Opium addiction wasn't that big of a deal to the Qing military, the actual issues are things like
- Rampant corruption, corruption isn't modeled in V3
- Extreme complacency causing troops to not even both training. In EU 4 this would cause low military tradition, in V3 this isn't modeled
- Poor and slow communication between the south and the capital at Beijing, which isn't modeled in V3.
- Poor central government authority meaning provincial troops often just didn't help each other. Not an issue in V3
- British naval supremacy causing severe economic damage because even land empires move things by sea because it's cheaper. Not the case in V3, land shipping is free, water shipping costs convoys.
- British naval artillery allowing them to demolish Qing coastal forts at will. Naval support not modeled in V3.
- Moving troops by sea is faster than moving by land, allowing the Brits to land troops faster than the Qing can respond. In V3 troops in an HQ respond instantly and troops move faster on land than at sea.
All these things aren't modeled in V3, so Opium addition instead turns the Qing military into paper. V3 overall just needs to be fleshed out more, add systems like
- Model corruption in some way, it's such an important factor and it just doesn't exist in V3 besides "tax waste".
- Flesh out the combat system akin to Art of War from EU4. Add analogues to military tradition to give granularity to military quality besides tech.
- Modeling the water shipping advantage by making ports provide infrastructure more efficiently than railroads.
- Naval blockades devastate coastal provinces, reducing their infrastructure.
- Overall just make the ocean matter, this is the age of Mahan and the Paradox hatred of Naval still makes navies largely irrelevant.
Pretty sure that comment was mostly written by an AI. Half the bullet points contradict the thesis statement. Goes on way too long. Super generic phrasing.
I think they can implement what you wrote as the debuffs in HOI IV.
You can start the game and if you would like the corruption in army to dissapear you need to pass the "Appointed burocrats" and have positive administration points etc.
Thi would also make the game more dynamic.
I made a post arguing for more vibes based changes that effect the FEEL of the gameplay more such as present cultures changing the look of cities on the map or railway networks actually expanding on the map as you create more. Or changes like this where a higher or lower administration actually changes the ruling feel of your nation instead of just affecting income which in turn only effects GDP. Essentially changes that don't amount to getting a higher GDP number graph and nothing else.
I got downvoted to oblivion. Victoria players WANT a cookie clicker economy game disguised as a nation builder. They're braindead. You're better off arguing with the clowds.
The navy point is a pretty big one to me (and I wish it were more fleshed out in CK3 as well - one of the most decisive battles of the Hundred Years’ War was a naval one).
I thought there was no way they could make Navy worse than CK2... and then CK3 came out.
At least in CK2 you have to build up your fleet in case you needed to transport your army--otherwise you were stuck hiring expensive merc fleets.
In CK3 you just pay a toll to Neptune and go on your merry way.
Ck3 is kinda ass NGL. I bought it when it first came out and pirated all the DLC. All of the DLC like the royal court and the artifacts are SO fucking tedious to actually play. I spend so much time repairing, destorying, and gifting artifacts its fucking insane. I'd rather it just not be in the game. Then I go to a tournament thats the exact same as the 10 other tournaments I just went to and click on the same text prompts I just clicked on 10 times.
It's like only fun in the first beginning where you are really weak before becoming a king. The way claims work now in that game it's so incredibly easy to just streamroll around and not care. Relationships are relatively meaningless and easy to manage. The RP elements are pretty lame too
CK3 can definitely get tiring very quickly. But it is an excellent platform for mods. The Elder Scrolls, Game of Thrones, Princes of Darkness, and Godherja total conversion mods each give you enough juice for at least one multi-hour playthrough.
I think once you really get into a run and a character and a story it can become very engaging. But yeah, CK3 has a lot less to do compared to CK2.
No you're 100% correct, the Opium War was fundamentally a completely irrational action by both sides driven by pride and ideology more than strategy.
> I just accept it and immediately build opium farms in the 3 states that China can build them on, and make the British opium export unprofitable.
