Economic Volatility Mod

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have also changed a number of other aspects, the price range for goods is now 99%, the lowest price is £0 and the buy sell difference is 1:4 – 4:1 rather than 1:2 – 2:1.
The minimum wage a factory can pay its workers is now £0.01.

For warfare, I’ve decided that, instead of trying to make it less total war, I embraced it and made it totaler war. I have changed the training rate of conscription centres to 40 per level, where the barracks rate is 20.
This is to emphasise the mobilisation of the population, as opposed to the professional army.

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

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

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

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

Another very strange thing that happens; where factories will set wages at £0.00, usually, this will correct itself because workers won’t work for free, though there are workers who stay.
This appears to be because their dependent income is able to cover their expenses, so these workers are willing to work for free. It’s very bizarre, and I will try to figure this one out.

Wars are absolutely devastating to the country it’s being fought in.
During my most recent test, Aristocrats in India decided to rebel against the EIC and Britain, the rebellion was crushed and resulted in 50M dead and wrecked its GDP to a whimper of its former self.

Many European countries also felt the ripples from this war; Britain exported a lot of goods to European powers that it produced from India, notably Britain produced a lot of groceries fed by Indian grain which in high export demand, but many of these countries suffered because the supply from India was disrupted.

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

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

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

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Compatibility
I’m reasonably sure that this mod should be compatible with other mods, however, I can’t say it will work well with other mods, it’s yours to experiment with!

I’ll list a few mods that I play with down below, which has just made me realise that I haven’t actually tested this mod in vanilla. Whoops.

ARAI
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2880152075

Army Needs Supplies
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2886311000

FIAD
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2981245142

Finance
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2920683871