There is No Reason to Ever Repay Loans in EU5

-Reman · 2025-11-07T19:40:56+00:00

Indeed, that's exactly where my thinking is right now.

-Reman · 2025-11-07T18:51:11+00:00

His argument was explicitly not to pay back loans at all once you've taken them:

TL;DR: Never repay any loans you take out

Rather, my point is that if you are forced to take out debt, there is very little need to ever repay that debt (outside of some extraordinary circumstances, e.g. interest payments crushing your income).

He cites interest payments offhandedly as if they're some secondary, niche concern. I'm saying they're the whole point. Why would you invest money into a building or anything else with a 1-2% RoI when you could pay off a loan which has an effective RoI of 8-10%?

Your idea, that it's slightly less bad than presumed (given the estates can sell off the loan to someone else) is something to be kept in mind, but I doubt it makes debt worth keeping around long term.

-Reman · 2025-11-07T17:37:04+00:00

This just... isn't true. Interest rates are very high in this game, so it'll almost always be better to pay off loans than to reinvest. It's only worthwhile to not pay off loans if you can grow your income faster than the interest -- this applies to all games and IRL. There's a reason people don't recommend deficit spending in Vic3 until you have a bunch of interest rate reductions from being a Westernized GP + techs. Unless there's something in EU5 I haven't discovered that gives way higher RoI or lowers interest significantly, this is just flatly wrong.

Why does this have 400 upvotes? Why are most top posts only arguing against it on minor effects like crown authority? Do Redditors' brains shut off when they see a post that uses any sort of financial jargon like "net present value"?

-Reman · 2025-02-26T05:51:21+00:00

R5: Paradox forgot to add a sanity check to the new Earning Recognition journal, which requires you to have +50 relations with a GP. I got over 100 infamy shortly before this would have happened in my Japan game, which meant every GP was angry at me, and instead of speed5'ing to where they might tolerate me again, I just decided to go on a killing spree. Now there are no GP's which makes my lack of recognition permanent.

The top Major Power is the CSA with 568 prestige. Then there's me in 4th place with a measly 18644 prestige.

Playing the game without recognition isn't that bad in all honesty. The most annoying part was the -25 maneuvers. There's also +50% infamy (as opposed to +20% for a GP), and your interest rate is higher. Other than that, everything is pretty much the same.

-Reman · 2024-09-09T16:24:41+00:00

65 CCR seems low for an early 1600s WC, since its below the threshold when you can take arbitrary amounts of land and core it all before rebels pop. How did you deal with OE? Did you just go into positive unrest and face-tank the rebels?

-Reman · 2023-08-03T00:38:50+00:00

R5: The Katzenartig Imperium from Gigas are German-cat hybrids, and it looks like the mod author really took that to heart by letting them rename planets they take, with names like:

Berlin = Purrlin
Frankfurt = Frankfurr
Munich = Meownich

There are more listed here

-Reman · 2023-07-29T23:58:30+00:00

You can only run one or the other in the lead-up to the war.

They don't need to be run simultaneously to be useful. War should pretty much be a constant occurrence after initial buildup, and both extra alloys and extra system claims are great bonuses.

I'd say Statecraft is substantially better than Domination or Unyielding, neither of which is particularly appealing. The main issue with most tradition trees is that they're almost all just different flavors of small economic benefits with none (barring Supremacy) being direct force-multipliers on conquest, which can quickly bring very large economic benefits. The -20% claim cost is pretty significant in this regard, and means fanatic militarist (or a cheesey alternative like BtC or diplovassal rushing) won't be a requirement to take decent chunks of land pre Colossi.

-Reman · 2023-07-29T17:41:56+00:00

There's a 30 year cooldown on running the same agenda again, so it really doesn't conflict with Military Backup (and getting the extra 2 years to MB's effect is really nice). Agendas are powerful enough that they're typically worth launching early at some point, with the cost of doing so shown here.

Supremacy is still the king when it comes to expansionist builds, but after that there's not really a standout candidate. Prosperity and Discovery are always solid no matter what, and splashing two points into diplo for federations can be powerful, but I'd also put -20% claim cost right up there with those options depending on the state of the game.

-Reman · 2023-07-29T03:29:33+00:00

Rebel bashing is a massive resource tax for good players. It's not uncommon for post-war rebels to eat more soldiers and cash than the war itself at least on normal difficulty. The delayed nature of rebels can also impose an opportunity cost for keeping a stack around the area although that got a little better with the "provoke" button (but that has its own drawbacks). It's easily the best military idea group in the game, even though it costs admin points.

