every single time. And this with having trade agreement with it somehow. The route popup tells me it won't increase due to tariffs. What?

The trade patch can't come sooner. Though I suspect AI will again select the tariffs most harmful to it.

 

[FranklyJustNess]

This all does not need to be rocket science.... Good available my market? No - Set import tariff to low or none. If Yes, keep it neutral. If good is to cheap, set to no export tariff. If base price is to high, set it to no import tariff, if in shortage set it to import subvention.

99% percent of cases covered with a very simple logic, only needs to be checked like once per month or so.

To be fair, the level of a trade route often gets stuck on level 1 regardless of tariff level, especially on low quantity, shortage goods. It's even easier for AI, that doesn't really go "I'll make this change, and market will adjust", but can get stuck in not applying PMs, because of low sell orders of input goods, and so low demand for those goods, and low priority for importing/building more.

In many cases you might start the game, see no small arms production and a shortage, import it from UK and France, still have a shortage, and see "level 1, won't expand, because it would lose revenue", so like there's 0 reason not to put an import tariff on it, and make some extra money off of foreign shopkeepers.

Tariffs are there to encourage higher quantities being traded, but if they have no effect on that, it's just throwing away money, which could be earned for free.

 

[TheFlemishDuck]

AI mostly (not all of them) stopped subsidizing railways which is already a problem. Like Britain is subsidizing but Sweden and Switzerland became ghost countries due to not doing it. The only solution is to cheapen the engines enough but when they also set tariffs on that they shoot themselves in the foot.

A lot of other silliness going in the game already but it's really breaking it. They really need to decouple market access from engine prices. AI cannot cope.

Switzerland afaik gets negative modifiers in those mountains to railways. It's not a help. Since more recent patches engine factory's can often struggle to make a good profit and railways have pretty bad productivity to start with. I would say that even for a small patch of your own it isnt the worse thing to up the output in transport for railways a tad, that will help make railways more profitable, their demand on engines more constant and it doesnt nessecarily require the AI to subsidize its rail then.

 

[exi123]

To be fair, the level of a trade route often gets stuck on level 1 regardless of tariff level, especially on low quantity, shortage goods. It's even easier for AI, that doesn't really go "I'll make this change, and market will adjust", but can get stuck in not applying PMs, because of low sell orders of input goods, and so low demand for those goods, and low priority for importing/building more.

In many cases you might start the game, see no small arms production and a shortage, import it from UK and France, still have a shortage, and see "level 1, won't expand, because it would lose revenue", so like there's 0 reason not to put an import tariff on it, and make some extra money off of foreign shopkeepers.

Tariffs are there to encourage higher quantities being traded, but if they have no effect on that, it's just throwing away money, which could be earned for free.

I know all of that. I just finished a run with the US and the current, old trade system is very frustrating, exactly how you described it. I posted this with the new coming trade system in mindm where the market itself will buy and adjust to its own needs.

The old system will be gone in a few weeks and with that hopefully the issue that it is basically not possible to flood new markets with new goods, even when their economy needed it. But there are also other issues that hopefully get fixed with a better supply and demand situation: Local services.

If you reach the super late game the ai struggles with the exact same issues as the player: Find a way to run powerplants and railways. They are simply not sensitive enough for small regions. When subsidized they can wreck whole economies and if not, they never reach the amount of employment to match the demand. The ai also never uses the train carts PMs which could free up a lot of work force for producing real goods.

 

[kingsword]

Switzerland afaik gets negative modifiers in those mountains to railways. It's not a help. Since more recent patches engine factory's can often struggle to make a good profit and railways have pretty bad productivity to start with. I would say that even for a small patch of your own it isnt the worse thing to up the output in transport for railways a tad, that will help make railways more profitable, their demand on engines more constant and it doesnt nessecarily require the AI to subsidize its rail then.

I removed subject payments and started bankrolling them and Norway, Sweden and Denmark finally started to subsidize and went from a death spiral to top GDP per capita in a couple of years. It really is amazing how game mechanics are more about "how do we block the player from gaming it" rather than "how do we make sure AI can play it" and we end up with AI killing itself without the player gaming anything.

Infra and power being based around a building that requires profitability should have been made foolproof for AI first rather than curbing players.

 

[Moe 3mperor]

Wait is the AI you are talking about actually is......

 

[Bisonmask]

Oh and the newest example of this non-sense:

Ottoman AI again managing to do most senseless thing possible. This time it puts export tariffs to oil so the wells I opened for them are useless while it could make a killing selling the oil to me. Foreign investment feature becomes utterly useless because the AI manages to pick the losing option out of the two every single time. And this with having trade agreement with it somehow. The route popup tells me it won't increase due to tariffs. What?

The trade patch can't come sooner. Though I suspect AI will again select the tariffs most harmful to it.

By the time Oil is a thing you should have a trade agreement and sufficient competitiveness to make this work. Mind posting some screenshots?