is it normal to waste 50K ON PAPER??

[Bapito]

like, if it wasn't for my immense gold reserve, I would be bankrupt and my biggest expense is paper, isolating around 50k
paper is not even that expensive on my market and i in fact have too few government administration as i am on a deficit of bureaucracy as well
im now just build a billion paper industries to try to fix it. any advice? am i doing something wrong?

[Bapito]

forgot to add: I also am the 5# producer of paper worldwide

[SquarelyCircle]

Major uses of paper include (at least) government administration buildings, art, and education. In nations with massive overpopulation, If you are trying to get your taxation capacity to maximum by building massive numbers of government administration, it will cost a huge amount of paper to administer, and it's not really worth it. You'll spend far more on paper than the taxes will provide.
Could this be what's going on in your game?

[Bapito]

decreased some government administrations buildings but it got worse
while yes the paper situation got better, it did not compensate for the taxes

[Bapito]

I am playing Austria and i just switched to other countries to see their paper situation

Prussia - 27k
Russia - 47k
UK - 70k
France - 60k

I think my save has been cursed with the fabled 'Curse of the (expensive) Paper'

all of the great powers were in terrible deficits too
I don't know if that is the ai being stupid again or the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ paper

[Blastaz]

Are you playing China or India or Japan (or another high pop per state country) and trying to get rid of tax penalties before you have actually built a tax base worth taxing? Because that's a way to waste money on paper.

[Bapito]

Just said it was Austria
a very colonial Austria

[Bapito]

I think I managed to make enough paper that now Im wasting only 35k compared to 50k
so the solution always was: if paper no work, use more paper

[LonelyCookie]

Great Powers always pay a lot for paper, you ARE the pre-modern prime examples of bureaucratic empires. Century before anyone could even imagine something like internet and digital databases. All on paper. All in multiple copies. In multiple offices and departments. :-D

Kinda universal advice I can give is to ignore tax waste coming from bureaucracy deficits and low taxation capacity as long as you can until it starts eating into your income too much and be very conservative about your institutions (keep them at minimum, except Health and Education, unless youre in some period of massive turmoil to need the home affairs or whatever lowers turmoil/radicals). Avoiding incorporating less important states helps too.

I am currently in middle of a MP i do with ~10 friends, playing as India and my paper costs around 140k in 1853 :-)

[Daonar]

It's called bureaucracy.

Potentially high paper expenses get noted, forms get filled with various requests providing data about those expenses, then more forms with responses, then requests to archieve both initial requests and expenses. Then you need to summarize and archieve the data.

By that point your initial data is already incorrect because amount of paper and related expenses increased due to your actions, so it starts over - but now they have to compare the actual data with initial point and data in the archives, so it spirals out exponentially.

[6ap6apblckaAa]

Short answer - yes, it's ok.

If you think you shouldn't:
1) Check every state tax balance - If it's greater than 50 delete gov admin buildings.
2) Check your Innovation production - if it's above your limit delete university buildings.
3) Check your market price of paper - if it's above 10% (or above your taste) build additional paper mills.

[6ap6apblckaAa]

Originally posted by Daonar:

It's called bureaucracy.

Potentially high paper expenses get noted, forms get filled with various requests providing data about those expenses, then more forms with responses, then requests to archieve both initial requests and expenses. Then you need to summarize and archieve the data.

By that point your initial data is already incorrect because amount of paper and related expenses increased due to your actions, so it starts over - but now they have to compare the actual data with initial point and data in the archives, so it spirals out exponentially.

Bureaucracy is expanding. To meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

[LonelyCookie]

Originally posted by 6ap6apblckaAa:

2) Check your Innovation production - if it's above your limit delete university buildings.

Okay, this is getting a hard no from me. Once growing literacy expands your innovation limit, it automatically goes into the limit and saves you any small delays between "you noticing" and "finishing the extra university", maximizing your research as its going to always be as fast as it can be.

On top of that, 20% of all "unused" innovations gets turned into an additional progress on Technology Spread.

Going way above your innovation limit is a fantastic strat to both stay at the top of the tech tree as a european GP, to keep up with others while only focusing one tech tree (eg Military) especially in Multiplayer and its priceless for "third world countries" when it comes to catching up to europeans.

[6ap6apblckaAa]

Yes, depending on your budget and attention you can go above innovation limit

[VoiD]

Haven't played in a while, but yes, very normal, admin costs are huge, and depending on your laws the gains may not outweight the costs.

Keep in mind the game's economy is a bit more complex than it looks, there are ways to tax industries better, so even if you are "spending" a lot on paper, if you're also producing it then you could be recovering a big part of your costs through taxes against your own factories, if you're still using one of the earlier laws focusing on per capita, or worse, land taxation then yeah, you're probably not getting much out of any of your factories making the entire situation worse, for you.

Playing as a country like Japan will quickly force you to learn that taxation isn't always worth it's cost.

[Kimlin]

50k for paper? Reminds me of the early days of the pandemic 🤣