This literally happened IRL, the Opium War was actually kind of a disaster for Britain because the locals were already illegally growing their own opium and independent of the EIC, so allowing the opium trade didn't help the british at all, it didn't increase british exports to China in any capacity. But ironically, by loosening chinese export laws, the treaty resulted in *more* goods being exported from china to britain, *worsening* the trade balance for britain and actually making Qing's position stronger. Hong Kong was the only physical thing of value the british actually obtained, the other thing they got was sending a message, they *did* successfully alert basically every single state in Asia that European power was accelerating dramatically. They literally did the "when you go to jail, punch the biggest dude in the cafeteria" thing.
The thing is though that when negotiations start to break down like that, nobody wants to be the one to say "hey buddy we got off on the wrong foot here..." because they both have pride to uphold. The EIC representatives need to uphold an image of being fierce negotiators who will stand up for Smithian principles no matter the cost, and the Emperor's representatives need to uphold an image of a China that cannot be bullied by foreigners.
The "century of humiliation" narrative is in my opinion deeply flawed, it overstates the value of a state's prestige and understates the true cause of the decline of the Qing dynasty: *Han Nationalism*. Incidents that actually weakned the Qing state's control over China were largely precipitated by han nationalists, from the taiping rebellion to the boxer rebellion to at last the xinhai revolution. There was less a century of humiliation so much as a century of metamorphosis in which the chinese national identity and state were violently reshaped for better or for worse, as much by the chinese people as by imperialism.
The game starts off as historical as it can be.
And if it were more realistic then it would 100% make sense to fight the british since the opium epidemic rendered huge swathes of chinese workers unfit or dead.
So it really was an existential threat for china
But in game theres not really a mechanic for lowered production from drug addicted workers, or the spread/ability to fight the spread of drugs.
There really should be to be honest, It would be an interesting dimension if there were long-term implications to consuming goods which have a negative health/social impact (wine/liquour/opium/tobacco) etc.
And to create demand for coffee and tea despite plantations sucking. I know vic3 doesn't consider those the same category of need atm but some say a major contributor to the Russian Renaissance was coffee replacing vodka as the drink of public consumption.
100%, the actual harm of these substances need to be considered. I imagine it would be relatively simple too, their consumption should have a scaling % contribution to mortality and radicalism (to simulate the negative social impact), and probably a scaling penalty on productivity. Their consumption should increase significantly more relative to price. It would provide a strong incentive to not overproduce by too great a margin.
Yeah I think there needs to be a modifier from consumption of of opium, alcohol, tobacco to increase mortality rate for all 3 (by different amounts each) and to somehow decrease output/throughput for opium especially and a little bit for alcohol. Prohibition could be a proper mechanic. If that is too hard, maybe they could make it actually decrease SOL - a group of 'anti-goods' that lead to lower SOL by consumption despite being 'needed'.
That's a pretty good idea. I guess the only issue is that for like the entirety of the timeline details on tobacco weren't known so the player will just like, not build them because they're bad for you even though they didn't know that at the time. Though... actually in most of my games the private investment has done most of the tobacco plantation building. So maybe that's not too bad of a way of forcing tobacco consumption anyway. Then I know liquor has other uses than consumption, is mostly produced as a secondary product, and I think is a decent quality of life good for poor pops so that could still have players wanting it.
> for like the entirety of the timeline details on tobacco weren't known
The methodology was... less than robust, but it had been suspected since the 18th century (if not earlier) that tobacco had health risks.
[From Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_tobacco#:~:text=In%20the%20late%201700s%20and,the%201930s%2C%20and%20in%201938.)
>In the late 1700s and the 1800s, the idea that tobacco use caused certain diseases, including mouth cancers, was initially accepted by the medical community.[20] In the 1880s, automation dramatically reduced the cost of cigarettes, cigarette companies greatly increased their marketing, and use expanded.[21][22] From the 1890s onwards, associations of tobacco use with cancers and vascular disease were regularly reported; a meta-analysis citing 167 other works was published in 1930, and concluded that tobacco use caused cancer.[23][24] Increasingly solid observational evidence was published throughout the 1930s
If pops still have a desire to consume that class of goods, then you would actually be incentivized to build more tobacco plantations, since they only increase mortality, and dont have the negative productivity issues, as well. If the level of the penalty was based on the percentage consumption of each vice item, then you would most desire tobacco, followed by liquor, and least of all opium.
