Economic Tips

[rickerts]

Played this a ton, less so since the economic overhaul took place. Was just curious as to any tips or suggestions. I'm willing to let the AI handle it even if I tend to try to take more of a hands on approach in game play overall

[LCcmdr]

Just one voice of the possible many...

I do not build prisons (because I take so many prisoners).
I do build about a dozen markets (all cities, size 5 or greater).
I do build one salt farm (as the Union).
I do build a navy of about 120K tons, using the steam ships primarily as the best fort busters.
I do build plantations and farms as the CSA--but not many.

I do buy a lot of troops as quickly as possible (though hardly any until after researching 12 month enlistments). When I hit BBB, I slow down, since the longer the war goes, the more recruits fill out my early builds.

I do use about a dozen small (4-5 lower end) ships to blockade rivers and the eastern seaboard, plus trade routes (once I have added the sea raider perk). This, IMO, does hinder the enemy's available cash.

Since most of my games end too soon (18-24 months), I don't have a clue how to handle later economic issues.

[drzom]

You do not build prisons though you take many prisoners? Doesn't that make you a war criminal?

[LCcmdr]

Building prisons becomes a huge expense to either side that I play. So, i don't build prisons. Any captured soldiers from battle are simply released. If they rejoin the pool of available soldiers, so be it. Anyhow, it's just less drain on my economic system.

Perhaps your comment was just a spoof or a tease; but, every battle report alerts you as to killed, wounded, missing, and/or captured. The last line of the report notifies of the paroled soldiers if you have no prisons built.

[Lonesomepoet]

Originally posted by drzom:

You do not build prisons though you take many prisoners? Doesn't that make you a war criminal?

It takes less than that to be a war criminal just look at the warden of the Chicago prison camp during the civil war that place was worse than Andersonville and it doesnt have the excuse of low supplies hell it was called the Andersonville of the north

[Butch]

So here’s the deal. This war is gonna cost a lot. No matter what side you play, your debt is gonna climb and your credit is gonna plummet. Playing optimally and successfully managing the economy is all about slowing down the rate at which your economy tanks. There are a number of things to keep in mind.

A common mistake most new players will make is to look at the economy warning tooltip and see that they are underproducing a product that is in high demand and then instinctively building farms or factories to help produce that product. Building expensive buildings using money from your treasury (without having accrued enough subsidies) is a bad idea. Instead, what you want to try and do is make the existing buildings more profitable so that they can automatically upgrade on their own without you having to spend government funds on them.

If you’re a decent player and you’re playing the unmodded vanilla game, the chances are you’re going to win the game by late 1862 to mid 1863. Building things like factories and ironworks simply don’t pay for themselves in a span of 2 or 3 years. As a matter of fact the general consensus is that you should avoid building most buildings so as to keep your economy afloat. This is especially true as the Confederacy.

With that said, there are still some buildings that are quite useful and some that are actually vital to help keep industries profitable.

Markets are fantastic. They significantly increase the amount of goods that can be bought and sold per week in the IIPs (important infrastructure points) like towns and ports around them. Prioritise them around your large ports or railways that are bringing in high sales taxes. Having markets around industrial zones as well as around large cities is a great idea. Cities generate a lot of demand for non military goods and allowing more trade volume around these areas means you can collect more sales taxes. More sales taxes helps ease the pain on your bottom line every year. The reason you want markets around your main industrial zones (where your factories and ironworks are) is so that they can sell more products every week (again more sales tax) and also because you want more pre-goods (raw materials) to reach them to keep costs down. Markets will help make a lot of buildings profitable.

When a building is very profitable due to low production costs and high demand for its products, private investors will upgrade it from level 1 to level 2 to level 3.

As the armies grow huge, the demand for provisions skyrockets. Provisions require food and salt. Food becomes a huge bottleneck in the early game. Food can be produced in a factory using either grain, livestock or flour. The availability of salt multiplies the food output by a factor of 1.5. So salt becomes a HUGE deal (as it was historically). It is an excellent idea to build enough salt works to meet the demand as early as possible. Put them in areas with high workforce ideally around factories so they can buy the salt nice and cheap. This will make food production very lucrative for your factories and help keep them profitable. Food is always the most highly demanded product throughout the entire campaign.

