How come I have no private capital coming in?

[HidekiTojo]

I am playing as S-P and its 1852 early and I have a few tradeposts and missions out there are they eating up my capital? Bc I am not making any even though it says on the B screen it should go up, WTF.

[loki100]

tradeposts cost you to set up but then (on a regular basis) will send goods to your national market, merchants send back PC and if they last long enough, will pay for their creation.

I'd suggest start reviewing your industry and trade. At the start if you need to generate PC for investment you often have to close down agricultural sites as these use PC in their production - think of it as a form of primitive accummulation where you run down agriculture to generate the capital to invest in industry. So if you have any agricultural products with a large stockpile (often fish and grain) run those stockpiles down for a few turns.

[Jim-NC]

The B screen assumes that all of your trade trasactions will occur. You are probably not selling everything you are offering for sale. Look at the F4 screen, it will give you a private capital number for transactions (buying and selling). Compare that to what actually happened (you can see this on the notes at the bottom of the screen, it will say we purchased 100 items at a cost of x, and sold 100 items at a cost of y - the 100 are for illustration purposes only). You will need to manually subtract the actual numbers to get a net number to compare to the F4 number. My guess is that the F4 screen total is much higher than the actual.

To fix this, you need to sell more, or as Loki100 states you will need to shut down industries that have excess stockpiles. You may also need more transport fleets to sell to a wider audience of countries.

Also, on the B screen, you can see how much you are offering, and how much is being sold in your trade area. You are in northern Italy, and if you hover over the grain icon for example, it will say something like 25 offered for sale, 10 requested, 0 our request. This means that someone (most likely you, but it could be Austria or anyone who owns a farm in the region) is offering 25 grains for sale, but only 10 are being purchased by others.

[33rd Fusilier Regt]

When you press F4, make sure you look at your structure expenses. I was very surprised while playing the 1880 campaign as Germany that I was deficit and kept having the business demand private capital +1% inflation and +xxxx private capital, just about ruined my economy. It took me a while to figure out that my expenses were greater than the revenue being generated on the market. The real puzzling aspect was that the majority of factories on the F11 screen were positive private capital. Another thing to consider is lowering your corporate tax. You'll end up with more private capital, will reduce unrest, high contentment more than pays for itself when you start getting the production bonuses for high contentment of your population.

[33rd Fusilier Regt]

Forgot to mention, the 'B' screen will show estimated sales that may or may not come to fruition.

[HidekiTojo]

ok thats a really big help. I also had one more question, I read I believe in the strategy guide about using the f4 to "limit the amount of mfg. available to the internal market" Idk if maybe this is is obsolete. But do you know what that means?

[loki100]

ok thats a really big help. I also had one more question, I read I believe in the strategy guide about using the f4 to "limit the amount of mfg. available to the internal market" Idk if maybe this is is obsolete. But do you know what that means?

if you work down the columns in the F4 screen then the 4th row for each good is the sales to domestic market. You can adjust this to between 40-80% (not quite sure but its in that range), so in effect that states the % of production and imports that will be sold to your populace.

As with everything on the F4 screen it doesn't actually mean they will buy it (in the three categories they may not want all of a particular good you have) but it is one way to ensure that a particularly valuable trade good is available for export (& thus in turn yields Private Capital). However, since domestic sales are another regular source of PC its a case of balancing needs and opportunities. I tend to keep domestic demand for hard to source goods like Mfg Goods as low as possible but the rest I set relatively high (happy people with their needs all met being an important part of building up your state).

[HidekiTojo]

Ok sorry for the stupid questions, ive another one. Im playing as SP and I've constructed some extra agricultural structures, some of them keep turning off during the end turn even though they are listed as profitable!

Doesn't make any sense why a profitable building would just close down

[Jim-NC]

While structures are being built, they can not be opened, and will shut down automatically. After you ask for the new farm, it takes a few months to start production (you can manually start it, but it shuts down immediately as it's not ready to produce), for factories, it can take years for some (I have seen some factories take 2 years to start production).

FYI - it's the amount of your stockpile you try to sell to your populace, and it can be as low as 5%. So if you 100 units in your stockpile (top line), and 30% chosen, your businessmen will try to sell 30 units to the population. They may or may not buy that much. The good news is that the computer screen will let you know how much they will buy immediately and correctly (unlike selling to foreign markets).