AGEOD Forums

It's August 1888, I'm playing the US, and I left England behind about three years ago.

The last time there was an inflationary panic I was able to quash the rate from 5 to 0 in one turn by flooding the international market with coal, steel, chemicals, and manufactured goods -- among other items. My people thought this was a whole lot better than taxing them up the wazoo.

I've got so much money I don't know what to do with it. But since no one is producing things like coffee, sugar, or silk, I am just parachuting money and material into the local economies with little concern whether they nationalize me or not. Heaven only know what they do with the money I send them for machine parts, light bulbs, and minerals.

Oh sure. I've made some mistakes. I'll never modernize agriculture again. Most of the South, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York are in constant turmoil.

On the other hand . . .

Tonkin, Annam, and Laos have all turned into positive colonies for me. I've spiked the French in Cambodia and the Brits in Annam, and crushed the French in a short conflict they provoked. I'm at -7 for Burma, but I hope I can turn that around before 1920. Since I own the Solomons I'm messing about in New Guinea and Rabaul to irritate the Prussians. And I flatter the Cuban government in exile while bombarding the Spanish with requests for free passage. THis is beginning to sound like a Marx Brothers movie.

So . . .

Can I search for a cure for cancer?

Start the Mercury program?

Provoke the Spanish-American War a little sooner?

Find a way to pacify the plundering rioters?

Prevent WWI?

Keep making money?

You could provoke the Spanish-American war (just declare war on them!), or by modifying the scripts that the game already has (move the start date of the war up 10 years or so). If you choose to move the dates up, beware other historical events (like a worsening of relations in preparation for the war) which have to move, or will fire at the right time for the wrong reason, or won't fire at all.

Is there some sort of central reference or wiki about modifying scripts?

I may just declare war, but I am waiting for my accelerated armored cruiser research program to kick in. I would rather provoke them into declaring war on me, but there is always the forged casus-belli.

I do have to be mindful of my SE Asian colonies. England has an outstanding casus-belli against me over my toe-hold in Assam. I don't seem to get a C-B over their toe-hold in Burma. The French seem to have given up for now. They have a protectorate over Cambodia, even though I control the capital and the consulate. That seems to be what is preventing them from moving on to colony status. It's odd to me how all of these out-liers develope, or I should say that I don't know how to cause or exploit this process in order to cause out-liers for myself or dislodge theirs. I suspect that I am at a dis-advantage due to the original SOI score in the region.

When I'm not donating silk plantations to the Chinese or pot stills to my southern neighbors, I am building up Burma and redistributing my native troops and American brigades to make it a tougher nut. My people would miss the gems and opium, but I have read that there will be little use for the rubber plantations I built there. If I can turn it into a positive SOI I could pick up a lot of points. It's not clear to me if there is anything I can do to speed up the change-over to positive besides hanging on tight.

I tried taking over customs and the railroads in Siam. That seemed to have had a negative effect on national morale, so I dropped that. I suppose I should give Haiti and the Dominican a whirl and see what happens -- but I rather suspect it will lead to sending in the Marines on a regular basis. I already have plenty of plundering rioters on view on national soil.

And about those rioters - - - at this point I am about ready to level Atlanta, Richmond, New Orleans, Charleston, Manhattan, and Philadelphia to see how they like them apples.

Sell them a large smattering of goods, especially luxuries, lower your taxes (if you can), offer national reforms and send in MP units. It will take time to correct (be prepared for around 10-15% improvement in a year per region, assuming nothing bad* happens).
There is a WIKI, but it is sometimes tough to determine what you are trying to do. If you search the forums, there are quite a few scripts written, you could always ask with a specific question (Kensai is a great resource for scripting of PON).

*-by bad I mean a strike, demonstrations, as both of those appear to lower contentment in the region, undoing all that wonderful work you just did.

Been there done that. I've had MP's in Manhattan and Philly since before the endof the Civil War. I play the social cards as they turn up. Corporate and excise taxes have been at 2 and 3 since Hayes. The tariff is at 3. I don't even charge census or maritime because I have little enough use for the money as it is, though I can fund three or four research projects if something interests me. Currently I am only doing armored cruisers.

