One interesting problem I found on the forums on the topic of goods and raw materials, I would like to know the answer to it and I believe you would too. So I looked into what happens when you run out of resources in Victoria III. This article is a part of my economy wiki which I’ve been working on for the past few days.
The basic characteristic of raw materials in the game is that they are traded on the market at a price. This price can be -75% or +75% of the base price.
In case you have a surplus of raw materials, the percentage price will be lower than the base price and in case you have a shortage of raw materials the price will go up.
What happens when the raw material gets to +75% of the price?
That’s the question that leads to the idea…
hmm so I’ll let the price go up to +75%, I’ll still have the raw material and it will just be expensive – I’ll never get to a point where I’ll be downright zero and won’t be so starved.
… which would realistically mean that nothing can happen to you as a nation if you have enough money. And here I think there is another mechanism that will push you to not want to have resources at +75% and that is the finances of the individual factories.
As far as I understand the videos, the buildings have their income and expenses. With the income they buy raw materials from the market, pay wages and if they still have income then they put the money in reserve. If their raw material input will be at +75% of the price – so the building will have to push down the wages of the employees.
With less pay, people will leave their jobs – they will be unemployed and start looking for other jobs or become radical against the government. Either way, in the long run it will lead to economic problems that you will have to deal with.
In addition to what I have described above so you can expect that in this strange state your country will get some negative characteristics with which you will have to deal and which will force you to solve this problem otherwise you will be in a death spiral and the game for you over time will end.
How to solve the problem of the lack of raw materials or high prices in Victoria III?
I understand there will be several solutions – currently I see three.
In the first instance, you can temporarily subsidize individual businesses that have a problem with the state of the market (i.e. wages/costs are paid for out of state funds) – but this is not a long-term solution.
Or you may have to get raw materials into the country from another country by trading, but again this could mean that if you have a problem together in the future the trades will stop and you will have to subsidize the market again – so caution is needed here and it is better to have multiple suppliers.
Well the solution is once you stabilize the situation to build your own factories for expensive material and produce it yourself if you have enough raw materials.
Range change from 50% to 75%
Maybe the only reason why I write in the article that the range is -75% to +75% when before in the developer streams you could see that the range is -50% to +50% is that this thing probably changed in the new builds. Which one of the official videos proves.