Another imporant thing you should remember to do is to mothball the supply depots in your rear areas that aren’t supplying your armies. You put them on red to make sure they stay empty and prevent them competing with the forward supply depots on the front line for vital supplies like ammunition and provisions.

Be smart with where and when you build supply depots. An army of 120 thousand men can actually stay very well supplied without a single supply depot in range if it’s in a city with a huge port and railway towns in range. Supply depots are expensive to build, expensive to fill and aren’t always necessary. Local supply can often more than meet an army’s demand with the added benefit of generating more sales taxes for you in the area where your army is encamped. This is why control of the railways, rivers and ports is so vital (again as it was historically). Always try to plan your offensives so that your armies will be in range of a railway or even better, an unblockaded port that is connected to the rest of your trade network.

I could probably go on and on but this reply is already way too long…

[Machiavelli]

I wish the economy in this game wasn't such an enigma

[drzom]

Originally posted by Butch:

As a matter of fact the general consensus is that you should avoid building most buildings so as to keep your economy afloat.

So it is a mistake to turn on the auto manage for buildings? Government buildings, too? Just ignore all the flashing lights and sirens from the dozens of structures clamoring for immediate attention? Yikes. Sounds risky.

Thanks for the advice on depots. I never even considered letting them be empty. I have been overbuilding depots, trying to campaign through low supply areas. It becomes costly.

Very helpful post, Butch. Thanks. Feel free to go on and on any time you like.

[GreatScots]

Never above self promotion, I'll recommend the following videos to you in the order I would recommend watching them. The short version of the economy, though, is that there's little you need to worry about producing, since the game doesn't model shortages well. Your "economic" problems are converted to fiscal ones, which are easily solved. A very small number of the most profitable railroad lines can be built, a very few depots, and some prisons, if you have an enormous number of prisoners or want to role-play having enough prisons to hold all of them. Almost all other buildings will not make back their cost before your campaign ends. The second video here provides most of the empirical evidence for these claims. To date, I have not seen anyone produce anything with results to the contrary. I wish they would.

1. https://youtu.be/XRV0xN-k_T0
2. https://youtu.be/T05mmu0zXO4
3. https://youtu.be/7bZ20VMjbY4

[rickerts]

thank you everyone and I will certainly give the videos a look. It'd be cool if the shortages worked or were implemented better and or the buildings paid for themselves etc but overall I imagine that it might be tough to pull off in a game such as this

[Balanced Integer]

I hardily second those vids by GreatScots, especially the "King Commerce" one. My early-to-mid war efforts are financed almost entirely by tariffs and Trade Deal project spam. Only later in the war do I need to pursue income taxes and the national bank, and almost never do I have to rely on the Printed Notes or War Bond policies.

As for other economy issues, I can concur with other posters here that about a dozen (give or take) Markets dropped around your larger, more industrialized cities is a nice move. I would only add that you should consider also jacking up your Econ subsidies to max and spamming a few Market Reform projects to further enhance their effectiveness.

(EDIT: According to Butch below, the Market Reform project is bugged and doesn't work properly. Can anyone else confirm that?)

One thing I've noticed is that if you do as above, the profitability problems that get highlighted in the economic alerts gradually decrease over time, as pre-goods costs come down.

[Butch]

GreatScots video guides are fantastic and definitely worth a watch for new players and veterans alike.

Originally posted by drzom:

So it is a mistake to turn on the auto manage for buildings? Government buildings, too? Just ignore all the flashing lights and sirens from the dozens of structures clamoring for immediate attention? Yikes. Sounds risky.

Very helpful post, Butch. Thanks. Feel free to go on and on any time you like.

You can essentially ignore the economy for the most part and leave it on auto-manage and be just fine if you're playing the vanilla game. The main reason is because most of the time your campaign rarely lasts more than 2 years. Most economic interventions will not have an effect that you can appreciate in that time span. If you play the AOM mod however, the campaign usually lasts way longer due to the fact that national morale and military experience drop MUCH slower. In a 4 year campaign, what you do in 1861 will definitely be impactful by the summer of 1864 or even 1865. War is expensive. A long drawn out war will require you to keep your credit rating and public wealth in decent shape if you want to keep spending. If you're playing the AOM mod, learning how the economy really works will definitely help.

