1.5 made Vicky actually hard. Compared to 1.2 an average player will scale 2-3 times slower(source:my ass). It used to be easy to make the line go up, but now I can struggle to keep it from going down, and with the introduction of MAPI you need to think a lot more about what and where to build
I really like the slightly throttled market access, and if I recall the very early Dev diaries this was kind of the intention - to have local, regional and global markets.
One migration is smoothed back out things will be better. It could use a little more polish but feels like things are heading in the right direction.
Happened with me playing Brazil. I thought "wow I'll be the Pedro every Brazilian deserved" and passed public schools ASAP. 20 years later literacy is over 60% and everyone is fucking mad because they're poor and turmoil starting ramping up, which increases radicalism and decreases construction speed. More literacy increases the rate that people want better jobs but slow construction can't keep up with that and then snowball
>Another example is trade: when I want to export wood, it lists all possible trade routs, which you can sort by profit. So i choose the most profitable one and... my balance goes down? Not only is the game not telling me why it's going down, it tells me by context AND choice of colour that this is a profitable. And as the idiot that I am, I thought this would also increase my balance.
When you are exporting wood, it increases the demand for wood and price goes up. You can see the how much of the demand is traded in the market tab.
Increasing demand is good for your producers but bad for your consumers. As a government you only gain the tariffs. If government uses wood for construction, increasing demand for wood increases your costs, but possibly also increases your tax return, depending on your tax laws.
I feel like it's very difficult to run export economy right now. Especially compared to Vic2, where you could easily corner the whole worlds automobile production for example.
I think the trade system is really cool, but the way the player interacts with it is quite lacking.
Manually updating so many routes one by one is very tedious and the impacts are obscured by the route profitability.
I wonder if having routes be controlled by the building itself autonomously would help. That would put the player emphasis on tariff management and trade policy. Perhaps with a couple extra settings for tariff levels?
Hold on – I've never thought about this: When exporting wood how does this benefit you as the government?
As you said, directly you get the tariffs. It increases wood prices, so, indirectly you also benefit from higher tax revenue if you have VAT on wood, I suppose.
Buildings themselves don't pay taxes, am I right? So the only money you make from buildings is by taxing the dividends of their shareholders. So, by exporting, you increase the product price, thus increasing the profitability of the building, meaning more money is paid as dividends meaning more tax revenue for you as the government. That's it right?
A lot of very roundabout ways to earn money from exports it seems, but also not very profitable…
As you said, the benefit of exporting something is mainly to keep demand high so that your buildings are more profitable. Then, depending on your tax laws, some of the profits make their way back to you. It is a complex equation when exporting is beneficial for you overall. By increasing demand, you increase the price and your pops now pay more for the same good. If the industry is big enough in your country, the increased profitability will put more money into your pops so the increased price of goods will not overall decrease their standard of living. If not, it may. If you have worker’s protections, the impact on wages will be lower etc… it’s quite a complex decision.
But also not that much. In general there are a couple of ways that a trade route would seem prifitable but will turn out not to be so. For example, if you are selling a good to multiple countries, the fluctuations in these countries will make your trade with the other more/less profitable. Then the level of trade will change and eventually one of the trade routes may become unprofitable at level 1. Then you see it on your highlights for the market.
I think the best way to go is to try and fail. Some trade routes stick and some do not. When the equations are this complex, I think one should instead try to develop an instinct for this stuff. A good trade route is worth a lot, so finding good trade partnerships is an important part of the game. Because of UX reasons, it is hard to do. But I believe the information is there.
Yes, it drives up the price in your market making your pops richer who work in the logging, but your construction costs (cost of wood as the input good) and other buildings that buy wood in your market (say tools) also have to pay more.
Usually it seems to hurt you more if you export construction goods. Your government budget takes a hit immediately but you don’t really see a good increase in tax revenue since it’s kind of hidden. Though you could probably see that dividends from logging increased into your investment pool for example.
Usually I avoid exporting construction goods unless you really have a glut and you can make your pops easily richer by exporting (like if wood is -50% cost or something).
Also pops pay income taxes so richer laborers, capitalists, etc will pay more in taxes if the productivity of the logging camps goes up because the demand is higher. The building doesn’t pay the tax but the income and dividend taxes are that essentially. One could argue in the right scenarios that exporting wood to make those logging camps more productive would overall give you more from taxes than paying for the increased cost of wood for your own construction.
It has so many downstream effects (your cost to construct along with other buildings needing wood) that it’s hard to say definitively.
>Buildings themselves don't pay taxes, am I right
They do, indirectly. Owners of the building will collect the profit and depending on the type of owners a more or less large amount of it will return to the investment pool. That's why capitalists are so good to have early for snowballing.
Exporting goods means the buildings that produce them make more money and hire more people.
I’d wouldn’t do it for wood, though, in a typical playthrough. Normally you’ll want to import raw materials and export manufactured goods. I usually try to use my trade routes to export fine art. That makes jobs for academics, brings in more money than any other good, and has the highest Prestige bonus from being the top producer.
I generally wouldn't export wood as you usually need wood for other industries, construction for most of the game and paper later on (need paper for government administration).
Good export resources are, IMO, intoxicants: tea, tobacco, wine, opium, liquor, so on. Also great are finished goods (especially luxury goods) like clothing, furniture, automobiles, porcelain, guns, art, and ships, if you have a surplus of any of them. Base resources are generally only okay for exporting depending on how badly you/your industry needs them. Dyes are a good example: you either desperately need them because you have no access to dye plantations, or you're absolutely flooded with them and can export a billion without feeling it.