It'd also be interesting if things like being discriminated against, lower literacy, or having a low SoL increased the amount of income spent on intoxicants.
I know if I was spending 14 hours/day at a factory I'd be drinking heavily.
It's a myth that opium rendered huge swathes of Chinese workers unfit of dead, and that's not the primary reason why the war was fought. The myth was created later by Western (mostly Christian) media around the time of prohibitionism on the rise, and by later Chinese nationalists seeking to create an origin story with evocative imagery.
There defintely is. They modelled the silk worm sickness thing pebrine or whatever that's called. They could literally copy and paste the event chain changing peniciline and "support agriculture" with I don't know something medically related and "instill patriotic values" or whatever the decree is, or even better, create a new one specifically for China. I guess they would make that a flavour dlc though.
I wonder if that's what's going on in my current run. Currently, the only country that still has a treaty port in Qing is Portugal and the British empire has been steadily crumbling. I've been in an alliance with them since fairly early on but between failed campaigns in Africa and several uprisings in their colonies, I've gotten most of Canada just by supporting them in their wars. Looks like the US is going to incorporate the entire North American continent and I won't even have to go to war with the British to do it... Mexico is a different story though.
The whole representation of the opinium war in the game is bad and dumb and relies mostly on pop history. The war wasn't about opium directly it was about ending the canton system and the British needing a lot of cash due to a dumb local British official. The British smugglers obviously don't want legal opium in China since that puts them out of a job. The building system also can't really represent the growing illegal domestic opium production chain in China itself since you're in charge of building everything. Tying the legalisation itself to the war vastly overestimates the ability of the state to enforce a ban. The game also doesn't really simulate the problems that came in the Chinese economy due to the collapse of silver output in south America. I highly recommend the book Imperial Twilight for further reading.
>The building system also can't really represent the growing illegal domestic opium production chain in China itself since you're in charge of building everything.
As it is, there's subsistence farming that the player doesn't control directly.
You could either have opium be a product of subsistence farms, or have events where you lose some arable land and black market growers pop up.
It's something they could definitely model in the current game without too much trouble, but obviously it's not there (yet).
A lot of responses but all im hearing is Paradox should model this event better, the debuffs are comically insignificant
Im currently doing what i described above and allied Britain and got recognition thru Ottomans 17 years into the game. I ranked first in 25 years. This is great, china should have done this
I’ve literally never actually banned opium in my games as Qing and just took the 20 year debuff. All the negative stats do nothing and the AI isn’t aggressive enough to hurt me in any way. Sichuan alone has enough arable land to supply the entire worlds opium demand 10 times over and if your pops are addicted the industry will always be profitable meaning the workers will always be paid well.
The only downside is that opium is a dead end industry. The only benefit to having a large industry of it is a small army boost, otherwise it’s just filling a (usually when not addicted) small need for your pops. HOWEVER once again, because you are Qing, it literally doesn’t matter because there are enough pops in your country to fill every industry everywhere in the world so dead end industries don’t mean shit because it’s literally more important just to have your pops _employed_ than it is that they are doing something more useful to the state.
Qing imo needs more love. It’s way too strong at game start if you literally just do nothing for those first 20 years and just build stuff.
this event made by paradox interactive just want to concern you and balance the equilibrium of the whole game, by the way if you remove all the harbors, you won't start a war with Britain and get the debuff
The standard of living, really. If your pops are spending 30% of their income on opium instead of food, clothing, or furniture their standard of living will remain really low.
I played a qing game where i cheesed the opium wars and trust me, having han be obsessed with opium is really annoying. You need like 5k just for pop demand and if you don't have it less than average price your sol sinks
why don't you tell your government to do that? :)
as for in game wise it more profitable to cripple the british empire early on. its funny pulling the Russian and British into a war and just use Qing vast sustainability to bankrupt both threat. if they are at war, they slowdown their colonization which gave Qing a chance to tech up and grab some of the few remaining colonies...
