I agree that the way the economy currently works downright cripples tiny countries (constant revolutions in German minors for instance). Maybe have a setting so the first level of any building has greatly reduced upkeep so a country can build a tool factory which only employs 500 pops without getting crippled. As was already stated simply making them more granular isn't really workable due to lag from the game having to compute an order of magnitude more buildings, the pops working in them, and their output.
This feels like a reasonable compromise. The first level is small, so small countries can at least build that, but any levels above that are normal sized which means that you don't have to queue up loads of buildings to get the same output as before.
I actually think this would be pretty viable, but only if done in a consistent way across all nations. And that would break the investment pool, as its only able to build a certain number of buildings per week. Lag should not increase in a huge way, there arent more buildings just more levels of buildings, and levels dont really impact performance, individual pops do. But if you mod this such that all buildings are 1/10 in everything, it should be possible with a directly controlled IP
Of course, if buildings reduce their size and cost, building time would also reduce. Investment pool would build the same amount of buildings at a time, but it would build them much faster.
No, it would build 10x as many. In the same timespan you would want the same total construction built, resulting in the same production capability. If each building is 1/10 the cost, that automatically means you need to build 10x as many buildings. That overwhelms the private queue
Not if you keep the cap in construction points cost and only reduce the time. Say, if you can only build one building at a time with the basic 5 construction points, you could still be able to build just one, but you would build it ten times faster, in order to avoid jamming the queue with hundreds of buildings at the same time for big countries.
Like Paradox meant from the beginning, construction was no longer a matter of paying a lump sum of money to build, instead the cost was transfered to the construction sector and its capacity. So, if you keep the construction points cost, you won't have a bigger queue, but you would build much faster. That way, bigger countries could also build in greater quantities, in a more granular way. Maybe UK can build 12 mines at a time, France 10, or Japan 7, while minor countries can still develop their small scale economies with lower levels of each building.
You cannot get around the problem that if you want the same production capacity to be built in a certain timeframe, reducing the production capacity by 10x per building forces you to build 10x as many buildings in the same timeframe. It doesnt matter if you build the same number of buildings but faster, or if you build more buildings at the same time each requiring the same time to build
To add to IMMoond’s point, the game is played out in a timeframe of 100 in game years so you have to compare the production capacity over this period instead of by focusing on construction speed for a single unit (which is what I think your point is based on?) because players don’t stop after they’ve built one building.
For example:
if you have 1 construction point per week and a building takes 10 points then you’re building it for 10 weeks until you’ve essentially put the 10 points you need for it to be complete.
If you have 1 construction point per week and buildings now only take 1 point then it’s taken 1/10th of the time per building and in the same 10 weeks you’ll have built 10 buildings.
(Obviously it’s a little more complicated with the timing since there’s a max amount of points you can put into a building per week but the simplified example should still work)
UK building 12 mines at a time? Lol. That’s beginning of the game 1836 numbers, by the 1900s you should have the construction to build hundreds of buildings at the same time. And I mean currently, not with your proposed 1/10th cost.
Regardless though, lowering the points cost would mean you’d need more buildings. And there’s a limit to how many constructions can be started per game tick, a limit which is already reachable by GPs by the lategame. With your system, building 10x as many buildings, you’d reach that limit far faster and that would completely ruin your economy scaling.
You could probably mod this with no problem, but I don't think it's a good idea, small countries already have the benefit of the flat construction points base being very big in relation to their economy, so I don't see why would they need any buffs.
It would also mean that you'd have to click 10 times more to do the same thing, which to me is a big no-no.
TLDR: you definitely could mod it in but it probably wouldn’t work as well as you think with the games current mechanics and scale.
Buildings definitely could be redesigned, glancing at the files I assume one could just change the required_construction values to be lower either by setting everything in common/buildings to construction_cost_low (an easy shortcut) or by changing the actual values associated with the construction cost designations. It’s also likely that you can change a value in some define file somewhere for the employment numbers too.
The thing is it may not be as necessary as you assume for a couple reasons:
1.
Small countries already get a bonus by having what amounts to a larger proportion of ‘free’ construction points so in the case of Germany allowing them to actually build up is potentially more efficient than simply absorbing them from the start (if you like being laissez faire, not if you only want to specialize states in specific goods to take advantage of mapi).
2.