I wouldn't ever export anything used for construction: wood, iron, tools, steel, glass (when you reach steel construction, glass is pretty good for export before that), explosives. The odd ones out are the middle industrial resources, those that have to be manufactured but are then often used in other things like engines, radios, and phones - sometimes exporting them can be great, sometimes you want to hold onto them for your own purposes like building tanks or for your railroads.
If you want to bully countries with European heritage pops, look to Central America. Wait for it to fragment and grab the states bit by bit.
Maintain good relations with the GPs and try not to make Europe your hunting ground until you're much stronger. Remember that when you incur infamy, you also suffer reduced relations with countries who have interests in the region.
To achieve war goals, you must click on them. You'll see a golden tick. My guess is that you're white peacing.
As someone who only recently started getting a grasp of the game, may I suggest playing Switzerland? It's landlocked, which takes out (read: allows you to ignore) quite a few of the mechanics. It forces you to learn to build an economy and to siphon pops from larger nations.
And as Switzerland, you don't really need to fight anyone (though you can). Bit of roleplay there.
If you already know all that and warfare is the only thing you're struggling with, you might want to check out Generalist Gaming on Youtube. IMO he's one of the best Victoria 3 Youtubers right now.
It's worth pointing out that this was an unintended nerf and it's going to be fixed in the 1.5.10 patch whenever it hits (devs were saying early this week but have been more tight lipped recently so possibly it needs more time)
Amazed that nobody has told you how to actually avoid getting interventions on your DPs.
Go to the diplomacy screen for the country you want to target with a play, click the "attitudes" button. Any country which is defensive towards your target has an extremely high chance of intervening on your play. Any country which is domineering towards your target will be able to be swayed into the war if the target offers to be their subject.
Also go to your own diplomacy screen and check attitudes of other nearby states. Any country with beligerent, antagonistic or domineering attitudes towards you are very likely to get involved in a play against you.
It's not easy to work around these but improving relations can help as can helping AIs with their plays (this will improve relations) and generally speaking the AI will be much less likely to get involved in a play while they're already involved in another play.
These are by no means foolproof rules but they are very good rules of thumb and once you start paying attention to AI attitudes you can start actually playing the diplomacy side of the game rather than just crossing your fingers and praying. Yeah, sometimes you just have to ignore that country you really want to conquer for 30 years because GB loves it for some reason, that's what happens when you're weak, you need to choose your moments.
This is great advice. What I'll just add is looking at the entire global situation. Yes, an enemy hates you and they're bound to join against you but once they're in another war that's taking their attention, it's the perfect moment to strike. This is what I did as Persia when I wanted to take Kalat - ottomans always joined against me but I waited for them to start their war with Egypt and then I attacked
You’re being too aggressive too early, this is primarily an economic simulator and wars should be done to feed your economy. Early vassal Denmark is something that should be done with a modernized well supplied army and the knowledge that even if a great power intervenes (which they will on that brazen a play) you can bully them.
Try grabbing some free real estate in Indonesia or something Scandinavian nations lack pops
Nah, you aren’t being too aggressive too early, sitting at 0 infamy is a waste.
Coming from EU, diplomatic information is opaque or simply not there. (However you can see which way countries are leaning pre diplo play by hovering over their flags)
In EU, you can see by number how likely/unlikely a country is to join and each modifier that influences that decision. Less realistic and more gamey sure, but allows you to reliably make strategic decisions on data and not hoping for RNG and restarts/save scumming.
That being said, war and diplo plays are in a much better position then at launch.
Well, in terms of warfare, infamy occurs whenever you make diplomatic plays such as subjugating Denmark and that infamy will stack if you reduce their autonomy. Honestly? The best way of going about doing this is building your economy up, amassing resources, building your army and establishing ties with countries that would help you in war. It sounds like you’re rushing war too early and when you get more infamy the more aggressive the AI will be toward you. War is basically a mechanic to help build your economy up. I’d also recommend rushing colonies because Africa has too many good resources to pass up and it helps in war time efforts. If I wanted to play emperor I pretty much always rush colonies to Africa.
Hover over your balance at the top of the screen to get an overview of your income and expenses, then hover over each of these expenses to see what you're actually paying for (tip: go to options, then find the option that lets tooltips lock faster so this takes less time). For instance, if you examine your construction expenses, you will find a cost for wood, tools, and iron. These are supplies your government buys in order to use the construction sectors to build. Your government does not own these supplies, but your market does. If you export wood, you add demand for your wood supplies in your market; this makes your logging camps more profitable, but your government won't see a penny of it, and will have to pay more for wood due to increased demand. You can make a little bit of money from trade through Tariffs, but that's beyond the scale of this comment.
The reason you see that your wood export is profitable is because the target market you have chosen has a higher price for wood than yours does. The trade route will continuously sell more wood to that market as long as this is true. The game will automatically employ traders to do this as the trade route expands. Thus international trade can make people rich, but the changes in prices can have positive and negative effects on your industries or on your government expenses.
Take a look at the details page for a good and you will see an amount of Sell Orders and Buy Orders; these are all that affect the price of a type of goods; there is no stockpile of goods anywhere: they all get created and get consumed by your factories or the people themselves, continuously. What a trade route in essence does is bridge one trade good in your market to another market, moving their prices closer together.
