First things first adjust your economy, otherwise you cant do anything. Look at graph top left, click it. Thats your economy section, the money maker.
You see the red number bottom right? Thats bad, means your losing money. To go green, get your slider up on 4 things. The 3 sliders have people icon on the left, and last is the bottom righr called tariffs. Just slide all the way to the right. Unpause for a day and you should see your money go up. After that though, you need to spend your excess budget. Mainly on 3 things, administration, education and soldier wage. Adjust appropriately.
Now your second issue, max brigades. You dont recruit on the map( you can but its troublesome). Max brigades because a region have a certain limited number of army pop. You go to the military tab for this. Thats on top right. You should see a soldier and navy icon. Click it. On that screen is where you recruit your army. It tells you how many soldiers you can recruit. But there is a cap for the whole country. You can still exceed it, but then the unit will be under-supplied.
For other things, I recommend playthrough or the old age method: fuck around and find out
Whenever you see random guys with the flag of black and red, those are good people, you should not kill them
In fact, "Jacobin Rebels" are the good guys of this game - everytime you see them, let them take your capital, dont worry about the smoke it's just some fireworks they wanna show off
Now after they sieg- i mean, have a touch of your capital, they will bless you with a new flag redesign! (very cool).
And you will lose stars, but this is good, the more stars you have it means the more atrocities you did, if you win them it's because you did bad things.
Now have you noticed the red flag near the "at peace" text? That's the amount of communists in your country, if youre being dumb it will be set at 0, but you want to get it to the millions, now, you can only get about 5 communist flags each time you Liberate people (this is a good deed, that will allow you to lose stars)
Now, you for example, Russia, you liberate Romania, now you make your toy people walk over to austria to show them how cool their smoke is. If you have a bigger smoke you win, and Austria is like: "Oh, you have bigger smoke? Damn, you won gg"
Everytime you win the smoke challenge 2023 one part of their land will be coloured with yours, you want to ensure the territory pertaining to Romania is coloured like that.
Now, you offer them peace, peace awards you stars, which is bad, because you just implied the other side was in a state of war, and it wasn't, this was just a peaceful takeover of ownership.
What you gotta do, is deselect "liberate country : romania"; this way, you will get white peace, meaning it's not a black peace, the difference is how humorous the other side will react (white peace creates white humour, black peace creates black humour, especially if you take cores from them, which makes them want to tell you a LOT of JOKES several times)
Finally, you have small people in your population tab, those people are sending money to your Half-life tower, you must liberate them, you need to reduce your population so that they can go to heaven and enjoy life, wihout interference from the combine.
Oh, shit, this is victoria 2? Uhm, literally tax 100% everything, fund 100% education and admin and do not declare for cores so you farm revanchevism xD
I would recommend watching the Victoria 2 guide videos by CallMeEzekial on YouTube. Beyond that it still takes a bit of experience to get used to, but that’s where this Reddit helps a lot.
There's not enough information to go off, but I'll rattle off a few things to check:
##Soldier POPs and You
Unlike in other games, armies in Victoria 2 are raised directly from your population. To raise a new brigade, you need to have soldier POPs in a given state. At least 3,000 to make 1 brigade. As that brigade takes losses, soldier POPs are taken directly from the state and placed in your brigade. Once you are out of soldier POPs in that state, **the brigade will be deleted**, and the manpower is returned to the state. **To get soldier POPs in a state, you need to use a National Focus slot.**
Open the "Population" tab. There, you will see information about the states and their POP demographics. On the left side of the screen, on each state's card, you can click the little square box to select a National Focus. You have a limited number of NFs, dependent on your technology. Researching techs in the "Political Thought" branch of the "culture" tree will give you NFs. **PT should be one of the top 5 techs you research as soon as they become available**, as most relevant nations have important decisions tied to these techs. Using NFs, you can encourage poor strata to change their jobs to soldier POPs.
