Transcription
Hello guys, and welcome to Real Politics. Today, I want to talk to you about the economy. So, the economy in this game is pretty nice for a grand strategy game. It really emphasizes its position in the modern day.
Here to start, let's simply look at the fact that there is a world economy. Now, this game is more arcadey than most relevant, similar, comparable games, and so don't expect too much depth here. But there is a world economy that you could see. There's a little line in the middle of this graph; when it's under the graph, that means the world economy is doing bad; when it's above the line, it means it's doing well. As the world economy goes up, that's just a passive boost into your GDP. As it goes down, it is a negative; it is a debuff into your GDP. And GDP is very important.
Moving on to talk about that real quick: GDP, your gross domestic product, the value of all annually produced goods and services, not only determines your position in the United Nations, as it says right here, it can actually give you voting power and enable you to affect the entire world. But it also determines the costs of research and things that you can do in the game, as well as some popup events that affect you. In addition, it affects, of course, the wealth of your population, and this affects a couple of things. Number one, it affects your economic development level. This is very important because that then affects many other things. It also affects how much you can tax out of your population without then losing GDP, but how much money you can get out of it total as well. Your taxes do have an effect on your GDP; the lower they are, the more your GDP will rise, allowing you to collect more tax income in the future, of course. And more taxes result in unhappiness as well.
And then back to that economic development level, it's not raw just GDP that affects it; it's your GDP per capita. So this scales alongside your population. The higher GDP you have per the population that you have, you can reach an economic development level which can affect your population growth, your GDP growth, and your HDI up here, which then affects your production of army units as well as your implementation of research SL projects. And you have to balance your GDP with your unemployment because there is an unemployment rate. Unemployment causes unhappiness, so in this game, generally, you don't want it. There are factors that affect it that it helpfully lists out for you. For example, your GDP growth; we have pretty high GDP growth at 0.54%. This is relatively—this is monthly—and your GDP growth you need per month to fight off unemployment, to kind of stop it from stagnating or growing, is .27. That's for this country right now, with these circumstances, accounting for the fact that we have some other projects that will increase unemployment and affect it as well.
All of this comes back to your money, your money of which comes in a monthly balance that is affected by debt. You could take out debt to have more money to spend, just like real life. You could pay that debt off whenever you want, but you also need to pay a maintenance on that debt, just like real life. And you could see your entire budget here and what generates it. You see our research costs a certain amount to maintain, as well as events; our military costs a certain amount; our debt is costing 10 times more than that. There is what you're making from your tax income, what you're spending on nukes, and if you have a block that is reflected here as well.
In a way, GDP can also be conquered via war. If you want to potentially try that, go into statistics, go to provinces, and sort by the GDP size of different provinces. There you can look at the amount of GDP in any given location and compare it with the population there, especially if you're going for GDP per capita. You could try to find locations that have a very high GDP size compared to their population, and that could help you if you wish to conquer GDP.
Then there's also the stock market, which you can join one for a benefit, but it's mostly beneficial if you own the stock market, where you can just add other neighboring nations to your stock market, or even non-neighboring; it's just that neighboring does better. You can invest action points, up to three, to make them more competitive. And then the more dominant that your stock market is in terms of GDP, the more you'll benefit from it. And so having a big economy and adding other big, powerful economies to it is the best thing, especially ones that are close by to you and are not across the world from you or in space. If anybody gets specifically trapped to space, which can technically happen, you get score income, and you earn money from it, so it's very, very useful. However, this form of money is especially, especially affected by the world economy situation.
However, if you want, you can minimize the effect of the world economy by going for different research and projects that give you high interventionism. Just note that you will benefit less from a world economy that's doing really well and then have less growth overall, but still more likely to be in the positive, especially if the world economy is getting really bad if you have that high interventionism. Low interventionism would mean you'd get more growth when the economy's doing well, lower growth when it's doing poorly; you're more up to the whims of the market. And again, you can affect this through a number of things, but mostly you go to your projects here, and you go to economy and find the things that affect it here.
