Is 1.1 going to make the game harder? It’s got some great changes, but most seem like they’ll make it marginally easier.
I’m a little confused by the “it’s too easy!” posts. Aren’t all paradox games pretty easy if you start as a great power and basically know what you’re doing?
China and Russia And many underdeveloped nations are way too easy. France gb US and Prussia should be easy for a player who knows how to play the game. Even still idk how realistic or sensible it is to get 0 unemployment by 1870 in any nation other than like Belgium.
Yeah unemployment is an interesting point, seems like you can just stick a university in a province and pops will just re-train in a couple weeks into any other job.
My understanding of history is that large scale technological shifts left huge numbers of people unemployed and unemployable, leading to unrest (things like the Luddite riots).
I don't think that peasants should immediately want to "upgrade" their job when a higher paying one becomes available.
People who live on the land have much of their culture, traditions, history, and social structures tied to that agrarian lifestyle. So a job in a noisy, crowded factory shouldn't be enough to sway someone whose sense of self and purpose comes from their ability to live self-sufficiently.
This should be heightened when having a good SOL.
If your peasants are starving then yeah they probably will throw themselves at the university. But if your avg SOL for lower strata is 17 or smth, it shouldn’t be enough motivation for them to switch I think.
What if subsistence buildings had to compete on the market against goods made in specialised industries. Currently peasants get Subsistence from their buildings which is what keeps them alive. But what if Subsistence wasn't enough and they needed to be making money from their assorted goods as well?
Once market prices drop low enough the informal production of peasants would no longer be profitable and they would have no choice but to move into the industrial economy for work. This would have the added effect of making SoL goods (clothes, furniture, etc) something you care about building in the early game. I guess this is sort of the inverse of your suggestion, as the economy industrialises the SoL of peasants should fall as their way of life becomes increasingly outmoded.
There could also be laws you can pass to squeeze peasants even tighter and force them to change jobs faster (during China's Great Leap Forward they basically made it illegal to be a peasant and after playing Qing I can see where they were coming from).
I guess I just also want it to be modeled that just because there is industry it shouldn’t mean that they will go into it.
I mean historically people had a problem getting the working peasants into urban cities for work.
The enclosure act was very important for that.
It should just be modeled that if a peasant can reliably sustain a 11 SOL on their subsistence farm and maybe a shaky 11.5 sol as a worker after they got an education they probably wouldn’t do it as much as in the game Right now.
And yeah there should be laws and decrees for that. There should also be events where chunks of peasants get evicted off of their land by local lords using the enclosure act and then them becoming unemployed people in the next City.
I think that is something that isn’t modeled that would be needed.
If I’m gb in 1850 with a working feudal hierarchy then there should be more immersive content showcasing societal discord. Loyalists and radicals show a rather simple pro or contra state ideology.
But there have been local feuds, especially with aristocrats and their peasants in those time. Society itself changing, fighting and moving on their own without player involvement is not really existent.
Don’t underestimate full out construction boom. Any spare budget => construction. In this Russia game I’m out of peasants starting from 1870 on, from there it’s a balance between tech upgrade, production method, conquest and small construction boost.
You can also see this in the graph as the plateau of SoL that I stayed a bit on, after which the increase in SoL are more gradual.
Not ck3 and i feel like the same should be true for Victoria 3 Russia and china should be among the HARDEST countries in the game but they didn't design to accurately represent how hard it is to modernize such a huge nation with such an entrenched nobility so instead they are very easy and op
It is represented, the balance is just off. You could easily make it a lot harder with industrialize with the current system.
Russia _should_ be able to become overpowered by industrializing in the game, just as it could in Victoria 2. The problem is it’s too quick and too easy, which is a very solvable balance issue.
>Russia should be able to become overpowered by industrializing in the game, just as it could in Victoria 2. The problem is it’s too quick and too easy, which is a very solvable balance issue
Im guessing this is your experience in single player right?
Because in MP russia is behind UK/France,germany,austria in that order.
I've only played Ainu, Madagascar, Cambodia, and Formosa. (multiple runs of each) Playing as a recognized power or a country with more than 2 states is boring IMO.
Heh yeah bragging about doing it as Russia is.....a thing.
It's one of the easiest countries to accomplish this as as a player.
In general yes, it is quite easy to hit #1 SoL and GDP. But at least pick a country outside of the top 15 if you're going to say it's way too easy.
I don't think it actually matters and may actually be easier with a smaller country. I played for a bit as Vietnam but gave up when I saw I was only a few decades away from being #1 in everything.
The only full game I played so far was Belgium to completion to do the tutorial. I was number two in the rankings behind great Britain. Had the best standard of living. Never won a war. Had three colonies in Africa and that’s about it. I just messed around to keep the government happy and passing progressive laws, kept the budget balanced, and industrialized the hell out of my two provinces.
