Economy & internal policy Events

Using my holidays to re-evaluate the ideas provided by Zerli, I came to the conclusion that we will do several things differently, especially in regard to Industrialisation. His original idea was to industrialise your country in 20 small steps by researching a tech and thus improve your available IC from the basic-IC.
While this is a good idea in its roots, I think it doesn´t go deep enough to model the problems faced by many countries in the World when dealing with Industrialisation. Often enough, they were not able to industrialise in 20 years even as they tried (Great Leap Forward?) or wanted (Economies in Africa?) - even India has not been growing as much as it is today for the previous 50 years of independence.

So, we have to take a much more detailed look on why some countries did sucessfully industrialise and others failed.
I don´t know yet which exact ingredients to put in here, but some rough ideas are: Government Corruption, Civil stability, Confidence (necessary for investment), Social structure, potential ressources, technology - amongst others I still have to think of.

So, you will not be able to industrialise with high Government Corruption, entangled in a Civil war with people who are looking to survive the next day rather than the next week.

If you meet the requirements, you might get a nice event though, which will give you the next tech-level. Yes, the technology will be kept as a basic idea, as it is easy to look at and a good overview of how far you have industrialized yet. And especially when using smaller steps, it is much better than country-modifiers in my opinion.

Probably this increase in difficulty for industrialising will mean a reduction of steps, as you will spend most of the time setting the stage before you get any visible effect in form of a new step towards industrialism.
Right now, my plans are to reduce the number of steps to 9 or 10:
Avaibale IC: 10% - 20% - 25% - 30% - 40% - 50% - 60% - 70% - 80 %
Furthermore, I thought, which percentage could fit which industrial "stage".
My ideas are for now:
-Nomadic (10%) - Tribal Societies in Sub-Saharan Africa, Arabia, Mongolia ; just enough IC to field some Cav
-Agricultural (25%) - most parts of the economy agricultural, only basic manufacturing & trade
-Manufacturing (30%) - Ancient / Medieval economic structure, basic manufacturing & more specialized economy
-Proto-Industrial (40%) - 16th & 17th century-style economy, with workshops, manufactures & early mechanisation
-Semi-Industrial (60%) - still dependent upon agriculture, but with substential industrial production
-Industrial (80%) - modern, developed, very specialized industrial economy

The economic growth & recession cycles will only apply if you have an industry developed enough (right now I´m aiming at Semi-Industrial level) to be substentially influenced by this...
This idea is logical AND of practical value, as I got spammed with test-events to check wether the cycle gets initialised properly - and I though why Afghanistan or Bolivia should be affected by this, as they are not really industrialised?

Good Idea? Bad idea? Too complicated?

As long as you can just keep it all together, it sounds good and simulates the way economies differ from one another.

Okay, I just spend some 2 hours transfering a small scetch as a visualisation of the model that I drew by hand on a piece of paper into a picture on the PC to share with you.
Here is the result:



Unfortunately, it was my first attempt to use the program, so it is not as perfect as my hand-drawing, but I hope you nevertheless get the point.

Some notes:
-Green boxes are laws, as you could easily guess
-red boxes are modifiers or variables that have to be scripted
-blue boxes (dark blue) are events or decisions
-light blue boxes are basic game mechanisms.
-white boxes with question-marks are to be discussed in regard to the model & their implementation


So, let me explain a little bit on the new things I introduced and the old things that are now brought into theoretical connection & order.

We start with the part left on top:
-Corruption, Stability, Social Structure

I put them up as exogenous (=outside the model) variables for now, I will have to make up my mind on how these will be influenced during the game and tied to other mechanisms.
They will influence the industrialisation-variable (or rather, technology) and will probably be tied into the political system which is still in its early development. Don´t expect to get any good economic development into motion with widespread corruption, bad stability or a very rigid societal structure.

Corruption is kind of self-explaining and the logic behind that is also visible. It is common knowledge that government corruption is one of the major problems for countries in Africa but also in South America and also Asian countries. Nevertheless, it is the weakest of the three I chose as essentials, as even India & China are so corrupt today that some businessman say, corrupting officials is the only way to make business there (at least this was the case in India)

I decided that Stability, a basic concept of Eu and also CK, has some importance for economy & development as well. It will not necessarily a modifier ranging from -3 to 3, but I will implement the basic idea behind it: An abstraction for the political & societal stability in your country, the confidence of your people in regards to the future. This one is obviously important as confidence & stability go hand in had - if the stability is low, there is usually less confidence and people tend to spend & especialy invest less, which leads to economic slowdown.
(Note: it is not depicted in the picture, but stability will also increase growth/recession-tendencies)

The third factor for industrialisation is societal structure. Looking into history, this one is probably THE most important socio-economic factor why some countries emerged and some remained backwards. It will include different kinds of societies, I will have to research somewhat deeper into this and am very happy about any help provided here.
Until then, it remains a somewhat undefined component, justified by the facts that nomadic societies never developed sophisticated industrial structures, that oligarchic/hierarchical societies with very unequal wealth-distribution fared worse in overall comparison than those with a free middle class, more equal wealth distribution and more social mobility. But all this remainds shady for now, until I focus my view on this.


I already talked about the other components prior to this post, thus I hope a small summary will do it for now:
Base IC relates to GDP, total available IC to GDP for defence purpose. I don´t know yet, but I will probably get rid of the consumer-goods branch by reducing it to 0.00 need and instead increasing supply-drain of troops.
Your set of laws influence how much of your GDP is used for military purpose, how much taxes you collect and how much money you spend for welfare.
Furtermore, you can set a CB-insterest-rate that might influence the country modifier for economic cycles with a slight chance in either direction. The country modifier is furthermore influenced by the industrial level (only semi-industrial or better have to cope with that), taxation, welfare spending, stimulus packs that are issued as decisions and global trade activity.