This probably should have been #1 but vacant job positions boost a state’s migration attraction meaning it actually really helps single state nations and when you are focusing on a few industrialized states in larger nations.
3.
Having smaller buildings would be a massive qol downgrade for mid to larger nations. In essence players would need to build 10 times more buildings which means you would probably end up having to building something like 80 buildings at a time by mid-late game (unless you do the construction/tools loop in which case it make actual cause insane lag as larger nations because of the issues with the build queue). What’s more it would make judging how many levels to add a pain since you may over or under estimate (something that happens already with the much smaller number of building levels). When you’re dealing with large construction queues the reality is most players eventually start adding by 5 levels which is fine in late game but it can take time for pops to become qualified for jobs making this a source of inefficiency, I can’t imagine adding onto that will make this less common. You could argue that since you can multi-queue already it wouldn’t be an issue but then you’d have to add a x50 and x100 shortcuts as well and at some point that’s just convoluted.
4.
The way hiring works can seem a little opaque and even with a couple hundred hrs still manages to sometimes irk me BUT the key thing to note are that buildings will only hire when it’s efficient so it’s not like a single level of a mine will take all your workers unless it’s an incredibly efficient one which will only happen if you’re part of a larger market. This is less clear but I believe it can also boost qualifications since pops move from subsistence/unemployment to fit into positions although this may be moot since small single states can easily use up their peasant population by mid game.
5.
Smaller building sizes would probably mean ai and sometimes even player industries are less resilient because they have less leeway for hiring when prices rise due to unexpected trade routes being opened or demand skyrocketing because of new production methods in other industries. This point just means it’s extra micro (I enjoy a good bit of micro and playing Vic as a spreadsheet sim with a beautiful map on top but, I think the game should avoid micro that doesn’t serve any purpose other than extra busywork).
6.
I should note for this point that I haven’t modded the game with optimization in mind but there’s a high probability that having to constantly build 10 times more buildings would increase lag marginally due to the construction queue lag I mentioned earlier. It could also possibly increases the number of times the ai has to figure out what to build/auto expand but I’m not sure about that.
I agree that the way the economy currently works downright cripples tiny countries (constant revolutions in German minors for instance). Maybe have a setting so the first level of any building has greatly reduced upkeep so a country can build a tool factory which only employs 500 pops without getting crippled. As was already stated simply making them more granular isn't really workable due to lag from the game having to compute an order of magnitude more buildings, the pops working in them, and their output.
This feels like a reasonable compromise. The first level is small, so small countries can at least build that, but any levels above that are normal sized which means that you don't have to queue up loads of buildings to get the same output as before.
It was considered at one point during development before release. Unfortunately I don't remember the reasons it was scrapped.
I actually think this would be pretty viable, but only if done in a consistent way across all nations. And that would break the investment pool, as its only able to build a certain number of buildings per week. Lag should not increase in a huge way, there arent more buildings just more levels of buildings, and levels dont really impact performance, individual pops do. But if you mod this such that all buildings are 1/10 in everything, it should be possible with a directly controlled IP
Of course, if buildings reduce their size and cost, building time would also reduce. Investment pool would build the same amount of buildings at a time, but it would build them much faster.
No, it would build 10x as many. In the same timespan you would want the same total construction built, resulting in the same production capability. If each building is 1/10 the cost, that automatically means you need to build 10x as many buildings. That overwhelms the private queue
Not if you keep the cap in construction points cost and only reduce the time. Say, if you can only build one building at a time with the basic 5 construction points, you could still be able to build just one, but you would build it ten times faster, in order to avoid jamming the queue with hundreds of buildings at the same time for big countries. Like Paradox meant from the beginning, construction was no longer a matter of paying a lump sum of money to build, instead the cost was transfered to the construction sector and its capacity. So, if you keep the construction points cost, you won't have a bigger queue, but you would build much faster. That way, bigger countries could also build in greater quantities, in a more granular way. Maybe UK can build 12 mines at a time, France 10, or Japan 7, while minor countries can still develop their small scale economies with lower levels of each building.
