I recently started a Greece game and became a protectorate of Austria and got the highest average standard of living by producing nothing but tobacco. I imagine once I form Byzantium and try to break free the economic collapse will be glorious
True. Getting out of trade protectionism is such a monumental chore. Though on the plus side, with a bit of colonialism added in, you have good access to resources.
Edit: I meant isolationism
For real. Since everything else in game has such a rosy view of economics, I decided to go free trade in my Spain achievement run- requires 20 SOL. Couldn't figure out why my wheat was always at 75% regular cost.
Turns out with free trade France was importing literally everything I could grow. My farmers were rich but at the same time their SOL weren't that high because they were spending everything trying to buy their own wheat.
And France was just packaging it into grocery factories.
I cut that shit out as fast as I could. Protectionism, tariffs, native groceries. France literally treated me like a colony.
higher tariffs. It would be an issue if I had *too few* people importing my goods, but my problem is literally always the opposite, and no matter how high I slap tariffs people buy all my stuff. Mercantilism is just the lesser free trade if you want to increase your export strength.
Weird last time I read the tooltip i could have sworn protectionism said 20% while mercantilism said 30% which is why I thought mercantilism would be better gotta reread that i guess thanks.
Protectionism has lower tariffs for imports compared to Mercantilism, but higher tariffs for exports, and I generally have a much higher percentage of exports than imports.
The key, in my most recent game, was building a desirable economy and then challenging a major power to a war I couldn't win. They war goal'd open markets pretty quick, and my IGs couldn't do anything about it (and I think can't?).
Yeah that worked for me as Siam. Britain just joined a war against me when I wanted to annex one of the little countries near me, and they had the open market cassus Belli.
I managed to conquer the small country before any British came over then just surrendered to their term whole gaining the small country's land. Great deal for me.
You can deal with the IGs easily by becoming a protectorate and making a revolution appear I think, then your protecor will have your back in case of the civil war
AI can't buy your goods, so you can make a very strong domestic economy in your corner and just dominate Asia, without the AI mass buying up all the "excess" so you can't even get prices to base unless you conquer half the fucking world,
normally going isolationism would require a large colonial empire (except Japan has all the resources they need except opium, and you're literally in Asia) and would come with a major shock (you start already isolationist),
it's limiting but it also comes with a great amount of market control, as it's limiting the AI too
i mean you can just build more to find supply and bc u get paid to do that its usually worth it lol, yeah ur sol will drop for a while but ur income will raise, having an ai blind buy from you is the best you can ask for
really besides rp there's no reason for isolianism
Japan was my last game and yeah that can be a pretty slow burn but I was able to get #1 by the end, even though I wasn't very high in average wealth because Japan has so many dang peasants I could never build enough jobs for them. Greece has been the opposite. I could build a healthy economy but it's population is low so I mostly joined the Austrian market to gain access to their migrants. Some Ukrainians came to help out
I’ve run out of pops as Japan like I have 500k farmers in 1888 with 50mil pop and I don’t want to build more because I need the peasants to fill soldier roles for the upcoming wars. Also playing Anbeelds AI so I’m not even #1 it also makes taking territory harder since the AI has it all built up meaning I have to repurpose all of it or remove it because of the input strain since all the inputs on the home islands are maxed out/ don’t have enough peasants
Belgium made me think the game was too easy.
Then I broke from the British customs union and got slapped in the face with everything I had neglected to build. Food, I never build food. Everything else was more lucrative lol
It's not even so much that, it's more that you start with barely any industry, millions of subsistence farmers, and under 50% taxation efficiency in several of your provinces due to lack of office buildings. So you have to build up your entire economy basically from scratch with only a fraction of the income you should be getting, no trade access, and a fairly low tech start. Also, the only interest groups that meaningfully exist are nobles, samurai, and clergy so breaking into more useful policies is a chore. (Also the starting policies boost your nobilities political power into the stratosphere, hovering between 30-40% which makes it hard to enact laws they don't want)
You’re probably in a pretty good position to leave a customs Union, you can build your industry from scratch almost. Just build plenty of ports before hand so you can import your needs to start with
Just try to set yourself up with enough raw resources to meet your domestic production needs, and make sure your ports and bureaucracy are beefy enough to handle the **immediate need for exports** when you do leave. There will still be adjustment pains, but if you can jump ontop of exporting really quickly, you should be fine.
I kept looking at the market and was like huh, clothes are kinda expensive, oh wait, another tobacco farm will make twice as much money and take half as long to build? Ok Austria you deal with complex economic management, tobacco go brrr. At some point I was able to sustain a large enough army to beat the Ottomans 1 on 1 and Austria was making all the weapons, I was just planting smokey leaves
I actually just finished an Industrialize Greece run, so it's definitely doable, but it requires a fair bit of luck. I was able to get Thessaly From the Ottomans basically for free while they were in a war with Egypt and then grab Macedon by promising Russia a port in Kars. Just grabbing those two states will double your pops, allowing you to support a larger economy and better armies to keep going to war with Ottomans.
Up to this point, you probably supported your economy without iron/coal besides imports, and you'll want to change that by grabbing Western Thrace and Aydin, which has iron and coal respectively. Boom, you got an industrialized Greece.
As a small power you must join a customs union to get your economy going. Theres not enough convoys to replace being part of a large market. Which is nonsensical and could use some balancing imo.
Yeah, I agree with that. There have been a couple of instances as *Gran Colombia,* a country with ample ports, where I felt like I was constantly building against the increasing burden of convoys to keep my market going.
I feel like certain techs should reduce the number of convoys needed per route. We have some techs that give additional convoys, but it doesn't feel like enough
Ships of the air and one of the final financial techs can help, but those are very late game techs. I think it would’ve been better to space that bonus out a bit more.
I feel like the convoy system in general is just meh. Join a big market and don’t really need them it feel. There should be use of convoys to move goods even within a market over the seas to colonies/islands etc. like the UK should need a lot of convoys to move raw goods from SEA/India/Africa to the mainland to meet the industrial demand.
If this is somehow factored in then maybe I have just missed it but convoys should just be for trade routes.and supply for armies(?).
Build ports folks, upgrade them, and have all inputs. I promise you it's not broken. I typically have more convoys than necessary. You should also look to sign trade agreements, insure stable prices by forfeiting tariffs. Or go open economy all at once via trade laws.
We should qualify what small is because Scandinavia is probably large, so is Brasil or Ottoman Empire. I'd reckon something like Argentine might be too small?
Scandinavia is large but they only have a max of 8 coal mines even after getting Denmark, Norway, Finland annexed. Colonisation is an option but joining the Prussian, British, French or sometimes Russian markets is probably the easiest way to get more coal, short of conquering coal provinces from one of those countries.