Global trade is supra-national (as it says - global) and will influence your development according to your foreign trade-dependence. To keep things simple, there is no distinction between import & export, only foreign dependence, as reduction in global trade is never good for a highly trade-dependent economy. Foreign dependence will be influenced by your trade-restriction laws and some amount of luck for now, and it will influence global trade activity regarding your base-IC - the bigger your economy, the more it will function as international "locomotive" or the negative counter-example.

And, to finish our "small" comprehension of the economy-model here, we have the growth & recession-events, appearing according to the state of your economy as depicted by the respective modifiers. They will influence base-IC (your GDP) and also unemployment, an important variable that will be ported into the political system.

----------------------

Short Political system outlook:

As I said, unemployment is one of the keys here. It will influence stability (being also one of the important variables for industrialisation) as high unemployment leads to unrest in a country, the fear of unemployment makes people spend less and so on. Furthermore it will increase dissent.
Stability will also influence your party-popularity and probably also organization-values. With decreasing stability, your country-politics will radicalize (just look into some news for current examples)

That is what I have noted until now. The question is, how will corruption, social structure be influenced and what other possibilites are there to influence stability?
What other factors apply in the political field, that can be put in as -systematic- influences? Everything else, without a direct cause-effect-relation have to be simulated with more or less random events.

I´d be glad about some help here and some more elaborate comments, suggestions and critique on the economic part, to bring some discussion up here that might lead to new ideas.

Black Guardian wrote:We start with the part left on top:
-Corruption, Stability, Social Structure

I put them up as exogenous (=outside the model) variables for now, I will have to make up my mind on how these will be influenced during the game and tied to other mechanisms. They will influence the industrialisation-variable (or rather, technology) and will probably be tied into the political system which is still in its early development. Don´t expect to get any good economic development into motion with widespread corruption, bad stability or a very rigid societal structure...

The question is, how will corruption, social structure be influenced and what other possibilites are there to influence stability?
What other factors apply in the political field, that can be put in as -systematic- influences? Everything else, without a direct cause-effect-relation have to be simulated with more or less random events.

The first idea I had while pondering the relation of these three elements with the rest of the system and politics was a kind of triad they form in relation to one another. Social Structure is certainly linked to Corruption since it represents the cultural values and current status quo. But changing Social Structure on purpose by a reformist or even revolutionary political means tends to have drastic effects on Stability - and destabilized societies are always at risk of getting caught in rampart Corruption. The vicious Third World cycle of one party after another rising up to "fight corruption" and merely putting new figures on top of the society to benefit from it can be implemented rather easily - and once stability drops enough a civil war is more than likely outcome.

Black Guardian wrote:Corruption is kind of self-explaining and the logic behind that is also visible. It is common knowledge that government corruption is one of the major problems for countries in Africa but also in South America and also Asian countries. Nevertheless, it is the weakest of the three I chose as essentials, as even India & China are so corrupt today that some businessman say, corrupting officials is the only way to make business there (at least this was the case in India)

Corruption tends to be slow to take hold, but also really difficult and time-consuming to get rid off once it has established itself within a society. The Russian government is still riddled with corruption that took hold on Soviet society decades earlier. In general, high levels of corruption should not only gnaw resources away from the economy, but also cause occasional corruption scandals where ministers of the government are forced to resign, thus leading to loss of Stability and increased demand for change - for single-party dictatorships this effect should be considerably lower and slower, but internal reforms and anti-corruption campaigns would have much less effect as well.

Black Guardian wrote:I decided that Stability, a basic concept of Eu and also CK, has some importance for economy & development as well. It will not necessarily a modifier ranging from -3 to 3, but I will implement the basic idea behind it: An abstraction for the political & societal stability in your country, the confidence of your people in regards to the future. This one is obviously important as confidence & stability go hand in had - if the stability is low, there is usually less confidence and people tend to spend & especialy invest less, which leads to economic slowdown.
(Note: it is not depicted in the picture, but stability will also increase growth/recession-tendencies)

Stability and demand for political reform should go hand in hand - additionally I think that certain levels of stability would be necessary for implementing certain policies. Thus low Stability would not be universally bad thing since it allows a radical reformist party to do some fundamental changes - in addition to historical revolutions think the way Dèng Xiǎopíng was able to change the economical and political course of PRC after decades of internal turmoil had almost brought the country to the brink of a new civil war, or how the stagnation of Brezhnev era created the conditions for reformer like Gorbachev rose to power within USSR.

Black Guardian wrote:The third factor for industrialisation is societal structure. Looking into history, this one is probably THE most important socio-economic factor why some countries emerged and some remained backwards. It will include different kinds of societies, I will have to research somewhat deeper into this and am very happy about any help provided here.

Until then, it remains a somewhat undefined component, justified by the facts that nomadic societies never developed sophisticated industrial structures, that oligarchic/hierarchical societies with very unequal wealth-distribution fared worse in overall comparison than those with a free middle class, more equal wealth distribution and more social mobility. But all this remainds shady for now, until I focus my view on this.

Hmm, this is indeed a category where we´ll have to carefully consider the level of detail we want to implement. I´ll definitively provide more thoughts about it later on.

Black Guardian wrote:I already talked about the other components prior to this post, thus I hope a small summary will do it for now:
Base IC relates to GDP, total available IC to GDP for defence purpose. I don´t know yet, but I will probably get rid of the consumer-goods branch by reducing it to 0.00 need and instead increasing supply-drain of troops. Your set of laws influence how much of your GDP is used for military purpose, how much taxes you collect and how much money you spend for welfare. Furtermore, you can set a CB-insterest-rate that might influence the country modifier for economic cycles with a slight chance in either direction. The country modifier is furthermore influenced by the industrial level (only semi-industrial or better have to cope with that), taxation, welfare spending, stimulus packs that are issued as decisions and global trade activity.

And thus a superpower with planned economy led by a stagnated and corrupted bureaucratic dictatorship might be able to churn out more T-54:s than anyone else and still lose the arms race in the long run due economic reasons. I really hope we can make this work like envisioned, since it´s such a great idea and ideal for simulating the realities of Cold War era.

