Re: Economy Observations, Tips, Etc.
forgive my ignorance but how important exactly is growth, i assume it effects the wealth producing capability of the province? the more growth the more cash generated? is this linked to trade as i will be going republican in my latest satsuma campaign and once i go republican no one trades with you so if it is linked to trade then it might not be so important in republican campaign?
Re: Economy Observations, Tips, Etc.
hallo
The next unlock is pretty expensive at this point in the game so I'm upgrading ports, specialty buildings and inns first. Somebody who's better at math could crunch the numbers more to see if the tax increase is actually worth it versus upgrading inns.
Re: Economy Observations, Tips, Etc.
Extremely important to the long term strength of your economy.Originally Posted by 47thlegion
The total wealth of your province is split into 3 main catergories - Farming, Commerce, Town wealth
Farming is determined by the level of farming withing your province multiplied by the fertility. High fertility regions can have some insane levels of wealth as a result. Commerce is a combination of every other building you build including trade ports, workshops, inns, etc. that add wealth to your province.
Farming and Commerce are fixed values that only change when you build or upgrade a building, or can be temporailiy reduced if for example your farming or port is damaged by a raid or bombardment. Once repaired the Farming and Commerce will return to exaclt yhte same levels as before.
Town wealth is completely different and is in a constant state of flux based on your economic growth. Evey province starts with a given amount of town wealth - larger, more important towns such as Edo can have quite significant starting Town wealth. Over the course of the game this figure will change each turn, based on the growth rate, either positive or negative - the absolute minimum is 0, while there is no theoretical maximum that I am aware of. Factors that improve growth are certain buildings i.e. markets, high level farms, railway stations in particular give a large boost to growth (+8 per turn) from memory. you also get a town wealth boost from having a Geisha present - at higher levels this can be in the order of +15 per turn which is pretty significant. Over 100 turns that Geisha has boosted your town wealth by 1500 which is like having an upgraded gold mine in your province!! Things that will decrease town wealth include unrest, high taxes, and quite importantly looting a city. If you loot a city it will tell you how much the town wealth will take a hit - I think the town wealth also has an impact on how much you get when you loot a city. Key thing is that you don't want the enemy to capture one of your high growth provinces then loot it - because all that growth you have built up over the course of the game can be wiped out. If you focus on developing town wealth from early in the game you can have some incredibly wealthy provinces. It is feasible with the right province, and the right buildings & characters to get your town wealth growing by 30-40 per turn, which is pretty awesome when you think about it.
Re: Economy Observations, Tips, Etc.
I would add to the above (very nice) breakdown on wealth growth, that there is no direct relationship between growth and trade income. The numerical growth bonus from the port itself goes straight into town wealth which is taxable income. Trade income comes from goods sold and tariffs and is therefore reported separately. However, as you upgrade your ports, you also increase export capacity alongside the local growth bonus. That allows you to sell more of your goods to fewer partners, which is important when trade partners become scarce or expensive to acquire. Have a look by mousing over each resource in the trade panel to see how much of what you produce actually gets traded. Owning more than one region with the same resource (and/or having fully upgraded facilities) will often lead to surplus supply. Surplus goods are consumed locally at reduced prices. Increasing export capacity to avoid that is a better solution than adding more trade partners due to the volatility of those agreements.
As for tariffs, they seem to increase (somewhat marginally) over time as the value of each trade agreement increases either due to adding goods or to growing prosperity (e.g. your partner expands, thus increasing demand). Not entirely certain what the mechanic is there, but they do grow. You can increase tariffs by a percentage bonus with the smuggling specialty buildings and some later civil techs. The techs are better, but I believe the building bonuses stack and there are 5 such regions, so you could make a game out of going after those. Smuggling buildings also provide a growth bonus to town wealth (+12 max?).
It's nice that some of the less emphasized elements of trade in S2 have a bigger role in FotS. Victory conditions require that the majority of regions be of your political persuasion, so it's to your benefit to help create strong allies with lots of holdings (rather than conquer everything). Maximizing those fewer, more reliable trade agreements by increasing export capacity and boosting tariffs gives that part of the game some needed depth.
Re: Economy Observations, Tips, Etc.
many thanks chaps, my ignorance is a thing of the past, where do get all this info? the manual? i've never looked at it but it doesn't look meaty enough to have this level of detail in? anyhow il be making more of an effort to keep my provinces in the green from now on!
since you seem to be so well versed in the mechanics of the game, why is it that sometimes other clans will trade with and sometimes not, eg: you might be very friendly with a clan but they still wont trade or only with cash incentive, i thought it might be to do with the resources, like if u had copper and they didnt say, they would be willing but if you have something that they already have then they won't trade as ports/ trade lanes are limited?
also sometime when i have provinces with a port, sometimes even a trading port no trade lane appears and i dont have the option to open trade with another clan, it says that all the trade slots in my home province are full??
cheers, if you dont have time to explain all that maybe you could put a link to somewhere for info?
Re: Economy Observations, Tips, Etc.
As to whether they will trade or not it can be a number of factors - firstly the 'balance' of the agreement - i.e. how much they will make out of it vs how much you will make out of it. You can see this by mousing over the trade route in question on the strategy map and it will give you a breakdown of how much each clan is earning from any given trade route per turn. If they do not go for an agreement sometimes a little bit of cash to sweeten the deal and offset any one-sided trade deals will make it work. As a general thing, the more trade goods you have the more money you will make from trade agreements therefore the less likely other clans will want to trade with you - a bit of a Catch 22!!
