Victoria 3

KevinC · August 11, 2022, 7:46pm

Revisions to trade:

As to what has changed, probably the single most important difference is that you no longer directly manage the level of your trade routes. Instead, all newly established trade routes start at level 1, and will grow (or shrink) on a weekly basis based on market conditions. So if you’re playing as Britain and looking to import Wood from Brazil, instead of setting the exact level of Wood imports that makes sense for your needs right away, you simply establish the route and it will grow towards those needs over time. It’s also worth noting in this context that we have removed the national limit on the number of trade routes you can have, and replaced it with a fixed bureaucracy cost per route (which does not increase with route level) instead, to encourage countries to have fewer, more impactful trade routes.

So what are the market conditions that affect whether trade routes grow, shrink, or stay unchanged? Well, the single most important factor is profitability. A trade route makes money by buying goods that are cheap in the exporting market and selling them at a higher price in the importing market, but it isn’t as simple as just looking at the current market price. Instead, each trade route has a purchase price and sale price which are calculated based on the difference between the pre-trade and post-trade price of the goods in the two markets.

However, probably the single most important tool we’ve added for controlling trade is Market Good Policies. There are 3 such policies, which you can set separately for each individual good in your market:

Protect Domestic Supply: This market good policy removes import tariffs and increases export tariffs, encouraging countries to supply more of this good to your market and discourages them from exporting it away from you, which might be useful if you for instance want to keep the price of Clippers low so that you’ll pay less to maintain your ports.

Encourage Exports: As the name pretty much explicitly states, this market good policy removes export tariffs and increases import tariffs, which is highly useful if you for instance want to drive up the price of Furniture so that your Furniture Industries will see increased profits.

No Priority: This is the default market good policy, which sets both Import and Export Tariffs at the baseline determined by your Trade laws. To give you a couple examples of what this baseline could be, under Mercantilism you have overall lower export tariffs and higher import tariffs, while Free Trade removes all tariffs altogether.