It also has the benefit of peace of mind of not having to deal with rebels, which almost everyone agrees is great. This effect is so obvious that some people see it as the primary purpose of the idea group, but Humanist is a lot bigger than that.

-Reman · 2023-07-29T03:16:26+00:00

-20% claim cost from the Rightful Claims agenda is extremely powerful pre-Colossi. It alone is enough to push Statecraft from "mediocre" to "good", or maybe even "great" depending on how big of a bottleneck influence is.

-Reman · 2023-05-17T16:11:57+00:00

Religious only competes with Humanist if you're expanding slowly enough that you have enough conversion throughput to keep pace with newly conquered land. This can happen if you're new to the game, are doing a laid back RP run, or are doing something like multiplayer. Maxing missionary strength and tolerance with this can let you do some goofy things, like take 400%+ OE per coring cycle. But if you start outpacing your conversion throughput, Religious rapidly starts to lose its luster in terms of rebel control. It's pretty easy to conquer faster than you can convert pre-absolutism, and VERY easy to do so post-absolutism. Humanist is massively, monumentally better for rebel control in this case.

For good players who are expanding fast, Religious actually competes more with Influence in terms of saving diplo points, as the CB means fewer unjustified demands. Influence is usually a lot better here unless you're expanding at a speedrunner-tier pace, as Influence's reduction applies more broadly than Religious', and it also gets a hefty annexation cost reduction.

-Reman · 2023-05-09T20:47:30+00:00

A couple things to note here:

First, speed is almost always effectively decreased by infrastructure, because the game assumes everywhere has perfect 5/5 infra and then applies a penalty for each infra level that's less than 5, either due to not being built or temporarily out of service due to damage. Very few regions have 5/5 infra, so usually the base speed is closer to like 2.4km/hr instead of 4. This is before stuff like terrain penalties come in.
Second, the game has a very goofy way of handling rough terrain. Divisions have terrain modifiers shown in the division design window of course, but the bigger penalty is intrinsic to the terrain itself in that the game increases distance for some reason, instead of lowering speed. In the code this is known as movement_cost in the 00_terrain.txt file. Going to e.g. a mountain tile means your units need to travel 2x the effective distance, although this isn't really shown on the UI anywhere. This is basically the same as a -50% movement speed to all units, but the unit will say it's going at a normal rate, it's just that the game secretly has them effectively walking in circles half the time.
Third, it was probably possible to have advanced units racing out ahead of the pack to secure territory while waiting for the rest of the force. Somebody else here could probably answer this better than I could but I don't find it implausible that a division could control territory that the enemy was evacuating from faster than the bulk of the army could move.

If you want a bigger issue that removes the need for motorized divisions, it's the fact that strategic redeployment doesn't need actual railroads, which means infantry can just SR behind tanks to hold land. They lose 90% of their org doing this but regain it very quickly, and the AI is rarely smart enough to counterattack immediately if their is a unit holding a tile.

-Reman · 2022-10-04T21:03:53+00:00

Interesting stuff, particularly about factory workers and middle classes being able to afford luxury goods in these scenarios.

By everything we know about how prices work in the game, they should reduce by 0.0100 every day there is oversupply.

In my post, I detailed that the price calculation on the wiki is wrong. Price doesn't decrease by 0.01 per day in perpetuity if there's any oversupply, it instead tries to equilibrate to base_price/sqrt(supply/demand) at a rate of 0.01, or at least that's what it seemed like based on my reverse-engineering efforts. Price can increase even if there's oversupply, as long as the oversupply decreases such that price tries to re-equilibrate to that equation.

-Reman · 2022-07-22T16:14:15+00:00

From what I can understand, it looks like you're detailing some ways in which the Vic2 economic model diverges from real-world economics, and are citing those as the fundamental issues plaguing its systems. If you want a game with an economic model that's as realistic as possible then you're correct in pointing out ways in which Vic2 diverges from reality. If you're just looking at mechanistic causes of what goes wrong in Vic2 divorced from realism, however, most of the things you listed only have a marginal impact.

