You can do the same in a world conquest game without building cost reduction. I love spammimg the build button... until I have so many provinces it starts lagging like crazy, thrn it stops being fun
I did a persia game, tried to race england to Global trade (was trying a game where i only had the persia subcontinent plus a few trade notes next to it for trade companies) and i accidentally got about 60% reduction and popped the missions for cloth and silk. Then I build manufacturies everywhere without really thinking about it. Suddenly, 10 ingame years later, I realize that I cant grow my economy through buildings because everywhere had a manufactury. The sad part is that I literally got full eco ideas about 2 years after spamming those manufacturies, so I couldve gotten 50+ diplo dev for free in a run where i try to dev every province in the continent to at least 20.
I love debtmaxxing. In an anbennar mp game it is 1500 and i am 35k in debt and i can still take like another 100 loans. It is a W. literally free money
Debt maxxing is all well and good, as long as you can get rid of the inflation. But with debt maxing allowing you to hire high skill advisors and investing the admin points into inflation reduction, it can certainly work out. and with the crazy modifiers a lot of nations in anbennar give to advisor cost, its certainly worth it.
@@pinkyfull Yeah I'm Verkal Gulan (the gold hold) so I have several yearly inflation reduction modifiers as well as heavily discounted button click. I'm at less than 1 inflation in that game iirc. I'm militarily pretty weak but I'm just the bank for my Jadd Empire ally, who is number 1 gp.
Huh. I remember a relaxed cooperative MP game where my economy was stagnating and my income flatlining due to keep up with (perceived) threats, so I decided to test "debt-funded investment" by borrowing heavily to build manufactories. It seemed to work, and with these numbers I can see why (I had good trade efficiency and close to complete control of my capital node). Really handy to see the maths behind it.
Great vid! I think I need to do some reading on the inflation mechanic. I think the one thing I’ve always assumed is the monarch point cost of reducing inflation from loans couldn’t be worth paying… and then at the same time I’ve never questioned the inflation gain from gold provinces. Lol I guess I should go compare the two. 2.5k hours into this game, and I’ve pretty much always just avoided taking debt (unless it’s the very beginning of the game and I’m going for a big war w/mercs.)
@@LemonCake101 yeah no kidding, but it would be neat to know the break even. Like if I Declare war on a Two province minor, it takes 2years to finish the war for 25 warscore and get 40 ducats is it worth it? Or does it need to be 120 to be worth it. It would be a neat project
@@jric6283 that's fair, although again really depends how quickly you finish wars/how good you are at the game as it where. We also have to pay the opportunity cost of taking money instead of just taking more land
@@jric6283 You can fairly easily calculate the simple returns by simply looking at what you pay your troops that are sieging it down. If you have maybe 3 infantry and a cannon sieging it down for 18 months after wiping their army that would be easy profit not to mention future profits from the provinces you now have. Especially true if you can just turn down army maintenance afterwards.
@@andrek6920 I feel like to do it accurately you would have to factor in time to end war, max money on an additive province basis, and cost of army which is all highly variable and involve multiple wars and games to verify how long the wars take. It seems very complex to me but i think it would be cool to see other examples of return on investment outside of buildings
Everyone always talks about how great burgher loans is but taking burgher loans gives -5% trade efficiency, in my current 1450 Sweden this is costing me 0.0835 in lost trade and 0.25 in interest, and early game trade is super low before you've consolidated the incoming nodes. At effectively 1.3% cost a lot of these no longer beat burgher loans, you should still invest in buildings and your economy but not through burgher loans imo, but I need more data to see the actual costs of -5% trade efficiency. Also I knew Manufactories were good but I thought that only the 0.6 or 0.7 were really good and the 0.2 were bad but still worth to grow your economy. I will stop feeling judged for building farm estates
The trade efficiency part is fair, but trying to factor that in is pretty impossible overall. Another thing to bare in mind, is that I assume 0% trade efficiency, which is just.. not the case.
@@LemonCake101 Oh for sure I don't expect perfect save that for the 'grand unified theory' video I just have a pet hate for this malus getting ignored.
When playing a merchant republic or some other very trade focused nation, I usually avoid burgher loans and instead give out all monopolies. Having a 4-5 ticking mercantilism every 10 years for the first 150 years sets you up for almost max mercantilism without inflation or any of these other kinds of issues. I'm just mad now because I'm playing brittany into canada and norther america doesn't have many trade goods for it.
You'd also have to account for the time value of money if you really wanted to look at it. That lump sum of cheaper cash will likely scale you harder and faster than just waiting. Especially as you said, your early trade income is miserable
Me too - I gave up playing when I stopped keeping up with DLC around Cossacks - wiki says 2015 - good grief. Considering relearning the game now that it looks like it is coming to end of life and hopefully some stability. Now then - Burghur loans - hmm!
I swear : I was thinking precisely about making such a comparison between interests per annum and money by production buildings ! Thank you a lot lemon cake ! The thing is : I thought it would’ve been more worthwhile to just take a bunch of regular loans and build every manu until 0.5 ducats/month, and… apparently not if I pay more than 400 ducats for it. That’s such a huge leap in understanding the game O.o
Maybe the true buildings are the TCs we made along the way? But seriously, TC investments are clearly contenders for the best income boosters, +100% production efficiency and 0.3 goods produced statewide for 800 gold base is really incredible, even with local autonomy
Technically, yea that's the best way of making money from traee companies, but in practice outside of the shitty 3 dev steppe areas/siberia, its not really worth it to carpet it everywhere
They really need to give the Trade Company investments macro builder a rework though. I hate having to pan around the map to get all of them instead of having a list like for regular buildings.
Honestly, I think a part of the discussion is how quickly you want the payoff. If you are going to be playing for 200 years, then having to wait about 100 years to get your investment back seems much worse than full campaign length.
