Advice on large populations

[harrisone16]

I keep running into the issue that countries with large pops always seem to have a low standard of living. I played Japan and no matter how many farms and such I made, the price of grain stayed through the roof and 8 of the 10 states ended up with at least 40% below SOL. What can I do to fix this?

[Big Moustache]

Subsidize those farms to attract workers from the manors. Do not upgrade production past your workers skill level. Do not build past your infrastructure or the market acces drops. Not all grain reach market and population can not buy from market and starve

[6ap6apblckaAa]

Most likely you did not have enough construction too keep up with population increase. You need about 500 points per 1M yearly pop increase to keep balance, more if you want to actually industrialize.

[Vellsi]

If you look at the population window you will see in the strata overview how much excess they have and how much taxes are removed from their income. Having more excess listed at the bottom will let them increase their standard of living over time. The prices of goods they consume the most of should therefore be cheap - and that's not only food. Consumption happens with substitution of goods in mind but best look at the Victoria 3 wiki see which could be substituted with what and which ratio.

Ultimately taxes are often what prevents rise of poorer pops. Land-based taxation issues a land tax, which deducts a flat value and not a precentage of an income. This obviously hurts more the poorer a peasant is. Similarly per-capita tax affects workers with a flat value, again hurting those who earn little to begin with most.

It's only at consumption-based taxation, proportional taxation and graduated taxation that rising of the poorest strata becomes less impacted by taxes. It's possible to create a graduated-taxation-like structure entirely with consumption taxes by just taxing goods mostly rich strata consume but that's a very advanced strategy.

Whatever one does, it's never good to issue consumption taxes on things the poor strata consumes. Grain, alcohol, tobacco, clothing, services, opium or wood are all bad to tax, even though they would give a lot of income. The list is not exhaustive but you look it up yourself in the game easier and better visualized.
Transportation, luxury furniture and luxury clothing on the other hand are great to tax, as they take from rich pops, who have a lot of excess to begin with.

As far as pricing is concerned you need to keep in mind that a good needs to be expensive enough for the producing building to be profitable, while at the same time being cheap enough for pops to afford. There's generally a certain balance one wants to achieve here, to get most people employed safely while allowing them to have money left over after spending on their needs. It's a complicated endeavor but you quickly see results in the pop window if pricing changes.


For government income reasons you want to de-peasant as much as possible by building resource buildings and farms but factories are great at producing higher quality goods in large quantities to keep prices down (and workers get paid better). What prevents one from just spamming industry is education though, as staffing a building requires enough qualified workforce, which requires an educated population. It's therefore not possible to take shortcuts and one has to gradually uplift people.
As you might have seen in tooltips of certain research the minimum expected standard of living goes up from literacy over time, so it's all a gradual and layered process your society has to go through.

[harrisone16]

Originally posted by Vellsi:

If you look at the population window you will see in the strata overview how much excess they have and how much taxes are removed from their income. Having more excess listed at the bottom will let them increase their standard of living over time. The prices of goods they consume the most of should therefore be cheap - and that's not only food. Consumption happens with substitution of goods in mind but best look at the Victoria 3 wiki see which could be substituted with what and which ratio.

Ultimately taxes are often what prevents rise of poorer pops. Land-based taxation issues a land tax, which deducts a flat value and not a precentage of an income. This obviously hurts more the poorer a peasant is. Similarly per-capita tax affects workers with a flat value, again hurting those who earn little to begin with most.

It's only at consumption-based taxation, proportional taxation and graduated taxation that rising of the poorest strata becomes less impacted by taxes. It's possible to create a graduated-taxation-like structure entirely with consumption taxes by just taxing goods mostly rich strata consume but that's a very advanced strategy.

Whatever one does, it's never good to issue consumption taxes on things the poor strata consumes. Grain, alcohol, tobacco, clothing, services, opium or wood are all bad to tax, even though they would give a lot of income. The list is not exhaustive but you look it up yourself in the game easier and better visualized.
Transportation, luxury furniture and luxury clothing on the other hand are great to tax, as they take from rich pops, who have a lot of excess to begin with.

