One thing I'd say is: To avoid the case where the Midlands decides to ship everything by sea instead of by land, I'd put a base penalty to shipping and unshipping goods, even if the ship traversal is as cheap as land traversal. That way, moving 10 states is more expensive than moving two naval nodes, but moving two states is cheaper than moving on and off a sea node.
Survivor's bias! I really like this idea, because the introduction of Freight as a good leans into the systems as they already exist, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. It addresses something that I've found to be a major failing of a game that is ostensibly about economic and nuanced diplomacy: Foreign markets are essentially irrelevant to most gameplay, specifically because they're not exploitable. I can gain influence benefits and some gains in economic activity by leaning hard into trade, but they're usually not worth the effort. In most of my playthroughs, I'll use trade as an early-game tool, then once I've established my economic footing at home I largely forget that it exists. Trade becomes just one more thing I could micromanage, and it doesn't provide near enough benefit to be worth the effort. I just build my market, and others can set up trade routes as they desire. I just keep my GDP going up and up and up, making anything that happens in the world's economy outside my market completely irrelevant. Freight and all its implications would go a long way to reversing that trend away from global market considerations, and bring the game closer to what it intends to be. As for this type of video, I loved it! You clearly had a lot of fun making it, too, and to me that's always a win as a viewer. Time will tell what the larger audience and the algorithm have to say about it, but I'm all for more of this style of video. You're one of the few Vicky-Tube creators that can really go deep on these more conceptual topics, rather than simply having fun gameplay (I like your gameplay, too, but it's the deep dives & guides that brought me here).
23:12 It's interesting that you say this is the suggestion that might slow performance but this is just a simple weighted average, which is trivial to compute. I actually think your first suggestion of determining distance to market capital is what would be more computationally expensive. Because you ideally want states and sea nodes to be weighted, this requires weighted pathfinding algorithms like Dijkstra to mimimise distance (or whatever other value you're trying to minimise). I guess you could technically just use unweighted graphs (so it's only a simple breadth first search), but that would lead to weird situations where moving over a mountain is exactly as hard as moving over an urban center with like 20 railroads or moving over a sea tile.
So calculating distance might be more intensive, but it wouldn't need to be done frequently at all. I'd not mind if the game just calculated 8% of states a week, and then updated them quarterly, or only checks if a railroad has been built, or if states have been lost or acquired.
@@generalistgaming That's fair, if it was calculated between larger intervals it could definitely be a lot more viable. I do know the devs have talked about this being a difficult endeavour though so I do wonder how viable it is. Especially considering NO Paradox game has really built a competent logistics system (except HOI3 I guess but we don't talk about HOI3 logistics)
Calculating the distance in absolute terms would actually be relatively easy to optimise--do it at game start. So, you can build a map of every province to every market capital once and cache it, then on the fly you only need to recalculate for when the straight connection has been _broken_ (and only until rejoining the calculated path). So, the performance impact, and not needing to recalculate that frequently, can be pretty optimised IMO.
@@rainehdaze9157 This seems like it would be great, but my experience with modding V3 tells me that ridiculous things would happen. Either wars/ fronts would have no effect on the system, or the game would crap its pants and die whenever a front changed. There are probably ways around this, but so many systems in the game would need to draw on this information more frequently (combat/fronts are calculated daily) and would force a recalculation of the entire freight network constantly. I think this is still the best option, but it would take a real coder to make it work (I'll stick to the defines file)
@@brandonzzz9924 Yeah, it's undoubtedly a thing that would need to be done in-engine, but a lot of work can be saved just because you only need to calculate when a state's path to its market capital has been cut off… which is, at least, a bit less common (although naval invasions in particular would suck). But it's an optimisable problem where you can do a LOT of precalculation (the maps and all initial states are known when you start the game), which gives me hope-as there's much less on-the-fly recalculation required.
Having railways reduce freight costs over land would really reinforce historical metas, like transcontinental railways. It would also be nice to see more of a "flowing" migration system. I'm tired of seeing my second rate states being starved because there's one utopian city eating up all the migrants. Maybe not all the migrants can afford my capital, and they move to an industrial hub?
@andresmartinezramos7513 Sure, but every country has a second city. Migration makes me have a city with all 50+ industries, and nowhere else will auto expand because there's no workers elsewhere
Very on the money here imo. I have long used a mod I wrote for aingleplayer, now adapted for multiplayer community, that makes ports private infrastructure and producing a good called "shipping lanes" to trade centers. It generally makes changes to buff specialization and trade between markets. Let me know if you want the link and/or a complete changelog.
11:50 Thank you for putting my thoughts into coherent words I always knew something was off but but now I know what it is and it sounds soo obvious Too obvious to be an oversight or a bad design choice by the devs It really seems to all boil down to the performance issue unfortunately with how many countries, pops and goods there are I'm not really surprised that we don't have stockpile and such But the overall performance has been getting better in my experience so maybe the devs have some overhead to work with That being said, having freight as a seperate good and privitizing shipment of goods sounds sounds like a solid idea
4:00 Port connection: Also one of the bad things about trrade is how it bottlenecked by amount of ports but in bad way. So For example If I as japan export 5k clothes to France and 3k to USA I can go dry on convoys, but... If France import 5k cloth and USA imports 3k cloth then I don't use any of my convoys at all! But AI is very bad at creating trade routes even with such big profits. Meanwhile situation is even worse on low scale trade. For example my economy consume 40 tools, Trade centers will import 5 tools per country keeping my economy in shortage as they see no profit to going "extra step" meanwhile I can't even subsidise exact goods import! only WHOLE TC at once. 12:00 MAPI: IMO Mapi should be "regional" not STATE based so it should count not "stae by state" but "region by region" 39:00 Selling transportation: That could also be solution to issue of "I want to be broker" Like Why Portugal can't purchase opium in India and ship it to China? Why fact that I produce no opium preven me to be retailer? 42:00 Urban centers: I believe that Urban centers and subsistance farms should also provide small (very small) amount of construction and industrial goods by "manufacturing" TBH I want to see Urban centers to be reworked to make them feel like a city. not random service producer
It kills me that pdx would rather add more half baked, non balanced systems, like the climatic crisis, that can flood your run to death and has no interactivity with the player, than to fix basic economical and warfare systems...