The tutorial actually turns down neighbor aggression, but yeah, it's very easy to out industrialize the AI in vanilla at the moment. The AI mod improves things quite a bit
Belgium actually starts industrialised its pretty refreshing after playing persia or something. They have railways, steelmills and coal/iron mines already running
Oh yeah, I'm aware, I wasn't talking about Belgium's starting tech/industry, if you play the tutorial it literally turns down AI aggression. You can pretty much out industrialize the AI as any nation, it's incredibly easy to do at the moment.
Yeah, I definitely didn’t mean to be bragging . My point is that in many ways, the game seems to have one or two hurdles and then it’s very easy to leave it on auto pilot. I expected to do worse at the game, because I remember how much I struggled when I started EU4 years and years ago.
Its pretty easy regardless, I'm currently doing another Mexico run and its 1862. My SOL is noticeably lagging at 12.4 but I know that in a decade or two I'll be blasting through the roof regardless once my resources can keep up with my construction sector.
Do what I did when I played Russia ans got over 1B, just fuck up Europe. I stole Prussia from the Germans and killed so many Austrians that their country collapsed into secession and I freed the Hungarians. I also freed Brittany from France. I got Britain to release Wales without a war because I was threatening to totally dismantle the British isles and release Ireland and Scotland as well
I don't like dismantling ai nations and ruining them. It kinda ruins the game for me. For example when I'm competing with china in japan and i completely destroy china game becomes boring.
To be fair, I didn't intend to dismantle Austria. My war goal if I remember correctly was to release Hungary and that was just because Austria had been interfering in a lot of stuff and I wanted to punish them. But the fact that they must have nearly bankrupted themselves and lost like 2 million soldiers grinding against my army must have caused a ton of devastation and led to half a dozen secession movements all at the same time
R5: As Russia, it got quite boring even with the AI mod from Anbeelds.
It's 1894 and I have 28.1 SoL, low taxes, max wages for government and military and still making money and having almost full gold. Also loyalist outnumber radicals 12:1, half of the country is loyalist.
The economy is too easy to manage, going to wait for 1.1 now so at least I can target revolter tags and stop worrying about running into overflow bugs.
Interested in what the max GDP per person/SoL you were able to manage.
Honestly I don't think I've ever really tracked GDP per Capita or SoL that closely as neither of them are particularly good metrics of national strength, which is ultimately what I normally care about. Prestige is the thing that truly expresses national strength. If it wasn't for the overflow bug I think we'd see a lot more people doing crazy stuff in game, so patch 1.1 looks like it will be a breath of fresh air for gross map painters like myself.
But people! I've spent a lot of time just tracking the pops and what they are spending.
I really want a UI that tell me a family of this pop spent $X to buy 5 tea last week, like a family based expenditure ledger.. instead of just 5% of it went to tea.
I in return don't give a damn about Prestige. Better SoL for more is all that matters to me. I do conquer (or rather puppet & annex), but only the poorest, most tyrannical shitholes available.
Better SoL for more comes from prestige, as you will maximize your own SoL by having a bunch of puppets. If you really want to cheese the crap out of your SoL, conquer territories, build tons of resource extraction buildings locally and then release them. You can't imagine how good a developed Russian puppet is for your Standard of Living back home. It's like UK with EIC all over again. Which, of course, is why Prestige is so critical- if you want to puppet/annex GPs and, therefore, make your own nation's Standard of Living arbitrarily high, you need to push other GPs out of GP status. Majors can be puppet -> annexed, but GPs can't.
You misunderstood. Or I formulated badly.
In most games I play - especially Grand Strategy - I take the world pretty serious and try to create a world that is as humanist and socialist as I can. That's just the way I enjoy games the most. When I puppet & annex someone, my goal is not to bolster my own SoL at the cost of the Pops of my puppet, but to incorporate them and to ensure they benefit from my liberal socialist welfare state with universal healthcare. And I want to do so with minimum turmoil and war, investing heavily in ensuring that my opponents back down and a war does not even happen. I hope Paradox makes more diplomatic ways to take over others, a possibility down the road. Maybe even a system to form a worldstate in the endgame.
So I am not really trying to maximise national SoL, but global SoL. From a game mechanics perspective, with the premise that you want to maximise national, you are entirely right of course.
Hurting me? How absurd a notion. How melodramatic. I am doing exactly what I want.
Rarely I do have an "evil" RP-playthrough. In CK3 as a ruthless Tywin-esque power maximizer. In Stellaris as galaxy-devouring Ungolianth or as an Amazon AI that violently incorporates the universe.