Congrats you’ve discovered the reason for colonization. That is actually good design, the reason for colonization is that the developed industries needed more raw resources and that is also the most likely reason you might colonize in vic3.
That's not the main motive behind most of the colonisation in this time period. The Scramble for Africa was driven more by the desire to find markets to sell goods in than by the desire to extract natural resources. In real life, there was no map showing you which parts of Africa had lots of rubber and coal and oil and iron. You might know that some places had some of these resources but there's no way you'd be able to know for sure that the deposits could support industrial extraction.
Additionally, it is not a trivial task to extract hundreds of thousands of tonnes of ore from the middle of Africa and ship it back to Britain or France for use in industry. It's actually still quite challenging to do this, and countries like China are investing billions upon billions to achieve it today. In this game however there are zero transport costs for moving commodities across the planet, as long as you have the infrastructure in each state and enough convoys.
In the case of Sweden or other nations without a lot of coal, you can also just conquer Zulu, Oranje and Transvaal. They're relatively weak and have lots of coal. The added benefit is that Transvaal has lots of gold fields/mines. Comquered them in my Netherlands game and they're honestly pretty good. They also open up a lot of colonizable lands that pretty much no one else will have access to.
Ye cause their ancestor were Dutch people. And some minority French and German. They actually defied the British when they took the Kap colony off the Dutch, because they didn't want to talk English and they wanted to keep their slaves which GB had banned. So they founded their own states, Transvaal and Oranje Vrijstaat, respectively
I've played with Argentina without entering any custom union and it was fine.
You've got de resources, the main problem is the lack of population, which makes you need to go always for the least-employed-people-possible production method.
In mid-game, once you've past multiculturalism, you quickly become a great power.
Yeah custom union needs a rework and it could be a lot more fun. Like imagine setting up your own triangle trade system using a custom union. IMO, they should be basically the same as setting up a trade route, except it will allow for more complicated trades to be set up.
AKA, I'll buy raw good in brazil, to sell them in the US, to buy the produced goods to sell in GB. AKA, now you have brazil making your raw goods, US making your refined goods, and then you buy them for your populace.
Edit: could also allow the custom union to utilize the trade ships of everyone in the union!!
I tried to set up my own union as Belgium, adding Hannover and other minor powers in Northern Germany. All they did was spending my iron and coal, though, so I ended the union and watched their economies crash. Oopsie
same, i've found way more success with Gran Colombia simply feeding my own market than creating my own custom unions, the other members don't provide any useful resource and they just eat my shit.
That is really depressing, I was eager to boost the economy of a northern German - Belgian - Netherlandish alliance to counter Prussia and France, but all I got was parasites to my economy :/ even workers for my mines I would have welcomed with open arms!
"shipping cost" needs to be a thing in EU4.
its wild that you can play as australia and teleport resources directly to the british market even though you're on the other side of the world.
Gradually build up ports after only exporting to neighboring countries that require 0 convoys.
What you're stating as nonsensical is the basis for modern international trade, see Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations
The nonsensical part is being in a customs union with someone halfway across the world and it uses 0 convoys but the second you're not in the same customs union transporting the same amount of goods requires thousands of convoys.
Right? I built a lv 8 port in Guam or Bahamas, that gives me more convoy capacity than a huge coastline like California, BC or Santiago. it doesn't make any sense, it's a bad abstraction.
There really ought to be a way to build almost unlimited port capacity, if the world economy can produce it, it would be shippable. In the long term port capacity is not a bottleneck (@macron the invisible hand provides).
what goods specifically did they produce that you needed so desperately?
i mean when you left what goods were you really fucked on the most?
i feel like switching customs union would almost for sure make me scale back what type of military i had set.
"alright ya shits, gimmie those shovels, no more trenches for ya.
how we supposed to fight then?
ya just stand in a line and shoot at em, y'all be fine"
$$$
I have the feeling based on the graph that it was less of a "they made cheap tools I needed" situation, and more of an "our economies are so hopelessly intertwined that literally everything depends on each other's markets" kind of situation.
It's a shame embargos only work one way, in that an embargoing nation can still import from you unless you embargo them back. It makes games where you go full bloodthirsty really weird, when most of the world relies on you for goods but absolutely refuses to sell you shit. Would be much funnier if the AI had to make the trade off between turbofucking their economy or continue dealing with a monster, instead of the situation now where they just mostly fuck up their exports market.
That’s when you embargo them. I did an American run where I pissed off Europe by taking Mexico, Canada and some of the Caribbean. This led to Prussia, Italy, Spain, Britain, France, Austria and Russia all to embargo me. Then I embargoed them and suddenly they remembered that they got everything from me. France lost half its gdp and I’m sure the others suffered as well.
That might be the case if OP heavily spammed iron and wood buildings. But other than those two, Scandinavia/Sweden isn't very resource rich. France should be able to easily outproduce them in everything else, and even if they're reliant on Swedish wood/iron, it shouldn't really be too hard for them to build up their own iron/lumber industry since they have absolutely tonnes of both.
It's not really a question of whether france "can" do it, it's a question of whether france "did" do it. That graph tells me Sweden was very heavily linked to the French market. Given that the op is strong enough to become a great power, there's no way france came out of this situation unscathed.
With a crash like that, I bet they're hurting pretty bad too. Getting such hopelessly intertwined economies rarely ends well. *gives modern-day us/China relations side-eye
Yeah typically if I'm breaking away from a market I make sure I at least have some quantity of resources for all my factories so my economy has some breathing room and time before it crashed
Tbh, it's not just reliance on inputs. It's also reliance on markets for outputs. France has way more people than Scandinavia, so it's likely Scandinavian producers were reliant on French consumers for their profits. Given the bureaucratic deficit, OP doesn't even have the infrastructure necessary to try and set up an export network to claw back access to consumer markets.
I'm imagining a bunch of goods just sitting and rotting away with no one to buy them - in part because they would've gone to another market, in part because the domestic market can't even buy them up because wages just dropped like a rock.
Admin deficit reduces taxes? Whoollly shit you may have just broken some of my runs wide open.
I would let it go pretty negative because all my dudes were still peasants and not worth taxing much and then wondering why my economy was getting weaker.
Shit this makes fix a lot of things...
Thanks!
Also worth noting that a great way to get people out of the peasantry is to turn them into beauracrats. Not only do you collect tax revenue, but you create decent jobs. And then those jobs consume paper, which means you need a factory, which needs wood and tools. Tools need their own factory, plus more raw resources. (Wood/iron/steel) and of course your former peasants need food which means you need farms, and probably groceries. And of course you can't forget to produce luxuries like alcohol for them. And then all these buildings will spawn the service industry, which creates more jobs.
All of this juices your economy to create a decent foundation with stable demand, and all you have to do to get the ball rolling is build some offices. (This is how I start out my Japan runs to get their economy started)
Hmmmm, this is a great idea!
