Every good that is produced has to be immediately consumed. There is no way to stockpile goods. I believe this is the primary issue that mostly causes the other problems.
If you consume more goods than you produce, the price of the good goes up. On the contrary if you produce more than you consume, the price goes down. That's it.
If for example you produce 100 fabric in cotton plantations and then consume 180 to make clothes in a factory, the only drawback is reduced profits due to high fabric price. 80 units of fabric missing won't harm the production of clothes in the factory whatsoever.
Railways chug engines (apparently the trains have to be replaced with new ones every week).
(note: IG = interest group)
The personal ideology of IG leaders dictate what laws the entire IG supports. If for example a reactionary ass IG gets a progressive leader then the whole IG suddenly becomes progressive.
The Armed forces IG gets its political strength from wealth and votes just like anyone else, even though they should probably have more due to controlling the unliving machines.
Thanks for reading my ramble. Does anyone else get annoyed by these type of things?
While I do think that PDX are more concerned with building an internally consistent simulation than one that is consistent with reality some of these complaints maybe just lack imagination.
Maybe you can’t stockpile goods because manufacturers want to sell them to willing buyers, they go bad, or they go out of style. Your textile producers may be selling more than the immediate production need to clothiers, who then stockpile some. It’s not implemented in the game but if you could stockpile resources - while cool - it would introduce all sorts of balance issues and require new mechanics like perishability.
The train thing too…they probably don’t need to replace every train weekly, but your production represents parts and design work too.
Overall I still think Vicky 3 will be incredible…in a couple more years, like Stellaris was.
They've stated before that the economy is meant to be understood as an abstraction, the things you're observing on the market are not actual goods moving between producer and consumer, they are buy and sell orders, functionally indications of capacity to produce and demand to use a good. And once the imbalance reaches a certain proportion it does negatively affect things, shortages cut throughput on the entire production chain affected.
I think you can effectively simulate stockpiling using subsidies, using government funds to, for example, keep your arms industries large enough to supply them when they are fully mobilized even in peacetime, as an example.
The probable reason as to why you can't stockpile goods is the same reason money became scarce at the endgame in vic2: the AI hoards it.
You think it's bad that other countries don't extract the basic resources your economy needs? Now imagine they are stockpilling it too...