EU4, mathematics, and spreadsheets, I'm in _heaven_ . I will add in the case for manufactures, they'll also add some cost reduction to institutions. You'll be getting trade power (which spreads global trade) from the increased goods produced, and manufactures directly from the building. That's going to be insanely hard to calculate because it's going to have wildly different numbers based on things like dev, country size, autonomy, spawn location, and how willing you are to buy it. But it can probably give you some leeway on some of those bottom numbers where loans are barely worth taking.
Pretty good explanation, only missing how inflation increases the cost of non-economy related things, which can end up turning net profit into a net loss that's extremely hard to calculate
I think the +20% land force limit "trading in" bonus you can get from grain manufactories does bare mentioning, especially for countries like Russia, PLC and China.
This reminds me how great that one burgher privilege is. Just by paying that one slot and having high burgher loyalty,which is pretty easy, you can get scaling interest per annum, and through other sources like parliament,events,eco ideas,mission and that op monument in slovakia you can make taking regular loans worth it to build virtually everything,since you can take more and they are easier to maintain.Plus that privilege basically halves the cost to reduce inflation,so thats epic.
Also keep in mind that increasing your income also increases the money received in every sell-seize cycle, so increasing your total income (but not your net income) with tax edicts in the first age is quite good as well.
I’ve been playing the game for many years and I didn’t even know there’s such a thing as burgher loans. That just speaks to how complex and intricate this game is.
How to grow your economy and get rich: 1. Take loans 2. Build buildings 3. Beg the richest ally for money 4. Declare war and take money 5. Pay off loans 6. Repeat No but in my Munster into Ireland campaign I realized how useful it can be to actually use the favor system
6:58 you know it's a real statistics video when the presenter apologizes for a simplification for the sake of presentation on something literally only two other people in the world crunching the math might be thrown off by this minor thing haha
I’m doing a Three Mountains run where I take the Aztec mission tree, and it’s about 1700. I’ve got my trade so effectively captured that I have over 250k in loans and I still net 1.6k in profit almost entirely because I’ve built tons of manufactories in the New World and capture all of it in the European nodes. Manufactories in 3 dev Siberian or Canadian provinces provide insane value per total dev.
What kind of assumptions are you working with for that segment at 16:00-16:30? Even with +50% goods produced modifier, +50% production efficiency and +50% trade efficiency on a 4 ducat trade good, the manufactory "only" clocks in at half your calculate income. Quick napkin math: 4 base trade value/year 6 trade value/year with GPM 9 trade income/year + 9 production income/year total 18 ducats/year or 1,5 ducats/month.
The base value figures go that high as a case of ‘this happens in extreme’ : so things like cloves manus, or building a manu in a node where you have trade companies setup for goods produced etc. The base 1.2 value is basically ‘highest manu I have seen’ and then I applied % multiplier to it
@@LemonCake101 The shown income number includes local modifiers to goods produced, trade value and most importantly production efficiency. This means you're most likely overestimating the trade income provided by the manufactory: for it to be accurate would require not +50% trade efficiency, but that your collecting trade efficiency is 1.5x that of your local production efficiency - this assumption falls apart basically as soon as you build workshops. I agree with your conclusion (manufactories stronk), but the 4% interest threshold is more difficult to reach than estimated.
@@BlurbFish trade value, and hence the trade efficiency/trade steering is not shown: only the production money, aka goods produced and production efficiency is the only bit that is demonstrated; hence the x2.5 multiplication, as the x2 is the trade value, although it should be reduced in fairness due to the production efficiency isn't leading to a trade increase. So yeah, the x2.5 multiplier depends on how good your trade steering etc is. I should have been much more clear.
@@LemonCake101 I am aware that the displayed manufactory income is only production, but the real income also increases via trade. I'll go through an example to illustrate what I mean: A manufactory shows it'll provide 1.2 income. The province in question has +50% production efficiency from a workshop (no other production efficiency modifiers whatsoever). The trade value generated by the manufactory is then only 0.8/month. With +50% trade efficiency, the trade income provided is then 1.2/month, not the 1.8 shown in your table. The total manufactory income is then 2.4 instead of 3, so in this concrete example, your table overestimates the total manufactory income by x1.25. In order for the table to be accurate, you'd need +125% trade efficiency (150% production efficiency x1.5 = 2.25). In my experience, trade efficiency is usually *lower* than local production efficiency, so trade income is typically *less* than the income displayed by the building. I don't think it is productive to bring trade steering into this discussion - but I'll gladly discuss it as a separate topic if you want to.
@@BlurbFish ok fair enough. To be very clear though; you are correct in the sense that it was incorrect, or honestly miss attributed to multiply the production efficiency. Those should have been calculated seperatly. Regarding 1.2 base income manus: those do exist, and I included them as the 'peak of the list' examples: in your game, go look at the manu and use those from the list as it where: I mean I literally went down to 0.1 manus after all. Now if you are setting up for trade/max money, trade efficiency etc absolutely demolish production income, its not even close. Trade steering etc is how you get the money overflow income per month levels of income, but that isn't what's being discussed here, trade steering is a seperate topic.
Buildings are more of an MP thing tbh, in SP its always just better (if your playing optimally) to just take someone elses money and land to expand loan cap and blob to build army buildings = more wars, more blobbing and bigger loan cap
@@ragefacememeaholic army buildings are good, churches and workshops? not so much in SP, blobbing is the best way to play and those buildings take a good while to provide a return, i rather invest the money into mercs, or manpower/force limit buildings
@@RobbiusBossiusI mean a church is making like .1-.3 ducats a month, costs 100 ducats base, that’s paying itself off in a few decades, if you’re planning on playing a run past 1500, building church’s at the start of the game is just making you money. Though I agree taking land is a better use of your money.
@@ragefacememeaholic money is literally irrelevant beyond the early game, before that church even breaks even you can easily build a good economy if you play optimally
My good sir, the mercs run out of manpower at around 200k even with Swiss fun stuff. My current MP war has me sitting on 4 million casualties, with the enemy having 5 million. The issue with mercs, is they do simply all die out, and you have to fight conventionally: I wish I could throw 100k at the enemy and win, considering I spent a lot more already.