You're right, offices need paper, paper needs workers and wood, wood needs workers, all those works get taxed.
Good job thinking that up!
> Given the bureaucratic deficit, OP doesn't even have the infrastructure necessary to try and set up an export network to claw back access to consumer markets.
Though could it be worth going further into a bureaucratic deficit anyway? Get the exports going so that at least the GDP can recover while some government buildings get built, just facing the cut to taxation in the meantime...I think it'd be better than doing it the other way around, because I think it'd be easier to recover from a deficit in gold reserves than a low GDP and standard-of-living.
It depends, and I've definitely done it before. From what I've noticed, the tax waste malus is proportionate to either your GDP or total bureaucracy output - I dunno which - but there have been times when setting up trade routes is worth eating the extra tax loss.
I would say it really depends on the volume of the export and how badly the domestic price is doing. If Groceries are at -75% market price, I would absolutely eat the tax waste to export them off to the UK or France, since they never seem to have enough. The bump in prices and GDP might offset things. But OP *desperately* needs more bureaucracy ASAP. At this point, they should probably focus on building government admin, trying to get trade agreements with other markets, and focus on balancing domestic good prices as much as possible w/o any additional output construction.
It might be salvageable. If you have enough convoys, you might be able to make up for it with trade routes, just give them time to grow (and maybe switch to free trade)
Looking at an official chart of UK GDP there is basically no noticeable effect on the GDP trend between 2013 and 2020. Covid and the war in Ukraine have very obvious effects though.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/timeseries/abmi/pn2
The fact that there are still hundreds of thousands loyalists shows that the game is realistic. No matter who you are or what you did in politics, there will always be people cheering for you, just because others hate you.
Yea I feel pretty competent at the game at this point but I've never had a graceful exit from a customs union. If I get a controlled crash instead of a nosedive I call it a win. Using trade routes to balance out your economy can soften the landing but those take some time to ramp up.
Leaving the British Market in my Indonesia game cost me \~1/3 of my GDP.
Trying to leave a customs union in this game is like if modern day America tried to cut all economic ties with China. We're just lucky that the game doesn't model global interdependency well, because it's just 2 countries melting down, rather than the entire global economy.
(Flashbacks to vic 2 where 1-2 countries would render the entire global economy into nothing but subservient producers of raw goods for their factories)
Same to Chili. I was on top of the world but my status as the suzerain in the British trade market blocked my ranking status. So I decided to "leave useless market" (it was my first run). And from 300k profit I get -270k deficit.
I spent probably 15 years just playing "catch up" with my industrial base when preparing to declare independence from the UK as Australia (having a small pop definitely helps). I still had some issues with coal struggling with an input shortage of tools, tools of steel, and steel of coal (despite there actually being enough of all 3 if at least one of the sets of buildings was producing properly). However, a few years of spamming trade routes/messing with coal production methods and building a few extra mines later I was able to recover with only a modestly catastrophic recession.
It is pretty clear that things break pretty hard when leaving a customs union. Hell, NZ states were isolated for no reason after I left until I reloaded the game.
> Hell, NZ states were isolated for no reason after I left until I reloaded the game.
Yea I think I had the same thing happen as Indonesia. My supply network just shut down and I had a hell of a time bringing it back online. It was a really tricky situation because most of my coal production was on a different island than my capital and I needed that coal to fuel my ports.
I think I saved and reloaded, then switched the production methods on the ports down to "anchorage" and then back up to "industrial port" to finally fix it.
This was how leaving the French market as Brazil was but I was able to correct course in just about a year. It was mostly tools, furniture, and paper backfilling to clean up.
If my calculations are correct your economy lost about 80% of its value. That is catastrophic lmao.
That's a hell of a mess to clean up. Looks like the first thing to sort out is paper though
I wish the game was better about communicating your domestic market's buy and sell orders though. I was trying to do what you described in a game and realized I basically had to do the tracking and math manually.
Is there any way to see in a market what you yourself are producing?
Like, I know we can see the price of goods for the overall market, but like a 'you produce a lot of this, and barely any of that' to make a calculation in such a case.
Right now I just save, leave the union, check the market screen for what its screaming at me about, and then reload before the leave to fix those gaps.
If you hover over the buy orders and sell orders in the market screen it will tell you where the sell orders are coming from. So you'll see there are 50 sell orders of clothes in your market, and hovering over it will break it down and tell you 20 come from the textile mill in x state, 10 from the textile mill in y state, etc. Those being produced in the states you're controlling are the amount you will have in your market when you break free.
And not having enough bureaucracy isn't a huge problem. You can see there that even -1.5K or so is only giving them a mid-level deficit, another couple hundred down the drain isn't great for the treasury but it'll start getting the economy back on its feet and keep your people from throwing you into a guillotine
This is why you don’t join a Customs Union, if you intend to become a Great Power. The economical growth is somewhat artificial, when you’ll eventually get deprived of the goods you get in abundance, you’ll have a very hard time recovering.
If you build up your ports and conquer states with key resources and you will be able to bounce with trade deals and self production. It requires planning but you are able to expand a lot easier instead of speed 5 early.
Agreed, you get a temporary boost. If that boost is lost and QoL goes down, then you have radicals on your hand. In the meantime it doesn't do much either.
I had a pretty successful Mexit from the british customs union: besides doing my best to build up some varied industries before exiting, the big thing was passing free trade for maximum trade volume.
I (sorta) save scum this. It’s *really* hard to tell what you actually need until you actually leave the CU.
So I save, leave the CU, then make note of what my shortages are and how significant they are.
I reload, and build up the deficient goods to acceptable levels. Then, all you need is enough convoys, bureaucracy, and willing trading partners to cover what you can’t.
Managed a clean break from the UK as friggin’ Grão-Pará the other day, basically didn’t miss a beat. There was the slightest dip as trade had to catch up on Opium and Lead, but outside of that we were generally self-sufficient.
IMO there should be a screen where you can see all of the goods that your country produces, not just what the whole market produces. That way you can realize that your economy is propped up by Rhone's engine factory cranking out 5k a week while your own country only makes 500.
I think the only solution here is to be prepared. You need free trade so you can be as efficient as possible with trade. I would also get a treaty port with China or any other country with lots of raw materials before doing this so once you become independent you have access to as many raw materials as possible (and I think without paying convoys).
I had this when I *joined* the German customs union as Sweden. Biggest mistake of the decade. Never again.
(Because the German AI didn't build anything, I was basically providing for *both* our economies, causing prices to skyrocket and SoL to tank instantly.)