The other thing which does seem to be a factor is if the AI wants a certain trade good - a great exampe is the cotton from vanilla STW. Cotton is required for advancing the Yari dojo building chain, and the only source of cotton in the game is from a trade node. So if you control that trade node you have a monopoly. I don't have any concrete proof but my experience tells me that if the AI decides it wants cotton, it will pay an enormous amount of money to get it from you. I've sold trade agreements for a lump sum of 17,000 koku - which is crazy, but it can happen.
The final question about port availalbility - for a trade route to be established you must have a free trade port that is connected to your captial by land. This causes problems for Chosokabe who are stuck on an island with only a handful of tradeports and none of their tradeports overseas will ever work for them! Also, your propective trade partner must also have a free slot in atrade port - so often the reason you cannot trade is because your potential trade partner does not have the ports available.
Re: Economy Observations, Tips, Etc.
I've seen some oddities occur with trade routing that may play into sea lanes being reported as unavailable when it looks like they're open. In my current FotS campaign as Saga, I had Fukuoka as a vassal and a trade agreement via sea lane. Later, I gained the province next to Nagasaki (Saga starting capital) which allowed for a land route to be established. The route subsequently switched to land and I verified that by checking the trade panel icon as well as noting the route itself on the map. However, I noticed that Fukuoka's imports were reporting as unavailable (reddened icons in the trade panel). I was still earning income from the agreement, but they apparently were not. Nor were they trading with anyone else along their newly opened sea lane. I noticed their port was damaged (the one through which our common trade lane formerly ran) and a sea lane still connected with my capital showing 0 income. Apparently the AI export route had not switched to land and the agreement became BOTH land and sea (with me on the lucky side). I could see where a similar occurrence between AI clans might result in sea lanes being reported as unavailable. They actually are unavailable, but there is no way you'd ever see that through the limited UI.
Re: Economy Observations, Tips, Etc.
Unfortunately, the manual isn't all that specific with actual game mechanisms. There are a number of helpful threads here at the ORG (see Tea House -> Confucian Academy) as well as over at TWCenter which attempt to uncover things through meticulous testing and observation. Trade, economics and diplomacy are some of the harder nuts to crack. Modding the game also can be informative as you can observe what happens when changing key variables. So a lot of the more specific information is littered about, unfortunately, and still open to speculation.
Frogbeastegg's guide is likely the most comprehensive resource and Darkside's Economy guide for S2 (at CA's forums) also has some good information. What we really need though is someone from CA to come by and do a Q&A regarding some of the more mysterious game mechanics. A nice fellow called Thamis (Jan van der Crabben) used to drop by at TWCenter back when Empire was released an posted quite a bit of the finer points of how the economic systems worked. He was the developer responsible for much of the economic systems inherited by Shogun, I believe, but has since departed.
Making certain you've moused over absolutely every last bit of text and icon elements in the UI is also surprisingly informative. There are a number of useful things hidden away there as well as some misleading information on game mechanics. For example, one tooltip for public order implies that happiness (vs repression) has a positive effect on growth. Unless there is some hidden bonus, this appears to be an abandoned concept. Instead, disorder leads to negative growth and happiness and repression are effectively equal (at least as far as the economy goes).
Last edited by Kurisu; 05-04-2012 at 13:02.
Re: Economy Observations, Tips, Etc.
Also, remember that in the TW series the tooltips work on a time delay. There are usually about three different bits of info that loop, so keep hovering.
Re: Economy Observations, Tips, Etc.
Having a horrible/fun time trying to play the Aizu has taught me a lot of things:
1. Castle upgrades are great for defense AND repression, especially compared to buying (or being stuck stationing) troops for extended periods of time.
And they don't hurt you economically like they do in Shogun 2, besides the fact that they cost money up front but they do tend to work forever afterwards to DEFEND your other investments.
Police stations are basically JUST for repression (and the agents), so I tend to install them everywhere only after inns and cottage industries start becoming a happiness problem.
2. Waiting for an enemy to finish an expensive upgrade that you want (like especially when they're one turn away from upgrading their settlement) saves you the cash AND the time it'd take to do it yourself.
3. Draining your neighbors of cash by selling them military access early in the game WILL make them weaker and slower (and give you a jumpstart on your own economy) but that could be bad or good for you depending on what is going on with the clans around them and what they would've normally done (to you or for you) if you didn't drain them a bit.
Its basically free money aside from that, though, since its so easy to get the AI to attack you by "boxing them in" when they're all programmed to expand at all costs.
4. Ships cost a lot of cash to keep running every turn, so try to avoid Huge Navy Stuff (if you can) until you are richer.
5. Learning the natural tendencies of your neighboring clans for growth and avoiding "the head of their snake" can save you cash by not making you fight battles on more than one front at once and you can start using that knowledge to your advantage (taking weakly defended or war-ravaged places with the minimum size army necessary to do it efficiently, letting them block or weaken your enemies for you, etc).
That's actually very economic heh.
5. A 2% bump from a settlement upgrade (plus more economic buildings) is a big deal per turn when you are taxing folks at the minimum rate of 10% to improve growth, and not something you'd feel so much if you were used to a 30% tax rate.
6. Entertaining noble geisha are great for cranking up the cash on a province and your police agents can get bonuses to repression (saves you time and money with newly aquired properties by not having to station troops).
7. There's a lot of ridiculously good tech tree upgrades for your economy.
8. Farms are good, fertile farms are great, very fertile farms are unfair haha.
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