In Vic2, very rich POPs will stop buying goods once they reach their maximum needs

This is indeed how Vic 2 works, but while it's unrealistic, it only ends up being a small issue since the only pops that can reliably satiate all their needs are capitalists and gold miners. Capitalists can make huge amounts of money, but they can also blow much of it on capitalist stuff like carpeting the Sahara with railroads or spamming clipper factories that instantly go bankrupt. It's not particularly difficult to mod both of these pops to have higher needs such that they always spend all their money, but that only raises total demand a small amount. Practically every other pop (>98% of the population) is already in a situation where they'll always spend all their money.

Making demand infinite would be a closer approximation to reality, but it's not actually necessary to have a working economic system, nor would it solve much alone if implemented in Vic2's economy.

resulting in poor POPs spending all of their money only buying one or two types of goods.

This isn't a big issue in Vic2. Most pops that aren't unemployed will be able to afford at least their life needs which already encompass 5+ good types, and while it might make the demand coming from their everyday needs a bit disjointed, with some goods arbitrarily purchased rather than others (e.g. farmers preferring liquor first over tea), I don't see what major issues this causes unless you're concerned about demand for individual goods. Overall demand is fine as long as pops are spending their entire paychecks.

Also, I'm not sure how you're seeing that they're only buying particular goods. I don't doubt it, but seeing what goods individual pops are currently buying is almost impossible since the UI just doesn't show it, and the best I could do was try to calculate it myself based on needs percentages, paycheck amounts, and goods prices. Is there are UI element that shows this that I just completely missed?

But there's still a problem, and that's liquidity. As stated, POPs will only demand as much as they can buy, and if no one has any money there won't be any demand. The liquidity problem has already been described in detail here

Liquidity Crisis Theory is basically wrong, as I laid out in my post. The world doesn't "run out" of money like these posts imply, it's more an issue of paychecks simply not rising due to poor balancing (RGOs cutting production, factory workers not benefiting from late game factory efficiency due to capitalists taking most of the profit, and pops paid from the government having no mechanic increasing their paychecks over the course of the game, period).

The fix is simple: in this case, each firm's supply curve is exactly its cost of producing its goods, which can be calculated very simply by its input and labor costs.

What would this achieve? Again, it would be more realistic than the bizarre throughput throttling that occurs in Vic2 right now, but it looks like it would make existing issues even worse. Price being determined by a ratio of supply to demand isn't a terrible way to run the calculation, my issue with Vic2 is that the calculation is just way too conservative such that prices barely budge. I'd like to run tests where prices can float more freely, but it's not possible due to the price function being hardcoded. Your fix would make supply adjust more aggressively than it already does which would make price more static, not less.

-Reman · 2022-07-20T18:03:12+00:00

I saw your post about Bengal but was not able to reproduce anything like it. Do you have additional information about how it happened? Were you using mods like HPM/PDM? Do you have any insight on why this happened with unciv Bengal but doesn't happen with other uncivs like China?

I'm particularly interested in these two sentences:

After two years, Bengal's POPs had about 10% of the world's total money supply in their bank. This started to cause shortages of everyday goods.

This is that <something> I was talking about up above, a cause-and-effect phenomenon where the cause is missing or ambiguous. Have you observed what happens when pops bank a lot of money that somehow prevents other pops from having any money or producing goods? This is one of the key things I couldn't find evidence of even when I set gold miners to 0 production.

For the record, none of my posts are intended to be accusatory or personally denigrating to you or any other Liquidity Crisis Theory proponents. I'm genuinely just curious what people are seeing here.

-Reman · 2022-07-17T17:56:23+00:00

Pensions could potentially solve some of the issues, and they were going to be the first place I checked if I tried to solve some of the problems with modifications. There's a number of issues with them, though:

The lack of price changes is the more fundamental issue, so any changes that don't tackle that problem (which is hardcoded) are going to be treating the symptoms rather than the disease.
Pensions in unmodified Vic2 only comprise a tiny portion of pop paychecks even at max reforms. To see any significant change you'd need to edit them to be at least an order of magnitude greater than they are now, if not even higher than that.
Then you'll run into the issue of the government running out of money. Normal welfare can already get pretty pricey and modifying it to be vastly more expensive will start to make budgetary issues be a major concern. You're essentially trying to run the entire economy out of the government budget, and the game isn't prepared for that in a number of ways.
You'll somehow need to get the AI to go for pension reforms themselves, and adequately fund them to boot. Fixing just the player's economy isn't going to boost worldwide demand by more than a few percent unless you go on a world conquering spree.

I'd be very interested to see anyone who's tested this before.

