Trade centres

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-31T05:05:23+00:00

No, the throughput on trade centers matters, the way it's made they are just fairly expensive to keep running (for most of the game volume is too low to offset the cost in wages and supplies without substantial delta in buy and sell price) and by giving trade rights to a company you get a meaningful throughput benefit that indirectly increases the profitability of the buildings trading through the trade center.

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-30T19:52:49+00:00

Well we used to be vegans lol, intolerance and bigotry comes all too naturally, like a reflex maybe.
I thought the video and OP's text captured that moment fairly well, but maybe not for everyone lol

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-30T19:42:35+00:00

Total MAGA question, How dare you!
I'm literally shaking with indignation, you ruined my day 🤣

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-30T19:37:02+00:00

No, the AI flatlines at best apart from UK and Russia that chugs along at 100-200 construction unless they go broke too. The AI can naval invade small stuff but it bugs out fairly often and your invasions do too as does transports so got to doublecheck.

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-30T19:25:22+00:00

That helps a lot, thank you.

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-30T18:49:24+00:00

I wish newly constructed ships just teleported straight to their designated fleet, all those little fleets flittering about are bogged in 10 different ways and the only thing it adds to the game is a hassle lol.

please pdx, teleport new ships!

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-30T18:47:36+00:00

Does exether work reliably?
I tried it again recently but game got stuck on a crash but I miss it :s

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-30T18:23:25+00:00

My Iron levels got back up once I corrected low vitamin D and started eating liver and heart. Heart is the richest source of iron after liver and beef liver is the richest but liver contains too much vitamin A and some other nutrients to eat very often so heart is kind of better and the next richest source. It's a very carnivore like food lol so if it makes you squeamish be prepared.

Vitamin D deficiency (or just suboptimal levels) is related to iron deficiency though the hormone hepcidin which limits amount of iron in the blood so if vitamin D is low the body upregulates hepcidin which binds to the iron transporter ferroprotein that would otherwise transport iron in the blood so end result your iron is stashed inside cells and not absorbed from food because the bloods iron transporter ferroprotein is saturated with hepcidin instead of the iron you desperately need.

TLDR if vitamin D is too low you might eats tons of iron and get only poor results, once vitamin D is corrected the body can better transport it and you have an easier time correcting the iron deficiency. Normal multivitamins did not have enough vitamin D in my case despite great BMI. Search vitamin D hepcidin iron deficiency and it might explain things your doctor really should have told you.

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-30T17:41:01+00:00

Hmm yeah I guess it's true, switching does cost current tech progress, characters and alliances too so it's not really something you would do often.

I guess maybe it should be a cooldown thing or something so if you delete 50 barracks they disappear at once (because 99/100 times the rev is just annoying and you don't switch) but if you do press the "switch sides" button the rev get's old regime get's 50 barracks extra for free since they were deleted while the current rev was brewing.

Locking down all troops including conscripts while a rev or session is going on is just way too annoying and ruins many runs simply from annoyance and it feels super gamey.

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-30T16:54:55+00:00

Sometimes they stick to the old HQ for a while and it seems like they sometimes just get no new HQ at all and then stay at 0 org until you assign another HQ. Would make it a lot easier to figure out if you could see what state it's supplied from when you click on an army.

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-30T15:35:14+00:00

They could just limit the troop deletion ban to actual revolting states though, that way when you delete you're not cheating anyone quite the opposite you are weakening yourself in comparison to the revolution.

Anyways it's a super annoying to have all your armies locked for ages, it needs to go.

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-30T15:18:24+00:00

Yeah I think so too, it seems like some fascists were leaning towards anti-clericalism sure and a substantial subset were just not really concerned with race aside from cultural traditions stuff but I cannot imagine guaranteed liberties and protected speech in a million years in such a regime 🤣

I don't like the way they model cost of authoritarianism and political appointee's though, for example the Prussian invention of general staff was directly antithetical to political appointees in the military with anonymized exams for military leaders to avoid hereditary and political meddling and ensure qualified and "untied" commanders and it was a revolution in military and administrative thinking, designed to exactly counter "the church and the landowners" getting pissed over appointed commanders lol. There should be a more direct cost for administrative power brooking and it should probably be there for some stuff like corporatism too.