Black Guardian wrote:Global trade is supra-national (as it says - global) and will influence your development according to your foreign trade-dependence. To keep things simple, there is no distinction between import & export, only foreign dependence, as reduction in global trade is never good for a highly trade-dependent economy. Foreign dependence will be influenced by your trade-restriction laws and some amount of luck for now, and it will influence global trade activity regarding your base-IC - the bigger your economy, the more it will function as international "locomotive" or the negative counter-example. And, to finish our "small" comprehension of the economy-model here, we have the growth & recession-events, appearing according to the state of your economy as depicted by the respective modifiers. They will influence base-IC (your GDP) and also unemployment, an important variable that will be ported into the political system.

Nothing new to add, I´m as exited about this as before

Black Guardian wrote:As I said, unemployment is one of the keys here. It will influence stability (being also one of the important variables for industrialization) as high unemployment leads to unrest in a country, the fear of unemployment makes people spend less and so on. Furthermore it will increase dissent. Stability will also influence your party-popularity and probably also organization-values. With decreasing stability, your country-politics will radicalize (just look into some news for current examples)

I think that we can create a system where politics are the main way the player tries to affect Corruption, Stability and even Social Structure and they in turn dictate the limits where the policy of a single country have to operate. Once all other pieces are in place, reassigning the minister traits according to the new will be a logical and necessary next step.

Well, thank you for your input, some of it was really helpful and enlightening, especially regarding the first issues.

For now, I have some serious technical issues. I tried to install Patch 1.4 to mod on the latest version, but something is pretty wrong now with my game, as it simply crashed some days after start, when an event was supposed to happen (HoI3.exe has detected a problem... you know). To sort out what it was, I just completed a new Mod-folder to only implement the economy-stuff without other Fatherland-features that might produce errors.

Nevertheless, it didn´t help me, so I decided to start completely from scratch, only implementing the changed modifiers and an event to activate it (even without the changed laws), but nevertheless, it crashed either the day the event happened or some days afterwards.

That´s especially odd as it does NOT crash when playing without the modded files.

Validator says there is some error with my localisation-folder (using the latest validator-version, it has some fatal error when trying to check localization)

Here is the code I changed:

Code:


(/common/event_modifiers.txt)

growth = {
   global_leadership_modifier = -0.05
   global_manpower_modifier = -0.05
}

recession = {
   global_leadership_modifier = 0.05
   global_manpower_modifier = 0.05
}
depression = {
   global_leadership_modifier = 0.08
   global_manpower_modifier = 0.10
}

Code:


(/events/economy.txt)
country_event = {

   id = 15000

   trigger = {
      not = { has_country_modifier = growth }
      total_ic = 50
      
   }

   mean_time_to_happen =  {
      days = 10

      modifier = {
         factor = 0.5
         IC = 90
      }
   }

   title = "Growth modifier set"
   desc = "Sucessfully initialized"
   picture = "politics1"

   option = {
      name = "Good"      
      add_country_modifier = {
         name = "growth"
         duration = -1
      }
   }
}


The events happen for other countries.
I tried it using Britain (always crashed) and France (crashed some days after the event, maybe when britain got it?!)

But why shouldn´t it work for Britain then, I cannot see what I did wrong?

I even tried to install Patch 1.4 again (without deinstalling HoI itself, though) - but the same things did work with 1.3
Maybe there is really something wrong with my vanilla-localization-folder? Maybe it was not installed correctly, though I tried 2 times? The thing is, I don´t want to completely re-install the game itself, as I´d have to download it again then, which seems like a waste of time and bandwidth if there is another explanation... Any idea?

Black Guardian wrote:Well, thank you for your input, some of it was really helpful and enlightening, especially regarding the first issues.

For now, I have some serious technical issues. I tried to install Patch 1.4 to mod on the latest version, but something is pretty wrong now with my game, as it simply crashed some days after start, when an event was supposed to happen (HoI3.exe has detected a problem... you know). To sort out what it was, I just completed a new Mod-folder to only implement the economy-stuff without other Fatherland-features that might produce errors.

Nevertheless, it didn´t help me, so I decided to start completely from scratch, only implementing the changed modifiers and an event to activate it (even without the changed laws), but nevertheless, it crashed either the day the event happened or some days afterwards.

That´s especially odd as it does NOT crash when playing without the modded files.

Validator says there is some error with my localisation-folder (using the latest validator-version, it has some fatal error when trying to check localization)

Here is the code I changed:

Code:


(/common/event_modifiers.txt)

growth = {
   global_leadership_modifier = -0.05
   global_manpower_modifier = -0.05
}

recession = {
   global_leadership_modifier = 0.05
   global_manpower_modifier = 0.05
}
depression = {
   global_leadership_modifier = 0.08
   global_manpower_modifier = 0.10
}

Code:


(/events/economy.txt)
country_event = {

   id = 15000

   trigger = {
      not = { has_country_modifier = growth }
      total_ic = 50
      
   }

   mean_time_to_happen =  {
      days = 10

      modifier = {
         factor = 0.5
         IC = 90
      }
   }

   title = "Growth modifier set"
   desc = "Sucessfully initialized"
   picture = "politics1"

   option = {
      name = "Good"      
      add_country_modifier = {
         name = "growth"
         duration = -1
      }
   }
}


The events happen for other countries.
I tried it using Britain (always crashed) and France (crashed some days after the event, maybe when britain got it?!)

But why shouldn´t it work for Britain then, I cannot see what I did wrong?

I even tried to install Patch 1.4 again (without deinstalling HoI itself, though) - but the same things did work with 1.3
Maybe there is really something wrong with my vanilla-localization-folder? Maybe it was not installed correctly, though I tried 2 times? The thing is, I don´t want to completely re-install the game itself, as I´d have to download it again then, which seems like a waste of time and bandwidth if there is another explanation... Any idea?

Hmm, I´ll have to take a look at it tommorrow. Could you send me the modified localization-file so I could check whether my vanilla 1.4-install crashes while using it?

