I'm finding it difficult to consistently grow an economy

[Inkidu]

I always seem to find myself in massive debt which hampers my ability to government spend lest I default, which I'm willing to do one time in one default period if I absolutely have to, but usually that doesn't fix the economy it just spirals out of control.

I know a couple of strategies using both the Food Industry and Tooling industry to juice an economy, and I know about the wood/fabric Construction Industry juicing strategy. It just seems like my debt management always gets away from me and it becomes difficult to keep the line going upward. Anyone have any strategies?

[teron]

Trick is to not overbuild construction sectors while also keeping input goods to them reasonable.

One thing to consider is that logging/fishing/farms/plantations take at max construction 8 weeks to build. Plus they employe the same number of pops as most factories (assuming labour saving techs are off)
Mines being the next fastest to build.

So those faster to build industries can be useful to spam to quickly shift large numbers of pops from peasant to better paying jobs. Since unless you are Consumption-Based Taxation, you would have some form of income tax being charged to pops.

Also you want to double check that your highly industrialized states have taxation capacity, and if not fix it via adding government admin, using better PMs or researching techs that give +taxation capacity. Since a state with a taxation mauls that has a ton of good paying jobs is something you want to fix first, boonies with a ton of peasants eh who cares.

[Inkidu]

I'm kind of confused as to what overbuild entails. Because some of the better players able to just get like 10k weekly positive early game just by building construction and wood and fabric. Construction is supposed to be a measure of how profitable your economy is. You obviously don't want to be stockpiling gold, but I always seem to run into my debt ceiling way faster than them.

[TasteDasRainbow]

The biggest variables in your budget, assuming you don't go adding more military, universities, etc., will be construction good cost, investment pool use, and tax waste if your bureaucracy or tax capacity goes negative.

Goods like Iron and Wood need to be kept as cheap as possible; these are significant portions of your construction costs, and will have drastic impacts on your economy. Mid game, shifting your iron from +10% to -10% can mean saving thousands to tens of thousands per week.

Investment pools can be tricky for most players at first. It is very helpful as it reinvests money from pops of certain types to be used for construction. You have to both track your investment pool contributions, and investment pool size.

Many people get carried away using their investment pool without realizing that they're consuming the surplus pool, and when that pool is emptied and you only have active investment pool contributions left, you could be left with a huge deficit. On the opposite, you can also find yourself not able to use investment pool contributions on certain buildings if your policy is traditionalism, agrarianism, or laissez faire, so you have to be *extremely* mindful of your investment pool.

That being said, I would recommend disabling private investments as the AI is not capable of making quality judgement in that respect.

Bureaucracy and tax waste is pretty straightforward. Anytime your bureaucracy goes negative, you will lose tax income across the country. Keep this positive at all times. Tax capacity is a factor as well, but not really for major nations, and it will rarely 'swing' a budget quickly.

[teron]

Originally posted by TasteDasRainbow:

Bureaucracy and tax waste is pretty straightforward. Anytime your bureaucracy goes negative, you will lose tax income across the country. Keep this positive at all times. Tax capacity is a factor as well, but not really for major nations, and it will rarely 'swing' a budget quickly.

Exception to this being China, India, Japan and Russia where the +taxation capacity society techs can give a bunch of free money. But that is just due to how they have poor taxation capacity everywhere so unlocking for example Central Archives which gives +25 taxation capacity in every state helps.

Also consumption taxes on services and luxury goods are good for your starting income.

[TasteDasRainbow]

Yeah if we're talking more towards secondary/regional powers, that's a very good point to highlight. Policies like traditionalism or hereditary bureaucrats, lack of tech providing bureaucracy/minting/capacity, etc. will be a rather large factor in the early game as far as tax waste is concerned.

It won't ever really 'swing' your budget negatively, so you don't have to be concerned with it as a problem when addressing balancing your finances, however solving it by addressing aforementioned problems can open up huge portions of tax income to further supplement more construction costs.

[lurkathon]

Paper is another one you want to keep cheap, especially if you have many levels of Admin buildings. I get myself 'back in the green' regularly by making more paper.

[Inkidu]

So here's something I want to get a handle on. How much construction is too much? I don't think I have a good grasp of what is too much.

[TasteDasRainbow]

You can pretty much freely convert any surplus budget into construction without consequence, assuming you are keeping a watch on aforementioned issues that may swing your budget and not outscaling that.

Sometimes you'll want to use surplus budget income to expand your military or universities as well, which will be beneficial for different reasons in different contexts. But for the most part you want to grow your construction sector, use that to construct the goods it consumes in an effort to lower those costs, and as you expand those and reduce costs, you rinse and repeat to grow you construction, and thus gdp, as fast as possible.

Much of the time you will be needed to grow your civilian economy after that fact to keep people happy, well employed, and to capitalize on in demand goods. But this ideally comes after you have fully maxed your construction sector without outscaling your budgetary income, as again any optimizing of your construction sector/goods consumed will increase the rate at which your gdp will scale.

[Midas]

1. Look which type of society do you have? Who is investing?
2. Industrial Buildings provide later on enough investment. So focus on consumer industry that has a good payout. Acces to silk and dye? Cloth and Lux Cloth, than export them! Long terme friends where markets grow is great! Or you join a market where you can easylie sell your stuff!
3. Try to avoid farming industries, they can get a problem if you whant to expand and grow fast. In the beginning they are good, easy to build, a decent investment, but later on...
4. There are several "markets" that are key to winning the economics, quin, russia, britain, france. Why these, because here you can establish yourself good, the quin market, if you trade with it, has enough money to make you rich, and provide some labourours perhaps later on.

[Urk_da_WAAAGH!]

Originally posted by Inkidu:

So here's something I want to get a handle on. How much construction is too much? I don't think I have a good grasp of what is too much.

It isn't a one fit all but USUALLY for every 5k positive income a month you will want to build a construction sector, as your economy grows anjd become more healthy you will see that you may build one construction sector for every 2-3k.

But as said, one doesn't fit all, keep an eye what resources you are using to build and make sure they are cheap

[Trackstar]

I usually play mid-tier powers, and it's a slow go. But take your time and don't go too fast, especially with the infrastructure changes for con buildings before you unlock railroads. I know what usually happens in my games around 1880-1900 that gives me a huge deficit is when I run out of peasants/pops. Once that happens, your average wage skyrockets which includes all your construction and government buildings. So it might be that your average wage is too high, I don't know where you are in the game.