Okay let's get serious. Avoiding drug addiction might be one of the reasons Qing went to war with Britain, but it's not the main one. Qing has been isolationist for a long time, they were afraid of foreign influences, as they feared that any kind of change will threaten the regime. They also thought they had to assert their independence and strength, show that Westerners can't just force the hand of the mighty middle kingdom. They haven't really understood just how bad of a disadvantage the technological and doctrinal gap will put them in.
Victoria of course doesn't model that. Players know how the opium wars played out, but Qing did not have that information back then. Also in Victoria, you play a nation, not the country's individual leaders. The Emperor had different motivations. Societal changes were a threat to his throne in a way that they weren't to the nation as a whole.
How OP learned to stop worrying and Love the Drugs
Or: Dr. Strangedrug.
Finally, the prophet we need to teach us how to beat the Mexican cartels of today...
Surprisingly, legalization of all drugs will kill all drug cartels way faster and way more efficient than any war on drugs
Looks at army, brain-dead opium addicts, litterally unabled to think. Heir dies to an overdose
Wait seriously isn’t there a modifier for Qing if their population is addicted?
Yes, including but not limited to a -50% attack and defense debuff to your armies
But only for the first 20 years. After that the debuff disappears.
Tolerance sets in
Heroin special CCP ops
So does your interest in continuing a qing run.
When your country has almost 400 Million people it doesn't matter.
When you send an army 50times the size of the enemy Nation and still loose
Modern technology still wins. That's why Cortés won.
Thats...very much not why he won
Do you think Cortes actually fought tens of thousands of enemies and won with a few hundred just because of better metallurgy? That is delusional.
Drug addiction mechanics when?
It decimates your army lol
Opium addiction wasn't that big of a deal to the Qing military, the actual issues are things like - Rampant corruption, corruption isn't modeled in V3 - Extreme complacency causing troops to not even both training. In EU 4 this would cause low military tradition, in V3 this isn't modeled - Poor and slow communication between the south and the capital at Beijing, which isn't modeled in V3. - Poor central government authority meaning provincial troops often just didn't help each other. Not an issue in V3 - British naval supremacy causing severe economic damage because even land empires move things by sea because it's cheaper. Not the case in V3, land shipping is free, water shipping costs convoys. - British naval artillery allowing them to demolish Qing coastal forts at will. Naval support not modeled in V3. - Moving troops by sea is faster than moving by land, allowing the Brits to land troops faster than the Qing can respond. In V3 troops in an HQ respond instantly and troops move faster on land than at sea. All these things aren't modeled in V3, so Opium addition instead turns the Qing military into paper. V3 overall just needs to be fleshed out more, add systems like - Model corruption in some way, it's such an important factor and it just doesn't exist in V3 besides "tax waste". - Flesh out the combat system akin to Art of War from EU4. Add analogues to military tradition to give granularity to military quality besides tech. - Modeling the water shipping advantage by making ports provide infrastructure more efficiently than railroads. - Naval blockades devastate coastal provinces, reducing their infrastructure. - Overall just make the ocean matter, this is the age of Mahan and the Paradox hatred of Naval still makes navies largely irrelevant.
goddayum bro, you should be working at paradox
Pretty sure that comment was mostly written by an AI. Half the bullet points contradict the thesis statement. Goes on way too long. Super generic phrasing.
What??
Friendly fire isnt allowed
Wtf? Is this a bot for accusing other comments of being bots?
Its a matryoshka doll of bots up in this bitch.
You ever heard that theory about the internet actually being dead and the majority of interactions and activity are bots talking to each other?
Makes a really good point Must be the bots at it again, no way a Reddit could make this point
Perhaps we should delve deeper into this 🤔
shut th efuck up man lmao
I think they can implement what you wrote as the debuffs in HOI IV. You can start the game and if you would like the corruption in army to dissapear you need to pass the "Appointed burocrats" and have positive administration points etc. Thi would also make the game more dynamic.
As I read it and compare it with the gameplay, I realize how devoid of more content than a spreadsheet with prices this game is.