Thrre is a weird fact and mechanic, in that, as convoys determine competitiveness, having only land trade means that convoys that should do nothing in there give the max competitiveness the capacity bar offers.
I'll get up and walk around when I see you finish a video by getting up and walking around. Great video, I have been suggesting things like this for a while. I do think that, while totally awesome, this system would be computationally expensive and need some other game systems changed as well (which you touched on, but would likely be a nontrivial amount of work for the devs). A few thoughts: 1. The latest dev diary mentioned adding in automated trade, which would be perfect with this system as freight could be a good that regulates trade center profitability and expansion via the market instead of backend algorithms. 2. Pirates. Need I say more? Ok sure. The freight system would be an amazing way to add piracy and privateering to the game. While the Golden Age of Pirates was over for a few decades at the start of the game, less internationally diplomatic nations still had maritime raiding which could effectively work like convoy raiding in peacetime. A few differences would be that only unrecognized powers could engage in piracy (recognized powers have privateering, which would just be convoy raiding by government militaries like currently), and that the pirate convoy raiding would be: limited by area (maybe 1-2 sea nodes from their lands), available during peace and war (with diplomatic agreements/bribes, and military actions (events?) to stop it), and generate revenue for the pirate country. This would allow for the private sector to run the trade, and the government would be responsible for protecting sea lanes. 3. Treaty ports should get a special monument building that acts as a governance and trade center that allows for further manipulation of the market they infiltrated. This would make treaty ports more historical as enclave (exclave?) cities that administer the region's peoples and economic interests. Maybe it could also use the company mechanics to establish more profitable trade centers as company headquarters. Making them into forts would be pretty sweet as well, but I've tried to mod this myself for dozens of hours and got nowhere so idk how feasible it is. 4. River trade was actually far more impactful than this video made it seem in this time period. The Rhine, Danube, Elbe, and Dnieper in Europe especially, and others like the Weser (Bremerhaven) and Thames were instrumental in the development of European economies and trade as they are easily navigable and plentiful enough to have tributaries reach just about everywhere in Europe (and they are consistent rivers, no catastrophic flooding wiping out entire cities like the more fertile Chinese rivers or the Ganges and Nile, that are conducive to infrastructure over agriculture). But the biggest and bestest river of them all, the Mississippi river system, was and is so ridiculously good for trade that it essentially turned half of the continental US into ocean ports. The historical approach would basically be a multiplier for freight along the Mississippi, Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, etc. rivers (anywhere from 2-5x would be reasonable) on ALL freight, with canal style projects for locks like the Erie canal and upper Mississippi to activate the bonuses past rapids and waterfalls. Most rivers are contained almost entirely in single nations (for super cool historical reasons), but the Danube is a great example of where rivers should provide ocean trade access to all the countries touching the river, with convoy raiding/piracy downstream during war or hostility. Rivers are so frickin important in this period before widespread railways. 5. I have never played or watched more than 30 min of HoI, so idk how the rail system works. The proposition for rail network strength is incredible though. One of the big changes in warfare during this time was rail mobilization (which is just an annoying cheese mechanic currently with horses gaining speed from trains. wtf?). The whole system of armies being able to march from Southern France to Denmark in one month is ridiculous (Toulouse to Hamburg is a 27 day walk at 12 hours a day on modern roads). Using freight as a measure of throughput for all goods, including human goods like cannon fodder, makes a ton of sense. Ideally, freight could be used as a limiter for how many troops can move to a front at a time so that local forces are necessary to hold off until the main armies can mobilize and march over, with railways drastically reducing the time and slightly increasing army movement throughput at higher levels. 6. You mentioned weight as a factor for freight limitations, specifically contrasting steel and iron, but volume is and was the bigger factor for many goods. Metals and minerals are easy to transport (by ship or rail, not by wagon) as their shape is uniform and fit to the container they are in. Iron is usually transported as a dust or gravel like consistency of rocks, and also makes for decent ballast in ships when secured properly. Steel is relatively easy to transport as it can be packed tightly with compact beams, but things like engines and furniture were a nightmare to transport. Engines are heavy and non stackable, though the higher price point negates some inefficiency in transport, whereas furniture is light but extremely space inefficient, making it very unprofitable to trade low cost furniture. Textiles are pretty much the perfect industrial good to ship with light weight and near optimal volume efficiency, second only to their inputs like fabrics and dyes. Food items could also use freight to make certain goods viable, like meat, fruit, and fish which spoil quickly compared to grains and sugar, so a lot of freight would allow for quicker transportation to keep the items fresh. Tobacco, tea, and coffee can be dried prior to transport (I know nothing about opium), so would be perfect for low freight economies that don't need priority trades. Freight could also increase trade route competitiveness to incentivize trade routes with more freight to persist through market shocks. 7. The military movement system (and trade) uses a spline network to calculate distance between points. Every state has 5 nodes, coastal get a sea access node as well, regardless of the number of provinces in a state. I believe that the mechanics are that the network is a picture and it calculates the number of pixels on the path of the network to determine how long an army takes to travel, whereas trade just measures the number of sea nodes and disregards land nodes for performance reasons. I think that the land nodes could be activated for calculating freight, MAPI, and trade, but my guess is that doing so would make the game roughly 30-70% slower from my research on performance drains using the tick tracker in debug mode. I think this would make the game so much better in every way except playing it, as trade in many of my campaigns can cause up to about a third of delayed ticks when no wars are taking place. Big wars that use the full spline network can cause delays (per day when fronts are calculated) up to 5x the normal daily tick rate. 8. Exploitation and trade wars are great ideas, I'll have to give these a think. Great stuff, great video. I didn't even have to put my kids back in the cupboard, though I think a spreadsheet showing how freight would impact the game would be pretty sweet for another video!