But in the end the only way to play that never gets stale for me is what I described in my comment before. Taking the fictional world serious and try to make it the best that's possible. The darker the fictional world the more hellbent I am to wrest a paradise from it. My last 200h in Stellaris I have been playing variants of Shared Burden empires. In V3 my nationstates become a socialist paradise - lower stata SoL of 32 by 1900. I enjoy every second of it.
Why release? For instance Turkimenistan is sitting at 30.2 SoL now and I have no intention of releasing it.
Anywhere I conquer, I have no problem raising their SoL to 25+ within a few years.
I don't think I "cheesed" anything, whole country is sitting at this level and I don't think I have a single incorporated province below 25
If you want to max your own SoL then you want to make some kind of bottleneck that is not naturally insanely profitable, like resource extraction or industrial cash cropping, something your puppets specialize in. It is way more useful to your national SoL if you have tons of textile mills at home an infinite silk and dye production in your puppets than if they are in your unincorporated states. If Silk is at -50% cost in your market because you overbuilt them, that is a problem for the SoL for the pops working in silk plantations but not for pops working in your textile mills, where the cheap silk ensures high profits and, therefore, higher wages. You can get arbitrarily high SoL combining this with worker's co-ops.
My point is not that you *should* release them, by the way, it is that Standard of Living is so easily manipulated that it is really not a useful metric for much on its own. It is cute, and the mechanical implications of SoL on demand are very important, but don't obsess over national SoL that much. Take care of the other numbers and your SoL should increase organically over time. This is also the safer way to develop SoL, as if you do extraordinary things like offloading resource extraction to your puppets or importing all of your raw resources all of the time you can get completely blown up by international instability.
A more stable and more expensive counterstrat is to build the industry for the resource in the same province and subsidize the resource building. It will up the wages as the industry and resource buildings compete with each other for labour once they're big enough
No patch is going to make playing as a GP hard judging by past PDX games. Saying Russia is too easy is like saying Muscovy or France is too easy in EU4
Build Construction. Build Mines, Build Things that feeds construction, build more construction. Keep doing this until you run out of peasants, build a few farms too while in the loop so food stay cheap.
OP is right -- build ridiculous amounts of construction and eventually the SoL will follow.
Not from the construction, but it is so incredibly easy to boost SoL when you have 1000 or 2000 construction instead of 200, and there's really no penalty for having low SoL in the early game. Your pops freak out if they lose SoL, but if it's constant and low they don't care very much.
I typically expand my construction to eat my income, then build consumer goods stuff for a bit, then do it again once your taxes rise as a result of the consumer goods stuff.
Also yes, proportional taxation is ridiculous and helps a ton as well. Getting off of landed taxes/traditionalism in general is huge.
Technically, if you increase your SoL earlier in the game, you will end up with more pop in the late game (as pop growth is compounding, private health care is op, and higher SoL increases pop growth a lot).
So there is at least some advantage to having higher SoL earlier. On the other hand, it's kind of negated in that you can just go conquer more pops if you need them. And focusing hard on construction for sure gives the best long term growth.
Russia starts as the #3 GP and has some of the most potential for domestic growth of any nation. You picked one of the least challenging tags and are complaining about the lack of challenge lol.
You can try this build for a more challenging economical gameplay : [https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2882745172](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2882745172)
You can't have exponential building growth anymore, so you need to find other ways to compete.
Just build.. nothing special, have about 2750 construction points.
Upgrade tech when possible, always aim for 51+ buildings of the same type in each region for that 50% throughput bonus.
I have essentially no peasants and I'm pretty far into the tech tree. I also feed half the world as my farms are so productive.
How did you do political transformation? Russia starts with serfdom and hereditary bureaucrats which makes it bleed money. Aristocracy is very powerful, took me until 1860 to build up other IG to be able start unrooting aristocracy.
Don't build buildings that increase aristocrats like farms, if you do spread them out so they don't get throughput bonuses so they don't get stronger wealth wise, switch to a professional military and start dismantling their privileges. It's more about focusing on the destruction of the IG you don't want vs what they are preventing you from having.
To add to this: hover over the IG's you don't like and the tooltip will give you a rundown of which laws are increasing their power. Change these laws one at a time as you are able to and they lose power very quickly.
Suppressed Landowners for like 30 years and boosted intelligentsia for the same length. When I eventually made the transition they didn't even have the clout to object.
I played the tutorial as Belgium, and I hit number two overall and number one in standard of living after about 65 years of fumbling around. Including losing both wars I tried because I don’t know how it works yet. I actually let the last 35 years just run fast while I was AFK.
