How is your Victoria Game going?

[Polycrates]

I haven't played much recently and don't have the last expansion, but I thought that granted reforms (or the lack thereof) had a greater impact on immigration than the rate of taxation.

Granted reforms in American/Oceanic countries (particularly voter reforms) have a massive impact on which country a pop decides to migrate TO (once they've already decided to migrate), but I'm not sure it has any direct effect on European emigration rate - except to the extent that granting reforms reduces existing issues-based dissatisfaction, reduces mil/con, and the effects of social reforms may alleviate the causes of pop anger.
Emigration is more about getting needs, high mil/con and unemployment. And people in colonies will basically never emigrate. Worldwide migration is pretty much tiny until about 1860-1870 anyway.

I generally do all-clergy or a mix of clergy/capitalist promotion early on if I'm trying to get some factories. Administrative efficiency can be buffed cheaply via sliders early on, and I like picking up the occasional tech that boosts AE instead of encouraging bureaucrats. Only exception is if I'm the US or have other colonial regions I want to become full state.

If your literacy is low, you are going to struggle to get enough capitalists and craftsmen to make your factories worthwhile, so I'd focus on RGOs. It's generally a good idea to pick up the RGO techs, because it smooths out the world economy, greatly boosts your tax income because the RGOs will generate more goods, and the upgrades shrink the size of your RGOs, which will eventually force more people into the factories.

I totally agree with this advice

Anyway @grandad1982, because of all that, I think that unless you're a Great Power, going for increased RGO efficiency and more tax/tariffs are the way to go economically in the early game. Everyone hates on high tariffs, but if your country has most/all of the life needs goods (wool/fish/beef/wheat/fruit) then they won't annoy people that much (especially when you're boosting RGO output), and they can nicely recoup all the "excess happiness" of your aristocrats and all the government-funded workers (so you can put your sliders higher). Your artisans are screwed if they want to work with imported goods, but hey they're screwed anyway. Let them work with local goods or go work in a mine! Incidentally it seems like there's a worldwide fruit shortage in the early game in HoD so if you haven't got any (and I'm pretty sure Sweden doesn't) your pops likely won't be getting their needs met anyway. I'm not sure how quickly Sweden gets sphered, but that will kill your tariff income anyway so enjoy it while it lasts!

Likewise, tax efficiency is so low early-game (even with the tech) that it won't be having that much of an impact on unhappiness - and with low early-game mil/con that unhappiness shouldn't be translating to much emigration. So I wouldn't be afraid of brutalising your people a bit early on with maxed-out sliders, to build up a nice war chest for some infrastructure. And pissing off your farmers is a good way of getting people into factories or a uniform. Pissing off artisans is a great way of getting them into the clergy or bureaucracy.

I just don't think investing heavily in factories/capitalists is really worth the heartache in the really early game unless you're a GP - the margins are so fine, and the supply/demand are so fragile unless you've got a nice captive sphere. Better to focus on RGOs, I think (especially since Sweden is unlikely to have full RGOs?).
On the other hand, I just had a look at Sweden and holy moly, Svealand is like the perfect early-game region for factories in HoD - it has awesome synergies for throughput bonuses and it's flat enough for good early rail bonuses. I would build a furniture, glass and liquor factory there and nothing else (maybe paper, but *don't* be tempted by a lumber mill or a steel mill just yet). Turn off subsidies and hopefully the diversity will be enough that your workers can flow between them as markets wax and wane.

So yeah, I reckon early focus on clergy, max out your sliders, go Ideological Thought/Freedom of Trade/Idealism/Medicine then tax/RGO/rail tech, then factory boosters. Then start lowering taxes/tariffs (starting with rich taxes) just enough to encourage industry. With State Cap, I would be inclined to spend money on factories and let capitalists build rail rather than vice versa. I don't know how Sweden would do at this, but carving out a bit of unclaimed North Africa (I'm thinking Tunis) for some fruit could be worthwhile too.

I would also be a bit wary about trying to become a GP too early - it's a dangerous distraction from building up your economic fundamentals, but especially with the crises in HoD, you will NOT have the manpower to get dragged into the endless pissing contests over Thessalonica and Poland.

 

[civ_king]

Granted reforms in American/Oceanic countries (particularly voter reforms) have a massive impact on which country a pop decides to migrate TO (once they've already decided to migrate), but I'm not sure it has any direct effect on European emigration rate - except to the extent that granting reforms reduces existing issues-based dissatisfaction, reduces mil/con, and the effects of social reforms may alleviate the causes of pop anger.
Emigration is more about getting needs, high mil/con and unemployment. And people in colonies will basically never emigrate. Worldwide migration is pretty much tiny until about 1860-1870 anyway.