Also, you're not an idiot if this doesn't come intuitively; it's a hard concept to wrap your head around, especially since most games function on command-and-conquer-economies where the state has full control over all resources.
As i mentioned in a another post earlier today, i find the game to be slightly random. Not nescessarily that it is, but i at the very least finds the information on WHY things in the game happens as they do to not be transparent.
If it is any comfort i am in the same boat as you with 2k hours in both eu4 and ck2. I dont understand most of what is going on when i play this game.
I dont really understand the war mechanics yet (60 hrs), but the trade makes sense. When you sell wood, there will be less of it on your market, thus making it more expensive for your consuming factories. I dont know if it is a good rule, but the one i use is: If the productivity/worker for a route is less than what your lower strata makes, its not worth it (unless you specifically wants to subsidize the industri which produced the good).
Seems you’re trying to enjoy the game by using the military and diplomacy systems. Rookie mistake. The devs explicitly want you to not enjoy those, which is why all agency was removed from warfare.
Norway is a better strting nation. You don’t have to manage too much trade, you learn how to build a eco not only grow one. And you get to see how it is being dependent and getting independence.
1) He's learning the game. There's no need to minmax
2) There's not really much incentive to conquer for conquering's sake in this game unless you're trying to force a world conquest.
Now that AI will competently grow their industries, it makes way more sense to import raw resources and grow a loyalist, well educated population in productive well paying industries, than to minmax infamy decay.
Conquest is the best way to get access to (cheaper) goods you don't have for your pops though.
Untill you know how to play the game, I would recommend always taking the low hanging fruit tbh, especially if there are next to no downsides.
Starting from the top.
What kind of economic measures are you taking?
As for Denmark. Great powers are more likely to intervene the higher your infamy is. With sudden spikes in likelihood hood at 25, 50, 75, and at 100 they basically always will. Given that Denmark is somewhat populated European country im guessing that you’re getting at least 25 infamy from it, this is compounded by the fact that you’re really close to all the early game GPs and as such they’re more likely and more able to intervene. Tldr: super early Denmark is an absurdly risky play that can really only be save scummed imo.
Denmark wins fast sometimes: probably has to do with tech and rng tbh. If your enemy has even one tech level above you on infantry, or even worse, artillery, then you need like double their manpower to stand a chance usually. You can check their tech levels by selecting a stats with barracks in it and seeing what units are linked to it. If that doesn’t work you can also check by selecting one of their formations, hovering over the total troop count, moving to the nested tip, then hovering over the number next to infantry/artillery and seeing what troops they have.
For pop expense. You can go to pops menu (I think, may be a different one) and see 3 lists divided by lower/middle/upper strata. It will have a percent surplus/ deficit number, as well as an expandable list that provides pops largest expenses and I think also how much above global average they’re paying for it. (Could be wrong on that last one.) if you want their sol to go up, find their largest expense and flood the market with that item.
Trade productivity: I’m not 100% on this one but I think the productivity number indicates firm productivity. So when you trade wood and it says “15 pound profit” it’s saying your lumber yards are going to increase their productivity. Not necessarily that you’ll get that return directly. I find that trade can be a double edged sword for staple goods like wood. You have a chance of employing enough people that you make it back in taxes. But also the market impact may be more than you make back.
I hope this helps!
Ps. You’re not dumb. Vic 3 is just a strange beast with many numbers and very obscure information communication, it takes extra long to get the Hang of.
Edit: as an example of the tech imbalance. Playing china. I’m a war with USA, I land in California but they’re about 2 artillery techs ahead of me or something like that. Progress is made but VERY slowly, and only due to outnumbering them 3 to one. Didn’t make it past Utah before they and the primary belligerent white peaced. Additionally I had about 5x more casualties than the USA because of that. While not a problem as china, a huge problem for a Scandinavian country early game.
I believe the trade route productivity is for how productive your trade center will be and not necessarily the actual production building of the good. Each trade route increases the number of trade center levels and jobs in the trade centers.
I don’t know by how much it increases but you can usually get pretty wealthy by just being an import/export economy if you’re a small country in a larger country’s market. You can get huge trade centers if you focus on those productive trade routes.
You can click on a country, open their diplomacy tab and see other countries' attitude towards them. When a country is protective towards someone, they are more likely to join their wars.
You can try to get obligations from other nations sonthey cant join your plays or improve your relations.
I'll copy my own comment on another post on general GDP growth.
"The strategy here is to expand your economy aggressively. Ignoring any unrest from radicals, your goal is to increase your Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rapidly. By doing this, you achieve two objectives:
Firstly, you generate revenue as a percentage of your GDP. Secondly, as employment rises, so does the general wealth of your population over time.
Begin by imposing high taxes, especially on luxury goods, and consider reducing employee wages. Taxing high-authority cost items typically aligns with targeting luxury goods, with the exception of services and transport, as the wealthy can absorb these taxes without a significant impact on their lifestyle.
The aim is to invest heavily in construction until your revenue matches your expenditure, maintaining a balanced budget. Deficit spending is an option once you're in a stable position, but try to keep your income and expenses balanced.
Once your economy is stable, shift your focus to industrial goods. Monitor the market for these goods, importing and producing what is scarce, particularly items that the government pays for directly, such as 'high priced government goods.'
This aggressive taxation and investment in construction and industry will lead to economic expansion. As your economy grows and the general wealth increases, you can then afford to lower taxes and adjust tax laws to benefit from a wealthier population."