As far as pricing is concerned you need to keep in mind that a good needs to be expensive enough for the producing building to be profitable, while at the same time being cheap enough for pops to afford. There's generally a certain balance one wants to achieve here, to get most people employed safely while allowing them to have money left over after spending on their needs. It's a complicated endeavor but you quickly see results in the pop window if pricing changes.


For government income reasons you want to de-peasant as much as possible by building resource buildings and farms but factories are great at producing higher quality goods in large quantities to keep prices down (and workers get paid better). What prevents one from just spamming industry is education though, as staffing a building requires enough qualified workforce, which requires an educated population. It's therefore not possible to take shortcuts and one has to gradually uplift people.
As you might have seen in tooltips of certain research the minimum expected standard of living goes up from literacy over time, so it's all a gradual and layered process your society has to go through.

Thank you, this is really helpful - is it good to try and use all arable land to get rid of peasants quickly? Or is it a better idea to try and build and sustain manufacturing?

[Hat8]

Originally posted by harrisone16:

I keep running into the issue that countries with large pops always seem to have a low standard of living. I played Japan and no matter how many farms and such I made, the price of grain stayed through the roof and 8 of the 10 states ended up with at least 40% below SOL. What can I do to fix this?

Ignore grain production and instead focus on creating jobs that will allow people to buy grain and pay you tax money. You can use your institutions to boost farms (they will boost subsistence farms as well) and allow you some stability. Your population will grow so fast that you will hardly make a dent in your population of subsistence farmers by building wheat/rice farms until you get a strong construction industry going.

[Vellsi]

Originally posted by harrisone16:

Thank you, this is really helpful - is it good to try and use all arable land to get rid of peasants quickly? Or is it a better idea to try and build and sustain manufacturing?

Generally speaking de-peasanting is pretty good for standard of living early on and to jumpstart the economy by giving your ever more resources to build with. However, if you just build resource buildings and farms without industry you will never transform into a wealthy nation and eventually fall behind. Keep in mind that industry scaling is held back by how many educated workers you can get to actually staff factories, which also depends on how wealthy people can get, as wealth tresholds and literacy are gatekeeping certain profession tiers. A peasant can not instantly become a capitalist, they need a certain amount of wealth first, which means they need to rise through economic opportunity.

Instead of just thinking about arable land and peasant count, go aim to increase construction throughput. Wood, fabric, iron (lots of it) and coal to enhance mining and later make steel are all important in huge quantities for construction and industry alike. Few agrarian goods have high demand and export potential early on. If you have access to opium and could export it to Qing it's a no-brainer, as they consume insane quantities and therefore pay insane prices. The same can be said about wine right now, as it sees demand for multiple consumption categories, making it way too valuable (though that will get fixed in an upcoming patch). Coffee and tea aren't as great and distance to the other nation might make convoy requirements too steep/costly to make building up coffee/tea viable. Grain is rarely worth it (though it has gotten a little better with 1.7), as every peasant in every nation produces it anyway.

Just be careful to not shoot yourself in the foot by sitting on land tax and dragging all peasants into work where land tax does not count. You need to pattern this out, depending on long-term goals, immediate needs and possible politics/laws a bit. There's no go-to route that works for every nation.

Obviously some industries are not overly viable for certain nations/areas. Textile mills without cotton and dye (or the ability to colonize to get them) just won't scale very well. Similarly a lack of iron or coal makes it very hard to grow past a certain point, forcing one to stick to simpler industrial base for income and trading, so one can trade for coal/iron even finished steel/engines later in the game.

Industries that work very well early on and for countries without coal/iron are food factories and tools. Groceries are more efficient at feeding people, as the value per grain increases, and are therefore great to export, too. You can also make lots of alcohol and if you are especially lucky and your nation has a taboo of alcohol it gives you a huge export potential.
Remember that you can create demand for a good in a market that doesn't have it yet by just exporting it anyway. The moment a cheap item comes into the other market people will buy more, starting up a purchasing and import/export loop.