Building Factories vs Capitalists.

[|Nick]

How much better is it to build factories in Gemany on your own vs letting the AI do it? Is the micromanagment worth it? DO you miss a lot of efficiency if you don't build themo n your own?

[The Void Boy]

I'd say its better to build them on your own. That's probably the most efficient way to do things but there's definitely a skill barrier though. Capitalists are pretty stupid, which is why Laissez-Faire is the worst of the 4 economy types. Its like "oh the level 12 steel mill is failing because it doesn't get enough iron. Let's build 3 new steel mills and never build a steamer convoy or an electric gear factory or anything the country needs."

[Lembley42]

Building it on your own is way better.

If you are new, just build a balanced mix of factories in your regions. Start off by building 1-3 factories in each of your region. Try to get the most important factories in your most popolous states and the "less important" in your less populated regions.

Turn on subsidies.

Check back every ~10 Minutes and just click on the "+"-Upgrade Icon on any factory while holding shift. This causes all factories that are near or at full employment to queue an upgrade.
Every now and then feel free to add factories when you feel you might need them.

Maybe every 20-30years close manually the biggest "offenders" in subsidies; you can see the sorted list by hovering over the "Subsidies" figure in Budget. Hint: Its usually paper mills that got built by capitalists. That reminds me: Dont build too many paper mills :D

You can (and should) micro more in "more important" settings (Multiplayer, Challenges, ...) but this will get you without much effort to a very good spot, much better than letting the AI handle things completely.

[Lil Juche]

Build it on your own. Capitalists in victoria 2 are essentially trying to mimic human action, via computation power. Never gonna work, ever. Better to just be your own Capitalist, and screw the in-game ones.

Edit: They do provide bonuses, but have very little direction. Only use them to support existing industry, not build future ones.

[Hat8]

Originally posted by Nick:

How much better is it to build factories in Gemany on your own vs letting the AI do it? Is the micromanagment worth it? DO you miss a lot of efficiency if you don't build themo n your own?

Capitalists are fine but getting them started is difficult so it'd be better to just build a few factories and let the capitalists have at it.

[Hasefrexx]

Personnaly I micro it at least until I get a strong economy going, because this is a very important part of the game. It's your main income source, if your economy is doing good, then your pop are wealthy, which means happy, so more internal stability, you have a better immigration balance so more population combined with less revolts.

Ideally you want to setup at least a basic network of factories. This is because factories get direct benefits if they have the required ressources directly produced in the province. So furniture line should be built in a state with wood. It won't benefit luxury furniture but lumber and furniture will produce more because there's wood, furniture will also produce more because there's lumber and luxury will produce more because of furniture. It's not over important to max out the benefits, but it's easy to pile it up, so no reason to not do it.

Then some factories are largely profitable, others are largely unprofitable. Luxury furniture, luxury clothes, vine, beer are some fairly reliable goods (if you have access to the ressources, not all countries do for luxury furniture/clothes) while lumber or canned food are dangerous investments. The AI does not seem to care and build more or less random things, in random places, with randomly available workforce and ressources (it's supposed to take it into account but it's largely superficial). If you have a very large country with a large number of capis, it can eventually work after random building here and there but I'd not say industrialize the Ottomans this way.

So overall it's fine to let capis build rails for you (you can kickstart their projects via state funds, it will be cheaper than directly building). You can also let them upgrade factories. But letting them create factories is dangerous, especially as low wages (low profitability factory) and unemployment will create unrest and can lead to the infamous massive communist revolts. Not being able to subsidize is dangerous too, because normally profitable factories can suffer from temporary ressource shortage which will bankrupt an otherwise profitable factory.

You will at the very least want to be able to close abominations that capitalists will randomly open, and regularly check what you are subsidizing as a handful of poorly chosen factories can bankrupt an healthy economy.

[|Nick]

so, statecapitalism it is, I guess

[Hat8]

Originally posted by Nick:

so, statecapitalism it is, I guess

May want to switch to interventionism when you have your factories set up.