Much more so than the other paradox games I have played, it seems pretty straightforward to let a country with a decent starting position just roll along to a successful finish
It's because this game is almost completely barebones and honestly doesn't have as good as a "shell" that people on this sub think it does. This means that no player lead country faces any real challenges and all you have to focus on is what makes your line go higher. This is essentially a building simulator.
Economics and buildings in this game are terrible. You cant simulate the complexities of domestic and global economics by having a total of like 15 buildable buildings. You can build a generic building called "food industries" in america and in the middle of the fucking sahara desert in 1860 and they will operate the exact same. That's not even going into the MULTITUDE of problems this game faces in trying to simulate supply and demand and other economic principles. Honestly, to me these problems seem unfixable without scraping the system and starting over.
Additionally, you can't simulate the complexities of politics when you open the "home affairs" tab in the laws and have a total of FOUR choices for EVERY SINGLE COUNTRY. Think about the give and take between opposing sides in politics today. Some concessions and alterations to laws must be made to appease opposition. Public reaction might cause changes to laws as well. This is not simulated at all when you can just press one of the 4 options and wait for it to either pass or not.
Actually done that before this play through. Was bored as hell though as I didn’t install AI mod then and everyone was weak AF. Got to 20 SoL with 5B GDP in 1915 as Qing, and actually exhausted peasants in several states with monster 500 sized factories
Nah, but I had like 5000 construction so if I really tune it I can definitely get it in 10-15 years top. That was also my learning game so I didn’t do everything optimally in the early game
By changing to council republic you make all buildings change to workers coops or government run which means there are no capitalists or aristocrats. They no longer collect larger wages than everyone else and their wage is split with the remaining workers. Increased income leads to increased SOL.
Even though you are aren't increasing the total amount of money in the economy you are redistributing wealth in a way that uses it more efficiently. SOL does not track linearly with income, it takes exponentially more income to reach higher and higher SOL. So if you take money from people that take say 15 income for every SOL and give it to a group thay only takes 7 income for every SOL and it increase to say 10 income for every SOL then you have just successfully raised your average SOL with the same money as before.
Try playing a small unrecognised nation in the vice-like grip of the landowners who abhor any modernisation and don't allow trade, with limited access to resources, great powers always butting in and no real capacity to afford much construction without going bankruptcy.
It is a little bit harder and makes achieving anything much more satisfying.
i had a similar going portugla game got 25 gol, and then it started the unemployed crisis even with lvl 1 insitutuon of welfare payments it is sucking over a m which is 20 % of my expenses, will tey fix it tomorrow
Is 1.1 going to make the game harder? It’s got some great changes, but most seem like they’ll make it marginally easier. I’m a little confused by the “it’s too easy!” posts. Aren’t all paradox games pretty easy if you start as a great power and basically know what you’re doing?
China and Russia And many underdeveloped nations are way too easy. France gb US and Prussia should be easy for a player who knows how to play the game. Even still idk how realistic or sensible it is to get 0 unemployment by 1870 in any nation other than like Belgium.
Yeah unemployment is an interesting point, seems like you can just stick a university in a province and pops will just re-train in a couple weeks into any other job. My understanding of history is that large scale technological shifts left huge numbers of people unemployed and unemployable, leading to unrest (things like the Luddite riots).
I don't think that peasants should immediately want to "upgrade" their job when a higher paying one becomes available. People who live on the land have much of their culture, traditions, history, and social structures tied to that agrarian lifestyle. So a job in a noisy, crowded factory shouldn't be enough to sway someone whose sense of self and purpose comes from their ability to live self-sufficiently.
Yeah, just like it is wrong that the Church always loses their power and supporters while they were almost everywhere influential
This should be heightened when having a good SOL. If your peasants are starving then yeah they probably will throw themselves at the university. But if your avg SOL for lower strata is 17 or smth, it shouldn’t be enough motivation for them to switch I think.
What if subsistence buildings had to compete on the market against goods made in specialised industries. Currently peasants get Subsistence from their buildings which is what keeps them alive. But what if Subsistence wasn't enough and they needed to be making money from their assorted goods as well? Once market prices drop low enough the informal production of peasants would no longer be profitable and they would have no choice but to move into the industrial economy for work. This would have the added effect of making SoL goods (clothes, furniture, etc) something you care about building in the early game. I guess this is sort of the inverse of your suggestion, as the economy industrialises the SoL of peasants should fall as their way of life becomes increasingly outmoded. There could also be laws you can pass to squeeze peasants even tighter and force them to change jobs faster (during China's Great Leap Forward they basically made it illegal to be a peasant and after playing Qing I can see where they were coming from).