@ The combined manpower pools and combined monthly gain of every available company (assuming you have enough available companies) with maxed out contracts and ideas and government reforms should be able to outpace even a large Prussia in a prolonged death war. Unless you’re leaving out some key detail where the Prussia you’re fighting has 6,000 development or is allied with every Great Power, then your 4 million to 5 million figure makes it sound like you’re coming out on top anyways. Keep fighting the good fight gamer.
@@wolfgangsgames in practise in MP, merc companies are nowhere near big enough. Remember, your enemy is grabbing them too, so you are fighting over the few companies left, and indeed, everyone is sitting on around 300/400 income etc. The realities of MP war are that mercs in practice are just way to pathetic to make a difference, but if you disagree, you are welcome to join an MP and prove people wrong.
@ I’m not even a fan of mercenaries in general, so I don’t have any desire to prove the world wrong or anything. I’m just talking about Switzerland’s unique experience of “throwing money at your enemies to kill them” being an actual play pattern and not just a meme that somebody uses to cope when they’re in a death spiral. Also I can’t play multiplayer past speed 1 or my PC turns into a thermonuclear warhead. I’m just saying from all the multiplayer games I’ve watched on stream, in the rare instance that both someone picks Switzerland and they get a good start, their mercs do a lot of heavy lifting. Either that or there’s a player Austria and they lose immediately.
but there's still the question of when it's worth braking an alliance that you normally needed at game start, also it's worth noting that you shouldn't spam loans for buildings unless you know what your doing (to clarify, i mean that you should pay off loans before you grab like 30 for several buildings)
One thing i didnt see you mention is the build time for manufactories. Any return on investment is posponed 5 years, which is notably the point at which you would need to either pay off or renew loans.
I quite literally mentioned in the video multiple times the return on investment includes the 5 years build time for manus and 1 year for workshops and temples. I even went into how I assumed you have no build time reductions…
@LemonCake101 your right sorry, I worded that badly. Wasn't talking about the date to break even, was more talking about whether it was worth to take 1% loans to build them. Unless I'm reading your spreadsheet wrong you have anything with more than 1% annual return as outperforming 1% loans, but if your taking 5 years to build, at which point you need to renew the loans, it could effect that math. Probably not super significant though.
@ Annual return does kinda assume instant construction in fairness: Issue is as a percentage of total return the time spent building depends on how long you play the game
Imagine paying off buildings. I just punch money out of my neighbors, build buildings, and then punch more money out of my neighbors with the income i get from buildings.
3:30 You forget that Burgher loans also reduce your mercantilism and trade efficiency, so these loans aren't really 1% interest per annum and more like 1% + 5% of your trade income per annum. So assuming you make 10 ducats in Trade per month without any modifiers, those burgher loans would cost an extra 0.5 ducats per month if this loan was 100 ducats large the interest per annum on 1% would be 0.08 ducats, with 5 loans that's 0.41 ducats per Month in interest so the 1% interest per annum would more accurately be a 2.2% interest per annum. That means you would need a 90 ducats building that returns 0.2 ducats per month to make a profit. I also wonder if the build time should be factored in, as you are paying interest on the loans while the building is building and isn't giving anything in return, which would be especially noticeable in manufactories.
I mean I am aware of that, moreso that tried to ignore trade efficiency as a metric. Should I include the extra loyalty from Burgers as economic buffs, since at 60 influence and 60 happiness they give you a lot more trade efficiency (20%?) Well yes, in a unified theory I would, but as mentioned, in here I didn't. To be clear you are correct with your statement, but I can't claim any number, weather 10 ducats or 100 ducats or 1 ducat as trade income.
@@LemonCake101 I wouldn't factor in the loyalty because loyalty could be below 60% or above it with or without the loans. But the trade efficiency is directly linked to the loans it will be deducted from your income so even things that would in theory be somewhat profitable in reality aren't I usually go with the rule of thumb burger loans for church or workshops that give a minimum of 0.12/0.13 and normal loans for 0.3ish income
I am the loan-averse guy. I think it's some sort of a trauma from my early playthroughs where I went bankrupt a bunch of times and it fucked up my country (Lithuania, I believe).
Any chance you could upload this excel sheet somewhere so I can play around with it? I’m taking a class in big data analysis rn and i think it would be neat to add in data on the the paired dev values and trade goods of all the provinces.
I mean it’s a very small one and nothing too fancy. If you want a proper data analysis one, I made a video ranking everyone province in Eu4 and that came with a 3.7k entry spreadsheet on every province with data like fort level, development trade goods and even things like great projects and estuaries and stuff. That one I also did ‘paywall’ though since it took like 2 weeks of work
0.08? damn.. i only do down to 0.2 lol I have a question though -- when factories are unlocked many provinces have 0 slots (sometimes even -2 which... how). My problem is that I never know where I should delete buildings to build them so I end up just... not.
build courthouses pretty mcuh everywhere, if your blobbing its one of the best buildings so you can half state more marketplaces are only worth it in trade companied centers of trade, never outside that
Unless you are netherlands/ you have infra ideas, building manu in trade goods that are actually giving bonuses to soldiers households doesnt make sense
Ah yes because the honestly massive amount of time you spend between unlocking farm estates and unlocking soldier's households means that you should just let those provinces do literally nothing, rather than literally something. Not sure why you would be money adverse for literally no reason.
Have I been playing the game wrong for 5k hours? I've always thought workshops (in regions where you control trade) increase trade value generated by the province as well as the production value, which is the number you see in the macro builder. Is that wrong, does a workshop just not affect trade value at all?
Spamming buildings/projects, waiting 5 years, and accepting a strategic bankruptcy is the bulking/cutting bodybuilder cycle of EU4. That's how stuff is ideally actually built, not spreadsheets.