Idea is cool, I would like to add on the market hub idea, I think you should be able to create more than one market hubs, for US one in california is kind of enough, but for more global powers, having multiple is a must e.g. one in europe, one in africa, one in south east asia, etc. This would also somewhat incentivize colonies to be closer together, so that player ideally should try colonizing (both literally and through conquering unrecognized nations) stuff that's closer to the hub, instead of just putting your colonists everywhere you can and attacking the most valuable states, even if they are very far away. Bigger countries like Russia would also benefit massively from having multiple hubs(e.g. one in capital, one in urals, one on black sea coast, one in far east). The main caveat is I doubt that pdx would ever even try to implement complex stuff like this, it feels like they made economy that is "good enough" and are afraid to make significant changes if not absolutely necessary (I would never get why manufacturing industries generally are less efficient per worker than mines).
Feedback as requested: the video was really good and thought provoking, I'd definitely be interested in more content like this. The editing on the section title slides was a bit wonky but we don't come here for editing and/or sound-proofing. This kinda stuff and some more POE2 content is what my generalist needs are
I understand that this is not point of the video, but few days ago I have writen suggetion to improve internal politics feeling in the game beyond just "supress/bulster movemet" below I will copy paste my suggestion from PDX forum: Right now "Interest group" are quite dull and there is additionaly reduced way to influence them, So I believe that there should be not just "goverment" as "parlament" but proper "cabitnet" mechanic. Cabinets should have some amount of seats based on institutions, tech and laws of country, with least deveoped countries have like 1-3 seats of"advisors" meanwhile advanced countries with developed institutions could reach 10+ seats. And each person would give you leverage over groups and parties. You can "Sell" seats for some preferences at legislation, you can give seats to improve relationships with groups, you can choice unpopular but skillful minister that will give you bonuses, for example like reduced burocracy cost for healthcare by healthcare ministry, reduced intrest rate by development minstry, increased migration attraction and etc. You can even invite foreign ministers but recieve penalty for interest group relations, maybe their skill will be more impotrant then some landowner opinions. Or probably you not care about good economic ssituation and ready to keep some corrupt boisss on their seats for their loaylty, and now you can build super-legitimate goverment that can squise every tax money while keep goverment stable and legitimate as there is noone to opose your rule. And no, it should not be just copy paste from Eu4 or Stellaris. I really want to think who I want to see as my minister of defence, should he be skillful general from opposition, loyal careerist or maybe economist who will make my army "cheaper" but... Nobody like him
So much to unpack here, so many good thoughts. Freight would be a nice addition to the simulation, and with its ability to warp markets maybe changing trade would be in order. As in any trade law that isnt free trade requires specific acceptance to trade between two countries, then trade routes can be set up. or having a two tiers of trade, consumer and industrial, consumer is always free to have routes opened where as industrial goods/raw materials are blocked behind a "trade agreement" not the kind we have now but less impactful one that just allows "all goods" to be traded between countries. This could open up an angle for diplo plays to be a big deal around trade agreements and treaty ports, more so than they are now. war goals for enforcing tariff free trading for a decade or two. Diplo interests should be split into two categories, one on a per country basis so you can join or defend against plays based in the homelands or colonies of a specific country. and two geographic so that you can assert your control over all in a region, yes there may be overlap with country based interest. if you didnt have a country based interest but a geographic one then wars could be contained to just that region between powers and homelands could be off limits, creating a need for supply, naval power and a simple change from storming the capital every war.
You could probably implement the freight system and it not be performance intensive by creating regional trade centers So that the computer doesn't have to process how connected every province is to every which would be very processor heavy It would only need to calculate how connected a province within a region is connected to its trade center and then that center to another center. Example Missouri sits in the Mississippi trade region of which New Orleans is the trade center. How connected Missouri is determines its pricing. And then how connected new Orleans is to London determines the difference in trade prices between them
I could only wish we had a system of many trade/logistics hubs forming a network. I think an additional consideration here would be the role of hubs like Singapore, Aden, Hormuz, Istanbul, Gibraltar, Copenhagen, the African coastline and especially Cape Town; so, the modelling of "Freight" travel. You have mentioned the cost aspect of sea freight, however it also would have time and lag considerations. Perhaps not at the beginning of the game, but definitely closer to the post industrial era.
I'm not feeling the freight removing infrastructure. If anything, I'd consider infrastructure as freight efficiency, so if you have high freight but infrastructure is quite bad, the companies might still be unable to bring the resources to the state. Some sort of "mobile" MAPI - the freight you give each state depends on the amount of resources shipped (so it is static and not a percentage of the whole country), the infra being consumed by the buildings, and the excess or lack of infra reduces how good the freight helps move resources.
Also while talking about infrastructure, I think the way it's represented in vic3 is just silly sometimes you have to build 300+ railways in one province all 300 hundred of which are super unprofitable and thus you have to pay 750k+ in subsidies just to stay afloat like what am I doing? running 300 train tracks in parallel? I think the freight system would work best with infrastructure Imagine just like in vic2 there were multiple levels of railways that you can build which you unlock with better technology and each level of railway decreased the "distance cost" to the market capital by an extra point (also decreasing the terrain debuffs by a percent) so the factories in that state require less freight to be profitable (I think this was simulated in vic2 by a flat production bonus) also along with any other benefit that cheaper freight would bring like migration quotas
the performance thing about goods doesn't seem so bad, given that it doesn't need to update in real time - it just needs to "pathfind" once every so often - real companies don't change their suppliers the second someone cheaper comes along
Even if it doesn't happen every tick, its still an np-complete calculation that will tax the tick it does occur. There may be a way to ease the performance hit by distributing it across ticks, but i think freight being a modifier already works within the systems/calculations that are already shown to be current and acceptable.
