Abonneren om te downloaden
Economic Volatility Mod (BROKEN/FIXING)

I fell away from working on this mod for quite a long time because every time I was getting somewhere with it, PDX would patch Vic 3, my mod would break the game and I'd have to start over again, it was very demoralising.

Anyway, I've found the courage and strength to get back at it, but again, the mod doesn't work with the current version, or more accurately; the mod works, it just breaks lots of other things, so I'm once again starting from scratch because I'm a novice modder, but will hopefully have a functioning version soon!

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.

_______________________________________________________________
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.

_______________________________________________________________
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.

_______________________________________________________________
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.
_______________________________________________________________
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!