Transcription
Hello guys, welcome to Real Politics. Today, I want to talk to you about research. So, research in this game is known as projects. You can get to it from over here if you have empty project slots, or down at the bottom, there's a projects button.
There are multiple categories: ad hoc, Unique, International, economy, internal politics, military, and trade. You're going to need to dabble in every single one of these at least a little bit if you want to play as effectively as possible and develop your nation to be as good as possible.
Now, ad hoc actions—these research projects—these are pretty much all temporary. You don't want to activate them permanently, even if you can, because they have some side effects. For example, full-scale immigration—very useful if you want to get population growth—however, it makes everybody very unhappy. There's the great offensive for war, which gives you an attack modifier, but it does have a cost; it comes at a price, just like no step back and kamikaze. I'm sure that you can guess there is a post-war rebuild to lower war losses you have incurred during war, with a massive cost attached. So you see, these are very temporary things. If you ever do activate it, only use it for the period of time that you want it and then get rid of it.
There are permanent ones as well. For example, most things under uniques are actually permanent, and you wouldn't want to deactivate them even if you could. There are some that you can't deactivate that are kind of permanent, but this one kind of goes in there as well. The reason you can deactivate these is because they have costs associated with them. Anything with a maintenance cost can be basically stopped whenever. If I go to economy, though—no, let's go to internal politics—see, down here there's internal politics advancements. These are permanent, and once you have them, you can't really even turn them off; there's no option for it because there's no maintenance cost. Anyway, so some of these are completely permanent, some of these are beneficial to turn on at times and maybe you want to keep them on, but they can still be turned off because they have costs associated with them, and then some of them are just completely temporary. Ad hoc is where everything's completely temporary. Uniques are usually very, very good; you just have to go out of your way to get some requirements in order to get them. They give a variety of bonuses. In uniques, again, yeah, you'll find a variety.
In International, you'll find things more related to international interaction. So you'll find stuff that has to do with the stock exchange, with diplomatic relations; you'll find things that have to do with warmongering, action points, your score. In economy, most of what you'll find is GDP related, or things that control your interventionism, which I've talked about in other guides, as well as things that control your taxes. There's some action points trickled in here and there and some population growth, but for the most part, it's focused on the GDP, money, Stock Exchange. The economy, especially at the top here, the industry profile being one of the most important parts of the economy research, where you have an agricultural society, an industrial society, and a service-based economy as well. Agricultural is the default; gives you a 10% bonus. Action points income, by the way, so that's a good thing. You could double that to 20% if you have a lot of natural resources, a decent amount of HDI, which is a measurement of your economic development, and other projects that you've enabled, other research that you've done. I talked about that more in other guides as well, but industry is more natural resource heavy than it is HDI heavy, and there are some costs for changing as well. You could then increase it by another 15%, so not quite another doubling, but still bigger than the difference from agriculture to industrial, where you lower the amount of natural resources needed but increase the amount of HDI needed. So you need a very high GDP per capita; you need to activate some researches that give you more HDI. A lot of those can be found in internal politics, so especially, for example, under schooling, there's some right here; there's more under culture programs. It's spread out, but this is one of the main places that you'll find it, is especially in internal politics.
Other than that, internal politics affect stuff that affects mostly your policies. So, for example, your personal control target, which determines how much of like a police state you are; there's things to affect happiness and unhappiness, your interventionism, which can affect how your economy works. It'll grow better if you're less interventionist; it will flop less badly if you're more interventionist. You know, when the entire world economy goes down, you could just completely turn your nation into some kind of religious hell hole where the religion controls everything, and that's mostly just flavor, but it does affect your policies quite a bit, as we could see. Talking about those things that I just explained—social policies like Social Security and it going all the way to socialist heaven can be found here, making your population happy, increasing the growth, but also increasing things like interventionism. If you want a free market, you don't want to be going down the socialism path. Not every research is good to do; you don't always want all of them. They may not work with your play style; they may not work with your country; you may not be able to afford the maintenance cost of money and maintenance that scales with your population, your amount of provinces, and your GDP. Usually, your biggest limiter in the game is going to be your action points. The main way you get these is by having provinces that we could see in the statistics that have high score and low population, because since it scales with population, that's bad; you don't want that. It scales with population way more than it scales with GDP, because as you can see, the population numbers go way higher than the GDP numbers. And so, big score and as little population is good. You do want a lot of GDP per your population as well, so even though things scale with GDP, more GDP is usually always a good thing. This can be somewhat controlled by right-clicking and building certain things, like the next-gen city can add GDP and score, also some population. Social housing adds population; you basically almost never want that. Advanced industries adds GDP; that is pretty good. Tourist infrastructure adds score—very, very, very, very important for action point generation and for your research, so I would definitely, definitely recommend doing that. But you always want to make sure you're not extending too much. Don't upgrade your military units too much, or you might not have the money or action points to sustain them. Thankfully, you could always cancel some of these projects if you need to. No point investing into upgrading your naval units if you don't use naval units.