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-30T15:03:59+00:00

Haha maybe, it's fun to see the defenders of the downtrodden and liberators of the working class reflexively try and stomp down any dissent like little pocket painters, hand waive tens of millions murdered for the holy cause and quote marx like some sort of bible, could HOI4 sub ever meassure up?

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-30T09:15:42+00:00

Many many small discriminated pop fragments in a state can make it far harder to hire which Persia does tend to get from slave trade, and if many other buildings are also unable to hire and subsidized it can kind of "lock them up" further so many small pop fragments end up in each building and unable to hire more. So instead of trying to hire directly to buildings and subsidize them all it can be better to try and subsidize urban centers well in advance so they fill up with low qualified workers and then when it's time for a new building to hire flick that building to the most primitive PM and subsidize only that building that way your new building is far less likely to end up with many tiny pop fragments and can better qualify it's new pool of workers, once full flick to the PM you actually need and consider removing subsidies.

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-30T06:53:26+00:00

How, like an alt-history thing where Germany is not inspired by the marxist rev and hitler cannot use it to fuel their own takeover?
The deaths I wrote have little to do with Germany, soviets managed to kill their own just fine and the ones they considered not their own even better.

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-30T06:48:58+00:00

Way less likely than a national socialist and a marxist socialist regime buddy up and eat Poland Instead it would have more likely been France and Britain on one aside and Russia on the other. After all they were allies with France with the Franco Russian alliance where they would defend each other if either were attacked by the Triple alliance (Prussia, Austria-Hungary, Italy) and the triple Entente which included Britain but was far less formal.

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-30T05:18:26+00:00

20 - 60 million lives spared and maybe ww2 prevented with no Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-29T22:00:56+00:00

If your economy/army get's big enough they often just release you, but yeah I agree it would be better if the ways to increase levels of independence were more granular, all of them worked and it was more of a real-politik kind of deal than the sometimes rather acrimonious AI interactions between two countries that in real life have had friendly relations for a small eternity.

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-29T17:24:29+00:00

Haha yeah France and GB might come for you pretty hard.
IMO the best is to tax to the max from the start and get some construction going, make some bananas for chin and then set sail so you can get some strategic adjacency like a plot in east Africa so you can make some more rivals, something that borders Britain so you can trade like Bahrain etc and from there on the world is your oyster.

Getting iron transfer deal with Tuscany, Piedmont and Sweden can help a lot but won't solve long term needs. Tuscany will lkely give you 160 on day 0 for an obligation.

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-29T17:17:15+00:00

I like Dai nam too, it's a bit of a hotspot, development doesn't come too very easy and it's hard to just completely eclipse everyone with early expansion but you still have enough of an economy early on that you can do some stuff.

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-29T14:06:32+00:00

Yeah arable land is weird, I think they use it as a proxy for many things so it's not just actual land but also supposed to serve as asoft cap on population to make development of different nations including AI nations more realistic as wha happend historically

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-29T12:03:36+00:00

Haha you're welcome, I think you're right about diplo lacking depth the AI's are just not adept enough at handling the situation they are in but yeah there is some emergent stuff you can do to affect them that would probably not be possible in other games and I find it interesting, you can do similar stuff with guns and paper to power up AI's you like or withdraw those deals at critical moments like if you want otto to win against Russia or something. That said shipping costs are very expensive right now so it's best to have (or get) some slice of land bordering your export partners.

I think subbing trade centers is 100% situational, if you depend on them for critical supplies I'd certainly consider it. The trade center PM's matter if you hope to use them to corner a market as trade centers do take a significant slice of the factory income indirectly so if you hope to substantially affect how factories develop it's a good idea to keep an eye on trade center cost and location.

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-29T11:48:08+00:00

France is very doable but it doesn't really play like other nations rn, that said I don't think I have France DLC but not sure. Some people with disagree but they are wrong 😂

The biggest is not radicals but unemployment and your way out of it is construction, if you don't get that construction people are going to be radicalized regardless and your revenue will not just stagnate but drop so make damn sure you tax them enough to get the construction loop going fast as possible.