My idea for how to make a market hub: Have it be a political decision/journal entry that's locked behind a few requirements. Something like 1) minimum number of combined buy and sell orders (there's stuff happening here), 2) high MAPI (it's easy to connect to the outside world), 3) low price of freight, 4) distance from other market (although I think probably like 2. Liverpool deserves one even if London already has it)
So many game mechanics are broken: war, assimilation, migration, trade, lategame factories, companies and so on. I dont feel like we have captain which got coherent vision of game. I played a few paradox games but this is first one which is creating same ammount of problems as it fixes.
I 100% disagree. I think the game’s leadership is absolutely inspired. 1.8 absolutely did introduce some new issues, but of the 3 new problems (migration, assimilation, companies), 2 are already fixed.
@@astrolonim2032 3 steps back, 2 forward. Feels like we are treading in place. Dude its already 2 years, we still dont have working eco system (and i am not even talking about implementing interventionism) .I will be Santa Claus before they finish game :).
Victoria has by far the most coherent vision of any of the main games by Paradox. Only rivaled by HoI4 at the start of it's lifetime and that ship sailed a long time ago. It knows what it wants to do and does so without the terrible loss of focus most of their projects suffer from. It is just younger, so kinks haven't been ironed out. Think of the launch states of HoI4, EU4, CK3, Imperator etc.
I think the straight line distance between the state could make sense instead of using amount of states for land connections partly cause its more performant and partly cause it makes big states less good
That is one of the propositions in the vides. He even says he is making the distinction to ensure that people don't mix up the existing system with the proposal.
20:23 I Think that it would be clear Per to like, Trade between 2 adjacent States, as Long as there issent a mountain in the Way or something, or 2 States that share a river,to Trade directlly with each other, than Reading through the market-Capital would!
What do you think of current company mechanics? construction and throughout bonuses are so high that it does feel right to build some of the buildings unless you have needed company, so on privatization company with buy this building and give it high throughout bonus. Also If you have LF and you create new company, then company cant buy building from financial sector, so you end up with having big industry where company have only 5 building and grow up very slowly
The biggest annoying thing right now is your inability to manually choose the amount of goods you want to trade. Just changing this would allow for more emerging gameplay.
At this time water was by far the cheapest, faster and efficient way to move goods, that why St. Petersburg was the commercial hub instead of Moscow. Also this is the time of the Canals ( Panama and Suez). The way Mississippi, Volga, Parana or Rhine river facilitate and develop the region surrounded it cannot be overlooked. Same in China, india, etc. For example In a video you did with india, where you wanted to make a land bridge to the territories in Africa to save the freight cost to in game language send it throught land, This for example wont have sense in real life, where good from africa to india would be cheaper by ship, even with train stations in place.
52:00 Firstly tey should make nevel raid/protect system MUCH better there is no way to manage manualy protectig convoys all way between London and Beijing it like 20+ naval nodes to manage
what about pop consumption? you talk about freight being an input for all buildings but it would also have to be part of pop consumption, no? Otherwise how would me exporting something like clothong to a poor country increase freight costs there?
@generalistgaming LOVE to see it! Hopefully this gets off the ground. If any help from us is needed maybe make a video as a shout out so we can go support the endeavor. Thanks!
For me a incredible disgusting stuff is that private building production mode is not automated for private buildings (and trade centers). But only for the disgusting amount of micro but also affect players demands getting out of forced issues like unemployment. This have a deep effect on transportation demand. I could argue of a hand free mechanic for all except universities, government and military. This also affect the game if you add the freight system in similar way to infra. I also think I'm general trade it's awful it needs to have a deeper hand free on off a planned economy. To above archive this I think that building should be split into owners, and Devs hate that cose espiralize the social units to compute, but I think it's a valid trade off cose every one could have different modifiers that make difference when are applying laws or for example when a idea prevent tax payments. Mapi-infra should also affect and cap the access to non local resources. The market limit to only use mapy to affect price and not the amount it's problematic. The lower price a item is still to high, should get like -97% to get prediction destroyed by low demand like rubber in early game where you can have many plantation without buyers. Connectivity should mean
Paradox, hire this man.
Sadly I'm not even handsome enough for voice over work :(
@@generalistgaming Keep doing what you do bro, nevermind about who might hire who.
donald trump, hire this man
One thing I'd say is: To avoid the case where the Midlands decides to ship everything by sea instead of by land, I'd put a base penalty to shipping and unshipping goods, even if the ship traversal is as cheap as land traversal. That way, moving 10 states is more expensive than moving two naval nodes, but moving two states is cheaper than moving on and off a sea node.
Wow very good video very informative thank you so much for your hard work
(the video was uploaded 49 seconds ago but I just know it will be good)
o7
Survivor's bias! I really like this idea, because the introduction of Freight as a good leans into the systems as they already exist, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. It addresses something that I've found to be a major failing of a game that is ostensibly about economic and nuanced diplomacy: Foreign markets are essentially irrelevant to most gameplay, specifically because they're not exploitable. I can gain influence benefits and some gains in economic activity by leaning hard into trade, but they're usually not worth the effort. In most of my playthroughs, I'll use trade as an early-game tool, then once I've established my economic footing at home I largely forget that it exists. Trade becomes just one more thing I could micromanage, and it doesn't provide near enough benefit to be worth the effort. I just build my market, and others can set up trade routes as they desire. I just keep my GDP going up and up and up, making anything that happens in the world's economy outside my market completely irrelevant. Freight and all its implications would go a long way to reversing that trend away from global market considerations, and bring the game closer to what it intends to be.