I dont understand people who are afraid to take loans, just outscale and grow beyond the debt in the early game because mid-late game money is never an issue anyways if you scaled correctly.
From what I've learned talking to and listening to people in the internet, some people are taught IRL that any and all debt is ruinous no matter what, that you shouldn't take any loan even if it's to your long term financial benefit (e.g. business loan to start a business or mortgage to get your own house and stop paying rent). And these people apply the same principle to games as well
Called me out so hard with the loan averse comment, I'll literally debase my currency 5 times to embrace an institution instead of taking on debt lmao.
@@LemonCake101 i mean merc ideas are kinda broken tho for inting people, the quality they give with the tier 5 reform is insanely strong i do think people overrate prussia tho for multiplayer, very strong sure, but qq persia, poland and siam are all stronger than prussia imo
@@LemonCake101 yea that -50% govcap is so ass to deal with lol (i love how prussia has that as a "nerf" yet qq persia exists with its...... comical dev devcost and cav fire/shock
why build manu on grain when they will give cost back when u gonna have manpower manu back there? and u can win wars by throwing money at problem with enough merks u can barrage assault refil before they can catch to you, but it is easier to do with manpower not with gold.
Well its not like you can actually build a soldier's household on that province regardless of whether or not its better. Its unlocked so much later, just remove the building if you can't expand infrastructure.
@@LemonCake101 :( Nice video btw. It won't convince me to take loans to build buildings, even though the numbers definetly were there, but still, nice video
I wouldn't rely on tooltips. Some are just straight up broken. And the ones that work might mislead you because of temporary issues like autonomy. I would consider dev, weather or not I will be able to profit from the produced trade value and synergies with other modifiers I am going to pickup. F.ex. churches with "Expand Temple Rights" gov reform is a hole different story than without.
Indeed: I had a video discussing how much the protecting trade one is broken. However, the building gain tooltips outside of the trade income bits are actually solid; they do take into account dev, the extra tax from expand temple rights, etc. Do test it yourself: take expand temple rights, and you will see the tooltip income go up.
i dont like lemon cakes
thank you I am not for eating
lemon cakes are delicious
@@LemonCake101i love lemons cake
nobody does _:D
More for me 😏
Thank you for solving the housing crisis
Thank you for housing the solving crisis
@@theorixlux thank you for crisis of solving housing.
I think he just created the sub-prime loan crisis in EU4.
@@azarisLP if the bubble pops after 1821 that's a different Paradox game's problem
I literally just did a 90% building cost reduction game. It’s very satisfying blindly building manufactures until you run out of Provences.
Why are you building manufactures in provence
@ man I do this every time
you run out of Provence after only 4 provinces, it's not that big of a state.
You can do the same in a world conquest game without building cost reduction. I love spammimg the build button... until I have so many provinces it starts lagging like crazy, thrn it stops being fun
I did a persia game, tried to race england to Global trade (was trying a game where i only had the persia subcontinent plus a few trade notes next to it for trade companies) and i accidentally got about 60% reduction and popped the missions for cloth and silk. Then I build manufacturies everywhere without really thinking about it. Suddenly, 10 ingame years later, I realize that I cant grow my economy through buildings because everywhere had a manufactury. The sad part is that I literally got full eco ideas about 2 years after spamming those manufacturies, so I couldve gotten 50+ diplo dev for free in a run where i try to dev every province in the continent to at least 20.
Money can be exchanged for goods and services
And thus society is born
I fact checked this to be sure and turns out you're right!
That's what THEY want you to believe. In reality, it's a tool to enslave the masses or something!
Juhu
Trvth nvke
I love debtmaxxing. In an anbennar mp game it is 1500 and i am 35k in debt and i can still take like another 100 loans. It is a W. literally free money
Debt maxxing is all well and good, as long as you can get rid of the inflation. But with debt maxing allowing you to hire high skill advisors and investing the admin points into inflation reduction, it can certainly work out. and with the crazy modifiers a lot of nations in anbennar give to advisor cost, its certainly worth it.
@@pinkyfull Yeah I'm Verkal Gulan (the gold hold) so I have several yearly inflation reduction modifiers as well as heavily discounted button click. I'm at less than 1 inflation in that game iirc. I'm militarily pretty weak but I'm just the bank for my Jadd Empire ally, who is number 1 gp.
US government policy be like
Fun fact: this is true in real life as well!
banks hate him!
[click here to find out why]
I build buildings 2 days before an event costing me money occurs...
This video was very enjoyable and wholesome. 10/10
thanks
Huh. I remember a relaxed cooperative MP game where my economy was stagnating and my income flatlining due to keep up with (perceived) threats, so I decided to test "debt-funded investment" by borrowing heavily to build manufactories. It seemed to work, and with these numbers I can see why (I had good trade efficiency and close to complete control of my capital node). Really handy to see the maths behind it.
Auspicious take
I like numbers
Great vid!
I think I need to do some reading on the inflation mechanic. I think the one thing I’ve always assumed is the monarch point cost of reducing inflation from loans couldn’t be worth paying… and then at the same time I’ve never questioned the inflation gain from gold provinces. Lol
I guess I should go compare the two. 2.5k hours into this game, and I’ve pretty much always just avoided taking debt (unless it’s the very beginning of the game and I’m going for a big war w/mercs.)
The Algorithm is going to send this video to Arumba subs. I 100% guarantee it because I learned most of this from him already 😂
Now we need a RoI video about treating other tags like a bank(see Ming) by factoring in land maintenance, reinforcments and regiment cost
Its really good, punching people for money from war is insane
@@LemonCake101 yeah no kidding, but it would be neat to know the break even. Like if I Declare war on a Two province minor, it takes 2years to finish the war for 25 warscore and get 40 ducats is it worth it? Or does it need to be 120 to be worth it. It would be a neat project
@@jric6283 that's fair, although again really depends how quickly you finish wars/how good you are at the game as it where. We also have to pay the opportunity cost of taking money instead of just taking more land
@@jric6283 You can fairly easily calculate the simple returns by simply looking at what you pay your troops that are sieging it down. If you have maybe 3 infantry and a cannon sieging it down for 18 months after wiping their army that would be easy profit not to mention future profits from the provinces you now have. Especially true if you can just turn down army maintenance afterwards.