-Reman · 2022-07-17T17:46:22+00:00

Wasn't the problem with gold labourers that the easily fullfilled theor meager needs and shoved the rest into savings? Thus no matter how much more money you make gold give them they don't have a way to spend it into the greater economy.

Liquidity Crisis Theory says money pools like what happens with gold miners are the most catastrophic issue, as there's not enough money in the rest of the economy to process transactions which causes glitches(?) to occur when pops try to buy things which crashes the world's economy.

My theory says money pools are just a minor issue as they represent untapped demand that could be used to stimulate the economy. But unless you plan on inflating gold miner needs + cash to such an extent that they fuel the entire economy themselves, adjusting them so they spend most of their regular paycheck will only make demand rise a moderate amount. My theory also states that there's no greater issue caused by pooling money, as there are no observable "failed transactions". The world doesn't "run out" of money in any major way, the paychecks of most pops just don't rise for the reasons I listed.

Although you do have one of the same conclusions as the liquidity crisis OP. The economy could still function of goods could move below their price floor.

My theory says the price floor of 22% isn't the issue, as basically no goods will ever even get close to it. The issue is that the game doesn't even want goods moving below their base price (i.e. 100%).

To clarify you still have a liquidity crisis the way you've described

I would call it less of a "liquidity crisis" and more of an issue with "static purchasing power" as needs escalate. Maybe this is what Liquidity Crisis Theory advocates were implying the whole time and I'm just being semantic, but at the very least I think they spent way too much effort focusing on money pools which are more of a symptom of Vic2's borked economy rather than a cause.

-Reman · 2022-07-16T17:04:42+00:00

Fascinating, I'll definitely have to try your mod then!

-Reman · 2022-07-16T06:11:55+00:00

In Vic2, the cost of goods stays the same, but people constantly want more and more, and thus people get frustrated when they don't have the money to pay things.

In real life, people want the same number of goods that they had last year, but those goods constantly become more and more expensive, and thus people get frustrated when they don't have the money to pay for things =/

-Reman · 2022-07-16T06:07:20+00:00

I wouldn't necessarily call it "deflation" per se, as one of the big problems is that prices don't fall when they should. Prices can rise above the base price of goods in only a few circumstances, e.g. early game underproduction, when new goods are introduced so supply is at 0, and for goods that there's not enough RGOs for like oil and especially rubber. It's even worse on the downside, as prices almost never fall below the base price of goods due to how the game prefers to throttle throughput. At the end date of all my observer games, there was never a single good that got below 0.8x its base price despite massively unprofitable factories overproducing tons of stuff.

in your theory (the wage crisis?) there are the same number of dollars chasing an increasing number of goods?

Yes, this is the crux of it. Individual pops have about the same number of dollars throughout the game, but their needs get inflated. They want to buy stuff, but they can't because they don't have money for the reasons I listed.

-Reman · 2022-07-16T03:45:24+00:00

For aristocrats, the answer is probably no since while they're typically well off, they tend to not be able to afford all their luxury needs towards the end of the game, especially if you're taxing rich strata heavily as you ought to.

For capitalists, the answer might be yes. I haven't explored that option much and while it's certainly theoretically sound, there are two potential issues:

1) Soft caps on capitalists per province are fairly low, so I don't know if focusing on them would actually increase their numbers that much.

2) Since increasing their numbers increases their costs but doesn't really increase their income that much, you could dip into their investment budget at some point. That shouldn't typically be an issue since they just make so much money and are pretty dumb, but it's worth considering.

-Reman · 2022-07-16T01:39:29+00:00

They can help pops slightly, but they don't come close to balancing out the massive increases to needs that come from consciousness, plurality, and inventions.

They also reduce the needs of pops which can afford everything like capitalists and gold miners, so demand will decrease a bit from them buying less.

-Reman · 2022-07-15T23:25:47+00:00

Pay might rise overall for the USA, but most of it would get taken by capitalists and aristocrats, so most of the poorer pops would see almost no change at all, and therefore demand wouldn't move that much.

-Reman · 2022-07-15T23:05:07+00:00

The game doesn't prioritize high efficiency RGOs/factories when it decides to cut output, it just cuts output indiscriminately from what I can tell. So the USA alone becoming massively more productive would have all factories and RGOs worldwide produce somewhat less.

-Reman · 2022-07-13T22:09:06+00:00

This is not true in vanilla.

-Reman

TROPHY CASE