Getting started as Japan (reposted from Paradox forums)
Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2011 6:27 pm
Since a lot of forumites seem to be here but not there, I'm reposting this guide/log of my first few years as Japan that I originally put up on the Paradox forum. It also serves as a basic economic primer:
Your first task is to get your consumption of industrial materials stabilized so your factories won't shut down. This is quite urgent, since Japan has heavy deficits in coal in particular and, to a lesser extent, minerals and wood.
Simply put, one strategy is to save capital up to buy a merchant fleet and sail it to Europe so you can buy the stuff you need; the other strategy is to build coal mines of your own. In time, you'll have to do both, but pick one or the other for starters.
To tide you over, and to get the materials you need to jump-start your industry, you can use the economic decisions to subsidize your imports of steel, coal and manufactured goods. (The decision to import goods is mislabeled "ban imports" in 1.01, so look at the icon and not the text.) The other economic decisions like building roads and augmenting telecommunications are not very useful to you; Japan is already quite well-developed for a preindustrial nation.
You can augment private capital by selling your surplus goods, to the extent that you have any; switch into economic mode and double-click on any of the resource icons on your territory to open the trade menu and do this. Once you have a merchant ship and it's in the location you desire, do the same to resources on foreign soil adjacent to the shipping location the ship is in, and you can buy goods. Remember that these buy and sell orders repeat every turn until canceled, so don't overdo it.
You can also buy goods by pressing "b" and clicking on the icons there, but that is an interface nightmare -- you can only get them in chunks of ten, it's not clear which goods are available in the regions you've chosen and which aren't, and you can't cancel the buy order or reduce it using that screen at all. In practice, all it does is increment the counters on the trade screen that you get by double-clicking on resource icons, so do that yourself, and don't use the "b" screen for anything but information.
To conserve vital goods, you can and should reduce the percentage of your stockpile you make available to the national market. Reduce the amount of coal and manufactured goods to 10% (I don't think you can't lower it any further than that) by control-clicking on the appropriate icons in the F4 economics screen. You might want to do this for wood, too. Don't bother conserving purely consumer goods like coffee - they only exist to be consumed.
Once you have a stable income of coal and other essential materials, your next goal is to 1) increase your income of capital and 2) increase your income of critical manufactured goods.
Increase your income of capital by satisfying your national market to the degree possible, and then after that, by producing goods like silk for export.
Manufactured goods are highly in demand in the early game, so no one will sell them to you -- you need to produce 100% of what you want to consume. Since you are pre-industrial, you can't make any new factories, but thankfully you have a few pre-industrial workshops already constructed. You'll eventually get the technology for railroads (it didn't take too long for me) and at that point you should build a railroad in Osaka as soon as possible. Railroads will double the production capacity of your industries, so a single railroad in Osaka will increase your manufactured goods capacity significantly. After that, save up for railroads in Nagano and Edo, and then some other productive provinces. Keep in mind that Nagano is a mountainous province and railroads (and all other structures) will be extra-expensive there.
There is not much you can do militarily as Japan at this point, but the economic juggling and learning the ropes will hopefully keep you busy until Perry comes (or "is supposed to come") at the end of 1853.
Your first task is to get your consumption of industrial materials stabilized so your factories won't shut down. This is quite urgent, since Japan has heavy deficits in coal in particular and, to a lesser extent, minerals and wood.
Simply put, one strategy is to save capital up to buy a merchant fleet and sail it to Europe so you can buy the stuff you need; the other strategy is to build coal mines of your own. In time, you'll have to do both, but pick one or the other for starters.
To tide you over, and to get the materials you need to jump-start your industry, you can use the economic decisions to subsidize your imports of steel, coal and manufactured goods. (The decision to import goods is mislabeled "ban imports" in 1.01, so look at the icon and not the text.) The other economic decisions like building roads and augmenting telecommunications are not very useful to you; Japan is already quite well-developed for a preindustrial nation.
You can augment private capital by selling your surplus goods, to the extent that you have any; switch into economic mode and double-click on any of the resource icons on your territory to open the trade menu and do this. Once you have a merchant ship and it's in the location you desire, do the same to resources on foreign soil adjacent to the shipping location the ship is in, and you can buy goods. Remember that these buy and sell orders repeat every turn until canceled, so don't overdo it.
You can also buy goods by pressing "b" and clicking on the icons there, but that is an interface nightmare -- you can only get them in chunks of ten, it's not clear which goods are available in the regions you've chosen and which aren't, and you can't cancel the buy order or reduce it using that screen at all. In practice, all it does is increment the counters on the trade screen that you get by double-clicking on resource icons, so do that yourself, and don't use the "b" screen for anything but information.
To conserve vital goods, you can and should reduce the percentage of your stockpile you make available to the national market. Reduce the amount of coal and manufactured goods to 10% (I don't think you can't lower it any further than that) by control-clicking on the appropriate icons in the F4 economics screen. You might want to do this for wood, too. Don't bother conserving purely consumer goods like coffee - they only exist to be consumed.
Once you have a stable income of coal and other essential materials, your next goal is to 1) increase your income of capital and 2) increase your income of critical manufactured goods.
Increase your income of capital by satisfying your national market to the degree possible, and then after that, by producing goods like silk for export.
Manufactured goods are highly in demand in the early game, so no one will sell them to you -- you need to produce 100% of what you want to consume. Since you are pre-industrial, you can't make any new factories, but thankfully you have a few pre-industrial workshops already constructed. You'll eventually get the technology for railroads (it didn't take too long for me) and at that point you should build a railroad in Osaka as soon as possible. Railroads will double the production capacity of your industries, so a single railroad in Osaka will increase your manufactured goods capacity significantly. After that, save up for railroads in Nagano and Edo, and then some other productive provinces. Keep in mind that Nagano is a mountainous province and railroads (and all other structures) will be extra-expensive there.
There is not much you can do militarily as Japan at this point, but the economic juggling and learning the ropes will hopefully keep you busy until Perry comes (or "is supposed to come") at the end of 1853.
.
I could have forgotten something.
