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1. Private, which means AI-controlled, and paid by "private investors"
2. State, also you, paid out of the treasury or the investment fund.
Note that only the material costs are paid by the investors or the fund, the construction sectors count as government buildings and you need to pay for their wages.
Besides, since the AI is very stupid, many people disable private construction and build everything by themselves. Which means that basically any state becomes a command economy.
I guess I see it differently, and see the game as a challenge to achieve the development and evolution of the state through the influencing of imperfectly controlled pops. Like you have to succeed despite the incompetence, or short-sightedness or adverse political biases of the pops in your state.
That makes all these things into *the challenge*, rather than being failures in the game's implementation. And for me it's realistic, like how can any Head of State control everything everyone does, make them all-seeing geniuses and telepathically ensure they have the same aims and objectives that you do?
It's also possible, in my world, to address the many imperfections in the game itself, in the same way. Like, "can I achieve what I want despite all this nonsense?".
Is it just me?
I'd be interested in your (constructive !) views.
There is a fundamental problem of game design. A three-body problem, so to speak.
1. The player needs something to play with. There should be a decision-effort-reward feedback loop to get that endorphine pumpin'.
2. Anything which is automated might as well be omitted. It's the player vs. AI, not AI vs. AI.
3. Too much micromanagement or complexity will overwhelm the player. You're playing a game, not training for several Ph.Ds.
In this case, one of the main points of the game is building your economy, and this is largerly achieved through constructing buildings. You have a reward system and a feedback loop of building stuff, watching it work, then building more, and so on.
However, there comes a time, when the number of buildings, provinces and production chains will become too large, too complex. It's the same issue in most strategy games, and the player has to decide, when do I start using automation mechanisms to ease that burden? On one hand, continuing as is means too much micromanagement, but on the other, I'm about to give away my reward system. Therefore, games have to work around this fundamental problem. Simplification to prolong the manual phase, other reward systems to keep the player entertained, streamlined command interfaces to reduce the micromanagement hassle, exotic designs (ex. combining several planets into a dyson sphere), the list is very long.
In Victoria 3, the devs implemented a system where you already start out with some automation. It isn't a bad idea, you can gradually get accustomed to sharing the micromanagement burden with the AI. Provided that the AI wouldn't be so stupid, that is. Doing it manually is simply far better, far more advantageous, so leaving it to the AI is rather a source of frustration, instead of help.
Then, there's actually little to do outside of building stuff, it probably accounts for half the game time. Take it away, and what is there left to do? Might as well let the AI play against itself. This point is probably due to the game being unfinished. There's not even any espionage, for example.
I think that a "private sector" should act as self interested entities that look for the best RoI in investment decision making.
A total cost of building a unit should be presented to the capitalist and he should pay it in exchange for his finished building.
Likewise if I build a facility with state money it should belong to the state and pay profit to the state until and unless sold to an investor. It would be a real enhancement if said investors were personalized and had goals.
I don't see how this is bad for a game, it's rational. Otherwise I'm just giving away assets for the promise of a small amount of taxes in return. It's not at all sustainable or reasonable.
That players abandon the private sector is a signal that something is very wrong with that implementation.
If it isn't a rational game, I don't feel I'm learning anything worthwhile.
In fact there should be private construction facilities in a private economy. The whole point of a private economy is that it makes its own decisions in its own sphere of endeavor and the state does state things.
The other thing is that facilities should be able to close down without being abandoned. Those states of being should be choices depending on a perceived future and available assets to maintain them.
If you choose to have a command economy then by all means the player should be making all decisions on every little thing.
In general the player should be making rules for the AI to follow, and decisions that affect strategic outcomes.
I can sit on the build queue and the market tab making largely uniformed choices. But it's not my idea of time well spent or strategic decision making.
It's offensive to my sensabilites that the "capitalists" are building random things rather than making best gueses for the best RoI. If the capitalists were personalized, i.e. being leaders, then they could have differences in behavior and ability.
Then there are things like the Panama Canal and Cristo Redeamer that only require checking off a box and throwing some cash at them. These should be huge projects that require massive labor, tech, leadership, funding, and decisions. A huge missed opportunity.
The military aspect o the game does actually fall into the idea of telling the AI to go do something and letting it do it. It could go further with better definitions of leaders and letting them make decisions.
So, if I understand correctly, when building in the "private" sector the material costs of construction are reembursed. But if I build the facility in the state build queue the facility simply becomes "private" and I don't get paid for the materials. It's just a write off.
If it's a private construction, then the material costs are paid by the "investors", regardless of any other factors.
If it's constructed by you, then it's possible to get the material costs reimbursed through the investment fund, provided that the building was eligible for it (depends on your laws).
Either way, the finished building operates by itself, and you may receive tax income.
P.S. or you run into a bug, where even a private construction drains money from the treasury.
Something built should be a product like any other product and sold as such. In fact for constructed products they should be paid for in advance by the "buyer".
If the builder is the state, it should belong to the state. Things should follow in a logical transfer of "ownership" through a transaction.
It's like no one at Paradox took an accounting class. Or an economics course.
Something I've thought about for a long time. Almost all strategy/supply chain games have this problem where at a certain point the next turn isn't worth the effort to prep it.
Key is realizing the limits of human perception and attention and as the structures become larger and more complex more automation should be made available to the player such that at all times the player's attention is dealing with a constant demand.