There is a cost associated with implementing any new project. The amount of time is in days. The main campaign does take place over an 80-year time period, period. So a year and a half passing or so is actually really not that big of a deal for activating a project, especially if you know you're going to keep it. The temporary ones, meanwhile, tend to be very fast to activate: 29 days, 43, 57. And this amount of time also scales with your AGDI, so the smarter your population is from your economic development and your other projects, the faster they will implement any new project, pretty much.
Now, moving on to military, as I said, there's a lot of different things here. You have mainly your stats in this box right here; there are others elsewhere, but you got tank upgrades up top, air upgrades below that. You have some things that influence infantry kind of sprinkled in between; there's naval. You can even put an arms production economy, which gives you more GDP, but it gives you interventionism and personal control target, because the idea is that state manufacturing is hiring jobs out, competing the private industry, but still growing the economy in order to produce arms. Production arms, basically. This costs—it costs you money, but it's good to generate economic growth. GDP growth is very important. I talk about that in my economics guide in the playlist below if you want to see it. Then there's other things that are more flavorful here, like you could go kind of an army state idea: more conscripts means bigger army, but maybe weaker units, but maybe you could make up for that a little bit by going all the way to the end and spending even more money and action points that you might not have. There's nukes at the bottom, tons of infantry buffs over on the right side here. There's a variety of buffs and prerequisites. A lot of these right here are prerequisites to other techs you can get. For example, nanotechnology is a prerequisite to infantry support tactics, as are lasers; gives a bonus to the attack of your infantry. If something is a requirement, then you can click on, for example, infantry support tactics, see the requirements, and oh, it's actually super material, sorry, not nanotechnology. See, that's why that's useful—click on it and then you see where it's going. These are just very similar images; good thing to click on that or hover over to see the specific thing. Then, huh, I was going to say it is kind of weird nanotechnology would be needed for that, but okay.
Trading is another one of these temporary things, but it could be permanent depending on the state of your nation. If you have a lot of economic growth, then you can actually outsource some jobs to get more action points, which is very important to have. It would make the rest of the world like you as well, but it would grow your unemployment, so make sure you have enough GDP growth and other policies in your economy tab to fight that off. If you have a lot of resources, you could actually go set up some export infrastructure; cost you a little bit of action points, and then you can export that for a bit of money, which is nice. Simultaneously, you could also have an import infrastructure that also cost money and action points—more of this, by the way—to import resources if you lack it. It's way more expensive to import than it is beneficial to export, so the less you need to rely on this, the better.
Since every nation's play style and your player's play style can be so diverse, and all the relevant techs go between the different tech trees quite a lot, there's not a lot that I can specifically recommend going for over other things. Obviously, things like this internal politics advancement are pretty easy to go for because they're one-offs; they take a long time to get. You do have two slots, for example, here; their bonuses are minimal, but they don't have a cost afterward, so that's definitely useful. Just be careful going for things that do have associated costs, and be careful about doing things that change the status of your nation, because before you know it, you might go from being a free market where everyone has like basically no control enforced upon them with minimal militarism and your a democracy, to you enabled a lot of things, look good, and now you're a totalitarian state that everybody hates; you're super interventionist during a period of time where the World Market is doing amazing, and thus you simply cannot grow your economy up to snuff. Your personal control is so high that everybody's getting super unhappy, and your militarism is through the roof, so all the other nations hate you. Now, anyway, you got to be very careful because these policies—these projects—are how you craft your nation to be unique. Otherwise, if everybody had the same projects, they would all feel exactly the same, one-to-one, with no variance whatsoever. So you got to be very careful with this and find out what you want.
For sure, I guess there's some bare minimum tips: look at military if you want to be militaristic; look at economy if you're looking to bolster that finance and GDP growth; internal politics is good for trying to figure out what your nation is supposed to be and advancing it in the HDI levels; International if you're wanting to get a hand with befriending others and not helping them; uniques is always important to go for—everything here is basically worth getting, and if you can get it, then I think you probably should. Trade is usually temporary, but if you're doing really well in economy, then outsourcing can actually be really useful as a permanent policy in exchange for some money, getting action points, 'cause again, action points will be the thing you struggle with the most for the entire game, guaranteed. And then ad hoc, you should only ever even look here if you desperately need something and you're okay with whatever cost is going to be put upon you for whatever benefits can possibly come from any of this. Most of them are locked by very extreme things anyway, so be careful with that.
If you guys have any questions, feel free to leave those in the comments below. If I can't answer them, perhaps somebody else can. If you have any suggestions for any of the guides, feel free to leave those in the comments below as well. As I mentioned before, I have a playlist in the description below that you can check out to see if I've already made your guide idea potentially already in the past. That's going to be it for today, though. So for now, thank you guys very much for watching, and I'll see you on the next one. [Music]