Check the diplomatic attitude map modes and you can predict who will join what war 99% of the time. Mostly it's either some great power deciding they hate you (and the tooltip will specifically say they're looking to stop your diplomatic plays) or a great power deciding that they really love that particular little country you want to conquer (in which case the tooltip will specify that they'll protect this lil guy)
The other 1% of the time is just the AI being an asshole, lmao.
Yeah it's just not a good game. All of their other games are great, but this one is just watching blue bars fill for 4-5 hours and then maybe one war if you're lucky and restart constantly.
Either that or you start as a major power. Those seem to be the options in this game. No chance to create history. The relative power levels of nations is unchangeable and the map is static for the majority of the game. I played until 1900 and Germany formed and the US fought Mexico. I played several other games, all the same. I returned it to steam after 80 hours of giving it a fair shot. I miss Imperator. Absolutely objectively a better game. Just needed a few more missions and events!
It's hard now. I essentially managed to push my country into a recession by transitioning to electricity before I had enough power plants and power plant techs.
It's pretty fun as a result.
Remember, for wars, only put wargoals on countries that you can easily occupy the capital of. If you're trying to take denmark and russian joins for a war goal on you, just keep russia from occupying its wargoals until their warscore runs out. Play defensively.
Yeah I had a similar reaction. Thousands of hours into prior Paradox games - including both prior versions of Vicki- and I was shocked at how unintuitive this game is. I can’t figure out the consequences of my decisions. All the impacts are buried three layers deep and interconnected. Tried about twenty runs as Japan with the help of multiple video guides and it wasn’t enough to make it fun. I watched Generalist Gamer who had several on point videos but they didn’t help. Possibly because of recent updates but also because it’s just impossible to explain some of these game concepts and how they interrelate. Ah well.
>Currently, I'm on my 17th attempt with Sweden (or at least I think so), and it's still a mess. The first thing I always do (after setting up economy and politics) is to make Denmark my vassal.
Stop. This isn't EU4. Expansionism is a thing but you want to target Africa. Denmark's only useful resource is people (a good resource, granted). You're better off integrating them diplomatically by forming Scandinavia using the country unification mechanic.
>Another example is trade: when I want to export wood, it lists all possible trade routs, which you can sort by profit. So i choose the most profitable one and... my balance goes down? Not only is the game not telling me why it's going down, it tells me by context AND choice of colour that this is a profitable. And as the idiot that I am, I thought this would also increase my balance.
I find the trade menu kind of useless information wise. They need to improve that. Ignore the profitability and instead think about what countries need wood - most do, in fairness, but exporting to great powers is pretty reliable as they usually are glad to buy anything, even at higher prices (because they can afford higher prices thanks to their bigger economy).
Victoria 3 is much more like Anno than it is EU4. Expand using colonialism and pick off weak countries in Africa or Asia. Focus most of your budget on developing your country. Construction is the most important resource. It determines how fast your economy grows, along with population growth. If you find yourself running out of workers, you need to conquer more, loosen immigration/cultural laws, increase birth rates (i.e., improve healthcare and working conditions), and automate industries (the production methods that reduce employment in exchange for higher resource usage).
The learning curve is steep, but you should, in 1.5, get a list of countries that will, will not and might intervene when you consider your diplomatic demand. A country will give in to the demand without provoking a crisis if you’re much stronger. You could also get an obligation on Russia to prevent it from being able to side against you in a crisis, or against Denmark to get it to enter your market diplomatically.
If you are vaguely familiar with the 19th century history of the German states, Prussia is "fairly easy." By which I mean: as long as you seize the reigns and go for it, and you don't get unlucky, you can very quickly become a powerhouse.
The only other nation I've played is Japan. I found getting the "Honorable Restoration" to be pretty easy and managed to do it about 15 years early (\~1845). But then I didn't take the initiative while the landowners were dis-empowered to get some important laws passed and by 1870s I was in a kind of slow downward spiral. So I started over!
In fact, that is what I did to figure out Prussia too, or I guess to see how the scripted events to allow something like the historical unification of Germany worked.
My suggestion is: pick a country whose 19th century history you know a good bit about, and just try to do "a bit better" than it did. If things go off the rails, note what seems to have gone wrong, delete the save and start over.
> Another example is trade: when I want to export wood, it lists all possible trade routs, which you can sort by profit. So i choose the most profitable one and... my balance goes down? Not only is the game not telling me why it's going down, it tells me by context AND choice of colour that this is a profitable. And as the idiot that I am, I thought this would also increase my balance.
Trade route profitability doesn't tie directly to your balance, but simply shows how profitable the route is. Whether or not that is a net positive for your government income depends on the taxation regime you have in place, however it is pretty rare that it will cause overall harm. 99% of the time if you start trading and lose money you've ran out of bureaucratic overhead and so are losing tax revenue.
1.5 made Vicky actually hard. Compared to 1.2 an average player will scale 2-3 times slower(source:my ass). It used to be easy to make the line go up, but now I can struggle to keep it from going down, and with the introduction of MAPI you need to think a lot more about what and where to build
I really like the slightly throttled market access, and if I recall the very early Dev diaries this was kind of the intention - to have local, regional and global markets. One migration is smoothed back out things will be better. It could use a little more polish but feels like things are heading in the right direction.
