Merina Kingdom

[eves_faith]

So I choose to go for a small country, the Merina Kingdom, but it seems solely made to be a vasall? I can't expand, I can't colonize, and I can't even join any trade. I thought it was about the research, or the lack of ships at first, but I have it all now and still can't trade and no one wants to agree on setting trade up with me, despite having good relations to some neighbors.

[Tragopan]

Merina Kingdom was also my first choice! It is an extremely small Isolationist economy (I don't know if you've switched out of Isolationism) which makes it very difficult to get a market running, particularly because you can't subsidize the jobs that you need and have a hard time hiring people for (Industries, especially Toolmakers). They are also a slave economy so they have a low standard of living, low GDP and high radicals.

Been working it over the past 20ish hours and haven't come up with a good strategy yet but I imagine your choices are to either buddy up to France as a protectorate (this is historical, and thus why they coded France to be so willing to do it at game start) and dip into their market for all your needs before you break off (if wanted) OR you could try to isolate, keep relations high with your neighbors and see if you can actually make an isolationist economy run on such a small island. In this case setting a law that will allow you to subsidize ANYTHING is probably best because otherwise your industries will never hire anyone. :<

Hopefully someone better at the game can offer us insight. Admittedly I've not given it a thorough examination because I've been generally disappointed and upset with Victoria 3.

[eves_faith]

Originally posted by Tragopan:

Merina Kingdom was also my first choice! It is an extremely small Isolationist economy (I don't know if you've switched out of Isolationism) which makes it very difficult to get a market running, particularly because you can't subsidize the jobs that you need and have a hard time hiring people for (Industries, especially Toolmakers). They are also a slave economy so they have a low standard of living, low GDP and high radicals.

Been working it over the past 20ish hours and haven't come up with a good strategy yet but I imagine your choices are to either buddy up to France as a protectorate (this is historical, and thus why they coded France to be so willing to do it at game start) and dip into their market for all your needs before you break off (if wanted) OR you could try to isolate, keep relations high with your neighbors and see if you can actually make an isolationist economy run on such a small island. In this case setting a law that will allow you to subsidize ANYTHING is probably best because otherwise your industries will never hire anyone. :<

Hopefully someone better at the game can offer us insight. Admittedly I've not given it a thorough examination because I've been generally disappointed and upset with Victoria 3.

How can I come out of this isolation? I can't really change any laws, really, the only ones given so far half through the tech tree are colonization and police, which honestly, doesn't help me one bit. I buddied up with Portugal, have a defence alliance with them, but no trade...

[Tragopan]

If you go into your Politics screen and look at the Laws Isolationism is in the middle row at the top. In order to switch to one of the more desirable Economic System laws we need to change up our government to include an Interest Group that wants the law in question. Our current leading Interest Group (Landowners) really wants to stay Isolated, so we need to diminish their power and raise the power of the Interest Group we want.

Interventionism and Command Economy would both allow us to subsidize anything we want to, but they both require the abolition of serfdom (another Law that Landowners want to keep in place). This is another law we cannot pass until we have the support of an Interest Group that actually wants it. Really it all boils down to needing to get the Landowners out of power.

However I don't know how to reliably do that. Industrialists and Trade Unions like Interventionism and Trade Unions like Command Economy, but to get a lot of those supporters you need people to be employed in Industrial jobs.. but you can't get people into those industrial jobs without being able to subsidize because they never have enough money to hire anyone on their own. Suppressing and/or Bolstering interest groups seems to have very little effect and is more geared towards steering the way of thinking of population jobs who might go for different Interest Groups if they had the option. It's frustrating to say the least.