Stagnant Ecomomy

[CarnageINC]

I think I screwed my economy up. It Jan 1854 as the Prussians. My private capital is stuck creeping up at roughly $10 per turn up now to 917. I was headed down the road of autarky but have changed my trading practices. Both my bought and sold merchandise have plummeted and my national markets are down too. I've messed with taxes and my trade but I can't seem to generate PC anymore and I'm at a loss of what to try to get my economy going again.

One thing that I haven't tried is shutting down factories, I do have large surpluses I'm trying to get rid of. I don't know when is a good time to shut factories down, any tips on this would be helpful too.

Should I post my turn or a picture of something so someone can help me out?

[loki100]

accumulating PC early game is a struggle.

so yes, shut down anything you don't need (esp agriculture) even for 3-4 turns can make a difference. Buy in, rather than produce stuff, on balance this will leave you more PC than maybe immediately obvious.

also don't overexpand early, things like Mfg Goods will be major bottlenecks in a few years. Key is a slow well focussed early expansion - luxuries (to sell), manufactures (as a basis for your own economy) is the way to go.

its the standard advice in this game - its a marathon not a sprint.

also pretty soon a load of techs will fire that will start to increase domestic demand, that in turn will perk up your (and everyome elses) economy

[Jim-NC]

As to a tip on when to shut down a factory:

Watch your selling patterns. Just because you offer 100 cattle for sale, doesn't mean anyone is buying. On the F4 screen you can tell your sales/purchases for the last 10 turns, and can see how much you need for internal sales. Any production over that needs to be shut down. So for example, if you are selling 3 cattle, and internal sales of 3 cattle, then you only need to produce 6 cattle per turn. Anything more than that, and you are just building inventory, which is consuming current PC. Shut down any extra cattle production (in this example). Also, check your stocks, if you have more than say 60 cattle (10 turns worth), you might want to shut down enough production to produce less than your need so you can save some money. You can always re-open the production when you get to 5 turns worth of supply (30 in this example). That would save you 5 turns of production costs.

[CarnageINC]

Ahh...I'm beginning to see (said the blind man) Thank you both very much for enlightening me.

[loki100]

you might find this discussion on how to use the F4 screen for decisions about whether to buy internationally, produce domestically, or shut stuff down of some use.

Equally this post from an AAR on the Paradox forum (that unfortunately died soon after it started) is as good an explanation to sorting out the economy in the early game as exists.