Just tested it with Britain and it did crash on 6th of January - but before that the 'Growth modifier set'-event succesfully fired for USA, Japan, Germany and Italy.
Hmm, have you tried to change the description and default picture of the event, it seems like the cause of the problem could be found from there?

Praise me, I found the error!

Though it was quite an obvious one if you look at it from the hindsight, that could have been detected earlier: 1.4 has introduced a set of new events that give some modifiers (volunteer surge, economic boost) - and if the game does not find the according modifiers because you simply copied your modified 1.3. file where these don´t exist, it will crash. Simple as that.

Heureka
Maybe I will use some of the free time I got between learning and stuff during the next week, to do some stuff.



Edit: So, with some Motivation by this breakthrough, I tested what to do with the percentages and the mobilization levels. The problem that soon arose is, that HoI 3 does first sum up all boni and mali and then applies the summarized bonus/malus on the base IC. Furthermore, the trigger "total_IC =" does only check for the modified final IC and not for the base IC. This means, checking for this means in our interpretation that only military production is checked, not the total GDP or something alike.

So, I must find a way to combine two ADDITIVE elements ((industrial level + military spending) *base IC) in a way that best represents a multiplicative calculation (base IC*Industrial Level modifier*Mil. Spending).
I made a table in my excel-sheet to look which modifier would originally result (ind. lvl * mil.Spending) and I will probaby try to find suitable additive values for the Industrial countries, as these are the ones that will dominate the game. The non-industrial are of second importance here, though I try to consider them as well.

I will let you know what came out of my experiments.


Edit 2 :

Back to the tools that paradox has already given us. I will use Consumer-goods to absorb the IC that is not mobilized. Maybe "private sector" would fit more here, but this is only naming. It is not the best way to represent this with a slider, but we have to deal with that as abstraction. At least, this solves the problem mentioned above, as CG is a percentage-value based upon the modified IC, and thus, exactly what we need.

Now, any suggestions which spending-level should be allowed depending on things like government (especially totalitarian), threat, or other factors (which?)?

Black Guardian wrote:Praise me, I found the error!

Praise, once again!

Black Guardian wrote:Back to the tools that paradox has already given us. I will use Consumer-goods to absorb the IC that is not mobilized. Maybe "private sector" would fit more here, but this is only naming. It is not the best way to represent this with a slider, but we have to deal with that as abstraction. At least, this solves the problem mentioned above, as CG is a percentage-value based upon the modified IC, and thus, exactly what we need.

Now, any suggestions which spending-level should be allowed depending on things like government (especially totalitarian), threat, or other factors (which?)?

Hmm, I quess we could start from checking historical Cold War-era spending levels and making rough comparisons in-game once we realize what exactly does the Consumer goods represent in this modified economy model?

Using "private sector" would be otherwise be more fitting name for this slider but how to deal with (almost) fully planned economy countries like the Soviet Union?

Karelian wrote:

Black Guardian wrote:Praise me, I found the error!

Praise, once again!

Black Guardian wrote:Back to the tools that paradox has already given us. I will use Consumer-goods to absorb the IC that is not mobilized. Maybe "private sector" would fit more here, but this is only naming. It is not the best way to represent this with a slider, but we have to deal with that as abstraction. At least, this solves the problem mentioned above, as CG is a percentage-value based upon the modified IC, and thus, exactly what we need.

Now, any suggestions which spending-level should be allowed depending on things like government (especially totalitarian), threat, or other factors (which?)?

Hmm, I quess we could start from checking historical Cold War-era spending levels and making rough comparisons in-game once we realize what exactly does the Consumer goods represent in this modified economy model?

Using "private sector" would be otherwise be more fitting name for this slider but how to deal with (almost) fully planned economy countries like the Soviet Union?

You could also simply call it "civil sector" or "civil industry" - this might be better than "private" for ideological reasons. It´s basically the share of Industry not mobilized for military purposes.
The "problem" is that Reserves add to the consumer-goods as well, so they increase the share of civil sector-economy required, so it always depends on the level of divisions in reserve how many actual military spending you have, not only on the law. But this is a minor issue. And maybe, one day, I´ll also find the variable that determines this ^^
Until then, I lowered the nominal CG-modifier from the law a little bit to give some kind of buffer-zone for this reserve-issue.

Black Guardian wrote:You could also simply call it "civil sector" or "civil industry" - this might be better than "private" for ideological reasons. It´s basically the share of Industry not mobilized for military purposes. The "problem" is that Reserves add to the consumer-goods as well, so they increase the share of civil sector-economy required, so it always depends on the level of divisions in reserve how many actual military spending you have, not only on the law. But this is a minor issue. And maybe, one day, I´ll also find the variable that determines this ^^
Until then, I lowered the nominal CG-modifier from the law a little bit to give some kind of buffer-zone for this reserve-issue.

Civil sector seems nice in my (non-native English speaker) eyes. And considering the earlier question about spending levels and their relation to government type, threat and other factors I find the idea of simulating arms race through in-game mechanics by linking threat levels to military spending quite interesting. So that once Germany starts to rearm and starts to gain threat that allows France and Britain to speed up their own rearmament, or in post-WWII situation where Soviet Union does not demobilize in the same extent as the rest of the world, starting to cause threat in the US, making to raise their military spending as a reaction.

Then again it is most likely not feasible in practice, I should study the game mechanics of threat a bit more.