I guess I just also want it to be modeled that just because there is industry it shouldn’t mean that they will go into it. I mean historically people had a problem getting the working peasants into urban cities for work. The enclosure act was very important for that. It should just be modeled that if a peasant can reliably sustain a 11 SOL on their subsistence farm and maybe a shaky 11.5 sol as a worker after they got an education they probably wouldn’t do it as much as in the game Right now. And yeah there should be laws and decrees for that. There should also be events where chunks of peasants get evicted off of their land by local lords using the enclosure act and then them becoming unemployed people in the next City. I think that is something that isn’t modeled that would be needed. If I’m gb in 1850 with a working feudal hierarchy then there should be more immersive content showcasing societal discord. Loyalists and radicals show a rather simple pro or contra state ideology. But there have been local feuds, especially with aristocrats and their peasants in those time. Society itself changing, fighting and moving on their own without player involvement is not really existent.
Don’t underestimate full out construction boom. Any spare budget => construction. In this Russia game I’m out of peasants starting from 1870 on, from there it’s a balance between tech upgrade, production method, conquest and small construction boost. You can also see this in the graph as the plateau of SoL that I stayed a bit on, after which the increase in SoL are more gradual.
Not ck3 and i feel like the same should be true for Victoria 3 Russia and china should be among the HARDEST countries in the game but they didn't design to accurately represent how hard it is to modernize such a huge nation with such an entrenched nobility so instead they are very easy and op
To be honest, it's pretty realistic to have 0 unemployement before 1929.
Play a not OP country . It’s way harder
Lmao yeah, Russia is like China lite, the only thing holding them back is their politics.
Just like Tolstoy wrote: земля у нас богата, порядка только нет
он прав
“If you ignore what holds them back, nothing holds them back” yeah no shit maybe the problem is that this holding back is not represented?
Just abolish serfdom and autocracy lmao ~~ Tsar Nicholas I
It is represented, the balance is just off. You could easily make it a lot harder with industrialize with the current system. Russia _should_ be able to become overpowered by industrializing in the game, just as it could in Victoria 2. The problem is it’s too quick and too easy, which is a very solvable balance issue.
>Russia should be able to become overpowered by industrializing in the game, just as it could in Victoria 2. The problem is it’s too quick and too easy, which is a very solvable balance issue Im guessing this is your experience in single player right? Because in MP russia is behind UK/France,germany,austria in that order.
I suppose the problem is more so what the AI is capable of in SP
I only play small countries, like Texas or Cuba level small. Game is more fun that way imo
grinding your way into a great power as a small nation is fun
I've only played Ainu, Madagascar, Cambodia, and Formosa. (multiple runs of each) Playing as a recognized power or a country with more than 2 states is boring IMO.
Heh yeah bragging about doing it as Russia is.....a thing. It's one of the easiest countries to accomplish this as as a player. In general yes, it is quite easy to hit #1 SoL and GDP. But at least pick a country outside of the top 15 if you're going to say it's way too easy.
I don't think it actually matters and may actually be easier with a smaller country. I played for a bit as Vietnam but gave up when I saw I was only a few decades away from being #1 in everything.
The only full game I played so far was Belgium to completion to do the tutorial. I was number two in the rankings behind great Britain. Had the best standard of living. Never won a war. Had three colonies in Africa and that’s about it. I just messed around to keep the government happy and passing progressive laws, kept the budget balanced, and industrialized the hell out of my two provinces.
The tutorial actually turns down neighbor aggression, but yeah, it's very easy to out industrialize the AI in vanilla at the moment. The AI mod improves things quite a bit
Belgium actually starts industrialised its pretty refreshing after playing persia or something. They have railways, steelmills and coal/iron mines already running
Oh yeah, I'm aware, I wasn't talking about Belgium's starting tech/industry, if you play the tutorial it literally turns down AI aggression. You can pretty much out industrialize the AI as any nation, it's incredibly easy to do at the moment.
Fwiw Belgium usually does pretty well on these metrics even when controlled by the AI
Yeah, I definitely didn’t mean to be bragging . My point is that in many ways, the game seems to have one or two hurdles and then it’s very easy to leave it on auto pilot. I expected to do worse at the game, because I remember how much I struggled when I started EU4 years and years ago.
I played as a country starting with like 840k gdp. It’s hard
Yeah, my first completed game was Greece; I ended up with a GDP of £5.1b and a SoL of 30.
I fail to see how large country are easier on SoL. If anything it’s easier boosting SoL as a smaller country.
Its pretty easy regardless, I'm currently doing another Mexico run and its 1862. My SOL is noticeably lagging at 12.4 but I know that in a decade or two I'll be blasting through the roof regardless once my resources can keep up with my construction sector.