As for this type of video, I loved it! You clearly had a lot of fun making it, too, and to me that's always a win as a viewer. Time will tell what the larger audience and the algorithm have to say about it, but I'm all for more of this style of video. You're one of the few Vicky-Tube creators that can really go deep on these more conceptual topics, rather than simply having fun gameplay (I like your gameplay, too, but it's the deep dives & guides that brought me here).
somehow just watched an almost 2 hour video that entertained me the whole time. Dang thats a good concept AND explaination!!
Well done!
can you shorten this to a 60s short? and add subway surfers on top? i cant pay attention without my family guy
thanks generallisimo
23:12
It's interesting that you say this is the suggestion that might slow performance but this is just a simple weighted average, which is trivial to compute. I actually think your first suggestion of determining distance to market capital is what would be more computationally expensive. Because you ideally want states and sea nodes to be weighted, this requires weighted pathfinding algorithms like Dijkstra to mimimise distance (or whatever other value you're trying to minimise). I guess you could technically just use unweighted graphs (so it's only a simple breadth first search), but that would lead to weird situations where moving over a mountain is exactly as hard as moving over an urban center with like 20 railroads or moving over a sea tile.
So calculating distance might be more intensive, but it wouldn't need to be done frequently at all. I'd not mind if the game just calculated 8% of states a week, and then updated them quarterly, or only checks if a railroad has been built, or if states have been lost or acquired.
@@generalistgaming That's fair, if it was calculated between larger intervals it could definitely be a lot more viable. I do know the devs have talked about this being a difficult endeavour though so I do wonder how viable it is. Especially considering NO Paradox game has really built a competent logistics system (except HOI3 I guess but we don't talk about HOI3 logistics)
Calculating the distance in absolute terms would actually be relatively easy to optimise--do it at game start. So, you can build a map of every province to every market capital once and cache it, then on the fly you only need to recalculate for when the straight connection has been _broken_ (and only until rejoining the calculated path). So, the performance impact, and not needing to recalculate that frequently, can be pretty optimised IMO.
@@rainehdaze9157 This seems like it would be great, but my experience with modding V3 tells me that ridiculous things would happen. Either wars/ fronts would have no effect on the system, or the game would crap its pants and die whenever a front changed. There are probably ways around this, but so many systems in the game would need to draw on this information more frequently (combat/fronts are calculated daily) and would force a recalculation of the entire freight network constantly. I think this is still the best option, but it would take a real coder to make it work (I'll stick to the defines file)
@@brandonzzz9924 Yeah, it's undoubtedly a thing that would need to be done in-engine, but a lot of work can be saved just because you only need to calculate when a state's path to its market capital has been cut off… which is, at least, a bit less common (although naval invasions in particular would suck).
But it's an optimisable problem where you can do a LOT of precalculation (the maps and all initial states are known when you start the game), which gives me hope-as there's much less on-the-fly recalculation required.
very nice idea. I hope one of the devs or administrators at paradox see this.
Having railways reduce freight costs over land would really reinforce historical metas, like transcontinental railways.
It would also be nice to see more of a "flowing" migration system. I'm tired of seeing my second rate states being starved because there's one utopian city eating up all the migrants. Maybe not all the migrants can afford my capital, and they move to an industrial hub?
To be fair, if your capital were an utopia I'd like to live there
@andresmartinezramos7513 Sure, but every country has a second city. Migration makes me have a city with all 50+ industries, and nowhere else will auto expand because there's no workers elsewhere
This is a really good system. This video should be a mandatory watch for every paradox employee
Very on the money here imo. I have long used a mod I wrote for aingleplayer, now adapted for multiplayer community, that makes ports private infrastructure and producing a good called "shipping lanes" to trade centers. It generally makes changes to buff specialization and trade between markets. Let me know if you want the link and/or a complete changelog.
"I have to sleep"
Generalist releasing a nearly two hour video of how to fix Victoria 3 fearures:
"Say no more"
good video i just finished watching all of it
11:50
Thank you for putting my thoughts into coherent words I always knew something was off but but now I know what it is and it sounds soo obvious
Too obvious to be an oversight or a bad design choice by the devs
It really seems to all boil down to the performance issue unfortunately with how many countries, pops and goods there are I'm not really surprised that we don't have stockpile and such
But the overall performance has been getting better in my experience so maybe the devs have some overhead to work with
That being said, having freight as a seperate good and privitizing shipment of goods sounds sounds like a solid idea
4:00 Port connection:
Also one of the bad things about trrade is how it bottlenecked by amount of ports but in bad way. So For example If I as japan export 5k clothes to France and 3k to USA I can go dry on convoys, but... If France import 5k cloth and USA imports 3k cloth then I don't use any of my convoys at all! But AI is very bad at creating trade routes even with such big profits. Meanwhile situation is even worse on low scale trade. For example my economy consume 40 tools, Trade centers will import 5 tools per country keeping my economy in shortage as they see no profit to going "extra step" meanwhile I can't even subsidise exact goods import! only WHOLE TC at once.
12:00 MAPI:
IMO Mapi should be "regional" not STATE based so it should count not "stae by state" but "region by region"
39:00 Selling transportation:
That could also be solution to issue of "I want to be broker" Like Why Portugal can't purchase opium in India and ship it to China? Why fact that I produce no opium preven me to be retailer?
42:00 Urban centers:
I believe that Urban centers and subsistance farms should also provide small (very small) amount of construction and industrial goods by "manufacturing" TBH I want to see Urban centers to be reworked to make them feel like a city. not random service producer
It kills me that pdx would rather add more half baked, non balanced systems, like the climatic crisis, that can flood your run to death and has no interactivity with the player, than to fix basic economical and warfare systems...