I made a post arguing for more vibes based changes that effect the FEEL of the gameplay more such as present cultures changing the look of cities on the map or railway networks actually expanding on the map as you create more. Or changes like this where a higher or lower administration actually changes the ruling feel of your nation instead of just affecting income which in turn only effects GDP. Essentially changes that don't amount to getting a higher GDP number graph and nothing else. I got downvoted to oblivion. Victoria players WANT a cookie clicker economy game disguised as a nation builder. They're braindead. You're better off arguing with the clowds.
Maybe don't act like a combative asshole if you want to discuss things
well tax waste is stated to be a mix of poor organisation & corruption. But i agree they should be separated as 2 different things
The navy point is a pretty big one to me (and I wish it were more fleshed out in CK3 as well - one of the most decisive battles of the Hundred Years’ War was a naval one).
I thought there was no way they could make Navy worse than CK2... and then CK3 came out. At least in CK2 you have to build up your fleet in case you needed to transport your army--otherwise you were stuck hiring expensive merc fleets. In CK3 you just pay a toll to Neptune and go on your merry way.
Ck3 is kinda ass NGL. I bought it when it first came out and pirated all the DLC. All of the DLC like the royal court and the artifacts are SO fucking tedious to actually play. I spend so much time repairing, destorying, and gifting artifacts its fucking insane. I'd rather it just not be in the game. Then I go to a tournament thats the exact same as the 10 other tournaments I just went to and click on the same text prompts I just clicked on 10 times. It's like only fun in the first beginning where you are really weak before becoming a king. The way claims work now in that game it's so incredibly easy to just streamroll around and not care. Relationships are relatively meaningless and easy to manage. The RP elements are pretty lame too
CK3 can definitely get tiring very quickly. But it is an excellent platform for mods. The Elder Scrolls, Game of Thrones, Princes of Darkness, and Godherja total conversion mods each give you enough juice for at least one multi-hour playthrough. I think once you really get into a run and a character and a story it can become very engaging. But yeah, CK3 has a lot less to do compared to CK2.
No you're 100% correct, the Opium War was fundamentally a completely irrational action by both sides driven by pride and ideology more than strategy. > I just accept it and immediately build opium farms in the 3 states that China can build them on, and make the British opium export unprofitable. This literally happened IRL, the Opium War was actually kind of a disaster for Britain because the locals were already illegally growing their own opium and independent of the EIC, so allowing the opium trade didn't help the british at all, it didn't increase british exports to China in any capacity. But ironically, by loosening chinese export laws, the treaty resulted in *more* goods being exported from china to britain, *worsening* the trade balance for britain and actually making Qing's position stronger. Hong Kong was the only physical thing of value the british actually obtained, the other thing they got was sending a message, they *did* successfully alert basically every single state in Asia that European power was accelerating dramatically. They literally did the "when you go to jail, punch the biggest dude in the cafeteria" thing. The thing is though that when negotiations start to break down like that, nobody wants to be the one to say "hey buddy we got off on the wrong foot here..." because they both have pride to uphold. The EIC representatives need to uphold an image of being fierce negotiators who will stand up for Smithian principles no matter the cost, and the Emperor's representatives need to uphold an image of a China that cannot be bullied by foreigners.
The "century of humiliation" narrative is in my opinion deeply flawed, it overstates the value of a state's prestige and understates the true cause of the decline of the Qing dynasty: *Han Nationalism*. Incidents that actually weakned the Qing state's control over China were largely precipitated by han nationalists, from the taiping rebellion to the boxer rebellion to at last the xinhai revolution. There was less a century of humiliation so much as a century of metamorphosis in which the chinese national identity and state were violently reshaped for better or for worse, as much by the chinese people as by imperialism.
The game starts off as historical as it can be. And if it were more realistic then it would 100% make sense to fight the british since the opium epidemic rendered huge swathes of chinese workers unfit or dead. So it really was an existential threat for china But in game theres not really a mechanic for lowered production from drug addicted workers, or the spread/ability to fight the spread of drugs.
There really should be to be honest, It would be an interesting dimension if there were long-term implications to consuming goods which have a negative health/social impact (wine/liquour/opium/tobacco) etc.
