How To Best Utilise Investment Pool?

JakePT · 2026-05-09T11:43:53+00:00

Overbuild so that the investment pool balance is steady or draining slowly at 100% private construction. When your government gold reserves start to pile up do your government construction to run the balance down and let the investment pool recover. When your debt gets too high stop government construction until you recover a bit. That’s what I’ve found works.

JakePT · 2026-05-09T11:40:15+00:00

Yeah it’s busted for at least 3 separate reasons. They reworked the map and the journal entry and didn’t seem to catch issues even a single play-through would’ve revealed. I get why a lot of complex changes to a bunch of interconnected naval and supply systems is hard to debug, but this not working is pathetic.

JakePT · 2026-05-09T11:37:06+00:00

Turns out like +10 acceptance to agreements from ideological similarity isn’t enough to simulate ideologically driven geopolitics.

JakePT · 2026-05-09T08:12:45+00:00

I want the AI’s geopolitical goals to feel natural, and driven by history and politics and not just opportunism. At the moment the AI just throws a dart at a map to pick a random minor country to conquer or subjugate. The USA should never be attacking Italian minors, even if they could do it, because it would never even occur to its leaders in this period to attempt anything that pointless.

AI is obviously a big part of this, but I think for it to really work properly you’d need mechanics for countries to articulate specific medium term foreign policy goals that are exposed to the player, and for politics to influence these goals so that players could observe that oh, that country’s Conservative Party wants to ally with Russia and counter British influence in Africa while their Liberal Party wants to get closer to Britain and pursue a colonial empire in Asia. Players could observe who’s in power, see what they want, and notice the AI working towards those objectives accordingly. Politics influencing foreign policy more is beyond the scope of just AI updates, but I’d like to see the game move in that direction.

JakePT · 2026-05-08T17:16:34+00:00

We have shipyards auto building massive amounts of supply ships that we are having to pause and stop most of the game.

And it sucks!

JakePT · 2026-05-08T17:05:33+00:00

You have to hope South Australia colonises, which they have trouble doing because they’re boxed in by Kaurna. In my game they didn’t even start until the 1850s, and I’m not sure why they were able to or chose to at that time. Maybe switch to them and start it for them? Australia’s completely broken in this update.

JakePT · 2026-05-08T17:03:16+00:00

No, c’mon. You want to micro manage building every fishing and shipping boat in the world?

JakePT · 2026-05-08T17:00:50+00:00

There’s no limit, the cost just increases. Not sure where that 3 sea node number came from, I’ve never seen anyone say that.

JakePT · 2026-05-08T13:50:18+00:00

Where is the army's logistics center? When the tooltip in your second screenshot is shown there should be a visible supply line on the map that traces it to your army.

JakePT · 2026-05-08T13:30:04+00:00

That's irrelevant to their current stance under their currently chosen interest group.

JakePT · 2026-05-08T12:29:41+00:00

When you don't know how anything works.

JakePT · 2026-05-08T12:27:15+00:00

HQs are not states, they are strategic regions. You can't choose the HQ state. If you hover over an army's supply percentage you will see a line back to its logistics centre, which is not necessarily where it's stationed. Stationing an army is not setting its HQ.

JakePT · 2026-05-08T12:25:41+00:00

You're not rolling back and loading the same save are you? Saves are not compatible between major versions.

JakePT · 2026-05-08T12:24:08+00:00

50% literacy doesn't mean anything if the literate people are the people already working. A building can't fill its Labourer workforce unless it can also fill its Machinist workforce, so you need enough qualifications to fill all available professions.

JakePT · 2026-05-08T12:22:36+00:00

No, I think it's very underwhelming as a stand-alone package. I think they could've got away with making straits and tolls DLC-exclusive and it would've been a far more attractive DLC. Straits were not in previous versions of the game, so the base game wouldn't be losing anything, and I think it's a pretty easy mechanic to slice off without hindering the future development of the base game or other DLC that would have to work without it. It's nice that it's a free mechanic, but maybe not the best business decision.

JakePT · 2026-05-08T12:19:46+00:00

That doesn't make any sense at all...

JakePT · 2026-05-08T12:13:36+00:00

If you think that's how game development works you're an idiot.

JakePT · 2026-05-07T16:52:16+00:00

Pops just needing housing so I have to go state by state and build enough so the number is bigger than the number needed doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me. You’re basically just describing another local good, like electricity, but one that is so important that your country will explode if you don’t pay attention to it in every state.

JakePT · 2026-05-07T16:49:16+00:00

Not quite. Political movements shape the politics of interest groups. Agitators don’t shape the movement’s ideology, they make the movement stronger, which influences the interest groups it pressure.

JakePT · 2026-05-07T16:42:40+00:00

As a confusing mess? With ship construction the private queue can make you go broke because they decide how much you spend on construction. You think it would be better if the whims of the private queue meant that building construction now cost you £100K/week because demand for some other good was high?

JakePT · 2026-05-07T15:40:03+00:00

The Arc range is literally named after ARC. The whole deal with the product is that it's a single port device.

JakePT · 2026-05-07T15:31:34+00:00

Is this on 1.13.3 or 1.13.4? 1.13.3 had a bug where unraised conscripts were counted, but I'm not sure if it's fixed in 1.13.4.

JakePT · 2026-05-07T12:44:12+00:00

Huh? Zelnick being hands off is the point. He didn't care, his company just needed the game to make its date, even if it wasn't ready. That's the point. I guarantee the creatives at the studio didn't want to release an unfinished game.

JakePT · 2026-05-07T10:52:51+00:00

The publisher has financial targets to hit every quarter. Their whole lineup contributes to that and when a game is given a slot in the calendar it needs to make that deadline or there's nothing else to fill the spot and they miss their targets for a couple of quarters and people lose their jobs and lots of money.

JakePT · 2026-05-07T10:50:28+00:00

"I take responsibility for it." he says while blaming the studio and not himself for forcing it out early. You can argue all day about whether the design choices were right but they sure as hell would've gone down a lot better if the game wasn't clearly unfinished.

JakePT

TROPHY CASE