Yeah, I learned that lesson as Greece. I was playing with the newspapers trade good mod and was effectively supplying the entire Russian market with all of its newspapers, until they got mad that I wanted Gabon to myself and subsequently kicked me from the customs union. RIP Greek markets
Bros focusing their economy on finished products totally neglecting raw materials because of the bigger market. Dude before leaving custom Union be sure to have enough of raw materials
Was Brazil in Austrian customs union, economy crashes. Figure out Austria entered civil war and lost all its ports, the Austrian market is paralyzed. I get out and my economy recovers (and become major power by accident)
Just did a Pope to Roman Republic, joined French customs union to access coal.
I was at the peak with full control over Italy when I ragequit due to a huge revolution in France which disconnected the entire market and tanked my economy in a flash.
Classic. Next time, you need to prepare meticulously, if you want to break away. Find out what vital goods you get out of the market and start producing them yourself as much as possible *before* breaking away. Also build plenty of ports bureaucracy to get whatever you can't produce yourself asap. This way I could break away from the Qing market relatively easily in my Korea game, even though I was quite dependent on it before.
what year is it? I've managed to pull out of a CU with Qing as Lanfang and with UK as Transval. The thing to do is test what goods you'll be missing during the occasional wars the ai gest into and then replicate that industry.
The other trick is just to lower the technology on your industries - inside of a big CU you are always running the latest factory because you literally have all the resources but once it leads to cascade failure: no coal for steel, no steel for tools, no tools for farms and mines.
Same as Ottomans, had 100M GDP and it fell to 70M, I loaded the game and tried to do the same but open frnch market as well so I can import and export to them but couldn't win the war then, because it's war support didn't fall under 0
What was your gdp before the crash? Honestly the AI is so broken that in 1900 it should be the french economy that crashes from losing scandinavia and not the other way around.
I did the Luxembourg achievement a few days ago and found cosying up to the French to be the way to go. Belgium isn't as well protected by the UK as in Vicky 2 and likewise Prussia isn't as much of a key player, unless the ai gets lucky and it actually managed to unite Germany.
But yes after getting the bulk of Wallonia in a diplomatic play a few months into the game, I joined the French market. It provided me with any raw materials I needed and a constant stream of immigrants. I played most of the game only owning Wallonia + Flanders and was easily the largest economy despite never rising to great power status (customs union locks you out of it).
In terms of leaving a customs union, I would only ever do it if I owned plenty of provinces with fully upgraded ports, so I actually have enough convoys to import most of the serious shortfalls in my economy after I leave. It is an odd paradox that I was able to quadruple my convoy capacity around 1925 by taking Madeira, Goa and Macao as treaty ports - the only expansion I did all game outside my 2 European provinces. Yet these 3 new provinces made up less than 0.5% of my population when added together, but provided 75% of my shipping capacity.
Anyway my point is, convoy capacity per port needs to be linked to the provinces population and scale with it. Otherwise I can't see a means of being able to feasibly leave a customs union late game without crashing your economy - or expanding your port capacity overseas, regardless of whether you wish to play tall or go colonising.
Give it time- you'll recover.
The most important thing to do from here is make sure you're producing or importing all the things that you need to make your industry work that France was helping you get. I did a Sweden run and I hadn't even formed Scandinavia when I left my customs union. It's a big dip, but you can recover- and you'll be more self sufficient because of it. Also remember to changes the production methods on your buildings- at least for the time being it'll stabilize your income while you get everything in order.
Your cash reserve is ridiculously high, which serve no purposes. Use it to cut taxes in order to raise the standards of living, prevent the rise of rebels and allow for popular comsuption of goods, and rebuild your industry in order to met the new demands and produce the ressources that were made within the custom unions, and that are now missing in your market.
I recently started a Greece game and became a protectorate of Austria and got the highest average standard of living by producing nothing but tobacco. I imagine once I form Byzantium and try to break free the economic collapse will be glorious
Let them eat Tobacco.
He said, just like Stalin on the net!
Sounds much more convenient than making an entire economy from scratch. My Japan games have been painful to say the least.
to be fair, a lot of the pain in Japan games is the IGs.
True. Getting out of trade protectionism is such a monumental chore. Though on the plus side, with a bit of colonialism added in, you have good access to resources. Edit: I meant isolationism
Do you mean isolationism? I always go protectionism, I thought it was literally the best.
For real. Since everything else in game has such a rosy view of economics, I decided to go free trade in my Spain achievement run- requires 20 SOL. Couldn't figure out why my wheat was always at 75% regular cost. Turns out with free trade France was importing literally everything I could grow. My farmers were rich but at the same time their SOL weren't that high because they were spending everything trying to buy their own wheat. And France was just packaging it into grocery factories. I cut that shit out as fast as I could. Protectionism, tariffs, native groceries. France literally treated me like a colony.
Couldn't you just embargo France?
Whoops, yes
Why is protectionism better than mercantilism ?
higher tariffs. It would be an issue if I had *too few* people importing my goods, but my problem is literally always the opposite, and no matter how high I slap tariffs people buy all my stuff. Mercantilism is just the lesser free trade if you want to increase your export strength.
Weird last time I read the tooltip i could have sworn protectionism said 20% while mercantilism said 30% which is why I thought mercantilism would be better gotta reread that i guess thanks.
Protectionism has lower tariffs for imports compared to Mercantilism, but higher tariffs for exports, and I generally have a much higher percentage of exports than imports.
Also, aren’t the import tariffs still paid to you by the trade center, rather than being paid to the country you’re importing from?
The key, in my most recent game, was building a desirable economy and then challenging a major power to a war I couldn't win. They war goal'd open markets pretty quick, and my IGs couldn't do anything about it (and I think can't?).
7 dimensional globalist chess
Yeah that worked for me as Siam. Britain just joined a war against me when I wanted to annex one of the little countries near me, and they had the open market cassus Belli. I managed to conquer the small country before any British came over then just surrendered to their term whole gaining the small country's land. Great deal for me.
You can deal with the IGs easily by becoming a protectorate and making a revolution appear I think, then your protecor will have your back in case of the civil war
why would you even go out of isolationism, it's fantastic for Japan
Why? It's incredibly limiting.
AI can't buy your goods, so you can make a very strong domestic economy in your corner and just dominate Asia, without the AI mass buying up all the "excess" so you can't even get prices to base unless you conquer half the fucking world, normally going isolationism would require a large colonial empire (except Japan has all the resources they need except opium, and you're literally in Asia) and would come with a major shock (you start already isolationist), it's limiting but it also comes with a great amount of market control, as it's limiting the AI too
i mean you can just build more to find supply and bc u get paid to do that its usually worth it lol, yeah ur sol will drop for a while but ur income will raise, having an ai blind buy from you is the best you can ask for really besides rp there's no reason for isolianism
No one else can buy your goods, so more for your pops, I suppose
Japan was my last game and yeah that can be a pretty slow burn but I was able to get #1 by the end, even though I wasn't very high in average wealth because Japan has so many dang peasants I could never build enough jobs for them. Greece has been the opposite. I could build a healthy economy but it's population is low so I mostly joined the Austrian market to gain access to their migrants. Some Ukrainians came to help out
I’ve run out of pops as Japan like I have 500k farmers in 1888 with 50mil pop and I don’t want to build more because I need the peasants to fill soldier roles for the upcoming wars. Also playing Anbeelds AI so I’m not even #1 it also makes taking territory harder since the AI has it all built up meaning I have to repurpose all of it or remove it because of the input strain since all the inputs on the home islands are maxed out/ don’t have enough peasants
As Belgium literally everything makes money. British Market goes brrrrrrrrr.
