Victoria 3 focuses on the economy of your nation on top of its society management-heavy approach to grand strategy. Making the most out of your goods and ensuring that your national markets run as smoothly as possible are key aspects of the more open economic model it proposes and which Paradox delved into in today’s developer diary 9.
National Markets counted as one of the first features addressed when Victoria 3 was revealed and, as you probably expect, they “are what drives the game’s dynamic economy by determining a rational price based on supply and demand for all trade goods in every state throughout the world. “
The more territory your National Markets stretch across, the more raw resources and customers you can access. Each country controls its own market, which usually revolves around its capital state. Other states connected to the market capital, whether via land or sea, are part of the Market, however, their level of access is based on their infrastructure.
“All local consumption and production in states contribute to the market’s Buy Orders and Sell Orders. Think of these as orders on a commodity market: higher consumption of Grain will cause traders to submit more Grain Buy Orders while higher production of Silk will result in more Sell Orders for Silk,” the developer explains.
All goods in Victoria 3 have a base price, representing their value under ideal market conditions. Produce a higher quantity in your buildings than demanded and it will sell for less. Should demand prove higher than supply, “the economy of buildings producing those goods will be booming” at the cost of Pops and other buildings that need those goods to operate will end up paying more.</b>
“When determining prices for goods across a market’s many states we start by determining a market price. This is based on the balance between a market’s Buy and Sell Orders, with the base price as a baseline. The more Buy Orders than Sell Orders the higher the price will be and vice versa,” reads developer diary 9.
“Buy and Sell Orders submitted to the market are scaled by the amount of Market Access the state has. This means a state with underdeveloped infrastructure will trade less with the market and rely more on locally available goods.” Essentially, a state with full Market Access can apply the market price for all its goods, while those with a lower amount of Access will only use part of the market price.
As opposed to its predecessors, “in Victoria 3 a single unit of goods is produced and immediately sold at a price determined by how many consumers are willing to buy it at the moment of production.”
This causes prices to shift as supply and demand do, making for a more open economic model that “is both more responsive to sudden economic shifts and less prone to mysterious systemic failures where all the world’s cement might end up locked inside a warehouse in Missouri.”
You can read more about the intricacies of Victoria’s 3 National Markets in the full developer diary linked above. There’s no word on when the game might launch but, with Paradox returning from its summer break, we can at least expect weekly developer diaries to give us more details on how it systems work.
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