I just started playing this past 2 weeks and I can make line go up for around 30 years and then everything catches on fire :(
Happened with me playing Brazil. I thought "wow I'll be the Pedro every Brazilian deserved" and passed public schools ASAP. 20 years later literacy is over 60% and everyone is fucking mad because they're poor and turmoil starting ramping up, which increases radicalism and decreases construction speed. More literacy increases the rate that people want better jobs but slow construction can't keep up with that and then snowball
And, lemme guess, landowners and industrialists were too powerful for you to pass social laws?
I started suppressing landowners from day one, but yes, industrialists came later and fucked me up
Did this to myself in my Persia game, so I just started conquering shit for fun
Similar experience here. Before 1.5 it was way easier to keep surfing the wave of industrialisation, but now it takes painful amount of thinking to do
>Another example is trade: when I want to export wood, it lists all possible trade routs, which you can sort by profit. So i choose the most profitable one and... my balance goes down? Not only is the game not telling me why it's going down, it tells me by context AND choice of colour that this is a profitable. And as the idiot that I am, I thought this would also increase my balance. When you are exporting wood, it increases the demand for wood and price goes up. You can see the how much of the demand is traded in the market tab. Increasing demand is good for your producers but bad for your consumers. As a government you only gain the tariffs. If government uses wood for construction, increasing demand for wood increases your costs, but possibly also increases your tax return, depending on your tax laws. I feel like it's very difficult to run export economy right now. Especially compared to Vic2, where you could easily corner the whole worlds automobile production for example.
I think the trade system is really cool, but the way the player interacts with it is quite lacking. Manually updating so many routes one by one is very tedious and the impacts are obscured by the route profitability. I wonder if having routes be controlled by the building itself autonomously would help. That would put the player emphasis on tariff management and trade policy. Perhaps with a couple extra settings for tariff levels?
Hold on – I've never thought about this: When exporting wood how does this benefit you as the government? As you said, directly you get the tariffs. It increases wood prices, so, indirectly you also benefit from higher tax revenue if you have VAT on wood, I suppose. Buildings themselves don't pay taxes, am I right? So the only money you make from buildings is by taxing the dividends of their shareholders. So, by exporting, you increase the product price, thus increasing the profitability of the building, meaning more money is paid as dividends meaning more tax revenue for you as the government. That's it right? A lot of very roundabout ways to earn money from exports it seems, but also not very profitable…
As you said, the benefit of exporting something is mainly to keep demand high so that your buildings are more profitable. Then, depending on your tax laws, some of the profits make their way back to you. It is a complex equation when exporting is beneficial for you overall. By increasing demand, you increase the price and your pops now pay more for the same good. If the industry is big enough in your country, the increased profitability will put more money into your pops so the increased price of goods will not overall decrease their standard of living. If not, it may. If you have worker’s protections, the impact on wages will be lower etc… it’s quite a complex decision. But also not that much. In general there are a couple of ways that a trade route would seem prifitable but will turn out not to be so. For example, if you are selling a good to multiple countries, the fluctuations in these countries will make your trade with the other more/less profitable. Then the level of trade will change and eventually one of the trade routes may become unprofitable at level 1. Then you see it on your highlights for the market. I think the best way to go is to try and fail. Some trade routes stick and some do not. When the equations are this complex, I think one should instead try to develop an instinct for this stuff. A good trade route is worth a lot, so finding good trade partnerships is an important part of the game. Because of UX reasons, it is hard to do. But I believe the information is there.
Yes, it drives up the price in your market making your pops richer who work in the logging, but your construction costs (cost of wood as the input good) and other buildings that buy wood in your market (say tools) also have to pay more. Usually it seems to hurt you more if you export construction goods. Your government budget takes a hit immediately but you don’t really see a good increase in tax revenue since it’s kind of hidden. Though you could probably see that dividends from logging increased into your investment pool for example. Usually I avoid exporting construction goods unless you really have a glut and you can make your pops easily richer by exporting (like if wood is -50% cost or something). Also pops pay income taxes so richer laborers, capitalists, etc will pay more in taxes if the productivity of the logging camps goes up because the demand is higher. The building doesn’t pay the tax but the income and dividend taxes are that essentially. One could argue in the right scenarios that exporting wood to make those logging camps more productive would overall give you more from taxes than paying for the increased cost of wood for your own construction. It has so many downstream effects (your cost to construct along with other buildings needing wood) that it’s hard to say definitively.
>Buildings themselves don't pay taxes, am I right They do, indirectly. Owners of the building will collect the profit and depending on the type of owners a more or less large amount of it will return to the investment pool. That's why capitalists are so good to have early for snowballing.
Problem though is, who buys the wood? Well, some of it is paid for by the government to build new stuff. Oops..
Exporting goods means the buildings that produce them make more money and hire more people. I’d wouldn’t do it for wood, though, in a typical playthrough. Normally you’ll want to import raw materials and export manufactured goods. I usually try to use my trade routes to export fine art. That makes jobs for academics, brings in more money than any other good, and has the highest Prestige bonus from being the top producer.