@@andrek6920 I feel like to do it accurately you would have to factor in time to end war, max money on an additive province basis, and cost of army which is all highly variable and involve multiple wars and games to verify how long the wars take. It seems very complex to me but i think it would be cool to see other examples of return on investment outside of buildings
Great video, I really enjoy that type of eu4 content where numbers are broken down. Keep it up!
Manufactories boost workshop income so dramatically in your states, even without the added trade value they're worth every penny.
Economics with my favorite pastry. What more can a map painter ask for?
Everyone always talks about how great burgher loans is but taking burgher loans gives -5% trade efficiency, in my current 1450 Sweden this is costing me 0.0835 in lost trade and 0.25 in interest, and early game trade is super low before you've consolidated the incoming nodes.
At effectively 1.3% cost a lot of these no longer beat burgher loans, you should still invest in buildings and your economy but not through burgher loans imo, but I need more data to see the actual costs of -5% trade efficiency.
Also I knew Manufactories were good but I thought that only the 0.6 or 0.7 were really good and the 0.2 were bad but still worth to grow your economy. I will stop feeling judged for building farm estates
The trade efficiency part is fair, but trying to factor that in is pretty impossible overall. Another thing to bare in mind, is that I assume 0% trade efficiency, which is just.. not the case.
@@LemonCake101 Oh for sure I don't expect perfect save that for the 'grand unified theory' video I just have a pet hate for this malus getting ignored.
When playing a merchant republic or some other very trade focused nation, I usually avoid burgher loans and instead give out all monopolies. Having a 4-5 ticking mercantilism every 10 years for the first 150 years sets you up for almost max mercantilism without inflation or any of these other kinds of issues.
I'm just mad now because I'm playing brittany into canada and norther america doesn't have many trade goods for it.
You'd also have to account for the time value of money if you really wanted to look at it. That lump sum of cheaper cash will likely scale you harder and faster than just waiting. Especially as you said, your early trade income is miserable
This video was very informative, I might actually return to eu4 again to test the new knowledge I've learned here.
Eu4 is a great game, can't recommend it enough!
Me too - I gave up playing when I stopped keeping up with DLC around Cossacks - wiki says 2015 - good grief. Considering relearning the game now that it looks like it is coming to end of life and hopefully some stability. Now then - Burghur loans - hmm!
I swear : I was thinking precisely about making such a comparison between interests per annum and money by production buildings ! Thank you a lot lemon cake !
The thing is : I thought it would’ve been more worthwhile to just take a bunch of regular loans and build every manu until 0.5 ducats/month, and… apparently not if I pay more than 400 ducats for it. That’s such a huge leap in understanding the game O.o
Glad to be of service!
Jokes on you I always sit at 30% inflation and take random loans to build churches in trade companies
Maybe the true buildings are the TCs we made along the way? But seriously, TC investments are clearly contenders for the best income boosters, +100% production efficiency and 0.3 goods produced statewide for 800 gold base is really incredible, even with local autonomy
That's fair, but a somewhat different catagory
Technically, yea that's the best way of making money from traee companies, but in practice outside of the shitty 3 dev steppe areas/siberia, its not really worth it to carpet it everywhere
Also dont have to wait for the returns unlike regular buildings.
Really makes me want to go a local autonomy reduction build to get insane trade companies again, majapahit is great for that
They really need to give the Trade Company investments macro builder a rework though. I hate having to pan around the map to get all of them instead of having a list like for regular buildings.
Honestly, I think a part of the discussion is how quickly you want the payoff. If you are going to be playing for 200 years, then having to wait about 100 years to get your investment back seems much worse than full campaign length.
Indeed!
EU4, mathematics, and spreadsheets, I'm in _heaven_ .
I will add in the case for manufactures, they'll also add some cost reduction to institutions. You'll be getting trade power (which spreads global trade) from the increased goods produced, and manufactures directly from the building. That's going to be insanely hard to calculate because it's going to have wildly different numbers based on things like dev, country size, autonomy, spawn location, and how willing you are to buy it. But it can probably give you some leeway on some of those bottom numbers where loans are barely worth taking.
You should build buildings when you can no longer war warrings, or dip dippings
Honestly war is way too profitable
True, war should be a lot more expensive in this game.
Spreadsheet explanation? Love it, great job!
Thank you for your service but I'll just keep building them when I feel like it's right.
There's even a better method: conquer already built buildings.
Yes, this but not as a meme, literally this
Genuinely best paradox interactive video ever uploaded.
"When should you build buildings?"
when you have excess money
But sometimes, its worth taking loan to build building :)
Pretty good explanation, only missing how inflation increases the cost of non-economy related things, which can end up turning net profit into a net loss that's extremely hard to calculate
No indeed: inflation as a concept is a topic for a whole video
I think the +20% land force limit "trading in" bonus you can get from grain manufactories does bare mentioning, especially for countries like Russia, PLC and China.
Brilliant video, I wasn’t thinking manufactories was that good because of the high cost(I was mainly going to .7)
Whenever the green number will give me a dopamine hit.
18:03 when true anarchy game (allowing people custom nation with +2 goods produced)
For the reason touched on here.... maybe no
This reminds me how great that one burgher privilege is. Just by paying that one slot and having high burgher loyalty,which is pretty easy, you can get scaling interest per annum, and through other sources like parliament,events,eco ideas,mission and that op monument in slovakia you can make taking regular loans worth it to build virtually everything,since you can take more and they are easier to maintain.Plus that privilege basically halves the cost to reduce inflation,so thats epic.
i tak edebt early game and then just get enough money that i can outspend any enemy
I mean ‘conquest’ is a really good scaling strategy too
So what you're telling me is I need to build a whole lot more manufactories...