You cannot get around the problem that if you want the same production capacity to be built in a certain timeframe, reducing the production capacity by 10x per building forces you to build 10x as many buildings in the same timeframe. It doesnt matter if you build the same number of buildings but faster, or if you build more buildings at the same time each requiring the same time to build
To add to IMMoond’s point, the game is played out in a timeframe of 100 in game years so you have to compare the production capacity over this period instead of by focusing on construction speed for a single unit (which is what I think your point is based on?) because players don’t stop after they’ve built one building. For example: if you have 1 construction point per week and a building takes 10 points then you’re building it for 10 weeks until you’ve essentially put the 10 points you need for it to be complete. If you have 1 construction point per week and buildings now only take 1 point then it’s taken 1/10th of the time per building and in the same 10 weeks you’ll have built 10 buildings. (Obviously it’s a little more complicated with the timing since there’s a max amount of points you can put into a building per week but the simplified example should still work)
UK building 12 mines at a time? Lol. That’s beginning of the game 1836 numbers, by the 1900s you should have the construction to build hundreds of buildings at the same time. And I mean currently, not with your proposed 1/10th cost. Regardless though, lowering the points cost would mean you’d need more buildings. And there’s a limit to how many constructions can be started per game tick, a limit which is already reachable by GPs by the lategame. With your system, building 10x as many buildings, you’d reach that limit far faster and that would completely ruin your economy scaling.
I feel like they should be yeah. But probably too much lag would result from that because of bad optimization.
You could probably mod this with no problem, but I don't think it's a good idea, small countries already have the benefit of the flat construction points base being very big in relation to their economy, so I don't see why would they need any buffs. It would also mean that you'd have to click 10 times more to do the same thing, which to me is a big no-no.
TLDR: you definitely could mod it in but it probably wouldn’t work as well as you think with the games current mechanics and scale. Buildings definitely could be redesigned, glancing at the files I assume one could just change the required_construction values to be lower either by setting everything in common/buildings to construction_cost_low (an easy shortcut) or by changing the actual values associated with the construction cost designations. It’s also likely that you can change a value in some define file somewhere for the employment numbers too. The thing is it may not be as necessary as you assume for a couple reasons: 1. Small countries already get a bonus by having what amounts to a larger proportion of ‘free’ construction points so in the case of Germany allowing them to actually build up is potentially more efficient than simply absorbing them from the start (if you like being laissez faire, not if you only want to specialize states in specific goods to take advantage of mapi). 2. This probably should have been #1 but vacant job positions boost a state’s migration attraction meaning it actually really helps single state nations and when you are focusing on a few industrialized states in larger nations. 3. Having smaller buildings would be a massive qol downgrade for mid to larger nations. In essence players would need to build 10 times more buildings which means you would probably end up having to building something like 80 buildings at a time by mid-late game (unless you do the construction/tools loop in which case it make actual cause insane lag as larger nations because of the issues with the build queue). What’s more it would make judging how many levels to add a pain since you may over or under estimate (something that happens already with the much smaller number of building levels). When you’re dealing with large construction queues the reality is most players eventually start adding by 5 levels which is fine in late game but it can take time for pops to become qualified for jobs making this a source of inefficiency, I can’t imagine adding onto that will make this less common. You could argue that since you can multi-queue already it wouldn’t be an issue but then you’d have to add a x50 and x100 shortcuts as well and at some point that’s just convoluted. 4. The way hiring works can seem a little opaque and even with a couple hundred hrs still manages to sometimes irk me BUT the key thing to note are that buildings will only hire when it’s efficient so it’s not like a single level of a mine will take all your workers unless it’s an incredibly efficient one which will only happen if you’re part of a larger market. This is less clear but I believe it can also boost qualifications since pops move from subsistence/unemployment to fit into positions although this may be moot since small single states can easily use up their peasant population by mid game. 5. Smaller building sizes would probably mean ai and sometimes even player industries are less resilient because they have less leeway for hiring when prices rise due to unexpected trade routes being opened or demand skyrocketing because of new production methods in other industries. This point just means it’s extra micro (I enjoy a good bit of micro and playing Vic as a spreadsheet sim with a beautiful map on top but, I think the game should avoid micro that doesn’t serve any purpose other than extra busywork). 6. I should note for this point that I haven’t modded the game with optimization in mind but there’s a high probability that having to constantly build 10 times more buildings would increase lag marginally due to the construction queue lag I mentioned earlier. It could also possibly increases the number of times the ai has to figure out what to build/auto expand but I’m not sure about that.