I just aquired the table with Madisons GDP-data that floated around on the paradox-forum recently. This means, I have now access to the figures and can present you some example-calculations:
For now, with pre-war-years to keep it simple

Germany 1938

• base IC: 342
  
• modified: 273

(by industrialisation factor (80%)

Military spending (~15% in 1938*)

• -with average spending: 54,6 IC in non-civil spending
  
• -with medium spending: 68,25 IC in non-civil spending
  

*this translates, depending on the divisions in reserve, to "average" or "medium" military spending law (medium is the more likely candidate, but I´ll make this dependant on balancing-issues)


Japan 1938

• base IC: 176
  
• modified: 140

(by industrialisation factor (80%)

Military spending (~20-30% in 1938)

• -> high spending: 49 IC in non-civil spending
  

China 1938
(taking the IC for whole China, so, including the warlords & Comm.Chi)

• base IC: 288
  
• modified: 86,4

(by industrialisation factor (30%)

Military spending (?!% in 1938**)

• -> maximum spending: 47,5 IC in non-civil spending
  

**I´m assuming here that China mobilizes everything it has to defend against the Japanese, which is hopefully not far away from the reality



Apart from this, I am currently thinking about how to revamp the industry-techtree to fit the new requirements. For now I´m quite sure that industrialisation-techs will not only drastically improve IC-modifiers, but also ressource-modifiers, as industrial machinery will be used for mechanized extraction.
So, I´m not quite sure about wether to keep these extraction-technology technoloy (but only available for at least semi-industrial economies) or to throw them abort completely.

Second, I´ll have a look what to do with IC-building. Enabling it for central-planning countries would be a cool feature, but even better would be the ability to modifiy the building-cost (preferably by LAW, event or modifier) so that price depending on your economic system law. (from affordable for central-planning to impossibly expensive to build for free market)

Third, Infrastructure will only be available for countries that are at least semi-industrial as well. My preferred solution would be a Victoria-like approach to enable different max-infra according to tech, but as this way is not eligible, I´ll simply abstract this, so that non-industrialized countries (NICs) will not be able to build it. An alternative approach could be to simply make it more expensive, as NICs will have less available IC anyway.
The reason for this is also simple: You will not build railways or sophisticated streets on your own if you don´t have the required industrial basis in your country. Everything else will be handled by foreign investment, if we ever get that far

Then, of course, the Industrial-production & efficiency-branch will disappear as well, as we will model more sophisticated ways of production simply by increasing the base IC (alas GDP) via the growth-events.

The question is what should happen with the agriculture-techs?
And of course, as stated above, wether the ressource-techs should remain?



And, as a final idea: Thinking about Chinese industrialisation, I considered that Chinas eastern coast was (and is) much more industrialised than the rural areas. Especially if single cities, but not considerable areas of a countrie is industrialised, I thought it could be nice to represent this by some kind of modifier, for example: "[Minor/Evolving/Major] industrial cities/centres" or something alike, that would slightly increase your IC-modifier(1-2%) depending on their level. Just as an idea for immersion and to give the player a feeling of the very gradual pace of industrialisation in his country.

Black Guardian wrote:
Apart from this, I am currently thinking about how to revamp the industry-techtree to fit the new requirements. For now I´m quite sure that industrialisation-techs will not only drastically improve IC-modifiers, but also ressource-modifiers, as industrial machinery will be used for mechanized extraction.
So, I´m not quite sure about wether to keep these extraction-technology technoloy (but only available for at least semi-industrial economies) or to throw them abort completely.

Adding them together gives us the ability to focus the industrial research elsewhere - resource bonuses could be gained through theories, as developing engineering discplines lead to applications that allow better resource extraction and refinement.

Black Guardian wrote:Second, I´ll have a look what to do with IC-building. Enabling it for central-planning countries would be a cool feature, but even better would be the ability to modifiy the building-cost (preferably by LAW, event or modifier) so that price depending on your economic system law. (from affordable for central-planning to impossibly expensive to build for free market)

I had a few ideas for this while reading your posts from the realistic economy-thread:http://www.europa-universalis.com/forum/showpost.php?p=8856266&postcount=57
The IC building restriction you proposed here sounds good. As for wartime economic mobilization, we should further underline the importance and difficulties involved in setting the economy for wartime setting. The current way of "war = instant total mobilization and loads of IC" is definitively not the way to go. How about adding economic mobilization as a step-by-step decision chain, linked to war exhaustion and neutrality? As an example, France was initially preparing to achieve full war production and economic mobilization only by 1941.

The way we could approach this could be by decision-event-law-chain. Here is an example of what I mean:
1. Hitler occupies Czechoslovakia after Münich, and France begins to prepare for war by making a decision for limited economic mobilization to react to German threat.
2. After a certain period of time an event fires to indicate that preparations for limited economic mobilization have taken place, and France can enact new law that affects things like maximum resource stockpiles, leadership and unit prizes.
3. France now has the option to enact decision to increase her economic mobilization based on enemy threat and her military spending laws - mobilization requires money and resources, after all.
4. The decision once again takes a certain time to implement the necessary changes in civilian economy, then a new event fires and France can increase her economic mobilization even further - and the process can once again take the next step.

Thus there would not be magical one-night mobilizations but instead gradual processes where the free market economies are slowly adjusting themselves for wartime footing. While planned economies like Soviet Union are relatively faster to implement such changes, fully mobilized industrialized Western economies will eventually reach same levels of military industrial production while churning out more profits in the process as well.

While the player should have some chances to speed up this process, enacting harsh national mobilization emergency laws and walking over the rights of private businesses should be close to a political suicide - and without strong national consensus, politically polarized countries like France will be really hard-pressed to effectively mobilize their economies in time in any case.

Black Guardian wrote:Third, Infrastructure will only be available for countries that are at least semi-industrial as well. My preferred solution would be a Victoria-like approach to enable different max-infra according to tech, but as this way is not eligible, I´ll simply abstract this, so that non-industrialized countries (NICs) will not be able to build it. An alternative approach could be to simply make it more expensive, as NICs will have less available IC anyway. The reason for this is also simple: You will not build railways or sophisticated streets on your own if you don´t have the required industrial basis in your country. Everything else will be handled by foreign investment

A maximum gap value would be quite ideal solution, but since I envision that such an approach might not be feasible, we could go by either increased prize approach or by adding so much construction time that building autobahns is simply not feasible. Thus even almost fully agrarian economies could achieve feats like Burma Road.

