Managing Population (satisfaction) - very little you can do???

[Doctoxic]

Ther about 3 full pages in the manual about managing your population but this pretty much all seems to be about how things work behind the scenes and very little on what you can do to influence things.

At present in my USA game my National Satisfaction is hovering just below 50% and often seems to change by a % or so every turn (up and down) - any chance of a tool tip on the displayed Satisfaction % to give more info in whats affecting it?

Anyway, back to the 'managing' bit. The bits i have found that i can do to improve satisfaction:
1) pass all the laws / social decrees etc
2) make sure you have enough of the 3 goods type on sale to your population

Does the fact that i have decalred war against the Dakota and Apache have a negative effect?

I have done all this but still can't satisfaction to get above 50%. So i expect there are things i have missed that i should be doing.

What else can/should i be doing to increase my national satisfaction?

many thanks

[Pocus]

There are two components to understand, they work together (or antagonistically ...). Satisfaction and militancy. if you have Militancy, then each turn you can lose some satisfaction.

Plus, satisfaction will be lost because you tax people. Only if you were not taxing at all people would you keep the same satisfaction.

So how you do you up satisfaction and lower militancy?

You up satisfaction by providing people with food and goods. Here, you need to have a very diverse panel of products for maximum effect. i.e if you provide them with tons of wheat and some fish, this is not enough, because even if you manage to cover all their need in food, you are not diverse enough to please them.

Satisfaction can also be lowered by war, but only if national morale is low, i.e if you are at 80+, you should not have this debilitating effect.

About Militancy, reforms yes... Some up satisfaction (short term reform...) some have a more lasting, profound effect (remove militancy). Some are even a bit weird because they will lower satisfaction but also lower militancy... i.e people are not happy by what you do, but the greater good is well served and in the end, this lower militancy.

In latest patch, if you have combat units in regions with very high militancy, there will be also an automatic martial law effect that will lower it, but at the cost of satisfaction points. If you are an autocracy, the process will be much more efficient.

[yellow ribbon]

ah, he wrote he uses patch "i" in an US GC... i had Militancy of over 25% in three years...


aside of Pocus explanations, please add patch "L" or will always struggle with decreased happiness and loyalty, especially after the ACW.

nay Pocus, once Generalissimo explained us, that even with no taxes and demand totally covered there is a compound effect preventing 100% happiness in the whole country. it goes 100 to 99 and increases in the same turn again by covered demand and so on...


if it is true, it would be logic, just google "keeping up to the joneses)

[dafredette]

Is there an ideal national market size?

I ask because I have played a few turns with Austria, and the satisfaction thing really prevents me from enjoying the game.

I have increased national market percentage to 60% on all goods except Manufacturing Goods (which almost no one sells & you need for everything) and Wood (which I cannot seem to buy enough of). Should national market be 70%, 80%, what is the right number? Also, if it needs to be in the 60%-80% why is the default 40%?

Also the tax rate. When I look it the manual it goes into this long discussion of 1/3s. Is the ideal rate 1/3 of the max causes the least damage to ones satisfaction? Just as in the market size above, why does it appear the default settings are to high in regards to developing negative satisfaction?

Any insight would be most appreciated.

[yellow ribbon]

hum? i fear you are mistaken:

what you changed is the percentage of goods from the stock that should be traded to your people instead of used for stockpile reserves.

i play normally the GC with US and set everything to 80%.

if you have NO goods in stock, like MFGs, they will not be sold. to lower MFGs percentage makes only sense whenever you have few and want to gather them for any building activity.
same is true for coal!

IMPORTANT is how many goods you truly have.

the goods are parted into groups and can substitute each other in this groups.

if i satisfy all needs with the US and set tariff to upper limit (to sell more own goods instead of foreign ones, so decreasing foreign market penetration), i do gain an average of 0,56% happiness each turn.

in end 1850s i have a that stable economy that i do not need taxes. only 15% tariffs.
then i get an increase of 1% average national happiness each 4-5 turns.

be aware, you can sell as much as you want, if MILITANTISM is higher than about 5% you will get very angry people.
the total impact depends then from your political situation in F1-ledger. barely predictable.

if i fulfill all need during the 1850s and set excise tax, corporate tax and tariff to the upper maximum, i can hold a steady state while the gain from sold goods covers the losses from taxes.
but then i can get only increases from reforms and they must outweigh losses from economic crisis events and other events.

taxes and tariffs have different impact on different groups of population

see:

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?561492-How-Taxation-works-in-PON&

but please, just take it as a examle of the impact. his file shows the right effects, but the calculations he did are highly misleading and even wrong, for he assumes that taxes hit all provinces with every degree for the population classes at the same time.
however, they hit only the population IN a province, thus provinces and areas are effected in different ways, depending what social classes are given. thats why you get the GENERIC messages showing that some areas are unhappy, while others are not experiencing major unhappiness...

[dafredette]

Yellow-ribbon thanks for the reply.

I probably used the wrong term, but what you are saying is what I meant. I upped the percentage of good that my people buy, hoping that would make them happy. Generally, I get between .20% to .27% satisfaction raise a turn. However, I get killed every time the tax hits come around in a dozen or so provinces. What sort of Tariff percentage is considered high? I believe Austria starts off in the 30s with a max. of 80% or 100% (I forget right now, I know Excise and Tariff are 80 and 100 I just forget which is which). I usually keep the Tariff in the 15% to 20% range.

I wish I could do 80%, but as Austria my internal production base is not diverse enough to support that (60% is about all I can manage). I rely on the market to make up the difference and get 1-2 extra a turn for all the goods I can, and since I do not always get my purchases my stockpiles usually stagnate or go up slowly. Getting Manufacturing Goods purchase is like a minor miracle, and two of these minor miracles is when I have enough cushion to actually build something. I try to make sure I can keep all my factories up even if I build something. I think I am only positive in internal production in steel and Iron, so they are the only things I usually sell.

Another issue, which might be throwing me off is Austria has a bunch of different internal ethnics groups, so I might be mistaking their natural unhappiness of being ruled by Habsurgs with Tax unhappiness.

Again thanks for your help.