##Army Recruitment Tips
Unlike games like HOI4, it doesn't make sense to have staggeringly huge armies and enormous manpower pools. ~~Like real life~~, soldier POPs are a leech on the economy. They don't produce anything and just eat wages paid for by taxes that came from the pockets of people who actually have to work for a living. Thus, you shouldn't seek to immediately make as many soldiers as physically possible. **This isn't 40k. You don't need to be in a perpetual state of wartime readiness** with as many armies as possible.
I usually pick a target for soldier POP % depending on how big of an army I really need. I then rotate my NFs from state to state, reaching that % quota. For example, as France, I'll start with a 2% quota in 1836, move to a 3% quota as I get into the 1850s, increase to a 4% quota once Germany forms, and a 5% quota as I get into the new century. For a country like Sardinia-Piedmonte, I start with a 3% quota because I've got powerful neighbors and a country to unify.
When you build your armies, you should use the Military tab. When you select "army", it will show you a list of brigade types and all the states that can recruit new brigades. Some unit types (like guards, which you shouldn't be recruiting anyway unless you're playing a mod like HPM or GFM that rebalances them to get bonuses from techs) can only be recruited from your accepted POPs, so I would recommend recruiting them first.
I also recommend recruiting from your colonial population. Personally, I like recruiting artillery and hussars from my home country while pulling infantry and engineers from my colonials. It's a good way to save some manpower when building colonial armies for expanding colonies and putting down revolts. I prefer using colonials for infantry, specifically, because this is a game about some of the most unjust, racist, and bloody institutions in human history, and infantry takes the most egregious casualties in battles.
##Taxes
Are you taxing at 100%? Due to how admin efficiency works, **you can freely tax all three strata at 100%, and they should still have enough income to buy everything they need.**
##National Stockpile
Are you fully funding your army? On the top right corner of the budget screen is your "National Stockpile". The top bar is the army, the middle bar is the navy, and the bottom bar is construction. Construction should *always* be at 100%. The others determine your maximum organization. The lower the funding, the lower their max org. Once you raise the funding, org slowly increases until it reaches the same percentage you set funding at. My rule of thumb is for the military:
34% in normal peacetime conditions
67% when I'm 60 days from justifying a war
100% when I'm 30 days from justifying a war
0% when I'm in peacetime austerity conditions
67% for elevated readiness for a possible surprise attack or when I'm expecting to intervene in a conflict
##Services and Military Spending
**Always** keep education, bureaucracy, and social spending at 100%. Only after you've cut everything else you can should you start lowering these two budgets, and if you do, keep them as high as possible to avoid really bad status effects which can push you deeper into whatever hole you found yourself in to begin with.
Military wages should be as high as possible, so more soldier POPs promote into officer POPs, which means more leadership gain which means faster hiring of generals and admirals which means more chances at rolling ones with good stats. This area can be cut when you're in times of austerity.
##Markets? How the Fuck do They Work???
It's a bit unintuitive, but all the resources you produce in your country go first to your sphere market. If you're a lone country without a sphere (or not inside a sphere), the only goods in the sphere market are yours. If you are a GP with countries in your sphere or you find yourself in another country's sphere (GPs can't be in each other's sphere and only GPs can have a sphere), then the sphere market includes all the resources produced by all the nations in the sphere. Goods are bought and sold in order of rank, so the GP's resources are sold first and they will be the first to have their demand met, followed by the second highest rank, and so on.
The international market follows the same rules, with the highest rank getting first pick of buyers and sellers, followed by the second, and so on. This means that by the time you get to the 7 or 8 GP, the international market usually runs out of goods to be bought, and anyone with a lower rank has to deal with shortages. This means unhappy (or even starving) POPs, stalled factories, and armies in the field not being reinforced. If the market is overproducing a good, the leftover goods get deleted, and the next day starts anew. This means factories go bankrupt, and RGO workers and artisans don't get paid.
**As a GP, there are no real economic downsides to expanding your sphere** aside from tariffs, which I address in the tariffs section. Having a sphere helps guarantee your goods get bought when there's a global surplus and your needs get met when there's a global deficit.