Black Guardian wrote:Then, of course, the Industrial-production & efficiency-branch will disappear as well, as we will model more sophisticated ways of production simply by increasing the base IC (alas GDP) via the growth-events. The question is what should happen with the agriculture-techs? And of course, as stated above, wether the resource-techs should remain?

I think this is another spot where we can give more meaning to theory techs by linking these effects at least partially to them?

Black Guardian wrote:And, as a final idea: Thinking about Chinese industrialisation, I considered that Chinas eastern coast was (and is) much more industrialised than the rural areas. Especially if single cities, but not considerable areas of a countrie is industrialised, I thought it could be nice to represent this by some kind of modifier, for example: "[Minor/Evolving/Major] industrial cities/centres" or something alike, that would slightly increase your IC-modifier(1-2%) depending on their level. Just as an idea for immersion and to give the player a feeling of the very gradual pace of industrialisation in his country.

These spot-type developments are really typical for Thirld World - while outskirts of the capitol might host a few modern foreign-build factories, the countryside still lives in traditional agrarian lifestyle without notable infrastructure.

Karelian wrote:
Adding them together gives us the ability to focus the industrial research elsewhere - resource bonuses could be gained through theories, as developing engineering discplines lead to applications that allow better resource extraction and refinement.

Good idea, that´s a nice way to strengthen this field again.

Karelian wrote:
The IC building restriction you proposed here sounds good. As for wartime economic mobilization, we should further underline the importance and difficulties involved in setting the economy for wartime setting. The current way of "war = instant total mobilization and loads of IC" is definitively not the way to go. How about adding economic mobilization as a step-by-step decision chain, linked to war exhaustion and neutrality? As an example, France was initially preparing to achieve full war production and economic mobilization only by 1941.

The way we could approach this could be by decision-event-law-chain. Here is an example of what I mean:
1. Hitler occupies Czechoslovakia after Münich, and France begins to prepare for war by making a decision for limited economic mobilization to react to German threat.
2. After a certain period of time an event fires to indicate that preparations for limited economic mobilization have taken place, and France can enact new law that affects things like maximum resource stockpiles, leadership and unit prizes.
3. France now has the option to enact decision to increase her economic mobilization based on enemy threat and her military spending laws - mobilization requires money and resources, after all.
4. The decision once again takes a certain time to implement the necessary changes in civilian economy, then a new event fires and France can increase her economic mobilization even further - and the process can once again take the next step.

Thus there would not be magical one-night mobilizations but instead gradual processes where the free market economies are slowly adjusting themselves for wartime footing. While planned economies like Soviet Union are relatively faster to implement such changes, fully mobilized industrialized Western economies will eventually reach same levels of military industrial production while churning out more profits in the process as well.

While the player should have some chances to speed up this process, enacting harsh national mobilization emergency laws and walking over the rights of private businesses should be close to a political suicide - and without strong national consensus, politically polarized countries like France will be really hard-pressed to effectively mobilize their economies in time in any case.

The "problem" with this part is, that war mobilization is - according to the contemporary approach I was taking - modelled completely by military spending, which means that military spending can impossibly be a requirement for mobilization, as it is the value affecting mobilization. Or do you think that we should keep a separated economic mobilization law?

But apart from that, I think this step-by-step approach is feasible and good, as it is more realistic and also adds flavour. In this case I even like the idea of using decisions instead of only implementing it via law-requirements.

Karelian wrote:
A maximum gap value would be quite ideal solution, but since I envision that such an approach might not be feasible, we could go by either increased prize approach or by adding so much construction time that building autobahns is simply not feasible. Thus even almost fully agrarian economies could achieve feats like Burma Road.

I just looked into the code... The question is, to what extend we want to mod this. It MIGHT be possible to add another building, as the Infra-code is the following:

Code:

infra = {
   on_completion = construction_practical
   completion_size = 0.13
   infrastructure = 0.1
   onmap = no
   cost = 1
   time = 365
   max_level = 10
}

Adding another one and changing the old one:

Code:

infra = {
   on_completion = construction_practical
   completion_size = 0.13
   infrastructure = 0.1
   onmap = no
   cost = 0.4  #requires less IC to build, because not mechanised
   time = 600  #takes substentially longer to build
   max_level = 5
}

Code:

industrial_infra = {
   on_completion = construction_practical
   completion_size = 0.13
   infrastructure = 0.1
   onmap = no
   cost = 3    #a lot more expensive in industrial terms
   time = 270  #much faster to build
   max_level = 5
}

So, up to level 5 you can build conventional road-networks, river transportation, canals, etc.
But to reach level 10 you must also build industrial infra, which means railroad-networks, streets, etc.

The question is wether this will work - and wether we are willing to mod all provinces that at have more than 5 infra



Finally, regarding theory-techs and industrial efficiency, I don´t think this is a good idea, as industrial efficiency is in our terms the extend of industrial production vs. agricultural production. Increasing the industrial efficiency even further would then reduce the proportion of agricultural production, which should only take place very gradually. So, maybe we can talk about 0.5-1% per tech-level, but it should not add up to more than 5-10% as reaching a degree of more than 80% industrial production did not happen in the war- or postwar years (not up until the 80s or 90s, I guess, though I don´t have numbers at hand)


Edit:

Again, one step forward:

Black Guardian wrote:The "problem" with this part is, that war mobilization is - according to the contemporary approach I was taking - modelled completely by military spending, which means that military spending can impossibly be a requirement for mobilization, as it is the value affecting mobilization. Or do you think that we should keep a separated economic mobilization law?
But apart from that, I think this step-by-step approach is feasible and good, as it is more realistic and also adds flavour. In this case I even like the idea of using decisions instead of only implementing it via law-requirements.

Heck, I didin´t honestly think that one through and wholly consider what you wrote earlier. Even though economic mobilization in wartime and military spending are two different things, dropping it off would simplify things and keep us from creating overly complex model. Your call, really, so far I´m just dropping ideas here

Black Guardian wrote:
The question is wether this will work - and wether we are willing to mod all provinces that at have more than 5 infra

The effect on gameplay vs. the amount of work this would require makes this a rather easy decision, even though knowing that the option to add railroads exist is an interesting observation.