Thrre is a weird fact and mechanic, in that, as convoys determine competitiveness, having only land trade means that convoys that should do nothing in there give the max competitiveness the capacity bar offers.
great video, loved all the ideas and really hope they redesign the convoys system when performance of the game is less of an issue
I'll get up and walk around when I see you finish a video by getting up and walking around.
Great video, I have been suggesting things like this for a while. I do think that, while totally awesome, this system would be computationally expensive and need some other game systems changed as well (which you touched on, but would likely be a nontrivial amount of work for the devs). A few thoughts:
1. The latest dev diary mentioned adding in automated trade, which would be perfect with this system as freight could be a good that regulates trade center profitability and expansion via the market instead of backend algorithms.
2. Pirates. Need I say more? Ok sure. The freight system would be an amazing way to add piracy and privateering to the game. While the Golden Age of Pirates was over for a few decades at the start of the game, less internationally diplomatic nations still had maritime raiding which could effectively work like convoy raiding in peacetime. A few differences would be that only unrecognized powers could engage in piracy (recognized powers have privateering, which would just be convoy raiding by government militaries like currently), and that the pirate convoy raiding would be: limited by area (maybe 1-2 sea nodes from their lands), available during peace and war (with diplomatic agreements/bribes, and military actions (events?) to stop it), and generate revenue for the pirate country. This would allow for the private sector to run the trade, and the government would be responsible for protecting sea lanes.
3. Treaty ports should get a special monument building that acts as a governance and trade center that allows for further manipulation of the market they infiltrated. This would make treaty ports more historical as enclave (exclave?) cities that administer the region's peoples and economic interests. Maybe it could also use the company mechanics to establish more profitable trade centers as company headquarters. Making them into forts would be pretty sweet as well, but I've tried to mod this myself for dozens of hours and got nowhere so idk how feasible it is.
4. River trade was actually far more impactful than this video made it seem in this time period. The Rhine, Danube, Elbe, and Dnieper in Europe especially, and others like the Weser (Bremerhaven) and Thames were instrumental in the development of European economies and trade as they are easily navigable and plentiful enough to have tributaries reach just about everywhere in Europe (and they are consistent rivers, no catastrophic flooding wiping out entire cities like the more fertile Chinese rivers or the Ganges and Nile, that are conducive to infrastructure over agriculture). But the biggest and bestest river of them all, the Mississippi river system, was and is so ridiculously good for trade that it essentially turned half of the continental US into ocean ports. The historical approach would basically be a multiplier for freight along the Mississippi, Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, etc. rivers (anywhere from 2-5x would be reasonable) on ALL freight, with canal style projects for locks like the Erie canal and upper Mississippi to activate the bonuses past rapids and waterfalls. Most rivers are contained almost entirely in single nations (for super cool historical reasons), but the Danube is a great example of where rivers should provide ocean trade access to all the countries touching the river, with convoy raiding/piracy downstream during war or hostility. Rivers are so frickin important in this period before widespread railways.
5. I have never played or watched more than 30 min of HoI, so idk how the rail system works. The proposition for rail network strength is incredible though. One of the big changes in warfare during this time was rail mobilization (which is just an annoying cheese mechanic currently with horses gaining speed from trains. wtf?). The whole system of armies being able to march from Southern France to Denmark in one month is ridiculous (Toulouse to Hamburg is a 27 day walk at 12 hours a day on modern roads). Using freight as a measure of throughput for all goods, including human goods like cannon fodder, makes a ton of sense. Ideally, freight could be used as a limiter for how many troops can move to a front at a time so that local forces are necessary to hold off until the main armies can mobilize and march over, with railways drastically reducing the time and slightly increasing army movement throughput at higher levels.
6. You mentioned weight as a factor for freight limitations, specifically contrasting steel and iron, but volume is and was the bigger factor for many goods. Metals and minerals are easy to transport (by ship or rail, not by wagon) as their shape is uniform and fit to the container they are in. Iron is usually transported as a dust or gravel like consistency of rocks, and also makes for decent ballast in ships when secured properly. Steel is relatively easy to transport as it can be packed tightly with compact beams, but things like engines and furniture were a nightmare to transport. Engines are heavy and non stackable, though the higher price point negates some inefficiency in transport, whereas furniture is light but extremely space inefficient, making it very unprofitable to trade low cost furniture. Textiles are pretty much the perfect industrial good to ship with light weight and near optimal volume efficiency, second only to their inputs like fabrics and dyes. Food items could also use freight to make certain goods viable, like meat, fruit, and fish which spoil quickly compared to grains and sugar, so a lot of freight would allow for quicker transportation to keep the items fresh. Tobacco, tea, and coffee can be dried prior to transport (I know nothing about opium), so would be perfect for low freight economies that don't need priority trades. Freight could also increase trade route competitiveness to incentivize trade routes with more freight to persist through market shocks.
7. The military movement system (and trade) uses a spline network to calculate distance between points. Every state has 5 nodes, coastal get a sea access node as well, regardless of the number of provinces in a state. I believe that the mechanics are that the network is a picture and it calculates the number of pixels on the path of the network to determine how long an army takes to travel, whereas trade just measures the number of sea nodes and disregards land nodes for performance reasons. I think that the land nodes could be activated for calculating freight, MAPI, and trade, but my guess is that doing so would make the game roughly 30-70% slower from my research on performance drains using the tick tracker in debug mode. I think this would make the game so much better in every way except playing it, as trade in many of my campaigns can cause up to about a third of delayed ticks when no wars are taking place. Big wars that use the full spline network can cause delays (per day when fronts are calculated) up to 5x the normal daily tick rate.
8. Exploitation and trade wars are great ideas, I'll have to give these a think.
Great stuff, great video. I didn't even have to put my kids back in the cupboard, though I think a spreadsheet showing how freight would impact the game would be pretty sweet for another video!
