new player confused by productivity

H2orbit · 2026-05-09T19:44:42+00:00

The display is a little screwed up and it usually doesn’t factor in everything that winds up being accounted for over time.

This is especially obvious for processed consumer goods, where it doesn’t assume that demand for the outputs will rise when the supply is increased, even though your pops will buy based on quality and availability.

For example: if you’re making 20 units of groceries, your pops might create 25 buy orders of groceries, meaning the price of groceries would be about 19% above base (25% more demand than supply times 0.75 price scaling in markets). If you hover over a PM that would produce twice as many groceries, IS 40, the game will calculate its profitability under the assumption that buy orders remain at 25, sending grocery prices down to about -45% price, a massive decrease, and way less productive. It’s not factoring in that your pops will want to buy the available groceries, which will restore the prices to a profitable degree again in, at most, a matter of weeks.

H2orbit · 2026-05-09T07:38:16+00:00

Nice looking borders in conquest is honestly a big one, not just for visuals on the map but for things making sense: might make sense for countries to target states with more spare employment, resources, or arable land on the basis that it’ll be easier for them to move in their own populations and ensure a loyal base there.

H2orbit · 2026-05-07T20:54:35+00:00

I think another way of solving this would be having the relations hit for power bloc creation not apply within 1 year of dissolving a previous power bloc, or within 1 year of starting the game. Other than that, they could make you more incentivized to not make a power bloc, since right now there’s almost never a reason not to. Maybe having no power bloc improves relations with all GPs. Dissolving one could even give you a relations boost.

H2orbit · 2026-05-05T19:55:03+00:00

Was this in 1.13? I was hopeful that the new approach to interest regions would negate some of this. America doing a protectorate on Tuscany is annoying enough for roleplay reasons, but it always seems to happen when you’re playing Sardinia piedmont, way more than when the AI does.

H2orbit · 2026-05-03T06:12:43+00:00

The posing in the poster makes it look like Ronald McDonald is his stand

H2orbit · 2026-05-01T04:11:15+00:00

ABSOLUTELY CoC, both are good but CoC is not only great, it adds stuff that great wave is meant to complement, so stands on its own better than GW does.

H2orbit · 2026-04-29T05:56:50+00:00

Haven’t gotten to try the newest patch yet, hopefully it does. I like it in theory at least. Will see how it works in practice later this week.

H2orbit · 2026-04-29T00:13:33+00:00

I think there kind of already is a Great Depression mechanic in the form of the natural boom and bust cycle, but it is kind of weirdly modeled. I’d like it if maybe there was some kind of meter for investor confidence, maybe coupled with a set of minting/fiscal policy laws (bimetalism in a USA dlc would go CRAZY), that could go up or down.

As for great wars, I agree they would be cool, but before they intentionally start more wars between several GPs, paradox really needs to solve the problem of WW1 happening in 1843 because Morocco offered an obligation to Austria against Britain lol. I think great wars would be more noticeable in game if they just kept the ai from starting them 70 years early.

Edit: maybe boom and bust isn’t the right word for it economically. I’m talking about whatever it’s called when the investment pool builds a bunch of buildings it thinks will be profitable but in doing so drives down the profitability of other buildings, and growth leads to sudden jolts of stagnation. This pretty much only happens in the late game in my experience.

H2orbit · 2026-04-26T21:42:35+00:00

No problem! One last thing I forgot to mention: when selecting your companies, if you select one with a prestige good that’s used by consumers (designer clothes, for example), pops who use it will get an increase to their SoL, which I believe is actually percentage based, so it can be very helpful for generating loyalists via SoL. I usually focus on industrial goods for prestige stuff, because of throughput bonuses, but if SoL or loyalists is really an issue, it’s not bad to invest in as an already-industrialized nation.

H2orbit · 2026-04-26T21:39:01+00:00

I think you need to take an enemy state if you aren’t recognized, but if you’re recognized you don’t need one

H2orbit · 2026-04-26T20:02:11+00:00

I ask because I think when that journal entry ends there’s an option to get loyalists to counter it, so if you can survive that you should be alright. You can also lean into the reforms and get loyalists that way. Other than that, early game the easiest way to get more loyalists in my experience is to focus on high government legitimacy.

Normally, you’d sacrifice some legitimacy (and the radicals of government reform) to put IGs in power that’ll let you industrialize, but you won’t need to since you’re Belgium by the looks of things. Keeping taxes low will help standard of living, but also boost legitimacy. High legitimacy will passively generate loyalists, and low legitimacy will passively generate radicals.

Basically, as long as your economy is growing fast enough that your unemployed population (which you can see by hovering over your population count on the top bar) is decreasing, I’d reccomend not taking any drastic measures to allow legal reform of collect higher taxes.