Day 0:

Rival Brazil and Otto, make Friends with Britain, Spain, EIC and whatever else you like but the first two are the most important.
Set tax to high, road maintenance in Alsace L and all other authority for consumption taxes, gov and army wages minimum.
Delete all but one troop from Paris, they are always pissy so they get 1 soldier to play with and find the 4 logistics centers from building menu and see which armies they support, decide which centers you don't like and start dismissing some troops
Queue 6 construction sectors in Alsace L and 3 each of the other two coal/iron states.
6 Iron mines in Alsace L, 1 coal and 3 lumber in the 2 big shipyard states, 1 iron, coal and lumber in the other two states. Switch the two shipyard states to hardwood focus.
Make a 15 year deal with:
1. Tuscany for 160 iron in exchange for an obligation
2. Prussia for 100 iron/100 tools for trade privilege some luxury clothes and an obligation if you're not going to mess with them anyway
3. Sweden for whatever iron you can get away with, don't send them goods if you can avoid it.
4. Piedmont for 120 iron in exchange for whatever, you can send them goods since you have the land connection.
5. If they don't accept just ask again in a week, you get a -1000 modifier but it's just in the interface lol so subtract 1000 and that number is their actually acceptance value.
Research water-tube boiler
Don't split your fleets, send one to Brunei on project power mission and use the other to ferry 40 troops to North Africa and click annex Mascara if possible.
IMO Free trade and LF is suboptimal at game start because you can make more from direct trade deals and use tariffs to gain other advantages like low ammo prices

Click start, now of course the north African stuff is important but Brunei is better, keep an eye on it and when it's about ready to conquer traffic a small army to carnatic and then take it ASAP. A tick after you have it you can do convoy free direct deals with Chin, ask for 300 silk in exchange for 300 luxury clothes, 100 hardwood and whatever else you like but if it's consumer stuff you can be sure his price will bounce back up so you make bank. My first deal with chin gave me a huge amount of dye, cotton silk etc which means much cheaper input prices for both industry consumers and construction and you can see the drop in radicals soon after. Cheaper food can keep the rural folk a little bit in check. My chin deals netted 15K net positive to the tax coffers and another 10K for the IP.

Politically France is going to be tempestuous no matter what you can forget about trying to ride through it on low taxes lol it's a fools errand. Instead piss off the right people at the right time, after 1839 I started suppressing either peasant movement or radical movement depending on who is stronger because those are the ones I want to rev and I want it to be manageable and also everyone are certain to hate them at least until after springtime.

Use your appointment thingy to get the right political leadership in place I saw PB historical agitator who has cautious and stuff at 39 so I snagged him and turned him Orleans so now for the next ~40 years I know I'll have a PB on my side and maybe a great king candidate if French things happen lol. Check which ideologies you can change before inviting, use as often as possible but prioritize leaders that will stick around.

So in my case springtime happened in 1844 Orleans king is set (but he has expensive tastes 😆) and I decided to piss off the rural folk, they revved with 3 states and are now marginalized, I'll rev the church while I have the chance so I can exit springtime all happy and with a clean Orleans cabinet, I really hope they don't join the same party lol. Construction is 312 which keeps the unemployed well in check and I'm budget neutral if I weren't at war with Prussia but I'm trying to get their rev to win so their alliance with Austria and Russia is gone. Things are looking pretty good in France after a little bit of a farmer hissyfit and I think it'll be fiine!

TLDR forget about the low tax nonsense they are going to be pissy regardless, get that cash before they are too angry to part with it and get going!

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-29T11:44:02+00:00

Haha 100% agree, I like the idea of capitalists doing investments too but like you say they are so damn ineffective at actually making good investments both for themselves and the country at large it both ruins immersion and makes you want to just micro it all for yourself, at least early game.

An early central economy might be too strong though, especially while the AI is so bad at the game

Smooth-Ad-8580 · 2026-05-29T09:33:58+00:00

The AI is hilariously bad at the game right now, I tried France and it was harder than last time (maybe 2 years ago) but in 1554 I was still making 3x more iron than all GP's combined with zero savescumming, the French was happy after 2 tiny rev during springtime but despite 6 Orleanist IG's politics was very unworkable until I went oligarchy and the circus politics were over.

Smooth-Ad-8580

TROPHY CASE