Victoria 3

[The Minsky Moment]

What works well is the overall development model where the focus is on sucking peasants out of the informal subsistence economy and into urban production centers. Also the new trade system is relatively agnostic as to free trade and protection, what is best depends on context.  Market leaders and advanced smaller countries can do well with free trade and maxing trade advantage, but its also viable to build out a horizontal empire with lots of resource access and go protectionist.

What Paradox hasn't done and has never been able to do is model a proper business cycle.  There are no inventories and no real banking system so I don't think they can do it organically.  The reference to the Grunderzeit in the development diary hints they are taking a crack at this in a limited way.  But it seems the effects will be limited to the German states, whereas in reality the 1873 Panic was worldwide and had many contributing factors.

[Syt]

Business cycles are tricky, because I think the game can react too quickly. In theory you have the main ingredients for e.g. a basic pig cycle in place - a commodity is profitable, many people start producing the commodity, price drops, production shuts down, driving up price etc. (ideally ending up in an equilibrium at some point).

However, except for building the production capacity there's not much in terms of delay/friction in this (and private investors maybe a bit too savvy in no overbuilding TOO much), because things seem to happen instantaneously to adjust. Natural disasters add a bit of fluctuation (and the 1840s potato blight is, I guess, a step towards having notably bigger impacts; hopefully this becomes a more generalized mechanic - currently I ignore harvest conditions almost entirely).

And that's before adding monetary mechanisms and policy and speculation.

Would love to have this modelled in game, but I wonder how fun it would be to the majority of gamers who will accuse the simulation to be "stupid" because its actors make choices that are not optimal long-term. (Like previously - "Clearly it's in the NATION's interest to build more steel plants and weapons factories ... why do they keep investing in super profitable furniture instead???")

I think the game must become clearer that your pops are autonomous and you need shepherd them or see them as antagonists at times, not just as tools to enact your plan. It's a bit like the characters in CK3 who may or may not do what you like, but you can try to get them to do so (or take direct action, which Vic3, admittedly, often doesn't have).

[The Minsky Moment]

So having finally reached a stable late game, it's clear the economy still needs a bit of work.

GDPs are just way too high. I looked at four major nations that are roughly proceeding in my game similarly as they did historically in terms of territory, ranking etc: Russia, France, Spain, Japan.  In real life from 1836 to 1905 the GDP of those countries increased from 2 to 3 times.   But in the game it increased much faster, from a low of 5x (Russia) to a high of 15X (Japan).  (Russia is partially lagging behind because it didn't conquer the central asian states).

Looking at demographics, only Russia has peasants left in 1905.  Spain in 1905 has virtually no peasants and farmers make up less than 10% of total pop.  That's WAY WAY off historically.  Japan is the same.  Only Russia has a lot of peasants still but much less than historically.

Growth rates are too fast.  The game loop usually involves pumping construction sectors (growth rate) up to the fiscal limit.  Construction sectors are extremely fast and cheap to build. If you upgrade your construction PM you can literally double growth rate in an instant if you can accommodate it fiscally (and in Vic 3 you can change tax rates immediately by fiat).  Increasing construction needs to have longer lag time and harsher penalties if you overbuild.

Late game is plagued with labor shortages.  The labor saving PMs are too weak. Efficiency techs are separate from the labor saving PMs and they usually either result in no labor change or even require more workers.  Efficiency techs should drop workers as well.  Industrializing 19th century economies were plagued by unemployment problems (reserve labor army etc).  It was a race between growth in output and adoption of technologies that substituted capital for labor.  There is a missing "class" of urban proletarians doing odd jobs and services and every efficiency tech that increases productivity should dump workers back into that class. Severe and chronic labor shortages were just not features of 19th century Victorian and Edwardian economies, even advanced ones.

Qualifications are too easy, not a constraint. You are going to build unis for innovation and ample qualifications are a byproduct.  IRL it takes years to educate a proper engineer.

The basic model is sound.  The early and mid gameplay is good.  Late game breaks down because growth is too fast and high tech production absorbs too many workers per unit of production.  Growth needs to be slowed down.

[Syt]

Sounds like you should start modding this.

[The Minsky Moment]

I don't know how to do that. 

Also not sure what mechanisms to focus on.

One probable contributor is post-release power creep - each successive patch adds stacking bonuses to throughput or construction through bloc mandates, company bonuses, journal entries etc.  So that biases growth up.

Another contributor is that everything is too fast and responsive.  Construction expands too fast, peasants move too fast, qualifications get enhanced too fast, PM's can be switched in an instant. But the alternative is to make the game economy more laggy and less responsive to player input, which at a high level is usually a no no for game design.