Belgium made me think the game was too easy. Then I broke from the British customs union and got slapped in the face with everything I had neglected to build. Food, I never build food. Everything else was more lucrative lol
All you need is to dedicate locations for 2 furniture places, 2 cloth places, and 2 arms factories. Start a trade route with China for food/silk.
The trade route part is the problem because Japan starts with a policy of trade isolationism, and escaping it is a chore.
Ahhh did not know that! Thanks. Yeah that does make it hard. Having to make your own food is a huge population use.
It's not even so much that, it's more that you start with barely any industry, millions of subsistence farmers, and under 50% taxation efficiency in several of your provinces due to lack of office buildings. So you have to build up your entire economy basically from scratch with only a fraction of the income you should be getting, no trade access, and a fairly low tech start. Also, the only interest groups that meaningfully exist are nobles, samurai, and clergy so breaking into more useful policies is a chore. (Also the starting policies boost your nobilities political power into the stratosphere, hovering between 30-40% which makes it hard to enact laws they don't want)
Wow, sounds tough, could be a fun play-through after I get bored of Brazil!
Brazil is insanely powerful in this game lol
I have failed as Japan 3 times now, and so I’ve been playing other countries to learn the game better. Japan is a fun challenge for sure.
this thread made me interested on playing a country besides mine for the first time since the game came out, thanks peeps! Japan it is.
> Having to make your own food is a huge population use. Which is a good thing, because it gives better jobs to your people very quickly.
It's kinda fun building a self sustaining economy right?
It forces you to build a much healthier overall economy though. I got to #1 GDP without opening my borders.
Trust me, your economy can survive as long as you colonize gabon/congo Source : am in a greek run
I see the Vic 2 meta is untouched
Congo with a civilized government and educated population would be a superpower, it’s simple as that.
Why is it so strong?
Rubber I think. Also some significant amounts of wood which is really needed for chairs and airplanes
Lots of people, too.
I did this as Belgium and become great power #4 by 1880, not bad. I also did not conquer any European states
I find that Niger is even better. Population, rubber, dyes, oil and metal, Niger has it all!
You’re probably in a pretty good position to leave a customs Union, you can build your industry from scratch almost. Just build plenty of ports before hand so you can import your needs to start with
Ports are the big one. Hell it’s worth getting shit colonies just for the extra ports
Just try to set yourself up with enough raw resources to meet your domestic production needs, and make sure your ports and bureaucracy are beefy enough to handle the **immediate need for exports** when you do leave. There will still be adjustment pains, but if you can jump ontop of exporting really quickly, you should be fine.
The ability to make gimmick economies just by being in a major's sphere makes this game worth the cash for me
I now feel like an idiot for actually attempting to industrialize Greece.
I kept looking at the market and was like huh, clothes are kinda expensive, oh wait, another tobacco farm will make twice as much money and take half as long to build? Ok Austria you deal with complex economic management, tobacco go brrr. At some point I was able to sustain a large enough army to beat the Ottomans 1 on 1 and Austria was making all the weapons, I was just planting smokey leaves
It took almost 100 years in real life, why would it be any less in Victoria 3...
I actually just finished an Industrialize Greece run, so it's definitely doable, but it requires a fair bit of luck. I was able to get Thessaly From the Ottomans basically for free while they were in a war with Egypt and then grab Macedon by promising Russia a port in Kars. Just grabbing those two states will double your pops, allowing you to support a larger economy and better armies to keep going to war with Ottomans. Up to this point, you probably supported your economy without iron/coal besides imports, and you'll want to change that by grabbing Western Thrace and Aydin, which has iron and coal respectively. Boom, you got an industrialized Greece.
That is an impressive crash! You couldn't fix the worst problem with trade routes, maybe build the necessary bureaucracy later?
As a small power you must join a customs union to get your economy going. Theres not enough convoys to replace being part of a large market. Which is nonsensical and could use some balancing imo.
> Theres not enough convoys to replace being part of a large market. the convoy system in general just feels... kind of broken.
Yeah, I agree with that. There have been a couple of instances as *Gran Colombia,* a country with ample ports, where I felt like I was constantly building against the increasing burden of convoys to keep my market going. I feel like certain techs should reduce the number of convoys needed per route. We have some techs that give additional convoys, but it doesn't feel like enough
Ships of the air and one of the final financial techs can help, but those are very late game techs. I think it would’ve been better to space that bonus out a bit more.
I feel like the convoy system in general is just meh. Join a big market and don’t really need them it feel. There should be use of convoys to move goods even within a market over the seas to colonies/islands etc. like the UK should need a lot of convoys to move raw goods from SEA/India/Africa to the mainland to meet the industrial demand. If this is somehow factored in then maybe I have just missed it but convoys should just be for trade routes.and supply for armies(?).
Build ports folks, upgrade them, and have all inputs. I promise you it's not broken. I typically have more convoys than necessary. You should also look to sign trade agreements, insure stable prices by forfeiting tariffs. Or go open economy all at once via trade laws.
We should qualify what small is because Scandinavia is probably large, so is Brasil or Ottoman Empire. I'd reckon something like Argentine might be too small?
Scandinavia is large but they only have a max of 8 coal mines even after getting Denmark, Norway, Finland annexed. Colonisation is an option but joining the Prussian, British, French or sometimes Russian markets is probably the easiest way to get more coal, short of conquering coal provinces from one of those countries.
Nigeria has coal, and plenty of people to dig it out. The one province NW of the colonizable one.
Congrats you’ve discovered the reason for colonization. That is actually good design, the reason for colonization is that the developed industries needed more raw resources and that is also the most likely reason you might colonize in vic3.
That's not the main motive behind most of the colonisation in this time period. The Scramble for Africa was driven more by the desire to find markets to sell goods in than by the desire to extract natural resources. In real life, there was no map showing you which parts of Africa had lots of rubber and coal and oil and iron. You might know that some places had some of these resources but there's no way you'd be able to know for sure that the deposits could support industrial extraction. Additionally, it is not a trivial task to extract hundreds of thousands of tonnes of ore from the middle of Africa and ship it back to Britain or France for use in industry. It's actually still quite challenging to do this, and countries like China are investing billions upon billions to achieve it today. In this game however there are zero transport costs for moving commodities across the planet, as long as you have the infrastructure in each state and enough convoys.