Also keep in mind that increasing your income also increases the money received in every sell-seize cycle, so increasing your total income (but not your net income) with tax edicts in the first age is quite good as well.
The best bank in the game is the peace deal. Historically, specially in the game time frame, nations developed by stealing.
I’ve been playing the game for many years and I didn’t even know there’s such a thing as burgher loans. That just speaks to how complex and intricate this game is.
How to grow your economy and get rich:
1. Take loans
2. Build buildings
3. Beg the richest ally for money
4. Declare war and take money
5. Pay off loans
6. Repeat
No but in my Munster into Ireland campaign I realized how useful it can be to actually use the favor system
6:58 you know it's a real statistics video when the presenter apologizes for a simplification for the sake of presentation on something literally only two other people in the world crunching the math might be thrown off by this minor thing haha
I’m doing a Three Mountains run where I take the Aztec mission tree, and it’s about 1700. I’ve got my trade so effectively captured that I have over 250k in loans and I still net 1.6k in profit almost entirely because I’ve built tons of manufactories in the New World and capture all of it in the European nodes. Manufactories in 3 dev Siberian or Canadian provinces provide insane value per total dev.
I think you have made EU4 the most analysed game in human history
nowhere near lets be honest, but I am working on it!
What kind of assumptions are you working with for that segment at 16:00-16:30? Even with +50% goods produced modifier, +50% production efficiency and +50% trade efficiency on a 4 ducat trade good, the manufactory "only" clocks in at half your calculate income.
Quick napkin math:
4 base trade value/year
6 trade value/year with GPM
9 trade income/year + 9 production income/year
total 18 ducats/year or 1,5 ducats/month.
The base value figures go that high as a case of ‘this happens in extreme’ : so things like cloves manus, or building a manu in a node where you have trade companies setup for goods produced etc. The base 1.2 value is basically ‘highest manu I have seen’ and then I applied % multiplier to it
@@LemonCake101 The shown income number includes local modifiers to goods produced, trade value and most importantly production efficiency. This means you're most likely overestimating the trade income provided by the manufactory: for it to be accurate would require not +50% trade efficiency, but that your collecting trade efficiency is 1.5x that of your local production efficiency - this assumption falls apart basically as soon as you build workshops. I agree with your conclusion (manufactories stronk), but the 4% interest threshold is more difficult to reach than estimated.
@@BlurbFish trade value, and hence the trade efficiency/trade steering is not shown: only the production money, aka goods produced and production efficiency is the only bit that is demonstrated; hence the x2.5 multiplication, as the x2 is the trade value, although it should be reduced in fairness due to the production efficiency isn't leading to a trade increase.
So yeah, the x2.5 multiplier depends on how good your trade steering etc is. I should have been much more clear.
@@LemonCake101 I am aware that the displayed manufactory income is only production, but the real income also increases via trade. I'll go through an example to illustrate what I mean:
A manufactory shows it'll provide 1.2 income. The province in question has +50% production efficiency from a workshop (no other production efficiency modifiers whatsoever). The trade value generated by the manufactory is then only 0.8/month. With +50% trade efficiency, the trade income provided is then 1.2/month, not the 1.8 shown in your table. The total manufactory income is then 2.4 instead of 3, so in this concrete example, your table overestimates the total manufactory income by x1.25. In order for the table to be accurate, you'd need +125% trade efficiency (150% production efficiency x1.5 = 2.25).
In my experience, trade efficiency is usually *lower* than local production efficiency, so trade income is typically *less* than the income displayed by the building.
I don't think it is productive to bring trade steering into this discussion - but I'll gladly discuss it as a separate topic if you want to.
@@BlurbFish ok fair enough. To be very clear though; you are correct in the sense that it was incorrect, or honestly miss attributed to multiply the production efficiency. Those should have been calculated seperatly. Regarding 1.2 base income manus: those do exist, and I included them as the 'peak of the list' examples: in your game, go look at the manu and use those from the list as it where: I mean I literally went down to 0.1 manus after all.
Now if you are setting up for trade/max money, trade efficiency etc absolutely demolish production income, its not even close. Trade steering etc is how you get the money overflow income per month levels of income, but that isn't what's being discussed here, trade steering is a seperate topic.
Informative.Please also make a video considering the inflation.
Inflation is really run dependent, most comes from money taken from AI or loans taken, so literally impossible for me to model based on buildings
0.2 ducats for tax and workshop
0.5 for manifactury
Buildings are more of an MP thing tbh, in SP its always just better (if your playing optimally) to just take someone elses money and land to expand loan cap and blob to build army buildings = more wars, more blobbing and bigger loan cap
Buildings are good in SP. More money equals more power. Even when expanding quickly, you should have plenty of money to build things.
@@ragefacememeaholic army buildings are good, churches and workshops? not so much in SP, blobbing is the best way to play and those buildings take a good while to provide a return, i rather invest the money into mercs, or manpower/force limit buildings
@@RobbiusBossiusI mean a church is making like .1-.3 ducats a month, costs 100 ducats base, that’s paying itself off in a few decades, if you’re planning on playing a run past 1500, building church’s at the start of the game is just making you money.
Though I agree taking land is a better use of your money.
@@RobbiusBossius Well the person who invested into more money will have more of those things than you.
@@ragefacememeaholic money is literally irrelevant beyond the early game, before that church even breaks even you can easily build a good economy if you play optimally
And how about disbanding armies for investing harderer and collecting return sooner ?
10:44 wheres the spreadsheet?i want to insert my my numbers into it.
Burger loans hehe
Short answer: when you have spare money to spend on... building buildings!
my mum was always getting in debt her whole life and spending all the time, so its weird but i hate taking loans even in a game
“You can’t throw money at Prussia until they surrender.”
Unless if you’re playing Switzerland.