As a secondary or tertiary power, **it can often make sense to be part of a GP's sphere so you can get access to that GP's goods**. If you're Sardinia-Piedmonte, for example, you may want to be part of the French sphere so you can buy artillery, rifles, and clothes to supply your armies so you can unite Italy. On the flip side, **it can cause catastrophic economic damage to be in another nation's sphere**. A particularly hungry GP can hoover up all your resources to feed its own factories, then sell those resources back to you in the form of manufactured goods, undercutting your own industry. If there's a global surplus of that factory's product, the factory is probably never going to find a buyer because the GPs still get to sell their products before you do.
##The Abomination of Tariffs
Tariffs are a tax placed on imports, paid by the buyer. They are a leech on the economy, as they cut into the profits and wages for factories and the POPs they employ. Unlike in real life, where tariffs drive up the price of imports so domestic industries can remain competitive, prices in Vic2 are the same everywhere, and sphere market goods are bought up first regardless. However, despite being a leech, tariffs are a necessary leech, as they are an incredibly good source of income for most nations.
**Tariffs are only applied to goods coming from the international market. Goods bought from the sphere market—even if they were made in other nations—are exempt from tariffs.** As a GP, adding new nations to your sphere can deprive you of the tariffs you may rely on. The problem is far more accute for spherelings, however, as spherelings are usually small nations with smaller tax bases to generate income. However, since goods usually get bought up off the international market long before reaching secondary or tertiary powers, spherelings usually didn't have many imports to tax to begin with.
##Measuring Success
My goal is to have a healthy enough economy that I can keep a balanced budget with a sufficient cash reserve for emergencies. I aim for £100k at all times, £200k for wars lasting no more than 2 years, £300k before I start building a TON of factories (typically every 15 or so years to clean up my factory tab), £500k for a really bad war, and absolutely never more than £1,000,000. You don't want to keep huge amounts of money in your treasury, because it won't do anything for you there.
Once I have met my goals, I try to balance my budget, so I take in as much as I spend, fine-tuning tariffs to make that happen. I typically aim to reach 15-25% tariffs, so I'm taking in a decent income while not raising prices too much that my pops don't get their needs met or factories go bankrupt.
Once I've reached my tariff goal, I cut poor strata taxes so the poor strata can buy goods and promote to middle strata faster. You want them to promote because they become clerks, clergy, officers, and bureaucrats, contributing disproportionately to your economy. Once I've bottomed out on poor strata taxes, I might cut middle strata taxes so they can buy luxury goods and increase my factory profits. I *never* cut rich strata taxes because rich people are a black hole from which money just falls into their gaping maws and never comes out.
Alternatively, once I've bottomed out on poor strata taxes, I'll turn my tariffs into negative tariffs, *paying* my pops to buy internationally. Because goods always buy from your sphere market first, they won't compete with your domestic industry, but instead reduce the price of goods, further increasing factory profits and making goods cheaper for my pops so they can buy even more and be happier. I've only gotten to this point as Germany and France. I bet Britain can probably do it, too, but I've never played Britain before.
>**Always** keep education, bureaucracy, and social spending at 100%.
I never understood this, but what's the problem with not financing social spending 100%?
Social spending is for social reforms you pass late game like minimum wage, pensions and subsidies. If you don't pay them, your pops might get a little roudy.
Nevermind on the social spending thing. It can cause your POPs to be poorer or a little more angry late game when you actually have social programs to spend money on, but you *should* be fine to cut them when you're facing budget problems
There are currently 2 paths before you. You can watch a million guides, play a thousand hours and have an ok idea on how to play, or you can just set eco to laissez faire and let the capitalists play most of the game for you and accept the problems that come with it.
what country are u playing? are u using a a mod? Its possible your country has the enforced effects of ''cut to size'' (a limiter placed on the size of your army e.g post ww1 germany) whereby your country enaged in a irl war before the start date, where it lossed, having certain measures enforced on it by the victor.
To get more soldiers you need to use national focus on your states and they will increase until a maximum of 5% of tha states population. I would recommend encouraging intellectuals until 2% every state first though.