Idea is cool, I would like to add on the market hub idea, I think you should be able to create more than one market hubs, for US one in california is kind of enough, but for more global powers, having multiple is a must e.g. one in europe, one in africa, one in south east asia, etc. This would also somewhat incentivize colonies to be closer together, so that player ideally should try colonizing (both literally and through conquering unrecognized nations) stuff that's closer to the hub, instead of just putting your colonists everywhere you can and attacking the most valuable states, even if they are very far away. Bigger countries like Russia would also benefit massively from having multiple hubs(e.g. one in capital, one in urals, one on black sea coast, one in far east). The main caveat is I doubt that pdx would ever even try to implement complex stuff like this, it feels like they made economy that is "good enough" and are afraid to make significant changes if not absolutely necessary (I would never get why manufacturing industries generally are less efficient per worker than mines).
US should have two, one in the east one in the west, because the panama canal doesn't exist at game start.
Otherwise I agree, great point.
@lamename2010 yeah I meant additional one
Excellent, historical and accurate video !! great job !
Glad you enjoyed it!
Feedback as requested: the video was really good and thought provoking, I'd definitely be interested in more content like this. The editing on the section title slides was a bit wonky but we don't come here for editing and/or sound-proofing. This kinda stuff and some more POE2 content is what my generalist needs are
Thank you for the feedback.
I understand that this is not point of the video, but few days ago I have writen suggetion to improve internal politics feeling in the game beyond just "supress/bulster movemet" below I will copy paste my suggestion from PDX forum:
Right now "Interest group" are quite dull and there is additionaly reduced way to influence them, So I believe that there should be not just "goverment" as "parlament" but proper "cabitnet" mechanic.
Cabinets should have some amount of seats based on institutions, tech and laws of country, with least deveoped countries have like 1-3 seats of"advisors" meanwhile advanced countries with developed institutions could reach 10+ seats.
And each person would give you leverage over groups and parties. You can "Sell" seats for some preferences at legislation, you can give seats to improve relationships with groups, you can choice unpopular but skillful minister that will give you bonuses, for example like reduced burocracy cost for healthcare by healthcare ministry, reduced intrest rate by development minstry, increased migration attraction and etc. You can even invite foreign ministers but recieve penalty for interest group relations, maybe their skill will be more impotrant then some landowner opinions. Or probably you not care about good economic ssituation and ready to keep some corrupt boisss on their seats for their loaylty, and now you can build super-legitimate goverment that can squise every tax money while keep goverment stable and legitimate as there is noone to opose your rule.
And no, it should not be just copy paste from Eu4 or Stellaris. I really want to think who I want to see as my minister of defence, should he be skillful general from opposition, loyal careerist or maybe economist who will make my army "cheaper" but... Nobody like him
So much to unpack here, so many good thoughts. Freight would be a nice addition to the simulation, and with its ability to warp markets maybe changing trade would be in order. As in any trade law that isnt free trade requires specific acceptance to trade between two countries, then trade routes can be set up. or having a two tiers of trade, consumer and industrial, consumer is always free to have routes opened where as industrial goods/raw materials are blocked behind a "trade agreement" not the kind we have now but less impactful one that just allows "all goods" to be traded between countries.
This could open up an angle for diplo plays to be a big deal around trade agreements and treaty ports, more so than they are now. war goals for enforcing tariff free trading for a decade or two.
Diplo interests should be split into two categories, one on a per country basis so you can join or defend against plays based in the homelands or colonies of a specific country. and two geographic so that you can assert your control over all in a region, yes there may be overlap with country based interest. if you didnt have a country based interest but a geographic one then wars could be contained to just that region between powers and homelands could be off limits, creating a need for supply, naval power and a simple change from storming the capital every war.
You could probably implement the freight system and it not be performance intensive by creating regional trade centers
So that the computer doesn't have to process how connected every province is to every which would be very processor heavy
It would only need to calculate how connected a province within a region is connected to its trade center and then that center to another center.
Example
Missouri sits in the Mississippi trade region of which New Orleans is the trade center.
How connected Missouri is determines its pricing.
And then how connected new Orleans is to London determines the difference in trade prices between them
By premaking the regions your essentially doing the geography math ahead of time for the computer
I could only wish we had a system of many trade/logistics hubs forming a network. I think an additional consideration here would be the role of hubs like Singapore, Aden, Hormuz, Istanbul, Gibraltar, Copenhagen, the African coastline and especially Cape Town; so, the modelling of "Freight" travel. You have mentioned the cost aspect of sea freight, however it also would have time and lag considerations. Perhaps not at the beginning of the game, but definitely closer to the post industrial era.
I'm not feeling the freight removing infrastructure. If anything, I'd consider infrastructure as freight efficiency, so if you have high freight but infrastructure is quite bad, the companies might still be unable to bring the resources to the state. Some sort of "mobile" MAPI - the freight you give each state depends on the amount of resources shipped (so it is static and not a percentage of the whole country), the infra being consumed by the buildings, and the excess or lack of infra reduces how good the freight helps move resources.
Also while talking about infrastructure, I think the way it's represented in vic3 is just silly sometimes you have to build 300+ railways in one province all 300 hundred of which are super unprofitable and thus you have to pay 750k+ in subsidies just to stay afloat like what am I doing? running 300 train tracks in parallel? I think the freight system would work best with infrastructure
Imagine just like in vic2 there were multiple levels of railways that you can build which you unlock with better technology and each level of railway decreased the "distance cost" to the market capital by an extra point (also decreasing the terrain debuffs by a percent) so the factories in that state require less freight to be profitable (I think this was simulated in vic2 by a flat production bonus) also along with any other benefit that cheaper freight would bring like migration quotas
ok nvm you mention this further down the video
I feel like a clown for not finishing the video before leaving a comment
the performance thing about goods doesn't seem so bad, given that it doesn't need to update in real time - it just needs to "pathfind" once every so often - real companies don't change their suppliers the second someone cheaper comes along
Even if it doesn't happen every tick, its still an np-complete calculation that will tax the tick it does occur. There may be a way to ease the performance hit by distributing it across ticks, but i think freight being a modifier already works within the systems/calculations that are already shown to be current and acceptable.
