It’s kind of a given that World War One had a lot of static trench warfare. What is often overlooked is the logistics required to make that happen. How did each nation get enough troops to the front lines to keep the other side from achieving that much sought-after breakout? And how did they keep them fed and supplied, all while keeping the rest of their country running? Money, that’s how. Lots of it. So much money that several of Europe’s most venerable empires suffered economic collapse, while those that didn’t barely managed to stay afloat.
So we’ve made sure that in The Great War, managing your nation’s or your empire’s economy is a crucial component of a successful war effort. As the leader of a modern state about to engage in industrial-scale warfare, you will have to make careful choices about how to mobilize your economy in support of your armies.
Production is key to a strong economic foundation for war. Deciding how and when to expand your economy, securing the supplies your factories need, and balancing the production of peacetime and wartime goods are critical factors for achieving success. Focusing your industrial capacity on autos, machine tools, and textiles will generate wealth for your treasury, but eventually you will have to direct your factories towards military hardware like tanks and artillery. This switch reduces the production of gold-generating items and lowers your income. Without a broad economic base capable of handling the strain of wartime spending and production, your military juggernaut might grind to a standstill for want of food, coal, and fuel.
Devoting the game’s early turns towards research is one way to avoid that ignominious route to defeat. Research is a way to invest long-term in raising income. By completing projects that improve farms, for example, you produce more food using less manpower, which can free up those citizens for other uses, including military service. Such advances in production can also help you build a stockpile of gold and resources with which to weather the leaner years of the coming conflagration.
Building that stockpile may require you to neglect funding your armies, but beware of lowering your military readiness level too much. While it will provide you with an instant increase in national income, a lower readiness level will also increase the time it takes for your armies to be ready for action when war does come. On the flip-side, when you increase your readiness level, other nations will interpret that as mobilization, raising tensions and possibly precipitating war.
Your economic success will also depend on your trade and diplomatic relations with other nations. In this “first age of globalization,” concluding favorable trade agreements in the game’s early years can help you maintain your supplies of critical resources, but beware of how you much of your rail, road, and shipping capacity you devote to global markets. Having a colonial empire is certainly helpful, though taking full advantage of this opportunity for expropriation will also require you to attend to shipbuilding and railway construction. And If you still run into problems with wartime shortages, you can ask allies and friendly neutrals for aid; become too dependent, however, and you might get a rude awakening when your wayward benefactor cancels that key aid agreement.
Raising taxes will of course remain a quick way to fill your country’s coffers, but higher taxes and war weariness in unstable realms may result in serious domestic unrest – a sequence of events all too familiar to the Romanovs.
Finally, military expansion against weaker countries remains the one sure-fire way of getting money and resources. After all, what could go wrong…?