I totally agree with this advice

Anyway @grandad1982, because of all that, I think that unless you're a Great Power, going for increased RGO efficiency and more tax/tariffs are the way to go economically in the early game. Everyone hates on high tariffs, but if your country has most/all of the life needs goods (wool/fish/beef/wheat/fruit) then they won't annoy people that much (especially when you're boosting RGO output), and they can nicely recoup all the "excess happiness" of your aristocrats and all the government-funded workers (so you can put your sliders higher). Your artisans are screwed if they want to work with imported goods, but hey they're screwed anyway. Let them work with local goods or go work in a mine! Incidentally it seems like there's a worldwide fruit shortage in the early game in HoD so if you haven't got any (and I'm pretty sure Sweden doesn't) your pops likely won't be getting their needs met anyway. I'm not sure how quickly Sweden gets sphered, but that will kill your tariff income anyway so enjoy it while it lasts!

Likewise, tax efficiency is so low early-game (even with the tech) that it won't be having that much of an impact on unhappiness - and with low early-game mil/con that unhappiness shouldn't be translating to much emigration. So I wouldn't be afraid of brutalising your people a bit early on with maxed-out sliders, to build up a nice war chest for some infrastructure. And pissing off your farmers is a good way of getting people into factories or a uniform. Pissing off artisans is a great way of getting them into the clergy or bureaucracy.

I just don't think investing heavily in factories/capitalists is really worth the heartache in the really early game unless you're a GP - the margins are so fine, and the supply/demand are so fragile unless you've got a nice captive sphere. Better to focus on RGOs, I think (especially since Sweden is unlikely to have full RGOs?).
On the other hand, I just had a look at Sweden and holy moly, Svealand is like the perfect early-game region for factories in HoD - it has awesome synergies for throughput bonuses and it's flat enough for good early rail bonuses. I would build a furniture, glass and liquor factory there and nothing else (maybe paper, but *don't* be tempted by a lumber mill or a steel mill just yet). Turn off subsidies and hopefully the diversity will be enough that your workers can flow between them as markets wax and wane.

So yeah, I reckon early focus on clergy, max out your sliders, go Ideological Thought/Freedom of Trade/Idealism/Medicine then tax/RGO/rail tech, then factory boosters. Then start lowering taxes/tariffs (starting with rich taxes) just enough to encourage industry. With State Cap, I would be inclined to spend money on factories and let capitalists build rail rather than vice versa. I don't know how Sweden would do at this, but carving out a bit of unclaimed North Africa (I'm thinking Tunis) for some fruit could be worthwhile too.

I would also be a bit wary about trying to become a GP too early - it's a dangerous distraction from building up your economic fundamentals, but especially with the crises in HoD, you will NOT have the manpower to get dragged into the endless pissing contests over Thessalonica and Poland.

Building up factories in the early game can also be quite decent if you have a large internal market like UK, France, Russia, Austria, US, Spain, Ottomans...

 

[Polycrates]

Building up factories in the early game can also be quite decent if you have a large internal market like UK, France, Russia, Austria, US, Spain, Ottomans...

I dunno, even then the margins for a lot of goods are so damn thin that you can end up losing money from paying wages (assuming your factory isn't suffering the wage bug at the time) even if you're using local inputs and selling all your goods. And any little hiccup can send the whole thing spiralling into collapse. You can build such a huge amount of money with early-game taxes+tariffs instead, and use that to manually build infrastructure in preparation for industrialising properly a little further down the road. I'm not convinced that it really hurts you so much early on beyond driving militancy up a bit, at least until your army prunes it away again (plus it helps give you a nice big army too so you don't have to worry about your losses!). Plus it helps drive artisans out of their jobs so there's fewer of them to compete with your eventual factories. Once you've got some efficiency techs, sure, go for it.
And on that list, Russia and the Ottomans are in no position to be even thinking of spending their precious research points on factory tech until they've slooooowly gotten a bunch of other tech (like Biologism!).

 

[Polycrates]

Since you are playing HoD you should focus on RGOs until your first minimum wage because otherwise craftsmen get 0 money from factories (bug right now).

So now that I've seen this bug it really is making the game kind of unplayable for me. Really screws up promotion/demotion the entire world round and lord only knows the effect it's having on militancy and politics in the rest of the world. Kinda like the good old days of vanilla 1.0, where hordes of rampaging craftsmen would blanket the world in revolution because they were fudged to have needs they could never fulfil.