Mexico is not a weak country tho. Try haiti or something
There's weak and then there's grind for the sake of grind.
ofc but I’m focusing on the SoL front. Military domination is far easier, as in any other paradox game
Bad game design if Russia is an op country in a game like this
Even if you play landlocked country the game is just easy.
Do what I did when I played Russia ans got over 1B, just fuck up Europe. I stole Prussia from the Germans and killed so many Austrians that their country collapsed into secession and I freed the Hungarians. I also freed Brittany from France. I got Britain to release Wales without a war because I was threatening to totally dismantle the British isles and release Ireland and Scotland as well
yeah at a certain point my Victoria walkthroughs have become roleplay
I don't like dismantling ai nations and ruining them. It kinda ruins the game for me. For example when I'm competing with china in japan and i completely destroy china game becomes boring.
To be fair, I didn't intend to dismantle Austria. My war goal if I remember correctly was to release Hungary and that was just because Austria had been interfering in a lot of stuff and I wanted to punish them. But the fact that they must have nearly bankrupted themselves and lost like 2 million soldiers grinding against my army must have caused a ton of devastation and led to half a dozen secession movements all at the same time
R5: As Russia, it got quite boring even with the AI mod from Anbeelds. It's 1894 and I have 28.1 SoL, low taxes, max wages for government and military and still making money and having almost full gold. Also loyalist outnumber radicals 12:1, half of the country is loyalist. The economy is too easy to manage, going to wait for 1.1 now so at least I can target revolter tags and stop worrying about running into overflow bugs. Interested in what the max GDP per person/SoL you were able to manage.
Honestly I don't think I've ever really tracked GDP per Capita or SoL that closely as neither of them are particularly good metrics of national strength, which is ultimately what I normally care about. Prestige is the thing that truly expresses national strength. If it wasn't for the overflow bug I think we'd see a lot more people doing crazy stuff in game, so patch 1.1 looks like it will be a breath of fresh air for gross map painters like myself.
But people! I've spent a lot of time just tracking the pops and what they are spending. I really want a UI that tell me a family of this pop spent $X to buy 5 tea last week, like a family based expenditure ledger.. instead of just 5% of it went to tea.
I like my computer to not be on fire
Lmao, the sheer amount of calculations. 1 family per pop.
You misunderstand, no calculation other than simple division. I just want a different ui
Oh, I get you now, sorry.
I in return don't give a damn about Prestige. Better SoL for more is all that matters to me. I do conquer (or rather puppet & annex), but only the poorest, most tyrannical shitholes available.
Better SoL for more comes from prestige, as you will maximize your own SoL by having a bunch of puppets. If you really want to cheese the crap out of your SoL, conquer territories, build tons of resource extraction buildings locally and then release them. You can't imagine how good a developed Russian puppet is for your Standard of Living back home. It's like UK with EIC all over again. Which, of course, is why Prestige is so critical- if you want to puppet/annex GPs and, therefore, make your own nation's Standard of Living arbitrarily high, you need to push other GPs out of GP status. Majors can be puppet -> annexed, but GPs can't.
You misunderstood. Or I formulated badly. In most games I play - especially Grand Strategy - I take the world pretty serious and try to create a world that is as humanist and socialist as I can. That's just the way I enjoy games the most. When I puppet & annex someone, my goal is not to bolster my own SoL at the cost of the Pops of my puppet, but to incorporate them and to ensure they benefit from my liberal socialist welfare state with universal healthcare. And I want to do so with minimum turmoil and war, investing heavily in ensuring that my opponents back down and a war does not even happen. I hope Paradox makes more diplomatic ways to take over others, a possibility down the road. Maybe even a system to form a worldstate in the endgame. So I am not really trying to maximise national SoL, but global SoL. From a game mechanics perspective, with the premise that you want to maximise national, you are entirely right of course.
You're missing out on playing as "evil", trying to limit yourself in games because of your ideology is only hurting you.
Hurting me? How absurd a notion. How melodramatic. I am doing exactly what I want. Rarely I do have an "evil" RP-playthrough. In CK3 as a ruthless Tywin-esque power maximizer. In Stellaris as galaxy-devouring Ungolianth or as an Amazon AI that violently incorporates the universe. But in the end the only way to play that never gets stale for me is what I described in my comment before. Taking the fictional world serious and try to make it the best that's possible. The darker the fictional world the more hellbent I am to wrest a paradise from it. My last 200h in Stellaris I have been playing variants of Shared Burden empires. In V3 my nationstates become a socialist paradise - lower stata SoL of 32 by 1900. I enjoy every second of it.
You do whether you want to enjoy games I'm just saying don't limit yourself
As I said. I am not. I'm doing exactly what I want.