There seems to be a tipping point beyond which they are not recoverable. And sometimes I wonder if there isn't some sort of averaging mechanism in the back-ground keeping a brake on the US to keep it from getting out of hand. I'll say one thing, the rest of the country ranges from hyper-Babbit smugness and complacency to delirious exceptionalism. I doubt they would notice or care if I demolished every structure in the sore spots.

I am sure they would notice and care eventually.

They wouldn't notice a drop in production that's for sure. But I can imagine them reading their newspapers and thinking it was a bit drastic to blow up all of the structures in the problem zones.

Just last year I was rocking along at 18% discontent and 75% contentment while generating between .66 and .71 due to the wealth effect. November rolled around and all of sudden discontent jumped to 21% and contentment to 73% with no noticeable change in wealth generation that turn. Maybe they were bummed out by all of the states created that year and the loss of the colonial structures. It's always something around that type of year. I've been stuck at 21 since the end of the Civil War.

I'm building my armored cruisers and about to take out Spain. I was disappointed to find out that destroyers disappear when the armored cruisers come in.

I am really regretting that I ever upgraded any of my farms, but maybe that will change when I get ammonia fertilizer.

The French have declared war on me a second time.

This time we mobilize.

There is a chance. per turn, that the world will have a recession if capital is higher than 2,000 over an average of the nations. As you only need to build a few repetitive structures the cost of building will soon go above this level. (10,000 for coal mines in Russia for instance. Feel okay about storing capital as the game is unbalanced in this aspect: You must break this 2.000 limit within about 20 years simply to expand.

Moriety wrote:There is a chance. per turn, that the world will have a recession if capital is higher than 2,000 over an average of the nations. As you only need to build a few repetitive structures the cost of building will soon go above this level. (10,000 for coal mines in Russia for instance. Feel okay about storing capital as the game is unbalanced in this aspect: You must break this 2.000 limit within about 20 years simply to expand.

I don't understand your comments.

I passed 2k back in the 50's and I am currently sitting on 113K pounds of capital and the country is humming along regardless of the rioters.

BTW, I have never experienced an actual recession in this game. There have been periods of inflation.

Sherman wrote:I don't understand your comments.

I passed 2k back in the 50's and I am currently sitting on 113K pounds of capital and the country is humming along regardless of the rioters.

BTW, I have never experienced an actual recession in this game. There have been periods of inflation.

It is a random chance each turn if the condition is met. You have been lucky!

Insanely lucky. Which is a good thing, because I wouldn't know how to play the game not to make money.

And I now own beach front property and a nuclear test range in the Society Islands courtesy of the bellicose French. If they come back a third time, it will cost them their possessions in the Western Hemisphere.

The Panic of 1993 has set in. And as this game works, it's an inflationary event and the price of grains has actually gone up. I hdn't had an inflationary event for quite a few turns.

Not a big deal really. The overall picture is that the US in the second half of the 1800's wasn't all cowboys and indians or beer and skittles either. Some historians count this event as part of the Long Depression. So once I get through this . . .

Lucky for me that I had already redeployed the military police to my major industrial centers before they turn bad. Let's see if they can earn their pay.

Turns out I had been ignoring the west, which became apparent after all of the square territories in the middle became square states. I was very sorry to lose Frisco and Sacto to the forces of anarchism, socialism, nihilism, and chaos. On the other hand, Chicago seems to have reentered the fold of productive areas. I'm not sure why. I had removed their MP in a futile attempt to save the gold fields.

I am now building out the other gold fields just in case. I stopped monetizing gold after the Civil War, and I never sell much -- either activity seems to lead to inflation.

In other news, The Solomons are now part of my national territory. The Brits are whingeing about my military reforms even though their military strength is twice mine. I sit in sixth place at least, with a military establishment that would be gargantuan by 19th Century US standards.