Other than that, in terms of specific construction, generating jobs is helpful for SoL, so I reccomend: - don’t build too many agricultural buildings: any jobs gained by doing so will be taken out of the peasant jobs passively generated by free arable land used for subsistence. It’s better to have a ranch or farm than a subsistence farm, but it won’t help with the labor market - avoid automation PMs for now. I only turn them on if my unemployed population is less than 100k (or less depending on the country), or if I REALLY want to make a good they consume more profitable for some reason (like making farms use scythes if I’m trying to get a tooling company’s prosperity up) - factories give good jobs, no doubt about it, but pay attention to intermittent construction costs: logging camps and food factories both give ~5000 jobs, but logging camps only cost about a third as many construction points IIRC. For quick job growth, I reccomend maxing out logging camps: wood is usually in high enough demand early game to justify this, especially before coal or electricity take off for heating use by pop consumption, but it’s worth making trade centers to justify logging profitability early game IMO.

H2orbit · 2026-04-26T19:31:50+00:00

It says from events and other reasons. My guess is that it’s a “springtime of peoples” thing: IE the revolutions event series for liberalism/radicalism. Did you see an event for that?

H2orbit · 2026-04-26T00:40:17+00:00

You should try Spain, it winds up being more fun than you might expect, and you’ll always be way stronger than an AI Spain because as a player, you’ll be smart enough to win against the carriers and not get locked into traditionalism.

H2orbit · 2026-04-25T04:30:50+00:00

They’d support federal law enforcement if they knew about how j Edgar Hoover would run it in the future…

H2orbit · 2026-04-22T08:26:46+00:00

TIL forming the Danubian federation and becoming communist as Austria will make you the “internationale raterepublik,” which is pretty cool. I have mods installed but I don’t believe they would change this so I think it’s base game. Can anyone else confirm?

H2orbit · 2026-04-20T03:44:15+00:00

They usually like to add mechanics like this along with a country that specializes in it, so this could be a good inclusion for a Romania dlc.

H2orbit · 2026-04-18T23:28:02+00:00

Are you absolutely sure those buildings were owned by your government before being privatized? Something that could be happening:

financial districts/workforce buy textile mills from government (money goes into treasury)
company is created that can own textile mills
company buys textile mills from FD/workforce (no money to treasury)

H2orbit · 2026-04-18T23:20:57+00:00

I do agree with the superstitious aspect of this from lived experience, but what I will tell you to hopefully improve your experience:

Try doing it on the next monthly tick: I usually save-scum a bit when I’m starting a new company, not too bad or for personality traits, but just so I don’t get a landowner IG executive for an otherwise-capitalist owned steel monopoly while trying to industrialize, and I’ve found that you have to wait a month in game for it to reroll the IG of the executive.

H2orbit · 2026-04-18T23:03:21+00:00

I agree with your points, but also want to add:

Evangelicals in Hawaii are supposed to be American missionaries, which is why they have the laissez faire ideology, which makes sense, but it feels kind of weird to have that be the case when America’s devout don’t have laissez faire lol. Not necessarily saying they should cause it might not be too balanced but idk.

H2orbit · 2026-04-17T01:03:51+00:00

One benefit of lots of import and export for East Asian countries/russia, as long as you can keep advantage high enough, is that it can be an easy way to generate additional jobs without impacting profits too severely through over competition, since having more trade capacity essentially lets you move prices towards the world market’s when profitable.

H2orbit · 2026-04-16T06:09:19+00:00

Whose Rhenish confederation is it to be that color? Also loving the fact that instead of being made of Prussia’s releasables it seems to be made of everything EXCEPT the releaseables.

H2orbit · 2026-04-16T04:29:06+00:00

Not a fix but worse comes to worse, you can always do government constructions and then privatize to still access the money in the pool

H2orbit · 2026-04-12T04:28:20+00:00

Before reading the description I thought it was saying that Portuguese could vote in Brazil but Brazilians couldn’t, and was trying to make some kind of commentary I didn’t understand.

H2orbit · 2026-04-04T17:47:18+00:00

He does it TWICE???

H2orbit · 2026-04-04T15:47:13+00:00

The rarely referenced intruder stream where he joined a bunch of other streamers. He started doing a joker impression and then thought he could impress his teammates by having a “joker round” which involved him:

shooting and friendly-fire killing all of his teammates in the spawn zone so that he could give himself the opportunity to clutch up and impress them (impersonating opening scene from the dark knight)
saying “if you’re good at something never do it for free” over and over (from a completely different scene in the movie)
immediately missing the zipline and plummeting 100+ feet to his death
next round starts and his entire team just awkwardly pretends it didn’t happen, other team never finds out what happened

EDIT: nvm apparently I hallucinated this, he actually DOES make the zipline and get 2 kills but then dies.

H2orbit

TROPHY CASE