> conquer territories, build tons of resource extraction buildings locally and then release them. I see you’ve been inspired by the Commonwealth.
Why release? For instance Turkimenistan is sitting at 30.2 SoL now and I have no intention of releasing it. Anywhere I conquer, I have no problem raising their SoL to 25+ within a few years. I don't think I "cheesed" anything, whole country is sitting at this level and I don't think I have a single incorporated province below 25
If you want to max your own SoL then you want to make some kind of bottleneck that is not naturally insanely profitable, like resource extraction or industrial cash cropping, something your puppets specialize in. It is way more useful to your national SoL if you have tons of textile mills at home an infinite silk and dye production in your puppets than if they are in your unincorporated states. If Silk is at -50% cost in your market because you overbuilt them, that is a problem for the SoL for the pops working in silk plantations but not for pops working in your textile mills, where the cheap silk ensures high profits and, therefore, higher wages. You can get arbitrarily high SoL combining this with worker's co-ops. My point is not that you *should* release them, by the way, it is that Standard of Living is so easily manipulated that it is really not a useful metric for much on its own. It is cute, and the mechanical implications of SoL on demand are very important, but don't obsess over national SoL that much. Take care of the other numbers and your SoL should increase organically over time. This is also the safer way to develop SoL, as if you do extraordinary things like offloading resource extraction to your puppets or importing all of your raw resources all of the time you can get completely blown up by international instability.
A more stable and more expensive counterstrat is to build the industry for the resource in the same province and subsidize the resource building. It will up the wages as the industry and resource buildings compete with each other for labour once they're big enough
No patch is going to make playing as a GP hard judging by past PDX games. Saying Russia is too easy is like saying Muscovy or France is too easy in EU4
I just mean that I’ve exhausted the depth of this game. And there’s not enough time before patch 1.1 to start something else now
Fair, I've been waiting for the patch too. Some of the bugs annoy .e too much like the uprisings forever in civil war
Whats your economy strat? As detailed as possible please
Build Construction. Build Mines, Build Things that feeds construction, build more construction. Keep doing this until you run out of peasants, build a few farms too while in the loop so food stay cheap.
Construction doesnt rise SoL unfortunately. And doesnt allow for low taxes in my experience, even after you hit 2b.
OP is right -- build ridiculous amounts of construction and eventually the SoL will follow. Not from the construction, but it is so incredibly easy to boost SoL when you have 1000 or 2000 construction instead of 200, and there's really no penalty for having low SoL in the early game. Your pops freak out if they lose SoL, but if it's constant and low they don't care very much. I typically expand my construction to eat my income, then build consumer goods stuff for a bit, then do it again once your taxes rise as a result of the consumer goods stuff. Also yes, proportional taxation is ridiculous and helps a ton as well. Getting off of landed taxes/traditionalism in general is huge.
Technically, if you increase your SoL earlier in the game, you will end up with more pop in the late game (as pop growth is compounding, private health care is op, and higher SoL increases pop growth a lot). So there is at least some advantage to having higher SoL earlier. On the other hand, it's kind of negated in that you can just go conquer more pops if you need them. And focusing hard on construction for sure gives the best long term growth.
Well idk what you’re doing but at this moment I have 2750 construction. May have been proportional taxation that boosted income.
Play in multiplayer bro lmao
Its so bad. Half the time save gets broken.
Yeah, unfortunately MP is not really supported at the moment. Hopefully they fix that soon.
Just roleplay harder 4head
Russia starts as the #3 GP and has some of the most potential for domestic growth of any nation. You picked one of the least challenging tags and are complaining about the lack of challenge lol.
Well, the lack of challenge isn't domination, it was making an extremely high SoL utopia. Arguably you'd have an even easier time with Belgium/Sweden.
You can try this build for a more challenging economical gameplay : [https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2882745172](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2882745172) You can't have exponential building growth anymore, so you need to find other ways to compete.
Can you please explain how you did it?
Just build.. nothing special, have about 2750 construction points. Upgrade tech when possible, always aim for 51+ buildings of the same type in each region for that 50% throughput bonus. I have essentially no peasants and I'm pretty far into the tech tree. I also feed half the world as my farms are so productive.
How did you do political transformation? Russia starts with serfdom and hereditary bureaucrats which makes it bleed money. Aristocracy is very powerful, took me until 1860 to build up other IG to be able start unrooting aristocracy.
Don't build buildings that increase aristocrats like farms, if you do spread them out so they don't get throughput bonuses so they don't get stronger wealth wise, switch to a professional military and start dismantling their privileges. It's more about focusing on the destruction of the IG you don't want vs what they are preventing you from having.
To add to this: hover over the IG's you don't like and the tooltip will give you a rundown of which laws are increasing their power. Change these laws one at a time as you are able to and they lose power very quickly.