Black Guardian wrote:Finally, regarding theory-techs and industrial efficiency, I don´t think this is a good idea, as industrial efficiency is in our terms the extend of industrial production vs. agricultural production. Increasing the industrial efficiency even further would then reduce the proportion of agricultural production, which should only take place very gradually. So, maybe we can talk about 0.5-1% per tech-level, but it should not add up to more than 5-10% as reaching a degree of more than 80% industrial production did not happen in the war- or postwar years (not up until the 80s or 90s, I guess, though I don´t have numbers at hand)

Then it´s better to axe them fully, making theory tech pre-requirements is fully enough to give them importance anyway.

Great work with tech editing.

Karelian wrote:
Heck, I didin´t honestly think that one through and wholly consider what you wrote earlier. Even though economic mobilization in wartime and military spending are two different things, dropping it off would simplify things and keep us from creating overly complex model. Your call, really, so far I´m just dropping ideas here

That´s again a simplification for our needs. Another idea regarding the mobilisation-thing was, to represent greater economic mobilisation by giving a modifier for FULL economic mobilisation that increases ic-to-supply efficiency, so that
a) you produce more supplies with less IC (representing all the women in the ammo-factories
b) you can redirect the IC to producing other military material (representing all the women in the tank-factories xD)

Furthermore this modifier could also further lower CG-need and thus free up more for the military sector... but this might be one thing that we need to think of...

Karelian wrote:
Great work with tech editing.

Now the more annoying part needs to be done: Making lists of which country belongs to which sector and adding the starting-techs >.<

Black Guardian wrote:
Now the more annoying part needs to be done: Making lists of which country belongs to which sector and adding the starting-techs >.<

Hmm, the least I could do would be to sort out the countries in starting scenario - although adding the actual starting techs should not be much of problem, I´ve done it once with land doctrines already.

The problems that arise are, that we sooner or later have to implement the new base IC, which is done via provinces. So, if we want to prevent doing stuff twice (though it might be interesting to release a vanilla version of the economy mod) with vanilla AND magrathea, we need a bug-free version of magrathea that actually works without killing off all events or alike.

Furthermore, due to the nature of the industrialisation-levels, we have to split major colonial areas (India, Indonesia, colonial Africa) and make them puppets of their colonial owner, so that they can have the respectively lower industrialisation-level.
But splitting these countries of is also done in the province-files.

So, there is a decision to be made: Doing things twice and creating a mod for vanilla, which will later be merged with magrathea when ready, or waiting for a clean version of magrathea?
Or doing things on the basis of the standart-ic-figures, which leads to massive imbalances and makes testing harder than nessecary, but enables us to test some standart-mechanisms?


Maybe we should make another attempt first, trying wether it is really magrathea that causes some of our problems?

Black Guardian wrote:So, there is a decision to be made: Doing things twice and creating a mod for vanilla, which will later be merged with magrathea when ready, or waiting for a clean version of magrathea? Or doing things on the basis of the standart-ic-figures, which leads to massive imbalances and makes testing harder than nessecary, but enables us to test some standart-mechanisms?

Maybe we should make another attempt first, trying wether it is really magrathea that causes some of our problems?

Hmm, I´d go with a limited test with standard IC first to get in touch with the basic mechanics of the modded system.

Just in case you don´t do it on a regular basis without being remembered: check your emails, something nice is hiding in your inbox

Nah, just been a busy weekend at work. Check your email as well.

yeah, once again a proof why it is always good to have your personal historian in the "team"
Now, on to the next small step: One set of starting techniques for every industrial level...
And then, on to adding it to the country files.

Black Guardian wrote:Now, on to the next small step: One set of starting techniques for every industrial level...
And then, on to adding it to the country files.

Hopefully everything goes well. A week from now we can start adjusting this stuff to Semper Fi

Industrial levels have been implemented into the country files and the first edition of the growth-event has been written. (triggering according to the size of the economy in market-systems that are more than semi-ind. for now)
Rudimentary testing with old IC values have delivered the following growth pattern:

(3 IC per event):

-Panama (Feb 36) [very interesting to see such a small country grow first, but thats the way randomness works ^^]
-USA (Feb 36) [much more of what I expected to happen]
-Greece (Feb 36)
-USA (June 36) [again]
-Japan (July 36)
-Mexico (Oct 36)
-Czechoslovakia (Dec 36)

Total IC-Growth in the world 1936: 21 IC

-USA (Jan 37)
-Latvia (Jan 37)
-Netherlands (Feb 37)
-USA (Feb 37)
-Luxemburg (April 37)
-Japan (April 37)
-Czechoslovakia (April 37)
-Greece (May 37)
-Switzerland (June 37)
-Poland (June 37)
-USA (Aug. 37)
-S. Africa (Aug. 37)
-Lithuana (Sept. 37)
-England (Oct. 37) [about time, growth here was quite low, only 2,5% in 1,8 years - though it only has 160 base IC]
-Canada (Oct. 37)

Total Growth 1937: 45 IC

Numbers will increase once I start adjusting the base-IC upwards for all countries and include things like interest rate into a modifier. Then, the growth-event is essentially done and I can do the recession-event...

Seems reasonable so far.
I´ll provide the earlierly promised list of theory techs during the next week when I finally have some time to spare once again.