Anyway my verdict on Heart of Darkness is that all the new stuff is awesome, but it does just need a patch or two to fix bugs and polish things up.

The throughput synergy bonuses for factories are perhaps my favourite bit - it massively adds to the factory-building side of the game and lets you set up specialised regions, which is very very cool.

My second most-favourite bit is probably the splitting of the stockpile slider into army, navy and construction sliders (although I think army maintenance should have a minimum like the navy does). It's small but it makes maintenance run a lot smoother. On the other hand, the doubled military supply requirements in war is a nice idea for making war hurt more but it makes the demand spikes even more crazy, and industry can't really handle it.

And my third most-favourite bit is the changes to the military. Sieging speed is very dependent on the size of the besieging stack, and the presence of light recon cavalry and engineers (for forts). Artillery have to be kept in the second row with an appropriate amount of meatshield or they get slaughtered. And ticking wargoals are fantastic - if you occupy most of the region you're trying to conquer, you'll start getting positive warscore, but if you don't you start losing warscore after a while. It makes wars with the powers over minor possessions they can't hang onto much better.
The new naval system is great too, since it places a LOT of importance on the development of your naval infrastructure. Unfortunately the new pre-dreadnought battleships are a bit strong though, and make dreadnoughts themselves pretty underwhelming rather than a game-changer.

The crises are awesome, but the system needs a little work - the current system means that they pop up really often, and always over the same couple of regions (usually Ottoman Greece). So the Ottomans or Austrians have to stare down a crisis every couple of years while other regions will hardly ever have crises because they accumulate crisis points just a bit more slowly. I know the Balkans were Crisis Central, but perhaps not so frequently and not to the exclusion of everywhere else.

And the colonisation/dominion system....for some reason the powers love nothing better than colonising a region then releasing it into the People's Republic of Wherever straight away. Gives some very strange results.

And the newspapers are pretty cool at first, but they don't filter info by relevance very well - but they're a good skeleton that I can guarantee some crazy modder is going to use to make something completely brilliant.

There's a bunch of other small-but-cool things I've discovered as well, so there's definitely enough there to recommend it in a few weeks when it's been cleaned up a bit.

 

[grandad1982]

Thanks for the advice guys. I'll fire up a new game tonight and see about improving my RGOs and getting a good baseline to be ready to industrialise from rather than rushing into getting factories I can't really use straight away.

Not sure about trying to get a chunk of Africa, but I'll think about it and I'll avoid war with Denmark this time!

 

[Civ'ed]

Just a word of advice about dominions - if you release them, make sure they only occupy a state or two. You do NOT want to end up having your former colonies as rival great powers (damn you, Tanganyika Union).
EDIT: 'nother update on my cheating-as-Japan-to-learn-the-mechanics-game. It's 1927, conservatives rule in Japan, me and China vs Yunnan and Siam over the annexation of Yunnan, Germany will never form courtesy of Russia and France...
oh, and Nicaragua's a great power.

 

[Antilogic]

Thanks for the notes on emigration, Polycrates, that makes perfect sense. HoD seems to have a lot of potential too, so that's good. I'm glad they are trying to adopt the good parts of PoN. Now if only there was some basic level of military organization so that you could handle tons of attrition-avoiding small stacks more easily.

In APD, I regularly see Canada become a great power once the UK releases them. Dominions are poison unless you keep them small, otherwise they break away.

 

[Polycrates]

Thanks for the notes on emigration, Polycrates, that makes perfect sense. HoD seems to have a lot of potential too, so that's good. I'm glad they are trying to adopt the good parts of PoN. Now if only there was some basic level of military organization so that you could handle tons of attrition-avoiding small stacks more easily.

In APD, I regularly see Canada become a great power once the UK releases them. Dominions are poison unless you keep them small, otherwise they break away.

That's one of the best bits - the small stacks really aren't an issue any more. Any unit in enemy territory takes a flat minimum 2% attrition loss, even if it's below the supply cap, so there's really no advantage to them. And small units siege sooooooo slowly - you can pretty much ignore them, and they hurt the other guy much more by making their main stacks weaker. So ten 3k stacks will pretty much never take a single province, will be extremely vulnerable, and will be losing just as many men to attrition as a single 30k stack that can siege provinces at record speed.

It does seem to be more optimal now to just have one or more major stacks (depending on your country's strength), and maybe a small mounted stack with a +speed general for taking free kills.

 

[Antilogic]

That is a huge improvement over the priors. I can handle most small and medium-sized fronts, but I was getting aggravated playing as, say, Russia with a massive Western front containing dozens of 30k stacks, usually two-deep in places so the first guys can occupy while the seconds can rush up when attacked... and the unit organizer was always a damned useless mess.