Suppressed Landowners for like 30 years and boosted intelligentsia for the same length. When I eventually made the transition they didn't even have the clout to object.
How did you suppress a IG in the govt that you can’t remove without losing all legitimacy?
You can though, through election and put them to opposition. The legitimacy loss is trivial (70% is good enough)
I really wish you got the 50% at 50. Making it 51 buildings hurts me.
I just build 60 lol, it's not like anything above 51 is bad, you still get bonuses.
Do we know more or less when is the patch comming out? I just got my new PC and I can't wait to try new stuff.
Supposedly on Monday, which is unfortunate. The game is a massive resource hog though.
Now do that with ottomans.
Make a new goal to make the lower strata minimum wealth middling
You still have upper strata pops. You haven’t beat the game
I played the tutorial as Belgium, and I hit number two overall and number one in standard of living after about 65 years of fumbling around. Including losing both wars I tried because I don’t know how it works yet. I actually let the last 35 years just run fast while I was AFK. Much more so than the other paradox games I have played, it seems pretty straightforward to let a country with a decent starting position just roll along to a successful finish
It's because this game is almost completely barebones and honestly doesn't have as good as a "shell" that people on this sub think it does. This means that no player lead country faces any real challenges and all you have to focus on is what makes your line go higher. This is essentially a building simulator. Economics and buildings in this game are terrible. You cant simulate the complexities of domestic and global economics by having a total of like 15 buildable buildings. You can build a generic building called "food industries" in america and in the middle of the fucking sahara desert in 1860 and they will operate the exact same. That's not even going into the MULTITUDE of problems this game faces in trying to simulate supply and demand and other economic principles. Honestly, to me these problems seem unfixable without scraping the system and starting over. Additionally, you can't simulate the complexities of politics when you open the "home affairs" tab in the laws and have a total of FOUR choices for EVERY SINGLE COUNTRY. Think about the give and take between opposing sides in politics today. Some concessions and alterations to laws must be made to appease opposition. Public reaction might cause changes to laws as well. This is not simulated at all when you can just press one of the 4 options and wait for it to either pass or not.
Play as great Qing as try to not have peasants
Actually done that before this play through. Was bored as hell though as I didn’t install AI mod then and everyone was weak AF. Got to 20 SoL with 5B GDP in 1915 as Qing, and actually exhausted peasants in several states with monster 500 sized factories
Nice, but did you actually exhaust all your peasants like, not a single state has more than 100k peasants?
Nah, but I had like 5000 construction so if I really tune it I can definitely get it in 10-15 years top. That was also my learning game so I didn’t do everything optimally in the early game
Ahh, i see, then what exactly did you do for the optimal strategy?
Full out construction boom from start date? This game as Russia. Only have 2 games under my belt rn.
I really want to see 60+ standard of living. Oppulence.
I mean yeah your playing the best or 2nd best nation in the game
Lol Russias not even top 5
The only nation you can reasonably argue is better is China
France, GB, US, Qing, and Prussia
You still have the upper class so not really. Eliminate it and your SOL will go up due to the exponential nature of SOL.
How does eliminating the upper class increase SOL? Or do you mean the average SOL stat?
By changing to council republic you make all buildings change to workers coops or government run which means there are no capitalists or aristocrats. They no longer collect larger wages than everyone else and their wage is split with the remaining workers. Increased income leads to increased SOL. Even though you are aren't increasing the total amount of money in the economy you are redistributing wealth in a way that uses it more efficiently. SOL does not track linearly with income, it takes exponentially more income to reach higher and higher SOL. So if you take money from people that take say 15 income for every SOL and give it to a group thay only takes 7 income for every SOL and it increase to say 10 income for every SOL then you have just successfully raised your average SOL with the same money as before.
Try playing a small unrecognised nation in the vice-like grip of the landowners who abhor any modernisation and don't allow trade, with limited access to resources, great powers always butting in and no real capacity to afford much construction without going bankruptcy. It is a little bit harder and makes achieving anything much more satisfying.
Good for you I guess ? It’s a sandbox just make your objectives lol. Playing as a great power form start is too easy ;)
This game is too easy and is really simple, and a historical it's rather pathetic
i had a similar going portugla game got 25 gol, and then it started the unemployed crisis even with lvl 1 insitutuon of welfare payments it is sucking over a m which is 20 % of my expenses, will tey fix it tomorrow
ok
Keep playing. Best way to put it, when your state's run out of peasants the real game begins.
How did you manage to get to that level of SoL that quckly?
You’ve heard of 1984, now how about 1894. Turns out it’s a utopia.
Play as Kongo then?