Started experimenting with new IC-numbers, as the basic mechanism for growth seems to work, but brings no good feeling of what it will be like when more IC is in game.
So, starting off with Belgium, Holland, Scandinavia, I chose Japan as the first major.
Including Korea and Taiwan it has now 210 base IC, 170 of which available industrially, but is has to spend 75% of it to consumer goods / civil sector:





37 IC are from Taiwan and Korea, actually, Japan has "only" 170 base IC...

Ooooooh this thread is awesome

General Baker wrote:Ooooooh this thread is awesome

I know

I have done all european countries except England yesterday (Germany, France, Scandinavia, Iberia, Italy, Eastern Europa & Balkan, Turkey, and all of the small countries in Europe that were not finished before)

First test run with France (192 IC due to the colonies that are not yet split from the mainland and contribute with their "full" IC (80% and not agricultural level which it should be in Africa & Indochina)) under growth conditions brought the following results:

Slow growth in 1936, only gaining 3 additional base IC (1.5% in comparison to previous year) despite good policy I chose. One Banking Crisis in Colombia (August) which didn´t went too bad as only some minor banks collapsed, 2 currency crisis (Estonia & Czechoslovakia) during March and April bringing these countries into recession.

In 1937 France then grew substentially, adding 8 IC (from 195 to 203) which means 4.1% of growth.

The recession in Czechoslovakia would yield the following results (until 1937 and without any stabilization as nothing was scripted here yet) -2 IC within 1936 (-4.5% in comparison to their 37 starting IC) and -1 IC within 1937, which means anoter -3%

Note that this is quite random, as we can see on the Estonian example:
1 IC economic GROWTH in 1936 despite recession-modifier (I don´t know the exact Estonian starting IC, but I suspect it is around 5, which means huge growth)
In 1937 they had exactly 0 growth (1 IC added, another removed), so, overall, they didn´t fare too bad in their recession in the first two years.

Next step after bringing the other countries to their new IC-level will be unemployment modifiers and the return from recession/depression to growth.

Good stuff ^^

If theres anything I can help out with - despite my low modding knowledge - I'd be glad to help

Looking good through the way. If you need statistics or playtesting, I´d be both glad to help and will also have time to spare since my summer vacation started recently.

Now that all the easy work is done, the extensive part begins. Adding IC to USA, India, China and Russia is not fun. Though Russia is not even the problem here...

+500-600 IC for USA
+200 for China
+200 for India

and everything with bare hands...

Any volunteers to help me adding this to the files?

Black Guardian wrote:Now that all the easy work is done, the extensive part begins. Adding IC to USA, India, China and Russia is not fun. Though Russia is not even the problem here...

+500-600 IC for USA
+200 for China
+200 for India

and everything with bare hands...

Any volunteers to help me adding this to the files?

Hand goes up o|

Would you mind doing USA (at least parts of it)?

I´m currently working on India.
If you arent sure were to put all the IC, have a look into an atlas and look for an economy-map
Economic Mapmode Ingame will help you to find the provinces.

A small manual how to do it:

copy the history/provinces/usa folder from your HoI3 directory. And, just to be on the safe side, back up the entire folder once again.

Then start your HoI3, look ingame where to add IC (=GDP) and search for the name of the provinces in the usa-folder you just copied into a place you like it most.
Then open the province-file as soon as the search has been completed, add (or modify, if already existent) the line

Code:

industry = X

and save the province file.
Repeat over and over again with all provinces you want to add or change IC.

If you want to check your progress ingame, copy the folder with the modified files back into your HoI3/history/provinces and integrate your new files by replacing the old (thats why you should back it up before)

Then start your 1936 game.

If you have 800 IC REASONABLY PLACED (not 10 IC in the deserts of Nevada, please) you can compress the folder into a .rar / .zip / whatever and send it over to me.

Feel free to post progress reports or ask questions if things are not clear.
And don´t worry about the lack of ressources yet.

sure!

I'll work on that all today :3

Black Guardian wrote:Now that all the easy work is done, the extensive part begins...Any volunteers to help me adding this to the files?

As stated above, just send me the files and we can divide the tasks.
Some useful maps:
China:
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/china_ind_1971.jpg
India:
http://www.intercont.com/E_Ex_7/india-map_1.jpg
Global historical GDP rates statistics by country:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_gdp-economy-gdp&date=1960

India, the economic superpower of the future... if it wasn´t all-out Agriculture.

Karelian, you can do more useful stuff by researching and speculating a bit. Though I am doing this for the 1936 setup with historical data, the same will be due sooner or later with the 1946-scenario, this time with Magrathea for our mod. Right now the economy-stuff is a separate mod but as we will integrate it sooner or later (apart from the vanilla-release that I might consider), we need some GDP-estimations for the 1946 start. It is 10 years later, but with massive destruction due to the war in some areas. So, if you could do a similar list as I send you once (Country Industrialisation - the one with base IC and industrial status) with updated Data for 1946.

[And by the way, I think I´ll also implement events that will remove IC (=GDP) in wartime, either as many bombardments occur or with enemies approaching and combat ongoing... But I´ll see how it turns out ]

I´ll handle China alone and the other minors are insignificant - and as the USA is already done, not much is left over.

And if you are finished with that, you can look for unemployment rates in the major countries in 1936
You don´t need to be too exact, just sort them into the classifications:

Code:

full employment   0-3 %
low unemployment   3-5%
medium unemployment   5-7%
High unemployment   7-15%
Very high unemployment   15-25%
Horrendous unemployment   25-50%


e_e Finding economic stats is harder than I first expected

General Baker wrote:e_e Finding economic stats is harder than I first expected

Don´t be too exact. Usually, I look on my map in the atlas where the huge cities are, especially the industrial ones, and give them numbers according to what I think it okay. Usually the surrounding provinces also get some IC, though less.

For example: Birmingham gets 10 IC as a huge industrial center in middle england, while the surrounding provinces depending on the size of the cities get some 3-5 IC
Big cities get more IC in general, but also mining areas...

So, to take the US as an example, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Pittsburgh, Buffalo and so on would all be industrial cities with 7-10 IC in my opinion, with the surrounding provinces having 3-6 IC, depending on their industrial concentration.
Smaller towns, of course, get smaller IC-numbers, usually 3-5 for a major city (with 5 being already an industrial center of smaller scale)

Thats my method

You are a wise man

Who can find the interesting thing in this screeni?