Africa was even worse in terms of size of the fronts, but there were usually fewer troops so that was manageable.

 

[Polycrates]

That is a huge improvement over the priors. I can handle most small and medium-sized fronts, but I was getting aggravated playing as, say, Russia with a massive Western front containing dozens of 30k stacks, usually two-deep in places so the first guys can occupy while the seconds can rush up when attacked... and the unit organizer was always a damned useless mess.

Africa was even worse in terms of size of the fronts, but there were usually fewer troops so that was manageable.

Well I dunno about that scenario being so much better - I haven't really dabbled so much with the late game, and I tend to favour the smaller nations.
I think the combat systems are very much still built around 1870s Franco-Prussian wars etc rather than 1914ish Great Wars (which would probably be better with more of a Hearts of Iron-type system). And I don't think their combat systems have ever really scaled well to larger late-game army sizes.
I can't remember if this was in before, but an attacker's supply limit is doubled when sieging now as well - which does mean you can get away with bigger stacks on the offensive as long as you're not marching them around too much.

 

[Antilogic]

Well I dunno about that scenario being so much better - I haven't really dabbled so much with the late game, and I tend to favour the smaller nations.
I think the combat systems are very much still built around 1870s Franco-Prussian wars etc rather than 1914ish Great Wars (which would probably be better with more of a Hearts of Iron-type system). And I don't think their combat systems have ever really scaled well to larger late-game army sizes.
I can't remember if this was in before, but an attacker's supply limit is doubled when sieging now as well - which does mean you can get away with bigger stacks on the offensive as long as you're not marching them around too much.

I switched to small nations because I got tired of the huge number of stacks.

And I don't necessarily need a HoI division-corps-army-army group structure with command bonuses, etc. either (although I would love it). I just need some kind of organizer built-in to clean up my list of troops on the sidebar, or group them by front. Victoria doesn't necessarily need the command structure and bonuses but at minimum a better interface for the late-game buildup.

 

[Leonel]

Man how do you get fascist governments and the cool flags that come with them? I've been encouraging fascists in my Germany game, the voters even elected the NSDP into power but no new change.

 

[Antilogic]

Man how do you get fascist governments and the cool flags that come with them? I've been encouraging fascists in my Germany game, the voters even elected the NSDP into power but no new change.

You can still be a democracy with a fascist party in charge, the only way to become a fascist government is for the rebels to overthrow whatever government you have and form a dictatorship, or through an event where there is high enough militancy and your government is 30% (I think) fascist. You have two options: you can either peacefully convert to a fascist dictatorship or face an immediate +8 militancy amongst all fascist populations, which usually provokes a rebellion.

It takes time to build up the fascists, since they are usually the last ideology to be enabled.

 

[uat2d]

Man how do you get fascist governments and the cool flags that come with them? I've been encouraging fascists in my Germany game, the voters even elected the NSDP into power but no new change.

I'm pretty sure that the only way you can change the flag to a fascist dictatorship without a rebellion is by setting the Upper House to be ruling party only and then revoking voting rights.

 

[grandad1982]

Still Playing my Sweden game. Been going steady. No big wars, just one to take Sinai so I can get some cotton, fruit and build the Suez Canal (mainly the last one).

I want to push my cores in Russia at some point but I need some good allies first!

I finally got Denmark in my sphere after UK banning my for about a decade!

Of course this followed...

Spoiler :

 

[NBAfan]

The patch for HoD is out now, so there is no good reason not to get it now.

 

[Lohrenswald]

The patch for HoD is out now, so there is no good reason not to get it now.

20 Euros...

 

[grandad1982]

Well the beta patch is out. Not quite the same thing as the "final product".

 

[Polycrates]

This is quite some patch!

- Fixed problem in factories economy, where factories were never paying $ to pops even though they were doing a profit and got tons of money saved.

Oh hell yes

Some other highlights:

- Fixed an issue with union tags being releasable as dominions (now requires most of the cores as well as other safeguards)
- Added 20% influence bonus if target is neighboring someone already in your sphere (but not directly bordering)
- Investing in guard posts now cost +10 per level which should lead to shorter races
- Improved alerts for colonization
- Congo provinces added to generic rubber event
- Less potato blight
- Fix for bad math in determining crisis backers (Russia backing Ottomans!)
- Ai no longer releases half colonies like melonstralia
- Added comet sighted option

 

[grandad1982]

I hope improved alerts for colonising also means that if I click on the colony icon in the top bar then it will take me to the colony in question. It's very annoying to keep ending up in the diplomacy screen!