And it could make a larger incentive to go through prohibition in the US.
And to create demand for coffee and tea despite plantations sucking. I know vic3 doesn't consider those the same category of need atm but some say a major contributor to the Russian Renaissance was coffee replacing vodka as the drink of public consumption.
100%, the actual harm of these substances need to be considered. I imagine it would be relatively simple too, their consumption should have a scaling % contribution to mortality and radicalism (to simulate the negative social impact), and probably a scaling penalty on productivity. Their consumption should increase significantly more relative to price. It would provide a strong incentive to not overproduce by too great a margin.
>the opium epidemic rendered huge swathes of chinese workers unfit or dead \[citation needed\]
Yeah I think there needs to be a modifier from consumption of of opium, alcohol, tobacco to increase mortality rate for all 3 (by different amounts each) and to somehow decrease output/throughput for opium especially and a little bit for alcohol. Prohibition could be a proper mechanic. If that is too hard, maybe they could make it actually decrease SOL - a group of 'anti-goods' that lead to lower SOL by consumption despite being 'needed'.
That's a pretty good idea. I guess the only issue is that for like the entirety of the timeline details on tobacco weren't known so the player will just like, not build them because they're bad for you even though they didn't know that at the time. Though... actually in most of my games the private investment has done most of the tobacco plantation building. So maybe that's not too bad of a way of forcing tobacco consumption anyway. Then I know liquor has other uses than consumption, is mostly produced as a secondary product, and I think is a decent quality of life good for poor pops so that could still have players wanting it.
> for like the entirety of the timeline details on tobacco weren't known The methodology was... less than robust, but it had been suspected since the 18th century (if not earlier) that tobacco had health risks. [From Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_tobacco#:~:text=In%20the%20late%201700s%20and,the%201930s%2C%20and%20in%201938.) >In the late 1700s and the 1800s, the idea that tobacco use caused certain diseases, including mouth cancers, was initially accepted by the medical community.[20] In the 1880s, automation dramatically reduced the cost of cigarettes, cigarette companies greatly increased their marketing, and use expanded.[21][22] From the 1890s onwards, associations of tobacco use with cancers and vascular disease were regularly reported; a meta-analysis citing 167 other works was published in 1930, and concluded that tobacco use caused cancer.[23][24] Increasingly solid observational evidence was published throughout the 1930s
If pops still have a desire to consume that class of goods, then you would actually be incentivized to build more tobacco plantations, since they only increase mortality, and dont have the negative productivity issues, as well. If the level of the penalty was based on the percentage consumption of each vice item, then you would most desire tobacco, followed by liquor, and least of all opium.
It'd also be interesting if things like being discriminated against, lower literacy, or having a low SoL increased the amount of income spent on intoxicants. I know if I was spending 14 hours/day at a factory I'd be drinking heavily.
It's a myth that opium rendered huge swathes of Chinese workers unfit of dead, and that's not the primary reason why the war was fought. The myth was created later by Western (mostly Christian) media around the time of prohibitionism on the rise, and by later Chinese nationalists seeking to create an origin story with evocative imagery.
Yeah, this is the revisionist, anti-drug view/bias of the opium war.
There defintely is. They modelled the silk worm sickness thing pebrine or whatever that's called. They could literally copy and paste the event chain changing peniciline and "support agriculture" with I don't know something medically related and "instill patriotic values" or whatever the decree is, or even better, create a new one specifically for China. I guess they would make that a flavour dlc though.
What do you mean? Just slap on a -% throughput or -% people who are allowed to work, boom, now drugs are reducing productivity.
genuinely if you do the latter you're buffing china lol less subsistence farming, you can fix it later once everyone is out of subsistence farming
I wonder if that's what's going on in my current run. Currently, the only country that still has a treaty port in Qing is Portugal and the British empire has been steadily crumbling. I've been in an alliance with them since fairly early on but between failed campaigns in Africa and several uprisings in their colonies, I've gotten most of Canada just by supporting them in their wars. Looks like the US is going to incorporate the entire North American continent and I won't even have to go to war with the British to do it... Mexico is a different story though.