My good sir, the mercs run out of manpower at around 200k even with Swiss fun stuff. My current MP war has me sitting on 4 million casualties, with the enemy having 5 million. The issue with mercs, is they do simply all die out, and you have to fight conventionally: I wish I could throw 100k at the enemy and win, considering I spent a lot more already.
@ The combined manpower pools and combined monthly gain of every available company (assuming you have enough available companies) with maxed out contracts and ideas and government reforms should be able to outpace even a large Prussia in a prolonged death war. Unless you’re leaving out some key detail where the Prussia you’re fighting has 6,000 development or is allied with every Great Power, then your 4 million to 5 million figure makes it sound like you’re coming out on top anyways. Keep fighting the good fight gamer.
@@wolfgangsgames in practise in MP, merc companies are nowhere near big enough. Remember, your enemy is grabbing them too, so you are fighting over the few companies left, and indeed, everyone is sitting on around 300/400 income etc.
The realities of MP war are that mercs in practice are just way to pathetic to make a difference, but if you disagree, you are welcome to join an MP and prove people wrong.
@ I’m not even a fan of mercenaries in general, so I don’t have any desire to prove the world wrong or anything. I’m just talking about Switzerland’s unique experience of “throwing money at your enemies to kill them” being an actual play pattern and not just a meme that somebody uses to cope when they’re in a death spiral. Also I can’t play multiplayer past speed 1 or my PC turns into a thermonuclear warhead. I’m just saying from all the multiplayer games I’ve watched on stream, in the rare instance that both someone picks Switzerland and they get a good start, their mercs do a lot of heavy lifting. Either that or there’s a player Austria and they lose immediately.
but there's still the question of when it's worth braking an alliance that you normally needed at game start, also it's worth noting that you shouldn't spam loans for buildings unless you know what your doing (to clarify, i mean that you should pay off loans before you grab like 30 for several buildings)
Indeed; its quite hard to hit normal loans to better then just paying off a loan
One thing i didnt see you mention is the build time for manufactories. Any return on investment is posponed 5 years, which is notably the point at which you would need to either pay off or renew loans.
I quite literally mentioned in the video multiple times the return on investment includes the 5 years build time for manus and 1 year for workshops and temples. I even went into how I assumed you have no build time reductions…
@LemonCake101 your right sorry, I worded that badly. Wasn't talking about the date to break even, was more talking about whether it was worth to take 1% loans to build them.
Unless I'm reading your spreadsheet wrong you have anything with more than 1% annual return as outperforming 1% loans, but if your taking 5 years to build, at which point you need to renew the loans, it could effect that math.
Probably not super significant though.
@ Annual return does kinda assume instant construction in fairness: Issue is as a percentage of total return the time spent building depends on how long you play the game
Imagine paying off buildings. I just punch money out of my neighbors, build buildings, and then punch more money out of my neighbors with the income i get from buildings.
3:30 You forget that Burgher loans also reduce your mercantilism and trade efficiency, so these loans aren't really 1% interest per annum and more like 1% + 5% of your trade income per annum.
So assuming you make 10 ducats in Trade per month without any modifiers, those burgher loans would cost an extra 0.5 ducats per month if this loan was 100 ducats large the interest per annum on 1% would be 0.08 ducats, with 5 loans that's 0.41 ducats per Month in interest so the 1% interest per annum would more accurately be a 2.2% interest per annum.
That means you would need a 90 ducats building that returns 0.2 ducats per month to make a profit.
I also wonder if the build time should be factored in, as you are paying interest on the loans while the building is building and isn't giving anything in return, which would be especially noticeable in manufactories.
I mean I am aware of that, moreso that tried to ignore trade efficiency as a metric. Should I include the extra loyalty from Burgers as economic buffs, since at 60 influence and 60 happiness they give you a lot more trade efficiency (20%?)
Well yes, in a unified theory I would, but as mentioned, in here I didn't. To be clear you are correct with your statement, but I can't claim any number, weather 10 ducats or 100 ducats or 1 ducat as trade income.
@@LemonCake101 I wouldn't factor in the loyalty because loyalty could be below 60% or above it with or without the loans.
But the trade efficiency is directly linked to the loans it will be deducted from your income so even things that would in theory be somewhat profitable in reality aren't
I usually go with the rule of thumb burger loans for church or workshops that give a minimum of 0.12/0.13 and normal loans for 0.3ish income
I am the loan-averse guy. I think it's some sort of a trauma from my early playthroughs where I went bankrupt a bunch of times and it fucked up my country (Lithuania, I believe).
i member when buildings cost power points. how far we've come
You can build buildings in this game?
If you play on building map mode, it will encourage you to build buildings
BEAUTIFUL - i absolutely LOVE excel. are those formulas automatic? did you write it yourself ?
Yup, and made it myself. Glad you enjoyed!
Yea I'm not smart enough to follow this. I just want to know what type of provinces to put each building type.
7:20 that's 3 sig figs for most of them. The number before the decimal counts (as long as it isn't zero). What you mean is two decimal places
Any chance you could upload this excel sheet somewhere so I can play around with it? I’m taking a class in big data analysis rn and i think it would be neat to add in data on the the paired dev values and trade goods of all the provinces.
I mean it’s a very small one and nothing too fancy. If you want a proper data analysis one, I made a video ranking everyone province in Eu4 and that came with a 3.7k entry spreadsheet on every province with data like fort level, development trade goods and even things like great projects and estuaries and stuff.
That one I also did ‘paywall’ though since it took like 2 weeks of work
Lithuania comes with 280 manufacturies in 1444 trust trust
Damn, they really got the +4 manu per province secret upgrade
0.08? damn.. i only do down to 0.2 lol
I have a question though -- when factories are unlocked many provinces have 0 slots (sometimes even -2 which... how). My problem is that I never know where I should delete buildings to build them so I end up just... not.
could you share the spreadsheet?
are you going to make it public cause i would find it nice to be able to use this as a tool to try to learn when to build
I am somewhat confused as to how the Manu interacts with the Workshops, do the modifiers stack?