The player should determine how much of the presentation of the world is to be automated and what is to be micromanaged.
Basically, at a higher level of play the player should be giving orders to subordinates to deal with the trivia while he focuses his attention on what is important to him. It means that AI leaders should be making decisions, maybe even bad ones, but based upon their unique characteristics.
the first being (as mentioned) the complexity point where further play is too much effort.
The second is, particular to 4x games, where if you don't kill the AIs early you'll be overrun, but if you do kill or neuter them the game is over anyway. It's just ticking off boxes until the "victory" conditions are met. Which is why I prefer empire building to 4x.
You idea of "personality-based" AI is interesting, but not particularly new.
I'm with you, with a lot of this, specifically (1) the "player needs to have something to do" and (3) the "too much micromanagement will overwhelm the player" points.
But I'm not with you on 3. To my mind, there's something about levels here. Like, I mean, I'm happy to have routine details done by AI, but actual decisions need to be taken by the player. E.g all the parts in Vic3 where the AI does the allocation of specific pops to buildings can't be omitted, but I don't need to do it. But I agree with the overall argument that there's a balance to be struck between "too much micro" and "nothing to do". And I agree the player needs to be able to adjust this so the balance is satisfying for them.
However, on this point:
I'm not really with you on this. And that makes me realise that I may be seeing the whole game in a bit of a different way.
The way I see it, Vic3 is a "complex system", or even a set of intertwined complex systems, that have to be managed in concert to make a country work well. The way it feels, and the way it's implemented, there are a whole bunch of inter-acting subsystems (e.g. the politics interacting with the laws, interacting with different aspects of the economy; each detailed area of the economy interacting with each other detailed area etc. etc. etc.) Adjusting any one subsystem has knock-on effects on each of the others, with a wide range of "gearing" between them. Also in the picture are "system shocks" or transitions, like embargoes, revisions to trade unions, wars, new tech etc.
All this means that one is constantly trying to understand what is now affecting what, why certain "symptoms" have arisen, and what action to take to address it. Often, more than one new inter-actional effect is in play at the same time and they can't easily be separated out.
The player's task, then, as I see it, is to constantly monitor and "tune" each individual interacting sub-system, and way the various sub-systems are interacting, so that the overall country does what you want. A hugely complex task. And one that is constantly evolving as each new tech comes in, or other "shocks" occur.
All this means that, as I see it, the challenge of the game is not actually Player vs. AI. Rather it is Player vs. "Player's ability to understand what's going on in a highly complex world and to adjust that world so it 'works'". And, given the nature of Pdx's implementation, one has to do all this in a situation where much of the world is a "black box", i.e. little or no information is available or obvious about what interactions are causing what symptoms.
To me, this is a very different challenge to "beating" the AI, or even to winning something like HoI4 in multiplayer. It's a learning and practice challenge, learning something very complicated and being able to prove to myself I do actually understand it enough to fix it and make it work.
And that's the core of why I like the game, and am (still) playing it. It's not really me against the (dumb) AI, it's me against the inherent instability of an interacting set of obscure multi-level, inter-actional complex systems.
(N.B. I have never, as far as I recall, found a game that has an AI (or at least a non-cheating one) that can actually beat the player long-term. You always end up outgrowing the AI, and the game. But with this, there are so many interactions and adjustments that for it hasn't yet gone stale, and doesn't really look like doing so any time soon.)
So, I'm not really with you on the point about 1/2 the game being just building stuff. Or, as many seem to see it, trying to "beat" the AI (whether economically or militarily). I guess I just see the game, what it's doing, what the challenge is, and how enjoyable it is, in this different way that I'm trying to describe.
The crises you point to are there, maybe, although I've never been overrun by AI's in Vic3 as they're just not good enough. And for me, the crisis of complexity you describe is not a crisis of the complexity of "just to much micro to be enjoyable". Like it was in Vic2 with micro-ing late-game wars, I might say ;-)
Rather, in Vic3, there are multiple other crises, of a fundamentally different sort. Crises of "system instability". For example, transitioning from one tech to another (particularly the "power" techs) can cause drastic system instability in the economy, and people have seen the 'death spirals' that can occur for this and other reasons. Similar crises of instability happen in terms of Pop's themselves and also Pops wanting something different to happen than what the player wants. etc.
So, for me, there are multiple inherent but "hidden" instability crises in the game, waiting to jump out and bite you. And seeing them, understanding them, fixing them and then eventually learning to manage through them all, as smoothly as possible, is the real challenge of the game. And I think this is fundamentally different than beating an AI, or multiplayer opponents, in either an Empire Builder or a 4x, or indeed in a straight combat-simulation game like Combat Mission.
(It's also why I personally find all the noise about the war mechanics a bit tangential to the real meat of the game.)
I think that the issue is rather that most of those complex systems are:
1. Poorly explained.
2. Half-finished.
3. Badly balanced.
4. Very bugged.
For example, the railroad problem which I've already explained.
Unraveling all those secrets, finding workarounds or even creating mods is indeed an interesting challenge. But only for so long. Sooner or later, you'll become disillusioned with all the potential the devs wasted by churning out such an unfinished game. So I'm sticking to the part which functions best, and that is building stuff, while avoiding the worst parts. Warfare in particular. It's a horribly bugged micromanagement mess.