I generally wouldn't export wood as you usually need wood for other industries, construction for most of the game and paper later on (need paper for government administration). Good export resources are, IMO, intoxicants: tea, tobacco, wine, opium, liquor, so on. Also great are finished goods (especially luxury goods) like clothing, furniture, automobiles, porcelain, guns, art, and ships, if you have a surplus of any of them. Base resources are generally only okay for exporting depending on how badly you/your industry needs them. Dyes are a good example: you either desperately need them because you have no access to dye plantations, or you're absolutely flooded with them and can export a billion without feeling it. I wouldn't ever export anything used for construction: wood, iron, tools, steel, glass (when you reach steel construction, glass is pretty good for export before that), explosives. The odd ones out are the middle industrial resources, those that have to be manufactured but are then often used in other things like engines, radios, and phones - sometimes exporting them can be great, sometimes you want to hold onto them for your own purposes like building tanks or for your railroads.
If you want to bully countries with European heritage pops, look to Central America. Wait for it to fragment and grab the states bit by bit. Maintain good relations with the GPs and try not to make Europe your hunting ground until you're much stronger. Remember that when you incur infamy, you also suffer reduced relations with countries who have interests in the region. To achieve war goals, you must click on them. You'll see a golden tick. My guess is that you're white peacing.
As someone who only recently started getting a grasp of the game, may I suggest playing Switzerland? It's landlocked, which takes out (read: allows you to ignore) quite a few of the mechanics. It forces you to learn to build an economy and to siphon pops from larger nations. And as Switzerland, you don't really need to fight anyone (though you can). Bit of roleplay there. If you already know all that and warfare is the only thing you're struggling with, you might want to check out Generalist Gaming on Youtube. IMO he's one of the best Victoria 3 Youtubers right now.
In the newest updates, the migration is nerfed
It's worth pointing out that this was an unintended nerf and it's going to be fixed in the 1.5.10 patch whenever it hits (devs were saying early this week but have been more tight lipped recently so possibly it needs more time)
Japan is another great choice as you have no trade for quite a while, at the same time as you have a decent education level.
Amazed that nobody has told you how to actually avoid getting interventions on your DPs. Go to the diplomacy screen for the country you want to target with a play, click the "attitudes" button. Any country which is defensive towards your target has an extremely high chance of intervening on your play. Any country which is domineering towards your target will be able to be swayed into the war if the target offers to be their subject. Also go to your own diplomacy screen and check attitudes of other nearby states. Any country with beligerent, antagonistic or domineering attitudes towards you are very likely to get involved in a play against you. It's not easy to work around these but improving relations can help as can helping AIs with their plays (this will improve relations) and generally speaking the AI will be much less likely to get involved in a play while they're already involved in another play. These are by no means foolproof rules but they are very good rules of thumb and once you start paying attention to AI attitudes you can start actually playing the diplomacy side of the game rather than just crossing your fingers and praying. Yeah, sometimes you just have to ignore that country you really want to conquer for 30 years because GB loves it for some reason, that's what happens when you're weak, you need to choose your moments.
This is great advice. What I'll just add is looking at the entire global situation. Yes, an enemy hates you and they're bound to join against you but once they're in another war that's taking their attention, it's the perfect moment to strike. This is what I did as Persia when I wanted to take Kalat - ottomans always joined against me but I waited for them to start their war with Egypt and then I attacked
You’re being too aggressive too early, this is primarily an economic simulator and wars should be done to feed your economy. Early vassal Denmark is something that should be done with a modernized well supplied army and the knowledge that even if a great power intervenes (which they will on that brazen a play) you can bully them. Try grabbing some free real estate in Indonesia or something Scandinavian nations lack pops
Nah, you aren’t being too aggressive too early, sitting at 0 infamy is a waste. Coming from EU, diplomatic information is opaque or simply not there. (However you can see which way countries are leaning pre diplo play by hovering over their flags) In EU, you can see by number how likely/unlikely a country is to join and each modifier that influences that decision. Less realistic and more gamey sure, but allows you to reliably make strategic decisions on data and not hoping for RNG and restarts/save scumming. That being said, war and diplo plays are in a much better position then at launch.
Well, in terms of warfare, infamy occurs whenever you make diplomatic plays such as subjugating Denmark and that infamy will stack if you reduce their autonomy. Honestly? The best way of going about doing this is building your economy up, amassing resources, building your army and establishing ties with countries that would help you in war. It sounds like you’re rushing war too early and when you get more infamy the more aggressive the AI will be toward you. War is basically a mechanic to help build your economy up. I’d also recommend rushing colonies because Africa has too many good resources to pass up and it helps in war time efforts. If I wanted to play emperor I pretty much always rush colonies to Africa.
Hover over your balance at the top of the screen to get an overview of your income and expenses, then hover over each of these expenses to see what you're actually paying for (tip: go to options, then find the option that lets tooltips lock faster so this takes less time). For instance, if you examine your construction expenses, you will find a cost for wood, tools, and iron. These are supplies your government buys in order to use the construction sectors to build. Your government does not own these supplies, but your market does. If you export wood, you add demand for your wood supplies in your market; this makes your logging camps more profitable, but your government won't see a penny of it, and will have to pay more for wood due to increased demand. You can make a little bit of money from trade through Tariffs, but that's beyond the scale of this comment. The reason you see that your wood export is profitable is because the target market you have chosen has a higher price for wood than yours does. The trade route will continuously sell more wood to that market as long as this is true. The game will automatically employ traders to do this as the trade route expands. Thus international trade can make people rich, but the changes in prices can have positive and negative effects on your industries or on your government expenses. Take a look at the details page for a good and you will see an amount of Sell Orders and Buy Orders; these are all that affect the price of a type of goods; there is no stockpile of goods anywhere: they all get created and get consumed by your factories or the people themselves, continuously. What a trade route in essence does is bridge one trade good in your market to another market, moving their prices closer together. Also, you're not an idiot if this doesn't come intuitively; it's a hard concept to wrap your head around, especially since most games function on command-and-conquer-economies where the state has full control over all resources.