[Syt]

Haven't looked at V3 specifically, but based on how Paradox generally does these things, I'll assume many parameters are stored in fairly legible ASCII files - I'd be 99% sure that things like the number of workers, construction time/requirements are in there. Probably also how quickly people gain qualifications or migration factors.

Some things (like switching production methods happening instantaneously) might be hardcoded, though.

I agree that taking direct control away from players is always a tricky proposition (and V3 already leans fairly far away from that compared to their other games where you usually have near complete control of your country/entity), so striking a compromise between modeling the historical situation and making it a fun game It's the old "railroading" vs "alt hit sandbox" debate, usually with different balances between games.

Lemon Cake had an interesting video about this (well, adjacent to this) the other day, i.e. how much information Paradox games give (or obscure)  players , how it compares to the historical situation (and if it actually matters in context of their games).

[The Minsky Moment]

The issue isn't so much control as responsiveness

It's like Gabe Newell's line about realism in gaming.  No one really wants realism because if you had it, your super secret agent character would spend most of the time filling out paperwork and attending departmental meetings as opposed to rappelling down skyscrapers and taking out bad guys. Even Kojima can't make decent cut scenes out of that.

What people want is responsiveness, the sense that their actions in the game are meaningful and impactful; Newell talks about this in the context of destructible environments in shooters and action games. IRL when policymakers act, there is a significant lag in economic effects.  E.g. Biden's 2022 bill funding green energy programs was just starting to be impactful in 2024/25, just in time for Trump to kill it. But from a gaming perspective, it's not satisfactory when you pull a lever and nothing seems to happen until 5 or 10 real life minutes later.  Not to mention it makes a game that is already challenging for beginners even more opaque.

At the end of the day, Vic 3 is a really fancified number go up game and so it is not surprisingly the developers have erred towards more player reinforcement in that respect.  And honestly it really doesn't matter that much if GDP growth is higher than it was in reality expect for data obsessives like me.  What does matter is the in game effect of horribly chronic worker shortages in the late game, which is not only "unrealistic" but hobbles one of the main gameplay elements.

[Norgy]

The only recessions and crises I have are of my own making when I switch production modes.

"Wow, 5 million down in GDP in two days. Well done, lad".

[HVC]

The only recessions and crises I have are of my own making when I switch production modes.

"Wow, 5 million down in GDP in two days. Well done, lad".

Congrats, you're now qualified to be president of the united states.

[Norgy]

 

I have not led a life without sin, but my list is so much shorter than DJT's that I feel FOMO.

[Syt]

As US capitalist oligarchy I switched from Free Trade to Protectionism because the industrialists forced me to. My GDP saw a bit of a drop.

[The Minsky Moment]

As US capitalist oligarchy I switched from Free Trade to Protectionism because the industrialists forced me to. My GDP saw a bit of a drop.

The trade advantage bonus for free trade is really strong.

Tariffs are just not that useful except as a less reliable way to tax articles without burning massive authority and except as a way to boost your treaty acceptance score by agreeing not to impose them.

[The Minsky Moment]

In the United States IRL the percentage of the labor force engaged in manufacturing did not exceed that engaged in agriculture until 1910.  It may have been earlier in Britain but later everywhere else.  My recollection from Adam Tooze's book is that it didn't happen in Germany until the 1930s.

In the game, peasants are gone from most of non-Russian Europe by 1900 and farmers start getting very scarce.  This has huge implications for politics, because the Rural Folk IGs basically disappear as a political force from the more advanced economies unrealistically early. The game also allows you to effectively "turn off" petit bourgeoise to a significant extent just by going publicly traded for financial sectors. That makes the political-legislative game both easier and less interesting, and it makes it hard to pursue a traditionally conservative politics.  Hopefully this will get looked into for 1.10 because IMO a lot of what they are trying to do with Austria and the Balkans is not going to work right if all the farmers are vanishing in the late 1800s.

[Norgy]

The three emigration histories I know of in my family were quite different.

My great grand uncle went to have a farm. In North Dakota or South Dakota. 1887 or 1888, I think.

My great grand uncle and great grandfather went to work. They ended up in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Not unusual if you were Scandinavian, I suppose.
My great grand uncle got married and stayed. My great grandfather returned in 1911.

One year later, grandma was born.
There is a myth Norway was poor. The country wasn't. The gini coefficient might have been a bit high.
But they earned like four or five times more than they would here by working in the US.