So here's another information dump that'll help explain some of the nitty gritty details that the manual doesn't really explain. I'm going to assume you're playing the AOM mod so some things will differ slightly but the main concepts are the same. I might eventually turn this into a full fledged steam guide at some point.

- As the Union, pass the Tariff Act early and raise the tariff slider to 50 %. This will net you a tremendous amount of income yearly. As a matter of fact, it will be your main source of income as Income tax and Sales tax pale in comparison.

- Tariffs will piss off the Europeans a little (-10 relations) but nobody cares because intervention is nearly impossible.

- Maximum tariffs as the Confederacy is less beneficial in the long run. The reason is you rely a lot on European trade to supply your less industrialized nation. Tariffs raise prices on import goods only. If those goods can't be produced internally (to meet the demand) and all of a sudden the foreign imports are more expensive, your existing factories are going to have a hard time staying profitable as the South.

- Your aim should be to try and keep all your factories, ironworks and farms as profitable as possible. Profitable buildings raise public wealth. When public wealth goes up, your income tax goes up and so does the support of the individual states.

- Printing notes will obviously net you a very large sum of money every year but public wealth will drop as a result due to inflation. From my experience it is still worth it in the long run to pass print notes 1 and 2.

- Remember that your factories are also trying to meet the demands of millions of civilians. The war will drive the prices of non-civilian goods up causing your factories to switch their production to the now more highly demanded products like provisions.

- When factories change their production in the early war to meet the new demands, their profitability will naturally drop because their efficiency goes down. Efficiency goes up the longer a building produces the same products. Higher efficiency leads to higher profits.

- Don't lower the sales tax slider or the income tax slider. You're not going to substantially increase the flow of goods (lower sales taxes means it's cheaper for IIPs to trade and theoretically they should trade more as a result) or raise public wealth (less income tax means wealthier citizens) to the point where it's worth missing out on a couple hundred million dollars a year.

- Subsidies are only really good for projects.

- The strongest industrial project is Infrastructure Reform. Raise your industrial subsidies and spam this project. The increased flow of trade in all your IIPs will make it much easier to supply armies using local supply as opposed to depot supply.

- Remember that depots are expensive. Military provisions, ammo and weapons for depots are bought using money from your treasury. Local supply doesn't cost the government money.

- Raise your Economy subsidies to max and spam the Improve Credit Rating project. This is probably the strongest project in the game.

- The market reform economy project is unfortunately bugged but it would be quite useful if it worked and you had a lot of markets around your major ports and railways.

- The Agriculture project "farm mechanization" is the obvious winner in that category. More volunteers and higher farm output is a no-brainer.

[Butch]

- Pace yourself with your spending especially early in the campaign before your income sources really start coming in. As your national debt begins to climb, your credit rating goes down and the interest you have to pay on your loans goes up.

- Maintaining a total and suffocating blockade on the CSA where every major port is 100 % under blockade will cost a ridiculous amount of money. Naval upkeep is very expensive so if you're going to commit to strangling the CSA economy then you have to be smart with how you build your navy.

- The blockade efficiency of a ship is determined by it's speed and something called "flagship value" which I assume is the cost of the ship in money. If you're aiming for a total blockade, the most cost effective ships for the sole purpose of blockading are 2nd and 3rd rate steamers. They're extremely fast and cheap to build and can stay out at sea long enough to make a difference before having to cycle back to port to resupply. The downside to them is that they don't have any armor and have larger hull sizes making them extremely easy to sink in battles. Mix them in with your existing frigates and fighting ships and you should be fine against the Confederate navy.

- Smaller fast ships such as ship's tender gunboats, 4th rate steamers and schooners have small hulls (harder to hit) and they're very fast but they lack the provision capacity to stay at sea long enough to be effective blockaders. They're more suited to scouting roles.

- Avoid spamming large expensive ships that require lots of resources to maintain. This is the fastest way to wreck your economy through navy upkeep. The overall effect on the enemy's economy will never be worth it. This is especially true when you're playing as the Federals.

- Buying the latest weapons is expensive. You don't need to supply your entire army with Springfields or Mississippi rifles to win. Doing so will put a huge dent in your economy. Pace yourself when it comes to weapons and wait until your standardization goes up before really going to town on the large and frequent weapon purchases. This is especially true if you're playing the excellent AOM mod.