Victoria 3

Victoria 3

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Economic Volitility Mod
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Jan 23 @ 5:09pm
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Economic Volitility Mod

Description
After the drama of my computer dying, losing all my progress from the previous version, and through a mixture of busy work life and low morale, I have an update that works on the current version of the game, though this is just an update to get the game working on this version with a few tweaks and changes, there is still much I want to add.

Firstly, I want to emphasise;
This mod is NOT designed to be balanced, some countries have a distinct advantage over others, while others will be very difficult to prosper, and one bad war, even if successful in the end, can destroy your economy.

I love Vic 3, though there are various things that really bugged me with the game that I decided to try to iron out, I'll break this description up into 4 segments; The Issues, The Changes, The Results, and Compatibility.

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The Issues
Issues may not be the correct word, it'd be more accurate to call them design choices that I think, in my humble opinion, could be better.

The economy has a sort of safety cushion, where the goods shortage penalty for buildings is -50%, even if there is a 100% shortage, the penalty sits at -50%. So the economy never really feels like it's ever in danger of collapsing.

I understand this is probably to keep the game flowing and prevent economic crashes from occurring, however, I feel this makes crashes rare, if they happen at all.

It's widely agreed that the game poorly portrays 19th century warfare, the whole war system is set up specifically to cater to late game early 20th century total war.

I also dislike that states that are completely occupied by invaders can still provide goods and reinforcements to the defenders, I always thought it quite silly that they'd be allowed to skip across the front line to supply and reinforce the defenders.

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The Changes
I changed the goods shortage penalty to -100%, so if there are 0 inputs, then there are 0 outputs, which affects other buildings, population and shrinks GDP.

I have also changed a number of other aspects, the price range for goods is now 99%, the lowest price is £0 and the buy sell difference is 1:4 - 4:1 rather than 1:2 - 2:1, so if a market is flooded with a certain good, it can become valueless.
The minimum wage a factory can pay its workers is now £0.01.

For warfare, I have reduced the recruitment rate of soldiers drastically in the early stages.
This is an attempt to simulate earlier warfare where entire populations aren't mobilised for minor wars, so an early defeat or victory could decide the war since when an army loses it's manpower, it's very unlikely to recover for the rest of the war and will even need a lengthy post war break to recover.

Down the line, as you change production methods in barracks, from training streamlining, you will start to see recruitment speeds start to pick up, giving armies a much easier time reinforcing during war.

Early war support has been altered, so that casualties have a heavier impact on war support, giving weight to these decisive battles, some wars can be decided after a single battle in the early game.
I have added some modifiers to military tech, so as you research certain things, the casualty penalty becomes less impactful on war support, so that by late game, you can have Great War statistics to your hearts content.

I have changed the effects of devastation, I have upped the migration and mortality rates quite a bit which scales with devastation levels, this is intended to represent displaced refugees and civilians killed in times of war

I have added two new effects to devastation, a throughput penalty and training penalty. As devastation increases, these penalties scale , when 100% devastation is reached, no more goods or soldiers come from the affected state, I have set it to scale so entire states don't grind to a halt when only 10% of it is occupied.

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The Results
Naturally, when you make various changes to a game that devs didn't design it for, weird things can happen at times, whether these are flaws, or features, is up to you.

I achieved my goal of making the economy more volatile, it almost worked a bit too well.
There is a strange thing at the beginning of a campaign where due to the mortality and minimum factory wage changes, most leading European powers lose population, this is due to a combination of the mortality and minimum factory wage changes causing a lot of deaths due to very low SOL, though this usually sorts itself. Usually.

Wars are absolutely devastating to the country it's being fought in.
During a recent test, Aristocrats in India decided to rebel against the EIC and Britain, the rebellion was crushed and resulted in 50M dead and wrecked its GDP to a whimper of its former self, this caused widespread food shortages in Europe as Indian grain was no longer being exported to other markets.

That being said, there's an annoying little issue that my mod has caused after the update, since advancing the frontline or conducting a naval invasion is reliant morale, food and gear shortages can prevent morale from reaching a high enough level to go on the offensive.
This is probably accurate, it doesn't make sense to send soldiers into battle if you know they'll lose because they aren't supplied properly, however, when both sides have this issue, the frontline can be a staring contest for quite a while, the stalemate does usually break eventually, it's just no good when you're in a rush.

As I said in the beginning, all it takes is one bad war to wreck your economy, and you'll have to work hard to build it back up, so if you're going to go to war, it may be best to keep it in enemy territory.

A problem, or feature, with this mod is that it can lead to uprising galore.
With the damage caused by war and/or struggling economy, people won't be best pleased with the current affairs, so they rise up. Two big wars between Prussia and Austria threw the German states into a spiral of utter anarchy, Prussia won the wars, but was so damaged by the fallout that Austria ended up winning the long game of Germany.

I've been trying to find ways to get buildings to downsize with increasing devastation, to portray damage to property, but it also bugs me when a state is sitting with a level 20 tools factory which is mostly empty because it isn't able to employ anyone. Though this may be beyond my modding ability.

I am also trying to set up timed modifiers, so that during the early stages of the game, initial mobilisation of conscripts is rapid with its recruitment, but after the initial intake, reinforcements slow down to the same level as the regular army, the intent is to simulate the raising on fresh armies rather than mobilising the population in the early game. This might work quite well for post war regular army recruitment, I'm not sure if the wait for the regular army to rebuild after a war is too long.

I seem to be failing my intelligence rolls with setting up timed modifiers.
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Compatibility
Due to time constraints, this update is really just to get the mod working on the latest version, though I have added things to finally have something akin to what I had before my pc death, there are still a number of things I want to tune and add.

Alas, I haven't been able to test it with mods as I've mostly been making sure it works with vanilla, I would play it safe and assume it isn't compatible with most mods, however, it's yours to experiment with!
13 Comments
Thyrampantpigeon  [author] Apr 1 @ 11:42am 
I apologise for not answering, I'm in the middlemoving house which has taken most if my attention.

The mod is in a pretty rocky place, I uploaded this version to get it "working" on the newer versions since the last big patch, but where it worked pretty well in the older versions, it seems quite iffy on the newer as countries really struggle to grow their economy moreso than intended.

This could be fixed with some simple balancing, or I might have to dig into the game files to try to find what has changed from the last version.

I apologise for the slow progress, but hopefully when I'm settled with the move I can spend more time with it.
Alex Mar 31 @ 8:40am 
just reading this description is funny enough lmao
Commissar BS Mar 29 @ 4:56am 
How long does it take for the AI to sort itself out?
Leviticus Mar 5 @ 1:50am 
Also this mod in its current state makes the ragamuffin wars impossible.
Leviticus Mar 4 @ 7:29pm 
Anyone knows if this mod plays nicely with Laaxus Revision AI?
Ellisten Feb 17 @ 7:44pm 
uhhhh

so the heavenly kingdom rebellion cut the population of china in half
gameshark429 Feb 17 @ 9:08am 
Your mods always deliver
TheGamingNot Feb 3 @ 11:26pm 
@see two my economic tweak mod does that. and some other things
Okraine Feb 1 @ 8:36am 
Awesome
see two Feb 1 @ 7:24am 
when game just released, one of the first mods was the one that added +-99% price of goods and up to -100% shortage penalty, but it doesn't work nowadays, hence why I'd love to see it reborn