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There was a lot of investment, but for the first half of the century most of that was concentrated in government debt. Unfortunately, right now we have no formal government debt modeling, though.
You still see a lot of private investment, though: South American investors for example sold lots of (often junk) bonds in the British stock exchange.
There's some really great tables in here, especially tables 4+5: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w11266/w11266.pdf
Basically you can see that 1) international bonds from all over were sold, even from nominally hostile Russia, and 2) growing chunks of the stock market were allocated to private investment.
One thing that jumps out: you sometimes hear about how important railways were, but fully *41%* of the British stock market was allocated to railways in 1883. That's just such a crazy figure, and I would love to see it better reflected in the game.
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I think this is a balance issue between MAPI and investment AI.
MAPI gives such a harsh pricing penalty that the AI thinks it's best to build a bunch of factories everywhere, and the AI underweights economies of scale in their investment logic. This is also the lowest hanging fruit to improve performance: going from 10 level-1 buildings to 1 level-10 building dramatically reduces pop fragmentation, and it really improves legibility/gameplay. E.g., Germany losing Westphalia should trigger "oh no, all my engine manufacturing is gone."
My bolder suggestion for that would be urbanization 'tiers' that limit how many unique buildings you can make, based on the urban center level: eg a level-1 urban center can only build one manufacturing building, while a metropolis like London can have a diversified manufacturing center. This also prevents the issue of placed like Darfur having a dozen level-1 manufacturing buildings with no employment.
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Only issue about this is that Trade centers are supposed to exhaust all trade capacity they have. No Trade center is supposed to not be using their trade advantage, unless there is no economic benefit from importing or exporting – that is, if all goods in the World Market are the same price as in the state the Trade Center is operating, or that because of tariffs there is a penalty.
You could say, instead, to do it if the building's cash reserves have been full for more than X time, or where the cost of importing the resource is more than Y% the sale price (reversed in exports), but it would be unobvious, and Trade centers are supposed to maximize that value anyways, so it would be a death spiral (and if you give the Trade Rights charter – under the DLC –, you're already allowing that)
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Oh yes yes! I just meant more like later on there was more direct investment, most of mines and Oil etc were owned by foreign capital, but there was also alot of loan giving to Russia itself to finance railroads etc and overall debt trade, I agree (I am speaking from my head right now as I don't have access to secondary computer with papers saved). And I agree, there's no debt issuing. Overall though I think foreign investment as it is now should be nerfed, like each tech giving more "allocation" for private investors $$ to invest abroad, otherwise (especially with regional HQs) things get crazy and everyone invests in everyone.
I think railways will never get implemented as they should, and it's kinda sad but understandable. Railways are just infra and transportation, while in reality they should give heavy MAPI buffs and urbanization and migration buffs. But the problem is that there's just soo many variables that would cause lag (like terrain, distance, urban/rural split: every state is just the same, we'd require "small states" that are cities and around them -> rural areas that start to migrate once railroads go into effect etc etc). Also with the way markets work, it'd be really hard to ex. model Polish trade with Germany/Austria because of railways. There's just no way to properly model MAPI etc.
And I overall Agree with you! Keeping it short as I have to go.
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Going back to QoL improvements, some ideas off the top of my head, in addition to what I mentioned previously:
- arrange armies (and fleets) in outliner in the same way they are in the Army "Mobilisation" tab - it gets annoying having to scroll through the list in a different order when you're trying to make sure you've got the mobilisation options you want for the different armies.
- for that matter, the ability to sort the armies/fleets by name (or even re-order them) would be great
- have different techs coloured differently, to make it easier to remember which is in which tree (hopefully coming in a future refresh of tech, generally?). Something like Blue for Production, Red for Military, Gold for Society? Just the wreath around the tech in the research queue (please make that easier to re-organise, btw!) would be helpful...
- arrange armies (and fleets) in outliner in the same way they are in the Army "Mobilisation" tab - it gets annoying having to scroll through the list in a different order when you're trying to make sure you've got the mobilisation options you want for the different armies.
- for that matter, the ability to sort the armies/fleets by name (or even re-order them) would be great
- have different techs coloured differently, to make it easier to remember which is in which tree (hopefully coming in a future refresh of tech, generally?). Something like Blue for Production, Red for Military, Gold for Society? Just the wreath around the tech in the research queue (please make that easier to re-organise, btw!) would be helpful...
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One other one: I would really like to split out "military" and "naval" tech trees.
It's a bit annoying to play as a landlocked country who has to invest in a bunch of naval tech so I can modernize my army, and splitting them out should allow a bit more specialization (eg Prussia all-in on army, Britain all-in on navy, France mixing the two).
It's a bit annoying to play as a landlocked country who has to invest in a bunch of naval tech so I can modernize my army, and splitting them out should allow a bit more specialization (eg Prussia all-in on army, Britain all-in on navy, France mixing the two).
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One more: Let me click on a resource building in a state even if it has 0 levels, so I can see its PMs and see the inputs and outputs and their prices in that state.
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1. Have attack / defend order set per front (or at the very least per army), NOT per general. Late game it takes me 32 clicks to switch all armies to defend / attacks. Its an UX nightmare and to this day I do not understand how that got through.
2. Make sure all units can upgrade to their next level. I still need to remove frigates, cannons.
2. Make sure all units can upgrade to their next level. I still need to remove frigates, cannons.
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If they really want to impose the construction cost for certain upgrades they could at least just have it so the upgrade button still works but opens a confirmation dialog asking “This upgrade requires new barracks. Add X barracks to construction queue?” and saying yes would just queue them up automatically.
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Another thought. When inviting characters their acceptance tier is displayed, which is relevant to your ability to invite them, but this isn't shown once a character is in your country. The acceptance is still relevant for actions like granting leadership, but there's no way to actually see it. You need to go several tooltips deep to add up their acceptance from religion and culture. Its especially annoying because a character's religion isn't even displayed when you open the character, you need to use the tooltip.
So a character's acceptance and religion should be shown in the character info window.
So a character's acceptance and religion should be shown in the character info window.
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