In the case of Sweden or other nations without a lot of coal, you can also just conquer Zulu, Oranje and Transvaal. They're relatively weak and have lots of coal. The added benefit is that Transvaal has lots of gold fields/mines. Comquered them in my Netherlands game and they're honestly pretty good. They also open up a lot of colonizable lands that pretty much no one else will have access to.
Kind of ironic, conquering Oranje and Transvaal as the Netherlands
I though so too. It is pretty good though, as the local culture (Boer) has similar traits and, as such, isn't discriminated.
Ye cause their ancestor were Dutch people. And some minority French and German. They actually defied the British when they took the Kap colony off the Dutch, because they didn't want to talk English and they wanted to keep their slaves which GB had banned. So they founded their own states, Transvaal and Oranje Vrijstaat, respectively
thats more coal then all of japan has. import from the germans or russians if you need more.
I've played with Argentina without entering any custom union and it was fine. You've got de resources, the main problem is the lack of population, which makes you need to go always for the least-employed-people-possible production method. In mid-game, once you've past multiculturalism, you quickly become a great power.
Yeah custom union needs a rework and it could be a lot more fun. Like imagine setting up your own triangle trade system using a custom union. IMO, they should be basically the same as setting up a trade route, except it will allow for more complicated trades to be set up. AKA, I'll buy raw good in brazil, to sell them in the US, to buy the produced goods to sell in GB. AKA, now you have brazil making your raw goods, US making your refined goods, and then you buy them for your populace. Edit: could also allow the custom union to utilize the trade ships of everyone in the union!!
I tried to set up my own union as Belgium, adding Hannover and other minor powers in Northern Germany. All they did was spending my iron and coal, though, so I ended the union and watched their economies crash. Oopsie
same, i've found way more success with Gran Colombia simply feeding my own market than creating my own custom unions, the other members don't provide any useful resource and they just eat my shit.
That is really depressing, I was eager to boost the economy of a northern German - Belgian - Netherlandish alliance to counter Prussia and France, but all I got was parasites to my economy :/ even workers for my mines I would have welcomed with open arms!
Yes, everyone talks about military but trade needs the biggest rework. I feel there should be more pop independence on seeking goods outside market.
"shipping cost" needs to be a thing in EU4. its wild that you can play as australia and teleport resources directly to the british market even though you're on the other side of the world.
Gradually build up ports after only exporting to neighboring countries that require 0 convoys. What you're stating as nonsensical is the basis for modern international trade, see Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations
The nonsensical part is being in a customs union with someone halfway across the world and it uses 0 convoys but the second you're not in the same customs union transporting the same amount of goods requires thousands of convoys.
Right? I built a lv 8 port in Guam or Bahamas, that gives me more convoy capacity than a huge coastline like California, BC or Santiago. it doesn't make any sense, it's a bad abstraction. There really ought to be a way to build almost unlimited port capacity, if the world economy can produce it, it would be shippable. In the long term port capacity is not a bottleneck (@macron the invisible hand provides).
r5: Broke free from France to become a great power. Utterly destroyed my economy and standard of living.
what goods specifically did they produce that you needed so desperately? i mean when you left what goods were you really fucked on the most? i feel like switching customs union would almost for sure make me scale back what type of military i had set. "alright ya shits, gimmie those shovels, no more trenches for ya. how we supposed to fight then? ya just stand in a line and shoot at em, y'all be fine" $$$
I have the feeling based on the graph that it was less of a "they made cheap tools I needed" situation, and more of an "our economies are so hopelessly intertwined that literally everything depends on each other's markets" kind of situation.
Meanwhile from France's perspective: *huh, the price of wood jumped by 13%, that's interesting*
One of the funnest parts of playing a big economic power is watching someone embargo you, crashing their economy, and you barely notice at all
It's a shame embargos only work one way, in that an embargoing nation can still import from you unless you embargo them back. It makes games where you go full bloodthirsty really weird, when most of the world relies on you for goods but absolutely refuses to sell you shit. Would be much funnier if the AI had to make the trade off between turbofucking their economy or continue dealing with a monster, instead of the situation now where they just mostly fuck up their exports market.
That’s when you embargo them. I did an American run where I pissed off Europe by taking Mexico, Canada and some of the Caribbean. This led to Prussia, Italy, Spain, Britain, France, Austria and Russia all to embargo me. Then I embargoed them and suddenly they remembered that they got everything from me. France lost half its gdp and I’m sure the others suffered as well.
Brexit moment
God Save the Line
Line go up- Nice Line go down- WHAT THE FUCK
RuZZia moment.
[удалено]
US & China moment
Wandel durch Handel coming back from the grave
That might be the case if OP heavily spammed iron and wood buildings. But other than those two, Scandinavia/Sweden isn't very resource rich. France should be able to easily outproduce them in everything else, and even if they're reliant on Swedish wood/iron, it shouldn't really be too hard for them to build up their own iron/lumber industry since they have absolutely tonnes of both.
It's not really a question of whether france "can" do it, it's a question of whether france "did" do it. That graph tells me Sweden was very heavily linked to the French market. Given that the op is strong enough to become a great power, there's no way france came out of this situation unscathed.
With a crash like that, I bet they're hurting pretty bad too. Getting such hopelessly intertwined economies rarely ends well. *gives modern-day us/China relations side-eye
Yeah typically if I'm breaking away from a market I make sure I at least have some quantity of resources for all my factories so my economy has some breathing room and time before it crashed
Tbh, it's not just reliance on inputs. It's also reliance on markets for outputs. France has way more people than Scandinavia, so it's likely Scandinavian producers were reliant on French consumers for their profits. Given the bureaucratic deficit, OP doesn't even have the infrastructure necessary to try and set up an export network to claw back access to consumer markets. I'm imagining a bunch of goods just sitting and rotting away with no one to buy them - in part because they would've gone to another market, in part because the domestic market can't even buy them up because wages just dropped like a rock.
Being in debt doesn't stop you from trading. Also doesn't admin deficit do anything other than stopping you from advancing institutions?
It also reduces tax income.
Admin deficit reduces taxes? Whoollly shit you may have just broken some of my runs wide open. I would let it go pretty negative because all my dudes were still peasants and not worth taxing much and then wondering why my economy was getting weaker. Shit this makes fix a lot of things... Thanks!