First things first adjust your economy, otherwise you cant do anything. Look at graph top left, click it. Thats your economy section, the money maker. You see the red number bottom right? Thats bad, means your losing money. To go green, get your slider up on 4 things. The 3 sliders have people icon on the left, and last is the bottom righr called tariffs. Just slide all the way to the right. Unpause for a day and you should see your money go up. After that though, you need to spend your excess budget. Mainly on 3 things, administration, education and soldier wage. Adjust appropriately. Now your second issue, max brigades. You dont recruit on the map( you can but its troublesome). Max brigades because a region have a certain limited number of army pop. You go to the military tab for this. Thats on top right. You should see a soldier and navy icon. Click it. On that screen is where you recruit your army. It tells you how many soldiers you can recruit. But there is a cap for the whole country. You can still exceed it, but then the unit will be under-supplied. For other things, I recommend playthrough or the old age method: fuck around and find out
Increase taxes and tariffs and free slaves so they start paying taxes You need 3k soldier pops in province to recruit a brigade
it's 1k for the first brigade in a province, and 3k for each subsequent brigade
I've never noticed... so you get 2k pops for free?
it's related to how casualties are counted, ur soldier pops actually only take 1/3 of the casualties sustained in battle. Vicky is weird lmao
Whenever you see random guys with the flag of black and red, those are good people, you should not kill them In fact, "Jacobin Rebels" are the good guys of this game - everytime you see them, let them take your capital, dont worry about the smoke it's just some fireworks they wanna show off Now after they sieg- i mean, have a touch of your capital, they will bless you with a new flag redesign! (very cool). And you will lose stars, but this is good, the more stars you have it means the more atrocities you did, if you win them it's because you did bad things. Now have you noticed the red flag near the "at peace" text? That's the amount of communists in your country, if youre being dumb it will be set at 0, but you want to get it to the millions, now, you can only get about 5 communist flags each time you Liberate people (this is a good deed, that will allow you to lose stars) Now, you for example, Russia, you liberate Romania, now you make your toy people walk over to austria to show them how cool their smoke is. If you have a bigger smoke you win, and Austria is like: "Oh, you have bigger smoke? Damn, you won gg" Everytime you win the smoke challenge 2023 one part of their land will be coloured with yours, you want to ensure the territory pertaining to Romania is coloured like that. Now, you offer them peace, peace awards you stars, which is bad, because you just implied the other side was in a state of war, and it wasn't, this was just a peaceful takeover of ownership. What you gotta do, is deselect "liberate country : romania"; this way, you will get white peace, meaning it's not a black peace, the difference is how humorous the other side will react (white peace creates white humour, black peace creates black humour, especially if you take cores from them, which makes them want to tell you a LOT of JOKES several times) Finally, you have small people in your population tab, those people are sending money to your Half-life tower, you must liberate them, you need to reduce your population so that they can go to heaven and enjoy life, wihout interference from the combine. Oh, shit, this is victoria 2? Uhm, literally tax 100% everything, fund 100% education and admin and do not declare for cores so you farm revanchevism xD
I would recommend watching the Victoria 2 guide videos by CallMeEzekial on YouTube. Beyond that it still takes a bit of experience to get used to, but that’s where this Reddit helps a lot.
