Victoria 3

[Syt]

Also, still no changes to economic AI. So if you want AI to build modern stuff later in game or generally keep up, Anbeeld's mod seems the go to option, despite its downsides.

[Syt]

Good mod list Syt. I'll add a few more.

[garbon]

Don't think so, but the Age Mod I mentioned above makes it less likely rulers rule till they're 100.

Yep, saw that and thanks for the mod summary.

Does make me wonder why that isn't something on quick fix list as does make any attention to head of state irrelevant. Maybe they want to do something more complex.

[Syt]

Maybe. There's more modifiers (e.g. when to up the chance for dying, when to start rolling the dice for heirs etc.) to play around with. So you could probably adjust them to create a nice bell curve where e.g. people generally die around 70-75, with the likelyhood dropping on either side.

It's one of those weird things where you wonder why it's currently in the vanilla game in a way that let's characters regularaly live into their high 90s.

[The Minsky Moment]

- France is always #1 in GDP by a huge margin (and that is with a mod that removes treaty port status for Pondycherry). I think they need journal entries to cover their demographic troubles at the start of the era.

Pdox has been very intent about modeling effects through the interaction of their systems as opposed to country specific effects; however, the problem is that their model doesn't capture the dynamics of French demographics (which is still not entirely understood).

It's clear that higher literacy, human capital investment returns, overall influence and greater social status for women all can contribute to lowering birth rates, but even controlling for these factors, France entered into its demographic transition much earlier than its neighbors.  Either those unique factors have to be designed and modelled somehow or France has to be dinged on births with a national modifier.  Otherwise there will be a few extra tens of millions of Frenchmen around to tilt balance of power scales in the hexagonal direction.

Similarly there is no direct modelling of national political cultures such that French politics is treated as being just as stable as UK politics with only the differences of names and some starting laws.

[Tamas]

So in the new game I started to check the patch out... Russia DoW-ed Egypt which isn't that unusual, but then things got out of control:

Egypt and Russia both demanded access from Ottomans who refused both, but because of sequence of events ended up in alliance with Egypt against Russia and not the other way around.

Fighting a war on the same side as Egypt did not for a second made the Ottoman AI cancel their ongoing play against Egypt, so now Ottomans and Egypt are allies in one war and enemies in another. 

I am glad I have managed to make the AI make better use of violate sovereignty, but this is a bit much.

[Syt]

As Japan I spent 20 years getting to mercantilism, railroads, and interventionism. And I got lucky that I got an early political movement to abolish serfdom. But hey, my economy is doing well (or so I'd like to believe), and I managed to build up my admin capabilities that I have a surplus, even though I haven't discovered the secret of FILING CABINETS yet.

Nothing too crazy going on otherwise. Except the UK fought the USA to abolish slavery and get a treaty port in Norfolk, Virginia.

[Syt]

- France is always #1 in GDP by a huge margin (and that is with a mod that removes treaty port status for Pondycherry). I think they need journal entries to cover their demographic troubles at the start of the era.

Pdox has been very intent about modeling effects through the interaction of their systems as opposed to country specific effects; however, the problem is that their model doesn't capture the dynamics of French demographics (which is still not entirely understood).

It's clear that higher literacy, human capital investment returns, overall influence and greater social status for women all can contribute to lowering birth rates, but even controlling for these factors, France entered into its demographic transition much earlier than its neighbors.  Either those unique factors have to be designed and modelled somehow or France has to be dinged on births with a national modifier.  Otherwise there will be a few extra tens of millions of Frenchmen around to tilt balance of power scales in the hexagonal direction.

Similarly there is no direct modelling of national political cultures such that French politics is treated as being just as stable as UK politics with only the differences of names and some starting laws.

Yes, and I'm generally in favor of trying to model as much through general mechanics as possible. But there will always be some outliers with unique starting positions that can serve as an additional challenge for the player (and the AI ... wishful thinking) to overcome. They have something like this with the Sick Man stuff for the Ottomans, and other country specific events/decisions/journal entries.

[Josephus]

The one concept I'm having a hard time understanding is politics, especially the Government Reform.

For instance, it is 1906 in my Scandinavia game. I am  a democratic republic. I just had an election and the Communist Party won. The only IG in the party is the Rural Folk. Now after the election I get the opportunity to reform the gov't. I can move the Rural Folk out of the government (and get an influence gain to boot)...but what does this simulate? Why should I be able to do this? And will this boot the commies from the government? If not, why not?

I'm having a hard time understanding the concept behind this.

[Syt]

The game has two basic measures for legitimacy atm: % of clout represented & size of government (# of parties, I believe). Plus modifiers (e.g. having the IG of your head of country in government, extra legitimacy from voting right, tax levels etc.).

So I suppose you can have a government representing a majority of voters, not being too big, but excluding the party with the highest shares of votes. For an IRL example look at the FPÖ/ÖVP coalition int he mid-2000s in Austria who were #2 and #3, respectively per votes, but formed a coalition that carried a majority and sent the party with highest % of votes - Social Democrats - into opposition. Meanwhile, a government with all three of them would have been unacceptable to most people (including member sof the respective parties).

[garbon]

It does feel weird to so easily exclude the winners of the election.

[Tamas]

It does feel weird to so easily exclude the winners of the election.

It is weird. I suspect they don't want to hard-lock people out of roleplay options. Which IGs in government define which laws you can attempt to enact so it would make steering the country harder.

But they do want to make it more meaningful with the legitimacy changes in 1.1 I think.

[Syt]

It does feel weird to so easily exclude the winners of the election.

Agreed, but there are potential outcomes where the winners might not have a majority.

Extreme example: Nazis win 40% of vote, Communists win 30% of vote, Socialists another 30%. Who should form the government?

The Nazis, who are the strongest party, but who the other two would not cooperate with (something I wish Vic3 will eventually try to model)?

Or the Communists + Socialists who represent a combined 60% of the vote and stand a chance to hash out a coalition agreement?

(And don't get me started on minority governments who do not represent the majority but who partner with various partners depending on the issue at hand, e.g. getting the votes from party A for law A, and partnering with party B for law B. Not saying it's a great way of governing, but it's also not exactly a super-rare outlier in parliamentary systems. )

[Syt]

Examples from Germany: Willy Brandt's first government 1969-72 had the votes of SPD (233) and FDP (27) vs CDU/CSU (258). Similar Schmidt in 1980. Yes, the general assumption is that the strongest party will try to form a government. But in cases where it's not possible, different coalitions might be found.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah I think they need to look at legitimacy - and possibly radicalism.

The Nazis are an extreme example - but there were also plenty of examples of bourgeois parties uniting to prevent socialist or communist parties from forming or participating in a government. I feel like it should increase radicalism of those groups to lock out a party from government if they win, but letting them form a government should maybe increase radicalism of opposed IGs. It might not work generally - America for example - but I think could from a European perspective where the period, in part, seems a story of the willingness/ability of political structures to accommodate first liberals and then socialists.

Maybe along with certain IGs refusing to join a government unless their leader has certain traits - for example industrialists and trade unions, intelligentsia and petite bourgeois, landowners and peasants feel like they shouldn't cooperate?