While we are here, I do want to take a look at something important. I'll probably go over everything a lot more in a research guide, but I do want to look at—up here is very important to your economy—is your industry profile. The least developed nations will start with an agriculture industry, and this gives you an action point bonus of 10%. Action points are probably the most valuable currency in the game, especially in the long run, as they enable you to do everything. So, not only are these important to your economy, though, but they're important to everything that you do. You have to meet some requirements to proceed onto an industry-based industry; agriculture versus, you know, working in factories, for example. You need to have a maintenance of a certain amount of natural resources, and your HDI needs to be a certain amount. You see why having a high economic development index is important because it affects your HDI. I need 30; you see I get 30 from economic development and 33 more from projects. So, just by having a high GDP per capita, essentially, I can have an industry-based industry profile. And then the final one is services; this is like the end game right here. You go from 10 to 20 to 35% action point bonus; this is huge, huge, and it will cost some more natural resources. You'll have to pay not as many as if you're running industry. By the way, these are only one at a time, unlike many other projects; they are not cumulative. You swap, and you only have one activated at a time, so you'll never get the debuffs of industry needing more natural resources. However, to have a service-based economy, you need 60 HDI. I only have 63. You see how important that is. It's very important to give yourself some breathing room and to hit this because if you don't have enough HDI, you'll have to go back to industry; you'll need more natural resources; you'll lose a 15% of the total of 35%—percent right here—of your bonus action points, which should make you negative for that, which should make you unable to afford more research and projects that you're trying to maintain, which could be importantly affecting the development of your nation. So it's very, very important to build this up.
As a couple of research notes, if you do want to improve or have, you know, a stock market, it's this tree right here to the left, under your industry profile, under economy. You could get more slots, more income from the different members; it's all very, very useful. You can even lower your interventionism because that's kind of a symptom of being like a free economy, benefiting from a financial sector, from a stock market. You won't find the HDI stuff in here. You can find some money, you can find some action points; a lot of these are actually just one-offs. You can find some GDP growth here, especially some pop growth, and you can find a lot of things that affect your interventionism. However, you have to go into internal politics to find your education; that's where you could find some things that end up giving—look—plus 20 human development index; that's your HDI—and plus 10 over here, and then we have plus 10 over here and plus 10 over here. This is where you're going to find most, but not necessarily all, of the HDI that you acquire. So there, even some more down here, just a permanent free plus five at literally like no cost if you go down the internal politics advancement. And then there's another plus 10 under culture programs. With this, does have a pretty heavy action point cost to maintain; it's spread out quite a bit, but most of it can be found under internal politics, so that's where you're going to have to go if you want to support that.
Sort of related to your economics, you can also outsource. If you have good unemployment, then you can outsource; increasing your unemployment is the main thing it does, but it gives you action points. And then if you have a lot of resources or not a lot of resources, you can either import them to get them, and you spend some money, you spend some action points; it's mostly in the first one, the import versus export infrastructures where the cost comes, or you can export it to get some money from your extra natural resources as well. And then, of course, it's worth pointing out that a lot of these benefits can be found under your uniques for research as well. And then if you right-click any location, you could build some relevant things as well. Tourists can give you score, giving you action points to work with. You can have natural resources for mining infrastructure. If you make a next-gen city, you'll actually get GDP from it, which is very nice, and more population to pay taxes if that's what you want, although more population is usually not good in this game. And then more GDP from advanced infrastructure. Together, you can also get population from social housing, but the economic benefit I would personally say is quite minimal.
When it comes to information, if you ever need information, you could hover over money and your GDP growth, especially up here at the top, to get some quick info. Otherwise, a lot of it's going to be under these buttons again; economy-related stuff is kind of spread out; interventionism, and then the economy tab. You can also go to other countries and kind of see everything all in one screen for them as well. You can't see their exact ratio for economic development, but you could see if it's high, medium, or low to get an idea of what you're working with. And again, those statistics in the statistics button down here for GDP size, it can also be applied to entire nations if you want to see just generally how much GDP for how much population. You see I have way more GDP per population than China has, so if I played China, my ability to enact things using action points would be severely limited compared to playing America. And with such a strong economy, if I wanted to, I could easily pay off all this debt, even if I played somebody a little further down the line; the population ratios are just way better than China. So, just despite China having a massive economy, don't assume that they benefit from it because for their population it's actually incredibly low.
That is a brief summary of the economy and how the economy works in this game; some functions of it, some tips. If you guys have any questions, feel free to leave those in the comments below, and I will try to answer them if I can. Hopefully, somebody else can. If you guys want to see any other guides, feel free to leave those suggestions in the comments below as well. I have a playlist in the description where I have more guides just like this one for you to check out, so see if your idea might already be there. For now, though, thank you guys very much for watching, and I'll see you on the next one. [Music]