My idea for how to make a market hub:
Have it be a political decision/journal entry that's locked behind a few requirements. Something like 1) minimum number of combined buy and sell orders (there's stuff happening here), 2) high MAPI (it's easy to connect to the outside world), 3) low price of freight, 4) distance from other market (although I think probably like 2. Liverpool deserves one even if London already has it)
So many game mechanics are broken: war, assimilation, migration, trade, lategame factories, companies and so on. I dont feel like we have captain which got coherent vision of game. I played a few paradox games but this is first one which is creating same ammount of problems as it fixes.
When this game is bugged as hell and it has no deep mechanics at all, what will happen to EU5 ... D:
I 100% disagree. I think the game’s leadership is absolutely inspired. 1.8 absolutely did introduce some new issues, but of the 3 new problems (migration, assimilation, companies), 2 are already fixed.
@@astrolonim2032 3 steps back, 2 forward. Feels like we are treading in place. Dude its already 2 years, we still dont have working eco system (and i am not even talking about implementing interventionism) .I will be Santa Claus before they finish game :).
Victoria has by far the most coherent vision of any of the main games by Paradox. Only rivaled by HoI4 at the start of it's lifetime and that ship sailed a long time ago. It knows what it wants to do and does so without the terrible loss of focus most of their projects suffer from.
It is just younger, so kinks haven't been ironed out. Think of the launch states of HoI4, EU4, CK3, Imperator etc.
You should be able to build ports, fisheries and naval bases in states of major rivers and lakes that are connected to the sea.
I think the straight line distance between the state could make sense instead of using amount of states for land connections partly cause its more performant and partly cause it makes big states less good
Will this be sent to the Devs for consideration?
Wouldn’t it just be easier instead of creating a new good to just make transportation the tying factor to this change?
That is one of the propositions in the vides. He even says he is making the distinction to ensure that people don't mix up the existing system with the proposal.
I like this idea. A lot. I think Freight would be too strong with even half the changes you suggested, but this is Vicky, who cares about balance?
20:23 I Think that it would be clear Per to like, Trade between 2 adjacent States, as Long as there issent a mountain in the Way or something, or 2 States that share a river,to Trade directlly with each other, than Reading through the market-Capital would!
What do you think of current company mechanics? construction and throughout bonuses are so high that it does feel right to build some of the buildings unless you have needed company, so on privatization company with buy this building and give it high throughout bonus.
Also If you have LF and you create new company, then company cant buy building from financial sector, so you end up with having big industry where company have only 5 building and grow up very slowly
Quality and more advance goods should also be a thing in this timeframe.
If country has multiple trade hub depending of the rank of country is great idea
Come on boys, get this trending!
Map problem can be fixed increasing the scale bonus. If you can get +100% or 150% of bonus 15 or 20% map decrease will not be a problem
For trade Capitals could it be one for strategic region? So that you can compete with other power for dominante of a region
And diminish needed calculations
The biggest annoying thing right now is your inability to manually choose the amount of goods you want to trade. Just changing this would allow for more emerging gameplay.
Now do one on the silly "construction sector" RTS-style system this game uses.
At this time water was by far the cheapest, faster and efficient way to move goods, that why St. Petersburg was the commercial hub instead of Moscow. Also this is the time of the Canals ( Panama and Suez). The way Mississippi, Volga, Parana or Rhine river facilitate and develop the region surrounded it cannot be overlooked. Same in China, india, etc.
For example In a video you did with india, where you wanted to make a land bridge to the territories in Africa to save the freight cost to in game language send it throught land, This for example wont have sense in real life, where good from africa to india would be cheaper by ship, even with train stations in place.
Is it possible for modders to rework this?
Wow. I want this!
so true
Very interesting.
52:00 Firstly tey should make nevel raid/protect system MUCH better there is no way to manage manualy protectig convoys all way between London and Beijing it like 20+ naval nodes to manage
what about pop consumption? you talk about freight being an input for all buildings but it would also have to be part of pop consumption, no? Otherwise how would me exporting something like clothong to a poor country increase freight costs there?
Wow, just wow
no Happy Saturday?
Someone PLEASE make this mod YESTERDAY! I will donate to the patreon if i have to!
A modder was talking about it with me earlier today, trying to implement it. Hard to create the exploitation loop w/ current systems
@generalistgaming LOVE to see it! Hopefully this gets off the ground. If any help from us is needed maybe make a video as a shout out so we can go support the endeavor. Thanks!
Implement this
For me a incredible disgusting stuff is that private building production mode is not automated for private buildings (and trade centers). But only for the disgusting amount of micro but also affect players demands getting out of forced issues like unemployment. This have a deep effect on transportation demand. I could argue of a hand free mechanic for all except universities, government and military. This also affect the game if you add the freight system in similar way to infra.
I also think I'm general trade it's awful it needs to have a deeper hand free on off a planned economy. To above archive this I think that building should be split into owners, and Devs hate that cose espiralize the social units to compute, but I think it's a valid trade off cose every one could have different modifiers that make difference when are applying laws or for example when a idea prevent tax payments. Mapi-infra should also affect and cap the access to non local resources. The market limit to only use mapy to affect price and not the amount it's problematic. The lower price a item is still to high, should get like -97% to get prediction destroyed by low demand like rubber in early game where you can have many plantation without buyers. Connectivity should mean
I'd already liked/subscribed, and you want a comment too? Bit greedy tbh.
AND CLiCk the NOTIFICATION bElL
First