As it stands, both the Panama and Suez give little besides prestige and a free territory, since the canals need subsidies to remain functional. Why is there no toll income? Or the ability to close the canal to enemy/belligerent powers?
Posted Jun 1, 2023, 10:10 PM UTC
I really want to see canals developed thoroughly in the game in the future, in a game about trade what could be as vitally important? I want to see buildable canals in Ohio and Ontario, let the Great Lakes connect to the ocean through the saint Lawrence River system. Let Gibraltar, Hormuz and Bosporus block trade routes if their navy can handle it. Straits and canals should be a central feature of the game and it should not be paywalled whatsoever. It's such an obvious feature of the era that's blatantly absent in so many ways.
Heck, with some of those straits, fortification should be enough to deter at least civilian fleets after a certain tech level.
The Better Canals mod allows the canals to produce transportation and be profitable.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2882752079
This is so annoying, I remember beelining for both of them once and then they weren't even able to hire anybody.
Oh yea usually what I end up doing is just going for the whole state. I mean getting the infamy sucks but it’s new Granada and Egypt so like mid to late game that’s no problem
I think they'd be a lot better if fleets were represented on the map in some way.
I like the system for armies in Vic 3 and don't want something exactly like EU4 where stacks meet and battle. Fleets should be able to coexist in the Med without necessarily finding each other and forcing decisive battles, but something like naval range and actual locations on the map would add strategic value to islands, straits, and canals
Naval range is so glaringly absent,
convoy protection is also so throughly useless having easier to protect routes doesn't really matter
When China sends their Man of Wars to raid convoys in the channel in the 1840s.
I have no bloody idea how the trade routes can be protected. I invaded France with a far superior fleet. It decimated the French fleet but once my troops landed I had like -2k shipping and 0 supply for my invasion force while my superior fleet was stuck in a second naval battle in the channel for months.
(The last french ship in the battle held out for several months on its own against my 100 ironclads while single handedly blocking all shipping of my country)
Most powerful english ironclad fans vs weakest French sailing ship enjoyer
It just works
because the game wasn’t ready when it was released
I can’t wait in five years for the expose on the development hell they went through.
Since I started playing Paradox games, I formed two opinions.
It was a better company when they had the programmers get drunk every night and come up with ideas that way.
The problem is that you can't force employees to do that. The owners of the company are no longer the programmers and the current programmers just aren't as good as they were. The culture of the company changed when the dudes that operated in the above paragraph went to management. They just left a huge gap below them that couldn't be easily replaced.
For what we know vic 3 might have been in development before imperator, i can't imagine the amount of iterations they have gone through
They get closed when you're at war, which is arguably funnier because if they used the maximum of their convoys their market crashes from the now lack thereof. But Fleets ignore time and space anyway so who cares, right?
I don’t use a lot of mods because I like to play games unadulterated but I did download a mod that provides just a little bit of income to canals. It feels like they should have that in the base game.
So true and unrealistic, but I hope they are just preparing something juicy related to canals and terraforming in general.
Canals are just so lame even for RP reasons give you only prestige and no trade or other logical related buff. I'm sorry - I'm more interested in trying to get DC district to get this White House buff or New York treaty port to get statue of liberty rather than bothering wasting mani building some prestige building in poor land
On a similar note, why do you only get half of the Suez when you build it? Is there a historical reason? Because it looks horrible imo
First time I tried to build the Suez Canal I thought it was a bug lol
It might be for balance/AI reasons, stop Egypt from being fragmented or make the fronts work better.
I think it's because when you use the decision to buy the area, you get a single province, but the distance from the Med to the Red Sea is 2 provinces.
It's so weird to me that they don't generate a profit from charging transport fees.
What annoys me is that there's no people in the states you get and no one want to work there
Agree you should be able to charge fees and/or block countries from using it if you are in war or embargoing
Disagree, the convoy cost reduction is very important for countries like GB, especially after the 1.3 convoy nerf.
Sure but this cost reduction is for everybody. Hell, you're probably benefitting some other countries more than yourself by building them. It gives a whooping 100 prestige, that's like what, 20 barracks or something?
It would be a mess if it only counts for you, every small country would have to rush it.
It's nice to have, but not over powered or mandatory. Same with most of the monuments.
It would be a mess if it only counts for you, every small country would have to rush it.
It would be fine if there was an optional cost for using it, and it was harder to build
Not saying it should only count for you, but you could have some control over it and/or receive a good chunk of money for its use by other countries. As it is now, I do it mostly to remove that entry from the journal pretty much.
Sailing around Africa and South America is a bastard man!
That’s why I build and own them.
And I’m like 20% sure they do close to your war enemies.
The Suez is Great to have for fighting wars. Blocks the enemies sea routs, increasing their convoy cost, making it easier to reduce their convoy supply
There should be some sort of system where the canal earns money from other nations' buildings transporting their traded goods through it.
I'm almost sure they reshape sea-lanes even at 0 employment. And they are quite good for saving on convoys if you wan to, for example, trade with China as Spain, or with India as Italy. They would be even better, if only NPCs had anything worth trading for.
In theory, the building of the canals should be game changing events though. The opening of the Suez canal caused a financial crash in Britain and France and a depression that lasted several years. The reason for this is that most trade between Europe and Asia went round the coast of Africa and used warehouses and coaling stations in mostly British colonies. Overnight, these facilities became unprofitable which hit the British stock market and trade between east and west became much cheaper for everyone else.
I'm not sure how you would model this in the game as it stands though, especially with there being zero cost of moving goods within a given market. Perhaps a system whereby the maximum throughput of sealanes is governed by ports in nearby states (a bit like infrastructure) which in turn generate revenue from volume of trade.
This would also give colonial powers an incentive to take control of and develop coastal provinces along important sealanes (something they historically did). It would also give them an incentive to try and control or even prevent the construction of canals that will shift the dynamic of global trade (historically Britain did both with Suez).
Maybe increase convoy cost geometrically as you have more and more lanes? The current system seems too lenient. Also, maybe have something linking ports and trade depots so that underutilizing convoys will depress wages at ports. This might cause too much micro though.
Theres no representation of travel really which is a big issue for canals and also a big issue for places that were valuable locations for trade purposes like South Africa.
Do you have more info or reading for the financial crash you talked about? I wanna do some digging cuz it sounds interesting but googling “suez economic crisis” leads to a lot of very recent articles concerning a certain big boat getting stuck sideways
It's called the Panic of 1873. It hit a lot of different countries and had an array of different causes but the Suez opening up was one of the key factors in Britain.
It's worth noting that while the opening of the Suez canal was a contributing factor in that economic crisis, it was not the single one, or even the most important.
It's called The Panic of 1873.
Idk i never notice any benefit to having them. Im never lookin at my convoy count and thinking "wow thank you suez for giving me these extra convoys." The benefits are too invisible imo