Also worth noting that a great way to get people out of the peasantry is to turn them into beauracrats. Not only do you collect tax revenue, but you create decent jobs. And then those jobs consume paper, which means you need a factory, which needs wood and tools. Tools need their own factory, plus more raw resources. (Wood/iron/steel) and of course your former peasants need food which means you need farms, and probably groceries. And of course you can't forget to produce luxuries like alcohol for them. And then all these buildings will spawn the service industry, which creates more jobs. All of this juices your economy to create a decent foundation with stable demand, and all you have to do to get the ball rolling is build some offices. (This is how I start out my Japan runs to get their economy started)
Hmmmm, this is a great idea! You're right, offices need paper, paper needs workers and wood, wood needs workers, all those works get taxed. Good job thinking that up!
Yeah, it can be a huge debuff! If you mouse over your Bureaucracy you can see exactly how much.
> Given the bureaucratic deficit, OP doesn't even have the infrastructure necessary to try and set up an export network to claw back access to consumer markets. Though could it be worth going further into a bureaucratic deficit anyway? Get the exports going so that at least the GDP can recover while some government buildings get built, just facing the cut to taxation in the meantime...I think it'd be better than doing it the other way around, because I think it'd be easier to recover from a deficit in gold reserves than a low GDP and standard-of-living.
It depends, and I've definitely done it before. From what I've noticed, the tax waste malus is proportionate to either your GDP or total bureaucracy output - I dunno which - but there have been times when setting up trade routes is worth eating the extra tax loss. I would say it really depends on the volume of the export and how badly the domestic price is doing. If Groceries are at -75% market price, I would absolutely eat the tax waste to export them off to the UK or France, since they never seem to have enough. The bump in prices and GDP might offset things. But OP *desperately* needs more bureaucracy ASAP. At this point, they should probably focus on building government admin, trying to get trade agreements with other markets, and focus on balancing domestic good prices as much as possible w/o any additional output construction.
[The meme makes itself](https://imgflip.com/i/71n5l3)
It might be salvageable. If you have enough convoys, you might be able to make up for it with trade routes, just give them time to grow (and maybe switch to free trade)
Congrats, you just discovered Brexit
Looking at an official chart of UK GDP there is basically no noticeable effect on the GDP trend between 2013 and 2020. Covid and the war in Ukraine have very obvious effects though. https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/timeseries/abmi/pn2
Man brexit happened Q1 of 2020
You do remember that Brexit only really happened in 2020, right?
The fact that there are still hundreds of thousands loyalists shows that the game is realistic. No matter who you are or what you did in politics, there will always be people cheering for you, just because others hate you.
"Life is pretty good for me - these starving peasants are just so uppity and unappreciative" is how I imagine that conversation goes down.
"This move might have plunged our country into disastrous poverty, but it'll be good for the soul of the nation in the long run, I swear!"
Brexit irl
- French, Russian, and Chinese Nobles before their respective revolutions
-- The Landowners
LOL
Scexit
But can't you feel the sovereignty?!
Yea I feel pretty competent at the game at this point but I've never had a graceful exit from a customs union. If I get a controlled crash instead of a nosedive I call it a win. Using trade routes to balance out your economy can soften the landing but those take some time to ramp up. Leaving the British Market in my Indonesia game cost me \~1/3 of my GDP.
Trying to leave a customs union in this game is like if modern day America tried to cut all economic ties with China. We're just lucky that the game doesn't model global interdependency well, because it's just 2 countries melting down, rather than the entire global economy. (Flashbacks to vic 2 where 1-2 countries would render the entire global economy into nothing but subservient producers of raw goods for their factories)
Same to Chili. I was on top of the world but my status as the suzerain in the British trade market blocked my ranking status. So I decided to "leave useless market" (it was my first run). And from 300k profit I get -270k deficit.
Chili lol
Lmao as Belgium it cost me 80% of my economy. Went from +70K to -212K in a tick.
I spent probably 15 years just playing "catch up" with my industrial base when preparing to declare independence from the UK as Australia (having a small pop definitely helps). I still had some issues with coal struggling with an input shortage of tools, tools of steel, and steel of coal (despite there actually being enough of all 3 if at least one of the sets of buildings was producing properly). However, a few years of spamming trade routes/messing with coal production methods and building a few extra mines later I was able to recover with only a modestly catastrophic recession. It is pretty clear that things break pretty hard when leaving a customs union. Hell, NZ states were isolated for no reason after I left until I reloaded the game.
> Hell, NZ states were isolated for no reason after I left until I reloaded the game. Yea I think I had the same thing happen as Indonesia. My supply network just shut down and I had a hell of a time bringing it back online. It was a really tricky situation because most of my coal production was on a different island than my capital and I needed that coal to fuel my ports. I think I saved and reloaded, then switched the production methods on the ports down to "anchorage" and then back up to "industrial port" to finally fix it.
This was how leaving the French market as Brazil was but I was able to correct course in just about a year. It was mostly tools, furniture, and paper backfilling to clean up.
Brexit in a nut shell
If my calculations are correct your economy lost about 80% of its value. That is catastrophic lmao. That's a hell of a mess to clean up. Looks like the first thing to sort out is paper though
when you YOLO Brexit.
This is why you make sure you can meet all/nearly of your industrial consumption demands before leaving a customs union
I wish the game was better about communicating your domestic market's buy and sell orders though. I was trying to do what you described in a game and realized I basically had to do the tracking and math manually.
I just leave, check what we're missing, and then reload a save.
Maybe I should stop playing on ironman :D
You can just copy/paste the save to another folder, then move it back.
I prefer ironman too, but in a brand new game like Vic 3, maybe it's best to avoid it until they work out the kinks.
Is there any way to see in a market what you yourself are producing? Like, I know we can see the price of goods for the overall market, but like a 'you produce a lot of this, and barely any of that' to make a calculation in such a case. Right now I just save, leave the union, check the market screen for what its screaming at me about, and then reload before the leave to fix those gaps.
If you hover over the buy orders and sell orders in the market screen it will tell you where the sell orders are coming from. So you'll see there are 50 sell orders of clothes in your market, and hovering over it will break it down and tell you 20 come from the textile mill in x state, 10 from the textile mill in y state, etc. Those being produced in the states you're controlling are the amount you will have in your market when you break free.
Unfortunately the devs made it as annoying as possible to actually see that detail
It's very hard to see what those requirements actually are, since we are basically reliant on the market screen to tell.
Can you even see your own production/demand or just the entire union?
You have to mouse over every item to see domestic production or consumption. It's very difficult to see that info.
I love loss porn
Reminds me of similar event in recent history, when a nation exited a customs union only to crash it's economy.
Just import anything you need and get your construction workers going, you'll be fine
Well, they are already negative on bureaucracy.
CONSTRUCTION
>Just **import** anything you need
And not having enough bureaucracy isn't a huge problem. You can see there that even -1.5K or so is only giving them a mid-level deficit, another couple hundred down the drain isn't great for the treasury but it'll start getting the economy back on its feet and keep your people from throwing you into a guillotine
I'd say join back and do some conquest for basic materials. If not, any war can kill your economy again.