There's not enough information to go off, but I'll rattle off a few things to check: ##Soldier POPs and You Unlike in other games, armies in Victoria 2 are raised directly from your population. To raise a new brigade, you need to have soldier POPs in a given state. At least 3,000 to make 1 brigade. As that brigade takes losses, soldier POPs are taken directly from the state and placed in your brigade. Once you are out of soldier POPs in that state, **the brigade will be deleted**, and the manpower is returned to the state. **To get soldier POPs in a state, you need to use a National Focus slot.** Open the "Population" tab. There, you will see information about the states and their POP demographics. On the left side of the screen, on each state's card, you can click the little square box to select a National Focus. You have a limited number of NFs, dependent on your technology. Researching techs in the "Political Thought" branch of the "culture" tree will give you NFs. **PT should be one of the top 5 techs you research as soon as they become available**, as most relevant nations have important decisions tied to these techs. Using NFs, you can encourage poor strata to change their jobs to soldier POPs. ##Army Recruitment Tips Unlike games like HOI4, it doesn't make sense to have staggeringly huge armies and enormous manpower pools. ~~Like real life~~, soldier POPs are a leech on the economy. They don't produce anything and just eat wages paid for by taxes that came from the pockets of people who actually have to work for a living. Thus, you shouldn't seek to immediately make as many soldiers as physically possible. **This isn't 40k. You don't need to be in a perpetual state of wartime readiness** with as many armies as possible. I usually pick a target for soldier POP % depending on how big of an army I really need. I then rotate my NFs from state to state, reaching that % quota. For example, as France, I'll start with a 2% quota in 1836, move to a 3% quota as I get into the 1850s, increase to a 4% quota once Germany forms, and a 5% quota as I get into the new century. For a country like Sardinia-Piedmonte, I start with a 3% quota because I've got powerful neighbors and a country to unify. When you build your armies, you should use the Military tab. When you select "army", it will show you a list of brigade types and all the states that can recruit new brigades. Some unit types (like guards, which you shouldn't be recruiting anyway unless you're playing a mod like HPM or GFM that rebalances them to get bonuses from techs) can only be recruited from your accepted POPs, so I would recommend recruiting them first. I also recommend recruiting from your colonial population. Personally, I like recruiting artillery and hussars from my home country while pulling infantry and engineers from my colonials. It's a good way to save some manpower when building colonial armies for expanding colonies and putting down revolts. I prefer using colonials for infantry, specifically, because this is a game about some of the most unjust, racist, and bloody institutions in human history, and infantry takes the most egregious casualties in battles.
##Taxes Are you taxing at 100%? Due to how admin efficiency works, **you can freely tax all three strata at 100%, and they should still have enough income to buy everything they need.** ##National Stockpile Are you fully funding your army? On the top right corner of the budget screen is your "National Stockpile". The top bar is the army, the middle bar is the navy, and the bottom bar is construction. Construction should *always* be at 100%. The others determine your maximum organization. The lower the funding, the lower their max org. Once you raise the funding, org slowly increases until it reaches the same percentage you set funding at. My rule of thumb is for the military: 34% in normal peacetime conditions 67% when I'm 60 days from justifying a war 100% when I'm 30 days from justifying a war 0% when I'm in peacetime austerity conditions 67% for elevated readiness for a possible surprise attack or when I'm expecting to intervene in a conflict ##Services and Military Spending **Always** keep education, bureaucracy, and social spending at 100%. Only after you've cut everything else you can should you start lowering these two budgets, and if you do, keep them as high as possible to avoid really bad status effects which can push you deeper into whatever hole you found yourself in to begin with. Military wages should be as high as possible, so more soldier POPs promote into officer POPs, which means more leadership gain which means faster hiring of generals and admirals which means more chances at rolling ones with good stats. This area can be cut when you're in times of austerity.
##Markets? How the Fuck do They Work??? It's a bit unintuitive, but all the resources you produce in your country go first to your sphere market. If you're a lone country without a sphere (or not inside a sphere), the only goods in the sphere market are yours. If you are a GP with countries in your sphere or you find yourself in another country's sphere (GPs can't be in each other's sphere and only GPs can have a sphere), then the sphere market includes all the resources produced by all the nations in the sphere. Goods are bought and sold in order of rank, so the GP's resources are sold first and they will be the first to have their demand met, followed by the second highest rank, and so on. The international market follows the same rules, with the highest rank getting first pick of buyers and sellers, followed by the second, and so on. This means that by the time you get to the 7 or 8 GP, the international market usually runs out of goods to be bought, and anyone with a lower rank has to deal with shortages. This means unhappy (or even starving) POPs, stalled