"No potential Private Constructions to invest in."

[dogeconomics]

I've scoured the forums to figure this out, and it seems like it might be a bug that popped up when I (Mecklenburg) left the Prussian bloc. 15M in the investment pool and its not being used. It just says "No potential Private Constructions to invest in." This is my first game on 1.7.4 after the earlier updates were unplayable. This also kind of makes the game unplayable. My economy is grinding to a halt, peasants are accumulating, etc. right when everything is set to blast off. Free Market, Interventionism, construction zones... I have 700 hours in game and an MA in Econ to boot, so I'm not new to this. Is it just still broken?

The entire building management interface is really no longer intuitive either. Super frustrating to wade through.

[Strifeboy]

Try to get investment rights on another country and see if they do something, also exit game and go back in, the fixes some things.

[Razorblade]

Do you have enough Infrastructure?

[dogeconomics]

Plenty of unused infrastructure in all states. Did a restart, same thing. Nobody wants to sign an investment agreement right now.

I don't think this one is user error.

[John Hadley]

Looking at Mecklenburg in my game it has no financial sector, so there's no place for capitalists to invest from. If you nationalized all the farms that the manor owns and built government owned farms on all the subsistence farming land then you would have no manor houses for aristocrats to invest from either perhaps.

[Dave Reckoning]

It's not the new patch, I've had the same message at various points with the previous patches.

How much do you understand of how Pops decide when to invest and what to invest in?

[dogeconomics]

Maybe not enough? Welcome advice. I'll try to take a deeper dive into that tomorrow.

Capitalists are 26% of the political power.. But the upper strata has a small income deficit. Could that have anything to do with it?

Had to abandon the game anyway, economy eventually collapsed. Super wealthy society, top 10, but without private investment it started to snowball after a few years.

[John Hadley]

Well if you want to invest in something you need to give them something to invest in. That means you need to get a protectorate where they could build outside of your country or you need to get investment rights in another country or you need to conquer some more states for them to start building in. Once a particular state is built up as much as it can be then you have to get more land to build more.

[Dave Reckoning]

So, the key question is something like "what are all the things necessary for the Pops to decide something is worth investing in, and to be able to invest in it?"

There's quite a number of factors, both on the "can we invest" side and on the "is there anything worth investing in" side. With you having money in the pool, I would think the problem must be factors on the "is there anything worth investing in" side.

(Personally, I avoid doing much Foreign Investment atm, preferring to have all available capital invested at home to build *my* economy rather than anyone else's. But atm for me is a Japan run, 1908, highest GDP globally, mass immigration coming from China, and my economy's not maxed out yet by a mile. Through this run I've had the message for a period of time on maybe 4 or 5 occasions. )

I'm sure you'll already know this but factors on the "is anything worth investing in" side include (and I expect there'll be more than just this):
- Employable staff of the right skills (obviously, there's a bunch of other factors behind that)
- Potential Profitability (again, a bunch of factors behind that)
- Infrastructure, transportation and power state-by-state (including all the building PM's that affect usage of all those).
- Possibly availability of convoys?

The AI must have an explicit calculation for this, down in the depths, but I (we?) have no way of knowing exactly what the calculation is (yet?).

I'm not giving / able to give an more advice for your specific case, partly because it will be related to the specific detailed issues in your own economy and also because I don't recall exactly how it got fixed each time (but I do think it was economy issues rather than law or government issues each time). Also, I find the process of "debugging the economy" is one of the most enjoyable aspect of the game and I'm sure you'll be dead chuffed when you get to the bottom of this in your own scenario.

Edit: P.S. Also worth checking you're allowing privatisation of the buildings the Government has built.

[Dave Reckoning]

Originally posted by John Hadley:

Well if you want to invest in something you need to give them something to invest in. That means you need to get a protectorate where they could build outside of your country or you need to get investment rights in another country or you need to conquer some more states for them to start building in. Once a particular state is built up as much as it can be then you have to get more land to build more.

I get that this is one approach, but personally I prefer to get the Pops to invest in the home economy rather than abroad. I haven't played every country (naturally!) but all the countries I have played (Sweden, Russia, USA, Japan, France) the home economy can be grown and grown and grown almost infinitely. I'd rather have the investors powering that home-development process, rather than getting involved in foreign entanglements or having my Pops pay to grow some other country's economy, even if my Pops end up owning it.

Although, if the problem proves to be something to do with resources, then I would play or war for that.