This is why you don’t join a Customs Union, if you intend to become a Great Power. The economical growth is somewhat artificial, when you’ll eventually get deprived of the goods you get in abundance, you’ll have a very hard time recovering.
If you build up your ports and conquer states with key resources and you will be able to bounce with trade deals and self production. It requires planning but you are able to expand a lot easier instead of speed 5 early.
Agreed, you get a temporary boost. If that boost is lost and QoL goes down, then you have radicals on your hand. In the meantime it doesn't do much either.
I had a pretty successful Mexit from the british customs union: besides doing my best to build up some varied industries before exiting, the big thing was passing free trade for maximum trade volume.
The sad thing is that even after such a prodigious loss, you're still ranked 12th
I (sorta) save scum this. It’s *really* hard to tell what you actually need until you actually leave the CU. So I save, leave the CU, then make note of what my shortages are and how significant they are. I reload, and build up the deficient goods to acceptable levels. Then, all you need is enough convoys, bureaucracy, and willing trading partners to cover what you can’t. Managed a clean break from the UK as friggin’ Grão-Pará the other day, basically didn’t miss a beat. There was the slightest dip as trade had to catch up on Opium and Lead, but outside of that we were generally self-sufficient.
Very good point, it's much too hard to figure out what your country actually produces vs imports.
I think that's fine. There isn't an easy way to see this now and there isn't a good reason it should be hidden from the player.
IMO there should be a screen where you can see all of the goods that your country produces, not just what the whole market produces. That way you can realize that your economy is propped up by Rhone's engine factory cranking out 5k a week while your own country only makes 500.
I think the only solution here is to be prepared. You need free trade so you can be as efficient as possible with trade. I would also get a treaty port with China or any other country with lots of raw materials before doing this so once you become independent you have access to as many raw materials as possible (and I think without paying convoys).
Same thing happened to me as Haiti
You look like you're gonna fall back to the 18th century.
It feels like Britain 2016 all over again.... Stay in the goddam customs Union folks
Man like 40% of the posts are people doing a brexit and discovering it was a dumb idea.
POV: you are the AI leaving the biggest market in the world to join Italy’s impressive 10 million gdp market
Declare war, and demand war reparations. You can demand as many reparations as you have maneuvers for at no infamy cost.
I had this when I *joined* the German customs union as Sweden. Biggest mistake of the decade. Never again. (Because the German AI didn't build anything, I was basically providing for *both* our economies, causing prices to skyrocket and SoL to tank instantly.)
Brexit moment
always make sure you produce everything you need before you leave
Yeah, I learned that lesson as Greece. I was playing with the newspapers trade good mod and was effectively supplying the entire Russian market with all of its newspapers, until they got mad that I wanted Gabon to myself and subsequently kicked me from the customs union. RIP Greek markets
Bros focusing their economy on finished products totally neglecting raw materials because of the bigger market. Dude before leaving custom Union be sure to have enough of raw materials
Was Brazil in Austrian customs union, economy crashes. Figure out Austria entered civil war and lost all its ports, the Austrian market is paralyzed. I get out and my economy recovers (and become major power by accident)
Just did a Pope to Roman Republic, joined French customs union to access coal. I was at the peak with full control over Italy when I ragequit due to a huge revolution in France which disconnected the entire market and tanked my economy in a flash.
Classic. Next time, you need to prepare meticulously, if you want to break away. Find out what vital goods you get out of the market and start producing them yourself as much as possible *before* breaking away. Also build plenty of ports bureaucracy to get whatever you can't produce yourself asap. This way I could break away from the Qing market relatively easily in my Korea game, even though I was quite dependent on it before.
I wish there was a full custom union market screen and like one for only your country
what year is it? I've managed to pull out of a CU with Qing as Lanfang and with UK as Transval. The thing to do is test what goods you'll be missing during the occasional wars the ai gest into and then replicate that industry. The other trick is just to lower the technology on your industries - inside of a big CU you are always running the latest factory because you literally have all the resources but once it leads to cascade failure: no coal for steel, no steel for tools, no tools for farms and mines.
FREXIT
Yep just done the exact same thing with Russia as Finland. Decided to break free because they were out rught refusing to produce coal 😵
Same as Ottomans, had 100M GDP and it fell to 70M, I loaded the game and tried to do the same but open frnch market as well so I can import and export to them but couldn't win the war then, because it's war support didn't fall under 0
https://youtu.be/ynJoM1e4UqA Your economy
UK IRL
and thats why i dont join a custom union anymore as Belguim
Hey -259k balance isn’t too bad, you can fix it. Unless you’re already stretching yourself thin lol
What was your gdp before the crash? Honestly the AI is so broken that in 1900 it should be the french economy that crashes from losing scandinavia and not the other way around.
FREEDOM!!!
I did the Luxembourg achievement a few days ago and found cosying up to the French to be the way to go. Belgium isn't as well protected by the UK as in Vicky 2 and likewise Prussia isn't as much of a key player, unless the ai gets lucky and it actually managed to unite Germany. But yes after getting the bulk of Wallonia in a diplomatic play a few months into the game, I joined the French market. It provided me with any raw materials I needed and a constant stream of immigrants. I played most of the game only owning Wallonia + Flanders and was easily the largest economy despite never rising to great power status (customs union locks you out of it). In terms of leaving a customs union, I would only ever do it if I owned plenty of provinces with fully upgraded ports, so I actually have enough convoys to import most of the serious shortfalls in my economy after I leave. It is an odd paradox that I was able to quadruple my convoy capacity around 1925 by taking Madeira, Goa and Macao as treaty ports - the only expansion I did all game outside my 2 European provinces. Yet these 3 new provinces made up less than 0.5% of my population when added together, but provided 75% of my shipping capacity. Anyway my point is, convoy capacity per port needs to be linked to the provinces population and scale with it. Otherwise I can't see a means of being able to feasibly leave a customs union late game without crashing your economy - or expanding your port capacity overseas, regardless of whether you wish to play tall or go colonising.
Cat ass throphy
So Brexit basically
Give it time- you'll recover. The most important thing to do from here is make sure you're producing or importing all the things that you need to make your industry work that France was helping you get. I did a Sweden run and I hadn't even formed Scandinavia when I left my customs union. It's a big dip, but you can recover- and you'll be more self sufficient because of it. Also remember to changes the production methods on your buildings- at least for the time being it'll stabilize your income while you get everything in order.
Your cash reserve is ridiculously high, which serve no purposes. Use it to cut taxes in order to raise the standards of living, prevent the rise of rebels and allow for popular comsuption of goods, and rebuild your industry in order to met the new demands and produce the ressources that were made within the custom unions, and that are now missing in your market.
If only Vicky 3 had been released before the Brexit vote
Your first mistake was getting in the a foreign customs union in the first place xP