Victoria 3

[Tamas]

It's funny how I can fall down the rabbit hole of the game files. 

I have managed to make it so that only recognised countries can start treaty port plays and only against unrecognised ones. But that restriction seems to go out of the window when it comes to adding secondary wargoals - the treaty port option is always there. I haven't been able to figure out where and how to prevent that, and I keep looking for it instead of playing, as if it makes that big a difference either way.

[Syt]

So I'm starting to convert my fleet to dreadnoughts, and my armies to squad tactics and infiltration tactis. Problem is, my radio production is still lagging, and prices for the new tech are ridiculous. Plus, I'm slowly introducing telephones to government administration to up my admin limits.

IRL Imperial Germany introduced a tax on champagne sparkling wine in 1902 to provide funding for its fleet.

In my game, it's 1910 and I just introduced taxes on coffee, opium, and tobacco to make up for the steep investments into state infrastructure.

[Threviel]

"Yes, but ..."

WTF? Östergötland missing from Götaland. FFS!

[Syt]

Sweden made an alliance offer. I generally avoid those. Don't want to get bogged down in a boneheaded Diplomatic Play if I can avoid it. Unfortunately I didn't realize that they were using an obligation on me. When I checked why I had fallen from #1 to #3 in the rankings I saw that I have a -25% prestige and infamy decay penalty that decays for 5 years - "Repudiated Obligation." It only clicked then for me what had happened.

Again: more notifications/infos, please, when stuff like this comes up.

[Syt]

 

[Tamas]

That's kind of awesome actually.  You should post it on the Paradox forum to see how all the teenage fascists react. 

[Syt]

It actually won its war against the US (who have been pretty crap at fighting wars in this save file ). I admit I did pay off their debts and bankrolled them for a bit.

Because I was running out of rubber, I decided to grab some land in Africa. Things escalated slightly, and I grabbed five indigenous states. Which made me a pariah, with everyone hating me. I was still fighting in Africa when the NGF started a play to cut me down to size. Lucky for me, no one else joined them, while I had Bavaria and Switzerland on my side.

We fought them defensively for a while. I was about to be pushed back but I called up all conscripts and that saved the day. Eventually I wore them out and I could launch an offensive. I got to the point where I could press my goals (reparations, releasing two subjects), but they refused. Meanwhile, I was hemorrhaging money. I nixed all expenses I could and raised what taxes I could, but I was losing 1M per week. In the end it was a race between getting them to capitulate or going bankrupt. I ended up 75M out of 77 in debt, but I did it.

Of course me trade network is in shambles, I'm a pariah, and my once beautiful market (Italy, Egypt, Russia, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, Haiti, Venezuela, some of them even my subjects) is in shambles.

Plus, my leader adds additional infamy decay penalties. So I'm going for universal suffrage to get him out of office. (And also to finally get to proportional taxation - tried a few times, but only the workers were supporting it, and with events the chance always dropped to 0% eventually ... )

Meanwhile, the North German Federation has its own problems. The Hohenzollerns were removed by a military coup some while ago, and their current ruler is King Friedrich Wilhelm von Breitenbach.

Following our little war, though, Fascists have taken over much of the NGF, though. And the fascist leader is a socialist king who wants a council republic  ...   



(As for New Africa in America - you can release them at the start of the game and play as them )

[Tamas]

That sounds fun.

[The Minsky Moment]

Oh, and what's the advantage of buildings being publicly traded instead of privately owned? It seems it increases capitalist jobs, but doesn't that mean more people draw income out of the building and thus lower the building's profits and cash reserves?

Big increase in your investment pool. 

1896 in US I am getting 410-420K in investment pool transfers.  That's running interventionism; with LF it would be close to double.

[FunkMonk]

Still playing my first game, I've rocketed to 2nd as Russia in the Power rankings, behind a France that has a massive GDP. Something happened with the UK because, going by the line chart, their GDP fell off a cliff for some reason and now they're way behind. I wish this game had an event log so I could go back and see what the hell happened to the UK that destroyed their economy.

Dare I say it is a little too easy to industrialize Russia and stay politically stable? It's literally my first game and my economy is on a rocket ship. I've also conquered much of the eastern Balkans, taking Bulgaria and western Thrace from the Ottomans and took a treaty port near Istanbul, manhandling the ottoman army and their Italian master (Italy formed and took the Ottomans as a protectorate). I also purported Persia in like 1838. And I'm still on friendly terms with most of Europe. This is on the highest aggressive settings.

[Syt]

Yes, and no. I massively industrialized as A-H, but my standard of living never really got off the ground floor. I have all the modern technologies, but I don't have the resources to run them. Sure, I can switch all my power plants to oil and add motor carriages to urban centers, and other buildings. But that would mean literally using twice as much oil as the world is currently producing (and I only own one source myself - really should have conquered Wallachia, in hindsight ). Same goes for rubber. And some other resources. Sure, you can still switch them over and run them without the resources, and that will work for a while, but it will eventually lead to the buildings being inefficient and losing money (and laying off people), or you have to subsidize them to keep them in business.