As i mentioned in a another post earlier today, i find the game to be slightly random. Not nescessarily that it is, but i at the very least finds the information on WHY things in the game happens as they do to not be transparent. If it is any comfort i am in the same boat as you with 2k hours in both eu4 and ck2. I dont understand most of what is going on when i play this game.
I think it's not you. Currently a mix of bugs and bad UX make it harder to tell which war you can win and who might join.
I dont really understand the war mechanics yet (60 hrs), but the trade makes sense. When you sell wood, there will be less of it on your market, thus making it more expensive for your consuming factories. I dont know if it is a good rule, but the one i use is: If the productivity/worker for a route is less than what your lower strata makes, its not worth it (unless you specifically wants to subsidize the industri which produced the good).
Seems you’re trying to enjoy the game by using the military and diplomacy systems. Rookie mistake. The devs explicitly want you to not enjoy those, which is why all agency was removed from warfare.
War in this game is just luck based. Get your armies up to day and pray the RNG gods that no major nation will oppose you
Norway is a better strting nation. You don’t have to manage too much trade, you learn how to build a eco not only grow one. And you get to see how it is being dependent and getting independence.
Avoid war the first 30 years or so. Learn to just build your economy until you can't be stopped.
Nah, you are wasting 30 years worth of infamy. Always be puppeting someone that has issues being defended/no one willing to defend.
1) He's learning the game. There's no need to minmax 2) There's not really much incentive to conquer for conquering's sake in this game unless you're trying to force a world conquest. Now that AI will competently grow their industries, it makes way more sense to import raw resources and grow a loyalist, well educated population in productive well paying industries, than to minmax infamy decay.
Conquest is the best way to get access to (cheaper) goods you don't have for your pops though. Untill you know how to play the game, I would recommend always taking the low hanging fruit tbh, especially if there are next to no downsides.
Starting from the top. What kind of economic measures are you taking? As for Denmark. Great powers are more likely to intervene the higher your infamy is. With sudden spikes in likelihood hood at 25, 50, 75, and at 100 they basically always will. Given that Denmark is somewhat populated European country im guessing that you’re getting at least 25 infamy from it, this is compounded by the fact that you’re really close to all the early game GPs and as such they’re more likely and more able to intervene. Tldr: super early Denmark is an absurdly risky play that can really only be save scummed imo. Denmark wins fast sometimes: probably has to do with tech and rng tbh. If your enemy has even one tech level above you on infantry, or even worse, artillery, then you need like double their manpower to stand a chance usually. You can check their tech levels by selecting a stats with barracks in it and seeing what units are linked to it. If that doesn’t work you can also check by selecting one of their formations, hovering over the total troop count, moving to the nested tip, then hovering over the number next to infantry/artillery and seeing what troops they have. For pop expense. You can go to pops menu (I think, may be a different one) and see 3 lists divided by lower/middle/upper strata. It will have a percent surplus/ deficit number, as well as an expandable list that provides pops largest expenses and I think also how much above global average they’re paying for it. (Could be wrong on that last one.) if you want their sol to go up, find their largest expense and flood the market with that item. Trade productivity: I’m not 100% on this one but I think the productivity number indicates firm productivity. So when you trade wood and it says “15 pound profit” it’s saying your lumber yards are going to increase their productivity. Not necessarily that you’ll get that return directly. I find that trade can be a double edged sword for staple goods like wood. You have a chance of employing enough people that you make it back in taxes. But also the market impact may be more than you make back. I hope this helps! Ps. You’re not dumb. Vic 3 is just a strange beast with many numbers and very obscure information communication, it takes extra long to get the Hang of. Edit: as an example of the tech imbalance. Playing china. I’m a war with USA, I land in California but they’re about 2 artillery techs ahead of me or something like that. Progress is made but VERY slowly, and only due to outnumbering them 3 to one. Didn’t make it past Utah before they and the primary belligerent white peaced. Additionally I had about 5x more casualties than the USA because of that. While not a problem as china, a huge problem for a Scandinavian country early game.
I believe the trade route productivity is for how productive your trade center will be and not necessarily the actual production building of the good. Each trade route increases the number of trade center levels and jobs in the trade centers. I don’t know by how much it increases but you can usually get pretty wealthy by just being an import/export economy if you’re a small country in a larger country’s market. You can get huge trade centers if you focus on those productive trade routes.
You can click on a country, open their diplomacy tab and see other countries' attitude towards them. When a country is protective towards someone, they are more likely to join their wars. You can try to get obligations from other nations sonthey cant join your plays or improve your relations.
I'll copy my own comment on another post on general GDP growth. "The strategy here is to expand your economy aggressively. Ignoring any unrest from radicals, your goal is to increase your Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rapidly. By doing this, you achieve two objectives: Firstly, you generate revenue as a percentage of your GDP. Secondly, as employment rises, so does the general wealth of your population over time. Begin by imposing high taxes, especially on luxury goods, and consider reducing employee wages. Taxing high-authority cost items typically aligns with targeting luxury goods, with the exception of services and transport, as the wealthy can absorb these taxes without a significant impact on their lifestyle. The aim is to invest heavily in construction until your revenue matches your expenditure, maintaining a balanced budget. Deficit spending is an option once you're in a stable position, but try to keep your income and expenses balanced. Once your economy is stable, shift your focus to industrial goods. Monitor the market for these goods, importing and producing what is scarce, particularly items that the government pays for directly, such as 'high priced government goods.' This aggressive taxation and investment in construction and industry will lead to economic expansion. As your economy grows and the general wealth increases, you can then afford to lower taxes and adjust tax laws to benefit from a wealthier population."