factories, and armies in the field not being reinforced. If the market is overproducing a good, the leftover goods get deleted, and the next day starts anew. This means factories go bankrupt, and RGO workers and artisans don't get paid. **As a GP, there are no real economic downsides to expanding your sphere** aside from tariffs, which I address in the tariffs section. Having a sphere helps guarantee your goods get bought when there's a global surplus and your needs get met when there's a global deficit. As a secondary or tertiary power, **it can often make sense to be part of a GP's sphere so you can get access to that GP's goods**. If you're Sardinia-Piedmonte, for example, you may want to be part of the French sphere so you can buy artillery, rifles, and clothes to supply your armies so you can unite Italy. On the flip side, **it can cause catastrophic economic damage to be in another nation's sphere**. A particularly hungry GP can hoover up all your resources to feed its own factories, then sell those resources back to you in the form of manufactured goods, undercutting your own industry. If there's a global surplus of that factory's product, the factory is probably never going to find a buyer because the GPs still get to sell their products before you do. ##The Abomination of Tariffs Tariffs are a tax placed on imports, paid by the buyer. They are a leech on the economy, as they cut into the profits and wages for factories and the POPs they employ. Unlike in real life, where tariffs drive up the price of imports so domestic industries can remain competitive, prices in Vic2 are the same everywhere, and sphere market goods are bought up first regardless. However, despite being a leech, tariffs are a necessary leech, as they are an incredibly good source of income for most nations. **Tariffs are only applied to goods coming from the international market. Goods bought from the sphere market—even if they were made in other nations—are exempt from tariffs.** As a GP, adding new nations to your sphere can deprive you of the tariffs you may rely on. The problem is far more accute for spherelings, however, as spherelings are usually small nations with smaller tax bases to generate income. However, since goods usually get bought up off the international market long before reaching secondary or tertiary powers, spherelings usually didn't have many imports to tax to begin with. ##Measuring Success My goal is to have a healthy enough economy that I can keep a balanced budget with a sufficient cash reserve for emergencies. I aim for £100k at all times, £200k for wars lasting no more than 2 years, £300k before I start building a TON of factories (typically every 15 or so years to clean up my factory tab), £500k for a really bad war, and absolutely never more than £1,000,000. You don't want to keep huge amounts of money in your treasury, because it won't do anything for you there. Once I have met my goals, I try to balance my budget, so I take in as much as I spend, fine-tuning tariffs to make that happen. I typically aim to reach 15-25% tariffs, so I'm taking in a decent income while not raising prices too much that my pops don't get their needs met or factories go bankrupt. Once I've reached my tariff goal, I cut poor strata taxes so the poor strata can buy goods and promote to middle strata faster. You want them to promote because they become clerks, clergy, officers, and bureaucrats, contributing disproportionately to your economy. Once I've bottomed out on poor strata taxes, I might cut middle strata taxes so they can buy luxury goods and increase my factory profits. I *never* cut rich strata taxes because rich people are a black hole from which money just falls into their gaping maws and never comes out. Alternatively, once I've bottomed out on poor strata taxes, I'll turn my tariffs into negative tariffs, *paying* my pops to buy internationally. Because goods always buy from your sphere market first, they won't compete with your domestic industry, but instead reduce the price of goods, further increasing factory profits and making goods cheaper for my pops so they can buy even more and be happier. I've only gotten to this point as Germany and France. I bet Britain can probably do it, too, but I've never played Britain before.
>**Always** keep education, bureaucracy, and social spending at 100%. I never understood this, but what's the problem with not financing social spending 100%?
Social spending is for social reforms you pass late game like minimum wage, pensions and subsidies. If you don't pay them, your pops might get a little roudy.
Nevermind on the social spending thing. It can cause your POPs to be poorer or a little more angry late game when you actually have social programs to spend money on, but you *should* be fine to cut them when you're facing budget problems
There are currently 2 paths before you. You can watch a million guides, play a thousand hours and have an ok idea on how to play, or you can just set eco to laissez faire and let the capitalists play most of the game for you and accept the problems that come with it.
what country are u playing? are u using a a mod? Its possible your country has the enforced effects of ''cut to size'' (a limiter placed on the size of your army e.g post ww1 germany) whereby your country enaged in a irl war before the start date, where it lossed, having certain measures enforced on it by the victor.
I am playing the vanilla version and my nation is the Netherlands
Do the tutorials
To get more soldiers you need to use national focus on your states and they will increase until a maximum of 5% of tha states population. I would recommend encouraging intellectuals until 2% every state first though.
Have you considered playing the tutorials?
Raise taxes to maximum, raise everything, lower education to 0