India Development Strategy?

[Sleeper Agent]

Doing my first "real" campaign now, and I've secured India as my base of power, because I heard that it can scale really well in the late-game. My question is, what should my priorities be in order to stabilize it and turn it into a late-game superpower?

Right now I'm prioritizing knowledge, economy, and military, with a secondary focus on welfare and boost, and one point on mission control and funding. My thinking is that I need sustainable GDP growth while promoting democracy and knowledge in order to eventually get cohesion and stability under control (currently have a counselor stabilizing basically full-time), while also raising military tech as fast as possible to prepare for the eventual alien invasion.

Do I have the right idea? Is there a better way to do this? Any tips or advice yall have would be appreciated :)

[gimmethegepgun]

You need to get their Cohesion high enough that the Unrest resting point is below 2 first, which mostly means running Welfare to reduce Inequality. That way you don't need to waste councilor actions reducing Unrest.
Raising Miltech when you have Unrest problems is quite inefficient, as it will spend a portion of the Military gains on fighting Unrest rather than raising Miltech, that portion being (10 * (10 - Government Score))%.

[Ericus1]

If you are playing on 0.4, you aren't going to be turning India into anything productive within the timescale of a regular campaign. You could in 0.3, although India was greatly inferior to China in this regards, it could still be "fixed" if you were going for a very long campaign.

Under 0.4 with the changes to IP and priority scaling against population, India is just not really going to be a viable choice to "develop". People obviously don't have to min/max to win the game, and people play campaigns starting in some of least efficient places for role playing or alternate campaigns which is all totally fine.

But it sounds like that's not what you're going for, and if you're playing on 0.4 I would strong urge you to start somewhere else, like the US or the EU if you really want to develop up a strong nation to start your campaign.

[corisai]

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

You need to get their Cohesion high enough that the Unrest resting point is below 2 first, which mostly means running Welfare to reduce Inequality.

And declaring wars (for temporary boost of Cohesion) / making rivals (for permanent boost of Cohesion).

[Sleeper Agent]

Originally posted by Ericus1:

If you are playing on 0.4, you aren't going to be turning India into anything productive within the timescale of a regular campaign. You could in 0.3, although India was greatly inferior to China in this regards, it could still be "fixed" if you were going for a very long campaign.

Under 0.4 with the changes to IP and priority scaling against population, India is just not really going to be a viable choice to "develop". People obviously don't have to min/max to win the game, and people play campaigns starting in some of least efficient places for role playing or alternate campaigns which is all totally fine.

But it sounds like that's not what you're going for, and if you're playing on 0.4 I would strong urge you to start somewhere else, like the US or the EU if you really want to develop up a strong nation to start your campaign.

Wait what did they change? I haven't been following the development too closely, but I do remember prior to this update I could pretty reliably get unrest under control, which has been almost impossible with India in this playthrough

[Ericus1]

The changes to IP investments scaling against population means the time it takes to improve India's economy, inequality, and their knowledge/government score is VASTLY longer that it was on 0.3. And that is just true across the board for all nations. China takes longer to fix as well. Neither are great places to start now; the payoff time is just too far in the future from game start.

[Sleeper Agent]

Originally posted by Ericus1:

The changes to IP investments scaling against population means the time it takes to improve India's economy, inequality, and their knowledge/government score is VASTLY longer that it was on 0.3. And that is just true across the board for all nations. China takes longer to fix as well. Neither are great places to start now; the payoff time is just too far in the future from game start.

Damn that kinda sucks. Only two good starts (US and EU) across eight factions seems a little unbalanced

[The Shadow Rose]

take all the greater india nations before you take india then war them all so they have no allies. Tada +5 to cohesion so you never need to do welfare till you hit 50 trillion. If you dont wanna deal with pakistans armies you can just exclude it. all but 1 pip into eco will get you to 50 trillion rather fast but since the gdp now gives way more control points pushing it to 100 trillion before 2030 isnt really viable till super end game. Then just lower inequality to 1 and max military. If you did the same with china even if the aliens take the rest of the world they cant win unless they kill you. Which they cant.

[Ericus1]

They are just the ideal starts. Like I said, people can and do start at other places and can still win. You could got for a number of smaller, richer nations like Japan, Korea, the Middle East, and work from there. It'll just be harder.