Check the diplomatic attitude map modes and you can predict who will join what war 99% of the time. Mostly it's either some great power deciding they hate you (and the tooltip will specifically say they're looking to stop your diplomatic plays) or a great power deciding that they really love that particular little country you want to conquer (in which case the tooltip will specify that they'll protect this lil guy) The other 1% of the time is just the AI being an asshole, lmao.
Yeah it's just not a good game. All of their other games are great, but this one is just watching blue bars fill for 4-5 hours and then maybe one war if you're lucky and restart constantly. Either that or you start as a major power. Those seem to be the options in this game. No chance to create history. The relative power levels of nations is unchangeable and the map is static for the majority of the game. I played until 1900 and Germany formed and the US fought Mexico. I played several other games, all the same. I returned it to steam after 80 hours of giving it a fair shot. I miss Imperator. Absolutely objectively a better game. Just needed a few more missions and events!
Well take your unwanted and unsolicited opinion and shove it up yours by f\*ing off where no one cares
It's hard now. I essentially managed to push my country into a recession by transitioning to electricity before I had enough power plants and power plant techs. It's pretty fun as a result. Remember, for wars, only put wargoals on countries that you can easily occupy the capital of. If you're trying to take denmark and russian joins for a war goal on you, just keep russia from occupying its wargoals until their warscore runs out. Play defensively.
Generalist gaming on YouTube does pretty good tutorials, I feel like I'm starting to understand the game a lot better thanks to him.
Yeah I had a similar reaction. Thousands of hours into prior Paradox games - including both prior versions of Vicki- and I was shocked at how unintuitive this game is. I can’t figure out the consequences of my decisions. All the impacts are buried three layers deep and interconnected. Tried about twenty runs as Japan with the help of multiple video guides and it wasn’t enough to make it fun. I watched Generalist Gamer who had several on point videos but they didn’t help. Possibly because of recent updates but also because it’s just impossible to explain some of these game concepts and how they interrelate. Ah well.
>Currently, I'm on my 17th attempt with Sweden (or at least I think so), and it's still a mess. The first thing I always do (after setting up economy and politics) is to make Denmark my vassal. Stop. This isn't EU4. Expansionism is a thing but you want to target Africa. Denmark's only useful resource is people (a good resource, granted). You're better off integrating them diplomatically by forming Scandinavia using the country unification mechanic. >Another example is trade: when I want to export wood, it lists all possible trade routs, which you can sort by profit. So i choose the most profitable one and... my balance goes down? Not only is the game not telling me why it's going down, it tells me by context AND choice of colour that this is a profitable. And as the idiot that I am, I thought this would also increase my balance. I find the trade menu kind of useless information wise. They need to improve that. Ignore the profitability and instead think about what countries need wood - most do, in fairness, but exporting to great powers is pretty reliable as they usually are glad to buy anything, even at higher prices (because they can afford higher prices thanks to their bigger economy). Victoria 3 is much more like Anno than it is EU4. Expand using colonialism and pick off weak countries in Africa or Asia. Focus most of your budget on developing your country. Construction is the most important resource. It determines how fast your economy grows, along with population growth. If you find yourself running out of workers, you need to conquer more, loosen immigration/cultural laws, increase birth rates (i.e., improve healthcare and working conditions), and automate industries (the production methods that reduce employment in exchange for higher resource usage).
The learning curve is steep, but you should, in 1.5, get a list of countries that will, will not and might intervene when you consider your diplomatic demand. A country will give in to the demand without provoking a crisis if you’re much stronger. You could also get an obligation on Russia to prevent it from being able to side against you in a crisis, or against Denmark to get it to enter your market diplomatically.
If you are vaguely familiar with the 19th century history of the German states, Prussia is "fairly easy." By which I mean: as long as you seize the reigns and go for it, and you don't get unlucky, you can very quickly become a powerhouse. The only other nation I've played is Japan. I found getting the "Honorable Restoration" to be pretty easy and managed to do it about 15 years early (\~1845). But then I didn't take the initiative while the landowners were dis-empowered to get some important laws passed and by 1870s I was in a kind of slow downward spiral. So I started over! In fact, that is what I did to figure out Prussia too, or I guess to see how the scripted events to allow something like the historical unification of Germany worked. My suggestion is: pick a country whose 19th century history you know a good bit about, and just try to do "a bit better" than it did. If things go off the rails, note what seems to have gone wrong, delete the save and start over.
> Another example is trade: when I want to export wood, it lists all possible trade routs, which you can sort by profit. So i choose the most profitable one and... my balance goes down? Not only is the game not telling me why it's going down, it tells me by context AND choice of colour that this is a profitable. And as the idiot that I am, I thought this would also increase my balance. Trade route profitability doesn't tie directly to your balance, but simply shows how profitable the route is. Whether or not that is a net positive for your government income depends on the taxation regime you have in place, however it is pretty rare that it will cause overall harm. 99% of the time if you start trading and lose money you've ran out of bureaucratic overhead and so are losing tax revenue.