In practice yes. The production efficiency effects the goods produced production income but has no impact on trade.
Did you consider the trade output of produced goods from manufactories? Or just the production income?
yes, in 23rd row lol. sorry.
no worries
What if I reduce the cost of my normal loans to be the same as Burgher Loans?
And if I also reduce the cost of my buildings as well?
You can remake the spreadsheet and run the numbers yourself :)
@@LemonCake101
Too hard, learning excel is like learning black magic.
Imagine accountants coming home to play EU4.
Doing the work we are all too lazy to do. Really out here just running off the old "if its .10+ build it" from however many years ago
What about courthouses and marketplaces?
build courthouses pretty mcuh everywhere, if your blobbing its one of the best buildings so you can half state more
marketplaces are only worth it in trade companied centers of trade, never outside that
Unless you are netherlands/ you have infra ideas, building manu in trade goods that are actually giving bonuses to soldiers households doesnt make sense
There are times in SP where I have had plenty of manpower, and not enough money; and frankly times I had both, so neither was worth building.
Ah yes because the honestly massive amount of time you spend between unlocking farm estates and unlocking soldier's households means that you should just let those provinces do literally nothing, rather than literally something. Not sure why you would be money adverse for literally no reason.
Why is it unlisted
editing moment, fixing a thing
But what about if you expect to dev your land later anyway?
Then just build it
Have I been playing the game wrong for 5k hours? I've always thought workshops (in regions where you control trade) increase trade value generated by the province as well as the production value, which is the number you see in the macro builder. Is that wrong, does a workshop just not affect trade value at all?
Nope workshops and production efficiency as a modifier have no impact on trade value. Goods produced effect trade value though
What about debasing for building?
... please don't do that
Spamming buildings/projects, waiting 5 years, and accepting a strategic bankruptcy is the bulking/cutting bodybuilder cycle of EU4. That's how stuff is ideally actually built, not spreadsheets.
Some consider bankruptcy building an exploit, and if you try that in MP, well please do I would love to be your neighbor ;)
What's not ideally built is bodybuilder's wieners.
wait a minute where is the subway surfers tiktok edits
Just imagine it in your head
I dont understand people who are afraid to take loans, just outscale and grow beyond the debt in the early game because mid-late game money is never an issue anyways if you scaled correctly.
Its mostly a personal choice I find
From what I've learned talking to and listening to people in the internet, some people are taught IRL that any and all debt is ruinous no matter what, that you shouldn't take any loan even if it's to your long term financial benefit (e.g. business loan to start a business or mortgage to get your own house and stop paying rent). And these people apply the same principle to games as well
@@exantiuse497 Literally me! It took me a long way to learn the power of loans...
@@exantiuse497 If only these people knew the power of 4% loans. Like legit an absolutely insane rate.
@@dfg7418 *pulls out Eu4 Credit Card*
Conquer now pay later..
Works everytime
Called me out so hard with the loan averse comment, I'll literally debase my currency 5 times to embrace an institution instead of taking on debt lmao.
Now, when should you pop Golden Age?
It depends :)
Specifically as an Anbennar dwarf at 600 dev 149.9 income
Depends where you play, why not max out buildings if ur rich n have truces
7:15 actually it wasn't. 1,33% is 3 significant figures
I did mean two decimal points
@LemonCake101 yeah i know
Лајк па гледам.
You can throw money at prussia until you win. Have you ever heard of mercenaries?
Do try that in MP
@@LemonCake101 i mean merc ideas are kinda broken tho for inting people, the quality they give with the tier 5 reform is insanely strong
i do think people overrate prussia tho for multiplayer, very strong sure, but qq persia, poland and siam are all stronger than prussia imo
@@RobbiusBossius ^ that's all fair, I just used Prussia as an example, after all these days you flip out of Prussia gov due to the Gov Cap issues.
@@LemonCake101 yea that -50% govcap is so ass to deal with lol (i love how prussia has that as a "nerf" yet qq persia exists with its...... comical dev devcost and cav fire/shock
Nice finally some spreadshits
dark mode excel pls
I like light mode sorry it’s more bright, lively and happy :)
Bongo
bongo
why build manu on grain when they will give cost back when u gonna have manpower manu back there? and u can win wars by throwing money at problem with enough merks u can barrage assault refil before they can catch to you, but it is easier to do with manpower not with gold.
That’s fair, and indeed frequently you don’t need the money. But if you do need the money, the potential is there
Well its not like you can actually build a soldier's household on that province regardless of whether or not its better. Its unlocked so much later, just remove the building if you can't expand infrastructure.
hate to say thats 3 sf not 2
You forgot the editing at the end of the video
yeah, re-recorded the whole end, and goddamn rendered the pre editing bit... so much wasted time
fixing it right now :(
W8. W8.
You can use money for gov cap??? How????
State houses and courthouses decrease the gov cap cost of provinces
@LemonCake101 ohhhh that's what you meant. Thx
You digress a lot
I do
SERBIAAAA SERBIAAAAAAAA
I don't think Serbia is a building sorry
@@LemonCake101 :(
Nice video btw. It won't convince me to take loans to build buildings, even though the numbers definetly were there, but still, nice video
@@panpsalt6757 fair enough, your choice at the end of the day!
I wouldn't rely on tooltips. Some are just straight up broken. And the ones that work might mislead you because of temporary issues like autonomy. I would consider dev, weather or not I will be able to profit from the produced trade value and synergies with other modifiers I am going to pickup. F.ex. churches with "Expand Temple Rights" gov reform is a hole different story than without.
Indeed: I had a video discussing how much the protecting trade one is broken. However, the building gain tooltips outside of the trade income bits are actually solid; they do take into account dev, the extra tax from expand temple rights, etc. Do test it yourself: take expand temple rights, and you will see the tooltip income go up.