All the while your people expect a higher standard of living, or have gotten accustomed to an improvement in life so that any step back will radicalize them.

So yes, I think it's easy to industrialize. However, I think the real challenge is to do it in a way that doesn't overextend your resources while still meeting the expectations of your (growing) population.

Meanwhile my people expect a higher standard

[Zanza]

I had that issue early with Prussia: Researched a fancy new tech, but it was too expensive to actually apply to any of my buildings. I feel that next attempt I shall go even more for Coal, Iron and Wood to make basic industries profitable.

[Tamas]

To test this economy + Prussia AI mod I mentioned, I started a Piedmont game with it on high AI agression.

Well I can see why it's Two Sicilies always uniting Italy. Piedmont has some good basis to build an economy I think EXCEPT for Labour force qualified for pretty much anything.

Anyhow I was climbing up slowly, while Prussia seemed to had laid some diplomatic groundwork before going on the offensive. It's first war against a German minor had Austria against them but Bavaria on their side.

Few years after that I honoured my alliance to Lucca defending against Sicily. That would had been an uphill struggle already. Út the Ottomans joined on Sicily's side so when the dust settled and the war ended I was left with tiny Savoy and considered it game over.

Before quitting the game I saw Prussia launching a Play to grab the regions Austria and the tow Tyrols...

[Tamas]

After the above I returned to my 1903 Austria save.
The thing to note is that even though that game has had a number of defeated communist and Conservative revolts, for whatever reason the spread of Liberal revolutionism only triggered 1905ish. I was receiving the events that I saw in the Prussia dev stream, in that one they were the originators of them - because they converted to some Liberal system they were getting popups to spread the revolution (I was on the receiving end of this)

I suspect it might be the "riad to liberalism" journal entry that triggers this. Which would be a bit silly because that to fire requires a non-monarchy fork of government, and most rebels who form even if Liberal have a monarchy, so if this what spring of nations is tied to, it ain't going to work.

Worse than that though, this spread of radicalism triggered several revolutions/civil wars in Europe, including one in Russia, which all have bugged out into white peace.

I don't think my peace desire modding has done this (I have reduced my modifications to fairly mild ones anyhow). Hopefully it is something they will fix in the patch the devs said we might get next week. Or this week if you are into the whole Sunday is the first day of the week nonsense.

Oh one more thing, I won't have a chance to test it for a while but regarding the AI not producing things like opium and oil, a possibly relevant typo was discovered, although unlikely it had this profound an effect:

There's a typo on line 598 of the 00_defines.txt file that may be hampering the AI's build decisions:

Code:
RODUCTION_BUILDING_OUTPUT_NEEDED_INDUSTRIAL_GOODS_FACTOR = 0.5 # Add this value to a building for each unit of money worth of industrial goods that are underproduced in the country and are used by buildings

[Syt]

I made it to 1936. The last 10, 15 years saw tons of communist/radical/fascist uprisings, but it seems the breakaways inherit the original country's laws, instead of something reflecting their ideology?

I managed to get my economy balanced so that I dug my way out of debt, subsidizing a few key industries/amenities and making sure my resources are applied to key industries (e.g. putting oil into coal mining, because I was ALWAYS short of coal), setting taxes so that my people aren't throttled too much in their spending etc.

Militarily I played more passively than intended. I wanted to stay out of Africa but ended up going anyways, and getting greedy put me into an extremely costly war that nearly wrecked my economy. I wanted to dismantle the Ottomans, but except taking Bosnia. Maybe I missed something, but it seems you can start plays to release protectorates but not countries that are part of the enemy (e.g. liberate Albania), only as additional war goals once you have claimed something else.

I wish there was a system to escalate existing wars. I feel regional powers should be able to intervene in neighbors' wars, and Major and Great Powers in their areas of interest. Such an intervention/sway could come with a big investment of influence and/or infamy to make sure it's not overused. Perhaps make it dependent on a society tech that allows to enter wars even if you had declared neutrality.

Anyways, here's my final score:



And on the subject of tiny pops all over ....





With parts of the US South becoming an Afro-American independent state, Dixie culture pops have made their way to Europe. In the Moldavia region there's about 500k Dixie pops working as subsistence farmers and laborers.

Otherwise, not much to say. Italy never formed because I stopped all attempts at it. USA was utterly useless in most things and almost fell to a radical revolution in the 1930s. Russia had a couple colonies in Africa and the Pacific. Portugal/Spain didn't do much, but France acquired most of their historical empire in Africa. Canada became a presidential dictatorship. Didn't see UK get involved in much of anything. They got some colonies, had some wars against natives, but that's about it.