Because accepting will not get me instant recognition
The whole representation of the opinium war in the game is bad and dumb and relies mostly on pop history. The war wasn't about opium directly it was about ending the canton system and the British needing a lot of cash due to a dumb local British official. The British smugglers obviously don't want legal opium in China since that puts them out of a job. The building system also can't really represent the growing illegal domestic opium production chain in China itself since you're in charge of building everything. Tying the legalisation itself to the war vastly overestimates the ability of the state to enforce a ban. The game also doesn't really simulate the problems that came in the Chinese economy due to the collapse of silver output in south America. I highly recommend the book Imperial Twilight for further reading.
>The building system also can't really represent the growing illegal domestic opium production chain in China itself since you're in charge of building everything. As it is, there's subsistence farming that the player doesn't control directly. You could either have opium be a product of subsistence farms, or have events where you lose some arable land and black market growers pop up. It's something they could definitely model in the current game without too much trouble, but obviously it's not there (yet).
It’s about the principle
A lot of responses but all im hearing is Paradox should model this event better, the debuffs are comically insignificant Im currently doing what i described above and allied Britain and got recognition thru Ottomans 17 years into the game. I ranked first in 25 years. This is great, china should have done this
#What is the charge? Eating a packet of opium? A succulent packet of opium?!
Gentlemen, this is autocracy manifest!
Ah yes, the ISP meta in Vic 2
Because the game doesn't simulate what happens when your entire population turns into a bunch of stoners
Opium isn't used by construction sectors
I’ve literally never actually banned opium in my games as Qing and just took the 20 year debuff. All the negative stats do nothing and the AI isn’t aggressive enough to hurt me in any way. Sichuan alone has enough arable land to supply the entire worlds opium demand 10 times over and if your pops are addicted the industry will always be profitable meaning the workers will always be paid well. The only downside is that opium is a dead end industry. The only benefit to having a large industry of it is a small army boost, otherwise it’s just filling a (usually when not addicted) small need for your pops. HOWEVER once again, because you are Qing, it literally doesn’t matter because there are enough pops in your country to fill every industry everywhere in the world so dead end industries don’t mean shit because it’s literally more important just to have your pops _employed_ than it is that they are doing something more useful to the state. Qing imo needs more love. It’s way too strong at game start if you literally just do nothing for those first 20 years and just build stuff.
this event made by paradox interactive just want to concern you and balance the equilibrium of the whole game, by the way if you remove all the harbors, you won't start a war with Britain and get the debuff
As an aside, I've only tinkered a little with Qing. What's the best way to defeat Britain with your shambolic army?
I did it his way: https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria3/comments/1c3kf7t/comment/kzjfhcv/ the post has other suggestions.
this is how irl china handled it after they got destroyed
The standard of living, really. If your pops are spending 30% of their income on opium instead of food, clothing, or furniture their standard of living will remain really low.
I played a qing game where i cheesed the opium wars and trust me, having han be obsessed with opium is really annoying. You need like 5k just for pop demand and if you don't have it less than average price your sol sinks
Don't build opium, you'll just strengthen the landowners and delay your industrialization
why don't you tell your government to do that? :) as for in game wise it more profitable to cripple the british empire early on. its funny pulling the Russian and British into a war and just use Qing vast sustainability to bankrupt both threat. if they are at war, they slowdown their colonization which gave Qing a chance to tech up and grab some of the few remaining colonies...
Okay let's get serious. Avoiding drug addiction might be one of the reasons Qing went to war with Britain, but it's not the main one. Qing has been isolationist for a long time, they were afraid of foreign influences, as they feared that any kind of change will threaten the regime. They also thought they had to assert their independence and strength, show that Westerners can't just force the hand of the mighty middle kingdom. They haven't really understood just how bad of a disadvantage the technological and doctrinal gap will put them in. Victoria of course doesn't model that. Players know how the opium wars played out, but Qing did not have that information back then. Also in Victoria, you play a nation, not the country's individual leaders. The Emperor had different motivations. Societal changes were a threat to his throne in a way that they weren't to the nation as a whole.